Was the Art of <i>S-Town</i> Worth the Pain?
This story contains spoilers for the entirety of the podcast S-Town.
As I listened to the first few chapters of S-Town, I couldn’t help but wonder how Flannery O’Connor would have reacted to the popular new podcast. S-Town’s deep exploration of white, rural America makes the comparison inevitable; the podcast’s inadvertent star, the eccentric John B. McLemore, could have risen whole from a Southern Gothic landscape. But by the end of the series, I wasn’t thinking of O’Connor, but of her friends and fellow writers, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.
Forty years ago, the two had a stark disagreement over a book of poems that Lowell wrote—poems that Bishop felt knowingly and cruelly used someone else’s private pain without permission because Lowell thought they made his work better. In her critique of Lowell’s book , Bishop lays out issues of intimacy, trauma, and consent in a way that speaks to the about the ethics of Her words give listeners a framework for weighing their own queasiness that goes past questions of lawfulness. Given thatand were behind the podcast, it seems all but certain that the necessary releases were signed—in a legal sense, permission was granted. But also takes its listeners into murky ethical territory when the story shifts to examine the life of McLemore after his suicide.
