Anne Goodwin Winslow was born during Reconstruction and died not long after the launch of the first ICBMs. She was 71 when her first novel, Cloudy Trophies, was published. To say, therefore, that this is a novel enriched by a lifetime’s worth of living is an understatement.
But then, if there is anything that characterizes Winslow’s work, it is understatement. She came of age when daughters of good families, particularly in the South, were raised in a manner not that different from that experienced by Jane Austen’s heroines. There was no formal schooling and social graces and embroidery were considered as or more important skills for young women to develop than literacy. From the shelter of her family’s estate, Anne Goodwin entered into marriage with a promising West Point graduate (first in his class), Lieutenant Eben Winslow, descendant of a Winslow who arrived in America on the Mayflower. With him she spent twenty-five years as an Army wife, mastering the art of surviving a series of posts almost airless in their social rigidity.
By the time she took up writing, however, first a little poetry and later a memoir (The Dwelling, and finally fiction, that world had largely been destroyed in two wars, revolutions, and a depression. More to the point, the intricate Victorian prose styles of Henry James and George Eliot had been given way to a variety of modernist styles, from the lean words of Hemingway to the visceral complexities of Joyce and Woolf.
What this meant for Winslow is that her sensibilities had not changed — but her sentences had. Where James might have used a paragraph or page to dissect the nuances of a character’s entrance into a room, Winslow chose to confine herself to a sentence or just a careful choice of adjective or verb. Or simply to leave it to the reader to discern the significance of a gesture or a statement from its context. She had, after all, spent decades in social circles where what was not said often spoke louder than conversations that had the substance of a butterfly’s flutter.
The events of Cloudy Trophies include a child’s death — possibly a murder — and a mother’s death — likely a suicide. Neither is taken head-on, though. On the other hand, they also aren’t tip-toed around. Instead, there is at most a stroke or two of the pen … and the assumed intelligence of the reader. Winslow writes like a classical Japanese painter paints, with light strokes instead of layers of colors. And for this reason, her fiction can given a reader the impression that nothing happens.
When Orville Prescott reviewed Cloudy Trophies for The New York Times, he wrote that Winslow “Promises much, but produces little. The beauty and the wisdom and the wit it offers would have been ever so much more effective if condensed into a short story or elaborated in an essay.” The charge is not entirely unfair: Cloudy Trophies is much more about what doesn’t happen than what does.
Richard Steele is a Senator from the South. Carolina? Georgia? Alabama? We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s a wounded land, where “often they would pass a place where the house had burned down, only the tall brick chimneys left standing.” The Senator’s time at home at the manor of a former plantation is consumed by trying to sustain a fragile network of sharecropped farms and an estate falling into increasing disrepair.
His wife, Laura, is considered an elegant jewel of Washington society. This is Washington society at the height of its elaborateness. Is this the 1880s, the 1900s? We’re never told, but when she and the Senator are in town, in their house facing Lafayette Square and a short walk from the White House, her mind is consumed with “calling, or staying where they could be called on, when the proper days rolled round.” And with “the Cabinet and the Supreme Court and Congress and their own days — the Senate — and the Legations,” almost every day is a proper day.
Laura is stifled by the vacuity of Washington society, compared to what she sees as the authencity of life in the country. “She still found herself saying, ‘Isn’t it a pretty day?’ to people who had evidently not noticed whether it was or not.” By contrast, “In the country the weather was more important than almost anything else.” To Laura, “Not mentioning the weather seemed a loss somehow. It was like not noticing the moon.”
Laura and Richard have lost a child, their only child, a son, Rickie, drowned in a pond near the manor. She suspects it may have been an act of vengeance by a disgruntled sharecropper. Richard, however, dismisses this as unlikely, irrational, and most important, a failure to move on. Unlike Laura, he craves his time in Washington. The demands of his job and the superficiality of Washington society offer him ways to escape from his pain.
One could read Cloudy Trophies and see it as a quadrille, an elegant dance in which the characters come together and part, never touching more than fingertips, following precise and predetermined steps, and conclude, with Orville Prescott, that it’s a short story padded out to 230-some pages.
But that would be mistaking the brush strokes for the picture. This is a story about how the death of a child can destroy a mother and father, can leave them shattered, fragments of themselves, struggling to find ways to survive. But it’s not Anne Goodwin Winslow’s way to jab her finger at the heart of her story and shout, “This is what it’s about!” Despite her relatively unadorned prose, hers is still a Jamesian sensibility. She aspires to be a person on whom nothing is lost, and she expects the same of her readers.
Cloudy Trophies is the third of Winslow’s novels I’ve read, and while her inexperience with the form shows in some aspects of the book’s construction, I remain in deep admiration for the assurance of her artistry and her respect for the intelligence of her readers. Hers is the kind of quiet art that is perhaps the easiest of all to become overlooked and forgotten.