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By Root 1339 0

” within eight weeks, and, as with “Good Country People,” her only other story written relatively quickly, her first reader, Caroline Gordon, was entirely impressed. “Caroline was crazy about my story,” she wrote Betty. “She read it to her class and they laughed until they cried or so she reported.” The only rewriting occurred when Catharine Carver interpreted the ending as her “blackest” and Ruby as “evil.” Flannery understood that this story was a departure, with its celestial vision of racial convergence — a transposing of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, widely televised that August. But most innovative was the kinder, gentler fate of the big country woman, granted illumination. She wanted no mistaking Ruby as “just an evil Glad Annie.” She told Maryat, “I like Mrs. Turpin as well as Mary Grace,” awarding her friend “half interest in Mary Grace” and signing one letter to her as “Mrs. Turpin.”

Although she could have sold “Revelation” to Esquire — where “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” appeared — for the grand sum of fifteen hundred dollars, Flannery chose to be paid substantially less to stay loyal to Andrew Lytle and the Sewanee Review. “I emulate my better characters,” she wrote Betty, “and feel like Mr. Shiftlet that there should be some folks that some things mean more to them than money.” Lytle was appreciative, judging both “The Lame Shall Enter First” and “Revelation” to have been “magnificent things.” When her close friends read the story, they concurred. “The breath was pushed out of me by this story,” Maryat wrote her. “You have done it. You have gone past them all. . . . The reception of Violent Bare has obviously not really touched your confidence — as it might have.” Recalls Louise Abbot, “I felt ‘Revelation’ marked a turning point in Flannery’s thinking, feeling, writing, everything. And that she had started in another direction.”

ON THE MONDAY before Christmas 1963, Flannery fainted, giving Regina a scare, and was immediately put to bed, where she remained for the next ten days. Her weakness was severe enough that this young woman who managed to get to church at seven o’clock most weekday mornings, on crutches, missed even the high festival of Christmas Day mass. “Not enough blood to run the engine or something,” she scribbled a note, in longhand, to Betty. Warning signals had been mounting over the past month — she grew too weak to be “hitting this typewriter” the week following November 22, as she watched the “sad” events of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and funeral on television; new tests revealed a lower blood count. In truth, she had begun the long, slow process of dying.

Flannery handled her latest medical downturn as she had all the others, by focusing on her writing. Using an electric typewriter to conserve energy, by Sunday, January 5, she took up her correspondence again and was able to return to mass for the first time. The weather cooperated, with ice storms that had frozen the plumbing giving way to near-spring days. Regina, in a red coat, was venturing out, “frisking” her small magnolia, and the peacocks had begun hollering. Flannery took advantage of a rising hemoglobin count — from 8.5 to 11.6, with 13 as normal — to write to Robert Giroux, on January 25, of her resolve to put together a second collection of stories, feeling that “Revelation” would “round it out,” with seven others. Giroux wrote back, encouraging her to aim for the fall list, which would require a finished manuscript by May.

A recent addition to Andalusia that turned out to be an unpredicted pleasure to both Flannery and her mother that winter was an old record player, which the Sisters, recipients of a new machine, sent down with Louis from Atlanta. Flannery had been mulling over buying one, but instead invested in a new pair of swans to replace a beloved, now deceased, one-eyed female. Hearing of the gift, her friend Tom Stritch sent along a box of records from his basement. While Flannery claimed that “I have the Original Tin Ear,” the music cast her back to Yaddo, where she had listened to classical records