But ultimately she is writing about something bigger and more universal, which is that, here on earth, in these human bodies, it is hard to be happy. We suffer from that eternal sorrow that Buddhists call samsara: the cycle of futility that comes from believing that happiness will be found in the satisfaction of our desire.
These stories are full of sorrow and loneliness and the human heart pushing back against these.
4.
Although I don’t know if Mason would agree with this assessment, I feel, reading her work, that her prose is guided by a sense of musicality—sound in cahoots with meaning. Her stories are language-forms, and proceed that way—a fact that was, I think, missing in the early rush to understand her stories as simple representations of some exotic (Southern, working-class) Other. Of course, no good story is ever strictly realistic—the stories of Raymond Carver are full of distortions and compressions, as are those of Flaubert, Munro, et al.
Stories are scale-models for the world that benefit by willful exaggeration. They are like model railroad towns whose construction is guided by delight—the things the author likes to do and is good at doing, which, in turn, produce a distorted-but-fun little place. The doorways of this writer’s town are full of quarreling couples; this writer’s town is perpetually snowbound; this one’s has more flowers than any real town could possibly sustain (growing on the roofs of cars and up the side of the bell tower); in the streets of this writer’s town, everyone walks happily arm-in-arm, but there are plastic mini-dragons situated in the alleys. And yet, somehow, actions occurring within these distorted towns produce heightened, meaningful representations of the real world. The distortions help us see, in extremis, parts of our everyday lives that normally remain submerged. (Everyone behaves fairly normally in “The Metamorphosis,” but that big bug in Gregor’s room causes us to reexamine the notion of “normal behavior.”)
These offsets can be slight but are always present, even in the most ostensibly “realistic” work. There are the first-order offsets caused by the necessary compression and omission. (Think of all the things omitted by the simple utterance “Jim sat down with his cup of coffee.” The clouds overhead! The thousand bugs in the bushes just outside! The scandalous thing just uttered by a drunk in the church next door!) But the most important offsets are the ones the author applies via her sentence-to-sentence habits of thought and preference, actualized through the process of revision. The best writers—writers like Mason—steer not by convention, or a desire to teach us something or export some worldview, but by this inner sense of preference, in a spirit of exploration, asking, through the enactment of a highly personal artistic method: What is it, after all, that I believe?
5.
So: what does the universe look like, refracted through the distortive preferential principles of Bobbie Ann Mason?
First, I note that the calm richness of the language produces a difficult-to-achieve fictional effect: that of nonjudgment. It is easy enough for a writer to be harsh. It is equally easy to be reflexively anti-harsh—to be sentimentally oversupportive of one’s characters. But to make a character about whom we feel an ongoing engaged ambiguity, or an expanding hopeful curiosity, is the hardest thing. The preferred relation of reader to invented world should mimic the relation between reader and actual world, in those moments when the reader is most fully alive to that actual world: befuddled, confused, engaged, brought to the edge of her seat, so to speak, by the vagaries and infinite variety of reality. When a writer puts us in that relation to her subject, that is real writing.
This quality of nonjudgment is one that Mason shares with the Chekhov of the two masterpieces “In the Cart” and “In the Ravine.” Mason, like the Russian master, is comfortable standing in the face of sorrow and loneliness. She does not have the reflexive aversion to these sentiments that might cause a writer to mock her characters or provide too-easy solutions, but, rather, through the calmness with which she abides there, collecting and sharing their (perhaps sad) data, she communicates a sense of compassion. Sorrow and loneliness are real, she seems to say, and much more common than we like to admit, but maybe not so terrible or unusual after all; haven’t we all felt these? Don’t we, in fact, feel them nearly every day? Mason refuses—structurally, I would say—to participate in our familiar American business of cloaking ourselves in denial. Is there unhappiness? Let it be so, she seems to say. This is the comfort Mason offers: the comfort that comes when we see someone not in denial of an evident darkness. This quality comes to feel, a few stories in, like a form of kindness: courageous and hopeful. There is, in my reading, a sort of motherliness about this: we come home hurt, terrified of what we might have done to ourselves; and what a comfort it is to have someone quietly look at the wound, no flinching, no gasping—just calm regard, a regard that offers its own form of healing.
6.
Another redemptive feature in a Mason story is the kindness and neighborly tolerance these characters show one another. Emmett in “In Country,” to cite just one example, is a particularly believable uncle figure, whose relation to his niece feels just right: he is fond of her. He is protective of her, a friend to her, to the extent that he can be, given the damage done him by the war in Vietnam. A reader habituated by an overhelping of mediocre contemporary fiction might find himself waiting for these characters to suddenly erupt in abusiveness, or at least to snarkify a bit—to take jabs at one another in their frustration—but Mason’s characters are stronger than that. They tend to be courteous, to decline to say the most hurtful thing. A reader also notes that Mason is this way herself—she resists the gratuitous comic dig that might serve to put author and reader firmly above the character, looking smugly down. And in this, she allies herself with her characters, and allies us with them too, and so we form a tight little empathetic bundle—a pleasant place to be, and one that improves us. It mimics the effect of standing beside a friend while a third person (a stranger, maybe) tells a somewhat odd story, and noting that the friend (unlike ourselves) is not rushing to a too-hasty or too-dismissive judgment of the stranger but, instead, is really listening. This is instructive; it teaches us that we, too, might be capable of such patient abiding.
But Mason is no sentimentalist. Tricky systems of psychological warfare are enacted beneath these calm surfaces; witness the way, in “Shiloh,” Norma Jean’s mother passive-aggressively brings up the notion of “neglect” after she has caught Norma Jean smoking, and Norma Jean (and the reader) understands this as an underhanded reference to a grandchild lost to SIDS: a deep and terrible insight into the way cruelty actually proceeds.
So, her characters are mostly gentle, but also vulnerable to sudden lurches to the dark side, which even they may not be fully aware they are making. In a more recent story called “The Horsehair Ball Gown,” Mason masterfully summarizes the life of a family and its hidden tragedy and, in the process, creates an unforgettable pair of siblings who, though they are old within the story, appear to the reader to be many ages at once, each of these selves simultaneously guilty and innocent—a beautiful story, full of tragedy and fun. The feeling you get reading this later work is that this is a writer who has spent a lifetime carefully watching people. She knows some things about us, and these are generous things, mostly; but a few of the things she knows have made her a touch skeptical about human beings, wise to the ways they can go off-track.
7.
Fiction, at its best, is not mere depiction, but effects a change upon the reader so as to prepare her for more enlightened living in the world—as Kafka famously says, it “prepares us for tenderness.” This is not to say that fiction should preach, or offer some canned, simple solution. On the contrary: fiction often simply lays out the difficulties we face; underscores the challenges presented to human happiness. The work of Bobbie Ann Mason, it seems to me, does this in a particularly loving fashion, full of truth, characterized by a refusal of the sentimental and an embracing of a muscular form of hope.
These are, to my e
ar, radical stories. That which we so ardently seek, these stories say, may not save us. Of her youth in Kentucky, Mason has said, “Primarily I rebelled against apathy and limited education. I was rejecting a whole way of life that I thought trapped everyone.” This strikes me as a pretty good starting place for understanding the body of her work, which includes five short story collections, five novels, a memoir, and a rich bounty of personal and critical essays, a good sampling of which you are about to have the pleasure of reading. Here, if I may briefly project my politics onto Mason’s work, I find myself thinking of her fictive world as a scale model in which good people—the longing-filled descendants of settlers and dreamers—wander through a still-beautiful, yet somehow hostile American dreamscape: a system of aggressive banality, constructed to serve distant capital, that thereby short-changes the individual and denies her celebration and sensuality and true liberty.
What is the antidote? Well, for starters, a lively and fearless awareness of the affliction, as evidenced in the pages you are about to read. Art, Chekhov claimed, does not need to solve problems, only to formulate them correctly. The stories of Bobbie Ann Mason formulate the problem of living this way: people, even good, kind people, will sometimes find themselves suffering, lonely, and frustrated, especially, perhaps, in an age like ours, where we have misplaced certain key values, become obsessed with things, and grown selfish. But then again, these stories say (and demonstrate, through their perceptivity and humor and what I believe used to be called “sass”) that there are ways back, and we are always trying to find them—ways back to happiness, to more authentic selves, to happier times, to love. Within that dreamscape, there is beauty. The beauty of friendship, and wit; the beauty of continuing to try. And stepping back, then, to include the creator of that work, we find more grounds for hope: we see an artist, equipped with her lovely heart, prodigious powers of observation, and a lean-but-lush American poetic tendency, gazing down at these imaginary people as she creates them, her eyes full of tenderness and genuine concern.
A Note to the Reader about This Reader
Bobbie Ann Mason
A collection like this is a patchwork autobiography of sorts. I see in it my lifelong tendency to look for patterns, and I see my rebellion against them too.
I grew up with scraps and scissors and paper dolls and colors and jigsaw puzzles. I helped my grandmother piece quilts—geometric designs of stars and flowers. And I learned sewing from my mother, a seamstress with a flair. After opening the compact package of a Butterick or Simplicity dress pattern, you had to cut out the pattern pieces, scissoring along the dark lines of the thin tissue paper. Cutting out material, piecing, sewing straight seams, working jigsaw puzzles, solving mysteries—all these simple but absorbing endeavors of my childhood became more intricate over time, yet design itself became more and more elusive. The simple quilt pieces of my childhood led me to the subtle shades of exquisite patterns in literature.
Writing fiction is a way of making patterns, discovering them hiding in the words and sensations of the story. It is a way of exploring what you know but didn’t know that you knew. And it is a way of finding out what you never knew but should have known long before. Fiction gives you an illusion of coherence, the possibility that things actually make sense. Images and words relate to each other in satisfyingly coherent ways, but they keep you on edge, wondering. Why doesn’t everything fit together the way it is supposed to?
Fiction takes you on an adventure into a world you thought you knew but that you find out is both familiar and unfamiliar. It twists your mind and makes you jump. As a reader I want to be shaken and disturbed, nudged and whirled. I want to be amazed and gobsmacked. I want to write fiction that does that to you when you read it and to me as I write it. I don’t want fiction to pacify or congratulate. It shouldn’t confirm your prejudices or simply mirror your own life. Fiction, I learned, should offer more than the gratification of connecting the dots, or the comfort of a warm quilt. The joy is finding the downy little feather that pokes through the fabric. “The detail is all,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Ada, or Ardor.
Cutting out a Simplicity dress pattern along the dark lines is not much of a challenge, but ending up with a dress is. My mother could create a dress without a pattern to follow, but the pattern was there, and she knew she would find it. And she knew the design is never complete. Something is always mysterious and unfinished. Likewise, a story with an ambiguous ending is a reminder of the uncertainty and mystery—and hope—we live with, an ending that isn’t there yet. A definite ending would be final, with nothing left to treasure.
I
First Stories
My first published story appeared in Stylus, the University of Kentucky’s literary magazine. It was the era before the MFA, so instead of pursuing creative writing in graduate school, I studied literature. Suddenly Donald Barthelme’s novella Snow White (1967) turned my head around. Sneaking off from graduate studies that summer, I tried writing a novel about the Beatles from a Barthelme slant.
Eventually, in the 1980s, when I began to write fiction in earnest, which I had wanted to do all along, I found myself in the middle of a hopping renaissance of the short story. All around me superb fiction writers were producing extraordinary fiction. Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, and Alice Munro were all the rage. Critics searched for labels for the new direction.
The surge of good fiction was stimulating and encouraging. The MFA programs had not yet reached their heyday, and everything seemed new.
My own stories, coming out of a rural western Kentucky world of unsettling change, seemed unfamiliar to many readers, but others were relieved to see fiction about people like those they knew—a truck driver, a drugstore clerk, a bus driver, a preacher, a retired couple headed for Florida. The reviewer Anatole Broyard wrote that my characters were “more foreign and incomprehensible” than European peasants, a line I treasure for its comic absurdity.
—BAM
Offerings
FROM Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)
Sandra’s maternal grandmother died of childbed fever at the age of twentysix. Mama was four. After Sandra was born, Mama developed an infection but was afraid to see the doctor. It would go away, she insisted. The infection disappeared, but a few years later inexplicable pains pierced her like needles. Blushing with shame, and regretting her choice of polka-dotted panties, she learned the worst. It was lucky they caught it in time, the doctor said. During the operation, Mama was semiconscious, with a spinal anesthetic, and she could hear the surgeons discussing a basketball game. Through blurred eyes, she could see a red expanse below her waist. It resembled the Red Sea parting, she said.
Sandra grows vegetables and counts her cats. It is late summer and her woodpile is low. She should find time to insulate the attic and to fix the leak in the basement. Her husband is gone. Jerry is in Louisville, working at a K Mart. Sandra has stayed behind, reluctant to spend her weekends with him watching go-go dancers in smoky bars. In the garden, Sandra loads a bucket with tomatoes and picks some dill, a cucumber, a handful of beans. The dead bird is on a stump, untouched since yesterday. When she rescued the bird from the cat, it seemed only stunned, and she put it on a table out on the porch, to let it recover. The bird had a spotted breast, a pink throat, and black-and-gray wings—a flicker, she thought. Its curved beak reminded her of Heckle and Jeckle. A while later, it tried to flap its wings, while gasping and contorting its body, and she decided to put it outside. As she opened the door, the dog rushed out eagerly ahead of her, and the bird died in her hand. Its head went limp.
Sandra never dusts. Only now, with her mother and grandmother coming to visit, does she notice that cobwebs are strung across corners of the ceiling in the living room. Later, with a perverse delight, she sees a fly go by, actually trailing a wisp of cat hair and dust. Her grandmother always told her to dust under her bed, so the dust bunnies would not multiply and take over, as she would say, like Wandering Jew among
the flowers.
Grandmother Stamper is her father’s mother. Mama is bringing her all the way from Paducah to see where Sandra is living now. They aren’t going to tell Grandmother about the separation. Mama insisted about that. Mama has never told Grandmother about her own hysterectomy. She will not even smoke in front of Grandmother Stamper. For twenty-five years, Mama has sneaked smokes whenever her mother-in-law is around.
Stamper is not Grandmother’s most familiar name. After Sandra’s grandfather, Bob Turnbow, died, Grandmother moved to Paducah, and later she married Joe Stamper, who owned a shoe store there. Now she lives in a small apartment on a city street, and—as she likes to say, laughing—has more shoes than she has places to go. Sandra’s grandfather had a slow, wasting illness—Parkinson’s disease. For five years, Grandmother waited on him, feeding him with a spoon, changing the bed, and trying her best to look after their dying farm. Sandra remembers a thin, twisted man, his face shaking, saying, “She’s a good woman. She lights up the fires in the sky.”
“I declare, Sandy Lee, you have moved plumb out into the wilderness,” says Grandmother.
In her white pants suit, Sandra’s grandmother looks like a waitress. The dog pokes at her crotch as she picks her way down the stone path to the porch. Sandra has not mowed in three weeks. The mower is broken, and there are little bushes of ragweed all over the yard.
“See how beautiful it is,” says Mama. “It’s just as pretty as a picture.” She waves at a hillside of wild apple trees and weeds, with a patch of woods at the top. A long-haired calico cat sits under an overgrown lilac bush, also admiring the view.
“You need you some goats on that hill,” says Grandmother. Sandra tells them about the raccoon she saw as she came home one night. At first, she thought it was a porcupine. It was very large, with slow, methodical movements. She followed it as far as she could with her headlights. It climbed a bank with grasping little hands. It occurs to Sandra that porcupines have quills like those thin pencils Time magazine sends with its subscription offers.
Patchwork Page 2
