Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [46]
DURING THE TIME She was getting to know John Sullivan, coincidentally enough, Mary Flannery took a class with an English teacher who finally responded with understanding and enthusiasm to her writing. The professor who “got” her work was Miss Hallie Smith, a large and nurturing woman, one of those in the cadre of GSCW professors who belonged to the Audubon Society, and qualified in all respects as a “suffragette-spinster.” In the spring 1943 quarter, while O’Connor was in her class, Smith gave her own talk to the DAR on “Woman, a Strength in Freedom’s Cause,” trumpeting the importance of “womanpower in this war and other wars.”
The elective course O’Connor took with Miss Smith that spring quarter was English 324, Advanced Composition. As the capstone of the composition sequence, the class included only a dozen young women. “Miss Hallie required us to write something for each class — then, to my chagrin, she expected us to read it aloud,” recalls Marion Peterman Page. “It wasn’t long before I realized that the only writer in the class was Mary Flannery. The efforts of the rest of us were so juvenile compared to her. She seemed to be very shy and very modest. She was a mousy looking young lady, but one forgot that when she read what she had written.” Another member of the class, Karen Owens Smith, who usually sat in the front row with Mary Flannery, a few feet from the teacher, remembers “a twang to her voice that I can still hear.”
On March 24, O’Connor handed in her first assignment, two descriptions of a street scene, one photographic, the second poetic. Naming her street Raphael Street, after Katie Semmes’s husband, she evoked Charlton Street in Savannah with a lineup of “six, tall grey buildings.” Yet she had obviously been reading James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” too, and precociously tried to copy the style of the Irish Catholic writer. On Dublin’s North Richmond Street, in Joyce’s story, “The other houses of the street . . . gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” On O’Connor’s Raphael Street, “gaunt houses all of somber, grey stone, gaze austerely at each other.” Miss Hallie was thrilled with the effort. On the single typed page, signed “M. F. O’Connor,” she wrote in red pencil, “A+.”
Five days later, O’Connor handed in a typed, one-page character study. “Nine out of Every Ten” was signed with a pseudonym that could have popped out of a Merriweather Girls novel, “Jane Shorebanks.” The sketch details a vapid young lady walking along chewing gum to the beat of the “Missouri Waltz.” In red pencil, Miss Hallie wrote an exclamatory “A!” and added, “Won’t you submit something to the Corinthian?” Miss Hallie sensed in O’Connor’s depiction of a face “sagging and contracting” as a girl chews a “slippery mass” of chewing gum a different tenor of writing talent. O’Connor had previously published, in the winter 1943 Corinthian, a mock review of a children’s book about Ferdinand the bull, deeming the book “highly recommendable literature for the college student,” and a satire on replacing cars with horses, “Why Worry the Horse?”
Over the next ten weeks, O’Connor wrote a series of short, descriptive exercises: lemon gelatin (“translucent mush”); celery (tastes like “sucking warm water out of a dish rag”); a kitchen; a velvet collar; and a mahogany table, much like the one in the dining room in the Cline Mansion. A description of a general store proprietor, for which she received an “A, An excellent use of the details at your disposal!” included “loud-labeled tin cans,” close in wording to the “tin cans whose labels his stomach read” in the general store in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” She created vignettes of a black laundress talking to a white woman, a third-grade teacher on a bad day, and a Mrs. Watson reading movie magazines under a hair dryer. A single-scene character