Everything That Rises Must Converge Read Free

impasse with Haze and didn’t know how to finish him off, she read for the first time the Oedipus plays. She went on then to end her story with the self-blinding of Motes, and she had to rework the body of the novel to prepare for it.
    So that year passed in our wilderness. The leaves turned, the rains came, the woods were bared, the snows fell and glittered, fenders were belted by broken chains, the winter stars shone out. In the early mornings we had the liturgies of All Hallows, All Souls, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany. The diaper truck and the milk truck slogged in and slogged out. We worked on at our jobs through thaws and buds, through the May flies, and into summer, when we could take our evening ease in deckchairs on the grass. In May we had a third child to be baptised, this one held by Flannery O’Connor as Godmother. Standing with her was Robert Giroux, who had become her editor (he too had met her in 1949) and later was to become her publisher. She was now one of the family, and no doubt the coolest and funniest one. She often entertained a child in her room or took one for a walk, and she introduced me to the idea and the Southern expression of cutting a switch to meet infant provocation—a useful recourse then and later. She was sure that we grown-ups were known to the children in private as “he,” “she” and “the other one.”
    In the second autumn I had reason to be especially glad of our boarder’s company at home, because I had to be away on a job half the week. But in December, just after the long labor of typing out her first draft, Flannery told us with amusement of a heaviness in her typing arms. When this got worse, we took her to the doctor at Wilton Corners. Rheumatoid arthritis, he was afraid it was, but he advised her to have a hospital check-up in Georgia when she went home for Christmas. On the train going south she became desperately ill. She did not have arthritis but a related disease, lupus, the disease that had killed her father.
    IV
    For the rest of that winter and spring she was mostly in Emory Hospital in Atlanta, and very sick indeed. Disseminated lupus, as it is technically called, is an auto-immune disease in the same general group as arthritis and rheumatic fever. The trouble is that the body forms antibodies to its own tissues. It is primarily a blood vessel disease and can affect any organ; it can affect the bones. I have these details from Dr. Arthur J. Merrill in Atlanta, who pulled Flannery through that first onset with blood transfusions and was able then to arrest the disease with injections of a cortisone derivative, ACTH, in those days still in the experimental stage. Her hair all fell out after the high fevers, her face became terribly swollen, and he had to dehydrate her and put her on a salt-free diet. It is a fair indication of how sick she was that, until summer, we had no letter from her at all but corresponded through her mother. When at last Dr. Merrill let her go home she was too weak to climb stairs, and Regina O’Connor, deciding to take her to the farm, made a home there which was to be hers and Flannery’s for thirteen years.
    It must have been in late spring or early summer that Giroux accepted the first complete draft of the manuscript of Wise Blood for publication at Harcourt, Brace, for I find an undated letter from Regina referring to this, and to attempts at revision that Flannery had been making before a recurrence of high fever sent her back to Emory. When this particular bout was over she slowly improved for the rest of the year and began to write to us regularly. In September she reported being down to two moderate shots a day from four large ones. “The large doses of ACTH send you off in a rocket and are scarcely less disagreeable than the disease, so I am happy to be shut of them. I am working on the end of the book while a lady around here types the first part of it … I have twenty-one brown