The Life of a Literary Freedom Seeker

MARY LEE SETTLE: A BIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW The Life of a Literary Freedom Seeker George Brosi In 1918, Joseph Edward Settle, a civil engineer, was operating a coal mine on Straight Creek in Harlan County, Kentucky. His pregnant wife, Rachel Tompkins Settle, decided to return to her mother's home in Cedar Grove, West Virginia, to deliver her baby, so Mary Lee Settle was born in nearby Charleston, West Virginia, on July 29, 1918. During the first year of her life, her parents lived near the mine in Harlan County, but for the next five years they lived in Pineville, the county seat of Bell County where Straight Creek flows into the Cumberland River. When Mary Lee was six, the mine closed, and her father accepted a job near Orlando, Florida, working on the design of the planned town of Venice, Florida. In 1928, the family moved back to West Virginia, and her father worked again as a coal operator. Her New York Times obituary noted what Mary Lee Settle called '"the brave Christmas dinner of 1930" when she and her parents were living with her grandmother 'because the bottom had dropped out of the coal business.'" Her father re-established himself as a coal operator and moved the family to Charleston where she attended junior high and high school as a member of a prosperous and prominent family. Her acting career began when she was twelve. In an autobiographical article which appeared in The Missouri Review in 1991, she emphasized how totally she recalled the director imploring her, over and over: No, Mary Lee, you are not a silly little girl in a costume' . . . Finally, I .. . spoke my lines and it was right, true pitch, and I knew it and she knew it, and I went home on the bus after dark completely happy. That night, with that voice coming out of the darkness, I learned that empathy, in writing or in acting, is what makes a fictional person ring true, and all the facts of life cannot replace it. In a phone interview in 1992, Mary Lee Settle told me that when she was a child her family maintained a hunting cabin near Chattanooga, Tennessee, and that climbing the steep slopes of Pine Mountain in Kentucky and Lookout Mountain in Tennessee formed an important 16 part ofher childhood recollections. In a 1987 interview, The Washington Post quoted Mary Lee Settle describing her childhood as giving her "a familiar sense of the mountains, of the daily life of a small town, of coal, of an atmosphere of violence that seemed taken for granted." In 1936 Mary Lee Settle graduated from Charleston High School. Her brother, Joe Ed (1913-1991) had gone to the Virginia Military Institute, and Mary Lee's parents wanted her to go to Sweet Briar College, a women's finishing school located about forty-five miles south of Charlottesville, Virginia. She preferred Barnard in New York City and was accepted there, but her parents insisted. Her experience at Sweet Briar is the focus of The Clam Shell (1971), according to her "Introduction" to the University of South Carolina edition, her "most consciously 'autobiographical' novel" centering on her eighteenth year from which came: the concern with the Spanish Civil War . . . with words . .. the poetry that grew in me instead of being an adolescent fancy . . . the opening of a clam shell of a mind in a world no longer feared, and the resolute passion to keep it open ... and more important ... the urge to find a path for myself, and not one made for me by my family, my past, and my own too narrow culture, even though I would have to bear, as we all do who make this decision, disapproval and often derision until we are redeemed by some kind of recognized success. She read Stendhal while writing this novel because she "knew his irony would not allow me to become too sentimental about my adolescence." During the summer of 1938, after her sophomore year at Sweet Briar, Mary Lee Settle worked as an apprentice actress at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia, and there she was "discovered" by a talent scout for David O. Selznick and...