Olive Ann was hooked on her story and determined to go on with it, but she was also realistic about her prospects as a first-time novelist. Rather than set her sights on publication, she thought of the novel as “just a hobby.” “Who would want to publish a novel by someone who doesn’t know how to write one?” she asked herself. “I thought if I finished it, I would just make some Xerox copies and give them to my family for Christmas presents. I really wasn’t sure I’d ever finish it, though. If I lived to be ninety, I might not finish it at the rate I was going.”
Oddly, it was a clean bill of health that slowed her down. After three years of on-and-off chemotherapy, a blood test showed that Olive Ann’s lymphoma had gone into remission. It was time for her to turn her attention away from Cold Sassy and back to the world—and to all the things she had missed during her confinement. Now she had choices to make. “I wrote when I wasn’t busy doing something else,” she said. “If I wanted to go camping with the family for three weeks, I didn’t say, ‘Oh no, I have to stay with my novel.’ I might go for weeks without writing; I might write every day for a while. Real writers tend to get up at four or five in the morning and write until they have to go to work, or they start at eight and that is their work, and they write steadily until about two or three o’clock.”
When Olive Ann was well enough to fulfill her responsibilities as a wife, mother, and homemaker, there was often little time or energy left for writing. It was being well that now presented the challenge. “My surprise, after conquering cancer, is to find that renewed health is something to cope with,” she wrote to the Sunday school class. “I’ve got postpartum blues! All the time I was sick I was happier than ever in my life. I accepted. I had everything to gain by fully and joyfully living one day at a time and worrying about nothing, not even the cancer. Viewed in the light of cancer, other problems never seemed worth a worry. Now that it has remissed, I’m realizing that I’ve gradually withdrawn from that sense of spiritual well-being. In other words, I’ve become a chronic worrier again, always impatient for progress. Cancer teaches that life is too short to be lived like that; you take your knocks when they come, not in advance.
“So my current project is to deprogram myself as a worrier. I find I can notice when I’m depressed or anxious and switch on another attitude—the way a man on an expense account can freely choose shrimp scampi over hamburger. Andy, who has always taken life in full stride, isn’t much help in the project. After I put a card on the bathroom mirror that said WHY WORRY? in big letters, he wrote under it WHY NOT?”
Friends who watched Olive Ann cope with cancer and the side effects of chemotherapy would not have characterized her as a worrier. She could always see the positive side of her illness, even saying, “It’s almost worth being sick awhile to come to such glorious joy and realization of how great it is to live.” She could transform any problem into an anecdote; she found the humor in every situation. But the stories themselves were often a means of prevailing over her worries. She believed that she had inherited her tendency toward anxiety from her mother. “I worried about my children’s problems,” she admitted. “I had no patience to just let their lives evolve; I wanted to make things happen. And I worried about not getting the house dusted and things like that.” Getting back to work on the novel provided a necessary distraction.
And so, instead of worrying about things she couldn’t change, she stewed over tricky scenes and bits of dialogue, turning them over in her mind until she had them right, jotting them down, and then fiddling some more. She struggled to make the dialect authentic, convinced that if you get a person’s words right, you don’t have to go on and on describing his or her personality. She loved to find ways to use the pieces of real life that seemed stranger and more wonderful than fiction could ever be. Granny Blakeslee’s hallucinations on her death bed, for example, were inspired by visions Andy’s mother had seen shortly before her death in 1978. After visiting with her in the hospital one day, Andy came home and told Olive Ann that his mother had grabbed him and tried to pull him right down onto the bed. The room was full of angels, she told him. Couldn’t he see them? Olive Ann comforted her husband. She also got him to elaborate on what had taken place, and later sat down and told the story of Granny Blakeslee’s death through Will Tweedy’s eyes.
At the end of the novel, when Grandpa is critically injured during a hold-up at the store, he is as feisty as Olive Ann’s own father had been after a bad fall. Nearly eighty and unwell, Arnold had stumbled on the front walk on the way to the car. He called Olive Ann and told her that he had broken his nose, cut his forehead, and was bleeding like a hog, but was going fishing anyway. When his daughter suggested that he stay home and rest, Arnold replied, “Haven’t you ever noticed? Folks die in bed.” Olive Ann jotted that down—and she remembered it when Grandpa broke his nose and ribs, banged his head, and twisted his knee.
All her life, Olive Ann had written down bits of conversation that interested and amused her. One country aunt, a particularly colorful speaker, once got so put out with her niece that she warned, “If you don’t stop takin’ down notes, I’m goin’ stop talkin’.” Olive Ann later said, “Well, I didn’t stop taking notes, and my aunt couldn’t stop talking.” Now, all those years of listening and paying attention to detail were bearing fruit. She had a feeling that the novel was finally coming together, and the reactions of others confirmed it.
In 1980 she spent time at a writers’ colony on Ossabaw Island. One evening she read some chapters aloud. Her fellow writers, she said, “were mostly Yankees who couldn’t understand my Southern accent. When I asked if they thought the dialect was overdone, a man said, ‘We can’t tell how much is the way you pronounce things and how much is the way it’s written, but it sounds great.’” One member of the group was Menachem Perry, a publisher and professor of literary criticism at the University of Tel Aviv. “He insisted on reading the whole manuscript,” Olive Ann said, “and shocked me by comparing it with Mark Twain’s work. He said it was not a regional novel, but a universal love story. He said a lot else—enough to make me believe that I had somehow stumbled into learning how to structure a novel. After that, I took the writing seriously.”
She bought herself a computer and set it up down in the basement, in the pine-paneled room her father had built. With the help of her son, she learned how to use the word processor, and realized that now she could rewrite and edit to her heart’s content. What’s more, she could steal away to this little room at all hours of the day, put on some classical music in the background, and lose herself in writing, without the sight of dishes piled in the sink or unmade beds to make her feel guilty.
Having made up her mind to finish the book, Olive Ann arranged to spend a month at the Hambidge Center, an artists’ retreat in the north Georgia mountains. Away from the familiar routines of home and family, however, she found it difficult to work. Later, she wrote an article about her experience there: “Whenever I hit a snag in the writing, the need for human companionship became overwhelming, but nobody lived within hollering distance of the Hopper House. I found myself neglecting the novel to write extravagantly long letters. I talked out loud to myself, and whenever I wasn’t working, I turned on the radio. Hungry for other voices, hungry for news, I listened eagerly to country music, school doings, even funeral news on ‘The Obituary Column of the Air.’ Only late at night was there good reception out of Atlanta or Chicago or New York—usually hard rock music that set me dancing like a teenager. Dancing gave me something to do and somebody to watch: surrounded by night, the kitchen windows became black mirrors in which my gyrating image was indistinct. Not quite me, a woman with grown children, but instead a lithe and lovely girl who, if I do say so myself, seemed rather winsome.” Olive Ann admitted that there were times during that month that she almost gave up and went home, but she stuck it out. In the end, the affection she felt for her characters was more powerful than her loneliness and isolation.
***
During
those years of writing, Olive Ann had never made publication her goal. All she really wanted, she insisted, was to perfect the dialect, to tell a good story, and to have fun doing it. “I wasn’t trying to preach or write a sociological study,” she said. “I wanted it to be funny. I’m tired of a world so dead serious, in which silliness passes for humor. I wanted to present fictional characters who are human but fundamentally decent. I wanted Grandpa to be true to himself and care about work and goodness, yet be free of the burden of perfectionism. I wanted him to live with courage and gusto, and know how to look death in the eye.”
There is so much passion, so much life and humor, and so much wisdom in Cold Sassy Tree that it is hard to imagine that Olive Ann might have finished her novel only to circulate it among her family and friends. As it happened, a publisher was practically delivered to her doorstep.
In 1982, Anne Edwards was in Atlanta doing research for her biography of Margaret Mitchell. One day, Andy gave her a tour of the Sunday Magazine office and helped her locate copies of the feature stories that Peggy Mitchell had written under Angus Perkerson. Grateful for his help, Anne and her husband invited Andy and Olive Ann out for dinner. The two couples hit it off, and before they parted, Olive Ann suggested that Anne be their guest the next time she came to Atlanta. As Olive Ann admitted later, she didn’t realize it might be an imposition to ask an author to read a manuscript in progress. When Anne returned and stayed with the Sparkses, Olive Ann said to her, “If you’d like to read a chapter or two of my novel, you’ll know me better.” Anne was complimentary, but, Olive Ann said, “I didn’t dream she’d ever remember it.”
Anne did remember, though. A year later, in May 1983, Ticknor & Fields launched Anne Edwards’s Road to Tara with a publication party at the Atlanta Historical Society. Although it was her night to celebrate, Anne also wanted to do some matchmaking between Olive Ann and the president of Ticknor & Fields, Chester Kerr.
Chester Kerr had become the president of Ticknor & Fields after a distinguished career as the director of the Yale University Press. On his retirement from Yale, he had been invited by Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston to preside over a new trade book subsidiary that would resurrect a famous nineteenth-century firm that Henry Houghton had acquired in 1880. In its heyday, Ticknor & Fields had published such American writers as Emerson, Thoreau, Holmes, Longfellow, Whittier, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and had imported from England the works of Tennyson and Dickens. Under Chester Kerr’s leadership, the revived imprint published its first titles in the spring of 1980, out of a modest office in New Haven, Connecticut. (Three years later, the offices were moved to New York.) In January 1981, I came to work at Ticknor & Fields as an editorial assistant.
Anne Edwards’s biography was an important addition to our 1983 list, and Chester and his small staff were determined to do everything right. Anne was pleased by Chester’s attention to detail, and she suspected that Ticknor & Fields might be just the right place for Olive Ann’s novel. On the plane trip to Atlanta she told Chester and his wife, Joan, about Olive Ann and her manuscript; she was eager for the Kerrs to meet her.
Olive Ann loved to recall her first impression of the man who was to become her publisher: “He was a tall, big man, with a shock of white hair and a shock of white mustache, and very dignified....I thought he was the kind of person you should call ‘Your Eminence’ when you speak to him.”
While Chester was busy making introductions for Anne Edwards, Anne’s husband introduced Olive Ann to Joan Kerr, who put the aspiring author immediately at ease. “Oh, tell me about your book,” Joan prompted. “Can you describe the characters and what it’s about?”
“I did,” Olive Ann wrote afterwards, “and she said, ‘Will you send it to us?’”
When Olive Ann asked if she should finish it first, Joan told her not to bother. “Send it tomorrow,” she said.
Olive Ann knew she couldn’t send it tomorrow—“it was the biggest mess”—but she now had a great incentive to get the manuscript in shape. “I had already spent eight years on the novel, and it was really time to wind it up,” she said. A month after their meeting, she wrote to Joan Kerr, “I plan to send my manuscript as soon as possible. In the rhythm of the South (actually my rhythm), that is not as fast as it sounds.”
But by the middle of August, she was almost done. She typed a title page for the novel, then entitled Call Me Love, packed up the manuscript (minus the ending, which she had yet to write), and sent it to Joan Kerr in New Haven. “The book will be about 825 pages, finished,” Olive Ann predicted, “but I am quite willing to cut it. I am also willing to tone down the colloquialisms and the Southern accents if they seem overdone....I think (fear) that submitting a manuscript is a lot like entering a Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes!” She enclosed a check to cover the cost of shipping the manuscript back to Atlanta.
Joan Kerr was not on her husband’s staff, but she had encouraged this charming Southern woman to submit her unfinished novel and she was eager to see if her hunch was right. It didn’t take eight hundred pages for Joan to know she had had the right instinct in urging Olive Ann Burns to send her book. The novel was too long, it sagged a bit in the middle—but there was certainly something special here and Joan felt certain that we should publish it. She asked me whether I would take the manuscript home over Labor Day weekend and read it.
I will always remember meeting Will Tweedy on that early fall weekend. Thanks to him, I had to abandon my holiday plans—yet any regret I may have felt melted away as I fell under the spell of this extraordinary novel. I remember feeling privileged to be among its first readers, privileged even to hold those pages in my hands. I had left the office on Friday afternoon with a pile of unexpected work, and I returned on Tuesday morning carrying one of the best books I had ever read.
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.”