Patchwork Read online

  Praise for Bobbie Ann Mason

  “Bobbie Ann Mason is an American master, an American original, and a (sly) American treasure. Funny, as sleuth-smart as Flannery O’Connor, and as Southern, Mason is also courageously godless. Her work is utterly contemporary in its deadpan attunement to the far-off tremors of that apocalypse bumbling toward us. These moments of grace in the aisles of a big box store or among the graves at Shiloh, she reminds us, are more than enough to memorialize our nation, forever.”—Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell

  “Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader.”—New York Review of Books, reviewing Shiloh and Other Stories

  “Synopsis cannot begin to do justice to the complexity, drama, and ultimate benevolence of Mason’s vision.”—Chicago Tribune, reviewing Feather Crowns

  “Bobbie Ann Mason writes with a pure, original voice from the heartland about all of us beyond any borders of state or nationality, gender or politics. Her work has always been from the heart—true, insightful, and honest. She’s a star in America’s literary sky.”—James Grady, recipient of France’s Grand Prix du Roman Noir, Italy’s Raymond Chandler medal, and Japan’s Baku Misu award for literature

  “What an astonishing writer! And here is a generous rattlebag, a quilt of her best materials—from American classic short stories, to novel extracts, to the quick punchy hits of her flash fiction and some of her luminous essays in the bargain. Throughout, Bobbie Ann Mason is fun but never dizzy, full of instruction but never pedantic, frisky but never trivial, important but never ponderous. She is master of the sentence and its best music and understands in her very soul how to (stealthily, quietly) keep her reader spellbound. She is the rarest sort of disciplined writer, possessed of an intuition for the art of sorting out the telling incident, the perfect line of dialogue, the signal impulse in a character’s life, or in her own, and excluding the dross. With Wendell Berry and Robert Penn Warren she is one of Kentucky’s greatest literary artists, meaning she is one of the world’s greatest, nothing less.”—James Robison, author of The Illustrator

  “With Patchwork, fans including me have a rare opportunity in the literary world: to savor a body of work as a whole in one volume and to learn from the author herself about the wellspring of her writing life. Here we find an overview, an essence, of Mason’s pithy, sparkling, often funny stories, her lovely reminiscences of life in rural western Kentucky, her literary essays and interviews, and her hilarious New Yorker riffs on subjects as different as sheep in New Zealand, a Picasso exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and President Clinton’s phrase ‘Adam’s off ox.’ If you’re wondering about this writer’s range, consider her pivot from Vladimir Nabokov to Mark Twain to Elvis Presley. As a kind of provisional summing up, Patchwork is an indispensable addition to any shelf of her novels and stories. Enjoy the delicious feast.”—James Reston, author of A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial

  patchwork

  patchwork

  A

  Bobbie Ann Mason

  Reader

  Introduction by

  George Saunders

  Due to variations in the technical specifications of different electronic reading devices, some elements of this ebook may not appear as they do in the print edition. Readers are encouraged to experiment with user settings for optimum results.

  Because this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices, the notices appear in a section titled “Copyrights and Permissions,” which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  Copyright © 2018 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

  and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN 978-0-8131-7545-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-7550-8 (epub)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-7549-2 (pdf)

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of University Presses

  Contents

  Preface

  Jonathan Allison

  Introduction

  George Saunders

  A Note to the Reader about This Reader

  Bobbie Ann Mason

  I. First Stories

  Offerings

  Shiloh

  Third Monday

  II. War

  FROM In Country

  An Appreciation of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

  Big Bertha Stories

  III. Love Lives

  Love Life

  Coyotes

  Bumblebees

  IV. Beginnings

  FROM The Girl Sleuth

  Reaching the Stars: My Life as a Fifties Groupie

  Reading Between the Lines

  FROM Elvis Presley

  V. Family History

  The Family Farm, FROM Clear Springs

  The Pond, FROM Clear Springs

  VI. Nancy Culpepper

  Nancy Culpepper

  The Prelude

  VII. More Love Lives

  Memphis

  Midnight Magic

  Wish

  VIII. Whimsy

  La Bamba Hot Line

  Sheep Down Under

  Hot Colors

  Sanctuary

  All Shook Up

  Hear My Song

  Terms of Office

  IX. Fiction and History

  FROM Feather Crowns

  X. Literary Meanderings

  The Universe of Ada

  Introduction to Mark Twain’s The American Claimant, 2004 edition 298

  XI. Atomic Fact and Fiction

  Fallout

  FROM An Atomic Romance

  XII. Zigzagging

  With Jazz

  Charger

  XIII. Another War

  FROM The Girl in the Blue Beret

  The Real Girl in the Blue Beret

  XIV. Zanies

  Whale Love

  with Meg Pokrass

  Talking through Hats

  with Meg Pokrass

  XV. Dancing

  Quinceañera

  The Horsehair Ball Gown

  XVI. Flash Fiction

  Corn-Dog

  The Canyon Where the Coyotes Live

  Car Wash

  Cumberbatch

  The Girl in Purple

  The State Pen

  Falling

  XVII. The Hot Seat: Interviews

  BOMB magazine, 1989

  Missouri Review, 1997

  Transatlantica, 2015

  2paragraphs.com

  Copyrights and Permissions

  About the Author

  Preface

  Jonathan Allison

  The University Press of Kentucky is proud to publish Patchwork: A Bobbie Ann Mason Reader, which brings together many of the author’s most beloved short storie
s and excerpts from her novels and memoirs, as well as essays, interviews, and recent work. In its variety and brilliance, it is certainly a “patchwork,” as the title suggests, but the contents have been carefully selected by the author to highlight themes such as war, love, marriage, and family history.

  As a writer, Mason rose swiftly to the national stage. Publication of her first story, “Offerings,” in the New Yorker marked the beginning of a long relationship with that magazine, where she has published many stories and pieces of reporting, some of which appear in the present volume. Her work, although often regional in setting, has national and international significance and appeal. If Mason is a great southern writer, she is also a great American writer and, as one critic noted, one of those writers who, “by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader” (New York Review of Books).

  “Shiloh” portrays the relationship between Leroy, a truck driver, and his wife, Norma Jean, who are haunted by the memory of their child, who died in infancy. Complex, compassionate, and poignant, the story became a contemporary classic and is one of the most widely anthologized stories in high school and college textbooks. The book that soon followed, Shiloh and Other Stories, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reviewing the collection in the New Republic, Anne Tyler described Mason as “a full-fledged master of the short story.” Critics began associating her with a new wave of short fiction emerging in the 1980s, including Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Richard Ford. Reflecting on this period, Mason recalled, “My work was about working-class characters whose inner lives were not often portrayed in the pages of the New Yorker magazine, so this created a stir,” and she began to feel “freer to write about so-called ordinary people, with the conviction that no one, after all, is ordinary.”

  She says her style “comes out of a way of hearing people talk.” She has a good ear for ordinary speech, and few authors depict the understated but subtly revealing dialogue of friends, mothers, daughters, and married couples better than she does. She identified with Elvis Presley because he “was so familiar—and he was ours! I don’t remember the controversy he stirred up because everything he did seemed so natural and real, and he was one of us, a country person who spoke our language.” This says something about her impulses as a writer: staying true to a voice, a tonality, and a form of language. “I write in plain straightforward English,” she says, “often in the language and cadences of rural and small-town Kentuckians. I hear the music of their speech, and I feel it conveys their attitudes toward the world. It is in that language that I tell their stories.”

  Much of her work deals with war and the grief and trauma that it leaves behind. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times described her first novel, In Country, as “a novel that, like a flashbulb, burns an afterimage in our minds.” It concerns a seventeen-year-old girl, Sam Hughes, whose father died in combat before she was born, and through memories gathered from her taciturn uncle and others she tries to imagine what the experience of Vietnam was really like, as opposed to the fantasies conveyed by TV and movies. When she finally reads her late father’s overwhelmingly blunt, factual war diary, she realizes how many illusions she has nursed for years. The novel begins and closes with a journey to the Vietnam War Memorial, where the splintered, multigenerational family is finally united in grief as they stand before the etching of Sam’s father’s name. As in much of Mason’s work, sprawling suburban and country landscapes are described in pithy detail, including the Howard Johnsons, Country Kitchens, and Exxon gas stations along the interstate. Popular music is everywhere on radios and stereos, from the Doors to Bruce Springsteen, sifted through the sensibility of the narrator, creating a vivid soundscape.

  Mason’s world is a place you can see clearly, but it is also a world of feeling. She has an extraordinary eye for detail, as when Leroy in “Shiloh” notices for the first time “the peculiar way goldfinches fly past the window. They close their wings, then fall, then spread their wings to catch themselves.” Her characters appear with clarity preceding a particularly dramatic revelation, as when Norma Jean is depicted “picking cake crumbs from the cellophane wrapper, like a fussy bird,” just before she declares, unexpectedly, “I want to leave you.” In Nancy Culpepper, Nancy watches her boyfriend during a tense moment at her parents’ dinner table: she “watched him trim the fat from his ham as precisely as if he were using an X-Acto knife on mat board.” Below the surface of the details, there are currents of feeling. When he tries to understand his relationship with the past, at the Shiloh historic battleground, Leroy realizes the limits of his capacity to understand even his own past: “Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history.” It is precisely “the insides of history” and of lived experience that Bobbie Ann Mason recovers in her fiction, portraying with consummate artistry the relationship between the world she observes and her characters’ inner lives, with all their hopes and dreams.

  Introduction

  George Saunders

  1.

  When I was a grad student back in the 1980s, Bobbie Ann Mason was considered one of the Southern reps of the so-called “dirty realists” or “Kmart realists.” Her work was praised for its frank, unabashed inclusion of elements then supposedly unusual in American literary fiction—television, brand names, pop culture, apartment complexes, malls, etc. Although she was rightly considered a master of the short story in this mode, reading her work again, I see what a short-sell this view was. Bobbie Ann Mason is a strange and beautiful writer indeed, and if she is a realist, she is that best kind of realist: an emotional realist. Her stories exist to gently touch on, and praise, even mourn, what it feels like to be alive in this moment, or in any moment, and her representations of American life are beautifully compressed and distorted, as all great art must be—to purpose—and that purpose is to embody an organic beauty that melds sound, sense, and substance.

  The first book she ever wrote was an unpublished riff on Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, on the subject of the Beatles. To my ear, even her more realist stories—the ones that began appearing to great acclaim in the New Yorker in the early 1980s—retain that essential postmodern energy. Though they concern ostensibly real people, often working-class, from Kentucky, and don’t include any overtly po-mo elements, their shapes are new and odd and truthful. (Also ornery and funny.) Like the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms, Mason seems to reflexively reject the compunctions of Freytag’s Triangle, that creative writing chestnut that would divide stories into Exposition, Rising Action, and Climax. Especially her stories seem averse, in their endings, to the too-easy solution of the existential problems they have worked so hard (in their beginnings and middles) to construct. A Mason story quietly builds to a point of tension (a tension often sorrowful), and then, in a move that feels courageous and culminant, the story refuses to explode falsely. The characters are often left right there on the hook, or on a nearby, similar hook. (“The goal,” she has said, “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.”) Even when a character takes action, the reader may not be convinced that this new direction will lead to real freedom or happiness. Mason’s is an approach devoid of falsification. She is OK, it seems, with the notion that American lives (and life in general) may be fundamentally sad, at least upon first examination.

  2.

  An early influence was Nabokov, and Mason’s stories contain some of the most precise and therefore poetic descriptions of nature in contemporary American literature. There are beautifully real gardens in her work, the kinds of gardens people actually have, and descriptions of fruits and vegetables and fields and flowers and weeds that wi
ll make you want to go sit in your own neglected yard and try, for once, to observe the way Mason does, which is to say, with all the senses engaged and the language center set on wide-open. These descriptions are the result of awareness-of-world, and that awareness extends even to the non-agrarian, reminding us of how pleasurable it is to read depictions of actual human noticing. (In her first New Yorker story, “Offerings,” for example, there appears this zinger: “Later, with a perverse delight, she sees a fly go by, actually trailing a wisp of cat hair and dust.”)

  These reminders of the freshness and immanence of the natural world are all the more moving because we feel that the more complete and organic relation to the land that, say, the grandparents of these characters might have had is coming to an end, and that the knowledge these descendants retain of nature is vestigial and fading.

  3.

  In Mason’s work people are often struggling under that particular form of contemporary distress brought about by paucity of resources, both material and spiritual. Distant forces seem to be conspiring to make these people peripheral, inconsequential. The stories are full of divorces, separations, marriages barely holding together; and the characters take up hobbies to fill the void, including minor fascinations with pop-cultural figures, those tentative mini-Gods. True religion has moved away from these people, or they from it, and where religion exists, it seems to share some taint of the material: it serves as a cudgel, or a social marker, a way for one person to assert superiority over another. (When someone, in a Mason story, invites someone to church, it is often a way of saying, “I feel there is something wrong with you” or “I know something you don’t.”)

  So you could say, as critics have, that Mason is writing about a particular form of late-twentieth-century American sadness, a moment during which something has fundamentally shifted in the American ethos. The way I would say it is that she is bearing witness to our descent into a new era of pure materialism. This, for me, is the essential energy of Mason’s work: the sense of loving, vibrant human beings stymied by the systemic rebuttal of their vitality.