Clair De Lune (30 page)
That was a long time ago. Much has changed since then. New kinds of darkness threaten. The nights are not always friendly. And there has been a change in the moon. Its light is not its own and it never was. But what of that? Remote and unassailable, it shed enchantment. We looked up and saw pure silver. Now the facts are brought home to us. The moon is dust and dead rock and no longer as it was.
But still it shines.
And sure as spring comes on, it will shine againâthrough that same garden, somewhere, here or there. And soon.
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More...
Jetta Carleton and
Clair de Lune
The Moonflower Vine
: A Neglected Book
J
ETTA
C
ARLETON
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.
J
ETTA
C
ARLETON
L
YON
called The Lightning Tree, the private publishing firm she owned and operated with her husband, Jene, “an affair of the heart.” She said the work was hard and the pay was low, but the satisfaction of keeping books alive was reward enough.
The Lyons set up their shop southeast of Santa Fe in the foothills of the Cerros Negros in 1973. They named their press for a giant ponderosa there, a landmark 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.
“[Jetta] said the work was hard and the pay was low, but the satisfaction of keeping books alive was reward enough.”
Jetta Carleton and
Clair de Lune
J
ETTA
C
ARLETON'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 tornadoâa 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 that same period she and her husband ran a small press called The Lightning Tree. “It was a lot of work, and sometimes it was a lot of fun,” she wrote of the press. “But mostly it was staying with it, month in, month out, with no real vacation. In spite of fatigue and tedium, machinery that malfunctions, walls that melt down, books that won't sell, frustration, boredom, disappointments, you stay with it.” It seems that she nursed along her second novel with the same dedication and wry pleasure. At the time of her death in 1999, Jetta bequeathed the manuscript of
Clair de Lune
to Daw and her daughter.
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 protagonistsâindeed, unlike
The Moonflower Vine
âthe 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 imaginationâto 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 novelâwhat I think of as its “Clair de Lune” movementâthe author writes: “But the night, as Thoreau reminds us, is a very different season. And it was a different creature whoâon those spring nights when spring had barely appeared, so shivering and dissembling that only the very prescient could tell it was there at allâran down the steps from Miss Liles's apartment, leaving behind the trappings of the day....”
“In the evenings, alone, [Allen] âdream[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 youthâbetween 16, say, and 28âwas 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 soulâlistening 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 moveâquite a daring one for any young woman, especially one living in post-Depression, small-town Missouri.
“Under the moonlight, the three explore the âchosen landscape' of the soul ⦠soon giving in to full blown âlunacy.'”