Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [55]
With the same deliberation that she applied to coming up with her “MFOC” monogram signature for her first college cartoon, and a revised name, “M. F. O’Connor,” for her first published college story, she decided nearly from day one at Iowa to introduce herself, and to sign her papers, as “Flannery O’Connor.” Everyone who met her in Iowa City knew her simply as “Flannery.” Yet unlike her character Joy, who spitefully changed her name to Hulga when she went away to college in the story “Good Country People,” O’Connor asked her mother’s permission in advance. Partly she wanted to lose the lilting double name that exaggerated her oddity as a Southern lady in Iowa City, but she also looked forward to her byline when she fulfilled a wish to write what Engle said she described to him as “shom storrowies.” As she later joked to the writer Richard Gilman of calling herself Mary O’Connor: “Who was likely to buy the stories of an Irish washerwoman?”
Enrolled for the fall semester in the Graduate School of Journalism, Flannery had a course load that was tilted, at first, in the direction of magazine work. She took Magazine Writing, with William Porter, a mustached pulp-fiction writer, given to wearing rumpled checked shirts, who had sold a couple of crime stories to the movies. He geared his course to “selling stories to magazines.” O’Connor wrote for Porter her short, somewhat flat-footed “Biography.” In Principles of Advertising, with Mr. Gordon, she studied commercial art. Her single political-science course, American Political Ideas, was a survey of “representative American thinkers,” from Roger Williams to James Madison, including a discussion of political cartooning. She received a grade of B in all three courses.
Still holding out for a possible career as a cartoonist, Flannery submitted cartoons and drawings to the Art Department to be admitted to the two-semester course Advanced Drawing, and to Individual Instruction. Hoping for some extra income, she submitted her cartoons to trade journals, expecting the competition would not be as steep as at The New Yorker, but with no success. As the Art Building was located on the west campus, she would walk to her life-drawing classes over a bridge, just below the Iowa Memorial Union and along gravel paths crowded with familiar enough companions — flocks of mud-caked geese. The department was lively during that era: the artist Philip Guston, an associate professor, won first prize in a Carnegie Institute “Painting in the United States, 1945” show; Mauricio Lasansky was setting up a world-class print studio.
Yet by knocking at the door of Paul Engle that fall afternoon, O’Connor had begun to shift her direction away from art toward what was called “imaginative writing” at Iowa. He immediately enrolled her in two of his classes, Understanding Fiction and Writers’ Workshop (the double-listed Workshop was credited as “Journalism” in her fall semester, and as “English” afterward). Engle was the one-man band of the Workshop. During the war years, it had been simply an informal class with eight or ten students. Earning one of the first creative graduate degrees in America, at Iowa, in 1932, for his collection of poems, Worn Earth, published in the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets, Engle became a tireless champion of the MFA concept.