I just had a scientific breakthrough in my head, in which for a moment I understood how size is relative to or perhaps even a function of time. This is patently obvious to people who study physics in any kind of sophisticated college-level way, I assume, but it’s been a stumbling block for my stolid imagination. (Time, that is.) I was staring at the picture of the full moon that I posted on Facebook the other day, looking at all the pock marks where it’s been struck by flying space debris; particularly enjoying the outward bounding marks of scattered force, as if this were a time lapse photo of the event as it happened…. Then I was picturing us living out our human history on earth some thousands of years with asteroids flying past us here and there at various safe distances, working out what we perceive as fate between two accidental moments when the planet is struck by some large flying stone; I could see the whole thing — all of the universe with bullets of hot rock pinging around in it. And if you are much bigger than the universe — say it’s a beachball in relation to you — then the bullets go shooting around in there real fast but if you’re sub-atomic-particle-tiny, as we are, then they move slowly, taking hundreds and thousands of years to go from one place to another.

What’s clear is that I have to get hold of some good weed and revert to a 1979 lifestyle. In Detroit. Or New Orleans. Someplace cheap. Read old New Directions paperbacks. Everybody will have lots of pubic hair — huge mounds of it. Untended genitals. I’ll wonder — in secret terror — about the future.

From an interview on July 5 in Die Zeit:

Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

In a forceful interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, the star economist Thomas Piketty calls for a major conference on debt. Germany, in particular, should not withhold help from Greece.

This interview has been translated from the original German.

Since his successful book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the Frenchman Thomas Piketty has been considered one of the most influential economists in the world. His argument for the redistribution of income and wealth launched a worldwide discussion. In a interview with Georg Blume of DIE ZEIT, he gives his clear opinions on the European debt debate.

DIE ZEIT: Should we Germans be happy that even the French government is aligned with the German dogma of austerity?

Thomas Piketty: Absolutely not. This is neither a reason for France, nor Germany, and especially not for Europe, to be happy. I am much more afraid that the conservatives, especially in Germany, are about to destroy Europe and the European idea, all because of their shocking ignorance of history.

ZEIT: But we Germans have already reckoned with our own history.

Piketty: But not when it comes to repaying debts! Germany’s past, in this respect, should be of great significance to today’s Germans. Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted. The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe.

“Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.”

ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?

Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

ZEIT: But surely we can’t draw the conclusion that we can do no better today?

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

ZEIT: Are you trying to depict states that don’t pay back their debts as winners?

Piketty: Germany is just such a state. But wait: history shows us two ways for an indebted state to leave delinquency. One was demonstrated by the British Empire in the 19th century after its expensive wars with Napoleon. It is the slow method that is now being recommended to Greece. The Empire repaid its debts through strict budgetary discipline. This worked, but it took an extremely long time. For over 100 years, the British gave up two to three percent of their economy to repay its debts, which was more than they spent on schools and education. That didn’t have to happen, and it shouldn’t happen today. The second method is much faster. Germany proved it in the 20th century. Essentially, it consists of three components: inflation, a special tax on private wealth, and debt relief.

ZEIT: So you’re telling us that the German Wirtschaftswunder [“economic miracle”] was based on the same kind of debt relief that we deny Greece today?

Piketty: Exactly. After the war ended in 1945, Germany’s debt amounted to over 200% of its GDP. Ten years later, little of that remained: public debt was less than 20% of GDP. Around the same time, France managed a similarly artful turnaround. We never would have managed this unbelievably fast reduction in debt through the fiscal discipline that we today recommend to Greece. Instead, both of our states employed the second method with the three components that I mentioned, including debt relief. Think about the London Debt Agreement of 1953, where 60% of German foreign debt was cancelled and its internal debts were restructured.

“We need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II. A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable.”

ZEIT: That happened because people recognized that the high reparations demanded of Germany after World War I were one of the causes of the Second World War. People wanted to forgive Germany’s sins this time!

Piketty: Nonsense! This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a rational political and economic decision. They correctly recognized that, after large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.

ZEIT: The end of the Second World War was a breakdown of civilization. Europe was a killing field. Today is different.

Piketty: To deny the historical parallels to the postwar period would be wrong. Let’s think about the financial crisis of 2008/2009. This wasn’t just any crisis. It was the biggest financial crisis since 1929. So the comparison is quite valid. This is equally true for the Greek economy: between 2009 and 2015, its GDP has fallen by 25%. This is comparable to the recessions in Germany and France between 1929 and 1935.

ZEIT: Many Germans believe that the Greeks still have not recognized their mistakes and want to continue their free-spending ways.

Piketty: If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.

ZEIT: The German Minister of Finance, on the other hand, seems to believe that a Greek exit from the Eurozone could foster greater unity within Europe.

Piketty: If we start kicking states out, then the crisis of confidence in which the Eurozone finds itself today will only worsen. Financial markets will immediately turn on the next country. This would be the beginning of a long, drawn-out period of agony, in whose grasp we risk sacrificing Europe’s social model, its democracy, indeed its civilization on the altar of a conservative, irrational austerity policy.

ZEIT: Do you believe that we Germans aren’t generous enough?

Piketty: What are you talking about? Generous? Currently, Germany is profiting from Greece as it extends loans at comparatively high interest rates.

ZEIT: What solution would you suggest for this crisis?

Piketty: We need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II. A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable. Just now, we’ve lost six months in the completely intransparent negotiations with Athens. The Eurogroup’s notion that Greece will reach a budgetary surplus of 4% of GDP and will pay back its debts within 30 to 40 years is still on the table. Allegedly, they will reach one percent surplus in 2015, then two percent in 2016, and three and a half percent in 2017. Completely ridiculous! This will never happen. Yet we keep postponing the necessary debate until the cows come home.

ZEIT: And what would happen after the major debt cuts?

Piketty: A new European institution would be required to determine the maximum allowable budget deficit in order to prevent the regrowth of debt. For example, this could be a commmittee in the European Parliament consisting of legislators from national parliaments. Budgetary decisions should not be off-limits to legislatures. To undermine European democracy, which is what Germany is doing today by insisting that states remain in penury under mechanisms that Berlin itself is muscling through, is a grievous mistake.

“If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.”

ZEIT: Your president, François Hollande, recently failed to criticize the fiscal pact.

Piketty: This does not improve anything. If, in past years, decisions in Europe had been reached in more democratic ways, the current austerity policy in Europe would be less strict.

ZEIT: But no political party in France is participating. National sovereignty is considered holy.

Piketty: Indeed, in Germany many more people are entertaining thoughts of reestablishing European democracy, in contrast to France with its countless believers in sovereignty. What’s more, our president still portrays himself as a prisoner of the failed 2005 referendum on a European Constitution, which failed in France. François Hollande does not understand that a lot has changed because of the financial crisis. We have to overcome our own national egoism.

ZEIT: What sort of national egoism do you see in Germany?

Piketty: I think that Germany was greatly shaped by its reunification. It was long feared that it would lead to economic stagnation. But then reunification turned out to be a great success thanks to a functioning social safety net and an intact industrial sector. Meanwhile, Germany has become so proud of its success that it dispenses lectures to all other countries. This is a little infantile. Of course, I understand how important the successful reunification was to the personal history of Chancellor Angela Merkel. But now Germany has to rethink things. Otherwise, its position on the debt crisis will be a grave danger to Europe.

ZEIT: What advice do you have for the Chancellor?

Piketty: Those who want to chase Greece out of the Eurozone today will end up on the trash heap of history. If the Chancellor wants to secure her place in the history books, as [Helmut] Kohl did during reunification, then she must forge a solution to the Greek question, including a debt conference where we can start with a clean slate. But with renewed, much stronger fiscal discipline.

This interview was translated by Gavin Schalliol.

From Rebecca Mead, reviewing the unfortunate David Brooks, in The New Yorker: “Even if Brooks is the kind of writer who makes you want to preface your sentences with the phrase “Brooks isn’t wrong to point out,” Brooks isn’t wrong to point out that the examination of what comprises a moral life, an examination that came as second nature to his subjects, has fallen out of cultural favor, at least in the overachieving circles of the meritocracy.”

The New Yorker, please, The New Yorker​. (You’d have to know their old ad campaign to get that construction.) But we’ll come back to The New Yorker.

First I want you to know this is an elegy and a tearful one, metaphorically, now that we can fully say goodbye to a word that used to mean (and quite elegantly served to mean) the opposite of what it seems by popular consent to mean now. That word is ‘comprise’. ‘To comprise’ means (sorry, meant) ‘to include or contain or be made up of”, and was, like include or contain, a strong assertively transitive verb insisting on an object, that object being invariably one or more entities or notions included in the realm of the sentence’s subject. The federal government of the United States comprises three independent branches of authority, decision-making, and power. It is not “comprised of” them; it comprises them.

When in the late 1990s Adelphi University dramatically changed management the new leadership appointed a committee of worthies to construct a new, meaningless mission statement to supplant, importantly, the previous, meaningless mission statement. After the committee was at work some months, its chairman sent the new text over to me, head of the propaganda arm of the institution. It began, “Adelphi University is comprised of….” etc. I told the committee chair that such would not be printed by us until it was fixed — to say Adelphi University comprises or Adelphi University is made up of, consists of, or something else along those lines. On account, I said, of us being a university, see? I felt it behooved us not to lead our mission statement with an error. He agreed.

But he needn’t have done so because soon enough the digital version of The Oxford English Dictionary, available in the school’s library and by web access to the library databases, listed a new, at the time 7th definition of ‘comprise’ — not its usual “consists of” but instead, “constitute”, or, essentially, the opposite of its traditional meaning. At the time the folks at Oxford just slipped that baby in there but now if you look online you’ll find they try to explain this theological mystery, this Miracle of transubstantiation:

Usage

Comprise primarily means ‘consist of,’ as in the country comprises twenty states. It can also mean ‘constitute or make up a whole,’ as in this single breed comprises 50 percent of the Swisscattle population. When this sense is used in the passive (as in the country is comprised of twenty states), it is more or less synonymous with the first sense ( the country comprises twenty states)….

Here, let’s repeat: ‘The country is comprised of twenty states‘ is “more or less” synonymous with ‘the country comprises twenty states‘…

More or less synonymous. As my name is ‘more or less’ synonymous with ‘genius’ and ‘hottie’. Okay, thanks lads and lasses. It is bread AND it is flesh. Now move along.

The mystery of how these two usages are ‘more or less synonymous’ is one the dictionary needs politically to stay away from because it makes traditionalists so angry, and Oxford, well, has a lot of them to contend with. As happens in English, which has no academy to oversee usage, a completely erroneous usage became so common that it was simply, perforce, no longer erroneous. That’s how English works, and we have to live with it. What’s funny and so annoying about this new version of ‘comprise’ is that it’s a kind of magnet word now, akin to ‘surge’, it’s everywhere, always used incorrectly. This usage has obliterated any knowledge or application of the original meaning.

And so The New Yorker people have no choice but to allow such a usage (along with Brooks’s quoted misuse of ‘their’: “‘Very rarely did he call anyone by their first name,’ Brooks observes of [George] Marshall…” and very rarely did Marshall, I bet, use the possessive pronoun “their” in reference to the antecedent “anyone.”  The New Yorker once would have put a ‘sic’ after that ‘their’ but no more.

It’s just that — I know, I know this is becoming an Andy Rooney routine and you want to throw a can of tomatoes at my head — some words and usages will forever annoy me. And my dear New Yorker: this use of ‘comprise’ constitutes one.

I’ve grown weary and irritated with the deep comfort with which Americans refer to the ISIS crew as “barbaric.” If ISIS forces were doing their killing by remote control with satellite assisted heat seeking missiles, or drones, or unaccounted-for and unaccountable, secretly-assigned, masked special forces with night goggles and machine guns, what would we call them?

“Barbaric” derives from the Greek word for “foreign.” Which, where they are, they ain’t. We are, however, quite so.  They’re bad, yes. But the shattering of stability in the Middle East, such as it was more than a decade ago, happens to have been instigated and led by us. And the Sunni insurgencies of Iraq were created by our invasion, which isolated them and handed power to their long-oppressed and vengeful enemy. Later, while keeping that useless Shi’a government aloft, in a move only Westmoreland would have understood, we strengthened the Sunnis  — remember Gen. Petraeus and his brilliant strategy of buying off the Sunni insurgent groups? Hello? What do you think he gave them? Whole truckloads of US currency — I wish I were exaggerating — disappeared during this little episode. Not to mention huge quantities of military equipment and heavy duty arms supplied by the US to Saddam Hussein while he was fighting Iran and then left where they were stored —  by us, who couldn’t be bothered to clean them up.  We also marched out leaving untold acres of military equipment behind because it was too troublesome and expensive to cart it out.

So, having destroyed half the country and utterly polarized its political machinery, and arming both sides as so often we do these days, we thought we were done. While Syria burned to the ground next door; and while our putative allies (Saudia Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, etc) continued our work of funding and arming ISIS and other Sunni groups, in order to paralyze the Shi’a gov’t in Iraq and keep the Iranians at bay. The degree to which the American leadership allows itself to live in fantasy land, and how it trains the ever-obedient corporate media to peddle these confused fairy tales, and the ways we keep choosing (largely by not choosing) vaguely to believe it all, are repulsive.  Oh these terrible barbarians. Wherever did they come from?

Here’s what happened: we went into the nation best suited to begin and keep fueled a region-wide Sunni-Shi’a conflict, weakened its infrastructure beyond repair with a twelve-year embargo and a brutal invasion, killed and maimed and made refugees of as-yet-untallied hundreds of thousands of people, including many of our own innocent and, alas, largely ignorant young people serving in our armed forces, and then we patted ourselves on the back, promoted Petraeus, and left.

As for ISIS — it’s a tough choice, when it’s your time to go, would you prefer to be beheaded by one of those guys or blown to stinking shreds by a US drone while you’re toasting your relatives at a wedding? Which of these is barbaric again?  How about this: when their murder count tops ours, maybe our air of moral superiority will feel a little more justified.

 

He walked.  Late in the night he wrote long passages in his head, describing the world. Last night, for instance, after the midnight session with Brian, he took a subway uptown to the old neighborhood. Coming up the subway stairs and ahead of him the dark gray figures of the people leaving the station, silhouettes against a pearlescent sky tinged with lavender and paler grays and bright silver. After a day of rain, cloud cover thin enough to let a luminous glow of the moon come through; everyone and everything looked so beautiful — so erotic and infused. On the street, a lone parked car, from the 1960s, big and sleek and gleaming, evocative of the city at some other era. Broadway from 137th swooped downhill toward 125th, and then swung back up again into Morningside Heights and Columbia at 116th, and this descent and rise, stretching away from this hilltop, lined by white streetlights, looked like some sort of  runway with the pilot on acid.  He loved the city at these moments, the sheer force of its existence, its millions of existences, an enormous organism that fed on electricity and music and rumbling trains, on people fucking in quiet rooms and some guy shouting in the street, on tired Mexicans in work clothes drinking Negra Modela on the stoops and West African cabbies taking tentative sips of black tea from takeout cups, testing the heat, making their way back home to the Bronx with a night’s fares, which they’ll give to their wives, but not before skimming a little for play.  Occasionally the city came to him whole like that, an unbelievable latticework of improvised imaginations, of endurance, of decency – no, you wouldn’t think so, but it was true, people in New York were generally kinder to each other than they were anywhere else he’d ever been, in circumstances of crowd and want and poor services, all arrayed perfectly against such kindness) — it was a well-protected decency, maintained in the face of the madness and mortality that comes when poverty must live alongside an untouchable, unimaginable plenty.

Oh Brian. Brian was married. To a woman. Brian had been married to the woman for thirty years but he looked so young — he was long and lean and a nice light brown shade because the Irish father had picked up a Tunisian wife in France after the war.  For that too his body was almost hairless, just armpits and pubic hair and a bit on the lower legs. Louis slid along it and took that handsome cock in his mouth and felt — what? He felt beautiful, in congress with this beauty.  You don’t think of a 52 year old man as beautiful but shit happens.

Hard to imagine, this beautiful man puts his pants and his workboots on and drives back to New Jersey, some little house in a clogged matrix of little houses. He said he liked to fuck his wife. She had a great ass and liked him to fuck her there. This drove Louis insane. For days he couldn’t eat after hearing this.

 

______________________________

 

He had had lunch with Steven Burken finally, after turning down three earlier approaches, claiming schedule conflicts.  Burken’s people to his people, Burken wanted him to write something moving and Jewish. Louis actually flew out to LA for this.  (He stayed — he always stayed — in the Beverly Wiltshire because it was the only hotel in Los Angeles that had allowed Paul Robeson to sleep in it.) They lunched on Burken’s self-consciously austere second-floor balcony beneath a white awning that snapped from time to time in the Malibu breeze. A haze hung above the sea. You couldn’t get over the sunlight out there. Lunch came only after Burken showed him the art — the usual suspects from all the Met’s most money-making shows, Matisse, Matisse, Picasso, Monet and Matisse. Louis felt — wanted to believe, really, he was feeling a bit vicious — that Burken could barely restrain himself from saying how much each one cost. Louis knew he was being infuriatingly ungushing. He looked, he made small ambiguous sounds, he murmured quick remarks — hmm, that green — as he might at a mid-level new show at the Whitney.  At the end he said, “Beautiful. You’ve been so very lucky.” Burken’s head went back two inches at this, his eyes narrowed. Then they ate. Somehow the melon and crab and haricote verte and sliced Japanese radishes, the baby greens, the view of the sea, the almost-purchased blue of the sky, didn’t interfere with Burken’s enthusiasm about heroic Jewish themes. His sense of Judaism and the suffering of his people came from family stories and a childhood exposure to Fiddler on the Roof and a reform suburban synagogue.  Louis brought up the Warsaw ghetto.  Burken was excited — then he wasn’t. (What would the title be? Warsaw?) You could see the idea pass out of his eyes after about 180 seconds of conversation, as if the light that diffused through the glowing white awning had suddenly darkened. It hadn’t. Burken was not into the Warsaw ghetto. Louis wanted to say, wait! Think Yentl, but with Tom Hanks! Daniel Craig! Polish people! So it went.

He sent a thank you note. He always sent notes. Inside he wrote: Dear Steven– Such a beautiful lunch and good conversation. Thank you so much. My regards, L.  On the opposing side of the blank card in his neat hand he wrote:

Do not fret because of the wicked; 

Do not envy those who do evil: 

For they wither quickly like grass

And fade like the green of the fields.

Psalm 37

______________________________

 

Hurricanes tornados earthquakes tsunami – all this post-apocalyptic shit, Louis found each new developing and finally completed fiasco dramatically correct, all of it gratified his sense of narrative justice. He’d been brought up reading the Torah.  You could feel it in the air, in the culture, in the universe’s underlying buzz, as when the birds in the woods get all hysterical then fall to stony silence.  Everyone he knew was well-intentioned, sound and decent; after each of the school shootings and the parking lot shootings and the movie theater shootings and the mall shootings his friends all got worked up for a few days tweeting and posting on facebook their outrage about gun control.  He didn’t care about gun control.  When pressed he realized his reasons weren’t that strong — an implicit anti-government reality to a wildly armed populace, the general uselessness of such laws —all his reasoning was soft as could be, but the bedrock fact was that he didn’t care and wouldn’t care and he didn’t really understand why this was, until one evening in a bar with his agent and her husband and a boy named Rick and a book editor from Viking, all debating him in turn, a gantlet of liberals, he was forced to admit to himself and to them that these social band-aids annoyed him and really couldn’t everyone see that the patient was deeply sick? That these new lesions were side symptoms, distractions? Shouldn’t everyone join him in wishing the process of destruction speeded up somehow so the patient would finally stop draining him emotionally and just fucking die?  He said this with proper drama, in resonant voice. He loved the sound of himself talking, especially after two martinis.  Alas people knew him now, strangers knew him: Page Six got it: Just ****ing die! That’s what Pulitzer playwright L. C. Pennybaker says he wishes for America. Buzzing with friends at toney…. Etc.  He was a famous gay playwright now! Look at that. They called him to confirm, to retract. He had never in his life denied saying something or taken it back so it proved a futile conversation in which he attempted to explain metaphor to a transplanted Australian girl. You said you wished America would die, she said. Die sounded like Dah with a tiny “i” thrown in.  You don’t deny it.  He told her he hoped her life would lead her away from pointless tasks such as this one, and hung up.  In his mind he was still the man about whose pronouncements in bars no one gave a particular shit; anonymous and therefore free.  But look: he was a public man: he’d show up at panels and conferences in his cowl-necked cape and with his funny eyeglasses like Ed Wynn meets I M Pei, and the unkempt academics and thin critics with big adam’s apples and the former wild girls now tenured and middle aged with at least one breast cancer scare behind them and in the aftermath a new Solara convertible that made them laugh with their diet-conscious friends –  here he was, Queer-theory bait, half celebrity half deity and all around freak, as if he was a talking giraffe with a toupée.   He made appropriately wise and outrageous comments and often collected a check right there, else the check was sent to his business manager who sent him a monthly statement and copies of his tax filings to sign. To sigh. To sigh and sign.  Once you have money, he’d been sad to learn, you had to fret about people stealing it from you.

Not only when he traveled but every day he left the apartment, he carried with him his passport, an American Express card, a MasterCard, and a thousand or so in cash.  He felt that he should be able to hail a cab and go the airport and leave the country at a moment’s whim or sense of alarm. The alarms had begun to outnumber the whims a good while back but he only rarely left the country.  Major arrangements had to be made to get him out of the city never mind the country.  The small bills, ones and fives and even tens that might come his way – he never told anyone this – he gave away.  He didn’t like to be bothered with them.  So he had a lot to lose in the coming eco-collapse but he was turning 50 soon so really it was a race to the finish-line as far as he was concerned.  If he died first, he won.

Today we can mark exactly fifty years since the death of Flannery O’Connor.  She was half a year short of forty, yet it is defensible to say that by the time she died she had accomplished all that she needed to accomplish in the artistic mode she’d chosen. This is not at all to say she couldn’t have or wouldn’t have written more superb stories and longer fiction but that she likely wouldn’t have written too many more works of the same kind; that having produced all that was new and startling and I would go so far as to say historic in her work, had she lived, she would have seen her way to and, indeed, demanded of herself, a new path, a newer diction, a loosening of form. There is evidence for this notion in her later letters and in her final stories but I’ll cite only one, written about a week before she died: “Caroline*gave me a lot of advice about the story [‘Parker’s Back’] but most of it I’m ignoring. She thinks every story must be built according to the pattern of the Roman arch…”  This was not the tone with which OÇonnor talked about her friend Caroline Gordon’s advice earlier in her own career, when she too believed, in a more country-fied and idiosyncratic way,that every story had to be built according to a classical pattern.

Yet as formal as her stories were, her novels were wildly unmodern, almost medieval. She wrote that she was in Hawthorne’s camp when he said he did not write novels, he wrote romances.  This means, I suspect, that she was not interested in the formal demands of the novel of realism as it had developed in France, Russia and finally England and the United States 50 to 100 years before her own time.  The short story was like a suit of clothes and she knew the type she liked to write, or could write: the novel was a house and she was no architect. She was a visionary, in the broadest sense of that word. And if you read her letters I believe you will come to see that, in her art, she was hungry for transformation; this hunger would have mixed powerfully (as it had in her early artistic development) with her very odd but almost unerring artistic intuitions — intuitions that even at the age of 25 she had trusted beyond any reproving words from eminent authorities. So I think she would have changed in some way, or suffered for not doing so.  Surprising when you ponder it, that her body of work in no way feels incomplete — unlike that of Stephen Crane or F. Scott Fitzgerald or other American writers who died so young and younger.

I should acknowledge that against my speculation stands the wittily unyielding figure of O’Connor herself.  In all other respects, and some would insist even in the pertinent aesthetic respects I’m trying to differentiate, O’Connor was a hard-barking conservative.  Not in the vicious ways that the word has come in recent decades to connote, but in the deeply committed intellectual sense, believing that the manners and conventions of a society evolved slowly with the ages and that, while one could certainly criticize them, and gleefully make fun of them, one shouldn’t try to mess with them. She also believed in truth: and as a Catholic she believed in one truth that stood above and oriented all others.  Change and rebellion were her enemies — from the age of 26 her body had been in chaotic rebellion against her; she didn’t appreciate either disease or revolution on other fronts. All these contributory factors in her conservatism had a few ill effects: they put her quite squarely on the wrong side of the civil rights movement, for instance, and they brought a biliousness to her political observations, which were few but left no doubt she was no fighter for temporal justice.  (To her activist liberal friend Maryat Lee she wrote, “…I lean, you know, in the other direction, towards the reactionaries, who got a better grip on the English language.”) Politics aside, I’d venture that in one sense she didn’t want her rapidly disappearing society to change dramatically because she had studied it so hard, and knew it so well, and took such deep (and at times cackling) pleasure in seeing it strut and lift its tail feathers, that she couldn’t bear to part with it.

All year — starting late last year — I’ve wanted to write a long piece about her work and its influence, on me, on American writers of my generation**, and on the shape of American literature in the largest sense.  I wanted to visit Milledgeville and the farm called Andalusia where she lived most of her adult life, and where she died, a place that Allan Gurganas told me, around the period when it was opening to the public for the first time, was distinctly the most moving literary site he had ever visited. Someday I think I will write this piece, but for now I haven’t had the strength of will or the clarity of mind. This is what writing — trying to write — a novel will do to you. It’s like having a spouse who beats you up and then leaves you alone for long periods of time — somehow even when the spouse is gone you remain totally loyal to the creature and can’t bring yourself to take up with a kinder more yielding lover.***

Now, however, this date has come around, the third day in August, and I feel a powerful and grievous need to do her at least a little bit of honor. This is the writer who more than any other — far more than any other — helped form me, form me not merely as an artist but as a human being, as someone alive in the world developing the tools necessary to perceive its cumbersome progress.  In 1979, when The Habit of Being, O’Connor’s letters as selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald, came out, I was an undergraduate, yearning to become a writer. I was twenty-two and I should have been graduating that year but due to a series of impediments it would take me two years longer.  Indeed at the time I was out of school, trying to write, reading everything I could find that I thought might guide me.  I read John Gardner On Moral Fiction; I recall disagreeing with it but I do not recall a word of what he said. Flannery O’Connor’s thoughts on the same matter I have never forgotten. Explaining to her friend, whom we know only as “A”, why she’d remarked that “the devil was a better writer than [Francoise] Sagan”, she handled the entire issue with a few Zorro-ish sword strokes:

The subject of the moral basis of fiction is one of the most complicated and I don’t doubt that I contradict myself on it, for I have no foolproof aesthetic theory. However, I think we are talking about different things or mean different things here by moral basis. I continue to think that art doesn’t require rectitude of the appetite but this is not to say that it does not have (fiction anyway) a moral basis. I identify this with James’ felt life and not with any particular moral system and I believe that the fiction writer’s moral sense must coincide with his dramatic sense. I don’t like Nelson Algren because his moral sense sticks out, is not one with his dramatic sense…. As I remember Celine, I felt that he did feel life at a moral depth – or rather that his work made me feel life at a moral depth; what he feels I can’t care about…. When I said that the devil was a better writer than Mlle. Saigon [Sagan], I meant to indicate that the devil’s moral sense coincides at all points with his dramatic sense.

It is always perilous, critically, to try to set aside Flannery O’Connor’s religious convictions in order more comfortably to talk about her art.  Frederick Crews wrote compellingly in 1990, after O’Connor had been canonized by an entirely secular readership interested in her identity as a woman, Southerner, outlier, primitive, victim, celibate, et cetera, that to read her without fully confronting her religious faith was not to read her much at all.  And her letters, in fact, brought me back to, and kept me for many years in, the Catholic Church, in which I’d been raised.

Yet I was more transformed by another aspect of her orthodoxy. You could today, as an irritated atheist, read these same letters, stepping over all the broken branches of religious talk that have fallen onto the trails, and still perceive that her requirements of herself as an artist were of the very highest kind; you can further perceive (the Catholics are so good at this) a comprehensive and coherent philosophy of art that she has studied, internalized, and employed, one that absolutely required her to aspire only to art’s highest methods and intentions. And she hands this to you as if it’s an old-fashioned picnic basket filled with cold chicken, store bread and butter, and a gingham cloth for cover. It is extremely radical but feels as natural as a tree in the yard. Once, long ago, in answer to the accusation that I liked no women writers, I said to my first wife, well before we were married, that this charge plainly wasn’t true: I worshipped Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, and Mary McCarthy.  “They’re not women writers,” she said. “Hell, Henry James is more of a woman writer than they are.” This remark amused me in part, I can see now, because it was an unintentional slap at women. At the time, I rather agreed with her. Now I do not. Flannery O’Connor — in her hardness, stoicism, stiletto wit, and stone-sculpted prose — was exactly a woman: clear as water, unsentimental, profoundly accepting of her misfortune and suffering and able to look within it to find a space where her full identity, her full ambition, her convictions and her art, could live and flourish. It’s difficult to envision a man who could have done it.

The greatest compliment ever bestowed on O’Connor’s work came from Thomas Merton, her contemporary – a Trappist monk, poet, and theologian. When he learned of her death from Robert Giroux, the editor he shared with her, he wrote back (and later published):

I don’t think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say about a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and dishonor.

For years I didn’t understand this remark. As much as I loved O’Connor I felt a little guilty about this statement because I wanted to believe it even though it seemed quite clearly to be overshooting its mark. Now I know a little more; I’ve even re-read and taught Sophocles a few times. She is not comparable to Hemingway or Faulkner or Porter because she was not a product of her own time. She broke out of that boundary. The writer – it has been said many, many times – is like God. She creates characters; she endows them with a certain kind of freedom of will which, if you’ve never written fiction, you likely doubt is possible. Typically she shapes a narrative around what these characters do, how things turn out, and suggests what in a larger context this might mean. But O’Connor was different, as was Sophocles. Both were tragedians but unlike most other makers of tragedies, they oriented their vision toward a specifically divine redemption. It is informative to compare, as pertinent examples, the ending of Oedipus at Colonus, unique among the tragedies, with the end of O’Connor’s story “Revelation.”  Very different and yet not: these are attempts to take literature absolutely as far into human existence and its meanings as it can go – to go further, in fact, in order to touch, fleetingly, a dramatically convincing vision of the gods, or God. They are overpowering moments in time, emerging perfectly and inevitably from the world the two artists have created.

So there she stands, dead at 39, now a monument and an increasingly forgotten one. But not by us. She was a miracle, really; and her voice, a purifying force, is in my head, always. What can I offer, what can I give back? I can say, Ave. There was Sophocles, there was Dante, there were Michelangelo and Bach.  And around 1950 they sent us a funny kind of girl with a thick accent, out of an old courthouse town between Macon and Atlanta. She was with us a short time — just long enough to show us everything.

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Notes

*This refers to Caroline Gordon, writer and wife of Allen Tate with whom Gordon wrote and edited The House of Fiction, an instructional anthology that reads now almost as obscurely as Thomas Aquinas and which is, essentially, a Summa in the religion of Writing Like Henry James. This and Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks’ and Robert Penn Warren’s  even more dense and Scholastic instructional anthology (also composed under the influence of James, whose fiction and criticism both underwent an energetic, almost religious revival in the 1940s) were the only two books about writing fiction I can recall O’Connor in her letters recommending. And she recommended them often.  The technical vocabulary of both these texts reads now like a glossary of 18th century medical terms.

**A bit of a lost group, trend-wise, my generation, falling between what I should call the John Barth and the Raymond Carver generations.  Lorrie Moore is almost exactly my age. Who was she influenced by? Donald Barthelme? Renata Adler? Jamaica Kincaid? From an acute angle, Ann Beattie, who was for a time quite influential, until Carver overshadowed her in that department, both practicising (her first) what was called minimalism. It would be hard to say. But you can see O’Connor there certainly.  The only writer of fiction who has influenced our particular generation as strongly as O’Connor (and in not uncomplimentary ways) is Don DeLillo.  DeLillo continues to be a large and powerful influence; O’Connor, I suspect, is nowadays deeply read only by a few.

***  O’Connor herself I don’t think was terribly keen on writing novels: she wrote two, both in a darkened version of the picaresque form if they have any form at all, and she remarked in one of her letters that taking time off from working on the second one, in order to write a short story, was like a vacation in the country.