Chrs,
Flannery
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ROSLYN BARNES
O’Connor inquires about the reception of her friend into the Church. O’Connor also concurs with the parallels the friend has perceived between two writers. The connection would result in the 1962 master’s thesis dedicated to O’Connor: “Gerard Manley Hopkins and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: A Formulation of Mysticism for a Scientific Age.”
MILLEDGEVILLE
APRIL 61
I’m sending you two books on Teilhard but you’ll have to send them back to me when you finish them as they’re all I’ve got. I particularly like the Tresmontain one.9 That is a good idea about Hopkins and Teilhard. I hadn’t thought of it but it figures. There is a novel called The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary in which there is a portrait of a Jesuit paleontologist who I am sure is modeled on Pere Teilhard.
Have you already made your First Communion and are you going to be Confirmed next, or will you do them both at the same time? I can’t keep up with you, but I am very happy for you. Has Pine Mountain been informed? What are you going to do this summer?
Give my regards to Mr. Santos [Bienvenido, Iowa Writers’ Workshop].
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
Diminishing her own suffering, O’Connor also reveals her approval of the presidential election of 1960. Revealing a rare political opinion may be rooted in O’Connor’s friendships with “yellow dog Democrats.” Because of the excesses of “Mr. Lincoln’s army,” such Democrats a century after the Civil War would vote for an animal before a Republican. Brainard Cheney—a journalist, novelist, critic, and speechwriter from Tennessee—as well as other friends and teachers of O’Connor—Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, and Andrew Lytle—were rooted in the Southern Democratic ethos.10 The orientation has all but disappeared from the contemporary Democratic party with its vocal socialist members and devotion to identity politics. Moreover, as other letters reveal, O’Connor disliked the anti-Catholic paranoia of the 1960 presidential campaign. O’Connor and her Jesuit friend also may have admired President Kennedy’s Irish Catholic ancestry.
MILLEDGEVILLE
4 APRIL 61
Dear Padre McG.,
They postponed it to the May issue so kindly tear through that. If it’s not there then, I am going to sue them.
I seem to be getting on very well, no major difficulties in coming off the steroids. There was unfortunately a good bit of painkiller to it, so now that I don’t have it, I feel the joints considerably and do not get about as fast. But I get about. I am probably going to St. Louis in May to Marillac College. That is one of those Sister Formation places. I believe in educating the Sisters, so I am putting in me oar there whenever requested. The more I see of them, the sharper I think they’re getting to be.
Ain’t it nice we’ve got a President after eight years?
I was glad to read that Montserrat [Jesuit Retreat House, Dallas] was good for nervous tension. Now if you could bottle it, you’d have it made. Don’t ever let Powers [J. F.] get in there.
My parent is as usual coping. This place is being undermined by moonshine. Every weekend the staff is loaded.
Well cheers to you,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ROSLYN BARNES
Like Ernest Hemingway, O’Connor included her own cartoons in some letters. A cartoonist in high school, O’Connor drew situations and characters that often would later reappear in her stories. This letter has an amusing drawing of a “flying nun” with a bright smile comparable to the nun described at the end of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”
6 APRIL 61
The duck and rabbit arrived somewhat worse for the wear but still relatively chipper. A friend of mine with five children appeared and they took them over with a bang. That was the last I saw of duck and rabbit. Thanks a lot. I was glad to have something to occupy their little minds and keep them from destroying the house.
I received a book the other day from Atheneum by a girl who is apparently at Iowa—Mary Elsie Robertson. Maybe you know her. I haven’t got to the stories yet.
I am probably going out to St. Louis in May to talk to the Sisters at Merrilac College—a college only for nuns. They wear a bonnet that looks like this [drawing that looks like a flying nun’s head].
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ROSLYN BARNES
O’Connor sends a religious gift. She also concurs with the friend’s criticism of a writing class at Iowa in which students assert their own views about the work of classmates while the professor provides little guidance. O’Connor is critical of such pedagogy which, however, has become fashionable in many creative writing programs. I have been amazed in my years of college teaching by the reaction of creative writing students who have stared at me in disbelief when I asked if they had read Shakespeare, Dante, or Milton in their classes. Unlike O’Connor, such students assumed creative writing classes provided a forum for them to express feelings and not study the writing skills of the masters.
MILLEDGEVILLE
MAY, 1961
I am sending you a short breviary in honor of May 18. I have one and it means a lot to me as I say Prime for my morning prayers and Compline for my night prayers. This way you are praying with the Church and not just yourself.
I have read more of St. Teresa of Avila than John of the Cross. They were very close. Some time read St. Catherine of Genoa’s Treatise on Purgatory.11
Bourjaily [Vance Nye] would be hard for me to take too. I have not liked what of his I have read. I think anywhere that more than three writers are gathered together the atmosphere is liable to be unhealthy. Students criticizing student’s work is always a mistake.
If you do come to Georgia in August, try to get down to Milledgeville for a weekend and spend it with us.
Cheers,
The Literary Guild is coming out on the 18th for their picnic like last year. You will be better engaged.
* * *
O’Connor witnessed campaigns for racial integration but would not meet with activists such as John Howard Griffin, James Baldwin, or Martin Luther King. O’Connor was thinking, however, of other forms of integration stimulated by her reading of a seminal Jesuit thinker. She seeks advice (June 17, 1961) from Barnes, who was formally trained as a physicist.
Can you tell me if the statement: “everything that rises must converge” is a true proposition in physics? I can easily see its moral, historical and evolutionary significance, but I want to know if it is also a correct physical statement. You are the only scientist I am acquainted with.
We are all freezing here as it is 15 degrees lower than the normal temperature for this time of year.12
,
* * *
O’Connor agrees to recommend her friend (July 26, 1961) to the Papal Auxiliary Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA). In November 1959, bishops from North and Latin America established PAVLA to respond to transformational social changes sweeping Latin America, such as the Communist revolution in Cuba in 1959 led by Fidel Castro. The prospect of other Communist revolutionaries toppling dictatorships, severe social inequality, Protestant missionary efforts, and the ineffective catechesis of indigenous Catholics in Latin America were challenges facing the Church. Pope John XXIII sanctioned PAVLA and its missionary program.
I have been wanting to write and thank you for some time for writing me about the rising-converging business, but we have had one thing and another going on and I haven’t done much that I wanted to. Anyway, what you said was helpful and follows my own line of thought on the subject, uneducated as that is.
I’ll be delighted to recommend you for PAVLA and I think you are wise to do something like this before you even think about becoming a Sister. And also wise to get the debts paid up. When people lend you money for your edu
cation, they are not very sympathetic to your becoming a missionary to any Indians before they get their money back. Not many people will understand your wanting to do this anyway—around here I mean—but I think it is fine.13
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
O’Connor notes that a mutual friend had visited Walker Percy. Percy was removing Catholic pietism from The Moviegoer. Such details reflect O’Connor’s tutoring of Father McCown. She was disabusing him of the idea that good fiction contained “polemical writing to defend Holy Church against her enemies.”14
MILLEDGEVILLE
23 JUNE 61
I was cheered to get my hands on The Ballad of Peckham Rye [Muriel Spark] beingst I had heard so much about it. I enjoyed it although I don’t think its as good as made out to be. Neither is the enclosed, though it is mighty well written. Walker Percy is a Louisiana Catholic (convert). Billy Sessions went to see him last year and he told Billy he was finishing his novel and was busy getting the Catholic parts out. A necessary operation as I well understand.
Did you know that Billy is shortly to be on his way to Greece to lead back a wife, or so he hopes? He met the young lady when he was in Greece three years ago, boarded with her family for a month, the rest has been by mail. So this summer they are going to look each other over, & decide for good.
The Gossetts had breakfast with us and were in fine fettle and full of news of you. We wish they were still in this neighborhood.
Did you ever find out what and where that was that your brother wrote [Robert McCown, S.J., “The Education of a Prophet: A Study of Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away,” Kansas Magazine]. It was more than likely a lot better than what was printed in America. That was pretty good on the stories, but bad on the novels.
Before this summer is over I think I am going to have a steel head put in my hip joint, thus eventually enabling me to get about on my own two feet. I hope. Pray that the Lord means for me to do this and that the operation will be a success.
Cheers to you,
STANLEY KAUFFMANN TO WALKER PERCY
In the previous letter O’Connor mentions Walker Percy’s revisions of his novel The Moviegoer. O’Connor’s stories were vital in showing Percy how to avoid religiosity in his fiction. The esteemed film critic Stanley Kauffmann, an editor at Knopf, proposes further revisions, but stresses the novel is close to being publishable. Kauffmann was familiar with existential literature and realized the novel was revolutionary in its presentation of what Thomas Merton would call a “merry kind of nausea.” Kauffmann recognizes Percy’s unique existential voice with its witty observations and satire of the legendary city of New Orleans. Percy was writing theistic existential fiction—and in the process putting the maligned French existentialists such as Sartre and Camus on the side of the angels. He recasts their reputation as philosophic absurdists hanging out in Paris cafés. As a reflective physician retooling himself as a novelist, Percy recognizes their contribution: “It is not inconceivable that even Sartre’s atheistic existentialism may be in the end far more productive for Christianity than many present-day Christian spokesmen who deal with religion in terms of mental hygiene, business success, and whatnot.”15
FEBRUARY 5, 1960
The revised manuscript of CONFESSIONS OF A MOVIE GOER has now been read by several editors here and discussed at great length. I’m sorry to report the consensus is that it is not yet—in our opinion—in publishable form, and I hasten to underscore the words “not yet” in hope that this will prevent discouragement on your part. All who have read the book here recognize a talent, a unique voice, and a viewpoint of pertinence and importance. All of us feel (as, I may say, I have felt from the start) that the writer who could do what has so far [been] done is capable of bringing the work to fulfillment.
Let me get to specifics. Some of these are matters which have disturbed me from the beginning; some are matters which struck new readers more forcibly. For clarity, let me make a list of them.
Binx’s search. This thread, which winds through the book, still seems to be raised with fanfare, forgotten, referred to sporadically, and rather handily tied up at the end. It needs definition, consistency, presence and force in the book. One doesn’t ask for the unanswerable to be answered; indeed one of the best things in the novel is that Binx learns to live with his questions rather than to give them neat homiletic answers. But the search, which seems to be the mainspring of his dynamics at the start, peters out and flares and dies again, and then seems to be remembered hastily at the end.
Characters and story-strands are dropped and picked up (some of them) arbitrarily. Stephanie, for instance. Binx’s campaign with her is excellently done, with lots of delightful detail and insight; then she disappears in mid-book. Kate (and Binx’s relation to her) is established well at the beginning; then to all intents she disappears, to be revived in the latter half. Any possible interplay between Binx’s feelings for Stephanie (and his other girls) and Kate is lost.
Binx’s relationship with the memory of his father is unclear as a force in the book and insufficiently resolved at the end. It seems to be in some sort of counterpoise with “the search” but too much is left to even the best-intentioned reader to supply.
Characters like Sam Yerger and Jimmy and Joel are employed beyond their utility. The[y] represent the “merde” world—at various levels and we get the idea more quickly than you think. The Mardi Gras party is needed as a catalyst to propel Kate onto the train with Binx, but it, too, goes on too long. These matters could be ameliorated simply by cutting, but if you are going to do the revision we hope for, you would want to keep in mind the use of these elements in proportion, not merely the cutting of them. One way to make scenes like dinner at grandmother’s with Yerger and the Mardi Gras party more interesting and useful to the book might be to integrate Binx and Kate more firmly with them: to make sure that Kate’s reactions are growing with the reader and that the characters—particularly those who are appearing for the first time—are filtering through Binx to the reader. Obviously, cutting alone will not do this.
Binx’s statement, 298–300, while excellently written, doesn’t really take the place of consistent growth perceivable and convincing to the reader. On the other hand, his agreement to go to medical school (305)—which has been a major matter through this book—is sloughed off in one facile reply. Why had he changed?
What all the above comes to, essentially, is that instead of a collection of brilliant and moving scenes rather arbitrarily bound together as the author seems from time to time to remember to bind them, we would like to see a more organic, better composed work in which the author has all his thematic and plot elements well in hand from the start and is moving them towards a conclusion. Our feeling still is that you discovered things about Binx and his relationships as you went along, rather than seeing him clearly in his spiritual and physical environment from the start and knowing exactly who this particular pilgrim is and what his progress is to be.
There is no blinking the fact that what we are asking for amounts to a major re-writing of the book. It means that you would have to consider this a first draft: a very extensively articulated first draft from which you would draw a great deal of material (I would hate to lose much of what is there now) to be fitted into a clear and effective design. It means, figuratively, that you would have to stand off, take a deep breath, and plunge in again—to create a book whose overall design is as effective as individual pages and scenes are now. To us it would seem a great waste of moving material if you didn’t choose to do this; but it is a matter only you can decide.
In spite of what must be at least some disappointment at this letter, I hope you will give the matter careful thought (there’s no need to reply at once), that you will ask questions if any of the above is unclear or if there are points bothering you which I have not raised, and that
you will then decide to tackle the job.
The date of delivery of the manuscript can be advanced to accommodate your convenience. You must believe that we are still strongly attracted to your talent and want very much to publish the novel that this can be.
I’m returning the manuscript to Miss Otis [Elizabeth, Percy’s agent] and will await word from you.
Every good wish.
Yours faithfully.
Stanley Kauffmann
WALKER PERCY TO STANLEY KAUFFMANN
Writing from Pompano Beach, Florida, Percy is unsure he can make the proposed changes to The Moviegoer. Percy, however, unlike O’Connor, who resisted editorial revisions to Wise Blood, worked assiduously at revisions. Kauffmann was always encouraging and polite and realized the potential for Percy’s novel.
FEBRUARY 11, 1960
Dear Mr. Kauffmann:
Naturally I am disappointed you all didn’t like it better. As I had written Miss Otis before I heard from you, there are changes I want to make, whether you accepted it or not, but nothing like the radical overhaul you seem to suggest. My own feeling is that I am getting pretty close to what I am aiming at. There are lapses and gaucheries here and there which need to be taken care of, some strained-for effects and some sophomore posturing, and I want to make a few additions. But it will come to no more than tinkering and polishing—I think.
It is not that I disagree with you that a complete re-write, from a higher level of consciousness so to speak would make a better book. The trouble is that the endpoint which I would approach in that case appears to be different, to judge from your letter, from the endpoint you have in mind. Your calling attention to dropped characteristics and interrupted story-strands is certainly valid novelistic criticism, but it does not seem applicable here—at least it does not strike a chord for me. Passage to India is a much better constructed novel than Nausea, but Nausea would be wrecked by a revision along these lines. I suppose I am trying to say that the fragmented alienated consciousness, which is Mr. Binx Bolling, cannot be done up in a novel in the usual sense of the word. At least I would not have the stomach for the job. Also, I am working on something else.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 25
