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| Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1970 |
A
few weeks ago I was reading an old interview of my favorite author, David
Foster Wallace. In the introduction, the interviewer apprised readers who may
be unfamiliar with Wallace’s work of the sort of writer Wallace is by comparing
him to other similar writers. When it comes to Wallace, the list of his comparable
contemporaries gets to be drearily repetitive as the same names get mentioned
over and over (Vollmann, Powers, Franzen, etc.). So I was very surprised indeed
when this interviewer invoked a name I had never heard before: Carol DeChellis
Hill.
I did
a Google search and not a lot of information came up. Most of the search
results were used book vendors selling her books. After rooting around a
little, I pieced together that she had four or five novels, the first one
written over 40 years ago. I was intrigued enough to pick them up to see what
she was all about. Some of her books were out of print, a couple were available
new on Amazon but as weirdly expensive paperbacks. There were no Kindle versions.
Using the Amazon marketplace and eBay, I picked up four of her books relatively
cheaply, a small investment for what I hoped would be a worthwhile discovery.
As
soon as her books started to arrive I dove in, and soon I began to get pretty
excited. She was a really good, sometimes brilliant, writer. I started to
devour her novels at a fast and steady clip. A couple of them I was convinced
were masterpieces.
As
I approached the last few pages of what I had initially ordered, I began really
scouring the internet for more information about her. I’m the type of person
who loves reading about artists I admire. (Even if they are not traditionally
“interesting”; for instance, I’ve somehow read three Salinger biographies.
Three!) I love in-depth interviews, profiles, stuff like that.
So
I was a little discouraged when the internet offered hardly anything at all
about Carol DeChellis Hill. There was no Wikipedia entry, no website (official
or otherwise), no author’s page on a publisher’s website. There were none of the
standard social media outlets authors use for promotional purposes: no Twitter
account, no Facebook, no blog. Not only that, no old interviews came up, no
profiles…nothing. I couldn’t even tell for sure whether she was still alive.
I
started tracking down all the miscellaneous writing she had done—the text for a
photography book, a novelization of a movie, little short stories squirreled
away in now defunct magazines—eager just to read more of her prose. While unearthing her more obscure work, I gradually came across stray bits of biographical information about her.
I knew I was going to write little reviews of all her books when I was done,
but at a certain point I realized I could supplement those mini capsule reviews with all the info I
had uncovered about her. Doing so would create a one-stop place for people who
newly discover her work to come and learn more about this unjustly
overlooked author. So, with that in mind, this is as much of Ms. Hill’s story as
I can piece together.
Before we begin, I will point out that most of the information about Carol DeChellis Hill that can be found on the internet is
taken from
her short bio in Contemporary Novelists,7th edition, a prohibitively expensive, 1000+ page compendium of author
bios published in 2000:
Early Life
Carol DeChellis Hill was born Carol Sue DeChellis on January 20, 1942. She grew up in
Westfield, New Jersey, and graduated from Westfield High School where she participated in many organizations including the literary club, dance
club, and bridge club, as well as being involved with the school magazine. Her main interest, however, was
theater and acting. During her senior year she served as president of the
school’s theater troupe, the Mask and Mime Club, and she had a major role in
the fall play, A Roomful of Roses.
She was voted “Class Actress” in the senior superlatives.
After
graduating high school, she attended Chatham College (founded in 1869 as the Pennsylvania Female College) in Pittsburgh, where she received a
B.A. in history. She was very active in various communities and organizations. She was president of the Christian Association, a student counselor, member of the Chatham choir, and president of the Junior class. She was also an excellent student, perenially making the Dean's List.
After college she moved to New York City, where she became the assistant publicity director for Crown Publishers. Throughout the '60s, she was active in a
couple different theater companies, including the Judson Poets’ Theatre, which
became one of the first theaters that constituted what is now known as “Off Off
Broadway.” In 1967, the Workshop Theatre at New York University produced her
full-length play Mother Loves (which
unfortunately I’ve been unable to track down).
Early Writings and First Novel
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| Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1970 |
The earliest piece of writing by Hill that I can find is an essay called “Theatre Without Ideas,” published in the magazine New Politics, December 1965. (She is credited as Carol D. Hill.) It is a review of the play known as Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss. She is fairly critical of the play; she writes that “[t]he play fails in dramatic terms primarily because Weiss has not created character” and that there is a “lack of originality in the ideas of the play itself.”
Hill’s
earliest piece of fiction I can find is the short story “The
Shameless Shiksa,” published in Playboy
magazine, September 1969. (She is credited as C.D. Hill.)
It is about a young Jewish teenager named David who
is working at his father’s fruit and vegetable counter in a grocery store in New York City. He is
mesmerized by an attractive female customer who regularly comes in and shocks
everyone with her nonchalant talk of things widely considered inappropriate
for discussion, like female orgasm and the mechanics of insemination. She
discusses these things in a matter-of-fact way (it is implied that her interest in these subjects is scholarly) and never in an overly salacious
manner (even when she is egged on by others), which makes everyone
in the store, especially the boy’s mother, look like prigs in comparison when
they are left mortified by what she is saying. David is also embarrassed by her frank discussion
of sexual matters, but he’s understandably fascinated by her as well and, predictably,
she takes over his fantasies. In the aftermath of a chance encounter with her
out in public, something happens that causes David to think he has left
adolescence behind for good. But his pronouncement of “Now I am a man” is more
menacing than it is triumphant, as his coming of age isn’t facilitated by the
object of his affection so much as it seems to come at her expense.
On
May 20, 1970, Random House published Hill’s first novel, Jeremiah 8:20. According to the Contemporary
Novelists bio, she was 28 years old at the time of publication. This 371-page
novel centers around a 39-year-old protagonist named Jeremiah Francis Scanlon.
He’s fat, balding, and socially maladroit. He lives in New York City and leads
an uneventful life working as a bookkeeper. He resides in a boarding house
filled with colorful characters, most of whom are indifferent to him when not
openly scornful. Deeply unsatisfied in an indefinable way, Francis, as he is
called most of the time, gets it in his head one day that the black community is
hoarding the answers to life’s big secrets, and he proceeds to get a tape
recorder and starts to surreptitiously record as many conversations between black
people as he can get away with. It is from this point that he embarks on a path
of discovery, both about the world at large and himself.
While
the novel is written in the third person, about 80% of it is closely tied to Francis’s
POV, with plenty of descriptions of what he is thinking. They are the thoughts
of a not overly educated man, full of terms like “din’t” and “allus” (always), words
lacking terminal g’s (“cleanin”, “somethin”, etc.), and mindless repetitions:
Having nothing
to do when he got there, he rearranged the sachet his mother had insisted upon,
among his socks, and looked for his book of crossword puzzles. He lay there for
some hours, across and down, down and across, not caring really, whether he got
it right or not. That was why, he knew. Milda always won it because she cared.
He didn’t really. He woulda liked to beat her to it, but really he didn’t care.
He lay back on the bed, opening and closing the night table drawer that
contained his supply of butter cookies, and lay there munching in a vague and
absent way as he stared hopefully out into the street, hoping faintly that he
might see something there.
-Jeremiah
8:20, pg. 43
Francis
is someone in whom exists a blend of naivety and idealism, a person who believes newspapers
never lie, cops possess unassailable probity, and Moby-Dick is a true story—notions that people around him have no
problem disabusing him of. He is, in many ways, that familiar figure who treads
the line between charming naïf and blundering idiot. What makes him unique is
that there is no clear indication that he should be the recipient of either our
scorn or sympathy; readers will find their feelings about him change on an
almost page-by-page basis. He can be by turns frustrating, piteous, funny,
admirable, dull, and surprisingly insightful. He doesn’t exist mainly to prove an author’s tendentious point. In other
words, he is that which all authors strive to create: a real, three-dimensional
character.
While
Francis’s voice is prevalent throughout, there are occasional moments when the
book shifts to an overarching view of events, and in these moments it is capable
of beautiful observation:
ARE YOU SCARED?
There seemed to
be a strange stillness in the air after he said that and suddenly a waft of
salt air so pungent to his nostrils that it stilled any further query,
surrounded them. The fog rolled in obscuring the land with its wet heavy
blanket, dragging almost clumsily, so slow, so stumbling was its advance,
catching on each thing, then to lift suddenly, over a bush, like the perilous,
inconclusive things raised by children, in small gusts and ebbing queries,
answered occasionally through the distance by a lugubrious response, a tried
and agreed upon thing whose occasional sounding it was believed, ensured the
general safety. Real fog, however, the kind raised most persistently, would
distort even the most practiced sound.
-Jeremiah
8:20, pgs. 270-271
Jeremiah 8:20 is an ambitious
novel, whose goal seems to be nothing short of encapsulating America, and it
succeeds pretty well in doing so. Through Francis and the characters he
encounters, Hill explores myriad topics including politics, office drudgery, sexual repression, race
relations, war, and the age-old question of “How does one live?” The character
of Francis and the heavily slanted-POV style of the novel seem to anticipate
the characters and styles of novels published later in the ‘70s that are widely
regarded as modern classics. You see aspects of Francis and his concerns
mirrored in Bob Slocum (Something
Happened by Joseph Heller, 1974), Harry White (The Demon by Hubert Selby, Jr., 1976), and Richard Nixon (The Public Burning by Robert Coover,
1977).
There
is a building tension as the novel takes on theme after theme and loads them in
significant and thought-provoking ways. Most narratives that attempt to filter
everything (or at least everything important
and vital) through a single character seem to inexorably inch toward a
climax that involves either a nullifying apocalypse or a cleansing rebirth. It is a credit to the author's talent that the
ending of Jeremiah 8:20 feels like
both at the same time. The long and short of it is that this book is an amazing artistic achievement. And I must say that the late great John Leonard elucidated the novel's merits much better than I ever could in his New York Times book review on May 21, 1970:
Early to Mid-‘70s
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| Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1974 |
In 1973, Holt Rinehart published Subsistence
U.S.A., a book of Bruce Davidson photographs with accompanying text by
Carol Hill. The book contains long interviews with people from all over the country living in some
kind of privation—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not—along with photographs of them. Hill writes little introductory pieces before
each interview, describing the environment the person lives in (they interview people from
California to Maine and everywhere in between) and the situation the person finds
him or herself in. They interview hobos, hitchhikers, destitute families from down
south, and hippies trying to live off the land, creating an affecting portrait of the perseverance of American people.
The short story “Gone” was published in the November 1974 issue of Viva magazine. While it is very short, it is well written and manages to be surprising while striking a
poignant chord that hums after the final word is read. I think it may be the
best 508-word short story I’ve read this side of Donald Barthelme.
In
1974, Random House published Hill’s second novel, Let’s Fall in Love. The story is a postmodern murder mystery that
takes place in various locales around Europe. A pair of detectives are trying to
solve the murder of an old lady who collected erotic esoterica, from antique
dildos to 19th century erotic manuscripts. They eventually cross paths with a
$10,000-a-night high-class courtesan and her acquaintances, some of whom have
ties to Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. Eventually it is uncovered that
the murder is part of a string of other unsoved murders that have something to do with the location of priceless paintings the Nazis stole
and hid away during WWII.
The
novel is as crazy and madcap as it sounds. It is also very entertaining and
pretty experimental. Hill drops in what appear to be real New York Times articles, mixing truth into her fantastical
narrative with intriguing results. There are also excerpts from real hundred-year-old
erotic texts, statistics from modern sex studies and surveys, reproductions of paintings, and
old magazine ads.
Some
of the book is just flat-out funny, like when one of the characters decides
she’s going to write an erotic novel and enlists the help of her friends:
“Now everyone,” she called, clanking on a
glass, “pay careful attention. First we have to define terms. Now we need terms
for the male and terms for the female. The first question is, is the dirtiest
word dirtier than the euphemism, and which is better for arousal?”
“Certain words,” Anna said, “we know are
dirty, i.e., prurient. They are: spread, if you follow it with the legs; if you
follow it with peanut butter it’s okay; squat, usually, licked, usually.”
“Sucked?” someone asked.
“Oh, that one,” Anna said, “depends on how
you use it,” and with that she leaned back, smoking a lollipop.
“Now is penis better or dork better?”
“Dork?” Lola said. “Ugh, is that a word for
a penis?”
“Yes,” Anna said, “it rhymes with pork,
that’s what I don’t like about it.”
“Scratch dork,” Lola said. Anna agreed. They
sat for a while around the pool enjoying the cool breezes. Finally Rabbi
Fennerman said, “What about schlong?”
“Schlong?” Anna asked incredulously, “Don’t
you mean dong?”
“No, no schlong,” the rabbi insisted.
“I like that,” Anna said, writing it down,
and then she read the sentence out loud, “He put his schlong into…”
“Wait,” Lola said, “put is too aggressive,
try something more delicate, like place.”
“Place,” Anna said, considering it. She
looked around, taking a vote. Bacco nodded. So did Rabbi Fennerman. It seemed
that they agreed that place was the thing for schlong.
Anna started again. “I think we’re going to
write a very good pornographic novel. Now listen to what we have so far, “He
placed his schlong into…”
“No no no,” Bacco said, “place is too polite, schlong has a very pushy
quality.”
“I think that’s an anti-Semitic remark,”
Rabbi Fennerman said.
“No,” Anna said, “I don’t like pushed his
schlong into.”
“Wait,” said Lola, “it’s not so aggressive
if you change what he’s pushing it into.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you have him pushing his
schlong into her cunt, that’s very rough.”
“Well, what do you want it in, her ear?”
“No, some euphemism. How about pushing his
schlong into her velvet glove?”
“I don’t like velvet glove,” Anna said, “it
sounds fuzzy.”
“You’re right,” Lola said, sitting back and
thinking it over. “If anything is velvet it should be the schlong.”
“What about rose,” said Bacco.
“Perfect,” said Anna, reading out loud, “He
pushed his velvet schlong into her rose…”
“No no, no,” Lola said, “you can’t say
that.”
“You can’t? Why not?” Anna asked.
“You can’t because,” Lola said simply,
“people don’t go around pushing things into roses. At least certainly not
decent, honest, hard-working people.”
“Well, he’s got to do something to it,” Anna
said, “maybe pry. What about he pried open the rose?”
“That makes it sound like a tin can,” Bacco
said.
“Um.”
There was silence for a moment and then Lola
said, “Maybe the rose could do something to him.”
“Like what?”
“Embrace,” Bacco volunteered.
“Embrace?” Anna said questioningly.
“Yes, good, good,” Rabbi Fennerman said.
“The rose embraced his velvet schlong.”
Anna was busy scribbling it down and asked
him to repeat it.
“ ‘The Rose and the Schlong.’ You know,
that’s not a bad title,” Bacco said.
“ ‘The Rose and the Schlong.’ ” cried Anna,
“yes yes, it’s absolutely perfect.” And so they all agreed.
-Let’s
Fall in Love, pgs. 143, 146-47
With
its elements of terrorism, sex, politics, and outré characters, Let’s Fall in Love reminds me of a
DeLillo novel, something like Running Dog,
Players, or Mao II. And like most DeLillo books, Let’s Fall in Love crescendos to a literally incredible ending, one
involving characters miraculously surviving a plane crash and then having to
escape an aborted séance in a moated castle in the Alps while evading gunfire
and crocodiles. Overall, this is a solid and fascinating second novel.
Side note: The cover of the UK release might be my favorite book cover ever:
Another
short story of Hill’s, “Only Sleep With the Husbands of Friends,” was in the June 1975 issue of Viva. [Note: Although the CN bio says there is a story called "Lovers" in the
April 1975 issue of Viva, there is no writing by Hill in that issue.] It is a highly erotic tale of a 30-year-old woman and her efforts to alternately resist and succumb to an Italian painter's charms.
An Unmarried Woman
In
1978, Avon released the novelization of the Paul Mazursky film, An Unmarried Woman. Actually, it says it
was based on the screenplay, so Hill probably had not seen the movie before
writing the novel. (Note: This book, as far as I can tell, is the first thing
that credits her as “Carol DeChellis Hill” and not just “Carol Hill.”)
The
book (and movie) is about a mid-30s woman named Erica who believes she has a
good marriage until her husband announces out of the blue that he’s leaving her
for a younger woman. With the help of her friends, she navigates the waters of
being newly single while trying to guide her precocious teenage daughter
through adolescence.
The
movie is not talked about much these days (there is no Blu-ray, and the DVD is
out of print but available from Netflix if you still have them ship you discs)
but it was a popular movie with both audiences and critics at the time, earning
over $20 million at the box office and scoring three Oscar nominations including
Best Picture and Actress for Jill Clayburgh.
The
novel is written in that slick, easy to read style of books that seem like they
were shipped directly to airport bookstores as soon as they got off the press. It is
designed to be finished in one or two sittings. It is competently written, but
something of a head-scratcher. I’d be interested to know the circumstances that
led Hill to take this project on.
There
are some key differences between the movie and book. The book has characters
in it that were either cut from the movie or never made it past the early
script phase. One of these characters is Erica’s mom, who doesn’t play a
significant role in the story but her short scenes make sense because of course you’d
call your mom if your marriage broke up. Another character that appears only in
the book is Erica’s boss, and his only purpose seems to be so Erica can ask him
for a raise because she’s worried about money now that her bread-winning husband is out of the picture (he
is a stock broker and they were one of those vaguely wealthy Manhattanite
families that populate virtually every movie that takes place in NYC). This is
another major difference between the two: in the movie, Erica seems to hardly care about money at all, acting like her financial situation will remain
unchanged even though she works as an underling at a not very upscale art gallery. My guess is
that while having the character worry about money is certainly more realistic,
it is not what Mazursky wanted the movie to be about, so he opted not to have
the character express any concern at all. In the book Erica finds
herself thinking about money every few pages in a very believable fashion.
Also,
Erica’s daughter is way more erratic in the book, prone to wild mood swings,
acting out more, etc. In the movie the daughter is a lot more placid and calm,
evincing “maturity” in almost every scene. Again, I think the book is more
realistic (the daughter is, after all, only 15 years old), but perhaps Mazursky liked the
unconventionality of having an imperturbable teen daughter in a movie about divorce,
especially since the girl they cast was clearly older than 15 and looked fairly
mature already.
The
last big difference between the movie and book (besides the ending of the
movie, which would be difficult to duplicate in prose, especially airport-book
prose) is that Erica has some pretty strong disagreements with her friends in
the book, leading to hard feelings that persist for large chunks of the story,
and are in some cases never fully resolved. In the movie the friends are pretty much unconditionally
supportive of Erica, always there for her and always receptive to Erica’s
emotional needs. In the commentary to the movie, Mazursky talks about how Erica
and her friends were precursors to the characters in Sex and the City, and how
it was almost revolutionary back then to depict a group of women as genuine,
supportive friends and not conniving and back-stabbing and in constant
competition with one another. Not that the friends in Hill’s adaptation were
total bitches to each other, but there was a fair amount of contention
interlaced with their good times together. It could've been that Mazursky wiped
out any trace of ill will between the friends early on before they started shooting, or maybe it was a decision
made during filming, or maybe Hill was just taking liberties with the story, changing things as she saw fit.
I could see any of these being possibilities.
Writing Full Time
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| Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1985 |
Hill worked as a
publicist and editor for many major publishers throughout the ‘70s. She attained her highest position in the publishing world when she became the vice president of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1978. She was also the senior editor at that company and edited many bestsellers, including Barry Goldwater's memoirs and The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias. (He thanks her in the acknowledgments of the new edition published in 2011.) In 1980,
she turned to writing full time.
In March of 1985, Holt Rinehart published
Hill’s fourth novel, The Eleven Million
Mile High Dancer. (It was published in England in 1988 with the title Amanda and the Eleven Million Mile High
Dancer.)
Amanda
Jaworski, the book’s protagonist, is NASA’s premier female astronaut and about
to be the first person to travel to Mars. Her specialty is
particle physics, but she is no stuffy scientist. Instead, she is the kind of free-wheeling genius who has no
problem gliding around her workplace on roller skates. She is a fiercely intelligent woman who also happens to fully embrace her femininity; she “liked strawberry sodas,
high-heeled shoes, men, lipstick, convertibles, long hair, bright toenail
polish, particle physics, quarks, entropy, speculations regarding the speed of
light, Darwinism, and archaeology.” It is undoubtedly these unusual qualities of hers
that attract the notice of two suitors: Bronco McCloud, a jet pilot oozing
machismo, and Donald Hotchkiss, a dashing aerodynamic engineer. She spends most
of her time with the more sensitive and giving Hotchkiss, but finds herself
wistfully thinking of the more adventurous possibilities that McCloud offers:
She thought that
for women, the likes of McCloud would hang them all. She knew she would give up
everything for the joys of McCloud’s love. True this was no idle passion; this
was no will-o-the-wisp thing without meaning. The meaning of this was this:
with McCloud and McCloud only could she give herself fully. Why this should be
she really didn’t know. But somewhere in his sweet momentariness, like the
pause of a butterfly on a flower, Amanda found herself. The staunch reliability
of Hotchkiss, Hotchkiss’s very depth, that he would rescue her if need be from
the jaws of death itself—this life-giving action was totally ignored by the
female heart. The female heart, she thought, if one approached it that way, was
giving hell to time. No future, no past, only the now, snatched at the heat of
passion, was the gentle sex’s way of saying fuck you to hands of time. Time,
time, time, the enemy, time ending the race, the dare, the choice; women more
than men, although all of them for sure, but women were timed: a time to bleed,
a time to stop, a time to bear children, a time to stop; aspects of femininity
were built so rigorously into a clock as to force an urgent stand against such
a terrible oppressor. Now and only now—what a way of getting even. She
didn’t understand it. She knew only this: it was a dangerous game and required
an elastic nature Amanda knew she did not have.
-The
Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, pg. 61
In
other passages, her analytical assessments of female concerns give the whole
novel a feminist tinge:
She was thinking
about that. And wondering what she would find on Mars. She was also thinking
about women. She was thinking that despite all this emancipation business, men
still ruled the earth. In most countries, in most places, men ruled. And most
people in most countries thought that men had “the answers.” What bothered her
was that women thought they should defer to men, that men should have the
answers; or therefore, that women shouldn’t. She thought that women who acted
like they had the answers weren’t sure deep down. Why, she wondered, was it so
hard for women to be sure?
-The
Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, pg. 153
 |
Letter included with advance copies
of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer |
But
soon there is hardly any time for introspection as the mechanics of the plot take
over and the story progresses at a dizzying pace. It all starts on the cusp of her journey
to Mars, when strange things start to occur. Her cat, Schrodinger, gains unnatural
intelligence, allowing him to read in multiple languages. Amanda is visited by
alien beings from millions of light years away. And unbeknownst to her, 10,000
Native Americans have disappeared without a trace in Texas. Soon Amanda—along
with Hotchkiss, a boy prodigy, and a trained chimp named 342—finds herself on
a journey to Epsilon Eridani, a star 40 million light years away from Earth, in order to
retrieve her cat, who has been stolen by a seemingly omniscient being called
the GBC, or the Great Cosmic Brain. It is there she uncovers the existence of armies
of red and blue robots intent on destroying the human race at the behest of the
GBC, who turns out to have been the earth’s creator. She enlists the help of
the mysterious Rastus and an inchoate entity called the Ooze to help her return
to Earth and save it in the process. The story culminates, of course, with the
appearance of an eleven million mile high dancer. (In the acknowledgments, Hill
says she was inspired by a picture in The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagel.)
 |
Picture that inspired The Eleven Million Mile High
Dancer, from The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagel |
Characters
and out-of-nowhere plot elements keep piling up in this science fantasy extravaganza.
It never devolves completely into farce, but a light, comedic tone is maintained
throughout, overlaid with a constant sense of wonder at the universe we live
in.
In the mid-80s, Hill wrote a couple book reviews for The New York Times, including one for Lorrie Moore’s first novel:
ANAGRAMS by Lorrie Moore. 225 pp. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf. $15.95.
BY CAROL HILL
Published: November 2, 1986
IN Lorrie Moore's ''Anagrams,'' there's a fierce,
hot eye that makes you wonder whether you're going to be stranded in the
familiar desert of the modern imagination. But the book has a saving grace:
Benna Carpenter - who is either a poet, teacher, nightclub singer, aerobics
instructor or all of these - is appealing as the heroine of this extraordinary
and often hilarious first novel. She sees the irony of her situation,
describing her meetings with her imaginary friend, Eleanor, as ''The Great
White Wine'' - ''whiney white people getting together over white wine and
whining.''
Benna's closest real friend is a musician, Gerard
Maines. Their apartments share a thin wall, and Gerard sits one night, dopey
with love, fully dressed in his dry bathtub, waiting for Benna to return,
yearning only for the sound of her toilet flushing. Gerard loves Benna, and she
kind of likes him. This is their first attempt to make love: ''We ended up in
my bed together, sort of, spastic and looped, doomed for failure, like two
senile inventors in an upstairs room, lonely as spoons. The whole business
finally seemed less an expres-sion of mutual attraction than a soft, noodly act
of existentialism.''
Benna and Gerard eventually do become lovers, and
she sits in a rinky-dink cocktail lounge where he sings and plays piano and dreams
of becoming an opera star. Then Benna gets pregnant, the imaginary Eleanor
sleeps with Gerard, and Benna has an abortion. Miraculously, the relationship
between Benna and Gerard not only survives these events but becomes a deep,
close friendship. Throughout all of this we are treated to Benna's reflections,
which often take the form of quirky, fond musings on words: '' 'Have fun in
Tunis,' I'd say as he disappeared off to rehearsals. I liked to say Tunis. It
sounded obscene, like a rarely glimpsed body part.''
Words roll around in Benna's mind like Life Savers
on a tongue. Beneath the sweet pleasure of play, however, we sense her need for
something else, some deeper articulation that will exorcise distance, bring her
love and keep her from death. Watching a flock of birds, she muses: ''From four
blocks away I could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable
intelligence; no doubt in its random flutters there were patterns, but alone
any one of those black birds would not have known what was up. Alone, as people
live, they would crash their heads against walls.''
To avoid hitting the wall, Benna falls in love with
Darrel, a black Vietnam veteran who is taking her poetry class. Race is
something Benna tries to avoid through her almost magical belief that whatever
separates us can be overcome if we find the right words. She assigns sestinas
to her poetry class, writing on the blackboard the end words ''race, white,
erotic, lost, need, love, leave.'' Darrel raises his hand and says that's seven
words, not six. Benna erases ''love,'' then changes her mind and erases
''white.''
It is a loss in the novel that this particular
relationship is not developed further. It's unfortunate too that the changes of
place and point of view in the beginning chapters interrupt and confuse us, so
that we move away from the story. Some of the early chapters read almost as if
they were independent entities, and it may be that Ms. Moore's talents as a
short-story writer, revealed in her collection, ''Self-Help,'' tempted her in
that direction. These opening chapters are like a magnificent engine alone on
its track. We watch, waiting for the hookup, which we get only in the last
section of the book.
Here we meet a wondrous 6-year-old, Georgianne
Michelle Carpenter, who is Benna's imaginary daughter. And it is here that so
much of the power and impact of the novel begin to make themselves felt. George
and Benna have a very good time: a sweet happiness flows between them as they
watch the news, take showers together on Saturday mornings to the tunes of
Broadway shows, dust the living room and revel in the intimacy of sickroom
caresses and goodnight kisses.
Benna loves Georgianne intensely, and in this love,
which is sustained only by words, we discover how much this novel is about
language, about the power of sounds to slice through the darkness, and through
meaning to join us. It is a tribute to Lorrie Moore's talent that the reader
believes in Georgianne. UNEXPECTEDLY, Gerard dies, a brutal blow to Benna, who
makes one last, painful effort to connect by visiting her lost, hapless
brother, Louis. When she and Louis wind up watching a sitcom about a dog on
Christmas day in a dreary Queens apartment, Benna's humor erupts in a swift,
savage swipe: ''Her mind wandered. She thought of pets growing tired and
committing suicide, what notes they would leave: 'Dear Benna: It's all a crazy
game. Farewell, Max, Your Schnauzer.' ''
We think Benna may now have lost her real
connections in the world. But we're wrong. There are stronger ties still. There
are Benna's gifts, imagination and language - and there is the child,
Georgianne. Benna's love for this child - like ''Anagrams'' itself - is a
powerful example of how imagination can save us with temporary pleasures.
Henry James’ Midnight Song
 |
| Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1993 |
On
August 31, 1993, Poseidon Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, published Hill’s
fifth novel, Henry James’ Midnight Song.
(She is credited as “Carol De Chellis Hill.”) It’s a murder mystery that takes place
mostly in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century, and it features an array
of real-life characters including Sigmund Freud, Henry James, and Edith Wharton,
along with lesser known historical figures like Lexa von Aehrenthal and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
It
is abundantly clear that Hill is well versed in this time period and the people
involved. It is this knowledge that allows her to mold the truth for her own
purposes in order to create a dazzling work of fiction. The book does not
demonstrate absolute fidelity to historical fact, nor should it. (In a
postmodern touch, a foreword claims that this is a “found text,” only lightly
edited, and warns the reader that there are many chronological inconsistencies in the
narrative. This unnamed scholar even goes so far as to point out some of the inaccuracies with footnotes.) In a work of fiction that uses historical figures,
the author needs to be nimble enough to know when to deviate from recorded
fact, lest the work turn into a collection of facts, which does not a novel
make (not a good one, at least).
While
it’s true that readers bring along certain unavoidable preconceptions when they
encounter real-life figures on the page, Hill does not rely solely on these preconceptions to inform the characters. These are not stiff,
musty cutouts from the annals of history. Instead, Hill augments what we may
know about each individual (or think we know) with a strong authorial vision (and revision).
Henry James and Edith Wharton are developed as any newly introduced characters are in a well-written novel. After that first frisson of recognition, we quickly discover
them anew, as Hill does a great job in imbuing them with individual concerns,
hopes, and dreams (most important in early 20th century Vienna). It takes remarkably few pages for them to become alive to us, to become characters we care about. In this
way, Henry James’ Midnight Song
reminds me of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon,
another novel that used numerous real-life events and characters. Pynchon also
resurrected his historical figures from safely embalmed history, vivifying them into
extraordinary literary creations while deviating a fair amount from established
fact. The lesson here seems to be that it’s easy to give writers artistic
license when you feel secure with their ability at the wheel. While Henry James’ Midnight Song does not have
the intimidating bravura of the pseudo-18th century diction Pynchon created for
Mason & Dixon (making Midnight Song an easier and more
pleasing novel for most readers, undoubtedly why there have been some
grand statements made about Hill’s acheivement, such as the one made by Judith Caesar of the Philadelphia
Inquirer: “[Henry James’ Midnight
Song] puts Carol DeChellis Hill among postmodern masters as Thomas
Pynchon, E.L. Doctorow, and Umberto Eco. She may even be better.”), there are
certainly affinities between the two novels, including the literary device
of telling stories within stories. (For what it’s worth, Mason & Dixon was released 4 years after Henry James’ Midnight Song.)
With
this novel, Hill confirms the breadth of the wide-ranging talent she evinced with her debut
novel 23 years prior. In some ways, Henry
James’ Midnight Song feels like an encapsulation of the themes of all her
previous major works. The book resonates with the sentiment expressed by one of the
characters in Jeremiah 8:20, that literary works can somehow be truer than reality. The murder
mystery mirrors the basic plot structure of Let’s
Fall in Love, and one of the epigraphs of that book is quoted by a
character in Midnight Song (“One can
only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in
the mind.” –Alphonse Bertillon, Founder, Bureau of Criminal Identification,
Paris Police Department). The feminist concerns of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer are reflected in the characters’ rumination
in Midnight Song about the differences
of male and female authorship of a novel, and there is open speculation
about how history might’ve been different if Hitler had been born female. (One
of the characters sees visions of the future Holocaust.)
What
unites Carol DeChellis Hill’s vastly different works is her voice, which is clear,
lucid, and perspicacious. One gets the impression that these novels needed to
be cared for by someone with the integrity to put aside ego and do whatever was
necessary for the book, adopt whatever voice was needed, do whatever research
the story required. As far as I can tell, they could not have had a much better
steward than Hill, who was able to construct lasting, resonant novels that overflowed
with ideas and contained abundant pleasures for both the heart and mind.
Henry James’ Midnight Song came out in 1993, and
there hasn’t been another Carol DeChellis Hill novel since.
Post-1993
It
appears Norton handled the paperback release of Henry James’ Midnight Song, and also did a re-release of Let’s Fall in Love and The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer in
1996. On the back of those books, it says Hill was living in New York City and
teaching writing at New York University.
Sometime in the mid-‘90s, she wrote a short bit on her writing process for some magazine (Victoria magazine?):
Carol De Chellis Hill:
Shared that she
writes from what she calls a ‘Military Zone’. Writing for her was a
complete war zone where she felt like she was wrestling with her characters.
She heavily researched the notion of ‘how to write a novel‘ thinking
she was missing something. She found a quote from Albert Einstein, ‘ I get
my best ideas anywhere among the three B’s –the bath, the bed and the bus‘.
These times Carol noted offered ‘brooding time‘. She shared that she
had many ideas that were ‘bubbling away on the back burner‘. Once she
found that she had enough information and a basis for a story she would begin.
She offered a quote from Polish author Czeslow Milosz, ‘a writer cannot be
really one person. A writer is more like a house without any locked doors. With
unknown guests who come and go. A writer must only hope that these spirits who
inhabit him or her leave benign traces and trail.'
In
1997, she was on the panel of judges for the National Book Award. They gave the
award, somewhat controversially, to Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier. (DeLillo’s Underworld,
one of the nominees, was widely expected to win. Also published that year was Mason & Dixon, which was not
nominated.) The panel that year was headed by the author Nicholas Delbanco. I spotted a copy of Jeremiah 8:20 online that
Hill had inscribed to him, presumably before they, along with their fellow judges, were to start debating on whom
the award should go to. The vendor selling the book included a letter Hill
wrote to Delbanco. In a fascinating paragraph, she talks a little about the process of writing her first novel. She also gives her first
impressions of The Puttermesser Papers, the Cynthia Ozick novel that was nominated. (As a DeLillo fan, I’d have
loved to hear what she thought of Underworld.)
According
to Amazon, Jeremiah 8:20 was
republished on March 27, 2001, by an organization called the Author’s Guild. It
is from their “backinprint.com program,” a print-on-demand
service. According to their website, they specialize in making available again
notable out-of-print books in new paperback editions. It appears the author, or
someone representing the author, has to actively enlist their services to get a
book reprinted. This edition of Jeremiah
8:20 is still available on Amazon.
Miscellany
UPDATE 4/20/13: Hill was interviewed by Don Swaim for his radio program Book Beat on April 24, 1985. The raw, unedited audio for this interview is available for download. They start out discussing The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, then Hill talks about how she became a writer.
At
some point, someone under the auspices of Dalkey Archive wrote an appreciation of Carol De Chellis Hill.
Some
of her papers are at Boston University, in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. They appear to have a 4-page short story called “A Woman’s Story,” and
material related to Let’s Fall in Love.
At least some of this material seems to be in the Natalie Robins collection.
Natalie Robins, an author, is married to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who was a
major contributor to the New York Times (now retired). Maybe Ms. Hill and Natalie Robins were/are friends
or acquaintances and the collection contains correspondence between them? (Note: Lehmann-Haupt
called Henry James’ Midnight Song “dazzling” and an “extravagantly
imagined new novel” but he did have major reservations about it in his New York Times review.)
The archives of The Westfield Leader, the local paper of Hill's hometown, contain many items of interest. There is an engagement notice on May 23, 1963, which says she will be marrying Herbert Hill that summer (and thereby acquiring the "Hill" surname). In the August 29, 1963 edition, it states that Ms. DeChellis married Mr. Hill at her home in Westfield on August 23, 1963. Herbert Hill was the national labor director of the NAACP at the time, a position he held until 1977. He died in 2004, at the age of 80. Strangely there is no mention of Carol DeChellis Hill in his obituary in the New York Times.
In the July 16,
1970 edition of The Westfield Leader there is an article about the publication of her first novel, Jeremiah 8:20. It lists a few of the early accolades and favorable reviews the book received, and goes on to list some biographical facts about Hill. Note that the article states that she graduated from Westfield High
School, class of 1957. This is confirmed by the yearbook I found. If her DOB
from the bio in Contemporary
Novelists is correct, she was 15 years old when she graduated. While this is not outside the
realm of possibility, if she was the more conventional 18 years of age upon graduation her birth date would be three years before the bio states, in 1939, which would make her 74 today (if the date in CN is
in fact correct, she turned 71 this past January).
The
article states that she is still married to Herbert Hill. At some point they must have divorced (Herbert Hill's obituary mentions that he married a professor named Mary Lydon in 1977) and she later married Jerry Albert, whom she thanks in the acknowledgements of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer and Henry James’ Midnight Song. (One can probably safely assume that he is the "Jerome Albert" credited as the photographer of her author photos on the hardcovers of Let's Fall in Love and Henry James' Midnight Song.)
Final Thoughts
My
excitement at discovering Carol DeChellis Hill’s work was quickly tempered by disappointment
at the fact that hardly anyone seems to know who she is. Her obscurity in the literary world is a downright shame considering that her debut novel Jeremiah 8:20 is not only one of the
best first novels of all time, it deserves to stand side by side with other
well regarded books of the same era. Her subsequent books are also very good, and burnish what has been a distinguished oeuvre.
And yet
there has not been another novel, or much word from her at all, in 20 years.
Has she been working on something all this time? She was clearly not a “book a
year” author, taking 7 or 8 years between her last couple books. But on that
schedule, we should still have had two new novels since Henry James’ Midnight Song. Did she have no more to say? Did her
inspiration fail to match her extraordinary talent? Or is she meticulously
preparing a grand final project? If so, her first novel in 20+ years would be a
major literary event, and a triumphant return of someone who should, if there’s
any justice, be regarded as one of the most significant American novelists of the last 50 years.
DHS
