Jetta Carleton and Clair De Lune Insights, Interviews & More

P.S. About the author 2 Meet Jetta Carleton 3 The Lightning Tree About the book 4 Jetta Carleton and Clair de Lune Insights, Interviews & More . Read on 10 The Moonflower Vine: A Neglected Book ClairDeLunePS_3P.indd 1 12/15/11 10:47 AM About the author the About Meet Jetta Carleton WilliamBerkeleyC. Jetta Carleton was born in 1913 in Holden, Missouri, (population: about 500) and earned a master’s degree at the University of Missouri. She worked as a schoolteacher, a radio copywriter in Kansas City, and, for eight years, a television copywriter for New York City advertising agencies. She and her husband settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they ran a small publishing house, The Lightning Tree. She was the author of the New York Times bestseller The Moonflower Vine. She died in 1999. 2 ClairDeLunePS_3P.indd 2 12/15/11 10:47 AM The Lightning Tree Jetta Carleton Lyon called The Lightning Tree, the private publishing [Jetta] said firm she owned and operated with her the work was husband, Jene, “an affair of the heart.” “ She said the work was hard and the pay hard and the pay was low, but the satisfaction of keeping was low, but the books alive was reward enough. satisfaction of The Lyons set up their shop southeast of Santa Fe in the foothills of the Cerros keeping books Negros in 1973. They named their press alive was reward for a giant ponderosa there, a landmark enough. scarred by lightning. Jene, who had worked as a production manager for New York publishing firms, was a ” genius with printing equipment and served The Lightning Tree as pressman, Linotype operator, and hand compositor, in addition to his duties as designer and bookkeeper. Having enjoyed some success as a novelist, Jetta used her literary skills to read manuscripts, proofread galleys, and do some rewriting. Until 1991, The Lightning Tree produced an eclectic list of titles, including books of poetry, regional history, bibliographies, and cookbooks, all designed and set in type by Jene. The foregoing description, which accompanied the exhibit Lasting Impressions: The Private Presses of New Mexico, was written by Pamela S. Smith, retired director of The Press at the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, and author of Passions in Print: Private Press Artistry in New Mexico, 1834–Present. Reprinted with permission of Pamela S. Smith. 3 ClairDeLunePS_3P.indd 3 12/15/11 10:47 AM About the book the About Jetta Carleton and Clair de Lune Jetta Carleton’s first novel, The Moonflower Vine, was a critical and commercial success when it was first published in 1962. Although the novel eventually fell out of print, it nevertheless enjoyed a cult-like following of reverent readers, among them the novelist Jane Smiley. In 2009, after Ms. Smiley included it in a list of one hundred classic novels, Harper Perennial reissued The Moonflower Vine. Once again it attracted enthusiastic reviews and brisk sales. Jetta Carleton joined the company of those rare writers, like Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison, whose one and only novel is discovered anew generation after generation. But there were still more discoveries to be made. Jetta had long been working on a second novel, Clair de Lune. Her family thought the manuscript had been swept away, along with most of her other papers, by a tornado—a bit of Missouri irony Jetta surely would have loved. After the reissue of The Moonflower Vine, a small Colorado newspaper published an interview with an old friend of Jetta’s who had recently read the manuscript of Clair de Lune. Dedicated sleuthing led the family’s literary agent, Denise Shannon, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and to Joan Daw, a close friend in Jetta’s later years. Over the course of their twenty-year friendship, Jetta had been working on one or another draft of the novel. During 4 ClairDeLunePS_3P.indd 4 12/15/11 10:47 AM that same period she and her husband ran a small press called The Lightning Jetta may have Tree. “It was a lot of work, and spent decades sometimes it was a lot of fun,” she “ wrote of the press. “But mostly it was taking the novel staying with it, month in, month out, apart and putting with no real vacation. In spite of it back together, fatigue and tedium, machinery that malfunctions, walls that melt down, but the para- books that won’t sell, frustration, doxical result is boredom, disappointments, you an enchanting stay with it.” It seems that she nursed along her second novel with the same freshness of style dedication and wry pleasure. At the time and inventive of her death in 1999, Jetta bequeathed characteriza- the manuscript of Clair de Lune to Daw and her daughter. tion. Jetta may have spent decades taking ” the novel apart and putting it back together, but the paradoxical result is an enchanting freshness of style and inventive characterization. Though set in a very particular time and place, Clair de Lune is a classic coming-of-age story. Unlike many novels that center on female protagonists—indeed, unlike The Moonflower Vine—the story of Clair de Lune does not revolve around romantic love. Though there is a romance, it is incidental to the central theme of a young woman becoming who she is, who she must be. Like The Moonflower Vine, Clair de Lune is set in Jetta Carleton’s home territory of southern Missouri, but it is a formal departure from Moonflower, which shifted between the points of views of the several members of the Soames family. Clair de Lune is told from only 5 ClairDeLunePS_3P.indd 5 12/15/11 10:47 AM About the book the About Jetta Carleton and Clair de Lune (continued) two perspectives: the author’s, who writes an informal prologue and epilogue and introduces each of the novel’s three movements, and twenty-five-year-old Allen Liles’s, to whom she handed part of her own story, “altered to fit.” Though Allen has never been out of Missouri, she has, like any serious reader, traveled far in her imagination— to the salons of Paris, the Italy of Byron, and, perhaps most momentously, to Greenwich Village: the Greenwich Village that is “much farther away from southern Missouri than it measured on a map.” The measure of that distance is evident in the characters who populate the junior college where she takes her first teaching job. Each represents a future comically remote from the one Allen desires. Mrs. DeWitt Medgar is a sour, skeptical soul who finds everything about Allen suspect, starting with her name. Dr. Ansel, Ph.D., a man “who knew what he knew and loved it greatly,” is still ball-and-chained to his widowed mother. The teachers Verna, Mae Dell, and Gladys form a veritable chorus of forsaken dreams and lives measured Though Allen out in coffee spoons. And then there’s has never been Miss Maxine Boatwright, young, pretty, “ socially prominent, and already engaged. out of Missouri, Maxine is everything a young woman she has, like any might aspire to be in this small city: a serious reader, well-married member of the country club set. In the daytime Allen is just traveled far in her another of their company, if slightly imagination. unusual: she is devoted to her teaching, ” passionate about contemporary 6 ClairDeLunePS_3P.indd 6 12/15/11 10:47 AM literature, and acclimating herself to the demands of her new station in life. In the In the evenings, alone, she “dream[s] herself evenings, alone, forward” into quite another future. “ At the opening of the second [Allen] ‘dream[s] movement of the novel—what I think herself forward’ of as its “Clair de Lune” movement— into quite another the author writes: “But the night, as Thoreau reminds us, is a very different future. season. And it was a different creature who—on those spring nights when ” spring had barely appeared, so shivering and dissembling that only the very prescient could tell it was there at all— ran down the steps from Miss Liles’s apartment, leaving behind the trappings of the day. .” Here we see exactly how much of Jetta’s own youthful “nightcrawling” she’s given to Allen. In a letter to her agent in 1972, she wrote: “I’ve been obsessed lately by the sudden realization that a good part of my youth—between 16, say, and 28—was lived most joyously after dark. My goodness, what a lot of larking about we used to do in the middle of the night! I can remember prancing up and down the big wide clean back alleys of Joplin, Missouri, on spring nights when the air was full of the scent of mock orange; and through empty parks and graveyards and along country roads. And we were always going into places, for godsake! I waded in more fountains, sat in the laps of more statues in public places, climbed astride more bronze horses, than anyone else I’ve ever known. And all of it in the wee hours, 7 ClairDeLunePS_3P.indd 7 12/15/11 10:47 AM About the book the About Jetta Carleton and Clair de Lune (continued) without anyone to stop us, and without a trace of fear.” The larking is launched when Allen discovers her true kin in the two young men who attend her literary seminar, George and Toby. Under the moonlight, the three explore the “chosen landscape” of the soul—listening to music, discussing literature, declaiming poetry and playacting, and soon giving in to full blown “lunacy,” gallivanting around town, eating sweets and drinking beer, and waltzing in the park.

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