[NOVEMBER 20, 1981]
RESIDENCE [NEW ORLEANS]
Peace!
I just finished The Habit of Being and am now taking stock of the marvelous gifts it has bestowed upon my heart and mind. I am still in a kind of amazement as I try to assess the incredible depth and variety of graces that have been bestowed upon this young woman of such limited environment and experiences, of such a short and restricted life. Yet she was able to cast outward the fruit of these graces upon her family and friends, and upon the people who are fortunate enough to have read her stories. As I read I felt myself saying over and over what a marvelous gift she has been to this country, to the Church, to the human spirit! Certainly I feel gratitude and love for Flannery, but I also feel much gratitude to you for your beautiful work of bringing all this together and presenting it to us. You have been a dear servant of the Word, and I am very much in your debt.
I have heard tell of you and your husband and family many times by my brother, Fr. James (not John!—we call him Hooty) McCown. He has promised many times to introduce me to you all when the geography permits it, and that’s a pleasure I am looking forward to.
Yours, with thanks and many blessings,
Robert McCown, S.J.
In memory of
Louise Boatwright Alexander (1920–2010)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank a dear friend, M. L. Jackson, for unfailing, generous support from the outset when I spread out copies of the letters on her kitchen table. Without her wise counsel and encouragement this collection would not have come to fruition. I also thank Kemper, Walter, and Mercer Jackson for their support. I also am grateful to Thomas Gossett and Neil Scott who entrusted several unpublished letters to me. I am also indebted to the late Beverly Jarrett. I thank the Earhart Foundation and its president, the late David Kennedy, for several grants that enabled me to lecture in Rome, Ireland, and other places. Jean Cash of James Madison University shared valuable research. I thank Ralph Wood of Baylor University who has provided helpful advice and encouragement. Likewise, Henry T. Edmondson III of Georgia College and State University. W. A. Sessions also provided personal recollections of the correspondents. I also am appreciative of Rosemary Magee’s assistance at Emory University. Louise Florencourt of the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust was also generous and hospitable on several visits to Milledgeville. I also thank Inge Kutt Lewis for her proofreading skills. I also am grateful for the specialized assistance of Michael Garanzini, S. J., of the Mary Flannery O’Connor Trust, as well as Patrick Samway, S. J., for providing information about literary estates; likewise Robert Marx. Mark Bosco, S. J., arranged a plenary lecture at Loyola University (Chicago). Likewise, David Solomon, director of the Ethics and Culture Center, Notre Dame University. I thank Dr. Max Bonilla of Franciscan University (Ohio), former dean of the faculty, who approved several faculty grants for travel and research. Dr. Stephen Krason, chairman of the Political Science department, also provided student assistants who were helpful in research tasks. Karen Homol, faculty secretary, provided precise transcription skills, as did Toni Aeschliman. Other faculty colleagues—John and Connie Pilsner, Kaybeth Calabria, Michael Healy, Joseph Almeida, Timothy Williams, Sarah Wear, Allen Schreck, Michael Sirilla, Scott Sollom, Charles Fischer, and Robert Doyle—offered support, encouragement, and/or research assistance. The staff of John Paul II Library of Franciscan University—Katherine Donohue, Linda Franklin, and Donna Ross—were skilled in locating obscure journal articles. I also thank Marcus Grodi of The Journey Home who hosted an encouraging interview, as well as Steve Mirarchi of Benedictine College for his precise review. I am also grateful for Joe Goodman of Good Country Pictures who introduced me to Jay Shanker whose legal skills have been invaluable; likewise Scott Hahn, for vital contacts. I am also grateful to Fair Pines Limited Partnership, its provision of a beautiful place for editing during academic breaks, and the support of Linda Alexander. Gary Jansen, executive editor at Penguin Random House, has also provided brilliant editorial advice in the final phases. I appreciate the advice of Ashley Hong. I also have been blessed with other supportive friends—Ernest H. Stanley Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Moore, Carl Arlotta, Adam Tate, and Ralph Ancil, and his late wife, Clarissa, the late Rev. John O’Shea, the late Rev. Ray Ryland and Mrs. Ryland, Aaron Urbanczyk, James Tanaleon, Tyler Scott, John Adams, Sandy Scott, the Rev. Tony Thurston, and the Rev. Brian Cavanaugh. For others whom I have forgotten, I hope I may recall you and to offer my thanks in the future.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: GOOD THINGS OUT OF NAZARETH
1. Penelope Laurens Fitzgerald, ed., Robert Fitzgerald: The Third Kind of Knowledge (New York: New Directions, 1993), 110.
2. Ibid.
3. “Correspondence,” Walker Percy Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library (II. Other Works, D. Other Writings, Folder 219), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
4. Brainard and Frances Neel Cheney Papers, Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives, Nashville, Tenn.
5. Cheney Papers, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.
6. I am grateful for Mr. Giroux’s letters and telephone calls of support in which he encouraged the publication of this collection and that “he knew most of the people.”
7. This letter is contained in the Sally Fitzgerald Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. The letter was published in Sally Fitzgerald, “A Master Class,” Georgia Review 33:4 (1979), 831–32. Fitzgerald states, “The letter of appreciation that Flannery wrote for this gift [a lengthy letter] from Caroline Gordon Tate is incomplete. Two sections of what is probably a draft remain.” Paul Elie, in The Life You Save May Be Your Own (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), also surmises (p. 196) that the letter was never sent.
8. The dating of this letter (and others between O’Connor and Gordon), noted in brackets, is based on Sally Fitzgerald’s handwritten listing of the letters by date in the Sally Fitzgerald Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
9. The full letter may be accessed at www.BenjaminBAlexander.com.
10. I am grateful to Jean Cash, the author of a biography of O’Connor, for informing me of these letters and their frequent praise of O’Connor and Percy.
11. The Fugitives, Nashville Public Television, Sept. 30, 2009. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O4XTjhKSSs.
12. For several years the University of the South has been undergoing an identity crisis about its historical associations with Confederate leaders and the Southern Agrarians. A student several years ago appeared in my class at a college in Ohio. He noted he had transferred from Sewanee as a “reverse carpetbagger” to study the Southern Agrarians, who were little read in classes at Sewanee. He also desired to read the tall tales of Southern humorists, the antecedents of O’Connor: David Crockett, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, A. B. Longstreet, W. G. Simms, and others. He noted the weather in the north was cold, the manners not as gracious. Importantly, though, Southern history and literature were available for study. The website of Sewanee, the University of the South, makes little mention of this vital background, while celebrating the beauty of the campus, the university’s liberal arts curriculum, and its Rhodes Scholars. The omitted history of the university may be gleaned from http://www.leonidaspolk.org as well as the memoir of William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee.
13. See Allen Tate, “Narcissus as Narcissus,” in Collected Essays (Denver: Allan Swallow, 1959), 248–64.
14. Poor health did not keep Henry Adams out of the Civil War. As private secretary he simply accompanied his father, Charles Francis Adams, to the Court of St. James’s. Henry Adams could not fathom the pro-Confederacy views of the British and their resistance to the “Lincoln government.” Sickness also did not
keep Twain out of the war. He deserted the Confederate Army and later became friends with General Ulysses Grant. Twain ghostwrote Grant’s Memoirs to help advance the Republican victory narrative of the Civil War. William Faulkner’s Civil War novels and Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative provide the Southern counternarrative of defeat.
15. Andrew Lytle, The Hero with the Private Parts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 27.
16. In an unpublished book review of Thomas More by Richard Marius, Percy in his witty prose further develops views of More. The review is contained in the Walker Percy Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
17. P. Fitzgerald, Robert Fitzgerald, 110.
18. The Flannery O’Connor Collection, Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville.
19. http://www.goodcountrypictures.com.
20. W.E.B. Du Bois had coined the term “Negro problem” in his seminal, vital analysis of African American spirituality, The Souls of Black Folk (1902). Dr. Du Bois documents the complex network of segregationist laws and practices preventing racial justice and social equality still present throughout the United States a generation after the Emancipation Proclamation. Ingrained patterns of segregation throughout American society render “the Negro” a “problem,” and prevent full assimilation and social equality.
21. I was pleased to meet Mrs. Walker Percy on Valentine’s Day, 2011 to discuss Caroline Gordon’s letters to her husband. Mrs. Percy immediately launched into praise of Gordon dealing with the turkey.
22. Caroline Gordon was appointed professor of creative writing at the University of Dallas in 1973.
23. Nancylee Novell Jonza, The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 305.
24. Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, ed., W. A. Sessions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 5.
25. J. Bottom, “Flannery O’Connor Banned,” Crisis 18, no. 9 (October 2000), 48.
26. The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, ed. C. Ralph Stephens (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), p. 38.
27. Cheney’s political views are vital historically. Cheney embodies a political ethos that has disappeared from the contemporary Democratic party and helps account for the 2016 election debacle (probably to be repeated in 2020). Years before, Cheney in the 1950s was a “Southern Democrat,” sometimes known as a “yellow dog Democrat.” This variety of Democrat would vote for a “yellow dog” rather than a Republican. Democrats of this persuasion, like Cheney, had heard repeated stories of Republican war policy during the Civil War and Reconstruction from living Confederate ancestors, including dismal tales of General Sherman’s “march to the sea.” Brainard Cheney, Gordon, Tate, the Southern Agrarians, and Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner, had all learned much of their history and political loyalties from the stories of Confederate veterans, not from textbooks, most written by the victors. Voting Republican for Faulkner was not an option, because of their rootedness in an oral tradition that endures in a plethora of narratives and novels. Faulkner, the “American Virgil,” rewrites American history from an oral tradition in chronicling in novel after novel the localist, defeated perspective of citizens from mythical Yoknapatawpha County. In his Nobel Prize address in 1949, Faulkner observed that he created “out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” His achievement would inspire Shelby Foote, Percy’s lifelong friend, to craft America’s “Iliad,” The Civil War: A Narrative.
28. Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, 39.
29. “An Apology,” Walker Percy Papers, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
30. Walker Percy, “Toynbee and the Rope Trick,” Walker Percy Papers, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
31. I told my father about this exchange with “Mr. Tate.” As a Harvard undergraduate in the 1930s my father had a course with T. S. Eliot; “Mr. Tate” reminded him of “Mr. Eliot.” Like Eliot, my father was from St. Louis and told “Mr. Eliot” after class one day they both were from the same town. Eliot gave him the “stare” for twenty seconds, mopped his brow with a handkerchief, and intoned “Indeed.”
32. Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). In a brilliant analysis of his cultural formation, Percy argues that Roman stoicism lay at the root of the planter class. “Noblesse oblige,” with an emphasis on duty, motivated planters at the top of the social hierarchy, rather than Christian charity. Inhabiting a “wintry kingdom of the soul,” aristocratic Southerners, most dysfunctional Episcopalians, exercised a kind of pre-Christian stoicism. Aunt Emily in Percy’s novel The Moviegoer personifies the code in her criticism of the mediocrity of Binx Bolling, her nephew. A skeptical lapsed Catholic, and speaking for Percy himself, Binx quips, “I had no idea what she was talking about.”
33. Tate recognizes the beginnings of Percy’s satirical treatment of Anglican gentility and the ceremonial grandeur of Episcopal religious celebrations in later novels such as The Moviegoer and The Second Coming. Aunt Emily in The Moviegoer is a dysfunctional Episcopalian who makes fatalistic pronouncements. Binx Bolling, the skeptical narrator of the novel, states that she is “an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice.” Jack Curl, the trendy Episcopal priest in The Second Coming, has abandoned traditional clerical garb for a jumpsuit in order to do the “religion thing,” which primarily concerns raising money. Percy’s satire is exquisitely textured to the point of limiting its impact to precise readers like Tate, himself a convert to Catholicism, and having experienced, unlike most readers, the high-toned Anglican community of Sewanee.
34. On several occasions when I enjoyed Mr. Lytle’s hospitality, he was interested in kickboxing karate champion Demetrius the “Golden Greek” Havanas of Dallas, with whom I was friends in the early 1970s. Lytle was interested in “American kickboxing” but insisted the oriental roots of karate not be lost.
35. The praise made such an impression that I secured a copy of the Holbein portrait of More on a trip to England in 1983 and gave it to Lytle.
36. For a penetrating essay about Lytle, see John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Mister Lytle: An Essay,” Paris Review, Fall 2010, https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/6048/mister-lytle-an-essay-john-jeremiah-sullivan.
37. Gordon’s recommendation of Jungian methodology had a profound impact on Lytle in his crafting of his most famous novel, The Velvet Horn (1957). In an essay about its composition, “The Working Novelist and the Mythmaking Process” (The Hero with the Private Parts, Louisiana State, 1966), he enthusiastically recounts “his Jungian reading” of the Garden of Eden myth in the Book of Genesis. Lytle notes that the sacred text concerns “spiritual incest.” He writes in the idiom of what Percy calls “religious science,” in which the novelist writes from outside the sapiential tradition of discourse. Not consulting ancient commentaries such as St. Augustine’s exhaustive treatise on Genesis, Lytle uses Jungian semantics to advance the idea that The Velvet Horn presented an “incest of the spirit which seemed my [Lytle’s] subject.” Gordon advocates in several letters Lytle’s Jungian approach, but O’Connor, as well as Percy, did not take her advice.
CHAPTER 2: “THE FIRST PRIEST WHO SAID TURKEY-DOG”
1. James H. McCown, “Flannery O’Connor,” lecture, University of South Alabama, Mobile, April 26, 1985, n.p.
2. Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 135.
3. James H. McCown, With Crooked Lines (Mobile, Ala.: Spring Hill College Press, 1990), iii.
4. The excerpts of this letter have been transcribed from the Thomas Gossett collection at Duke. A copy of the
letter also appears in The Habit of Being. The excerpts of the letters in this collection may not coincide in some cases with the letters in The Habit of Being, since the volume’s editor sometimes omitted passages. I have selected excerpts to maintain contextual, thematic continuity in this collection.
5. Later collected in Carter W. Martin, ed., The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery O’Connor (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983).
6. Transcribed from Thomas F. and Louise Y. Gossett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.
7. McCown, “Flannery O’Connor,” lecture.
8. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.
9. Ibid.
10. Scott Lucas, Ph.D., “Re: William Sessions,” email message to Benjamin B. Alexander, February 2018.
11. Transcribed from the Gossett Papers, Duke University. The letter also appears in The Habit of Being.
12. Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, ed., W. A. Sessions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 23.
13. O’Connor quotes from Louise Gossett’s “Existence: or, Mr. Henley Never Knew He Had It So Bad.” Tom Gossett appended, “This is the poem by Louise which Flannery mentions in her letter to me of Jan. 23, 1958.”
14. Sally Fitzgerald, ed., Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988), 1251.
15. William Esty, “In America, Intellectual Bomb Shelters,” Commonweal (March 7, 1958): 586–88.
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