Flannery (16 page)

Yet no amount of prairie-flower bohemianism, or postwar euphoria, could assuage O’Connor’s first reaction to her new surroundings: homesickness. Far from her extended family, and speaking a dialect routinely treated as a foreign language, she experienced an acute ache. As she later wrote to her friend Maryat Lee, of “The Geranium,” her first published Iowa story, “I did know what it meant to be homesick.” At Currier House, she roomed with a couple of rumba-loving suitemates who cranked up the volume on the record player. While remaining friendly toward them, she soon relished their weekend departures. Every day, she wrote a letter to her mother, who wrote back daily replies, as well as forwarding the weekly Milledgeville newspaper.

Her home away from home did not turn out to be Currier House — and certainly not the Airliner, a long, narrow tavern, just across from campus, with white tile floors and a jukebox, popular with other students. Instead she found the antidote for her homesickness two blocks away at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, on East Jefferson Street. A modest, brick structure with a clock-tower steeple, built in 1869, St. Mary’s provided a worship experience enriched by seventeen church bells. Its high altar was crowded with Victorian paintings and pastel statues of St. Patrick and St. Boniface, reflecting the mixed demographic of Irish and Germans in the parish. In the fall of 1945, the church pastor, Monsignor Carl Bernstein, offered daily morning masses at six thirty and seven thirty. As O’Connor told Roslyn Barnes, a young woman enrolled in the Workshop, in 1960, “I went to St. Mary’s as it was right around the corner and I could get there practically every morning. I went there three years and never knew a soul in that congregation or any of the priests, but it was not necessary. As soon as I went in the door I was at home.”

With the same deliberation that she applied to coming up with her “MFOC” monogram signature for her first college cartoon, and a revised name, “M. F. O’Connor,” for her first published college story, she decided nearly from day one at Iowa to introduce herself, and to sign her papers, as “Flannery O’Connor.” Everyone who met her in Iowa City knew her simply as “Flannery.” Yet unlike her character Joy, who spitefully changed her name to Hulga when she went away to college in the story “Good Country People,” O’Connor asked her mother’s permission in advance. Partly she wanted to lose the lilting double name that exaggerated her oddity as a Southern lady in Iowa City, but she also looked forward to her byline when she fulfilled a wish to write what Engle said she described to him as “shom storrowies.” As she later joked to the writer Richard Gilman of calling herself Mary O’Connor: “Who was likely to buy the stories of an Irish washerwoman?”

Enrolled for the fall semester in the Graduate School of Journalism, Flannery had a course load that was tilted, at first, in the direction of magazine work. She took Magazine Writing, with William Porter, a mustached pulp-fiction writer, given to wearing rumpled checked shirts, who had sold a couple of crime stories to the movies. He geared his course to “selling stories to magazines.” O’Connor wrote for Porter her short, somewhat flat-footed “Biography.” In Principles of Advertising, with Mr. Gordon, she studied commercial art. Her single political-science course, American Political Ideas, was a survey of “representative American thinkers,” from Roger Williams to James Madison, including a discussion of political cartooning. She received a grade of B in all three courses.

Still holding out for a possible career as a cartoonist, Flannery submitted cartoons and drawings to the Art Department to be admitted to the two-semester course Advanced Drawing, and to Individual Instruction. Hoping for some extra income, she submitted her cartoons to trade journals, expecting the competition would not be as steep as at
The New Yorker,
but with no success. As the Art Building was located on the west campus, she would walk to her life-drawing classes over a bridge, just below the Iowa Memorial Union and along gravel paths crowded with familiar enough companions — flocks of mud-caked geese. The department was lively during that era: the artist Philip Guston, an associate professor, won first prize in a Carnegie Institute “Painting in the United States, 1945” show; Mauricio Lasansky was setting up a world-class print studio.

Yet by knocking at the door of Paul Engle that fall afternoon, O’Connor had begun to shift her direction away from art toward what was called “imaginative writing” at Iowa. He immediately enrolled her in two of his classes, Understanding Fiction and Writers’ Workshop (the double-listed Workshop was credited as “Journalism” in her fall semester, and as “English” afterward). Engle was the one-man band of the Workshop. During the war years, it had been simply an informal class with eight or ten students. Earning one of the first creative graduate degrees in America, at Iowa, in 1932, for his collection of poems,
Worn Earth,
published in the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets, Engle became a tireless champion of the MFA concept. As he liked to brag of his program, “You can get an M.A. degree without counting the commas in Shakespeare.”

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 she 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.”