The Yearling – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I wasn’t sure what was causing my problem with novels – so many failed to engage me. Were there any books left out there that were truly outstanding? Or had I lost the capability to appreciate fiction? Then this one comes along, and restored my faith. It’s a fine work from beginning to end, and it deserved being a best seller, it deserved the 1939 Pulitzer Prize. My appreciation is a bit strange, for I recall, as a teenager, trying unsuccessfully to get into this book. Here I am, over six decades later, turning to it again. This is mainly because I was so impressed by Cross Creek, Rawlings’ memoir about her years spent in the Florida scrub. She was born in Washington, D.C. and lived much of her life up north, but at age thirty-two she moved to a place that would give rise to deep feelings. Though The Yearling, which is set in that primitive world, has been classified as suitable for young readers, I disagree; it’s a very adult work, something a boy of fourteen could not possibly understand. Especially nowadays, when life is so different from the precarious existence depicted. Man must kill to survive; not just for food, but for clothing and sundry other uses. And the failure of a crop is a disaster. The story is commonly described as being about a boy and his pet deer, but it’s actually about the relationship between a boy and his father. Penny Baxter is a good father — every boy should have such a man to bring him up. (Possibly prospective fathers are the ones who should read this book.) The mother is a woman damaged by too many infants lost in birth or shortly thereafter; by the time Jodie arrived something warm and loving had closed down in her. The deer Jodie adopts doesn’t appear until about a third of the way into the novel. Penny is bitten by a rattlesnake, and immediately shoots a doe that happens to appear nearby so that he can use its liver to draw out the venom (this snakebite episode, and its aftermath, is appalling). Jodie notices that she has a fawn. Later, when they return to the house, Jodie lies on the floor beside his father’s bed, and his mind goes to the fawn, alone by the body of its mother, without the warmth and food and comfort she had provided. And though Jody routinely kills animals, he has a soft spot in his heart, and “was torn with hate for all death and pity for all aloneness.” When he later goes to where the doe was shot he sees the fawn still there, and he brings it home. Maybe Penny allows Jodie to raise the fawn because he had taken the life of the mother to save himself. But the decision turns out badly. Would an adolescent understand (or accept) the grim ending of the novel, in which Jodie leaves the things of childhood behind and accepts a life of toil on isolated Baxter’s Island? As for Rawlings’ prose, it flows, with not a bump, even when she’s using the backwoods vernacular in the speech of the characters. How she, with her Northern upbringing, could get this speech so right, how she could recreate what a group of men talk about around a campfire – well, it’s downright amazing. *

Blood of My Blood – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I was so caught up by The Yearling that I was interested in an “autobiographical novel” by Rawlings – I wanted to know what made her tick. Why did the scrub country of Florida hold such appeal for someone born and raised in the north? Actually, the answer may be that she was rebelling against her upbringing. That upbringing was dictated by the wishes of her mother, who believed in surface values: money, clothes, a big house, a husband with status. (Things which the mother never had, but sought through her daughter.) In the beginning Marjorie (all the names used are actual ones) tried to live up to the mother’s wishes. But while in college she abruptly turns away from that value system. What precipitated this change is not made clear, though it could be due to the influence of the man she would marry. That said, the novel is not really about Marjorie. It’s about the mother. The first third is devoted to Ida, from childhood on to marriage (and the birth of a daughter). Rawlings is to be lauded for this portrayal. It could have been a hatchet job, but instead it’s an exploration of the emotional life of a misguided soul. Marjorie comes across as an unattractive personality, both as the compliant striver and as the rebel. In the first role she was a callous user, in the second a harsh rejecter. When exactly Rawlings wrote Blood is not known, but in 1929 she submitted it to a competition (she had the manuscript returned with a polite form rejection). Apparently she put the novel away, and, when fame came, she didn’t revive it (her editor, Maxwell Perkins, never knew of its existence). It wasn’t until long after Rawlings’ death that it was published. Would she have been pleased? I have my doubts. Not because it was a novice work, which it isn’t. And not because she portrays herself so harshly – she would accept the truth. But I think she came to see it as a purely personal unburdening, to a large degree an offering of supplication and appreciation to her deceased mother. Why else that last, moving paragraph? At any rate, I’m glad it did become available. It’s an absorbing and perceptive psychological study with something to say about life.