Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [153]
In opening up to Teilhard, and moving beyond while never abandoning an absolute Thomism that some felt “too straitjacket,” or old-fashioned, Flannery was aligning herself, as well, with a more general mood shift in the Church, signaled by the papacy of John XXIII, who had succeeded Pius XII in October 1958, five months after her audience with the ailing pope. In 1957, the Vatican banned Teilhard’s works from Catholic bookstores. But John XXIII was more encouraging, saying, when asked about Teilhard’s books, “I am here to bless, not to condemn.” When a 1962 monitum, or formal warning, was issued, which the pope later deemed “regrettable” and Flannery found “depressing at first,” she did draw back, suggesting that the Bulletin find a clergyman to review Teilhard’s subsequent books. But she never lost her conviction that the Frenchman might be “canonized yet.” She assured Father McCown, “If they are good, they are dangerous.”
Certainly, throughout the spring and summer of 1960, visitors to Andalusia and a wide range of friends received copies of or were encouraged to read Teilhard’s books. At the end of May, two such visitors might well have landed on Flannery’s “Very Peculiar Types” list, except that both “wore very well.” De Vene Harrold, known as “Dean,” diagnosed with lupus in 1959, had just returned from a honeymoon with her new husband, Robert Hood, a painter, when she saw the Time piece on O’Connor and wrote for advice in a panic. On the couple’s first visit, from St. Augustine, Florida, Flannery and Regina took them on a tour that featured her favorite junk-car yard. “Looka there, look there, would you,” Flannery excitedly called out as she pointed from the highway. Driving by antebellum mansions in their Chevrolet, she chided her mother, “They don’t want to see THIS part of town,” and she steered them instead toward the poorer, black section. She then mailed Dean a copy of Teilhard’s book for her “edification.”
A group more likely to entertain discussions of Teilhard was made up of five Dominican nuns, along with their Superior, Sister Evangelist, of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta, who visited Andalusia in July 1960, wishing for help with a project. Since Giroux’s brief stopover and word of Merton the previous year, Flannery and her mother had become regular communicants at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit, often heading north on Sundays to attend mass. They would then linger to visit with the monks, especially the abbot, Augustine More, and the bonsai expert and gardener Father Paul Bourne, also chief censor for the Trappist order in America and, so, Merton’s bête noire. “Paul Bourne was strict on Merton,” recalls one Conyers monk. “He was finicky about any sexual stuff, and said that he had gotten some ‘whining and complaining letters’ from Merton. He taught us Church history on Tuesday mornings, was a litterateur, not a liberal, and had read all of Flannery’s stuff. I think she saw in him a kindred spirit.”
Abbot More and Father Bourne became regulars at Andalusia, and, on that Monday in July, the abbot — a “giggler” — had driven the Atlanta sisters in a station wagon to discuss their request for help on a book project. Their subject was Mary Ann Long, a twelve-year-old girl with a cancerous tumor growing on one side of her face, whom they cared for until her death. When they first contacted her, Flannery’s reaction was a visceral “no” to the notion of writing a novel about the saintly girl, but the photographs they sent haunted her. “What interests me in it is simply the mystery,” she wrote Betty, “the agony that is given in strange ways to children.” So she agreed to help edit a book and write an introduction, half hoping a finished manuscript would never arrive. Paul Bourne jokingly wondered which of her “murder stories” had prompted them to approach her.
What Flannery carried away