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successful character in her novel. (“I found Rayber a very sym-pathetic and moving character,” she wrote in her diary, “and probably from her point of view, not unlike myself, although of course I had nothing to do with Rayber.”) From that visit on, a bemused Flannery addressed letters to her liberal humanist friend, with whom she often found herself at an impasse on religion and politics, by variations on Rayber — Raybutter, Raybalm, Rayfish, Rayverberator — adding an occasional marginal doodle of skull and crossbones, or a smiling thistle. Maryat likewise invented nicknames for Flannery based on the novel’s inflammatory boy prophet — Tarbabe, Tarsoul, Tarsquawk.

WHEN ROBERT GIROUX had visited the previous spring, Flannery was most excited to hear him speak of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and philosopher, as well as a paleontologist, present at the discovery of Peking Man, in 1929, whose philosophical writings were denied publication by the Roman Holy Office during his lifetime. The inventor of such science-fictiony terms as “noosphere” and “omega point,” to describe phases of a cosmos he theorized as evolving both materially and spiritually toward a culminating Body of Christ, Teilhard had died in 1955 at the age of seventy-three in New York City. An “omnivorous reader,” as Giroux described her, Flannery was now anticipating the appearance of Teilhard’s books in English translation, and this personal connection only redoubled her interest. As she reported to Ted Spivey, “My editor from Farrer, Straus was down here to visit me last week and I was asking him about Chardin and it turned out he knew him for about a month in New York before he died. He said he was very impressive.”

Giroux recalled, “I said I met Father de Chardin, and she said, ‘You did, where? I didn’t know that he was ever in America.’” Flannery’s editor went on to recount,

I explained that Roger Straus’s uncle, a Guggenheim, funded some research. She said, “What was he like?” I said he was very handsome in a masculine way, and he had asked me about Merton, and whether I thought both his feet were firmly planted on the ground. I said, “Yes they are,” and he said, “I’m glad to hear that.” I told her of remarking to Roger that I had a vague feeling I had seen that face before — in Houdin’s bust of Voltaire in the Metropolitan Museum. Roger said, “Of course, Voltaire’s name was Arouet, and Chardin belongs to the Arouet family.” Well she loved that.

Giroux also told of attending Teilhard’s funeral at St. Ignatius Church on Park Avenue, with the Straus family and “about twenty or thirty Jesuits at the altar.”

The publication of Teilhard’s writings in America, beginning in 1959 with The Phenomenon of Man — his 1938 manuscript attempting to reconcile Christian faith with evolutionary theory — was perfectly timed to answer a burning intellectual need of Flannery’s. In November 1958, she already longed for “a new synthesis,” and complained to Betty Hester, “This is not an age of great Catholic theology. . . . What St. Thomas did for the new learning of the 13th century we are in bad need of someone to do for the 20th.” Her immediate provocation was the feeling that she was at a disadvantage in theological debates with Ted Spivey. “Only crisis theologians seem to excite him,” she told Betty; yet she had to concede that the “greatest of the Protestant theologians writing today . . . are much more alert and creative than their Catholic counterparts. We have very few thinkers to equal Barth and Tillich, perhaps none.”

Her search for eminent twentieth-century Catholic thinkers had begun a few years earlier when she started reviewing for the Bulletin in 1956. The local Episcopal rector and Andalusia reading-group cofounder, William Kirkland, said that his friendship with Flannery was sealed in the midfifties, when she discovered that they both owned well-worn copies of Letters to a Niece, by Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a turn-of-the-century Catholic humanist whose support of Darwinian science drew him dangerously close to the “Modernists”