Impaired as she was by lupus, O’Connor may not have been able to barrel ahead with the same level of prolific productivity as some of her contemporaries—such as James Baldwin for example-- but neither did she let it bring her career to a screeching halt between the time of her diagnosis and her death on August 3, 1964. 

She followed the novel Wise Blood with a collection of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find, in 1955; the novel The Violent Bear it Away in 1960; and the short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge ––a book on which she worked virtually right up until her death–– published posthumously in 1965. In between the writing and the publishing, she marshaled her strength to travel (aided by crutches) and lecture, write articles for popular magazines (for which she was generally well paid), and write numerous letters to friends, supporters, and critics. 

(To read part 1 of this story please click here. For part 2 click this link.)
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The O’Connor readers and scholars now know would not have been possible without a tightly woven network of friends and family members who supported her work through belief in, and out of love for, her. After illness derailed her plans to live the life of a postmodern New York author, she famously surrounded herself with peacocks at Andalusia, her family’s farm, and allowed the world to come to her just as much as she continued to embrace it on the page and through speaking engagements. Fellow authors, theologians, aspiring writers, general admirers, and would-be lovers in the form of men as well as women often made their way to her front door.  

​Her editor, Robert Giroux, believed enough in the corpus of her work that in 1971 he published The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. A compilation of all her short fiction, The Complete Stories went on to win the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972, and in 2009—shortly after Brad Gooch’s biography was published–– was voted “The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction.” 

Of all those who shared their life’s energies to help endow Flannery O’Connor’s with enduring meaning possibly none were more crucial than her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor. The relationship between mother and daughter could alternate between a sensitive symbiosis and a barely-restrained combativeness. But: the fact is that despite her great intellectual prowess Flannery O’Connor was made an invalid by her disease and it could not have been any easier for her mother to watch her daughter’s slow agonizing physical decline any more than it had been to watch her husband’s. She nevertheless bore the “cross” of the affliction which defined so much of her own life’s story.

As such, she did the kinds of things caregivers tend to do when committed to ensuring as high a quality of life as they can for someone they love: setting aside a thermos of hot coffee at night to share with Flannery in the morning, running a farm to secure an income, tolerating the droppings and cries of beautiful but annoying peacocks, traveling abroad with her daughter even when she herself was ill, and standing guard at her hospital room door to ensure a chance at rest and possible recovery. 

Regina Cline is very much present in the pages of Flannery but a section or two presented within the context of her struggles to assist her daughter might have made this powerful biography even more compelling. She outlived the writer by almost thirty-one years, dying on May 8, 1995, at the age of ninety-nine. 

In the acknowledgments section of his biography on the author, Brad Gooch informs readers that he “first stepped into the world of Flannery O’Connor in the late 1970s.” Thoroughly smitten by what he found in that world, he respectfully wrote her close friend Sally Fitzgerald, editor of The Habit of Being, Letters of Flannery O’Connor, to obtain her blessings for his hope to write a biography. Fitzgerald advised him in 1980 against such an undertaking because she was already in the process of writing a literary biography of her friend. Consequently, Gooch held off and waited, even beyond Fitzgerald’s death in 2000, for a book that never appeared.
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Then, approached by an editor in 2003 about a biography on O’Connor, it clearly was not an offer he could refuse. A dream which had been deferred for more than two decades finally saw the light of day in 2009 and by most accounts it was very much worth the wait.

If you missed part 1 of this post and want to check it out please click here. Part 2 begins now: 

McNaughton's nods to the late "Imaginary Man of Las Cruces," poet Nicanor Parra, in the poems "¿ENTONCES QUÉ?" and "(COLIN CHRISTOPHER" (open parentheses per original) should not surprise anyone. Given the company his pen has kept over the decades, it would be too much of a stretch to say he and Parra share the same antipoetic approach to their craft. There nevertheless are similarities which reveal a kinship between their aesthetic instincts. The humor employed by both poets at times oscillates between comic hilarity and nightmare darkness. It can assume the form of thinly-disguised self-deprecation or more overtly-poised social and political satire.

If Parra's is a poetry of anguished laughter and mournful tears as some have suggested, then it may be McNaughton's is an equally intense but more restrained verse of amused hopeful smiles and astonished frowns.  Both employ a minimum of embellishments to achieve maximum provocation. Both balance ironic incongruities with subtle personal resolve in a manner similar to the way jazz musicians utilize highly-charged counter-rhythms to produce captivating performances. Both, as Parra put it, incorporate "the hideousness and the beauty of the world" (Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier, Interviews with Latin American Writers, 1989). Therefore, naked pain and uncertain joy play crucial roles in rendering disturbing truths aimed at disrupting, or reclaiming, different kinds of power.
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The narrator of "CHILDHOOD + YOUTH" laments, via "figures of speech," wars of different kinds which have never ended, and, numerous bridges burned while waging them. He finds his understanding of these interior and exterior traumas challenged by doubt, but then reaffirmed by an authoritative witness who knows what it means to survive unnerving cycles of destruction and rebirth. Taking a trip "to David Highsmith's furniture store," he buys a copy of Hector France's Musk, Hashish and Blood:

​Such healing, empowering, and time-bending solidarity can only come with dedicated practices of remembrance and recognition, among the hallmarks of McNaughton's extensive oeuvre. As the late writer Benjamin Hollander put it in "The Pants of Time," his definitive review of TINY WINDOWS, "McNaughton’s work achieves a testament of personal observation embedded in a trans-historical tendance of the imagination." Moreover: "He discovers history for himself anew..." (Boston Review, June 5, 2015).

He also increases its capacity for simultaneously preserving autobiographical identity and expanding notions of community to accommodate kindred spirits occupying physical and non-physical forms. Thus the poem "AS EFFECT AN ECHO" is less an elegy in which McNaughton bids farewell to Hollander than it is the written continuation of a relationship:

​The stars in the heart comprise the sweet substance of enduring friendships, or alliances, and even less-binding associations, which take on a kind of sacredness for the way they inform and sustain each other’s' personalities. They reject the insanity proposed by stars as symbols of genocide sewn onto the clothes of Hollander's ancestors in Nazi concentration camps as they do all restrictions placed on basic human freedoms and civility.   

Nowhere in the pages of SOMEWHERE IN THE STREAM is the consecrated nature of authentic friendships, especially as forged by shared dedications to poetry, more intensely realized than in "(COLIN CHRISTOPHER [Stuart]" and "OLD SOCKS." Within the former he describes the synthesization of a poet's work and person as "twins.' McNaughton then offers this observation: "...Whatever The World's suppositions of/ poetry and of what a poet ought to be, whenever those/ 'twins' descend and ascend, below and above, to the/ disturbance of truth on behalf of trust, then we are in the/ dimension of 'The Imaginary Man,'..."

In "OLD SOCKS" our narrator confronts the reality of mortality and what it has meant within the context of life lived up to this point. While wrestling with "my very own tangle/ of being," the poet reflects on successions of wars which have threatened the innate integrity of that being. In contrast, friendship has helped guard against the threat by reinforcing the front lines of self:

​Whether writing autobiographically or assuming the voice of another seems less important than the invitation to celebrate shared histories, friendships, lives, knowledge, acts of compassion, or acts of remembrance. These endow life with a quality of being which--despite media glamorizations of artificial presences in a world where such creations too often diminish capacities for actual thinking or organic human interaction--seem to lose more value by the day. Likewise, different literary strategies may have their irrefutable uses and powers, but in the end they too are floating along with everything else Somewhere in the Stream of discoveries and encounters as we navigate shifting currents, or dodge the increasing fury of hurricanes, and hold on for the sake of poetry and each other. 

Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, the Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962,  is not the kind of book I could rate based on nothing more than how much I did or did not like it. The subject matter is much too deep for that and the dangers the author endured to write this phenomenal work far too real.

Jisheng's account as presented to us in the English-language edition of Tombstone is a single-volume 629-page condensed version of the original Chinese-language 1,200-page 2-volume set first published in Hong Kong a decade ago. There's no need to question what may or may not have been lost in translation because Jisheng provided so much fact-based data with which to work in the original publication.

Moreover, Tombstone is much more than just a triumph of historical writing. It represents in many ways the triumph of a movement to shed light on "the worst famine in human history." As an integral part of that movement: "Yang got people who experienced the famine to describe it in their own words. He found local journalists who'd witnessed and reported on murders and starvation and got them to write their memoirs. He located and interviewed local implementers of the fatal policies. He got surviving resisters to recount their experiences" (pp. X-XI). 

​It took a while for me to adjust my brain to magnitude of the fact that the horror described actually occurred less than 70 years ago. In that hellish avoidable atrocity an estimated 30 to 45 million people died within a four-year period basically because of authoritarian arrogance and a total disregard for the freedom of individuals. Yet my shocked incredulity as a reader is nothing compared to the painful awakening Jisheng experienced as a member of the Communist Youth League proudly committed to promoting the policies of Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" initiative only to discover those very policies in 1959 caused his father's death. 

Ironically, it was while working in the late 1960s as an official journalist that he learned "how 'news' was manufactured, and how news organs served as the mouthpiece of political power." (Very different dynamics from what U.S. President Donald Trump's so often proclaims as "fake news.") However, it was not until the late 1970s that the awful deadly scope of the great famine became apparent:

"Now we knew that it was a man-made disaster that had caused tens of millions of people to starve to death... In my effort to shake off deception, I came to understand the social background of my father's death and to reflect more profoundly on his life..." (pp. 11-12).

That "deception" has remained hard for a lot of Chinese to shake off in part because of many official's refusal to acknowledge the famine for what it was and insist on referring to it in such euphemistic terms as "the three years of natural disaster," or "the years of difficulties." Another seems to be to avoid the appearance of discrediting the legacy of People's Republic of China founder Zedong.

Tombstone is not easy reading by any means. Where Jisheng narrates the actions leading up to the abuses of power, and fear of the same, which led up to the famine, he is straightforward and factually dense. That is a quality hardcore historians relish but average readers might find less entertaining. And in a way that is the point.
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Jisheng's objective as a journalist is to share awareness of an event which it would seem impossible for the entire world not to know about already, but which it appears relatively few actually do. As a human being and the son of foster-parents who gave all they had to raise him and support his education goals, he is determined to honor those parents and the dozens of millions who lost their lives to the famine. Therefore, the title selected for the book: "A tombstone is a memory made concrete." (p. 3)

The result his investigative labors is indispensible documentation of officials' motives for allowing the tragedy to occur; and, how many hypocritically gorged themselves on the good life while entire villages literally starved to death. Yet such documentation is balanced with reports difficult to read for a very different reason. In short, Jisheng does not censor the stories of people describing acts of cannibalism which they either witnessed or committed themselves.

We learn about: people in villages who wait for strangers to come along so they can kill and eat them, an adolescent sister who kills and eats her younger brother after their parents have died, people who wait a few hours after funerals so they can dig up corpses and consume them. These and other actions seem too extreme to believe they really occurred in a civilized nation. But we are aware now that they did. Some people even describe which parts of the human body they found most delectable.
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If you're a fan of the movie Bone Tomahawk, starring Kurt Russell, Lili Simmons, and Patrick Wilson, and you did not flinch watching the scene where "Troglodytes" split a man in half to eat him, then the above accounts of cannibalism might not bother you too much. Anyone who did flinch, throw up, scream, or faint, can empathize to some meaningful degree with those who survived the horror of the Great Famine and with Jisheng's determination to tell their collective story.

The importance of the history provided in Tombstone is evident enough in its own right, or at least it should be. "Human memory," the author tells us, "is the ladder on which a country and a people advance. We must remember not only the good things, but also the bad; the bright spots, but also the darkness" (p. 3). 

The record of this particular memory is a significant indicator of the dangers that can befall populations which opt for authoritarian rule by a single individual, or small group of individuals, versus government by a robust engaged citizenry exercising some form of democracy. Even more than pitting one political ideology against another, it is about accepting some share of communal responsibility that automatically comes with living in any society hoping to make great strides forward, or just to maintain for its citizens peace, security, and decently-stocked refrigerators. 

Aberjhani
author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

What was at the center of Sartre’s sometimes mercurial passions and obsessions? Perhaps it was less a rejection of personalities and movements that it was a devotion to something which likely was not always apparent: the facilitation of an organic dialogue on how best to steer humanity toward acknowledgement of the ways it engineered unspeakable tragedies and why it is imperative we accept collective responsibility for correcting them. 

To read part 1 of this article please click here.

In this, he was much more a world citizen, or internationalist, than a nationalist. Cohen-Solal demonstrates as much through accounts of his physical and psychic immersion into different cultural and political environments as a traveler, and through applied adjustments of his literary focus as an engaged philosopher. Referring to the aftermath of a 1945 trip to the United States: 

​ And, as philosopher and social justice advocate Cornel West points out in his introduction to the biography, despite any criticisms of the man: 

​The book publishing industry being what it is in 2017, marketplace titles are often the result of sensational headlines or celebrity personalities rather than the value represented by the quality of a manuscript’s substance. As such, in addition to Cohen-Solal and Cornel West, readers of the American trade paperback centennial edition of Sartre: A Life can thank The New Press for its proven dedication to principles and practices that support the publication of books based on their intrinsic merit. Doing so is not about worshipping someone like-Paul Sartre––whose closest contemporary counterpart may be the African-American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison—as a cultural icon. It is about maintaining access to the kind of literature on which humanity depends to help preserve whatever hard-won rights and freedoms still exist.

​Among the most beguiling of Sartre’s diagnostic tools of philosophical inquiry was how he chose to employ the biographies of others, such as Jean Genet’s and Gustave Flaubert’s, as mirrors. Rather than emulating their approaches to literary form, metaphysical paradoxes, or political conundrums, he used them to “think against himself,” as if his intellect were a knife, or sword, and theirs whetstones upon which he sharpened concepts and strategies. It is possible Cohen-Solal, though she indicates otherwise, has done the same in regard to Sartre with her masterful examination of one of the 20th century’s most engaged, courageous, and influential creative thinkers.

Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle continues to win acclaim for a number of reasons: one is the author’s insightful blend of world cultures to create a single tapestry of world-class literature. Another is his seemingly
seamless fusion of classic genres such as Gothic, erotica, and horror to create something new beneath the literary sun. And a third is his invention of two of
the most compelling characters in modern literature.  
 
The role played by the defining power of character throughout The Gargoyle becomes evident in its first horrific opening pages as our nameless anti-hero drinks and drives his way to a life-altering crash. The detailed account of the inferno that engulfs and permanently disfigures him is as lucidly terrifying as it is mesmerizingly precise.  It’s not the kind of thing that most people survive but this man does, albeit with severe anatomical damage and loss: “I could hear the bubbling of my skin as the flames kissed it.” In fact, as a man and former porn star, he suffers the loss
of the one appendage with which he had earned his living. 
  
During the course of his hospital recovery, the narrator battles thoughts of suicide, a growing addiction to morphine, and the excruciating pain of cultivating the growth of brand new skin. Enter Marianne Engel––“She appeared in the burn ward door dressed in a light green hospital gown, with those unsolvable eyes and that riotously entangled hair”––a former psychiatric patient and artist famed for sculpting gargoyles. She is convinced that she and the once-upon-a-time porn star have shared at least one major previous lifetime together when she was a German nun and he was a mercenary soldier. Even more odd, however, is Engel’s claim to have never died at all while waiting some seven centuries to reconnect with her once-beloved. She is comfortable enough with this belief that she strips naked in her new/old friend’s hospital room to reveal a body covered with a luxury of tattoos: a
beaded rosary and cross, a snake coiling up her leg to her sex, a Sacred Heart
on her left breast, a pair of angel wings upon her back, and more. 
 
Whereas we might expect the irony to be painful, it is instead profoundly daring. Engel stands before her friend painted with beautiful symbols while the man once accustomed to being paid for his beauty is now something more akin to her gargoyle sculptures. To a degree, it would seem that his extreme disfigurements make him into the “Gargoyle” of the book’s title. But herein may lie a central aspect of author Davidson’s literary art. Is his anti-hero a gargoyle now because of how he looks, or was he in fact more of a gargoyle because of the cynicism and self-absorption that dominated his personality before his life-transforming accident? And does the ensuing journey to emotional and spiritual recovery make actually make him more beautiful than he ever was in the past?     
  
Marianne seems at first to be a hyper eccentric teller of tales whose stories simultaneously puzzle, captivate, and motivate her friend.  It turns out, however,
that these stories––in such diverse settings as France, Japan,Germany, and
Iceland––have a much greater function than simply passing the time while recuperating. Davidson’s skill at evoking the passions and dilemmas of characters in different cultures and historical eras is truly admirable. Likewise, his Dickensian talent for the creation of a cast of supporting characters who, against the odds, lend credible depth, substance, and color to the narrator’s and Marianne’s fantastic  story.
 
Maniacal or not (or more precisely, “schizophrenic or not,”as our narrator suspects) Marianne becomes much like the angel indicated by the tattooed wings on her back as she moves our narrator into her home. There, she alternately nurses him, tells one amazing story after another, and works herself into frenzied bloody exhaustion to complete a final series of gargoyle sculptures, with the very last being of you-know-who. As one grows weaker and the other grows stronger, their original roles reverse and readers find themselves rethinking the plausibility of Marianne’s extraordinary claims.
 
Interwoven masterfully throughout The Gargoyle are deeply embedded allusions to Dante Alighieri’s Inferno that not only tell the history of the book itself, but that in some ways re-write the masterpiece and present it in modern form as The Gargoyle. To fully understand such a notion, one has to read and actually
experience Davidson’s triumphant first novel. A number of readers have suggested
that taking on The Inferno (for those of us who did not get to it in high school or college) either after or before reading The Gargoyle, doubly  enhances the pleasure of delving into this exceptional work of new millennium fiction.    

by Aberjhani