Chapter 24 The Passage of Time #3
That spring semester of ’65, before he graduated from the University of New Hampshire, Jimmy was sleeping with a girl in his creative writing class.
Before they had started sleeping together, he had told Maud he was married to a Dutch girl—a lesbian who had a girlfriend in Amsterdam.
Maud said this sounded like fiction. She’d read an excerpt from The Dickens Man in their writing class; she thought Mieke and Jolanda, and now the newborn baby, were just characters in Jimmy’s novel.
He had to show Maud photos of Mieke and Jolanda and Vienna to convince her of what Jimmy and his grandfather understood: “Real life isn’t plotted like a novel,” he told Maud.
Then (somehow) Maud heard about Alma. Maud didn’t believe Jimmy when he said he wasn’t really sleeping with Alma.
Maud’s graduation present to Jimmy was a dose of the clap, with the usual symptoms. The gonorrhea made him cry out loud when he was peeing. Naturally, Alma overhead him.
“It sounds like an issue for Dr. Prudence—it sounds like Maud has been sleeping around, Jimmy,” Alma told him, when she heard him yelp when he was pissing.
Alma was no less the supporter of personal hygiene and privacy than she’d always been.
Jimmy just knew it was true—real life isn’t plotted like a novel.
“Mind over matter, Jimmy. What don’t you get about condoms?” Prudence asked him.
In those days, only Stanford and Iowa offered a master’s degree in creative writing, but James Winslow wasn’t moving away from Pennacook, where Vienna now lived and had those four Winslow women serving as mother substitutes.
Jimmy pursued a master’s degree in Victorian literature at the University of New Hampshire, where the English Department faculty already knew he was devoted to Great Expectations and David Copperfield as models of the bildungsroman.
One of the fiction writers in the UNH English Department introduced Jimmy to his literary agent.
An editor who was a big deal at Random House bought The Dickens Man when the novel was half-done, and Jimmy was still studying for his master’s.
By then, even Honor Winslow knew Jimmy wasn’t really sleeping with Alma, who was so familiar with Jimmy’s reading voice that he didn’t need to read aloud to her anymore. Alma preferred reading to herself.
Jonah Feldstein had just published a first collection of short stories with a university press.
There were only a few reviews, and no sales to speak of, but the reviews were good ones.
This led Jonah to a full-time job at a university in the South, where he was teaching English and creative writing—Jonah also had a full-time girlfriend.
Jonah’s sister Sarah wrote Jimmy about the girlfriend: “There’s been no mention of marriage or children—not nearly as original as your situation, Jimmy.
” Thus began their correspondence; if he couldn’t sleep with Sarah Feldstein, there was no reason he couldn’t write her.
By then, Mieke Koster published her first novel in the Netherlands—her maiden name sounded better in Dutch than her married one, Winslow.
The title was taken from the first sentence of George Eliot’s Middlemarch—the epigraph to Mieke’s novel: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” Thrown into Relief would be the title in English—like Middlemarch, Mieke’s novel was about the nature of marriage and the status of women.
Also like Middlemarch, Mieke’s novel would be published to a mixed reception, but there were a lot of reviews.
Jimmy’s editor at Random House would publish Thrown into Relief in English, and Mieke Koster had a U.K.
publisher in addition to her European translations.
Vienna Winslow would be four in 1969, when her father’s first novel, The Dickens Man, was published—like Middlemarch and Thrown into Relief, to an abundance of mixed reviews.
It was no coincidence that Mieke’s Dutch publisher was among the first to issue James Winslow’s many European translations.
For a literary novel about a teacher who saves his troubled students with Dickens, The Dickens Man was an unusual bestseller in a lot of languages.
Jimmy made close friendships among his foreign publishers—not only with the one in the Netherlands, but with his other Western European and his Scandinavian publishers as well.
The epigraph to The Dickens Man was a line James Winslow loved from the fourteenth chapter of Great Expectations.
“It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.” The most troubled students, the ones in need of rescuing, were the ones who were ashamed of where they came from; maybe this resonated with readers who needed saving, too.
Claude, in his nerdy way, noticed a French review of Mieke’s Thrown into Relief and one of Jimmy’s The Dickens Man—two different reviews, by different reviewers—that complimented both novels for the same quality.
The French word both reviewers used was “intertextualité.” According to Claude, intertextuality was a new word in English—meaning “the interrelationship between a text and other texts, creating a new text.”
“Leave it to Claude to make something that was perfectly clear completely incomprehensible,” Jolanda said.
When The Dickens Man was published, Jimmy was teaching English and coaching wrestling at Pennacook Academy.
He was also a full-time father with a houseful of mother substitutes.
With the international success of his first novel, he would become self-supporting as a writer—he could write full-time now.
Mieke Koster was also an international success and a self-supporting novelist. Naturally, the fact that the two of them were married to each other—in a somewhat unusual way—would be written about.
They had a real marriage, but Mieke had a lesbian partner—her relationship with Jolanda was her only actual relationship—and Jimmy was free to have a girlfriend (or as many girlfriends as he wanted).
Vienna Winslow was a shared child; the way it worked was that Vienna had two moms and one dad.
“Vienna has a bunch of moms—if you count my mother, and my three aunts, too,” Jimmy always said.
Although she was a fiction reader, Chantal Beaudette—now Madame Guilbert—was slow to read The Dickens Man. It wasn’t only that she waited to read the French translation. Second Lieutenant Arnaud Beaudette—Company A, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division—had been killed in action.
Chantal’s nephew had died amid a rocket attack and small-arms fire, searching for the body of a missing soldier in Vietnam, in February 1968. James Winslow understood why Chantal took her time reading his novel. Compared to Arnaud, in Chantal’s mind, Jimmy was a draft dodger.
Esther’s letter to Honor about Matzpen (“Compass” in Hebrew)—a revolutionary socialist organization, founded by former members of the Israeli Communist Party—was in step with Esther’s thinking, but the ideological splits within the group pissed her off.
There was a Trotskyist split and a Maoist split, not to mention a Matzpen Tel Aviv and a Matzpen Jerusalem; the latter group had adopted the name Matzpen Marxist. “Intellectualizing fuckheads!” Esther said, sounding very characteristic of Esther to the Winslow sisters.
Matzpen had issued a declaration—a sweeping generalization that rubbed Esther the wrong way. Matzpen asserted: “It is both the right and duty of every conquered and subjugated people to resist and to struggle for its freedom.”
“Not if these same people seek to eliminate the Jews,” Esther said.
In 1973, James Winslow would publish a historical novel.
The Doctor’s Rules is set in a fictional orphanage based on St. Cloud’s, where the fictional doctor is based on Dr. Larch, who gives women what they want—they can either get an abortion or leave behind an orphan.
Jimmy’s third novel would also be historical.
Set in Vienna in 1963–64, it parallels Jimmy’s junior year abroad, but the characters based on Jolanda and Claude are both women.
Roommates in Vienna (1977) is a roman à clef—a male American student is sharing two rooms and one bathroom with a Dutch lesbian couple.
The Dutch girls want a child of their own; their roommate makes the baby.
“An alternative family saga,” a reviewer described the story.
Frau Holzinger has another name—as does Irmgard, who isn’t a prostitute.
The American boy who’s based on Jimmy has a prostitution problem—he can’t stop visiting them.
The Dutch girlfriends won’t let him make a baby until he gives up the prostitutes.
In Roommates in Vienna, the Jewish German tutor is not called Fr?ulein Eissler, and she isn’t working for the Israelis.
Her single agenda is to cure the anti-Semitic landlady and her family of their anti-Semitism—thereby saving the character based on Siegfried, who is a five-year-old girl.
Jimmy’s third novel is dedicated to his daughter, Vienna.