Alane Mason
I am a professional enforcer of clarity, but my mentor and one of my life’s great loves was someone I only ever half understood. Her name was Daphne Athas, a second-generation Greek writer of both fiction and nonfiction whose moment of professional glory—a TIME Magazine “Best Book of the Year” and Cosmopolitan Book Selection (!) in 1971—had already faded into the distant past by the time I first had her as a teacher in the fall of 1983 or maybe 1984. She seemed to have stopped writing or publishing fiction since Cora, in 1978, her last book with Viking, which I suspect had not sold despite critical acclaim. Not that this was anything that interested us as students, we didn’t care much about our teachers’ writing careers but only about what good they would do for us. (I’m thinking of a well-known writer who told me not long ago that a student had said to her, “Oh, do you write too?”).
Daphne Athas was part of a triune of writing teachers in which she had the least authority. Doris Betts was more famous, still published by Knopf, a regal figure in Southern letters. Max Steele had published stories regularly in Harper’s Magazine, and had collaborated with George Plimpton in Paris in the 1950s on the founding of the Paris Review, (which he made sure you knew), and was a man, albeit a gentleman, and the chair of the department, and knew how to use both hilarity and insight as tools or maybe instruments of control in the classroom. Daphne was soft-spoken, not Southern, thought elliptically, hated the presumption of authority, and taught a class on nonsense. Many of her students found her go-anywhere trains of thought terrifying, fearing that not-understanding meant they were stupid. Others of us found it thrilling to let go of work-a-day processions of words and to scramble after some more elusive and intoxicating idea of meaning.
Other teachers seemed to have in mind a Platonic ideal of writing that it was their sacred duty to instruct you in; you would be graded, gently for the most part, on how close you got to that ideal. They were Americans to the core. Daphne touted her authentic “Greek-ery,” celebrating her immigrant father who, arriving penniless, got himself into Harvard. She was Socrates, Lucretius, Heraclitus and Aristotle all rolled into one, with a dash of Epicurus—she seemed to see writing as a wild experiment, a voyage out of The Odyssey, on which you never knew what fascinating monsters (but she would not call them monsters) you would meet, or whether you would get to your destination. And the destination was hardly the point. Certainly she had her own idea of who would end up feeding the fishes but she never elevated her taste and judgement to a universal ideal. She would later tell me she didn’t believe in “good” and “bad” writing—a terrifying credo for the young editor I was when she said it. But she responded with a literal squeal of delight—a “wheeee!!”—whenever a passage of prose or poetry spoke to her ear. She valued surprise, enthusiasm, unpredictability—a sense of music and rhythm, a sense of being pulled on an ocean current across a wine dark sea.
And she had gone places. She had hitchhiked to Mexico as a college girl in 1941, had assisted the war effort in London, traveled frequently to Greece, her father’s homeland, starting in the late 50s, and, after stopping in Moscow to visit Red Square, taught in Iran in the 1970s. There she’d had an unruly classroom, perhaps unaccustomed to a female teacher, and she’d called the ringleader of the boys up to the front of the class and in that soft voice of hers, proceeded to humiliate him with questions he couldn’t answer. After that, the class were like birds eating out of the palm of her hand. I don’t know who enjoyed that story more, she in the telling or I in the hearing. She wanted us to know that despite that soft soft voice, and her general spirit of tolerance, she was no pushover. She was fearless, intellectually and otherwise. She was the least provincial of any teacher I had at UNC or elsewhere.
And she was free. She seemed to live her life exactly as she chose. Conventions of femininity didn’t matter to her at all. People saw her as a person of indeterminate sexuality as she rode her old bike in her old poncho. Her strong features had become more pronounced, eccentric with age. She didn’t give a damn. But she was concerned lest her being unmarried cast some sort of pall on suspicion on her most devoted students, if they were too frequently seen with her outside the classroom. Beyond that, she was confident in her own brand of womanhood, even saw herself as a bit of a femme fatale and a flirt. Getting married and having children “was not her bag,” she told me, in the way these things were defined in her day, but she was not dogmatic (as some writers have told me their professors and editors were) that hers was the only true path; she thought the younger generations had more leeway to define roles as they wanted them, and she was glad.
It was the Reagan era, the beginning of the great conservative retrenchment. In the 1980s, sororities at UNC were still passing candles around in ring ceremonies to celebrate girls’ engagements (maybe they still do), and many of my female friends were already worrying about whether they were going to have to make a choice between career and family. The media was full of scare stories about career women who regretted that they had “forgotten” to have children, that they had waited “too late.” Daphne modeled a life that was not bound by those (or seemingly any) expectations—one that was not lonely or frustrated in her domestic solitude but completely self-determined and whole. Her model of freedom became my lodestar—I wanted to be Daphne when I grew up.
But growing up for me meant coming to New York City where independence was a fetish but self-determination was hard. After four years as the glorified publishing secretary that an editorial assistant was in the late 1980s—when assistants typed all the correspondence, before editors had desktop computers, and a self-correcting typewriter was the great liberation from LiquidPaper and Correct-o-Tape, and you just hoped your boss would abandon using the Dict-o-phone, an anachronism even then—I went on forty “informational interviews” to try to get promoted to editor. I was considering the leap to a job teaching English in newly post-Communist Prague when, finally, I had the pivotal interview. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, among the last then-standing of the great publishing firms founded in the decade after the First World War, had just been sold to General Cinema, soon to be renamed Harcourt General, then Harcourt (the trade publishing division ultimately part of HMH, recently bought by NewsCorp). The bow-tied editor-in-chief of then-still HBJ was Cork Smith, discoverer of Gloria Naylor and Carolyn Chute and Thomas Pynchon before being ousted by the “bean counters” at Viking. His previous publishing job at Ticknor & Fields, another name in the great cemetery of 20th century book publishing, had evaporated while he was on vacation. Eric Ashworth, a great agent who soon died of AIDS, called him “the King of Fiction.” Near the end of an interview punctuated by his smoker’s cough—he might even have been smoking a pipe—Cork looked up from my resume, over the top of his black rimmed reading glasses, and asked: “I see you went to UNC, did you ever come across a writer named Daphne Athas?” My eyes unquestionably lit up. Daphne! I admitted she was my North Star and mentor, that I considered her a friend, and we kept regularly in touch.
I didn’t know that Cork had been Daphne’s editor. In fact, it might have been that his firing had something to do with the fate of Cora. But Daphne had given me the magic key. After a couple more interviews at HBJ, including one with Peter Jovanovich himself, and a lunch with Cork (I think a lunch was part of the interview process, to show you could handle the social requirements of being an editor), I got the job.
In New York, from the fire-escape overlooking my landlord’s fig tree in the Brooklyn of the early 1990s (not yet the literary “Brooklyn” of today), I wrote Daphne long letters full of doubts, I’m sure, about every choice I ever made. It was a lonely time. She wrote back extraordinary long handwritten letters of sympathy and encouragement (letters now lost, to my dismay, in a flood in the basement of Norton’s office building), of which I have only a few fragments I typed up for a Daphne-encomium in a North Carolina literary journal some years ago:
Am I inveighing you to digest the autumn of the first (second? Third? Fourth? Fifth?) realization of the conundrum of the literary life? Not limited to editing, but to writing as well. Not finding any good scapegoats either, except the entirely neutral one of money. Money, the bottom line, is not to blame. Only people’s ultimate choice for money. Spurred on by the corporate pressures. It is very hard to live in this world filled up with people crushing each other for advantage.
But in this world not only is the question one of money, it is also one of influence. Influence enters the realm of mythology…. Influence is when the ‘community’ buys the propositions of certain people….This is the way, as you know, the mythology of winners is perpetuated.
You have now entered the realm of mythology. You have entered the marketplace where people listen to you. You have some influence. In your place in the pantheon still money talks. You and they need your books, some of them, to make money. And you need to be free enough to publish the work you know to be good in your vision of excellence. The books that move you. And the challenge is to balance these. To not be dragged down and drowned by a universe in which key players can no longer be moved by literature, only by the possibility of money return. It is fortunate that people (some) do read and are moved. Although a multitude think they don’t count. They do. I know it, and you do, too. Somehow you must with your left hand make money for your employers and paddle your own canoe, which is filled with dreams writ large. Is it possible? Of course you are at the heart of the Mammon factory, and when the product is written by seers, dreamers, and jokers, as well as nifty, thrifty, capable opportunists and merchants of words for paltry purposes, well, it is easy to be swamped and then drowned. Does this describe the source of your discouragement?
It does take strength to live without losing your sense of values, and all the more, I think when you’re successful but feel fragile.
It is easy for me to posit the situation, if I’m right. I would do anything to prevent you from being discouraged. That’s why, although I send you this Paperbacking of Publishing article [a great piece in The Nation by Ted Solatoroff in 1991] I do it on a day when the squirrels are nibbling with lifted ears, when the breeze has come up just enough (it came up as I was writing this) for me to know it as a grand breath, and when all the antennae beyond money, opportunism, and the small horizon of small minds are lifted beyond infinity. It is easy for me, pounding on this typewriter to you, as if enticing you to hear a different beat, to say throw it to these winds if it isn’t good or big enough for your view of books…. Anyway, don’t lose your vision… There are many ways to be an editor. And you are in a good position to find them… The best you can do is to exert your influence, and that means your freedom….
My God, how could I have been so fortunate. How could I not have read and re-read this letter every day of my working life since? Not for the practical advice—there was no practical advice, the pile of manuscripts was just as daunting day after day, the hailstorm of small tasks just as constant and distracting, the art/commerce too tidy when the requirement is both/and, the idea of “influence” terrifying then and now (and if there is no good or bad writing, how on earth to choose?), mythology no help at all—but for the love in it, which I cannot now read without tears.
So articulate a love, such generous freedom.
Her orbit of freedom was so strong that for decades afterwards just setting foot in North Carolina, especially Carrboro, where she lived, made me feel freer than elsewhere. I loved sitting on the slate porch of the cabin she had built herself, by hand with friends, in the woods, smelling the leaf mold, eating one of the bananas she kept for breakfast, and I would often spend a night or two on the low cot across from the computer table in her spare guest room/office, where the sound of the rain or falling hickory nuts on the tin roof made it seem the farthest extent of the planet away from New York City.
As I struggled to get my footing as an editor, Daphne mentioned how much she admired the list of an editor I had never heard of, Elizabeth Sifton—the literary fiction world being its own kind of bubble, I hadn’t really heard of any of the great nonfiction editors. But Daphne read nonfiction as voraciously and enthusiastically as fiction. And though I never met Ms. Sifton, Daphne’s admiration reassured me and gave me another notional role model when Harcourt General fired nearly everyone in New York and I was offered a job as primarily a nonfiction editor at Norton, where I’ve now worked for nearly 30 years. I had not yet read much nonfiction out of school, and probably thought in a bigoted, product-of-creative-writing-program way, that less fun and less depth was to be found in nonfiction than in fiction, but if Daphne found nonfiction work to admire, surely I could and would, too. And I have.
I think she would have found value in whatever I did. She found value in living, not just a passive being in the world but in a kind of sustainable mining of it for thought and conversation. That is what writing was for. So her novels and essays spilled into letters, thousands of pages of those rhapsodic, exploratory, sometimes indecipherable letters in arabesques of prose that she sent to the—how many? A dozen or so?—students who stayed in touch over the years. “Stayed in touch” being too anodyne a formulation. Returned to her as if to the intellectual and creative mother ship, for filling up tanks with oxygen so as to keep on breathing in a sometimes suffocating world.
She was fascinated by character, grooved on how it was shaped by history and time and circumstance, hence the necessity of knowing about everything in order to understand it. It worried her, politically and morally, that her notion of character had, she felt, become unfashionable. She didn’t like the shortcut of signaling character with historically real people about whom readers already had opinions—this was the basis of a friendly argument she had, jousting, with student Randall Kenan for well nigh a decade. She didn’t give a damn about money but respected the reality of it and resented that the university had hardly paid her two nickels and never given her tenure in all the decades she had been there. The women in the program had been paid a fraction of the salary of the men.
On her 95th birthday, an admirer brought her a balloon. I was there with Randall, who knew it was her birthday, while the timing of my NC visit had been entirely by chance. It was clear I could not stay under the hickory nuts this time; she really was old, and couldn’t tolerate too much disruption. A visitor the day before had already tired her so that she had, unthinkably, deferred my stopping in on her. Yet once we got there, she and we couldn’t stop talking — she pulled us back in every time we tried sensitively to leave so as not to wear her out. She was having fun! We talked about what, god knows, about everything. But it was the balloon that captured it all. I wrote her a huge long letter about travels afterwards and when she did not reply for a long time, and when she did, wrote only of the balloon, it did seem her mind was beginning to drift. But only sometimes. We argued over email about whether the balloon had been red or green. And when I sent her some sort of edible arrangement for her 96th birthday in 2019, it too came with a balloon. She wrote:
I put the new balloon on top of my refrigerator and it spent the night silently waving and weaving in the small air which has blown one way and another softly through the heaters and registers.
Doesn’t that remind you of the Keats’ poem, which promulgated, TS Eliot’s poem “I grow old I grow old. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I can hear the maidens singing each to each, but I do not think that they shall sing to me.
It was my surprise actually to find out that that poem is only a quarter of what T.S. Eliot actually wrote in the whole work. Check me if I’m wrong. I’m such a victim of tinnitus that I do not get everything correct in fact and order. I add or subtract too much at my own will.
My thoughts are slow, but nowhere as slow as my arthritic fingers. However, I am very fond of my tinnitus.
I get up. I get up. If I don’t get up, I’m afraid I’ll never rise again. I am not a a bunch of tulips waving in the wind. and sinking in the snow to dry and later wash away
Blow on, O wind and rain,
Enjoy each moment as you can!
In other words you have sent me an entirely new balloon to compete with the green balloon which I have written you about. I had made the green balloon such a presence that I refused to kill it by blowing it up and bust it with a loud explosion after so many MONTHS I’ve kept it
It is presence against reality. The red balloon is alive.
I hope you understand what I am saying. Because I am so deaf in real reality, the existence of these two creatures have expanded my ideas and ideals.
Can I please be Daphne when I grow up? When my mind starts to drift, can it drift so eloquently, bobbing like a balloon on currents of air, or on water along those channels that she dug out for us?
I thought she would live out of sheer curiosity to see the election results in 2020, to see what would happen in the pandemic, but she went out, trapped in a nursing home but COVID free, on the great tide of death. She had written me about death when a close friend of mine died in 1994:
Since time becomes (or is) a positive force in life on earth you may forget him in one sense, as he begins to operate on you in another. The very fact that he will never grow old, will remain young, will maybe keep uttering certain words wot you which he actually uttered, which will in their dynamism, nevertheless, stay always where they are, superseding time and its talent for changing the quality, timbre, and intonation, means that he will become like a landmark, or a statue. Something in one’s private museum…. Better still, a wayside identification. Like a shrine. Like a talisman….
And so she is now. I think of her whenever I consider the big tides of history and culture on which we paddle our very small canoes. Her world was “l-a-a-a-r-g-e,” written just so, like “g-o-o-o-d,” its largeness and goodness somehow encapsulated in these lines of a letter she wrote from Egypt in in 1990:
There I stood in my velvet footsteps in the sand, and thew that they, the Pharaoh and his wife, breathed something from three or four thousand years ago. But what was it? Oh, the usual ineffable.