"A slight Southern fetish, mixed with fear": Sufjan Stevens on his favorite writers

On Monday, Rick Moody talked with Sufjan Stevens and Wesley Stace about literature and music at the second PENultimate Lit event. The full audio should be up on the main PEN site soon, but in the meantime, you can watch short clips filmed by a few of the many Sufjan fans who were in the audience. In this one, Sufjan talks about his favorite writers, who are largely from the South-- Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner:



Sufjan's Illinois album, lent to me by one of our generous interns, reminds me more of the great Winesburg, Ohio than any other book I can think of-- and, indeed, at the very beginning of the clip, you can hear Sufjan briefly mention his fondness for Sherwood Anderson.

He also told a funny story about sending a short story to Harper's magazine back when he was writing fiction. Sufjan did an MFA at the New School; his thesis, he told the crowd on Monday, consisted of short stories set in two fictional Michigan towns (some of those stories, he said, led to the songs on his Michigan album). His story was rejected, and scrawled in hand on the standard rejection letter was a note that said, "Harper's fiction is impenetrable. Do not send any more stories." He appreciated the personal attention.

By the way, at the end of the clip above, you'll see links to two short clips from Sufjan's solo acoustic set at the event. And if you click here, you'll get moderator Rick Moody's thoughts on Flannery O'Connor, published in PEN America 2: Home & Away.

Update: The audio of the event is now online (along with some lovely photographs by Beowulf Sheehan).

"Prose fiction was born Protestant."

Not long ago while leaving a restaurant in Brooklyn, I walked into a strange and holy ritual. A red-haired priest in black suit and white clerical collar was out on the sidewalk blessing an iguana. Scales iridescent in the sun, the reptile looked like a small dragon. People gathered around and the sacrament had the undeniable air of divinity. After the priest made the sign of the cross over the lizard, he moved into the restaurant surrounded by true believers urging him to bless their son, their baby, their little yappy dog.

So begins Darcy Steinke's excellent review of Mary Gordon's new memoir, Circling My Mother, in the most recent New York Times Book Review. Steinke is herself the author of a memoir about a religious upbringing-- though Lutheran rather than Catholic. Steinke does not dwell on (or even mention) that religious difference-- which perhaps would have been out of place in a book review. But it would be interesting to hear her thoughts on the matter. Gordon herself had some fascinating things to say about it in a tribute to Flannery O'Connor (the author rendered above) titled "Bad Behavior" and published in our second issue:

Whatever beliefs she professed as an orthodox Catholic, her fiction suggests that not only is human fate mysterious, human behavior is as well, and for this reason all notions of reward and punishment are entirely beside the point for her. This, I believe, separates her from Protestant Fundamentalists. Her characters may be deeply moved by the fear of hellfire but she is interested in hellfire only as it interests them. Even the terms of reward and punishment are difficult to discern in her fiction. Many of her characters have soul-expanding experiences that end in death. Are the characters, then, said to be rewarded or punished? Is Nelson, the fat dull child of the do-gooder social worker father, who is cloaked in a noble mourning invisible to his father, rewarded or punished in “The Lame Shall Enter First” by the death he achieves when he tries to join his dead mother among the stars, urged by the wily Satanic crippled boy who will not take Nelson’s father’s good intentions for what they are? Mrs. May in “Greenleaf” is gored by a bull: is this her comeuppance or a rapture of ecstasy? Julian’s mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is smacked in the face by the pocketbook of a furious black woman wearing a hat identical to hers: she meets her end, but is it a punishment for racist condescension or the corridor to paradise?

Gordon goes on to say that the "very unanswerability of these questions, and the fact that the characters’ fates are random, disproportionate, and surprising, puts them smack in the corral of mystery and outside the territory of motivation"-- which, she says, is precisely how O'Connor wanted it.

Gordon's tribute begins with the provocative remark that serves as the title of this post, and contains several insights into a writer who has gotten so far into Gordon's psyche as to actually appear in her dreams:

I dreamed that Flannery O’Connor and I were speaking together on a panel. Her hair was perfectly coifed; she was wearing a perfectly tailored suit, and a perfectly crisp white blouse, and perfectly shined penny loafers. My hair was filthy, my slip was showing, my stockings were ripped. In the dream she said to me, “Your problem is that you don’t believe in perfection.” And I said to her, because it was my dream, “I do believe in perfection, but you think perfection is flawlessness, and I think it’s completeness.” Well, that just shows how she can scare a Catholic girl, because we do think of her as a Catholic writer.

Read the rest. And for more of Gordon's thoughts on her literary forebears, see her essay about Virginia Woolf in our first issue.

Robert Lowell, Flannery O'Connor, and the FBI

Robert Lowell's Day by Day was published thirty years ago this month, and shortly afterward won the National Book Critics Circle award-- hence this insightful essay by Adam Kirsch over at Critical Mass, the offical blog of the NBCC. Kirsch argues that, had Lowell lived more than a mere month beyond the book's publication, the volume might have come to seem a "modest, transitional work," and he laments that the rhetorical question near the end of the collection-- "Yet why not say what happened?"-- became "an ars poetica for a whole generation of poets," an "ethic of accuracy, based on pity for the transitory world."

Among his many grand accomplishments, Robert Lowell was responsible for introducing his publisher, Robert Giroux, to another Southern writer: Flannery O'Connor. Giroux recalled this at a tribute to O'Connor hosted by PEN American Center; his words were later published by PEN America. That introduction took place in 1949, the year that Lowell and O'Connor met at Yaddo. Both writers left the famous retreat after learning that it was under investigation by the FBI for ties to an alleged communist spy.

More details about that shady story are here; more tributes to Flannery O'Connor are here.