Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [48]
Mary Flannery could be particularly irate and funny about Social Science 200, Contemporary Georgia Problems. As Ana Pinkston Phillips, a student in her class during the winter of 1944, recalls, “My introduction to her was when she slammed her book shut and said, as she left the room, ‘I don’t need to know how many pigs were born in Georgia in 1932!’” (A couple of her later fictional young women with Southern, feminine double names were book slammers, as well — Mary Elizabeth in “The Partridge Festival” and Mary Grace in “Revelation.”) Her reaction to the course was already set when she laid eyes on the syllabus the quarter before; a November 1943 cartoon of hers depicts a lumpy student, hair in disarray, soliciting a snappily uniformed Wave: “Could I interest you in buying a Contemporary Georgia syllabus?”
With one eye on “Podunk,” she dutifully fulfilled, during the same academic year, requirements toward a minor in Education. As she accurately reported to her friend Janet McKane, in 1964, “I had 3 education courses in college. Pure Wasted Time.” Of one of those classes, with only four students enrolled, the fellow pupil Jane Strozier Smith, says, “I remember Flannery as outstanding, not only for her brilliance, but because she never flaunted it at all.” She produced the equivalent of her “Contemporary Georgia” cartoon in three satiric essays for the Corinthian — “Doctors of Delinquency,” in fall 1943, about Hayden Struthers III, getting a “Master of Rotating Tops Degree” at Columbia Kindergarten; “Biologic Endeavor,” in spring 1944, on the modern miracle drugs Tums and Ex-Lax; and “Education’s Only Hope,” in spring 1945, with its loopy parting shot:
. . .until students quit school in the grammar grades, higher education will not attain that ultimate goal which the poet, Ridinghearse, expressed so beautifully when he wrote:
“Gee,
It’s chilly
Up here!”
A reprieve from “progressive education” was provided by two single women professors, Miss Mary Thomas Maxwell and Miss Helen Greene. Many of O’Connor’s college friendships wound up being drawn not so much from other students as from a circle of professors closer in age to her aunts, perhaps explaining what one student called her “old fashion wardrobe — long dark skirts, long sleeves.” Joan DeWitt Yoe, a staff member at the Corinthian, was put off by her: “I was an art major and my job was to illustrate Mary’s short stories. I regret now that my drawings weren’t abstract to be in the same mood as her stories. She would hand me a copy of her story without a word or looking me in the eye. It was a strange situation that I still don’t understand. She wouldn’t let me in her space. . . . I do know that all of the teachers adored her and were constantly around her.”
Miss Mary Thomas Maxwell, the first of these teacher-friends, was nicknamed Tommy. “She was one of the most inspiring, exciting, and beautiful teachers,” remembers Helen Lewis of the sparkling woman in her thirties. “She introduced us all to Walt Whitman. Her exam would be imagining a dinner party with Mark Twain sitting next to another author, and you would have to develop a conversation between them.” O’Connor respected Tommy Maxwell enough to take her English 308 course in Spoken English during the summer of 1944, even though she cringed at public speaking. When Miss Maxwell queried her, she replied, “Well I know it won’t do any good, but I have to show Regina and Sister.” At the end of the summer, she received a B, not because her delivery had noticeably improved, but to acknowledge the “splendid” content of her talks.
Confiding to Betty Boyd that she felt Dr. Helen Greene, with