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The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. Cherise Wolas
Читать онлайн.Название The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008201166
Автор произведения Cherise Wolas
Издательство HarperCollins
Ashby writes for the sake of the work, although, when pressed, she did not apologize for seeking her own lasting place in the world of letters. In a 1988 interview with Esquire, she said, “It’s not actually possible to write for an audience. Or at least I can’t. I write for myself and hope others may find themselves in my work. It takes a lifetime to attain a writerly expansiveness, and finding an audience is the least of it. Of course, when I’m honing a story for the thousandth time, I admit my desire for that audience may have become conscious. I labor to be in charge of my own material, and if that hard work allows me to sit at the table with other serious, great writers of this and past generations, I don’t shy away from that. Why would I? I write for myself, but I seek to be read, for the work to be deeply felt.”
The Linder interviews and the Esquire interview are also interesting because Ashby limited the questions she was willing to answer to her childhood, her life as a young writer, her literary dreams. She never discussed her current personal life. As a result, many of her fans were shocked to learn she had married just before the international tour for Fictional Family Life commenced.
In early June 1989, under the bright lights of television cameras, Ashby read to a sold-out, standing-room-only crowd at Barnard College. Afterward, many female members of the audience inundated her with questions about her recent marriage, expressing their dismay. We note that the following transcription of Ashby’s remarks are set out here for the first time. The program that aired on PBS did not include these revelations.
“Sometimes I worry, too, that what I have done will end up disappointing myself. Beware of friends encouraging you to take a break from your writing, telling you to have a little fun and celebrate your success, if only for a long weekend. Beware, because your life may move in ways you didn’t expect, or want, suddenly hallmarked by the seemingly traditional. In other words, beware of finding yourself living an unintended life.
“I don’t normally divulge the personal, but it seems right to share how I ended up here. A road trip a couple of years ago with friends, fellow—or rather female—editors at the publishing house where I used to work. They chose Annapolis because the Naval Academy was there; all those strong and handsome men excited them. I wasn’t interested, I had my focus. But there we were on the July Fourth weekend, in a bar on the waterfront promenade. My friends let themselves be swept away, but I held on to my place at that bar, thinking I’d stay and observe and slip back to the motel, make a few notes for the future. Then a man introduced himself to me and his extravagantly long hair was eccentric among all those shorn skulls of the naval cadets.
“If I had figured out immediately the kind of man he was, things might now be different. I believed then, as I still do, that my writing benefits from my perceptual abilities and my observational skills. So I absorbed this man’s long hair, his long fingers, his long eyelashes, his romantic brown eyes, and I wondered what a painter or a sculptor, some kind of artist anyway, was doing in this naval bar. He struck me as likely leading a peripatetic life, attributing his unsteady schedule to a muse. But my snap denouncement of him was completely wrong. He was at Johns Hopkins, a doctor in the midst of a fellowship, specializing in rare eye surgeries, enraptured by his ability to help people see their worlds again. He was home for a visit with his vice admiral father, at the bar taking a breather from the old man who was still angry that his son had refused the navy.
“Groan now, because I know you will. He bought me a drink and said that when he completed his studies he was moving to a small town that had a world-class research hospital and lab where he would work on his theories for revolutionizing neuro-ocular surgery. What I heard in all that was small town, and I could not imagine anyone wanting to live in such a place. Two drinks in, I stupidly agreed to see him the next day. That turned into two more days spent together. I could see he was infatuated, but the notion did not fill me with unalloyed pleasure. I was not looking for love. Love was more than simply inconvenient; its consumptive nature always a threat to serious women. I had seen too often what happened to serious women in love, their sudden, unnatural lightheartedness, their new wardrobe of happiness their prior selves would never have worn, the loss of their forward momentum. I wanted no such conversion, no vulnerability to needless distraction. Since childhood, I had kept my literary ambitions at the fore of my mind.
“On the trip back to New York, I refuted my friends’ belief that love had found me. ‘He’s a doctor who looks like a disheveled artist and neither he, nor any man, figures into my plans for my future,’ I told them, in those or similar words, and I meant it.
“I held my ground against his romantic campaign of phone calls and handwritten love letters for a while, and then I agreed to see him again, on my own territory. [Much laughter here.]
“Come on, most of you probably would have done the same thing! I didn’t anticipate our coordinated humor, or our perfect balance in those other meaningful ways. After that, every third weekend, he took the train to New York or I took the train to Baltimore. I had assumed I would live happily alone, passionately consumed by the lives of my imagined humans, but for the first time, I found my thoughts synced to those of another. I had never before experienced that with anyone. Being cherished took me longer to acknowledge and accept. He makes me kinder, more generous, when I step out into the world, and there is a gorgeousness in seeing oneself in the loving reflected glow of a worthy other.
“When I finally settled into the seriousness between us, the palpable love, it struck me as rather marvelous. Obviously, I put up serious barriers—my work comes first, no children, we’ll consider a dog—but he wasn’t put off, not even during this insane year with the publication of Fictional Family Life and my constant absences.
“What I also discovered is that I’m having no problems writing what will follow Fictional Family Life, thrilled that the work contains no words about either of us at all. [Much laughter here.]
“You laugh, but I’m incredibly relieved. The idea of mining material straight from my own life is abhorrent to me. I have no desire to write self-indulgently. I say this with appropriate trepidation, but I think love might make me a better writer, a writer able to delve even more deeply into what makes people human, because I am now experiencing the full range of emotions. If nothing else, discovering I have a speed, other than breakneck, has been revelatory.
“We’ve bought a small house in a place that calls itself a town but is no bigger than a village.4 I’ve been living there for exactly two weeks, most of my time spent in a spare bedroom that is now my study, continuing to work on my first novel. And no, I won’t tell you what it’s called or what it’s about.”
The novel Joan Ashby was working on in her Rhome study in 1989 remains a mystery, for she has not published anything since Fictional Family Life. The Barnard event would be the last time Ashby read or spoke publicly, and thereafter she ceased granting interviews of any kind. On that evening, twenty-eight years ago, Ashby was wholly unaware that she, newly married, was pregnant.
(Continued after the break)
ANOTHER STORY IS WRITTEN
Ēka aura kahānī likh di
Joan Ashby was frank with Martin Manning right from the start: “There are two things you should know about me. Number one: My writing will always come first. Number two: Children are not on the table.