Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in America on Sept. 8, 1979.
Since bookstores are finding it hard to keep A Habit of Being (Flannery O’Connor’s letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald; Farrar, Straus, Giroux) in stock, and since Flannery O’Connor seems to be making her way into the list of American classic writers, and since I knew her well and a lot of those letters are addressed to me, I thought it might be becoming to relate what I remember about her.
Back in the 1950s, I was the assistant pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Macon, Ga., strong Baptist/Methodist/post-K.K.K. territory, where the Irish, Italian and Lebanese Catholics made up a brave 1 percent of the population. What the church needed, I thought, was a heightening of its cultural level, and I was working hard to heighten it. So, when a rare, highly literate parishioner, Doris O’Shaughnessy, mentioned Flannery O’Connor as a “Georgian, a coming writer, a Catholic, a convert and very snooty” (she was dead wrong on the last two points), I decided to get on the O’Connor trail. I read her two books and their reviews. Like the rest, I thought Wise Blood gripping but too concerned with bizarre, freakish people. A Good Man Is Hard To Find was much more to my tastes. Now to visit the lady herself.
In one of her references to me in her letters, Flannery wrote that since the automobile was invented she had never seen a grounded priest. She was wrong. To visit her in Milledgeville, 40 miles from Macon, I had to beg a ride with Horace Ridley, a fat, big-hearted, unacademic whiskey salesman and lover of new Cadillacs. So, when you read about me coming to her house first in a white Cadillac, then in a black one, please do not misinterpret me.
In Milledgeville, we got directions from Mrs. Toomey, the mother of the local pastor. “Eight miles out on the Eatonton Road you will see a sign on the left that says Andalusia. That’s it. I know they will be glad to see you, Father. Mary Flannery is a sweet girl, and she comes to Mass every Sunday. But those stories she writes! They are terrible. Everybody says so. I’m afraid to go near her. She might put me in one of her stories.” I suspect that Flannery did, more than once.
The O’Connor home sits back on a low hill behind a high hill, so it is invisible from the highway. The winding gravel driveway passes a round pond ruled by a large white swan, who is so quarrelsome that he is dangerous, as I learned later. Bantam chickens and guineafowl scattered ahead of us, a peacock shrieked at us from the gable of a barn and a gaggle of white geese came at us hissing as we got out of the car. The driveway ended at the back door of a steep, white, two-story house. Being proper, I walked around to the front and knocked on the screen door there.
Flannery answered my knock. No swung-open door and cheery “Come in, Father.” Instead, she opened the door and said, “Howdy.”
“Miss O’Connor?”
She looked at me for a disquieting few seconds, and I looked at her. What I saw was not the smart-looking, independent-acting lady author that her name somehow promised. She was dressed in old jeans, long before they became modish, and a brown blouse, and she leaned on a pair of aluminum waist-high crutches. Sharp blue eyes looked at me from a face that was roundish, puffy and a little blotchy—the results of her strong medication for lupus, the disease that finally killed her.
“Yes,” she said.
“My name is Father McCown. I am assistant pastor of St. Joseph Church, in Macon, and this is my friend, Mr. Ridley, who was kind enough to drive me over. I read your stories, and I just wanted to meet you. I liked them very much.”
“Proud you did,” she said, smiling for the first time. “Wanna come in?”
Later she told me that I was the very first Catholic who had called on her in the interest of her writing, which is a source of great pride for me. To another correspondent, she said: “He was the first priest who said turkey-dog to me about my writing.” She appreciated my interest, I am sure, but further insight into my literary stature could not have overwhelmed her.
Much later, in a letter to Tom Gossett, she says: “Father McCown breezed in here … on his way to give a talk to the St. Joseph Guild on ‘Literary Horizons of Catholic Thought’ or some such grandiose title. He knows nothing whatsoever about the subject, but was not letting that deter him.” I never claimed to know much about literature, only that I knew more than most Macon Catholics. And what I do know I learned largely from the seeress of Andalusia.
We corresponded extensively and I visited her often. And always, Regina, her bright-eyed little mother, who looked and talked much like Mrs. Toomey, sat in dead center of every conversation and steered it insistently to such topics as the modification of the Communion fast, nuns doffing their habits, what did I think of priests running around in gray suits and so on and on. Occasionally, she would remember a pot on the stove and excuse herself for a moment, but the respites were not long.
Flannery, I quickly learned, was not a convert, but a Georgia cradle Catholic from a long line of such. She was also not snooty, just reserved. She was no fence straddler, a quality I could trace to her mother. She liked all the French and English authors that so excited Catholics at the time: Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, Greene, Waugh, Spark and the Americans Percy and Powers. We passed many books back and forth, and I treasured her short, salty judgments.
My first visit so impressed me that I went home and wrote to Harold Gardiner, S.J., then literary editor of America, suggesting that he become alerted to this exciting Catholic talent. He was grateful and immediately asked Flannery to do a piece for America, “The Church and the Fiction Writer” (3/30/57), now reprinted in Robert and Sally Fitzgerald’s Mystery and Manners (Noonday). It quickly became a basic text for Catholic writers, and I have come across several references to it. But Father Gardiner edited in a sentence that made Flannery furious: “What leads the writer to salvation may lead the reader to sin, and the Catholic writer who looks at the possibility directly looks the Medusa in the face and is turned to stone.” Flannery, bless her heart, thought boldly and straight, and was not intimidated by the rigorist-neurotic cast of so much Catholic moral theology of the time.
Some time later, I got my Oxford-educated brother, Robert, also a Jesuit, interested in Flannery. He read her books, corresponded with her and wrote an article for The Kansas Magazine that she said showed more understanding of her than anything that had been written. Sadly, my brother passed up an opportunity to meet Flannery on a trip to the East. He intended stopping by on his way back, but by that time she was dead.
Mr. Ridley drove me over to Milledgeville several times in his varicolored Cadillacs. I gave him Flannery’s books. His view: “I liked some of her stories pretty well, but to tell you the truth, a book has to be a little trashy for me to like it.” I told Flannery this and she loved it.
She was an unappreciated prophet in her home town. A doctor who worked in the mental hospital there had read Wise Blood. He said: “I enjoyed it, but I know one thing. She don’t know a damn thing about a whorehouse.” Flannery later admitted that she had leaned on conjecture in her Wise Blood brothel episode.
As a red-hot, zealous, young, pre-Vatican II priest at a time when convert making was pretty much the measure of a priest, my interest in “Catholic writing” was entirely pragmatic: a way to rout Protestant error and enthrone Catholic truth in our great country. The word ecumenism was hardly known. I misread the fundamentalist Protestant characters etched in her books as being satires on Protestantism, not realizing that she had a real admiration of their sincere religiosity. She was so knowledgeable about her Catholic faith, so concerned, that I began to think she was wasting her talents on fiction that I secretly thought was of questionable value anyhow, when she could be using that well-honed intellect to defend Holy Church against her enemies, especially the Georgia Baptists. I broached the subject: Why not do a bit of Catholic polemical writing? Her answer was instant and tart: “That ain’t my dish of tea.” And I learned a lesson about integrity in art.
I became enthusiastic about a booklet by a nun, with a title something like Arrows at the Center. The author averred that true literature dealt with the most fundamental meanings, and she used the best Catholic authors of the time to illustrate this. I thought that Flannery’s work, so concerned with fall and redemption and God-consciousness, qualified admirably according to Sister’s norms. I sent the booklet to Flannery, and she did not like it at all. She said that if the lady were to be taken seriously, then we would read only novels that were about a saint, set in a monastery and written by a saint.
At the time, I was much taken with Mary McCarthy’s writing. (I still am.) I asked Flannery what she thought of her. She had met Mary, had been at dinner with her up East somewhere. Flannery had felt shy, and had not had much to say. Mary was quite vocal, and when she, the ex-Catholic, said—condescendingly, Flannery thought—that the Eucharist was admittedly a “meaningful symbol,” Flannery said she contributed her only major utterance of the meal: “If it’s only a symbol, then I say to hell with it.” Then McCarthy said something else that puzzled Flannery to the end of her days, for several times heard her mention it. She spoke of some aspect of Catholic belief as being “portable.” In later musings, I suspected that what Miss McCarthy actually said was “potable,” which in some context would have made sense. I never got to pass my musings along to Flannery, who, I am sure, would have been impressed by my insight.
Ralph McGill, doughty columnist and “conscience of Atlanta,” was awfully proud of Flannery, and he knew her life’s history in great detail. He once had me to dinner with an Atlanta novelist, Margaret Long. Margaret said, “Flannery certainly is a great writer, but, you know, there is no love in her writing.” I confronted Flannery with this. “She’s right,” she said. “You can’t write about love when you haven’t had it, leastwise the kind she is talking about. I never had any.” And, it’s a fact, she never did. The early onset of her terrible illness ruled out the normal activities of youth that lead to love and marriage. She was incapable of being anything but herself, and the self she was would probably have frightened away any save a suitor of singular discernment.
She was not, however, without offers. A letter once came from a young man in Florida. In effect, he said: “It is evident that you know nothing about sex. I know plenty about it, but I don’t write very well. What say we pool our skills?”
It was my pleasure to take Tom and Louise Gossett over to meet Flannery. It was the beginning of a happy friendship, as the Gossett letters attest. Alfred Kazin lectured at Wesleyan University, where Tom taught. I was asked to drive with them and Kazin to visit Flannery, whom Kazin much admired. It was good, good talk the whole trip. Smart people are so interesting. I felt no inclination to tell any of my good jokes. Kazin encouraged me (sizing me up, I guess, as an authentic Southerner) to talk, and he listened as intently and humbly as if I were somebody. Just the mark of a great man, I am sure.
Everything we saw along the highway—the kind, before the interstates, that caresses the contours of the land and slows down at every village—reminded Kazin of something in Flannery’s writings: old wagons, muledrawn plows, well sweeps, hay ricks, corn cribs, hog pens, sawhorses and wood piles, outdoor privies, piney woods. I knew the area well, and once, when I said that there was a special old house I wanted them to see but “I think we just passed it. Let’s go back to that sandy lane yonder,” they all burst out laughing because every person there was immediately reminded of the misdirection in A Good Man Is Hard To Find that sets up its tragic ending.
Mrs. O’Connor was extremely protective of “Mary Flannery.” Twice, Mr. Ridley and I tried to get Flannery to go out and eat with us, because I yearned for some good talk without unceasing interruption. Each time the mother declined for her before Flannery had a chance to speak. I presumed it was because of the state of Flannery’s health, but later someone who knew Regina well surmised that she took a dim view of a priest and her daughter consorting with a whiskey salesman. In each case, Flannery submitted without comment and with no sign of irritation. She never, in fact, revealed to me any hint of conflict with her strong-willed mother. I broached the subject once, for much has been said about the relationship, how she allegedly worked out her hostilities toward her mother in such stories as “The Displaced Person” and, even more, in “Greenleaf.” Flannery was not reluctant to talk about this. Her mother was the widowed mother of an only child whose physical health was her single-minded concern. She would not be alive today, Flannery said simply, but for her mother’s care. She professed nothing but love and gratitude for her.
Her mother’s acceptance of her art, she said, was simply one of blind faith. She did not understand what Flannery was about, but she supported her completely in it. I am sure she would have shared Mrs. Toomey’s view of Flannery’s writing. Flannery said that her mother was well aware that she and the farm and even the family connections were all used in her stories, but only for atmosphere, and that she was perfectly content to be so used. Flannery was as deeply religious as her mother, and for Mrs. O’Connor this was enough assurance that her daughter’s writings were good.
And so the visits continued, several times with the Gossetts, of whom she became quite fond. After her death I gave all my Flannery letters to Tom Gossett. He wanted to quote from them in a piece he wrote, but Mrs. O’Connor refused permission. So he had to use the far less vivid indirect discourse in reporting Flannery’s views.
Her uncle Louis Cline kept her supplied with feathery exotica. She showed me her pens of pheasants and her chicken house. (She adamantly refused to ever let me peep into her study.) She was proud of her success at raising peafowl, and their raucous voices shrilled at us from all parts of the yard. A cock that had lost a foot in Shot’s mowing machine once put on his shattering peacock display in front of the screened-in front porch where we were sitting. Flannery whispered that the peacock was in medieval times considered a symbol of the Transfiguration of Jesus. And no wonder, though it could just as easily symbolize the capital sin of pride. There were also screaming guineafowl, chickens, ducks and geese to complete the menagerie.
In time, I left Georgia and went to work in Mexico for a spell. I sent chapters of a book in process to Flannery. She urged me to “Keep ’em comin’, ’cause my mama just dotes on them, especially when you talk about animals.”
One of Flannery’s concerns was a brilliant girl named Roslyn Barnes. With Flannery’s encouragement, the girl had become a Catholic with a vengeance, for she soon went as a Papal Volunteer to Antofagasta, Chile, to teach. Flannery introduced us by mail and hoped I would keep in touch with her. This I did with pleasure, and the pleasure grew as I knew Roslyn better. I never met her in person. Shortly after Flannery’s death I asked Roslyn for any letters she might have saved from their correspondence. She sent a few which found their way into A Habit of Being, and promised to send more that she had “somewhere in her belongings.” But something I wrote—or did not write—offended her, for she abruptly cut off the correspondence. I located her mother not long ago, but she had not heard from her daughter Roslyn in 11 years, though she had some evidence that she was alive. Her Flannery letters, if they still exist, would be a treasure trove.
Eventually, Flannery looked to me as a sort of “moral and dogmatic adviser.” As told in her letters, a group in Milledgeville wanted her to join them in literary discussions. They were headed toward Gide and Sartre, both on the terrible Catholic Index of Forbidden Books, still alive and growling then. Only a bishop could give permission to read “Indexed” books. Flannery and I both knew that Bishop Hyland was not the sort lightly to deviate from the letter of that woeful law. So I wrote my old morals professor, Gerald Kelly, S.J. His satisfactory response was that a Catholic has an obligation to obey church law, yes. But she has an even higher obligation to protect the church from ridicule. He suggested that she use an epikeia, a reasonable interpretation of a law here and now patently inapplicable. Flannery loved the word.
As a Catholic thinker, she was abreast of the most advanced theological concerns in the church, in the early days of Vatican II. Yet she was inclined to strictness with herself in anything having to do with church discipline. And while others were leaving the church protesting its strictures on their freedom, Flannery maintained that she drew her strength and vision from her church’s firm guidelines.
She also wrote me about problems in her spiritual life. I can only say that they were of the scope and seriousness found in a convent-bred schoolgirl. How such sophistication could coexist with such innocence and delicacy of conscience is still a marvel to me.
I could go on and on. Little things: She was jovially critical of the Irishness of the local Irish-American pastor, the way he draped the church in green on St. Patrick’s Day. She was less jovial in her criticism of what she called the Irish cast of American Catholicism of the time.
Walker Percy told me that when his The Moviegoer came out, Flannery wrote: “Dear Mr. Percy: I sure liked your story. I hope you will make up another one real soon.”
I once asked her what she thought of a certain popular book. She said: “I didn’t like it. Nobody gets kilt in it.”
Shortly after the advent of The Violent Bear It Away, a friend of Louise Gossett asked a bookstore clerk if they had anything by Flannery O’Connor. “Oh, yes,” the young girl said, “we have The Bear Ran Away With It.” There was nothing that Flannery tried or wanted to get away with. She was the most honest person I ever knew, and the “dish of tea” that her letters reveal is a savory and needful dish in a confused and pseudosophisticated time.
