Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [80]
Equally profound was Lowell’s next introduction, Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace. Still a junior editor, with an alert, open face, Giroux had already published the early novels of Jean Stafford; the poetry of Lowell and T. S. Eliot; Hannah Arendt’s first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. When Lowell brought Flannery by the firm’s modern offices, at Madison Avenue and 46th Street, Giroux was instantly convinced of his “unusual” visitor’s literary future. “She was very quiet,” said Giroux. “She was very chary of words. Lowell of course was vocal and full of interesting phrases, a great talker. But she had electric eyes, very penetrating. She could see right through you, so to speak. I was a young publisher, interested in acquiring writers. I thought, ‘This woman is so committed, as a writer, she’ll do whatever she’s made up her mind to do.’” But he knew that she was signed to Rinehart and felt sure she would not go back on an agreement.
“At first, her speech was difficult to understand because she had a deep Georgia accent,” remembered Giroux. “I had to concentrate. I was amazed when Paul Engle told me he couldn’t understand a word she said. I could hear the words. It was the rhythm and accent that required attention. It occurs to me that Robert Lowell had a Southern accent, too. He was born in Boston. But he went to Kenyon, and Ransom had a definite, very nice, genteel Southern accent, and he sort of picked up on that.” Flannery’s only request was for a copy of Giroux’s surprise bestseller that season, The Seven Storey Mountain, a memoir, by his Columbia classmate Thomas Merton, of abandoning the literary life of Manhattan to become a Trappist monk in Kentucky. When she left his office that day, book in hand, she felt the same sympathetic tug of interest in the young editor, educated in a Jesuit high school, whom she would later call “my good editor,” that he felt for her.
As the first week in March, and Lent, progressed, so did Lowell’s religious fervor, and Flannery’s special role in his vivid imaginings. His was to be a poet’s conversion more dramatic than even Merton’s. On March 4, he phoned Robert Fitzgerald to inform him that on Ash Wednesday, March 2, his thirty-second birthday, he had “received the shock of the eternal word.” He went on, “Today is the day of Flannery O’Connor, whose patron saint is St. Therese of Lisieux.” At Lowell’s direction, Fitzgerald got out a pad and pencil and took notes, writing, “He filled his bathtub with cold water and went in first on his hands and knees, then arching on his back, and prayed thus to Therese of Lisieux in gasps. . . . He went to the Guild Bookshop to get Flannery a book on St. Therese of Lisieux but instead before he knew it bought a book on a Canadian girl who was many times stigmatized.” Lowell then left town on a weeklong meditative retreat for absolution and counsel at his own chosen Trappist monastery in Rhode Island.
Word of these visions, and of Lowell’s insistence on canonizing Flannery, began to circulate at Manhattan cocktail parties. When Betty Hester heard such tales, independently, during the sixties, and asked her friend about them, she obviously hit a tender topic. “Let me right now correct, stash & obliterate this revolting story about Lowell introducing me as a saint,” O’Connor fired back, about the part played by her and Robert Fitzgerald. “At the time it was happening, poor Cal was about three steps from the asylum. He had the delusion that he had been called on some kind of mission of purification and he was canonizing everybody that had anything do with his situation then. I was very close to him and so was Robert. I was too inexperienced to know he was mad, I just thought that was the way poets acted. Even Robert