This house is in turmoil. Allen leaves Friday morning to fly first to Princeton where he will inspect Little Caroline Wood and other members of the family, then he’ll take off for a cultural congress in Paris, to be gone about three weeks in all. He’s scared to death of flying, but not as scared as he used to be before he joined the Church. I told him I would pray all the time he was on the ocean. He said that was all right, but he’d like to have a few nuns’ prayers, as well. He’d appreciate yours, too, no doubt, even if you aren’t a professional. He doesn’t seem to think that a convert’s prayers avail much.
We look forward to seeing you this summer. I do hope your health continues to improve, affectionately,
Allen read the first paragraph of your book and said “You can tell from that first paragraph that she is a real writer.” It is such an original, strong book! I am delighted by it all over again. You’ve got something that none of the rest of them seem to have.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
The original eighteen-page letter is excerpted.9 It illustrates Gordon’s copyediting detail. O’Connor, of course, benefited from such scrutiny, which is rare in American literary history. Gordon perhaps engaged in such precision because she understood that O’Connor’s Wise Blood was a witty and dramatic satire of a fashionable theme in modern Catholic writers, such as James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce’s autobiographical novel presents a favorable “portrait” of the sterile strictures of many facets of Irish Catholicism—drunken Churchman, mean Jesuits, and bullying in religious schools that the novel’s protagonist experiences. Recanting his faith, Stephen Daedalus becomes a cult figure of theological rebellion that O’Connor ruthlessly mocks in Hazel Motes in Wise Blood. He seeks to found an atheistic Church complete with his evangelical proclamations about the “Church without Christ Crucified.” Emulating other famous epiphanies such as St. Paul himself and St. Francis, Motes ends up blinding himself as a penance. He also has a version of a medieval hair shirt in the form of barbed wire he wraps around his chest.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE SOUTHEAST
MINNEAPOLIS 14, MINNESOTA
ST. DIDACUS’ DAY
[NOVEMBER 13, 1951]
Your manuscript has come. I spent yesterday reading it. I think it is terrific! I know a good many young writers who think they are like Kafka. You are the only one I know who succeeds in doing a certain thing that he does. When I say that I am merely reaching out for some phrase that will partly convey my notion of your work. I do not mean that it is in any way derivative of Kafka. In fact, this book seems to me the most original book I have read in a long time. But you are like Kafka in providing a firm Naturalistic ground-work for your symbolism. In consequence, symbolic passages—and one of the things I admire about the book is the fact that all the passages are symbolic—passages echo in the memory long after one has put the book down, go on exploding, as it were, depth on depth. As that old fool, E. M. Forster, would say: “You have more than one plane of action.” (And what a contrast they are to the maunderings which he presents as his planes of action!)
Robert Fitzgerald reported to me something that you said that interested me very much, that your first novel [Wise Blood] was about freaks, but that your next book would be about folks. It is fashionable to write about freaks—Truman Capote and his followers write about little else. It astonishes—and amuses me—to find a writer like you using what is roughly the same kind of subject matter. But what a different use you put it to! Whenever I read any of the homosexual novels that are so popular nowadays I am reminded of something Chekhov said, that “he and she are the engine that makes fiction move.” That strikes me as profoundly true. One can write about homosexuals if one shows them as differing from normal people, as Proust does, but when a writer gives us a world in which everybody is a freak it seems to me that he is doing little more than recording the progress of his disease.
But homosexuality, childishness, freakishness—in the end, I think it comes to fatherlessness—is rampant in the world today. And you are giving us a terrifying picture of the modern world, so your book is full of freaks. They seem to me, however, normal people who have been maimed or crippled and your main characters, Sabbath, Enoch and Haze, are all going about their Father’s business, as best they can. It is a terrifying picture. I don’t know any other contemporary who gets just such effects. Genet achieves remarkable effects but for me they are all marred, finally, [by] his sentimentality. You are never sentimental.
I think that you have done a good job on the revision. I don’t really see how you managed it. The Fitzgeralds told us that you have had a severe illness and are only recently out of the hospital. There comes a time for any manuscript when one must let it go with no more revisions. I think that having done the job you’ve done you could let this manuscript go with a good conscience. But I am going to make a few suggestions and comments. They are really suggestions for your future work, but I have to have something to pin them to, so I am going to take passages from Wise Blood as illustrations of the points I am trying to make. If I seem overly pedantic it is doubtless the result of teaching. When you are reading a manuscript for a fellow writer you can say “I like this” or “I don’t like that” and he figures it out for himself, but if you are dealing with students you have to try to relate your reactions to some fundamental principle of the craft.
I admire tremendously the hard core of dramatic action in this book. I certainly wouldn’t want it softened up in any way. I am convinced that one reason the book is so powerful is that it is so unflaggingly dramatic. But I think that there are two principles involved which you might consider.
It is the fact that in this world nothing exists except in relation to something else. (I take it that being a Catholic you are not a Cartesian!) In geometry a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Theology takes cognizance of a soul only in its relation to God; its relation to its fellow-men, in the end, help to constitute its relations with God. It seems that it is the same way in fiction. You can’t create in a vacuum. You have to imitate the Almighty and create a whole world—or an illusion of a whole world, if the simplest tale is to have any verisimilitude.
As I say, I admire the core of dramatic action in this book very much, but I think that the whole book would gain by not being so stripped, so bare, by surrounding the core of action with some contrasting material. Suppose we think of a scene in your novel as a scene in a play. Any scene in any play takes place on some sort of set. I feel that the sets in your play are quite wonderful but you never let us see them. A spotlight follows every move the characters make and throws an almost blinding radiance on them, but it is a little like the spotlight a burglar uses when he is cracking a safe; it illuminates a small circle and the rest of the stage is in darkness most of the time. Focusing the reader’s attention completely on the action is one way to make things seem very dramatic, but I do not think that you can keep that up all of the time. It demands too much of the reader. He is just not capable of such rigorous attention. It would be better, I think, if you occasionally used a spotlight large enough to illuminate the corners of the room, for those corners have gone on existing all through the most dramatic moments.
What I am trying to say is that there are one or two devices used by many novelists which I think you would find helpful.
Often one can make an immediate scene more vivid by deliberately going outside it. A classical example is the scene in Madame Bovary in which Charles and Emma are alone together for the first time. Charles’ senses are stirred by Emma, he is looking at her very intently. At the same time he hears a hen that has just laid an egg cackling in a hay mow in the court-yard. Going outside that scene somehow makes it leap to life. The very fact that the sound is distant makes the people in the room seem more real. Hart Crane uses the same device in a poem called “Paraphrase.”
A man is standing beside a bed looking down at the body of a dead woman and grieving for her death. His grief is made more real by “the crow’s cavil” that he hears outside the window.
I think that this very device could be used very effectively in Wise Blood. Occasionally you get a powerful effect by having the landscape reflect the mood of the character, as in the scene where the sky is like a thin piece of polished silver and the sun is sour-looking. But it seems to be monotonous to have the landscape continually reflecting their moods. In one place I think you could get a much more dramatic effect by having it contrast with them. For instance, in the scene where Haze, Sabbath and Enoch meet, I think that the landscape ought to actually play a part in the action, as it does sometimes in Chekhov’s stories. If the night sky were beautiful, if the night were lyrical the sordid roles the characters have to play would seem even more sordid. After all, here are three young people trying to do as best they can what they feel that they ought to do. Sabbath wants to get married. Enoch wants to live a normal human life. Haze, who is a poet and a prophet, wants to live his life out on a higher level. You convey that admirably, I think, by emphasizing his fierce dedication to his ideals. But the scene itself is too meager for my taste. Your spotlight is focused too relentlessly on three characters.
There is another thing involved: the danger of making excessive demands on the reader. He is not very bright, you know, and the most intelligent person, when he is reading fiction, switches his intellect off and—if the author does what he is trying to do—listens like a three or thirteen year old child. The old Negro preacher’s formula for a perfect sermon applies here: “First I tells ’em I’m going to tell ’em, then I tells ’em, then I tell ’em I done told them.” It takes much longer to take things in than we realize. In our effort to keep the action from lagging we hurry the reader over crucial moments. But anything that is very exciting can’t be taken in hurriedly. If somebody is killed in an automobile accident people who were involved in the accident or who merely witnessed it will be busy for days afterwards piecing together a picture of what happened. They simply couldn’t take it all in at that time. When we are writing fiction we have to give the reader ample time to take in what is happening, particularly if it is very important. The best practice, I gather, is to do the thing twice. That is, the effect is repeated, but is so varied that the reader thinks he is seeing something else. Actually the second passage, while it interests the reader, exists chiefly to keep him there in that spot until he has taken in what the author wants him to take in. Stephen Crane uses this device often and to perfection in The Red Badge of Courage.
Yeats puts it another way. He says that in poetry every tense line ought to be set off, that is, ought to be preceded and followed by what he calls “a numb line.” He is constantly doing this in Major Robert Gregory [“In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”]. His numb lines do not slow up the action. They make it more powerful…
There is another thing that I think the book needs: a preparation for the title. Henry James says that at the beginning of every book “a stout stake” must be driven in for the current of the action to swirl against. This stout stake is a preparation for what is to come. Sometimes the writer prepares the reader by giving him a part of what is to happen. Sometimes he conveys the knowledge symbolically, sometimes he does it by certain cadences, as in “A Farewell to Arms,” when at the beginning the narrator says “The leaves fell early that year”—another way of saying “My love died young.” At any rate, however it is done, the reader must be given enough to go on, so that, in the end, he will have that comfortable feeling that accompanies “I told you so!”…
To sum up, there are three places in the book where I think a few strokes might make a lot of difference, this scene and the scene where the patrolman pushes the car over and the scene where Haze and Sabbath and Enoch first meet.
And one more thing: I think you are just a little too grim with Sabbath when she is nursing the mummy. I don’t like the use of the word “smirk” there. It is almost as if the author were taking sides against her. I think it would be more dramatic if you were a little more compassionate towards her. After all, she is a young girl trying to lead a normal life and this is the nearest she’ll ever come to having a baby—since she’ll probably end in the Detention Home. At any rate, the situation is grim enough without the author’s taking sides.
I will now—God help us both!—make a few, more detailed comments…
Well, that’s enough of that! I would like to see you make some preparation for the title, Wise Blood, and I’d like to see a little landscape, a little enlarging of the scene that night they all meet, and I’d also like to see a little slowing up at certain crucial places I’ve indicated, but aside from those few changes I don’t think that it matters much whether you make any of the revisions I’ve suggested. I am really thinking more of the work you’ll do in the future than of this present novel which seems to me a lot better than any of the novels we’ve been getting. But of course in writing fiction one can never stand still. Once you learn how to do one thing you have to start learning how to do something else and the devil of it is that you always have to be doing three or four things at a time.
But my heartiest congratulations to you, at any rate. It’s a wonderful book. I’ve written to Robert Giroux, expressing my admiration. My best wishes to you. I do hope that you continue to feel better.
Yours,
Caroline
NEXT MORNING:
I realize that in all this long letter I’ve said little about what I admire in the book. It is, first of all, I think, your ability to present action continually on more than one plane. Only writers of the first order can do that. Everything in your book exists as we all exist in life, mysteriously, in more than one dimension. When Haze runs the car over Solace Layfield he is murdering his own alter ego as well as Layfield. His Essex is not only a means of locomotion. It is pulpit. When he finds out that Sabbath’s father is blind he finds out much more than that. This goes on all through the book and yet you never succumb to the temptation to allegorize. I admire, too, very much, the selection of detail. You unerringly pick the one that will do the trick. And the dialogue is superb. But you will have gathered, by this time, that I am tremendously enthusiastic about the book. My heartiest congratulations on the achievement. It is considerable.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FRANCES NEAL CHENEY [MRS. BRAINARD CHENEY]
Mrs. Cheney was a professional librarian. Her husband, Brainard (known as “Lon” because of his resemblance to the actor Lon Chaney), was a novelist, political speechwriter, and essayist from Georgia. The Cheney home, Cold Chimneys, near Nashville, was a place of festivity and conversation for Gordon, Tate, and O’Connor, who enjoyed stimulating fellowship when they visited.
Gordon praises O’Connor and Percy.10 She also mentions friends, Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson, a poet, essayist, critic, and faculty member at Vanderbilt University. Davidson, Allen Tate, and other Vanderbilt faculty formed the Fugitives, a network of writers who wrote modernist, intellectual poetry influenced by T. S. Eliot.11 Many of the Fugitives were members of a related sociopolitical group, the Southern Agrarians—Andrew Lytle was one of the most ardent and colorful. Some of the writers converted to Catholicism, including Gordon, Tate, and the Cheneys, while Lytle, calling himself an “old Christian,” did not.
Gordon also refers to another vital literary community, “the most unlikely Nazareth I know of: Sewanee,” currently known as Sewanee, the University of the South, an Episcopal college and seminary founded in 1856 in Tennessee. Walker Percy’s uncle, William Alexander Percy, had a home at Sewanee, Brinkwood, and taught at the university. He devoted a chapter in Lanterns on the Levee to fond memories of teaching there. The Sewanee Review is published by the university and frequently featured the writings of Gordon, O’Connor, and Percy while Andrew Lytle, mentioned several times in this collect
ion, was the editor.12
465 NASSAU STREET.
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
DECEMBER 29, 1951
Darling Fannie:
How sweet of you to think of me! This flowery square is going right downstairs on one of Joseph Warren Beach’s little tables to remind us of you every day. We think of you practically every day. We think of you particularly at holidays for I believe we have had more fun at youall’s house, whether on West Side Row or Cold Chimney’s, than any other house we know of. I would write you oftener, in spite of having absolutely no time to spare, if it weren’t for your hellish address. The first time I saw all those bristling numbers I knew I could never master them, and wrote them down carefully and parked them in a special place—not alas, in my ordinary address book—so I could have them handy. But the place was so safe I have never been able to find it again. I have repeated this maneuver several times. The last time was when your letter came a few weeks ago. Thank God, I have got it again, thinks I, at which moment the door bell rang. When I got back upstairs Allen, who, as you know, has few housewifely instincts, had come along and burned the envelope with the address on it up. Just trying to get the place straight, he said. Evidently I am not fated to possess your devilish address. Never mind, Lon will have it to forward this…
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 5