Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [175]
The man most in a position to know just how independent from some extraordinarily constricting outward circumstances O’Connor could be was her editor Robert Giroux, now in possession of the completed manuscript for her final book. Like many others, though, he felt at loose ends about how to mark his personal grief. So he seized an opportunity when a postal card came in to the Farrar, Straus and Giroux offices, from an unknown friend of Flannery’s, Janet McKane, announcing a memorial mass to be held in the Byzantine rite at a church on Third Avenue. “I went and found only two people present, myself and Miss McKane, and it was a high mass!” he reported to Caroline Gordon. “Behind the altar was a towering mosaic of Christ, and when I read Flannery’s story, I realized that Parker’s choice of tattoo was of course this figure. (Miss McKane told me afterwards that Flannery had always been fascinated by the Byzantine rite.)”
When Everything That Rises Must Converge was published the following April 1965, the response was more powerful, and uniform, than for any of O’Connor’s other books. Playing into the fascination, of course, was the tragedy, as the simple white book cover carried only an epitaph on the back from Thomas Merton, “I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.” Flap copy described the book as a “worthy memorial,” and began with a factual error, “The death of Flannery O’Connor at 38 marked the loss of one of America’s most gifted contemporary writers at the height of her powers.” Yet such public relations were backed up by general recognition of a vision that now looked full and coherent. The critic Charles Poore in the Times judged “her promise . . . fulfilled”; “the work of a master,” said the Newsweek critic; and so on.
Attuned enough to O’Connor to have recognized her potential without reading a word, when she first walked into his office with Lowell, on a wintry afternoon in 1949, Giroux now wished to secure her literary rank. So he next put together a chronologically arranged collection of her short fiction, from her first published story, “The Geranium,” through to its final, mature rendition, “Judgment Day.” The strategy succeeded; many readers and critics recognized the sort of underlying pattern that Henry James once described as “the figure in the carpet.” And The Complete Stories was awarded the 1972 National Book Award in Fiction, the prize she had lost to John O’Hara in 1956. Backstage at the awards ceremony, Giroux had a bit of a contretemps with a celebrated author who complained, “Do you really think Flannery O’Connor was a great writer? She’s such a Roman Catholic.” But Giroux said, “You can’t pigeonhole her. That’s just the point. I’m surprised at you, to misjudge her so completely. If she were here, she’d set you straight. She’d impress you. You’d have a hard time outtalking her.”
Onstage, Giroux proved quite capable of advocating for her in a convincing way, setting the audience straight. The awards of 1972 were highly politicized, as the Vietnam War dragged on with no end in sight. Accepting the posthumous thousand-dollar prize, on behalf of Regina O’Connor, who was ill at home in Milledgeville, Giroux, “the soft-spoken vice president and editor of Farrar, Straus & Giroux,” gave what the Times called “the sharpest indictment of literary and moral standards”: “In an age of mendacity, duplicity and document-shredders, the clear vision of Flannery O’Connor not only burns brighter than ever but it burns through the masks of what she called ‘blind wills and low dodges of the heart.’ She once said, ‘When I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it’s because we are still able to recognize one.’”
Yet such full-throated acclaim, and all