New book brings rich insights into Florida author Rawlings
“You are a wonderful example of a shell game with your soul as the pea,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ first husband, Chuck, wrote to her in their youth. “God knows which walnut shell you will find it under next.”
The couple, both writers, divorced in 1933, the same year she published her first book, “South Moon Under,” about life in the Florida pine scrub; the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Yearling” (1938) and “Cross Creek” (1942) would follow.
Now, Rawlings is perhaps underappreciated outside Florida for her literary legacy and also not sufficiently understood even in the Sunshine State, where she’s something of an icon — a status that may bring with it oversimplification of a complex woman. Who was she, really? It’s a question author Ann McCutchan answers brilliantly, with nuance and style, in her new biography of Rawlings, “The Life She Wished to Live,” published this month by W.W. Norton.
McCutchan is no stranger to Florida, including school years in Pompano Beach and then Titusville, during its transformation from a village to the blastoff boomtown of the 1960s. She first encountered Rawlings when her 4th-grade teacher read aloud to the class from “The Yearling”; reading it again as an adult, McCutchan determined to discover the roots of Rawlings’ strengths as a writer as well as her complexity as a person.
Roots of a writer
One of the most persistent myths about writers is that they spring into the world bursting with a talent that allows them to pick up a pencil and fill pages with brilliance.
But as McCutchan shows us well, it takes hard work and practice. By the time Rawlings published her first novel, she had written for years, beginning in childhood, in forms that
ranged from poetry to journalism. During a stint with a Hearst newspaper in Rochester, she churned out stories with headlines such as “Easiest Thing in the World to Get Dope, Cries Woman Addict.”
As McCutchan takes us from Rawlings’ family roots and her birth in 1896 to her death in 1953, she deftly notes the social and political forces at work in the worlds in which Rawlings moved, including the women’s suffrage movement, world wars and segregation and efforts to end it.
Across this canvas, Rawlings’ world moves with other outsized talents and personalities, ranging from Ernest Hemingway to Zora Neale Hurston, whose friendship brought Rawlings to confront her own racism. “She knew Zora was her equal” as a writer, McCutchan noted in a recent phone interview. “It turned on a great light bulb in Rawlings’ head” about her own attitudes about race.
In addition to her racial reckonings, the five-year court battle in which Rawlings’ old friend Zelma Cason, the Cross Creek census taker who charged Rawlings with invasion of privacy in a court case, provides a compelling saga in a life that was contradictory but never unexamined.
Beginning in her youth, when she had a classic experience of spiritual
awakening, Rawlings sought to know more about the soul and the “cosmic consciousness” of which she felt she was a part. As McCutchan notes, the interdependence of Rawlings’ characters with nature and with one another “described, in Rawlings’ major works, the cosmic web she had sensed since her college days. Cosmic connection was the ‘private gospel’ she wanted so much to preach.”
Asked why Rawlings remains relevant, McCutchan doesn’t hesitate: “She created beautiful descriptions of nature and insight into the human condition . ... She’s a writer’s writer, with a beautiful voice on the page.”
To learn more
Ann McCutchan was interviewed by author Craig Pittman for Episode 45 of the “Welcome to Florida” podcast (see craigpittman.com). You can also learn more at annmccutchan. com. For information about how to visit Rawlings’ Cross Creek home, see marjoriekinnanrawlings.org.