Until August 31, 2015, help us reprint Chessman's glorious The Beauty of Ordinary Things and Someone Not Really Her Mother.
Since around
2001, Harriet Scott Chessman has produced a series of slim, luminous novels,
each of which has been that kind of rare and unforgettable reading experience
for me. If you already know Harriet’s work, you know what I’m talking about.
Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning
Paper, Someone Not Really Her Mother, Ohio Angels – each of these short books is a
singularly beautiful tone poem of kinds, each one wistful, elliptical, and lit
with late-summer or autumnal tints, touched on every page by the light of life
as seen by characters facing profound transformations, eyes wide open. Always
there’s a tinge of tragedy, but always it is tragedy born of the very beauty of
existence. A Chessman novel is a story that says what all great poetry says: to
live is glorious, and to be alive is to change, and change is painful, and
change is life-giving. Lydia Cassatt, chronically ill sister to the lauded
painter; or Hannah, in Someone Not Really
Her Mother, an elderly woman whose mind is wandering uncontrollably back to
her youth and the war in Europe; or Hallie in Ohio Angels, a young struggling artist and would-be mother visiting
her Ohioan hometown, where her own mother suffers manic depression – these are
characters radiant with consciousness and yearning. When you find a writer as powerful as this,
you await their next work.
I first met
Harriet in 2004. We were seated together at a bookseller dinner. I was
twenty-six and very new to this “literary world.” I found her to be very nice,
easy to talk to, a good listener, genuinely humble but in all ways serious
about writing and literature. Great personal attributes, all, and pretty rare (I
would soon understand their exceeding rarity
in the world of writing and publishing). That evening, Harriet inscribed my
copy of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning
Paper, “To Mark, Traveling in spirit. Keep writing and writing!” I looked
at these words and thought: “I am traveling in spirit. Traveling in spirit is
exactly what I’m doing. How did she know this?”
Harriet and
I crossed paths a few more times over the course of the next few years. While
we were chatting on one of these occasions, I told her a bit about the way my
second novel was shaping up, mentioning that it employed first, second, and
third-person perspectives. Instead of the sidelong pitying look so many others
had given me when I shared this fact, Harriet’s eyes actually widened in
delight at the weird idea. I still don’t know if she knows how encouraging that
was. When that novel was published, I sent Harriet a copy. Rare soul that she
is, she not only read the book, but responded at length in writing. Still more
encouragement from a novelist I so admired.
We kept in touch by e-mail. Harriet was working on her fourth novel, I my third. Now and then I would send her a note of greeting, usually with a word about my book’s progress. In the main, I was eagerly hoping to learn the publication date for hers, and I would always take care to fold the question in amid the padding.
My own notes
grew gradually more grumpy. My book was done, it was being “shopped around,” as
they say, and the wide indifference, occasional dismissiveness, and
across-the-board irrelevance of the editorial responses was starting to get to
me.
Around us,
the publishing world seemed to be imploding. All this chatter about e-books and
self-publishing, Amazon’s thuggish discounts; the Big Six oozing into Five like
a deflated soufflé; the legendary Knopf saving its bacon by picking up a series
of Swedish potboilers; all those unpaid publisher invoices when Borders went
down.
Apocalyptic
days. You could hear in the Zeitgeist, like an icy, cosmic echo, the words
tossed off in those horrid conference rooms at the top of the world: “Midlist?
Wha’ the hell is that? Who needs it?”
About this
time, Harriet dropped a passing hint about that fourth novel of hers, something
that led me to understand that it was finished, had been finished a while, and
that the new publishing status quo had looked and seen not.
Harriet said
she’d been told the book was “too quiet.” (What the hell does that even mean?)
I started to
get angry. Even Harriet Scott Chessman’s glorious work had been put adrift!?
What do you
do when you’re a novelist and you’re angry? Start a micropress, of course.
Here’s an
example of how screwed up the mainstream publishing world is: they let The Beauty of Ordinary Things, the
sublimely gifted Harriet Scott Chessman’s most powerful novel yet, be published
by me!
Or maybe
there’s something more Providential at work in all of this. Maybe it’s got
something to do with “Traveling in spirit.” Maybe, a full ten years ago,
Harriet called it.
When I first
read the manuscript of The Beauty of
Ordinary Things, and when the Irish/Boston voice of the young Vietnam vet
Benny Finn began to live so richly, so honestly, and so movingly in my readerly
head, it was a voice I recognized, unmistakably. Here was another one who was
traveling in spirit.
Harriet has
called this book her most personal novel. Benny Finn, she says, is “so much
like me, sometimes I cannot distinguish between us.” She said she thinks of the
book as “an homage to those who overcome challenges and find grace in their
lives … I wish for grace in mine every day.” She says, “I wanted to do what I
could to tell the truth, without bells or whistles.”
For almost
two years now, I’ve lived in the pages of The
Beauty of Ordinary Things, and I still cannot tell you how a novelist
achieves such honesty on the page, such an exquisite emotional accuracy, or how
a book can resonate in such – yes – quietude, and rise to such profound
affirmation. One of the early notes of praise about The Beauty of Ordinary Things proclaims: “This book will open your
heart.” Another says: “It would be hard to close this book and not feel changed.”
They’re dead on.
I can hardly
believe what good luck the collapse of literary publishing has been for me, to
have been given this privilege, of working with such a magnificent writer and
such a genuinely wonderful human being.
What an
honor to welcome Harriet to Portland tonight. Please join me.
