Lost Horizon

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had her first glimpse of Florida in March 1928, aboard a steamer at the mouth of the St Johns River. It was love at first sight, which really can happen with people and places. I’ve had a similar rush of amazed delight about particular landscapes myself: it feels like the surprise of connection, or perhaps of recognition. Whatever you want to call it, it exists. Florida still charms many people, of course, including me, although what tourists now enjoy in Miami, Orlando or Key West bears no relation to the wonders that entranced Mrs Rawlings eighty years ago. She saw an alien, tropical, untamed land lit by an impossibly clear wide sky and knew that she could find what she needed there; knew that she could write there, as she passionately wanted to do. It was, as they say, a defining moment.

By November of that year, Mrs Rawlings and her first husband Charles Rawlings had bought, sight unseen, an orange grove in central Florida, set in a wild jungle between two marshy lakes – or, to be more precise, they had bought 74 acres of land with 3,000 citrus trees, a small pecan grove, a flock of 200 chickens, two mules, a four-room ‘tenant’ house and an eight-room farmhouse. The tiny local community, which Mrs Rawlings later described as no more than ‘a bend in a country road’, was called Cross Creek. Her first biographer, Gordon Bigelow, described her response to it: ‘When she stepped for the first time out of the bright sunlight into the deep shade of the orange grove, she had a feeling that after long years of spiritual homelessness she had at last come home, that an old thread, long tangled, had come straight.’ Before Cross Creek, the Rawlings had been working as journalists in Rochester, New York, and trying to write fiction in their spare time. For Marjorie the move to Florida gave her exactly what she needed, and although her marriage did not survive the transition, her writing flourished because of it. In the years that followed she became a protégé of Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribner’s in New York, and thus became a member of twentieth-century America’s literary élite: Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald were also Max Perkins’s authors. But Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was then, and still remains, distinct from them all as a writer, not only by virtue of her sex but also because of her chosen subjects and style. It was above all a sense of place that informed the energetic sweep of her writing, and it was that sense of place and her skill in bringing a particular landscape into vivid focus that brought her national celebrity and a host of significant awards and honours, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for her best-known novel, The Yearling. Her attachment to the landscape of central Florida also made her that state’s most enduringly famous author, and turned her Cross Creek home into a site of literary pilgrimage. Mrs Rawlings’s delight in the land never dimmed. The dark rich soil, the tender new growth on the orange trees in spring, the exotic delights of yellow jessamine and red trumpet vines, of allamanda and their ‘deep golden caves’ of flowers, all entranced her. She celebrated the landscape as you might celebrate the characteristics of a beloved, and it became her accomplice in creativity. And she was drawn to the local people – often referred to, then and now, as ‘Florida Crackers’ – who were, she realized, ‘an authentic, living remnant of the American frontier, surviving into the twentieth century’. By October 1931 she wrote to Max Perkins that her notebooks were crammed with ‘voluminous notes of the intimate type, for which the most prolific imagination is no substitute’. She set to work drafting ideas for her first novel, and within two years had sketched out notes for the main substance of all her later Florida writing. Mrs Rawlings’s first novel, South Moon Under, was a commercial and critical success, but she had trouble finishing her second, Golden Apples, and spent months fighting her way through difficult revisions. In June 1933, Max Perkins – sympathetic to her frustrations – wrote asking if she’d ever thought of writing a book about a child in the Florida scrub country. The idea of a ‘boy’s book’ took root and thrived, and The Yearling was published five years later, in 1938. It was immediately proclaimed a sensation, stayed at the top of the bestseller lists for 93 weeks and has never since been out of print. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings did not intend The Yearling as a book for children, although that is how it is now regarded, both in the United States and in Britain. In 1938, however, neither the fact that the book’s main protagonist, Jody Baxter, is a 12-year old boy, nor that the main thrust of its dramatic impetus is the boy’s love for his pet fawn, necessarily marked it as juvenile literature. When her New York agent asked for an early sample to show to Cosmopolitan for possible serialization, Mrs Rawlings didn’t mention Jody’s age or his centrality in the narrative. Instead, she cabled that the book had no love interest, and added ‘ALL WOMEN CHARACTERS PAST MENOPAUSE’ to convince her agent that it was unsuitable for the magazine. The Yearling is set in the late 1880s in the Big Scrub, an area between the St Johns and the Ocklawaha rivers that today is part of the Ocala National Forest. Jody’s family are farmers, working the thickly wooded hammock (from the Spanish hamaca, or net) land, where the soil has been layered over centuries with leaves from live oak, magnolia, sweet gum, holly and hickory. In South Moon Under, Mrs Rawlings had described the Big Scrub as rolling ‘towards its boundaries like a dark sea’ and casting itself ‘against the narrow beach of swamp and hammock that fringed the rivers’. In The Yearling, however, she emphasized the Big Scrub’s silence, wildness and loneliness: the characteristics that most resonated in her heart. While she was working on the book, she wrote to Max Perkins:

The scrub, as a matter of fact, has defeated civilization. It is one of the few areas where settlements have disappeared and the scanty population is constantly thinning . . . There is no human habitation – there never has been and probably never will be – in the scrub itself. As far as I can determine, there is no similar section anywhere in the world . . .

The Yearling is a story of growth and survival in strikingly difficult conditions. The Baxters live 15 miles from the nearest town and 4 miles from their nearest neighbours, the Forresters, a family of massive sons who are variously good-hearted and murderous drunks. The little Baxter family scratches out its existence in this unforgiving environment, and it is not one for the faint-hearted. There’s a marauding bear that seems impossible to kill; a pack of hungry wolves, several dozen strong; a flood that destroys everything in its path and leaves the plague in its wake; and a terrible poisonous snake that threatens the life of one of the characters. But moments of great beauty break through, many associated with the relationship between Jody and Flag, the fawn he claims after its mother has been killed. By the end of the book, when events have taken their difficult course, Jody’s father Penny Baxter tries to explain how he wanted to spare his son from the griefs of adult life as long as he could: ‘A man’s heart aches, seein’ his young uns face the world. Knowin’ they got to git their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin’.’ But, as he points out, life knocks you down, and when you get up, it knocks you down again. ‘Ever’ man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. ’Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but ’tain’t easy.’ The Yearling was often described as a regional novel in contemporary reviews, a description that Mrs Rawlings loathed. She thought ‘regional’ was a misleading and limiting term that discounted a writer’s art in transforming local material into something universal. In Cross Creek, her later (and equally successful) book of stories about life in that community, she said, ‘We [at the Creek] draw our conclusions about the world from our intimate knowledge of a small portion of it,’ which perfectly encapsulates her aims as a writer. As with any love affair, Mrs Rawlings’s with Cross Creek had its betrayals and disappointments as well as its rewards and contentments. A four-year legal battle with a neighbour, the growing demands of visiting readers, and a second marriage to a hotel owner led her to seek alternative homes. By 1942 she was frequently living away from Cross Creek, but its absence tormented her. She tried to recreate her relationship with the Creek in other locations, as she repeatedly tried to shake off her attachment to Florida novels and her label as a Florida writer, but neither strategy worked for long. She’d discover a new landscape – up north, or further afield in Europe or the Caribbean – and fall on it with all her old enthusiasm, only to find the ghost of places past had travelled with her and stood between her and the new interest. Max Perkins’s death, the continuing separations from her life at the Creek, her intermittent ill health, and the demands of a life of fame: all these bit deep into her creative confidence, and her sense of herself as a writer. She had never found writing easy; she had to drag it out of herself, almost against her will. The process was almost always very slow, and very hard work. She rewrote constantly, discarding material and beginning afresh, uncertain of how to begin or how to continue; how to find her way to the truth of what she wanted to convey. It seems that the obstacles to her creative energy were stacked too high, and her productivity declined further. Work on The Sojourner tormented her for ten years, and the book never came together as she’d planned. She put this down to Max’s absence from her professional life, but it was more than that. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings didn’t want to be just a Florida writer; she wanted to challenge herself on a larger stage. It may be that she needed a break from writing about Florida; even, perhaps, that she’d said enough. But forcing herself on to another path – trying to turn herself into something she was not – was counter-productive, and her Cross Creek connections somehow gave her a creative courage she couldn’t replicate anywhere else. I believe that her love affair with Cross Creek may have had as simple a basis as my own experiences in Florida. When friends ask what I like most about my life in Key West, I say: ‘I like who I am there: I like my lines in Key West.’ Many aspects of the town remind me of growing up in sub-tropical rural New Zealand but, more importantly, Key West allows a straightforward connection to a part of me that flourishes there, and nowhere else. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a Florida writer. She wasn’t ‘only’ a Florida writer, but she most certainly was one, and there’s nothing to denigrate in that, nor in the range of her achievements. Not all her books have survived the passing years well, but The Yearling is still an astonishingly good book, Cross Creek is still gloriously entertaining, and her short stories are still engaging and precise. She was a perceptive and clever writer, and anyone who hasn’t read her books deserves to give themselves a treat, just as any thoughtful visitor to central Florida should visit her house at Cross Creek, now a National Historic Landmark.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 25 © Belinda Hollyer 2010