Flannery O’Connor
“The King of the Birds,” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
Image: Mark M. Mellon
“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 to Betty Hester, July 5, 1958.
These lines O’Connor wrote to her friend Betty Hester have become the epigraph of Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (2010), one of the many biographies which, in fact, have been written about the author’s life and works. As she spent most of her life in and around her house, taking care not only of her chickens, but of her incredibly flourishing family of birds — of which the peakcocks were her favourites — Flannery O’Connor has been often associated with images of birds during — and after — her entire life. Indeed, many covers of her books show pictures and drawings of birds and a couple of the author’s most famous photographs portray her with her beloved peakcocks.
Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965), “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose” (1969), and “The Complete Stories” (1971).
Her interest in birds is a very precocious one, as Brad Gooch shows through the recollections of one of her classmate, who says that one of their teachers always gave young Flannery a hard time in the composition class because “She said that she always wrote about ducks and chickens and she said that she never wanted to hear about another duck or a chicken” (Gooch: 34). In “The King of the Birds,” one the essays posthumously collected in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969), O’Connor herself writes about her fascination with these animals starting from a childhood anecdote:
“When I was five, I had an experience that marked me for life. Pathé News sent a photographer from New York to Savannah to take a picture of a chicken of mine. This chicken, a buff Cochin Bantam, had the distinction of being able to walk either forward or backward. 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.”
Flannery O’Connor, “The King of Birds”
The irony with which Flannery O’Connor recollects this event lies in the way in which she describes the death of her chicken: it was so overwhelmed by the popularity caused by the attention of the press and stuck in its forwards-backwards movement that it died shortly after the footage was recorded. As Gooch narrates, the poor reporter had a hard time filming young Flannery’s chicken walking backwards and at the end of the day he left after having shot only a four seconds footage, which would have become part of a 1932 vignette called “Do You Reverse?”
“If I put this information in the beginning of an article on peakcocks, it is because I am always being asked why I raise them, and I have no short or reasonable answer.”
Flannery O’Connor, “The King of the Birds”
Although O’Connor never had a chance to watch the vignette, she wrote that the experience with the photographer turned her interest in chickens into a passion: after that afternoon she began collecting more and more chickens, even though she preferred specimen with some odd features — weirdly colored feathers or three-legged animals. Her “quest” eventually ended when she bought her first peakcocks:
“As soon as the birds were out of the crate, I sat down on it and began to look at them. I have been looking at them ever since, from one station or another, and always with the same awe as on that first occasion.”
Flannery O’Connor, “The King of the Birds”
It should not be surprising, then, that by the time she became a prominent figure in literature, these images have almost turned into a symbol of her life and works — a sort of signature that can only lead back to Flannery O’Connor and to her identity as a woman and a writer.
