Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [95]
A prepublication notice, in Library Journal, labeled Wise Blood “odd,” and set the sharp tone of the more negative reviews: “Written by another of that galaxy of rising young writers who deal with the South, this one was penned at deep-freeze temperatures.” The all-important Sunday Times review, “Unending Vengeance,” by William Goyen, introduced O’Connor as “a writer of power,” but slighted her style as “tight to choking” and her novel as “an indefensible blow delivered in the dark.” An anonymous review in Time accused her of being “arty,” using Gordon’s blurb as ammo: “All too often it reads as if Kafka had been set to writing continuity for L’il Abner.” The unnamed New Yorker critic wondered “if the struggle to get from one sentence to the next is worth while.” After reading Oliver LaFarge in The Saturday Review — “sheer monotony” — Flannery wrote to Giroux, “I am steeling myself for even more dreadful reviews.”
Yet the novel eventually found some critical acceptance as more thoughtful notices began to appear. The first break in all the tough talk was a review by Sylvia Stallings, “Young Writer with a Bizarre Tale to Tell,” in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review: “Flannery O’Connor, in her first novel, has taken on the difficult subject of religious mania, and succeeds in telling a tale at once delicate and grotesque.” Newsweek gave her celebrity treatment by running a profile, including a photograph of her “ancestral mansion”: “Flannery O’Connor is perhaps the most naturally gifted of the youngest generation of American novelists, and her first book, ‘Wise Blood,’ has an imaginative intensity rare in any fiction these days.” John W. Simons, in Commonweal, touted Wise Blood as “a remarkably accomplished, remarkably precocious beginning.”
Like many a young author, Flannery soon discovered that no critic could cause as much anxiety, or be as incisive, as relatives and friends. Before a single review had appeared, she knew that she had a scandal on her hands in Savannah and Milledgeville. Her mother’s reactions had always been muted, perhaps from sheer incomprehension. When the second draft was completed, she told the Fitzgeralds, “My mother said she wanted to read it again so she went off with it and I found her a half hour later on page 9 and sound asleep.” Cousin Katie Semmes was far more alert to the prospect of her precocious niece in print. She ordered advance copies to be mailed to her inner circle, the priests of Savannah, including Monsignor James T. McNamara, who joked around town that he genuflected whenever passing Mrs. Semmes’s home, as she was a major donor.
Trepidation about Cousin Katie’s reaction was palpable for weeks at Andalusia. If Regina missed some of the subtlety of the work, or its Kafkaesque technique, she knew well that men’s room graffiti and a teenage nymphomaniac in black stockings — a Chicago Sun critic would later praise O’Connor for having anticipated Lolita, in Sabbath Lily, five or six years before Nabokov — were far more incendiary than the material in Mary Flannery’s previous scandal, “My Relitives.” “My current literary assignment (from Regina) is to write an introduction for Cousin Katie ‘so she won’t be shocked,’ to be pasted on the inside of her book,” she explained to the Fitzgeralds, when the first hardback copies arrived. “This piece has to be in the tone of the Sacred Heart Messenger and carry the burden of contemporary critical thought. I keep putting it off.”
The pasted disclaimer did not convince her overly high-minded cousin.