Good Things out of Nazareth
Page 32
I’ve been in bed all during the holidays—low blood count—but I am picking up now. This here is the electric typewriter you’re being writ to on.
I can see you’ve got no bidnis smoking but maybe they’d let you dip snuff. There must be something [in] it, they [farm workers] love it so. Makes them sort of drunk in a nice way.
Two days ago Miss Regina was out in her red coat frisking her small magnolia. Everything was bowed over with ice. Today is a good spring day and the peafowl have begun to holler.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon notes the reaction of students to an O’Connor story read aloud in class. Having also endured the painful dissolution of her marriage to Allen Tate, Gordon speculates about living with religious. She, like C. S. Lewis, reveals that sickness can actually become a kind of retreat. Lewis writes of spells of illness that turn into quiet times of delight in reading two or three novels in as many days.
JANUARY EIGHT, 1964
I don’t think of you as a “writer.” Well, that doesn’t sound very nice, does it? I mean one of those writers whose works I have to read. Reading one of your stories is, for me, always an adventure and a delight, as you must know. I have just got back from wanderings that were pretty fatiguing and found your ms. on top of the pile of accumulated mail. I have read one quarter of it so far. Took it in hand and dashed with it to my seminar in fiction which gathers at half past seven on Monday evenings. I explained that I was taking the liberty of sharing this reading with them because Miss O’C. has the humility of the true artist and, I felt, wouldn’t mind said sharing. I, myself, don’t yet know what you are up to but the reading went over big. I have a notion of what I think you’re up to and I suspect that you are working in this story a kind of magic (wrong word, that!)—anyhow, shall we say you are using a technique you have used before in some of your best stories: a technique which induces the reader to most willingly suspend his disbelief. You do it by making him laugh his head almost off. My students responded heartily. They laughed till some of them had tears in their eyes. Don’t see how you could expect to accomplish more than that in six pages. More on this subject later.
I am awfully sorry to know that you had to take to you bed during the holidays. Do let me know how you got on. I can’t help being anxious about you.
My aunt, who is eighty six years old, announced that she was being hostess at her last Christmas dinner on this earth. I realized that this was a command performance, changed my reservations, (made weeks ago), and set off on a giro that I egotistically believe, would have daunted Odysseus. However, the Lord, as so many of the theologians point out, mercifully veils what is to come from our sight…
I aspire to end my days with the Carmelites, so I stayed over a day in order to trek over to the Madonna Residence in Brooklyn. It is a huge building, fronting on that imitation Place de la Concorde which was set up in honour of the Grand Army of the Republic. Opposite is the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Art Museum. The sight of the place sharpened my desire to get in there but the sister who finally consented to see me was pretty discouraging. Still, she admitted, we do have vacancies…Yep, I thought, thanks to the Grim Reaper…
I recount my adventures and misadventures at such length, partly because I want my friends to share some part of my sufferings, and, also in the hope that being forced, as it were, to participate in mine, may help a little bit, even to console you for having to be in bed during the holidays. Being in bed is tough any time, but I must say that if I have to take to my bed, I would prefer to take to it during the holidays. Two years ago I had the worst attack of flu I have had since I was sixteen. (It felt like the kind you had then. “Spanish Flu.” Katherine Anne [Porter] had it and it turned her hair grey.) I was put out of circulation by losing my voice. A man I was trying to talk to long distance finally said, “I wish you’d hang up. You sound like a bat trying to talk.” I thereupon got into bed and had one of the happiest Christmases I ever had. But some of my friends in Princeton refer to that Yuletide as “that time you said you had the flu.”
How did the Methodists take Ernest’s balking at the door of the chapel? No doubt they were polite about it but I bet my hat they had dark subterranean thoughts, such as what can you expect of a jackass raised by Papists. I am going to put him in Needle point yet! I had my Needlepoint and my Divine Comedy, plus Charles Williams’ Figure of Beatrice along on my wanderings. If I hadn’t had something to really occupy me I think I would have been locked up somewhere along the route…
I must get back to my mountain of real mail—mail that has to be answered. I’ll be writing you about “Revelation” later. I’m quite excited about it.
Much love for you and Regina. Do let me have some news when you feel like writing. I know you wouldn’t take to your bed without good reason but maybe you needed a rest in more ways than one. You’ve been working pretty hard, haven’t you?
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
COPYEDITING OF “REVELATION”
The narrative is fragmented because it was written apparently at different times from New York City. Gordon is accompanied by Erik Langkjaer, the Danish textbook salesman O’Connor dated briefly. O’Connor perhaps told him about Gordon, but in the commentary Gordon seems unaware of their association.
At the end of copyediting, perhaps influenced by Mrs. Turpin experiencing a “visionary light” settling “in her eyes,” Gordon is reminded of Dante, the pilgrim, looking to the stars at strategic times in his pilgrimage. She recommends that a storyteller read the Florentine. This counsel about the parallels between Dante and O’Connor opens up a rich fount of comparison. In Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, we can see the potent parallels and influences of Dante’s comic strategies that she uses to lead her audience to ponder sacramental theological truths through violence.2 He establishes the techniques of “divine comedy,” upon which later writers of similar theological interests draw. O’Connor’s handwritten notes to the 1933 Modern Library edition, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, edited by C. H. Grandgent, show a close familiarity with the poem’s allegory. At the end of the Inferno she writes that hell is
an exemplification of everlasting punishment without free-will. You could not have hell as Christian conceives it—pagan doesn’t blame man as much since man is not wholly to blame for his sins. State of hell is state of rebellion against the divine order. Sinner in hell contradicts his own reason—against duty also.3
The girl’s face is “seared,” not “seered.” In this masterly story it is Mrs. Turpin, who, like a blind seer in a trance, seeing all her own mischance, drifts, not down to Camelot, but up that there ladder of humility, celebrated by the A.A. Dante Alighieri, St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Franz Kafka—if in reverse. (At least, as I see it.)…
Again, if I were doing it, I’d break the mother’s explanatory speech up a bit. Perhaps by a gesture, I’d let “Mary Grace goes to Wellesley College” stand for a second, anyhow, as the pleasant lady’s explanation of her daughter’s eccentric behaviour. Then, as I see it, this admirable woman who, herself, has suffered so much from Wellesley College (nice bit of projection, that,) will realize that her audience will not have any notion of what Wellesley College can do to disrupt family lives and will hasten to specify some of the results of going to Wellesley College—like reading all the time, etc…
…The man [Allen Tate, perhaps] whom I considered the finest man I knew has run off with my money and blackened my reputation and had the nerve to ask me to lunch with him last Monday.
…I had been told that if I wanted a quiet place in which to converse with a friend I would do well to go [to] the Café St. Germain on East Forty Seventh Street. I accordingly walked over there with Eric Langjkaer. We had some private business to discuss and I had asked him to meet me in the Scribner Book Store because I did not want to go upstairs to the edito
rial offices; I was afraid I might encounter So and So whom I would just as soon not see; he edited my last book. Erik did not seem to mind meeting me downstairs. But when we got to the restaurant we were both a little taken aback to see Scribner’s new editor-in-chief sitting all by himself at a table over in a corner…
One final objection. I do not believe that she can hear either the “hoard” (or “horde”) of souls. She cannot hear any one of those souls any more than she can hear a hog or a railroad train or any object or person. She hears the sound emitted by the object or person.
You are making for the anagogical level. One doesn’t use colloquialisms or idioms there for the reason, I hazard, that there everybody understands everything anybody else says.
Allen [Tate] has expressed astonishment at my story, “One Against Thebes.” It is the stars in the final paragraph that puzzle him most. He says they “work” but he can’t see why they work. The answer seems simple to me. Anybody—my nine year old girl, Mrs. Turpin—can look up and behold the same stars that Dante beheld as he emerged from Hell:
The beauteous burdens of the sky,
Fletcher translates the line.
Have you been reading The Divine Comedy? Or were you smarter than I am and read it years ago? I have just finished reading it, for the first time, in what I begin to suspect, is a mis-spent life. Owe it to Ashley [Brown]. He kept going on about how I had learned thus or that technique from Dante and I finally told him that, like most of my contemporaries, I had read the Inferno all the way through but had progressed no further. He replied: “You’d better.”
So I started in this Fall and, now that I have finished, I am going to pursue the plan I have followed for fifteen years with St. John of the Cross. Soon as I get through the whole works, I turn around and start in again at the beginning.
It seems to me that you—or I or any other fiction writer—can find any technique we can muster right there, used to perfection by Dante. All these things I keep trying to tell young people—he can show them to them better than I can ever hope to show them.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE
As O’Connor’s energies continue to dissipate, she is thankful for the kindnesses of her friend.
MILLEDGEVILLE
11 JANUARY 64
Dear Janet,
The two books came yesterday and I believe the Chagall [Marc] is the most beautiful I have ever seen. The other is different order of things and it is interesting to compare the two religious imaginations. I am very grateful to you and appreciate them more than I can say. It troubles me though that you should spend so much money on something that you are not here to enjoy with me. Let us own these books together and let me send them back to you after six months or so and I have absorbed them into my bones and you absorb them into yours. This kind of book ought to be shared. I feel like the proverbial bloated bondholder—only of the arts—to have them and I insist that they travel back and forth between us.
I feel better and as you see am able to be up operating the electric typewriter, a great invention. I am like the late Pope a “powerful fork” (big eater), with emphasis on proteins, do exactly like the doctor tells me always and take quantities of iron. My kind of anemia is the kind that doesn’t respond to liver but does to iron. I take it in the latest form, six pills a day of something called SIMRON, which is the best form possible. I support the Merrell Laboratories single-handed with my purchases of SIMRON. I will do as you say and stretch occasionally but I am afraid that if my thoughts were too pleasant the quality of my prose (not as exhibited in correspondence) would decline.
I work a little every day but am not up to my usual three hours, and hour and a half and I am shot, and a lot of time has to be taken up with business that accumulated while I was in bed. A student in Chile wrote and asked me to correspond with him and tell him “my ideas about life” as he had to write a paper on me—that sort of thing.4 Also such stuff as: “I am in the ninth grade and next week is Georgia Authors week and our teacher told us we had to pick a Georgia Author to write about and I picked you. Will you please send me some interesting biographical information and tell me what books you have written.” And then there are the ones who are writing their Master’s Thesis and send you a list of questions.
Thanks also for sending the Metropolitan Bulletin. My mother has been sick with the flu and she enjoyed it while she couldn’t be up. Incidentally, don’t you want these back? You may keep a file of them. Let me know. And my great appreciation again for the beautiful books and let me know what you think of my plan that they should travel.
Cheers,
Flannery
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE
Typically eschewing literary labels, O’Connor rejects the term “gothic,” often applied to her fiction. The term has been popular over the years with academic commentators drawn to the sensational, dramatic scenes in O’Connor’s stories and labeling them “gothic.”5
22 JAN 64
MILLEDGEVILLE
Dear Janet,
Thanks for your letter and various clippings and what not. I’m feeling better but not up to any full scale letter. I’m glad you like my notion of sending the book for a summer in the Bronx. It will come. Dont send me the piece out of Renascence [Marquette University] on the Gothic novel. Sounds very bogus. My work is not gothic and I dislike the whole conception intensely.
Its in the 60s here today and the birds have begun to strut and I feel like we are getting somewhere toward spring. Can’t get there too fast for me.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE
O’Connor with typical good humor refers to Caroline Gordon’s epistle of January 8, 1964. O’Connor tolerates Gordon’s grammatical instruction and also praises her mother’s practical skills.
MILLEDGEVILLE
28 JANUARY 64
Thanks a lot. The reason we know some of the same things is we went to school to the same lady [Caroline Gordon]. She has beat it into my head on so many occasions that you have to show the eyes or whatever it is you’ve got to show that by now I’ve just about made it instinct. But I always need somebody to tell me if the thing is finished and that I’ve got a dull thud in there. I’ll get rid of the dull thud. I don’t know about the svelt-like. They read words like that in the papers and even the farm magazines and then they go put a like behind it and make it their own.
I had thought I wouldn’t send this one to Caroline because I hadn’t heard from her in a long time and I thought I might be in her black books; however I heard from her, so I sent it. She liked the story all but a couple of sentences which she proceeded to analyze grammatically insofar as it was analysable. She is a great hand at grammar. She wrote me six pages about grammar and another six about her Christmas vacation, which was all on broken-down trains and planes that didn’t fly and misconnected busses—from Lafayette to Chattanooga to Princeton to Lafayette. What that woman has is Vitality. She went to see the Carmelites, for she has this idea of ending her days in one of their establishments. I think she would end the Carmelites. Anyway their instinct for self-preservation will keep them from taking her.
I’m writing another story now but its not funny and its all will and just drag drag drag. It’s also not credible, which don’t help any. So what I said about being dried up doesn’t seem so funny to me. Its just like you said: you have to be chosen. And in between times of being chosen, you have to keep on writing.
I’m all right now but Miss Regina has had the flu. Her policy is never to admit anything but perfect health, however she was pretty obviously poorly this time and had to stay in bed a week and suffer my ministrations. She thinks I’m an incompetent when it comes to doing anything and she appeared right surprised that what had to be done got done. Now she is up again and back to her usual winte
r plumbing activities. We have an ancient labyrinthine mysterious system of water pipes that have to be cut off and drained and usually freeze and break anyway, but she knows it down to the last pipe-fitting. The place is also complicated electrically with two wells and two pumps and a water tower. My nightmares concern being left to cope with the pipes and wires.
You do what you feel like about sending me your story. I can’t help you like you can me but I want you to know I’m around if I ever could. If I ever get this one I’m working on anyways believable, I’m going to send it to you but I promise not to send but one copy. That was inconsiderate of me.
I hope you are more involved with the typewriter & less with [illegible]
Cheers
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE
O’Connor senses her time is running out and uses her energy to work on a second collection of stories that would be published after her death.
11 FEB 64
Dear Janet,
Thanks so much for your card from New Rochelle and the Metropolitan Bulletin and so forth. Your generosity exceeds my free energy. My blood is back up now so I am working like mad and hope to keep it up so that possibly I can have a book of stories out in the fall. The ms. will have to be delivered in May if I do and there is most too much work needed to get it done but I am going to try anyway.
My two new swans arrived and look pretty good but only time will tell if they’re a mated pair. They sit facing each other and converse a lot so I hope thats a good sign.
Maybe sooner or later I will get to write you a leisurely letter but I dont know when.
Cheers,
Flannery