Flannery O' Connor

A speck lost in the middle of Georgia. Milledgeville, reads the name on the map. Hard to imagine it was once the state capital. A fallen capital, cluttered with ruins from the Civil War. The perfect icon of the Lost Cause of the American South.

It's there that Flannery O’Connor spent most of her days. And it's there that, fifty years ago this August, her life came to an end. Yet, from that remote corner of America, her voice has never stopped resonating. Not only through the pages of books (from Cormac McCarthy to Joe R. Lansdale), but also in music rooted in the deepest soil of America.

How many writers can claim to be quoted as often as she is, by songwriters of old and new generations alike? An indelible mark left in just thirty-nine years of life, through a few dozen short stories and only two novels ("Wise Blood" and "The Violent Bear It Away").

– MEANNESS –

"Hey, Bailey, look, read this," said the grandmother, and she got up with one thin hand on her hip, waving the rustling newspaper with the other over her son's bald head. "There's a fellow who calls himself the Misfit... He's escaped from the federal pen and headed toward Florida. Read here what it says he did to these people. Read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."

Bruce Springsteen – Nebraska

(Nebraska, 1982)

An elderly lady in white cotton gloves. A criminal freshly escaped from prison whom everyone calls "The Misfit". And the roads of the South, raw and dark as a premonition. That's all Flannery O'Connor needs to build the American tragedy of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find". In her stories, reality always comes first, in all its starkest concreteness: "Fiction is about everything human, and we are made out of dust," she liked to say. "If you disdain to be tainted by any of it, you had better not try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you."

It is precisely in the pitiless realism of that gaze that the most intimate connection between Flannery O'Connor's writing and the songs of Bruce Springsteen lies hidden. Springsteen first encountered the Georgia author's work while making "Nebraska": "Her stories reminded me of the unknowability of God, and they suggested a dark spirituality that, at the time, resonated with my own feelings" ¹.

Just the opening lines of the title track would be enough, with their cold, spare rendering of detail: her with her baton, him with his sawed-off shotgun. "Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died." The story told in "Nebraska" bears the imprint of the characters from Terrence Malick's "Badlands", but it's impossible not to glimpse, beneath the surface, the unmistakable features of Flannery O'Connor's Misfit. Above all in that one word, "meanness", which echoes with equal force both in the Misfit's own words and in those of the song's protagonist. "I guess there's just a meanness in this world." For both of them, the meanness of the world is no alibi: it is the most terrible revelation of one's own face in the mirror.

– SOUTH –

“Attraversiamo la Georgia alla svelta, così non dobbiamo guardarla troppo” propose John Wesley.

“Se io fossi un bambino, non parlerei così dello stato dove sono nato” disse la nonna. “Il Tennessee ha le montagne e la Georgia ha le colline”.

“Il Tennessee è un cesso pieno di buzzurri” dichiarò John Wesley “e anche la Georgia fa schifo”.

Andrew Bird – Far From Any Road (Be My Hand) (The Handsome Family)

(Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of…, 2014)

Muddy waters, abandoned churches, corners hiding unspeakable secrets. It only takes watching a single episode of "True Detective" to realize how the landscapes of the South can take on the force of a fully-fledged character. It's no coincidence, then, that a song by Handsome Family was chosen as the soundtrack for the opening titles of the series created by Nic Pizzolatto: for two decades now, the duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks has continued to explore, down to its darkest recesses, the sense of mystery woven into Southern folk tradition.

In search of that same echo, their old friend Andrew Bird devoted an entire album to Handsome Family's songs. In his tribute, released this very year under the title "Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of…", there was no way he could leave out a rendition of the opening theme of "True Detective", "Far From Any Road (Be My Hand)": a tale of poison, desert and eternal love that perfectly sums up the fatalism-steeped Southern landscapes of the Sparks couple.

Like them, Flannery O'Connor never hid her Southern roots. A visceral, contradiction-riddled relationship, forever torn between her ties to her origins and a sense of alienation from the Protestant culture she was immersed in. "The Catholic writer in the South," she wrote, "is forced to follow the spirit into strange places and to recognize it in many forms not totally congenial to him."

Flannery O'Connor spent her life chasing after the incarnations of the spirit without ever straying far from the family farm, "Andalusia," surrounded by her flock of peacocks. Confined there by lupus, the hereditary illness that had already taken her father when she was just 15. And yet she was always ready to seize, even within the limits of that seeming prison, the chance to probe more deeply into her own self: "It is a great blessing, perhaps the greatest, for a writer to find at home what others must go elsewhere to seek." Because the South holds within it an entire universe. A universe of stories just waiting to be told.

– SIN –

“Gesù ha mandato tutto a gambe all’aria. È stato lo stesso, per lui e per me, solo che lui non aveva commesso delitti e invece hanno potuto provare che io ne avevo commesso uno, perché avevano le carte. (…) Ho preso il nome di Balordo perché non riesco a far tornare il conto del male che ho fatto e di quello che ho patito per scontarlo”.

16 Horsepower – Sinnerman (traditional)

(Folklore, 2002)

Among all the major figures of modern Americana, Dave Eugene Edwards would surely be the best cast as a character out of a Flannery O'Connor story. His grandfather, a Church of the Nazarene preacher forever traveling between one Colorado town and another, raised him on visions of eternal damnation and old Johnny Cash records. And when he was just five years old, God himself called him by name: "I don't have stories to tell like 'while I was doing this or that the Lord appeared to me,' but I immediately felt that it was true," recalls the leader of 16 Horsepower and Woven Hand. "I've always doubted myself and everything else, but I've never doubted that God was exactly what he claimed to be."

Around the same age, Flannery O'Connor used to shut herself in her room and spin around with a fierce look on her face, trying to punch her guardian angel. "You can't hurt an angel, but I'd have been happy to muss up his feathers." As in the pages of the Georgia writer, the Bible that runs through Edwards's lyrics is not a cheap way of soothing one's conscience, but the mark of a tormented struggle between sin and redemption. "The more you become aware of what God truly is, the more you realize how far you are from him. It's like looking at something under a microscope and seeing what it's really made of: it's not the pretty picture you thought it was. My job is to tell people they're sick. And that they need to go see a doctor."

The classic spiritual "Sinnerman," recorded with 16 Horsepower for the covers album "Folklore," sums up this struggle in the most emblematic way, echoing with a voice from which there is no hiding: "Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to?"

– GOTHIC –

“Gesù è stato l’unico a risuscitare i morti” riprese il Balordo. “E non avrebbe dovuto farlo. Ha mandato tutto a gambe all’aria. Se ha fatto quel che ha detto, allora non ci resta che gettare tutto e seguirlo; se non l’ha fatto, allora non ci resta che goderci meglio che possiamo i pochi minuti che ci avanzano: uccidendo qualcuno, bruciandogli la casa o facendogli qualche altra cattiveria. Non c’è piacere al di fuori della cattiveria” affermò, e la sua voce divenne quasi un ringhio.

Slim Cessna’s Auto Club – Jesus Christ

(Always Say Please And Thank You, 2000)

Southern gothic. Or rather “the tragic and the comic, the immense and the trivial, the sacred and the obscene, the whole soul of man and his most material details”. So said another celebrated Georgian writer, Carson McCullers, long grouped alongside William Faulkner, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams among the masters of Southern gothic literature. And, of course, alongside Flannery O’Connor: because, as Fernanda Pivano immediately sensed, “the grotesque and the horrific, the two hallmarks of the so-called ‘gothic school’ of Southern writers, are omnipresent throughout her pages”².

In the realm of the grotesque, blood and comedy merge into an inseparable whole, without which American gothic would be impossible to understand. Even the most vicious evil can be mocked, once you're certain it's destined to be defeated. That's why, in Flannery O’Connor, “the gratuitous violence, the bizarre and the grotesque, a mix of comedy and horror, are not a mere adherence to or simple sharing of the aesthetic canons of the Southern American storytelling tradition: they are a tool of understanding, a lens through which to read. It's as if the writer were slapping the reader in the face”³.

A slap that, in music, keeps landing through the heirs of contemporary southern gothic, the latest standard-bearers of a folk tradition built on murder ballads and Appalachian darkness. Not only Handsome Family and 16 Horsepower, but also ingredients like the black humour of Those Poor Bastards and Lonesome Wyatt And The Holy Spooks, the macabre theatre of The Devil Makes Three and Reverend Glasseye, the folk-punk fury of Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and O’Death, or the chiaroscuro songwriting of Josh T. Pearson and Wooden Wand.

Right through to names not strictly tied to the South, such as Will Oldham or Marissa Nadler, in whose songs it's not hard to recognise the mark of the South's deepest soul. Nor are there any shortage of artists who have absorbed Flannery O’Connor's influence not just in their work as songwriters, but as bona fide writers too, from Nick Cave (with his two novels “And The Ass Saw The Angel” and “The Death Of Bunny Munro”) to Josh Ritter (who recently published his first book, “Bright’s Passage”).

From Slim Cessna’s Auto Club comes the interweaving of gospel echoes, woozy yodelling and spectral traces in “Jesus Christ”, a perfect icon of the shadowy religiosity that saturates the spirit of the South.

– BLOOD –

The Misfit's voice seemed on the verge of breaking and for a moment the grandmother's mind cleared. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own, as if he were about 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 down the gun, took off his glasses and began to clean them.

Johnny Dowd – One Way

(Wrong Side Of Memphis, 1998)

The neon lights of a gas station cast their unreal glow into the night. A man dressed in black grips an electric guitar to give voice to a skeletal, hallucinatory blues. His name is Johnny Dowd and the song he's singing is called “One Way”. The scene comes from “Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus”, the documentary made by the BBC in 2004 across the deepest American South. A kind of descent into hell guided by songwriter Jim White, who narrates the journey and draws in not only his friend Johnny Dowd, but also Handsome Family, Dave Eugene Edwards and other artists more or less connected to the southern gothic scene.

Once again it's Brett and Rennie Sparks who sum up the meaning of this journey through the rust of junkyards and the fire-and-brimstone of preachers: “There's a great artistic tradition born from the clash between what is sacred and what is secular. The devil lives in the South. Without the devil, what would God be? Nothing. You need both. You need something dark. You need ghosts. You need evil, before good can make any sense. You need sin. It's a God and a devil that can be felt and touched. All these people, like Jerry Lee Lewis or Johnny Cash, could easily have been preachers, or they could have been murderers”.

It's no coincidence that a quotation from Flannery O'Connor closes the film, this time through the words of Jim White: "You went looking for some truth about the South, some revelation. But you can't find it unless it happens by chance or by grace. These people know it because they have what Flannery O'Connor called 'wise blood.' It's the blood that rules them, not them that rule the blood. If you want to know the secret of the South, you have to have it in your blood."

“Miracles happen everyday”, murmurs Johnny Dowd amid the shadows of the gas station. “There are two roads, but there is only one real way”. The crossroads of freedom: that's where destinies intertwine, as in the encounter between the Misfit and the old grandmother along the dusty roads of Georgia.

– GRACE –

“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it’s somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.

“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It's no real pleasure in life.”

Sufjan Stevens – A Good Man Is Hard To Find

(Seven Swans, 2004)

It's the voice of Sufjan Stevens that leads us to the heart of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, taking us straight into the gaze of Flannery O'Connor's Misfit. His closing dialogue with the grandmother contains the essence of the whole story. The more she tries to talk her way out of being shot, the emptier her words sound. But there's a moment, an instant, in which the Misfit seems to lay his soul bare. And the grandmother drops her mask of hypocrisy, truly looking into the eyes of the man before her. An instant that is immediately shattered by the echo of gunshots.

That's where the drama plays out, face to face with death. That's where freedom and grace confront each other. Because the true subject of all of Flannery O'Connor's stories, as she herself put it, is “the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil”. And grace acts by entering reality unexpectedly, even using evil and violence as its instruments. Yet it never denies man even the possibility of refusing it. “Violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. A man in a violent situation reveals those qualities that are most essential to his character, the qualities that will be with him at the moment of eternity.”

In the end, this is the key to the influence Flannery O'Connor still exerts today: the honesty with which she confronts life's most decisive questions, never censoring anything of what makes us human. All it takes is an open gaze, a willingness to “discover their own sense of mystery through contact with reality, and their own sense of reality through contact with mystery”.

The Misfit's shadow blurs once again into Sufjan Stevens's lyrics. “Hold to your gun, man/ And put off all your peace”, he whispers amid the raw guitar and drifting keyboards of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”. “But someone's once like me/ She was once like me”. Man is the cruellest of animals, they say. And yet, even in the deepest reaches of the devil's territory, one can glimpse within him the spark of grace.

Notes

2- F. Pivano, Foreword to “La saggezza nel sangue”, Garzanti, 2010.

3- A. Spadaro, “Flannery O’Connor. "La saggezza nel sangue," in “Nelle vene dell’America”, Jaca Book, 2013.

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