A newly published novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a harsh portrait of her mother, sheds some light on her later writings.

[Times photo 1996 ] Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote The Yearling, Cross Creek and several other novels using this typewriter and table on the front porch of her home in Cross Creek.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 2, 2002

As I was reading the newly discovered and darkly revealing "lost" novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings called Blood of My Blood, I kept thinking about the first time I came under the spell of Mrs. Rawlings, who lived and wrote for so many years at Cross Creek.

I was 12 when I encountered The Yearling, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel she wrote in 1938. There was no better read for a boy who hated school and shoes and lived only for fishing and poking around the Everglades with his dad. At night, as the crickets chirped outside the open window, I lay in bed, under the covers, with my flashlight trained on Mrs. Rawlings' words:

"Sound filled the swamp. Saplings crashed. The bear was a black hurricane, mowing down obstructions . . ."

Penny Baxter, his boy, Jody, and their dogs, Rip and Julia, were on the trail of the notorious rogue bruin, Old Slewfoot.

I still read The Yearling every five years or so, though no longer by flashlight. I now see that its underlying themes make The Yearling more of an adult novel than a child's book.

It's the complicated portrait Rawlings drew of Jody's mother, Ma Baxter. She's ugly and heavy and bitter about life. Penny Baxter tries to inspire his son. His sad mother, afraid to love too deeply, takes the wind out of his sails as if she is preparing him for a long life of defeat.

Why? Why such a harsh portrait of a mother?

Now we may have the answer.

A domineering mother

"The physical ugliness of my mother was the bitter drop that tainted the fluid of her life."

That's how Rawlings began Blood of My Blood, which she called fiction but wrote as autobiography. It's about her family's history, from her grandparents to when she marries and leaves home. It's about her loving father and his passion for country living and beauty.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

But the central character is her domineering mother, who manipulates and schemes and tries to run her daughter's life to a point where only a nervous breakdown or rebellion can result.

In Marjorie's case, it was rebellion.

"It's sort of Marjorie's version of Mommie Dearest," explained Rawlings scholar and actor Betty Jean Steinshouer, who has portrayed the author in one-person dramas for more than a decade.

Mommie Dearest, written by Joan Crawford's daughter, Christina Crawford, was a harrowing account of child abuse. So is Blood of My Blood, though Ida Kinnan somewhat redeemed herself at the very end of her life.

But it's clear her daughter never got over a traumatic youth. Although Rawlings continues to be hailed by her most innocent fans as an Earth Mother and Maria Von Trapp rolled into one, she was in fact an unhappy woman who struggled with depression and alcoholism for most of her life.

"Ida laid the foundation of her child's life on personal appearance," Rawlings wrote of her mother and herself in Blood of My Blood. "She remedied the lank thinness of its hair by curling it with hot irons. When it was necessary to take it out in public on a rainy day, she lamented bitterly. She swathed its head in veils, and unwrapped it like some fragile trophy, peering anxiously for vestiges of the curl.

"Her first anger at the child burst out when, crisp in white organdie and a small pink sash, it waddled away and sat down in a mud puddle. She shook it viciously. She so impressed it with the enormity of this offense that the girl reached full maturity before she was able to shake off a tense stiffness when in fresh clothes."

In 1928 Marjorie Rawlings moved to Florida after a brief stint as a northern newspaper reporter. She was 32 when she and her first husband, Charles, bought a farm at Cross Creek with the intention of growing oranges and writing up a storm. He wanted to write adventure stories for magazines, and she dreamed of being the next Jane Austen.

In 1929, she submitted Blood of My Blood to Atlantic Monthly Press and received a polite rejection. Most authors would have immediately sent the manuscript to another publisher, but she put it away and went on with her life.

What a life it turned out to be. She managed to get the attention of Maxwell Perkins, the famous editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. He rejected her attempts to become Jane Austen but was captivated by her letters about the hardscrabble lives of rural Floridians. Perkins advised Rawlings to write about them.

And so she did.

She became one of America's most beloved, and respected, authors over the next dozen years. But as depression and alcoholism took over, she seldom published. Instead, she devoted 10 years to what she hoped would be her masterpiece. That novel, The Sojourner, published in January 1953, was widely considered a failure. Eleven months later she suffered a fatal stroke.

Only 57, she died a disappointed woman.

Mystery manuscript

In 1988, when Anne Blythe Meriwether was 39, she was working on her doctorate about Southern women and literature at the University of South Carolina when a New York book dealer who knew of her interests sent her a mysterious box of old papers.

She almost fell down when she started reading.

"I spread them out on my kitchen and couldn't believe it," Meriwether said. "Supper came and went. I kept reading until I was through."

She was reading letters Marjorie Rawlings had written to Julia Scribner, the young daughter of her publisher. The letters offered advice to a troubled teen. Rawlings told Scribner, kindly, that it was time to grow up. She praised Julia's talent and spirit, and said she needed to buckle down and work. Quit the partying!

She knew Julia struggled with a difficult parent.

"It is possible," Rawlings wrote, "that in your case, as it was in mine, only your mother's death will liberate you, and that is a price one would wish not to pay for liberation."

At the bottom of the box lay 80 typewritten pages.

Meriwether started reading. It was Blood of My Blood. Why had she given it to Julia Scribner? Nobody knows, but perhaps she wanted to inspire a younger woman about what was possible even if you had grown up dysfunctional.

After Julia Scribner's death, the manuscript and the letters lay in a box stored in an attic until Meriwether got them.

"Nobody but Rawlings and her first husband and Julia had known about Blood of My Blood," Meriwether says. "All of them were dead. It just came into my hands."

In 1988, Meriwether attended a meeting of Rawlings fans to share her discovery. Many were delighted, but some were shocked, none more than Rawlings' widower, her second husband, Norton Baskin. He claimed Meriwether's manuscript was a fake. When it was authenticated by experts, Baskin filed suit, saying his wife's writings belonged to him. It took four years for the court to decide in Meriwether's favor.

Finally she could edit the work.

"Every time I read it, and every time I read it now, I'm stunned," Meriwether said when I called. "I'm stunned by the brutal honesty of it. She's harsh not only on her mother but on herself. But her mother, oh my: the tug of war between mother and daughter, the mother's desire to shape a child in her own image, and almost being able to do it. It's scary and heartbreaking.

"You almost can't sit down and read it for pleasure. It's too painful."

Last month University Press of Florida published Blood of My Blood.

At home with the neighbors

At Cross Creek, a tiny village in backward, poverty-stricken Cracker Florida, Rawlings was considered a live wire. It wasn't only that she had divorced her first husband, almost unheard of in the God-fearing community, but it was also the fact she chain-smoked in public and didn't hide her love for liquor and guns.

She feuded with neighbors but had their respect, because she wasn't afraid of them one bit. And she loved their kids, especially boys. Her neighbors were the Glissons, and their boy, Jake, was a blond dreamer. One day Mrs. Rawlings found him lying next to the creek watching a little water mill he'd constructed out of palm fronds. He became one of the models Rawlings used for the wide-eyed boy in The Yearling.

Some neighbors feared Rawlings' sharp tongue, but Jake was too innocent to be scared, he once told me. Afraid he was failing high school, he asked a teacher what would happen if he could convince the famous Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to talk to the senior class.

"You'll graduate," said the teacher, who had no idea Jake knew the author.

The next day Jake showed up at school with his neighbor, who agreed to address the whole school.

"If I do this," Mrs. Rawlings said to the principal, "Jake passes. Right?"

Jake passed. He's in his 70s now and sometimes flinches when people talk bad about his Miz Rawlings.

I interviewed Idella Parker several times. She's mentioned in Rawlings' Cross Creek as "the perfect maid." An African-American in Cracker Florida during its most racist period, she had a complicated relationship with her employer. Rawlings was a Southern liberal who sometimes used the "n" word.

Parker hated and feared Rawlings, but also loved and protected her. Sometimes she tried to grab away the car keys after Rawlings had spent a drunken afternoon at her typewriter. Rawlings once turned her car over on a slippery road, breaking Parker's ribs.

Toward the end, Parker could no longer tolerate working with Rawlings and had to leave. In her 80s, ailing herself, Parker in recent years has loved visiting the old farmhouse, now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Historic Site, and talking about the times the two of them cooked up a storm and gossiped.

Dessie Prescott died two weeks ago at 95, near Crystal River. When I interviewed her in 1996, Dessie and I had a grand time swilling beer and talking about hunting and fishing. Prescott taught Rawlings how to survive in the woods and appears in a chapter of Cross Creek. She was an old-time Cracker woman who slept with a shotgun at her bedside and was delightfully familiar with the phrase "son of a b- -- - -- -." Though younger than Rawlings she was in some ways a mother figure for her friend, whom she called "Young 'un."

Rawlings loved people like Prescott. But she also enjoyed the company of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Margaret Mitchell and Robert Frost, the poet, who often stayed with her at Cross Creek.

Rawlings liked to say she and those other authors suffered greatly from "cosmic despair."

'The right sort of mother'

Whenever I want a few goose bumps, I go watch Betty Jean Steinshouer. In college, she was the oratory champion of Missouri and later got a master's degree in literature from Madison University in Virginia.

Acting was her passion. After meeting Hal Holbrook, who did thousands of one-man shows as Mark Twain, she decided she might be able to combine her flair for the dramatic with her love of literature. She's performed all over the country as Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. She lives in St. Petersburg.

Last week I drove to Winter Haven and watched one of her performances as my favorite Florida author.

"I'm in dire need of drink," were her first Marjorie words to the audience. She claimed her husband had hidden the Bacardi from her. Then she got out her Lucky Strikes; Rawlings was a five-pack-a-day smoker.

When she performs as Rawlings she almost becomes Rawlings. I've heard tapes of Rawlings speaking, and so has Steinshouer. Rawlings' voice was a little nasal, a little snotty, a little snobby. She'd say "ad-ver-tiz-ment" instead of "ad-ver-TISE-ment."

[Times photo: Jamie Francis ]

Actor Betty Jean Steinshouer, portraying writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, struggles to light a Lucky Strike in St. Petersburg on Saturday. Steinshouer has acted the part of Rawlings, a five-pack-a-day smoker, at engagements throughout the country for more than a decade.

"Does my voice bother you?" Steinshouer's Rawlings asked the audience. "I'm afraid I'm sounding more and more like my mother. That's very disturbing. I was talking to Hemingway once. He hated his mother as much as I hated mine . . ."

My hair stood on end.

Rawlings always told people how she longed for a child. She never conceived and considered that still another failure in a life filled with failure. Once she wrote the young Julia Scribner:

"How I wish you were my daughter! I would be the right sort of mother for one like you."

A few years before her death she wrote another friend:

"I have been in such anguish. I came closer to killing myself than ever before. . . . I have always felt that without my writing, I was nothing. . . . Sexual failure, lack of happiness, none of it matters if I can say the things I want to say." At the time she was working on what would be her last book. The Sojourner is fiction, but it's the story of her family.

It's Blood of My Blood, written not by a young writer, but by a polished novelist who knew how to hide the personal in a story that seemed made up. Again, the central character is a manipulative mother who damages her child.

Oh, Marjorie.

"Blood of My Blood and The Sojourner turn out to be bookends," Meriwether told me. "At the end of her life she was still trying to work out her relationship with her mother."

Oh, Marjorie. May you rest in peace.

-- Betty Jean Steinshouer will portray Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings at 7 p.m. today at Davis Hall 130, at USF in St. Petersburg.

As Rawlings, she will talk about art, life and racial issues with Phyllis McEwen as Zora Neale Hurston and LeRoy Mitchell Jr. as James Weldon Johnson.

Their performance is sponsored by the Florida Humanities Council. For information call 727-553-3801.

Mother's Day review

On May 12, Times Book Editor Margo Hammond reviews Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Blood of My Blood, her recently published "lost" novel based on her mother. The review will appear on the Books pages in the Perspective section.

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