Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Flannery O’Connor

36 / flannery o’Connor mary flannery O’connor (1925–64) was born in savannah, Georgia, the only child of regina cline O’connor and edward O’connor, the latter of whom died when flannery was fifteen years old. she attended the Peabody Laboratory school, Georgia state college for Women, and the iowa Writers’ Workshop. in 1951, having been diagnosed with the hereditary lupus from which her father had died, she returned to the ancestral farm in milledgeville, where she lived out her remaining fifteen years by writing two novels, thirty-one short stories, many reviews and essays, and letters to numerous friends that included betty Hester, robert Lowell, elizabeth bishop, Porter, the mystery writer cecil dawkins, and the classics translator robert fitzgerald and his wife, sally. she was a devout catholic whose religious beliefs as well as the southern Gothic tradition infused her fiction. source: Letters of Flannery O’Connor:The Habit of Being, ed. and intro. sally fitzgerald (new york: farrar, straus and Giroux, 1979), 260, 275, 276, 416. to cecil dawkins, 22 december 1957 i have never met miss K.A.P. All the men who know her seem to like her as i strongly gather she has a way with them, but i know a few women who seem to like her too. i have friends in nashville who know her rather well and they say she’s always pleasant. so many catty remarks circulate and people always suppose that there is rivalry between women writers. if so, i always figure they are not the best writers. to “A” [betty Hester], 4 April 1958 Katherine Anne Porter read in macon on the 27th and the next day the Gossetts23 brought her over to have lunch with us. she was very pleasant . . .24 When she asked me 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, perhaps she would get there some day and make a Part 5. new york, europe, michigan, virginia, and Washington, dc / 169 novena that she would finish her novel [Ship of Fools]—she’s been on it 27 years. After that the conversation somehow got on the subject of death— there were two professors from north carolina and the Gossetts and us and her—in the way that death is discussed at dinner tables, as if it were a funny subject. she said she thought it was very nice to believe that we would all meet in heaven and she rather hoped we would but she didn’t really know. she wished she knew who exactly was in charge of this universe, and where she was going. she would be glad to go where she was expected if she knew. All this accompanied by much banter from the gentlemen. it was a little coy and a little wistful but there was a terrible need evident underneath it. . . .25 to cecil dawkins, 14 April 1958 miss Katherine Anne was very nice indeed.very pleasant and agreeable, crazy about my peacocks; plowed all over the yard behind me in her spikeheeled shoes to see my various kinds of chickens. i didn’t hear her read but most of the people i talked to who did thought she read well. they say she had on a black halter type dress sans back & long black gloves which interfered with her turning the pages. After each story, she made a kind of Katherine Anne Porter, flannery O’connor, and one of O’connor’s “chickens” that Porter admired, at O’connor’s home in milledgeville, Georgia, April 1958. courtesy Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, special collections, University of maryland, college Park, Libraries. 170 / Katherine Anne Porter remembered curtsy, which someone described as “wobbly.” she’s about sixty-five. she’s been on her novel 27 years and says all her friends call it “you-know-what.” i hope i won’t be on mine 27 years from now.26 to cecil dawkins, 8 november 1960 i have been recuperating from minnesota,27 and then an Arts festival at Wesleyan attended also by caroline [Gordon] and miss K. A. Porter. caroline spent the weekend here after it . . .28 and one night of it, we had a lot of them to supper. Katherine Anne remembered to inquire...