Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [137]
As with Betty, Flannery did not blink, or “flippity flap” away, but she did transpose the discussion into a more spiritual key. “Everything has to be diluted with time and with matter, even that love of yours which has to come down on many of us to be able to come down on one,” she carefully responded. “It is grace and it is the blood of Christ and I thought, after I had seen you once that you were full of it and didn’t know what to do with it or perhaps even what it was. Even if you loved Faulkes and Ritche and me and Emmet and Emmet’s brother and his girl friend equally and undividedly, it all has to be put somewhere finally.” Maryat groused that her reply was full of pious clichés, not flesh and blood. The line went quiet between them for four months. When Maryat got back in touch, Flannery steadily reassured, “I am not to be got rid of by crusty letters.”
Where Flannery truly diluted her friendship with Maryat, as with much of the time and matter of her life, was in her fiction. When Maryat sent the letter of rapprochement in October, Flannery was already at work on “The Enduring Chill,” the story that treated her own fluctuating illness, but was also a trial sketch of Maryat as a perfect life model for one of her favorite types, the egoistic artist-intellectual. While the character Asbury shared some of Flannery’s symptoms, he was closer to Maryat: like her, he was a playwright living in a New York tenement walk-up with “a closet with a toilet in it”; his work in progress, “a play about Negroes,” was a swipe at Maryat’s performed in Harlem by an all-black cast; his forced integration, smoking a cigarette with black workers in the milk shed, captured the spirit of her taboo ride to the airport with Emmett.
The story was also a mulled response to Maryat’s opinions on religion as spouted on their first meeting while Flannery, according to Maryat, “suffered my remarks with curious attention.” The comment that stuck, as Flannery wrote her, concerned “the orthodoxy, which I remember you said was a ceiling you had come through.” In “The Enduring Chill,” the water stains “on the ceiling” above Asbury’s bed transform into the Holy Spirit, surprisingly envisaged as a fierce bird of chill-inducing ice descending, in graceful revenge. “But — the last paragraph! You really seem to have busted a ceiling,” Maryat joked when she read the story in Harper’s Bazaar. “This is the closest I have seen you come to your mind’s passion.” She got its message about Asbury, as well: “the descent of the Holy Icicle, despite himself.” When Maryat sent a gift subscription to the Village Voice, Flannery thanked her for the newspaper, which was founded in 1955 by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolf out of a downtown apartment: it “reminds me of my character, Asbury, and his life in the city.” Maryat signed one of her next letters, “Wishing for an icicle to descend, M.”
Flannery read “The Enduring Chill” aloud publicly just once, at what she called a “pseudo-literary&theological gathering,” a weekly reading group held at Andalusia, instigated by William Kirkland, the local Episcopal minister, where Maryat read a play in progress that spring, too. Lasting from the fall of 1957 until 1960, the group began with a grand plan to discuss “theology in modern literature” and was made up of six to eight regulars, mostly GSCW professors, plus an air force sergeant and a psychiatrist from the mental hospital. Flannery was thankful when their reading list relaxed from Kierkegaard and Sartre to Lardner and Welty. On the evening she presented her new story in the smoke-filled dining room, Kirkland recalls that she played up the comic relationship of Asbury and his physician: “She really bore down with special emphasis on his comment, ‘What’s wrong with me goes way beyond