The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [2]
At the same time, in an effort to honor her commitment, she answered the publisher’s letter next day: “I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer… I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from… In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you now have.”
Matters had not improved much by the following April, when she wrote Paul Engle to tell him that “other publishers who have read the two printed chapters”—she was referring to “The Train” and to the publication that winter of “The Heart of the Park” in Partisan Review—”are interested.” She also told him about her meeting with the dissatisfied publisher, at which he “and I came to the conclusion that I was ‘prematurely arrogant.’ I supplied him with the phrase.” She thought that “no one will understand my need to work this novel out in my own way better than you, although you may feel that I should work faster. I work ALL the time, but I cannot work fast. No one can convince me I shouldn’t rewrite as much as I do.” She concluded with the news that she had been turned down for the Guggenheim fellowship for which Mr. Engle had recommended her. (Her other sponsors were Robert Lowell, Philip Rahv and Robert Penn Warren.)
I met her again in May 1950, at the christening of Maria Juliana Fitzgerald in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I noted what good spirits Flannery was in, as we gravely performed our roles as godparents, renouncing the devil and all his works and pomps. (It is to be regretted that she did not live to see our godchild become Sister Mary Julian in 1970.) She told me she was still working hard on the novel and was still committed to her publisher, though her literary agent soon informed me that the submission of additional chapters had not allayed his doubts. Finally, in October, after she had obtained a release from him, I offered and she signed a contract for Wise Blood.
The strength I sensed in Flannery at our first meeting now had an incredible strain put on it. She was stricken with lupus on her journey home for Christmas, and spent nine months, desperately ill, in and out of Emory Hospital in Atlanta. On her release she was unable to climb stairs, and Regina O’Connor then decided to move to “Andalusia,” their country place five miles from town, which was to be their home and Flannery’s refuge from then on. By the following September Flannery was writing Miss McKee, “The last time I saw Bob Giroux, he said we would push the date of delivery of the manuscript up to the first of the year (1951) but that there was nothing magic in that date. There is nothing magic in my speed or progress at this time, but I don’t know anything for it. I plan to last until the first of the year and then see what I’ve got.” A full year later (September 1, 1951) she wrote Miss McKee from Milledgeville: “Bob Giroux and Caroline Gordon made some suggestions for improving my book and I have been working on these and have by now about come up with another draft of it.”
By the end of the year the novel was ready, and we began to prepare for publication. Flannery had less vanity than anyone I have ever known. When I asked her for a photograph to use on the book jacket, I expected a picture taken before her illness. The new one she sent was not unattractive, and she looked out at the reader with that clear-eyed gaze of hers, but her hair had not fully grown