Dear Regina: Flannery O'Connor's Letters from Iowa

By Monica Carol Miller

Dear Regina offers a remarkable window into the early years of one of America’s best-known literary figures. While at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop from 1945 to 1948, Flannery O’Connor wrote to her mother Regina Cline O’Connor (who she addressed by her first name) nearly every day and sometimes more than once a day. The complete correspondence of more than six hundred letters is housed at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. From that number, Miller selects 486 letters to show us a young adult learning to adjust to life on her own for the first time. In these letters, O’Connor shares details about living in a boardinghouse and subsisting on canned food and hot-plate dinners, and she asks for advice about a wide range of topics, including how to assuage her relatives’ concerns about her well-being and how to buy whiskey to use for cough medicine.

These letters, which are being published for the first time with the unprecedented permission of the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust, also off er readers important insights into O’Connor’s intellectually formative years, when her ideas about writing, race, class, and interpersonal relationships were developing and changing. Her preoccupation with money, employment, and other practical matters reveals a side of O’Connor that we do not often see in her previously published letters. Most importantly, the letters show us her relationship with her mother in a much more intimate, positive light than we have seen before. The importance of this aspect of the letters cannot be overstated, given that so much literary analysis conflates her and Regina with the “sour, deformed daughters and self-righteous mothers” that critic Louise Westling sees so often in O’Connor’s work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780820361840

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DEAR REGINA

A publication of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University

SERIES EDITOR

Clinton R. Fluker

Emory University

FOUNDING EDITOR

Pellom McDaniels

Emory University

Flannery O’Connor’s Letters from Iowa

EDITED BY MONICA CAROL MILLER

The University of Georgia Press

Athens

Published by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

© 2022 by the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust

All rights reserved

Designed by Erin Kirk

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: O’Connor, Flannery, author. | O’Connor, Regina Cline, addressee. | Miller, Monica Carol, 1974– editor.

Title: Dear Regina : Flannery O’Connor’s letters from Iowa / edited by Monica Carol Miller.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2022] | Series: A publication of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021062321 (print) | LCCN 2021062322 (ebook) | ISBN 9780820361857 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820361840 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: O’Connor, Flannery—Correspondence. | O’Connor, Regina Cline. | Iowa Writers’ Workshop. | Women authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Creative writing (Higher education)—United States. | Mothers and daughters—United States.

Classification: LCC PS3565.C57 Z48 2022 (print) | LCC PS3565.C57 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54 [B]—dc23/eng/20220203

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062321

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062322

CONTENTS

Introduction

Editor’s Note

Cast of Characters

Academic Year 1945–1946

Academic Year 1946–1947

Fall Semester 1947

Coda

Works Cited

Index

INTRODUCTION

In the fall of 1945, twenty-year-old Flannery O’Connor arrived at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, to begin graduate school after earning a bachelor of arts degree in social sciences from Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) in Milledgeville, Georgia. Although she had been admitted to Iowa’s Graduate School of Journalism, once there she sought out Paul Engle, the highly respected director of the Writers’ Workshop. Their memorable first meeting has often been recounted:

When she finally spoke, her Georgia dialect sounded so thick to his Midwestern ear that he asked her to repeat her question. Embarrassed by an inability a second time to understand, Engle handed her a pad to write what she had said. So in schoolgirl script, she put down three short lines: My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop? Engle suggested that she drop off writing samples, and they would consider her, late as it was. The next day a few stories arrived, and to his near disbelief, he found them to be imaginative, tough, alive. She was instantly accepted to the Workshop, both the name of Engle’s writing class and of his MFA graduate writing program, the first in the nation, to which she would switch her affiliation from the Graduate School of Journalism by the second semester. (Gooch 117–18)

O’Connor’s education at Iowa was an important step in her evolution as a writer as well as an introduction to the writer’s life and community in which she would spend the rest of her short life and career. It was at Iowa that she wrote the beginnings of Wise Blood. There she met Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and others who would help her gain traction in publishing as well as provide the connections that would get her into Yaddo’s artists’ community. The work she accomplished at Iowa and the connections she made there formed the foundation for her future writing success.

While scholars have written about how her time at Iowa shaped her writing, there has been less focus (and few resources freely available to scholars and others) on how her time at Iowa shaped her personally. The correspondence in Dear Regina has only been freely available to scholars in the manuscript collections at Emory University since 2014; even since then, access required travel to Atlanta and appropriate credentials. Up until she left for graduate school, O’Connor had grown up in Savannah and then Milledgeville, Georgia: both smallish, southern towns in which she was a member of well-respected, long-established families. Iowa was a revelation for many reasons: she was away from home, away from her known climate, region, family, and habits. Iowa gave her an opportunity to reinvent herself, as this was when she started going by Flannery O’Connor, rather than Mary Flannery, as well as creatively, as her work evolved from the cartoons she first came to Iowa to create to the incisive fiction that she produced as a student in the Writers’ Workshop.

Yet while her graduate school experience allowed for such reinvention, much about her former life stayed constant: her daily mass attendance, her spiritual devotion, and—surprising to many—her strong relationship with her mother. When scholars and fans of O’Connor alike consider the mother-daughter relationships in her work, they tend to assume that the dynamics in the stories have their basis in O’Connor’s relationship with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor. To be sure, much of this interpretation is based on Flannery’s own descriptions of their relationship. Often referring sardonically to Regina as the parent in letters to her friends,¹ Flannery seemed at times to chafe at living her adult life with her mother, who disapproved of anything remotely inappropriate. (Flannery’s father, Edward O’Connor, died of lupus in 1941, when she was fifteen.) In a letter to Elizabeth Hester, O’Connor admitted to sharing a disposition with her character Joy-Hulga Hopewell in Good Country People, even giving her character an unattractive sweatshirt, a source of real-life contention between O’Connor and her mother: The only embossed [sweatshirt] I ever had had a fierce-looking bulldog on it with the word GEORGIA over him. I wore it all the time, it being my policy at that point in life to create an unfavorable impression. My urge for such has to be repressed as my mother does not approve of making a spectacle of oneself when over thirty (Letter to A., 5 Aug. 1955). Biographical readings of O’Connor’s work have been further encouraged by Louise Westling’s foundational 1978 article on the sour, deformed daughters and self-righteous mothers who appear in her fiction (511). Scholars have continued to read O’Connor’s stories through this lens of mother/daughter animosity, as Claire Kahane’s identification illustrates: [I]t is most often maternal figures, mothers and matriarchs, she argues, who are the objects of assault by enraged and misfit children of all ages who haven’t gotten what they need (3). Many readers continue to assume that the relationship between Flannery and Regina was similar to that of Joy-Hulga and her mother in Good Country People, that of an overbearing mother preoccupied with appearances and her petulant, overintellectual daughter.

However, the 2014 acquisition of a significant collection of Flannery O’Connor’s papers by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University has provided access to a significant amount of material previously unavailable (see Justice, Flannery O’Connor Archive). Within the nineteen linear feet (forty boxes) of papers in this archive is a collection of letters that Flannery wrote to Regina nearly daily from 1945 to 1947, while she was a graduate student at Iowa. Collected here for the first time in print, the letters in Dear Regina reveal that their day-to-day relationship had much more depth and affection than the generally accepted narratives would allow. Indeed, I believe such characterizations have exaggerated and overemphasized the contentiousness between the two women. Flannery is clearly a willing participant in their correspondence, noting early on that I am the only one here who hears from home every day and should like to continue to be (5 Oct. 1945). I have argued that psycho-biographical readings such as Westling’s distract from what I see as several striking currents of critique in O’Connor’s work, including those of southern pastoralism and gender stereotypes.² Indeed, I believe that exaggerations of the contention between Flannery and Regina have led to misreadings of the mother-daughter relationships in O’Connor’s stories. A willingness to take such mother figures as Mrs. Hopewell in Good Country People or Mrs. Crater in The Life You Save May Be Your Own seriously, rather than reject them as flat, comical characters, offers enticing new readings of O’Connor’s fiction.

The letters from Flannery to Regina during her time in Iowa collected here bolster such sympathetic readings. Written from September 1945, when she first arrived in Iowa City and began her graduate studies, through the fall of 1947, the letters provide insights not only into this mother-daughter relationship but into Flannery’s own personal and professional development.³ Some letters are brief reports of hard work and regular meals. Others include detailed accounts of the logistics of life away from home, the complexities of travel arrangements, dental appointments, getting typewriter ribbons, and food—so much food!

One notable aspect of these letters that has surprised and interested scholars is Flannery’s preoccupation with food (see, e.g., Davis and McCoy). She reports on her window-ledge delicatessen, where she keeps eggs and milk chilled in the cold Iowa winters, as well as her hot-plate dinners, the casseroles offered at the school cafeteria, and the comfort foods from home she misses and craves. For example, during the fall of 1946 Flannery writes to Regina what have become known among O’Connor scholars as her mayonnaise letters. In many letters, food plays an important role: she consistently comments on her acquisition of food, her meals, and the care packages she receives from home. She also makes references to food shortages, providing important insights into daily life in the 1940s. Despite the end of World War II, food shortages continued in the United States and worldwide in 1946, as Flannery’s experiences reflect (see, e.g., Leuchtenberg). In one letter, she mentions that she has not been able to find mayonnaise anywhere, and she asks Regina to send her a jar of homemade mayonnaise. Over the course of twelve days, Flannery mentions mayonnaise in eight letters, asking Regina repeatedly to send her some, to see if one of their relatives will send her some, lamenting her lack of mayonnaise—and, when it finally arrives in the mail, rejoicing at her good fortune.

Scholars have already begun considering the meaning of Flannery’s extended preoccupation with mayonnaise, particularly with regard to what these letters reveal about the mother-daughter relationship. Certainly, mayonnaise represents the comforts of home, especially the homemade version; it is easy to read her repeated requests as evidence of homesickness, the kind of nostalgia favorite foods are intended to cure, as Caroline McCoy observes (Flannery O’Connor’s Two Deepest Loves). Indeed, citing Brad Gooch’s biography of the author, David A. Davis suggests that, Although O’Connor insisted on several occasions that she was not homesick at all, she wrote to her mother every day and craved food from home, which suggests that food was a form of familial connection for her, so the mayonnaise represents attachment to her mother (32). Davis extends this biographical reading to her fiction, arguing that food acts as a language of connection in her mother-daughter stories, so we can read the stories’ internal dynamics and character tension through food (32). The myriad food references throughout Dear Regina not only provide a window into Flannery’s day-to-day life for her readers and fans but also open up possibilities for new readings of her work through the framework of food studies.

Unlike Davis, however, Caroline McCoy dismisses the idea of Flannery’s homesickness, noting how often Flannery writes to Regina of thriving in Iowa and her intentions to develop her literary career outside of Georgia. Rather, McCoy believes that O’Connor’s penned testimonials to mayonnaise are, to me, small attempts at connection. A thousand miles from her mother’s kitchen, the absence of the ingredient could become a shared curiosity and an acknowledgment of maternal influence. I imagine her wishing to affirm her love of home and family, even as she anticipated leaving both behind (Flannery O’Connor’s Two Deepest Loves). Despite their differences in interpretation, both Davis and McCoy see Flannery’s preoccupation with mayonnaise in these letters as proof of a strong connection between the daughter and mother, though the tenor of that bond is complicated.

The letters in Dear Regina depict a complex and dynamic relationship between mother and daughter during the time that Flannery was developing her writing craft in graduate school. They document her growth as both a writer and a young woman as she navigates a new chapter of her life in completely unfamiliar territory: in the Midwest, in graduate school, and—importantly—in Engle’s challenging community of writers at the University of Iowa. Engle’s strong vision existed within the wave of post–World War II creative writing programs whose long-lasting effect on American letters continues to be felt and understood. According to Eric Bennett in Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War, Engle’s creation of the workshop found itself at the cutting edge of a movement that transformed the institutions of American literature (88).

Flannery originally enrolled in the Graduate School of Journalism in 1945, submitting drawings and cartoons to the Art Department with the goal of being admitted to the advanced drawing course sequence. Her original goal was to continue creating the kinds of cartoons she had published in various publications in high school and during her undergraduate career at Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College and State University), aiming for an eventual career publishing in venues such as the New Yorker (Gooch 121–22; see also O’Connor, The Cartoons). From her first days at Iowa, Flannery exhibits a focused, confident attitude toward her work. Writing to Regina about her submissions to the Art Department, she reports: Saw the Art people today and they looked at my stuff and seemed much interested, helpful, appreciative, etc. Am signed up for an advanced drawing course with a man who has done cartooning and says he can help me (21 Sept. 1945). In this same letter, she describes that first meeting with Engle, which became nearly mythic in Engle’s retelling. For Flannery, however—at least in her letter to Regina—it was a much less dramatic experience: Also got into the Writer’s Workshop that was supposed to be so difficult—without any trouble. The differences between Flannery’s succinct account of her admission to the workshop and that of Engle provide important insights into Flannery’s inner confidence in her work, regardless of how she might have appeared to Engle upon their first meeting.

At Iowa, Flannery’s craft developed in an environment where her work was taken seriously. After the first meeting with Engle, Flannery reports, The more I stay around here, the more I think I will be able to make money after this training. These people know how to do things (21 Sept. 1945). Flannery saw her time in the workshop as an important apprenticeship; she approached the development of her writing as the honing of a craft. In her letter about Paul Horgan, an American writer who taught at the workshop while she was there, she describes him admiringly as very thorough and seems to be above all a craftsman which is what I need (21 Feb. 1946). Flannery’s understanding of writing as a craft reflects the larger movement in MFA programs at this time, of which the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was an exemplar. Christopher Kempf describes the craft sensibility of this era’s workshop approach as a synthesis of expressive labor and guild-like programmatic discipline (4), a succinct description of Flannery’s experience. After Horgan leads a critique of one of her stories, for example, Flannery writes: He is a colonel, by the way, just got out of the army—big discipline man—insists the writer should write a certain number of hours a day at a given time regularly and without interruption. Which is what I will have to do this summer, as I have to have 20 or 30 thousand words done before September on the novel I will have to do for my thesis (1 Mar. 1946). These letters in particular chronicle the birth of Flannery’s work ethic as a writer. The resulting discipline would last the rest of her life.

The letters in Dear Regina show Flannery’s introduction to a community of writers and publishers that would play an important role in her professional life and success. Engle brought in writers such as Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Lowell, all of whom quickly became admirers of her writing. Certainly, their critiques and celebrations of her work were both enlightening and pragmatically useful to her revision process. However, these established authors also showed a remarkable willingness to provide resources for her practical success. In these letters we find stories of Flannery’s mentors offering to help her find fellowships, jobs, and publishing opportunities.

In addition, their recognition of Flannery as an emerging writer also contributed to a palpable increase in her sense that a writing career was a very real possibility for her. During her first semester in the workshop, for example, she expresses feeling encouraged by a classmate’s suggestion of a possible market for her story (22 Oct. 1945), though that same month she says that there is only a vague possibility that I may be able to sell a story somewhere, but that is slight (28 Oct. 1945). One year later, however, after a summer at home in Milledgeville spent diligently writing and revising, Flannery’s letters are full of inquiries after the mail at home, expecting to hear back from such literary journals as the Sewanee Review and Accent, journals whose publication of her work would be a benchmark of her success as a serious writer. By the time she graduated in 1947 with her MFA, she had won the prestigious Rinehart-Iowa Award, which would support the completion and possible publication of her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), and she had also secured a teaching fellowship for the following year. Her letters during the fall of 1947 reveal in Flannery a clear understanding of what it will take to complete and publish her work.

However, the letters in Dear Regina reveal more than the evolution of Flannery’s writing career. They also tell the story of a young woman on her own for the first time, whose views on life are developing and changing in response to new experiences and encounters. Over the course of these two and a half years, Flannery grows from a young woman who seeks her mother’s advice about travel arrangements and what she should write in letters to family members to a confident woman who explains the finer details of her publishing contracts and even expresses concern over her mother’s own career. It is true that there are numerous moments of recognizable, sardonic complaint from daughter to mother, such as Flannery’s requests that Regina Please restrain yourself from sending me any more aprons. I know it will be hard but please restrain yourself (13 Oct. 1945). However, the letters also contain ample evidence showing their relationship to be one of mutual respect.

In one notable example, O’Connor expresses concern as her mother begins to take over the running of Andalusia, the family farm she inherited from her uncle. These letters not only demonstrate that Flannery understood the difficulties that her mother faced in running the farm but also provide a different picture of the relationship between the two women than is generally recognized. Upon learning that her mother is taking over running Andalusia,⁴ Flannery expresses concern for the difficulties she expects her mother to face in taking on this arduous responsibility. Over the course of several letters, O’Connor offers suggestions for renting out the house; frets that the farm will increase her mother’s worries; and, finally, reassures her mother that her reservations about the situation are more regarding the realities of farm life than they are doubts about her mother’s abilities. These letters highlight the fact that Flannery understands the expenses and troubles of running a farm are real and significant and offer a new perspective for reading the many characters in her stories created in Regina’s likeness: tough negotiators and driven businesswomen who also find the responsibilities of running a farm to be seriously demanding. Reading stories such as The Displaced Person, A Circle in the Fire, or even Good Country People in the context of these letters allows for a more complex reading of O’Connor’s work, especially as characters such as Mrs. McIntyre, Mrs. Cope, and Mrs. Hopewell acquire more depth than is typically attributed to them.

Indeed, Dear Regina revises somewhat the image of Regina Cline O’Connor as an overbearing mother and businesswoman. It is frustrating as a reader that we only have Flannery’s side of their correspondence, but much can still be gleaned from the context of Flannery’s letters. In addition to details about the farm, Flannery’s letters are filled with chatty questions and news about close family members and members of the Milledgeville community. For example, Flannery makes several references to her friend Mary Virginia Harrison, her closest friend in high school who was the daughter of the postmaster Ben Harrison and her mother’s friend Gussie Harrison. Although [t]heir match was made by their mothers, their friendship thrived throughout high school and college (Gooch 58). Despite grumbling about the details, Flannery even ultimately admits enjoying her friend’s visit to Iowa in the fall of 1947. The letters also contain regular references to Regina’s sisters Katie Cline, nicknamed Duchess by the family, and Mary Cline, whom Gooch characterizes as the impresario of the Cline Mansion in Milledgeville (54). Flannery’s letters also frequently reference Cousin Katie in Savannah, Regina’s cousin Kate Flannery Semmes, who lived next door to the O’Connors during Flannery’s childhood in Savannah. Regina named her daughter Mary Flannery after Cousin Katie’s mother, Mary Norton Flannery. As biographer Jean Cash notes, Regina had dual motives in naming her daughter ‘Mary Flannery’: she gave her the name both to honor Mrs. Semmes’s mother and to influence Katie Semmes herself to assist the family financially (11). Indeed, throughout the letters in Dear Regina, Flannery refers to the financial assistance from Cousin Katie, which helped her afford graduate school.

While the importance of Flannery’s family remains a constant in these letters, her sense of self undergoes remarkable changes. Certainly, her adoption of Flannery rather than Mary Flannery is the most visible marker of these changes. Several scholars have quoted from Flannery’s 1946 letter to Regina about her adopted pen name, in which she explains: As far as writing is concerned, the Mary is so much impedimenta. All my writing will be done under Flannery O’Connor. That is what I am called here and that is the way I want it (13 March 1946). However, less well known are her later letters to her mother in which she directly asks Regina herself to call her Flannery, rather than Mary Flannery: That is who I am, that is who I am always going to be, and the people whom I will associate with and do associate with know nothing else (4 Nov. 1947). Flannery’s assertion of her adopted identity in not only her professional life but also her personal life provides important insights into her evolution as a writer. Indeed, her insistence upon her preferred name offers intriguing opportunities to analyze Flannery’s conception of identity in her work and in her personal life.

Among the most significant aspects of Flannery’s psychosocial development revealed in Dear Regina is her changing understanding of race and racial dynamics. As the question of O’Connor’s own views on race, racism, and civil rights continues to be a focus of both scholarly and readerly inquiry, these letters are of particular interest because in them we see a definite evolution of O’Connor’s understanding of race. In her early letters, she complains about having to lock her door because of other boarders she describes as Cubans. She also admits that having a black classmate made her feel uncomfortable enough about a story she wrote (which included a black character) that she passed on reading the story out loud in class (19 Oct. 1945). Later in the correspondence, however, she defends having lunch with her black classmate to her mother (27 Oct. 1945) and rejects what she characterizes as Regina’s moral lecture on the race problem in a previous letter (2 Nov. 1945). This ambivalence stands in stark contrast to the previously published correspondence from later in Flannery’s life, after her lupus diagnosis and her move back to Milledgeville, where she lived with Regina until her death in 1964. Paul Elie characterized these later letters as possessing a habit of bigotry that grows more pronounced as O’Connor’s fiction, in matters of race, grows more complex and profound—a habit that seems to defy the pattern of her art (327). Putting the letters in Dear Regina in conversation with the letters previously published in The Habit of Being and The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor, along with scholarship about issues of race in O’Connor’s work, allows for a fuller understanding of how racism inflected her worldview.

Indeed, in the first book-length study of racism in O’Connor’s fiction and correspondence, scholar Angela Alaimo O’Donnell notes the contrast between how O’Connor’s fiction often enabled her to escape the limitations of her white perspective yet how the limitations in her own attitudes and behaviors [were] a more challenging enterprise (8). Hilton Als concurs with this assessment in his 2002 New Yorker article on O’Connor’s depiction of race, as he compares her inability to understand the Civil Rights Movement to that of William Faulkner, noting that O’Connor herself had difficulty assimilating the push toward integration which took the region so suddenly and violently in the fifties and sixties. She clung to the provincialism she satirized, and she was sometimes clumsy at conveying real life among blacks beyond her own circles—their class distinctions, their communication with one another apart from whites. Despite Als’s criticism of the limitations that O’Connor’s racialist thinking placed on her writing, he does praise her depiction of black characters in comparison to other white writers such as Faulkner, whose character Dilsey, for example, he criticizes as a fulcrum of integrity and compassion rather than a human being. In contrast, Als says that O’Connor’s black characters are not symbols defined in opposition to whiteness; they are the living people who were, physically at least, on the periphery of O’Connor’s own world. O’Connor’s upbringing in the overtly racist, pre–Civil Rights era South contributed to what Als characterizes as her most profound gift: her ability to describe impartially the [white] bourgeoisie she was born into, to depict with humor and without judgment her rapidly crumbling social order. As O’Donnell explains, O’Connor knows the thoughts of her white racist characters because she herself has entertained them. Such toxic animosities [of racism] are in the air O’Connor breathes and, inevitably, become part of her way of seeing the world (19).

To be fair, the letters in Dear Regina do not contain any specific epiphanies of racist reckoning on O’Connor’s part; rather, they are Flannery’s reports on the various experiences of a young woman—whose horizons are expanding—confronted with racially integrated environments and people from backgrounds very different than her own. In these new situations, Flannery’s worldview expands and changes from that of a sheltered, southern white girl from the Jim Crow South. O’Donnell points to her return south, forced to live with her mother in Milledgeville after her lupus diagnosis, as a return that meant, to some extent, readaptation to the culture that had produced her and was part and parcel of who she was (21). In Dear Regina, we see Flannery’s growth before this return and readaptation. In no way do these letters exculpate Flannery from the charges of racism that haunt her work—quite the contrary, in fact. Flannery’s potential for evolving a less racialist worldview apparent in these