God-Intoxicated Hillbillies

THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY (243 pp.) --Flannery O'Connor--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.75).

Author Flannery O'Connor is a retiring, bookish spinster who dabbles in the variants of sin and salvation like some self-tutored backwoods theologian. She is an earnest Roman Catholic who raises geese and peacocks on the family farm near Milledgeville, Ga., which she rarely leaves; she suffers from lupus (a tuberculous disease of the skin and mucous membranes) that forces her to spend part of her life on crutches. Despite such relative immobility, Author O'Connor manages to visit remote and dreadful places of the human spirit. In Wise Blood (TIME, June 9 1952) and A Good Man Is Hard to Find (TIME, June 6, 1955), she dealt with weird turns of terror and violence as naturally as if she had observed them on her farm. In her new novel, a kind of horror story of faith, the characters are for or against God with a kind of vindictiveness that, the reader sometimes feels, must make even Him uneasy.

Francis Tarwater is 14 when his great-uncle dies at 84. The boy and the old man have lived alone on a back-country farm, and the boy knows what he must do: bury his uncle in the coffin the old man built himself and inscribed MASON TARWATER, WITH GOD. Old Mason tried it out when he finished it, but his belly protruded, and young Francis coolly remarked: "It's too much of you for the box. I'll have to sit on the lid to press you down or wait until you rot a little." Now the boy is digging the grave, and it is hard work. More than that, his secret resentments against the old man rise to the level of passion. For the old man was a windy man of God, a self-proclaimed "prophet" who raised the boy to go into the world to preach the Word. He especially charged him to baptize his city cousin, an idiot child whose schoolteacher father is a sweaty atheist. At the thought of this mission, young Tarwater is torn. An inner voice tells him that the old man was a fool or worse. He gets drunk, sets fire to the house, where the old man is still sitting dead at the breakfast table, and finally heads for the city.

He baptizes his idiot cousin all right, but he deliberately drowns him in the process. Through the murder, Tarwater thinks that he has exorcised his great-uncle's injunction to preach and baptize. But back home the boy discovers that a Negro neighbor has rescued his uncle's body and given it Christian burial. He recalls the inner voice that had warned him against the compulsion to serve God: "You have to take hold and put temptation behind you. If you baptize once, you'll be doing it the rest of your life. If it's an idiot this time, the next time it's liable to be a nigger.'' Now, at his uncle's grave, he throws himself to the ground and hears the order: GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY.

He is last seen heading back to the city, "where the children of God lay sleeping." Author O'Connor tells this bizarre plot with her own brand of authority; her hard prose seems armed with staring, baleful eyes. The reader may shudder in distaste, but those eyes fix and hold him. And yet, while her handling of God-drunk backwoodsmen is based in religious seriousness, it seldom seems to rise above an ironic jape. It is this suggestion of the secure believer poking bitter fun at the confused and bedeviled that lingers in the mind after the tale is ended--rather than the occasional flashes of pity that alone make such a story bearable.

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