Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [138]
Maryat’s reading from her play Kairos, set in the South, took place while she was in town for the formal investiture of her brother as college president on April 3, 1958. She later remembered the group as “not particularly scintillating; everybody on good behavior. . . . It was a bit academic for me.” Mary Barbara Tate, a high school English teacher at the time, and a member of the group, recalls, “Maryat read us a play one night that she had written. She was such a nut. She had such an ego. And yet there was something very warm and appealing about her. I liked her.” Maryat’s knack for scandal was accented by the presence of a companion, Jean “Poppy” Raymond, formerly a principal ballerina in an Australian dance company, whom she had met on the eventful Japanese freighter trip and was now living with in New York City; she and Foulkes-Taylor had parted company in Hong Kong, though they still remained married.
Alert to all the imagery from O’Connor’s stories lurking in the landscape of the farm, established authors began arriving, as well. By the spring of 1958, Andalusia had become a known destination. The young poet James Dickey, later the author of Deliverance, stopped by in early March. Dickey told a friend that when he started writing, O’Connor was the only author in Georgia who “was doing anything.” That day he identified himself mostly as an admirer of Robert Lowell. On a subsequent visit, O’Connor happily reported that he brought his son, “to show his little boy the ponies.” “My father tempted me there with talk of Shetland ponies,” concurs Christopher Dickey, who went on to become Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief. “I was horrified because I had never met anyone so sick and crippled. But, as a child, I kept one of her peacock plumes in my collection of treasures.”
Katherine Anne Porter, at work for twenty-seven years on her novel Ship of Fools, arrived, too, for lunch after a late-March public reading in Macon; she was driven over by the Gossetts. Flannery was amused when she heard that Porter performed at the college wearing “a black halter type dress sans back, & long black gloves which interfered with her turning the pages. After each story, she made a kind of curtsy, which someone described as ‘wobbly.’” Entertaining the “very pleasant and agreeable” Southern writer — her “Noon Wine” was an early influence at Iowa — Flannery noted that she “plowed all over the yard behind me in her spike-heeled shoes to see my various kinds of chickens.” In a more lyrical account of the afternoon, Porter recalled her “gracious” hostess as “tenderly fresh-colored, young, smiling . . . balanced lightly on her aluminum crutches, whistling to her peacocks who came floating and rustling to her, calling in their rusty voices.”
Chapter Nine
Everything That Rises
Whenever Flannery talked about her upcoming trip to Lourdes, planned for three weeks in April and May 1958, she cast herself as an accidental pilgrim. This sole trip outside the United States, by the woman who had already decided that sickness was “more instructive than a long trip to Europe,” was not of her own design. Hearing of the Lourdes Centennial Pilgrimage — organized as a package tour by the Diocese of Savannah, to the site of Bernadette Soubirous’s vision of the Virgin Mary in the south of France — Cousin Katie Semmes immediately thought of Mary Flannery, and her worsening condition. Knowing the reputation of Bernadette’s spring for physical cures, she insisted on paying the $1,050.40 per-person fee to send both mother and daughter.
Over the six-month lead-up to their departure, Flannery mined the imminent event for all its comic potential, though her barbs about the “holy exhaustion” anticipated with a dozen fellow pilgrims, mostly “fortress-footed Catholic females herded from holy place to holy place,” belied true anxiety. She blamed the trip entirely on Cousin Katie’s “will of iron.” Her trepidation began to sound reasonable when a final itinerary was presented that included, within a time frame of seventeen days, stops in London, Dublin (“I