Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Mason: It is tempting to say that writing does serve the writers first; I often think many of us are misfits who can’t hold a job and who achieve, at best, some kind of mystique by virtue of our quirks. But I look back to Emerson and Thoreau when I think about why literary writing matters. It’s easier to see the writer’s role in the smaller world of Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth century. Thoreau was certainly a quirky misfit, but Walden comes down to us as an instruction manual for the heart and soul, as well as for getting a crop out. Emerson was famous, a very public figure, but both of them were quite visible in their community. In Concord, a town of two thousand, they could simply go to the Lyceum and give lectures. They engaged their neighbors in their discoveries. As writers, Thoreau and Emerson were lively and curious and demanding. They took on the world and tried to figure it out and then to translate what they found to the public, all in terms of the deepest questions about the nature of reality and morality and aesthetics. They led with their genius, turning their observations of nature into poetry and essays. They were standing on the verge of our time and they could almost see what was going to happen to us. They were leading their readers and listeners into the future. Writers belong on the edge, not in the center of the action. Nowadays we don’t have leaders who are worth much when it comes to the heart and soul, but if writers can make us feel and appreciate and explore the world, then I think that’s an extremely valuable function; it goes far beyond entertainment and steers well clear of politics.

  MR: How do you see your own role as a writer?

  Mason: I don’t make any claims for myself. I’m sitting on the toe of Thoreau’s boot. I’m not a natural storyteller. I see writing as a way of finding words to fashion a design, to discover a vision, not as a way of chronicling or championing or documenting. In other words, it is to applaud the creative imagination as it acts upon whatever materials are at hand. Creative writing is not to me primarily theme, subject, topic, region, class, or any ideas. It has more to do with feeling, imagination, suggestiveness, subtlety, complexity, richness of perception—all of which are found through fooling around with language and observations.

  MR: You’ve written two story collections, two full-length novels, and Spence + Lila, which is really more of a novella. Your work has been pretty much equally divided between long and short fiction. Do you consider yourself a novelist first, or a short story writer first?

  Mason: I don’t know. I’ve written only eight or nine stories in this decade. In the eighties, I wrote about seventy-five stories. I have been busier with novels and nonfiction in the nineties. But in the future, it could go either way. There’s more of an immediate gratification in writing a story, but in the long run, writing a novel is more deeply gratifying. It’s not really something I can consciously control. But I try to be wary of jumping into a novel too casually. Some notion has to really grab me hard for me to get into a novel. Stories come and go. If a story doesn’t work, it’s no great loss to throw it away. But a novel … that’s years of my life.

  MR: And a bigger challenge?

  Mason: Yes. The challenges keep getting more and more complicated, as you become more aware as a writer. Committing to a novel is so risky and uncertain, and there is so little to go on when you begin. With In Country I couldn’t find the story that held those characters together; with Feather Crowns I had to sustain a long narrative on a subject that threatened to be grotesque. I had to show how the characters’ actions were justifiable in the terms of their world.

  MR: That novel was quite a departure for you. Like your other fiction, it’s set in Kentucky but it’s Kentucky of the turn of the century. What made you turn to historical fiction?

  Mason: I don’t think Feather Crowns was a major departure. It’s the same people, the same landscape I have been preoccupied with since the start. The contemporary characters in my stories are the descendants of the rural people who were rooted on the farm for generations. On the farm, they were independent, land-owning yeoman farmers—in rural terms, the middle class. The Depression, the decline of the farm and the lure of cash sent them out of their culture into what they called “public work.” In many ways, it was a demotion. In working for a boss, they lost their autonomy. That transition since the Depression has had profound effects on rural and small-town culture. It formed my expectations that I would have to work in a factory or at a clerical job. I dreaded and feared the loss of independence. Writing was my way of keeping my own life.

  MR: Can you say something about the genesis and writing of Feather Crowns?

  Mason: The book was inspired by a true story, the birth of quintuplets in 1896. It happened in my hometown—in fact, across the field from where I grew up. I did not hear the story until 1988, and there wasn’t much information about it, but it was enough to inspire me. I had been wanting to go back into the world of my grandparents when they were young, and that true story was just right for the journey. I seized on it for my own, as a chance to get into the language and folkways of the rural culture of the turn of the century. These things have a deep connection to the present, because the old ways are still hanging on; change is much slower than we imagine. So I see continuity between Feather Crowns and Shiloh more than I see a radical juxtaposition.

  MR: The project itself was somewhat different, though. For one thing, it must have required a lot of research. It’s also a bigger novel than any that you’ve written so far—longer, more characters, richer and more complex thematically. Did you feel at all like Christie, at the start of the book, who fears that the baby inside her—which is actually five—is so big and wild that it must be a monster?

  Mason: The historical research wasn’t as extensive as you might think because I knew that world intimately, through my parents and grandparents. The language, superstitions, landscape, farming methods—all of it came down to me in my lifetime. The rural community didn’t change that much from the turn of the century to the nineteen-forties. Much of my research involved asking my mother questions, and much of it I simply knew firsthand. I spent about the same amount of time writing it as I did writing In Country. The story was clear to me from the beginning, whereas with In Country there was so much I didn’t know about what was going on. I actually spent more concentrated time writing Feather Crowns, whereas with In Country I spent most of the time searching and trying out various directions for the characters.

  No, I didn’t feel quite like Christie. I knew from the beginning that it was a big book, and I could see what it required in terms of pacing and emotion and goal. I had to invent most of it—the characters and their world—but I had a clear sense of direction.

  MR: Among other things, the novel is about the loss of privacy, and Christie and James’s inability to defend themselves against the damaging effects of the public’s curiosity. The babies are the product of a very intimate kind of desire, but they thrust the Wheelers’ personal lives into public view. Christie is referred to by someone as having “dropped a litter,” and James is leered at by other women, who assume he’s extremely virile. Eventually the Wheelers’ grief, too, becomes a public affair. Was that part of the real story you learned, of the 1896 quintuplets? Or is that your imagination, operating on the historical incident?

  Mason: Some of it was true, but there was very little information on the 1896 quintuplets. I know they were besieged by the public. I think the litter-dropping and a sense of the public invasion was also part of the reports surrounding the Dionne Quintuplets. Everything else I had to imagine.

  MR: One of the very significant events in the book, which actually takes place prior to the main action, is Christie’s trip with her friend Amanda to the revival at Reelfoot Lake. It becomes a sort of focal point for Christie—and not just because it’s one of the only times she’s ever been away from James and her children. What, in your own mind, is the importance of that event in the novel?

  Mason: The focal point had to do with guilt—Christie has impure thoughts about that sexy evangel
ist, Brother Cornett. So she builds on this guilt when she realizes her pregnancy is unusual. She imagines she’s carrying a monster, a devil. But the true monster turns out to be the public response. Also, in her attraction to Brother Cornett and the sideshow atmosphere of the camp meeting, we have the seeds of her vulnerability to celebrity that she encounters later. Her innocent desire to experience something new also leads her into danger.

  MR: Can you comment on your current writing project?

  Mason: I don’t quite know what to say about it, as I’m still in the midst of it as we speak. It’s called Clear Springs and I hope it will come out sometime in 1998. It is a personal story of the fate of the family farm—my family’s farm. It includes a lot of memory of childhood and some autobiography, but I don’t think of it as a memoir. It’s less about me than about my family, especially my mother. By extension, it’s about a way of life that’s disappearing—the small family farm, the small rural community, that was once seen as the ideal for American civilization.

  MR: How does your notion of what Bobbie Ann Mason, the writer, is about differ, do you think, from the public and/or critical perception of your work?

  Mason: I don’t think of myself as the Kmart realist. I hope that what I’m trying to do is more than document patterns of discount shopping in the late twentieth century! Many teachers and scholars seem primarily concerned with themes and ideas, but that’s not the way I think. If that was what I was after, I’d write a term paper. I think more in terms of literal details and images, as well as sound and tone—all the textures that bring a story to life. Sometimes it seems I’m working mostly with sounds and rhythms, the voice in my head. I write a story over and over until it sounds right. If it works, then the themes will be there. I don’t plant them.

  MR: So you’re more concerned with character and place than with any overriding theme in your work.

  Mason: I’m not saying I’m uninterested in what a story means, it’s just that I find it hard to isolate that, either during the process of writing or in the final analysis. I think theme sometimes gets separated out too much from a work. The themes are important, but the artistry is just as important. Ideally, form and function are inseparable. That’s what I read for most: writing that can’t be torn apart, a story that can’t be told any other way. I read a writer for the way he tells the story. And when the substance and style are perfectly wedded, you can’t reduce the story to a set of abstractions.

  Transatlantica Interview

  By Candela Delgado Marin, February 2015

  CDM: New Yorker author Hannah Rosefield wrote a piece (“No More Questions,” 2014) this January reflecting on the struggle or nuisance interviews may represent for writers. She reported that in 1904, Henry James said in his first interview: “One’s craft, one’s art, is his expression, not one’s person.” And Joyce Carol Oates claimed earlier this year that a “writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.” How do you approach interviews?

  BAM: What is difficult about an interview. … A writer spends weeks and months and years working with words, trying to get them into a final shape that works, so that the whole can’t be easily broken apart, so that the words chosen are exactly the right ones. Then the writer, who is maybe not a talker, is suddenly on TV and expected to talk off the top of her head and make sense! The transition is startling. Also, the writer may be expected to be articulate, to talk in confident analytical terms, while writing fiction is so different! It is more like singing a song while swimming underwater.

  CDM: And yet I find your answers literary, as well as analytical. Your language seems to be unconditionally linked to the musicality of fiction. Don’t you feel that interviews for writers are created to receive answers that maintain the tone of the author’s fiction? What are the emotions that you relate to the image you just described, “singing a song while swimming underwater”?

  BAM: The approach of the literary critic is so different from that of the fiction writer. The critic wants to explicate and comprehend what the writer may not be of a disposition to explain. The writer is not thinking in those terms. The metaphor above draws from the mystery and the fear of creation and the music that is its aim.

  CDM: In your latest novel, The Girl in the Blue Beret, Marshall Stone, an American WWII veteran who was a B-17 bomber pilot, now a retired widower in his 60s, revisits France in the quest to find the members of the French Resistance that helped him and other Allied aviators escape occupied Europe once his plane was shot down in Belgium. One of the people he is most keen to locate is Annette, the young girl from the Resistance, who wore a blue beret to be recognized and whose family hid him until he could be safely transferred to Spain. Marshall Stone is inspired by your father-in-law’s experience of being shot down in World War II, and Michele Moët-Agniel, whose family helped him escape from the Germans, is your real model for the girl in the blue beret. When you met her in Paris in 2008, you learned that she and her parents had been arrested during the war. Her father died at Buchenwald, and she and her mother were sent to labor camps. In the novel, Annette’s family is betrayed and they are imprisoned in labor camps. Annette and her mother survive.

  You visited Chojna, in Poland, in September 2013 because the WWII labor camp, where five hundred women worked in inhuman conditions to build an airfield runway, was located there. The trip could be seen as a follow-up to the publication of the novel. When you showed her photos of the abandoned airfield, where she was forced to work, Michèle, in her eighties now, stared for a long time at one of the pictures of the runway. In your notes from the encounter you describe how her eyes focused on a point “where flowers were growing through the cracks in the pavement.” You add: “Finally she said, ‘I built that.’” This report of such a moving anecdote marks for me the clear difference between your novel and history. I would really appreciate hearing your take on the fine line between fiction that deals with history and the study of a historian.

  BAM: Although they may want to discover and present the fascinating story within their subject, historians don’t normally take the liberties fiction writers do. Fiction writers are generally dedicated to showing a kind of truth that the known facts alone might not reveal. What was it like to be a bicycle courier in World War II? How did it feel to fly a bombing mission? In realistic fiction, within certain boundaries of historical fact, the writer is free to invent characters, descriptions, plots. On the other hand, my friendship with Michèle Agniel has provoked profound thoughts and feelings about some things that actually happened. And that, in turn, is different from reading fiction.

  CDM: Writer Daniel Swift in his review of the novel in The New York Times states the book is a work of “remarkable empathy” (“A War World II Veteran Revisits his Saviors,” 2011). How does it affect your conception of the story when research intertwines with the establishment of personal relationships, when the sources being investigated are loaded with emotions?

  BAM: The Girl in the Blue Beret was an unusual venture for me because it was inspired by real people and their stories. Normally, I am not restrained by any desire to stick to someone’s story. It is much easier to invent. But in this case, not only did some real stories draw me into the subject, but I began to feel a deeper commitment to doing justice to their stories. Still, that did not mean I followed them literally. Rather, it meant that I felt motivated to go as deeply, imaginatively, as I could into the possibilities of their history.

  CDM: Present and past frequently merge in your novels and short stories. At times, recollections seem to assail the characters. This is a constant in The Girl in the Blue Beret, as it was for the Vietnam veteran Emmett in your novel In Country. You explained that the main character in your latest novel, Marshall, had been avoiding the past, and during his European quest, memories start to come forth, at times, when he least expects it (Bloom, 2012, The Art of Word Making). How do you interweave the present and remembrances? Do you approach the representation of traumatic war memories with a spec
ific technique?

  BAM: It was the interplay of two narrative lines—the present, 1980, and the past, 1944. Incidents in the present triggered memories of the past. Psychologically, it was fairly simple. Not all the memories would come at once. For instance, the memories of Marshall’s B-17 being shot down are doled out from time to time—for narrative suspense—before Marshall can face the full impact of the crash-landing. So the reader experiences it gradually, and likewise Marshall slowly comes to terms with his memories.

  CDM: You state the following in the “Introduction” to your short story collection Midnight Magic: “Like me, these characters are emerging from a rural way of life that is fast disappearing, and they are plunging into the future at a rapid saunter, wondering where they are going to end up … I am excited to meet them at a major intersection” (xii). Much has been written about the concept of the Post-Southern reality, an ever-changing simulacra of what the South used to be. As a writer, how do you work with this “intersection” as the setting, with the Post-Southern everydayness?

  BAM: I don’t think about it in these broad terms. I’m an observer of detail. I notice what people have in their shopping carts at the grocery, what they are saying when I overhear them, what they’re wearing, what kinds of jobs they have. The particulars going on in a character’s life reveal this larger concern. You can’t address “intersections” and “simulacra” straight on. You have to hear a character saying, “It’s amazing that I have strong feet, coming from two parents that never had strong feet at all.” I actually overheard that, and it entered my story “Shiloh.” That sentence contains so much. It is the sound of it, the attitude.

  CDM: Is it then from the language, the chosen words, and the details being described that the current South and its features spring up? How do you think a reader unfamiliar with the American South could read, and pick up on, this subtle contextual information?