Flannery (43 page)
A group more likely to entertain discussions of Teilhard was made up of five Dominican nuns, along with their Superior, Sister Evangelist, of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta, who visited Andalusia in July 1960, wishing for help with a project. Since Giroux’s brief stopover and word of Merton the previous year, Flannery and her mother had become regular communicants at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit, often heading north on Sundays to attend mass. They would then linger to visit with the monks, especially the abbot, Augustine More, and the bonsai expert and gardener Father Paul Bourne, also chief censor for the Trappist order in America and, so, Merton’s bête noire. “Paul Bourne was strict on Merton,” recalls one Conyers monk. “He was finicky about any sexual stuff, and said that he had gotten some ‘whining and complaining letters’ from Merton. He taught us Church history on Tuesday mornings, was a litterateur, not a liberal, and had read all of Flannery’s stuff. I think she saw in him a kindred spirit.”
Abbot More and Father Bourne became regulars at Andalusia, and, on that Monday in July, the abbot — a “giggler” — had driven the Atlanta sisters in a station wagon to discuss their request for help on a book project. Their subject was Mary Ann Long, a twelve-year-old girl with a cancerous tumor growing on one side of her face, whom they cared for until her death. When they first contacted her, Flannery’s reaction was a visceral “no” to the notion of writing a novel about the saintly girl, but the photographs they sent haunted her. “What interests me in it is simply the mystery,” she wrote Betty, “the agony that is given in strange ways to children.” So she agreed to help edit a book and write an introduction, half hoping a finished manuscript would never arrive. Paul Bourne jokingly wondered which of her “murder stories” had prompted them to approach her.
What Flannery carried away from these first letters and meetings was not yet a sense of kinship with Mary Ann so much as with the founder of the Dominican order, Rose Hawthorne, and, by extension, her father, the New England author of dark, gothic, moral tales. She went to her bookshelf and took down Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” which was included in her college
Understanding Fiction
anthology, and drew a connection between the beautiful Georgiana, subjected by her scientist-husband to a vicious precursor of cosmetic surgery to make her even
more
perfect, and Mary Ann’s “plainly grotesque” tumor. But she also made a connection between the author and his saintly Catholic-convert daughter. Ever anxious about covering any tracks of Faulkner, by September she could easily write Bill Sessions advertising her newly adopted literary stepfather: “Hawthorne said he didn’t write novels, he wrote romances; I am one of his descendants.”
During the remainder of the fall and winter of 1960, Flannery devoted herself to talks and essays and even her single foray into magazine feature writing, thriftily titled “The King of the Birds,” a previously discarded title for “The Displaced Person.” While this article on her peacocks showed her knack for prose at once stylish and talky enough for the pages of
Holiday,
a chic travel magazine that paid her $750, she tucked a tiny nightmare into its ending. Skewing the mood for any readers alert enough to catch the downshift, she injected some dark changes into the anecdote about the Pathe cameraman, which she used as her opener: “Lately I have had a recurrent dream: I am five years old and a peacock. A photographer has been sent from New York and a long table is laid in celebration. The meal is to be an exceptional one: myself. I scream, ‘Help! Help!’ and awaken.”
Using all of these occasions as opportunities to think aloud about the intellectual concerns between the lines of her fiction, Flannery traveled to Minnesota in October to take part in a three-day fiction workshop devoted to her work at the College of St. Teresa in Winona, and to present a talk on “Some Thoughts on the Catholic Novelist” at St. Catherine’s College in St. Paul — pleased that she “met no duds” at either Catholic school. While not speaking directly of Teilhard, she did knot together the terms she first used when writing about him to describe her “Catholic novelist”: “The fiction writer should be characterized by his kind of vision. . . . His kind of vision is prophetic vision. Prophecy . . . is dependent on the imaginative and not the moral faculty. . . . The prophet is a realist of distances.” She also read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” at the University of Minnesota, where she felt at an advantage, as “I sound pretty much like the old lady.”
She was back in Georgia just in time for another such engagement during the third week in October: a southern arts festival at Wesleyan College, in Macon, where she was being “paid (well) to swap clichés about Southern culture” with Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, and Madison Jones, as well as to speak on “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Putting less emphasis at this non-Catholic event on Teilhard, she went public instead for the first time about her kinship with Hawthorne: “When Hawthorne said that he wrote romances, he was attempting, in effect, to keep for fiction some of its freedom from social determinism, and to steer it in the direction of poetry.” In O’Connor’s own stories, where Elizabeth Bishop, “green with envy,” swore that she could “cram a whole poem-idea into a sentence,” she was striving for similar poetic freedom.
Following the festival, a dinner was held at Andalusia, which included Katherine Anne Porter, the moderator Louis Rubin, Ashley Brown, and the “strenuous” Mrs. Tate, again staying over the weekend, as well as her friend with lupus, Dean Hood, who drove six hours, unannounced, from Florida for the conference. “I helped Regina in the kitchen with Louise,” Dean recalled. “I was outta my league in the living room.” Katherine Anne Porter exclaimed that night with great regret that it was too late to visit a chicken Flannery had shown her on her last visit. “I call that really having a talent for winning friends and influencing people,” Flannery wrote Cecil Dawkins, “when you remember to inquire for a chicken you met two years before. She was so sorry that it was night and she wouldn’t get to see him again as she had particularly wanted to. I call that social grace.”
Soon afterward, Flannery discovered that she had lost a bet with the nuns. She had wagered a pair of peacocks that they would never find a publisher for their memoir. Robert Giroux was interested, though he admitted that his author’s “Introduction” to
A Memoir of Mary Ann,
not the nuns’ writing, finally swayed him. In this eloquent essay, as fine as her best stories, dated December 8, she seized an opportunity to weave together her feelings about the girl forever fixed at the age of twelve; the “mystery” of disease, hers and Mary Ann’s; the long shadow of Hawthorne, to whose memory the book was dedicated; and the hope for meaning that she found spelled out so compellingly in Teilhard. Indeed she made Mary Ann a human face for Teilhard’s meditation on illness: “She and the Sisters who had taught her had fashioned from her unfinished face the material of her death. The creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare his death in Christ. It is a continuous action in which this world’s goods are utilized to the fullest, both positive gifts and what Père Teilhard de Chardin calls ‘passive diminishments.’”
B
Y THE BEGINNING
of 1961, Flannery was at work on a new story for which she was using as a title yet another popular phrase of Teilhard’s, “everything that rises must converge,” which summed up the priest’s notion of all life, from the geological to the human, converging toward an integration of the material and the spiritual, not to mention an integration of the scientific theory of evolution and the theological dogma of Incarnation, of God made man. Giroux remembered sending her a French anthology of Teilhard’s writings, with a section titled
“Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge.”
After Teilhard’s death, the French mint struck a medallion in his honor, stamped with his aristocratic profile and this mystical axiom. Writing to Roslyn Barnes, a young Catholic convert at Iowa, to whom she sent a copy of Teilhard’s
Divine Milieu,
Flannery mentioned her “story called ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge,’ which is a physical proposition that I found in Père Teilhard and am applying to a certain situation in the Southern States & indeed in all the world.”
This “certain situation” was a coy reference to political events creating big headlines in early 1961, as forces of change loosely filed under the label “the sixties” took hold in the South, across America and the world, and indeed throughout the Roman Catholic Church. Dovetailing with
aggiornamento,
or the spirit of renewal, introduced by John XXIII, was the election and inauguration on January 20 of a young Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, whose candidacy Flannery supported, judging that “I think King Kong would be better than Nixon” and scorning JFK’s opponents of “the secularist-Baptist combination, unholy alliance.” She told Cecil Dawkins, “All the rich widows in M’ville are voting for Nixon, fearing lest Kennedy give their money to the niggers.”
In the South, much politics was racial politics, and the “certain situation” O’Connor was addressing in lofty Teilhardian terms was the civil rights movement. In December 1955, Rosa Lee Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, her dramatic gesture helping to force an issue obviously overdue: within days of her nonviolent resistance, fifty thousand black citizens walked to work in Alabama’s capital city in a bus boycott lasting 381 days, led by the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr. In the fall of 1957, nine black teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as thousands of National Guardsmen patrolled in the schoolyard. The first sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter had just occurred, in February 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Yet while her Teilhardian phrase rang with the obvious implication of integration, Flannery’s own position had shifted from the shocking contrariness of the girl who wrote from the point of view of black characters in her high school stories and decried the segregated buses she rode to Atlanta as a graduate student, to one of complex ambivalence. She had returned to settle in a society predicated on segregation and had taken on its charged voices and manners as the setting of her fiction. Certainly her mother was given to sharp racial comments, enough for the Gossetts to remember Flannery warning guests not to bring up the race issue. William Sessions has recalled a Thanksgiving dinner where her uncle Louis angrily slammed down a copy of
Life
magazine, featuring a photograph of Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston washing the feet of a black man during a Maundy Thursday service.
Throughout the late fifties, Flannery had not seemed especially interested in coverage of the civil rights movement in the
Atlanta Constitution
and the
Atlanta Journal,
her main sources of news (she did not own a television set until March 1961, when the sisters gave her one as thanks for her work on
Mary Ann
). She rarely discussed related political events. Yet eventually she came face-to-face with such topical issues, beginning mostly at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, also a favorite retreat of Dorothy Day. Indeed Bill Sessions had driven Day from Conyers to the Atlanta train station, following her visit to Koinonia, an interracial community in Americus, Georgia, where in 1957 she had survived a drive-by shooting. The incident prompted Flannery to voice her mixed feelings to Betty: “All my thoughts on this subject are ugly and uncharitable — such as: that’s a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc. I admire her very much. I still think of the story about the Tennessee hillbilly who picked up his gun and said, ‘I’m going to Texas to fight fuhmuh rights.’ I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.”
Another visitor to Conyers, and another befriended by Bill Sessions, was John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who darkened his skin and wrote an account of his experiences traveling for six weeks through the Deep South in
Black Like Me
(1961), a classic study of racism. A Roman Catholic convert, Griffin wrote in his book of meeting “a young college instructor of English — a born Southerner of great breadth of understanding. . . . We talked until midnight. He invited me to go with him to visit Flannery O’Connor the next day.” Griffin declined, feeling that he should spend his few remaining hours in the monastery. Less charitably, telling Maryat of the near meeting, Flannery wrote, “If I had been one of them white ladies Griffin sat down by on the bus, I would have got up PDQ preferring to sit by a genuine Negro.” She told Father McCown that she would be delighted to see Griffin at Andalusia, but “not in blackface.”
Like the broader Catholic Church, the great old enemy of the Klan, which was dispensing teachings on racial justice, the monks at Conyers were supportive of the civil rights movement. Though generally conservative, Paul Bourne, an Englishman educated at Yale, was certainly liberal on this issue. And so O’Connor’s monk friends were alert to the paradoxes of her attitude. “I would call Flannery a cultural racist,” says one Conyers monk. “It wasn’t that she didn’t know they were children of God redeemed by the blood of Christ. Of course she knew that. But the vocabulary she used was typical Southern white. Paul said so. I never heard her. Her mother was worse. Flannery tempered it some. She did not hate black people. But she did resent the whiteys from the North coming down and telling us how to handle our problems with the blacks.”
Leonard Mayhew, then an Atlanta priest, who occasionally visited her, sometimes bringing along his sister, the New York editor Alice Mayhew, says, “She never said anything racist, but she was patronizing about blacks, treated them as children. When I was introduced to black workers on the farm, they would take off their hats. I was both a white man and a priest. So they were doing double duty.” O’Connor’s position basically fell close to William Faulkner’s. Segregation was an evil, Faulkner stated; but if integration were forced upon the South he would resist (in one feverish moment, he even said he would take up arms). In his personal life, his behavior toward African Americans was always cordial and kindly, but as one writer has characterized it, it was also “patronizing: he belonged, after all, to a
patron
class.”
