Natasha Whitton

12/15/2000

Clear Spring to the Past: A Life of Writing   For any author, the complex negotiations of text and context involve, to some degree, explorations of artistic identity. The prose of Southern writer Bobbie Ann Mason is inextricably tangled in her autobiography and in the geographic place of her ancestors. Mason was born and raised in the heartland of rural Kentucky near the quiet hamlet of Mayfield. The eldest daughter of a long line of agriculturalists, she was raised on a small dairy farm during the middle of the twentieth century, a pivotal period for the small-time American farmer. Mason's father, Wilburn, had returned to the family homestead following the second World War and settled into a life following in the footsteps of his father and his father's father. Although Mason's mother, Christy, had hoped to venture beyond the confines of her in-law's property, and did at one point open a roadside restaurant near the main highway in town, she was unable to break free from the grinding routine of the farm. Growing up, Mason was acutely aware of her family's isolation and longed to follow the fates of the cars that passed through Mayfield on their way to more exciting destinations. An avid reader, she was drawn to the mystery stories of the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew. Not only was she interested in the exciting locales that the young sleuths visited, she also enjoyed puzzling out the mysteries. During her middle and high school years, Mason was able to enter that outside world of excitement and mystery by serving as the coordinator of the fan club for the Hilltoppers, a male quintet that made their way onto the national scene from Western Kentucky. After finishing high school, Mason completed a bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, majoring in English. Intending to pursue a career as a writer, Mason moved to New York after her graduation and worked as a journalist. Although never losing sight of her dream to write, she eventually returned to school, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. In her fledgling career as a writer, Mason repeatedly received advice not to write about anything so boring and mundane as her life in Western Kentucky. She often felt like a hick among the slick northeasterners that she met during her time in New York and later in Connecticut. When Mason did finally find her voice, however, her success came as she embraced her past and explored her homeland, creating vivid characters and placing them in the scenes of her childhood landscape and the changing society that she found on her frequent visits home. Mason's first collection of short stories appeared in 1982 and received the Ernest Hemingway Award. Soon after, she began to receive popular acclaim and academic attention. Three novels and three collections of short stories later, Mason recently tackled the complicated story of her genealogy directly. Beginning with the story of her parent's lives, Mason slowly winds her way back through the closet of her family, finding more than one skeleton along the way. With this newly published autobiography in conjunction with Mason's frequently published non-fiction works in journals such as The New Yorker, I will explore the connection and interrelation of Mason's life and her fiction, particularly in the character of Nancy Culpepper as the counterpart of this examination. In her attempt to make sense of and reclaim her "self," Mason looks to the lives of her parents and ancestor: "I read so much into my parents," she writes. "I read the character and history of American in them as if they were a book." (Clear Springs, 280) Because of this thorough "reading" of her past, Mason's realistic novels and short stories explode with the tangible sensations of the conflict and turmoil of the displaced children of what was once the backbone of American society, the professional farmer. The interplay of text and cultural history dynamically illustrates the author's sense of her own story as well as that of a particular time in American history. In examining the fiction and autobiography of Bobbie Ann Mason, I will rely on the critical practice of life writing as described by Marlene Kadar as well as a more general analysis of female "self in text." In the introduction of Essays on Life Writing, Kadar traces the evolution of life writing from genre to critical practice. Beginning with the strict view of life writing as a genre in the eighteenth century when it could basically be equated with the term "biography," Kadar then moves to an explanation of the expansion of this genre in recent decades due primarily to the research of "gynocritics" absorbed in the task of recovering lost female life writing in forms other than biography. Kadar, however, chooses to move beyond even this more liberal genre to an understanding of life writing as a critical practice, including a more complicated understanding of writer and reader. Her problem with the expansion of life writing is that she still feels that the genre "is understood by new critics, for example, as primarily 'nonfictional,' a term with which Quebec feminist fiction theory, deconstruction, and postmodernism have some difficulty. Nicole Brossard wrote: 'In reality there is no fiction.'"(1) The genre need no longer be limited to autobiography or even biography but should include all types of literature. In this critical practice, life writing underscores the relationship between autobiography and fiction, illustrating that looking for "truth" in non-fiction may be as difficult as finding the "real" in fiction. As John Paul Eakin points out: Autobiographers themselves, of course, are responsible for the problematic reception of their work, for they perform willy nilly, both as artists and historians, negotiating a narrative passage between the freedoms of imaginative creation on the one hand and the constraints of biographical fact on the other.(2) Mason walks this tightrope in the retelling of her life story and that of her family. Some details and certain scenes and settings are familiar to the reader of her fictions, blurring the fine line even further. Before we begin to analyze the fiction more closely, however, I believe that it would be helpful for us to get the names of the Mason and Culpepper families straight. Nancy Culpepper resembles Bobbie Ann Mason and the details of her life that she has revealed in her autobiography and other non-fiction venues. Her parents, Wilburn and Christy, parallel Spence and Lila Culpepper, and Wilburn's parents, Bob and Ethel become Amp and Rosie. Mason has two sisters, Janice and LaNelle, and a brother Don. In the Culpepper family, there are a total of three siblings, Lee, Cat, and Nancy. Other relatives share family semblance, but these are the most important for this examination. Nancy debuts in Mason's first collection of short stories, Shiloh and Other Stories, in a selection bearing her name, "Nancy Culpepper." The story opens as Nancy, living in small town Pennsylvania with her husband, Jack, and their young son, Robert, learns of her parent's plans to place her grandmother in a nursing home. Worried that treasured photos and her granny's memories will be lost in the move, Nancy decides to make a trip home and alludes to her desire to return to Kentucky permanently. Bobbie and her husband, Roger, lived and taught for a number of years in the Pennsylvania area before purchasing land and eventually moving back to Kentucky in 1990. When Nancy arrives home, her parents are preparing to move granny to the nursing home. Mason's parents did not consider putting Bob's mother in a home, but instead spent most of their lives moving back and forth between their home and the original family homestead. Mason's story allows her to work through the possible consequences of the decision that her own parents chose not to consider. In the story, Nancy is especially interested in learning of a relative who bore her name years earlier. Mason has a similar affection for Bobbie Mason who died around the turn of the century, "from blood poisoning, after giving birth to twins." (Clear Springs, 268) Fictionally, there is a picture of Nancy's namesake in the attic, "walled up behind some insulation" (Clear Springs, 217) and Nancy would like would like to try to find the picture, even if she has to tear down the wall. She has reverted to her maiden since hearing about her ancestor, but reminiscences at length about her marriage to Jack. They were married in the Northeast without the family present by a chain-smoking minister, like Mason and Roger. The wedding pictures were taken by a friend and the reception was a casual gathering of friends. In their first married home, both Mason and Nancy remark on the heart-shaped rock in the fireplace above the mantel. Near the end of the story, Nancy sits down with her grandmother to talk to her about her past and learn more about the extended family that she has lost track of in her years away from home. The scene is nearly identical to one the Mason writes of in Clear Springs. She sits with the matriarch of the family patiently showing her pictures and asking for details of their lives. In a self-deprecating manner, Granny responds that "there wasn't anything to tell." (Spence + Lila, 193) When Mason asks to write the names on the back of the photos, Granny is confused-after all, she knows who everyone is, but both Nancy and Mason persist in penciling the names into a notebook. The past is slipping away as Nancy's Granny slips into a nursing home and Mason's Granny slips ever closer to her grave. Nancy Culpepper reappears in the next story in the collection, "Lying Doggo." This time, she stays home in Pennsylvania while helping to ease the suffering of the family dog, Grover Cleveland, who is well past his prime. With this story, it is more difficult to draw comparisons between the events and Mason's life story primarily because her marriage remains an area of stony silence. In the autobiography, Mason speaks briefly of her wedding ceremony and the honeymoon period of the first married years. Roger occasionally reenters the prose but always in lurking in the background, never in plain sight or fully fleshed out as a character. Mason has written a number of short stories about women trapped in Kentucky in unhappy marriages, but none of these experiences seem to fit her own. Another important departure witnessed in "Lying Doggo" is the focus on Nancy and Jack's son, Robert. Mason and her husband have never had children, although she has referred to her work as a substitute for mothering. Mason's career choice for Nancy is also interesting. She works as an assistant principal at a small private elementary school, and even more ironically reads the fiction of a friend from school that seems to be based on people that she knew in college. The overall affect of the mixture of fiction and fact is a clear illustration of Mason's depth as a writer by taking a character closely related to her own personal history and placing her in a unfamiliar milieu. The story of Spence + Lila is based on the relationship of Mason's parents, Wilburn and Christy. The central conflict in the novel is Lila's battle with breast cancer and her attempt to come to terms with her own mortality, as Spence faces the possibility of losing her. In Mason's autobiography, Clear Springs, she writes of a similar family drama. Christy Mason had a hysterectomy after being diagnosed with cancer. In fact, in an interview with Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver, Mason describes how she started the novel, and it was indeed based on her mother's experience: At 11:00 o'clock one morning I was looking at this notebook I had been keeping when my mother was in the hospital having a mastectomy. I had taken a lot of notes. I started writing them out and after five minutes I realized, "I'm writing a novel." I had all this material and I could see the whole book. (Lyons and Oliver, 39) Ironically, Mason's mother had a hysterectomy according to the autobiography. It is the fictional character, Lila, who had the mastectomy. If Mason herself confuses her fiction and reality, what does this mean for her writing process? As the book began to take shape, Mason focused particularly on the characterizations of Spence and Lila and peppered them generously with the details of her parent's lives. First, the patriarch of the Mason home, Wilburn bears a marked resemblance to Spence. Both tolerate cats without doting on them and enjoy giving them strange and exotic names, like Abraham. Both Spence and Wilburn share a wartime experience in the navy. For both men, the war was a larger animal in which they had a small part and were unable to grasp in full. They also dislike country music, enjoy driving foreign cars, and repeatedly comment, "I ain't that old." Besides the immediate and obvious coincidence of their cancer, Lila and Mason's mother, Christy, also share a number of character traits and common incidents. Both were abandoned at a young age by their fathers and lost their mothers while still adolescents to childbed fever after remarriage. The women had nearly identical childhoods after the loss of both parents, being farmed out to relatives who didn't necessarily appreciate having an extra mouth to feed. Mason translates the imagery from one her mother's most traumatic experiences into an equally dramatic yet altogether different experience. In the novel, Lila remembers: A cat drowned in the cistern once. The men drained the cistern, and her cousin Dulcie, who bossed everybody, made Lila descend a ladder into that dark pit to get the dead cat. "You're so crazy about cats, you're the right one to send," Dulcie said in a practical tone. Lila brought the cat up in her arms, slimy and already rotting, and for a long time after that the water wasn't fit to drink, but they washed in it. Even now, whenever Lila sees a dead cat she recalls that cat in the cistern. (Spence+ Lila, 71) Christy also enjoyed carrying cats around her relative's farm, but instead of having to retrieve a rotting cat from the cistern, Christy was made responsible for removing a chunk of watermelon from her choking grandmother's throat. When asked to reach her hand back into Mammy's throat because her fingers were small: Chris did as she was told. Her grandmother's head was limp, and Chris had to force her fingers past rotten teeth. The odor was like a putrefying dead animal. She pulled out the slippery piece of watermelon. But Mammy Hicks was dead. (Clear Springs, 223-4)   In both cases, the incident leaves a deep impression on the young girl. Again, as with Spence, Mason pays close attention to more mundane details. The lunch that Christy fixes before heading off for her day of factory work is identical to that later created by the fictional Lila, right down to wrapping the lettuce separately. Like Christy, Lila worries that her husband does not attend church with the rest of the family. She is afraid that because "he didn't [go to church] they wouldn't end up in heaven together." (Spence + Lila, 58) After retirement, both women travel extensively, seeing the world that has passed them by during all of those years working on the farm, and both women bounce back quickly after their surgeries-too much to take care of around the house. In the character of Nancy Culpepper, Mason comes closest to approximating her own life experiences. In childhood, both Nancy and Mason were difficult to wean and became seriously ill from pneumonia while their fathers were away in the war. They also share a traumatic childhood memory of a beating received at the hand of their grandfathers. Both found the incident difficult to forget and to place in among the pleasant childhood memories of their grandfather. Both girls love to read and keep their noses in a book, even as adults waiting in the hospital. Spence comments that "Nancy would probably read a book during a nuclear attack." (Spence + Lila, 151). Mason and Nancy also share memories of farm work, especially helping out in the repetitive combine work on the tractor with their fathers. Both girls look for ways to eliminate their jobs and recreate popular music in their heads as the tractors groan down each row, foreshadowing their eventual decampment from the farm to the wider world of experience. The central theme of the novel is the way in which Spence and Lila relate to each other after so many years of marriage, and the outline of the story of their courtship and lives together closely parallels that of Wilburn and Christy. Spence and Lila ran off to get married before creeping back to Wilburn's parents' house. Christy was introduced in the morning to Wilburn's surprised parents, Bob and Ethel. Mason works to understand how her mother must have felt waking up in this new home as an outsider. She was accepted into the family with the understanding that she was the addition. Life would continue as it always had, and it would be Christy's job to bend to the schedule of her in-laws. Lila's remembrances of this event as she lays in the hospital are shorter than those in the autobiography but congruent: They sneaked into his house before daylight, and at milking time he brought her out of his room to meet his astonished parents. She was tall and thin, but even then her breasts were large, and they jutted forward into the surprised line of sight of her new mother-in-law. (Spence + Lila, 112) The emphasis in this version on the size of Lila's breasts underscores the loss that she is experiencing due to the mastectomy. Mason revisits Christy's feelings in Spence + Lila as if this retelling of her mother's struggle will bring her closer to grasping who her mother is and what forms her character. So what do all these similarities between Mason's life and her fiction tell us about her writing style? Are they merely coincidences-memories that crop up unconsciously? How does the context inform the text? How do the stories related to her personal family life inform the larger history of American culture at this time period? Mason's use of family facts in her fiction places her in the larger context of female life writers like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. The self that shows through in Mason's texts is carefully crafted to illuminate certain aspects of her life. Dark corridors remain, but the reader must remember that the author is still alive. Perhaps, as in the case of Virginia Woolf, even closer ties to her fiction and her life will emerge after her death. Woolf readily admitted in her introduction to Mrs. Dalloway that "nothing is more fascinating than to be show the truth which lies behind those immense facades of fiction-if life is indeed true, and if fiction is indeed fictitious. And probably the connection between the two is highly complicated." (vi) In writing her fiction, Woolf explored the unclear boundaries separating her fictional craft and her factual life. The relationship between the two became available to scholars when her diaries were published and the result has been a marked increase in the understanding of Woolf as a writer and craftsman of experience. For Mason, the intersections represent more than coincidence. She purposely confronts certain painful memories in her history and works through them in the process of writing. Sometimes she even seems to work out possible conclusions before they arise in her life. Perhaps, Mason, herself, can explain this complicated relationship best. In the introduction to her most recent collection of short stories, Midnight Magic, she writes, When I wrote these stories, I was venturing along roads that looked familiar, but which I found myself seeing in a new way. I discovered that a backlog of imagery is stored in the dark recesses of the mind, as if waiting to emerge at night-like Dracula. That's what the creative act is for me-a challenge to inhibition, a delving into the hidden and forgotten. It's as though a cornucopia has been stoppered and needs to be uncorked by the muse-the midnight magic, Cinderella's glass coach, whatever-to divulge its extravagant contents. (xi) Bibliography   Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Lyons, Bonnie and Bill Oliver. Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Kadar, Marlene. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Mason, Bobbie Ann. Shiloh and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. _____. Midnight Magic. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1998. _____. Clear Springs. New York: Random House, 1999. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: First Modern Library Edition, 1928. 1. Marlene Kadar. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, 5. 2. Paul John Eakin. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985, 3.

More on Mason: