by Brad Gooch
Bernard and Louis lived together at Bell House, Atlanta’s elite boardinghouse for confirmed bachelors and a few widowers. Housed in a Victorian mansion, with four Tiffany stained-glass windows, on the northeast corner of Peachtree and Third streets, Bell House required that residents be recommended by three members in good standing. The house rules were no drinking; coats worn downstairs and on the veranda; no smoking in the dining room. In exchange, the men were well attended by a staff of cooks, waiters, and housekeepers. As Elinor Hiller wrote in the Atlanta Journal Magazine in 1929, “Being an ex–Bell House boy is something like Roman citizenship, a thing to be proud of, a thing with just a touch of distinction in it.” Of visits to his uncles, Jack Tarleton recalls, with less mythology, “Bell House was musty, with high ceilings, leather furniture, and big magnolia trees out front. It was a fancy men’s club that had begun to age a bit.”
Dr. Bernard Cline was quite the gentleman-about-town. His social portfolio included not only Bell House, but also the Piedmont Driving Club, boasting the city’s first golf course, and the Capital City Club. Both of these exclusive clubs were “restricted” to the wealthiest of Atlanta’s white society — meaning, closed to Jews and blacks. Even before moving to Atlanta, Mary Flannery and her Florencourt cousins were accustomed to fetes in their honor at the Piedmont Club, or on the front lawn of Bell House, where the main event featured black men in white coats driving up in ice cream trucks full of fancy desserts. The Atlanta Journal covered one of Uncle Bernard’s “old-fashioned” lawn parties for eighty-five guests at Bell House, under the heading “Dr. Cline Hosts Affair Feting Nieces”: the girls pinned the tail on Mickey Mouse, and released colorful balloons into the air.
Yet for the fourteen-year-old Mary Flannery, Atlanta was less a lawn party than a perfect storm of yet only dimly understood troubles. Even as an adult, she held on to a juvenile animus for the place. “My idea about Atlanta,” she wrote Ted Spivey, “is to get in, get it over with and get out before dark.” The sources of these negative feelings were her experiences in 1939 and 1940. During that unsettled period, her father was ill, even if temporarily asymptomatic. Every weekday he would put on a jacket and tie and travel downtown to the FHA offices on the fifth floor of the Austell Building at 10 Forsyth Street, working at one of Roosevelt’s many “alphabet agencies” to help ease the city’s housing crisis. As adjustment to the city was proving difficult for the family, his daughter would spend these same hours, ill at ease, in the corridors of her modern high school.
Given the extra stress, tensions between Regina Cline and the O’Connor family resurfaced. “Regina and my mother did not see eye to eye at all,” reports Dr. Peter Cline of relations between Regina and her sister-in-law Nan, at whose wedding she met her husband. “All the other in-laws called my Grandmother and Grandfather O’Connor, ‘Mother’ and ‘Father.’ Regina never called them anything except ‘Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor.’ That gives a little clue as to what she was like. . . . Edward O’Connor was a sweet, charming man. He was tall, good-looking, very warm, the total opposite of his wife. The O’Connors were warm, loving people, very loving, very outgoing.” As O’Connor herself later summed up these dynamics, especially on the Cline side, “I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”
The Atlanta that O’Connor knew, growing up in the thirties, suffered even more than most cities from the poverty and distress caused by the Great Depression. The South had already experienced an economic turnaround brought about by the destruction of King Cotton by the boll weevil, described by stunned cotton farmers in the 1920s as “a cross between a termite and a tank.” The region was the hardest hit in the nation when the stock market crashed. Even in bucolic Buckhead, in 1932 six hundred families were considered “destitute.” A year later, only half the workforce of Atlanta was employed. Although by 1939, relief from the destitution was finally evident, O’Connor was familiar with streets thick with panhandlers and apple sellers, long “hunger marches” and breadlines. On either side of Bell House, where she visited her uncles, half the stores were boarded shut on Peachtree Street — a decade earlier, the city’s most fashionable stretch of boutiques.
Images of hard times, and down-and-out types, are often found in O’Connor’s fiction; according to Ted Spivey, her “absurdist vision of cities” was drawn from “the few months O’Connor spent in Atlanta.” Certainly Taulkinham, in Wise Blood, with its street peddlers, vacant lots, and railroad yards is a depressed city. O’Connor told Spivey that the novel’s City Forest Park Zoo was based on Atlanta’s Grant Park Zoo. When her editor Catharine Carver visited in 1960, Flannery took her on a tour of the Cyclorama next to the Grant Park Zoo, one of Enoch Emery’s favorite spots: “We met her in Atlanta and took her to the cyclorama in the mvsevm where Enoch got the mummy.” In “The Artificial Nigger,” Atlanta is compared to Dante’s Hell, especially a sewer system that the ten-year-old Nelson imagines as “the entrance to hell.” Both the building of new sewers, and the refurbishing of the panoramic painting of the 1864 Battle of Atlanta in the Cyclorama, had been WPA projects much in the news in Atlanta during the thirties.
Even closer to O’Connor’s heart was the adolescent homesickness she put into the mouths of a trio of bad boys in “A Circle in the Fire.” In the story, their ringleader, Powell, waxes nostalgic for his early boyhood on a farm that closely resembles Sorrel Farm, with its main house and white water tower rising up behind it. His itinerant father then moved “out to one of them developments” in Atlanta. Although their cluster of ten four-story concrete buildings was much more down-market than Peachtree Heights, the term “development” covered both. “So you boys live in one of those nice new developments,” says Mrs. Cope, the farm’s owner. Powell’s sidekick W.T. sets her straight: “All the time we been knowing him he’s been telling us about this here place. Said it was everything here. Said it was horses here. . . . He don’t like it in Atlanta.” Evoking the all-important naming of Shetland ponies at Sorrel Farm, Powell says, in a nostalgic reverie, “I remember it was one name Gene and it was one name George.”
The biggest public event in Atlanta during O’Connor’s stay, if not in the city’s entire cultural history, was the grand premiere of Gone With the Wind. Yet all the hoopla over the novel and film left her merely irked. For O’Connor, as both girl and woman, there was no escaping the endlessly popular historical romance about Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of an Irish Catholic immigrant, surviving the Civil War years in Atlanta and on Twelve Oaks plantation in central Georgia. When O’Connor was eleven years old, living in Savannah, the novel first appeared and sold a record 250,000 copies in five weeks. As John and Cleo Tarleton were early friends of Margaret Mitchell and her first husband, the family rumor was that the novel’s Tarleton twins owed their name to O’Connor’s aunt and uncle. Street guards for crowd control at the gala movie premiere in Atlanta were all drawn from the ROTC chapter (of which James Dickey was a member) of O’Connor’s high school.
On the evening of December 15, 1939, five giant searchlights clashed like crossed swords above Loew’s Grand Theatre downtown. Confederate flags whipped in the wind along Peachtree Street as the lead actors Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh and the novelist Margaret Mitchell arrived. Pathe and Movietone crews filmed more than two thousand celebrities, and the governors of five Southern states, disappearing into a lavish façade redone as a Greek Revival plantation home. Many of these Confederate-themed festivities stretched out over the entire week, enacted along a fault line of Jim Crow tension. The black actress Hattie McDaniel, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Mammy, was not invited to the premiere. The sixty-voice Ebenezer Baptist Church Choir, directed by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., entertained at a whites-only Junior League ball associated with the opening event; choir members, including the ten-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., were dressed as slaves.
For O’Connor, a rare So
utherner of her generation to complain “I sure am sick of the Civil War,” neither the book nor movie was a draw. Her irritation at the reception only intensified when relatives later needled her for not writing a popular moneymaker like her fellow Georgian woman author. She took revenge by sending up the gaudy opening night as the high point in the life of 104-year-old Confederate veteran General Sash in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”: “‘I was in that preemy they had in Atlanta,’ he would tell visitors sitting on his front porch. ‘Surrounded by beautiful guls. It wasn’t a thing local about it. It was nothing local about it. Listen here. Every person in it had paid ten dollars to get in and had to wear this tuxseeder. I was in this uniform.’” And parroting her own mother’s criticism, the mother of the fledgling writer Asbury, in “The Enduring Chill,” advises, “We need another good book like Gone with the Wind. . . . Put the war in it. . . . That always makes a long book.” In “The Partridge Festival,” Aunt Bessie, a stand-in for Aunt Mary, remarks hopefully to her aspiring-writer nephew, “Maybe you’ll be another Margaret Mitchell.” For the twenty-five years following the premiere, Gone With the Wind remained a running joke in O’Connor’s life and work. Dean Hood, a friend from Florida, recalled that when she and her husband, Robert, visited Milledgeville during the 1960s, a Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal ran a memorial feature on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, “which Flannery sputtered over all day long.”
IN THE FALL of 1940, the silhouette of Death that O’Connor described, in an apprentice story, as a man in white “coming slow up the road, to take you,” grew more distinct. Because their daughter was unhappy in school in Atlanta, her parents enrolled her for the tenth grade back in Peabody High School, in Milledgeville. Edward O’Connor, under the care of physicians in Atlanta, moved in alongside his two brothers-in-law in Bell House. Soon even this shaky arrangement fell apart. A worst-case scenario came true. As his health deteriorated, O’Connor could no longer hold down his government job. By the end of the year, he retreated to the Cline Mansion to spend his last months as an invalid, dependent on the kindness of his wife’s family for care. His fifteen-year-old daughter watched as the father she adored — a middle-aged man, otherwise in his prime — suffered a mysterious, painful, wasting death from the fatal illness.
Edward O’Connor’s death on Saturday, the first of February 1941, came exactly a month after his forty-fifth birthday. Its apparent suddenness was a shock, especially to those outside the immediate family circle. Just a year earlier, a holiday party at the Cline Mansion had been billed as both a New Year’s Day celebration and a birthday party for Edward O’Connor, with decorative yellow calendulas in a large silver bowl on the dining room table, and his daughter assisting with the entertaining. His mysterious illness had been kept enough of a well-guarded secret that a brief obituary in the Atlanta Constitution claimed that he died “following a two-week illness.” A Union-Recorder obituary more fully reported, “In recent months his health had not been good, but his death was unexpected. His cordial personality, his leadership and ability won for him many friends. He waged an unrelenting fight to lift some of the tax burden from real estate.”
The burial service took place on Monday, February 3, a gray, wintry day, at Sacred Heart Church on Milledgeville’s North Jefferson Street. This simple sanctuary, topped by a steeple and cross, had been the scene of all of the important Cline and Treanor rites of passage for nearly three-quarters of a century. Built with bricks and Gothic-arched, hand-pressed, clear-glass windows from the handsome Lafayette Hotel that once stood on the site, the church was constructed mostly with help from Flannery O’Connor’s great-grandparents. Its first wedding was held on February 8, 1875, when her grandfather Peter J. Cline married Katie Treanor. Its first funeral was that of Mary Treanor, daughter of Hugh and Johannah Harty Treanor. Edward and Regina had been married there just nineteen years earlier by Father Morrow. The current church organist was Aunt Gertie Treanor.
The chapel was an intimate, confined space, like a small country church. To the left, behind the altar rail, was a baptismal font; to the right, a freestanding pulpit. The Reverend James E. King conducted a traditional requiem mass, in Latin, facing the main altar, looking up toward a hanging, nearly life-sized, loin-draped Christ on the cross. An honorary escort for the casket, resting in the center aisle, was made up of local and state officers of the American Legion. Among the pallbearers was Dr. C. B. Fulghum, the Cline family doctor. Edward O’Connor was interred in a Cline and Treanor family plot on the northern edge of City Cemetery, and a special Rosary was said for the repose of his soul in the front parlor of the Cline Mansion. “I went to the funeral as I was a Peabody class officer,” recalls Elizabeth Shreve Ryan. “It was a very cold day, and it was a very sad, dreary occasion. I don’t think any of the rest of us had ever lost a father.” Mary Flannery consoled her mother by reminding her that he was now better off than they were.
O’Connor rarely spoke of her father again. Yet not speaking of him did not imply that she did not feel his loss deeply. She would often keep a discreet silence about subjects that mattered to her the most, beginning with her relationship with her father. Her very silence was a stolid marker of its depth. “I think she did have a wholehearted love for her father,” says Louise Abbot, a close friend of O’Connor’s, beginning in the midfifties. “The love was of a kind we most often think of children having for their mother.” In talking about her personal feelings about God in her religious life, O’Connor, tellingly, once wrote Betty Hester, “I’ve never spent much time over the bride-bridegroom analogy. For me, perhaps because it began for me in the beginning, it’s been more father and child.” While many have noticed the dominant place of widows in her fiction, every widow, or orphan, implies a missing husband or father. O’Connor’s two novels, and many of her stories, are filled with the eraser marks of all these dead fathers.
In a jumbled notebook that O’Connor kept during her first year of college, about two years after the death of her father, she did meditate briefly on her grief. A spiritually precocious seventeen-year-old, she gave a rare glimpse into the private wisdom she earned from the tragedy:
The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, “You have forgotten — mine?”
Soon after their return to Milledgeville in the fall of 1940, Regina O’Connor got in touch with George Haslam, the adviser to the high school newspaper, the Peabody Palladium. She knew that her daughter was too shy to make such a move herself. Yet she also knew how much time and effort went into the drawings and writings she was always doing in her attic studio. With her husband ill and living separately in Atlanta, her mother had hoped to find some school activity to occupy her. Haslam agreed to the suggestion and asked the extremely introverted girl to contribute to the paper. “I don’t know how to write,” Mary Flannery answered. “But I can draw.” As a result, she was made art editor in October, and, almost immediately, began to flourish in the role.
For the October issue of the Palladium, she painstakingly created a linoleum-block cut, her first, titled One Result of the New Peabody Orchestra. The cartoon shows a girl wearing a tasseled hat, sweater, pleated skirt, and saddle oxfords, blowing on a large saxophone, as “BLAH,” all in caps, emerges from the horn. A background figure, in skirt and jacket, frowning, cups her hands to her ears. The cartoon accompanied the article “Students Join Concert Group.” With a knack for difficult, idiosyncratic crafts, the new art editor produced 120 of these block prints over the next five years: drawing a sketch on a piece of linoleum, gouging away the white portions, applying oil-based ink to the ridges, printing a reversed paper copy on a special press. Her first few cartoons — a girl at her desk wit
h a thought bubble of a turkey, for Thanksgiving; a dozing pupil with Z’s stringing from her mouth — were rough, scratchy affairs. As one critic has described her genre, they were “single-frame satires.”
Although Mary Flannery claimed not to be a writer, she was really writing nearly as much as drawing. For her, the two activities were joined from the start. Appearing in the same November 1940 issue as her Thanksgiving cartoon was her debut poem, “The First Book.” Profiled a few years later in the local newspaper by Nelle Womack Hines as “a female Ogden Nash,” O’Connor aspired in her first effort to the terse, doggerel style of the popular New Yorker poet:
His mind began to wander,
And his bean began to rage.
Her light verse winds up as a paean to books, the source of her earliest enthusiastic collaborations with her father:
Thus the ancestor of books was born,
On slides of stone and clay.
While her father had been homebound, she was working on a send-up of Marcel Proust, though she had certainly not read much, if any, of Remembrance of Things Past. In a letter to Maryat Lee, in 1956, she admitted that she had read only Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes of the French novel. But at fifteen, she knew enough of Proust’s central conceit — the sensation of biting into a madeleine cookie to release a flood of childhood memories — to write a four-paragraph burlesque. In writing, as in cartooning, satire was her signature adolescent style. In “Recollections on My Future Childhood,” she makes fun of Proust, as Ogden Nash was making fun in the 1930s of literary greats such as James Joyce, in his “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man.” “Fish oil,” not a French pastry, is her narrator’s mnemonic trigger: “It was my first sardine . . . bruised & blue from the crowding.” She winds up concluding, “Proust wanted past time. I’ll take any old time.”