Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [75]
As being at Yaddo and having a Guggenheim fellowship (of about twenty-five hundred dollars) were nearly synonymous in the late 1940s, Flannery decided that fall to apply. Clifford Wright, himself applying, described Lowell, when he arrived, as “Guggenheiming it.” Hardwick, likewise “enGuggenheimed,” had received hers in June. Flannery did find herself in the fortunate spot, shared by Lowell but few others, of having crossed a Mason-Dixon Line of literary politics — published by the Sewanee and Kenyon Reviews, associated with conservative, even reactionary Southern writers, as well as by Partisan Review, the provenance of left-leaning, often Jewish, New York intellectuals. Her own recommenders were George Davis; Philip Rahv; Paul Engle; Robert Penn Warren; Theodore Amussen, a Rinehart editor, who had moved to Harcourt Brace; and Robert Lowell, providing the inside information that she wrote “sentence by sentence, at snail’s pace.”
In December, pleading economic worries, Flannery made the bold decision to spend Christmas away from home. Instead, she hunkered down with the two remaining Yaddo guests, Lowell and Wright. By then, their social rhythm was comfortable. After Thanksgiving, Ezra Pound’s son, Omar Shakespeare Pound, visited, and Lowell reported, in a letter to T. S. Eliot, “I introduced him to our Yaddo child, Miss Flannery O’Connor. Weird scenes of Omar trying to help her into her muskrat coat — a new experience for both.” When Lowell recalled her tripping up stairs with a bottle of gin, she corrected him: “It was not gin but rum (unopened) and the steps were slick.” Wright appreciated Flannery’s “high moral tone,” and found “ingeniously funny and ominous” the zoo chapter from her novel, which she told him was titled The Great Spotted Bird. He found the title “perfect,” summing up the “grotesque” book as “short . . . the main character is a boy.”
The Christmas holidays were a bit milder than Lowell might have liked. “My suggestion that we have bottled egg-nog for Christmas breakfast fell rather flat,” he complained of his housemates, who were “not celebrating types.” But he consoled himself on Christmas Eve by reading Pride and Prejudice “aloud to the two Yaddonians,” and listening to the “Gloria” from three masses — Bach’s B Minor, a Palestrina, and a Gregorian. Remembering her last holiday on the train from Iowa City with Jean Williams, Flannery wrote her friend:
It would be nice to meet you again this year on the train. However, I am glad I won’t be fooling around with any trains this Christmas. I am not budging from this place. The Yuletide Poorhouse fare is very decent. The cook will be off and we three will be sent to the New Worden Hotel for dinner. We have a Christmas tree but will not hang up any stockings. We three are myself, Robert Lowell, and a stray painter.
Indeed the next day, after a week of light snowfall, the three were driven into town for a holiday dinner at the only year-round hotel, courtesy of the Yaddo Corporation.
Soon after the New Year, Flannery mailed her agent a freshly typed manuscript of the first nine chapters of her novel, adding up to 108 pages, with a note: “please show John Selby and let us be on with financial thoughts.” But her steady misgivings came true when the editor in chief responded with his impression that the work needed revision, allowing that its author was “a pretty straight shooter.” McKee forwarded Selby’s letter, which Flannery promptly showed to Lowell. She eventually passed on the poet’s comments to Paul Engle, now caught in the middle: “He too thought that the faults Rinehart