Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [98]
Thank you for sending me WISE BLOOD, which I read with interest. You want a favorable opinion to quote. The best I can say is: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” End quote. It isn’t the kind of book I like much, but it is good of its kind. It is lively and more imaginative than most modern books. Why are so many characters in recent American fiction sub-human? Kindest regards, E.W.
When Giroux forwarded the pulled quote, Regina was “vastly insulted.” Putting the emphasis on if and lady, she asked, of the author she called “Evalin Wow”: “Does he suppose you’re not a lady? . . . WHO is he?”
Open season on Wise Blood ended by early summer, culminating with a mostly negative review in the New Republic from Isaac Rosenfeld. His extreme interpretation was that O’Connor “writes of an insane world peopled by monsters and submen, Motes the first among them. . . . Motes is plain crazy. . . . How then can one take his predicament seriously?” He found the characters revealed “in a pallid light reflected mainly, I should say, from Faulkner and Carson McCullers.” As O’Connor reported on the review with humor, seemingly able to rise to any challenge, “He found it completely bogus, at length.” Yet even Rosenfeld allowed that the author exhibited “a variety of sensibility out of which the kind of fiction that matters can be made.” As her friend and champion Robert Fitzgerald put the best face on three months of critical dissonance: “But Rosenfeld and everyone else knew that a strong new writer was at large.”
IN EARLY JUNE, Flannery finally realized her wish to return to the Fitzgeralds’ Connecticut home, a year and a half later than anticipated. Almost immediately upon her arrival, Robert Fitzgerald needed to depart for six weeks of teaching at the Indiana School of Letters. They now had four children all under four years of age, and he was frantically working wherever he could to support his rapidly multiplying family. But he was present when Flannery arrived, “looking ravaged but pretty, with short soft new curls” and having smuggled three baby ducks on the plane from Georgia, to delight the children. And he remembered joining in the first few meals of cress and herbs that Sally prepared, as their guest was still on a restricted, salt-free diet.
Except for a day trip to New York for lunch with Caroline Gordon, Flannery tried her best to settle back into her former existence in her garret studio over the garage. But life did not cooperate, and the summer proved much more difficult than the bucolic season, two years earlier, when their greatest nuisance had been swarms of flies. The stone house on the remote, wooded ridge was fuller, with the children growing in size and in their ability to cause trouble. A leader in this trend, three-year-old Benedict, as Flannery reported to Gordon, “climbed in the car, drove it twelve feet over a chair and into a pile of rocks, climbed out the window, looking exactly like Charles Lindburg, and received a whipping from me (Sally was in bed sick) as if it were a great honor.” Flannery remained a proponent of such old-fashioned “cutting a switch” in child rearing.
Two other additions to the household added to an atmosphere of unruliness, emphasized by the absence of the patriarch subtly depended on by both Flannery and Sally. To help in the care of their clan of small children, the Fitzgeralds had brought over from Yugoslavia Maria Ivancic, an old shepherdess. The Roman Catholic Church was active at the time in putting such “displaced persons,” or “DPs,” whose lives had been disrupted by World War II, in American homes as immigrant workers; Mrs. O’Connor had been trying to secure just such a mutually beneficial arrangement for Andalusia. Yet, as Robert Fitzgerald explained, the old woman from Gorizia, on the border of northern Italy, “after being helpful for a year, had learned from Croatian acquaintances of the comparative