Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [47]
The one full-blown story she wrote for class was her most startling work of the semester, revealing a grasp of materials that her classmates never suspected from the “plain looking girl, unassuming.” Says Marion Peterman Page, “At the time it seemed too deep for me to understand.” The graphic tale, titled “A Place of Action,” transpires on Saturday night in a black neighborhood, complete with a “zuit-suited” character who is stabbed by a woman he is hassling. While the story is melodramatic, and turns entirely on a stereotyped cast of characters, its use of violence as its climax, and its downbeat setting — “a dingy corner” — signal a writer finding her voice. Miss Hallie wrote “good” next to the description of the knife: “A thick, red coating hid its glimmer.” Her final comment: “You might call your theme Saturday Night. Would you like to submit this to the Corinthian?”
O’Connor took Miss Hallie’s advice. She began to publish stories as well as satires, though nothing as edgy as “A Place of Action,” as its racy treatment of urban blacks was a definite taboo for a young Southern lady of the time. Her first published story, printed that spring, was “Elegance Is Its Own Reward,” a weird tale, in the style of the “humorous” Poe, about a husband murdering both his wives, one with a hunting knife, the second by way of strangulation. Another written about the same time, and published in the fall 1943 Corinthian, “Home of the Brave,” was set in wartime Milledgeville, turning on two snobbish matrons rolling bandages at a ladies’ aid society while engaging in a lot of gossip, as “belligerent,” she wrote, as “the Battle of Stalingrad,” including their criticizing of Eleanor Roosevelt for not staying home enough.
She followed the writing course with two summer literature courses, The Short Story, taught by Miss Hallie Smith, and a Survey of English Literature. O’Connor later developed a selective memory about what she had read and when. “When I went to Iowa I had never heard of Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, much less read them,” she later claimed to a friend. Yet her early stories bear traces of the fingerprints of both Faulkner and Joyce. And The Story Survey, her textbook for her English 311 course, with her name, “M. F. O’Connor,” and address, “305 W. Green Street, Milledgeville” carefully inscribed on the front page, has a checkmark in the table of contents next to Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun,” a star next to Joyce’s “A Little Cloud,” and lots of underlining of the explanation of “gothic” in the write-up on Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado.”
She was obviously mining authors for ideas for her own experiments in writing, and for kindred sensibilities. So her take on literature courses could be likewise highly personal, creative, often “smart-aleck.” Unimpressed by Emily Dickinson, O’Connor compared the New Englander’s poetry to the froth on a glass of Alka-Seltzer. When a friend once asked if she had read Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, she reported back, “I had a course in college entitled ‘Tennyson, Browning,’ and it looks like they would have made us read it. I don’t remember anything about it though. All I remember from the whole course is ‘Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, night, has flown.’ I thought that was hilarious.” She loved telling of the freshman in Miss Hallie’s class who piped up that the moral of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was “Think twice before you commit adultery.”
During her junior year of 1943–44, she paid the price for her spiteful Social Science major by needing to take a series of sociology courses, beginning with Sociology 301: Introduction to Sociology. “In college I read works of social-science, so called,” she complained in a letter years later. “The only thing that kept me from being a social-scientist was the grace of God and the fact that I couldn’t remember the stuff