Everything That Rises Must Converge Read Free Page A

ducks with blue wing bars.”
    She sent the retyped manuscript to us and we forwarded it, at her request, to Caroline Gordon, who had read Flannery’s few stories with intense interest. “She sent it back to me,” Flannery wrote later, “with some nine pages of comments and she certainly increased my education thereby. So I am doing some more things to it and then I mean to send it off for the LAST time … I have got me five geese.” A little later: “Enclosed is Opus Nauseous No. 1. I had to read it over after it came from the typist’s and that was like spending the day eating a horse blanket … Do you think Mrs. Tate would [read it again]? All the changes are efforts after what she suggested in that letter and I am much obliged to her.”
    One of Caroline’s main points was that the style of the narrator should be more consistently distinct from the style of the characters, and I believe that Flannery saw the rightness of this and learned quickly when and when not to use a kind of indirect discourse in the country idiom she loved. Before the first of the year the publishers had the manuscript in its final form, and it was published in May, 1952. The reviewers, by and large, didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t think anyone even spotted the bond with Nathanael West. Isaac Rosenfeld in The New Republic objected that since the hero was plain crazy it was difficult to take his religious predicament seriously. But Rosenfeld and everyone else knew that a strong new writer was at large.
    Flannery had announced in December that she aimed to visit us sometime in 1952. “I am only a little stiff in the heels so far this winter and am taking a new kind of ACTH, put up in glue…” This worked so well that in the course of the spring she decided to come in June. Reactions to her grisly book around Milledgeville were of course all that could have been expected. One of the kin delighted her with a telling and memorable remark: “I wish you could have found some other way to portray your talents.” In May she wrote: “My current literary assignment (from Regina) is to write an introduction for Cousin Katie ‘so she won’t be shocked,’ to be pasted on the inside of her book. This piece has to be in the tone of the Sacred Heart Messenger and carry the burden of contemporary critical thought. I keep putting it off.”
    She came, looking ravaged but pretty, with short soft new curls. She was still on the salt-free diet, so my wife gave her cress and herbs. It proved to be a difficult summer. We now had four small children and were taking a small Negro slum child for a two week country holiday. I had to go off on a six week job in the Middle West. Our D. P., an old shepherdess from Gorizia, after being helpful for a year, had learned from Croatian acquaintances of the comparative delights of life in Jersey City, and had begun to turn nasty. Before I got back, my wife was ill and Flannery, herself on the verge of a relapse, had to return to Milledgeville. She took the Negro child, Loretta, with her as far as New York. I’m afraid she had no high opinion of our quixotic hospitality to Loretta, who, she wrote to me, “might have been controllable if there had been a U.S. marshal in the house.” My wife says this was pure Georgia rhetoric on Flannery’s part, Loretta having been too shy during her visit to do anything but stand around caressing the blond heads of our young. Flannery had picked up a virus infection, which aroused her lupus, and Dr. Merrill had to put her dose of ACTH up temporarily from .25 cc. to 1 cc. a day. As to this, she wrote, “I have gotten a kind of Guggenheim. The ACTH has been reduced from $19.50 per bottle to $7.50.” Soon she was better, up, and working, “and have just ordered myself a pair of peafowl and four peachicks from Florida…”
    That year, in spite of illness, she did a