Good Things out of Nazareth

by Flannery O'Connor

  I had a note from Paul Engle [Iowa Writers’ Workshop] today after I had written to congratulate him on his O. Henry collection. He said the Saturday Review had just attacked it and the Workshop. He seemed sad about it but I think it’s obviously an honor.

  Love and thank you for seeing that story. I am going after it.

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO PETER TAYLOR

  A publisher had apparently sent O’Connor a collection of Taylor’s stories. The publisher perhaps hoped to obtain a blurb for the dust jacket from O’Connor.

  MILLEDGEVILLE, GA.

  15 APRIL 54

  Harcourt, Brace sent me a copy of your new collection [A Long Fourth and Other Stories] and I reckon I ought to thank them instead of you but I would rather thank you so that I can say that I admire your stories so very much and have for a long time. I always read them several times, hoping I will learn something painlessly. This may be an extravagant hope. My favorite story is still the one called “Skyline” in the other collection and I would like to write one that good some day.

  It occurs to me to say also that I have just seen Kenyon Review and observe with horror that my story has got a new last line. I suppose this is my fault as I added it to the proofs—but not at that point. I attribute its removal to the end to some learned printer. In any case, it doesn’t do much for the story.

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON

  Reference is made to a publisher, including in O’Connor’s collection The Artificial Nigger. The title story became one of her favorites. At the end of the story she created a powerful crucifixion image of African American suffering that functioned like a Station of the Cross in the liturgical penitential rite of Lent. Penitents meditate on images of suffering from the Passion of Christ. In “The Artificial Nigger,” a dedicated racist is convicted of his own bigotry when he gazes at a cruciform statue. O’Connor’s intentions are laudable, as revealed in A Prayer Journal, where she beseeches God, “Please let Christian principles permeate my writing.”24 In the reception of the story, however, over the years, O’Connor’s intentions, like those of Twain and Faulkner, have been eclipsed by the emotional impact of the racial slur she used, even leading to the banning of O’Connor’s stories in some Catholic schools.25

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  27 OCTOBER 54

  I met Bob Giroux in Atlanta yesterday and he told me your daughter had been ill and that you had been back some time. I will pray for her—he said she was better. I have not heard from anybody in great lengths of time but I suppose all my acquaintances are as glad to get shut of the summer as I am. Grace after the season. He told me about Cal [Robert Lowell].

  We’ve been besieged lately by rabid foxes—to the extent that we’ve lost three cows, one a good one, of hydrophobia—so the government has come in and set traps. Every morning the traps have to be investigated. I never knew so many skunks, possums & coons had been created. Every night the negroes take home a possum or so and yesterday they went with two possums, a coon, & a fox-squirril. I asked the colored woman how she cooked the coon and she said, “First I boils him and then I bakes him.” I was going to ask her to send me a piece but now I’m not sure I want him.

  Where are the Fitzgeralds? I last heard they were in some kind of moated castle belonging to one of Mr. Pound’s connections and this was teeming with theirs and other people’s children.

  I have a new story called “The Artificial Nigger,” that I want to send you if you are not too busy & if you are really in Minnesota. Apparently Harcourt is going to put out my collection of stories in August. I have ten & have gone over them and removed all such words as “squinch,” “skrunch,” “scrawnch,” etc.

  I managed to raise two peachickens this summer. They are fearfully tame and both are vicious. I can’t tell what sex they are yet though a man we had working out here told me that the way to tell is you hold the chicken upsidedown by its two front toes and if it tries to turn rightsideup again, it’s a hen and if it just hangs down, it’s a rooster. He swore this was a sure way and that he had used it many times to separate three-day-old chickens. One of mine turned up and the other hung down but they still look exactly alike.

  Remember me to Allen.

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON

  O’Connor mentions Lon Cheney’s working for the Tennessee governor, Frank G. Clement. O’Connor also mentions a televangelist and connects the scene of his preaching to a character in Wise Blood.

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  10/23/53

  This is absolutely the last one of these things I am going to let myself write until I have my foot well on Tarwater’s [early version, Francis Marion Tarwater, The Violent Bear It Away] neck again. I would like to know if it works or not. I’m afraid the end is too abrupt. After about 18 pages I always get the to-hell-with-it feeling and sign off. I think the reason I don’t help the reader over the stile is because I am too busy getting myself over it. I don’t always know what’s happened even after it has.

  Let me know where the Fitzgeralds [Sally and Robert] are when you find out and give them my blessings. My mother wants to know where to send their fruit cake. She has her fruit cake seizure about this time of year and there’s nothing to be done about it but get out of the way.

  Robie [Macauley] writes me that the Lowells [Robert and Elizabeth] have bought a big old house in Duxbury, Mass. Mansion about 300 years old, from which they aim to commute to Iowa. Cal also has a big old Packard named “The Green Hornet.” I hope Elizabeth does the driving. The Fitzgeralds thought Cal was going to be at Cincinnati this year but apparently he is still at Iowa [Writers’ Workshop].

  Lon [Cheney] wrote that he was back at fiction after doing the Governor’s paper work for his conference with the President [Eisenhower] about TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]. It was very successful he says. His Governor Clement is a big friend of Billy Ghrame [Graham, the evangelist]. I saw old Billy on the tellyvision this summer at my aunt’s in Boston. They had a real repulsive announcer—the good-looking cream variety—and then a real repulsive singer—same kind—and then Billy. Billy was very vigorous and less repulsive than the other two but I suspect they were chosen so that this would be the case. He looks like Onnie Jay Holy only he’s better dressed.

  I think Mr. Ransom [John Crowe] has forgotten I sent him the story and the chapter. Incidentally Cal [Robert Lowell] has a long review of Warren’s poem [Robert Penn, Brother to Dragons] in the last Kenyon [Review]; he read it three times, he says. I read the part that came out last year but haven’t read the whole thing; I have no perception about poetry though. I can tell Edgar Guest from Shakespear—that is about all.

  LON CHENEY TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  Three years have passed since Cheney wrote a seminal article on Wise Blood. A speechwriter for Governor Clement of Tennessee, Cheney writes (July 19, 1956) to enlist O’Connor in support of his efforts to influence the 1956 Democratic convention.

  …The chief reason for my using a dummy committee—which I will call the Committee for Renewing the Democratic Party, or something of the sort—is that I must publish under a soubriquet or anonymously in order not to embarrass Governor Clement before the Convention. The article is, of course, freely critical of the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party and could prove embarrassing for him if my name was connected with it. I intend to by-line it A Life Long Democrat…

  As you can imagine, I am in a terrible swivet in preparation for the Convention which Our Boy [Governor Clement] will keynote…”26

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO BRAINARD CHENEY

  O’Connor agrees to serve on a political committee, noting she will listen to Governor Clement, whose speech, written by Cheney, electrified a sleepy Democratic convention.27 Bill Clinton, elected President of the United States in 1992, also listened to Clement’s spe
ech in which the governor famously accused President Eisenhower of staring down the “green fairways of indifference.” Criticism of presidential golf has remained a bipartisan topic from President Eisenhower to Donald Trump. President Bush gave up golf during the Iraq war, while Donald Trump criticized President Obama for too much golfing. Once elected, President Trump has happily enjoyed the fairways with famous champions such as Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus, and awarded the Medal of Freedom to Woods on May 6, 2019.

  20 JULY 1956

  I’ll be real pleased to have my name on the dummy committee…it sounds mighty congenial.

  I’ve been sitting with my ear glued to the radio when Brother Clement makes his oration. May St. Thomas balance Billy Ghrame.28

  CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  Gordon is working on a novel, The Malefactors, while reading O’Connor’s story about Tarwater, who would eventually become the rebellious prophet in The Violent Bear It Away. The Malefactors features a moody, condescending, unfaithful husband given to financial mismanagement and advancing his literary career. Gordon mentions the sullenness of the characters in the two works, perhaps reflecting her own troubled marriage.

  VIA ANGELO MASINA 5

  (PORTA SAN PANCRAZIO)

  ROMA

  [OCT. 31, 1953]

  I finished the first section of my novel the other day [The Malefactors]—it took only seven chapters to carry the hero from breakfast to the time when he sank around four o’clock in the morning into a troubled sleep. I hardly know which is the more sullen companion—he or Tarwater. You wouldn’t think it to look at—or listen to him—but he’s busy with his Fiery Crosses, too. Seems they all are, one way or another. Anyhow, I made the mistake of turning my back on him long enough to do a bit of sightseeing and here it’s three weeks I been letting him lay—and without the kind of excuse you have for turning your back on Tarwater…

  “The Displaced Person” has some of the most brilliant passages you’ve written, notably Mrs. Shortley’s conversations with the two Negroes. I like them so much I’ve read them aloud to various people, all of whom have gone into the proper stitches over them. Allen [Tate] likes them, too. In fact, our reactions to the story seem to be about the same. I’m going to give them to you as best I can, but for Heaven’s sake remember that I may very well not know what I’m talking about. I’m really just thinking aloud—mulling over what seems to me to be the problem. We both feel that the story doesn’t quite come off at the end, though superb up till then. Neither of us is quite sure what the trouble is. I’ll hazard some guesses.

  Mrs. Shortley’s vision, though fine in itself, doesn’t seem to be integral to the story. The connection between the vision and the denouement isn’t established, really, seems to me. If the vision is in there it ought to “work,” ought to have some particular job to do.

  I am wondering whether the trouble, after all, isn’t in the handling of the viewpoint at the end? I don’t like the touch of levity (“I have been made regular etc.”) in this context. It cuts the ground out from under Mrs. Shortley’s feet, makes her pathetic rather than tragic. But you have been building her up for a tragic role—a mountain of a woman, or at any rate, a woman of larger size than most of her companions, a woman who thinks as deeply as she can, and, certainly, ponders even if she isn’t capable of ratiocination.

  It seems to me that the denouement ought to take place on a larger stage. Mrs. Shortley ought to see herself in somewhat the same position as those heaps of bodies dead, naked people that she saw in the movies. Damn it! She ought to see or feel herself and Mr. Shortley being dismembered!

  As I see it, the structure of the story rests on three supporting scenes, the way a roof might rest on three columns: the sight of all those naked, dead bodies in the movies, the vision and the command to prophesy and, lastly, her realization of what it is she is prophesying: hers and her husband’s destruction.

  Mr. and Mrs. Shortley are Displaced Persons, Dismembered Persons, more displaced, more painfully dismembered than the Gobblehooks [Guizacs], if they only knew it, and your story is Mrs. Shortley’s realization of what is happening to them. It’s all there—and magnificently—it seems to me. All you have to do is bring out a little more what is already implicit in your action…

  Hastily, with love,

  By the way, it’s “carcase,” not “carcus.” Also, I don’t at all like “squinch” on page 21. Here is an example of the thing I was talking about in my last letter. There is no such word as “squinch.” It is not in the vocabulary of the omniscient narrator, who is above colloquialisms and that sort of thing. The word therefore can come only from Mrs. Shortley’s vocabulary. The use of Mrs. Shortley s vocabulary, which is to say, her view-point here, abruptly contracts the field of vision and also lowers the tone of the action—at the moment when you need a wider vision and an exalted tone.

  You have here, in a nut-shell, it seems to me, the chief weakness in your work: the tendency to use too restricted a viewpoint at crucial moments, thereby cutting down the scope of your action. You are superbly agile in slipping in and out of your characters, borrowing their eyes and ears and mouths in the interest of verisimilitude. In fact, it is through this very agility that you achieve some of your finest effects but I would like to see you learn to do something else—to soar above the conflict, to view it as if through the eyes of an eagle, at certain crucial moments. And this passage is one of those moments. After all, you have a more exalted subject matter than any of the other young writers. Your language ought to match it—but without relinquishing anything of what you have already got, not even one double negative. Of course this will be hard to do but you have got what it takes to do it. I feel very certain of that.

  I think that this group of stories you’ve just done are among the finest that have been written by any American.

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON

  O’Connor mentions visiting friends at Cold Chimneys in Smyrna, Tennessee. O’Connor entertained her friends, including the editor of The Sewanee Review and his wife, by reading a story.

  MILLEDGEVILLE

  18 DECEMBER 53

  I have just got back from spending a weekend with the Cheneys. I like them both very much. Lon seems to be in the middle of one novel but wanting to write a different one. I suppose you always want to be writing a different one. They had the Spears [Dr. and Mrs. Monroe] up Saturday night and I read them the Displaced Person, having doctored on the end of it according to your directions. I took off the mama and papa business and added a sentence to the effect that they (the girls) had never known that she had been displaced or that now her displacement was at an end. You were right: it gives it another dimension.

  The D.P. is currently telling Shot, the colored man, that he can get him a wife from Germany but that he’ll have to pay five hundred dollars for her. My mother says “Oh get out, Mr. Matisiak, you know all those folks over there are white.” She has had a lot of trouble anyway with Shot’s matrimonial complications. He is estranged from his first wife who used to have him put in jail every month because he wouldn’t support his child. My mother finally after paying his bond several times has it arranged so that she sends the check for the child every month—twelve dollars. She was talking to mother the other day and told her that she was mighty tired of having to be Shot’s bookkeeper (she also pays his policy man, his board, & his incidental debts). His mother said well she wished he’d go back to his wife and then he wouldn’t have to send out that twelve dollars every month. My mother says why you know that woman doesn’t want him back. “Oh yesm she do,” his mother said, “she wants him worsen a hog wants slop.” I happened to be present and nearly fell off my chair but my mother didn’t bat an eye until the old woman had gone, then she said, “I hope you are not going to use that in one of those stories.” Of course I am as soon as
I can find me a place to.

  You would probably be interested in Mrs. Steven’s children’s Sunday school organization. It is called the Meriwether Mites. Meriwether is their community. Very Very Very Methodist. The Mites are mostly interested in the social opportunities in religion; the decent ones that is. They have “no drinking, no smoking, and no setting around in cars.”

  The story I enclose is one of those old ones that I am undecided about including in the collection. It is very funny when read aloud but I’m afraid there’s not much to be said for it otherwise. Anyway I’d like to know what you think.

  I hope your mobbing experiences are over. The people I saw in Nashville were powerful interested in it. Merry Christmas.

  CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  Gordon engages in copyediting, even the colloquialisms in “The Artificial Nigger.” Earlier she had praised Walker Percy’s presentation of “the Negro problem” in The Charterhouse. The title, however, of O’Connor’s story at the time of its composition in the 1950s does not present a similar “problem,” perhaps because the spiritual meaning of the story was obvious to Gordon and O’Connor, but would not be to many others in later years.

  Gordon also embraces the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung both for counseling and aesthetics. Unlike Gordon, O’Connor and Walker Percy would remain steadfast in their skepticism of Jung as a helpful influence on their writing and faith. In the late 1950s, Percy would concur with O’Connor in a long, unpublished essay, “An Apology.” Percy argues that Jung was unable to embrace the central claims of Christianity. Instead, Percy notes, he essentially grouped Christianity with other world religions. They all shared similar archetypical or mythical patterns.29 In another unpublished essay, Percy notes that Jewish exiles in the Old Testament are little different from any other dispossessed people in world history. As a result, the biblical chronicle of the Jewish quest for the Promised Land is just another mythical pattern for categorization.30