Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [78]
Its least likely participant was Flannery O’Connor, ever silent, and keeping a canny distance. Yet the combination of Lowell’s mesmerizing personality, some annoyance with Mrs. Ames’s autocratic style, and a simple view of Communism as evil, all led her to take part. Her cross-examination by Lowell was the least expansive of the testimonies, just a single page of a sixty-page transcript. Describing her relations with Mrs. Ames over the summer as “very pleasant. I saw little of her,” she said matters had devolved to being “precariously cordial”: “I felt more like Mrs. Ames’ personal guest than a guest of the Corporation.” To Lowell’s leading question, “Has Mrs. Ames said anything contrary to her official position?” she replied sharply, “Mrs. Ames said that Agnes Smedley had been living in fear for a long time . . . that seemed different to me. It did not seem to fit in with an impression of her as an old-fashioned Jeffersonian democrat.”
In her testimony on Ames’s arbitrary rule, Flannery told prosecuting Lowell, “I asked to stay through July, largely through economic pressure, which has not improved, but I am leaving next Tuesday.” The last four guests did hastily depart Yaddo within a day or two. Of the “little mix-up,” Hardwick claimed, “It wasn’t as much as it seems now. Flannery wasn’t so much in that.” All was forgiven enough for Elizabeth Ames to invite O’Connor to return, in 1958; she declined, writing back of her peacocks, “When I look at my birds I often think of Yaddo and how well a few of them would go with the place.” Yet at the time much was being made, and aftershocks followed the group to New York City, where a board meeting was scheduled the next month to decide the issue. Having been present at the feverish Garage meeting, Malcolm Cowley reported back to a friend: “The guests departed, vowing to blacken the name of Yaddo in all literary circles and call a mass meeting of protest. . . . I left too, feeling as if I had been at a meeting of the Russian Writers’ Union during a big purge. Elizabeth went to a nursing home. Her secretary resigned. Yaddo was left like a stricken battlefield.”
THE SELF-IMPOSED EXILE of the group from Yaddo threw Flannery into confusion, vexing for a young woman whose writing depended so much on cloistered regularity. “We have been very upset at Yaddo lately and all the guests are leaving in a group Tuesday — the revolution,” she reported to Elizabeth McKee on February 24. “All this is very disrupting to the book and has changed my plans entirely.” Arriving in Manhattan during a winter storm that covered everything in snow and ice, with gusting winds, she was nearly as disturbed as she had been during her abrupt girlhood removal to Atlanta. As Enoch cries to Haze, of Taulkinham, in “The Peeler,” published nine months later in Partisan Review, “There’s too many people on the street . . . all they want to do is knock you down. I ain’t never been to such a unfriendly place before.”
Flannery was oblivious to most of the changes that were making New York City the “first city” of the postwar world: its population, during the administration of Mayor William O’Dwyer, approaching the 1950 census figure of 7,891,957; construction beginning along the East River of the United Nations Secretariat, the world’s first glass-walled skyscraper; African American sharecroppers migrating from Southern cotton farms to Harlem; Puerto Ricans arriving on daily flights from San Juan. Yet she was painfully aware of the numbers on the streets, the crowds captured in the canonic images of the Life photographer Andreas Feininger, using a telephoto lens, to compress lunch-hour workers on Fifth Avenue into even more of a cliché of a “rat race” in a “skyscraper jungle.” As she told Betty Boyd of the anomie she was witnessing daily, “There is one advantage