Novelist Returns to the Rural Upbringing She Tried to Flee

Most Americans nowadays grow up in cities or suburbs. Many have never even spent time on a farm. Yet somehow, the basic elements of country life seem strangely familiar. Perhaps this comes from having watched “The Waltons” or “The Andy Griffith Show.” Or from being exposed to country music. And, of course, long before country became a staple of mass media, there were generations of writers, from Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland and O.E. Rolvaag to William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, whose novels and stories have left us with indelible impressions of rural life in New England, the Midwest, the West and the South.

The subject’s appeal clearly has a lot to do with the quality of the writers who have written about it. But quite apart from this, the agrarian ideal has a strong hold on the American imagination. Ever since Colonial times, immigrants to the New World dreamed of farming their own land. A republic of family farms was how Jefferson and others envisioned the new nation. The ideal promised freedom, self-sufficiency, fruitfulness and a life lived in harmony with nature. The reality, however, often meant a struggle to make a living, heavy debts and finding oneself at the mercy of weather, blight, pests and other of nature’s caprices.

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The stories and novels of Kentucky-born Bobbie Ann Mason poignantly express this ambivalence. Having drawn upon her rural upbringing in such fictional works as “Shiloh and Other Stories,” “In Country,” “Spence + Lila” and “Feather Crowns,” Mason returns yet once more to her sources, this time in a nonfiction memoir. Both kinds of writing require a combination of memory and imagination, attentiveness and empathy, and in this memoir, Mason’s intimate knowledge of growing up on a small Kentucky farm is supplemented by her ability to imagine the lives of her mother, her grandmother and others who came before her.

Hard work, thrift, vigilance, responsibility and a life lived in close touch with the cyclical rhythms of the seasons: Mason knows the virtues of rural ways. Yet much as she deplores the gradual, seemingly irreversible, decline of the family farm, she recognizes the seeds of that decline in her own heart. Living on a farm made her eager to seek a different kind of life in the wider world:

“My mother watched the skies at evening for a portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign. Our livelihood--even our lives--depended on forces beyond our control. . . . I hated the constant sense of helplessness before vast forces. . . . Farmers didn’t take initiative, I began to see; they reacted to whatever presented itself. . . . I believed progress meant freedom from the field. . . . That meant moving to town.”

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Movies, radio and television also fed Mason’s dreams of becoming part of a grander, more glamorous world. The books she read seemed to be sending the same message: Even Jo March of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” moved to New York to pursue her writing career.

Mason’s creative writing teacher at the University of Kentucky also advised his students that they needed to live more “intensely,” which, in his view, meant to live in New York. Mason headed there as soon as she graduated, and as she wryly recalls, saw 143 movies--from “Lolita” to “La Dolce Vita,” in a single year.

Her college writing teacher, who’d already made overtures to her as a student, reappeared in New York, offering to make her his mistress, so that she could have the kind of “life experience” so necessary to becoming a writer. (Although Mason felt herself to be rather naive and inexperienced, evidently she was not naive enough to fall for this old line.)

Mason has come to see her own life as a kind of ongoing dialogue between rootedness and wandering: “It’s an old question . . .” she reflects. “Who is better off, those who traipse around or those who stay in the same spot, growing roots? The way I see it, a clever cat prowls, but calls home occasionally.”

Plain-spoken, thoughtful, sometimes humorous, but never cloying, Mason’s recollections of growing up in the country, striking out for the wider world in the 1960s, and then spiraling back toward her roots, are sure to resonate with a wide audience.