A Writer’s Life—The Magic Flute
The first time I sat in the cheap seats of the majestic Metropolitan Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” I was in utter despair. My writing life seemed over — at 29. Though I’d published my first novel, River of Light, with the revered Knopf fiction editor, Judith Jones, she’d just rejected my second novel.
On my visit to her Manhattan office, Judith gave me a penetrating look from behind her fortress of a desk, piled high with manuscripts. “Your novel reads like a long hallucination,” she said in her rich, mezzo voice.
I flinched with each dismissive comment as Judith continued her eloquent critique of The Promised Land, set during the Great Depression when crops and people were swept away in the Dustbowl. My first novel’s critical success had been enough for me to exit my five years as an editorial slave at The New Yorker magazine.
I was now commuting between working as the fiction editor at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Magazine and a Writer-in-Residence at Arizona State University. In Arizona I’d spent much time traveling the contemplative homeland of the Hopi tribe. Those incandescent deserts, villages, stylized art, and spiritual traditions haunted me, inspiring The Promised Land.
Judith removed her glasses, so they hung on their trademark lavalier. “What is this . . . magical realism?” She set the manuscript aside. “My dear, your reach far exceeds your grasp.”
I could hardly hear her continuing edits because there was such a deep undertone of disappointment. It shattered me. Turning away, I stared hopelessly out the window. Would this glass break if I leapt out?
Judith was my literary True North, guiding me for several years. She’d once promised, “I’ll be with you for your entire oevre.”
Judith often fell into French since that was where she’d made her publishing career in post-war Paris at Doubleday. She’d discovered and published The Diary of Anne Frank. At Knopf, she was respected as the country’s most prominent editor of John Updike, Anne Tyler, and John Hersey, not to mention the culinary juggernaut of Julia Child. To be rejected by such a literary luminary was a death sentence. Would any other editor take me on?
How many books are not seen at the right time or ahead of their time; or the audience has not yet been created?
Stumbling out of Judith’s office, I stood numbly on the busy sidewalk against the stampede of ambitious New Yorkers. I banged my head against a rusted, iron railing. It’s over, I told myself. There’ll be no more books.
Melodramatic, yes, but I was young and had just lost the editor I expected would accompany me for a long, literary life. Weeping, my forehead bruised, my carefully chosen dress disheveled, I finally arrived at my elder New Yorker co-worker, Beata Sauerlander’s upper West Side apartment. My German friend studied me a long time. Then she pronounced two words.
“Die Zauberflote,” Beata took me firmly in hand. “Mozart is at the Met tonight!” Embracing me, she squared my shoulders. Then she said what I couldn’t hear then but have always remembered. “Imagination, my dear, it endures . . . everything.”
Beata knew all about endurance. Much of her Jewish family had perished in the Holocaust, though her father had been prescient enough to move his wife and daughters to New York before Hitler condemned a country to rage and genocide. This late 1970s performance of The Magic Flute was still shadowed by World War II. At The New Yorker, I’d heard Holocaust survivors whisper their horror stories in the hallways.
Beata was in her mid-70s. When she talked about the war, she always remarked, rather cryptically, “The tragedy of being old is . . .” she would pause and look at me, her dark eyes fierce, “you’re still young.”
I didn’t understand this riddle. It would be many years before I was old enough to understand that youth may be eclipsed by physical age, but its memory persists, vivid and achingly alive. In the opera house, we perched in seats so far up in the rafters, it was dizzying. Or maybe, it was just my writerly death wish that disoriented me.
A long hallucination, Judith’s editorial refrain echoed like a eulogy.
As the conductor lifted the baton for those first three bold notes of the Overture, I whispered to Beata, “I know nothing about opera . . .” Bowing my head, tears streamed down my face. I could hardly see the heavy curtain rise with an audible whoosh, a thrill from the crowd.
“Hush,” Beata insisted. “You’ll forget all about yourself.”
And I did. Tears still streamed down my cheeks during the first scene. But the moment the three ladies fluttered over Tamino, cooing, and coveting the young prince for his manly beauty, I also fell in love. When the Queen of the Night stunned with that impossible aria that begins as a mother’s lament and crescendos into a damning curse of her daughter, I hunched over with the abject rejection etched now in my bones. My editor was also banishing me to an underworld. As if possessed, the coloratura queen finished her astonishing arpeggios, running through four octaves.
Amazed, the audience leapt up with a roaring, standing ovation.“Brava!” we all shouted so loud, I almost toppled from my vertical seats.
That Met Opera production was pure enchantment — Marc Chagall’s otherworldly sets and designs, the magical swirl of serpents, angels, and animals in wild, colorful costumes like living fairy tales. At the end of the “The Magic Flute,” my own trials and troubles lifted like dark mists evaporating into the serenity of light. It dawned on me that Beata must be right — such transcendent imagination was a survival skill.
After that rejection, I kept in touch with Judith and took her advice to set aside The Promised Land to wander in the wilderness of another novel, Duck and Cover, a dark comedy of family. On my last month teaching in Arizona, Judith and her husband, the writer, Evan Jones visited me. I drove them deep into Hopi lands silhouetted by jagged red rocks stabbing an azure sky.
On a vast mesa, near the village of Oraibi, Judith lightly took my arm as we gazed out across what seemed like time itself. “I understand,” she breathed.
It was the last visit I would have with Judith for years as we lapsed into silence. During those decades, I would become the writer I almost abandoned, if not for a wise elder friend and The Magic Flute. I enjoyed working with other remarkable editors, some who are dear friends.
Looking back at my abandoned second novel, perhaps Judith was right. In 1979, the literary world was publishing very few novels about Indigenous lives. John Hersey and John Updike ruled the day. Minimalists like Anne Beattie were the rage. We had yet to be graced with the inspiring voices of Louise Erdrich or Linda Hogan, my co-author for five books, or Joy Harjo, with whom I taught in Arizona and who was the 2020–2022 Poet Laurate.
It is probably still not the right time for me to publish my Hopi novel. The novel Judith rejected still sits in my storage unit, though a few excerpts were published in literary magazines and won awards. But do I have the heart to return to The Promised Land?
How many books are not seen at the right time or ahead of their time; or the audience has not yet been created? Even now these many years later, fictional imagination has been ghettoized and narrowed; if you are not a certain ethnicity or gender, you are forbidden to write from any other point of view than your own. How will we learn empathy if we do not fully imagine the territory of other’s lives?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Over those years of exile from my first editor, how I wished that long ago in the nosebleed seats at the Met, next to that grieving young writer, I had been able to sing to her of the books that would come — a body of work. How I still longed to reunite with Judith, if only for a cup of tea and memory.
In 1996, I read of Evan’s death and brave the chasm between us to write Judith. She responded quickly in her trademark green ink perfect penmanship: “I miss you.”
I cherished that reunion letter and framed it on my writing wall. On a business trip to New York, Judith welcomed me back into her impressive kitchen and served tea with her legendary shortbread. I noticed that Judith had many of my books in her library.
“We lost each other,” she said simply. “Now, mange!”
I stayed in touch with Judith, birthdays, holidays, letters. She liked and almost accepted my 2010 memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind, but she was retiring from Knopf and leaving her devoted authors behind. Before she died in the summer of 2017 at 93, Judith wrote me about her cherished Vermont gardens and we often chatted about her beloved dog, for whom she’d published a very sensible cookbook.
Every time I see The Magic Flute, Judith and Beata’s spirits accompany me as much as Mozart. In spring, 2023, I watched the Metropolitan Opera’s live film of Die Zauberflote. As I sat in the theatre’s back seats, nearby two well-coiffed elder opera buffs, my hair was just as silver as theirs, as Beata’s had been when I saw that first Mozart opera. When I’d decided that living on, no matter the suffering, was much better than dying.
Simon McBurney’s “fantastic and political” production of Die Zauberflote was shadowed by a Ukraine war, the characters stripped down to underwear or camouflage. No whimsical Chagall sets. Instead, there were red-clad soldiers and Tamino offered a pistol by the militant Queen of the Night rampaging in a wheelchair. So many colors and historic shades in this sobering 21st century vision. Too many underworlds. Our grasp of peace is so much less than our reach.
Recently, I clambered through my storage unit crammed with boxes of books, to find my manuscript of The Promised Land, a territory that seemed so beyond my youthful reach. The pages are crinkled and stained with the smudges of an old Olympia typewriter ribbon. As I edit and revise, I’m using a green ink pen in the margins, with Judith still sitting on my shoulders, critiquing, and advising. She’s often in my dreams.
If this resurrected novel is ever published, it will be dedicated to my beloved first editor, whom I lost and found again. Though I’ve lived since 1981 in Seattle, I am finally returning in my memory to those sun-drenched deserts and mysterious mesas. The land and the characters are still right there on the page, welcoming me back to their promised land, or what the Hopis call “The center of the universe.”
Imagination is always at the center of any writer’s universe. It survives and sings to us, even when we are too young to understand or too old to hear; it is the breath that makes music through our frail flutes. Magic.~
Brenda Peterson is the critically acclaimed author of over 20 books, including the novel Duck and Cover, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year,” now in audiobook. Her memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth was chosen as an Indie Next “Best Top Read” and named among the “Top Ten Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor. Library Journal gave Peterson’s new book, Wild Chorus a starred review. “Code Breakers,” an excerpt from the Hopi novel, was published in 2022 as an “Editor’s Choice” in Cutthroat Journal of the Arts. Peterson lives on the Salish Sea in Seattle, Washington. www.BrendaPetersonBooks.com
