Virginia Wray

Flannery O'Connor's Long Apprenticeship:
Honing the Habits of Irony and Satire

Toward the end of her introduction to The Habit of Being, Sally Fitzgerald alludes to Maritain's Art and Scholasticism to make a claim about the nature of Flannery O'Connor's art and life, and to suggest a way in which the reader should approach the volume of letters. She writes:

Flannery consciously sought to attain
to the habit of art, and did by customary
exercise and use, acquire it in the making
of her novels and stories. Less
deliberately perhaps ... she acquired as
well, I think, a second distinguished habit,
which I have called "the habit of being":
an excellence not only of action but of
interior disposition and activity that
increasingly reflected the obj ect, the being,
which specified it, and was reflected in what
she did and said. (Habit, xvii)

The sixteen years of letters that constitute The Habit of Being are, indeed, a totally engaging testament to O'Connor's "exercise and use" of her art and to the emerging clarity of her "interior disposition and activity." A similar - though granted minuscule by comparison - picture of her developing habits is paintedby availablejuvenilia. The Flannery O'Connor Collection at Georgia College holds papers dating from the "scrappy notebook" (Habit xi) createdby the hands of atwelve-year-old child to little known non-thesis material from the Iowa period. Collectively, these precollege, college, and graduate school texts document a serious emerging writer struggling toward character types, mode, and tone characteristic of her mature work.

As early as 1941, O'Connor's desire to write is documented in a feature story about her in her high-school paper, the Peabody Palladium (I6 Dec. 1941). Like many such pieces to follow, it describes O'Connor's fascination with fo@l and enumerates the members of her flock: "Herman ... her remarkable gander who hatched out a brood of eight goslings"; "Hallie Salassie, her pet rooster" whose portrait O'Connor painted for her art class; "Winston, a black crow, [who] was added to her menageries when a neighbor shot the feathered rascal stealing pecans"; and the recently deceased rooster Adolph whose name O'Connor had had to change to quell neighbor's puzzlement over "the 'Here Adolph's!!"' issued from Mary Flannery's backyard." In addition to confirmation of young O'Connor's early interest in the global and political scene suggested by this catalog of pet names, the feature story, more importantly, provides evidence of O'Connor's early persistent intent to write. Its title, under a picture of a white-bloused, dark-sweatered Mary Flannery O'Connor in wire-rimmed glasses, is "Peabodite Reveals Strange Hobby." Copy begins with what is presumably straight citation from the interview: "'Mary Flannery, what's your hobby?' 'Collecting rejection slips!' 'What?' 'Publisher's rejection slips!"' The unnamed reporter claims that the young O'Connor "began writing at the delicate age of six and just kept right on writing until 'Mistaken Identity,' 'Elmo,' and 'Gertrude' were produced." All three of these are very early pieces about a goose, Herman, whose mistaken gender was clarified by his surprise hatching of a brood of eight. This particular revelation is recorded in "Mistaken Identity," the one surviving book of the three held in the O'Connor Collection. In words O'Connor no doubt suggested to her Palladium interviewer, this early trilogy is "of the novelty type - too old for young children and too young for older people." The young face staring from the page prophetically claimed that her "ambition ... [was] to keep right on writing, particularly satires [my emphasis]."

The bulk of the young satirist's creative work for the Palladium is cartoons. There is, however, one poem entitled "lbe first Book" (I I Nov. 1940). Although its sing-songy, altematelyrhymed twentyeightlines show little glimmer of a poet in the making, the poem's subject and tone both tend to corroborate thejudgments about the aspiring writer that the newspaper's interviewer would make the following year: its subject is a peculiarly serious one for an eleventh grader, and its light satire of notions of progress culminating in the poem's last two lines perhaps adumbrates O'Connor's scathing treatments of the same theme in the mature fiction.

The First Book
When man was just a caveman,
In the prehistoric age,
His mind began to wander,
And his bean began to rage.
To think that he had all these years 
Been lonesome, dumb, and tough,
Without a spot of culture
To make him not so rough.
He took his brain within his hands
And pressed it hard and tight,
Until within his feeble mind,
There shone a spark of light.
Thus inspiration came to man,
And he without delay
Wrote down the words she told him to
On slides of stone and clay.
And when the masterpiece was done
He called his friends to look,
They asked him what he named the thing [sic] 
He said with ease, "A Book."
Thus the ancestor of books was born, 
On slides of stone and clay.
How far removed was that old book 
From those we have today?
And since we have the chance to read 
Let's take it while we can,
How far removed are we today,
From prehistoric man? 
(Palladium, 20 Nov. 1940)

In a 13 June 1943 feature in the Macon Telegraph and news, O'Connor, who had just completed her first year of college, reiterates her aspiration of two years earlier in the Palladium. The author of the story, Nelle Womack Hines, writes, "Miss O'Connor frankly states that her literary ambition is to be able to write prose satire. She plans to work hard and hopes some day to find a place where her satiric essays and cartoons will fit to good advantage" (3). By the publication of this Telegraph and News feature the Georgia College student publications were fast becoming such a place. She published five pieces during the 1942-43 academic year, all under the name M.F. O'Connor. The first, "Going to the Dogs" (Fall 1942) is a scathing description of the full Georgia State College for Women student body. O'Connor had started GSCW during the previous summer in a three-year accelerated program comprised of a small group of selected students. The intensity of this piece, no doubt, documents her early reactions to the full entourage of "Jessies," as the students were dubbed from the College's initials. O'Connor describes "students beneath the shrubbery...... reposing under the radiators," and "chas[ing] a cat up a tree on the front campus." Shocked by the "utter lack of refinement" of the "hounds who saunter casually about the grounds" and by the "occasional hound who lopes leisurely into a Fine Arts class," O'Connor ends with a plea to students that likely did not earn her many friends: "Tbe moot purpose behind this lecture, ther6fore, is to plea to all students not to stop at picking up paper around the campus, but to whistle, or otherwise intrigue all four-legged residents of the college into departing with all possible haste" (14). Similarly, in her review of Munro Leaf's The Story of ferdinand (Winter 1943), O'Connor ends her discussion of the book as a study of the clash between individualism and "the enjoyment of the mob" with yet another slap at her Jessie peers: "Despite the involvement of the sentences and the complexity of the emotional content, it is generally believed that Ferdinand the Bull is highly recommendable for the college students" (14).

The last of O'Connor's first-year contributions to 7he Corinthian is a short narrative piece entitled, "Elegance Is Its Own Reward" (Spring 1943). It is a fable-like tale of a young man in 400 B.C. who cuts his wife's head off for her money. After the murder he becomes obsessed with the uncouthness of his "dull...... ordinary," and "unromantic" act. "The more he thought of it the more agitated he became; the more agitated he became, the more repulsive his lack of refinement appeared to him." Consequently, he sets about a more "'classical"' murder of his second wife, "work[ing] it out to the smallestdetail, slowly, intently, diligently." With "restraint, simplicity, loftiness, decorum" (7) and murmuring elevated love cliches, he approaches his second wife by a bird bath, wrings her neck, and lets her fall into the bird bath. Clearly in the tradition of Edgar Allen Poe's Humorous Tales, which O'Connor spoke of having read in childhood for a "period that lasted for years" (Habit 98). "Elegance Is Its Own Reward" is a satire of empty forms and proprieties; the theme rings true of the mature O'Connor even if this ancient proper young murderer does not speak Southern and his mode is mock heroic.

In the following year,O'Connor published three pieces in The Corinthian, two of which show her growing penchant for social satire. "Doctors of Delinquency" (Fall 1943) satirizes the modem methods of childrearing designed to liberate the child in the name of "free, self-expression of those under twelve" (I3). The essay ends with the sentence, "Obviously, however, the thing may go too far," as O'Connor lets us glimpse its inevitable conclusion: "one Siefried Myers, Jr., fifth vice president of the second grade of Chicago Progressive El. [speaking] with prophetic voice of the day when education could be eliminated, and the teaching profession preserved merely as an honorary superannuation for mothers and aunts" (19). "Biologic endeavor" (Spring 1944) satirizes the miraculous medical advances claimed by patent medicines unavailable to Great-Uncle Benedict who lived in the dark ages," dying in 1882. While Benedict "stumbled along in his ignorance, treating his faulty digestion by temperance", his nephew Finley and especially his great-nephew Simpson have the decided advantage of "TUMS," "SALHEPAYTICA," "VIMS," "EXLAX," "ASPERGUM," "STANDBACK," and "CASTORIA" (7).

The third piece O'Connor published in The Corinthian during her second year at GSCW is "Home of the Brave" (Fall 1943). It shares the previous pieces' satiric mode, honing in on superficial patriotic stances, hoarding of rationed war-time goods, and vicious backbiting among mothers over the merits of their children. But it is also substantially different from the previous pieces: it is clearly a short story. O'Connor effectively collects her cast of characters in a bandage-making room "pervaded with an air of belligerency" attributable not to the raging war abroad, but to the polite animosity among the middle-aged bandage makers: Mrs. Walaker Grimer, Mrs. Gordon Dye, Mrs. Samply Prendagast, Mrs. Wilkerson McDuff. Throughout, one-liners fly, generally hitting their marks....... lips [tremble] with the impact of explosion" and allies retort, "reinforc[ing] the exhausted, left flank" (5). The plot quickly focuses on a nasty comparison between Mrs. Dye's son Randolph, a West Pointer who is "[iln Florida, training men for overseas duty" (6) and Mrs. Grimer's dull son qarlyle, who is still a private presumably in combat as they speak.

Although the story's language has no discernible Southemisms and the setting could be any small town, the clarity of the language and the crispness of the dialogue are closer to a mature O'Connor work than her previous college efforts. The twisting ironic conclusion may even foreshadow the concluding gesture that was to become so significant to O'Connor's fiction. On her way home, supercilious Mrs. Dye hears that Mrs. Grimer has "'just received a cable saying that Carlyle died en route to Australia... (7) from, we learn late in the story, "' mumps and complications"' (I8). Pleased at the thought that she will not have to send flowers if they bury him at sea, Mrs. Dye arrives home to her own telegram from Florida. Worried that her son Randolph had never had mumps on the left side, she rips open the telegram to discover an announcement of his ten-day furlough. When she, much relieved then, conveys the "funny" news about Carlyle Grimer to her daughter Lavinia, Lavinia "laughed too - a laugh that caused her mother to snap from her reverie to hold the girl's shaking body still against the wall....... Lavinia! Lavinia! What are you acting this way for? What is Carlyle Grimerto us?"' The girljerks herself free of her mother and shrieks, "'Your son-in-law!"' Mrs. Dye's self-centered, unfeeling reaction -with which "The Home of the Brave" ends - "'Oh, my God ... if the funeral's here, I'll [sic] have to sit with the Grimers"' (I8) - certainly qualifies her as an ancestor of the Mrs. Copes and Mrs. McIntyres to come.

During her senior year, O'Connor edited The Corinthian. contributions to the magazine that year are relatively small in number and disappointing in comparison with "The Home of the Brave." In the fall 1944 issue are "Fashion's perfect medium," a satire on sweater styles-, "PFTT'," a poem dismissing sophomoric notions of the grandioseness of art; and "Excuse Us While We Don't Apologize," her editor's introduction in the first issue, warning the reader of the absence of Jessies' much loved romantic tripe and of the expected "smack of literary pretension" (4). In the spring there is "Education's Only Hope," a humorous, yet sarcastic and mildly embittered essay exposing the failure of education at Georgia College, and "Higher Education," a less successful two-stanza version of the essay. The terseness and relative strangeness of O'Connor's senior contributions to The Corinthian may reflect the considerable time she must have spent as art editor for her senior annual, The Spectrum; they may also suggest an awareness that she had outgrown her context.

In addition to these published pieces, the O'Connor Collection holds a number of files of unpublished works, mostly fragments and probably many class exercises, up through O'Connor's collegiate years. The precollege pieces include an amusing little poem in which O'Connor enumerates her cantankerous traits. The first of the four quatrains is

I'm a little angle [sic]
I lack a certain grace,
My hands are always dirty
And I never wash my face. (File 3)*

Aradically different precollege piece is a burlesque of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past entitled "Recollections on My Future Childhood" (File 2). Although memorable for its wild tales of Mitzabeth Boldtower, Uncle Radient, and Mrs. O'Skivinski and for its Proustian narrative associations that connect these tales, this piece is probably more important for its evidence of young O'Connor's serious reading, undoubtedly extracurricular, while a student at the Peabody lab school.

The college pieces (File 4a-i) are generally pieces done for writing classes. Somearedated and designated english 324, Advanced Composition, or English 331, The Short Story, and even graded; some undated pieces, as suggested by the handwriting may be, as Stephen Driggers has noted (1), from her freshman composition courses, English 101 and 102. What emerges from these pieces, whether by M.F. O'Connor or her pseudonyms Jane Shoebanks or Gertrude Beachlock, is a young writer, in Fitzgerald's words, "consciously [seeking] to attain to the habit of art ... by customary exercise" (Habit xvii). A two-paragraph descriptive exercise dated March 26, 1943 and misdesignated English 321 instead of 331, Advanced Composition is a good illustration (File 4a). Both are descriptions of Raphael Street, the location of Mrs. Dye's house in "The Home of the Brave," published the following fall in The Corinthian, and quite possibly modeled on Charleton Street in Savannah where O'Connor and her parents lived next door to her rather commanding cousin Katie Flannery Semmes - Mrs. Raphael Semmes. The first paragraph is straightforward, realistic description of the trees and the houses that line it. From the details emerge a sense of the setting's sterile regularity and impersonalness; the street is straight and the sidewalks parallel; the houses redundant right down to their common grayness and repeated stoops "encased by ... iron railing[s]"; the lawnsare" [t]reeless, grassless, practically colorless."The second description transforms Mrs. Dye's street into a wartime setting through personification of the houses reminiscent of the opening of James Joyce's "Araby," even though O'Connor claimed not to have heard of Joyce until she went to graduate school. The houses are "lean, gaunt" and "gaze austerely at each other across Raphael Street." "Like stiff, gasmasked soldiers, ready for inspection, they stand grimly at attention." The sidewalks and yards "unhampered by skates and skaters, unimpeded by tricycles and tricyclists, unburdened by trees or marauding blades of grass," provide an open place on which to meet any attacker....... [A]II of Raphael Street is ready for an emergency."*

Other pieces in the clearly collegiate file show emerging types, themes, modes. There is the proprietal elderly woman in a March 29, 1943 piece who "cringed slightly and quickened her pace," as she passes a gumchomping girl (File 4b)*. "The Cynosure" (April 20, 1943) describes the middle-aged habit-ridden Mrs. Peterson who always arrives thirty minutes early to the theatre and demands the same seat: "seat 10, front row, middle aisle" (File 4c)*. An undated description of a trashy, packed general store moves toward its concluding irony as the proprietor sits back and "plant[s his feet] on top of the squat coal bumer" and speaks admiringly: "'Nice store,'he muttered [sic]'nice store"' (File 4d)*. Situational irony underpins two highly fragmentary pieces (File 4g): a description of third-grade teacher Miss Harttie who the narrator predicts will "haul off and slap"* a kid when her progressive theory does not work; and a vignette of Mrs. Watson, deafened under a dryer while a young beautician brags of having just eloped with Mrs. Watson's son. Less characteristic of the directions O'Connor's fiction would take is an ill-focused psychological piece about a young girl Mytrice who fears that people at her mother's funeral will suspect that she has strangled her (File 4h).

There are two pieces, "Interruptions Are So Exasperating" and "A Place of Action" (Files 4f and 4i), with very heavy black dialect and stereotyped characters and plots. Neither seems more than a southern set piece. The former sketches a black woman's crafty verbal play concealing the whereabouts of a black girl named Beatrice from a white woman who has come looking for her. The latter describes an altercation between a black woman and man that ends in a knifing. The instructor's suggestion that O'Connor might change the title of the latter to "Saturday Night" responds to the piece' s limited intention of describing a mass of stereotyped blacks come to town for the evening of payday.

Driggers' arrangement of the remaining pre-thesis manuscripts suggests - and probably rightly so - that they are all from O'Connor's Iowa days. Many indicate a perspective on self and a disquieted probing of her southern roots that would have likely come with maturity and distance. The first piece (File 6) is a delightful biographical sketch that Driggers believes O'Connor wrote for her "Magazine Writing" course her first year in Iowa (3). She describes herself as a wack-o in parochial school who would replace "Rover" with "St. Cecelia [sic]" in a sentence like "'Throw the ball to Rover"' and a self-expressive adolescent ... pointed out to school visitors." (Peabody was a "lab" school for GSCW.) Authorities ignored her mathematical and spelling deficiencies because they thought she would be a writer and "could cease using [her] brain altogether and rely solely on the principles of free creative thought...... the last full paragraph has a much less riotous, even somber tone as she recalls her college years and the dreaded intent of teaching "high school English in Podunk, Georgia, at $87.50 a month. " Against this backdrop, she explains that the fellowship to graduate school "put off the inevitable parting between me and the academic world ... and graduate school would either convince me of my ability to do more than teach English to ninth-graders in Podunk, or provide me with the means of finding a more agreeable and payable vocation."*

A fictive fragment with clear autobiographical overtones (File 9c) shows another glimpse into O'Connor's person which, like the previous autobiographical sketch, is more open and revealing than the guarded personas she tended to assume in the college writing. When seen kissing her chickens by nosey neighbor Miss Nora Pitts, a young girl named May Flemming feigns craziness by blowing into the rooster's face, turning him upsidedown, and running about and finally into the house, to escape Pitt's stare. The narrator explains: "This is what she knew when they see you doing something like that alone by yourself, you start quick doing a lot of crazy things and they will think you have been there doing these crazy things and they won't know what the thing was you were doing in the first place. She had always known that, or at least, she had always done that."* But escape inside away from the judgmental stare of the neighbors means for Mary Flemming subjection to commands from her mother that she wash her hands, hold her stomach in, and so forth. For Mary Flannery Iowa City must have been a relief not just from imagined Podunk, Georgia, but also from Milledgeville.

Despite this escape from place and family - perhaps because of it the more interesting of the Iowa unpublished pieces capitalize on O'Connor's southern roots with a specificity absent in her college writing. In one fragment (File 9a) an unnamed politician comes to town looking for Weaver Singleton. In his pink shirt, straw hat with turned up brim, and "golden yellow bowtie that clung under his sad chin like a butterfly drinking in something sweet," he is clearly a slow-talking southern con man evocative of the devil in The Violent Bear It Away. The boy whom he comers for directions, Edisel Singleton, wears a battered hat and walks in a halting gait evocative of both Hazel Motes and Rufus Johnson. When the man who has an "idear" he wants to sell to Weaver explains that Weaver Singleton has continued to be a "southern gentleman" even though he has made a lot of money, the boy's retort is one that Motes or Tarwater or Johnson would approve: "'He's from Illinoise,"'*

At this point the plot dissolves and the narrative turns to pure description of the beauty of the countryside. When the narrator's panning eye sweeps across the scene and lands on an impoverished shack of a Negro, he ends with a condemning assessment of contemporary attitudes toward the racial situation: "This scene gives one person a chance to say that yonder is a real picturesque sight and another a chance to consider what a social ill is and both to feel better for it there."* There seems in the end of the piece and especiallyinthese scathingassessments acatharsisforitsauthorwho, miles from her native south, seems more preoccupied by it than she had been in it.

It is not surprising then that the major non-thesis piece is a complete short story, with variants, about a black laundress and her drunkard husband Abram. Miles from home, O'Connor returns to a clearly southern setting and characters, cutting much of the heavy-handed black dialect and overtly stereotypical plot of her collegiate pieces "Interruptions Are So Exasperating" and "A Place of Action," and developing her protagonist in some depth. In this story the laundress Rosa discovers a coatless corpse one night on her way home where she finds her husband drunk from liquor he claims to have bought with money he got out of a coat he found in the Woods. Assuming that he is lying, Rosa makes the drunken man return with her to the corpse and bury it. Discovered in the process by white possum hunters, Abram refuses to go quietly with them and is killed on the spot. A day or so later, in an O'Connoresque twist, Rosa learns the truth of Abram's innocence when her white customer Mrs. Wilkerson explains that her husband lost a coat in the woods while hunting.

O'Connor thought enough of "The Coat" to send it to Allen Maxwell of The Southwest Review who, when he had rejected "Wildcat" in June 1946, encouraged her to send more of her work. While he is critical of the rather uncertain manner in which the "action of ["The Coat"] seems to move along," he tells O'Connor that her writing has "both force and insight" (Maxwell to O'Connor, 16 July 1946; File 16d).*

The force and insight that Maxwell observed, even in a piece as flawed as "The Coat" are products of years of persistent, disciplined practice and evolving habitual satiric and ironic stances. If we accept O'Connor's claim to have begun writing at the age of six and if we mark her maturity with the publication of Wise Blood, her apprenticeship is no less than twenty-one years. Such a late apprentice piece as "The Coat" is not chronologically far from Wise Blood and from O'Connor's discovery of her essential religious theme that gives her mature fiction its shape and direction. Pieces like "Tbe Coat" and the unnamed fragment about the man looking for Weaver Singleton combine her then habitual irony and satire with her new-found southern subject matter. This combination of typical mode and typical context is an essential step in her hastening approach toward her discovery of the religious theme in Wise Blood. These early years produced no firstrate literature, but collectively they present a pattern of disciplined and persistent effort leading steadily toward fruition in Wise Blood and the mature merger of mode, context, and theme. As usual, O'Connor may be her own best and certainly most succinct critic. Written on the back of one of her freshman papers is a one-liner of advice no doubt gleaned from one of her Georgia College writing instructors, that is an apt description of O'Connor's long, deliberate apprenticeship ending in 1952 with the publication of Wise Blood: "put approach first then wats [sic] cooking."*

Works Cited

1. Driggers, Stephen G. and Robert J. Dunn with Sarah Gordon. The Manuscripts of Flannery O'Connor. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.

2. Hines, Nelle Womack. "Mary O'Connor Shows Talent as Cartoonist." Macon Telegraph and News 13 June 1943:3.

3. O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit ofbeing: Letters offlannery O'Connor. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Girous, 1979.

4. O'Connor, M.F. "Biologic Endeaver." The Corinthian 19.3(1944): 7,18.

5. "Doctors of Delinquency." The Corinthian 19.1(1943): 13,19.

6. "Education's Only Hope." The Corinthian 20.3(1945): 14-15.

7. "Effervescence." The Corinthian 18.3(1943): 16.

8. "Elegance Is Its Own Reward." The Corinthian 18.3(1943): 7.

9. "Excuse Us While We Don't Apologize." The Corinthian 20.1(1944): 4.

10. "Fashion's Perfect Medium." The Corinthian 20.1(1944): 12-13, 16.

11. "Going to the Dogs." The Corinthian 18.1(1942): 14.

12. "Higher Education." The Corinthian 20.3(1945): 8.

13. "Home of the Brave." The Corinthian 19.1(1943): 5-7, 18.

14. "The Story of Ferdinand." The Corinthian 18.2(1943): 14.

15. "Why Worry the Horse?" The Corinthian 18.2(1943): 15.

16. O'Connor, Mary Flannery. "The First Book." Peabody [High School] Palladium 20 Nov. 1940.

17. "Peabodite Reveals Strange Hobby." Peabody [High School] Palladium 16 Dec. 1941

Quotations from unpublished writings of Flannery O'Connor are used with the permission of her literary executor. Copyright © 1994 by Reginia O'Connor. Parenthetical references to files indicate Drigger's organization of the manuscripts.

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