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had added to the heat of their debates in recent years by defending the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, of whom she allowed, “There is a lot of ill-directed good in them.” Spivey claims that a noticeable cooling occurred after he announced his engagement to Julia Douglass, a Georgia schoolteacher. When O’Connor “knew I was going to get married it made her real mad,” says Spivey. “I had a feeling she wanted to marry me, as a matter of fact.” Yet Flannery had already refuted this notion in a letter to Betty two years earlier, “My Jung friend is not a little bit in love with me but resents me rather thoroughly I think. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, I just don’t think the first is so.” As likely a cause for the rift was her growing exasperation with his significant dreams, which included Carson McCullers in her closet, Louise and Jim Abbot in her bed, and, most galling, dreams about Regina.

While speaking with students at Rosary College, Flannery had bemoaned that she had no new novel under way, as much as she wished she did, and so planned on “an awful lot of porch-setting’” on her return home. In June, she tried to put an end to this arid stretch by beginning work on a third novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage? Its title was taken from a conservative religious column printed on Saturdays in the Atlanta Journal. Having long expressed a wish to turn “The Enduring Chill” into the first chapter of a novel, she adopted much of the setup of its country farm: an intellectual son forced home by a bad heart; a snooty schoolteacher sister; a perpetually irate mother; and the addition of an invalid father. Instead of finding Heidegger, Walter’s mother has to suffer the indignity of coming across her son’s copy of The Satiric Letters of St. Jerome. When a section was published in Esquire in July 1963, an accompanying editorial note stated, “Flannery O’Connor’s novel is as yet untitled, and she says it may be years before it’s finished.”

Yet the character jumping out from hundreds of pages of drafts, written over the next year, was not included in the excerpt, and may have been both the work’s secret motor, and its roadblock. For while Walter, a bookish “secular contemplative,” embodies a side of herself Flannery described as “hermit novelist,” Sarah (sometimes called Oona) Gibbs is an outright satiric cartoon of Maryat Lee: she lives in an apartment on Second Avenue with other members of her commune, the Friendship Fellowship, a send-up of the Koinonia community in Georgia. In a letter, Sarah brags to Walter, “I have broken through the ceiling of a cramping religion.” Yet most of the manuscripts trail off with the activist Sarah speeding southward in her little red car to meet Walter, who has passed himself off as a black man to trick her. As the O’Connor scholar Virginia Wray has plausibly written, “The depth of respect for and genuine warmth evidenced in O’Connor’s letters to Maryat Lee during the 1960s may have led O’Connor to cease her satiric barrage, especially since during this period Lee was suffering from some serious health problems.” (Maryat was having thyroid problems and could not find any helpful medication.)

Whatever the nature of the block that she was experiencing — not necessarily final for an author averaging seven years for a novel — the character Walter Tillman, dressed, like Flannery in her at-home outfit, in “plaid shirt and . . . jeans and moccasins,” did reflect some of her intellectual interests at the time. A huge event to Flannery in the fall of 1962 was the October 11 convening of the Second Vatican Council, the first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church in ninety-two years. “But it’s so obviously the work of the Holy Spirit,” she enthusiastically told Louise Abbot. Described in an article by John Kobler in the Saturday Evening Post as an attempt to “reflect the Teilhardian spirit,” the pope’s charge “to open the windows of the Church” encouraged wider scholarship. Like Walter’s, Flannery’s library now included an underlined copy of St. Jerome, the fourth-century “desert father