Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [165]
In November she embarked on a Southern lecture swing, involving four talks in six days, beginning with East Texas State University, in Commerce, Texas. “Nobody can get me out now but Kruchev,” she groaned before leaving home, referring to the recent standoff between the Russian premier and President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis. In and around Dallas, she picked up some tasteless jokes about race to relay back to Maryat. Most stimulating was New Orleans, where she arrived to give talks at the Catholic student Newman Club of the University of Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette; the University of Southeast Louisiana in Hammond; and Loyola. Her guide to the city was Richard Allen, once her double date in high school. This encounter was less of a fiasco, as Allen, now curator of a museum of jazz at Tulane, guided her past “a Negro nightclub called ‘Baby Green’s Evening in Paris,’ which I might some day like to investigate.” As she kidded with John Hawkes, “If I had to live in a city I think I would prefer New Orleans to any other — both Southern and Catholic and with indications that the Devil’s existence is freely recognized.”
On Sunday evening, November 18, she made her way to Marquette Hall to deliver her basic talk on “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” freshened up with introductory quips about Walker Percy, whose recent success, The Moviegoer, had won a 1962 National Book Award and whose answer to newsmen, asking why there were so many good Southern writers — “because we lost the War” — pleased her no end. She planned to meet her fellow Catholic novelist — who also used Caroline Gordon as a first reader — and Percy had made his way over the causeway from Covington. By the time Flannery arrived at the second-floor reception, she was exhausted, having been carried up an unanticipated flight of exterior stairs, slung between Richard Allen and a teenage girl. Even Percy, who grew up in Alabama, found himself “thrown at first by her deep Georgia accent,” until they managed some small talk about Katherine Anne Porter. Yet he always treasured a typescript of her speech, and modeled Val, an ex-nun in his novel The Last Gentleman, on O’Connor.
Although she was turning only thirty-eight in March, during 1963 O’Connor was often afforded the treatment of an elder statesman rather than a young woman writer. Her itinerary was full of special bookings: on March 8, at a symposium on religion and the arts, with the poet John Ciardi at Sweet Briar College in Virginia; on April 24, at Troy Stage College in Troy, Alabama; over the week of October 14, at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia; at the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore; and finally, at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In June, she had been lauded with yet another honorary doctorate at graduation ceremonies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was an “oppressive” day, lightened for her only by the presence of Robert Fitzgerald. Her citation, she told Tom Stritch, was “something (fishy) about ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’”
Yet her struggle to discover a deeper mode of fiction — tantamount to an extended writer’s block, or at least writer’s puzzlement — continued to agitate beneath the surface of all these awards and honors. In May, clearly echoing concerns expressed fourteen months earlier to Father McCown, she wrote Sister Mariella Gable, a teaching nun she had met at Marillac, who was working on an essay about ecumenism in O’Connor’s stories, “I appreciate and need your prayers. I’ve been writing eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.”
O’Connor’s novel in progress was certainly not providing the solution. In September, she complained to John Hawkes, “I have been working all summer just like a squirril on a treadmill, trying to make something of Walter and his affairs and the