54
2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Hanging on by a Thread a review by Tara Powell Doris Betts. The Scarlet Thread. 1964. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2013.
Tara Powell received her MA from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1999 and her PhD in 2004. Her publications include a chapbook of poems, Physical Science (Finishing Line Press, 2010), and a scholarly monograph, The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Louisiana State UP, 2012). A co-edited collection on food in Southern literature is forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi. Among her current research projects is a study on Doris Betts’s uncollected short fiction. Statesville, NC, native Doris Betts (1932–2012) is the author of six novels and three collections of short stories. Her numerous honors include three Sir Walter Raleigh Awards for best fiction by a North Carolinian, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal of Merit. Read more about Betts in NCLR 2009, which includes an essay by Maurice York, based on remarks he gave on the occasion of Betts receiving the Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration.
North Carolina’s visible literary constellation has brightened with Press 53’s recent reissue of The Scarlet Thread, an early novel by the late Doris Betts. Betts was a celebrated novelist, short story writer, essayist, and teacher, whose storied public career spanned six decades and was firmly rooted in the Carolina Piedmont, even as her words reached for the wider world. Early Betts works, like The Scarlet Thread (which first appeared in 1964), have languished out of print for many of those decades, at times frustrating the efforts of scholars and teachers to give Betts her due. Though some original reviewers and even Betts herself were critical of elements of The Scarlet Thread, new and returning readers will find much to exclaim over in the excavation of this Press 53 Classic. Not only is Betts’s distinctive treatment of the industrialization of small-town North Carolina in the historical backdrop of this novel deeply important to the fabric of our national literature, but its unforgettable characters and loving attention to the inner lives of everyday people are pure, unmistakeable Betts. The superficial materials of The Scarlet Thread are familiar as a family drama. Unfolding from the alternating perspectives of three children about to come of age in Greenway, NC, the novel follows Esther, Thomas, and David Allen through adolescence and young adulthood as their lives (and their family’s fortune) are shaped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the coming of the mill to their hometown; the rise of the white middle class;
number 23
the vanishing rural South; and changing attitudes toward race, gender, and religion in small-town America. The novel begins at playtime under the Allen home, where Esther is persuading her younger brothers to practice going through the looking glass while they ignore their mother’s call to come inside. Resentful, power-hungry Thomas and observant, artistic David are often swept up in Esther’s imaginative play and the strength of her personality, whether they are going through the looking glass, learning to fly, or getting in trouble with their parents. The children encounter a lively cast of memorable characters that border at times on caricature but then tumble back from the brink of it with unexpected and engaging human quirks that lend to the children’s coming of age the kind of specificity and energy required to render the historical setting in vivid color – the cantankerous grandfather who secretly dotes on Esther, the knowing conjure woman with a weakness for cornbread, drunken Uncle Silas still tenderly in love with a mad woman, the nononsense Yankee who comes to set up the mill but also wanders by the creek in search of something more, a hardworking black moonshiner who collects jars of words, and the reclusive stonecutter whose art may just rescue David from himself. And so on. This is a sweeping, capacious historical novel that is as personality driven as it is picaresque. Elizabeth Evans reports that Betts thought of The Scarlet Thread as an unsuccessful novel constructed out of otherwise good short stories, and some reviewers
above right The original book jacket photograph of
Doris Betts for the 1964 edition of The Scarlet Thread