[illegible]. I will pray for you. St. Simons and I hope very much they’ll do this.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ETHEL DANIELL
A few years after Gordon asked Walker Percy to teach in a “School of the Holy Ghost” at a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, O’Connor reveals her skepticism. She may have thought such a “school” could lead to misleading literary categorization. O’Connor distances herself from literary movements, a consistent theme in the letters.
MILLEDGEVILLE
6 FEBRUARY 56
I so very much appreciate your letter and your interest in my books. Fr. McCown told me something about you and I had asked my editor at Harcourt, Brace to send you a copy of a novel called The Malefactors, which they are going to publish in March. It is by Caroline Gordon (Mrs. Allen Tate) who came into the Church six or seven years ago. She’s a fine novelist—has been a fine one for a long time—and should be known by more Catholics. Her husband, a poet and critic, became a Catholic a few years after she did. They were both part (in the 20s) of that Nashville group that called itself The Fugitives—they were “agrarians”—such people as John Crowe Ransom and Robt. Penn Warren. The Tates were the only ones that ended up in the Church, although the Church seems a logical end for the principles they began with. That was all part of what is now pompously called the Southern literary renascence.
As for myself and wanting to be a “Catholic writer”—well, what I want, of course, is to be a better Catholic and a better writer. Sorry professional writers, no matter of what degree of piety, don’t do much good for the Church—I suppose I have to exempt sorry unprofessional writers like St. Theresa of Lisieux. Your Catholicism affects your art, no doubt about it, but an intense application to the discipline of an art or even some craft should intensify your Catholicism. I have about decided that form is one’s moral backbone transposed to the subject at hand.
I have written one novel, Wise Blood and a collection of short stories. The stories are the better of the two but both were the best I could do at the time and could not have been written, by me, a line different. I am afraid some of my characters are even more unpleasant that M. Mauriac’s and that you wouldn’t want to know them either. However, they’re all, even the worst of them, me, so my tolerance of them is supreme. I have pious and even intelligent friends who write me that the Catholic writer must write about love and redemption and not so much the lack of it. It’s quite possible to agree with this and to add, “Yes, and we’re all supposed to be saints.” I find the advice I get from the inexperienced is always correct but seldom possible. One writes what one can and prays to do better.
I heard little about Grailville [Ohio], not much. Is that writing center a press or a school for writers or what? I would be suspicious of a school for Catholic writers, as there’s no way special for Catholics to write.
I live in the country on a dairy farm with my mother. Milledgeville is 40 miles from Dublin and if you visit your connections there again, you must come to see us too. I don’t get about much as I walk on crutches—this, thank the Lord, makes me no good around the house so most of my time is spent writing and reading and watching some peachickens I have. My avocation is raising peachickens. I hope that when you read my stories you will let me know what you think of them. I don’t require my friends to like them and am inured to the fact that most of them don’t. All I hope is that all aunts who burn my books have to buy them first.
Sincerely and with many thanks,
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
On November 25, 1952, Caroline Gordon writes Walker Percy, praising his revisions of The Charterhouse as well as the novel’s treatment of the “Negro problem.” Gordon probably had heard the phrase from Allen Tate, who had professional connections with Langston Hughes and wrote, “I know I am / The Negro Problem /…Wondering how things got this way / In current democratic night” (“Dinner Guest: Me”).20
Gordon, as she often does, addresses syntax and grammar. “There are not many different kinds of sentences that can be written. But you ought to have in your repertory at least three kinds.” She provides a recipe for a good paragraph:
Short declarative sentence. Declarative sentence a little longer than the first. Short declarative sentence. Sentence beginning with a subordinate clause or sentence formed by putting two clauses together. Declarative sentence. Declarative sentence. Long declarative sentence.
As in previous letters, Gordon also corrects Percy’s misuse of pronouns. She adds apologetically,
I am going on at such length, partly out of my natural irritability, and partly because I am so tremendously interested in your work. I think you ought to try to form the habits that make good writing. Maritain says that art is habit, anyhow. If you try to observe just these few things I have been talking about in no time at all they will become habitual.
Gordon concludes, “Well, you will have gathered that I am all for this book. In all the years I have been trying to help writers I have never had one who so richly repaid my efforts.” Citing an elderly nun, she notes, “You [Percy] are in a position to receive help from the Holy Ghost, which none of my other students have been in.”
Having finished the novel, Gordon writes the next morning that she plans to submit the novel to Charles Scribner’s Sons and “minor corrections” can be incorporated later. She recommends Percy read Mauriac and Bernanos, but observes,
They are criminally bad craftsmen, and hence, I think, theologically unsound, both of them—less Christian, according to Maritain’s definitions, than a man like James Joyce—There is Manichaean contempt for their craft, for, in fact, the whole natural order, that is fatal to a novelist. Damn it, they are not good novelists, either of them. Any first year student in a “Creative Writing Workshop” could point out the technical flaws in any book either of them ever wrote, but they have a range, they reveal a whole register—a plan of action—that is practically unknown to the contemporary “Protestant” novelist. I mean a man who writes out of the “Protestant” myth. They make a man like Hemingway seem flat, one-dimensional. I would not have you write like them. All my lecturing has been to keep you from writing like them, but I do wish you’d investigate them, nevertheless. I think that you might find them helpful in showing the way to some things that might be done but haven’t been done yet in the novel.
WALKER PERCY TO CAROLINE GORDON
Writing some years after having won the National Book Award in 1962, Percy praises the teaching of grammar and mythology in a creative writing class. He also recollects his friend’s wrestling with a frozen turkey at a Thanksgiving gathering at the Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia.21
FEBRUARY 14, 1974
Dear Miss Caroline,
A letter from Bob Giroux today reporting among other things, you’d sent him a mythology quiz you gave your students. He took it and flunked it.
Your life in Dallas sounds lovely.22 Since with God all things are possible, it even appears that the country and the church might be saved in Dallas! (Certainly not in Princeton or New Orleans.)
Either we must see you there, or you must drop by here on one of your visits East. You could fly into New Orleans, we’d pick you up at the airport and whisk you across the Lake.
I keep getting inquiries about your creative writing program out there. A smart alec Ph.D. at Tulane asked me if it was true you were teaching grammar. I said I hoped so.
Caroline II sounds lovely. Allen Tate II stopped by my brother, Phin’s on his way to Mexico last Fall. They liked him very much. Said he planned to be a farmer. A sensible choice.
If you come by to see us, you can wear your red flannel nightgown like in Conyers but you’ll not be required to deal with a frozen turkey.
Good luck on your antepenultimate novel—I’m hopelessly stuck with mine, hopeless because I can’t get
it right and I can’t let it go. A rotten life—I should have stuck to pathology. At least after polishing off a body a night, one had a feeling of accomplishment. For the present, all I have is a title, The Knight, Death and the Devil [Percy’s novel Lancelot]. (Remember the Durer engraving?) (Don’t tell any thieving Texas novelists.)
Love,
Walker
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
In the late fall of 1952 Gordon writes Charles Scribner’s Sons that Walker Percy is “the most important talent to come out of the South since Faulkner.”23 On December 8, 1952, Gordon writes Percy that Scribner’s is considering his novel and that she is “simply crazy about your book.” She notes, “I prophesy that it will sweep the country.”
Capturing the essence of Percy’s later published novels, Gordon specifically praises “Catholicism being implicit in the action (without even being mentioned)—maybe so. In this novel you are really treating of conversion—or lack of conversion, though, aren’t you?” She also mentions again her love-hate opinion of the “Catholic revivalists” (Bernanos, Mauriac, and Bloy). She criticizes “their poor craftsmanship,” which “would disgrace a first year student in a ‘Creative Writing’ course most of the time.” She does praise, however, the “higher plane” of their characters, which surpasses the “spiritual adventures” of Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms and Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor discusses the perpetual tension between her writing and pietistic, didactic fiction, in particular a novel, The Foundling, by Francis Cardinal Spellman. She also is gratified by Brainard Cheney’s penetrating review of Wise Blood, which proved vital in advancing her career. She also cites William Faulkner’s appreciation of a new theistic element in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
MILLEDGEVILLE
JAN. 29, 53
Thanks so much for looking for the missing page. It was the one before the one you sent but I will look for it in The Sewanee Review and send that to such of my kin as will be impressed with the sight of this much stately printed matter mentioning a niece. The size of it will fairly stun my 83 yr old cousin. Nothing stuns her but sheer bulk. Mr. Monroe Spears wrote me and asked if I had a story. My stories are adequate, there’s nothing in particular wrong with them but they sicken me when I read them in print; however, there’s that money.
I liked the piece in The New Republic very much but where it ought to be expanded is Thought. Though who reads Thought that don’t go to Fordham? Maybe it ought to be in Our Sunday Visitor. Could His Eminence keep it out of Our Sunday Visitor? My attitude toward him and his works (literary) is more lenient than yours and more crafty. It is—if we must have trash, this is the kind of trash we ought to have. This states your case and at the same time flatters the Cardinal. Somebody has to write for my cousin and she might as well have a prince of the church and with him so well-suited to the task etc etc. I suppose its a problem that there’s nothing for but the Holy Ghost. I dreamed one night about a Pope named April the 15th, and woke up thinking this must be Francis. Then I realized Francis would be the lst and this would be one of his descendants. It was a mighty comforting dream.
I read Middlemarch a few years ago and thought it was wonderful all but the end. I suppose that was a concession to the century or something.
I got me the Modern Library edition called the Best Known Novels of Geo. E[liot] then and thought I would have a great time with them but I didn’t. I started on The Mill on the Floss but that thing must be a child’s book or I don’t have any perseverance or those big books are just too heavy to hold up. I started on one about some Methodists and didn’t finish that either. I remember something from Middlemarch about “the roar on the other side of silence.” That’s what you have to pick up in a novel—I mean put down in one, I suppose. I want to read Middlemarch again and see if she wrote about freaks.
Do you know a man named Brainard Cheney? I found a review of my book by him in a quarterly called the Shenandoah that I hadn’t known but that comes from Washington and Lee [University, Lexington, Virginia]. It was a very good review, one of the only ones. This quarterly had a review of The Old Man and the Sea by Faulkner. He said Hemmingway had discovered the Creator in this. It was just a paragraph. I think where he discovered the Creator in it was that sentence about the fish’s eye—where it looks like a saint in a procession. I thought when I read it that he’s seeing something he hasn’t seen before; but I haven’t really read many of his books.
I guess you are right about Cal [Robert Lowell] I remember about the preacher who bought the sailor’s parrot but finally had to give him up because whenever he cried “How shall we get god into our hearts?” the parrot hollered, “Pull Him in with the rope! Pull him in with the rope.”
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
Caroline Gordon informs Percy (January 31, 1953) that John Hall Wheelock, editor in chief of Scribner’s, had written her that Percy’s novel showed “flashes of great talent” as well as “serious weaknesses.” She also warns that Percy is almost “falling into one of the first snares that the Devil lays for young writers.” She warns about “stylistic laziness.” She cites Hemingway’s criticism of Gertrude Stein:
Ernest used to say that she was lazy by nature, though gifted and that when she found out how tough the going was she set about devising a way to spare herself and so created the style which is so admired by fairies. I never saw one who didn’t dote on her.
Gordon believes Percy is not “fitted by Nature, evidently, to take Gertrude’s way, so you gaze wistfully after Maugham [Somerset] and Marquand [John P.].” She encourages him to reread the Odyssey and to study the precision of James Joyce and Henry James. She also beseeches him to study her own technical virtuosity in the crafting of scenes in her books and to compare them to scenes in the novels by George Eliot. She concludes, “It is not necessary or even desirable that you try to write like me, but if you take to trying to write like Maugham please don’t ever tell anybody that I ever gave you any advice about your work.”
CAROLINE GORDON TO BRAINARD CHENEY
Gordon congratulates Cheney for his “political job” as a speechwriter for Governor Frank G. Clement of Tennessee. Even though Cheney published four novels, he is better known for journalistic commentary, speechwriting, and the vital article he wrote about O’Connor’s Wise Blood.
2-4-53
1908 SELBY AVENUE
ST. PAUL 4
You sure are smart! To work out a political job that will make you a living and give you time to write, too. Well, you deserve it. I am glad the new governor realizes how much he is indebted to you. And I’m awfully glad that you’ve got things worked out to suit you.
In the mail with your letter came a letter from Flannery O’Connor asking me if I knew a man named Brainard Cheney. I started to say “Like a book” when I reflected that our oldest and dearest friends are all sealed books to us, so I just said that I aimed to become your god-mother. How about that? Any hope for me?
What you say about your not being worthy to partake of the Eucharist reminds me that several weeks after I had been baptized my eighty three year old Jesuit instructor asked me if I was taking Communion regularly, whereupon I astonished the good soul by saying that as yet I didn’t feel worthy. “You never will be!” he snorted. “That’s the reason you take it.” I am also reminded of another pearl that dropped from the lips of Monsignor Cummings after some weeks of instructing the Cummington boys, “I never feel easy about a convert till I’ve buried him.”
I hope you and Fannie will run into Flannery O’Connor some time. I think you’d both like her. Cal [Robert] Lowell says she is a saint, but then he is given to extravagance. She may be, though, at that. She is a cradle Catholic, raised in Milledgeville where there are so few ot
her Catholics that the priests would come to the house and make the piano into an altar, but she sure is a powerful Catholic. No nonsense about her! She has some dire disease—some form of arthritis—and is kept going only by a huge dose of something called ACTH. We are expected to adore all the Lord’s doings, but it does give you pause when you reflect that this gifted girl will probably not be with us long, whereas Truman Capote will live to a ripe old age, laden down with honours…
But I am leaving here March fifteenth to go to Seattle to teach a ten week course at the university there. Everybody tells me it will be pretty nice in Seattle then. I can hardly wait, though the winter here has been extraordinarily mild.
Allen is rushing all over the country this spring, making as much money as he can by lecturing and I am picking up every fee I can, too, so we can leave some dollars here for them if we go to Italy next year. All the scholastic committees have passed on Allen’s Fulbright application and it’s up to the FBI now, and as he hasn’t done a single subversive thing since he went over last August, they ought to pass him. But you never know…
Do let us hear from you again. We miss you both so much and long to see you. We think now that we’ll go abroad around the last of July. Any chance of your getting up our way before then? We also think of renting us a cottage or at least some lodgings at Seaside Heights, fifty five miles from Princeton. Why not join us there?
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 8
