Single mothers telling their story

Two young women came in to the writing center today back to back. Each had the assignment of writing a personal narrative. Both narratives began with the drama of reading a pregnancy test and finding out that it's positive.

One of these young women looked almost too young to be the mother of a one-year-old. The other had three children. One was married to the father of her child, and she had a lot of family support to go back to college. The other one was not married to the father, and he didn't help her at all with the expenses of daycare and formula and diapers. This woman had, despite her family responsibilities, managed to get a certificate in dental assisting, and was working for a dentist for a good wage, but she still could not pay her day care expenses and have any money left over.

Both had written well-structured, dramatic narratives with good telling details. Both appeared to be smart and hard-working. Both loved their children so much that they would do almost anything to make their children's lives better. Both seemed to have some support from their own families.

But both were being screwed by the low wages we have in America and by the lack of affordable, quality day care. And one of them was being seriously undone by the father's unwillingness to take responsibility for the lives he had created.

It's hard not to feel outraged when stories such as these come in the writing center, and they come in regularly. Some people might be tempted to say something like, "Well, come on, they knew that sex creates babies." And the young women themselves did not let themselves off easy: both stated in their writing that they understood their own complicity in their hard lives. But young people are wired to want to have sex. There's nothing we can do about that. Why not prepare them a little better? Why not tell these young Catholics that the Pope is wrong about birth control being a sin? Why not point out that the Church is not going to help them raise their babies or pay for their day care?

One of the women said that most of the teenaged mothers that she knows just stay home with their babies and don't work or go to school. So apparently it is somewhat normal for Hispanic teenagers to get pregnant. I heard a young Hispanic mother on NPR, in fact, say that it was pretty normal. An article this summer in the Dallas Morning News said that a CDC study "found that Hispanic teens aged 15-19 are much more likely to become pregnant (132.8 births per 1,000 females) compared to their black (128 per 1,000) and white (45.2 per 1,000) peers." The teen birth rate is rising again after years of improvement.

It may be normal in some communities to be a teenage mother, but as these young mothers know better than anyone, it is very, very hard. The fierce determination of these young women to do the best thing for their children--to get educated to work at a higher level--is inspiring. But imagine what that drive and determination could have accomplished if they had had some help earlier with birth control; if they had not been brainwashed by the Catholic Church; if the fathers of their babies weren't so feckless; if wages for high school graduates were higher; and if our society believed it was in the common interest of everyone for young mothers to have more support and help with daycare.

the vorpal blade went snicker-snack

Stanley Fish has been writing a series of articles in the New York Times about the teaching of writing. The third one appeared yesterday, and it's worth reading.

He makes several good points. First, we should stop moaning about how poorly prepared college students are, and how their high schools failed them (which they did), and get on with the job of getting them up to speed. Second, yes, it's true that a lot of reading makes people into good writers, but good luck persuading eighteen year olds to do a lot of reading. And, while theoretically everybody is entitled to write in their own dialect, it's not the best way to get ahead in the world: you have to learn standard English, as a second language if necessary.

Fish's main point is that college students today need a lot of help understanding something very basic: what a sentence is. We may think that we writing teachers should be teaching researching skills, or complex argument skills, or organization skills in writing. But a great many students have a lot of trouble with the basic unit of writing: the sentence. (Ok, the word is a more basic unit, but most students know what a word is.) I have found it to be true that the most common errors in student writing revolve around the problem of not knowing what a complete sentence is: this misunderstanding underlies the sentence fragment, the run-on sentence, the comma splice, etc.

How does Fish remedy this misunderstanding? He has some great ideas. He writes a sentence like "Jane likes cake" on the white board, and challenges students to elaborate this simple sentence into a Proustian one of a hundred words, explaining how they did it and why it's still one sentence. He gives them the famous Lewis Carroll nonsense poem "Jabberwocky" and has them replace the nonsense words with "real" words, explaining how they know, for example, what you could write instead of "Oh frabjous day!" (Unfortunately anything you might write instead would be worse.)

I was amazed by his final assignment: he divides his class into groups and tells them to invent a language! With a lexicon, and a grammar. Wow. Budding Tolkiens must love this class. Then they have to present this language to the rest of the class and explain how to translate its messages into English. Presumably they use the Roman alphabet? Or not?

Sometimes he writes a boring sentence on the white board--"The first year of college is full of many challenges"-- and then the students add to this sentence in a kind of linguistic Exquisite Corpse game, but where you can see what everybody else did.

Fish provides some useful links to other teachers' books and methods. I recognized one: They Say/I Say, which is about the scholarly debate that we're trying to get students to join. Only problem is, there are some things about this debate that are kind of stupid, such as the requirement that we start our papers with propositions like, "Everybody that has ever written about Faulkner and environmentalism up to this point has been wrong. I'm the one with the goods."

I'm sure Fish's methods work great with students who have a basic command of English. But in many community colleges, we are teaching students who are not only unsure about what a sentence is; they are unsure about what a lot of English words mean. I wonder if ESL students could do that Jabberwocky exercise. To them, everything sounds like, "the vorpal blade went snicker snack!"

Harold Bloom on spectacle vs. text

Wow, no sooner did I diss the overabundance of spectacle and the dearth of good text in country music, than I read this editorial in the New York Times by Harold Bloom, who writes,

"More than ever in this time of economic troubles and societal change, entering upon an undergraduate education should be a voyage away from visual overstimulation into deep, sustained reading of what is most worth absorbing and understanding: the books that survive all ideological fashions."

I'm not totally against ideological fashions, but I know what he means. He lists Some Great Books: "Homer, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Milton." What I am against is visual overstimulation, via those glowing rectangles that seem to be everywhere. Real pictures, not so much. Over-indulge all you want in black and white silver gelatin photographs in particular.

The death of the country music author, circa 1971

Last night I watched a DVD of the Johnny Cash show, which ran on ABC from 1969 to 1971. By that time, I was not watching much TV; I stopped in the summer of 1968, because the police riot at the Chicago convention scared me so much. But I think I might have watched a few episodes of the Johnny Cash show. It was a big deal for Nashville; it was filmed at the Ryman Auditorium, the Mother Church of country music, and the home of the Grand Ole Opry. Johnny Cash envisioned the show as a way of bringing together musicians from many genres: country music, jazz and blues, folk, and rock. Last night I saw Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Louis Armstrong, Linda Ronstadt, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Tammy Wynette, James Taylor, Neil Young, and Credence Clearwater Revival.

It was amazing to see some of these powerful singers and songwriters when they were very young, at the beginning of their careers. But the most striking thing about the Johnny Cash Show was the fact that it looked completely different from the way TV music shows look now. When singers perform on television now, they dance, gyrate, throw their hands in the air, grab their crotches, etc. But in the late sixties and early seventies, they stood ramrod straight and barely moved as they sang. Some of the folk rockers made expressive faces--James Taylor closed his eyes to sing--but the country music people looked like deer caught in the headlights. Tammy did not move at all the whole time she sang "Stand By Your Man." When she was talking to Cash, she looked down at the ground, afraid to look into the camera. George Jones looked more like a possum than ever, about to play dead. Marty Robbins sort of tried to move around a bit, but he had trouble. Only the Man in Black seemed truly comfortable in front of the TV cameras.

I have seen these people perform since, and they are passionate, powerful performers in person. Why were they so damped down? It was as if somebody had turned down the volume on everything: the voice, the body, the passion. Suddenly it occurred to me that country music people were not used to being on television! They were comfortable on the stage of the Ryman when it was full of Shriners and middle-aged people on vacation in Music City, and on the stages of county fairs and small-town auditoriums around the country; but the lights and cameras of television, even on that familiar stage, made them very nervous.

These performances were interspersed with recent interviews with Kris Kristofferson and Hank Williams, Jr, about the show and its effects on country music especially. Somebody, I think Kristofferson, said that there wasn't much music on TV in the late sixties, and there was almost no country music at all on television. It was a huge thing for country music, to be broadcast on a network TV station into the homes of people all over the country. It was so huge that it scared the shit out of them, and their fear showed.

Still, the performances were great, although wooden by today's standards. What made them great? The songs. The song lyrics were really, really great back then. Think of "Sunday Morning Coming Down":

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An' I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An' stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I'd smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I'd been pickin'.
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin' at a can that he was kicking.
Then I crossed the empty street,
'n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken.
And it took me back to somethin',
That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin' comin' down.

In the park I saw a daddy,
With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,
And listened to the song they were singin'.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'.
And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin' comin' down."

The imagery in this song is so vivid. The persona wakes up dirty and drunk, and probably under the influence of some other substances than just beer. His kitchen has no food; he has to have a beer for breakfast. There's nobody taking care of this man, cooking him eggs and bacon, or cleaning his clothes; he's alone, and he doesn't take care of himself. He lives in a gritty walk-up downtown somewhere. All around him are signs of normal family life: children playing, somebody frying chicken, people singing in a church. These are things that he has lost "somehow," but like anybody hung over, he can't remember exactly how he lost the normal comforts of family life. The listener is left to imagine the events that caused this kind of wreckage and loneliness, and it's not too hard to imagine them. But the persona's understanding of his loss seems like a small ray of hope, that he might yet pull himself out of this lonely, dissipated life.

Johnny Cash sang this song on the show, and apparently the fact that he actually sang, "Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned," was an amazing TV moment, because the network execs wanted him to change the lyrics to something less gritty.

Kris Kristofferson himself sang, "Lovin' Her Was Easier Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again," another poem set to music:

I have seen the morning burning golden on the mountains in the skies.
Achin' with the feelin' of the freedom of an eagle when she flies.
Turnin' on the world the way she smiled upon my soul as I lay dying.
Healin' as the colours in the sunshine and the shadows of her eyes.


Wakin' in the mornin' to the feelin' of her fingers on my skin.
Wipin' out the traces of the people and the places that I've been.
Teachin' me that yesterday was something that I never thought of trying.
Talkin' of tomorrow and the money, love and time we had to spend.

Lovin' her was easier than anything I'll ever do again.

Comin' close together with a feelin' that I've never known before, in my time.
She ain't ashamed to be a woman, or afraid to be a friend.
I don't know the answer to the easy way she opened every door in my mind.
But dreamin' was as easy as believin' it was never gonna end.

And lovin' her was easier than anything I'll ever do again.


Again, this is better than average love song writing. In the first stanza there's some ambiguity about whether it's the speaker or the sun that's aching, turning, and healing; so the sun's movement becomes a metaphor for changes in the speaker, under the influence of this warming, golden woman, who herself, if she is the sun, is also aching, turning, and healing.

The next stanza repeats the series of verbs ending in "-ing" or rather "-in'": waking, wiping, teaching, talking. You also have some alliteration going on in the repeated w's and t's. And this wonderful phrase, "Teaching me that yesterday was something that I never thought of trying." What could that mean? Many things: that the past wasn't as bad as he thought; that things could have been different if he'd done things differently; that memory itself is possible and good. And that these yesterdays, rather than being just a blight on memory, are the seeds for better "tomorrows," of money, love, and time. Kristofferson seems to be making an oblique allusion to another famous love poem, "To His Coy Mistress," which also wonders about how much love and time there is to spend; but whereas the poet Marvell was urging his mistress that there was not much time left for love, in this poem it's the lady that's telling the poet how it is, and her view is that there is plenty of time in the future for love (and money). Rather than scarcity, she preaches abundance, like the sun that gives off limitless energy to everything that can soak it up.

Of course at the end of the song there's a sense of tragic loss, of this abundance and ease. Country music used to be tragic. It used to be about loss, mainly. This is hard to remember when you listen to the radio now. At some point in the seventies, the decision was made by people on Music Row to make country music more appealing to more upscale, younger, and more urban listeners, and country music lost its roots in Great Depression hardship, poverty, and loss. The Johnny Cash Show was canceled for the same reason by ABC in 1971 during the "rural purge," when they canceled everything that had a tree in it, as somebody quipped: Mayberry, the Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, and the Johnny Cash Show. Again, they were trying to appeal to younger, more urban, more hip audiences.

The Johnny Cash Show stood at the cusp of a new era in music entertainment. In the future, music would be more spectacle and less meaning, as Baudrillard would say. Less text, more dancing, color, and lights. It would be about the simulation of reality, not the actual gritty reality of the Great Depression that people of Johnny Cash's age could remember. No more songs like Merle Haggard's about working class resentment and anger: "I'm tired of this dirty old sidewalk...You can keep your retirement and your so-called social security...Think I'll walk off my steady job today." Instead, the country music of the radio morphed into the country music of CMT, a world of fast-cut, surrealistic editing, elaborate costumes and sets, lip synching, and "stars" who look more like models than like hard-scrabble survivors of rural working class life.

As "wooden" as George Jones was on the TV set, he still looked like a possum, which is something that you could never say about Tim McGraw.

Are Flannery O'Connor's stories good?

I read a review early in the summer of a new biography about Flannery O'Connor, a writer I first encountered in a literature class in college almost 35 years ago. She is a Southern woman writer, and a rural person, and therefore I am interested in her, because I am a Southern rural woman, although not much of a writer. I was excited when I found the new biography in our local library (although it was filed wrong, under "F.") I also wanted to acquaint myself again with Flannery O'Connor, because I admired so much the short story, "Idols," that Tim Gautreaux published in The New Yorker. The story was based on a couple of O'Connor's characters, Julian in "Everything That Rises," and Parker in "Parker's Back."

I got about half way through the biography, called Flannery, and got rather bored. O'Connor had in fact predicted that a biography of her would be boring; she wrote, “As for biographies, there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” Well, she was sort of right. It was interesting reading about her early education at a local women's college, and her subsequent trip to various writer's workshops and colonies, and her friendships with other intellectuals, but once she got sick with lupus, she had to go home to her farm and live with her mother, and her life pretty much was spent between the house and the chicken yard.

So, I decided that instead of reading the entire biography, I would read her collection of short stories, also in our library. It's a rather thick tome with a lot of stories in it, dated from the forties through the mid-sixties. But again, I couldn't quite finish it. I wondered why.

It's not that the stories aren't beautifully written, in terms of the prose style and the dialogue. O'Connor is a wonderful describer of people. Sometimes she makes you laugh out loud in recognition; for example, a woman character "was about the size of a cedar fence post." The characters themselves have wonderfully real Southern voices and are themselves great observers of other people. A young man describes a middle-aged woman thus: "She had theseyer brown glasses and her hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull." One can imagine O'Connor silently making these observations about the people around her, chuckling to herself, and writing them down in her notebook as quickly as possible. She is a meaner Jane Austen.

Sometimes the descriptions of the landscape take your breath away:

"A cloud, the exact color of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun....The turnip continued to descend. After a few minutes there was a guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin-can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet's car."

Who else would describe a cloud as a big turnip? Or thunder as "guffawing"? Or rain as tin-can tops? This is the world of the rural South, where fantastic natural beauty coexists with all our junk, like turnips, tin cans, old cars, and a guffawing God behind the clouds.

And this brings me to the real problem I have with these stories: that guffawing God figure, who is there at the end of every story to kill somebody or burn them up or drown them or shoot them. It may seem as if another character performs the execution, but it's really God acting behind the scenes. O'Connor was a devout Catholic. Apparently she didn't believe in showing this directly in her stories. But her God is like the Wizard of Oz, behind a curtain, pulling the levers.

This is the a formula to the stories: there is a complacent, somewhat stupid middle-class rural white person, usually a woman. Sometimes this woman lives with one or two children, but there is never a husband or father around; he is always dead or gone. Usually the child is defective in some way: one daughter has a wooden leg; another is retarded; or the child may simply be precocious, or an intellectual (a handicap in its own way in the rural South). Into this rural, land-owning but barely scraping by (usually racist) woman's life comes some kind of a Misfit. In one story he is actually called the Misfit. The Misfit may be a crazy tenant farmer, an immigrant (the Displaced Person), a babysitter, or a con artist. This person, the reader quickly realizes, is going to destroy the main character, or at least seriously disrupt her orderly little scene. And the reader is always right. Often there is a violent death at the end of the story. There is basically no denouement or "falling action"; after the death or disaster, the story ends.

During the action leading to the climactic violent event, the Misfit character challenges the main character's complacency. The Misfit will often be more ignorant, more backwoods, than the middle-class main character. He is a kind of noble savage, full of cryptic remarks such as, "Jesus thrown everything off balance." He, or his wife, is often what we would call now a Pentecostal Protestant Christian, given to a very emotional, personal kind of spirituality, in stark contrast to the main character's more staid, denominational church-going. O'Connor writes of one of these nominally Christian women, "She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true." In the fifties and early sixties, these rural Pentecostal evangelicals were truly marginal folks, not the mainstream suburbanites that they are now. They handled snakes and spoke in tongues and got baptized in muddy rivers.

The main character feels superior, more worldly and educated, than this invader who will upset her world. But in the end, it seems, O'Connor sides with the ignorant and the violent, who cause a rupture, even a death, in the complacent Christian's life. It is the emotional, primitive Pentecostalism that carries the day with her, it seems.

This is where O'Connor loses me. How is violence redemptive? If the grandmother ends up shot and dead at the end of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," what good is the "learning" that the murderer/misfit imposes on her? The Misfit says, famously, "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." I suppose that means that her soul was lost in the minutiae of her petty, safe bourgeois life. Well, sometimes that does happen.

I guess you can only believe in the redemptive power of violence if you believe in an after-life, where you get to think about the circumstances of your violent death and why it happened to you. But even if you grant O'Connor that, it seems excessive to kill off a child at the end of "A View of the Woods." The murder is particularly brutal: the child's grandfather bangs her head against a rock. It's hard to see how the child "learns" anything from this. Or the grandfather for that matter.

After about ten or fifteen stories like this, the reader begins to dread the ending so much that she stops reading. It seems as if O'Connor is deliberately horrifying and terrifying the reader, almost as if she is writing a B-grade horror movie rather than a literary short story. The violence often seems like a cheap trick, to make the story more dramatic. Violence sells!

But in real life, it doesn't take a murder or a house fire to make a person change or learn something about herself, fortunately. But it may be harder to write a story where the main character changes as a result of, say, a peaceful, chance encounter with a stranger. I admit that when I try to write a story, I try to think of something "dramatic" for the climax. Maybe I should read more John Cheever or John Updike, to find out how Yankees structure their stories. As I recall in those stories, usually nobody gets gored by a bull. Maybe somebody gets drunk or has a brief affair. A woman might say something cutting to a man. That's about as bad as it gets.

Five Houses Down, by Christian Wiman

This poem from a New Yorker of about a month ago made a huge impression on me. I think it's because it describes my neighbor's house almost perfectly. I looked up Christian Wiman. He's the editor of Poetry, a journal of (guess what) poetry, and he was born in West Texas. I guess that explains why his neighbor's yard looked so much like my neighbor's yard: Texas is where people from Tennessee go when they can longer get along with their neighbors. Poetry magazine has a very good website, where you can read more entertaining poems. The poems there are not the inscrutable poems they made you read in high school and college. They make sense, but not in a prose way. If all English teachers would use Poetry or even The New Yorker (which sometimes publishes inscrutable poems) to teach literature rather than anthologies and textbooks, I think students would like reading and writing better.

Five Houses Down
by Christian Wiman June 29, 2009



I loved his ten demented chickens
and the hell-eyed dog, the mailbox
shaped like a huge green gun.
I loved the eyesore opulence
of his five partial cars, the wonder-cluttered porch
with its oilspill plumage, tools
cauled in oil, the dark
clockwork of disassembled engines
christened Sweet Baby and benedicted Old Bitch;
and down the steps into the yard the explosion
of mismatched parts and black scraps
amid which, like a bad sapper cloaked
in luck, he would look up stunned,
patting the gut that slopped out of his undershirt
and saying, Son,
you lookin’ to make some scratch?
All afternoon we’d pile the flatbed high
with stacks of Exxon floormats
mysteriously stencilled with his name,
rain-rotted sheetrock or miles
of misfitted pipes, coil after coil
of rusted fencewire that stained for days
every crease of me, rollicking it all
to the dump where, while he called
every ragman and ravened junkdog by name,
he catpicked the avalanche of trash
and fished some always fixable thing
up from the depths. Something
about his endless aimless work
was not work, my father said.
Somehow his barklike earthquake curses
were not curses, for he could goddam
a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch,
but one bad word from me
made his whole being
twang like a nail mis-struck. Aint no call for that,
son, no call at all. Slipknot, whatknot, knot
from which no man escapes—
prestoed back to plain old rope;
whipsnake, blacksnake, deep in the wormdirt
worms like the clutch of mud:
I wanted to live forever
five houses down
in the womanless rooms a woman
sometimes seemed to move through, leaving him
twisting a hand-stitched dishtowel
or idly wiping the volcanic dust.
It seemed like heaven to me:
beans and weenies from paper plates,
black-fingered tinkerings on the back stoop
as the sun set, on an upturned fruitcrate
a little jamjar of rye like ancient light,
from which, once, I took a single, secret sip,
my eyes tearing and my throat on fire.

Tim Gautreaux and Flannery O'Connor

The June 22 issue of The New Yorker had a story in it by Tim Gautreaux, a Louisiana writer. The story was called "Idols," and it was about a man named Julian who had inherited a big house in Mississippi. I thought this sounded vaguely familiar, especially the character's name. The fact that the story ends in a conflagration made me think of Flannery O'Connor, who loved to end her stories with a big fire, and also of Faulkner, who burns down houses and barns in his stories too. I imagined that Tim Gautreaux, a Southerner, took as his mentors both O'Connor and Faulkner, as many Southern writers do.

Later I found out that the connection between Gautreaux's story and O'Connor was more direct: the Julian character in "Idols" is in fact the Julian in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." The latter story was first published in 1961. Julian has just finished junior college, so he's about 20 years old. In "Idols," which appears to be set in the present, Julian is in his sixties, an aging typewriter repairman. This fact is poignant, because in "Everything That Rises," he is selling typewriters as a temporary job until he "gets on his feet," as his mother says. Apparently, he never got beyond that.

In "Everything That Rises," Julian is both attracted to his aristocratic heritage, in the form of the old house he saw once, and repelled by his mother's constant invoking of her aristocratic forebears. He and his mother have fallen on hard times, and they live in a run-down neighborhood in a city, perhaps Memphis. Furthermore, black people are "rising," and the buses are recently integrated. Julian's mother both resents and patronizes black people, and she gets her comeuppance in a big way at the end of the story.

In "Idols," black people are absent. Class antagonisms have taken the place of racial conflict. Julian is now patronizing a poor white man, whom he hopes to help by employing the man, Obie, to fix up the old mansion which he has finally inherited. But it turns out that Obie is the one in control, as he is far more skillful and competent than Julian. Obie has his own goal: to rid himself of the tattoos that cover his entire body, including one of a Byzantine image of Christ on his back. The alert reader will recognize this Obie as O.E. Parker, from O'Connor's story "Parker's Back." Obie's wife calls the tattoos "idols," and won't take him back until he has them removed by a doctor, a painful process. By the end of the story, Obie's "idols" are gone, although they were once the things that gave meaning to his life.

Guess what. By the end of the story, Julian's "idol" is gone too, at least most of it. The big house is flooded, and the outbuildings are burned. Julian is bankrupt and can't restore his house, its plaster fallen in the flooding, its electricity ancient, its heating system nonexistent.

At first this story seems like a little moral parable: don't attach too much importance to yourself and your possessions, because they are mere idols that separate you from the real God, or other people, or something. But it's not that simple: one of Obie's "idols" IS God, or an image of God, on his back. His wife hated it because, like the late Byzantine Christians (the iconoclasts), she thought that images of God were idolatrous: "He don't look....He's a spirit. No man shall see his face." Parker's getting rid of this image is a little piece of iconoclasm, analogous to the work of zealots in the early medieval period who insisted on erasing images of Christ from Byzantine churches and who smashed wooden icons.

Maybe the point is that Julian's house was a similar image of his "importance," as he puts it, just as it was for his mother. Julian despised his mother's snobbery, her constant allusions to her family's lost aristocratic past. She kept saying, "I know who I am." Who she is, she thinks, is a Godhigh, a descendant of a prosperous landowner and slave-owner. Despite Julian's rejection of this identity in his youth, he has thoroughly embraced it by his late sixties, as Gautreaux imagines him. He thinks he knows who he is--the owner of a beautifully restored antebellum mansion, and by extension an aristocrat himself--just as Obie thinks that he knows what God looks like. But the mansion, and the name Godhigh, are no more representations of what Julian really is than the image of God on Parker's back is a representation of the real God. Parker doesn't know what God looks like, and Julian doesn't really know who he is.

I wonder if Gautreaux embraces O'Connor's relentlessly Christian view of the world. Somehow I doubt it. He is good at Southern voices, as she was; he seems to like a semi-apocalyptic ending to his stories, as she did. But "Idols" is less of a parable than O'Connor's stories, which nevertheless always manage to just barely avoid being so much parables that they cease to be art. Still, she came a little too close for comfort sometimes.