Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [125]
As much as a sympathetic reader, of course, Flannery was in need of a dear friend. Betty’s perceptive letter came just three months after the news from Erik of his engagement, and the same month as his marriage. While Flannery was in New York City, her new friend Fred Darsey had detected on her face a “disappointed look.” She insisted that this expression, which she claimed others had noticed in the city, was congenital: “This is the look I have been carrying around since birth — born disenchanted.” Yet she certainly had cause for disappointment, including, most recently, the loss of her confidant. Like Erik, Betty promised to be able to keep up with her intellectual breadth and curiosity, as they filled their letters that summer with lively debates on Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson, Henry James, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett, Sigmund Freud, Victor White, and Carl Jung.
Ever the fiction writer, Flannery characterized her friends quickly, and stuck to the categories she imposed. Erik was a “displaced person,” the prototype of a traveling salesman. Betty, she decided early on, was Simone Weil. She saw in this homegrown intellectual — an agnostic obsessed with God — something of the tormented, brilliant French Jew, who was deeply drawn to Christianity, yet agonizing over and never taking the step to baptism. Weil had died of tuberculosis in England, in 1943, refusing food in solidarity with those living in Nazi-occupied France. In her second letter, Flannery asked if Betty had ever read Weil, and, in the next, confessed, “I have thought of Simone Weil in connection with you almost from the first.” She also revealed a wish to write a novel about a character like Weil: “and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?”
Their connection soon went beyond merely typing out thoughts on paper. Flannery was once moved to enclose a peacock feather, and an article on Edith Stein — a Jewish-born Carmelite nun and Catholic saint who died at Auschwitz — clipped from the Third Hour, the magazine edited by Erik’s aunt. Betty mailed her a novel by Nelson Algren. “I have read almost 200 pages so far,” Flannery answered. “I don’t think he is a good writer.” They soon developed a system, as they sent books back and forth by post, thriftily turning around the brown packing paper, adding Scotch tape, and addressing the stickers on the reverse side. From her own shelf, Flannery mailed off The Lord by Romano Guardini, a contemporary theologian in Germany. From an Atlanta public library, Betty sent back Simone Weil’s Letters to a Priest and Waiting for God.
By early October 1955, Flannery was preparing to visit the Cheneys in Nashville. The challenge was steeper than usual, though, as she had to adjust to crutches. Her doctors had diagnosed a “softening” of the top of the leg bone, and believed that taking weight off the hip for a year or two might allow the bone to harden again; if not, a wheelchair or an operation to insert a steel cap would be necessary. They assured her that the condition was unrelated to lupus, though later studies established an occurrence of this condition of osteonecrosis in twenty percent of lupus patients treated with high-dose corticosteroids. She was also switched to Meticorten, a trade name for prednisone, a new pill form of the drug. “I am learning to walk on crutches,” she wrote Betty, “and I feel like a large stiff anthropoid ape who has no cause to be thinking of St. Thomas or Aristotle.”
She wrote a letter to Betty before leaving, hoping to strengthen their bond. If Betty instigated the relationship, Flannery tended to take responsibility for ensuring its growth. Betty had exhibited a guarded interest in the Thomism that Flannery had been