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he “could sense certain deep and sometimes disturbing currents” running through the author he would later describe as “the most complex person I have ever met.” He soon had his answer, though, as before he even had a chance to write a bread-and-butter note, Flannery sent him a letter at his parents’ home. “I have just finished a book which I am sure you would find relevant to your train of thought,” she began. “This is Israel and Revelation by Eric Voeglin. . . . It has to do with history as being existence under God, the ‘leap in being,’ etc.” Spivey was touched that she had recommended a writer so attuned to his interests, who became a favorite after he borrowed her copy. He was even more encouraged by her closing: “I enjoyed your visit and hope that you will stop again if you find it convenient when you pass this way.”

Spivey’s second visit took place in November while he was visiting his parents at Thanksgiving. By then, he had sent Flannery a copy of Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God and was eager to hear her reaction to the contemporary Jewish theologian. “Now on a first-name basis, she met me dressed informally in slacks,” remembered Spivey. “Because the weather had turned cold, we sat in the living room under the gaze of her well-known self-portrait.” He interpreted the bird in the painting as an archetype, “a representation of her inner prophetic spirit.” Flannery was surprisingly excited about the “dialogic” Buber, even admitting that she found him a “good antidote to the prevailing tenor of Catholic philosophy.” She began to look beyond the apologetic Thomism of her formative years, while noting the absence of an indwelling Christ in Buber’s God as Other. Of Spivey, she wrote Betty, “He has a very fine mind inspite of the apocalyptic tastes.”

“Prophetic” and “apocalyptic” were catchwords in the conversations of Flannery and Ted Spivey that winter, as they were the through-line of the novel she was writing, especially as she completed its last few pages — Tarwater, his eyes singed from fire, like Jonah returning to Nineveh, sets off “toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.” Anxious for closure, Flannery had been counting off the pages to her friends. On New Year’s Day 1959, she promised the Fitzgeralds, “I only have to bear with the prophet Tarwater for about ten or twelve more pages.” She told Betty, of her imminent accomplishment, “I must say I attribute this to Lourdes more than the recalcifying bone.” By month’s end she was able to type and send off the forty-three-thousand-word manuscript, as with all her manuscripts since Wise Blood, to Caroline Gordon.

Flannery took advantage of the turnaround time while Mrs. Tate “had her say” with the draft, preparing for two workshop classes and a public reading of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which she was giving at the University of Chicago, the week of February 9, as a replacement for Eudora Welty, who needed to cancel her engagement. She claimed the seven-hundred-dollar fee “persuadeth me.” Yet the logistics of this trip proved her most difficult ever. Placing her suitcase in the car on a wintry morning, Louise, their household helper, said mournfully, “Miss Mary, I hopes we meet again.” Flannery dryly replied, “I hopes so too.” En route, a blizzard and ice storm forced her plane down in Louisville, Kentucky, and she was put on a bus for a nine-hour ride. As Richard G. Stern, director of the writing program, recalled, “I met her at two a.m. in the immense terminal building downtown. She was off the bus first, her aluminum crutches in complex negotiation with handrails, helping arms, steps. Tall, pale, spectacled, small-chinned, wearily piquant. I was to recognize her, she’d written, by the light of pure soul shining from her eyes. Fatigue, relief, wit-edged bile were more like it.”

The requirements for the honorarium included the caveat of living for five nights in the guest room of a women’s residence hall so that she might “confer with the young ladies as to how to attain their ideals — this being a clause in some old lady’s will who is providing