Please forgive me for lecturing you at this great rate. Somehow couldn’t stop once I got started. I’ll promise not to do it every time I write, though. And please write again. We can’t help but worry about you when we don’t hear from you. There’s just not anybody we’re fonder of than you and Fannie. Anything that concerns you two concerns us deeply. Allen sends his love and so do I.
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
Aware of the precarious health of both Percy and O’Connor, Gordon (winter 1952) addresses Percy’s monitoring the recurrence of tuberculosis. She notes, “Many good writers have had their way smoothed by some such affliction.” Gordon enumerates (mistakenly) the American writers kept out of the Civil War by maladies:
Of the James boys, only Wilkie and Bob, the two dopes of the family, fought. Both William and Henry were hors de combat. Henry Adams was safe in England with his father and Mark Twain was ‘roughing it’ in the Rockies. Only poor Ambrose Bierce got into the front line, and he was not much of a writer. If we keep up our present draft system, which is so efficient that it’s hard for anybody to slip through its meshes, we’ll probably kill off all our geniuses.14
In an undated letter written a short time later, Gordon is delighted “to hear that you [Percy] are reading Henry James.” Gordon recommends two other books: “One is Advent by Fr. Jean Danielou, the foremost Patrologist in France. It is terrific. He tells you things about both the Old and New Testament that pretty near take the top off your head.” Gordon also praises (as she does to O’Connor) the “Life of St. Thomas More, by R. W. Chambers,” noting “this is above all, the book for Southerners, for Confederates, for any English-speaking person.”
CAROLINE GORDON TO ANDREW LYTLE
Gordon and her friends were developing a vision of history rooted in the patriotism of Thomas More. More’s defense of liberty was applicable to their struggle to come to grips with Southern defeat in the Civil War. In an earlier letter to Percy, Gordon had recommended a biography of More, noting that he “seems to me the greatest Englishman that ever lived. And the man above all whom we should follow today.” Percy responded by setting forth his view of More, which Gordon enthusiastically shared with Lytle. He was an ardent admirer of More, repeatedly quoting his dying words in his teaching and writings. Percy’s analysis may have influenced Lytle’s observation that More was one of the last defenders of Christendom against Machiavelli’s Prince, which “showed the princes of Europe they might rule free of spiritual counsel, looking only to their wills for guidance.”15 To Lytle, Gordon, Percy, and O’Connor (implicitly), the kind of liberty for which More was martyred was a resistance to the modern conglomerate nationalist “state” of Henry VIII.
APRIL 4, 1952
I had a letter from Walker Percy (Will Percy’s nephew) the other day in answer to some things said about St. Thomas More. That boy is sure smart: His letter is so good that I have copied the excerpt from it and sending it to you and Edna [Mrs. Lytle], for I think it will interest you.
Hastily,
Caroline
WALKER PERCY TO CAROLINE GORDON
I agree with you about St. Thomas More. He is, for us, the Road Back. For our countrymen, I mean, for southerners. For More is the spiritual ancestor of Lee. He is the man to pray to for the conversion of the south. One of the stumbling blocks to the Southerner (or the American) who is drawn to the Church is that he sees, not the Church of More, not the English Church which is his spiritual home, but the Church of St. Alphonsus Liguori by way of the Irish Jesuits. If he does go in, he must go in with his face averted and his nose held against this odor of Italian-Irish pietism and all the bad statues and architecture. Of course this is somewhat exaggerated and prideful, because it is a salutary lesson in obedience and humility to take St. Alphonsus. (Hell, he was a great saint!) But if Allen is forming a St. Thomas More Society I want in.16
I got the New York edition of James. (I would never tell you what it cost me.) But it is worth it…What gets me (in connection with your paper) is the way James’ heroes go diving in and out of Catholic Churches to collect their wits, or to hold interminable conversations. I have a theory about James’ indifference to the Church, or rather for the strange dissociations of his attitude: splitting off his great aesthetic reverence for St. Peter’s, for instance, from any necessity for taking seriously the claims of the Church upon him. It was the Age of Unbelief, if ever there was one. It would have been absolutely unthinkable for any man, however knowing and intelligent, to see his way clear to conversion. It would have taken an heroic amount of grace. Of course there are obvious reasons for this; it was the Age of the Success of Science; the great Victorian edifice was still mighty and secure. But I believe that there is a dialectic of Faith. Of course this is nothing new. But the dialectic is in our favour now; we are certainly coming into the Age of Faith. It is not so much Faith as the polarity of Faith-Unfaith. This alternative simply did not exist for our grandfathers or for James. There must surely be a providential allowance for the fix that they were in. I thank God that I didn’t live then. When I look at my father’s library, comprising as it does, many religious works, but all of the liberal-scholarly-protestant variety which stemmed from 19th century German rationalism by way of English divines, it gives me the creeps. It is much more lethal to the Faith than, say, the violent atheism of a Spanish Mason. They had a big middle ground in those days. Now it is being cut away.
James never had a chance. I am sure that the Road to Rome never even occurred to him, except as something “European” and therefore traditional and pleasant. The trouble was that all the other buildings were still standing and the Dome of St. Peter’s wasn’t especially conspicuous. Now the others have all fallen down and even I can see it.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon mentions teaching a new interpretation of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to nuns. The interpretation may have been inspired by her copyediting Wise Blood, a dramatic satire of Portrait. She also praises the Chambers biography of Thomas More. The biography clarified for her that Henry VIII’s government was essentially a modern state with an intelligence apparatus. Informants of the Crown were bent on crushing dissent and consolidating power of the Machiavellian king who often instilled fear in his subjects.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE S. E.
MINNEAPOLIS 14, MINNESOTA
I am not going to be able to review your book, after all. I stupidly forgot to caution HB [Harcourt, Brace] about using my name as a blurb and am therefore ineligible to review the book, Francis Brown tells me. I’m sorry. I am vain enough to think that I understand better what you’re getting at than the next reviewer.
The sisters who sit in on my lectures will read it with great interest, I’m sure. They continue to astonish me. The other day, after I had finished giving my interpretation of Joyce’s Portrait, which, to say the least, is not the interpretation that I was, so to speak, brought up on, one of them sighed softly and murmured: “That’s what Sister Mariella Gable has always said!”
I am so glad to hear that you have been feeling well again. If you visit the Fitzgeralds in June maybe we’ll see you. We hope to land in Princeton around the first of July.
Spring has come at last! All the ice is gone from the river. The sidewalks are at last clear of snow and ice and the grass is turning green. It seems to happen overnight here and a damned good idea it is. I don’t think we could have stood much more of that other stuff.
I have been having a great time all winter reading and re-reading The Golden Bowl. If you take into consideration three facts: a, that it is the only one of James’ novels that has a happy ending, b, that it is the only one in which a child is born to the hero and heroine, c, that it is the only one in which the hero and heroine are both Catholics, you don’t see James turning into a Catholic but you see the book turnin
g into something quite different from what F. O. Matthiessen [American Renaissance] et al. would have you believe it is.
Allen appalled me when I had finished an essay on this subject by saying that I ought to expand the essay into a small book. The idea does fill me with horror—I can’t write expository prose. However, the fact that nobody will be anxious to publish such a book will probably save me from having to write it.
Another book we have read this winter is R.W. Chambers’ Life of St. Thomas More. It is simply terrific. Not having read it is for me a little like studying the Civil War from the Yankee point of view—you don’t get much idea of what it was all about.
I hope the stories go well and we look forward to seeing you soon.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon writes about a retreat to a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, which had a significant spiritual impact on her. Gordon praises Dorothy Day frequently to both O’Connor and Percy. Over a half century before Pope Francis in a papal visit to the United States cited Day as one of “four great Americans,” Gordon offered her own praise many years earlier.
SEPTEMBER 20, 1952
1908 SELBY STREET,
ST. PAUL 4, 1952
I was indeed glad to hear from you and so awfully glad to know that you are up and at work again. We were disappointed not to have a visit from you at Princeton. I found myself wishing that I had kidnapped you and taken you on there that day we had lunch together…
Allen is still reeling all over Europe—Rome one week, Venice the next, but he will have to come home by September twenty ninth as the U. of Minnesota, an institution that is doubtless far from his thoughts these days, opens on that date. He has had such a good time that he is positively dazed. At some time or other he was due to have a talk with the Holy Father. He had things he much wanted to discuss with His Holiness. I am curious to see whether awe in the pontiff’s presence will keep him from saying all he thinks about his fellow Scribner-author, Francis Cardinal Spellman.
I got to St. Paul about a week ago and have been busy settling into our new (rented) house. It is just heavenly to be able to unpack and hang your clothes up in your own (rented) closet. This has been a hellish summer. I have not got a chance to put in as much as one hour’s work on my novel and in the last few weeks I have been getting pretty peevish about it.
About The Strange Children, I think you are right about Reardon. He isn’t quite right. I think now that he is mis-cast. He had to be a “little” man, one whom they could all rather look down on, but he could have had another variety of littleness. I see a different character in his role now—a man who has little intellect and who would reveal himself more than Reardon does, trying ponderously to account for his conversion and never being able to, yet holding on to whatever it was stubbornly, nonetheless. Ah well—one reason for writing another novel is the chance to avoid the mistakes you made in the first! While we’re on the subject, I’ll point out another flaw in that novel…
I took advantage of Allen’s absence to go up to Dorothy Day’s “Maryfarm” at Newburgh to what she calls “the basic retreat.” It lasted five days. I had to come back in the middle to see Allen off, so got in only three days in all—rushed right back the minute he took off. It was an extraordinary experience. Dorothy says that for several years after she entered the Church she got little help, little more than platitudes from parish priests.
Then she went to a retreat given by Fr. La Couture in Canada. He is dead now but she keeps the retreat alive, training first one and then another priest to give it. It is tough sledding—this particular retreat is frowned on in many quarters.
They call their joint a “Hospitality House”—any bum is free to wander in off the road, and many do. The audience was therefore pretty motley. But you ought to have heard those bums sing the Latin Prime before Mass and two conferences in the morning, then dinner and a short rest and an afternoon conference and supper and another conference. I don’t think I could have stood up under five days of it, but when I got back from Princeton towards the end of the retreat they were all as fresh as daisies.
The approach was frankly mystical and I was reminded often of what Jacques Maritain says, that every real novelist is a mystic, “for nobody else knows what is in the human heart.” Jacques was invoked often. So were Aristotle and other worthies. And the whole series of talks was based on a figure of St. Augustine’s “pondus animae”—spiritual gravity, as it were. The father also threw in the mediaeval schoolmen’s demonstration of the existence of God and a good many other things that have hardly been heard of in the academic circles in which I move. It really was something! I had such a good time that I didn’t even envy Allen his trip to Italy. I guess we are going there in 1954, though. Allen has got himself a Fulbright professorship at the University of Rome for that year—I reckon Minnesota will let him off.
I do hope you get good news from Sally [Fitzgerald]. I haven’t heard from her since her illness. I do so hope things are going better there. I was dreadfully disappointed not to get over to Ridgefield but Sue Jenkins whom I was visiting at Sherman was ill and I couldn’t get transportation over at the time I’d planned.
Let me hear from you when you feel like writing. If I don’t answer you’ll know it’s because I’m wrestling with my novel. Getting back to work after a four or five months interruption is a grim business, isn’t it? Luck to you, always,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor mentions suffering from the deadly sin of sloth. She was a student of Dante and Aquinas; the seven deadly sins suffuse her writing. Robert Fitzgerald, who taught The Divine Comedy at Harvard, recalled, “I am almost sure I lent Flannery the Binyon version.”17 Her handwritten notes to The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (Modern Library, 1933), show a close familiarity with the poem. O’Connor enumerates Dante’s seven deadly sins in a list beside a diagram of Purgatorio’s mountain. Learning from Dante, she identifies pride, envy, and anger as “sins of perversion,” anger and sloth as “defective love,” and avarice, gluttony, and carnality as “excessive love.”18 Good Country Pictures is preparing a television series, 7 Deadly Sins, Seven Films Based on Flannery O’Connor’s Stories.19
O’Connor also refers to a visit from a Danish textbook salesman who cannot fathom works of charity.
MILLEDGEVILLE
5/20/53
I thank you the Lord knows for haranguing me twice on the same counts and at the expense of boring yourself stiff. This is Charity and as the good sisters say Gawd will reward you for your generosity. I hope quick. But you are wrong [in] one place—I do not suffer from the modern complaint of Abstraction; I suffer from the 7th Deadly Sin: Sloth. The slothful are always in a big hurry. I know all about it. And how it catches up with you before the end. My contrary disease is called lupus but it’s only the Aggressive Sloth made Manifest. I’d like to persuade myself that I hear time’s winged chariot and so on and so on but then I think you take such good care of yourself you’ll have the embarrassment of being around like your cousin when you’re 85, in spite of the ailment and the agony and the outrage. The effort to achieve some intensity is terrible but it isn’t as terrible as it must have to be or there’d be more intensity coming out somewhere.
Anyway I will work on this story longer. I keep asking myself: how would the dam [sic] woods look after two pistol shots? The Omniscient Narrator is running me nuts. I thought he could ease into a brain and rifle it and ease out again and look like he had never been there in the first place. Mine is just a bungler. Also I think I will start talking like Dr. Johnson as a matter of course—if this is possible. My mother says I talk like a n——— and I am going to be out sometime and say something and everybody is going to wonder what kind of people I come from etc etc. Her predictions turn out on the double and worse than true and here it is has affecte
d the Om. Nar.
There was a man at Yaddo [Saratoga Springs, New York] who used to say Gide was the “great Protestant spirit.” I was glad they put him on the Index as it meant I wouldn’t have to read him. Otherwise I would have thought I had to. If I had charge of the Index, I’d really load it up and ease my burden.
Somebody brought a man out here, a textbook salesman for Harcourt, Brace [Erik Langkjaer]. He was a Dane and had studied at Fordham with Fr. Lynch and was interested in Dorothy Day. He wasn’t a Catholic and said what he couldn’t understand was why she fed endless lines of endless bums who crawled back to the gutter after every dish of soup. No results. No hope. No nothing, he said. The few Scandanavians that I have seen have impressed me as being very antiseptic about everything. I said it was Charity and there was nothing you could do about it. He seemed to be fascinated and disgusted both. What I can’t understand about them is the pacifism. If Charity were in the form of a stick I can imagine beating a lot of people over the head with it.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 7