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guests, including Katie Semmes, driving up from Savannah, and Flannery’s college nemesis Mary Boyd, were received by Regina O’Connor and Mary Cline. Visibly mended from her bout of illness, the prettily made-up author wore a sleeveless silk dress, pinned with a large corsage. She signed copies, seated in a striped chair at a wooden table. “Cocktails were not served but I lived through it anyway and remember signing a book for you sometime during it,” she wrote Betty Boyd. In a thank-you note, she praised the library staff for having been “most brave.”

“I have rarely enjoyed a situation more,” remembered Alumnae Journal editor Margaret Meaders.

For situation it was, first of all, and function only — and barely — second. Having read her book, I understood perfectly the quandary that had befallen so many of the dressed-up visitors. . . . What to do? Everybody liked the child. Everybody was glad that she’d got something published, but one did wish that it had been something ladylike. What to say to her? What to do with your book once you bought it and she had signed it. If you read it, did you say so? If you owned it, did you put it out to be seen — or slip it behind Mama’s copy of The Poems of Father Ryan? . . . From time to time that morning I saw what I’m sure was the quick light of laughter in Flannery’s eyes.

A companion event, a week later, was a luncheon in honor of the book’s publication, held on May 22 at Sanford House, and hosted by Mrs. Nelle Womack Hines — unkindly characterized by Flannery to the Fitzgeralds as “an old dame that I abide with gritted teeth.” Seated around a white-covered table, decorated with sprays of pine and two silver candelabra with green tapers, members of the Milledgeville Book Club were asked to tell what childhood book had impressed them most. “I have been told that everyone tried hard to come up with an impressive choice,” wrote one Milledgeville resident, Mary Barbara Tate, “and the statements were, as Huck said of those in Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘interesting but tough.’” When her turn came, Flannery punctured the pretension by drawling flatly, “The Sears-Roebuck Catalog.” Departing guests were then presented with autographed copies of Hines’s Treasure Album of Milledgeville.

Among her more sophisticated, now epistolary, friends, reactions were just as conflicted. Robert Lowell remained one of the most ardent and committed supporters of the novel. Not yet having seen the final, published version, as he was living in Amsterdam, he did read the “Enoch and the Gorilla” excerpt, sold as second serial rights by Harcourt, in New World Writing, and he dashed off an enthusiastic response in early June: “When I was through reading I could have hugged the gorilla. The whole incident is rather epically dismal.” He suggested for her next book the story of Lizzie Borden, accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. Lowell later informed Flannery, from Manhattan, that the Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv “now goes about enraging New York literati by telling them they should write a Wise Blood.”

Andrew Lytle was not as pleased, though he did not relay his disapproval directly to his former student. Having encouraged her during an early, fecund stage of the novel, Lytle did not appreciate the severe religious turn the novel had taken at Yaddo and in Connecticut; he rightly suspected theology in the retooling of the main character into what O’Connor herself later called “a Protestant saint, written from the point of view of a Catholic.” When the Shenandoah editor Thomas Carter asked Lytle to review Wise Blood, he declined, explaining, “I think she left out too much circumstance of sardonic humor. . . . There is a move towards the Old Church on the part of some of my friends, and I’m afraid an extraneous zeal is confusing their artistry.” Mary McCarthy’s husband, Bowden Broadwater, remained unmoved, saying, “I still can’t read Flannel Mouth.”

To try to get out a more sympathetic message about the book, Giroux began to solicit comments that might be useful in ads. He wrote especially to