Why Flannery?

I have a dear friend who, shall we say, does not share my enthusiasm for all things Flannery. I thought of her when I recently came across a letter between O’Connor and playwright Maryat Lee.

The 1959 letter touches on everything from race relations to cocktail parties, Flannery O’Connor uses friend Brainard Cheney as a foil to explain her view of race relations in the South and in the Northeast - particularly urbane and sophisticated New York City. Mr. Cheney, she says, is trying to write a novel “set in interracial circles in New York,” but after two weeks in Gotham has been “unable to meet one Negro” socially. Cheney, she explains, would probably like to meet James Baldwin.

O’Connor apparently had been asked to see James Baldwin in Georgia but declined to do so because it would cause the “greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion.” She added that she had read one of his stories and “it was a good one.”

She ends the letter by suggesting that if Cheney wants to try again, “I’ll get him to call you and maybe you could scout up a few,” though she thinks he will instead rely on his imagination.

I don’t know whether Cheney ever met Baldwin or which story of Baldwin’s O’Connor read and found to be “a good one.” It could not have been “Going to Meet the Man,” which was not written until after O’Connor died. Nor did Cheney’s imagination allow him to finish that Northeast interracial novel - all his published works are set in the rural South.

So Adrienne, if you are reading this, I’d like to suggest that, in the parlance of our times, “it’s complicated.” Or not. So let’s talk soon - at Flannery’s.