Authors: Thomas Mallon
These lines have a calculated charm, but Emerson’s egotism (charged against him by many, including his second wife) usually keeps him from spreading charm’s more basic mischief. When in 1840, he decides against joining Brook Farm, he writes to its founder George Ripley that “the Community is not good for me,” and that he must not burden it with “the task of my emancipation”—as if that had been the utopian commune’s raison d’être.
The all-for-one-and-one-for-one attitude that’s detectable between the lines of his long and polite letter to Ripley surfaces elsewhere, sometimes with a great self-loving clang. What, finally, are we to make of a shipboard communication to his brother William in which Emerson claims to wonder how people
have borne with me so long—, and the oddity & ridicule of it all, is,—given me a literary reputation too, which I make dangerous drafts upon, every day I live. The will o’ the wisp, the light invisible except in certain angles, & in all but impossible circumstances, seems to me how often the type & symbol of us all. We cannot overestimate or underestimate these strange goodfor-nothing immortal men that we are.
Does all this self-deprecating, oxymoronic, philosophical flummery really
mean
much? It’s certainly less revealing than a peculiar train of thought that Emerson sends toward Margaret Fuller in a letter written during the summer of 1841:
Friends are luxuries, are they not? things that honest poor people can do without but indispensable as serenades & ice to all fanciful persons. Thus the other night I found myself wishing to die because I had friends,—which sounds very like nonsense but was a veritable reverie very pleasant to entertain.
Does he wish to die from guilt over having the friends an honest,
un
fanciful person doesn’t require? But if that’s the case, why would such a reverie be “very pleasant to entertain”? One can’t help but believe that the reverie’s real pleasure is the chance it gives Emerson to imagine his own funeral, at which he can be serenaded by the eulogies of those delightful friends.
He writes with great force and feeling after the deaths of his first wife and son (“fled out of my arms like a dream”). But in less extreme circumstances he is, by his own admission, “negligent of professing love.” When Margaret Fuller and the poet Caroline Sturgis accuse him of too much coldness and caution, he overcompensates with ardent pledges of friendship and a promise that he “shall never go quite back to my old arctic habits.” Two months later, however, he confesses the likelihood of relapse: “tell me that I am cold or unkind, and in my most flowing state I become a cake of ice.”
Emerson’s admiration of Carlyle surpasses what he feels for all others, and yet the buoyant letters he sends from Concord to London float along on a certain obliviousness as well as intellectual ardor. Emerson brags about his own independent income two paragraphs before complimenting Carlyle’s honorable poverty. (One thing he never transcends is the bottom line: Emerson keeps after his brother William about repaying a loan, and says he would rather have his lectures abused than transcribed, since the latter fate would cut down the size of his next audience.) Well-enough traveled himself, he tends to mock others when they take to the road; and yet when he’s the one abroad, he can be quite blind to the sights en route. Passing the coast of Ireland in October 1847, he sees only “a country as well cultivated & plentiful as Brookline & Brighton”—this a week before deciding that Carlyle and his unhappy wife Jane “live on beautiful terms.”
He ages with surprising grace, inspiring a reader, when he’s
nearly seventy, with the stock-taking he does after a bad house fire: “this late calamity, however rude and devastating, soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins.” Age shortens his letters, but only to make keener their depiction of age’s depredations: it has “tied my tongue & hid my memory.”
One admires him for not sinking into the “velvet life” he believes Goethe to have indulged in. And yet, having inveighed against writing “luxuriously” as well as living that way, he’s unable to feel the wacky plush in some of his own spiritual sentences through which he moves “God-ward, striving to keep so true a sphericity as to receive the due ray from every point of the concave heaven.” By famously pronouncing a foolish consistency to be the hobgoblin of little minds, he fashioned for himself the biggest loophole any philosopher ever created, one that could lasso the whole earth. Is ours a “little coloured world,” he wonders in his correspondence, or a “sickening planet”?
He declares this place we live to be merely “the apparent the partial,” but it’s hard to see Emerson transcending Nature when he’s so busy running it: “what is [Nature] but the circumference of which I am the centre, the outside of my inside, object whereof I am subject?” He is using these last two terms in their grammatical, not monarchical, senses: the subject governs the object.
“My creed is very simple,” he writes in 1841; “that Goodness is the only Reality.” Are sentiments such as this the reason why, like Melville, we resist him? Or do we resist because, just after calling Reason “the highest faculty of the soul—what we mean often by the soul itself,” Emerson will go on to say, without telling us what the pronoun “it” even stands for, that “it never
reasons
, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision.” From such a formulation we want nothing so much as the chance to reason our way back toward the hard and plain and clear. And yet, Emerson’s most provocative idea about God has to do with the Supreme Being’s own possible inarticulacy: “Does the Power labour, as men do, with the impossibility of perfect explication, that always the hurt is of one kind & the compensation of another?”
In carrying out what he called the “gravest acts” of his life, Emerson
always preferred to write instead of speak, certain that what a man puts to paper gives a more authentic idea of him than his conversation can. His own letters, as he feared, do turn into homilies, and for succumbing to that occupational hazard of the preacher and sage he’s easily enough forgiven. But still, after too many pages of yearning and abstraction and sky-high-mindedness, what relief a reader takes from the concrete glimpse that Emerson gives to Thoreau, in June 1843, of some ordinary road-builders: “The town is full of Irish & the woods of engineers with theodolite & red flag singing out their feet & inches to each other from station to station”—men making the hard human journey not in one oversoul’d leap, but step by halting step.
“MAIL IS VERY EVENTFUL TO ME,”
Flannery O’Connor wrote a college friend in 1951. The novelist answered letters “at once and at length,” but a collection of her correspondence, published in 1979, fifteen years after her death at thirty-nine, reminds one of the slowness with which a writer’s editorial life was conducted before the fax and e-mail—or even, in O’Connor’s case until 1956, the telephone. More important, though, it proves to a reader how natural letter writing—with its opportunities to question, affirm and exhort—is to any spiritual journey, even one conducted along a much more straight-and-narrow path than Emerson’s.
Literary figures come and go in O’Connor’s letters, but mostly it’s just “Me & Maw”—O’Connor and her widowed mother, Regina—on the farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery, throughout her thirties, raises peacocks and writes her books while fighting off lupus and the deterioration of her bones. The local farmworkers provide the sort of daily dramas and epistolary material that servants do in the letters of Virginia Woolf: “Louise recently stuck an icepick in Shot,” O’Connor reports in 1961, “but otherwise we go on our peaceful way around here.” The sightseeing opportunities for her visiting French translator include “the local monuments, the reformatory, and the insane asylum,” along with, over in Eatonton, the home of Uncle Remus. O’Connor’s own
room is such a security-inducing clutter of books that any enforced tidying by her mother makes her feel that she is “being sawed in two without ether.” Her sincere belief that “Routine is a condition of survival” was surely a blessing to her life as an invalid; her single visit to Europe includes a trip to Lourdes, a place so crowded and dirty the real miracle “is that the place don’t bring on epidemics.”
She views her illness with a detached bravery that the reader of her letters comes to understand as a manifestation of grace. She explains her ACTH injections to the playwright Maryat Lee in 1958: “I owe my existence and cheerful countenance to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago Illinois at the Armour packing plant. If pigs wore garments I wouldn’t be worthy to kiss the hems of them.” The crutches she requires are her “flying buttresses,” and since crossing the room on her “own four legs” requires “a major decision” every time it’s done, she ends up living as painstakingly as she writes. After seven years’ work on her novel
The Violent Bear It Away
, she has “to begin thinking of the next one—one damn book after another.”
A reader expecting self-pity is upended, in letter after letter, by two varieties of humor—the cornpone lingo and persona she puts on for correspondents like Maryat Lee and Sally Fitzgerald (eventually the letters’ editor) and, sometimes in the same paragraph, examples of her own forbearing sophistication in front of Maw and the neighbors:
Regina is getting very literary. “Who is this Kafka?” she says. “People ask me.” A German Jew, I says, I think. He wrote a book about a man that turns into a roach. “Well, I can’t tell people
that,”
she says.
O’Connor’s crustiness (“I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome”) is only a comic amplification of her clear-mindedness and integrity. Letter writing allows her to be herself, only more so. “In person I lack command,” she declares; but she can manage it “through the mail.”
Her grotesque fictions invite wild misapprehension and a “lunatic
fringe” of reader correspondence, some of which she cherishes. (In 1955,
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
provokes much mail “from gentlemen who have got no farther than the title.”) But her work also attracts an awed response from serious young writers;
The Habit of Being
, as Sally Fitzgerald titled the volume of letters, contains O’Connor’s thoughtful, lengthy replies to novelists and poets like John Hawkes and Alfred Corn. If her spelling is sometimes doubtful, her paragraphing demonstrates a mind as organized as it is definite. Typing strikes her as more personal than handwriting since one uses “ten fingers to work a typewriter and only three to push a pen;” what emerges from her machine is the most vital collection of letters produced by any American writer during the mid-twentieth century.
Her gift—or grace—is for making an imaginative virtue of necessity. Having spent a few years up North in the “delusion” that her “writing depended on [her] staying away,” she returned South to the certainty that it “is great to be at home in a region, even this one.” If, as she says, “Experience is the greatest deterrent to fiction,” there are worse fates than not being able to get out much.
Her inventions run to the gaudy and distorted because that “is the only way to make people see,” but critics usually fail to notice the deadly forest of faithlessness for all its blasted trees: “when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.” And yet she seems inclined toward the twisted as much from personal taste as for its potential revelations: “Did you see the picture of Roy Rogers’s horse attending a church service in Pasadena?” she asks Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in 1952. “I forgot whether his name was Tex or Trigger but he was dressed fit to kill and looked like he was having a good time.”
Professors who turn her books into schematic exercises in symbol and message are her special cross, and she bears it unwillingly. When she doesn’t know the teacher who’s written her for an answer key, her response will be harsh. When she does, it will be merely exasperated: “My Lord, Billy,” she writes William Sessions in September 1960, “recover your simplicity. You ain’t in Manhattan.
Don’t inflict that stuff on the poor students there; they deserve better.” A writer who takes so long to produce her books cannot afford to be anything but practical, sometimes even in her choice of reading: “I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won’t get swamped.” She confines her worry over the death of the novel to the question of “whether the one I’m working on is dead.” Opposed to progressive education, to “learning for life” and to the pursuit of happiness (quite different from salvation), she pronounces literary “Theories” to be “worse than the Furies”—and dies a merciful decade before their still-current mutations devoured the academic study of English.
Catholic doctrines are another matter. These are necessities of faith, not delusions of the intellect. They humble the mind into its proper place: once inside the Church, a person’s intellect “will cease to be tyrannical.” Dogma, she insists,
increases
her vision and freedom to create. To the young writer Shirley Abbott, in 1956:
It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing. I don’t write to bring anybody a message, as you know yourself that this is not the purpose of the novelist; but the message I find in the life I see is a moral message.
She does not want religious mysteries explained and cannot see man being truly free unless Hell continues to exist. O’Connor and John Hawkes conduct an ongoing epistolary argument about their two very different devils. “My Devil,” she explains,
has a name, a history and a definite plan. His name is Lucifer, he’s a fallen angel, his sin is pride, and his aim is the destruction of the Divine plan. Now I judge that your Devil is co-equal to God, not his creature; that pride is his virtue, not his sin; and that his aim is not to destroy the Divine plan because there isn’t any Divine plan to destroy. My Devil is objective and yours is subjective.