Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [85]
Flannery was moving closer to achieving her goal of being “a writer on my own,” residing, like so many young American authors at the time, in New York City, or one of the many small towns within a hundred-mile radius. If she was unaware of the solitude of her chosen path, news that fall of the wedding plans of two girlfriends reminded her. From each event, she kept a stiff distance. When Mary Virginia Harrison invited her to be a bridesmaid at her wedding, she invoked canon law forbidding Catholics to participate in “outside” religious services, even though the reception was being held at Andalusia. She sent Betty Boyd a congratulatory note on her engagement to James Love, with a tiny line drawing of three disheveled violets, and the telling admission, “Marriages are always a shock to me.” According to Sally Fitzgerald, “She did husband her energies. She knew she had much work to do. And she knew that she had to do it alone.”
In December, Flannery returned to Milledgeville for what was expected to be a routine holiday visit. Lowell and Hardwick kept her company as she awaited her train in New York City. “We spent an hour and a half in the station with Flannery,” Lowell informed Robert Fitzgerald, “more or less on tip-toe because her train was ‘reported’ an hour late, which meant it might leave any minute.” Yet, once in Milledgeville, she fell seriously ill, and was told that she would need to be hospitalized for an operation for a floating kidney — upsetting news that she relayed lightly to friends. “I won’t see you again,” she wrote Lowell, of a planned rendezvous, “as I have to go to the hospital Friday and have a kidney hung on a rib.” In early January, she was admitted, for a month, to the Baldwin Memorial Hospital — a two-story redbrick building on Greene Street, formerly the Richard Binion Clinic, consisting of four doctors’ offices on the first floor and a small patient facility on the second — just a few blocks east of the Cline Mansion.
As Lyman Fulton was in training as a physician, she went beyond her usual vague, comic report that she was “having a kidney tacked up” when telling him of her situation. “She wrote to me about having had a so-called Dietl’s crisis,” said Fulton. “This is a condition, often very painful, in which a kidney slips out of place so as to cause a kinking and obstruction of the ureter. Surgery is often necessary. I wrote expressing my condolences.” When he learned later of her lupus, he understandably wondered if “the Dietl’s crisis, if that’s what it really was, may actually have been the opening salvo in her battle with that cruel disease.” Spending the month of February recuperating at the Cline Mansion, Flannery indicated the serious toll of the “radical cure” on her energies only to her agent: “I’m anxious to be on with the book but don’t have any strength yet.”
When she did finally return to Connecticut, near the end of March, the seasons were already turning, as Robert Fitzgerald has poetically recalled: “We worked on at our jobs through thaws and buds, through the May flies, and into summer, when we could take our evening ease in deckchairs on the grass.” In May, the Fitzgeralds’ newly born third child, Maria Juliana, was ready for baptism, and Flannery held her as godmother, standing with her fellow godparent Robert Giroux. “I noted what good spirits Flannery was in,” said Giroux, “as we gravely performed our roles as godparents, renouncing the devil and all his works and pomps.” For Flannery, as for the Fitzgeralds, the sacrament confirmed not only Maria’s, but Flannery’s, place among them. “She was now one of the family,” Robert Fitzgerald wrote, “and no doubt the coolest and funniest one.”
The warmer months in Redding were highly productive for the novelist. During the spring, she invented central episodes involving the radio preacher Hoover Shoates, a shyster’s name much celebrated by the Fitzgeralds. In the summer, when she reached an impasse with the character of Haze, she found a startling solution by reading the copy Robert Fitzgerald had inscribed for her of his translation