Angst & the City
The Education of Flannery O’Connor

7,513 words

Katheryn Krotzer Laborde
Flannery O’Connor’s Manhattan
(Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series)
New York: Fordham University Press, 2024

I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.
–Flannery O’Connor[1]

***

Constant Readers will recall my recent exploration around H. P. Lovecraft’s traumatic but rewarding two years in New York City. This tour was guided by a recent book, David J. Goodwin’s Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft In Gotham, published, appropriately enough, by Fordham University Press (Fordham, for those not in the know, being — mostly — in the Bronx).

Fordham seems to have an interest in this kind of psychogeographical literature, as another such work has come strolling into view, Flannery O’Connor’s Manhattan, by Katheryn Laborde.[2] This one, however, may be more related to Fordham already having a book series devoted to O’Connor and other Catholic authors.[3]

The two authors have somewhat different agendas as well. While Goodwin delved into the by now massive body of biographies, monographs, and above all, correspondence that comprise the body of Lovecraftiana to provide an almost minute-by-minute account of Lovecraft’s two years in New York City, Laborde — though no doubt just as well versed in the parallel materials that have accumulated around O’Connor[4] — uses her scholarship to unlock the information in five small address books O’Connor used during her four brief residencies in Gotham.

As Laborde tells the story, one day, back in 2016, she was in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (whew!) at Emery University, intent on examining the recently acquired letters written by Mary Flannery O’Connor to her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, whilst she (the former, of course) was attending the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and becoming the writer known to us as Flannery O’Connor. Unable to stand another letter detailing how much Mary Flannery loved her mother’s homemade mayonnaise, she randomly requested the first box in the archive, which turned out to contain five personal address books in various sizes and colors.

Fortunately for us, Laborde had the imagination to grasp what a find this was, her typographical layout conveying the intensifying stages of her realization:

Considered together, they provided a telescope’s view into O’Connor’s universe, within which a galaxy of worlds existed. There was the ever-changing world of friends and the ever-growing world of acquaintances. There were the shadowing spheres of family and family and of friends of family.

There were nuns, priests, and monks. College professors. Physicians.

Agents. Editors.

Writers.

What Laborde grokked here was that the address books provided not just names but the interconnections of all the people and institutions that made up O’Connor’s world, given physical form and thus accessible decades later.

And this likely would not be possible today, thanks to what we might call the “Two D’s”: digitalization and decluttering.

Many people now keep track of addresses and phone numbers on their smartphones and computers rather than in paper books. We still update contacts, but the old information disappears unless we make an effort to keep the outdated listings. With this change of method, we indeed have lost those confusing messes of cross-outs, arrows, and lines, but, in truth, we have lost far more. We have lost access to possible portals to times past: our own and those of others, be they relatives, friends, or public figures. Fortunately, O’Connor did not live in a time of digital record-keeping. [5]

To take the what-if a little further, in our age of encouraging the decluttering of every shelf, drawer, and closet, I can’t help but be grateful that these books were not tossed out as trash. Because they were not, the account of O’Connor’s life is all the more complete for them. These simple, utilitarian, and messy books offer illumination in so many ways, but particularly as they toss light on previously unexplored avenues of her life, such as the Southern midcentury writer’s time in, and connections to, New York City.

At the risk of adding some clutter of my own, I must record a bit of synchronicity: while reading Labordes’ book I was also examining a very different book, and came across this bit that seems to provide a somewhat fancier way to make the same point about a somewhat larger universe:

So how are we to reconcile the empirical fact that nature has structure with the emerging Western understanding that spacetime is not fundamental? How are we to think of the irreducible foundations of nature as both lacking extension and having structure? I submit that this is the least recognized and discussed dilemma of modern science; and one that Analytic Idealism resolves.

To understand the solution, we must start with an admission: ‘physical’ objects and events[6] do indeed inherently require spatiotemporal extension to be differentiated; Schopenhauer was right about the principium individuationis. But we know of one other type of natural entity whose intrinsic structure does not require extension.

Consider, for instance, a hypothetical database of student records. Each record contains the respective student’s intellectual aptitudes and dispositions, so the school can develop an effective educational workplan. The records are linked to one another so to facilitate the formation of classes: students with similar or compatible aptitudes and dispositions are associated together in the database. Starting from a given aptitude, a teacher can thus browse the database for compatible students.

Now, notice that these associations between records are fundamentally semantic: they represent links of meaning. Associated records mean similar or compatible aptitudes, which in turn mean something about how students naturally cluster together. Therein lies the usefulness of the database. Even though the latter may have a spatiotemporal embodiment—say, paper files sorted by box in an archive—there is a sense in which their structure fundamentally resides in their meaning. Spatiotemporal embodiments merely copy or reflect such meaning. After all, the semantic relationships between my intellectual aptitudes and those of others wouldn’t disappear just because our respective paper files went up in flames.

I submit that this is how we must think of the most foundational level of nature, the universe behind extension: as a database of natural semantic associations, spontaneous links of meaning, cognitive associations…. The associations can indeed be projected onto spacetime—just as databases can have ‘physical’ embodiments—but, in and of themselves, they do not require spacetime to be said to exist. This is how nature can have structure without extension. [7]

If I were to continue torturing this analogy, I would say that in what follows, Laborde begins by giving us a quick, bird’s eye view of O’Connor’s NYC residencies, and then avails herself of the address book data to discern the deep structure of semantic connections holding together the O’Connor universe.[8]

She kicks things off with a brief imaginary bus tour of O’Connor’s New York haunts, which kind of reminded me of Kenny Kramer’s Seinfeld Reality Tour. Then, five short chapters, largely drawing on her correspondence, briefly outline her visits or residencies in the city.

I say visits or residencies because O’Connor’s first encounter with the concrete jungle of New York City predates her actual brief periods living there or even her stay at the Yaddo artist colony in 1948. It was in 1943 that the 18 year old O’Connor, about to become a junior at Georgia State College for Women, spent a summer on the road, which included a few weeks at the Montclair, New Jersey home of Grace Stone, the sister of a family acquaintance, Lydia Bancroft (B.A., M.A. Columbia); the two would “show O’Connor the sights of the city” (i.e., Gotham).

The destinations that her guides chose were indeed informative: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History (where O’Connor was drawn to the mounted ducks), and the Planetarium. In addition, there were visits to Radio City Music Hall, where O’Connor attended performances of the City Service Concert Orchestra and, on another occasion, of the Don Cossacks. Because her charge was a devoted Catholic, Bancroft made sure to include a visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral; O’Connor commemorated the event with the purchase of a postcard picturing the Our Lady of New York altar in the Lady Chapel, which she sent to Regina. This altar, consecrated the year before, was still relatively new when O’Connor viewed it. A Requiem Mass in O’Connor’s honor would be given in the Lady Chapel twenty-one years later, a few days after her death.

“Informative” indeed. The chapter is entitled “The Education of Mary Flannery O’Connor,” and Laborde jumps right into her agenda: “Travel is educational, down to the physical act itself.”[9] She reproduces a charming cartoon, drawn by O’Connor to illustrate for her mother the cramped conditions of her wartime travel,[10] but then immediately warns us:

O’Connor makes mention of public transportation being filled not only with soldiers but also with Jews and Blacks. In her solo train ride to Massachusetts, she was shocked at how a middle-aged White woman chatted amiably with a Black (and, one assumes, off-duty) porter who subsequently put his feet up and napped.

Yes, the trope here is the tiresome — and counterfactual — “racists just need to be educated by experience” or, in Ebonics, “Thass ignorant. You juss be ignorant.”[11] This will be a leitmotif.

Laborde then notes that when O’Connor writes to her mother about a visit to the Bronx Zoo, the only details she gives are about her visit later that day to a Chinatown restaurant.[12] Here again, The Other is an object of suspicion:

While the restaurant name may have seemed Western enough, one glance down iconic Pell Street would have told O’Connor otherwise, and when she entered the building, her nose twitched uncomfortably at the new and literally foreign aromas. Young O’Connor did not want to eat there, much less be there. She thought it fortunate that her cold (which she later determined was actually hay fever) spared her from having to actually taste the objectionable food (though, to be polite, she declared it superlative).[13] In the end, she says, the food did seem clean, an important detail to note as it points to the idea that there was more to her reluctance than squeamishness.

What “more” could that be? We get a little history lesson:

O’Connor was perhaps acting as many Americans of that time would, a time when a common name for soy sauce was bug juice. [14] O’Connor grew up at a time when people experienced the Yellow Peril, that existential dread suggesting that East Asian people were dangerous. At the time of O’Connor’s visit, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was still in place, though it would be repealed by December of that year; China was, after all, on the side of the Allies. By the war’s end (and only two years after O’Connor’s visit), Chinese cuisine would be more commonly accepted and enjoyed in this country.

Ah yes, the Yellow Peril, an angsty “existential dread” rather than, you know, well-founded concern over employment, drug cartels, or just, you know, merely preferring to live among one’s own kind. But fortunately, tasty MSG-ridden cuisine has enlightened us today.

It does seem to be true that New Yorkers have always loved to expose visitors to such exotic locales, where both the cuisine and environs could seem alien and threatening to a provincial.[15] Lovecraft writes about a similar expedition to both Chinatown and the Lower East Side some twenty years before O’Connor’s. [16]

But O’Connor’s guides had more on their minds than razzing a hayseed; as they wrote to Regina (as O’Connor always called her mother), they were “thus broadening her education.” (Raising, not razzing her). Bancroft and Sutton (another guide, with a suitably hoity-toity name) had taught in O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville and knew that it was … segregated! And so a deliberate plan of what we would call “consciousness raising” was implemented.

Of course, there’s the subways, with Sutton writing Regina that

[She] had “seen to it” that O’Connor had ridden through “the dirtiest subways and ‘L’s in New York, through all the dirty ugly sections,” adding that, as she saw it, O’Connor had never had “so much fun and so much pain at the same time in all her life.”

A veritable Coney Island roller coaster! Don’t be such a fraidy cat, Mary, you won’t risk being thrown on the tracks, punched in the head, or burned alive for several more decades!

What O’Connor herself found dirty and ugly was one thing in particular:

But in private correspondence to Regina, she expressed her extreme discomfort in Blacks and Whites sitting near one another on public transportation, adding that she was not ready to, or interested in, doing so herself. And she saw that this mixing was happening beyond the subways. While still in Montclair, she wrote to her mother about her visit that day to Columbia University—shocking because Black and White students sat together in the classrooms and, more disturbing, used the same restrooms.

And the simple act of dining out is once again forced into what we might call another “teachable moment:

In another letter, O’Connor commented that Bancroft deemed a trip to the automat as part of her “education” (again, that word), an outing that caused O’Connor’s ice cream to go down the wrong way when she saw a young Black woman, tray in hand, make her way to go sit with three White people.[17]

Laborde sums up O’Connor’s “truly limited … worldview” thus:

As offensive as some of her comments would be found today, they are typical of one who had never differently known, had never differently seen, had never been differently shown. She was genuinely shocked by what she saw, and what she saw was indeed educational.[18]

I’m struck by how Laborde supplements the “education” trope with the even more emphatic “seeing” motif, modulating through “seen,” “shown,” and “saw” — as will Sutton’s “seeing to it” earlier — related perhaps the notion that “racists” are merely offended by “the color of their skin” rather than the “content of their character,”[19] and reminding us that we are dealing with O’Connor’s “uneducated” reactions to what she saw among the “dirty and ugly sights” of the city; a bit later, her initial visits to New York are described in a way that ratchets up the visual trope and directly connects it to the educational one: “a time in her life when she was directly shown how others lived, perhaps for the first time. The education, conceivably, had paved the way to growth.”

As we know, “racism” is solely a function of not seeing enough of the Other and spending enough time in their company will bring enlightenment. That’s the ticket.

Anyway, in O’Connor’s case, it seems to have worked; Latrobe is able to report that two years later, now at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Connor could write to her mother about sharing a cafeteria table with a Black [sic] poet, one Gloria Bremmerwell, and even enjoyed her company. Regina was concerned about such interracial fraternizing, but “O’Connor firmly puts the older woman in her place and more or less tells her to mind her own business.”

Latrobe recalls that O’Connor had been amazed back at the Automat when interracial diners “didn’t seem to know the difference” and concludes proudly that now it’s O’Connor that “didn’t know the difference.” Which seems like an odd result of being “directly shown” and “educated,” is it not?

In the next chapter, we turn to another hot-button issue: from racism to anti-Communism; or, as Latrobe rather luridly calls it, “a cocktail of paranoia and fear known as the Red Scare.” O’Connor, you see, took up residence at the Yaddo Artists and Writers Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, in June of 1948, aiming to work on the book that would be known as Wise Blood, for which she had already received an advance of $750 from Rinehart.[20]

Although living “‘only’ 185 miles from the heart of New York” was more convenient than being in Milledgeville, she was unable to arrange a face-to-face meeting with her publisher and new agent (no Zoom then, of course) before her stay at Yaddo ended. But after being awarded another stay in the fall, she managed to do so during another brief stay in Manhattan (at the Woodstock Hotel) before returning to Yaddo.

Here’s where the “fear and paranoia” cocktail gets served up. It seems that O’Connor’s new pal at Yaddo, poet Robert Lowell, had been alarmed by a New York Times article linking a “journalist,” one Agnes Smedley, to a Soviet spy ring; alas, Smedley had stayed at Yaddo from 1943 to 1948, supposedly working on a biography of some ChiCom “revolutionary,” and Lowell thought that this called into question the leadership of Elizabeth Ames, the executive director.

It’s not clear what Lowell’s motive was: outraged patriotism, fear of guilt by association, personal animosity, academic politics, or whatever. Latrobe is vague even in stating the issue:

At a special meeting of Yaddo’s board of directors…Lowell led fellow guests [Elizabeth] Harwick, [Ed] Maisel, and O’Connor in allegations that Ames had harbored a known Communist.

What does it mean, to say Lowell led O’Connor and others in allegations? It makes it sound as if Lowell had misled or bullied them into showing up to support his wild charges or other. The Times helpfully backed off a few days later, leaving Lowell & Co. out to dry.

The issue was settled weeks later with an admonishment from the board. [Again, what does this mean? In the context of what follows, I take it that the board admonished Lowell, not Ames]. As many in the arts community rushed to Ames’ defense, Lowell himself suffered a bit of a public black eye. Most who knew him saw what came to be known among the Yaddo crowd as “the Lowell affair” as the beginning of the disturbing unravelling he would experience over the next few weeks as he bounced from one place to another…. Before long he was sent, though not by choice, to a small, private mental hospital…. Diagnosis: manic depression.

As always, truth doesn’t matter, and it’s the guy making the “allegations” that’s the bad guy; why, in fact, he must have been nuts!

Latrobe doesn’t expand on any of this, so I turned to Wikipedia; very midwit, I know, but certainly not known to be rabidly anti-Communist.

 Ruth Price, author of the most recent and extensive biography of Smedley, writes that there is very strong evidence in former Soviet archives that Smedley was indeed a spy who engaged in espionage for the Comintern and on behalf of the Soviet Union.

But not just any old garden variety spy; no, as fitting a Yaddo resident, she was a real turbo-spy:

According to PBS, in her work as triple agent for Communists in China, India, and the Soviet Union, Smedley “was one of the most prolific female spies of the 20th century.” Feeling pressure, she left the U.S. in the autumn of 1949. She died in the UK in 1950 after surgery for an ulcer. Her ashes were buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing in 1951. [21]

 

Ah yes, another innocent lamb unfairly targeted by “fear and paranoia.”

Although O’Connor and the others were driven out of Yaddo for their sins, the upshot was positive, with O’Connor taking up residence in a series of furnished rooms in Manhattan (along with a couple stays in Connecticut with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald), and for six months in 1949 she could cultivate professional contacts, enjoy the company of literary friends, and of course take in the sights and sounds of the big city. Latrobe does a good job of untangling the series of more or less formal living arrangements (from furnished rooms to garage lofts, including a stay at the YWCA) during this time, guided by the address books.

Finally, she came home to Milledgeville, knowing that life in New York did not interest her. [Later, writing to a friend in New York, Fred Darcy, whom we shall soon meet] she told Darsey that she had given him the wrong impression if he thought she would enjoy living in New York. Yes, she would like the intellectual stimulation of people she would know there, but the lifestyle itself would not be to her liking, noting that one had to be “geared to a very high pitch just to cross the street.” Furthermore, she found the city depressing.

O’Connor was not entirely a hermit, traveling here and there for awards or interviews, but the development of O’Connor’s chronic, ultimately fatal illness, lupus, made travel increasingly difficult, eventually requiring the use of crutches in an age that did not know the word “accommodation.” Latrobe devotes three more brief chapters to some brief visits to New York, including the filming of an interview for that new-fangled invention, television, (the only film of O’Connor in conversation) to promote A Good Man is Hard to Find in 1955 and, characteristically, a stopover while heading with her mother to attempt a miracle cure at Lourdes. (O’Connor was not enthused about bathing with a crowd of strangers but eventually forced herself to dive right into the sacred spring, to no apparent result).

The bulk of the book follows, extracted from the address books and arranged in address book style (A to Z), but now with the contents fleshed out and given plenty of cross references to reveal the interconnections of the people and institutions O’Connor passed among.

Some are famous on their own — such as Mary McCarthy or Patricia Highsmith[22] — others known only to their friends and family. They’re mostly literary types, of course, either “content producers,” as we might say, or involved in the trade: publishers, editors, publicists, etc.

You might think they’d be a dull bunch and make for dull reading, but you would be wrong. Some of the most obscure — today at least — can be surprisingly interesting.

Consider Elizabeth Fenwick, writer of “domestic suspense novels” who, though O’Connor considered that she and Fenwick “were as different from each other as could be,” would “share a deep friendship.” Different, perhaps, but with a heritage right out of an O’Connor story: her mother, being bow-legged, played boys in the Ziegfeld Follies, while her father would later be “disabled by an experimental medical treatment.”

Her first marriage not so much ended but evaporated. During World War II, Clark McBurney worked in counterintelligence and moved on to the newly created Central Intelligence Agency afterward. When he unaccountably ceased communication and abandoned her, the marriage was annulled in 1946.[23]

Or consider Elaine Gottlieb (or Gottleib or Gotlieb, as she variously appears in O’Connor’s address books), a New York born writer, translator and teacher:

Staying in Mexico in 1946, she quickly fell in love with a handsome, older man, author and flying ace Elliott Chess (1898–1962). The two were engaged within two weeks of meeting each other and, to celebrate, caught a bus to Guadalajara. Their joy was soon challenged when gunmen attacked the bus. Chess saved Gottlieb’s life. The two lived together for two months but were never legally married. Gottlieb boarded a train for New York, and although Chess promised to meet her there, they never saw each other again. Gottlieb gave birth to their daughter, Nola, the following year. She notified Chess of the birth of the little girl with a brief letter, her last to him.

And consider Fred Darsey, who had struck up a correspondence with O’Connor before escaping from a Georgia nuthouse (the world’s largest, interestingly) and winding up — of course — living in New York, as one does, hosting O’Connor on several occasions. After her death, he seems to have blossomed:

For example, in 1966, when he threw a going-out-of-business sale for the Manhattan gift shop he owned with his wife, the event hit the papers because he did not have a permit for such a sale…. The shop’s 1966 closure had been brought about by the effects of a transit strike on sales for two months running. To go out of business, however, Darsey was required to pay a twenty-five-dollar fee and file daily inventories. When Darsey was served a warrant for not having a permit, he placed a large photocopy of the summons in the store window, which led to a second summons. When asked why he didn’t simply pay the fine, he responded that he didn’t have the money because he was going out of business. He was placed in the infamous Tombs; when the story of his arrest hit the evening news, a neighbor paid the jail fines and bought him a drink.

That arrest was not the first of Darsey’s legal troubles and far from the worst of them. After his divorce trial, Darsey kidnapped his son in the middle of the night, an event that captured local front-page headlines. There was a nationwide alert, and once the child was found (a relative reported his whereabouts), Darsey was not only charged with kidnapping and breaking and entering but also was arrested by the FBI and charged with making harassing phone calls from New York to the judge who had handled the divorce proceedings in another state. The Bureau stated it was likely the first charge of its kind, coming after the recent passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Darsey was convicted of the federal charge and three misdemeanors.

He died in 1980, “the coroner listing the cause as shotgun wounds to the heart and lungs.” If O’Connor had lived, might she have used him in a sequel to Confederacy of Dunces?[24]

 

Excursus on Lovecraft in the City

Speaking of literary doppelgangers, one can’t help but compare O’Connor’s Gotham adventures to Lovecraft’s.

Readers will recall — especially if they have read my review of Midnight Rambles — that Lovecraft, despite his reputation as a Providence-bound hermit and misanthrope, paid a few visits to New York City in the months leading up to his surprise (to everyone) announcement of his marriage to his hostess, Sonia Greene (a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine). He moved to Brooklyn and lived with Sonia for about a year and a half, then set up on his own when Sonia moved to Ohio in search of employment, all the while living a largely bachelor or student lifestyle, oddly reminiscent of today’s hipsters, staying out late with his literary friends; and finally, after a brief rejection of provincial life for the artistic and intellectual stimulation of the urban scene, realized that his life and work could only flourish back in Providence, and moved back and lived the rest of his brief life with his maiden aunts.

One of his “New York Stories,” somewhat vaguely titled “He,” summed up his experience:

My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

Other than the city itself, might anything else connect these two, apparently dissimilar authors?[25]

Lovecraft, a scion of a downwardly mobile but heritage-proud family of New England WASPs, might be expected to look down up a woman living on a chicken farm in Georgia; but at least she was White and native-born. However, I can recall no examples of attacks on or parodies of the South in his fiction, and Lovecraft made several enjoyable trips to the South. In fact, on one such trip he wrote about how pleased he was at the segregation mandated on trains, and suggested it be implemented in New York; a mindset rather like the “pre-educated” O’Connor we saw above.

Moreover, Lovecraft had a remarkable ability to keep his opinions in check when dealing with individuals, as exemplified by his marriage to Sonia and his long-time friendship with Samuel Loveman, a homosexual (although apparently safely closeted); he maintained a high opinion of the work of Hart Crane while “sardonically and not without mimicry” decrying the poet’s “morality” (clearly a codeword for sexuality). [26]

As an atheist and materialist, he would have regarded O’Connor’s Catholicism with the same scorn as McCarthy or Highsmith, but again, only privately (several of his closest friends being Catholics, such as August Derleth).

This then brings us to the question of their worldviews; surely Lovecraft’s “acosmism” and “cosmic horror” are anathema to and the antipode of the Catholic standpoint. But AI suggests that the relation of Lovecraft’s atheism to Catholicism is more complex than one might assume.[27]

However, O’Connor is not so much a standard “Catholic” author as she is a Catholic writing in a genre known, after all, as Southern Gothic. [28] Famously, when asked why Southern writers had a penchant for “freaks,” she replied, “Because we are still able to recognize one.”[29] Of course, Lovecraft’s monsters and freaks are not so much unrecognized as unrecognizable, but Allen Barra may be onto something when he glosses that reply thus: “The violence that erupts in O’Connor’s fiction summons up the demons of an earlier time.” The stereotypical Cavalier courtliness and aristocratic traditions of the South may hide as many demons as Lovecraft’s Puritan-haunted New England.

Unlike Lovecraft, she neither went through a period of infatuation with the city, nor seriously tried to find a day job and settle down there; but neither did she develop the same hysterical, vein-popping fear and loathing of the modern Babylon: as we’ve seen, rather than intensifying her racialism, typical for her time and place, it was “successfully” overcome. Obviously, the things that drove Lovecraft almost mad – blacks and immigrants — could only have gotten worse by O’Connor’s time, although Latrobe would no doubt consider that to be yet more “progress.”

While Lovecraft’s time in New York was, according to Michel Houellebecq, what made him a writer,”[30] Alice McDermot says that “It was the illness, I think, which made her the writer she is.”

Perhaps the strangest non-similarity is that while Lovecraft had spent a long period in his early youth living with his mother, and after her death gradually freed himself and came to some kind of working arrangement with the outside world — his visit to Gotham being a part of that transformation, both personal and literary, as we saw in Midnight Rambles — the city had no discernable influence on O’Connor’s writing, positive or negative (except perhaps through personal and business relationships), and after returning to living with her mother, the progress of her disease made returning to the city almost impossible.

Part – well, almost all – of Lovecraft’s “coming out” was his discovery of the world of “amateur publishing,” a sort of early-twentieth century kind of Substack or Medium, along with the pulp magazines, like Weird Tales, that would later accept his odd little stories; that was even how he met Sonia. Otherwise, the official world of publishing paid him no nevermind (not that he made very much effort in that direction). Lovecraft would make vain efforts to find employment or contacts in the New York publishing world, while O’Connor’s whole purpose of residing in New York was to further her already first-rate literary contacts — she was a product of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (although that was another mark against her for Highsmith), where she had gotten a grant from Reinhart to support the writing of her first book, Wise Blood.

Both died back in their hometowns at an early age (Lovecraft at 47, O’Connor at 39).

Of course, both authors are now enshrined — entombed? — in the Library of America, in each case only a single, slim volume.

***

As Midnight Rambles is for Lovecraftians, this book will be an automatic purchase for the O’Connor fan, while there is enough biographical detail and connections made to O’Connor’s oeuvre to give the newcomer a place to start. I think the best way to read this book is, well, to read it twice; first, with the chapters bringing you up to speed on O’Connor’s Manhattan sojourns, followed by the expansion and explication of the address book entries of her family, friends and business acquaintances; then re-reading the whole once more, or perhaps turning to one of the other O’Connor biographies, now with a sense of the whole web of personal connections that underlies the O’Connor universe.

Notes

[1] Letter to Maryat Lee, May 3, 1964. She would live for another 3 months. See “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” The author, Paul Elie, notes that O’Connor’s letters “put her champions in a bind—upholding her letters as eloquently expressive of her character, but carving out exceptions for the nasty parts;” reminding us of Lovecraft, and not for the first time, as we’ll see.

[2] Katheryn Krotzer Labordeis a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop, and a Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. Among other works, she is the author of the intriguing title Do Not Open: The Discarded Refrigerators of Post-Katrina New Orleans and The Story behind the Painting: Frederick J. Brown’s The Assumption of Mary at Xavier University.

[3] The website says: Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series seeks to publish critical, biographical, and historical studies that engage the work of noteworthy Catholic writers, especially, though not exclusively, the work of Flannery O’Connor. Studies that explore the relationship between the writer’s Catholicism and the larger culture he or she belongs to are of particular interest. The editors invite submission of manuscripts that aim to enrich our understanding of the literary legacy of well-known Catholic writers (including Don DeLillo, Andre Dubus, Louise Erdrich, Caroline Gordon, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, William Kennedy, Thomas Merton, Muriel Spark, Walker Percy, Katherine Anne Porter, and Evelyn Waugh, in addition to Flannery O’Connor) and to explore and promote the work of lesser known or more recent practitioners whose reputations and literary legacies may not yet be well established (some possible authors in this category include Ron Hansen, Dana Gioia, Mary Gordon, Josephine Jacobsen, Mary Karr, Alice McDermott, Marie Ponsot, Valerie Sayers, and Tobias Wolff, among others). The editors welcome proposals for single-authored monographs and edited collections, which will be vetted internally and undergo peer review by two specialists in the field.

[4] Though surely O’Connor’s correspondence must be dwarfed by Lovecraft’s grapho-maniacal output: Joshi estimates that HPL wrote around 87,500 letters (see his “A Look at Lovecraft’s Letters” (in Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft) in admittedly a somewhat longer but still brief lifespan (47 years to 39 years).

[5] I know, and I assume Laborde knows, that this is not strictly true: as Col. Oliver North discovered, “erasing” a database record or an email only marks the various bytes as available for reuse; it can be a relatively simple process for an investigator to recover the data; additionally, there can be tape and cloud backups. But just go with me on this.

[6] Kastrup uses single quotes to clarify the distinction between the contents of our experience (‘physical objects’) and any putative objects independent thereof. So we can ask: Do ‘physical objects’ correspond to physical objects, and if so, how?

[7] Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup pp. 158-60

[8] OK, if you think this is all too high-faluting, let’s just say it’s like watching Better Call Saul after Breaking Bad. “Yo, it’s Tuco!”

[9] “I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love…Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women…women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake…but I do deny them my essence.” Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964). For my review of Strangelove, see here; for more on essence, see my essay “Of Apes, Essence and the Afterlife,” reprinted in my collection Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, & Other Populist Gurus (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020).

[10] Reminiscent of Lovecraft’s cartoon lampooning his supposed nakedness after most of his clothes were stolen from his Brooklyn bachelor pad by a burglar; reprinted in Midnight Rambles.

[11] Interestingly, as the quote shows, Laborde capitalizes White as well as Black, so at least she abjures the even more tiresome trope of “white isn’t an identity.”

[12] In view of what’s to come, it should be noted that the Bronx Zoo was founded by Madison Grant, an echt-WASP lawyer, race theorist, eugenicist and proto-conservationist. For more on Grant, see here and here.

[13] Southerners, polite but racist.

[14] I’ve never heard this, either in real life or film/fiction. Asked “what bug is in bug juice” fourteen years ago, one internet chap says “There are no bugs in bug juice. It’s an American English idiom that most often refers to some sort of extremely sweet fruit punch (which at a picnic will draw lots of bugs to you) or insect repellent” while another does say “Where I am from, soy sauce — that dark salty liquid put on Chinese food — was called “bug juice”. Whether in the “old country” it really did have some real bug juice in it for additional flavor, I don’t know.” That last remark shows how racism still persists in our supposedly “educated” land; sad.

[15] Goodwin tells us that “By the 1920s, travel guides and publications included itineraries of Manhattan’s ethnic enclaves, marking such neighborhoods as ‘safe’ for middle-class and implicitly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant sightseers and consumers. The tea parlors and import stores of Chinatown and the espresso bars and pastry shops of Little Italy offered an ‘exotic,’ yet ultimately predicative [predicable?] experience for tourists from the ‘real’ America—a description often deemed unapplicable to New York.” Goodwin, op. cit., p54

[16] Despite his well-known distaste for anything “exotic,” including a horrifying vision of a New York swarming with yellowish, squint-eyed creatures in the contemporaneous story “He,” Chinatown rather suited him: “He admired the clean sidewalks, mocked tourists gawking at fake opium dens, and found Doyers Street, a narrow, curving commercial strip, to be ‘fascinatingly Oriental.’” The Lower East Side, on the other hand, brought out the Lovecraft we know and love: “The very sight of this dense, polyglot, immigrant neighborhood stood as a physical affront: ‘These swine have instinctive swarming movements, no doubt, which no ordinary biologist can fathom. Gawd knows what they are—Jew, Italian, separate or mixed, with possible touches of residual ab-original Irish and exotic hints of the Far East—a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to eye, nose and imagination—would to heaven a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place.’” Goodwin, op. cit., pp. 53-54.

[17] Lovecraft was delighted with the Automats of New York, and William Burroughs would eventually become their poet laureate as well; see the “Naked Automat” section of my review of Goodwin, op. cit.

[18] Goodwin also notes that Lovecraft’s racial views are actually fairly run of the mill for his time, place, and class, although, in the case of his Final Solution for the Lower East Side, he expresses some discomfort: ”Although using crude and ugly language, Lovecraft’s general view of immigration and new Americans, especially those from Eastern and Southern Europe, differed little from that promulgated by many popular magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, and the leadership of scientific and cultural institutions, such as the American Museum of Natural History. However, Lovecraft’s xenophobia veered in directions and posited outcomes extreme for mainstream eugenic proponents and racial gatekeepers: he presented the idea of spraying the Lower East Side with poison gas to clear it of excess and undesirable populations. Such a statement would not prove to be an outlier or anomaly.” As we see, by O’Connor’s time, “educated” opinion had changed considerably.

[19] There was an issue of the National Lampoon, back in the seventies – either “Tale of the South” or “The Miracle of Democracy” – that had some Gahan Wilson cartoons satirizing the incredibly antiquated segregationist senators, one of whom is quoted thus: “I unnastan’ they black all ovah, even undah they clotheth.” It’s interesting that as the Democrats moved from strict segregation to wokism, they continued the tradition of trusting their leadership to the most elderly and decrepit among them; their only consistent principle being devotion to gerontocracy. Touching, really.

[20] See Trevor Lynch’s review of the 1979 John Huston film here. The screenplay was by Benedict Fitzgerald, the son of Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally; Benedict is not named here, but as he was born in 1949, he would likely be one of “the children” we hear of when O’Connor babysat in the fall of that year when renting a space over the garage at the Fitzgeralds house in Connecticut. She was introduced to them by the poet, Robert Lowell, who will appear shortly

[21] Her Wikipedia entry makes fun reading. Apparently, she was the prototype for those women who travel the world, getting banged by as many men as possible, as long as they’re anti-Western darkies. I can see Kate Hepburn or Cate Blanchett in the biopic; grrrl power! There’s also a bit of Savitri Devi here as well: “As a college student during World War I, she organized support for the independence of India from the United Kingdom, receiving financial support from the government of Germany. After the war she went to Germany, where she met and worked with Indian nationalists.” They also give us a great photo of her in full Hindu drag that could be slipped into, say, Gold in the Furnace without anyone noticing.

[22] Neither of whom seem to have “clicked” with O’Connor. McCarthy, an ex-Catholic become atheist, earned O’Connor’s wrath for calling the Eucharist a “good symbol.” After the incident was relayed in a review of O’Connor’s collected stories, McCarthy wrote in to twist the knife: she was actually trying to be polite; as a “firm atheist” she had “no feelings at all on the matter.” Highsmith went further, regarding fellow Yaddo-ite O’Connor with contempt, she was happy to spread a number of anecdotes, such as finding O’Connor, one rainy night, kneeling at Yaddo’s front door, illuminated by lightning, insisting that a stain on the door was the image of Christ. O’Connor admits in letter that another incident, where O’Connor had dropped a bottle of vodka on the stone steps and then kept walking on, was true, but it was a bottle of gin and the steps were wet.

[23] That would be the year before the CIA was created; related?

[24] See Greg Johnson’s review here, and reprinted in his new collection, Novel Takes: Essays on Literature.

[25] Other than living in a couple of places in Brooklyn, Lovecraft rambled all over Manhattan in search of the colonial atmos’ he craved, along with the Bronx, Queens, and even visiting Elizabeth, N.J. by ferry, while O’Connor seems to have only hung her hat in Manhattan apartments and offices of her literary and professional colleagues (and churches, of course). As noted above, her increasing disabilities made later trips short and inconvenient; not for her Lovecraft’s often day- or night-long rambles.

[26] Several more examples are given in my Midnight Rambler review, op. cit.

[27] “Despite his atheism, some argue that Lovecraft’s depiction of a godless, indifferent universe can serve as a stark contrast to Catholic teachings, thereby offering a reflective tool for believers to reaffirm their faith.

“In Lovecraft’s stories, Catholic characters are occasionally depicted as more cautious and wise, often understanding the dangers of delving into forbidden knowledge, which can be seen as a commentary on the importance of respecting the unknown and the sacred. For instance, some stories include Catholic characters who advise against the pursuit of knowledge that could lead to cosmic horror, suggesting a respect for boundaries that aligns with certain Catholic teachings.

“Some argue that while Lovecraft’s works contain elements that are antithetical to Catholicism, such as the existence of multiple gods and the absence of a moral order, they can still be read critically and reflectively by Catholics, who might find value in the philosophical and literary aspects of his work. Others caution that the anti-Catholic undertones and racial biases in Lovecraft’s writing should be acknowledged and approached with discernment.” The latter comment suggest the same “caution” Catholics are advised regarding O’Connor’s “racism.”

[28] The only live theater O’Connor ever attended was likely the original production of Tennessee Williams’ intensely Southern if not entirely Gothic play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Ben Gazzara (The Strange One, The Big Lebowski), Barbara Bel Geddes (Vertigo, Dallas) and Burl Ives, which she saw in New York. She didn’t like it.

[29] “To them, you’re just a freak like me. … See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.” – The Joker, The Dark Knight.

[30] “This man, who did not succeed at life, did indeed succeed at writing. New York helped him. He who was so gentle, so courteous, discovered hatred there.” Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, intro. Stephen King, trans. Dorna Khazeni (New York: Cernunnos, 2019), p138.