Between the Flowers: A Novel
Harriette Simpson Arnow
* * *
title : Between the Flowers
author : Arnow, Harriette Louisa Simpson.; Svoboda, Frederic Joseph
publisher : Michigan State University Press
isbn10 | asin : 087013535X
print isbn13 : 9780870135354
ebook isbn13 : 9780585188034
language : English
subject American fiction.
publication date : 1999
lcc : PS3501.R64B47 1999eb
ddc : 813/.52
subject : American fiction.
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Between the Flowers
Harriette Simpson Arnow
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
EAST LANSING
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Copyright © 1999 by Marcella Arnow and Thomas Arnow
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Michigan State University Press
East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5202
04 03 02 01 00 99 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Arnow, Harriette Louisa Simpson, 1908-1986
Between the flowers / Harriette Simpson Arnow ; edited by
Frederic J. Svoboda.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87013-535-X (alk. paper)
I. Svoboda, Frederic Joseph, 1949 II.Title.
PS3501.R64B47 1999 99-6812
813'.52dc21 CIP
Cover design by Ariana Grabec-Dingman
Book design by Nicolette Rose
Visit Michigan State University Press on the World-Wide Web at: www.msu.edu/unit/msupress
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Acknowledgments
Michigan State University Press and Frederic Svoboda would like to acknowledge the support granted by the Office of Research of the University of MichiganFlint, the assistance of the Special Collections and Archives of the University of Kentucky's King Library, and the hospitality of the University of Kentucky's Gaines Center for the Humanities. Haeja Chung provided valuable background information, and Pat Arnow cogent suggestions regarding my introduction to the novel.
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Introduction
Frederic J. Svoboda
Harriette Simpson Arnow received acclaim for her five novels and four histories published from the 1930s through the 1970s, but one worthy novel written early in her career she abandoned to a drawer. Between the Flowers was written after successful publication of Mountain Path in 1936, but the author found herself frustrated in her attempts to revise the work to suit the demands of a publisher sometimes ignorant of the mountain life she portrayed so accurately.
Hearkening back to a way of life so different from today'seven in rural Kentucky where the book is setthe themes of the book also resonate to contemporary concerns. And because there is continued interest in the author's work more than a dozen years after her death, publication of this sixty-year-old manuscript is appropriate and timely.
Harriette Simpson, a young writer from Kentucky, submitted her first novel to Covici-Friede publishers in New York City after being encouraged by editor Harold Strauss, who had read her story "A Mess of Pork" in the journal The New Talent. She already had written one, the story of a young woman who becomes a teacher in a remote Kentucky mountain school. It was based in part on her own experiences. When he read "Path," which previously had been rejected by Macmillan, Strauss recognized the quality of the work. However, he advised Simpson that it might be wiser not to publish it but to develop a more "dramatic'' and commercial novel.
Strauss desired to develop her as a star for the company, perhaps a parallel to Covici-Friede's other rising young novelist, John
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Steinbeck. He bowed to her wish that the novel be published despite contrary opinions from other Covici-Friede editors and several literary critics to whom the typescript had been sent.
It appeared in 1936 as Mountain Path and was well received by critics. It also was named a Book of Month Club Alternate Selection. Simpson was living in Cincinnati, having worked as a waitress and in similar jobs at the beginning of her five-year plan to become a successful author, then working for the Federal Writers' Project.
Simpson soon turned to her next novel, submitting an early version of Between the Flowers. This was the tale of an idealistic young mountain woman married to an abusive man. It contained many of its themes in melodramatic formincluding a scene, for example, in which after a quarrel the woman looks at her sleeping husband and whets a knife. It also repeated the rural Kentucky setting of Mountain Path, something Strauss had advised against because of the tendency for that subject matter to be viewed in terms of hillbilly stereotypes. This may have been commercially sensible advice, but it ignored Simpson's powerful imaginative link to her home.
Strauss gave considerable advice on the new novel, particularly suggesting that she make the husband as realistic a character as the wife instead of the two-dimensional and unsympathetic man she had portrayed. The novel's moral conflict would derive not from cruelty, but from the characters' contrasting desires in life. As Simpson developed this version, Strauss sought advice from multiple readers.
One reader's report illustrates great misunderstandings. He faulted her characterization as "sheer baloney" and misread the facts of farm life she presented. The reader did not understand a violent outburst from the husband about his wife's independence, unparalleled in their traditional society; and he did not even realize that for farm folk "dinner" was the noon meal.
Arnow's bitter disappointment at this unsympathetic reception is palpable in her marginal notes on her editor's letters, as is the frustration in her attempts to meet Strauss's seemingly shifting requirements. She was struggling to find the appropriate ending to what had become a novel of dual protagonists, the idealistic young woman and her husband, now both sympathetically seen. Eventually she wrote,"... the more I saw what I was up against, the more I knew that [the husband] was lost and hopeless and I had no
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heart to go hunting words. Just now I feel as if I never wanted to write again...."
Late in 1938 Strauss explained to Simpson that despite his personal opinion of the book, the editorial board had rejected it. She continued revising, but Strauss lost his position at the foundering Covici-Friede and took a job with the Federal Writers' Project. While Arnow continued in Cincinnati he attempted to place her with other publishers, submitting Between the Flowers to Knopf and to William Morrow & Co. Both rejected the novel, and early in 1939 Strauss was advising her against trying to publish the book herself. Simpson soon would return to rural Kentuckyand marry Harold Arnow, whom she had met through the Cincinnati Federal Writers' Project.
The attempt to publish Between the Flowers had come to an end. It would be a long wait for her next novel. Hunter's Horn (1949), published under her married name of Harriette Simpson Arnow, would be even better received than Mountain Path. It was listed as one of the ten best books of that year by the New York Times Book Review and named book of the year by Saturday Review of Literature. Arnow would build a distinguished career as novelist and regional historian, achieving her greatest fame with The Dollmaker (1954), the story of Kentuckians uprooted morally as well as physically by their migration to work in the factories of World War II Detroit. That novel would particularly be marked by the conflict between Gertie Nevels, a woman who loved and lived for the land, and her husband Clovis, a man most at home wherever a machine needed repair.
At Arnow's death in 1986, she had
lived in southern Michigan for much of her adult life. That Michigan connection led The Michigan State University Press to explore publication of works by and about her. Knowing my interests in twentieth-century American literature and textual editing, the Press asked me to examine the typescript of Between the Flowers that survived among her papers. What I found was not the stereotyped book that the 1930s reader's report might have suggested, but a novel of moral conflict deriving its tension from its dual protagonists' ultimate desires. It was precisely the novel that Harold Strauss had asked Harriette Simpson to write so many years ago.
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I recommended publication. I worked with the novel with a light touch of the editor's pencil, making only a few cuts where Arnow struggled with the ending. Between the Flowers is a work of art and it deserves to be seen in its original condition.
The title Between the Flowers accurately suggests the book's lyrical and realistic qualities. This is a novel lived in the natural world, from season to season and year to year. And the moods of the book change and evolve from chapter to chapter. The closing of the novel echoes its beginning at a Memorial Day observance, as a young man, Marsh, first comes to a rural community and meets the spirited young woman, Delph.
One of the editors who regretfully rejected Between the Flowers in the late 1930s wrote of the novel as offering "a sensitive, authentic story of farm life ... that goes beyond the ordinary values of these so-called "soil" novels...." Today's readers will find in it an honest yet touching exploration of the joys and compromises and everyday textures of married life. It is a novel of adventure and lyricism and psychological depth. And now it is available, as by rights it should have been some sixty years ago.
FLINT MICHIGAN
JULY1999
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1
Mrs. Crouch stood on the porch under the weatherbeaten sign, Costello's Valley, Ky. U.S. Post Office, and looked up the steep stretch of narrow hill road where August heat waves trembled above the sheep-skull rocks and uneven chunks of blue-white limestone. The sun glare hurt her eyes, and she rested them with a slow glance over Costello's Valleythe sloping sides of wooded hills leading down to a gently moving creek bordered with willows and sycamores, the wooden bridge across the creek, and the great beech trees that grew on the bit of level land on either side of the road. The trees, the road, the creek, and the white-painted, high-porched building in which she lived and tended the mail and a general store, with plenty of time left to care for a plot of vegetables and flowers, made up Costello's Valley.
She heard from somewhere down the creek the soft clinking thuds of pitched horse shoes and low easy murmur of hill men's voices, and now and then from the heavy shade of the beech grove a squirrel's bark or a trinkle of bird song; but still there seemed less sound than silence. The heavy breathing of Old Willie Copenhaver on the other end of the porch came so loud that she turned to look at him. He sat as he had been setting for the last hour, his bark bottomed chair tilted against the house wall, his head dropped forward with his bushy gray beard spread over his chest; one knobby, blue-veined hand on the Bible in his lap, the other on a hickory sapling cane.
His son, Young Willie, a tall, stoop-shouldered bachelor in his late fifties, sat a few feet away. Mostly he watched the other occupant of the porcha little old man with thin white hair and bright
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blue eyescarve a hazel nut basket, though sometimes he glanced concernedly toward his father. Mrs. Crouch, when she had studied the old sleeping man for a time, said to Young Willie, "It's a mighty hot day for a man old as your paw to be ridin' around."
Young Willie shifted his tobacco and spat into the yard, then smiled on his father. "Nothin' 'ud do him but he must come. He's not missed a Memorial Day up at Big Cane Brake in more'n fifty years. I wisht I could ha' gone with him but I've got that mail carryin' job. I'm hopin' though that Juber here'ull kind a look out for him."
The little man twisted about on his nail keg seat, and looked down through the beech trees to a slender legged bay mare tethered to the low boughs of one. "Pshaw, he'll be safe as a baby in its cradle a ridin' his Maude, an' anyhow I'll be gittin' on back to church pretty soon, Delph or no Delph. Today's th' day fer her magazine, an' nothin' ud do her but she must have it. I'll ride along with yer paw an' look out fer him."
The postmistress waited until Juber had finished his talk, then turned to search the road again. She was a big hill woman of middle age, wide faced and blue eyed with a twist of sand colored hair and a generous sifting of freckles across her nose and along her muscular forearms. She stood a moment and fanned herself with slow flaps of her gingham apron, then turned wearily to look at the flowers she had cut from her garden. She touched a drooping ladyfinger, and felt the coldness of the water in the pail that held snow-on-the-mountain and dahlias. She sighed and turned back to the road. "I wanted to have 'em fresh like an' pretty," she said, "but Lord that mail'll never get here so I can lock up an' go. Th' mornin' service it'll be over an' I'll hear none a th' singin'."
"It must be th' catalogues a keepin' him," Juber said, and added cheerfully, "Permelie, you've been tendin' th' mail long enough to know that Memorial Service or election day, rain or shine, it's all th' same to Sears Roebuck catalogues. They come an' a body cain't help it."
"An' while he's stoppin' at ever fence an' holler to hand 'em out, my flowers 'ull wilt an' die."
Juber smiled on a pale yellow gladiola. "Lord, it makes no difference to th' flowers when you put 'em on your graves. They'll be wilted dead by sundown anyhow."
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Mrs. Crouch walked restlessly away to the end of the porch where she stood on tip toe and watched the road. But the road remained empty as ever; a hound dog trotted down from the poplar trees on the hill side, while one of the postmistress's hens led a bevy of half fledged chickens in a search for grain some waggoner had spilled among the stones. She watched the hound dog with narrowed mistrustful eyes, but when he paused to nose inquisitively at a small chicken strayed a bit from the others, the dominecker mother hen came at him with such a clucking and clacking and lifting of her feathers that he hurried on. ''Here comes one a Old Willie's hounds a huntin' him," she said to no one in particular.
Juber cocked his head to one side and studied the dog. "That's no hound a Old Willie's. He'd never let a hound dog get so fat. Must belong to one a them strange oil men over on th' Long North Branch."
"I never heared of a oil man stayin' in one place long enough to keep a dog," Mrs. Crouch answered.
The hound settled the argument by coming up to Old Willie and sniffing his feet. The old man opened his eyes, patted the hound, then seemed to fall asleep again. "It's paw's all right," Young Willie said, "but it's hardly ever about th' place anymore. Took up with that nitroglycerine carryin' man that batches up on th' ridge above our placean' he's feedin' it to death."
"Must be a funny oil man," Mrs. Crouch said, and after failing in an attempt to count her chickens, turned and watched Juber as he bent to the painstaking carving. "Always whittlin' things for them Costello youngens or growin' flowers for Delph," she said, and added, half teasingly, half sadly, "You ought to a had some a your own, Juber, an' not be tied hand an' foot to John Costello an' his breed all your days.''
Juber straightened his back and studied the postmistress. "You're in a bad humor today, Permelie. If I'd a had children they'd a been dead or gone like yours an' ever'body else's in this Little South Fork Country. An' th' Costellos are better to work for than most. Not many like 'em left that foller th' old ways."
"Foller th' old ways is right. John's bringin' up Delph tighter than they raised girls in my day."
"Don't be too hard on him, Permelie. He's done what he could.
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He wants to raise Delph right. Look, how hard he worked to git 'em to put this high school out here. Mostly on Delph's account he got it done, I know."
Mrs. Crouch sniffed. "An' that was all a mess of foolishness. Th' pore girl w
ent through th' eighth grade three times while she waited fer th' school, an' anyhow what good'll this three year high school do her if he won't let her go to th' one in town to graduate?"
"Now, Permelie, don't be too certain about things you don't know. Lord, they've had it up one side an' down th' other this summer, her on one side, an' John an' Fronie on th' other. 'Pears like they'll have to give in." He sighed and bent again to the carving. "I wisht they would. T'other day I found her a cryin' in th' hay loft. Delph was never one to let a body see her cry."
