Tanya Long Bennett, the author of “I have been so many people”: A Study of Lee Smith’s Novels, is a professor of English at the University of North Georgia, where she has taught for thirteen years. She earned her PhD in English at University of Tennessee. Corey Parson, the assistant managing editor at the press, sat down with Dr. Bennett to discuss the release of her book as well as receive insight into Lee Smith’s work. Below is the transcript from that interview.
~ Please join Dr. Tanya Long Bennett and Corey Parson at the release party for Dr. Bennett’s new book, “I have been so many people”: A Study of Lee Smith’s Novels, at the Vickery House on July 1st from 7:00pm – 9:00pm. ~
Corey Parson: In your book, “I have been so many people”: A Study of Lee Smith’s Novels, you note how the Appalachian region seems to be the other of the South, and that is where many of Lee Smith’s novels are set. How does this relate to where you are from? From where do you hail?
Tanya Long Bennett: Actually, I am from Texas. I read Lee Smith for the first time when I was back in Texas in-between stints of getting my PhD from the University of Tennessee. Though I am from Texas, there is something about Lee Smith’s novels that resonates even with a non-Southerner.
What was the first Lee Smith novel you read?
It was Fair and Tender Ladies. I got really turned on to her fiction at that point. I wasn’t intending on writing my dissertation on her until I finished those novels and I went back to finish my PhD work. By that point, I was hooked on her fiction. I started reading one book after another.
From reading your book, I get the impression that Lee Smith’s fiction is rather raw. What were your first impressions of that rawness and the issues of rape and incest in Smith’s books?
I think a lot of Southern literature does that. There is an interesting mix in Lee Smith of the raw quality that you find in Faulkner and a kind of optimism that you don’t find in Faulkner. Her characters go through terrible things. But there is a sense of joy about life in her characters. I always think back to Ivy Rowe [Fair and Tender Ladies] in particular. There is nothing that can daunt her. She does go through a phase where she’s probably going through menopause, and she is lost, perhaps lost in her own life. She goes off with another man, and while she is gone, one of her daughters dies. She then blames herself for her daughter dying. But there is something important about the time she spends out in the mountains with Honey Breeding, and them telling stories to each other, that you have to consider alongside the fact that her little girl died. So even as Smith is telling it like it is—women dying of childbirth in the mountains, some people never being able to have what we would consider a real life because they are just trying to survive—there is this kind of joyful quality to the story.
Speaking of the character Honey Breeding, do you believe he is a real person?
That is a good question. I don’t know if I do. As a professor, I’m usually the one asking that question. I think in a way it doesn’t matter because she does leave her husband for someone else. If that someone else is herself, if Honey is just an aspect of Ivy, I think of it as the same thing. It is almost like she had an affair. She sort of needed that, and I actually like to think of Honey as being another aspect of Ivy. When they go to the mountain together, Ivy says, “I could have come any time and never did it, but now I am finally here and it is with a man. But it is a man like no other that I have known.” It is almost as though she has gotten in touch with the masculine part of herself.
What does that say about the message Lee Smith is portraying in her novels, specifically Ivy if Honey happens to be the masculine part of her? Does that mean a woman must find a masculine figure, even if it is her imagination?
In this case, Honey is not a really masculine man. In fact, Ivy says he is the same size she is, and he kind of glows, and he has this blond hair. The way I would put it is less that she has to find the masculine in herself, and more that she needs to break out of what she thinks is the traditional feminine. She needs to give herself permission to do all the things that Ivy can do.
Do you feel Smith is glorifying the feminine or is she trying to strip away the feminine to a point of ambiguity?
I think she breaks down the hard line between the traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity. However, one thing I like about Lee Smith is that she is just very honest, and she makes her characters deal with reality. When Ivy goes to watch the loggers, and they are getting ready to go off on the river, she really wants to go. Ivy says, “I have half a mind to dress as a boy and go, but I can’t because I am getting a bosom.” Once her body blooms and she becomes a woman, it changes her experience—it is part of her experience in the world. Then she has Jolie, her baby, and once she has children, her life is the life of a mother. She can’t erase those aspects of who she is. I like how Smith writes the body, in a way. She doesn’t allow her characters to be free of any of that because that is not the case for any person in the world.
It is interesting how Smith refers to Huck Finn in not just one but two novels. What is striking to me about the reference is that Twain’s Huck Finn actually cross-dresses in one part of the novel. I’m sure Smith was aware of this, and this is more than a coincidence.
I think she’s so aware of the Huck Finn story. I see it all the way through. In fact I think of Ivy Row as the female Huck Finn, and what would happen if a girl wanted to do this, what would her life be like. In some ways we get the same kinds of revelations from Ivy that we get from Huck. Huck says, “Well, I will just go to Hell then, because I am not going to turn in Jim.” Ivy is the same way. She says, “If this brother of mine, this corrupt guy, is God’s vessel for bringing me salvation, well then He can have it. I don’t want it, and I will just go to Hell.” There are a lot of similarities.
I must say, I really enjoyed reading your book. With an analytical, nonfiction book, it can be difficult to harness a true voice. That is not the case with “I have been so many people”: A Study of Lee Smith’s Novels. Your voice rings out so clear in this book, and makes it very enjoyable to read.
Thank you!
Through reading your book, I noticed a departure of Smith and her novels when she wrote Saving Grace. It seems the topic of religion is definitely in the forefront of Saving Grace in relation to her other novels. Do you see any differences in how she approaches religion in Saving Grace versus her other novels?
I address this in the book as well, and I will say that I believe the ending of that novel is problematic. I think the thing that is similar to her other novels is that she never makes a final pronouncement about religion. None of her characters leads us to the conclusion that there is no such thing as God, so there is always this possibility of the spiritual. In fact, I have an interview with Lee Smith where she talks about how, as a child, she was really drawn to these kinds of charismatic experiences of the religious. She was interested in the idea of people speaking in tongues and things like that. One thing I love about Saving Grace is that she approaches the topic of snake handling with so much respect. She is not making fun of them. She is really introducing it in a way that makes us consider it alongside things like romantic notions of ecstaticism, this idea that you can experience the spiritual in the physical world. Why not by handling snakes? If you can do it by taking communion, why not by handling snakes? Grace’s father is a real problematic vehicle for religion because he is not a very good father; he has affairs all the time, and he abandons her. But I think Smith shows how when one is that close to the line between the flesh and spirit, where they join, one might fall onto situations like Grace’s father falls into. For example, Grace actually has sex with her half-brother during a revival. Their senses, their awareness, and their emotions are so heightened that it leads to this incident.
You say her novels do not conclude whether there is or isn’t a God. Could Smith be insinuating that the true religion is the religion of self, since the self and self-awareness seems to be a recurring theme in her novels?
I think Smith does question traditional religion. It is often restrictive and denies sexuality in a lot of its forms. I think I would say it is more the idea of denying the self, Smith doesn’t seem to buy that aspect. We are sexual beings. Unless there can be a religion where one is able to integrate that part of the self into it, I would say Smith rejects it. She always questions religion. Almost all of her characters are interested in it, though some are not really capable, like Richard Burlage in Oral History. He tries, but he is such an intellectual, he cannot get out of his alienated intellectual state to really experience the spiritual. I think Smith does have regard for spiritual experience, but not the most traditional forms of religion, the social trappings of it.
What do you think of the men in her novels and what is their purpose?
She has all kinds of men in her novels, so I do not think they are flat characters. I love Oakley Fox [Fair and Tender Ladies]. He is right for Ivy, and he seems, on some level, to understand what she needs when she does go off and has the affair with Honey Breeding. He is mad at her when she comes back, but he does take her back. In some ways, they have a better relationship afterwards than before the affair. She respects his religion. She says when they go to church, he looks different when they come out of the service. He has a glow about him; even though she can’t experience it when they are there, she respects it and she believes it’s real. In The Devil’s Dream, you have some really great male characters. Completely immersed in the musical world, it is just part of their culture. They are also very passionate and very sexual, most of them.
I think Richard Burlage [Oral History] is at the opposite end of the spectrum. I don’t think I would say he represents the masculine world. I don’t feel Smith aligns or makes a statement about male dominance through a particular male character, or by having all male characters do that. But Richard, I think his real problem isn’t that he is a man, it is that he is an intellectual, that he is part of the contemporary world which kind of pulls him away from a more immediate experience of the world. You and I are scholars, so we have had a similar experience where we can’t read a novel anymore without analyzing it. Richard has that same problem. He can’t just experience something; he has to analyze it. So when he is walking down the aisle to get saved at church, he says, “I hate to admit it, but I was watching myself as I went down the aisle.” We know what that looks like because we do the same, I think to some extent at least, in the contemporary world, and I think that Smith is describing a contemporary problem. When I say that he lacks the ecstatic experience, I think she is trying to remind us that we have the potential for that. That even people who do what we do, that we could just let go sometimes and feel the spiritual presence, experience nature, or have an encounter with another person where we didn’t have this intellect in-between us.
I like how, though her main focus is on the female and the feminine, her male characters seem as though they don’t have it figured out either. Honey Breeding, though, seems to know more of himself, but we are not certain he is a real person.
He kind of reminds me of Jacky Jarvis in On Agate Hill, even though Jacky is real. He is very playful; he likes to tell stories. He loves Molly. She is kind of a free spirit and he doesn’t mind that. He does have affairs but he is also a musical kind of person, an artistic kind of person. He is also fleeting because he ends up dying, but he serves a purpose in her life. I think he fosters her for a particular phase in her life.
Smith has all kinds of male characters. I think that is a good point. There are also the preachers that are sometimes just horrible. Sam Russell Sage [Fair and Tender Ladies] is completely hypocritical. He is preaching hellfire and brimstone, yet he is having an affair with Geneva on the side. He is eating all the food in the house, and he is greedy. So you do have some of those negative male characters as well. Smith does give us a variety.
The children also seem to lack an innocence we would associate with childhood. Smith seems to give us a harsh, real image of what childhood was really like which wasn’t all that innocent.
With exception to The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, most of Smith’s characters are of age physically before they have some kind of experience like that. In The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, I think a very young Lee Smith was trying to deal with the idea of how we are introduced to that knowledge about what it means to be a sexual being. It makes you vulnerable, and it also makes you knowing in some way. The knowledge Susan gains that year is huge. It is a factor in her maturing, so it is necessary. But it is so very difficult for her to deal with because she is so young. There are children in Smith novels who seem to have an easier life, but that’s not usually the case for the protagonist’s family. In Saving Grace, Grace really likes her friend that has a nicer life with nice clothes and good food. But Smith’s main characters are never in those families.
It feels like the children in her novels are dealing with the same kind of problems as are the adults, and sometimes it is a cycle that continues. For example, Grace hates her father for cheating on her mother, yet when Grace grows up, she cheats on her spouse.
And she is aware of it. One example of a family that actually has money is the Bird/Hess family from Family Linen. But they have these dark repressed memories. Sybill suffers from horrible headaches, and she is sent to a hypnosis therapist. She soon figures out that, as a child, she may have seen something horrible. So she maybe had a seemingly idyllic childhood, but ass these characters’ lives are more closely examined, it becomes clear that the suppressed memories were actual real events.
It also seems like Smith is not only commenting on our relationships with each other and the opposite sex, she is also commenting on family values and capitalism, particularly the development of Ghostland in Oral History. What do you think Smith is trying to tell us about that?
As always, she doesn’t make a final conclusion about capitalism. There is a point in Fair and Tender Ladies where Ivy is very excited because they got electrification up in the mountains, and they can listen to the radio, and it makes their lives easier. But at the same time, her mother has sold the mineral rights of her land to the big coal company, and the coal company is basically destroying the land. They are causing all kinds of floods by the way they are changing the landscape with their mining. Ultimately, it is more negative than positive. If Richard Burlage [Oral History] is an example of how we alienate ourselves from our immediate experience, I think Smith is suggesting that capitalism does the same to us too. In The Devil’s Dream, there is a really interesting take on capitalism. The Baileys are a musical family, and it is something that springs right out of their experience with their community. They go to these parties in their community, they sing, and they are well known. They have grown up with these people. The songs are familiar. They have all sung these songs since they were kids. Then they decide to record these songs. You can see in the sessions where they are actually doing the recording that something is happening when they make the music commercial. It changes it. It alienates them from the music and it puts something between the listener and the song. So it can’t be the same. It is not the same product anymore. Just like the house at Ghostland [Oral History]–it is not the same house anymore once the function of it changes. It is similar to Dolly Parton’s childhood home in Dollywood. It is not the same house that she grew up in. Even though the materials are the same, its role has changed, so its meaning is different.
I wonder if that may also be relating to modern feminism and what modern feminism says about women and how they should feel. Is Smith saying that this kind of feminism is taking away what is really there? I feel like Smith is commenting that we don’t need to get rid of the feminine, but redefine the feminine.
I guess what you are referring to is how in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, the feminist movement approached liberation by having women take on male roles. So women wore power suits, and they said, “If you can do it, we can do it.” Women became more like men, if you want to put it that way. And you are suggesting that maybe Smith is saying we shouldn’t sell out the valuable things we brought to the table in the first place.
I think that is a good point. You might apply that to Jolie in Fair and Tender Ladies. When she grows up, she is writing novels. But Ivy, her mother, doesn’t see herself as a writer because she didn’t become the kind of writer her Jolie is, which is a commercial writer. In some ways, Ivy’s novel, her collection of letters that becomes our novel, is more meaningful in some way because she kept her role in her community and with her family. Smith does have some good comments regarding art, and how art that springs out of the community, which involves caring for the community, is more meaningful. Another example is Candy in Family Linen. She does hair, yet she isn’t considered an artist because it isn’t what society would consider as art. To be an artist, people have to know your name, and people have to buy your paintings or novels. Well, Candy does a kind of art that is more organic. It includes the community.
She touches everybody in the community.
But maybe in an even more meaningful way because she goes to the wedding, she knows the bride whose hair she fixed. There is another character Smith writes about in a short story called “Cake Walk”. The character makes cakes. This is consumable art, art that isn’t leftover a hundred years later. There is a real function to that kind of art. I hesitate to say that Smith is aggrandizing the feminine because she blurs the line a little bit between feminine and masculine, and I don’t think she likes the categories’ being stark. But at the same time, I do think she has been recognized for raising the status of what we think of as feminine kinds of art.
How has Lee Smith’s writing impacted you as a scholar, a woman, and a mother?
On a personal level, when I read Fair and Tender Ladies, I was pregnant. I identified so much with Ivy. She really resonated with me, especially her courage. She refuses to marry the father of Jolie, her child (though he ends up getting killed anyway in the war). She says, “I’m not going to sleep in this bed just because I made it.” I really loved her attitude. She has a brave approach to life.
I feel my role, as a scholar, is to help promote literature that really speaks to our culture and provides insights that we maybe don’t see in simply looking around at the world. I gravitate to women’s writing because I think often they aren’t receiving the recognition that they deserve for providing those insights. I believe Lee Smith is an important writer. It is my hope that people will see her as a major contributor to American Literature.