Life From Two Angles -- Bailey White Is A Listener, Not A Storyteller

Bailey White's stories leave us soothed by the knowledge that life is odd but warm.

And though her two books of essays and regular readings on National Public Radio make readers and listeners feel sure that she is both a keen observer and a wonderful storyteller, she is not the member of her family to invite for a porch visit.

"It's surprising when people refer to me as the storyteller because I am not a talker," said White, so reserved in real life that she granted only three interviews for her best-selling first book, "Mama Makes Up Her Mind," and only one for her current promotional tour with "Sleeping at the Starlite Motel" (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995, $20).

White, who will read tonight with fellow NPR writer David Sedaris for the Seattle Arts & Lectures series, said Saturday in a visit at the Edgewater Inn that her brother and sister are the acute observers.

"Really, all I do is listen to what they say and write it down," she said, not knowing that in the background, Barbara White, her sister, who is accompanying her on this tour, was shaking her head.

White's quiet ways - and her familiarity with and appreciation of things old - are what draw many of the eccentrics to her. What they don't know is how she mines the world for irony and misses very little of what goes on.

In an essay called "The Wedding Guest," an old woman hobbles over to White, who is seated against a wall at a wedding contemplating the size of her feet. The guest tells her: "I believe I knew your grandmother . . . dreadful woman."

Bailey White's history in Thomasville, Ga., goes back to her great-grandfather, a carpetbagger from Philadelphia. White teaches first grade in the same school she attended. Her mother, the leading character in many of White's richest essays, lived with her on what's left of the old family estate until she died last spring.

Life at home is so dull that White keeps a journal only when she is traveling. Details of the family come from hearing the same stories told over and over.

"It helps when you have the kind of life where you have people to talk to about things," said White. "People in our family, even when they die they're hardly dead, because we talk about them as if they were alive."

Through Write's writing, we get to share those details. In the story "Folk Art," for instance, White describes a woman who made yard sculptures to honor the local boys who so bravely fought World War I.

"She was a tiny woman, over ninety years old, with wisps of white hair not quite covering her scalp, which shows through in patches as shiny and pink as stretched silk satin . . . I was holding her arm and I could feel her skin slipping over tiny sharp bones."

Or this, about a nurseryman's nose:

"It looks as if it had been formed from the mass of five normal noses, melted down and then shaped into this one nose before it was quite cool enough to handle."

Or this, about trying to eat in a house that had suffered from a century and a half of bad housekeeping.

"This house looked like the birthplace of botulism - the dingy corners, the fusty Oriental rugs, a long-haired dog with a skin problem rubbing himself up against the furniture. In the kitchen a gummy knife lay on the counter and the nubs of these very cucumbers were strewn about in the sink."

White's relatives seem unusually odd. There's the great aunt, for instance, whose preferred method of dealing with roaches was to "creep into the kitchen in the dark of night, suddenly switch on the light, and then fly into a wild stamping dance as the frantic roaches fled for their lives."

But White can find oddities even in such places as Seattle, where, of course, no eccentrics reside. What she finds on her visits she "squirrels away," she said.

When next we see those details, they may be in the form of fiction. She will take another year off teaching, her second in three years, to finish a book of short stories, which to her relief will get her out of first-person narrative.

White still writes on an old typewriter, which she moves from room to room, most often setting it up on her kitchen table.

She has a computer, which she uses to clean up her final copy, but she finds it too remote for writing. When she was hired in 1990 by National Public Radio, she had written only two essays, which NPR promptly used. She believes they were looking for a Southern voice to show that not all NPR correspondents come from the Northeast.

White's stories, read in her frayed Georgia accent that makes her sound like a contemporary of Eudora Welty rather than a woman entering her middle 40s, soon made her the recipient of more mail than any other NPR correspondent. She told The New York Times two years ago that most of the letters come from strayed Southerners who say she reminds them of their grandmothers.

But she is not a storyteller, not even a good reader, she says, pointing out that vanity, and not modesty, drives that assessment.

She worries that people's thoughts might wander when they're listening. If they were reading, they could go back and catch up.

"When I read things out loud, I'm always wondering if people just got that very good thing I just read."

She writes to be read and not heard, she said, and some of her most tightly written stories don't translate to radio.

"I have one piece I've written that I really like a lot, but when I read it, people just look dazed," she said. The characters are introduced very quickly into the story and if people miss a detail they get lost.

"I've thought about making a chart and putting it up but that would be too much like a first-grade teacher."

In one of the "Sleeping at the Starlite Motel" essays, she tells about the impossibility of breaking up the house of an old aunt who is preparing to go to a retirement home. Neither she nor the aunt wants to disturb a single book.

All of White's relatives read. Although as a teacher she chastises herself for saying so, she believes people learn more from reading than from formal education.

White finds it increasingly difficult to write about her family. They have started offering ideas of their own.

"That isn't how I do it, exactly," she said.

Her mother, Rosalie or Rodie White, never complained about how she came across in the stories, White said. She had a wonderful sense of humor. If she had a complaint, it was about the quality of writing and not about the content.

"Her main wish in life was that her children would be happy and successful at what they wanted to be. She didn't mind if they said scurrilous things about her getting there."