by Brad Gooch
Using all of these occasions as opportunities to think aloud about the intellectual concerns between the lines of her fiction, Flannery traveled to Minnesota in October to take part in a three-day fiction workshop devoted to her work at the College of St. Teresa in Winona, and to present a talk on “Some Thoughts on the Catholic Novelist” at St. Catherine’s College in St. Paul — pleased that she “met no duds” at either Catholic school. While not speaking directly of Teilhard, she did knot together the terms she first used when writing about him to describe her “Catholic novelist”: “The fiction writer should be characterized by his kind of vision. . . . His kind of vision is prophetic vision. Prophecy . . . is dependent on the imaginative and not the moral faculty. . . . The prophet is a realist of distances.” She also read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” at the University of Minnesota, where she felt at an advantage, as “I sound pretty much like the old lady.”
She was back in Georgia just in time for another such engagement during the third week in October: a southern arts festival at Wesleyan College, in Macon, where she was being “paid (well) to swap clichés about Southern culture” with Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, and Madison Jones, as well as to speak on “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Putting less emphasis at this non-Catholic event on Teilhard, she went public instead for the first time about her kinship with Hawthorne: “When Hawthorne said that he wrote romances, he was attempting, in effect, to keep for fiction some of its freedom from social determinism, and to steer it in the direction of poetry.” In O’Connor’s own stories, where Elizabeth Bishop, “green with envy,” swore that she could “cram a whole poem-idea into a sentence,” she was striving for similar poetic freedom.
Following the festival, a dinner was held at Andalusia, which included Katherine Anne Porter, the moderator Louis Rubin, Ashley Brown, and the “strenuous” Mrs. Tate, again staying over the weekend, as well as her friend with lupus, Dean Hood, who drove six hours, unannounced, from Florida for the conference. “I helped Regina in the kitchen with Louise,” Dean recalled. “I was outta my league in the living room.” Katherine Anne Porter exclaimed that night with great regret that it was too late to visit a chicken Flannery had shown her on her last visit. “I call that really having a talent for winning friends and influencing people,” Flannery wrote Cecil Dawkins, “when you remember to inquire for a chicken you met two years before. She was so sorry that it was night and she wouldn’t get to see him again as she had particularly wanted to. I call that social grace.”
Soon afterward, Flannery discovered that she had lost a bet with the nuns. She had wagered a pair of peacocks that they would never find a publisher for their memoir. Robert Giroux was interested, though he admitted that his author’s “Introduction” to A Memoir of Mary Ann, not the nuns’ writing, finally swayed him. In this eloquent essay, as fine as her best stories, dated December 8, she seized an opportunity to weave together her feelings about the girl forever fixed at the age of twelve; the “mystery” of disease, hers and Mary Ann’s; the long shadow of Hawthorne, to whose memory the book was dedicated; and the hope for meaning that she found spelled out so compellingly in Teilhard. Indeed she made Mary Ann a human face for Teilhard’s meditation on illness: “She and the Sisters who had taught her had fashioned from her unfinished face the material of her death. The creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare his death in Christ. It is a continuous action in which this world’s goods are utilized to the fullest, both positive gifts and what Père Teilhard de Chardin calls ‘passive diminishments.’”
BY THE BEGINNING of 1961, Flannery was at work on a new story for which she was using as a title yet another popular phrase of Teilhard’s, “everything that rises must converge,” which summed up the priest’s notion of all life, from the geological to the human, converging toward an integration of the material and the spiritual, not to mention an integration of the scientific theory of evolution and the theological dogma of Incarnation, of God made man. Giroux remembered sending her a French anthology of Teilhard’s writings, with a section titled “Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge.” After Teilhard’s death, the French mint struck a medallion in his honor, stamped with his aristocratic profile and this mystical axiom. Writing to Roslyn Barnes, a young Catholic convert at Iowa, to whom she sent a copy of Teilhard’s Divine Milieu, Flannery mentioned her “story called ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge,’ which is a physical proposition that I found in Père Teilhard and am applying to a certain situation in the Southern States & indeed in all the world.”
This “certain situation” was a coy reference to political events creating big headlines in early 1961, as forces of change loosely filed under the label “the sixties” took hold in the South, across America and the world, and indeed throughout the Roman Catholic Church. Dovetailing with aggiornamento, or the spirit of renewal, introduced by John XXIII, was the election and inauguration on January 20 of a young Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, whose candidacy Flannery supported, judging that “I think King Kong would be better than Nixon” and scorning JFK’s opponents of “the secularist-Baptist combination, unholy alliance.” She told Cecil Dawkins, “All the rich widows in M’ville are voting for Nixon, fearing lest Kennedy give their money to the niggers.”
In the South, much politics was racial politics, and the “certain situation” O’Connor was addressing in lofty Teilhardian terms was the civil rights movement. In December 1955, Rosa Lee Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, her dramatic gesture helping to force an issue obviously overdue: within days of her nonviolent resistance, fifty thousand black citizens walked to work in Alabama’s capital city in a bus boycott lasting 381 days, led by the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr. In the fall of 1957, nine black teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as thousands of National Guardsmen patrolled in the schoolyard. The first sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter had just occurred, in February 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Yet while her Teilhardian phrase rang with the obvious implication of integration, Flannery’s own position had shifted from the shocking contrariness of the girl who wrote from the point of view of black characters in her high school stories and decried the segregated buses she rode to Atlanta as a graduate student, to one of complex ambivalence. She had returned to settle in a society predicated on segregation and had taken on its charged voices and manners as the setting of her fiction. Certainly her mother was given to sharp racial comments, enough for the Gossetts to remember Flannery warning guests not to bring up the race issue. William Sessions has recalled a Thanksgiving dinner where her uncle Louis angrily slammed down a copy of Life magazine, featuring a photograph of Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston washing the feet of a black man during a Maundy Thursday service.
Throughout the late fifties, Flannery had not seemed especially interested in coverage of the civil rights movement in the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal, her main sources of news (she did not own a television set until March 1961, when the sisters gave her one as thanks for her work on Mary Ann). She rarely discussed related political events. Yet eventually she came face-to-face with such topical issues, beginning mostly at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, also a favorite retreat of Dorothy Day. Indeed Bill Sessions had driven Day from Conyers to the Atlanta train station, following her visit to Koinonia, an interracial community in Americus, Georgia, where in 1957 she had survived a drive-by shooting. The incident prompted Flannery to voice her mixed feelings to Betty: “All my thoughts on this subject are ugly and uncharitable — such as: that’s a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc. I admire her very much. I still think of the story about the Tennessee hillbilly who picked up his gun and said, ‘I’m going to Texas to fight fuhmuh rights.’ I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.”
Another visitor to Conyers, and another befriended by Bill Sessi
ons, was John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who darkened his skin and wrote an account of his experiences traveling for six weeks through the Deep South in Black Like Me (1961), a classic study of racism. A Roman Catholic convert, Griffin wrote in his book of meeting “a young college instructor of English — a born Southerner of great breadth of understanding. . . . We talked until midnight. He invited me to go with him to visit Flannery O’Connor the next day.” Griffin declined, feeling that he should spend his few remaining hours in the monastery. Less charitably, telling Maryat of the near meeting, Flannery wrote, “If I had been one of them white ladies Griffin sat down by on the bus, I would have got up PDQ preferring to sit by a genuine Negro.” She told Father McCown that she would be delighted to see Griffin at Andalusia, but “not in blackface.”
Like the broader Catholic Church, the great old enemy of the Klan, which was dispensing teachings on racial justice, the monks at Conyers were supportive of the civil rights movement. Though generally conservative, Paul Bourne, an Englishman educated at Yale, was certainly liberal on this issue. And so O’Connor’s monk friends were alert to the paradoxes of her attitude. “I would call Flannery a cultural racist,” says one Conyers monk. “It wasn’t that she didn’t know they were children of God redeemed by the blood of Christ. Of course she knew that. But the vocabulary she used was typical Southern white. Paul said so. I never heard her. Her mother was worse. Flannery tempered it some. She did not hate black people. But she did resent the whiteys from the North coming down and telling us how to handle our problems with the blacks.”
Leonard Mayhew, then an Atlanta priest, who occasionally visited her, sometimes bringing along his sister, the New York editor Alice Mayhew, says, “She never said anything racist, but she was patronizing about blacks, treated them as children. When I was introduced to black workers on the farm, they would take off their hats. I was both a white man and a priest. So they were doing double duty.” O’Connor’s position basically fell close to William Faulkner’s. Segregation was an evil, Faulkner stated; but if integration were forced upon the South he would resist (in one feverish moment, he even said he would take up arms). In his personal life, his behavior toward African Americans was always cordial and kindly, but as one writer has characterized it, it was also “patronizing: he belonged, after all, to a patron class.”
Flannery’s foil in this race business, and a prime motivator of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the uncharacteristically “topical” story she decided to write and her fictional comment on racial politics in the South, was Maryat Lee. Maryat had been unflagging in trying to bring Flannery around to a more forward position, perhaps even to use her public stature to advance social justice. In April 1959, Maryat met James Baldwin on the street in Manhattan, prior to his leaving for a trip, without a car, through Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. She wondered if Flannery would welcome a visit from the author whose first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a coming-of-age story about growing up in Harlem, had been published within a year of Wise Blood. Flannery responded politely enough, though quite firmly: “No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on — it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.”
In other letters to Maryat, Flannery was far less polite. In accordance with the name game they began after The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery signed off one of hers “Cheers, Tarklux”; she might well have signed a number of others similarly. For as the two began, comically, to goad each other on the race issue, their little drama escalated rapidly, with Maryat cast as the ultimate Northern liberal, and Flannery a bigoted Southern redneck. Unfortunately, in a number of these letters, many still unpublished, Flannery slipped into her role too easily, her mask fitting disconcertingly well. She turned out to be a connoisseur of racial jokes, regaling Maryat with offensive punch lines.
More productively for O’Connor’s more nuanced fiction, Maryat included in their slapdash correspondence anecdotes of her own misadventures in the shifting world of political etiquette that lodged challengingly with her foil, a.k.a. “Tarconstructed.” She wrote of sitting on the subway next to a “colored” man in an expensive suit who was reading Vance Packard’s Status Seekers, a popular book on social stratification in America. And she recounted, at length, a bus trip north from Milledgeville after her recuperation, in April 1960, when a black woman in “her Easter hat which was purplish red” sat beside her as a political act. Rather than be offended, Maryat offered to save her seat after a rest stop, apparently to the woman’s disappointment, as she soon removed herself to a back seat: “I waved to her to join me, but she looked out the window.”
Flannery adored this cautionary tale about the deflation of puffed-up political idealism by petty human conflicts. If not its entire reason for being, the incident became a central ingredient in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” her story of priggish, liberal, college-educated Julian escorting his mother, in her “hideous hat” with “a purple velvet flap,” to a weight-reducing class at the Y on the newly integrated buses. Like Maryat, Julian makes a point of seating himself next to a well-dressed Negro carrying a briefcase. And he experiences an inner yelp of pleasure when a Negro woman, wearing an identical “hideous hat” with “a purple velvet flap” seats herself, with her little boy, across from Julian’s mother — an object lesson he makes every effort to force her to understand. An elaborate interracial ballet of seat shuffling by whites and blacks ensues.
At the College of St. Teresa in Minnesota, O’Connor told a student interviewer, of writing black characters, “I don’t understand them the way I do white people. I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro. In my stories they’re seen from the outside.” This tack, while it was a type of artistic racism, worked well for her; Alice Walker, for instance, felt that O’Connor’s keeping her distance “from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit,” sparing the world more stereotypes. Certainly in “Everything That Rises,” her “one-and-a-half point of view” is reserved for Julian and his mother. Yet in its treatment of a burning social issue, as well as Julian’s acute heartbreak over his mother’s stroke, after she is slugged by the irate black woman with her red pocketbook, the story was a departure. “The topical is poison,” Flannery explained her choice. “I got away with it in ‘Everything That Rises’ but only because I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.”
By the time that “Everything That Rises Must Converge” appeared in New World Writing in October 1961, and won the O. Henry Award the following year, Flannery was much further along in her views on the pace of integration. While never giving up playing “Tarfeather” to her “Raybutton,” Flannery would write Maryat in November 1962, “I’m cheered you like the converging one. I guess my mama liked it all right. My stories usually put her to sleep. She’s accepting all the changes in her stride.” And, in 1963, well in advance of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, O’Connor wrote a friend, “I feel very good about those changes in the South that have been long overdue — the whole racial picture. I think it is improving by the minute, particularly in Georgia, and I don’t see how anybody could feel otherwise than good about that.”
In addition to taking her title phrase from Teilhard, Flannery identified with his habit of writing for the ages. “As long as he lived,” she told Betty, “he was faithful to his Jesuit superiors but I think he must have figured that in death he would be a citizen of some other sphere and that the fate of his books with the Church would rest with the Lord.” Likewise in her talks on the “Catholic Novelist,” Flannery claimed that she would swap “a hundred readers now” for “one in a hundred years.” As Teilhard wrote for a time when evolution would be universally accepted, so O’Connor wrote for a mo
ment when she was sure the races would converge. No matter what routines she did privately, in her stories she always presented blacks with dignity; indeed, in The Violent Bear It Away, only “a Negro named Buford Munson” finally gives the uncle his Christian burial. In literature, as in life, she clearly believed “love to be efficacious in the loooong run.”
Chapter Ten
“Revelation”
During her next visit to Andalusia, in the summer of 1961, Caroline Gordon gave Flannery a jolt when they discussed, as they always did, her latest writings. As in most of their other visits, Caroline stayed in the left room on the second floor, and Ashley Brown, her “chauffeur,” was assigned the “upstairs junk room.” Because they were arriving on a Friday afternoon, when the O’Connors dined at Sanford House, Flannery left Louise instructions to let them in. Ashley, as usual, brought along a few bottles of sherry, much appreciated by Regina. “We got along right from the beginning,” says Brown. “Regina was not given to having intellectual conversation at the dinner table. But she was a Southern lady of a certain generation I was extremely familiar with. Not too many people were permitted to wash dishes, as I was, after dinner. It was all very easygoing.”
Ashley’s task was to keep Mrs. O’Connor occupied while Caroline and Flannery went off to discuss theology and literature. Even Caroline was impressed by the depth and breadth of Flannery’s growing collection of books. “Few people realized that she actually knew a lot of theology,” she later reminisced to Robert Giroux. “I know I was astonished when I saw her library.” On this trip, Flannery shared an early draft of a new story that she had begun working on, “The Lame Shall Enter First.” Taken from snippets of The Violent Bear It Away, left lying about in her imagination, the story was another attempt to get right the triangle of a liberal widower, his “average or below” son, and a tormented, delinquent teenager. As she worked on the second novel in 1953, she had bragged to Robert Fitzgerald of “a nice gangster of 14 in it named Rufus Florida Johnson.” Having decided to excise Rufus, she was now resuscitating him.