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By Root 1486 0

the evening before the death of President Roosevelt, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New England poet Robert Tristram Coffin spoke at Peabody Auditorium and was given a reception at the Cline Mansion. When Janet McKane happened to quote some of the poet’s lines in a 1963 letter to O’Connor, she triggered O’Connor’s memory of the event and of her own college poems, which she compared to a work of thudding end-rhymes by Edwin Arlington Robinson: “Your quoting of a poem of R.P.T. Coffin took me back. He visited our college when I was about 18, read some poems of mine and came to our house for some kind of program. That was the only time in my life when I attempted to write poetry. All my poems sounded like ‘Miniver Cheevy.’”

Described by O’Connor as a “striking-looking old man,” Coffin had been subjected at the party to an earnest Q-and-A session by many of the young women present. According to Margaret Meaders, one of them asked Coffin — “a bit breathlessly but, oh, so charmingly in the manner of one poetic soul to another” — to unlock for them the symbolism of a fox in one of his poems. The poet sputtered, in an unguarded moment, “My God, just a fox, just an ordinary, everyday fox!” Looking over at Mary Flannery, Meaders caught her “busy disciplining the mirth that twinkled in her eyes.”

The most important class O’Connor took at GSCW turned out to be one of her last, Social Science 412: Introduction to Modern Philosophy. Its professor, George Beiswanger, had been hired, along with his wife, Barbara, in the fall of 1944. They quickly were nicknamed “Dr. He-B” and “Dr. She-B.” The son of a Baptist minister, with a PhD from the University of Iowa, Beiswanger had just moved from Manhattan, with his wife, a dancer who had studied with Martha Graham. Over the past five years he had worked as associate editor of Theatre Arts Monthly, written dance criticism for Dance Observer, and taken part in an arts symposium at the avant-garde Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. Hired as chairman of the departments of Art, Philosophy, and Religion, the dapper gentleman, always dressed in a suit, and his wife, hired to teach modern dance techniques, brought with them a gust of cosmopolitanism.

Mary Flannery had already taken note of “Dr. He-B” the previous quarter. His debut address to the student body had been on the dull topic “Good Manners and Campus Courtesies.” As assigned by the Student Government Association, the subject was far afield from his ten-page spread in Theatre Arts Monthly on his high hopes for modern dance as “humanizing the machine.” As a jumping-off point, the rookie professor used a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Manners are the happy way of doing things.” In the next, February 7, issue of the Colonnade, O’Connor printed her riposte — a drawing of a girl entering a classroom in a strapless evening gown, long white gloves, pumps, a fluffy boa draped over one arm, and a load of books clutched in the other, while a second annoyed student, dressed in one of the exaggeratedly long knit sweaters popular in the period, whispers to her friend, “I understand she says it’s the happy way of doing things.”

Dr. Beiswanger’s class was a survey of modern philosophers, the assigned textbook, The Making of the Modern Mind, by John Herman Randall, Jr. As Beiswanger has recalled, the book was “an academic best-seller whose viewpoint (and mine) was secular humanist (grounded in Pragmatism) and took for granted that the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment set the Western mind free from the benightedness of Medieval thought (from Thomas Aquinas, etc.).” The hero of the course was the seventeenth-century French philosopher Descartes, for relying in his Discourse on Method (1637) on mathematics and science to unlock the secrets of a purely material world. Yet a few weeks into the course, the professor became aware of a persistent, subtle scowl: “Flannery sat in class, listened intently, took notes, and without her saying a word, it became clear that she didn’t believe a word of what I was saying.”

Although Beiswanger saw Mary