Scribblers Page 16

  The April 6, 1990, issue of the Rocket ran sixteen pages and sold for ten cents; the yearly subscription rate was ten dollars in North Carolina and twelve outside the state. There are two pictures on the front page. One is of the Penderecki String Quartet, “one of Poland’s finest chamber ensembles,” scheduled to perform at the Blowing Rock Arts Center ten days hence. The other shows the fledgling author holding her dog. “Jan Karon’s ‘Father Tim—The Mitford Years’ begins this week,” the caption says. “Scheduled to appear weekly in the Blowing Rocket, the feature will share the everyday trials and tribulations of Father Tim as he goes about his parish duties.”

  Inside the paper, an illustration by Jan’s own hand decorates the first installment. It’s Father Tim’s face viewed straight on. He’s bald save for a single tuft in the middle and a dark fringe around the sides. He wears round glasses and a preacher’s collar. It’s a prototype for the drawings that will later appear in more than eight million copies of Jan’s books.

  An editor’s note promises that the columns “will give readers an opportunity to enjoy a return to the writing style and content of newspapers of a previous era, when fictional serials were the dominant theme of major newspapers around the world.”

  The principal difference between Jan’s original serial and At Home in Mitford, the first of the novels, is that the opening several installments in the Rocket focus almost exclusively on Father Tim’s adoption of Barnabas the dog. By the time she reworked the columns in novel form, Jan had the good sense to get her several story lines up and running earlier, which makes the novel version quicker and tighter. I don’t have the time to compare the two side by side at length, but she seems to have found the rhythm that would carry through the entire novel series by the eighth or ninth column.

  Of greater interest is the author’s note that follows the farewell installment in the Rocket of April 24, 1992. After thanking her friends, neighbors, and readers, Jan promises “a long list of acknowledgments in the book when it’s published.

  “So, when is it going to be published?” she continues.

  “The answer is:

  “I don’t know.

  “Two well-known publishing houses have declined the manuscript, one ‘after several careful readings.’

  “Does this mean it’s not a good book?

  “Not necessarily.

  “Agatha Christie sent her first novel off to five houses before she got an acceptance. Beatrix Potter, discouraged because no one wanted to publish Peter Rabbit, decided to self-publish. Ten years later, the little book was selling in the millions.…

  “The good news is that I believe in this simple, wholesome book with its genuine, ordinary people. Now, all we have to do is find an editor with whom the chemistry is right.…

  “If you’d like to see more wholesome fiction on shelves that are overcrowded with the lurid and sensational, please pray for Father Tim.…

  “P.S. Several readers have written to say they’ll miss Father Tim and all the gang. Actually, I’ve been missing them terribly since I completed the manuscript last October. So, I’ve decided to begin the sequel even before the original has found a publisher. This, my friends, is what’s known as an act of faith.”

  Even when Karon located that special editor and publisher, her books weren’t an instant success. My copy of A Light in the Window, the second Mitford novel, is a first edition—that is, a trade-paperback original bearing the imprint of Lion Publishing. Curious as to how the series found its first home with the now-defunct, Illinois-based subsidiary of a British house, I track down David Toht and Bob Klausmeier, her editors at Lion.

  “I’m guessing she began like everyone else, trying the New York houses and not succeeding. Was that the case?” I ask Toht.

  “Well, it’s interesting,” he says. “We kind of started the Mitford series because she did succeed with a New York house.”

  “Way back, the way we first got to know Jan was she sent us a children’s book,” Klausmeier says. “She originally sent it to the U.K., and the children’s editor over there suggested she try through the American office. And so she sent me the children’s picture book that became Miss Fannies Hat. When we finally decided we wanted it, she had also sent it out to a New York house—Putnam, I believe—and they wanted it. And so she apologized and said, ‘Well, I’ve got this serialized thing that I’ve been doing for the local paper, and it’s actually a novel, or I’m planning to turn it into a novel. Would you like to look at that manuscript?’ So I said sure, and she sent it on then, and that was the beginning, At Home in Mitford”

  “We were very much impressed,” Toht says. “Being a branch of an English company, we imported a lot of British books, with inevitably a British orientation. And these were so wonderfully American. I must say, I think we pretty early on thought that these were going to do well, certainly for us. Not as well as they finally did, but …”

  “What was the arrangement?” I ask.

  “We contracted for three books,” Toht says. “They were just perfect for us. We were trying to produce books about orthodox Christianity without a distinct denominational relationship, books that would be of interest to people who were unfamiliar with the faith or outside the faith or also inside the faith—we called them ‘gentle readers’—our assumption being that the Christian world view is one of many that can inform characters in a book, and be a perfectly valid approach. So we had fiction titles as well as general reference titles related to the Bible and the Christian faith, and a line of children’s books.”

  “I guess the attractions of Jan’s books were Father Tim himself, and the clean story, and the positive image of Christians,” I say.

  “In her books, aspects of the faith were really nicely integrated into the plot, because he’s a priest. And they’re also just great stories. I consider her really a humorist almost, because they’re very, very entertaining books. But they weren’t preachy books. That’s what we were seeking, something that sort of integrated Christianity into good fiction.”

  “But the books didn’t have much success with you, did they?”

  “Five to ten thousand copies for the first year would have been fine,” Toht says. “I cannot recall the numbers. We were in the turmoil of being sold. It was pretty nightmarish. The U.S. entity had never made a profit, so we were sold to David C. Cook. This was just about a year after we contracted with Jan. And that proved to be a pretty unsatisfactory marriage. Jan, among her many strengths, had really sound ideas for promoting her books, having been in advertising recently. Many of these she was going to handle herself at very low expense to the company. I was all for them, but the bosses just didn’t agree that the books were worth promoting to the degree that they deserved.

  “We knew we had something, but we didn’t even get to the national book convention until after we were sold. And I remember, I really wanted to make the whole booth sort of a mini-Mitford, and just let that title be the one we really promoted, because we really felt good about it.”

  “How did things finally fall apart?” I ask.

  “While I was there, we published the first one, and then I resigned and started my own business and was asked by the new Lion entity in the U.S. to edit her next two books. And then Jan called me and said she was really disappointed in how things were being handled with her new contacts through David C. Cook. You know, people weren’t calling her back, and they weren’t backing her ideas for promotion. And I said, ‘I think if you went to them and just said, “Could you release me from my contract?” they might go along with it.’ Because David C. Cook handled mostly children’s books. That was their forte. And they did. They released her from our three-book contract.”

  “After the first two, that was.”

  “Yeah. And so on she went to Viking/Penguin. Unfortunately, we had our horse shot out from under us. It was kind of a tragic story.”

  From the original Blowing Rocket drawings to those in the Lion editions, Father Tim’s severe looks sof
ten, his hair making a miraculous comeback and his glasses growing less prominent on his face.

  But it is in the Viking/Penguin versions of the early books that Mitford and Father Tim are fully realized. The drawings show Father Tim about to get knocked ass-over-teakettle, fending off a joyful attack by Barnabas the dog; Father Tim astride his new motor scooter, the townsfolk gathered around to cheer his bravery; Father Tim and Emma, the church secretary, frowning over one of the boxes containing the office computer; Father Tim in the barber chair, about to be shorn by the slightly slutty Fancy Skinner. To observe the progression from weekly paper to small publisher to major house is to witness a franchise being born.

  Jan Karon has taken her lumps along the way. She’s seen as a saleswoman first and a writer second. She’s “a marketing wizard” who’s “every bit as sincere as she is slick,” according to Newsweek. Her books aren’t generally reviewed by the big newspapers. And when she does receive attention from a major source, she probably wishes she hadn’t. “The promise of [an] easy union with the divine is a large part of what has made Karon successful,” opined The Atlantic. “But authentic or not, it strikes this [reviewer] as Sunday-school religion: memorize a Bible verse and get a Jesus sticker.… The Mitford books are short on wit, poetry, and insight.… They seem … like children’s books for adults.”

  True, the books touch on unpleasantries like child abuse, illness, and alcoholism, but there’s never a doubt everything will be rosily resolved by the last page. Kirkus has called them the “literary equivalent of comfort food.” Take up a Mitford book after an overnight rest and it’s confounding to try to remember the last thing that happened in yesterday’s reading.

  Then again, there aren’t many critics who’ve invigorated an entire category of literature—Christian fiction. Karon identified a void in the marketplace, and a public hungry for clean, gentle novels marched forth to buy them by the armload.

  In many cases, they marched all the way to Blowing Rock, where they roamed the village vainly trying to tie local people and places to their Mitford equivalents. Initially, the Main Street merchants—the same sort of people trusting enough to leave a stranger locked alone in the newspaper office—obliged when asked for directions to the author’s cottage, easily identified by the “Peter Rabbit Slept Here” sign outside. Karon suffered so many fans camping on her lawn and otherwise straying beyond the bounds of propriety that she had to establish a primary residence elsewhere.

  The merchants have since learned their lesson, though. And the author is forgiving. She returns often.

  I’m half-dozing one Saturday morning after the long drive to my writers’ group meeting. It is the portion of the program when the guests in attendance briefly introduce themselves. It usually holds little interest for me. They’ve written some stories and are trying to find an agent, or they’ve entered the first two chapters of their novel in a contest, or they’re working on some poems and need direction and support.

  The woman sitting next to me is new. She’s in her sixties and plainly dressed in an old windbreaker. I don’t notice much about her beyond her hands, which have the kind of toughened fingertips and well-worn nails that don’t clean up even when they’re carefully washed. She works in the dirt. She’s a farm woman or a serious gardener.

  When it’s her turn to speak, I sit up straight. Her name is Joan Medlicott, and she’s the coauthor of a book called Celibate Wives: Breaking the Silence.

  I’ve never spoken to the woman, yet I already know more about her than I should.

  The publisher generated little publicity for the book, she says, yet she knocked on doors herself until she was invited to be a guest on Good Morning America and other such shows. She’s also written a couple of self-published collections of Virgin Islands tales.

  I’m not sure I’ve heard this last part right. I have no idea how to reconcile folklore and sexless marriages.

  Joan pays the fee to join the writers’ group but to my knowledge doesn’t attend any further meetings. Still, she must keep in contact in some fashion, because the news circulates six months or so later that Joan has scored a contract with St. Martin’s for a series of woman senior-citizen buddy novels set in the Asheville area. Again, this choice of subject matter is hard to square with her previous work.

  I’ve ordered many books from out-of-print dealers and never felt compelled to explain my purpose until now. “I need a book you have called Celibate Wives,” I tell the lady over the phone, then quickly add, “I’m doing some background research on one of the coauthors, Joan Medlicott, who now writes novels for St. Martin’s.”

  I don’t read much popular psychology, but I’m impressed with the book’s even-handed treatment of its subject, and especially with Joan’s willingness to open the text with her own case history, in which she frankly discusses her failed sexual expectations following her marriage at age eighteen, the frustration that drove her into an extramarital affair, and finally her divorce after three children and more than fifteen years. She does all this without laying blame on the man she still acknowledges as a good husband generally and a fine father and provider. Clearly, this is a woman with some starch to her.

  Joan was born in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Her early marriage interrupted her education. She went back to college at twenty-nine, but because she moved frequently for her husband’s job—to Chicago, New York, Florida, Switzerland, Germany—she didn’t complete her bachelor’s in history for ten years. A self-starter, she also took correspondence courses in horticulture. By the time she returned to St. Thomas in 1964, she knew enough about tropical plants to be hired as director of the Division of Beautification for the Virgin Islands. She remarried in 1967 and earned a master’s in counseling while living in Florida in 1973.

  After Joan had worked as a therapist for a dozen years, she and a colleague discussed celibacy in their marriages over dinner one night. Knowing the lack of literature on a tender subject that affected some of their clients, they placed ads in local and national publications seeking the stories of women living in sexless marriages. They also raised the subject discretely with the hygienists at the dentist’s office, fellow diners at restaurants, and other unsuspecting folk. And so Joan’s writing career was born, though it was soon to assume a different shape.

  She and her husband moved to Barnardsville, a half-hour north of Asheville. Joan was soaking in the bathtub one day when an idea for a novel struck her.

  “Well, I don’t know what happened,” she tells me during a phone conversation. “These pictures kept coming. They just kept coming and coming. And I was working on something else. I had determined to write a novel about the celibate issue. But these ideas just started to come—a conversation, a visualization of the people—and finally I just set everything else aside and started working. And the minute I did, it was channeled. I don’t know how else to tell you. And that may sound really odd to people, but I would open up the computer and start to write. I had no plan, I had no plot, I had no idea what was happening, and it just unfolded.”

  What came to her was the notion of three senior women—cautious, self-doubting Grace Singleton; outspoken Hannah Parrish, a former professional gardener now plagued by physical problems; and fragile, grief-stricken, French-accented Amelia Declose—living in a dreary Pennsylvania boardinghouse. Emotionally scarred, beginning to break down physically, on uncertain terms with what remains of their families, they’ve lost all sense of usefulness and are becoming wards of the system.

  That is, until Amelia responds kindly to a letter from an unknown relative in the North Carolina mountains. They strike up a correspondence; the elderly gentleman grows ill; Amelia receives notification that he has died and left his farmstead to her.

  Grace is the only one of the three friends who can drive. They resolve to pack her old station wagon, leave the lives they hate, and remove themselves to the pinpoint village of Covington four states away. There, they set about renovating the farmhouse, pursuing new avocations,
finding love, working out their relationships with each other, overcoming their children’s protests at their new lifestyle, and generally reviving their spirits in the mountain air.

  It’s a great concept for a series of popular books designed to appeal to mature women. The first installment, The Ladies of Covington Send Their Love, comes out in 2000. The Gardens of Covington, From the Heart of Covington, and The Spirit of Covington follow within two years. Joan’s deal is for hardcovers and paperbacks both.

  I ask her what it was like to begin writing fiction at age sixty-six. “That must take a certain self-confidence, to believe you could find success after starting so late,” I say.

  “And a certain lack of attaching age to what you can do,” she says. “I don’t attach age to it. I may walk slower, I’ve had trouble with a knee, and I’m careful where I place my feet. And that’s okay. But as long as I’m well, and as long as I’ve got my mind and my fingers, I have to write.

  “I think people have different kinds of minds and different belief systems. I’m a person who always began new careers knowing nothing about them but certain that they would unfold, as these stories unfold. I’ve always been a storyteller. My grandchildren would come to me and say, ‘Grandma, tell me a story,’ and I would say, ‘Give me the name of a character or an animal or something you want to hear about,’ and they would say a stone, a troll, a monster, or whatever, and then I would make up a story.”

  “How long did it take you to place the first book?”

  “It took about two and a half years to get it in shape. It didn’t take long to get an agent. I sent out query letters to twenty-five agents and received twenty-four no’s and one yes. So, naturally, you’re so grateful to get an agent, you take the agent gladly. And she was an old-timer in the business and placed the first book very quickly with St. Martin’s Press. It was a two-book contract to start with. And then they wanted two more books. But I’m not with them anymore. I’m now with Pocket Books.”