Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [148]
Soon after she returned home in May, Robert Giroux, on a scouting tour, including visiting “all my famous authors,” fittingly stopped at Andalusia after spending time with Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. “Brother Louis,” his Trappist name, had shown great interest in O’Connor, of whose work he later wrote, “When I read Flannery O’Connor, I don’t think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles.” He peppered Giroux with questions about her life on the farm, and gave him a beautifully designed presentation copy of his Prometheus: A Meditation to bring to her. “The aura of aloneness surrounding each of them was not an accident,” observed Giroux. “It was their métier, in which they refined and deepened their very different talents in a short span of time.”
Giroux first stopped at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, a daughter house of Gethsemani in Conyers, just outside Atlanta, where, by chance, he met Bill Sessions. Taking a bus from the monastery, he was then picked up at the gate of Andalusia by mother and daughter. “The car was going about five miles an hour up this road,” remembered Giroux. “As we drove in she had about thirty peacocks strutting around. They’re very beautiful, but very stupid, and their trains were trailing. They were so slow that the car would run over their trains.” He immediately went upstairs to change into his loafers and a flannel shirt: “I tried to be as informal and relaxed as possible. I could see this was all of interest to her, how men behaved.” Giroux thought that the O’Connors were “really putting on the dog for the editor from New York,” as he was then a guest at a formal lunch at the Cline Mansion, replete with silverware and crystal, served by a black butler in white cotton gloves.
A tense moment occurred at breakfast the next morning when Mrs. O’Connor asked, over cornflakes, “Mister Giroux, can’t you get Flannery to write about nice people?” Giroux said, “I started to laugh. But Flannery was sitting utterly deadpan. I thought, ‘Uh, oh. This is serious to her.’ Flannery never smiled, or raised her eyebrow, or gave me any clue.” On his return to New York he told Lowell of the trip and the poet passed on the news, adding an even sharper edge. “Her life is what you might guess,” he wrote Elizabeth Bishop. “A small, managing indomitable mother, complaining that no one helps her, more or less detesting Flannery’s work, impressed however, wishing she would marry — Flannery silent in her presence. A tall ancient Aunt living next to the old State Capitol, the unwanted peacocks . . . her Mother forcing her to bathe at Lourdes, an improvement, announced as a miracle by the Mother, Flannery silent. Battles between the Mother and the Catholic priest about an unwished-for altar tapestry.”
By the fall Flannery finished typing up her manuscript and enjoyed a brief spell of satisfaction. “I sit all day typing and grinning like the Cheshire cat,” she wrote Maryat of the novel, now clearly organized around the drowning-baptism of Bishop by Tarwater. “Does it have symbolisms in it?” her mother asked. “You know when I was coming along, they didn’t have symbolisms.” Caroline Gordon chose to visit Andalusia in October, after the novel was completed. She was driven there by Ashley Brown, who was teaching at the University of South Carolina. Brown had recently finished his doctoral dissertation on Gordon’s work, including a chapter on her 1956 novel, a roman à clef based loosely on Dorothy Day, which Flannery thought “the best thing I’ve read on The Malefactors.” As Caroline was in the throes of a painful divorce from Allen Tate, though, the weekend was difficult, intensified by a formidable antagonism between her and Mrs. O’Connor.
Everyone came away a bit weary. Having spotted a dog she decided was lost on the highway, Caroline importuned Ashley