Mary Fitton

During World War II, Mary Fitton Fiore served in the Women’s Army Corps. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1946. She enrolled at Black Mountain College in the fall of 1949. After her marriage to Joseph Fiore (February 3, 1925-September 8, 2008), a former student who taught art, she remained at the college as faculty wife until the college closed the Lake Eden campus in September 1956.

Fitton took a general curriculum with an emphasis on literature and writing. As a member of M.C. Richards’s class she helped to edit the June 1951 Black Mountain College Review. When the college was threatened with foreclosure, a loan from her family helped to forestall foreclosure proceedings.

After her marriage to Fiore and the birth of their son Tom, Fitton was mother and homemaker for her family. She remained active in community life, participating in theater productions and sitting in on Charles Olson’s classes.

Biography written by Mary Emma Harris for the Black Mountain College Project.

Alternative Names: Mary Fiore

Relationships

Husband: Fellow BMC student, Joe Fiore

Black Mountain College Project

Mary Emma Harris interviewed Mary in 1976 and the transcript is available from Appalachian State University under The Mary Emma Harris and Black Mountain College Project, Inc. Oral History collection.

Topics:Jack Rice – Dan Rice – Pot Shop – Charles Olson – Joseph Fiore – Olson influence on college community – Wesley Huss – Betty Kaiser and Charles Olson – Connie Olson – Theodore Dreier – meaning of college closing – John Cage, Paul Williams, and Gatehill community – burning of Roadside cottage – Olson personality – Olson class – Charles Olson and Joseph Fiore relationship – Paul Leser – Michael Rumaker – Martin Duberman book – Theater at BMC – college parties and decorations – Johanna Jalowetz and bookbinding – Malrey Few and Cornelia Williams, college cooks – M.C. Richards – performance of Cocteau’s Marriage on the Eiffel Tower – performance of Obey’s Noah – 1953 lake tableau – other theater performances – Robert Duncan’s Medea – performance of The Gyres, Kyklops, Wagadu – Frank Moore – Robert Klein, drama director – Paul Goodman – 1952 Pottery Seminar – David Tudor concerts – Buckminster Fuller – Natasha Goldowski – Madame Anna Goldowski – Tom Field car crash – college atmosphere in closing years – college closing – Robert Creeley – Cynthia Homire – Caresse Crosby and Black Sun exhibition – Ray Trayer, Doyle Jones, farmers – Max Dehn – dead cow debacle – herd sale – student trip to beach – Arlene and Phyliss Franklin – Kate Olson

Asheville Art Museum

Writings about Mary can be seen in digitized college bulletins on Asheville Art Museum's collection website: collection.ashevilleart.org. They can be found by searching these accession numbers:

2017.40.342 June 1951 BMC Review

"EXCERPTS FROM A JOURNAL- MARY FITTON

April 17 These are two positions of womanhood: defensive and attacking. How can a woman offer love when love dries in her breasts like milk. Profession: housewife. Its work. The machine must be tended. A woman on the attack scatters her seed and loses it, her task is nourishment of what is. A woman writer is a woman. I do not like the word authoress. -ess sounds minor key. There are modes, you understand, and the female is a mode. As writer I draw upon myself as woman for material, this is not the feminine viewpoint. I do not wish to make my fight the fight to make myself into a man, good as any man.

April 18 WHY be a Concord? No reason, less than no reason for me. It is not this which matters, not the place as place; to continue IT as a thing not for me. A gelatine for germ culture, seeds in that fruit. Humanity? It is a word I find hard to believe. To see what one makes personal and what another makes personal. To touch is not always personal. Patterns Christ what are patterns for, they are for something. To repeat, not to expend energy always in that direction of a choice- one pattern or some other, take it, make what you will of it. Record yes, but one must be more than a medieval copyist dealing in gilded capitals. Chisel is a tool. Why matter, why bother; connections. Physiological comes back to me and back to me, furrows of brain, rhythms of birth to decay, walking arms swinging oppositely the eye focus the liquid balance in ear and slow secret secretion of glands. Last night I loved the world the real world outside and bursting love, is female to moisten the dry ground. Make it to sing this: once dealt with is not forever. Three new copper wires are parallel in the sunshine, the lake drained down to its bed of silt, I smell wood smoke from the two furnaces in the lodges. My senses work, my brain registers registers files away, will not sort and handle: MAUL these things, things I said things I mean things. I didn’t go to lunch today. I didn’t need food, the sun gave me its energy direct and my stomach churned with its undigested energy. Oh write it over and over, try it over again to acquire fibre tough and resilient. The principle’s all over the place, mud between the toes, our element. To draw is to delight: to pick up the pencil, make one line on the new paper, the next line must relate to that drawn line an all the undrawn lines. Words. All smeared with use as colors fresh from the silver tube can never be. It would be fun to be an analyst just for the puzzle and the figuring from scraps and clues, but not all the pomposity and ritual and earnestness and theories. (Supine position). I’d hate to learn all the theories and be responsible to send out the new man. What is the apprehension of reality? In one single moment I know he is another person, he has totality, he is organized within himself to rhythms outside himself, his body cuts through the air flow with its own pattern, he is contained within himself, I am real and he is real, his blood stream is a closed and open system fed and living. I don’t care where I go, the end of the written page is not the end, the page moves, you must read it over, it does not exist in your mind. Listed to my sound, I am not telling you something: I am saying, hear me. I read this story. A ewe lived in a cave with her two lambs. Each day the ewe went to the field where she pulled grass and carried it home between her horns. At the door of the cave she knocked with a front hoof and cried, “The jug between the legs and the hay between the horns.” So the lambs would open the Cave to the ewe. So I do care what I say. I have the notion: a poem is the highest written art. And yet I should like to tell a story and have my audience listen like children understanding without understanding. Before lunch I read in the sun. He came over to talk and say why be an artist they’re all either starving or psycho; and named names and diseases. I do not understand. What is an artist. I want to write, I want to proceed from where I am now and burrow my tunnel through this hill of earth to the light on the other side; but there is no circle of light, only earthworms, roots and underground rivers.

April 19 Frobenius says culture is bi-polar and the two poles are space and time. Nice you say, these are smooth words, handled before. But bi-polar, that’s meaty. Poles do not exist apart; tension between them, attraction repulsion. Think of bi-. Two. Two sexes. Well of course. It’s a cliché. Sun and moon. Four seasons. We have lost the fruited richness of numbers. One source of all being. An amoeba is one; he divides out of himself. Or do you prefer chaos as first principle? An adding machine can add to divide; where’s the reference back to five fingers five toes five senses the holy trinity of three and fleur de lis. And therefore and exhaustive listing of number and reference traced furthest avails nothing. Who cares one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so. Show me. Don't tell me. Show me. Make me see. Is not a challenge the American incentive to deed done? Frobenius: The soul looks with indifference on facts as so much raw stuff for the senses, so much building material for the intellect. REALITY is the latent essence of fact, is the witchness of the witch, is that which, at rare intervals, takes possession of us and struggles for expression. To make you hear my line. I will carve out of sea shells ears for you to catch the cadence of the sea. There is no key word, no phrase, no sentence, there is only the act the process of brick upon brick. - the green fruit of my joy.

April 20 Like having a child, the rhythm of pain. If you bear down hard it helps they say. Cooperate with your muse. After the joyous minute of conception, nine full months of easy waiting, pleasant to be waiting; the interval between control and control. The things grows inside: just you eat a little more and sleep a little more. After its born out of water to air what is it? Little and red, alive and ugly. You love it because its yours? Oh you glance at it sideways: what is it? From you, not of you. Now is the time to feed this growth cut from yourself. A planned diet grows strong bones. When I walked up the road after lunch I observed the tulip trees, their leaves, their shape and placement on the stem, and I admired them. Admired them- God I envied them envied them lustfully, ripped a leaf from the stem and squeezed its green juice over my hand. How can this leaf have a clear clean outline, symmetrical, divided and subdivided by veins, attached to a stem attached to a branch attached to a tree, how can this tulip tree leaf lie flat to the sun, “spaced evenly to catch the sun,” spaced evenly on its stem with the other leaves on the branch. Design is flow of must and rhythm of right, gaity of design, frivolity of ornamentation, realer than reason, stronger than code of the law. And a little flower shall lead them.

April 21 The disc of the sun became a wheel. My greatest sense of riches before me, mine, lies in the fact that I have fifty more years to live. Not dull not dull not dull; the disc of the sun became a wheel. How do you view it? I am tied to that wheel and it moves over me pushing my nose into the ground; a free ride, a joy ride. (Oh Mr. Aantrobus,,, your turbine.)…"To see the cherries hung with snow”...I look over my left shoulder at every new moon and open my mouth to swallow each full one. Steiri says everyone is always repeating:- apprehend the design, you are in of; out below with; above without it. What guides your hand? Once you’ve used a tool it handles easier next time. The moon sucks at all the waters and blows them out again. The disc of the sun became a wheel. Then high airy spokes of twowheels propelled by pedals (a rush and a gasp). Solid oxen wooden wheels. The lines lie deeper (next time around I’ll CATCH the brass ring); the gait fixes the muscles. Katherine Litz is a dancer, her theme becoming to woman, repeats and repeats. Pound wrote a sonnet for a day for a while. Mostly I brush my teeth every morning. I love: fact one. I give: fact two. Work out from these, like kneading the dough, kneaded over and pulled and risen:- when a star shoots its track, streaks light and ends dead cold in a pit- You discover the old very old- you can fight the beat in a dance, delirium of the off-beat; surge of the shock to step off, up into air; hesitate; down to hit bounce; resilient, resistance, persistent. the disc of the sun became a wheel. Now here I get didactic. Of course. I say. The disc of the sun became a wheel. Now I said it. Now you know it. Now you make up a landscape: you, your turning wheel. Thank you can shift the gears, think you can whip up the team? Think you can carry a wheel on your back, ride a unicycle, construct a steering wheel, enjoy the view, crash into a tree and stop a while? The words matter. Free wheeling used by just too many historians (determinedly). If my hair turns white- too late, my gestures still blondlined. You know a woman learns to expect this or that. Get it or not. Know thyself, I don’t know about that one, but enjoy the ride for the price of the fare or whatever. We, you, and I, have now pursued this metaphor far enough. Do you think there’s a point to it all? What’s the relation between a grain of sand and its lustrous pearl, a strawberry seed and a toothpick? Gentle reader now go your way or if you know what’s serious and when’s not let me know sometime. "