Publishing

by Gail Godwin

  Soon after I came across those lines in the journal, I read an interview with a film director who said that the mind of an adolescent was like a haunted house. A buzzer went off in my brain: “This way!”

  Everyone quickens at the idea of a haunting, but if you are to make a success of this kind of story you have to find the level of haunting that you’re comfortable with. There are many ways of being haunted. If you force your haunting story past the line your own belief can tolerate, the story dissolves in a puddle of fakery. I found myself halted by my toleration line every time I tried to force “the ghost” across the threshold of my novel. I was sure that it would be the grandmother Nonie’s ghost and that, given her propensity for talk and instruction, she would manifest herself as an auditory ghost rather than a visible one. But eventually I let the voice simply be Helen’s internalization of her grandmother’s advice, stories, and concealments.

  The progress of a novel is never a simple point-to-point endeavor that can be traced in reverse like running your finger backwards over a road map. It’s more like a pattern of clusters, with extensions exploding from the individual components that make up those clusters. If I hadn’t eventually scrapped the film director’s temptation, Flora could have ended up as a ghost story. It might have been a good one. I would have tried to make it subtle and ambiguous, like, well, The Turn of the Screw, which became my secret model.

  But here’s the thing: I wouldn’t have chosen The Turn of the Screw as my secret model if I hadn’t been tempted toward a ghost story by the film director’s remark. Both the ghost idea and The Turn of the Screw became my boosters, like the rockets that blast off with a space orbiter, then drop away. Only, my rockets stayed attached for quite a while.

  James’s novella was a dependable booster whenever my confidence sputtered. (Who’s going to want to read about a little girl and her summer guardian isolated on a mountain in the past? Well, but, how many times have I reread the tale about that long-ago young governess isolated with her charges?) I even considered naming my little girl Flora, like the one in James’s tale, but quickly revolted at the aggressive mimicry. Yet the lovely, old-fashioned name seemed just right for the simple-hearted young woman who would stay with Helen while the father was away.

  The ghost story teaser, in the form of a preface, still clung to the electronic file of Flora I sent to the literary agency. In this preface people are sitting around a fire waiting out a storm and someone suggests telling ghost stories. One person says that the scariest ghost is the one inside yourself. Someone else ups the ante by positing a ghost that has lived inside you all your life and shaped your destiny, only you didn’t realize you were inhabited by it until you were old.

  “I’m wondering if you need that preface,” said Moses Cardona, who had inherited me after John Hawkins, recovered at last from all his surgeries, dismayed us by his sudden death. “The minute Helen and Flora get together, I am hooked,” said Moses. “What happens between them is haunting enough for me.”

  I decided Moses was right and deleted the preface.

  From the start I had asked myself, “What does ten-year-old Helen make happen?” I knew Flora was going to fail or be harmed or defeated in some way. But I needed to observe them together, chapter by chapter: the artful little girl and the guileless Flora, who didn’t seem to have any agenda other than doing her duty. What made a person simply guileless and brave? And Flora is brave, though Helen, many-layered and devious, decides right away that Flora is a fool. Helen thinks she may have to cover up Flora’s simplicities and maybe end up having to take care of the person who is supposed to be taking care of her.

  Concentrating specifically on the interactions between Helen and Flora, day after day, I realized that Flora was a new kind of major character for me. Before now I hadn’t been all that interested in people who weren’t cunning and determined to win. Studying Flora, getting inside her enough to figure out her responses (which were so often antithetical to what mine would have been) became an adventure. It opened more life to me. I saw for the first time the wonder of people like this, people who live straight from the heart, without thought of what is in it for them. They don’t always do well in this world, but it’s refreshing to imagine there are such people in it. Maybe the reader of such a character will go through this process, too. (“Wait a minute, Flora’s not dumb, she’s just modest; not a plotter, she’s happiest and easiest in acceptance mode. But she exasperates Helen. If I were in Helen’s place, would Flora exasperate me? Why?”)

  Flora doesn’t have much confidence in herself, she tells Helen, ad infinitum, but you can deduce from her stories that she has been loved by the beleaguered people who raised her; and two men so far have asked her to marry them. The young soldier who delivers groceries on his three-wheeled motorcycle to Flora and Helen on their quarantined mountain (there has been an outbreak of polio) finds Flora warm and lovely, though Helen misinterprets his attraction as kindness toward a fool. Even Helen’s snobbish and discriminating grandmother Honora (“Nonie”) was disarmed in her last years by Flora’s faithful letters filled with devotion and indiscreet confessions. (“Goodness, the poor girl thinks I am her diary!”) During their six years of correspondence, Honora had encouraged Flora to make the most of her assets and to “act as if” she has the confidence she lacks. The older woman gives Flora pointers on how to present herself; she urges her to rely on courtesy and, when in doubt, to remember that “spoken word is slave; unspoken is master.”

  By the end of this novel I was surprised how sad I was to let Flora go. Having forced myself, in the character of young Helen, to coexist with an uncunning heart, I found myself, like the old Helen, mourning the loss of this person’s brief presence in my life, even though I kept reminding myself that Flora was “only” a person I had invented.

  During the writing of Flora I noticed that my writing style was undergoing a change. I was shaping a shorter, sharper sentence and working toward an essentialness in theme I found almost severe at times. Was I becoming harder to please or just losing more words? On days when the thesaurus fell short of my needs, I would snatch up the basic word, or the nearest that came to mind, and carry it to the giant dictionary across the room. It was becoming a necessary indulgence to choose. If the ideal choice continued to elude me, I would lug down a volume of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which John Hawkins had given me when he had his apartment remodeled, and sit with the heavy tome shedding red leather crumbles on my lap, browsing and sighing. An hour might go by. No problem: there was no deadline, no contract. Just my pursuit of the perfect match. Who would have guessed that the word uncanny had started off meaning “un-homelike”? No wonder Helen and Flora each felt the other’s home life had been “strange”!

  During the three years I was working on Flora, I also became aware that my methods of work were changing, along with my attitude toward “my career.” I was in my midseventies now, having already gone past the life span of many of my favorite writers. I had outlived Henry James, who died at seventy-two, and before long I would be edging into Thomas Mann’s territory when he was writing Confessions of Felix Krull, at the end of his seventies. That is not to say that I was becoming immune to the ups and downs of publication, the “picks and pans” of the business. A sharp enough “pan” could still send me to bed or on long, furious walks, and an unexpected “pick” could still shoot me into the stratosphere of too much elation (like that bus trip home after my first Today show in 1982, when I felt sure I had exceeded my limit of public exposure and was heading for a stroke). Even today, the “too much” highs, when they occur, make me feel less comfortable than the old familiar lows, when I can always buttress myself with the long-ago retort from the raven-haired tomboy in the 1967 Writers’ Workshop, after her compeers finished trashing her story:

  So? What do I risk? Obscurity?

  During the composing of Flora, I found myself abandoning my computer screen and ergonomic kneeling stool and settling into the arm
chair across the room with a pen and notebook. This was a dramatic change. From the age of nine, I had typed my stories, hunt-and-peck style, the way my mother did. Her typewriter kept its place on the kitchen table as long as I lived in her house, and I was welcome to it whenever she wasn’t clacking away. I had my own typewriter in college and didn’t need one at the newspaper (though when I was transferred to a bureau and had to send stories over the Teletype, I did what Emma Gant did in Queen of the Underworld: painted the letters and numbers on the blank keys with silver nail polish). Until Flora I had composed my first drafts on typewriters and later on computer keyboards. Handwriting was reserved for my journals and for correspondence requiring the personal touch.

  But now I was opting for the armchair and its hassock and an array of notebooks, pens, and pencils. I discovered I liked the view from the armchair: my empty computer screen on its desk and a lineup of all my American hardcovers on the shelf above. It opened a new perspective on time. One day, like the millions of writers before me, I would leave behind an empty desk; however, I would also leave behind a row of books.

  One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks.

  (Could I accept imagining myself into a manipulative child? I probably was one. Playing one person against the other. That first intimation that you are being used for someone else’s purposes. Or that you are going to make use of someone for your purposes.)

  (There have been characters like Flora. Elizabeth Bowen’s Irene in The Death of the Heart: “Irene herself—knowing that nine out of ten things you do direct from the heart are the wrong thing, and that she was not capable of doing anything better—would not have dared to cross the threshold of this room.”)

  The empty desk

  “I discovered I liked the view from the armchair: my empty computer screen on its desk and a lineup of all my American hardcovers on the shelf above.”

  The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.

  The guests, stranded by an autumn storm, were gathered around the fire. Someone said, “There’s really nothing you can do about weather like this except wait it out. That’s probably how ghost stories got started.”

  “A fear you can control to take your mind off the fear you can’t,” suggested someone else after a wicked slash of lightning.

  Opening of the abandoned preface to Flora

  Remembering Charlotte Brontë’s handwritten notebook pages of Jane Eyre under glass at the British Library, I had to stop myself from writing the same page over and over until it was as pristine as Charlotte’s. Even if all of her pages were as unflawed as the ones on display, I wasn’t going to get very far if I allowed myself no crossouts. I enjoyed the sensuous glide of my Pilot rolling ball pen over the thick, creamy pages of the Levenger Notabilia notebooks. Covering the lines with black, slanted letters wet from the pen connected me with the flow of my whole life. The St. Genevieve nuns taught us to write using the old Palmer method, to which I later added flourishes and ornaments of my own. This method, which stresses shoulder and arm involvement, went out of fashion in the 1960s but is having a comeback as a teaching tool for those who have limited use of their fingers. It also helps prevent cramping. During my book tour for Flora, I would hear many parents and grandparents lament that state schools had dropped the teaching of cursive writing. Bill Griffith, the curator of Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, told me his nine-year-old son had been crushed: “But, Daddy,” he protested, “I need to learn the secret writing.”

  Yes, there is something personal and meditative about “the secret writing.” A slowing-down feeling of privacy and play.

  But when does “play” turn into procrastination, like the old joke about the writer who has to sharpen all his pencils and polish all his shoes before he can begin to work?

  “Well, you know what Casals said about play,” a friend told me when I was wondering aloud whether my newfound “work habits” of leisurely penmanship and drawing and cutting out pictures of houses and people and three-wheeled motorcycles might not be dawdling—or worse, the beginning of senility.

  “No, what did Casals say?”

  “‘The first twenty years you learn. The second twenty years you practice. The third twenty years you perform. And the fourth twenty years you play.’”

  Performances

  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.”