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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0006, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Harriette Arnow is perhaps best known as the writer of numerous historical novels
that dramatize the lives of Appalachian people. These works include The Dollmaker, Hunter’s Horn,
and Seedtime on the Cumberland. In this life history
interview, Arnow offers a vivid overview of her family heritage, reaching back
to the Revolutionary Era. Born in 1908 in Wayne County, Kentucky, Arnow's
upbringing as she describes it was representative of family relationships in the
Appalachian region. Born into a family of five daughters and one son, Arnow
describes the role of southern gender norms in her life and emphasizes her
experiences in school. Especially illuminating is Arnow's description of her
college days, first at Berea and then later at the University of Louisville. In
her early twenties, Arnow worked as a schoolteacher, and briefly as a principal,
in small, rural communities. By the 1930s, however, she began to pursue writing.
Many of her published works were drawn from her experiences growing up in the
South. Other revealing aspects of Arnow's life covered in this interview include
her decision not to marry until she was in her thirties, her experiences in
balancing work and family, her views on labor politics in the 1930s, and her
reaction to critiques of her writing as both "transcendentalist" and
"feminist."
Southern novelist Harriette Arnow discusses what it was like to grow up in Kentucky during the 1910s and 1920s. The teacher-turned-writer focuses especially on her family relationships, her experiences in school and in teaching, her goals as a writer, and her views on marriage and family.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I'm talking today with Harriette Arnow, who has published five novels1 and two social histories,2 a number of short stories,3 and also done some journalistic work.4 And we're in her home today in Ann Arbor, and I'm going to let her tell her own story. Could you tell me first where and when you were born?
I was born in Wayne County, Kentucky. That's the most I can say. It was near Monticello, but the post office, I think it was Coopersville. The government has done away with all those small post offices, so that about all I can say is, I was born in Wayne County in 1908, the daughter of Elias Thomas Simpson and Millie Jane Denney.
And could you give me the exact date of your birth?
July 7, 1908.
And can you tell me first a little bit about your mother's family and what her name was before she married and a little bit about her family and her history?
Wilton Eckley, Harriette Arnow, 1974, Twayne's United States Authors Series (chronology, selected bibliography, and summary of her life and writings).
Mama was Mollie Jane Denney. Her father died, leaving her mother—who was Harriette Foster, married James Braxton Denney—a widow with three small children when she was only in her mid-twenties. And my mother, Mollie Jane Denney, was almost five years old. My Grandmother Denney's people (the Fosters), by that date, had already gone to Missouri. As you know, many people migrated from the South long before we heard of the Southern Appalachian migrant. They usually went to Texas, Missouri, Illinois, and Oklahoma. They went there to farm; they didn't turn north to the industrial centers.
What did your Grandfather Denney do?
He had been a teacher. After his death, Grandma Denney's father-in-law, Jackson Denney (that's my mother's paternal grandfather), was most insistent that they come live with him. And my mother grew up more or less in his home. He was then an old man; he'd been born in 1817, and he knew many men who had been in the War of 1812, and a few of the very old. . . . Born thirty-six years after the close of the Revolution, he knew many Revolutionary soldiers.
Was one or many of your ancestors also in the Revolutionary War? You talk about a Thomas Merritt, a beautiful description at the beginning of Seedtime.5
Yes, Thomas Merritt was on my father's side. On that side I also had a White and a Shrrell who were in the Revolution. On Mama's side there was a Taylor and Anthony Gholson and a Dick who were in the Revolution. My father's Simpson ancestor was a Tory, so the story goes, but the others were in the Revolution.
Do you know when your mother's family first came to this country, where they came, and where they came from?
That I am not certain of. Somewhere I read that "Captain Joseph Collins, Gentleman, led a party against ye Indians." This happened in Virginia in 1753. But I don't know where the Denneys came from. I think they were Scotch-Irish, but I'm not sure.
Is your heritage all Scotch-Irish? You have some French, I think, too.
Yes, my grandmother's name was Harriette LaGrande Foster. And one side of her family—I've never had much time to spend on genealogy, I mean far back—they, I believe, settled on the Santee River.
In Kentucky.
No, the Santee River is in North Carolina. [The Santee River is in South Carolina.]
And then your father's family, do you know when they came to this country?
No, I don't. I only know that most were English. I've tried to get past
Reuben Simpson—that was his great-great-great-great-grandfather—he's the
one who was a Loyalist. So far I've been unable to do so. I haven't
spent any time on it. But the story goes that he was living in Virginia.
Some of his relatives were for the colonists; others were Loyalists. He
didn't want to kill any of them, so left Virginia and went to South
Carolina and was living near the site of
Your Grandfather Simpson, what did he do?
My Grandfather Simpson was a teacher and a farmer.
So it's a long line of teachers in your family.
Yes, and our mother was determined that her daughters should be teachers.
Did your Grandmother Denney work, I mean, for example, as a teacher? Did she work outside the home?
No, she never worked outside the home that I know of. I loved Grandmother Denney, but she was a curious person. When I first knew her, her husband had been dead, I'd say, thirty years, and she still wore, when travelling or going to church, a black silk mourning bonnet with a long tail. She dressed completely in black. At home she would liven up a little. And she visited us. I think when I first remember her, she'd given up housekeeping; I'm not certain. Because she had inherited from her husband a farm which she rented and had some income, though not a great deal. She wore dresses, either white sprigged with black or black with very faint designs in them.
Were they silk dresses?
No, she had silk dresses for church; her good dresses were always black. If you'll wait, do you want to see a quilt she pieced for me when I was eight years old?
Oh, I'd love to.
[interruption]
Your Grandmother Denney—also, I think that you wrote about this or mentioned this—that while she was alive, and I think she died when you were nine?
Ten, the summer I was ten years old.
Did she have you dress in very pretty dresses, and have your hair curled and things? Would you tell me a little bit about that?
Oh, yes, when she was home I'd go to school with these little sausages, you know, down to my shoulders and a bow; all the little girls dressed that way, a great hair bow. Your bow had to stand up, you know.
Did you like having a grandmother who had you get all
Oh, yes, I loved it when she was home. The only thing I had against
Grandmother Denny, she wanted to be busy always, and one of her
activities was knitting lace out of Number 80 white sewing thread. The
lace had points on it, and we would wear it around the tops of our slips
or petticoats
(Laugh)
...and my legs. And usually I had some old chigger bites I'd want to scratch, but in church you had to sit perfectly still.
So Grandmother Denney was quite a lady.
Oh, she was. And another thing she did, she liked to help with the churning or anything, and before churning she'd put on her mitts, which she also knit. I've never seen anyone else wear them; I know it was once the custom. But they were black and, I think, knit of coarser thread than the lace, and they covered the first knuckles of her fingers so that the tips of her fingers and the end of her thumb, but her palm was protected.
Perhaps you should have had those. I remember when you wrote about grinding, and your knuckles got bloodied.
Oh, that was when I was teaching school and I tried to grit corn. So many
of these things they did, in the back
So perhaps you should have had Grandmother Denney's mitts. [laughter]
To do that? I don't know. Really, the word is "grated," but they all said "gritted corn." And oh, the bread was delicious stuff.
Did Grandmother Denney live far away from Burnside, or did she live with you, or what?
She lived in Wayne County near her old home or in it, and our home was in Burnside—that's a small town on Cumberland River—after I was almost five years old. She usually spent most of her winters with us.
And was she a very important figure in your family? Was it different when she was there and when she wasn't?
It was different in many ways, it seemed to me.
Grandma tried harder to make what she called "ladies" out of us. We were not supposed to slump. If she found me sitting the way I am now, she'd make a remark about it and suggest or tell me to walk around a while with a book on my head. And she'd talk about the old days. I don't know whether she'd been to such a school or not where the girls in school wore back boards.
Oh, like a finishing school or something.
Yes. To make them sit and stand straight, and she sighed for the days
when women were well corseted in those corsets. Mama
How did your mother feel about having. . . . I think there were four daughters and one son?
Five.
Five daughters and one son. Did she share Grandmother Denney's, her own mother's, view about having you be ladies?
She worried less about that, I think. Our mother had migraine headache among other things. When I was a child and walking through Burnside—you know, everybody knew everyone else—and the question was always, "Well, how's your mother holding up?" Mama didn't live; she just held up. And of course she bore six children; that's enough to make anyone feel not too well at times. But Mama held up until she was almost eighty-nine years old. But Grandma Denney was the one who worried more about our manners and our speech. I recall once she told me to sweep the little side porch. The broom wasn't in its usual place, and I yelled out, "Where's the broom at?" And she didn't lift her voice or anything; she just said, "You'll find the broom just behind the at." So I always think of that if I hear someone using "at" at the end of a sentence, or an unneeded one, or if I'm tempted to or do so.
How did your father feel about Grandmother Denney trying to make ladies of you?
Oh, he was always glad to see her. She was a very kind,
But I remember Grandma Denny's biscuits. Of course, at that time and in that town, you always had biscuits and cornbread for breakfast. And we took biscuit sandwiches to school. I was so embarrassed once. I'd always, when I went to the store, if Mama wanted some bread, I asked for loaf bread. And one day I said, "I want a loaf of loaf bread, please," and somebody behind me tittered, so I started saying "bread", but it didn't seem right because there were so many different kinds of bread, instead of just what you got at the store. And then years and years later, I read in Boswell's Journal in Scotland, he said he hadn't seen a single loaf or any loaf bread because they ate oat cakes and muffins
You never knew your Grandfather Denney.
No. I never knew either of my grandfathers; they were both dead when I was born.
But your Grandmother Simpson, did she live in Burnside?
No, she also lived in Wayne County.
Did you know her very well, or did she live while...
I did know her, but I didn't see as much of her as Grandma Denney.
Grandma Denney died when she was sixty-seven. Grandma Simpson, when I
knew her, was much older than that, but she was a sweet, kindly soul. I
never heard her complain of anything. She had what was
Is Grandmother Simpson the one who would tell you stories about guerilla activities during the Civil War?
Yes, that's how old she was. She married during the War and was a young married woman and remembered nothing horrible happened to her. Well, the guerillas came and tore up the country. And when I visited the homeplace, my cousins showed me the cave where they'd had to hide the horses to keep them from being stolen. One group was under Tinker Beattie, who claimed he was a soldier for the Union. And Champion Ferguson claimed he was fighting for the Confederacy. You see, in our part of Kentucky—it's south-central—many of the people owned slaves. The Simpsons had freed theirs several years before the War. I don't think Mama's people had any slaves, at least not the Denneys. And allegiance was mixed. And guerillas just overran the country; there was no law or order to stop them. They killed a good many people, stole horses and food, and burned buildings.
Did the Simpsons own many slaves? Do you know about how many?
There were no really large slaveholders in. . . . Well, some, I suppose,
had thirty, thirty-five. I think the Simpsons only
I know that in your book, Seedtime on the Cumberland, you make a distinction between farmers and planters.
Yes.
And farmers, I assume, are small landowners who do their own farming, and planters are those who, with or without slave help—some used white tenant help—were more propertied. So that would mean that the Simpsons were planters, is that...
No, practically everybody around there were farmers. There's another
distinction I should have made, too. The planters, as a rule, were
one-crop: the great cotton planters, and then you've heard of the rice
planters. There were some planters in Tennessee, and I suppose. . . .
Well, now, I don't know about the bluegrass. Maybe where they grew a lot
of hemp. That is in Kentucky. Some families certainly owned a great many
slaves, but insofar as I know all my people were farmers, that is they
grew many crops. They sold cattle and hogs and tobacco and of course, in
the early years, whiskey. Until they passed the excise tax, Lincoln—I
think that was in 1863—making it into whiskey was the one way farmers
had of getting their corn to market. They owned small stills, but they'd
usually make a thousand or so gallons. At Nashville they could get a
dollar a gallon for it. I don't have the figures for Wayne, but in
Pulaski County around 1830
Can we go back for a second? You were born in Wayne County, and when you were four you moved to Burnside.
Yes, I was almost five.
Were you born at home?
Yes. Practically everybody was born at home. The closest hospital was at Lexington, although there may not have been a hospital at Lexington when I was born.
Where do you fit into the order of your family?
Elizabeth is my one older sister. There's Elizabeth, Harriette, Margaret, Lucy, Sarah. And five years after Sarah was born, when my mother was forty-four years old, James William was born. My mother was always wishing for a boy. She'd tell me she wished I had been a boy, and each succeeding baby, she hoped for a boy, and at last one came.
Did that bother you or affect you in any way when she'd tell you that she wished you were a boy?
I really don't know. I remember it annoyed me, because I didn't want to be treated like a boy or have to do boy's work or anything like that.
What was boy's work, I mean like chores at the farm?
I had different chores at times. I used to have to bring
Were you close with your sisters and brother?
Yes, quite close, but you see, there was thirteen years between me and my brother. I finished high school a short time before I was sixteen. Then I went to Berea. And I taught, so that I was never again, after I was sixteen, at home all the time. Oh, I would visit, of course, or spend part of the summer there, but I didn't live there anymore.
Could you describe a little bit what Burnside was like when you were living there, up till the time you were sixteen?
When we moved there, Burnside had around two thousand people. It was
primarily a lumber town. There was a veneer mill,
Why did your family move to Burnside?
Our father, as I say, was a teacher—taught only eight years—and in those days teachers' salaries were very low in Kentucky. And you can't support a family with that, so he became a tool dresser in the oil field in Wayne County. It was quite a little field there. And then when that was drilled out, he came to Burnside to work in the veneer mill. He worked there about six years. And when they opened more wells during World War I in another part of Kentucky, he went back to his tool dressing in that oil field.
I thought that he also was a bookkeeper.
No. He kept tally for several months.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
... and what he did and his influence on you.
He worked at the veneer mill, did something called "feeding the hog." Of
course, visitors were not allowed there when the mill was in operation.
It was all those saws and logs moving around and
And wasn't he also a wonderful storyteller?
He was; he was a great storyteller. He was particularly good at ghost tales—he'd scare us to death—and so did "Jack the Giant Killer," because he would mimic each thing. He could be the sly butcher, you know, who gave poor, innocent Jack a handful of beans for a good cow, or he could be the giant. Oh, he could really roar; he sang bass in the church choir. Or he could be the harp, speaking in a high falsetto, the treacherous harp that almost cost Jack his life. Scare us to death.
Did he tell a lot of the Jack tales?
He told several. He told another story that is really part, I think, of the folklore of most nations in Europe, about the man who thought he could do his wife's work quicker than she, and it was uproarious. The wife went off to work in the field or she went to church or something, and the man thought he'd have stewed chicken for dinner. And then the details: he cut his thumb when he was trying to cut up the chicken, and he put turpentine on it and got turpentine in the chicken.
(Laugh)
And on and on and on; it was really uproarious.
It sounds to me like all of your people were wonderful storytellers.
They were. Papa also seemed to remember most of the poetry he not only
taught, but read. Like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"—he knew
practically all of that—and a lot of Tennyson and
But now your mother was a good storyteller, too, wasn't she?
She was quite a good storyteller, but most of her stories were of her past when she'd been a teacher. I remember she talked so much about Maude, I think I first thought Maude was a sister. But Maude had been her favorite five-gaited saddle mare that she'd ridden when she was teaching. She usually had a school fairly close to home where she could stay at home and ride to work on Maude, of course on a side saddle and in a riding skirt. Did you ever see one of those riding skirts?
Only pictures.
We had one around the house. How a woman even got around in it, I don't know.
I think I remember your saying that your mother had—not only for Maude—but had very detailed memories of a lot of horses.
Yes, and people she'd known, families; she knew most of the families that
were at least distantly related in Wayne County. If Mama didn't know at
least who their grandparents were, she considered them strangers.
Because she'd grown up that way with the Denneys. There was Denney's Gap
and a Denney post office and two Denney graveyards, and Denney's Store.
And she'd grown up
I know you said you had a few relatives in Burnside. They were Simpson relatives?
Not all. They were mostly distant cousins. Papa had some relatives, the Rankins, who were girls, married when we moved there. One of them was my Sunday school teacher, and I knew their mother. They were lovely people. The other relatives were Cousins Emma, Mollie, and Dora, all Denneys before their marriages. They were, I think, first cousins of my dead Grandfather Denney. And every once in awhile, Grandma Denney, she was no blood relative, but she would put on her black silk bonnet and a silk dress and go over to see them. They lived in Burnside in the upper town. And I loved the place, but of course I always sat still on a horsehair sofa. If you haven't ever sat in thin summer clothing and socks on a horsehair sofa, you don't know what itching and scratching are.
The women all seemed to enjoy talking of the past. Mama was that way, too. And they talked a lot about their father, the three cousins did. They were married, but they had no sure-fire way of birth control; they just waited until they were past the age of child-bearing, you see, and then married, so they had no children.
Oh, my heavens.
That's, I suppose, one way of birth control.
Was that common?
Women, I think, that we knew married older; they were older than they are now. Mama was twenty-eight.
And you were thirty-one?
I was thirty-one, yes.
I was interested in that, because I didn't know if it was unusual for you to marry late, or, because your mother and father had also married late, it was...
I don't know. I guess the man I wanted just didn't come along, although I was preoccupied with writing. I published a book, my first novel, and some short stories, and I didn't think much about marriage. On the other hand, many of the girls my age in high school married at about the same age I did.
I was confused about that, because I knew that there was a strong emphasis on husband, children, family—I think there was in your upbringing—and I wasn't sure, in your twenties, whether you had pressure from your family, "Why aren't you married?" or whether that was just part of either the tradition of your family or the tradition of the people that you grew up with. I mean, especially since they objected to your writing.
I don't know. I think it's a mixture. Mama didn't want my older sister
and I to marry at all, and my older sister didn't. The rest of us did.
And I don't know; it was a combination. But many girls my age in high
school married about the same time I did, and some of them didn't marry.
There was no pressure or feeling that
Why do you think your mother didn't want you to marry? Did she actually say?
I don't know. She wanted us, I think, to stay at home, which we didn't...
[laughter]
...and stay close to her, is all I know. World War II came just at the right time; our brother finished all his work for the bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky—I don't think he went through the motions of graduating—and joined the Air Force. So during the War she was writing to him overseas—he was a navigator in a bomber—and to five daughters in five different states. Now the Denneys seemed to hang all around the great-grandfather Matthew. The country, that part, was full of Denneys, and you'll still find an awful lot in that same county. Looking at the list of teachers, here's Denney, Denney, Denney; they still teach school. Papa's people, one of his uncles went to Idaho, the territory, long before there was a state. One of his sisters, shortly after her marriage, she and her husband bought land in Alberta, Canada. I always wanted to go there; I never have. She married a Burnett. I have few Simpson relatives left in Wayne County. They scattered, and I think they wanted to go to different places. Some went all the way to Oregon before there was a state of Oregon.
But you think it was simply because your mother wanted to have you at
home.
No, she had married. She may have had feelings against marriage; I don't know. Of course, she wouldn't say, but I've often wondered. She seemed to love her past as a teacher. She didn't tell us any remote stories from the distant past the way Papa and Grandma Simpson and Grandma Denney did, but it was all about when she was a girl or woman and teaching. She had one of these old red plush albums. Most of the photographs in that were of her and her friends when they'd go to what they called "Teachers' Institute" at Monticello. And so on and so forth. I think she perhaps enjoyed that part of her life better—I don't know—but she wouldn't, of course, come out and say, "Well, I wish I'd never married" or anything like that.
I think you once mentioned something about your mother having a wonderful imagination. I think I get that from the time that she made a pumpkin pie and put double the spices in [by mistake] and decided to put meringue on it so that it would be like chocolate, to help you imagine better that it was chocolate.
Yes, I remember that. I was so mad, annoyed when I bit into it, because you could tell from the taste she had spilled the spices; Mama was not a great cook.
[laughter]
The double spices were not deliberate. She got it so black
But did she have a real strong imagination, or was that just an isolated example that makes it sound that way?
I think she did. One thing I got from Mama, she loved growing things. I didn't appreciate it at the time. She wanted a vegetable garden. Of course, Papa could help a good deal in that when he wasn't working. She also grew flowers, and the house, it was large enough for the children and so forth, but in winter there were potted plants and ferns, begonias and sensitive ferns and other ferns. I remember a stand in the dining room, and then there were more. . . . We didn't call it the living room; I guess we called it the sitting room or just the place where we spent most of our time. And if you tried to play or do anything boisterous, you'd be certain to knock over a plant. And Mama also liked to watch the sky, the sunsets and the moon and all that sort of thing.
And didn't she know how to tell the weather really well by the sound of the wind or the appearance of the sky?
She was a close observer and was quite a good weather forecaster. Well, so was Papa, though. You see, they had grown up in a world where you had no weather forecast on TV or radio; there weren't any. And they watched the sky. It didn't always rain when she thought it would.
One thing we had when we were children, was sky. We lived on Tyree's Knob
in Burnside school district, but above Burnside.
What was the house like?
I wish I'd known you were interested. I would have tried to find a picture. It was a frame house, two stories in front, kind of gaunt-looking with the usual porches front and back and on the side, and only one story in back for the kitchen and the dining room. And it was, I guess, six rooms, but the rooms were all big, as I remember. I remember upstairs in the bedrooms, you could get two double beds in with no trouble, and anything else you wanted to put in. We brought with us, I remember, what Mama had inherited from the days when there were few closets. We had closets in our house, but we still had what they called wardrobes. Did you ever see one?
Yes.
One was oak and one was walnut, and they always made me think of coffins stood on end, dark, and there'd be plenty of room for those and anything else you could cram into a room.
Was your house, for the town, considered a large house?
No, it was about average, I guess, although shortly after it was built. . . . I remember when I first heard the word "bungalow," and those were one-story houses. Most of the homes in our town were two stories. It was smaller than some and bigger than others, plenty of room.
I remember you mentioned something about your father having inherited oil
rights; he got royalties from the mineral rights of
Yes.
Did that plus his work mean that you were some of the wealthy people in town?
No. We were only better off than some. But that was the unusual thing
about Burnside when I was a child: the children of the mill owners—of
course, they were not great mills, but they did earn a lot of money—and
the other businesses came to school with the workers. Everybody went to
the public school then. And I don't think there were any millionaires in
Burnside. There were, though, some very poor people. I remember our
church and the other churches did the same: each Christmas we had what
we called a white Christmas—the dandelions might be blooming, but we
called it that—and each member of each family in the church was to
bring, wrapped in white tissue paper, one or two gifts for the poor. I
know Mama always sent a lot of preserves and jelly and canned goods, and
we bought food or sometimes she'd make clothing for small children. You
see, there were no government aids for the poor except I think, I'm not
certain, there was a county home—no, I don't believe there was—for the
elderly poor. It was the custom, if elderly people needed financial
help, the children took care of them. But there may have been one for
the poor, because there were people so poor they couldn't take care of
themselves, or so I heard. [Text Missing]
Were there any blacks in Burnside?
No. No blacks. We were all one hundred percent white Protestants, mostly the descendants of Revolutionary soldiers, which didn't mean anything. Burnside was in that part of Kentucky set aside for soldiers of the Revolution. You know, they gave them land; they couldn't pay them any money.
And that's why a lot of the people would have come from North Carolina.
I think so, yes.
Can you describe the grade school that you went to? You went to grade school in Burnside.
Yes.
Was it a one-room school?
No, it was a graded and high school housed in a red brick building. And
let's see, in the first grade a great deal of emphasis was put on the
sounds of letters. We had to study; we spent all day. There was no
kindergarten; you began when you were six years old or close to it. And
you learned the letters and sounds. Meanwhile you were learning to read.
You learned the numbers, learned to write them. And we were soon doing
simple addition and
Oh, my heavens.
We were the ones who planned to go on to college, and all of us did, I think, but two girls. One of the girls married. But nobody seemed to care whether the people went to school or not. They were held back until they learned. I remember when I went to first grade, I was surprised: there were children in there much bigger than my older sister. Then there were fewer in the second grade, still fewer in the third and the fourth.
So there was no compulsory education at this time.
No. The feeling was that. . . . Well, that's what Papa said when I asked him once why didn't they send their children to school? He said, "Well, it could be they didn't have winter clothing." I noticed that most of them dropped out in the winter. And in the fifth and sixth grade there were so few they had only one teacher.
Wow.
Still not as many as in the first grade, and that was true in the seventh and eight.
So by the time you finished high school, as you say, most of the people were going on to college. But in the first grade, when there were fifty of you, it sounds more like there were very poor children and also rich children.
There were some with well-to-do parents.
Were there children who didn't have shoes? I mean, for example, you were talking about when Grandmother Denney was there and you'd have really pretty dresses and things. Could you see a big difference in how the children were dressed?
I don't recall noticing much difference in the first and second grades,
but I did notice it later, and I did notice that some dropped out in the
winter. I thought for many years we were of the poorest because our
mother complained a lot about how little money we had, even though Papa
worked. He made what other men made, I think, and he received some money
from his oil rights, which, when oil was high as during World War I
amounted to quite a lot. Then as a tool dresser, he made higher wages. I
hadn't noticed any difference, because everybody came to school starched
and ironed, and we dressed a good deal alike. The well-to-do children
you couldn't have told—or to my causal eye; I never studied it—perhaps
you could have seen differences in dress. But one day I'd been sent on
an errand to the store. We were on the hill, and down in the
[laughter]
And I've heard many funny stories of boys, sometimes young men going out
to see their best girls, coming home, and stumbling over
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
...when you first started to write, or your early years in school, whatever.
Before I started to write, I can't remember when I didn't think up
stories and happy endings. Some of the stories I heard, especially of
what we called "the war"—we never said the Civil War or the War Between
the States, because the country was so divided; we just said "the war";
we named other wars, like the War of 1812—and I would hear these sad
stories. I'd only be sad a few minutes, because I could imagine a happy
ending. In school I think we started writing compositions in the third
grade, but they were always about factual subjects such as George
Washington or Arbor Day. Now, in this little town, though there were
forests all around us, we kept Arbor Day and planted trees. I'm not sure
they do that in Ann Arbor or Detroit. But it was not until I was in the
fourth grade that we were sometimes told to write imaginary pieces, and
that was what I wanted. I could go to town on that. And, oh, I felt as
if I'd published a story when my teacher read one of mine aloud to the
class. I had no desk at home of my own. I did have a little washstand
where I put things. But I wanted a great desk such as I had seen at the
[laughter]
I was always short. So I imagined an old desk that had come into my possession and wrote its memories. But I tried no writing on my own until I was in high school. This is probably in that book you have, but I remember I was specially fond of walking in the woods and looking at the wildflowers; I'd always done that. So the first story—it wasn't the first I'd written, but the first one I tried to send out—was a fairy tale of flowers talking to each other, the different names, the anemones and the dogtooth violets and all those. I sent it to Child Life. I had no idea what to do. I single-spaced it on writing paper. And they kept it, and my hopes rose. It eventually returned with a note saying they had torn the story while they were reading it, and someone had retyped it for me. It was typed with the proper spacing and margins on the correct typing paper in the correct kind of envelope. Child Life was a magazine we subscribed to at home; I'll always love that magazine. I never tried it with another story, but I suppose someone did tear my story. I don't know. But whatever it was, it was a lesson in how a manuscript should be when you submit it. After that, I was always careful to type in the same way the few manuscripts I submitted during the next several years.
And you were only thirteen when you did that, is that right?
I was thirteen or fourteen.
Also, I think I remember something about your having bad penmanship and that, although your parents were against your writing, they gave you a typewriter.
Yes.
So that your teachers. . . . I guess because they had been teachers.
Yes.
They were thinking about the teacher rather than you, so they gave you a typewriter. Is that right? Can you tell me a little about that?
Yes, that's right.
Is that when you were thirteen?
I guess I was. I was a sophomore in high school, I think, when I got it.
Because you typed that story to Child World, so you must have.
Yes. I had the typewriter then.
Was that unusual, because even when I was in school it would be really unusual for someone young to type their work. Were you the only one who typed?
Oh, I felt
(Laugh)
But my penmanship, I tried. I used to cry over it in the grades, and it
just got worse and worse, no matter what I did. And
But yet I thought that when you wrote the first draft of a book or manuscript, that you wrote it in longhand.
Oh, I always did.
So it's okay for you; it's just...
Yes. My husband typed most of The Dollmaker. How he read it I don't know, but he typed it out of the longhand into my first working deaft. You see, I have many drafts. I don't write as much as I rewrite. I'm a very slow worker. And I don't know how he did it. And I've wondered about Grandma Denney. I enjoyed writing letters. As soon as I could write. . . . Grandma Denney wasn't there all the time, and I'd also write to Grandma Simpson. I inflicted more letters on those two poor women.
[laughter]
But both would always thank me for a letter and answer as if they'd read it.
Before we go on to talk about your high school education, I
Well, let me see.
Did you have a baptism that was a total immersion baptism?
Yes. The Christian Church, the Baptist Church, and the Church of Christ I think all have total immersion.
What do you remember about that? Were you eight years old, did you say?
I think so.
Do you remember it?
Yes, I think I do. I think the minister kissed me.
[laughter]
I remember getting ready for it. I think Mama made me a new white dress. Of course, that was nothing unusual. My parents belonged to the church.
I thought they were Campbellites, or were they Christian Church?
Some Baptists called members of the Christian Church Campbellites.
Okay, right.
The followers of Alexander Campbell belonged to the Christian Church. Now I don't know the exact difference between the Church of Christ and the Christian Church. I know some Church of Christ groups will have no instrumental music in their church.
See, it's just that you mentioned that first you belonged to the Christian Church, and then you said later, "I became a Campbellite."
No, the members of the Christian Church are followers of Alexander Campbell. They are Campbellites. I became a Campbellite when I was baptized into the Christian Church.
Right. I've got it.
And that's what they called us. We thought of ourselves as members of the Christian Church. And our church is called the Christian Church, the building, not the Campbellite Church.
Did they bring you down to the river?
Yes, we were baptized in the Cumberland River. Of course, the Methodists and the Presbyterians didn't go for total immersion. Then later—that was after I was gone from Burnside—the Baptists enlarged their church and had a baptistry which could be covered over very nicely and used for other things. And it was said that some of the Church of God people and perhaps the hard-shell Baptists. . . . I don't know. There are many varieties of the Protestant religion, many denominations, but members of some denominations were scandalized. They said you couldn't get to Heaven being baptized in a little bit of water in a house; you had to be baptized in a river as Christ was baptized in the River Jordan. And of course by that time all city churches had baptistries, but a few Burnsiders didn't know it. We were all Protestants, but the feelings of a Baptist with a daughter who married a Methodist, or vice versa, made a bigger gap than today if a Protestant were to marry a Catholic.
That day that you were baptized. Were you excited about it? Was it a big celebration, or were you proud, or what?
I don't know. I remember feeling solemn. I remember there was something
about singing down by the water. I remember
Oh, that's interesting.
Even baptism didn't always keep church from being a bore. I remember this minister would read the text. Then he would say, "Now, in the Latin, it said so-and-so, but in the Greek this word meant so-and-so, but, when you get back to the original Hebrew," and on and on and on.
[laughter]
And I didn't even know Latin then. I never learned Greek or Hebrew.
In your own home with your mother and father, what was the religious training like?
Our religious training at home. . . . As I told you, I had to memorize certain passages from the Bible. Then we were encouraged to read the Bible, the whole Bible. And when I was at home I read it twice, although parts of it, like when So-and-so begat So-and-so, it goes on for. . . . Other times it was exciting, the wars and so forth. Other times I couldn't figure out God.
Do you remember Jephthah's daughter?
No, I'm sorry, I don't.
Well, Jephthah made a vow to God that he would sacrifice the first thing he met when he came home. I suppose he thought it would be a sheep or a goat. Well, his most beloved daughter went out to meet him. So she was given a certain number of days to bewail her virginity, which seemed odd. At the time I had no idea what virginity was. We did have a dictionary, but I was not encouraged to use it when I was reading the Bible, because I might have learned things I wasn't supposed to know. And then she was sacrificed; that seemed kind of cruel to me, as was the treatment of Hagar. She almost starved in the wilderness. And then God told her He was saving her not because of her, but because of her son. And so on and so forth. And of course the New Testament, the awful time Paul had. But I think I liked Paul's sentences. Later, I memorized some verses from Corinthians. "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." And some versions read "love". I substituted "sincerity" and used it as a text for writing.
Oh, that is really interesting.
That's a good text for anyone. Or leave it as it is. Because usually we love or have charity for the people of whom we write, for our characters.
[interruption]
I wanted to ask you about the period starting in 1919, when you went to St. Helen's Academy? I wanted to ask you about high school and where you went to high school.
Well, let me see. That wasn't 1919.
That's when you would have been eighteen.
No. In 1918 in the autumn, I was ready for the fifth grade; I was ten
years old that year. The flu was raging. From our home we could see the
red mounds of earth in the graveyard. Our mother said none of us should
go to school. Our father wasn't at home; he was working in an oil field
near Beattyville, Kentucky. And in spite of the flu, Mama suddenly
decided we should move to this oil field. I won't go into the oil field.
It was a most interesting place. Of course, we were not allowed to hang
around the machinery. And Mama said she would teach us at home.
Elizabeth was ready for high school, and I was ready for the fifth
grade. So she taught us at home. Well, sometime late the next summer she
borrowed a horse from Mr. Jeff Frogge and a side saddle from Mrs. Frogge
I remember that.
Next day in class we would have new sentences we'd never seen, and turn by turn—but not always in order, so we just couldn't be studying a word—sometimes we would get a sentence. The sentence is a compound sentence, indicative mood, the subject is "she"; the indirect object is "him"; the main clause is "She went to town"; the subordinate clause is "to see Dr. Smith, who had an office on Main Street." "Parse she." " ‘She’ is a pronoun, singular number, feminine gender, nominative case, subject of the verb ‘went.’ " On and on.
[laughter]
Not all of it.
[laughter]
I had a struggle. Mama had taught us a good deal of grammar, but I'd
forgotten what a gerund was; well, I had to learn in a hurry. And over
and over, this woman would say, "Never write a sentence in
Oh, no.
We had no compositions, just grammar day in and day out. Then I also remember math, or arithmetic. I struggled and filled pages with problems. There were problems about how many acres in an uneven piece of land that is so many rods this way and so many rods that way, and so on and so forth. In order to solve it, you had to divide it into triangles, then find the area of the triangle. Then there were problems—I remember wrestling with one—about carpeting stairs, in which only the overall dimensions were given, and the number of steps. So, in order to get the width of a stair, I had to make a triangle and extract the square root—I knew the hypotenuse—and do this and do that. Mama had taught me how to extract a square root, but I'd forgotten it. Anyway, when school was out that year, I graduated from the eighth grade. As I remember, it was just flying through; I don't remember anything I learned, to speak of.
Now was St. Helen's a boarding school? I know later you went to one.
Yes, near the place where we lived. There were no schools. The closest one was around the ridge, a mile or two away. Elizabeth and I went to investigate, but there were no classes above the fourth grade.
And this is because your father was working in the coal fields then.
In the oil field.
I'm sorry, the oil fields.
Yes.
And didn't you used to bring him his breakfast or dinner in a lunch pail,
or the (Laugh)
Yes, that was the only time I could get to see the machinery, and we weren't allowed to stay. The drilling rig. . . . Well, it could be a dangerous place, but they didn't want anyone around except the driller and the tool dresser. You'd be apt to be in the way.
Did you like going to bring him his meals?
Oh, I loved it, and I always wanted to stay. But of course I couldn't.
It seems like you were always the errand girl. Now here you were the second in the family, and yet when there was the influenza scare of 1918, the great Asian epidemic, you were the one, the only one who got to do the errands and run to the store, and here you were bringing your father his pail. How did you get to be the errand girl?
That was Mama. Mama made an errand girl out of me, as if I were the errand boy.
(Laugh)
And I was rather glad to do it. Elizabeth, the older, had to stay home and help in the kitchen. Our mother was sick a great deal with migraine. Sometimes Elizabeth had to cook when she wasn't more than eight or ten years old. She made beds. And there was always a baby. There were six of us. She was the oldest, and only ten years older than the youngest girl. So there was always a baby, either to tend to or to watch.
I just remember from being a child that getting to do the errands was definitely the best task.
Yes.
So I just wondered how you managed to corner it.
No, it was given me. I was never then, and I'm not now, too good at housework. You can see that. So I was given the job of the errands and hunting the cow. I also, as I grew older, had to be able to do the milking when Mama was sick. And Elizabeth had to stay inside and do the housework.
Then in 1920, when you were twelve, you went to Stanton Academy?
Yes.
Now where was that?
St. Helen's is still shown on the maps, and there's still a Stanton.
Stanton was the county seat of Powell County, but at that time they had
no public high school. Stanton Academy was a Presbyterian academy and, I
thought, a wonderful place. I liked the teachers. We were
I think that you advanced two grades.
Yes.
Then you were only sixteen—I think that was in 1924—when you entered Berea College.
Yes, I graduated and was sixteen in July, and then went to Berea for two years.
Before I ask about Berea, can I ask you, when you went back to Burnside High School for two years?
Three years.
Three years.
Okay, right. And then you had one year at St. Helen's, and then three...
That's when they finished my elementary education. I was at St. Helen's the year before I went to Stanton Academy.
So that you skipped the grades, in fact, in grade school.
Yes.
Okay. When you went back to Burnside, you were first of all two grades higher than the people that you'd started out with, and you'd also been out of town. Did it make it different?
It did. I resented being out of my age group. I'd hoped I could continue at Stanton Academy, but after all, I suppose it was no use. Mama said she needed me at home, and why spend money sending me to high school when there was a school at home? But the Burnside students I had always known and been with were in the eighth grade, and I was a sophomore. I was younger than the others. I was short then; I'm short now. And at first I was very unhappy. But I soon grew accustomed to it.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
Why did you choose Berea, or did your parents choose Berea?
No, I chose Berea. There wasn't too much money in the family then. Berea
was inexpensive. Elizabeth had gone to Richmond. You know, what do they
call it? Eastern Kentucky University, although then it was little more
than a normal school. One reason I went to Berea: of course, Mama wanted
me to teach, be ready to teach by the time I was eighteen. I didn't want
to teach, and I had to take education courses, which I resented. But at
Berea, I could get two electives I wanted very much to study. One was
botany, which I'd been interested in for years. I had a taste
Did you end up majoring in botany?
No, I majored in science. I trained to be a general science teacher. No, I often wished I'd majored in botany, but at the University of Louisville I really began to write. I didn't publish anything, but I met other students who invited me to join a group of writers few know anything about today. There are not many chapters of Chi Delta Phi left. It was a group interested in writing. I joined that, and I met other students who were writing, some writing poetry and some fiction. I took all the literature courses I could. I had a wonderful course in Milton.
And this was at Louisville.
Yes. And modern verse and some others. But I had no wish to major in
English, because I knew I'd have to teach it and I felt it would be too
great a pain to have to read the writings of
That's real interesting.
But I did later
[interruption]
You talked about some of the courses at Berea, but I wondered how you felt being at a place that was bigger than any place you'd been before, and being away from home, if you liked it? You were younger, too. That's the thing: you were sixteen.
That always was a bother, but I'd been away from home two years in boarding schools. And I don't know, I think I was disappointed. I met so many students from small towns or the country. I wanted something new and big and different, you know, a city. And the college occupied only a small part of Berea, and we were so closely watched and so many rules and this and that, there was no danger of getting lost or anything like that. And our dormitory was a small wooden dwelling. If I stayed there now, I'd be scared to death.
[laughter]
It was called Gilbert Cottage, as I remember. We were the overflow from
the college women's dormitory. And there were
Was Berea the strictest school you'd been to up to that point?
Yes, it was extremely strict. I think Berea made me want to smoke. I thought anything that's worth a fifty-dollar fine must be wonderful.
[laughter]
And boys were never allowed out with girls, except on certain occasions
or except in a group. And there were so many clothing rules. Burnside
was a small place, and when you graduated from high school, oh, forty or
fifty people would give you a small gift of some kind. And I received,
among other things, eight or ten pair of silk hose, silk, because nylon.
. . . Well, you're too young to remember the first nylon or rayon hose
that were no good. And these were silk. Well, of course, I couldn't wear
them at Berea. But the girls with money could in the college store buy
Were you allowed to dance, or was that strictly forbidden?
[laughter]
But that was the burden of her talk: "Don't wear suggestive clothes; don't show your knees"—that is, the knee was already covered with hose—but you don't show them; you don't show too much bare arm. You could wear short sleeves in summer. And since I didn't know what "suggestive" meant, I'd always feel guilty: "Well, have I been wearing something suggestive?"
[laughter]
Really. All that emphasis on sex, sex, sex. She never
If you were only sixteen—I mean, you were much younger than the others—had your mother talked to you about that before you...
No. Girls and mothers—or at least in our little town—were very different from today. Our mother explained nothing. Of course, I learned a little from farm animals. We had cows and chickens with roosters. At first I didn't know what the rooster was doing when he jumped on the hen. I learned a little that way and then chance reading in books, the few facts of life that I knew when I went to Berea. The bare outline. But I couldn't figure out what "suggestive" meant. That Dean of College Women talked to us as if she thought all of us were incipient streetwalkers or whores, I don't know.
Wow, that's really. . . .
She didn't use such crude words, of course.
[laughter]
But all that emphasis. I'd never really thought much about sex. I suppose I awakened very slowly.
When you were at Berea, didn't you also have to work? I mean, wasn't that part of the way school ran, that everyone had to also work?
Yes. You did have to work. I first washed dishes. Then I asked if I could
work at Fireside Industries. They did make beautiful things there, and I
thought I would like the work. I only measured linen for towels, but the
linen was so well woven that when you
So, in other words, was it a big commercial factory, or was it more like a...
No, there were only, as I recall, five or six girls sitting around a
table in one room—they were hemstitching—and I was measuring linen.
So it's more like a craft place.
Yes, it was a craft place, and I think that at that time the thread for the weaving was dyed there; I'm not sure. I never did see anyone carding or spinning. I don't think they spun their own thread; they may have. They did weave.
Did you get paid for this?
Yes, I think I earned five or ten cents an hour. I've forgotten. I guess it was five cents an hour.
Were all the people who worked there students at Berea? Yes.
Except the leader, or two or three of those around. Women who'd watch us and tell us what to do.
And how often did you have to work?
I worked every day except Sunday. I think we were supposed to work twelve hours a week.
Twelve hours a week. So it would be more than two hours
We worked on Saturdays, but I know at dishwashing you washed dishes three meals a day, seven days a week.
And got paid a nickel an hour?
Yes, but more skilled work paid at least ten cents an hour. Dishwashing was supposed to amount to two hours daily, I think. They put a great deal of emphasis on the joys of labor and the use of labor as a. . . . What would you call it? They never spoke of labor as a way of earning money or a way of learning. It's a curious business. At the same time, they glorified labor.
Was it anything like the detachment that you talked about, like the way they talked about sex? I mean that was detached to a point where you couldn't understand what they were talking about.
The girls in the dorm sometimes talked about sex or told jokes I'd never heard and couldn't always understand. This woman, the Dean of College Women, never came out and said what she was talking about; she'd just say "suggestive." And I later understood part way, although I think the whole idea is silly, what she meant, but, so far as I know, she never used the word "sex."
From what you're saying, it sounds as though they may have talked about labor in the same way, in other words, that the idea or the word had some meaning that was known to them, that they never came out and said.
No. They talked of labor, however, in an entirely
Why do you think they glorified labor? I mean, you know, there are lots
of reasons; there are schools today that do that [laughter]
No. Many Berea students needed the money. (I needed to earn as much as
possible.) I think labor was glorified because of those students who had
to work in order to pay their expenses. In the President's report today,
they make a very small amount from student labor. The wage laws changed
all that; they had to pay more. But they don't have as much student
labor as they once did. They have sold the dairy and most of their farm.
In spite of the fact that Berea is for the hill people, it's really on
the edge of the Bluegrass. You can see the hills. And I don't know how
many hundreds of acres they had and still have in the hills, and they
had a large campus. At the time I went there they had college, a normal
school, an academy, I think a school of music. I'm not certain. They did
teach a good deal of music, especially singing to those with voices. And
they also had what they called a Foundation School. At that time there
was a need for it. It was a place for any sixteen-year-old who wasn't
ready for high school, or perhaps could
How did you feel both about the working and about their attitude toward working?
I disliked their attitude toward work. At home I had worked, done errands and helped in the garden and helped with the milking, done all kinds of work. But I did it because it was needed; it was something to be done. And we—my mother and everybody—we were glad when the work was finished. We could sit down and read or do whatever we wished, go to the woods or anything. We were free, and work was not glorified. As I said earlier, my father had this expression, "A mule can pull." Anybody can work if the work doesn't amount to anything. Of course, most of Berea's work did; most of that work went either to feed the students, on the farm and the dairy and the bakery—I think they sold milk, too-or for things to sell, as in the woodworking shop and the Fireside Industries.
Later in your work, either explicitly or implicitly, you deal with alienation, and a lot of the alienation you deal with has to do with alienation of work. And I wondered if this experience at Berea. . . . I mean, for example, in The Dollmaker, the difference between Gertie Nevels' whittling out of love and of just...
Work? I don't think any experience at Berea affected my writing.
...work. And then having to saw them in a way that she doesn't feel pleased with the work; it's a way to get money. This attitude that you're talking about coming in contact with in Berea, a glorification of something that in your life up to then had just been part of your life; it wasn't something separate. Was that a first experience, or was it an early experience, or an experience at all of alienation?
I don't quite know. I didn't mind the work. The second year I was at Berea I worked most of my way. I was a student matron in a kitchen. Now how or why; I knew nothing about such things. I learned a whole lot. I enjoyed that work. I enjoyed my work at Fireside. The supervisor watched me like a hawk for the first few days, so afraid I'd make a wrong cut. Well, when I didn't, she praised my work, and when I quit she said she was very sorry to see me go. She'd hoped I would stay. When I went to Fireside, I'd hoped I could learn more, perhaps learn to weave. But as it turned out, I was just measuring and cutting linen for towels day after day. I did the job all right. And I think the girls who hemstitched did the same thing day after day. And I didn't mind the work. I didn't like dishwashing. It was the constant praise of work...
That's what I meant.
...that got on my nerves. Still, I realized that Berea's work program
made education possible for students who without
Did you feel annoyed with, or angry with, or did you feel like those people who were teaching you or who were the head of labor at the school didn't really know what work was, or they wouldn't be glorifying it?
I felt that way sometime, because I knew about work. I remember the errands up the hill, maybe carrying a load of something downtown and getting tired. I remember working in the garden. I knew what work was. We just never glorified it, as I say.
Now you were at Berea from '24 till '26.
Yes.
And then you went in '26, when you were eighteen, to teach in Pulaski County in Kentucky.
In a rural school. I learned more that year than in any year in my life, I think. I didn't appreciate all the learning, but I learned a lot.
What were the circumstances for your leaving Berea? Why did you leave Berea?
For one thing, Mama wanted me to start teaching. Elizabeth had taught two
years and was going
Were you twenty-six when you went to the University of Louisville?
No. Let me see.
Oh, no, I'm sorry. You were twenty. You were only twenty years old. That's right. It was 1928. You were twenty.
Yes. I got my degree in 1930.
Was it a very big shock—to use an expression not from that period, a "culture shock"—having gone to work in the rural school in Pulaski County and experiencing that year, and then going to this other place?
I don't know. I'd hoped Berea would be something like [interruption]
I was just going to ask you, that year when you were teaching in Pulaski County?
Yes, the first year.
Right. What was the most memorable thing that happened that year to you?
They told me I was the first teacher they'd had to stay all year there. Remember this was 1924 and '25; it was a very remote community in a bend in the Cumberland River about eight miles from a railway, a flag stop; so it was easier to walk. All the way home was only about fourteen miles, and I walked it quite often. I stayed in the community during the week. I had a nice boarding place. It was a big old log house, two-storied with a little fireplace in my room.
Was it a family?
It was a family, yes, and the children went to school. It was a small
school. When the weather was bad, I might have only the two children
where I boarded. They'd go with me to school, and we would stay there
all day. I had good, well-behaved pupils. They worried me sometimes. The
boys enjoyed climbing trees, and to see all your boys in the tops of
high trees and some of them in hickories, high, high, and hear, "I'll
see if this will swing down." And if the hickory wouldn't swing down,
I'd begin to wonder what the boy would do [laughter]
I think I remember your writing in one of the Cumberland books that you
had never taken a note until, I think, you were eighteen or something
like that, when you took notes on a bucket. Is this totally unfamiliar
to you? (Laugh)
No. I did attempt later to write some descriptions of things. I remember
the quietness on a Saturday when the dogs would be asleep, and every day
the housewife was eternally, everlastingly
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
...an older man, and he insisted on calling me "Mistress Simpson." And I would say, "Well, I'm Miss." He continued to call me Mistress.
I quit correcting him. Well, it was years later before I learned there
was a period in English history when "Mistress" was a title of respect,
a long, long time ago. And he was giving me that title because I was the
schoolteacher. Most of the children never called me by my name; they
just called me "Teacher," and that was that. And there were so many
other words I either misused or heard for the first time. Some were of
their own invention, like they mention that So-and-so is walking with a
boy, and she's been walking with him a long time, and they asked me, "Do
you have any boy you walk with?" And I in time learned that their use of
"walking" meant courting seriously. I suppose it arose because one of
the few places you could court was walking home from church or walking
to church together. And they had a cave with a cold spring running
through it and then down, and they used to keep watermelons in there
during the summer. I came home from school one hot day, and they asked
me if I wouldn't like some good cold watermelon. I said, "Oh,
[interruption]
I think we're talking about when you were in Pulaski County, and you were talking about how it was the year that you learned the most in your life. Did you take notes at the time, some notes?
No, I took no notes. I did, to practice writing, write some descriptions of scenes and things. You see, this was a remote place, a log house, and many of the things they used were much like those of the pioneers. For example, I had never seen a watering trough made of the hollowed-out trunk of a poplar tree.
Oh, wow.
And other things around. I was especially intrigued by their language. They were as definite as Shakespeare. For example, the children never said "tree"; they named the tree: white oak, black oak, post oak, poplar, they knew them all.
Now this was in fact a place only fifteen miles from Burnside.
That is right.
Was it for you the first close contact you'd had with hill people?
Well, yes and no. My people were hill people, after a fashion, but I had never been in a community that was so remote. Though Burnside was only fifteen miles away, it was on the railway—this place was not—Burnside had also been served by steamboats since 1833. It was more or less in the world. Like at home, we had a daily newspaper and magazines and books and other things we could buy.
Right. And also you had doctors and dentists, isn't that right?
In Burnside, yes, but not these people. Most of them had never been to a physician or a dentist.
Did people in Burnside travel to other places? I mean, it wasn't unusual for people from Burnside to go to other towns.
No, they often went north. Well, everybody went to the county seat town of Somerset—that was a short distance—but many went to Lexington. The Southern Railway due north to Cincinnati or south to Chattanooga. It was interesting, among my people and in that town: their faces had, for over fifty years, been turned south to Nashville. That's where the steamboats went, where the steamboats came from. They could take a packet to Nashville and from there get another packet and go wherever they wished in the Mississippi Valley, even up to Pittsburgh.
Now when you went to teach in the school in Pulaski County, what was the name of the town or the actual place?
Well, they called it Possum Trot School. I've forgotten if it had a better name; I don't know.
Was that also the name of the place, Possum Trot?
Was it Hargis? No. Perhaps it was Hargis; I've forgotten. I should know, because there was a post office there, where the mail came three times each week in saddlebags on a mule. And rarely did one see a wagon, and my schoolchildren, most of them, had never at that time seen an automobile, the road was so rough. Most of the men, however, had. They'd go to Somerset. And they did most of what they called the "trading": they didn't use the word "shopping". They traded. This, I think, arose from the fact that they usually had something to sell. It was too far away for milk and butter, but they could, as I say, trade eggs at a small store across the river. Others dug ginseng—it was about all gone—dried it and sold it to a company in Burnside. Some dug yellow root and May apple root. There were few furbearing animals left, but several of the boys sold raccoon and opossum hides.
How did these people feel about you coming in? Do you know how they reacted to you? Were you as unusual in your education and in coming from Burnside as if you had come from four or five hundred miles, from outside the whole culture?
I think they thought I was peculiar. On the other hand, I tried very
hard. I stayed over many weekends. When they went to church, I went to
church with them. We had a bit of trouble with speech sometimes. Most of
the
Did you take notes on the words that you were learning then, or was that later?
No. I just remembered because I was in the back hills again, and I heard such language again and listened for it. It's about all gone now.
Also, I know from your education, with a concentration on memorizing in the young years...
Yes.
...and also I think you mentioned that your father memorized a lot...
Yes.
...and I've heard you recite passages that are from memory. Do you still memorize things?
Much less than I used to, and the sad thing is I have forgotten most of
what I once knew. I was trying the other day to recite a few lines from
"Dover Beach". You know, it's very applicable to this time in which we
live. I never got it right. Like "Ah, love, let us be true to one
another/for the world which seems To lie about us
But you spent two years there, and then you went to the University of Louisville and graduated in the nineteen-thirties?
Yes, I received a bachelor's degree in 1930.
When you were twenty-two?
I wanted, after my first term of teaching, to return to that remote place. I liked the people, and they seemed to like me. But our mother stepped in and secured for me what she thought was a great plum; that was the "principal", so-called, of a two-room school at Tateville, close enough I could walk home. I didn't care for that at all, because nothing was different; nothing was strange. These children lived by the railway. So I only at that time spent one year in this particular place.
And that was in 1931? You only spent one year there.
No, I was teaching in a different place in 1931. You see, this small rural school, I taught it when I was eighteen years old, after two years at Berea.
And then you went to the University of Louisville.
Then I taught this other school I mentioned and then attended the University of Louisville for two years.
And then after that was when you were the principal.
Of a small high school, yes.
And then after that, when you were twenty-six in 1934, you went to teach at a junior high school in Louisville?
I went to Louisville in early 1933. I was not yet twenty-five. I lasted only one semester. I was sick; I had some kind of virus. I didn't like the work. I don't think the principal cared for me. And I did manage to hang on until the last of the year; then I was in the hospital. It was only one semester. I had always wanted to teach in Louisville, realized I was no better there. I had quit the job at the small high school, which I later regretted, and gone to Louisville in the middle of the year. The community where the small high school was, out from Somerset, was a very different one from the remote community where I first taught. The people had books, newspapers, magazines, and on the whole were farther up, I'd say, the educational, social, and economic scale.
But it sounds like you've always had a pull between city—perhaps from
growing up in a town with the steamboats and the railway—
Yes.
And it sounds like that was one of the times you had felt a pull. I don't know.
It was, because I wanted to get back to Louisville. The country can be rather lonely in a way. I can always find some rapport with another human being—we're all human beings—but at the same time I like to be in a place with a library, where people are doing and thinking somewhat the way I am. But I didn't find that in the Louisville junior high school.
Did you find it in Louisville, though?
Yes, I did, at the University of Louisville. I think we discussed that yesterday.
Yeah, we did.
Where there were others interested in writing. I had teachers. . . .
Now another thing is, about that time you were about twenty-four, and I wondered if there would have been a pull between. . . . I mean, if you went back to the Pulaski County school, you would have had a hard time meeting other people about your age. Had you ever met any young mountain man that you would have...
No, I don't think so. No, I'm sure. The men I went with in Cincinnati
were young writers. And I just wasn't attracted in the mountains. And I
think, too, there were very few young men around. They felt I was a
curiosity,
After you were teaching junior high in Louisville, you spent a summer at Conway Inn in Michigan?
Yes.
I think that was in 1934, when you were twenty-six?
Wait a minute. No, no, I was almost twenty-five. I was twenty-two—
What was the name of that?
It was called Colo, in another part of the county. And at the middle of the year I went to Louisville and taught only one semester. So I would have been twenty-five, I believe. I had been to Conway Inn one summer when I was in college, while I was at the University of Louisville. I worked up there one summer. I loved the place.
How did you happen to go to that place?
I don't know. I met some woman who knew about it or knew the people, and she suggested I go, that it would be a wonderful place to spend the summer.
And you worked there as a waitress?
I worked as a waitress. Our hours were short. Then we could go swimming
or canoeing or do whatever we wished to do. And northern Michigan was a
revelation to me. I'd never seen birches,
I would go down to Petoskey sometimes with the manager of the hotel, who went daily to buy fresh lake trout for the guests. And sometimes I would go with her. And at that time the Indians would come around with baskets to sell. I have the pieces of an old one; I'm crazy about basketry, though I've never tried to make one. And they would also sell wild raspberries and blueberries, which had an entirely different flavor and were better than the raspberries which came earlier and the blueberries and raspberries which are cultivated.
Did you start to write Mountain Path when you were in Michigan?
Yes, the second time I was in Michigan. Mrs. Trask, I told her I wanted to write.
She was the manager? Yeah.
In addition to the hotel, she had several cottages where guests could
stay and either cook their meals or come over to the dining room.
Was that in 1934 that you went to Cincinnati?
No, that would have been the autumn of 1933.
Okay.
I think that's right.
Now why did you go to Cincinnati?
I don't know why. I really never thought a lot about it, but it was a
bigger place than Louisville, and I knew it had a great library, and I
really don't know why. I thought about going to New York or somewhere,
but Cincinnati was my Left Bank. And the first things I published
The Grapes of Wrath.
The Grapes of Wrath, of course. It had not yet been published.
When you began to publish, did it change your personal relationships? I mean, were you sort of lionized? I mean, you know, because you were, I think, twenty-six or so, and here you were published.
I was twenty-eight. I began the book when was twenty-five, and it was
three years before I had a book published, the quickest I've ever done a
book. No, not a great deal, as I remember. The newspapers were
interested, and they wrote stories about me. I remember one that my
mother saw. My father was dead; he died when I was twenty-one. And she
was furious. It had a headline "Waitress Writes Book." Now I had taught
longer than I'd been a waitress, and I had been working in short hours
in a bookstore.
In Burnside. But did your mother give you a hard time about writing?
She didn't object so much to The Dollmaker, but she and some of my sisters didn't like the idea of Mountain Path at all. The story about a waitress was bad enough, but, she said, the town would think I'd fallen in love with a moonshiner and so on and so forth. They'd think everything in that book had happened to me. Well, that did worry me a bit at the time, but I've realized since, no matter what you write there are people who think it is autobiographical. Some are certain I was Millie in Hunter's Horn and poor Harold was Nunley D. Ballew. But Harold never had a fox hound.
[laughter]
Well, that's beside the point. An editor came to see me shortly—a Macmillan man—before the publication of The Dollmaker. He said, "Oh, I'm surprised to see such a small woman." I wanted to say, "Well, why in the hell shouldn't I be small?"
[laughter]
My grandmother could stand under my father's arm. I apparently inherited her stature.
But he was thinking,
But you early got over that difficult. . . . I mean, I think that is a very inhibiting factor in beginning fiction, when you have strong family ties, the worrying that people you love and care about will say, "What are you doing thinking those things?" or "What are you doing painting me?"
Yes, and what made it so hard on my mother, here I was prepared to teach,
I had a degree, I'd given up a good job in the county—teacher in this
small high school—I'd had another job in Louisville. I don't know that
my principal would have asked me to return.
But now how did you feel? I mean, did you feel really close to your mother and torn, that there was a conflict between what you wanted to do and...
Not a great deal. It was only when I was
In Cincinnati is where you met Harold, your husband, is
Yes.
Did you meet him in 1928, or how old were you when you met him?
Oh, let me see. I guess I was twenty-nine when we met.
You married him when you were thirty-one.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
You were telling me about meeting Harold.
Harold came to Cincinnati hoping to get a job on the Times-Star, I
believe is the paper. [Audio Missing. Text provided in transcript.]
Where in Alaska had he been?
He was on the I want to say Susitna Peninsula, but that wasn't the name of the place.
Was he writing up there, is that what he was doing?
Yes, he had done quite a bit of writing. He was working on a novel about
Alaska, a trapper there, but he never did finish it. That's one thing
that drew us together: he was working on a novel, and I was thinking
about writing another one. It wasn't but about a year after Mountain
Path was published. But he never finished that
This was in 1939.
Yes. That's right. We married in early March.
[Text Missing]
Was your mother there, or your sister?
No, we just went off and got married. After all, it was Depression, and we felt we should save all our money for this farm we were talking about.
Did you get married in a church?
No, we were married, I'm sorry to say, by a justice of the peace.
Why "sorry to say"?
Well, I didn't like the idea at all, the things to go through with. It embarrassed our mother because there was no announcement in the county paper that So-and-so was going to marry So-and-so, you know and this and that. But...
But was your mother pleased that you married
No, she was not.
Why?
Well, she was never pleased when any of us married. I don't know why. And none of us married at home.
Huh.
Two of the others, Sister Lucy and Sister Sarah, had proper weddings, you know, though not at home, and relatives of the family were there. Mama didn't go. Their weddings were previously announced in the local...
Why didn't your mother go?
Well, she didn't feel like it. She wasn't feeling well, I suppose was her reason. And Sister Margaret—we called her Peggy—graduated from high school in June—she was the third girl—and, much to the surprise and shock of our family, she ran away and married in August, I guess. She and her husband got along fine and had two wonderful children. She married before I did, of course.
Had your mother met Harold before you married?
No. No, I took him down a short time after we were married. I'm not sure I wrote her. She did have a good heart, or she might have had a heart attack. I guess I wrote her before that I was bringing my husband down. I don't think I went there cold. He still talks about how frightened he was.
Yeah, I can. . . . How did it go?
It went all right. I mean whatever feelings Mama had about a stranger or a visitor, she was lady enough she wouldn't show them or make a scene or anything like that.
I wanted to ask you just to go back for a minute about Cincinnati. Now that was during the Depression years that you were there. What was Cincinnati like during the Depression?
It was mostly the people I knew. It was a sad place for many of them. I
knew some writers, one who was writing for Sunday school
magazines—you're familiar with those—for a quarter or half a cent a
word. Others were writing for the pulp magazines for a cent a word. I
knew a girl who was a salesgirl at a large department store. I had rooms
in a place, and she lived there. She always dressed nicely and was
pretty. But some days she didn't make one sale, and she knew if she
didn't make a few sales that her time as a salesgirl would be up. But it
was Louisville where I saw. . . . I had some money, but not a lot. That
was when I was at the University of Louisville, I guess. Yes, because I
graduated in 1930, and a bank
Did you feel sort of bewildered or confused, or were you personally affected by the Depression?
No, I don't think so. Of course, I was working as a waitress, but I had
been teaching before the Depression for about seventy dollars a month.
Kentucky teachers'
But then there were also times when you made a hundred dollars a month teaching?
Oh, yes, I made more than seventy dollars a month when I taught in the small high school. I think my pay was over a hundred a month. And in Louisville it was only a hundred.
In either Louisville or in Cincinnati—at least I know about Cincinnati; I don't know very much about Louisville at that time—was there much political activity? You know, I mean the thirties was a very politically active period.
I guess I was out of that. There was an awful lot of proletarian
literature published, but I don't recall any political activity. I was
absorbed, I think—I only read about it then in the
Did you feel drawn to go there and write about it?
I thought about it, and I guess. . . .
A novel or...
A novel. And you know, I can't think of one novel that was written about
a coal miners' strike in the United States. I had read
In different times and places, I think I mentioned to you that I met some of the students, the high school kids from Whitesburg who you talked to.
Yes.
And I guess that was last year.
Yes.
In '75. Of course, they admired you greatly, again mostly for The Dollmaker. And you said, "Now I wrote the wrong novel. You are the children of the miners; you write the novel." And did you mean by that for them to write a novel like what you're talking about? In other words, the mountain family or coal family or whatever, that your whole thing was the road and the migrations and the changes, but for them to write a story or a novel about the people who stayed and are still fighting battles in the coal fields?
Yes, fighting battles for safety. Well, I wasn't suggesting that they try to write novels such as Zola had done, but write about their lives, the things they know. We've had so few realistic novels out of the Kentucky hills.
Do you think you still would like to do that?
I don't know; I've thought about it. It would be from the point of a wife
or mother at home, a life warped by the careless loss of men. You see,
I'm not acquainted with people who work in
It showed the hardship and the hunger when the mines were closed and the man couldn't get a job, and the gentle struggle of the wife. They'd moved to a place where they'd have some land and she could have a garden, and he would work in the mines nearby. Then those mines would close or he would be out—something happened—and she would want to stay. She would tell him, "We could live on the land." "No." Then they'd move to a mining town where there was just a bit of bare earth before her home and nothing. That book is little known, though it's a great story.
I've seen some of the journalistic work you've done. For example, we talked earlier about "No Rats in the Mines" that you wrote for The Nation in, I think, 1970. In the late twenties and thirties, did you think in terms of writing journalistically about what was going on with the mines or anywhere else?
A bit. Mostly, however, I was interested in a novel. But I wanted to find
out what was going on; no one knew. I read years later in a Harlan
newspaper the following incident.
Oh, yes, I love
In West Virginia,
Again, your interest was with that, and you were following what was going on with the unions and such.
Were you politically active at all during this period or other periods?
No, I don't recall that I was politically active at all. The most you heard about in the literary world was proletarianism.
Yeah, I think somewhere we mentioned this. Is it true
Yes, I read those. I read some proletarian novels, and what I read didn't jive with my upbringing and individualism: man is responsible for his own acts. Also, most of this, especially The New Masses and The Daily Worker, talked of the proletariat as if they were just a herd, like cattle, with no minds of their own, with no thoughts, and they were to be guided and driven, gently, of course, to greener pastures; that was the purpose. And I couldn't see treating people in such fashion. I mean, even though they never spoke of force or any cruelty, but thinking of the masses of people not as individuals with minds of their own, but as one great herd of proletariat, it sickened me.
Did it make you in any way remember when you were at Berea, when they glorified work, and it was not terribly connected with what you knew of work?
No, proletarian writers
I read Gorky at that time, in translation.
One story that I wanted to ask you about, that I thought fits in with
what you're talking about, your feelings about individualism.
No. They don't call Fireside Industries a factory at Berea. It was a tourist attraction and craft shop. You see, up and down the road from Berea there are signs inviting tourists to stop, and so many tourists came to Fireside Industries to watch the girls at work. And it was a tourist—not a teacher—who asked me if my parents could read or write. And I just felt I'd fly all to pieces with that. I thought of how they read, the books they'd bought for us—there was no library in our town—the magazines; any spare time they had, they were reading or talking of what they had read. And then to be asked a question like that just because I was at Berea. I suppose I looked rather stupid, was the only reason I could think of for asking that.
So what did you say to the tourist?
I just told a whopping big lie. I wanted to be rid of that woman. I said,
"No." She was staring at me
And didn't you mention something about that the effect of
I thought not only that I'd never be a tourist to go around and stare at others, but in my own world I would never stare at people or treat them as if they were of a different species from mine. And I remembered that when I taught in the back hills, not to stare at the bare feet of children who came to school.
Was Marcella born at home when you were living with Harold at...
Yes, we were still living at the place where we went to do subsistence farming. No, she wasn't born at home. Mama was so worried, and she was born at my home with my mother.
In Burnside.
Yes.
Was your mother the midwife, or did you have a granny-lady or...
Oh, no, Mama never believed in that. Even my grandmothers had doctors from Monticello. So we, of course, had a physician.
But she was born in the house that you had lived in.
Yes. The closest hospital at that time was Lexington.
And then how long did you live on that farm, and did you leave because it was remote for the children for things like doctors' care?
Tom was born in Providence Hospital in Detroit in `46. The War came. My husband was not accepted as a soldier. He was thirty-five. And all other men were leaving, and it was difficult. We were still doing subsistence farming. So he went to Detroit. He'd worked on newspapers in Chicago, so he came to Detroit. And I stayed on a few months in the farm, long enough to sell the cattle and so forth, but I didn't want to be down there alone with Marcella. She developed a serious throat infection and ran a high temperature. I was scared to death before I could get her to the doctor in Burnside; that was the closest doctor. So I sold the cattle and lived in Burnside until he could find a place for us, and at that time all he could find was in a public housing development.
Which housing development was it?
Emerson Homes in the northeastern part of Detroit.
What kinds of people lived in that? I mean I know that
There were all manner of people there. I lived near the wives and children of a mailer on the Detroit News, a minister, a policeman, and factory workers.
Were there mountain people that had migrated up?
No, I never met one person from the hills. There were two families from the South; one was from southern Georgia, and I think the other was from Alabama. But most of the people around were native Detroiters. It was difficult to get a place in a housing development as the War went on, and there were Polish Americans who had grown up in nearby Hamtramck.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
When we didn't have the tape on, we were talking about one of the difficulties with writing are people who insist on thinking that it's autobiographical, in other words, the people who are surprised that you're 4′11″ instead of a rawboned Gertie Nevilles. And I think you mentioned that there was a woman. . . . Could you tell me about the woman who called you up and said, "Homer's my son-in-law," and then the woman who said you wrote about Willow Run. Could you tell me a little bit about that?
That was the same woman. Oh, some months—it's been
[laughter]
...the background of the book: the housing development was Willow Run, the place where they made Flying Fortresses; many hill people lived there. I said no, I had never been in Willow Run. The background was a Detroit housing project; I believe the name was Emerson Homes, wartime housing. She said no, she was certain it was Willow Run because Homer was her son-in-law.
[laughter]
Homer is a minor character in the book, if you remember...
Yes, he's doing graduate work and studying people in the same way the tourist studied you.
Yes. He studied people as if they were bugs under the microscope. And his wife, you recall, didn't feel that way. It was useless to tell that to the woman on the telephone. She practically called me a liar, you see, and I didn't feel like arguing with her, so we ended our conversation as quickly as possible. But wherever that woman is, she is still certain that I used her son-in-law, whatever his name was, as Homer and found him in Willow Run. She was less interested in the background. She only knew it was Willow Run because her son-in-law, whom I had used as Homer, was living there during the War.
Why did you name him Homer?
I thought it was an excellent name...
I do, too.
...for such a man. I have great difficulty in naming characters. I go through telephone directories and try mixing names, and then you never know.
But do you have any feelings about Homer? I mean, is there any connection between Homer and the kind of person who observes in the way that Homer the character you created observed?
No.
Or anything about his particular kind of odyssey.
No, and I think I shouldn't have named him Homer, because Homer was a great poet. And perhaps that was wrong, but I have such a struggle in finding names. I don't think I named the character for the Greek genius; today, Homer as a given name is fairly common.
Didn't you also tell me that once a woman called you from Oakland, California, to insist that The Dollmaker was set in a housing development out there?
No, she only wrote; she didn't telephone. The one who telephoned was on another matter. No, she was only certain that the housing development I used was in Oakland, California, because she had lived in it for a while. All manner of people lived in those; and all wartime housing developments were apparently much the same.
Now did you start writing The Dollmaker when you moved to Detroit?
Yes. I began Hunter's Horn when we were going to do subsistence farming
and spend most of our time writing. It turned
One thing I was very curious about: I read in a 1944 Atlantic Monthly a short story called "The Hunter" which was published under the pseudonym H. Arnow, which they described as being the pseudonym for Harriette and Harold Arnow. In fact, it's really just like Hunter's Horn.
It is. I wrote the story, and Harold said, "No magazine will ever use
that in its present form." He'd quit work on his own novel. He said,
"You will have to have a more decisive ending." Well,
It's just that when I read it I could only see you, because it was Hunter's Horn.
Well, it was all my writing, but Harold made suggestions for cutting and shaping it into a story, making it short enough. I already had the ending, but getting to it sooner than in the...
Now that was the only example that I've found of both of you working together.
Yes, this is the only one. As I said, for The Dollmaker, he typed. . . . I guess I had it just about finished when we moved out here, but moving, and Harold wanted to move to the country again, and that living in the country with his driving back and forth to Detroit each day. And I drove the children back and forth to the Ann Arbor schools. It took a lot of time out of my writing. But Hunter's Horn was published before we came out here.
That was in '49.
And The Dollmaker almost finished.
Now how many years did you work on Hunter's Horn?
I started it about the time we married.
In '39.
Covici Friede had gone out of business, and Macmillan had written, I
guess before I married, to know if I had a book-length manuscript
That's interesting.
And those hounds could run all night or all day. And the ugliest things, although they were good hounds. They had Julys, and Red Bones down there.
When you started to write Hunter's Horn, I mean hunting is one of the last of the great male prerogatives. Did you come up against objections or uppitiness against your being a woman and daring to write about a man's sport or field of interest?
No, I came up against no objections. If there was something I wanted to
know, I would casually ask a man, or better, listen. We had to have help
for the farm work quite often, and around the table they would often
talk of hunting, different men, and I heard them so much. Of course, you
can hear the bayof hounds for miles, and I would listen and hear the
stories from the children and their mothers, or the men. But in using
Nunn as a central character, I failed miserably. I didn't see Nunn as a
no-good rascal, but some of the
[laughter]
I do have a compulsion to write, since high school, I guess, and I'm unhappy if I'm not doing something about writing each day. That doesn't mean writing a letter. I have heavy correspondence. I try to answer all letters. But my compulsion is somewhat different from Nunn's. Nunn was determined to get the Big Red Fox. He didn't always enjoy hunting, if you recall; he'd look at his neglected fields. Remember, in the first part of the book, Milly wanted sugar to make the usual jelly and preserves to be canned, and Nunn spent the sugar money on dog food; he had the Big Red Fox to catch.
I had no red fox to catch. I wasn't certain that I would get anything; it was just to write.
Because I am very interested in the balance, or the difficulty in keeping a balance, between being a woman who is a wife and a mother, and a woman who is a writer.
Of course, the wife and mother always comes first, up to a point. I did
my writing early in the morning. I never neglected—or don't think I
did—the children or cookery and kitchen work. I could have kept a better
house. You can see from the things that are scattered around this room
and other rooms that I'm not the world's best housekeeper, and time that
should have gone to dusting and cleaning and windows and this. . . . I
did have a cleaning woman for a number of years, but she had to come
from Detroit. She was getting old, and she retired. It's very difficult
to get household help in Ann Arbor, and I've heard the same story from
other women. It seems much easier in the South. But I couldn't write all
day, although there were many days when I wished I could
Now in the years when your children were very young and you'd have to get up and get them breakfast and bring them to school, did you write from four to seven in the morning?
Yes, I have awakened as early as 2:30 and gone to work on something, but
not that often. I usually get up around five. And I had a few hours, and
then it was time to get them and get my husband
The times that you would get up earlier than five, the times that you would get up out of bed at, say, two or two-thirty, would it be the pressure of the characters in your head making you get out of bed?
I think so. I'd awaken— fortunately, some people are not made that way—I awaken fully awake, thinking usually, if I'm working on something, about what I'm trying to write. But I'm not much good in the afternoon. I get sleepy. I keep on going. About the most I can do, especially late in the afternoon as a rule, is housework.
When you would get up early in the morning or any time of day that you'd write, did you write your first drafts on legal paper and in pencil? Is that right?
I used the black pencil, but I always used something where the pages were
fastened together. I like
Now when you wrote, did you just sort of write straight through and just
try to keep it moving, or did you stop and think over
That happened sometimes. Sometimes I could write straight through and I seemed to be going well. Other times the word I wanted would elude me, and I'd waste most of my time thinking, trying to find that one right word. Some form of contrariness. The sensible thing, I believe, would have been to have left a blank for the word and gone on, because names and places, when I forget, come to me, but the words would hold me up. That didn't happen all the time.
Then when you came to do a second draft, I think that's when the typing came in, is that right?
Yes.
Now you've mentioned that your husband Harold—although you were not sure how he did it, because your penmanship isn't the best...
He only typed, as I recall, the first typed draft of The Dollmaker.
So for the other works, you typed them yourself.
Yes, and the first typescript is my working draft.
Then for example, with The Dollmaker, how many drafts did you do after you got the first typed working draft?
The beginning of anything I write is the most difficult part. I think I
did fourteen or twenty of the first chapter of Hunter's Horn. And I
didn't do that many of The Dollmaker, but I must have done five or six.
First, for The Dollmaker, I wrote showing Gertie at home. She was either
plowing to put in a turnip patch, or perhaps
Also, your incredibly keen ear for dialogue. Now I know that we talked about your early years, being exposed to so many wonderful storytellers. Did you just develop your ear from that, or did you ever take notes on dialogue?
No, I noticed even before I could read, the difference, I think, in the
speech of people. One of our neighbors had lately moved to Burnside from
somewhere in the deeper South—I think it was southern Mississippi, I'm
not sure—but I noticed her speech was different from our own. And at
school, our principal had been bred and born in Pennsylvania, and his
speech was different from that of anyone in Burnside. I noticed the same
thing at Berea; practically all of our teachers there were from the
East; we had no one that I can recall
Oh, yes, I'd love to.
Which I cannot read
[interruption]
One thing that you have written about is, for example. . . . I think it was Flowering of the Cumberland rather than Seedtime, but you have a chapter in there where you talk about sound. I think the chapter is called something like "The Sound of Human...
Human Kind."
Did you find it hard to translate the sound and the music and the rhythms of the human voice of the mountain people into the flat, linear written word? I mean, did you find that a problem, or was that as easy for you as...
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
For my fiction I never found it particularly difficult. In The Dollmaker I sometimes had difficulty, not with Gertie or hill people, but with some of the residents. At that time they spoke very little.
Like the Irish immigrants?
No.
Oh.
There were people, especially children, who would say "Yeah." They could use the word "Yeah" with so many inflections. The listener knew what was meant. I remember a woman who liked to listen to gossip or just a story, not necessarily gossip. She was always drinking Coke, or not Cokes necessarily, some kind of soft drinks, and she'd have the bottle by the neck. And someone would start a story of something that had happened at work—many of the women worked in war materiel plants—and she'd say "Yeah" in a kind of uninterested way and take a drink. And as the story progressed and she became more interested, she'd say "Yeah?" and then she'd say "Ye-a-h?" "Oh, yeah!" and forget to drink her Coke. And that way. Or two little boys tuning up for a fight. Suppose one didn't believe what the other said, he'd say "Yeah," and the other one would say "Yeah" in a different kind of way, and the other one "Yeah" back in another way, and then that "Oh, yeah" would come. In this case it was different, meant a fight. And people who spoke so little and used the same word, like the word "lay" had many meanings to them; not all meant "laid off" from work.
For example.
Well, to be laid off at the mill. Or "lay" was also used in describing a sexual act. And "He laid him out" referred to the outcome of a fist fight.
But did you find that hard, to write about the people who didn't talk very much and who used, as you say, the same word over and over again, like "yeah"? I mean, did you have to just do things like use the Coke bottle?
Yes, I had to translate those "Oh, yeah"'s and other expression into a language the reader could understand. And I thought what a wonderful play it would make, to have almost nothing in it except soft drink bottles, because you can tell the amount of interest or anger when somebody stops drinking or turns the bottle upside down and starts to clobber someone. And have almost nothing in it but soft drink bottles...
Oh, how wonderful.
...and "Yeah" and "Oh, yeah."
Have you ever thought of writing plays?
At times I have, but I've never really tried.
How about poetry? I know that you love poetry.
Yes, but you couldn't call what I try to write, "Poetry". You might
stretch a point and call it "verse," but I've never shown it to anyone.
It isn't fit to be seen.
Have you written much poetry? About how much poetry?
Not a lot. Not enough to make, I think, oh, perhaps enough to make one
small book if it were readable and publishable. But to get back to the
non-fiction work, the chapter on "Sounds of Human Kind," I had to learn
the speech of the people. Many of them spelled phonetically. I read a
great deal in the Draper manuscripts, many of them not yet published,
and these were the accounts of older men who had either been in the
Revolution or been with George Rogers Clark or
How did you decide on spellings of dialect?
I tried to spell it in the least confusing way.
As opposed to following some particular method.
Yes.
Right.
And I'm glad I wrote it, because between the radio and since REA brought electricity into the hills, their speech is growing more and more like the speech of those they hear on radio and RV, and the old words are slipping out of their language.
Did you write Seed time on the Cumberland and Flowering of the Cumberland after you'd moved to Detroit?
I wrote those after we moved out here.
To Ann Arbor. Now how did they come about? I mean, weren't you asked to write those?
No. As a child I heard all these stories about my people, most of whom had lived in the colonies. And later, I'm the sixth generation, I suppose—no, only the fifth born in Kentucky; the sixth generation to have lived there—and I heard these stories, and I always wanted to read more but I couldn't find a book about the pioneers that suited me.
So you wrote two. [laughter]
All I could find was stories of Daniel Boone and his coonskin caps, you
know, people living like wild men. And I hadn't planned such a great
undertaking. I first thought I would write only a small book about a few
counties on that part of the Cumberland in south central Kentucky that
is navigable. My home was in Pulaski County. Burnside was head of
navigation of the Cumberland River.
When you were writing those books, you had to go to different places to do the research.
Yes.
Was that difficult, because it was at this time your children were still quite young.
No, my husband helped a great deal there. Most of the time the children
were big enough to travel quite well. The research; the vacation. And my
husband would take part of his vacation at the proper time. For example,
one winter we went down to Nashville so I could work in the Tennessee
State Archives there. It's a wonderful place. And they stayed in a
motel, and they had a lot of fun. This hotel or motel had trailers to
rent to families—long, long trailers—they'd never lived in a trailer, so
they lived there for about two weeks. We never went south during the
summer; it was too hot. And sometimes we'd go during spring vacation.
Well, we did go one summer, and while I did research in Nashville my
husband found a place on the Cumberland plateau, cool, with a swimming
pool and everything—it was a resort of some kind—where he and the
children
Have the children ever been to Burnside?
Oh, yes. As long as Mama lived. She didn't die until 1965.
Oh, so they knew her.
So they knew her.
Did it seem strange to you to have children that were like northern children or city children, who hadn't grown up in Kentucky?
Well, Harold's speech is very different from mine.
He's from Chicago?
Yes. And he grew up in Chicago and attended the University of Illinois. But it is strange that their speech has nothing in it of my speech at all. But I don't feel as badly as an old woman I knew in the community where we lived for a while. She came to me one day. Her grandchildren had been down from Cincinnati to visit her with their mother, her daughter. And she was crying when she said it. She said, "It hurts to the bone to see my little grandchildren growen up and talken just like them people in the north. I can't stand it. And I took them out in the woods to show the flowers and so forth, and you know what one of them said? He kept saying, ‘Where's the bathroom? I have to go to the bathroom’ and looken around as if he expected to see a bathroom in the woods. And I told him to go stand behind a tree." There's a great...
Were those your children you were talking about, or the
No, it was the old woman's grandchildren.
It is always difficult with different generations, but did they ever take up any of the northern attitudes towards hill people? I mean, did they ever kind of make you feel sort of odd about...
I don't know. I suspected they have, because they've heard, especially in Detroit, a great many jokes that were even appearing in the papers about the ignorant hillbillies. And they may have; I don't know. But I don't think they minded, because there wasn't such a gap between my mother—although she spoke with an accent, she was careful like her mother to speak grammatically—and by the time my children came along, she was accustomed to grandchildren from other places. Now Sister Margaret—Peggy, we called her—they lived in Huntington Woods, north of Detroit, where their children grew up.
Let me ask you if your children have a strong affinity towards Kentucky, I mean if it's something that they're interested in or not interested in or whatever? I mean, do they feel like they're Kentuckians?
No, definitely not. They do love the land we have down there. The house has long since almost fallen down.
Burnside.
Burnside and the place where Harold and I lived for awhile. They love the
woods and the house, but they have no
How did they feel about you as their mother being a writer?
They were seldom embarrassed by that. Marcella was embarrassed once in junior high, because one of her fool teachers asked her to say something about her mother. That was after The Dollmaker was out, and it was widely reviewed and made a little splash. And that embarrassed the child terribly. But as a rule, in Ann Arbor it didn't matter because so many of the children are the sons and daughters of university professors who are learned men and who have published learned books. So a fiction writer doesn't rate, you know, too highly in Ann Arbor.
You remember, we were talking about the original names of the books.
Yes.
And it was going to follow what really amounts to alienation, and the
incursion of another society on an old society. Now here we are in what
used to be country, and it's still a gravel
Overtaken the children and my...
Yeah. I mean that even though, from your earliest years, this is something that you've written about and been aware of—the need for connectedness and roots—do you feel. . . . Well, I'm thinking about your most recent book, The Weedkiller's Daughter, and also when you talk about Hunter's Horn. You weren't just talking about Nunn and his problem, but something very much more general. That you have been aware of and have spent a lifetime writing about a problem that, despite the awareness, may still be overtaking even your own home and your own life and your own children's lives. I mean, do you feel at all...
I don't know. I think I felt more alienated in my childhood home after I
started writing and no one was interested in my writing. I thought it a
waste of time that I should teach. I had the same feeling at Berea
College, though the students I met were much the same as I. And I don't
think alienation necessarily arises from a physical change of the home.
Nunn, for example, was alienated from the better men of the community.
He lived with them, but if you recall, Old John, the largest landowner,
lectured him on neglecting his farm, and telling him he came of good
people who
[laughter]
Of course, they're better now, but we had no electricity then. That was before REA. No telephone.
Right. [laughter]
You can have a telephone now. And it would undoubtedly be somewhat different now; I don't know. And as for the children being alienated, I don't think so. They make their own world, have their own friends. I never stressed the past to them a great deal, because they weren't interested, or didn't seem to be.
And did that make you feel bad, or did you just accept it?
No, I had enough of it, especially from Mama. Mama talked so much about the Denneys; I don't know what the Denneys had ever done.
[laughter]
Well, one, I think, a great uncle, was in the Kentucky Legislature
What does it come from?
Well, as I told you, being at home or at Berea and feeling different from the others because I...
But mostly alienated with your writing, not having...
Yes.
...some like-minded people. So do you like being in Ann Arbor now?
Well, I didn't want to move to the country again. My husband is the one—it seems to be that way—who grew up in the city...
[laughter]
...and can never get enough country. Ann Arbor is all right, I think. Of course, it's changed a very great deal since we moved here twenty-five or -six years ago.
And Marcella went to the London School of Economics?
First she spent two years at Swarthmore, and there had her first course
in economics. She planned to major in physics, taking
Is she working now as an economist in New York?
Yes.
Do you think she admires your writing?
I don't know. But she and our son, too, if they wrote, would write of more sophisticated people and events than of what I have written.
And your son is working with computers at McGill?
He is in Texas. He has a degree from McGill in chemistry. Then he changed his mind and became interested in computers. He is now running a hospital computer. He is also attending a university planning to get a degree in what do you call it — computer science?
Yes. Right.
Program in science. I don't know what.
Are you working now on a manuscript for...
I want to get to one just as soon...
As soon as we stop taping. [laughter]
No, but there are so many other things. I wrote this manuscript for the University Press of Kentucky, which I shouldn't have taken the time to do. I don't think they'll want it; it's much too long.
What is the manuscript on?
It's about old Burnside.
Oh, so an historical piece.
Burnside had an interesting history. All the business section was swallowed in Lake Cumberland.
Oh, that is interesting. Do you have any idea about the next novel that you plan to write or hope to write?
Oh, yes. If I didn't have an idea about it, I wouldn't be wanting to write about it. But I never talk about my writing, not even to my husband or anyone, until I have it written.
It makes good sense, because otherwise you talk it away.
Well, I've heard of people. . . . I read somewhere about some man who could have been a writer, but he talked his novels out.
Yes. I believe in that, too. You mentioned earlier when we were talking,
but not on tape, that at this point
You know, I never knew I was a feminist—and I still don't think I am—until a woman wrote. I didn't have time to read it; she wrote a piece about me for something. Apparently it's lost. Harold did read it, and he said she made me a feminist. Now when I began writing, I was a "regionalist."
[laughter]
And a student from your part of the country, at the University of East Tennessee, did his master's on The Dollmaker . . .
Oh, I have
No.
Oh. I've got a copy of that from a student at East Tennessee.
Well, I haven't seen that one. I've seen other Christ
[laughter]
But this man had proved, to the satisfaction of his advisers and
teachers, that I was a transcendentalist. He did this by quoting
passages chiefly from Thoreau, and some from me from The Dollmaker,
which flattered me no end because I think that no other man has been
able to bring the woods and a pond and fields alive as has Thoreau. In
his description of the Maine woods on a rainy night,
How did you feel about what this student wrote about you in relation to transcendentalism?
Well, as I say, I was flattered. I'd never thought of myself as a transcendentalist.
How about all that's written, including by Joyce Carol Oates in the afterword for The Dollmaker, about the Christ symbolism?
Well, most people saw the book that way. And several, much to my surprise, are seeing the same thing in the baby in Kentucky Trace, though I can't quite see why; the baby was not put to death. The mother only wanted it put to death.
Well, as I said, I began to be known as a regional writer. And at least one person thought of me as a transcendentalist. Most readers read a symbol of Christ into The Dollmaker and symbols in the other books.
And then more lately I discovered, though I haven't been able to read
the piece the woman wrote, that I was a feminist. I cannot believe that
I am a feminist. I don't think Gertie was a faminist. What was best for
her children came first. On the other hand, I'm weary of this talk of
women. It's much like the old talk of the proletariat, that woman is
woman, and there are no individuals, and all women are alike. It makes
me both angry and sick at my stomach, because women are individuals and
each should be permitted to follow her own bent, have control of her
body. If a woman wants to marry and stay home and raise six children,
that's her business, and never with a thought beyond the home and the
church and the school. Of course, I hope too many women don't do that,
because we're rapidly reaching the point in the world of overpopulation
and under-food. I don't know what would happen should we have another
Dust Bowl. We have no promise from the weather or God that we can go on
producing enormous quantities of wheat and corn year in and year out. So
I believe in planned parenthood for those who can possibly accept it.
There is discrimination against women; I know that. But I also know—I
think the trend is changing—that too many girls pushed on by mothers and
fathers marry out of high school, and if they don't succeed in catching
their men they go to college, and everybody feels they're a
But see, I think that one reason why women—"women," but anyway—are interested in you is that you managed to do both, have a family with husband and children and follow your writing. And it seems when we talked earlier, you said that when you were in your twenties and late twenties and still unmarried, that your dedication was to writing, and that the right man hadn't come along. I mean, you put it up to sort of being lucky, that you were thirty-one; I think he was thirty-five?
Thirty-one.
And then you married and could pursue what amounts to a double career.
Yes.
But was it as simple as that? I mean, had you really . . .
No. You see, I'd been writing. My first book was published when I was twenty-eight. Since that time I've published only four novels and two social histories. Now other women, most women writers are married. Look at Joyce Carol Oates. She is not only married, but she teaches at a university in Windsor. Or I know a woman who is doing extremely well as a lawyer. She got her bachelor's degree, and then when her children were getting old enough—she had three—she studied law and made a success of it. And there are many women doing both, or trying to.
That's true. But you know, you talked about meeting the right man when you were thirty-one. But I mean earlier, before that, were there other men that could have been the right man, but your decision was that writing was the most important?
Yes, I wasn't eager to get married. There was no compulsion at home.
The other thing was, in those years, like late twenties, another thing that a lot of women feel, in addition to a compulsion to be married, is, as they get older, they feel that their childbearing years are diminishing.
Yes.
And feel a real desire to have children, and that's very
Oh, not too often. Oh, sometimes I'd think I'd like to have children, but it was no compelling desire until about the time I married and I wanted children very much. Or perhaps until my sisters younger than I married before I did. No, two didn't; one did, and she had children. But you must remember that during the Depression, the Great Depression of the thirties, people didn't stop marrying but they waited a while, and the birth rate went way, way down, just as it has gone down during this very minor depression.
Well, you can't call it "minor" to someone who's been out of work for
months,
Now that your children are away from home and you say that you write every day, and I know that sometimes you, like today, will be going over to the University of Michigan to lecture to a labor history class, do you give lectures or do you teach still? Or do you belong to organizations?
I belong to P.E.N. American Center and Writers' Guild, ACLU, and Planned
Parenthood. There's a local ACLU, but I seldom attend a meeting;
I guess I just wonder if, at this period in your life, as much time is taken out by people like me coming to do tapes and commitments to lectures and things like that, or whether you really can devote a lot of your time now to writing.
Well, I've had a bad time here lately with that old Burnside thing, which
I shouldn't have decided to write. And I have agreed to go to Louisville
for two appearances. And this meeting this afternoon. Then I don't
expect to do anything except write and clean up this house for the next
several weeks. I don't have to accept these lectures; I like to get out
once in a while. In Louisville I will be seeing an old friend and others
I knew. So nobody forces me to do these things. I spend more time, I
think, answering letters and telephone calls. Friends and neighbors know
I'm usually working
I guess I'll just ask you one more question, which is, since we've been doing an oral history tape on your life, if there are things that we haven't mentioned that you feel you'd like to say about how you feel about your own life?
Well, I think we have completely covered my life. One thing—I may have said it; I don't know—you often read that childhood impressions are the most lasting. And in one respect mine were. As a child I learned to grow flowers and vegetables, to look at the sky, and then my favorites playground was the woods. And I think that is possibly why I have all those things in my stories. And the stories I heard as a child, handed-down stories and others, no doubt influenced me to do my non-fiction books on the pioneers, but I don't think they influenced the course of my fiction. That's difficult to tell. Except, at first I heard stories; then I read them. Our parents bought books for us. So that I can't remember a time when I didn't enjoy hearing stories; the story was the thing, any kind of story, true or a fairy tale. So in that respect, I think it influenced me; I don't know.
Do you get to hear many good stories these days?
No, I'm not out enough among people. I don't read enough. I heard some
stories in Louisville—most of them are sad—about this one or that one.
Or you hear political rumors
But I guess you have a whole lifetime of stories to work with, several
hundred years'. [laughter]
I'm getting old; I don't have a whole lifetime left. And I don't know; I hope to have a few more years. I vow at times I'll never go out on another lecture or teach in another writers' workshop, but I always do, because it's a change, I guess.
Okay, I think we might as well end it, okay?
END OF INTERVIEW
The Kentucky Trace (Knopf,
1973); The Weedkiller's Daughter (1970); The Dollmaker (1954); Hunter's Horn (1949);
Mountain Pass (as Harriette Simpson) (1936)
The Flowering of the
Cumberland (1963); Seedtime on the Cumberland
(1960).
Between the
Flowers (unpublished novel); writes short stories published in
the old Southern Review, then edited by Robert Penn
Warren; The New Talent; the stories: "Marigolds and
Mules" (1934), "A Mess of Port" (1935; The New
Talent), "Washerwoman's Day" (1936; Southern
Review).
Nation 211: 71-77, August 3, 1970), "Gray Woman
of Appalachia" (Nation 211: 684-87, December 28,
1970); "No Rats in the Mines" (Nation 213: 401-04,
October 25, 1971).
Seedtime on the Cumberland.