Flannery had begun working on a story again, but more of her downtime was now given over to listening to records and watching television than her friends ever expected. TV satisfied a taste for the vulgarities of popular culture that used to be filled for her solely by newspaper coverage — of Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, attending church in Pasadena, or a local beauty contest for “Miss North Georgia Chick.” Now she was up on “Geritol, Pepto-Bismol, Anacin, Bufferin, any kind of soap or floor wax, etc. etc.” A sports fan, her
aperçu
on the Kennedy assassination was that “all commercial television is stopped until after the funeral and even the football games called off, which is about the extremest sign of grief possible.” She and Tom Stritch communicated about their mutual televised passions, stock-car races and track events. She even “postponed my work an hour” to catch W. C. Fields’s 1941 comedy,
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
In the third week of February, she received a verdict from her doctors that she would need to have a hysterectomy to remove an enlarged fibroid tumor, the cause of her severe anemia and fainting spells. Dr. Merrill was hesitant to allow any sort of surgery for fear of triggering a lupus flare and wished to have the operation take place in Atlanta. But Flannery refused to leave Milledgeville. Mary Cline had just been released from the hospital, and Regina, recovering from a week in bed with the flu, was caring for her. She did not want to impose the extra strain of an Atlanta hospitalization on her family, or herself. In preparation, she canceled readings scheduled that April for Boston College and Brown University, where John Hawkes was teaching, as well as for the University of Texas. In order to safeguard against reactivating the lupus, she was “loaded with cortisone.”
Admitted to Baldwin County Hospital on Monday, February 24, 1964, Flannery spent the night before her operation correcting the galleys of “Revelation,” which had just come in the mail from the
Sewanee Review.
As she reread the pages in the hospital light, the story suddenly “didn’t seem so hot.” For the operation the next day the local surgeon, Dr. Walker, enlisted five blood donors and briefly considered an artificial kidney. Over the three days following, she was kept on glucose and cortisone drips. While she shared such surgical details with Maryat, everyone else was treated to a lighter version of events. “One of my nurses was a dead ringer for Mrs. Turpin,” she wrote Betty in a typical dispatch. “Her Claud was named Otis. . . . She didn’t know she was funny and it was agony to laugh and I reckon she increased my pain about 100%.”
The outcome of this operation, from which she returned home on March 5, was at first deemed positive. “It was all a howling success from their point of view,” she wrote Robert Fitzgerald, “and one of them is going to write it up for a doctor magazine as you usually don’t cut folks with lupus.” Within two weeks, though, she was back in bed, “not doing any brain work but reading,” while subject to postoperative infections and cystitis. Her physical reaction was dramatic enough that by the time of her thirty-ninth birthday, on March 25, she was no longer concealing her inkling that something was gravely wrong. “I suspect it has kicked up the lupus again,” she wrote Betty three days later. “Anyway, I am full of kidney pus and am back on the steroids.” She described for Betty a visit to the doctor’s office the day before: “same scene as in ‘Revelation.’”
A new friend and correspondent was Cudden Ward Dorrance, a sixty-year-old short story writer, and friend of Allen Tate’s, whom she had met at a breakfast at Georgetown. Dorrance, himself dying of emphysema from smoking, sent her the two books she was closest to during this month. The first was C. S. Lewis’s
Miracles,
the Anglican author’s meditation on the transformative power of imagination. Flannery noted a correspondence between Lewis’s Christian novels and hers: “we both want to locate our characters . . . right on the border of the natural & the supernatural.” Then, for Easter 1964, Dorrance sent Lewis’s
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer,
which she regarded “as being probably what I need worse personally.” She confided to him an excess of “nervous energy,” from being back on the steroids she had endured from 1951 to 1961, and requested that he “pray I don’t have to stay on them long.”
The turn of a month led to a return to the hospital, where Flannery found herself the third week in April for ten days. The antibiotics that Dr. Merrill suggested for treating kidney infection were insufficient to halt her careening physical problems. “Monday I woke up covered from head to foot with the lupus rash,” she alerted Brainard Cheney. “A sign that things are as screwy inside as out so I headed for the hospital and here I am for an indefinite stay.” In a conspiracy of improbabilities, Mary Cline was also in the hospital again, on the floor above Flannery’s, having survived a nearly fatal heart attack. They both returned the same day to Andalusia, where her aunt was set up in a recent back-parlor addition. Her Florencourt cousin Catherine Firth soon arrived from Kansas City to help out at the farmhouse that Flannery nicknamed “Jolly Corners Rest Home.”
Flannery’s first instinct on her return home was to ensure that a second book of stories would be published, no matter what happened next. So on May 7 she wrote a highly detailed letter of instructions to Elizabeth McKee. Her initial plan had been to go back into the originals with her usual vengeance of rewriting and polishing. But under doctor’s orders to spend the rest of the summer in bed and a prohibition on any typing outside of short business letters, she arrived at a more practical compromise. She simply asked her agent to round up copies of the stories as they had been printed in magazines, and assemble the book from these. “I think I’ll be able to make any really necessary changes on the proofs,” she promised. She then listed the eight stories she was envisioning, winding up with “Revelation.” The book’s title remained an open question.
Unable to sit for long at the typewriter, in May Flannery shifted to writing stories in her mind. Of one such purely conceptual creation, she told Charlotte Gafford, who had completed a thesis on her work at Birmingham-Southern College, and sent crystallized violets and a book of poems as get-well gifts, “I am writing me this story in my head and I hope by the time they let me up maybe I’ll have it.” Even such mental work, though, was made more difficult by sluggishness; once a week she visited the doctor for a blood transfusion, spiking her energy, and resulting in a few letters to friends. “I havent had it active since 1951 and it is something renewing acquaintance with it,” she alluded to her lupus, in one such missive to the Gossetts. On good days, she worked for an hour. “My my I do like to work,” she wrote Maryat. “I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.”
Flannery eventually heard from Robert Giroux with his approval of the plan to go ahead with the book, using stories in print. She had since decided, on looking over them, to withdraw “The Partridge Festival,” as a “very sorry story.” In its place, she mentioned, for the first time, one “that I have been working on off and on for several years that I may be able to finish in time to include.” The intended story was “Judgment Day,” a retelling of her first published story from Iowa, “The Geranium.” Roiling in her head over the month was the notion to circle back to her beginnings and redo her original successful story, revealing how far she had come. As she began retooling the original, old man Tanner, in his daughter’s New York apartment, is not just homesick, but actively plotting his escape, even if in a box. The note he pins to his pocket reads, “IF FOUND DEAD SHIP EXPRESS COLLECT TO COLEMAN PARRUM, CORINTH, GEORGIA.”
Yet every few weeks brought a new hardship. Toward the end of May, the unfortunate news was a medical decision that O’Connor would need to check back into Piedmont Hospital, the ultramodern, 250-bed redbrick hospital in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, where she had been given a series of bone tests in late 1960. Before leaving for the hospital, she signed a contract for her collection, with the title she had originally suggested:
Everything That Rises Must Converge.
As she wrote Maryat on May 21, referring to her Milledgeville Drs. Fulghum and Burrell, “Going to Piedmont tomorrow to let Arthur J. Merrill take over. F. & B. give up, more or less, for the present anyways.” She at least felt confident, with Dr. Merrill, that “he knows what he’s doing.”
Her eye for irony unimpaired, Piedmont Hospital provided much material; and as weak as she was, with visitors discouraged, a number of friends managed to get past Regina, who guarded the door by day and resided nearby with her sister Aunt Cleo at night. The hospital included a nursing school, and among Flannery’s favorite characters to pin to an imaginary wall were its student nurses. As she wrote in an account to Maryat, signed “Excelsior,” “Here the student nurses switch in with very starchy aprons and beehive hairdos and say such things as ‘What’s bugging you, huh?’” Flannery wrote to Betty, “By now, I know all the student nurses who ‘want to write,’ — if they are sloppy & inefficient & can’t make up the bed, that’s them — they want to write. ‘Inspirational stuff I’m good at,’ said one of them. ‘I just get so taken up with it I forget what I’m writing.’”
The first of her friends to show up was Abbot Augustine More, met by Regina, who warned him he could stay only three minutes, though he stayed thirty. One weekend, Caroline Gordon “breezed in . . . her hair the color of funnytoor polish.” Gordon later recalled, “After the nurse had left the room, Flannery pulled a notebook out from under her pillow, ‘The doctor says I musn’t do any work. But he says it’s all right for me to write a little fiction.’ She paused to grin at us.” Louise Abbot, having received a note from Flannery — “I am sick of being sick” — hurried to her “fourth or fifth floor” hospital room, its bank of windows overlooking the tops of green trees. “Guess who’s here?” Regina sang, as she ushered in Louise. “Flannery has just waked up, and she pushes herself up on one elbow and smiles,” remembered Abbot. “The afternoon sunlight in the room and the dark blue of her pajamas make her eyes bluer than I have ever seen them.”
The child psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles, author of
Flannery O’Connor’s South,
met O’Connor only once, at her bedside at Piedmont. Involved with issues of race relations in the South, he and his wife had become acquainted with Ruth Anne Jackson, a six-foot, 250-pound, African American woman who worked as a nurse’s aide at Piedmont. She told them of “Mizz O’Connor,” her patient, a writer “who believed in God,” who she wanted them to meet. “I met a woman who was dying,” says Coles, knowing nothing then of her reputation. “Her face was inflamed as a consequence of steroid treatment.” Flannery was “tickled” to discover that Coles was from Concord and preferred Emerson to Thoreau. “You will find here in rural Georgia fallen angels by the thousands,” his wife remembered her telling them, with the thinnest of smiles.
Complaining of a bed table “too high so you can’t write on it without breaking your arm,” Flannery did manage to accomplish impressive work from her hospital bed. She had actually finished the bulk of her rewriting of “Judgment Day,” which she had briefly been calling “Going Home,” when she completed “Revelation.” In the hospital she mostly concentrated hard, within her flickering imagination, to make out the curious images and plot of her next story, “Parker’s Back.” She wrote to Catharine Carver on June 17, warning her that when she returned home she would be sending her “Judgment Day” for her opinion. “I have another in the making,” she added, “that I scratch on in longhand here at the hospital at night but that’s not my idea of writing. How do those French ladies such as Madame Mallet-Joris write in cafes, for pitys sake?”
She had slowly been building “Parker’s Back,” layer by layer, over several years. Her first glimmer of the story came when she ordered George Burchett’s
Memoirs of a Tattooist
from the Marboro bookstore list, which delighted her with its photograph of the old tattooist’s wife covered in tattoos, “like fabric.” Since at least 1960, she had been composing her story of O. E. Parker, a tattoo-covered young man and his disapproving wife, Sarah Ruth, daughter of a “Straight Gospel preacher.” In her unfinished third novel, she briefly found a spot for a man whose body was covered in tattoos — Mr. Gunnels, the farm help, with the face of God tattooed upon his back. When Walter tries to take a picture of the haunting image, his hand trembles and the photo comes out blurry.
Often more intimate in letters than in person, Flannery, during her grave illness, shared some of her most vulnerable feelings with Cudden Ward Dorrance, whom she had met once, and Janet McKane, a schoolteacher from Manhattan, whom she had never met but who had written her a letter that touched off a flurry of responses, beginning in January 1963, often including childhood memories from Savannah, or her brief time in Manhattan. On April 2, McKane organized a high mass to be said for Flannery’s recovery at a Byzantine rite church in Manhattan. “I read my Mass prayers this morning,” Flannery wrote her on the day, “not Byzantine by any means but with much appreciation of what you were doing for me.” So tucked into her story was a signal to McKane, like so many to Maryat, because she chose as the image for Parker’s back a tattooed Byzantine Christ, done in “little blocks.”
Flannery’s hospital stay was marked by four blood transfusions and an endless series of tests. Her weight was down about twenty pounds. As days turned into weeks and finally, to her near disbelief,
“one month,”
the only new prescription by the doctors was a low-protein diet, since her kidneys were unable to refine toxins out of meat, eggs, and cheese. “I’m for medicare; otherwise I got few convictions and almost no blood,” she wrote the Cheneys, as her lupus, and so her hospital bill, was not covered by insurance; she and her family had been paying most of the medicine and hospital bills. But a hint of resignation crept into her tone, amid all the comedy, when Dr. Merrill decided that she would not be helped by further hospitalization. “Dr. Fulghum is back in the driver’s seat,” she ominously informed Maryat, “& Dr. M. has checked out.” When the volunteer ladies in pink smocks brought three letters from Janet McKane, she closed her reply with a heartbreaking couplet from Gerard Manley Hopkins: