Pulitzer Prize author inspired by vintage postcards

 By Neil Plakcy
For Antique Trader - May 22, 2002
Robert Olen Butler collects postcards. But rather than concentrate on image, age, or quality, Butler is interested in the message on the back. "Particularly in the first two decades of the last century, before telephones were common, people often poured out their hearts on postcards," he says.

The author of eleven books, Butler won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for the story collection Good Scent from A Strange Mountain. Born in Illinois in 1945, he grew up in the St. Louis area and received a bachelor's degree from Northwestern and a master's in playwriting from the University of Iowa.

He wrote his first four novels while living on Long Island and working as the editor-in-chief of a business newspaper in Manhattan. He moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana to accept a teaching position in the master's program in creative writing at McNeese State University, and more than a decade ago began collecting old advertising and trade cards, what he calls "wonderful artifacts of the pop culture of a century ago."

Butler prefers "real photos," photos developed and printed on card stock. Most are one-of-a-kind, taken by amateurs to record personal or local history. He looks for cards "where you read the message and hear a distinct individual voice." One of his favorites is a reproduced photo of a forlorn woman with the caption "Heartbroken." Addressed to a man in Massachusetts, the back of the card reads simply, "We'll meet in death." "From the address," Butler says, "you can see that the guy is in a sanitarium. He's dying of tuberculosis and this woman is using the printed sentiment to convey a complex emotional moment."

A professor of creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Butler attempts to convey these moments in his own writing. To communicate that intent to his students and, indeed, to anyone with an internet connection, he recently wrote a story before a live webcam. He had already written two stories based on postcards from his collection for Hemispheres, the inflight magazine of United Airlines, and he felt that writing another would be a good way to open up his creative process to his students.

His first step was to choose a few cards from his collection of several hundred, and then, before his audience, he began evaluating which might make the best story. The one he chose, a grainy black and white shot of an old-fashioned biplane, reads on the back, "This is Earl Sandt of Erie, PA in his aeroplane, just before it fell."

The card is a "white border" type, printed during the period between 1915-1930. The divided back of the card allows for correspondence on the left side and the name and address of the recipient on the right. This card was kept as a souvenir rather than being sent, as the caption spans both columns.

The resulting story, "This is Earl Sandt," can be read at Butler's FSU website, http://www.fsu.edu/~butler. This story, and the others that have been published so far, have been so successful that Butler now plans a book of stories based on the cards in his collection.

Butler's current novel is based on a story Francis Ford Coppola commissioned for his Zoetrope magazine after seeing Sharon Stone serve as celebrity auctioneer for a charity auction. Fair Warning is centered around auctioneer Amy Dickerson, "the dazzling star of auction house Nichols and Gray, smaller but farther up-market than its rivals Sotheby's and Christie's," according to the New York Times Book Review.

Alain Bouchard, an enigmatic Frenchman who's buying Nichols & Gray, says to Amy, "The man or woman who loves to collect is a man or woman who loves the rich variety of life. The collector says, Yes. Yes, I will embrace these things, I will treasure these things. It is like identity, is it not? I own this thing, therefore I am? We choose the objects around us to discover who we are."

Butler says, "That's quite true, I think, and not just for people who think of themselves as collectors. In fact, Fair Warning stamps the collector as metaphor for the way people live in the world and how they form relationships. Since my wife, Elizabeth Dewberry, is a writer as well, we tend to gravitate toward those things carry the sense of human life with them. I am unlike most collectors in that absolute mint condition of objects is undesirable-- I like the patina of human life on things that I buy."

Traces of Butler's own collections can be found in Fair Warning, which takes its name from an alternative to "Going, going, gone," which some auctioneers use to warn bidders that the gavel is about to fall. Like Alain Bouchard, Butler collects fountain pens, and owns several Waterman Patricians, including one that was given to a top Waterman salesman. "That's a touch I really relish," he says.

Butler and Dewberry also collect shoes. "Our collection ranges from a woman's shoe from 1785, to a Civil War boot, to a Chinese footbinding shoe, to one worn by Ella Fitzgerald. We always collect shoes of adults, with formed personalities, and always shoes that have been worn. We own a shoe that a woman wore at her wedding in the 1920's, and from the circular scuff marks on the bottom you can see her pivoting her foot to dance the Charleston on her wedding night."

It's those details that keep Butler collecting, and that continue to influence his work as a writer as well. They're also the details that keep us reading, and Fair Warning, in particular, is a novel that anyone interested in collections, antiques or the world of the auction will find intriguing.