Flannery O’Connor is so thoroughly associated with the South that it is easy to forget that she spent much of her 20s in other parts of the country. After graduating from the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville in 1945, she spent two years in Iowa at the Writers’ Workshop; several months at Yaddo, the famous artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York ; six months in New York City ; and several months as a boarder in the Redding, Connecticut, home of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, between 1949 and 1952. After she was diagnosed with lupus, and it eventually became clear she could no longer live on her own, she returned definitively to Milledgeville to live with her mother.
In Flannery O’Connor’s Manhattan, Katheryn Krotzer Laborde takes a closer look at her relationship with New York City. Laborde argues that O’Connor’s “time in Manhattan was important to her development as both a person and a writer” and details the people she met there — like the Fitzgeralds and the editor Robert Giroux.
O’Connor’s six-month stay in New York in 1949 was unplanned. She left Yaddo suddenly with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick after Lowell accused Yaddo’s executive director, Elizabeth Ames, of harboring communist spies following an article in the New York Times that had linked a previous guest to a Soviet spy ring. The board closed Yaddo briefly to investigate.
O’Connor initially stayed with Hardwick at 28 East 10th St. before renting a room at the YWCA-owned Tatham House on 138 East 38th St. Lowell introduced O’Connor to the Fitzgeralds, who shared her Catholic faith , shortly after arriving in Manhattan. Sally Fitzgerald would become a lifelong friend and confidant, as well as the editor with her husband of O’Connor’s posthumous collection of essays and lectures, Mystery and Manners.
Robert Fitzgerald, who would go on to publish highly regarded translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, sent a draft of O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, to the critic and novelist Caroline Gordon (and wife of Allen Tate), who would become both a mentor and friend to O’Connor. Fitzgerald also served as O’Connor’s literary executor after she died.
Laborde also writes about O’Connor’s relationship to her editor, Giroux, who would publish nearly all of her books, and explores a few other figures in detail. She discusses O’Connor’s relationship with her agent, Elizabeth McKee, and playwright Maryat Lee, her longtime correspondent, even though the two never met in New York. (They met in Milledgeville in 1956 when Lee visited her brother.)
This brings us to one problem with the book: New York, as a place, wasn’t that important to O’Connor. Laborde claims that O’Connor’s Manhattan “is made up of more than the names and places” in O’Connor’s address books, which Laborde lists in the book, but “of what happened and what didn’t. Of what she experienced and what she merely thought about.” But not much happened in New York, and while the city may still have left a mark on her writing in some way, Laborde doesn’t discuss this in any detail.
The fact is that O’Connor didn’t seem to care for the city at all. Her initial trip there as an adult (she visited once as a child) was unplanned, and she left as quickly as she could — to stay with the Fitzgeralds in Connecticut only six months after arriving in the city and meeting them for the first time. Lee tried to convince O’Connor to visit in her letters, as Laborde notes, but O’Connor never does, even though she visits other places during the same time — Chicago, Nashville, Minnesota, Louisiana, Texas, and St. Louis.
In the end, the book is little more than a list of names and places, most of whom had little lasting effect on O’Connor, the Fitzgeralds and Giroux excluded, whose relationship with O’Connor has already been explored in other books.
This may make the book useful for O’Connor scholars, but it will be of decidedly less interest to lay readers, even though Laborde tries to appeal to them by using the now-tired technique of inserting herself into the narrative and, strangely, takes readers on an “imaginary tour” of O’Connor’s New York, complete with a guide in a “fox-colored T-shirt” and “The Good Guide in big letters across the back.” “Some passengers get the allusion,” she writes, “the ones who don’t turn to their smartphones.”
At one point, Laborde imagines a passenger asking, “Would Flannery be amused or horrified by all this?” O’Connor probably wouldn’t be horrified by a tour, but she would certainly find it curious, as she would a book claiming that a short and unplanned trip to New York in 1949 is “important in attaining a fuller understanding of her life and career.”
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Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.
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