The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

part of some other plan for her.
In her room at Andalusia, far from the world, she would have no
possible distractions. She would make it clear to her mother that those
two or more hours of writing in the morning were sacred to her and
she would not tolerate any interruptions. Now she could focus all her
energy on her work, get even deeper into her characters, and bring
them to life. Back in the heart of Georgia, listening closely to visitors
and farmhands, she would be able to hear the voices of her characters,
their speech patterns, reverberating in her head. She would feel even
more deeply connected to the land, to the South, which obsessed her.
As she moved about in these first months back home, she began to
feel the presence of her father—in photographs, in objects that he
cherished, in notebooks of his that she discovered. His presence
haunted her. He had wanted to become a writer; she knew that.
Perhaps he had wanted her to succeed where he had failed. Now the
fatal disease they shared tied them together even more tightly; she
would feel the same form of pain that afflicted his body. But she would
write and write, insensitive to the pain, somehow realizing the
potential that her father had seen in her as a child.
Thinking in this way, she realized she had no time to waste. How
many more years would she live and have the energy and clarity to
write? Being so focused on her work would also help rid her of any
anxiety about the illness. When she was writing, she could completely
forget herself and inhabit her characters. It was a religious-like
experience of losing the ego. As she wrote to a friend with the news of
her illness, “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.”

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There were other blessings to count as well: Knowing early on about
her disease, she would have time to get used to the idea of dying young,
and it would lessen the blow; she would relish every minute, every
experience, and make the most of her limited encounters with
outsiders. She could not expect much from life, so everything she got
would mean something. No need to complain or feel self-pity—
everyone had to die at some point. She would find it easier now to not
take so seriously the petty concerns that seemed to roil others so much.
She could even look at herself and laugh at her own pretensions as a
writer, and mock how ridiculous she looked with her bald head,
stumbling around with a cane.
As she returned to writing her stories with a new sense of
commitment, Flannery felt another change from within: an increasing
awareness of and disgust with the course of life and culture in America
in the 1950s. She sensed that people were becoming more and more
superficial, obsessed with material things and plagued by boredom,
like children. They had become unmoored, soulless, disconnected from
the past and from religion, flailing around without any higher sense of
purpose. And at the core of these problems was their inability to face
their own mortality and the seriousness of it.
She expressed some of this in a story inspired by her own illness,
called “The Enduring Chill.” The main character is a young man
returning home to Georgia, deathly ill. As he gets off the train, his
mother, there to meet him, “had given a little cry; she looked aghast.
He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His
mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he
supposed that if the experience didn’t kill her, it would assist her in the
process of growing up.”
As she saw it, people were losing their humanity and capable of all
kinds of cruelties. They did not seem to care very deeply about one
another and felt rather superior to any kind of outsider. If they could
only see what she had seen—how our time is so short, how everyone
must suffer and die—it would alter their way of life; it would make
them grow up; it would melt all their coldness. What her readers
needed was their own “bullet in the side” to shake them out of their
complacency. She would accomplish this by portraying in as raw a
manner as possible the selfishness and brutality lurking below the
surface in her characters, who seemed so outwardly pleasant and
banal.

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The one problem Flannery had to confront with her new life was the
crushing loneliness of it all. She required the company of people to
soothe her, and she depended on the cast of characters she met to
supply her endless material for her work. As her fame grew with the
publication of Wise Blood and her collections of stories, she could
count on the occasional visit to the farm from other writers and fans of
her work, and she lived for such moments, putting every ounce of her
energy into observing her visitors and plumbing their depths.
To fill the gaps between these social encounters, she began a
lengthy correspondence with a growing number of friends and fans,
writing back to almost anyone who wrote to her. Many of them were
quite troubled. There was the young man in the Midwest who felt
suicidal and on the verge of madness. There was the brilliant young
woman from Georgia, Betty Hester, who felt ashamed for being a
lesbian and confided in Flannery, the two of them now regularly
corresponding. Flannery never judged any of them, feeling herself to
be rather odd and outside the mainstream. To this growing cast of
characters and misfits she offered advice and compassion, always
entreating them to devote their energies to something outside
themselves.
The letters were the perfect medium for Flannery, for it allowed her
to keep some physical distance from people; she feared too much
intimacy, as it would mean getting attached to those she would soon
have to say good-bye to. In this way she slowly built the perfect social
world for her purposes.
One spring day in 1953, she received a visit from a tall, handsome
twenty-six-year-old man from Denmark named Erik Langkjaier. He
was a traveling textbook salesman for a major publisher, his territory
including most of the South. He had met a professor at a local college
who had offered to introduce him to the great literary figure of
Georgia, Flannery O’Connor. From the moment he entered her house,
Flannery felt they had some kind of mystical connection. She found
Erik very funny and well read. It was indeed rare to meet someone so
worldly in this part of Georgia. His life as an itinerant salesman
fascinated her; she found it humorous that he carried with him a
“Bible,” what those in the business called the loose-leaf binder of
promotional materials.

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Something about his rootless life struck a chord with her. Like
Flannery, Erik’s father had died when he was young. She opened up to
him about her own father and the lupus she had inherited. She found
Erik attractive and was suddenly self-conscious about her appearance,
constantly making jokes about herself. She gave him a copy of Wise
Blood, inscribing it, “For Erik, who has wise blood too.”
He began to arrange his travels so that he could pass often through
Milledgeville and continue their lively discussions. Flannery looked
forward to every visit and felt pangs of emptiness when he left. In May
of 1954, on one of his visits he told her he was taking a six-month leave
from his job to return to Denmark, and he suggested they take a good-
bye car ride through the county, their favorite activity. It was dusk, and
in the middle of nowhere he parked the car on the side of the road and
leaned over to kiss her, which she gladly accepted. It was short, but for
her quite memorable.
She wrote to him regularly and, clearly missing him, kept discreetly
referencing their car rides and how much they meant to her. In
January 1955, she began a story that seemingly poured out of her in a
few days. (Normally she was a careful writer who put stories through
several drafts.) She called it “Good Country People.” One of the
characters is a cynical young woman with a wooden leg. She is
romanced by a traveling salesman of Bibles. She suddenly lets down
her guard and allows him to seduce her, playing her own game with
him. As they are about to make love in a hayloft, he begs her to remove
her wooden leg, as a sign of her trust. This seems far too intimate and a
violation of all her defenses, but she relents. He then runs away with
the leg, never to return.
In the back of her mind she was aware that Erik was somehow
extending his stay in Europe. The story was her way of coping with
this, caricaturing the two of them as the salesman and the cynical
crippled daughter who had let down her guard. Erik had taken her
wooden leg. By April she felt his absence rather keenly and wrote to
him, “I feel like if you were here we could talk about a million things
without stopping.” But the day after she mailed this she received a
letter from him announcing his engagement to a Danish woman, and
he told her of their plans to return to the States, where he would take
up his old job.

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She had intuited such an event would happen, but the news was a
shock nonetheless. She replied with utmost politeness, congratulating
him, and they wrote to each other for several more years, but she could
not get over this loss so easily. She had tried to protect herself from any
deep feelings of parting and separation because they were too
unbearable for her. They were like small reminders of the death that
would take her away at any moment, while others would go on living
and loving. And now those very feelings of separation came pouring in.
Now she knew what it was like to experience unrequited love, but
for her it was different—she knew that this was the last such chance for
her and that her life was to be led essentially alone, and it made it all
doubly poignant. She had trained herself to look death square in the
eye, so why should she recoil from facing this latest form of suffering?
She understood what she had to do—transmute this painful experience
into more stories and into her second novel, to use it as means to
enrich her knowledge of people and their vulnerabilities.
In the next few years the drugs began to take a toll, as the cortisone
softened her hip and jawbone and made her arms often too weak to
type. She soon needed crutches to get around. Sunlight had become
her nemesis, as it could reactivate the lupus rashes, and so to take
walks she had to cover every inch of her body, even in the stifling heat
of the summer. The doctors tried to remove her from the cortisone to
give her body some relief, and this lowered her energy and made the
writing that much harder.
Under all the duress of the past few years, she had managed to
publish two novels and several collections of short stories; she was
considered one of the great American writers of her time, although still
so young. But suddenly she began to feel worn down and inarticulate.
She wrote to a friend in the spring of 1962, “I’ve been writing for
sixteen years and I have the sense of having exhausted my original
potentiality and being now in need of the kind of grace that deepens
perception.”
One day shortly before Christmas of 1963, she suddenly fainted and
was taken to the hospital. The doctors diagnosed her with anemia and
began a series of blood transfusions to revive her. She was too weak
now to even sit at her typewriter. Then a few months later they
discovered a benign tumor that they needed to remove. Their only fear
was that the trauma of the surgery would somehow reactivate the

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lupus and the powerful episodes of fevers that she had experienced ten
years before.
In letters to friends, she made light of it all. Strangely enough, now
that she was at her weakest, she found the inspiration to write more
stories and prepare a new collection of them for fall publication. In the
hospital she studied her nurses closely and found material for some
new characters. When the doctors prohibited her from working, she
concocted stories in her head and memorized them. She hid notebooks
under her pillow. She had to keep writing.
The surgery was a success, but by mid-March it was clear that her
lupus had come roaring back. She compared it to a wolf (lupus is Latin
for “wolf”) raging inside her now, tearing things up. Her hospital stay
was extended, and yet despite it all, she managed here and there to get
in her daily two hours, hiding her work from the nurses and doctors.
She was in a hurry to scratch out these last stories before it was all
over.
Finally, on June 21, she was allowed to return home, and in the
back of her mind she sensed the end was coming, the memory of her
father’s last days so vivid within her. Pain or no pain, she had to work,
to finish the stories and revisions she had started. If she could manage
only an hour a day, so be it. She had to squeeze out every last bit of
consciousness that remained to her and make use of it. She had
realized her destiny as a writer and had led a life of incomparable
richness. She had nothing now to complain about or regret, except the
unfinished stories.
On July 31, while watching the summer rain by her window, she
suddenly lost consciousness and was rushed to the hospital. She died
in the early hours of August 3, at the age of thirty-nine. In accordance
with her last wishes, Flannery was buried next to her father.
• • •