MILLEDGEVILLE
24 MAY 59
You said one time did I have any copies of WB [Wise Blood] and I have just got some so I enclose a couple.
Tom Gossett went up to the monastery a few weeks ago and he was so taken with it that he plans to go again next Friday and take me and my mamma. Did I tell you he has a job for next year at Trinity University (Presbyterian) in San Antonio. At Wesleyan the faculty has petitioned the board of trustees to ask for an investigation of ________ and a large percent of the faculty has already resigned. Carl Bennett is going to a school in North Carolina [colleague of Dr. Gossett]. All the religion faculty has resigned—one of these is going to become an Episcopalian. He said his family thinks this is the downward path, first to liquor and then to Rome. The saying about Wesleyan now is that there is Madness in their Methodism.
The latest indignity foisted upon this congregation is a statue of Guess Who. He has everything about him but the snakes—a purple shirt, a green robe, an orange book, white gloves, gold hat—and is holding up as if for sale or edification a four-leaf clover, I mean a shamrock. This atrocity is not in the back of the church either—up smack in the front. He also has similar statues but of different sizes we hear in his bedroom, living room, kitchen, and automobile.
The Catholic ladies here have a sewing circle that meets on Thursdays—just for social purposes. On Ascension Thursday he informed them they could not sew. Sin to sew on Ascension Thursday. May I ask you if you do not think this is somewhat Extreme? Not a peep out of him this year about the sin of going to hear the bacculariat sermon. We think he was sat upon by Atlanta for that.
I had a very kind letter from a Fr. Romagosa in the wake of your passing.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO TOM AND LOUISE GOSSETT
O’Connor mentions that a friend and his father participated in an integrated meal at the Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia. The detail would have interested the Gossetts, since Tom had been suspended earlier from his academic post at a Macon college because of his support of integration.
MILLEDGEVILLE
24 JUNE 59
We are looking forward to seeing you all in August but we can’t go to Pass Christian—not just the cat although I can’t imagine my parent in the car with one, but just because we aren’t the travelling kind. Nothing short of Europe could lure us off the place at this point…and as you know, we done been there already.
She sends you this picture of a cat but says when you come to leave yours in the car. Maybe this has deep psychological roots as the graduate students say; anyway they are too deep for me. I am mighty glad she doesn’t have an aversion to chickens or my life might have been ruint.
We were glad to get your address so we could thank you again for taking us to the monastery. Regina sent Fr. Paul some tuberous begonias by Billy [Sessions] the last time he was here. Billy brought his daddy up and they spent the night at the monastery. The old man is from South Carolina and isn’t a Catholic. It so chanced that the week end they were there, The Trappists were having a retreat for some society of Negroes. They make no distinction, so old man Sessions had to eat with them. I understand he bore up well, however.
We were at the Sanford House the other day and both Mary Jo and Miss White came over to say behind their hands that a certain lady there was none other than MRS. MARTIN. We had a good look. No comment.
Let us know when you will be here. We’d like you to spend the night but if you can’t at least plan to eat with us. The cat can be served in the car.
Cheers,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES MCCOWN
O’Connor recounts differences in Catholic opinion. While the Jesuits admire her, another religious order harbors suspicions about her writing. Anchored in the faith, O’Connor retains her good humor.
MILLEDGEVILLE
11 JULY 59
Reverend & Dear Father,
I hope you don’t subscribe to that paper. I hope you just picked it up out of some ecclesiastical trashbasket. You and I know that somebody with a Southern accent should be teaching the Pope English. All such mistakes are a result of the fall.
The Gossetts say they are going to see you on their way to San Antonio. We wish we could come with them but we are the original Stick-in-the-Muds. I have just energy enough to pick up the eggs out of the chicken yard every morning.
There is a very funny book on death and Judgment (a novel) called MOMENTO MORI [sic] that you should read and recommend in your book store. By a lady named Muriel Spark[s]. The extra copies of your brother’s article came in very handy [Robert McCown, S.J., “Flannery O’Connor and the Reality of Sin”].
The Revrundpaster here had in two sisters from Warner Robins for three weeks to teach the vacation school—straight from you know where they were. So one of them hears that I am a Catholic writer and requests to see my book immediately. So I bundled a copy of yr brother’s article with it. We never heard the verdict. She took it all away with her, leaving the message that she hadn’t had time to read it. I wonder.
I am typing my novel [The Violent Bear It Away] for the last time and it should be out in the spring with all the other crocusses.
Do you subscribe to the Davenport Messenger [Iowa]? If you do not let me know and I will send you a subscription. I get more out of it than out of the Comminwheel.
* * *
O’Connor makes an allusion to a Jesuit perhaps derived from Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Riding a motorcycle instead of a horse, Father McCown traversed the rugged American Southwest like Cather’s Father Latour did a century earlier in the novel.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
2 AUGUST 59
Well you are getting farther and farther away from civilization but I guess the people in Texas need to be saved worsen us Georgians and Mississippians…
I hope you will be allowed to wear a cowboy hat and spurs along with the Roman collar.
Maybe you can introduce your brother to a better brand of conservatives. Some of the new conservatives, such as Russell Kirk [The Conservative Mind], can barely be told from the better liberals.
Your subscription to the Davenport Messenger [Iowa] will have begun in the middle of August and sent to Texas. Mary McCarthy may be in Europe OR she may not wish to correspond with no wily Jesuit.
* * *
O’Connor requests prayer from the Jesuits. She is thankful for the few accurate interpretations of her fiction and plans for Father McCown’s brother to review her forthcoming novel.
MILLEDGEVILLE
14 NOVEMBER 59
Thank you for the quick reply, which sets that out of my head so that I can go about my business. It is very good to know somebody you can ask.
Honor Tracy is a woman and so far as I know that’s her name. It is hard to tell from the book [The Straight and Narrow Path] whether she is a believer or not. I have a friend who insists she is, but I don’t know. The book is both funnier and more serious if she is.
My professor friend and I have about covered the ground on saints. I told him he was looking for the dramatic saints of the last age, whereas the Church was successfully busy teaching people how to live their daily lives in Christ and how to die. He is now taking the line that he is a member of the soul of the Church, which he points out Catholic doctrine says is enough for salvation. I have sent off a letter saying it is enough for those in invincible ignorance but not enough on principle. Every time I make any kind of point, he shifts ground to somewhere else.
You are right that Coffee [Thomas P.] ought to be a better writer himself if he is going to criticize other Catholic writers [“Is There an American Catholic Literature?” Saturday Review, September 5, 1959]. At some time or other
I may try to write a more reflective piece on the same subject and send it to the Sat. Review. It is not a good magazine.
I want to put your brother’s name [Robert McCown, S.J.] on the list for Farrer Straus to send review copies of my book to [The Violent Bear It Away]. Anybody who has written on me they will send a copy to if I send the address, so will you send me the address where your brother is liable to be in December or January. That is when I expect the advance copies will go out. Pray that the reception of this book will not be too bad. It is a book that most will find very hard to take. There is nothing appealing in it. I am stealing myself for the worst.
* * *
O’Connor includes a comic strip apparently from the Sunday bulletin of the local Catholic Church. A seedy character in a smoke-filled room is reading a “forbidden book.” He dies, and in judgment before an irate St. Peter he is condemned to hell.
MILLEDGEVILLE
16 JUNE 59
Thanks for all the edifying literature. I enclose you our last Sunday’s comic strip instruction on bad reading. We have like examples to curdle us every Sunday. Note that the people who put this out call themselves CATHOLITE PUBLICATIONS.
Whilst you were wondering where the Clines were, they were here.
My book probably won’t be out until next spring. In the meantime, this is a good one.
* * *
O’Connor mentions a friendship with a Catholic convert, Russell Kirk, who was a prolific writer, historian, and essayist. He has never been as well known among the Jesuits (and in the larger Church) as Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. While their conversion stories are familiar, Kirk’s is not. His influence is arguably as significant as Day’s or Merton’s. His political vision is different, and in some respects more penetrating in its analysis of the American founding and the later history of the republic.
O’Connor met Kirk when both visited mutual friends, the Cheneys, in Tennessee. O’Connor reviewed one of his many books for the diocesan newspaper. His most famous nonfiction work, The Conservative Mind (1953), emphasized that the legacy of the American founding is rooted in the Jeffersonian tradition.24 Decentralization, limited government, and political subsidiarity were its vital features. The Jeffersonian principles formed a bipartisan American traditionalism in the aftermath of World War II upon which Ronald Reagan relied in his landslide reelection in 1984. Kirk provided vital counsel, especially in Reagan’s recovery of Jeffersonian language in his 1981 inaugural address. Reagan, ironically, as a Republican suggested the alternative to Lincolnian nationalist centralization: “All of us—all of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the states; the states created the Federal Government.” Reagan’s successors, in particular George W. Bush, abandoned Reagan’s subsidiaritist vision and supported a stolid neo-conservative imperialist foreign policy. President Bush increased massive centralist government and was dedicated to imperial global democracy fundamentally at odds with Reagan’s support of limited government and avoidance of American interventionism.
MILLEDGEVILLE
20 SEPTEMBER 59
We were real sorry to hear about that Mr. Benton that we didn’t get to call up. We don’t take the Macon paper so we didn’t see about it. I sent the clipping to Tom that you gave us. Apparently nobody paid Martin’s letter any attention. They are stuck with him. Tom and Louise [Gossett] didn’t come through here but went to West Virginia and then were going on to San Antonio. The General Clines are also in San Antonio but I don’t know their address.
Russell Kirk is a Presbyterian who goes to the Catholic Church. I know two or three Presbyterians who go to the Catholic Church. It seems to be the thing for intellectual Presbyterians to do. Russell, I think, is not a Catholic because the Church is not as conservative as he is. He and I were guests at the same house in Nashville one weekend. He is nice but hard to talk to.
Well, good for old Mary McCarthy answering your letter. I imagine there may be some bitterness in her feeling about the Church but I couldn’t say for sure. Wm. Alexander Percy [Uncle, Walker Percy] seemed to leave in a kind of will-less way.
My friend, the professor, writes that he finds none of the Church’s doctrines intolerable and that he would come into the Church tomorrow if he thought the Church was doing a good job of making saints. So what do you say to somebody like that?
I don’t think there is anything I could do about your brother reviewing my book anywhere because authors just can’t suggest people to review their books; but I do hope he will review it. I think if he just wrote the magazine, told them he had written on me before and where and would be interested in reviewing that that would be the best thing.
My mother indicates that she will get YOU in trouble with the Holy Office if you miss any further appointments at her table.
Cheers,
Are you getting the Davenport Messenger [Iowa]? You are supposed to be.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO MRS. BRAINARD CHENEY
The letter from many years before the election of Ronald Reagan presents an amusing contrast between the president’s later global fame and his earlier role as a television host. The prospect of Reagan playing Mr. Shiftlet in O’Connor’s story is a scene typical of her humor.
MILLEDGEVILLE, 23 SEPTEMBER 56
…I have just sold “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” for a television play to be put on (I think) by the General Electric Playhouse.25 People with TV sets tell me this is a program conducted by Ronald Reagan but I don’t know if that means that Ronald Reagan is going to get to be Mr. Shiftlet or not. I have got my money anyway and now I am going to try and forget about it, although that is mighty hard to do, thinking all the time that R. R. may be Mr. Shiftlet and that they will probably let him and the idiot daughter live happily ever after in a Chrysler convertible. I don’t know when it’s going to be and I don’t want to know. With the proceeds, I have bought my mother a new refrigerator, the latest model with every attachment. It spits the icecubes at you, the trays shoot out and hit you in the middle, and if you step on a button, the whole thing rolls out from the wall…26
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
MILLEDGEVILLE
10 OCTOBER 59
Thanks for the pitchers. I was glad to see myself looking so well. My mother says the trouble with you is you can’t take pictures, just don’t have steady nerves, etc.
I enclose the enclosed famous article lest you have not seen it. I do not think, as the Davenport Messenger, that he should be condemned for putting it in the Sat. Re[view].27 When Catholics realize that their linen is sometimes going to be hung on the public line, they may get it in better condition. However, I don’t think Mr. Coffee distinguishes between “letters” and journalism and I don’t think he knows what prose and poetry is being written. But a lot of this needs to be said.
I can’t tell my friend about the numbers at the Communion rail and the filled churches because he doesn’t see any practical result from this church going. All he knows is what he reads in the papers. This is somewhat like my lapsed Catholic friend who says her mother goes to Communion and comes out of the church making uncharitable remarks about this one and that one. It don’t do any good to tell this girl that this is just a characteristic of ladies of that age and generation and that it doesn’t mean anything. To her it means that the sacrament has no effect. Incidentally, this girl has sold three stories in the last year and they are excellent. The Church is going to sport another very good Lapsed Cath. Writer.
Excelsior,
* * *
O’Connor seeks counsel (December 18, 1959) to defend the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had paralleled Jesuit monastic community with Marxist social organization.
Also [Jung is] full of such things as equatin
g the Communist idea of community with the Church’s and Communist methods with Loyola’s. You ought to get hold of it just to see what you have to combat in the modern mind. I need something that covers this end-sanctifies-means business.28
O’Connor also criticizes Jung’s “syncretist religion”:
Jung has something to offer religion but is at the same time very dangerous for it. Jung would say, for instance that Christ did not rise from the dead literally but we must realize that we need this symbol, that the notion has significance for our lives symbolically, etc.29
FATHER JAMES McCOWN TO FATHER SCOTT WATSON
[handwritten postscript]
Dear Youree [Scott Watson, S.J.]: Greetings from here for Christmas and New Year. This letter will prove interesting to you, I know. Could you help me on the request contained in large paragraph above, and actually send a book with answer to Flannery? She returns books faithfully, and she deserves good treatment in a matter such as at hand—many better than I or our house minus-library could supply. Since I am keeping her correspondence, you might return this letter with a little note in enclosed envelope. Her new book “not a joyous thing that people will like” will be out soon. That’s what she is referring to in the last line above. Things are beginning to hum here.
God bless you,
Hooty
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 17