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The Book Of Eulogies (Page 3 of 4)
"One would think... that she could not look so steadily, so drily, and so long at so much false respect without herself dying of despair."
FLANNERY O'CONNOR On the brink of her writing career, at the age of thirty, the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus, a degenerative disease, which forced her return to her mother's farm near Milledgeville, Georgia. As Sally Fitzgerald, O'Connor's friend and editor, wrote, "Her return was for good, in more ways than one." O'Connor's disease got worse, but during this last decade of her life, she produced most of her best work. | ||||||||||||||||||
Thomas Merton, a convert to Catholicism, became a Trappist monk in Gethsemane, Kentucky. It was said that the door shutting behind him was a noise heard round the world. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, triggered a wave of applications to monasteries in the 1950s. His essays, poetry, and books of spiritual reflection continue to be widely read. Now Flannery is dead and I will write her name with honor, with love for the great slashing innocence of that dry-eyed irony that could keep looking the South in the face without bleeding or even sobbing. Her South was deeper than mine, crazier than Kentucky, but wild with no other madness than the crafty paranoia that is all over the place, including the North! Only madder, craftier, hung up in wilder and more absurd legends, more inventive of more outrageous lies! And solemn! Taking seriously the need to be respectable when one is an obsolescent and very agile fury. The key word to Flannery's stories probably is respect. She never gave up examining its ambiguities and its decay. In this bitter dialectic of half-truths that have become endemic to our system, she probed our very life — its conflicts, its falsities, its obsessions, its vanities. Have we become an enormous complex organization of spurious reverences? Respect is continually advertised, and we are still convinced that we respect "everything good" — when we know too well that we have lost the most elementary respect even for ourselves. Flannery saw this and saw, better than others, what it implied. She wrote in and out of the anatomy of a word that became genteel, then self-conscious, then obsessive, finally dying of contempt, but kept calling itself respect. Contempt for the child, for the stranger, for the woman, for the Negro, for the animal, for the white man, for the farmer, for the country, for the preacher, for the city, for the world, for reality itself. Contempt, contempt, so that in the end the gestures of respect they kept making to themselves and to each other and to God became desperately obscene. But respect had to be maintained. Flannery maintained it ironically and relentlessly with a kind of innocent passion long after it had died of contempt — as if she were the only one left who took this thing seriously. One would think (if one put a Catholic chip on his shoulder and decided to make a problem of her) that she could not look so steadily, so drily, and so long at so much false respect without herself dying of despair. She never made any funny faces. She never said, "Here is a terrible thing." She just looked and said what they said and how they said it. It was not she that invented their despair, and perhaps her only way out of despair herself was to respect the way they announced the gospel of contempt. She patiently recorded all they had got themselves into. Their world was a big, fantastic, crawling, exploding junk pile of despair. I will write her name with honor for seeing it so clearly and looking straight at it without remorse. Perhaps her way of irony was the only possible catharsis for a madness so cruel and endemic. Perhaps a dry honesty like hers can save the South more simply than the North can ever be saved. Flannery's people were two kinds of very advanced primitives: the city kind, exhausted, disillusioned, tired of imagining, perhaps still given to a grim willfulness in the service of doubt, still driving on in fury and ill will, or scientifically expert in nastiness; and the rural kind: furious, slow, cunning, inexhaustible, living sweetly on the verge of the unbelievable, more inclined to prefer the abyss to solid ground.... The way Flannery made a story: she would put together all these elements of unreason and let them fly slowly and inexorably at one another. Then sometimes the urban madness, less powerful, would fall weakly prey to the rural madness and be inexorably devoured by a superior and more primitive absurdity. Or the rural madness would fail and fall short of the required malice and urban deceit would compass its destruction, with all possible contempt, cursing, superior violence, and fully implemented disbelief. For it would usually be wholesome faith that left the rural primitive unarmed. So you would watch, fascinated, almost in despair, knowing that in the end the very worst thing, the least reasonable, the least desirable, was what would have to happen. Not because Flannery wanted it so, but because it turned out to be so in a realm where the advertised satisfaction is compounded of so many lies and of so much contempt for the customer.... ... She respected all her people by searching for some sense in them, searching for truth, searching to the end and then suspending judgment. To have condemned them on moral grounds would have been to connive with their own crafty arts and their own demonic imagination. It would have meant getting tangled up with them in the same machinery of unreality and of contempt. The only way to be saved was to stay out of it, not to think, not to speak, just to record the slow, sweet, ridiculous verbalizing of Southern furies, working their way through their charming lazy hell. That is why when I read Flannery I don't think of Hemingway or Katherine Anne Porter or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can be said of a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor.
"Now, with the sad wisdom of remembrance, he seems to me to have been an expert in the infinite varieties of unrequited love among which the infuriating substitution of admiration for love surely must have loomed large."
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN Along with Christopher Isherwood and Sir Stephen Spender, Auden was a leader in a left-wing literary group that lived in England during the thirties. In 1939, he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1946. A professor of poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1967. In 1971 he returned for good to England, where he lived until his death. Political scientist, writer, and philosopher, Hannah Arendt is best known for her writings on Jewish affairs and the rise of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism and imperialism. She became an established intellectual power with her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this excerpt from her tender tribute to Auden, she explores what it was that accounted for both his misery and his greatness. I met Auden in the autumn of 1958, but I had seen him before, in the late forties at a publisher's party. Although we did not exchange a word on that occasion, I still remembered him quite well — a nice-looking, well-dressed, very English gentleman, friendly and relaxed. I would not have recognized him more than ten years later, for now his face was marked by those famous deep wrinkles as though life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the "heart's invisible furies." If you listened to him, nothing could be more deceptive than this appearance. Time and again, when to all appearances he could not cope any more, when his slum apartment was so cold that the water no longer functioned and he had to use the toilet in the liquor store at the corner, when his suit — no one could convince him that a man needed at least two suits so that one could go to the cleaner or two pairs of shoes so that one pair could be repaired, a subject of an endlessly ongoing debate between us throughout the years — was covered with spots or worn so thin that his trousers would suddenly split from top to bottom, in brief, whenever disaster hit before your very eyes, he would begin to kind of intone an utterly idiosyncratic, absurdly eccentric version of "count your blessings." Since he never talked nonsense or said something obviously silly, and since, moreover, I always remained aware that this was the voice of a very great poet, it took me years to realize that in his case appearance was not deceptive and that it was fatally wrong to ascribe what I saw and knew to the harmless eccentricity of a typically English gentleman. I finally saw the misery, somehow realized vaguely his compelling need to hide it behind the "count your blessings" litany, and still found it difficult to understand fully what made him so miserable, so unable to do anything about the absurd circumstances that made everyday life so unbearable for him. It certainly could not be lack of recognition. He was reasonably famous and anyhow ambition in this sense could not have counted for much, since he was the least vain of all authors I ever met.... Not that he was humble; in his case it was self-confidence that protected him against flattery, and this self-confidence was prior to recognition and fame, prior also to achievement. ("I am going to be a great poet," he told his Oxford tutor, Nevill Coghill.)... In other words, he was blessed with that rare self-confidence that does not need admiration and the opinions of others and can even withstand self-criticism and self-examination without falling into the trap of self-doubt. This has nothing to do with arrogance but is easily mistaken for it. Auden was never arrogant except when provoked by some vulgarity, in which case he protected himself with the rather abrupt rudeness characteristic of English intellectual life. Stephen Spender, who knew him so well, has stressed that "throughout the whole development of [Auden's] poetry... his theme had been love."... And he tells, at the end of the address he gave in memory of the dead friend at the Cathedral Church in Oxford how he had asked Auden about a reading he had given in America: "His face lit up with a smile that altered its lines, and he said, 'They loved me!'" They did not admire him, they loved him — here I think lies the key both to his extraordinary unhappiness and to the extraordinary greatness, intensity, of his poetry. Now, with the sad wisdom of remembrance, he seems to me to have been an expert in the infinite varieties of unrequited love among which the infuriating substitution of admiration for love surely must have loomed large. And beneath these emotions, there must have been from the beginning a certain animal tristesse which no reason and no faith could overcome:
When I knew him, he would not have mentioned the best any longer so firmly had he opted for the second-best, the "formal order," and the result was what Chester Kallman so aptly has named — "the most disheveled child of all disciplinarians."... What made him a poet was his extraordinary facility with, and love for, words, but what made him a great poet was the unprotesting willingness with which he yielded to the "curse" — the curse of vulnerability to "human unsuccess" on all levels of existence; the crookedness of the desires, the infidelities of the heart, the injustices of the world.... It seems, of course, very unlikely that young Auden, when he decided that he was going to be a great poet, knew the price he would have to pay. I think it entirely possible that in the end, when not the intensity of his feelings and not the gift to transform them into praise, but the sheer physical strength of the heart to bear them and live with them gradually faded away, he might have considered the price too high. We, at any event, his audience, readers and listeners, can only be grateful that he paid his price up to the last penny for the everlasting glory of the English language. And his friends may find some consolation in Stephen Spender's beautiful joke beyond the grave — that "his wise unconscious self chose a good day for dying" — for more than one reason. The wisdom to know "when to live and when to die" is not given to mortals; but Wystan, one would like to think, may have received it as the supreme reward that the cruel gods of poetry bestowed on the most obedient of their servants.
Copyright © 1997 by Phyllis Theroux About the Author Phyllis Theroux is the author of California and Other States of Grace and Nightlights: Bedtime Stories for Parents in the Dark. The founder of the Nightwriters seminar, she is a magazine columnist, children's book writer, and was a regular essayist on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She lives in Ashland, Virginia. More by Phyllis Theroux |
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