Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [71]
As in Iowa City, she took up as well with a few protective men who helped her along. One was Paul Moor, who wrote about music, described by Mrs. Ames in her notes as “an accomplished pianist and a socially graceful person.” Moor had an unfortunate summer: he collapsed from heat exhaustion on a visit to Manhattan and had to be flown back to Yaddo; at the end of July, his studio accidentally burned to the ground. Yet he made a most important difference in O’Connor’s professional life by recommending her to Elizabeth McKee, his literary agent. “Elizabeth McKee was a wonderful woman,” recalled Robert Giroux, who eventually became O’Connor’s publisher. “For New York, she was really genteel and didn’t act like most literary agents I knew. She was very loyal to Flannery, was a damn good agent for her, and really helped her.”
In her introductory letter to McKee, on June 19, Flannery apologized for writing to her “in my vague and slack season,” and warned, “I am a very slow worker. . . . I have never had an agent so I have no idea what your disposition might be toward my type of writer.” Evidently charmed by the candor and self-deprecation, McKee responded within a few days: “Your work sounds very interesting. . . . Please don’t let it worry you that you are not a prolific writer.” As they began to discuss the details of the contract for her novel with Rinehart, Flannery, who reported that she was working on the twelfth chapter, further defined her “type of writer” as decidedly not formulaic: “I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”
McKee showed commitment to her new writer by asking George Davis, a fiction editor at Mademoiselle, for a chance, as her agent, to look over the galleys of “The Turkey,” set to be published as “The Capture” in the magazine’s November issue.
The gentleman most taken with the taciturn young lady from the South was Edward Maisel, a musicologist, author, and Harvard graduate in his early thirties, who had published a successful biography of the American composer Charles T. Griffes five years earlier. A confidant of Mrs. Ames, he lived with an overflow of guests out at North Farm, on the far side of Union Avenue, where he could sing at the top of his lungs while writing. He was fond of picking up Flannery after working hours to take long strolls in the woods, and he even led her on a boating expedition on a nearby lake. The two occasionally walked into downtown Saratoga Springs, where he introduced her to some of the townspeople he found amusing. She obviously responded, as she later wrote: “after a few weeks at Yaddo, you long to talk to an insurance salesman, dog-catcher, bricklayer — anybody who isn’t talking about Form or sleeping pills.”
Maisel was caricatured by Robert Lowell, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, as “a real Yaddo ringer who knows everything and everybody — is in on everybody — and is sort of a pain.” He was fond of telling guests’ fortunes with a deck of tarot cards. Yet his very nature as a learned and amusing busybody stood Flannery in good stead when he took it upon himself to become her advocate. As silence was the rule at Yaddo, much communication took place by note passing; Mrs. Ames’s favorite medium was a blue slip on which she often warned guests of infractions. In one typed missive, Maisel diplomatically urged her to notice Flannery’s distinction: “By the way have you got to know Flannery O’Connor at all? Probably not, because she’s so very silent and withdrawn, and needs bringing out; but I have been on several evening walks with