Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [62]
Flickering through various drafts of “The Train,” marked “Workshop,” is the presence of a more military Haze, recently demobilized, among army buddies en route, like Flannery, from Chicago to Chattanooga. In one version, he is the life of the party, buying them all beers in the club car and passing out cigarettes. While keeping quiet in class, Flannery had evidently been listening closely to the war stories of classmates, like Jim Eriicson, at work on a novel about a veteran in a hospital, suffering, he told the Cedar Rapids Gazette, from “the Oedipus complex.” She borrowed from these war-torn heroes for her own more comic antihero. And although Iowa City never left many traces in her fiction, the minute she hit Dearborn Station, where Hazel felt “a thump of recognition” at hearing “flat and twangish” country voices, her imagination clicked on.
When she returned to Iowa City, in January 1947, Flannery set to work finishing “The Train,” the last of the six stories in her thesis collection, the writing requirement for an MFA degree. She also began adapting the story as the first chapter of her novel in progress. The novel was inspired not simply by themes of “awayness” and “homeness,” but also by Paul Engle’s announcement in November of an award from Rinehart Publishers of a $750 advance for a novel, to be awarded to a Workshop student in May, with an option, upon acceptance, of another $750. Engle had already sent two of her stories to his friend John Selby, the Rinehart editor in charge of the prize. Flush from the success of their recent bestselling novels, The Lost Weekend, by Charles R. Jackson, and The Hucksters, by Frederic Wakeman, the publishers hoped to sign up hot new talent.
For help with writing the required outline and four chapters, or twelve thousand words, she turned to Andrew Lytle, brought in by Engle as a visiting lecturer and instructor in February and put up in Quonset hut no. 244. Tall and wiry, Lytle, in his midforties, was a card-carrying Southerner and gentleman farmer. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, he had been one of the original members of the Agrarians, a literary movement nostalgic for Old South rural, aristocratic values. Before leaving college to go off to Yale Drama School and a stint as a Broadway actor, he was friendly with the founding Fugitive poets, including Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren. In “The Hind Tit,” the essay he contributed to the 1930 Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, he wrote of Tennessee yeomen farmers, much like Hazel, displaced from the land by the “pizen snake” of industrialism.
Lytle first encountered Flannery while sitting in on a Workshop class, where he was asked to read her student story aloud: “I was told later that it was understood that I would know how to pronounce in good country idiom the word chitling which appeared in the story. At once it was obvious that the author of the story was herself not only Southern but exceptionally gifted.” Flannery responded to Lytle as a protective big brother and consummate prose stylist, known to “make a federal case out of a comma.” It fell to Lytle to help her through a scene involving Hazel and a prostitute that wound up in the novel’s second chapter: “She would put a man in bed with a woman, and I would say, ‘Now, Flannery, it’s not done quite that way,’ and we talked a little bit about it, but she couldn’t face up to it, so she put a hat on his head and made a comic figure of him.” He advised her to “sink the theme” and “clobber” her reader more subtly.
Their master-apprentice relationship irritated those students baffled by the growing recognition of the young lady meanly described by one as having “a bale of cotton in her mouth.” Aware of the rumblings, Lytle said, “She was a lovely girl, but scared the boys to death with her irony.” Lytle did not help matters