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. Wha
t 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?”
“Incidentally,” she added, “I will be sixty in July, and if there’s any reason to use that fact, I certainly don’t mind. I’d rather be sixty than dead, and also I realize I couldn’t have written Cold Sassy Tree when I was thirty. I didn’t know enough about life. Anyhow, I’ve only just begun to realize I’m middle-aged...I don’t really think I’m old enough for my age to help promote the book. If I were a hundred, that would be something you could make hay out of.”
As far as we knew then, even if Cold Sassy Tree did enjoy modest success, Olive Ann wouldn’t have to worry about finding time to do her Christmas shopping. Despite a generous handful of prepublication comments, we figured that Cold Sassy Tree, like any first novel, would need every push we could give it. But with publication still several months away, there was not much more to be done, so at the end of June, Olive Ann and Andy set off for two weeks in England, for a reunion of Andy’s World War II military unit—a luxury paid for by her advance.
Andy had grown accustomed to his chemotherapy treatments, eventually scheduling them for late on Thursday afternoons so that he could be sick Friday and all weekend, and still be able to go to work on Monday morning. But the drugs had taken a toll. Andy Sparks was the embodiment of an old-time gentleman journalist, with his lively blue eyes beneath scraggly, bushy eyebrows. He wore snappy ties, hats that would have looked silly on anyone else, and a mustache that only emphasized the width of his smile. He had boundless energy and enthusiasm, and was one of those rare men who can work all their lives in one job and yet never assume the demeanor—the tired posture, the tension, the lines of worry or resignation—of a working man. He loved his life and he loved his work, and he radiated happiness. Whether he was on his way to the office downtown or to his beloved garden in the backyard, he walked with a bounce in his step and a look of anticipation on his face, like a kid stepping into Saturday morning.
Now, for the first time, he looked his age. And without those eyebrows or the mustache, not to mention the hair on his head, he didn’t look like Andy. In a letter to John just before they left for England, Olive Ann wrote, “A strange thing has happened about Dad. About me, really. Until recently I have felt I had a new husband from the skin out—he looked so different. I’d find myself just sitting staring at him, trying to get used to it. Because he has gained weight, the lines in his face have filled out and he really does look good, but he doesn’t look like Andy. Now I guess I’ve become used to the difference, because I’m really enjoying the new him all of a sudden. I can’t remember how he looked before!”
Olive Ann had nursed Andy through the worst of it, telling him that she wished they could just trade places; she had learned to be such a good cancer patient, she felt, that it would be easier on her than it was for him. “No,” he told her, “you had your turn; now it’s mine.” Olive Ann found that it was harder for her to deal with Andy’s illness than her own. “I could face the possibility of dying myself,” she said, “but I didn’t want to live without him.” Throughout the spring, Andy kept assuring her that the book was more important than his throwing up; that’s what they would focus on. “It’s something to remember,” Olive Ann wrote to John. “If you ever have a prolonged problem, do something that gives you something else to think about—like have your wife publish a book, or the two of you go off to England for a second honeymoon.”
By the time they returned, the prepublication excitement had prompted Chester to move the publication date up from November to October. Gwen Reiss was busy scheduling autographings and interviews, and the Book-of-the-Month Club had named Cold Sassy Tree a featured alternate for October. Gwen wrote to Olive Ann and asked how she felt about public speaking, for it was becoming apparent that Cold Sassy Tree was generating more attention than a typical first novel. “I found out long ago that talking to a thousand or two hundred or ten is all the same,” Olive Ann replied. “I mean it doesn’t scare me, and if it’s a small group I enjoy the ones who are there instead of lamenting that it isn’t a crowd.”
She did want us to know, however, that she was not a “fancy speaker.” “I don’t declaim,” she wrote, explaining that her talks were “really kind of like Cold Sassy Tree— funny, with stories and throwaway comments, but carrying significant and, I hope, inspiring messages. I don’t mean I try to be inspiring, but when I say things that are heartfelt, things that other people are surely dealing with, too, they seem to respond. Also, I don’t try to act brilliant or as if I take myself to be the world’s greatest gift to audiences. If I did, I’d feel like a fool and fall on my face. As it is, they take me for one of them and it seems to be effective.”
Characteristically, she wanted to make sure that Ticknor & Fields didn’t incur any extra expense on her account. Olive Ann prided herself on never spending a penny she didn’t have, and she certainly didn’t expect her publisher to spend any more than necessary on accommodations. “My ego needs are small,” she assured us. “Being Andy’s wife and a fulfilled person are enough, and all this is just icing on the cake. I can be just as happy about talking to the little literary club in Cornelia, Georgia, as to more important groups. And I don’t need any VIP treatment. Do whatever you need to for T&F’s image, but limos and ultra hotels are unimportant to me. I’m game for anything that w
ill make the promotion budget stretch. To me, ordinary taxis will be a luxury because driving tires me if I’ve never been there before and have to feel my way, and any place to sleep will be fine if it’s not on a busy highway beside an uphill curve where trucks scream into lower gear all night long.”
The only thing she insisted on was some time to lie down in the middle of a busy day, and a taxi instead of the services of “a little old-lady driver who drives scatterbrain or tailgates and with whom I must carry on a conversation. I like such conversation,” she said, “but I would arrive out of breath at my destination.”
She meant what she said: Olive Ann loved to talk and she could somehow ask questions and tell a funny story at the same time. She once told me that her talking had caused one of the few arguments she and Andy had, when, early in their marriage, he suggested on the way to a party that she try to keep her mouth shut that night. If she could do it, he told her, she might hear something interesting. Much as Olive Ann talked, I never once heard her say anything that wasn’t worth listening to. It was impossible for her to be boring. And her letters were almost as wonderful as Olive Ann in person—long and leisurely, funny and intimate, and thoroughly entertaining. When she returned her author questionnaire with a ten-page single-spaced essay about her intentions while writing Cold Sassy Tree, everyone in the office gathered round to read it. “I think what I’ve written is more than you want to know about anybody,” she apologized, “and certainly more than you need to know for publicity purposes. But I decided to send it on as is. At least you’ll have some idea of what you’re dealing with.”
Her essay became a publishing story in itself. “I don’t know if it will help sales to say Cold Sassy Tree isn’t a dirty book,” Olive Ann wrote, “but I don’t think I’m the only person who is tired of sordid stories about unsavory people. I’m tired of books and movies full of paper-doll characters you don’t care about, who have no self-respect and no respect for anybody or any institution. I hope this book is compelling and realistically sensual; I have great respect for human sexuality. But I’m tired of authors so lacking in sensitivity that they wallow in vulgarity and prostitute sex—making exhibitionists out of the characters and peeping Toms out of the readers. And I don’t want to sound preachy or Victorian, but I’m tired of amorality in fiction and real life. Immorality is a fascinating human dilemma that creates suspense for the readers and tension for the characters, but where is the tension in an amoral situation? When people have no personal code, nothing is threatening and nothing is meaningful.”