OBSCURITY AND BREAKTHROUGH
When we compare the present life of man with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a lone sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counsellors. Inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the darkness whence he came.
Bede, A History of the English Church and People (A.D. 731), translated by Leo Sherley-Price (1955)
“So? What do I risk? Obscurity?”
This riposte, which a fiction workshop student flung back at her peers after their critique of her story in the spring of 1967, just after I arrived in Iowa City, reverberated through the fourth-floor halls of EPB and was quoted with awe and respect by her colleagues.
I was not in that workshop, but my friend Lorraine O’Grady had been in it, and Lorraine was a reliable narrator.
“That’s exactly what she said,” Lorraine told me. “After they finished tearing her story apart because it was too ‘obscure’ and nobody would publish it, she stood up and said in that husky deadpan voice of hers, ‘So? What do I risk? Obscurity?’ Just like that. You could have heard a pin drop.”
Lorraine, whom I had met in 1961 after a Marian Anderson concert in Copenhagen and stayed in touch with ever since, had urged me to come to Iowa and “get serious” about my writing; she had personally delivered my English vicar story to the faculty member in charge of admissions. (“Your friend has some kinks,” Eugene Garber, the metaphysical tale writer, told Lorraine, “but we can work them out of her.”) Lorraine had entered the workshop two years before me to become a novelist but ended up translating her teacher José Donoso’s novel Este Domingo (This Sunday) into English instead. She went on to make her living as a translator and a teacher until she burst like a guerrilla rocket on the New York conceptual art scene in 1980 as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a black debutante in a white ball gown who crashes art openings in defiance of the current convention, which at that time kept the black and white art worlds segregated. Since then Lorraine O’Grady has become a performance pioneer in her field. The morning after I met her at the American ambassador’s house in Copenhagen, I started a novel about her. It was titled Roxanne O’Day. Roxanne was to be the star, and Carrie (my role) would function as the dazzled Nick Carraway narrator. They have just been introduced by the cultural attaché at the American ambassador’s house. Roxanne is all in white, Carrie all in black. (“Here you are, two American girls traveling solo,” said the attaché. “What did you think of the concert?” Anticipating this question, Carrie delivered the answer she had prepared during the concert: “What a majestic voice. I felt honored to be in that hall.” Roxanne said: “Well, of course she’s incomparable. However, I don’t think she should have sung quite so much German in this country, if you know what I mean.”)
When Lorraine and I reconnected by e-mail in 2012 after I saw photographs of her new show in the New York Times, I decided to devote a chapter to her in Publishing. I was going to call the chapter “Embodying Your Art,” which is what Lorraine does. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire wore a floor-length dress made of hundreds of white gloves sewn together by herself. In her May 2012 show there is a twenty-minute black-and-white video entitled Landscape (Western Hemisphere), which at first seems to show a field of blowing weeds; but it is a close-up of Lorraine O’Grady’s African American hair being blown between two fans. In both my attempts to write about her, the abandoned 1961 Copenhagen novel and the abandoned chapter for this book, my narrative powers were outdone by Lorraine’s reality.
I knew by sight that workshop student with the husky deadpan voice, a raven-haired tomboy loner, similar in looks to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow today, though swarthier and always unsmiling. I have tried to recall her name. I’m sure I would have written it in my journal, along with the famous obscurity quote, but that particular journal was thrown into the Iowa River by a jealous boyfriend determined to destroy everything that came before him.
I don’t know whether that workshop student went on to publish her “obscure” story in a literary quarterly, or whether she ever published at all. But she has remained my beau ideal for a last-ditch pigheadedness essential to a writer’s day-to-day endurance. When my inner naysayers start chipping away at me for risking something—or even thinking of risking something—I fling back the tomboy loner’s retort, and it restores perspective.
So? What do I risk? Obscurity? became my mantra during that Iowa autumn of 1968, as I marched the fifteen blocks to and from my apartment on North Dubuque Street.
By 1968, most of my close circle had moved on. Lorraine went to Chicago, where she was translating a nineteenth-century German prostitute’s memoirs into English and Hugh Hefner’s daily menus into French for his chef.
John Irving had moved back east with his wife and first child, Colin, to take a teaching job. I had met John when Jane Barnes and John Casey and David Plimpton took me with them to Irving’s twenty-fifth birthday party. In his small apartment, John showed us the writing room he had made for himself in a coat closet. For his birthday guests he played a tape of the “film score” for his first novel, Setting Free the Bears. He hadn’t finished the novel yet, no publisher or movie person had laid eyes on it, but John had chosen the music he wanted, from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. (“I often did that,” John told me many years later. “I picked the music for my film before I finished the book. Call it my mayhem confidence.”)
David Plimpton, having published a first story before any of us, about a young man on the verge of his future, in Penthouse, had gone back east for graduate study in psychology. John Casey had married Jane Barnes and they were finishing their M.F.A. degrees at the workshop. Casey had just sold his first story to the New Yorker about his time in the army. Jane, who was in Coover’s class with me, was expecting a baby in December.
The other recitation that sustained me on my fifteen-block walks between EPB and the house on North Dubuque Street was lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer.” (“Though the correct translation of anhaga is not ‘wanderer’ but ‘he who is solitarily situated,’” Professor McGalliard had explained to us.)
Hwaer cwom mearg? Hwaer cwom mago?
Hwaer cwom maƥƥumgyfa?
Hwaer cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwaer sindon seledreamas?
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
And then came the hopeless lines that I loved best:
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away,
all under the cover of night,
as if it had never been!
It was all going to pass away for everybody! Whether I was the warrior with the gold cup or Bede’s little sparrow darting through the banqueting hall, we were all going to vanish, every last one of us, published or unpublished, back into the night from whence we came. This never failed to cheer me up. Unlike the aloof stars high above the Blue Ridge Mountains or the scrubbed-out stars over pink-lit London or smoggy New York, the low-hanging stars over Iowa winked and signaled with pre-Copernican intimacy. The Anglo-Saxon Wanderer (or “he who is solitarily situated,”) would have felt right at home under this sky.
I was “she who is solitarily situated,” on my night walks, marching to the beat of a doomed language.
“Whether I was the warrior with the gold cup or Bede’s little sparrow darting through the banqueting hall, we were all going to vanish.”
In the early morning of October 2, 1968, I dreamed there was a house where my future was. It was horribly dirty and sooty. I went down a hall and turned right into a living room—substandard furniture, filthy, no books—a young blond boy loitering. “Do you know if there are any books here?” I asked. He said, “No, but downstairs.” He showed me how to descend a ladder to the floor below, and there was a library of boring old books. I went into other rooms. Each room got cleaner till at last I found a neat study, and on its shelves I found one thin book that I had written. Its title was Unpublished Prosperities.
It was an affecting dream, but what did it mean? Was I literally headed for “unpublished prosperity” for the rest of my life, or was the dream telling me something in its own code?
Two fiction workshop students had a young agent in New York, John Hawkins, who worked for the old, esteemed firm of Paul R. Reynolds, which had represented Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Willa Cather. Hawkins had read both their manuscripts in progress and told them he would send out their work when they had completed “fifty good pages.” The first student, from the Philippines, Willie Nolledo, had gone on to finish his novel and Hawkins had sold it. The second, who tended to fall in love with newly discovered words, like tessellations, was still perfecting his first fifty pages.
The prospect seemed less onerous when the goal was “fifty good pages.” With this magic number in sight, I started over, trying to forget the disappointments and wrong turnings of my publishing attempts and focus on my ill-matched couple, whose disappointments and wrong turnings were not going to be as easy to conceal under the bright scrutiny of the island’s sun. The more I wrote about the little boy who will not speak, the more I realized that his maddening silence was a reflection on the unspoken falseness of their whole situation. They were never going to be the family they wanted others to think they were. They were never going to be like the beautiful French family staying in their hotel. In fact, I was still calling the novel The Beautiful French Family.
When I had four chapters (which came to forty-eight pages), I mailed them in a manila envelope (with stamped return envelope enclosed) to John Hawkins, who wrote back that he was fascinated by the pages and would like to represent me. “I know I shouldn’t ask,” he said, “but I am curious to know how old you are, and whether you are English or American.”
He got to work immediately. The publisher William Morrow offered $250 for an option on the forty-eight pages, but Hawkins wrote that he thought we could do better. (How nice it was to be a “we”!) He said the Morrow offer was an encouraging nod, but not as binding as a contract. He would like to try other publishers.
I had a vivid dream of going to a bookstore with the Little Magician. Coover was dressed in tights like a court jester and was scolding me for neglecting to update the class bulletin board, which he took great pride in because it was an extension of his personality. I told him that if we were going to do the board justice we would need to buy some beautiful colored letters in porcelain for it, and led him into an extension of the store that sold knickknacks. There he became smitten with a little glass elephant with a rider, which I encouraged him to buy. But it cost more than he had and I felt bad.
When I woke up I knew there was going to be bad news in my EPB mailbox, and there was. Hawkins had enclosed a rejection letter from an editor at Random House. (“She’s a born storyteller, but the subject and location of this book are just too remote and I fear we couldn’t sell enough copies.”) John had written “Onward and Upward!” above his signature.
Back down into hopelessness once more, which at least felt more familiar, I walked to the university in winter cold, read The Owl and the Nightingale in Middle English, taught my core class King Lear and played for them on a record the part near the end when Cordelia awakens Lear (Paul Scofield) and he thinks she is a spirit:
You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave;
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.
I wrote the next chapter of my remote novel that wouldn’t sell enough copies, and trudged home under the starlit canopy of obscurity.
“You’ve still got us,” my mother said on the phone. “Come for Christmas.”
“But, I was just there last summer.”
“Well, come again.”
That summer, walking through the neighborhood where we had lived when Kathleen Godwin was also Charlotte Ashe when she had more than one story in an issue, we had returned to our favorite topic, writing and getting published, a topic that never failed to charge my mother’s voice with a youthful wistfulness. She hadn’t stopped writing, even after the love pulps had seen their day. She wrote novels, under the name Mary Godwin, one after the other, after she remarried—a GI taking one of her English classes at Asheville-Biltmore College—and had three more children. My favorite of her novels was (and remains) The Otherwise Virgins, about three quite different coeds on the Chapel Hill campus after World War II: the promiscuous Lisa; the withdrawn Jane, who loves women; and Debby, an older student, a former call girl in New York. In some ways it was ahead of its time. Nobody wanted to think about Jane’s problem, and they found the ex–call girl adopted by the southern senator beyond belief. Her agent, Ann Elmo, kept faith with Mary Godwin through the years. My mother and I could recite by heart the entire letter forwarded to her by Elmo in December 1949:
Miss Ann Elmo
AFG Literary Agency
545 Fifth Avenue
New York 17, New York
My dear Ann:
I do not know Mary Godwin but, in spots, she writes like the angels. In others, she hits notes of monstrous tedium calculated to repel the most ardent reader.
I’m not going to buy “And Not to Yield.” I might have if the classroom scenes were not so long; and if, perhaps Allen and Ravenelle could refrain from blaspheming the romantic couch with recitations from Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Rubaiyat. The best thing she could do is to pare the fat from this. It comes to 135,000 words and would read beautifully at 90,000.
Still, Miss Godwin is one hell of a writer. If she lives nearby, I’d be happy to take her to lunch and talk about a book for us.
A Merry Christmas to you . . .
Jim Bishop
Editor
Fawcett Gold Medal Books
We had a little duet for our refrain:
“Writes like the angels!” (soprano)
“With notes of monstrous tedium!”(alto)
“Merry Christmas to you!” (soprano)
“If you pare the fat!” (alto)
On our final walk around the old streets last summer, we had been discussing Colin Wilson’s funny autobiographical novel, Adrift in Soho, about young aspiring writers, artists, and anarchists hanging out in London after World War II. I had read it first, on the bus trip to Asheville, and passed it on to her.
“I enjoyed it so much,” she said. “And you know what I loved best? Some of them are so close to fulfilling their dreams of being artists or published writers and they don’t know how close. But we do!”
Tuesday, December 10, 1968, Iowa City was iced in. The day before, Jane Barnes Casey had given birth to a little girl, Maud. I had intended to walk to campus and write in my office, but then looked out my window, saw cars and people slipping and sliding all over the place, and decided to stay home and grade papers and wash my hair in the bathtub where St. George the dragon had slept and frolicked until he grew too big.
Around six in the evening, Kim Merker, the hand printer who had his press in the basement of EPB and an office next to mine, phoned. “There are all these notes stuck to your door to call your agent.”
“I guess it’s too late to call him now,” I said. “If it’s anything urgent, he’ll have my home number.”
As soon as I hung up, John Hawkins phoned. Yes, he was still at his office. An oral storyteller himself, he insisted on narrating the day’s news chronologically. David Segal, an editor at Harper & Row, had read the forty-eight pages and outline of The Beautiful French Family and wanted to meet with John and discuss it. Over lunch at the Brussels, he’d offered fifteen hundred dollars for an option on the book. Over dessert (crème brûlée), John had said, “Gail would be so much happier with fifteen hundred dollars and a contract,” and David had agreed.
“Will a delivery date of May 1969 give you enough time?” John asked.
A scholar’s reading room inside Wilson Library
Where Gail’s papers are archived today.
I made long-distance calls to Ian Marshall, the psychiatrist in London, Lorraine O’Grady in Chicago, and John Bowers in New York, who was working on his autobiographical novel, The Colony (1971) about a young man learning to write at the Handy Writers’ Colony in Illinois.
“It’s what you wanted,” said Ian, “and I’m glad. But you still owe me your airfare back to America.”
“Good God,” said Lorraine. “Look, you’ve got to give me a moment to take this in.”
John Bowers was overjoyed. “See? See? Didn’t I always tell you?”
I had saved the most important phone call for last.
“Now when you come for Christmas we will really have something to celebrate,” my mother said. “I know what this means, believe me. And you know I know what it means.”