The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [4]
On a trip south in 1959 I stopped at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to see Merton, before going to see Flannery in Georgia.
He gave me a presentation copy of the beautifully designed private edition of Prometheus: A Meditation to take to her. He was much interested in Flannery’s peacocks. From previous visits to “Andalusia” I was able to tell him about their habits—how they roost at dusk by gradual hops from ground to fence post to tree limb; how their trains get caught under car wheels because they refuse to hurry; how vain they are (they seemed to jockey for good angles when they saw my camera); how funny it is to see peachicks rehearsing with their immature featherduster tails; and how rare it is to see the ultimate display, when the peacock shimmers and shakes his feathers in a kind of ecstasy at the height of preening I could not tell Merton enough about them or about Flannery and her surroundings. What was Milledgeville like? Well, one of its sights was the beautiful ante-bellum Cline house, where Flannery’s aunt served a formal midday dinner. He was surprised to learn that far from being “backwoods” Milledgeville had once been the capital of Georgia. I also showed him a letter in which Flannery wrote: “Somebody sent me a gossip column that said Gene Kelly would make his TV debut in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘backwoods love story’ [The Life You Save May Be Your Own]. I certainly can’t afford to miss this metamorphosis.”
When I got to the O’Connors’, Flannery was curious to hear about Gethsemani. Was Merton allowed to talk to me? Yes, without restriction. I described our walks in the woods and the monastic routine of the day: first office (Matins) at two a. m. and last office (Compline) at sunset, followed by bed. I mentioned that in Louisville I’d bought Edith Sitwell’s recording of Facade, which Merton played over and over, laughing so hard that tears ran down his cheeks, and Flannery asked me to recite some of the poems. Even my pallid approximation of Dame Edith’s renderings of “Daisy and Lily, lazy and silly”,“Long Steel Grass” (pronounced “Grawss”), “Black Mrs. Behemoth” and the rest made her face light up with smiles.
When Flannery died, Merton was not exaggerating his estimate of her worth when he said he would not compare her with such good writers as Hemingway, Porter and Sartre but rather with “someone like Sophocles… I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.”
Up to the very end, she worked hard. She was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge during her final illness. “I have been thinking about this collection of my stories and what can be done to get it out with me sick,” she wrote Miss McKee on May 7, 1964.
“I am definitely out of commission for the summer and maybe longer with this lupus. I have to stay mostly in bed… If I were well there is a lot of rewriting and polishing I could do, but in my present state of health [the stories] are essentially all right the way they are.” This is a typical O’Connor understatement; some of these last stories, like “Revelation” and the title story, are as nearly perfect as stories can be. In the same letter she proposed eight stories for the book, one of which, “The Partridge Festival,” she later withdrew.
All eight had appeared in magazines. Later in May she wrote, “I forgot to tell Bob Giroux that the title Everything That Rises Must Converge is all right with me if he thinks that is what it ought to be.” It seemed absolutely right and (though she never said so) may have dated from a few years earlier when I sent her a French anthology of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, one section of which was entitled Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge. I was unaware of the two unpublished stories she was working on.
The first of these new stories was “Parker’s Back.” Caroline Gordon