Flannery (14 page)

She followed the writing course with two summer literature courses, The Short Story, taught by Miss Hallie Smith, and a Survey of English Literature. O’Connor later developed a selective memory about what she had read and when. “When I went to Iowa I had never heard of Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, much less read them,” she later claimed to a friend. Yet her early stories bear traces of the fingerprints of both Faulkner and Joyce. And
The Story Survey,
her textbook for her English 311 course, with her name, “M. F. O’Connor,” and address, “305 W. Green Street, Milledgeville” carefully inscribed on the front page, has a checkmark in the table of contents next to Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun,” a star next to Joyce’s “A Little Cloud,” and lots of underlining of the explanation of “gothic” in the write-up on Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado.”

She was obviously mining authors for ideas for her own experiments in writing, and for kindred sensibilities. So her take on literature courses could be likewise highly personal, creative, often “smart-aleck.” Unimpressed by Emily Dickinson, O’Connor compared the New Englander’s poetry to the froth on a glass of Alka-Seltzer. When a friend once asked if she had read Robert Browning’s
The Ring and the Book,
she reported back, “I had a course in college entitled ‘Tennyson, Browning,’ and it looks like they would have made us read it. I don’t remember anything about it though. All I remember from the whole course is ‘Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, night, has flown.’ I thought that was hilarious.” She loved telling of the freshman in Miss Hallie’s class who piped up that the moral of Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter
was “Think twice before you commit adultery.”

During her junior year of 1943–44, she paid the price for her spiteful Social Science major by needing to take a series of sociology courses, beginning with Sociology 301: Introduction to Sociology. “In college I read works of social-science, so called,” she complained in a letter years later. “The only thing that kept me from being a social-scientist was the grace of God and the fact that I couldn’t remember the stuff but a few days after reading it.” The other second-year requirement that she put on an equal plane of disdain, though earning her much lower grades — C’s rather than A’s — was Physical Education. “She was considered dangerous with a golf club in her hand,” one Phys Ed classmate of hers has recalled. “She was apt not to look around or yell ‘Fore.’ She wasn’t particularly athletic, but she was a good sport and laughed at herself.”

Mary Flannery could be particularly irate and funny about Social Science 200, Contemporary Georgia Problems. As Ana Pinkston Phillips, a student in her class during the winter of 1944, recalls, “My introduction to her was when she slammed her book shut and said, as she left the room, ‘I don’t need to know how many pigs were born in Georgia in 1932!’” (A couple of her later fictional young women with Southern, feminine double names were book slammers, as well — Mary Elizabeth in “The Partridge Festival” and Mary Grace in “Revelation.”) Her reaction to the course was already set when she laid eyes on the syllabus the quarter before; a November 1943 cartoon of hers depicts a lumpy student, hair in disarray, soliciting a snappily uniformed Wave: “Could I interest you in buying a Contemporary Georgia syllabus?”

With one eye on “Podunk,” she dutifully fulfilled, during the same academic year, requirements toward a minor in Education. As she accurately reported to her friend Janet McKane, in 1964, “I had 3 education courses in college. Pure Wasted Time.” Of one of those classes, with only four students enrolled, the fellow pupil Jane Strozier Smith, says, “I remember Flannery as outstanding, not only for her brilliance, but because she never flaunted it at all.” She produced the equivalent of her “Contemporary Georgia” cartoon in three satiric essays for the
Corinthian
— “Doctors of Delinquency,” in fall 1943, about Hayden Struthers III, getting a “Master of Rotating Tops Degree” at Columbia Kindergarten; “Biologic Endeavor,” in spring 1944, on the modern miracle drugs Tums and Ex-Lax; and “Education’s Only Hope,” in spring 1945, with its loopy parting shot:

. . .until students quit school in the grammar grades, higher education will not attain that ultimate goal which the poet, Ridinghearse, expressed so beautifully when he wrote:

“Gee,

           It’s chilly

               
Up here!”

A reprieve from “progressive education” was provided by two single women professors, Miss Mary Thomas Maxwell and Miss Helen Greene. Many of O’Connor’s college friendships wound up being drawn not so much from other students as from a circle of professors closer in age to her aunts, perhaps explaining what one student called her “old fashion wardrobe — long dark skirts, long sleeves.” Joan DeWitt Yoe, a staff member at the
Corinthian,
was put off by her: “I was an art major and my job was to illustrate Mary’s short stories. I regret now that my drawings weren’t abstract to be in the same mood as her stories. She would hand me a copy of her story without a word or looking me in the eye. It was a strange situation that I still don’t understand. She wouldn’t let me in her space. . . . I do know that all of the teachers adored her and were constantly around her.”

Miss Mary Thomas Maxwell, the first of these teacher-friends, was nicknamed Tommy. “She was one of the most inspiring, exciting, and beautiful teachers,” remembers Helen Lewis of the sparkling woman in her thirties. “She introduced us all to Walt Whitman. Her exam would be imagining a dinner party with Mark Twain sitting next to another author, and you would have to develop a conversation between them.” O’Connor respected Tommy Maxwell enough to take her English 308 course in Spoken English during the summer of 1944, even though she cringed at public speaking. When Miss Maxwell queried her, she replied, “Well I know it won’t do any good, but I have to show Regina and Sister.” At the end of the summer, she received a B, not because her delivery had noticeably improved, but to acknowledge the “splendid” content of her talks.

Confiding to Betty Boyd that she felt Dr. Helen Greene, with her PhD from the University of Chicago, was “the smartest woman at that college,” she took her course in European History. As a member of an honor society, the International Relations Club, she attended evening meetings in Dr. Greene’s faculty apartment in Beeson Hall on Montgomery Street; afterward, another student would walk the “very carefully brought up” girl home. “My survey of European History was of special interest to her, I thought,” Dr. Greene has reminisced, “because the author of our textbook, one of those widely used, was a noted professor at Columbia University who, while working on his studies of Martin Luther in Germany, had changed his membership to the Roman Catholic Church.”

S
PRINGTIME WAS TREATED
as a happy cliché at GSCW. Each year, the
Spectrum
yearbook published a few pages of black-and-white shots with a caption, much like that in the 1945 edition: “Springtime brings with it Dogwood blossoms and flowering Iris.” One entry, a few years earlier, had filled in the scene with more local color: “Elms form a stately avenue for academic processions, dogwoods flaunt their beauty in Terrell Court. The formal garden accentuates the classic architecture of the buildings.” M. F. O’Connor added to the spring theme, while purposely getting it backward, in “Effervescence,” an ode printed in the spring 1943
Corinthian,
in which the sun rises on dogs sleeping beneath dogwoods. Its opening line, “Oh, what is so effervescent as a day in the spring,” was a parody of “And what is so rare as a day in June?” in “The Vision of Sir Launfal” by the American Romantic poet James Russell Lowell, a granduncle of Robert Lowell.

The spring of 1945, as O’Connor began her final quarter at GSCW, felt, even more than usual, to the young women and their guests, the Waves, as if the world was making a historic turn on its axis. During the previous summer, the D-day invasion had taken place with 155,000 Allied troops landing on the beaches of Normandy, opening a wedge in the Nazi domination of continental Europe. On February 23, 1945, Joe Rosenthal snapped his iconic photo of a group of marines and a navy corpsman raising a huge American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. By March 1945, Hitler was confined to his bunker in Berlin while American bombers attacked the city, and American troops liberated the first Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald. Within two months, on May 8, 1945, VE-day was declared, marking the official end of the war in Europe.

In the midst of so many positive historic events, the sad news came on April 12 that Franklin Roosevelt, recently inaugurated to an unprecedented fourth term, had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. “My roommate and I went to an afternoon movie, returning to campus around five, and someone told us ‘The president has died,’” remembers Betty Anderson Bogle, a student from Atlanta. “We assumed she meant Guy Wells. When we realized she meant Roosevelt, we were stunned beyond belief.” A performer at one of the GSCW Monday musical events had been Navy Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson, a black accordion player. When
Life
magazine appeared, many of the women recognized him in a photograph, playing “Going Home” on his accordion, tears rolling down his face, as the president’s hearse rolled past the steps of the Warm Springs polio hospital.

As she prepared to graduate, at twenty years old, O’Connor was far more active on campus than might have been expected. She had made enough of a name for one classmate to remember her as a “B.W.O.C.” (“Big Woman on Campus”). The girl whose only campus activity her first year had been the Newman Club was now editor in chief of the
Corinthian
literary magazine, feature editor of the
Spectrum
yearbook, and art editor of the
Colonnade
newspaper, as well as having been elected to all the honor societies — the Phoenix, Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities, and the International Relations Club. The tone of her first Editor’s Letter in the fall 1944
Corinthian,
titled “Excuse Us While We Don’t Apologize,” was unmistakable: “Although the majority of you like the ‘my love has gone now I shall moan’ type of work, we will give you none of it. Although the minority of you prefer consistent punctuation and a smack of literary pretension, we aren’t going to worry about giving it to you.”

She had grown particularly ambitious for her cartoons. With the
New Yorker
cartoonist James Thurber a household name in America during the forties — his
My World and Welcome to It
was published in 1942,
The Thurber Carnival
in 1945 — she submitted cartoons to
The New Yorker,
only to receive what she later described as “a lot of encouragin’ rejection slips.” Says the
Colonnade
’s feature editor Bee McCormack, echoing a common sentiment among the students, “I thought then she might become the new James Thurber.” As O’Connor later reported to Janet McKane: “I like cartoons. I used to try to do them myself, sent a batch every week to the New Yorker, all rejected of course. I just couldn’t draw very well. I like the ones that are drawn well better than the situations.” A sheaf of her cartoons from the time includes a classic of her sensibility: one fish saying to another, “You can go jump out of the lake!” While taking a two-semester course on “The United States” with a new history professor, James Bonner, she focused on the textbook
A Century of Political Cartoons,
imagining for herself a future in the profession.

Impressed by the splash her cartoons made in the student newspaper, Margaret Meaders, a journalism instructor and editor of the
Alumnae Journal,
asked the senior to contribute some work for the upcoming issue. Meaders later recalled looking out her office window in Parks Hall one afternoon and catching sight of Mary Flannery sauntering across Hancock Street, entering the campus, and making her way up the broad front walk beneath the overarching elms. She was on her way to their meeting, toting a pile of her “wonderful, merry cartoons.” Meaders wrote, “We Southerners would say that she ‘moseyed.’ I never remember seeing her hurry.” She summed up O’Connor’s understated presence at the college as “slow-spoken, quiet-mannered,” rather than that of “a campus big shot, a professional bright-girl-sure-to-heap-glory-on-all-of-us.”

The climax of O’Connor’s stint as campus cartoonist was the 1945
Spectrum.
The endpapers of the yearbook were panoramic views of the campus, a reprise of her greatest hits: chins-up, eyes-forward Waves marching in columns; girls balancing books and umbrellas; hounds curling their long tails. She also designed an entire “Pilgrimage through JESSIEVILLE” of ink drawings, redoing her tall-short pair with a sketch, from the rear, recognizable as the tall dean of women, Ethel Adams, and the short, stout dean of studies, Hoy Taylor. Her friend Robert Fitzgerald later judged these illustrations less successful. “In the linoleum cuts the line was always strong and decisive with an energy and angularity that recall the pen drawings of George Price, drawings that in fact she admired,” he wrote, noting the influence of a lesser-known, but brilliant
New Yorker
cartoonist. “For the yearbook . . . she tried a rounder kind of comic drawing, not so good.”

Because all of the student publication offices were located in Parks Hall, Editor O’Connor spent many hours in its basement. In her spare time, she took on herself the project of painting murals on the walls of its student lounge. “Mary Flannery decorated the walls with some of these Thurberesque types,” Dr. Helen Greene has written. She also completed a painting,
Winter,
included in a traveling exhibition through Georgia. A posed yearbook photo shows her sitting at a desk, in a cramped office, dressed in classic coed style — sweater, bobby socks, scuffed saddle shoes, with coiffed dark hair — surrounded by her staff of ten young women. In another shot, she leans against a pillar, one leg coyly tucked up, examining a copy of the magazine with her business manager, Peggy George. “We were laughing,” recalls Peggy George Sammons. “That is the only picture I have ever seen of her where she even had a smile on her face.”