Portrait of a Storyteller : Former Artist Allan Gurganus Draws Raves With First Novel, ‘Oldest Confederate Widow’

The way Allan Gurganus was lovingly caressing the contents of the battered old trunk in his living room, you’d think it was some rare treasure, some precious object with a value far greater than gold.

Which, to Gurganus, it definitely is.

“Here it is,” he said, sifting through a Mattherhorn of type-written pages. “This is the manuscript.”

Gurganus is not alone in his reverence for his first novel. Critics have lavished praise on “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” comparing it to works by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Margaret Mitchell, even Homer. His publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, launched the book with a hailstorm of hype and a generous 50,000-copy first-run printing, then rushed back, well before the official publication date of Sept. 6, to print 50,000 more. Just after Labor Day, Gurganus leaves for a two-month, 25-city publicity tour. Homer, it will be remembered, wrote a best seller about a similarly arduous trek, but Homer’s publishers never rewarded him by putting him on the talk shows.

‘Inventor’ of Stories

The objects of all this affectionate attention are Gurganus, 42, and Lucy Marsden, 99. A writing instructor who has taught at Duke, Stanford, the University of Iowa and Sarah Lawrence, Gurganus is a former painter who has forever “invented” stories. Even in grammar school, in Rocky Mount, N.C., Gurganus thought it was much more interesting to make up a book review about a nonexistent book than to read a real book and write about it. Once, for example, “I made up a book called ‘Ray, a Dog of the Pyrenees,’ by Sonia Riddle Bly.” Gurganus pronounced the book “compelling” and “filled with adventure,” and his teacher never for a moment caught on.

Even today, Gurganus prefers to ride the subway than to take a cab, in part so he can concoct stories about the lives of fellow passengers. “I go around the car, left to right, or right to left,” he said, the same method he used to use in restaurants with his friend and former writing instructor, the late John Cheever. Cheever was responsible for Gurganus’ first published story when he submitted one of his student’s works to the New Yorker. “Minor Heroism” was the first story involving a gay character the magazine had ever published.

As for Lucy Marsden, she is the feisty narrator and heroine of Gurganus’ 718-page opus. Nearly blind and confined to a charity nursing home in Falls, N.C., a town that sounds suspiciously like Rocky Mount, Lucy looks back on a life marked equally by the War Between the States, the Battle Between the Sexes and the Struggle Between the Races. “Too old to lie, too vain to need to,” Lucy exuberantly holds back nothing.

Lucy was just 15 when she was married to 50-year-old “Captain” Will Marsden, a Civil War veteran for whom--like almost everybody in Falls--the war has never fully ended. In Castalia, Cap Marsden’s slave since childhood, Lucy finds an unlikely best friend who offers new light on the indignities of the peculiar institution.

So vital is Lucy, so outrageous and opinionated is she, that sometimes, talking to Gurganus in his small, city-subsidized apartment on the Upper West Side, you half expect the crusty old widow to roll up in her wheelchair and discourse on the burning by Sherman’s troops of the family plantation, or maybe to proffer her favorite recipe for shortbread.

“Oh, yes, absolutely, Lucy is completely alive for me,” Gurganus said. She was such a part of his life that “Oldest Living Widow” took 7 1/2 years to write. Only when his editor, Elisabeth Sifton, and publisher, Sonny Mehta, offered major incentives did he reluctantly trim the original 1,700-page manuscript to its present, spare 718 pages and call the book complete.

Gurganus was well along on another novel, “The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church,” about a television evangelist and a sex scandal, when Lucy so rudely interrupted him. He was working at Yaddo, a writers’ colony in New York state, when he picked up the newspaper to read about a reunion of Confederate War widows. That was it for television evangelism and what Gurganus calls “the spot where the holy spirit and carnal knowledge coincide.” He sat down that very day and wrote 30 pages in the voice of Lucy Marsden.

“From the very start, from those first 30 pages of Lucy’s voice, I believed in her,” Gurganus said. “I just knew it was right. Not for a second did I think ‘this is the wrong idea.’ ” The novel’s title may have come from the newspaper article, Gurganus added, “but Lucy is mine, all mine.”

In creating a narrator who was both female and more than twice his age, Gurganus was following, in a way, a classroom exercise he often gives his fiction students. “Write a love story in the voice of someone of the opposite sex,” he tells them. Students, as he has said, “who might once have willingly written, ‘The curvaceous cutie with her great throbbing alabaster globes’ eventually find it harder to write ‘I, the curvaceous cutie with my throbbing alabaster et ceteras.’ ”

But Gurganus also was supplying himself with the garrulous grandmother he wished he had and the family history no one ever wanted to talk about.

The eldest of four sons, Gurganus comes from a “comfortable, if Republican” family that has been “shabby genteel for four generations.” Fundamentalist Baptists, with preachers on both sides, the family went to church every Sunday, no matter what, and afterward piled into the car to visit Grandma, every Sunday, no matter what. But Grandma was a taciturn type, so Gurganus was left to imagine the stories he wished she’d tell.

Slave Owners

The scope of those imaginary stories broadened considerably when Gurganus tripped across the family secret, that his ancestors in Rocky Mount had been slave owners.

Polite Southern families, said Gurganus, are governed by a kind of “doubleness.” Slavery “is not something that gets mentioned. I knew that my family had been sort of prosperous farmers, and I knew there were black people in town with my family name, but it never crossed my mind” that slavery might be the connection.

In a letter that accompanies review copies of his book, Gurganus writes of this realization, “Neither my father nor my grandfather--carriers of that name--had ever mentioned slavery as running in our family like a tendency toward gray-green eyes or epilepsy. That my own people had gone to Fayetteville or Charleston, where slave sales took place, and had bought whole other families seemed to me alien and shaming.”

If the discovery was shocking to Gurganus, it was also not without irony. It was 1968; Gurganus was just 21. Tried for draft evasion, the one-time University of Pennsylvania art student found himself with a choice between six years in federal prison and a tour of duty in the military. He opted for the latter.

His ‘Salvation’

Pressed into the Navy and a sailor’s white uniform, Gurganus found himself stationed first in Long Beach, “of all unpromising places.” His “salvation,” the only way he could keep his sanity, was to venture into the L.A. County Art Museum. One day, he remembered, “I was so homesick that I finally saw the face of someone I thought I knew terribly well.” Gurganus approached the woman and blurted out the name of every living friend or relative who might have known her. She replied, “Oh, darling, I’m so embarrassed. I used to advertise cheese on Perry Como’s music show. Everyone thinks they knew me.”

To curb his boredom, Gurganus took to rummaging through the stacks at “a pretty little Carnegie library set among park statues and palm trees.” It was there that he came across an early volume of U.S. Census records. Leafing through the dusty ledger, he learned that in addition to owning 960 acres of farmland, Josiah Gurganus, his great-great-grandfather, had in 1790 been in possession of 13 slaves.

Gurganus knew he could never truly identify with the horrors and the humiliation of slavery. But at the time, “I was a stranger in a strange land. I felt a fugitive, sent by my own country on a ship to places I dreaded, to do work nobody else would do.” And so eventually, “the whole notion of slavery” would become “one of the cornerstones” of his first novel.

But writing a novel was still half a lifetime away. At the time, Gurganus had practically never read a novel. “It was only when I was on the aircraft carrier that I was bored into reading,” he said. Gurganus’ job aboard the Yorktown was to decode top-secret messages sent by the North Vietnamese and the Koreans. “Luckily,” he said, “the top-secret messages didn’t come in very often,” and Gurganus would hole up with Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Marcel Proust. The ship had a “marvelous” library, he recalled, and soon the librarian was having books secretly helicoptered for him. When other guys got Playboy, he got Chekhov. By the time he was discharged, Gurganus had read 1,200 books. This feat was enough to convince Sarah Lawrence to give him two years of college credit.

At Sarah Lawrence, his first writing teacher was Grace Paley. What Paley taught him, Gurganus remembers, is that “people always find the language to say what’s important to them.” Some years after Gurganus had studied with John Cheever at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cheever, by then dying of cancer, sent Gurganus a “To-whom-it-may-concern” letter. “I consider Allan Gurganus to be the most morally responsible and technically brilliant writer of his generation,” it said.

The moralism, a trait that burns through in the person of Lucy Marsden, is something Gurganus would never deny. It’s a tough time to be a moralist, he agreed, but a great time to write about morals.

‘Right and Wrong’

“I would say that the one way to be original in fiction now is to ask questions about right and wrong,” Gurganus said. Because it fails to address those questions, Gurganus abhors minimalism, the genre popular among so many young writers. In the Manhattan of minimalists, for example, “there are not, as there are in my neighborhood, 85 beggars on the street,” Gurganus said. “If you buy a loaf of bread today, you have to make that decision about how much of that bread you will keep, and how much you will give away.” With such quandaries confronting people, “I think there is a real appetite on the part of readers and citizens for a reader who is going to say ‘this is right, and this is wrong.’ ”

He will consider himself morally dead, Gurganus said, the day he picks up the morning paper and fails to seethe over at least half the articles on page one. Since “one of the things I found most sobering while I was writing this book was living through the AIDS crisis in New York,” one day, this very issue confronted him head-on.

“I was taking the paper to a friend who had AIDS. While I was on the subway, I read that Ronald Reagan had cut $50 million from AIDS research on the same day he had spent $3 million to redecorate the presidential yacht.” Gurganus was furious, and had to make a decision about whether to show the paper to his ailing friend. He did. “Finally,” he said, “we can’t really protect each other.”

Along with slavery, the question of the absurdity and immorality of war ripples through “Oldest Living Widow.” With his best friend Ned, Cap Marsden has joined the rebel forces at age 13. The best friend dies in an accidental shooting, and one of Lucy’s tasks then becomes to describe how the death of this young man touches the lives of people who never knew him for the next 100 years.

To explain what he sees as the “real image of war,” Gurganus resurrects a childhood episode of his own. For years, he had begged to shoot a gun. One day, his male relatives handed him a hunting gun, and said, shoot.

“I was 11; I weighed about 85 pounds,” he said. When the gun went off, he nearly fell over with it. “I pretended it had shot where I wanted it to, but in secret, I had a bruise on my shoulder that I showed no one.” What he learned about is what he went on to write about, how “it was not the explosion outward, but the concussion inward” that truly symbolized war.

‘Moral and Erotic’

Slavery, war, relationships between men, women and children--”what I wanted to write was a kind of moral and erotic fairy tale for grown-ups,” Gurganus said. “My interest was to write a funny book about the worst possible situation.

“It seems to me that what is facing the world now is so dark.” For Gurganus, that fact makes it “a simple time to write fiction, because there is only one question: ‘Can we save the world, or is it too far gone to pull back?’ Fiction that does not address that is frivolity.”

But Gurganus, slender, and with a bright, easy smile, somehow manages to remain an optimist. “I have to believe that somehow, some of it will be saved,” he said. Even writing, “the very act of setting down words on a page,” assumes someone will be around to read them. “It assumes, like putting a note in a bottle, that there will be another shore.”

Because he believes that “it is a responsibility for people who are inherently funny to be funny about something,” Gurganus’ optimism is tinged with humor. If that sense of comic survival is evident in his book, it is even more apparent in his apartment.

An article he wrote in HG magazine this spring made the place sound like a one-bedroom palace. In fact it is a minuscule place in a building that is one step up from a project. Every possible square inch is crammed. On one wall, there is his collection of more than 200 masks, “co-sufferers, co-jokes,” he calls them. There are clocks that tick resolutely, dozens of them. His Navy medals are framed in the bathroom, right alongside his Boy Scout merit badges. There are pictures of relatives who fought in the Civil War, on both sides, family photographs and, on his desk, a framed portrait of Chekhov, “my mentor.”

He has a collection of Atlas moths, a passion since boyhood, and also his childhood Christmas stocking, framed of course. “Fixing up the place has been important to me,” he said. “You bring your history with you, and you are perpetually creating it.”

His sudden celebrity means that Gurganus could probably move somewhere less gritty. But why? he figures.

‘Lawyers as Janitors?’

“The thing that I find most heartening is that I really might be able to go on writing,” he said. Writers and artists go through such strange apprenticeships, he said. “Can you imagine if lawyers had to work as janitors for 20 years before finally being allowed to argue a case?”

He is fast at work on another book, a collection of short stories and novellas to be called “White People.” Some, like the tale about Jessica Helms (“the senator in drag”), are outtakes from “Oldest Living Widow.” There is still the Baptist church to write about.

He keeps a list of ongoing stories on a sheet of yellow paper in his bathroom, right under the Navy medals. It seems unlikely he will ever run out.

Several universities have approached him about acquiring his papers, he said. What they are especially interested in, he said, is the manuscript for “Oldest Living Widow.” Gurganus bent down to admire one of the pages with its hand-illustrated graphics. The trunk and its contents, he said, will stay with him.