The Strange Psychology of Admiration

I just did Ms. Phillips a favor in microcosm and purchased her debut collection, which I read, in Wolfgram Memorial Library, some odd thirty three years ago, in 1982. Read yes, but cannot remember the slightest thing about it, because of my young vibrating brain fumes. Of all Phillips work, I believe I responded to Black Tickets best, but if I can be unkind about my brain damage and overzealous emotional longing, I can stick a few pins in feminine literary endeavor which has its moment in the sun and then becomes more of a routine expectation. Much like Lorrie Moore, with whom I only have passing familiarity as a reader, Jayne Anne never quite sealed the deal with her modern overlay on the South's agrarian argument with the cosmopolitan North, and I harbor the vague idea that I was referred to her work because of the effective shock value of her plot points about body betrayal-- one of her stories where this is accessible and easy to grasp is "Home", an anthologized piece about a dying grandmother and the battle with "smell". The bonny instructor is less confrontational about fecal matter than I am in my posts, but "Home" is brave, honest, nicely balanced between burgeoning youth and the struggle with age over death.

Why the bottom fell out for Phillips after that is anyone's guess. Writing is a lousy way to make a living. Machine Dreams, her novel, has some interesting tropes, but those figures of speech weren't enough to sustain the book, and like many short story authors, she falters in long form, and Fast Lanes, which I now read at Paley, alone and unhappy, did not seem to sharpen the perspectives of her voice. Why then I cut her portrait photo out of P&W, taping it on my door in Diamond Park, and wrote her publisher a frothy enthusiastic letter, and then my more dangerous poem, "fortissimo" published in Metis, a tribute, yes, but it was also something else, a form of sexual imitation so that I could get laid the way I imagined Jayne Anne herself presenting her body to men as something to be feasted. Heady stuff, eh?

Yes, but both Jayne Anne and I will soon be passing the torch, and to those who will listen, although you'll have to learn this for yourselves: it is okay to get "blown away," by a writer who touches on your affinity, but this doesn't mean they aren't ambivalent about hero worship, that they aren't flawed people too who have to have practiced shields with students, and they will not necessarily offer you the friendship you think you don't have.

I don't think I asked her if she ever got the letter. It was foolish in any case; the poem, however, will be in my book, with her work more evenly adjudicated.