CASILLA 1200
U DEL NORTE
ANTOFAGASTA, CHILE
FRIDAY AUGUST [1964]
It was very good to hear from you this morning.
Yes, Flannery means very much to me. I do share your grief. I teach her stories in my classes, but it’s not the artist I miss. It’s the human person. Some friends have written to me saying what a loss that so fine an artist with so much to give should die so young. I don’t really agree with them. I feel that Flannery’s vision and interpretation of Reality had matured and would not have changed. And her style of writing was good enough to express that vision clearly and powerfully at times. She would have written more. But would it have been different? No, the real loss is for me her herself, the human person. Of course the bonds of love, and knowledge are never broken and I can still say “She means a lot to me” and not “She meant a lot to me.” But death does take away her face, hands, the sound of her voice, things we need and miss so much. And there’s always apprehension, at least for me. What is she experiencing…What is life-after death really like? What is it like for her?
The news of her death was news I hadn’t expected. When [I got] back from Santiago (winter vacation) the end of July…from her awaiting me. She said she was still in bed, but then went on to talk about her new swans, saying she hoped to…more time with them in a month or so. Her letter, as usual, [was] cheerful, although the handwriting was very faint and shaky. Then about Aug. 10 I got a letter from a friend of mine who works as a fiction editor for a NY magazine. The first thing that fell out of the envelope was a newspaper notice of F’s death. Yes, I do have most of her letters to me but in the States. Of course I would be happy to loan them to your friend. Like yours they aren’t profound, mostly about everyday things, peacocks, neighbors, the farm. Light, humorous, always cheerful and simple. I did often regret that she never talked with me about the things that were most serious for her, because I loved her and sensed her alone-ness. But I respected and accepted her reticence since she felt the need for it. In a sense you might say she helped me about the Church. She was the one responsible for my conversion: She made me read Teilhard de Chardin, who is certainly my “spiritual father” far beyond any other, as she knew, I think, he would be. Her fiction itself had its influence on my way of thinking. Once in a great while she would make a comment or a suggestion. But she never never tried to advise or convince me about anything. The times she directly spoke to me about religion are so few, I can tell them to you quickly. Before I knew anything about the Church, a friend of F’s died, and wrote her a letter of sympathy. Somehow in the interchange of ideas [and] letters, she had the occasion to explain Purgatory to me, very simply and beautifully, in only a sentence or two. A year later when I wrote her I was taking instruction she advised me to go to Mass every day so that I would become Catholic as a “whole person”…would never make me become Catholic, she felt. I can’t recall now the exact way she said this. It was much more beautiful than the way I have written it. And later, when I thought of entering PAVLA she warned me against ignorant priests and nuns. If only I had taken her more seriously in that! I was too idealistic and I almost paid for it with my faith. I never let F. know about my troubles with the Church, but maybe she guessed I was asking for trouble in my naivete and wanted me to know a good priest. So she asked you to write to me. Not that she told me that. She told me you were writing a book about Mexico and thought I might be able to help a little, especially in explaining Cuernavaca. So you see—of direct help, there was hardly any. Mostly, she just gave me her friendship and accepted mine. And the example of her beautiful fidelity and clear honest thinking were always there to give me confidence. I hope she really cared for me and was not just “doing her Christian duty.” One of the things that has hurt, shocked, and scandalized me most is the distortion of love I have found in so many good Catholics. It makes one feel so very bad to be an object of charity, to be used as somebody’s spiritual exercise or good-deed-for-the-day, etc. To be loved “for God’s sake” is so often not to be loved at all. I cannot bear this. For me it is a form of prostitution, and no less disgusting than the form the Church condemns. Our director here, Fr. Magsam, has explained to me that it’s bad spirituality, that Christian love is very different from this, that this is not the Church’s ideal of loving, etc. Yet I run into it almost constantly in good Catholics, so that it seems to me that the Church does commonly teach what is admitted to be bad spirituality by this very human, intelligent and experienced priest. If you are writing to me to do your duty, please don’t do it any more—I’ll tell St. Peter I excused you from it if you have trouble at the gate.
The Mass and the Sacraments and the Mysteries of Christ’s life mean very much to me. But the Church and some of its “elite” have hurt and shocked me so deeply that I know I may never recover from the damage. I have suffered so much these past 2 years that God’s love seems almost like a dream to me and sometimes I can’t feel that I believe in it at all. Fr. Magsam tells me this is only the effect of pain and that I do have faith. I don’t know. I’m glad F. didn’t know all this. It would have hurt and worried her. And who knows? Perhaps everything will still be all right and the things that have happened to me Providential after all…Am enjoying Christ & Apollo [William F. Lynch, S.J.] very much. Thanks for sending it. Did F. tell you that I dedicated my MA thesis to her? It was on GM Hopkins & T. de Chardin, a comparison.
I am a “me-tooer” too in what you say about love. But I think that love on earth must have elements of ugliness, as the Passion of Christ itself did. In this world both saints & lovers look grotesque and repulsive. And the world of loving is so much more chaotic than the world of hate. To commit oneself to love is to ask for destruction—Christ’s experience is the proof of it. If only we were all so capable of taking destruction as He! I know that a woman loves in a very different way than a man. Her love approaches closer the way God loves. It has an element of Divinity even when it looks extreme and grotesque, ugliness you say. The face of love can be ugly as well as beautiful…Do you like Tagore? There is a beautiful sentence of her which says, “Amor: cuando…” Don’t forget my principito…Please excuse me if my letters have seemed rude. L’AMOUR is something I can’t discuss un-passionately. You will have to write CIF that you know one missioner who has certainly succeeded in acculturating “beyond the call of duty!”…We will miss F. so much. I like you more for knowing the Church hasn’t educated you out of feeling. Here’s hoping for a return home to Mexico for us both!
Your friend, Roslyn
The last specific date from Roslyn Barnes with her whereabouts in Chile documented is in a letter of November 17, 1964, to Father McCown. Sally Fitzgerald notes that “she disappeared in the course of her mission work. All efforts to trace her or learn her fate have failed.”11 O’Connor herself ominously wrote of her friend on January 22, 1964:
She is presently lost in the wilds of Chile, the last letter she was somewhere for Christmas that was just like Nazareth, no water no lights not nothing but holy Indians and mud houses and she was eating it up.
The theme of this collection reappears, albeit tragically. “Good Things Out of Nazareth” recur in the letters of Barnes to her mentors, Flannery O’Connor and Father McCown. Her reading and teaching of the fiction of O’Connor and Percy in Chile indicate their initial global impact.
CAROLINE GORDON TO ROBERT GIROUX
From Milledgeville, “Good Things” continue to come “out of Nazareth.” Gordon reports of publishing contracts for O’Connor’s fiction in Japan and Germany.
MARCH 11, 1966
I saw Walker Percy last weekend—for the first time in twenty-five years, he says. (The years have gone over my own head so fast I haven’t been able to keep count.)
I have just finished reading his new novel [The Last Gentleman] and have written him a carping letter about a few minor technical fla
ws. But I told him and must now tell you that I am delighted by the book. Simply delighted!
If I read it right, this is the Odyssey of a Southern Prince Myshkin through regions as strange as Odysseus ever visited. The events which, at times, are almost incredible, take on the Dostoyevskyan stage of the modern novel. A book which could only have been written by a Southerner, packed as it is with knowledge and wisdom about that region and other strange regions.
I trust that what I am saying is not too hi-falutin for your publishing purposes. I am not skilled in writing blurbs as I never write one unless I am crazy about the book. If I do write a blurb I want it to be serviceable. And I have found that where new novels are concerned you have to tell people what to think about them. I don’t mind trying again if you want me to.
I visited Regina O’Connor recently. She was busy signing contracts with Germans, Japanese and other folk. We stopped at Andalusia a little while on our way back to Atlanta. Not a human being in…One of my companions said he was explaining Flannery’s stories to the Japanese, but I suspected that he was refuting something Allen said when Gone with the Wind came out: that its wide popularity would set the art of fiction back two hundred years. It seems to me that Flannery did a lot to offset that influence. And now you’ve got Walker! I congratulate you!
Best wishes, as ever,
WALKER PERCY TO JOHN WILLIAM CORRINGTON
Perhaps influenced by Caroline Gordon’s teaching him as an aspiring novelist in the 1950s, Percy plans to offer a course at Loyola University in New Orleans some years later.
APRIL 10, 1967
Dear Bill,
If you still wish to sign me up for next year, I’ll sign. Though, to tell the truth, I feel somewhat inferior to the girl in Miller’s [Williams] poem.
a girl, anonymous as beer
telling forgotten things in a cheap bar
how she could have taught there as well as I.
Better.
It will, in any case, be unlike any English course ever taught anywhere. It will be a medical-pathological-psychiatric-anthropological approach to modern fiction which will probably set out with Notes from Underground and have nothing to do with Hemingway and Faulkner (whom I leave to you).
Slightly more seriously: I do vaguely contemplate a treatment of the modern novel from the point of view, not of stylistic considerations, but rather from what is known in Europe as a philosophical anthropology: more specifically, the consequences for fiction of such generally pervasive views of man as modern scientific positivism and existentialism.
A Wednesday-night deal like Miller’s would be fine with me. I should think not less than 5 nor more than 10 students, though I shall leave that with you, as well as the actual students selected. Matters not to me.
Should like to leave myself the following escape hatch if it is practicable Would it be possible to put this on a semester-at-a-time basis, so that, in the event I see in the first semester this thing is a general bore to all concerned (but selfishly, mainly to me) I can cut out? And Loyola gets half their money back.
As yet, have not decided whether to work in some creative writing—perhaps reading one semester and writing the next. As I understand you you’re willing to leave it open.
Best,
WALKER PERCY TO ROBERT DANIEL
Percy declines to attend the celebration for a mutual friend at Sewanee, Tennessee. Percy has taught the course mentioned in the previous letter and devised a syllabus.
NOV 4, 1974
Dear Rob:
Thought we were going to make it up there for Allen’s [Tate] birthday. We ain’t. We don’t have time to drive and in airplane’s too expensive—$200.
Recalling your kind invitation last summer to put us up, I thought I’d better release to (bishop’s?) bed. I don’t think I’ll be missed much. Lewis Simpson said he heard the event was getting out of hand—too many people.
I’ll be working for your pupil, Jerry, next semester—a novel workshop—a Quixote enterprise at best—I’ve no idea how to do such a thing—This semester’s “novel of alienation” has gone pretty well—only trouble: the students talked less than I had expected, so I had to talk more. My best student: a boy named Bob Daniel—from Miss State U. I took your advice and made up a definition of alienation—even a syllabus!—beginning at the Fall, Genesis 3!
My liver is better—spirits also a degree high. Look forward to 1975 and booze—
Phin says he stands ready with all manner of advice on Province—
Love—
Wak
P.S.—Shelby’s [Foote] vol iii is out in advance copies [The Civil War: A Narrative]. A real knock-out, I think—
W—
Percy in the previous letter mentions a syllabus. The outline is vital in understanding how his fiction is rooted in the Western theological and philosophic ethos. O’Connor’s stories are vital in reinforcing Percy’s syllabus, especially the stories of alienation such as “Good Country People” and “The Enduring Chill.”
Optional Background Readings
I. Alienation in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition
The Fall (Genesis, chapter 3)
Alienation of the Believer-Sinner (Psalm 6)
Alienation of the heathen: Strangers with the world about you, no covenant to hope for, and no God (Ephesians 2)
Misery of life in the fallen city of man (St. Augustine, The City of God, Book 19, chapter 5)
Life without Christ: All that is in the world: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life (I John 2:16)
Man’s estrangement in the world (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, section II)
Man’s disproportion in nature (paragraph 72)
Man’s concealment of his plight from himself through diversion (paragraph 139)
The doctrine of the Fall is incomprehensible to man yet without it man is incomprehensible to himself (paragraph 434)
The alienated self: The despair of the self which has not become itself (Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 44 ff.)
Man’s nature: Man as pilgrim and wayfarer (Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator)
II. The Revolt of Naturalism: Alienation Denied, Man as Organism among Organisms
Man as organism evolved through adaptation and natural selection (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, chapter 1)
Man as responding and learning organism (I. P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes)
The satisfaction of needs and growth through experience (John Dewey, Intelligence in the Modern World, p. 801ff.)
Utopia without God (Walden II)
III. The Mind-Body Split and the Beginning of Modern Alienation: The Ghost in the Machinery
The isolated cogite: I think, therefore I am; the absolute separation of the res cogitans from the res extensa (René Descartes, Discourse on Method, part IV)
IV. The New Secular Alienation
A. Alienation seen as a moment in the historical process: The alienation of the worker from himself and his work in capitalistic production (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 100)
B. The Revolt of the Left-Over Self against Scientific Naturalism and Humanism: The Great Literary-Artistic-Philosophical Secession
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
Fyodor Dostoevski, Notes from Underground
Vincent van Gogh, “Cypresses”: World-things portrayed as symbols of the alienated self
Pessimism and wasteland in man’s most spectacular century (T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)
The triumph of technology and the despair of man (Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment, chapter 1)
&n
bsp; Some alternatives to current alienation; the revolt against reason and the hatred of science: Consciousness III, Cure or Cop-out? (Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America; Theodore Roszak, Making of a Counter Culture)
V. Alienation Systemized: The Existentialists
The Three Stages of Existence (S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 261–26)
Heidegger’s Dasein and the Fall of the Self into Inauthenticity (Being and Time, pp. 210–19)
Self as Nothingness: The Hole in Being (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 73–79)
VI. Peculiar Position of Southern Literature vis-a vis the Modern Literature of Alienation
The non-participation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Southern writers in the Great Literary Secession (L. P. Simpson, “The Southern Writer and the Great Literary Secession,” in The Man of Letters in New England and the South)
A Southern solution to Northern alienation: I’ll Take My Stand and the Southern Agrarians
WALKER PERCY TO THOMAS MERTON
Percy continues to write fiction in the relative obscurity of his own “Nazareth” in Covington, Louisiana. He beseeches Thomas Merton to help in his research for a novel.
JULY 13, 1967
Dear Father Louis [Thomas Merton]:
It was a pleasure to meet you. Though I must admit I felt somewhat diffident, putting myself in your shoes and imagining how much it would have put me out having that somewhat diverse crew straggling about your hillside.
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 36