Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [30]
For O’Connor, a rare Southerner of her generation to complain “I sure am sick of the Civil War,” neither the book nor movie was a draw. Her irritation at the reception only intensified when relatives later needled her for not writing a popular moneymaker like her fellow Georgian woman author. She took revenge by sending up the gaudy opening night as the high point in the life of 104-year-old Confederate veteran General Sash in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”: “‘I was in that preemy they had in Atlanta,’ he would tell visitors sitting on his front porch. ‘Surrounded by beautiful guls. It wasn’t a thing local about it. It was nothing local about it. Listen here. Every person in it had paid ten dollars to get in and had to wear this tuxseeder. I was in this uniform.’” And parroting her own mother’s criticism, the mother of the fledgling writer Asbury, in “The Enduring Chill,” advises, “We need another good book like Gone with the Wind. . . . Put the war in it. . . . That always makes a long book.” In “The Partridge Festival,” Aunt Bessie, a stand-in for Aunt Mary, remarks hopefully to her aspiring-writer nephew, “Maybe you’ll be another Margaret Mitchell.” For the twenty-five years following the premiere, Gone With the Wind remained a running joke in O’Connor’s life and work. Dean Hood, a friend from Florida, recalled that when she and her husband, Robert, visited Milledgeville during the 1960s, a Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal ran a memorial feature on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, “which Flannery sputtered over all day long.”
IN THE FALL of 1940, the silhouette of Death that O’Connor described, in an apprentice story, as a man in white “coming slow up the road, to take you,” grew more distinct. Because their daughter was unhappy in school in Atlanta, her parents enrolled her for the tenth grade back in Peabody High School, in Milledgeville. Edward O’Connor, under the care of physicians in Atlanta, moved in alongside his two brothers-in-law in Bell House. Soon even this shaky arrangement fell apart. A worst-case scenario came true. As his health deteriorated, O’Connor could no longer hold down his government job. By the end of the year, he retreated to the Cline Mansion to spend his last months as an invalid, dependent on the kindness of his wife’s family for care. His fifteen-year-old daughter watched as the father she adored — a middle-aged man, otherwise in his prime — suffered a mysterious, painful, wasting death from the fatal illness.
Edward O’Connor’s death on Saturday, the first of February 1941, came exactly a month after his forty-fifth birthday. Its apparent suddenness was a shock, especially to those outside the immediate family circle. Just a year earlier, a holiday party at the Cline Mansion had been billed as both a New Year’s Day celebration and a birthday party for Edward O’Connor, with decorative yellow calendulas in a large silver bowl on the dining room table, and his daughter assisting with the entertaining. His mysterious illness had been kept enough of a well-guarded secret that a brief obituary in the Atlanta Constitution claimed that he died “following a two-week illness.” A Union-Recorder obituary more fully reported, “In recent months his health had not been good, but his death was unexpected.