Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [65]
Jean Williams saw her only a few times that fall, outside of the Monday afternoon Workshop sessions. As Mrs. Guzeman didn’t serve Sunday dinner, Flannery occasionally took her noon meal at the Mad Hatter Tea Room, over Bremer’s Clothing Store, on Washington Street, where Williams worked as a “salad girl.” They once bumped into each other as she was exiting Woolworth’s Five-and-Ten-Cent Store with a single cake of Palmolive soap. “I doubt if Flannery ever bought two of anything at one time,” she recalled. When Williams visited O’Connor’s room at Mrs. Guzeman’s, she was struck by the “monastic simplicity” of its “neatly-made bed, the typewriter waiting on a desk. There was nothing extraneous in that room except a box of vanilla wafers beside the typewriter. She nibbled on cookies while she wrote, she said, because she didn’t smoke.”
A more involved friendship began at the same time with Robie Macauley. On leave for the year, Engle put Andrew Lytle in charge of the Workshop and brought in Macauley as both a student and instructor, teaching a course in Russian literature. “He was a brilliant young professor,” says Bernie Halperin, a Workshop writer who took his course. “He was a thin, nice-looking fellow, with a tremendous knowledge of those massive Russian novels.” At the age of twenty-eight, the Michigan native had earned a BA at Kenyon College, where he studied under John Crowe Ransom; served during the war in the Army Counterintelligence Corps; taught at Bard College; and worked as an editor at Henry Holt and Company. Upon first hearing O’Connor read from her novel in progress, he was immediately impressed by the work as “entirely original, strange.”
“I used to date Flannery and I remember sitting with her long hours on the porch swing of her boardinghouse . . . discussing a number of deep matters or reading the new chapters of Wise Blood, which she was writing at the time,” Macauley later recounted. “As for the deep matters, I remember that Flanders Dunbar had become intellectually fashionable that year and we’d both read her, and so we spent a lot of time discussing psychosomatic medicine.” The Dunbar book was Mind and Body, its author also a medievalist with an interest in Dante, a favorite of the two new friends. Macauley also occasionally escorted Flannery, with Workshop instructor Paul Griffith and his girlfriend, to Sunday lunch in Amana, the historic German Pietist community, twenty miles from Iowa City: “We ate in a big barnlike dining hall with everybody at long tables. Flannery liked that.”
During the fall, Macauley introduced Flannery to his friends Walter Sullivan, a Workshop writer from Tennessee, and his wife, Jane. “Robie took care of Flannery . . . he had a gift of making her relax,” Sullivan has observed of their easygoing relationship. When Macauley first brought her by a small party at their home, promising, “There’s a little Georgia girl here you’ve got to meet,” she found an audience highly receptive to spun tales of her childhood, especially her centerpiece story of the Pathe News arriving to film her backward-walking chicken. “Flannery would get strung out and start telling stories about the South,” said Jane Sullivan of her many visits. “Funny stories, and it was hysterical, but this required a small group for conversation; it wasn’t party stuff.”
Regarding his friendship with Flannery, Macauley used the term “date” a couple of times with interviewers. Yet whatever dating occurred was of the lightest sort. As he explained when pressed, “Flannery and I had no ‘romantic’ relationship. I was engaged to Anne Draper (who was in New York) and Flannery was well aware of it. . . . We did spend a lot of time talking and reading manuscripts.” Her bond with the tall, soft-spoken intellectual, not a “party man,” was more as a “soul mate.” Like the soldier John Sullivan, he was a good-looking, somewhat unavailable, slightly older guy who protected and encouraged her. And she brought a similar excitement to their friendship. Once Jean Williams saw Flannery on her way to the library to