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By Root 1350 0

” might be the same one that the three little arsonists carry in “A Circle in the Fire.” Most poignantly, “Judgment Day,” a story O’Connor was working on during the last weeks of her life, was a retelling of her first published story, “The Geranium,” remarkably closing her fictional circle. The separation between her life and her art was porous: a peacock comes walking off Andalusia onto the farm of “The Displaced Person.” In “The King of the Birds,” she reveals an eye for such patterns in her life as well. The emphasis is hers when she notes a line of pedigree from the unique chicken of her childhood to its artistic descendant, her unfurled peacock that will “dance forward and backward.”

The girl with the expression she recalled as exhibiting “dignified ferocity,” recorded in the archival footage in “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse,” is instantly recognizable to us. Her features are clearly those discerned in anecdotes about her childhood in Savannah — contrary, a prankster, determined, funny, creative, and focused. And just as her Cochin bantam morphed into a peacock — a bird observed by the old priest in “The Displaced Person” as “taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail” — so this clever child performer grew into the one-of-a-kind woman writer, “going backwards to Bethlehem,” who freighted her acidly comic tales with moral and religious messages, running counter to so much trendy literary culture.

Part One

Chapter One

Savannah

In the fall of 1963 Flannery O’Connor delivered her final public lecture. The occasion was the 175th anniversary celebration of Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, where she read prepared remarks through her prominent eyeglasses for about forty-five minutes from the proscenium stage of the ornate Gaston auditorium in historic Healy Hall. “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” was the last of more than sixty such talks and readings she had given in the decade since the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, enough for her to have confided about her “element of ham” to a friend: “I have a secret desire to rival Charles Dickens upon the stage.”

Early in her speech that evening, she cast back to the beginnings of her creative life. “The things we see, hear, smell and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all,” she said softly, in a flat, dry Georgia accent, while leaning on crutches. “The South impresses its image on the Southern writer from the moment he is able to distinguish one sound from another. He takes it in through his ears and hears it again in his own voice, and, by the time he is able to use his imagination for fiction, he finds that his senses respond irrevocably to a certain reality, and particularly to the sound of a certain reality. The Southern writer’s greatest tie with the South is through his ear.”

For O’Connor these sights and sounds had their origins in Savannah, where she was born Mary Flannery O’Connor on March 25, 1925, at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and lived her first thirteen years, nearly a third of her life. The Savannah into which she was born was a classic Southern city, pungent in spring with blooming jasmine, though more sophisticated than other insular Georgia towns like Macon or Valdosta. No longer a booming nineteenth-century port, teeming with cotton brokers and shipping agents, the cosmopolitan center, with seventy-five thousand residents, still hosted a dozen or more foreign consulates; strangers with accents did not draw stares on the streets; and a cavalcade of steamers embarked daily from its harbor to ports in Germany, Britain, and Japan.

On the blustery spring day of her birth, the one-word weather forecast in the Savannah Morning News was dramatic enough: “unsettled.” Savannahians awoke that morning to word of President Calvin Coolidge calling for a naval conference on the readiness of the American fleet. Most of the local talk concerned a girl evangelist from Fresno, California, packing crowds into the Municipal Auditorium with her message, “Sinner Must Be Reborn in Christ.” Most auspicious