- My guest this evening is one of the most amazing people I've ever known.

She has been a New York fashion model and an enlisted English woman during the World War II Blitz.

She screen tested for Gone With a Wind and had a play of her own produced in New York.

She won a top prize for her fiction and founded another fiction prize that is likely to become America's highest in an age of small scale introspective literature.

She has written a five volume excursion into the past to discover where we have come from and what we have become.

Join us for a chat with Mary Lee Settle.

I mentioned Mary Lee's five volume series of novels.

The series is called The Bah Quintet, and Mary Lee has just published the last of the novels in the Quintet, the Killing Ground, published by Pharaoh Straus and Giro.

Mary Lee, you've been working on this for 18 years.

When you finished this one, did you, did you sigh A breath of relief?

- Well, I sighed a bigger breath of relief than you might understand, because it's been 28 years.

28 years.

28 years.

Yes, I stopped and did other things.

That's - Right.

- But really it started in 1954.

What, what was the first one?

Well, the first one written was O Erland.

- Yeah.

- But actually the first one of the quintet is called Prisons, mid 17th century.

- What possessed you to to write this five volume?

- Good grief.

I don't know, Tim, if I'd had any, you know, the Bible says you should sit down and count the cost.

If I'd sat down and counted the cost of this, I'm sure I never would've done it.

- This is the last one now, and I, and mere, I get the impression this is kind of the most personal of the, of the ones of all of them mean.

Do you, do you feel that way?

- No.

Oddly enough, it's not, I mean, of course it has things about my background, scenic things, fragments of things that I've heard, things that I've seen and so on.

But to me, and I'll surprise you with this, to me, the most personal one is prisons.

- That's the one said in England.

- That's right.

I have never, so far as I know, been a mid 17th century soldier in Cromwell's army.

But as far as the autobiographical realization of the character, Johnny, and to a lesser extent Lily, in the 1912 section called The Scapegoat, I have more in common with, I think, than I do Hannah.

- Now, the first three novels all, all sort of deal with men or the central characters.

And then in the scapegoat, in the killing ground, a woman is a central character.

Is there some, do I, am I supposed to draw something from that, that there, is there a feminist - Being?

No, I, no, I didn't realize it until after it was over, - But - Of course the answer to it is in the fact that the Hannah of the last volume is the one who has done the search, and in doing the search she finds or candy tells her, if you remember that there is a Johnny in all of us that one who seeks is in all of us.

So why shouldn't it be a woman?

- Yes.

And the dream that Hannah has toward the end where she dreams that she's both, she's both the old Hannah and, and Johnny at the same time.

In other words, almost a tarus like thing.

I mean, - That's right.

- The two sexist murder.

- That's right.

She, she becomes both in the dream.

But that, of course is to please, mommy, don't forget.

But then in the end, when she goes to sleep, she dreams.

She's thankful.

She's Johnny Church.

- When you started 28 years ago, did you know that you were gonna do five?

- No, evolve?

I started, originally I didn't, I didn't know what I was gonna do.

All I knew was that I, I hate to use the word vision because it sounds so pompous, but you do get a visual scene in your head.

You know, we get, we all get visual scenes in our heads when we dream.

And this is like a waking dream that starts a novel often.

And it was a visual sense of one man hitting another man in a drunk tank on a Saturday night.

And I started questioning the vision, why with 40 men in the Drunk Tank, does he pick this one instead of that one?

So I started questioning the fist as it were to find out what was behind the fist, what was personal hatred.

He doesn't know him, remember what was cultural hatred, simply how far back that cultural resentment might have gone.

And first, I ended up with the first Hannah in the Woods in 1755, partly because, I'll tell you a secret about that.

I wanted to write a scene where somebody was so stripped down to survival that an animal skin and a roof over their head was luxury.

And you remember that's the way she ends up with the animal skin over the roof, over her head.

I then wrote, no, nothing, the 19th century volume, and then I made an aborted attempt to write the modern one.

- That was fight night.

- That was fight night.

What happened was my publishers cut the 1910 section of that one, so that here I was writing about a world that ends in a valley in West Virginia without mentioning the coal business, which seems kind of silly.

Then I realized that with starting with oah land, the land hunger was there, but that basic democratic drive itch that we have had not been articulated.

It had already become land hunger.

It had already been taken for granted certain ideas.

I mean, it's pre-revolutionary.

It had been taken for granted long enough.

So people were making a beginning to make a revolution out of it already in 1755.

So then I went back to try and find someplace where these ideas had come, had first been articulated.

I knew two things.

I knew that Thomas Jefferson wore the name Lilburn on a ring, and that nobody knew why I knew that.

The American Civil Liberties Union motto is the first few lines of a speech in the Star Chamber in London in, I think it's 1632, I'm not sure, But this is a 22-year-old man called John Lilburn freeborn.

Jack Lilburn got up in front of the star chamber, which would be like some kid having to get up in front of the Supreme Court now and defend himself.

And the beginning of his speech was, was the line, what is done to one man is done to all men.

So that was another clue to the fact that somewhere in that mid 17th century English history, I might find it.

So then I began studying the English Revolution to find out whether it followed the, the revolutionary pattern that Trotsky calls the, the time of Theor taken.

Of course, I found Revolution.

- Yeah, - Yeah.

And of course I found it.

- You sure did.

You know, I think we should get something clear here.

The, your, your town, the town that's in killing ground, and it's throughout most of the books you call Cana, West Virginia, and you grew up in Charleston, and there are parallels between the two towns.

I'm not saying Cana is Charleston, but there's certain, well, it's not, no, there's certainly parallels between the two.

And so your books are about the settlement not only of Charleston, but of of Virginia as well, aren't you?

And that, oh, certainly view of the land is is the progress toward, toward West Virginia.

I think that's one reason why your books are so, such vital importance to people who live here and elsewhere.

And now you've come and lived in the Tidewater, which you have interesting comments to make in your books from time to time, from a mountain perspective, don't you?

- Yes.

You remember in Oah Land, which McCartle, is it in Obu Bula Land?

Is it Gideon?

I can't remember.

Okay.

Anyway, when Jonathan Lacey is elected to the House of Burgesses from the new county, he runs up to the carriage just as he is leaving and says, Johnny, get finished with the British so we can get back to hate in the tide water.

As a matter of fact, a friend sent me a wedding present from Charleston with this quote written in it, - Mary Lee can, can someone read this book alone and not know the others?

Can someone do that?

- Well, why not?

Because the whole thing is in a circle.

You discover along with the Hannah in the book that there is a past and then there are two levels to, well, two levels that I'll talk about to this book.

One is the first section where Hannah has already done the research, and then the second one is how she began it.

So you see, you follow her.

- Well, it's a constant discovery though.

- It's a constant.

That's the pool.

Constant discovery.

That's right.

And so at the end of it, she dreams, I am 20 today, she dreams as Johnny Church.

I'm 20 today.

And there's only thankful Perkins to tell it to.

- And - It forms a complete circle because that's the first line of prisons.

- It is richer though, if you know the other books I have, I had the feeling at the end of this book when Hannah leaves on the airplane and she looks down at the mountain, that mountains, that reminded me so much of the Hannah in the opening to the of Buol.

She - Looks down - At - Hannah.

Yes, exactly.

- From, from the, and the contrast between the two and the, and the parallels between the two.

- Well, remember when, when the new Hannah standing on the Rock where, where Johnny Catlett has stood on his way to Missouri, where I don't think the first Hannah got to that rock, but you remember she looks down in the gorge and she sees the Rock where the first Hannah ate the piece of Raw Bear, - Mary Lee.

Are the books, do you see the books all five of them as a kind of continuous 300 year history or, or are there kind of repeating personal stories in each one?

How, how does that is, is it which, which is it?

- Or is it No, I don't know.

I don't see it as that.

I see it as a kind of, you know, if you put a bucket in a river, you have to put it in at one place and you may catch a few things, but you have to choose your place in the river and in, I pompously, I'll call it the river of time.

I chose my places to go into it.

And in a way, the places have a parallel with the present.

They're places of decision.

They're places where wars are going to come in.

- Well, in fact, all three of the books almost take place on the verge of revolutions.

The - That's right.

Well, and you see this one is - Both, all of them.

- Both post-revolution.

Yeah.

And pre-revolution.

Because I think that probably the psychic revolution in this country that began with those, those incredibly brave young black people sitting at the Woolworth counter, what was it, 1956 - Greensboro, North Carolina.

- That's right.

The incredible courage of those people and the dignity of them that comes right in the middle of this book, if you remember.

So part of it, the beg the beginning of it, the 1978 part is post-revolutionary.

Then the 1960 part is more like the the other books.

- Yeah.

Buol Land, right.

Goes up to the, to the revolution.

No, nothing goes to the Civil War.

And that's always sort of looming in the background.

- That's right.

You know, that happened.

The reader knows that happened.

Yeah.

But he may not know what came up to it.

You just watch it grow through the books.

And even in prisons, it's moving up to the few days before Cromwell takes over as the first modern dictator.

- It's interesting, you wrote that book in the sixties.

You wrote prisons in the sixties, didn't you?

Course.

And that's, that's of course there's a lot of one that's, that's a very contemporary book, even.

That's right.

Sure is.

Let me see.

Let's talk a minute about talk me talk a minute about how you work.

How, how do you work first about the research?

I know what I wanted.

I used to live in western, western part of Virginia.

And you're, you have a great ear.

I can hear the, the, the, the West Virginia people talking.

I roomed with a couple of boys from West Virginia.

And even in the long flow of the stories that the people tell in the book, I, I can just hear my old - Classmates draw back and get going.

- You must have, how much of this, of the stories do you think is drawn from family lore and your grandfather's tales or oral history, - That kind of thing?

I was a terrible listener when I was a child.

I listened all the time and I forgot very little, which of course is a disaster for the people around you.

Everybody should be very nice to their children and their neighbor's children, because you never can tell when there's a novelist out there shooting novels.

You know who, who was it said never, never, never forget what's been done.

And it isn't a, a bitterness about the past at all.

It's a necessary understanding of the past.

- I know it, it's, it's the true, it's the truth.

I know that you're constantly after, - You know that you were talking a minute ago about Canna Charleston.

You build, or I do anyway, build a fictional city in much the same way.

I build a fictional character.

It will have elements of many people, a fictional person, and then transcending all those elements of people.

It's just like making a cake.

And it has different ingredients in it.

But when the cake is finished, it's not any of the ingredients anymore.

It's a cake.

Cake may fall, and so may the person, the fictional person, and you build a city in much the same way.

For instance, the city of Jeremo in blood tie on the coast of Turkey.

That's only a little heap of stones.

And I had to move a mountain 85 miles before it would suit me.

You do this, it's fiction.

- Do you don't do what Joyce did when he did Dublin or I mean, when he did Ulysses, he drew a map of Dublin and had it all worked out and moved his people around like they were soldiers.

Ah, do you do that?

- Did you do that?

I used the Fry Jefferson map, and I know exactly how far one of my fictional cities is from another one.

In other words, I set them down in the terrain where they belong.

It's a real map.

And then, yeah, the Fry Jefferson map.

Yeah.

- I don't know.

- It was, well it was Peter Jefferson.

Oh yes.

Jefferson's father.

- Jefferson's father.

- And it was the first map that was published by the Royal Society of this country.

And it, that's where I got the name, the Endless Mountains.

'cause hardly anybody had been across it then.

It was all Indian territory.

- The BAH is historical too, isn't it?

Isn't that his, is that - No, there are lots of it.

Bah.

There are lots of bah.

I got that straight from the Bible.

- Okay, let's talk.

I know something else I want to ask you that, that I've never asked you.

I'm interested in your short stories and plays.

What are you gonna do with them?

You know, you've, you've got, you've done some fine short stories, but are we gonna get those published in a book - Sometimes?

No, I don't like my short stories.

I haven't done very good short stories, Tim.

I did one that got, you know, that was an oh Henry Short story and so forth.

But Matt Canvas tends to be bigger than, I'm not a good short story writer and I must not be a very - Good, that's play nobody great stories within you.

I don't think that's true.

You tell great stories, the stories of individual people.

Yeah.

- But they belong to other stories.

They all connect.

How about the plays?

Oh, well there have been sixth plays, but they've never been done except for the one that was done at the American place in New York.

- Juan Laca.

- Yeah, - Yeah, yeah.

That's a, his Spanish historical story.

How - That's right.

- How'd you get on that one?

- Founded in the British Museum.

I was interested in the fact that her reputation had been, can you imagine growing up when your tutor is tomata?

I didn't.

She was a nice girl.

But her tutor was Tomata.

She met then married into the low countries, which was the most liberal part of Europe at the time, and suddenly plunged from that inquisition training into the low countries.

She got a little too liberal for the folks at home.

See now Juan la Loca is autobiographical, except I've never gone la loca hope and went back.

You, - You know, Manti did an opera.

John Carlo Manti did, did an opera on the same story.

Beverly Sills sang at it in California.

Were you interested in that at all?

- No, I wasn't.

Because he follows the legend.

- I see.

- And that is that Juana went mad for love and a lot of foolishness like that.

And actually she was incarcerated because she was a nuisance.

She came back with new ideas.

She broke, she and her husband, Philip the Fed, broke the inquisition in Seville.

And then of course Philip died.

It said of the plague.

But it was a very convenient case of plague.

- Lemme go back to visions.

You mentioned about the vision that you had for this whole series, and it's the kind of thing that crops up in the novels.

I mean, Hannah has a vision in, in this, when she thinks that her brother has been killed.

When the phone conversation she has and she knows and she goes back to Charleston.

And this is a thing that recurs in several and other books.

What is it?

What are you talking about?

- I'm smiling because the first vision that Hannah has is that those women being buried in the Cadillac and their bones being found in the same way the ancient Indian bones were found.

It's conjuring.

- What do you mean?

You mean I know, I think this happens to people, often cases of people who are a long ways away, their wife or child.

Well, they can feel it.

Yes.

You've heard that story.

Have you had these experience, these kind of experiences?

And, and another thing, I guess one thing I'm trying to drive you to say perhaps is these are things that a novelist needs to hold onto, I guess, isn't it?

I mean, this, the, the visions am am I making sense?

- Yes.

Because after all, the whole book is a vision.

That's only the initial vision.

And then once I got to it, I wrote it not as a vision, but as a scene.

Until you have the vision, you can't write the scene is that when you start writing, when you have the vision, when it becomes so visual that you forget what it's about.

There's a Hungarian grapher called Karenni who wants explain this as saying you can't have an abstract thought and concrete ideas at the same time.

But with the novelist, that abstraction comes first.

I am going to write about why one man hit another man.

I am going to find out about the dilemma of American democracy.

All of that has to go right by the board until you sit and you wait and you listen.

And then you hear, he got him his stick and he went up that pond and she said, and you begin to hear the voice.

- There's a whole philosophy in this of course, in what you're talking about.

Interesting.

Do your research now.

I know you do.

You've done what, how many years was it you spent in the British Museum?

- Oh, I spent some years in the British Museum because I did the research for Obu land there.

And I also did the research for prisons there.

- You found the material was better there than it was in West Virginia, - Wasn't it?

I thought I couldn't write the book there and then started reading in the British Museum and I realized of course, that we were them and that there are far more documents in the British Museum.

And I got to the place where I was creating a historic memory for myself.

I read for 10 months without taking a note simply because I wanted to be used to the language.

I wanted to be used to what was happening.

And by the time I started the book and started Bulah Land, this is, I would recognize something written in 1775 instead of 1774.

Goodness.

Say one year, - 1775.

7 74 1 year.

Goodness sakes.

- Well, things change if you looked at a newspaper published last year.

Oh, - You mean just the events or the style?

- Well, the events and style go together and new languages come up.

- Well, where is it in your research?

When do do then, do you start taking notes and where is it that the re that notes, writings, leads into actual writing - Of the book when you have the vision ah, when the vision comes out of the research - And it, and with each one of the books.

Do you think it, was there a, a specific vision within this larger one of getting - Knocked down?

Yeah, so we keep using the word vision in and itself.

- Yeah, I know.

I don't wanna make, I don't wanna make mystical of it.

Sure.

- It sounds mystical and it's not.

- No, yeah.

- You simply wait, - Said - The same thing.

Wait to you hear the people speak.

- That has to do I think with another thing at Remark I know that you've made is that you don't, you were sort of, you feel like, and again, I don't wanna make anything mystical out of this, but I think a lot of writers say this, you're sort of chosen to be a writer.

You find yourself a writer and there you are, isn't it?

- Why you choose it?

I can't think.

- But it's chosen for you kind of, - Isn't it?

I think in a way it is.

I mean, you just get hooked on a, not on writing a book or writing about or so, but on asking questions.

I, I think that are serious.

Novelist is far more like a scientist and that is given a fragmented world.

You want to find the connections and make them, and you must do them imaginatively.

- Tell me this now, you finished the five books.

What, what are you gonna do?

What are you doing now?

- I'm writing a book for children about Under the Sea.

Under the Sea.

That's as far away from the coal mines as I can get.

You don't mind talking about your books to point?

Well, no, because it's already started and besides it's nonfiction now, Tim, we've known each other for a long time and you've never heard me talk about fiction, have you?

- No, no.

While I was doing it, - Don't.

Yeah, well I can tell you all about the mountains of the sea and it just pleasures my soul to do it.

I'm having a wonderful time.

- This is, by the way, is not your first children's book you've done, you did another Now I've done a couple more.

Well, tell me about it.

The Mountains of the Sea.

How'd you get into this?

Went from West Virginia to fashion modeling and everything else.

Where did you - Get into this one?

I was, I just happened to be living in Turkey.

Ah.

And I started diving in the scuba diving and I became so fascinated with, what is it?

Three quarters of the world is under the sea.

And you know, the wonderful thing about it, it's quiet.

- Yeah.

- It's so wonderfully quiet and directionless.

And I got interested in interested, it's a bad word, I fell in love with Under the Sea.

I think that's why so much of blood tie takes place under the sea.

And then I, I started reading about it and I thought, no, I didn't think at the time.

As a matter of fact, I was pushed into it by Catherine Patterson and Witty Taswell who thought I ought to use some of this energy that was left over on something that was a little more fun than writing an enormous book.

And I'm so glad they, they persuaded me to do it because I'm having such a good time with it.

When I found out that about a third of the sand of the sea was made out of fish poo poo, I was just delighted.

And that there are mountains higher than the Himalayas in the Mid-Atlantic.

Did you know that?

I, I didn't know I higher than the Himalaya.

Higher than the Himalaya.

Isn't that wonderful?

- Is it going to be this kind of thing?

I mean, - Yeah, it's gonna tell wonders everything you wanna know, everything you've always wanted to know about under the sea, and we're afraid to ask.

It's gonna tell you how deep it is, how wide it is, how dark it is, how big the octopus are, and how little the, they're little tiny monsters about this big six miles down.

And don't get me started there, sea worms.

Oh, seas gone.

There are sea worms that live on the sulfur from volcanoes instead of on chlorophyll.

It's like a whole, they're six feet long and they're blood red and they're huge clams that do the same thing.

They can't live in our world.

They have an undersea world of their own now.

You know?

That's fascinating.

- It really is.

When do you gonna try to publish it?

- It'll come out next spring.

Late spring - Next.

Next spring.

- Yeah.

Ah, - Well I'm looking forward to it.

You know, we've used up a half hour No, and I haven't gotten to half my questions, but I want to, want to have you on again for any, any, any time.

And thank you so - Much.

Don't about anything fish poo.

P - Thank you so much Mary Lee.

Settle.