Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [54]
In September 1945, more than 11,600 students enrolled for the fall term, expanding the town’s population by more than half, and helping to bolster its extravagant nickname, “The Athens of the Midwest.” With the highest percentage of full-time, resident PhDs in the country, town-gown friction was not a problem. The 425-acre campus was viewed more as an extension of the city, like a municipal park sloping down from the Old Capitol to sturdy footbridges spanning the muddy Iowa River. Its nine colleges, housed in fifty-odd gray stone buildings, on both the east and west banks of the bisecting river, introduced into the life of the city each fall aspiring doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, businessmen, actors, musicians, writers, and artists. The Iowa Hawkeyes, a Big Ten college football team, generated alarming civic frenzy at home games in the monumental Iowa Stadium.
This influx was greatly exaggerated in 1945 by a spike in enrollment from returning veterans, increasing through the spring and peaking in the fall of 1946. In the wake of the formal surrender of the Japanese to General Douglas MacArthur, on September 2, marking the end of World War II, millions of demobilized soldiers started streaming back from Europe and the Pacific. A large number took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights, or Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, providing a free college education and one year of unemployment compensation. “Iowa City was a bustling place,” recalls one graduate, “because it was flooded with GI Bill students, as well as droves of foreign exchange students.”
To returning vets, with more worldly experience, the county seat, its feeder roads crowded with trucks full of pigs, could look ominously “hick.” Many had been in the position of Haze Motes, in O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, which she began in the Workshop the next year: “The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him.” Yet as John Sullivan was moved by wartime experiences to study for the priesthood, others resolved to lead creative lives: they wanted to write the great American novel, play jazz, or paint. To their relief, they soon discovered a homegrown artistic tradition of “regionalism,” as exemplified in American Gothic, the iconic portrait of a stately farmer, with pitchfork, and his wife, painted in the thirties by the faculty member Grant Wood. Arriving to sign up for the Workshop in midsemester the next spring, still in his “Eisenhower jacket” and parachute jump boots, James B. Hall wrote of “a new Bohemia, albeit in cornfields.”
Yet no amount of prairie-flower bohemianism, or postwar euphoria, could assuage O’Connor’s first reaction to her new surroundings: homesickness. Far from her extended family, and speaking a dialect routinely treated as a foreign language, she experienced an acute ache. As she later wrote to her friend Maryat Lee, of “The Geranium,” her first published Iowa story, “I did know what it meant to be homesick.” At Currier House, she roomed with a couple of rumba-loving suitemates who cranked up the volume on the record player. While remaining friendly toward them, she soon relished their weekend departures. Every day, she wrote a letter to her mother, who wrote back daily replies, as well as forwarding the weekly Milledgeville newspaper.
Her home away from home did not turn out to be Currier House — and certainly not the Airliner, a long, narrow tavern, just across from campus, with white tile floors and a jukebox, popular with other students. Instead she found the antidote for her homesickness two blocks away at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, on East Jefferson Street. A modest, brick structure with