Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [150]
The article that caused Flannery the most pain was titled “God-Intoxicated Hillbillies” and ran in Time magazine at the end of February. Using the review as a pretext for detective work on the mysterious author, the unnamed critic helped realize Flannery’s greatest fear of having her life, and disease, exposed, while also getting his medical facts wrong. O’Connor was characterized as “a retiring, bookish spinster who dabbles in the variants of sin and salvation like some self-tutored backwoods theologian. . . . She suffers from lupus (a tuberculous disease of the skin and mucous membranes) that forces her to spend part of her life on crutches.” Flannery wrote the Cheneys of feeling violated, like “having a dirty hand wiped across your face. They even bring in the lupus.” To Maryat, she complained, “My lupus has no business in literary considerations.”
Far more pleasing was an overlooked essay in Catholic World, by P. Albert Duhamel, fittingly enough, a professor of Medieval Studies at Boston College. Alerting Cecil Dawkins to the piece, while alluding to Ingmar Bergman’s art-house favorite The Seventh Seal (1957), its hooded figure of Death as allegorical as her own whispering Satan in The Violent Bear It Away, O’Connor wrote, “Perhaps I have created a medieval study. Which reminds, have you seen any films by this man Ingmar Bergman? People tell me they are mighty fine & that I would like them. They too are apparently medieval.” She appreciated, as well, Joan Didion’s praise for her “hard intelligence” in the National Review. Unlikely acceptance came with an excerpt after publication of the novel in the April issue of Vogue, crediting Flannery as “a young writer with an uncompromising moral intelligence and a style that happily relies on verbs, few adjectives, and no inflationary details.”
Reactions from friends tended to be equally split. Wholehearted in her first response to the novel was Elizabeth Bishop. “I received Flannery’s new book last week,” she wrote Lowell. “That first section that was published somewhere before still seems superb to me — like a poem. In fact she’s a great loss to the art, don’t you think? . . . There’s an idiot child named for me, I think.” Writing back that “I hadn’t connected ‘Bishop’ with you,” Lowell was cooler: “The fire is there — a terrifying ending, the grotesque beginning — a short story to which the rest was added. . . . I don’t know whether this book is her best or just her most controlled.” In her response, Bishop, modulating her tone, conceded, “Yes, the Flannery book is a bit disappointing, I’m afraid — one wishes she could get away from religious fanatics for awhile. But just the writing is so damned good compared to almost anything else one reads: economical, clear, horrifying, real.”
Sharing most intimately in Flannery’s reactions as she received these responses — the critical successes usually marked by a telegram or phone call from Bob Giroux — was Maryat Lee, in Milledgeville through February, recovering from an operation at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. She spent most afternoons in Flannery’s room, making oil paintings of Andalusia, as Flannery herself painted, or read books. Admitting in her diary a “wave of tenderness” toward her friend, “so unapproachable that I am inhibited,” Maryat felt her affection returned in other ways by Flannery, who took to calling herself “Aunt Fannie.” She witnessed Flannery’s pose of being unfazed by a letter from a young protégé criticizing this novel as inferior to her first. Seeing that his remarks “really dug very cruelly at her innards,” Maryat ripped the letter into pieces and tossed it into the wastebasket, to Flannery’s shock and relief.
Almost certain to see matters from a contrary point of view, Maryat — lying one afternoon on an exercise couch set crosswise at the end of the bed — told Flannery of deeming Rayber the most