Fr. Watson’s primary apostolic mission throughout his life was teaching young Jesuit students studying philosophy as part of their Jesuit academic formation. He taught the History of Philosophy and his notes were published as “A Short History of Philosophy.” Besides history of philosophy, he regularly taught aesthetics. From 1965 until his death, he taught a combined metaphysics and theodicy (philosophy of God) course…Fr. Watson had broad interests in literature and fine arts. He was an expert (and published) on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins….Everyone said his best work with students was in one-on-one conversations. He was unfailingly kind and generous and referred to regularly as ‘a saint.’33
Father Watson’s academic, pedagogical background enables him to place O’Connor’s novel within the canonical tradition of theology and philosophy rooted in Augustine and Dante. The interaction of faith and reason is fundamental in Father Watson’s analysis of her fiction.
FEBRUARY 3, 1960
I’m glad you found the book and letter of some help. Thanks for your own interesting letter. Father Benedetto, our librarian, was ‘edified’ at your returning the volume so promptly (this is not, I’m afraid, the usual experience of librarians), and appreciated your little note.
In the meantime an event has occurred: your new book [The Violent Bear It Away]!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to read it for several days. All the while I kept it on my desk, bright and appealing in its violet jacket. Rashly! for it was a constant source of temptations to neglect the preparation of my classes and other urgent work. I had hoped eventually to have a morning or an afternoon free in which I could drink it all in one great draught, which seems to me the proper way to begin with a work of art, leaving till later a savoring of details. But in the end I couldn’t bear to wait any longer for such an opportunity, and descended to reading it in installments. External factors alone could determine the end of each installment, for I nowhere found a spot where I could, I don’t say willingly, but even resignedly lay the book aside for. a time. It so gripped my attention, indeed, that though I could put it out of my hands, I could never wholly put it out of my mind.
After reading it I felt as though I had lived through a storm or perhaps a bombing. I seemed to myself to be at least a year older. This latter feeling, by the way, serves as my personal criterion for a truly powerful book. St. Augustine’s Confessions made me feel that way and Pascal’s Pensées. Among novels I recall at the moment The Brothers Karamazov. Both of you—you and Dostoevski—know how to tell a story, but Dostoevski cannot resist telling several stories at the same time though they have little or no connection, with the result that his force is, as it were, dissipated, whereas The Violent Bear It Away, though less than half the length of The Brothers, makes a stronger, if less complex, an impression.
I was interested in the technique of frequent flash-backs you employ in this novel. I don’t recall ever before having seen it used to the same extent. One gets the sense of living through the same momentous experiences again and again, but each time with a richer background and so with ever greater understanding. Another point of technique that intrigued me (though I’m not familiar enough with the modern novel to be certain that it is original with you) is that you, as author, get inside of two, and only two, consciousnesses: the boy’s and Rayber’s. This enables you to present a number of the most important events from two contrasting points of view. You wisely refrain from intruding into the consciousness of the old “prophet” and thus, as is proper leave his inmost soul still veiled and unprofaned. To return to the flash-backs, these can, of course, be somewhat confusing at times to the reader, but on the whole I should say your use of them was quite effective. By means of them you sometimes have two narratives running simultaneously, not independently, but skillfully interwoven, closely harmonized, a sort of literary counterpoint.
There are so many features of your book I should like to praise that if I were to try to speak of them all, this letter would never be finished or, at any rate, would run on to unconscionable lengths (and my classes go unprepared!). Let me just mention your wit (in the ancient sense of the word). One example comes immediately to mind: Tarwater’s complaint to his grand-uncle that he never “ast” to come to the city: “I’m here before I knew this here was here.” Let me mention too the poetry of many a passage, poetry rising to its most glorious in the lyrical thoughts of the child preacher. (Let me confess: I don’t recall ever having been so stirred by any “real” sermon as I was by the words of Lucette.) I must mention also the masterful use of dialog, suggesting that you may someday turn with great success to the writing of plays.
But what impresses me most about your style is its organicity. This work of yours is a true whole with its many parts all contributing to the one total effect. Nothing seems casual or accidental. Everything in the beginning is the anticipation of something in the end; everything in the end is the fulfillment of something in the beginning. To give one of the most obvious and important examples of what I mean. On page 5 one reads: “The old man, who said he was a prophet, had raised the boy to expect the Lord’s call himself and to be prepared for the day he would hear it…He had been called in his early youth and had set out for the city to proclaim the destruction awaiting a world that had abandoned its Savior.” Here anticipation of what is to come, and in the last pages of the book the boy, who has so long wrestled with God, at last surrenders, lets go his proud independence (“something he had been clutching all his life”), and, being now prepared, receives the call in an atmosphere so charged with the supernatural that others (Buford) cannot stand it, and then without looking back presses forward on his mission, “his face set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.”
To be sure, this is in a sense the whole story. Everything else ties in with this starting point, this conclusion. Moreover, the direction is kept clear. We have, for instance, that amazingly fine page or two (26–27) in which Tarwater first discovers that the city is wicked and so ought to be preached to and feels indignation that his uncle walks through this evil “no more concerned with it all than a bear in the woods: ‘What kind of prophet are you?’ ” And when the uncle retorts: “If you been called by the Lord, then be about your own mission,” the boy’s face pales and his glance shifts: “ ‘I ain’t been called yet,’ he muttered.” Just an illustration, for there is scarcely a phrase about Tarwater that doesn’t help to reveal the character of the boy and the forces working on him, in such a way as obscurely to suggest the rising struggle, the climax, and the denouement. Some Catholics and perhaps some Protestants too will be upset by your story, judging that you are, if not intentionally, at least in effect, ridiculing religion. Not thus, not thus at all, do I read your heart-gripping story. First of all, I know it is a story, that is, a work of fiction, describing characters that are possible, indeed plausible (we have all known certain prototypes). As a novelist, I take it, you ask yourself what would such characters (above all what would a boy like Tarwater) with such temperaments and such backgrounds do if confronted with such and such experiences; and your artistic imagination enables you to foresee. what it is they are most likely freely to do. (I don’t for a moment believe that Rayber was right: though Tarwater was suffering from terrifyingly powerful psychological forces, I think he retained throughout at least a minimum of free will; if I thought the contrary I should find him hardly more interesting than poor little Bishop, who, nevertheless, is a source of great interest by reason of his symbolic value & of the reactions he excites in others.) If, then, your characters and the situations in which you represent them are plausible and the reactions of your characters to these latter, if at first surprising, are in the end seen to be what we too, your readers, should have expected, how can anyone say you are ridiculing religion? Can reality ridicule religion?
Actually, it seems to me, that if you yourself, as author, are wholly objective, that is, if you d
o not, so to speak, get outside your story in order to pass judgment on your own characters, nevertheless the events of the story itself do encourage, if indeed they do not force, the reader to pass such judgment. Here is the judgment which one reader at least felt impelled to make. For me the old man is a symbol of truth and goodness. A symbol, no more; he is not goodness itself, but goodness as we find it on earth, mixed with dross; not pure truth, but truth mingled with error. His religion has much of true religion in it, but it has also a deal of superstition and fanaticism. If he is (in a non-technical sense) an heir to the prophets of the Lord in the Old Testament, he is also the descendant in part of the pseudo prophets against whom the true prophets lifted up their voices like trumpets (even these latter, as we know, were not—all of them—without certain glaring faults). Rayber, on the contrary, I understand as a symbol of wickedness and untruth. But he is not pure wickedness and error; there is in him much, very much that is admirable. In fact, a Christian reading the story cannot but feel sympathy for Rayber. This can go so far (I speak from experience!) that he may find himself almost hoping that Rayber will finally bring the boy around to his point of view, till something is said or done that suddenly awakens him to the realization that this “hope” is abominable, that Rayber’s point of view involves the total rejection of Christianity. Rayber, I should say, is “the world,” not in disembodied abstraction, but incarnated in one, very vividly depicted, individual. Nor is Satan himself absent. I assume that the “voice of the stranger” which talks to Tarwater as he digs at his uncle’s grave at the beginning of the story is not only the voice of his own worse self, the proud, self-sufficient side of his conflict-torn personality, but also, symbolically, the voice of the devil (who, as St. Ignatius tells us in his Spiritual Exercises, is wont to disguise himself as an angel of light). So it is that when Tarwater begins to listen to him, “the stranger” quickly becomes “his friend.” Perhaps at no time does Satan so clearly reveal his “serpent’s tail” (another phrase from St. Ignatius) as at the moment when Tarwater, after crying out the words of Baptism, “heard the sibilant oaths of his friend fading away on the darkness.” And since we have the world and the devil, it is appropriate that among the forces of evil at work in the story we have also the flesh; hence the incident of the rape, which is evil in its most visible; most tangible form, evil in all its ugliness, evil unmasked. This horror coming on top of the harrowing experience on the lake evokes in the boy that reaction which prepares the way for his definitive rejection of “evil” and the acceptance of his “call” to good. And, by the way, one does not fail to note that the rapist has eyes the color of his lavender shirt, or to remember the “violet eyes” of “the friend.” No, you, as the author, don’t take sides in your book but let the story speak for itself. If, however, one considers that it is Rayber’s (and before Rayber, the friend’s) point of view which actually leads Tarwater to the murder of Bishop (Rayber himself hadn’t been strong enough of purpose to live out his principles—he could say NO to God, not do No), whereas it is the old man’s influence, and all that this symbolizes, which finally breaks through the hard crust of the boy’s selfishness and pride and sends him off on his way to try, however misguidedly, to save mankind, one cannot, I think, doubt what the story says and, through the story, reality itself; namely, that religion is right, irreligion wrong. In a sense the truth shines out all the more clearly in that religion as embodied in the story is disfigured with human weaknesses and errors and irreligion decked out in the attractive garb of reason, arid science, and commonsense (as the misere of the human element in the Church may serve as a foil to set off the splendor of the divine in it). One argues: If even so imperfect and faulty a religion as this is far better than irreligion even when persuasively presented, how incomparably superior will be the true and perfect religion. And if hitherto he hasn’t so much as conceived this, perhaps now he will at last begin to look for it. Religion, the story says, is not only ideally better, it is more humanly satisfying. Irreligion, as Rayber’s sufferings go to prove, is unlivable, a burden too great for man to bear.
All this, and much more, is what I personally drew from the novel. Very probably not all will draw the same. It could well be that not everything which I found in the work was explicitly intended by the author! Nevertheless, I maintain that somehow everything, or nearly everything, of which I have spoken did get into the novel, that it’s there and not just something concocted by me. Moreover, besides the great lesson spelled out by the story, that happiness comes only from God and from submission to His will, there were other things that it taught me. Thus never before, l believe, have I so clearly realized the tremendous-importance of Baptism nor the central position in the Christian life of the Eucharist (for me the “Bread of Life,” which Tarwater at first despised and for which at the end he discovered he had an enormous hunger, is a most appropriate symbol of the Eucharist—which in turn is a beautiful symbol though far more than a mere symbol—of the heavenly banquet and so of the beatifying union with God, the hope which gives life its supreme meaning.)
There will be many, I suppose, who will see little in your novel but the powerful influence a strongly emotional old man can exert on a child entirely submitted to his care; yet I don’t see how they can wholly miss a far more powerful influence, namely that of the imaged ideas which act in and through the “prophet,” but are not properly his, being in great part, though with many corruptions, expressions of some of the great truths of Christianity. Even the most Rayber minded reader should at least perceive that for all its age Christianity still has left in it, as Chesterton puts it, enough fire to burn the world to rags. And this insight should excite that wonder and interest which is the good ground for the seed of the Sower.
Before closing let me add that if you haven’t read C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, I’m sure that you would enjoy doing so. It is a tale, remotely like your own, embodying the conflict between naturalism or rationalism and supernaturalism or faith. The former is at first made to appear extremely attractive, the latter quite repulsive; gradually, however, Lewis has his story bring out the deficiencies of rationalism and the beauty of true religion. But, though admirable in many ways, the book has too much of fantasy or myth and not enough of unity. Interesting throughout and lovely in places, it lacks the drive and the power of The Violent Bear It Away. Let me thank you most sincerely for your kindness in having a copy of your book sent to me; but let me thank you far more for the much greater gift—to me and to so many others—of the story itself and the soul-shaking experience it offers. My eyes are scorched. I seem to feel seeds opening in my blood.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER JAMES McCOWN
The letter commemorates George Washington’s birthday. O’Connor appreciated the difference between the birthday of the country’s first president and commemoration of President Lincoln’s birthday, later blurred in the hybrid day now celebrated as Presidents’ Day. The meaning of national holidays was vital to O’Connor and reveals the precision of her historical perspective.
Father McCown offers to read O’Connor’s new novel twice. He also plans to send her a novel popular among high school students at the time because of its existentialist themes of angst and rebellion. O’Connor dealt with the same themes more dramatically in The Violent Bear It Away.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEO. WASH. BIRTHDAY
FEB. 22 [1960]
Thanks for your letter and the offer to read the book twice [The Violent Bear It Away]. It isn’t out until the 24th but there was a long piece on it in the February Catholic World. Your brother [Robert McCown, S.J.] put them onto me so now they are giving me the whole hog treatment. It is a very good piece. There will be a review in the Feb 27th Saturday Review and I think there will be one in Time this week.34 Don’t know whether the Time one will be favorable or not. You never know what they are coming up with. A Fr. Quinn, a friend of mine at the University
of Scranton, wrote me that he was to review it for America.35 You may see that one and me not.
I’d love to have the copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I read it years ago but would like to read it again.
I haven’t heard from your mother but I will look forward to meeting her in Mobile and I will invoke your memory if I see any azalea bushes.
Fr. Watson was mighty nice to send me the answer to the end-means business. I passed it on to my Loyola-hating friend, and I trust he profits by it, but it would be some loss to him if he had to stop hating Loyola.
Our best to you,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER SCOTT WATSON
6 APRIL 1960
Here are some I don’t think you will have seen. Some of them are mighty entertaining. Observe particularly the New York Post and San Francisco Chronicle. I was so very pleased to see you at the airport and I only wish I could have sat down and talked to you while I was there. That answer to your question about the symbolism in the book was not satisfactory, but I find it hard to collect my thoughts when I am on exhibit, as it were. If you get to the Library to see that Duhamel [P. Albert, Catholic World, February 1960], I would like to know what you think of it.
FATHER SCOTT WATSON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
The commentary of Father Watson and his colleagues was vital to O’Connor’s novel being properly understood. Most critics approached the novel from a secular perspective through the lens of religious science. Father Watson and his brother Jesuits read the novel as both credentialed academics and believers in a rare combination of both erudition and faith.
PALM SUNDAY
Good Things out of Nazareth Page 19