Many thanks again for your interest and prayers.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES H. McCOWN
O’Connor mentions William Sessions, who had been a Fulbright scholar at the University of Freiburg (1957–58), where he studied with Martin Heidegger. Sessions wrote O’Connor about consultations with him and other famous thinkers. I attended an academic conference many years later sponsored by Southern Denmark University where Sessions recounted his interactions that year.18 In seminar discussions, Sessions’s sense of humor was evident. His first words to me were, “You mean you had to come this far to drink some Jack Daniel’s?”
O’Connor also departs from Caroline Gordon’s praise of Dorothy Day. Once a Marxist, Day retained a hostility to capitalism, corporations, and income taxes. By contrast, O’Connor paid taxes and admired the business acumen of her beloved parents. O’Connor occasionally praised philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller, whose foundations provided financial support. On the other hand, Day writes to C. J. Kelly, a “friendly critic,” “If Mr. Rockefeller offered us [Catholic Worker Movement] $100,000, indeed, we would not take it. We would tell him to go and give it back to the miners in Colorado from whom he stole it.”19
MILLEDGEVILLE
1 OCTOBER 58
Enclosed please find your French friend from Butler. Everybody has been writing her up since she returned from her summer trip to France.
Billy Sessions is back too and according to him he is about to lose his mind. The descent from Freiburg [University in Germany] to Carrollton [Georgia], from the great university to West Georgia College is such a severe shock to his nerves that he don’t know if he’ll make it. But I don’t reckon he will have to endure it long as it doesn’t look as if in another ten months there’ll be any more school teachers in Georgia. I shudder to think what’s ahead.
I am disenchanted with the Catholic Worker myself. Some of their pronouncements on the South are highly naieve [sic] and all the pacifist stuff and income tax stuff is painful.
I certainly want to see your brother’s article [Robert McCown, S.J., “Flannery O’Connor and the Reality of Sin”] when it comes out. These woods do not harbor any copies of The Catholic World but if you will let me know when it appears, I will order off after one through some of my city friends.
The local cleric treated us to a Pat-and-Mike last Sunday. These fall as upon the dessert air but he is not deterred.
* * *
O’Connor mentions (November 15, 1958) that she is becoming better known in the larger academic community in Minnesota, perhaps because of the influence of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon who taught at institutions there. O’Connor reveals continued interest in interfaith connections.
I am reading a book called THE ECLIPSE OF GOD by the Jewish theologian, Martin Buber. These boys have a lot to offer us. At your bookstore I hope you sell a book called HOLY PAGANS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT [Jean Daniélou]. Also you ought to read DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. I thought everybody was praising it just because Pasternak was a good Russian, but not so—it is a great book.20
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO THOMAS GOSSETT21
O’Connor refers to her fellow Georgian Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus stories. She wishes Tom will be “as wily” as Brer Rabbit in rebuking unjust, shabby treatment from the academic community.
MILLEDGEVILLE
20 NOVEMBER 58
We have been reading about your dismissal in the paper and think you have been treated in a low-down fashion. I hope you tear up that briar patch before you are through with it.
We have missed seeing you and Louise [Gossett] his fall.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
Dr. Gossett’s academic “trial” is delayed. O’Connor is also amused about consumerist churchmanship as a sign of heterodoxy. With O’Connor’s encouragement, Father McCown a few years later became friends with Walker Percy. Father McCown may have shared O’Connor’s misgivings with Percy who satirized consumerist religious practices in Lancelot and The Second Coming. In the latter, Jack Curl, a trendy Episcopal priest who has jettisoned clericals for a jumpsuit, has reduced his vocation to entertainment and fund-raising. He is perplexed in a conversation with Will Barrett who asks him several times if he believes in God.
20 DECEMBER 58
MILLEDGEVILLE
Tom Gossett was over here last night & he sure was pleased you called him up. Those jokers postponed his hearing until after Christmas so it is still hanging. He was telling me that , a now Methodist minister, is a lapsed Catholic. He says says that when he left the Church at the age of 18, all the Catholics came after him with guns and knives. Too bad they missed, from all I hear of him.
Merry Christmas to you and your mother and brother. We wish they would send you to Atlanta to help out Fr. Jerrold. I hear they are going to have a drive-in retreat house. I reckon you honk and a Jesuit runs out and hears your confession. It’s later than you think.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
O’Connor is saddened (December 23, 1958) about friends leaving the Church and encourages them. She mentions a successful academic conference.
In fact I seem to have nothing but friends who have left the Church. They have all left because they have been shocked by the intellectual dishonesty of some Catholic or other—or so they say, frequently of priests. It’s only partly that but it does account for a good deal. I wish we would hear more preaching about the harm we do from the things we do not face and from all the questions that we give Instant Answers to. None of these poor children want Instant Answers and they are right. Do you ever read that Fr. Murchland [Bernard] in the Commonweal? He is one of the best writers the Church has in America, besides Fr. Weigle [Gustave]…
I don’t know what kind of conspiracy that was at Minnesota. Powers [J. F.] and I are, I suppose, the only two young writers in this country who are well thought of and connected with the Church. We both have the same kind of horns…22
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO TOM GOSSETT
MILLEDGEVILLE
7 JANUARY 59
We just heard yesterday about your Reinstatement. I am trying to think of a Charlye Wigginish exclamatory remark but I am an old lady and don’t have that kind of energy. We hope you’ll be coming to see us and give us just the details.
Cheers,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO LOUISE GOSSETT
O’Connor describes the difficulties at a conference where she had substituted for the novelist Eudora Welty. She uses a vital term that reveals her perspective on conventional American history, noting she felt “unreconstructed.” The term had been coined by John Crowe Ransom in perhaps the best essay, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” in I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Ransom means that after the Civil War, refugee Georgians during Reconstruction were not “reborn” spiritually into the civil religion of American exceptionalism and the “new birth of freedom” of the Republican nationalist victory narrative. The defeated and their heirs, like O’Connor, remained “unregenerate” and dissented from the civil religion of democracy. Ransom as an editor and teacher was also instrumental in publishing O’Connor’s stories.
MILLEDGEVILLE
1 MARCH 59
Dear Louise,
We were real cheered to hear from you on 1 Feb as the bidnis letters say. And I was glad to be introduced to Bro. Juniper. I suspect him of being Anglican.
We haven’t seen Tom since he brought his class over but I mean to drop him a note to come over and tell us the latest. We certainly hope you all won’t be leaving next year. That would be a blow to us all and I am afraid the Rev. Pres. Martin will be at Wesleyan forever unless there is an appropriate thorn in his side at Mercer.
Out of twenty writing students at the Universit
y of Chicago there were two who had some talent and the rest were strictly from hunger. The classes went off all right because I could write and they couldn’t. It gives me the needed confidence. Malamud [Bernard] is coming to do the same thing next month. At the public reading there was no public. I read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” omitting the paragraph about the little n——— that didn’t have any britches on. I felt very unreconstructed in that liberal territory.
I believe I have finished my novel. Somebody said you didn’t finish one, you just said to hell with it. I am working it over and find it hard to let go. I look at it one day and think it’s the worst novel ever written, the next day I manage to find possibilities in it, etc. The name of it is going to be THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY. (“…the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” Matthew 11:12.)
The geese are laying and the peachickens have started screaming and eating up my mother’s crocus, so everything here is coming along with the season.
Give my regards to Isobel Rogers.
Cheers to yourself,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
O’Connor cites the generosity of a philanthropic foundation and praises a favorable portrayal of a religious. She also notes difficulties in traveling.
MILLEDGEVILLE
1 MARCH 1959
A book you ought to read is THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN by Romain Gary, and you can get it in a Cardinal Editions paper back for four bits. It has a Jesuit in it that I think is modeled on Pere Teilhard de Chardin, the paleontologist. There was a piece on him not long ago in the CommonWheel. Anyway, this is a most inneresting book and ought to be in your bookstore.
I hear General Cline is leaving for Texas, or has done left. They will miss you.
I am going to be supported for the next number of years by the Ford Foundation. The Lord has blessed me with a Patron!
The trip to Chicago was awful. Plane grounded in Louisville and an eight-hour bus ride after that to Chicago. After I got there it was all right and the students weren’t better than students anywhere else that I could see, at least not the writing students. A man named Joel Wells from The Critic showed up at the reading and came back and said who he was and then vanished, but at least he came.
We haven’t heard the latest on the Gossett affair but I mean to get him over here shortly to give it to us
Merry Easter,
* * *
O’Connor recommends a biography of a nineteenth-century Catholic convert, Orestes Brownson—a journalist and political thinker. Brownson is little read or studied in American classrooms and appears in few textbooks. Abolitionist writers—Douglass, Thoreau, Emerson, and President Lincoln—on the other hand, have been canonical figures for generations. Study of Brownson leads to a questioning of their historical assumptions that have shaped conventional American history for a century.
Up until the Civil War, Brownson was a leading apologist for the Catholic faith in the United States. Brownson’s writings were vital in shaping the Vatican’s understanding of sectional disputes that would lead to the Civil War. Brownson thought the war could have been avoided or its carnage mitigated considerably had the American War for Independence been used as a model of restraint. While O’Connor’s reputation has grown, Brownson’s has become obscure. Brownson regarded in the mid-nineteenth century many of the Abolitionists as irrational zealots (for example, John Brown) and leading Transcendentalists who justified their conduct as theologically heterodox. In later generations the radicalism of the Abolitionists and the eccentricities of Transcendentalists have been normalized in American classrooms and textbooks. By contrast, Brownson was influential in the listing of the Abolitionist novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe on the Index for heterodox theological views. He also did not support President Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. Brownson decried the increase of unitary executive power in President Lincoln’s exercise of “war powers” and his suppression of dissenting journalists. He also criticized Lincoln’s conscription measures, in which Irish Catholic immigrants, some of whom did not speak English, ended up in the Union army. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brownson was a “Peace Democrat,” not a “Lincoln man.” He argued that a “War for the Union” should not destroy the Southern aristocracy. The American Revolution served as a precedent that evinced compromise and restraint. Brownson believed Lincoln’s presidency was a radical departure. Study of Brownson’s writings challenges the central premise of conventional American history that casts Lincoln as the custodian of the essential principles of the original War for American Independence. Brownson’s views were often vilified for their criticism of Republican war policies ordered by Lincoln and executed by General Sherman and others. Brownson believed Sherman’s prosecution of “total war” against civilians departed from the tactics of General George Washington in the Revolutionary War and constituted a serious abrogation of a Catholic just war. Brownson’s dissent from the nationalist political narrative of the Civil War is a vital yet neglected part of the historical record.23 O’Connor was knowledgeable of the narrative by way of Brownson’s biography, which she recommends to Father McCown.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
3 APRIL 59
I am enjoying reading about poor old Brownson [Orestes]. Converts do have a hard time in the Church and his story seems particularly sad, in as much as if they had left him alone he would probably have made more of a mark on his Protestant friends.
I sent you a Mary McCarthy, which I don’t want back. The Lowells [Mr. and Mrs. Robert] took me to dinner at her house one night. I didn’t open my mouth all evening. It was powerful intellecchul talk that went on. It finally got around to the Church and she said that when she was a child and went to Communion, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost because that Person of the Trinity was “the most portable.” She also said that the Eucharist was a symbol, upon which I finally gained my tongue and chirped, “Well, if it’s symbol, to hell with it.” After that I was heard from no more. I don’t know whether her attitude is like Joyce’s or not. She has a book called Memories of a Catholic Girlhood in which she says more or less why she is above the Church. I haven’t read it, but I guess your answer would be there. She has a second husband named Bowdon Broadwater who seemed to me rather nice.
Tom Gossett has accepted a job in Texas for next year. Presbyterian college and a lot more money than what he got at Wesleyan. Part of his reinstatement agreement was that he wouldn’t come back. Apparently all the alumnae is trying to get rid of that _____, but he is glued there apparently. A few weeks back Tom came over one afternoon and as we had Mass at five o’clock, he went with us. After it was over, he asked why Fr. _____ didn’t come out and shake hands with the people. Haw, we says. He couldn’t think of anything to say if he shook their hands. Tom said well Fr. McCown did it. You should have seen the church on St. Patrick’s day—green carnations.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
MILLEDGEVILLE
10 MAY 59
Dear Caroline:
You heard the subterranean note in Cal’s [Robert Lowell] voice correctly I guess. Bob Giroux spent last Monday and Tuesday with us and said Cal hospitalized himself before the party. He thought it a good sign that he did it himself and didn’t have to be forced to. Giroux had just been to Gethseminie (sp?). He stopped over in Atlanta and visited the Trappist monastery in Conyers, which he said was much better looking than the one in Kentucky, or at least will be when they complete it. All the people in the outlying areas go to look at the monks—like going to the zoo.
I’m glad you have set out on The Air of the Country. With all the other things you do I don’t see how you find time for it but I suppose after teaching it is a real relief to do it. It will be a big treat for me to see it.
I read at Wesleyan last week—“A Good Man
Is Hard to Find.” After the reading, I went to one of their classes to answer questions. There were several young teachers in there and one began by saying, “Miss O’Connor, why is the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked quite disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” says I. He really looked hurt at that. Finally he said, “Well Miss O’Connor, what IS the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” “To cover his head,” I say. He looked crushed then and left me alone.
I am doing the whole middle section of the novel over. The beginning and the end suit me, but the middle is bad. It isn’t dramatic enough. I telescoped that middle section so as to get on with the end, but now that I’ve got the end, I see there isn’t enough middle.
I don’t reckon I saw many Fugitives at Vanderbilt. The Kreigers asked for you. He read a paper which was over my head, but was very nice when he wasn’t reading a paper. The Mabrys came down from Guthrie and I was glad to meet them. While I was at the Cheney’s I read part of Ashley’s [Brown] thesis, the chapter on The Malefactors [Caroline Gordon]. Ashley ought to get to work on that book and publish it. I think it’s the best thing I’ve read on the Malefactors. If you would give him a verbal shove, he might get on with it. He is leaving Santa Barbara after this term but I don’t know where he will go.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES H. McCOWN
Anti-Catholic paranoia and eccentric parish activities evoke O’Connor’s typical bemusement. She mentions Father McCown’s professor friend at St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 16