A Powerful Shock of Recognition

MARY LEE SETTLE'S LITERARY LEGACY A Powerful Shock of Recognition______ Keith Maillard ?. When I read the email that told me Mary Lee Settle was dead, my first though was not, "Oh, what a terrible loss to literature." My first thought was, "Oh, what a terrible loss to me." I had read her books, but I had never had the chance—and now I would never have the chance—to meether. I had always imagined that we wouldhave found plenty to talk about. Yes, she was a great writer whether measured by the yardstick of West Virginian, Appalachian, American, or even world literature, but, for me, she was more than that. She was kin. Settle and I grew up in the same state; her landscape was defined by coal as mine was by steel; if her work is saturated with a West Virginian sensibility, then so is mine. I, too, spent much of my childhood as Settle related in Addie, "eavesdropping on the grownups" who talked as though we couldn't hear what they were saying and thus made our future books easier to write. As teenagers, we both heard voices calling to us from a corner of the library and read voraciously—everything but what Mary Lee's mother called "bessellers" because they bored us, and lied to us. We became novelists. We both left the United States to protest the Vietnam War. But the kinship I feel for Settle goes far beyond any similarities in our biographies. I read her too late in my career to count her as an influence; what I felt when I first encountered her work was a powerful shock of recognition: I experienced the relationship between her writing and mine in a way that was immediate, unmediated, and intensely personal. So now that she's gone, how could my honest response be anything less than personal? I do not want to write another literary essay. I want to talk to you about the things that I think are important in Mary Lee Settle's work. 2. In the interview she did with Kate Long for the series In Their Own Country broadcast on West Virginia Public Radio, Settle says, emphatically: "Recorded history is wrong. It's wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it. It becomes official history." Of course writing for her matters: "I wasn't concerned with what they call 63 historical fiction. I was concerned with the fact that we had had our history censored. And I didn't like that. I wanted to find out what had actually happened." But she wanted to do more than report facts. For Settle, a novel must be as she said in Addie, "true beyond facts." What can it possibly mean to be true beyond facts? The solid trustworthy core of a true novel is hard to define, but in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) the Russian theorist, M. M. Bakhtin comes as close to it as anyone. "The decisive and distinctive importance of the novel as a genre," he says, is that "the human being in the novel is always a speaking human being; the novel requires speaking persons bringing with them their own unique ideological discourse, their own language." Like this passage in O Beulah Land for instance: "The gintleman's tard, Hannah. Git thim youngins outn the way and come set him down a bed." Jeremiah examined him. Squire thought for one second that the man was going to reach out his dirty paw and feel his head. "Thankee, sar." Squire looked up then and favored him with a smile. Then, remembering the New Light, "God bless ye, sar," he said simply. Even in this short passage, the authenticity of detail puts us right there. In the small frontier cabin with its loft and ladder, we can sense the children looking down at us from above. The reference to the religious movement called "New Light" springs into the character's mind not to demonstrate the author's knowledge of the period but exactly as it would have at the time for a man like Squire; he is not a believer but wishes to be seen as one so he can...