THE PUBLIC IMAGE
If I am an unknown man, and publish a wonderful book, it will make its way very slowly or not at all. If I, become a known man, publish that very same book, its praise will echo over both hemispheres. . . . You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.
Jasper Milvain, the go-getter writer in George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)
Norman Mailer has evolved a theory that an author must create a public personality for himself in order to sell books.
Kirkus Reviews (review of Advertisements for Myself), November 1, 1959
CORMAC McCARTHY: This is a first for me.
OPRAH: Oh, yes? And why is that?
CORMAC McCARTHY: I don’t think it’s good for your head. You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it, you should be doing it.
McCarthy’s first on-camera interview, Oprah Winfrey Show, 2007
I. “BUILDING YOUR BRAND”
When my first novel, The Perfectionists, was published, in 1970, there was no photo of me on the jacket. Author photos were for stars like Hemingway, with his bare chest and white beard, and Camus, with his cigarette, and Mary McCarthy, with her dead-straight center part. During the course of the novel’s production, nobody asked me for any kind of publicity photo, and I didn’t expect to be asked. After publication, my agent, John Hawkins, phoned me in Iowa City to tell me that Newsweek planned to run a review of The Perfectionists and would be sending a photographer to take my picture. The photographer drove over from Cedar Rapids, shot many poses, but no photo or review ever appeared in Newsweek. “That happens all the time in the news weeklies,” Hawkins consoled me. “They run out of space or you get bumped by a bigger story. Don’t worry, something else will come along.”
Soon after, Saturday Review (remember that excellent periodical, which reached its zenith in 1971 with a subscriber list of 660,000, and nosedived that same year when it was sold to the cofounders of Psychology Today?) notified Hawkins they were running a review and would like a picture if we could get one to them quickly, and so my writers’ workshop friend Alys Chabot lent me her white cable-knit sweater, hurried me onto her porch, and achieved a very attractive portrait of me bathed in sunshine. The Jesuit president of Regis College saw the picture in his Saturday Review and was reminded of his late, beloved sister. Then he read the review, which compared me to Jane Austen and D. H. Lawrence, and invited me to come to Denver, all expenses paid, and talk to Regis students about writing.
That was my first author appearance, and though certain brazen elements of my performance make me writhe with shame today, I was treated royally and, some twenty-odd years later, was able to transfer those brazen elements to my character Magda Danvers in The Good Husband as she lectures to priests and seminarians about the creative process and does her best to shock them. This scene, from chapter two, is from the point of view of the young novice Francis Lake, who later becomes Magda’s husband.
Though the lectern stood ready with its lamp switched on, she never so much as approached it. Instead she started stalking up and down the carpeted lounge. She carried not a single paper or notecard, delivering herself in a steady, confident, frequently amused tone. Once in a while she would slow down for a ruminative aside, or come to a full halt to scowl out of the window into the darkness, as if challenging the night to provide her with her next line. When pivoting around on one of her high spike heels for the return march, she would occasionally fix some member of the community with her insolent dark eyes. She was all in black: sweater, skirt, stockings, shoes. He wondered if she had done it out of deference to the black cassocks worn by the teachers and professed novices. But the sweater did not hide the curves of her figure, and she did not give the impression of being a person who did much out of deference.
Yes, I wore all black, too, and a huge silver cross, which I had bought in Mexico. When the president of the college came to pick me up at my motel room (which he had supplied with flowers, chocolates, and a bottle of Scotch), he said, “You are dressed like a nun.” “Well,” I said, “somebody has to keep up the old standards.” Thus showing my ignorance: Jesuits don’t necessarily wear clericals. Though one elegant old priest did. He was to become my model for the august Father Birkenshaw in The Good Husband. Here he is, listening to Magda’s riff on William Blake’s plea to his wife for an open marriage:
Father Birkenshaw’s high-boned face was a rock wall of cold courtesy.
My first book tour was in early 1982, when Viking Press sent me on an extensive one to promote A Mother and Two Daughters, my fifth novel. I found myself in front of television cameras for the first time in my life. On the way to the Today show, my Viking publicist, Juliet Annan, and I took a wrong turn in the underground labyrinth of Rockefeller Center and I remember us laughing wildly as we ran and Juliet gasping in her low English voice, “Not to worry, not to worry, I’ll get you there,” and she did. Time stopped during those three minutes with Jane Pauley and my face went numb, but I watched the tape later and saw that a public Gail from somewhere sailed right through. Several weeks before, Today’s Emily Boxer had done a pre-interview with me over the telephone, so I knew what was expected of me.
However this was not always the case on that tour. Thirty-one years later, at the 2013 American Booksellers Association Winter Institute in Kansas City, I offered up some book tour anecdotes at breakfast to Samantha Shannon, Bloomsbury’s youngest, newest writer, who would be publishing The Bone Season, the first of her seven dystopian novels, three months after I published Flora. I told her about the morning TV show in Cleveland whose hostess, wearing a pink evening gown, informed me as soon as we were on the air: “Your publisher never sent me your book, dear, so you’re going to have to tell us all about it.”
Samantha, an early starter if there ever was one (age twenty-one, Oxford University graduate, an auction for movie rights), already had anecdotes of her own: while she was on a pre-book tour in Australia, an interviewer asked her how much her agent had made on her so far. “But that was easy,” she said, “I simply told him I had no idea.”
My book tour memories whirl around in my head like familiar old clothes in a see-through dryer. In the whirl I spot the awful things I did and the awful things that were done to me and shudder over them first. I remember strutting about on the carpet at Regis College and I remember getting up from a dinner table in Cincinnati, declaring in a huff I was canceling all my engagements for the next day, and stalking off to my hotel room. The local publicist knocked on my door through the night and there were flowers and notes outside in the morning, and of course I went through with the interviews and the luncheon. What had set me off? The other author the locals were hosting had written a diet book and part of his act was to stand beside a life-size cardboard replica of himself as a fat man and give his spiel. At the previous night’s dinner, the publicist had triumphantly informed him that he was booked on all the morning TV shows. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get any TV for you,” she said to me. “Novels are harder to book.”
Though I’m sure I suffered as much as the publicist during that long-ago night (I lay on the floor and never got undressed), it seems funnier now, and quite prescient of things to come: that author in 1982, I don’t remember his name or his book, was successfully “building his brand.” All by himself he lugged his cumbersome double, folded to the size of a carry-on garment bag, on and off all those flights.
And I remember the escorts, those individuals who are paid to meet you at the airport, get you to all your interviews, and be your companions while you are in their towns. There are angel-companions, like the one in Madison, Wisconsin, who took one look at me when I staggered off the plane and said: “I am going to iron your clothes while you take a nap.” And there was that prince of escorts, David Wenger, who founded one of the first escort companies in D.C. and would later become my model, even in physical appearance, for the character of Francis Lake in The Good Husband. Between The Diane Rehm Show and a bookstore signing, David and I were sitting in an outdoor mall. “How did you come to choose this line of work?” I asked. He thought for a minute and said, “It suits me to serve people’s needs.” This is what the young seminarian Francis Lake replies to Magda Danvers when he is driving her to the airport the morning after her strange lecture. (And Magda, being Magda, retorts: “What about your own needs? Who’s going to serve them while you’re off serving everybody else’s?”)
And then there were the devil escorts, like the woman who drove me at top speed along a Los Angeles freeway while regaling me with the details of two of her recent authors who had suffered heart attacks, one at the radio station toward which we were heading (“he vomited first . . . we thought maybe it was just something he ate”) and one in this very car (“her tour had to be canceled, of course”).
And there are the confiders who drain your empathy, like the young man who couldn’t keep a girlfriend (“You’ve got to learn to play harder to get,” I heard myself advising him as we pulled up outside a pharmacy to get me some cold medicine.) And there was the sad fellow who had charge of me for five days, up and down the Northern California coast: he wore a black suit and was enduring horrible domestic trials. He wept inside the car until the windows fogged, and I kept reminding myself, Soon this will be over for you, Gail, but not for him.
And then there are the “compare-and-contrast” escorts, which are the most dispiriting of all. (“Sue Grafton always makes the bestseller list the first week of her tour. . . . What are you in now, your third?”) (“Be glad you’re not like X, she always draws a crowd, because people want to say they’ve seen her, but then nobody buys her book. Whereas your crowd is not big, but at least we sold fifteen books.”) (“You’re early! When I went to pick up Shirley MacLaine, her handler was standing outside her house giving me the finger. Shirley MacLaine goes ballistic when people are even one minute early.”) (“I’m loving your novel, though I’ve only just started it. Last week, I had that writer who cut his own hand off, and our schedule was beyond frantic.”)
At the beginning of my Flora book travels, in May of 2013, Bloomsbury arranged a brunch at Sarabeth’s on Park Avenue South for me and my editor, Nancy Miller, and two other novelists, Caroline Leavitt and Emily St. John Mandel, who were also full-time bloggers. (“This is going to be smart women talking about writing and whatever else occurs,” SallyAnne McCartin, my publicist, told me.)
Caroline Leavitt was about to begin a book tour for her tenth novel, and Emily St. John Mandel’s third novel had been published the year before. I told them I was saving the final chapter of my Publishing book until I had completed my book tour and asked for their thoughts about the author as public presenter of her books. Caroline, who interviews writers on her Carolineleavittville blog (she had interviewed me in 2010 for Unfinished Desires) was just beginning a forty-city tour (with intermittent returns home for rest, she said) to promote Is This Tomorrow. Her publisher, Algonquin, encourages her to tour (on a budget), whereas Emily St. John Mandel told us she used the money from her French sales to send herself on an American tour and she was seeking a new publisher for her next book. Emily also accepted expense-paid invitations to go anywhere in the world and had recently returned from Writers’ Week in Adelaide, Australia, where she had interviewed other authors and promoted her most recent novel, The Lola Quartet. I was equally impressed and alarmed by the amount of time both writers felt they had to spend on the road and zipping across continents to make themselves available to the public in service of their books.
And I was struck particularly that Emily, so generous with her own appearances and interviews, spoke with a respect bordering on awe for one writer at the Adelaide Writers’ Week because she would not allow any interviews. (It was M. L. Stedman, the London barrister and author of The Light Between Oceans.) This has stayed in my mind.
“Today an author has to brand herself,” Caroline said when we were discussing wardrobes. Her trademark has become her red cowboy boots. This started some years earlier when she was invited to give a talk to 150 librarians. It was to be her first onstage appearance, and, being “pathologically shy,” she asked an actor friend for help. The friend told her to prepare for the event as she would prepare “to be the kind of character who would be having a blast up there.” Caroline bought a pair of ten-dollar red cowboy boots on eBay “because I was sure that a woman who would wear boots like that could only give a talk that would mesmerize. The astonishing thing to me is that it’s worked so well that now people come to my readings in their own cowboy boots and want to take pictures of boots against boots.”
I described my elegant silver jacket, bought for a book tour at an Emporio Armani in lower Manhattan twenty-four years earlier. For years I wore the jacket with a big Victorian brooch pinned on the right lapel, but for my 2013 tour, wanting to emphasize the “silver eminence” persona I felt I was growing into, I added a double row of silvery Venetian beads made by a Woodstock jeweler.
Emily said her main aim was to travel light, with lots of powdered soap to rinse out garments; but she had two favorite outfits she counted on—the identical dress in different colors. (Emily sews her own clothes, I found out from a later blog; I also learned from her blog that she has a new publisher.)
“By branding yourself,” Caroline elucidated in a follow-up e-mail to me, “I also meant that readers want to be able to know who you are quickly—or feel they know who you are. I get a strong response from audiences whenever I say something personal about myself that relates to the book. For Is This Tomorrow I talked about growing up in the only Jewish family in a prejudiced Christian neighborhood and how I was bullied. This was so painful to me that I didn’t want to talk about it, but I decided it was important to the book. A few books back I would never have revealed so much about myself to people whom I didn’t know, but now I do, and I somehow find it liberating.”
Caroline talked about the growing practice among bookseller-hosts of offering a “facilitator” to their authors, a local somebody or a fellow author who will engage you in conversation as part of the event. It takes some of the pressure off your performance, she said.
I found that to be true, but with caveats. It’s a fact that audiences don’t tolerate long readings anymore, and, unless you are a spellbinding reader, anything over fifteen minutes is long. Yet they want to see the author in action and come away feeling they know the person who wrote the book they are (perhaps) going to buy. They have gone to enough readings and watched enough talk shows to expect an entertainment. A facilitator can share the pressure, that is certainly true, but you have to be on the lookout for those who see their facilitating role as an opportunity to hog the spotlight.
I had two facilitators booked for me on my recent travels. After a few minutes of backstage discourse with the first one, an adroit self-promoter, I realized I had to set some limits.
“Here’s what I’ve always felt most comfortable doing,” I told her, taking refuge behind my silver eminence persona. “The bookstore owner introduces me and then I will come out to the lectern and read a little and talk about how I came to write this novel. After that you will come onstage and we’ll sit down in those armchairs and have a dialogue about writing and then I’ll take questions from the audience.”
Since I knew and admired my second scheduled facilitator, the novelist Angela Davis-Gardner (this was for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, N.C.), I was sad for both of us when she fell on the day of my appearance and had to cancel. I knew she would have prepared scrupulously and imaginatively and that she was a favorite with local readers; the audience would be disappointed, too. So, after my introductory remarks about how Flora came to be written and the reading of three short passages from the novel, I said I was going to imagine the questions I thought Angela might have prepared and then try to answer them. This I did for about ten minutes. Then I encouraged questions from the audience “on any topic from writing habits, personal history, family, geography, psychology, religion, you name it.” What followed was a high point in my experience of communal rapport. Not only did I find myself working out my next novel with them (“My late uncle was a judge here; I hope he won’t mind if I turn him into a woman and move him across the state to the mountains”) but a cousin I had never met announced himself from the back of the room. Then there were some delightful back-and-forths between me and a lady whose late father had rented my uncle his law offices in the 1930s, and between me and a reader of Father Melancholy’s Daughter and Evensong who asked if my ideas about God had changed, “and, if so, how, exactly?” What was absent from that gathering was a single ego fluffed up like a hen on top of a rehearsed question meant to impress the room or challenge the author.
After the 1982 Viking tour for A Mother and Two Daughters, there were eight more, including the double coast-to-coast tour for The Good Husband that Linda Grey set up, herself accompanying me on the first one, for booksellers. I did modest tours for Evensong (1999) and Heart (2001), an East Coast tour for Queen of the Underworld (2006), where a reader commented while I was signing her books: “My, you’ve had a nice long run, haven’t you?” For Unfinished Desires (2009) I did a New York reading at Barnes & Noble and was invited for a second time to the National Book Festival in Washington. In the spring of 2013 Bloomsbury sent me to seven cities for Flora (which included the January prepublication trip to the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute in Kansas City).
I often think about my return trip aboard the Adirondack Trailways bus to Woodstock after my first Today show appearance. On that bus full of strangers, I still felt too visible for my own good, even though nobody was noticing me. The facial numbness that had begun while I was talking to Jane Pauley had now localized itself in the right side of my mouth. This is the retribution for too much attention, I thought. I’m about to have a stroke. I was, after all, going on forty-five.
On the self-promotion comfort-level scale, I guess I am closer to the Cormac McCarthys than to the Norman Mailers and Jasper Milvains. (Oh, how Jasper would have loved blogging and tweeting!) Once I’m in front of an audience I can perform, but when it’s over I collapse in solitude and wonder how I did it.
What make the performances worth it are the experiences I bring back and the connections and reconnections I make. I wouldn’t have met the inspiration for the character of Francis Lake if I hadn’t needed a D.C. escort for my appearances and interviews.
If I hadn’t given that reading at the Ninety-second Street Y in Manhattan, I would not have looked up from signing books and seen Dorothea, my U.S. Travel Service colleague from the London days. “Please don’t leave,” I said. “I’m not leaving,” she said, “I live quite near.” From that moment until the end of her life, we developed the friendship we had begun in 1960s London. Dorothea had married a Harvard professor and was now widowed and raising her daughter, Katie. I would stay over at her Fifth Avenue apartment, one of those old layouts that included servants’ quarters, and after we had talked into the night I would curl up between fresh sheets in the maid’s tiny suite, complete with its own bathroom.
If I hadn’t gone on a London book trip for The Finishing School in 1985, I would not have met up again with Irene Slade, the fiction-writing teacher from the City Literary Institute, who had set me on the path to Iowa with my English vicar story.
If I hadn’t gone to Sweden in 1994 for The Good Husband, I would have missed that illuminating backseat conversation with my Swedish publisher, Solveig Nellinge of Trevi, after my talk at Uppsala University. We had been discussing Doris Lessing, whom Solveig proudly published, and I was saying how exceptional it was when an author—in this case, Lessing—had been able to access such a large amount of her material.
“She seems capable of using herself up before she’s done,” I wistfully observed.
“Yes,” Solveig agreed. “With so many writers, you know, you feel their borders are never reached—not approached, even.”
Even since the drive back from Uppsala I have been pondering Solveig’s theory about a writer’s borders. There is the vertical dimension to consider, too. You have to ask not only How far am I from reaching my borders? but How deep have I dug inside them?
II. REVIEWS
Some reviews of my book to hand. The qualities which people are the most willing to grant me are just the very ones I most detest.
-André Gide, The Counterfeiters (1927), translated by Dorothy Bussy (1927)
That’s Edouard, the novelist, writing in his journal. Over many rereadings of Gide’s brilliant novel, I have tried to figure out what the detestable qualities were for Edouard. From reading Gide’s journals I have come up with some guesses.
Book reviews and book reviewers don’t require any appearances or performances from the author (unless, like Norman Mailer, you show up at newspaper offices to pick a fight with the book review editor—how many of those are left now?). But reviews definitely contribute to an author’s public image. Sometimes even a well-intended review will corral a writer into a cramped enclosure she chafes to kick down. For example, “While X’s characters will cut you up and eat you, Godwin’s will bring you casseroles.” I get which qualities the reviewer is trying to convey to her readers, I like those qualities, but please, spare me the casserole corral.
Toward the end of his life, John Updike said that he had come to believe his bad reviews and be suspicious of his good ones. That has resonated with me. I won’t go so far as to say criticism makes me feel more comfortable than praise, but criticism has often made me stronger. Harvey Ginsberg, my editor for A Southern Family and Father Melancholy’s Daughter, told me his rule for authors had always been “If a review makes you wish you had done something differently, file it away. If not, toss it.”
At cocktail hour, Robert and I sometimes competed against each other in our Waves of Boredom game, which involved dredging up memorized quotes from our very worst reviews. The game’s title derived from the lead of Robert’s awful review, early in his career, in the Boston Globe: (“Waves of boredom swept over the audience when the opening notes of Robert Starer’s Concerto . . .”) Two of my big winners were “See Jane Think, See Jane Love” (New York Times headline for Anatole Broyard’s put-down of The Odd Woman) and “Laughs Are Few in Iowa City” (Larry McMurtry trashing The Odd Woman).
Robert and I found Waves of Boredom so much fun, I think, because it reversed the stakes. If you wanted to win the game you had to prove you had been the bigger loser.
In Buddhist practice, negative and aggravating people and events count as your important life teachers. Some of my lowest hours, review-wise, have become my teachers.
LONDON, 1982
Robert and I are staying in the Primrose Hill house of my English publisher, Tom Rosenthal, who has planned a full day to celebrate the publication of A Mother and Two Daughters. We are to be driven to Cambridge for a booksellers’ luncheon and then a special tour has been laid on to show us parts of the university not everybody gets to see. But when I come downstairs to breakfast, Tom reluctantly hands over the reviews in London’s morning papers.
The four of us drive in silence to Cambridge. Editor Jane Turnbull at the wheel, Tom in the passenger seat, Robert and I in the back. Daffodils. Greening fields and hedgerows. Silence. Robert looks so sad. Tasty lunch with booksellers, one or two of whom make light remarks about the “silly” reviews. Robert and I are taken away by a lovely giant of a man in tweeds to look at Pepys’s handwritten diaries.
End of English spring day.
A Mother and Two Daughters became a bestseller in England and Ireland. The devastating phrase applied to it on that lost Cambridge day, comparing the book to an American apple, big and shiny with no taste, never won a single Waves of Boredom competition.
WOODSTOCK, SEPTEMBER 1994
Late morning. Golden Notebook bookstore signing and reception for The Good Husband scheduled for midafternoon. Looking out the window, I see Robert slowly ascending the porch steps. He has been to collect the mail, and he looks very sad. The New York Times Book Review, to which I subscribe, is rolled up in his fist.
Another lost day.
“Gail Godwin is a good writer, but The Good Husband is not a good novel.” That opening sentence won a single Waves of Boredom contest, I seem to recall, but more out of playful solidarity between the combatants than anything else.
And then there was the beautiful day in the Swiss mountains that I spoiled for Robert and me because the English bookstore down in St. Gallen did not have any of my books. (Hugo Henry, my prickly, embattled novelist in The Good Husband, throws a similar scene in St. Gallen and spoils a day of his honeymoon with Alice.)
But those ruined days now yield treasure, because Robert’s sad face in the center of them brings back how much he loved me. “I am you,” he said once, having rushed home from the city because I had broken a bone in my foot.
If another bite of a tasteless apple could restore that face in all its vividness of feeling for me, I’d gladly chew it up and swallow it any day.
III. THE PARTY
While waitressing and lifeguarding at a small hotel in the North Carolina mountains during the summer before my senior year at Chapel Hill, I kept company with a man who was certain I was going to become a successful writer. He said he could see it in my Daily Tar Heel columns, which were all I had to show at the time, and he could predict it by the intensity of my determination. He was a businessman, much sought after in his field, and I took his forecast seriously.
“It won’t happen overnight,” he said. “You’ll get your start in journalism, then you’ll write a novel and then another novel. And one day they’ll throw you a big party.”
We talked about this party during the several years we continued to see each other whenever we could arrange it. For relaxation, he liked to play golf by himself, and I would follow him around golf courses or ride with him in the cart. The party was to be high up in a skyscraper, the lights of New York spread out at our feet, everything achieved at last. We didn’t populate the room; it was more like a stage set, waiting for its hour. The young Kathleen Krahenbuhl could have designed it well for one of her Playmakers productions.
On a spring afternoon in 1999, signing copies of Evensong at a bookstore in Hendersonville, N.C., I looked up and there he was. Much the same in appearance and demeanor, though he had been in his forties when we last met and now he was in his eighties.
“Remember golf?” he said, smiling.
After I had finished signing, we stood in a corner and talked. “You know, I never did have a publishing party to equal the one we made up,” I said.
“Ah, that’s too bad,” he said. Then, getting into the spirit of forty years earlier, he added with a twinkle: “But how could anything equal that?”
Viking gave me a party at the Lotos Club to celebrate the publishing of The Finishing School in 1985. It was a splendid affair, held in the second-floor marble foyer with its Tiffany skylight and in the adjoining two-story paneled library with fires blazing in both fireplaces. But there was a bittersweet note, in that my editor, Alan Williams, was no longer at Viking (though he came to the party) and I knew I would probably be seeking a new publisher soon.
SATURDAY EVENING, MAY 18, 2013
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JIM AND KATE LEHRER’S HOUSE
The lamps are lit and the party has begun. First guests are circulating between library, porch, and living room. I’m sitting beside Father Edward on a hassock in the library, and Maria Bauer is on the sofa to my left. I have deep histories with both of these people and would welcome a whole evening alone with either of them. Father Edward was rector of St. Mary’s Church in Asheville during the 1980s and ’90s and was close to my mother until her death. He and I were close as well, and he heard my confessions once a year. He is all over my mother’s journals, and appears as Father Devereaux in A Southern Family. On the next to last page of that novel, Lily is leaving the church after lighting a candle for Theo on the first anniversary of his death and sees the priest returning to the rectory.
Young Father Devereaux was carrying a stack of neatly folded sheets and towels in from his little Japanese car. He had been to the Laundromat. They stopped and exchanged pleasantries. Poor Father Devereaux; it had not been an easy year for him. The wagging tongues of Our Lady’s had taken their toll. Now he never had weekend guests at the rectory. He had gotten thinner and looked lonely and rather sad. Oh, the wagging tongues. If Jesus Christ had lived in Mountain City and invited His disciples for a weekend, thought Lily, indignant on behalf of the gentle and devout young Father Devereaux, who reminded her in some ways of her own Theo, the wagging tongues would probably have billed it as a gay orgy.
“The lamps are lit and the party has begun.”
Father Edward has five copies of Flora for me to sign, and we sit together on the hassock and fill each other in on the last fifteen years. I had tracked Edward down via Google to invite him to this party, and he and his partner, John, also a priest, drove up from Baltimore.
Maria Bauer and I met at Byrdcliffe, the Woodstock arts colony, on a summer day in 1980. I had given a talk on fiction writing, and afterward an elegant woman came up and introduced herself, saying she had the advantage of knowing me a little through my novels. After retiring from the U.S. diplomatic service, she and her husband, Robert, summered in Woodstock. Maria had grown up in Prague; Robert had been a lawyer in Vienna. The two of them had escaped the Nazis, along with her parents, who had spent the rest of their lives in Woodstock. In our first conversation, I sensed that Maria was one of those rare humans who lives on several levels at once. She was socially at ease and cosmopolitan, yet I felt her constant radar scanning the inner vibrations of the people around us. As I was calculating how we might meet again, delighted masculine laughter erupted across the room. Her Robert and my Robert, both Austrians by birth, had been regaling each other with Graf Bobby jokes in Viennese dialect. Graf Bobby is a chuckleheaded Austrian count who, when you point out that he’s wearing one black shoe and one brown one, excitedly confides: “And, you know, I have another pair exactly like them at home!”
The four of us did become friends. We shared candlelit dinners and swam in the Bauers’ pool, Maria calling these our “swims parlando” because we talked as we swam, the three of them switching between English and French and German. I often wondered, swimming along in my one language, how well I would have fared if, as a young person, I had lost my country, my language, and my possessions and had to begin all over again in a foreign land. That is Maria’s story in Beyond the Chestnut Trees, which Peter Mayer’s father, Alfred, published at Overlook Press in 1984, and which was released as an e-book in 2012. Robert and I also visited the Bauers in Washington and got to know their son, Bob Bauer, who would later become President Obama’s White House counsel, and their hospitable, book-loving daughter, Virginia Ceaser, both of whom are present at this party tonight.
Robert Bauer died in 2003, two years after Robert Starer, but Maria and I recall when the four of us were here in the mid-1980s for the Lehrers’ gala dinner to benefit PEN/Faulkner. Robert and I performed a new piece we had collaborated on, “Anna Margarita’s Will,” for piano and soprano. (I spoke the lines.) Anna Margarita, still a relatively young woman, is fantasizing at sunset about how she will dispose of her worldly goods and gets caught up in imagining the lives of her beneficiaries and how they will receive her gifts. The piece was to become a favorite with sopranos because of its vocal adventurousness and range of moods. We had worried that we might have gone over the top with the humor, but when guests laughed unreservedly at the funny parts at our Lehrer performance, we knew we were okay. And at dinner that same night in the library where I am sitting now, the Canadian ambassador and I discovered our mutual fascination for that Victorian rare bird Wilkie Collins, whose “sensation novels,” as they were called then, were the precursors of our detective fiction. The ambassador told me about a lesser-known Collins novel, No Name.
My sister-in-law Caroline Lee, whom Bloomsbury sent with me on the first half of my book tour, is rejoined tonight by my brother Rebel Cole, who has flown in from Chicago, where he teaches at DePaul University. Rebel of course knows Father Edward, having accompanied our mother to St. Mary’s from an early age. Caroline has never met Maria Bauer, and the two of them have much to say, Maria with her diplomatic background and long residences as wife of the cultural attaché in Egypt, India, and Iran, and Caroline, who went to work for the State Department while still in high school and stayed on until she decided to risk a new career as a songwriter and librettist. Caroline has just seen a staged production in Chicago of the first act of her latest musical work, The Last Storyteller, based on her trip to Aleppo with my brother the year before that city fell. Chicago has a large Syrian population, and Caroline really did meet the old storyteller, who was training his grandson to replace him before the fighting began.
There are stacks of Floras available on a corner table in the Lehrers’ library. It looks good in stacks. A week earlier, when I was at the Bloomsbury offices signing first editions, my publisher, George Gibson (who has come down on the train for this party), took a sweeping photo of the conference table covered with stacks of Floras for me to use as the screen saver on my iPhone. Flora’s jacket is one of the three handsomest of all my hardcovers, the other two contenders being the 1974 jacket of The Odd Woman with Daniel Mafia’s moody painting of a thinking woman in a wing chair and the 1987 jacket of A Southern Family with Honi Werner’s painting of a casket spray of a single yellow chrysanthemum and two orange oak leaves against a branch of magnolia leaves, the whole surrounded by a vivid noonday blue. Flora’s jacket, designed by Patti Ratchford, is haunting, with its twilight greenyblue wash over the woman’s partial profile, which captures her expectant, nonjudgmental attitude to whatever is in front of her. The title, which is her name, is raised in cursive white letters midpage, and my name, in upright red roman, is at the bottom.
“When I was in seminary,” Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, “my spiritual director told me not to read theology. ‘Read novels,’ he said, and I have.”
Earlier in the day, Paul, my escort and driver for the D.C. part of the trip, had said: “I’ll just wait outside for you while you’re at the party.” “But why not go to the party?” I asked. “There are too many noteworthy people,” he said. “I wouldn’t know anyone.” “Well, I wish you would come,” I said. “I need a courtier.” He did come, wearing a festive tie, and for the first hour of the party hovered in discreet attendance, bringing me one club soda with lemon after another. Then he spotted a welcoming face towering above the others and his own face lit up. “There’s someone I know. Donald Graham. Will you excuse me?”
I first met Don Graham at a small dinner at the Lehrers’ when I had just begun writing Queen of the Underworld. “I am going to put my old Miami Herald experiences in it, but my young woman reporter is going to be pushier than I was,” I told him. “And I have a character called Lou Norbright, who is sort of based on Al Neuharth.” “Oh!” he exclaimed happily, “let me live to read this novel.” He then entertained us with a few stories of his own about Neuharth and himself when Neuharth had been setting up USA Today in Washington and Don was the publisher of his family’s newspaper, the Washington Post. From then on, whenever I lost faith in my newspaper novel, the memory of Donald Graham’s enthusiasm recharged me. “Yes, we bonded over Al Neuharth,” recalls Don tonight.
Now I’m standing at the entrance to the library, where Jim has been welcoming the guests. I can greet Andrea Mitchell again with a new appreciation for her work. The last time we met, in 2006, we shared newspaper and book-writing experiences, but until the 2008 elections I wasn’t much of a TV watcher beyond Turner Classic Movies and Masterpiece Mystery!. Now I can tell her how I have usually finished my work just in time to catch her one o’clock news hour, and that I have come to depend on her seasoned judgment and reportage of what she sees rather than what she wants to see. “I also look forward to what you are going to wear,” I tell her. “You are part of my daily life.” “She’s part of mine, too,” Alan Greenspan says.
Ron Charles, the Washington Post book editor, arrives with his wife, Dawn. He gave my work a generous introduction when I spoke at the 2010 National Book Festival. Then he dropped cross-legged to the ground (we were inside a tent) and set about tweeting the event. It was the first time I had witnessed someone engaged in this social sport. Ron Charles loved Evensong’s Margaret Bonner when he was still reviewing for the Christian Science Monitor in 1999; in equal measure he had hated Emma Gant when he reviewed Queen of the Underworld in 2006 for the Post; but he has given his wholehearted endorsement to Flora in 2013. We talk of his groundbreaking video reviews, which he says he makes gratis with the help of his family, and of a first novel by a young Washington writer, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which we both admired.
Now the party is fully astir, and Jim Lehrer clinks his glass and announces it is time for Kate’s and my performance. “I want you two to stand between the library and the porch so people on both sides can hear you,” Jim directs. Kate goes first, speaking of the way writers help other writers and recalling how, some years earlier, when she had stalled on a book idea and was miserable, I suggested she write a sequel novel about what happened to the little girl in The Turn of the Screw. What kind of adult would she have become? How would she remember the summer when her governess went mad and killed her little brother?
Gail said, “You can call it Flora.”
“But why don’t you write it?” I asked her.
“It’s not for me,” Gail said, “but I would love to read it and lots of other people would, too.”
I remember being excited about this Flora that Kate was going to write. I told her to read the diaries of Alice James, Henry’s invalid sister, to get a feel for the historical setting and in case the little girl in Turn of the Screw would grow up to be damaged from the governess trauma. On the other hand, the little girl might have crafted a formidable adult persona to cover the wounds, and we agreed that would be an even more interesting development. In the end, Kate went back to her own characters and eventually I wrote my own Flora about a threatened little girl in 1945 and how she looks back on that regrettable summer of her childhood.
Kate then turns to me and asks me to say something about Flora, and, while Jim is repeating his directions to address both rooms of people, I am blindsided by a rare bashfulness. I hear myself mumble that there is nothing more to be said, but Jim Lehrer, champion anchor and moderator, says: “Give us forty-eight seconds—and divide it equally between the rooms.”
Somehow, Jim’s “forty-eight seconds” summons me back to the public sphere, and I stand in the doorway between the library and the porch and pluck from the air some essentials about Flora. As I talk, I do a little dance step back and forth over the threshold, to emphasize that I am dividing my sentences fairly between the two audiences.
During the hours before her big party, Clarissa Dalloway lies on the sofa mentally defending herself against an old suitor who has returned from India and will be at her house that night.
But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties—what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): “They’re an offering”; which sounded horribly vague. . . . Here was So-and-So in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; . . . and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
The Lehrers’ library and porch
“I do a little dance step back and forth over the threshold, to emphasize that I am dividing my sentences fairly between the two audiences.”
That’s what I’m standing in the middle of tonight: a combination, a creation, something graciously offered in my honor so that the people gathered here can collect, form new alliances, refresh old ones. The living people I am closest to, those whose existences continuously populate my imagination, even when I don’t see them for years, and the professionals who are currently sustaining me in my publishing life are all present in this room. Diane Rehm is being appreciated by two longtime fans of her radio show, Father Edward and Father John. My sister-in-law Caroline Lee shares a love seat with my editor, Nancy Miller, who will take over from Caroline as my travel companion in the morning. Jim is calling his car service to get my publisher on the last train back to Manhattan, though George Gibson is still insisting he can perfectly well walk to the corner and hail a taxi to the station.
Susan Shreve and I at last have a chance to be together. We met in the late seventies at Bread Loaf when she was always attached to little children and numerous carryalls. Susan read a story there that I’ll never forget, about an aloof and faultfinding woman whose purse, when opened after her death, turns out to be crammed with decades of clippings and cuttings about her daughter-in-law, who had always believed her husband’s mother disliked her. In 1984, Susan’s Dreaming of Heroes was the first novel to be published about a female Episcopal priest. The ordination of women had been approved only eight years before. Her novel’s heroine, Jamie, made it less daunting for me to have Margaret, at the end of Father Melancholy’s Daughter, seek ordination against her late father’s wishes. Again in 2012, when I was writing the polio parts of Flora, I pored over Susan’s 2007 memoir, Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven. Forerunners, inspirers, empowerers. As Kate was saying earlier: writers helping other writers.
Now Paul is driving us home from the party. My editor, Nancy Miller, and my agent, Moses Cardona, are with me in the backseat; Frances Halsband, who came down on an afternoon train, is in the front seat. We are pooling our impressions of the party.
Suddenly something out of the Arabian Nights—or fin de siècle France—blazes up ahead of us on Massachusetts Avenue.
“Look at that!” I cry. “What is it? An exotic embassy?”
“No,” says Frances. “It’s just the Cosmos Club, where I’m spending the night. It’s much dowdier inside.”
Nancy and I say good night in the lobby of the Hotel Washington (now known as the W), where the rest of us are staying, including my brother and sister-in-law. Nancy and I will leave early in the morning for North Carolina. It’s a good thing we can’t see into the future, so we are spared the canceled flight in Charlotte, the perfect thunderstorm while she is driving us from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi, the eight-hour delay going home.
Moses, always the gent, accompanies me to my room. Earlier he sent flowers, which we took on to the Lehrers’ party. “If you’re not too tired,” I say, “come in and let’s have a postmortem. The hotel left me a nice looking bottle of red wine and I’d be happy to see you drink it.”
He opens the wine and takes the chair by the window, and I curl up on the bed. Of course we talk about John Hawkins first, and the last time the three of us were here in Washington, in the fall of 2001, September 8 and 9, to be exact, two days before the unimaginable events of 9/11. I had been invited to read at Laura Bush’s inaugural National Book Festival, and had asked John to go with me to the reading and dinner at the Library of Congress and the White House breakfast the next morning. It was my first outing since Robert’s death back in April. Moses made all the arrangements, including our reservations at the Willard, and announced at the last minute that he was coming with us, “not to the events, but to take care of you both.”
We haven’t quite swung into our party postmortem when there is a knock and in come Rebel and Caroline.
“Aha!” cries Caroline to Moses. “Now you have someone to share your wine with. I had my eye on that bottle earlier.”
Rebel has his own libation in a paper cup and he has brought me a Meyer lemon for my future bottled waters and a small plastic knife, that item most precious to fliers. ‘This lemon should last you the rest of your trip if you’re careful,” he says.
They snuggle up on either side of me in the bed, my baby brother, born when I was a senior in college, and his Lady Caroline, whom our mother would have thoroughly appreciated, had they been able to know each other.
“I asked Jim if you kept to the forty-eight seconds,” Rebel reports. “He said you actually came in at forty-seven.”
The lamps are lit and the party begins all over again.