Southern Bookman

Donne's Ride Remains New After 400 Years

With Good Friday here again, a bit early this year, I once more read John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward." How nice to again turn the pages of my Norton Anthology of English Literature, from Beowulf to Chaucer, Sydney, Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare to Donne, leading the 17th century.

The reading has special significance this year when I see I have reached the 400th anniversary of the ride described in the poem. Yet Donne's language, the glow of his mind, remain fresh and vital.

While still bound by pre-Copernian cosmology, Donne's outlook seems close to ours with its emphasis on business and self-improvement. The poet is a man on horseback, but he could just as well be on a plane. The key, unchanging element is the promise of redemption, a faith in a self that transcends daily busyness. As with all great poems, "Riding Westward" contains a mystery, a presence, beyond its words. Each year I read its lines, It's like for the first time.

A light on John Berryman's spiritual side

The Catholic intellectual journal Commonweal miraculously reappeared at the Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, along with the Times Literary Supplement. I hadn't seen either publication on the newsstands for years, and their reappearance sparked my flickering hopes that print culture was not in rapid decline. Alas, the TLS quickly disappeared, and when I inquired, the clerk, with the gravity of an undertaker or a doctor with bad news, said "we are no longer carry it." Not enough buyers, he said. However, Commonweal remained.

The other day, I at last picked up a copy, to read an article on the new translation of the Catholic liturgy, which will be imposed upon us in November. The old English liturgy has been the once recited at Mass since the 1960s, when the Latin Mass passed away in the days of Vatican II. I'd read an article in The New York Times about the new translation, which sounded awkward, convoluted, tone deaf, unmusical, etc., if allegedly accurate.

Unforunately, I found the Commonweal piece on the new liturgy as dull and wooden as the new translation itself is supposed to be. Luckily, though, I found a moving article on John Berryman and his late "Eleven Addresses to the Lord."

The article recounted Berryman's struggles with alcoholism and despair and how a conversion experience in a a rehab center had led to the "Addresses." Tragically, the conversion didn't take, not did the alcoholism cure, and Berryman killed himself by leaping off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill's piece places Berryman as one those spiritual seekers who swerve between great doubt and great faith. His "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," found in his 1970 "Love & Fame," one of the first poetry books I bought as an adult, reflect that conflict. Cahill doesn't even mention Berryman's best-known work, "The Dream Songs," with which he is saddled. It's one of the masterpieces of his generation, but its popularity has taken away attention to Berryman's other work. It's refreshing that she concentrates on his religious poetry.

Many of the poets of Berryman's generation were known for their personality extremes. While Berryman wasn't medically diagnosed as manic depressive like his sometimes admirer Robert Lowell, Berryman showed all of the erratic behavior and mood swings of his peers. 

Berryman's longing for religious grace and spiritual healing was among his most admirable features, along with his handling of the vernacular as a poet and his depth as a scholar and critic. Thanks to Cahill for examining this side of him. The piece made me wish for a "Collected Poems" of Berryman, as has been done for Lowell. Editions of "Dream Songs" abound, but I would love to have all of Berryman's work collected in one place.

 

Memories of Newman and Gissing

The July 30 Times Literary Supplement, with pieces on John Henry Cardinal Newman and George Gissing, brought me back to one of my most memorable college courses, "Victorian Autobiography."

I retain a memory of our attractive and energetic professor, a young scholar whose name I cannot recall, lecturing to us in her starched shirts and sensible, knee-length skirts. She enjoyed having our small class meet outdoors, and my memories remain strong of sitting on the grass in the cool spring, or perhaps fall, air and discussing Dickens, Thackery, Carlyle, Trollope, Butler and Newman and Gissing.  Not only did we read straight autobiographies, such as Newman's "Apologia" and Carlyle's "Sartor Resartis," but autobiographical novels such as Dickens' "David Copperfield."

Something about Gissing's gloomy outlook and unsparing examination of London's lower classes drew me, and I wrote my class paper on him, reading his classic look at the metropolis' bleak publishing scene, "New Grub Street," along with other novels and studies of him. 

The TLS had a review of a new academic edition of Gissing's first novel, "Workers of the Dawn," the first of a series of Gissing novels to be republished. Also appearing in the issue was an exerpt from a Gissing article from 1902, in which he criticized a critical study by Swinburne on Dickens. The literary columnist NB also had an amusing item about a row between the author of a new Gissing biography and the secretary of the Gissing Society.

Ever since those college days, I've kept up with Gissing studies and news. Although I found his novels hard going, including "New Grub Street," I was fasinated by his story. Gissing was a classics scholar at Oxford who ruined his career in a scandal involving a young prostitute, and was forced to eke out his living for years as a literary hack and struggling novelist, although he eventually found success and is considered by some enthusiasts as one of the top novelists of his time.

Newman, who will gain beatification from the Catholic Church when Pope Benedict travels to England in September, also fascinates me. The leader of the "Oxford movement," Newman had a long spiritual journey leading to his eventual leaving the Anglican faith for the Catholic Church. If the church can document a miracle or two, Newman will become a saint. His great spiritual writings make some consider him the best English stylist of the 19th century. A memorable, if highly unreverential portrait, of Newman can be found in Lytoon Strachey's "Imminent Victorians."

The TLS included a searching review of a new biography on Newman, as well as a in-depth commentary on Newman's thought and writing. Another strong article looked at the thought of another noted Catholic convert, G.K. Chesterton.

Gissing and Newman represent two poles of British society of the Victorian through Edwardian era. Newman is an intellectual giant upholding the tradtional faith against the assaults of science and modernity. Gissing is the modern existential man, buffeted by wrenching economic and social changes and forging new ways of perceiving the world. Thanks to the TLS for stoking my interest in them, and reviving memories of those sunlit classes from long ago.

 

 

Recalling Christopher Isherwood

Watching the movie "The Single Man" with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore brought back my Christopher Isherwood phase, 25 or 30 years ago, when I read several of Isherwood's books. That was also the time of my Graham Greene phase, but that's another story.

After the movie "Caberet," I read Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," with the famous beginning "I am a camera." Then I read as much of his work as I could find, including "A Single Man." I liked his taut, old-school mandarian style, its sardonic, stylish tone unable to stop heartbreak and despair from breaking through. The interplay and conflict between the main character's high literary culture and British eduction and the glitzy, unrooted culture of Los Angeles and Hollywood charged the books with tension and foreboding.

Directed, written and produced by Tom Ford, the movie version of "A Single Man" gets closer to the heart of Isherwood's work than the overly sentimentalized "Caberet," which I still love. Colin Firth's perfomance as the grief-stricken professor George Falconer deserves the praise it received. Julianne Moore again shows herself a marvel. 

The story takes place in November 1962, in the aftermath of the Cuban missle crisis. A major theme is the pervasive fear at the time over nuclear annhiliation, with the global Cold War with the Soviet Union reaching its zenith. Despite the characters' anxiety, the movie made me longe for the era. The movie evokes the time with its well-designed, lovely products, such as the vintage Mercedes that Falconer drives. The clocks, the furrniture, the clothes all speak of a sense of aesthetics and elegance soon to be blown away.

Firth's face changes from scene to scene. His English drawl recalls Michael Caine, and his thick glasses and lovely suits made me think of George "Superman" Reeves as Clark Kent. He also reminded me of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who would be slain exactly a year after the events of the movie. Like Kennedy, Falconer represents a world of culture, learning and refinement swept away by the '60s counterculture. This new cultural energy is brilliantly shown in the outstanding scene of the sad dinner party between Falconer and Julianne Moore's lovesick Charley. The tipsy couple get together to dance, and Charley changes the record from the jazz classic "Stormy Weather" to Booker T. and the MGs' "Green Onions." They awkwardly, then increasingly abandonly, do the twist, then collapse in exhaustion to the floor. That brief sequence embodies the huge cultural and social swifts of the next few years.

The film is loaded with literary references. One striking one is that George's class is studying Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan." Aldous Huxley, also a member of the Britisith literary expatriates in Los Angeles who would dabble with psychedelic drugs and mystical religion. That whole mileu is fascinating; acute sensibilities bred in tradition and literary culture captivated by sensuality and psychic experimentation. Also there in the L.A. scene were such worthies as Thomas Mann and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, seeking to transplant European culture to the far Pacific coast.

Isherwood's old chum W.H. Auden, who also left England for the New World before World War II, would remain in New York and cling to the old culture, finding solace in traditional Christianity. Watching "A Single Man" bids me to reread Auden's poems of the era, which evoke the same despair, the same sense of the poetic and literary mind beset by America's consumer culture, love of speed, power and new money. The two worlds could reach common ground: I first heard of Auden when I saw him on the Johnny Carson show.

 

Donald Revell: A Poem Is An Utterly Intimate Communication

      

I met Donald Revell (left) at the Indiana Writers’ Conference at Indiana University. Then early in his poetry career, Revell electrified the conference with a series of lectures on poetry and aesthetics. His dynamic talks presented a fresh vision of the transcendent power of poetry as an ecstatic way of looking at the world.

   As I recall, the late Bill Matthews was a workshop leader at that conference, providing a vibrant counterpoint to Revell’s lectures. In a few brief days, Revell and Matthews dazzled me with the magic of poetry.

Afterwards, I followed Revell’s career through several poetry collections, a series of columns in the American Poetry Review, and two collections of his prose work that echoed many of the themes from his Indiana talks.

    The essay collections “Invisible Green” and “The Art of Attention, A Poet’s Eye” were based on a broad knowledge of philosophy, literary theory, poetry and history. With each collection, his poetry grew in experimental daring and technical power, fulfilling his early promise and securing his place as one of the most original and dynamic voices of his generation.

  In preparing for this interview with him, I looked again at his early standout collection of poems, “The Gaza of Winter” and rediscovered that he had autographed the book for me at Indiana. On June 25, 1992, he said in his dedication, “I hope we meet again.”

     Alas, we haven’t met since, but have reconnected through this Southern Bookman interview.  

   

1. I was entranced by your concept of poetry and reading as “friendship.” Could you define what you mean by this?

For me, a poem is an utterly intimate communication, probably best understood as something whispered by the poet to his poem. (My poem is the only audience I can actually imagine.) Hence, the friendship, as friendship is a sacramental and disruptive intimacy, like a poem. Jesus forsook his family in favor of friends, and he required his friends to do the same.

2. In “Invisible Green” and “The Art of Attention, A Poet’s Eye,” Henry David Thoreau and Guillaume Apollinaire are seen as major influences, or “friends.”  Do you see them as similar or different?   Thoreau proposed the sanctity of "walking;" Apollinaire proposed the sanctity of errer, i.e. of walking around Paris with no destination. I hope to follow.

3. You often describe feelings of ecstasy in reading and writing poetry and in experiencing life and nature.  At the end of “Invisible Green,” you speak of “mindfulness.” Are ecstasy and mindfulness related? Are they religious and mystical in nature, the basis for a broad approach to living?

   In ecstasy I believe we find our mind, i.e. our New Mind, and perhaps a good word for such mind is God.

 

4. In “The Art of Attention,” you describe your growth as a poet from your more formal earlier work to freer, more experimental later poems. In what directions is your poetry moving at present?

Just now, I am looking for a language of humanity's aftermath, trying to make poems in which there is no difference between an alphabet and clouds in the sky.

 

5. I enjoyed your “Homage to John Frederick Peto” and commentary upon the poem in the April issue of Poetry. The poem reflects your affection for an earlier America, the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when the country was growing economically, industrially and artistically. You see it as a youthful time of  hope and optimism. Although from an earlier time, your vision of Jefferson looking down upon the Shenandoah Valley embodies this ideal of peace and harmony. Has this been irrevocably lost, and could it be recovered?

I have no hope for the former United States. The peace of the valleys has been irrevocably broken and the shorelines drenched with oil. Yet there are times....when I read Jefferson, when I revisit the Shenandoah or walk in the Green Mountains of Vermont or climb far into the Red Rock country of the Mojave…I hear the old music, I feel the ruined peace.

 

6. I was touched by your portrait of your father in “Invisible Green.” You say there and in the April Poetry that your father was unable to read but wanted you to. Was your father able to witness and enjoy your literary success?

   My father would have had no notion of nor any use for success. He loved his children, creme de menthe, and listening to opera on a gaudy Victrola late into the night.

 

7. You’re a poet, critic/philosopher, translator, reader and teacher. How do these relate to each other? What brings you the most satisfaction?

My satisfaction, when I can feel such a blessing, comes from having been of some help to younger poets. If I have any future, it is they.

The Anti-Religious Solace of Christopher Hitchens

At a recent seminar at Emory University with Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, I was surprised to hear Hitchens criticize the biblical command to "love thy neighbor as thyself." I was well-aware of Hitchens' record as a rabble-rouser and puncturer of religious doctrine, so I shouldn't have been caught off-guard. But, since Hitchens does see some religious thought and practices as beneficial, I thought that Hitchens might have seen the validity of the statement, as a foundation for the moral and ethical necessity of helping others in trouble and pain.

Hitchens said that the command would be impossible to follow and was therefore absurd,  generating guilt rather than compassion. I saw his point, but my response would be that the command was supposed to be a difficult ideal to attain. If it were easy to carry out, it would be worthless. Nor did I necessarilty see it as a literal statement. Hitchens did qualify his disdain for the injunction by saying that recent translations have seen it as meaning love thy fellow tribal member as thyself, making it appear less absurd in his way of thinking. For me, though, this made the command much weaker, nearly meaningless.

Since I no longer have faith in many of the Christian beliefs with which I grew up, I decided to read Hitchens' "God Is Not Great," a condemnation of religion and all of the pain, suffering and death it has brought into the world. Hitchens builds a good, if one-sided, case, ignoring  the alleviation of suffering and the comfort religion has brought to people. But his overall case against religion is devastating.

As I read, I found that I share much common ground with Hitchens. He speaks for a sense of wonder and mystery in the world,  and talks fondly of the King James Bible and religious art. At one point, he says that he feels close to the sentiments expressed by Philip Larkin's "Church Going." I also found compatible his belief in science and reason.

As someone who was wounded by religion during childhood, while also formed intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically by its language and rituals, I find liberating Hitchens' book and his campaign against religion's horrors. However, I still will see "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself" as a profound moral teaching.

From New York to Atlanta and Home

An unexpected midwinter visit to New York City left me full of literary and spiritual longings.

At a memorial service for my late brother in law, the rabbi had read the beautiful verses from Ecclesiastes, "to every thing there is a season." Then, he'd chanted the Kaddish. Even though I didn't understand Hebrew, the words filled me with the beauty of music, while giving me an understanding of their meaning on a deep, visceral level.

In late afternoon, I walked through snow-covered Central Park, recalling the words of Holden Caulfield and others about the beautiful greenway. The park was full of people, enjoying the sunshine and the cold, crisp air. I walked over the St. Gaudens' monument to Gen. Sherman, recalling Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," inspired by St. Gaudens' statue in Boston honoring Col. Shaw's black regiment. St. Gaudens was also connected to another literary favorite: he did the tomb of Henry Adams' wife, Clover. Looking at St. Gaudens' Sherman Statue in the Grand Army Plaza, near the old Plaza Hotel, snatches of Lowell and Adams swirled through my mind. Of course, I couldn't help remembering that May afternoon, beaten down by a grueling tryout at The New York Times, when I'd walked to Central Park from Times Square and witnessed a beautiful woman walking down the sidewalk, one of the loveliest visions of my life.  

With dusk giving the city a crepescular afterglow, I took the subway downtown to the West Village to join my friends Tim and Pui for a poetry reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe. When I emerged from the West Fourth Street Station, I received that jolt of energy and excitement of the village, again recalling that first time long ago when I'd first visited New York. t the cafe's cozy downtown space, hearing Donald Lev read, I traced the Old Testament cadences, the hunger for the word and music, through his poems. "To Every Thing There Is A Season."

Headed back uptown, enjoying the company of new friend Norman  for part of the journey, I again felt the conflicting joys and sorrows of the great city. My wife's family's loss of Woody, the man who loved to knock down walls and rearrange the furniture. Language and memories. Art and change. Love and literature. I got out at 96th Street and walked to the hotel through the swirling snow. Through the mist, I could see the ice-filled East River, Robert Moses' FDR Drive, the towering edifice of the Triborough Bridge. In the hotel, I enjoyed a glass of red wine, served by the young Latino woman who'd been there every night. Her warm, bright smile reminded me of an old insight: God's greatest miracle is the human face.

Early the next morning, we left New York. As we sat on the runway at LaGuardia, waiting for our place in the takeoff queque, I looked out at the gray horizon, barely able to make out the Atlantic, across which so many had come seeking new lives of freedom. At last, the plane climbed into the sky.

Back in Atlanta, the snow that had covered the ground when we left had melted away. A few stubborn snowmen still stood here and there. By week's end, bright, cool weather had arrived. I'd discovered another reading adventure, "The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and The People Who Read Them" by a woman named Elif Batuman. Apparently, she'd been writing for some time for The New Yorker. Although I religiously read the magazine every week, I'd never read her pieces. I looked forward to delving into her essays on reading and how books enrich life.

Before reading Elif though, I wanted to finish Scott L. Mingus Sr.'s "The Louisiana Tigers in The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863" (LSU Press). In the bright afternoon sun, I sat on the front porch and read about the Tigers' valiant but ill-fated charge up Cemetery Hill in the dusk and moonlight of July 2, 1863. As I read, my attention was diverted by crows cawing and flying among the high treetops of the pines in our yard. Again, I returned to the exploits of Brig. Gen. Harry T. Hays and his boys from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Alexandria and elsewhere, when I heard a splashing. A small bluebird was enjoying the waters of the birdbath. When it shook its feathers, the cascading water sparkled in the late afternoon light.

Roy Blount's "Translator's English" and the Birth of Terrorism

Tin House continues its good work in its new issue (Volume 11, No. 2) with Cassandra Cleghorn's interview of Roy Blount Jr., the incarnation of Samuel Johnson or perhaps H.L. Mencken. Like those giants, Blount happily writes for money in a variety of genres while adhering to the most exacting standards. Also like them, he's a serious student of the English language, while maintaining a non-specialist's joy of discovery. In the interview, he calls it "shade-tree etymology."

...In talking with Cleghorn, a poet and a senior instructor at Williams College, Blount revisits his excellent book on English usage and words, "Alphabet Juice." He shows his pride at his versatility by mentioning that he's written about Yogi Berra for Sports Illustrated, Pauline Kael for the Atlantic, and Ray Charles for the Oxford American. The wide-ranging, at times elliptical, interview gives an intriguing portrait of a restless, probing, creative mind. 

...I'm looking forward to perusing the rest of the magazine, which also has a story by the fine writer Antonya Nelson, poetry by D. Nurske and Dorianne Laux, an essay on Afghanistan by the excellent Ana Menendez, and a piece by Roxana Robinson on "Kentucky Bread."

...The Jan. 4 New Yorker included a strong short story by the Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan. The Jesuit priest's story, "Baptizing the Gun," has a predictable major plot twist, but gives a vivid picture of the chaotic energy of the teeming Nigerian capital, Lagos. The conflicts between Western technology and political philosophy and the city's tribal loyalties, engrained customs and primitive social conditions are etched with comic, poetic language and zany, wildly imaginative situations.

The story inspired me to repair to the local library and put a computer "hold" on Akpan's noted short story collection, "Say You're One of Them." The computer told me that out of roughly 10 copies of the book in the Atlanta-Fulton County library system, only one was available. That was an encouraging sign of broad readership of an important book: I wondered if that meant that it is being widely assigned in the city's high school English classes. I was also interested to see that the one copy available was at the Carver Homes branch, serving what was once one of Atlanta's most desperate housing projects, although a major effort has been made in recent years to alleviate conditions there. I would think that residents of the community would find much of interest in Akpan's work, and I hoped that the book's availability there wasn't a sign that it is being neglected there. No matter what, I punched in my library card number, punched the send button, and placed the hold. I will look forward to the library's friendly computerized voice mail message telling me the book is ready for me to pick up.

...Roy Blount, in the Tin House interview, cites English writer Alan Furst's comment that he wanted to write in "traslator's English," as if it had been translated from another language. Blount says this means that it can, in turn, be translated readily into other languages. At first, I didn't know quite what to make of this, but then thought of the work of Akpan and the Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, both of whom use English as their primary language and studied in American writing programs. Their English retains the exotic flavor of their native cultures, giving their works the flexiblity and color of what might be thought of as "translator's English." Joseph Conrad, for whom English was a second language, is one of the pioneer masters of that branch of the language.

...Speaking of Conrad, a look back at his works would expand understanding of the  forces that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day. The stresses of colonialism conveyed by Conrad continue to influence developments like radical Islamism. Dostoyevsky would be another writer worth studying for insights into terrorists' psyches. In books like "The Devils," Dostoyevsky wrote about well-educated, indulged youngsters like Abdulmutallab being seduced by violent action in the service of extreme ideologies. What we know as terrorism had its first incarnation in Dostoyevsky's late 19th century Russia. His young intellectuals, caught between the forces of rapid development, feverish ideas and a primitive culture, turned to atheistic anarchy, the precursor of the Bolshevik revolution. But like radical Islam, the political ideology offered a messianic, narcotic, unambiguous solution to spiritual emptiness.

The Confessions of Mary Karr

Mary Karr's memoir "Lit" stirred and appalled me. I was engaged by her porrayals of people in crisis, not only herself in her battle against self-hatred and alcoholism, but a parade of similarly troubled souls. Despite its strong language, the book left me with that queasy feeling of involuntary voyeurism.

Disgust often edged sympathy as the book drew me forward. Karr often seemed too pleased at describing her own bad behavior, indulging in the self-exhibitionism so prevelant in our culture today. Her book is on a higher plane than trashy celebrity confessions, but too often lurched in that direction.

I'm certain she's sincere about how prayer and her conversion to Catholicism allowed her to overcome her alcoholism and self-destructiveness, but her story of her life spinning out of control, including the predictable stint in a mental institution, was all too familiar.

The best memoir I've read this year, Joe Queenan's "Closing Time," also piled on the appalling details. As in Karr's admired first memoir, Queenan relentlessly exposes his horrible childhood. But his depictions of two surrogate fathers who helped him overcome his own father's abusive behavior created an original, striking portrait,  more illuminating and heart-rending than Karr's latest, which replays notes we're often heard. Plus, his condemnation of the philosophy of recovery, which Karr espouses, provided a refreshing corrective to our cult of therapy.

Still, Karr's book held me to the finish. She presents a colorful gallery of writers, including Etheridge Knight, Thomas Lux and Tobias Wolff. Despite her wallowing in her bad behavior, the book takes its place among memoirs worth reading.

Revisited Sally Fitzgerald and Flannery O'Connor

On a glorious autumn afternoon, I gathered in an overheated room at the Emory University library with a host of others for a symposium on Sally Fitzgerald's literary and personal friendship with Flannery O'Connor.

Fitzgerald, once the wife of the outstanding translator Robert Fitzgerald, edited O'Connor's collection of letters, "The Habit of Being," and O'Connor's Library of America books. The Fitzgeralds, introduced to O'Connor by Robert Lowell, shepherded O'Connor's early career. Later in her life after divorcing Robert, Sally played the major role in building O'Connor's literary reputation to its current soaring height.

After a symposium of four O'Connor scholars presented pleasant but not particularly illuminating talks, Jonathan Yardley, the esteemed longtime book critic of the Washington Post (and the late Washington Star) presented a warm, refreshingly non-academic, talk on O'Connor's letters and Fitzgerald's role in compiling them for publication.

Along the way, Yardley pointed out a striking reality: with the advent of e-mail, volumes such as O'Connor's "Habit of Being" are a soon to be an extinct species. Writers no longer compose long, well-considered letters to each other, but, like everyone else, converse with terse e-mails that are quickly deleted. Thus books such as O'Connor's represent the twilight of a long literary tradition.

The absence of epistolary evidence will also make the labors of biographers more difficult in the future. In the past, scholars could pore over a writer's, or a statesman's, letters for information about his or her daily life.

The sense of cultural loss could be overblown: Yardley says he quickly deletes his e-mails, but some writers and politicians could have the sense of history to preserve theirs. It's difficult to see, however, how the restricted e-mail consciousness can match the eloquence and craft shown in such famous letters as those by Keats.

The O'Connor enthusiasts in attendance didn't display the kind of messianic fervor I've witnessed before. She, like followers of C.S. Lewis, draws a group of readers who respond to her work with a kind of spiritual vertigo. The Emory group would probably agree with Dr. William Sessions' comment that O'Connor must be judged not as a Catholic writer but as a writer.

On that point, O'Connor's amazing ascendancy into the top ranks of American writers is possibly overinflated and in need of correction. It's telling to return to early reviews of O'Connor's work, such as one that recently was reprinted in the Times Literary Supplement, to see that she was at first considered a minor writer at best. The early TLS reviewer saw her work as limited, warped by her Southern outlook and religious viewpoints. He also saw in her a corrosive racial insensitivity.

Most O'Connor readers would vehemently condemn the reviewer's view. I do think that O'Connor's short stories are among the best an American has produced, but a rereading of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" a few years ago left me thinking that it was not as accomplished as I had thought when I first read it. The story's disparate elements didn't mesh so well, and The Misfit's comments on the elderly lady he'd just murdered I found contrived and arbitrary. One of these days, I'll get back to rereading her stories, novels, essays and letters in depth, to see how she stands in my personal rankings.

The highlight of the evening was Dr. Sessions displaying a stunning photo of O'Connor as a young woman. Sessions, who is writing a biography of O'Connor to follow the recent one by Brad Gooch, was a close friend of O'Connor and said he will have access to materials that Gooch didn't. The photo shows O'Connor in a black blouse and long black dress, and she looks at us with big, dark, luminous eyes. She appears sure of her talent and eventual greatness.