Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [50]
She had grown particularly ambitious for her cartoons. With the New Yorker cartoonist James Thurber a household name in America during the forties — his My World and Welcome to It was published in 1942, The Thurber Carnival in 1945 — she submitted cartoons to The New Yorker, only to receive what she later described as “a lot of encouragin’ rejection slips.” Says the Colonnade’s feature editor Bee McCormack, echoing a common sentiment among the students, “I thought then she might become the new James Thurber.” As O’Connor later reported to Janet McKane: “I like cartoons. I used to try to do them myself, sent a batch every week to the New Yorker, all rejected of course. I just couldn’t draw very well. I like the ones that are drawn well better than the situations.” A sheaf of her cartoons from the time includes a classic of her sensibility: one fish saying to another, “You can go jump out of the lake!” While taking a two-semester course on “The United States” with a new history professor, James Bonner, she focused on the textbook A Century of Political Cartoons, imagining for herself a future in the profession.
Impressed by the splash her cartoons made in the student newspaper, Margaret Meaders, a journalism instructor and editor of the Alumnae Journal, asked the senior to contribute some work for the upcoming issue. Meaders later recalled looking out her office window in Parks Hall one afternoon and catching sight of Mary Flannery sauntering across Hancock Street, entering the campus, and making her way up the broad front walk beneath the overarching elms. She was on her way to their meeting, toting a pile of her “wonderful, merry cartoons.” Meaders wrote, “We Southerners would say that she ‘moseyed.’ I never remember seeing her hurry.” She summed up O’Connor’s understated presence at the college as “slow-spoken, quiet-mannered,” rather than that of “a campus big shot, a professional bright-girl-sure-to-heap-glory-on-all-of-us.”
The climax of O’Connor’s stint as campus cartoonist was the 1945 Spectrum. The endpapers of the yearbook were panoramic views of the campus, a reprise of her greatest hits: chins-up, eyes-forward Waves marching in columns; girls balancing books and umbrellas; hounds curling their long tails. She also designed an entire “Pilgrimage through JESSIEVILLE” of ink drawings, redoing her tall-short pair with a sketch, from the rear, recognizable as the tall dean of women, Ethel Adams, and the short, stout dean of studies, Hoy Taylor. Her friend Robert Fitzgerald later judged these illustrations less successful. “In the linoleum cuts the line was always strong and decisive with an energy and angularity that recall the pen drawings of George Price, drawings that in fact she admired,” he wrote, noting the influence of a lesser-known, but brilliant New Yorker cartoonist. “For the yearbook . . . she tried a rounder kind of comic drawing, not so good.”
Because all of the student publication offices were located in Parks Hall, Editor O’Connor spent many hours in its basement. In her spare time, she took on herself the project of painting murals on the walls of its student lounge. “Mary Flannery decorated the walls with some of these Thurberesque types,” Dr. Helen Greene has written. She also completed a painting, Winter, included in a traveling exhibition through Georgia. A posed yearbook photo shows her sitting at a desk, in a cramped office, dressed in classic coed style — sweater, bobby socks, scuffed saddle shoes, with coiffed dark hair — surrounded by her staff of ten young women. In another shot, she leans against a pillar, one leg coyly tucked up, examining a copy of the magazine with her business manager, Peggy George. “We were laughing,” recalls Peggy George Sammons. “That is the only picture I have ever seen of her where she even had a smile on her face.”
On April 11,