Book Review Article, Don DeLillo, "LIBRA"

             
                 FROM THE SERIES, "REVISITING CLASSICS"

Book Review Article

Don DeLillo, Libra, NAL/Penguin paperback, 1989, 456 pp. (first published by Viking Penguin, Inc., 1988)

WHO ARE YOU?

In an interview that she gave some fifty years after the fact, Marina Oswald Porter is still puzzling over the whole business. What happened, how and why, and by whom was it made to happen? She isn’t sure she knows even the least thing about the man she married in the USSR and lived with, bore two children with. The interviewer asked her what question she would ask Lee, were he to return somehow miraculously from the dead. She said, “I’d ask him, Who are you?”

Scads of books have been published since November 22, 1963, all trying to answer questions that arose on that date. In fact, interlarded with the story of Lee Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy in Libra is the tale of a researcher, Nicholas Branch. This fictional character is a retired senior analyst of the CIA, “hired on contract to write the secret history of the assassination.” We first meet him on page 15, and already he is overwhelmed by facts, fictions and factions. “Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. There’s no end in sight.”

Branch shows up periodically throughout the pages of Libra, always struggling with the data, the facts both pertinent and impertinent, musing upon any number of irresolvable issues. “He has his forensic pathology rundown, his neutron activation analysis. There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”

Of course, it all always comes back to Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who was simply Lee Oswald until that November day in 1963. Then he was awarded, as the notorious are—compare U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who also shows up in the pages of Libra—with “the full intonation of the name,” which seems strange to him. Lee Harvey Oswald is on everyone’s lips, but to Lee “it sounded odd and dumb and made up.” That’s not him. “They were talking about somebody else.” Yes. Maybe they were. 

Who is he/was he? Here’s the best answer: Lee was a misfit from day one, a loner, not particularly talented at anything, but determined to show the world that he was somebody, not nobody. And he did, because now he’s in all the history books. “After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.”

That’s the way it went in the sixties and seventies of the last century. Of course, the times have changed. The loner/misfit/loser with the gun, the assassinations of the famous in the U.S.—this has gone out of style in the year 2020. Politicians apparently have much better security these days; the technology is so much more highly developed. So those mired in quiet desperation have to find other ways to prove to the world that they exist.

But Marina’s questions still remain unanswerable. Despite the piles of evidence in the office of the fictitious Nicholas Branch, notwithstanding the multitude of books on the Kennedy Assassination. We just do not know and never will how and why a concatenation of circumstances came together on that fateful day in November, 1963. Nonfiction cannot get even close to definitive answers, but fiction possibly can. Sitting like Nicholas Branch, all alone in a room not far from where young Lee once lived with his mother Marguerite—and where Trotsky lived as well, “only blocks away,” in the Bronx—a writer of fiction circumvents the massive pile of data and tears through the very veil of existence with his fictional account. You want the best possible variant on what happened that day and how, and why? Read Don DeLillo’s Libra.

IN THE BRONX: RIDING THE SUBWAY WHILE MAKING UP A LIFE

Libra begins with a chapter titled “In The Bronx,” a wonderful description of young Lee Oswald as he rides the New York subway trains, not riding to get anywhere, but just riding for the sake of the ride. “The train smashed through the dark. People stood on platforms, staring nowhere, a look they’d been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were . . . . . . Then the express stations, the creaky brakes, people bunched like refugees. They came wagging through the doors, banged against the rubber edges, inched their way in, were quickly pinned, looking out past the nearest heads into that practiced oblivion.” Ah, people in elevators or subway stations, practicing their looks of blankness—right away we know we’re in a DeLillo novel.

Then again, the random riding of the train is a kind of all-enveloping metaphor for the existence of loser Lee. Random movement is characteristic of the whole of his short life. It begins as he and his weird mother Marguerite move from city to city, and from apartment to apartment within those cities. “They were not wanted anymore and they moved to the basement room in the Bronx, the kitchen and bedroom and everything together, where blue heads spoke to them from the TV screen.” Two lonely people, sitting alone together, watching blue talking heads.

Lee was born in New Orleans and did not wander his way north with his mother until early adolescence. He always has “a turbulence running through him, the accepted fact of a fatherless boy.” He finds nothing in school to interest him, no contact with his peers in the Bronx, who mock him for his southern accent. He skips school, not once or twice, but every day. He hangs out at the zoo, watches the animals. Two fellow students, Nicky Black and Scalzo, harass him there. Nicky Black, a dreamer, sums up the modest aspirations of an adolescent boy in the American fifties: “The kid quits school the minute he’s sixteen. I mean look out . . . The kid gets a job in construction. First thing, he buys ten shirts with Mr. B collars. He saves his money, before you know it he owns a car. He simonizes the car once a month. The car gets him laid. Who’s better than the kid?”

Nicky Black never shows up again later in the novel, but you can imagine him fitting right in with the narrative as it proceeds in the sixties, joining the multitude of sad nonentities who come together to make up the story. For Libra is all about nonentities, little people with big ideas. The biggest nonentity of all is Lee Oswald, but he does not think so, and nothing’s either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Lee lives in a magic world of his own imagination. He watches “I Led Three Lives” on TV and sees himself in the role of secret agent Herb Philbrick. Several times the movie Seven Samurai is mentioned; that’s another film Lee would like to star in. He’d like to be one of the “men outside society” these “free-lance warriors” who are called on to save a helpless people from destruction.

Lee Oswald is certainly a person from outside of society. He never even begins getting inside society, would have no idea of how that is done. He meanders on through his nocount life, grinning his little grin, which says, like Nicky Black, “Who’s better than the kid?” The answer is that practically everybody is, but in the kid’s own smug mind he dreams grandiose dreams. “There is a world inside the world.” That leitmotif of a sentence shows up four or five times scattered through the text. As if to say that our world is not real, that there’s a world more real inside our world. And Lee’s.

THE MARINES

The kid has big plans. Like Nicky Black, his plan number one involves quitting school at age sixteen. Which will assure that he has no education and few chances to make a decent wage for the rest of his sorry life. But the kid doesn’t care, for his dreams soar far above the pallid bourgeois dream of gainful employment, home, hearth and family. Even before joining the Marines at age seventeen Lee Oswald reads Marxist literature, fancies himself a rebel socialist. While in the Marines, stationed at Atsugi, a U-2 base in Japan, he preaches Communism to his fellow Marines, who call him Ozzie the Rabbit and Oswaldovich. Note the casual disdain. Nobody ever takes this guy seriously. “In Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, keeping to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs.”

Given the complexities of the Russian verbal system, I’d have loved to be there for that scene, observing the dyslexic Oswaldovich as he struggled with the imperfective and perfective forms. Marine life is oppressive, but so what? “Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self.”

Lee never came out of the dark night of the isolated self, nor, it appears, did he ever wish to. His narcissistic, sociopathic personality had little need of his fellow man. Who’s better than the kid, heh? In Atsugi he was a radar operator with a security clearance, which he lost when he violated a rule about prohibition of personal firearms. He shot himself in the arm, with the aim of averting a transfer, and ended up in the brig. Always scheming.

DeLillo invents the description of Lee’s time in the brig. I don’t think anything here is based on actual fact, it’s all fiction, but Libra is so written that you cannot always tell who the real characters are—Marguerite Oswald, Jack Ruby, Guy Bannister, and so on—and who are the totally fictitious—Nicholas Branch, Win Everette, T.J. Mackey. But then, when DeLillo works his magic upon the person of a real character, he so thoroughly delillocizes that character that he or she fits perfectly into what some critic once called “the insidious and chronic disquiet” of the DeLillo fiction. 

Bobby Dupard, Lee’s cellmate in the brig and fellow native of Texas, is, I think, totally made up. Later on, back in Texas, he helps Lee in his attempt to assassinate right-wing general Edwin Walker. Walker was real, and so was Oswald’s attempt to shoot him. Dupard is a fictional character, he wasn’t “really” there, but the story makes sense the way it’s told. Much later in the text Dupard’s violent end—he is shot and killed in a robbery—jibes with the violent ends of so many others in the scenario, real and imagined.

Next comes an early discharge from the Marines, predicated on false grounds—that Oswald had to go back home and help his poor mother. The kid had no use for his mother, nor any desire to help her. He was already under the sway of a new grandiose dream. He would defect to the Soviet Union and live there in the magical world of ideal socialism. And that’s exactly what this nineteen-year-old kid did, a person not totally ignorant, but not all that smart either. At this point his life held, apparently, few prospects for future success, but there was something there, not yet delved by history itself, but it was there. And could be there are fiction writers out there who, unbeknown to us, write us as we live our lives. One of these is the fictitious Win Everette, a renegade CIA agent who is instrumental in fomenting a plot to assassinate, or pretend to assassinate, President Kennedy.

“We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He [Everette] would show the secret symmetries in a nondescript life” [Oswald’s life]. What’s going on here? Everette’s scheme to make up a fitting background life for Lee Oswald, the man he will use as the patsy, to take all the blame for the attempt on Kennedy’s life that Everette and other renegade former CIA employees are planning. Meanwhile, another concocter of fictions behind the scenes, Don DeLillo, adds “the compression and numinous sheen,” reveals “the secret symmetries,” not only in the lives of Oswald and Everette, but also in the lives of all the other fictional and semi-fictional characters in the plot of Libra.

THE USSR: A MISFIT ABROAD

October, 1959. Bright-eyed boy in never-never land, writing in his “Historic Diary.” He can barely spell the words “and” or “the” right, but does that mean he’s dumb? No, he’s dyslexic. “He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word.” In Norman Mailer’s biography, Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), he re-spelled all the misspelled passages in Oswald’s writings, and the boy came out looking not so ignorant at all.

In Moscow, out of the blue, Lee tells his Intourist guide Rimma that he wants to stay in the Soviet Union, apply for Soviet citizenship. She is flabbergasted. He meets with some official, tries to explain to him why he wishes to remain in the glorious USSR, vanguard of the worldwide struggle of the workers and peasants. After carefully checking that the door is closed, that bureaucrat tells him in confidence: “USSR is great only in literature. Go home, my friend, and take our good wishes with you.” For his twentieth birthday, two days after his arrival, Rimma gives him a copy of Dostoevsky’s novel, Идиот (The Idiot).

No way in hell Lee Oswald would ever read that novel in Russian, no way he could read Dostoevsky, with his complex, jagged, nervous style, with his nineteenth century literary vocabulary—not even after he had lived in Minsk for two years and already spoke the language, at least at a rudimentary level. No way. I see this gift as an inside joke on the part of the KGB officers, who were giggling in the background of that scene—ha-ha, let’s give the idiot a copy of The Idiot—the same men who, a mere four years later, on November 22, 1963, after hearing news about the dull young American they had once come across, sat in their offices at the Lubyanka, messing their pants.

As if to prove his good intentions, Lee next goes to the American embassy, where he does some very stupid and rash things. He renounces his U.S. citizenship and hands over his American passport; he won’t need it any more. Burning all the bridges to his past life. Except that, only a few years later, when he changes his mind, he has to find a way to build those bridges back. And that, once again, is a leitmotif in the confused life of Lee Harvey Oswald: riding the subway train of random behavior, never deciding exactly what stop to take, where to get off, or get back on, or who he wants to be or where he wants to go.

From the “Historic Diary”: “I leave [American] Embassy, elated at this showdown. I’m sure Russians will except [sic] me after this sign of my faith in them.” Accept my life, accept my life, accept my life. Lee was soon surprised to learn that nobody in the USSR was happy with his decision to defect. Nobody. Most of the officials he dealt with wanted only to get rid of him, this in line with the Russian propensity to avoid taking responsibility in ticklish cases. “Does Mother Russia want this boy? He was useful as a radar specialist at a U.S. base. What do we do with him here? Is it conceivable we might send him to the building on Kutuzovsky Prospect, where he would be trained, genuinely educated, in Marx and Lenin, microphotography and secret writing, Russian and English, rebuilt so to speak, given a new identity, sent back to the West as an illegal?”

No. Mother Russia does not want this boy. “This was not agent material. You want self-command and mettle, a steadiness of will. This boy played Ping-Pong in his head. But Alek [KGB guy] liked him and would arrange something decent. Has to be far from Moscow. A place where there are no foreign journalists, no chance to use him for propaganda. Give him a nice apartment, a well-paying job, a sweet subsidy in the name of the Red Cross.”

So Lee was sent to Minsk, capital of Belarus. Not, however, until he had cut his wrist in a real or fake suicide attempt and ended up in Moscow’s Botkin Hospital. Libra makes much of the workings of coincidence, and many people will never accept the coincidental deaths of so many persons on the fringe of the events of the Kennedy assassination. But coincidence is everywhere. Here’s the bodyguard Tony Astorina, speaking to the high-level gangster Carmine Latta midway in the book: “Speaking of Cuba, a couple of weeks ago I dream I’m swimming on the Capri roof with Jack Ruby. The next day I’m on Bourbon Street, who do I fucking see? You talk about coincidence.”

Don DeLillo, coincidentally, lived only a few short blocks from where Lee and Marguerite once lived in the Bronx. He quite likely passed young Lee in the streets in those days; had they only known what was to come they might have greeted one another.

In 1967-68, when I was a graduate student in Russian at Tulane, I must have driven many times past the New Orleans apartment where Lee once lived, on Magazine Street. I surely stepped on his former footprints along Canal Street. During my first stay in the Soviet Union (summer of 1972), I ended up, after a bout with dysentery, a patient in Botkin Hospital. Later, in the late eighties and nineties, when running student study tours into the Soviet Union for Miami University, I frequently had an overnight stay in Helsinki, Finland, at the Klaus Kurki Hotel, the same hotel where Lee stayed in 1959, while awaiting a visa that would admit him to the USSR. Coincidence.

MINSK

So the KGB and all the bureaucrats in Moscow “footballed” (сфутболили) the kid, passed on potential trouble to distant Minsk. Now, had Oswald been the type to satisfy himself with the bourgeois dream—a nice place to live, a job, home and hearth, marriage and children—Minsk was the best place imaginable for him. Back home in the U.S. what were his prospects? Zilch. Not even a high school education, no training for any kind of decent job, zero talent for making friends and influencing people. What about women? He never had got anywhere with women in his American years and not likely he ever would; for he had so little to offer.

But in Minsk they set him up with a job working at a factory making radios. They provided him with a nice subsidy check every month and a nice place to live. Of course, he did not want to work making radios, he slacked off at his job, just as he would at every job he ever held. In the U.S. they would fire him for his work ethic, but not in the Soviet Union. Then again, here, in Russia, he was something special, a man from the Cinderella world of America, so he did fine with women. After a very short courtship he ended up marrying a local beauty, Marina Prusakova. The newlyweds did not get along, for who could get along with his sociopathic personality? But, had they remained in Minsk, he could have indulged himself in any number of extra-marital affairs. Who’s better than the kid, heh? His apartment with balcony overlooking the Svisloch River was nothing special by American standards, but by Soviet standards it was way above average. As it turned out, this apartment was the nicest place the kid ever lived in his short life.

But, notwithstanding the birth of his first child, June, the kid was not one to let home and hearth interfere with his big plans. As usual, he did not know exactly what those plans entailed, but, as usual again, he assumed that he, loser Lee, was destined for some kind of greatness—staying here in provincial Minsk was a dead end. So after two years in the Soviet Union he managed to get his passport back and returned, with his wife and child, to the U.S. He feared that maybe some consequences awaited him back home for his disloyal behavior, but there were none. 

Mother America re-embraced her prodigal son. Maybe back here, at last, the man with no identity would finally discover who he was. “That’s what they want, isn’t it, these people who live in corners inside themselves, in blinds and hidey-holes? A second and safer identity. Teach us how to live, they say, as someone else.” Is that what Lee Oswald wanted? You might have asked him but you would receive no satisfactory answer, for Lee did not really know what he wanted.

Newly arrived in Fort Worth, strolling one evening past a department store, Marina and Lee, June in his arms, come upon a television set in the show window, broadcasting live. “It was the world gone inside out. They were gaping back at themselves from the TV screen.” Marina was astonished. “She looked at Lee and June in the window, then turned to see them on the sidewalk. She kept walking out of the picture and coming back. She was amazed every time she saw herself return.” Lee’s reaction to seeing himself on TV is not described, but quite possibly this is the one thing that he wants: to be both on TV and not on TV at the same moment, and to be the director behind the camera, setting up the action for The Life of Lee Oswald, Secret Agent.

Back at the time Oswald was planning to defect to the USSR he heard rumors about a false defector program run by the Office of Naval Intelligence. “The whole scheme was written with him in mind. He half expected to be approached by Naval Intelligence. It was easy to believe they knew about his pro-Soviet remarks and Russian-language newspaper. They’d train him intensively. He’d be a real defector posing as a false defector posing as a real defector. Ha ha.” But what he’d really be was what he always had been, all his life, a loser/dreamer playing Cowboys and Indians in his own solipsistic mind.

TEXAS, NEW ORLEANS: THE MISFIT RETURNS, ENTERS INEVITABILITY

Black is white is black and left is right and right is left, and neither are quite right, and some things are true, but some are truer than true. That is a mélange of quotations from various passages in Libra. The researcher Nicholas Branch thinks, “There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.”

The crackpot Guy Bannister, anti-Castro crusader, speaks with T.J. Mackey, one of the fictional characters (renegade CIA) who is to become instrumental in bringing about the assassination. “I believe deeply there are forces in the air that compel men to act. Call it history or necessity or anything you like. What do you sense in the air? That’s all I’m saying, T-Jay. Is there something riding in the air that you feel on your body, prickling your skin like warm sweat?”

The kid’s back home, where he runs into the inevitability of the thing hanging somehow in the air; it’s a thing that has to be done. Here’s Carmine Latta in conversation, the gangster who yearns to resume his Cuban business dealings, just the way they were under Batista:

“The President crossed the line when he put out word he wanted Castro dead. Let me tell you something.”

“What?”

“I want to tell you a little thing you should always remember. If somebody’s giving you trouble, again, again, again, again, somebody with ambitions, somebody with a greed for territory, the first thing you consider is go right to the top.”

“In other words you take action at the highest level.”

“That’s where they’re letting it get out of hand.”

“In other words you bypass.”

“You clean out the number one position.”

“In other words you arrange it so there’s a new man at the top who gets the message and makes a change in the policy.”

“You cut off the head, the tail doesn’t wag.”

The primary contention in Libra about what “really” happened in November of 1963 is that a lot of different men—former big players in Batista's Cuba, Bay of Pigs veterans who hated Kennedy, former CIA operatives who thought the President had to pay for cozying up to Castro, and others, perhaps many others—were plotting all over the place, determined to kill John Kennedy. By 1963 there was that inevitability in the air; one way or another Kennedy had to die. That was among the things that were truer than true.

DeLillo goes to great effort to reinforce that sense of inevitability throughout the novel, but I’m not convinced. Read the wonderful biography of Huey P. Long by T. Harry Williams, read where the author describes another sort of inevitability in the air of the 1930s; Huey Long had to die. Nobody knew who would do it, but everyone assumed someone would. That I can believe; not so much the same thing in 1963 with our President. At any rate, in the fiction that we are reading the inevitability is paramount, and loser Lee Oswald floats about in the atmosphere of that feeling, himself unaware of it.

Meanwhile a group of conspirators, the CIA renegades led by Win Everette in Texas are grooming Lee for his patsy role, the kid who will take the rap. The conspirators had first learned of the existence of this boy defector now back in the U.S. from the improbable George de Mohrenschildt, another of the real characters in the book who is more believable as a fictional character. Mohrenschildt, a man with a highly checkered past, a speaker of Russian, had met Lee Oswald at a gathering of Russian exiles in Texas.

Still ignorant of the conspiracy, Lee goes about readjusting, in his own unique way, to living back home. He takes a series of menial jobs, doesn’t do the work, loses the jobs. In January, 1963, he mail-orders a snub-nose .38 pistol from a firm in LA; in March he sends away to Chicago for an Italian carbine rifle with a sniper’s scope. Both weapons arrive the same day.

Meanwhile, Win Everette is busily constructing a reliable past for his patsy. “Through his contacts in Little Havana, Everett had planted a cryptic news item in an exile magazine published in New Jersey. The story, from an unnamed source, concerned an operation run in July, 1961 by the Office of Naval Intelligence out of Guantánamo, the U.S. base near the eastern end of Cuba. The story was fabricated but the plan itself was real, involving the assassination of Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. This news item would be found among the subject’s effects after the failed attempt on the life of the President.”

Note that Everette’s plan from the beginning was to shake things up, to perpetrate a failed attempt on the life of Kennedy, but as the plot burgeoned, then progressed, the word “failed” somehow was left out of the equation. The thing of the inevitability proposed not a stray bullet, but a fatal shot.

The conspirators plot on, but fate and coincidence are also busily at work, and Everette soon becomes aware of a striking truth: “It was no longer possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent of the plot.” T.J. Mackey picks the lock at the apartment where Oswald lived briefly in New Orleans, at 4907 Magazine Street, and “What Mackey learned about him in a brief tour of his apartment made Everette feel displaced. It produced a sensation of the eeriest panic, gave him a glimpse of the fiction he’d been devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world.” In other words, Everette’s fiction is anachronistic before he has completed it; Fate has already concocted the necessary background detail.

Mackey discovers, among other things, Oswald’s correspondence with the national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the leaflets Oswald had been handing out on the streets (“Hands Off Cuba”), a novel, The Idiot, in Russian (and most certainly still unread), several fabricated documents—a draft card in the name of Lee H. Oswald and another in the name of Alek James Hidell. The kid has been hard at work, playing Cowboys and Indians.

There are the true things, and then there are the truer than the true. “There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.” What is a conspiracy? “If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us . . . . . . But maybe not.” Nicholas Branch’s research has led him to conclude that “the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like.” Fate playing games, laughing in the process.

For a time the conspirators lose track of their patsy; he has disappeared. Then suddenly the kid appears, of all places, at the offices of Guy Bannister in New Orleans—U.S. headquarters for the anti-Castro movement—where he, Oswald the Castro lover, asks for a job as some sort of secret agent, claiming that he has experience in fabricating aliases. This, in terms of verisimilitude, rivals, e.g., the story of how Elvis once dropped in on President Nixon, all drugged up as usual and asking for a job as a narcotics agent.

Still working free of charge and independently on the fictional background that Everette wanted created for him, Lee takes a potshot in April at General Edwin Walker, shoots through a window at his house and just misses killing him. This is not DeLillo’s fiction, but almost certainly fact. Above and beyond all idea of literary fiction, there is a story fabricating itself here, a story full of coincidences too unbelievable to be used in fiction. There are true stories, and then there are the truer than true.

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Where were you? Here’s where I was. I was in the U.S. Army, studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, California. On that particular day they took us on buses into downtown Monterey, to the Steinbeck Theater, where we watched a film of a Russian opera, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. From the libretto: “At last, at last, Heaven has sent us a sunny day, what air, what a sky! It could even be May, what delight it would be, delight indeed, to spend our whole day here, we’ll not see another day like this, no, no not for eons of time.” Our teachers, most of whom were old, who came out of the First Emigration—right after the Russian Revolution and Civil War—went with us to watch the opera. Seated beside me was one of them, Count Leuchtenberg. I’ve already lent this scene, in a number of variants, to characters in my fictions.

We watched the movie; nothing untoward was apparently in the air. We watched them sing the opera. The movie ended, we got up to go, but then the projectionist stuck a handwritten note in the lens and projected it onto the screen: “President Kennedy felled by assassin’s bullet in Dallas.” That was it; no details. We looked at each other, milled around; no one knew what to say. Standing next to me, Count Leuchtenberg, like most of our teachers, had little English. He asked me, in Russian, “What is this, what does it mean, this word, ‘felled.’ I told him that the President apparently was shot, and he ‘fell.’ Was he dead or alive? I didn’t know. Nobody did.

They put us back in the buses posthaste and we returned to the Presidio, which was then locked down, like military bases all over the U.S. Nobody knew what to expect next; possibly a nuclear assault from the USSR. The only television was in the orderly room, so we went there to watch. The announcement came on: the President was dead. Not long after that a suspect was in custody, and that suspect had a Russian wife. This news set off another of our teachers, a bent old man who went by the sobriquet “Shaky Jake.” Stomping around with his arms folded behind his back, Shaky went into a tirade in Russian: “How dare they? How dare they? Just because he has a Russian wife they say he shot the President. How dare they?”

Years later I learned that while he was living in Minsk Oswald sometimes went to the opera. His favorite was Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. Coincidence. So that while we were in the Steinbeck Theater, listening to the arias, he may well have been nervously humming one of them, as he aimed his Italian carbine out the window of the Texas School Book Depository. Here’s another coincidence, this one almost unbelievable. Ruth Paine, with whom Marina was staying in Dallas, had mentioned that the chronically unemployed Lee needed a job. A neighbor lady, Linnie Mae Randle, said that her brother worked at a book warehouse in downtown Dallas. They may be hiring there.

So it turned out, they were. Going to extremes to make its garbled plot work, defying all odds of probability, Sheer Fate got the kid employed in the perfect spot, on the perfect floor of the building, just in time for the President’s visit to Dallas. Did the CIA, or its renegade officers set him up there? No. At the time he took that job nobody could possibly have known about the motorcade route through downtown Dallas.

Coincidence? “Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively dead.” George de Mohrenschildt, David Ferrie, Guy Bannister, etc., etc. A lot of them died violent deaths, but “In 1979 a House select committee determined there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate of those who were connected in some way to the events of November 22.” Want something for comparison? Say you loved the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” released in the year 1975. How many of its cast members are still alive, and how many dead? How many died violent deaths? There’s a site on the Internet where you can check this out. Life is precarious.

The plot of Libra, as concerns the events of November 22, does not appear to differ that much from what “apparently” happened. The kid shot three times (apparently), hitting Kennedy once in the neck, missing him once but hitting the Texas governor, then blowing off the top of Kennedy’s head with the third shot. In Libra Oswald hits Kennedy once, hits governor Connelly, then misses his third shot. A Bay of Pigs veteran, the Cuban Raymo (a fictitious character) takes the final shot from ambush, the head shot, makes it, then escapes. In “reality” the kid goes back to his lodgings, gets his thirty-eight, wanders randomly down the street (where did he think he was going?), shoots a policeman who tries to question him. 

That Oswald shot the policeman Tibbett there seems to be no doubt. He did it. Then he ducks into a movie theater. In the Libra plot the conspirators have told Lee to reconnoiter with them in the theater. They will drive him to Galveston, where he will meet up with David Ferrie, who will fly him out of the country. But they have sent another loser/nonentity, Wayne Elko, to the theater to shoot Oswald in the back on the head. Wayne has no time, however, to eliminate their patsy, because the police arrive on the scene almost immediately and arrest Oswald.

THE RHYTHMS OF AMERICAN SPEECH

Libra could be read as a kind of guidebook on American speech: here’s the way people talked, still talk, in American English. DeLillo’s ear is perfectly tuned to pick up the jargon, and that adds to the atmosphere of unreal reality that pervades the novel. Here is young Lee, moving amidst the teenage world of the early fifties in the Bronx, hearing someone say, “A two-tone Rocket Olds with wire wheels,” being hassled by Scalzo and Nicky Black, two other losers and truants just like himself.

“But how come you never talk to me, Tex?” [says Scalzo]

“Let’s hear you drawl,” Nicky Black said.

“I say all right.” [nonsense language, equivalent to something like “Hey bob-a-ree-bah”]

“Talk to Richie. He’s talking nice.”

“But let’s hear you drawl. No shit. I been looking forward.” [truncated sentences, typical all thru Libra]

Scalzo and Nicky Black were ten yards behind.

“Hey fruit.”

“He sucks Clorets.”

“Bad-breath kissing sweet in seconds.” [advertising slogans of the times]

“One and a two.”

“I say all right.”

“One two cha cha cha.” [popular dances of the times]

“He don’t know dick.”

“I mean look out.”

“But how come he won’t talk to me?”

“I say all right.”

“But talk to us.”

“We’re talking bad or what?”

“But say something.”

“Think fast, Tex.” [followed immediately by a punch, or by throwing something at you]

“I say all right.”

Here’s Jack Karlinsky, a lowlife mobster, persuading Jack Ruby, one and the same type, to kill Oswald.

“Jack, I’m sure you hear the same thing in the street I’ve been hearing for almost two days. The man who kills that communist bastard is saving the city of Dallas from world shame. This is what they’re saying in the streets.”

“What is Carmine [Latta, high-level mobster involved obliquely in the assassination] saying?”

“Good point. Because here you have an ally. Here you have protection and support. Carmine himself brought up the subject of the loan. I think you’ll be delighted with the terms.”

“And for this?”

“For this you undertake to rid the city.”

“In other words.”

“Jack, you’re a floater all your life. This is a chance you put your fist around something solid. You want to end your life selling potato peelers in Plano, Texas? Build something. Make a name.”

“So what you’re saying, Jack.”

“Take him off the calendar.”

“Clip him.”

“Turn him into a crowd,” Karlinsky said sadly.

Marguerite Oswald and Jack Ruby are perfectly rendered as fictional personages in Libra. DeLillo’s portrayal of them must certainly come close to how they really were, crackpots and nonentities, both of them. The author achieves this perfection of characterization by perfect description of their random, chaotic movement through life, and by showing us the haphazard, distorted speech by which they express themselves. Here’s Jack Ruby in the midst of all the chaos right after the assassination.

“A burly man moved through the crowd introducing out-of-town reporters to Dallas cops. He handed out a brand-new card he’d printed for his club. Who could it be but Jack Ruby? It was a card he was proud of, with a line drawing of a champagne glass and a bare-ass girl in black stockings. It was a come-on to the average patron, but with class. Nobody challenged Jack’s presence in the assembly room. He had the ability to carry a domineering look into a building. He was looking for a radio reporter named Joe Long because he had a dozen corned-beef sandwiches in the car which he planned to take to the crew at KLIF working into the night to report this frantic tale to the unbelieving city . . . Jack was playing newsman and tipster tonight. He was in complete charge of mentally reacting. He had a pencil and pad at the ready, just in case he caught a remark he could give to NBC.”

Here is Marguerite Oswald, blathering her way along, to anyone who will listen, in the final pages of the novel.

“I will time his movements on the fatal day. I will interview every witness. I am not speaking just to be speaking [but she really is]. I know as the accused mother I must have facts. Listen to me. Do you know I took Russian classes at the library? I went and studied once a week on my one day off, hoping in my heart that Lee would contact me someday, that I could talk to Marina in a normal way. Listen to me. Listen. I cannot live on donation dribs and drabs. Marina has a contract and a ghostwriter. She refused to wear the shorts I bought. And this boy on a Sunday in Fort Worth was not packed to go anywhere and the next day he was gone with his wife and baby to a job in Dallas, overnight, without notice to his former employer or his mother. A job in photography where the details are not known. You have to wonder. Who arranged the life of Lee Harvey Oswald? It goes on and on and on. Lee had a stamp collection. Lee swam at the Y. I used to see him on Ewing Street with his hair all wet. Hurry home dear heart or you will catch your death. I am not letter-perfect but I have managed, judge. I have worked in many homes for fine families. I have seen a gentleman strike a wife in front of me. There is killing in fine homes on occasion. This boy and his Russian wife did not have a telephone or television in America. So that is another myth cut down. Listen to me.” And on and on and on and on. American blather, nonstop.

NONENTITY PILED UPON NONENTITY

The title of the book is Libra, because that is Oswald’s astrological sign. There are several mentions of this in the book, explaining why the title is suitable, but a better title might be American Nonentity. The action describes how a concatenation of losers and nobodies, led by one Super Nobody, come together, much aided and abetted by Fate, to kill an American President. Of course, it’s so preposterous that it could not possibly have happened this way: not the way it happens in Libra, and not the way it happened in “reality.” It is as if playing in the background score of the whole Libra libretto and the whole “real” events surrounding November 22, 1963, were the nonsensical messages broadcast during the Bay of Pigs invasion by Radio Swan, “located on a tiny guano island”—the gibberish meant to discombobulate Castro’s armed forces: the boy is in the yellow house, the one-eyed fish are biting this evening, and it’s a perfect day for bananafish, or, to repeat the leitmotifs that show up all through Libra, left is right and right is left, black is white is black, and some true things are much, much truer than other true things, even if those true things are true.

“Curtain rods found on shelf in garage of Ruth Paine.” A metaphor for the whole random mess that is the plot of the book, for these curtain rods are lonely. “There they are. The picture shows no more or less. But Branch feels there is a loneliness, a strange desolation trapped there. Why do these photographs have a power to disturb him, make him sad? Flat, pale, washed in time, suspended outside the particularized gist of this or that era, arguing nothing, clarifying nothing, lonely. Can a photograph be lonely?”

The bleak, blurred unreality of the colossal disarray revolving around November 22, 1963. Does it come into focus with time? No. Watch Marina Oswald in interviews, fifty years after the fact, still agonizing, still trying to figure something out. Anything. That has an air of unreality. Watch interviews with her grown daughters, June and Rachel. They are remarkably intelligent, well-spoken young ladies. But when they begin talking about their father, some of the gnawing sense of loneliness creeps back into their speech. June complains, e.g., that she has no birth certificate. It was among the many items confiscated as evidence after the assassination, and the government refuses to return it to her. Imagine that lonely document, moldering somewhere in a government file. Imagine what it looks like in its original Russian. Oswald wanted to name her June Marina Oswald, but Russian tradition demands that the middle name be based on the father’s name. It is called the patronymic, and if you’re a Russian you’re not allowed not to have a patronymic. Even if you’re born illegitimate, somehow a father has to be produced. June’s name on that document would look very strange, almost eerie to a Russian: Июнь (or did they transliterate the original from English: Джун?) Леевна Освальд (June Leevna Oswald).

WHAT HAPPENED AND WHO DUNNIT?

It’s fifty-seven years now, and we’ll never know how exactly it played out. We can sift through all the “evidence,” study the doctored snapshot that Marina took of armed vigilante Lee, holding his weapons, ever playing Cowboys and Indians—wait, now they say the photo was not doctored—on the back of which Marina wrote in Russian, “The Fascist hunter, ha, ha.” We can study the dreams of eyewitnesses after the assassination and after the Jack Ruby fiasco follow-up killing. We can ponder mad Ruby’s final days, when he believed all his brothers and sisters would be killed on account of what he did, when he imagined all the Jews of America were being put in kill machines, slaughtered in enormous numbers, when he believed people distorted every word that came out of his mouth, since “there is a process that takes place between the saying of a word and when they pretend to hear it correctly but actually change it to mean what they want.”

My own opinion, for what it’s worth. Oswald and Oswald alone, loser Lee killed our President. There was no conspiracy, no one helped him. And no one but voices in Ruby's own wacko brain put Jack Ruby up to killing Oswald. But, you object, that’s simply not possible, such a nonentity, such a vicious little nerd of a kid, no way he could do that all by himself. Nor could Ruby, an armed man, be allowed so close to the proceedings on the day Oswald was being moved. It simply lacks all verisimilitude. 

Well, the fact is that God loves humankind and usually takes good care of us, but once in a while He’s tired, or in a bad mood, and He turns things over temporarily to his twin brother, a jokey sort of guy with a loud irritating laugh. Just for the fun of it that Evil Joker sets things up, working against all rules of logic and probability, cackling his way through the plot. He’s the one responsible for the coincidences, the totally impossible things that could not have happened but did. You want somebody to blame for the Kennedy assassination? Blame God’s nasty twin brother.

Maybe the best way to end this review is with a picture of Shaky Jake, stalking about the orderly room at the Presidio of Monterey—long, long dead now, Shaky, but this is his ghost we’re seeing, a spectre from out of an incongruous past, truer than the truest true—hands behind his back, shaking even more than usual, screaming out his plaint for all the world to hear, in Russian: Как они смеют, как они смеют, How dare they?

BOOK REVIEW, Viet Thanh Nguyen, "The Sympathizer"

BOOK REVIEW

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Sympathizer

Grove Press: 2015

Don’t bother reading all the blurbs that go with the paperback edition of this book. Just read the first page; already you know you are in the presence of a talented writer. Here’s how we begin:

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides” (1).

We are not surprised later to learn that the narrator—never named, known only as the Captain—loves Russian novels, for this first paragraph recalls the beginning of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” featuring one of the most perverse split-personality ironist narrators in the history of world literature: “I’m a sick man . . . I’m a spiteful man. Unpleasant is what I am as a man. I think my liver is diseased. But then, I don’t know jack squat about my illness, and probably don’t even know what hurts where. I don’t seek treatment, and never have, although I respect medicine and doctors.”

Although he is not up in your face as forcefully as is Dostoevsky’s narrator, the Captain is in a similar limbo, living the life of in-between—neither fish nor fowl. Early in his career Dostoevsky wrote “The Double,” featuring a man who literally splits into two, and he was by far not the first European writer to air out the theme of the bifurcated psyche. So here we are, in a novel of the twenty-first century, reaching back into a grand tradition in Western literary art: the theme of the split, the two in one. This is the major theme of The Sympathizer.

The Captain was born split in two, and nobody among the Vietnamese who surround him has ever let him forget it. He is “the bastard,” illegitimate son of a Vietnamese mother and a French father, who is a Catholic priest to boot. He is a mixture of the Occident and the Orient. He has lived and studied in the U.S., has an excellent grasp of English and vast insights into American culture. Throughout the novel he seeks a resolution to his bifurcation. He never finds it, and at the end he is just as mixed up and split as he was at the beginning.

The theme is not all-inclusive, but, nonetheless, quite broad. Take Abe, the uncle of the Captain’s Japanese-American mistress (another character living, in her own unique way, with the split). Abe was born Japanese in the U.S., put in an interment camp during W.W. II. After the war, seeking his true identity, he went back to live in Japan, where no one accepted him as Japanese. Neither fish nor fowl.

As the action of the novel begins, we learn that the bi-racial Captain has made one big decision for political oneness. He does not waver between backing the South Vietnamese government, with its American ally, in the war against communism, or backing the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese communists. He has chosen communism, and he works to further the cause of communism throughout the whole novel. But the job he has chosen—sleeper agent—forces him to lead a double life, be an actor perpetually playing a role: “sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face” (136). Now he knows how Vladimir Putin must feel. As we shall see, he also shares with Putin some views on American foreign policy.

The Captain’s story is intertwined with that of his two blood brothers, fast friends since childhood. One of them, Bon, whose father was murdered by the communists, is a staunch supporter of the South Vietnamese government. The other, Man, like The Captain, fights to liberate the country from the Americans and South Vietnamese. As the action begins, in 1975, Saigon is about to fall to the North Vietnamese troops, while the Americans and their allies—including Bon, The Captain, and The General, the man whom The Captain works for, and spies against—are in full flight back to the U.S.

A large part of the novel’s action is set in California in the seventies, where the expatriate Vietnamese military men end up, and where they plot to return home and overthrow the communists. The Captain goes on ostensibly working as aide to The General, while sending back coded messages to his handler Man in Vietnam. As the title tells us, he is a communist sympathizer. Then again, he professes sympathy as well for “the enemy”: “I confess that after having spent my whole life in their company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others. My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as bastard” (36). Later the General asks him, “Do you know what your problem is?” Like all people who ask that question, he answers it himself: “You’re too sympathetic” (231). As we learn in the final part of the book, the communists who have taken over Vietnam will tell him exactly the same thing.

Then again, the sympathizer is, at many points in the book, not very sympathetic at all. He is personally responsible for the murder of two innocent men in America, and later we learn that he is obliquely responsible for the murder of his own father. As in The Brothers Karamazov—mentioned by name in The Sympathizer—we have the theme of parricide. But even more to the point, Dostoevsky’s final novel airs out the theme of bifurcation and the theme of guilt. It turns out that we are all, to one degree or another, guilty, and that’s what Viet Thanh Nguyen is telling us as well. In the words of Claude, the CIA agent who trains the narrator in interrogation techniques, “Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We’re all innocent on one level and guilty on another. Isn’t that what Original Sin is all about? (103). The Captain’s blood brother Man, handler of his sleeper/spy activities, makes exactly the same point: “Of course men will die . . . . . But they aren’t innocent. Neither are we, my friend. We’re revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent. We know too much and have done too much” (111).

This is a book about Original Sin, which receives frequent mention by the narrator, who is laden in his own mind with sin: “I was impure, and impurity was all I wanted and all I deserved” (124). Brought up as a Catholic, with his father, the priest, force-feeding him in the dogma of Catholicism as a boy, the Captain—now a professed atheist and communist—can’t totally shuck off his Catholic guilt. The two men he has murdered in the U.S. return to him as ghosts and haunt him on a daily basis.

For a book professing to be about Vietnam the theme of America is dominant. The Captain appears to both love and hate the U.S. simultaneously, and here we have another bifurcation. The whole book reeks with Anti-American thoughts and sentiments.

“America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the Super Bowl! America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR. Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many ‘super’ terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?” (29).

Understandably, The Captain cannot forgive the U.S. for coming to Vietnam to, ostensibly, save the country and then killing three million people and leaving, having saved nothing and nobody. Furthermore, he is rankled by the narrative of the war, perpetuated by Hollywood, which tells only of American glory. This is “the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created” (Hollywood; 134).

“Nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence” (218). Here we get into the issue of American exceptionalism and the self-appointed role of America as policeman of the world, which is Vladimir Putin’s primary beef with the U.S. today.

Resident in America, the General’s wife makes clear her opinion of the country that has given her shelter, stressing “the lewdness and the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much” (122). After being given a hero’s welcome in the U.S.A. upon his expulsion from the Soviet Union, the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made a series of such remarks in his speeches, and I have frequently heard Russian immigrants speaking in the same vein. American the Beautiful is often American the Ugly to them. Or America the Stupid. Looking for more endearments? Here are two others (in a book teeming with them): (1) “the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth” (255); (2) “As the crapulent major said, A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own” (91). As a life-long American, I read the plethora of criticisms in The Sympathizer and must admit, alas, their credibility. Even when The Captain asserts that it’s against the law to be unhappy in America. “If I was unhappy, it would reflect badly on me, for Americans saw unhappiness as a moral failure and thought crime” (254). Too true.

Finally, on page 280, the Captain—on his way out of the country and back to Vietnam—gets around to saying a few good things about the U.S.A. “I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulated traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious” (280). Good writing there, but the whole book has sentences like that. Nice.

Then again, the novel is about human bifurcation, so it is only natural that the narrator who hates America also to some degree loves America. In the latter part of the book he arrives back in his homeland, in the company of a group of former South Vietnamese soldiers trying to establish a foothold for a new anti-communist revolution. They are captured by the communists, and now comes the greatest irony in the novel. The sleeper agent, who has worked tirelessly in aid of communism, is not received with open arms. He is stuck into a re-education labor camp, where he is given the opportunity to write a confession, in an effort to purify his soul—badly tainted by Western culture. To do, in effect, the impossible: re-educate himself out of his double nature.

That confession, prepared for the commandant of the camp, comprises the first 307 pages of the book. In the eyes of the communist true believers the Captain’s manuscript is blasphemy. Too many good things, it seems, have been said about the West, too much complexity pervades the pages, no revolutionary slogans have been voiced, even beloved Uncle Ho Chi Minh is mentioned but once. The Captain, so it turns out, is too complicated to be a true revolutionary. True revolutionaries oversimply life’s realities—wiping out all the grays and making them into blacks and whites. But the Captain in his bifurcation is the epitome of gray. Here’s a hypothetical dialogue between him and the commandant.

                --Okay, who are you?

                --Me, myself, and I.

                --Right. You are you yourself and you, but you’re not allowed to be all those. Choose one.

                --But how can I choose between me, myself, and me? If I do that, I won’t be truly me, myself, and I anymore.

                --Choose!

(Actually, it’s somewhat easier for the Captain—but still impossible—he has to choose only between me and myself.)

What is the first thing that the Grand Socialist Revolution always has to do? Kill off the intellectuals, for the Revolution wants people chanting slogans, but certainly not thinking. “I believed in these slogans,” says the Captain, “but I could not bring myself to write them”(318). Not really true. He does not believe in the simpleminded slogans of Socialism. He is too intelligent to be a believer in the revolution, and deep down he senses why the Socialist Revolution never works. Revolutionaries think they know something that is really unknowable: who “the people” are for whom they fight. “Like salmon that instinctively knew when to swim upstream, we all knew who the people were and who were not the people. Anyone who had to be told who the people were was not [could not be] one of the people” (220). The Captain, deep down, is an intellectual, one of those stubborn, reactionary types who will tell you the truth: the whole idea of “the people” is a vast oversimplification and a fraud. Nothing on earth is really black or white; everything is gray. And “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” as Emerson is quoted as saying (12).

At the end of the book the Captain is put through the same torture methods that the CIA once taught him way back when: sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation. He must learn the error of his ways and be, finally, re-educated to become a true Socialist believer. Of course, the bifurcated man cannot be put back together; he will always be what Dostoevsky’s hero is in “Notes from the Underground”: the man with the disease of hyper-consciousness, he who sees the many sides of any issue, too intelligent for his own good. The main thing he has learned through a lifetime of experience as a sleeper agent is that when the French left, and then when the Americans left, the Vietnamese were not finished with being given the shaft; they began “fucking themselves now,” as the book tells us. Even the narrator’s blood brother Man, the most intelligent character and, at one time, a true believer, ultimately comes to the conclusion that the revolution has failed.

Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, The Captain, for all of his apparent efforts to work his way out of his bifurcation, is the eternal rebel, whose allegations that his doubleness dooms him to an alien life are not that believable. He assumes that, as half breed, marriage has been denied to him for all time. But certainly in America—with his excellent knowledge of English and American mores—he could make a marriage if he wished. Bastardy hardly limits one in the U.S., where huge numbers of children are born out of wedlock, and where The Captain could function well in a miscegenated society. Why does he not consider such a move? Because he loves his loneliness, he adores his status as misfit, he revels in the alienation. Incapable of love for anyone but his now dead mother and his three blood brothers, he has no desire to make any accommodation with a woman.

In a kind of deus ex machina ending, Man, now a communist commissar, arranges for the Captain and Bon to escape from Vietnam with the boat people. Even if they survive the journey, we wonder where they will end up. The Captain has burned his bridges in the U.S., having committed a murder (of the character Sonny) just before leaving the country. He will be the prime suspect in that murder, so he cannot return to the beloved/hated U.S. At the end of the novel the man in limbo finds himself in even a physical liminality: he is the eternal displaced person, with no country to call home.

The Sympathizer is full of so many brilliantly written passages that you feel like quoting everything in full. The author has a way of writing set scenes with a mass of accumulated detail. Here are selections from a long passage describing the many fates of the Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S.: “the naïve girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried and frozen, and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two children before killing himself in Cleveland, . . . . .  and the devout Buddhist who spanked his young son and was arrested for child abuse in Houston, and the proprietor who accepted food stamps for chopsticks and was fined for breaking the law in San Jose, and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed for domestic violence in Raleigh, . . . . .  and the half dozen who went to sleep in a crowded, freezing room in Terre Haute with a charcoal brazier for heat and never woke up, borne to permanent darkness on an invisible cloud of carbon monoxide” (70-71).

The above passage goes on for a full two pages, and, eventually, grades into the success stories: “the story of a baby orphan adopted by a Kansas billionaire, or the mechanic who bought a lottery ticket in Arlington and became a multimillionaire, or the girl elected president of her high school class in Baton Rouge, or the boy accepted by Harvard from Fond du Lac” (71). The whole long riff ends as follows: “So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead” (71).

Another wonderful passage describes The Captain’s visit to the home of a Hollywood director, where—after finally breaking his way through the conceited director’s monologue, he delivers a forceful lecture on a subject dear to his heart: how the Vietnamese scream.

“Screams are not universal, I said. If I took this telephone cord and wrapped it around your neck and pulled it tight until your eyes bugged out and your tongue turned black, Violet’s scream [Violet is the director’s assistant] would sound very different from the scream you would be trying to make. Those are two very different kinds of terror coming from a man and a woman. The man knows he is dying. The woman fears she is likely to die soon. Their situations and their bodies produce a qualitatively different timbre to their voices. One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private” (130-31).

The power of the above passage is reinforced when The Captain tells us what he was thinking as he impressed the words upon the fatuous director. “I stood up and leaned on the desk to look right into his eyes. But I didn’t see him. What I saw was the face of the wiry Montagnard, an elder of the Bru minority who lived in an actual hamlet not far from the setting of this fiction. Rumor had it that he served as a liaison agent for the Viet Cong. I was on my first assignment as a lieutenant and could not figure out a way to save the man from my captain wrapping a strand of rusted barbed wire around his throat, the necklace tight enough so that each time he swallowed, the wire tickled his Adam’s apple. That was not what made the old man scream, however. It was just the appetizer. In my mind, though, as I watched the scene, I screamed for him.

“Here’s what it sounds like, I said, reaching across the desk to pick up the Auteur’s Montblanc fountain pen. I wrote onomatopoeically across the cover page of the screenplay in big black letters: AIEYAAHHHH!!! Then I capped his pen, put it back on his leather writing pad, and said, That’s how we scream in my country” (131).

So many good passages, too many of them to quote in detail. There are, for example, (1) touching passages about the former South Vietnamese military men, now living emasculated in the U.S., working as bus boys and landscapers.  They train to go back and fight as guerillas in their home country—returning through Thailand. They hate America for many reasons, the main one being that in America they are no longer men, and they are willing to die in their effort to become men once more (220-222). (2) poetic passages using the device of accumulating detail, such as all of the things about the Vietnam that “we could not forget” (238-39).

The author has a wonderful feel for the way human psychology works. In the scene describing how The Captain murders the innocent Sonny (274-76), there is a suggestion that deep in the neurons of his brain Sonny realizes the danger he is in, but the neurons cannot get the full message to his conscious mind in time. Flustered at the Captain’s admission that he is a sleeper agent, Sonny suggests that the General has put him up to coming here—the General has done so, but he has put out a contract on Sonny’s life. Sonny even once uses the word “kill”: “I think you’ve come here to trick me. You want me to say I’m a communist too, so you can kill me or expose me, don’t you?”

The novel is a bit weaker at the end, where it describes the Captain’s return to Vietnam and his interment in a labor camp for “re-education.” The author, although by birth Vietnamese, has barely ever been in his home country and must make up nearly everything in this part. Consequently, the reader must do a good deal of “suspending disbelief” in the latter pages of the novel. The business (370-78) about how Man insists on torturing his friend until The Captain understands the meaning of the word “Nothing” is much belabored and, ultimately, unconvincing. Then again, we are expected to believe that by the time we read it, the manuscript (the first 307 pp.) has already been through three drafts, which are redacted by the commandant of the camp. I see little evidence of the viewpoint of a true-believing communist in that manuscript part of the book. One more thing: what language is the ms written in, Vietnamese or English? It is so thoroughly steeped in the English language that one has trouble imagining it written in Vietnamese for the eyes of the commandant. More heavy suspension of disbelief.

A few passages would be wonderful, were they not so suggestive of other Western writers. Take the masturbation scene: “I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen.” The story of the love affair with the squid goes on for two pages, and would be more entertaining were not the whole business purloined from Roth’s Portnoy (78-80). Once in a while a line sounds like it might have come out of Mickey Spillane, or from Garrison Keillor in the role of Guy Noir: “Her legs demanded to be looked at, and would not take no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe for an answer” (243). Then again, the Captain can be quite an innocent for a military man; even though he himself carried a .38 special back in Vietnam, he is unaware that the weapon accommodates five cartridges, not six (97).

These are mere quibbles, not meant to detract from the brilliance of the novel on the whole. Although the writer has a Vietnamese name, he is, essentially an American, having come to this country at age four. The novel, as well, is set firmly in the tradition of the Western novel. To what extent it may also be in the tradition of the Asian novel, I do not know, as I confess my ignorance of Asian literature. It would be interesting to hear how this book goes over in Vietnam, after it is translated into Vietnamese and published there. You kind of wonder if the Vietnamese reaction might be like the commandant’s reaction to The Captain’s confession: too mired in Western ways, too “American” in its viewpoints. And that would be still one more grand irony.

To return one last time to Dostoevsky, the ending of The Sympathizer reminds me somewhat of the ending of Crime and Punishment. In that novel we are left with the author’s nudging hard at his recalcitrant, atheistic Raskolnikov, with the aid of the unbelievably saintly Sonya, pushing him over into the camp of Russian Orthodox faith, but not quite getting him pushed there. The split-personality “hero” of C and P—so we are told—has made strides forward, but has certainly not yet resolved his split or atoned for having committed murder. It would take another long novel, writes Dostoevsky in the final pages, to describe Raskolnikov’s true religious transformation and healing. Of course, that novel was never written. In his turn, the author of The Sympathizer has mentioned in interviews that he has considered writing a sequel to his novel. He has not suggested, however, that the bifurcated Captain has a chance to resolve his split. Not likely.

A Personal and Critical Essay on FLANNERY O'CONNOR

The Misfit in Exile

(A Personal and Critical Essay on Flannery O’Connor)

                                                                        (1)

                                                              

Backgrounding

          

Here’s an example of what Southern was in the forties and fifties, when I was growing up. Our town, Mt. Dora, Florida, had a population of 5001. A carnival once came through when I was fifteen. They set up their tents out near Pistolville; Farris wheels and whirly-gigs, freak shows. They had the sheep with two heads, the snake woman, the kid in the iron lung. My friend L.W. was a good boy, but he was fifteen as well and full of hormones. He paid a quarter to get in one tent (males only). The audience sat up in bleachers, making off-color comments, and then a bunch of malnourished redneck girls came prancing out in bathing suits. They made circles around the proscenium, leering and winking at the audience. Then they left, and the barker said, “All right, yawl boys ain’t seen nothing yet. For another fifty cent, you proceed on back into this here next tent, and I guaran-damn-tee you that when you get back there, yawl won’t be looking at nothing but hot hair and pussy.

            Of course, everybody, including L.W., dug deep in their dungarees, and they all proceeded into the next tent, where, it turned out, they had only one scrawny blonde girl. She was performing behind a chain link fence, prancing around, creeping up to the fence then backing off. She was wearing absolutely nothing. Everybody was already seated but she was paying nobody any mind, still doing her little tiptoed dance with the hip shimmy. Then, finally, she yelled out to the men up in the stands: “All right, boys. Get your butts down by this fence and get your flies unbuttoned. Whip ‘em out, boys, and put ‘em through a hole in the fence. We gone see which one of yawl is the best man!”

            Then, believe it or not, so L.W. told it, five or six of those old boys in overalls (not bashful L.W., though) really did pull them out and stick them through that fence. Then the scrawny girl would boogie-woogie up to each standing tool, take it unto herself, and, in a loud laughing voice, give her opinion on its merits and demerits. Did L.W. actually watch that embarrassing spectacle, with interest and concupiscence, when he was only fifteen? He did, but he can’t recall the vulgar business to this very day without blushing. Some readers may find it hard to believe that a tent carnival in Georgia would put a hermaphrodite on display, a creature who (in a story by Flannery O’Connor) informed his/her audience: “God made me thisaway. . .This is the way He wanted me to be, and I ain’t disputing His way. I’m showing you because I got to make the best of it.” I have no trouble believing that, and neither would my boyhood friend. By the way, L.W. has a doctorate in education now, and he’s teaching AP classes in South Florida to this very day.

            Only in the early seventies, when I already had a Ph.D. in Russian from Vanderbilt, when I was a young assistant professor, teaching Russian language and literature at Miami University, did it suddenly dawn on me who I should have married: Flannery O’Connor. I read her fiction for the first time, and I thought, in the vernacular of her native Milledgeville (which differed very little from the vernacular that enveloped me as a child): (1) It ain’t no two ways about it. I am in the presence of a hard, formidable intelligence and a mighty fine creative talent (2) In every particular this woman is writing about the life that surrounded me, smothered me even, when I was a Southern child. Every line she writes is so familiar, and, besides that, she has this quirky, wicked Southern sense of humor. My sense of humor. I want to marry her.

But it was far too late. During the summer of 1964 I was in the army, living in a huge khaki field tent with fifty other soldiers. We were up on a hill, in a wheat field, overlooking the East German border, staring down at the barbed wire and the mine fields of a country that no longer exists (the German Democratic Republic). We were on a TDY exercise, we “Monterey Marys,” and we were supposed to be &^%*&*&^% (previous passage deleted for purposes of national security), but we spent most of our time listening to the Rolling Stones on a pirate radio station that broadcasted out of Luxembourg. Yes, reader, believe it or not, the Rolling Stones were already extant in 1964; they looked a bit younger back then. As for Mary Flannery, who at the very time I was up there in that wheat field, pulling guard duty, walking a German shepherd guard dog that enjoyed attacking all of us friends (there were no enemies around to attack), toting an empty M-14 assault rifle, protecting (ostensibly) my country from the Roosskies, Flannery was back in Georgia, dying. I was entirely ignorant of that fact; furthermore, I had never even heard of Flannery O’Connor.

            But I knew her world, because it was mine. In the mid-fifties I played baseball on the Mt. Dora town team. Our rickety old stadium was out in Pistolville (the white trash section of our town). Our night games often coincided with services at a Holy Roller church right next to the ball park. While gangle-shanked Cecil Barks was kicking high his stick of a leg and delivering his knuckleball to the plate, I was standing in center field, listening to the shrieking and testifying that emanated from that concrete block building just outside the stadium gate. Listening to them exalt the prophet Ezekiel (whose saint’s day in the Eastern Othodox Church, by the way, is Aug. 3)—Ezekiel, who connected dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, and heard the word of the Lord.

            “Son/Daughter of Man, can these bones live?  And she, Mary Flannery, prophesied upon the bones for almost forty years, saying unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.”

            As a boy I recall huddling in the dark on our tiny screened front porch (two blocks from Hwy 441), watching, fascinated, as the Ku Klux Klan cavalcades drove past, meandering around the streets of our town. Their ultimate destination was East Town (black section), where they would erect a cross and then burn it. My Yankee Catholic mother tried to pull me back inside, but the spectacle was too eerie and thrilling to miss: those portly Ku Kluxers, sitting proud in their white sheets and pointy white hoods. One of them had a cigar (pronounced “seegar”), and he was smoking it through the mouth hole in his hood, pointing a red dot toward me. The locals called this exercise of putting on a presence and burning a cross “keeping the niggers in line.” What else? Lots. But if you want a sampling of my childhood, just read Flannery’s fiction. It’s all there.     

            In 1964 I had not yet learned how to read artistic literature. In college (University of Florida, 1958-1962) I had majored in political science and history, while taking a couple of creative writing courses on the side. Andrew Lytle, Flannery’s old mentor, taught one of those courses. He called me into his office one day, opened a Faulknerian text in the middle of the book, and asked me to explicate some symbolic imagery. I sat perplexed, turning red in the face, and he finally said, “Why, you didn’t read this book. You just skimmed it!” I suppose he was right. The textbook in Lytle’s course was Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction, the same one Flannery once used. Did I understand fiction? Hell, no!

            Lytle never enlightened me. I left his course just as ignorant about how to read or write creatively as I’d been when I walked in there. One day we ran into each other at the university cafeteria and sat down to eat together. I only wish that the imposing Lytle, with his musilaginous Southern voice, had told me to read Flannery, instead of blithering on about the merits of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, then asserting, with vehemence, “The South should have won that war; the South could have won that war!” Like F.O., I was never much for re-fighting the War Between the States, which was a common activity among the people who lived in my home town: Billy Pat Harding, Anna Pearl Haskins, Buddles Ledford, Flavell Bagwell, etc.

                                                                        (2)

                                

More Congruences

Our little town was not in rural Georgia, but it was a lot like rural Georgia. My father was a devoted Protestant from South Carolina who hated Catholicism and all the values of the Yankees. My mother was a devoted Catholic from New Jersey, a Yankee who despised Protestantism and other Southern institutions, such as racism. My sisters and I were baptized in the Catholic church, but we never were confirmed. Why? Who made us? God made us. My mother and father had no argument on that, but they disagreed on almost everything else. Daddy found my mother’s contention that only Roman Catholics would go to Heaven rather off-putting, to say the least. Our childhood consisted of a never-ending religious war, waged right in the middle of the household. Oh, one more thing: it appears that my mother and daddy loved each other. F.O’s works are good at showing how loving and hating often operate simultaneously.

After that stint in a German wheat field the army sent me to England, where I worked in a building without windows. I finished my daily intelligence tasks in three hours, then spent the other five hours reading Russian novels. Once I was reading Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, in Russian. A red-faced sergeant intruded into the little cubby hole where we worked, demanding to know what I was doing reading on the job. I simply held up the book and showed him the cover: with Идиот written on it in big Cyrillic letters. Immediately he backed off, intimidated by the hieroglyphics. We were allowed to read in Russian on the job. This was called, “keeping up the skills of the linguist.”

            In 1953 (this is a “coincident,” as F.O.s characters would say), Flannery O’Connor received a shipment of books and then had the following conversation with her mother Regina:

SHE: “Mobby Dick. I’ve always heard about that.”

ME: “Mow-by Dick.”

SHE: “Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What’s it about?

ME: An idiot.^[1]

While I was eating out with a fellow American professor in Moscow (1999), he casually mentioned that he had once met Flannery O’Connor. He had been teaching in Atlanta then, and somebody got up a group to drive up and visit Andalusia. He did not have a good recollection of that visit, he did not remember much of interest, but I wanted to reach over and touch him—one step (again), one short step away from the woman of my dreams!

                                                                       

(3)

                                   

                                    Taking Flannery, and a Group of Other Writers, to Russia

            The closest that Flannery O’Connor got to Russia was in her imagination, through her reading of Russian writers. Preparing for her reluctant “pilgrimage” to Europe in February, 1958, she joked as follows in a letter to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald: “Left for two minutes alone in foreign parts, Regina and I would probably end up behind the Iron Curtain asking the way to Lourdes in sign language.”^[2] I taught Russian literature, the Russian language, and Russian folklore for thirty years. Toward the end of my academic career I received a Fulbright Scholar grant for an academic year in Russia (1999-2000). I taught in provincial Novgorod, the oldest city in Russia, which claims the year 859 A.D as its founding date. My main course was “Practical Methods of Literary Translation.” I had prepared all the reading materials in advance, aware that there would be no books or ancillary materials available at Novgorod University, where the library facilities are a wasteland.

            Here is a brief listing of the contents of that course:

Introduction. Theory of Translation (Readings from Kornei Chukovsky, A High Art)

The need to study a literary text before translating it

Translation as adaptation: Gogol’s story “The Nose,” Michael Frayn’s adaptation for stage of the Chekhov story “The Sneeze.”

Translating humor: Chekhov’s “The Death of a Petty Clerk, “Precious” (Dushechka) Complications: (1) Into British or American? Note how Constance Garnett (in “Precious,” or “The Darling”) translates a lovable Russian child into a lovable British child (2) Music: translating the music of Chekhov’s prose; counterpoint in “Precious”

Translating a writer with a lavish style: Bunin’s “Light Breathing”

Translating awkwardness of style into awkwardness (but not too awkwardly!): selections from Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Translating dialect and substandard speech: Shukshin, “Bespalyj, Bunin, “Porugannyj Spas,” Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People” [abbreviated below as AGM and GCP]

When a writer translates himself: Nabokov, “Recruiting,” “Cloud, Castle, Lake”

The possibilities and impossibilities of translating poetry: (1) Marina Tsvetaeva, “Mne nravitsja, chto Vy bol’ny ne mnoj” (“I’m glad that you’re not sick with love for me”) (2) Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse” (3) e.e. cummings, “Buffalo Bills (4) Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Khoroshee otnoshenie k loshasd’jam” (“Treating Horsies Nice”) (5) A.E. Housman, “Others, I am not the first”

What to do with an invented language that has Russian roots? Selections from Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (Zavodnoj apel’sin).

Translating children’s verse: (1) Kornei Chukovsky, “Telefon,” (“The Telephone”) (2) Shel Silverstein, “Boa Constrictor,” “My Beard,” “Chester”

Final exercise: translating Russian classics from English back into Russian, then comparing your translations with the original

            My students at Novgorod University were, primarily, females. On the cusp of the new millennium the Soviet Union as a country had recently collapsed, and Russia was in economic crisis. Males were gravitating toward courses in economics, accounting, etc., those fields that (so they hoped) would enable them to get jobs when they graduated. I had to struggle against a few longstanding Russian traditions: (1) Students kept up a steady blather among themselves during the class, like junior high kids in the U.S. For some reason, this is an accepted practice in the Russian classroom (2) Students thought they need not necessarily attend classes, or even keep up with the work assignments, because everything depended on the final (oral) exam, which they are allowed to take over and over, until they have passed it (3) The head of the department was interested, primarily, in how wonderful the grades of her students looked on paper. She was horrified when I told her that I would give them the grades they deserved, and if they did not show up for class they would flunk.

            Of course I, the interloper professor from abroad, lost this struggle against Russian traditional haphazardness, and at the end of the semester the department head informed me that I wouldn’t have to worry about retesting the students: she would have another professor do that for me. In other words, the students, whom I had informed that there would be one and only one final exam (no taking it over if you flunk), got to take it over anyway.

                                                                        (4)

                                                    Teaching Flannery in Russia

            When it came time for the students to read the two O’Connor stories I had selected (AGM and GCP, in English and in Russian translation), I realized that presenting such a writer to a foreign audience would be a stupendous task. Presenting Flannery to any audience is no mean trick, make no mistake about that. But my Russian students had little acquaintance with America, let alone with the American South of the forties and fifties.

On Translation and Interpretation

           

My students could read English well, and I asked them to read the English originals before reading the Russian translations. Some of them, I’m sure (if they were tired) began with the translations, which are quite well done, given that a writer like F.O. pulls up to the translator’s door with her mule hitched to a  wagon-load of problems.^[3] Since most of my readers probably are not interested in a detailed analysis of the translations, a few high points here will suffice. At the time they were working on these stories (the seventies), the Russian translators were unlikely to have travelled anywhere in the U.S., let alone in the rural South. They probably had no idea what a chinaberry tree looks like or why the mud puddles in Georgia are full of orange-red water (for the same reason the river is red in the story “The River”—because of the red clay).

            In translating you must resign yourself, as well, to the fact of in-exactitude. Plenty of words simply do not have perfect equivalents in other languages. For example, “misfit” (see AGM) has no Russian match. A misfit is a person ill-adjusted to his/her environment or one who is disturbingly different from those with whom he associates. The translator came up with izgoj in Russian, which is not bad, but is, nonetheless, inexact. Izgoj is from the verb izgonjat’/izgonit’, which means to banish, expel, drive out. Izgoj is not someone who does not fit in, but someone who has been banished from society—an exile. The difference may be minor, but it is a difference. What else? Well, for example, the translator sometimes gives up on difficult words or phrases, or is forced to give up where there is no equivalent. “Pickanniny,” e.g. (the grandmother’s word for a little black child in AGM), is not translated. Instead the grandmother says (I’m translating the Russian back into English) “Just look at that. How cute!” Since they don’t have barbeque in Russia, the family (at Red Sammy’s) snacks on “fried sandwiches.”

            In AGM we have the following interesting sentence: “The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.” Not knowing exactly what to do with those “mean trees,” the translator writes (I am again translating this back into English from the Russian), “The trees were bathed in silver-white sunshine, and even the ugliest of them sparkled.” Not bad, but not exact. In the Russian the Misfit consistently addresses the grandmother as “mamasha,” a colloquial term that literally is an affectionate word for “mother.” In the English original the word is “lady.” When the Misfit mentions that he was once a gospel singer, the poor translator, having no conception of what that is (and she could not find a suitable Russian translation even if she did) makes him into a Russian pilgrim, “wandering the roads and singing the Psalms.” By way of getting herself shot, the grandmother says her final words (in the Russian), “You’re my son, you know. You’re one of my children.” The original reads, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” At the end of the story the Misfit (or rather, the Exile, Izgoj) says, “Shut up, Bobby Lee. There’s no happiness in life.” The original reads, “Shut up, Bobby Lee. . . .It’s no real pleasure in life.”

            I mention all of this not as criticism of the translation, which, I believe, is quite good. So is the translation of “Good Country People” (titled literally “The Salt of the Earth” in the Russian), but it has some of the same problems I’ve just illustrated from AGM. In both stories, the translators, e.g., do a good job of finding colloquial or dialectical expressions to translate the Southern speech, although they don’t have a cat in Hell’s chance of capturing the exact Southern American tone in Russian, and even if they did they could not win. Why? Because the idea of American hillbillies speaking Russian is incongruous.

            An old old truth: translating, to some extent at least, cannot help traducing. Reading F.O. was hard enough for my students, who had the English original as well as the translations, but most people in Russia cannot read English; they have nothing but the translations. I can only imagine how bewildered they are when encountering the works of F.O. for the first time. The Russian collection I used is in bad need of explanatory notes—not footnotes, which intrude too directly upon the author’s text, but notes at the back of the book. It has none.

            Any translator is, willy-nilly, an interpreter of the literary text. Translation is a kind of interpretation. But so is the very act of reading. Someone who did not grow up in the American South is highly unlikely to understand the cultural baggage that goes with phrases like “good country people,” or “I’m just a country boy.” The cliches of one’s time and one’s society cannot be grasped by someone living in a different language and culture. When I read F.O. I have the advantage of having lived in practically the identical milieu. Like her, my family sewed drapes and dresses out of chicken-feed sacks with flowered patterns. We coped with the summer heat (no air conditioning), with enormous roaches and redbugs (chiggers), we watched the newsreels called “The March of Time,” in a movie theater (“picture show”) where, exactly as in Milledgeville, there was a separate entrance for blacks, who sat in the balcony (see Brad Gooch, p. 89, 241, 244). Above all, we talked the talk. Rather, my parents and their generation recycled, over and over, the same tired opinions, while I myself listened quietly, aghast at the pettiness of this blather—like so many of Flannery’s younger characters, her “intellectual” types, listen as well, gnashing their teeth.

                                                                        (5)

                                                                 

Perspectives

            Even during her lifetime Flannery sometimes despaired of being understood by “stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical life in the dear old dirty Southland” (HB, p.537). In speaking of Poles and Germans, Mr. Shortley (in “The Displaced Person”) opines, “It ain’t a great deal of difference in them two kinds.” Leaving aside Mr. Shortley’s considered opinion, there is, nonetheless, less difference then you might imagine between a Russian reader of F.O. and an American reader living in, say, Detroit or New York City. “Them two kinds” may both be incapable of translating the language of her stories into a language comprehensible to them. This is not to say that intelligent readers of the twenty-first century cannot grasp the fiction of O’Connor. They can, even if they do not comprehend all the background detail. What it takes, above all, intelligent reader, is a willingness not to stereotype people.

            Is it possible, e.g., for a bigot to be a good person? Yes. I grew up with bigots all around me, and so did Flannery, but she did not consign her bigots to eternal perdition. They were people, many of them her close relatives, and a lot of them were pretty good people. This is hard to grasp for those who avert their eyes from life’s grey tones, preferring everything to be either black or white. These are the sanctimonious types, who, to this very day, in American liberal academic circles everywhere, produce that predictable smirk of derision: “Ah, those redneck idiots.”

            What would Flannery say about such hasty judgments? If Flannery were alive to hear the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s recent comment about his former parishioner Barack Obama, would she be quick to condemn the reverend? I don’t think so. He’s saying something not very palatable, but he’s still a human being. He said (June, 2009) that he had not been able to speak with Obama lately “because all them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me.” Judge not.

Humiliation is one of the worst things a person or a people has to bear. It can break the spirit, or it can enrage a person to the point where he/she cannot think rationally. The Reverend Wright is a good example. American blacks were still being openly humiliated in the American South of the fifties and sixties (and not only in the South, by the way). They are somewhat better off now, but they certainly have not forgotten that humiliation. My white grandfather was born in South Carolina in 1876. He was humiliated too, because when he was born his state was still “under Reconstruction,” occupied by federal occupation forces. My father remained “un-reconstructed” all his life. He and my grandfather were little concerned about how blacks were humiliated, since they were festering in their own humiliation. The humiliated do not necessarily sympathize with the humiliated. Often, rather, they humiliate others in their turn.

            Flannery O’Connor may seem, to some modern liberals, all too unconcerned with the problems of the black race in her time, but her ambivalent attitude toward integration makes sense to me. She had the brains to see that the Civil Rights movement had religious truth and common-sense morality behind it, but she still did not like callow outsiders (who took joy in preaching sanctimony) coming into her native state and telling people how to behave. As for literature, she took umbrage at works that oversimplified the situation, painting, say, an oppressed black hero with the brush of rectitude, while smearing tar all over the racist bad guy. Besides that, the fact that she (and we) resisted help from outside is just human nature. F.O. understood human nature. She was certainly no racist. She certainly never would have advocated beating up or murdering freedom riders. Of course, she had one irremediable beef with the grand liberal agnostic/atheistic secular humanist crowd. Them folks simply did not believe. Had she lived, I’d imagine that she would have voted for Obama. She would have also denigrated most of the academic fads that have come out of the “revolutionary” years of the sixties. She would be horrified beyond measure at the excesses of “political correctness.”

            I voted for Obama; I was happy that he was running. I like to imagine that my SC granddaddy (“Col. Bob”) and my SC grandmother (“Bowie Mom”) and my daddy and my Uncle Cecil and Aunt Wren are whispering encouragement to me (as my mother is) from beyond the grave, but if the personality undergoes no essential revamping after death I can imagine them, rather, screaming indignantly, in unison: “You did what?”

                                                                       

                                                                        (6)

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

            I agree with R.V. Cassill that AGM “may not be susceptible to exhaustive rational analysis.”^[4] In fact, it is clear to me that the story has been over-analysed now by the vast O’Connor academic critical industry. Someone has even found a source for the cat’s name, “Pitty Sing” and made much of that. Maybe this is worth making much of, but I just assumed, as I told my Russian students, that this was babytalk for “Pretty Thing.” Had she not been, as she wrote, “in a state of shock,” Flannery herself would have been amused by a letter she once received from an English professor, who informed her that he and his students had concluded that the Misfit was a sort of  hallucination in Bailey Boy’s mind, and that the car accident might never have occurred (HB, p. 436-37).

            O’Connor frequently came out “against interpretation.” The look she directed toward “the Academy” often had a wry grin stuck on it. Another expression you see facing down the camera in some of her photos says, “Don’t nobody mess with me.” A student once sent a letter asking “just what enlightenment” she was supposed to derive from the stories. Flannery replied, “I wrote her back to forget about the enlightenment and just try to enjoy them.”^[5] This is an answer I especially appreciate, since when I taught literature I always told my students that the main thing they should “get” out of reading artistic prose is aesthetic pleasure. Flannery and I also agree that in teaching literature, the high school teachers and the college profs should go easy on the social studies. Hunting for symbols, as well, is a barren and futile exercise. A young teacher at Wesleyan asked F.O. (HB, p. 334) if the Misfit represented Christ, and he was told (in the typically blunt O’Connor style), “He does not.” The same fellow, who was searching diligently for the symbolism of the Misfit’s black hat, was informed that the significance of the hat was “to cover his head.”^[6] In “On Her Own Work” (p. 108) she also writes that “A story really isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind.” Amen, Flannery, and I believe that AGM is precisely such a story.

            Speaking of symbolism, here is another excerpt from Flannery’s conversations with her mother. When F.O. was writing The Violent Bear It Away, Regina O’Connor asked, “Does it have symbolisms in it? You know, when I was coming along, they didn’t have symbolisms” (Gooch, p. 317). Regina was right: we’re all better off without symbolisms. Considering her own stance “against interpretation and symbolisms,” I think that F.O. made a big mistake when she went around to universities reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and then explicating it for her audience. She, of course, was afraid that the story would never be understood as she wished it understood—from the point of view of her religion, her theology—so she had to tell people what it was about. The grandmother, heroine of the story, has (according to this explication) a kind of religious epiphany at the end, when she reaches out to the Misfit and calls him one of her children. She dies happy, smiling, because in her final moments on earth she has been granted the grace of God. Meanwhile, the Misfit, will be somehow inspired by the old lady’s last gesture, which, “like the mustard seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. But that’s another story” (“On Her Own Work,” p.113).

            Yes, ma’m. It certainly is another story. It’s like the story that Fyodor Dostoevsky promised to write at the end of Crime and Punishment (which novel, incidentally, reverberates faintly through the “mean” trees of  AGM). For how many pages, (five hundred?) the protagonist-murderer Raskolnikov has resisted expiating his sin. At the end of the novel he is still resisting, so the author elbows him over into the camp of Christ, then concludes by telling us that Raskolnikov’s redemption, how he will learn to know “a hitherto undreamed-of reality,” is a new tale, “but our present one is ended.” In other words, “Sorry, reader, but it seems I’ll have to write another novel to explain how Raskolnikov gets saved.”

Meanwhile Raskolnikov, he of the incorrigibly split personality, while well aware that “Jesus thown everything off balance,” is glowering at his creator Dostoevsky, snarling, “Yeah, just try writing another novel about me, and see how far you get!” Assuming that the Misfit can somehow go on existing beyond the bounds of the story (as his creator imagines when she explains the story), I figure that he’ll go right on repeating, as well, that he “don’t need no hep” from Christ.

            In recently reading Richard Giannone’s treatment of AGM,^[7] which echoes the author’s explication in Mystery and Manners, I wrote “Huh?” all over the pages of the book, in the places where he tells us that the grandmother, “unlike the morose killer, finds a way to pleasure by becoming a child of love. . . .She chooses to love, and her tenderness crushes the gunslinger’s might.” Huh? To me the grandmother at the end of the story remains perfectly in character. She goes on talking, but now she knows that her life depends on how persuasive that talk will be. She is portrayed as a woman trying to save her skin, and whether she finds a moment of grace or not is secondary. Imagine my having to present F.O.’s rather dubious interpretation to a group of Russian students, who were born in the atheistic Soviet Union and have no comprehension of theology in any form. I’m afraid, furthermore, that it cannot be presented convincingly to modern readers anywhere. Without prompting on the part of the author or her acolytes (professors with a religious bent), readers have little more chance of seeing this “moment of grace” and the Misfit’s promising future than unprompted students, say, who read Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters” have of finding that acrostic in the final paragraph of the story.

            So, if I knew that the theological approach was impossible (even had I accepted it, and had I had the theological background to do it justice), just how did I go about teaching “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People” in Russia? I started out by trying to provide my students with certain cultural markers. I told them some of the things I have mentioned above, about growing up in a town much like Milledgeville, Georgia. I told them that my town was, in fact, only five miles from Eustis, Florida, where my father worked as a “policy man,” selling “nickel and dime” life insurance, and from where Flannery ordered her first “hen and rooster peafowl” in 1952.^[8] I was there. I could have driven past that peafowl farm with my daddy, could have seen the birds being packed up in crates for shipment to Georgia. Maybe I did see that. I certainly can hear their yowls (“Help! Help!”) in my imagination today.

            I tried to explain the place names (real and invented) and the rather skewed itinerary of the family (they headed north from Atlanta first, then somehow ended up just off Highway 441 near Milledgeville—in Toomsboro, that ominous town, with the spelling changed slightly—after spending time at Red Sammy’s place in the fictional “Timothy.” We discussed the names of the characters: John Wesley (the religious connection), June Star (the Shirley Temple connection). I told the students that I was well equipped to deal with characters named “June” and “Bobby Lee,” since I have a sister named June, and I myself am a Bobby Lee. I talked about the television program “Queen for a Day,” sang the song “Tennessee Waltz” for them. I explained to them what red clay is and what a chinaberry tree looks like.

I told my students stories. I told them the way it was in the segregated South of the forties and fifties. Searing moist heat, black mammies in East Town, sitting out in brassieres on the porches of their shanties, fanning themselves with cardboard church fans, mumbling  “Lord, I mean to tell you. Ain’t it hot, though?” Rural white families giving their sons feminine names (Hazel, June), poisonous snakes, voracious mosquitoes, ringworm on children’s legs; bamboo groves, Spanish moss hanging from live oaks and water oaks, horse flies, deer flies, “separate but equal,” camphor trees, crape myrtles, folks riding boats on Lake Gertrude (in Sylvan Shores, the rich whites’ section of our little town), the tentative social interactions between blacks and whites (beautifully illustrated in so many of O’Connor’s stories), the way they talk to each other, about each other, “I ain’t got nothing against no colored folks, ‘long as they know their place,” the games of conversational song and dance, “Yassuh, yassuh, huh, huh, huh,” (which feigns stupidity, but is, among other things, a way of not agreeing with what the white man just said), the bob and weave of the integrated conversation, the love-hate feelings blacks and whites share for each other. Still do. I know. I live in the rural South today.

The funny papers: Nancy, Smiling Jack, Gasoline Alley, Henry, and Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead. Pork barbeque from East Town with hot hot sauce, General Sherman, Southern mores (how a “lady” should behave, the difference between “poor white trash” and “good country people”). I assured my students that, believe it or not, I, as a child, ran across characters like Red Sammy Butts on a daily basis. In fact, one thing that so fascinates me about O’Connor’s writings is how perfectly she captures the essence of the country people living in her milieu. To me L.C. Durden—part of that huge Durden clan from over in Pistolville—L.C. with his stump on one arm, out in his airboat hunting gators for a living, was not “grotesque” at all; like everybody else all around me back then, L.C. was just folks (well, okay, I never met anybody like the Misfit).                                                       

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More Backgrounding

            Our town had a population of five thousand and one. That one was the man we all called “The Walking Jesus.” He was the local rambler, traipsing the streets and byways, muttering the word of the Lord, shouting out prophecies. He had shoulder-length white hair and a long white beard. He dressed in white satin trousers and silk shirts. Sometimes he had chartreuse handkerchiefs tied around his neck. No matter how cold the weather, no matter how hot, he always went barefooted.

            One scorching day we were riding the back roads in our blue forty-eight Chevy (my Daddy, my sister June and I, Bobby Lee), drinking ice-cold Coca-Colas, and there he was, ambling along the roadside.

            “Hey, there goes the Walking Jesus!” said June. She had a little package of salted peanuts, and she was transferring its contents into the top of her Coke bottle.

            “It’s him, all right,” said Daddy. “You reckon he’d like a ride?”

            We didn’t really believe he’d get in the car. The Walking Jesus didn’t ride in cars; he walked. But mirabile dictu! When we stopped and opened the door, he crawled in the back seat, where June was sitting.

            We drove on down the road, wrapped in a sense of wonder. Nobody spoke. We drank our Cokes, out of those original classic bottles, which were all steamed up and sweating in the heat. We drove past the old clay pit, those brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple, crowned by sharp scrub pines sparkling in silver-white sunlight.

            Finally Daddy said, “It’s a hot one today, I mean to tell you.”

            The Walking Jesus said, “Sho nuff is.”

            “Would you like a Co-Cola?” asked Daddy.

            The Walking Jesus blanched.

            “I ain’t about to take the spawn of Satan into my body,” he replied with a scowl.

            Nobody said anything else. We tooled on down that hot asphalt, on the Old Sorrento Road. I sat there still feeling wonderstruck. Just imagine: it was Daddy and June and me, ten-year-old Bobby Lee, and we were riding along in our car, past the citrus groves, past the live oaks strewn with Spanish moss, past the clay pits, chinaberries, the mundane realities of our lives. We were imbibing the devil’s spawn as we went, and riding along with us in the back seat that day was none other than The Walking Jesus. I just wish Flannery O’Connor could have been there to see that.

            But what about the “meaning” of AGM? As I’ve made clear above, I think that it has all kinds of meanings for all different people. Most of my Russian students were shocked and chagrined by the change of tone, when a light-hearted story about a silly family on a trip to Florida suddenly turns into a tale of mass murder. This bothers Martha Stephens too, a critic who has written an intelligent book about F.O.^[9] Others have insisted that the tonal change makes for a “failure” of the story as fiction. As for me, I agree with the writer T.C. Boyle, who has remarked that “It’s very powerful when the safety net drops away from the comic universe where nothing can go wrong, and there’s this overpowering, terrible violence.”^[10]

I, personally, think that a central theme in a lot of O’Connor’s stories is palaver, what I call good ole Southern b.s. People blather their way through their lives like the grandmother does, saying, essentially, nothing, and finally they persiflage their way on out of this life. Such talk is so absolutely familiar to me that I could put myself, say, on the bus with Julian and his mother (“Everything that Rises Must Converge”) and I would already know by heart everything everyone would say. Southern people of my time (the fifties) could have been playing roles in a play: they knew their lines perfectly. A literary scholar could write an article (probably already has): “Slouching Loquaciously Toward Valdosta: Phatic Southern Speech in the Works of  Flannery O’Connor.” Of course AGM, as any great work of fiction, is about a whole lot of other things too.

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Good Country People and the “Interlekshuls”

           

One of the funniest short stories in American literature, GCP takes a joke about a travelling salesman and turns it into art. It is another story about idle badinage, but, in her scorn of the palaver, the “intellectual” Joy-Hulga ends up propagating twaddle of her own. According to the biographer Brad Gooch (p. 256), the passage from Hulga’s philosophy book, about how “science wishes to know nothing of nothing,” is taken from Heidegger’s Existence and Being. This passage “worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish,” and, truth be told, it makes Hulga look rather silly. Of course, quoting Heidegger out of context is unfair. Any abstract thinker can be made to look bad out of context. Take the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who exerted such an influence on O’Connor late in her life. He writes that “In itself, death is an incurable weakness of corporeal beings, complicated, in our world, by the influence of an original fall” (cited in Martha Stephens, p. 7). I assume that you have to be thoroughly immersed in Teilhard de Chardin’s theology  before that makes any sense to you!

                       

The Paradoxical Truth about the Modern-Day “Interlekchual”

            While frustrated by the failure of her relatives (or practically anyone else in Milledgeville) to understand her works, F.O., simultaneously, was scornful of the academics who weighed in on her fiction. As Giannone so wonderfully puts it (in reference to Joy-Hulga), “graduate study exposes how systematic thinking can be a form of infantilism” (63). My Uncle Talmadge would second that in his Georgia voice (“Ain’t it the truth!”), and I, who, unlike Talmadge or Flannery’s Milledgeville kinfolks, inhabited the world of Academe for thirty years, would add that university teaching sometimes manifests a spirit of infantilism. In fact, some of the most puerile people I’ve met in my whole life are college teachers with Ph.D.s. I speak, primarily, of the ones who have found themselves a CAUSE and who spend every class moment beating it like a drum (as if nothing else in life existed). Students too much under the influence of these ideologues would walk into my classes with thoroughly closed minds, and I had a hell of a time trying to open those minds back up. Unfortunately, the “sand box revolution” of the American sixties (the great E.O. Wilson’s term), or, to be more charitable, perversions of the worthwhile ideas of the sixties still have resonance in college classrooms everywhere. In fact, since Wilson first coined that term things have become much worse. Today the spirit of political correctness has instigated THOUGHT CONTROL all over the world of academe.

            Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all academics are idiots. In reading literary criticism on F.O., I have discovered a lot of intelligent things. Of course, I have not had the time even to make a dent in the huge volume of materials that are out there, but I might mention here that I particularly appreciate the criticism of Martha Stephens, Frederick Asals, and Richard Giannone. On the other hand, I can imagine F.O. chuckling and shaking her head over certain “interleckchul” lucubrations. I am thinking of one article that appears to have been written by a latter-day twin sister of Hulga Hopewell, Ph.D. We will leave the writer of this article mercifully anonymous. It is roiling with sentences something like this: “Let us now concentrate on the recalcitrant interstices in the bodies of Southern women, who denigrate the conservatism of a racist ideology and who perpetuate in the subjects of their discourse the illusion of incoherence.” After finishing it, I took a look at the list of contributors in the back of the book and discovered that this woman had published several articles on a variety of famous writers. She was teaching at a prestigious American university and her new book (titled something like Battling Against Tobacco Road: the Perambulations of Billingsgate in the Works of Liberated Southern Women), was soon to appear. It would be published by some big-name university press. Why was I not surprised? The formula for success is not that hard: you start with a fashionable cause, and you propagate your cause in language that is highfalutin and abstract. If  Flannery were still alive I can imagine her, with her hard intelligence and keen wit, verbally “grabbing aholt of that there lit critter and turning her ever’ way but loose.”

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Russian Literature and Flannery O’Connor

            Another way that I presented GCP to my Russian audience was to emphasize the obvious influence of Russian literature on it. O’Connor read bits and pieces of Tolstoy, Pasternak, Turgenev, Chekhov, Nabokov, ^[11] but only two Russian writers indubitably have hitched a ride on her sentences and paragraphs: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852). The Misfit, e.g., is a Dostoevskian character with a Southern American accent, and in GCP there are two typically Dostoevskian perverts: Mrs. Freeman, who is enthralled by stories about people with crippling diseases, and Manley Pointer, whose sexuality is imbued with fetishism. While engaged in his childlike seductions, he takes special pleasure in collecting women’s glass eyes or prostheses. He, as Giannone writes (p. 64) “savors Hulga’s limp.” Dostoevsky’s works are crammed with pedophiles, as well as with characters who savor the limps of others, even to the point that his enemies accused the writer himself of harboring such perversions. One prominent example is Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, with his tainted attraction to his landlady’s daughter, whom he, ostensibly, wants to marry. She is a sickly girl, and, says Raskolnikov, “If she had been lame or a hunchback, I might very well have loved her even more” (Part Three, Ch. III).

To me Dostoevsky’s influence on O’Connor is most obvious in The Violent Bear It Away and in “The Lame Shall Enter First.” These works, with their doubling of characters and split personalities, with their emphasis on perversity amidst a Christian quest, are quite “Dostoevskian.” I am reminded most directly of The Brothers Karamazov. F.O. may not have ever read bleak (“sick”) stories such as “The Meek One” (“Krotkaja”) and “A Sleazy Little Business” (“Skvernyj anekdot”), but, in writing some of her later works, she certainly has affinities with the “cruel talent” of Dostoevsky (the critic N. K. Mikhailovsky’s term).^[12]

            Although he is not often looked upon as a humorist, Dostoevsky has a wicked dark sense of humor. See, for example, his Notes from the Underground, one of the most profound short novels in world literature, a work in which the narrator wallows in perversity but can be, simultaneously, extremely funny. O’Connor’s laughter, however, is usually more “Gogolian” (light, ironic, genuinely funny) than “Dostoevskian” (dark, depraved).

            Nikolai Gogol has a special place in Flannery’s heart. Brad Gooch mentions how Jean Williams once ran into F.O. as the writer was on her way to the library to check out Dead Souls. Robie Macauley, who taught Russian literature at Iowa, had told her to read it since this “was a must-read for every writer.” She told Williams, “So I reckon I better do it” (Gooch, p.143). Later, in a letter to Betty Boyd Love (9/20/52), F.O.  writes, “Do you like the novel Dead Souls? I like Tolstoy too but Gogol is necessary along with the light” (HB, p.44). In an interview from July, 1962, F.O. comes right out and says it: “I’m sure Gogol influenced me.”^[13]

            This “necessity” and the influence are obvious in GCP. One way of reading Dead Souls is to see the protagonist-swindler Chichikov as an agent of the devil, “a travelling salesman from Hades,” journeying around Russia and buying up souls (both dead and living).^[14] In GCP the devil has two obvious agents in the story, Mrs. Freeman and Manley Pointer. Before the action of the story begins, Satan has already insinuated Mrs. Freeman onto the Hopewell farm. Manley is innocent of his calling, unaware that he is in the employ of the devil. He is presented as a naive character, and in many respects both he and Hulga are innocent children. Manley works (unconsciously) at his job, collecting souls, in the form of glass eyes and artificial legs, for the forces of evil. There are, however, hints of his provenance. For example, he has no address. He is, as he says, “not even from a place, just from near a place.” The devil keeps him busy travelling, so he has no fixed abode.

            Hulga is described as having a special solicitude for her artificial leg. “She took care of it as someone else would his soul...” At the end of the story Manley filches her soul and runs off with it, and Hulga sits in the hayloft, bereft of leg and soul. Critics have enjoyed playing with this situation, talking about how Hulga loses her footing and even her foot, or ends up sitting down, without a leg to stand on. A salient fact about GCP is this: you can’t help enjoying it; it’s hilarious. You don’t get that queasy feeling at the end, the way you get at the end of “The Lame Shall Enter First,” or at the end of Dostoevsky’s “A Sleazy Little Business.” GCP makes me laugh in a Gogolian way. I’m thinking, in particular, of the humor of Dead Souls, not of Gogol’s well-known tendency to veer, sometimes, over into sloughs of despond. One of his “funny” stories ends, famously: “Skuchno na etom svete, gospoda (Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a dreary world we live in).” 

            Flannery herself admits in her letters to reading her own stories as comedy long after she has written them: “I read them over and over and laugh and laugh” (HB, p. 80-81). Here she is making an important statement about herself, as human being and as writer. In her public appearances she emphasized that she wrote grotesque scenes because her readers were blind (she had to use hyperbole to reach them) and deaf (she had to talk loud for them to hear). Maybe so, but I think she took great pleasure in describing the hilarious grotesqueries of life. For me her wonderful sense of humor is what most draws me to her. Does the fact of her being a comic writer detract from her merit? Not in the least. Some critics seem to assume that comic writing cannot be dead serious simultaneously. They are wrong. The greatest comic writing is always dead serious simultaneously, and such are the writings of Flannery O’Connor and Nikolai Gogol.

            In terms of her personal situation Flannery O’Connor resembles Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), who, himself a doctor, knew he was dying of tuberculosis but pretended to himself that he was not, while writing stories and plays full of wry humor. Even more, however, she resembles Nikolai Gogol, the comic genius who was never known to have had any sexual relationships, who was steeped in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, who believed thoroughly in the existence of the devil, who read the Lives of the Saints and the Desert Ascetics. 

            The differences between Gogol and O’Connor, however, are immense. Gogol’s comic genius battled perpetually inside him with his Eastern Orthodox religious beliefs. He somehow thought that the laughter he generated was sinful. Awash in delusions of grandeur, he travelled incessantly around Europe, attempting to write a second volume to Dead Souls, a book that he thought would “solve the riddle of his existence” and, in effect, explain the meaning of life. When he finally came to understand that he was attempting the impossible, Gogol effectively committed suicide, burning the manuscript of Vol. II of his novel and starving himself to death in a religious frenzy (Feb., 1852). He was almost forty-three years old. Flannery O’Connor was sick physically, but not emotionally. Gogol was just the opposite. He was afflicted with a terrible soul sickness.

            Fyodor Dostoevsky was also a devoted Eastern Orthodox Christian (especially after his years as a convict in the labor camps), but his Christianity is constantly called into question—in his fiction, not in his life or his journalistic writings—by powerful voices that deny the message of Christ. Both Gogol and Dostoevsky were thoroughly conflicted personally. Each of them teetered on the rim of insanity at various times in his life, and both had serious sexual complexes. As far as I can gather, however, Flannery O’Connor was never anything if not eminently rational and sane, and her religious beliefs never clashed with her artistic genius. In reading her fiction I do not hear other voices (as in Dostoevsky), contradicting the essence of her theology.^[15]  Certain perceptive critics, such as Bloom and Asals, have suggested, however, that a “creative inner dialogue” (Asals’ term) is at work inside O’Connor, and her editor, Robert Giroux, once contended that she did not allow herself to understand the full implications of her writings (Gooch, p. 347). There is food for thought here. In speaking of her favorite story, “The Artificial Nigger,” F.O. herself once wrote that “there is a good deal more in it than I understand myself” (HB, p.140). I believe that this statement pertains to almost everything she wrote.

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A Benediction

            In June, 2003, in a ceremony conducted in the Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg, Russia, I was received into the Russian Orthodox Church. I made this move (1) at the urging of my Russian wife, and (2) in a last desperate attempt to reconcile my parents (now long dead) within myself. I felt as if my mother and father were standing there beside me as I was conducted through that ceremony, with the priest stumbling over the Old Church Slavonic words (the text of this rite was unfamiliar to him), and with me trying to repeat them after him. I was saying, “Okay, Mommy, okay, Daddy; this is the best that I can do for you. I’m not a Protestant and I’m not a Catholic, but at least I’m officially part of some Christian religion.”

            Of course, if the Orthodox priests find out what I think about some of their dogma, they could boot me posthaste out of their church! Maybe, like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, Bobby Lee is a “Christian malgré lui”! The best I can do is to say, along with Flannery and St. Peter (HB, p. 92), “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”

            For all that, I find consolation in a lot of the Orthodox prayers. I run through them every morning, invoking various wonderworking icons, in an attempt to help lots of people, living and dead, who have their problems. I also repeat a lot of the prayers of praise (mostly the Psalms), thanking whomever put me on this earth for the experience of life. Don’t know if I’m doing anybody, or myself, any good, but, for some reason, this daily concourse with the deities makes me feel better.

            Here’s a prayer that I wish I could have sent to Flannery O’Connor in the summer of 1964, back when I was living in that wheat field next to the East German border and she was dying in Georgia. I know that it’s awfully late to be sending this to her, but Time, in the grand scheme of things, is irrelevant. After all, I, unfortunately, did not know Flannery in 1964. I had not read her coruscating works. I didn’t know that she was born on Annunciation Day, or that she died on the saint’s day of the Prophet Ezekiel (Eastern Orthodox), and I didn’t know this prayer either. But here it is, for what it’s worth, in my translation from the Russian.^[16]

                                                Prayerful Suspirations by Parfeny of Kiev

When, in a state of sickness and depression, I sense the approach of the end of my earthly existence: Lord, have mercy on me.

When my poor heart is beating its last, when it mourns and pines with the anguish of death: Lord, have mercy on me.

When, for the last time, my eyes brim with tears, as I think that over the course of my life I have offended thee, O God, with my sins: Lord, have mercy on me.

When the rapid heartbeat signifies the imminent departure of my soul: Lord, have mercy on me.

When the deathly pallor of my face, when my body growing ever colder strikes fear into the hearts of my dear ones: Lord, have mercy on me.

When my eyesight grows dim and murky, when my voice falters and my tongue turns to stone: Lord, have mercy on me.

When hideous phantoms and spectres lead me to despair of Thy beneficence: Lord, have mercy on me.

When my soul, affrighted by recollections of my transgressions and dread of Thy judgment, languishes in its battle with the foes of my salvation, those fiends who strive to draw me away into the realm of pitch-dark torment: Lord, have mercy on me.

When I am drenched in deathly sweat, when, in the throes of horrible sufferings, my soul begins separating itself from my body: Lord, have mercy on me.

When death’s shadow hides from my eyes, glazed over in mist, all the objects of this earth: Lord, have mercy on me.

When within my body all sensations cease, when my veins are petrified and my muscles become as rock: Lord, have mercy on me.

When human speech and all the sounds of the world no longer reach my ears: Lord, have mercy on me.

When my soul stands before thy Visage, O God, awaiting thy decision: Lord, have mercy on me.

When I harken unto the just sentence pronounced by thy Holy Court, which decides my eternal fate: Lord, have mercy on me.

When my body, separated from the soul, becomes the prey of worms and of rot, and when, finally, all of my substance is transformed into a handful of dust: Lord, have mercy on me.

When the clarion call sounds to awaken all upon thy Second Coming, and when the book of my deeds is opened wide, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon thy sinful servant, Mary Flannery. Into thy hands, Lord, I commend my soul. Amen.

                                                *********************************

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^[1]Letter to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, in The Habit of Being, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 55-56. Hereinafter noted in the text as HB.

^[2]Cited in Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (N.Y.: Little, Brown and Co., 2009), p. 298.

^[3]For the stories in Russian see Flannery O’Connor, Khoroshego cheloveka najti ne legko [A Good Man Is Hard to Find], various translators (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974). The title story is translated by L. Bespalova, and GCP is translated by V. Murav’yov.

^[4] Cassill cited in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Flannery O’Connor (collection of articles on the story, edited by Frederick Asals, Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. 119.

^[5] “On Her Own Work,” in Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (N.Y.: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1957) p. 107.

^[6] You can’t help noticing, for all that, F.O.’s preoccupation with hats (from Wise Blood through The Violent Bear It Away), and I believe that a good scholar would be justified in writing an article called “Hats and Their Uses (Besides Being to Hold Down Heads) in the Works of Flannery O’Connor.” I once read (no joke) an excellent article about the significance of Raskolnikov’s hat in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

^[7]Richard Giannone, Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love (Fordham University Press, 1999), p. 52.

^[8]For more detail on my childhood and youth in a small Southern town (with one football game wrapped around the whole thing), see my memoir, A Roast for Coach Dan Spear (Hamilton, Ohio: Ogee Zakamora Press, 1998). On the purchase of the peafowl, see HB, p.45.

^[9]Martha Stephens, The Question of Flannery O’Connor (L.S.U. Press, 1973).

^[10]Cited in Frederick Asals’ introduction to the collection of articles, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” p. 20.

^[11]In her letters she mentions reading, liking Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. She also enjoyed Nabokov’s Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Bend Sinister. During the hoopla over Lolita she defended the novel (see HB, p. 98-99, 304-05, 339,343-44, 491).

^[12]The most profound influence of Dostoevsky came late in her career. Only about a year before her death (April 27, 1963), as if dissatisfied with her comprehension of the great Russian, she was promising in a letter, “I intend to read Dostoievski this summer.” See F.O., Collected Works, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (The Library of America, 1988), p.1181.

^[13]Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, edited by Rosemary M. Magee (University Press of Mississippi, 1987), p. 94.

^[14]Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (N.Y.: New Directions, 1944; corrected edition, 1961), p. 73. On Gogol as split and tormented, see the article I posted (June 3, 2009—in honor of the bicentennial of his birth) on the Internet compendium called Johnson’s Russia List (#103, Item No. 37). The article is titled, “Man Discovers He’s Afflicted with Comic Genius; Man Dies of It (The Case of Nikolai Gogol, 1809-1852).”

^[15]Secondary literature on Dostoevsky, just in English, is monumental. A good place to begin is with Joseph Frank’s brilliant five-volume critical biography (Princeton University Press, 1979-2002). The best criticism on Gogol is still in Russian (not translated into English). On Dead Souls see, e.g., Yu. Mann, V poiskakh zhivoj dushi: “Mertvye Dushi” [In Search of a Living Soul: “Dead Souls”](Moscow: Kniga Publishers, 1984). In English see the Norton Critical Edition of Dead Souls, edited by George Gibian, translated by George Reavey (W.W. Norton and Co., 1985). See also Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Harvard University Press, 1979).

^[16]From the prayer book Molitvoslov (Moscow: Blagovest, 2002), p. 190-93.

                                          Isaac Levitan, "Evening Path," 1882