A magic carpet 'wafting us to a special world'

 

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” – Caroline Gordon

 

Born in Kentucky in 1895, Gordon was a novelist, literary critic and friends with nearly every famous writer of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.   A great writer herself, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 and the O.Henry Award for her short story Old Red in 1934.   In 1963 she republished the story as the lead work for a book called Old Red and Other Stories, also an award winner.

 

A “free spirit” (her term for herself), she and husband Alan Tate often hosted major writers in their Kentucky home where “writing was the talk from dawn ‘til dark.”  

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot and Robert Penn Warren were frequent visitors, but the most important one for her was Ford Maddox Ford, who she considered her mentor.  It was Ford who counseled and prodded her into completing the novel Penhally, key to gaining her the prestigious Guggenheim.

 

She wrote 9 more novels and dozens of short stories, often autobiographical and drawn from the South, giving the rest of the world an in-depth look at the region.  The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, published at the time of her death in 1981, was lauded as one of the 20^th Century’s best short story collections. 

    

Gordon thought of her writing as a form of art.  “And art,” she said, “should never be judged.  It should be the judge of us.”