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By Root 1517 0

being down South, whittling a pair of eyeglasses from wood and fitting them onto the face of the black worker Coleman Parrum — Jim to his Huck Finn — while asking, “What you see through those glasses?” “See a man,” answers Coleman. The point is their spiritual kinship. In “Parker’s Back,” when O. E. Parker unveils the image of God on his back to his pregnant wife, she beats the blasphemous tattoo bloody with a broom. The story ends in a flood of emotion, with Sarah, at dawn, peering through a window at her husband, “leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.” As the O’Connor critic Frederick Asals has written, these last stories were growing somehow “mellower.”

Her dosage of prednisone having been ordered cut in half by Dr. Merrill, at the beginning of July, due to a rise in the nitrogen content of her blood, Flannery was now deprived even of “nervous energy.” Yet, as she reported to Maryat, she was at least not experiencing some of the more ethereal side effects she had recorded before the hospitalization and transfusions: “hearing the celestial chorus — ‘Clementine’ is what it renders when I am weak enough to hear it. Over & over. ‘Wooden boxes without topses, They were shoes for Clementine.’” Punning on the Latin “lupus,” she ruefully wrote Sister Mariella Gable of her disease, “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place. I’ve been in the hospital 50 days already this year.” In an attempt to restore some of her energy, the doctor adjusted her medication to more frequent but smaller doses of prednisone.

On July 8, Flannery wrote to Janet McKane, apologizing for the “fancy” stationery. She documented an amusing catalog of get-well cards, decorated with chickens, Bugs Bunny, and the “funny” kind with “Get the hell out of that bed” messages, and she bragged that while she tossed the cards in the trash, saying “a prayer for the soul of the sender,” she economically kept any stationery to reuse. Included in this hilarious letter, though, was somber news, shared only with Janet, that when the priest brought her Communion the day before, “I also had him give me the now-called Sacrament of the Sick. Once known as Extreme Unction.” Flannery knew that this sacrament of “final anointing,” renamed by the Second Vatican Council, did not presume death. Yet her special request indicated that she saw herself as dangerously ill.

For the next three weeks, Flannery devoted every inch of her consciousness to her two stories, climbing out of bed “into the typewriter about 2 hours every morning.” Catharine Carver returned “Judgment Day,” with a few queries, but mainly praise for the story. So Flannery then sent “Parker’s Back” to her, which she also mailed to Caroline Gordon and Betty Hester. This time around, her “first reader” advanced a very theological theory, suggesting that the story illustrated, in Sarah’s puritanical horror at an iconic tattoo of Christ, the Docetist heresy that Jesus had only a spiritual body, not a physical one. She also sent a heady telegram: “Congratulations on having succeeded where the great Flaubert failed!” But Flannery grumbled to Betty, of “a lot of advice” she was ignoring from Gordon. “I did well to write it at all.” She focused instead on well-timed news about “Revelation”: “We can worry about the in-terpitations of Revelation but not its fortunes. I had a letter from the O. Henry prize people & it got first.”

Although Flannery was now devoting twenty-two hours a day to resting up for writing, over the last two weeks in July she was forced to return to the doctor’s office and the Baldwin County Hospital several times. Having suffered three coronary arrests, Dr. Fulghum was no longer making house calls. When Flannery’s symptoms of kidney infection returned, he put her on a double dose of antibiotics again and withdrew the cortisone. Bringing along a Günter Grass novel, The Tin Drum, sent by Maryat, O’Connor went once more to the hospital for a blood transfusion to lift her hemoglobin count, again below eight. “It’s six of one and a half dozen of the other,” she decided. As she had once written,