Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [79]
Her first stop was Elizabeth Hardwick’s apartment in Devonshire House, a 1920s building in the “Hispano-Mooresque” style at 28 East 10th Street, where she stayed briefly, while Lowell checked into the Hotel Earle, off Washington Square. Always retaining fond feelings for Hardwick, she later wrote of the “very nice girl” to Betty Hester, “I think Elizabeth is a lot better writer than she gets credit for being. She is a long tall girl, one of eleven children, from Kentucky. . . . I used to go up to Elizabeth’s apartment to see her when I lived in New York and the elevator man always thought I was her sister. There was a slight resemblance.” Hardwick felt the mistake had to do with their accents, adding, “But mine was upper South, hers was very deep, small-town Southern.”
She moved next into a two-dollar-a-day room that smelled like “an unopened Bible,” in Tatum House, a “horrible” YWCA residence, at 138 East 38th Street, on Lexington Avenue. The building provided breakfast, and she took most of her other meals at a nearby “very good co-op cafeteria,” on 41st Street between Madison and Park: “The only place in New York that I could afford to eat downtown where I didn’t feel I was going home with pyoria.” She was hardly alone her first week in the city, though, as Lowell introduced her around. Including her in visits to friends, he rallied support for his Yaddo crusade, while announcing his “reconversion” to Catholicism, having attended mass, with Flannery, for the first time in over a year, before leaving Saratoga Springs. Both issues meshed in his psyche into an apocalyptic struggle of good versus evil.
Yet Lowell was quite intuitive in his introductions, helping Flannery make contacts crucial for her life and career. He brought her to meet Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, living with their two young children in a small, two-room apartment on York Avenue. A poet (A Wreath of the Sea), critic, and translator of Euripides and Sophocles, Robert Fitzgerald, nearly forty, had been brought up Irish Catholic in Springfield, Illinois, left the Church — O’Connor liked to say, “to become an intellectual” — and then returned to the fold, resulting in an annulled first marriage. Sally, thirty-two, the daughter of a Texas judge, was an aspiring painter who studied at the Art Students League in New York, served as an officer in naval intelligence during the war, and had become an intense convert to Catholicism, briefly considering entering a convent before her marriage.
Responding to their doorbell on the gray, wintry afternoon, the Fitzgeralds discovered, standing in the hallway, their disheveled poet friend, “shooting sparks in every direction,” accompanied by Flannery, slender, sandy-haired, with a straightforward blue-eyed gaze and shy half smile, dressed in corduroy slacks and a navy pea jacket. She bore out Lowell’s account of Yaddo as she sat facing the windows reflecting light off the East River. “She did this with some difficulty, frowning and struggling softly in her drawl to put whatever it was exactly the way it was,” remembered Robert Fitzgerald. “We saw a shy Georgia girl, her face heart-shaped and pale and glum, with fine eyes that could stop frowning and open brilliantly upon everything. We had not then read her first stories, but we knew that Mr. Ransom had said of them that they were written.”
She made a strong impression on Sally, too, who grew curious to discover “how this affable, smiling girl from Georgia who didn’t have much to say, wrote, how she went about it.” Finding a copy of “The Train,” she quickly became riveted by its intense tale of Hazel Wickers, “shapes black-spinning past him,” hurtling toward Taulkinham: “I was unprepared for it, for the force, the sheer power of the writing. When I finished the story my hair was standing on end.” By the time Flannery left that afternoon, a sort of familial triangle was already forming, with Robert as the paterfamilias, a font of literary knowledge,