Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [82]
In a letter to Betty Boyd that summer, Flannery was every bit as shrill, and apocalyptic, in her damning of Communism, as Lowell, the Catholic Church, or even Billy Graham, who preached, in a career-making, eight-week mission in Los Angeles in 1949, “On one side we see communism . . . against God, against Christ, against the Bible.”
She vehemently reported on the Yaddo incident to her college friend, “Our action gained a good deal of publicity — not through us — and we have been assailed as people who want to destroy civil liberties etc etc. . . . As to the devil, I not only believe he is but believe he has a family . . . Yaddo has confirmed this in me.”
When she did return to Manhattan, Flannery survived a muggy summer, marked by heat waves “much worse than Georgia.” She lived for four months in a furnished room on the twelfth floor of the Manchester, a pre–World War I brick apartment building, at 255 West 108th Street and Broadway, in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood teeming with Columbia students, Jewish families, and Puerto Rican immigrants. Replicating her Iowa City routine, she began each morning by walking around the block to pray at the white marble Church of the Ascension, a mostly Irish parish, near Amsterdam Avenue. “I liked riding the subways and busses and all,” she reminisced, “and there was a church on 107th and I got to Mass every day and was very much alone and liked it.” She told Betty Boyd, “All the women over sixty-five in New York are wearing sun back dresses.”
But she spent most of her time in her room, writing; any progress achieved by training her attention on what she called, near the end of Wise Blood, “the pin point of light but so far away that she could not hold it steady in her mind.” Claiming that her own knowledge of the complicated layout of the city was limited to “uptown” and “downtown,” she later admitted to a friend, “I didn’t see much of the city when I stayed in New York. . . . I didn’t go to a single play or even to the Frick Museum. I went to the natural history museum but didn’t do anything the least cultural. The public library was much too much for me. I did well to get out and get a meal or two a day. I finally ended up eating at the Columbia University student cafeteria. I looked enough like a student to get by with it, and it was one of the few places I suspected the food of being clean.”
A rare visitor to her small, comfortably arranged apartment was Lyman Fulton, a Tennessee native, who had begun a residency at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center on July 1. A friend of Mary Virginia Harrison, Fulton visited three or four times in the company of Flannery’s first cousin Louise Florencourt, and he found her “not overly talkative. I decided she was reclusive, probably a bookworm. . . . I had the impression she spent most of her time at the apartment.” A running joke between them was the meal she served her guests of “goat’s milk cheese and faucet water.” The longest conversation between the two Southerners concerned Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, published with much controversy the year before. Added into the scandal, still being discussed at Yaddo, was Capote’s summer affair with Newton Arvin. “I do remember that she had a definitely negative opinion of Truman Capote,” said Fulton.
Her greatest consolation, outside the featureless room where she wrote, was two trips to the medieval collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Cloisters, the assemblage of monastic chapter house and chapels, imported from France and Spain, and reconstructed stone by stone just a decade before, on a dramatic crest overlooking the Hudson River, at Fort Tryon Park. The Cloisters was a must-see destination for postwar visitors, its energetic