CLEAR SPRINGS: A MEMOIR; By Bobbie Ann Mason; Random House; 298 pages; $25.Bobbie Ann Mason does not romanticize the country life. It was what it was. Hard.
When she was a girl, blackberry bushes came with big thorns. After the road in front of their farm got blacktopped, her dogs and cats were run over regularly. Her beloved Granny suffered from an unnamed depression and was sent for stints in the state mental hospital and came home scared and confused.
On the other hand: The land was green. Her parents loved her. Her school teachers saw her promise. Her mother was a good cook.
"Clear Springs," is Mason's memoir. She writes of growing up in Clear Creek, Ky., during the 1940s and '50s. In her latest book, she tells the real story that she's told before in fiction (including in the novel "In Country," which was made into a movie starring Bruce Willis).
In "Clear Springs," Mason includes a chapter about what happened when the film crews came to her town to shoot "In Country." They borrowed her mother's hanging plants and family photos for the set; lost a couple of the pictures; neglected the plants; paid her $1,100 for the loan. Her younger sister ended up marrying one of the set designers.
A year later, when the movie opened at the mall in Paducah, her parents declined the offer of a limousine and drove themselves to town, saw the show, came home and didn't say a thing about it.
Mason knew that didn't mean they didn't like it. She understood their reserve.
She's reserved herself. Growing up in the country taught her to feel inferior to city people, she explains. But the reserved quality of her writing makes for lovely story telling.
She tells it plain: The story of a family headed by two grandpas who were both named for Robert E. Lee. The story of a little girl who was named Bobbie to honor those two Roberts.
When she writes of her father, coming home to the family farm after having served in the Navy during the Second World War, she writes of farmers everywhere.
"I'm beginning to understand what my father must have felt. . . . He had survived the war. He decided what was important. And he knew who he was. He renewed his vows to the land, even though there was little prospect of prosperity.
"I imagine his sense of resignation came down to him through history: from the pioneers, who learned to cultivate stinginess and sternness on such matters as seed corn and labor; and from the Civil War, which filled an entire culture with a profound sense of loss. After lurching through Pacific waters, my father was stilled, as a cow is held in a stanchion while being milked. Coming home, he found peace in honoring the violent necessities of the soil and the seasons, and in bowing to the authority of his father. Undeniably, his nerve failed him -- in part his resignation was a defeat. But I think he also loved his place in the scheme of things. In part, he chose his life."