I would be pleased if your literate friend would call me, although I don’t feel literate. Let me hear from you.
Regards,
FOC
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor recalls difficulties writing Wise Blood while she was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she seeks counsel from a Jesuit priest. Her Prayer Journal reveals that she accepted the Church’s authority, even though she might be disappointed with the literary knowledge of priests. O’Connor also is averse to parochial girls’ schools, a perspective present in these letters. Gordon was teaching at the College of St. Catherine in Minnesota and had written favorably about her experiences.
[NOV. 1951]
Thank you so much for your letter and for wanting to help.7 I am afraid it will need all the help it can get. I never have, fortunately, expected to make any money out of it, but one thing that has concerned me is that it might be recognized by Catholics as an effort proper for a Catholic; not that I expect any sizable number of them who arn’t kin to me to read it—reading is not necessary to salvation which may be why they don’t do it—but I have enough trouble with the ones who are kin to me to know what could be expected. You can’t shut them up before a thing comes out but you can look forward to a long mortified silence afterwards. I used to be concerned with writing a “Catholic” novel and all that but I think now I was only occupying myself with fancy problems. If you are a Catholic you know so well what you believe, that you can forget about it and get on with the business of making the novel work. This is harder to do, knowing what you believe, but Catholic writers ought to be freer to concentrate on good writing than anybody else. They don’t, and I wouldn’t know why. When I first started my book, I was right young and very ignorant and I thought what I was doing was mighty powerful (it wasn’t even intelligible at that point) and liable to corrupt anybody that read it and me too so I visited a priest in Iowa City and very carefully explained the problem to him. He gave me one of those ten cent pamphlets that they are never without and said I didn’t have to write for fifteen year old girls. The pamphlet was by some Jesuit who did reviewing. He seemed to think that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was about as good as you could get. Somebody ought to blow the lid off.
Since your letter to Robert [Fitzgerald] this summer, I have been examining my conscience on the business of writing about freaks. I didn’t start out with that intention or any other but I found that I couldn’t sustain a whole character. Andrew Lytle [professor, Iowa Writers’ Workshop] saw a few of the early discarded chapters and said you keep out of that boy’s mind, you’ll get yourself messed up if you don’t. It appeared to me to be good advice, but then the only way I seemed to be able to make clear what Haze was thinking was to have him do extreme things. I suppose what I needed to do then was make it plain that he was a freak in the philosophical order and not the kind that belonged in a clinic and I don’t know if I’ve done that or not. This occurs to me now; nothing occurred to me while I was doing it.
I went to school to the sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in Savannah and liked them but I wouldn’t much relish having a ring of them around my seminar; however, I don’t think it would hurt them any to be there. I have always had a horror of Catholic girl’s colleges. There seems to be a peculiar combination of money and piety and closed forms about them—this is all pure prejudice, I never attended one, and times may have changed. We have three of those sisters here, trying to start a school for the children. Two of them are former Baptists.
All these comments on writing and my writing have helped along my education considerably and I am certainly obliged to you. There is no one around here who knows anything at all about fiction (every story is “your article,” or “your cute piece”?) or much about any kind of writing for that matter. Sidney Lanier and Daniel Whitehead Hickey are the Poets and Margaret Mitchell is the Writer. Amen. So it means a great deal to me to get these comments.
I had felt that the title wasn’t anchored in the story but I hadn’t known how to anchor it. I am about that now. It won’t be a stout stake but it’ll be something.
I had also felt that there were places that went too fast. The cause of this is laziness. I don’t really like to write but I don’t like to do anything else better; however it’s easier to rewrite than do it for the first time and I mean to enlarge those places you mentioned. I’ve been reading a lot of Conrad lately because he goes so slow and I had thought reading him might help that fault. There is not much danger of my imitating him.
The business about making the scenery more lyrical to contrast with their moods will be harder for me to do. I have always been afraid to try my hand at being lyrical for fear I would only be funny and not know it. I suppose this would be a healthy fear if I had any tendency to overdo in that direction. This time, working so long on the book, I may have cultivated the ugly that it’s become a habit. I was much concerned this summer after your letter to Robt. [Fitzgerald] to get everything out of that book that might sound like Truman Capote. I don’t admire his writing. It reminds me of Yaddo. Mrs. Ames [Elizabeth] thought he had about achieved perfection in the form of the short story. I read in the Commonweal that his last book was better than the first one. The reviewer quoted something from it with great admiration about private worlds never being vulgar. I can think up plenty of vulgar private ones myself.
* * *
O’Connor mentions a friend, Robie Macauley—novelist, teacher, editor, and critic—who taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and also admired Wise Blood. She also hopes to return to Connecticut to resume living with her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
MAY 2, 1952
I’m sorry you won’t be able to review the book but I am glad to have the comment on the jacket, where it will give pause. I thought you would be interested in Waugh’s comment which was as follows: “You want a favorable opinion to quote. The best I can say is: ‘If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ End quote—It isn’t the kind of book I like much, but it is good of its kind. It is lively and more imaginative than most modern books. Why are so many characters in recent American fiction sub-human? Kindest regards.” Well, I am determined there’ll be no apes in the next one.
I have heard from Robie Macauley who liked it. He says his own novel has been accepted by Random House and will be published in November. I am very glad because I like him and what he writes. Today I had a letter from Cal [Robert Lowell]. They are in Saltzburg and he is teaching at the American school there. The letter was very nice and very much like him but it makes me sad to think of the poor old boy.
I haven’t worked my way up to The Golden Bowl yet, but I have just finished The Portrait of a Lady. The convent in that is the most awful I have ever read about. It beats the place where Julien Sorel was a seminarian. When the Mother Superior said she thought the child had been there long enough I thought I would jump out the window. This winter I read that book of Max Picard’s, The Flight from God. I was knocked out by that.
I do hope I will see you all this summer. I hope to get to Ridgefield [Connecticut] by taking it easy. I am about ninety-two years old in the matter of energy and will have to travel with the sterilizer and syringe and all such mess but I am looking forward to it.
* * *
O’Connor addresses an unusual topic for the modern short story. She also discusses the differences in prayers of believers.
5/12/52
I was very pleased to be able to read this piece on James and I have read it a couple of times by now and with wonder every time. Since my critical training, such as it was, took place in a lump at Iowa, I’ve always felt that it would be horribly gauche to voice any insights on a novel or poem that came via Catholic conviction. At the same time I’ve though
t that if a thing is art, it has to take in enough to be catholic—at least with a little c—and that if it’s that, it is penetrable by Catholic standards. But aesthetics is way over my head. I don’t have enough of the proper kind of words. Anyway, as I read it, I felt that this was surely the normal natural way to react to Henry James; I mean the way God and Henry intended.
I get so sick of reading all this stuff about his “accident.” I am sure you mean to dismiss it once and for all when you say, “If he had been congenitally incapable of the marriage relation he would have written books different from the ones he wrote,” but this statement confuses me. I’m not very subtle; to me, it puts the emphasis back where you intend to take it off. I think he could have been physically incapable of marriage and still have written the books he wrote because I don’t think that that would have had anything to do with his talent or the Grace that he had to write them with. I guess you mean that if he had been morally or emotionally unfit for the marriage relation, he would have written different books, which I can readily see. Maybe I am being knocked over by a gnat here but I wish you would enlighten me. I arrive at the obvious only after lengthy research.
Most of the stories you used in it, I hadn’t read but I did find a copy of THE GREAT GOOD PLACE [Henry James] and read it yesterday. I thought the vision was more one of Purgatory than of Heaven. It wouldn’t have been much of a Heaven to a Catholic anyway. While he didn’t suffer there the young man who took his place was a suffering figure and wasn’t there a kind of communion of saints atmosphere between them? Also, although the Brother called it the Great Want Met, it was only a great want for contemplation and regaining of the self—it wasn’t the great want you think of as being satisfied in heaven. The presence of God is in the place but it is experienced only vaguely and never seen. Wasn’t St. Catherine of Sienna rewarded with self-knowledge in her visions of Purgatory, or rather when she felt she was actually there? I don’t mean that James thought of the great good place as purgatory but only that Dane was probably not as far up as he thought he was, or James maybe thought he was.
I will certainly pray for Mr. Tate in the air but my opinion is contrary to his. I always thought converts’ prayers availed more else they wouldn’t be where they are and that born Catholics are only born Catholics because they would be too lazy to save themselves any other way. But maybe this only applies to the Irish.
I am certainly indebted to you for letting me see this piece and I think it ought to be a book.
If Catholic novels are bad, current Catholic criticism is PURE SLOP or else it’s stuck off in some convent where nobody can get his hands on it. Sr. Mariella Gable ought to disguise herself as Freudina Potts and undermine the Partisan Review from inside. She could send the whole place to the devil.
* * *
O’Connor mentions working on a story about rural arson and the terrorism of cross burnings. She may have reworked the scene to craft her later story “A Circle in the Fire” and the ending of The Violent Bear It Away.
MILLEDGEVILLE
6/2/52
All this is very helpful to me and I intend to take the slow tour through Madame Bovary. I read The Craft of Fiction [Percy Lubbock] periodically but I am still at the stage where I have to worry more about if anything is going to BE then How. I notice Mr. Lubbock says Flaubert never had to hold down his subject with one hand while he wrote it with the other. Me neither. I have to go in search of it. I don’t know whether I get blood out of the turnip or turnips out of my blood. The novel I am writing now is very exciting to me but I keep writing the wrong thing, proceeding like the mole. It has three boys for heros—all very guilty and sharp. They burn a cross on one [of] them’s papa’s lawn and the cross is something different to each of them and something else for the papa, etc etc. It is going to be kind of impossible to do but I think it must be the impossibility that makes the tension.
My method is more liable to be affected by my mother’s dairyman’s wife than by Mr. Henry James. She hangs around all the time and all her sentences begin: “I know one time my husband seen…” It works like you say. He sees everything and she sees twice as much as he sees but she has never looked at anything but him. They both read my book and said: it just shows you how some people would do.
Don’t be amused by my profession of gratitude. It’s drastic and the fact I have had a few people apply to me for advice about their manuscripts but they are always hopeless, and have a mission, or are just plain crazy. One of them, a lady, said, “You use the block style, don’t you?” Another is a disciple of Henry Miller. The other is a bank clerk and when he brings a paper, he sits on the arm of the chair smoking heavily while I read it and every now and then his finger descends on a word and he says “See? That’s where I use much iron-ny.” It scares me to death when I think how good the Lord is to give you a talent and let you be able to use it. I reresolve to become responsible, and to Madame Bovary I go.
I do pray for you but it strikes me I ought to be praying for the logical positivists. A distasteful business.
Affectionately,
* * *
O’Connor mentions a visit to her friends the Fitzgeralds and their loss of a child. She also disciplined their son, Benedict, who years later became a skilled screenwriter and co-wrote with Mel Gibson the screenplay for The Passion of the Christ (2004). Fitzgerald also collaborated in writing the script for O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1979), directed by John Huston.
MILLEDGEVILLE
9/11/52
Last night I happened on this picture of your connection here. Since I had sent him two bucks in memory of Mark Twain (before I asked you about him), I figure I must have at least paid for the license. He [is] mighty well preserved.
I am up again now and looking forward to a recessive period of my come-and-go ailment. It’s very good working again. I am just writing a story to see if I can get away from the freaks for a while.
This summer while I was at the Fitzgeralds, I read “The Strange Children” [Caroline Gordon]. I thought it was a beautiful book, part one probably in the development of Grace in these people. Of the characters I noticed that the Catholic, Mr. Reardon, was the least filled in. Was that because he would have taken the book over if he had been? It was not his story of course but it takes some doing to put a Catholic in a novel.
I have just read “Victory.” Everything I read of Conrad’s I like better than the last thing. I’ve also just read the “Turn of the Screw” [Henry James] again and to me it fairly shouts that it’s about expiation.
Have you seen the Fitzgeralds? Sally seems to be having a bad time still. I had to leave in a hurry on account of my fever a few days before she lost the baby. Benedict [Fitzgerald] has had the chicken pox but they say it has only given him more zest—which he didn’t particularly need. The day before I left, he climbed in the car, drove it twelve feet over a chair and into a pile of rocks, climbed out the window, looking exactly like Charles Lindburg, and received a whipping from me (Sally was in bed sick) as if it were a great honor.
I suspect you are getting ready for Minnesota.
* * *
O’Connor is pleased that Gordon approves of “The River.” O’Connor is also working on a story that would become a novel a few years later, The Violent Bear It Away. She also praises one of Gordon’s most famous stories, “Old Red,” which taught O’Connor much about writing fiction (The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981).
[SEPTEMBER, 1953]
I am highly pleased you liked that story “The River.” I had been thinking about a woman baptizing a child that didn’t know what it was about for a long time and finally I thought myself up to the point of writing it. The Churches ceremony of Baptism is so elaborate! I keep trying to think of some way in fiction that I could convey the richness against the threadbareness of t
he other but my thought is none too productive. The Church takes care of everything and I am always struck fresh with it on St. Blases Day when you have your throat blessed. The One True Holy Catholic & Apostolic Church taking time out to bless my throat! And these people around here have to scratch their religion out of the ground.
Which brings me around to what I wish you would do in Rome—see those Texas Baptists that are there to convert the Italians. I think that is the story of the century and if I knew anything about Rome I would be at it myself but I’ll probably never get there. I saw the picture of one of them in Time—he looked like a clipped lion with a raging headache, a little like a stupid Cal. You could wring that subject dry!
Guess what I did this summer. I spent a weekend in Nashville with the Cheneys [Lon and Fanny]. They had me and Ashley Brown [professor, University of South Carolina] and we had a lovely time, mostly listening to Lon whom Fanny says is a non-stop talker. They had some people in one night and let me read “The River.” I like to read once I get started and quit thinking about it. They had a picture of yours of a peacock and some other birds and wild animals that I was much taken with. It was the only peacock I’d ever seen with the face of a mandril. My peafowl seem to just die for meanness. I have a cock and two hens left. She hatched one peachicken this summer and raised it big enough for a weasel to eat before he went to bed. Next year as soon as they hatch I am bringing them in the house and going to raise them in the bureau drawer. The Cheneys have been in Ripton, Ver. and were going by to see the Fitzgeralds on their way back home. I got to the Fitzgeralds too. You are the Oracle around there. Everytime those children do something awful which is none too infrequent they say Aunt Caroline let me do that etc etc. Benedict is very superior, having visited you. Things finally got evened up when they let Hugh visit the Maxwells. Now when Benedict says Aunt Caroline had a ferry boat, Hugh says the Maxwells had a bear-skin rug that was a real bear. When I left they hadn’t been able to rent the house yet and their trip to Europe was hanging fire but I am hoping they have got it rented by now.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 3
