Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [106]
While Helen Greene remembered Erik’s response as an enthusiastic “Of course!” he felt, in truth, puzzled. “She was sure that Flannery would be interested in meeting me,” says Langkjaer, “and I must say I couldn’t imagine why, because I hadn’t read the novel, and I hadn’t even been told that she was living in Milledgeville, and why would anyone want to meet a perfect stranger on such a flimsy pretext. But the professor said that she doesn’t see too many people, living as she does with her mother. I went along with that idea. Some time in the afternoon, we rang the doorbell of Andalusia.” Helen Greene judged the introduction a success: “He and Mary Flannery liked each other a great deal, and, as I recall, she guided him on a tour of Baldwin County in his car. . . . He was happily surprised to find such interesting and attractive people in the area.”
Sophisticated, funny, and widely read, Erik possessed a cosmopolitan background rarely encountered in east-central Georgia. The son of a Danish diplomat and lawyer and a Russian émigré mother, he had been born in Shanghai, where his father served as consul-general. After a difficult childhood in Copenhagen, marked by bitter divorce proceedings between his parents, he eventually moved to New York City with his mother. When he graduated, on scholarship, from Princeton in 1948, he was then guided by his grandmother’s cousin, Helene Iswolsky, a Catholic intellectual and activist, to study and teach at Fordham. As a religious skeptic with a Lutheran background, though, Erik did not see much of a future in a Catholic college. One of his Jesuit professors, William Lynch, a favorite theologian of Flannery’s, advised him to seek his fortune elsewhere. Feeling at loose ends, he turned to the publishing industry.
Flannery thought enough of his visit to spill lots of its details into a letter to the Fitzgeralds, jumping off from a conversation she and Erik had on this first meeting about Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, a social justice ministry to the poor, forsaken, hungry, and homeless, begun as a hospitality house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan:
I never heard of Conversations at Newburgh (sp?), but there was a man by here the other day who was a textbook salesman from Harcourt, Brace who told me that was one of D Day’s farms. That man was from Denmark, not a Catholic but had some Russian aunt who was a Catholic and somebody or other with a magazine called Nightwatch or Watchguard or somesuch. Anyway he had studied philosophy at Fordham and taught German there and knew Fr. Lynch and was much interested in Dorothy Day.
Flannery was challenged by her facsimile of a “gentleman caller,” who had a strong Danish-British accent that marked him as a definite outsider. Although they talked theology, he wasn’t Catholic. He was also highly opinionated, and far from shy in voicing his opinions; of Dorothy Day, “He couldn’t see he said why she fed endless lines of endless bums for whom there was no hope, she’d never see any results from that, said he. The only conclusion we came to about this was that Charity was not understandable.” Flannery camouflaged her interest in the young man to the Fitzgeralds with the throwaway remark “Strange people turn up.” Yet she soon ordered a subscription to the Catholic Worker, and back issues of the Third Hour, the journal edited by Langkjaer’s Russian relative Helene Iswolsky, a regular contributor to Dorothy Day’s newspaper.
They discussed more on this first visit than Day’s social activism, or the ecumenical mission of his “aunt” in reuniting the Russian Orthodox Church