the storyteller’s tale : Lee Smith is the Latest in a Long Line of Southerners Who Transform the Region’s Voices and Visions into Quintessentially American Novels.

On Writing

I didn’t have an image of a writer [as a child]. I didn’t know any writers. I grew up in the midst of people just talking and talking and talking and telling these stories. My Uncle Vern, who was in the state legislature, was a famous storyteller, as were others, including my Dad. It was very local. I mean, my mother could make a story out of anything; she’d go to the grocery store and come home with a story. And I was a reader. I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t know anybody [else] that was reading; I didn’t have anybody that I shared this with. I was just always reading. I mean, nothing else affords me the kind of intense pleasure that reading does. So it just seemed like writing was the next step.

It was never a question whether I would do it or not. I don’t think it mattered whether I got published. It [was] just really necessary to me. I mean, it’s my work, but it’s also my deepest joy, just to do it every day a little bit--and do it a lot other days. I think it’s my religion. It’s my religion--it’s what I do. I guess my favorite thing is before you even start writing, when you’re sitting down every day just thinking about [it], and it’s all completely fluid in your head and there’re all these people running around, and there’s infinite possibilities of what they might or might not do in the course of the novel. And I’m always thinking about this for several months before I actually start. And I love it. Everything is all intensely alive, and it’s just total possibility, [but] as you write it, in a certain way you’re nailing them down. I mean, it’s very exciting, but it’s also--you’re nailing them down. And when you finish, when you put the book in a little box to send to New York--and a writer I admire, John Ehle, used this image--it’s like putting it in a little coffin. That’s how I feel--you know, it’s just the process of it.

You would have to hear Lee Smith’s voice to fully absorb its range of expression and moods. Of course, anyone who has read one or more of Lee Smith’s seven previously published novels and two collections of short stories--her new novel, “Saving Grace,” is just out this week--will have gotten a good sense of the accent, the passionate and puzzled humanity and fine appreciation of the absurd, but for further insight into its variousness, its unpredictable, almost desperate humor (“I mean, it’s a wild world out there”), the true Appalachian song, you would almost have to attend a reading, as I did recently at the Cameron Village Regional Library in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, where Lee Smith has lived for the last 21 years.

There, a roomful of listeners with no apparent common denominator was transported, without hesitation or exception, to the world of Smith’s latest novel, transfixed by the voice and tale of Florida Grace Shepherd, the daughter of a serpent-handling preacher, and her struggle for salvation. I had read the book carefully, I thought, but Smith’s reading added new dimensions of humor, and of gravity, to it as well. There was a lilt to the language, and an attitude to the words, that almost demanded the author’s voice (imagine Mark Twain reading “Huckleberry Finn” to us, without the intervention of an impersonator or the passage of the years). There was, as always, a fine and unbuttoned declaration of individuality (think of Zora Neale Hurston transported to the mountains of Appalachia), a celebration of the striking uniqueness of her characters and their world.

“Lee Smith taught us to be proud of who we are,” is the way one admirer put it (“If she can get that stuff published, we know we must be OK,” was the way the quote went on), but the author could just as easily turn the expression around. It was her embrace of her own past and the particularity of her own experience that made her proud of who she was, and she could well be seen at the center of a movement, loosely defined as New Southern regionalism and incorporating everyone from Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Anne Phillips, [need comma?] and Cormac McCarthy to Jill McCorkle, Kaye Gibbons, James Wilcox, [need comma?] and Larry Brown, which has found new inspiration in this simultaneous embrace of past and present, this insistent chronicling of the small, heroic battles of the human spirit, a recognition of the dignity and absurdity of the commonplace.

Regionalism alone, of course, could not account for the diverse appeal of all this work, and in many ways the label has served as a barrier to its broader acceptance, as critic Louis Rubin, Lee’s teacher at Hollins College and, later, founder of Algonquin Books, the publishing house that has been a cornerstone of Southern regional expression since 1983, points out. “If Lee’s a regional writer, so is Thomas Hardy. I think the relationship of the literature to the society is very intense, no question about it, but to see that as a limiting factor . . . . I mean, Eudora Welty is an American writer because she’s a Southern writer, not in spite of the fact.” Or, as Lee’s friend, humorist Roy Blount Jr., said less reverentially (but no less appreciatively) of one of her books, “The closest thing to reading this would be reading ‘Madame Bovary’ while listening to Loretta Lynn and watching ‘Guiding Light.’ ”

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Grundy Girl

Lee Smith was born in Grundy, Va., in the coal-mining country in the far-western corner of the state, in 1944. She was a “town girl.” Her father, Ernest, operated the local five-and-dime; her grandfather was county treasure for 50 years; various uncles owned and operated the local movie house, the Piggly Wiggly and the Ford dealership in town. Her mother, Gig, was a “foreigner” from Chincoteague Island on Virginia’s eastern shore who’d “come to do good, she’d come to teach.” Still, it would be wrong to get too much of a sense of privilege in a town like Grundy. There was, says Lee, no real class system--everyone in town went to the same school. If you look at a picture of the neat little house on Main St. that she grew up in, you will see the Dismal River right behind it and, rising in the background, just across the river, the slag heap that the coal company left behind.

“Grundy, Virginia,” wrote Dennis Covington in his recently published “Salvation On Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia,” “[is] a mining town on the lip of a widening river between mountains so steep and irrational, they must have blocked most of the sun most of the day. It is difficult to imagine how children can grow up in such a place without carrying narrowed horizons into the rest of their lives.” “Which I just loved,” cackles Lee, “When I finally met Dennis, he said, ‘I’m sorry what I said about Grundy.’ ” But you know she takes it as a compliment.

What set Lee apart was neither geography nor class but her own situation and imagination. She grew up as what she might herself describe as “deeply weird,” consumed with reading on the one hand (“Oh, I was always having nightmares and little nervous breakdowns and every kind of thing--’Raintree County’ put me to bed”) and social success on the other (“I was Miss Grundy High--I was. I got a set of Samsonite luggage and a steam iron”). She was an only child, born to parents in their late 30s who were themselves not like everyone else, even if her father was “the most loved man in the community” and her mother was elected queen of the Junior Prom every year by the girls in her Home Ec classes. For both parents were what would now be called manic depressive, her father alternating workaholic activity with periods of complete shut-down, her mother suffering similar bouts of crippling depression.

“They were the sweetest people--I mean, they were just wonderful, but it was almost like they were too sweet to live. I mean, they were not tough. And it was interesting, because when one of them was having a hard time, the other would be the strong one, except one time when I was 13 and they were both in the hospital at the same time.”

It did not, Lee insists, stigmatize her in any way. To the town, the Smiths were just “kindly nervous”; if they had to go away from time to time, “things would go on running, my dad’s dime store would go on, I might live with my cousins for a while, but you know, in a town like Grundy there was a high tolerance of any kind of abnormality or unusual behavior. In fact eccentricity was not only tolerated but prized. It was just--I did have a sense that the world was kind of precarious, and there was stuff you couldn’t understand, and there were sad things, and there were complications.”

Perhaps the reading was a retreat, then--one that threatened to get out of hand. The librarian, Mrs. Lillian Elgin, a friend of her mother’s, probably said nothing when Lee read “Jane Eyre,” “Little Women,” “Johnny Tremain” and all of Mark Twain over again, “but every now and then they would try to exercise some control, because I was reading things like ‘The View From Pompey’s Head’ and ‘Forever Amber.’ But nobody else had read the books, so they didn’t know what to tell me to read or not, so I just read everything.” With other neighborhood kids she put out a magazine called The Small Review and wrote plays that they would put on in the breezeway of her friend Martha Sue Owens’ house.

Her first story, written at the age of 8 and printed out on her mother’s stationery, was about Adlai Stevenson and Jane Russell, who went West and became Mormons, the very themes, she says, she is still writing about today. “You know, religion and flight, staying in one place or not staying, containment or flight--and religion.”

She went to the movies every Saturday night, worshiped Grace Kelly and tried to look like Sandra Dee, and wept for days at the tragic, unfair denouement of “Imitation of Life.” She frequently visited A. P. Carter’s store in Maces Spring and heard various members of the Carter family sing and play, and she saw the Stanley Brothers when they performed at her uncle’s drive-in on Saturday night before the movie went on. She lived a worldly life, yet was saved again and again in spectacularly demonstrative fashion--to her mother’s acute Methodist embarrassment. One time at summer camp she heard God speak to her, and “I told everybody about it, and they put me in the infirmary and called my parents--this is really true.” At 16, she went off to boarding school in Richmond (“My father was worried that I would marry my high school boyfriend. Which I probably would have”), where she worked her way through a considerably more extensive library. Then in the fall of 1963 she arrived at Hollins College outside Roanoke, Va.

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Finding a Voice

It’s hard to tell why a kid’s a writer. Sometimes it takes a writer a long time to get going, and then there are the ones who are extremely good as undergraduates but for some reason or other never go beyond that. But then you get the occasional writer like Lee, who you just knew from the very beginning was going to write. I mean, Lee’s a real writer. She writes all the time. She writes when she’s down. She writes when she’s up--that’s just her way of dealing with the world. And you could tell that from the very beginning.

--Louis Rubin

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She felt a sense of release when she got to college. It was the old Jane Russell-Adlai Stevenson story: containment or flight. “I think I had just felt so circumscribed and pigeonholed. By the geography and by the sense that your life is totally determined by who your family is. It’s like, you have to go home with the one that brung you. Don’t get above your raisin’. All this sense of determinism. So I had this kind of break-out period, I just went kind of wild.”

At the same time, Hollins, Class of 1967, was exuberant enough en masse to promote a sense of wildness in almost anyone creative enough to dream. “This group came in the fall of ‘63, and they cut a wide swathe,” says Louis Rubin, who had begun his teaching career six years earlier. “There were seven or eight of them who kind of grouped together. I think three have Ph.D.s; one of them became a good newspaperwoman; Lee, of course, writes fiction, and Annie Dillard writes various things. Remarkable group of kids--they were there for four years, and they just took the place apart.”

For Lee the experience offered not just liberation but reinforcement. “What I fell into at Hollins was like a womb. It was like the warmest, most nourishing possible surroundings for a writer or a would-be writer. I was with other girls who wanted to be writers, we had a creative writing program that was totally nourishing--I mean, they read a work like it deserved to be read. Which it did. And it was just wonderful. I mean, a woman’s college was really important for me. Because I was raised as a Southern girl, where you’re not supposed to put yourself forward, where you’re not supposed to be too smart, if you’re weird, you try to hide it. And I can just see myself never having written--or written with the enthusiasm, or come out into the open as somebody who was passionately interested in this, if I had gone to a co-ed school. I really think that’s true.”

She read passionately, and all over the place, both for her classes and for herself, working her way, alphabetically, through the school library: Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf (she and Annie Dillard were go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band made up of English majors called the Virginia Woolfs), Harriette Arnow and Marcel Proust. There was a strong commitment to work but an equal commitment to exploring the broad “terrain of the imagination,” wherever that voyage might go. “Women’s colleges are not fashionable now,” says Louis Rubin, “but at Hollins, at that stage of the game, they got to do all kinds of things never could have done if they’d gone to Washington and Lee or UVA [the University of Virginia]: edit the newspaper, run the government, be in charge of this, be in charge of that. Freshman year they weren’t satisfied with the college literary magazine, so they published a little one of their own that they called Beanstalks, and by the next year they could just take over: it was extremely good training.”

The summer after junior year, Lee and a half dozen[ other girls decided to emulate “Huckleberry Finn,” and take a raft down the Mississippi. They succeeded in constructing it in Paducah, Kentucky, then ran into bureaucratic red tape, which required them to have a licensed captain. “So we were all on TV crying, right? And Captain Gordon Cooper--he was a riverboat pilot who had retired into the Irvin S. Cobb Retirement Home and never expected to go on the river again--he saw us on TV and emerged from the door of the Irvin S. Cobb in his white outfit and said, ‘I will take these girls down the river.’ And he loved it--I mean, he just had the best time. He was a real story teller, and he never shut up.” The story of that journey, how a free-spirited voyage of exploration was transformed into a media field day (“Well, you know, we had imagined just floating along the river, and then we were on Huntley-Brinkley, and we got famous and people bugged us, and we were met by a jazz band from Preservation Hall when we got to New Orleans, and it was all different than what we thought”) makes for a wonderful tale, but in the end it only goes to show how inextricably art and life are linked both in their clarity and in their confusion.

Because at the heart of Lee’s Hollins experience was her writing. The stories that she composed to start off with, and for which she received encouraging Cs, dealt with “stewardesses living in Hawaii and evil twins,” nothing to do with Grundy or the mountains or the world she came from, until she was assigned a story by Eudora Welty and then, in her sophomore year, heard Welty read. She has described the impact of the experience in a number of different ways, including the manner in which Welty disarmed a passel of academics seeking to know how she had come up with the powerful symbol of a marble cake. “Well,” declared the author, “it’s a recipe that’s been in my family for some time.” A response that would have had to delight Lee Smith, who revels in “the things of this world” while raging against abstraction to this day. Probably, though, her first response was her truest. “It was like a revelation , really, kind of like, oh, well, OK, well, I can write about anything . I can write about the people that I knew growing up and everybody I heard my daddy talking about--I mean, I can write stories about this!”

She devoured Welty’s work, and the work of James Still, a transplanted Alabamian who had come to Knott County, Ky., in 1932 to “keep school” and whose 1940 “River of Earth,” an Appalachian “Grapes of Wrath,” she discovered all by herself under the S’s in the Hollins library. “At the end of the novel,” Lee has written, “I was astonished to read that the family was heading for--of all places!--Grundy! . . . I read [the] passage over and over. I simply could not believe that Grundy was in a novel! . . . Then I finished reading ‘River of Earth’ and burst into tears. Never had I been so moved by a book. In fact, it didn’t seem like a book at all. ‘River of Earth’ was as real to me as the chair I sat on, as the hollers I’d grown up among.”

What she had found in these writers was not just an echoing voice but an echoing sensibility . The first story that she wrote after her revelation reflected this newfound sense of kinship. “It wasn’t even a story, it was just a sketch. It’s funny, my last image of leaving Grundy to go to Hollins was, I kept waiting for my dad to come home from the dime store so we could drive over. And some of my aunts were over there, too, and they were having what I felt was this totally interminable conversation about whether my mother had colitis or not, and it just went on and on, and I thought my father would never come, and I would be stuck on this porch forever. And I just wrote a little sketch about some women sitting on a porch and talking about whether one of them had colitis. And then later, in the next course, I wrote something about this club we’d had in my neighborhood when I was a kid, and it later turned into my first novel.”

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The Writing Life

“I was strangely fortunate in that I was published when I was real young, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was married and having babies in Alabama [Lee’s two sons were born in 1969 and 1971]. I didn’t know anybody in New York; I didn’t even know my agent. I mean, I was an idiot. I was just totally immersed in my writing and my babies, and it didn’t occur to me that it should be any different.”

She published three novels with Harper & Row in rapid succession, her third, “Fancy Strut,” a hilarious account of the small-town misadventures engendered by a theme-park staging of a sesquicentennial celebration, which was the direct result of two years of reporting for the Tuscaloosa News. But then, under the influence of events in her own life and out of a sense of wanting to return to her “mountain material,” she wrote a disturbing fourth novel, “Black Mountain Breakdown,” about flight and freedom and the impossibility of ever getting out--and no one wanted to publish it.

“Harper & Row wouldn’t touch it, and then my agent didn’t want to handle me either. So I sent the book around to about 20 publishers, and it was turned down, and everybody said, ‘This is so dark, this is so depressing--bleuu!’.

“This was a very difficult period of my life. I was having a hard time even sustaining the idea that I might be a writer, and I decided I needed to find an agent that I could talk to, a woman agent, so I went to New York, and I thought I had found one, but she went to Greece to find herself, and I never heard from her again. Finally, my great good friend, Roy Blount, hooked me up with Liz Darhansoff [her agent to this day], a woman I could really relate to, that I loved--she taught me something about taking myself seriously. I mean, I had always taken my work real seriously, but she read ‘Black Mountain Breakdown’ and she liked it, and she called up on the phone, and she has this real Northern voice, real businesslike, and she said, ‘Well, send me some clips.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, clips?’ She said, ‘Reviews, I mean reviews of your earlier books.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t think I have any.’ And she said--I’ll never forget this, this was kind of a turning point for me, ‘Well, how can you expect me to take you seriously if you don’t take yourself seriously? ‘ And I said, ‘Good point.’ ”

“Black Mountain Breakdown” was finally published in 1980 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, seven years after she first started sending it out and the same year as her divorce from her first husband, poet James Seay, with whom she had moved to North Carolina in 1973. In the meantime, she had begun her exuberantly informal, semi-obsessive documentation of the mountain material--the life, the people, the family bonds, the alternating push-and-pull of the past, the landscape amid which she had grown up and to which, it seemed, like Cyrstal, the broken heroine of “Black Mountain Breakdown,” she was inexorably drawn. “Black Mountain Breakdown” was not the direction in which she ultimately wanted to go. For all of its disturbing power, though, the novel failed to capture the vitality of the mountains, the life that Lee was driven to celebrate in all of its splashy colors, in all of its messy, beautiful, ugly, anarchic reality. To find that, she had to go home.

Almost without being aware of where it was taking her, she began taping relatives, neighbors, friends, “anybody that would talk.” Weren’t they, wasn’t she self-conscious? I ask, from the depths of my own self-consciousness. “Are you kidding?” she says. “They loved to talk.” As for herself, it became “my hobby, my avocation, I began to get addicted to ‘going around.’ And it made me realize--well, it made me doubt the possibility of ever getting it right from an omniscient point of view. I mean, in any given novel. And finally, I began to get a sense that it’s the storyteller’s tale, that the storyteller tells the story the best he or she can, but that it’s always according to the needs, or the vision--and the particular angle of vision--of the storyteller. And so the events themselves don’t mean as much to the story as that it’s coming out of somebody. And when I did decide I wanted to deal with some of this Appalachian material and history, it seemed to me: Who knows what happened in the past? Who can ever say?”

That was the genesis of “Oral History,” a 1983 novel that incorporated a chorus of diverse voices and remains one of her most ambitious undertakings. It offers the complex interweaving of myth and experience, a fragile web combining lyrical realism with gritty lyricism in a form that is very much, and very originally, its own. And yet it is framed by what Lee describes as the most “ramshackle” of devices, as a city girl named Jennifer goes back to her people, “her unexplored roots,” for an oral history project for her professor, Dr. Bernie Ripman. At the beginning of the book she leaves her tape recorder up on top of Hoot Owl Mountain, deserted now because it is thought to be haunted, and the 250-page body of the novel is made up of the ghostly voices that the tape recorder captures.

“Well, you see, after my third novel, the sense of the well-made novel falls apart. It really does. But that was also--you see, I was trying to be a certain way, and finally my marriage wasn’t going to work out, and I wasn’t going to be able to be that way, you know, and my sense of reality and the world and politics and everything was just--I just had to drop, I guess, the well-made novel as a means of expression.”

She started out writing “Oral History” in the third person. “I started writing just straight, standard English, but one of my main intentions was to document and transcribe the mountain speech that I had grown up hearing. But when I wrote it down accurately, it sounded so stupid, juxtaposed alongside the proper English; it made them all sound like they were on ‘Hee Haw.’ And it made it sound like I was condescending to my characters. So finally, I just realized this wasn’t going to work at all, and I decided to let each person speak for herself or himself, and that was the only way I could do it. And just pray that the language that they were using was close to the way it had been. ‘Cause you never really know--but it had to be their own voices, the characters’ own voices, and not me talking about them.”

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Listening to Voices

The novels and the stories poured out of her. “Family Linen” was a multi-generational comedy mystery; “Fair and Tender Ladies,” an epistolary novel, is her most beloved book, touching in a way that narrowly avoids sentiment by means of the same comic ferocity that has increasingly come to dominate her work. To date there have been at least four babies that Lee knows of who have been named for its heroine, Ivy Rowe. What seems to have captured the imagination of her readers is Ivy’s indomitable tenacity, her dedication to forward motion in the face of life’s many obstacles, a quality that echoes Lee’s own philosophy.

Women come up to her all the time to tell her how they have been inspired by Ivy, to let her know how Ivy’s example gave them the strength to go on, something I witnessed one evening at dinner when a woman who recognized Lee from her book-jacket photograph tentatively approached. She had read the book when her mother was dying, she said, and it had meant so much to her. In a way this doesn’t seem to surprise Lee all that much, because Ivy gave her the strength to go on, too; it was written at a time when her own mother was dying, she tells the woman, and she faced other domestic crises as well. Writing the book helped her to keep her own life together.

In 1990, she won a Lyndhurst Prize to study the history of country music as background research for the novel that would become “The Devil’s Dream.” It is the story of a family like the Carter Family in many respects, recounted through several generations up to the present day. Once again it is a conflicted tale in which success carries within it the seeds of failure; the very independence of Katie Cocker, its contemporary heroine who directs her own life, who produces her own records, doesn’t come without a price. Empowerment is always at the expense of connection. It’s the eternal conundrum of country music, it’s the eternal conundrum of life: As you sing a song that arises from a particular place, “what you want, of course, is to be successful, and as soon as you’re successful . . . that’s never your place again. You’re always singing of home, but you’re never home. And there’s something about that--I think I feel like that about a lot of things, this intense ambivalence. To me that is the perfect ground for fiction.”

That ambivalence was extended into real life with the publication of “The Devil’s Dream.” For Lee it represented something of a crisis of self-definition. Up until that time she steadfastly resisted pushing herself in the marketplace, both for practical reasons (she had two boys at home) and because she still clung to the idea that it was her job to write, not to promote. “But with ‘The Devil’s Dream,’ I felt like if it was marketed in the right places, in the right way, that it might really sell. I mean, I know my other work is weird, it’s very regional, I’m obsessed with things that nobody else cares about, but here I felt like, this music is universal, there are a lot of people interested in it--people in all walks of life. But I think the publisher’s perception was that people who are interested in country music can’t read. And the people that can read would never presume to be interested in country music. They were just really uninterested, really uninterested in this particular book. And I really got my feelings hurt, because they didn’t care at all.

“So ‘The Devil’s Dream’ kind of broke my heart, and it made me just about decide, well, I’ll just forget about, you know, selling. But then two of my best friends, Susan Ketchin and her husband [the novelist] Clyde Edgerton were upset that nothing more was being done for the book, so for a reading I was going to do in Raleigh, they said, ‘Well, we’re going to sing some songs.’ And it was just so much fun, we had so much fun, and other people started asking us to do it, and we got up this ‘Devil’s Dream’ show, and it was hysterical. We did it on campuses, we did it in Nashville at the Southern Festival of Books, and, of course, I got to dress up in a glitter outfit, even though I can’t carry a tune. So we just had the best time in the whole world, and it ended up--I was kind of pissed off, but finally the publishing of it was so much fun, because we did this show.”

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Pilgrim’s Regress

The new book is, as Lee likes to say, “profoundly weird.” The primitive Pentecostal world that it portrays, whose practices and premises “Saving Grace” simply presents as a given (the story is told by a daughter of a serpent-handling preacher, who doubts her faith but never her father’s power), represents both “what terrifies me and fascinates me the most about the South in a certain way. I see it both ways. I see it as real attractive and also very, very dark. It’s all about giving over yourself, giving up yourself, issues that to me somehow also have a lot to do with being a woman, and particularly a Southern woman. It’s that desire to affiliate, you know, that terror of being on your own and thinking that you shouldn’t be on your own. I mean it’s always easier to do what you’re expected to do and get with the group that will tell you what to do--I’m not articulating this at all, but there’s something about that kind of religion, that kind of fundamental religion, and that kind of father, that is both totally compelling and desirable--and terrifying to me: then you don’t have to make any decisions--ever .”

From the opening passage of the novel to its bleak conclusion, you never doubt the voice or the winning, disturbing humanity of the main character. “Oh, I just loved Gracie so much. In a certain way it was like giving birth to a terrible child.” Much of the narrative consists of Grace’s stubborn struggle to deny her heritage (“I am and always have been contentious and ornery, full of fear and doubt in a family of believers”), and her embrace of it in the end can be taken as either triumph or failure, or both. In the end, like all of Lee Smith’s books, it is non-judgmental and non-categorizable; there are “no big sociological explanations,” there are no more explanations in fact than there were for Eudora Welty’s cake. It is all, as Lee sees it, just another manifestation of experience, “these people are doing this because they want to feel that passion, they want to feel God move on them directly--which I think is [the same reason] why I write. It’s like this woman told me one time, she said, ‘Honey, I don’t know, all I can tell you is, when you have the serpent in your hand, the whole world has got an edge to it.’ Isn’t that great? I mean, you know what she means--that’s really true.”

She wrote the book in a fever, breaking off from the story cycle that was going to be her next book when Gracie’s voice started calling to her and then refused to be still. “I didn’t mean to write this novel, I knew it wouldn’t be something that my publisher would want, or anything, really, that I wanted to write, but sometimes a voice will just come to you so insistently--you know, it was almost like automatic writing once it started.” She has always looked for inspiration in her reading, sought out a familiar touchstone for each book, and for this book it had to be Flannery O’Connor. She went to Milledgeville, Ga., last spring for the annual Flannery O’Connor Festival, reveled in the landscape and in rereading all of O’Connor’s work, returned home and wrote nonstop until she finished, delivering the manuscript to her publisher a year early. “So I never felt like I wrote it, actually--it just came like ee-uuh , and all I could do was just kind of keep up.”

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Lee’s Voice

And so here she stands, once again on the brink of publication, on the brink perhaps of wider fame, about to start a publicity tour of the South by automobile with her husband of 10 years, journalist Hal Crowther (his collection of columns, “Unarmed but Dangerous,” is being published at the same time as “Saving Grace”). She has just been awarded a three-year Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award , and she will use it both to support her writing and to maintain her commitment to the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Ky., where she will teach writing workshops in the adult learning program for those who can read and story workshops for those who can’t. There is a musical adaptation of “The Devil’s Dream” that has just opened in Raleigh (an earlier one-woman presentation of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” had played in Grundy several years ago), there are Grundy connections to maintain, maybe even brandy to be sipped with James Still. And while she will undoubtedly miss her students at North Carolina State (from which she has taken a three-year leave of absence after 14 years of teaching), you have the feeling that everywhere she goes she will be teaching--and learning.

“Very few of your students will actually become writers, but the ones that don’t, you know, have had a chance to really express things, to hear things that they wouldn’t have heard otherwise, to have been in this very special relationship with a group of people. To have read together and to have talked about things that mean so much to them. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, it’s a wonderful sort of process to be engaged in together. And I just think you have to understand, if you’re a young writer, that it’s a life, you’re embarking upon a life, and everything else is going to have to fit in around finding you the time to do it. It’s a life, and it won’t ever be a living probably, it’s just a process, and the product is really not all that important for a long, long time.

“I don’t write anything unless I am totally moved by it. I mean, it’s a totally emotional experience for me. It’s never a rational experience. And it’s always something I feel deeply ambivalent about. I don’t know. I just think when you’re young, you’re more arrogant, and you think that you can fathom out the truth, and then the older you get, it’s like the more paths go off into the forest, and you can’t, you just can’t find your straight way.

“A lot of times for me it has really just been like salvation to write. Because, to anybody--even the people you love the most. Terrible things are going to happen to them. Terrible things are going to happen to you. And you can’t control any of it. But to write is to order experience, to make a kind of ordering on the page, no matter how fragile it is. And it is, of course, profoundly, deeply satisfying--even though it’s not real. It’s like prayer, I think.”