SOURCE: Kling, Vincent, and Bobbie Ann Mason. “A Conversation with Bobbie Ann Mason.” Four Quarters 4, no. 1 (spring 1990): 17–22.

[In the following interview, originally conducted in October 1988, Kling discusses academic approaches to Mason's writing and prompts the author to comment on her favorite stories.]

She isn't recondite, she isn't grotesque, she isn't minimalist, she isn't experimental, she isn't ideological. She stands quietly shoulder-to-shoulder with her characters, unruffled and unjudging no matter what they say or do, and yet passionately committed to their every move and every gesture. She guards their right to be themselves. Like so many writers, Bobbie Ann Mason says that she waits patiently for her characters to disclose themselves through attitude and action, through the clothes they wear or the music they listen to. One of her greatest strengths is what she does with those characters after they've made themselves known to her. She has the uncanny wit to take them as she finds them, to accept them as they are without dressing them up or down.

It calls for one kind of skill to keep the pale fires burning or to launch Flaubert's parrot in its dizzy flight, another kind, just as exacting, to make us forget that an artist is at work. Convoluted surfaces and self-referential devices are not for Bobbie Ann Mason. She's written astutely about Nabokov, but she doesn't situate her craft anywhere notably close to his. Perhaps she wouldn't mind (what writer would?) a comparison with Katherine Anne Porter. My experience has been that green undergraduates and burnished critics alike come away with the certainty that something has happened in “Nancy Culpepper” or “The Rookers,” just as in Porter's “The Grave” or “The Circus.” Mere vignettes—such small detail, such commonplace episodes. Yet we finish fairly bemused by the depth at which we know Miranda. Everything appears to have arranged itself, to have fallen into place through some routine domestic economy that anyone could manage.

This kind of seeming artlessness requires concentration and skill beyond most writers' capacity. Everything is there as an unassuming object in a simple scene, but everything is an enormously charged symbol of every event and every feeling. The bullet-pocked log cabins in “Shiloh” become in themselves the marriage that has grown to be a civil war. A woman's ordinary vegetable garden in Spence + Lila gently gets transformed through timing and arrangement into a temporary but triumphant paradise regained. A young girl seeing television for the first time in “Detroit Skyline, 1949” has to adjust her vision before she can make out the dim figures on the screen; that need for adjustment becomes her whole emotional venture into joy and pain as she tries to take in what she only half-understands. And all that rendered detail ends in felt experience, in the completeness that comes of coherent, valid emotion. This is a writer who cares about her characters and has the craft to make us do the same.

Talking with Bobbie Ann Mason when she was here at La Salle University in October of 1988 was as much a pleasure as I'd anticipated, but in a very different way. I thought I'd get her to talk about the continuity of Southern literature, about being a woman writer, and about pastoral. She gently warded off those professorial-style questions and took the conversation where she wanted it to go. The more she did, the better it went. I felt like Pascal, who said he went to Montaigne expecting to find a style but that he came away having found a person.

[Kling:] As an academic, I suppose I'm accustomed to applying labels and categories. So if I ask about scholarly treatments of pastoral it's to say that I came to the end of Spence + Lila and thought, “We're in a garden, and life has triumphed, and growing things are being harvested and the couple is back together in every sense.” So I wondered if Bobbie Ann Mason (being a Ph.D. in literature) had thought about Louis Simpson on pastoral, for instance. I can't imagine any writer doing such a thing, but I wondered if you'd started with an overall pattern.

[Mason:] You say you couldn't imagine any writer stopping to think about Louis Simpson at that moment. Of course I wouldn't; it would get in the way. I think I knew intuitively the progress of the story from sickness to health, and it's emotionally the way things had to progress.

But a writer thinks about things really in quite literal, specific terms. Is Lila going to have chemotherapy in the story? Does she feel well enough to come home from the hospital? Does she feel well enough to go out to her garden? What is growing in the garden? I mean you're stuck on that level, that's the level you operate on. Really you're working out all the surface details, and if they're right then the other will come through. But you can't start with the thematic content and work backwards.

You said earlier today that the story you read (“Midnight Magic”) began when you saw a man sitting in a car that had “Midnight Magic” painted on the back and he looked terrible, so you asked yourself what could have brought him to that point.

Yes, that's the kind of scene that triggers my imagination. With the “pastoral” scene at the end of Spence + Lila—you know that's a personal story and I don't mind saying it was drawn very closely from my parents. But also they became fictional characters at some point so that I was able to deal with them without too much baggage, personal baggage. Still, I know what it's like to see my mother in the garden and so my mother was in the garden, with the beans and the cucumbers getting ripe. That's the time to get her laughter; it was the sound of her laughter that was the important thing to me. The sound of her laughter, her attitude, her feelings for the garden and her connection with her husband—just all those emotional things. You could call it pastoral if you want to, but it was not the way I went about it.

I'm not surprised. Most people who exercise a demanding craft don't seem to be helped by thinking about it in a distanced, theoretical way.

It's a perspective I couldn't possibly have as I write. Maybe intellectually I could have it later, or maybe I could be shown things about my work by critics and reviewers that would surprise me and please me and ring a bell and I'd say, “Oh yeah, that's what I was trying to do.”

It's a different language, and not just a different language, but maybe a different thought process and different side of the brain in operation in the creative process as opposed to the critical process. Not that a writer isn't capable of both or that a critic isn't capable of both either; we all have different ways of operating.

I guess I have a kind of perverse reaction to a lot of labels. I tend to want to resist some things. If you say I'm a Southern writer I want to say, “Oh, not really,” or if you say I'm not a Southern writer I might say, “Of course I am!” There's that kind of perverse habit of mine I have, and then there's a kind of resistance I have out of my own personal experience to academic approaches.

When I was teaching and would go into the classroom and I would be teaching Southern literature, I would feel compelled to instruct the kids on the pastoral and the Agrarian movement and all that belongs under that topic. I would feel that I had to impose all of that on them because as a teacher one has to be the authority and since then, since I no longer teach, I never want to be in that position again. I never want to be in a position of being a false authority, and as teacher I never really felt secure in the knowledge I was trying to impart to them or in my supposed authority. So it feels very liberating to me not to have to come on that way, just to talk in a more straightforward way about what I do and what is important to me in what I write. But I'm resisting your questions!

That's perfectly all right. I can always come up with categories and labels. The excitement now is to hear what you say irrespective of what I'm asking, just as I like it when a student says, “I don't agree,” or, “I don't like the way you're running this class.” I'm not a very secure person, but I'm glad when that happens.

I've been thinking a lot lately about academic approaches as opposed to the creative process. I've visited classes and the students very often want to know what something means or what the theme is, or they're discussing the symbols. Those were certainly not the things I thought I was dealing with when I wrote the story, but they very well may be there in the finished product.

In that situation it's a little hard for me to say what is exciting about the work for me and what went into it and what I thought I was doing. Here's an example from my novel In Country. The character Emmett sometimes wears a skirt. He wears a wrap-around Indian-print skirt with elephants on it. Somewhere, some student has written a term paper about why he's wearing a skirt. Well, when I wrote this—it was one of the first scenes I wrote when I began writing In Country—I was captivated by the idea of this guy putting a skirt on and I didn't know why he was doing it, but that was one notion I kept from the very beginning throughout the whole process of writing—this guy in a skirt. It was mysterious and I had to develop it as I went along and make discoveries about it, but in the final analysis I can't reduce to any meaning why he wore that skirt. Still, it's an indelible part of the story; it's part of the fabric.

When I went to Kentucky during the filming of In Country the wardrobe mistress showed me the skirt that Bruce Willis was going to wear in the movie. There it was. It was made tangible. She had found it in a thrift shop or somewhere. It was from the 60's, an Indian-print wrap-around skirt with elephants on it. I had made it up in my mind, but it actually existed. To me it was a lot more exciting to see that skirt come to life than it was to know that somebody had written a paper telling what that skirt meant because seeing the skirt come to life was more in tune with the imaginative process. It was the way I saw it in my imagination and it was what it meant in my imagination—just the textures of it, the elephants on it and all that.

I don't mean that the person writing the term paper about what it meant is barking up the wrong tree. But seeing that actual skirt made concrete reminded me of what was special to me about it in the novel. It was the vitality of it. You always come to the question of whether the work is interesting or not. Does this follow this? Is this passage dull? Do the characters come to life and are they interesting? Do you care about them? What are they eating for breakfast? Where are they going today? How are they going to deal with this problem? That's the level you're operating on when you're writing and I think it's the level you're operating on when you're reading, but not when you're trying to analyze.

A very general question about where Nabokov might fit. I think your first book was about him. How did you move from such a self-conscious artist to your own seemingly artless way?

There's a strong connection in the business of that skirt. I was very charmed to read Nabokov once in an interview when he gave his response to the movie of Lolita. He loved the way the actress drew her sweater around her shoulders. He thought that was just lovely. Apparently in his mind it evoked the true Lolita. It evoked something about her vitality and what she meant to him as a character. He was a writer who resisted characterization and analysis of meaning and he thought that everything was on the surface, except that the surface was a prism of infinite mirrors and reflections. There are certain affinities I feel with Nabokov, and you know that I wrote my dissertation on him in graduate school. But I don't think his influence or connection should be blown out of proportion; there are many other influences in my life too.

Like your mother's garden. That's beautiful. That stays with me. What about other writers you grew up with?

Well, I didn't read much good writing when I was in high school. I didn't discover literature until college. In high school I read Forever Amber and Peyton Place and a lot of pseudo-science things like The Search for Bridey Murphy.

Oh, for heaven sakes, we're the only people left who remember that, you and I. I can't wait to put that in.

There was no one to steer me in any direction, so I just drifted. When I got to college I read Salinger, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe.

Was there anyone when you started out writing fiction you thought you wanted as a model, or did you immediately say, “I just want to put down whatever I have felt, experienced, remembered”?

No, I started writing in college. I guess Scott Fitzgerald was my favorite and I thought his writing was so beautiful, stylistically, and the romance of his generation was all so pure, soft. He was probably my strongest influence at that time.

What about favorites among your own stories? They get strong reactions from other readers. My students loved “Shiloh.” I love “Detroit Skyline, 1949.” I remember the margarine, the old TVs; I remember the Red scare. Maybe it's about being a certain age.

A number of people have said the same thing to me about “Detroit Skyline,” and I think it's because they have a personal connection to those memories. So different people have different favorites. My favorite of what I've written is In Country. I feel that's special.

I'm proud of the novel and awed by the characters—very fond of the characters. I feel proud of it because I felt it touched on something that reaches a lot of people and that's why I'm excited about the movie. The movie reaches a much larger audience than I could. It's not my work exactly, but it's going to reach someone. I think the subject is very important. I wouldn't say that about other things I've written, but in that case just the subject alone is very important. I guess one story I'm especially fond of is “Nancy Culpepper.” I could identify with her a lot.

Thanks for such a thoughtful and honest exchange. I'm learning more through your not answering my questions. Why don't I just ask an open question. What hasn't come up that you would really want to say? What would you want a reading public to know?

You asked about other things that shaped me, other shaping influences. Well, you know, you can look at the evidence. You can look at the fact that I wrote a book about Nabokov and that I'm from the South, and that I liked Scott Fitzgerald, but the real shaping influence? I guess it's really the Southern culture that has had the most profound influence on me personally.

I'm writing about some kinds of people that aren't restricted to the South; they're all over. But they're people I come from and am still connected to. Readers who don't know about their world are often mystified by my writing, or they may understand the writing OK but would never dream that I might have come out of that world, so they treat me as if I'm somehow remote from it, but that's not really true. I keep trying to explain something about the hold of that culture and the pervasiveness of it and how it's all around us.

Yet people who read books aren't necessarily knowledgeable about that world. You know, this goes back again to my resistance against the academic because I'm writing about people who wouldn't know a good book if it hit them on the head and, you know, I care about those people.

It may bother me that they don't read, but I don't think that their lives are any less valid or that their emotions or feelings are any less complex. I'm not even sure where I belong myself. I still have one foot in that culture and it drags me back, and yet it nourishes me too. I'm not sure whether it's better to be sophisticated or not.

Let me think. I think I have somewhere to go with this. You know, these people—some of them may be sending money to those tele-evangelists and they may be voting for Bush and who knows what else they're going to do, but I feel like their lives are ignored and that they're put down for those things that I just mentioned, when, you know, maybe that's not everything about them. It's so easy to ignore them because they have no power.

I actually write about people on the way up, people in the middle classes, and I guess people associate the Kmart with my characters and say in a kind of condescending way that these are people who have nothing better to do than shop at the Kmart or that their values are so shoddy and materialistic that they're defined by the Kmart. Well, I really resist that, resist that very much, because as I said—and I've said this before—if they could afford to shop at Saks Fifth Avenue maybe they would, but they can't. They're caught up in the limited appeal of what Kmart has to offer and the people who are doing the criticizing probably have more money and can go to better stores. I just find that a kind of hypocrisy. I can't accept it. So, you know, its not that I'm celebrating the Kmart but I'm very aware of the limitations of these characters' world and of what's informing and defining their responses. I feel very sympathetic towards them for those reasons.