Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [35]
Cartoons turned out to be a happy medium for this quiet, yet extremely critical girl. Through her monthly cartoons, she could bare her teeth in the guise of a smile. As a more mature O’Connor wrote, in 1959, to Ted Spivey: “From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden.” Among the sins that she exposed was the pretense of senior plays: in “Senior, Senior, Wherefore Art Thou, Senior,” she conjured two girls in a histrionic balcony scene to accompany the article “Seniors Present Annual Plays.” Like any good cartoonist, she was alert to the mood of her audience. A week following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in a December 1941 cartoon, she modulated her tone with “In Hopes That a Jimmie Soon Will Be There”: a girl sits next to a fireplace, with a soldier’s jacket hung from the mantel as a Christmas stocking. (Jimmie was a nickname for a cadet at Georgia Military College, many of whom enlisted in the war effort.)
Most unsuitable for the physically awkward girl was gym class. “She just thought playing sports was the biggest bore,” says Elizabeth Shreve Ryan. “We had to put on our blue bloomers and go out to a grassy area behind the school on the main campus and play volleyball. I can just remember her standing in her gym uniform making no effort to give the ball a hoist. She’d kind of nudge her shoulder as if that was all she was willing to do. She did that very cheerfully, but it was just not her bag.” Likewise “not her bag” were dance invitations to battalion balls at Georgia Military College, and the chance to dress up in the retro gowns of Southern belles to match the gray uniforms of the boys. She was much happier adding to her collection of 150 replicas of birds, and other animals, in china and glass, or designing another of the original lapel pins she sold out of a local drugstore.
O’Connor was most in her element in English class, especially a six-week segment devoted to creative writing. Her Composition teacher, Frances Lott Ratliff, has remarked on how surprised she was that a fifteen-year-old could show such talent. “How she looked didn’t seem to matter,” she added. Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls the sensation caused by O’Connor’s writing: “Being in a creative writing class with Mary Flannery in high school was sheer torture. I remember she wrote a very strange story with weird characters. I don’t know whether it was a ghost story, but it was gripping. As World War II was just beginning, I wrote some drivel about a soldier and his girlfriend. Her stories were written with panache, and a wry sense of humor. But they were just weird.”
She did agree to go on one double date. The special event was arranged by Flannery’s friend Mary Virginia Harrison, who has been described by Elizabeth Shreve Ryan as “the belle of the ball. She had beautiful clothes, and never lacked a date, or an invitation to a dance.” Mary Virginia’s date was Reynolds Allen, one of the few male students at Peabody. He had recently won a Baldwin County essay contest, in May 1942, by writing about U.S. Representative Carl Vinson. Allen’s first-place essay, awarded a full college scholarship, won over Mary Flannery’s second-place effort, awarded ten dollars, on the college president Dr. Melvin Parks. Her “blind date” that evening was Reynolds’s cousin Dick Allen, a slight, bookish boy. The quartet went to the country club and drank Coca-Colas. At some point in the evening, Mary Flannery blurted out, “My dad-gum foot’s gone to sleep.”
While she complained about having attended a high school where you could “integrate English literature with geography, biology, home economics, basketball, or fire prevention,” she graduated with a solid list of credits in a standard array of academic subjects. She even received