Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  BAM: But there seems to be a difference between these stories in Love Life and where I’m headed now, and where the stories were in Shiloh. I think back then the characters were at home at night watching their favorite network shows, and the TV shows were very important, and they would never miss an episode of M*A*S*H or whatever. But by now, they’ve gotten cable TV or satellite dishes, and there are too many channels to choose from. So TV actually has less importance in their lives in an odd way. And I think it throws them back on their own resources, or it makes them seek out other diversions. So I think people are out and about a lot more in the newer stories.

  CG: What is it that you think that these things—TV and music—have replaced in these people’s lives? What do you think would have been there before that was there?

  BAM: I think you’d have to go back to about 1930, because we’ve had TV and radio constantly in our lives since then.

  CG: And what do you think would be there?

  BAM: (pause) I think the romantic view is that people would be telling stories and making their own music and having fellowship. The reality might be that people had to put up with each other a lot more. (laughter) I had a passage in Spence + Lila where Lila is remembering her childhood and how people sat around after supper. The uncle ruled everybody, and he did as he pleased. And the cousins bickered, and they had to do their work, like their ironing. They bickered, and there was no entertainment to do the work by. It was just each other and a very small world. I don’t think that’s so romantic. I’m sure it isn’t all like that, but I don’t think TV is the great destroyer that people want to think it is.

  CG: In “Sorghum” Ed says to Liz, “It’s a tradition, one of those things that’s supposed to mean something.” What do we end up doing with these lost traditions, these traditions that end up being a civilization’s detritus?

  BAM: I think that suggests that traditions lose their value. I never trusted holding onto traditions for the sake of tradition. I think I do look for value, and I don’t like empty ritual. I don’t like rituals for the sake of ritual, and I’m excited about things that are new and challenging, things that shatter the old ways. (laughter)

  CG: An example of that would be in “Love Life,” where Opal sneers at the tradition of the burial quilt that her niece, Jenny, wants to see so badly. A tradition unravels for one character, Opal, while another character, Jenny, reinvents the meaning of that very same tradition.

  BAM: Yes, yes. The contest in that story is between Opal, who hadn’t been much of anywhere and who hadn’t broken out of that small world, but who had wanted to and had been too afraid to. And Jenny, who had broken out much more easily and then came back searching for her roots, as young people are wont to do at a certain age.

  CG: And the burial quilt ends up serving a purpose. It unleashes all the feelings Jenny had about an old boyfriend who she lost track of, and found out had died. So the function of the burial quilt or its tradition, still, in a very oblique way, seems real.

  BAM: Oh, yes. We can’t get away from those basic processes in human life and nature: grieving and celebration, change, growth.

  CG: Another way of asking this question would be to ask how many ways do you think the Old South can die? Or has it died, or will it ever?

  BAM: Oh, dear, that’s a real broad one. I’ve not been very knowledgeable about the really deep South. I don’t know. I think the South is still very defensive. There’s a line I have in “Love Life” where the real estate agent, Randy, says, “We’re not as countrified down here now as people think.” Southerners have always, since the Civil War, had this sense of inferiority and fear that Yankees aren’t going to think that they’re as up-to-date or as sophisticated. This image of being “country”—Southerners have had a terrible time with this. And you probably know yourself, in going North, how Southerners feel about their accent.

  CG: Going back to when we were talking about characters that speak in a blunt language that cuts to the heart of things. A large preoccupation and a major source of tension in the stories is the way in which times have changed. Opal says: “Girls used to say they had the curse or they had a visitor. Nowadays, of course, they just say what they mean.” But really saying what they mean still doesn’t say it all. Yes, it’s a more blunt way of saying it, but it still doesn’t express all that it is and means.

  BAM: I feel that my style derives from the language of farm life which is very practical and not decorative.

  CG: It’s a language of service and serviceableness.

  BAM: And I hang onto that language, and polish it and care about each word, because I think that that style of language conveys an attitude that I want to get across, an attitude about the world that’s not layered over with a veneer of polite society or Southern hospitality. And it’s a class distinction. It’s not the language of Southern hospitality, the upper classes. It is, for the most part, more direct and closer to what people think than sophisticated, polite ways of dealing with people. And it can be blunt and hard—painful.

  CG: I’d like to talk about structure. The way I look at the structure of your stories is that they’re centripetal; they spiral in. They seem, to me, to track their prey. They circle and circle, getting tighter and tighter. And they’re usually moving in on a specific emotion or a specific image, and when that image or emotion gets stretched, taut, the stories end. Does that make sense to you?

  BAM: I never heard of that.

  CG: (laughter) How do you deal with structure? Do you have a structure that you go by? Is it instinctual?

  BAM: It’s instinctual. I never map it out. It’s what feels right. There’s a movement to it, and it comes to a certain point and you leave it.

  CG: In “Airwaves” there was a passage that illustrated how I think you structure stories: “It was that everything in her life is converging, narrowing, like a multitude of tiny lines trying to get through one pinhole. She imagines straightening out a rainbow and rolling it up in a tube.” When I think about your stories, that’s the motion I see in their structure.

  Your stories generally do end in one image and it’s usually an image of stasis or entropy. It’s a moment, a pause, where things are about to change. They’re suspended moments; moments of very uneasy equilibrium. One that comes to mind, even in its title, is “Residents and Transients.” It ends: “I see a cat’s flaming eyes coming up the lane to the house. One eye is green and one is red, like a traffic light. In a moment I realize that I am waiting for the light to change.” Do you believe that there are resolutions in life? And, if so, what form do you think they take?

  BAM: Students very often want to know why the stories never come to a complete end, why they’re never wrapped up clearly. And I try to tell them they do come to an appropriate end, which is that they just place the image. And I point out that in life nothing’s ever wrapped up for very long. So resolutions in life are evanescent. Life has that structure of sunrise, sunset; day, night. It goes through cycles and seasons. The times of life. So there is something very natural about movement and balance and change, but resolution—final resolution—I suppose that means death. Or of living happily ever after.

  CG: Which is a form of death. Raymond Carver spoke about the “aftereffect image” of your stories. And I think this comes not only from the whole story itself, but from that one image that you end with. Do these images come to you and then you write towards them?

  BAM: Usually not. It’s usually in the process of writing that they burst out at the appropriate moment. It’s so exciting when it happens. It’s not that they’re all that spontaneous, but sometimes it happens, and then I’ll have to work on it to get it to feel just right. No, I don’t usually work toward the end. I don’t have the ending and write the story to fit it.

  CG: One of the biggest sources of grief for your characters is when they somehow get above their raising, so to speak. Like in “Memphis,” when Beverly calls Jim and Tammy Bakker the biggest phonies she ever saw, her mother says to her:
“Do you think that you’re better than everybody else, Beverly? That’s what ruined your marriage—you’re always judging everybody.” This essentially is a writer’s dilemma. Not that you judge everybody, but in the process of writing you have to pull away from them. You’ve spoken of yourself as being an exile. Have you become less connected to where you were born by focusing in on it?

  BAM: No, I don’t think so. I think I’d be much less connected if I had gone back to live in Kentucky. I think about it; I write about it. Lots of people move away from the South and don’t look back, so they are cut adrift. The one thing that is paramount is my relationship to my place, to Kentucky, to my family. Being a writer, moving into the world of being a writer, into the literary world—I can’t forget where I came from in the world. It’s very important to me to still be who I am, to still be from Kentucky, to still be that person and not to become a Literary person, with a capital L. That makes me very uncomfortable.

  CG: I think one of the real strengths of your stories is that you are infinitely compassionate to these people.

  BAM: Well, they are my people. I’m part of them, and so I see myself implicated and reflected in their lives. So I can’t become this Northern Literary person who looks back on them from some great distance and judges them.

  CG: No, you really seem like you’re among them.

  BAM: But, yet, in order to write about them, I have to have a certain amount of distance. Just enough.

  CG: This exchange is from “Sorghum.” One character says: “I just feel like something’s going to happen.” And another character, Ed, says: “I always feel like I’m on the verge of something.” A cynic might say that the truth is that these people are on the verge of nothing, or, at best, they’re on the verge of just being on the verge.

  BAM: Again, that’s maybe somebody who’s way, way outside and is very sophisticated and has been through it and knows that it might not amount to much. But my characters don’t know that.

  CG: What is it, do you think, that they think they’re on the verge of?

  BAM: Something about to change for the better.

  CG: How do you think your first stories, the stories in Shiloh, differ from the latest ones in Love Life?

  BAM: That remark I made about television describes one way I think they’ve gotten more complex. I hope they have. They seem more complicated to me, and I hope they’re more mature artistically. I find the whole process of writing gets more and more complicated. The more I know about it, the harder it is to do. Because I think one’s vision of things and how the story should be gets more complex. But the first draft of a story is just as clumsy and innocent and awful as it ever was. So the task gets harder, shaping it into something that matches your vision.

  CG: For me, the newer stories are more specific and more complex in fewer words. There’s more air in them. When I went back and looked at Shiloh, it’s inundated with details. The atmosphere is much heavier than in Love Life. Another way I thought that they were different was that in “Shiloh” for example, Leroy says: “Nobody knows anything. The answers are always changing.” In the later stories, it seems as if there are no answers, or the characters don’t look for them as much. I don’t know whether you think that’s true or not.

  BAM: I don’t know. It’s hard for me to really generalize about them as a whole. Things like that, I don’t know where that comes from.

  CG: You’ve said that the language of the place is the key. And in your stories, the wants and needs of the characters are very human and very general—what it takes to love and be loved. It’s the details of the stories that make your stories specific. I think it was Flaubert who said that “God is in the details.”

  BAM: And Nabokov said: “The detail is all.”

  CG: Does this minutiae of life constantly prey on your mind? Do you make lists and keep notebooks to make things specific?

  BAM: That’s really the starting point for a story, and it’s the raw material, and it’s your access to the heart. When you stop to think about it, you don’t really know many other people very well, very intimately, so if you see something you want to write about, if you see a person, you probably don’t really know what’s going on. And you have to use your imagination to get at them. So usually I find that physical details or description, observation, what’s going on in the outside—those are clues about what’s going on in the inside. And you have to use more imagination to get across what’s going inside, because you don’t have as much access to that.

  “Midnight Magic” was prompted by a guy I saw one morning in a supermarket parking lot. He was in this blue car, hiked-up rear end. It had “Midnight Magic” painted on the rear and he was sitting in his car eating chocolate-covered donuts and chocolate milk, and he hadn’t shaved, and he really looked like hell. And I wondered, “Who is this guy? What is his story?” So I just took it from there. My first paragraph is that description. And then because those physical details sparked my imagination, I was able to make up his story.

  CG: What, to you, is the biggest misconception about your work? What really gets your goat?

  BAM: I think it’s attitudes that are elitist, or that come from people who may not have known people who watch television. (laughter) How should I say this?

  CG: So it’s people who think that these characters aren’t worth writing about?

  BAM: Yes. Who judge them in their own terms rather than in the characters’ terms. And, you know, it may be my own failing that I don’t present them fully enough, but I do think the reader should judge the characters in terms of their own, and in terms of the characters’ context, and not in terms of their own context. So, in general, it’s disparaging comments about these characters who watch television. The fact is that most people, most Americans, watch a lot of television. It’s quite an ordinary thing to do. Some people fail to understand that TV has a role in other people’s lives, and that they’re not necessarily having their brains turned to mush; they’re interrelating with it.

  CG: For your characters, a lot of their hard news information comes from 60 Minutes or 20/20, shows like that.

  BAM: I have a character in one of the Shiloh stories who finds a lump in her breast and has a mastectomy. I’m quite sure she wouldn’t have found that lump in her breast before television. And she wouldn’t have known what to do about it.

  CG: What do your parents think about the stories?

  BAM: Oh, they love them. They’re really proud of them and get a kick out of them and think they’re funny. And enjoy seeing the familiar, and they recognize a lot of the language and behavior.

  CG: Yes, I think we all recognize those things whether we come from there or not.

  Missouri Review Interview

  This interview was conducted by correspondence over a period of several months in 1997 by Jo Sapp and Evelyn Somers of the Missouri Review editorial staff.

  MR: How did your background, growing up on a Kentucky dairy farm in the forties and fifties, contribute to your becoming a writer?

  Mason: It was a somewhat isolated social setting, although we lived close enough to town that its pleasures and privileges seemed within easy reach. I suppose the desire to go to town helped make me ambitious, and the allure of the worlds that came in over the radio also helped. But the rewards of growing up on a farm were far greater in many ways than life in town. There is nothing that compares to the familiarity with natural detail: with knowing about grasshoppers, the anatomy of a leaf, the texture of high weeds, the color of a robin’s egg.

  MR: Is that part of the reason you returned to Kentucky, after living in the Northeast for a while?

  Mason: I moved back to Kentucky eventually for family and cultural reasons. I’d returned to nature, so to speak, during graduate school, when I was writing my dissertation about the nature imagery in Nabokov’s Ada. I moved to the country in Connecticut and planted my own garden then. Most of the time I was in the Northeast I lived in the country, and I think that helped me to discover my mater
ial for writing.

  MR: So your home, the place you came from, and your interest in nature gave you a lot of material. Were there also ways in which these things gave you the motivation to write?

  Mason: My motivation to write was complicated: for some reason, probably because I was the first-born, I was treated as special. I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines. I suppose I had the sensibility of a writer—the attentiveness to texture and detail and sound, and the desire to learn. But in order to become a writer, I had to rebel against the limits of my surroundings. We weren’t poor, but we were well defined, circumscribed by generations of folkways and the rigid expectations of a farm culture. I wanted to get out. I wanted to go places, see the world. This ambitiousness developed at a time historically when it was first possible to leave—to go to college, to seek a livelihood other than farm wife. So you could say the early ambition to write was part natural sensibility and part idealism.

  MR: Was the feeling of being constricted more intense, do you think, because you’re female? Gender roles seem to be a concern in your early work especially. Sam Hughes, for example, is disgusted by her friend Dawn’s pregnancy and her own mother’s new baby, and she’s very aware of the limited—and limiting—potential of her relationship with her boyfriend. Norma Jean, in “Shiloh,” is discovering her capabilities in a way that Leroy doesn’t understand; he’s worried that it’s “some Women’s Lib thing.” Would you say that was true of you and your ambition? Was part of your desire to achieve, and get out, a feminist desire?

  Mason: I rejected the traditional notion of “women’s work,” but I never thought of my early ambitions in a feminist way, exactly. Primarily I rebelled against apathy and limited education. I was rejecting a whole way of life that I thought trapped everyone. I didn’t see women doing much of anything in my region except having babies and slaving away on the farm. They might work in stores or factories or teach school, but none of that was for me. But I didn’t see men doing anything I wanted to do either. When I went to college, all the intellectuals and writers were men, so I aspired to crash into that world. I never had that feminist sense of wanting to prove myself by having a job. I didn’t know of any women trapped at home in a fifties paradise with nothing to do. The idea of working outside the home as a matter of principle was a middle-class notion that I had little knowledge of. My mother worked in a factory some of the time, and she didn’t do it to make a point. She did it for money. I was trying to get an education so I could escape from the labor force.