Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [92]
His second night in Taulkinham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.
As Caroline Gordon was now a literary confidante, Flannery felt that she might express to her some vulnerable feelings on the frustrations of exile in middle Georgia. Under the delusion that her ailment was acute rheumatoid arthritis, she was still viewing recuperation at the dairy farm as an inconvenient detour on the way back north to Connecticut, and to her “adopted kin,” the Fitzgeralds. “All these comments on writing and my writing have helped along my education considerably and I am certainly obliged to you,” she thanked Gordon in a draft of a letter. “There is no one around here who knows anything at all about fiction (-every story is ‘your article,’ or ‘your cute piece’) or much about any kind of writing for that matter. Sidney Lanier and Daniel Whitehead Hickey are the Poets and Margaret Mitchell is the Writer. Amen.”
Yet during these same weeks that she was deriding her fate, she was simultaneously settling, nearly imperceptibly, into the new life that was awaiting her. If she had foretold her own debilitating illness through Haze Motes in Wise Blood — a book that she once described as “autobiographical” — she also sensed her new direction while thinking about her work. In a telling comment to Robert Fitzgerald (he passed it on to Caroline Gordon), Flannery claimed that while her first novel was about “freaks,” her next book would be about “folks.” This prediction began to come true as she adjusted to the land and folks at Andalusia. During this period, she took up oil painting, using scenes of farm life as subjects, and was delighted to be back among those dear companions of her youth, farmyard birds. “I have twenty-one brown ducks with blue wing bars,” she informed the Fitzgeralds. “They walk everywhere they go in single file.”
The “folks” looming largest in the immediate ken of this young author, discovering the subject matter of her own mature style, were the Stevens family — her mother’s dairyman, his wife, and two daughters — living just beyond the farmyard gate, in the unpainted, gray, wooden plantation cottage, with two front entrances and a long porch. “He was sort of like the foreman,” remembers a friend of Mr. Stevens. “He was a country fellow . . . real easy to get along with.” Flannery enjoyed spying on this tenant family (the house was visible out her bedroom window), picking up dialogue, and mailing off snippets for the amusement of her friends up north. She first introduced Mr. Stevens, much like a character in a story, to the Fitzgeralds in a mid-September letter: “I have just discovered that my mother’s dairyman calls all the cows he: he ain’t give but two gallons, he ain’t come in yet. — also he changes the name endings: if its Maxine, he calls it Maxima. I reckon he doesn’t like to feel surrounded by females or something.”
Even more fascinating to Flannery was the talkative Mrs. Stevens, a homemaker, who did not participate in the working farm, except for the occasional feeding of some yard chickens. Yet she quickly insinuated herself in the lives of the O’Connors, appearing daily at their back door. “She always tells us every morning what the weather is in different parts of the country, giving exact time and location”;