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.’”
Her greatest bit of meticulously planned showmanship took place in Margaret Abercrombie’s Home Economics section. The “activity” for the semester was sewing, and all the other girls busily sewed aprons, or underwear, for weeks on end, while O’Connor sat idly off to the side, not participating. “Now next Wednesday is the examination day for this course,” Miss Abercrombie finally announced, a bit exasperated. “All members who expect to receive a grade are to bring and display the various garments made during the quarter. I hardly see how you are going to get a whole outfit finished and ready, Mary Flannery, by that time.” As a fellow student has reported, “On the appointed day
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.’”
Her greatest bit of meticulously planned showmanship took place in Margaret Abercrombie’s Home Economics section. The “activity” for the semester was sewing, and all the other girls busily sewed aprons, or underwear, for weeks on end, while O’Connor sat idly off to the side, not participating. “Now next Wednesday is the examination day for this course,” Miss Abercrombie finally announced, a bit exasperated. “All members who expect to receive a grade are to bring and display the various garments made during the quarter. I hardly see how you are going to get a whole outfit finished and ready, Mary Flannery, by that time.” As a fellow student has reported, “On the appointed day
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