The other night Caroline and I stumbled across the 1928 silent film Our Dancing Daughters on TCM and watched the whole damn thing. As the hepped up actors herky-jerkyed across the screen, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind living within the confines of a silent movie. For one thing, I’m practically deaf, so how convenient it would be to have utterances appear in writing, floating in the air long enough for even the slowest of readers to decipher.
Also, facial cues are a breeze to pick up on in a silent flick. In my adulthood, on more than one occasion, I’ve had a highschool friend tell me that she had a crush on me back in the day. Well, in a silent movie, picking up on flirting is less of a problem.
On the other hand, music in silent films is generally melodramatic, a solo piano tinkling or a muted orchestra holding forth. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, the hardest working man in showbiz, would be wasted in a silent movie, though his amped-up dancing might give Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin a run for his money.
The Godfather came up in conversation last night at the Blind Tiger Porter-Gaud alumni party. I was chatting with former student Jamie Ewing, reminiscing about driving his cousin Willy Hutcheson to school in the 90s with the late Erin Burton and my two sons. On our trip from the IOP and Sullivan’s Island, we listened to various CDs Monday thru Thursday, but Friday mornings were dedicated to JB.
I told Jamie that I saw the Godfather live in ’75 at the Carolina Coliseum, one of the few white folks to attend that extravaganza. Then Jamie floored me with this revelation: he waited in line at the Apollo Theater in Harlem[1] to see James Brown lying in state, one of the hundreds to file past the coffin.
I mean, one of the greatest albums of all time is Brown’s 1963 Live at the Apollo, and Jamie can boast that he saw James Brown dead at the Apollo.
Bravo, Jamie, and RIP Barnwell, South Carolina’s, most famous citizen, the hitmaker who gave us “Pass the Peas,” “Gimme Some More,” “It’s a Man’s World,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” . . .
[1] I know “in Harlem” is redundant, but ain’t everybody as hip as you and me.
Donald Trump has dubbed his rambling speeches “the weave,” claiming that if you connect the dots of his zigzags, a unified picture appears. So I thought I’d give it a try myself.
Here goes.
The other night, after suffering through a self-righteous, ill-informed screed from a Facebook follower, I found myself listening to Bob Dylan’s masterful protest song “Hurricane,” a cinematic narrative recounting the arrest and trial of Rubin Hurricane Carter, a boxer wrongly convicted of a triple homicide in 1966 in Patterson, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, far away in another part of town Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are drivin’ around Number one contender for the middleweight crown Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down
When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road Just like the time before and the time before that In Paterson that’s just the way things go If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street ‘Less you want to draw the heat
Near the end of the song Dylan sings,
How can the life of such a man Be in the palm of some fool’s hand? To see him obviously framed Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game
Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell An innocent man in a living hell
As I was listening, the long gone idealism of the 60s came to mind. Dylan himself — and Joan Baez –performed at the March on Washington, sharing the stage with Martin Luther King. They heard firsthand the “I Have a Dream Speech.” They’re both still alive sixty-one years later.
In 1963, the American people considered communism the greatest threat to the nation’s sovereignty, and the Soviet Union was our greatest enemy whose spy agency the KGB eventually became the employer and training ground for Vladimir Putin, whom Donald Trump so idolizes, along with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator.
According to Trump, outside forces like Russia and North Korea aren’t the greatest threat to American sovereignty; no, it’s “the enemy within,” American citizens, news organizations, and celebrities tarred with the paradoxical disapprobation “woke.” It’s Joe McCarthy redux, and McCarthy’s corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s mentor.
Trump and his followers bring to mind WB Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming”:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Fueled by the fifth deadly sin wrath, these resentful white supremist faux Christian cultists seem to prefer a dictatorship of oligarchs to the teachings of their would-be Savoir who famously preached
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Today, 21 September 2024, happens to be the autumnal equinox, and here on Folly Beach, the Edge of America, the weather is perfect, not a cloud overhead, the temperature Edenic, downright Elysian — no flies at Chico Feo, no mosquito swatting needed on my walk home from the bar.
However, today also happens to be the 35th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo. As you can see above, Hugo was, “a mighty, mighty storm.”[1] Ask any Lowcountry resident who opted not to evacuate, and you’re likely to hear tales ranging from extreme discomfiture to abject terror.
Our family – Judy Birdsong, sons Harrison (5) and Ned (3), springer spaniels Jack and Sally, and I-and-I lived on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island that lay in the crosshairs of a cone of inevitability – in other words, Charleston was going to get clobbered by a monster category 4 cyclone.
On Wednesday evening before Thursday’s late night landfall, before we drove to my parents’ house in Summerville to drop off the dogs and spend the night before fleeing further inland to Columbia, I drove downtown to Charleston to hear Allan Gurganus read from his just published novel The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. I bought a copy, had Allan inscribe it, then drove back home and nailed plywood over sliding glass doors.
As it turned out, the novel, which deals with Reconstruction, offered a parallel to what we were about to endure. My father-in-law Ralph Birdsong compared the post-Hugo Isle of Palms and Sullivans Island to the bombed out towns of Europe he witnessed in World War II.
Sullivan’s Island 22 September 1989
Reconstruction indeed.
We left Summerville first thing Thursday morning and arrived at my friend’s Jake’s house around noon where we watched the storm swirl closer and closer to the coast on a television screen. That evening, we had dinner at a restaurant in Five Points. We had been lately listening to Lyle Lovett’s most recently released album, which featured a song called “Here I Am.”
Here’s are the lyrics from the last verse, which is spoken rather than sung:
Look, I understand too
little too late.
I realize there are things
you say and do
you can never take back.
But what would you be if
you didn’t really try?
You have to try.
So after a lot of thought
I’s like to reconsider.
Please if it’s not too late,
Make it a cheeseburger.
When it was time to order our meal, I asked three-year-old Ned what he would like to eat, and he said in a tiny little Lyle Lovett voice, “Please make it a cheeseburger.”
That almost made the entire ordeal worth it.
Almost, but nor entirely. Because the only bridge to the islands was destroyed, we became homeless for 17 long days, moving from family to family, devoured by anxiety. However, once we finally made it to the island via a ferry and walked from the marina to our home, he were delighted to see it standing in one piece. The ground floor had received about two inches of water, a tree had smashed through a back door into our bedroom, the floors were warped, so we had tons of work to perform, but we could sleep upstairs.
Sullivan’s Island Bridge (photo credit Judy Birdsong)
Ever it be so pounded, there’s no place like home.
[1] I copped that quote from the Black spiritual about the Galveston hurricane of 1900.
In the early ’80s, after my late wife Judy Birdsong landed a full-time position at Trident Technical College teaching psychology, I quit my po-dunk so-called assistant managerial position at Safeco[1] and decided to try my hand at writing short fiction full time. I had been selected to participate in a SC Arts Commission workshop headed by Blanch McCrary Boyd. Other writers in the workshop included Josephine Humphreys, Lee Robinson, Billy Baldwin, Harlan Greene, Steve Hoffius, Greg Williams, and Starkey Flythe, Jr., among others.
Through Starkey’s suggestion, Greg Williams and I attended the Sandhills Writing Conference at Augusta College in Georgia, where Starkey lived.[2] At the conference, I learned a lot from writers I’d never heard of before, but the most profound consequence of my attending was discovering Raymond Carver. Why I had not heard of Carver is puzzling; nevertheless, better late than never.
I found his short stories thrilling, well crafted in the Flannery O’Connor sense of every detail contributing to the stories’ central themes, for example, the long white beard of the blind man in “Cathedral” evoking associations with blind seer Tiresias as he guides the benighted first person narrator into the realm of light, the blind not leading the blind not into a ditch but into a state of enlightenment.
However, most of Carver’s stories are the opposite of uplifting, like “A Serious Talk,” the story of a post-divorce Boxing Day encounter in which an estranged husband attempts to make up with his wife after trying to burn her house down, or like “Popular Mechanics,” a story dramatizing a breakup that ends with the husband and wife engaging in a literal tug-of-war with their baby:
“Let go of him, he said.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’re hurting the baby,” she said.
“I’m not hurting the baby, he said
The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder. She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.
“No!” she screamed just as her hands came loose.
He would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
In this manner, the issue was decided.
* * *
Three years after Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was published, Bruce Springsteen released his seventh album, Born In the USA. Aside from the sonic pleasures of Springsteen’s rock-‘n’-roll, I have always admired his story-telling talents, how he creates working class characters who come alive for the listener. He, too, like Carver, provides details that vivify his narratives, and as with Carver’s, Springsteen’s characters often don’t find redemption.
Here are the lyrics of “Downbound Train,” the final song of Side 1.
I had a job, I had a girl I had something going, mister, in this world I got laid off down at the lumber yard Our love went bad, times got hard.
Now I work down at the carwash Where all it ever does is rain Don’t you feel like you’re a rider On a downbound train?
She just said, “Joe, I gotta go We had it once, we ain’t got it anymore.” She packed her bags, left me behind She bought a ticket on the Central Line.
Nights as I sleep, I hear that whistle whining I feel her kiss in the misty rain, And I feel like I’m a rider On a downbound train.
Last night, I heard your voice You were cryin’, cryin’, you were so alone You said your love had never died. You were waiting for me at home.
Put on my jacket, I ran through the woods. I ran ’til I thought my chest would explode. There in the clearing, beyond the highway In the moonlight, our wedding house shone.
I rushed through the yard, I burst through the front door. My head pounding hard, up the stairs I climbed. The room was dark, our bed was empty. Then I heard that long whistle whine And I dropped to my knees, hung my head and cried.
Now I swing a sledgehammer on a railroad gang Knocking down them cross ties, working in the rain. Now don’t it feel like you’re a rider On a downbound train?
But here’s something else. When Springsteen performs these songs, he transforms into the characters he sings about. Like a method actor, he summons memories that blur the distinction between rock star and the wretches he sings about. He feels what they feel, and it shows.
For example, note during the dream sequence of the clip below, at 1:55, how he trembles when he sings,
“Put on my jacket, I ran through the woods. I ran ’til I thought my chest would explode. There in the clearing, beyond the highway In the moonlight, our wedding house shone.
I rushed through the yard, I burst through the front door. My head pounding hard, up the stairs I climbed. The room was dark, our bed was empty. Then I heard that long whistle whine And I dropped to my knees, hung my head and cried.”
I mean, I find this to be very moving. Like the blind man in “Cathedral,” Springsteen is creating empathy, creating someone besides myself I can feel sorry for.
Blessed be the artists who take us out of ourselves.
[1] Not the insurance company but a safety equipment distributor.
[2] Coincidentally, Greg won in a tie the second place short fiction award.
I have the slightest acquaintanceship with the novelist TC Boyle, whom I occasionally try to convince that his despair over what he sees as Trump’s inevitable election is unfounded, so I thought I’d summarize my arguments and share them with the public at large.
So, ladies and gentlemen, bulldogs and babies, here’s why Trump’s going to lose the 2024 election.
Technical Reasons
Donald Trump runs the Republican Party the way dictators run their fiefdoms, i.e., by purging professional bureaucrats and replacing them with family members, like daughter-in-law Laura, the head of the RNC, who would probably have trouble successfully running a laundromat, much less a complicated multi-state conglomeration. This means that the party doesn’t have the organizational apparatus in place to competently run a campaign, to assemble a 50-state ground game, for example.
A case in point, the piss poor vetting of JD Vance. To win the election, Trump needs to increase his appeal among suburban women, and he’s not going to win them over by selecting a frothing at the mouth misogynist like the Senator from Ohio[1]. In 2020, on Eric Weinstein’s podcast Portal, Vance agreed with his host that “postmenopausal females” exist just to help take care of children. I’m certain some slick communistic Hollywood commercial maker is crafting an attack ad quoting Vance as I type this. Hey, JD, this is late empire America not Medieval Slovenia.
With more states adding right-to-choose referenda – most recently Arizona and Missouri – more women will be inclined to vote. The women I hang with, postmenopausal and otherwise, don’t want some self-identified hillbilly or convicted rapist telling them what they can’t so with their bodies.
Perhaps the most salient technical reason that DJT is going to lose the election is that he seems incapable of attempting to broaden his coalition. All he does at these rallies is sling red meat to lost souls in attendance and promise massive tax cuts to CEOs who would rather increase their wealth than provide free school lunches to food-insecure children.
And by the way, as much as Donald would like the economy to crater before the election, with today’s strong retail sales report and a likely interest rate cut coming in September, that ain’t going to happen in the 90-odd days before the election.
Fundamental Reasons
Donald Trump’s always suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder; however, now that pathology is compounded by his diminished mental acuity, the product of decrepit age, to use WB Yeats’ unlovely term. Some also suggest that Trump is addicted to Adderall, which they blame for his periodic sniffing. Anyway, he is, as he said the other day, who he is.
No way he’ll quit obsessing over crowd sizes or cease with the adolescent nicknames, and as the election intensifies, his infirmities will be increasingly obvious to those paying attention.
Anyway, his song and dance is getting really stale, or as one wag put it on Twitter/X, Donald is in his fat Elvis stage. Diehard fans adore him, but who else enjoys being bombarded with a constant barrage of hyperbolic negativity – foreign hordes pouring into our cul-de-sacs, the future a Blade Runner hellscape if Kamala wins – a land in which saying Merry Christmas could land you in jail.
Only idiots believe shit like that.
Harris Walz
Trump could very well have defeated Biden, especially after the debate; however, now he’s running against a formidable ticket that exudes joy and points to a bright future where citizens collaborate to address problems, a ticket that doesn’t want to dismantle NATO, or coddle up to dictators.
Conclusion
So chins up, pinko-fascists, if we work hard to get out the vote and unloosen our purses and donate, we got this thing. I don’t foresee my deleting this post on November 7, the day Caroline and I are going to see fellow Trotskyite Sarah Silverman at the Charleston Music Hall.
So, chill thyselves.
[1] Note the authentic-sounding pundit-ese. – “the Senator from Ohio.”
Even though I’ve written parodies of self-help books, I don’t think I’ve ever read a real one all the way through.[1] But, oh, lots of other people have. According to Worldmetrics.org, “the global self-help industry is estimated to be worth $11 billion,” and “58% of Americans have purchased a self-help product at least once.”
I guess one reason I’m not into self-help is that I’m in my seventies, retired, so not in the market to pick up “the 7 habits of highly effective people” nor do I have the energy to “accept nothing less than the life [I] deserve.”[2] Before retirement, revisiting the texts I was teaching left little time for recreational reading, so if I were going to slip a side book in between Crime and Punishment and The Sound and the Fury, it would be a contemporary novel like Cloud Atlas rather than the bogus-sounding The Influential Mind: What Our Brains Reveal About Our Power to Change Others.
There is, however, a topic I wish some self-help sage would address, i.e., helping wretches like me come to terms with “the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to,” in other words, how to help us forget those PTSD-inducing experiences.
My late wife Judy Birdsong used to complain about what she called my “demons,” for example, my habit of awakening in the dead of night screaming after a nightmare conjuring that time at age seven when I accidently saw my demented wheelchair-bound great aunt naked. Or my self-defeating habit of reexperiencing in a never-ending loop Lonnie Smith’s getting deked in the ’91 World Series and not scoring what would have been the winning run. Imagine being at your in-laws at the Thanksgiving table holding hands while the patriarch is praying out loud, but rather than joining in the amens, you blurt out, “Dammit, Lonnie, why did you stop running?”
I wish some self-help sage would write How to Turn Your Demons into a Flea Circus. Ideally, this book would demonstrate to the – to use a quaint term – neurotic reader that she has blown negative life events way out of proportion, that she should shrink those bloodsucking vampires of her imagination into fleas, absurd itty bitty insects performing amusing little tricks in a miniature circus mock-up complete with tiny trapezes and tightropes. In essence, to find the humor in horror.
How to Turn Your Demons into a Flea Circus would teach us how not to take ourselves so seriously. Rather than being blown out of proportion, these negative life events would be weighed against what TS Eliot called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy” i.e. the historical tapestry of famine, war, and genocide.
Come to think of it, though it’s certainly not a quick fix, reading great literature is a way to tame those demons because it teaches, to quote Wesley Moore III, that “suffering doesn’t make you special; it makes you human.”[3]
I suspect that there’s not a quick fix. So, to quote the late, great Kurt Cobain, “never mind.”
I try not to take things for granted. For example, yesterday Caroline and I sludged on foot through heavy humidity to Planet Follywood for breakfast, and as my sunglasses fogged up like a time-lapsed cataract, I thought to myself how nice it is not to have to assess essays.
Of course, we’re smack dab in the middle of the summer, so I wouldn’t have any essays to grade anyway, but still, if I weren’t retired, I’d be lamenting that it’s really not the middle of the summer, given contemporary school schedules. The post Labor Day onset of school has gone the way of the hand-cranked eggbeater, a relic of the predigital era. I recently overheard someone say that school this year starts on August 7th, which is way too early — way, way too early.
Of course, the very beginning of school does have its charms, like meeting new colleagues and students, and the welcome-back faculty and staff cocktail party is fun, but the next thing you know, you’re slogging through over-annotated summer reading books and their accompanying journals. More than any other project, including research papers, I hated assessing those annotated novels and journals, fussing over inelegant quotation integration, encouraging students to break quotes into small units and imbed them into analytical prose.
For example,
Not: “Moore juxtapositions descriptions of impoverished Camilla Creel and Jill Birdsong during Activity Period. Camilla has no friends. ‘As usual Camilla Creel doesn’t move from her seat when the bell rings for Activity Period. The rest of the girls in her home economics class can’t wait to put away the dress patterns they’re cutting out and stow those scissors so they can rush out into the teeming halls where boys cut fool and girls gossip.’ Compare this with ‘Jill Birdsong has made her way to the Junior Civitan meeting in Miss McGee’s room.'”
[vigorous yawn]
But Instead: Moore adds another set of foils to underscore differences among the characters, in this case Camilla Creel and Jill Birdsong. At Activity Period, friendless Camilla ‘doesn’t move from seat when the bell rings,’ unlike Jill Birdsong, who is making ‘her way to the Junior Civitan meeting in Miss McGee’s room’ to interact with her peers in choosing a charitable project for an African American nursing home. Ironically, Camilla is so impoverished that her family lives in an abandoned school bus, but to the rest of the school, she’s essentially invisible.”[1]
[lesser yawn]
So, my mid-summer Island life isn’t darkened by dreading upcoming responsibilities. Now I can complain about the heat and tourists walking five abreast on Hudson Street instead of interminable faculty meetings and the annual blood borne pathogen tutorial and accompanying test.
[cue Alice Cooper]: “School’s out forever.” The back-to-school sales no longer produce sighs.
[1] from Today, Oh Boy, (121-3). BTW, I realize it’s obnoxious to market my novel like this. But buy it, dammit. Here’s a LINK.
For whatever reason, this summer I’ve started missing teaching. I have an acquaintance, a very intelligent and accomplished young woman who is trilingual, spent a couple of years in Africa with the Peace Corps but who now suffers from what I’ll call low-grade ennui, her post jungle job not as satisfying as it seemed on paper. I see her occasionally at Chico Feo, and I ask her how her ennui is going, I’ve also been reciting snippets of poems dealing with profound boredom, riffing on Baudelaire, Yeats, Eliot, Roethke, Berryman, and Bukowski.
For example, J. Alfred Prufrock is no stranger to tedium.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
She enjoys these snippets, leans in so she can hear Prufrock above piped-in music.
Contemporary culture is so impoverished. TikTok, Insta, Facebook, et. al offer quick fixes to sate the need for constant stimulation, but they’re about as nourishing as cardboard. It’s not only fun but also life enhancing turning young people on to what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” As a teacher, I especially enjoyed explaining how the elements of cultures reinforce each other and how the best art incorporates contemporary science and history into its mix: Planck and Einstein + WW1 + Freud = Modernism.
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
So yeah, I miss that (but not meetings, emails, EpiPens, essay grading, overwrought parents, dress code violations, and all that life-negating rigmarole.
***
What brought this nostalgia to mind was watching last night a video of Elvis Costello in 1978 performing “Watching the Detectives” in Kohn, Germany. We had a tradition that if every student in my class scored a 100 on a reading or vocabulary quiz, we’d have what I called a “Festival” and turn them on to some really wonderful music videos like Etta James and Dr. John performing “”I’d Rather Be a Blind Girl” or the Pogues doing “Dirty Old Town.” I considered it not a waste of time but an enrichment of their lives.[1]
“Watching the Detectives” is an homage to film noir, and the lyrics mimic a screenplay:
And the music that supports these lyrics percolates ska-like. It’s such a good song, and I wish I could share it with someone and explain it to them[2] why it’s relevant.
[1] Also, it was a huge incentive to read the assignments.
[2] Yeah, I know, I know, “them” should be a singular pronoun.
Thursday night, our friend David Boatwright met Caroline and me at the Terrace Theater to check out the Ethan Hawke Flannery O’Connor biopic Wildcat.[1] It’s gotten mixed reviews—hovers around 5 on the Rotten Tomato ten point scale— but I wonder if to fully appreciate the film you need to be familiar with O’Connor’s work. Throughout the action, Hawke and fellow screenwriter Shelby Gaines intersperse fiction from O’Connor’s canon into the story of her adulthood, but if you’re unfamiliar with her stories — e.g., “Parker’s Back” or “Revelation”— you very well may find the film quilt-like, a series of narratives stitched together that don’t create a comprehensive or unified overview. Brandon Yu, who reviewed the movie for New York Times, complains, “Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.” However, if you’ve read the stories, this is not the case. You see how they came to be via her daily interactions with others and understand how the stories embody her Catholic vision.
I don’t think the Hawkes (Ethan’s daughter Maya plays O’Connor and his wife Rachel is credited as a producer) necessarily set out to produce a fully integrated masterpiece like Citizen Kane but rather made the movie as an homage to Flannery, an artist of the highest caliber who simultaneously can make you laugh out loud and feel pathos. Maya Hawke discovered O’Connor in high school, used O’Connor’s Prayer Journal for her audition monologue at Julliard, and essentially became obsessed with the writer.
I can empathize. I’ve learned a lot from Flannery O’Connor about writing fiction. Not only that, but her stories are so fun to teach, are so well crafted with each element of the plot — name selection, physical description, characterization, symbolism, and tone—linked to a common central theme: in a Catholic universe underserving people can be granted grace, even in the seemingly godforsaken Southern Gothic world of rural Georgia.
Take the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” for example, which dramatizes a family vacation where a mother, father, two bratty children, an infant, and a grandmother are murdered by an escaped convict called the Misfit. Yet I’d classify the story as a comedy, both in the literary sense and also in the Medieval sense of “The Divine Comedy” where a soul moves from darkness to light. The grandmother in the story is a self-centered pain-in-the-ass who essentially causes the wreck that allows the Misfit to murder the family and steal their car. However, at the very end of the story, grace descends upon the old woman when she sees how miserable the Misfit is and tries to comfort him:
[The Misfit’s] voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
illustration by Jeffrey Smith
Note that her “legs are crossed,” an obvious Christian symbol, “under her like a child,” which suggests innocence regained, and that she is “smiling up at a cloudless sky.” In O’Connor’s Catholic universe, this amounts to a happy ending for the Grandmother’s death comes at a moment of redemption. This message is no doubt alien to most contemporary US citizens; however, as the movie makes abundantly clear, she wasn’t writing for the materialistic middle class.
“Either one is serious about salvation or one is not,” O’Connor writes in Mystery and Manners. “And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”
For me a movie is a successful if I think about it a lot after seeing it. In the wee hours this morning, as I wandered the barren moors of my insomnia, I thought about how the subdued colors of the film in general and threadbare genteel shabbiness of her home in specific underscore the profound melancholy of Flannery O’Connor’s life. She had studied at the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop, hung out with Robert Lowell and Katherine Anne Porter, but after developing lupus was exiled from a literacy life in the North to a suffocatingly provincial existence on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, There she worked in pain and physical decline until her death at 39, all the while being totally unappreciated by her homefolk who found her fiction to be inaccessible and life-negating.
My only gripe is that the Hawkes’ depiction of O’Connor lacks the dry humor that she demonstrated in her letters. Maya Hawkes’ acting is superb, but she portrays O’Connor as sort of a rigid, humorless young woman on the spectrum whereas in reality O’Connor was fun to be with. I once had dinner with the late Ashley Brown, a professor at the University of South Carolina, who was close friends with Flannery and who appears often in her collected letters. I asked him if she were as severe a Catholic as the stories suggested, and he said, “Oh, no, not at all. She was delightful, very witty, fun to be with.” Then he whipped out photo albums featuring pictures he had taken of her with her peacocks. She was often beaming in those photos.
Nevertheless, by external standards, her life was bleak, and the film’s underscoring of that fact has made me appreciate her achievement even more. To see her alchemizing on screen the characters from her daily life into the immortals of her stories is very satisfying indeed. I also appreciate the way she didn’t outline her stories but had them unspool spontaneously from her subconscious, which is the way I also write fiction.
I’ll leave you with this delightful seduction scene from “Good Country People” where in a hayloft Manly Pointer, a door-to-door Bible salesman, demands that one-legged hot-to-trot nihilist Hulga Joy Hopewell say the words “I love you” to satisfy a mechanical formula he insists must be followed as a prerequisite for sex:
The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, “Yes, yes.”
“Okay then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”
She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.
He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he whispered.
I often say that my novel Today, Oh Boy has the most unerotic sex scene in all of American literature, but now, rereading the above, I take it back.
[1] Although better known in Charleston a muralist and a painter, David is also a filmmaker, and sitting next to a filmmaker made me pay closer attention to technique, which is a good thing.
You Do Hoodoo 