• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1522 0

some disappointments, too, in her important friendships. Chief among them was Betty Hester, for whom she had such tender feelings. While she had feigned some indifference to Betty’s choice to be confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church five years earlier, the move was actually a source of great joy. She hoped Betty would find in religion the strength that she sensed the fragile young woman, who had such difficult setbacks in life, sorely needed. And so she suffered when Betty told her, shortly after a visit to Andalusia in September, that she had decided to leave the Church. As with her response to news of Erik’s engagement, Flannery retreated into the protective plural, writing Betty that “I don’t know anything that could grieve us here like this news.” She deemed the turn of events “painful.”

Flannery eventually came to blame this loss of faith on Iris Murdoch, the Dublin-born novelist who had been strongly influenced by Simone Weil, and by Wittgenstein, whose lectures she attended at Cambridge. Earlier in the year, Flannery had read two of Murdoch’s novels, The Flight from the Enchanter and A Severed Head, finding them “completely hollow.” But Betty grew infatuated with these works, which were full of ethical questions and sexual complications among the English upper class. “This conversion was achieved by Miss Iris Murdoch,” Flannery wrote Cecil Dawkins of the weird literary battle for Betty’s soul. “It’s as plain as the nose on her face that now she’s being Iris Murdoch, but it is only plain to me, not her.” Flannery’s misgivings were borne out by several bouts of depression suffered by Betty. Their friendship survived, but with less hopefulness on Flannery’s part than in the first years. Betty went on to initiate a correspondence with Murdoch that lasted until her own death — by suicide, in 1998, when she was seventy-six.

Nonetheless, with a brief break in early November to address the cloistered nuns of Marillac College near St. Louis, Missouri, on “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” Flannery did manage to finish “The Lame Shall Enter First” by year’s end. Still angry at Robie Macauley for the illustration that she claimed was a misguided attempt to “compete with PLAYBOY,” she submitted the story instead to her old teacher Andrew Lytle, now editor of the Sewanee Review. She never knew that Lytle had passed on reviewing Wise Blood, or, as Macauley later revealed, that at Iowa he “found her fiction rather uncouth.” Yet, like many readers, Lytle was won over as her adult stories appeared; he even wrote for her 1956 Guggenheim reapplication that she was “immensely improved since I first taught her.” Lytle not only accepted the story, but planned a special summer issue around O’Connor’s fiction, with essays by Robert Fitzgerald and John Hawkes.

Flannery had actually known Lytle’s intriguing choice, the young novelist John Hawkes, since the summer of 1958, when he and his wife stopped by on their way to Florida from Harvard, where he was teaching. He then mailed her two of his early novels, which she admired as “the grotesque with all stops out.” When James Dickey visited, he surprisingly revealed that he, too, was an avid reader of Hawkes’s dark, surrealist works. “You may state without fear of contradiction that you now have two fans in Georgia,” she quickly wrote Hawkes. Three years later, in a rare blurb, she praised his 1961 novel, The Lime Twig: “You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can’t.” Hawkes, likewise, championed O’Connor, shocking a Brandeis University audience by reading aloud, before its publication, the rape scene of Tarwater from her latest novel.

Yet the liveliest point of contention — and interest — between the two was Hawkes’s main theory about O’Connor’s writing: that hers was a “black,” even “diabolical,” authorial voice. Since he first read her fiction ten years earlier, at the prompting of Melville’s granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, in Cambridge, he had been developing this line of thought,