The Key West Citizen

Features

LIFE'S GLAMOR: Author of 'Varmints' Has No Time for Makeup
By WILLIAM GOBER, JR.

HENDERSONVILLE, Fla.—From her elfishly demure looks, you'd think that Peggy Bennett, 21, could write a novel like "Varmints", a lusty tale of small-town life in Florida.

The story is laid in Tupelo, a sun-drugged town on the Gulf. It traces the life of Ezra, a whip-lean man of 50, who finds forgetfulness in the arms of the village prostitute after his wife dies; and of Ethel and Mutt and Hillard, his children.

Miss Bennett, acclaimed by some reviewers as a "brilliant new American novelist," does not belong to the "glamor girl" school of writers. She uses no makeup; not even face powder. Show windows displaying fashions that bewitch the hearts of most women leave her cold. She doesn't go to movies because "they are too artificial."

"I love to write," she explains simply. "I think if I did not have my writing I would melt away."

Miss Bennett would not have to go far to melt away. She is barely five feet tall and weighs 100 pounds. She has light brown hair and dark brown eyes. Most of the time her face holds a wistful sadness, something like that of the films' Margaret O'Brien, but when she is amused her laughter is bright and quick.

Only when she talks does one perceive that here is a deadly serious young woman who gained her word-knowledge by poring over Webster's and factual tomes during countless childhood hours.

Miss Bennett is descended from a long line of Southern Baptists who were "definitely non-literary." She was born in Hendersonville, N. C., where her late father was a carpenter. She attended college for three years and until recently lived at Apalachicola. During the war she was a payroll clerk at a Florida Army camp.

She reads little fiction, no articles of advice to writers. Of the authors she has read, George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats are her favorites. (She hopes no one will think her writing has been influenced by a fellow North Carolinian, Thomas Wolfe, of whom she has read little.)

Already she has her next book blocked out; one that will deal with modern business. "I have an idea a lot of people in America are trapped," she says.

Her mother would like her to stay home and write books for children. But she is happier writing stories like "The Varmints" of which Ethel's odyssey is a part:

"The city, the metropolis, where the eye-duets take place a million every split second. The metal tower of Babel, a thousand tongues making their strange noises. Everywhere she looked she met the eyes, she saw so many beautiful young men that she dreamed of being some kind of supernatural being who loved each individually and was loved by them all."

Had she ever lived in a small incredibly provincial town named Tupelo, that town which wore blinders such as a horse wears and refused to recognize the United States as part of its world?

When she can thus mould her feelings into word-pictures, Miss Bennett feels sorry for people who have to spend their lives typing and clerking.