by Gail Godwin
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 Lehrers’ library
“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 w
as 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 vagu
e. . . . 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.
