A Surprise Literary Hit--Even to the Author

Charles Frazier stands before a formidable crowd at Quail Ridge Books, looking slightly ill at ease. Not that long ago--back when he was still a part-time English professor and stay-at-home dad--he could have walked into this bookstore, only miles from his home, and nobody would have noticed.

But then “Cold Mountain” changed everything. A Civil War story about a wounded Confederate soldier who deserts a field hospital in Raleigh and walks home through the North Carolina mountains, Frazier’s first novel has become the literary surprise of the year.

Published June 16 by Grove Atlantic Press, it cracked the L.A. Times bestseller list within three weeks and by now is into its seventh printing. Early this month, Frazier sold the film rights to United Artists for a reported $1.25 million. Anthony Minghella, who turned “The English Patient” from a novel into last year’s Oscar-winning best picture, has been signed to adapt “Cold Mountain” to the screen, with Sydney Pollack co-producing.

It’s a remarkable performance for a literary book that had an initial print run of 25,000 copies.

Here at the bookstore, people are asking Frazier how many drafts he wrote, if he comes from a family of storytellers--the sorts of things a celebrated debut novelist is asked. Frazier is soft-spoken and his words don’t travel to the back of the store where people stand jammed amid shelves, clutching their copies of his book. He has drawn the largest crowd for an author’s reading that Quail Ridge Books has ever seen--larger than the ones for Charlton Heston or Amy Tan or Dan Quayle, according to a store employee.

Frazier thought his novel would end up in a drawer, or in a box down in his basement.

“It’s funny to spend years by yourself working on this thing, and then suddenly it’s out there and all these people are reading it,” he muses the morning after the reading, over breakfast at a coffee shop.

Actually, he calls the attention and acclaim that have greeted his book disconcerting, a harsh light in his eyes after years of solitude, when he researched 19th century Appalachian life exhaustively and wrote in obscurity--sometimes in a mountain cabin at Blowing Rock, N.C., not far from the world of his book.

It’s a romantic image, but in fact he was doing unromantic work, questioning and sharpening words and images until he’d arrive at something that pleased him enough to continue. He estimates that he put each chapter through anywhere from 12 to 20 drafts. In the end, “Cold Mountain” would take him seven years to finish.

He would shelve the book for months at a time, bring it back out, shelve it again. “There were times when the day’s production might be a paragraph,” says Frazier, who at 46 exudes the unhurried temperament of a man who could spend hours fixing a screen door. “I read somewhere recently that when Raymond Chandler was writing he would cut typing paper into strips. His rule was there had to be something delightful on every strip. An interesting phrase or line had to happen. I think that’s a good thing to work toward.”

*

“Cold Mountain” is a book with an epic sweep, a wartime love story that refuses to give in to tired sentiment. It is not, however, a book geared toward Civil War buffs. The fighting takes place offstage; its impact is most apparent in the desolation of the main characters’ shellshocked psyches.

Frazier’s protagonists are Inman, wounded in the neck at a battle in Virginia, and Ada Monroe, the lover who waits for him as he tries to make the long trip home. The war is coming to a close; the defeat of the South is a foregone conclusion. Chapters trade off between characters: Inman trudges on, battling starvation, the rugged terrain, the war deserter round-ups; Ada struggles to subsist on her dead father’s farm.

As initially conceived, the book was to deal only with Inman’s journey, but Frazier decided that that story on its own would have been too stark. He added Ada, but not merely as a device, a love interest. Her character offers an equally rich glimpse into the cost of the war back home, from a woman’s point of view.

“These wounds from the war, not just the military wounds but the kind of loss that people at home suffered during that time, the feeling of being defeated--that was a very strong element of the South when I was a child,” Frazier says. “And there are still remnants of it.”

When people talk about “Cold Mountain” their focus inevitably turns to the prose--the craft of the sentences, the care given to language, the authenticity of detail. Frazier has the ability to make the physical landscape eerily real (see box). Lee Smith, a novelist who lives in Chapel Hill and has been one of “Cold Mountain’s” most vocal champions, calls Frazier’s writing a wonderful break from the “impoverished level of language we have become accustomed to.”

Before “Cold Mountain,” Frazier was teaching 20th century American literature part time at North Carolina State and taking care of his daughter, Annie, while his wife, Katherine, worked. The desire to write a novel did not drive him.

“Cold Mountain” began as a hobbyist’s pursuit; for a time, Frazier knew only that he might someday want to write about the 19th century in the Southern Appalachians. As a child growing up in the rural mountain town of Andrews, N.C., the son of a high school principal, he had seen traces of a rapidly dying way of life--a neighbor, for instance, making molasses using a mule and an old mill.

And so in the beginning, before he had a story, Frazier traveled to fiddler conventions, reread Appalachian jack tales, trolled county libraries. “I was always looking at my subject as the Southern Appalachians,” he says. “I wanted to get the landscape, the animals, the folklore, the music. There was this world that’s virtually lost and I wanted to record my impressions of it.”

Then, family history intervened--in the form of an anecdote he heard from his father about a great-great-uncle who had been wounded during the Civil War and had walked all the way home. As soon as he heard that story, Frazier says, he knew he had something his raw material might work around.

But there was more research to do--poring over Civil War-era correspondence and regimental histories in libraries at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When he wasn’t sure what should happen next to Inman on his journey, Frazier would drive up to the mountains to exercise his imagination.

And still, years would pass before he would take himself seriously as a novelist. He had tried fiction writing in his 20s and promptly decided he didn’t have anything to say. So he’d taken the academic route, getting a doctorate in American literature at the University of South Carolina. He taught at the University of Colorado and then at North Carolina State--part time, so he could be at home with his daughter. He’d published a short story in an anthology called “Best of the West,” but that hadn’t given him the bug.

He’d been writing while he “was being a parent at home while I was trying to teach some classes at State. I began to realize I could do two of those things pretty well, but I couldn’t do all three. And writing was always the thing that came in third.”

*

Enter Kaye Gibbons, a family friend whose own debut novel in 1987, “Ellen Foster,” had propelled her into a literary career. The Gibbonses knew the Fraziers because each couple had a daughter attending the Montessori school in Raleigh. Gibbons had seen and liked one of Frazier’s short stories, but he was still reluctant to show her his work.

“Charles just isn’t the kind of person to go up to someone like Kaye and say, ‘Here, read my stuff,’ ” says Katherine Frazier. Finally, Katherine went behind her husband’s back, smuggling 200 pages of the novel-in-progress to Gibbons. “He was worried she wouldn’t like it and that would hurt our friendship,” Katherine says.

He needn’t have worried. Gibbons called the next day to ask Frazier if he wanted her to Federal Express the manuscript to her agent in New York or just send it by regular mail. She also told him to quit his teaching job, to devote himself full time to finishing the book.

Elisabeth Schmitz, a rights director at Grove Atlantic, was the first person there to read “Cold Mountain.” She immediately took it to her boss and soon they came back with a heady offer for Frazier--a six-figure advance to snatch up the rights before “Cold Mountain” went to auction.

And this was while Frazier had yet to figure out an ending to his story.

Paperback rights were sold to Vintage for $300,000. Schmitz throws out comparisons to other recent literary surprises--John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” David Gutterson’s “Snow Falling on Cedars”--and says “Cold Mountain” is on track to surpass them.

Frazier is now on a whirlwind book tour scheduled to have him in Los Angeles in September. Newsweek, People and others have come knocking at the house outside of Raleigh. It’s a Hollywood ending to a story that would have to include the scene where Frazier’s 12-year-old reads passages of her father’s writing aloud so he can listen for rhythm and tone, for the sound of his language.

Life in the Land of ‘Cold Mountain’

“Beyond the fields stood flatwoods. Nothing but trash trees. Jack pine, slash pine, red cedar. Inman hated these planed-off, tangled pinebrakes. All this flat land. Red dirt. Mean towns. He had fought over ground like this from the piedmont to the sea, and it seemed like nothing but the place where all that was foul and sorry had flowed downhill and pooled in the low spots. Country of swill and sullage, sump of the continent. A miry slough indeed, and he could take little more of it. Out in the woods, cicadas shrilled all around, near and far, a pulsing screech like the sound of many jagged pieces of dry bone twisting against each other.”

--From “Cold Mountain,” by Charles Frazier