Introduction
by Ivan Doig Her name was Lana, and she came to the ranch house like the doe-eyed orphan she was, cradled in the boss's arms minutes after her hay-hidden mother had fallen victim to his mowing machine.
A fawn all velvet and delicate, a human heart or two melting over its helpless beauty, an impulsive adoption: hadn't we seen this before, in these very pages, or at least at the Saturday-night show in town to sop in the Technicolor version of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's emblematic novel?
Maybe we overlooked the component of truth in fiction. Maybe we figured that Rocky Mountain deer were literally loftier creatures than the Florida backwoods species of flag-tailed mischief so memorably depicted in The Yearling. Maybe a pretty face just always wins its way in. In any case, the specific tribulations that were visited upon scrub-country settlers Ezra and Ora Baxter and their pet-smitten twelve-year-old son Jody in the book and movie could not afflict us. The sheep ranch we were on, covering one entire corner of the county, could not be eaten to the ground by a single munching adolescent deer, and the fawn was granted plenty of elbow room of another sort: she was the plaything of the boss's wife, a bored town-born woman accustomed to better stuff than any of us, including her husband, were made of. We of the ranch crew recognized status when it raised its head, and the wife there in the big house bestowed it on the orphan fawn as unmistakably as the star-power name she gave it. Even so, trouble came with Lana.
Back there half a century ago I was, as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings might have put it, "Jody-age." As the tolerated offspring of hired hands my father was the foreman, my grandmother the ranch cook I tagged along on anything, and watched with interest when the long-legged wildling bounded forward in the pen with the bum lambs at bottle time. The first few times the boss's wife did the feeding herself, then the white-mustached choreboy was given the task, and whenever he was deployed into the hayfield, my grandmother none too willingly had the fawn added to her victualing duties. I bottle-fed it myself a few intrigued times, but my heart wasn't going out to anything that was so obviously not mine. Besides, Lana was already surprisingly bossy.
So I was able to stand back when, in the fullness of time, this gamin creature turned on us, we of the human kind. As she grew, Lana developed hooves like terrible knives in a fable, dark obsidian blades that suddenly, treacherously, were in front of your face. Her time among us ended when she slashed someone's shirt from collar to bellybutton. Just as it was written in that renowned story whose message we did not heed, nature had overcome nurture.
That this incident leaps to mind the instant I am in the vicinity of these pages testifies, I think, to the uncanny staying power of The Yearling. Any of us who are former children I have in mind here that boss's wife, impelled to that dazzler of a fawn by some smoldering yearning, its outbreak likely as startling to her as it was to us, for whatever pet she had or did not have as a girl harbor in some corner of our memory an extreme case of wanting, such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings portrays in Jody Baxter. A child of his place and time, America when it was raw and rural and barely healing from the Civil War, the boy in the isolation of the Baxter's Island pinspot of clearing in the central Florida scrubland looks to nature to provide him the creature of companionship he so badly wants. In a wording that is as telling as it is curious, the author has Jody struggle to enunciate his craving for a pet: "I want something with dependence to it."
It gives away nothing to say that dependence/independence are twinned throughout The Yearling, and that, piquantly singular as the title is, the story rapidly becomes the tale of two yearlings, two growing things: the gangly fawn named Flag and the sprouting boy, Jody. There, though, this book simply starts. It lasts because, for all its reputation as a heart-grabber, best read when you are Jody-age, the achievement within these pages is similarly twofold: it stands as a leading example of that most natural and durable way to tell a story, the journal of a year in an intensely specific place, and at the same time it clicked as a publishing phenomenon crafted by two savvy veterans of the word business.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had behind her a newspaper career and a modicum of success as a syndicated columnist when she and her husband moved south in 1928 to operate an orange grove and, intentionally or not, cultivate a new field of literary possibility for her. She apparently alit into Florida all ears. Journalistic pro that she was, she knew how to get lingo down on paper, and by the early 1930s her short stories with Cracker-flavored dialogue had found favor: "Gal Young Un" won the O. Henry Prize for the best short story of 1932. She went on to try longer fiction under the most famous editing hand around, that of Maxwell Perkins.
Part of Perkins's fabled success in making the Scribner's publishing list into such a jackpot the alphabet of authors he handled included Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Ring Lardner, Alan Paton, and Thomas Wolfe came from his capacity to spread his bets all over the literary table. Thus, at the same time that he was spending day and night trying to thread storyline into the boundary-breaking prose of Wolfe, Perkins took care to continually encourage, nudge, and do some persuading on Rawlings, who on the face of her previous pages was never going to be that innovative a stylist but showed promise as a natural straight-ahead storyteller. The Perkins-Rawlings correspondence itself became a tome, and in it are the two seeds of what was to come: Max Perkins's suggestion that she try to do "a boy's book" set in the Florida scrub she knew so well, and Marjorie Rawlings's ultimate corrective response that it would be "a story about a boy."
It took them a couple of other novels first, and only so-so luck with the reading public despite Perkins's marketing efforts on Rawlings's behalf, but with The Yearling's publication in 1938, they hit it big. Book-of-the-Month, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, sustained best-sellerdom, the movie contract, iconic imprinting into the minds of an entire reading generation it all rolled in for the hardworking team of writer and editor.
And there on the page? Let us now appraise the sound on the paper, most noticeably Rawlings's decision, with Perkins's acquiescence if not encouragement, to use orthographic literalness for her characters' dialect. Here is the first swatch of dialogue in The Yearling, as Ezra "Penny" Baxter explains to Jody why their hunting hound resists the boy's petting affections:
"You was pups together...ten year gone, when you was two year old and her a baby. You hurted the leetle thing, not meanin' no harm. She cain't bring herself to trust you. Hounds is often that-a-way."
Neither Flannery O'Connor nor Eudora Welty would have done it that-a-way. Yet, for whatever digestive problem we as modern readers may have with it, Rawlings's sometimes awkward-looking spelled-out version of Cracker dialect does capture the accent she heard around her in central Florida, pins for in display there on the page. In another aspect of lingual flavor, drawing on the riches of what William Carlos Williams called "words marked by a place," she was equally bountiful. The Dictionary of American Regional English, the authoritative University of Wisconsin linguistic project that is compiling our national trove of folk expressions, cites a prodigious 186 distinctive usages in The Yearling thus far (DARE's volumes have reached the letter S), from a mort of sickness all too much of it to all manner of jessies, which are creatures or varmints, human and otherwise. The dancer and the dance, the language and the local twists and twirls we give it Rawlings honors the people she is writing about by weaving their deep-South lexicon into her literary tune.
Putting our ear to the page as she does, Rawlings also takes us back to a time when paternal and maternal matters echoed off some very stony walls of fate. Until Jody survived and thrived, Ezra and Ora Baxter, addressed on nearly every page as "Pa" and "Ma," had endured the premature deaths of six other children: six! In an interesting choice of characterization, it is Ma Baxter who is so hardened by these relentless losses that she will not let herself be openly affectionate toward Jody, while Pa Baxter is lenience and tolerance personified. The icon of the long-suffering mother, back there in the white-settler days of the 1870s, was still current during the throes of the Depression when Rawlings was writing: Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Perkins in the long-running radio serial. American grit, though, was being obscured by makeup by the time The Yearling was made into a movie, in 1946.
Given an often startlingly visual piece of work to draw on the neighboring Forrester brothers sitting around naked as they make music through the night! A cotillion of whooping cranes sending the voluble Jody and his equally voluble father stark speechless with the beauty of their mating dance! Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer merely ran the novel through its assembly line of stars. Jane Wyman as Ma looks as though she is doing her homework instead of her housework, trying to figure out how much of a sourpuss she dares to be in a role that the book succinctly gives as "a woman all Hell couldn't amuse." Gregory Peck was a foot too tall and a dozen times too sunnily handsome for the role of the runty, hard-used Penny Baxter. (What a role it would have made for Elisha Cook Jr., the plucky little overmatched homesteader so memorably gunned down in the mud by Jack Palance in Shane.) Even the squad of deer that are meant to be Flag at various stages of growth had to endure miscasting; in a quite early scene of the movie, when the supposedly few-months-old fawn snuggles close to Jody and Penny, there are the very visible nubbins of horns of a year-old buck.
And so, after all the clankings of the machinery of popular culture, the validity of The Yearling ends up pretty much back where it started, in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's inspired determination to tell the story of a year on a chosen span of earth. It is a classic literary strategy, employed by the best nature writers: Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, Hal Borland's Book of Days, Henry Beston's Cape Cod memoir The Outermost House. The intricate yet fundamental orbit the seasons carry us through is still the basic path of life for us and what we see around us, and Rawlings obviously relished the almost overpowering cycles of scenery-change and abrupt plenty or sobering want in the intense climate of the Florida scrubland. Notice how it begins, the calendar of this book and the Baxter family's wander-year of the soul: April, not the cruelest month at all, but a time of heady abundance, when bees are staggering through the air from one flowering richness to the next. We meet Jody on an afternoon so delicious to the senses he can barely stand it, playing hooky from his chores. Off he goes, drawn by bee-drone, into the pleasures of springtime and, we know, beyond.
Follow those bees, and we are led to some of Rawlings's loveliest writing. "The Scuppernong grapevine, a gift from his mother's kin in Carolina, was in bloom for the first time, fine and lace-like. The wild golden bees had found its fragrance, and were standing on their heads to guzzle its thin honey." When she every so often drenches a scene with nature this way, the author is giving us an essence that underlies The Yearling's much commented-upon mantle of inevitability. What the land says is the true accent of this book. Spring brings. ("The fawns were being born.") Summer simmers along in the hardscrabble routines of life for the Baxters. Then we come to the first quarter of the September moon, the silver crescent standing upright in the sky like a door swung open. Woodsman that he is, Penny Baxter reads rain from that open portal and is exultant, only to turn apprehensive at the next weather sign: seabirds flowing inland where they don't belong. When it arrives, the crop-drowning torrent is riding a wind that the author gives us every memorable atom of: "It seemed to leap the cornfield in one gust. It struck the yard trees with a hissing, and the mulberries bent their boughs to the ground, and the chinaberry creaked in its brittleness...The pines whistled. The rain followed."
The year bends dramatically beyond that, and in what to me stands as the most masterful sequence in the novel, Rawlings provides us the juxtaposition of Christmas preparations and the desperate tracking down of the nemesis bear, Slewfoot. The New Year's leaf on the calendar brings plowing, the Florida version of February warms the earth, and March invites planting. Then it is April once more, the year closing its circle of evolution, and in the course of it Jody, under the implacable tutelage of these natural surroundings, has grasped the difference between appetite and hunger.
There is a storytime within this rustproof story, when the boy and his father call at the general store in Volusia on a rare trip to town. The storekeeper and Penny Baxter begin making talk, and while the boy listens, his family's travails and triumphs of the season past are woven into a skein of storytelling by his father. "Jody lived the summer over again, and it was better than when it happened, the way Penny told it." Just so, do stories told with such relish last and last.
Copyright 1938 by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Copyright renewed © 1966 by Norton Baskin
Interior decorations by Edward Shenton copyright 1938
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Copyright renewed © 1966 by Charles Scribner's Sons
Introduction copyright © 2002 by Ivan Doig