Chapter Three

“MFOC”

Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville proved to be a good fit for seventeen-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor. The “girls’ college” did remain a lifelong target for her satire, sent up as Lucy Gains College, the “local college,” in a draft of “The Partridge Festival,” and as Willowpool Seminary, “the most progressive Female Seminary in the state,” in a draft of a graduate thesis story, “The Crop.” In her Iowa “Biography,” she leveled her alma mater for its emphasis on high school teaching, her early career path, by default, describing the training as qualifying her only for a job in Podunk, Georgia, earning $87.50 a month. Yet to her friend Janet McKane, in 1963, she admitted the bottom line of her feelings about high school and college: “I enjoyed college and despised the progressive high school but only remember people and things from both.”

With classes starting almost immediately in the summer of 1942, the laboratory school and the college were at first nearly indistinguishable. Like all of her Peabody classmates — except one, who went away to college in Alabama — O’Connor simply “moved over” to Georgia State College for Women, or GSCW, but continued to live at home. Registering for a special wartime three-year program that required summer sessions as well as the fall, winter, and spring semesters, she was already enrolled by June 9, a mere ten days after her Peabody graduation. In classrooms exactly like those in high school, she took four courses in Biology, Composition, Math, and Humanities that she later remembered as survey courses she had merely endured.

Of a lifelong friendship that began almost at once during that ten-week summer session, while most of the college buildings were shut against the Georgia heat, and most of the faculty away on vacation, Betty Boyd Love has written, “I first met Flannery O’Connor in the summer of 1942. We were both freshmen entering a new accelerated college program at Georgia State College for Women. There weren’t many of us in the program. Most of the summer students at GSCW were public school teachers returning to renew or upgrade a credential, so the small group of us who were ‘regular’ students got to know each other quite soon.” O’Connor met Betty Boyd while she was enduring Math 110, or Functional Math, in which she received a 75, her lowest academic grade.

A poet and mathematician from Rome, Georgia, with wavy hair, round eyeglasses, and a bright smile, Boyd was the first friend Mary Flannery truly chose on her own, without her mother’s oversight. The two young women discovered that they shared unfocused literary ambitions and, in the first flush of their friendship, both were writing poems. Two of Boyd’s were published in the fall 1942 issue of the college literary magazine, the Corinthian — “Fairies” and “Reflection,” a sensitive meditation on roses “twining over the wall . . . built around my soul.” O’Connor tended to stilted odes, like “Pffft,” published two years later. Its first line was “Some new, unheard-of thought I would put down!” Both later cringed at these “pretty terrible poems,” said Love. Hearing a rumor, in 1949, of a sighting of a published poem, O’Connor wrote her in a panic: “have not written anything but prose since I got out of stir. But several awful ghosts come to mind. Do you remember the poems we sent to an anthology and had accepted — called America Sings, printed by offset somewhere in California?”

Yet the thrill of being literary coconspirators was an important bond. Appealing, too, for the extremely guarded Mary Flannery, was Betty Boyd’s quiet earnestness. She later portrayed herself as a “horribly serious” college student, her studiousness counterbalanced by O’Connor’s “same dry whimsical humor.” The Corinthian editor Jane Sparks Willingham concurs that “Betty Boyd was a deep-thinking person, not somebody who sat around and cracked jokes about what you did the night before on your date.” Boyd’s sensitivity was evident in an essay published in the fall 1942 Corinthian, tremulously recording her summer arrival at GSCW. She wrote of bidding good-bye to her parents, “the two people I love more than all others”; having “walked up the steps to the library to register”; and looking forward to “companionship with a fine group of smiling, quiet, friendly girls.”

If not handpicked, Betty Boyd was approved by Mrs. O’Connor, and often invited to the Cline Mansion, where she spent “a great many hours” enjoying the “large and high-ceilinged and cool” rooms: “I soon became a regular visitor there and enjoyed many a Sunday dinner at the wonderful long walnut table with its silver napkin rings and the little pot of demitasse coffee served to pour over the ice cream at dessert. They had trouble keeping a cook because of the demands of Miss Katie. . . . In retrospect, this seems to me a somewhat unusual household, but at the time it appeared perfectly unexceptional, and I’m sure they all looked on it as such.” Although Aunt Gertie died just four months after Edward O’Connor, Aunt Mary kept the mansion as a haven for single women by inviting two college teachers as occasional boarders, Miss Bancroft and Miss Kirby.

The most unusual aspect of the house might have escaped the notice of the young Betty Boyd: the group of women was self-sufficient. “Miss Mary was a businessman from the word ‘go,’” reported one Milledgeville resident. The GSCW History professor Dr. Helen Greene has remarked that “Miss Mary . . . inherited many rental properties and often a person in need of a place to live would come to the house to speak with her. The family employed a number of black people for the maintenance of their house and yard, and some of these employees were truly devoted.” The younger sisters contributed as well. Following Edward O’Connor’s death, Dr. Bernard Cline brought Regina to Atlanta to train as a bookkeeper for Sorrel Farm; in the spring of 1941, they received a sweet-milk contract from State Hospital. Aunt Katie worked her entire life at the postal job she secured in the 1920s when elder brother Hugh T. Cline was the Republican-appointee postmaster.

Not only did O’Connor discover, over the course of this summer, her capacity for close friendship, but even the introductory courses she later brushed aside provided intellectual awakening, and at least one challenge. Most important for her was Survey of Humanities, with Dr. Paul Boeson, of the Classical Language Department. Because Dr. Boeson was a Roman Catholic, and a Latin scholar, she trusted him as her first guide to the world of philosophical ideas. On the cover of the winter 1943 Corinthian was a photograph, reprinted from his personal collection, of a nun, in stark wimple and habit, reading a book illuminated by light streaming through a window. “She and Dr. Boeson would talk every day before the class would start,” recalls a fellow student, Lou Ann Hardigne. The following year O’Connor took the second half of his survey, buying the editions of Plato, Aristotle, and the Selected Essays of Montaigne that she would keep her entire life.

More trying was her first college writing class, English 101, General College Composition, with Miss Katherine Kirkwood Scott. Nearly twenty years later, in January 1960, Flannery O’Connor was invited back to the college, as a local literary celebrity, to speak at Chapel in Russell Auditorium. Her topic was “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” but she added personal comments that she left out when giving the same talk some months later at Macon College. These thoughts, tailored to her GSCW audience, suggested insecurities that had haunted her ever since college. She confided that morning: “When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’ Some writers can ignore this presence, but I have never learned how.”

An early reader, who may well have said, “I don’t get it, I don’t see it,” in not so many words, was Miss Katherine Scott. Although she gave O’Connor a grade of 92, Miss Scott was the steel magnolia version of Sister Mary Consolata at Sacred Heart. A writer herself, Scott later published a nostalgic memoir about Milledgeville titled The Land of Lost Content. While O’Connor was in college, Scott delivered a talk billed as “poetic and romantic” on “Greece: A Pioneer in Democracy,” to the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She liked to hold at least one class session at her 1838 Victorian family home that she claimed was haunted; she brought along to school her three prized Boston bulldogs.

“They would not have been a happy combination,” says Mary Barbara Tate, later an English teacher at GSCW, and a friend of Katherine Scott’s. “She thought Flannery had great talent, but she wanted her to write like Jane Austen. She was the kind of teacher who expected to be a mentor, and to be the one who gives out of this box of knowledge.” As Scott was a family friend, and had been in a small fourth-grade class with Regina Cline, both teacher and pupil were perfectly civil. Fran Richardson, a student in the class, has reported, “They would start talking and forget the rest of us were there. I told Mary Flannery once that I wished I could borrow some of her creativity, and she replied, ‘I’d exchange it for your ability to attract men.’” Yet when a journalist asked Scott, decades later, about her famous pupil, she revealed a lifelong ambivalence. “Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” she replied, “warped, but a genius all the same.”

ON SEPTEMBER 28, the fall semester officially began with the arrival of the entire student body of 948 students, mostly from middle-income families in rural areas and small towns in Georgia, paying a yearly tuition of $67.50. The scale of O’Connor’s campus had suddenly expanded from the three “Choo-Choo” buildings, a few steps in from a side street, to include nearly twenty neoclassical brick buildings, trimmed in limestone, and striped with white Corinthian columns. Set in the middle of Milledgeville, this twenty-three-acre quadrangle of firs and plumed elms, courtyards laced with flowering shrubs, and wide promenades and stone fountains constituted a humble postcard version of a Southern women’s college. “I found my ideal,” wrote Betty Boyd of its “old stately buildings” in her Corinthian piece on “My First Impression of GSCW.”

Much of the charged atmosphere of the time made these years at GSCW indelible in the memories of alumnae from the early forties. Influencing all of their moods was the sensation of a nation now fully mobilized for war on two fronts. Students returning that fall remembered well the evening of December 7, 1941, when they had filed into Russell Auditorium for the annual choral singing of Handel’s Messiah, having just heard news of the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, resulting the next day in a declaration of war against Japan. “Girls were crying, although we didn’t fully realize why we were crying,” says Louise Simmons Allen of the class of ’44. “The next day I listened carefully to President Roosevelt’s ‘day of infamy’ speech on the radio. Our boyfriends were in the service and writing back about new experiences. The war was always with us.”

From the start of the fall semester of 1942, the women at GSCW gathered regularly in a large room set aside in Porter Hall to roll surgical dressings for the Red Cross, and pack khaki gift kits for soldiers. Many consumer goods popular with students were rationed, including radios, phonograph records, even rolled cigarettes. Bicycles were in vogue, as few of their male dates, or even family members, could spare rationed gasoline for pleasure driving. “Sugar was scarce, but they had Ribbon Cane syrup, and fig preserves, on the table every meal,” recalls one dormitory resident, Virginia Wood Alexander, of “meatless” and “breadless” suppers in Atkinson Dining Hall. Reacting to the shock of a number of unexpected American defeats early in the conflict, one student confessed in the college paper, the Colonnade: “This war is making us think.”

The young women were also beginning the academic year at a college that had its academic accreditation suddenly pulled the previous December by an irate Governor Eugene Talmadge, not to be restored, retroactively, until January 1943. GSCW was that most unusual of institutions for middle Georgia in 1942: a progressive college, with a faculty of about sixty men and women, including a number of bright lights with PhDs from the University of Chicago and Columbia, some even transplanted Northerners. Embodying its contradictions was its longtime president, Dr. Guy H. Wells. A gruff, cigar-chomping, stout, and jowly gentleman who mangled his grammar and lacked polish, he was also a liberal on race. As early as a talk in Chapel in 1932, he was “calling attention to the prejudice against the negro.” Governor Talmadge was punishing Wells with de-accreditation for his “foreign ideas” in forming a campus “Race Committee.”

With all these challenges, the women who blithely nicknamed themselves “Jessies,” eliding the GSC initials, operated on a cusp between the “Woman Power” called for in the homeland during the Second World War, and the more traditional giddiness of coeds away at college. Especially for women from farm communities, the four-block strip of downtown Milledgeville had its draws: Culver Kidd Drug Store, with its lunch counter specializing in hot dogs and ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a favorite spot to meet cadets from Georgia Military College; Benson’s Bakery; E. Bell’s Beauty Shop, which O’Connor turned into “Palace Beauty Salon” for a college composition exercise; the Darling and Peggie Hale dress shops; and two movie theaters, the Campus and the Co-ed, charging fifteen cents for students, with separate entrances for blacks to segregated balconies.

Known as “Georgia State College for Wallflowers,” because of the reduced number of available cadets and town boys, college house rules still chafed: signing out to go to the movies; ten o’clock curfew; a limit of two dates per week, one in a public parlor, with a chaperone. If Dr. Wells was liberal on race, he was a stickler on female propriety. “I grew up in Madison, Georgia, where we felt safe and as free as butterflies,” complains one alumna, Gladys Baldwin Wallace. “Upon entering GSCW I felt as though I had been clapped into irons. Shortly before, two girls had been suspended for smuggling two Cokes into the dorm. One girl stood outside the window with the Cokes, the other dropped a cord out the upstairs window and hoisted them upwards.” Wallace also remembers sightings of Regina O’Connor, “a hide-bound Southern lady, always wore hat and gloves in public.”

Some of the more serious young women became involved in the YWCA, a center among campus clubs for race politics and social feminism. “People find it odd when I tell them that I was radicalized at this women’s college in Georgia in the forties,” says the 1946 yearbook editor Helen Matthews Lewis. She credits support for such leanings from a cadre of “older spinster-suffragette teachers: strong, independent women who were among the first generation of women to vote.” The director of the YWCA, Emily Cottingham, once boldly drove a car full of GSCW students to Atlanta University to live in the dorm, and eat in the cafeteria, with black women students. When the Milledgeville paper printed an editorial critical of an AFL-CIO speaker, brought to campus by the YWCA, Betty Boyd and Helen Matthews composed a ringing “Letter to the Editor”: “Ours are girls with a vivid realization that the pattern set for the coming world will deeply affect their future well-being and happiness and those of their children.”

Living in an “imposing” terraced home, like the aunts in “The Partridge Festival,” about “five blocks from the business section,” O’Connor, as a freshman, was insulated, either by her design or her family’s, from many of these burning issues among her peers. As she was a “town girl,” she didn’t fully reside in “Jessieville.” “Most of the time Mary Flannery walked home alone when she had a break from classes, but sometimes she stayed in the Town Girls Room,” remembers Zell Barnes Grant, who lived on a farm a mile outside town. “She always had her nose stuck in a book.” Tellingly, the only club O’Connor joined her first year was the Newman Club, which met weekly in the Sacred Heart rectory and included about ten girls, the total number of Roman Catholic students at the college; they all woke up at dawn to attend monthly First Friday masses together.

She kept her friendship with Betty Boyd during all their years at school. “They were so close,” remembers their mutual friend Jane Sparks Willingham. “They had a kindred spirit. Yet Betty was not awkward like Flannery. She was a very polished person, and much more into things on campus.” Within the first few weeks of the fall semester, Boyd had already grown beyond the circumference of summertime at the Cline Mansion. She was living in Terrell, the freshman dormitory, with a roommate coincidentally named Mary Boyd, an English major from Calhoun, Georgia, who worked on the literary magazine. And she became active in student government. The tall, shy, reticent young woman showed such a knack for engaging in policy issues at meetings that she was elected freshman class secretary.

As Betty Boyd’s roommate, Mary Boyd was also invited many times to Sunday dinner at the Cline Mansion. “She was very fond of her mother in Flannery’s way of liking people,” Mary Boyd Gallop has recalled. “Being the only child, the mother seemed just as fond of her girl as were two maiden aunts living there.” Yet there was tension between Betty’s two friends. Mary Flannery once told Betty Boyd that she found her roommate “just a bit too pedantic.” More to the point, Mary Boyd made constant comments along the lines of her observation, years later, that “O’Connor never seemed interested in the opposite sex. She was happy just being herself.” Mary Flannery did avoid dating. Yet she was uncomfortable at having such a private topic openly discussed.

Her defense was to cast Mary Boyd as a husband hunter, or simply boy crazy. O’Connor’s letters to Betty Boyd in the years following graduation are peppered with jokes about Mary Boyd and marriage, obviously continuing a college routine. In 1949, O’Connor received a letter from Mary Boyd asking point-blank if she planned to get married. “Now let me see,” O’Connor pretended to muse. “Do I or do I not want to get married?” When Betty Boyd announced her own impending wedding later that year, O’Connor’s humorous response was: “This should reassure Mary Boyd.” Pushing the matter to its extreme, O’Connor wrote Betty Boyd Love, in 1951, that she expected a letter from Mary “shortly, probably asking me if I like men, or some such.”

If Mary Flannery stood on the sidelines of the mating rituals of many of her fellow Jessies, she was just as removed from their liberal campus politics. “We kept trying to get her to come to these things,” says Helen Matthews Lewis, of the YWCA events. “But she was apolitical or nonpolitical.” She saw leading campus characters as figures of fun, rather than as serious role models. The “country bumpkin” side of President Wells impressed her more than his being “ahead of his time” on race issues. Six years after graduation, she wrote to Betty Boyd, in her collegiate tone, “I read in the local paper where Guy H. Wells was going somewhere to give a talk entitled, ‘Humor of Many Lands.’ Now, I said, ain’t that a laugh?” Bringing up the “spinster-suffragette” professors to Betty Hester in 1955, she skipped over their social feminism for a funny remark that turned on a novel by the Atlanta author Frances Newman: “she did write a novel called The Hard Boiled Virgin I find, which now I must read. I am going to see if they have it in the GSCW Library — the title may keep it out of there, a natural inconsistency, since half the teachers at that place are surely such.”

The first official gathering of the entering freshman class, in September 1942, was a formal tea at the Old Executive Mansion, the residence of President Wells. Once home to Confederate Governor Joseph E. Brown, as well as to General Sherman during his March to the Sea, the Palladian high Greek Revival governor’s mansion, with its soaring fifty-foot rotunda and gilded dome, was located on the same block as the Cline Mansion. Mary Flannery could spy its massive rose-colored masonry walls from her bedroom window, just beyond the backyard where, according to Betty Boyd Love, she still “kept ducks.” Yet her family had to force her to walk around the block to the social event. “Flannery did not want to go but was pressured into it,” remembers their classmate Harriet Thorp Hendricks. “She donned the required long dress — but wore her tennis shoes.” When asked why she was sitting alone in a corner, she replied, “Well, I’m anti-social.”

A tradition that elicited nothing but scorn from her was Rat Day, which began as Freshman Initiation Day in the thirties. A mass hazing of the freshman class, Rat Day commenced at four thirty in the morning. By evening, freshmen who had not shown enough servility were put on trial before a screaming jury of juniors in a Rat Court in Peabody Auditorium. Among the punishments meted out, in a 1943 Rat Court reported in the Colonnade: “Connie Howell was sentenced to wash her mouth out with soap. Sarah Pittard was seen sitting on a Coke bottle and washing clothes.” Earlier that day, Mary Flannery had been tested by just such a group of hazing sophomore girls, ordering her to wear an onion around her neck. When she flatly refused, they commanded her to kneel and beg their pardon. “I will not,” she responded with disdain, and walked off.

Even more trying for her than Miss Scott’s creative writing class was English 102, the sequential General College Composition, taught that fall by Dr. William T. Wynn. Known to his students as “Willie T,” the Southern-lit buff did not give the young writer even the benefit of the doubt of a high grade; she earned an 83, keeping her off the first-quarter dean’s list. “Dr. Wynn was a gentleman of the old school who was soon to retire,” reported a class member, Kathryn Donan Kuck. “He did not enjoy her style of writing and he tried hard to change it. He wanted her to be ladylike and graceful.” When the time came to declare a major, she chose Social Science to avoid taking two requirements for the English major taught only by Dr. Wynn, a grammar course, using a little textbook he had written, and Shakespeare. “He was a laughingstock,” says Mary Barbara Tate. “She just did not want to have him again. That’s how she evaded him.”

A sample of her writing style that would have stoked Dr. Wynn’s ire was “Going to the Dogs,” the first of a number of satires she published in the Corinthian. The parody appeared in the fall 1942 issue, with its black-and-white cover photograph of a thoughtful Jessie penning a “Dear Soldier” letter while lying on the campus lawn. “A few days later I was further startled by seeing another group of students chase a cat up a tree on the front campus,” complains her narrator, reminiscent of the myopic groom of Poe’s “The Spectacles,” as she mistakes roving dogs for college students. She signed this effort “M. F. O’Connor,” a half step to “Flannery O’Connor.” Tenderly echoed in the neutral signature, too, were the initials used by her father, “E. F. O’Connor.”

By the middle of the fall semester, Mary Flannery clicked into a congenial role for herself in the GSCW community: campus cartoonist. As she simply “moved over” from Peabody High to Georgia State, she likewise “moved over” as a cartoonist. The faculty adviser to the Colonnade was the same journalism instructor, George Haslam, who had invited her to contribute to the Palladium. Together they agreed that she would raise her rate of production to a cartoon every week and take over as art editor, beginning in November, in the newspaper offices in the basement of Parks Hall. She quickly adopted the campus as the setting for her cartoons, signified by a Greek column or a stone pediment. But instead of aligning herself with the idealistic view of Betty Boyd’s first-impressions piece, O’Connor fixed her gaze on its eyesores: packs of stray dogs; boards patching holes in the muddy lawn; glaring nighttime spotlights.

As with her first published college story, O’Connor marked her new artistic venue with a new signature, a monogram. Such monograms, formed by turning initials, or the letters of a name, into heraldic pictures, representing a person or a job, and used on stationery, handkerchiefs, and business cards, were a wartime fad; they were even highlighted in the popular Paramount Pictures “Unusual Occupations” series of ten-minute color newsreels, in a 1944 segment titled “‘What’s in a Name’ Monogram Art.” For her own identifying emblem, she mined her dearest obsession, scrambling her initials to make a design suggesting a bird: “M” for a beak; “F,” a tail; “O,” a face; “C,” the curve of a body. “It may look like a bird,” Betty Boyd Love wrote of the witty final result, “but I’m sure she would have said it was a chicken.”

O’Connor’s debut cartoon appeared on October 6, with her chicken logo fixed in the lower-left corner. Titled “The Immediate Results of Physical Fitness Day,” its subject was a spent girl in baggy sweater, skirt, and saddle oxfords, stiffly supporting herself with a cane, her tongue hanging out. The illustration accompanied a feature story: “Keeping Fit: Physical Fitness Program to Be Daily Feature at GSCW.” Over the next months, she concocted an unfolding frieze of such challenged types — some, like a harried, limp-haired girl, staggering under a load of books, an obvious self-portrait. “I thought of her then as a cartoonist who also tried her hand at writing,” says Gertrude Ehrlich, an Austrian “refugee student.” “She was a genius at depicting us ‘Jessies’ running around campus, with scarves hanging out of pockets, or messily draped on our heads.”

By the time O’Connor completed her eight cartoons of the first fall quarter, she had developed her favorite situation — a short, fat girl and her tall, thin sidekick, bouncing caustic remarks off each other. In an October 24 spoof of a faculty-student softball game, one of the pair of girls, loaded down with books, grouses to her friend, “Aw, nuts! I thought we’d at least have one day off after the faculty played softball!” The accompanying article: “Faculty Score 13 Over Seniors’ 12.” The steady outfitting of her odd couple with raincoats, galoshes, and umbrellas was a wink to a knowing audience. “It seemed to rain a lot in Milledgeville and we wore khaki-colored cotton gabardine raincoats most of the time,” explains Virginia Wood Alexander. “This is the way I remember Flannery. She would come ‘slouching’ along like the rest of us.”

A rare campus event that O’Connor truly enjoyed was the Golden Slipper, an annual drama contest between the freshmen and sophomore classes, with a small golden slipper as the award. “I remember her being behind some of the brilliant backdrops and scenery in this competition,” says her classmate Frances Lane Poole. The production that November was especially important to her, as the freshman entry, “Blossoms on Bataan,” was directed by Betty Boyd. It was set in a foxhole during the Battle of the Philippines, an American defeat in April 1942. The equally topical sophomore production “The Bell of Tarchova” took place in a village church during the 1939 Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia. When the sophomore class won, O’Connor’s November 14 cartoon featured her trademark girls, defeated, in highly elongated saddle shoes, with the caption “Doggone the Golden Slipper Contest. Now we have to wear saddle oxfords.”

Enough excitement was generated by these cartoons that at the end of her first school year the Macon Telegraph and News ran a profile, written by Nelle Womack Hines, alongside a freshman photo of a grinning O’Connor wearing round glasses, her hair done in the typical pin-curled style of the 1940s. The piece was headlined “Mary O’Connor Shows Talent as Cartoonist.” Hines found herself with an easily quotable subject in the girl she characterized as “fast making a name for herself as an up-and-coming cartoonist”: “When asked how she went about her work, Miss O’Connor replied that first — she caught her ‘rabbit.’ In this case, she explained, the ‘rabbit’ was a good idea, which must tie up with some current event or a recent happening on the campus.” Hines rightly observed, with coaching from the cartoonist, “Usually Mary presents two students in her cartoons — a tall, lanky ‘dumb-bunny’ and a short and stocky ‘smart-aleck’ — female, of course.” The interviewer’s conclusion was politic: “A keen sense of humor enables her to see the funny side of situations which she portrays minus the sting.”

IN JANUARY 1943, World War II came marching onto the campus of Georgia State College for Women. By that winter, the global conflict had intensified. GSCW students and faculty heard daily news reports of battles from Guadalcanal to Tripoli and Stalingrad, as they worked in the Civilian Morale Service’s Key Center, operating out of Russell Library. But the war came home in a more startling way when Waves began drills on campus, and moved into their dorms and classrooms. Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services were among eighty-six thousand female soldiers pressed into navy service on the home front. With lobbying from the powerful Milledgeville Congressman Carl Vinson, House chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee (who helped Ed O’Connor win his FHA appointment), GSCW was chosen as one of four campuses for on-site training (Smith was the only other women’s college).

The first of four hundred initial “Ripples” (a nickname that never caught on) “weighed anchor” on campus on January 15, taking over the prime dorms of Ennis, Sanford, Mayfair, Beeson, and the top floor of the Mansion, their numbers eventually adding up to a startling fifteen thousand between 1943 and 1945. As regulations required the women to speak navy language, Ennis became the “U.S.S. Ennis,” and its floors, “decks”; its stairs, “ladders”; its windows, “ports.” As part of their training to replace navy men at shore stations, the Waves woke to reveille, marched sixteen miles daily, attended six lectures in Arts Hall, typed two hours, exercised one hour, and went to bed to taps at ten p.m. Their uniforms were navy blue suits, blue hats, black gloves, and low-heeled black shoes. “They’d get out every morning at six marching between the dining hall and the library,” remembers Jane Sparks Willingham. “It wasn’t a happy mix, but it was necessary.”

Many of the Jessies, now crowded three or four to a room, had mixed feelings about this reverse invasion, as the Waves transformed their women’s college into a battleship in dry dock. But they usually cut their resentment with a grudging patriotism. “We had very little contact with them,” Dr. Elizabeth Knowles Adams has recalled. “Some of us were probably a little jealous because they seemed so glamorous in their uniforms.” For the proponents of the social equality of women, the presence of independent female soldiers on campus could be seen as a bonus. “Woman Power” became essential in the national emergency, and the radical-sounding slogan was adopted for regular use by the United States government, as well as by the Board of Regents of Georgia. Yet even the social feminist Helen Matthews Lewis found their unavoidable presence invasive: “They were always in the way, keeping us from getting to class.”

Mary Flannery skipped the patriotism and went straight for the comedy; in the Waves, she found her most reliable cartoon topic. Not since the nuns she liked to mimic at Sacred Heart had she seen so many single women together in uniform. The first of her series of Waves cuts appeared on January 23, a day after fifteen staff officers were introduced to the students during morning Chapel. The setting is a campus corner, where two girls espy a couple of Waves walking toward them. “Officer or no officer,” says one in a plaid skirt, “I’m going to ask her to let me try on that hat.” There followed two years of girls butting their umbrellas along the backs of marching Waves’ legs; girls clinging to tree trunks, like cats, to escape a drilling platoon; girls sneaking to check if Waves carried gunpowder in their handbags; or using Waves for archery practice.

Not only women, but male soldiers also bivouacked more and more in Milledgeville. Few showed up in O’Connor’s cartoon world, yet they were a force in the town and on campus. Although the only local “base” belonged to the navy women at GSCW, there were many military bases nearby: Camp Gordon, Augusta; Fort Benning, Columbus; Camp Wheeler, Cochran Field, and Warner Robins Field, Macon; as well as a naval hospital in Dublin. On weekends, throngs of servicemen with leave passes crowded into Milledgeville. As there were not enough hotels to house them, or families to take them in, they often slept on porch swings, or in sleeping bags, on campus. “When convoys passed, the soldiers threw down notes for the GSCW students to pick up,” recalls Charmet Garrett, who lived in Ennis Hall across Hancock Street. The military presence in town was dense enough for Bob Hope to broadcast his NBC radio show live from Russell Auditorium, for an audience of Waves and Jessies, on May 18, 1943.

Male soldiers became known to Mary Flannery mostly through Sacred Heart Church, and the USO, or United Service Organizations. A number of Roman Catholic soldiers would show up at her church on Sunday, and the Clines often invited them home for a family dinner. As early as 1941, Aunt Gertie reported to Agnes Florencourt that “two of the soldiers came over from Macon — Louis met one and asked him over, so Mary told Louis to ask him to dinner. . . . they were both at church.” The Clines were just as involved with the USO — Aunt Katie was appointed chairman after the opening of its social club, in December 1943, in a storefront at the corner of Hancock and Wilkinson streets. On Sunday mornings, soldiers who crashed on the campus of GSCW sauntered across the street to the USO to clean up and enjoy free coffee and doughnuts.

While short, solid, gray-haired Katie Cline was a regular presence at the post office, she had known other more engaging moments in her life. As a young woman, she was a member of the Georgia Military College Players Club, acting in light comedies with Bardy, brother of Oliver Hardy, later of the Laurel and Hardy comedy team, then a rotund, teenage, silent-movie projectionist at the Palace Theatre in town. The second most memorable chapter of her life, locally, was her generous hospitality to soldiers during the war. “Miss Katie used to sit out on the porch on a Sunday morning and talk to all the passers-by,” Betty Boyd Love has recalled. “If a lone service man happened by, he might be invited to dinner.” One wounded soldier later wrote to her from Camp Wheeler, “I can still remember vividly the first time I had dinner in your home. It was just grand, Miss Cline.” Another wrote her from Fort Benning, “About this time of day I’d be sitting on your veranda, begging for a Coca-Cola and cake — if I were in Milledgeville.”

One Sunday, Aunt Katie invited home from church John Sullivan, recently assigned as a sentry to the naval training station at the college. As Sally Fitzgerald, who met Sullivan once, in Cincinnati during the 1980s, told the story, he had been “a handsome Marine Sergeant, resplendent in his dress blues.” Following the service, he was handed a note, written by Miss Katie, inviting him to be the guest of “the Cline sisters” for a midday dinner at their home on Greene Street. He accepted, and met their cherished niece, in her freshman year at GSCW. The two quickly developed a rapport based partly on a similar family background: an Ohio boy, Sullivan came from a large Roman Catholic family. They were able to trade funny stories, and share suppressed giggles, as he became a regular visitor, a “fixture” welcomed by all the aunts and uncles.

Of course, he and Mary Flannery were quite different. He was blithe, outgoing, confident, and at ease with his good looks. She was painfully shy, given to awkward gestures, and, as Mary Boyd was fond of pointing out, not used to the company of boys. Yet because Sergeant Sullivan appreciated her offbeat wit, and wry inside tips about Southern mores, they went on what amounted to “dates” — long walks, an occasional movie. He even escorted her to one college dance, though he quickly discovered that she was truly a bad dancer — she later claimed to have a “tin leg.” The foiled attempt may have contributed to her April 1943 cartoon on the opening of the college gym for dances, portraying a “wallflower” of a girl in a long striped skirt, with glasses, sitting alone, watching other couples dance. The caption: “Oh, well, I can always be a Ph.D.”

When Fitzgerald interviewed Sullivan, forty years later, he claimed that theirs had been “a close comradeship,” not a romance. Yet the two played at romance enough to tease a hopeful mother. Once, as they sat together on the couch in the parlor, Regina called liltingly over the stairwell, “Mary Flannery, wouldn’t you and John like to polish the silver?” After an exchange of amused glances, her daughter wickedly answered with a flat “No.” Following Sullivan’s transfer to a training camp for the Pacific war zone, O’Connor did show signs of a modest “crush.” She wrote many drafts of her own “Dear Soldier” letters, stashing them between the pages of her college notebook. In a journal entry, she made fun of herself for “casually” dropping to her family that she had just heard from John. This exchange of letters lasted until he entered St. Gregory’s Seminary, just after the war, briefly studying for the priesthood.

Her “crush” was enough of a blip — or a carefully concealed secret — that no relatives or classmates in Milledgeville remember the marine sergeant. What remained for O’Connor, though, was the PhD thought balloon that she floated during their time together. For at eighteen, she was hatching a plan for a life away from Milledgeville — studying journalism, or working as a newspaper cartoonist. No one in her family took these plans seriously. John Sullivan did, and he offered “admiration and encouragement.” She must have felt in him some of her missing father: the handsome man, occasionally in uniform, who was both confidant and supporter. Like one of the suitors in her later stories — the less likeable Mr. Shiftlet, for instance, who comes walking up the road in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — his surprise visit had subtly enlivened things.

DURING THE TIME She was getting to know John Sullivan, coincidentally enough, Mary Flannery took a class with an English teacher who finally responded with understanding and enthusiasm to her writing. The professor who “got” her work was Miss Hallie Smith, a large and nurturing woman, one of those in the cadre of GSCW professors who belonged to the Audubon Society, and qualified in all respects as a “suffragette-spinster.” In the spring 1943 quarter, while O’Connor was in her class, Smith gave her own talk to the DAR on “Woman, a Strength in Freedom’s Cause,” trumpeting the importance of “womanpower in this war and other wars.”

The elective course O’Connor took with Miss Smith that spring quarter was English 324, Advanced Composition. As the capstone of the composition sequence, the class included only a dozen young women. “Miss Hallie required us to write something for each class — then, to my chagrin, she expected us to read it aloud,” recalls Marion Peterman Page. “It wasn’t long before I realized that the only writer in the class was Mary Flannery. The efforts of the rest of us were so juvenile compared to her. She seemed to be very shy and very modest. She was a mousy looking young lady, but one forgot that when she read what she had written.” Another member of the class, Karen Owens Smith, who usually sat in the front row with Mary Flannery, a few feet from the teacher, remembers “a twang to her voice that I can still hear.”

On March 24, O’Connor handed in her first assignment, two descriptions of a street scene, one photographic, the second poetic. Naming her street Raphael Street, after Katie Semmes’s husband, she evoked Charlton Street in Savannah with a lineup of “six, tall grey buildings.” Yet she had obviously been reading James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” too, and precociously tried to copy the style of the Irish Catholic writer. On Dublin’s North Richmond Street, in Joyce’s story, “The other houses of the street . . . gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” On O’Connor’s Raphael Street, “gaunt houses all of somber, grey stone, gaze austerely at each other.” Miss Hallie was thrilled with the effort. On the single typed page, signed “M. F. O’Connor,” she wrote in red pencil, “A+.”

Five days later, O’Connor handed in a typed, one-page character study. “Nine out of Every Ten” was signed with a pseudonym that could have popped out of a Merriweather Girls novel, “Jane Shorebanks.” The sketch details a vapid young lady walking along chewing gum to the beat of the “Missouri Waltz.” In red pencil, Miss Hallie wrote an exclamatory “A!” and added, “Won’t you submit something to the Corinthian?” Miss Hallie sensed in O’Connor’s depiction of a face “sagging and contracting” as a girl chews a “slippery mass” of chewing gum a different tenor of writing talent. O’Connor had previously published, in the winter 1943 Corinthian, a mock review of a children’s book about Ferdinand the bull, deeming the book “highly recommendable literature for the college student,” and a satire on replacing cars with horses, “Why Worry the Horse?”

Over the next ten weeks, O’Connor wrote a series of short, descriptive exercises: lemon gelatin (“translucent mush”); celery (tastes like “sucking warm water out of a dish rag”); a kitchen; a velvet collar; and a mahogany table, much like the one in the dining room in the Cline Mansion. A description of a general store proprietor, for which she received an “A, An excellent use of the details at your disposal!” included “loud-labeled tin cans,” close in wording to the “tin cans whose labels his stomach read” in the general store in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” She created vignettes of a black laundress talking to a white woman, a third-grade teacher on a bad day, and a Mrs. Watson reading movie magazines under a hair dryer. A single-scene character study of an imperious Mrs. Peterson being ushered to her seat at the theater was titled “The Cynosure,” signed with another silly, feminine pseudonym, “Gertrude Beachlock,” and marked “Excellent. Let me have a copy. A.”

The one full-blown story she wrote for class was her most startling work of the semester, revealing a grasp of materials that her classmates never suspected from the “plain looking girl, unassuming.” Says Marion Peterman Page, “At the time it seemed too deep for me to understand.” The graphic tale, titled “A Place of Action,” transpires on Saturday night in a black neighborhood, complete with a “zuit-suited” character who is stabbed by a woman he is hassling. While the story is melodramatic, and turns entirely on a stereotyped cast of characters, its use of violence as its climax, and its downbeat setting — “a dingy corner” — signal a writer finding her voice. Miss Hallie wrote “good” next to the description of the knife: “A thick, red coating hid its glimmer.” Her final comment: “You might call your theme Saturday Night. Would you like to submit this to the Corinthian?”

O’Connor took Miss Hallie’s advice. She began to publish stories as well as satires, though nothing as edgy as “A Place of Action,” as its racy treatment of urban blacks was a definite taboo for a young Southern lady of the time. Her first published story, printed that spring, was “Elegance Is Its Own Reward,” a weird tale, in the style of the “humorous” Poe, about a husband murdering both his wives, one with a hunting knife, the second by way of strangulation. Another written about the same time, and published in the fall 1943 Corinthian, “Home of the Brave,” was set in wartime Milledgeville, turning on two snobbish matrons rolling bandages at a ladies’ aid society while engaging in a lot of gossip, as “belligerent,” she wrote, as “the Battle of Stalingrad,” including their criticizing of Eleanor Roosevelt for not staying home enough.

She followed the writing course with two summer literature courses, The Short Story, taught by Miss Hallie Smith, and a Survey of English Literature. O’Connor later developed a selective memory about what she had read and when. “When I went to Iowa I had never heard of Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, much less read them,” she later claimed to a friend. Yet her early stories bear traces of the fingerprints of both Faulkner and Joyce. And The Story Survey, her textbook for her English 311 course, with her name, “M. F. O’Connor,” and address, “305 W. Green Street, Milledgeville” carefully inscribed on the front page, has a checkmark in the table of contents next to Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun,” a star next to Joyce’s “A Little Cloud,” and lots of underlining of the explanation of “gothic” in the write-up on Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado.”

She was obviously mining authors for ideas for her own experiments in writing, and for kindred sensibilities. So her take on literature courses could be likewise highly personal, creative, often “smart-aleck.” Unimpressed by Emily Dickinson, O’Connor compared the New Englander’s poetry to the froth on a glass of Alka-Seltzer. When a friend once asked if she had read Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, she reported back, “I had a course in college entitled ‘Tennyson, Browning,’ and it looks like they would have made us read it. I don’t remember anything about it though. All I remember from the whole course is ‘Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, night, has flown.’ I thought that was hilarious.” She loved telling of the freshman in Miss Hallie’s class who piped up that the moral of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was “Think twice before you commit adultery.”

During her junior year of 1943–44, she paid the price for her spiteful Social Science major by needing to take a series of sociology courses, beginning with Sociology 301: Introduction to Sociology. “In college I read works of social-science, so called,” she complained in a letter years later. “The only thing that kept me from being a social-scientist was the grace of God and the fact that I couldn’t remember the stuff but a few days after reading it.” The other second-year requirement that she put on an equal plane of disdain, though earning her much lower grades — C’s rather than A’s — was Physical Education. “She was considered dangerous with a golf club in her hand,” one Phys Ed classmate of hers has recalled. “She was apt not to look around or yell ‘Fore.’ She wasn’t particularly athletic, but she was a good sport and laughed at herself.”

Mary Flannery could be particularly irate and funny about Social Science 200, Contemporary Georgia Problems. As Ana Pinkston Phillips, a student in her class during the winter of 1944, recalls, “My introduction to her was when she slammed her book shut and said, as she left the room, ‘I don’t need to know how many pigs were born in Georgia in 1932!’” (A couple of her later fictional young women with Southern, feminine double names were book slammers, as well — Mary Elizabeth in “The Partridge Festival” and Mary Grace in “Revelation.”) Her reaction to the course was already set when she laid eyes on the syllabus the quarter before; a November 1943 cartoon of hers depicts a lumpy student, hair in disarray, soliciting a snappily uniformed Wave: “Could I interest you in buying a Contemporary Georgia syllabus?”

With one eye on “Podunk,” she dutifully fulfilled, during the same academic year, requirements toward a minor in Education. As she accurately reported to her friend Janet McKane, in 1964, “I had 3 education courses in college. Pure Wasted Time.” Of one of those classes, with only four students enrolled, the fellow pupil Jane Strozier Smith, says, “I remember Flannery as outstanding, not only for her brilliance, but because she never flaunted it at all.” She produced the equivalent of her “Contemporary Georgia” cartoon in three satiric essays for the Corinthian — “Doctors of Delinquency,” in fall 1943, about Hayden Struthers III, getting a “Master of Rotating Tops Degree” at Columbia Kindergarten; “Biologic Endeavor,” in spring 1944, on the modern miracle drugs Tums and Ex-Lax; and “Education’s Only Hope,” in spring 1945, with its loopy parting shot:

. . .until students quit school in the grammar grades, higher education will not attain that ultimate goal which the poet, Ridinghearse, expressed so beautifully when he wrote:

“Gee,

           It’s chilly

                Up here!”

A reprieve from “progressive education” was provided by two single women professors, Miss Mary Thomas Maxwell and Miss Helen Greene. Many of O’Connor’s college friendships wound up being drawn not so much from other students as from a circle of professors closer in age to her aunts, perhaps explaining what one student called her “old fashion wardrobe — long dark skirts, long sleeves.” Joan DeWitt Yoe, a staff member at the Corinthian, was put off by her: “I was an art major and my job was to illustrate Mary’s short stories. I regret now that my drawings weren’t abstract to be in the same mood as her stories. She would hand me a copy of her story without a word or looking me in the eye. It was a strange situation that I still don’t understand. She wouldn’t let me in her space. . . . I do know that all of the teachers adored her and were constantly around her.”

Miss Mary Thomas Maxwell, the first of these teacher-friends, was nicknamed Tommy. “She was one of the most inspiring, exciting, and beautiful teachers,” remembers Helen Lewis of the sparkling woman in her thirties. “She introduced us all to Walt Whitman. Her exam would be imagining a dinner party with Mark Twain sitting next to another author, and you would have to develop a conversation between them.” O’Connor respected Tommy Maxwell enough to take her English 308 course in Spoken English during the summer of 1944, even though she cringed at public speaking. When Miss Maxwell queried her, she replied, “Well I know it won’t do any good, but I have to show Regina and Sister.” At the end of the summer, she received a B, not because her delivery had noticeably improved, but to acknowledge the “splendid” content of her talks.

Confiding to Betty Boyd that she felt Dr. Helen Greene, with her PhD from the University of Chicago, was “the smartest woman at that college,” she took her course in European History. As a member of an honor society, the International Relations Club, she attended evening meetings in Dr. Greene’s faculty apartment in Beeson Hall on Montgomery Street; afterward, another student would walk the “very carefully brought up” girl home. “My survey of European History was of special interest to her, I thought,” Dr. Greene has reminisced, “because the author of our textbook, one of those widely used, was a noted professor at Columbia University who, while working on his studies of Martin Luther in Germany, had changed his membership to the Roman Catholic Church.”

SPRINGTIME WAS TREATED as a happy cliché at GSCW. Each year, the Spectrum yearbook published a few pages of black-and-white shots with a caption, much like that in the 1945 edition: “Springtime brings with it Dogwood blossoms and flowering Iris.” One entry, a few years earlier, had filled in the scene with more local color: “Elms form a stately avenue for academic processions, dogwoods flaunt their beauty in Terrell Court. The formal garden accentuates the classic architecture of the buildings.” M. F. O’Connor added to the spring theme, while purposely getting it backward, in “Effervescence,” an ode printed in the spring 1943 Corinthian, in which the sun rises on dogs sleeping beneath dogwoods. Its opening line, “Oh, what is so effervescent as a day in the spring,” was a parody of “And what is so rare as a day in June?” in “The Vision of Sir Launfal” by the American Romantic poet James Russell Lowell, a granduncle of Robert Lowell.

The spring of 1945, as O’Connor began her final quarter at GSCW, felt, even more than usual, to the young women and their guests, the Waves, as if the world was making a historic turn on its axis. During the previous summer, the D-day invasion had taken place with 155,000 Allied troops landing on the beaches of Normandy, opening a wedge in the Nazi domination of continental Europe. On February 23, 1945, Joe Rosenthal snapped his iconic photo of a group of marines and a navy corpsman raising a huge American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. By March 1945, Hitler was confined to his bunker in Berlin while American bombers attacked the city, and American troops liberated the first Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald. Within two months, on May 8, 1945, VE-day was declared, marking the official end of the war in Europe.

In the midst of so many positive historic events, the sad news came on April 12 that Franklin Roosevelt, recently inaugurated to an unprecedented fourth term, had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. “My roommate and I went to an afternoon movie, returning to campus around five, and someone told us ‘The president has died,’” remembers Betty Anderson Bogle, a student from Atlanta. “We assumed she meant Guy Wells. When we realized she meant Roosevelt, we were stunned beyond belief.” A performer at one of the GSCW Monday musical events had been Navy Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson, a black accordion player. When Life magazine appeared, many of the women recognized him in a photograph, playing “Going Home” on his accordion, tears rolling down his face, as the president’s hearse rolled past the steps of the Warm Springs polio hospital.

As she prepared to graduate, at twenty years old, O’Connor was far more active on campus than might have been expected. She had made enough of a name for one classmate to remember her as a “B.W.O.C.” (“Big Woman on Campus”). The girl whose only campus activity her first year had been the Newman Club was now editor in chief of the Corinthian literary magazine, feature editor of the Spectrum yearbook, and art editor of the Colonnade newspaper, as well as having been elected to all the honor societies — the Phoenix, Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities, and the International Relations Club. The tone of her first Editor’s Letter in the fall 1944 Corinthian, titled “Excuse Us While We Don’t Apologize,” was unmistakable: “Although the majority of you like the ‘my love has gone now I shall moan’ type of work, we will give you none of it. Although the minority of you prefer consistent punctuation and a smack of literary pretension, we aren’t going to worry about giving it to you.”

She had grown particularly ambitious for her cartoons. With the New Yorker cartoonist James Thurber a household name in America during the forties — his My World and Welcome to It was published in 1942, The Thurber Carnival in 1945 — she submitted cartoons to The New Yorker, only to receive what she later described as “a lot of encouragin’ rejection slips.” Says the Colonnade’s feature editor Bee McCormack, echoing a common sentiment among the students, “I thought then she might become the new James Thurber.” As O’Connor later reported to Janet McKane: “I like cartoons. I used to try to do them myself, sent a batch every week to the New Yorker, all rejected of course. I just couldn’t draw very well. I like the ones that are drawn well better than the situations.” A sheaf of her cartoons from the time includes a classic of her sensibility: one fish saying to another, “You can go jump out of the lake!” While taking a two-semester course on “The United States” with a new history professor, James Bonner, she focused on the textbook A Century of Political Cartoons, imagining for herself a future in the profession.

Impressed by the splash her cartoons made in the student newspaper, Margaret Meaders, a journalism instructor and editor of the Alumnae Journal, asked the senior to contribute some work for the upcoming issue. Meaders later recalled looking out her office window in Parks Hall one afternoon and catching sight of Mary Flannery sauntering across Hancock Street, entering the campus, and making her way up the broad front walk beneath the overarching elms. She was on her way to their meeting, toting a pile of her “wonderful, merry cartoons.” Meaders wrote, “We Southerners would say that she ‘moseyed.’ I never remember seeing her hurry.” She summed up O’Connor’s understated presence at the college as “slow-spoken, quiet-mannered,” rather than that of “a campus big shot, a professional bright-girl-sure-to-heap-glory-on-all-of-us.”

The climax of O’Connor’s stint as campus cartoonist was the 1945 Spectrum. The endpapers of the yearbook were panoramic views of the campus, a reprise of her greatest hits: chins-up, eyes-forward Waves marching in columns; girls balancing books and umbrellas; hounds curling their long tails. She also designed an entire “Pilgrimage through JESSIEVILLE” of ink drawings, redoing her tall-short pair with a sketch, from the rear, recognizable as the tall dean of women, Ethel Adams, and the short, stout dean of studies, Hoy Taylor. Her friend Robert Fitzgerald later judged these illustrations less successful. “In the linoleum cuts the line was always strong and decisive with an energy and angularity that recall the pen drawings of George Price, drawings that in fact she admired,” he wrote, noting the influence of a lesser-known, but brilliant New Yorker cartoonist. “For the yearbook . . . she tried a rounder kind of comic drawing, not so good.”

Because all of the student publication offices were located in Parks Hall, Editor O’Connor spent many hours in its basement. In her spare time, she took on herself the project of painting murals on the walls of its student lounge. “Mary Flannery decorated the walls with some of these Thurberesque types,” Dr. Helen Greene has written. She also completed a painting, Winter, included in a traveling exhibition through Georgia. A posed yearbook photo shows her sitting at a desk, in a cramped office, dressed in classic coed style — sweater, bobby socks, scuffed saddle shoes, with coiffed dark hair — surrounded by her staff of ten young women. In another shot, she leans against a pillar, one leg coyly tucked up, examining a copy of the magazine with her business manager, Peggy George. “We were laughing,” recalls Peggy George Sammons. “That is the only picture I have ever seen of her where she even had a smile on her face.”

On April 11, 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 Flannery as confident, behind her poker face she was actually rattled enough to have to think twice about what the instructor was saying. “What kept me a sceptic in college was precisely my Christian faith,” she later confided to the young poet Alfred Corn, going through his own period of doubt as a student at Emory University in 1962. “It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read.” By the end of the quarter, though, she had emerged from her shell enough to give the professor a hard time. As she relived one exchange with him, in a letter to the Fitzgeralds, in 1952: “[He] is the one that one day in a class says, ‘The Medieval Church was politheistic.’ I rise and say, ‘The Medieval Church was not politheistic.’ [He] fixes me very coldly, ‘I am speaking,’ says he, ‘as an anthropologist.’”

Helen Matthews Lewis, a student in the class, remembers a few other charged exchanges between professor and pupil. Once O’Connor went up to the blackboard to diagram, in detail, what she saw as the contrast between Aquinas and modernism. “Philosophy class was early in the morning, and most of us would be pretty sleepy and would have missed breakfast,” says Lewis. “We would run across campus, sometimes trying to hide our pajamas under our raincoats, to get to class. Flannery was always there, bright and ready to go, ready to argue with the professor.” As Beiswanger summed up O’Connor’s position: “It was philosophical modernism that had blinded the Western mind.”

What registered most strongly was the certainty that he had before him no ordinary girl: “She knew Aquinas in detail, was amazingly well read in earlier philosophy, and developed into a first rate ‘intellectual’ along with her other accomplishments. . . . It soon became clear to me that she was a ‘born’ writer and that she was going that way.” A classic example of a teacher making a difference, Beiswanger encouraged his A student to apply for graduate school at his alma mater, the University of Iowa. She sent in applications to both Duke University and to the journalism program at Iowa, mulling a possible career in newspaper political cartooning. The professor lobbied his contacts at the school to secure her a scholarship. When offered a journalism scholarship from Iowa, providing full tuition and sixty-five dollars a term, she quickly accepted.

At eleven o’clock on Monday morning, June 11, 1945, the fifty-fourth annual commencement of Georgia State College for Women opened with a procession of graduating seniors, O’Connor among them, accompanied by the well-worn organ strains of the “Grand March” from Aïda. Taking place on a hot Georgia summer’s day, with temperatures expected to rise to the midnineties by afternoon, the procession might well have “plodded stolidly along” to Russell Auditorium, like that of Sally Poker Sash and her graduating class in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”:

The black procession wound its way up the two blocks and started on the main walk leading to the auditorium. The visitors stood on the grass, picking out their graduates. Men were pushing back their hats and wiping their foreheads and women were lifting their dresses slightly from the shoulders to keep them from sticking to their backs. The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them.

Like the commencement speaker in “Late Encounter” who “was through with that war and had gone on to the next one,” Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall assured the 165 GSCW graduates that “the hope for lasting peace lies not in Washington nor on the battlefronts of the world, but in the hands of the 1945 graduates.” All were then “hooded” by Miss Katherine Scott. In the flurried ritual of yearbook autographing, Mary Flannery wrote as her standard entry, simply, “The usual bunk — M. F. O’Connor.”

In its coverage of the graduation, the Colonnade reported that “the realm of further study” had claimed five graduates, including Student Government Association President Betty Boyd at Chapel Hill, and “Mary Flannery O’Connor at Iowa State.” Yet this salutary, now definite news was not being entirely celebrated at the Cline Mansion. The notion that Mary Flannery was going off, by herself, to a school in the Midwest was nearly unthinkable. Up until graduation, O’Connor’s classmates were still walking her home at night, the two blocks from college meetings at Beeson Hall. Yet fragile appearances to the contrary, their sheltered niece obviously had a mind of her own, and her father’s quiet, stubborn will to back up her decisions. With Savannah in her past, having met John Sullivan of Ohio, and reading far and wide, she knew well the limits of Milledgeville.

As O’Connor later summed up her personal longitude and latitude at this juncture, in her “Biography,” written at Iowa, she felt that her big opportunity came in the form of the fellowship to graduate school. She hoped that the experience would either verify her suitability for little else but the job of teaching ninth-graders in Podunk, Georgia — the horizon line for most women majoring in English at GSCW — or that she would discover a happier means of making a living. Writing in her journal during the summer of 1945, Mary Flannery’s response to the wishful, dire predictions of a number of her relatives that she would be home in three weeks came down to one word — “Humph!”