Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [67]
Another such informal Midwestern salon took place in the rented rooms of the writer John Gruen and the painter Jane Wilson, then both MFA students at Iowa. “We would invite her to our house because we had little gatherings, and ask her to read,” says Gruen. “She would sit quietly at first until she was asked to read. ‘Okay, Flannery, did you bring your story?’ ‘Yeeees.’ ‘Are you going to read it?’ ‘Yeeees.’ I believe that she read the first chapters of her novel in an accent that was even fiercer than the way she regularly spoke. She took on all the characters. She would read in this kind of very heavy singsong but not really singing. It was a performance. It became totally hypnotic. So that all of us sitting there, young people in their teens and twenties, were totally struck.”
In early drafts of her novel, Hazel had a sister, Ruby Hill, a “modern” type who lives in a boardinghouse and, upon discovering she is pregnant, wishes to have an abortion. The bit Jane Wilson recalls Flannery reading was a version of this subplot, later spun off by the “demon rewriter,” as Robie Macauley dubbed his friend, into “Woman on the Stairs,” published the next summer in Tomorrow, a small literary magazine, and eventually revised and published as “A Stroke of Good Fortune.” “She read the story in this rhythm of a woman climbing a stair,” remembers Wilson. “It was so persuasive. It was a monologue of silly miseries and dismay. ‘Oh this waistband is so uncomfortable on me. Oh, God!’ Then in the end when she gets to the top of the stairs her worst fears have burst through. It’s not weight gain. She’s pregnant. . . . The writing was scary. But she emanated warmth while she was reading it . . . affection, in a way.”
Over the course of the spring, Flannery was given guidance in planning her future. As Norma Hodges suggests, “She had this air of dependence about her, as if she needed someone to take care of her.” Engle arranged a teaching fellowship for the following year. Griffith suggested applying for a summer residency at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. He then helped her gather a strong list of recommendations. Austin Warren endorsed her as “a personally shy but kind and charming young Southern writer.” Andrew Lytle wrote that she had “as much promise as anyone I have seen of her generation.” Engle praised her as “one of the best young writers in the country.” Her application was successful, and Hansford Martin reported to Engle in April, “Flannery seems happiest of all, blossoming like a rose, packing for Yaddo.”
She was happy enough even to overcome her reluctance to read aloud in the Workshop. In the class run that spring by Lytle, Flannery had rarely spoken up. Once, when her mentor asked her to comment on a student’s story, she paused a beat, then in a deadpan voice, she replied laconically, “I’d say the description of that crocodile in there was real good.” For her memorable late-April performance, she chose to read the vignette of the woman on the stairs, which she introduced as the second chapter of her novel. Her “flat, nasal drawl” reminded the Workshop writer Gene Brzenk of the comic screen actress Zasu Pitts, known for her switchboard-operator voice. “She never looked up,” he recalled, “and acknowledged her audience only when the laughter drowned out her voice. When she finished reading, we all applauded and the meeting broke up in high good humor.”
At the close of the afternoon, Flannery quickly disappeared through the door to return to her room, while