Re-Creation of Western Kentucky : Writer Bobbie Mason Gives Life to ‘Ordinary People’

Here in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, amid cornfields and 18th-Century stone houses and whitewashed barns decorated with ancient hex symbols, Bobbie Ann Mason re-creates Western Kentucky.

Surrounded by the apple orchards and the small towns with their German names, she gives life to a modest literary world of K-Mart clerks, truck drivers, housewives and farmers who live in the rural hills and valleys of a region she left a quarter-century ago.

They are the “ordinary people” who populate her powerful first novel, “In Country,” and they are the unpretentious heroes of the short stories that have, in the past five years, established her as one of the best of a new breed of short fiction writers.

Mason didn’t publish her first story until 1980, when she was 40 years old. And she didn’t start writing seriously until 1976, 1 1/2 decades after she had left her family’s dairy farm near Mayfield, Ky., to get an English degree at the University of Kentucky.

But her unaffected, evocative portraits of rural men and women--especially women--embedded in a changing world of shopping malls and dirt bikes, birth control and divorces, immediately dazzled the big-city critics. Her 1982 collection of short stores, “Shiloh and Other Stories,” won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded her a grant of $12,500 to work on a novel.

Critical Praise

And now that novel, “In Country,” a story of a 17-year-old girl’s growing obsession with Vietnam and her father’s death there, is attracting the same kind of critical praise.

All of which has left Bobbie Ann Mason a little bemused.

“When I read my name in the paper or read something about what I’ve written, it’s not really about me ,” she said, sitting in the living room of the secluded country home just west of Allentown that she shares with her husband, editor Roger Rawlings, seven cats and a collie named Beowulf. “You wrote something, and it’s very private, because you do it alone. And then suddenly you find perfect strangers have heard of it and have read it and have had a response to it, and that’s very gratifying. But it’s always surprising.”

At 45, Mason has spent half of her life away from Kentucky, but her voice still carries a Kentucky lilt. She is a small woman, with short brown hair that falls straight over her forehead. She favors blue jeans and work shirts and denim vests and running shoes. She smiles quickly, and she has a shy, sudden laugh that surfaces when she talks about the appeal her work seems to have, for rural readers who recognize the characters, and for urban readers who wish they did.

“The kind of responses I was getting from the people in the cities or the people in publishing, it was almost as if this was a novelty, this was a whole world they hadn’t known about. They’d say, ‘Who are these people and why haven’t we heard about them before?’ But in the South, I was getting responses like, ‘Yeah, these are people we all know and they’re very familiar.’

‘Feel Cut Off’

“But it was almost as if . . . people in the cities and in modern life feel cut off from something authentic, and they feel like they’re hearing about it through something like the current fiction about ordinary people.

“I think people who are interested in reading about laborers and farmers may in a way romanticize it themselves. They wouldn’t want to be in that position, but it’s comforting somehow to read about it, because they get a sense that those lives are more authentic.

“In fact, I think laborers and farmers have as much existential anguish as anyone else.”

Indeed, most of Mason’s characters are country people who feel trapped in a world bounded by the Holiday Inn and J. C. Penney’s--trapped and yearning to get out. The young leading character of “In Country,” Samantha Hughes, wants to escape Hopewell, Kentucky, and “move somewhere far away--Miami or San Francisco, maybe.” She is distressed by the mundane progress of life, where passage into adulthood can mean going from the local drive-in restaurant to the maternity ward: “Sam used to hang out at the Burger Boy even before she started working there. Lonnie used to pick her up after work and they would drive around. It all seemed so innocent then, but what it amounted to, Sam thought now, was having babies. This was the mating ground Emmett talked about . . . Sam thought about how it used to be that getting pregnant when you weren’t married ruined your life because of the disgrace; now it just ruined your life, and nobody cared enough for it to be a disgrace.”

Longing to Leave

It’s that longing to leave, that sense of yearning and dissatisfaction, that is woven through much of Mason’s work. It’s the same sense that has marked much of her life.

The oldest of four children, she grew up on the dairy farm where her parents still live. Neither of her parents graduated from high school, but they insisted she transfer from the country grade school to the “city school” in Mayfield (pop. 10,725) to improve her education. As soon as she graduated, she moved away to the University of Kentucky. After collecting her English degree there, she headed for New York City.

“I wanted to see the world, and I thought New York was where you started . . . you either went to New York or California.”

After 1 1/2 years of living in the city as a writer for a movie fan magazine (“all I did was go to the movies”), she decided to return to school to avoid the ignominy of “having to work as a secretary or something.” She became something of a perpetual student, attending the State University of New York at Binghamton and the University of Connecticut, eventually receiving a Ph.D. in English literature. She married Rawlings in 1969, and they moved to Covington, Pa., where they lived when he taught English at Mansfield College. When he took a job as an editor for Rodale Press, they moved to the Pennsylvania Dutch country near Allentown in 1980.

In all the years after leaving Kentucky, Mason nursed a notion that she would someday write, but did little to act on it until 1976, when she decided she “didn’t have the commitment necessary to be an academic.” She wrote a novella that summer, demonstrating at least to herself that she could sustain the discipline to write.

Sent Short Stories

In 1978, she began sending short stories to The New Yorker, and almost immediately began receiving encouraging letters from editor Roger Angell. They were all rejection letters, but they were full of enthusiasm. In 1980, the New Yorker published her first short story, “Offerings.” In the next two years, she published a score of stories in the New Yorker, Atlantic, Redbook and several literary magazines--almost all of them focusing on the deceptively complicated lives of the apparently simple people of rural Kentucky. She had found her subject, and her success.

“If I had been writing stories all that time, and collecting rejection slips, I’m sure I would not have been further along than I was,” she said, smoothing the fur of one of her cats, Alice. “It was a matter of experience and getting distance on my subject matter and discovering what my subject matter was. It was a matter of time, rather than practice.”

Her rapid success has not erased that out-of-place feeling she still has, the same kind of feeling that invests her characters.

“I don’t feel at home here at all . . . I never did. I don’t feel like I know much about the North, to write about it, and I don’t respond to it. I think at some point I just decided to let it be alien and to feel like an exile.

“Of course, I never felt at home in Kentucky, either. I felt very much an outsider, because I felt like I had to be different, I had to rebel. I rebelled by leaving, by being relatively anti-social, and by not following the expected patterns.”

But in her stories, Mason shows us a Bobbie Ann that might have been, a Bobbie Ann who might have gotten pregnant in high school and married a truck driver.

“I think the reason I write about the people I do, or create these characters, is that I’m more or less trying to imagine what I would have been like if I had not gotten out of a small town.”

Gradually Taken Over

The characters and their themes seem, sometimes, to have as much control over the author as Mason has over the characters. “In Country,” she said, was gradually taken over by the Vietnam War--a conflict that seemed very remote to Mason when it was happening and which initially had nothing to do with the story she was writing.

“It was a year or so into it before I realized it had anything to do with Vietnam. When I realized Sam’s father was killed in Vietnam, I realized that was a very powerful subject, and that it was one that couldn’t have been written about before, because it was only just now that a new generation was coming of age. Sam’s at that transition period, being at a time when she’s coming of age, and a subject like that does gradually dawn on her. I think that’s exactly what happened with me and what’s happening with America in general as it begins to look back at Vietnam from a convenient vantage point now that 10 years or so have passed.

” . . . I realized it was the center of the story, but even then I didn’t know how to deal with Vietnam. I kept writing all around the issue and not really facing it. But it was something that grew gradually and something that eventually I couldn’t hide from.”

Thrilled Parents

Back on the farm in Kentucky, where her father has been forced to sell his dairy cattle and take up driving a bus for the handicapped, Mason’s success has thrilled her parents. Some of their daughter’s literary notoriety has rubbed off: A team from People magazine visited the farm in September to photograph the farm and her folks, Wilburn and Christie Mason.

“My parents were so proud to have their pictures made, and my mother served them lunch,” Mason said, laughing. “I don’t know whether that’s the goal one should strive for in this world--being in People magazine, but that was great.”

In fact, Mason said, a big part of writing and being recognized as a writer has been realizing her parents’ hopes that she would make it off the farm.

“I think that if they could have had the words for it or really visualized it, this is what they would have thought I’d do. They thought I was smart, and they encouraged me. They thought I would do something smart to get me famous.

“The biggest reward in writing, the real reward, has been fulfilling that dream for them.”