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By Root 1480 0

When Ransom chose one of O’Connor’s stories to read to the class, she was encouraged to be singled out, and by such a prominent Southern writer. Yet the work was in the mode of her high school story “A Place of Action,” or “The Coat.” She was trying to render the dialogue of poor whites and blacks in the South. When Ransom came across the word “nigger,” he refused to read it aloud, substituting the word “Negro.” “It did spoil the story,” Flannery complained to Robie Macauley, after he arrived as a Workshop instructor in 1947. “The people I was writing about would never use any other word.”

For one of her next stories, she turned again to Understanding Fiction, and Caroline Gordon’s “Old Red,” for a model. By now, winter had dramatically fallen on Iowa City. Flannery had been home to Georgia for the Christmas holidays and discovered that she had grown more than an inch her first semester, up to about five five. By the time she returned for the February 3 resumption of classes, the cornfields were a silent blur of thick, fallen snow. Fellow Workshop member Norma Hodges recalls walking out after one evening Workshop meeting into the bracing Iowa air: “Flannery was so cold, she was shivering all over. I said something about, ‘Not quite your Southern weather.’” Always tense around the “little pale girl with big glasses,” Hodges felt her silly pleasantry returned with “one of those dirty, dirty looks. I didn’t mess with her much.”

Yet on the day Flannery read her “Old Red”–inspired story, Hodges was “flabbergasted. I was real excited about Flannery when I heard her. But then the men gave her a hard time, which seemed funny.” The story she read was a draft of “The Geranium.” In Gordon’s “Old Red,” an old Southern gentleman finds a symbol for his life in a wily red fox. In O’Connor’s story, a Southerner, Old Dudley, living in a tenement in New York City, finds a symbol for his homesickness in a potted red geranium. As she later wrote to Maryat Lee of this story, expressing the underlying emotion of her first winter in Iowa City, “I couldn’t though have written a story about my being homesick.” Instead she embodied the experience in “an old man who went to live in a New York slum — no experience of mine as far as old men and slums went.”

The early mimeographed draft Flannery read in a contentious Workshop session had a more extreme ending that was later cut. Upon finding that the pot had fallen off a windowsill, the old man, rather than merely feeling crushed, as in the final version, according to Hodges, “pitched himself out of the window. I think his daughter asked, ‘Where are you going?’ and Old Dudley said, ‘After that damned geranium!’” But feelings among the men in the class were already stacked against O’Connor as she began reading the story with what Hodges called a “broad Southern drawl”: “After a few lines, groans arose from the oval of chairs and the story was given to a man with more recognizable diction.” When the old man leapt to his death — a finale Hodges found “mythical” — “They all went, ‘No . . . couldn’t happen . . . it’s too much,’ and so on.”

“The only day I felt she fell flat on her face was when she tried to write about a boy-and-girl situation,” Hodges added, of O’Connor’s talent for these “mythical” stories. “It wasn’t her thing. And one about an educated black became labored.” Engle likewise noted her awkwardness in writing about sex or romance. In the corridor, following one Workshop session, he tried to make a few suggestions. “‘This scene of the attempted seduction just is not correct, I want to explain,’” he said. “‘Oh no, don’t, not here!’” Flannery quickly replied, looking nervously about. “So we went outside, across the street to the parking lot and into my car. There, I explained to her that sexual seduction didn’t take place quite the way she had written it — I suspect from a lovely lack of knowledge.”

If Engle felt that her sex scenes were not graphic enough, Flannery was still worried about their mere existence in the work of a young Catholic writer. As she later wrote of this crisis of