by Gail Godwin
You can watch Paul Chi-Chan Yu’s thirty-six-minute film of “A Sorrowful Woman,” and there is a brief homework helper by David Wheeler, downloadable for $2.00 on Kindle, addressing the story’s fairy-tale elements. “In many ways,” Wheeler begins his essay, “this story is an inverted fairy tale—beginning with ‘Once upon a time.’”
For a while I answered touching or intelligent pleas sent to my website. “I have done my best to deal with this text,” a young man wrote. “Does she have a motive or is she just a sick, confused person? I don’t want you to do my assignment for me, but any hint of what this story is supposed to mean would help.”
I couldn’t tell him what it was supposed to mean but told him how I wrote it and what had been cut out and suggested he just sink into the story like a warm bath. Take note of the objects and surroundings, observe how the characters respond. Don’t feel you have to come up with a diagnosis out of the latest mental disorder manual.
When Raymond Carver’s story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was republished in 2009 under a new title, Beginners, with all Captain Fiction’s cuts restored, John Hawkins phoned to ask if I still had that Lish spoof I had written. He thought it might be fun to send it to the New York Times. Back in 1969 in a fit of pique I had dashed off a story, in a letter to John, and then “excised” it, Lish-style. John couldn’t find the letter and I hadn’t made a copy. I told him I didn’t even have a copy of the uncut “Sorrowful Mother,” unless there was a mimeograph of it yellowing away in an old Writers’ Workshop file.
WOODSTOCK, N.Y., LATE JANUARY 2009
John Hawkins phoned. “Jennifer Hershey called me again. Random House is still dead set against The Red Nun as a title.”
“But I just got the cover art yesterday! There it was, The Red Nun, in big Gothic letters, and I thought, Good, that squabble is over.”
“Apparently not. Jennifer has made a list of some other possible titles. She wants to go over them with you herself.”
Jennifer prefaced her phone call with a respectful e-mail. She herself was okay with The Red Nun, but she didn’t have any parochial school memories of nuns hitting her with rulers. Many people at the house, “including our president,” were strongly against the present title. They felt it would put off many potential readers and hurt the sales of the book. I e-mailed back that the nuns in my novel weren’t the ruler-hitting kind. I also reminded her that key elements of the story included a life-size red marble statue of a nun (and what the statue had come to symbolize to generations of girls) and a play put on every few years called The Red Nun, written by the headmistress when she was a schoolgirl.
The Red Nun was a novel I had been saving up to write for most of my life. When I was in my teens I wrote a story, “The Accomplice,” told from the viewpoint of a non-Catholic second grader who had just entered the convent school of “St. Catherine’s.”
When she heard the familiar thudding walk on the dormitory halls late at night, when she saw the nun thundering across the wooden-floored assembly room to call roll before morning prayers, when she looked out the window and spied her crunching angrily through the helpless autumn leaves on the way back from the chapel, Nancy always went over the whole day in her mind and tried to think if she had done anything wrong.
“The Accomplice,” in First Words: Earliest Writing from Favorite Contemporary Authors (1993), edited by Paul Mandelbaum
“The accomplice” in this story is none other than Jesus on the cross, who is the only person the scary principal, Mother Blanche, fears and loves, according to the Catholic second graders who are giving Nancy a crash course in their religion. Fanning the flames of her predisposition for magical thinking, Nancy sleeps with a crucifix under her pillow and plots the nun’s comeuppance.
St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines, the convent school in Asheville I attended from second through ninth grades, continued to allure and elude me from my twenties through my sixties. During those years, I began and abandoned many novels that might fit inside its haunting ambience. In 1987 it provided an educational background for the main characters in A Southern Family, and the final scene is set inside the rebuilt school, where the old nuns are praying for Theo on the anniversary of his death. And then, one morning in 2006, shortly after I had finished my Miami novel, Queen of the Underworld, I suddenly saw a whole complex story of girls and nuns that could fit inside those rooms and hallways that had been haunting me for fifty years. I photocopied a picture of the old Victorian building on a piece of red paper, put the title, The Red Nun: A Tale of Unfinished Desires, at the top, and taped this paper to the wall above my computer screen.
That gives you some background of how invested I was in the title The Red Nun. But I was curious to hear the alternative titles from Jennifer because, after all, Random House was my publisher and I had to believe they wanted the best and widest readership for this novel. She called and we went down the list of phrases she had picked from the book. None of them were striking or apt; she agreed she hadn’t found the right one yet. What they were looking for, she said, was “something that evokes the most appealing aspects of the book, like female friendships and family.”
St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines
“I photocopied a picture of the old Victorian building on a piece of red paper, put the title, The Red Nun: A Tale of Unfinished Desires, at the top, and taped this paper to the wall above my computer screen.”
I reminded her that the book was equally about betrayals, female enemies, drunk fathers, and vicious mothers. And nuns.
Nevertheless, before we hung up, I had promised to “give it some thought.” I tortured my brain, even resorting to the I Ching. This ancient Chinese oracle has never failed to expand my limited perspectives on any subject I bring to it, and occasionally it has stunned me with its uncanny prescience. This turned out to be one of those occasions.
Do not doubt your inner vision or ethics . . . Do not compromise your principles or alter your standards, for there is no end to the chaos and nothing reasonable can be resolved . . . Do not be tempted by promises of rewards or extravagant remunerations in return for your participation in a stagnant situation.
R. L. Wing, The I Ching Workbook, Hexagram 12, “Stagnation”
Jennifer phoned again, and I told her I had given it the promised thought and concluded there was simply no title other than the one that was in my contract and already on the cover art. “For me it has always been The Red Nun, with its subtitle A Tale of Unfinished Desires.”
“What about Unfinished Desires?” asked Jennifer. She was between a rock and a hard place. I could hear the strain in her voice.
That was my caving moment. I could have said, should have said, sorry, but no. But then I thought, If they hated the nun in the title that much, what if they simply withdrew all support from their marketing efforts if I insisted on keeping her? And after all, Random House–Ballantine had the license to all but three books on my backlist. I went into a cynical triage mode. At least I could save part of my title.
“Okay,” I said. “Call it Unfinished Desires.” I waited to hear the relief in her voice.
“Well, I have to run it past our president first,” she said.
Later she called back. “Gina loves it,” she told me.
I have since wondered what would have happened had I refused to give up The Red Nun as a title. There is a clause in all my contracts that gives the author final approval of the cover art (“within reason”), and with John Hawkins’s help I probably could have forced the issue. But I didn’t. It seems to me now that The Red Nun would have attracted more of the kind of readers who would have appreciated such a book. There are still thousands of them out there who went to school with nuns, many of them likely to eschew a title smacking of a bodice ripper.
On this subject of title mutilation, I have a further story from Robb Forman Dew, though it has a happier ending than mine. Anyone who reads Robb Dew’s novels knows to expect the recurring instances in which good manners pu
nish the inveterate practitioners of them. The titles she gives her books always perch above their ironic opposites, from her first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death (winner of the National Book Award for best first novel) to her recently completed family trilogy: The Evidence Against Her, The Truth of the Matter, and . . .
When her publisher asked that she change the last title of this trilogy to In the Garden (“although he hadn’t read the book and there is absolutely nothing in it that involves a garden”), Robb stood up for her rights and threatened to withdraw the book. And so the title she chose was kept—with its cover art of a teacup and saucer of awfully nice china (the Desert Rose pattern by Franciscan).
Being Polite to Hitler, a novel by Robb Forman Dew.
But wait: what about my fight to keep Father Melancholy’s Daughter as a title?
During the first year and a half of my writing that novel, my eighth, I called it Vinca. That is the title designated “Work #2” of that contract with Morrow. In the Vinca version, the reader first meets Margaret Gower when she is twenty-one and graduated from college. Her depressed father has finally gone under and is in an institution, and Margaret decides to use the first free time of her life to look into the circumstances of her mother’s death. Her mother had run away with an old school friend, Madelyn Farley, when Margaret was six, and was killed soon after while the women were traveling abroad. But Margaret knows that Madelyn Farley lives at present in a town in upstate New York, tending (unwillingly) to her own crochety old father. Margaret goes to this town, gets work with a landscaping firm, and calls herself Vinca. It is her plan to work for Madelyn and get to know her and do some sleuthing. Then I reached chapter four and felt those familiar queasy signs of having taken a wrong turn. What to do? Time for a look backward? I took Margaret back to the age of six, the day she comes home and finds her mother gone “on a brief vacation” with Madelyn. And felt immediately in the right place, a child at home in the rectory with her depressed father. Their life together for the next fifteen years was exactly where I wanted to be.
Then I had to take a break and fly off to a writers’ conference in Tennessee. On the second leg of the journey I found myself sitting behind Walker Percy on a small commuter plane. I was touched by how sad and vulnerable the back of his head looked. Melancholy, I thought: Father Melancholy. Father Melancholy’s Daughter. Everything was in alignment when I had that title. And, two years later, when the new president of Morrow called John Hawkins and said of the finished manuscript: Look, John, Father Melancholy’s Daughter “just doesn’t shout big book,” I was able to stand my ground.
WOODSTOCK, N.Y., SPRING 2009
Donna, the hygienist, walked with me to the window where patients paid for services. “I have to say it, Gail,” she said, handing over my little bag of free dental products, “I’m really sad it’s not going to be The Red Nun. When you first told me that title two years ago, I got very excited. It was the perfect title, it suggested so many things. How could you let it go? Well, meanwhile, keep up the good work.”
She meant my Water-Piking and my flossing.
“You caved!” my brother Rebel had shouted over the phone. My sister-in-law, Caroline, who had gone to Estonia to get me a certain icon of a saint in a red nun’s habit, was very sad when she heard I had let my red nun go.
At the end of the trade paperback edition of Unfinished Desires, instead of submitting to one more “author interview,” I wrote “Some Questions and Comments for the Author from Four Characters in Unfinished Desires.” These questions and comments can be read in their entirety in the Random House Reader’s Circle edition.
I started with the headmistress, Mother Ravenel, the linchpin of the novel. “Now, Gail,” she begins, “there were some things I liked about your novel and there were other things I definitely did not like.”
I of course ask her what she did not like, and she proceeds to tell me. I got a thorough dressing-down. At the end she says, “Well, dear, let’s not dwell on what is too late to change. But you weren’t practicing holy daring, were you, Gail?”
Anyone who has read the novel will understand why that hurt most.
Onward and upward!
Flora, the Fourteenth Novel
A CHANGE OF HEART AND STYLE
There is a place in me I haven’t gone yet.
Author’s 2009 notes when starting Flora
Grandmother’s storyline: This is what didn’t happen. It’s my cover up, and after I’m dead you won’t know what I had to cover up.
Flora’s storyline: This is what happened. It’s all I know.
Author’s 2010 notes while writing Flora
“You think this story is going to be about Helen,” said Alexandra Pringle, my English publisher at Bloomsbury UK, “but when you reach the end you realize it’s about Flora, and you are devastated.” She was describing the reader’s response, but she also was describing my experience of writing it.
I began the book thinking it was going to be all about Helen and how things turned out for Helen: the precocious and cunning child who became the accomplished and remorseful adult. But I also uncovered a new kind of character in Flora. Her story is over but I miss her and want her back.
“I thought I knew her intimately, I thought I knew everything there was to know about her,” reflects Helen as she looks back over the summer that her cousin Flora took care of her, “but she has since become a profound study for me. . . . Styles have come and gone in storytelling, psychologizing, theologizing, but Flora keeps providing me with something as enigmatic as it is basic to life, as timeless as it is fresh.”
Helen is ten and Flora, a first cousin of Helen’s late mother, is twenty-two, during their summer together. Helen’s grandmother Nonie, who has raised her, died in the spring, and Helen’s father is off doing secret war work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Flora was the first novel I kept to myself. During its three years of writing, I showed it to no one. At first my reasons for withholding it were practical ones. There was no longer someone living in the house to whom I could read chapters hot from the presses and have him first praise the successful things and then, in subsequent bearable increments, suggest where it fell short. (“Listen, I’ve been thinking: Margaret is eighteen years old. You have to give her a boyfriend.”) My agent and first reader outside the house was slowly and painfully convalescing from a series of major surgeries. Also, I was not ready to make another contract: I was pretty sure I was going to seek a new publisher, and first wanted to get an idea of where the book was going.
But as the chapters accumulated and the characters’ interactions pointed more and more inevitably toward the conclusion, the intimacy between me and this book became too precious to risk. Constructing this lean tale about the underpinnings of the self was more important than any book contract or suggestions from others.
Flora and I were alone together like ten-year-old Helen and her caretaking cousin Flora, isolated on top of their mountain in the summer of 1945.
“You have everything you need,” I wrote to myself, “in this house with its peculiar history, the rutted road that leads to it, and the grandfather’s cratered shortcut through the woods to town.”
The seed for Flora lay buried in a 1969 journal from my graduate school days in Iowa City. I had just sent off the final draft of my first to be published novel, The Perfectionists, to David Segal at Harper & Row and, being hungry for success, had jumped straightaway into a new project.
“1000 Sunset Drive.” That summer, when everything shifted and a young girl grew a carapace.
That house on top of the mountain! Children are like bombs that will one day go off.
One thousand Sunset Drive was an actual address. In the summer of 1948, my mother and new stepfather, recently demobilized from the army, rented some upstairs rooms in a house on top of Sunset Mountain in Asheville. There was a polio epidemic in town and I could play only with the children who lived in the house. Eugene was twelve, Jackie was nine, and I was eleven.
Since we couldn’t go off the mountain, a man from the drugstore delivered candy and comic books once a week. We would stand around the open trunk of his three-wheeled motorcycle and choose which comics we wanted. At the end of the summer, my family moved back into town and I returned to my girls’ school run by nuns. I never saw Eugene or Jackie again and, soon after, the house on the mountain was torn down.
But that three-wheeled motorcycle would become the conveyance on which Finn, who calls himself “the deliverer,” rides into Helen and Flora’s isolation and becomes “the third wheel” of their fate.
I don’t remember what “1000 Sunset Drive” was going to be about. What carapace had the girl grown? What had she done that was bomb-like? Within days after its single mention in the journal, I had begun another novel about citizens’ attacks on English universities in the 1400s. Nothing remains of it, either.
Three-wheeled motorcycle
On which Finn rides in and becomes “the third wheel” of their fate.
It was not until 2008, when I was helping Rob Neufeld edit volume two of The Making of a Writer, that I unearthed the mysterious 1969 lines about the house, the summer, and the bomb. The discovery was timely because I had been fantasizing about writing a novel about a young girl, isolated and threatened in some way. What measures would she take to protect herself, and what would the fallout be?
