Bruce Springsteen on Flannery O'Connor and inner meanness

"The really important reading that I did began in my late twenties, with authors like Flannery O'Connor.  There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about.  They were a big, big revelation.  She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn't be getting it.  It was always at the core of every one of her stories—the way that she'd left the hole there, that hole that's inside of everybody.  There was some dark thing—a component of spirituality—that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own.  She knew original sin—knew how to give it the pesh (sic) of a story.  She had talent and she had ideas, and the one served the other."

Bruce Springsteen in conversation with Will Percy, for DoubleTake Magazine (Spring 1998)

(Do you remember DoubleTake?  How I loved that magazine.  The photograph above is of Asbury Park, taken in winter, a few years back.)

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The Good Writer

"When asked why she wrote, she replied, 'Because I'm good at it.'"

That's Flannery O'Connor as quoted by Joy Williams in her New York Times Book Review review of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.

Because I'm good at it. And why not? Why not abandon all the philosophizing for a moment—put the moral avatars in one corner and the world peace makers in another, give the riff raff their pot of coffee (very black) and their prime rib (bloody rare), and make a declaration?

Flannery O'Connor wrote lonely, she wrote dying, she wrote in pain, she wrote through. Flannery O'Connor wrote, and she was good. Didn't need the world to tell her (though it did). She had no time to lose.

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