Betty Hester: "A Noble Soul"
by William Sessions, Georgia State University
During the night of December 26, 1998, Hazel Elizabeth Hester shot herself through the left temple with her left hand, the gun muffled in two pieces of her jockey underwear. It was a hollow-nosed bullet (a particularly devastating kind and probably deliberately chosen because I found cases of such bullets in the house). The enormous impact insured there would be no lingering. It shattered her skull spraying blood all over the room that she was using as a place to sit and read in (a huddled mattress and blankets in a corner indicated she slept there as well). The blood formed a fine mist over the cigarettes and the books from Dickens and Murdoch nearby, but there were heavier blotches immediately near her body on a recent O'Connor Bulletin and the manuscripts of a play of mine she had recently read and two poems I had given her that afternoon.
That afternoon, the day after Christmas, St. Stephen's Day, we had visited her. She had laughed and joked a great deal, devouring the Christmas food we had brought her (she had obviously not been eating regularly). She had always been devoted to my family, my wife from the first days she had arrived from Greece, and my younger son, now a physician, a particular favorite. I had known in the weeks before Christmas that she was not doing well. In October, for no apparent reason, she had fallen on the concrete steps to her house, and her neighbors who adored her (especially the younger children) had all volunteered to buy and build a grand wooden stair case for her up to her house in the middle of Atlanta. Whatever the actual illness (and as both her main doctors were mine, I have since learned they had no clear diagnosis), Betty felt that she was losing control of her body. Having nursed her aunt in her final days and having little money of her own for a nursing home (and refusing to accept as always any kind of support or gift), she contemplated in her seventy-sixth year the indignity of a collapsing body with a mind that still sparkled, as it did that final afternoon of St. Stephen's Day. In our last hours together we laughed and bantered, Betty mocking me as always for taking the Church seriously and remembering stories of our time with Flannery or talking about life in Atlanta when we first met in the 1950s or about Iris Murdoch's recent illness (John Bayley's book about his wife, sent as a Christmas present from Sally Fitzgerald, lay on the coffee table between us).
Then Betty did a remarkable thing: she suddenly handed me a series of packages that I saw immediately were a bundle of manuscripts. "Here, Billy," she said. "I want you to have these -- forever." I was startled, seeing at a glance that they were HER stories, novels, and her philosophical treatise, many of which (but not all) I had seen before. We had known each other since our days as mutual friends of Flannery O'Connor forming a kind of triad, as the letters in The Habit of Being reveal (and it was I who had suggested Betty's letters to Sally Fitzgerald in the late 70's and who, in fact, as Betty reminded me that afternoon introduced the two to each other). Because we sometimes had sharp differences, I had thought Betty might make these manuscripts, her most precious possessions, gifts to closer or worthier friends. But, as I know after her death, she trusted me as she did virtually no one else. She knew that, if anyone would treat her writings, like her life, with the honor and dignity it deserved, I would.
Sensing in that bright warm December afternoon that some event of historical change might soon occur (though in her merriment not once did I suspect she planned to kill herself that night), I turned to a more immediate question. I knew that she had other collections of letters, not least a whole cache from Iris Murdoch. As tactfully as I could, I turned the question of their location in that house whose back rooms had probably not been cleaned in several years. "Look in my books," she said hastily and then went on. When the next day I was called in and, when the family from Houston made me her literary executor and showed me her powerful and stunning suicide note with its startling revelations -- a large section of which was clearly directed to me (she gave me, for example, the care of all her 4000 books) -- I learned of the general location of the letters. I then found, among those books, letters from Murdoch, Dickey, and a number of other writers. These included three new letters from Flannery O'Connor and a manuscript of an O'Connor story with commentary, as far as I can figure out at this time, from Caroline Gordon. Flannery had a habit of sending to close friends sections of her work or letters from mutual friends. I have, for example, part of a letter from Betty to Flannery after Betty had left the Church, sent to me by O'Connor, perhaps the only extant part of "A's" side of the correspondence.
Searching for these letters became, in the mild January days that followed, a task like exploring Miss Haversham's house or miss Emily's unsealed room or like finding the poems of Emily Dickinson herself, stuffed as they were in books, on the floors, under cabinets. The search involved literally digging on hands and knees through layers of dust balls and hair and other residue from her three cats and then the hard red blood itself that had coagulated and not been cleaned out. What I found was worth the weeks of travail. The letters from Murdoch are phenomenal. If more notes than the lost discourses of O'Connor's or of Dickey's responses, they deal, however cursorily, with questions of art (characterization, for example) and philosophy (especially on Wittgenstein). Most of all, they show the extraordinarily bountiful nature of Iris Murdoch. Of the Murdoch correspondence I have thus far found and that Betty saved -- from many more over thirty years and now lost -- the first is a card to Betty from Rome in 1964 and the last is actually a very kind and generous from John Bayley in 1997 announcing that Iris Murdoch has a severe case of Alzheimer's disease. It is what Bayley underlines, quite literally, that shows the basis for the Murdoch-Hester correspondence: "She [Iris] loves you letter." Bayley hopes she will continue to send them and he also thanks Betty for her superb acumen in analyzing his own fiction.
What appears to be Murdoch's last letter to Betty in 1996 -- they are often not dated -- contains a strange kind of syntax, with the breaks and slips that could only have come from Murdoch's physical degeneration. Yet at one point almost without context, with a child's sudden intuition about a large event, Murdoch writes: "You are a noble soul." It is an astounding comment from one of the twentieth-century's greatest authors. What did Murdoch mean? I think she saw in Betty Hester what Flannery herself saw from the start, an extraordinary vulnerability that could not contain its utter reach for the Absolute (with a capital A). That insight of Murdoch's and earlier of O'Connor's became the fundament for a relationship of friendship and extraordinary letters.
At age 13, Betty Hester had seen her mother commit suicide and die before her eyes as neighbors, believing the mother in another of her fantasies, had refused to call the police. Immediately afterwards, she was shipped off to Young Harris College, a Methodist educational institution in the mountains of North Georgia, where she remained through the first year of junior college before she left. These six years constituted her only formal education, but it was enough in the later years of drudgery as a secretary and clerk in office after office, in the Cold War U.S. army (and in Germany), and in her general isolation as a woman who had to fend for herself. Until she was over forty -- and I remember it was Flannery who pointed this out to me -- she lived in small apartments with no bedroom of her own. She was sleeping, as I remember her place on Peachtree Street, on a living room couch (it did not fold out) surrounded by her beloved books. With her 4000 books, from the elaborate collections of Dickens, James, and modern British fiction to the modern philosophers like Heidegger, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Levinas, Hawkins, scientists like Einstein and Heisenberg, to recent novels like those by Greg Johnson, Betty Hester continued her search. It lasted until St. Stephen's Day and that final afternoon of conversation about Flannery, Iris, and the ideas Betty held about her own destiny.
In point of fact, Betty was in great pain for most of her life. Although never diagnosed and without medication (I can vouch from having closely examined her medicine chest and cabinets in her house at the time of her death), she clearly felt the mental anguish of her life as it spun between the orbits of periodic mania and deep depression. What was terrible was that she had early on learned of her profound difference, not least as a women, from everyone around her in that world of the 1930s when her mother had killed herself in a rented room at the very moment, only blocks away, Margaret Mitchell was finishing the story of the idealized epic woman Scarlett O'Hara. Betty's female epic was far more ordinary in its pain. Her father had disappeared early and, although her distant family was quite devoted (and in her last years she lived with a widowed aunt), she was essentially alone. Only a few in her world could understand the churnings and desires, especially intellectual, of her inner life and its own call. The hope, even the fantasies that could keep her going were matched by the fear and shame she could feel in her deepest depressions -- in a roller-coaster cycle that could come on so suddenly and leave her quite vulnerable and isolated. From that fear and pain, however, in a dialectic that can only be described as the mystery of her being, there rose the surprising courage and good humor, the sheer joy in her reading, and then the wisdom and depth of her own letters to O'Connor and Murdoch and others -- all testaments to the person who died last December 26, 1998. It is this complex, self-effacing, vulnerable woman Iris Murdoch named a "noble soul."
--Reprinted with permission from William Sessions and Cheers!
--"Betty Hester: 'A Noble Soul'" originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 1998-99 issue of Cheers!, the Newsletter of The Flannery O'Connor Society.
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