Robert Flynn is a professor emeritus, Trinity University and a native of Chillicothe, Texas, is the author of over a dozen books. Seven novels: North To Yesterday (Knopf, 1967), In the House of the Lord (Knopf, 1969), The Sounds of Rescue, The Signs of Hope (Knopf, 1970, TCU, 1988), Wanderer Springs (TCU Press, 1987), The Last Klick (Baskerville, 1994), The Devil’s Tiger (TCU Press, 2000), co-authored with the late Dan Klepper, and Tie-Fast Country (TCU, 2001). His dramatic adaptation of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was the United States entry at the Theater of Nations in Paris in 1964 and won a Special Jury Award. He is also the author of a two-part documentary, A Cowboy Legacy, shown on ABC-TV, a nonfiction narrative, A Personal War in Vietnam (Texas A&M, 1989), an oral history, When I Was Just Your Age (Univ. of North Texas Press, 1992), two story collections, Seasonal Rain (Corona, 1986) and Living with the Hyenas, and two collections of essays, Growing Up a Sullen Baptist and Other Lies (UNT Press, 2001) and Slouching Toward Zion (UNT Press, 2004).

He is a member (and past president) of the Texas Institute of Letters, The Writers Guild of America, Marine Corps Combat Correspondents, and P.E.N. In 1998, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

MEMOIR/CRITICISM

Robert Lopez Flynn

Holy Literary License: The Almighty Chooses Fallible Mortals to Write, Edit, and Translate GodStory

Wings Press

Paperback, 978-1-6094-0465-9, 258 pgs., $16.95 (also available as an e-book)

October 1, 2016

Reviewed by James R. Dennis

Robert Flynn is a fine storyteller. His new book, Holy Literary License: The Almighty Chooses Fallible Mortals to Write, Edit, and Translate GodStory, places that gift on display in a remarkable way.

This book offers us an intimate glimpse into Flynn’s relationship with the Bible, a lifelong relationship dating back to Flynn’s first Bible, given to him when he was a boy of nine. To be sure, however, this book is not an academic work of biblical scholarship; it neither professes nor pretends to be one. Rather, it is a kind of memoir of a life lived against a scriptural and literary background.

Clearly, Flynn can rail like an Old Testament prophet when the need presents itself. He writes, “When your national god is Mammon [money], then a clean, beautiful world is as remote as Eden. You must destroy your country — plow mountaintops, poison the air, pollute rivers and lakes, sacrifice your children — to save it.” He speaks out against the idolatry of Wall Street, Hollywood, American exceptionalism, and our lust for power and control. As Flynn notes, “Even false gods are a demanding lot. They require your soul.”

Perhaps Flynn is at his best in moments of poignant personal revelation. Even then, he will accept nothing less than the truth, and shuns the shallow pabulum that too often masquerades as balm these days. Of his own personal tragedy, he writes:

 On a personal level, I am acquainted with grief. I know the emptiness, bitterness, the everlasting and futile steps to rise above it; the unbearable lightness of words, the valley of the shadows that you must walk alone. I know enough to want to assuage the grief of others, enough to know I can’t. Enough to know that ‘God needed another angel in heaven’ is false witness. Enough to know that ‘God won’t give you more than you can bear’ really means until you can’t bear it anymore.

Flynn provides a sharp critique of biblical literalism, and particularly of those who use proof-texting (the pointed selection of snippets of the text) to promote an agenda of power and control. As a friend of mine has observed, “Biblical fundamentalism is fundamentally un-biblical.” As an antitoxin to that biblical literalism, Flynn offers a profound hermeneutic. In this spiritual memoir, Flynn describes a life understood in the context of Scripture, just as he understands Scripture against the backdrop of his own life.

That sort of deep reading requires a lifetime of study, understanding, compassion, and sometimes calls for fathomless searching rather than easy answers. Then again, as Thomas More once wrote, “We cannot get to heaven on featherbeds.”

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