Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  MR: You’ve said elsewhere that your early reading was typical: children’s series like the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew. You’ve even written a book about female detectives in some of those books, The Girl Sleuth. How, if at all, did those series influence you?

  Mason: The Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew fed my aspirations to see the world, to become something else. The Bobbsey Twins always went on vacations, and of course a dairy farmer does not take a vacation, not even a day off, because the cows have to be milked. The Bobbseys frustrated me with their endless travels. The girl detectives’ adventures made me long for something exciting to happen. I got the notion that everything exciting happened elsewhere, so I was filled with desire to go places and find out things. I tried to write stories patterned after the girl detectives, and that was the first thrill of writing—finding adventure through it.

  MR: How has the traditional farm culture that you came out of changed in the past fifty years or so? If you were growing up on the farm now, how might your trajectory be different from what it’s been?

  Mason: Growing up on a farm nowadays is not that isolated or autonomous, and the family farm as I knew it hardly exists. You couldn’t feed a family on fifty-four acres now. Anyway, the wide world is much closer and more accessible than it was when I was little, so a kid today would have more choices. My ambitions were fed mostly by illusions and lack of information. I had little to go on except the movies and songs on the radio. I often dwell on that impossible question—what would my life have been like if I had had more advantages? Or what if I’d had fewer; what if I had lived in my grandmother’s time? That’s the personal question underlying Feather Crowns. I can’t really answer it.

  MR: You made a foray into academia before becoming a writer. You went to graduate school at SUNY-Binghamton and the University of Connecticut. Did you plan to teach literature?

  Mason: I went to graduate school in literature because I wanted to read and write and didn’t want to work at a meaningless job. I had no plans for a teaching career. I was just trying to find a situation where I could read and write for as long as possible. I had wanted to go to a writing program, but there were only a few of them then. In fact, I had applied to the Stanford creative writing program but I wasn’t accepted. So I went into literature. I was a graduate assistant, and I taught freshman English, but the class wasn’t only composition. It was a survey of Western literature course.

  MR: What was teaching like for you?

  Mason: Frightening. At Binghamton all the students were smart, sophisticated kids from New York City, and as a quiet Southerner I was terrified. I look back on that time with a shudder because it was so embarrassing, difficult, and scary—that classic situation where you feel everybody else in the room seems suave and articulate. That was what visiting a professor’s house was like, too. At one such gathering at the University of Connecticut I found myself seated next to the poet John Berryman, a genuine luminary who had just given a reading there. I was nobody, with nothing in my head, unable to speak. Poets lived on another plane. What would you say to a poet? I found myself catapulted into situations like this, where I felt I didn’t belong, and I had neither the confidence nor the social graces to manage.

  MR: How did the experience of living in the North affect your notion of regional differences?

  Mason: The North was, in our Southern mythology, the land of arrogant Yankees. They were the authorities. We felt inferior; we were losers. When I lived up there, I subscribed to that notion so completely that it was years before I could begin to get out from under it. Jimmy Carter had to be elected before the South in general could get ahold of its shame and start to turn it around. In the North, I was in few situations where I could tell about things like my Granny wringing a chicken’s neck or how my chore was washing the milk cans twice a day. If I did tell people a little about my background, they tended to misinterpret it in terms of quaint stereotypes, something out of Ma and Pa Kettle. There was a yawning cultural gap between North and South in those days, and bridging it seemed almost impossible for somebody as bashful as I was.

  MR: Do you think of yourself as a Southern writer?

  Mason: I’m a writer from the South and I write out of a Southern culture, but I’m not immersed in the South. I think my exile in the North gave me a sense of detachment, a way of looking in two directions at once. It’s an advantage. I don’t want to celebrate the South more than it deserves—which it does to a great extent, of course, but I’m wary of too much regional pride. It’s important to pick a place and be there, but not to be provincial about it. So much country music wallows in that provinciality—like saying “I’m ignorant and proud of it.”

  MR: Did you “pick your place” early on, or did your subject come to you over time?

  Mason: I think, given my background and my earnest endeavor to lose my Southern accent—to find my place in the North—that it was unlikely that I would know early on what my material was. I started writing fiction in college, but it took me a number of years to get the right perspective on my material. I hadn’t really recognized what I had to write about. I was looking outside. In the late sixties I wrote a novel about the Beatles, inspired by Donald Barthelme’s Snow White. Finally, in the early seventies I wrote the obligatory autobiographical, coming-of-age novel. These were great practice and got me started, but I was slow to get into focus.

  MR: It’s hard to imagine the Bobbie Ann Mason who wrote “Shiloh” and In Country being inspired by an experimental, satirical book like Snow White.

  Mason: Snow White was right up my alley. Early on, I was interested in stylists, writers who loved language and played with words. In college, I loved Max Shulman (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!); his writing was sophomoric, but then I went straight to James Joyce. Barthelme’s story “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” gave me the idea that you could write fiction about somebody famous. Snow White was written in short bursts and had a sustained tone of disconnectedness. The technique was very alluring. Nothing had to be explained, no full context and development—just hits. It looked easy and revolutionary. I wrote most of the Beatles book in 1967, the summer of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was a time to throw the graduate school reading list out the window and just go with the times.

  MR: Were you also writing short stories during this period?

  Mason: I wrote short stories in college, published one in the college literary magazine, but I didn’t write any more stories to speak of for fifteen years.

  MR: But then you started writing them again, and you made an immediate impact with the stories in Shiloh. How did that come about?

  Mason: In the late seventies, as I neared the mid-life identity-crisis time, I decided it was now or never. I think the crisis went back to my childhood conviction that I was special, and I followed the notion, picked up in college, that writing was a calling, that writers were different and could indulge their sense of apartness by writing. All that seems a little silly to me now, but at the time it helped give me the determination I needed. When I realized that I hadn’t yet done anything of note, I got busy. I wrote a story that was about five pages long and took it to a writers’ workshop. I got some inspiration from seeing that people were actually writing and it looked possible, so I wrote a couple of other stories and immediately sent them to the New Yorker. Do you see the ten-year-old child there answering the Famous Writers School ad in the back of a magazine? What was I thinking? To my surprise, I got encouraging responses from Roger Angell, one of the New Yorker’s most illustrious editors and writers. He took me under his wing, responded to all my submissions with great care and interest, and gave me the first real encouragement I had ever had.

  MR: What was the writers’ workshop you attended?

  Mason: For three summers in the late seventies I went to a week-long workshop run by Joe David Bellamy from St. Lawrence University. It was at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. It was pleasant, a chance to hang out with some writers. I attended worksho
ps run by Gail Godwin, Charles Simmons, and Margaret Atwood. They were all encouraging, but I think what charged me up most was the rediscovery of a notion I had gotten in college that writing was a passionate commitment and an honorable thing to do. I had always believed that, but my writing ambition had gotten so dissipated by lack of confidence and various diversions. The typical story for women writers seems to be that they spend twenty years raising children and then they go back to their original ambition of writing. I didn’t raise children, but it took twenty years just to get my head together.

  MR: Love Life is dedicated to Roger Angell. What was that writer editor relationship like?

  Mason: Roger Angell was the first person who said, “You are a writer.” His encouragement brought me to life as a writer. Finally, I believed I could do it. As an editor he has always been very professional, yet he deals with a story on the level of emotions; in those early stories he helped me understand that I should go deeper into the characters’ lives. His responses were subjective, never prescriptive. I heard how the story made him feel. He was always very careful not to tell me how to do it. He said he didn’t know, but he made me think that I did. The story “Offerings” was the first story he accepted—the twentieth one I sent in. He telephoned me and said he liked the story but thought there was something lacking in the portrayal of the absent husband. It needed something a little darker. I studied the story for a long time and worked on some revisions. I was going to New York about three weeks later and I was going to meet Roger for the first time—November, 1979. I took the revisions with me—only about three sentences’ worth—and met him in his office. He passed the story along to William Shawn, the editor, who made the ultimate decisions. The next day, a Friday, I met Roger for a drink at the Algonquin Hotel. I still did not have a story accepted—I would know on Monday—but there I was, being entertained at the celebrated Algonquin. It was awkward, but exciting. I kept looking for the Algonquin cat, Hamlet. On Monday I was to call about one o’clock, which was when the messages ordinarily came back from Mr. Shawn. I phoned from some place on Fifth Avenue, and Roger said the word hadn’t come yet. He said to call again in fifteen minutes. I called again. Still no word. Then I had another appointment and couldn’t call until 3:15. I called from the ladies’ room phone at Saks Fifth Avenue and learned that the story was accepted. Roger wanted to know my social security number. I spouted out some numbers, but realized later they were wrong. The rest of the day is quite unclear in my mind. I was probably never so thrilled in my life.

  MR: What about the editing of your books? Do you have any insights into the working relationship between a novelist and her editor?

  Mason: I have been fortunate to have had some of the great editors—Roger Angell, William Shawn, and Ted Solotaroff. I was spoiled by the New Yorker, and so I expect careful, close editing that serves the work. Ted Solotaroff’s great quality is his ability to penetrate the heart of a work and to push for something deeper. In the early stages of writing In Country, he pushed me to confront the subject of Vietnam. I’d worked on the novel for some time before I realized it really was about the effects of the Vietnam War. When I did realize it, I felt somewhat intimidated. How could I write about such a big subject? What authority did I have? But Ted helped give me the confidence to stay with it.

  MR: Critics said of your first book something to the effect of your being, already, a full-fledged master of the short story form. Shiloh and Other Stories was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Book Award, and received several other honors. With the exception of the Nancy Culpepper stories, the characters are all ordinary, small-town people who work at ordinary jobs—the “Kmart crowd” as they’ve been stereotyped. You were obviously well on the way to developing your vision by the time that collection was published. How did that happen?

  Mason: I don’t know how I developed a cohesive “vision,” if that’s what it is. The subject matter is a given. The vision is something internal, and writing helps me find it and bring it out. For me, the process of writing is a matter of dealing with inhibitions, to find out what I have hidden down inside; if I can get it out, it seems to fall loosely into shape, and then I help it along in a more deliberate way. My stories typically start out very rough. But if I see there’s something in a story, I’ll work and rework it over and over, making small improvements with each draft until it finally reaches its finished shape. In writing most of the pieces in Shiloh, I just fooled around with what randomly came to mind. In that way I made discoveries that I could work with. I wrote about fifty stories, of which sixteen went into the collection.

  MR: Most of your early short stories are told in third person, and they’re almost all in the present tense. You use present tense and the same center-of-consciousness viewpoint in your first two novels, also. Why is that natural for you, and what do you think are the respective advantages and disadvantages?

  Mason: The later stories moved into the past tense—stories like “Memphis” and “Coyotes”—when I got really tired of that convention of present tense. Present tense seems quite natural for characters meandering through a vague situation. It prevents the author from overtly asserting authority, the privilege of saying “Once upon a time … this happened, and I know how it is going to end and I’m going to tell you how it was.”

  MR: Critics and readers have commented, too, on the consciousness, in your early work, of popular culture and of the media, especially film and TV.

  Mason: I’m a little sensitive about being reduced to the terms of “popular culture,” since it’s often a pejorative term. I don’t think the culture of the people ought to be dismissed like that. Their lives are just as important as the lives of those who read the New York Times and go to the opera. I often write about characters who happen to watch TV. Most Americans do watch TV. It’s a big deal in their lives, especially if they work hard at some mind-numbing job. I try to write what is appropriate to the characters, the attributes and interests that are meaningful to them. For most of them, the TV is not a malignant force droning in the background, as it might be in a Cheever story. For many of my characters, it’s a source of pleasure and escape, although that’s changing now, as they get cable and find fifty-seven channels with nothing on. As a writer I can maintain a bit of detachment from the characters, showing them in their world and seeing a little bit more than they do. But I’m not looking down at them.

  MR: You’ve had some magazine writing experience, also. You’ve written quite a bit of nonfiction for the New Yorker.

  Mason: Since I began publishing fiction in the New Yorker in 1980, I’ve been contributing occasional nonfiction pieces as well. I’ve done a couple of dozen “Talk of the Town” pieces, some humor pieces, and some reporting. I had a little background in journalism—writing columns for my college paper, and teaching journalism for a while during the seventies. In certain ways, I was influenced by Tom Wolfe and Lillian Ross and some of those “new journalists” anthologized by Wolfe.

  MR: How did those writers influence you?

  Mason: I absorbed them because I had to deal with them so much in teaching journalism: Tom Wolfe’s use of point of view—“the downstage narrator”—and his accumulation of what he called “status detail.” Lillian Ross’s wonderful deadpan reporting. Those writers wrote about real events by using techniques of fiction. It was the techniques of fiction I was most interested in, and so I picked up on some of them.

  MR: What would you say are your literary “roots”?

  Mason: I think my aesthetic principles derive from James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. From Joyce I learned about how a work is organic—how sound, for instance, is meaning, how the language is appropriate to the subject. If the story is about a journey, then it should be a journey. From Nabokov I learned that the surfaces are not symbolic representations, but the thing itself, irreducible. Rather than depending on an underlying idea, an image or set of images should be infinitely complex—just the opposite of what we�
�re sometimes taught about symbols and themes as hidden treasures. You can hack off an image and examine it, but it would be like trying to cut away light and shadow. The work should shimmer.

  MR: You mention Joyce as an influence, but you generally eschew the Joycean epiphany as a way of ending a short story. In your stories, because we’re so much in the minds of characters who aren’t necessarily all that self-aware, the “recognition”—if there is one—is left up to the reader. How deliberate is that?

  Mason: The goal is to leave the story at the most appropriate point, with the fullest sense of what it comes to, with a passage that has resonance and brings into focus the whole story. It has to sound right and seem right, even if its meaning isn’t obvious.

  MR: How, in your mind, is that different from what a novel does?

  Mason: It’s principally scale, the size of the canvas. I write novels in much the same way as I write stories—that is, the process is the same, but the effect is larger, more developed. In either case, though, I revise and revise. I fuss over every word.

  MR: While we’re on the subject of what fiction does, perhaps I should ask what you see as the role of the writer in society. How does literary writing matter—other than, obviously, as a sort of catharsis for the person doing it?