A Writer and Her Times

Part of me would rather just sit on the couch and read tonight rather than post (F. Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull is waiting half-read, not to mention a true crime about polygamists), but I can't let go of the question that Max posed in the comments of the last post: If an unknown, unconnected, relegated-to-the-slushpile Flannery O'Connor were alive today, would she be published?

Of course this is really several different questions. If Flannery O'Connor were writing today, how would her writing be different? Would she still be writing about Southern Grotesques? Would she even write at all? Would her love of language have been beaten out of her by dreadful 1970's reading curricula (which I blame for the low numbers of readers today)? Would she be writing scripts for reality TV shows, instead?

And, okay, say she was a writer and had the same pet subjects. Even though most current editors would claim to respect her as a canonical writer, would they actually publish her? Or is her gift and her talent one particularly suited to her times, and not really transferable to other times?

And say her gift does transfer, and she writes more or less the same stuff but neatly updated for today's reader: you know, with televangelists. Are today's editors too thick and money-grubbing to recognize a good thing when they see it?

Here's what I think: Some, maybe most, writers have talents and material that are not transferable. That is, they are stuck in their times, they speak only to their times, and teleported elsewhere they would not have much to say. The great historical writers are mostly the exception: Shakespeare, Dickens, Homer. But the rest of us are able to write and be published only because of a particular juncture of self and country and era.

I think Flannery O'Connor is one of the exceptions. I think if she were alive today, she would be a writer, and though her material would be different, I think she would be able to publish it. Who knows if she'd get the kind of audience she did in her own time. But her voice is distinctive enough, and she herself was persistent and single-minded enough, that she would probably publish books.

I don't live in the city, and I've met only a few editors, so I can't make many sweeping judgements about them. But thinking about all the people I know who want to write, all the people who've tried to become writers, I can't think of a single one who writes moderately well and is persistent who hasn't published. I know lots of brilliant unpublished writers, but every single one of them -- without fail -- has quit or is still quite young or new at it or is taking a very long break. There are about as many of them as there are mediocre writers who work their tails off and get book contracts, present company included.

So what I'm saying is, I think there are at least a couple of editors who are smart enough to recognize the good in our contemporary F. O'Connor. Not all of them, judging by the appallingly bad memoir I just skimmed in ARC (Such a Pretty Fat it's called, I'm not joking). An obvious talent like hers would float to the top of the slush pile eventually, with or without her connections or MFA. Maybe it would take a while, longer than it should. But I think it would happen.

Sunday Morning, Wednesday Night

Today I read Kim Cooper's book In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, an essay on the the Neutral Milk Hotel album, which I posted about last month. It's a good book, part of Continuum's intermittently terrific 33 1/3 series, and one bit struck me. The second song on the record begins with lead singer Jeff Magnum crying, "I love you, Jesus Christ," and I was a little surprised to learn in Cooper's Book that Magnum meant this entirely in earnest, not merely from a musical character's point of view, and certainly not ironically. One listener is described as having been initially "repelled" by the lyric, and it occurred to me how much of what I consider the best contemporary art, music, and literature is essentially secular, and that religion, in the public sphere, has largely become the provence of authoritarians and political opportunists.

I am not without my own eccentric spiritual awareness, and I am acutely preoccupied with the big questions about human existence. But, institutionally speaking, I'm an agnostic. That said, I am not repelled by earnest expressions of religious faith. I am repelled by the all too common and extraordinarily shrill hypocritical ones--the kinds I was alluding to in the previous paragraph. Mangum's lyric moves me, though, and I started wondering if I could think of any good religious fiction.

Well, Flannery O'Connor. She's the main one. (Her faith is kind of a deal-breaker for some people, but it deeply endears her to me.) Has anyone read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead? I suspect I would like it, having loved Housekeeping, but haven't gotten to it yet. Dostoyevsky, of course. And Rhian likes Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy. Most others I've tried seem soppish to me--Updike's In The Beauty Of The Lilies is the one that springs most immediately to mind. (I don't dislike Updike, but he bugs me more often than he amazes me. I like Of The Farm and all the Bech stories quite a lot...and his book reviews and other nonfiction. The rest...eh. One of these days I'll post about why Roth is way better at bad men than Updike is, but not today.)

Amen!