Yours Ever (29 page)

She calls herself a “hillbilly Thomist” and, as early as 1955, has an exact sense of how her faith must drive her work: “I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this
within
the Church is to bear a burden.” She shows palpable agitation when Robert Lowell and Betty Hester, her most frequent correspondent, leave the Church: “The loss of [faith] is basically a failure of appetite, assisted by sterile intellect.” She loves to hate the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s
positive-thinking columnist, Dr. Frank Crane, and in 1963, finds John F. Kennedy’s somber funeral “a salutary tonic for this back-slapping gum-chewing hiya-kid nation.”

Beset with “a stomach full of liberal religion,” O’Connor takes every opportunity she has to set straight interested correspondents on the subject of divine intervention. God does not engage in any “continuous miraculous meddling … in human affairs.” His grace is not sprinkled like fairy dust but obtained through “faith and the sacraments” and over our own great capacities for resistance. O’Connor’s literal belief in Purgatory is a personal necessity to someone whose “virtues are as timid as [her] vices.” Faith is not meant to be “emotionally satisfying,” and self-knowledge is a waste of time unless it leads to salvation.

Her theology is finally as practical as her literary criticism. “Do you know the Hopkins-Bridges correspondence?” she writes William Sessions, the same man she urges to “recover [his] simplicity” in aesthetic matters. “Bridges wrote Hopkins at one point and asked him how he could possibly learn to believe, expecting, I suppose, a metaphysical answer. Hopkins only said, ‘Give alms.’” She had doubts about the efficacy of this advice, but she repeated it to others and tried to use her own letters in an ad hoc missionary way. Toward the end, as her death approached, they became occasions for asking instead of answering. “[T]oday in bed I did a day’s work,” she informs Janet McKane in late June 1964. “This must be the result of my friends’ prayers”—spiritual favors she has taken to requesting through the mail.

LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT
Hopkins’s letters to Robert Bridges, which must have had a special appeal for O’Connor, coming as they did from another writer living in spiritual fervor and literary isolation.

In 1866, John Henry Newman, making sure that the twenty-two-year-old Gerard Manley Hopkins was “acting deliberately,” reminded him that he “must come to the church to accept and believe,” which is just what Hopkins proceeded to do with disciplined intensity. (He gave his parents the news of his conversion in a letter.) Submitting to the Church and entering its priesthood, Hopkins would eventually choose a very different law and canon to rebel against: the rules and pantheon of English poetry. Having burned his own youthful work and denied himself all verse writing for the half dozen or so years of his novitiate, Hopkins later burst into renewed composition, upending English metrics with an almost Luciferian clatter.

He required a correspondent who was, like himself, vocationally split, and he found one in Dr. Robert Bridges, a young writer pulling a long double shift of medicine and poetry. Their twenty-three-year-long epistolary exchange may be free from the more familiar competitiveness of full-time men of letters, but it is hardly without its strains. Hopkins can never quite get over trying to be Bridges’s confessor as well as his critic. Thirteen years into their letter writing, the Jesuit proselytizes his correspondent: “You understand of course that I desire to see you a Catholic or, if not that, a Christian or, if not that, at least a believer in the true God.” But Bridges is a tough sell. He upsets Hopkins by implying that the priest’s own zeal is somehow temporary and unserious; disgusts him by taking pleasure in another priest’s abandonment of his vows; and generally exasperates him with earthbound thinking. “You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does,” Hopkins scolds. “You mean an interesting uncertainty … But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty … the interest a Catholic feels is, if I may say so, of a far finer kind than yours. Yours turns out to be a curiosity only.”

In 1879, lest there be an epistolary breach, Hopkins proposes not compromise but compartments: “Morals and scansion not being in one keeping, we will treat them in separate letters.” Unsurprisingly, this separation of church and verse fails: two years later Hopkins is trying to make Bridges a believer by means of Bridges’s own poetry: “This poem as well as that sonnet express your belief that the mind is immortal … You cannot wisely neglect this world of being to which you imply that you will come. In it or above it is the sovereign spirit of God, to whom you should now at once make your approach with the humblest and most earnest prayers.”

When he does confine the subject to versification, there is still nothing gentle about Hopkins’s ministry. He is compulsively corrective of Bridges’s work—its technical shortcomings, figurative flaws, unconscious imitations. As he giveth (“The
Early Autumn
very beautiful and tender”), so must he taketh away (“but in the octet at all events not perfectly achieved”). He can, very occasionally, contrive wonderful compliments (“If I were not your friend I shd. wish to be the friend of the man that wrote your poems”), but the dominant message is that very little of Bridges ever measures up. Even someone else’s positive notice of the poet falls short: “The review in the
St. James’s
is pleasing and appreciative, though it might have been stronger.”

When speaking of his own work, Hopkins may worry about the cloistered routines that have left him with “so little varied experience” compared to other poets, and he may pick homely metaphors for his own creative process (he has “two sonnets soaking” and another “hot on the anvil”), but none of this really conveys his confidence—perhaps even sinful pride—in the excellence and rightness of his enterprise. By the summer of 1877, when revising “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” he has “fixed [his] principles” and wed himself to the sprung rhythm of irregular stresses that will give his poems their unique, torrential sound. As he urges it upon Bridges (“I hope to convert you”), he can make the technique sound more like a political platform or production quota than an aesthetic (“I have consistently carried out my rhyming system”), and he rebuts Bridges’s objections in the manner of a commissar: “your criticism
is of no use, being only a protest memorialising me against my whole policy and proceedings.” What he’s doing is not
meant
to be completely clear, he insists; Bridges should “take breath and read it with the ears.”

Bridges’s breath must sometimes have been taken away by the pugnacity of this unpublished cleric, who finds portions of Tennyson “commonplace and wanting in nobility,” and judges the Brownings to be “very fine … in their ghastly way.” But Hopkins gradually loses hope of seeing his own eccentric poems in print. As the years pass, teaching, clerical duties and poor health confine him to a “coffin of weakness and dejection;” he approaches the end of his short life with more plans than finished productions (“all my world is scaffolding”), worn out, the modern reader of his letters feels, by a grinding vocation that stole him from his real one.

“You are my public,” he wrote Bridges in 1877. The substitution of a single man for a whole readership in some ways equals the letters’ replacement of any face-to-face relationship between the two correspondents. Throughout the long exchange, especially in its early days, Hopkins declines opportunities for the two men to rendezvous in person (“I daresay we may not meet again for years”), even though limits can be put on the number of letters he may receive or send and his superiors have the power to censor incoming and outgoing mail.

Hopkins’s unwillingness to address Bridges by his Christian name (“for first it wd. not feel natural to me and secondly it wd. be unnecessary, for your surname is the prettier”)—even while he enjoys Bridges’s use of
his
first name—gives the reader a sense of the odd, magnetic field of reserve and intimacy over which this correspondence travels. One finds a teasing element on Hopkins’s side of it, a flexing of emotional strength that one associates with a lover who’s in control: “As for this letter,” he explains, “it is to soothe you and stop your mouth; I will write more elsewhen.” On December 18, 1881, however, it’s Hopkins who pouts: “Bridges, my dear heart, why have you not written?” Perhaps because less than two months before, Hopkins had pronounced a letter he was sending a piece of “charity to wile away your time, for I ought to be at other things
than letterwriting: it certainly has wiled away mine.” After Bridges takes a bride, a certain awkwardness, bordering on the creepy, encloses itself with one or two of Hopkins’s letters. The priest confesses to “a kind of spooniness and delight over married people,” and closes with a “goodnight to Mrs. Bridges or (what is more beautiful) to your wife.”

Hopkins sometimes lets us see the correspondence’s real importance to him through nervous, mock-heroic flourishes. On April 6, 1877, he sends a postcard, like a small herald, to announce the dispatch of a full-length letter “laden to her gunwales with judicious remarks;” four years later he acts surprised to find that his “magic nib has … minuetted and gavotted into the syllables of [Bridges’s] name,” as he writes a letter whose “first movement shall be something of a stately saraband.” Even so, one finds him, at least once, ending with “No more now”—that age-old envoi as strange as it is commonplace, by which a letter writer acts as if what he’s composing is a dalliance to be resisted, or a bedtime story whose prolongation would be good for neither teller nor listener.

In Hopkins’s case, it is only when there is truly to be no more—six weeks before his death, in his last letter to Bridges—that he finally signs off with his Christian name. “Gerard” is the final word he mails his correspondent, who goes on to outlive him by forty years and who, in 1918, publishes Hopkins’s poems. The priest’s one-man “public”—the doctor he couldn’t bring to God—at last secured Hopkins a real audience, and a second kind of afterlife.

IT IS DIFFICULT
to imagine an aspiring poet
more
in the literary thick of things than Keats. If creative isolation was Hopkins’s condition, the letters of his Romantic predecessor show a crush of collegiality: “Shelley was there;” “Haydon is in Town;” “I have seen a good deal of Wordsworth. Hazlitt is lecturing on Poetry at the Surrey institution—I shall be there next Tuesday;” “I met Mr. Green … in conversation with Coleridge—I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable.” Yes, it would be—to us, too. Letters from this scrappy, five-foot-tall versifier still burst
out of their envelopes with every sort of vigor and longing, from the careerist to the ethereal.

Keats’s professional ambitions never tire a reader, because his pursuit of them usually resembles that of the young man trying to get the girl. In fact, poetry
is
the girl. On a Saturday in March 1819, he declares: “I know not why Poetry and I have been so distant lately—I must make some advances soon or she will cut me entirely.”

More often, he’s all over her. This aspirant youth, in such a hurry that he nicknames himself “Junkets” (say “John Keats” very fast), will “read and write about eight hours a day” and think about Poetry even longer than that—“so long together that I could not get to sleep at night.” At twenty-one, he’s swinging for the fences of posterity, banishing doubts as fast as they can arise:

Despite critics’ attacks on his ornate, upstart productions, he has a brazen confidence that he “shall be among the English Poets after [his] death.” His letters seem full of foreknowledge, for himself and for us; all through them one hears signals of the poems that are yet to come: “I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty,” Keats writes to his brother and sister-in-law in December 1818, five months before writing “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Still, the road up Parnassus is an obstacle course. Along with reviewers determined to block passage by a Cockney interloper, there are editors bent on taking too much credit for Keats’s own efforts. Add to this the landlady’s children, who make too much noise for
any poet’s concentration, and top it all off with the torment of going to the bank—“to me worse than any thing in Dante.” His friends and acquaintances are always quarrelling, and there is never a time when everyone’s healthy at once. More often it’s nearly the opposite: “Every body is ill.” His brother Tom spits blood like a motif, reminding a reader of the tuberculosis that will soon kill two of the three Keats boys, including Junkets, who even so never loses faith that there is “something real” in life, or that he has “that in me which will bear the buffets of the world.”

“Real” is a favorite word, one he puts, for example, into a note thanking Benjamin Bailey for an epistolary kindness: “Your tearing, my dear friend, a spiritless and gloomy Letter up to rewrite to me is what I shall never forget—it was to me a real thing.” And yet, we would not want the same favor from Keats himself, because his troubles never lie on the page as mere complaints. They’re superior grist for his spiritual business here on Earth: “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pain and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?” he writes in 1819, at the age of twenty-three. We live “where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook … it is the text from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity.”