Last April, I was asked by Sharon’s agent and publisher to host a Facebook Live event celebrating Sharon’s life and career. A portion of what I presented included something I said I would someday use as a blog post.
As promised, here is a selection of entries from Sharon’s personal journal from which I picked significant entries highlighting her writing life and various items of inspiration for her books.
Last week, I was able to help out Sharon’s lovely family: her brother Bill, her sister-in-law Nancylee, and her nephew Billy, by traveling out to her home in New Jersey to help them sort through Sharon’s legacy. In the process of sorting rooms full of books, boxes of files, and lots and lots of original manuscripts, my helper, Mary Glassman, came across a significant old journal. It sparsely covers the years 1969-1973. I poured over it and found some very interesting tidbits which I thought would be interesting to those of us who loved her and her books. I want to read a selection to you now.
In 1969, Sharon was 23 and a college student at the University of Texas in Austin. On January 14, 1969 an entry from her journal reads: “There are several emotional currents that have the power to move me deeply – my consuming interest in Richard III, my attachment to New Orleans, the unhealed sorrow of last June. I feel all of these emotions with a sharp, swift intensity. I also have a strong desire to travel.”
In the summer of 1969, she fulfilled a lifelong dream to live in Hawaii. Her June 29, 1969 entry reads: “I made a mistake tonight. I took out my white notebook and I reread some of what I’ve written in the past 2 years. It reassured me that I can write, and I needed that reassurance.”
Come December of that year, she has left Hawaii and has also spent time in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now she is in Arizona.
December 27, 1969: “And now it is a brief moment until the decade will end. 1970 – I have a good feeling about it, instinct or wishful thinking. I’m not sure which. ……… I still want to travel and to write, and with luck and determination I might do both.”
Two years later, in December 1971, she finds herself back in New Jersey attending law school at Rutgers. On the 20th of December she writes: “When I was 10, I created a world more to my liking – the civilization was of my making and I was God. Now I do the same in my writing – and as I conjure up real beings, endow them with life, I blur reality, perhaps even reject it.”
Her journal is very sparse, and there are many large jumps in time between entries. She journals about this tendency often, chiding herself for not being consistent. Six days later she writes this: “Last Monday I felt the urge to write – for the first time in 2 years. I wrote and then I folded the paper and put it away. ….. I went back into the past not very far – just as far as 1968. Back to New Orleans… and those first exciting ventures into the life of a man dead nearly 500 years. ……. I wrote often that summer. …….. And then nothing (she means no journaling) for 2 years. Nothing. Months in Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Months in Atlantic City – so many quiet hours of thought, returning to the nest, to the sea, the writing. Two years of frustration and pleasure and polishing, learning to cut words like diamonds. All my energy, all my ambition, all went into my book – yes, I call it that now; it may never be finished, may never see the light of day, but after 3 ½ years I’ve earned the right – it definitely is a book! So much of me went into writing of another sort those two years. Richard, always Richard. More than a “Magnificent Obsession,” my lifelong companion! I doubt if I’ll ever finish that tale. The historical and psychological implications alone are staggering. It’s my life work.
………………………………. And my passions, what are they? First and above all, Richard Plantagenet and his world. History. Travel. New Orleans. California. Hawaii. And always England – the Yorkshire of the Bronte’s, and the ghostly shadows of Middleham. Cornwall. Ireland, emerald green and high drama. ….. Good writing – even if it isn’t mine! The law, almost as much as it frightens me. Cats. ………. All the places I’ve yet to see. …….. March, when the swallows come back to Capistrano….. The Old Testament. Mark Twain. The fun of dramatizing in brilliant, splashing colors. Greensleeves, a haunting echo across four centuries, once heard and remembered for always. Those so-sweet moments when words come easily to me and in the right order, with the right meaning. Flashes of hope, when I truly believe we might learn to live together in some semblance of harmony. And tomorrow. Always tomorrow.
It’s now almost a full year after the last entry I read. Sharon is still attending law school in New Jersey. But something horrendous has happened. Someone broke into her car parked outside her apartment, thinking probably only to steal the beautiful leather satchel in the backseat. But what the thief didn’t know was that inside the satchel was a manuscript. A completed manuscript over 1,000 pages long. Hand-typed and ready for submission. We all know that manuscript now as the book The Sunne in Splendour. But to the young woman who came out to her car the next day to discover the theft, her life work was gone.
It’s now November 12, 1972, a month after the theft, and you can hear traces of her bitterness, anger… and that wry wit we’ve all come to know and love: “All life is sleeping now – while I try vainly to turn off my mind, and Mei-Ling (her black cat) stalks the apartment in eerie unsettling pursuit of an unseen enemy, for all the world like the murdered ghost of Hamlet’s father. Or am I reaching for that one?
It’s amazing (or amusing?) how profound one becomes as the dark drags on. Basic immutable truth number one: Never, NEVER read Dorothy Parker except in the glare of the noonday sun and with the high spirits of a lottery winner. Basic Truth Number Two: The harder you try not to think of whatever vulture happens to be currently hovering at your shoulder, the more conscious you are of the flapping in the air, the presence of its evil. Basic Truth Number Three: Whatever is written at Fitzgerald’s three o-clock forever should be shredded as soon as the ink dries; though of course it won’t – the egotism of the writer survives all else and unlike virtue, emerges triumphant once more.
Mei-Ling is still seeking her private prey, for all the world like one of the Imps of Hell. There is something at once sinister and fascinating about a black cat on the prowl – little wonder earlier ages burned them as Satan’s collaborators. Perhaps Is hould make use of her. After all, I have a frightening image of the cat as evil incarnate on my wall, a demon-red light to spill over onto the floor, a chant to murmur in the dark and my own medium to act as guide. What more could I need? What should I ask from the high priests of satanism?
The return of my manuscript? In all honesty, there’s precious little I wouldn’t do to have it back, or failing that to cause pain to the one who took it.
Or perhaps my desires are much simpler and basic on a Sunday morning. Perhaps I’m not able to deal with griefs or guilts or with anything more complex or elemental than a simple need to sleep – is that too much to ask, Satan? A long night’s sleep, dreamless and dark.
Another dark month passes in New Jersey, and matters are still unbearable for her. And the weather matches her mood, dark and gloomy. December 12, 1972: “I still grieve for a lost book. It was so much a part of me and now the emptiness is nigh-well unbearable. I can’t bring myself to think of it, to try to pick up the scattered pieces; yet I do dwell on it despite myself.”
But five months later, some hope has returned. On May 13, 1973 she writes: “And it was in March that I began to write again – it took 5 full months before I was able to try to rescue what I could, a remembered sentence, a studied phrase, a random thought. Today it is 7 months since the loss of the book – 7 months I wouldn’t, couldn’t relive, at any price. ….. Time is not always the healer. It can be the illuminator as well. What might have been… I can’t believe there are four words so painful, so unbearable, in any language.”
Of course, we all know she would rewrite the novel. And it’s also likely that the rewriting made it a better novel than it could have been the first time. It was published in 1982 and, one could argue, changed the way we see Richard III, whether we want to or not.
She of course went on to write her popular Welsh trilogy, 6 novels about her beloved Henry II and Eleanor and their so-called Devil’s Brood, and then last but not least, her four Justin de Quincy mysteries, attaining best-seller status for several of them.
“grief exists in a timeless void and memories endure forever.”
– Sharon’s journal, June 29, 1969
Lisa Adair, a friend of Sharon’s prepared a photo book of some of her best memories of Sharon. At the end of the book, she used this quote, and I thought it was very fitting as an ending:
“She was burning with fever, but she welcomed it, eager to shed the body that had become her enemy. It would be soon now, for she was slipping her moorings, one by one, tethered by gossamer threads that trembled with each labored breath she drew. Gradually she became aware that she was no longer alone. She opened her eyes, but she saw only swirling shadows, candles that glimmered like distant stars in the dark. ‘God’s bones, woman, how much longer are you going to make us wait?'”
— The death of Eleanor of Aquitaine, from A King’s Ransom
