“You see the review in the Times?” the blue-haired bookstore clerk asked. “The author’s here for a signing next week, which should be freaking lit.”
I winced at the idea of a bookstore event related to Clio being “lit.”
Sinking into a comfy armchair, I flipped through the pages. There was my name in the acknowledgments, but after all my years in book publishing, I’d grown accustomed to that. Ingrid’s thank-you was more effusive, though: “It’s no exaggeration to say that without Livvie Bliss, this would be a very different book— not much of a book at all. She is a hero and a visionary.”
The block of references in the index to “Bliss, Livvie” startled me. I ran my finger down the list, but didn’t turn to those pages. Instead, I hunted for the story’s climax.
In advance of publication, both Ingrid and Gerri had offered to tell me the book’s assessment of Flora’s edits, but I said I could wait. I had only asked to see the direct quotes Ingrid attributed to me. Now as I skimmed the chapters, relief surged through me. She had done a bang-up job on Clio’s short stories, and her measured treatment of The Dismantled set the scholarly record straight without repudiating Clio’s talent or playing psychoanalyst to her relationship with Flora. My words popped off the page at me: “She told me they were a team. ‘It was all so innocent,’ is what she said. If they’d stayed a couple, Flora’s role might not have been an issue.”
There would be endless articles about the revelation, reviews attracting readers with misleading, almost lurid headlines like the one in The New York Times: “The Dismembered— Clio Hartt, Flora Haynes, and the History of a Hoax.” I couldn’t control what happened after I told Clio’s secret, and that had to be all right.
Recently, Ingrid returned Clio’s manuscript to me so that it could join the Clio Hartt archive. My plan is to transport it to New York City myself. But right now, it rests on a shelf in my office in the royal blue manuscript box I special-ordered for it. The sight of it every day comforts me. “For me, Miss Bliss?” I hear my friend say. “What a divine color!”
Acknowledgments
As a young lesbian in New York City in the early 1980s, I was amazed to learn that legendary writer Djuna Barnes was still alive and living in Greenwich Village— a part of the city I knew intimately. I would pass Patchin Place, her little corner of the Village, on my way to Djuna Books, a women’s bookstore on West 10th Street— named in her honor, although not with her approval. Many years later, while I was doing research for an LGBT history project, I read a memoir of Barnes in her declining years, and the fact that she belittled lesbianism— even though the great love of her life was a woman named Thelma Wood— stuck with me. In these bits and pieces of information, Clio Hartt had her genesis. While Clio isn’t Djuna by any stretch, she shares some of the famous writer’s experience and personality.
For help with this novel, I have many people to thank. The book was made possible in part by a Regional Artist Project Grant from the Arts and Science Council of Mecklenburg County and the North Carolina Arts Council. The grant allowed me to spend a week in June 2017 at Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where I workshopped the first two chapters. Many thanks to my cohort there, especially Corey Stewart Hassman and Amy Hill, for insightful comments and edits; and to our workshop leader, Fred Leebron, for his wisdom and generosity.
My longtime writing buddies, Selene dePackh and Lucy Turner, read the manuscript in its entirety twice, and offered savvy suggestions about both content and format. They generously read the parts about Livvie in the present an additional two times and gave comments that helped me zero in on plot issues. Thanks also to Debra Efird, who read an early draft; her comments helped steer me toward a better understanding of some of the characters.
As always, my spouse, Katie Hogan, deserves huge thanks— not just for putting up with me when I fussed and fretted and cried out, “I can’t finish this thing!” but also for reading multiple drafts and offering detailed comments about language, plot, and characters.
The women of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brookyn, New York, get a shout-out for pointing me toward online copies of the defunct feminist news-paper, WomaNews; thanks especially to Rebecca Arciprete and Marguerite Campbell. Rereading that newspaper— where I was a volunteer and then staff member for four years in the 1980s— brought back the New York City of my young womanhood in vivid detail. Most of the places I mention as Livvie’s hangouts are actual spots I frequented as a young woman; many are gone, and some readers may remember their physical layouts differently than I do.
For my understanding of the Paris lesbians and their world, I’m indebted to the following books: Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank by Andrea Weiss; Women of the Left Bank by Shari Benstock; Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes by Phillip Herring; Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation by Noel Riley Fitch; Wild Heart: Natalie Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris by Suzanne Rodriguez; and Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner by Brenda Wineapple. Hank O’Neal’s memoir, “Life Is Painful, Nasty and Short . . . In My Case, It Has Only Been Painful and Nasty”: Djuna Barnes, 1978-1981, gave me a glimpse into the final years of that great writer’s life.
And finally, thanks to the women of Bywater Books— in the short term, for bringing this novel to life, but over the long haul, for their amazing dedication to lesbian-themed literature.
About the Author
Paula Martinac is the author of a book of short stories and five novels, including The Ada Decades (Bywater Books, 2017), a finalist for the 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction; a 2017 Foreword Indie Award for LGBT Fiction; and a Golden Crown Literary Society Goldie Award for Historical Fiction. Her debut novel, Out of Time, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction (1990; e-book 2012) and was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award. Her short stories have appeared in Raleigh Review, Main Street Rag, Minerva Rising, Bloom, A&E, and many others. She has also published three nonfiction books on LGBT themes, including The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites, and authored plays that have been produced in Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Her full-length screenplay, Foreign Affairs, about the love affair between journalist Dorothy Thompson and novelist Christa Winsloe, finished second in the 2003 POWER UP screenwriting contest. She is a lecturer in the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a writing coach with Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts.
Read more at www.paulamartinac.com.
Bywater Books
Copyright © 2019 Paula Martinac
By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Bywater Books.
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61294-148-6
Bywater Books First Edition: April 2019
Cover designer: Ann McMan, TreeHouse Studio
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This novel is a work of fiction. All characters and events described by the author are fictitious. No resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, is intended.
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