Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [169]
The turn of a month led to a return to the hospital, where Flannery found herself the third week in April for ten days. The antibiotics that Dr. Merrill suggested for treating kidney infection were insufficient to halt her careening physical problems. “Monday I woke up covered from head to foot with the lupus rash,” she alerted Brainard Cheney. “A sign that things are as screwy inside as out so I headed for the hospital and here I am for an indefinite stay.” In a conspiracy of improbabilities, Mary Cline was also in the hospital again, on the floor above Flannery’s, having survived a nearly fatal heart attack. They both returned the same day to Andalusia, where her aunt was set up in a recent back-parlor addition. Her Florencourt cousin Catherine Firth soon arrived from Kansas City to help out at the farmhouse that Flannery nicknamed “Jolly Corners Rest Home.”
Flannery’s first instinct on her return home was to ensure that a second book of stories would be published, no matter what happened next. So on May 7 she wrote a highly detailed letter of instructions to Elizabeth McKee. Her initial plan had been to go back into the originals with her usual vengeance of rewriting and polishing. But under doctor’s orders to spend the rest of the summer in bed and a prohibition on any typing outside of short business letters, she arrived at a more practical compromise. She simply asked her agent to round up copies of the stories as they had been printed in magazines, and assemble the book from these. “I think I’ll be able to make any really necessary changes on the proofs,” she promised. She then listed the eight stories she was envisioning, winding up with “Revelation.” The book’s title remained an open question.
Unable to sit for long at the typewriter, in May Flannery shifted to writing stories in her mind. Of one such purely conceptual creation, she told Charlotte Gafford, who had completed a thesis on her work at Birmingham-Southern College, and sent crystallized violets and a book of poems as get-well gifts, “I am writing me this story in my head and I hope by the time they let me up maybe I’ll have it.” Even such mental work, though, was made more difficult by sluggishness; once a week she visited the doctor for a blood transfusion, spiking her energy, and resulting in a few letters to friends. “I havent had it active since 1951 and it is something renewing acquaintance with it,” she alluded to her lupus, in one such missive to the Gossetts. On good days, she worked for an hour. “My my I do like to work,” she wrote Maryat. “I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.”
Flannery eventually heard from Robert Giroux with his approval of the plan to go ahead with the book, using stories in print. She had since decided, on looking over them, to withdraw “The Partridge Festival,” as a “very sorry story.” In its place, she mentioned, for the first time, one “that I have been working on off and on for several years that I may be able to finish in time to include.” The intended story was “Judgment Day,” a retelling of her first published story from Iowa, “The Geranium.” Roiling in her head over the month was the notion to circle back to her beginnings and redo her original successful story, revealing how far she had come. As she began retooling the original, old man Tanner, in his daughter’s New York apartment, is not just homesick, but actively plotting his escape,