Leaving Cold Sassy: The Unfinished Sequel to Cold Sassy Tree

by Olive Ann Burns

  Reading through the letters Olive Ann wrote during 1985, I’m struck by how happy she was. In the midst of all the publicity she once said, “It’s as if everybody I know is dancing with me.” She meant it when she said that fame was never important to her, and never once did she write to inquire about sales figures or advertising plans. Instead, she wrote to tell us about her adventures with Cold Sassy Tree. She was the first to admit that she loved being in front of an audience, and she found herself in steady demand. “I said no to invitations three times today,” she announced in one letter, “but last week I said yes to PREACH at a morning service in a Methodist church. I’ve always wanted to write a book entitled Flattery Will Get You Somewhere. It got me to say yes to this.” The same day, her aunt called to say that a professional speaker had come to her church to review the book. “Maybe I can cut out all my going and just let other people talk about it,” she joked. But in the next sentence she said, “I never knew there were so many literary clubs. It’s ego-stroking to attend one—all those excited women coming in with my book under an arm.”

  When a woman hurried up to her at a writers’ conference and exclaimed, “You’ve changed my life!” Olive Ann admitted, “Oh, I felt so important. I thought one of Grandpa’s sermons in the book did it.” But no, that wasn’t it. The woman continued, “I read that interview with you in the paper where you said you wear all your underwear inside out. I tried it, and sure enough, it is more comfortable to have the inside outside ’cause it’s smoother.” “That’s what I said,” Olive Ann conceded. “I didn’t think about anybody remembering that, but she did.”

  Someone told Olive Ann that “the real pros” accept only one speaking engagement a month after their book promotion tours are over. “Unfortunately,” she admitted, “I keep accepting invitations because they are so attractive—like going to Mercer for two days, and to the University of Georgia where I can see, hear, and touch Mr. Erskine Caldwell, not to mention James Dickey....And I do indeed love to talk to the eager ones among high school and college students, and to old folks, as at Cornelia, Georgia, last week—lots of them were cousins I’d never met. I got a teacher’s certificate in college as well as the degree in journalism, and this has been my first chance to indulge. Also, it is exhilarating to get out of my basement hole and back in the world again. I was such a hermit for so long that at first I felt resentful of the calendar ordering me to be here today and there tomorrow instead of at home doing whatever I pleased. But I do look forward now to almost every place I speak. I am a ham.”

  The book continued to sell steadily, and the invitations showed no sign of abating, but we all agreed that the best thing Olive Ann could do for her fans now was begin on novel number two. She decided that June would be her cut-off point for “speaking wholesale,” as she called it. “It has been and still is a very happy experience,” Olive Ann wrote to a friend, “and I have had a grand time speaking. (I really always wanted to be a stand-up comedienne or an actress, and I really can make an audience laugh. They connect with me. What fun!) But I’ve stopped it all for the time being, and I am emotionally and physically ready just to be me, housewife and writer. I have no itch for any more attention. I am satiated with it. I know that I’ll be a one-shot writer if I don’t say no to most invitations next year, and I’m already finding it hard; libraries and schools are gearing up for fall and winter and the invitations keep coming, and saying no to them is a little like a girl having to stop kissing a boy she’s crazy about. Maybe my pleasure in talking (I don’t really give speeches) is a little like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s and Betty Smith’s thirst for drink, but I don’t think for the same reasons. Also I know that I really enjoy writing more, so once I get the book going I’ll be more tempted to be right here in front of a computer instead of in front of an audience.”

  Certainly Olive Ann hoped that would be true. “I plan to start the new novel the last week of June,” she wrote to me, “when all my commitments will be done with. I have now run the gamut of life as a new author—everything except starting to write again.” She got home from a week of teaching on June 22, and on June 23 she sat down in her basement room and began to write. The next morning, however, she couldn’t go on. Instead, she sent me a letter. “I’ve learned that when I feel blocked,” she said, “it’s always because what I’ve done is not going to work, and my subconscious knows it.” She spent a week rereading her family history, thinking, and planning; she read Cold Sassy Tree cover to cover (and admitted that she was surprised by how good it was); she turned over ideas for the first chapter, but she couldn’t seem to go back to it. She had begun to write Cold Sassy Tree out of desperation, knowing that she was facing, as she put it, “nausea, pain, and death—the great uncertainty.” But in the summer of 1985, she had no such crisis to back her against the wall. Indeed, life was offering all sorts of new pleasures and adventures. In addition to the invitations to speak and travel, she and Andy were embarking on a project together. They had decided to build a small vacation cabin in the mountains about two hours north of Atlanta.

  “Mostly,” Olive Ann wrote to a friend, “it will be a writing place. I’m not so famous that I need an unlisted number or that anybody bothers me here at home (fan mail is no bother!), but the house and all I need to do here besides write are always pulling me this way and that.” The cabin would be a quiet retreat for work. Meanwhile, planning and building and furnishing it together would be more fun than sitting alone in the basement, facing a computer screen. For the first time in her life, Olive Ann felt that she could relax about money—which is not to say that sixty years of thriftiness could be abandoned overnight. She often said that, for her, being rich meant being able to throw away a soup that didn’t work; usually, if a pot of soup didn’t turn out well, she kept adding things, trying to make it better. John would always complain, “Mom, you’re not making it better; you’re just making it BIGGER.” Being rich, she went on, “is buying fish and fruit without feeling guilty, buying books and nice gifts for friends without worrying about the cost, buying maid help.” After Cold Sassy Tree was published, Olive Ann and Andy began to allow themselves all these things, but they still seemed like indulgences.

  Once, writing had been Olive Ann’s indulgence; now the success of Cold Sassy Tree had brought her unexpected fame and, at the same time, the pressure to produce another novel. She was no longer a cancer patient with a hobby; she was a best-selling author with an audience. In some ways, the latter role was more of a challenge.

  Olive Ann knew the story she wanted to tell in Time, Dirt, and Money, but she kept changing her mind about how best to tell it. She had felt confident writing Cold Sassy Tree from Will’s point of view as a fourteen-year-old; she had her father’s stories, told in his own words, to inspire her. This time, though, she wanted to write in a different voice—that of Sanna Klein, Will’s wife. “I have already figured out everything that will happen to each character in the new book,” she assured me, “and I KNOW the characters—not only those left over from Cold Sassy Tree, like Miss Love and Will and his family, but also the new ones.”

  She hoped that a month at the Hambidge Center, free of all other temptations, would enable her to get “a big glump of writing done.” In fact, the weeks she spent there were difficult ones, as she grappled not only with the first chapter of her novel, but with a return to the discipline and isolation of writing. She was surprised by her own lack of confidence. “I had a good writing day today,” she reported to Andy and Becky two days after arriving. “Redid the first chapter and I now believe I can still write (more than yesterday). I remember now that I do my best writing off the top of my head and then developing it further later.” But before she sent the letter, she added a P.S.: “It was a faulty remembrance. I tried it today and got bored to death.” She tried writing in Sanna’s voice, and stopped after five pages. She turned on the radio and danced to rock music; she ate meals with friends, attended a bluegrass concert, and wrote more letters home. After two w
eeks, she went home herself, sick with a fever and feeling that she had made little real progress. She now had four different first chapters and didn’t like any of them.

  Though she was not feeling well, Olive Ann made a trip to New York on September 9, 1985, to speak at the annual dinner of the Bookbinders Guild. She had accepted this invitation because it meant that she and Andy could have a holiday in the city, and they had been looking forward to it for months, planning trips to museums, meetings with Olive Ann’s agent and her paperback publisher, and visits with old friends. When Gwen Reiss and I arrived at their hotel to take them out to dinner on the first night, Olive Ann was running a temperature and hadn’t been able to eat for several days. Nevertheless, she was determined to enjoy herself—and she did. I think she was as surprised as the rest of us when she handily put away two good-sized lamb chops at the Yale Club that night, and her speech the next evening was a smashing success. She stood before a crowd of well-fed businessmen, most of whom had never read her book, and won their hearts. “The Yankees laughed as hard as they do in the South,” she wrote afterward. But she spent most of the rest of her time in New York in bed. Back home, she signed books and gave speeches. But every day that she spent before an audience was a day that she was not working on her novel. At the end of September she returned to the Hambidge Center, hoping that this time inspiration would strike.

  All of the other residents had left by the time she arrived, and the retreat was about to close for the winter. This time Olive Ann really was alone; she cooked her own meals in her tiny cabin. “It is a beautiful time here,” she wrote, “fall nip in the air, leaves beginning to turn.” She suspected that she had had so much trouble those first two weeks because she was sick and getting sicker without being aware of it. Now she felt strong, but still not sure of her direction. “I could really get all my correspondence done now,” she wrote to a friend. “It is so easy and gratifying, and starting the book is so hard.” Three days later, she wrote to me, “I seriously sat myself down the first day back here and asked myself, ‘Do you really want to write a novel? You’ve done that.’ I asked myself if it wouldn’t be fun just to take a year off from have-to’s and just cook good food and go to Italy with Andy and read lots of books, and get my kicks with a speech here and there.”

  She was still pondering that question when a letter arrived from Mary Hood, the Georgia writer who had become a friend. Mary knew that Olive Ann was still rewriting Chapter 1, and she enclosed a copy of an essay by Robert Pope entitled “Beginnings,” about authors’ efforts to write first lines. “Beginnings may be entrances to a time and place, a culture and a faith, a moment, an eternity,” Pope wrote. “The struggle to find first words creates great anticipation, if not great anxiety, in the writer searching for the voice in which to speak, for each writer hopes to reach that voice inside himself which is immortal.” It was the right thing at the right time. “How can I ever thank you?” Olive Ann wrote back. “I was actually about to give up and come home. I haven’t liked anything I’ve tried. It wasn’t alive. And of all the things you might have copied from writing philosophers, you chose the one that made me see what was wrong...I realized suddenly that I was using the wrong voice to tell the story.”

  Sanna Klein may be the main character, Olive Ann realized, but that didn’t necessarily mean that Sanna should narrate the story. “Sanna is modeled after my mother,” she wrote in her letter to Mary, “who was beautiful, and good, shy, often depressed, always trying so hard, always doing the right thing, a brilliant woman, under-used intellectually, a chronic worrier; I loved her very much and thought of her as my best friend—we had many interests in common, I valued her thinking, she was intellectually stimulating. But from the time I was a teenager it exhausted me to be with her, listening to her and trying to pull her up from depression, anxiety, endless rumination about all her problems from childhood to now. Because I was her therapist, her telling me so many details of her life [gave] me a sense, and understanding, of what she was like and why. She was an amazing person, and her family was unbelievable, and I couldn’t have made up such a person without knowing her. Sanna will be different in ways, but I think I was afraid of dragging the reader down as I was often drug down.”

  Reading Pope’s essay had forced Olive Ann to confront the fact that she simply didn’t want to assume her mother’s voice, as she had her father’s. “To write as Sanna would be to BE her for two or three years,” she wrote, “and I felt exhausted by the prospect. And I realized I wanted to keep on writing as Will Tweedy. My father had so little understanding of my mother, and she knew him inside out, but he had a zest for life and challenges and change that made him very appealing. Without Grandpa Blakeslee to grab the book and run away with it, Will and Sanna will have a chance to have their own troubles and triumphs—and there is no doubt that the way Sanna is is a challenge to him.”

  For the first time, Olive Ann knew in her heart not only that she wanted to write another book, but that she could do it in her own way and feel good about it. Having decided that she would be Will Tweedy again after all, she sat down at her typewriter and “wrote some first words, and words following words—so free and spontaneous and alive that I felt resurrected.” At last she was having fun again. “I had almost forgotten that writing can feel wonderful,” she wrote to Mary. “I don’t think I’ll worry any more about whether it gets published than I did about Cold Sassy. I’ve always been a perfectionist about writing—wanting to make it my best and all that—but I haven’t really been ambitious. Ambition can be a spur, but if it uses up energy it can be a cruel taskmaster.” It wasn’t ambition that Olive Ann discovered at Hambidge; it was a renewed confidence. Even though she didn’t come home with a tall stack of manuscript pages, she had done something just as important: she had decided that she would write another book because she wanted to, not because the world expected it of her.

  ***

  It would be a mistake to assume that Time, Dirt, and Money would have been strictly a biographical novel, for while her parents’ marriage was certainly to be at its heart, from the very beginning Olive Ann was taking liberties with their story in the name of fiction. Real life was her jumping-off point, it was even the basis for her plot, but it would not have been the whole story. She had learned how to weave fact and fiction together while writing Cold Sassy Tree. Although she began that book thinking Will would be her father, she quickly discovered that he needed a life of his own. “After three pages,” she said, “I realized I couldn’t keep trying to recreate my father because then I couldn’t let Will become himself—a person, not a reminiscence.” In the same way, Sanna Klein is both Olive Ann’s mother and her own creation, and she is all the more compelling for that.

  Olive Ann said that her parents’ marriage was a great love story. She thought of Time, Dirt, and Money as a love story, too. The title came from a psychiatrist friend, who had once told her that the three things worriers worry about most are time, dirt, and money. “What about sex?” Olive Ann asked. No, her friend assured her, sex wasn’t in the top three. The phrase captured Olive Ann’s imagination, and she knew that she could create a character whose worries would threaten to deprive her of any real happiness. Will and Sanna would meet, be attracted to each other, and marry. But they would not be in love. True love would come to them years later, once they had learned to accept each other just as they were, for better or worse, and for all time. When we leave Will and Sanna at the end of Chapter 15 their life together is just beginning. However, the family history does shed some light on the challenges they were to face, and it provides a glimpse of their final reconciliation. It is also a fascinating document in its own right; it reveals how Olive Ann drew on real life to write her fiction. Here, for example, are Ruby Burns’s memories of meeting her future husband, from which Olive Ann created Chapter 1 of Time, Dirt, and Money:

  I met Arnold at a watermelon cutting in the park. The school board gave the party for the teachers, and a lot of young men came b
ecause there were a lot of new teachers. Arnold was working in Athens and brought several friends with him from the college. There were quite a lot of attractive young men there that day. I was impressed with Arnold Burns, but not overly. I didn’t think he was exactly handsome, he was so skinny. He just weighed 135. But I knew I liked him. The next Sunday he asked me for a date and I had a date with him every Sunday from then till summer, when he went to the Army. He had a motorcycle when I first met him, but he always used his father’s car for dates and I never remember having a date with him by myself. He always filled up the car. He wasn’t too good at talking in those days—I mean saying sweet things or handing out a line. Arnold was good at DOING. I mean he showed me how he felt, by wanting to be with me.

  That’s Will Tweedy, all right, but only Olive Ann could bring him to life. Her notes for the novel make it clear that Ruby Burns’s struggles were to provide some of the book’s major themes—namely, Sanna’s lifelong search for a sense of belonging, and her need for constant reassurance that she came first in her husband’s heart.

  Ruby Burns told Olive Ann that she didn’t let Arnold kiss her until the day she told him she would marry him. “She always said she thought part of what kept Arnold after her was being hard to get,” Olive Ann wrote in the family history. “He was so popular and attractive that girls had always fallen for him and he wasn’t used to anybody as feisty and independent as she was.”