Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [143]
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,