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 pursuit 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

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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

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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.

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

Having spoken at Georgetown University, O’Connor acquires a new friend. Because of their common background, she enjoys a special candor. Road signs, which play a significant role in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and other stories, also appear in O’Connor’s own experiences.

MILLEDGEVILLE

20 OCTOBER 63

Dear Cudden Ward,

Do you know your letter of 12.X. was here waiting for me when I got back? If I had got it before I left, I would have been down sitting on that yeller sofa waiting on you. And I would have told you my lecture wasn’t about what the Protestants do to him but what they do for him; in fact I rather lay that on and leave them thinking they’re all going straight to hell because they weren’t born in Georgia. On the way driving to Milledgeville, we passed one car that had JESUS SAVES painted in red on the back bumper and a truck that said FREE FOR ALL BAPTIST CHURCH AND NURSERY SCHOOL. If I weren’t a Catholic I could only be happy in the Free for All Baptist Church. Or could I? Anyway, I loved having breakfast with you and I hope I stirred my egg the right way and left you thinking of me as a solid, sane, not altogether inscrutable addition to your universe.

May I send you a copy of the new edition of Wise Blood that has a note to the 2nd ed by me in the front of it to mark the occasion? Let me know.

Meanwhile cheers to Mrs. Purefoy [character, Dorrance’s novel] & love,

WARD ALLISON DORRANCE TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Dorrance comments on the reissue of O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood. William Faulkner had observed in the 1949 Nobel address that his fiction created “out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” Wise Blood is similar in its allegorical levels of meaning, specifically the “anagogical level” that O’Connor embeds in her novel and stories. Dorrance also mentions their mutual friend, the editor of The Sewanee Review.

2. XI. 63

Dear Cousin Honeybug:

This has been delayed because, just after your visit, the doctors told me certain things, the gut of which is that I may stop fretting about how I am going to live after my retirement; the dear fellows will be bug-eyed if I reach that age. Well, well. I have been so unhappy in this world, you’d think I’d be happy to leave it, and I expect I shall be when I’ve had time to look about me & tidy up and not take off like a pagan. Meanwhile I feel at least the shock I’d feel if I’d fallen down a flight of steps or been told, between bites of an apple, “Pack some things. We’re off for Alaska.” The shock was bad enough that I put aside writing…

Your letter was hilarious…what you said about Miss Regina, I mean…but hilarious for me in almost a holy way this is the way to your writing because where artists come from, as you say, is the first question, and you and she and I did most certainly come out from under the same log. God grant her a long life, free of pain & muddle-headedness, “ed puis le paradis a la fin de ses jours.”

Your book, triumphantly, was of a piece with Miss R. & the holy way. I don’t know if you meant I should write you my opinion of it, but I feel moved to say:

1) The Holy Ghost seems to me to have started you out with certain advantages that other writers cannot reach by mere talent, much less by study or by will.

2) Your whole pitch, for instance, is putting new wine into old bottle—a vast and a deep source of strength.

3) Your main “holt” (your biggest bottle) is what I call the fairy tale for adults. Here the field is strewn with the bodies of fallen men. Hawthorne (in all his works, if you ask me) and Henry James in such as The Altar of the Dead & The Beast in the Jungle.

4) You get away with it where they fail for at least two reasons which I see:

a) You constantly keep the abstractions on your anagogical level tied down into not only the necessary naturalistic level but into a naturalistic level that lifts the hair on the back of my neck. Take your scene in which your boy eats with his hat on with the women in the dining car…or the one in which the chap in the ape suit surprises the spooners. I stare at those pages, fascinated, and have to put the book down and get up and walk around a bit before I can go on.

b) Here you seem to know that the usual naturalistic level won’t do. You are dealing (no matter what your ultimate “meaning”) with fantasy.

What do you mean by a “low blood count”? How are you now?…

Meanwhile I’m not sure my story-that-Andrew-Lytle-won’t-touch is worth any drain on your strength. Think it over again. If it would amuse you, or keep you company in a lonely spell and if you’d take it with the understanding that you could throw it away, or wait six months.

Love to you & the Lady in

the Red Coat,

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

O’Connor has inspired Dorrance to work on a novel. Reading his writing has also influenced one of her funniest stories. She notes many writers lack roots in region, custom, or speech. To demonstrate her contention, O’Connor describes the particular situation on the dairy farm where little has changed in a century. She deeply admires her mother’s authority in defusing volatile situations.

MILLEDGEVILLE

3 NOVEMBER 63

Dear Cudden Ward:

I’m glad I put a chunk under Mrs. Purefoy [The Party at Mrs. Purefoy’s]. You put a chunk under me. I came home and read your four stories over and then I wrote me one [“Revelation”]; at least, I’m most through with it and I’m pretty sure it’s good, not just good, but right like those are right. I suppose this is what a little human communion with a real writer can do for you, but I don’t go along with you on liking their company as a general rule or because they’re writers. They’ve got to come from somewhere. Too many of them don’t come from anywhere, don’t belong anywhere, and couldn’t if they tried.

You would have to see my ma in action. I can’t do justice to her. We’ve got a very 19th-century operation here. Three colored people live here in what was the guest house to this house—Louise and Jack, husband and wife, and Shot, their boarder; Louise and Shot work for us, Jack up the road. The guest house was right next to ours but Regina and a negro named George Harper put it on telephone poles about twenty years ago and rolled it out of earshot (a two story house itself) but not out of sight. Now we are connected to it by an electric bell. The bell is for us, if we get scared, to call them, but more often it rings over here. It rang last week and Short came stomping over to say Louise was drunk and had thrown potash water on him. He brings her the liquor and then comes running over here when she goes wild, which she every so often [does]. We’ve had these negroes going on fifteen years. Regina gave her a lecture the next day, saying that one of these days she was going to put his eyes out. “Yes’m,” Louise says, “I hope I gets at least one of them.” She stays mad with him about a day.

Regina’s big aim is to stop the flow of liquor in here, but I tell her she might as well try to stop the Mississippi from rolling on. She gives them all sorts of lectures about how nice folks do and when they are about to kill each other, she says, “Now let’s not have any more of this unpleasantness. Bring that shotgun over her and leave it.” What she has is no doubt whatsoever about her authority…I’d ask them [farm workers] to please bring the shotgun over, or some fool thing. She listens to their lies very seriously, and I mean they lie like artists. It’s never a matter of finding the truth but of which lie suits you best the moment to accept in its place.

This is the right and only place for me to be but even with all of it here, as you say, you have to be chosen. And the problem is to make it believable, too, because to the rest of the world, it’s not. They don’t think this kind of place or life exists anymore, and if they saw it, they’d think it shouldn’t.

Enclosed is the book. It’s not to read but to throw at anyone who joggles you.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO “CHILDREN”

O’Connor’s friend Janet McKane taught school in New York City. O’Connor replies to letters from her students.

MILLEDGEVILLE

GEORGIA

NOVEMBER 5, 1963

Dear Children,

Thank you for all your letters. I was glad to hear you liked the peacock feathers and the picture of Equinox and his mama. Equinox says he is sorry nobody has offered him a pair of lavender shoes or a hat. He thinks he’d look pretty good in them. He sends you all his best regards.

Sincerely yours,

Flannery O’Connor

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

O’Connor encloses a clipping of a “lady” evangelist who will preach locally. Such gatherings may have influenced similar scenes in The Violent Bear It Away.

NOV 1963

Dear Janet,

Thought you might like to see this lady. If you had done Salvation Preaching with your accordion playing, you might still be playing it.

She’s right up the road from us.

Thanks for the Metropolitan Bulletin & your letters. I’ve got an eye infection so don’t want to continue using them now. Hence this scrawl.

Cheers,

Flannery

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O’Connor writes as a regionalist, noting, as she does in other letters, playful theology associated with ecumenism in the local community.

MILLEDGEVILLE

GEORGIA

9 DECEMBER 63

Dear Janet,

Thanks so much for the children’s letters and the veils and the copies of Ramparts [Catholic journal]. I will have a veil to put in all my pockets so that when I get to church I can just reach in for one. Thanks a lot. The little boy who addressed me as Miss Flannery is doing it the Southern way. Here all the children call you your first name prefixed by Miss—Miss Regina and Miss Flannery we are.

I was much surprised to see the piece in Commonweal. I don’t know who Rupp is or if I met him there. You meet so many people at these things, talk to them a split second and they are gone, and I’m no good at names. I met mostly students there anyway. It’s always odd to see the interpretations people put on things.

Regina was delighted to have Ernest for a mother’s day present as that put us in the way of getting Equinox. At this writing Equinox and his ma will go to the Hardwick Christian churches pageant because Ernest has been invited to go to the First Methodist. He is supposed to walk across the front of the Methodist church, led by a deacon or deaconess I hope, and as he is a great cut-up, he’ll probably let out some kind of noise in the middle of it. He has an unearthly bray which he delivers at full gallop. Maybe Methodism will do something for him.

I’ll be looking out for this yellow mystery.

Cheers to you,

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

O’Connor courageously accepts dire illness and possible death, which both she and her friend face. Using an electric typewriter enables her to put limited energy to greater use. She recounts the reaction of family members to the reissue of Wise Blood.

MILLEDGEVILLE

10 DECEMBER 63

Dear Cudden Ward,

If you have got shut of Lawrence and tidied up your desk before death and not left a mess for your friends to clean up, you are ready to get back to work on Mrs. Purefoy [The Party at Mrs. Purefoy’s], and with a free mind and a free soul. Every sentence ought to be like one of the dates the crow brought St. John Whatshisname in the desert. I think I envy you—the amount of notice of death anyway. I hope I get as much. My desk is a buzzard’s nest. It’ll take me a week or two to get it in a state I can properly leave it in. I hope you drop in your tracks though and don’t have to hang around in bed. I am prepared for that for myself. In one of my affluent years I bought me a Smith Corona compact 250 electric typewriter and I’m going to get one of those hospital tables that swings across the bed and set the electric on it. It requires about 75% less energy to use an electric typewriter. I use it now for a lot of work and I can work four hours at it at a time without getting tired and I’m good for about an hour and a half on the manual.

Miss R. [Regina] would say, “Well we’ve all got to go but you’re not dead yet.” She tends to clichés delivered briskly. I notice about Southern ladies of her generation that when they’ve found the cliché to clap on the occasion, they take great satisfaction, as if life had been rendered its due at least as far as the language is concerned. I had considerable qualms when she read Wise Blood. She hadn’t read anything since Ivanhoe, of course, and I thought Oh Lord, this will shock her to death and embarrass her and so forth and so forth. But after it was accepted she demanded to read it so I handed it over and she took the ms. off to bed with her in the afternoon—we “lie down” after dinner which we eat in the middle of the day—and I waited for the first groan or moan or explosion or whatever. After about a half hour I began to hear these gentle snores. Then I had an 82 year old cousin in Savannah who had been very good to me and I was worried about her reading it too. I thought it’s going to kill her, she’ll have a heart attack or a stroke or something and I’ll go around with her on my conscience the rest of my life. But it didn’t do anything to her either, except increase her rectitude. She sat right down and wrote me a letter beginning, “I do not like your book. There is enough trouble and misery in the world without your adding to it.”

Thank you for commenting on it. That about better ventilation I will try to remember. I think the second one is better ventilated, it’s also less of a fairy tale, though a disembodied devil does preside over it partially, but I’m not really much of an observer, I mean I see what knocks me down but I never have gone out of my way to look and I should. If I get it fixed up to my satisfaction I am going to send you a copy of this story I have just written because there will be a piece of your finger baked in that pie. About the nouminous and all.

Merry Christmas to you & Mrs. Purefoy.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER SCOTT WATSON

O’Connor confuses a title of a famous novel, perhaps because in another letter she notes her dislike of the story. She herself endured admirers at literary gatherings confusing the titles of her stories.

12 DECEMBER 63

I did appreciate your card when you were in the Atlanta airport with nothing to read but How to Kill a Mockingbird. The Atlanta airport is bad enough by itself and I don’t know how long that particular book could be expected to deaden you to it.

We still hope that one of these days we’ll see you in Milledgeville again. I plod along in my work and I guess you do too. It’s something to be able to plod, and I’m thankful for it.

My mother and I hope you’ll have a fine Christmas and the best of New Years.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

12-13-63 [POSTCARD]

Heavens no! Nothing in your last offended me. I was real pleased with what you said and glad you felt like saying it. I understand the state of shock but get out of it as it will interfere with your work and you have plenty to do. I expect to hear more of Mrs. P. [Purefoy] if Lawrence doesn’t. Happy Christmas.

Love, Flannery.

W. Dorrance appends a phrase of explanation: “This is an answer to a letter of mine in which I said that she (in her writing) ‘got by pure outrage.’ ”

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

This postcard features rural character Chess McCartney leading a parade of goats. O’Connor approves of her friend’s succinct comment on her storytelling strategy.

12-30-63 [POSTCARD]

[CHAS. or CHESS McCARTNEY and His Goat Caravan]

Pure outrage for the new year.

Cheers,

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

O’Connor seeks expert opinion about “Revelation,” written while both she and her friend are quite frail.

MILLEDGEVILLE

5 JANUARY 64

I had decided I wouldn’t send you this because you being low on energy you ought to use what you’ve got for Mrs. P. [Purefoy], but you’ve asked for it so here it is—double. And I want the criticism and don’t fear to offend me. My feelings are made of pig iron. I really need an eye on this. When I finished the first version I sent it to an old editor of mine in New York to look at. She wrote me it was one of my blackest stories. I had thought it was one of my lightest. She thought the main character, Mrs. Turpin, was mean and evil. I thought she was funny and innocent and big, one of those country women that are usually in touch with forces larger than themselves. So I concluded the story was a failure and I did over the end—second version. I want this woman to have this vision. I want it to be a real revelation. Maybe I’ve tilted the sack too fast there but I went just as slow as I dared. Anyway tell me what you can and which version is best; if either.

I’m supposed to send it to Andrew [Lytle, editor of The Sewanee Review] but he’ll probably give me hell too. I want to get it right first. I can’t criticize but I can react, if you want a third eye on yours. Maybe you’re sick of eyes on it. I’m sick of this one but I’ve got to keep at it.

I’ve been in bed all during the holidays—low blood count—but I am picking up now. This here is the electric typewriter you’re being writ to on.

I can see you’ve got no bidnis smoking but maybe they’d let you dip snuff. There must be something [in] it, they [farm workers] love it so. Makes them sort of drunk in a nice way.

Two days ago Miss Regina was out in her red coat frisking her small magnolia. Everything was bowed over with ice. Today is a good spring day and the peafowl have begun to holler.

CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Gordon notes the reaction of students to an O’Connor story read aloud in class. Having also endured the painful dissolution of her marriage to Allen Tate, Gordon speculates about living with religious. She, like C. S. Lewis, reveals that sickness can actually become a kind of retreat. Lewis writes of spells of illness that turn into quiet times of delight in reading two or three novels in as many days.

JANUARY EIGHT, 1964

I don’t think of you as a “writer.” Well, that doesn’t sound very nice, does it? I mean one of those writers whose works I have to read. Reading one of your stories is, for me, always an adventure and a delight, as you must know. I have just got back from wanderings that were pretty fatiguing and found your ms. on top of the pile of accumulated mail. I have read one quarter of it so far. Took it in hand and dashed with it to my seminar in fiction which gathers at half past seven on Monday evenings. I explained that I was taking the liberty of sharing this reading with them because Miss O’C. has the humility of the true artist and, I felt, wouldn’t mind said sharing. I, myself, don’t yet know what you are up to but the reading went over big. I have a notion of what I think you’re up to and I suspect that you are working in this story a kind of magic (wrong word, that!)—anyhow, shall we say you are using a technique you have used before in some of your best stories: a technique which induces the reader to most willingly suspend his disbelief. You do it by making him laugh his head almost off. My students responded heartily. They laughed till some of them had tears in their eyes. Don’t see how you could expect to accomplish more than that in six pages. More on this subject later.

I am awfully sorry to know that you had to take to you bed during the holidays. Do let me know how you got on. I can’t help being anxious about you.

My aunt, who is eighty six years old, announced that she was being hostess at her last Christmas dinner on this earth. I realized that this was a command performance, changed my reservations, (made weeks ago), and set off on a giro that I egotistically believe, would have daunted Odysseus. However, the Lord, as so many of the theologians point out, mercifully veils what is to come from our sight…

I aspire to end my days with the Carmelites, so I stayed over a day in order to trek over to the Madonna Residence in Brooklyn. It is a huge building, fronting on that imitation Place de la Concorde which was set up in honour of the Grand Army of the Republic. Opposite is the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Art Museum. The sight of the place sharpened my desire to get in there but the sister who finally consented to see me was pretty discouraging. Still, she admitted, we do have vacancies…Yep, I thought, thanks to the Grim Reaper…

I recount my adventures and misadventures at such length, partly because I want my friends to share some part of my sufferings, and, also in the hope that being forced, as it were, to participate in mine, may help a little bit, even to console you for having to be in bed during the holidays. Being in bed is tough any time, but I must say that if I have to take to my bed, I would prefer to take to it during the holidays. Two years ago I had the worst attack of flu I have had since I was sixteen. (It felt like the kind you had then. “Spanish Flu.” Katherine Anne [Porter] had it and it turned her hair grey.) I was put out of circulation by losing my voice. A man I was trying to talk to long distance finally said, “I wish you’d hang up. You sound like a bat trying to talk.” I thereupon got into bed and had one of the happiest Christmases I ever had. But some of my friends in Princeton refer to that Yuletide as “that time you said you had the flu.”

How did the Methodists take Ernest’s balking at the door of the chapel? No doubt they were polite about it but I bet my hat they had dark subterranean thoughts, such as what can you expect of a jackass raised by Papists. I am going to put him in Needle point yet! I had my Needlepoint and my Divine Comedy, plus Charles Williams’ Figure of Beatrice along on my wanderings. If I hadn’t had something to really occupy me I think I would have been locked up somewhere along the route…

I must get back to my mountain of real mail—mail that has to be answered. I’ll be writing you about “Revelation” later. I’m quite excited about it.

Much love for you and Regina. Do let me have some news when you feel like writing. I know you wouldn’t take to your bed without good reason but maybe you needed a rest in more ways than one. You’ve been working pretty hard, haven’t you?

CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR

COPYEDITING OF “REVELATION”

The narrative is fragmented because it was written apparently at different times from New York City. Gordon is accompanied by Erik Langkjaer, the Danish textbook salesman O’Connor dated briefly. O’Connor perhaps told him about Gordon, but in the commentary Gordon seems unaware of their association.

At the end of copyediting, perhaps influenced by Mrs. Turpin experiencing a “visionary light” settling “in her eyes,” Gordon is reminded of Dante, the pilgrim, looking to the stars at strategic times in his pilgrimage. She recommends that a storyteller read the Florentine. This counsel about the parallels between Dante and O’Connor opens up a rich fount of comparison. In Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, we can see the potent parallels and influences of Dante’s comic strategies that she uses to lead her audience to ponder sacramental theological truths through violence.2 He establishes the techniques of “divine comedy,” upon which later writers of similar theological interests draw. O’Connor’s handwritten notes to the 1933 Modern Library edition, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, edited by C. H. Grandgent, show a close familiarity with the poem’s allegory. At the end of the Inferno she writes that hell is

an exemplification of everlasting punishment without free-will. You could not have hell as Christian conceives it—pagan doesn’t blame man as much since man is not wholly to blame for his sins. State of hell is state of rebellion against the divine order. Sinner in hell contradicts his own reason—against duty also.3

The girl’s face is “seared,” not “seered.” In this masterly story it is Mrs. Turpin, who, like a blind seer in a trance, seeing all her own mischance, drifts, not down to Camelot, but up that there ladder of humility, celebrated by the A.A. Dante Alighieri, St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Franz Kafka—if in reverse. (At least, as I see it.)…

Again, if I were doing it, I’d break the mother’s explanatory speech up a bit. Perhaps by a gesture, I’d let “Mary Grace goes to Wellesley College” stand for a second, anyhow, as the pleasant lady’s explanation of her daughter’s eccentric behaviour. Then, as I see it, this admirable woman who, herself, has suffered so much from Wellesley College (nice bit of projection, that,) will realize that her audience will not have any notion of what Wellesley College can do to disrupt family lives and will hasten to specify some of the results of going to Wellesley College—like reading all the time, etc…

…The man [Allen Tate, perhaps] whom I considered the finest man I knew has run off with my money and blackened my reputation and had the nerve to ask me to lunch with him last Monday.

…I had been told that if I wanted a quiet place in which to converse with a friend I would do well to go [to] the Café St. Germain on East Forty Seventh Street. I accordingly walked over there with Eric Langjkaer. We had some private business to discuss and I had asked him to meet me in the Scribner Book Store because I did not want to go upstairs to the editorial offices; I was afraid I might encounter So and So whom I would just as soon not see; he edited my last book. Erik did not seem to mind meeting me downstairs. But when we got to the restaurant we were both a little taken aback to see Scribner’s new editor-in-chief sitting all by himself at a table over in a corner…

One final objection. I do not believe that she can hear either the “hoard” (or “horde”) of souls. She cannot hear any one of those souls any more than she can hear a hog or a railroad train or any object or person. She hears the sound emitted by the object or person.

You are making for the anagogical level. One doesn’t use colloquialisms or idioms there for the reason, I hazard, that there everybody understands everything anybody else says.

Allen [Tate] has expressed astonishment at my story, “One Against Thebes.” It is the stars in the final paragraph that puzzle him most. He says they “work” but he can’t see why they work. The answer seems simple to me. Anybody—my nine year old girl, Mrs. Turpin—can look up and behold the same stars that Dante beheld as he emerged from Hell:

The beauteous burdens of the sky,

Fletcher translates the line.

Have you been reading The Divine Comedy? Or were you smarter than I am and read it years ago? I have just finished reading it, for the first time, in what I begin to suspect, is a mis-spent life. Owe it to Ashley [Brown]. He kept going on about how I had learned thus or that technique from Dante and I finally told him that, like most of my contemporaries, I had read the Inferno all the way through but had progressed no further. He replied: “You’d better.”

So I started in this Fall and, now that I have finished, I am going to pursue the plan I have followed for fifteen years with St. John of the Cross. Soon as I get through the whole works, I turn around and start in again at the beginning.

It seems to me that you—or I or any other fiction writer—can find any technique we can muster right there, used to perfection by Dante. All these things I keep trying to tell young people—he can show them to them better than I can ever hope to show them.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

As O’Connor’s energies continue to dissipate, she is thankful for the kindnesses of her friend.

MILLEDGEVILLE

11 JANUARY 64

Dear Janet,

The two books came yesterday and I believe the Chagall [Marc] is the most beautiful I have ever seen. The other is different order of things and it is interesting to compare the two religious imaginations. I am very grateful to you and appreciate them more than I can say. It troubles me though that you should spend so much money on something that you are not here to enjoy with me. Let us own these books together and let me send them back to you after six months or so and I have absorbed them into my bones and you absorb them into yours. This kind of book ought to be shared. I feel like the proverbial bloated bondholder—only of the arts—to have them and I insist that they travel back and forth between us.

I feel better and as you see am able to be up operating the electric typewriter, a great invention. I am like the late Pope a “powerful fork” (big eater), with emphasis on proteins, do exactly like the doctor tells me always and take quantities of iron. My kind of anemia is the kind that doesn’t respond to liver but does to iron. I take it in the latest form, six pills a day of something called SIMRON, which is the best form possible. I support the Merrell Laboratories single-handed with my purchases of SIMRON. I will do as you say and stretch occasionally but I am afraid that if my thoughts were too pleasant the quality of my prose (not as exhibited in correspondence) would decline.

I work a little every day but am not up to my usual three hours, and hour and a half and I am shot, and a lot of time has to be taken up with business that accumulated while I was in bed. A student in Chile wrote and asked me to correspond with him and tell him “my ideas about life” as he had to write a paper on me—that sort of thing.4 Also such stuff as: “I am in the ninth grade and next week is Georgia Authors week and our teacher told us we had to pick a Georgia Author to write about and I picked you. Will you please send me some interesting biographical information and tell me what books you have written.” And then there are the ones who are writing their Master’s Thesis and send you a list of questions.

Thanks also for sending the Metropolitan Bulletin. My mother has been sick with the flu and she enjoyed it while she couldn’t be up. Incidentally, don’t you want these back? You may keep a file of them. Let me know. And my great appreciation again for the beautiful books and let me know what you think of my plan that they should travel.

Cheers,

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

Typically eschewing literary labels, O’Connor rejects the term “gothic,” often applied to her fiction. The term has been popular over the years with academic commentators drawn to the sensational, dramatic scenes in O’Connor’s stories and labeling them “gothic.”5

22 JAN 64

MILLEDGEVILLE

Dear Janet,

Thanks for your letter and various clippings and what not. I’m feeling better but not up to any full scale letter. I’m glad you like my notion of sending the book for a summer in the Bronx. It will come. Dont send me the piece out of Renascence [Marquette University] on the Gothic novel. Sounds very bogus. My work is not gothic and I dislike the whole conception intensely.

Its in the 60s here today and the birds have begun to strut and I feel like we are getting somewhere toward spring. Can’t get there too fast for me.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

O’Connor with typical good humor refers to Caroline Gordon’s epistle of January 8, 1964. O’Connor tolerates Gordon’s grammatical instruction and also praises her mother’s practical skills.

MILLEDGEVILLE

28 JANUARY 64

Thanks a lot. The reason we know some of the same things is we went to school to the same lady [Caroline Gordon]. She has beat it into my head on so many occasions that you have to show the eyes or whatever it is you’ve got to show that by now I’ve just about made it instinct. But I always need somebody to tell me if the thing is finished and that I’ve got a dull thud in there. I’ll get rid of the dull thud. I don’t know about the svelt-like. They read words like that in the papers and even the farm magazines and then they go put a like behind it and make it their own.

I had thought I wouldn’t send this one to Caroline because I hadn’t heard from her in a long time and I thought I might be in her black books; however I heard from her, so I sent it. She liked the story all but a couple of sentences which she proceeded to analyze grammatically insofar as it was analysable. She is a great hand at grammar. She wrote me six pages about grammar and another six about her Christmas vacation, which was all on broken-down trains and planes that didn’t fly and misconnected busses—from Lafayette to Chattanooga to Princeton to Lafayette. What that woman has is Vitality. She went to see the Carmelites, for she has this idea of ending her days in one of their establishments. I think she would end the Carmelites. Anyway their instinct for self-preservation will keep them from taking her.

I’m writing another story now but its not funny and its all will and just drag drag drag. It’s also not credible, which don’t help any. So what I said about being dried up doesn’t seem so funny to me. Its just like you said: you have to be chosen. And in between times of being chosen, you have to keep on writing.

I’m all right now but Miss Regina has had the flu. Her policy is never to admit anything but perfect health, however she was pretty obviously poorly this time and had to stay in bed a week and suffer my ministrations. She thinks I’m an incompetent when it comes to doing anything and she appeared right surprised that what had to be done got done. Now she is up again and back to her usual winter plumbing activities. We have an ancient labyrinthine mysterious system of water pipes that have to be cut off and drained and usually freeze and break anyway, but she knows it down to the last pipe-fitting. The place is also complicated electrically with two wells and two pumps and a water tower. My nightmares concern being left to cope with the pipes and wires.

You do what you feel like about sending me your story. I can’t help you like you can me but I want you to know I’m around if I ever could. If I ever get this one I’m working on anyways believable, I’m going to send it to you but I promise not to send but one copy. That was inconsiderate of me.

I hope you are more involved with the typewriter & less with [illegible]

Cheers

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

O’Connor senses her time is running out and uses her energy to work on a second collection of stories that would be published after her death.

11 FEB 64

Dear Janet,

Thanks so much for your card from New Rochelle and the Metropolitan Bulletin and so forth. Your generosity exceeds my free energy. My blood is back up now so I am working like mad and hope to keep it up so that possibly I can have a book of stories out in the fall. The ms. will have to be delivered in May if I do and there is most too much work needed to get it done but I am going to try anyway.

My two new swans arrived and look pretty good but only time will tell if they’re a mated pair. They sit facing each other and converse a lot so I hope thats a good sign.

Maybe sooner or later I will get to write you a leisurely letter but I dont know when.

Cheers,

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO TOM AND LOUISE GOSSETT

As the result of increasing health problems, O’Connor cancels a lecture tour and a visit to her friends in San Antonio.

MILLEDGEVILLE

18 NOVEMBER 64

Dear Tom & Louise,

I sure do wish I could come but I have had to cancel all the lectures—Boston College, Brown and the University of Texas—and I have very shortly to go to the hospital and be cut upon by the doctors. I suggested they ask me again next year but I don’t know. This is all fairly sudden. I WASN’T LOOKING FOR IT.

Thanks for asking me anyway. If I were coming, I would accept.

Fr. McCown seems to be in Houston. He sho do move around aplenty. Tell him not to forget to send me your lunatic book. Just right for hospital or recuperative reading no doubt.

Cheers,

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES H. McCOWN

The next two letters concern immediate hospitalization. O’Connor also notes that Father McCown has become a nomadic retreat leader and lecturer. For almost a decade O’Connor has beseeched prayers from her Jesuit friends and Janet McKane.

MILLEDGEVILLE

20 FEB. 64

You do flit from place to place. One day I get a pamphlet from Houston + the next day a magazine from Mobile. Thanks a lot for both. We’ll give the men the Knights of Columbus pamphlet. That other must have been a joke.

I am being operated on Tuesday here and will be in the hospital 10 days or 2 weeks. Rather serious so kindly commend me to the Lord, formally & informally and ask my friend Fr. Watson to do the same—if you stay in Mobile long enough to receive this.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

MILLEDGEVILLE

22 FEB 64

Dear Janet,

Well I didn’t have much respite for work. I have to go to the hospital Monday for an operation—abdominal—and I’ll be there about ten days. So I appear to be a fit subject for your prayers at all times. I’d just as soon you didn’t write me for the next ten days because I won’t feel like reading anything. I’ll be full of tubes and jacked up to the apparatus of transfusions and what not. I’ll count on your good prayers.

Cheers,

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

O’Connor is thankful for an illustrated book that imparts spiritual strength as she recuperates from surgery.

9 MARCH 64

M’VILLE

Dear Janet,

Just a note to tell you that I am back at home and the operation was a success, and thank you for your prayers and the book of Bible illus. which is wonderful. I feel like a train has run over me and am going to take your advice and let things fade for a while. I dont feel like writing letters or even much like reading them. I guess it’ll take a couple of months. I’m still running a fever. I’ll feel better when I can throw that off.

Many many thanks,

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER SCOTT WATSON

O’Connor replies to Father Watson who had written her a moving letter in which he invoked a Franciscan formulation about “Sister pain” in discussing the death of his brother.

15 MARCH 64

I was real sorry to hear you had lost your brother. I know the pain of a loss like that’s greater than any kind of physical pain.

I came out very well from my operation. I have no strength yet but I guess that will come back in time. Then I will just pray to have something to write that will be worth the expense of energy.

I am going to have a story in the Spring Sewanee Review [“Revelation”] which I hope you will see. I thought it was good until I read the galleys and they always affect me adversely.

Now I just hope it is.

Thank you again for your prayers, I will remember you and your brother in mine.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO LOUISE AND THOMAS GOSSETT

O’Connor congratulates Tom for the positive review of his book, Race: The History of an Idea, in a popular magazine. O’Connor’s fiction did not fare as well in such publications. O’Connor also demurs from reading a long narrative about the Spanish Civil War. She perhaps preferred the more concise For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

20 MARCH 64

MILLEDGEVILLE

Thanks for that hog-sloppin card. It was real inspiring to me and I think I will get well at once. The operation was a success and the doctors are very pleased with themselves but I am still just creeping about and exercising my natural aptitude for doing nothing.

I was real pleased to see that Time took so heavy to your book [“Intellectuals as Racists,” March 13, 1964]. Better to have those people for you than agin you even though they don’t have much sense. Preacher McCown hasn’t sent it yet. Incidentally I hope I can save my soul without reading The Cypresses Believe in God [José María Gironella Pous].

We hope you all are going to Virginia by way of Georgia this year. I’ve got two new swans as my old one “passed on,” as genteel folks say. These new ones are very different from the old ones as to personality. They jabber constantly and the old ones were about 100% silent. Anyway, I hope I have the opportunity of innerducing you to them in June.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

O’Connor continues to appreciate Janet’s thoughtful gifts. O’Connor continues reading C. S. Lewis, earlier recommended by her friend.

28 MARCH 64

Dear Janet,

How did you know I liked mugs? I drink my coffee out of one every morning and think they are vastly superior to cups. Thank you so much for thinking of me. I like this one a lot.

As for the state of my health that is pretty uncertain at this point. The operation was a success but it kicked up the lupus, which with me means kidney complications, and I have been put back on the steroid drugs. They (steroids) have saved my life before but at the same time they do much side damage to the bones.

The doctors don’t say much but “we’re walking on eggs now.” I’ve been through all this before and it doesn’t mean much to me. One thing suits me about as well as another. It may be summer before I can really get to work. Fortunately I have a natural aptitude for doing nothing.

I am reading CS Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm. You would like it.

Cheers,

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO LOUISE AND THOMAS GOSSETT

Having read a narrative sent by her friends about Africa, O’Connor speculates about ethnology. The subject was germane to Tom Gossett who was one of a handful of academics offering new courses at the time in African American literature and history. O’Connor comments about the connection of African Americans to Africa itself.6

31 MARCH 64

MILLEDGEVILLE

I’m really enjoying Out of Africa [Karen Blixen]. I like [Blixen’s] the Seven Gothic Tales but they are all I had read. I think Regina may like Out of Africa too if she ever lights long enough to read a chapter of it. Our natives aint native, but I recognize in them some of the qualities she talks about. There is no straight answer in their book.

I am still more or less in bed and have been put back on cortesone but I hope not forever. I have taken a swipe or two at my electric typewriter but don’t think I’m ready for it yet.

Everybody here is getting ready for the Garden Club Tour of Homes. My position is usually over the ink spot on the dining room sofa, but this year somebody else will occupy my post.

Cheers and thanks again for the Baroness Blixen and let us know when we can expect you in June.

,

FATHER JAMES McCOWN TO THOMAS GOSSETT

Father McCown writes from Atlanta, Georgia, hometown of Martin Luther King, Jr. Just eight years after Gossett’s dismissal from a Georgia college for his support of desegregation, Father McCown reports favorable reception of Gossett’s scholarly work on race, including O’Connor’s praise. While O’Connor was in frail health, Father McCown notes that he had visited her novelist friend, Walker Percy, who supported the Jesuit order’s social activism in behalf of racial justice.

IGNATIUS HOUSE

6700 RIVERSIDE DRIVE, N.W.

ATLANTA 5, GEORGIA

APRIL 9, 1964

Chronologically here is how my awareness of your book [Race: The History of an Idea in America] developed. I mean that it had been published. First your letter, telling me that a copy was being sent me. This arrived, or rather was waiting for me, Monday when I arrived back in Atlanta after my southern sojourn. Since I was very busy getting my Macon talk together (more about this later), I could not answer you just then. Then when I hit Macon I thought I was breaking some fresh news when I told them about your book, only to learn that the whole literate part of the city has been buzzing with excitement since it was written up in the March 13 Time, which, as luck would have it, I had missed completely on my travels [“Intellectuals as Racists,” March 13, 1964]. On my way to Macon I stopped for a most satisfactory visit with Flannery. She immediately launched into an enthusiastic recital of the virtues of your book, which she was ⅔ through. I wanted to borrow her copy to take to Macon to tell them about it, but she wouldn’t part with it. All I could borrow was the dust jacket. Then, when I returned to Atlanta you had found time to write me another card telling me what direction to expect my copy from—and all this before I had had a chance to so much as drop you a line! Am I embarrassed!

Congratulations a thousand times over, Tom! I am so proud of you and your work and of being a friend of yours. Naturally I have not had the chance to read RACE but will eagerly await my copy from the publisher. The writeup in Time which I feverishly found after half of Macon had told me about [it], was wonderful. I don’t know how justified their one adverse criticism of RACE is, but certainly they are over all in deepest admiration of it. The closing line of their review is terrific. Flannery was so visibly pleased over it that it did me good.

Flannery: She looked almost as good, I thought, as when we saw her in late August. Her color is still good, though I thought I caught a hint of purplish cast that I think is one of the symptoms of the lupus or the medicine. She looks far from emaciated or weak, though, once again, she might be a little puffed from the medicine. For, there is no doubt about it, the lupus has been reactivated by her illness, though I got the impression that it was not as severe as feared. She is back on the medicine, but she brushed my anxious inquiries aside by saying that she took it for ten years in the past and survived it, so she is not fearful of going back on it. The “it” is cortisone, I think. She is not doing any work now, but is resting a great deal. Mrs. O’Connor was her bouncy self, and real agreeable. Her sister and niece were there too. Came in just after I arrived. The reason for their presence was that Mrs. O’s other sister Mrs. Cline, is critically ill, not expected to live, just a matter of time. The young lady, Flannery’s cousin [Louise Florencourt], was one of the most beautiful young women I ever met, a lawyer, from Washington, D.C., about 35 years old, who responded to my inevitable nosiness about her unmarried status with the quick reply, “when I find a man who can support me in the manner I am accustomed to live, I’ll gladly marry him.” I stopped at Flannery’s during a dry two hours in the middle of a heavy rainy spell. As I went to get into my car six peacocks, probably celebrating the lull in the rain, did their stuff at the same time. It was shattering.

My reason for going to Macon was that the parish library was celebrating its tenth anniversary with a big blowout at the country club, and I, having been partly responsible for its inception, was to give the talk at the dinner. Well, I chose the ambitious subject NEW HORIZONS IN CATHOLIC LITERATURE. My idea was to talk on just some of the more popular novels that were of Catholic interest, so I wrote Flannery and asked her to name about five important such and to write just a paragraph on each. This and a letter to my brother plus my own cogitating was supposed to build up into a nice talk. Well, it did work that way pretty much. The crowd was pleased with my talk, and I had a marvelous time. There were 180 men and women at the dinner at $2 a piece, at noon on Wednesday. I thought that a wonderful response. The whole affair went off so nicely. It was at that dinner that I displayed the dust jacket of your book and told them about it, only to find out that they all knew. Remember Filomena Campbell? She made the remark to me that Wesleyan will be another ten or fifteen years getting over your departure. Incidentally, at her invitation one of the professors from Wesleyan and his wife were there, name forgotten…

I can’t wait for your trip north this summer. And, don’t forget to stop in to see my Mother in Mobile. She was so pleased over your visit, and has so often spoken of you. And now that you, Tom, are famous, she will be terribly disappointed if you don’t stop by.

Did I tell you that a few weeks ago I spent the better part of a day with Walker Percy, author of THE MOVIE GOER? Flannery says he is very good. Certainly he is one of the most charming people I ever met. He is a doctor, but he (along with five others) contracted TB in his internship from working in a lab on TB specimens. So he does not practice medicine now.

If you plan to come along the gulf coast of Mississippi again, let me know so I can give you some names of friends in Pass Christian and Biloxi, Miss. Thanks for your kindness to me. God bless you. And, again, Tom, congratulations.

WALKER PERCY TO FATHER LOUIS J. TWOMEY

Percy’s friendship with Father McCown was part of a network of Jesuits dedicated to social justice and works of mercy. Percy was influenced by their efforts and took an active role himself in instituting programs in the local community.

APRIL 3, 1968

REV. LOUIS J. TWOMEY, S.J.

INSTITUTE OF HUMAN RELATIONS

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY

NEW ORLEANS, LA.

Dear Father Twomey:

I am writing you on behalf of a group of interested persons in Covington who wish to initiate a Head Start Program and a Day Care Center here. It is our hope to enlist the aid of Loyola University in sponsoring our application to the Office of Economic Opportunity toward this end.

The leader and moving spirit of our group is Fr. Willis V. Reed of Covington, a Negro, and the chief beneficiaries of the program will be the Negro children of the area, though we would hope of course that deprived white children would participate as well.

The need is great, as I am sure Mr. Reed has told you. For one reason or another, St. Tammany Parish has failed to participate in any of such programs made available. A year or so ago, for example, the League of University Women tried to start a Head Start Program but were refused the use of public school facilities. The main stumbling block has been the unavailability of a building adequate enough to meet O.E.O. standards.

Our hopes have been revived by the news that certain excellent new facilities might be available at the Novitiate of the Eucharistic Sisters of St. Dominic which is close by Covington. The building, as I understand it, includes classroom space, kitchen, toilets etc. In fact, Sister Stanislaus of this order first approached us with the suggestion that they would like very much to see their extra space so used.

We would greatly appreciate the good offices of Loyola University in this matter as well as your own advice in getting such a program under way. Ours is a group of responsible persons, black and white, including a pediatrician and an attorney, who would do whatever they could to assist such a program.

I understand there is a time element involved here, that the Eucharistic Sisters have to make a decision about the use of their facilities in the near future. So I am sure that they as well as we would hope to hear from you and Loyola in the near future.

With kindest personal regards,

Sincerely yours,

Walker Percy

P. O. box 510

Covington, La. 70433

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

Sharing a common regional history with her friend, O’Connor details a gathering of the larger family, including matriarchs. Caroline Gordon also remains in contact. Another esteemed editor and teacher of O’Connor recuperates from serious surgery. O’Connor praises C. S. Lewis again.

MILLEDGEVILLE

9 APRIL 64

Dear Cudden Ward,

I am real pleased to have the picture and such a fine picture! You appear to be made out of some kind of thinking rock. I’ll send you one of me but I’ll have to find one at least a quarter this good. I don’t like photographers in general. A magazine sent one down here last year and the first thing he said to me was, “I can’t take a good picture of you. Your resistance is too great.” He took a lot of pictures however and in every one I looked like one of the Oakie women and this place looked like Oklahoma in the dust storm. Whereas this is really a beautiful place. But he had never photographed anything but migrant fruitpickers and holiness preachers and the inside of flop houses. Anyway I will find you a decent picture when things quiet down here. We are in the state of waiting.

I may not have mentioned that my mother’s oldest sister, Miss Mary, lives in the family home in town. She’s 81 and sort of the matriarch of the family. The cook found her on the floor last Thursday week and she has been in the hospital since, no hope for her, but they all have wills of corrugated iron, and she is holding her own. But all the family has been called and is in and out and there is much confusion. My mother has these three living sisters—Miss Mary, Miss Cleo, and Miss Agnes. Miss Cleo’s domain is Atlanta and Miss Agnes’ Boston. Miss Cleo has a lawyer son, aged 32, who is still under her wing, and Miss Agnes has four high-powered daughters who seldom let her speak, though she continually tries. One of the daughters is here now and another on the way. They are all givers-of-orders, not takers. My aunt doesn’t know how sick she is because she’s full of cortesone and she’s giving orders too from her hospital bed. Regina has the real responsibility and is running herself to death.

As for me you see I am at the electric typewriter, but only to write you a letter. I’m not in for business yet. I don’t need any surgical instruments, just a shovel and a spoon and a pile of dirt and not to be tired. I can see pretty well when I’m tired but I can’t think. I have a cold so tear up this letter when you read it and go wash your hands. You can get colds through letters. I read hit [it].

Caroline [Gordon] called me up from Purdue last week. She was in high gear, sounded like something sixteen—talking to her grandmother. And two weeks ago the Mabrys [Mr. and Mrs. Thomas] were through here and called me up. I was in bed with fever so they didn’t come out, though I would have very much liked to have had them come. The Cheneys [Lon and Fannie] wrote me they had been to see Andrew [Lytle] and he was in a big old fashioned bed and in some pain.

10 APRIL 64

Cut off the bottom of that one and was going to write you some more as this is another day and I have some more energy but Miss Regina hollers in “You know what he (doctor) told you. Get away from that typewriter.” All he told me was to take it easy. I was going to say something about Miracles but I guess it involves too much use of the brain at the moment. I thought you might like a book I’ve got called On the Theology of Death, by Karl Rahner—he’s about the best of those German theologians. It’s one of those books I didn’t understand but it makes you bolder. Let me know if you’d like it. German theologians may bore you. He don’t write good like Lewis [C. S.].

I hope you are feeling fitter.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

O’Connor sends a card with a beautiful drawing of the original executive mansion in Milledgeville where the governors of Georgia resided until 1868, when Atlanta became the state capital.

4-11-1964

Somebody sent me this paper so I thought you might like to see what our old Governor’s mansion looks like—now used as the home of the President of the college [Georgia College and State University]. Our house in town is next to it and was used as the Governor’s mansion while this one was being built. All this in the 1800’s of course but its still in good shape.

I don’t think I could stand to read the thing in Renascence [Marquette University]. Sounds horrible. That is a terrible combination—nun, musician and Yankee. Any of them alone would be supportable but the combination! Fathers above. Poet to the outcast! What rot. I have a suspicion that a good portion of the outcast are outcast for good reason.

My aunt continues to hold her own.

Cheers,

F

---

O’Connor recounts different details of religious observances. She also thanks her friend for enrolling her in the prayer ministry of the Cenacle Sisters.7

18 APRIL 64

M’VILLE

Dear Janet,

Thanks for the Metro. Bulletins & the cenocle pictures of Sisters Sumot & O’Connor. What I want to know is how they manage to endure those starched white head-cuffs cutting into their faces. I have a friend who is a Daughter of Charity. She calls her habit “the iron lung.”

I feel better but the reason I write so bad is that my hands swell. The steroids make you retain water in the tissues. Right now I have about ten pounds of excess water in mine…

I hope you survived your British guests.

My aunt received the last rites Monday after which she took a decided turn for the better. She can’t sit up yet but we believe she’s going to make it.

Our pastor is a victim of clerical taste. He has just done over our church, consulting nobody but himself—PINK. It looks like a nursery.

Cheers,

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

Writing on Easter Sunday, O’Connor works assiduously on stories for the second collection. The writings of C. S. Lewis lead to a recollection of parochial school staffed by Irish religious. Lewis’s presentation of “supernaturalism” may have influenced the dramatic endings of stories such as “The Enduring Chill” and “Revelation,” which appear in O’Connor’s second collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge.

EASTER 1964

MILLEDGEVILLE

I was in the middle of Miracles [C. S. Lewis] when the Letters to Malcolm [Lewis] arrived so I put up Miracles and read the other, as being probably what I need more personally. I do need it and am grateful to you for sending it. I went 6 years to a parochial school as a child and I’ve been unlearning those six years the rest of my life. Not that it didn’t have its virtues too, but in those days most of the sisters were either just off the boat from Ireland (and says Miss Regina should have been in the kitchen and not in any class room) or they were genteel Victorian ladies. They taught you a very measuring religion…

To keep that [lupus] under control you have to take the steroid drugs. I took them constantly from 1951–61. They eat your bones up but it’s a matter of being dead with good bones or alive with bad ones. So now I am on the steroids and if you want to do any specific requesting, as you pray for me, pray I don’t have to stay on them long. They fill you full of nervous energy but its not the kind of energy you can do much work on.

The other day Tom Mabry [The White Hound: Stories by Dorrance & Mabry] called me up. They were passing through…Anyway it’s a great pleasure to be reading C.S. Lewis on the subject. And I was liking the one on miracles too. That stuff is right up my alley. I couldn’t close the book and make anybody believe in miracles but what his kind of a book does is something for the imagination. I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder. I’d like to read it twice if you don’t want it back at once. I guess where we both want to locate our characters is right on the border of the natural and the supernatural—so that the reader don’t know which is which at the moment…

I hope you can read this such as it is. I can really only think on the typewriter.

Cheers

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

The scenario in the letter perhaps influenced “The Enduring Chill,” featuring a sickly writer confined to a rural farmhouse. Asbury Fox in his insipid whining, however, should not be confused with the cheerful, long-suffering O’Connor. She also is thankful for the unstinting care Regina O’Connor provides.

MILLEDGEVILLE

8 MAY 64

I’ve been thinking about you and hoping you haven’t got yourself in the hospital again. Which is exactly what I did for ten days. My aunt grandly survived. She was in the hospital a month and I was on the floor above her and we both got to go home the same day. She had to come out here with us because she’s not well enough to go to the house in town. So Miss R. [Regina] has all her worries under one roof and I think that is easier for her.

The lupus has got me and I am slowed down considerably. No work for the next month or two, but I think I have a story in the head and maybe if I calculate about it these two months, it’ll be ready to come out when I get rolling again. Which I finally aim to get d. v.

My aunt has never been one for the country but she seems pretty content. We were afraid these 30 peafowl would disturb her but she is just deaf enough that they sound pretty good to her. She has announced that they don’t holler as loud as they used to.

Cheers, and let me hear how you do.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

O’Connor revisits the perspective of children that occurs in a memorable story, “The River.” She discusses farm animals in which her friend’s young students might be interested.

12 MAY 64

MILLEDGEVILLE

Dear Janet,

I’m delighted with the mugs and as soon as my mother had opened them for me, I proceeded to have some coffee in the one with two holes for fingers—very much intrigued by those two holes for fingers. However I am pleased with all of them and will have my coffee in a different one every day. Thank you so much…

Thank the children for me for their letters and tell them that Equinox is learning to bray. He just started this about a week ago and he sounds almost like Ernest, his pa. He is separated from his parents now and is in a plot with a pony (Shetland) by the name of Tommy Traveler. Tommy Traveler is a baby pony, in spite of that name. I watch them out of my window.

Your French friend’s trouble sounds grim—very European and somewhat medieval. I hope she gets over it.

Cheers to you and much appreciation.

Flannery

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO LOUISE AND THOMAS GOSSETT

In the midst of trying circumstances O’Connor shows good humor and once again praises her mother’s care. O’Connor would use her own repeated visits to the doctor in a funny story, “Revelation.”

MILLEDGEVILLE

12 MAY 64

Well our state has changed considerably since you least heard from me. I have been in the hospital again and now am in bed full-time. That operation started up the old trouble (disseminated lupus) and I am back on the cortesone and doing none too well—though I feel no pain, only weakness. Yesterday I had a blood transfusion (you get up and go after it) so today I got the energy to write some letters. In addition to me here, we have my aunt Mary. She grandly survived her heart attack and is out here with us. So my parent is running the Creaking Hill Nursing Home instead of the Andalusia Cow Plantation. Or rather she is running both.

If my trouble runs its predictable course, I reckon I will be in bed all summer. I haven’t had it active since 1951 and it is something renewing acquaintance with it. I am not supposed to have company or go anywhere but to the doctor, which I do once a week. Maybe you all will be coming back this way in the fall. I sure hope for better things then. It’s a good thing I cancelled that trip to Texas in May. Let us hear from you anyhow.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO WARD ALLISON DORRANCE

Perhaps sensing her student’s days are numbered, Caroline Gordon and the abbot from the Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia visit O’Connor. She is determined to finish her second collection of stories. O’Connor is thankful for her mother defending her rights as a patient.

PIEDMONT HOSPITAL

ATLANTA, GA. 6/2/64

Dear Cudden Ward,

I am as cheered about that house as if I could come down the chimney of it and pay you a visit. But you see by the above where I am paying a visit at right now. I’ve been in this one ten days and am like to be ten more. Miss Regina is staying with her sister Cleo and stays here at the hosp. in the day time and demands my rights for me.

The other day who should blow in to the hospital to pay me a call but Caroline [Gordon], together with the Trappist Abbot and another monk friend of hers. She was in high spirits. Her next book on creative writing, she says, is going to be called Craft Ebbing.

Nothing fits in a hospital. The bed table is too high so you can’t write on it without breaking your arm. I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you in your new house.

Cheers,

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON

O’Connor is thankful for the vigilance of Regina O’Connor in facilitating continued writing. O’Connor seeks counsel from her beloved tutor for one of her last stories as she did years earlier for her first novel, Wise Blood.

MILLEDGEVILLE

11 JULY 64

I finally got out of Piedmont after one month there. An old lady here wrote me that anyone who could survive a month at Piedmont had nothing to worry about as far as health was concerned. I’ve been home three weeks today, confined to two rooms, am not supposed to walk around, something about they want all the blood to go to the kidneys, but my momma arranged the table so I can get out of the bed right into the electric typewriter. Enclosed* the result. Would you mind looking at it and letting me know what ails it or if you think it’s fit for my collection? It’ll be the usual great favor.

Did you find out how old swans have to be to lay? Mine do nothing but sit in their tub or on the grass.

Never ride with the clergy if you are not immediately ready to meet your maker. They kindly offered to bring me home from the hospital but I declined even before your description of your ride to the airport. I hope Florida is doing Fr. Charles some good.

Love,

Flannery

*Parker’s Back

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

MILLEDGEVILLE

20 JULY 64

Dear Janet,

Thank you so much for having the mass said at the cenocle and please thank your friend for her note (Sr. Sumort). My blood count has dropped again and I just don’t have the energy to answer any letters. I’ll appreciate the book you are sending when I am better. My mother appreciates your thought of her and that is enough. She doesn’t really have time to look at anything.

These pictures were taken in April but just got developed.

Cheers,

F

Going to hosp for another transfusion etc

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON

O’Connor appreciates her friend’s scrutiny of her story as health problems continue to impede completion of the second collection. O’Connor deflects from her own suffering to the well-being of others.

MILLEDGEVILLE

21 JULY 64

I do thank you for the remarks. I read both versions and hope to do a little something about it all but I don’t know how much as the lid has been put back on me. I go to the hospital tomorrow for another transfusion. The blood count just won’t hold. Anyway maybe I’ll learn something for the next set of stories. You were good to take the time.

One of the sisters at the Cancer Home wrote me that the Rev. Fr. (I presume she meant the Abbot) had had a siege of being in the hospital. She said he had some torn ligaments in his arm but didn’t say what happened to him. I’m glad Fr. Charles is better. Cheers to you and pray for me.

Love,

Flannery

REGINA O’CONNOR TO JANET MCKANE

Janet received notification of O’Connor’s passing. O’Connor’s funeral Mass at Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville took place the next day.

WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM 1964 AUG 3 PM 4 59

FPA111 AC310

A MLA036 RX PD MILLEDGEVILLE GA 3 328P EST

MISS JANET MCKANE

2767 MARION AVE NYK

FLANNERY O’CONNOR PASSED AWAY EARLY THIS AM. THANKS FOR ALL YOUR KINDNESS

REGINA CLINE O’CONNOR

FATHER JAMES MCCOWN TO LOUISE AND THOMAS GOSSETT

Father McCown and the Gossetts learned of O’Connor’s death a few days after her passing. Writing from the retreat house of his own formation, Father McCown provides counsel about the loss of a dear friend. As a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop O’Connor wrote in her Prayer Journal, “The nearness [to God] I mean comes after death perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it, either I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable.”8 Father McCown is assured that his friend experiences God’s holy presence.

OUR LADY OF THE OAKS (MY ASSIGNMENT FOR THE YEAR)

RETREAT HOUSE

GRAND COTEAU, LA.

AUGUST 24, 1964

Louise, you write the most graceful newsiest letter! Yes, I did receive your letter ’way down in Mexico (more later about that), and had all sorts of good intentions about answering. Then when I got home I became overwhelmed with all I had to do, so I really did nothing. Like the mountain flowers and the Heidi atmosphere, this climate and place has its own “relaxing” effects.

The first news I got at home was about Flannery. But since she had died a week before I arrived, I was sure you had heard. I was prepared for the news mainly by your letter. Like you, I had assumed that she was not mending. But then your letter and a letter from her young friend Miss Barnes, teaching in Chile, gave me much concern. Sure enough, there were two letters from Macon with clippings about her death. A letter from me in Mexico must have reached her too late, I wrote her mother, of course, but haven’t heard from her. Poor woman. What has she to live for now? Well, I know how you feel about our precious Flannery, and you know how I feel. God has His own reasons for removing from our needful world such choice souls so soon. But it is an exercise in Faith to accept it. That faith tells me that the souls in Heaven can by their prayer achieve more good among us wayfarers than they ever could by their efforts on earth no matter how skillful they may be. And I believe this. But it is not easy to adjust my human feelings to it. I am especially sorry that my brother Bob [Robert McCown, S.J.] never met her. I know he will feel bad because I urged him to take a day out of his trip recently to visit her. But he was in such a hurry he decided to see her “on the way back.” He is in England taking his last jot of training as a Jesuit. We call it “tertianship,” and it is a final spiritual discipline that has in it a minimum of scholarship and a maximum of affective training. He will be back in May to go to work in college teaching…

Could you come by here on your way home? I think you would be doing violence to your trip to bypass Grand Coteau. We are right between the towns of Lafayette and Opelousas, La., deep in the real Cajun country. And such damp beauty you never saw…And if you come through Alexandria, Louisiana, I would like for you all to meet my charming sister Helen and her beautiful family of seven children…And, of course, if you do come through Mobile my Mother remembers you fondly and would love to see you again.

Love

Fr. McCown

ROBERT GIROUX TO ROBERT FITZGERALD

O’Connor’s editor and friend describes a memorial Mass. The ecumenical interfaith congregation testifies to O’Connor’s wide appeal. Giroux also notes that even in death, O’Connor is misunderstood, evident in an obituary in a national magazine. Giroux asks Fitzgerald to write an introduction to the posthumous collection of her stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge.

29 EAST 66TH ST.

NEW YORK CITY 21

[AUGUST 1964]

I am most grateful for your letter. The Mass for Flannery on August 7th at St. Patrick’s [Cathedral, New York City] was something of an occasion. The celebrant was a poet, Fr Francis Sweeney of Boston College (a friend of Tom and Valerie [Eliot]) and a great admirer of Flannery’s, who had had a letter from her only two weeks before her death. Though he had never met her, they corresponded, and she was to have participated in a writer’s conference on his campus last April. Boston priests are much more liturgically advanced than New York ones, and Fr. Sweeney spoke the Mass to the small group in the Lady Chapel and expected responses in Latin and got them, to the amazement of local monsignori who don’t yet know what dialogue is. Father wore white vestments because the Blessed Sacrament was exposed at the main altar, but as he explained white is a mourning color too, and it was truly appropriate for Flannery.

It was quite an ecumenical occasion, and about one third of those present were not Catholics and perhaps not Christians, though all were there out of love of Flannery—Catherine Carver, Eliz. McKee, Arabel Porter, Margaret Marshall, etc, etc. John Farrar came from my firm and Hal Vursell. Several Georgia people in town, Maryat Lee and Alexander [sic] Sessions [William], who could not get to the funeral (August 4th) in Milledgeville. Paul Horgan (who had taught F. at Iowa) turned up.

I’ve written Regina about the occasion, and I do believe it is one that Flannery would have been pleased with. It would not have happened as it did without Fr. Sweeney (who has good friends on the cathedral staff); if I had tried to arrange it myself, I do not believe I could have. I could not reach Caroline [Gordon] but got Percy Wood in Princeton; she was away in New England.

We have eight stories for EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE, and Katy Carver tells me she saw two stories that F. wanted to add—“Judgement Day” and “Parker’s Back.” I hope there are no executor complications with the estate. I have not (understandably) heard from Regina.

Robert, would you be willing to do a preface for the book? Something personal and perhaps biographical about Flannery, as well as critical if you so elect? This should be a memorial to her. We want to bring it out in early Spring, if possible. So few people seem to have the facts straight. Did you see that irritating Time obit—“backwoods Georgia” indeed. You and Sally knew Flannery in a way that few did; she was not easy to know. Will you consider this as a formal offer from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (as we will be as of January 1st) to write the introduction? I do hope you will accept.

With all my love to you and Sally,

Yours ever,

Robert

FATHER JAMES McCOWN TO THOMAS AND LOUISE GOSSETT

Father McCown notes that O’Connor’s pithy statements just months after her death are becoming quotable. Her memorable phrases in later years have made her one of the most quoted American authors. Tom’s book also occupies a vital place in its revelations of unknown aspects of American history, as noted by Father McCown. Gossett’s tracing “race,” the “history of an idea,” had an impact on the Jesuit order’s dedication to racial justice and diversity.9

HOLY NAME OF JESUS CHURCH

6383 ST. CHARLES AVENUE

NEW ORLEANS 18, LOUISIANA

FALL, 1964

Somewhere I have your ecstatic letter written after our viaje mexicana, so my response to it will not be very sensible, since I cannot find it. However, I just wanted to write you about this and that. A half a dozen people sent me clippings about Flannery. They have been on top of my desk getting yellow. I don’t know what to do with such things. Please take what you don’t already have and throw the rest away. Also enclosed is a real nice letter of Flannery’s, possibly the last of any length that I got. I found it in a Manila folder where I had a talk I gave in Macon last year. The occasion for this letter was that talk. The Catholic women of Macon asked me to speak on “Catholic Authors,” so I asked Flannery to write me a “short paragraph” on some of her preferred ones, or to give me any other ideas she might have. Her line “If they are good they are dangerous,” ought to be immortalized. The markings on the letter were made by me, because I read this letter to the ladies, only omitting the part about her health. The Louise, dear Louise, at the bottom of p. 2 is not yourself but a colored woman who works for the O’Connors, and Shot is her husband. We had fishing worms and a dollar tip to draw us together.

Tom, I am so proud of the recognition that RACE [Race: The History of an Idea in America] is getting. It deserves every single bit of it. It fills a very real need, it seems to me…

I am going to take a day off today and ride down to Pass Christian. I love it there. I have to prune some grapevines I planted there years ago.

Love,

Fr. McCown

ROSLYN BARNES TO FATHER JAMES H. McCOWN

Roslyn Barnes is the first American to teach the fiction of both O’Connor and Percy in a Latin American university. Discussion of a crucifix also perhaps reveals the impact of the incarnationalism of O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” and “The Artificial Nigger.”

CASELLA 1280

U. DEL NORTE

ANTOFAGASTA, CHILE

WEDNESDAY SEPT 23, 64

Dear Fr,

It was a pleasure for me to find your letter waiting when I returned here from September vacation yesterday. I visited in the South, and now it rains for the first time in 15 months—Spring is coming now. In Santiago with another girl, a new volunteer. I climbed up the mountainside outside the city to the Benedictine Monastery, my favorite place there. The view is breathtaking from the top! And the chapel of the monks is my idea of what a church should be. Very very simple, lots of windows in plain glass of different shades of gold, no statues cluttering up the place. The altar is blond wood, very plain, and Mass is offered facing the congregation. The candles are big and fat and are just set flat on the altar with no holders. The monks—most of them German—chant and afterwards give you tea and bread before the long walk back to the highway. They are friendly and have simplicity and live close to the earth. It is good to be here. You’re going to miss that kind of thing in the parish where you are, aren’t you? I’m so sorry. For someone who loves what Mexico is, your assignment is going to be hell, I guess. So’s mine. The last thing the Chileans are is simple and spontaneous.

Thank you for offering me just simple friendship. Please don’t think about whether you are giving me what I need or not. To love and be loved—what else is there to need?

I would like very much to meet your friend Walker Percy. I read The Moviegoer, and like it so much that I’m using it in a literature course of mine. He is a medical doctor, isn’t he?

I also know Mrs. O’Connor, and got a plucky note from her too…

I have a straw crucifix on my wall. I happened to look up and see it just now—it’s from Mexico, and it’s the only crucifix I’ve seen I really like. You know the kind you find in all the marketplaces, nothing unusual. The color is gold, and I think of Christ Glorified when I see it. I don’t think one ought to go around being “resigned” to things, do you? And I remember a lovely passage from Ivon le Fort. Do you know it?

“Then I said: ‘Lord, it is a crown of suffering, let me die of it.’ But the voice spoke: ‘Know you not that suffering is immortal. I have transfigured the Infinite: Christ is risen!’ ”

Well on that cheery note I had better be on my way. Oh, it was so good to hear from you! I wish I could meet you in person. Thanks for offering to send me the books, but better not to send them yet, because I don’t know how much long I will be here, perhaps only 2–3 months more. If I should happen to come back to the States in February or March, could I stop by a few days to see you in La [Louisiana]? I’ll be broke—but might if you know some respectable sisters who have a respectable couch? Would be so glad to have your opinion on my thesis. At the moment it is in Peru, with a Mother Superior who I’m hoping will give me a job next year.10 But when she returns it, I’ll send it your way. Thanks for your interest.

Good-bye for now. Let me hear from you.

WALKER PERCY TO THOMAS MERTON

In the previous letter Barnes notes she is teaching Percy’s The Moviegoer in Latin America. The novel is gaining international readership. In January 1964 Thomas Merton writes Percy to ask if he could help arrange for the novel’s publication in France. Percy happily assents to more international exposure.

FEBRUARY 14

Dear Tom Merton—or Fr. Louis as the case may be—

I remember the “Fr. Louis” from another book you wrote—

Your letter meant much to me—I am a slow writer, easily discouraged, and depend on luck, grace, and a good word from others.

You make me want to read Julien Green [French-American novelist and playwright]—

Yes, please send me an abstract calligraphy!

No, The Moviegoer was published in Denmark, Italy, England, but not France—yes, tell the guys at Le Seuil [French publisher]!

I am reading your poetry.

ROSLYN BARNES TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN

Barnes’s formation with Msgr. Illich and her study of O’Connor enables her to understand Latin American history first as a Catholic and secondarily as an American. The historical outlook is different from the conventional, predominantly “American” perspective rooted in progressivist history. The American story looks different, as Barnes reveals, when the narrative originates in the pre-colonial appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Most textbooks, instead, locate American beginnings in colonial New England.

CORREO AEREO

MONDAY NOV 17 1964

Dear Father,

How good it always is to hear from you! Would you let me read your book on Mexico? I’d love to. I liked the chapter that you sent me that time. I’m doing a—well, I wouldn’t dare call it a book yet, but maybe someday—on Our Lady of Guadalupe. I think she’s a “Displaced Person” and I want to put her back where she belongs: in her pre-hispanic theocultural setting. I think she came to fulfill the precolumbian religious concepts, which were beautiful and sound, not to replace them. So I’m studying prehispanic theology and trying to figure out as well as I can the terrific appeal which she had for people of those beliefs from the beginning. I think the idea was to sanctify the authentic, indigenous spirituality, not to make them adapt a European form of Christianity. Anyway, that’s my idea. I’m glad I don’t have a Supervisor to decide its fate. It is going to be very difficult. I don’t know if I can do it, but it’s so lovely to study the ancient ritual and beliefs. They were so beautiful, and many of them are still practiced, though usually in degenerate forms in many Indian communities. I hope Ixmiguilpan works out for you. The…never did get cultured, it seems. The Aztecs called them “barbarians.” Actually the Aztecs were far more civilized and virtuous than their Spanish conquerors. One of Cortez’ soldiers commented: We have never imagined anything like this in our wildest dreams…was bigger than…or Seville at the time and more beautiful than Venice. A good writer on pre-hispanic Mexico is Miguel (?) Leon-Portilla. Paul Westheim, too and Jacques Soustelle. All these have a certain “sympathy” that deepens their comprehension considerably. Vaillant’s book—the one you mentioned—is not really good and has some serious inaccuracies. Neither is another “popular” version, the one by von Hogan. Alfonso Caso is very good…

You know I have doubts that the Feb. trip is going to result. Unless a job turns up in the US—and that’s unlikely in the middle of the school year—I may stay on in Chile until next September. I will write my aunt about Flannery’s letters. I left them in her house with other things to keep. I had not thought of writing an article on Flannery, though it had entered my mind to do someday a criticism of her stories. It will always be one of the sorrows of my life that I never did get close to her really. With me she was extremely reticent and I didn’t know how to get her to reveal herself to me. We corresponded regularly and I was and am devoted to her. Why didn’t any real intimacy happen? I don’t know. Maybe partly the presence of Mrs. O’C. Or maybe she needed to be strong so much that she couldn’t let herself become vulnerable the way you do if you let someone come very close to you. Maybe she suffered so much it was better not to look directly at how much or let anybody else look. F. invited me to see her—and then she kept her distance. Of course, we never had a chance to talk alone for any length of time. I often wondered, and do wonder now, what exactly it was that kept us strangers to one another when we should have been so close. I never had the nerve to ask her. Did I fail her someway? I don’t know. And I don’t know how close others got to her. I wouldn’t dare do an article on her, though of the “personal type.” I have an “intuition” of her—but it’s no more than that…

Well—a biography?!—I was born and bred in Ga. along with Flannery + Brer Rabbit, a small town named Pine Mountain. I went to college in M’ville the first 4 years—that’s how I got to know F.—and then went to Iowa for grad. work. And here I am in L A [Latin America]. That’s a pretty lame excuse for a biography, I know. But you’ll just have to know me in person, Father. This is one [of] those times when words just don’t suffice! What about you? Are you from the South originally? I know you have a brother who’s a Jesuit, too. Did he once publish an article on F.? I saw one awhile back by a Robert McC. [Robert McCown, “The Education of a Prophet: A Study of Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away”] Is he yours?

I’m enclosing an “experiment” of mine. Please tell me what you think of it?

Thanks for the “perfume.” Consider yourself, “lightly hugged and chastely kissed!”

Con mucho cariño

Roslyn

P. S. What are the “J” and the “H” for?

---

Barnes notes a Maryknoll priest instructed her about a sacrament through a story by O’Connor. The same religious offered a Mass for her, perhaps the only one celebrated for O’Connor in Africa. Barnes also inquires about tension between religious who write literature and their superiors.

CORREO AEREO

THURSDAY EVENING

Dear Fr.,

You are so good to me and without ever having even so much as seen me! Do you suppose your Bishop would give me a dispensation to hug you? Anyway, consider it done by Panagra—It wasn’t perfume, but it was equivalent—equivalent and yellow and organdy. OK?…

Thank you for welcoming me to New Orleans. I hope the trip works out, but can’t tell yet, until I know more or less what my future’s going to be like after Christmas….

A Mass was offered for Flannery in Tanganyika [now Tanzania, Africa]. By the young Maryknoller who gave me my first 3 mo. of Instruction. I knew him when we were both in Writer’s [sic] Workshop at Iowa, and he used Flannery’s “The River” to teach me about the Sacrament of Baptism. An awfully nice person. His novel was coming along well. But his Superior won’t give him permission to publish it. Well, maybe someday—But it seems to me that some way ought to be provided of protecting religious from the errors and prejudices of Superiors. Look at what happened to Fr. Teilhard [de Chardin], and Sahagun [Bernardino, General History of the Things of New Spain] himself was threatened with the Inquisition for his invaluable research. I realize that all Superiors can’t be superior. There are bound to be mediocre ones. But since this is true, why can’t there be worked out some system of protection from them? Has the Pope thought of this? Of course he probably doesn’t run into such things with his Superior…

Will close now—am out of paper, news, and time. Write me when you get a chance, & take it easy on the Cuba libre’s—

affectionately,

Roslyn

Writing from Chile, Barnes notes that she is teaching O’Connor’s fiction. She is grateful for the depth of O’Connor’s friendship. O’Connor is instrumental in Barnes’s conversion and her reading a famous Jesuit. Barnes, also through O’Connor, came to understand the meaning of love. Her description illustrates Msgr. Ivan Illich’s spiritual formation had a profound impact.

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 flaws. 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)

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.

It turned out later that the reason you and I were left alone Saturday morning was the expectation that somehow some great Apostolic Catholic sparks would fly and Katallagete would be fecundated by many noble ecumenical ideas.12 When the truth is I haven’t had an idea for months. Anyhow it was a pleasure meeting you and something I have aimed to do for some time.

Would you mind giving me the name of that book on Bantu metaphysics. It suddenly fits into a novel I am trying to conceive. It concerns, as I think I told you, the decline and fall of the USA as a consequence of its failure with the Negroes. It takes place in a pleasant all-white 100% Christian exurb named Paradise. As a consequence of internecine conflict between right-wing “patriotic” anti-Communist “Christians” and left-wing scientific-artistic euthenasic psychodelic pagans, the country falls apart, the whites more or less kill each other off, leaving a black guerilla group in control of Paradise. These latter I conceive as middle-class blacks who have turned from Christianity and adopted Bantu metaphysics. It seems proper and fitting to have the Paradise Country Club taken over by middle-class Bantus (who employ a few whites as caddies etc. and who even develop paternalistic affections for my whitey, cf. the Southern expression: He’s my n_______).

Therefore, I need some Bantu lore, particularly the sacramentals of mana or its equivalent.

Sincerely,

Walker

---

Percy registers his skepticism about the growing dissent against the Vietnam War. He remains aloof from Merton’s criticism, as well as that of other antiwar activists such as Dorothy Day and Father James McCown.

AUGUST 27, 1967

Dear Father Louis:

Most grateful indeed for the stuff on the Bantu eclectics and the reference, Sundkler’s book. Am most entranced by the prospect of a society of prosperous middleclass fallen-aways from the African Castor Oil Dead Church who will have taken over the Covington Country Club Estates in 1977 following the ideological wars among the Whites.

Also much gratified by The Long Hot Summer of Sixty Seven with which I largely agree—although I must confess I have reservations about uniting race and Vietnam under the same rubric, since I regard one as the clearest kind of moral issue and the other as murderously complex and baffling.13 At least it baffles me.

There’ve only been two sensible pronouncements following this Hot Summer that I’ve read. One is by John McCone [chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, 1959–1960; director, Central Intelligence Agency, 1961–1965], who said that the situation may very well be hopeless and the country may be destroyed but we must resist the temptation so to regard it. The other was said by Whitney Young: “You’ve either got to shoot all the Negroes or treat them with justice.”14

Prosper in your hermitage,

Walker

WALKER PERCY TO CAROLINE GORDON

The letter reveals the different trajectories of two novelists. Percy has completed one of his most popular novels. He admires Gordon’s new novel but politely implies she may have wandered from her regional roots. Gordon’s novel exhibits technical skill and innovation but did not achieve the acclaim of Percy’s novel.

FEBRUARY 6, 1971

Dear Miss Caroline:

I do wish you could come to New Orleans. How could you turn down the Yucatan. I must find out from Percy [Wood, Gordon’s son-in-law] where to stay. I’d love to go.

So happy you got shut of Glory of Hera.15 Heracles for God’s sake. I do hope there’s also some Tennessee in it.

I too just got rid of mine. Love in the Ruins; it ended up subtitled: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World—the salesman at Farrar Straus said the bookstores wouldn’t go for it, but I insisted on the subtitle. After all a bad Catholic ought to be attractive. Anyhow I’ll send you mine if you send me yours.

Please give my best to Father Abbot and Fr. Charles if you get to Conyers. I’d love to join you, but I can’t leave my daughter just now. I have to tutor her every night.

Fr——— is crazy if he doesn’t stay put right there in Conyers. He called me up, stoned in some motel in Georgia where he was traveling with a young man in a Volkswagen. I told him if he didn’t sober up and go back to Conyers he’d be dead in 6 months so God bless him, I’m glad he did (God bless the Abbot too).

Love,

Walker

—Hope your brother is better

A few letters chronicle both O’Connor’s and Percy’s consistent anti-Communism from the 1950s. As the collective memories of the massive sufferings and cruelties of socialist/Communist ideology are forgotten, the letters of O’Connor and Percy provide a valuable record. The precision of Percy and O’Connor in the use of political words is vital given the profound ongoing confusion about “Russians” and “Communists” caused by sloppy, partisan journalism.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO MISS DANADIO

MILLEDGEVILLE

GEORGIA

19 APRIL 56

About the Czech and Polish publication possibility: I wouldn’t want my work published in any Russian-occupied country as the danger that it might be used as anti-American propaganda is apparent. I understand some of Jack London is now being used that way.

Yours,

Flannery O’Connor

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO MAURICE-EDGAR COINDREAU

Echoing the sentiments of the previous letter, O’Connor does not sanction the translation of her fiction in some countries. Always vigilant for possible scenes for stories, she describes a rivalry between an evangelist and a Muslim religious.

MILLEDGEVILLE

GEORGIA

27 MARCH 60

Dear M. Coindreau,

We were sorry to hear we won’t see you Easter but the last of May or early June will be fine. We don’t care when you come just so you get here. Let us know when and we will be at the bus to meet you.

It came up a few years ago about my having a translation in one of the iron-curtain countries. I forget which one it was. I asked Denver Lindley [editor] what he thought about it and he said he would advise against it. I wouldn’t want my books used for any purpose opposite to their meaning. We would like to meet the Polish lady though [Jurast Domska]. I am going to have to be in Savannah April 30 and May 1, but before and after that we’ll be here if she calls, and would be delighted to have her come down.

My friend in Paris, Ville Rolin [Gabrielle], wrote me that there was an enthusiastic piece in L’Expresse (?) about La sagesse dans le sang [Yves Berger]. I don’t know if this was the one illustrated with Billy Ghrame or not. I hope Billy doesn’t sue me for defamation of character. The Moslems have been giving Billy a time. I guess you read about his being challenged to a healing contest by the Moslem leader. The Moslem’s message to Billy was quite insolent with brotherly love. The whole episode might have been written by Mr. Waugh [Evelyn].

I am so glad you showed my book to M. Maritain and that he liked it. I hope he will read the other one too one of those days. People seem to be finding it strange: however, there have been one or two good reviews.

WALKER PERCY TO COMMONWEAL

Percy criticizes anti–Vietnam War activism by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, both Catholic priests. A famous protest entailed Philip Berrigan and other activists breaking in to a Selective Service office in October, 1967 in Baltimore and pouring duck blood over draft records. In May, 1968 the Berrigan brothers also broke in to another office in Catonsville, Maryland, and set afire draft records with napalm.

AUGUST 3, 1970

THE EDITORS

COMMONWEAL

NEW YORK, N.Y.

Dear Sirs:

I think the Berrigans are wrong.

They have violated federal law, destroyed public property and terrorized government employees.

These actions they justify as the moral expression of their convictions about U.S. foreign policy.

It would follow, by the same logic, that a Catholic opposed to the use of public funds to promote population control could with equal propriety destroy the files of the Internal Revenue Service.

No society could long endure if many people resorted to the same violent, not to say illegal, means of translating belief into action.

But perhaps that is what the Berrigans want.

You and the Berrigans consider the United States’ policy in Southeast Asia to be criminal. It is hardly necessary to point out that a great many people, perhaps as decent, as courageous, as equally distressed by the Vietnam War, do not agree with you and the Berrigans. Shall the issue be determined then by the more successful stratagem of violence?

In these parts, the Ku Klux Klan burns churches and tries to scare people in various ways. Their reasons are, to them, the best: they do it for God and country and to save us from the Communists. I would be hard pressed to explain to a Klansman why he should be put in jail and the Berrigans set free.

As it happens, I stand a good deal closer to the Berrigans than to the Klan. The point is, however: God save us all from the moral zealot who places himself above the law and who is willing to burn my house down, and yours, providing he feels he is sufficiently right and I sufficiently wrong.

The less said about Father Berrigan’s comparison of his own difficulties with the persecution of the English Catholic clergy of the 16th Century, the better.

Sincerely yours,

FATHER JAMES MCCOWN, PUBLIC LETTER

Father McCown describes two pilgrimages: one to revisit Flannery O’Connor’s home and the other to Nicaragua. Since his visit in 1987 to Andalusia, O’Connor’s home has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places. There have been frequent celebrations there, including a twenty-four-hour marathon reading of her stories on Andalusia’s front porch, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the author’s death, August 3, 2004. In August 2017, Andalusia was given to Georgia College and State University (Milledgeville). The university president stated that the donation would “help preserve, protect, and enhance the memory of one of our most influential alumni, Flannery O’Connor.”16

NEWSLETTER

from Padre Jaime

MAY 8, 1987

FR. J.H. MCCOWN, SJ, IN RES.

SPRING HILL JESUIT COMMUNITY

4,000 DAUPHIN ST. MOBILE, ALABAMA 36608

SPIRITUAL ODYSSEY WITH “WITNESS FOR PEACE”

Dear ones

Ordinarily I get a letter to you about every three months. This time I am rushing things to reach you before I leave for Nicaragua on April 23. Dry those tears! I’ll be back on May 8 full of new information on what is happening in that distressed country. I will go as a member of WITNESS FOR PEACE, a highly structured, prayerful, biblically based, ecumenical organization committed to bringing back to the people of the U.S. an awareness of what is really happening in Nicaragua, and to sharing first-hand the sufferings of the poor in that country. In two weeks we will visit many parts of the country, especially the embattled zones. We will interview people from all parts of Nicaraguan society, and actually work in the fields with the campesinos. We will return full of determination to mobilize public opinion in the U.S. to help bring justice and peace to the people of Nicaragua. I am trying to go with an open mind. I have heard of endless atrocities committed by the Contras, the counterrevolutionary army sponsored by the Reagan administration. But I have also heard serious complaints about the Sandinista government, especially its communism and its alleged persecution of religion. I hope to get some hard answers. It’s hardly necessary to tell you that I hope for your prayers and best wishes. When I get home I shall tell you about my trip there, what I did, what I found out, and what I hope to do about it.

My main work now is traveling from place to place giving parish retreats, or missions, or revivals. (That last is such a beautiful word. It tells exactly what my set of talks is, a re-kindling of faith that is already in my listeners.) First I drove to Macon, Georgia, where I feel much at home, having worked there for five years early in my priesthood. Just breathing Macon air does something wonderful for me. Forty miles north of Macon I stopped in Milledgeville the home of Mrs. Regina O’Connor, Flannery’s mother. First I visited the State Women’s College, Flannery’s alma mater, hoping to get into the O’Connor Archives. But it was Saturday & the whole college was closed. I went to Andalusia, the old farm where Flannery had lived and done most of her writing. The sign was gone, and, though the drive was open, the road was neglected, muddy, rutted. The inner gate was locked, and the weeds and woods have taken over. The circular pond where the mean swan once lived is now hardly visible because of the gums and pines and willows that crowd its edges. The house is unchanged, and I noted again what must be the highest, steepest un-bannistered brick front steps in Georgia. I had forgotten all about them. I climbed a fence and walked up to the house hoping to find a caretaker at least. No luck. Then I drove back to Milledgeville determined to find Mrs. O’Connor. I asked a native Georgian in a filling station where the Catholic church was. A long, pregnant pause, and a final, careful statement, “Never heard of it.” I found the church, and remembered the fun Flannery had telling about it and its Irish-American pastor. I got no answer from my doorbell ringing. But in the church itself a genteel lady was arranging flowers. She knew all about “Mary Flannery” and Mrs. Regina O’Connor, and directed me where she lived, but with the warning that she had become something of a recluse and probably would not receive me. She said that the dear lady had been much annoyed by callers who wanted to write about Flannery, and who so often misquoted her, or tried to make something gothic about her relationship with her famous daughter. Regina now lives in the once gorgeous ante-bellum home of her girlhood. Formerly it was the governor’s mansion, but was now rundown and needing a paint job. I rang the bell and pounded on the heavy front door, but had no response. I walked through a weedy yard around to the back and found clear signs of life. An elderly black man answered my knock and told me that Mrs. O’Connor was not well and did not receive visitors. We talked, and he was delighted when I told him I had known Shot, the yard man at old Andalusia. I gave him my card and he quickly returned with word of welcome. Regina was in bed, and had a nurse with her. She looked wan and wasted. She is well over ninety now. I expected her to be senile, but her sharp blue eyes and clear articulation put that fear to rest. In our conversation I thanked her for some generous contributions she had in the past made to my poor kids’ camp. I said, “You have been good to me, Mrs. O’Connor.” She shot back, “I sent that money for the camp not for you.” I had understood that, of course, but was a little taken aback by her vehemence. Anyhow, we had a nice visit, and I was glad to see her after many years. She has been good to me…

The second pilgrimage concerns Father McCown’s ecumenical mission to Nicaragua to assess the volatile political situation. In stark contrast to his earlier anti-Communism in With McCown in Mexico, the narrative O’Connor hoped would be published, Father McCown’s views shifted dramatically in the trip to Nicaragua. He admires the Marxist regime. The position contrasts with O’Connor’s earlier letters and her unwavering theological resistance to atheistic tyranny that she shared with Father McCown. She once wrote in a classic summation: “Communism is a religion of the state and the Church opposes it as a heresy.”17

The subsequent Jesuit resistance to Latin American dictatorships in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other countries and support of revolutionary governments like the one in Nicaragua led to frightful violence against members of the order. Father Henri Nouwen cites the murder of six Jesuits in El Salvador in 1989 as an example of the order’s “commitment to peace and justice” and “represents the best that the Church has to give to the world.”18 A global perspective might be invoked to assess such judgments. While some Jesuits supported revolutionary governments in Latin America, the situation in Western Europe was reversed. John Paul II, having survived Polish Communism, orchestrated a powerful witness with other leaders such as President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They helped bring about the miraculous crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the source of support and funding of Marxist dictatorships in Latin America.

FATHER H. CLANCY TO FRIENDS OF FATHER JAMES McCOWN

JESUIT SEMINARY & MISSION BUREAU

MOBILE ALABAMA

NOVEMBER 27, 1991

Dear Friends of Hooty,

Fr. James McCown died of cancer at 9:18 p.m. on Tuesday 26 November 1991 at Ignatius Residence…the Jesuits of the community gathered around Hooty’s bedside along with Hooty’s sister, Rosemary.

Hooty had told me before that one of the things he liked best about Ignatius Residence was the personal and tender care he received. He did not want to die in an intensive care unit with tubes up his nose. He died as he wished surrounded by his brother Jesuits…

I have just returned from Ignatius Residence. Rosemary told me of his beautiful death. Hard-bitten Jesuits told me that they had never seen a holier death…

May he rest in peace.

H. Clancy, S.J.

FATHER ROBERT McCOWN TO SALLY FITZGERALD

Father Robert McCown, Father James’s brother, never actually met O’Connor but wrote some brilliant analysis of her fiction. He outlived his beloved brother and died in 2012. Like many readers, he recognizes O’Connor’s gifts as beautifully conveyed in her letters.

[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.