Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [159]
She had first come upon her title, six years earlier, in an elevator in Davison’s department store, on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. An elderly woman entered behind Flannery, who was navigating on her newly acquired crutches, and said in a pitying voice, “Bless you, darling!” As Flannery wrote Betty of the incident, the woman then “grabbed my arm and whispered (very loud) in my ear, ‘Remember what they said to John at the gate, darling!’ It was not my floor but I got off and I suppose the old lady was astounded at how quick I could get away on crutches. I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, ‘The lame shall enter first.’ This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches.” The phrase aptly fit her character Rufus, with his “monstrous club foot.”
But when Caroline read the new pages, she was not impressed. She found them “completely undramatic.” Going beyond her usual criticism, Caroline pierced to the essence of O’Connor’s fiction. As Flannery summed up her comments to Cecil Dawkins, “Caroline says I have been writing too many essays and it is affecting my style. Well I ain’t going to write no more essays.” While she did not keep her promise as far as talks were concerned, she did seem happy for any excuse not to write more magazine articles. She had found such writing paid well but was full of indignities. “I’m amused by the letter from Holiday,” she wrote Elizabeth McKee. “The fellow obviously thinks it’s a great accomplishment to write something for them.” When the magazine requested another piece on a Southern town, she complained that doing so might “activate my lupus.”
As soon as Caroline and Ashley departed, Flannery set to work redeeming her story. “She did think the structure was good and the situation,” she told Betty of further comments from Gordon. “All I got to do is write the story.” So she deepened the drama by borrowing from Hawthorne’s allegory in “The Birthmark.” Her social worker, Sheppard, with his “narrow brush halo” of prematurely white hair and wish to reform wayward boys, shares a penchant for human engineering with Hawthorne’s mad scientist Aylmer. Like Aylmer’s unwitting victim, his wife, Georgiana, who expires along with her blemish, Sheppard’s son Norton, whom his father wishes to teach to be “good and unselfish,” accidentally hangs himself while peering through an attic telescope for some sign of his dead mother. The stand-in for Aylmer’s cloddish assistant, Aminadab, is Rufus, the very incarnation of fundamental evil in the guise of a young boy with a Hitlerian forelock.
Although her story was now moral and nearly allegorical, like Hawthorne’s, rather than “topical,” Flannery used current events and popular culture to update, and to camouflage, the original. In May 1961, Alan Shepard, “America’s first space hero” — his name tantalizingly close to that of her own Sheppard, who buys Rufus a telescope to teach him the wonders of space travel — made a suborbital flight in Freedom 7. Flannery had been following the space race, her new symbol for human pride, on TV, and the next January reported to Betty, regarding the forthcoming televised space launch of John Glenn, “Tomorrow I am orbiting with Glenn.” In July, Wild in the