Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [1]
O’Connor never had the pleasure of seeing the tandem performance on-screen. The short never came to a Savannah movie theater, though “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse” was released as a one-minute, twenty-seven-second, vignette in March 1932, a week shy of her seventh birthday. Its cute subject matter was the sort that appealed to Depression-era audiences in other lighthearted spoofs that played on seven-to-eight-minute reels along with current events and sports news before the main feature. Among other whimsical topics treated by Pathe that year in its animal “gag reels” were Florida sportsmen feeding crackers to turtles; Boston kids showing off their pet tabby cats; a girl at the Westminster Kennel Club Exhibition in New York City producing a tiny dog out of her satchel.
While O’Connor’s star turn is brief, its afterimage still flickered in her mind years later. Even though she was not a woman, or author, overly given to delving into childhood memories to unlock her identity, something about that afternoon’s performance stayed with her. Certainly the obdurate refusal of her bird to be easily seduced by the ambassador from klieg-lit culture kept her giggling. But so did its pratfall, and, by association, hers. O’Connor loved to make fun of her own diminutive stature in popular culture. When a friend accused her of “celebrity” after the publication of her first book of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, she gleefully wrote back that her fame was “a comic distinction shared with Roy Rogers’s horse and Miss Watermelon of 1955.”
She also enjoyed the attention. O’Connor dates her lifelong passion for raising exotic birds to the rush she at least pretended to have gotten from the noisy movie camera. “From that day with the Pathé man I began to collect chickens,” she writes in “The King of the Birds,” her Holiday magazine article. As a Catholic schoolgirl trying to re-create her winning formula, she began to collect other birds with freakish traits: one green eye and one orange, an overly long neck, a comb askew. She searched in vain for a one of a kind with three legs or three wings, and pondered a picture in Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not! of a rooster that survived thirty days without its head. “Apparently Pathé News never heard of any of these other chickens of mine,” O’Connor writes, with a stage sigh. “It never sent another photographer.”
Yet the memory did not stop there. In the fall of 1948, O’Connor was a guest at the Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York. Now a young woman of twenty-three, a budding writer, she had settled on fiction as her vocation after several years preparing for a career as a cartoonist by designing linoleum-cut cartoons for her women’s college in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her artistic signature: the initials of her name arranged to resemble a bird with beak, though she eventually dropped the “M” for Mary, simply becoming “Flannery.” At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she went for an MFA, her professors helped her win a residency in the prestigious colony for a few months. Another guest that fall was Robert Lowell, a thirty-one-year-old poet who had won a Pulitzer Prize the year before for his first book, Lord Weary’s Castle.
Lowell needed no introduction, because she already knew his work. The two quickly developed a friendship based on mutual admiration; he would