Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  But such were not her immediate concerns with The Violent Bear It Away, officially on sale on February 8, 1960, and doubtless her most difficult publication experience, its main themes not sexual but prophetic and apocalyptic, its cast of characters more often freaks than folks. Dedicated to Edward Francis O’Connor, with a cover illustration of a gaunt boy in a black hat peering through cornstalks against a violet background, which Flannery felt evoked “The School of Southern Degeneracy,” and back-cover praise of her “Blakean vision” from Caroline Gordon, the novel received decidedly mixed notices. Orville Prescott in the New York Times gave O’Connor backhanded praise as a “literary white witch,” but felt her “harsh” novel failed; in the Sunday Book Review, Donald Davidson warned of “strong medicine”; Granville Hicks described the novel’s style as “Southern Gothic with a vengeance” in the Saturday Review.

  The article that caused Flannery the most pain was titled “God-Intoxicated Hillbillies” and ran in Time magazine at the end of February. Using the review as a pretext for detective work on the mysterious author, the unnamed critic helped realize Flannery’s greatest fear of having her life, and disease, exposed, while also getting his medical facts wrong. O’Connor was characterized as “a retiring, bookish spinster who dabbles in the variants of sin and salvation like some self-tutored backwoods theologian. . . . She suffers from lupus (a tuberculous disease of the skin and mucous membranes) that forces her to spend part of her life on crutches.” Flannery wrote the Cheneys of feeling violated, like “having a dirty hand wiped across your face. They even bring in the lupus.” To Maryat, she complained, “My lupus has no business in literary considerations.”

  Far more pleasing was an overlooked essay in Catholic World, by P. Albert Duhamel, fittingly enough, a professor of Medieval Studies at Boston College. Alerting Cecil Dawkins to the piece, while alluding to Ingmar Bergman’s art-house favorite The Seventh Seal (1957), its hooded figure of Death as allegorical as her own whispering Satan in The Violent Bear It Away, O’Connor wrote, “Perhaps I have created a medieval study. Which reminds, have you seen any films by this man Ingmar Bergman? People tell me they are mighty fine & that I would like them. They too are apparently medieval.” She appreciated, as well, Joan Didion’s praise for her “hard intelligence” in the National Review. Unlikely acceptance came with an excerpt after publication of the novel in the April issue of Vogue, crediting Flannery as “a young writer with an uncompromising moral intelligence and a style that happily relies on verbs, few adjectives, and no inflationary details.”

  Reactions from friends tended to be equally split. Wholehearted in her first response to the novel was Elizabeth Bishop. “I received Flannery’s new book last week,” she wrote Lowell. “That first section that was published somewhere before still seems superb to me — like a poem. In fact she’s a great loss to the art, don’t you think? . . . There’s an idiot child named for me, I think.” Writing back that “I hadn’t connected ‘Bishop’ with you,” Lowell was cooler: “The fire is there — a terrifying ending, the grotesque beginning — a short story to which the rest was added. . . . I don’t know whether this book is her best or just her most controlled.” In her response, Bishop, modulating her tone, conceded, “Yes, the Flannery book is a bit disappointing, I’m afraid — one wishes she could get away from religious fanatics for awhile. But just the writing is so damned good compared to almost anything else one reads: economical, clear, horrifying, real.”

  Sharing most intimately in Flannery’s reactions as she received these responses — the critical successes usually marked by a telegram or phone call from Bob Giroux — was Maryat Lee, in Milledgeville through February, recovering from an operation at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. She spent most afternoons in Flannery’s room, making oil paintings of Andalusia, as Flannery herself painted, or read books. Admitting in her diary a “wave of tenderness” toward her friend, “so unapproachable that I am inhibited,” Maryat felt her affection returned in other ways by Flannery, who took to calling herself “Aunt Fannie.” She witnessed Flannery’s pose of being unfazed by a letter from a young protégé criticizing this novel as inferior to her first. Seeing that his remarks “really dug very cruelly at her innards,” Maryat ripped the letter into pieces and tossed it into the wastebasket, to Flannery’s shock and relief.

  Almost certain to see matters from a contrary point of view, Maryat — lying one afternoon on an exercise couch set crosswise at the end of the bed — told Flannery of deeming Rayber the most successful character in her novel. (“I found Rayber a very sym-pathetic and moving character,” she wrote in her diary, “and probably from her point of view, not unlike myself, although of course I had nothing to do with Rayber.”) From that visit on, a bemused Flannery addressed letters to her liberal humanist friend, with whom she often found herself at an impasse on religion and politics, by variations on Rayber — Raybutter, Raybalm, Rayfish, Rayverberator — adding an occasional marginal doodle of skull and crossbones, or a smiling thistle. Maryat likewise invented nicknames for Flannery based on the novel’s inflammatory boy prophet — Tarbabe, Tarsoul, Tarsquawk.

  WHEN ROBERT GIROUX had visited the previous spring, Flannery was most excited to hear him speak of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and philosopher, as well as a paleontologist, present at the discovery of Peking Man, in 1929, whose philosophical writings were denied publication by the Roman Holy Office during his lifetime. The inventor of such science-fictiony terms as “noosphere” and “omega point,” to describe phases of a cosmos he theorized as evolving both materially and spiritually toward a culminating Body of Christ, Teilhard had died in 1955 at the age of seventy-three in New York City. An “omnivorous reader,” as Giroux described her, Flannery was now anticipating the appearance of Teilhard’s books in English translation, and this personal connection only redoubled her interest. As she reported to Ted Spivey, “My editor from Farrer, Straus was down here to visit me last week and I was asking him about Chardin and it turned out he knew him for about a month in New York before he died. He said he was very impressive.”

  Giroux recalled, “I said I met Father de Chardin, and she said, ‘You did, where? I didn’t know that he was ever in America.’” Flannery’s editor went on to recount,

  I explained that Roger Straus’s uncle, a Guggenheim, funded some research. She said, “What was he like?” I said he was very handsome in a masculine way, and he had asked me about Merton, and whether I thought both his feet were firmly planted on the ground. I said, “Yes they are,” and he said, “I’m glad to hear that.” I told her of remarking to Roger that I had a vague feeling I had seen that face before — in Houdin’s bust of Voltaire in the Metropolitan Museum. Roger said, “Of course, Voltaire’s name was Arouet, and Chardin belongs to the Arouet family.” Well she loved that.

  Giroux also told of attending Teilhard’s funeral at St. Ignatius Church on Park Avenue, with the Straus family and “about twenty or thirty Jesuits at the altar.”

  The publication of Teilhard’s writings in America, beginning in 1959 with The Phenomenon of Man — his 1938 manuscript attempting to reconcile Christian faith with evolutionary theory — was perfectly timed to answer a burning intellectual need of Flannery’s. In November 1958, she already longed for “a new synthesis,” and complained to Betty Hester, “This is not an age of great Catholic theology. . . . What St. Thomas did for the new learning of the 13th century we are in bad need of someone to do for the 20th.” Her immediate provocation was the feeling that she was at a disadvantage in theological debates with Ted Spivey. “Only crisis theologians seem to excite him,” she told Betty; yet she had to concede that the “greatest of the Protestant theologians writing today . . . are much more alert and creative than their Catholic counterparts. We have very few thinkers to equal Barth and Tillich, perhaps none.”

  Her search for eminent twentieth-century Catholic thinkers had begun a few years earlier when she started reviewing for the Bulletin in 1956. The local Episcop
al rector and Andalusia reading-group cofounder, William Kirkland, said that his friendship with Flannery was sealed in the midfifties, when she discovered that they both owned well-worn copies of Letters to a Niece, by Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a turn-of-the-century Catholic humanist whose support of Darwinian science drew him dangerously close to the “Modernists” who had been excommunicated by Pope Pius X. O’Connor admiringly quoted in the Bulletin Hügel’s advice to his niece not to be “churchy.” Likewise her beloved Guardini, a friend of Buber’s, was developing a fluid and dialectical theology considered a departure from absolute Thomism, which she praised for its “total absence of pious cliché.”

  But these near-contemporary theologians, along with William Lynch, Erik Langkjaer’s teacher at Fordham, whose concept of a “theology of creativity” O’Connor singled out in a review in the summer of 1959, or the neo-Thomism of Etienne Gilson, in Painting and Reality, were just bits and pieces of a vision she finally saw synthesized in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin. In her first mention of Teilhard, in a February 1960 review of The Phenomenon of Man, O’Connor announced to the small circulation of readers of the Bulletin that the name, which she spelled out phonetically for them, “Tay-ahr,” was one that “future generations will know better than we do.” She went on, “The scientist and the theologian will perhaps require a long time to sift his thought and accept it, but the poet, whose sight is essentially prophetic, will at once recognize in this immense vision his own.” At the center of this vision, she explained, was “convergence.”

  A careful reviewer, O’Connor quickly and intuitively hit on a characterization of Teilhard as poet and visionary that kept her in good stead as his posthumous writings were attacked by both scientists, for ascribing consciousness to matter, and theologians, for ignoring original sin, or contradicting the creation story in Genesis. But at Christmastime 1959, she had come across a “lucky find” in a commentary on a passage of St. Thomas Aquinas. “St. T. says that prophetic vision is dependent on the imagination of the prophet, not his moral life,” she wrote Betty. Not only did this discovery make official her own kinship with Tarwater, but she could apply these same terms to Teilhard. Like her, he was a writer tilling the fields of language and imagination, meant to be judged by the power of his “prophetic” vision, rather than specific moral or scientific ideas.

  At the heart of Teilhard’s vision were formulations that obviously spoke to Flannery and created a strong resonance for her with the content as well as the poetic style of his writings. Particularly appealing was The Divine Milieu, an intimate, personal meditation, the second of his books, published in America in 1960 and described by her in the Bulletin as “giving a new face to Christian spirituality.” She drew marginal lines in her copy next to Teilhard’s concept of the Incarnation as “a single event . . . developing in the world”; a cosmic presence in local material lay behind her own arguing for regional writing. But the quieter concept that she kept mulling and returning to privately was “passive diminishments,” Teilhard’s unusual term for significant suffering, which she obviously applied to her own disease. As she wrote a friend: “Pere Teilhard talks about ‘passive diminishments’ in THE DIVINE MILIEU. He means those afflictions that you can’t get rid of and have to bear. Those that you can get rid of he believes you must bend every effort to get rid of. I think he was a very great man.”

  Flannery proselytized avidly for this “great mystic . . . if there were errors in his thought, there were none in his heart,” recommending him to a long list of friends, including Ted Spivey, Betty Hester, the Cheneys, Cecil Dawkins, Robert Fitzgerald, and Father McCown. Spivey’s response disappointed her, as he found in Teilhard merely a “Jesuit mind.” She shot back, “Some of the severest criticism I have read about it has come from other Jesuits,” and she even pandered to Spivey a bit, by detecting in their evolutionary views “parallels between Jung and Teilhard that are striking.” More to her liking was Brainard Cheney’s confirmation that “his work is, I think, the most important philosophical statement for Christianity since the Summa.” When the American Scholar, a periodical of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, canvassed leading authors on the most important book published between 1931 and 1961, Gore Vidal chose Doctor Faustus; Alfred Kazin, Finnegans Wake. O’Connor’s selection was The Phenomenon of Man.

  In opening up to Teilhard, and moving beyond while never abandoning an absolute Thomism that some felt “too straitjacket,” or old-fashioned, Flannery was aligning herself, as well, with a more general mood shift in the Church, signaled by the papacy of John XXIII, who had succeeded Pius XII in October 1958, five months after her audience with the ailing pope. In 1957, the Vatican banned Teilhard’s works from Catholic bookstores. But John XXIII was more encouraging, saying, when asked about Teilhard’s books, “I am here to bless, not to condemn.” When a 1962 monitum, or formal warning, was issued, which the pope later deemed “regrettable” and Flannery found “depressing at first,” she did draw back, suggesting that the Bulletin find a clergyman to review Teilhard’s subsequent books. But she never lost her conviction that the Frenchman might be “canonized yet.” She assured Father McCown, “If they are good, they are dangerous.”

  Certainly, throughout the spring and summer of 1960, visitors to Andalusia and a wide range of friends received copies of or were encouraged to read Teilhard’s books. At the end of May, two such visitors might well have landed on Flannery’s “Very Peculiar Types” list, except that both “wore very well.” De Vene Harrold, known as “Dean,” diagnosed with lupus in 1959, had just returned from a honeymoon with her new husband, Robert Hood, a painter, when she saw the Time piece on O’Connor and wrote for advice in a panic. On the couple’s first visit, from St. Augustine, Florida, Flannery and Regina took them on a tour that featured her favorite junk-car yard. “Looka there, look there, would you,” Flannery excitedly called out as she pointed from the highway. Driving by antebellum mansions in their Chevrolet, she chided her mother, “They don’t want to see THIS part of town,” and she steered them instead toward the poorer, black section. She then mailed Dean a copy of Teilhard’s book for her “edification.”

  A group more likely to entertain discussions of Teilhard was made up of five Dominican nuns, along with their Superior, Sister Evangelist, of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta, who visited Andalusia in July 1960, wishing for help with a project. Since Giroux’s brief stopover and word of Merton the previous year, Flannery and her mother had become regular communicants at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit, often heading north on Sundays to attend mass. They would then linger to visit with the monks, especially the abbot, Augustine More, and the bonsai expert and gardener Father Paul Bourne, also chief censor for the Trappist order in America and, so, Merton’s bête noire. “Paul Bourne was strict on Merton,” recalls one Conyers monk. “He was finicky about any sexual stuff, and said that he had gotten some ‘whining and complaining letters’ from Merton. He taught us Church history on Tuesday mornings, was a litterateur, not a liberal, and had read all of Flannery’s stuff. I think she saw in him a kindred spirit.”

  Abbot More and Father Bourne became regulars at Andalusia, and, on that Monday in July, the abbot — a “giggler” — had driven the Atlanta sisters in a station wagon to discuss their request for help on a book project. Their subject was Mary Ann Long, a twelve-year-old girl with a cancerous tumor growing on one side of her face, whom they cared for until her death. When they first contacted her, Flannery’s reaction was a visceral “no” to the notion of writing a novel about the saintly girl, but the photographs they sent haunted her. “What interests me in it is simply the mystery,” she wrote Betty, “the agony that is given in strange ways to children.” So she agreed to help edit a book and write an introduction, half hoping a finished manuscript would never arrive. Paul Bourne jokingly wondered which of her “murder stories” had prompted them to approach her.

  What Flannery carried away from these first letters and meetings wa
s not yet a sense of kinship with Mary Ann so much as with the founder of the Dominican order, Rose Hawthorne, and, by extension, her father, the New England author of dark, gothic, moral tales. She went to her bookshelf and took down Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” which was included in her college Understanding Fiction anthology, and drew a connection between the beautiful Georgiana, subjected by her scientist-husband to a vicious precursor of cosmetic surgery to make her even more perfect, and Mary Ann’s “plainly grotesque” tumor. But she also made a connection between the author and his saintly Catholic-convert daughter. Ever anxious about covering any tracks of Faulkner, by September she could easily write Bill Sessions advertising her newly adopted literary stepfather: “Hawthorne said he didn’t write novels, he wrote romances; I am one of his descendants.”

  During the remainder of the fall and winter of 1960, Flannery devoted herself to talks and essays and even her single foray into magazine feature writing, thriftily titled “The King of the Birds,” a previously discarded title for “The Displaced Person.” While this article on her peacocks showed her knack for prose at once stylish and talky enough for the pages of Holiday, a chic travel magazine that paid her $750, she tucked a tiny nightmare into its ending. Skewing the mood for any readers alert enough to catch the downshift, she injected some dark changes into the anecdote about the Pathe cameraman, which she used as her opener: “Lately I have had a recurrent dream: I am five years old and a peacock. A photographer has been sent from New York and a long table is laid in celebration. The meal is to be an exceptional one: myself. I scream, ‘Help! Help!’ and awaken.”