Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [38]
Not only did O’Connor discover, over the course of this summer, her capacity for close friendship, but even the introductory courses she later brushed aside provided intellectual awakening, and at least one challenge. Most important for her was Survey of Humanities, with Dr. Paul Boeson, of the Classical Language Department. Because Dr. Boeson was a Roman Catholic, and a Latin scholar, she trusted him as her first guide to the world of philosophical ideas. On the cover of the winter 1943 Corinthian was a photograph, reprinted from his personal collection, of a nun, in stark wimple and habit, reading a book illuminated by light streaming through a window. “She and Dr. Boeson would talk every day before the class would start,” recalls a fellow student, Lou Ann Hardigne. The following year O’Connor took the second half of his survey, buying the editions of Plato, Aristotle, and the Selected Essays of Montaigne that she would keep her entire life.
More trying was her first college writing class, English 101, General College Composition, with Miss Katherine Kirkwood Scott. Nearly twenty years later, in January 1960, Flannery O’Connor was invited back to the college, as a local literary celebrity, to speak at Chapel in Russell Auditorium. Her topic was “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” but she added personal comments that she left out when giving the same talk some months later at Macon College. These thoughts, tailored to her GSCW audience, suggested insecurities that had haunted her ever since college. She confided that morning: “When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’ Some writers can ignore this presence, but I have never learned how.”
An early reader, who may well have said, “I don’t get it, I don’t see it,” in not so many words, was Miss Katherine Scott. Although she gave O’Connor a grade of 92, Miss Scott was the steel magnolia version of Sister Mary Consolata at Sacred Heart. A writer herself, Scott later published a nostalgic memoir about Milledgeville titled The Land of Lost Content. While O’Connor was in college, Scott delivered a talk billed as “poetic and romantic” on “Greece: A Pioneer in Democracy,” to the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She liked to hold at least one class session at her 1838 Victorian family home that she claimed was haunted; she brought along to school her three prized Boston bulldogs.
“They would not have been a happy combination,” says Mary Barbara Tate, later an English teacher at GSCW, and a friend of Katherine Scott’s. “She thought Flannery had great talent, but she wanted her to write like Jane Austen. She was the kind of teacher who expected to be a mentor, and to be the one who gives out of this box of knowledge.” As Scott was a family friend, and had been in a small fourth-grade class with Regina Cline, both teacher and pupil were perfectly civil. Fran Richardson, a student in the class, has reported, “They would start talking and forget the rest of us were there. I told Mary Flannery once that I wished I could borrow some of her creativity, and she replied, ‘I’d exchange it for your ability to attract men.’” Yet when a journalist asked Scott, decades later, about her famous pupil, she revealed a lifelong ambivalence. “Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” she replied, “warped, but a genius all the same.”
ON SEPTEMBER 28, the fall semester officially began with the arrival of the entire student body of 948 students, mostly from middle-income families in rural areas and small towns in Georgia, paying a yearly tuition of $67.50. The scale of O’Connor’s campus had suddenly expanded from the three “Choo-Choo” buildings, a few steps in from a side street, to include nearly twenty neoclassical brick buildings, trimmed in limestone, and striped with white Corinthian columns. Set in the middle of Milledgeville, this twenty-three-acre