Flannery (15 page)
On April 11, the evening before the death of President Roosevelt, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New England poet Robert Tristram Coffin spoke at Peabody Auditorium and was given a reception at the Cline Mansion. When Janet McKane happened to quote some of the poet’s lines in a 1963 letter to O’Connor, she triggered O’Connor’s memory of the event and of her own college poems, which she compared to a work of thudding end-rhymes by Edwin Arlington Robinson: “Your quoting of a poem of R.P.T. Coffin took me back. He visited our college when I was about 18, read some poems of mine and came to our house for some kind of program. That was the only time in my life when I attempted to write poetry. All my poems sounded like ‘Miniver Cheevy.’”
Described by O’Connor as a “striking-looking old man,” Coffin had been subjected at the party to an earnest Q-and-A session by many of the young women present. According to Margaret Meaders, one of them asked Coffin — “a bit breathlessly but, oh, so charmingly in the manner of one poetic soul to another” — to unlock for them the symbolism of a fox in one of his poems. The poet sputtered, in an unguarded moment, “My God, just a fox, just an ordinary, everyday fox!” Looking over at Mary Flannery, Meaders caught her “busy disciplining the mirth that twinkled in her eyes.”
The most important class O’Connor took at GSCW turned out to be one of her last, Social Science 412: Introduction to Modern Philosophy. Its professor, George Beiswanger, had been hired, along with his wife, Barbara, in the fall of 1944. They quickly were nicknamed “Dr. He-B” and “Dr. She-B.” The son of a Baptist minister, with a PhD from the University of Iowa, Beiswanger had just moved from Manhattan, with his wife, a dancer who had studied with Martha Graham. Over the past five years he had worked as associate editor of
Theatre Arts Monthly,
written dance criticism for
Dance Observer,
and taken part in an arts symposium at the avant-garde Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. Hired as chairman of the departments of Art, Philosophy, and Religion, the dapper gentleman, always dressed in a suit, and his wife, hired to teach modern dance techniques, brought with them a gust of cosmopolitanism.
Mary Flannery had already taken note of “Dr. He-B” the previous quarter. His debut address to the student body had been on the dull topic “Good Manners and Campus Courtesies.” As assigned by the Student Government Association, the subject was far afield from his ten-page spread in
Theatre Arts Monthly
on his high hopes for modern dance as “humanizing the machine.” As a jumping-off point, the rookie professor used a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Manners are the happy way of doing things.” In the next, February 7, issue of the
Colonnade,
O’Connor printed her riposte — a drawing of a girl entering a classroom in a strapless evening gown, long white gloves, pumps, a fluffy boa draped over one arm, and a load of books clutched in the other, while a second annoyed student, dressed in one of the exaggeratedly long knit sweaters popular in the period, whispers to her friend, “I understand she says it’s the happy way of doing things.”
Dr. Beiswanger’s class was a survey of modern philosophers, the assigned textbook,
The Making of the Modern Mind,
by John Herman Randall, Jr. As Beiswanger has recalled, the book was “an academic best-seller whose viewpoint (and mine) was secular humanist (grounded in Pragmatism) and took for granted that the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment set the Western mind free from the benightedness of Medieval thought (from Thomas Aquinas, etc.).” The hero of the course was the seventeenth-century French philosopher Descartes, for relying in his
Discourse on Method
(1637) on mathematics and science to unlock the secrets of a purely material world. Yet a few weeks into the course, the professor became aware of a persistent, subtle scowl: “Flannery sat in class, listened intently, took notes, and without her saying a word, it became clear that she didn’t believe a word of what I was saying.”
Although Beiswanger saw Mary Flannery as confident, behind her poker face she was actually rattled enough to have to think twice about what the instructor was saying. “What kept me a sceptic in college was precisely my Christian faith,” she later confided to the young poet Alfred Corn, going through his own period of doubt as a student at Emory University in 1962. “It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read.” By the end of the quarter, though, she had emerged from her shell enough to give the professor a hard time. As she relived one exchange with him, in a letter to the Fitzgeralds, in 1952: “[He] is the one that one day in a class says, ‘The Medieval Church was politheistic.’ I rise and say, ‘The Medieval Church was not politheistic.’ [He] fixes me very coldly, ‘I am speaking,’ says he, ‘as an anthropologist.’”
Helen Matthews Lewis, a student in the class, remembers a few other charged exchanges between professor and pupil. Once O’Connor went up to the blackboard to diagram, in detail, what she saw as the contrast between Aquinas and modernism. “Philosophy class was early in the morning, and most of us would be pretty sleepy and would have missed breakfast,” says Lewis. “We would run across campus, sometimes trying to hide our pajamas under our raincoats, to get to class. Flannery was always there, bright and ready to go, ready to argue with the professor.” As Beiswanger summed up O’Connor’s position: “It was philosophical
modernism
that had blinded the Western mind.”
What registered most strongly was the certainty that he had before him no ordinary girl: “She knew Aquinas in detail, was amazingly well read in earlier philosophy, and developed into a first rate
‘intellectual’
along with her other accomplishments. . . . It soon became clear to me that she was a ‘born’ writer and that she was going that way.” A classic example of a teacher making a difference, Beiswanger encouraged his A student to apply for graduate school at his alma mater, the University of Iowa. She sent in applications to both Duke University and to the journalism program at Iowa, mulling a possible career in newspaper political cartooning. The professor lobbied his contacts at the school to secure her a scholarship. When offered a journalism scholarship from Iowa, providing full tuition and sixty-five dollars a term, she quickly accepted.
At eleven o’clock on Monday morning, June 11, 1945, the fifty-fourth annual commencement of Georgia State College for Women opened with a procession of graduating seniors, O’Connor among them, accompanied by the well-worn organ strains of the “Grand March” from
Aïda.
Taking place on a hot Georgia summer’s day, with temperatures expected to rise to the midnineties by afternoon, the procession might well have “plodded stolidly along” to Russell Auditorium, like that of Sally Poker Sash and her graduating class in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”:
The black procession wound its way up the two blocks and started on the main walk leading to the auditorium. The visitors stood on the grass, picking out their graduates. Men were pushing back their hats and wiping their foreheads and women were lifting their dresses slightly from the shoulders to keep them from sticking to their backs. The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them.
Like the commencement speaker in “Late Encounter” who “was through with that war and had gone on to the next one,” Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall assured the 165 GSCW graduates that “the hope for lasting peace lies not in Washington nor on the battlefronts of the world, but in the hands of the 1945 graduates.” All were then “hooded” by Miss Katherine Scott. In the flurried ritual of yearbook autographing, Mary Flannery wrote as her standard entry, simply, “The usual bunk — M. F. O’Connor.”
In its coverage of the graduation, the
Colonnade
reported that “the realm of further study” had claimed five graduates, including Student Government Association President Betty Boyd at Chapel Hill, and “Mary Flannery O’Connor at Iowa State.” Yet this salutary, now definite news was not being entirely celebrated at the Cline Mansion. The notion that Mary Flannery was going off, by herself, to a school in the Midwest was nearly unthinkable. Up until graduation, O’Connor’s classmates were still walking her home at night, the two blocks from college meetings at Beeson Hall. Yet fragile appearances to the contrary, their sheltered niece obviously had a mind of her own, and her father’s quiet, stubborn will to back up her decisions. With Savannah in her past, having met John Sullivan of Ohio, and reading far and wide, she knew well the limits of Milledgeville.
As O’Connor later summed up her personal longitude and latitude at this juncture, in her “Biography,” written at Iowa, she felt that her big opportunity came in the form of the fellowship to graduate school. She hoped that the experience would either verify her suitability for little else but the job of teaching ninth-graders in Podunk, Georgia — the horizon line for most women majoring in English at GSCW — or that she would discover a happier means of making a living. Writing in her journal during the summer of 1945, Mary Flannery’s response to the wishful, dire predictions of a number of her relatives that she would be home in three weeks came down to one word — “Humph!”
Iowa
S
itting in his office early in the fall of 1945, Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, heard a gentle knock at the door. After he shouted an invitation to enter, a shy, young woman appeared and walked over to his desk without, at first, saying a word. He could not even tell, as she stood before him, whether she was looking in his direction, or out the window at the curling Iowa River below. A hulking six foot four inch poet, in his thirties, with wavy dark hair, alert blue eyes, and expressive eyebrows, Engle quickly took the lead. He introduced himself and offered her a seat, as she tightly held on to what he later claimed was “one of the most beat-up handbags I’ve ever seen.”
When she finally spoke, her Georgia dialect sounded so thick to his Midwestern ear that he asked her to repeat her question. Embarrassed by an inability a second time, to understand, Engle handed her a pad to write what she had said. So in schoolgirl script, she put down three short lines: “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop?” Engle suggested that she drop off writing samples, and they would consider her, late as it was. The next day a few stories arrived, and to his near disbelief, he found them to be “imaginative, tough, alive.” She was instantly accepted to the Workshop, both the name of Engle’s writing class and of his MFA graduate writing program, the first in the nation, to which she would switch her affiliation from the Graduate School of Journalism by the second semester.
For all of her outward timidity, she had quickly found her way to Engle, and her vocation. Just a few weeks earlier, the third week in September, she and her mother had departed Milledgeville together. In Atlanta, they boarded a train to Chicago, where they transferred at La Salle Street Station. They then made the four-hour trip west to Iowa City on the Rock Island Railroad, through a countryside of cornfields, apple orchards, and colts grazing on grassy hillocks. Anticipating subzero winters, O’Connor arrived carrying a fifteen-pound muskrat coat. Mrs. O’Connor stayed long enough to make sure that her only child was comfortably settled in Currier House, at 32 East Bloomington Street, a two-story, old-brick, corner building, housing fifteen or twenty graduate women in double rooms.
Iowa City was a nearly rural university town of about eighteen thousand year-round residents. Downtown consisted of four or five banks, a couple of hotels, as well as drugstores, bookshops, tea rooms, and beer halls rigged for student trade. Like Milledgeville, this Johnson County seat had once been the state capital, until the government moved to Des Moines, in 1855. Left behind was the gold-domed Old Capitol, revamped as the State University of Iowa main administration building, set high on a hill in the center of town, near a Masonic Temple. Quiet residential backstreets were lined with dull clapboard houses, interspersed with some Victorian follies. O’Connor later told Robert Lowell that she quickly responded to the “naturally blank” tenor of the place: “I always liked it in spite of those sooty tubercular-looking houses.”
In September 1945, more than 11,600 students enrolled for the fall term, expanding the town’s population by more than half, and helping to bolster its extravagant nickname, “The Athens of the Midwest.” With the highest percentage of full-time, resident PhDs in the country, town-gown friction was not a problem. The 425-acre campus was viewed more as an extension of the city, like a municipal park sloping down from the Old Capitol to sturdy footbridges spanning the muddy Iowa River. Its nine colleges, housed in fifty-odd gray stone buildings, on both the east and west banks of the bisecting river, introduced into the life of the city each fall aspiring doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, businessmen, actors, musicians, writers, and artists. The Iowa Hawkeyes, a Big Ten college football team, generated alarming civic frenzy at home games in the monumental Iowa Stadium.
This influx was greatly exaggerated in 1945 by a spike in enrollment from returning veterans, increasing through the spring and peaking in the fall of 1946. In the wake of the formal surrender of the Japanese to General Douglas MacArthur, on September 2, marking the end of World War II, millions of demobilized soldiers started streaming back from Europe and the Pacific. A large number took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights, or Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, providing a free college education and one year of unemployment compensation. “Iowa City was a bustling place,” recalls one graduate, “because it was flooded with GI Bill students, as well as droves of foreign exchange students.”
To returning vets, with more worldly experience, the county seat, its feeder roads crowded with trucks full of pigs, could look ominously “hick.” Many had been in the position of Haze Motes, in O’Connor’s novel
Wise Blood,
which she began in the Workshop the next year: “The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him.” Yet as John Sullivan was moved by wartime experiences to study for the priesthood, others resolved to lead creative lives: they wanted to write the great American novel, play jazz, or paint. To their relief, they soon discovered a homegrown artistic tradition of “regionalism,” as exemplified in
American Gothic,
the iconic portrait of a stately farmer, with pitchfork, and his wife, painted in the thirties by the faculty member Grant Wood. Arriving to sign up for the Workshop in midsemester the next spring, still in his “Eisenhower jacket” and parachute jump boots, James B. Hall wrote of “a new Bohemia, albeit in cornfields.”
