Good Things out of Nazareth
Page 21
I meant to talk about your novella [The Lame Shall Enter First] published in The Sewanee Review, but have run on at such length about other things that now no time is left. Let me just say that if we compare The Violent Bear It Away to a great, leaping fire we must liken The Lame Shall Enter First to a “hard gem like flame” by reason of its lesser scope, its admirable conciseness, its sculptured quality. It was fascinating to see the same great theme of the failure of rationalism to satisfy the heart of man undergo a new and dexterous development. Yet in its greater simplicity and clarity it will also serve as an excellent introduction to the novel.38 Incidentally, I shall recommend both works to a young friend of mine, and former student, who, it seems, has sold his unbuyable faith for a mess of rationalistic pottage that can never quiet his soul’s hunger. Please pray for him. I’ve not yet had an opportunity to read the articles on your work that appeared with the novella in The Sewanee Review, but I trust they are competent. Congratulations on the ensemble as well as on the new edition of Wise Blood, with its handsome format, cover, jacket.
CHAPTER 3
“HER KIND OF LITERATURE: PLACES AND FOLKS”
While O’Connor finds herself increasingly immobile, letters in this chapter show her keen interest in “folks” traveling to interesting “places.” The chapter begins with her letters to a convert friend, Elizabeth “Betty” Hester. O’Connor praises her stories and a play by their mutual friend, William Sessions. A steadfast Catholic convert himself, Sessions grasped the deep bond between Hester and O’Connor. He encouraged a portion of O’Connor’s letters to Hester be included in the seminal, The Habit of Being. Sessions notes that the correspondence comprises “the richest letters in the book” and that the collection itself “has been…compared to the letters of Keats.”1
O’Connor, also in 1960, writes her fellow Georgian Roslyn Barnes, whose spiritual odyssey differs from other friends of O’Connor such as Betty Hester and Robert Lowell, who left the Church. Like O’Connor, Barnes attended college in Milledgeville and graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. O’Connor writes her about professors and experiences they have in common. Barnes dedicated her 1962 master’s thesis, “Gerard Manley Hopkins and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: A Formulation of Mysticism for a Scientific Age,” to O’Connor. Barnes would become a missionary in the Papal Auxiliary Volunteer Corps for Latin America (PAVLA), a lay movement sanctioned by Pope John XXIII. O’Connor recommended and counseled her in becoming a missionary.
Roslyn Barnes undertook rigorous spiritual formation in Mexico. She endured the severe discipline of the legendary, controversial Monseigneur Ivan Illich. Since Father McCown knew of Msgr. Illich and had himself ministered in Mexico, O’Connor enlists him to write Miss Barnes. Her thoughtful letters in reply introduce a global perspective on the writings of both O’Connor and Walker Percy that would continue in later years.
Both Barnes and Father McCown shared their love of Mexico with O’Connor. While she is often skeptical of Father McCown’s literary skills, his chronicle about a pilgrimage in Mexico in 1962 wins O’Connor’s praise. McCown’s unpublished account delights and entertains O’Connor and her mother. Father McCown regaled both with his stories. (He would continue to send Regina O’Connor his travel narratives after O’Connor’s death in 1964.)
Father McCown masters the literary genre of the Jesuit order. What he says about his later African narrative applies to the Mexican chronicle: “I fondly, rashly, hope that this could be a sort of contemporary ‘Jesuit Relations,’ in the tradition of the early newsletters sent back to Europe by early Jesuit missionaries to the New World.”2 Such narratives often recorded the perils faced by religious—Roslyn Barnes was no exception. She disappeared in Chile and was later presumed dead.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ELIZABETH HESTER
O’Connor traces a central theme in her fiction to antiquity. She also addresses mundane matters about propriety of dress, likening descriptions from a neighbor to a character from a story by a famous author.
MILLEDGEVILLE
8 AUGUST 59
Dear Betty,
We sure have been enjoying your candy but we won’t be for much longer as my mother set it out yesterday where my uncle’s eye could light upon it and he went to it, she said, “like a cow to a salt lick.” I thank you too for the books. I am reading the mythology one and bringing back my early days. I grew up on the Greek and Roman myths and was well up on the infidelities of the gods before I knew what infidelities were. There is much betrayal there too. You say I am concerned with that theme, but how could anybody not be? The violent bear it away. Relax, forget for an instant, and you find yourself betraying.
After you left Mrs. Armstrong said between smacks on her gum, “Is that lady a nurse?” I said no. “Well,” she said, “she sher looked like a nurse. I would have said she was a nurse right off. She looked so efficient and all.” They stayed about an hour. Were you there when she told about her shorts? Some Oconee [Georgia] ladies came and told her she wouldn’t be liked if she wore those shorts in Oconee. She said, “Listen here, you ladies, I don’t know who sent you up here to tell me that but you tell them I have a lot more shorts than I have dresses and if anybody changes their ways around here, it’s not going to be me.” Now she says all the women in Oconee wear shorts. Another lady stopped at her g[arden] one day when she was working in the flowers in her shorts. The lady said she had on real short shorts, didn’t she? Mrs. Armstrong said, “yes and this is only June. The hotter it gets the shorter they get. You just wait until August.” Mr. Armstrong never says a word himself but he listens to every word she says as if its pure music. Wednesday, we had a letter from her saying that the peahen died the next day, that she thought it got too hot. That made me kind of sick. I wrote her I’d buy the cock back if she wanted to get rid of him, so I am hoping they will come back this afternoon and bring him. My mother says its no telling if they went right home with those birds or not. Anyway, the hen was not sick when she left. Anyway, Mrs. Armstrong is straight out of Ring Lardner and I think her words are as golden as her old man does.
The enclosed may be of same use to you. I thought I had sent it before.
I will buy what you say about a story starting with a love split in opposite directions, though desire seems a better word to me than love. It seems to me you can only love the good, but you can desire the bad.
The next time you come we are going to take you to the Sanford House, the asylum, the reformatory and the Sinclair dam. Can you wait?
Cheers
* * *
Due to the travails of Caroline Gordon, O’Connor asks her friend to give a story the kind of scrutiny Gordon had provided. O’Connor asks only a very few friends for such commentary.
WEDNESDAY
Dear Betty,
I would be much obliged if you would read the enclosed diversion and let me know what you think about it. You will have to be Caroline on this as I think she is too distraught to send it to right now.
Long distance from Eel Lopez Hines tells me that I must get aholt of the Sept 5 Saturday Review and see the article in it on Catholic Writing. Marvelous Sueperb and Etc. She read most of it to me over the phone, and it did sound sane. Sanity delivered in her shriek has a curious effect of intoxication.
Cheers,
F
* * *
O’Connor patiently listens to an Episcopal professor enumerate a Catholic student’s problems with priests and nuns. O’Connor is strengthened by rereading Cardinal Newman.
MILLEDGEVILLE
5 SEPTEMBER 59
Dear Betty,
In spite of all that Billy [Sessions] says is wrong with your novel there are a good many things right with it too, but I suppose it is a good thing he put it across to you if it pulls you up from making your characters discuss religion. This always should
be avoided. I spent 7 years avoiding it in this last book of mine. Some people can do it but it is always dangerous. If you were stupider you would write better fiction because you wouldn’t conceptualize things so much.
We got week before this a post card from the lad saying he would be with us for dinner Tuesday (card arriving Monday) and on Tuesday instead of him we get a telegram: AM SICK. HOPE TO APPEAR THURSDAY. It so chanced that we were having company Thursday and going out Friday so I forthwith wired him that I couldn’t see him Thursday or Friday. So we haven’t heard from him again and don’t know what the state of his poor health is. Maybe grandmaw was too much for him.
All good Catholics become anti-clerical sooner or later. It is a noble and honorable tradition. All the sins of the priesthood have been visited on me lately via Dr. Spivey [Ted R., professor, Georgia State University] who has a Catholic student whom he is trying, or so he says, to keep in the Catholic church. The girl came in when she was 15, is now 18, went one year to a Catholic college which she could not abide and in her three years in the Church has met nothing apparently but “lying” nuns, stupid mechanical Catholics and neurotic priests. I have never known a nun myself who would deliberately lie so what I presume the girl is talking about is “intellectual honesty” and I pointed out to Dr. Spivey that you had to have an intellect before you could be accused of intellectual dishonesty. However, it is a losing battle. I guess the little girl is looking for an excuse to get out, and she will find it, meanwhile giving Dr. Spivey many excuses for not coming in.
I have just read over Cardinal Newman’s Apologia [Pro Vita Sua]. Have you read this at all or have you read it lately. I hadn’t read it in about ten years, but it was very enlightening.
Never heard a word more from the Armstrongs. My heart is broken.
Cheers,
Flannery
* * *
O’Connor notes a story has elicited criticism from her mother. She was vigilant in reading her daughter’s stories with an eye to the offense they might give locally. O’Connor recounts, by contrast, larger perspectives after having read a philosophic work by an influential priest and journal articles about Catholic literature.
MILLEDGEVILLE
19 SEPTEMBER 59
Dear Betty,
Well I have a sad tale to tell. “The Partridge Pageant” will never see the light of day, or at least not for many years. I should have known better that to start with it, but I went careening through it like a hoop. Milledgeville had one of the things in 1953—its Sesquicentennial and the Saturday before the festivities, a fellow name Stembridge shot the chairman of the pageant committee and another lawyer and himself. Of course, it was the greatest thing that had happened to Milledgeville since Sherman passed through. When my mother read it [the story] she was horrified, declared it would cause the families of those people suffering and so forth. Maybe when I am 60 years old and all the families are dead and gone, I will reach my withered paw into the trunk and pull out this, but for the present, it is just one for the pot, a nest egg. I almost sent it on before I showed it to her, but I thought she might as well see it. Then I knew by her reaction that it probably would hurt those people, so there is nothing to do but forget it. Maybe I can give somebody else the grass bag. I put your notes up with it, but I don’t have the feeling to correct any of those things now.
Euthyphro was a dumb fellow whom Socrates met outside of the courts of law, and questioned on the nature of justice. Euthyphro was going to court to sue his father. This piece of erudition is not native to me. I have just finished Guardini’s The Death of Socrates, which if you would be interested in, I will send you.
Thanks very much for sending the Sat. Review. It certainly is a lousy magazine. Do you want it back? What did you think of the article? I think the Messenger is quite wrong to criticize him for putting it in the Sat. Re. As I pointed out to the old soul, until Catholics realize that their linen is sometimes going to be hung on the public line, they will not get it in better condition. I think he confuses journalism and letters, and his remarks on fiction and poetry don’t indicate that he knows what is being written. Even if there are not so many fiction writers, there are some very fine Catholic poets. But his other pronouncements I can accept vigorously.
Tuesday Miss Betsy Locheridge is to come down here and interview me for the Sunday supplement. You will probably find me tricked out in the personality of the Georgia Farm Girl or Good-Earth-Loving Author or something equally horrendous. Hoping to remove such possibilities, I have prepared a list of questions with answers, typewritten, which I shall hand to her to incorporate. “Here Betsy, I have done half the work myself!” Isn’t Betsy a very unlikely name
Billy [Sessions] discussed his “entire weltsmelts” (spelling mine) with Peter, who is supposed to have plenty of bedside manner. I can visualize the scene.
Modified cheers,
Flannery
* * *
O’Connor praises a loose association of writers and implies that her correspondent is a member of the community. Betty’s manuscript, perhaps The Joys of the Fittest, has been submitted, via O’Connor, to her agent. O’Connor also reacts to liturgical innovations.
MILLEDGEVILLE
17 OCTOBER 59
Dear Betty,
…The proofs are back in New York and I have recovered some of my insensitivity to it and hope I don’t lose it again. I enclose Jack Hawkes letter because it will interest you. It is a most tactful document. He has a strange and wonderful mind. I am not sure what he means by “demonic” as he uses it; frequently he leaves me behind, but I think what he says is just & good [“Flannery O’Connor’s Devil,” The Sewanee Review, Summer 1962]. Except that I am very partial to Enoch. In both cases what he thinks lowers the interest is the very thing that makes the book possible as a novel. This is inevitable I suppose when your creative energy just can’t encompass but one bill of goods, metaphysically.
We don’t have a Catholic literature in the sense that we have a group of writers gathered around a central motivating proposition, or a leader, but we do have something in that there are a very respectable number of good poets who are Catholics (as our friend Hawkes would have it) who are sitting in their own places writing good poetry. And this don’t have to include dear Allen [Tate] or Carol Johnson either. Raymond Roseliep, Ned O’Gorman, John Logan, John Fandel, John Frederick Nims, John Edward Hardy, a couple of interesting nuns, Leonie Adams, and Robert Fitzgerald and there may be others. This is not a movement or a school; but literature is produced by people writing. There are no literary geniuses in this bunch but those are given by the Lord now and again and can’t be had by improving the culture or anything.
Can’t recollect reading anything Anne Fremantle wrote on Turnell [Martin] but I have a paper back copy of his The Novel in France, which is enjoyable if you want to see it. Also if you want to see Elizabeth Hardwick’s article on book reviewers I have it as somebody sent me that issue of Harper’s as I am thrown a bone in it by Alfred Kazin. The donor properly marked the passage, etc. The issue is very interesting.
I am one of the laymen who RESIST the congregation yapping out the Mass in English & my reason besides neurotic fear of change, anxiety, early bed-wetting and laziness is that I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.
I haven’t heard from Elizabeth McKee about your ms, but the last person I recommended to send her something, she sent it back to them with a note that it didn’t interest her. So I am cheered that she is showing yours to some people. Her scent for money is keen enough to extend as much as ten years into the future. Yes I know her personally, which is to say I have lunch with her when I am in NY. Send her your next one. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
Yrs,
Flannery
A book yo
u must investigate: The Straight and Narrow Path by Honor Tracy.
* * *
O’Connor provides judicious, specific comments about friends and visitors.
MILLEDGEVILLE
DECEMBER 59
Dear Betty,
My mother said did I tell you how much she appreciated your looking up that book for her and I said naw I don’t think I did, at which she was not well pleased. I am a very poor hand at conveying other folks appreciation, but she appreciated it. I think, since she wants to give me a book like that, I will get Malroux’s [André Malraux] Voices of Silence. They tell me it is very fine, but I’ll wait until we come to Atlanta and look at it myself.