Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [131]
The decisive event that she related to Flannery, though, occurred in Germany, where she was dishonorably discharged from the military for sexual indiscretion, having been intimately involved with another woman. Such incidents concerning lesbians were treated with special virulence in the Cold War period. Following wartime encouragement of enlistment as Waves or Wacs, women remaining in the military, rather than returning to motherhood, stood out as a deviant group stereotyped as lesbian, and often associated with Communism. Introductory lectures warned newly enlisted women about “confirmed” lesbians, and encouraged informing on them. In her coming-out letter to Flannery, Betty spoke of feeling “unbearably guilty” for her part in the incident, and offered to end their friendship to prevent scandal from being visited on the author.
Flannery’s response to Betty’s revelation was immediate and caring: “I can’t write you fast enough and tell you that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference in my opinion of you, which is the same as it was, and that is: based solidly on complete respect.” As to Betty’s point about scandal, Flannery argued, “I’m obscure enough. Nobody knows or cares who I see. If it created any tension in you that I don’t understand, then use your own judgment, but understand that from my point of view, you are always wanted.” Flannery did suggest that they not tell Regina as “she wouldn’t understand.” Given the nature of their friendship, she parsed the matter theologically, “Where you are wrong is in saying that you are a history of horror. The meaning of the Redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history.” She then invited Betty for Thanksgiving dinner.
When Betty declined the invitation to a goose dinner with Bill Sessions and Father McCown, she evidently questioned the premise of Flannery’s theology: Did she mean that she was expected to change her nature by entering the Church? Flannery clarified: “I wish you could come but I respect your reasons. Perhaps what I should have said is that you are more than your history. I don’t believe the fundamental nature changes but that it’s put to a different use when a conversion occurs and of course it requires vigilance to put it to the proper use.” Soon enough their friendship was back on track, with a shared secret. For Christmas, Betty sent the Notebooks of Simone Weil, and Flannery thanked her, for “Simone Weil but even more for your own letters.” Within nine months, Betty began to visit Andalusia again, for a few longer stays. As with the Fitzgeralds, Flannery grew to think of her as one of her “adopted kin.”
Yet Betty did have a crush on Flannery, and, in this case, was the unrequited partner. Forty years later, she wrote a fan letter to the Atlanta novelist Greg Johnson — as she had once written Flannery — and the subject of her “in some odd ways truly strangely innocent” friend took over their correspondence. She addressed Johnson’s remark that he felt “speculating about her sexual feelings in print would no doubt have been extremely distasteful to her,” by agreeing and adding that he might even be underestimating the distaste by limiting it to print alone. Betty confided that Flannery had once said to her, ‘In my stories is where I live.” In a tender confession, she concluded to Johnson, “As you must sense, I did love her very, very much — and, God knows, do.”
IN THE FALL of 1956, Georgia State College for Women recruited a new president whose name alone would have