Good Things out of Nazareth

by Flannery O'Connor

  16. I am indebted to Ralph Wood of Baylor University, who pointed out this crucial point in a lecture I was privileged to hear.

  17. Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, 1251.

  18. William A. Sessions, “Then I Discovered the Germans: O’Connor’s Encounter with Guardini and German Thinkers of the Interwar Period,” in Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds., Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

  19. Robert Ellsberg, ed., All the Way to Heaven: Selected Letters of Dorothy Day (New York: Image Books, 2010), 84.

  20. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.

  21. Dr. Gossett appends a note: “At the time I had been suspended at Wesleyan College [Macon, Georgia] mostly over the issue of racial integration (I was for it). I later was reinstated with the provision I would leave at the end of the academic year. Miss O’Connor offered me her warm sympathy at the time. If the story about me is of any possible interest, it was a big thing in the Macon newspapers. Nov.–Dec. 1958. Thomas F. Gossett, January 17, 1973.”

  22. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.

  23. Popular books and movies, such as Killing Lincoln (Bill O’Reilly) and Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), present the nationalist victory narrative with minimal references to the counternarrative of the nineteenth century present in several O’Connor letters. President Lincoln’s policies and oratory have become the gold standard of interpretation as if no other views are worthy of serious consideration. “The Civil War: Legend and Lies” (Fox News), for example, retains O’Reilly’s inflexible, one-sided viewpoint and reveals how O’Reilly largely forsook his Irish roots in championing Lincolnian imperialism. Occasionally, the Fox script refers to the counternarrative, but a visual device enumerating the body count concludes each episode. The numerical device dramatically registers the frightful number of lives lost in the Civil War, speculated to be six hundred thousand. The devastating number is presented as normative and necessary in a flurry of escalating figures at the end of each episode. The American Revolution, the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the recent end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union illustrate much less horrific resolutions to protracted political conflicts. Such resolutions provide stark relief to the frightful, avoidable carnage of the American Civil War. Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the dissolving of the Soviet Union, stands out as a leader, for example, who pursued an alternative to frightful global war.

  24. A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor, ed. Henry T. Edmondson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017), features Edmondson’s essay tracing Kirk’s influence on O’Connor’s fiction (see “He Thinks He Is Jesus Christ!”). Jerome Foss in Flannery O’Connor and the Perils of Governing in Tenderness (Rowman and Littlefield) argues that Kirk was one of the seminal writers who enabled O’Connor to interact with the political thinkers of the Western tradition: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. Political theorists are writing some of the most penetrating, illuminating criticism of O’Connor’s fiction.

  25. The CBS-TV film adaptation, on “Playhouse of Stars,” starred Gene Kelly, Agnes Moorehead, and Janice Rule, and was broadcast on March 1, 1957.

  26. Stephens, ed., The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, 42.

  27. Thomas P. Coffey, “Is There an American Catholic Literature?” Saturday Review (Sept. 5, 1959): 11.

  28. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.

  29. Ibid.

  30. McCown, “Flannery O’Connor,” lecture.

  31. Stephen Rountree, S.J., “Re: Scott ‘Youree’ Watson,” e-mail message to Benjamin B. Alexander, June 12, 2012.

  32. While the bishop extolled Father Teilhard, the Episcopal Church in the United States has pursued for a generation heterodox theology in doctrine and discipline and has estranged the community, perhaps irreparably, from the Catholic Church. The irony of the bishop’s enthusiasm for Teilhard de Chardin concerns the Jesuit’s persistent quest for unity of knowledge and belief that the Episcopal Church has abandoned through its many divisive policies pursued for a generation.

  33. Stephen Rountree, “Re: Scott ‘Youree’ Watson,” e-mail message to Benjamin B. Alexander, June 12, 2012.

  34. “Reviews of The Violent Bear It Away by P. Albert Duhamel,” Catholic World (Feb. 1960): 280–85; Granville Hicks, Saturday Review (Feb. 27, 1960): 18; Anon, Time (Feb. 29, 1960): 118–19.

  35. Father Quinn’s review actually appeared in Best Sellers 29:4 (May 15, 1960): 76.

  36. See “It Takes a Story to Make a Story: Flannery O’Connor’s Life and Imagination,” YouTube, May 3, 2013, https://youtube.com/​watch?v=pLe4ZLnhdVs, for Sessions’s colorful remembrances.

  37. Robert McCown’s review is not included in Flannery O’Connor: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For a discussion of the importance of Father McCown’s article, see my essay “ ‘These Jesuits Work Fast’: O’Connor’s Elusive Politics,” in A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor, ed. Henry T. Edmondson III (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017). Father McCown’s article can be accessed at BenjaminBAlexander.com.

  38. The award-winning Danish film director Jaap van Heusden adapted “The Lame Shall Enter First” for Danish television. It was broadcast in 2014 on NPO2 as “The Prodigal Son,” in the Demonic Dilemmas series.

  CHAPTER 3: “HER KIND OF LITERATURE: PLACES AND FOLKS”

  1. Unpublished letter, William A. Sessions to Benjamin B. Alexander, Dec. 5, 2004.

  2. James H. McCown, Elephants Have the Right of Way (Liguori, Mo.: Liguori Publications, 1975), 3.

  3. Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, ed. W. A. Sessions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 19.

  4. The excerpts of this letter have been transcribed from the Thomas F. and Louise Y. Gossett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. A copy of the letter also appears in The Habit of Being. The excerpts of the letters in this collection may not coincide with those in The Habit of Being, since the editor of the collection sometimes omitted passages. I have selected excerpts from the Gossett Papers to maintain contextual, thematic continuity in this volume.

  5. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.

  6. O’Connor, Prayer Journal, 10.

  7. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.

  8. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Love, Henri (New York: Convergent Books, 2017), 294.

  9. The reference may be to Salvator Attanasio, trans., Claude Tresmontant, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Thought (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1959).

  10. The last prominent Democratic politician rooted in the “yellow dog” tradition was President Bill Clinton; his wife, Hillary Clinton, lost the presidential election of 2016 largely because of a stolid imperviousness to the electoral chemistry that earlier propelled her husband to the White House. Ironically, a New York billionaire voiced the populist rhetoric of the “yellow dog” tradition, which unexpectedly helped elect him to the presidency in 2016.

  11. St. Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory, trans. Charlotte Balfour and Helen Douglass Irvine (London: Sheed and Ward, 1946).

  12. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.

  13. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.

  14. J. H. McCown, S.J., “Flannery O’Connor,” lecture, University of South Alabama, Mobile, April 25, 1985, n.p.

 
15. Walker Percy, “Which Way Existentialism?” Southern Historical Collection, Walker Percy Papers, Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

  16. My experience teaching outside the South for many years has been the opposite of the pattern of institutions in the South. A college in Michigan where I taught for a few years in the 1980s had instituted a course in “Southern literature,” and faculty members admired the Southern Agrarians. A few years ago, however, influenced by neo-conservative thought, college leaders normalized the radicalism of the Abolitionists in the dedication of a statue to Frederick Douglass on the campus in which he was enlisted as a “conservative.” Another college in Ohio where I later taught for many years allowed the teaching of Southern literature and history as long as it was not marketed to students as “Southern literature.” It could be promoted as a variety of American literature but not advertised as “literature of the American South.” A colleague seriously intoned in a meeting that “Southern” writers like Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner, were “provincial.” On the other hand, the institution’s president once at a faculty convocation praised the tactical adroitness of a Confederate general who “charged both ways” in a battle. The allusion to the general elicited little response among the faculty, because apparently no one was familiar with him. Had such a favorable reference to a Confederate general been made by an official at a Southern institution where memorial statues and plaques have been removed, immediate vilification or dismissal would have probably resulted.

  17. Along with O’Connor and Porter, Caroline Gordon and Louis D. Rubin participated. O’Connor also gave a lecture, “Some Thoughts on the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” which was later published in Mystery and Manners.

  18. Perhaps because of its Indiana location and the educational formation of the Holy Cross order whose members founded Notre Dame, there seems not to have ever been much of a historical consciousness of the intersection of Catholic and Southern history. O’Connor herself is acutely aware of the alliance in her perspective on history. The moniker the “fighting Irish” and the protracted vilification and persecution by the British made the immigrant Irish Catholics in the United States natural allies with their Southern counterparts. O’Connor embodies the connection that is little known and little taught in Catholic institutions in the United States, even Notre Dame, with its conspicuous Irish identity. Most Catholic institutions are dedicated to the conventional view of American history rooted in a progressivist orientation and, as O’Connor notes, “educationism.” Even though O’Connor was a popular speaker at Notre Dame and her professor friend, Thomas Stritch, sanctioned and understood her historical vision, this connection has not been systematically taught there or at most other Catholic institutions. The emphasis predictably is on O’Connor’s theological orthodoxy in her letters and fiction, or, more recently, English departments are interested in how her stories reveal various kinds of literary theories such as feminism, environmentalism, and cultural studies.

  19. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Ibid.

  22. “Off the Cuff,” The Critic 21 (Aug.–Sept. 1962): 4–5, 71–72. The interview is reprinted in Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, ed. Rosemary Magee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987).

  23. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 227.

  24. John Ciardi (1916–86), a poet, published several collections, including Homeward to America (1940), Live Another Day (1949), In the Stoneworks (1961), and For Instance (1979). He also translated Dante’s Inferno (1954) and Purgatorio (1970).

  25. “Some Notes on the Combination: Novelist and Believer.” A version of this address appears as “Novelist and Believer” in Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, eds. Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).

  26. O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 214. A brilliant analysis of O’Connor’s penetrating realism is applied to political philosophy in Jerome Foss, Flannery O’Connor and the Perils of Governing by Tenderness. Foss locates O’Connor in the mainstream of the imperiled discipline of political philosophy studied and taught in just a few colleges in the United States. A few critics have perceived the interdisciplinary character of O’Connor’s fiction and show how it dramatically reveals the enduring issues of political philosophy. See the essays by Edmondson, Sykes, Ciuba, Roos, O’Gorman, and Alexander in A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor, ed. Henry T. Edmondson III (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017).

  27. Roslyn Barnes reveals wide and deep learning in modern philosophy and literature, including familiarity with Dietrich von Hildebrand. In my interactions with academic devotees of Hildebrand in the United States, however, I have not encountered a similar breadth. A Hildebrandian graduate scholar who studied at the International Academy of Philosophy (Liechtenstein) once asked me if I could tell him “something about Percy Walker.” Some Hildebrandians operate within a limited network. They are conversant in conventional philosophic novelists, such as Sartre and Camus, but are unfamiliar with American existential novelists such as Percy, Ralph Ellison, Charles Johnson, and others.

  28. The reference may be Coindreau’s 1960 translation of Wise Blood, La sagesse dans le sang. Henri Morisset translated A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which was published in 1963.

  29. Les braves gens ne courent pas les rues (A Good Man Is Hard to Find). Translated by Henri Morisset (Paris, Gallimard, 1963).

  30. Bernhard Sinkel, in his 1988 miniseries Stacy Keach, Hemingway (Beverly Hills: Lance Entertainment, 2003), further popularizes the “legend” with scenes of Hemingway, a supposed “journalist,” transformed into an irregular militia leader with the French Underground. After the Nazis flee, Hemingway and his band are the first to enter Paris. Hemingway, of course, finds his way to the Ritz Hotel, opens the bar, and buys drinks for everyone.

  31. Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999) was born in Russia and became a novelist and literary critic who wrote and published in France.

  32. The reference may be to MacKinlay Kantor (1904–1977), novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, whose novel Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.

  CHAPTER 4: “REMOVING CHOICE SOULS SO SOON”

  1. The talk appears in Sally Fitzgerald, ed., O’Connor, Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988), 853–64.

  2. I gave several essays I had written about the parallels entitled “Dante and Flannery O’Connor: A Study in Divine Comedy,” to Sally Fitzgerald at a lecture she gave in Ohio in 1996. I was gratified and surprised in 2012 to discover she provided marginal comments to these essays and deposited them among her papers (Writings by Others 1970–1998) at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

  3. Flannery O’Connor Collection, Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville.

  4. This may be a student of Roslyn Barnes, a friend of O’Connor’s, who was teaching at a university in Chile.

  5. Irwin H. Streight of the Royal Military College of Canada gave an informative lecture at the American Literature Association meeting in Boston (2017) about the heavy metal group Wise Blood, seizing on the so-called “gothicism” of O’Connor’s fiction to celebrate varieties of dehumanization and depravity in their music and shows. Such performances completely miss the point of O’Connor’s stories derived from Dante’s Inferno: violence is used as a technique to point to larger sacramental truths such as the Incarnation and the Eucharist.

  6. The question has elicited different responses. The famous Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, called himself an “American slave” instead of an “African.” Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois theorized about a “twoness” of both African and American spirituality in the “souls
” of American “black folk.” Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1952), disliked the term “African American” and called himself an “American Negro.” Malcolm X repeatedly criticized “so-called Negroes” and stated the term was pejorative. James Brown, one of the most “sampled” of African American musicians, in the anthem song of the civil rights movement chanted, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.” President Obama has identified himself as African American as if his parents are both African American. Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, on the other hand, having similar parentage, is identified as “biracial.” Issues of ethnology remain existential and varied.

  7. “Prayer Enrollment,” Cenacle Sisters, accessed June 27, 2018, https://www.cenaclesisters.org/​Prayer-Enrollment/.

  8. Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, ed. William A. Sessions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 13.

  9. In my experience I have not witnessed a similar emphasis on diversity in other Catholic communities outside the American South. Midwestern Catholic communities or monastic orders rooted in Irish identity have little experience with the African American ethos, revealed, for example, in not observing properly Black History Month. By contrast, both Father McCown and Dr. Gossett were native Southerners and interacted with African Americans throughout their lives and were keenly aware of their culture. Their experience was typical of most Southerners from communities with a large African American presence and history. The situation does not obtain in some Catholic communities outside the South where there are few or rare opportunities for interaction with African Americans. Other than a cursory admiration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s witness and oratory, such communities remain unaware of African Americans, their culture, and their literature. In these cases, the African American ethos remains essentially “invisible,” as the novelist Ralph Ellison reveals in Invisible Man.

  10. See Gary Ciuba, “ ‘School for Sanctity’: O’Connor, Illich, and the Politics of Benevolence,” in A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor, ed. Henry T. Edmondson III (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017), 243–44. Before her death, O’Connor submitted an article from Barnes’s thesis for publication in the Review of Politics and The Sewanee Review.