Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [147]
Awaiting Flannery, on her return home, was confirmation of news that she had already heard from Henry Rago, the editor of Poetry magazine, at a cocktail party in Chicago: she was a recipient of an eight-thousand-dollar Ford Foundation fellowship, an honor shared that year by Robert Fitzgerald and eight others. “I hope you are accustoming yourself to the pressure of the grant,” she wrote Fitzgerald. “I feel it myself.” When she had received her earlier Kenyon grant, funded by the Rockefellers, she invested in real estate: a five-room house on East Montgomery Street, on the way to the waterworks. “The house is subject to termite and poor white trash,” she told Tom Stritch, “but I get $55 a month for it.” Now she planned to buy an electric typewriter, a comfortable chair, and, otherwise, make the grant, paid over two years, “stretch into ten.”
The last week in February she finally heard back from Caroline Gordon, who returned her manuscript covered with “doodles, exclamation points, cheers, growls.” While Flannery cherished Gordon as a first reader, she was beginning to separate from her as sole critical authority. She worried that Gordon was overly “enthusiastic,” and questioned whether her comments tended to the stylistic rather than the substantive. For second opinions, she sent drafts to the Cheneys, the Fitzgeralds, and Catharine Carver, now an editor at Viking. Brainard Cheney found some parts “obscure.” Robert Fitzgerald corroborated her sense that Rayber was “too much a parody”; so she rewrote the middle section for him, inventing the dramatic episode of a girl revivalist. As she kept mailing her redone pages, she complained to Carver, “When the grim reaper comes to get me, he’ll have to give me a few extra hours to revise my last words. No end to this.”
Resolving to “work on Tarwater the rest of the summer,” Flannery did manage to entertain a number of visitors crucial to her literary career and, between drafts, even took a few trips herself. In April, her translator Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, teaching French literature at Princeton, arrived for a three-day stay at Andalusia. While most famous for setting off a Faulkner craze in France, with his 1931 essay in La Nouvelle Revue Française, he had recently been translating William Goyen and Truman Capote. Flannery worried about entertaining “an elderly French gentleman” for several days, but he busied himself easily, filming her flock of peacocks with his movie camera, and working on an introduction to La Sagesse dans le Sang (1959), in which he gave a brief history of American revivalism, including sketches of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson, setting the novel in the context of the “monde tragicomique de ces évangélistes.”
Two weeks later Flannery stayed again for four days with the Cheneys in Nashville, participating in a literary symposium at Vanderbilt, where she read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Ted Spivey, who was in the audience, remembered her as “sort of uptight . . . but very intense about reading that story.” The next morning she was interviewed by several of the university’s English majors, along with a fellow panelist and guest at the Cheneys’, Robert Penn Warren. She disliked the formalities. “Whoever invented the cocktail party should have been drawn and quartered,” she groused, but she was in awe of “Red” Warren, one of the first established writers to recognize her talent at Iowa. “I found her witty, shrewd, and strangely serene,” Warren later recalled the event,