Meeting: Michael Fitzgerald on the Courage of Flannery O'Connor

This coming week at the Meeting at Rimini, there will be an Anglo-American exhibit on the American fiction writer Flannery O'Connor (see also Traces 12:7).  Screenwriter Michael Fitzgerald accepted an invitation to give a presentation on O'Connor.  Fitzgerald, the son of O'Connor's close friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, persuaded director John Huston to produce the 1979 film Wise Blood, based on O'Connor's novel.  He wrote the screenplay together with his brother and raised the funding for the low-budget production. 

Fitzgerald is presenting on O'Connor's courage in living with lupus, the inherited illness which crippled her and took her life at age 39.  In an interview with Martino Cervo, he described her ironic outlook with the story that when she was six years old she taught a chicken to walk backwards.  Referring to the film, he said, "I was there with the chicken. I was just there to help, but it was the highlight of my life.  Everything that has happened since then has been an anti-climax."  He said:

The illness was the central event of her life.  At twenty years old, right after returning home after a stay with us, she had her first attack.  After that, it always accompanied her.  But the limitation on her talent was a springboard for her freedom.  There is one episode that explains better than anything else what I mean.  In the last moments of her life, at 39 years old, she sent a letter to my parents describing the food at the hospital:  she wrote of a terrible "stew that smelled like Kleenex".  She was dying...

 She would have deflected or laughed at the idea of being considered a great writer, which in fact happened.  She would have been horrified at the idea of promoting a particular artistic conception.  She was a great Catholic writer, her Catholicism and her sense of the absolute were completely at the center of everything she wrote.  And this is exactly what shocked the literary world, without them knowing it.  For example, there is no doubt about her influence on a giant like Cormac McCarthy.

Lazarus, Come Forth!

Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon, in his latest novel The Lazarus Project, offers a double story structure to suit his theme of dual citizenship. The narrator, Brik, is a a Bosnian expatriate and unemployed writer married to an American brain surgeon. To salvage his dignity, he has to publish a book. The pursuit of his subject, the 1908 killing of a Russian immigrant, Lazarus, by a policeman in Chicago, sets him on a journey across Eastern Europe. Brik (like Hemon) missed the Bosnian war, since he was in the U.S. when the shooting began and only heard the "steadily unreal rumors". He packs a load of survivor's guilt which gives rise to incessant questions.

The story lines are woven through alternating chapters. Lazarus was gunned down as a suspected anarchist, while his sister Olga was left to fend for herself against the hysteria and city interests, offering a parallel to the War on Terror. Brik is accompanied on his journey by his childhood friend Rora, a gambler, photographer veteran of the Bosnian war and an epic Old World figure. Rora is a storyteller in need of a scribe; he's also the opportunist, connected with warlords, who once sold "replica" chunks of the Berlin Wall and replaced prayers with native nursery rhymes as he led religious tours through Medjugorje collecting big tips. Rora offers a continual entertaining stream of stories but repels all questions. He has replaced questions with tales, as Brik will come to understand. Rora tells Brik he will never know anything.

Let me tell you what the problem is, Brik. Even if you knew what you want to know, you would still know nothing. You ask questions, you want to know more, but no matter how much more I tell you, you will never know anything. That's the problem.

Brik's wife Mary also resists questions. About death, when Brik asks if she ever gets angry, she answers: "When a patient dies ... I feel that he is dead." Mary won't acknowledge the mistakes America is making in the current war, which causes friction between them. He notes that her "hands are bloodied by love."

For Brik, religious observance has blocked the quest for truth. Mary and her family are Catholic, whereas Brik, when asked about his faith, answers ironically: "I am nothing... God knows God is no friend of mine.. I envy people who believe in that crap. They don't worry about the meaning of life and things, whereas I do."

As for ethics, he knows his own "moral waddling", sleeping late instead of working and with porn residing on his computer. He is "forever stuck in moral mediocrity" between Mary's high ground and Rora's nihilism. A journalist named Miller figures in both stories; as writers they cannot hold onto neutrality; in both cases they become implicated in the crimes.

Brik, seeing himself as a man who escaped with his life from a place of death, wonders why Lazarus would be resurrected only to continue wandering the earth. He wants to know: "Did the biblical Lazarus dream, locked in the clayey cave? Did he remember his life in death--all of it, every moment? ... Did he have to disremember his previous life and start from scratch, like an immigrant?" As he wanders through the graveyard of his grandfather's birthplace in the Ukraine, he chants: "Hoydee-ho, haydee-hi, all I want is not to die."

Brik confirms his unstated suspicion that all are implicated in the violence which recruits supposedly good people. After hiring a driver on their journey, he and Rora are used as an alibi for human trafficking. They rescue the girl involved, and in doing so Brik finds his own good intentions tested. By the end of the story, Brik will have a chance to sort through the events and stories, from his own and Rora's experience. He ends with the beginning, which is the intention to write, and what he will carry forward are these same questions.

To Kill for Love

Chris is taking his friend and former colleague Larry on a duck-hunting trip. Larry will need some assistance, because the former college history professor has multiple sclerosis and less than a year to live. They once hunted together often, but this will be their last time, if Chris has his way.

Chris is divorced and in love with Larry's wife, Rachel. Larry, after losing his job, his body and periodically his mind to the illness, has expressed the wish to die. Chris plans to oblige him. This much you know practically from the first chapter of Jon Hassler's book The Love Hunter. Hassler, a Minnesota novelist, died last March of a Parkinson's-like illness.

Chris, a school psychologist, is not a criminal type by any ordinary standard. He can be careless: he nearly shot off his friend's head during their first hunting expedition. He was responsible for his ex-wife's dog getting killed in traffic, though he has a good explanation for it.

Rachel (for the most part) and their son Bruce are devoted to Larry in his illness. Her relationship with Larry's best friend is complicated. Larry needs Chris, but Chris' attentions toward Rachel strain Larry's already fragile mental state. Rachel, an actress, keeps Chris guessing. He figures once Larry is out of the way the problem will be solved.

The book is a dialogue on love, and Chris and Rachel have different theories. Rachel sees a continuity between what her husband was and what he is by now with love as the constant. Chris, who admits to his emptiness, sees love as a blind attraction.

Love, according to Chris, was that heedless dash toward what we believe is the source of our happiness, never mind if the source proves, when we get there, to be nothing but a squawk box.

The details of the story are precious. This is a messy illness, and Larry's grief is harrowing. Chris wants to keep things in hand, but events never go according to plan. And life itself will intervene in a very satisfying manner.

Aharon Appelfeld at Rimini

[A few months ago, I posted a quote from Traces from an interview with the Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld. I was very fortunate to hear him speak at Rimini yesterday and transcribe my notes below in first person. The title of the talk was "Bellezza e positività della vita" or "Beauty and Positivity of Life". He gave a very poetic and deliberate delivery, so I reproduce it as closely as possible.]

I refer to my generation, 1939'44, to children condemned to death. I was born in 1932 in Chernowitz in Eastern Europe which was Jewish and assimilated. My parents thought of themselves as European. My grandparents followed the Jewish commandments but without belief. They couldn't change their way of life. They had a sadness that was one of defeat.

The Holocaust buried us in suffering without distinction between believer and the alienated. Our suffering was physical as children, we had no soul-searching. For our parents, it was the loss of the world, their beliefs were overthrown. We were left only with naked Jewishness. It was an empty loss. Tens of thousands of Jews were separated from dear ones, deprived of everything, stigmatized with shame. Their heritage hemmed them in, blocked the path to full freedom. Together Jews from East and West were under an iron sky.

We were first exiled to the railroad station, with an enormous panic of hunger and crushed. We absorbed our parents' bitter silence before our separation. Our parents protected us until the last moment when they left us, as Moses' mother left her baby to the mercy of heaven.

Loneliness was our lot. Some were in the forest, others in monasteries and others lived with tyrannical peasants who treated us like beasts. We learned the secret of Judaism. It's better to hide it. Those with no parents were isolated from humanity and grew up like animals, cold and fearful. Judaism made us fair game. Without it, existence is more meager. That secret was the only shelter over our misery. We had images of our parents and our homes, our last refuge.

We lived with death as familiar but not ceasing to be afraid. Every encounter with death increased our fear. The promise to our parents was that we would look out for ourselves. This made us stronger than we were, when we wandered from forest to forest. We were not children but animals, who are lost in the dark thickets of forest. We learned to get food from trees, fire from stones and to reflect.

Why were we so persecuted? In the woods and on riverbanks, that question arose in all its nakedness. We thought it was our smell, our longer ears, our fear of darkness. If we overcame our flaws, no one would guess we were Jews. We did not know that was the old Jewish curst passed on.

In 1945 at the end of the war, I was 13. What to do, where to go? There was a sea of refugees flowing from place to place. We had a huge debt and didn't know where to put it down and get rid of it. A great catastrophe leaves us mute. What can we say about the death of one person, what more a heap of corpses. Speech was blocked, almost nothing was said. Speech is to serve existential needs, approaches the depths of the soul, is metaphysical. It is silent. The depths are full. Appropriate vessels were not raised up for what had accumulated.

I was orphaned not only from my parents, but their values and beliefs seemed naive and ridiculous in the face of the monstrous people who tortured us. What would our world be from now on? To go into the pit of cynicism, betray the beliefs of our parents, to betray the faith of my grandparents, inward religiosity, betraying my communist uncles who had sacrificed life for the redemption of humanity.

One dark evening, I realized the ghetto, camps, and forests would never leave me. I was lost in a world of lost values. I wrote the names of my parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins on a piece of cardboard. I wanted to make certain that they had existed, that the house I came from was not imaginary. By writing their names, I brought them to life. They rose and stood before my eyes.

I was no longer an orphan but a boy surrounded by loving people. I was so happy, I kept the paper in the lining of my coat, the key to my chest, precious secrets of the soul. If I felt lonely or oppressed, I took out the cardboard, the real names of the parents I had lost.

Writing opens a hidden world. The written word has the power to kindle imagination and illuminate the self. From cardboard to writing took a long time. Everything revealed in the war years crowded in me like a dark mass. I thouhgt of the ghetto, camp, forest. The images were no less horrible than reality. To avoid images, I would run out to cut myself off from them. The method worked only partially.

The past can't easily be separated from you. In 1946 in Palestine there was a pioneering spirit to create a new Jew, to shed the dread of the past. To turn toward the present and the future. The Jewish past was a curse to escape. The experience of the past seemed something shameful to be erased. Go and uproot from the soul everything experienced from five years to plant a pastoral idea. Forget about that significant part of life. People did that with a heavy price. A person without a past, as dreadful and shameful as it may be, is handicapped without connection to parents, grandparents. Without the values instilled by ancestors, it is like being a living body without a soul.

I wrote letters to my mother at night. It was a collection of trivial details about daily life. If they reached, her, they would make her happy. I did it eagerly night after night, which connected me to the world once mine. It did not act like a magic wand. Vexing questions plagued me. Who was I? What was I doing in an agricultural training program at the edge of the desert? Could I deny the spiritual world? My mother tongue was German. I heard it ag home until age 9. I learned Lithuanian and Prussian during the war. A few German words were sufficient to write to my mother letters full of mistakes.

In the afternoon I studied the Hebrew of daily life and the Bible. A young man from an assimilated, secular home recoils against religious books. I was not familiar with the Hebrew Bible and thought it full of angels and saints. What did they mean to me? A surprise awaited me. The patriarchs of the Bible were not saints but earthly, lively. There were treasures stored in the Bible. I decided to copy a chapter every day.

The Hebrew Bible deals not only with content but with form. The whole enchanted me. Biblical prose is simple, unembellished, lacking description, almost without adjectives. Like all ancient languages, it has a severity, a hard logic without sentimentality. I didnàt know severity suited my life experience. On the suffering of ghetto, camp, forest, it is impossible to lavish words. The greater the suffering, the more important it is to use few words. Pain refuses to be shaped by a language drunk with words.

In Biblical prose not speaking is as important as speech. Outward description is an illusion. We must strive to reach the inner kernel of soul. I didnàt internalize this easily or rapidly. The attraction for the sentimental or the noisy is almost natural. Biblical prose taught me to overcome the tendency the victim to regard himself as always right. Biblical prose taught me an objectivity to the superficiality of one-sidedness. In my life experience, egocentrism lurks in every corner.

Biblical narrative has no ideal people. These are flesh and blood with weaknesses. One is a womanizer, another vengeful, one sends a man to battle to die to take his wife, another is a villain. Primo Levi, on writing of Auschwitz, also wrote in very factual, dry language without rhetorical ornament, perhaps for the same reason.

It took great effort to acquire the Hebrew language. I made it my mother tongue and language to find me to my grandparents and great-grandparents and to learn about the character and destiny of the Jews. I read and copied the Bible. It included various experiences--poetry, prophecy, law, history, philosophy. I was charmed by narrative - people emerged, earthly people, but connected with heaven. There were no saints among them. But they knew in their souls they would not be without answers.

I read the Bible with devotion but it wasn't especially religious reading. I wanted to cling to the roots of language, to the primal experience of stories. It was a great joy, after years of struggling, I wrote a short story. The content was not biblical, but there was something of the poetics of the Bible in it.

Poetry is the assertion of strong people in the world, conscious and unconscious, people with us and those who have passed away. The longings, fears, grief and despair, marvelous moments. Life raises us beyond ourselves. We feel closeness to God. The Bible story has earnestness, like prayer, enclosed within it, it opens the heart in spiritual accounting. It does not lack humor, irony, penetrating criticism, ambiguity and sarcasm. The Biblical narrative is not didactic. It deals with good and evil, obligations, devotion, love for unworldly purposes and love for its own sake without preaching or idealization.

The Biblical narrative teaches that man is dust and ashes and created in God's image, two powerful feelings that traverse the length and breadth of the Bible story. Though heroes of the Bible forget, they are created in God's image. They behave like fatalists addicted to eat, drink and be merry for they will die. Abraham has closeness to God, is intimat ewith revelations, but has moments of weakness. He claims his wife is his sister for fear Pharoah will kill him. His treatment of his wife, of Hagar, is far from splendid.

The Bible shows human beings with lives and tribulations, with great questions on the purpose of our lives. It is great literature to be judged by what and by how. A true statement can sound false, banal, arrogant, garrulous if it doesn't find the correct form.

The story of the sacrifice of Isaac, what absurdity, cruelty, how can it be submitted without discussion? A short harrowing episode riddled with silence. What can the father say to the son? There is a short dialogue between them which is less revelatory than perplexing. Before the abyss our jaws are dropped. What lesson from this trial? Do everything God commands you, even if contrary to feelings of humanity. Any lesson from the episode, subject to a trial beyond comprehension, would be narrow-minded, dogmatic. Silence rather than speech characterizes it-the unsaid is greater than the said. Any confrontation with the abyss silences us. Life subjects us to trials, to many abysses. It is not easy for flesh and blood to dwell together.

Fortunate favored me. I was fated to encounter the Hebrew language. It was in books for 2000 years and the Jewish people studied and prayed it, but didn't speak it. It came to life miraculously 70-80 years ago and I am a witness of its resurrection. So many years of silence are embedded in it, in every sentence. I who came from hell needed a primordial language to speak for me. The Bible taught me to contemplate, to feel the footsteps of life and to write. To write, to live only in what is necessary. Vigilantly to find silence that surrounds the written word. It taught me, but no one can write like the Bible. There is a powerful primordial nature in every page. No human being must imitate the writing engraved in stone, but the spirit of the Bible is open to everyone who is perplexed by the riddle of humanity and our life and to all who would express this world.

The Hebrew language opened my heart and connected me to my ancestors. When I came to Israel in 1946, a lost orphan, I could not imagine that the Hebrew language, not my mother tongue, would rehabilitate my great loss.

Michael O'Brien at Meeting 2008

Michael O'Brien at Meeting 2008, originally uploaded by *clairity*.

I had to fight my way into the first conference at the Meeting 2008 at Rimini by name-dropping (Letizia Bardazzi, remember that!), so instead of standing at the back, I landed a second-row center seat! The hall was already filled with hundreds of people waiting to meet Michael O'Brien, the Canadian author of Father Elijah (which has been translated into eight languages) and some half-dozen more titles published by Ignatius Press.

The unassuming father of eight didn't come to speak about his books, however, but instead addressed the subject of fatherhood and particularly of God our Father, and of his silence which is total presence to us with an immense love.

O'Brien quoted from then Cardinal Ratzinger's address in Palermo in 2000 who offered an urgent message on fatherhood.

Human fatherhood gives us an anticipation of what God is. But when human fatherhood does not exist, when it is experienced only as a biological phenomenon without its human or spiritual dimensions, all statements about God the Father are empty. That is why the crisis of fatherhood we are living in today is an element, perhaps the most important, threatening man in his humanity.

Ratzinger then reflected on the name of God, because God is a Person and has a Name. In the Apocalypse, God's antagonist, the Anti-Christ, is a Beast. He has no name, but a number. In the concentration camps of World War II, faces and names were erased. People were transformed into numbers. This is the spirit of the anti-Christ, to make man a component of the meta-machine, to be reduced only to a function. The anti-Christ makes war on mankind.

In our days, Cardinal Ratzinger warned, we must not forget the monstrosities of history which occur when we adopt the same mentality. The world of the machine becomes normal. The machine imposes the same law as the concentration camp when men are interpreted by a computer, translated into numbers.

God our Father has a name. He calls each of us by name. He is a person who looks at us and sees another person. The true story of man is that we are sons and daughters, and we can never be things. To be a thing is the working definition of materialism, of a soft totalitarianism.

This is homo-sino-deo, man without God, autonomous man. Some have never known a Father, are orphaned, or think they never had a Father. The problem is multidimensional: social, psychological, spiritual.

O'Brien went on to relate three personal stories from his experience as a father which I won't transcribe because too much would be lost without his own delivery. The impression left was of a strong man of faith who encouraged us to trust in God's paternal love for each of us and to accept the sacrifice united to the cross that love needs to expand the heart.

St. Catherine of Siena: lay, that is, Christian

I didn't know much about St. Catherine before reading Louis de Wohl's Lay Siege to Heaven. I knew that she was Dominican, but I didn't know that she was a tertiary, a lay affiliate of the Dominicans. She is called a nun throughout the book but she lived most of her life in her mother's house. In her letters especially, she urged people in every part of society to move beyond their own interests and embrace catholic peace. At one point, someone describes her as both a politician and a saint. Now, that's what it means to be Christian, or lay.

Everything Is Possible

On beginning the new book for our School of Community, Is It Possible to Live this Way? by Fr. Giussani, we are talking about the problem of trust. Fr. Giussani issues this challenge: "the more one is moral, the more one is capable of trusting; the less one is moral, the less one is capable of trusting, because immorality is like a schizophrenia or psychic dissociation." Marie and Suzanne have blogged on their impressions of this provocative question.

As far as trust goes, our natural reaction seems to be that it is a matter of being smart more than being moral. Of course, we don't want to be deceived. We would even risk missing out, rather than be duped. This is the problem set out in a wonderful little parable by Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Gimpel the Fool." "I am Gimpel the fool. I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that's what folks call me."

Gimpel is a storyteller, and he tells the story of himself as the most gullible person in his village. He believed any story anyone would tell, or at least would consider it.

I like a golem believed everyone. In the first place, everything is possible, as it is written in the Wisdom of the Fathers. I've forgotten just how: Second, I had to believe when the whole town was down on me! .... "You want me to call everyone a liar?": What was I to do? I believed them, and I hope at least that did them some good.

For example, a yeshiva student came and announced: "[T]he Messiah has come. The dead have arisen." Foolish Gimpel asked why he didn't hear the ram's horn blow.

Like Hosea, Gimpel has the misfortune to have an unfaithful wife. As the schoolmaster told him, "There isn't a woman in the world who is not the granddaughter of Eve." Four months after their marriage, she is delivering the child of another father, and Gimpel does what he must when a wife is in labor. "The thing to do was to go to the House of Prayer to repeat Psalms, and that was what I did." Gimpel is the true realist. He says, "You can't live without errors." Besides, he loves the little boy.

For Gimpel, there's more at stake in believing than outing lies: "What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in."

Time unravels everything. On her deathbed, his wife asks forgiveness. Gimpel quotes the rabbi: "Belief in itself is beneficial. It is written that a good man lived by his faith."

Now, Gimpel warns us that after his wife's death he leaves the town and becomes a storyteller, so take his "yarns" as you will. Or just accept his lesson on believing.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world... When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.