13 June 54
Dear Erik,
Well your aunt for some reason sent me two copies of The Third Hour so I reckon I got my money's worth, having read you in EACH copy. Of course I think you are better than W. H. Auden and Bishop John of San Francisco combinded, but then I'm not exactly your objective critic any longer. I do observe about some of the aphorisms and about some of your other pronouncements too that they are no more than the platitudes of the saints, dressed up to look a little less pious. I'm not accusing you of sanctity but of a High Comical Ignorance and you better hope you escape my prayers or you will find yourself firmly plugged in—to the circuit of charity. I really don't pray for you to see the light but for you to recognize some of the light you already see; which is very profound of me, I think.
We have sailed through the Steven's wedding. It was a ghastly sweet affair with bridesmaids in six flavors, children with dripping candles, weepy mothers, and a cadaverous preacher in white pants, blue coat, & a yellow & black striped tie. When it was over Mr. Stevens said, "It's just like she was daid," referring to the bride.
My mother has just attended a dairy festival in Eatonton. The governor attended and Miss America. All the cows were in rope stalls around the Courthouse and Miss America, very sunburned, my mother said and in a whit strapless evening dress (11 A. M.) had to pick her way among them and admire each one while she kept the tail of the dress out of the little piles of manure. She also had to kiss a calf. Universal suffering.
Incidentally, my mother has survived a reading of your aphorisms. I handed her a copy and said, "Here if you want to read Mr Langkjaer," and she sat right down to it. After a while she said, "What did you say you called those things?" and I told her. Then after a while longer, she said, "What are those things suppose to do? Make you think?" and after a while still she said, "You mean you paid TWO DOLLARS for that book?" Still, she speaks of you very fondly and has learned to make some kind of bread that she says is Danish.
I reckon your mother sent you the Maritain issue of the Commonweal. I thought Fr. de Menasce's piece was nice. That is somebody you ought to meet.
I haven't seen any dirt roads since you left & I miss you.
Regards,
Flannery
*
Milledgeville
18 July 54
Dear Erik,
You will probably think I am enclosing my whole trashcan but this is all more or less edifying literature and if you don't like it you can amuse yourself speculating on my low motives for sending each item¬—these go from Vulgar Proselytism DOWNWARDS. You've probably seen the review from the Commonweal but I couldn't resist it. I think the Irish should continue to comment extensively on the Scandanavians, for the benefit of the Scandanavians [sic].
Thank you for the post card. I put it in the Bible naturally. I'm glad to have savedyou from Billy. He's back in Ashville, having his kidneys repaired for the next crusade.
Everything here is busy electing the Governor. There are 9 candidates and the ones I have heard over the radio all sound like hound dogs that have learned to declaim. They are all but one running on keep-segregation platforms and everything is geared to the boys who sit in front of the wooden stores and tell you not to run into a street car down there. (On acct. of the rotten borough system their vote is worth three or four of a city vote.) Anyway, I have my own plan to keep segregation though I'm not running for Governor. I want all the colored children of school age shipped to Denmark where there is no negro problem. They can all go to that Hufffinpppuffin??? Boarding School. I have my own ideas about why the Danes have no problems.
My latest communication from the Lunatic Fringe has come from Eureka, Calif. from a young man who is starting a new literary magazine to be called "HEARSE: a magazine to convey the dead. It will appear three times a year and convey stories, poems, reviews, and art-work to the great Cemetery of the American Intellect." He's going to have a section, however, called "The Quick," for which he requested I write a comment on why I writer. I have just written him that I would hesitate to assume myself quick if everybody else is dead. Anyway, I ain't that depressed about the American Intellect.
We are being visited by all the out-lying relatives at this season and having just endured three weeks of my aunt Agnes, we now face 10 days of my Uncle Frank & his Spouse. They are a devoted couple, each weighing ten stone, who spend the entire 10 days discussing their neighbors in Louisianna whom we have never seen. (Thank God.) My aunt A. is an admirer of Senator McC., for says she, "You people don't look at television so you don't know what's going on in the world." She then tells you.
I have a month old peachicken hatched in the incubator so my cup of joy is running over. & I trust yours is the same for some equally sufficient reason.
Yrs tr.
Flannery
*
Milledgeville
20 August '54
Dear Erik,
The enclosed clipping is a highly romanticized account. Actually the fox was only on the limb with the peafowl. Shot knocked him out and hit him with a plank and Mr. Stevens promptly took the victim to town and had their picture taken together at the newspaper office. Here the newspaper will take your picture with anything four-legged, dead or alive. The point is that news around here is so scarce that such as this is in the paper.
I got your letter and I like so much hearing from you! My mother informs me that you write like an old man. This refers to your penmanship as viewed from the envelope and from the cards which she finds un-intelligible even after several scrutinizings on the way home from the post office.
I've never heard of any of those Germans you sent me the names of except Rilke and Mann but when the library opens again I'll investigate. Right now I am reading the four essays of Heidegger that have been translated. This is very hightoned reading, only not the way I read it. In fact, all I've got out of it so far is an interest in Hölderlin. Do you know anything about Hölderlin? He's done died, of course, but the few poems I've read sound as if they might have been written in the 20th century instead of at the end to the 18th.
I don't doubt you are full of ideas and though I shudder to think of what some of them may be, I hope if you put them on paper, you will put them in some language I am familiar with (English, French, or Peafowl) as I think it would be a high loss for you not to have me for a reader—considering my marked powers of logic and so forth. Everything you are seeing and doing sounds so very rich and strange to me! I would probably see it all upsidedown if I were there and would probably not have been half so moved as you by the Mass you watched in the Benedictine monastery [sic]. How blasé Catholics can get about the Church is the worst thing about Catholics. I see you are still concerned about "avail." The Kiss of Peace is a symbol of avail that already is: charity—I remember you once said Dorothy Day's soup was of no avail either.
I have just got a noisily desperate letter from that girl that corresponds with me in New York. She has moved to the village in order to writer her wild novel (in collaboration with another girl, if you please) but is unable to write a thing on acct. of having just read everything of Sartre's & Mdm. de Beauvoir's and being consequently drained out. In contrast to hers, a letter came from the Boston lady who thinks I ought to stick to chickens. She says her husband recently ran for public office and was defeated but they don't feel a bit bad about it because of all the "contacts" he made.
We are about to be visited now by my lady lawyer cousin from Boston, a very talkative girl who thinks anybody who didn't go to Harvard is underprivileged. She will be followed by my 86 year old cousin and her two companions, 82 & 76, all grimly gleeful about having survived to these years.
If your unstable energies will support you, write about Denmark and what you are doing, for I exercise concern.
Yrs,
Flannery
*
Milledgeville
17 October 54
Dear dear Erik,
I think your going to Cophenhagen to study Shakespeare & Keats & American writers after 1920 is the unholiest preoccupation I have ever heard of and certainly better than anything I could think up. You are wonderful and wildly original and I would probably think you even more so if I didn't still hope you will come back from that awful place. The reason I know it's awful is because my friend Miss Fergusson felt so morally at home there—she has the moral imagination of a banana. Anyway, I am sure the Danes are as dull as your mother said they were or they wouldn't be so advanced.
Around here nothing is advancing except an assortment of grisly possibilities. We naturally elected the fiercest candidate governor & it's his intention to preserve segregation if he has to be crucified on a stalk of sugarcane to do it. The plan is to give the state legislature the power to junk the public school system and then give every child—black and white, sir—the money to attend a private school of his own choice!!!! We will foil those nine rascals on the supreme court yet. I think I will start a private school for Negroes Only, the main subjects to be Latin & Greek, but as I know neither, the project is going to requi[re] closer study by me. I can offer you a job as head master for $10 a month and all the milk you can drink.
Nearer at hand we are being done in by foxes. They have gone rabid in this area and three of my mother's cows have been bitten and passed away unquietly of hydrophobia. Consequently Mr. Stevens and Mr. Matisiak have had to have tetnus shots. This didn't please Mr. Stevens any but Mr. Matisiak had a wonderful time going to the hospital every day where he would growl and make faces at the nurses as if he were going mad. My mother is afraid for me to stick my head out the door for fear I will be bitted by a fox but if I meet one I am going to follow your grandmother's line of action and bite him first.
My 86 year old cousin didn't come after all because she fell from her chair and broke off the end of her front tooth and vanity prevented. 86 years doing nothing for it, I guess the 7th shovelful of dirt will take care of that too. She is going to come when the tooth is repaired. She just sent me a book the other day called "Beauty in the Heart," by Archibald Rutledge, poet laureate of Nawth Carolina—which I declined to read but which my mother read and said was "lovely." When my mother says a book is lovely I know I've done well to give it a wide berth.
She has brought my piano out from town and I am taking music lessons but I don't make any progress. I see I don't actually believe in music and also that the piano is too delicate an instrument for my kind of character—I ought to be beating on buckets filled with water.
Did I tell you I call my baby peachicken Brother in public and Erik in private? But he doesn't know the difference & is only interested in eating.
Yours,
Flannery
*
Philosophic. 1) Everyone [illegible]
2) Displaced [illegible] as others are [illegible] mentally and physically displaced: we must do something that will please God. I decided I must compromise.
April 1, 1955
Milledgeville
1/4/55
I told my mother about what you might possibly do this summer and gave her the Catholic Worker to read about the Abbe Pierre. She never looks the CW unless requested to and then she holds it at a certain distance as if she doesn't like the way it smells. I think it's on acct. of the black and white figures at the top with the shovels. Anyway when she finished reading it, she put her finger as usual on the heart of the matter. "Well that's fine," she said, "but do you think Erik will like being a ragpicker?" My own opinion is that you somehow have to be a ragpicker no matter what you do, I mean you have to be "engaged" even if you're in an iron lung. Doing it actually is like the business of being shot by an Arab—everybody can't have it. I have about decided that everybody must be a displaced person too, even if he has a place to be. You wonder how anybody can be happy in his home as long as there is one person without one. I never thought of this so much until I began to know you and your situation and I will never quite have a home again on acct. of it.
I have just got back from Greensboro where I said all the wrong things on the panel and made up my mind if I ever have to teach anything, it won't be writing. If I am forced to live off my own efforts I am going to have to be a dishwasher. I met Peter Taylor there and he is just as nice as his stories. I suspect even nicer. I had 20 min. conferences with 5 students, who each appear with ms. which I was supposed to read & criticize while they are sat there waiting watching breathing swallowing sniffing, etc. After the first one I made them read the stuff to me but neither way was desirable. Fortunately the stories were so bad that any criticism would have been applicable.
Last month I went to Atlanta for a breakfast put on by the Penwomen. They had 8 Ga. "Writers" that they were going to introduce to the club—3 newspaper reporters, two Women of the Year, a man from Coca Cola Company who wrote a history of Atlanta, an old lady who compiled a book on parliamentary etiquette, a boy named Hyman who wrote a best-seller, and me. Such a gastly affair you never imagined. Next month I am to go to another one in Macon. The truth must be that my lower nature craves low recognition. Two ladies came over to invite me to the one in Macon. They had never read a line I had written but such enthusiasm you never heard.
My mother & I had to go visit my 86 yr old cousin last week. She & her companion are abrest of all the latest tragedies and it is one long recitation of house fires, divorces, bankruptcies, cancers, automobile accidents, unbearable marriages, crippled children, uppity negroes, war, death, destruction, and the hydrogen bomb and how they get it all I don't know as the companion can't walk farther than a few blocks and my cousin does well to get to the bathroom. While we were there she got stuck in her elevator and the fire department had to be called. A truck as long as the block & 6 fireman & a policeman arrived instantly and got her out.
Write me because I want so much to hear.
Flannery
I feel like if you were here we could talk about a million years without stopping.
*
23 May 55
Milledgeville
Dear Erik,
When I told my mother this time what you were now going to do, she said, "I told you that boy wouldn't enjoy being a ragpicker." Moral: you can't get ahead of mother. In any case you know you have my best wishes, affection and prayers in this new venture and I hope it will be the beginning for you of always finding what you want. As for the Abbe, I presume he prefers those with a criminal background and that he is not out a very energetic hand for the summer anyway. We are glad that you plan to return South and we want you to let us help you make your wife at home in this part of the country. Consider us your people here because that is what we consider ourselves.
My own course these days is not so edifying as yours. I am on my way to New York on the 30th for a television interview with Harvey Breit; also the opening section of The Life You Save is going to be dramatized on this same program and as no New Yorker has any insight into what comes out of the South, I know it will be a mess—actors without shoes, New Jersey hillbilly voices, etc. etc. And then I have a mental picture of my glacial glare being sent out over the nation onto millions of children who are impatiently waiting for The Batman to come on. I am fast getting a reputation out of all proportion to my desire for one and this largely because I am now competing with The Lone Ranger. Everybody here shakes my hand but nobody reads my stories. Which is just as well. After New York I am going to do some visiting in Connecticut and Boston and then go to Nashville. In August I am invited to Princeton but it is doubtful there will be enough of me left to get there.
The State of Georgia recently banned two text books for sale in the schools here, one that said Negroes learned as fast as white folks and another, a song book, that changed the word "darkies" to the word "brothers," in one of Stephen Forster's songs. With the latter I am wholly in sympathy (with the banning that is) as I am afraid the next thing to go will be "Ol Black Joe." "Old Neutral-colored Joe." It is good you will have an opportunity to further observe the Southern character. I have been hearing a good deal about some aspects of it lately from my Kentucky friend who now lives in Tenn. He was telling me that the Gov. of Tenn., who is a great pal of Billy Ghrame's and thinks that he has been called by God to be Governor, recently appointed his own daddy to be head of the Tenn. Supreme Court and when critisized for this, replied, "We all like to honor our parents but few, like myself, are in a position to do so." Billy recently had a crusade in New Orleans and the Gov. hired a train of hymn-singing politicians and travelled down to cash in on the crowd.
Your reflections on the Church are painful, as usual. The merit of the Church doesn't lie in what she does but what she is. The day is going to come when the Church is so hemmed in & nailed down that she won't be doing anything but being, which will be enough.
All the best and don't neglect to let us know what you are doing etc.
Flannery
*
1/9/55
Dear Erik,
I was glad to hear you are still in one piece though a moody one and hadn't frozen. I have a mental picture of you as an icycle riding a bycycle (spelling????) The image is much more fragile than I remember you as being and will probably melt in the summer.
I thank you for the criticism but of course if you were within my view, I wouldn't let you get away with an inch of it. I am very much at fault in that story for not making you see that Mrs. Shortley had a stroke and died in the car: it is supposed to be her dead eyes that seem to contemplate her true country—which is death. Anyway, I am going to try to fix it up on the proofs some way or other (book due to appear in May) This makes the ending a metaphor not a moral; and if you don't believe me you had better accept it on faith. But you are in total darkness about chickenfeed sacks. Here chicken feed comes in flowered print sacks so farm women can makes dresses out of them—but enough of such. You'll be further horrified to learn that I have added two more parts to the story, displacing some others, and that it is now about 60 pages long and has a peacock in it.
We got through our holidays handily. Christmas morning the Eatonton Hwy. toward town was lined with colored children in black and silver cowboy suits and ten-gallon hats, all armed. My mother noted the number of new bicycles & washing machines but the biggest display was up the road from us where some colored people named Brown got a television set. They live in two rooms and draw all their water from a spring a half a mile over on our place. The arial is twice as high as the shack and attached to the four corners in such a way that it seems to be lifting the roof off.
In March I am invited to go to Greenboro to the Women's College to be on a panel. I haven't the foggiest notion whatI'll do on a panel except look glum. Anyway I am going in order to have the illusion that I am out in the world and over eleven but if called on to say anything I'll probably sound like the delegate from the Okeefenokee Swamp. My mother is only afraid I'll look like that. ("Nobody would know—to look at you—that you come from nice people!")
I must tell you that the other night Shot came over to borrow some money before he went to visit some of his city connections. He had on an ex-suit of my cousin's husband's, a hat three sizes too big that he had got from somewhere, and a tie that I recognized as probably having been selected by your mother at Best's with an eye to your pale skin. Anyway, he looked exactly like himself.
The enclosed might inspire you to write another article if it doesn't first make you too sick. They are funny but they sound the depth of present day Christian misery, these children, I mean. Perhaps since you arn't a Christian you can escape the misery but I doubt that you do. However you can't write truthfully about even the tent meeting without it. I think of you as the blind man that Christ touched once and asked what he saw. The man said he saw men as if they were trees, but walking. Then Christ touched him again and he saw things as they were.
My prayers for you are that you be touched again. It's not that I'm anxious to see the Church increased by one, but you increased by the Church. I see you reflecting that prayers are on of the more obnoxious acts of love.
I mean always to ask for your mother.
Regards,
Flannery
P.S. An old lady here has just published a book of verse entitled SILVER MISTS AND WISPS OF SMOKE (Playtime Press, Dallas). Presumably if you can say the title, you'll admire the poetry.
*
Write me an unintelligible postcard please so I will have an excuse to write you a letter. My mother don't think it is proper for me to send mail when I don't receive it. Was J. H. McCallym one of your glorious superiors at H.B? I had a formal letter from him saying he was now in the Trade Dept after being in the College Dept since 1937. I guess he wants everybody to know.
Flannery
*
Milledgeville
10 February 56
Dear Erik,
Enclosure and delayed new year's greetings to you and your wife. I am a little behind on everything these days as I started about five months ago walking on crutches and this has decreased my tempo considerably. My mother sends her regards—her tempo ain't decreased any at all.
I recently had a note from Mr. Jovonovitch who informed me you were still working for them, which answered the question what you might be doing in La Porte. I recall passing along the back of La Porte in the train one my way to Iowa—the evil being sufficient for the day thereof.
I also recently had a notice that there would soon be another Third House and that if I sent my money before such and such a date it would only be 1. 75. I mean to take advantage of the bargain.
All the best wishes to you both and if you get South, don't fail to bring your wife to see us.
Regards,
Flannery
*
Milledgeville
29 April 56
Dear Erik,
I am highly taken with the thought of your seeing yourself as the Bible salesman. Dear boy, remove this delusion from your head at once. And if you think the story is also my spiritual autobiography, remove that one too. As a matter of fact, I wrote that one not too long after your departure and wanted to send you a copy but decided that the better part of tact would be to desist. Your contribution to it was largely in the matter of properties. Never let it be said that I don't make the most of experience and information, no matter how meager. But as to the main pattern of that story, it is one of deceit which is something I certainly never connect with you. In my modest way, I think it's a wonderful story. I read it over and over and nobody enjoys it as much as I do—which is more or less the case with all my productions.
Thanks for the article about the A-rab. I've read a good many of the Existentialists by now but it's all a trip in a glass-bottom boat to me. Total non-retention. Since we neither one of us are liable to ever get shot by an Arab, I guess the next best thing is to practice good works.
My health is fine except that from now on it's crutches for me. This has a certain nuisance value but as I am not a sporty type, it doesn't interfere too much. I do object to the moist looks I get from old ladies in elevators. The last time I got on an elevator in Atlanta, one sidled up to me and yelled in my ear, "Remember what they said to John at the gate, dear!" I find out that what they said to John at the gate was: "The lame shall enter first." I don't doubt it a bit—they'll knock everybody else down with their crutches and rush in.
I have just got back from a week in Lansing, Michigan where I gave one of my talks. I am a kind of third-rate celebrity, a little below Miss Watermelon of 1950 and slightly above the Lone Ranger's horse. Lansing is where Michigan State University is. There you can get a degree in Hotel Management. They all asked me about segregation and I said, "What's that?"
Best wishes to your wife, your mother, your grandmother, and to Mr. Jovonovitch. Did you know he used to be an Anglican acolyte?
Flannery
*
Milledgeville
Georgia
12 August 56
Dear Erik,
All kinds of congratulations on your state of parenthood. I hope you'll be able to hold your own against the younger generation. My advise is gain about forty pounds so your mere presence will scare hell out of him and you won't have to resort to any violent means. Someday I am going to set myself up with a newspaper column telling parents how to keep the upper hand. My qualifications will be that I live only two miles form the reformatory.
Civilization is encroaching on us around here: we now have a telephone. My mama sits in the back hall and speaks with seed & feed man, mechanic, engeneer and veterinarian. She is in good form and sends you and your wife all the proper messages only I forget what I they are.
About the business of praying as if there were Someone, I can't see it as other than sentimental. I have been reading some articles by yr friend Fr. Lynch on Theology and the Imagination which have been helpful to me and also I have been reading the essays and addresses of Baron von Hugel. Do you know this man, died about 1925? He was one of those caught in the modernist controversy about the first of the century but weathered that storm. Anyway, I have found him most congenial and daresay you should investigate him before you resign yourself to any permanent state of flabbiness.
I enclose my latest concrete sermon for your edification.
Best to you three.
Flannery
*
Milledgeville
31 July 57
Dear Erik,
Congratulations on the new job and this move which I reckon is one to greener pastures, though that doesn't exactly seem to be the right image for Scarsdale. I was in Indiana myself last April at Notre Dame where I gave a lecture and I didn't think it was too bad; but I suppose Notre Dame would be less dreary than La Porte. I can lecture at Catholic Colleges on the Catholic Aspect of Southern Degeneracy and at Southern colleges on the Southern Aspect of Catholic Degeneracy, so having two subjects I am mildly in demand.
I have not seen you yet in the CW but I will be looking out. I hope you have not developed the Peter Maurin style. Miss Dorothy Day was recently in Georgia at an interracial colony we have in Americus, run by some Baptists, which get's itself bombed every few weeks by the local citizenry. If you cannot afford to be shot by an Arab, we can offer you this less glamourous martyrdom for practically no inconvenience except getting down here and standing the heat, and of course waiting around in the interracial colony until the right local citizen decides to shoot you. She was shot at but escaped; for which I am very glad.
We recently had a visitor who knew Helene Iswolsky—a Fr. Tavard, a French priest who wrote a book called The Catholic Approach to Protestantism. He had had a piece in her magazine recently in which I gather some sentences had appeared upsidedown and some not at all. He bore it with Christian fortitude. Should you run into him in New York you would find him very interesting. I think he is temporarily at that Spanish church on West 14th.
We have no white help on this place now, either foreign or local. Everything is noblesse obleeege [sic]. The customary distinctions between black and white are observed, and peach reigns supreem [sic]. Our D. P.s went to another dairy and Hungarians appear very hard to come by. Anyhow we no longer want any.
I hope you'll like Scriber's better than HB and that your family is all well and on the increase.
Best ever,
Flannery
*
Millegeville
26 February 58
Dear Erik,
Congratulations on the daughter and the piece in the Catholic Worker. I think the daughter is the greater accomplishment. To really hit the Catholic Worker style you have to write either from 1) jail or 2) the lunatic asylum. If you could managed to go bezerk for a few days and run down Madison Avenue with your shirt tail out and get sent to Bellvue, you would have it made. Editor in Psycho. They'd love it.
As for the unilateral disarmament business, it is beyond my mental powers to contemplate such things. You put it in the form of a letter and make it brother to brother, but in reality it is not brother and brother but one inhuman mass against another. I used to have a misty minded teacher who would say such things as "What man's mind can create, man's mind can control." One mind can create but one mind cannot control. I reckon what you say is true but I would like to see it written in cold blood, to the inhuman mass and not to Ivan with your love. Keep on loving Ivan but it's not he with whom you have to deal.
The doctor says I can't do all that going that it would take for a pilgrimage so my mother and I think we will go to Milan for a week, or rather Levanto, where I have friends and then join the tour at Lourdes and go on with it to Rome and home. I am not in the least enthusiastic about going anywhere. In May I'm going to the University of Missouri for a few days and talk and see them prairies or whatever they have out there.
I take it Jack Reen has your old territory as I had a card from him from Decatur, Illinois. He wasn't liking it.
Well cheers to you and your family and my best,
Flannery
