Post #4: Thinking Lee Smith's Blue Marlin

“I can do this again: read it and be there once more, anytime I like. Sifting, adding, recapturing. Making the work work while it makes me do the same. Just like leaning into the radio; or sitting cross-legged at the feet of grandparents.

Skill is enough, but I prefer the art.”

—Toni Morrison “The Reader as Artist”

It has been exciting work so far, delving into Lee Smith’s Blue Marlin. As I mentioned at the end of the previous post, I have only read to page 25 (with my pencil!), but I then decided to read those pages again (with my black pen!).  And, what did I find?  All sorts of ways to make me and the work work, as Toni Morrison explains, like “leaning into the radio” or “sitting cross-legged at the feet of grandparents,” only in this story, we are sitting at the feet of the “athletic and enterprising” Jenny Dale and her author Lee Smith.

My reading with pen & pencil…

The narrative point of view is tricky, since the reader (you and me!) discover that Jenny, our first-person narrator, is thirteen in 1958 at the time the events of the novella unfold, but on page eight, where she announces that she keeps a “Davy Crockett spiral notebook” to help preserve the observations she makes from her bike trips around town,” she mentions as an aside, “I would use this stuff later, in my novels.” While Jenny’s notebook contains “everything: date, time, weather, physical descriptions, my reaction” in order to advance her self-proclaimed “secret career” as a spy, we now know this is also material for her career as a novelist. What then is the “stuff” of novels?

There are more questions about what authors do that makes “good readers” (see previous post) pause and wonder: Why is the narrator telling this story, and why now? Since the narrator is a novelist and has chosen this material and these details rather than other material and other details (remember to notice what is absent), what might she be after? And, as is always the case with the first-person point of view, is she reliable?

Storyteller, Teacher, Enchanter

Lee Smith is a rare sort of writer because it is so clear that she cares deeply about her readers and about writing. She is an inveterate teacher both in the gift of her writing and outside of it.

“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered,” Nabokov posits in his essay “Good Readers and Good Writers,” she “may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter.”

In Lee’s afterword “The Geographical Cure,” the reader is treated to a treatise on the value and purpose of fiction for the author and ultimately for all of us, her readers. I won’t spoil any of that here other than to say that this novel, Lee explains, is “autobiographical fiction.” She offers additional colorful context in her charming book trailer:

In many ways, having divulged the “plot” generally, the author invites her readers to read carefully, to join in on the detective work that is also a defining element of the narrator’s (hence the writer’s!) existence, to be inspired to notice the details, and to write (keep a notebook!) in order to find meaning in them.

“There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected.”—Vladimir Nabokov

If you have a notebook (a scrap of paper, an audio recorder...), grab it now and try out these three engaging writing prompts Lee offers to accompany her story. It is possible these match some of those she used in the process of writing. Writers do this too, so why shouldn’t readers? When we meet Lee on July 13th, I am sure we will want to ask her more about her own notebooks and journals. About her process!

Readers Writing

Prompt #1: Take A Trip!

Lee writes:

My novel Blue Marlin--which is one of our VILLAGE READS books, so I hope you'll read it!--was prompted by my own real memory of a trip I took with my parents in 1959, when I was 13 years old. Some important events happened on that trip, events that made me change the way I thought about  a lot of things and made me grow up a little bit too. This puts BLUE MARLIN into the big category of what we call "initiation stories"--that is, a story in which a young person has a new experience in which she learns something she didn't know before...about the world, and maybe about herself. Often these realizations come when we take a trip--an actual trip--or maybe just  have a new experience. Think about it. We all have our initiation stories. Maybe it was a literal trip, such as the time you went to your cousins' house on Christmas and found out about Santa Claus--or the first time you went hunting and killed a deer--or the first time you went out on a lobster boat with your grandaddy--or the first time you went to the beauty shop with your mother--or had an actual date for the prom--or just the realization you came to when you got to know some people who are not like you and your family at all. So, think about it!  I'm inviting you to take a trip here...to travel back into your memory, back in time....and maybe to another place, too. Then, write a story about that trip and about what you learned from your journey.

Prompt #2: Before and After

Lee calls this one “Then and Now,” but since I started reading the novella deep into our quarantine, I was struck by the way Jenny Dale’s declaration on the very first page captured our collective experience of an enormous, innocence-shattering “after”—I wonder if you share my sense of nuance in word choice:

One day I was riding my bike all over town the way I always did, and the next day I was riding my bike all over town knowing it, and this knowledge gave an extra depth, a heightened dimension and color, to everything. Before, I’d been just any old thirteen-year-old girl on a bike. Now, I was a girl whose father was having an affair—a tragic girl, a dramatic girl. A girl with a burning secret. Everything was different.

Everything certainly is different in this pandemic “after,” in now “knowing it”—italics are Jenny’s (and Lee’s as much as they are ours). This manner of drawing attention to words certainly opens up the “knowing” and the “it” to interpretation. Though Jenny tells us it’s “the famous affair” her father has with Carroll Byrd, the daughter of his client “Old Man Byrd,” knowledge is itself complex, uncertain, and dangerous. It is what ejected Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the origin of coming-of-age, initiation, maturation, loss of innocence narratives and of all the clashes with the established social order that come along with these processes. Yet, there is also the question I had early on: How does Jenny know what she says she knows?

What that “it” is for you, for me, for the world today, is as much the stuff of fiction as it is the stuff of fact, since facts really can’t do much on their own, and maybe that’s one of the reasons Jenny’s mother hates them—she needs story. Indeed, Billie, like her young daughter, craves tragedy, drama, secrets, and certainly the feeling that “everything [is/could be/ought to be] different.” As Lee put it in her afterward:

During a lifetime of writing, I have always felt that I can tell the truth better in fiction than nonfiction. Real life is often chaotic, mysterious, unfathomable. But in fiction, you can change the order of events, emphasize or alter certain aspects of the characters—you can even create new people or take real people away in an instant. That means you can instill some sort of order to create meaning, so that the story will make sense—where real life often does not. Fiction is also heightened reality.

Annex Arts hopes you will also participate in the Quarantine Journal project and take advantage of this double and linked experience. We hope this project deepens your engagement as a reader while also encouraging you to leave a historical record of your experience as a writer.

On to Lee’s prompt...

Here is an idea for a poem named "Then and Now."  It is all about growth and change, and it is all about YOU! Fill in the blanks with as many words as you want, but be very concrete and specific, and don't think about being "poetic!" Okay, here we go...

The Poem About Me

I used to think...

But now I know...

I used to believe...

But now I believe...

 I used to be afraid of...

But now I...

I used to hate...

But now I...

I used to love...

But now I...

I used to feel...

But now I feel...

I used to want...

But now I want...

Prompt #3: Coming of Age!

Watch Lee’s video made just for Village Reads readers:

As we imagine together and bring to life the Village Reads experience, I wonder how some of us might find ways to share the results of these writing prompts and other material from our reading journals. So, as I often find myself saying these days, please stay tuned. There must be a platform for that!

Carroll Byrd

It may feel as if I am jumping over so much material to arrive at Carroll Byrd as I compose this first post on Blue Marlin, but for me, Carroll is intriguing as a character—she is, after all, mentioned in the first sentence of the novel, the woman with whom Jenny “knows” her father “had his famous affair.” As depicted, she is a foil to every female character in town (so far at least—in the first 25 pages!) and especially to Jenny’s mother, a spectacular figure for sure in the mind of the daughter-narrator, yet one who also represents many conventional traits of the women of her time and place—the late 1950s, small-town Virginia or Appalachia, where Lee also grew up—yet defies some of the expected ones. She’s the woman every woman wants to be and in those days, or rather, if I may, the woman everyone thought she wanted to be: beautiful— “the most beautiful women in Virginia...Previously she had been the most beautiful girl in Charleston, South Carolina” and apparently a heart breaker—devoted to her husband, a lawyer, “the best lawyer in town,” whose father ran Dale Industries, the mill of the town. She reads “love magazines and movie magazines” and goes to the movies; she hates “regular newspapers,” “facts,” “club meetings, housework, politics, business, and her mother-in law.” Jenny’s characterization packs important defining detail in lists and negatives—“She was not civic”—a useful reminder that we are also what we are not.

Reading with Memory

A good reader reads with memory, Nabokov explains in “Good Readers and Good Writers,” without really offering much about what that entails. Lee’s “Coming of Age” writing prompt encourages probing memory for an event or experience that changed the way we thought about things, the way her family trip to Key West did for her and will do for Jenny. That is one sort of memory we all bring to the books we read if we are willing to look. But, Nabokov encourages readers to gain a little more distance to ensure they have done enough thinking and feeling in the new world the author has invented on the page! And, there is memory that predates our existence, stretching much, much farther back in time. This is the sort of memory Goethe had in mind when he warned, “He who cannot pull on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”

But, there is yet another memory that never fails to enhance the experience of reading and that is the memory from having read other works. Here, my memory calls to mind another fictional character, Emma Bovary, the eponymous protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary. Like Jenny’s mother, Emma is a beautiful provincial woman who also loves reading her era’s version of love and movie magazines, since before movies there were theaters and romance novels (these still exist, and you’ll find them often on racks in airports), and throughout time, it seems, there were always glamorous people living glamorous lives somewhere else, usually in cities like Paris, where Emma, the daughter of a farmer and married to a (mediocre) country doctor, dreams of visiting (she never makes it there in her short lifetime).

What happens when two works come together like this in the mind of the reader? Well, neuroscience would likely discover that even more receptors begin to fire as the mind engages in the act of comparison and contrast and thus enlarges context. The process always ensures for me that more of both works sticks as I give them space to talk to one another. (An additional bonus in doing this is that you may find yourself picking the other book off its dusty perch on the bookshelf and rereading it!) Two works (and their authors!) in conversation open opportunities for transformation, new and creative interpretations and meanings. Some ideas crystalize, others do not hold up. You are now reading like a detective as you continue to test the evidence from the texts. You are really thinking the work!

Billie Dale and Emma Bovary

 “If Emma Bovary had not read all those novels, it is possible that her fate might have been different.”—Mario Vargas Llosa (Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist and college professor, b. 1936, Nobel Prize in Literature, 2010)

It is very possible that I am the first reader to join together these two characters in this way, grateful for the chance Blue Marlin offers my mind to do so (since it also means a return to one of my favorite novels) and in deep admiration of Lee Smith’s art that inspired me to do so. It would take more time to flesh out in writing all the observations that have started to flood my mind, so I will list some of that material here along with the questions they inspire me to ask. Extending Morrison’s earlier metaphor, in doing this sort of activity, the reader is “sifting, adding, recapturing...sitting cross-legged at the feet of grandparents.”

Both Billie and Emma are so-called beautiful woman for and from their respective regions outside of their country’s (France and the US) cosmopolitan centers—we know they are “provincial” ladies, but they do not...entirely. If you look closely, they seem to put on a few cosmopolitan airs, which was made possible by their culture. In both cases, even separated in time as they are by about a century, these women and their communities are emblematic of that status we call middle class—in France and in French, the bourgeoisie.

Calculating the precise gap in time is complicated by the fact that the events in Madame Bovary take place over the course of 20 years from 1827 to 1847 while the novel itself was written over a ten-year period before publication in 1856. Blue Marlin is set in 1958. It is unclear precisely when Jenny is writing this story later in life as a successful novelist (I may have missed a detail here and will now be looking more closely), but we know that Lee Smith published this novella in April 2020! In that space between then and now, before and after, there is potential for the imagination and for making meaning as we continue to question and relish the choices the authors made.

Such matters of time and place (setting) are always fascinating to think about—how much have we or haven’t we changed? How much are we or are we not a product of our time and place? Both women live in small towns where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Both are married to men who are, let’s say, similarly (at least initially for Emma) charming—and this comparison and contrast opens up even more interesting avenues for interpretation, of course. The mind fires a few more neural pathways thinking about the two husbands, Charles Bovary and “Daddy” Dale.

Ironically, in Madame Bovary, it is Emma who has the affair (commits adultery! )—actually she has several affairs—and not her faithful husband. Jenny is the intermediary in Blue Marlin, whereas Flaubert’s free-indirect style means there is no fixed point-of-view, a radical structural move for his era, one that can feel destabilizing for the reader yet introduces the capacity to display complex ironies. (Time to reread Bovary and if you are interested, Jane Austen, who some decades earlier from 1811 to 1817 discovered free indirect discourse in her novels, an innovation in the history of the novel that William Galperin, author of The Historical Austen, claims was akin to the discovery of the atomic bomb in the history of warfare.)

Jenny’s “knowing it,” which makes her suddenly and indeed happily (as much as if she had finally gotten her period!) “a girl whose father was having an affair—a tragic girl, a romantic girl,” is akin to Emma’s response to the image of herself she notices in the mirror the day after her “knowing it”:

But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, "I have a lover! a lover!" delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights.

Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the love-dream of her youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had so envied.

Jenny-as-narrator (since there is also a Jenny-as-character) tells the reader that “Daddy was a hero, a tragic figure. He stood six-feet-three and looked like Gregory Peck.” Earlier she writes “Some people said Mama looked like Marilyn Monroe.” Jenny is affected by the same culture that has fed her mother’s penchant for movies and movie magazines and thus unites her with Emma, establishing a continuum impossible to ignore. Depicted at roughly the same age early on in Flaubert’s novel, while at boarding school—actually a convent school located in the provincial capital city of Rouen (Rouen is not Paris!)—Emma befriends a housekeeper who smuggles in those popular and, in those days, “steamy” romance novels mentioned above, filled with female transgressors. “Madam Bovary” (Mrs. Dale!) is a container—there are many of them, generations! Maybe some of those same novels are in your library too. And so, what does that say about us? Both works dance with the idea that we are what we read.

By the way, Emma Bovary also has a daughter, an only child, she names “Berthe” after having heard the name at a country viscount’s ball she and Charles have the luck to be invited to. In English, it’s Bertha. I always thought the choice unfortunate. Bertha hardly appears in the novel; she is rejected by her mother, which in itself was part of the novel’s scandal—What mother rejects her child? Bertha does not fit into her mother’s romantic vision and becomes an absence that evolves into a powerful and real tragic presence in the final pages. Billie Dale, on the other hand, clearly enjoys the company of her daughter, a “surprise,” who came to the couple “so late in life.” Though Jenny has two older sisters, she is or says she is responsible for having “sapped” her mother’s strength and “lowered her resistance.” Jenny is effectively an only child and guilty of lessening her mother’s experience of life.

Because of the difference in point of view, Flaubert can mock his protagonist’s taste in literature. Jenny does not or cannot. Jenny partakes in the memory of her romantic indulgence with her mother—she is only 13 at the time, so perhaps this is appropriate—and enjoys the escape. But, she also secretly plans “to go up north to college before becoming (to everyone’s astonishment) a writer” (italics Jenny’s). The passage continues,

First I would write steamy novels about my own hot love life, eventually getting world-famous like Grace Metalious. I would make millions of dollars and give it away to starving children in foreign lands. I would win the Nobel Prize. Then I would become a vegetarian poet in Greenwich Village. I would live for Art.

We admire Jenny’s aspirations and certainly by alluding to Metalious, the author of the steamy 1956 novel Peyton Place, as her literary mentor, we also question the “Art” she imagines making—notice capital A. Growing up is so complicated.

In spite of Peyton Place’s best-selling status—and it remains one of the best-selling works in publishing history— Metalious had her critics, to whom she commented, “If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste.” Flaubert knew a lot of people in his world had lousy taste—and in this he is best known as one of history’s harsh critics of the bourgeois culture and its aping of the manners and customs of the upper class, a phenomenon that had taken hold of France from the fall of the old regime in 1789. As history goes, Madame Bovary was also deemed too steamy for publication in 1856, when Flaubert was called to trial (which he won!) to defend his novel from charges of “outrage to public morality and religion.” The novel became an immediate bestseller.

What other novels and their narrators or protagonists come to mind as you have been reading Blue Marlin?

Back to Carroll Byrd

What is it Jenny observes and loves so much in Carroll Byrd?

Then Carroll Byrd sat down on the iron bench to watch her fire burn for a while. She lit a cigarette, striking the match on her boot. Now I noticed she wasn’t wearing a brasserie, something I had read about but never seen done among ‘nice’ women. When she leaned over to stub out her cigarette on the patio tiles, I saw her breasts shift beneath the black sweater. Immediately I thought of “Selena’s brown nipples” on page 72 in Jinx’s and my dog-eared, hidden copy of Peyton Place. I was both disgusted and thrilled.

“We watched her fire, the two of us from our different vantage points.” (Student artist and designer, Julian Krušič O’Donnell, offers his interpretation of the memorable moment.)

This vision initiates a “before and after” experience for Jenny. Arriving home again after the successful spying episode, Jenny announces the change: “my own house seemed too warm, too bright, too soft—now I hated the baby-blue shag rug in my room, hated all my stuffed animals.” Jenny sees her mother in a new light: “Mama was too soft, too sweet, too safe for Daddy, like one of those pink satin pillows on her huge unmade bed. A man cold sink down in there and never get out.” Jenny hates her prepubescence—“No breasts, no period, no sex, no art”—and simultaneously the invisibility it confers; she hates the pain of not knowing certain things or not being told the truth about certain things such as why her father’s father killed himself. Jenny hates being underrated and not being an artist (yet) like Carroll Byrd. 

I’m moving on now to read the rest of the novel before the end of the week. I hope you will too and that you might want to share some of your “art of reading” from these early pages of our first Village Read in the Comments below.

And just in case you made it this far, mark you calendar and note the webinar information for our conversation with Lee Smith on July 13th: