Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [70]
Animals turned out to be fitting company that summer, as her own imaginary companion was Enoch Emery, the zoo guard who winds up near her novel’s end donning an ape suit. While many of the characters she was inventing were fated for the cutting-room floor, or spun off into other stories, “grinning” Enoch, in his “yellowish white” suit, “pinkish white” shirt, and “greenpeaish” tie, somehow stuck. First noticed by Haze, in a seventy-five-hundred-word draft, marked “Yaddo,” looking “like a friendly hound dog with light mange,” he became his faithful, if abused, sidekick. “In my whole time of writing the only parts that have come easy for me were Enoch Emery and Hulga,” O’Connor later admitted. During her Yaddo summer, she was sending out, getting back, and rewriting the two stories that brought Enoch to life, “The Peeler” and “The Heart of the Park.”
The downside of Yaddo for Flannery was its artiness, or the “arty” pose she felt that many of her fellow guests adopted. “At the breakfast table they talked about seconol and barbiturates and now maybe it’s marujana,” she warned Dawkins. “You survive in this atmosphere by minding your own business and by having plenty of your own business to mind, and by not being afraid to be different from the rest of them.” The summer was marked by many of the legendary Yaddo parties, of which O’Connor claimed, “I went to one or two of these but always left before they began to break things.” The more extreme action usually took place on weekends at Jimmy’s Bar, on Congress Street, in the black section of town. But at one official Yaddo event, a woman writer, ginned up, felt inspired to perform a combination cancan and cooch dance.
“Miss Highsmith and Mr. Wright had a taxi driver follow them around from bar to bar and then didn’t have any money to pay him so were taken to jail in a highly uncooperative mood, but managed to talk themselves out before morning,” Clifford Wright recorded of his high jinks with Highsmith, who characterized herself, at Yaddo, as falling “between those two stools” of writing and partying. All of the alcohol consumption — “in any collection of so-called artists you will find a good percentage alcoholic in one degree or another,” sniped O’Connor — combined with late hours, led, of course, to sexual escapades. “In such a place you have to expect them all to sleep around”; she went on, observing satirically, “This is not sin but Experience, and if you do not sleep with the opposite sex, it is assumed that you sleep with your own.”
Having defensively decided that “the help was morally superior to the guests,” Flannery’s initial response was to shrink back from the others, and to make friends, instead, with Jim and Nellie Shannon, the Irish caretaker and head cook, who lived with their three kids in East House, one of three smaller buildings on the property. “Dad had been a ragpicker on the docks until he got in a brawl and someone put a bale hook in his skull, so he moved upstate,” says his son Jim. Although Flannery couldn’t reproduce her daily Iowa City ritual, each Sunday morning she drove with the Shannons in their 1930s Ford station wagon to mass at St. Clement’s Church on Lake Avenue in Saratoga Springs. She kept a close watch, too, on the staff of mostly Irish maids, a type she was familiar with — “all well over forty, large grim and granit-jawed or shriveled and shrunk.”
Flannery did, soon enough, form a close friendship with one other woman writer, Elizabeth Fenwick. A Texas-born author of both thrillers and lyric novels, Fenwick was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, working for a Columbia professor. “I remember she was a kind of sexy creature, very attractive physically,” says Frederick Morton. The coincidence that brought Flannery together with the easygoing “Miss Fenwick,” as she liked to call the more facile writer, was that