Clio Rising Read online

  Table of Contents

  Titlepage

  A Very Private Writer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  The Longer View

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About Bywater

  “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last. Lines becomegenerations made out of pictures and words just kept.”

  —Lucille Clifton, Generations

  “—May God protect us! I wonder what you’ll write / When I am dead and gone.”

  —Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon

  Clio Hartt proved a difficult subject for a biography. She famously protected her privacy, giving only one interview in the years from the publication of her masterpiece, The Dismantled, in 1936 to the time of her death in her Greenwich Village apartment in 1984.

  The occasion was in 1966, on the publication of a thirtieth-anniversary scholarly edition of her novel, when she granted The New York Review of Books an hour-long interview. The NYRB piece provides insight into her beliefs about her work and her privacy. When asked if she would consider penning a memoir, like so many of her counterparts among the Paris expatriates, she said, “Why would I? I have said everything I wanted to say about my life in my fiction.”

  — From the introduction to Dismantling Clio Hartt: Her Life and Work, by Ingrid Coppersmith

  A Very Private Writer

  April 2014

  The thirtieth anniversary of Clio’s death came and went without fanfare. A few notices ran in academic forums about her complete archive opening to scholars for the first time, but that was it.

  A couple of months later, I got the call I’d anticipated for three decades. While I was in a staff meeting to review our 2015 and 2016 lists, a buttery voice left a message: “Ms. Bliss, this is Ingrid Coppersmith. I’m a professor at Syracuse, and I’m working on a literary biography I’d like to talk to you about. You may have seen my piece in the latest Inside Higher Ed about the perils of doing research on a very private writer like Clio Hartt?”

  I let Ingrid Coppersmith’s message run its course and then I replayed it. “Ramona Costa at the Bea Winston Agency told me Ms. Winston passed away last year, and you were the best person to talk to about Clio’s final months. She said you were Clio’s assistant or companion? She wasn’t sure exactly what to call you.”

  Ramona. She didn’t know the secret I was still keeping.

  “I’ve written chunks of the book, but there are these . . . gaps, especially about her final years. I’ve had a look at the new material. What the New York Public Library just released? I thought you might shed some light. Clio certainly was an enigma, wasn’t she?” Ingrid’s laugh tottered on the brink of insecurity. “Long story short, I’m anxious to talk to you. Here’s my cell.”

  When I listened a third time, I flinched when she used the familiar “Clio.” For the six months I knew her, the great writer was “Miss Hartt,” and I was “Miss Bliss” or “young lady.” Except for that one day when she looked at me in a peculiar way and said, “I would like to hear you call me ‘Birdie.’” I did, but just once.

  Now no one has called me “young lady” in a long time, except for my seventy-something dentist. But the last days of Clio’s life have replayed in my head as sharp and resounding as a DJ’s loop: the box under the daybed, the manuscript wrapped in twine, the sirens wailing, the cat on the fire escape, the box under the daybed . . .

  Chapter 1

  New York City

  August 1983

  Back then, room and board at the Parkside Evangeline Residence for Young Women ran me eighty-five dollars a week. Aunt Sass, who had fronted me the cash until I could find a job in publishing, insisted on a Christian women’s place, the exact one where she’d stayed a generation earlier when she tried “big-city life.” But the hotel fit me as poorly as my waitress uniform, and I couldn’t tell anyone why. When the Parkside girls asked if I had a boyfriend back in North Carolina, I dodged the question by poking fun at my height and lanky build: “Now what guy would date me?” That made them trip over each other, offering to take me clothes shopping, teach me how to accent my cheekbones with blusher and widen my eyes with liner.

  The Parkside felt as limiting as my old life in Weaverville, and I escaped whenever I could. The Friday night I met Gerri, I skipped dinner, even though it came with the rent, and ducked past Sergeant Sal as she was reciting the “no men above the lobby” rule to a prospective resident. From the chaste world of the Parkside and Gramercy Park, it was just a few long crosstown blocks to Ariel’s.

  Weeks earlier, I had stumbled on the bar while trekking across Manhattan to save bus fare. Black shades and a security grille obscured the front window, but the name “Ariel’s” on the awning hinted at magic. I could hear and feel the pulse of disco music through the door, where a gruff woman with a pack of cigarettes tucked into her T-shirt pocket stood guard. She dipped her head at me in recognition. With a fluttering in my stomach that could have been exhilaration— or terror, I had abandoned my plans to listen to the radio in my room and stepped into my first-ever lesbian bar.

  With feverish speed, I transformed into a semi-regular, and Ariel’s bore most of the blame for my shrinking bank account. Honestly, I drank too much those first months in New York— not just a beer or two after work to unwind, but enough so that I struggled to navigate the streets back to the Parkside. That particular night, I couldn’t afford to blow the twenty in the pocket of my khakis, but I had convinced myself it was an investment. The bouncer, when she said anything at all, had let it slip a few days back that she worked multiple jobs, and I wanted to chat her up for ideas about getting a second job.

  When I arrived, the bouncer wasn’t on duty yet. Beer in hand, I found a table but no chairs and asked a woman sitting alone if I could use the empty one next to her. “Why don’t you join me?” she suggested, shoving her granny glasses up her nose. She was a little too heavyset to be my type, with a shadow of a mustache, but I admired her concert T-shirt— the Allman Brothers and Bonnie Raitt at U Mass— so I accepted her offer.

  “I love Bonnie Raitt,” I said, nodding toward her chest as I plopped down.

  “My sister lives in Amherst.” She took a draw on her Bud. “You’re from the South.”

  “It shows.”

  “When you said ‘love’ it was about three syllables.”

  I braced myself for teasing or crude imitation. My fellow waitresses at the Village Diner, struggling actresses who had rid themselves of whatever regional accents they’d once had, poked fun at my North Carolina twang in the kitchen and locker room. “Well, land’s sakes, sugar!” one of them had said on my first day when I greeted everyone on my shift as “y’all.”

  But instead of making a piss-poor joke at my expense, the woman in Ariel’s said, “My first roommate in college was from Georgia, and I loved her drawl. You don’t hear that kind of thing too much in New York.” The chair felt comfier then, and I took a long pull on my beer, forgetting that I needed to make it last.

  Her nam
e was Gerri Burr, and she didn’t want to date me. She was waiting for her girlfriend to show up so they could go to dinner. “She’s late a lot,” Gerri said, more as a fact than a complaint. “I’ve made a lot of friends because of her.”

  And, in fact, while we sipped our Buds, Gerri and I talked like school friends who effortlessly pick up again years after graduation. The process of finding my tribe in New York had gone slowly, and not just because I was the odd girl out at work and at the Parkside; many of the gay women I’d met were hard to connect to. There’d been women I’d danced with under Ariel’s disco ball, but we had very little in common except our sexual orientation, or “preference” as we said back then. After my first-ever Lesbian Pride dance, I went home with a curvy redhead to her Brooklyn apartment— a casualness that was so foreign to me, it was like I’d become a character in a pulp novel. In the morning light, I spotted a holster and NYPD badge on a chair and questioned what it felt like to be in such a male-identified job. She must have found my line of inquiry offensive, because later she barely stifled a laugh about my desired career: “So, publishing. Really? Is there any money in that?” Neither of us called for a rerun.

  So a conversation that flowed naturally made my heart lighter in my chest. Gerri had the life I wanted. She had moved to the city with Renee, her girlfriend, right after college and now worked as an assistant editor at Random House. She said her job sounded more impressive than it was, but she was meeting the “right” people and “putting in the time.” One of her regular activities, when she wasn’t at a bar, was attending readings by feminist authors at Womanbooks. Renee’s family had money and supported her while she studied at Hunter for her MSW. The couple had adopted a dachshund named Alice B. (as in Toklas), and in their Sheridan Square apartment they hosted a monthly lesbian salon and book discussion group called the “Women’s Academy.”

  “Like Natalie Barney’s?” I asked.

  Gerri had a wide, gap-toothed smile that the girls at the Parkside would have advised her to have fixed but that she offered to me with confidence. “Somebody knows her lesbian history.”

  “I did an independent study on the women writers of the Left Bank. And another on the Modernists.” I hadn’t drunk enough beer yet to spill the whole truth: The Modernist writers were Hallie’s area of expertise and I’d chosen to study them mostly so I could spend three hours a week alone with Professor Shepherd in her office.

  “The group reads a lot of classics, but we tackle new work, too. Bertha Harris, Audre Lorde. This month it’s The Color Purple.”

  The notion of belonging to a group of book-loving lesbians was so enticing I almost jumped in and invited myself to join. But my mother’s voice was in my head, warning me to wait to be asked, so I simply dropped a few hints about being a voracious reader who was keen to work in publishing and before I knew it I had wrangled an invitation to their next meeting.

  And a tip on a job. “Well, it’s not a publishing house, but it’s the next best thing,” Gerri said, and I pressed her for details. She eyed me closely. “You know, on second thought, I really shouldn’t recommend it. I like you.”

  As lights darted off the disco ball and across our faces, we sat watching the women on the dance floor, whose hands ran up and down each other while Boy George crooned, “Do you really want to hurt me?” My thoughts weren’t on relationships, though, but on the hint Gerri had tossed out: How bad could the job be and what was “the next best thing” to publishing? Whatever the position, it had to be better than waiting tables for chump change.

  “I’ll do anything,” I said, breaking the silence between us. “I know entry-level jobs are just grunt work, but I’m at the end of my financial rope. I mean, it’s either get a real job or head back to North Carolina.”

  “Oh, don’t do that! I’d like to hang out with you. We could go to readings together. You could meet Thea.” She didn’t explain who that was, instead jumping up to get us two more Buds.

  “I don’t mean to be cagey about the job. It’s just I’ve heard not great things about it,” Gerri continued. “You know who Bea Winston is?”

  I didn’t, but that didn’t mean anything. I was a drooling infant when it came to the New York literary scene.

  “She’s a powerhouse agent,” Gerri explained. “A legend. A big ol’ feminist champion, started the first woman-run agency in the city. Not gay, but not a homophobe either, from what I hear. She represents some huge writers, and she’s brought a lot of women novelists back into print, including lesbians like Rosalyn Clare and Clio Hartt.”

  I’d read Clio Hartt’s The Dismantled in the Modernist independent study I did with Hallie, and the memory of Hallie’s hand on my back as I asked her about a tricky, long-winded passage sent a wave of heat up my neck. The experimental structure and prose had been tough sledding for a college senior, but Hallie helped me unpack it— both in her office and later at a motel where we backed our cars into their parking spaces so no one could read the license plates from the road.

  “Wow,” I said to Gerri, trying to dispel the image of Hallie’s lips from my mind. “And she has a job opening?”

  “It’s the office assistant. She goes through them fast. Either you do everything wrong and she cans you, or she likes you and you move up to junior agent. In the meantime, you make a lot of coffee and count pencils.”

  “How hard could that be? I make coffee at the diner, and I used to help my dad take inventory at his store.”

  Gerri nibbled on her thumb. The nails on her right hand were angry-looking, bitten to the quick. “Well, here’s the thing. I knew someone who knew someone who had the job for two months and said Bea Winston was a bitch. Her words, not mine. I don’t like the B-word.”

  “I have a pretty strong constitution,” I insisted.

  Gerri had stashed her backpack under the table as if she’d come to Ariel’s right from the office. She rifled through it and pulled out a business card that confused me because it had the name Sarah Marcus embossed on it.

  “My boss,” she explained. “That’s how I heard about the Bea Winston job. Tell Bea you found out about the opening from Sarah Marcus’s ‘office.’ Don’t pretend you know Sarah, though. That’ll come back to bite you.”

  As I was inspecting the card, holding it in my hand like a winning lottery ticket, a willowy brunette appeared at our table. She looked a little like the photo of Rita Mae Brown on the cover of Rubyfruit Jungle, casually messy hair and expressive dark eyes. She leaned over and French-kissed Gerri, right there in front of me, before introducing herself. Renee didn’t sit down, and they didn’t invite me to dinner. And now there was even more to envy about Gerri’s life.

  Chapter 2

  On the phone, Bea Winston had a smoky voice, and before I met her I pictured someone who sipped martinis in a sleek black cocktail dress, her hair impeccably coiffed— Marlene Dietrich, maybe. In person, Bea resembled someone’s middle-aged mom, a leftover hippie-type, with shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair falling loose over a slightly wrinkled plum silk tunic. She came only to my shoulder, but when we shook hands, her grip belonged to a much taller woman.

  Bea ran her finger down the single page of my accomplishments as if she were interested. Nothing really translated to this job, aside from a BA in English from UNC Asheville and an internship at the local newspaper, where I’d basically been a gofer. She peered at me over her wire-frame aviator glasses and across the vast expanse of her oak desk. “‘Oh, lost!’” she quoted, out of nowhere.

  Another applicant might have been puzzled by the line from Look Homeward, Angel, but I jumped at the bait. “Yes, ma’am, Asheville’s claim to fame.” Native son Thomas Wolfe had immortalized Asheville and its environs in his first novel.

  “And you’ve read his work.”

  “In my twentieth-century lit class, yes.” I was hedging, nervous that she’d ask me specifics I couldn’t dredge up. The two years between that class and the interview in Bea’s office were a gaping hole of vanished knowled
ge.

  “An overrated writer, if you ask me,” she said, setting my resume aside in a way that suggested our interview was over and I’d failed the test. But then she added, “I’m from Georgia myself, home to the great Flannery O’Connor. You wouldn’t know it because I divested myself of my accent in 1950. I stood in front of a mirror every evening and forced myself to form words differently.”

  Bea leaned back in her chair, farther than seemed possible without toppling over. But she knew the limits of that chair— and just about everything else. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  I stammered for a few minutes about what a giant she was in publishing, how I admired her for founding the first-ever woman-run agency— facts that Gerri had fed to me.

  “No, what are you doing in New York? Good girls from Asheville get married and stay put. Especially girls named Olive Bliss.”

  Her question seemed vaguely illegal, but I very much wanted to be myself everywhere. In particular, I wanted my first real job to let me be me, and Gerri had said she didn’t think Bea was homophobic.

  “I’m gay,” I blurted out. “My family actually lives in Weaverville, which is even more small-town than Asheville. My folks don’t know about me.” I omitted the part about leaving because I was heartbroken, too.

  “Did you dress that way back home?”

  I glanced down at my outfit: khaki pants, navy blazer, and light-blue button-down shirt were my idea of business attire.

  “Because if you did, they all know,” she observed.

  My mother didn’t like the way I dressed, but she’d given up objecting to it when I went to college. My sisters didn’t try to set me up with men anymore. If they knew what to call me, none of them would ever use the word.

  “Maybe,” I allowed with a shrug. “But New York seemed like the best place for me. And no, ma’am, I can’t change my name. But just so you know, everybody calls me Livvie.”