The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

When I woke up this morning, I had read about 50 pages of The Violent Bear It Away. About halfway through the book, if you had asked me what it was about, I would have told you that I wasn't really sure what I was reading, but I couldn't stop reading it. By 3:30 this afternoon, I had finished the book.

This book is about the God of grace and mercy, but it's not easy grace, and it's not the mercy that droppeth as a gentle rain from heaven. It's about the God who is a consuming fire. The title of the book comes from Matthew 11:12, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away."

Mason Tarwater is one of those who bear it away. He is a prophet (and bootlegger) who lives on a secluded farm, and who is raising his great-nephew, Francis Marion Tarwater (called Tarwater), whom he kidnapped from his legal guardian, his uncle George Rayber. Old Tarwater is preparing his great-nephew to be his successor. He already tried this once with his nephew George, whom he kidnapped for four days when George was seven, but this attempt backfired.

If you have read much about prophets, you know that they are not particularly comfortable to be around and that some of them might even be regarded as out of their minds, and the Tarwaters certainly fit the bill. I wondered what tarwater or tar water was, and looking around the internet I find that it is made from a cold infusion of pine resin in water, and is used for healing and to get rid of spirits, the latter being more appropriate to our story.

Old Tarwarter has charged Tarwater with two tasks to accomplish after his death. One is to bury him with a cross at his head, so he can be found at the last day. The other is to baptize George's son, Bishop. This book is about Baptism, and water, and Baptism by water, but maybe even more about Baptism by fire.

I am not going to say any more about the story because if you read it in a summary, you will completely lose the power that is behind O'Connors masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece--maybe I should say tour de force.

In a letter to a friend written on November 14, 1959, shortly before publication of her novel in January, 1960, O'Connor said;

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial. I'm afraid it will just be dammed and dropped, genteelly sneered at, a few superior kicks from one or two and that  will be that. . . . Well, we will have to wait and see. I expect the worst. At least this is an individual book. I can't think of anybody else's that it might remind you of. Nobody would have been found dead writing it but me . . .

The Violent Bear It Away did get a lot of bad reviews, but it has stood the test of time. O'Connor spoke to at least a couple of friends about a sequel to the novel, but I guess she ran out of time. It took her a long time to write a novel, she was talking about this one as early as 1954, and she died about four and a half years after it was published.

I recommend this book very highly, but I would strongly suggest you not read it unless you are already fairly familiar with O'Connor, because it takes most people a while to see what she is doing in her work. In this case, I would suggest that you begin with a few short stories: Revelation, A Temple of the Holy Ghost, and A Good Man is Hard to Find. (It was while reading Revelation that I first got O'Connor. Then you might read The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters, and maybe Mystery and Manners, a collection of talks and essays.

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AMDG