Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [59]
Having flown home for summer break in May because of a national railroad shutdown, in spite of President Truman’s call for “strike curbs,” O’Connor continued to submit her stories to literary magazines, though with less luck, from Milledgeville. She received two rejection notes over the summer, both from Allen Maxwell, the editor of Southwest Review, and both addressed to Mr. Flannery O’Connor. Either purposely, or inadvertently, her pen name — especially when stories lacked any stereotypical female romantic touches or domestic details but were full of guns and violence — often caused her to be mistaken for a male writer. In June, Maxwell rejected “Wildcat,” a story about an old black man’s fear of a prowling beast that was highly imitative of Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun.” In July, he rejected “The Coat” for moving along “in a rather uncertain manner.”
ON HER RETURN to Currier House in September 1946, for the second year of the two-year program, Flannery was better adjusted to her surroundings and roommates than she had been when she first arrived in Iowa. Now living in a quieter back bedroom on the east side of the ground floor, she was able to experience the plus side of the Iowa Workshop that she later described as “an easier, freer childhood.” Her roommate the first semester was Sarah Dawson, a former Wac (Women’s Army Corps) from Des Moines, and, the second semester, Martha Bell, a former Wave from Mount Pleasant. In the adjoining double bedroom — four women shared a single bathroom — lived Jean Newland, of Belle Plaine, and Barbara Tunnicliff, a business major from Emmetsburg.
Barbara felt that she and Flannery had found in each other “kindred spirits,” as they often took walks together around Iowa City, steering clear of any dating or frenzied weekend parties. “They would have house parties once in a while and invite men, but I just didn’t feel comfortable with those people,” says Barbara Tunnicliff Hamilton. “I don’t think either of us went to such things.” Together they concocted a pipe dream in which Barbara, the “business woman,” would become the “patron” who would contribute to the financial support of the “artist” Flannery. “We both had a sense of humor, almost a sense of the ridiculous,” said Barbara Hamilton. “We were both a little offbeat.” They exchanged bulky sweatshirts: Flannery’s bore a University of Iowa insignia; in return, she gave Barbara one emblazoned with “Georgia” in big, red capital letters.
Yet mostly Barbara just heard, or sensed, Flannery on the other side of the closed door, working. “I didn’t bother her when she was doing that,” says Barbara Hamilton. The young writer liked to keep things plain: no curtains on the windows; a bare bulb hanging by a long cord from the center of the ceiling. When she was alone, she would pull down the shades and sit at her typewriter with a pile of yellow paper, writing and rewriting. If she wasn’t writing, she was reading. As there was no food service in “Grad House,” she usually took her breakfast and lunch in the room, often snacking on tins of sardines, or perishables that she kept cool on the windowsill. When Barbara asked Flannery why she worked so obsessively at her writing, she replied that she “had to.”
“She was very serious about her mission in life, and had a sort of sense of destiny,” says Barbara Hamilton. “She knew she was a great writer. She told me so many times. If I would have heard that from other people, I would have laughed up my sleeve, but not with her. We both agreed that she might never be recognized, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to do what she thought she was meant to do.” Another graduate woman in the Workshop, Ruth Sullivan, already looked up to Flannery as a writer, and treated her as an authority. “With the door open between our rooms,