Lytle would have appreciated O’Connor’s reading. Trained as an actor at the Yale School of Drama, Lytle was a gifted teacher who mesmerized students in his classroom performances of O’Connor’s stories at the Universities of the South [Sewanee] and Florida [Gainesville]. When he was editor of The Sewanee Review, students from his classes and other admirers congregated at the “Log Cabin,”Lytle’s ancestral home in Monteagle, Tennessee. Lytle would simply resume his class on his front porch or beside the fire, where more unforgettable teaching occurred.
An undergraduate might imbibe highballs served in silver cups with “Mr. Lytle,” and assorted luminaries in town might appear for the evening. These might include the novelist, Eudora Welty; the Faulkner scholar, Cleanth Brooks; Lytle’s fellow Agrarian, novelist Robert Penn Warren; the biblical scholar, the Reverend William H. Ralston, Jr.; Thomas (“Tam”) Carlson, of the English faculty at Sewanee; the Reverend K. Logan Jackson, dynamic president of the national campaign to preserve the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, his wife, Mary Lyman [Scott] Jackson—concert pianist, brilliant writer, and the cofoundress of Exodus Youth Services (Washington, D.C.), and many others. Sometimes appearing in black dancing slippers, Lytle might recall his adventures as an actor or his experiences boxing.34 He praised O’Connor, while noting Faulkner’s shortcomings. He lauded Joyce, noting that Portrait of the Artist was about the integrity of the artist who would not serve a corrupt Church. (The observation has renewed cogency with the unfolding scandal in the Catholic Church.) Lytle lamented the liturgical revisions of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer that resulted in the gutting of Anglicanism’s claim of Catholic orthodoxy. Mr. Lytle proclaimed that the “Episcopal bishops no longer believed that Jesus was the son of God.” He decried “the puritans” and admonished his guests to “use the gifts of God.” Lytle repeatedly praised Thomas More, often quoting his famous line “I die my king’s good servant but God’s first.”35 “Mr. Lytle” as a host, conversationalist, and raconteur was a legendary, magnetic personality who had an impact on many students and admirers.36
SHERMAN, CONNECTICUT
JUNE 15, 1955
Dear Andrew and Edna:
Here is a letter which I thought I had mailed to you two months ago. Seems I wrote it just before I went to that symposium where I had to preside over a “Faulkner panel.” There were two talks on Faulkner, by young profs from Catholic universities. They swallowed the symbolism—and the screwy theology—in “A Fable,” hook line and sinker. I had only two or three minutes in which to set forth my views. I read from your piece: the part that says that this work is begotten by an act of will etc. The speakers did not like what you said at all, but the sisters loved it. It really went over big, and it was handy for me to quote from another writer instead of trying to set forth my own views. But enough of Faulkner panels…
I am still reading Erich Neuman’s The History and Origin of Consciousness and think it is about the best book I ever read, next to holy Writ.37 I am anxious to see what you all think of it and asked Sue Jenkins to send you the copy I lent her but she never got around to it and now I have to keep the copy to use in a lecture I am trying to get ready for Indiana.
I see by some advertisement I read, Andrew, that you think as much of Flannery O’Connor’s work as I do. She is certainly a remarkable person and a remarkable writer. She spent a week end with us recently. We had the Van Wyck Brookses [The Flowering of New England] and the Cowleys [Malcolm] over for dinner. After dinner Van Wyck insisted that Flannery read one of her stories. She was quite willing and wanted to read “Good Country People,” but there were several elderly ladies present and I simply could not see them taking that scene in the hay-loft, where the Bible salesman tries to seduce the one legged Ph.D. and switched her on to “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which is shocking enough, God knows. Van Wyck said later that it was sad to see such a talented young writer have such a pessimistic view of life. He said that he found the experiences of her characters “alien to the American way of life.” He said that he and Gladys had driven all over this country and found nothing but loving-kindness!
James Waller is going to visit us ad Dulce Donum this summer and we hope the Cheneys will come by on their way up here. They expect to spend September with Sue. I wish you all were coming, too. We expect—and fervently hope—that this summer will be less hectic than last summer. The Lord does sometimes temper the wind to—elderly—shorn—sheep.
Love for both of you and for the girls,
as ever,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ANDREW LYTLE
The letter is representative of O’Connor’s respect for a vital mentor and teacher. He had instructed O’Connor at Iowa about Wise Blood and recognized its originality and power. He witnessed a rare occurrence in the classroom: O’Connor’s classmates giving her a standing ovation after her reading the novel. Over a decade later, O’Connor remains grateful for his consistent support and understanding.
MILLEDGEVILLE
4 FEBRUARY 60
Dear Andrew,
I feel better about the book, knowing you think it works. I expect it to get trounced but that won’t make any difference if it really does work. There are not many people whose opinion on this I set store by.
I have got to the point now where I keep thinking more and more about the presentation of love and charity, or better call it grace, as love suggests tenderness, whereas grace can be violent or would have to be to compete with the kind of evil I can make concrete. At the same time, I keep seeing Elias in that cave, waiting to hear the voice of the Lord in the thunder and lightning and wind, and only hearing it finally in the gentle breeze, and I feel I’ll have to be able to do that sooner or later, or anyway keep trying.
There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected. Like when the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her own children and reaches out to touch him. It’s the moment of grace for her anyway—a silly old woman—but it leads him to shoot her. This moment of grace excites the devil to frenzy.
The book [The Violent Bear It Away] is going to be published by Longmans, Green in England. After they read the manuscript, they wrote to inquire what the significance was of Tarwater’s violation in the woods by the man in the motor car. Besides the fact that nobody knows about the devil now, I have to reckon on the fact that baptism is just another idiocy to the general reader. A lady-librarian reviewing it in the Library Journal said that there was not “enough convincing action to bring this macabre tale to a successful conclusion.” She also noted that Tarwater added to my “band of poor God-driven Southern whites.” God-driven means underprivileged.
Well any, I am most grateful to you and steadied by you. If you get up this way, please stop with us. Ashley enjoyed his visit with you all. That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner.
Yours,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER SCOTT WATSON
O’Connor writes an erudite Jesuit friend who identified the dramatic sacramentalism and biblical element in The Violent Bear It Away. She also qualifies its connection to a British novel and also quotes a revered teacher.
8 FEBRUARY 60
You can’t know how very much obliged I am to you for your letter. Reading it I felt for the first time that the book actually did work, for you got out of it what I intended to put into it. Of course I won’t find many readers with your equipment to read, either in the literary or religious sense. Most people find baptism just another idiocy, prophecy an anachronism; the Eucharist nothing but a symbol, or rather just a sign. When one writes, or anyway when I do, I have constantly in mind the kind of person I am trying to get my vision across to. For me, this person is always an unbeliever and the strain of making him see is considerable. Perhaps it is too much to ask to make him see. All I re
ally hope to do is disturb him, lose him a night’s sleep maybe.
I’ve read Till We Have Faces [C.S. Lewis] and had mixed feelings about it. It was pretty much allegory. A friend of mine, Andrew Lytle, a very fine novelist [The Velvet Horn, The Hero with the Private Parts], wrote me about my book and said this, “I felt the end of Wise Blood got too allegorical, almost fantasy, in my belief that always there must be the natural action which contains and represents the supernatural or imaginative. Allegory can exist only in an age of belief. People exist today in their personalities, so desperate is our plight.” He felt that this last book of mine was better than Wise Blood because “the symbols seem true symbols, that is containing the action, not signs in place of action.” I am interested in this subject of allegory and symbol. There is a book by a man named Erich Heller called The Disinherited Mind which has a good chapter on the subject.
Once again, my very inadequate thanks.
CHAPTER 2
“THE FIRST PRIEST WHO SAID TURKEY-DOG”
One of O’Connor’s lasting friendships was with the Reverend James Hart McCown, who called on her at Andalusia in January 1956. When she opened the door, he said, “I read your stories, and I just wanted to meet you. I liked them very much.” She never forgot that he “was the first priest who said turkey-dog to me about my writing.”1 Father McCown soon introduced O’Connor’s stories to other Jesuits. These included Robert McCown (his brother), Scott (“Youree”) Watson of Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, and Harold Gardiner, the literary editor of the Jesuit journal America. O’Connor writes to her friends the Fitzgeralds, “These Jesuits work fast. Ten days after I had the visit from the one in Macon, I receive a communication from Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. asking me to contribute to America.”2 In March 1957 O’Connor’s “The Church and the Fiction Writer” appeared in the journal.
In 1956, Father McCown introduced O’Connor to Thomas and Louise Gossett. Thomas Gossett at the time was an English professor at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. As the friendship between the Gossetts and O’Connor flourished, Tom Gossett pioneered in the new academic fields of African American history and literature. Gossett supported racial integration, which in 1958 led the president of Wesleyan College to suspend him from the faculty. O’Connor steadfastly supported him and admired his scholarship.
Gossett’s seminal Race: The History of an Idea in America has become a canonical work in African American studies. Writing in a time and place of entrenched segregation, Gossett undertook to examine thoroughly the origins and development of racism in the United States from colonial times to civil rights activism. Father McCown, a civil rights activist himself, delighted in Gossett’s original scholarship and writes his enthusiastic congratulations in April 1964.
Professor Gossett’s scholarship also included collecting the letters O’Connor wrote Father McCown. He recognized the daily sanctity of Father McCown and the genius of O’Connor. Gossett and O’Connor admired the relentless zeal of Father McCown. Writing in his 1990 autobiography, With Crooked Lines, Father McCown catalogs his fifty years of ministry, including
[teaching in] Jesuit high schools in New Orleans and Shreveport; parish and youth counseling in Macon; setting up a racially integrated country parish in Fort Valley, Georgia, in the early sixties, working in retreat houses on the Gulf Coast, Atlanta, Lake Dallas, and Grand Coteau, founding a poor kids camp near San Antonio, traveling through the southern states conducting parish retreats, working in slum parishes in El Paso and San Antonio, and posh parishes in New Orleans and Dallas.3
During their friendship, Gossett requested that Father McCown send the letters that O’Connor had written him. Father McCown cheerfully did so. The correspondence of these lively friends would span nearly a decade, from 1956 until O’Connor’s death in 1964. The first letter recounts Father McCown sending Gossett his letters from O’Connor. (In a few letters Tom Gossett’s appended clarifying information is included.)
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES H. McCOWN
Mr. Ridley [Horace], a friendly whiskey salesman, drove colorful Cadillacs and was a parishioner of Father McCown’s church in nearby Macon, Georgia. He ferried books and people back and forth to Andalusia, O’Connor’s home. He once told Father McCown that he did not think O’Connor’s stories were “trashy enough.” O’Connor instructs Father McCown about Catholic fiction, including the benefit of reading “bad Catholics.”
MILLEDGEVILLE
19 JANUARY 56
Thank you for the books sent in the mail and the ones Mr. Ridley brought. I’m returning the Michelfelder novel and several of the magazines that I have enjoyed very much, and I also enclose in that package a pocket book copy of Wise Blood which I forget whether you said you had seen or not. [If] you have time to read it sometime I’d like to know what you think of it.
The Michelfelder book [William Michelfelder, A Seed upon the Wind] is amazing and I am very glad to have read it. It interests me particularly because it deals with loss of faith which was the underlying subject of my novel, though I didn’t use a Catholic background. A Catholic has to have strong nerves to write about Catholics.
I have read almost everything that Bloy, Bernanos, and Mauriac have written. The Catholic fiction writer has very little high-powered “Catholic” fiction to influence him except that written by these three, and Green [Julian]. But at some point reading them reaches the place of diminishing returns and you get more benefit reading someone like Hemingway where there is apparently a hunger for a Catholic completeness in life, or Joyce who can’t get rid of it no matter what he does. It may be a matter of recognizing the Holy Ghost in fiction by the way He chooses to conceal Himself.
I hadn’t read the Eric Gill [Autobiography] and am enjoying it. If Mr. Ridley doesn’t stop in the next few weeks I’ll mail these library books back to you unless you want them sooner.
Again I’m very grateful for the visit and the interest. I asked Harcourt, Brace to send you a copy of Mrs. Tate’s [Caroline Gordon] book which I trust they will do sooner or later.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO LOUIS RUBIN
O’Connor declines to write an apologetic essay about her region. Writing stories, by contrast, enables her to present both regional and religious patrimony. O’Connor uses the idiom of regional autonomy and subsidiarity in speaking of the South as a “country” with its own traditions, customs, and language—the region is not a province or a section and has historically been resistant to cultural and political uniformity imposed from the outside. Reaching a diverse nonregional audience, O’Connor blends together both regional and theological elements in stories such as “The Displaced Person.” O’Connor’s stories reveal deeper historical complexities. Like the writings of Faulkner, Foote, and Percy, they contain an implicit counternarrative to the victory narrative of American exceptionalism rooted in colonial Puritan rhetoric of dissent.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
24 JANUARY 56
Thank you so very much for asking me to contribute to the book of essays that you are going to edit. Unfortunately, all my views about the South have to be expressed in the form of fiction. I simply know no other and if I set out to write an essay, it would very shortly turn into a story and wouldn’t serve the purpose.
My own experience as a Southern writer is complex because I am not only a Southerner but a Catholic and thus have two regions to deal with. This is a complication that can best be shown in fiction, and by me, only in fiction.
Please let me say that I have read two of your reviews of my stories and that I find them very understanding; and that I’ll be looking forward to reading the book when it comes from Regnery.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES H. McCOWN
On February 6, 1956, O’Connor sets forth her literary instruction that emphasizes realism. She recommends well-crafted works writ
ten by Catholic, irreligious, and dissenting writers.
However, it does seem to me that you don’t have to rely on the virtue of prudence to prevent pornography in your writing, but that you must first anyway rely on the virtue of art. Pornography and sentimentality and anything else in excess are all sins against form and I think they ought to be approached as sins against art rather than as sins against morality. At least this is practical in these times when most writers are pagans and if you are going to talk to them at all, you have to talk in terms they can understand. The pious style is a great stumbling block to Catholics who want to talk to the modern world…
I enjoyed Black Popes [Thomas D’Esterre Roberts] very much and found an article by Archbishop Roberts in The Month which I enclose in returning the book. I haven’t read Weeping Cross [Henry Stuart Longan] but I judge it is historicalish from some ads I saw. I have just read a very funny book by a priest named Fr. Robo [Etienne]—on St. Therese of Lisieux. It’s called Two Portraits of St. Therese. He has managed (by some not entirely crooked means) to get hold of a photograph of her that the Carmelites have not “touched up” which shows her to be a round-faced, determined, rather comical looking girl. He does away with all the roses, little flowers, and other icing. The book has greatly increased my devotion to her.4
* * *
O’Connor mentions (February 20, 1956) reviewing books for diocesan publications.5 These reviews rehearse her tutoring strategy with Father McCown to make him a discerning reader of well-crafted (but not necessarily pious) works. She also reveals the origin of a story with a racial slur in the title. Ugly lawn statues originally revealed a tragedy for her region. The story challenged such distortions with a cruciform image of suffering at the end.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 12
