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.” “Fish oil,” not a French pastry, is her narrator’s mnemonic trigger: “It was my first sardine.bruised & blue from the crowding.” She winds up concluding, “Proust wanted past time.I’ll take any old time.”Her own reading was far from orderly or comprehensive.She spent many hours during her childhood visits to the Cline Mansion reading about Greek and Roman myths, and lots of other topics, in an 1898 set of the children’s encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge that had once belonged to her grandmother.As fascinated by the graphics as by the text, she later wrote a friend that she particularly remembered “the illustrations about a young man of about six in a sailor suit and round hat.He stood on a wharf and watched a ship come in.In each illustration the ship was bigger.He therefore came to the conclusion that the world was round.He did this without assistance.I was mighty impressed and will never forget the Book of Knowledge.I reckon it’s deteriorated though.” She complained that “the rest of what I read was Slop with a capital S.”After “the Slop period,” she became absorbed, “for years,” with a ten-volume “commemorative” edition of Poe’s work she found on the family bookshelf.She enjoyed The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a short lyric novel about a stowaway on a whaling ship whose survivors resorted to cannibalism.But her favorite was volume eight, the Humorous Tales, including “The Spectacles,” “The Man That Was Used Up,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” She later recalled, “These were mighty humerous — one about a young man who was too vain to wear his glasses and consequently married his grandmother by accident; another about a fine figure of a man who in his room removed wooden arms, wooden legs, hair piece, artificial teeth, voice box, etc.etc.; another about the inmates of a lunatic asylum who take over the establishment and run it to suit themselves.” She added, “I’m sure he wrote them all while drunk too.”According to Elizabeth Hardwick, who met O’Connor at Yaddo, the Poe collection was a staple in many educated homes of the period.“We didn’t have a lot of books in my house but we did have the complete Poe,” said Hardwick, of her childhood in Kentucky.“I bet they had the same edition.I remember sitting on the front porch in Lexington and reading ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ I’ve often looked back and thought, ‘How did that happen?’ You have nothing to read when you’re twelve and you’re reading Poe.” For O’Connor, Poe continued to haunt: showing up in the coffins and “walling up cats” of Wise Blood, and as an inspiration for the Misfit’s spectacles for sizing up the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and for Hulga’s unscrewed wooden leg in “Good Country People.” Most immediately, though, the tales were grist for “Recollections of My Future Childhood,” in which Aunt Bertha locked her fiancé in her left bureau drawer and “never opened it.”During the spring of 1941, Mary Flannery completed writing and illustrating three books of her own, all about geese — “Elmo,” “Gertrude,” and “Mistaken Identity.” “She wrote these books about her animals when she was growing up,” says fellow Peabodite Deedie Sibley (known in high school as Frances Binion).“I remember them being pink cardboard.They had spiral binding and you just flipped them open.There was a picture of a duck, and then some little sentence or something she wanted to say about the duck.” Impressed by the mechanics of publishing by her father, she was quite professional about these handmade books.“M.F.has finished three books on her geese, and put each in a box,” Aunt Gertie informed Aunt Agnes in March 1941.“Nearly all who have seen them think they are good.She is thinking about having them copyrighted if she just finds the right way of going about it.Louis seems to think he knows a party in Atlanta who could put her on the right track.”She paid the most attention to “Mistaken Identity,” her seventeen-page poem, with colored illustrations, about a case of gender confusion among geese.The poem was occasional, based on the true incident of her pet gander Herman laying an egg and hatching a brood of eight goslings, leading to the conclusion that “Herman’s HENRIETTA.” In December 1941, the Peabody Palladium picked up the story of her foiled attempts to find a publisher for the three books in a piece titled “Peabodite Reveals Strange Hobby.” The interviewer asked, “Mary Flannery, what’s your hobby?” She replied, “Collecting rejection slips.” “What?” the confused reporter responded.“Publisher’s rejection slips,” she explained.The piece ends with the upbeat news: “As for Mary Flannery’s ambition, she wants to keep right on writing, particularly satires.” When she eventually self-published Mistaken Identity as a bound booklet, she added a preface: “The following is a drama especially prepared for highly intelligent adults and precocious children.”Seemingly custom-made for the young writer, Peabody High School had purposely been designed as just such a meeting place for intelligent adults and precocious children.Her school’s idealistic motto was “The Good, The True, The Beautiful.” Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls, “We were always told, ‘Leave the world a better place than you found it.’” There were no “classes,” only “activities.” In Home Economics, students planned and executed a formal dinner at one of their homes.A semester of Chemistry began with the instructor asking her pupils what they wished to study, and then helping them fulfill a desire to learn about photography or cosmetics.“The teacher did run in a little bit about the elements and the periodic table,” one student remembered.Literature appreciation was favored over diagramming sentences.History began with reading and reporting on the front page of a daily newspaper.The choir, of which Mary Virginia Harrison was a member, was a cappella, involving mostly reciting poetry in unison.Yet the newspaper’s contrary art editor had nothing but scorn for such experimental teaching.She got her wish to be liberated from the nuns only to be equally disdainful of their polar opposites, the freethinkers.“I went to a progressive highschool where one did not read if one did not wish to,” she complained to Betty Hester in 1955.“I did not wish to (except the Humerous Tales etc.).” In an early draft of Wise Blood, the Peabody principal Mildred English becomes “Mr.English the principal who had graduated from Teacher’s College, Columbia,” and the school becomes Tilford High School.While putting down the principles of original thought and free expression, and teachers playing to their audience at the next meeting of the PTA, she was actually a beneficiary of the system.Cutting a highly original profile, Mary Flannery was generally accepted as the “creative” girl dressed in a plaid skirt, rolled sleeves, and a pair of brown Girl Scout shoes, her school notebook painted in oils and covered with cellophane.She often waved “hello” with a salute as she strode the halls with her head thrust forward.“I can see her plodding along,” says Charlotte Conn Ferris.“That’s how she walked, with her hands behind her back, just clumping along, thinking about something, who knows what.” For life drawing in Art, she brought her goose of a gander, Herman, as a portrait model.She played clarinet, and bull fiddle, because, she said, “I am the only one who can hold it up.” As an adult, she told an interviewer that all she remembered of high school was “the way the halls smelled and bringing my accordion sometimes to play for the ‘devotional [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]