Clair De Lune

by Jetta Carleton

  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.

  “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.”

  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 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”

  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 out in coffee spoons. And then there’s Miss Maxine Boatwright, young, pretty, socially prominent, and already engaged. Maxine is everything a young woman might aspire to be in this small city: a well-married member of the country club set. In the daytime Allen is just another of their company, if slightly unusual: she is devoted to her teaching, passionate about contemporary literature, and acclimating herself to the demands of her new station in life. In the evenings, alone, she “dream[s] herself forward” into quite another future.

  At the opening of the second movement of the novel—what I think of as its “Clair de Lune” movement—the author writes: “But the night, as Thoreau reminds us, is a very different 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....”

  “In the evenings, alone, [Allen] ‘dream[s] herself forward’ into quite another future.”

  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, 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. With these friends, only a few years younger than she, Allen feels brilliant and completely engaged, and for a while she manages a fragile balance between daytime decorum and nighttime daring.

  Inevitably, Allen’s trespasses become the cynosure of gossip and speculation. With a mixture of mortification, shame, and confused pride, Allen faces the moral, social, and financial implications of her nighttime self. Back and forth she goes, from the determination to keep her position at the school to the lure of larger dreams, the woman she knows herself to be, and the larger world she longs to join. She is not undone by fear but refined by it.

  The last scene masterfully enacts the suffocating tension between Allen’s two choices. Finally, she is compelled to make a bold, irrevocable move—quite a daring one for any young woman, especially one living in post-Depression, small-town Missouri.

  “Under the moonlight, the three explore the ‘chosen landscape’ of the soul … soon giving in to full blown ‘lunacy.’”

  Jetta Carleton was herself such daring soul, moving from Missouri to New York, where she worked as a television advertising copywriter. Creating Allen Liles from a distance of more than fifty years, she is able to dramatize the dilemma her character faces with a light touch, bring her characters to life in a sentence or two, and portray each of them with a clear-eyed compassion born of experiencing much more than dreams. Jetta’s philosophy is Epicurean, finding the highest virtue in happiness and friendship. How rare it is for a novel to celebrate “the chosen landscape of the soul,” the enchantment of moonlit spring evenings, and the importance of good old-fashioned fun.

  Since Jetta’s novel was still a work in progress when she died, Joan Daw and her agent, Denise Shannon, asked me to edit the manuscript, to address some inconsistencies of sequence and characterization, and to clarify a few phrases likely to perplex a twenty-first-century reader. I have used my lightest editorial touch and done my best to honor what I believe were Jetta Carleton’s intentions.

  I expect Clair de Lune, like The Moonflower Vine, will meet with enduring success, especially among young readers. It is, at its heart, a novel that encourages idealism—a quality, as Jetta Carleton says of innocence, that seems in short supply these days.

  Ann Patty

  October 2011

  “Jetta’s philosophy is Epicurean, finding the highest virtue in happiness and friendship.”

  Read On

  The Moonflower Vine: A Neglected Book

  The following is Brad Bigelow’s review of The Moonflower Vine. The review appeared on NeglectedBooks.com, December 23, 2006.

  I READ THE MOONFLOWER VINE after coming across Jane Smiley’s discussion of it in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. It wasn’t so much what Smiley had to say about it as that it was essentially the only genuinely little-known novel she saw fit to include in her list of one hundred great novels. In there amongst Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, and Ulysses was this book with a completely unfamiliar title and by a completely unfamiliar author. To see a neglected book rate such high-profile coverage alone made it worth a try.

  I can’t say that The Moonflower Vine would have stood much chance of a second look from me had it not come with such a sterling recommendation. Its marketing, back when it was picked as a Literary Guild selection and condensed in a Reader’s Digest edition, was definitely aimed at a feminine audience, and its first paperback edition featured a small picture of a big, strong, dark-haired man embracing a delicate young woman—the sort of image that’s become the cliché of gauzy romantic novels.

  “Its marketing, back when it was picked as a Literary Guild selection and condensed in a Reader’s Digest edition, was definitely aimed at a feminine audience.”

  As Bo Diddley s
ang, though, you can’t judge a book by looking at the cover. There’s barely a lick of romance in the whole of The Moonflower Vine. Carleton grew up on a Missouri farm perhaps not too unlike that described in her novel, and no farm family that survives a hard winter or a bad harvest has much romanticism left in its veins. The pragmatism of farm life is multiplied by the stern morality of the Midwest Methodist, with its clear-cut sense of right and wrong (and none of the Southern Baptist’s taste for a little melodramatic backsliding).

  The Moonflower Vine is a multidimensional tale of the lives of Matthew Soames; his wife, Callie; and their four daughters, Jessica, Leonie, Mathy, and Mary Jo. Mary Jo is probably closest in profile to Carleton herself. The youngest of the girls, she is roughly the same age as Carleton and, like her, left rural Missouri for a career in the world of television in New York. She narrates the introductory section of the book, which takes place one summer Sunday when the daughters (with the exception of Mathy, who dies before the age of twenty) have come back to the family farm for a visit. This section is gentle, lightly comic, and bucolic in its description of rustic pleasures such as skinny-dipping in the creek.

  “Carleton grew up on a Missouri farm perhaps not too unlike that described in her novel, and no farm family that survives a hard winter or a bad harvest has much romanticism left in its veins.”

  The rest of the book, however, is related in the third person. Starting with Jessica, it deals in turn with each of the other members of the family—Matthew, who struggles throughout his career as a teacher and principal of a small-town school with a lust for bright young women in his classes; Mathy, the family rebel, who elopes with a barnstorming pilot; Leonie, the dutiful daughter, who never quite manages to find her right place in the world; and finally, Callie, the mother, whose brief moment of adultery mirrors her husband’s own private sin.

  Sin is a constant presence in the book. Everyone in the family, with the possible exception of Mary Jo, commits one or more sins, in their own eyes or those of the community, that prevents any form of love expressed in the book from being completely unequivocal. Matthew never fully forgives Mathy for quitting school and running off with one of the local renegades, nor Jessica for marrying a drifter Matthew takes on briefly as a hired hand. The Soameses are a God-fearing family, stalwart members of the Methodist Church, very much Old Testament Christians.

  “Sin is a constant presence in the book.”

  At the same time, though, progress makes its own changes in their lives. While Matthew and Callie refuse to install indoor plumbing, planes, trains, and automobiles all bring the outside world a little closer to their doorstep. Jessica and her new groom catch a train for his family home in southern Missouri—genuine hillbilly country—and though he dies less than a year later, she remains with his people thereafter. Ed, one of Matthew’s old students, returns to town with an old biplane and proceeds to sweep daughter Mathy off her feet, only to kill her a year or two afterward in a crash landing. Sometime later, Leonie takes a trip to Kansas City, meets a somewhat reformed Ed, and eventually decides to marry him.

  Though The Moonflower Vine is full of lush descriptions of the trees, birds, flowers, and plants that fill the Soameses’ world, it’s very much a Midwestern, rather than Southern, novel. The comedy and tragedy are always moderated with a spare sense of realism. Missouri is, after all, the “Show Me” state—skepticism prevents any of the characters from leaping headlong into any of their passions for more than a moment or two. Or, rather, it makes them look before leaping, if leap they do.

  As the reviews of The Moonflower Vine on Amazon.com demonstrate, this novel, though long out of print, continues to hold a fond place in the hearts of readers who’ve discovered it.

  “Missouri is, after all, the ‘Show Me’ state—skepticism prevents any of the characters from leaping headlong into any of their passions for more than a moment or two.”

  Brad Bigelow edits and maintains the Neglected Books Page (www.neglectedbooks.com), which features reviews, articles, and dozens of lists of fine but forgotten books and authors. He also edits the Space Age Pop Music Page (www.spaceagepop.com), which pays attention to music most people prefer to ignore. After serving with the U.S. Air Force for twenty-five years, he now works for NATO and lives outside Brussels, Belgium.

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  Other Works

  ALSO BY JETTA CARLETON

  The Moonflower Vine

  Credit

  Designed by Michael P. Correy

  Copyright

  HARPER PERENNIAL

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de Lune” copyright © 2012 by Ann Patty. All rights reserved.

  P.S.™ is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  CLAIR DE LUNE. Copyright © 2012 by Jetta Carleton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook 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 HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-06-208919-9

  EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN 9780062089182

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