Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [83]
But Flannery’s favorite was not the striking statue of the Strasbourg Virgin, celebrated in the daily press. In the soft light of the Early Gothic Hall, illuminated by three thirteenth-century windows carved by stonecutters in Normandy, she was drawn instead to a smaller, four-foot-high statue of Virgin and Child, with both parties “laughing; not smiling, laughing.” She imagined that “the Child had a face very much like the face of a friend of mine, Robert Fitzgerald.” What chiefly pixilated her in the sculpture was its artistic sensibility. As she wrote to a friend, “Back then their religious sense was not cut off from their artistic sense.” Embodying a profound spirituality that could accommodate humor, even outright laughter — a recipe she was working toward in her own novel — the statue, which “wasn’t colored,” was living proof of Maritain’s writings on the breadth of expression possible in religious art.
Another entertainment that fascinated her, in August, was of a different sort altogether, satisfying her countervailing taste for the more ludicrous products of popular culture. She either saw or closely followed reports of the premiere of Mighty Joe Young, a film that opened to wide success at the Criterion Theatre in Times Square. Its publicity campaign of a man in an ape suit greeting customers in front of the theater made the August 8 edition of Newsweek, with a photograph of the ape-man dangling from a line stretched across Broadway. Flannery lifted features of its simian hero, and its publicity gimmick, for her novel; when Enoch, the embodiment of all things goofy, slips into a cinema to watch a film “about a baboon named Lonnie who rescued attractive children from a burning orphanage,” he was actually engrossed in the finale of Mighty Joe Young.
Lyman Fulton rightly enough concluded, “I don’t think New York City was Flannery’s cup of tea.” At her most excoriating, she complained to Betty Boyd of its thick “culture fog” and even its “fornication.” More immediately, she was bothered by its hay fever season, accompanied by a high pollen count that “comes in there August 15 and don’t leave for three weeks.” So she quickly accepted an offer from the Fitzgeralds to move, as a “paying guest,” to a large country house they had bought, in July, in the woods of Connecticut. The plan had been put forth by Robert Lowell — now out of Baldpate and married to Elizabeth Hardwick, as of July 28. Anticipating more children, the Fitzgeralds were feeling constricted by New York apartment life; the agreement was that O’Connor would pay sixty-five dollars a month, and babysit one hour each afternoon.
“ME AND ENOCH are living in the woods in Connecticut with the Robert Fitzgeralds,” Flannery proudly reported her change of address to Robie Macauley. Her new rural retreat, “miles from anything you could name,” was actually a stone and timber house on a wooded hilltop in Redding, Connecticut, a two-hour drive from the city. Located on Seventy Acre Road — a dirt road at the time — and set back in a wilderness of laurel and second-growth oak, the rambling structure included an attached garage with an upstairs bedroom and bath. In this modest garret, with a gable roof and three casement windows overlooking a boulder-strewn field, Flannery set up her typewriter. To make the room more welcoming, the Fitzgeralds rolled a coat or two of paint on the beaverboard walls, and painted the Sears, Roebuck dresser a bright sky blue. When the nights turned frosty, their clever boarder pushed pins into the walls, to “hurt their feet,” she said of the field