The playwright Maryat Lee was an unlikely friend for Flannery O’Connor. After attending Union Theological Seminary, Lee remained skeptical of all religious institutions. O’Connor, on the other hand, was deeply committed to the Roman Catholic Church. Lee had a populist streak; in an effort to reach “the people” she staged one of her plays (Dope!, 1952) in a vacant lot in Harlem to crowd of two thousand. O’Connor was a notorious recluse, crippled by lupus, and living at home with her mother in Milledgeville, Georgia. Yet Lee was one of her most avid readers, and at one point even professed a passionate love to the author (which O’Connor, politely if awkwardly, rejected).
4 April 57
It is not known by everybody but: the peafowl is called peafowl because his favorite dish is peas-green peas, black-eyed peas, sweets or any peas that come to mind. Furthermore, the peacock sheds his tail every August and the alert owner goes behind with a bucket and picks up each feather. You are the recipient of a last August’s feather and it cost the bird in question no sqwark (sp?). In fact I am sure he would be delighted to know it will be among first-class passengers as he has no use for the lower orders. The other day I saw your brother who said, “Well are you going to New York?” “What for?” says I in my stupid way. “Oh,” he says, “atmosphere and all that, I heard she asked you and I think that was awfully nice of her.” I said I thought it was too but I reckoned I’d have to put up with the atmosphere around here. My only other Japanese acquaintance is Mr. Sanobu Fujikawa, who several years ago lived in Kamakura City. He spent an afternoon on our porch one time, brought by some friends of mine from Nashville while he was there on a Fulbright. He too was interested in Contemporary American Literature.
I would like you to bring me back one saber-toothed tiger (with cub) and a button off Mao’s jacket and any chickens that you see that I don’t have already, I mean kind of chickens…Presently a thank you letter arrived saying the Tokyo Chamber thanked the Atlanta Chamber for the grits seeds, that they had been planted but had not yet come up. That story is just to illustrate that you are going amongst a heathen people and that you may not always be understood. Frankly I will feel much relieved when you get back here. I guess all the bumbling boys at Notre Dame will be forced in off the golf courses and football fields to squint at a live novelist. I may not say anything, I may just make faces. Anyway, the word beauty never crosses my lips.
Well, cheers and kindly keep me posted on your progress in the Orient and do not neglect to see about your return passage.
Sustained anxiety.
From Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1988), pg. 212-213.
FURTHER READING
A recording taken from Flannery O’Connor’s speech at Notre Dame (the “bumbling boys” referenced above).
A history of Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.
The Church and The Fiction Writer, O’Connor’s treatise on the art.