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A Sharp, Observant Eye - Jane Oliver Menard: Helen Chappell
A Sharp, Observant Eye
In Memory of Jane Oliver Menard
by Helen Chappell
I’m never going to find out how that novel ended. The wonderful, witty woman who would send me each chapter as she dashed it off has left us for the great keyboard in some fantastic writer’s study on the other side. I like to think Jane is up there having a drink with Jane Austen and James M. Cain as they cynically discuss the mortals who remain on this planet.
Any loss is a great one, but losing a friend, a sister writer and a mentor is a gray tragedy. When Jane Oliver Menard slipped quietly away, stolen by cancer, she left a hole in many people’s lives. Her son, Covey Menard, her grandchildren, her surviving brother, Jeff, and sisters, Lucy and Scotti. Part of her legacy is being a part of that legendary family. But her life stands as a time well and truly lived.
Covey and Barbara Oliver seemed to be so exciting to me. Dr. Oliver served as the ambassador to Colombia, as an undersecretary of state, as dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. He was an authority on international law.
Barbara was just as glamorous and exciting. She’d lived everywhere and done everything and, without being supercilious, was one of the most sophisticated people I’ve ever met.
Just to have dinner with Covey and Barbara and their kids, who were my great friends, was exciting to me. The food was exotic, the stories spellbinding and their Mitford matter-of-fact approach just fine with me.
Jane Oliver Menard and we worried we might put him someplace where he might be ac-
Jane had taken a reporter job cidentally smothered by coats. We in Louisiana, on a Cajun country ended up stashing him in the walknewspaper, when I first met her. in closet, where he snoozed unmoShe and her then-husband, Junior, lested until the early hours a full- blooded Coon Ass (it’s a self- I’ll never forget the interview referential term Cajuns use for she did with me. We didn’t know themselves, don’t look at me that each other that well yet. The story way), moved back up to Maryland lead started with the windfall of in search of better work and more pears in the yard, which I hadn’t money. They were expecting a picked up. That was the sort of debaby, and the pickings looked bet- tail Jane noticed. She had a great ter up here with the Oliver family. eye for telling details throughout Jane got a job on the then thriving her writing career. Talbot Banner, and we bonded as “The pears lie there because no sister writers. one has time to gather them,” she
I remember having a party opened. I didn’t explain they were shortly after son Covey was born. full of wasps and rot and I wasn’t He came, asleep in his carrier, going to touch them. She also took
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the best picture of me ever, which I still cherish, because I am about as photogenic as a pile of rotting crab shells.
Of course, both of us being writers and wanting what the other one had, I envied her talent for journalism, and she thought a life writing fiction was pretty cool. I learned the secrets of the AP Stylebook from her, and I hope she learned that a basis in reality makes good fiction from me.
We shared a common bond, a love for the written word that led to our spending a lot of time picking over writing, editors, copy and how to write up events, real or made up.
Jane had an incredible eye for detail and a great insight into humanity. After the Menards moved back to Louisiana, her letters about her adopted home were funny, insightful and pithy, the work of a bemused anthropologist, an outlook she never surrendered.
One time she wrote about a dance she’d attended. The women, she said, sat around the sides of the rooms “like plump hens,” their only subjects children, cooking and church. The men stood in the middle of the room basically ignoring the womenfolk as they discussed trapping, fishing and boats. It might have been a hundred or two hundred years ago down there. She observed that many women of
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Jane Oliver Menard from Jane, I was dropped into the boiling water that was the Bana certain age were illiterate. Going ner in those days. Let’s just say I to school had never been a part of didn’t get a lot of guidance from the the plan, as they were expected to home office, and pretty much had get married, have babies, cook and to learn by doing. Sometimes I had let the man be in charge. I wrote to call Jane in Louisiana to learn back that it kind of sounded to me how to do something. She was unlike the Eastern Shore. failingly patient, even thought she
To this day, I owe Jane an enor- had her deadlines and a family life mous debt. When the Menards to deal with and was on an equally moved back to Cajun country, she small and chintzy paper down on offered me her job on the Talbot the bayou, where she was dealing Banner. It was the last hurrah of with a lot more action than sleepy the dead tree newspaper, and the old Talbot offered. Cambridge Banner had set up a The second gift Jane gave me weekly in Talbot, perhaps because was the training and confidence to the Star Democrat had set up a write nonfiction. I can only hope I weekly in Dorchester. gave her the same encouragement
With about three days’ training to explore fiction. She had a lifetime
of real people and events for inspiration.
Eventually, she sensed the future and the death of the dead tree paper and changed careers. She moved to Baton Rouge and became a social worker, which gave her even more stories to share. We often traded snippets of weird events from our lives as well as thumbnail synopses our works in progress, hoping for suggestions, ideas and encouragement.
All the Oliver family were musical, and when Jane took up the banjo and started playing in a band, I was delighted but not surprised. I wish I’d gotten her to send me a CD.
About that same time, she started seriously working on a novel. From time to time, a snippet would arrive in my email. I was fascinated by the shrewd and observant way she’d captured the exotic world of the Deep South where she’d lived so long. It was both a foreign country to her and her home, and that love/ hate spilled into the story of a lone woman cop trying to catch a serial killer rapist while all the men, of course, didn’t believe her. It was like reading about another world.
Now, many regional writers can evoke a sense of place and people- ~ I’ve done it myself ~ but Jane’s writing just dropped you into that swamp.
When she told me that she was going to take a rest while she underwent her chemo and radiation, it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t pick it up again when she got better.
But Jane never got better. This breaks my heart, to lose a friend, a sister writer and a mentor, but this is my final tribute to her. Wherever we go when we leave here, I hope she’s writing.
Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam and Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen names, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline Brooks, she has published a number of historical novels.
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