Reviews for Private Marjorie: The Love Letters of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings to Norton S. Baskin

The average rating for Private Marjorie: The Love Letters of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings to Norton S. Baskin based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-05-28 00:00:00 Erin Saveall The collected letters of Rawlings to her husband Norton Baskin are a veritable treasure trove of information about her writing life, friendships, and day-to-day experiences. What always astounds me in these letters is how little time the two seemed to spend together after their marriage. Baskin served overseas in WWII. When he returned, Rawlings spent most of each year in Van Hornesville completing The Sojourner. After their trip abroad, she then spends a good deal of time in Richmond working on the Glasgow biography. Even when she is in Florida, she is frequently at the Creek while he is in Crescent Beach. The time apart did give her the opportunity to write all of these letters, but seems so excessive, especially after how much she missed him during the war. The letters also detail her struggles with alcohol, advancing opinions on the race question, and the many books she read during this time. "The hills are stark and bare [Van Hornesville, NY], the bones of the earth protrude, telling a skeletal truth, the wind whistles through my doors and windows, and God, how I love it. I am perpetually torn between courage and cowardice. I am afraid all of the time - of what, I do not know - and when I am most frightened, suddenly I exult in danger." "The last two nights there has been a phenomenon. Restless, I have aroused in the late night, and seen a milky whiteness, the whole atmosphere nacreous, no snow falling, no sleet, no rain. Only this great suspended whiteness-. And in the morning, the bare trees have been covered with what the local denizens call 'Frost.' It is in depth a quarter of an inch or more, it is not ice, it is not snow, it is evidently a condensation overnight, and the result is that the trees, the bushes, the shrubs, the grass, are outlined in a silver filagree [sic]. it is as though there were winter leaves and blossoms of this crystal." On race (in response to reading "An American Dilemma-The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy")- "While revealing pitilessly and dispassionately both the totally unfounded irrationality of American behavior to and judgment of the Negro, and the amazing rationalizations made to attempt to cover up the irrationality, the book is also extremely generous to the American nature, saying that the American Creed is a noble ideal genuinely imbedded [sic] in American thought and action, destined to be of ultimate inestimable value to the world's thought and action. The author shows that the very discrepancy between the American Creed and the actual treatment of the Negro, including the mental reservations and discriminations, accounts for the violence with which the most prejudiced defend their stand, as it is natural, psychologically, to be most on the defensive, and most violent in one's rationalization, when one knows, in one's secret and unadmitted conscience, that one is wrong, or at least knows in secret that one is acting contrary to one's highest ideals." "All I could say was, that when it comes down to it, we just do not improve their education and so forth and have kept using that as an alibi too long. I also said that I believed opening the gates would be exactly like the granting of women's suffrage. I can remember all the same talk, that women would take over the world, would run men out of their jobs, and the world would be ruined - that women were definitely inferior to men and had to be by hand kept in their place! Well, the gates were suddenly opened wide to women, and my God, they don't even bother to vote most of the time. Babies continue to be born, men continue to have jobs, and the only apparent difference is that it's a woman's own fault these days if a man beats her!" On writing: "I really think that from now on when anyone asks, 'Are you writing?' or 'What are you writing?' I shall fall back in return on Peggy's [Margaret Mitchell] question, 'Have you had intercourse lately?' It seems to me that one activity should be as private as the other. How embarrassing to have to tell people when you do it!" "I am trying to work into my book a statement by one of my characters that is actually my own, and if I can manage it artistically it will be this: 'I cannot accept the idea of immortality. Living one life has almost killed me.'"

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-04 00:00:00 Thomas Hlavinka You gotta be obsessed to read ALL the details of life, love between two private people. She and he were interesting people with interesting and famous friends. But the wading through got too sluggish for me and I quit.