NONFICTION
‘Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir’
By Gail Godwin
Bloomsbury, $25, 208 pages
Gail Godwin was a 31-year-old, twice-divorced graduate student when she wrote “St. George,” a beguiling little fable that says much about her eventual celebrity.
The story involves Gwen, a driven but lonely English scholar who cracks open an egg and finds a baby dragon inside. As the dragon grows, so does his appetite for precious gems. Realizing the fire-breathing pet no longer fits in her bathtub, Gwen faces the tough choice of either killing or releasing the creature.
Godwin explains the genesis of “St. George” in her latest book, “Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir,” revealing that the story’s true subject isn’t romance or motherhood, but her own insatiable passion for words. “Writing had lived inside me since I was a little girl, and the need to write had continued to grow like a beast, but how to give it the room it needed and not become a bitter human being?”
And grow it does. Fourteen novels, three nonfiction works and two story collections later, Godwin calls the new memoir a mediation on the hunger to be published. It’s also a fascinating, if lopsided, record of Godwin’s 45-year career in publishing — yet another beast.
In a lengthy epigraph, Thomas Wolfe describes the North Carolina landscape as “raw, powerful and ugly.” The phrase applies to the treacherous industry the memoir examines. Godwin skips over most of her autobiographical record (born in Alabama; raised in Asheville, Wolfe’s hometown, by an artistic mother) and begins the book in 1958. The narrator is an ambitious journalism student at the University of North Carolina with a twice-weekly column in the Daily Tar Heel and dreams that her novel in progress will make her famous.
A scout from Alfred A. Knopf does not agree. The rejection proves to be the first of many. Godwin gives only scarce details about ensuing adventures — a hurried marriage and divorce; gigs in Miami, Copenhagen, and London. These years were covered in her previous two-volume collection of journals. Godwin goes deeper, to a point, when tracing her creativity back to the made-up stories she and her mother traded. “It became comfortable for me to cast my life, her life, into the mold of a story.”
Such skills eventually land her at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, studying fiction under Kurt Vonnegut. At age 33, the long aspiration to be published is fulfilled with “The Perfectionists.” Three of her next four novels become finalists for the National Book Award. One touching passage describes the peculiar sensation of looking back on past triumphs and the paradox of being an unpublished grad student, an in-demand author and septuagenarian widow all at once.
“When recalling today that seven major New York houses were bidding for my book … I feel there are still three of me in one skin and none of us can quite believe it.”
That one skin got the chance to rub a lot elbows. Literati stars of the ’70s and ’80s show up in colorful anecdotes about attending John Irving’s 25th birthday party, or surviving an arduous hatchet job at the hands of editor Gordon Lish, aka “Captain Fiction.”
The book’s tone darkens noticeably in its middle third. Godwin witnesses upheavals that shake the major publishing houses. In the early 1980s, the industry enters what her agent calls the “ungainly and ruthless stages.”
While early chapters of “Publishing” tend to tantalize with crumbs from longer stories, these uncomfortable years are documented with a curious, often tedious, comprehensiveness. The rehashing of decades-old squabbles over titles, rewrites and contracts comes with a whiff of score-settling, making the reader wonder if those old fears about bitterness might have been prescient.
Like the distraught scholar of “St. George” feeding jewels to a hungry dragon, Godwin finds herself settling for lower advances and paying for newspaper ads to promote her later novels. Yet, in the midst of such indignities she also displays a buoyancy that’s invigorating. In 2006’s “Queen of the Underworld,” Godwin gives a nod to Jane Austen’s “heroine whom no one but myself will much like” and names her main character “Emma.” She writes: “At the start of the novel, I resolved not to have an older, mellower Emma looking back on her embarrassingly vainglorious young self who was hell-bent on making it as a top journalist, famous novelist, and femme fatale — all three as soon as possible. No, I would stay right inside young Emma and we would do our worst together.”
The same is true of the defiant voice that keeps the pages turning in “Publishing,” even as the memoir mellows, pleasantly, in later chapters. Godwin’s focus turns from political tiffs and indignities to more tactile matters: changes in her writing tools and routine, “the sensuous glide” of a rolling ball pen over notebook pages. The trance-like finale is surprisingly humble, toasting the “forerunners, inspirers, empowerers … writers helping other writers.”
“Publishing” makes its intentions and target audience clear in the subtitle, “A Writer’s Memoir.” The book presumes a certain familiarity with the Big Six (now Big Five) monarchy of publishing houses. Still, Godwin shapes the ups and downs of her writing life into a unique contemplation of artistic “success-hunger.” Her account of almost a half-century in the book business can be sometimes petty, other times poetry, and just as vexing as the industry it chronicles.
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