February 25, 2004
Dave,
I do appreciate your getting back to me regarding the letter I sent you about Flannery O’Connor and the death of Ernestway. I am now eagerly awaiting your response to the letter I sent you concerning Petuniacon…
Actually, I must apologize myself. I heard a copy of the SPACE show’s Spirituality Panel that you did with Steve Peters (thinking at first when you started speaking: “Man, who the hell is that talking, Donald Sutherland?”) where you made the remark that you didn’t get any feedback anymore. I had not sent you anything because I seem to recall you mentioning that your work day had eaten almost all of your time and that you had a “stack of letters a foot high” you would be getting to “as soon as you were done with Cerebus” (which, apparently, you did) so I just assumed you had enough on your plate without wading through all the fawning fanmail. Since hearing that, though, I had been meaning to get around to complimenting the excellent work you were doing at the time, even “Chasing Yahweh,” but I never did. Now, however, my finances are in such a shape that I haven’t had the means to keep up with Cerebus in a number of months, and here you’ve finished up the run. So, I’ll just take the opportunity to congratulate you on finishing your historic project sight-unseen since I’m quite sure you managed to pull it off in fine style (no doubt by pissing off as many people as humanly possible on your way out the door.)
Concerning my letter, I have to admit that while I remember writing it, I have absolutely no recollection of sending it to you, so you may well imagine my surprise at your answering it. In fact, I had to dig through my documents just to find what the hell it was about. I was gratified to see, though, that I had complimented you and Ger on the death scene, which was a phenomenal piece of work. As far as my being “robbed” because the letter might have made it into Aardvark Comment: well, getting into the AC was hardly one of my lifelong ambitions anyway so I suppose I’ll somehow manage to live with the exclusion.
I have had some time to consider the situation with O’Connor in the interim, and I have come to believe that we are given our talents because God has use for them and that the greatest realization of those talents is in Him. In His work. There, really, is no other viable reason for anyone to have been given any talent but this. We are, of course, free to turn away from this, free to use them for our own devices, but in the end we come up short because of it. I think that is why there was such a profound disappointment among Fitzgerald’s critics on the subject of the substance—or lack thereof—in his work. He had not ever given them any reason to think he was capable of such a thing, and yet they discerned something missing, something they felt should have been there. Fitzgerald was a man of enormous talent who turned away from God. One wonders what he might have achieved had he done otherwise.
It was weakness on the parts of Hemingway and Fitzgerald that turned their eyes to themselves. To perceive anything larger than they were was only to make that weakness more apparent and all the more unbearable. They became their own gods, rendering themselves on the page so that they might rework the world in their own images. In the end, it was this very thing that destroyed them. As is so often the case. How very different from the case of Flannery O’Connor.
Even as a young woman in New York, there is something out of place in her, her eye drawn to things that the others are blind to. When she began writing Wise Blood, did she tempt God’s hand there? Did He see something in her? Did He want to make her see? Like so many things, we simply cannot know. What must have that been like, when her body began to ache and fail her, when the fevers came? Did she take God to task, did she ask for intercession? What was the answer? I AM?
What was left to her? To go back home, back to the very place she had striven so mightily to escape. She was pulled back like a dog on a leash. In the end when her strength fails her, she is cloistered in her own body. There is somewhere along this path that she begins to understand the nature of all of this. We cannot know when. Perhaps all the way back in New York or maybe in her little room in the house she was born in, when the spirit implacable manifests itself to her. What does one do when presented with such a thing? I think that is indeed the hour of our understanding and impossible to know save to have stood before it oneself and found just who, really, we are. She bent her head to it. She took the yoke. She became a bride of God.
A devout Catholic, she sincerely believed that without the foundation of the Church, the Protestants were compelled to act out the very stories in the Bible to understand them, to internalize them, and these acts would often break them in their weakness. She saw the South as a yard of human wreckage, those who were broken before God. And yet her life was just as much an enactment of Biblical scenery itself. With her irony like knives one wonders why this irony escaped her but it was a passion play she acted out— that acted upon her— and she was not broken by it. She was a white rose in Gehenna, bright amidst the young men who drowned children in a state of sin to purify them, amongst proud women who flung themselves down into pig stys to receive a revelation. She was bright because she was all of these things and yet she stood still, bent but deeply rooted.
She was bent by God and by His work. And every moment in that work drew her farther and farther away from the humanists of her time, her friends in New York understanding her less and less as she moved beyond them. The critics did not understand what she was writing; they thought she was being ironic. She was, but not about that. Not about God. She was absolute in the things that she wrote about—grace and faith—and yet this escaped the critics, so many of her readers. One would be hardpressed to find an acclaimed writer whose work is so profoundly misinterpreted. And yet the Word does get out, doesn’t it?
And in all of this, it is impossible to find in any of her letters the slightest claim to martyrdom or sainthood. Or even the notion of any reward for her devotion. She was being a faithful servant of God and that in and of itself was her reward. I for one cannot imagine a better use of a life, any life, than that.
Anyway, take good care of yourself, and I look forward to whatever you decide to do in the future.
Yours,
D.B. Little
P.S. Your tacky little couplet, I must admit, gravely offended me, and I intend to send it to Kim Thompson for his immediate excoriation just as soon as I am done laughing at it.
(Oh hell, I just remembered, having brought up the SPACE show panel: you mentioned the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet with spikenard and his peculiar statement about: “For the poor always ye have, but me ye have not always” (John 12: 8) and that he says she will be remembered for doing it. You took issue with that statement, since no one knew who the woman was, but the woman was Mary, Lazarus’ sister. And Jesus says just previous to the statement about the poor that: “Let her alone; against the day of my burying hath she kept this [the spikenard],” which, to me, illustrates that Mary knew he was about to die and anointed him with the spikenard for that purpose. The disciples, you might remember, still had not clued into this fact yet, yet Mary did. I, for one, am glad that someone understood the gravity of the situation, considering what Jesus was about to do and was so utterly alone in it with his half-witted sidekicks. Maybe we should cut old Mary a little slack here.)
