#80: Bonaventure Cemetery: The Bird Girl Sculpture

“All lovely things will have an ending,

All lovely things will fade and die,

And youth, that’s now so bravely spending,

Will beg a penny by and by.”

—Conrad Aiken (All Lovely things)

Bonaventure Cemetery: The Bird Girl Sculpture
Born in Savannah, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) was both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet. He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate in 1950. Just before his death in 1973, Governor Jimmy Carter appointment him the Poet Laureate of Georgia. Aiken’s father, a respected physician and eye surgeon, murdered his mother in a jealous rage and then killed himself at their home located on Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah’s Historic District. Aiken reflected: “And life is paved with cobblestones.”

Aiken was eleven at that time — and he was home to hear the shots. “Six inches of brick separated me from the tragedy of my boyhood,” he later wrote. His poetry was strongly influenced by the philosopher George Santayana and the psychiatric theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Meeting as students while they were attending Harvard, Conrad Aiken and T.S. Eliot remained life-long friends.

Later in life, Conrad and Mary, his third wife, wintered in Savannah. The Conrad’s are now buried in Bonaventure Cemetery next to his father and mother in the family plot. John Berendt’s book: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story featured their burial site. Aiken’s tombstone, fashioned as a stone bench, encourages reading poetry while enjoying his favorite drink, a martini.

This painting of the Bird Girl sculpture is the only non-en Plein air of my Postcards from Savannah series. Naturally, I would have loved the opportunity to paint this sculpture in its designated habitat inside of Bonaventure Cemetery, but that opportunity was lost to the appearance of Berendt’s book. Lucy Boyd Trosdal (1881-1971), purchased the Bird Girl statue around 1940 to watch over her family’s Bonaventure plot. But ‘the book’ written by Berendt’s ultimately changed the fate of the Bird Girl sculpture.

To be sure, this beautiful sculpture played no part in John Berendt’s writings on Savannah. It did, however, lead to the commissioning of a cover photo for the book. Berendt suggested that using a photo from the magnificent Bonaventure Cemetery would make for a good cover. Random House, the book’s publisher, hired well-known Savannahian photographer Jack Leigh to submit various options. His photograph became renowned throughout the world. It was one of those times as an artist when you know it when you see it. And Jack Leigh did. He submitted only one photo to Random House—and that became the cover of ‘the book.’ Undoubtedly, if only judging a book by its cover, ‘the photograph’ did assist ‘the book’ becoming a New York Times bestseller in 1994 and then a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

You might remember the opening scene of Clint Eastwood’s big screen version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The camera passes over the Wilmington River and down into the thick mossed live oaks of Bonaventure Cemetery to pause over Johnny Mercer’s grave. The soundtrack plays Skylark, a failed tune written by Hoagy Carmichael — well, until he added Johnny Mercer’s lyrics in 1941.

Eastwood’s camera finally brings the viewer to focus on the Bird Girl, and you get the sense of what it was to gaze upon her standing in the cemetery. By the time the movie was shot in 1997, Bird Girl was removed from Bonaventure out of fear of theft due to the fame of ‘the book’ and its cover. Sylvia Shaw Judson (1897-1978) sculpted the magnificent Bird Girl in 1936. The inscription on its pedestal reads: “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.” (II Corinthians 5:8.) Indeed, which remains, eternally, the final hope of us all