Bernice Kelly Harris: A Good Life Was Writing.

Bernice Kelly Harris: A Good Life Was Writing. By Valerie Raleigh Yow. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxii, 334. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2348-X.)

Bernice Kelly was born in 1891 or 1894 (the text of this biography relies on the former date, but the copyright page lists the latter), and grew up on her father's substantial farm near Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated from Meredith College in the state capital and taught school in the same state, first in the mountains and later in the town of Seaboard. Kelly married the wealthy, aging, tight-fisted, and peculiar Herbert Harris of Seaboard in 1926. Six years later she began writing dramas for the local villagers. During the Great Depression she interviewed the local peasantry for the Federal Writers Project. She then turned to novel writing, and in 1939 published Purslane. In the following decade she produced six more critically acclaimed novels. Although her national fame ebbed with her own waning creative energies, she remained a minor literary heroine in her home state almost until her death in 1973, but soon even Tarheelers forgot Harris.

Historians and literary critics had excluded Harris from study long before her death. She appears, for example, briefly in only one paragraph of one survey article in editor Louis D. Rubin Jr.'s nearly six-hundred-page History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge, 1985). She certainly possesses significance in regional letters and history, and one hails a revival of interest in Harris and her work. Valerie Raleigh Yow's biography fails to exploit much of Harris's moment; indeed, and sadly, its failures are almost endemic to biographical studies, particularly of the less than famous. Yow begins her book with the old saw "that a biographer is an artist under oath" (p. xiii). Yet this is pretty much the last time art appears within the text. Yow falls back instead on the most artless structure of chronological exposition of facts presented chiefly as Harris herself lived them.

All biographies need not be "life and times" studies, but a biographer, particularly of a private person, also possesses an obligation to justify a life. The fact that a person lived and produced anything, whether art work or meringue pies, lacks weight in itself without a biographer's shrewd ordering of data. Yow's work lacks this sense of large discrimination or significance, and it lacks such discrimination page-by-page. Thus Yow treats Harris's cooking, her relations with servants, her correspondence with other literary figures, the production of her novels, her tippling bootleg liquor for her health, and her receiving electroshock treatments all in essentially the same voice.

Yow's book reflects a failure of distance, art, and discrimination in general, but, because there is very little context here, it also possesses historical shortcomings. The revival of regional intellectual life by "the generation of 1900" is certainly one of the most extraordinary episodes in regional history, and the place of women in this revival is equally astonishing, yet Yow virtually ignores this development. Her use of secondary sources is scanty and even eccentric: thus her passing references to an Erskine Caldwell biography them, a Caroline Gordon study here, or, over yonder, an overview of the southern renaissance by Richard King. The historiographical insights seemed tacked on. There are other problems as well. Although a historian herself, Yow chooses not only to scant historical context, but also to make literary evaluations of Harris's life instead. Her comparison of Kelly with Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty does nothing for Kelly, Porter, or Welty. The possum's not hiding in those trees. The more tortured lives and peculiar literary careers of Marjorie Rawlings or Margaret Mitchell might have offered better models.

Yow's object with this book would seem to be the presentation of the whole life of a woman who indeed baked coconut cakes as well as produced novels, but this "social history" approach to biography--the leveling out of all data--simply does not suffice other than to provide a reference work for later scholars. Yet Yow has labored diligently and has produced a genial and maybe even noble failure. Perhaps her biography mirrors Harris's own shortcomings. For all the limitations of the one or the both, however, twentieth-century southern intellectual and cultural historians and historians of southern women will find valuable material here. When scholars get around to that extraordinary subject of women in the southern literary renaissance, for example, they will ignore Yow's work at their peril.

DARDEN ASBURY PYRON Florida International University, Miami