Flannery by Brad Gooch Page B

described by stunned cotton farmers in the 1920s as “a cross between a termite and a tank.” The region was the hardest hit in the nation when the stock market crashed. Even in bucolic Buckhead, in 1932 six hundred families were considered “destitute.” A year later, only half the workforce of Atlanta was employed. Although by 1939, relief from the destitution was finally evident, O’Connor was familiar with streets thick with panhandlers and apple sellers, long “hunger marches” and breadlines. On either side of Bell House, where she visited her uncles, half the stores were boarded shut on Peachtree Street — a decade earlier, the city’s most fashionable stretch of boutiques.
    Images of hard times, and down-and-out types, are often found in O’Connor’s fiction; according to Ted Spivey, her “absurdist vision of cities” was drawn from “the few months O’Connor spent in Atlanta.” Certainly Taulkinham, in
Wise Blood,
with its street peddlers, vacant lots, and railroad yards is a depressed city. O’Connor told Spivey that the novel’s City Forest Park Zoo was based on Atlanta’s Grant Park Zoo. When her editor Catharine Carver visited in 1960, Flannery took her on a tour of the Cyclorama next to the Grant Park Zoo, one of Enoch Emery’s favorite spots: “We met her in Atlanta and took her to the cyclorama in the mvsevm where Enoch got the mummy.” In “The Artificial Nigger,” Atlanta is compared to Dante’s Hell, especially a sewer system that the ten-year-old Nelson imagines as “the entrance to hell.” Both the building of new sewers, and the refurbishing of the panoramic painting of the 1864 Battle of Atlanta in the Cyclorama, had been WPA projects much in the news in Atlanta during the thirties.
    Even closer to O’Connor’s heart was the adolescent homesickness she put into the mouths of a trio of bad boys in “A Circle in the Fire.” In the story, their ringleader, Powell, waxes nostalgic for his early boyhood on a farm that closely resembles Sorrel Farm, with its main house and white water tower rising up behind it. His itinerant father then moved “out to one of them developments” in Atlanta. Although their cluster of ten four-story concrete buildings was much more down-market than Peachtree Heights, the term “development” covered both. “So you boys live in one of those nice new developments,” says Mrs. Cope, the farm’s owner. Powell’s sidekick W.T. sets her straight: “All the time we been knowing him he’s been telling us about this here place. Said it was everything here. Said it was horses here. . . . He don’t like it in Atlanta.” Evoking the all-important naming of Shetland ponies at Sorrel Farm, Powell says, in a nostalgic reverie, “I remember it was one name Gene and it was one name George.”
    The biggest public event in Atlanta during O’Connor’s stay, if not in the city’s entire cultural history, was the grand premiere of
Gone With the Wind.
Yet all the hoopla over the novel and film left her merely irked. For O’Connor, as both girl and woman, there was no escaping the endlessly popular historical romance about Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of an Irish Catholic immigrant, surviving the Civil War years in Atlanta and on Twelve Oaks plantation in central Georgia. When O’Connor was eleven years old, living in Savannah, the novel first appeared and sold a record 250,000 copies in five weeks. As John and Cleo Tarleton were early friends of Margaret Mitchell and her first husband, the family rumor was that the novel’s Tarleton twins owed their name to O’Connor’s aunt and uncle. Street guards for crowd control at the gala movie premiere in Atlanta were all drawn from the ROTC chapter (of which James Dickey was a member) of O’Connor’s high school.
    On the evening of December 15, 1939, five giant searchlights clashed like crossed swords above Loew’s Grand Theatre downtown. Confederate flags whipped in the wind along Peachtree Street as