Local author brings 32-year-old manuscript to life

Napa Valley Register

Carolyn Younger, June 2, 2005

For more than three decades a biography of Kathleen Norris, a prolific and popular early 20th century novelist, lay tucked away in a Wisconsin cheese box stored in the basement of a San Francisco home.

Thirty-two years later, the manuscript is out of the box and into paperback as "A Woman of Certain Importance," with an introduction by California State Librarian emeritus Kevin Starr and published by Illuminations Press of Calistoga.

The biographer, Deanna Paoli Gumina, was a 30-year-old assistant archivist at the San Francisco History Room and a soon-to-be mom when she started the project. She was a mother of three by the time she finished.

"I wrote this 30 years ago," Gumina said last week, as her husband, Peter, puttered in their St. Helena garden shadowed by the family pooch, Winston. "I was raising children and I never thought of myself as a writer, so I kept it in a box. I thought if I send it out to publishers, I know what will happen, they'll send it back to me with a rejection slip. I refused to stick my neck out."

Historian, not writer

But Gumina, who considers herself more of an historian than a writer, nevertheless went on to write a bilingual book, "Italians of San Francisco, 1850 to 1930," an account of Old St. Mary's Church and articles for Pacific Historian, the Journal of San Francisco History and the California Historical Society publication, California History.

Four years ago Tiberon reporter Dierdre McCrohan came across some of the articles on Norris and gave Gumina a call, asking if she had more information on the author. Gumina unearthed a copy of the manuscript and sent it off. It was returned six months later with tidy editorial notes in the margins and the admonition, "Go find a publisher."

Found a publisher

Gumina's search for a local publisher was every bit as painful as she had imagined, she admitted, but find one she did — Calistogan Gene Dekovic. Her book, whose title is a reworking of one of her favorite Norris books, "Certain People of Importance" published in 1932, came out last year. Earlier this month, Gumina held a reading and a book signing at the St. Helena Library.

In 1973, Gumina, a San Francisco native who holds bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of San Francisco, was an assistant archivist in the San Francisco History Room under the wing of city archivist Gladys Hansen.

Her interest in Norris grew out of a longtime family connection with Norris' son, Frank, a San Francisco obstetrician/gynecologist who delivered her brother, her cousins and later, her oldest son. San Francisco, for all its international aura, still had the elements of a small town — in certain circles everybody knew everybody else's business — and the Norris family of writers — Frank, his younger brother Charles and Charles' wife Kathleen, were often in the public eye.

Norris on TV

One evening in the mid-1950s, 11-year-old Deanna Paoli was watching her family's favorite television show, "This Is Your Life," and there was Kathleen Norris surrounded by surviving family members.

"Finally, I had a picture of who she was and the family cast of characters," Gumina said. The image stuck, reinforced by comments in Herb Caen's column and newspaper stories of Norris' activities as a community activist.

At the time of Norris' death in 1966 at 86, she had written 93 novels and numerous short stories, "novelettes" and several plays and at one time was the highest paid and most sought-after woman writer in the country. She was also a popular guest speaker and was once acknowledged as the "top career woman in the nation" by the Federation of Women's Clubs.

"There were people who just couldn't wait to get her next book," Gumina learned. Magazines that ran Norris' serialized novels flew off the racks. Mothers named their daughters after her.

A born storyteller

Norris was a born storyteller, Gumina said, and her life unfolded like the heroine in one of her novels. She was 18 when her parents died within a month of one another. She and her older brother, Joe, moved the four younger children and their aunt out of their Mill Valley home and returned to San Francisco, the city of their birth, where Joe and Kathleen went to work to support the family.

Following a series of clerical jobs, Norris was hired by the San Francisco Call newspaper at the time of the 1906 earthquake and fire and soon after, the Examiner. She was writing up society events for the women's pages when she met her future husband, Charles Norris, a member of what Gumina calls, San Francisco's "Irishtocracy." Despite resistance from his mother, the young couple was engaged within a month of their meeting, and married a year later in New York.

Always a cad in story

Gumina, who scoured used bookstores for copies of Norris' work, managed to read most of the novels and occasional plays. The underlying plot in most revolved around a heroine who had to overcome some great failing, the biographer said. "Then there was always a cad in the story, and someone she would fall in love with who was honorable, but she would always have to unravel a tremendous knot in her life … Norris was also very good at character building, they were more important than the plot."

Gumina was eventually aided in her research by Norris' son who directed her to his cousin, Rosemary Benet. It was Benet who generously turned over boxes of private papers and letters.

The more Gumina read, the more she realized that Norris drew on her own family — her five siblings, her aunt, her parents, her grandparents, herself — to flesh out the characters in her books.

Final novel in 1957

Following her final novel, "Through A Glass Darkly," published in 1957, she set to work telling her life story, but, following her father's precept that "any good story deserves a top hat and a stick," she added embellishments and smoothed out what rough edges her characters may have had in real life. The book — later titled "Family Gathering" — "will not be true," she wrote her niece, Rosemary, "and I will be quite the phenomenon, the spoiled pet of a too generous husband."

Norris contributed to the literary history of California as well as to women's literature "on a grand scale," Gumina believes, "and nobody gets that. She was the highest paid woman writer of her day. The minute her name appeared on the cover of a magazine, the sales went up. She was sought after by all the top magazines … That's her contribution.

"They recognized Charles Norris. He was a founder of the Bohemian Club so the club keeps his memory alive. And Frank Norris ("The Octopus," "McTeague") is always in front but we'll see what happens to him. Kathleen has always been relegated to the sidelines but hopefully she'll find her place in the sun."