Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [76]
Hardly resistant to rewriting — indeed Selby wondered about “some aspects of the book that have been obscured by your habit of rewriting over and over again” — Flannery was more annoyed by his tone. She asked McKee, “Please tell me what is under this Sears Roebuck Straight Shooter approach,” and she resented the jauntiness of a reply “addressed to a slightly dim-witted Camp-fire Girl.” Emboldened by having Lowell on her side, she wrote back to Selby of her choice to take the high road of art, responding to his sense of a limiting “kind of aloneness in the book, as if you were writing out of the small world of your own experience”: “I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.” Because Selby was disturbed by what he termed “the hardening of the arteries of her cooperative sense . . . most unbecoming to a writer so young,” a decision was made that she come down from Yaddo for a late-February meeting, to clear the air, or part ways.
In the meantime, Yaddo was going through one of its seasonal reshufflings, the deck held entirely in the hands of Mrs. Ames, who informed Flannery that she was free to stay until the end of March, and perhaps beyond — as long as she swept the hallway carpet, each Sunday. Added to the mix, in January, were James Ross, brother-in-law of the Southern novelist Peter Taylor; Edward Maisel, redux; and Alfred Kazin, staying with Mrs. Ames at Pine Garde, her English Tudor cottage on the grounds. Kazin’s first impression was that Flannery “seemed to be attending Robert Lowell with rapture.” But he quickly became more interested in her writing, as he read pages from her novel, tipping off Giroux at Harcourt Brace, for whom he was working as a scout. “No fiction writer after the war seemed to me so deep, so severely perfect as Flannery,” wrote Kazin. “She would be our classic: I had known that from the day I discovered her stories.”
The arriving guest having the most catalytic social effect was “dimpled agreeable” Elizabeth Hardwick, returning on January 5, as she excited Lowell’s already teeming passions. If their quickly escalating romance bothered Flannery, she did not let on. Indeed for the young lady who wished to remain on the prepubescent side of twelve, and with Lowell who saw her as “our Yaddo child,” the development may have been tolerable, even comfortable. “Lizzie Hardwick and Cal Lowell have become about as close as two people can get,” Wright reported. “I have not infra-red photo phlashes to prove it. Flannery is playing it cool.” As Kazin, who engaged in heated nightly political debates with Lowell, crankily recalled, “Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick were a brilliant couple, but Lowell was just a little too dazzling at the moment.”
Hardwick, too, tended to view Flannery as even younger than her twenty-three years, about seven years younger than she and Lowell: “Most of all she was like some quiet, puritanical convent girl from the harsh provinces of Canada.” Remembered Hardwick, “She was a plain sort of young, unmarried girl, a little bit sickly. And she had a very small-town Southern accent . . . whiney. She whined. She was amusing. She was so gifted, immensely gifted. But the first thing I saw of hers after we met her at Yaddo, I’m sort of ashamed to admit, maybe I saw pages of Wise Blood, and I thought, ‘What on earth is this?’ It was just so plain, so reduced, after reading really startling things like Ulysses. Of course now I think it’s wonderful, I later did. But at first it didn’t hit me. . . . I think she and Cal were quite friendly. He was very interested in her.”
By early February, political controversies overtook aesthetic distinctions, or became intensely enfolded in them. Engagé Marxists of