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to drive back to look for the animal, which they luckily never found. “I was not ABOUT to have that dog spend the night in my car,” Ashley told Regina. On Sunday morning, Caroline gave Flannery a two-hour lecture on the “seems” and “as if” constructions in her prose. “When she is doing something like that she is most nearly herself,” Flannery said. More “nerve-wracking” was “keeping her and my mother’s personalities from meeting headlong with a crash.” A near collision occurred with Caroline’s censure of the O’Connors for using artificial breeding with their cows, which she deemed antithetical to Catholic theology. After her departure, Regina sharply remarked that she understood “why that man would want to divorce her.”

Flannery took advantage of a two-month lull before the novel’s publication — “this is the best stage,” she told Maryat, “before it is published and begins to be misunderstood.” She returned to story writing, with “The Comforts of Home.” Unusual in its casting of a widowed mother as a bleeding-heart liberal who takes in the caricature of a sex-starved “Nimpermaniac,” Star Drake (real name, Sarah Ham), the story revolves around the widow’s only son, Thomas, driven to matricide by the presence of the “little slut.” Making him resemble his namesake, St. Thomas, in more than “large frame,” O’Connor planted an inside joke: when he chases the girl from his bedroom door by “holding the chair in front of him like an animal trainer.” So, too, had Aquinas been fabled to chase away a prostitute with a red-hot poker. “It would be fashionable today to be in sympathy with the woman,” Flannery archly wrote Betty, “but I am in sympathy with St. Thomas.”

“The Comforts of Home” afforded a glimpse of a Jansenist aspect of Flannery’s character that she usually kept hidden in her stories, along with the topic of sex altogether. But when Robie Macauley, succeeding John Crowe Ransom as editor of Kenyon Review, published the story a year later, with an inch-high illustration of a naked Star Drake, Flannery fumed. “I was pretty disappointed and sick when I saw the illustration you stuck on my story,” she angrily wrote him. “I don’t know what you’ve gained by it but you’ve lost a contributor.” By way of explanation of such outbursts, Betty Hester, writing to Greg Johnson, fell back on her sense of Flannery’s intact innocence, her professed desire to remain twelve. She presumed Flannery was most likely “unaware of the strangely sexual undertones of . . . Thomas’ murder of his mother” in ‘The Comforts of Home.”

Ted Spivey, too, quickly became mindful of what he called her “revulsion at the frankly sexual in literature.” She was devastating on the subject of Thomas Wolfe, or of critical praise for D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (“pious slop”), as well as the openly homosexual writings of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. “Mr. Truman Capote makes me plumb sick, as does Mr. Tenn. Williams,” she wrote Betty. When anyone detected a sexual undercurrent in her own stories, she could be as outsized in response as she had been with Macauley. Receiving a letter from an acquaintance, six years earlier, ascribing a lesbian subtext to “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” she protested, “As for lesbianism I regard that as any other form of uncleanness. Purity is the twentieth centuries dirty word but it is the most mysterious of the virtues.”

But such were not her immediate concerns with The Violent Bear It Away, officially on sale on February 8, 1960, and doubtless her most difficult publication experience, its main themes not sexual but prophetic and apocalyptic, its cast of characters more often freaks than folks. Dedicated to Edward Francis O’Connor, with a cover illustration of a gaunt boy in a black hat peering through cornstalks against a violet background, which Flannery felt evoked “The School of Southern Degeneracy,” and back-cover praise of her “Blakean vision” from Caroline Gordon, the novel received decidedly mixed notices. Orville Prescott in the New York Times gave O’Connor backhanded praise as a “literary white witch,” but