1409 EAST RIVER ROAD
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
[FALL 1954]
Business before pleasure—as our vagabond cook, Willie, said when Allen wanted her to sweep the front porch and she felt called to the post office, to get a real special delivery letter. You asked for it and here it is:
As usual, I think you have improved your story by revision. (one reason that makes me reluctant to advise you is the danger that in re-working a story you will lose some of the good stuff. People nearly always do. But I don’t think you do). I shall now treat this revised version as if it were coming out of my own work-shop. I would read it over now, for God knows the how manyeth time,) for tone and dramatic effect.
I think you can improve your first paragraph. The tone is not yet elevated enough, authoritative enough for the story you have to tell. Its subject matter is even more important than the subject matter in Joyce’s “Araby,” and look at the high and mighty tone he takes throughout that story of something that has happened to every one of us in our time—to be promised a treat as a child and then disappointed. Joyce takes that universal experience and makes it an analogue of man’s situation in the universe, a small, lonely figure under a vast, dark dome, a figure whose eyes “burn with anguish and anger” as the child-man realizes his plight. Your story is about an old man who realizes that all along he has been no better than a child. Your subject matter entitles you to take an even higher tone. So does your Christianity, which Joyce forsook and which you didn’t.
Have you ever studied any of the paragraphs in Joyce’s short stories or in “The Portrait”? It is very rewarding. Each paragraph has in it at least three kinds of sentences and each sentence does its appointed task with something that approaches perfection. You should learn to write the long, complicated—in the sense that it carries a lot of stuff—kind of sentence with which Joyce ends “The Dead.” You ought to have a sentence like that to end this story with. The sentence you end isn’t quite strong enough, not weighty enough…
Your story has the same form, the same three great supports: First, Mr. Head in the moonlight, second, Mr. Head and Nelson waiting for the train. I don’t think you give this scene enough attention. III corresponds to Dante’s “mid-way in the forest of our life.” You ought to set this scene more carefully—that is by using more sensuous detail—ought to make it more mysterious, for it is the “forest” out of which your action will emerge. You go at it too fast and don’t choose your words carefully enough; “Stuck” is not good there. Set the scene. Were there any trees there? If so, how did they look then? Did the tracks run through a flat place or did the train emerge from a small defile? Were the tracks straight or was there a bend? You do put the trees in but too late to have the right effect…
It’s dangerous for me to say this to a young writer who is such a master of colloquial dialogues as you are, but I dare say it just because you are such a master. Your dialogue delights me. I wouldn’t like to see less of it in your stories. I ask only to see it more set off, better displayed. That can be done, I think, by elevating the tone of the rest of the story—more beautiful, high-toned sentences. More paragraphs without a colloquial word or phrase in them. In that way you would get contrast that would make you[r] dialogue sparkle even more than it does.
Faulkner can do it—when he’s in the groove, but he, poor fellow, is bogged down, I judge from his last book, in what Allen calls “Mississippi theology.” You have an advantage over him there. For God’s sake make the most of it!
Allen and I have been reading a lot of Jung recently. It’s amusing and exciting to watch him making his way to the Church by way of alchemical symbols in the dreams of his patients! We are also reading a book by a Fr. Victor White called “God and the Unconscious,” a discussion of Jung and Freud, which Allen is going to send poor Cal [Robert Lowell] for Christmas. (How I wish I could wrap that boy up and mail him to a good Jungian practitioner). I think you’d find this book very interesting, also a book of Jung’s called Religion and Alchemy (Pantheon Press.) It is fascinating and ought to be very helpful to any fiction writer. It is to me, at least.
By the way, you ought to be able to get any book you need through your local library. They ought to purchase any book you need for your work if they follow the almost universal custom of extending special courtesies to writers. If they don’t you can get them to order books from the Library of Congress’ Inter-Library loan service.
I’ve got to get to work on the ill-wrought paragraphs of a promising old writer named Gordon. Love and congratulations on your revision. I don’t think you’ve lost a thing and you’ve gained an awful lot by the revision.
ALLEN TATE TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
As the detailed copyediting of O’Connor’s fiction proceeds, Tate’s presence is primarily through absence. In this letter, however, he praises “Good Country People,” and plans to read it to a class. O’Connor—not Hemingway, not Faulkner, not Joyce—could better capture the attention of distracted college students in a story about a Bible salesman stealing an atheist philosopher’s wooden leg.
While Tate recognizes the dramatic power of O’Connor’s story for teaching, he himself was uninspiring in the classroom. He usually entered class with a patrician air wearing a tweed jacket and sometimes puffing from a cigarette in a holder like President Roosevelt. He dispensed C papers to undergraduates struggling with poetry expositions—Eliot, Yeats, Lowell, for example. Tate once returned an essay to me with a superior admonition: “What that poem says is obvious to me but not to you.”31
Other critical observations by Tate in this letter reveal his brilliance. The “maimed souls” reference in relation to “Good Country People” reiterates the story’s rootedness in Dante’s Inferno, a harrowing narrative of dismemberment and cannibalism in the darkest places of Hell. Tate recognizes that O’Connor’s storytelling emanates from the Florentine master, Dante himself.
FEBRUARY 22, 1955
I have just read “Good Country People,” and I admire it greatly. It is without exception the most terrible and powerful story of Maimed Souls I have ever read. This kind of soul is obviously your subject, in whatever situation you may embody it; and this new fiction is a landmark in your treatment of it.—Much of your power comes of isolating the world in which these maimed persons live; they suddenly appear with the mystery of a natural force, or perhaps of the supernatural force of evil. So this is just a note to congratulate you. Here and there, I was disturbed by details and little touches that I didn’t understand. When in the expository and narrative passages Hulga is referred to as the Child, I can’t tell who thinks of her so. Here the “point of view” is in question; for if it is the narrator calling her the Child, I fear it won’t do; for the narrator has not established herself in the action or as an observer; and she can’t really have any views. Moreover it seems to me that Hulga’s Ph.D. is unreal as you present it; nothing in Hulga’s conversation or behavior, before the coming of the Bible salesman, indicates that she has this side to her character. We simply must take your word for it. If you could give it fictional reality, it would do better the work that I suppose you intend it to do; that is, to stand for the spiritual maiming corresponding to her physical maiming, and thus to make quite plain her vulnerability to the advances of the Bible salesman. I am sure that Caroline has mentioned these points and commented on them more searchingly than I have. You are a wonderful writer, and you started out with the first instinct of a good writer: you write only about the life you know. I am wondering whether you know Chekhov’s little story “On the Road.” The scene is as limited as yours, and the characters suffer, not exactly a spiritual wound, but a failure of charity which is also an aspect of your typical theme. Nevertheless, without seeming to do so, Chekhov manages to place the crisis of the story in a larger spiritual world.
I have mentioned to my class in
Southern literature the names of three Southern writers who are masters of Southern rural dialect: Elizabeth Roberts, Caroline and you. Before you can ask me not to, I am going to read “Good Country People” to my class on Thursday. The way your people talk is a marvel to read.
Ever yours,
Allen
Why can’t the story be in your book?
ALLEN TATE TO WALKER PERCY
Three years before Tate’s praise of O’Connor, he expresses reservations to Percy about The Charterhouse. Tate, however, recognizes Percy’s gifts, in particular the implicit theology of the novel that Percy would fully explore later in a penetrating essay, “Stoicism in the South.”32 Tate’s theological speculation leads to a “digression” about a fellow Southern Agrarian—and novelist. In the postscript Tate recognizes the beginnings of Percy’s satirical treatment of Anglican gentility and faith. Once the satirical seed was planted, Percy distanced himself from the Anglican patrimony that appears in nuanced mockery in later novels such as The Moviegoer and The Second Coming. A convert to Catholicism, and having experienced, unlike most readers, the high-toned Anglican community of Sewanee, Tate appreciates Percy’s satire.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE SOUTHEAST
MINNEAPOLIS 14, MINNESOTA
JANUARY 1, 1952
Dear Walker:
I finished reading your novel yesterday. I am not sure that I can add anything to what Caroline has written you, and I may merely repeat what she said; I didn’t read her commentary. It is a most impressive job, and I hope that you will be able to do the revisions necessary to round it out. I don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the book, but I do feel that there must be more work in detail…
Assuming, as I think you also would assume, that a literary technique from one point of view reflects the moral and even religious ideas implicit in the material, I am struck by the shadowy quality of the minor characters. Many of them come to life for a moment, only to sink almost immediately from sight. This literary effect would follow from Ben’s moral condition, a state of sin that maybe described as using others for one’s own ends, even though those ends may be compulsive and irrational, and generally destructive. It seems to me then that one of your problems in revision is to offset this moral implication of the subject-matter by giving the other characters a little more life of their own…What I am trying to say was first said by Aristotle about tragedy—that it is an action, not a quality; that character cannot exhibit its full meaning unless it is involved in an action; and one man isolated, as Ben is isolated, cannot make an action…
I am certain that you can almost at will actualize any portion of the novel, or any character: the minor characters, in so far as we know them at all, we know well. Miss MacGahee is wonderfully done—but what happens to her? She is, of course, the female version of Ben, and not too much could be done with her. I am not sure that you oughtn’t to make Ben’s marriage to Abbie a partial realization of the righting of a wrong: he need not know the full meaning (i.e., the full “conversion”) of the righting of this wrong, but a dim perception of it would give him greater dignity than he has at the end: he would be a man of stature whose imperfect “contrition” would give him a tragic implication.
One more thing. Your Southern business men are beautifully conceived but I think they are overdone: they represent the satire of the author rather than the actuality; they are almost allegorical. They don’t, of course, in life, constantly refer to their “class,” etc. By highlighting all this you almost caricature them; and I take it that this quality is scarcely the right coefficient of the seriousness of the hero. Ben’s father, I repeat, is excellent; he has real “specification”; but he tends to be dissolved in the exaggeration of his friends. You are absolutely right that the Roman myth still hangs on the South, and that the South is not really Christian; it is merely reactionary without being traditional.
(When Andrew Lytle [editor of The Sewanee Review, and novelist and professor] says he can’t join the Catholic Church because it isn’t in the Southern tradition, what he ought to mean is that the South has no tradition without the Church; for the thing that we all still cherish in the South was originally and fundamentally Catholic Christianity. Andrew’s position is sheer idolatry—worship of a golden calf, mere secularism—and alas his views are more representative today than yours or mine—or yours and mine. Twenty years ago I knew that religion was the key to the South [as it is to everything else] but I didn’t see far enough then.)
Well, that digression is not criticism of your novel. One more suggestion, I hope a practicable one: why not review the progression of incidents, and decide which ones are crucial? Then develop each one as if it were a distinct bit of action? This wouldn’t necessitate as much rewriting as you might think. It seems to me that this process might correct the faulty scale of the book as it is. There is too much before Ben returns to the Retreat, if there is going to be so little after; I think there’s just about enough after; so perhaps the other end should be scaled down.
The dream about the Church is not convincing, and I can’t think of a way to make it convincing. I see what you are up to, and the equivalent at least is probably necessary. My hunch is that the rounding out of Ignatz from the beginning would almost do the equivalent thing.
I congratulate you. You have great intelligence and power, and you’re going to be a valuable novelist.
Ever yours,
Allen
P.S. The satire of Sewanee [University of the South] as a psychiatric retreat is wonderful—effective in itself, but with an added dimension for those of us who know Sewanee.33
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON AND ALLEN TATE
O’Connor mentions the autobiographical theme in “Good Country People,” revealing that without faith she might have been like the story’s atheist intellectual, Hulga. Another O’Connor story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” contains insights about her adolescence, while “Revelation” contains autobiographical elements of her struggles as an adult with a deadly illness.
MILLEDGEVILLE
1 MARCH 55
I do appreciate both your letters and I am glad to have my opinion on that story confirmed. I really thought all the time it was the best thing I had done. Hit (it) was a seizure. Anyway, Mrs. Freeman’s remarks are not much credit to me. She lives on this place and all I have to do is sit at the source and reduce it a little so it’ll be believable. As for the other lady I have known several of her since birth and as for Hulga I just by the grace of God escaped being her; the Bible salesman also came without effort. I am mighty afraid he is my hidden character.
I have corrected the business about the child and now only use it from the mother’s point of view. This is a great improvement. Then I have added two touches to support the intellectual life of Hulga; one, like you said about the name, and the name’s working like Vulcan in the furnace, etc. Hulga thinks that one of her greatest triumphs is that her mother has not been “able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga.” That helps some. Then while Mrs. Hopewell is thinking about Hulga and how she is getting more bloated, rude and squint-eyed every day, I stick in this (from Mrs. Hopewell’s viewpoint):
“And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said—without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full—“Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malbranche was right: we are not our own light! We are not our own light!” Mrs. Hopewell had no idea, to this day, what brought that on. She had only made the remark (hoping Joy would take it in) that a smile never hurt anyone.”
Anyhow, with these changes, I sent it airmail to Giroux and h
e wired me he would try to get it in the collection if it didn’t cost too much to throw away the old type and do the resetting [A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, 1955]. Seems there can’t be but so many pages or they will go broke. I was to get the proofs this week so I suppose he could wring my neck.
I know you are glad to get out from under that novel, or anyway where you can see out. If I could just get where I could see a little daylight in mine I would be happy. It hasn’t moved an inch in 18 months and when I stop it and write a story I feel like I am letting myself down from the penitentiary by a rope. I mean a thread.
The story of Powers [J. F.] in the O’Henry collection is better than any of the others in the book. If you ever see him I wish you would tell him he has one solid admirer in Georgia.
CAROLINE GORDON TO MR. AND MRS. ANDREW LYTLE
Gordon writes from Sherman, Connecticut, where she is visiting Walker Percy’s agent, Susan Jenkins. Gordon describes the impact of a public reading by Flannery O’Connor. Serial murders interwoven with discussion of the Resurrection were meant to both entertain and provoke genteel critics.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 11
