Until I Win the Lottery

Dear FO'CA,

I am enclosing my check for $50, and I wish I had a million to contribute. I am a 79-year-old widow (for 14 years), and I live on Social Security and a very small pension. But my gratitude and love for Flannery O'Connor know no bounds. It's funny, I had just said goodbye to a luncheon guest, Jeff Blake, who is also an avid O'Connor fan, when I found your request in my mail. We had shared our books and talked about O'Connor at great length.

He was fascinated with my photos of her, and the fact that I had visited her when I was a student at Wesleyan in Macon. He asked to copy them, and I was glad to let him do so. The photos were taken by Dr. Thomas Gossett who is mentioned in The Habit of Being along with his wife, Louise, and he sent them to me during the time that we corresponded after we had both left Wesleyan, up until the time of his death several years ago, of pancreatic cancer.

I first read O'Connor's story "Good Country People," while lying on a blanket out in my back yard in Decatur, the summer before I was to go off to Wesleyan. I believe it was in "Harper's Bazaar" magazine. I had been raised a Southern Baptist, and I was both fascinated and puzzled by this story. Was this author a man or a woman? Was he/she making fun of the South? Of religion? Later, I read A Good Man is Hard to Find and was delighted to understand a bit more about O'Connor. When I went to Wesleyan and learned that she lived a short distance away, I couldn't wait to go out there and meet her. And the opportunity to do so was provided by Dr. Gossett, and also another professor, Dr. Warren Gignilliat, who took his Writing Lab students out one day.

I remember having lunch at the Sanford house with O'Connor, her mother, and Katherine Anne Porter. I was paralyzed with awe, and I didn't open my mouth. But the talk around the table was very interesting.

Sorry to be so long-winded. The main point of my story is that through my reading and re-reading of O'Connor (I'm now re-reading Wise Blood for the umpteenth time), I wanted to become a Catholic, and I did, finally, going through the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) at Christ the King in Buckhead, and then transferring my membership to Sacred Heart in Atlanta, now the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, where I volunteer for Meals on Wheels, the Prison Ministry, Habitat for Humanity, and anything else that will have me.

And, the most important thing to me is that my husband, Francisco Fontsere, who was raised Catholic in Spain (Barcelona) and turned against the church during the Spanish Civil War, became interested in O'Connor because of my constant references to her, and he read her letters and then the stories, and he eventually returned to the Church with me, through RCIA. The ripple effect... O'Connor has had and continues to have such a profound effect on my life. My husband passed away in July of 2000. At the time, he was also a great fan of Teilhard (?) and the Spanish Christian mystic, Unamuno. I had written on his headstone a quote from Unamuno, "With reason, without reason, against reason, I believe."

Again, I wish I had a million dollars to contribute, but this will have to do until I win the lottery.

With love and gratitude,
Helen Poole Fontsere

Flannery O'Connor looking for a peacock feather to give Helen Fontsere (c. 1958-59).

Different Views

On family vacations, I was always the one who thought a hike in a nearby state or national park added an important dimension to the trip; my husband gamely agreed, while my two oldest children tromped resignedly alongside and my two youngest lagged decidedly behind, whining at evenly spaced intervals. So on this, my second visit to Andalusia, I was surprised yet excited to find that a walking trail had been cut through the grounds since my last visit, and I knew that was one thing I would not leave without experiencing. 

The path began at the bottom of the steep slope that would have been in the center of O’Connor’s vision from her vantage point of the front porch. It circled the pond and wound into the woods beyond, a short circle of less than a mile. Walking woods, for me, is not a social event; like Thoreau, I much prefer solitary walks, the quiet of the trees surrounding me, my steps, the scurrying of squirrels, and the mingled calls of birds high above the only sounds. When I walk, I stare, something O’Connor would have approved of, for in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” she writes, “[T]here’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it” (MM 77). My eyes rove as I walk, moving different directions than my feet, slipping up the scaled bark of a tree and squinting against the point of light caught in the upper branches. They rake the path in front of me, noticing the tuft of wildflowers at the base of a tree, the flick of a scrawny squirrel tail jutting from behind a rock. In the relative silence around me, what sounds there are resound more loudly. A thick hulled nut thuds from branches above to the leaf mulched path in front of me. I stoop to pick it up, an unfamiliar, slightly conical shape, unlike the hickory and walnut that litter my own woods back home in Indiana. A small metal plaque nearby tells me this is a pignut hickory, and judging from the number of hulls on the path, the woods of Andalusia are thick with them. I vaguely recall a reference to this tree in one of O’Connor’s stories—is it in “A View of the Woods”?—and when I return home I search for it, but cannot find it.

Wandering on that trail, turning that green, smooth ribbed seed in my hand, it occurs to me that O’Connor rarely details her fictional landscapes—hers is a wider view. The ubiquitous tree line in the distance, delineating scope for her characters; the omnipresent sun, rising and setting, God’s eye overlooking his stubborn people; the four oaks in the yard, massive and unyielding, that appear in more than one story, including the last novel she was working on. My own writing, by contrast, focuses on the minute, the often-missed specific thing: dew on a spider’s web, the varied tones rain has as it falls on different surfaces, the fluted underside of a mushroom shouldering up through forest humus.

And then I stop, pausing between slants of sunlight, another revelation. These thick Georgia woods, made accessible to me by paths chiseled through them, would more than likely have never been explored by O’Connor herself, though she lived surrounded by them for thirteen years. The crutches leaning against the dresser in her bedroom offer enough explanation for that. But even as a child, before treatment for lupus deteriorated her bones, on her trips here with cousins to ride horses or to have picnics on the lawn, O’Connor was not, as she put it, “sporty.” On my seventeen acres in Indiana, I jump stream beds, tramp ravines, climb over barbed wire fences, lie on my back on a mat of crisp fallen leaves facing the sky. When I rise, yellow maple stars are embedded in the weave of my sweater.

O’Connor would, I think, have surveyed these woods from her porch, the pond, these trees, cross hatched by the mesh of screen between her and them. Her gaze would have been deep and clear, focused by wise blood, true and unflinching. But her view of the woods would have been different from mine, her frame, her scope providing different angles than the ones I have here, trees, towering, trail turning.

At this spot on the path, the simmering July sun beats down. I lift my head and my face floods with light. In this shared Son our visions converge.

--Colleen Warren is a professor of English at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. Her book, Annie Dillard and the Word Made Flesh: An Incarnational Theory of Language, is published by Lehigh Press. She blogs at www.warrenpeaceofmymind.wordpress.com    

Our guest blogger was among 24 scholars attending "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor" a Summer Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at Georgia College in July 2014. For more information about the institute, please visit http://www.gcsu.edu/nehoconnor/index.htm 

 

"The path began at the bottom of the steep slope..."

A view of the woods from Andalusia's porch.

A Monumental Life

Fifty years ago this week, Flannery O’Connor died in Milledgeville, her mother Regina nearby, ever devoted. 

Flannery O’Connor’s life was marked by her sharp intelligence and broad humor, even from her early years in Savannah: scrawled, misspelled, scathing book reviews written on Charlton Street; tedious piano lessons with Sister Mary Joseph, who turned her hearing aid off when Flannery played; dry bathtub readings with unwilling childhood friends as audience.

As an adult, when Flannery wrote her Iowa Prayer Journal, she didn’t realize that Andalusia would be God’s answer to her wish for purity (and publication!). Andalusia gave Flannery precious, abundant material.

The woods, if anything, she wrote, are the Christ symbol. 

Flannery O’Connor’s years at Andalusia—bed to desk to window and beyond—marked a life larger than most of us can dream.

I was roped and tied and resigned the way it is necessary to be resigned to death, O’Connor wrote, trying to explain to Maryat Lee the experience of returning to the South. I thought it would be the end of any creation, any writing... And as I told you by the fence, it was only the beginning. 

In her final days, Flannery hid unfinished writing beneath her hospital pillow.

 

In her final days, Flannery and Regina prayed. Together or separate—we’ll never know.

This August 3^rd, let’s not think of the life lost too soon.  

Let’s celebrate Flannery O’Connor’s monumental life. 

-- Christine Flanagan 

Associate Professor of English at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia

Our guest blogger was among 24 scholars attending "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor" a Summer Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at Georgia College in July 2014. For more information about the institute, please visit http://www.gcsu.edu/nehoconnor/index.htm 

 

Flannery O’Connor and the Little Flower

On my most recent visit to Andalusia I noticed for the first time a small image of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), the “Little Flower,” hanging next to a doorway in the back of the house. As is typical, the saint is portrayed in her Carmelite habit holding two items. The first is a crucifix, which indicates her intimacy with Christ’s suffering through her own struggle with tuberculosis. This ended in her death when she was just twenty-four. The second is a bouquet of roses, which refers to the saint’s promise to provide a shower of roses—miracles, favors—from heaven. Such miracles began to be reported even before Thérèse was buried.

Given her own serious health struggles, Flannery O’Connor surely identified with this suffering saint whose spirituality Thérèse called the “little way.” St. Thérèse believed that everyone is able to grow in the spiritual life by focusing on God’s transforming love. Her famous image for this spiritual program is an elevator to God that allows the believer to avoid an arduous climb up the steep stairs to heaven. This simple plan belies the saint’s subtle intellect, another trait that she shared with O’Connor. Thérèse’s theological incisiveness is evident in her letters and especially her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, published posthumously. She was named a Doctor or official theologian of the Catholic Church by Pope John Paul II in 1997.

Curious about the life of Thérèse O’Connor read Etienne Robo’s biography Two Portraits of St. Therese of Lisieux (1955) and found a kindred spirit in its pages. The book describes the sanctity of Thérèse but also explores her character defects. It is notable that O’Connor marked a passage in the book that describes the airbrushing of photos of the saint by members of her religious community shortly after her death. These ostensibly improved images became the basis for portraits, icons, and statues. Robo argues that a similar airbrushing of Thérèse’s life often downplayed her “strong and inflexible, strict and stern” side.

O’Connor recorded her reaction to this book in a letter that she wrote to her spiritual director, Fr. McCown: “I have just read a very funny book by a priest named Fr. Robo—on St. Theresa of Lisieux…. He has managed (by some not entirely crooked means) to get hold of a photograph of her that the Carmelites have not ‘touched up’ which shows her to be a round-faced, determined, rather comical-looking girl. He does away with all the roses, little flowers, and other icing. The book has greatly increased my devotion to her.”

Robo’s biography suggests that in heaven Thérèse might have smiled at the prettiness her fellow nuns inflicted upon her in the touched-up images because for them “her real face was not presentable.” This prettified version of the saint is the one familiar to the vast majority of Catholics throughout the world. O’Connor must have been amused by Robo’s insight, especially when she realized that the image of Thérèse at Andalusia was based on an airbrushed version of the real woman.

Indeed O’Connor herself might smile now at the attempts of many admirers to prettify and even sanctify her, to forget, for example, her biting wit, which regularly features in letters to many friends. What O’Connor discovered in her reading about Thérèse was not only the sanctity of the French nun and the significance of her theological vision, but also her humanness—flaws, shortcomings, blemishes and all.

--(Fr.) George Piggford, C.S.C.

Associate Professor of English, Stonehill College, Easton, MA 

Our guest blogger was among 24 scholars attending "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor" a Summer Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at Georgia College in July 2014. For more information about the institute, please visit http://www.gcsu.edu/nehoconnor/index.htm