Flannery (17 page)

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.”

O
N 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 proportion 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.”

Yet Flannery’s personal attitudes about race were actually quite progressive during her years in Iowa. “I see I should ride the bus more often,” she wrote to Betty Hester, in 1957. “I used to when I went to school in Iowa, as I rode the train from Atl. and the bus from M’ville, but no more. Once I heard the driver say to the rear occupants, ‘All right, all you stove pipe blonds, git on back there.’ At which moment I became an integrationist.” Having become friendly for a while with a black woman graduate student, she bucked warnings from her mother that interracial friendships were dangerous, refusing to be swayed by such issues. She joked of “Verge” Hancher, complicit in Southern-style segregation on campus, as being president of the “Iowa Barber School.”

Another story she wrote that year was equally a departure. While she had created a morning discipline of daily mass, followed by hours of writing, she had yet to put the two activities together. She had not treated the religious faith that was sustaining her in a story, even a darkly comic one. Her first attempt was “The Turkey,” which used as its central symbol the bird she had once drawn in a preschool cartoon. In the story, a little boy, Ruller, “captured” a wild turkey, already shot dead in a ditch, interpreting the prize as a sign of favor from God. The juvenile preacher in training fancies himself, in one draft, “like Billy Grahme.” Imagining himself into the 1938 film
Boys Town,
“He thought of Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy. He might found a place for boys to stay who were going bad.” But when his bird is swiped by just such bad boys, his faith becomes mixed with terror: “He was certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him.”

As important to the young writer as assiduously imitating the masters were her reading courses. She took Seminar in Literary Criticism, taught by Austin Warren, another rising star among the New Critics, at work at the time with Iowa Professor René Wellek on their landmark
Theory of Literature.
For her supplementary texts in the class of this cultivated, Jamesian gentleman, with a national reputation as an organist, she chose Joyce’s
Dubliners
and Brooks and Warren’s
Understanding Fiction.
During the class segment on Joyce, Warren treated her as the resident expert in Roman Catholicism, asking, “Now, Miss O’Connor, what are we talking about here?” She took, as well, a two-semester course, Philosophy in Literature; Aesthetics in the Philosophy Department; and Select Contemporary Authors, concentrating on modern European novelists.

By far her most significant literature class was a two-semester independent study, Reading for Final Exam, directed by Engle. “I didn’t really start to read until I went to Graduate School and then I began to read and write at the same time,” she rattled off her regimen to a friend:

Then I began to read everything at once, so much so that I didn’t have time I suppose to be influenced by any one writer. I read all the Catholic novelists, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, Green, Waugh; I read all the nuts like Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson and Va. Woolfe (unfair to the dear lady of course). I read the best Southern writers like Faulkner and the Tates, K. A. Porter, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor; read the Russians, not Tolstoy so much but Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. I became a great admirer of Conrad and have read almost all his fiction.

Around Christmas 1946, Flannery started work on a new story, “The Train.” She began with the conscious intent to build a novel from its tale of Hazel Wickers, a nineteen-year-old, homesick, country rube returning South after the war. In choosing a first name as unisexual as her own, she relied on a custom she happily noticed among rural families who occasionally gave their sons feminine names — June, for instance. Her readings in Joyce and Faulkner were echoed in neologisms like “greyflying” to describe the train whizzing by. Yet what truly caught her imagination was a train ride home for the holidays. As she later explained the genesis of the story, “It started when I was on a train coming from Chicago. There was a Tennessee boy on it in uniform who was much taken up worrying the porter about how the berths were made up; the porter was so regal he just barely tolerated the boy.”

On the first leg of that holiday trip, Flannery made her way across downtown Chicago from La Salle Street Station to Dearborn Station, “a journey that never impressed me as beautiful.” She then caught the Dixie Limited, to travel from Illinois through Tennessee to Georgia. A discarded draft gives a glimpse, through Hazel’s eyes, of “the dilapidated [Dearborn] station, where the southern trains came in. There was a strange feeling in it for him, of awayness and homeness mixed. . . . It was a sooted red brick with turrets and inside it was grey and smoked and there were spittoons parked at the end of every third bench.” O’Connor later delighted in telling a friend of one of her own encounters at the terminus, “I sat down next to a colored woman in the waiting room at the Dearborn Street station in Chicago once. She was eating grapes and asked me to have some but I declined. She was very talkative and kept talking and eating grapes. Finally she asked me where I was from and I said, ‘Georgia,’ and she spit a mouthful of grape seeds out on the floor and said, ‘My God,’ and got up and left.”