Bits and Bobs

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
(1896-1953)
at her home in Cross Creek, Florida

I finished reading Hugh Howard's Writers of the American South and learned that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling, at one time wrote for the The Courier-Journal, my hometown newspaper. That would have been in the 1920s before she moved to Central Florida. I also learned that she wrote a memoir Cross Creek about life on her citrus farm in Florida where she learned to cook - on a wood-burning stove, no less - alligator, rattlesnake, and blackbird pie along with okra, mustard greens, and hush puppies. 

Howard writes:
Her voice is that of a wise storyteller seated on her porch - where she often wrote, sometimes in longhand, sometimes on her L.C. Smith portable typewriter - telling the tales of the friends and neighbors who, the reader understands, are as likely as not to saunter by as the story unfolds. 

The only quarrel I have with this book is its design. The paper is semi-gloss, the type is small, and the ink is not very black. For my Woman-of-a-Certain-Age eyes, it made for a strain to read. But I made it through with the occasional help from my trusty magnifying glass.

I also finished up The Long-Winded Lady by Maeve Brennan. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed these tales of hers about Manhattan. I decided they read like short stories. Along the way I learned that Ms. Brennan liked her martinis, had a penchant for eating in French restaurants, and read mysteries. 

One day, sitting in a restaurant she spies two nuns walking down the sidewalk. Seeing them prompts memories of her miserable time in Dublin where she was sent to a convent boarding school. The nuns, she recalls, were violent and stingy. Not a good combination. 

She writes about the two of the nuns who ran the school:

..they spent most of their time looking for sin. They were alway on patrol, sometimes together and sometimes separately. They patrolled the silent study hall, and they patrolled the corridors, and they patrolled the classrooms and the washrooms, and they even patrolled the dormitories, often walking between the beds after the lights were out. 

And then:

Those two nuns tracked [sin] down even in the refractory, where we had breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper. They never seemed to notice what was on our plates. Awful food. It was always tea and bread scraped with butter, except at midday dinner, when it was boiled potatoes.

Hers is a book that should be a required textbook for aspiring writers. Ms. Brennan's attention to detail and her choice of words constitute perfect writing lessons.

Writers of the American South

Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind,
at an old sewing table she used as her desk.

I have been dipping into Writers of the American South off and on these past mornings. It contains portraits of twenty-two Southern writers and features wonderful photos of their homes showing how a sense of place is reflected in their works. The text is written by Hugh Howard and the photos come from the camera of Roger Strauss III.

Faulkner and Foote (William and Shelby) are side by side in the book. Welty and Wolfe (Eudora and Thomas) are the final two entries in the volume. I was especially interested in those entries as they are homes I have visited. Oxford, Memphis, Jackson, and Asheville. 

And I have also spent time in the sweet town of Beaufort, South Carolina which is the adopted home of Pat Conroy (although I have never been invited to his house).

Some of the authors in this book are still alive and writing. Some are long gone and others have left their writing desks forever since the publication of the book in 2005.

I found the text to be a bit choppy but the photos of the exteriors and interiors of the homes are very fine. I am always interested to see where writers do their work. 

What sort of desks can be found here? 

Ah, well, Shelby Foote had his made from dismantled oak beams from a mill in New England. Conroy sits at a Queen Anne style desk placed facing a large window. Faulkner had his typewriter on a small table with barely room left over to hold a lamp. I can just picture him hunched over, puffing on his pipe and pounding out his saga of Yoknapatawpha County. 

Marjorie Rawlings often wrote on a handmade cypress tabletop on the porch of her house in Florida in order to catch a summer's breeze. James Lee Burke crafts his mysteries at a plain modern desk set in his spacious and well-lit office in Louisiana.  

Some of the homes are fixtures in the landscape and feature large verandas for sitting a spell (Kate Chopin - Louisiana). Others are more contemporary (Ann Patchett - Tennessee). Some are located on the water (Carl Haaisen - Florida), some are exotic (Ernest Hemingway - Key West), and some have had the city grow up around them (Margaret Mitchell - Atlanta).

And imagine this...all the homes are filled with books. Books on shelves, piled on tables, stacked on floors and counters, toppling atop bookcases. 

A helpful feature is a list of the books published by each author at the end of his or her section. A great book to browse through and a nice resource to own.