Janet Burroway - Biography

Biography

The second child and only daughter of tool and die worker Paul Burroway and his wife Alma (née Milner), Janet Burroway was raised in Phoenix, where she attended public school. (Her older brother, Stanley Burroway, a journalist, worked for the Los Angeles Times until his retirement.) Burroway’s intelligence and gift for words were so obvious even in elementary school that one teacher began tutoring her in poetry after class. Burroway told an interviewer that she began writing poetry at the age of five, and that her earliest memories are of “the fronds of an awesomely tall palm tree and beyond that the searing blue Arizona sky.”

Like many precocious youngsters, Burroway understood that she had to leave Arizona to satisfy her intellectual hunger, and the only way to do that was by attending college. But since her family couldn’t afford to send her, that meant winning awards and scholarships, and getting published.

Her first scholarships were courtesy of local men’s clubs—the Elks and the Knights of Pythias—which gave her the financial wherewithal to attend the University of Arizona. After studying there for a year (1954–55), Burroway won the Mademoiselle Magazine College Board Contest and spent part of the summer of 1955 in New York City as the magazine’s Guest Editor. (Several talented women writers of her generation have held that position, including poet Sylvia Plath and novelist Joan Didion, who was Burroway’s co-editor.) Burroway’s first poem to be published in a national magazine was “The Rivals,” which appeared in Seventeen when Burroway herself was eighteen (June 1954). In 1955 her first play, Garden Party, was produced at Barnard College. Seventeen also published Burroway’s first short story, “I Do Not Love You, Wesley,” in January 1957. In August of that same year, The Atlantic published Burroway’s poem “Song.” The young writer from the American outback was making a name for herself.

Burroway earned her A. B. cum laude from Barnard in 1958 on another scholarship. While there, she made Phi Beta Kappa, won the Barnard Memorial Prize for Drama, the Mount Holyoke Intercollegiate Poetry Prize, and several scholarships. Unsurprisingly, she chose the one that took her farthest from Arizona. In 1960 she moved to England where she attended Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship.

While in England Burroway finished her first novel, Descend Again (Faber and Faber, London, 1960), which she had begun while attending Barnard. Often overlooked by critics because it was not published in the United States, the book is structured around the myth of Plato’s “Cave.” When asked whether fiction is more closely affiliated with poetry or drama, Burroway replies, “There are two different ways of organizing : a dramatic, and a poetic way. And the people who organize fiction as drama are more likely to be on the best-seller list, and people who organize fiction as poetry are more likely to be boring, but profound. The best thing is to do both.” In 1961 Burroway’s first book of poetry, But to the Season, was published by Keele University Press. Burroway spent 1960-1961 in New Haven, Connecticut after receiving an RCA/NBC scholarship in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. “I had been interested in drama all along; I really would like to have been a playwright,” Burroway says now, in hindsight. “I found this a difficult decision and I’ll never know if I made the right one. My sense then was that the British are fundamentally artistic and Americans are not. I think I might have found a more congenial community in England, and that it offers more incentives to playwrights. As it is, I have lived back and forth between America and England . . . . ometimes I have trouble deciding which nationality my characters are.”

While at Yale, Burroway married Belgian theatre director Walter Eysselinck and lived in Belgium for two years where she worked as a costume designer. The couple’s oldest son, Timothy Alan Eysselinck, was born in Ghent in 1964, where Burroway finished her second novel, The Dancer from the Dance (Faber and Faber, London, 1965; Little, Brown, Boston, 1967) and began her third, Eyes (Faber and Faber 1966; Little, Brown 1966). After Eysselinck took a theatre job in Sussex, the family relocated to England, where Burroway had their second child, Tobyn Alexander (Alex) Eysselinck, in 1966. After receiving her M. A. from Cambridge, Burroway taught at the University of Sussex from 1965-1970. Her fourth novel, the critically acclaimed The Buzzards (and Burroway’s personal favorite), came out in 1969 (Little, Brown; published by Faber and Faber in England that same year), and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. As critic Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has noted, “The Buzzards is a political novel of unusual artistry. Its controlling metaphor is adopted from the first chorus of the Oresteia . . . . warrior-birds swoop upon a pregnant hare, tearing out the unborn brood.” Ironically, that same year the first of Burroway’s two children’s books, The Truck on the Track, came out in England (Jonathan Cape). The American edition was published the following year by Bobbs-Merrill. The book enjoyed a long print run, and like Burroway’s second, The Giant Jam Sandwich, was televised by the BBC. The Giant Jam Sandwich, published in 1972 by Jonathan Cape in England and in the US by Houghton Mifflin, is still available in hard and paperback and on cassette from both publishers. In 2008 composer Philip Wharton set it to music for narrator and orchestra, and the piece had its debut performance with the Iowa City Symphony.

Burroway completed her fourth play, Hoddinott Veiling, in 1970; it was performed that year by ATV Network Television in London. Another play, The Fantasy Level, was first produced in 1961 at the Yale School of Drama, and again in 1968 by the Gardner Center for the Arts for the Brighton Festival in Sussex. The Beauty Operators (1968) was also produced by the Gardner Center for the Arts, then by the Armchair Theatre, Thames Television in London in 1970.

But Burroway, struggling to maintain her identity as a writer while being a traditional good wife and diligent mother, paid a heavy price for her productivity. In 1971, when Tim was seven and Alex was five, she admitted that she found motherhood “daunting” and that her troubled marriage had finally, fatally, collapsed. In her essay “I Didn’t Know Sylvia Plath” (published in Embalming Mom: Essays in Life, University of Iowa Press 2002), Burroway writes, “I married a man with a smaller talent than Ted Hughes, and a shorter fuse.” She left Eysselinck in 1971 and came back to America with her sons after landing a stop-gap job in the Special Educational Opportunities Program at the University of Illinois. Depressed, distraught, and almost paralyzed by inertia, Burroway, like Sylvia Plath (whom she had met on a few occasions), contemplated suicide. But instead, like several of her own female protagonists, unlike Plath, she chose to live.

The following year, 1972, Burroway rallied sufficiently to interview for the position of Associate Professor of English Literature and Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, located in Florida’s panhandle by the Gulf of Mexico. Except for brief stints at other institutions—such as serving as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop—Burroway taught at Florida State University until her retirement in 2002. She married William Dean Humphries, an artist, in 1978, but the marriage did not last. The two divorced in 1981. Burroway continued to win awards, the most important being a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1976, followed by two resident fellowships at Yaddo (in Saratoga Springs, New York), one in 1985 and again in 1987. She continued to write novels, plays, poetry, and essays.

Burroway’s fifth novel, Raw Silk (Little, Brown 1977) was a runner-up for the National Book Award. It had taken Burroway seven years to research and write, but it was responsible for introducing her to a wide popular audience. The book was also important for her personally, since she had incorporated chunks of her own life into it, a practice she had tentatively begun in The Buzzards. In speaking of Eleanor, one of the female characters in that novel, Burroway says, “It was Eleanor’s experiences of an ordinary awful morning, or rather it was my experience of writing about her ordinary awful morning, that made me face that women’s concerns were my concerns, and that I had better pay attention to their significance. . . . ne morning I got up in despair and said, ‘Eleanor has three children and I have two children and I’m going to give Eleanor everything to do that I have done this morning before I sat down at the table.’” Burroway wrote about eighty pages in a two-day period, then revised the material down to nine pages that “worked perfectly well as narrative. And it forced me to see that if I was avoiding my real concerns and trying to write Great Literature, I would likely not be able to write.” After that, Burroway looked over the books she had written and realized that the threads she consistently wove through her narrative and kept returning to—in particular, mentor relationships, the abandonment of children, race, and suicide—were in fact themes. “That’s why I began Raw Silk with, ‘This morning I abandoned my only child.’” Burroway also credits a suggestion from her brother the journalist for deleting the beginning portions of the novel until all she had left as a starting point was that stark declarative sentence.

Another book of poetry, Material Goods, was published in 1980 by the University Presses of Florida. In 1982 the first edition of Burroway’s indispensable “how-to” book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, was published by Little, Brown. Burroway wrote two more novels, Opening Nights (Antheum, 1985), which draws on her background in theatre, and Cutting Stone (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), set, like her first novel, in a small Arizona town of another era. Cutting Stone became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, and in 1993-94 Burroway was awarded the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellowship. A collection of essays-as-memoir, Embalming Mom, came out in 2002 (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City).

By 2004, Burroway was working on another novel, Paper, which dealt with the love affair between a white woman and a black mill worker. (In her second novel, The Dancer from the Dance, the young female protagonist is mixed-race.) “Race has been a central theme for me,” says Burroway, and her protagonist in Paper “believes that she understands what prejudice is, but thinks that prejudice is the province of whites against blacks, and so has a very difficult time understanding how outraged family is that he is demeaning himself by going out with her.” Burroway notes she had been the editor of her high school newspaper in Arizona when desegregation took place, and that she won the Mademoiselle Guest Editorship for “an editorial called ‘Color Scheme,’ a piece of very wide-eyed righteousness about racism.”

Then, a phone call and a simple four-word message, “Tim has shot himself,” shattered Burroway’s world into fragments. Tim Eysselinck, her first-born son, had flown from Iraq, where he was leader of a team training Iraqis in mine removal, to his home in Namibia for a vacation with his wife and children, where he killed himself. Dark-haired, bearded, and dashing, Tim had his mother’s Wedgewood-blue eyes and fierce intelligence. He was polite, a Republican, and a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association. Even though he loved his mother deeply, he had, since childhood, cherished values antithetical to hers. Several years before his suicide, Burroway had written that sometimes, when conversing, the two would “stumble into uneasy territory. We have learned to acknowledge that, mother and child, we not only don’t share a world view, we cannot respect each other’s. Our task is to love in the absence of that respect. It’s a tall order.” Tim once admitted to her that “‘It’s a good thing it’s you who’s the liberal, Mom. If I were the parent, I wouldn’t want to let you be you the way you’ve let me be me.’”

Burroway knew her son was depressed by “‘he corruption, the incompetence, the greed, the lies’” of George Bush’s war, but she could not gauge the depth of his feelings. On the evening of April 23, 2004, Tim sat down at the dining room table of his family’s home in the Windhoek hills of Namibia and shot himself in the head.

In the larger scheme of things, a child who dies before his parents is unnatural. But a child who deliberately destroys himself is a torment to all who survive him. Burroway spent the next harrowing days and months trying to answer the unanswerable. For a while it was all she could write about. In the essay “Six Months On: What I have Learned about Grief,” she says, “It is half a year since my son’s suicide. Timothy Alan Eysselinck, forty, Captain, Ranger, father, hunter, contractor overseeing mine removal in Iraq, Republican, idealist, perfectionist, gun nut, my firstborn, my baby” Then she couldn’t write about anything at all.

Eventually Burroway stepped back from the brink herself (again), chose life (again), and returned to her life’s work, writing. More specifically, she returned to the subject matter of her abandoned novel Paper. In an interview with Anna Crowe, Burroway says that twenty years earlier she had toured a paper mill. “I decided to write a novel about a poet, a man who leaves his family for a sabbatical and inadvertently rents a cottage in a paper mill town. He sits in front of the blank page while tons of the stuff pours off the rollers behind him--and can’t write, of course. Then his wife comes South to patch up their marriage and instead falls in love with a black mill hand.” But her editor hadn’t liked the novel. Burroway didn’t either—writing it had been drudgery. “The only thing I loved was the little store that had appeared quite incidentally,” Burroway admits. “I scrapped the novel, wrote three plays and a book of essays, and thought about the little store. I gave up the writer as hero. It’s always a good idea to give up the writer as hero.”

Drastically re-conceived and re-christened Bridge of Sand, the novel explores what happens when a white woman falls in love with a black man in the contemporary American South—and the reaction of Cassius’s parents to the couple’s affair is only the beginning. Burroway’s protagonist, Dana, is now female, and Burroway gives her the blue-collar background—a background similar to Burroway’s own. At the novel’s end, Dana, pregnant with Cassius’s son, returns to her working class roots. Burroway laughs. “When my brother read this novel, he said, ‘She’s going to give birth to Obama!’”

In 1993 Burroway married her long-time partner, Utopian scholar Peter Ruppert. The two spend their time in Tallahassee, where Burroway is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and in London.