Flannery (11 page)
“MFOC”
G
eorgia State College for Women in Milledgeville proved to be a good fit for seventeen-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor. The “girls’ college” did remain a lifelong target for her satire, sent up as Lucy Gains College, the “local college,” in a draft of “The Partridge Festival,” and as Willowpool Seminary, “the most progressive Female Seminary in the state,” in a draft of a graduate thesis story, “The Crop.” In her Iowa “Biography,” she leveled her alma mater for its emphasis on high school teaching, her early career path, by default, describing the training as qualifying her only for a job in Podunk, Georgia, earning $87.50 a month. Yet to her friend Janet McKane, in 1963, she admitted the bottom line of her feelings about high school and college: “I enjoyed college and despised the progressive high school but only remember people and things from both.”
With classes starting almost immediately in the summer of 1942, the laboratory school and the college were at first nearly indistinguishable. Like all of her Peabody classmates — except one, who went away to college in Alabama — O’Connor simply “moved over” to Georgia State College for Women, or GSCW, but continued to live at home. Registering for a special wartime three-year program that required summer sessions as well as the fall, winter, and spring semesters, she was already enrolled by June 9, a mere ten days after her Peabody graduation. In classrooms exactly like those in high school, she took four courses in Biology, Composition, Math, and Humanities that she later remembered as survey courses she had merely endured.
Of a lifelong friendship that began almost at once during that ten-week summer session, while most of the college buildings were shut against the Georgia heat, and most of the faculty away on vacation, Betty Boyd Love has written, “I first met Flannery O’Connor in the summer of 1942. We were both freshmen entering a new accelerated college program at Georgia State College for Women. There weren’t many of us in the program. Most of the summer students at GSCW were public school teachers returning to renew or upgrade a credential, so the small group of us who were ‘regular’ students got to know each other quite soon.” O’Connor met Betty Boyd while she was enduring Math 110, or Functional Math, in which she received a 75, her lowest academic grade.
A poet and mathematician from Rome, Georgia, with wavy hair, round eyeglasses, and a bright smile, Boyd was the first friend Mary Flannery truly chose on her own, without her mother’s oversight. The two young women discovered that they shared unfocused literary ambitions and, in the first flush of their friendship, both were writing poems. Two of Boyd’s were published in the fall 1942 issue of the college literary magazine, the
Corinthian
— “Fairies” and “Reflection,” a sensitive meditation on roses “twining over the wall . . . built around my soul.” O’Connor tended to stilted odes, like “Pffft,” published two years later. Its first line was “Some new, unheard-of thought I would put down!” Both later cringed at these “pretty terrible poems,” said Love. Hearing a rumor, in 1949, of a sighting of a published poem, O’Connor wrote her in a panic: “have not written anything but prose since I got out of stir. But several awful ghosts come to mind. Do you remember the poems we sent to an anthology and had accepted — called
America Sings,
printed by offset somewhere in California?”
Yet the thrill of being literary coconspirators was an important bond. Appealing, too, for the extremely guarded Mary Flannery, was Betty Boyd’s quiet earnestness. She later portrayed herself as a “horribly serious” college student, her studiousness counterbalanced by O’Connor’s “same dry whimsical humor.” The
Corinthian
editor Jane Sparks Willingham concurs that “Betty Boyd was a deep-thinking person, not somebody who sat around and cracked jokes about what you did the night before on your date.” Boyd’s sensitivity was evident in an essay published in the fall 1942
Corinthian,
tremulously recording her summer arrival at GSCW. She wrote of bidding good-bye to her parents, “the two people I love more than all others”; having “walked up the steps to the library to register”; and looking forward to “companionship with a fine group of smiling, quiet, friendly girls.”
If not handpicked, Betty Boyd was approved by Mrs. O’Connor, and often invited to the Cline Mansion, where she spent “a great many hours” enjoying the “large and high-ceilinged and cool” rooms: “I soon became a regular visitor there and enjoyed many a Sunday dinner at the wonderful long walnut table with its silver napkin rings and the little pot of demitasse coffee served to pour over the ice cream at dessert. They had trouble keeping a cook because of the demands of Miss Katie. . . . In retrospect, this seems to me a somewhat unusual household, but at the time it appeared perfectly unexceptional, and I’m sure they all looked on it as such.” Although Aunt Gertie died just four months after Edward O’Connor, Aunt Mary kept the mansion as a haven for single women by inviting two college teachers as occasional boarders, Miss Bancroft and Miss Kirby.
The most unusual aspect of the house might have escaped the notice of the young Betty Boyd: the group of women was self-sufficient. “Miss Mary was a businessman from the word ‘go,’” reported one Milledgeville resident. The GSCW History professor Dr. Helen Greene has remarked that “Miss Mary . . . inherited many rental properties and often a person in need of a place to live would come to the house to speak with her. The family employed a number of black people for the maintenance of their house and yard, and some of these employees were truly devoted.” The younger sisters contributed as well. Following Edward O’Connor’s death, Dr. Bernard Cline brought Regina to Atlanta to train as a bookkeeper for Sorrel Farm; in the spring of 1941, they received a sweet-milk contract from State Hospital. Aunt Katie worked her entire life at the postal job she secured in the 1920s when elder brother Hugh T. Cline was the Republican-appointee postmaster.
Not only did O’Connor discover, over the course of this summer, her capacity for close friendship, but even the introductory courses she later brushed aside provided intellectual awakening, and at least one challenge. Most important for her was Survey of Humanities, with Dr. Paul Boeson, of the Classical Language Department. Because Dr. Boeson was a Roman Catholic, and a Latin scholar, she trusted him as her first guide to the world of philosophical ideas. On the cover of the winter 1943
Corinthian
was a photograph, reprinted from his personal collection, of a nun, in stark wimple and habit, reading a book illuminated by light streaming through a window. “She and Dr. Boeson would talk every day before the class would start,” recalls a fellow student, Lou Ann Hardigne. The following year O’Connor took the second half of his survey, buying the editions of Plato, Aristotle, and the
Selected Essays
of Montaigne that she would keep her entire life.
More trying was her first college writing class, English 101, General College Composition, with Miss Katherine Kirkwood Scott. Nearly twenty years later, in January 1960, Flannery O’Connor was invited back to the college, as a local literary celebrity, to speak at Chapel in Russell Auditorium. Her topic was “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” but she added personal comments that she left out when giving the same talk some months later at Macon College. These thoughts, tailored to her GSCW audience, suggested insecurities that had haunted her ever since college. She confided that morning: “When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’ Some writers can ignore this presence, but I have never learned how.”
An early reader, who may well have said, “I don’t get it, I don’t see it,” in not so many words, was Miss Katherine Scott. Although she gave O’Connor a grade of 92, Miss Scott was the steel magnolia version of Sister Mary Consolata at Sacred Heart. A writer herself, Scott later published a nostalgic memoir about Milledgeville titled
The Land of Lost Content.
While O’Connor was in college, Scott delivered a talk billed as “poetic and romantic” on “Greece: A Pioneer in Democracy,” to the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She liked to hold at least one class session at her 1838 Victorian family home that she claimed was haunted; she brought along to school her three prized Boston bulldogs.
“They would not have been a happy combination,” says Mary Barbara Tate, later an English teacher at GSCW, and a friend of Katherine Scott’s. “She thought Flannery had great talent, but she wanted her to write like Jane Austen. She was the kind of teacher who expected to be a mentor, and to be the one who gives out of this box of knowledge.” As Scott was a family friend, and had been in a small fourth-grade class with Regina Cline, both teacher and pupil were perfectly civil. Fran Richardson, a student in the class, has reported, “They would start talking and forget the rest of us were there. I told Mary Flannery once that I wished I could borrow some of her creativity, and she replied, ‘I’d exchange it for your ability to attract men.’” Yet when a journalist asked Scott, decades later, about her famous pupil, she revealed a lifelong ambivalence. “Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” she replied, “warped, but a genius all the same.”
O
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EPTEMBER 28
, the fall semester officially began with the arrival of the entire student body of 948 students, mostly from middle-income families in rural areas and small towns in Georgia, paying a yearly tuition of $67.50. The scale of O’Connor’s campus had suddenly expanded from the three “Choo-Choo” buildings, a few steps in from a side street, to include nearly twenty neoclassical brick buildings, trimmed in limestone, and striped with white Corinthian columns. Set in the middle of Milledgeville, this twenty-three-acre quadrangle of firs and plumed elms, courtyards laced with flowering shrubs, and wide promenades and stone fountains constituted a humble postcard version of a Southern women’s college. “I found my ideal,” wrote Betty Boyd of its “old stately buildings” in her
Corinthian
piece on “My First Impression of GSCW.”
Much of the charged atmosphere of the time made these years at GSCW indelible in the memories of alumnae from the early forties. Influencing all of their moods was the sensation of a nation now fully mobilized for war on two fronts. Students returning that fall remembered well the evening of December 7, 1941, when they had filed into Russell Auditorium for the annual choral singing of Handel’s
Messiah,
having just heard news of the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, resulting the next day in a declaration of war against Japan. “Girls were crying, although we didn’t fully realize why we were crying,” says Louise Simmons Allen of the class of ’44. “The next day I listened carefully to President Roosevelt’s ‘day of infamy’ speech on the radio. Our boyfriends were in the service and writing back about new experiences. The war was always with us.”
From the start of the fall semester of 1942, the women at GSCW gathered regularly in a large room set aside in Porter Hall to roll surgical dressings for the Red Cross, and pack khaki gift kits for soldiers. Many consumer goods popular with students were rationed, including radios, phonograph records, even rolled cigarettes. Bicycles were in vogue, as few of their male dates, or even family members, could spare rationed gasoline for pleasure driving. “Sugar was scarce, but they had Ribbon Cane syrup, and fig preserves, on the table every meal,” recalls one dormitory resident, Virginia Wood Alexander, of “meatless” and “breadless” suppers in Atkinson Dining Hall. Reacting to the shock of a number of unexpected American defeats early in the conflict, one student confessed in the college paper, the
Colonnade:
“This war is making us think.”
The young women were also beginning the academic year at a college that had its academic accreditation suddenly pulled the previous December by an irate Governor Eugene Talmadge, not to be restored, retroactively, until January 1943. GSCW was that most unusual of institutions for middle Georgia in 1942: a progressive college, with a faculty of about sixty men and women, including a number of bright lights with PhDs from the University of Chicago and Columbia, some even transplanted Northerners. Embodying its contradictions was its longtime president, Dr. Guy H. Wells. A gruff, cigar-chomping, stout, and jowly gentleman who mangled his grammar and lacked polish, he was also a liberal on race. As early as a talk in Chapel in 1932, he was “calling attention to the prejudice against the negro.” Governor Talmadge was punishing Wells with de-accreditation for his “foreign ideas” in forming a campus “Race Committee.”
With all these challenges, the women who blithely nicknamed themselves “Jessies,” eliding the GSC initials, operated on a cusp between the “Woman Power” called for in the homeland during the Second World War, and the more traditional giddiness of coeds away at college. Especially for women from farm communities, the four-block strip of downtown Milledgeville had its draws: Culver Kidd Drug Store, with its lunch counter specializing in hot dogs and ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a favorite spot to meet cadets from Georgia Military College; Benson’s Bakery; E. Bell’s Beauty Shop, which O’Connor turned into “Palace Beauty Salon” for a college composition exercise; the Darling and Peggie Hale dress shops; and two movie theaters, the Campus and the Co-ed, charging fifteen cents for students, with separate entrances for blacks to segregated balconies.
Known as “Georgia State College for Wallflowers,” because of the reduced number of available cadets and town boys, college house rules still chafed: signing out to go to the movies; ten o’clock curfew; a limit of two dates per week, one in a public parlor, with a chaperone. If Dr. Wells was liberal on race, he was a stickler on female propriety. “I grew up in Madison, Georgia, where we felt safe and as free as butterflies,” complains one alumna, Gladys Baldwin Wallace. “Upon entering GSCW I felt as though I had been clapped into irons. Shortly before, two girls had been suspended for smuggling two Cokes into the dorm. One girl stood outside the window with the Cokes, the other dropped a cord out the upstairs window and hoisted them upwards.” Wallace also remembers sightings of Regina O’Connor, “a hide-bound Southern lady, always wore hat and gloves in public.”