Good Things out of Nazareth
Page 28
2 MARCH 63
Dear Betty,
How many Perrys are there for pity’s sake? I thought there was just this one man. If there are two against him, he might as well fold up. What is it, man & wife? Always a bad combination. Whatever they have is not the nasty parents deal because Mr. Jiras tells me the man wants to get rid of Bevel’s father altogether and have the mother be ready to get married again. While she is off getting herself a man, I gather, the child is sent off with the baby-sitter for the whole weekend. Mr. Jiras wants me to help them with a couple of new scenes [“The River”] between the child and Mr. Paradise and with the preacher, but of course I am not contributing a line to something I disapprove of—which will be a great excuse for me not to contribute my services. Actually, I don’t care what they do with the thing, but I definitely prefer the Gene Kelly kind of crap to this kind.
Quote from latest communication from Dr. A. [Ashley] Brown: “You can inform Betty that Iris Murdoch’s annual novel will be out soon. This one is about a unicorn [The Unicorn].”
Mr. Sherry after his visit here went home and thought it over and then wrote and asked me if I would contribute an article every month to his supplement. I have told him no but that I will contribute an occasional one and have agreed to do something for the first issue. I have been right disgusted with all the sentimentality wasted on those teachers who were giving Steinbeck and Hersey to the 8th grade so I am writing on that. Ralph McGill had an idiot column on it in which he implied that Hersey was much better than Hawthorne.
Miss Leone is still going strong, hanging onto her cock.
Thursday, Friday and Saturday I will be at a Symposium at Sweet Briar and will be wishing I was not. Also there is going to be a philosopher named George Boas, a theologian named Hopper, and art critic named James Johnson Sweeney (friend of Tom’s), a pianist I forgit her name and old John Chiardi [Ciardi] who is everywhere anybody else is.
“Everything That Rises Must Converge” has got the O. Henry prize this year. I was much surprised as I had forgotten that that prize existed. Somebody from Harvard is now running it.
I am right worried about the state of the Wm. A. Sessions and have written Billy to render an account of himself.
Cheers,
Flannery
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
Juxtaposed against Father McCown’s narrative about Mexican faith is O’Connor’s description of the increasing alienation of some academic communities in the United States from theological orthodoxy. The observation has become prophetic in the triumph of hostility to Christianity on many American campuses today. She invents a famous phrase that summarizes well the theological essence of her lectures and apologetics. Because of fashionable theological trends in the academic world, O’Connor was unexpectedly becoming an apologist for orthodoxy.
MILLEDGEVILLE
4 APRIL 63
I can’t find anything much to complain of in this, in fact nothing [With McCown in Mexico]. Whether you can get it published will depend pretty much on what the whole looks like when you finish it. I don’t know what publishers think about travel books. I am thinking you might just try Sheed & Ward and see what they say.
I hope the debutants edified you and visa versa and all. I have just been to a symposium at Sweet Briar in Virginia on Religion and Art and did I ever get a stomachful of liberal religion. The thing began with a paper by George Boaz on Art and Magic. I don’t know exactly what he meant to say but he left the impression that religion was a good thing (or at least unavoidable) because it was art and magic. They had a Methodist-Universalist there who talked about how the symbology of religion was decayed and then it ended with John Chiardi [Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?] told them about how God was a grandfather image and they had better shuck it.24 I gave them a nasty dose of orthodoxy in my paper but I think it passed as quaint. It is later than we think.25
Pray for my friend Roslyn. She has been sent to a new University [Universidad Católica del Norte] at Antofagasta, Chile, where I gather things are pretty bleak. It’s a Jesuit University but apparently nobody practices the religion but the Jesuits and Roslyn. I am afraid she will get impatient there and I hope to the Lord she don’t undertake to reform the Jesuits.
I friend of mine who lives in Brazil is sending me an example of native religious art—a crucifix in a bottle. She says she hopes I won’t be too appalled. It has not arrived yet.
A happy Easter to you and remember me to your mama and sister and brother.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO LA TRELLE
While several letters recount misreadings of The Violent Bear It Away, O’Connor reveals in a pithy paragraph the scriptural inspiration of the novel and its root in ascetical theology.
MILLEDGEVILLE,
14 FEBRUARY 63
Dear La Trelle,
I was cheered to hear from you and receive that snappy valentine. I had been a little worried after your note Christmas and wanted to write you but had lost your box number up there. Now I have it written down in my book. If I can manage not to lose the book.
About Matthew 12:11. The King James version has it “…the violent take it by force,” but I thought “bear it away” sounded better. What they take by force or bear away is the kingdom of heaven itself. The violent in this case are the people who are willing to act upon their faith and act vigorously. St. Augustine and St. Thomas say the violent here are ascetics. Anyway it is the kind of passion for the things of God which makes asceticism possible, which puts nothing in the way and lets nothing interfere with winning heaven. Old Tarwater is this kind of Christian. All the saints are. I guess John Wesley was. Call it a single-minded assault upon the kingdom of heaven, often accomplished in part by self denial. By doing the will of God.
I am going to be at Sweet Briar College, Va March 7–9 and at Troy State April 23–4. I’m going to the University in Athens sometime this spring but the date hasn’t been fixed. Don’t let me miss you when you come.
There are two articles in here that I think very good. You can see if you get anything out of them and send them back to me when you get through with them.
That degree was a Doctor of Letters, St. Mary’s College, Indiana, 1962.
If I can recommend you for a teaching job just put my name down. I don’t know any of those schools.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ELIZABETH HESTER
O’Connor speaks of sentimentality in the movies, which she labels “tenderization,” and worries about distortions of a film version of her story. Her observations draw on one of her most penetrating statements:
…we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness, which long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is divorced from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.26
MILLEDGEVILLE
16 MARCH 63
Dear Betty,
By the enclosures you will see that the young man is a dead-ringer for his paw with a touch of something foreign thrown in. A long breathless letter accompanied these, detailing how the master of the house had nearly had a collapse what with overwork and strain and so forth but how now things were looking up. Jenny [Mrs. William Sessions] is going to Greece for part of the spring and all of the summer as she has a small legacy there and Billy will go back to Oree County [Horry County, South Carolina] to his momma and poppa. And thus is it with the Sessions.
The Perrys sound fair gruesome to me. I have been reading about the picture here and there. It is always called “tender.” I think they are only trying to make Mr. Jirases movie [“The River”] into something “tender.” So we shall just have to wait and see how well Mr. Jiras resists its tenderization. If they are going to make it tender I hope
they make it so dam tender that it will make a million bucks and I will become so filthy rich that I can quit going to symposiums in Virginia…
As for it, it was like all the rest of them. I wouldn’t know what to tell you about Chiardi [John Ciardi]. He has a magnetic personality as far as students are concerned. If he were a crooner they would squeal. You feel he has said the same thing to students so much that if his mouth were plastered up, it would come out of his ears. This is probably true for anybody who is articulate and does much of this. Boas [George] moderated the whole thing and at the end of it when he was summing up the “conclusions” or the non-conclusions more likely, he said, “And it’s been a great pleasure for me personally to be here at Bryn Mawh College” [Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania]. It was Sweet Briar [College, Virginia], of course.
Miss Leone is failing fast, but Miss Winnifred Fowler is about to make it and Elizabeth is delighted because [she] bet that Miss Winnifred’s daughter was thinking that she was going to get to spend all that money at last.
Cheers,
Flannery
ROSLYN BARNES TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
O’Connor encouraged Father McCown to continue writing Roslyn Barnes. He sent her letters to Thomas Gossett. Formed by the severe discipline of Monseigneur Ivan Illich, Barnes seeks counsel, as had O’Connor, from Father McCown.
CASILLA 1280
U DEL NORTE
ANTOFAGASTA [CHILE]
SUNDAY [SPRING, 1963]
Dear Fr. Mc C.
I just returned from vacation and reunion in Santiago, to find your letter and the books awaiting me. Many thanks! I am very anxious to get into Christ and Apollo [William F. Lynch, S.J.]. I remember Flannery’s recommending it very highly, but I was unable to get a copy at the time. Thank you so very much. I found a letter waiting from Flannery, too. Her handwriting was so shaky, she must still be terribly weak. But at least she seems to be out of danger, and that is a great deal!
I am afraid I have expressed my viewpoints badly to you. I do believe that consecrated virginity is one Christian ideal. But I do not believe that it is the Christian ideal, and I do not believe that the consecrated virgin is more “pure” than the partners of a genuine love relationship expressing itself through sex. There are pure virgins & impure virgins, and pure lovers and impure lovers. For me the degree of purity depends absolutely on the degree of love and loving self surrender, whether the Beloved is God Himself or God incarnated in a human person. Fidelity is an element of genuine love, and I do not approve of the treatment your little Mexican unwed mothers have received from their men. (But any real woman will give herself to the man she loves regardless of what the consequences are for her, just as you would give yourself completely to God even if you knew He was going to send you [to] Hell). Love is the important thing. Only thru love can there be any real purity and real charity, in whatever state of life. You mentioned not having run into a good book on this subject. I recently was given a very good one to read by the priest who has charge of us gringos in Chile—Fr. Charles Magram, MM—you ever meet him in the States? It’s called In Defense of Purity, Hildebrand [Dietrich von]. It provides some good insights.27
Ixmiquilpan must have been a wonderful experience. The little Sisters are certainly charming. Actually, this Order seems to me the ideal for…life—it perfectly celebrates the incarnation of God in the everyday world. They do not “retreat” from the world—they penetrate it. Theirs is a beautiful vocation. I have often wished it were mine, but I know it isn’t. But for me it is the ideal for the woman living the life [of] consecrated virginity. When I came thru Arequipa last summer, I visited the little Sisters there, and found them just as radiant and gay.
Time to be closing now—second semester is under way, and I still have an afternoon of work ahead of me. Let me know how your work goes in the States now, and your book too [With McCown in Mexico]. Don’t forget my “principito.”
Yours,
Rosalyn
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO LOUISE AND THOMAS GOSSETT
O’Connor expresses her skepticism of academic honors. Her professor friends who were treated poorly by academic officialdom, as other letters reveal, would probably have appreciated O’Connor’s views.
11 MAY 63
We’re supposed to be where we’re going on the 1st so we’ll be a-going there on the 31st. I call it down right revolting. I’m getting another stinking degree at one of them fancy colleges up there and I would much rather stay at home and visit with you all. Are two non-negotiable degrees more negotiable than one? No. Anyway, why don’t you all come back through here? We can discuss Texas since I been there now.
Let us know how you find your West Virginia peacocks. Mine are all strutting in the middle of the road this year and are very trying to the colored folk’s traffic. They come up the road at 80 mi per hr. have to stop and dislodge the bird who gives them a kind of modified course as they do so. Not at all good for race relations.
Cheers,
* * *
The letter borders on becoming a story. O’Connor identifies with her rural characters in dealing with hostile commentators and the national government. An honorary degree shows a cheerful association with Southern literature that O’Connor avoids in other letters.
MILLEDGEVILLE
4 AUGUST 63
I don’t see how you all are making out up there without the consolation of a peahen and having mud in the bathtub and toting your drinking water from the spring. I think you had better get you a place in Georgia. I can then supply you with peahens and even a duck or two. I have this muscow duck that hatched nine in March, six in June, and is at it again underneath the back steps. I can look through a hole and see her setting. Each set she has hatched has been taken over by a bantam hen so that the muscovy could go back to her social life, which is very intense. There were six hens in the first set, I gave away the second. But next March, by my calculations I should have upwards of sixty infant muscovys. Muscovys are quackless ducks but adept at sign language.
I haven’t read that Irving Malin book [New American Gothic]. Somebody wrote me about it but left me with the impression that I had been condemned, insulted, knocked down and drug out in it, so I thought well there’s no use my raising my blood pressure by reading it. How I keep so calm is I just keep in mind on feeding myself and my chickens and resisting the pressures of the Federal Govermint. I write a few stories but I don’t know how to interpit them.
We were awful sorry to miss you in June and that doctors degree don’t do me a bit of good either. They gave away six of them—bargain day at Smith [College, Massachusetts]. Most of them were Smith graduates and scientists, buggy or social, but when they start looking for somebody in literature they have to go South, naturally.
We wish you all would take this way back. I might even attempt to speak on the subject of angels in fiery furnaces or artificial niggers and mercy if you were here in person.
Cheers,
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
The next few letters trace the renewal of the friendship between Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O’Connor. By 1963 Maurice-Edgar Coindreau had translated some of O’Connor’s fiction, and she was becoming popular in France. Coindreau had made Faulkner’s fiction accessible to his countrymen who were interested in the Mississippian’s unexpected existentialist themes in regional settings in The Sound and the Fury and other novels. Both Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre found Faulkner’s writing compelling, especially Camus, who was also translating Faulkner as he edited Combat, an underground newspaper during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Coindreau recognized that O’Connor drew on Faulkner’s achievement with her own resourceful techniques. In 1958, he began translating O’Connor’s stories. The fruit of his efforts appears in Porter’s letter in which she inform
s O’Connor of her celebrity in France.
SUNDAY AUGUST 12, 1963
PARIS, FRANCE
Dear Flannery:
Maybe you have a clipping bureau service of some kind, or your publishers for you. I have never had either, except for three months after my novel came out, which The Atlantic Monthly took for me: I never see anything printed about me or my work unless some friend or relative sends me it. So I am sending you this. Not long ago my translator here asked me if I could suggest any young American writers for her to translate, and I said, “Flannery O’Connor.” She had never heard of you. I said, “No and the French never catch on except fifteen years later.” I mentioned Faulkner, totally unknown here when Steinbeck was considered the great American writer. I said, “Malcolm Lowry is just being heard of here, and his publisher in America sent me the page proofs of Under the Volcano just seventeen years ago! While you people were having kittens about Henry Miller!”
Etcetera. I could run on this way for several paragraphs. Well, we were in Galignani’s librairie—a huge place,—looking around, and there on a table with a show of writers translated from English, you were! or rather, two books of yours! Marcelle Sibon (the translator and my old friend) prides herself on keeping up the best writers in English as they come. She suffered chagrin, as the French say, and serves her right. And I asked Galignani himself, if he sold many of your books. And he said, “Very nicely, nothing sensational, it is just that she has her readers!”28 And Flannery, I glowed with pleasure, for what honest artist could ask for more? And I know, because from my first book I had my readers, and I still have them, and my unchanging affection for them and delight in them; I never expected or wanted more, and all those quite hundreds of thousand persons who seemed to have bought the Ship [of Fools] and, so it has been said more than once, were unable to read it, have after all made no difference except that now I have a modest fixed income—I can’t of course really have the use of the money because the Revenoors will take 91 percent of it, and I just don’t feel that generous! Any way, not to Revenooers.—But nothing has changed in my life or my good solid relation with my readers, and that is something to treasure! You have, after all, enormously more of a reputation than I had at your age or for many years after, and I don’t doubt as much or more that I have now: that is purely relative and personal and is not what I am talking about. As you well know.