Flannery (40 page)

In the evening, the group flew to Barcelona, where they stayed overnight at the Hotel Colón. In the morning, at the Cathedral, Flannery purchased a tile for Betty. Hearing so much about her from Flannery and Bill, Sally purchased for Betty, too, a small plastic statue of the Spanish Black Virgin of Montserrat, to be toted back to Georgia. Two of the Savannah travelers, the spinster sisters Eleanor and Marie Bennett, of Augusta, recorded the events of the remainder of May 3 in their highly detailed pilgrimage diary: “After lunch we left Barcelona by plane for Rome. On our way, we dipped down in Nice for thirty minutes; also, at Milan for customs, on entering Italy. This was our longest plane ride on the Continent, something over five hours. Flying over the Alps, it was a beautiful sight to see the mountain peaks through the clouds.”

The high point of Flannery’s journey turned out to be Rome, having already been intrigued by a promise from Caroline Gordon that the eternal city would improve her prose. Skipping the general tourism, Flannery stayed shuttered in her room at the Regina — a hotel coincidentally sharing her mother’s name — until the next day, when she crossed the Tiber River with the group to attend a general audience with Pope Pius XII at St. Peter’s Basilica. In the company of Archbishop O’Hara of Savannah, all were ushered by a knight-chamberlain to front box seats. At noon, to roars of “Viva Papa!” the pope, in his first Sunday audience after a long illness, was borne to his throne on his
sedia gestatoria.
Following the audience, he walked down to greet the travelers, giving a special blessing to Flannery, on account of her crutches. Impressed, she hurriedly wrote Betty, from Rome: “There is a wonderful radiance and liveliness about the old man. He fairly springs up and down the little steps to his chair. Whatever the special superaliveness that holiness is, it is very apparent in him.”

Staying long enough for a Monday evening dinner in honor of Archbishop O’Hara, given by the group at the Regina Hotel, Sally needed to bid farewell once again to her friend, a familiar event in their history, to return to Levanto. So for the rest of the trip Flannery trained her sights on her fellow pilgrims. She and her mother were now both under the weather, and remained in their room in the Hotel Florida, in Lisbon, the last stop, while the others took a hundred-mile bus trip to Fátima, yet another site of a Marian visitation, in 1917. “Shrines to the Virgin do not seem to increase my devotion to her and I was glad not to go,” she wrote Sally. But she avidly reported on the progress of the “4 old ladies who are always getting lost from the rest, 4 priests, 2 little boys, 12 &14, 2 secretaries, & me and ma.” Of a suggestion of Monsignor T. James McNamara that she “write up” the trip, she rightly observed, “I don’t think he has thought this through.”

Upon their return to Andalusia on May 9, while Regina “revived as soon as she hit the cow country,” Flannery was indeed a victim of exhaustion, needing to cancel a speaking engagement on “The Freak in Modern Fiction,” scheduled at the University of Missouri in two weeks. “My capacity for staying home is now 100%,” she declared, with great finality, to Ashley Brown. Mimicking Nelson in “The Artificial Nigger,” she added, “Of course, I’m glad I’ve went once.” Quite startling to her, though, was word from Dr. Merrill of an X ray showing that her hip had unexpectedly begun to calcify. She was now free to walk about her room without crutches. Flannery happily shared this news with Katie Semmes shortly before her cousin’s death, at the age of ninety, in November. At the requiem mass at the Savannah Cathedral, Archbishop O’Hara said to Regina, when told of Flannery’s improvement, “Ah, seeing the Pope did her some good!”

Flannery never did fulfill her writing assignment on Lourdes for Monsignor McNamara, or for Katie Semmes, who presented her with a leather-bound travel diary before her departure. She typed up her mother’s notes for their cousin instead. Floating the opinion that “experience is the greatest deterrent to fiction,” she promised Maryat that she might one day write her own account, but only “when the reality has somewhat faded.” Yet though Lourdes — “a beautiful child with smallpox” — never fully appears in her work, the trip affected her writing, she would claim, in a more essential way. When Katherine Anne Porter had visited, she swore that if she ever went to Lourdes, she would make a novena to finish her novel. Flannery borrowed this attitude. Recalling her experience in the grotto, she later confided that “I prayed there for the novel I was working on, not for my bones, which I care about less.”

I
NSPIRED BY THE
waters of Lourdes, as well as by a “much better contract” from Robert Giroux at Farrar, Straus, Flannery did return to her second novel in earnest as soon as she was able after the trip. Already, by the third week of May, she could brag to Cecil Dawkins, “The little vacation from the Opus Nauseous seems to have done me some creative good anyway as I am at it with something like vigor, or anyway, have been for the last two days or so.” And within a month, she had finished nearly a hundred pages of a first draft that she conceived as needing only about fifty more pages. “Unfortunately not any 50 will do,” she told Betty. “However I am much heartened.” She was again set on creating a dark chamber piece rather than a symphony, almost a novella, enough for her to wonder if the work should be published within a larger collection of stories.

While Flannery had agonized fitfully over her short novel for six years, and went through sharp ups and downs in her responses to it, she had already settled on its final riddle of a title the summer before:
The Violent Bear It Away,
a phrase taken from Matthew 11:12. The page was marked by a paper clip in her Douay translation of the Bible — the translation from the Latin Vulgate preferred by the Roman Catholic Church. Jesus’ words, in full, read, “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” For O’Connor the violence implied was interior. “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you,” she explained to Betty. She also felt this spiritual struggle was against death itself, for she penciled in the title phrase next to a passage in her copy of
Personalism,
by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier: “Love is a struggle: life is a struggle against death.”

Yet for many readers the title remained enigmatic. Beginning with Maryat: “I am the dense kind,” she wrote, when she heard the phrase. “The violent bear goodness away? purity? love? creation? God? mercy? It’s a very southern title.” Maryat teased that she was now inspired to write something entitled “The violent bare it.” Flannery swatted back at Maryat, who proposed that she saw her scripts in “colors . . . pink, light blue,” by describing her own palette: “my novel is grey, bruised-black, and fire-colored.” After its publication, though, Flannery loved telling of a lady in Texas who wrote that a friend went into a bookstore looking for a paperback copy of
A Good Man Is Hard to Find,
and the clerk replied, “We don’t have that one but we have another one by that writer. It’s called THE BEAR THAT RAN AWAY WITH IT.”

While keeping a respectful distance from William Faulkner — “I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won’t get swamped,” she insisted — this second novel was much more haunted by his richly clotted images, and plot twists, than any of O’Connor’s other works. Perhaps he was particularly on her mind because his translator Maurice-Edgar Coindreau had recently begun working on
Wise Blood
for the French publisher Gallimard. (When Coindreau told him of the O’Connor project, Faulkner raised his head, pointed a forefinger at him, and stated emphatically, “
That’s
good stuff.”) Her second novel’s unburied great-uncle strongly suggests the burial complications of Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying;
“innocent,” seven-year-old Bishop is a close relation of Benjy, the idiot narrator in
The Sound and the Fury;
Tarwater’s pyromania is pure Yoknapatawpha County; and the novel’s closing paragraph is remarkably close to “Barn Burning.”

The opening chapter of
The Violent Bear It Away,
and its last thirty pages, came as easily to Flannery as the characters of Enoch or Hulga. She was on familiar terrain. Like Nelson and his uncle Mr. Head in “The Artificial Nigger,” Tarwater, his name borrowed from a quack cure-all, and his great-uncle share a cooked breakfast before his death, as the author weaves in and out of their thoughts in the “one-and-a-half point of view” that O’Connor told Louise Abbot she devised for the novel: “one part third-person narrator, one-half omniscient narrator.” For Mr. Meeks, the salesman who drives the hitchhiking nephew to the big city, she was tickled to borrow from Dr. Crane’s advice column; like Dr. Crane, Meeks feels “you couldn’t sell a copper flue to a man you didn’t love.”

Similarly the novel’s notoriously perverse penultimate scene, and its apocalyptic finale, fell neatly into place. As an embodiment of the devil himself, O’Connor chose a stock character. Giving Tarwater a lift back to Powderhead, Tennessee, is a homosexual predator whom she first imagined for
Wise Blood,
but dispensed with: in one draft, Haze was importuned by Mercy Weaver, a cruising homosexual. When the Fitzgeralds asked about the broadly stereotypical character in a lavender shirt and Panama hat, who rapes the teenage Tarwater in the woods, Flannery swore that she had seen one such, “with yellow hair and black eyelashes — you can’t look anymore perverted than that.” In her extreme theology, this pederast Satan triggers grace. “Tarwater’s final vision could not have been brought off if he hadn’t met the man in the lavender and cream-colored car,” she later explained.

The problem was the middle section, concerning Tarwater’s life with his schoolteacher-uncle Rayber and his retarded cousin Bishop in an Atlanta-like big city — a section Flannery spent most of the next year and a half actively rewriting. She felt that she never came to terms with Rayber, a liberal, atheist, do-gooder, spouting jargon from sociology textbooks but fighting the “horrifying love” he cannot help feeling for his maimed son, whose existence makes no sense in his calculations. She found him, with his hearing aid, signifying a Cartesian separation of head and heart, to be a “stumbling block,” and feared that she was “out of my depth” and did not “really know Rayber or have the ear for him.” Two years later, when the critic Richard Gilman visited Andalusia, Flannery worried aloud that she hadn’t “gotten right” the intellectual Rayber. “I don’t reckon he’d be very convincing to you folks in New York,” she said.

To make a point about Rayber’s sentimental utopianism, she tucked in a light parody of J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye.
Flannery was a fan of Holden Caulfield, the hard-boiled adolescent pointing out the “phoniness” of adults. When Salinger’s novel first appeared in 1951, she had pored over the book so avidly that Regina warned she was going to “RUIN MY EYES reading all that in one afternoon.” But, by the late fifties, the “Catcher Cult” was the very definition of “cool,” and she felt free to poke fun. Illustrating the naivete of his savior complex, O’Connor swiped Holden’s catcher-in-the-rye fantasy — catching “thousands of little kids” falling off a cliff — for Rayber, who imagined himself in a garden where he would “gather all the exploited children of the world and let the sunshine flood their minds.”

Flannery, having reached the age of thirty-three, experienced much renewed strength during the summer of 1958. Besides facing down her novel again, she decided to address the fear expressed to Sally on their European train ride, brought on by Regina’s hospitalization for a bruised kidney before their departure. Flannery resolved to learn to drive when she found herself dependent on Aunt Mary, who, she told Betty, “can drive me nuts in about two minutes.” A slight setback occurred when she flunked her test on June 25, plowing in the wrong gear onto the front lawn of a stranger. The attending state police officer advised, “Younglady, I think you need sommo practice.” But two weeks later, she returned and passed. The “swan of old cars,” as Robert Lowell once called her, was now licensed to drive the “hearse-like” black Chevrolet with automatic transmission that she and her mother had ordered, with Uncle Louis’s help.

About the time of the delivery of this “rolling memento mori,” from Atlanta, she was also visited by a fan of her work, who became identified in her mind with her volatile feelings about the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and, particularly, theories of the role of dreams and the subconscious in literary production and religious expression. Ted Spivey, a writer on myth and literature, and a professor at Georgia State College, was soon classified by her as “my Jung friend,” and, therefore, a source of mixed feelings. As Louise Abbot, who knew them separately, parsed Flannery’s friendship with her far more extroverted, excitable friend, “She certainly found him an intelligent and good man. But she was not interested when he came to order his own life according to dream interpretations, especially when he started dreaming about her.”

Spivey, just two years her junior, and briefly a student of Allen Tate’s at the University of Minnesota, had completed a dissertation on George Eliot, launching him on a mission to find an American woman writer with the intellect of Eliot, or Virginia Woolf, another favorite. When he began reading O’Connor’s fiction, he felt that he might well have found her and screwed up his courage to write, suggesting a meeting for August 15, when he would be driving from Atlanta to visit his parents in Swainsboro. Flannery assented, giving directions to show up at two p.m. “When I knocked on her door,” he wrote, “she appeared in a light-colored, rather conservative dress and suggested that we sit in rocking chairs on her porch. She asked me a few questions about myself, and within five minutes we were talking about writers and about their connection, when they had any, with religion. The talk lasted about two hours and was intense.”

Leaving Andalusia that afternoon, Spivey was unsure whether the meeting had been a success, as he “could sense certain deep and sometimes disturbing currents” running through the author he would later describe as “the most complex person I have ever met.” He soon had his answer, though, as before he even had a chance to write a bread-and-butter note, Flannery sent him a letter at his parents’ home. “I have just finished a book which I am sure you would find relevant to your train of thought,” she began. “This is
Israel and Revelation
by Eric Voeglin. . . . It has to do with history as being existence under God, the ‘leap in being,’ etc.” Spivey was touched that she had recommended a writer so attuned to his interests, who became a favorite after he borrowed her copy. He was even more encouraged by her closing: “I enjoyed your visit and hope that you will stop again if you find it convenient when you pass this way.”