Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 11, 1990 TAG: 9004110126
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MILLBORO - LENGTH: Long
"The day finally came when, sitting at a typewriter staring at the fifteenth page of a story I was working on, a merciless realization obliterated the page: What I was writing - indeed, all that I had written - was not good enough," she later wrote.
Then just 20, the young woman understood that she had not lived enough to tell about other people's lives. She tore up those 15 pages and 200 more and took a walk.
"As they say, something within me died," she wrote. "For a long time afterward, I wrote nothing but the poetry that my mind kept composing without my willing it, but it wasn't good enough, either."
Fifty years later, Virginia Bell Dabney has found that at last she has lived enough to tell the story of her life on a Virginia farm, and the lives of the people she grew up with.
Her book is a memoir called "Once There Was a Farm: A Country Childhood Remembered" (Random House, $17.95). It's a touching work, animated by descriptions felicitously simple and profoundly exact - the legacy, the author believes, of all that poetry she wrote.
The New York Times Book Review called it "a good deal more than an affectionate tribute; it is an elegy; it moves with the natural dignity of longing and regret, without being afflicted by self-pity."
Mostly, it just rings true. Names of places and people have been changed to protect their privacy, but the feelings Dabney sets forth are too strong and natural to be anything but heartfelt.
When Virginia Bell Dabney looks back to that farm in central Virginia, she does not don rose-colored glasses. Life was hard. Her mother was resolute. Her father was as distant to her on his infrequent visits to the farm as he was at his home in Chicago. Her two older sisters, Daphne and Allison, treated her the way siblings always treat their inferiors.
Yet from these elements Dabney manages to paint an affectingly human portrait.
Virginia Dabney is back in the country now, after decades spent in Richmond, where she was a writer for the Virginia Tuburculosis Association, later the Virginia Division of the American Lung Association. She is 71 years old, with three grown daughters and one grandson.
She lives midway between Goshen in Rockbridge County and Millboro in Bath, in a plank-sided cabin on 10 mostly wooded acres. The small house with the sloping roof is six years old. She heats with wood in the kitchen's cook stove and writes in a small side room. She intends to write beside big windows once the basement is finished.
Dabney, too, is small. She has gray hair, and on this chilly, rainy day, she wears a navy V-neck sweater over a white turtleneck, tan slacks and brown laced shoes.
"This whole thing is a first for me," she said. 10 1 DABNEY Dabney "I'm a little nervous about it."
Favorable book reviews from important publications have left her "a little overwhelmed by the whole thing," she continued, with a smile. "It's not that I didn't think it was good. I didn't think it was that good."
Dabney began what became "Once There Was a Farm" in the late 1960s, aiming it at young readers and including many imaginary events.
She submitted it to Doubleday. The publisher expressed interest, with one reservation: The black dialect was "awfully sensitive" in that era as in this, and would have to go.
Dabney tried to rewrite it with other characters in place of the black housekeepers and farm workers, but the book no longer worked.
"I left it in manuscript for a long, long time," she said.
Dabney later moved from Richmond to Nelson County and from there to Bath. In Bath, she began to write a novel. She sent it to a New York literary agent with whom she was acquainted. The agent liked some of it a little and some of it a lot.
"She didn't say it that way," Dabney said, "but that's what she meant."
The manuscript came back, Dabney went back to work and in 1988 she had the essence of the book that bears her name.
She calls it "the story of a family who persevered when they didn't have everything, but still tried to emphasize some important ideals."
The dominant voice is the author's. The dominant personality is her mother's. Dabney's mother was strong-willed and high-minded. She moved to the farm, at least in part, so that her children would not become targets of her husband's sarcasm.
Though he sent money to help support the farm and family, she worked for a time for the farm loan office, in addition to supervising her farm and household help and giving her children a stable, if old-fashioned, upbringing.
"My mother was not a laughing woman," Dabney said. Though her mother did not show much affection once her children reached a certain age, she still managed to convey her love for them.
"I would like to have known my father better," Dabney said. "What I did know of him was not positive for me."
He worked in Chicago in the insurance business and visited at Christmas and for a couple of weeks in summer. When he retired, he moved to the farm to stay. He was aloof, annoyed by her intrusions and friend to none save a young farmer, with whom he debated theology.
"By the time I wrote the book I knew this was a man who was someone I felt sad about," Dabney said. She concluded that he was lonely. "I think he missed a great deal in life, and I don't think he even knew."
Children go out into life bearing the marks of their parents. "I imagine my unawareness of a lot of things came about because I didn't know men," said Dabney, whose marriage ended after the birth of her third child, "and I didn't know men because I didn't have a father figure. I think I had a totally unrealistic attitude toward men - romantic."
For laughter and solace on the farm, young Virginia turned to the black women her mother employed, one named Susan, the other Mary Marshall. They were "among the most wonderful figures in my life," she said. Her memories of them haunt her still.
"I think I communicated with them on a different level, a more relaxed level."
Susan, in particular, was a lively, irreverent counterpoint to Dabney's strict mother. In one passage of the book, Susan's description of baptism by immersion prompts young Virginia to baptize herself in a stream, with Susan as unsuspecting witness. Virginia stepped behind a tree to wrap herself in old white curtains. She then waded into the creek and squatted in a pool, saying, "I am now baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
"I opened my eyes and looked at Susan to see her in deep prayer, her face completely hidden in her apron. I stepped out of the water, walked in my squishing shoes up the bank (I had orders never to go barefoot) and, dragging the wet curtains, went up to her bowed figure. Her shoulders were shaking . . .
"Susan?"
"Hmmmmmm?"
"Am I baptized now?"
"There was a brief spasm of her shoulders and she raised her head, took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. Then I understood that she was not praying but laughing so hard that she could not speak . . .
"This was not the effect that I had expected my baptism to have."
Dabney's book is full of the touchstones of life - work, play, joy, sorrow, love and death. Her description of a forest fire that burned down the farmhouse and scorched the surrounding fields is as terrifying in the recounting as it must have been that day.
When she tells how her home in Nelson County was ruined by traffic going into Wintergreen ski resort on what had been her rural road, you can smell the exhaust from the diesel buses, see the frogs "squashed without thought and probably without notice by people heading to the resort four miles up the mountain."
Dabney says you must have felt deep emotion in order to write about it. You must also have experienced simple pleasures like kindness and generosity. Her book is filled with examples of of those, too.
"I don't think it goes far enough to be a sad book," she said. She did not cover her parents' deaths. Nor did she give more than a sentence to the end of her marriage.
These omissions enhance the story in an odd way. Dabney doesn't drown you in detail. The feelings have space to be felt.
Now she is working on a novel about four women as they look back on their relationship with one man. "Fiction is never fiction," she said, adding no more except that the plot is "so ordinary I think only good writing will redeem it."
On the surface, "Once There Was a Farm" sounds ordinary, too. But meaning can be divined from everyday life, if one has eyes that see.
Dabney is wry about her success.
Before it was published, her editor at Random House said, "This is a good book, Virginia, not a great book."
Then she read a blurb he concocted, calling it "a small masterpiece."
She laughed. "I don't know which to believe - the public man or the private man."
Virginia Bell Dabney will sign copies of "Once There Was a Farm" Friday from noon until 2 p.m. at Book Strings & Things on Market Square in Roanoke.
by CNB