Bruce Springsteen: The Ghost of Flannery O’Connor

A few years ago Rolling Stone ran the above photograph of “Bruce’s Retreat” – the room in his house in Rumsen, New Jersey, where he reads and writes. As printed in the magazine, the photograph was just enough of a close-up that you could make out a few of the books. I know this because a friend told me that he was sure he could see my first book there on the Boss’s shelf. Reader, I used a magnifying glass … but no, the book wasn’t mine, dammit, it was another book with a black-and-gold spine.

Now we have Springsteen’s current reading tastes from a more reliable authority: his own. For those of us who have kept up with his catholically canonical favorite books, there are no great surprises in the Times’s brief “By the Book” e-interview, not even the fact that he wrote “The Ghost of Tom Joad” before reading The Grapes of Wrath – no surprises, that is, except for the stress that he still puts on Flannery O’Connor’s influence more than a third of a century after his first encounter with her.

That was when, at age 28, he started reading seriously for the first time: O’Connor, James M. Cain, John Cheever, Sherwood Anderson, and Jim Thompson.

These authors contributed greatly to the turn my music took around 1978-82. They brought out a sense of geography and the dark strain in my writing, broadened my horizons about what might be accomplished with a pop song and are still the cornerstone literally for what I try to accomplish today.

These authors — but O’Connor in particular. Asked which one book – which one author – made him who he is, he explains:

One would be difficult, but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.

Little-known fact: In the last months of his life Walker Percy, prompted by his nephew Will, wrote what he called a “fan letter of sorts” to Springsteen – whom he called “one of the few sane guys in your field.” He asked the Boss about “your spiritual journey,” and in particular about “your admiration for Flannery O’Connor. She was a dear friend of mine,” he told Springsteen, “though a more heroic Catholic than I.”

In a 1997 interview in DoubleTake (it figures into The Life You Save May Be Your Own) Springsteen told the nephew what O’Connor meant to him in the voice familiar from his long on-mike introductions to songs like “The Promised Land”:

There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about. They were a big, big revelation … There was some dark thing – a component of spirituality – that I sensed in her stories, and that sent me off exploring on my own.

And me on mine. And you on yours – as with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which Springsteen likes to read on a summer’s day on the front porch.

• 2 November 2014
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