Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [74]
Lowell’s feelings for Flannery were not romantic, but they were full of excitement for her Roman Catholicism and her rare brand of Southern literary talent: “I think one of the best to be when she is a little older,” he promised the poet Elizabeth Bishop. “Very moral (in your sense) and witty.” Of strong-jawed New England Puritan stock, Lowell had converted to Catholicism during his marriage to his first wife, Jean Stafford, partly from reading Jacques Maritain; when he left the marriage, he left the Church. As O’Connor later put it, “I watched him that winter come back into the Church. I had nothing to do with it but of course it was a great joy to me.” Writing by day of a “Christ-haunted” character, she confronted one at dinner each night. He, in turn, liked the glamour of canonizing a new saint. As late as 1953, Caroline Gordon wrote to friends, “Cal Lowell says she is a saint, but then he is given to extravagance.”
Lowell was extremely tender, and full of elegy and exactitude, when he later wrote Elizabeth Bishop, on hearing of Flannery’s death. Their Yaddo autumn had been a sort of parenthesis in both their lives, as she worked on her novel, and he on his long narrative poem The Mills of the Kavanaughs:
It seems such a short time ago that I met her at Yaddo, 23 or 24, always in a blue jean suit, working on the last chapters of Wise Blood, suffering from undiagnosed pains, a face formless at times, then, very strong and young and right. She had already really mastered and found her themes and style, knew she wouldn’t marry, would be Southern, shocking and disciplined. In a blunt, disdainful yet somehow very unpretentious and modest way, I think she knew how good she was.
At the time, of course, his tone about her was far more gossipy, and bemused, as he shared news, usually with Robie Macauley, as if she were a little sister passed from the care of one brother to another: “She’s run through the local library, put out crumbs for birds, bought a sternostove — I think she’s planning a sort of half-hibernation to never leave a small dark cheerless room where she’ll subsist on vita-min B soup capsules, and Dr. E. Flanders Dunbars psycho-somatic summa. But we’ve learned her ping-pong.”
The library Flannery read her way through was an ugly brick building at Skidmore, the small liberal arts college housed mostly in antiquated Edwardian and Victorian buildings in downtown Saratoga Springs. Especially absorbing to her was the dark fiction of the eminent French Catholic novelist François Mauriac, which addressed the irreconcilability of sexual passion with the world of pure spirit. Wright complained that he heard so much about Mauriac at dinner that he finally gave in and made a painting titled The Desert of Love, after Mauriac’s novel about the romantic triangle of a father, his son, and a fatally attractive woman. Of Mauriac’s books, at least fifteen of which she came to own, Flannery was especially drawn to the novel Destines, published in English under the title Lines of Life, about a middle-aged widow infatuated with a troubled, dissolute young man. As she later wrote of the novel, to Betty Hester, “I read it about ten years ago in the Skidmore College Library and remember nothing about it but the last sentence, which in that translation was: ‘And (she) was again one of those corpses floating down the stream of life.’”
Flannery received from the lost, often amoral characters of this living Catholic novelist the same thrilling permission she received theologically from the Thomist definition of art, in Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, as a “habit of the practical intellect,” rather than a speculative or moral activity — the territory of theologians and saints. As Maritain concluded, “The