There are at least half a dozen weekly literary and art newspapers, Les Arts, Le Figaro Littéraire, Les Lettres Françaises, Nouvelles Littéraires, L’Express, etc., besides of course the serious bookshaped ones (and they really are newspapers, full of gossip and lively shop talk, with quite often a long chatty piece about American literature, which they seem to discover scrap by scrap, and they hardly know any of the younger ones) and of the older for years they knew nobody but Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald!! They were fifteen or twenty years getting around to translating Faulkner. But anyway, there was a long piece about the younger generation—some of them looking a little shopworn by now—and how they were trying to find the right man for the place left vacant by Hemingway and Faulkner—the candidates were carefully selected from their “set”—Bellow, Roth, Salinger, Styron, et al., even with Truman Capote and John Updike trailing along: and there you were named alongside Carson McCullers, not of course as Candidates for the exclusively male honor of heading up our national literature, but as its ever-blooming peripheral female adornments!
Well, on to other things…
For months I have been trying to decide where to go and what to do next, here in Europe or Spain or Greece: and I cannot think of any place I want to go, or anything to do: I don’t even want to come back to the USA and wouldn’t for anything stay in Paris a day longer than I have settled for: and this means quite simply that I want to get located somewhere reasonably permanent and dependably quiet, and work. I am quite bored and tired of everything in the world except the lovely prospect of getting my books and papers around me once more, and the uninterrupted days and weeks and months of writing…
I hope I shall see you again sometime soon. I hope you are doing well and also doing whatever you want! This picture of you is better than the other, but it isn’t flattering, either. I like best your self-portrait, and if you have a photograph of it, I wish you would give me one! I’ll swap, if you like. I haven’t got a hand-painted one, but I have one that looks somewhat like me, for the present, and will be glad to send it when I am back in the country. (I remember well Marianne Moore’s warning against sending unsolicited photographs.) I do it in hell’s despite, of course.
Hasta luego!
With affections
Katherine Anne
There has been a Marvelous joyous carnival of mourning for Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau, and it was real! They died as they had lived, with style and grace and their proper eccentricity; and Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time. So do I. I loved them both, and I shed my few difficult tears for them, and I miss them—especially Cocteau, who was exactly of my generation. KA
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
O’Connor distances herself from other popular women writers of her generation and prefers association with a televangelist.
MILLEDGEVILLE, GEORGIA
10 NOVEMBER 63
Thanks so much for the clipping. You never know what kind of company you’re going to keep next but I think I prefer Mary McCarthy to Carson McCullars. These translations give me a very uncomfortable feeling. A French review of Wise Blood was illustrated by a big picture of Billy Ghrame. But then I prefer Billy to both those ladies.
I have been looking around for a picture of my self-portrait. I used to have some but I haven’t turned one up so far, but I have been taking pictures around here and I thought you might like to have these. The peacocks were losing their tails at the time but I think the swan and the burros are nice. I had two swans but the lady passed away and since then the cob has been in love with the bird bath. I made enough on my last trip to order me two new swans as I am determined to raise some. They are supposed to be on their way now from Miami.
I hope you are back and have your things around you. All my best and thanks again.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO LOUISE AND TOM GOSSETT
O’Connor expresses concern for their beloved Jesuit friend. At this time, he was engaging in an exhausting regimen of retreats and travel.
MILLEDGEVILLE
22 SEPT 63
We have about et up your mama’s bread and drunk up that bottle of wine and we still remember your visit with relish. So I hope you can hit us again in June. I can propose a new menu. Shot killed a hoot owl last week and they ate him for supper. I thought I had better find out what he tasted like so I asked Louise how he was and what he tasted like. She said he sho was fine and he tasted about like hawk. So if they kill another, I’ll be tempted to claim him and put him in the deep freeze for special guests.
We didn’t think Fr. McC[own] looked so hot. I know he was pleased you saw his mama.
Mine sends greetings. She is against owl in the deep freeze. Contrary as usual.
Cheers,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
O’Connor mentions facilitating a new friendship for her friend with Walker Percy. She also mentions her contributions to local ecumenical observances. This letter and several others show O’Connor’s playful theology which she may have learned from reading Dante. The Florentine presents animal characters in scenes of complex theological revelation, such as the talking eagle’s long speech in the Paradiso about the salvation of virtuous pagans. The participation of O’Connor’s farm animals in religious celebrations reveals the Dantean element of playful joy.
MILLEDGEVILLE
11 DECEMBER 63
Merry Christmas to you and your mama and brothers and sisters. I’m glad you could get shut of Atlanta over the holidays and that you got a visit to Walker Percy. Hep yourself if you want to lend him my book [The Violent Bear It Away, probably]; however, as it is out in paperback, he might rather get a copy of his own and not have to fool with sending it back.
I’m glad you’re growing Andalusia worms in the state capital. That should add something to the capital.
One of our burros is being lent to the First Methodist church for their Christmas service. I hear tell he will walk across the front of the church. The other two burros are being lent to the Christian church. That is our contribution to the current ecumenical spirit. And we’ll get to see what Protestantism does for their characters in that short time.
CHAPTER 4
“REMOVING CHOICE SOULS SO SOON”
This chapter features letters of Flannery O’Connor to Ward Allison Dorrance, another writer tutored by Caroline Gordon. She wrote O’Connor from Paris in 1953 that she was showing Dorrance O’Connor’s stories. Some years later Dorrance was a professor at Georgetown University when O’Connor lectured there in 1963 at the 175th anniversary of the university’s founding. O’Connor encourages him to finish his novel, The Party at Mrs. Purefoy’s. She also recounts the difficulties of living on a dairy farm and provides an admirable portrait of Regina O’Connor.
The letters to Dorrance, moreover, impart moving details about O’Connor’s final months before her death—what she was reading and what she was thinking. Dorrance was also very ill (he had emphysema). Right up to the end, O’Connor plies the craft of fiction as Caroline Gordon had taught both her and Dorrance.
As O’Connor weakened, the letters chronicle how the steady diet of theological reading in neo-Thomist theologians and philosophers changed. A friend from New York, Janet McKane, had urged O’Connor to read C. S. Lewis. Dorrance also sends books by Lewis in which O’Connor delights. Both Dorrance and O’Connor in their dire physical conditions discovered the apologetic power of Lewis, what he called “mere Christianity.” Lewis’s writings both comforted and inspired O’Connor as she was assembling the stories that would make up Everything That Rises Must Converge.
O’Connor’s untimely death was a great loss to her friends. Father McCown comforts the bereaved, Tom and Louise Gossett. Father McCown’s relentless pursu
it of social justice also continued after O’Connor’s death. His theological and political views, however, would depart from what O’Connor called in a letter a “nasty dose of orthodoxy.” McCown tested his new views on Walker Percy. As much as Percy enjoyed McCown’s travel writings, he would criticize his drift into anti-Americanism. Percy was rooted in the political realism of John Paul II, who survived the twin tyrannies of Nazism and Communism through theological orthodoxy.
Father McCown’s friendship with Percy after O’Connor’s death reveals the continued mediation of her faith-based political positions. Percy endured the senseless murders of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the protracted Vietnam War. During this violent, dark period, Percy adroitly managed, unlike Father McCown, to embrace both anti-Communism and the civil rights movement. Percy, like O’Connor, also maintained allegiance to his Southern roots. He had little patience for the distant sanctimony of commentators, critical of segregation as a purely regional failing of Percy’s native Mississippi. For Percy, Detroit, Newark, and Boston were no paragons of racial accord.
Unlike several of O’Connor’s friends after her death, Father McCown never left the Church—anti-Americanism and advocacy of Latin American liberation theology, however, influenced his thinking, as the correspondence in this chapter reveals.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE
O’Connor is grateful for her friend’s correspondence. O’Connor also discusses the emotional problems of another friend, a “confessional poet.”
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
31 MARCH 1963
Dear Miss McKane,
Thank you so much for the Lourdes book and the book of Miss Tabor’s [Eithne] poems [The Cliff’s Edge: Songs of a Psychotic]. I have been sick in bed with my annual spring cold and I enjoyed them both then. I would like to show the poems to one of the chaplains at the state hospital here. I don’t know if I mentioned it but we have in Milledgeville the largest mental institution in the world. They have just got onto religion out there and now they have three Protestant chaplains. One of them, a Presbyterian, called on me not long ago. He had read some of my stories. He had been an engineering student before he went into the ministry and he didn’t know much about literature but he was interested in poetry. I sent him off with a couple of Robert Lowell’s books. Robert Lowell is a friend of mine who was in the Catholic Church for a while and who is plagued by recurring phases of mental illness. I told this minister that I thought every mental institution ought to have a resident writer. There are a lot of them (patients) who are well enough to do more with themselves and their time than weave baskets. I think he would be much interested in this girl.
I also enjoyed the article on Vaughn. That was just the beginning of the trek away from the liturgical and the farther the world gets away from it, the harder the writer’s job. Do you know a book by Wm. F. Lynch called Christ and Apollo? I think it is in a paper back now. You would like it.
The “passive diminishment” is probably a bad translation of something more understandable. What he means is that in the case he’s talking about, the patient is passive in relation to the disease—he’s done all he can to get rid of it and can’t so he’s passive and accepts it. (de Chardin) [Teilhard].
You are very kind to offer to look for books for me that I can’t get. I may call on you some time. Right now I am pretty well supplied. I don’t have many Catholic friends who are interested in reading. The ones who are have left the church, the ones who don’t read, manage to stay in. An exaggeration, but this is the way it often seems. I can’t think of any of them that I could present a copy of Eve and the Gryphon to right at the moment. I only just recently got hold of two paperback books I ordered from the Paulist Press—Unless Some Man Show Me, a book about the Old Testament I have been told is good and Love or Constraint which is about “some psychological aspects of religious education.” If you haven’t got them or haven’t read them, I’ll pass them on to you when I read them.
I hope you have the best kind of Easter. I am very grateful for your interest in me and my work.
Yours,
Flannery O’Connor
* * *
O’Connor shares the breadth of her reading which included the Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, and reports about the Second Vatican Council convened from 1962 to 1965.
MILLEDGEVILLE
15 JUNE 63
Dear Miss McKane,
This is certainly it. I guess that in order to keep something in mind we exaggerate it and then when we see it again we find that it is more subtle than we had thought. It’s really the Child who is laughing, the Virgin is only smiling. I don’t remember the hand being off. Now I’m more anxious to see it again than ever.
You must be psychic all the way around because in the Cross Currents you sent, you had marked the review of Karl Barth’s book, the same one I received a few days ago to review [Evangelical Theology: An Introduction]. I am making slow headway with it. Although it is not difficult it is a little wearing to read such a good man who thinks that believing in the Catholic church is idolatry.
I’ll keep the Metropolitan Bulletin a while before I return it as I’d like to read these articles in it. The pictures I’ve seen of German Medieval carving have always fascinated me. In a lot of ways I’d like to be able to write like they carved. But then I’ve never seen anything but pictures except for my two fading trips to the Cloisters.
Have you read the Xavier Rynne book, Letters from Vatican City? It is a much expanded version of some letters that were first in The New Yorker, and I guess it is the best report that we’ll have on the Council.
I guess you are about through teaching for the year. What do you do in the summer? I look forward to the summer because I can stay at home and work and don’t have to go anywhere.
Best,
Flannery OC.
MILLEDGEVILLE
3 AUGUST 63
Dear Janet,
Did you get the two books I sent some time before I thanked you for the article on Chagall? I figure you didn’t. The mails are very peculiar. Anyway I sent the Raven book & a copy of the British ed. of The Violent Bear etc [It Away], also a letter enclosed thanking you for the cards and commenting on same.
Thanks a lot for the leaflet. I’m most glad to be getting them again.
I’m still struggling to get through Karl Barth. I like what I read though.
More again
Yours
Flannery
* * *
A devout parishioner of Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville, O’Connor applies a theme of her story, “The Displaced Person.” A few years after the suppression of Catholics by the Marxist government of Cuba, the local parish experiences the effects with the appearance of displaced Cubans in the local congregation. O’Connor also beseeches prayer, since traveling for lectures is becoming more difficult.
MILLEDGEVILLE
1 OCTOBER 63
Dear Janet,
Thanks so much for the veils. I’ve always wanted one of these and somehow never got around to getting myself one so I am terribly pleased to have them. You are adding several cubits to my height against firm Biblical admonition. I am 5'4", weigh 115, so I guess the larger one should go to somebody that could grace it properly. We have a large Cuban population in our church and they wear them. They, incidentally, seem to be either exceptional Catholics or have no use for it at all. Most of the ones we have are doctors and their families. They have positions at the state mental hospital. Most of them are at church every time the door opens. I had always supposed Latin American Catholics universally indifferent, but it is not so.
The burro arrived, has been named Equinox by my mother, and his picture is enclosed. Also one of my swan
drinking out of the bird bath; he is very fond of the bird bath. The burro is pictured at 1 hour old behind our house in the orchard. He looks kind of hangdog in the snapshot but he’s actually very lively and gallops around bucking and kicking.
I am going to give a talk called “The Catholic Novelist” in the Protestant South at Notre Dame of Maryland and at Georgetown and at Hollins I am going to read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” with commentary.1 The lecture never suits me and I keep changing it, usually probably making it worse rather than better. I despise the traveling, am always afraid the plane is going to be fogged in and I won’t get where I’m supposed to be and one thing and another like that. So please remember me in your prayers especially from the 14th through the 19th.
Thanks for the leaflet and the Sign and the piece on Buber [Martin], all of which I’m enjoying. I’ve just got through reading a book called Atheism in Our Time by Ignace Lepp. I recommend it highly.
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