Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [135]
If Fitzgerald’s motives in inviting Flannery had been purely self-serving — he simply wished to see her — he was pleasantly surprised on Monday evening to discover that she “had wonderful things to say as a public speaker.” Her appearance before an audience of three hundred that she reckoned to Maryat was “25% Bumbling Boys, 25% skirted and beretta-ed simmernarians” proved successful enough for extra chairs to be moved into the hall. She read her paper, as Fitzgerald remembered, “intent upon it, hanging on her crutches at the lectern, courteous and earnest and dissolvent of nonsense.” Arguing that she was not your stereotypical Southern gothic writer — “unhappy combinations of Poe and Erskine Caldwell” — O’Connor insisted that her own use of the grotesque was meant to convey a shocking Christian vision of original sin. “To the hard of hearing you shout,” she said, “and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
Fitzgerald rightly recognized that the “score” of talks she was beginning to give “brought her into the world again and gave her a whole new range of acquaintances.” But her stories were touching enough readers that even when she stayed home her circle of friends and fans was expanding exponentially, belying the stereotyping of her in the press as a reclusive Emily Dickinson of Milledgeville. She had recently received a letter of praise from Robert Lowell’s friend the poet Elizabeth Bishop. While the two never met, Bishop did telephone once from Savannah: “Quite soon a very collected, very southern voice answered and immediately invited me to ‘Come on over.’” (Bishop later admitted to feeling a bit “intimidated” by O’Connor.) When the poet sent a teeny, carved cross in a bottle from Brazil, Flannery wrote back, “If I were mobile and limber and rich I would come to Brazil at once after one look at this bottle. . . . It’s what I’m born to appreciate.”
A highly informal letter arrived that spring from Cecil Dawkins, a young fiction writer from Alabama, teaching at Stephens College in Missouri. A friend lent Dawkins a copy of A Good Man, and she found the stories revelatory. “I sat down with a six pack of beer one night and I started reading this book and I got increasingly excited,” she recalled, “and when I had finished, I wrote a note on just a yellow pad and said, ‘You’re really great. . . . You’re terrific’; and I didn’t know where to send it. I just sent it to Milledgeville and I didn’t know if she’d ever get it. But I got an answer by return mail and we wrote until she died.” Although they met only three times, Flannery recommended Dawkins to her agent, and to Yaddo; she also helped the Roman Catholic writer with her religious doubts. “She became my reader,” said Dawkins. “Her reader was Caroline Gordon and Flannery read everything I wrote when I was finished.”
The fourth or fifth visitor to become a truly close friend in less than a year was Louise Abbot, a lovely young woman trying to combine motherhood and writing, who lived with her lawyer-husband and small children in Louisville, Georgia, just sixty miles away. Abbot first encountered O’Connor’s stories at St. Joseph’s in Atlanta, where her husband was hospitalized: “I tried reading them aloud to my husband, but had to stop because it hurt him to laugh.” Though a recognized writer, with a prize-winning story published in Mademoiselle, she confessed to almost trying to pass herself off as a journalist to meet O’Connor. “I am very glad that you have decided not to be a lady-journalist,” Flannery wrote back, inviting her to Andalusia, “because I am deathly afraid of the tribe.”
On the Thursday in late April 1957 when Louise Abbot was invited to Andalusia for the afternoon, her husband had earlier legal business in Milledgeville, so she killed time by taking in Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, at the local movie theater. Driving up the red clay road at precisely three thirty, she admitted in her own letter to Maryat Lee, years later, of her first