Memories Of Harriette Arnow

Memories Of Harriette Arnow by Shirley Williams I happened upon a novel called The Dollmaker in the Berea College Library when—recently culled from Eastern Kentucky—I was a student there in 1954. Indelible memories of the novel's indomitable main character, Gertie Nevéis, were so deeply etched then that when I met Harriette Simpson Arnow in 1978, my first thought was that she had made Gertie the physical antithesis of herself. Luminous-eyed Harriette, a diminutive four feet eleven inches when shod, was puffing away, demolishing one unfiltered Lucky Strike after another. She seemed in no way akin to the rawboned Gertie. We were both instructors in a writing workshop at the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County that year. After five yearly week-long August encounters there with Harriette and her journalist husband, Harold, I knew that she was more than a match for Gertie in both strength of will and character. Both of the Arnows were somewhat deaf—Harriette more so—and an outing with them was always adventurous and precarious—particularly if Harold was driving. A few times I went along when he had to replenish Harriette's supply of Old GrandDad to make sure he found the nearest liquor store (Knott County is dry, dry, dry), just across the county line in my own native Perry County. I also went with them to visit poet Albert Stewart at Alice Lloyd College and a few years later at his cabin outside Hindman, and once took them to Vest in search of a hand-woven tablecloth at Quicksand Crafts. They had the tablecloth the Arnows wanted in a natural color, and Harold, always curious, asked if they had them in other colors. They did not, and Harriette refused to buy one. Harold was disappointed and told me so. When we reached the car, Harriette said to me in her atonal but expressive voice, "I wanted to get a tablecloth but my husband wanted a colored one and they didn't have any." I looked at the steep hill we had just come down, and didn't try to straighten out their misunderstanding. When Harriette won Kentucky's Milner Award in 1983 and came to Danville for the ceremony. I asked her about the documentary film that Appalshop in Whitesburg was making about her. "So that's why Herb E. Smith was following me around at Hindman," she exclaimed. I needed to do an interview and smoking is not allowed in the Centre College buildings, so we found chairs and moved them outside . The night air was too brisk for her, but she endured it, shivering and smoking as we talked. In 1979, Harriette and Harold were in Louisville as house guests of Cora Lucas, who had been her roommate when she attended the University of Louisville. I spent a morning there interviewing her for a Courier-Journal Magazine profile. Later, I found that my interview tapes were blank. When Cora sent the film of the photos she had taken that morning to be processed, it too was blank. Cora's explanation: There was a poltergeist in her house. However, my film from that morning was fine. That's when I made the portrait accompanying this article. I called Harold and explained my problem. I had re-created as much as I could remember from the tapes, but I needed some quotes from Harriette and wanted to ask her a few more questions, though I knew it was difficult for her to hear over the telephone. We didn't tell her the tapes were gone. I well remember her exasperation when I asked about the land they owned in Kentucky. "Why in the world do you want to know that?" She was disappointed that The Dollmaker got so much attention over the years while her other four novels were seldom mentioned. She felt that Hunter's Horn was equal to or even better than The Dollmaker. Her first novel, Mountain Path, was published in 1936, and it, Hunter's Horn and The Dollmaker, formed a trilogy depicting the "Great Appalachian Migration." Harriette particularly resented interviewers who discovered The Dollmaker after Jane Fonda began making a television movie...