Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [73]
Flannery felt herself on deadline at West House to finish a draft of her novel, to send to John Selby at Rinehart in hopes of an advance to cover a year of rewriting. Yet she was already bracing herself — and Elizabeth McKee — for rejection: “I cannot really believe they will want the finished thing.” Laid out on the table before her were chapters in varying states of completion: the opener, “The Train”; a third chapter, “The Peeler,” where Haze (now Motes) meets Enoch, as well as the fake blind man who begins to tap his way through her novel like the truly blind prophet Tiresias of The Waste Land; “Woman on the Stairs,” then chapter four; and “The Heart of the Park,” chapter nine. Though unsure about Selby, she was encouraged to learn that Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, had decided to publish “The Heart of the Park” in the February issue.
Into Flannery’s seclusion and her pile of plans, six days after her own arrival, walked Robert Lowell, assigned a West House bedroom and studio for the fall and winter, too. Crackling with the sudden literary fame that she had seen him manifesting in Iowa City, Lowell had a knack for stirring up controversy. He arrived fresh from the post of poetry consultant to the Library of Congress — and from a fight, eventually successful, with supporting votes from Eliot, Auden, and Tate, to award Ezra Pound the 1948 Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos. Protests had come from leftist poets over Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts for Mussolini. Indeed, one of Lowell’s first letters from Yaddo was to Pound, under sanatorium arrest for treason at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, informing him that “Yaddo is a sort of St. Elizabeths without bars — regular hours, communal meals, grounds, big old buildings etc.”
Except for Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he found charming and convinced to return in midwinter, Lowell could be sharp about the skeleton crew remaining. Clifford Wright was “pleasant,” but with “a rather withering old-maidish torpor.” The English professor J. Saunders Redding and the painter Charles Sebree were pegged as “an introverted and extroverted colored man,” the painter James Harrison as “a boy of 23 who experiments with dope.” He judged Malcolm Cowley likeable but boring. For his part, Cowley was stressed by the endless table talk about politics, both literary and national. Off-season dinners took place on the second floor of the Garage, and the charged topic, in the fall of 1948, was the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace for president, described by one guest as “the friend of Moscow.” Asked whom he was voting for, Cowley, a radical Marxist during the thirties, cautiously replied, “There’s not one of them I want to see elected.” Then “Someone gave a nervous laugh,” he recalled, “and conversation resumed.”
Lowell’s favorite was Flannery, who treated him at dinner to the surefire story of her backward-walking chicken that had delighted their mutual friend Robie Macauley. Lowell found her “acute and silent,” and quickly became her champion, writing Caroline Gordon, who was teaching Creative Writing in the General Studies program at Columbia: “There’s a girl here named Flannery O’Connor, an admirer of yours, a Catholic and probably a good writer, who is looking for a teaching job. Is there anything at Columbia?” Gordon later told Sally Fitzgerald, of O’Connor’s feelings for her new, larger-than-life friend, “She fell for him; she admitted it to me.” Arriving back in January, Edward Maisel opined theatrically,