Autobiographical sketch for
Authors Today and Yesterday, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz
with Howard Haycraft and Wilbur C. Hadden.
New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1933.
I WAS born May 15, 1894, at Indian Creek, Texas, brought up in Texas and Louisiana, and educated in small southern schools for girls. I was precocious, nervous, rebellious, unteachable, and made life very uncomfortable for myself, and I suppose for those around me. In fact, simply a certain type of child. As soon as I learned to form letters on paper, at about three years, I began to write stories, and this has been the basic and absorbing occupation, the intact line of my life which directs my actions, determines my point of view, profoundly affects my character and personality, my social beliefs and economic status, and the kind of friendships I form. I did not choose this vocation, and if I had had any say in the matter, I would not have chosen it. I made no attempt to publish anything until about ten years ago, but I have written and destroyed manuscripts quite literally by the trunkful. I say trunkful because I have spent fifteen years wandering about, weighted horribly with masses of paper and little else. Yet for this vocation I was and am willing to live and die, and I consider very few other things of the slightest importance.
All my intense growing years were lived completely outside of literary centers; I knew no other writers and had no one to consult with on the single vital issue of my life. This self-imposed isolation, which seems to have been almost unconscious on my part, a natural way of living, prolonged and made more difficult my discipline as artist. But it saved me from discipleship, personal influences, and membership in groups. I began to read at about five years and have read ever since, but my reading until my twenty-fifth year was the most important, being a grand sweep of all English and translated classics from the beginning up to about 1800. And then I began with the newcomers, and found new incitements.
Within the past dozen years I have lived in New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Mexico City, New York, Bermuda, Berlin, Basel, and now live in Paris, and in all these places I have done book-reviewing, political articles, hack writing of all kinds for newspapers, editing, re-writing other people’s manuscripts, by way of earning a living, and a sorry living it was, too. Without the help of devoted friends I should have perished many times over.
My short stories have been published by Century, transition, the New Masses, the Second American Caravan, the Gyroscope, Scribner’s, and the Hound and Horn; poems in Measure and Pagany. A small collection of short stories was published in 1930 under the title of Flowering Judas. In 1931 I received a Guggenheim Fellowship for writing abroad and as this is written I am still working on my novel Many Redeemers which I began in Mexico years ago. A book of old French songs which I translated last year will be published in Paris this summer. I have also resumed work on a study of Cotton Mather, which I began in 1927, got half way thru, and had to give up for other work.
Politically my bent is to the Left. As for esthetic bias, my one aim is to tell a straight story and to give true testimony. My personal life has been the jumbled and apparently irrelevant mass of experiences which can only happen, I think, to a woman who goes with her mind permanently absent from the place where she is. My physical eye is unnaturally far-sighted, and I have no doubt this affects my temperament in some way. I have very little time sense and almost no sense of distance. I have no sense of direction and have seen a great deal of the world by getting completely lost and simply taking in the scenery as I roamed about getting my bearings. I lack entirely a respect for money values, and for caste of any kind, social or intellectual or whatever. I have a personal and instant interest in every human being that comes within ten feet of me, and I have never seen any two alike, but I discover the most marvelous differences. It is the same with furred animals. I love best remembered landscapes two or three countries away. I should like to settle to live in a place where I might swim in the sea, sail a cat boat, and ride horseback. These are the only recreations I really care for, and they all take a good deal of elbow room. Not for nothing am I the great-great-great-grand daughter of Daniel Boone.
This spring in Paris I married Eugene Pressly, originally from Pennsylvania, and we plan to live here for several years.
Fall 1933