Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [163]
Maryat was livid when she read the new preface, and shot off an impassioned complaint to her friend: “Now what did you go and put a PREFACE on it for you damn Jeswit, why it’s a ruddy apologia.” Giroux explained, “Flannery was a paradoxical person and a paradoxical writer. It’s what fascinates us. It’s a natural human reaction when a person is so contradictory.” But the reaction among some of her more secular friends to this paradox was to begin to feel that she did not accept, and perhaps in some truly shuttered way did not even allow herself to understand, the implications of her writings. Like John Hawkes, Maryat simply decided to ignore Flannery’s own pronouncements. “The writing is one thing and the thinking and speeches are another,” she wrote a mutual friend. “Jekyl and Hyde if you will. Perhaps.”
Praising to Betty the essential ingredients of “much liquor and male companionship, both of which I could stand more of more often,” Flannery then visited the Notre Dame campus on May 4, after two days of her more usual fare of speaking on “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” to the sisters of Rosary College, outside Chicago. Driving her from Rosary, including a stretch in the middle lane of Chicago’s teeming Congress Street Expressway, flanked by “odiferous diesel trucks,” Joel Wells has recalled her candor; when asked what she thought of the recently published sensation To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, she replied, “It’s a wonderful children’s book.” She then returned to South Bend, just a month later, to receive an honorary doctor of letters at St. Mary’s College, the “sister college” of Notre Dame.
Between her first trip to the Midwest and her second, for collecting her hood, which her mother duly “wrapped up in newspaper against moths and put in the back reaches of the closet,” she made an appearance at Emory to talk about “The South.” When the critic Granville Hicks visited Andalusia in April, Flannery insisted, of her crutches, “They don’t interfere with anything.” Such certainly seemed to be the case with these demanding connections between cars, trains, and plane, as her mother met her at the Atlanta airport with a wheelchair. In the audience on the warm Sunday afternoon of May 20, for the Emory talk, given outside on the Quadrangle, was Alfred Corn, who went on to become a well-known poet and critic. Then a first-year student, studying Wise Blood in a Great Books course, he vividly remembers her “wearing a blue plaid skirt and a white blouse, buttoned at the top, of course, and unattractive pointed glasses.”
While too nervous to walk up to speak with her afterward, as “she was that awesome creature, a famous writer,” Corn did screw up his courage to write, like Cecil Dawkins before him, putting as the address simply “Milledgeville.” With early aspirations to the Christian ministry, Corn, from South Georgia, confessed to a crisis of faith upon entering college. Flannery carefully addressed these concerns in a handful of profound letters, in the genre of Hügel’s Letters to a Niece. In response to his worries about the challenge of secular learning, she shared her own experience: “At one time, the clash of different world religions was a difficulty for me. Where you have absolute solutions, however, you have no need of faith.” Instead she suggested a respect for “mystery,” a term she first applied to illness, but which was increasingly key in her theology. As for the conundrum of predestination and God’s punishment, she offered a literary answer: “Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”
That June a second of Flannery’s friendships splintered, this time with her intellectual sparring partner Ted Spivey, who