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By Root 1352 0

Savannahians still gossip that “Mrs. Semmes went to bed for a week after that incident,” while penning notes of apology to all the priests who received copies. “Wherever did she learn such words?” Cousin Katie cried. In Milledgeville, Aunt Mary Cline was equally horrified, and theatrical. “I can see her right now, after that book came out,” recalls a neighbor, Charlotte Conn Ferris, “drawing herself up, raising her head, crossing her arms, and saying, ‘I don’t know where Mary Flannery met those people she wrote about, but it was certainly not in my house.’” One relative remarked, “I wish you could have found some other way to portray your talents.” Yet Flannery weathered the family drama. As she encouraged John Lynch, a writer and teacher at Notre Dame, four years later: “I also had an 83-year-old cousin who was fond of me and I was convinced that my novel was going to give her a stroke and that I was going to be pursued through life by the Furies. After she read it, I waited for a letter announcing her decline but all I got was a curt note saying, ‘I do not like your book.’ She is now 88.”

Reaction among the ladies who lunch in Milledgeville was just as disapproving. Upon reading the description of Mrs. Watts, lounging in her place of business — “the friendliest bed in town” — Flannery’s first college writing instructor, Katherine Scott, threw the novel across the room. In an interview with a journalist, decades later, Miss Scott said, “When I read her first novel I thought to myself that character who dies in the last chapter could have done the world a great favor by dying in the first chapter instead.” Some townspeople later claimed that they circulated Wise Blood among themselves in brown paper bags, and one upright citizen boasted that she burned her copy in the backyard. “I read Wise Blood when I was ten,” says Mary More Jones, a Sanford House waitress during her college years. “I was attracted because it was hidden in Mother’s and Daddy’s closet.”

Even a few of the men of Milledgeville held opinions. A doctor working at Milledgeville State Hospital read the novel, and remarked, “I enjoyed it, but I know one thing. She don’t know a damn thing about a whore house.” Flannery later admitted to a priest friend that she indeed leaned on conjecture in the brothel episode. And Reynolds Allen, who had once defeated her in the high school essay contest, was attempting to write mystery stories and found that Flannery (they had resumed their friendship when she returned to town) was adept at “spotting inconsistencies in character very quickly.” But she disapproved of some of the British writers he appreciated — Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley — and urged him to read Faulkner. When Wise Blood appeared, he recalled, “I was pleasantly surprised. It was wittier than I would have guessed.”

All of these social tensions were politely ignored when the time came for a public response to the appearance of Mary Flannery’s novel. The headline in the college newspaper was “Flannery O’Connor Wows Critics with New Book”; in the Union-Recorder, “Top Literary Critics in Nation Are High in Praise of ‘Wise Blood.’” Brought up with the rubric “pretty is as pretty does,” many of the same women who expressed distaste were the most active in arranging lovely teas and luncheons for the book’s celebration. Flannery soon found herself preferring the bad reviews to this round of local book parties, which she forbade on all subsequent publications. As she complained to Robie Macauley, whose first novel, The Disguises of Love, would soon be published, “I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea.”

On Thursday morning, May 15, from ten o’clock until noon, a kickoff “Autograph Party” was held for “Miss O’Connor” at the Beeson Reading Room at the college library. The room was decorated with bouquets of cut flowers, and several of Flannery’s recent oil paintings hung on the walls. Nearly three hundred