A Writer Reborn | Mary Lythgoe Bradford, Leaving Home: Personal Essays

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At the age of seven Mary Bradford imagined herself presenting a story to a New York publisher, the manuscript “rolled into a scroll and tied with a yellow ribbon” (p. 16). Now in midlife she wonders what ever became of that little girl. “She nags at me—she seems to be asking me what has happened to all those stories and poems I was going to write” (p. 20). This is a bittersweet collection, at the same time a celebration of family life and a confession of failed dreams. 

Although Bradford never directly answers her own question, there is an answer found between the lines of her essays. It is an answer familiar to women’s literature. Her poems and stories became Christmas cookies and Family Home Evenings and fireside talks and, yes, six and a half years of DIALOGUE. Others flourished under her care while her own dreams waited. The dates of the essays in Leaving Home tell the story. Five of the twenty-two were written between 1968 and 1972, seventeen between 1981 and 1987, and none in the decade between. While it is hardly surprising that a girl who produced a summer time newspaper in her mother’s kitchen with “a pan of viscous yellow jelly” that she called the Hectic Hectograph should end up publishing a journal from the basement of her suburban Washington, D.C., home, there is also something distressingly Mormon about such a story. That is why the appearance of this volume is so heartening. Mary Bradford, the Writer, is back. 

Leaving Home is a gallery of Mormon family life. There are comic snapshots (Mary baking the Twelve Days of Christ mas or delivering a mustard plaster to the office gigolo), a wedding portrait (she and her husband Chick as an unresolved lithograph), and even a collection of travel slides (with her daughter Lorraine to En gland and the Philippines and with her son Stephen to Spain). Woven in and out of the various sections are reflections and even advice on parenting, with just enough of Bradford’s pungent wit to offset the potential preachiness. Her essay on sex education, for instance, begins, “In fifth grade I read Gone With the Wind, deducing from it that if my father were to lie down by me at night, as he was wont to do during my frequent bouts with the croup, I would become a mother” (p. 41). 

The richest, mostly fully realized essays explore the author’s relationship with her own childhood. In “Yesterday the Ward house” and “An Art Deco Childhood” she introduces her readers to the curious corner of Salt Lake City and of Mormondom where her dreams developed. In a ward house that was once mistaken for a dairy she recited scriptures and Dorothy Parker poems, learned to embroider a dishtowel, sang the Elijah, wore a drop-shoulder dress in a roadshow, and stood up in testimony meeting to thank God for saving her mother’s life. It was in that ward, too, that she met “a certain Mr. Romstoff, who, according to his thrilling sacrament meeting accounts, had survived a hair-raising escape from Russia” (p. 14). For a time he nurtured Mary’s hopes of writing for The Improvement Era, and he “even talked of laminating my little testimonies for possible missionary cards!” (p. 15) Unfortunately, it was soon whispered in the ward that “the Man Who Knew Tolstoy was living in sin with his housekeeper, a fact that threw doubt on his tales of intrigue about the Russian Revolution” (p. 15). 

Bradford writes of a never-celebrated and almost-forgotten Mormonism. The provincialism and the absurdities of mid twentieth-century Utah are there, lovingly limned, as well as the warmth and the nurturing of children’s hopes. Reading about the wardhouse, or the family orchard, or the ’28 Chevy that became the protagonist of a backyard adventure series, I began to hope that Bradford’s literary “leaving home” would not be permanent. The material she has begun to mine here is as rich in local color and universal significance as Garrison Keillor’s Minnesota childhood, the subject of a fatter and more expensive book with the same title as hers [Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories, New York: Viking, 1987). 

In two of her most recent essays, “The Veil” and “Gentle Dad,” she reworks these childhood materials to a poetic depth that, in my view, make them the best of the col lection. “Gentle Dad” takes its title and central image from an early poem she had never shown to her father. It, like the essay, concerns Leo Lythgoe’s relationship with his orchard. 

Dad sang in the morning 
As he called us from sleep 
But he sometimes wore overalls 
White with the spray of death
Dad in his reading voice
Hesitated over our stories at night
And by day his shears
Crippled the Paradise trees (p. 86).

The paradoxes of the poem are elaborated in the essay, which brings together most of the themes of the collection, the Art Deco childhood, family love and guilt, the human need for self-expression. Significantly, it ends with a dutiful child’s version of the creative child’s question: “What has happened to all those stories and poems I was going to write?” Here the focus shifts from the child to the parent: “Why hadn’t I spent more time documenting his life? Dad was such a good storyteller. Why hadn’t I been less selfish, more attuned to his needs, to the rhythm of his life” (p. 95). The self-deprecation so apparent here is at the center of the essay and accounts for much of its emotional power, yet what is especially moving about this passage is the author’s seeming unconsciousness of what she has achieved. Ironically, the essay works because it is about her pain, not his. Preserving her own story she has found a way to honor him.

Reading such an essay one wants to prescribe for Mary Bradford a large dose of Selfishness, preserving her from all Good Works for at least the next ten years. To paraphrase the finale of another of her essays, “Yes, they also serve who only sit and write!” (p. 113)

Leaving Home: Personal Essays by Mary Lythgoe Bradford (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 162 pp., $7.95.