Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (24 page)

Olive Ann told us that when she received Joan Kerr's letter the following week, she was so happy, she cried. “Boy howdy,” it began, “that is a fine book you have sent us. Katrina Kenison, our editor, and I can hardly wait for the concluding chapters!” Olive Ann had never let herself set her sights on getting published; now she had a publisher eagerly awaiting the rest of her manuscript. “Hurry up with the conclusion,” Joan wrote, “so Katrina and I can take the ms. to Chester for preparation of an offer. And congratulations on a superb job.”

Olive Ann treasured this letter for the rest of her life. “Reading your warm, encouraging letter,” she wrote to Joan, “is the most exciting thing that has happened to me since Andy and I got married and had babies.” She estimated that it would take her till mid-November to finish the book, depending on how much rewriting she decided to do. “I have never seen a first-draft sentence that couldn't be improved,” she wrote. “As you can imagine, your letter has put wings on my imagination.” But while Chester and Joan waited in New Haven, Olive Ann found herself waylaid in Atlanta.

As would be the case all too often in the years ahead, her inspiration and good intentions were thwarted by illness. After a week of high fever, she ended up in the hospital with an infection. Then, just as she felt up to working again, an inner ear problem brought on a few days of dizziness. “That too is passing,” Olive Ann wrote to Chester, “but so is time. If I were not a wife, mother, and housekeeper, and if I did less rewriting, I could go like a nine-day wonder and still finish before Thanksgiving. As it is, a more realistic deadline is mid-December.”

It was worth the wait. “If you think it is unsatisfactory in any way,” Olive Ann wrote, “I will try again.” In fact, there was remarkably little to be done. All those years of polishing had paid off. Olive Ann may have created Grandpa “free of the burden of perfectionism,” but she allowed herself no such freedom. She had been as meticulous with the details as Angus Perkerson himself might have been, carefully checking all the historical facts, confirming the authenticity of the dialect, and scouring the manuscript for typographical errors. She had also taken Anne Edwards's advice and engaged an agent in New York. Five days before Christmas 1983, Chester called her to say he was ready to make an offer.

That day, in a gesture so characteristic of her, Olive Ann took the time to share her good news with her old Plot Club friend, Wylly Folk St. John, now widowed and in a nursing home. “Today has been a red-telephone day,” she wrote. “The first thing I could think of after calling Andy was to write you and thank you for saying all those years, ‘If I could do it, you can too.' I never believed that made it so, because you knew instinctively what I had to write for eight years to learn—how to put together a novel. But your encouragement—back when writing a novel was not even a gleam in my eye—has meant everything to my keeping on trying. One thing I have to accept is that I can't tell Mother and Daddy or Ma Sparks or Tom [Wylly's husband] about it. But accept we must in the death part of life.”

The encouragement of others meant a great deal to Olive Ann. Now that Chester had actually offered to buy her novel, Olive Ann wrote to Joan, “I think anybody who suffers from low self-esteem should get letters from you, Joan. I feel quite confident as an article writer but one reason I had to work on this book for eight and a half years is that I was, and felt like, a total amateur at fiction. So to have you tell me enthusiastically and warmly that things I tried have mostly worked is very gratifying.”

Eight years after she had begun to write, with the threat of cancer hanging over her, Olive Ann Burns found herself in remission from lymphoma, a finished novel to her credit, and an enthusiastic offer from the very first publisher to have read it.
Cold Sassy Tree,
as we now agreed to call it, would be published in the fall of 1984.

After so many years of working alone, Olive Ann loved the collaboration of the editing process, which we began the day after New Year's, 1984. I knew from our first telephone conversation that this would be more than a business relationship. That day, I took a deep breath and picked up the phone to tell our new author that, much as I loved her book, I thought it could be made even better if we cut it by about a fourth; there were too many incidents that did nothing to advance the plot. “I'm game if you are,” she said, adding, “I look at it as a challenge to cut and at the same time make the book better.”

It was clear that all of this was simply great fun for her. Business would be done, of course, but above all, we would have a good time. For Olive Ann, that meant getting to know each other. I wanted to hear all about her and how her book had come to be—but Olive Ann said, in her gently insistent and irresistible Southern accent, “Tell me about
you.
” Years later, as I sorted through her papers after her death, I found notes she had made during that very first phone call—about our publication plans for her book, yes, but also about where I was born, where I went to college, and how many people were in my family. Even then, in that first rush of excitement at becoming a published author, Olive Ann was as interested in the people she would be working with as she was in what would happen to her book. She was tremendously happy that
Cold Sassy Tree
was going to be published at last, but she was not at all impressed—and she knew there was a difference.

The next day, Olive Ann sat down and wrote a letter answering all my questions—and some I never would have presumed to ask. She described her childhood in Banks County and in Commerce. She wrote, “1906 is a whole generation before my time, of course, but it is interesting that even in 1934 they still could produce a few tottery old Confederate veterans in uniform to sit on the stage for our Southern Memorial Day exercises at school, and there was always a Confederate flag—though by 1934 they had a U.S. flag, too. The war was still bitterly discussed on front porches, and I never met a Yankee till I was in high school in Macon, Georgia. When I told my mother's mother I was in love with a Yankee (she was five years old when Sherman's soldiers ransacked her home), she said there must be a few good ones.” I think this was her way of letting me know that, despite my own Yankee heritage, she would be willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, and would consider me a “good one” until she was proven wrong.

We had decided that I would suggest cuts and editorial changes on one copy of the manuscript while she made her own on another, and then we would put both versions together and decide what should go and what should stay. Despite her fear that the dialect might be overdone, I felt she had written it to perfection—that it was, in fact, one of the novel's greatest achievements. We worked to hone the story line while preserving as many as possible of what Olive Ann called “the nonessential stories and dialogue that make the characters alive and what they do believable, and that also help to color the time and place.”

She was particularly fond of her “dying stories.” Andy described
Cold Sassy Tree
as “a funny book about death”—a theme that had never occurred to Olive Ann. As she said, “There's just no way to avoid the fact of life called death in a book set in the year 1906. Folks died a lot back then.” But it wasn't quite that simple. Like many Southerners, Olive Ann had a well-developed appreciation for good dying stories. “If Southerners get going on dying and funeral stories,” she said once, “a party can last till 3:00
A.M
.” After Granny Blakeslee dies, at the beginning of the novel, Will Tweedy spends a morning alone in her house, missing her. He says, “One thing I got on to that morning, with the house full of Granny and empty of her at the same time, was the notion that she'd have hated dying so plain. Like doctors and undertakers, she really told good dying stories. There wasn't a grown person in Cold Sassy who couldn't pass away the time after Sunday dinner by recollecting who'd died of what when, but Granny was the only one I ever heard be interesting about it.” Needless to say, Olive Ann could be pretty interesting on the subject herself. In the end, we arrived at a compromise—her favorite dying stories would remain intact, and the ones she could bear to sacrifice would go, in the interests of space and pacing. Typically, Olive Ann turned our deliberations into a good story; she loved to tell how her Yankee editor had never heard anyone tell dying stories and couldn't understand why there were so many of them in the book. That would always set people shaking their heads, asking “You mean, you had stories that she made you take out of the book? Well, what were they?” One way or another, Olive Ann got to tell her dying stories; after the book came out, she even wrote a
Sunday Magazine
article on the subject.

During the spring of 1984, we sent revisions back and forth and talked on the phone almost daily. Olive Ann loved every minute of it, but her happiness was tempered by the discovery that Andy now had lymphoma himself. She had suffered from side effects during chemotherapy, but she had never been terribly sick. Andy endured the treatments with his usual good grace and humor, but, in addition to losing every hair on his body, he was violently ill almost continuously for two or three days after every treatment. In February, he was hospitalized, and Olive Ann sat at his bedside, editing the manuscript. She sent the first batch back to me right on schedule. “I look back in amazement to all I've done besides be a compassionate wife in the five weeks since Andy went to the hospital,” she wrote. “Sitting with him at the hospital, I went through the first 600 pages, coordinating your copy and mine. Counting the above, I have read through and revised it five times since the original I sent you, including the revisions I made as I ran it through the computer again twice. Much has been smoothed out that way, including the cut parts, and I had a grand time doing it, despite fatigue.”

Before, Olive Ann had written for her own pleasure; now she had a book contract and deadlines to meet. The sense of urgency was new to her, and she rose to the challenge. Olive Ann met every deadline and she went through the entire manuscript yet again to respond to the copy editor's queries and suggestions. She also managed to take care of Andy, attend an aunt's funeral, and help her son pack his belongings for a move to Colorado. (“He left home this morning and I haven't even had time to cry yet,” she wrote in one letter.) Little wonder that, nearly nine years after beginning to write, she took pride in the fact her job was done;
Cold Sassy Tree
was finally ready to go to the printer. “You have to understand that I am not a workhorse type,” she wrote to me. “Besides writing and cooking and housework, I take naps and camping trips and go swimming and read. All such has taken a backseat lately to what in this household is called ‘Mother's Book.' I have really enjoyed the push, though I still find it hard to believe I could do so much.”

Olive Ann added a P.S. to this letter: “I am about to get so I don't shout when I talk to you all in New York. I could say I talk loud so you can hear me way up there. The truth is, I think, that I'm feeling more at home with you all and am getting over the shock and surprise of being publishable as a fiction writer.” For her, one of the best things about having her book published was that it led to friendships with people she never would have known otherwise. She was delighted to find herself suddenly in the company of all these “Yankees,” and she loved to hear the details of the Kerrs' lives in New Haven and mine in New York City—a name she always said with some awe, as if it were as far away and as foreign as the moon.

With the editing done and the manuscript out of her hands, Olive Ann had only to sit back and wait for the second installment of her advance. “I look forward to getting the second check,” she wrote to her agent in New York. “I'm going to have the sofa re-covered and buy an electric skillet with mine. What are you going to do with yours?”

Now that her novel was about to be published, wellmeaning friends warned her not to have high expectations. “Most first novels sell only about five thousand copies,” several Atlanta authors told her, and she had no reason to expect that hers would be different. In a letter to Chester she wrote, “I find myself hoping that the book is a success for all of you even more than for myself. Fame and fortune have come to few writers that I know, so I have no illusions or delusions or frivolous expectations. Having had a marvelous time writing it, and never having thought it would get finished, much less published, I can't lose. But I want it to make enough money to justify the time and enthusiasm you all are bringing to the project.”

Years ago, she and Andy had decided they would live off his salary, and that any money she made from writing would be for nice “extras.” Now, she assured us that “making gobs of money or becoming famous myself isn't even in my daydreams. This sounds naive or insincere, since obviously if T&F makes a lot of money, I will make some too. The point I'm trying to make is that, having no craving for fame and fortune, I expect whatever I do in the way of promotion will just be fun, not a time of anxiety or overblown expectations.”

Just because Olive Ann didn't have any illusions about publicity didn't mean that we weren't thinking about it. We had already decided to pique interest in
Cold Sassy Tree
by producing a thousand bound samples of the first sixteen chapters. In an accompanying letter, Chester Kerr wrote, “When a cheese seller has faith in his cheese, chances are he'll offer you a taste before you buy. We have faith in
Cold Sassy Tree
—in fact we're ebullient about it—and that's why we want to give you a taste of it now. We're sure these pages will whet your appetite for more.” He was right. As soon as these “teasers” were distributed at the American Booksellers convention that May, word began to travel among booksellers that Olive Ann Burns was a first novelist to watch. Early readers of the manuscript were responding with glowing letters and phone calls. Olive Ann claimed that she wasn't “looking any farther ahead than the next project, which will be the galley proofs and getting the house cleaned up,” but it was becoming clear that we would be able to drum up attention for our first-time novelist. Olive Ann was more than willing to help, but she was also wondering what to expect. In a letter to the Ticknor & Fields publicist, Gwen Reiss, she wrote, “Since I'm such a neophyte in this business and have no idea what to expect next fall, could you tell me when the publicity will start?...I assume there will be a lot of autographings in and around Atlanta, and around Georgia, but do you think I'll have to go farther than that? And does that usually slack off, say, in a month, or had I better get my Christmas presents bought before then?”