Walter Sullivan [professor of English, Vanderbilt] dropped by here a few weeks ago. He is on a Ford foundation grant observing creative writing classes. He was going to observe one or two other people and then hole up in Florida to write his own novel, and observe Andrew [Lytle, novelist and professor, University of Florida] for the rest of the winter.
Speaking of novels, strange things are happening. Twice in the last month I have seen the novel of the future—the novel they will all be trying to write—right here in this study. The two best first novels I have ever read have come to me last month. One is by Flannery O’Connor of Milledgeville, Georgia. Harcourt, Brace who have finally been persuaded to publish it, say that it is the most shocking book they ever read. It is a picture of a world, the world turned over to Protestantism. A sort of Kafkan effect that goes on exploding in your mind long after you have put the book down. There is no Catholic apology in it and Catholicism is mentioned in only one scene. A Catholic boy named Murphy invites the hero, a hill-billy who has lost his Holler Roller faith in the army and is now dedicated to spreading his faith in unfaith: “The Church without Jesus Christ”—well, better start again. This Murphy invites Haze Motes, the hero, to visit a whore house with him. When they come out he informs Haze that what they have done is mortal sin and that they will go to hell if they die without confessing it—and proposes that they go back the next night. But Haze is a real Protestant martyr and prefers to spend his time preaching the gospel of unfaith. The action is stripped to the bone. The light that plays on the action is like the flashlight a burglar turns on the safe he is going to rob—which is one reason HB were unwilling to publish it. Robert Giroux couldn’t make out what it was about, though he knew that it was something damned unpleasant.
The other novel came out this season of the year when good things come out of Nazareth, out of what I would have said was the most unlikely Nazareth I know of: Sewanee. Walker Percy, Will[iam Alexander] Percy’s nephew, after cutting a good many Didoes among the young ladies of the mountain—one was on the point of leaving her Episcopal minister husband for his sake—after all this Walker suddenly leaves the mountain, gets married to a little Mississippi girl whom Sewaneeans had never heard of, and lies doggo for four or five years. We had heard that he had joined the Catholic church, but had had no other news of him till he wrote and asked me if I’d read his novel, and sent it on in a suit case. I saw the size and groaned, then read a few pages and threw away the bottle of Wolfe-bane I kept on my desk for young writers who are taken with running fits, or as Uncle H. James puts it, “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”
None of that here. There are a few things he needs to learn, it seems to me, but he is learning them fast—all by himself, too. When he really gets to going good I don’t see what there is to stop him. He knows what its all about and knows what he wants to do. Allen and I both feel that he is just about the most intelligent young person that has ever come our way. Of course he is not so awfully young. Nearing forty.
Speaking of novelists, Lon doesn’t write as often as we wish he would. Still he’s pretty good about it. In every letter we’ve had he bewails the complications of his life which are certainly pretty considerable right now. (I also get a good many letters from Tommy Mabry [Thomas, The White Hound: Stories by Dorrance and Mabry] not so much bewailing the complications of his life as asking wistfully for a sort of certification to the effect that he is a writer. If he only had some of Lon’s courage!) I will be glad when he either gets that novel published or lays it aside and gets down to a new one…
The Catholic note creeps in sooner or later, doesn’t it, my fine feathered Buddhist Fellow Traveler? By the way, Eric Bell, Don Davidson’s son in law, is taking instruction from a priest. I expect to see Don himself in the Church within the next few years. Wont that be fun? We’ll just baptize Alfred while we’re at it. Poor fellow. He certainly needs it.
Allen is sending Lon today a book that he has been reading, with exclamations for the last week. Thomas Merton’s new book, The Ascent to Truth. That boy has finally learned how to write. But he had the sense to get him one of these greatest masters: St. John of the Cross. It is amazing to compare this book with The Seven Storey Mountain, which I still consider one of the most important documents of our time, but certainly no literary masterpiece.
This is a poor letter. I came home to find my desk piled even higher than usual with letters that had to be answered. One result of moving out here has been a perfect avalanche of semi-business letters. I am glad teaching a seminar in fiction at the College of St. Catherine here, and am going to teach at the Methodist university, Hamline, next term. After four years at Columbia, where you had to set the universe up fresh for each seminar, as there were no moral values which could be easily referred to, it is a relief to be teaching Catholics, even Catholic jeunes filles. I have twelve of them around a big table, with an outer circle of nuns. I was positively thrilled the other day when Mother Antonine wrote me that I was doing all right.
This recent re-reading of James has given me the illusion that I have discovered something about his work that has never been treated in print, though I certainly cant be the only person who has been struck by it. There is no use in inflicting an outline of the essay I propose to write. It will be in The Sewanee Review or something like it soon enough. I am going to call it “The Figure at the Window on the Carpet.” Now isn’t that a nice title?
We have no pets here, so I have become an indoor bird-watcher. I feed the birds three times a day. Mostly I just get sparrows, but there are two jay birds who come every day. I have got real attached to them.
June seems a long way off. But you certainly will be coming home then, won’t you? We hope to spend the summer at Nag’s Head [North Carolina] and are already trying to rent a cottage there throughout Huntington airn’s [sic] real estate agent. We decided it was best to leave the Woods in possession of Benbrackets [Gordon home], and there isn’t room there for both families. And we are both just dying to have some months by the sea. Maybe you and Lon can join us there during July or August!
We both send our fondest love. We can’t tell you how much we miss you.
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
In January 1952, Caroline Gordon writes Walker Percy that Allen Tate concurs with Gordon’s criticism of Percy’s novel:
One trouble with the book is that the first sixty pages don’t engage. A man is shown in flight but since we see only what is going on in his head it is hard to realize that he is in flight and we have no idea what he is fleeing from. I believe it is almost axiomatic to say that you cannot begin a novel with a long soliloquy. The character must be shown in relation to other objects and other characters before we believe in his existence.
Gordon never fully grasped that Percy was writing fiction more concerned with “being” than “doing.” This view may be rooted in her teaching college students not attuned to existential fiction of “being.” Gordon’s reactions are not unusual—college students then and now are more drawn to O’Connor stories in which violent action predominates, such as a family murdered on the roadside or a Southern matron gored in a pasture by a bull. Gordon advises Percy to revise The Charterhouse to make it more like an O’Connor story: “The last chapter must be presented more dramatically.”
WALKER PERCY TO CAROLINE GORDON
Writing fifteen years later, when his second novel, The Last Gentleman, was published, Percy politely explains the existentialist fiction he has been writing. He notes, ironically enough, that Allen Tate’s famous “Ode to the Confederate Dead” inspired his novels. Despite the poem’s title, it is not about war dead nor is it a formal ode; rather, the so-called “ode” is about the paralysis of what Percy identifies as “solipsism.” The condition afflicts the protagonists of his novels.
TUESDAY [MARCH 1966]
Dear Miss Caroline:
Well, I do give myself credit for knowing the people to impose on. Plenty of people will tell me they like the book even though they may have reservations. A few will tell me that they like it except for such and such. But you’re the only one who can say what is wrong and why it is wrong.
You must know that I attend very carefully to what you say. And I even know you are right. The only trouble is that my faults are incorrigible. At least the fault which really raised your hackles: beginning a book with a solitary young man thinking. It reminds me of the time you were teaching at Columbia and some girl gave you a manuscript which dealt for the first two hundred pages with a girl lying in a bed in Paris and gazing at the wall—you saying you were so pleased when, on p. 201, somebody finally got in bed with her. Yes, right. I even knew what light I was sinning against and hoped to redeem myself by saying in the 4th sentence that in the course of the next five minutes something was going to happen which would change his life.
It is a deliberate sin and therefore all the more mortal, I reckon. I mean to say that, what with the times being what they are, one almost has to begin a book with a solitary young man. All my writings, for better or worse, take off from the solipsism which Allen described in his essay about “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” The best I can do is break him out of the solipsism.13
You are right about the tone.
My Uncle Hughes sent me a story-and-picture about you in his son’s newspaper.
It was very good seeing you and Fr. Charles—though I think Fr. Charles is nutty as a fruitcake. As good as he can be and delightful, and knowledgeable, and maybe even a good writer—but all I could think was, I would hate to be Father Abbot and try to figure out what was best for Fr. Charles. Father Abbot! I am haunted by the recollection of his goodness and sweetness of nature. My Uncle, an old-style Georgia Catholic and nephew of Archbishop Spalding, didn’t say so but I had the hunch he thinks the Trappists are a bunch of kooks, new-fangled Protestant Catholics etc.
Love and thanks again
Walker
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
Replying to a letter from Percy on January 7, 1952, Gordon sends him O’Connor’s Wise Blood as an example of a novel with a plot and vivid action. She also warns Percy about the flaws of Brainard Cheney’s protagonist in his novel. Percy predictably is respectful but does not heed her advice in his published fiction.
465 NASSAU STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Dear Walker:
The Express Company swears it will come and pick your ms. up today. I put Flannery O’Connor’s novel in, partly for ballast, and partly because I thought you might like to read her book. It is an old copy. She has revised it twice since then and may not want it. So don’t do anything about it unless she calls for it. I should say that she and you have the opposite weaknesses. It’s hardly possible, I suppose, to “render” too much, but her story is too bare, too stripped, I think of all but the essential core of action. She presents none of the peripheral action which helps make the main action seem real. As I wrote her, her focus seems to me like the spotlight a burglar plays on the safe he is cracking. You don’t see anything else in the room. But she is sure good. This novel is more like Kafka than anybody else I know of. Every damn thing in it—and practically everything in it is damned. That’s one trouble with it: a world consisting entirely of freaks—everything in it stands for something and you only find out what it stands for after you’ve left the book and the events sort of explode in your mind. She has some dire illness and may die. You might pray for her.
Yes, I think a novel about New York City, with scenes laid in Bellevue, might be terrific.
But to our moutons.
You said one thing in your letter of January seventh that made me shudder, that you were reluctant to give up your angelic escape from the mountain-top. One reason I shudder is that I think you are in danger of falling, as a writer, for what Jacques Maritain calls the sin of the age; angelism. The shudders in me come from the teacher. I have just had the grisliest experience of my career as a teacher. Our old and cherished friend, Brainard Cheney, has been working for six years on a novel which he calls THE IMAGE AND THE CRY. He turned down good jobs, quit everything and plowed doggedly through it. There are five hundred pages. Red [Robert Penn] Warren read it, Allen read it, I read it, his agent read it and half a dozen publishers read it and all of us told him exactly the same thing. It is a prime example of angelism. He gives his hero a chair to sit on in his office but does little else to locate him in time and space. The poor fool sits there and thinks, thinks, thinks sometime for eighty pages at a time. It was done deliberately. He believed that he could focus the reader’s interest on thought, rather than action. This stubborn belief leads him into all sorts of absurdities. The hero and his mistress get in bed and have a good, long talk about freight rates and the C. I. O. Once when he pinched her leg I found myself writing “Thank God!” in the margin.
His story is, in a way, the same as your story: The modern man who wanders bewildered with no help from above. Lon’s hero is essentially a religious man. He finds what he is seeking in the primitive faith of the Holy Rollers and dies as the result of a snack-bite. A lot of these “Illuminists,” as Fr. Knox would call them, turn wistful eyes on the Holy Rollers. They see real faith there but don’t realize that the poor dopes are heretics.
But to go back to Lon. He is not a skillful writer, to begin with, and doesn’t understand the limitations of his medium, limitations which in masterly hands are often turned to great advantage. He doesn’t really know what a novel is and persists in doing something that can’t be done in a novel. He is, in other words, trying to use his feeble intellect as if it were an angel’s—what we are almost all trying to do, in one way or another, according to Jacques.
Let me sum up in my own Credo, in the hope that I can make what I am trying to say clear. A novel, any novel, in the first place, must be about love. There is no other subject. It is a romance. That is, it deals with something that is part of a whole. Human love—between man and woman, is the proper and only subject, as an analogue for Divine Love. St. Catherine of Siena says that we cannot love God directly. We must love him through our neighbour in order to be more like God, who loves us even if we don’t deserve his love.
The proper subject of a novel, then, is love, and it must be incarnated, as Christ was. Christ could not have accomplished the redemption of mankind if he had stayed in Heaven with His Father. He had to come to earth and take human shape. So does every idea in your head that goes into your novel. It cannot float in the aether—that is, you cannot have a scene that is not located in time and space. Your business as a novelist is to imitate Christ. He was about His Father’s business every moment of His life. As a good novelist you must be about yours: Incarnation. Making your world flesh and making it dwell among men…
CAROLINE GORDON TO BRAINARD CHENEY
Unlike in the previous letter, Gordon praises Cheney’s novel This Is Adam, published in 1958, which featured a prominent racial theme. She also comments on Cheney’s possible conversion to Catholicism. Sponsored by the Tates, the Cheneys became Roman Catholics in 1953. Gordon concludes by praising O’Connor and Percy.
2-16-52
…I have put my money on a good many horses, in my time, as you know. Scatter-brained though I be, I occasionally get a glimpse of the wheels going around. I saw them revolving here in this study several months before Christmas. When I was working on Flannery O’Conner’s novel and then Walker Percy sent me his novel. He’s got a lot to learn, that boy, almost everything, but reading that novel was like suddenly getting down on your knees on a long, dusty walk to drink from a fresh, cold spring. His novel and Flannery’s suddenly convinced me of something that I had been feeling vaguely for a long time. The Protestant mystique (which is what everybody who isn’t a Catholic, even Communists, are w
riting out of, whether they know it or not) is out-worn, sucked-dry, beginning to rot, to stink. That accounts for the curious dryness which almost everybody remarks in homosexual novels. There’s no juice left in that orange. Everybody has suspected it for some time, but the fact is now being brought into the open.
Flannery’s novel—as grim a picture of the Protestant world as you can find—and Walker’s novel, which is the story of a man’s desperate effort to stay alive spiritually, will be sensations when they come out. They will show so clearly that the tide has turned. One gets hints of it in almost any novel one picks up, but they come right out with it. Here’s another sign. Dwight McDonald is writing a profile of Dorothy Day for The New Yorker and has asked me to help him. Two years ago, even, they wouldn’t have touched Dorothy with a ten-foot pole. But the world is changing—fast—these days. Here’s another item that will interest you. Father Henry came to give Nancy his blessing after her accouchement and told her that a Jewish gentleman, who was so famous that his conversion would make international news, had just been baptized in his church by Fr. John LaFarge. Old Wise Woman Tate knows who it is, though Fr. Henry wouldn’t tell Nancy. Bernard Baruch, don’t you think? The Good News has got to the man on the park bench. Novels will take a different form from now on.
But you are stuck, half in, half out of the shell. The way you’ve been using your mind all your life is not going to help you. I don’t mean that you’ll have to give up using your mind that way, but you’re going to have to learn to use other faculties. Reason, the way you’ve used it, just won’t do the work. While I’m at it, I may as well compare you to another great man. Has it occurred to you that your situation much resembles the situation Allen [Tate] was in a few years ago? Except that you aren’t making a fool of yourself [as] openly as he did. His situation is very different now. I believe that he is happier than he’s ever been in his life. For the past two weeks he’s been getting up at six or seven and almost has his long poem in the bag. I don’t think that there’s any question that it’s the finest thing he’s ever done. It lacks that unmotivated violence that his work has so often had heretofore. And the writing is certainly the most beautiful that he’s done. Realizing what its all about has released energies that for years were chiefly bent to the service of his neuroses. If you didn’t know him so well I wouldn’t be saying all this, but I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know. You yourself must have marked the change in him. It is the result of the exercise of faith.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 6