You do not have to like a writer of fiction or know anything about his or her life to like their books. Sometimes you learn more about a favorite writer than you wanted to know. Christopher Isherwood in his diaries made anti-semitic statements over and over; Flannery O’Connor told racist jokes and used the “N” word. Both William Styron and Saul Bellow made homophobic comments in their letters. And if you want to talk about poets, Philip Larkin, whose poetry I love, was apparently a mess. The less we know about his life, the better. That most reclusive of great writers, when it came to her own biography, Eudora Welty, may have been on to something, then, when she supposedly called up all her friends when she found out that a woman was working on the first full-length biography of her a few years ago and said something to the effect that I would appreciate it if you didn’t talk to her. Not to worry. Lee Smith is a writer you can love along with loving her fiction.
Ms. Smith’s latest gift to the world DIMESTORE: A WRITER’S LIFE was just what I had hoped for, having read many of his books and heard her read on several occasions. She is as authentic and beautiful as those blue Virginia mountains she loves so much. Her story will make you laugh, and parts of it will make you cry if you are alive. She is as adroit at telling her own life story as she is at writing about any of her fictional characters. Born in Grundy, Virginia to parents who obviously adored her, she spent many happy times in her father’s dimestore from which the book gets its name. Her mother was ever the lady and tried hard to make one out of Ms. Smith who describes herself as a tomboy but someone who fell in love with reading at an early age. “I was a reader long before I became a writer.” But she began her life as a writer by adding on to her favorite books sometimes with a character named “Lee Smith.” While Ms. Smith was a student at Hollins College, Louis D. Rubin, Jr. introduced her to Southern literature. She says she had to go to the college infirmary for a tranquilizer after reading William Styron’s LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS. Her account of the she-thinks-now-graduate student who asks the visiting Eudora Welty a question about the symbolism of the marble cake in one of her stories as the union of yin and yang, blah, blah, blah—these types show up at every reading I have ever attended and always ask long convoluted pretentious questions—is priceless. Miss Welty responded in that beautiful lilting voice: “’Well, it’s a lovely cake and a recipe that has been in my family for years.’” I still remember Miss Welty's response to an eager young woman at an event in Jacksonville, Florida way back in 1971 I think. The young woman wanted to know if Miss Welty thought being a woman affected her writing. This gentle woman's answer: "I certainly hope so."
I would love to have met Lou Crabtree, although Ms. Smith makes her come alive. She was a student in one of her creative writing classes in 1980. Ms. Smith describes her as “this old woman in a man’s hat and fuzzy bedroom shoes.” She thought Ms. Crabtree was a “nutty old lady” until she asked her to read the first line of her short story. “’Old Rellar had thirteen miscarriages and named every one of them.’” Ms. Smith says, “I sat up. ‘Would you read that line again?’ I asked.” The women became fast friends.
While Ms. Smith talks much about the good life she has as a child in Grundy, she does not shy away from telling the truth about her family: “Wasn’t my childhood wonderful? Yes and no. . . In the parlance of today, our family was dysfunctional (is any family not?) I would certainly agree.
I should have read DIMESTORE straight through but didn’t. I read the first chapter “Dimestore” first, then “On Lou’s Porch” and skipped around—not a good reading plan since the last chapter I read was “Good-bye to the Sunset Man.” I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It is this lovely woman’s account of going with her husband Hal Crowther to strew part of the ashes of her beloved son Josh off the coast of Key West. (I defy anyone to read this chapter with dry eyes.) “Josh loved James Taylor, especially his song ‘Fire and Rain.’ But we were too conservative, or too chickens—t, or something, to put it on his tombstone, the same way we were ‘not cool enough’ as Josh put it, to walk down the aisle to ‘Purple Rain’ (his idea) while he played the piano on the day we got married in 1985.” Then Ms. Smith quotes part of the song to her husband as the light fades in Key West. “But I always thought that I’d see you again. Well I won’t. I know this. But what a privilege it was to live on this earth with him, what a privilege it was to be his mother. . . Yet to have children—or simply to experience great love for any person at all—is to throw yourself wide open to the possibility of pain at any moment. But I would not choose otherwise. Not now, not ever."
DIMESTORE is as good as anything Ms. Smith has written.
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