Kathleen George met Hilary Masters in Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s, when the acclaimed novelist and memoirist was in his 50s. Though they were together three decades, George said, large swaths of his life remained mysterious to her, including a previous marriage and his days as a young press agent in Manhattan, in the years just after World War II.
Masters died in 2015. In her new novel, “Mirth,” George conscripts her imagination to fill in the years of his life she missed.
“Mirth” (Regal House Publishing) follows Harrison Mirth, the character Masters inspired, from those press-agent years to his life as a family man and aspiring novelist in upstate New York and his relocation to Pittsburgh. The story is largely organized around the three main women in Mirth’s life: his first wife, Amanda, his second, Margie, and his third, Liz, who is loosely based on George herself.
It’s a bit of a departure from the work George is best known for, her seven Richard Christie detective novels, including “The Odds.” Her oeuvre also includes two historical novels, “The Johnstown Girls” (about the Johnstown Flood) and “The Blues Walked In” (about jazz great Lena Horne).
George, a Johnstown native, is a longtime teacher of theater and writing at the University of Pittsburgh. “Mirth” is her 10th novel.
“I think grief made me decide to write it,” she said.
Masters was born in Kansas City, Mo., in 1928, the son of famed “Spoon River Anthology” poet Edgar Lee Masters. “Mirth” broadly tracks the real life of its inspiration. Like Masters, Mirth and his wife move upstate, where he runs unsuccessfully for a seat on the New York State Assembly and, after years of rejection letters, finally begins a career as a published novelist.
“I imagined a young man with talent,” said George, “but with a very, very romantic soul and a romantic notion, so that any idea that he got was just feeling and feeling, and lots of wanting to write about love and connection between men and women. And so that pushed me to imagine what early works might be in the mind of a writer that didn't quite take, but he couldn't stop doing it.”
Mirth, also like Masters, eventually becomes a peripatetic writing teacher at universities around the country. In 1983, Masters came to Carnegie Mellon and stayed longer than he had anywhere else, more than three decades.
He continued publishing, too, some 15 books, mostly novels, but also collections of short stories (“Success”) and essays (“In Montaigne’s Tower”) and perhaps his best-known work, the 1982 memoir “Last Stands: Notes From Memory.” (Here's an interview with him from Pittsburgh City Paper about his Pittsburgh-set 2006 novel "Elegy for Sam Emerson.")
The title of “Mirth,” by the way, is not ironic. The fact that Harrison has an amusing surname comes up a few times in the novel, but George said she is genuinely drawn to “male characters who are treated badly but who rise way above it, and take the high road, and are romantic nonetheless.” She cites British novelist Winston Graham’s character Ross Poldark; Christopher Tietjens from Ford Madox Ford’s novel “Parade’s End”; and Benedick from Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”
“They all have need to smile and joke and look for joy, even when things haven't gone well,” she said. “I found that fascinating. And that's a character that I wanted to write.”
George said she had considered writing about Masters while he was still alive, and in fact – with his OK – had done so, drafting a story that became part of “Mirth.” She thinks her late husband would find her portrayal of him in the novel amusing.
“I think he would have said, ‘Oh, really? Was I that stupid?’” she said. “And then he would have been forgiving. He was a very forgiving person.”
