Accent on Kentucky : Novelist Bobbie Ann Mason Harks Back to Her Roots for Inspiration

She was fresh off a western Kentucky farm and frazzled by the big city. Bobbie Ann Mason had never lived in a metropolis before, and when she moved to New York in 1962 to work for Movie Star and TV Star Parade magazine, she attempted what many Southerners had done before.

She tried to lose her accent.

E-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-e, friends told her. Lose that mush-mouth, honey, and get with the program. Mason did her damnedest but failed miserably.

A good thing it was. Today, she’s one of America’s most respected fiction writers, a prize-winning author whose command of dialects and cultural quirks stamps her as a leading voice of the new South.

In earlier works, such as “Shiloh and Other Stories,” Mason has documented Kentucky’s K mart culture with merciless contemporary detail. She’s painted a barren suburban landscape, a place where most folks only dimly remember the Civil War, and malls dot the interstate.

Now, in her latest novel, “Feather Crowns,” Mason turns back the clock to 1900. She explores the world of Kentucky mountain folk, brilliantly capturing their fierce regional pride and almost gentle innocence toward outsiders. It’s a radically different take on Mason’s traditional turf, yet the parallels to the modern world are striking.

“Some may see a connection between the gossip and social pressures in this older time and our own TV culture today,” says Mason, shifting uncomfortably on a hotel chair as a photographer snaps away. “But I also hope the story just plain grabs people.”

In the book, Christie Wheeler gives birth to quintuplets in a remote Kentucky town and the event sparks a national sensation. Pressed for cash, Wheeler and her husband take their infants on a barnstorming tour of the South. But the lectures they’ve planned degenerate into a media carnival. By the end of “Feather Crowns” (HarperCollins), the family is part of a traveling freak show, sandwiched between the fat lady from Arkansas and the snake charmer from Borneo.

It’s a spellbinding read--and a case of life imitating art. As she starts her own national tour, Mason, 53, is bombarded with questions and expected to sound intellectual in front of strangers. Just like her backwoods heroine. It’s that damn city thing again, Mason jokes, as a car alarm shrieks outside her hotel window and a reporter turns on the tape recorder.

Times: You had a strong sense of your own roots. Why did you want to change your accent when you first came to New York?

Mason: You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture. With the accent, it’s an internal dialogue that Southerners have with themselves. We kind of carry around that shame, that feeling of being inferior to the North. I think I did lose some of the accent for a while. Because when I was a graduate student, I was terrified at having to get up in front of a roomful of smart New York kids.

Times: How do you feel about that shame and insecurity now?

Mason: In the South, we’re getting over those feelings. It’s been a revelation and a liberation for me to go back and be a Kentuckian. To be a Southerner again and feel proud. Times: What made you write a novel about 1900 instead of the present?

Mason: It was a personal thing. A matter of looking back into my family and genealogy, to find out where my people came from. Memory is a powerful thing for a writer. And I was trying to imagine the world of my grandparents. It was important for me to understand who I am and where I came from. To get a hold on why I do certain things. Your grandfather did things a certain way, and so do you: that quietness. That reticence. A fierce independence and a humility, a tendency to be intimidated by outsiders. That’s very Southern. You’re kind of taught early on to view the people in town as authorities. You know, people from the North. *

The enemy.

Raised on a 54-acre dairy farm, Mason has tried much of her life to come to terms with city folk. After the brief magazine stint, she studied comparative literature at the State University of New York in Binghamton and then earned a doctorate in English in 1972 from the University of Connecticut. She’s married to writer Roger Rawlings and lives in a small rural Kentucky town, not far from her birthplace in Mayfield, Ky.

Like the people she knew growing up, Mason’s literary characters are deeply rooted--in family, tradition and cultural resentments. Although it’s tempting to contrast the old-timers in “Feather Crowns” with the drifters in her modern stories, all are Southern products. And while they come alive in her books, the author is under no illusion about who reads them.

Indeed, she contends that most of the real-life people mirrored in her stories are too busy making a living to read. There’s a class division involved, Mason suggests, because some folks are never encouraged to explore serious literature. They’re more likely to read romance novels or to watch endless hours of TV. And they love the Grand Ole Oprah.

Times: In “Feather Crowns,” Christie Wheeler’s privacy is destroyed by voyeurs. But she brings it on herself when she goes on tour. Isn’t that reminiscent of people going on shows like Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue today, and baring their souls for millions to see?

Mason: It is. What we’ve seen in the 1980s and ‘90s is nothing new to Phil Donahue. He tapped into something that’s been growing and been with us all along. There used to be freak shows and carnivals in America, long before people could turn on a television set. We’ve always had this appetite for something sensational in this country. People want to know everything, to consume. We overeat. We’re a very indulgent country.

Times: How would you compare the voyeurism of 1900 with 1993?

Mason: It used to be a lot more grotesque. We’ve toned that down in certain ways. We’ve realized that Siamese twins should be cared for as people, not as freaks in a carnival. But in other ways, it’s the same. There’s something in all of us that wants to be on TV and wants to be noticed. The medium’s changed, that’s all.

Times: Your characters carry a dramatic sense of personal loss. That’s certainly true of the heroine in “Feather Crowns.” How much of a Southern theme is this?

Mason: It sure sounds like a Southern problem, doesn’t it? A lot of these people have had shattering experiences. .. And I think the people I’m writing about represent a large strata of America. They’re a group of people who are often ignored. America doesn’t really know about them. And that also explains why there’s such a provincial pride among mid-Southerners. It’s why I insist on writing about Kentucky, and western Kentucky in particular.

*

Part of Mason’s appeal, however, is that she functions so well in different worlds.

When she first wrote stories, her parents were relieved that she didn’t use a lot of big words they wouldn’t understand. Mason was pleased that she could capture the dialects and characters of people so close to her old Kentucky home.

Yet none of that would have happened if she hadn’t caught the attention of movers and shakers in New York publishing. Key among them was Roger Angell, fiction editor of the New Yorker, who was the first literary professional to tell Mason that she had talent. Her early stories needed work, he said, but he encouraged her to keep plugging. Mason continued to send him stories, and the New Yorker finally published her in 1980--her 20th submission.

Since then, Mason has produced two collections of short stories and a novella. Her first novel, “In Country,” about a Vietnam vet, became a successful movie. As her national tour progresses--an Oct. 18 appearance is scheduled at Dutton’s Books in Brentwood--the nervous author insists that she’s not reading reviews of “Feather Crowns.”

She needn’t worry: Critics have been nearly unanimous in their praise, and several say the 457-page novel is her finest work.

Times: What was it like to crank out one story after another for years and being told “no” so many times before finally getting the green light?

Mason: It was truly an effort of will that made me sit down in my late 30s and start writing short stories. For some reason, (Angell) picked up on them. He treated me like a serious writer, and that gave me the confidence to keep plugging away. It’s worked out well.

Times: You’ve said that writers like Vladimir Nabokov and F. Scott Fitzgerald have been big influences on you. What’s the link between their works and yours?

Mason: Well, I’ve always been partial to writers who use the craft of language to create a certain style. I think it’s a love of words and language. When you read a Scott Fitzgerald story, it’s distinctive. And Nabokov also has a distinctive style with language.... I find poetry in the language of everyday people. And when I write about western Kentucky, it’s not a language that’s dead. It’s still very much spoken. And it’s been a motivating force for me.

Times: Enough so that you don’t worry anymore about losing the Southern accent?

Mason: Right. I mean, I tried. But I didn’t do it, did I? Can you tell? (Long pause.) Good!