Everything That Rises
W
henever Flannery talked about her upcoming trip to Lourdes, planned for three weeks in April and May 1958, she cast herself as an accidental pilgrim. This sole trip outside the United States, by the woman who had already decided that sickness was “more instructive than a long trip to Europe,” was not of her own design. Hearing of the Lourdes Centennial Pilgrimage — organized as a package tour by the Diocese of Savannah, to the site of Bernadette Soubirous’s vision of the Virgin Mary in the south of France — Cousin Katie Semmes immediately thought of Mary Flannery, and her worsening condition. Knowing the reputation of Bernadette’s spring for physical cures, she insisted on paying the $1,050.40 per-person fee to send both mother and daughter.
Over the six-month lead-up to their departure, Flannery mined the imminent event for all its comic potential, though her barbs about the “holy exhaustion” anticipated with a dozen fellow pilgrims, mostly “fortress-footed Catholic females herded from holy place to holy place,” belied true anxiety. She blamed the trip entirely on Cousin Katie’s “will of iron.” Her trepidation began to sound reasonable when a final itinerary was presented that included, within a time frame of seventeen days, stops in London, Dublin (“I bet that’ll be real sickening,” she told the Fitzgeralds), Paris, Lourdes, Barcelona, Rome, and Lisbon. According to her math, she concluded to Betty Hester, “7 into 17 is 2 and a fraction and if four days are devoted to Rome, I figure them other places will not see much of us. By my calculations we should see more airports than shrines.”
A reprieve came in February, when Dr. Merrill advised canceling the trip because her X ray revealed hip deterioration that he now admitted was probably a side effect of the lupus. He suggested possible treatment at Warm Springs. Flannery received the news with secret relief — but not Cousin Katie, who then offered to fund a less taxing trip that would include Lourdes, but not all the other stops. Flannery was hardly eager to take in what she kept calling “Baloney Castle” — the Blarney Castle, in Killarney. But she had hoped to see the Fitzgerald family. So when Sally offered to put the O’Connors up at their home in Italy and accompany them to rejoin the other pilgrims in Paris, Flannery agreed. “Left for two minutes alone in foreign parts,” she joked to Sally, “Regina and I would probably end up behind the Iron Curtain asking the way to Lourdes in sign language.”
Yet for all her satire, Flannery was not entirely opposed to the trip. In the face of skeptics, this unlikely “church lady” could be far less sarcastic about it. Flannery was sincere about the upcoming pilgrimage with Katherine Anne Porter, who briefly converted to Catholicism in her youth, during a brush with tuberculosis. She told Betty that when Porter asked, during her March visit, “where we were going in Europe and I said Lourdes, a very strange expression came over her face, just a slight shock as if some sensitive spot had been touched. She said that she had always wanted to go to Lourdes.” She conceded to the Fitzgeralds that “my cousin is certainly very good to give us this trip.” While claiming to prefer to visit the Matisse Chapel, in Vence, just completed in 1951, a journey to the heart of a nearly medieval spirituality was hardly unthinkable.
Three days before departing she responsibly filed her “Last Will and Testament of Mary Flannery O’Connor,” at the Baldwin County Court House, reflecting a sense at the time of European travel as a major undertaking, and belying her focus, perhaps even more than usual, on her certain mortality. “Item-One” of the will directed her executrix, Regina O’Connor, to “set aside the sum of $100.00 for the purpose to have masses said for the repose of my soul.” Robert Fitzgerald, named literary executor, was assigned care for all unpublished manuscripts and the letters that had been preserved by her in carbon copies. Her books and paintings were to be consigned to the GSCW library. After the filing of the will, the remainder of preparation over the weekend consisted of packing, with much extra fussing by Regina. Flannery relayed one exchange to Betty: “She is reading the Lourds book and every now and then announces a fact, such as, ‘It doesn’t make any difference how much you beg and plead, they won’t let you in.’ ‘Won’t let you in where?’ ‘In Lourds with a short sleeved dress on or low cut.’ ‘I ain’t got any low cut dress.’”
On Monday, April 21, Flannery and her mother, “like Mr. Head and Nelson facing Atlanta,” she joked to Maryat, boarded a plane bound for Idlewild Airport in New York City. Unlike the other fourteen pilgrims, who took a bus to the Manger-Vanderbilt Hotel, at Park Avenue and 34th Street, Flannery and her mother were met by a limousine dispatched by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, to transport her to a meeting with Mr. Straus and Miss Cudahy. Giroux’s advice on an escape clause had proved to be prescient, as both Carver and Lindley did depart Harcourt, and Flannery and her agent decided that her novel should be with Mr. Giroux. “I am properly back where I started from,” she said, with delight. The publisher Roger Straus telegrammed ahead to colleagues in Paris and Rome, informing them of the arrival of “our new important American author.”
On the evening of April 22, O’Connor and her mother returned to the airport by bus, with the group, for a transatlantic flight aboard the TWA Constellation. Separating from the others at Shannon Airport in Dublin, a leg of the trip that Flannery, still holding on to the anti-Irish fervor of her girlhood, was only too happy to miss, they traveled on to London. Early the next morning the pair flew to Milan, where they arrived shortly after noon, and were met by Robert Fitzgerald. Nearly a year after driving Flannery from Chicago to South Bend, he now took her and Regina on a prettier ride from Milan to Levanto, a coastal town on the Ligurian Sea, south of Genoa, at the end of a thickly wooded pine valley. There Flannery was reunited with Sally, and with her three girls and three boys, for whom Flannery brought
Uncle Remus
tales after promising pocketknives and snuff.
The four days spent at the Fitzgeralds’ villa — built on several levels on a steep hill dotted with olive trees, and overlooking the light blue sea, where Robert had been translating
The Odyssey
— certainly fulfilled Dr. Merrill’s orders for Flannery to rest between the strenuous beginning and middle of her trip. On spring days the trees below exploded with white and pink blossoms, the night air grew heavy, and, through open windows, the blond children could often be seen, or heard, playing in the courtyard. O’Connor reread the
Uncle Remus
tales that she brought as a gift, as well as Nabokov’s
Pnin,
finding the comic novel about an absentminded professor of Russian literature “wonderful.” Even so, as she reported to Ashley Brown, “The first cold germ I met on the other side moved in and stayed for the 17 days so most everything I saw was through a fog.”
Arriving in Paris from Milan with Sally and Regina, Flannery was forced by her cold to recuperate inside the art deco Hotel Ambassador, near the Paris opera house, where she was visited by Gabrielle Rolin, a young French journalist and novelist. “Instead of seeing Paris I saw her,” said Flannery. Although Rolin judged the novel “almost unreadable,” she brought her, as a gift, Emile Zola’s
Lourdes.
“Flannery’s way of speaking reminded me of Donald Duck,” recalls Rolin, “and her ‘home made permanent,’ Shirley Temple, but her eyes . . . perhaps she owed this interior light to her faith, this look so sharp and blue. ‘I owe it to my Irish origins,’ she said. But there was something more. The terrifying Mrs. O’Connor also had a keen eye but she didn’t look beyond her interlocutor. Flannery saw farther, higher, elsewhere. . . . The amiable Mrs. Fitzgerald’s smile was a comfort after having encountered the acid grin of the mother.”
Reunited with the group from Savannah, the three women then traveled south from Paris to the Haut-Pyrenees region of Lourdes, near the border of Spain, long a medieval pilgrimage route on the way to Compostela. Crossing through France, during one phase of this trip, Sally and Flannery had a long, confidential conversation in a train compartment. “She said to me . . . that she had come to terms with her illness, with the crippling, the isolation, the constant danger of death,” recalled Fitzgerald. “That, in fact, her only remaining fear was that her mother would die before she did. . . . She added, ‘I don’t know what I would do without her.’” Yet when Fitzgerald later passed on this remark to Caroline Gordon, who never liked Mrs. O’Connor, she flashed her black eyes at Sally, and snapped scornfully, “Yes! She would have lost her material.”
Flannery had mixed feelings about going to Lourdes, as she was used to being an observer of, or writer about, religious enthusiasm boiling over into visions and healings, rather than a participant. Yet the village itself was a study in contrasts. The accommodation for the Savannah group, on the evenings of April 30 and May 1, was the nineteenth-century Grand Hotel de la Grotte, on the avenue Bernadette-Soubirous, the cream-colored epitome of
la vieille France,
with hanging eaves, wrought-iron balconies, and long white wooden shutters, situated on rocks overlooking a valley cut by the teal green Gave de Pau, and just below a medieval fortress castle. Though Flannery dubbed the place a “clip-joint,” because of a forty-two-dollar bill for Sally’s cot, the hotel was the first choice for American pilgrims, including a group of 350 led that spring by Francis Cardinal Spellman, during a Jubilee Year attracting more than 5 million visitors.
Lourdes had always been subject to commercialization, almost within months of reports, in 1858, of the healing of the paralyzed fingers of Catherine Latapie, when she plunged them into the spring discovered by her friend Bernadette, at the direction of the Virgin Mary — an apparition the fourteen-year-old at first simply called “Aquéro,” or “that thing,” in the local patois. In the early twentieth century the aesthete and Roman Catholic convert Joris-Karl Huysmans derided its many honky-tonk shops as “a hemorrhage of bad taste.” Flannery enjoyed quoting Mauriac’s remark that “the religious goods stores were the devil’s answer there to the Virgin Mary.” Such marketing had only escalated in the past decades with the appearance of a six-hundred-page historical novel,
Song of Bernadette,
by the Jewish novelist Franz Werfel, and its adaptation as a 1943 Academy Award–winning, black-and-white Hollywood movie, starring Jennifer Jones.
But all sales of religious souvenirs ceased at the large iron St. Michael’s Gate at the foot of the boulevard de le Grotte, which marked the beginning of the Domain, a sort of medieval town arranged about various churches, squares, and shrines, and full of pilgrims, many as maimed and afflicted as O’Connor’s characters. In this veritable open-air hospital, the critics of Lourdes often had a change of heart. No less a snob than Huysmans allowed that “nowhere have I seen such appalling illnesses, so much charity and so much good grace.” For Mauriac, the grotto was a “heart that never stops beating.” “The heavy hand of the prelate smacks down on this free enterprise at the gates of the grotto,” Flannery wrote Ashley Brown. “This is always full of peasants milling around and of the sick being wheeled on stretchers.” In a postcard to Katherine Anne Porter, O’Connor penned a single line: “The sight of Faith and affliction joined in prayer — very impressive.”
Not only was Flannery in the company of her mother and Sally, but they were joined on their first day by William Sessions, who was on a Fulbright grant in Freiburg, Germany, attending the lectures of Martin Heidegger — Hulga’s philosophical obsession in “Good Country People.” Sessions arrived on May 1, the weather having turned warm and humid, in spite of breezes from nearby snowcapped mountains. “I joined them for lunch my first day, and it was the upstairs of their small hotel,” he remembered. “I kept wondering how Flannery had managed with her crutches. . . . Sally and Regina were on one side of the table, and I slipped into the outside seat beside Flannery. While we were eating, and Sally and Regina were talking, Flannery leaned over to me and cast her eyes rather slowly about the dining room. ‘Look,’ she whispered to me, ‘at all those Mauriac faces.’”
That afternoon, Flannery, Regina, and Sally sat at the back of the Grotto, the outcropping of rocks where Bernadette had experienced her visions, while Sessions braved the crowds of farmers descended from all over France for May Day, a holiday honoring the Virgin Mary. As they were marching ceaselessly up and down, he jostled to get to the spigots dispensing springwater above a basin, hoping to score just one gift bottle intended for Caroline Gordon. “In the pushing and shoving among the pilgrims for the holy water, I was knocked into the basin but not before I’d filled three bottles,” wrote Sessions. “Sally and the O’Connors were laughing when I returned with soaked polyester trousers but handing them bottles.” In the evening, Flannery and her mother looked on as Sally and Bill took part in the nightly candlelit procession in Rosary Square, beneath the basilica, singing the Lourdes Hymn to the Virgin and saying the Rosary, their entire group marching behind a “Savannah” banner.
Flannery had been clear about not wishing to take the baths, an immersion in the springwater believed to possess healing properties. She insisted that she was going as “a pilgrim, not a patient.” She assured Betty Hester, before departing, “I am one of those people who could die for his religion sooner than take a bath for it.” Her resolve was strengthened by Gabrielle Rolin, who had remarked in Paris that the only true miracle at Lourdes was the absence of any epidemics from the filthy water. Yet Sally felt sure that Mrs. Semmes would be disappointed if Flannery returned home without taking part in the essential ritual. Using her French, and his German, she and Bill managed to secure for their friend an appointment for early the next morning. Flannery complained that Sally had a “hyper-thyroid moral imagination” — “she was determined that I take it and gave me no peace” — but grudgingly acceded to her arrangements.
Before nine o’clock, she arrived at
les piscines,
actually a series of seventeen sunken marble pools — six for men, eleven for women — allowing some privacy, with only about forty people ahead of her in the stone waiting portico, so the waters appeared clean. She drank from a communal thermos bottle circulated among the
malades.
And she put on the sack robe she was handed, still damp from the previous woman, before passing behind a curtain and being lowered into the water. “At least there are no societal trappings along with the medieval hygiene,” she wrote Elizabeth Bishop. “I saw nothing but peasants and was very conscious of the distinct odor of the crowd. The supernatural is a fact there but it displaces nothing natural; except maybe those germs.” Nor did she report a mystical experience. “Nobody I am sure prays in that water,” she told Betty.