Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [93]
What she could not discover by direct observation, she picked up by reading, closely, the weekly Union-Recorder, along with Georgia’s agricultural tabloid, the Farmer’s Market Bulletin; she later told a friend that she “gleaned many a character” from its pages. The previous September, the newspaper ran an article, “Want to Win Movie Pass? Shake Hands with Live Gorilla,” on the appearance at the Campus Theatre of Congo, the star of Mark of the Gorilla, in time for her to swipe its handshaking stunt, and the phrase “first ten brave enough,” for Wise Blood. In August 1951, the paper featured the 106-year-old Confederate veteran General William J. Bush, photographed in a “dashing” full-dress uniform and military hat, attending the graduation of his 62-year-old wife from GSCW. O’Connor lifted and doctored the item when she returned to story writing the following summer, in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.”
Flannery gained full exposure each noonday, as well, to the social class of ladies, usually in their hats and white gloves, who filed in with the O’Connors for lunch, the main meal of the day, at Sanford House. Opening that fall — just as Flannery was reemerging into daily life — the new tearoom was located in an 1825 Federal-style white-pillared home on Wilkinson Street, directly across from the college. Dubbed by Flannery “the local High Dining Establishment,” the restaurant was the creation of Miss Fannie White, the senior partner, and Miss Mary Thompson, dieticians from Wesleyan, a women’s college in Macon. The two ladies stayed true to the building’s antebellum spirit: in the entrance hall they hung a copy of the Secession Ordinance, printed on silk; over an Adams mantel in the dining room was a large etching of General Robert E. Lee.
“It seems like the O’Connors were coming from the beginning,” remembers Mary Jo Thompson. Likewise, Frances Florencourt recalls, “If it opened at twelve, they were right there at quarter to twelve on the front porch, sitting, waiting for people to gather.” They would always request the same corner table, Regina facing the bustling dining room, her daughter staring out a front window toward the Second French Empire clock tower of the brick courthouse, where the Klan had rallied three years earlier. “Flannery mostly ate in silence,” recalls Dorrie Neligan, a town resident, “while Regina visited with everybody she knew.” The menu was typed twice daily, with dishes billed as “unusual”: grits soufflé, rolled flank steak, hand-churned cranberry sherbet. Flannery’s favorites were fried shrimp, on Fridays, and peppermint chiffon pie for dessert.
WISE BLOOD WAS finally published on May 15, 1952, in a modest run of three thousand copies, selling for three dollars apiece. Its abstract, cream-colored cover did not give buyers many clues for prejudging the book, evoking a stylish noir thriller, or an Agatha Christie suspense novel. The words “Wise” and “Blood” were isolated in pools of red and olive, surrounded by jagged, pencil-like ripples emanating outward. The entire back of the book was taken up by a black-and-white portrait of O’Connor, her thinned hair fixed in a standard pageboy. She was still puffy from cortisone and was dressed in a blouse and dark blazer. She resisted having the photograph taken, sending the print a month later than Giroux requested, and was horrified, when first shown a “very pretty” copy by a local bookseller, to find herself “blown up on the back of it, looking like a refugee from deep thought.”
A lone “imprimatur”