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ALABAMA AUTHOR IS EULOGIZED
CAMP HILL, ALABAMA -- Catherine Rodgers-McLain was eulogized by
friends, former students, and other writers at a memorial held for the
novelist at the First Universalist Church of Camp Hill on Sunday, July 25th.
Rodgers-McLain, 88, was the author of a bestselling novel, THE TOWERS
INHERITANCE, published in 1958. She died July 13th at Bethany House in
Auburn.
She published her first short story in 1937 at the age of 21. She
continued
perfecting her writing craft at both Auburn University, where she received
her master's degree in 1941, and later at the University of Alabama. After
publishing short stories over the next ten years, she was accepted into
Hudson Strode's advanced writing class at the University of Alabama which
was then world renowned for turning out published novelists. Professor
Strode adhered to the belief that each person has a book in him, and his
methods succeeded
in helping to bring them out. Lonnie Coleman, author
of BEULAH LAND, HOT
SPELL, etc., credited Strode's sucess to the fact
that he treated students
as professional writers, and classmates generally
critiqued one another's
work in a professional manner. His techniques
succeeded beyond those of any
other writing program in the nation. Each
student was required to complete
one novel during the course, and in many
cases this led to contracts with
publishers. In Strode's lifetime the class
produced 59 published novels and
hundreds of short stories. Besides Coleman,
some of the other students included Walker Percy, Babs Deal,
Borden Deal,
Gay Talese, Wayne Greenhaw, Winston Groom ("FORREST GUMP"),
and
Helen Norris ("THE CHRISTMAS WIFE", "THE CRACKER MAN",
etc.).
Harper Lee audited the class.
Catherine Rodgers completed her first novel, THE SWINGING GATE, in 1951
while at the University of Alabama and promptly sold it to Doubleday & Co.
However, due to the Korean War, the publisher decided an anti-war novel
would be unpopular, and publication stalled for several years. Finally it
was shelved altogether.
Doubleday later published her second novel, THE TOWERS INHERITANCE, which
became a Book-of-the-Month Club feature selection, quite
an honor at that time.
Nelson Doubleday himself personally edited the book. He also gave the book
its title, which she detested. The success of the book, however, gave Rodgers
freedom to do as she liked. She wrote more short stories and edited
other
writers' novels through the years following her greatest
success but never
published another novel. She continued to teach high
school English, and
spent 50 years teaching at Talladega High School, Camp
Hill High School,
Tallapoosa Academy, and Lyman Ward Military Academy,
because she said it
helped her keep in touch with young people. She
devoted much time in her
last years to environmental causes and animal rights.
S. Dennis Hale of Notasulga said that she was a great inspiration to him
when
he wrote his first novel, THE PRAYER AMENDMENT. "Her advice and
comments were very helpful." Hale is pastor of the First Universalist
Church
of Camp Hill where Rodgers-McLain was a member.
Cathy Clark, a former student, friend of many years, and caregiver, was
with
Rodgers-McLain when she died. "Her body was going, but her keen
mind and
sense of humor were there until the end. As she was dying and I was
talking
to her, she corrected something I said. Then she smiled and said,
'Even now
when I'm at the gates of Hell, I'm still correcting your grammar.'"
THE TOWERS INHERITANCE was a bestseller in 1958 but was later
overshadowed by the popularity of Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD,
which was published the same year. Some reviewers
described THE TOWERS
INHERITANCE as a sweeping epic comparable to GONE WITH THE
WIND.
A Spanish translation appeared in 1961.
Catherine Rodgers McLain married Thomas Jackson McLain in 1960. He
was
a former Vaudeville entertainer and died in 1977.
They had no children.
MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR ALABAMA
AUTHOR SET FOR JULY 25
A memorial service for Catherine Rodgers McLain, 88, is scheduled for 11
A.M. Sunday, July 25, 2004, at the First Universalist Church in her hometown
of Camp Hill, Alabama.
The author of a bestselling novel, THE TOWERS INHERITANCE, published in
1958, Ms. McLain was a schoolteacher for 50 years. She died July 13th at
Bethany House of Hospice in Auburn.
”She was a grand lady,” said Cathy Clark, of Auburn University’s Human
Resources Department, who was a former student and a close friend for more
than 40 years.
EARLY LIFE
McLain was born in Camp Hill on March 27, 1916, the daughter of George
Robert Rodgers and his second wife, Bessie Garlington Rodgers. She was
born in the house her father built for her mother in 1912 at the corner of
Rodgers Street and Sen. Claude Pepper Drive, and she lived there all of her
life with the exception of her college years.
She began writing stories about animals at age seven and published her first
short story in the BIRMINGHAM NEWS-AGE HERALD in 1937 when she was
21. She received her master’s degree in English from Auburn University in 1941.
She then taught high school English at Talladega High School until she was
accepted into Sir Hudson Strode’s advanced writing course at the University
of Alabama, which was then famous for producing successful writers. Some
fellow classmates included Walker Percy, Gay Talese, Lonnie
Coleman, Helen Norris, Borden and Babs Deal, Wayne Greenhaw, Martha
Leatherwood Moffett, Thomas Rountree, John Craig Stewart, and other well
known writers. Winston Groom, author of FORREST GUMP, was one of the
last of Strode’s students.
In recent months, McLain had given interviews to writer Charles Shields for
a biography of Harper Lee, who also audited Strode's class.
Like Lee, McLain had just one novel published during her lifetime.
Her first novel, THE SWINGING GATE, was purchased by Doubleday but never
published. “Then the Korean War was starting and they thought an anti-war
novel would be unpopular,” she said later. “They wanted it rewritten with a
minor character, a promiscuous female, as the main focus of the book. I
thought about it but finally declined to rewrite it.”
BLOCKBUSTER NOVEL
THE TOWERS INHERITANCE was published by Doubleday & Co. in 1958, the
same year as Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. It was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection and briefly a bestseller, but had
moderate sales compared to Lee’s runaway blockbuster.
"It was sort of an Alabama GONE WITH THE WIND, about an Alabama
lumber family dynasty, and was exceptionally well written and well
paced," says a former student and friend who declined to be named
“The original title was THE INHERITANCE. It was edited by Nelson
Doubleday personally, and was originally much longer. Catherine said
that he got her to cut a third of the manuscript to begin with. And then
it was his idea to compress all the short lines of dialogue by multiple
speakers into these huge half-page paragraphs. Originally the book was
over 1,300 pages, and Doubleday condensed it to 383 pages.
"I'm told that her father and uncle were in the lumber business, worked in
a lumber mill, and I was told at one time owned a pulpwood mill. He later
had a sawmill business, and Catherine worked there in the office for her
father. They were also building contractors and built many of the old
houses still standing in Camp Hill from around the turn of the century.
Catherine’s uncle built the house next door and later hung himself
from
a rafter in the attic there. The flame-haired heroine, Savannah Towers, was
a bit like auburn-haired Catherine in personality, and Vanna had
a much
older sister whereas Catherine had an older half-sister. And Vanna’s love
interest, her distant cousin David Towers, somewhat resembled Tom
McLain. But that's as far as any similarities go, so far as I know. She
would bristle at the suggestion that the novel was anything but fiction.
Invariably people tried to draw comparisons. All you had to do was read the
description on the book jacket and then look at the picture. The
illustration on the jacket looks like it was painted it from photos
of Catherine and Tom, as if Doubleday wanted to cause a stir by making
people think it was a true story.
”Thomas Jackson McLain was twelve years older than she. He was an
ex-vaudevillian and general roustabout with quite a varied background,
worked on the railroad and other things, and he intrigued her. She had been
in love with him most of her life, she said. He was in his seventies and
she would still giggle like a schoolgirl when he was around. Her first
published short story was about two children she had loosely based on the
two of their personalities. Not as they had been factually, but as they
might have been if they were closer in age, she said. These two children
became the characters in THE TOWERS INHERITANCE.
After that book was published, Tom divorced his first wife and came back to
Catherine. They married in 1960. They had no children, but he had two by
his first wife.”
From 1958 through the early 1960s, Catherine Rodgers McLain was the hit
of the Alabama literary front, being a little less shy than Harper Lee.
Another former student, D. Davis, once said that everyone on the East
Alabama social scene wanted to give a book signing party for her, and a lot
of the same ladies would show up, of course, and hand her a book to
autograph which she had already signed a dozen times before.
Catherine would sign it again for them, each time with the date
beside it, and it was a status symbol to get as many autographs as
one could, since it showed how many parties one had attended.
She died of lung cancer, though she “had never smoked a day in her
life,” Cathy Clark said. “Tom smoked, though.” Tom McLain died in 1977.
In later years, Catherine Rodgers McLain contracted with a few writers to
edit their manuscripts and in 1975 edited a horror novel about a man-eating
tiger. “She was a perfectionist, and she wasn’t pleased with that one,”
Ray
Isbell, another former student, related. “It wasn’t that nobody would publish
her work, it was that she never considered it good enough or interesting
enough to finish it. Or if she did finish it, she was satisfied with that and
stuck it in a drawer and went on to another project.” During these years
she taught high school English at Camp Hill High School, Tallapoosa
Academy, and Lyman Ward Military School.
She also spent a number of years writing her memoirs and stated in a
magazine interview in 1979 that she was working on another novel.
Soon before her death, she left some of her unpublished manuscripts
and papers to Auburn University.
ON WRITING STYLE
"She often spoke of her days at Alabama,” Isbell said. “She told me
once that Hudson Strode called her a chameleon, and another time he
described her lean, journalistic approach as having ‘as much style
as a traffic report.’
She said, ‘Hudson always told us: ‘Write like you’re watching a movie
and
it won’t be boring. Whether it’s action or dialogue, keep it moving.
Always write it in scenes, and imagine it as a movie.’ Tom Wolfe has
praised Gay Talese as teaching him how to write ‘scenes,’ as Strode was
advocating long before Talese began writing for the CRIMSON TIDE magazine
in l950. Talese’s style is also credited with influencing Lillian Ross'
celebrated book PICTURE (1952) as well as Truman Capote's THE MUSES ARE
HEARD (1956). But nobody in Alabama wrote vivid scenes as well as
Catherine. I’ve read a lot of novels byAlabama writers, but I’ve never read
any, including all those supposedly ‘weightier’ ones, who could top
Catherine as a page-turner. The most surprising thing to me is that it’s
never been reprinted.”
Catherine Rodgers McLain gave an interview for the January 1979 issue
of ALABAMA LIFE magazine in which she acknowledged that writing “is a
business, and this I didn’t realize soon enough.”
She spent her last years writing various manuscripts that were never
published and devoting time to a few pet causes such as animal rights and
environmental issues.
She is survived by a step daughter, a nephew and niece, and a close
friend and caregiver, Cathy Clark.
In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the First Universalist
Church in Camp Hill or to the Bethany House of Hospice of EAMC, 1171
Gatewood Drive, Building 100, Auburn, Alabama 36830.
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