In 1974, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote to her friend Naomi Lebowitz, a professor of English and comparative literature at Washington University, in St. Louis, to ask, “what am I supposed to think about Flannery O’Connor?” The Southern writer had been mentioned, Murdoch told Lebowitz, by her “mad fan in Atlanta Georgia.” Murdoch initially thought that the reference was to Flann O’Brien. “The one was female, the other male, but who cares these days?” she added. The fan had sent her O’Connor’s complete stories, but Murdoch was unimpressed. “I read one or two and thought them very accomplished but was not really moved,” she wrote. “Should I persevere, is she very good?”
Murdoch does not appear to have realized just how close her fan in Atlanta had been to O’Connor—even though, by then, she and this fan had been corresponding for a decade or more. She had described the fan to Lebowitz as “dotty” and “a tiny bit crazy,” but, nonetheless, Murdoch continued exchanging letters with her, as is made plain in the book “Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995,” published by Princeton University Press earlier this year. “Did I tell you my crazy Atlanta fan has surfaced again?” Murdoch wrote Lebowitz, in 1983. “She has started ringing me up at 3 a.m. Atlanta, 8 a.m. here (I’m glad it’s not the other way round). Yesterday she said would I please have a blood test to determine whether I am male or female? (She thinks I am male, only no one knows this but her.)” Murdoch continued, “In spite of such delusions she managed, till lately retiring, to hold down a regular job in an insurance office.”
There is no doubt that this was Hazel Elizabeth Hester, a file clerk at Atlanta’s Retail Credit Company, now the credit-reporting giant Equifax. Murdoch and Hester, who called herself Betty, corresponded for more than thirty years, until the onset of Alzheimer’s disease made it impossible for Murdoch to reply. Even then, John Bayley, Murdoch’s husband, asked Hester to continue. “She loves hearing from you,” Bayley wrote Hester in January, 1997, “and she sends loving greeting. Please go on writing to her because it means a lot to her—a really very great deal.”
That Murdoch corresponded for decades with an Atlanta file clerk is not entirely surprising: Murdoch replied to everyone, and spent up to four hours a day on correspondence. (“I have had a letter from an electronics engineer (male) in Walsall who changes his clothes every evening and becomes Hilda,” she wrote her longtime lover, the novelist and critic Brigid Brophy, in 1969. “He seems to think I should do something about it. Have written him a relaxed letter.”) But Hester also happened to be the correspondent known only as “A” in “The Habit of Being,” Flannery O’Connor’s collected letters, published in 1979. O’Connor’s letters have been described as the twentieth century’s answer to the letters of John Keats, and Hester, the mad fan, is now widely considered her most important correspondent.
Hester first wrote O’Connor in July, 1955, to object to a review in The New Yorker of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor’s first collection of stories. After taking issue with the review, Hester asked O’Connor whether the stories weren’t actually “about God.” O’Connor said they were, then added, “I would like to know who this is who understands my stories.”
After “The Habit of Being” was published, many others wanted to know, too: over their nine-year correspondence, O’Connor revealed more about herself and her religious and creative life to “A” than to anyone. But it was not until Hester sat in a chair in her home in late 1998 and shot herself in the head, at the age of seventy-five, that her identity became public. “Letters to Betty Hester, 1955–1964,” a collection of roughly two hundred and fifty letters from O’Connor, is today available for viewing at Emory University. None of Hester’s letters to O’Connor survive; nor do any of those she sent Murdoch. Hester therefore remains an enigma—“a clerk out of Kafka, living a secret life of the mind,” as the Catholic writer and critic Paul Elie has written. She was also a lesbian, and the dilemma of being gay in the South in the nineteen-fifties likely played a role in how assiduously she guarded her privacy.
But the mystery surrounding Hester is now eroding. Last year, a detailed military file stemming from her time in the U.S. Air Force became available from the National Archives for the first time. This past fall, I flew to Atlanta, where a hitherto unknown cache of Hester’s personal papers—unsent letters, mostly, offering rare examples of her epistolary voice—is kept by a man who knew both Hester and O’Connor. The new materials shed light on the way that Hester’s sexual identity, her careful and passionate reading, her religious interests, and her outsider status made her the perfect correspondent for both O’Connor and Murdoch. Feisty, even flirtatious, in her written communications, she challenged O’Connor to write her most profound letters, meditations on the divine that rank with those of C. S. Lewis and Gerard Manley Hopkins. That correspondence alone has already made Hester a secretly crucial figure in twentieth-century literature; if or when they are released to the public, the thirty years of letters she received from Murdoch will likely broaden our perception of her influence. But her military file and the other papers also show Hester to have been a tormented woman, resilient yet psychologically fragile.
In 1948, Hester joined the Air Force. A little over a year later, while stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, north of San Francisco, she became suicidal and checked herself in to a hospital for psychiatric help. A medical report from this period describes her as a “rather nice looking very neat girl of medium height. She speaks very fluently, and uses an extensive vocabulary.” She “went with a ‘literary’ group” at school, her “main form of recreation is reading,” and “she has always been intensely interested in writing.” The details that emerge about her early life read like a Flannery O’Connor story. Her father worked at a filling station; her mother, an educated woman, turned to bootlegging. “Once, the patient can remember at the age of eight, during a serious quarrel, the mother tried to commit suicide by shooting herself, and then ran outdoors in her underclothes,” the report explains. Her mother succeeded in killing herself when Hester was fourteen years old. According to William Sessions, who first met Hester at the ballet in Atlanta, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, and later became her literary executor, Hester’s mother died before her eyes.
Hester attended Young Harris, a boarding school and college in northern Georgia, but left, according to the medical report, because “a rather aggressive homosexual girl was trying to force her into a physical relationship.” Hester told that medical examiner, in 1950, that she and this former schoolmate later lived together for a year—and that this was “the only actual physical involvement she has had.” At age twenty-five, she enlisted. Fifteen months later, she developed a romantic attachment to a woman in her barracks, a personal crisis that led to her hospital stay. “I’m feeling better now,” she told her examiner, per the report, “but I turned in to the hospital because I was having too frequent spells of depression, and was having strong urges to do away with myself.” The infatuation apparently followed an old pattern: “She says that each girl that she has ever been in love with, four of them in all . . . has some sort of ‘inner decay,’ and is always getting into difficulty,” the report explains.
By May, 1953, Hester had advanced to the rank of technical sergeant, and was stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany. It was here she became drawn into a military inquisition that sought to purge the ranks of lesbians. “Well, I guess you’re one of them,” an investigator told Hester, according to Sessions. “She said, ‘Yes. I. Am!’—I mean, it’s that defiance that she had,” Sessions told me. She received an “undesirable” discharge, tantamount to a criminal record. That narrowed her job options back in Atlanta. But she had worked as a bookkeeper at Retail Credit Company before enlisting, and an old manager said he did not need to see her military papers to renew her employment. Hester stayed in the job until the late nineteen-seventies. Sessions said she never shook the fear that people might discover her history.
When Hester first wrote O’Connor, two years after her discharge, O’Connor, then thirty years old, was already the author of a novel (“Wise Blood,” from 1952) as well as the story collection. Lupus, the autoimmune disease that later killed her, frequently confined O’Connor to her mother Regina’s dairy and farm, eighty miles from Atlanta, and her illness made the exchange of letters even more important to her. She and Hester also met a handful of times; O’Connor told Hester that she “was prepared for white hair, horn-rimmed spectacles, nose of eagle and shape of ginger-beer bottle,” but that, to her surprise, “you ain’t even passably ugly.”
O’Connor began a low-key campaign to coax Hester into the Catholic Church, and Hester quickly succumbed: she asked O’Connor to be her sponsor, and she was baptized in March, 1956. Yet she felt the Church an ill fit. O’Connor’s unpublished letters from later that autumn make it clear that Hester revealed a great deal about herself to the writer, including her sexual orientation. O’Connor assured her, “Where you are wrong is in saying that you are a history of horror. The meaning of the Redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history and nothing is plainer to me than that you are not your history.” She added, “Understand that from my point of view, you are always wanted.”
Hester was apparently unconvinced: Sessions told me that she called the five years that she was a Catholic the worst of her life. When the final apostasy came, in late 1961, O’Connor believed that she knew whom to blame. “This conversion was achieved by Miss Iris Murdoch,” she wrote a friend. Hester “doesn’t believe any longer that Christ is God and so she has found that he is ‘beautiful! beautiful!’ Everything is in the eeeek eeek eureka stage.”
The two women remained close, nonetheless; O’Connor wrote her last letter to Hester just days before her death, in 1964, at age thirty-nine. Nine months later, in May, 1965, Hester traveled to London to meet Murdoch. “This for two or three hours. All in a taxi or at that restaurant in Soho,” Hester wrote, in a letter that is now part of her estate. “When we parted at Paddington Station she leaned into the cab and kissed me fleetingly on the forehead.” She adds of that kiss: “Whether perfunctory or an impulse she could not repress, to this hour I don’t know.” Judging by the papers Hester left behind after her death, that question haunted her for the rest of her life.
“We were a kind of trio,” William Sessions told me when I flew to Atlanta to meet him, “Betty and myself and Flannery.” Sessions appears in the letters between O’Connor and Hester as “Billy,” an endearing egotist and the butt of their jokes. A former ballet dancer, who studied under Martin Heidegger as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Freiburg, Sessions is something of a legend among O’Connor scholars. At eighty-seven, he is one of the last living links to the writer. (Murdoch’s letters to Hester are, for now at least, in a restricted collection at Emory, accessible only to him.)
He, his late wife Jenny, and his son Eric were also likely the last people to see Hester alive, during an afternoon visit to her home on December 26, 1998. She lived like a hoarder among her thousands of books—“like the Unabomber,” Sessions said. Yet she did not appear unhappy. “It was a very positive day for her—I mean there was no depression, no drama, she just had kind of a little secret,” Eric, who describes Hester as a “vital” woman, a Southern Katharine Hepburn, told me. Hester shot herself using a hollow-nosed bullet a few hours after their departure. Sessions and his wife spent days going through all those books; they found letters from Murdoch tucked between their pages. At the Sessions home, father and son led me to a table where they had gathered a mound of papers they had salvaged. Eric handed me a jar of California Girl artichoke hearts containing the last of Hester’s ashes. “Welcome to Southern gothic,” he said.
Hester’s papers—a collection of notes, drafts, and unsent letters—offer rare glimpses of Hester’s written voice, which for years beguiled two literary giants. But they speak, too—repeatedly, painfully—of her deep, often manic feelings for both O’Connor and Murdoch. “To the degree that I had ever had any call to be, I was in love with Flannery. I was, I am, I will be for as long as I am I,” she wrote in the draft of a letter to Murdoch. “I have a firm conviction that we spend our lives over and over falling in love with the same thing. Given this simple basic formula, how in God’s name could I ever have lost my head (or heart, or whatever) over two such disparate entities as Flannery and you?” She adds, “The psychologist had an instant answer. You hate sex, you want to be a writer, you’re homosexual, ergo, you fall in love with women writers from whom you are safe.”
In another drafted letter to Murdoch, Hester explains that she had sought the help of an analyst because “I had become much alarmed by the curious lunacy of my letters to you.” That “lunacy” is evidenced, for example, by Hester’s efforts to make romantic romans à clef out of Murdoch’s books. “You are Bradley, Flannery is Arnold, and I am Rachel,” Hester wrote, citing characters from Murdoch’s 1973 novel “The Black Prince.” Elsewhere she writes, “It is no ‘metaphor’ that you literally are Christ and that you and Flannery and I are all male.” These scribblings remained unsent, but Murdoch received similar messages; in a characteristically whimsical 1965 note to Brigid Brophy, kept in the Iris Murdoch Archive at Kingston University London, Murdoch includes as a member of her ideal cricket team “E. Hester (my American disciple who says I am Jesus Christ and Tolstoy).”
Hester began writing others, too. “My name is HESTER,” she told Peter S. Hawkins, a professor of religion and literature at Yale, who had written a book pairing Murdoch and O’Connor’s fiction. “It is not HISTON, as in the snake in the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, you hear and you see sublimely. You are very beautiful.” This was ten years after “The Habit of Being” had introduced readers to “A.” “Never mind keeping me anonymous,” Hester wrote. “Ask Iris. She will, I think, tell you the truth.” Hawkins received the first of these letters in the mid-eighties. “They were sort of ecstatic letters,” he told me. “I wasn’t disturbed by them, but they were disturbed.” In replying, he said, he “made it clear that I did not believe that Iris was Flannery’s prophet.” He added, “Iris Murdoch spending thirty years writing to a file clerk in Atlanta going in and out of madness? It’s an Iris Murdoch novel, that story.”
Among the Hester papers Sessions showed me at his home in Atlanta, I found just one letter from Murdoch. It dates from 1991, and reflects their more fathomable philosophical discussions, which often centered on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who Murdoch briefly knew at Cambridge University. Murdoch is kind, patient. “Dear Betty,” she begins, in a barely legible scrawl. “Perhaps it was wrong to call L.W. a cold fish.”
Seven years later, Hester wrote a letter to Sessions, thanking him for mailing her a copy of Bayley’s “Elegy for Iris,” which had appeared in The New Yorker, and which detailed Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s. Hester had been devastated when she learned of Murdoch’s illness from Bayley: “She is my forever if ever there was, or is, or could be,” she wrote then, in an unsent letter. “My thinking itself began with her. It’s as though, crazy as it sounds, she conceived me.—Maybe we do get born twice.—.” When Sessions sent her “Elegy for Iris,” Hester told him again of the moment, in 1965, when Murdoch kissed her on the forehead. “Without qualification,” she wrote, “she is the greatest being with whom I’ve ever been in such immediate contact.”
As it happens, Murdoch’s description of this encounter is contained in two letters to Brophy stored at the Murdoch archive in London. “I had a pleasant lunch with Betty Hester, at least I enjoyed it,” she wrote. “She was at first too scared to talk (except for saying ‘Gee, my mouth is so dry’) and couldn’t eat anything at all. I ate an entrecote while she failed to touch some soup. However she soon became calmer and at least talkative. Atlanta Georgia sounds a desolation.”
“I am afraid she’s had a lousy time in London,” Murdoch continued, in the second of the letters, “what with freezing (at first) in Atlanta Georgia springtime clothes, & then my failure to materialize until so late (which I do blame myself for: one must read the last pages of people’s letters)—& this her first visit to England.” That farewell kiss, the memory of which had dogged Hester for three decades, isn’t mentioned.
