Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [89]
Though her imaginings may have been delirious, she did hit on a critical truth. For while she “never had a moment’s thought over Enoch . . . everything Enoch said and did was as plain as my hand,” Haze did not truly cohere as a character until the stretch of time between her two hospital visits. In sickness and near death, the author bonded with her “morbid” character. Only in the last few months, and last dozen pages, had Haze moved beyond his snarling sermons atop his “high rat-colored” Essex for the Church Without Christ — preaching that would strike a Newsweek reviewer as “a subtle parody of Communist soapboxing” — to a glimmer of humility and self-awareness. As she would tell one interested reader, “I just unfortunately have Haze’s vision and Enoch’s disposition.”
Following a month’s stay, Flannery emerged from Emory, and the harrowing debut of her illness, with a novel that finally felt balanced, after she continued to make changes in the hospital. Recuperating in Milledgeville, she was put by Dr. Merrill on a strict salt-free, milk-free diet, and she learned to give herself four daily shots of ACTH. But, mostly, she focused on preparing for submission the pages that had been typed for her in Atlanta. With Rinehart officially declining to publish the novel, she was now free to mail her manuscript to Robert Giroux, which she did on March 10. Having long ago discarded “The Great Spotted Bird,” and whittled down “Wise Blood and Simple,” the author, who had just been through four months of blood tests and blood transfusions, was set on a title, as well. “I have finished my opus nauseous and expect it to be out one of these days,” she wrote Betty Boyd Love, on April 24. “The name will be Wise Blood.”
IN THE SPRING of 1951, shortly after her twenty-sixth birthday, Flannery and her mother moved to Andalusia, a practical change motivated by her difficulty navigating all the steps at the Cline Mansion, and allowing more privacy for recovery and writing. Regina O’Connor had already been spending more time at the dairy farm, as she became that most daunting of figures in a small Southern town, a tough businesswoman. After a summer marked by several returns to the Atlanta hospital, Flannery filled in the Fitzgeralds on her situation: “Me & maw are still at the farm and are like to be, I perceive, through the winter. She is nuts about it out here, surrounded by the lowing herd and other details, and considers it beneficial to my health. The same has improved.”
The austere farmhouse where Regina and Flannery took up residence, expecting to stay through the summer, was the two-story, white-frame Plantation Plain–style house, with a steeply pitched red metal roof, built in the 1850s, where the writer had spent so many summer days and evenings with her cousins as a child. From any of the rockers always set in a row on its columned, screened front porch, mother and daughter could look out over a sloping front lawn, full of oak trees, and onto a 550-acre estate of rolling hills, ponds, pastureland, and pine forests, with Tobler Creek, a spring-fed waterway, meandering through hayfields and wetlands at the rear of the property. Sunsets, as O’Connor often paints them in her stories, might be a “purple streak,” or “flame-colored,” or “like a red clay road.” “Does it every evening,” the mother, Lucynell Crater, reminds shiftless Tom T. Shiftlet as he admires one in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”
When they arrived that spring, the property was at its most inviting. The four-mile ride northwest from town on the main paved road toward Eatonton cut through dense woods. Just before Andalusia was a half-mile stretch of fields filled with kudzu vines, and the fragrant purple