by Brad Gooch
The title of his lit course was actually the title of its textbook, an anthology of stories that O’Connor later said Engle “was able to breathe some life into” — Understanding Fiction. Published in 1943, it had been edited by Cleanth Brooks, Jr., and Robert Penn Warren, with interspersed explanations. An academic marker for the fashionable school of New Criticism, its editors emphasized “close reading,” paying attention to the art and craft of stories, rather than to historical or cultural concerns, or to mining fiction for a series of psychological clues to a writer’s life. Many of the selections were eye-openers for Flannery: Caroline Gordon’s “Old Red”; Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”; William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” In an exam essay, in November, she argued that Thomas Thompson’s “A Shore for the Sinking” was about “a man’s realization that he has been ‘left out.’” Engle wrote on her blue book, “A+. Admirable.”
All of the creative writers at Iowa, and many painters and musicians, too, passed through Engle’s Workshop. Still in its nascent wartime stage in the fall of 1945, the writing seminar was taught in the English Department faculty offices, or in a small classroom in the University Building, next to the Old Capitol on the Pentacrest of five buildings. “It was a plain little room in an old building on campus that nobody was competing for,” recalls one student. A dozen chairs would simply be drawn into an informal semicircle around a reading desk set on a platform a wooden step up from the floor. As Paul Engle described the class routine, in the Des Moines Register, “Each meeting consists of the reading of manuscripts by, customarily, two students. . . . The students are quite merciless in criticizing each other’s work, as well as in challenging the faculty before them.”
One of a small minority of women in the 1945 Workshop, Mary Mudge Wiatt, from Sioux City, was present the first time Flannery read a story. “Her voice was quiet, with a nice, rich Southern accent,” remembers Wiatt. “I thought she seemed not really at ease. She colored easily, flushed. I remember one scene where a white woman answers the door. A black man had some business with her. They spoke back and forth.” The story, a draft of “The Coat,” was Flannery’s attempt to mimic a selection she admired in her Understanding Fiction anthology, “The Necklace,” by Maupassant. In the original French moral tale, a string of paste jewels, mistaken for diamonds, destroys the heroine’s life. In her Southern rewrite, Rosa, a black washerwoman, invites tragedy on her husband, Abram, by wrongly imagining that he killed a white man for “dat coat.”
O’Connor wrote about this shaky period in Iowa, trying to find her way as a writer, for the Alumnae Journal at Georgia State College for Women, when the magazine was running a series on choices in career paths. In a piece titled “The Writer and the Graduate School,” which appeared in the summer of 1948, she confessed her initial doubts: “What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul; a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome. Therefore, of what use graduate work?” She answered her own question, with some of her arch high school humor, by claiming that a creative writing program at least saved a few authentic writers from becoming one of the scholarly “dead birds” in “the literary woods”: “Some of these were laid away with Ph.D.’s and doubtless all with an excellent knowledge of Beowulf.” The MFA program was an alternative, she concluded, to “the poor house” and “the mad house.”
An early boost came with a classroom visit from the poet John Crowe Ransom, the founder and editor of the Kenyon Review, the house organ of the New Critics. Visits from such writers deemed, by Engle, “of the right sort,” were an important component of the Workshop. When Ransom chose one of O’Connor’s stories to read to the class, she was encouraged to be singled out, and by such a prominent Southern writer. Yet the work was in the mode of her high school story “A Place of Action,” or “The Coat.” She was trying to render the dialogue of poor whites and blacks in the South. When Ransom came across the word “nigger,” he refused to read it aloud, substituting the word “Negro.” “It did spoil the story,” Flannery complained to Robie Macauley, after he arrived as a Workshop instructor in 1947. “The people I was writing about would never use any other word.”
For one of her next stories, she turned again to Understanding Fiction, and Caroline Gordon’s “Old Red,” for a model. By now, winter had dramatically fallen on Iowa City. Flannery had been home to Georgia for the Christmas holidays and discovered that she had grown more than an inch her first semester, up to about five five. By the time she returned for the February 3 resumption of classes, the cornfields were a silent blur of thick, fallen snow. Fellow Workshop member Norma Hodges recalls walking out after one evening Workshop meeting into the bracing Iowa air: “Flannery was so cold, she was shivering all over. I said something about, ‘Not quite your Southern weather.’” Always tense around the “little pale girl with big glasses,” Hodges felt her silly pleasantry returned with “one of those dirty, dirty looks. I didn’t mess with her much.”
Yet on the day Flannery read her “Old Red”–inspired story, Hodges was “flabbergasted. I was real excited about Flannery when I heard her. But then the men gave her a hard time, which seemed funny.” The story she read was a draft of “The Geranium.” In Gordon’s “Old Red,” an old Southern gentleman finds a symbol for his life in a wily red fox. In O’Connor’s story, a Southerner, Old Dudley, living in a tenement in New York City, finds a symbol for his homesickness in a potted red geranium. As she later wrote to Maryat Lee of this story, expressing the underlying emotion of her first winter in Iowa City, “I couldn’t though have written a story about my being homesick.” Instead she embodied the experience in “an old man who went to live in a New York slum — no experience of mine as far as old men and slums went.”
The early mimeographed draft Flannery read in a contentious Workshop session had a more extreme ending that was later cut. Upon finding that the pot had fallen off a windowsill, the old man, rather than merely feeling crushed, as in the final version, according to Hodges, “pitched himself out of the window. I think his daughter asked, ‘Where are you going?’ and Old Dudley said, ‘After that damned geranium!’” But feelings among the men in the class were already stacked against O’Connor as she began reading the story with what Hodges called a “broad Southern drawl”: “After a few lines, groans arose from the oval of chairs and the story was given to a man with more recognizable diction.” When the old man leapt to his death — a finale Hodges found “mythical” — “They all went, ‘No . . . couldn’t happen . . . it’s too much,’ and so on.”
“The only day I felt she fell flat on her face was when she tried to write about a boy-and-girl situation,” Hodges added, of O’Connor’s talent for these “mythical” stories. “It wasn’t her thing. And one about an educated black became labored.” Engle likewise noted her awkwardness in writing about sex or romance. In the corridor, following one Workshop session, he tried to make a few suggestions. “‘This scene of the attempted seduction just is not correct, I want to explain,’” he said. “‘Oh no, don’t, not here!’” Flannery quickly replied, looking nervously about. “So we went outside, across the street to the parking lot and into my car. There, I explained to her that sexual seduction didn’t take place quite the way she had written it — I suspect from a lovely lack of knowledge.”
If Engle felt that her sex scenes were not graphic enough, Flannery was still worried about their mere existence in the work of a young Catholic writer. As she later wrote of this crisis of literary conscience, “I was right young and very ignorant and I thought what I was doing was mighty powerful (it wasn’t even intelligible at that point) and liable to corrupt anybody that read it and me too.” Her solution was to visit one of the local Iowa City priests and carefully explain the problem. The priest drew out from his stash “one of those ten cent pamphlets that they are never without” and told her that sh
e didn’t need to write for fifteen-year-old girls. While this permission to write for a wider adult audience was helpful, his pamphlet failed to impress when she discovered that its Jesuit author deemed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn “about as good as you could get.”
O’Connor later told an interviewer, concerning the Workshop, “When I went there I didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper.” In spite of her insecurities, Engle encouraged her to keep submitting work for publication. Her first submission to the Sewanee Review was rejected over Christmas break. But in February, she mailed off two more stories, “The Geranium” and “The Crop,” to Accent magazine. A broad satire in the style of some of her juvenile fiction, “The Crop” concerned a spinster schoolmarm with pretensions of becoming a writer of “social problem” stories. Like the young Miss O’Connor, trying on different author’s story lines, the assiduous Miss Willerton, sitting in front of her typewriter, “discarded subject after subject and it usually took her a week or two to decide finally on something.”
In March, close to her twenty-first birthday, O’Connor received word that “The Geranium” had been accepted for publication in the summer issue of Accent. Flannery was now “published,” a crucial distinction in the Workshop. A “little magazine” from the University of Illinois, credited with printing the first stories of J. F. Powers and William Gass, Accent was on a short list of publications considered “of the right sort” among the Workshop members. Flannery admitted to a fellow student that she had not begun to think of herself as a fiction writer until the respected literary magazine had taken her first story, adding, “Although I reckon I got a long way to get yet before I’m what you call good at it.” As she simply parsed her achievement at Iowa to the TV interviewer Harvey Breit, in 1955, “Then I began to write short stories, publicly.”
Mixed feelings about having been picked out, but mildly censored, by John Crowe Ransom, were transformed into pure pleasure when Robert Penn Warren selected a story of hers from a pile of student work during a visit to the university in April 1946. Warren had delivered a talk in the Senate Chamber of Old Capitol on his story “Blackberry Winter”; his new novel that year, All the King’s Men, was awarded the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. Another Southerner, and an editor of her Understanding Fiction anthology, “Red” Warren was one of the more influential writers and critics of the moment. As James B. Hall has recalled, “When R. P. Warren cocked one eye and said, ‘By god, I like this paragraph right heahr!’ — well, something happened. You were stronger, more daring, more resolved the next time out.”
Just as important to Flannery’s maturing as a writer was advice she received before the end of the spring semester from Paul Horgan, her instructor in Imaginative Writing, a backup course to the Workshop. Hired in February, “Lt. Col. Paul Horgan,” as the student newspaper identified the recently discharged officer, was a novelist and 1946 Guggenheim Fellow. O’Connor later told Betty Hester that “Horgan never even knew I was in the room, I am sure — though once he noted about forty things wrong with a story of mine and I thought him a fine teacher.” His advice to the girl he did indeed later remember as “a sort of waif of the art of writing” was to set aside a number of hours daily for writing — same time, same place. That habit became her lifelong regimen, the very soul of her artistic credo. She later shared her discipline with a young writer, in 1957: “I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. . . . Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don’t sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won’t be sitting there.”
Having flown home for summer break in May because of a national railroad shutdown, in spite of President Truman’s call for “strike curbs,” O’Connor continued to submit her stories to literary magazines, though with less luck, from Milledgeville. She received two rejection notes over the summer, both from Allen Maxwell, the editor of Southwest Review, and both addressed to Mr. Flannery O’Connor. Either purposely, or inadvertently, her pen name — especially when stories lacked any stereotypical female romantic touches or domestic details but were full of guns and violence — often caused her to be mistaken for a male writer. In June, Maxwell rejected “Wildcat,” a story about an old black man’s fear of a prowling beast that was highly imitative of Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun.” In July, he rejected “The Coat” for moving along “in a rather uncertain manner.”
ON HER RETURN to Currier House in September 1946, for the second year of the two-year program, Flannery was better adjusted to her surroundings and roommates than she had been when she first arrived in Iowa. Now living in a quieter back bedroom on the east side of the ground floor, she was able to experience the plus side of the Iowa Workshop that she later described as “an easier, freer childhood.” Her roommate the first semester was Sarah Dawson, a former Wac (Women’s Army Corps) from Des Moines, and, the second semester, Martha Bell, a former Wave from Mount Pleasant. In the adjoining double bedroom — four women shared a single bathroom — lived Jean Newland, of Belle Plaine, and Barbara Tunnicliff, a business major from Emmetsburg.
Barbara felt that she and Flannery had found in each other “kindred spirits,” as they often took walks together around Iowa City, steering clear of any dating or frenzied weekend parties. “They would have house parties once in a while and invite men, but I just didn’t feel comfortable with those people,” says Barbara Tunnicliff Hamilton. “I don’t think either of us went to such things.” Together they concocted a pipe dream in which Barbara, the “business woman,” would become the “patron” who would contribute to the financial support of the “artist” Flannery. “We both had a sense of humor, almost a sense of the ridiculous,” said Barbara Hamilton. “We were both a little offbeat.” They exchanged bulky sweatshirts: Flannery’s bore a University of Iowa insignia; in return, she gave Barbara one emblazoned with “Georgia” in big, red capital letters.
Yet mostly Barbara just heard, or sensed, Flannery on the other side of the closed door, working. “I didn’t bother her when she was doing that,” says Barbara Hamilton. The young writer liked to keep things plain: no curtains on the windows; a bare bulb hanging by a long cord from the center of the ceiling. When she was alone, she would pull down the shades and sit at her typewriter with a pile of yellow paper, writing and rewriting. If she wasn’t writing, she was reading. As there was no food service in “Grad House,” she usually took her breakfast and lunch in the room, often snacking on tins of sardines, or perishables that she kept cool on the windowsill. When Barbara asked Flannery why she worked so obsessively at her writing, she replied that she “had to.”
“She was very serious about her mission in life, and had a sort of sense of destiny,” says Barbara Hamilton. “She knew she was a great writer. She told me so many times. If I would have heard that from other people, I would have laughed up my sleeve, but not with her. We both agreed that she might never be recognized, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to do what she thought she was meant to do.” Another graduate woman in the Workshop, Ruth Sullivan, already looked up to Flannery as a writer, and treated her as an authority. “With the door open between our rooms, I often heard bits of their conversations,” says Hamilton, of Sullivan soliciting Flannery’s opinions. “I remember Ruth once saying she thought maybe she’d better give up trying to write, get married, and have a ‘a pack of kids.’ Flannery seemed always glad to try to help with advice.”
In the fall of 1946, the Workshop moved into a sheet-metal Quonset hut on the banks of the Iowa River north of the Iowa Memorial Union; its next move, soon afterward, was to four corrugated-iron barracks. Quickly assembled to accommodate the influx of GI Bill students, in a style dubbed “World War II Ghastly” by knowing vets, these rows of official metal buildings constituted a fitting stage set for much of the fiction being written. “When more than half the class are returned servicemen, and when a good p
roportion of the fiction being written concerns war experiences, one would naturally expect veterans to disagree on the psychological reactions of story heroes,” the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported of the Workshop, now numbering thirty-five students. “Men who have served in the navy question the motives of the air corps story heroes; infantry men do the same about the navy.”
While not writing about the war, Flannery did try her hand at a topical subject for a next story, “The Barber.” In November, a married couple had opened University Barber Shop on East Market Street to accommodate black students unable to get haircuts at “Jim Crow barbers” in town or on the campus. The State University of Iowa president, Virgil M. Hancher, refused to take a position on this divisive issue. For weeks, the Workshop had been abuzz with the topic as its only black member, Herb Nipson, who later became an editor of Ebony magazine, needed to travel twenty-one miles to Cedar Rapids to get a haircut. At about this time, Nipson was present at Flannery’s reading of a story of hers involving relations between blacks and whites. Afterward a student complimented her dignified, respectful portrayal of a black servant. Nipson has recalled that “Flannery’s answer went something like this, ‘No. That’s just the way he was.’”
In “The Barber,” she reset the racial tension to Joe’s Barber Shop in Dilton, a fictional college town in the rural South. The story turns on three visits made by Rayber, a liberal college professor, when he argues with its patrons, all supporters of Hawkson, a populist and racist conservative candidate. With little personal knowledge of men’s barbershops, she pulled off a convincing evocation of hot lather, tinted windows, and good old boys spitting tobacco. But from its opening line, “It is trying on liberals in Dilton,” Rayber was more a brunt of jokes than heroic, lending credence to a suspicion among some in the Workshop that she displayed too much of the “Southern attitude.” James B. Hall reports, “She once said to my wife, also a Southerner, ‘Momma and me got a nigger that drives us around.’ My wife was privately critical of that order of talk.”