Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [2]
That fall and winter at Yaddo, O’Connor was mostly holed up from breakfast until dinner in her tiny room in West House, a smaller version of the unheated main Mansion, closed to guests at the end of summer. There she worked on drafts of her first novel, Wise Blood. Lowell read and commented on the work in progress, begun in Iowa City two years earlier. The challenge of the novel was its protagonist, Haze Motes. Once she hit on his tone and stature, the novel began to cohere. In earlier drafts, he was a homesick Southern boy. By the time she finished, he was a more extreme character, a high-contrast and highly contrary prophet. The phrase O’Connor used to nail his essence is put in his landlady’s head in the novel’s last few pages: “She saw him going backwards to Bethlehem and she had to laugh.”
It’s tempting to read Haze Motes as O’Connor’s backward-walking hen, baptized by fire. “Backward” is surely the word for him. “Time goes forward, it don’t go backward,” his landlady warns him. He’s the template for a number of memorable O’Connor creations who decide to operate their souls in reverse: The Misfit, snarling about a world thrown off balance, or O. E. Parker, who gets an image of God tattooed on his back. Maybe this first instinct to draw a line connecting Motes back to her stubborn Cochin bantam, which fittingly died, struck O’Connor as right. This time around the performance would be humorous, entertaining, weird, but religious as well. Maybe she snickered as she realized what she’d done, or maybe not. Perhaps their kinship was accidental rather than planned.
Where O’Connor literally went with the backward-walking chicken is spelled out in “The King of the Birds,” first published under the title “Living with a Peacock”: “My quest, whatever it was actually for, ended with peacocks.” As a woman living with her mother on a farm in central Georgia for the rest of her adult writing life, after being diagnosed with lupus when she was twenty-six, O’Connor reverted to her childhood passion for collecting unusual birds — a one-eyed swan, a tribe of mallard ducks, three Japanese silkie bantams, two Polish crested bantams, a pen of pheasants, and a pen of quail. Yet the high-profile birds she first ordered from an ad in a Florida Market Bulletin, at sixty-five dollars a pair, were peacocks, or as she usually called them, “peafowl.”
These fantastic creatures, with tails that resembled maps of the solar system, are the birds most often associated with O’Connor. After she became a well-known author, many photographers visited, or wished to visit, her farm, Andalusia. As much as she cast her younger self as pixilated by the attention of the Pathe cameraman, as a woman she dreaded his kind. When she did allow Time magazine or one of the Atlanta papers to send a photographer, the results invariably featured her exotic birds. She wanted them to upstage her. In the most famous of these photographs, taken by Joe McTyre for the Atlanta Journal in 1962 and later used on the back cover of her collected letters, The Habit of Being, O’Connor is posed on aluminum crutches before a screen door, seemingly in dialogue with a peacock preening on the brick steps beside her.
O’Connor loved to play with patterns in her stories. The jalopy that Tom T. Shiftlet drives in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” looks a lot like that of Haze Motes, last seen pushed over a cliff in Wise Blood. The big black valise the Bible salesman lugs in “Good Country People