Inspired by a perfume on Etsy called “Dead Writers,” Book Riot’s Amanda Nelson imagines scents named after various canonical authors.

Our favorites include Flannery O’Connor (“Church incense, soap, vanilla, ginger”) and Edgar Allen Poe (“Poppies, absinthe, sandalwood, and mold”).

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This kind of conversion notion is based on a very comforting idea—that if only we had sufficient information, we wouldn’t act badly. And that’s one of the great things about what The Misfit tells the Grandmother in the line I like so much. He’s not saying that a near-death experience would have turned her into a good woman. He’s saying it would take somebody threatening to shoot her every minute of her life.

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Barry Moser, who is writing the introduction to the upcoming book on O’Connor’s early art, likens her linoleum technique and general temperament to her keen eye for gesture: All the poses her figures strike seem realistic, despite her rarely using references. Moser also believes that the consciously lazy attention she paid to other writers is evident in her visual artwork as well, and may have been a key part of her whole aesthetic practice.

Also, O’Connor taught a chicken to walk backwards when she was six, which she later said was the “high point of her life”.  Gosh, she’s cool.

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The great Southern novelist and story writer William Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, on February 23rd of this year, at the age of 70. An intensely private man who valued his reclusion and had no interest in the sometimes shameless self-promotion required by authors, Gay spoke at great length and on numerous occasions with William Giraldi in 2008 in preparation for Giraldi’s essay “A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction of William Gay,” the only in-depth critical analysis of Gay’s novels and stories. We offer Giraldi’s essay for the legion of Gay’s heartbroken fans, and for those lucky ones who are about to discover for the first time this important voice in American fiction.

***

In William Gay’s scorched world Flannery O’Connor is present less like a looming ghoul than an elderly aunt who lives in his house and will not die. And yet despite O’Connor’s strong presence (and the unavoidable presence of the Yahweh of Southern literature, the god from whom no male writer in the South can ever hope to flee) Gay’s work is wholly its own, pulsing with both tradition and novelty. His books have been crafted from darkness: The Long Home (1999), Provinces of Night (2000), Twilight (2006), and the story collection I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down (2002). Gay is, along with Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and Harry Crews, one of the four horsemen of the Southern apocalypse.

There was not a single pocket in Tennessee in which Gay could hide from Faulkner’s commanding influence. For an aspiring writer in working-class Lewis County, Faulkner existed in the very air. He was a kind of Delphic oracle for new scribes: without him nothing even remotely literary came to pass. Gay read Faulkner in the thirty-five-cent Signet editions he bought at the local drugstore in Hohenwald, Tennessee. He had been buying notebooks and pens since childhood, but now, late in high school, charged by O’Connor’s and Faulkner’s doomed visions of the South, he began to formulate his own fiction, began to heed the insistent voices calling from within. His parents contemplated the boy as something of an anomaly; although Gay was the first in the family to finish high school, his mother and father weren’t sure that writing was a prudent choice of occupation. Gay’s father toiled as a sharecropper and at whatever blue collar drudgery came along. His two younger brothers fell in line; they and their father had enough Southern machismo to fire a rocket. They hunted and fished; Gay, on the other hand, “wasn’t much interested in killing things.” About his mother, Gay offers one word only: “Loyalty.”

A vigilant teacher in high school noticed that the boy was reading Zane Gray westerns in his extra time, and thinking Zane Gray too inferior for the boy’s thriving intellect, the teacher passed him a copy of Look Homeward, Angel. Gay considers this gift the turning point of his life: Wolfe’s novel ignited him to his core; it proffered him the insight that this can be done, that a writing life for him was not a drunken pipe dream. Alongside J.T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel is the quintessential American novel of experience, of growing, of how a home fashions a psyche for good or for ill. It allotted Gay the confidence to tell the stories of his own experience and the certain knowledge that those experiences were valuable even though they lacked privilege and swagger. Wolfe lit the green lantern at the end of the dock; O’Connor and Faulkner provided him the vessel to get there.

Here is the horror story, a masterpiece of brutality and loss worthy of O’Connor: In an upscale region in Tennessee, a wealthy Pakistani couple employs tradesmen to complete work on their mansion. The paperhanger—he has no name; the force within him eludes definition—feels belittled by the wife. The couple’s tiny daughter pesters him; she plays with his hair while he labors on his knees. His calm in the face of this annoyance is unnatural, otherworldly. Then the tiny girl goes missing in the house; authorities arrive to mount a search; the paperhanger and others have their vehicles checked, and then they aid in the search. She is not found. Months pass. The Pakistani couple separates under the strain. The grief-sunk wife keeps returning to the unfinished mansion. She meets the paperhanger there one afternoon. That evening they lie in his bed after alcohol and urgent intercourse; the wife sleeps. And then the paperhanger goes from the bedroom only to return a moment later with the frozen body of the tiny girl, wrapped in plastic.  He arranges the corpse next to her mother, and then himself disappears into the ancient evening.

Gay’s “The Paperhanger” temps you to classify it, explain it, wonder at its majesty and terror—the story is “The Tell-Tale Heart” written by the bastard offspring of Wilkie Collins and Charles Manson, in a prose part Hebrew Bible, part Hemingway—and then defies such feeble attempts at comprehension, at reduction. The story breathes, enigmatically, as if just born; the odors of blood, beer, and birth fluid waft up from the page. Gay’s story offers almost no information about these characters: not where they come from, not their fevered dreams, not what they yearn for at first light. In his short fiction, Hemingway—an early, necessary influence on Gay—famously withholds motives and histories. Gay learned from Hemingway never to clarify what the reader is capable of clarifying himself; verbosity maims, insults the dignity of narrative. In “The Paperhanger” we know only how the characters react in the midst of an unexpected mystery, how their language reveals their warped psyches, and with that alone Gay enables us to know them for life, to taste their sweat.

The paperhanger is simultaneously ominous sprite and veritable everyman. Once her mother drifted from the room, the little girl jabbed out her tongue at him and the paperhanger’s hand shot from his side like “a serpent” and snapped the child’s neck. Fragile as a Christmas bulb, she was tiny enough to fit inside his toolbox. What psychological explanation does Gay give for the paperhanger’s crime?  None—not boyhood trauma or possession by devils—because he knows that such explanations are trite, exhausted, imaginary, that human beings commit acts of abrupt barbarity that no therapist, no writer, can ever adequately explain. When the paperhanger appears with the frozen body in his arms, the moment is outrageous, satanic, inevitable. As the wife sleeps, the paperhanger whispers: “Sometimes . . . you do things you can’t undo. You breaks things you just can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it. . . . There are things only a miracle can set to rights.” Does he regret the murder in those lines, the devastation he delivered to a family? Regret is possible only when one has not accepted one’s nature or the cruelty of the wilderness from which we emerged naked and panting like beasts. The paperhanger is too much himself, too comfortable with Hobbesian analyses of human destiny, or what Hume aptly called “the natural depravity of mankind,” to wonder how he ought be a more benevolent man.

He departs in the wife’s car, “tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a malignant spore,” and thinking about “not just the possibility but the inevitability of miracles.” He will beget more carnage, to be sure. The miracle he ponders: the rabid injustice of this business called living, God’s abandonment of his creation, lunatics set loose. It seems a miracle that a place designed by a loving deity could be thoroughly polluted by such monsters. The man knows he’s an abomination; he’s made his peace with that fact. The second miracle: how Gay can massage your morality into feeling miniature sparks of sympathy for this child killer, a lonesome and forsaken recluse who suspects that his own birth was a cosmic error.

“The Paperhanger” turns V.S. Pritchett’s definition of the short story, “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing,” into something that confronts you head-on, always. O’Connor accomplishes the same magic throughout A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the story collection Gay read as an adolescent; he bought the Signet paperback and knew—immediately, instinctually—that they were the best American stories ever written. He marveled over her packed sentences, her perfect endings. Gay studied O’Connor the way an evangelical studies Genesis, and from her brilliance he learned how short fiction is shaped, how a character can come alive in just a few lines, and, more important, how to tell a story that matters.

***

When the novel The Long Home arrived in the world a decade ago, William Gay was fifty-six years old and right away compared to both Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. Where did those years go between the teenager who read Wolfe and the middle-aged man who published his first novel? They went to the Navy, to Vietnam, and then after the war to stints in Chicago and Greenwich Village (Gay bumped into Janis Joplin at a pub). Back in Tennessee the years went to marriage, to children, to a mortgage, and to the construction work that paid for it all. But his time also went to reading and writing, to accumulating experience that no campus could provide, to honing his craft into a diamond tip. The chasm of those decades was widened by the fact that Gay didn’t know writers, hadn’t made academic connections, wasn’t given feedback. But when The Long Home finally appeared it felt like a masterwork and not a first novel because it was the product of forty-odd years of practice. At a time when twenty-two-year-olds scribble sensational memoirs badly disguised as serious novels, it humbles one to think of William Gay in Hohenwald, Tennessee, patiently tapping the keys of his typewriter for four decades.

The Long Home takes its name from Ecclesiastes—“Because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets”—and commences with a boom: in the undulating green environs of 1940s Tennessee, the earth has burst open with the muscle of an atom bomb, the result of either a seismic disturbance or the dawning of Judgment Day. This groaning gorge sits center stage as the four principal characters—Nathan Winer, Amber Rose, William Tell Oliver, and Dallas Hardin—circle it in a contest of reckoning. Hardin murdered Winer’s father in a dispute over illegal whiskey and then dropped his body into the gorge. Winer was only a child at the time; he doesn’t know what dirty fate befell his father. Dallas Hardin earns his fortune bootlegging and presides over the countryside like an ex-Baptist Mafioso. Old man Oliver takes the teenage Winer into his tutelage, and by the time Hardin and Winer are done scrapping over Amber Rose, there is blood.

Like Milton’s dazzling Satan, Dallas Hardin makes off with all the applause. Gay’s reader becomes a pubescent lass from a good family who falls for the foulmouthed bad boy with a switchblade. In his villainy and hunger for destruction, Dallas Hardin is first cousin to the title character of Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout, another masterpiece about a Southern psychopath with a fondness for bullets and blades. Trout goes through the damaged world in reticence, creepy and devoid of all charm; one imagines him stinking of urine and gasoline. Hardin, meanwhile, traverses his won territory with suave assurance, always in control, always self-righteous. He speaks like a backwards Jesus and probably reeks of fifty-dollar cologne. His name indicates his worldview: hard-headed, hard in the heart—only the hard survive. Furthermore, he is hard for Amber Rose, the teenage girl he helped raise after he stole her and her mother from the dying man whose property he confiscated and now occupies.

***

Where is the law? In Gay’s world, the law lies mostly impotent and shriveled on the other side of town. It can be cajoled without much effort or else ignored altogether. In Hardin’s case, he has paid the scoundrels in uniform to turn their backs on his criminality. If the law does come knocking, as it does in Gay’s story “Sugarbaby,” the knock seems a callous affront to an individual’s right to freedom. In that story, Finis Beasley blasted his wife’s little dog from the back porch with a large caliber handgun because its “yip yip yip” made him batty. His wife deserted him, sued for divorce, and Beasley ignored the letters from lawyers and the summonses to appear in court. The law arrives to apprehend him, and when it does, Beasley simply cannot muster the incentive to go quietly. He tells his son-in-law at one point, “I’ve always minded my own business. . . .Kept my own counsel. I’ve always believed if a man minded his own business everybody would leave him alone.” Beasley’s actions are less a case of gun-toting Southern insurrection than a fed-up exhaustion in the face of authorities mightier than the individual. The aggravation of so many inconveniences piles up to the point that Beasley feels disgusted by his own powerlessness. This disgust for his own pathetic, diminutive place in the cosmos fuels his violence. He would have chosen peace if he had been given the opportunity to choose, if he had been left alone. Dallas Hardin, however, stomps through The Long Home choosing sadism and savagery because he knows no other method of being.             

In Gay’s able hands the archetypal characters of The Long Home spring to life as if for the first time: the young man on a quest; the gray sage who guides him; the comic sidekick who aids him; the gorgeous damsel who inspires him; and the villain who tries to thwart him. Their language is so authentic it seems not written at all: you listen to their dialogue as they sit in the same room with you. It’s speech that smells: the Coca Cola and cool beer belches, the early morning conversations held through the aroma of black coffee drunk from jars. Midway through the novel, Hardin and Winer stand out in the afternoon sun on Hardin’s property. Hardin had hired Winer to do carpentry on a honkytonk he wants built, and on this day the boy notices that Hardin is clutching his father’s knife. Hardin took it from Winer’s father the night he murdered him; when the boy asks how Hardin came by the knife, he claims he found it in the cedar grove.

“Your pa lit out, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know what happened to him. I never did believe he lit out and I don’t believe it now.”

“Well, folks is funny. I don’t care how close you think you know somebody, you don’t know what wheels is turnin in their head. Course you don’t remember but times was hard for folks back then. Times was tightern a banjo string. Lots of folks was on the road. He might’ve just throwed up his hands and said fuck it and lit out.”

“No.”

“Well. I ain’t tryin to tell you what to think about your own daddy. But seems to me me and you’s a lot alike.”

Hardin tells the boy that his own father abandoned him as well, which may or may not be the truth: Hardin, like Milton’s Satan, is the great deceiver. Winer then offers to pay for the knife.

“Hell, take it. You said it belonged to your pa.”

“Well, you’ve had it all these years. Decide what you want for it and hold it out of my pay.”

“Hell, no. If it means something to ye, take it on. Seems to me it’s a damn poor substitute for a pa but such as it is you’re welcome to it.”

You will not locate written speech more authentic than that: every syllable in its place, the cadence as smooth and firm as the skin on a drum. The lines also suggest the ambivalence of Dallas Hardin’s character: the killer, rogue, and corrupter of Amber Rose who nevertheless attempts to give Winer honest employment, world-wary advice, and a free knife. One roots for Hardin’s comeuppance while at the same time wishing for his repentance. This is testament to Gay’s tremendous skill as a craftsman: his South contains no cartoon drawings, no simplistic Zoroastrian division of darkness and light. In Gay’s world, as in ours, the wicked are laced with good and the good are always part devil.

The Long Home owes its intricacy of assembly to The Sound and the Fury—the book Gay received from his high school teacher when he finished with Look Homeward, Angel—and yet the novel never feels as convoluted as Faulkner’s because Gay has a Dickensian aptitude for densely woven patterns of plot and character that cohere without seam or effort. The dense, verdant prose style, sweet and slow like sap—a vibrant language of poetic intensity—achieves newness in every paragraph.

Then lightning came staccato and strobic, a sudden hush of dryfies and frogs, the walls of the attic imprinted with inkblack images of the trees beyond the window, an instantaneous and profound transition into wall-less night as if the lightning had incinerated the walls or had scorched the delicate tracery of leaf and vine onto the wallpaper. Then gone in abrupt negation to a world of total dark so that the room and its austere furnishings seemed sucked down into some maelstrom and consigned to utter nothingness, to the antithesis of being, then cool wind was at the trees, the calm eddying away like roiled water.

If Gay shares with McCarthy a rich vernacular packed with flare, he also commands sentences composed of simple independent clauses strung together with the conjunction “and,” sentences that would feel at home in any of the Nick Adams stories. Hemingway’s reliance on concrete nouns is a lesson in the accuracy of the five senses, but it is Faulkner’s and O’Connor’s mytho-religious storytelling sensibility that infuses The Long Home from start to finish.

***

During one of our numerous phone conversations, Gay clarified what first struck him about Faulkner: “He took ordinary people and gave them mythic dimensions. Wolfe’s people are loftier, more aware of themselves. But Faulkner’s people are in the middle of it all, buffeted and battered by life.” In The Long Home, the narrator remarks that the men and women who frequent Hardin’s honkytonk—soldiers, drifters, wastrels with something to hide—are turned grand by their circumstances: “The songs and the lights and the quickened pulse of their lives made them larger than life so that they saw themselves as figures of myth and tragedy.” Later, when Oliver tells Winer the violent history of their region, the boy “wondered what the truth was, secretly doubted there was any truth left beneath the shifting weight of myth and folklore.” But of course Gay knows that myth and folklore are truth, or at least one way of arriving at truth: the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. Winer’s wondering about the plausibility of truth does not amount to a trendy relativism since the boy is “buffeted and battered” and thoroughly confused. In the preface to the revised edition of Brother to Dragons (1979), Robert Penn Warren writes: “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” Warren captures Gay’s mission in The Long Home precisely: the intersection of myth and history and how the truth makes itself known through living.

Cormac McCarthy’s wasteland mingles history and poetry to produce a bloody modern mythology that always approaches the Old Testament in its potency. Gay has an encyclopedic knowledge of McCarthy, as he does of Faulkner, Wolfe, and O’Connor: he can recall scenes and sentences as easily as he can the names of his children. In the early 1970s, before relocating to New Mexico (and long before the globe knew of his genius), McCarthy lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. Staggered by those early novels—The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1978)—Gay fanned through a phonebook one afternoon and discovered that McCarthy’s number was there waiting for him to dial it. McCarthy had no interest in expounding on his own work, but as soon as Gay mentioned Flannery O’Connor, McCarthy perked up and was delighted to talk. They three together shared in their work a violent vision of a postlapsarian South. They spoke by phone for a year and McCarthy corresponded with Gay about the younger writer’s stories; it was the only feedback available for an isolated upstart.

Gay maintains that in the 1970s the world of literature seemed to him controlled by ivory towers strewn from Boston to Manhattan. Barry Hannah was the first Southern scribe of Gay’s generation to be taken seriously. The publishing Mecca’s ostensible disinterest in new Southern voices—a mystery as profound as quantum mechanics considering that the Great American Novel, Huckleberry Finn, is a Southern story—coupled with Gay’s remoteness from anything even resembling a coterie of writers, made for dim prospects. He forged on just the same, teaching himself the craft, reading and revising, sending stories out to magazines and journals when he felt ready (one publication returned his handwritten manuscript with a note insisting on typed material only). Then, in the 1990s, two books incited a reevaluation of Gay’s region and material: Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992) and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997). The tremendous success of those novels shifted Gay’s luck: “Things got easier for me after that.”

In composing The Long Home, Gay flushed McCarthy’s stylistic dazzle from his system: “That language and those metaphors were all backed up in me. I just let it loose.” By the time Gay sat down to compose Provinces of Night, the orgasmic splendor of language via McCarthy had spent itself (although the title comes from McCarthy’s Child of God: “Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them”). Gay lighted on a soberer style, yet one recognizably from the same hand that penned The Long Home. The novel divulges the lives of three generations of Bloodworth men from Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. The district in which they live has been slated for inundation in a dam-building project, and those imminent floodwaters hover over the narrative like God’s promise of annihilation. When E.F. Bloodworth returns home after thirty years on the road playing banjo and hiding from his crime of killing a deputy, long-dead sentiments and scores will be resurrected. He is another of Gay’s clever, irascible old timers: from Oliver in The Long Home to Meecham in the story “I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down” to Scribner in the story “Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues.” No one matches Gay’s expertise for unforgettable old men.

Of E.F.’s three sons, only Brady remains in Ackerman’s Field; he cares for his demented mother and practices voodoo against deserving enemies. Warren, alcoholic and lecherous, resides over the state line in Alabama. Boyd has left town for Detroit to trail his faithless wife and her lover. As in The Long Home, the twin heroes of this novel are the old man and the teenage boy, E.F.’s grandson Fleming—Boyd’s sovereign son—an aspiring story writer and one of Gay’s most compassionate creations. Provinces of Night includes no archetypal evildoer like Dallas Hardin, but the vixen-heroine is present in the form of Raven Lee Halfacre, a cagey wit at sixteen years old. Her heat snags Fleming in a net of longing; she smells of possibility, of liberation. The relationships Fleming shares with Raven, his grandfather E.F., and his close friend Junior Albright—an endearing jester who illuminates every room he walks into—allow this novel a pouring forth of affection. The hostility of Gay’s universe has not diminished—there is a storm of blood when Boyd finally uncovers his wife and her lover in Detroit, and E.F. too comes to an untidy end—but in Provinces of Night Gay has tempered the brutality with tenderness. Here he has surpassed O’Connor; you will not come upon many moments of tenderness in her blazing Georgia. Her sanctimonious one-armed conmen, atheistic one-legged damsels, and half-naked children who crawl from the forest filthy and starved for destruction like fairy-devils: for them tenderness is but a rumor, the unicorn of her God-forsaken netherworld.

And then there’s the comedy in this novel. Of all of Gay’s people, Fleming comes closest to approaching the character of Nick Adams—his civility, moral code, grace under pressure, desire to write, and distressed union with his father—but Fleming differs from Nick (and from so many of the denizens of the worlds of O’Connor and McCarthy) in his appreciation of humor. Kingsley Amis once remarked that “the rewards of being sane are not many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them,” and Fleming is nothing if not sane, especially when compared to his volatile parents and his witchdoctor of an uncle, Brady. At one point Fleming’s uncle Warren jars him awake in the middle of the night to chauffeur him and his sex-scented drunk accountant over the state line because Warren himself is too intoxicated to know north from south. Fleming says:

“I don’t have a driver’s license.”

“I’m drivin on a revolted, a revoked driver’s license myself and if they catch me it’s my ass. I’ll pay your fine if you get caught. You’re not drunk are you?”

“No.”

“That’s a start then. You furnish the sobriety and I’ll furnish the car and the money and we might just get organized here.”

“What about the accountant?”

“Well, yeah, I’m furnishin her too.”

The drunk accountant wants a hamburger, Warren can’t remember where he aims to go, and Fleming doesn’t make a congenial match with an automobile. They find themselves stalled in the scrub.

“Now you’re catchin on,” Warren said. “This flat black thing, I think that’s what we’re supposed to be drivin on. Those woods and shit, I believe I’d just try to stay out of them as much as I could.”

“We turned over in the woods three or four times,” the woman said in an awed voice.

Fleming slid his hands under his thighs to halt their shaking. “We never turned over,” he said.

“The hell we didn’t,” she said. “You blackhearted little liar. You tried to kill us. We turned over three or four times in the bushes and I seen every bit of it through the glass. I’m wet all over myself and I ain’t ridin with you crazy sons of bitches one foot more.”

Twelve pages of riotous humor, with Fleming exasperated by the silliness of the circumstances, this car scene reveals Gay’s almost Cervantean facility for the coalescence of tragedy and comedy.

To those who know only The Long Home and “The Paperhanger,” Gay’s humor in Provinces of Night might seem uncharacteristic, but comedic play has been his staple all along. Most of the stories in I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down are distinctive precisely because Gay can bend types, can marry heartbreak to hilarity in a single paragraph. Gay claims to have been influenced by the humor of Harry Crews, but Crews’s comedy is almost entirely satirical, as in the Night-of-the-Living-Dead finale to his novel Celebration, or his mockery of muscle-heads in Body. Satire has the heavy but playful hand of fabrication, while Gay’s humor always touches softly, always stems from characters behaving believably in unexpected quandaries. In the title story of Gay’s collection, Meecham has fled from an old age community and returns home to discover that his son has rented his house to an insolent redneck named Choat who will not budge. Meecham handles this predicament as only an obstinate, iconoclastic eighty-year-old can: he irritates Choat to no end. (The film version of this story stars Hal Holbrook as Meecham.) In “Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair,” the sixteen-year-old Quincy Nell makes it her life’s ambition to acquire for a husband Bonedaddy Bowers, a Tennessee Casanova who has a difficult time domesticating. When she finally relents and allows Bonedaddy what he’s been scratching after, “came then hot honeysuckle nights of eros.” Bonedaddy gives Quincy Nell a stuffed panda, but then takes another girl to a dance: Quincy Nell “beheaded the panda with a single-edge razor and set the truncate corpse on the bureau, poor piebald panda with its jaunty air of yard-sale innocence.” By story’s end, Bonedaddy Bowers will wish he had never toyed with the virginal allure of Quincy Nell Qualls.

In The Long Home women are merely wagers in a gory contest for masculine dominance, but in Provinces of Night and most of the stories, the women are shrewd operators who see men as the bumbling brutes they are. Fleming’s grandmother tells him, “If sense was gunpowder ever one of you men put together wouldn’t have enough to load a round of birdshot.” Raven Lee informs Fleming, “You men are always breaking things you don’t know how to fix.” In “Crossroad Blues,” when a grotesque little man teleported from O’Connor Country tells the main character that “a woman’ll warp your mind worse than whiskey,” he says it in admiration, as if he were contemplating gamma rays from a supernova. Gay’s story “The Lightpainter” begins: “Jenny’s mother once shot her husband in the thigh with a small-caliber pistol.” The demonstrable logic in Gay’s world is simple: if a man behaves himself and treats a woman with courtesy and compassion, that man will not have his will crushed on the righteous anvil of femininity. Raven Lee Halfacre arrives as Fleming’s deliverance, not his demise; and Fleming deserves this deliverance because his kindness has earned it.

Fleming Bloodworth’s fight is against his testosteroned family, not a female. In Provinces of Night, the central struggle announces itself in the family name: what, exactly, is blood worth? What does one owe to family members, and for how long? In Twilight, the protagonist’s sister offers him this on family: “Once you’re in one, you’re in it for life. You can’t turn away from blood.” Gay’s great theme throughout his work is not men against women and the agones of that competition, but a Homeric man-against-man and the life or death outcome of that battle. His story “Charting the Territories of the Red” (published in The Southern Review in 2001)—about an Achilles-like brawler who cannot let pass a slight about his wife—culminates on a riverbank in a mess of brain matter, blood soaked into the soil as into the sands of Ilium.

***

Twilight is the crown of Gay’s oeuvre, a taut sweat-inducing thriller so horrifying both John le Carré and Stephen King should rethink their enterprises and revise their blueprints. The storytelling sets a new standard for darkness and depravity. You will find no humor here; like Oedipus Rex, the novel is so unrelenting in its sinister vision that any hope of light or comedy gets sucked back into the story as if by a black hole. The year is 1951 and the two killers of the novel, Fenton Breece and Granville Sutter, are every bit as psychopathic as McCarthy’s Lester Ballard (Child of God) and Anton Chigurh (No Country For Old Men). Their diabolism and nihilistic designs sink so far beneath the everyday evil of men that they make Dallas Hardin look like Saint Peter; what’s more, they make God look like an inebriated lunatic who holds stock in carnage, “some baleful god remonstrating with a world he’d created that would not do his bidding.”

Fenton Breece—a corpulent, wealthy undertaker and necrophile who quotes Auden and listens to Mahler—surgically desecrates the bodies of the dead before interring them. He removes genitalia or positions men and women in sexual congress within the same casket, “arm in arm in eternal debauchery.” In some instances he does not inter them at all, but rather stores them for his carnal bliss, dressing them in lingerie and snapping photos of his copulation with them. When the siblings Kenneth and Corrie Tyler suspect Breece’s deeds—Breece violated their father’s body—they unearth several caskets in the cemetery and discover for themselves the heinous mutilation: they sit “cataloguing these forbidden exhibits. From a carnival freakshow wended here from the windy reaches of dementia praecox. He hadn’t known there were perversions this dark, souls this twisted.” Kenneth spies on the undertaker, manages to thieve a briefcase containing photos of him with dead women, and then Corrie attempts to blackmail Breece for fifteen grand.

Enter Granville Sutter, a merciless murderer who at one point in the novel uses a switchblade to slaughter an entire family: mother, father, daughter, sons, even the dog. Breece hires Sutter to persuade the Tylers to return his property, and when the siblings refuse, Sutter causes Corrie’s death in a truck crash and then pursues Kenneth Tyler through the wintered wilderness like an iniquitous hound. While Fenton Breece has his way with Corrie’s corpse, the cat-and-mouse competition between Tyler and Sutter reaches deep into a gelid wasteland inimical to life.

As in all of Gay’s fiction, the weather and the landscape become characters of their own, except that his Wordsworthian nexus to nature becomes the worship not of God’s presence in the natural world, but rather the worship of nature’s lethiferous command over human life. Gay’s nature swirls in the same Tennessee towns: Ackerman’s Field, Centre, Clifton, and a mostly uninhabited expanse of unkind, fabled forest called the Harrikin, the very ex-mining land into which Tyler and Sutter plunge headlong and hell-bent. Tyler

thought he must have crossed some unmarked border that put him into territories in the land of Nod beyond the pale where folks would shun him for the mark laid on him to show that he’d breeched the boundaries of conduct itself and that he’d passed through doors that had closed softly behind him and only opened from the other side of the pale and that he’d gone down footpaths into wilderness that was forever greener and more rampant and ended up someplace you can’t get back from.

The Harrikin seems imagined into being by the Grimm brothers. Tyler comes upon a witch who stirs potions and an old man with a shotgun who sits vigil in his dilapidated shack. The boy’s desperation, hunger, and shivering soaked body are palpable on the page. He attempts to pass through the Harrikin to locate the high sheriff in Ackerman’s Field in hope of finding rescue from Sutter, but the landscape and its deranged tenants will not yield:

He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.

Gay might not appear at first glance to share O’Connor’s preoccupation with religion, but every novelist with Gay’s mythic, dramatic vision is religious in his own way. Gay’s language owes much to the Pentecostal South and the Christianized folklore of his region, allusions and metaphors that Gay—and his characters—could not help absorbing. By novel’s end, both Sutter and Breece will be smote by angry angels of the earth, but not before they have brought brimstone to this patch of Tennessee. Twilight is one of the most intrepid American novels ever written, absolutely audacious in its confrontation with hell on earth, as terrifying as medieval torture: “It is true this world holds mysteries you do not want to know. Visions that would steal the very light from your eyes and leave them sightless.”

Some of the important Southern writers who have come before Gay—Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy—seem timid in comparison to Gay and his nightmarish depictions. As a reader Gay never took to Taylor or Percy; the gentility of Southern aristocracy could not communicate with his experience, and the white collar writers of the New South were not gritty enough for what he knew of the human animal. The writer Tom Franklin, a dear friend to Gay, tells a story about how Gay was so poor when he was a youth that he had to mix water with crushed walnut shells in order to make ink. Gay admits that the family couldn’t afford a car when he was growing up, but he doesn’t boast of poverty. The writer with unflinching portrayals of human cruelty in his fiction is in life a mild and dignified man.  Franklin speaks of his “purity,” his indifference to celebrity and the hurly-burly of New York publishing. For such an astoundingly natural talent, Gay can sometimes sound surprised that he’s a writer and that he’s been able to earn a living from his work for the past decade.

Surprised or not, Gay continues to beget stories and novels that help splinter the early twentieth century fairytale of an Edenic South, that shear humankind down to the bone to lay bare the original sin and the sporadic warmth beating beneath our ribs, and for that you should thank whichever god you call your own.

***

This essay was originally published in The Southern Review in 2008.

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Most people writing to their favorite authors do not, I’d guess, think they will get an answer back, and perhaps Betty Hester didn’t either. She was not a scholar and she was not a writer, herself. She was a 32-year-old clerk at a credit bureau in Atlanta the first time she wrote to Flannery O’Connor, in the middle of July 1955. Hester read a great deal, and she had been taken by A Good Man is Hard to Find. Hester had been surprised to see that The New Yorker hated the collection — “all we have, in the end, is a series of tales about creatures who collide and drown, or survive to float passively in the isolated sea of the author’s compassion, which accepts them without reflecting anything.”

Hester wrote to O’Connor to object. “These are stories about God, aren’t they?”

O’Connor was so thrilled by this letter from a person who “understands my stories” that she immediately wrote back. “The stories are hard,” she told Hester, “but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching towards Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”

In the some 300 letters they later exchanged, Hester and O’Connor talked about faith, mostly, and philosophy. Hester was interested in the French mystic philosopher and radical Simone Weil, who had worked in a factory and fought in the Spanish Civil War, and then starved herself to death, perhaps over an obsession with Schopenhauer. O’Connor began reading her too, admitting though that “[t]he life of this remarkable woman still intrigues me while much of what she writes, naturally, is ridiculous to me… I would like to write a comic novel about a woman — and what is more comic and terrible than the intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?”

Sadly O’Connor never got around to it, though in some sense perhaps her letters to Hester could stand in. They are remarkably erudite. When O’Connor’s friend, Sally Fitzgerald, published a selection of letters entitled The Habit of Being, many of her letters to Hester were included. They are some of the most vibrant and engaging in the collection. But Hester was a private person, and told Fitzgerald she didn’t want to be hounded by scholars and journalists. So Fitzgerald disguised Hester as “A.,” for anonymous.

Some found the concealment curious, and suspected that perhaps Fitzgerald was trying to conceal the nature of “A.”’s relationship with O’Connor. No one learned who “A.” really was until after Hester shot herself at Christmastime 1998. According to William Sessions, an O’Connor scholar and mutual friend of both women who found the body, next to it on a side table was a copy of Cheers!, the newsletter of the Flannery O’Connor society, spattered with Hester’s blood.

In the years since, the contours have been filled in. In silhouette, Hester had what looked like a simple, quiet, ordinary life, if an unusually lonely one. She lived with her aunt, and for most of her life she couldn’t drive and took the bus to work. She chain-smoked, and she was fond of cats.

There was, however, more to the story. She was from Rome, Georgia, where her father had abandoned the family and she had watched her mother commit suicide at thirteen. She later attended a small Methodist college where one classmate remembered her as into “deep, dark philosophy,” and disdaining “men and men’s ideas.”

For a time after World War II, Hester served in the Air Force. When her letters were unsealed, and opened to scholars, in 2007, one of them revealed that she had received a dishonorable discharge from the military for sexual indiscretion. That indiscretion, naturally, was with a woman. In that letter Hester offered to cease all contact with O’Connor, worrying that an association with someone so disgraced would tarnish O’Connor’s reputation.

“I can’t write you fast enough,” O’Connor replied, “and tell you that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference in my opinion of you.” O’Connor was not herself a lesbian, or at the very least, there’s no conclusive evidence that she was. (She rebuffed the advances of another lesbian correspondent, Maryat Lee, and was known to have had one romance with a man, a college textbook salesman, in the early 1950s.) She told Hester, who was considering converting to Catholicism and asked O’Connor to be her sponsor, that she did not think joining the Church would require any fundamental change in Hester’s nature.

But Hester only lasted a few years before leaving the faith, in 1961. She’d struck up a correspondence with Iris Murdoch, who was rather less an admirer of the Catholic Church than O’Connor. Biographers sense that at this point O’Connor became frustrated with Hester, but they wrote to each other right up to two weeks before O’Connor died.

Many years later, not long before she died, Hester would write to another friend that she thought of O’Connor as “truly strangely innocent.” “As you must sense,” Hester had written to a friend, “I did love her very, very much — and, God knows, do.” That might seem like some confirmation of what Brad Gooch, Flannery’s biographer, called a “crush.” But perhaps we’re all best off remembering that the word love can mean a lot of things.

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As for the book blogs…

Xerox is gonna help make those espresso book machines.

Mark Athitakis hates lists, too.

Patricia Highsmith and Flannery O’Connor were roommates. “Look, can’t you see it?” said O’Connor to Highsmith during a lightning storm, “Jesus’s face.” That must have gone swimmingly.

I love Cormac McCarthy. I think the man can tell a story like no other. I’ve read pretty much all of his books. But he, like David Foster Wallace, seems to be the kind of writer no one wants to criticize right now. Steven Poole is taking issue with his writing, and from the comments, it seems he hit a nerve. Now you’ve done it, Mr. Poole. Judge Holden is coming for you. (via)

At The Millions, the art of purging books.

And finally, I might be bending our “no celebrities” rule, but here it is anyway: Christopher Walken reading “The Raven.” (via) (via)

-@sethfischer

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In a new biography, Brad Gooch makes romantic assumptions about the relationship between O’Connor’s life and art.

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor is a lushly detailed, compulsively readable narrative, the result of painstaking research and an obvious affection for its subject. Brad Gooch, author of a well-received biography of the poet Frank O’Hara, renders in continuous, novelistic fashion the story of O’Connor’s extraordinary artistic development, her swift rise to fame, her return to live as an invalid with her mother, her almost superhuman courage in the face of her debilitation by lupus, and her death at the age of thirty-nine.

Gooch seeks to weave a unified whole out of O’Connor’s life and art, the cultural and religious influences which shaped her, the multiplicity of voices – barbed, generous, at times innocent and longing – of her letters. And yet at times, the lyrical, urbane sensibility of Gooch’s narrative, its focus on the psychological, misses its mark.

Though billed on its flap copy as the “first major biography” of O’Connor, there is little in Flannery that cannot be found, in homelier form, in Jean Cash’s Flannery O’Connor: A Life; Gooch’s book leans heavily upon the earlier volume, acknowledging the debt only in bibliographical fine print. There are some revelations in Flannery, but mostly about people whom O’Connor knew, rather than O’Connor herself. A newly-opened trove of letters from O’Connor to Betty Hester—“A” in O’Connor’s collected correspondence, The Habit of Being—does not uncover a love affair, consummated or otherwise, as had been speculated; neither do the letters of Maryat Lee, to whom O’Connor wrote her last note before she died, though both correspondences include declarations of love to O’Connor and O’Connor’s gentle, awkward demurrals. There is a ghastly description of O’Connor’s only known adult kiss. There are no letters between O’Connor and her mother, Regina: Sally Fitzgerald, O’Connor’s literary executor and the editor of The Habit of Being, had not planned to include them in her own biography of O’Connor, which she was working on when she died in 2002, and one assumes Gooch did not have access to them for his book.

Flannery O'Connor

Gooch’s writing is at its best when evoking O’Connor’s early childhood in Savannah, the hothouse atmosphere of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the literary worlds of Yaddo and 1950s New York. In the New York scenes—O’Hara’s world—Gooch depicts with an expert eye O’Connor’s tour of the circles of literary society, with a seemingly demented Robert Lowell as the devil (a set piece at Yaddo, in which Lowell attempts to oust the director because she harbored a guest with communist sympathies, casts light on O’Connor’s naive cooperation with Lowell). The view of the early Writer’s Workshop is fascinating, not only as a peephole in time into the social and fictional atmosphere there, but also into the origins of the formalist aesthetic doctrine that shaped O’Connor’s fiction.

Flannery also succeeds in its portrait of O’Connor’s youth. Cash also records that O’Connor’s father married into one of the city’s most prominent Catholic families, but Gooch gives a palpable texture to O’Connor’s childhood, literally shadowed by the Roman Catholic cathedral in Savannah her maternal grandfather helped finance, and in Milledgeville, where her family occupied the former governor’s mansion; he evokes a magical sense of privilege, as well as Regina O’Connor’s rigid protectiveness, and the family’s financial entanglements. Gooch’s account of O’Connor’s early artistic efforts, including a roman à clef titled My Relitives [sic], is lovingly rendered, and the atmosphere of entitlement which both encouraged and politely marginalized her gifts is cannily traced, pointing forward to the day when the ladies of Milledgeville, who found Wise Blood “horrible,” held a tea, attended by over 300 guests, in its author’s honor.

But Gooch’s understanding of what it meant for O’Connor to be known as “Miss Regina’s little girl” who also happened to write, only goes so deep. At times, as when he offers a page-long catalogue of the family’s Milledgeville mansion’s décor, he seems struck dumb by the milieu he seeks to inhabit. In contrast, Cash’s poll of O’Connor’s former classmates at Georgia State College for Women, which mainly elicited comments on her attractiveness or lack thereof, better conveys, intentionally or not, the atmosphere in which O’Connor lived most of her life.

Jean Cash's earlier biography

After her return to Milledgeville, O’Connor’s relationship with her mother became central in her life. Yet for long stretches of Gooch’s book, Regina O’Connor disappears, resurfacing only toward the end. Perhaps this absence is due to scrupulousness—Flannery’s day-to-day life with her mother was mostly unobserved. Gooch settles for a familiar mise en scène of Regina as a tyrannical mother, ignorant of the meaning of her daughter’s work yet fiercely protective of her, and O’Connor as a docile child, unconsciously taking revenge on her in her stories. But Cash keeps Regina on stage, poking and prodding with every scrap of quotation at her disposal, until gradually a subtly different picture emerges—in O’Connor’s own concerns about money, in Regina’s awkward attempts to join literary discussions, in the starched formality of Regina’s note to Maryat Lee, forwarding O’Connor’s extraordinarily moving last letter to her, which Cash quotes in full.

Gooch is also silent on the effect on O’Connor of her father’s death. He does offer an insightful quote from an early notebook, in which she wrote of his death that “God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side,” an early formulation of her conception of divine grace. He also quotes an eerie early story, as Cash does, in which Death appears, carrying “something at his side.” Unlike Cash, he does not cite O’Connor’s oft-quoted letter to Betty Hester about visiting an orphanage as a girl, a letter which viscerally conveys her horror at having lost her father.

What Gooch doggedly pursues is evidence of O’Connor’s romantic life. He is seldom unseemly—his depictions of O’Connor’s platonic relationship with Robie Macauley, her unrequited love for Robert Lowell, Betty Hester and Maryat Lee’s one-sided declarations, never leer. Several times, he returns to a quote from O’Connor to the effect that she intended never to “grow up” past the age of twelve, an age before her father’s death, before adolescence and sex. Suggested, though never stated, is an assumption that O’Connor chose to eschew sexual relationships in order to devote herself to her art. Cash adduces a more hard-nosed explanation for her solitude, at least after her return to Milledgeville: She did not want to burden her mother with a husband in the house, and did not want to burden a husband with her own illness. The first explanation is psychological, the second social; both explanations seem true, neither entirely so. But Gooch’s choice of the former suggests a rather romantic set of assumptions about the relationship between O’Connor’s life and art.

Throughout his book, Gooch relates the facts of O’Connor’s life to the events of her fiction, connecting her return to Milledgeville during her first attack of lupus with the railway arrival of the protagonist in “The Enduring Chill,” Regina O’Connor’s Polish tenant farmers to the tenant family in “The Displaced Person.” He does not venture to say how O’Connor transformed these scraps of observation and experience into art; he presents the facts, presents the stories, and asserts a direct relation between the two. He records, as Cash does, her early reading of Poe’s Humorous Tales, her late enthusiasm for the theologian Teilhard du Chardin; he dutifully lists her religious and fictional reading; but he has almost nothing to say about how she put these materials to use in her life and work. He asserts that her work is anagogic, but his account of its creation suggests that it is actually psychological.

This view comes into focus most clearly in the recounting of O’Connor’s relationship with Erik Langkjaer and its transformation into “Good Country People.” O’Connor dated Langkjaer, a sales representative for her publisher, until Langkjaer interrupted their courtship to move back to Europe, implying that he would return, not revealing in his letters his meeting and eventual engagement to a woman there.

O’Connor wrote “Good Country People” before Langkjaer revealed his engagement, but Gooch interprets the story as “a red flag from the imagination.” “Developments in her relationship with Erik played a part in its creation, too, even if they were only dimly understood by her. By the beginning of 1955, Flannery knew that Erik was extending his leave of absence. And ‘Good Country People’ contains many coded references to him…”

Gooch builds a convincing case for Langkjaer as the model for Manley Pointer, the traveling “Bible salesman” in the story. Langkjaer was agnostic, as is Pointer, the promotional materials he used known in his trade as “The Bible.” O’Connor’s letters to Langkjaer are moving, especially in contrast to her usual barbed tone, and Gooch’s depiction of O’Connor’s guarded longing brings her vividly to life. But his view of “Good Country People” ignores O’Connor’s own take on the story, in which she describes the theft of Joy/Hulga’s wooden leg as the loss of “a wooden part of her soul”—a bullet in the side, a moment of grace entering, as it always does in O’Connor’s fiction, through pain and violence. O’Connor’s explanation suggests a different, more ambiguous message, both of desire and a lampooning of that desire, of her ability to view her own desire with cold objectivity, an objectivity at the center of her faith and her art, her strength and her genius. Gooch’s conflation of O’Connor’s life and art is a profound misreading of an author who used modern realism to convey a vision of “thirteenth century” religious revelation, the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, in which faith seeks understanding through revelation but uses the knowledge provided by reason, a faith cultivated through the discipline of self-examination.

Brad Gooch

It also implies a profound misreading of her life. O’Connor was a human being who fell in love, fought with and found a way to live with her mother, was ambitious, suffered greatly. Gooch does a masterful job of bringing O’Connor to the page in these and other respects. But in viewing these things through a primarily psychological lens, he misses the centrality to her life of religious faith—a particular Irish Roman Catholicism of the Deep South, a strange hybrid of the mystical and the pragmatic, suspicious of its Protestant neighbors yet tinged with apocalyptic hellfire—and how it colored every aspect of her existence.

Humanism, which she saw as an attempt to banish religious mystery from our lives, to shrink our conception of experience to a merely human scale, was anathema to Flannery O’Connor. As she famously said, in response to Mary McCarthy’s concession that the communion wafer was a symbol of the Holy Spirit, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” By relegating her faith to this symbolic realm, albeit with great sensitivity and tact, by omission rather than statement, Gooch trivializes his subject.

Depicting O’Connor’s life and art in a culture she viewed as “hostile” to spiritual meaning is a daunting prospect. O’Connor was scathing toward hagiography and religious sentimentality of any kind. It is hard to imagine the biography that could encompass her faith, work, and emotional life, and the culture which shaped them—given the vanishing of the culture in which she lived, and the bias in favor of psychological representation of human experience which exists today. It is understandable that Gooch handled these central aspects of her life so gingerly. Flannery is a skillfully executed biography that should be welcomed and valued by her admirers—but it is still only part of her story.

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“I don’t think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does… There’s something heroic to me about people taking risks for the sake of this fragile and intangible thing.”

Catherine Brady is the author of three short story collections: The End of the Class War (1999); Curled in the Bed of Love, which won the 2003 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories, published last month by the University of Nevada Press; as well as a biography of molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn. Her stories have appeared in the anthology Best American Short Stories, as well as numerous literary journals. Joyce Carol Oates has called Brady’s brand of psychological realism “timeless” and Lorrie Moore has identified “love imprecisely understood by onlookers” as one of Brady’s themes. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. – Ann K. Ryles.

The Rumpus: Many of the protagonists in The Mechanics of Falling seem to suffer from their desire to do good. Is one of your obsessions as a writer the downside of virtue?

Brady: When I was writing stories around this idea, I don’t think I conceived of falling in strictly moral terms. You don’t really have a story until you discover the moment when the pressures on a character force a sudden, abrupt shift in direction and she falls through the net that has so far held her in place.

But I don’t think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does. If you cross-section anyone’s life from one angle and then another, what constitutes goodness looks different each time. It’s not an absolute. It can’t be disentangled from human fallibility. It’s so provisional. There’s something heroic to me about people taking risks for the sake of this fragile and intangible thing.

The Rumpus: Your characters exhibit a wonderful frankness and even pragmatism or utilitarianism about sex. Is writing about sex something that is easy or difficult for you?

Brady: My Irish Catholic mother loved romantic movies, provided they ended with a kiss before the screen went dark. If things went any further than that, she’d complain, Why can’t they leave something to the imagination? I sort of subscribe to her philosophy when it comes to writing sex. I think it’s very hard to be sexually explicit and erotic—though there are writers, like K. M. Soehnlein, who are just brilliant at this. It’s hard to write sex because it’s hard to write desire, period. For me, what’s compelling about sexuality is the way that desire transforms what we take in through our senses, the ways in which our bodies betray us or rescue us by insisting on their own non-negotiable truths. Anything but frank or pragmatic.

The Rumpus: In The Mechanics of Falling you’ve chosen to use no quotations for dialogue. Three of the stories also adopt other formal constraints, such as the repeated sentences that are braided into the narrative at various intervals in the story “Slender Little Thing.” How does the decision to adhere to this sort of narrative strategy affect your writing?

Brady: What I’ve found as I have kept writing stories is that more and more your way is barred. I feel really choked by what I already know how to do, by the fact that my obsessions nearly always mount a sneak attack, so that I find myself writing another version of the same thing. I have to trick myself into writing a story—impose some arbitrary constraint to distract me from the constraints of my past habits or my fear that I don’t have much to say.

I’ve always hated quotation marks: they’re ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another. When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again.

“Slender Little Thing” uses repeated lines throughout the piece, and I was thinking of a villanelle or a pantoum, poetry forms that rely on repetition. I wanted to let form lead my thinking, and repetition always confronts you with the interesting problem of how to break out of a cycle that seems so deterministic, which was germane to the story’s concerns.

The Rumpus: With three collections of short stories under your belt, can you talk about what has kept you loyal to the short form in your work so far? What will your next book be?

Brady: Chekhov used to correspond with aspiring writers, and once he gave this advice to Maxim Gorky when he was encouraging him to pare his wordy sentences: “When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that’s grace.” The short story, by definition, embodies this notion of grace, because it requires such forceful compression to achieve its effects. Unlike a poem, it can employ the resources of narrative and character. Unlike a novel, its images, diction, and actions can all be reconfigured by a powerful ending—every single element is still in play, where in a novel the reader (and probably the writer) simply can’t remember everything. I love the way a story’s ending can force you to read backwards. It’s as if you are slowly adjusting a kaleidoscope until a random scattering of colored crystals suddenly falls into a beautiful symmetrical pattern.

I’m working on two manuscripts right now. A novel, which is driven by my current fascination with long, convoluted sentences (don’t ask), and a book of essays on craft. I had to set the novel aside to work on the craft essays, because I have a contract and a deadline for that.

The Rumpus: One of the stories in The Mechanics of Falling features a male professor of creative writing who remarks that too many people wanted to be writers “just because they had talent.” As a professor of creative writing yourself, what do you think about this character’s comment?

Brady: So how is it any of my business what motivates someone else to write? For that story, I was thinking of the kind of writer-teacher who used to hold sway in writing programs: an alpha male who cuts others down to size. In my experience as a graduate student, teachers like this often had a sort of cult following, with students desperate for approval from someone who gave it grudgingly or not at all. These teachers tended to make a lot of big pronouncements too: this is the kind of writing you should pursue, your novel should really be about x instead of y. I’ve never felt I could presume to that kind of authority, even though I secretly envy it a little, which was what made it fun to write this character. A little vicarious living. When you write, you’re supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that’s not in line with your own reflexive truths.

The Rumpus: Do you feel a tension between nurturing your own writing and nurturing the writing of your students?

Brady: No! I can’t imagine a more fortunate job for a writer. If you’re teaching, you can’t just settle for understanding the craft (of a student manuscript or a masterpiece) for yourself. You have to think about how someone else might respond to the work and frame questions that speak to that and lead students to look where they might not have thought to look. If you listen to their answers, you’ll make discoveries along with them. You have to be able to play: this is spontaneous interaction, and it flexes all the creative muscles you need as a writer. And empathy is one of those muscles.

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