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Mary Lee Settle

All the Brave Promises, by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

cover of US edition of All the Brave Promises by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

When Studs Terkel titled his 1984 oral history of the American experience in World War Two The Good War, he meant it ironically. Terkel’s book is full of accounts of G. I.s and civilians who could still, decades afterward, think of themselves as casualties. Thanks, however, to Tom Brokaw’s hagiographic 1998 bestseller The Greatest Generation, however, the honeyed glow that Terkel refused to give his portrait of the war is now once again well-established and part of the current dementia among some Americans for a history that’s all nice, clean, and guilt-free.

If you count yourself among these folks, Mary Lee Settle’s 1966 memoir of her time in the Royal Air Force, All the Brave Promises, is not for you. Indeed, Settle opens the book with a salvo designed to eradicate any inclination a reader might have of looking on that time nostalgically:

We are accused of being nostalgic. We have been. What we have remembered are events. The Second World War was, for most of us, a state, a state of war, not an event. It was a permeation, a deadening, a waiting, hard to recall. What we have told about is the terrifying relief of battle or the sweet, false relief of leave.

These were not the causes of a psychic shock from which a generation of people are only now beginning to emerge. For every ‘historic’ event, there were thousands of unknown, plodding people, caught up in a deadening authority, learning to survive by keeping quiet, by ‘getting by,’ by existing in secret, underground; conscripted, shunted, numbered. It took so many of them, so many of their gray days and their uprooted lives. It taught them evasive ways to survive. These ways, dangerous to the community and to the spirit, have been a part of the peace.

“It taught them evasive ways to survive” is not how Tom Brokaw wanted us to look on the experience of American veterans of World War Two. But it’s the sort of bracingly brutal respect for honesty that makes Mary Lee Settle’s writing seem at times like a slap across the face. Not an insulting slap — a “Wake Up!” slap.

Settle came to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the women’s arm and second-class component of the Royal Air Force by a circuitous route. After marrying an Englishman named Rodney Weathersbee in 1939, she followed him to Canada when he joined the RAF and was sent there for training and delivered their son Christopher while still there as a military wife. The marriage soon fell apart, though, and she headed back to West Virginia, where her parents took over the care of Christopher while Settle headed to Washington, D.C. to get involved in war work.

During that period before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t easy for an American woman to get into the British forces. She started by applying at the British Embassy in Washington, where she was aided by the young Roald Dahl and the playright and World War One veteran flyer Ben Travers. Then it was a matter of getting to England, which she finally did in October 1942, along with a boatfull of Roayl Navy and RAF trainees.

Through Weatherbee and her embassy friends, a posh welcome was arranged and Settle spent a week enjoying the finest comforts wartime London could offer. But then she reported for duty and the fun part came to an end.

Her first day as a WAAF was a foretaste of what much of the next 13 months would be like. With her foreign accent, refined looks, and High Street clothes, Settle was quickly labelled an outsider by her fellow enlistees, most of whom came from poor families in the East End. They stuck together like a chorus, commenting savagely on the faults of their superiors and anyone else who wasn’t “their type.” For Settle, “It was the first glimpse of the stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health to sugar in tea and by which each Englishman holds himself apart, himself his castle, from his fellows.” Although she did manage to establish a few weak friendships during her time, Settle son grew accustomed to her permanent position in the eyes of the other WAAFs as an undesirable and untrusted alien.

The year or so Settle spent in the WAAFs included some of the grimmest days of the war. This was the long, slow, unthrilling buildup to D-Day and beyond. Settle was assigned to RAF Hullavington, the Empire Central Flying School, where much of the RAF’s basic flight training took place, There, she was assigned as a radio operator, spending hours each day in the darkened control room and trying to communicate with pilots over weak and heavily jammed signals. It was like staring into a solid fog hoping to make out the faintest shapes, and it eventually led to aural hallucinations that nearly drove her mad.

cover of UK edition of All the Brave Promises by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

The food was bad, the showers cold, the barracks largely unheated, and the days full of damp, grey, chilly English weather. The WAAFs were at the bottom of the station’s pecking order, lower even than the kitchen staff, some of who were prisoners of war. To make matters worse, any possibility for camraderie was undermined by the fact that WAAFs were assigned to positions individually, rather than as a formation. As Settle puts it,

It showed even in the language — one was ‘attached’ to a station, each new place approached without knowing a soul, so that to be posted off your station was a thing to be feared and in it was a vague sense of punishment. Such isolation among the vast majority of the ground crews bred an unseen poisoned miasma, secret beneath the structure as sex was secret to authority.

Her work and the living conditions proved exhausting, relentless, and utterly thankless. Any sense of contributing to a greater cause was life. On the other hand, as she realized one afternoon off as she cycled through some nearby villages, being treated like a cog in the war machine brought a novel, if odd, sense of freedom:

[For] the first time I sensed an irresponsibility, an ease of letting go. My uniform was issue, my bicycle was issue. I was utterly without worry about where my food was coming from. So long as I did what I was told, kept silence and remained acquiescent, I had freedom from decision, freedom from want, freedom from anxiety for survival. That, too, seemed out of my hands—the deci- sion of an abstract, an order from “above.” For a few minutes the rose hedges swept past me; I felt an almost mystic contentment. Then, even in the sun, cold fright caught me and I pedaled faster, as if I could ride away from the space of that feeling. I had experienced the final negative freedom, that of the slave.

There’s another one of those Settle slaps: “the negative freedom … of the slave.”

After a particularly long and demanding shift, Settle collapsed and was diagnosed as severely underweight and malnourished. She was sent to London to recouperate and quickly realized that her talents and temperament were better suited for work with the U.S. Office of War Information. The OWI arranged for her separation from the WAAF and her induction — as a major, though without uniform — into the U.S. Army.

The framing facts of Settle’s story — her marriage, her son, her escape into the OWI — are missing from All the Brave Promises. It took her much longer to provide these facts, in her unfinished memoir Learning to Fly, which was published shortly after her death in 2005. All the Brave Promises is not, however, a book that depends on external context to succeed. Her aim, as she later wrote, was simply to document how thousands of young English women were used by their country and to counter what she called “the official peacetime bravery … the self-congratulation of it, its terrible mistakes.” “It was such a tiny arrow thrown,” she acknowledged, “But it was all I could do.”

With an aim as keen as Mary Lee Settle’s however, even tiny arrows can be deadly. If you should ever find yourself giving into notions of the romance of war, I recommend All the Brave Promises as an antidote.

All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391, by Mary Lee Settle
New YorK: Delacorte Press, 1966
London: Heinemann, 1966

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle (1964)

Cover of US edition of Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday

This is a story about two novels. When Mary Lee Settle published Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday in 1964, she wasn’t happy with the reviews or how her publisher handled the book. Settle saw the book as part — the conclusion, in fact — of a larger series she’d begun with O Beulah Land (1956) and Know Nothing (1960), which ultimately became known as the “Beulah Land Quintet.”

Her plan was to trace the story of a family not unlike her own and those she grew up with: landed white people in West Virginia who could trace their lines from religious and political dissidents who left England for America in the 1600s, through the pioneers who drove their wagons into the hills of Appalachia and what would become West Virginia, who fought (on both sides) in the Civil War, who started the coal mines and fought in the battles between the miners and the owners (again, on both sides) in the early 20th century, and who saw the introduction of strip mining.

In 1964, an outside might have thought that this was a story that ended on a high note, at least for the owners and their descendents. Strip mining was pulling coal from the earth faster than any lot of troublesome miners could and the money that came in could be spent at exclusive country clubs, resorts like The Greenbrier, and shopping trips to New York and Europe.

Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.
Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.

But Mary Lee Settle was no outsider, and she must have had the sense that there was going to be a price to pay for raping this land. She picked up on clues that are sprinkled throughout Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday. And so, almost twenty years later, after writing the beginning of the story (Prisons (1973)) and the penultimate chapter (The Scapegoat (1980), about the violence between the miners and the owners around 1912), she returned to update her ending with The Killing Ground (1982).

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday appears relatively intact as the middle section (“Before the Revolution, 1960”) of The Killing Ground, which begins in 1978 and ends two years later. So, it can be read as a work in progress or a fragment. Personally, I think neither of those interpretations is correct. Fight Night and The Killing Ground tell fundamentally different stories. The Killing Ground is truly the culmination of the Beulah Land quintet, which is a larger story, a story about people and generations and their land. Fight Night, on the other hand, is a snapshot in time, a story about individuals, set over the course of little more than a weekend. And as a result, I think, a better and tighter book.

The book opens with a late night drunken phone call from Johnny McKarkle, the wealthy but aimless son of a family with coal money, to his sister Hannah in New York City. Johnny is in a phone booth in Canona, their home town in West Virginia. It’s Saturday night, “the night for a man to fight free to the surface of his life, not caring how he did it or how much hate he dragged up and let fly.” Johnny wants to confide in Hannah about his problems — marriage, meaningless job, unlistening parents — and to coax Hannah down to cut loose with him. The next call Hannah gets, a few hours later, brings the news that Johnny is dying, his head having been bashed in while he was sobering up in the town’s drunk tank.

Johnny is clearly painted as a tragic figure and Hannah isn’t much better off. But at least she’s had the sense to leave town, and when she gets off her flight from New York the next morning, her senses are alert for the signs of getting pulled back. Friends stop by her parents’ place — “set sentinel on the hill above Canona” — to express concern on their way home from church, but she knows they’re just looking for fuel for the gossip mill:

They would take whatever words I stammered out, piece an “inside” story together, their unkissed mouths breathing the smell of cigarettes and coffee into their telephones, making little secretive sounds to each other. I remembered how small termite mandibles were, and how, if you lean close and pinpoint attention, you can hear them, how their combined tenacity can crush a building. These women were moving close to trouble, chewing at it because they had, that week, none of their own to feed the others with.

These are the three best-written sentences I’ve come across in a long time. Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday is full of them. There are dry pages and a few ill-crafted passages in this book, but it’s worth reading just for sentences that cut to the bone like a switchblade in the hands of a killer with a swift and sure mastery of her weapon. Hannah on her father, a man who’s spent his adult life in the shadow of a domineering wife: “How could I ‘go easy’ with my father — a man whom I had never seen separately, as you see, in a split second of love or even horror, in all my life? Christ, I knew a two-day lover better than I knew my father.” On her mother, putting herself together after the shock of learning of Johnny’s death: “She began to take her own shape, hiding the woman again behind the lady.” Or Johnny’s relationship with Hannah: “Usually he loved me as you live in spite of.” Or the atmosphere of the Greenbrier (called Egeria Springs in the book): “Egeria’s smell, from the gate on into the rooms, a smell compounded of expensive secluded mountain air, hand-ironed linen, polish, huge, glossy, well-fed plants, and thick notepaper, I recognized later wherever I smelled it, and it brought me back to Egeria Springs. It was the clean, crisp new smell of protected American money.”

At times, Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday made me wonder if Balzac had been reincarnated as a woman from Charleston, West Virginia, for Settle deals with the relationship between families and money in a way few American writers — and even fewer of Settle’s generation — equalled. What she knew better than any of her characters was that families and money are always moving together in one of two directions, up or down. There is no stasis.

Johnny’s head is bashed in by one of his distant cousins, a hard scrabble farmer still trying to hold on to a poor patch of hill farm. Jake Catlett is from the unlucky line that got stuck with the rocky hillsides when the McKarkles got the rich bottom land along the river. A few decades of coal-mining wages wasn’t even to prevent the Catletts’ slow slide into deeper and deeper poverty.

But neither are the McKarkles secure in their grand house above Canona. Coal mining is starting its decline. Owners who failed to make the switch to strip-mining have already seen their fortunes evaporate:

Money disaster had a phrase: You ran through with every last thing. I could see people fleeing down River Street, running through it, shoveling money, until they threw the last thing, the last dollar, and having at last committed the unpardonable sin, they were stripped as if they had shed their clothes, left naked, turned away from, cut from the minds, except in moral stories or in late-night memories.

In the case of the McKarkles, this disaster is lurking somewhere in the future. Having lost his illusions during the war, Johnny — the heir to the McKarkle fortune, such as it is — has done nothing to avert this: “Without land to till or people to care for, Johnny had been caught in a parody where the land had shrunk to a genteel suburban house he wasn’t even needed to work for.” And with his death, that fate becomes certain.

The coming money disaster is paralleled by the disaster becoming evident in the toll that coal has taken on the landscape. That awareness is just setting in: “The river was too dirty with chemical and coal waste for many fish to survive in it. But they kept on trying.” As Settle sees it, however, in a perspective that at the time was just beginning to be expressed, the land was going to be the ultimate victim:

We had cut down its trees, and the water had poured down its naked gulleys and swept itself clean. We had stabbed too hard, and in those places it had shrunk back baring its rock teeth. Arrogance and lack of care toward its riches had grown into arrogance and lack of care for each other. The crash of the grabber at the coal face had exploited, grabbed, as we had grabbed. We had left a residue of carelessness, and the hatred that grew in it had made a fist.

Cover of The Killing Ground by Mary Lee Settle

When Settle returned to Canona and fit the small story of Johnny McKarkle into the fabric of the “Beulah Land” series when she incorporated Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday into The Killing Ground, the consequences of coal mining on both land and people had become clear. The two books, however, take very different views on their subject. In The Killing Ground, we see the decline of Canona and the McKarkles as if through a telescope, in the larger context of history. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, we see in small dimensions: one weekend, one family, one death. The larger context of history is only the background to Hannah McKarkle’s close observation. And when the writer is a cold-blooded and skilled knife fighter like Settle, used to feeling her victim’s breath as the blade goes in, the larger context of history doesn’t stand a chance.

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle
New York: The Viking Press, 1964

Joseph Weiner recommends Mary Lee Settle’s “O Beulah Land” Quintet

Reader Joseph Weiner writes to recommend Mary Lee Settle’s five-novel series, “O Beulah Land,” which covered the roots, history, and lives of some families in West Virginia. “She’s long been a very under-appreciated writer,” he comments–which is certainly true.

Mary Lee Settle, 2003Settle had a pretty remarkable life before she took up writing: born and raised in West Virginia coal-mining country, she worked as a model and actress, and even auditioned for the role of Scarlett O’Hara. She married an Englishman, bore a child, and, when World War Two broke out, joined the Royal Women’s Auxiliary Air Force–in part as a way out of the marriage. It was an experience she later recounted in All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391. She was 36 before her first novel, The Love Eaters, was published.

Settle went on to write over twenty books in the course of a fifty year career; the last, Spanish Recognitions: The Road from the Past, a combination travelogue and memoir based on a trip she took to Spain when she was 82.

Cover of first U.S. edition of "O Beulah Land"Her best-known work is the “O Beulah Land” quintet–although I think it would be more accurate to call them five interconnected novels. The work had a structure that emerged slowly and somewhat haphazardly. The first book to be published–but the second book in terms of the overall story’s chronology–O Beulah Land (1955) was set in a fictional version of Charleston, West Virginia (then, of course, just part of the Virginia colony) during the American Revolution. The next year, she published Know Nothing, which eventually became the third installment of the story. Know Nothing shifted to the west of Charleston and forward in time to the 1850s, when divisions over slavery laid the roots for the decision to separate from the South and join the Union as the new state of West Virginia.

Then, in 1964, she published the last book in the trilogy: Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday.

I told you the structure emerged slowly and haphazardly.

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday was Settle’s shortest novel, and she was never happy with editorial cuts she had to accept to please Viking, her publisher. But it’s also clear that she was still coming to understand the story she wanted to tell, for nine years later, she published Prisons, which takes the story a great leap backward in time and space: from western Virginia in American Revolution to England in the time of Cromwell and the Civil War. Prisons is now considered the first book in the quintet.

Seven years later, she published The Scapegoat, which is based on the “Paint Creek Mine War,” a 1912 strike that was organized by Mother Jones. Finally, in 1982, she published The Killing Ground, which returns to Canona–her fictional Charleston–in the 1960s and 1970s. The Killing Ground is, effectively, an “author’s cut” version of Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday–and, like director’s cuts in film, much longer than the first release.

And, oh by the way, between Prisons and The Scapegoat, she also published Blood Tie, a novel set among the expat community in Turkey (where Settle lived for some years), which won the 1978 National Book Award for fiction.

Settle’s work does not really meet my own standards for a neglected book. It’s critical reputation is solid, if still marginalized. One academic study has been published–Brian C. Rosenberg’s Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet: The Price of Freedom (1991), and the series, along with most of her major works, is available from the University of South Carolina Press as the Mary Lee Settle Collection. The USC Press has also released a critical overview of her work, Understanding Mary Lee Settle, written by a novelist himself often mentioned as a neglected master: George Garrett.

I would not be fully honest, though, if I didn’t admit that I’ve never managed to get past about page 40 of any of Settle’s books, aside from All the Brave Promises. I’m not sure she was always well served by her editors. If, as Settle felt, Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday was cut back too far, there are also a few of her books that cried out for a thick blue pencil. Of Prisons, Kirkus Reviews observed that, “The book is filled with endless religious conversations revolving around freedom of conscience, all in the Puritan idiom of the middle 17th century–not exactly the most enlivening discourse in the world”–although it acknowledged that this might be a “necessarily tedious effort” –not exactly the most enthusiastic endorsement of a book, either. Reviewing The Killing Ground in the New York Times back in 1982, Aaron Latham argued that Settle should “sift out the slag and reduce her ‘Beulah Quintet’ to a single long novel.”

However, with a sum total of zero books to my name, I feel most ungracious to an author with such a large and diverse oeuvre to end with such comments. Mary Lee Settle was driving around rural Spain by herself, packing a laptop, a rich understanding of history and culture, and a burning curiosity when she was 82 years old. I hope I’ll have the same kind of moxie if I make it that far. So I will close with a few lines from her foreword to The Killing Ground: “All I knew and always have known, is that once I have asked the question ‘why?’ of an image, I cannot let it go until it blesses me. It is the way all my work has been done, and will be. Even at the end, like the annoying child within, I will keep on asking why.”