New Orleans ALA, Monday, June 26, 2006

Gail Godwin
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Dear Librarians and friends of the book, you asked me to speak about how I write and how I am influenced by my readers and critics. Incidentally, I love your logo for this presentation, “The Buzz of Books”: Writers, editors, publishers, publicists, reviewers, librarians, readers, all going round in a circular food chain for the mind, with a little bee posted at the launch of each arrow, to provide the buzz. Specifically you ask, where are my readers while I am writing? Do I try to gauge what they want from me? And what about the reception of my book after publication? How does it -- or doesn’t it -- affect my view of the work?

You couldn’t have given me a more timely assignment, because here I am on this last Monday in June, wrapping up my last public event this year. Tomorrow it’s back to Woodstock, to zip my persona back into its garment bag, and resume the monastic side of authorship.

I’ve titled my remarks to you: “The Two Faces of Authorship in 2006.” Originally, I thought this meant simply the “staying home and writing” face of an author versus the “going out and promoting” face. But now I realize that for me, at this point in my life, it also involves the face of an author’s legacy beyond the face of her career: the long-term face beyond the short-term face.

In 1970, when I began life as a published author, there was almost no visibility required of a writer. My first and second novels didn’t carry jacket photos. Except for Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus and Mary McCarthy, living authors were blank faces to me. No writer I knew of had ever gone on a book tour.

Yet I must have been aware that book tours existed, because as early as 1963, while taking a creative writing evening class in London, I wrote a story about an Anglican vicar who meets God while walking in the rainy English countryside. The vicar was moved enough to record the vision. His vision was published, re-titled by the publisher My Interview with God, and he was sent on a transatlantic book tour. By the end of the tour, his rainy day vision is gone, even his speech notes are gibberish to him, and all he is capable of, behind the lectern of his last tour stop at a small girls’ college in the American south, is to describe to his audience his house, his study, and the surrounding English countryside. He has been stripped of everything except his hospitality. This story, titled “An Intermediate Stop,” to be found in my first story collection, Dream Children, was what you might call my “training story.” This story, rewritten many times, prophesied much about the eventual public side of my writing life, even though at the time I was completely unaware of it.

You stumble into a moist, vision-friendly moment, which has been prepared for by many contemplative hours and by your regular routines of daily obligation -- and then you confront someone or something that moves you or challenges you -- and you write about it. And then you take your vision out into the world, where it charms or offends or is cheered or misunderstood, and then you return home and start all over again from scratch.

I’m glad that my last author appearance in this recent round of book travels is with the librarians of America. It seems fitting, it feels downright symbolic, because my latest two books, my twelfth novel and volume one of a writer’s diary, jointly published back in January, are long past the end of what Calvin Trillin has called a book’s six weeks of shelf life in the stores -- (“same as yoghurt,” he says.) If these two books of mine get to go on to a higher life un-ruled by publicity or returns, that life will be in your keeping.

A new novel begun last summer faithfully awaits me at home. But, as faithful house pets are known to rebel, the new novel will exact a penance for my absence. It always does.

First comes the disenchantment with the work in progress. Which is not such a bad thing. Get past the disenchantment simply by surrendering. Start the book over, going page by page, re-acquainting yourself with its rhythms, making room for new insights, tightening, livening up, until you have fallen in love with your manuscript again. Blessed be DELETE, CUT, COPY, PASTE, and UNDO! When I started off in this business, it was with a manual typewriter, carbons, and whiteout.

After that, I can look forward to almost a whole year of uninterrupted time with what began as a novella about ninth grade girls in a convent school, but which has somehow grown rooms and extensions and decades of history and voices, until to do justice to all the ghosts that haunt this story, I realized I needed the scope of a hefty, full-length novel in which everybody has a say.

This time last June I was several chapters into The Red Nun: A Tale of Unfinished Desires, though it didn’t have its sweep of decades and voices yet. I’m glad I was that far along, because now I have something to come back to.

By this time last June all my work was done on Queen of the Underworld, my twelfth novel, and Volume One of the diary of my apprentice years, 1961-1970, The Making of a Writer, edited by Rob Neufeld, who is one of your own, a librarian and a book critic. [And with us here today.]

But the promotion machine for these two finished books was just “ramping up,” as they say in the trade. I had to rise earlier and earlier to steal quiet time with my Red Nun and my bad little girls before the publishing crew arrived at work down in Manhattan and the phone started ringing and the fax machine began spitting updates and requests with deadlines. Barnes and Noble had made Queen of the Underworld as it’s “Pick of the Week” for January 25, but now they needed me to answer a substantial questionnaire about my favorite books, music, and films, to post it on line for their readers. Likewise, AARP magazine, with its irresistible circulation, was to review the book in January and they wanted me to write a sideline piece about myself that could be posted on line. The Writer magazine was doing an interview, with substantial excerpts from the novel and the journals, and the magazine wanted me to choose the excerpts. [The Writer magazine, by the way, has donated free copies of this issue and you can pick up one at the Random House booth.]

In January 2006, I flew to Miami for the first stop of my book tour, accompanied by my baby brother, Rebel, who is a forty-seven-year-old Professor of Finance and a traveling consultant for the International Monetary Fund. Every night, back at our hotel, my brother and I held a post-mortem on the day’s events. This was a rare opportunity for both of us. Because of our 21-year age difference I was finishing college when he was born and we had never spent so much time together. We discovered on this book tour how much we enjoyed each other’s company and how different our professions were. At the end of our two week tour, when we were in Washington, he said, “I’m glad I came with you. Now I understand your book business better.”

“Please, tell me. What is my book business like?”

“Well, in some ways, it’s a creaking business model. It’s not cost-efficient. And in other ways, it’s valiantly trying to re-invent itself with all this new technology that keeps re-inventing itself every day. You haven’t begun to tap the resources. You all may pay lip service to the concept of target marketing, but you haven’t skimmed the top off its linking and focusing potential.

“Also, your promoters aren’t using you efficiently. With the exception of the Center for Southern Literature reading at the Margaret Mitchell house in Atlanta, which was a highly-coordinated ticketed event, the chosen venues were poor uses of your time. Why read at bookstores with horrible sound systems and crowded spaces, with the cappuccino machine gurgling in the background and the sales help yakking within earshot, just so you can be “on site” to sign the books afterwards? If I were to redo your tour, I would make arrangements with the local public libraries or local universities. Your readings could be packaged as benefits. The bookstores could come and set up tables.

“And there has to be a better way for you to build your momentum -- or jump-start it -- once you’ve got an actual, tangible book to offer. From what I’ve gathered, your publishers are most excited about your book when they’re bidding for it. What was it that one publisher said? ‘I feel like I’m asking you to marry me.’ And then they do really well producing the books, too. These are beautiful advance reading copies and beautiful finished books. A lot of care goes into getting them just right. But by the time the early reviews and interviews for Queen and Making of a Writer started to appear, when the book was actually out there in the stores, and your tour was in progress, your publishers were working on their SEASON AFTER NEXT list or proposing marriage to someone else.”

Returning now to the homebound side of my work, I’m going to copy my vicar’s hospitality at the end of his book tour by inviting you into my study back in Woodstock and showing you what I see when I look up in desperation, or for inspiration, from my computer screen. I see a lineup of all my hardbound books, sixteen in all. Eleven novels, one novella, two collections of stories, a book on the history of the heart, and a first volume of a two-volume journal. I’ve arranged them up there, chronologically, from 1970 to 2006, in their colorful jackets, to give me courage and remind me: if you have done it sixteen times, you can probably do it a seventeenth. And pasted just below them on that shelf’s facing, in 50-point bold type, are the words

You make it up.

That’s because I have to remind myself every single writing day that I am free to make up anything I like. You build stories out of your life’s perceptions, but by remaining free to make it up as you go along, you allow things to slip in that you didn’t know you knew.

Where are my readers for me when I’m writing, you have asked?

I once asked an old priest -- we were standing in his study, in front of his kneeling desk -- “Where, exactly, is God when you’re praying?” He gruffly answered: “Six inches inside that wall.”

I can tell you who is six inches behind me, looking over my left shoulder, but it’s not you, my gentle readers, its my lone, hysterical, nit-picky inner critic. Honestly, it’s a wonder I ever get anything done. I’ve written about him elsewhere, in a New York Times piece called “The Watcher at the Gate,” which you can find on-line. I’ve even drawn his portrait and it’s not flattering. His is posed, face-front, cringing and wringing his hands. I age, but he doesn’t. His favorite sentence is: “Oh, Gail, what if you fail?” I finally found something to quote back to him: Samuel Beckett in his last work, Worstward Ho!

My watcher is still hovering over my shoulder, but that’s all the space I’m giving him today.

When I’m writing, what I am aiming to do is to present my scene so a reader -- and I count myself as a reader -- can wholly enter it. It’s like going ahead into a room before the party starts and making sure everything is there for all of us. I have to draw my characters, even the minor ones, in all their complexities. I can’t go on writing until the scene is real to me and I can feel the people and their dreads and desires moving around in it. This is mostly a matter of visualizing who’s there and what’s happening and then looking for word matches to convey it. My thesaurus is my best friend. To the right of my keyboard is a notepad and a typical day’s scribbling, say, on June 8, when two factions of schoolgirls are competing for power, bears these semi-cryptic notations: 910.9. haughty . . . fey . . . shallow. 141. Mercurial, mobile, immutable. 795.13. Specious, sham, insolent. 554. Showdown . . . emergency.

During the two years while I was writing Queen of the Underworld, I lived daily inside the consciousness of my 22-year-old young woman experiencing her first days as a reporter in the Miami of 1959, sharing a hotel with a fascinating group of Cuban exiles, who believed, as she did for them, that Castro would soon lay an egg and they would return home.

I named her Emma Gant -- the “Gant” after Thomas Wolfe’s voraciously ambitious Eugene Gant; the “Emma” after Jane Austen’s eponymous heroine, about whom Austen said when beginning the novel: “I am going to take a heroine whom nobody but myself will much like.”

Like Austen’s Emma, my Emma moves from self-delusion toward some measure of self-recognition. I did not practice 20-20 hindsight by having a later, wiser, ironic Emma look back on all she hadn’t known at the time (such as: the Cubans weren’t going back home; such as: she wasn’t cut out to be a journalist); nor did I safely distance myself from her foibles.

I wanted to write what is called a kunstlerroman, or apprentice novel about a young woman determined to be a writer. There were plenty of classics recounting the young manhood of a sensitive protagonist struggling towards his creative mission -- James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel -- but where was the novel about the young woman feeling her way toward an artistic calling, the novel I looked for and couldn’t find when I was a young woman?

How well did I succeed in providing such a novel to readers?

The first pre-publication review in Booklist pronounced the novel a voluptuous and radiant bildungsroman. The first two reviews after publication were similar in tone. A DRAMATIC PORTRAIT OF THE WRITER AS A YOUNG WOMAN, was the Chicago Tribune headline. “Finally,” the critic wrote, “after 150 years or more of the novel’s evolution in the U.S., we have a book that more than fills the role of a bildungsroman about a female writer in her formative years.”

On the same Sunday, the Boston Globe’s headline was: THROUGH HER NEW NOVEL’S HEROINE AND HER OWN JOURNALS, GAIL GODWIN REVEALS THE MATURATION OF A YOUNG, HUNGRY WRITER. (“The wizardry of this novel is its pitch perfect rendition of what it was like to be a true solo artist, a female of ambition coming out of the 1950's.” ) When my agent faxed me these two reviews, I went around in a bubble of light-headedness (“Oh, good, They GOT it.”) but the bubble was tinged with the murky stain of foreboding. Having lived through thirty-six years worth of reviews, I know unstinted praise is almost always tinged with spurts of rancor. And this time round was no exception. GET OVER YOURSELF, blandished the headline in USA TODAY. The Washington Post’s Book World took me to task for “a severe lack of authorial distance,” and concluded by wondering wistfully how Emma’s story might better have been handled by Henry James -- “or the novelist Gail Godwin.” A few customer reviewers on Amazon roundly scolded Emma (and her author) for not realizing that the biggest story of all was right under her nose: those poor exiled Cubans, with whom she spends so much of her time. However, that’s their own historical dimness kicking in. In the summer of 1959 there was hardly any press coverage about the Cuban exiles themselves. Neither the newspaper editors who assigned stories or the U. S. government knew what to make of Castro and were being very wary of coming down on the wrong side. Eisenhower solved the problem by going to the golf course the day Castro came to Washington; he left vice-president Nixon to do the honors.

Both The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times Book Review suggested that, for maximum reading experience, the reader should treat Queen of the Underworld and the journal as companion pieces. “TWICE-TOLD TALE OF A WRITER’S EVOLUTION” is the Atlanta headline. “Many novelists write romans a clef (“rô män ZA klé”) says the Times, “but Godwin might be the first to publish the clef with the roman.” [A word to the reader, here: Most of Queen of the Underworld is not autobiographical. That fascinating array of exiled Cubans Emma meets are crafted from bits and pieces of people the author has known or wished to know; the former madam, after whom the novel is named, was carefully and lovingly imagined out of pure longing to befriend such a creature.]

The difference, I found, between this round of reviews and the previous ones was that this time there were far MORE of them, and not just because I had published two books on the same day. Two things have changed. First: more newspapers are syndicating reviews; that way, they don’t have to hire a book editor. So if you are praised or excoriated in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a clone of this review will pop up in six to ten other papers across the country.

Second: anybody can be a reviewer on line, ranging from experienced and perceptive readers to egregiously ignorant ones, who couldn’t recognize a literary device or a classical allusion if it walked past them naked on stilts.

Blog sites, the best of them with their refreshing “beholden to no one” insights, and the worst of them with their not-so-hidden ambitions, proliferate by the hour. Though recently I came across a surprising “resignation” on Slate’s “culturebox.” Titled “This is my last entry; Why I shut down my blog,” the writer confesses that, after five years of the immediate satisfactions of blogging, she was starting to feel that she was “the only one left in the blogosphere without a book deal.” and had decided to just write her novel.

If I were to dig down and try to locate the impulse from which all my novels have grown, I would probably grab hold of some bumpy rhizome-root representing the individual’s struggle through a given place and time and personal circumstances toward selfhood, independence, and authenticity. I am frankly amazed that for thirty-eight years, I have been writing whatever story I felt compelled to write next and have had publishers and readers willing to take a chance on it. I am even more astonished that a few windfalls received from publishers have made it possible for me to write full time for the past twenty-four years. Those windfalls are scarcer for writers starting out today. The publisher who said: I feel like I’m asking you to marry me? Well, reader, I said yes to her. Shortly after I signed the contract she was fired by the company. Her replacement as president and publisher was guess who? The woman at the OTHER publishing house who had been bidding for my novel. This woman was a good sport, however, and we rubbed along amicably until my day of publication. She had arranged a celebratory dinner in Manhattan, during which she was to present me with an oil painting of the cover of Evensong, but earlier that day she was fired, and the painting was eventually sent to Woodstock by UPS. Now both of these publishing houses that bid for me are owned by the same company, and don’t bid against each other.

Finally you have asked how the reception of my work -- the reviews, the response of readers, affects me.

Well, apropos of negative responses, I am the sort of writer who, the minute she sees a can of worms with her name on it, has to open it. I read or listen to the awful words, decide whether the criticism makes sense -- or whether someone was too rushed or tired -- or stupid -- to get it. I may dive under the eiderdown with my cats, or take a long walk in which angry phrases are coined. Once or twice I have gotten joy by naming an unpleasant character after a bitchy reviewer. A person called Sarah Maitland began her review, “Gail Godwin is a good writer, but The Good Husband is not a good novel.” So when I began my next novel, Evensong, I gave my trouble-making evangelist the name Grace Maitland. But, later on in the novel, I changed her name to Grace Munger—a combination that suggest both “anger” and “hunger,” which was much closer to the Grace I had come to know.

Taking my brother’s advice, I am looking for new ways to build on what momentum my books have, to jump-start momentum on the backlist ones, and to rectify mis-readings. My web masters are re-designing my web site and adding links so more readers can discover my body of work. [Here I must emphasize: I want readers to find more ways than ever to discover what I have to offer them, and to sample and taste it, but not to be able to consume the whole thing free of charge.]

This time around, instead of asking the publishers to hire someone to write the author interview and questions for the Readers Circle trade paperback of Queen of the Underworld, I am composing (and donating) my own reading guide and my own set of questions to the reader. When the Readers Circle edition comes out next February, in plenty of time before my April program at the Folger, entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman,” the paperback will carry an after-word in which I discuss the tradition of the kunstlerroman, the apprentice artist novel, so my readers will know where I was coming from. They need to know, if they haven’t figured it out for themselves, that this was not meant to be a “looking back” kind of novel. It is about exile lived within the moment, whether that exile involves just yourself or a bunch of others.

On the positive side, I like to hear from readers who say specific things like, “I read the books your characters are reading, I listen to their music, and I cook their food.” Or “I always learn about some esoteric thing I didn’t know before. Like those misericords hidden underneath the choir seats in The Good Husband.”

It gives me incentive to provide more of the same. Oh, good, I think, now I’ll show them how old Stella Rossignol creates her custom perfumes in Queen of the Underworld.

The first lesson reading teaches us is how to be alone, the second is how to imagine for ourselves. It is a life’s work in progress to build a self, and books help us do it from inside, silently assembling our own mental pictures as we follow the black marks along the white page, not settling for a prepackaged picture of a “forest” or a “castle” or a “spaceship” flashed at us from a flat screen.

We read to nourish this self-in-progress and to learn its authentic interests. The less structure we have within ourselves, the more we have to borrow from outside. Many people have no self. What they substitute for an internal structure -- what Emma likes to call her “unique and untransferable self” -- is a paste-on collage that passes for a self, the pieces snipped from popular culture.

In the long-term, as pictured so beautifully in your logo, it all comes round again -- from authors to editors to publishers and publicists and reviewers -- and back to librarians.

And, in closing, let me give you my take on why we readers and writers depend on you for the future of books.

When the six weeks short-term hoo-hah of book publication is over, that’s when you step in for the long-term.

You are our trained guides through this vast communal field of psyches -- of “untransferable selves” seeking to meet and overlap and interconnect in a worldwide dance of minds.

You are our discerners. There is a glut of information swirling around us, but you have to lead us in separating the significant from the worthless. There are links and relationships that enrich every topic under the sun, but someone has to know where to look for those links and how to make the vital connections. A young reader said to me about Jane Eyre: “That book has something for all the shelves of my mind.”

You are the people who know what shelf to go to, to find the book for the shelves of our minds.

You are the guardians of our long-term library shelves, whether these shelves are Dewey Deceimal or Library of Congress or virtual shelves.

Quite possibly you may also be the guardians of our long-term selves.

Because -- and now there really ought to be a song for me to end on -- because you are what is there after the buzz is over.