Good Things out of Nazareth
Page 4
You will see quick enough that I am enclosing two things. The one called “Whom the Plague Beckons” is the first chapter of my novel and that is all. There ain’t no more and I do not know where the next word is coming from. By the time I get it finished we may both be dead and gone to our reward. My intention is to take Tarwater on to his uncles, the ass in town, pursued all the time by the cross he didn’t set up—which he finally sets up on his uncle’s lawn with the appropriate consequences. It’s full of stuff but I am no where near it yet. The other is a long story (long for me) that I don’t know whether [it] comes off or not but would appreciate your word on the subject. I have sent both of these to Mr. Ransom [John Crowe, Kenyon Review] and have asked him to send me back the one he doesn’t want. Nothing like presumption. I would like to send something to Bottegha Osura but I would also like to paint the side of the house so I will be sending it to Madam McIntosh [Mavis] instead to have it buried in some fashion magazine for a price. I had one in the Sept. Harper’s Bazaar, wedged in between all the skeletons in pill box hats. It made me sick to look at it.
Since I aim to be so long about the novel I have inveigled Giroux [Robert] into saying they will publish a book of my short stories in the fall of 54—to be called A Good Man Is Hard to Find. They take a dim view of it of course and I take a dim view of it myself though it’s my idea. The fact is I am uncertain about the stories. Three early ones would have to be included and I can’t even bring myself to read them over. If you say so, I would like to send them to you and get you to say if you think they ought to be included. Did you see that one of mine in the Spring Kenyon [Review] called “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”?
One of these stories, the first I ever had published, was written after I had read one called “Old Red” which you are doubtless familiar with. “Old Red” was the making of me as a short story writer. I think I learned from it what you can do with a symbol once you get a hold of it. Beforehand I hadn’t even known such a thing existed.
I was mighty glad to hear from you. I live in a Bird Sanctuary but the birds are not enough.
* * *
O’Connor writes to Gordon, who is living in Rome with her husband. Gordon comments on stories that would make up the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955). She also has written O’Connor about her visits to different sites. Invoking the allegory of her own fiction, O’Connor applies the technique to Gordon’s experiences.
MILLEDGEVILLE
2 OCTOBER 53
You will think I never appear but what I am loaded. I don’t know if I’m writing these stories to keep from writing that novel or not but I suspect myself. Tarwater is a mighty sullen companion. Anyway it cheers me that you find him worthy. I’m distressed that dogs don’t root things up but we don’t know anything about dogs here. My mother won’t allow one on the place because she has the grande dame cows, all neurotic. There’s no such thing as a contented cow. If one of hers sees a particularly fierce horse fly, the milk production falls off. Also she won’t have a hog on the place. She just don’t like to look at them. I guess I will change it to hogs and then I’ll have to insert a couple of hogs somewhere in the scenery. I am a city girl. One time Mr. Ransom [John Crowe] had to point out to me that you don’t hunt quail with a rifle.
I’ve been scouting around in the Book of Daniel for a better title for the story but all the stuff there is too heady. What the angel really did was to make a wind in the heart of the furnace, like the wind that brings the dew. I need something that won’t wag the dog but perhaps I’ll think of the right thing before the book comes out.
I’ll send you the old stories by a slower freight. I have just finished this one and as is my habit I am very pleased with it. I always am for about twenty four hours. You are mighty good to look at these things and it means a great deal to me.
The Fitzgeralds [Sally and Robert] have found themselves a tenant and say they set off Oct 12 for Milan. This will be an experience for the Italian Airlines.
All I know about these people from Texas is they’re Baptists. I haven’t seen anything about them lately but last year they were raising cane about how they were being persecuted in Rome. Maybe by now some Swiss guard has walled them up in an unused catacomb or they have moved on to see what they can do about Spain. I think I could handle their end of it; what I have no idea about is Rome. You must feel you are living on several levels of reality, or maybe I mean see you are, right clearly—coming up from the catacombs to catch the streetcar or whatever. The Fitzgeralds sent me a clipping about The New Jerusalem—to be built by Eddie Dowling at Pinellas, Florida. A 4.5 million dollar project, an exact replica, the smell of camels, real olives from Gethsemane, etc etc. Dowling said, “Once the site is determined, you can have the custodian come over from the Garden of Gethsemane. Right from that day, you’re in business with an attraction.” All this is in the vicinity of Palm Beach. Non-sectarian. Big name stars for the major roles (Jesus—Gregory Peck; Mary Magdalen—Rita Hayworth). Tourists from all over the world. I see Haze and Enoch [characters, Wise Blood] prowling around here, sniffing the camels.
The enclosed from Peacock. His regards, my love.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO BEVERLY BRUNSON
O’Connor responds to one of the few local readers who has carefully read Wise Blood.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
9 DECEMBER 53
Dear Miss Brunson:
I am pleased that you can suffer to read my novel twice. Some months ago I met a lady who said, “Oh I haven’t read your novel. I can’t read much on account of my eyes so I only read books that improve my mind!” room for improvement I thought. Having a novel behind you is like having an idiot child at your elbow: people feel they must make some discreet remark.
A shrike looks something like a masked mocking bird. I don’t think it shrieks at night. What it does do is impale large bugs and mice on thorn bushes so it can eat them at its leisure. Altogether a good bird for a writer to have around but I forget where I have used it. Bird watching is actually too strenuous for me but I have a backyard full of various ridiculous looking chickens: Polish crested, Japanese silkies, pheasants, peafowl (these are beautiful), mallards, geese.
As for the abbot, he was not looking in the grave gratuitously; he was burying the dead, one of the corporal works of mercy which we are more or less required by necessity to perform from time to time. The contemplative vocation doesn’t thrive in cafes. H. Motes was actually a contemplative but the means to that life not being at hand for him, the only way he could achieve it was by violence—binding himself.
A Georgian cannot of course be against Coca Cola. We feed it to our babies, serve it to our guests, console the dying with it and expect it to make us loved throughout the world. It was invented right here, sprung full blown from the head of somebody, and we are very happy that its natural merit raised it in the public appreciation above some horrid New England drink called Moxie. I daresay the claptrap we have to make our way amid is no more ridiculous than it ever was or is. The point is to see it and beyond it to what it hides.
Regards,
CAROLINE GORDON TO ROBERT FITZGERALD
Gordon writes that Flannery O’Connor “is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.” This comment is the foundation of the correspondence between O’Connor and Gordon and the letters O’Connor wrote to her Jesuit friends. The emphasis on “technique” over “piety” extends back to medieval times, to another “Nazareth”—Florence, Italy—and its most famous writer, Dante. He is remembered for his “dramatic sense” in the sensational horrors of the Inferno and the beauty of Purgatorio and Paradiso. Relying on technique, Dante presents his faith in an implicit yet compelling way. His argument for the necessity of purg
atory is conveyed not in a tract but in a story about climbing a mountain in the Purgatorio. Dante may be the greatest of ecumenical Catholic writers because storytelling overrides piety. This is the foundation of Gordon’s instruction of O’Connor and Walker Percy.
[MAY 1951]8
I’m glad you gave me Flannery O’Connor’s novel to read. I’m quite excited about it. This girl is a real novelist. (I wish that I had had as firm a grasp on my subject matter when I was her age!) At any rate, she is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.
I hope that old GS 40 hasn’t gone to my head, but I find myself wanting to make a few suggestions about this book. I think that it has real objectivity, but I think, too, that certain technical imperfections deprive it of its proper frame of reference and actually limit its scope. I believe that a touch here and there and a re-writing of two key scenes which she has muffed would do wonders for the form. I feel so strongly about this that I am going to go ahead and make the suggestions I have in mind and you can pass them on to her or not, as you see fit. After all, I know her very slightly. She may find me presumptuous.
But I am much interested in the book itself. Her general procedure seems to me sound. She is, of course, writing the kind of stuff people like to read nowadays: about freaks. Her book, like those of most of the younger writers, is full of freaks, but she does something with them that Buechner [Frederick] and Capote and those boys seem to be incapable of doing. Truman’s people, all seem to me, to belong in some good clinic. Her characters started out real folks but turned into freaks as the result of original sin.
She has one line of dialogue that I contemplate with envy: on page 142: “ ‘Blind myself’ he said and went on into the house.” You remember two lines of Ernest’s in To Have and Have Not: “Are those girls any good?…No, hon…” I always thought that those were the two fastest lines of dialogue that any of my contemporaries had written, but this “Blind myself” strikes me as being just as good. If this girl is capable of writing a line like that she is certainly capable of making the revisions this manuscript needs. I hope she won’t think I’m being presumptuous in pointing them out.
We—all of us, including the prospective godfather—await news from you all. Do let us hear as soon as you can,
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
A convert, Gordon is enthusiastic about teaching at a Catholic college. Reference is also made to the political extermination of an order of nuns during the French Revolution. This vital detail illustrates Gordon’s precise perspective on history. She distinguishes between the American War for Independence and the French Revolution. Conventional civic education in the United States rarely observes the crucial distinction and often conflates the War for American Independence with the French Revolution.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE SOUTHEAST
MINNEAPOLIS 14, MINNESOTA
[MAY 1951]
I am delighted to hear now that you are feeling better that you have finished your novel. As you know, I was much impressed by the novel in its original form. There are so few Catholic novelists who seem possessed of a literary conscience—not to mention skill—that I feel that your novel is very important. I shall be glad to read it whenever Robert [Fitzgerald] sends it. I am going to write to Robert Giroux, too, and tell him that I want to review the novel when it comes out and that I would like to do anything I can to help—though, of course, there is little that one can do, or needs to do to help a good novel.
I had a letter yesterday from Will Percy’s nephew, Walker Percy, who lives at Covington, Louisiana. He says he has written a novel which he guesses is “a Catholic novel, though it has no conversion or priests in it.” I don’t know that your paths are likely to cross, but if they ever should I imagine that you’d find it interesting to know each other. He has been in the Church about five years.
Allen and I are crazy about Minnesota. Everything is on such a grand scale, and the city itself is very handsome, with the Mississippi river, to my continual surprise, running right through it. Frank Lloyd Wright was here, all right. There are a lot of modern churches, Mother Cabrini’s, shaped like a Viking ship, St. Ignatius, shaped like a fish, and then there is one church that has a dialogue Mass. St. John’s Abbey, sixty miles away, is the largest Benedictine community in the world. Three hundred monks and three thousand acres of this fat black earth.
I am teaching a seminar in fiction at the College of St. Catherine. I have about twelve girls and, each week, an outer circle of auditors, alumnae and nuns. The presence of the nuns made me rather nervous at first, but I am getting used to them. They are sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, an order that was almost exterminated during the French Revolution—I believe they had to give up the habit and lived about in caves or sheltered by peasants—till the order was finally re-planted and six nuns were sent to St. Louis, Missouri, from which community nuns were sent here.
I shall await the manuscript with eagerness. Many thanks for sending it.
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
In 1951, Walker Percy sent Caroline Gordon his novel The Charterhouse for copyediting. Gordon foresees the ecumenical scope of Percy’s fiction that enabled him, like O’Connor, to reach a wide, diverse audience.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE SOUTHEAST
MINNEAPOLIS, 14 MINNESOTA
Dear Walker:
First, let me tell you how very glad I am that you have entered the Church and then let me add that I’ll be glad to read your novel. I remember having a conversation about writing with you years ago at some party and in that conversation you revealed the fact that you already realized that techniques were involved in the writing of novels. A Catholic novelist who relies more on his technique than his piety is what is badly needed right now. I wouldn’t want to pass up a chance of discovering one.
Ordinarily I shouldn’t accept a fee for reading your novel, but since you are a Catholic I will ask you a fee of one hundred dollars. I need an extra hundred dollars for a sort of Catholic project with which I imagine you’d be in sympathy. Allen and I have two god-sons, a young man and a young poet, both very gifted, whose lives have been re-made since they entered the Church a little over a year ago. They are truly Benedictine in spirit and were long before they knew anything about the order and they are anxious to attach themselves to some monastery where they can put their considerable talents to the service of the Church. We both feel that St. John’s Abbey, near St. Cloud, is the place for them, but they are in Massachusetts, where they run the Cummington Press, and before they could do anything at all is quite expensive. If I read your novel I’ll apply the fee to their railroad fare. I think it may mean a turning point in their lives.
St. John’s Abbey, incidentally, is the largest Benedictine community in the world. It is great fun living so near it. In fact, Minnesota is a wonderfully exciting place for a convert. The Church here is more like the mediaeval Church. I suppose the French influence hasn’t quite died out.
My own order—I feel quite proprietary about it since I am teaching a seminar in fiction at the College of St. Catherine—the sisters there are an order that was almost exterminated during the French revolution and then re-planted at Carondelet in Missouri and sent from St. Louis to which at that time was known as “Pig’s Eye.” The sisters hastily christened it St. Paul.
I am delighted to be teaching in a Catholic college. I was getting tired of teaching—or trying to teach Protestants. One wastes so much time defining terms.
Allen and I both send you our best wishes and congratulations, or perhaps you ought to be sending them to us. I’m not sure which of us got to the fold first. Percy and Nancy [Mr. and Mrs. Percy Wood, daughter and son-in-law] and their two children were all baptized last spring. Our neighbor, Jacques Maritain, s
aid that it was like the conversion of Clovis and the Franks.
Yours sincerely in Christ,
Caroline
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon mentions that her husband, “Allen” [Tate], is reading Wise Blood. As the letters reveal, however, Gordon does the hard work of copyediting O’Connor’s stories but often defers to Tate for commentary.
[MAY, 1951]
The book arrived just after I wrote you. I think the end comes off marvelously. And that was a ticklish job, too. I have been holding my breath for fear I had been giving you a bum steer, but I really don’t think so, now I see what you’ve made of my suggestion. It was all there implicit in the action, anyway, of course, just needed a little more bringing out.
Waugh’s [Evelyn] comment on your book is interesting. I don’t really think that he is a novelist. His Edmund Campion is a beautiful thing, but Helena is amateurish, at times embarrassingly so.
I am enclosing the piece of James I have been labouring on all winter. I’d like to know how it strikes you. I don’t feel that James has been read yet. Certainly, when read from the Christian view-point he yields some results he hasn’t yielded to any of the critics. I have a lot of other notions about his work that I couldn’t get into the essay. It is strange, for instance, that so many of his big scenes take place in churches. Strange, on the other hand, that he will present a convent, say, in the most stereotyped way: the one Claire de Cintre retires to, in The American, for instance. Graham Greene, in a piece called “Henry James; An Aspect,” says that the fact is that James was abysmally ignorant both of the dogma and the rites of the Catholic Church, though he was strongly attracted to it.