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The pairing of Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) and Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) may seem a surprising and somewhat unexpected association: one a poet and the other a novelist and short-story writer; one a New England/Canadian/Brazilian sojourner and the other a rooted Georgia southerner; one a religious skeptic and the other a devout Roman Catholic; one homosexual and one heterosexual. Moreover , the two never met in person, though they did correspond intermittently, and Bishop once chatted with O’Connor on the telephone when passing through Savannah . Although they apparently had little influence on each other as writers, I want to make the claim that the connections between these two major figures are far from superficial, and the impact that each made upon the other was profound. In addition, their work shows surprising similarities, however different the ends to which they exercised it. Each writer openly admired a quality in the work of the other that was paramount in her own, an unyielding commitment to seeing the world with a scrupulous accuracy and depicting it in highly sensuous language. For both, the precision of the eye (and all the other senses) in portraying the world comprises the foundation of their art. Characterization within their work is so various as to defy easy categories, but each shares a presentation that is gently tolerant of small human imperfections, especially as manifest among the working class, whom both knew well. O’Connor, more than Bishop, employs an unsparing satire on egotism, materialism , and human exploitation, but Bishop is also consistently attentive to the causes and victims of poverty and exploitation. As she says in a letter: “My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see. But I think we should be gay in spite of it” (PPL 863–64). Bishop’s agnosticism allows for little of O’Connor’s more overt Christianity. Yet, each reflects the other in a method that draws liberally upon a symbology of Elizabeth Bishop and Flannery O’Connor Minding and Mending a Fallen World George S. Lensing BISHOP AND FLANNERY O’CONNOR 187 Christian objects, allusions, and parables. As I hope to show, such objects often set in motion certain sacramental and transcendent reverberations. When O’Connor died in 1964, Bishop wrote to the poet Robert Lowell: “I feel awful about Flannery. Why didn’t I go to visit her when she asked me to. And I hadn’t even met her, or answered her last letter. . . . I feel awe in front of that girl’s courage and discipline. I have some wonderfully funny letters from her—one about Lourdes” (WIA 552). Shortly afterward, Bishop wrote a brief memorial for the New York Review of Books in which she said: “I lived in Florida for several years next to a flourishing ‘Church of God’ (both white and black congregation), where every Wednesday night Sister Mary and her husband ‘spoke in tongues.’ After those Wednesday nights, nothing Flannery O’Connor ever wrote could seem at all exaggerated to me” (PPL 717). The idiot son of Rayber, whom Tarwater simultaneously baptizes and drowns in O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear It Away, is named Bishop—a character, she wrote Lowell, “named for me, I think” (WIA 309). O’Connor’sadmirationof Bishopwasnolessfervent.“Ihaveagreatrespectfor your own work,” she wrote, “though I am almost too ignorant ever to know why I like what I like” (Collected Works 1022). The two women did indeed share certain similarities: hardened by the catastrophes of life with a stoic toughness, living as writers outside the ordinary geography of their peers and often in isolation; keen observersofthosearoundthem—especially,forO’Connor,theblacksofGeorgia, and for Bishop, the Brazilian working class, many of whom she knew during her many years living in that country. In one letter, O’Connor wrote, “I hadn’t realized that life in Brazil might resemble life here in the South but I guess there are many similarities” (Collected Works 1021). Both lost their fathers at an early age. Both were skilled amateur painters. They shared a literary editor, Robert Giroux, who became a close friend to each. Both abhorred and satirized hypocrisy; O’Connor’s fiction underscores Bishop’s conclusion in an interview: “I don’t like modern religiosity in general; it always seems to lead to a tone of moral superiority” (Conversations 23). Each had a great capacity...

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