On November 8th, 2024 Zadie Smith received The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. In her speech she connected the recent presidential election with Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” first published in The Kenyon Review in 1953:
Thank you. I’ve been told I have about ten minutes. For some reason it seems to be my destiny to accept literary awards at times of world historical disaster. If I was superstitious, I might conclude it was God’s way of teasing me, though Lord knows I need no reminders of the relative insignificance of my work. But here I am again, accepting a literary prize, feeling somewhat alienated from myself, experiencing myself as a posthumous entity. Zadie Smith: she of all those novels, all those essays. Thank you for celebrating her this evening – if she were here, I know she would be very grateful. And now, for the rest of the nine minutes, I would like to speak about somebody else: Flannery O’ Connor. Early on in her short career – in her short life – she wrote for the Kenyon Review, and in a rare mode unknown to me: as if her life depended on it. Her life did depend on it. Me, I write for magazines and journals and publishers, I write for myself, and sometimes others, but I also get to go to places, and have many intimate relationships, and a partner, and children, and martinis, and my health. Flannery O’ Connor existed as writing, pure and simple, so when the Kenyon Review published those remarkable stories, they were the means by which Flannery extended herself into this world, as she was never really able to do in real life. Via the Review, her spirit and mind traveled abroad – soared, actually – from Savannah through Ohio and outwards to the rest of America, and then far beyond these shores, where she reached me, as a young woman, in my mother’s flat, in Willesden. Even back then I never confused Flannery for a saint – as so many people did, much to her annoyance – but I knew at once that here was a dead woman of spectacular gifts, who was presently reaching beyond the grave to give to others what had been given to her. I am thinking especially of a story called The Life You Save May be Your Own. In that dark fable, a flim-flam man, a plausible American shyster, a guy with one arm who promises to fix broken things for nothing and improve everybody’s lot – this extremely shifty guy, usefully named ‘Mr Shiftlet’ – turns up at a broken-down homestead in Georgia. Fond of mansplaining, he tells everybody how things are and should be, and also who he is.
“There ain’t a broken thing on this plantation,” he claims. “That I couldn’t fix for you, one-arm jackleg or not. I’m a man,” he said with a sullen dignity, “even if I ain’t a whole one. I got,” he said, tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he was going to say, “a moral intelligence!”
In this confident self-determination, Mr Shiftlet is quite different from Flannery herself, who once said “I won’t ever be able entirely to understand my own work or even my own motivations.” No, Mr Shiftlet is not like that. He’s the kind of person who thinks he can tell you very precisely what kind of a person he is. A fraud, in other words. And down in Georgia, he finds two easy marks: a gullible, ruthless woman called Lucynell, and her simple daughter, also called Lucynell, who has the body of a thirty-year-old but the mind of a toddler. The important thing to know about this story is that everybody involved either thinks they are a pretty good person, or at least appear to be so. Lucynell the elder believes herself to be a decent hardworking Southern mother, who does not suffer fools, looks after her vulnerable daughter, and has no mortgage on her property. Mr Shiflet himself is full of moral bromides, and treacly piety, and offers to fix up a leaky roof for free and even mend the family car – all of which he does. And Lucynell the younger? Well, she is non-verbal and mentally impaired and perhaps does not have a concept of the good, but we, as readers, certainly cannot imagine any malice in her. She is utterly dependent on the mercy of others. Between these three people an arrangement occurs: Mr Shiftlet will work on the property and the car, and in exchange he will have a place to sleep, a car he can use, and some good Southern company – which, as a one-armed man with no prospects or money would appear a pretty good deal. Lucynell the elder will get her roof fixed. And Lucynell the younger is taught her first word by the enterprising Mr Shiftlet: he somehow teaches her to say ‘bird.’ Bird bird bird she says and this appears to give her pleasure – and that’s one of the gifts we humans can give each other: pleasure. But now the story turns darker. What began as some pleasant bartering, of the kind that perhaps went on in the earliest days of the American settlements, moves swiftly to cold, hard cash: Mr Shiftlet needs some money to paint this newly fixed car of his. And then, from the business of capital, we shift into an even older American register: the sale of people. Oh, nobody explicitly says ‘I’d like to sell my daughter.’ But in effect, this is what occurs. Lucynell the elder – extolling to Mr Shiflet the potential joys of having a wife who can’t talk back – gives Mr Shiftlet enough money for a honeymoon in an Alabama motel. His part of the deal is that the couple will afterwards come home and live with the elder Lucynell, who loves her daughter and does not want to live alone. Off they go. Never in my life will I forget the moment when Mr Shiftlet, bored of his non-verbal child-bride, leaves her, en route,asleep at the counter of a roadside diner, telling the waitress she’s a hitchhiker whom he hasn’t the time to rouse nor wait for… After which, he gets back on the road. A little while later he picks up a young male hitchhiker – it’s his good deed for the day – and commences sentimentally lecturing this young man about the goodness of mothers! The story ends with the boy leaping out of the car, very suddenly, apparently instinctively repulsed by this Mr Shiftlet. After which it begins to rain, and Mr Shiftlet falls into a pit of despond and fitful tears. An orgy of self-pity which never transforms into self-recrimination. Off he drives towards Mobile, in his free car, with money in his pocket. The end. One important thing to remember about fascists: they are always terribly sentimental. Anyway, teenage me sat there with that story. Imagining the old Lucynell at home, waiting for the return of her beloved daughter and new son-in-law. Imagining young Lucynell, waking up at that diner counter, far from home, uncomprehending, able only to say: bird. I thought about the difference between good intentions and actual goodness. Between selfishness and evil. I realised the whole story was constructed in such a way as to nudge me in the direction of that quality Mr Shiftlet so enthusiastically ascribes to himself: moral intelligence.
Why am I telling you all this? Because the world is full of Mr Shiftlets. One of them has just won the presidency – again. And the world is also full of people like the elder Lucynell, which is to say, people like you and me, who barter and buy and sell and compromise and trade and cheat and do their best and sometimes their worst, but all the while thinking of themselves as pretty decent folks. And, finally, the world is also full of young Lucynells. Truly afflicted people. Truly vulnerable people. Struggling people. Who haven’t the power to utilise others as the rest of us do. Who can only rely on other people to fashion a tolerable world. Sometimes, at certain junctures of history, like right now, it can feel like Mr Shiftlets are everywhere, in the ascendant, and that there is no grace left in this fallen world, and we have all of us abandoned Lucynell in that diner. All I know is that to get through the next four years we will need all the moral intelligence we can muster. We’ll have to develop it like an instinct. Like that young hitchhiker. We will have to be very clear about whose car we have got into, and how to get out of it even if it happens to be driving in the direction we wanted to go. We’ll have to learn to protect ourselves and our communities as best we can from the sentimentality, viscousness and manipulations of our own Mr Shiftlet. We will not fall into fits of self-pity, or if we do, we will remember to go further along the road until we reach self-recrimination, too. And we must try, above all, to attend to the afflicted, to the truly vulnerable, even if our minds are on our own leaky roofs and broken cars. To finish, here’s a quote for you, from Flannery herself: “You have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.” Thank you.
The 2024 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement Gala
