Good Things out of Nazareth Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Benjamin B. Alexander

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  convergentbooks.com

  CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use the material below:

  Caroline Fallon: Previously unpublished Caroline Gordon letters used by permission of Caroline Fallon. All rights reserved.

  The Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust: Letters of Flannery O’Connor copyright © The Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust. All rights reserved. Permission granted by the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust via Harold Matson Co., Inc.

  The Paul Engle Estate: Previously unpublished Paul Engle letter used by permission of Hualing Engle, on behalf of the Paul Engle Estate. All rights reserved.

  The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Trust: Previously unpublished Katherine Anne Porter letters used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Trust, www.permissionscompany.com. All rights reserved.

  The Robert Giroux Estate: Previously unpublished Robert Giroux letter used by permission of Hugh McKenna, on behalf of the Robert Giroux Estate. All rights reserved.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, on behalf of the Robert Lowell Estate: Unpublished letter written by Robert Lowell to Flannery O’Connor dated January 30, 1960. Copyright © 2019 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Robert Lowell Estate. All rights reserved.

  The Walker A. Percy Estate: Previously unpublished letters of Walker A. Percy copyright © 2019 by Ann Percy Moores and Mary Prett Lobdell. Reprinted with permission of McIntosh & Otis, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780525575061

  Ebook ISBN 9780525575078

  Cover design: Jessie Sayward Bright

  Cover illustration: Vivienne Flesher

  v5.4

  ep

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Editorial Note

  Preface by Benjamin B. Alexander

  Chapter 1: Good Things Out of Nazareth

  Chapter 2: “The First Priest Who Said Turkey-Dog”

  Chapter 3: “Her Kind of Literature: Places and Folks”

  Chapter 4: “Removing Choice Souls So Soon”

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  EDITORIAL NOTE

  The spelling, capitalization, phrasing, punctuation, and dialect in the letters have been retained. A few obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Editorial conjecture in a few cases has been exercised to clarify illegible phrases, words, or omissions in the original letters. Emendations appear in brackets. Where the meaning could not be discerned, the original text has been retained. Other brackets provide factual information or clarifications. Dots appear sparingly to avoid repetition or tangential details.

  PREFACE

  Flannery O’Connor is a master of the American short story, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, Hawthorne, Poe, Hemingway, and Faulkner in the literary canon. Now a fixture in textbooks and collections, she always maintained a powerful ethical vision rooted in a quiet, devout faith. It informed all that she wrote and did.

  She was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, but she lived most of her life on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, raising peacocks. O’Connor practiced her craft in a modest room near an ample front porch, where she received many visitors. She composed on an old typewriter with bookshelves nearby of modern fiction, philosophy, and theology unique among American writers. The novels of William Faulkner, the American Virgil, beside the rich theological writings of the angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas, testified to wide study. Novels by the Russians, along with volumes of the serene German theologian, Romano Guardini, occupied a shelf. The massive work of arguably the most penetrating political theorist of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin, had another space. Such works and many others in O’Connor’s library gave me a rich reading list that I have tried to pursue. When I first saw the actual setup of O’Connor’s room, I was moved by the austerity. In the corner was a narrow iron bed where O’Connor spent sleepless hours courageously enduring lupus, which would take her life at the young age of thirty-nine.

  * * *

  O’Connor left a body of fiction featuring a combination of violence and sacramental truths that continues to stun readers. Sensational action at the point of a gun or the end of a rope reminds them of what they see on television. O’Connor was a careful observer of the medium in its early days. Slow-motion, rarefied stories might have entertained readers of earlier times, but not in the age of “moviegoers,” as O’Connor’s compatriot writer, Walker Percy, revealed. O’Connor recognized that her readers were becoming increasingly conditioned by television and cinema, causing her to pack dramatic action into her stories. She once noted, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling pictures.”

  O’Connor’s strategy still wakes up somnambulant English classes. O’Connor can still break through a dull lecture with a story in which a Bible salesman steals the wooden leg of an atheist philosopher (“Good Country People”) or an impudent teenager hurls a book at a racist old lady in a segregated waiting room, calling her an “old wart hog from hell” (“Revelation”).

  I will always remember I first heard that O’Connor phrase in an undergraduate class in the late 1960s. Those days of campus radicalism and opposition to the Vietnam War imbued many students with a loathing of their country that still endures on college campuses today. The Kent State shootings were shocking and paralleled the murders of the innocent in an O’Connor story. In 1969, I enrolled in a course taught by Andrew Lytle who had taught O’Connor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There he had witnessed O’Connor herself reading Wise Blood to a class. An accomplished novelist and critic in his own right, Lytle performed O’Connor’s stories dramatically in the classroom. The nasal drawl of the Misfit was unforgettable. Lytle revealed O’Connor’s dialect and power to distracted students, like me. We became “woke.” I soon wanted to understand O’Connor better and teach her stories from the other side of the desk.

  The academic vocation has proved daunting at times, but my students, many outside the South, have responded more readily to her writing than to other masters, such as Faulkner or Hemingway. Teaching O’Connor became easier in 1979 with the publication of her letters, The Habit of Being. New readers, my own mother among them, read and re-read her letters, delighting in the infectious humor and pithy wisdom. A less startling voice than the one in the stories often spoke. O’Connor’s letters made her fiction more understandable. They also revealed O’Connor as an apologist for the faith and spiritual director for a few searching friends. O’Connor nourished my own spiritual hunger in the 1970s left unfed by the imploding Episcopal Church that had irrationally jettisoned its historic Elizabethan prayer book. Often amused at O’Connor’s unparalleled sense of humor, I also was instructed by her unflinching catechesis.

  Having marked up three copies of The Habit of Being, I heard at academic conferences that there were more unpublished O’Connor letters
. She often wrote to a Jesuit priest, the Rev. James H. McCown, who appears sparingly in The Habit of Being. He visited her many times at the Georgia farm. This vital, unexplored friendship contributed to O’Connor’s creation of Ignatius Vogle, S. J., in her story “The Enduring Chill.” Father McCown introduced O’Connor to Thomas and Louise Gossett, both credentialed academics. From 1956 through O’Connor’s death in 1964 and afterward, Thomas Gossett collected her letters to Fr. McCown. (He died in 1991.) In 1972, Gossett, a pioneer in African American studies (a role O’Connor admired), shared the O’Connor letters with her editor-friend Robert Giroux, who encouraged their publication. In 1974, Gossett wrote the first article about the riches of O’Connor’s letters and hoped to be the first to publish them.*1 The Habit of Being pre-empted him. Since then readers have eagerly waited for more correspondence.

  Some forty years later, Good Things Out of Nazareth contains the letters Gossett originally collected, many not in The Habit of Being. I also provide annotation (suggested by a wise editor) that is part spiritual autobiography, part literary history. O’Connor’s serene voice from A Prayer Journal (2013)—writings that she kept in graduate school—is juxtaposed with her more blunt comments in her later letters. New insights appear.

  Many letters concern the friendship between Father McCown and O’Connor and the Gossetts’ own lively bond with her. They reveal O’Connor’s support of these close friends engaged in civil rights activism, and why she herself did not become involved. Fr. McCown was a tireless social justice warrior at a time when, as Martin Luther King Jr. also discovered, the Catholic Church was resistant to change. Thomas Gossett’s academic career was nearly ruined in 1958 because of his support of integration in Georgia. O’Connor concurred with Gossett’s prophetic observation that the kindred of William Faulkner’s “Snopes,” a network of “white trash,” had penetrated academic officialdom. They were “freaks in grey-flannelled suits,” as O’Connor noted. Still other letters lay to rest the unseemly speculation by scholars about why O’Connor did not marry. Finally, several letters in Good Things silence the cruel stereotyping of O’Connor’s mother, Regina, as merely a woman from the backwoods. Mrs. O’Connor was a rare person—astute in business, dairy farming, protocol—but especially a charitable caregiver as her daughter’s illness worsened. She did ask “Mary Flannery” once about a story in which a man turns into a roach. Regina perhaps saw the connection to the bizarre scenes in her daughter’s stories.

  One memorable hot June day a few years ago, I delighted in reading about these lively exchanges in the letters that Thomas Gossett had collected and donated to the Duke University archives. The afternoon of the same sweltering day, I made my way to Chapel Hill and discovered another treasure trove in the Walker Percy papers. There were the letters of Caroline Gordon, an opinionated, neglected novelist, but a gifted, precise teacher of writing. She wrote to Percy in his apprentice years before the publication of The Moviegoer, the National Book Award winner in 1962. Signing obscure book reviews “Walker Percy, M.D.,” the aspiring novelist had little knowledge at the time about writing fiction:

  After twelve years of a scientific education I [Percy] felt somewhat like the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard when he finished reading Hegel. Hegel, said Kierkegaard, explained everything under the sun, except one small detail: what it means to be a man living in the world who must die. My interest began to turn from the physical sciences and medicine to philosophy and the novel.*2

  Percy dispatched to Gordon the manuscript of The Charterhouse. She also soon received Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and would scrutinize it line by line. Caroline Gordon prophetically recognizes the gifts of the two writers in long epistles to each. She made a bold claim to Brainard Cheney (December 1951), another promising novelist, that O’Connor and Percy represent,

  what the next development in the novel will be, (according to me). And it will be something new. At least something we have not had before. Novels written by people who are consciously rooted and grounded in the faith…people who don’t have to spend time trying to figure out what moral order prevails in the universe and therefore have more energy for spontaneous creation. Its no accident, I’m sure, that in the last two months the two best first novels I’ve ever read have been by Catholic writers [O’Connor, Wise Blood; Percy, The Charterhouse]….Harcourt Brace says it [Wise Blood] is the most shocking book they ever read but have already agreed to publish it….I have been thinking about this a lot since these two novels came my way and have finally decided they do mark a turning point in some tide.*3

  Gordon writes Walker Percy in 1951: “Well this is the season when the good things come out of Nazareth,” an allusion to the tiny (some considered backwater) town where Jesus lived with his parents.*4 In other words, something important was rising from a place many ignored.

  Gordon encourages Percy to visit O’Connor, knowing that faith for both writers imbued all the work they did. For Gordon, O’Connor and Percy embodied the opposite of Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation.” Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and their disillusioned spiritual brothers stumbled through post–World War I America and Europe spiritually shell-shocked. O’Connor and Percy “found” the faith many of the “lost generation” forgot in the horrific trenches of the Great War. O’Connor and Percy in the aftermath of yet another global conflict at later mid-century were new and original in American literature: two Catholics from the South, one a cradle believer, the other a convert, to a faith they both cherished.

  * * *

  A few years ago, I envisioned that the unpublished letters of O’Connor and her friends might become a collection. I began to assess the interest and audience. I showed the letters to a dear writer friend in Virginia, M. L. Jackson (a native Georgian), who insisted then and years after they merited publication. Robert Giroux also telephoned me encouraging publication and that “he knew most of the people.” A little later a kindly manager of a credit union in “hillbilly elegy” country responded enthusiastically to the phrase, “good things out of Nazareth.” Venturing forth from Appalachia of the Ohio River Valley where I was teaching—home to Dean Martin, coach Lou Holtz, and Pulitzer Prize winner, James Wright—I went on to lecture at several “Nazareths” in rural Ireland and Denmark; I even spoke at an O’Connor conference in Rome near the Vatican where I insisted O’Connor be considered for sainthood in addition to Dorothy Day.

  At an Irish literary festival near Dublin dedicated to Gerard Manley Hopkins, I imparted passages of what O’Connor called a “nasty dose of orthodoxy” to scholars from Europe and the United States. O’Connor stole Hopkins’s thunder. In fact, I told them, O’Connor (and Percy) would force a re-appraisal of Hopkins’s conventional niche in the canon. Things were changing, as Caroline Gordon predicted. Attendees were amazed and shocked. O’Connor was an amusing yet compelling apologist for the historic faith that the deracinated Irishman, James Joyce, loathed. O’ Connor had learned from Caroline Gordon to value the exquisite craftsmanship of Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist and Dubliners, the short story collection. Gordon insisted Joyce’s fiction not be judged according to churchmanship or piety. The teaching took root. Gordon wrote Flannery O’Connor’s friend and mentor, Robert Fitzgerald, “This girl [O’Connor] is a real novelist….She is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.”*5

  This comment is the foundation of Good Things Out of Nazareth. Gordon’s emphasis on “technique” over “piety” is a vital principle. It has largely been abandoned in the pedagogy of many creative writing programs today, even those in Catholic institutions. The mastery of technique requires discipline, practice, and repetition still observed in music education and athletics. The formation deters what Thomas Aquinas calls “religiosity” that leads to literary condemnations based on piety. The master practitioner of craft over religiosity originates in medieval times, in another “Nazareth”—Florence, Italy, and
its most famous citizen, Dante. An exiled patriot and believer, he is remembered for his “dramatic sense” in the sensational horrors of the Inferno and the beauty of Purgatorio and Paradiso. Dante’s faith is implicit, yet compelling because he is a storyteller first. Dante’s presentation of purgatory, for example, is conveyed not in a tract but in a narrative about climbing a mountain. The Purgatorio is not only ecumenical but also interfaith in its appeal—in a word, “catholic.” I have witnessed students of various beliefs and no beliefs absorbed by Dante’s narrative; likewise, both Islamic students and a professor-friend. Dante may be the greatest of theological writers because storytelling overrides piety.

  O’Connor’s rootedness in Dante runs through the letters in Good Things Out of Nazareth. In one letter she conceives of the stories in A Good Man Is Hard to Find as an exposition of the seven deadly sins modeled on Dante’s Purgatorio. Sequencing of the stories is essential. The famous lead story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” has for many years, like others, been studied apart from the cycle, leading to misreadings. A priest stared at me in disbelief when I told him the story is not really about a serial killer murdering a family. The letters reveal O’Connor intended larger contextual revelation rooted in a specific order of reading. O’Connor’s stories comprise cycles—they are like Dante’s cantos and are to be read in order. Good Things Out of Nazareth reveals this vital principle that enables readers to better understand O’Connor’s fiction.

  Stressing both “technique” and “piety,” Gordon and O’Connor also exchange letters revealing their esteem for the writing of other “bad” Catholics such as Hemingway and Graham Greene. They advocate that their works need to be rescued from uncharitable pietistic critics. Gordon teaches O’Connor (and Percy) immersion in the masters of literary realism; O’Connor, in turn, passes the instruction on to her correspondents. She and Gordon react to readers, both secular and religious, often distracted by the excesses of Hemingway’s personality and poor Churchmanship.