Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [136]
As they sat rocking in the tall, high-backed chairs, Louise was sensitive enough to pick up on some of the tensions between Flannery and her mother. Unlike Maryat, she was able to chat with Mrs. O’Connor quite easily. Yet when Regina seemed about to make a condescending remark, as Louise described herself as “wanting” to write, Flannery interjected, “She’s had a story published. She’s a professional writer.” Before disappearing into her room to fetch copies of Wise Blood and Understanding Fiction, Flannery startled Louise by turning and saying, “You stay here.” Abbot noticed, “There was a quality in Flannery that forbade intimacy.” At the suggestion that she was a “famous writer,” Flannery scowled. “I believe in a good deal of Hell’s fire on this earth, and if I thought of myself in such a way for a minute, I’d consign myself to it promptly.”
Yet as they found common ground in shared Savannah girlhoods in the 1930s and a perverse love of “The Worry Clinic,” the advice column of Dr. George W. Crane that ran almost daily on the comics page of the Atlanta Constitution until 1957, a friendship flowered: Flannery’s favorite was Crane’s counsel to a lethargic soul to donate a water cooler to his church because “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” When Louise revealed that her family was Associate Reformed Presbyterian, Flannery asked, “What in the wurld-d is that?” Louise, in turn, was surprised to find that Flannery was Roman Catholic. “Yes, we believe . . . ,” she began, and recited the entire Apostles’ Creed, as nineteen peacocks high-stepped across the lawn. Walking together to her car, Louise admitted to being a bit lonely as a housewife-writer in Louisville. “Come back as often as you can,” said Flannery. “I’m in the same position you are.” Louise Abbot was soon returning often, invited to join Flannery and Regina for lunch in the combination sitting and dining room, or at Sanford House; she was one friend Flannery could trust not to judge her mother, or their relationship.
Over the spring and summer the letters between Flannery and her closer friend Betty Hester turned from theology to the carpentry of constructing a good story and gossip. The true zing in her correspondence that season, though, came from the irrepressible Maryat Lee, living a life of adventure that fulfilled her niece’s characterization of her as Auntie Mame. Maryat had failed to mention that she was engaged to an Australian named David Foulkes-Taylor, whom she met while covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1952. When she finally broke the news of a summer wedding, Flannery wrote back, “The following is good Georgia advice: don’t marry no foreigner. Even if his face is white, his heart is black.”
The marriage did take place, on the freighter Mukahuru Maru, sailing from Long Beach, California, to Japan. But the union did not go off without a hitch. Along the way, Foulkes-Taylor met a man to whom he was attracted, while Maryat, in Tokyo, soon developed a one-sided crush on the film critic and well-known writer on Japanese culture Donald Richie, who remembers her “intense manner and big, square teeth.” In the midst of such news, and plenty of light banter from Flannery about Chairman Mao, opium parlors, and saber-toothed tigers, Maryat sent a four-page letter in late May exclaiming that she loved her, too. While she did not label herself “bisexual” until the seventies, such free love was already part of Maryat’s style.