Poet James Seay shares my interest in literary ghosts. He once found Faulkner's resting place with no more to go on than the memory of a couple of old oak trees he'd seen in a photo of the author's burial. He's been as far afield as Moscow, to seek out Boris Pasternak's grave.
“I have spent time in out-of-the-way rooms,” Seay has written, “rooms where people whose work I care about came and left something. It's my theory that gifted people generate a tremendous energyâthough it need not always be manifest on the surfaceâand a residuum of that energy is left behind in places, especially rooms, where the gifted burned up part of their gift.”
Seay once piled a witch-medium and five of her acolytes into a station wagon and led them up the mountains to Asheville, where they held a seance in one of Fitzgerald's old rooms at the Grove Park Inn. Seay brought a couple of Fitzgerald objects with him: a brown paper bag containing a copy of the “Crack-Up” articles and a book with photos of the author, tape covering the spine so the witches couldn't identify it. They were unaware of Fitzgerald's association with the inn. Indeed, they probably knew little of the man.
After some heavy sweating and a few guttural utterances around the table, one of the acolytes took a pen and wrote down a psychic transmission coming in from the other realm. It said, simply, “Damn You Love,” which Seay took as a possible manifestation of what Fitzgerald meant when he commented that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Two names also came over the wire: Tony and Gloria. Seay supposed them to refer to Anthony and Gloria Patch of
The Beautiful and Damned.
That's pretty slim pickings given the trouble he went to in organizing the event, but his results were still better than mine.
It is nine or ten days after the conference when I receive in the mail a photocopy of my book's cover, along with a same-sized mock-up of Bryan Aleksich's proposed redesign. Of course, I have copies of my own book and don't need a xerox of its cover. I suspect he has sent both covers
so I can compare them on equal terms. I also suspect he is the kind of man who will feel indebted to me for reading his manuscript and so is trying to offer something of value in return. Still, the cover is a dead issue for me. Unsure of an appropriate response to Bryan's gift, I don't respond at all.
Four weeks later, I get a call from him asking if he can send replacement pages for a small section of his manuscript he's reworked. I confess that I've been busy with my own writing and have read only to about
page 80
.
“Oh, are you finding it tough going?” he asks.
I assure him not.
Bryan proposes that I drop him a note when I'm done reading, after which he'll phone me at home to discuss the manuscript at length.
His call spurs me, and I finish the novel a week later. Its promising opening notwithstanding, the manuscript has structural problems. Too much space is given the mating dance of the air base's pilots and love-lorn women. Even the flight scenes, which are Bryan's special prideâa mock dogfight, a thunderstorm sequenceâneed a better context so they don't become ends in themselves. It matters little that Bryan has been writing the story for well over three decades. It still needs another draft.
I call to tell him all this. I catch him unaware; he wanted to be the one to phone me. I sense that I'm low-bridging him, though my intention is only to talk while the details are still in my mind. He leaves the line briefly to turn down his music; he fumbles for a pencil or his glasses. But he recovers quickly. He listens without argument or bitterness; he queries me on aspects of the story I
haven't brought up; he makes notes throughout; he takes the criticism just as it is meant; he continues to see the possibility of success.
When I return his manuscript a couple of days later, I include a cover letter I hope will soothe any hurt feelings. “You don't strike me as someone who needs to have things sugar-coated,” it reads in part, “so what you got the other day over the phone was my honest opinion. What I may not have expressed very well is my admiration for what you've accomplished. I think you've brought the novel most of the way to where it needs to be.”
It crosses in the mail a gracious two-page letter from Bryan thanking me for my time.
I still want to understand what writing means to him. Say he continues revising his novel until he grows infirm but never finds a publisher. How will that rank among the disappointments of his life? Is his writing an avocation or a need? Is he near the point of quitting?
I receive an indirect answer to this last question five days later, when Bryan calls me at work. He says he had written the editor at Algonquin who was his first choice to review his manuscript sample at the conference. He has sent that editor fifty dollarsâthe same fee he paid for my servicesâand his first two chapters in the hope that the editor will now provide him a conference-style evaluation like the one he and I had in Asheville.
He tells me this by way of background. The reason for his call is that, since writing the Algonquin editor, he has received his manuscript back from me and has noted the marks I made regarding grammar, punctuation, word choice,
repetition, and the like. He is wondering if he ought to send the editor replacement pages.
I tell him that what he has requested of the editor is rather unusual and that, no, he shouldn't send replacement pages. All the same, I have to admire his moxie.
Sometime during our conversation, I tell Bryan about my Asheville-area writers' group and invite him to attend. I also describe the book I'm working on and confess my selfish interest in him and his novel.
Where I live, the spring rains are quickly forgotten. Unless you water heavily, the ground begins to crack around the Fourth of July, and unshaded grass crunches underfoot like dry cereal. The air is humid, and the skies most summer afternoons fill with storm clouds, but any promise of moisture goes unfulfilled nine times out of ten. By late August, it might take you an hour to dig a hole big enough to plant a sapling, if you cared to try.
But this year is an exception. The previous summer having been so parched that many towns instituted water restrictions, the unusually heavy winter rains are welcome. By early spring, the reservoirs are replenished and the rivers are running at normal levels. By mid-spring, they're topped off. But spring conditions continue halfway into summer, and flooding results. People who've had bone-dry basements for thirty years now have standing water. Mold begins to
grow, starting underneath houses and working its way upward. An employee at a local hardware store tells me he's selling fifty dehumidifiers a week.
One Saturday, I brave our crawlspace to check for moisture and mold. Low and thick with cobwebs, it's one of my least favorite places. At times, I'm flat on my belly squeezing under the water pipes, pulling myself along by my fingernails almost. It takes me forty-five minutes to make the circuit. There are puddles in a few places and, yes, what I take to be mold.
Upon emerging, I'm covered with red-clay mud from top to bottom, front and back. It's the dirtiest I've been since I was a kidâmaybe ever. When I step in the back door to the kitchen, I learn the girls are out of sight upstairs, so I strip to my undershorts and throw my clothes out onto the deck, to be dealt with later.
The phone rings. I'm close to it, but I ask my wife to answer, since I don't want to touch anything. I can hear that it's a woman.
My wife hands me the phone.
“This is Gail Godwin.”
I'm better prepared than I was the first time I thought about approaching her. I've read several of her books and what print interviews and biographical material I've been able to find.
But you'd never take me for an ace interviewer looking at me now.
I wrote her a blind letter introducing myself, describing my book project, and asking for fifteen minutes of her time. Not knowing her preference for a means of responding, I gave
her my home address, home phone, work phone, and e-mail address. I had no real expectation of hearing from her at all. If I did, I suspected it would be by mail, not by phone at home on a Saturday morning. This is not meant as a complaint by any means, but rather as a token of my surprise.
I tell her about the rain, the mold, and the crawlspace, my free hand flailing futilely in my attempt to explain why I'm unable to talk just now. I finally calm down and ask if I can call her back a couple of days hence, to which she graciously agrees.
Gail Godwin is not so much a mountain author as she is an author who happens to be from the mountains. Fred Chappell and Robert Morgan, for example, explore their themes in the context of Appalachian culture in almost all the fiction they write. But Godwin doesn't like to keep treading the same ground.
“My settings move as I move,” she tells me during our subsequent conversation. “It has to do with a writer's quest, what she or he is trying to do, what theme attracts them. One of my themes that attracts me has always been how to move on, how to change the spiritâhowever, whatever it isârather than staying in one place and getting to know all the levels and sublevels, like Faulkner.”
But something about her protagonist Margaret Gower has kept the author herself from moving on. The 1999 novel
Evensong
interests me partly because it's the only sequel Godwin has ever written.
Margaret, the principal character in
Father Melancholy's Daughter,
is six years old when Madelyn Farley, a long-lost
friend of her mother's, comes for a visit to the family's home in Virginia. Madelyn lives the kind of artistic existence Margaret's mother has given up for her stifling life as the wife of a small-town Episcopal priest who is too old for her and suffers from depression. On the afternoon following Madelyn's arrival, no one picks up Margaret at the bus stop. Her mother, it turns out, has accompanied Madelyn on her return north. At first, Margaret's father tells his congregation and his daughter that the trip will reinvigorate his wife's spirit. But months pass and she fails to return. Margaret's mother subsequently dies in a car wreck while traveling in England with Madelyn, leaving her daughter uncertain if she ever would have come home and even if she was having a lesbian affair.
Father Melancholy's Daughter
is told from Margaret's perspective as a college senior.
The tragedies in Godwin's life have been known to find their way into her fiction. Her half-brother's murder of an ex-girlfriend and his subsequent suicide were recast as central events in
A Southern Family.
Godwin's mother died in a car accident near Asheville two years before the publication of
Father Melancholy's Daughter.
Gail Godwin was born in Alabama, her parents, both North Carolinians, having taken temporary residence there for her father's job as manager of a lakeside resort. Her parents soon divorced, after which mother and daughter came to live with Godwin's grandmother in the North Carolina mountain town of Weaverville and then on Charlotte Street in Asheville.
During World War II, the wives of servicemen had an easier time finding work than did divorcees. When people
asked the whereabouts of Gail's father, Kathleen Godwin told them he was fighting the war, which was true, since he was in the navy. After the war, she said he'd died in the fight. When he finally came to Asheville to visit, she claimed he was Gail's uncle.
Kathleen Godwin did just fine without a man. In the mornings, she taught drama, poetry, or creative writing at one school and composition and Spanish at another. In the afternoons, she wrote for the Asheville newspaper. In her later years, Julia Wolfe became enamored of her son's fame and would call the paper whenever she recalled another anecdote from Tom's youth. Kathleen Godwin was the writer dispatched to cover those stories.
“That was so funny,” Gail tells me. “Mother would come home and say, âWell, Julia called again today. She remembered something else about Tom.'
“Her beat during the war years was mainly Oteen, where all the wounded servicemen were. She also covered famous visitors to town. I remember Bela Bartok spent a summer writing music there. She was sent over because the only language they had in common was French. Hers wasn't very good, but she was able to interview him in French. Oh, and when Mrs. Roosevelt would come to visit the servicemen in the hospital, Mother always got her. Mother was so impressed that Mrs. Roosevelt always remembered people's circumstances and names. She would always say, âAnd how's your little girl, Gail?'
“And then whenever Mrs. Wolfe called, Mother would go over to the Old Kentucky Home with her spiral notepad.”
Gail's grandmother took care of the household chores
while Kathleen “went out in all weathers to bread-win for us like a man,” according to Gail. On the weekends, Kathleen earned two cents a word writing romance stories for pulp magazines. She wrote under her own name and a pseudonym, Charlotte Ashe.
Gail attended St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines Academy, a Catholic school in Asheville.
“The thing about the nuns was, we had to write so much,” she tells me. “I wonder if children have to write so much today. We were always writing something. We had to do book reviews, book reports. We had to make a magazine and put stories in it, advertisements, and create the entire magazine ourselves. They were very generous about reading your stuff. I had this one nun, I would write stories in a notebook, and then she would read them on the bus home. We weren't allowed to talk; we sat silently. She would read my stories and then give me a little sign language that they were good.”
But when I ask who was more important to her writing, there is no doubt.
“Let's see, as they say on the grand jury, which I'm serving on now, âOn a scale of one to ten, where's the pain?' On a scale of one to ten, I would say my mother's influence over my writing was an eight, and the nuns were a five. Of course, that adds up to more than ten.”