And the way they USED to do it

Okay, I'm a devotee of Helen Hooven Santmyer's novel ...And Ladies of the Club and have been for years. As it turns out, my husband's grandmother lived up the street from Santmyer and we inherited her autographed copy of the novel when she passed away. Inside, I found all sorts of newspaper clippings about Santmyer's work and unexpected success.

All quotes are from the Columbus Citizen-Journal Friday, January 13, 1984 and Saturday, January 14, 1984.

Santmyer was 88, nearly blind and living in a nursing home when her book was published. It took her fifty years to write. The book was handwritten and in print was 1,344 pages long. It was originally published by Ohio State University Press, which still holds the copyright to the book, and was then published by Putnam after it was made a selection of the Book of the Month club.

Weldon Kefauver, director of the Ohio State University Press, said he kept in contact with Miss Santmyer during the writing.

"When she finished it and asked my advice, I asked her to send it to me and she did--in 11 boxes."

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That would be 11 boxes of bookkeeper's ledgers covered with longhand writing. Originally, only a few hundred copies of the book were sold and most of those copies went to libraries in Ohio. BUT...

...And Ladies of the Club gained a new lease on life with Grace Sindell of Shaker Heights overheard a woman tell a librarian that it was the best book she ever read. Intrigued, Mrs. Sindell checked the book out and finally persuaded her son, Gerald to read it. Sindell is a Los Angeles writer, producer and director."

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It was through Sindell's influence that ...And Ladies of the Club went from a small print run from a university press to a# 1 NYT bestseller status, Book of the Month, and a standing place in American literature. He contacted an agent at the William Morris Agency, Owen Laster, who sold the rights to Putnam. When it was made the Book of the Month main selection, everything took off from there. Miss Santmeyer died two years later.

Talk about the long way around! When someone asked her if she'd written the next great American novel, she said

"Oh, no. It's just a book about politics."

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At any rate, Helen Hooven Santmeyer's story is so vastly different from the success stories we usually hear in literature that I thought it deserved a moment of consideration here. As a writer dedicated to her craft, her perserverance should be an example to us all. FIFTY years! She published other things during those years--she was an accomplished poet and educator, one of the first women to receive a Rhodes scholarship in fact--but this one piece of fiction consumed the majority of her life. And when her moment came, it came when she was alone (having never married) and seriousy ill, in a nursing home in Xenia, Ohio where only a few good friends (like my husband's grandmother) went to go see her. I just thought I'd share it with all of you.

I was focusing more upon the dedication to her craft and her story--to spend fifty years of her life working on one novel. From what the family says, Miss Santmeyer not only was indifferent to her success and the subsequent financial repercussions but found the whole thing rather amusing. She was just as happy to have her book in print with a small press as she was with all the adulation afterwards. It's generally thought around Xenia (the town where she lived and oh, by the way those 11 boxes of manuscript survived the immense Xenia tornado) that her story was a barely disguised autobiography. The dedication she had to this project was something we can all learn from in these days when people expect overnight success and fame and fortune to follow closely on their heels. This is an example of a writer who was focused upon the story and not the perks of being published.

If you've never read ...And The Ladies of the Club I highly recommend it. When you do read it, you immediately see the precision she used with every word and scene. Precise is not a word I use to describe fiction that often, but Santmeyer's talent with language and imagery is razor-keen. On the surface, it looks like it would be boring: it traces the history of an Ohio town and the country from the end of the Civil War until the 1930s through the eyes of the women who formed a literary club. The book ends when the last--and the youngest--of the founding members dies. But it's a beautifully-written novel and reflects the changes of not only the status of women in American society but how they thought and behaved, what they dreamed of and planned for and how the walls of old prejudices eventually crumbled against the onslaught of the next generations. It's always been my goal as a writer to find that kind of precision and to NOT have it take fifty years--but then again, I type quicker than I could write longhand.

Aschenbach said:

I love your (nightttimer's) avatar.

But I don't agree that quality and quantity are mutually exclusive.

If a writer has it in them to write one brilliant novel, why not write another one?

Why stop at one and mythologise it as a decades-long struggle to defy mediocrity and produce the ultimate? Some writers do exactly this. And lots of readers seem willing to swalow the idea of the one-off genius.

Personally, I think that attitude is self-indulgent.

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Well, actually, as I said earlier, Santmeyer published other things during her career. Her previous book Ohio Town I also own and she was a well-respected poet. I never said quality and quantity are mutally exclusive. Not sure where you got that from, but it wasn't from me. I was just commenting on the dedication to her story that she displayed.

Well, I have a book in query hell right now with manuscripts sitting on agents' desks from CA to NYC. I'm impatient--waiting gracefully isn't a virtue I share. So yesterday, when I pulled ...And Ladies of the Club out for its annual spring read, I took a look at the newspaper clippings and that impatience was soothed. It was like a salve to all of the angst that submitting creates in me. So I thought that perhaps I should share it with all of you, in the hopes that it would have the same effect.