Flannery
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE
Having spoken at Georgetown University, O’Connor acquires a new friend. Because of their common background, she enjoys a special candor. Road signs, which play a significant role in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and other stories, also appear in O’Connor’s own experiences.
MILLEDGEVILLE
20 OCTOBER 63
Dear Cudden Ward,
Do you know your letter of 12.X. was here waiting for me when I got back? If I had got it before I left, I would have been down sitting on that yeller sofa waiting on you. And I would have told you my lecture wasn’t about what the Protestants do to him but what they do for him; in fact I rather lay that on and leave them thinking they’re all going straight to hell because they weren’t born in Georgia. On the way driving to Milledgeville, we passed one car that had JESUS SAVES painted in red on the back bumper and a truck that said FREE FOR ALL BAPTIST CHURCH AND NURSERY SCHOOL. If I weren’t a Catholic I could only be happy in the Free for All Baptist Church. Or could I? Anyway, I loved having breakfast with you and I hope I stirred my egg the right way and left you thinking of me as a solid, sane, not altogether inscrutable addition to your universe.
May I send you a copy of the new edition of Wise Blood that has a note to the 2nd ed by me in the front of it to mark the occasion? Let me know.
Meanwhile cheers to Mrs. Purefoy [character, Dorrance’s novel] & love,
WARD ALLISON DORRANCE TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Dorrance comments on the reissue of O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood. William Faulkner had observed in the 1949 Nobel address that his fiction created “out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” Wise Blood is similar in its allegorical levels of meaning, specifically the “anagogical level” that O’Connor embeds in her novel and stories. Dorrance also mentions their mutual friend, the editor of The Sewanee Review.
2. XI. 63
Dear Cousin Honeybug:
This has been delayed because, just after your visit, the doctors told me certain things, the gut of which is that I may stop fretting about how I am going to live after my retirement; the dear fellows will be bug-eyed if I reach that age. Well, well. I have been so unhappy in this world, you’d think I’d be happy to leave it, and I expect I shall be when I’ve had time to look about me & tidy up and not take off like a pagan. Meanwhile I feel at least the shock I’d feel if I’d fallen down a flight of steps or been told, between bites of an apple, “Pack some things. We’re off for Alaska.” The shock was bad enough that I put aside writing…
Your letter was hilarious…what you said about Miss Regina, I mean…but hilarious for me in almost a holy way this is the way to your writing because where artists come from, as you say, is the first question, and you and she and I did most certainly come out from under the same log. God grant her a long life, free of pain & muddle-headedness, “ed puis le paradis a la fin de ses jours.”
Your book, triumphantly, was of a piece with Miss R. & the holy way. I don’t know if you meant I should write you my opinion of it, but I feel moved to say:
1) The Holy Ghost seems to me to have started you out with certain advantages that other writers cannot reach by mere talent, much less by study or by will.
2) Your whole pitch, for instance, is putting new wine into old bottle—a vast and a deep source of strength.
3) Your main “holt” (your biggest bottle) is what I call the fairy tale for adults. Here the field is strewn with the bodies of fallen men. Hawthorne (in all his works, if you ask me) and Henry James in such as The Altar of the Dead & The Beast in the Jungle.
4) You get away with it where they fail for at least two reasons which I see:
a) You constantly keep the abstractions on your anagogical level tied down into not only the necessary naturalistic level but into a naturalistic level that lifts the hair on the back of my neck. Take your scene in which your boy eats with his hat on with the women in the dining car…or the one in which the chap in the ape suit surprises the spooners. I stare at those pages, fascinated, and have to put the book down and get up and walk around a bit before I can go on.
b) Here you seem to know that the usual naturalistic level won’t do. You are dealing (no matter what your ultimate “meaning”) with fantasy.
What do you mean by a “low blood count”? How are you now?…
Meanwhile I’m not sure my story-that-Andrew-Lytle-won’t-touch is worth any drain on your strength. Think it over again. If it would amuse you, or keep you company in a lonely spell and if you’d take it with the understanding that you could throw it away, or wait six months.
Love to you & the Lady in
the Red Coat,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE
O’Connor has inspired Dorrance to work on a novel. Reading his writing has also influenced one of her funniest stories. She notes many writers lack roots in region, custom, or speech. To demonstrate her contention, O’Connor describes the particular situation on the dairy farm where little has changed in a century. She deeply admires her mother’s authority in defusing volatile situations.
MILLEDGEVILLE
3 NOVEMBER 63
Dear Cudden Ward:
I’m glad I put a chunk under Mrs. Purefoy [The Party at Mrs. Purefoy’s]. You put a chunk under me. I came home and read your four stories over and then I wrote me one [“Revelation”]; at least, I’m most through with it and I’m pretty sure it’s good, not just good, but right like those are right. I suppose this is what a little human communion with a real writer can do for you, but I don’t go along with you on liking their company as a general rule or because they’re writers. They’ve got to come from somewhere. Too many of them don’t come from anywhere, don’t belong anywhere, and couldn’t if they tried.
You would have to see my ma in action. I can’t do justice to her. We’ve got a very 19th-century operation here. Three colored people live here in what was the guest house to this house—Louise and Jack, husband and wife, and Shot, their boarder; Louise and Shot work for us, Jack up the road. The guest house was right next to ours but Regina and a negro named George Harper put it on telephone poles about twenty years ago and rolled it out of earshot (a two story house itself) but not out of sight. Now we are connected to it by an electric bell. The bell is for us, if we get scared, to call them, but more often it rings over here. It rang last week and Short came stomping over to say Louise was drunk and had thrown potash water on him. He brings her the liquor and then comes running over here when she goes wild, which she every so often [does]. We’ve had these negroes going on fifteen years. Regina gave her a lecture the next day, saying that one of these days she was going to put his eyes out. “Yes’m,” Louise says, “I hope I gets at least one of them.” She stays mad with him about a day.
Regina’s big aim is to stop the flow of liquor in here, but I tell her she might as well try to stop the Mississippi from rolling on. She gives them all sorts of lectures about how nice folks do and when they are about to kill each other, she says, “Now let’s not have any more of this unpleasantness. Bring that shotgun over her and leave it.” What she has is no doubt whatsoever about her authority…I’d ask them [farm workers] to please bring the shotgun over, or some fool thing. She listens to their lies very seriously, and I mean they lie like artists. It’s never a matter of finding the truth but of which lie suits you best the moment to accept in its place.
This is the right and only place for me to be but even with all of it here, as you say, you have to be chosen. And the problem is to make it believable, too, because to the rest of the world, it’s not. They don’t think this kind of place or life exists anymore, and if they saw it, they’d think it shouldn’t.
Enclosed is
the book. It’s not to read but to throw at anyone who joggles you.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO “CHILDREN”
O’Connor’s friend Janet McKane taught school in New York City. O’Connor replies to letters from her students.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
NOVEMBER 5, 1963
Dear Children,
Thank you for all your letters. I was glad to hear you liked the peacock feathers and the picture of Equinox and his mama. Equinox says he is sorry nobody has offered him a pair of lavender shoes or a hat. He thinks he’d look pretty good in them. He sends you all his best regards.
Sincerely yours,
Flannery O’Connor
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE
O’Connor encloses a clipping of a “lady” evangelist who will preach locally. Such gatherings may have influenced similar scenes in The Violent Bear It Away.
NOV 1963
Dear Janet,
Thought you might like to see this lady. If you had done Salvation Preaching with your accordion playing, you might still be playing it.
She’s right up the road from us.
Thanks for the Metropolitan Bulletin & your letters. I’ve got an eye infection so don’t want to continue using them now. Hence this scrawl.
Cheers,
Flannery
* * *
O’Connor writes as a regionalist, noting, as she does in other letters, playful theology associated with ecumenism in the local community.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
9 DECEMBER 63
Dear Janet,
Thanks so much for the children’s letters and the veils and the copies of Ramparts [Catholic journal]. I will have a veil to put in all my pockets so that when I get to church I can just reach in for one. Thanks a lot. The little boy who addressed me as Miss Flannery is doing it the Southern way. Here all the children call you your first name prefixed by Miss—Miss Regina and Miss Flannery we are.
I was much surprised to see the piece in Commonweal. I don’t know who Rupp is or if I met him there. You meet so many people at these things, talk to them a split second and they are gone, and I’m no good at names. I met mostly students there anyway. It’s always odd to see the interpretations people put on things.
Regina was delighted to have Ernest for a mother’s day present as that put us in the way of getting Equinox. At this writing Equinox and his ma will go to the Hardwick Christian churches pageant because Ernest has been invited to go to the First Methodist. He is supposed to walk across the front of the Methodist church, led by a deacon or deaconess I hope, and as he is a great cut-up, he’ll probably let out some kind of noise in the middle of it. He has an unearthly bray which he delivers at full gallop. Maybe Methodism will do something for him.
I’ll be looking out for this yellow mystery.
Cheers to you,
Flannery
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE
O’Connor courageously accepts dire illness and possible death, which both she and her friend face. Using an electric typewriter enables her to put limited energy to greater use. She recounts the reaction of family members to the reissue of Wise Blood.
MILLEDGEVILLE
10 DECEMBER 63
Dear Cudden Ward,
If you have got shut of Lawrence and tidied up your desk before death and not left a mess for your friends to clean up, you are ready to get back to work on Mrs. Purefoy [The Party at Mrs. Purefoy’s], and with a free mind and a free soul. Every sentence ought to be like one of the dates the crow brought St. John Whatshisname in the desert. I think I envy you—the amount of notice of death anyway. I hope I get as much. My desk is a buzzard’s nest. It’ll take me a week or two to get it in a state I can properly leave it in. I hope you drop in your tracks though and don’t have to hang around in bed. I am prepared for that for myself. In one of my affluent years I bought me a Smith Corona compact 250 electric typewriter and I’m going to get one of those hospital tables that swings across the bed and set the electric on it. It requires about 75% less energy to use an electric typewriter. I use it now for a lot of work and I can work four hours at it at a time without getting tired and I’m good for about an hour and a half on the manual.
Miss R. [Regina] would say, “Well we’ve all got to go but you’re not dead yet.” She tends to clichés delivered briskly. I notice about Southern ladies of her generation that when they’ve found the cliché to clap on the occasion, they take great satisfaction, as if life had been rendered its due at least as far as the language is concerned. I had considerable qualms when she read Wise Blood. She hadn’t read anything since Ivanhoe, of course, and I thought Oh Lord, this will shock her to death and embarrass her and so forth and so forth. But after it was accepted she demanded to read it so I handed it over and she took the ms. off to bed with her in the afternoon—we “lie down” after dinner which we eat in the middle of the day—and I waited for the first groan or moan or explosion or whatever. After about a half hour I began to hear these gentle snores. Then I had an 82 year old cousin in Savannah who had been very good to me and I was worried about her reading it too. I thought it’s going to kill her, she’ll have a heart attack or a stroke or something and I’ll go around with her on my conscience the rest of my life. But it didn’t do anything to her either, except increase her rectitude. She sat right down and wrote me a letter beginning, “I do not like your book. There is enough trouble and misery in the world without your adding to it.”
Thank you for commenting on it. That about better ventilation I will try to remember. I think the second one is better ventilated, it’s also less of a fairy tale, though a disembodied devil does preside over it partially, but I’m not really much of an observer, I mean I see what knocks me down but I never have gone out of my way to look and I should. If I get it fixed up to my satisfaction I am going to send you a copy of this story I have just written because there will be a piece of your finger baked in that pie. About the nouminous and all.
Merry Christmas to you & Mrs. Purefoy.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER SCOTT WATSON
O’Connor confuses a title of a famous novel, perhaps because in another letter she notes her dislike of the story. She herself endured admirers at literary gatherings confusing the titles of her stories.
12 DECEMBER 63
I did appreciate your card when you were in the Atlanta airport with nothing to read but How to Kill a Mockingbird. The Atlanta airport is bad enough by itself and I don’t know how long that particular book could be expected to deaden you to it.
We still hope that one of these days we’ll see you in Milledgeville again. I plod along in my work and I guess you do too. It’s something to be able to plod, and I’m thankful for it.
My mother and I hope you’ll have a fine Christmas and the best of New Years.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE
12-13-63 [POSTCARD]
Heavens no! Nothing in your last offended me. I was real pleased with what you said and glad you felt like saying it. I understand the state of shock but get out of it as it will interfere with your work and you have plenty to do. I expect to hear more of Mrs. P. [Purefoy] if Lawrence doesn’t. Happy Christmas.
Love, Flannery.
W. Dorrance appends a phrase of explanation: “This is an answer to a letter of mine in which I said that she (in her writing) ‘got by pure outrage.’ ”
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE
This postcard features rural character Chess McCartney leading a parade of goats. O’Connor approves of her friend’s succinct comment on her storytelling strategy.
12-30-63 [POSTCARD]
[CHAS. or CHESS McCART
NEY and His Goat Caravan]
Pure outrage for the new year.
Cheers,
Flannery
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE
O’Connor seeks expert opinion about “Revelation,” written while both she and her friend are quite frail.
MILLEDGEVILLE
5 JANUARY 64
I had decided I wouldn’t send you this because you being low on energy you ought to use what you’ve got for Mrs. P. [Purefoy], but you’ve asked for it so here it is—double. And I want the criticism and don’t fear to offend me. My feelings are made of pig iron. I really need an eye on this. When I finished the first version I sent it to an old editor of mine in New York to look at. She wrote me it was one of my blackest stories. I had thought it was one of my lightest. She thought the main character, Mrs. Turpin, was mean and evil. I thought she was funny and innocent and big, one of those country women that are usually in touch with forces larger than themselves. So I concluded the story was a failure and I did over the end—second version. I want this woman to have this vision. I want it to be a real revelation. Maybe I’ve tilted the sack too fast there but I went just as slow as I dared. Anyway tell me what you can and which version is best; if either.
I’m supposed to send it to Andrew [Lytle, editor of The Sewanee Review] but he’ll probably give me hell too. I want to get it right first. I can’t criticize but I can react, if you want a third eye on yours. Maybe you’re sick of eyes on it. I’m sick of this one but I’ve got to keep at it.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 31
