University of Northern Iowa

Flannery O'Connor: A Reminiscence and Some Letters

Author(s): Jean Wylder
Source: The North American Review, Vol. 255, No. 1 (Spring, 1970), pp. 58-65
Published by: University of Northern Iowa
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 A classmate of the late Flannery O'Connor in the
University of Iowa Writers' Work
shop of the 'Forties, Jean Wylder recalls the impression made by Miss O'Connor on
friends, teachers, and critics, and includes excerpts from a correspondence that con
tinued off and on until shortly before the Georgia author's death. Mrs.
early Wylder
is presently associated with the International Writing
Program at Iowa.

Jean Wylder

FLANNERY O'CONNOR: A Reminiscence and Some Letters

was that she a vision like a frog

JYLy first impression of Flannery O'Connor of it, with its little organs laid open,
looked too young and too shy to be a writer. We were in a bottle."

graduate students at the University of Iowa and members Sometime late in that first semester I learned that
of Paul Engle's Writers Workshop during the fall and Flannery had received the MFA degree the year before
spring semesters of 1947 and 1948. On the opening day and that she had already published one story. "The
of class, Flannery was sitting alone in the front row, over Geranium," the title story in her MFA thesis, had ap
against the wall. She was wearing what I was soon to peared in Accent in the summer of 1946. And "The
think of as her "uniform" for that year: plain gray skirt Train," also from the thesis, was scheduled to come out in
and neatly-ironed silkish blouse, nylon stockings and Sewanee Review the next spring. Flannery was staying
was a trace on at Iowa for another year because Paul
penny brown loafers. Her only makeup of lip Engle had
stick. Elizabeth Hardwick once described her as "like gotten her a grant of money to live on while she worked
some quiet, puritanical convent girl from the harsh on her first novel. The one person I had
thought to look
provinces of Canada;" there was something of the con least like a writer on the opening day of Workshop had
vent about Flannery that day ? a certain intentness in turned out to be the most promising writer there! From
the slight girlish figure which set her apart from the rest then on, I may have looked forward more to sitting beside
of us. She seemed out of place in that room composed Flannery than to the Workshop itself which, in those
mostly of veterans returned from World War II. Flannery days, was something like going to a good movie. Writers
was only 22 years old then, but she could easily have read their own stories, sitting at the front of the room.
passed for 17 or 18. Flannery never entered into theWorkshop discussions.
I don't believe she was to change very much in the I heard that when she was first in the Workshop in 1945,
next seventeen years before her death. In the later photo before she had published anything, her stories had not
graphs, showing her on the aluminum crutches that be been well received and she had not tried to defend them.
came a permanent part of her life, there remains that The only comment I ever heard her make in class was
same schoolgirl freshness, a young gentleness in her the next spring. Andrew Lytle was in charge that semester
face and expression. Only in the unsmiling eyes of the during Paul Engle's absence from campus, and he asked
stern self-portrait is there evidence of the Flannery who her what she thought of the story we were discussing that
wrote blood-curdling fiction. day. By then, most of the students knew she was already
It was her isolation from the other "writers" in the a published writer; everyone in the room wanted to hear
class that first drew me to her, and soon that semester I what she would say. In a
perfectly dead-pan voice, ad
moved to the empty seat beside her. We and one other dressing herself to the general emptiness of the front of
girl were the only women in the Workshop that year. the room, came her laconic reply: "I'd say the descrip
Most of the others, the former GI's, were tuned-in to New tion of that crocodile in there was real good." The irony
Criticism theories, and many sensitive young writers got of Flannery's statement lay in the fact that the crocodile
was the best thing in the story but it had
shot down by the heavy onslaught of their critical fire. absolutely no
Stories were dissected like so many literary specimens; meaning in the texture of the story itself. She had said
few stood up under the minute probing. Many years later all there was to say ? but she would have never offered
when Flannery was speaking to a writing class at Hollins that much ifMr. Lytle hadn't asked her.
College in Virginia, I'm sure she was remembering those After I began to know her better, I realized it was
Workshop sessions at Iowa when she said, "Every time simply not in her nature, especially while she was in the
a story of mine appears in a freshman anthology, I have process of finding her own way in fiction writing, to sit

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 in judgment on another writer's story. In the years after porter. "They know exactly what they're doing all the
she became a lady-of-letters, the darling of the Sewanee time," she said. "No dilly-dallying atall." I think she was
and Kenyon and Partisan Reviews, manuscripts from to put something of that observation into the character
hopeful young writers appeared regularly in the mail, and of the porter who confronts Hazel Motes in the first chap
many of the writers of these came to the door of the ter of Wise Blood ? the novel which was beginning to
farmhouse outside Milledgeville, Georgia, with or without take shape that year at Iowa. The Wise Blood porter
an appointment, seeking advice and criticism. At times, knows, for instance, that it takes him exactly seven min
their manuscripts accompanied her on the trips to the utes to make up a berth.

hospital. Although she was to say many times that the But Flannery did talk some during that train trip. She
last she wanted to be was a critic, she never turned said that while she was an undergraduate student at
thing
Her concern with those who would write, State for Women known as
anyone away. Georgia College (now
as a friend has noted, was "a perennial kind of service." Woman's in Milledgeville,
College of Georgia) she'd al
I saw Flannery very little that fall except at the Mon ways thought of herself as a cartoonist, although she was
day afternoon Workshop sessions, and occasionally on also writing short stories then. "I sent a lot of cartoons
noon at the Mad Hatter Tea Room, that used to to the New Yorker," she said, "but they never bought
Sunday
be up over Bremer's Clothing Store, where I worked as any. Just sent me a lot of encouragin' rejection slips."
salad girl. Flannery's boarding house didn't serve meals When she came to Iowa to graduate school in 1945, she
on and so she came there. I can remember had really expected to get a degree in journalism and had
Sunday,
meeting her twice on the campus or the street. Once taken courses in Advertising and Magazine Writing. But
only
she was going to the library to check out Dead Souls. she'd also signed up for the Workshop and Paul Engle's
She said Robie Macauley recommended that book as one course in Understanding Fiction, and after the first se
every writer should read, "so I reckon I'd better do it." mester she began
to work on a
degree in creative writing.

(Years later she was to say that she supposed Gogol was (Her thesis of six stories, all but two now published, is
an influence.) And the other time she was coming out dedicated to Mr. Engle.) She said she didn't begin to
of Woolworth's Five and Ten Cent Store where she had think of herself as a fiction writer until after Accent had
one cake of Palmolive soap. (I've thought about taken that first story, "although I reckon I got a long way
bought
that single purchase since then, and it seems to me it says to go yet before I'm what you'd call good at it."

something about the uncluttered life she always lived. I She told me the funny story of the chicken she'd had
doubt if Flannery ever bought two of anything at one when she was five years old that could walk both back
time, unless it were peacocks
or swans or bantam chicks. ward and forward. Path? News had come all the way to
Her room at Iowa, when I saw it that one time, to make a newsreel of her and and
expressed Georgia it, Flannery
the same kind of monastic simplicity: the neatly made doubted if anything else in her life would ever surpass
bed, the typewriter waiting on the desk. There was noth the triumph of being filmed and shown around in theaters
ing extraneous in that room except a box of vanilla all over the country. (She was later to use the same anec
wafers beside the typewriter. She nibbled on cookies dote to open the article she wrote on peacocks for Holiday
while she wrote, she said, because she didn't smoke.) magazine.) "I also had a pet quail once," she said, "by
That Christmas we got on the same Rock Island train the name of Amelia Earhart, but she couldn't do anything
out of Iowa City. I didn't have a first-class ticket, but unusual."

Flannery convinced the porter it would be all right for And she talked about her family. Her father had died
me to sit in the parlour car with her. Convinced is not the year before Flannery was graduated from high school.
the word here, at least not in a verbal sense. She had no brothers or sisters. She and her mother, whom
exactly right
She simply said it would be "right nice" if he would she referred to as Regina (Flannery also called her father
"allow" me to sit with her as far as Chicago so we could by his first name of Ed), owned a dairy farm outside
talk. I had been kicked out of more than one parlour Milledgeville called Andalusia which was run by a dis
car by porters who righteously the first-class
guarded placed family from Poland. She started to describe the
of their car from the common lot of travelers, where she and her mother
privileges family home in Milledgeville
and I expected to be this time. I'm not sure if the porter lived (they didn't move out to Andalusia until after Flan
even looked at me, maybe with a brief flick of his eyes, nery's illness) until she remembered the snapshot she had
but he gave his approval to Flannery without an instant's in her purse. She showed it to me, and it fulfilled my
hesitation. Scarlett O'Hara image of what a Southern mansion was
The three hours or so it took to get to Chicago was like: its graceful white verandas encircling both the first
to be the longest single period of time I would ever spend and second stories, and the four towering Ionic columns
with Flannery, but if I had hoped that we would be talk in the front. It was known as the Cline House, she said,
was glad to be
ing all the way I soon knew otherwise. Part of the time by her mother's maiden name. Flannery
she was caught up in the winter landscape as it flashed going home that Christmas. She looked very pretty, more
and vanished from the window. We sat in wonderfully like a college girl than the convent girl, almost tall in a
comfortable highback swivel chairs, and sometimes turned blue plaid suit and a tan polo coat.
them toward the car itself to watch the other passengers The trip seemed to end before it had hardly started.
and the porter. Flannery was intently interested in the When I said- goodby to her at LaSalle Station, where I

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changed trains to go on to Indianapolis, I was more I did, however, begin to consider myself her closest friend
than ever how this little from on the campus. Her favorite place to go in Iowa
puzzled quiet girl Georgia, City was
who had lived an even more sheltered life than I'd out to the City Park. Once, I walked out there with her on
thought, could know so many things about the people an especially bleak
February Sunday afternoon to look at
"from the other side of the tracks" in her very promising the two sad and mangy bears, the raccoons, and the special
short stories.
foreign chickens they had. It seemed a particularly desul
Margaret Meaders, one of Flannery's journalism teach tory thing to be doing, and I was puzzled at how com
ers at Georgia Women's College and a family friend, tried pletely absorbed and interested Flannery was that day
to explain that mystery in an article in the spring issue of looking at these things which I knew she'd looked at many
Colorado Quarterly in 1962. She wrote: times before. She was still working on the novel then, of
course (which was to be Wise Blood),
although she never
Apparently, Flannery never forgot any person she talked about it, and I knew nothing at that time about the
really looked at or any rhythm of speech she ever zoo and park scenes in that book until I read it a few years
heard or the meaning of any small episode of the later. But, I also realize now, her fondness for the zoo
human comedy she ever witnessed. And she has looked went beyond the fact that she may have been
getting
and listened and perceived and then interpreted with "material" for her work. Years later, in letters to me, she

amazing skill and understanding, either because of or was to recall the City Park as almost the only asset Iowa
in spite of having been 'well born,' carefully reared, City had to offer. The following letter begins with a com
widely educated. ment on Iowa City housing and is dated December 28,
1952. She wrote:
But such a statement leaves out one other factor,
important
. . . I remember those
I believe now, and overlooks what Flannery said in an boarding houses in Iowa City
interview that appeared in the fall of 1960 in Censor: that very well and all the cold rooms I looked at. My land
imagination is also a form of knowledge. "I don't think lady, Mrs. Guzeman [at 115 E. Bloomington Street],
was not very fond of me because I
you have to know [the people you're writing about] very stayed at home and
?
well," she said then. "You discover them." required heat to be on at least ON. It was never UP
that I remember. When it was on you could smell it
What she meant about to know your characters
getting and I got to where I warmed up a little every time I
as "discover" them or, in other words, as you write
you smelled it. One of these days I would like to see Iowa
about them, was true in Flannery's
particularly writing.
City again, but only for the zoo where those game
The process of how she discovered her characters through bantams were & the bears donated by the Iowa City
writing can be seen in a study of her work concerning Lions Club. I am raising peafowl myself. They are
the character of Hazel Motes of Wise Blood. She first
beautiful and contrary and expensive but I justify the
began the "discovery" of Hazel in a short story at Iowa, expense on the grounds that I don't smoke or drink
entitled "The Train," which is contained in her MFA
liquor or chew tobacco or have any bad habits that
thesis. It was later published in the April 1948 issue of cost money .... One of these days I hope they'll be all
Sewanee Review, the first of five stories that were to ap over the place ....
pear in that magazine during her lifetime. The final ver
sion we have of it is as the opening chapter of Wise Blood, Flannery's love for unusual and exotic fowl is now

published in 1952. In the four or five years intervening legend, of course. In a very few years she did have them
between the story and the novel, Hazel Motes emerges "all over the place," at Andalusia, a story she was to tell
in a charming essay, "Living with a Peacock," which ap
from the self-conscious country T)oy who wishes his dead
mother could see him eating in the diner to the religious peared in the September 1961 Holiday. The morning after
fanatic trying desperately to rid himself of the stalking I had read that, I came upon, quite by accident, a bright
little ceramic peacock sitting in a gift shop window in
ragged figure of Jesus at the back of his mind. Although
he retains his original country manner of the backwoods Albuquerque. I sent it to her that day. A letter came by
the return mail:
in the novel, his character now seems deepened by the
sullen and contemptuous tinges with which he relates to / am crazy about the peacock, even down to the flower
the world, and which make it possible for him to say to he has just managed not to step on. They have very big
the woman he shares a table with in the diner: "If you've feet and if they step on a flower, that's the end of
been redeemed, I wouldn't want to be." Flannery's
dis the flower. What they don't step on, they eat so it's
covery of Hazel Motes was so complete that he could no as long as it's short. Vm delighted with it and now I
longer be confined within the limits of the short story. can say I've got them inside and out ....

Robert Fitzgerald uses excerpts from her correspond

ence in his Introduction to Everything That Rises Must
2.
Converge, the posthumous volume of short stories, in
the next semes which she often breaks off discussion about the work she
JYLy friendship with Flannery continued
ter. I would have liked to have gone to the movies with was doing at the time with ? "I've got me five geese,"
her or had a Coke with her, but it simply didn't occur to or "I have twenty-one brown ducks with blue wing bars"
? almost as if writing fiction were the digression from
me that things like that could ever be a part of her life.

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 the greater endeavor of raising peacocks and a one-eyed writes me that "they give much joy to the cancer patients
swan and ducks with blue wing bars, instead of the other in their last days." The rest of the peacocks still reign
way around. Sister M. Joselyn, O.S.B., writing in the at Andalusia, and are "looked after" by Mrs O'Connor
memorial issue of Esprit, Winter 1964, was to say: "Per and Flannery's uncle.) If peacocks made Flannery feel
. . . the rich, like the Judge in her story, it was in a way that
haps peacocks freed so much for our delight that
was in Flannery O'Connor, helped her so greatly to show money could never have.
us what she was, became her 'objective correlative,' if one Sometime in March of 1962, she was to write again,
wants to be literary about it." "If I ever get back to Iowa City, it will be to look at those
I think it is interesting, too, that in the pent-up fury Chinese bantams in the Park." One of these days the
of the O'Connor landscape: the stark pasture on the edge City Park in Iowa City ought to consider dedicating its
of the dark woods, which Fitzgerald says "reappears like collection of strange looking chickens to the memory of
a signature in story after story," the bilious indignation Flannery O'Connor. That would be a very nice thing for
of sun and sky and clouds with what goes on below ? in them to do.
this antithesis of the Garden of Eden to which man has
3.
fallen ? there appears one peacock who perhaps alone
defies her threatening universe. He is in "The Displaced
1 hat spring in the Workshop I heard Flannery read for
Person" of *AGood Man Is Hard To Find, kept by Mrs.
the first time. It was a chapter from the novel she was
Mclntyre "out of a superstitious fear of annoying the on and had made
working into a short story for the
Judge [her husband] in his grave. He had liked to see
occasion (although it turned out to be for all time, since
them walking around the place for he said they made him no trace of it ever turned up in either of her novels.) She
feel rich." And for the old priest in the story, the peacock on the Stairs," and it was
called the story "The Woman
is almost a Christ-figure:
under this title that it was published the following year in
'So beauti-ful,' the priest said. 'A tail full of suns,' the August 1949 Tomorrow. The story was to appear
and he crept forward on tiptoe and looked down on in the issue of Shenandoah in 1953 with the
again spring
the bird's back where the polished gold and green title "A Stroke of Good Fortune," and again with this title
design began. The peacock stood still as if he had just as one of the ten stories in the collection A Good Man Is
come down from some sun-drenched height to be a Hard To Find, 1955. Flannery dedicated that volume to
vision for them all. The priest's homely red face hung the Robert Fitzgeralds ? "Nine stories about original
over him, glowing with pleasure. with . . . ." as she was to say to them
sin, my compliments
Whatever the peacocks were to Flannery O'Connor, later in a letter quoted by Mr. Fitzgerald in his Introduc
they added an interesting dimension to her life and gave tion to Everything That Rises Must Converge. I have often
her immense pleasure. She loved to send their tail feathers wondered which one of those ten stories Flannery ex
to the children of friends. Robert Penn Warren, in his cluded from that category of original sin, but it certainly
tribute to Flannery in the memorial issue of Esprit, wrote would not have been "The Woman on the Stairs" we
that she had sent his little girl, whom Flannery had never heard that day. Although the story has since been des
seen, "a bright piece of a peacock's tail." My children, cribed as perhaps the most purely comic of any of her
too, in their turn, were to receive the long delicate pack stories, the odyssey of Ruby Hill on the stairs, this
age, so painstakingly wrapped, and as their delighted woman "shaped nearly like a funeral urn," proclaims the
eyes met that "tail full of suns" for the first time, it seemed sorry human state which underlies most of her characters
to me that she had introduced them to the exotically who suppose that they are in control of life and are
beautiful as surely as the richest bazaar of Araby might calling all the shots.
have. In the Holiday article, Flannery has said that "A In many of the stories Flannery
was to write later,

peacock on a fence post is a superb sight. Six or seven she permits a moment of vision to descend on the main
?
peacocks on a gate are beyond description." But
a single character ? very like the Joycean epiphany in which
tail feather from this king of the birds, removed from its he may see himself clearly for the first time. The moment
full context, to retain, more than of when her characters see themselves as
dazzling manages any insight, sinning

thing else I can think of, something of the splendor of beings, comes from the working of grace for them. It
the whole. In the pictures of Flannery taken for the press, is achieved through things which cannot be predicted.
frequently a peacock stands at her feet. She painted her It is something mysterious which can not be elucidated.
favorite one in the self-portrait, and he stares as unflinch Grace comes to the Grandmother of "A Good Man Is
ingly at the world as does his mistress. In describing the Hard To Find" in her recognition of the Misfit as her
Eee-ooo-ii! Eee-ooo-ii! of the peacock's voice, she has own child. It comes to Mr. Head of "The Artificial
said : "To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to Nigger" through the artificial nigger, and to Mrs. Turpin
the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded of "Revelation" in the pig pen. But it does not come to
like a cheer for an invisible parade." (Before Flannery Ruby Hill as she sits at the top of the stairs looking
died, she gave two of her peacocks to the Cancer Home "down into the dark hole, down to the very bottom
in Atlanta, run by a group of nuns called the Servants of where she had started up so long ago," for she hears
Relief of Incurable Cancer which was founded by Nath own empty words. Ruby
only the leering echo of her
aniel Hawthorne's daughter, Rose. Flannery's mother Hill then may be one of Flannery O'Connor's truly damned

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 characters, and the story, although exemplifying elements ament. As Ruby Hill climbs the dark steep stairs,
fight
of the purely comic, becomes tragical in the sense that ing off the knowledge of her pregnancy which she equates
the character is denied any glimpse of self-understanding, with death, so do we all in some lonely instant struggle
and therefore salvation. She sits at the top of the stairs with that old paradox that life begets death. We, too,
literally full of nothing, feeling the roll in her stomach live in the funeral "urns" of our bodies.
". . . as if it were not in her stomach. It was as if it After Flannery finished reading the story, we sat there
were out somewhere in nothing, out nowhere, resting until Andrew Lytle gave meaning to our silence by saying
and waiting with plenty of time." Workshop
was over for the day. For once, there was not
But few, if any, of us knew that afternoon in the going to be any critical dissecting. Flannery disappeared
Workshop when Flannery read this story that it was about out the door to go back to her room at Mrs. Guzeman's.
original sin, that her vision embraced the early Christian Most of the others took off for the Brown Derby on
concept of man's loss of innocence with the rejection of Dubuque Street, which was the writers' hang-out in those
his first parents from the Garden, that she really did days. The Workshop afternoon was over. That we had
believe in evil and damnation and redemption. We knew said nothing about Flannery's story was a tribute to her
none of these things, and I, for one, did not even know genius. But, the other girl writer and I wanted there to
? and not until several years later ? that ?
that day be something
more some more
tangible token of our

Flannery O'Connor was a Roman Catholic. admiration. We went around Iowa City on that late spring
Why then were we so strangely moved by her reading afternoon, walking into people's yards as if they were
that afternoon which I suppose was the most memorable public domain, to gather arms full of flowering branches
? ?
Monday the Workshop has ever had, before or since? taking only the most beautiful and we carried them
As I remember her voice now, its slight Southern drawl up to
Flannery.

enhancing the country idiom she was just beginning to

4.
and was to use, both in her characters'
perfect always
a
dialog and as a kind of indirect discourse, and giving /\t the end of that semester, in June of 1948, she left
humorous reinforcement to the irony in that story, I Iowa and I never saw her But our corres
City, again.
realize that her stories are always intensely oral in the
pondence was to begin, continuing until her death in 1964.
highest sense of the story-telling art. It is a great loss that Robie Macauley, in the memorial issue of Esprit, speaks
no recordings were made of Flannery reading her fiction. ?
of comic sense a sense of
Flannery's "magnificent
But, of course, her voice alone could not account for the humor that often comes out in her published work but
we were in the presence
feeling we had that afternoon that which had an even greater freedom in her private letters."
of a significant writer. She did not usually write literary letters as such; rather
Perhaps what she said in an interview with Joel they were letters for giving the news, their low-keyed
Wells, appearing in Critic, August-September 1962, on humor often directed at herself. Her letters to me, and
the Christian writer's basic problems best explains our I regret that they were to diminish
even
through the years,
acceptance of "The Woman on the Stairs" that day, were to reveal her special kind of temperament and ? as
though we were ignorant at that time of her particular
I know now ?
courage, in a way that her in
knowing
vision and frame of reference:
Iowa City had not.
One of the Christian writer's basic problems is that The next Christmas, 1948, found her at Yaddo, and
he is trying to get the Christian vision across to an she wrote:
audience to whom it is meaningless . . . Neverthe
It would be nice to meet you again this year on the
less, he can't write for a select few. His work will have train. However, I am glad I won't be fooling around
to have value on the dramatic level, the level of truth
with any trains this Christmas. I am not budging
recognizable by anybody. The fact that many people
from this place. The Yuletide Poorhouse fare is very
can't see anything Christian about my fiction doesn't
decent. The cook will be off and we three will be sent
interfere with many of them seeing it as fiction which to the New Worden Hotel for dinner. We have a
does not falsify reality.
Christmas tree but will not hang up any stockings. We
Flannery considered herself a realist above all else. three are myself, Robert Lowell, and a stray painter.
Her characters, no matter how freakish and bizzare they
seem on or
I had seen a picture in Life of Truman Capote perched
may the surface, how and white
commonplace
? ? in a tree at Yaddo sometime within that year and had
no matter how home dark
trashy unsettling speak
written to ask her if he was still there. The same letter
truths and, if anything, become almost too lifelike. She
continues :
herself once indicated that no really good story could
a right theology. thank you. He had departed
ultimately be accounted for in terms of No Truman Capote,
As Robert Drake writes at the close of A Critical Essay, before I got here. I read his novel this summer and
"What makes Miss O'Connor's stories good and at times regretted wasting the time. I think it's poorly written
brilliant is that, in her own way, she does seem to have even for such fake stuff . . .Don't by any means let
?
man's number and the world's." Because her lonely American Letters get your five bucks. They haven't
fiction magnifies the drab and the colorless, we are gotten mine. If their first issue doesn't come out within
stirred to a recognition of ourselves in the human predic
the next five years, I am going to write them to send

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 me back the story. [She had sent them "The Woman get started on a novel unless you don't mind dragging
on the Stairs"] . . . . I live on a new time scale now. A out the agony ....
week amounts to about or visa on another, but more fateful, train
forty-five minutes, That
Christmas,
versa. It has advantages which I sense but haven't home to
trip going Milledgeville, Flannery became des
the brain to define. ill from the first onslaught of what would be
perately
Another letter early in January announced that Par diagnosed as lupus. I knew nothing of the train incident
tisan Review would be publishing "The Heart of the at that time? not until I was to read of it in Fitzgerald's
Park" the next month. This was also a chapter from Wise Introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge,
Blood, which she had made into a short story. "I may not after her death in 1964. She was to make only the most
get me a whole novel out of this," she wrote, "but maybe casual reference to her illness, and that infrequently, in
I'll get a few stories. A friend asked me the other day her letters through the years. Most of what I learned of
what my procedure was for writing. I said 'well, I mostly it came from others, and that was I
usually reassuring.
do a lot of staring at the typewriter.' That about sums up never knew how serious it actually was. Once I was to hear
this business." that the disease had been arrested by miracle drugs and
was out to make it as a writer, and that soon she would no be on crutches. was
Flannery really by longer Lupus
the next spring she was living in New York and "working the disease that had killed her father who had died after
like a well disciplined mole. I'm staying at a horrible only three years of illness, in 1941 at the age of 45. But
YWCA that smells like an unopened Bible, having left the drugs Flannery was to have, had not yet been in
Yaddo for good and great relief, a story I would like to vented for him to benefit from. This news, in its promise
tell you if I ever see you again." I sent her an announce that she would be spared for a longer life than his, was
ment of my marriage in June that summer, 1949, and she comforting in itself.
wrote back: My first indication that Flannery was ill came in a
letter dated January 30, 1950 (one of the few in which
/ think it's delightful that people still get married.
she gives complete reference to the time), only six weeks
Several people I know are doing it. The last time I
after the onset of lupus. She wrote that my last letter, after
offered my official nuptial politeness I congratulated ?
the bride and my mother said that was very poor form, being forwarded four or five places, had reached her
. . . at an
that the groom. Please opportune time: I was in the hospital for a
you only congratulate congratu
three week stay after a kidney operation. Now I am at
late the groom for me and give yourself some best
home again, just beginning to walk around. I feel
wishes. I asked Mr. Macy's Store to send you a silver
about like one of those chickens that hangs upside
butter spreader.
down in meat market windows?> but by late March or
She was working hard on the novel, and the letters I . . .
April I hope to go back to Connecticut
had from her that summer referred to it as "this slow
But there was nothing in that letter to imply that she was
novel I'm working on." Sometime in July (often her
letters were dated with just the name of the day or month, really seriously ill, and I was not unduly alarmed that I
did not hear from her again for nearly a year. If I had
seldom the complete date) she wrote:
heard during this time that Flannery was near death, as
This slow novel proceeds with all due caution. The she was, I suspect I would not have believed it. There was
chapter you heard about the woman on the stairs [she too much that she hadn't written for that to happen to
was still including it as part of the novel at this time] her for quite a long time yet. A letter came that fall, in
will be in the August issue of Tomorrow. I got it October, sounding very much like the old Flannery. I was
back from American Letters after seeing an issue of still unaware that her disease had been diagnosed as the
same. Don9t let them get your five bucks . . . . I under fatal lupus, and so I missed the irony of the last line ?
stand that Tomorrow is very anxious for stories and until later. She wrote:
would use four an issue if they could get them. If . . . I got a letter from a friend the other day who
you're still in this practice (?) you might try them said she wasn't interested in reading about morons &
.... I'm the butter I was
glad you got spreader.
perverts, and unfortunately the dear girl has a point.
beginning to think that Mr. Macy had decided to keep
The better you are able to write, the harder it gets and
it for himself. the more dangerous it is. But I plan to live like the
In the fall of that year Flannery wrote that she was buzzards ? from day to day. Cheers.
living in Connecticut with her friends, the Robert Fitz In checking back through the letters I had from
geralds. The "slow novel" was still with her, but she had Flannery, I find that this was the first time she closed
sold another chapter of it to Partisan Review: with "Cheers." Her ending in letters before this had been
My book comes along very slowly but it comes along. "Yours" or "Regards;" I believe there is a very good
I mean it to have the faults of a second novel instead of possibility that she began the use of "Cheers" as a sign-off
a first. Then my second can have the faults of a third. in her informal correspondence fairly soon after she knew
You see the advantage in this .... Partisan Review she had lupus.
has kindly consented to print another chapter that I It was not until sometime in the summer of 1951 that
call "The Peeler" in their December issue. Don't ever I was to hear about Flannery's disease by name, and that

63

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 it was a rare disease of the blood vessels and kin to arth win Flannery the 0. Henry Award in the next ten years.
ritis and rheumatism. My informant also said she was Of these, three were first prize stories: "Greenleaf"
being treated with a cortisone derivative, ACTH, and that (1957), "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1963),
there was every chance for her complete recovery. Since and "Revelation" (1965).
there is a long history of arthritic disorders in my own By the end of 1953 the little girl from Georgia must
family, most of whom remain reasonably productive and have surely known that she had come far
enough along in
live to a ripe old age, Flannery's diagnosis was not par fiction writing to be "what you'd call good at it." I believe
ticularly alarming. Neither was her answer to my letter somewhere she even said so in an interview when some
of inquiry for more information: but simple-minded soul asked her why
well-meaning
You heard right about what I've got, but I can't see she was a writer. Flannery is said to have snapped back,
"Because I'm at it."
that it affects my brain any. The least you should good
In the time left to her, she was to write fourteen short
get out of a disease is a better brain. I told my doctor
last year I didn't think I had enough blood to make do stories and a second novel, The Violent Bear It
Away.
with. He said "well, you don't have much but you got A third novel, Why Do The Heathens Rage?, was left
unfinished. In those ten years, her fiction was published
enough for a Southern girl." That's about what it
amounts too [sic]. Cheers to all. in England, France, and Germany. She received two
Kenyon Fellowships, a grant from the National
In November of that year, my first child, Stephen, was Academy
of Arts and Letters, a $10,000 grant from the Ford Foun
born, and Flannery wrote a funny letter on the nature of dation. Her short stories were anthologized year after
children. "They size up the parents very soon," she year. They appeared five times in Martha Foley's yearly
warned, "and usually can tell right away they're always Best American Short Stories. Smith College gave her an
one up on them. Don't let that happen to you." Along with
honorary degree. Flannery didn't write to tell me of these
the letter came a copy of H. Belloc's Selected Cautionary achievements. I heard or
about them, read about them.
Verses (poems about a lion named George who ate chil I found her
short stories in the literary quarterlies at
dren) and inscribed on the cover with "For Stephen from libraries; I her books as came
university bought they
Flannery." Both the letter and the gift were further out. Once, at least, I must have offered up some literary
reassurance that there couldn't be much with
very wrong criticism of sorts on something I had read, probably Wise
Flannery. The Belloc book had been published in England, Blood, for I have a letter from her in which she wrote:
and I had a vision of her gleefully placing a transatlantic "Thank you for your kind words of interpretation. A
order for dozens of copies to have on hand for the blessed friend of mine told me not so long ago that she found that
events of friends. Flannery was just beginning to get
chapter totally lacking in meaning. She said it didn't make
involved in peacock raising at this time, which also sense . . . ."
any
seemed to me something someone very sick would not be As Flannery's literary life continued toward an inter
able to do. The same letter continues: national fame, and mine became more and more engulfed
. . . / have 3 hens and 3 cocks but of these, 4 are still in domesticity, I began to feel hesitation at correspond
peachicks and they have to be three years old before ence. In those years I had various occupations
to tend to.

they lay. I haven't lost any yet but they are supposed For awhile I was a reluctant den mother. Once I was vice
to have a fondness for pining away. One of my young president of the local PTA. I collected money on my street
ones spits blood on occasion, but I haven't found out for the Cancer Drive, for Heart Sunday, for Muscular
what produces an occasion. One of these days I'll hope Dystrophy. I served on various committees for this and
to send Mr. Stephen a feather with an eye in it ... . that. I was a sometime member of the Faculty Wives Club.
There was considerable humor in all of these experiences
In April of the next year, 1952, a chapter from the ?
"slow novel" appeared in New World Writing I, which
because I failed in most of them. But just as I had
once thought Flannery didn't go to movies or drink Cokes,
she called "Enoch and the Gorilla." In May Wise Blood
so I then believed these activities of mine were outside the
was published by Harcourt, Brace, the novel that had been
realm of her existence as a writer. To write her of them
started so long ago at Iowa. "I'm glad to be rid of it
once and for all," she wrote. "Now I'm going to spend my would be to impose. Our letters became farther apart.
It was my fault that this was to happen ? not Flannery's.
time in less agonizing ways. The first thing I intend to
me some more . . ." In reading through her letters of the last years, I find,
do is to order peachicks from Florida
more often than not, that they begin with her concern in
But the second thing Flannery did that year was to
not hearing from me. In the fall of 1961 I had written
write "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "The
River." She also began to work on The Violent Bear It suggesting the climate of New Mexico might be good for
her and that she should come for a visit. Almost by return
Away. The stories appeared in 1953, the first in Kenyon
the second in the Sewanee. That was one of Flan mail, dated October 29, she wrote:
Review,

nery's best publishing years. There were five stories in / was real cheered to hear from you at last and at
a
all, the other three appearing inModern Writing I, Harp length. You are good to think of the climate there as
er's Bazaar, and Shenandoah, IV. Paul Engle selected possibility for me but I don't have anything that a
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" for the 0. Henry climate will affect. I am getting along real well. This
Prize Stories in 1954, the first of six stories that would year I acquired a pair of swans and I burst with pride

64 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW/SPRING 1970

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 of ownership. I plan to become as great an authority of the front page, datelined from Milledgeville, and I
on swans as I now consider on .... read: famous short writer and
myself peacocks "Flannery O'Connor, story

In March of 1962, another letter begins: novelist, died this morning at the age of 39 . . . ."
Truthfully, I was always a little in awe of her literary
/ thought I was never going to hear from you again
. . . . I am
genius, beginning back at the time I had sat beside her
this month over some
spending laboring in the Workshop at Iowa. I am sorry for that now. I
talks I have to give next month ? one at North think now she would have welcomed all my news of chil
Carolina State College and one at Converse. I have dren and household trivia. Letters from others had be
this one rather moth-eaten talk that I pull out and re come her lifeline into the world outside the boundaries
arrange slightly for each place. This time the places of Andalusia and Georgia. Those she wrote in return gave
are so close together that I am having to
practically expression to the warm whimsicality of her nature, gave
write a new one. Not the way I would like to be spend much to enjoy and to love. Robie Macauley, speaking of
ing my time .... We had spring last month and are Flannery's letters in his Esprit tribute, said, "I have never
having winter this month. The old ladies in town known anyone whose wit had such edge and at the same
blame these the season on the atum bomb.
vagaries of time such kindness." Too often we forget the essential
Cheers and much affection human of those who achieve a measure of great
beingness
By the year of her death, our correspondence had ness. Their life styles, we believe, transcend the ordinary,
dwindled to an exchange of Christmas notes. I did not when, in fact, it is the common touches of reality that give
know she was dying. On the evening of August 3, 1964, sustenance, especially to the artist. The failing is a human
as I sat down to read the Albuquerque Journal, my eyes one ? one that Flannery probably understood and for
were drawn instinctively to a tiny AP story at the bottom gave. At least, I like to think so.

WILLIAM WITT

THE WATER SPIDER

We fear to lose only

the fear of him, scuttling
and brown across
gray
his stones beneath the water

he draws a line we do not

pass. At the edge of deeper
pools where water would slide
its slender fingers about our hips

we hold back, like children,

though once you approached him,

(the water licking its way between
your toes) to watch him search
his darker surface: it is his love

he seeks, said, to consume it:

you
make me a poem about him.

I will wait a better season,

for him to sleep, I said.
In winter, I said, I will.

65

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