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By Root 1494 0

from these first letters and meetings was not yet a sense of kinship with Mary Ann so much as with the founder of the Dominican order, Rose Hawthorne, and, by extension, her father, the New England author of dark, gothic, moral tales. She went to her bookshelf and took down Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” which was included in her college Understanding Fiction anthology, and drew a connection between the beautiful Georgiana, subjected by her scientist-husband to a vicious precursor of cosmetic surgery to make her even more perfect, and Mary Ann’s “plainly grotesque” tumor. But she also made a connection between the author and his saintly Catholic-convert daughter. Ever anxious about covering any tracks of Faulkner, by September she could easily write Bill Sessions advertising her newly adopted literary stepfather: “Hawthorne said he didn’t write novels, he wrote romances; I am one of his descendants.”

During the remainder of the fall and winter of 1960, Flannery devoted herself to talks and essays and even her single foray into magazine feature writing, thriftily titled “The King of the Birds,” a previously discarded title for “The Displaced Person.” While this article on her peacocks showed her knack for prose at once stylish and talky enough for the pages of Holiday, a chic travel magazine that paid her $750, she tucked a tiny nightmare into its ending. Skewing the mood for any readers alert enough to catch the downshift, she injected some dark changes into the anecdote about the Pathe cameraman, which she used as her opener: “Lately I have had a recurrent dream: I am five years old and a peacock. A photographer has been sent from New York and a long table is laid in celebration. The meal is to be an exceptional one: myself. I scream, ‘Help! Help!’ and awaken.”

Using all of these occasions as opportunities to think aloud about the intellectual concerns between the lines of her fiction, Flannery traveled to Minnesota in October to take part in a three-day fiction workshop devoted to her work at the College of St. Teresa in Winona, and to present a talk on “Some Thoughts on the Catholic Novelist” at St. Catherine’s College in St. Paul — pleased that she “met no duds” at either Catholic school. While not speaking directly of Teilhard, she did knot together the terms she first used when writing about him to describe her “Catholic novelist”: “The fiction writer should be characterized by his kind of vision. . . . His kind of vision is prophetic vision. Prophecy . . . is dependent on the imaginative and not the moral faculty. . . . The prophet is a realist of distances.” She also read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” at the University of Minnesota, where she felt at an advantage, as “I sound pretty much like the old lady.”

She was back in Georgia just in time for another such engagement during the third week in October: a southern arts festival at Wesleyan College, in Macon, where she was being “paid (well) to swap clichés about Southern culture” with Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, and Madison Jones, as well as to speak on “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Putting less emphasis at this non-Catholic event on Teilhard, she went public instead for the first time about her kinship with Hawthorne: “When Hawthorne said that he wrote romances, he was attempting, in effect, to keep for fiction some of its freedom from social determinism, and to steer it in the direction of poetry.” In O’Connor’s own stories, where Elizabeth Bishop, “green with envy,” swore that she could “cram a whole poem-idea into a sentence,” she was striving for similar poetic freedom.

Following the festival, a dinner was held at Andalusia, which included Katherine Anne Porter, the moderator Louis Rubin, Ashley Brown, and the “strenuous” Mrs. Tate, again staying over the weekend, as well as her friend with lupus, Dean Hood, who drove six hours, unannounced, from Florida for the conference. “I helped Regina in the kitchen with Louise,” Dean recalled. “I was outta my league in the living room.” Katherine Anne Porter exclaimed that