Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [0]
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Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: February 2009
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-316-04065-5
The author wishes to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, for their support during the writing of this book. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for permission to reprint excerpts from Flannery O’Connor’s work.
Copyright acknowledgments appear here and constitute a continuation of the copyright page.
Contents
Prologue: Walking Backward
Part One
Chapter One: Savannah
Chapter Two: Milledgeville: “A Bird Sanctuary”
Chapter Three: “MFOC”
Chapter Four: Iowa
Chapter Five: Up North
Part Two
Chapter Six: The Life You Save
Chapter Seven: The “Bible” Salesman
Chapter Eight: Freaks and Folks
Chapter Nine: Everything That Rises
Chapter Ten: “Revelation”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Also by Brad Gooch
City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara
For Paul Raushenbush
As for biographies, there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
— Flannery O’Connor
Prologue
Walking Backward
When Flannery O’Connor was five years old, the Pathe newsreel company dispatched a cameraman from its main offices in New York City to the backyard of the O’Connor family home in Savannah, Georgia. The event, as O’Connor wryly confessed in an essay in Holiday magazine in September 1961, almost three decades later, “marked me for life.” Yet the purpose of the visit from “the New Yorker,” as she labeled him, wasn’t entirely to film her, outfitted as she was in her best double-breasted dark coat and light wool knit beret, but rather to record her buff Cochin bantam, the chicken she reputedly taught to walk backward.
How a Yankee photographer wound up for a memorable half day at the bottom of the O’Connors’ steep back stairs isn’t entirely clear. One rumor ascribes the connections of Katie Semmes, a well-to-do dowager cousin who lived in the grander house next door, and whose tall windows looked down on the yard where the filming took place. According to a girlhood playmate of O’Connor’s, “Miss Katie brought them down here to do it.” O’Connor simply credits an item on her celebrity chicken in the local papers: “Her fame had spread through the press and by the time she reached the attention of Pathé News, I suppose there was nowhere left for her to go — forward or backward. Shortly after that she died, as now seems fitting.”
The shoot did not go smoothly. O’Connor was certainly prepared. Whenever the cumbersome camera on its tripod began to grind, she adopted a fierce, dignified expression — the one she used if she felt she was being watched. The problem was her uncooperative tan “frizzled” chicken, with its backward-growing feathers, spending hours scratching obliviously in the yard while the cameraman fidgeted. Finally, as the afternoon wore on, the bird began to back up. O’Connor, a natural mimic, jumped next to her and began to walk backward as well. The operator stuck his head under his tent. A few seconds later, the hen hit a bush and abruptly sat down. Exasperated, “the Pathé man” gathered his equipment and made a quick exit, refusing even to enjoy a dish of ice cream.
O’Connor’s screen debut exists in all its fragility in a Pathe film archive. The brief stretch of scratchy footage opens with