Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [144]
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