From the Archives of UD: Caroline Gordon’s Catholic Imagination
A guest post by Christine Flanagan, Professor of English, Saint Joseph’s University
Today’s guest post is from Christine Flanagan, professor at St. Joseph’s University, editor of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon (University of Georgia Press, 2022), and a prizewinning author herself. About her book she has said: “Watching Gordon—an expert craftswoman, generous teacher, and deeply active convert to Catholicism—teach O’Connor (who becomes an expert craftswoman and teacher) has changed the path and content of my writing.”
Hearty greetings to the attendees of the 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference at the University of Dallas!
Two years ago, I spoke at the University of Dallas (a talk titled “Caroline Gordon and Flannery O’Connor: From Letters to Legacy”) and—as an afterthought—I asked to visit the archives of the Donald and Louise Cowan Center.
It was the most delightful discovery.
The archive, located in the Cowan-Blakley Library on the University of Dallas campus, primarily contains the papers of the visionary Donald and Louise Cowan, who came to UD in 1959.
There, in the archive, however, I found some remarkable artifacts related to Catholic novelist Caroline Gordon (1895-1981), who spent her final teaching years at the University of Dallas.
Many know Caroline Gordon as a writer of fiction, as a friend and former secretary to Ford Madox Ford, or as a wife to poet Allen Tate. Gordon’s longtime editor, Maxwell Perkins, was editor to Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe; in 1952, Gordon’s The Strange Children was nominated for the National Book Award alongside books by J.D. Salinger and Truman Capote. The list of Gordon’s accomplishments—too lengthy to summarize here—is as startling as is her absence from contemporary awareness.
Caroline Gordon is also quietly recognized as a longtime mentor to notable Catholic writers like Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, both of whom credited Gordon with formidable support, both in revising and publishing their work. My book, The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon (University of Georgia Press, 2022) publishes a thirteen-year correspondence between the two women. The letters showcase the breadth of Gordon’s knowledge about the craft of fiction and the artistic path of the Catholic writer.
What’s least known about Caroline Gordon, however, is the kind of teacher she was. While working on my book, I found volumes of unpublished teaching materials, lectures, and essays in her archives at Princeton University—and, surprise!—there’s more at UD in the Donald and Louise Cowan Archive.
Nearly fifty years ago, Gordon wrote to a friend from her home in Princeton:
“By daylight I work on a course I invented called Creative Grammar […] I am pulling up stakes here and moving to Dallas this Fall. I will be giving this course at the University of Dallas. Those people kept propositioning me and I kept putting them off on the ground that I had to finish my novel before making any other commitments. But I went out there to lecture and found I worked better there than here. So off I go on August first. I figure that I may have two more years’ hard work in me. But if I conk out on this job it won’t make any difference. Louise Cowan can do anything I can do and more. She is a genius. So is her husband, Don Cowan, president of the University. […] The U of D which is his creation, is a dream boat of a place.”1
Gordon arrived at this “dream boat of a place” in 1973, as an energetic 77-year-old determined to infuse the study of creative writing with the sensibility of the classics.
Biographer Nancylee Novell Jonza writes that Gordon lined up friends “to serve as advisors for the creative writing program”—friends like Seán Ó Faoláin, Madeline L’Engle, J.F. Powers, and Eudora Welty.
She would remain teaching at UD until 1978, when she moved to Mexico for her final years.
Back to my visit to the Archive: During my visit to UD, I wondered if—suspected—there might be some papers Gordon left behind.
There were. Among Gordon’s artifacts at the Donald and Louise Cowan Center, I found:
“The Companion”—a short story written while Gordon and Tate lived at 108 Perry Street (New York, circa 1947). Gordon’s longtime editor, Maxwell Perkins, died in 1947.
“Anzio” (undated, with handwritten notation “unpublished story”)—written while Gordon lived on Nassau Street (Princeton).
“‘Off with Her Head!’ An Attempt to Define the Logic of Fiction”—an unpublished lecture delivered at UD in 1977.
“The Shape of the River” (incomplete draft). Gordon returned to and repeated this lecture a number of times for her university speaking engagements—and there are moments where the content feels quite contemporary. (“The technological advances on which we pride ourselves have so far removed the bulk of the population from ‘work in the fields’ […] that the very metaphors which have served poets of every language since there has been any record, written or spoken, of men’s imaginings, seems to obscure rather than illuminate the poet’s meaning.”)
A complimentary letter to one of her favorite students, Kathleen Burk (dated 1977): “When you have written novels as long as I have,” Gordon wrote, “you grow accustomed to having your work first misread, then misrepresented. It is a rare experience to have the techniques you have employed not only identified but defended.” Dr. Burk—an accomplished scholar and administrator—recently served as Associate Dean of Constantin College at the University of Dallas and Director of the Association of Core Texts and Courses.
My favorite Gordon treasure in the archive, however, might be a long letter Gordon wrote to Louise Cowan in November 1974, where Gordon outlines her belief that a writer need only master eight techniques. The letter combines elements of Gordon’s education as a classicist with her long studies or fictional techniques, all in service of her critical sensibility as a Catholic writer.
“It is necessary to conjure up at least three ‘live specifications’ in order to make any object seem to exist in fiction,” Gordon writes in one passage. While the young writer might worry that details will “clog the action,” Gordon says, “Getting him to realize that what he calls ‘details’ are ‘specifications’ which are, so to speak, the red corpuscles of his fiction is hard work. In fact, the moment when he realizes that leaving out specifications is like bleeding his fiction represents a great divide between the person who will never be able to read fiction, much less write it, and the person who is fated to write fiction or read it truly.”
You can read more about Caroline Gordon and her time at UD in Nancylee Novell Jonza’s The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon (University of Georgia Press, 2010). And if you’re unable to schedule a visit to the archives during this fall’s 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference (why would you have time, with the remarkable lineup of speakers?), I highly recommend a return trip. The Archive is located in the Cowan-Blakley Library on the University of Dallas campus.
Listen to my April 2019 talk at UD here: “Caroline Gordon and Flannery O’Connor: From Letters to Legacy”
Find more information on the 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference here.
Caroline Gordon to Ward Dorrance, 15 May 1973, Ward Dorrance Papers, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill.
There was a book written detailing her final days at the University of Dallas that I once read in the UD library, but I can't seem to identify it by searching online. Any ideas what it was?