Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [91]
In June, word finally came of the acceptance of Wise Blood, and Flannery was “mighty pleased.” Following the good news, Giroux sent a list of suggested additions and corrections. She had also mailed the manuscript to the Fitzgeralds, her steady correspondents throughout her convalescence. With her permission, Robert Fitzgerald passed the manuscript on to Caroline Gordon. Like her husband, Allen Tate — just asked by the Fitzgeralds to stand as godfather for their fourth child, Michael — Caroline Gordon was a recent convert in search of a Catholic literary “renascence.” In Wise Blood, and in the manuscript of another first novel, The Charterhouse, sent to her almost simultaneously by Walker Percy from Louisiana, though never finally published, she saw some of her wish realized. As she reported the coincidence to Brainard Cheney, a friend in Nashville: “It is no accident, I’m sure, that in the last two months the two best first novels I’ve ever read have been by Catholic writers. The other novel is by Flannery O’Connor. Harcourt, Brace say it is the most shocking book they have ever read but have finally agreed to publish it.” And to Fitzgerald, she wrote back excitedly, “This girl is a real novelist. She is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.”
True to character, Gordon did find herself “wanting to make a few suggestions” on improving two “muffed” scenes, and was “presumptuous” enough to send them along. Yet for countless young writers, as Gordon knew, her opinion was most welcome; the literary pedigree of this fifty-five-year-old Kentucky-born author of a half-dozen Southern novels and of such classic stories as “The Captive” and “Old Red” was impeccable. As she liked to point out, she had been Ford Madox Ford’s secretary in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, and he had once been Henry James’s secretary; Lowell thought of her as “almost my mother.” Her fiction workshops at Columbia, where she had taught since 1946, were coveted. One of her students recalls, “She presented herself in class as a correct Southern lady, wearing a frilly dress, polished black shoes, and a hat. But she told fascinating tales of friendships with Hemingway, in Paris, and Hart Crane, and was incredibly generous with her time, and her pages of typed comments.”
Flannery was quite grateful for the “touch here and touch there,” indicated by Gordon, whose criticism obviously struck her as more apt than Selby’s earlier “vague” comments that she suspected were designed to “train it into a conventional novel.” She made her corrections, in ink, while “a lady around here types the first part of it.” But rereading the revised draft in mid-September felt to the novice author like “spending the day eating a horse blanket.” So she asked “Mrs. Tate” if she would mind taking yet another look. Emboldened by the request, Gordon typed back a staccato, nine-page, single-spaced list of suggested edits. Jammed into these tight lines was a crash course in the basics of her fictional creed: Henry James advising a “stout stake” around which the action would swirl; the practice of Flaubert to never “repeat the same word on one page”; Yeats’s recommendation to offset every tense line with “a numb line.”
Beginning with this “St. Didacus’ Day” letter, November 13, 1951, Flannery entered into an informal, and lifelong, correspondence course that Sally Fitzgerald dubbed a “master class.” Wise Blood was six years in the making partly because Flannery was learning on the job, teaching herself to write as she went along. Although she would eventually wean herself from Gordon’s absolute authority, in the fall