by Brad Gooch
Her own reading was far from orderly or comprehensive. She spent many hours during her childhood visits to the Cline Mansion reading about Greek and Roman myths, and lots of other topics, in an 1898 set of the children’s encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge that had once belonged to her grandmother. As fascinated by the graphics as by the text, she later wrote a friend that she particularly remembered “the illustrations about a young man of about six in a sailor suit and round hat. He stood on a wharf and watched a ship come in. In each illustration the ship was bigger. He therefore came to the conclusion that the world was round. He did this without assistance. I was mighty impressed and will never forget the Book of Knowledge. I reckon it’s deteriorated though.” She complained that “the rest of what I read was Slop with a capital S.”
After “the Slop period,” she became absorbed, “for years,” with a ten-volume “commemorative” edition of Poe’s work she found on the family bookshelf. She enjoyed The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a short lyric novel about a stowaway on a whaling ship whose survivors resorted to cannibalism. But her favorite was volume eight, the Humorous Tales, including “The Spectacles,” “The Man That Was Used Up,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” She later recalled, “These were mighty humerous — one about a young man who was too vain to wear his glasses and consequently married his grandmother by accident; another about a fine figure of a man who in his room removed wooden arms, wooden legs, hair piece, artificial teeth, voice box, etc. etc.; another about the inmates of a lunatic asylum who take over the establishment and run it to suit themselves.” She added, “I’m sure he wrote them all while drunk too.”
According to Elizabeth Hardwick, who met O’Connor at Yaddo, the Poe collection was a staple in many educated homes of the period. “We didn’t have a lot of books in my house but we did have the complete Poe,” said Hardwick, of her childhood in Kentucky. “I bet they had the same edition. I remember sitting on the front porch in Lexington and reading ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ I’ve often looked back and thought, ‘How did that happen?’ You have nothing to read when you’re twelve and you’re reading Poe.” For O’Connor, Poe continued to haunt: showing up in the coffins and “walling up cats” of Wise Blood, and as an inspiration for the Misfit’s spectacles for sizing up the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and for Hulga’s unscrewed wooden leg in “Good Country People.” Most immediately, though, the tales were grist for “Recollections of My Future Childhood,” in which Aunt Bertha locked her fiancé in her left bureau drawer and “never opened it.”
During the spring of 1941, Mary Flannery completed writing and illustrating three books of her own, all about geese — “Elmo,” “Gertrude,” and “Mistaken Identity.” “She wrote these books about her animals when she was growing up,” says fellow Peabodite Deedie Sibley (known in high school as Frances Binion). “I remember them being pink cardboard. They had spiral binding and you just flipped them open. There was a picture of a duck, and then some little sentence or something she wanted to say about the duck.” Impressed by the mechanics of publishing by her father, she was quite professional about these handmade books. “M.F. has finished three books on her geese, and put each in a box,” Aunt Gertie informed Aunt Agnes in March 1941. “Nearly all who have seen them think they are good. She is thinking about having them copyrighted if she just finds the right way of going about it. Louis seems to think he knows a party in Atlanta who could put her on the right track.”
She paid the most attention to “Mistaken Identity,” her seventeen-page poem, with colored illustrations, about a case of gender confusion among geese. The poem was occasional, based on the true incident of her pet gander Herman laying an egg and hatching a brood of eight goslings, leading to the conclusion that “Herman’s HENRIETTA.” In December 1941, the Peabody Palladium picked up the story of her foiled attempts to find a publisher for the three books in a piece titled “Peabodite Reveals Strange Hobby.” The interviewer asked, “Mary Flannery, what’s your hobby?” She replied, “Collecting rejection slips.” “What?” the confused reporter responded. “Publisher’s rejection slips,” she explained. The piece ends with the upbeat news: “As for Mary Flannery’s ambition, she wants to keep right on writing, particularly satires.” When she eventually self-published Mistaken Identity as a bound booklet, she added a preface: “The following is a drama especially prepared for highly intelligent adults and precocious children.”
Seemingly custom-made for the young writer, Peabody High School had purposely been designed as just such a meeting place for intelligent adults and precocious children. Her school’s idealistic motto was “The Good, The True, The Beautiful.” Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls, “We were always told, ‘Leave the world a better place than you found it.’” There were no “classes,” only “activities.” In Home Economics, students planned and executed a formal dinner at one of their homes. A semester of Chemistry began with the instructor asking her pupils what they wished to study, and then helping them fulfill a desire to learn about photography or cosmetics. “The teacher did run in a little bit about the elements and the periodic table,” one student remembered. Literature appreciation was favored over diagramming sentences. History began with reading and reporting on the front page of a daily newspaper. The choir, of which Mary Virginia Harrison was a member, was a cappella, involving mostly reciting poetry in unison.
Yet the newspaper’s contrary art editor had nothing but scorn for such experimental teaching. She got her wish to be liberated from the nuns only to be equally disdainful of their polar opposites, the freethinkers. “I went to a progressive highschool where one did not read if one did not wish to,” she complained to Betty Hester in 1955. “I did not wish to (except the Humerous Tales etc.).” In an early draft of Wise Blood, the Peabody principal Mildred English becomes “Mr. English the principal who had graduated from Teacher’s College, Columbia,” and the school becomes Tilford High School.
While putting down the principles of original thought and free expression, and teachers playing to their audience at the next meeting of the PTA, she was actually a beneficiary of the system. Cutting a highly original profile, Mary Flannery was generally accepted as the “creative” girl dressed in a plaid skirt, rolled sleeves, and a pair of brown Girl Scout shoes, her school notebook painted in oils and covered with cellophane. She often waved “hello” with a salute as she strode the halls with her head thrust forward. “I can see her plodding along,” says Charlotte Conn Ferris. “That’s how she walked, with her hands behind her back, just clumping along, thinking about something, who knows what.” For life drawing in Art, she brought her goose of a gander, Herman, as a portrait model. She played clarinet, and bull fiddle, because, she said, “I am the only one who can hold it up.” As an adult, she told an interviewer that all she remembered of high school was “the way the halls smelled and bringing my accordion sometimes to play for the ‘devotional.’”
Her greatest bit of meticulously planned showmanship took place in Margaret Abercrombie’s Home Economics section. The “activity” for the semester was sewing, and all the other girls busily sewed aprons, or underwear, for weeks on end, while O’Connor sat idly off to the side, not participating. “Now next Wednesday is the examination day for this course,” Miss Abercrombie finally announced, a bit exasperated. “All members who expect to receive a grade are to bring and display the various garments made during the quarter. I hardly see how you are going to get a whole outfit finished and ready, Mary Flannery, by that time.” As a fellow student has reported, “On the appointed day Flannery arrived with her pet duckling, and a whole outfit of underwear and clothes, beautifully sewn to fit the duck! The class in great glee all gathered round and helped dress the duck. Flannery successfully passed the course.”
By now she had a full menagerie of birds to choose from for her models. On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Mary Flannery was particularly drawn to names for her pets lifted from the daily
newspapers she was required to read for History class. With an instinct for shock value, the author who would later warn, “The topical is poison,” went straight for the headlines. She named her black crow, rescued when the bird was shot by a neighbor for stealing pecans, Winston, after Winston Churchill. Her pet rooster, another of her models in Art class, was Haile Selassie, for the emperor of Ethiopia, reinstated in 1941 after being routed by the armies of Benito Mussolini. Most controversial was her second rooster, Adolph, the pen mate of Haile, as Adolf Hitler, the führer of Germany, had just declared war on the United States in December 1941. She changed its name only after neighbors were disturbed by calls of “Here, Adolph!” issuing from the Cline backyard.
Cartoons turned out to be a happy medium for this quiet, yet extremely critical girl. Through her monthly cartoons, she could bare her teeth in the guise of a smile. As a more mature O’Connor wrote, in 1959, to Ted Spivey: “From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden.” Among the sins that she exposed was the pretense of senior plays: in “Senior, Senior, Wherefore Art Thou, Senior,” she conjured two girls in a histrionic balcony scene to accompany the article “Seniors Present Annual Plays.” Like any good cartoonist, she was alert to the mood of her audience. A week following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in a December 1941 cartoon, she modulated her tone with “In Hopes That a Jimmie Soon Will Be There”: a girl sits next to a fireplace, with a soldier’s jacket hung from the mantel as a Christmas stocking. (Jimmie was a nickname for a cadet at Georgia Military College, many of whom enlisted in the war effort.)
Most unsuitable for the physically awkward girl was gym class. “She just thought playing sports was the biggest bore,” says Elizabeth Shreve Ryan. “We had to put on our blue bloomers and go out to a grassy area behind the school on the main campus and play volleyball. I can just remember her standing in her gym uniform making no effort to give the ball a hoist. She’d kind of nudge her shoulder as if that was all she was willing to do. She did that very cheerfully, but it was just not her bag.” Likewise “not her bag” were dance invitations to battalion balls at Georgia Military College, and the chance to dress up in the retro gowns of Southern belles to match the gray uniforms of the boys. She was much happier adding to her collection of 150 replicas of birds, and other animals, in china and glass, or designing another of the original lapel pins she sold out of a local drugstore.
O’Connor was most in her element in English class, especially a six-week segment devoted to creative writing. Her Composition teacher, Frances Lott Ratliff, has remarked on how surprised she was that a fifteen-year-old could show such talent. “How she looked didn’t seem to matter,” she added. Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls the sensation caused by O’Connor’s writing: “Being in a creative writing class with Mary Flannery in high school was sheer torture. I remember she wrote a very strange story with weird characters. I don’t know whether it was a ghost story, but it was gripping. As World War II was just beginning, I wrote some drivel about a soldier and his girlfriend. Her stories were written with panache, and a wry sense of humor. But they were just weird.”
She did agree to go on one double date. The special event was arranged by Flannery’s friend Mary Virginia Harrison, who has been described by Elizabeth Shreve Ryan as “the belle of the ball. She had beautiful clothes, and never lacked a date, or an invitation to a dance.” Mary Virginia’s date was Reynolds Allen, one of the few male students at Peabody. He had recently won a Baldwin County essay contest, in May 1942, by writing about U.S. Representative Carl Vinson. Allen’s first-place essay, awarded a full college scholarship, won over Mary Flannery’s second-place effort, awarded ten dollars, on the college president Dr. Melvin Parks. Her “blind date” that evening was Reynolds’s cousin Dick Allen, a slight, bookish boy. The quartet went to the country club and drank Coca-Colas. At some point in the evening, Mary Flannery blurted out, “My dad-gum foot’s gone to sleep.”
While she complained about having attended a high school where you could “integrate English literature with geography, biology, home economics, basketball, or fire prevention,” she graduated with a solid list of credits in a standard array of academic subjects. She even received a credit in Latin. “At that time they said the same things they usually say about Latin,” says fellow Peabodite Dr. Floride Gardner. “That it gives you such a good basis for English, particularly verbs.” But O’Connor’s Latin teacher, Lila Blitch, later claimed to be “terribly disappointed” by the negative Southern character portrayed through Haze Motes, in Wise Blood, by her former pupil. O’Connor also received two credits in French, taught by Miss Adams.
The culmination of her time at what she dismissed ever after as “the progressive high school” was a graduation ceremony at eight thirty on the evening of May 28, 1942, at Russell Auditorium. Her graduation day cartoon in the Palladium the year before was titled “At Long Last . . .” and pictured a girl in cap and gown rushing with arms outstretched and head bent toward a door marked “EXIT” in big, block letters. Actually, all the girls wore evening dresses rather than caps and gowns. The program opened with the singing of the class song, to the tune of “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi”: “When our schooldays are gone, / As they’re bound to go, / We’ll be broken hearted but true.” Class President Mary Virginia Harrison addressed “our mothers, our fathers,” and spoke of the occasion as “the most significant one we have ever known.”
Afterward, Mrs. O’Connor and Mrs. Harrison threw a party at the Cline Mansion for their daughters, the graduating class of forty-six seniors, and Peabody faculty. Frances Binion helped ladle punch at a dining room table decorated with garden flowers and lighted tapers. Lila Blitch volunteered as one of the hostesses. “I recollect Mrs. O’Connor serving us little pink cakes, and little sandwiches, and punch at our graduation party,” says Elizabeth Shreve Ryan. “She was a genteel Southern lady, full of graciousness. But her daughter was on the couch looking as if she’d been crammed into her evening dress. She made it plain to everyone that she was not about to be a gracious hostess.” In contrast to her “very pretty” mother, Mary Flannery sat out the entire affair alone, her face fixed in a look of utter boredom.
Chapter Three
“MFOC”
Georgia 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?”