Scribblers (12 page)

The sway our parents' lives hold over our own is one of the issues examined in
Evensong.
Margaret Gower Bonner ostensibly leads her father's life. She is now an Episcopal priest at a church in a North Carolina mountain town patterned partly after Highlands, southwest of Asheville. But it
is her mother's legacy that weighs on her. Like her mother, she has married a priest considerably older than she is. Adrian Bonner has a keen intellect like her father but none of the humor to go with it. He is emotionally arrested and sexually ambivalent, twin products of his childhood in an orphanage. He's also sickly. Temptation enters the story in the person of Madelyn Farley, the same woman who once stole Margaret's mother. Margaret has traveled with Madelyn to Europe—to her mother's death site, even. She has met Madelyn's artsy friends and felt the pull of their lifestyle. She has even cared for Madelyn in her infirmity. A critical juncture in the novel comes when Margaret is willed Madelyn's New York apartment and travels north to dispose of the property. Or will she take the apartment herself, heed the call of the broader world, and forsake her tired life with Adrian? Does she have the strength of character to be someone other than her mother's daughter?

My only chance to look at the Gail Godwin Papers at the University of North Carolina is on a Saturday, when the special-collections library closes at one. By the time I make the ninety-minute drive from my home, find a parking deck off campus, walk the half-mile to the library, and sign the forms that allow me access to the collection, it's a little past nine-thirty.

The forty-plus linear feet of materials, thousand-plus folders, and twelve-thousand-plus items encompass drafts and proofs of Gail's novels; plot, character, and theme notes; research matter; financial records; notebooks; early writings penned under various names; some of her mother's writings; photograph albums; texts of speeches; audiovisual
records of some of Gail's public appearances; correspondence with publishers and editors; correspondence with authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, and John Updike; teenage scrapbooks; school mementos; diaries; yearbooks; drawings; items related to her mother's death and half-brother's murder-suicide; even letters from the child witness to the crime.

I barely have time to drink a drop from the ocean.

I'm most interested in Kathleen Godwin's writings. I find some complete issues of romance magazines, as well as pulled pages containing only Kathleen's stories. “Home Is the Hero,” from the October 1945
All-Story Love,
carries the teaser, “One girl collected medals. Did the other collect hearts?” There's also “Memory of a Love Song” from
Love Short Stories
(“Cam was the man Jeanie loved—and his faithless fiancée was her best friend!”), Charlotte Ashe's “Dangerous Kisses” (“Intrigue and love went hand in hand when Pam kissed a handsome stranger”), and numerous others.

When men returned home wanting jobs after the war, Kathleen quit the newspaper before she could be let go. In the late 1940s, she took to writing novels.

Gail speaks highly of her mother's fiction. “I have to wonder how they ever made it into [these] magazine[s],” she wrote of Kathleen's love stories in a
New York Times
piece. “They are too complex for the form into which they have been squeezed.” She tells me Kathleen's three or four complete novels are wonderful.

But none of the novels ever reached publication. “In spots, she writes like the angels,” an editor at Fawcett told
Kathleen's agent. “In others, she hits notes of monstrous tedium calculated to repel the most ardent reader.”

A manuscript of Kathleen's novel “The Otherwise Virgins” is designated Series 4.3, Box 75, Folders 963-966, in the Gail Godwin Papers. Actually, it's a joint mother-daughter effort, written by Kathleen and apparently practiced upon by the young Gail. On the cover page is a handwritten note, probably by Gail, reading, “GG's ‘first novel'—a rewrite of KK's [Kathleen's] novel.”

In the story, Deborah Parrish is a Cardiff College sorority queen, but the arrival on campus of one of her former Johns threatens to expose her past as a high-priced call girl and scotch her engagement to Henry Van Storen IV. Scheming freshman Lisa has come to college for the sole purpose of husband hunting, her quarry being Deborah's old client. Breastless, bookish, bespectacled Jane is a minister's daughter with lesbian leanings who vows to turn Lisa on to the life of the mind.

I'm no literary archaeologist, and the librarian announces closing time before I can read as far as I'd like, but I still feel I can distinguish the handiwork of daughter Gail and mother Kathleen. The description of the students' arrival on campus and the capsule account of Deborah's rise from whore to debutante are textured and rich, but the plot points are so familiar that one could take a stab at outlining the novel without reading past
page 20
.

It's easy to see the influence of the mother who taught, worked for the newspaper, and wrote pulp in her famous daughter who paints, composes librettos, and writes literature.

In
Evensong,
heroine Margaret ultimately repudiates her mother's life by returning home to her husband and raising a daughter of her own.

But some daughters proudly become their mothers and even improve on their legacy.

Evensong
isn't the only novel that makes 1999 a blessed year for mountain writers.

As promised, Fred Chappell provides me updates on his progress in writing the novel that is to be called
Look Back All the Green Valley.
He's efficient. Every time I send him a brief written query, I have a response from him in my mailbox in three or four days.

“I've got 3 chapters so far, probably about 75-90 pages,” he tells me, and in another letter, “I have a fairly well done
Chapter 2
and very rough drafts, almost skeletal in some respects, on 1-5.”

These things don't mean much to me, as I don't even know the conceit of the novel. What's of greater interest is the undercurrent of nagging responsibilities. Fred tells me of speaking at a prep school in Delaware; traveling to a booksellers' convention in Mobile; attending a two-day symposium on his own writing; going to a book festival in Nashville; reading poetry for the National Book Award, for which he is a judge; attending the awards ceremony in New York, at which Charles Frazier's
Cold Mountain
is the surprise winner in fiction; writing book reviews for newspapers; reading a novel manuscript for a friend; writing a foreword for a poetry book; preparing lectures for Nichols State University and the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans; writing a
commencement address for East Carolina University; writing an inauguration ode for the president of Georgia State University; and speaking at a local middle school. Of course, this is in addition to the duties of his full-time teaching job: leading workshops, reading material by the young men and women in his classes, meeting with students for conferences. I wonder when he shoehorns in work on his novel.

And in the middle of all this comes news that Fred has been named the state's poet laureate. In an article in my local newspaper, he calls it “the friendliest, cheerfulest and most harmless of all state-appointed posts.” He might have added “most time-consuming,” too.

“My duties were simply to take poetry to different places, mostly give readings, at high schools, grammar schools, community colleges, colleges, churches, libraries—lots of libraries—retirement homes, all kinds of places,” he tells me later in his campus office. One of his gigs was writing and reading a poem when President Bill Clinton came to the mountains to designate the New River an American Heritage River.

“Everybody wanted new stuff?” I ask.

“For those things that were just readings, I would take a selection of North Carolina poetry from different people. Sometimes, I'd read my own. The hardest thing was to figure out what the hell they wanted. Anyhow, I was asked to write poems for a number of occasions—the opening of a library, the anniversary of a university or a college, the retirement of somebody from a position. So I wrote lots and lots of occasional poems like that. And I read lots and lots of manuscripts from people.”

“That's part of it?”

“That just comes with the territory, I guess. People write a lot of folk poetry and send it to you, and you have to write something nice back.”

But here's what surprises me most. “Not a lick of progress,” he writes in one letter updating me on
Look Back All the Green Valley.
“Just got in the copy-edited ms. of my translation of Euripides'
Alcestis
and it's in a horrible mess—so, Lord knows when I can get back to the novel.”

He translates Greek?

Fred's reticence and modesty make people want to impress him. I remember seeing a few of my fellow graduate students playing erudite with him, telling him everything they'd read and what they'd gleaned from it. Knowing a little about the man, I understood that Fred could polish off their reading lists before breakfast. I listened for a put-down, but it never came. Fred's willing ear and noncommittal nature only made them try harder.

So when I ask him about his translation, I'm on guard against this tendency. I pretend to be indifferent to his accomplishments, inscrutable even. Maybe I've done some Greek translations myself, and I don't need to apologize for them like he does; maybe they're in the folder in my lap even as I sit in his office. Or maybe I know of Euripides but can't recall the name of anything he wrote—aside, now, from
Alcestis.
I could be expert or rube; Fred will never read it in my face.

“I'm guessing the translation is an assignment you sought out, rather than one that sought you out,” I venture.

“No, no, no, that's the one I never would have thought of doing in my whole life.
Alcestis
is such a well-known play,
I'm not sure it needs another translation. But a friend of mine was putting together this translation that he had asked for from somebody else, from a real scholar, and it turned out not to be satisfactory, and he asked me as kind of an emergency measure if I could translate
Alcestis
in I think it was about six weeks, or something like that. And I did, but it was a rush job, and I was so uncertain about how to translate from a language I just barely know.”

“Have you studied it formally, or are you self-taught?”

“Self-taught. I taught myself some Greek, started back when I was in graduate school. I keep it up a little bit now and then.”

“How did he know of your familiarity with the language?” I ask.

“Well, we're old friends. He did a collection of Roman drama, too, and I did a play from Platus for him, which I really enjoyed doing.”

He translates Latin, too?

“But this Euripides, because of my uncertain scholarship, turned out to be the dullest translation,” he says. “I didn't take any chances whatsoever.”

He bad-mouths his laureateship as well.

“The poet who preceded you died during his tenure, didn't he?” I ask.

“He did. It was a lifelong tenure at that time, and they changed it to five years when they got to me. They didn't trust me.”

It's hard to tell what effect all of Fred's obligations are having on his writing. He tells me he's done several rewrites on the ending of
chapter 2
. He indicates in one letter that
he's finished the first three chapters and is moving on to rewrites of the next three, then says in the following letter that his opening chapter needs a complete reworking. He takes his manuscript on the road and reads from it publicly at some of his appearances, but what he gleans from this are mainly ideas for further revisions. “But as far as getting forwarder … No, alas,” he writes.

But maybe this is his usual way of making progress. I remember reading a quote from Fred years ago to the effect that he considers himself an average writer but a first-rate reviser. He apparently goes through several drafts of “handscript” before he ever types his chapters. At no time does a computer seem to enter the process.

There comes a point when it appears he is stalled. “Am looking forward to getting into 5. Lord knows when that might be,” he writes.

And then his next letter says this: “My progress report is: no progress. There simply have been no hours for me to work on the book. And there won't be for some five or six weeks.”

I decide to give our correspondence a rest. I let the requisite five or six weeks pass, then get lazy and go another seven or eight without querying him. By the time I finally write, his ship has sailed.

“Yes, at last I have a draft of
Look Back All the Green Valley,”
he writes.

Movement is quick after that. He mails the novel off; it is accepted by Picador USA; his agent negotiates a deal; a release date is scheduled; his editor asks for revisions; Fred accomplishes those. Our correspondence peters out.

The task he has set himself is complex. The final note in his “octave” of interrelated books, the new novel has narrative and structural obligations to four previous volumes of poetry and three of fiction. “This means that it is top-heavy with theme,” Fred tells me, “and that always means you have to struggle sweatily to find a story that can carry so much thematic weight.” Moreover, it has to fit a framework that combines ten chapters with a prologue, a “midpiece,” and an epilogue. “If the books aren't symmetrically alike, the parallels get lost and the whole edifice is busted,” he says. The novel's dominant classical element, earth, must be easily recognizable, so as to echo its companion fourth poetry volume,
Earthsleep.
And its largest theme—the passing away of the mountain culture—must be perceptible. Lastly, the book's many allegiances to the other seven volumes mustn't keep it from standing on its own without reference to its companions, for those readers unfamiliar with the entire cycle.