Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [32]
For the October issue of the Palladium, she painstakingly created a linoleum-block cut, her first, titled One Result of the New Peabody Orchestra. The cartoon shows a girl wearing a tasseled hat, sweater, pleated skirt, and saddle oxfords, blowing on a large saxophone, as “BLAH,” all in caps, emerges from the horn. A background figure, in skirt and jacket, frowning, cups her hands to her ears. The cartoon accompanied the article “Students Join Concert Group.” With a knack for difficult, idiosyncratic crafts, the new art editor produced 120 of these block prints over the next five years: drawing a sketch on a piece of linoleum, gouging away the white portions, applying oil-based ink to the ridges, printing a reversed paper copy on a special press. Her first few cartoons — a girl at her desk with a thought bubble of a turkey, for Thanksgiving; a dozing pupil with Z’s stringing from her mouth — were rough, scratchy affairs. As one critic has described her genre, they were “single-frame satires.”
Although Mary Flannery claimed not to be a writer, she was really writing nearly as much as drawing. For her, the two activities were joined from the start. Appearing in the same November 1940 issue as her Thanksgiving cartoon was her debut poem, “The First Book.” Profiled a few years later in the local newspaper by Nelle Womack Hines as “a female Ogden Nash,” O’Connor aspired in her first effort to the terse, doggerel style of the popular New Yorker poet:
His mind began to wander,
And his bean began to rage.
Her light verse winds up as a paean to books, the source of her earliest enthusiastic collaborations with her father:
Thus the ancestor of books was born,
On slides of stone and clay.
While her father had been homebound, she was working on a send-up of Marcel Proust, though she had certainly not read much, if any, of Remembrance of Things Past. In a letter to Maryat Lee, in 1956, she admitted that she had read only Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes of the French novel. But at fifteen, she knew enough of Proust’s central conceit — the sensation of biting into a madeleine cookie to release a flood of childhood memories — to write a four-paragraph burlesque. In writing, as in cartooning, satire was her signature adolescent style. In “Recollections on My Future Childhood,” she makes fun of Proust, as Ogden Nash was making fun in the 1930s of literary greats such as James Joyce, in his “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man.” “Fish oil,” not a French pastry, is her narrator’s mnemonic trigger: “It was my first sardine . . . bruised & blue from the crowding.” She winds up concluding, “Proust wanted past time. I’ll take any old time.”
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,