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Show IN mTm EM RaV I EWi Facing toward home INTERVIEW 1 f BY MICHAEL SIMS This wasnt what I meant to write at all, Bobbie Ann Mason says of her new memoir. Clear Springs. She laughs. But thats often true of a work. Usually I dont know where Im going at all. I'm just following something. What Mason followed this time was an urge to recreate her own upbringing and the history of her family, especially her relationship with her mother over several decades. In five sections ranging back and forth from the 1940s into the 1990s, Clear Springs beautifully paints a loving and perceptive portrait of a familys personalities and fortunes. I think the questions I was asking are universal questions, Mason says. The book starts out with the chapter at the pond, and reflecting on a moment of looking at where Ive been and what Ive connected to. Its a way of asking who you are. About five years ago Mason wrote what is now chapter one as a separate essay. I didnt realize I had a book for another year or so. In this case I did have a few years worth of interest in family history that got me going. There were all those early chapters about ' ence of writing a memoir fascinating. I think its a natural impulse to want to find some kind of coherence and mean-- 1 ing in your life, to find that it has a nar- -' rative, and that there are patterns. There are themes in your life, and themes that connect back to previous generations. You can see where you fit into the puzzle. The image of fitting together puz- zle pieces occurs repeatedly in Clear Springs. Your life starts to make sense, in terms of what youve done before and what you're doing now. The prose in the new book is slower, more leisurely and meditative, than that of Masons fiction. The characters I write about usually are in the middle of the whirlpool," Mason admits. Theyre racing down the highway. The confusion that the characters in the stories are in its a culture shock. Its rural people meeting the modem age and getting thrown out. One parallel between the fiction and the nonfiction is that Mason thinks of all the real people in Clear Springs childhood and school and church. I kind of put them in different piles and tried to see what kind of sense I could make out of them. I had to find a way of sorting them all out so that they would cohere so that there would be patterns of them. Clear Springs is Masons first book of autobiographical nonfiction, but it seems an inevitable step. Most of her fiction deals with the area she knows best, rural and suburban Kentucky, where she now lives again after decades in the North. Mason found the experi- - as charac- ters. I think right at the heart of the book, for all the characters, she speculates, is culture shock. It all happens at World War Two and thereafter. Before that, everything was pretty much the same. For all three generations that Im writing about, the culture shock is happening almost simultaneously. Mason has been chronicling this kind of shock for some time. Since her 1982 debut story collection. Shiloh and Other Stories, she has gone on to three novels In Country. Spence Lila, and readier Crow ns and the excellent recent collection Midnight Madness. She is also writing the volume on Elvis Presley for the new Penguin Lives series of short biographies. One of the many pleasures in Clear Springs is Mason's inclusion of snippets of the first stories she wrote, youthful imitations of the girls detective stories she so loved, which later resulted in her charming (and recently reissued) book The Girl Sleuths. Considering her scholarly interests, evident in her book on Nabokov's nature imagery. Masons style is surprisingly straightforward, never tricksy, seldom particularly allusive. But like Nabokov in his own autobiography, she es facts with the tools of an artist: "Its think the questions I was asking are universal questions . . . looking at where Ive been and what Ive connected to. Its a way of asking who you are. I want to turn a corner and go in a differawfully hard working with facts or even what you remember as facts. I had ent direction. don't know what that will so much trouble writing this book be. Well, I want to write short stories. I because I had to be faithful to whaT dont know what they'll be like, but I knew to be fact, and yet I was try ing" to think Urey II be different." write something that in many ways was Clear Springs ends in October of like fiction. But I couldn't just haul off 1996. with a masterful chapter in which and make up things. Mason herself does not Like most memoirs, appear. With all of her Clear Springs returns novelist's talenis she CLEAR recreates an event her again and again to the mother described to her. question of the accurain which the elderly cy and potency of memories. I realized woman falls into a pond that your memories while trying to catch a fish. Its a simple scene, over time are really lost, or they're transbarely an anecdote, that Mason somehow leaves formed," Mason says. They become memoresonating with signifiries of memories, and cance and passion and. quietly, implicitly, with you lose sight of the her profound love for her B O I! B F original. And finally there are a lot of mother. There's a fine moment things you remember in Clear Springs when that you can't prove Mason and her young really happened, and there are a lot of things you don't husband begin their first garden. It nicely remember that did happen. sums up her tone and symbolism in this Out of her memories Mason brings book: "When I plunged my hands into the to life the finely graded social distincblack New England soil, I felt I was tions which would be invisible to outtouching a rich nourishment that I hadn't had since I was a small child. It had been siders, but which anchor and define the members of a group, like the hierarchies years since I helped Mama in the garden. in the world of Proust or Tolstoy. For Yet the feel of dirt seemed so familiar. This was real. It was true. I wheeled example, Masons father treated her mother like a country girl, and his fami- - around and faced home. ly made her feel inferior because she maimed slightly above her station. Michael Sims is the author of Darwin's To the question of whats next for Orchestra t Henry Holt). Bobbie Ann Mason, she gives some Random House, $25, 0679449256 thought and responds slowly. 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