Scribblers (24 page)

Bryan sinks twenty-seven hundred dollars into his print-on-demand venture. But when he receives the proofs, he discovers that his drawing at the front of the book, designed
to stretch across the title page and its verso page, has been reduced to fit on the title page only; that the font for his chapter titles has been changed, and is now different from the font for the main text; that the margins are too narrow throughout the book; and that his brief statement at the end of the text describing the type font has been replaced by an author biography, which merely duplicates the author biography on the back flap. He's so upset that he withdraws the entire project.

Not to worry, though. Coming out the other side of triple-bypass surgery, Bryan is ready to begin submitting again. He finds a small publisher in the mountains that is happy to take on his Cold War novel. It's due to be released about the same time as my own book. I hope this will bring a satisfactory end to his decades-long devotion. I have no doubt it's a far better novel now than when he self-published it many years ago and took an electric drill to the unsold copies.

I'm also pleased for Frankie Schelly, who once seemed so frustrated over her efforts at placing her social-issues novels. She finally foots the bill for
At the Crossroads,
which centers around four nuns who teach at a parish school threatened with closing. The writers' group members like the novel but not the page design. Frankie apparently agrees; a couple of months later, I read that she's had it laid out again and reprinted. She then releases another novel,
Chance Place.

Frankie proves a tireless promoter, as everyone knew she would be once she got started.
At the Crossroads
is favorably reviewed in
Library Journal,
quite a coup for a
self-published effort. It wins an honorable mention in a contest sponsored by
Writer's Digest,
while
Chance Place
is a finalist for the International Hemingway First Novel Award—though it's actually her second, by my count. She takes a shot at selling foreign rights at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany.

Eileen Johnson continues traveling to Ireland. In fact, her writing inspires a couple of her readers to take trips there, too. After she publishes her regional history tracing Irish roots in Appalachia, and then her Irish cookbook, she undertakes a novel about the potato famine.

Jack Pyle's
The Sound of Distant Thunder,
once submitted to my company in manuscript form, is chosen Novel of the Year by the Appalachian Writers' Association, an award previously won by Robert Morgan, Sharyn McCrumb, and Charles Frazier. Jack is now the author or coauthor of seven books ranging from moon-sign-gardening guides to a mystery novel to a short-story collection to a young-adult novel. He sends me a copy of his latest, largest, and most ambitious novel,
Black Horse, White Rider,
about a New York clergyman's daughter who marries a philandering, slave-holding rice-plantation owner from Georgia.

Steve Brown's energy and creativity in promoting his books are a match for anyone's. He has a series of three James Stuart novels, a pair of World War II novels, and three standalone novels. His Susan Chase mysteries now number six. They're sold in stores, of course, but they're also available through his websites, individually or in a complete set, autographed or not. And he's forged a mass-market deal with one of the Simon & Schuster imprints for five of the Susan
Chase books. Moreover, he's savvy enough to have retained rights to the series. He's pleased that he finally has a contract with a major house, but he still takes special pride in hand-selling his original Chick Springs Publishing editions.

I'm browsing a mega-bookstore out of state one day. One of those catch-all tables toward the front is stacked with books organized by no apparent theme—
The Art of War, Candide, Lolita,
Kafka's
Metamorphosis,
David McCullough's biography of John Adams, a Jonathan Franzen, a Barbara Kingsolver, a David Guterson, a Garrison Keillor.

But wait! There's
America Strikes Back
—touted on the cover as “the exciting sequel to
Of Love & War”
—by Steve Brown. Hey, I know that guy!

I think of writing or calling him when I get home, but I let the moment pass. He'd be thrilled to learn his book is keeping such company. Then again, there's a good chance he knows already.

When Charles Price travels on behalf of his novel published by my company, he has middling results.

We finally agree on
Freedom's Altar
as a title. One day, he is to give a reading at a large chain store. The events coordinator has set him up a lectern and a small array of chairs for listeners. But an audience is slow to materialize. The chairs have been pilfered from their customary places around the store, and browsers would like to have them back. Someone approaches Charles and asks to take one of the chairs. He's not in a position to say no even if he would. Seeing the first person's success, another customer is emboldened to remove a chair, as is a third. It isn't long
before Charles is alone at his lectern with neither listeners nor the means to accommodate them, unless they think to bring floor pillows.

Should he begin reading to the empty space and hope his voice draws someone?

Should he pack his stuff and try to sneak out unnoticed?

The first time he wears his Western getup for a reading is at an independent store of excellent repute. He does have an audience that day, but when he's introduced and stands to begin his presentation, he discovers he's forgotten his glasses and can't read a thing. The lady running the store offers hers, which he gladly accepts, no matter that their predominantly purple color and bright sparkles diminish the effect of his big hat, fancy boots, and shoestring tie.

In Nashville, Tennessee, there's a Confederate cemetery that holds the grave of one of the Curtises, the true-life family on whose lives
Freedom's Altar
is loosely based. Charles's visit to the grave is to be covered by local television. He waits forty minutes at the site, however, and the camera crew never shows.

The shame in all this is that the book is as good as we thought. “Against a fascinatingly detailed backdrop of the decaying and lawless postslavery South,” says
Publishers Weekly,
“Price eloquently addresses questions of race and class and morality, poignantly exploring whether hope and loyalty can exist in a world where war has damaged lives irrevocably.”
Booklist
finds it “compelling” and “lyrical yet controlled,” while
Kirkus
judges it “well-written.” It claims the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, the state's highest literary prize, an honor won over its
fifty-year history by luminaries from Reynolds Price to John Ehle to Fred Chappell to Lee Smith to Allan Gurganus to Kaye Gibbons to Clyde Edgerton.

Charles sends us a new novel. It's a follow-up to
Freedom's Altar,
and the third of his Price-Curtis novels stretching from the Civil War into Reconstruction.

The manuscript is disappointing. Overly derivative of his previous work, it reexamines scenes from the first two novels and focuses on characters whose wads have been shot. It's heavy on summarizing and explaining at the expense of storytelling, which is Charles's strength. There's none of the delight we got when the manuscript that became
Freedom's Altar
showed up at our door.

Except for one chapter, that is. It tells of the short-lived moonshining career of young Ves Price, the son of one of the principals in
Freedom's Altar.
Ves is the kind of stupid person who's dangerous because of his conviction that he's clever. In the span of about twenty pages, he overcooks the mash, dumps barrels of moonshining by-products into a stream where they can easily be traced to the dangerous men for whom he's working, samples the new batch too liberally, alienates an old girlfriend, and soils himself and exposes his privates in front of his true love. Since we met him as a boy in
Freedom's Altar,
Ves has matured into a worthless, effortless fuckup, and we want to know what further damage he can do.

We reject the manuscript. Using the moonshining chapter as our example, we tell Charles how he should have moved the saga into the next generation of characters and given them their own, new story lines. Should he ever
consider doing so, we tell him, he's welcome to send the manuscript back for another look.

We don't hold out much hope. We're really asking for an entirely different novel. We're suggesting he keep twenty pages and throw out four hundred.

What comes back some months later reminds me why I go to work in the morning. Ves Price is still there, but his is only the second- or third-best story line now. The novel really belongs to a minor character from
Freedom's Altar,
Hamby McFee, a headstrong mulatto who doesn't fit among either blacks or whites but who remains bound to the land by a bitter, confused loyalty he wishes he didn't feel. Hamby raises fighting chickens. His dream is to accumulate enough winnings to leave the mountains, while his reality is a life of labor that keeps afloat what remains of the Curtises, the local aristocracy gone to seed. The main thrust of the story is how he comes to accept his feelings for the Curtis clan, the only family he has, even to the extent of putting his life at stake for family friend Ves Price, whose greed has led him to inform on moonshiners for the Revenue, and whose incompetence has gotten him caught doing it.

I've never known an author to take a suggestion and run with it so well, or to turn a book around so completely. It's the best manuscript I've read in my time in the business.

Informally, Charles refers to it as “the chicken book.” We publish it as
The Cock's Spur.

“Lyrically written, character-rich and authentically atmospheric, the novel affords a deeply affecting insight into the aftermath of war,” says
Publishers Weekly.
Charles is
named Storyteller of the Year at the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Still, returns of the book are heavy. Reviews are fewer than for
Freedom's Altar,
and save for
Publishers Weekly,
they're in minor magazines and newspapers. Charles now has three novels, each superior to the last, yet his sales are stagnant.

On both sides, there's disappointment. We all feel—
know
—they're good novels that should be finding an audience by now. Charles wishes we had a more sensible plan for promoting his books. Some on our staff wish he were a more enthusiastic salesman. There are no hard feelings, but when Charles writes a fourth and final manuscript in his saga, it's mutually agreed that it's time to part company.

This one is called “Where the Water-Dogs Laughed.”
The Cock's Spur
remains my favorite, but there's no doubt the new novel is the most daring thing Charles has written, particularly in the way it pays homage to the Cherokee culture and world view. At its center is Northern exploitation of the Southern mountains, in the person of timber baron George Gordon Meade Weatherby. A full-time clear-cutter of forests and part-time hunter of big game, Weatherby grows obsessed in his quest to kill the preeminent bear in the high country. Wounded in the head and driven to rage by pain, infection, and hunger, the animal turns the attack on his tormentors. It is left to Hamby McFee, now aged, to track and kill the bear in the merciful, grateful tradition of the Cherokees and so begin to restore balance to the natural world. It is Hamby's death scene, too.

As should a man with three well-received novels and a
pair of midlevel awards to his credit, Charles begins by contacting agents in the hope of making a sale to a national publisher. But like me, he's not as persistent as he ought to be. One agent tells him he's “clearly a wonderful writer” who is “fully deserving of representation and a larger potential readership,” then declines to take him on as a client because of the difficulty in getting publishers to accept “a writer such as yourself.”

What kind of writer would that be, exactly? He's understandably discouraged by such mixed messages.

Charles submits the manuscript directly to an editor at one noted house, only to receive a faux-personal reply saying it has been read “with care and interest”—though his package appears not to have been opened at all—and that it is being rejected because “we are a small publishing company and we have to limit our list to only a few new titles each year.” Charles fires off a reply mimicking the letter line by line, describing himself as “a small author” who must limit himself to a few rejections per annum. It's funny and probably justified. It's his way of saying good-bye to commercial concerns, to the whole set of conditions that combine to turn aside good work.

The novel finally finds a home with a new, small publisher in the mountains. The staff there is thrilled to have Charles and promises to involve him in every phase of the process. As a gesture of their developing relationship, the publisher even presents him a three-foot chainsaw-carved figure of a bear.

A couple of times, I try to draw him out on the subject of Charles Frazier.

Feelings in the mountains toward Frazier are complex. When someone like Robert Morgan scores an Oprah-sized coup, it's acknowledged that he's gotten lucky, of course, but the consensus is that he's fought the noble fight over a long career and that his good fortune is to be celebrated. But Frazier's success has so far exceeded everyone else's, and it's come by such a different path, that there's no agreement on what to make of him. He's a man whose manuscript likely would have mildewed in a basement if his wife hadn't taken part of it without his knowledge and shown it to her friend Kaye Gibbons, who in turn recommended it to her agent. He's also a man whose one-page outline for a second novel, based on the life of white Indian Will Thomas—a well-known figure in the mountains whose story anyone might have fictionalized—brought him an eight-million-dollar book deal and another three million for movie rights.