by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
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.
Contact Highs, Literature Style
Gone to see Flannery O'Connor’s notebooks and got to see Seamus Heaney’s desk as a bonus.
Yes, that’s the woolly Nobel laureate’s coffee- and ink-stained writing surface above: two oak planks, long part of the site-specific furniture at the Belfast school where he once taught, that he repurposed as a desk in the Eighties and then stuck with all through the stormwinds of fame and eminence out of “a superstitious fear of making a designer study, a film set rather than a bolt-hole” and finding that his poetry had “absconded.”
The desk is part of an extraordinary exhibit of Heaney’s books, papers, fine-press editions, and ephemera, all drawn from Emory’s special collections, which include huge caches of manuscripts by Heaney, Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, Salman Rushdie, and others.
A few floors upstairs is the university’s newly acquired deposit of Flannery O'Connor materials: letters, manuscripts, cartoons, photographs, notebooks, report cards, birthday cards, even a luggage tag from her 1958 pilgrimage to Lourdes. It was a privilege to see them; more soon.
Emory’s director of special collections, Rosemary Magee, is an O'Connor scholar, and when I asked if it would be possible for her to arrange a loan of materials to Georgetown – where O'Connor spoke powerfully and memorably fifty years ago, and where a chapel now under renovation will showcase religious art – she was intrigued. We are discussing.
With that prospect in mind, I concluded a long and absorbing day in the O'Connor archive by reading a typescript or two about mystery and manners. And then went downstairs for some field work.
Now at Emory, the Flannery O'Connor We Never Knew
“Well I have seen the production and I thought it was slop of the third water. I aver that everybody connected in any way with it, except me, had a stinking pole cat for a mother and father.”
That’s Flannery O'Connor, being Flannery O'Connor — and, more precisely, stating her considered critical opinion of a 1957 CBS television adaptation of her story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (starring Gene Kelly as Mr. Shiftlet) in a letter to George Haslam, a teacher of hers.
For those of us who are devoted to Flannery O'Connor, everything she wrote is significant; and the particular significance of that critical opinion is that it didn’t appear in The Habit of Being, the 1979 volume of O'Connor’s letters; it appeared a decade later, when the Library of America published an omnibus volume of her works, including a selection of letters. Long unpublished, that is, eventually it was published – and it amplified our understanding of this great American writer.
Now our understanding of O'Connor is about to be amplified beyond our greatest expectations. Through an arrangement with O'Connor’s close relatives and executors, Emory University has acquired thirty boxes of unpublished letters and other materials, including some 600 letters that she wrote to her mother, Regina, while an exile in the North, so to speak.
More than any other postwar American writer, O'Connor has gained in stature due to the adroit management of her estate and the artful editing and publishing of the work she left unpublished on her death in 1964: the essays in Mystery and Manners, the letters in The Habit of Being and the Library of America volume; and the composition book published last year as A Prayer Journal.
Speaking of novels, she once remarked that “I wish they could be written and deposited in a slot for the next century myself.” Now it is the next century, and the letters and other writing that she deposited in a slot are coming into view – and the “second life” of her art is entering a new and fascinating phase. I’m looking forward to taking a role in it.
Meanwhile, an essay of mine about the Prayer Journal is forthcoming in the New Republic, whose editors, like O'Connor, take the long view.
The photograph is of a 1944 journal kept by Flannery O'Connor and included in the materials now at Emory.
Flannery O'Connor, Artist of the Global South
Flannery O'Connor died fifty years ago this month: “Late in July she was taken to Milledgeville hospital with a severe kidney failure, and she died there in a coma on the morning of August 3,” as Robert Fitzgerald put it in the prefatory essay to Everything That Rises Must Converge.
I was in Africa on August 3: driving with family across the border and up into Swaziland en route to the Mkhaya game reserve past Big Bend (where the photograph above was taken). And as we traveled in South Africa for several weeks, I pondered a conviction about O'Connor and her work that had trailed me the eight thousand or so miles from Brooklyn and Georgetown to Johannesburg and KwaZuluNatal and Cape Town.
Which is this: that these days the distinctive half-fictive region cherished as “Flannery O'Connor’s South” is more contiguous with the global South than with the southern part of the United States, and the aptness of O'Connor’s work to the global South is a crucial reason why it seems to point forward, not back.
In an address in Georgetown’s Faith & Culture series several years ago now – an effort to measure the gap between O'Connor’s time and ours – I wound up putting a point this way:
The genius of Flannery O’Connor was that she left many of the cultural distinctions cherished by Catholics of her age out of her work, recognizing that they were not related to truth. Instead, she made work that crossed borders—between North and South, black and white, Catholic and Protestant, the realistic and the grotesque—in order to dramatize the central human question: the question of “the salvation or loss of the soul,” as she put it. Her work will make sense when the “Protestant South” is the territory of Central and South America. It will make sense when the admirable nihilist, the practitioner of a do-it-yourself Christianity, is an oilworker on a derrick in Nigeria or a “house Christian” in Beijing. It will make sense because she looked forward, not back—looked forward imaginatively through the “realism of distances,” another term for prophecy.
Well, to travel in southern Africa is to know that this is true already – or rather, that it has become more true in this part of the global South while it has become less true in Atlanta and Louisville and New Orleans. The coexistence of races, and the separation of the races; the busyness and disorganization and drama of public life at streetside and open market; the do-it-yourself churches with their creeds handpainted on the walls outside; the constancy of poverty; the sense that life is precious, because life is dangerous, and one’s own survival is not assured – all these are recognizable in the big cities, the villages, the townships of South Africa.
Flannery O'Connor was a regionalist, yes; but her region – her country – was the place that Pope Francis (with the Community of Sant'Egidio) calls “the periphery.” The periphery is vast; and to travel on the periphery in South Africa is to recognize that we in America live on the periphery of a world that’s larger and more complicated than we generally realize.
Elaine Stritch: Flannery O'Connor’s Long-Lost Almost Second Cousin
July is the cruellest month: in the past couple weeks, I’ve found myself posting a number of pieces prompted by decease: the deaths of Teeny Hodges, Charlie Haden, and Nadine Gordimer. And now Elaine Stritch, the actress renowned for her one-woman shows, who “has died” (as the English papers put it) at age 89.
I don’t know Stritch’s work at all. What I do know is that she was a niece of Samuel Stritch, cardinal archbishop of Chicago in the Fifties, and that this made her practically next of kin to Flannery O'Connor. Here’s how.
Beginning in 1955 O'Connor traveled regularly from her home in Georgia to college campuses in the South and Midwest, giving the lectures – “these stinking talks,” she called them – later collected in Mystery and Manners. During a visit to the University of Notre Dame, she met Thomas Stritch, a professor of American studies, ten years older than she was – and a nephew of Cardinal Samuel Stritch.
Over time she developed what she called an “inordinate fondness” for him. Together they were fond of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and motor races such as the Indianapolis 500. He spent most of a week with her at Andalusia in August 1963, and she planned to dedicate a book to him.
Her fondness comes through in her letters to him. While he was traveling in Europe in 1962, she wrote:
I hope you are having a good time and are not becoming converted to culture or anything. Dr. Crane, with whom I am in daily telepathic communication, says to tell you that the American traveler abroad is a salesman of the USA and that in Europe the Sincere Compliment is an important part of our foreign policy. Don’t hesitate, he says, to use the same sincere compliment any number of times as sincerity is always fresh and useful.
She had gotten an honorary degree at Notre Dame, and so went on:
My degree hasn’t done a thing for me so far, hasn’t increased my self-confidence or improved my personality or anything I expected it to do. The local wags have already got tired of calling me `Doctor.’ Regina wrapped the hood up in newspaper and put it away and unless I wear it Halloween, I guess it’ll stay there …
Two years later – greatly diminished by lupus – she wrote to him with undiminished humor:
Here I am yours truly on the electric typewriter and I feel more or less like folks … I do what amounts to two hours of work a day and that is about as good as I ever did anyway. I asked the doctor if I could sit up at the electric typewriter and work. You can work, says he, but you can’t exert yourself. I haven’t quite figured this out yet; anyway I am confined to these two rooms and the porch so far and ain’t allowed to wash the dishes. I guess that is exerting yourself where writing officially is not.
It’s a shame nobody ever thought to get Elaine Stritch to star in a one-woman show devoted to Flannery O'Connor.
Thomas Stritch spent his whole career at Notre Dame, where he “lived on campus in Lyons Hall as one of the University’s `bachelor dons,’ a unique group of faculty members he himself once described as `youth-devoted teachers who never married, or postponed marriage till late in life.” He died in 2004.
Flannery O'Connor & Elizabeth Bishop, Speaking in Tongues
Pentecost is Greek for “the fiftieth day,” and the term, originally applied to the Jewish feast of Weeks, now of course also refers to the feast that falls seven weeks (or 49 days) after Easter – the disciples speaking in tongues, being touched by tongues of fire, and so on.
Today is day fifty-five, and I find that I’ve spent the past five days thinking through an image that came to mind on Pentecost, which I spent on the sidelines: literally (watching soccer matches and baseball games) and figuratively (away from the Oratory, which I didn’t reach till Monday midday).
Fifty years ago this August Flannery O'Connor died, and after her death the New York Review of Books sought recollections of her by writers who had known her or her work.
Elizabeth Bishop began hers by regretting that she had never taken up O'Connor on her invitation to visit Andalusia, and went on to add what Robert Giroux, friend and editor of both writers, called “a bit of testimony that Flannery herself would have relished”:
Critics who accuse her of exaggeration are quite wrong, I think. I lived in Florida for several years next to a flourishing `Church of God’ (both white and black congregation), where every Wednesday night Sister Mary and her husband `spoke in tongues.’ After those Wednesday nights, nothing Flannery O'Connor ever wrote could seem at all exaggerated to me.
To me, the significance of Pentecost lies in the fact that the disciples spoke in different tongues and yet understood one another. That is the way it is with art, and that, it seems to me, is the way it is with religious art. Artists in our different languages, our different voices, our different media, with our different preoccupations, make art that enables other people – other artists first of all – to understand experience through these languages that are not our own but are intelligible even so.
That is the way it was with Bishop and O'Connor. Bishop recalled:
From Brazil I sent her a cross in a bottle, like a ship in a bottle, crudely carved, with all the instruments of the Passion, the ladder, pliers, dice, etc., in wood, paper, and tinfoil, with the little rooster at the top of the cross. I thought it was the kind of innocent religious grotesquery she might like, and I think she did, because she wrote:
“If I were mobile and limber and rich I would come to Brazil at once after one look at this bottle. Did you observe that the rooster has an eyebrow? I particularly like him and the altar cloth a little dirty from the fingers of whoever cut it out…I am altogether taken with it. It’s what I’m born to appreciate.”
Bishop, half a world from Georgia, had sent O'Connor a work of art, made in a different language and a different medium, which O'Connor recognized right away as akin to her own.
I have a notion that Pentecost (or, say, one of the days following) might become something like a feast day for religious art and artists. Next year the feast falls on Sunday, May 24, in the middle of a long weekend.
If you like the idea, let me know – and pass it on.
The crucifixion-in-a-bottle in the photograph isn’t from Brazil. It was made by a Russian POW during World War II.
Charles Wright: Angel of Happy Meeting
Charles Wright will be the next Poet Laureate of the United States. Truly, is there anybody better? No – though some equals among his peers come to mind.
His body of work takes in Dante, the Civil War, Eastern philosophy, manhood, poetry and poets, and the superaliveness of a certain American mind in the second half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first.
And Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Worker, in a poem that as far as I can tell was called forth by The Life You Save May Be Your Own.
Here is a passage from the book which describes Flannery O'Connor in the early summer of 1964 – more or less fifty years ago:
“Prayers requested,” she informed Sally Fitzgerald. “I am sick of being sick.” She wrote letters to Grace Bug, Marybat, Raycheek, and Raybat— to Maryat Lee— and signed them Mrs. Turpin, Tarbug, and Tarbutter. In a letter to Elizabeth Hester she remarked, “There’s a right interesting review of Richard Hughes ’ Fox in the Attic by Walker Percy in the summer 64 Sewanee.” She spoke fondly of Hopkins’s poem “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
To Janet McKane, who was also sick, she sent the Prayer to St. Raphael, which the Catholic Worker people had sent her on a postcard in 1953. She had said it daily for some years:
O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us: Raphael, angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for … . Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the province of joy, all ignorant of the concerns of our country. Remember the weak, you who are strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder, in a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright with the resplendent glory of God.
Here is the poem “Flannery’s Angel,” from Charlie’s 2010 book Sestets:
Flannery’s Angel
Lead us to those we are waiting for,
Those who are waiting for us.
May your wings protect us,
may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy.
Remember us who are weak.
You who are strong in your country which lies beyond the thunder,
Raphael, angel of happy meeting,
resplendent, hawk of the light.
That is what poets do. We’re lucky that he’ll be doing it for the next couple of years at the Library of Congress in Washington.
Friends with Cellphones
From author friends on the road, two pieces of Mertoniana: above, from Fred Bahnson (he of Soil and Sacrament), the plaque at the corner of Fourth and Walnut Street (now Muhummad Ali Boulevard) where Merton had the sudden epiphany (described on the plaque) that prompted his turn to the world in the years that follow; and below, from Jim Martin (he of Jesus: A Pilgrimage), a letter from Merton to Dorothy Day in which he praises her witness for peace as akin to satyagraha, and – paraphrasing Czeslaw Milosz – tartly adds: “Nowadays it is not a question of who is right, but who is at least not criminal.”
More on both episodes in The Life You Save May Be Your Own. The Merton plaque puts in mind a conversation that took place last week in Brooklyn during an informal supper-gathering of writers with religious preoccupations hosted by Ayana Mathis (she of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie). One of us observed that appeals to love are pretty rare in public discourse just now; where Merton, or Day, or James Baldwin, or Walter Brueggemann, would ask what course of action would best honor the love we are meant to feel for one another, such appeals today are made in terms of respect or rights or justice or equality or the common good or progress – but not love …
MFA vs. NYC: Flannery O'Connor Weighs In
Flannery O'Connor – born March 25, 1925 – is the most accomplished graduate of an American MFA program, and like any freshly minted MFA, no sooner did she get her degree than she propounded on the whole business. Her insights – in an essay written for the alumni magazine of the Georgia College for Women – are little known and rarely seen.
Exit writer with baccalaureate degree:
What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul; a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome.
Enter the graduate-education-industrial complex:
Lately, some universities and colleges have begun to examine their consciences on this matter, with the result that there are now institutions beside the poor house and the mud house where the writer is encouraged or at least tolerated in his odd ways.
What can a writing program do for a writer?
It can put him in the way of experienced writers and literary critics, people who are usually able to tell him after not too long a time whether he should go on writing or enroll immediately in the school of Dentistry.
What good is the MFA degree?
… it will be pronounced upon by his future employers should they chance to be of the academy. Because fine writing seldom pays, fine writers usually end up teaching, and the degree, however worthless to the spirit, can be expected to add something to the flesh.
And her own MFA experience: how was it?
The only writing program I am familiar with – there are many considered to be adequate – is that at the University of Iowa. The program there is designed to cover the writer’s technical needs as mentioned above, and to provide him with a literary atmosphere which he would not be able to find elsewhere. The writer can expect very little else.
MFA in hand, O'Connor made her way to NYC, renting a room at 108th and Broadway and taking her meals at the Columbia student cafeteria – “one of the few places I suspected the food of being clean.”
New Orleans Feast, as Seen on TV
I let Mardi Gras pass on the site because, this year, it passed me by – just about. Mardi Gras, for this northerner, is not about parades, or costumes, or dancing, or food and drink. Mardi Gras is about the music of New Orleans; and this playlist put Treme in mind – specifically, the Mardi Gras set-piece that figures into season three.
Remember Treme? David Simon’s post-Katrina New Orleans series got all its buzz on the front end, aired for four irregularly spaced seasons, and didn’t end so much as subside. Or so it seemed: I haven’t seen the fourth season – just watched season three in December and January. Watching it, I wondered, as I’d wondered while watching seasons one and two, where the whole Catholic side of New Orleans is felt in the series.
Is it? Watching late in the evenings, I missed parts and am hazy on others: but I can’t remember a significant moment that involved the famously thick Catholic culture of the city. Take that Mardi Gras scene. In the day, we are told – and we read in novels like The Moviegoer – Mardi Gras was a last guzzle before Lent. Tuesday was fat because Wednesday would not be. But on Mardi Gras on season three, the Indian krewes face off, the DJ guy with the soul patch ends up sleeping over in the restaurateur gal’s apartment, and the punky violinist catches a dawn cab to the airport. Mardi Gras is a culmination; the next day things start to get back to normal.
Have I got this right? And if so, what does it mean? I don’t ask in the way of pundits concerned that Catholic stuff should be represented on TV or claiming that the place of religion in the mass media is under threat. And I don’t ask with any confidence that “Catholic New Orleans” still exists. Louisiana was the first place hit hard by the crisis of priestly sexual abuse, and Jason Berry’s great and sick-making book made it feel like a storm as devastating as the hurricane a few years later.
I’m asking mainly out of curiosity as to what it would mean for the stories we tell. Flannery O’Connor, on the basis of literature and hearsay and a single day’s visit, characterized New Orleans as a city “both Southern and Catholic, and with indications that the Devil’s existence is freely recognized.” In cultural history the sense of the city was long rooted in the idea that Catholics (with their frequent confessions) take things easy as compared to their Protestant (especially Baptist) neighbors; that the food, drink, and rituals of the place are rooted in those of Catholic France and Spain; and that in the day-to-day of the place Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday are twined, with the city’s joyous excesses arising from the city’s deprivations: poverty, corruption, spongy ground, muggy air, lack of opportunity, and dependence on the outside forces of Big Oil and tourism.
It seems to me that if the Lenten side of the story has gone out of the story of New Orleans, a lot changes in our sense of the place – and in our sense of Catholic literature and culture in America, too. Is it left out, or is it gone, or does the one anticipate the other? Is it the case that, in life as in Treme, what the people of New Orleans believe in is New Orleans?