Between the Flowers: A Novel

Introduction

Introduction Frederic J. Svoboda H arriette 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 oflife so different from today's-even in rural Kentucky where the book is set-the 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 BETWEEN THE FLOWERS 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 ofher 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 form-including 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 offarm 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 IX 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 ajob with...