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When Lowell returned to New York on March 16, he appeared much calmer, as he awaited the Yaddo board meeting scheduled for March 26, following the inconclusive Garage meeting a month earlier. During that week, he and Hardwick brought Flannery along to dinner at the midtown apartment of the novelist Mary McCarthy and her husband, Bowden Broadwater. In O’Connor’s words, McCarthy, a lapsed Catholic, prominent in the Paris Review circle, was “a Big Intellectual.” Arriving at the apartment at eight, the group engaged in fast-moving dinner conversation, with Flannery never adding a word — it was “like having a dog present,” Flannery said, “who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.” At a defining moment toward one o’clock in the morning, she did finally speak. As O’Connor told the story, “Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, he being the ‘most potable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’” Of what became a well-known response, Hardwick, McCarthy’s close friend, said defensively, “It did become famous, in Flannery’s favor, so to speak. But I don’t consider it a proper answer. . . . Considering how intelligent she was, she was more pious than any other Catholic I’ve ever known.”

Flannery was not present for the denouement of Lowell’s mise-en-scène, his temporary downfall. For to his great disillusionment, a counterpetition in support of Mrs. Ames was signed by fifty-one writers, including Kazin, Porter, McCullers, Delmore Schwartz, and Cheever, accusing him of “a frame of mind that represents a grave danger both to civil liberties and to the freedom necessary for the arts.” At their March 26 meeting, the Yaddo board dismissed Lowell’s charges. Stung by the rebuke, and following an appearance at a Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he introduced himself as “a poet and a Roman Catholic,” Lowell flew off to Chicago to visit Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. There his behavior grew extreme enough for him to finally be hospitalized at Baldpate, in Massachusetts. Of what he felt was their enabling of Lowell’s delusions, Tate chidingly wrote to Hardwick, “But you are a woman and Miss O’Connor is a woman, and neither of you had the experience or knowledge to evaluate the situation in public terms.”

A few days before the Yaddo board meeting, Flannery was already on the train home, where she celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday and stayed through Easter. When Giroux had handed her a copy of The Seven Storey Mountain, he did so for her “to take with her to her mother’s house in Milledgeville.” She read there of the importance to Merton of Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism in reconciling his identities as novelist and contemplative, and of a religious conversion played out in apartments and Catholic sanctuaries in Manhattan. In Georgia, arguments were stacked against her living in Manhattan. Mrs. O’Connor worried about her daughter alone in the most notorious of northern cities. Money was tight; as Flannery wrote Paul Engle, “I didn’t get any Guggenheim.” Yet her Yaddo friend Elizabeth Fenwick had helped her secure a rented room in the uptown apartment of an acquaintance, and Flannery had every intention of returning.

During her month down South, she continued to bristle from the Yaddo incident. Even Lowell would later joke of the time they “blew our lids there” and “tried to blow the roof off.” Her upset at the time, though, was nearly as charged as his. Her GSCW history professor Helen Greene remembers Flannery agitatedly stopping by her office in Parks Hall during this spring visit, asking reproachfully, “Why didn’t you teach me about Communism?”: “I told her that her major in social studies had included a great deal on the subject