Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [72]
Flannery’s describing herself as “thirteenth century” on their walks shows the weightiness of some of these crepuscular conversations; she wasn’t much for small talk. The phrase was also a passkey to her more private thoughts. “She was completely intellectual, and cerebral,” assured Giroux. “She was a thinker. And in those days encountering a philosophical woman thinker was rarer.” The most “thirteenth-century” book she was reading, and avidly underlining, at the time was Art and Scholasticism, by Jacques Maritain, a French Thomist, who was teaching at Princeton and helping to make the thought of Thomas Aquinas relevant in forties America. Its eighth chapter, “Christian Art,” was a thunderclap to O’Connor; she drew line markings next to the passage “Do not make the absurd attempt to sever in yourself the artist and the Christian.”
Maisel’s crusade worked, and on July 26, a mere three days before Flannery’s departure, Mrs. Ames sent a note inviting her to return: “Then you may count on staying, definitely, to the end of the year: and I shall do my best for you to remain well after that date.” In a note of thanks, Flannery claimed, “I have worked with much peace here.” Her invitation was a coup, treated as a loud secret, in keeping with the intrigue around most of Ames’s decisions. “Dear Flannery is leaving tomorrow, but is coming back in September to stay all winter (this is a secret from the rest of the guests),” Clifford Wright confided in his diary. Soon after her return to Milledgeville, Flannery wrote “Dear Elizabeth,” that “were it not for my mother, I could easily resolve not to see Georgia again.” Her news of an open-ended stay at the artists’ colony, though, was greeted with far less enthusiasm by Regina, irritated that her daughter would give up a practical Iowa teaching fellowship.
Still, Flannery pushed ahead, writing Paul Engle a postcard suggesting he transfer her grant to Clyde McLeod, while including an inside joke about Haze’s casketlike upper berth in “The Train”: “I sleep in my coffin beginning every evening at 7:30.” The biggest excitement on her visit home was an August 12 rally of 350 Klan members on the steps of the Milledgeville Court House, which she reported, dryly, to Ames: “It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with red electric light bulbs.” Likewise regaling Clifford Wright with tales of visiting her “ancient wealthy” cousin Katie, who told her to mind her manners more, she confided her tactic of not telling tales of Yaddo for fear of upsetting her relatives, who “think the height of Bohemianism is wearing slacks out of the house.”
When Flannery returned to Yaddo on the early afternoon of September 16, she joined a reduced group of fifteen guests. Among them, until the end of the month, was Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born Partisan Review writer in her early thirties, already a lively presence on the literary scene in Manhattan. “She was a brilliant creature, a wonderful conversationalist, who fainted once that summer on the tennis court,” says Morton. When Mrs. Ames invited Hardwick back for January, she signed her note, with unusual warmth, “My love to you.” Staying until mid-October was Malcolm Cowley, assistant editor of the New Republic from 1929 until 1944 and one of the Yaddo board members who approved O’Connor’s application, with the comment “She seems to have talent.” (The only naysayer on the board, the Smith College professor Newton Arvin, found her submitted stories “hard to like . . . unrelieved, gray, uncolored.”)
As the main mansion was shut for the winter months, Flannery was put up, for “the small season,” in a modest bedroom, and separate work studio, on the first floor of West House, where Mrs. Trask had spent her final years, until her death in 1922. A miniature version of the mansion, with an attached stone tower, the whimsical wooden farmhouse had its own Victorian