by Brad Gooch
Arriving in Paris from Milan with Sally and Regina, Flannery was forced by her cold to recuperate inside the art deco Hotel Ambassador, near the Paris opera house, where she was visited by Gabrielle Rolin, a young French journalist and novelist. “Instead of seeing Paris I saw her,” said Flannery. Although Rolin judged the novel “almost unreadable,” she brought her, as a gift, Emile Zola’s Lourdes. “Flannery’s way of speaking reminded me of Donald Duck,” recalls Rolin, “and her ‘home made permanent,’ Shirley Temple, but her eyes . . . perhaps she owed this interior light to her faith, this look so sharp and blue. ‘I owe it to my Irish origins,’ she said. But there was something more. The terrifying Mrs. O’Connor also had a keen eye but she didn’t look beyond her interlocutor. Flannery saw farther, higher, elsewhere. . . . The amiable Mrs. Fitzgerald’s smile was a comfort after having encountered the acid grin of the mother.”
Reunited with the group from Savannah, the three women then traveled south from Paris to the Haut-Pyrenees region of Lourdes, near the border of Spain, long a medieval pilgrimage route on the way to Compostela. Crossing through France, during one phase of this trip, Sally and Flannery had a long, confidential conversation in a train compartment. “She said to me . . . that she had come to terms with her illness, with the crippling, the isolation, the constant danger of death,” recalled Fitzgerald. “That, in fact, her only remaining fear was that her mother would die before she did. . . . She added, ‘I don’t know what I would do without her.’” Yet when Fitzgerald later passed on this remark to Caroline Gordon, who never liked Mrs. O’Connor, she flashed her black eyes at Sally, and snapped scornfully, “Yes! She would have lost her material.”
Flannery had mixed feelings about going to Lourdes, as she was used to being an observer of, or writer about, religious enthusiasm boiling over into visions and healings, rather than a participant. Yet the village itself was a study in contrasts. The accommodation for the Savannah group, on the evenings of April 30 and May 1, was the nineteenth-century Grand Hotel de la Grotte, on the avenue Bernadette-Soubirous, the cream-colored epitome of la vieille France, with hanging eaves, wrought-iron balconies, and long white wooden shutters, situated on rocks overlooking a valley cut by the teal green Gave de Pau, and just below a medieval fortress castle. Though Flannery dubbed the place a “clip-joint,” because of a forty-two-dollar bill for Sally’s cot, the hotel was the first choice for American pilgrims, including a group of 350 led that spring by Francis Cardinal Spellman, during a Jubilee Year attracting more than 5 million visitors.
Lourdes had always been subject to commercialization, almost within months of reports, in 1858, of the healing of the paralyzed fingers of Catherine Latapie, when she plunged them into the spring discovered by her friend Bernadette, at the direction of the Virgin Mary — an apparition the fourteen-year-old at first simply called “Aquéro,” or “that thing,” in the local patois. In the early twentieth century the aesthete and Roman Catholic convert Joris-Karl Huysmans derided its many honky-tonk shops as “a hemorrhage of bad taste.” Flannery enjoyed quoting Mauriac’s remark that “the religious goods stores were the devil’s answer there to the Virgin Mary.” Such marketing had only escalated in the past decades with the appearance of a six-hundred-page historical novel, Song of Bernadette, by the Jewish novelist Franz Werfel, and its adaptation as a 1943 Academy Award–winning, black-and-white Hollywood movie, starring Jennifer Jones.
But all sales of religious souvenirs ceased at the large iron St. Michael’s Gate at the foot of the boulevard de le Grotte, which marked the beginning of the Domain, a sort of medieval town arranged about various churches, squares, and shrines, and full of pilgrims, many as maimed and afflicted as O’Connor’s characters. In this veritable open-air hospital, the critics of Lourdes often had a change of heart. No less a snob than Huysmans allowed that “nowhere have I seen such appalling illnesses, so much charity and so much good grace.” For Mauriac, the grotto was a “heart that never stops beating.” “The heavy hand of the prelate smacks down on this free enterprise at the gates of the grotto,” Flannery wrote Ashley Brown. “This is always full of peasants milling around and of the sick being wheeled on stretchers.” In a postcard to Katherine Anne Porter, O’Connor penned a single line: “The sight of Faith and affliction joined in prayer — very impressive.”
Not only was Flannery in the company of her mother and Sally, but they were joined on their first day by William Sessions, who was on a Fulbright grant in Freiburg, Germany, attending the lectures of Martin Heidegger — Hulga’s philosophical obsession in “Good Country People.” Sessions arrived on May 1, the weather having turned warm and humid, in spite of breezes from nearby snowcapped mountains. “I joined them for lunch my first day, and it was the upstairs of their small hotel,” he remembered. “I kept wondering how Flannery had managed with her crutches. . . . Sally and Regina were on one side of the table, and I slipped into the outside seat beside Flannery. While we were eating, and Sally and Regina were talking, Flannery leaned over to me and cast her eyes rather slowly about the dining room. ‘Look,’ she whispered to me, ‘at all those Mauriac faces.’”
That afternoon, Flannery, Regina, and Sally sat at the back of the Grotto, the outcropping of rocks where Bernadette had experienced her visions, while Sessions braved the crowds of farmers descended from all over France for May Day, a holiday honoring the Virgin Mary. As they were marching ceaselessly up and down, he jostled to get to the spigots dispensing springwater above a basin, hoping to score just one gift bottle intended for Caroline Gordon. “In the pushing and shoving among the pilgrims for the holy water, I was knocked into the basin but not before I’d filled three bottles,” wrote Sessions. “Sally and the O’Connors were laughing when I returned with soaked polyester trousers but handing them bottles.” In the evening, Flannery and her mother looked on as Sally and Bill took part in the nightly candlelit procession in Rosary Square, beneath the basilica, singing the Lourdes Hymn to the Virgin and saying the Rosary, their entire group marching behind a “Savannah” banner.
Flannery had been clear about not wishing to take the baths, an immersion in the springwater believed to possess healing properties. She insisted that she was going as “a pilgrim, not a patient.” She assured Betty Hester, before departing, “I am one of those people who could die for his religion sooner than take a bath for it.” Her resolve was strengthened by Gabrielle Rolin, who had remarked in Paris that the only true miracle at Lourdes was the absence of any epidemics from the filthy water. Yet Sally felt sure that Mrs. Semmes would be disappointed if Flannery returned home without taking part in the essential ritual. Using her French, and his German, she and Bill managed to secure for their friend an appointment for early the next morning. Flannery complained that Sally had a “hyper-thyroid moral imagination” — “she was determined that I take it and gave me no peace” — but grudgingly acceded to her arrangements.
Before nine o’clock, she arrived at les piscines, actually a series of seventeen sunken marble pools — six for men, eleven for women — allowing some privacy, with only about forty people ahead of her in the stone waiting portico, so the waters appeared clean. She drank from a communal thermos bottle circulated among the malades. And she put on the sack robe she was handed, still damp from the previous woman, before passing behind a curtain and being lowered into the water. “At least there are no societal trappings along with the medieval hygiene,” she wrote Elizabeth Bishop. “I saw nothing but peasants and was very conscious of the distinct odor of the crowd. The supernatural is a fact there but it displaces nothing natural; except maybe those germs.” Nor did she report a mystical experience. “Nobody I am sure prays in that water,” she told Betty.
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.”
INSPIRED 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 hitc
hhiking 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.