Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [66]
The first week in October a dorm mate of Macauley’s from Kenyon, Robert Lowell, arrived to give a poetry reading in the Old Capitol and to critique Workshop poems. A Boston-born disciple of the Fugitives, Lowell had camped out during the summer of 1937 in the backyard of Allen Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon, in Tennessee, to learn at the feet of the Vanderbilt masters; he then broke with family tradition by leaving Harvard to study, like Macauley, as one of “Ransom’s boys,” at Kenyon. Later describing Iowa City as “tame and friendly,” the thirty-year-old poet, in 1947, was treated as a wild celebrity. Chain-smoking, curly-haired, and unruly, he cut a poetic figure. “He was so sensitive, he trembled as he read to us,” recalls James B. Hall. Flannery was quite impressed by Lowell, at the reading and at a dinner, where he held forth one night during his four-day visit.
A visitor altogether different from Robert Lowell arrived later in the month for a weekend stay — Mary Virginia Harrison, her attractive “best friend” from high school. Mary Virginia stayed at a hotel, and one night the girlfriends shared a double bed at Mrs. Guzeman’s. Flannery had written that she could meet her train at any hour, as her own life was “simple, austere.” As for clothing, she advised, “The well dressed Iowa Citian is usually seen in a sweat shirt, trousers or skirt (as the sex may dictate), heavy coat and limp cigaret.” A Jessie classmate they both knew was Faye Hancock, married to the Workshop writer Hank Messick, and living in Victory Park, a student trailer park for veterans. Messick later recalled that on her visits Flannery preferred bottled Blue Ridge spring-water. “When it was gone,” he wrote, “she returned to mixed drinks, claiming a lot of Scotch was necessary to make the water drinkable.”
For her third holiday trip home to Milledgeville that December, Flannery was accompanied as far as La Salle Street Station in Chicago by Jean Williams. The train ride in high-backed swivel chairs in the parlor car was their longest time spent together. Flannery convinced the porter it would be “right nice” if he would “allow” her friend into the first-class section, too. She was putting the final touches that month on “The Train,” which would be published in April in the Sewanee Review, the prestigious quarterly from Tennessee’s University of the South, edited by both Lytle and Tate. “They know exactly what they’re doing all the time,” she said, eyeing the porter. “No dilly-dallying atall.” She then took out a snapshot of the Cline Mansion from her purse to show. “Flannery was glad to be going home that Christmas,” wrote Jean Williams Wylder. “She looked very pretty, more like a college girl . . . almost tall in a blue plaid suit and tan polo jacket.”
When they both returned to Iowa City, Jean accompanied Flannery on a walk that doubled as a fact-finding mission. At work on a chapter about Haze’s lone friend, Enoch Emery, at City Forest Park Zoo, Flannery suggested they visit the local City Park Zoo, a half-mile walk along the Iowa River. Here she got her inspiration for Enoch’s fixation on a cage of “two black bears . . . sitting and facing each other like two matrons having tea,” which she worked into her story “The Heart of the Park.” According to her friend, on this bleak Sunday afternoon in February, a “completely absorbed and interested” Flannery stared at “the two sad and mangy bears, the raccoons, and the special foreign chickens they had.” O’Connor later remembered “two indifferent bears . . . and a sign over them that said: ‘These lions donated by the Iowa City Elks Club.’”
If her “barbarous Georgia accent,” as she joked of it, had been a liability two years earlier, during the spring of 1948 readings by Flannery were much sought after. One circle where she felt comfortable sharing her work gathered on Sunday evenings at Austin Warren’s elegant home. The in-group included Robie Macauley; Andrew Lytle;