Summer Reading: Moonflower Resurrection

Near the end of Jetta Carleton's first — and only — published novel, an old Missouri farm woman named Callie Soames pauses during her round of morning chores to examine a moonflower vine that grows near the smokehouse.

"The flowers were so lovely and they lasted so short a time," Callie reflects. "It was ... something you looked forward to all year, then it came, and you enjoyed it so much, and then it was over, in no time."

For a few months after its publication in December 1962, Carleton's novel was one of the flowers of the literary world. The Moonflower Vine spent four months on the New York Times Best Sellers list, alongside J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and John Updike's The Centaur. A main selection of two major book clubs, it was published in eight other countries and appeared as a Reader's Digest Condensed Book, a sure sign of mid-20th-century literary success.

The reviews were rapturous. After the excitement of its first publication, though, the book faded into obscurity. Carleton died in 1999.

Aside from two brief paperback revivals in the late '70s and '80s, The Moonflower Vine was largely forgotten, except among the few readers who discovered musty copies at library sales. One of these acolytes: novelist Jane Smiley, who included The Moonflower Vine on her reading list of 100 novels in 2005's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.

This spring, Harper Perennial, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, has reissued The Moonflower Vine as part of its "Rediscovered Classics" series.

"Books are like viruses," Smiley says. "They're passed from hand to hand. Some take hold and infect the whole society. When a book gets revived, it has another chance to infect society. If society is susceptible, it will succeed."

In 1962, Jetta Carleton was nearly 50 years old, a self-described "glad old girl" and well-established in New York's advertising world: She wrote TV ads for Ivory soap. A former dancer, she was slender and red-haired.

"She was an extraordinary person," remembers Charlie Langdon, a longtime friend. "She was so excited about life. She had a wonderful way of talking, very precise."

Every Thanksgiving, Carleton and her husband, Jene Lyon, would return to her parents' home in Nevada, Missouri, roaring into town in a rented sports car with their two cocker spaniels.

"We were so impressed," remembers her great-niece, Susan Beasley, who now lives in Torrance, California. "She was so fashionable. She was just different, in a good way. She didn't have airs. She kept that farm quality. She loved earthy things, like good homegrown tomatoes. She never talked about her writing."

In Nevada, Carleton slipped back into the family routine, joining her two older sisters, Truma and Yana, in the tiny kitchen to prepare elaborate meals, and later, when the dishes were done, playing canasta with her nieces and nephews.

This sense of family pervades The Moonflower Vine, along with vivid descriptions of the farm between Leeton and Calhoun, 50 miles southeast of Kansas City, where the Carletons often spent summers.

In the opening pages, Carleton describes the land as "a region cut by creeks, where high pastures rise out of the wooded valleys to catch the sunlight and fall away over limestone bluffs. It is pretty country. It does not demand your admiration, as some regions do, but seems glad for it all the same."

Carleton was born on the farm in 1913, in a house that never had indoor plumbing. Her father, P.A. Carleton, was superintendent of schools in Nevada. Her sisters, who were nearly 20 years older than she was, were schoolteachers, too. Jetta was expected to follow in their footsteps. But, Beasley says, "Jetta didn't want that life. It wasn't her choice."

As a student at Cottey College in Nevada and later at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Carleton studied English literature. She also danced and acted in student productions and, in 1936, was named Mizzou's Poet of the Year.

After getting her master's degree in English in 1939, Carleton dutifully taught English at Joplin Junior College, but that didn't last long. "She didn't fit into anyone's mold of a teacher, not in her thinking or how to behave," Beasley explains. "She loved to have a good time."

Instead, Carleton moved to Kansas City and found a job at WHB 810. She wrote radio ad copy and jingles and eventually hosted her own 15-minute show about events going on in the city.

Here, she met Jene Lyon, whom she married in 1943. Their marriage, Beasley remembers, was a long and happy one. "He took care of her, and she took care of him. They weren't quite the same when they were separated."

Sometime in the late 1940s or early '50s, they moved east. Carleton went to work in advertising and Lyon took a variety of jobs: a translator of scientific documents for the U.S. State Department, a production supervisor for a book publisher.

They settled in a big, drafty house in Hoboken, New Jersey. But every summer, they took the annual two-week sojourn back to Missouri.

"We lapsed easily into the old ways, cracked the old jokes, fished in the creek, ate country cream and grew fat and lazy," she wrote. "It was a time of placid unreality."