Some years ago, I was in New Orleans at a small academic conference. On Sunday, my flight back to Georgia was canceled due to storms rolling across the South. The agent told me that Tuesday was the earliest they could get me back to Georgia. Since I had classes the next morning, I rented a car for a marathon drive.
To stay awake, I downloaded a new album released by Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska, because I’d read it was inspired by Flannery O’Connor, and I usually found music from “The Boss” full of energy. “This will keep me awake,” I thought.
Big mistake.
The album consists of Springsteen, his guitar, and his harmonica—nothing else. Slow and melancholic, it features no driving drum, no bouncing bass, no soulful saxophone. The kind of music and lyrics better designed to put you to sleep, and with bad dreams at that.
Years later, the album is the focus of a new biopic on Springsteen that was just made available for streaming, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. It chronicles a difficult juncture in Springsteen’s career. This offers the opportunity to look more closely at the album, especially its association with Southern writer Flannery O’Connor. Even more, Springsteen has said it is the album by which he should be remembered.
Like him or not, Springsteen channels a kind of primeval energy in the studio and on the stage. He is a force of nature: For example, “Badlands” expresses the gut-wrenching exercise of the will necessary to confront life’s obstacles, an effort buoyed by “faith, hope, and love”:
Badlands, you’ve got to live it every day
Let the broken hearts stand as the price you have to pay. . .
Well, I believe in the love that you gave me
I believe in the faith that could save me
I believe in the hope
And I pray that some day
It may raise me above these badlands . . .
Nebraska and O’Connor
Nebraska, however, brings something different. Some call the album a tour de force; others prefer the flirtatious ambivalence of “I’m On Fire,” the good times of “Glory Days,” or the fun of “Dancin’ in the Dark.” Yet some will find Nebraska an acquired taste; others will shake the dust off their device, delete the album, and move on. It was Springsteen’s sixth studio album, released in 1982. The title song, “Nebraska,” is about the serial killer Charles Raymond Starkweather who killed eleven people in Nebraska and was executed for his crimes.
“State Trooper” is a rhythmic silent plea by a troubled car thief, silently asking that a highway trooper not stop him, otherwise the trooper may not live the day.
Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife
The only thing that I got’s been bothering me my whole life
Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me
Please don’t you stop me, please don’t you stop me
The title of the film, “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” appears in the last lines of the song with the thief’s angst-ridden prayer:
Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer
Hi ho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere
“Johnny 99” opens with a sorrowful wail. It features a disgruntled ex-worker at a Ford plant whose frustration ends in the death of a hotel clerk. Upon capture, the tortured worker begs for the death penalty.
Fr. Damian Ference tells us that Springsteen was reading Flannery O’Connor in the days leading up to Nebraska. Springsteen was once Catholic but says he left the Catholic Church, especially because the nuns were clueless in managing his temperament. He reports in his memoir, Born to Run, that a sister once stuffed him in a trash can and made him stay there because “that’s where you belong.” Yet Springsteen concedes that though he left the Church, “The Catholic Church never left me.”
The sad but melodic ballad “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” was an album outtake, which means it was one of the seven compositions that could not be included on the album. It is also the title of O’Connor’s best-known short story and the title story of her first compilation of short stories. It is her story most often anthologized in American literature textbooks. Springsteen also uses one of its most memorable lines explaining that there is a “meanness in the world.” The phrase is ascribed to the Misfit, the escaped serial killer who executes Bailey’s family. The last to die is the obnoxious Grandmother. The Misfit tells her,
He [Jesus] thown everything off balance. If he did what he said he did, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.
Nebraska has an existentialist flavor; some might ascribe the same to O’Connor, though that is misleading. Springsteen, though, does not take his narrative to the extreme as in the original O’Connor’s story. For Springsteen, the song is about a young woman who is (again) left lovelorn; this time she pines beneath a Christmas tree. She worries that she will have to tell her daughter that “a good man is hard to find.” By contrast, O’Connor completes her story with six violent deaths—no soft Yuletide glow. The moral of O’Connor’s story is the need for grace that may of necessity come with violence; for Springsteen, life is sad, signaled by miserable weather: The last line notes, “It’s cloudy out in Pittsburg.”
Well, she sits by the light of her Christmas tree
With the radio softly on
Thinkin’ how a good man is so hard to findWell, once she had a fella
Once she was somebody’s girl
And she gave all she had that one last time
Now there’s a little girl asleep in the back room
She’s gonna have to tell about the meanness in this world
And how a good man is so hard to find
At the Movies
After seeing the trailer, I was in no hurry to see the film. I listen to Springsteen because I want to feel good. This did not appear to be a feel-good-movie, but I’m happy to report that the film is much better than expected. Jeremy Allen White, who had little prior musical experience, learned to play guitar and sing for the role, receiving support from The Boss himself. The real Springsteen’s voice is occasionally interwoven. Springsteen even provided White with a beautiful vintage 1955 Gibson J-200 guitar. Method actor Jeremy Strong ably plays Springsteen’s long-time manager, producer, and confidante.
“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.”
One of the most important things we learn from the film is how important Nebraska was to Springsteen. He recorded the songs in his home using only a cassette player. He further insisted that the sound engineers use that recording for the album, a demand that required considerable expertise, time, and expense. The album and film seem to illustrate artistically what Springsteen once said about O’Connor’s fiction:
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 that 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—she knew how to give it the flesh of the story.
The film suggests that Springsteen was working out personal demons with the album, specifically the consequence of his upbringing with his father, whom Springsteen later acknowledged was mentally ill but raised him and his siblings the best he could. By his own admission, the album was born in a period of great depression that Springsteen couldn’t escape. Despite his enormous standing at the time, Springsteen admitted the state in which he found himself—and which has been a recurrent affliction—was not something he could “succeed” out of.
Quirky Grace
How then might we summarize this comparison of Nebraska with O’Connor’s fiction? Is the alleged O’Connor influence overstated, or is there something to it? The answer is an unambiguous yes. Grace is harder to find in Nebraska than it is for some to understand in O’Connor’s stories; on the other hand, Nebraska does share a sense of man’s fallen condition with O’Connor. She wrote that the “serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character . . . the bedrock of original sin.”
Is there grace in Springsteen’s album? The answer is decisive for the comparison since O’Connor once explained, “All of my stories are about grace.” There is a hint of grace in “Atlantic City,” which begins with a report of the death of a local mob figure, “The Chicken Man.” The melodic line is the most appealing of all the songs on the album. The lyrics then turn to the narrator’s sweetheart and the hope that the two can eke out a life worth living. The song suggests redemption: Although “everything dies,” maybe “someday” it comes back. While not the definitive flash of grace the Grandmother experiences, the song does point to something with a transcendent reach.
Now I been lookin’ for a job but it’s hard to find
Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line
Well I’m tired of comin’ out on the losin’ end
Well I guess everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes backPut your hair up nice and set up pretty
The album’s closing track, “Reason to Believe,” sketches four pitiful events: A man hopes to revive a dead dog on the side of a highway by poking it; a woman waits at the end of a road for a man who never comes; a child is born and a man dies; and a groom waits for the bride who stood him up. Canadian O’Connor scholar Irwin Streight argues the song “seeks to resolve the litanies of meanness, desperation, hopelessness, and longing recounted in the preceding stories, and to resolve them in a decidedly Catholic fashion.” Perhaps. The song does suggest that in the face of tragedy, human beings still maintain a “reason to believe.”
Springsteen’s album is quirky; O’Connor’s fiction is offbeat. But then again, the Southern writer warned, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”