I am thinking tonight, as I address this unenviable task, of Flannery O’Connor, because she would advise against it, my addressing this unenviable task. I revere her in a way that she would also advise against, in fact would probably repudiate outright, hard: as something of the godhead, or goddesshead, of letters. I like touching the goddesshead. I do it whenever I can. I’ll touch the godhead too. Once I was so drunk on the grounds of Rowan Oak and a storm hit so violently that I was convinced Wash Jones would come out of the house with the scythe and I would not hear him for the thunder and only at the last minute in a flash of lightning would I see him with the weapon poised to behead me, which I deserved.
I call Flannery’s cousin Louise Florencourt sometimes to touch the goddesshead. Louise is nine months younger than Flannery would be were she alive, and regally correct (she was one of the first three women to attend Harvard Law School, in 1937), and never married, and is Catholic, and is literary executrix of her famous cousin’s estate, and lives right there in Milledgeville in her famous cousin’s mother’s big house on Greene Street so fine that it once served as the temporary governor’s mansion, and Louise still has a mule, Flossie, on the famous farm, a hennie mule that was almost there when Flannery was, or maybe was there, mules live forever and my arithmetic is weak and I have not asked Louise if Flossie and Flannery actually overlapped, so Louise is to my mind the closest thing, genotypically and phenotypically, to Flannery O’Connor, and when I talk to Louise I feel it’s as close as it’s going to get to talking to Flannery, touching the goddesshead.
Sometimes Louise quietly rebukes, and that is thrilling. Once at her country club at lunch I told her of my recent divorce and she presumed I would be in some kind of rebound peril and she said, “You have to be very careful, Mr. Powell. Of course I’m too old.” I froze the way I imagine one does when playing cards in a saloon and you are accused of cheating.
I feel I may have gotten a little off-line. Maybe I should say here that I think the craft of fiction has a lot more to do with being off-line than with being on-line, a whole lot more, but in saying that I would be appreciably more off-line than I wish to be at this juncture. I have not even properly detailed yet why this task is unenviable and why in its particulars I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor. I have intimated that these are things I will say, and one of the things fiction must do, I am afraid, is deliver what is intimated will be delivered. Here is Flannery O’Connor, then, if you must have it, on the giving of advice, and why I am calling the giving of advice unenviable:
“I am becoming convinced that anybody who gives anybody else advice ought to spend forty days in the desert both before and after.”
My arithmetic is not so weak that I cannot figure that to be eighty days in the desert. That is too much. I have no experience with the desert but I spent thirty-seven days on the ground in Kenya, as opposed to in the safari car where mzungu is advised to stay, and was so debilitated by what the French doctor attending my survival called an intestinal weerus after we spent three months looking for a parasite that could not be found by every blood test there is, and stool analysis, and finally sonogram, which altogether I estimate would have cost about ten thousand dollars in the states but that ran me $250 in France, so please do not tell me that we do not want a public option or that socialized medicine is evil-–was so debilitated by the weerus that I found Jesus, or He me, walking along a quay on a midwinter day in sunny Bretagne.
Jesus I now know, though Flannery would cane me for this, is the invisible friend that we tell children after age five they may not have. He will pull you through, even through a weerus from Africa. My Jesus wears a Pink Panther suit dirty at the knees.
I love it when Powell gets going.
