Dimestore

by Lee Smith

  I give it mostly to my sister writers (because it is one of the best books ever written about writing) but also to anyone suffering adversity of any sort, especially any kind of illness or disability, for it is truly a story of transformation, one of the finest spiritual autobiographies ever written. Basically I give it to people I love, trusting that it will mean as much to them as it has to me. As Katharine herself says (I’m going to call her Katharine in this essay since I consider her my true friend), hers was “a lonely voyage of discovery” that began when she decided that she “couldn’t let fear decide things” for her, when she decided “to follow the single, fresh living voice” of her “own destiny.” Indeed this is a fearless book, as well as an entirely original one. It is not at all like anything else I have ever read. Though she was very frail, Katharine was tough as nails, intellectually; wielding her pen with a jeweler’s precision, she crafted this book like an exquisitely cut jewel—a topaz, I think, rather than a diamond (maybe I think this since it’s my own birthstone, but everybody who reads this books wants to claim it as her own). Each facet reveals a new insight or an indelible image. Hold it up to the window, turn it this way and that, and it will cast off rays of light in every direction, piercing even the oddest, most secret depths of the reader’s psyche. The Little Locksmith tells the story of how Katharine overcame her severe physical and psychological handicaps (her “predicament,” she calls it) and came to this tiny, out-of-the-way village on Maine’s stern rocky coast where, against her family’s wishes and all advice, she bought a house on Court Street, overlooking the harbor.

  I’m headed there now. I give Betty a biscuit, close the front door softly, and walk out our leafy lane, turning right onto the main road. I walk through swirling ground mist across the old British Canal, then climb up the long, steep curve into town. Katharine’s book fits easily in the pocket of my windbreaker; it’s a small book, like its author.

  Born in 1890 into a loving, prosperous family in Salem, Massachusetts, Katharine Butler Hathaway was stricken with spinal tuberculosis at age five and “changed from a rushing, laughing child into a bedridden, meditative one.” The most advanced medical theories of the day dictated her new “horizontal life,” which would last for ten years. “For the doctor’s treatment consisted in my being strapped down very tight on a stretcher, on a very hard sloping bed, with my shoulders pressed against a hard pad. My head was kept from sinking down on my chest . . . by means of a leather halter attached to a rope which went through a pulley at the head of the bed. On the end of the rope hung a five-pound iron weight. This mechanism held me a prisoner for twenty-four hours a day, without the freedom to turn or twist my body or let my chin move out of its up-tilted position in the leather halter, except to go from side to side. My back was supposed to be kept absolutely still.” However, Katharine’s “hands and arms and mind were free. . . . I held my pencil and pad of paper up in the air above my face, and I wrote microscopic letters and poems, and made little books of stories, and very tiny pictures” along with paper dolls, dollhouse furniture, and doll clothes. In these Brontë-like pursuits she was accompanied always by her loving brothers and sister, who “took it for granted that no other amusement was really interesting compared with drawing or writing or making something” and made her bedroom “the natural center of the house for the others.”

  Yet her natural “happy, sparkling” sense of herself was challenged by the “ghoulish pleasure” of visiting children who stared at her halter and strap, and by their parents’ overt pity. Worst of all was the occasional appearance of the hunchback who came to the house to fix locks. Katharine had been told that without the treatment she would have grown up to be like him. Yet she felt the “truth was that I really belonged with him, even if it was never going to show. I was secretly linked with him, and I felt a strong, childish, amorous pity and desire toward him, so that there was even a queer erotic charm for me about his gray shabby clothes, the strange awful peak in his back, and his cross, unapproachable sadness which made him not look at other people, not even me lying on my bed and staring sideways at him.”

  When Katharine was finally released from her board at fifteen, this suspicion was, alas, confirmed: “That person in the mirror couldn’t be me! I felt inside like a healthy, ordinary lucky person. . . . A hideous disguise had been cast over me.” Katharine’s refusal to accept her limitations—including her desire for sexual love, which shocked many readers when this book was first published in 1943—strikes me as an act of great courage. She always “believed passionately that every human being could be happy,” including herself.

  She was admitted to Radcliffe College, where she spent three blissful years as a special student and made several good friends for life: smart, artistic, bohemian girls among whom she flourished in her “perfect imitation of a grown-up person, one who was noted for a sort of peaceful wise detachment,” whose “curious, impersonal life gave her an enviable agelessness and liberty.” But this self fell apart when she returned home after college. She fell into deep depression and “toxic fear” (agoraphobia), a complete disintegration from which she finally emerged through her old childhood pastime, writing.

  “A block of paper and a pencil had saved me. They had not only saved me by satisfying my hunger and canceling the overwhelming terror of the universe, but they gave me also an inexhaustible form of entertainment because they gave me, or seemed to give me, the equivalent of all sorts of human experience. There was no end and no limit to this kind of living.” Her writing restored “the greatest visible world” to her as “an object of love, full of mystery and meaning.” Thus she “got hold of a most extraordinary joy.”

  Katharine’s transformation was further accomplished by buying the house I’m standing in front of right now, atop this windy hill. When an unexpected legacy allowed her to conceive her grand plan of living independently, she first thought she’d buy “a thimble . . . something mignonne and doll-like,” just like herself: “a very small childish spinster . . . a little oddity, deformed and ashamed and shy.” Instead, she found herself “awestruck by the force of destiny” when she came upon this “very large high square house on Penobscot Bay overlooking the Bagaduce River and the islands and the Cape Rosier Hills. . . . I knew that whether I liked it or not this at last was my house.”

  Somebody else lives in Katharine’s house now, of course, and yet it’s all here, just as she described it: the bright sun, the endless wind, the flower-studded fields dropping down to the harbor. It’s easy to imagine her sitting on this wide stone doorsill, “rapturously at home,” as she often sat that first summer while workmen hammered and painted and restored the chimneys, the twelve-paned windows, the “old heavy original door” whose “panels, set with narrow, handmade moldings, made a great serene sign of the cross—two short panels at the top and two tall ones below.” Indeed it is still the “sober, grand, romantic house” that was to be her “rebellion against cuteness. . . . I wanted room to find out what I really was, and room to be whatever I really was.” The Little Locksmith is the story of how Katharine grew to fit her house, shedding her self-identity as a cripple and assuming her true identity as artist.

  Katharine’s transformation, her “new world,” is described in terms of light: “I had never seen a world so gilded and so richly bathed and blessed by such a benign sun as that world was by that sun. The sun seemed to pour down a lavish, golden, invulnerable contentment on everything, on people, houses, animals, fields—and a sweetness like the sweetness of passion.” Which would come to her, too, against all odds, in “that graceful sitting room, full of sunshine, on the southwest corner, the room destined to become the one most used and most loved of the entire house. Wonderful, strange things happened to me and were said to me there, which I never could have believed were possible at the time when I was so eagerly preparing it.”

  Eventually, Katharine left this house and found her way to Paris, where she became part of a vibrant circle of friends, writers, and artist
s. “Everything is different since Castine. Yet it all began there. For there and then I first began in utter ignorance and naïveté and to heed the little voice which spoke to me and told me which way to turn.” Eventually Katharine came to believe that this was in fact the voice of God; she wrote that The Little Locksmith was “going to be my bread-and-butter letter to God, for a lovely visit on the earth.” Her happiness was complete when she fell in love with Dan Hathaway of Marblehead, Massachusetts, marrying him in 1932. Though the Depression forced them to sell Katharine’s beloved house, perhaps it had already served its purpose; the couple ended up blissfully happy in a “smaller and cozier” house in Blue Hill, Maine—just up the peninsula from Castine.

  Chapters of The Little Locksmith were being serially published in The Atlantic Monthly magazine in the fall of 1942—to great acclaim and national interest—when Katharine’s precarious health “went haywire.” “At present,” she wrote from the Blue Hill Hospital in early December, “my only comfortable posture is on the knees with head bent down in front of me, like a snail or an unborn child. Only then can I breathe.” She died on Christmas Eve. The Little Locksmith was published posthumously the following year. Writing it meant everything to her (“I love this book and I can hardly bear to leave it now” she wrote at the end); its publication seemed almost irrelevant.

  And yet it’s still here. This book is in my pocket. This house is still here on its hill, everything just as Katharine described it: the fanlight over the heavy door; the twelve-paneled windows; the brick path, lovingly uncovered; the swaying willows; and most of all, the light. The entire “great visible world” is here before us, our own real world, where amazing things are possible. It’s all still here for us all, if we can overcome our fears and summon the courage to trust ourselves, to listen to whatever voice speaks within us, to trust Katharine’s “magic of transformation.” I check my watch: seven forty-five. There’s still time to walk back down the hill, make some coffee for my husband, if he hasn’t done it already, and maybe—who knows? start a novel.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Since these essays are drawn from every part of my life, there’s no end to the people I’d like to thank—so many that I’m scared to make a big list for fear of leaving anyone out. So here I will try to acknowledge those who have contributed most to the actual writing of Dimestore. First comes my old friend Debbie Raines, senior English teacher at Grundy High School, whose insights and on-the-scene commentary have been invaluable to me, as was the time I spent working with her students to publish our oral history of downtown Grundy, Sitting on the Courthouse Bench, in 2000 (Tryon Publishing Co., Inc., Chapel Hill). My longtime editor Shannon Ravenel (recently retired) offered initial enthusiasm and some shrewd judgments at the outset of this project; my present editor Kathy Pories brought close editing and a much needed sense of order and shape to this collection. I also want to thank Mona Sinquefield, friend and secretary, who suffered through version after version, draft after draft; Chris Stamey, the best copy editor in the world; Brunson Hoole, whose sleight of hand somehow turns all this stuff into an actual book; art designer Anne Winslow; and too many other people at Algonquin to name, starting with publisher Elisabeth Scharlatt, Ina Stern, Craig Popelars, and the whole wonderful publicity team. It’s such a pleasure to work with you all. I’m indebted to sister writers and early readers Frances Mayes and Marianne Gingher, who came up with great ideas and suggestions. Big thanks go out to my special support group of “Good Ol’ Girls”—Jill McCorkle, Marshall Chapman, and Matraca Berg. To my beloved friend Elizabeth Spencer, always an inspiration, and to the wonderful and steadfast Liz Darhansoff, who has been my agent practically since we were girls. Special thanks to the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky, where I have spent so much valuable time over the past thirty years. My essay “Lightning Storm” honors the people I was privileged to know during my three years working in the literacy programs at Hindman’s adult learning center. I also want to thank all my Grundy and southwest Virginia relatives, especially my father’s business partner and best friend, Curtis E. Smith, his son Jack Smith, and Steve Smith, now CEO of the Food City stores, which have benefited so many in southwest Virginia, for their constant support always and especially their loving care of my parents during their later years. Thanks to Ava McClanahan for this as well as being a constant source of lore and stories all my life. Love and apologies for general ditziness during the writing of this book go to my children Page Seay and Amity Crowther, and always, always, to Hal.

  LEE SMITH began writing stories at the age of nine and selling them for a nickel apiece. Since then, she has written seventeen works of fiction, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and most recently, Guests on Earth. She has received numerous awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with her husband, the writer Hal Crowther. (Author photo by Diana Matthews.)

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  “Dimestore” contains material by Lee Smith from two articles from the Washington Post and the introduction to Sitting on the Courthouse Bench: An Oral History of Grudy, Virginia, edited by Lee Smith, 2000, Tryon Publishing Co., Chapel Hill, N.C.

  “Recipe Box,” originally published in House and Garden, 2002.

  “Lady Lessons” in Garden and Gun, 2010.

  A version of “Marble Cake,” in Eudora Welty: Writers’ Reflections upon First Reading Welty, edited by Pearl McHaney, originally published by Hill Street Press, 1999.

  “Raised to Leave,” in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, 2001.

  “Lightning Storm,” originally published by the New York Times as “Given Tools, They Work the Language,” 1996.

  “Driving Miss Daisy Crazy,” originally a talk, then published as the introduction to New Stories from the South, 2001.

  “Good-bye to the Sunset Man,” originally published in the Independent Weekly, October 2004.

  “A Life in Books,” based on an Associated Writing Program keynote address (and then printed in the AWP magazine/newsletter) and a piece named “Everything Else Falls Away” written for the collection Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, edited by Will Blythe, Little, Brown, 1998.

  “Angels Passing,” originally published in the Independent Weekly.

  “The Little Locksmith,” in the Raleigh News and Observer, 2002.

  “Heritage,” in From the Mountain, From the Valley: New and Collected Poems by James Still, edited by Ted Olson, published by the University Press of Kentucky, March 2005.

  Excerpts from The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life by James Still, published by the University Press of Kentucky, July 9, 1991.

  “Salvation,” in The River Hills and Beyond by Lou Crabtree, published by Sow’s Ear Press, 1998.

  “Song to Oysters,” in Soupsongs/Webster’s Ark by Roy Blount Jr., published by Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

  With gratitude to the original publishers of Lee Smith�
�s work quoted herein: The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, Harper and Row, New York, 1968. Oral History (1983) and Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. The story “Tongues of Fire,” in Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, by Lee Smith, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1990.

  eISBN 978-1-61620-596-6