Seebach: Jean Auel's passage to fame has been plain hard work

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Hearing Jean Auel talk about how she became a best-selling novelist was a highlight of the Mensa conference in Orlando earlier this month even if I did have to pass up the sing-along scheduled for the same time.

Auel is the author of five books in a series she calls Earth's Children, about life in the Ice Age, roughly 30,000 years ago when Neanderthals and modern humans both lived in Europe. The first, The Clan of the Cave Bear, appeared in 1980; she is working on the sixth and she said she plans a seventh.

As with so many things in life, writing novels wasn't something she planned to do. Now 70, she married at 18 and had five children in seven years (and now has 14 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren). She and her husband Ray moved to Oregon in 1964, and she began to think she needed more than a house and children to engage her mind.

"I decided it was my turn, but I wasn't sure I was smart enough to go to college," she said. She read about Mensa, took the test and passed, and started attending meetings. Some of the people she met then are still her friends, she said. Ray also joined Mensa a couple of years later.

Capsule summary, from my hastily typed notes: Got a full-time job as a keypuncher, started night classes, had to learn math; gained enough confidence to apply to better jobs; designing circuit boards, after years, wrote instruction manual "So you'd like to design circuit boards," and was asked to write technical manuals. Could qualify for MBA program at Portland University if they passed the entering exam with a score 50 points higher than those with bachelor's degrees. Ray and I were both accepted, and got MBA degrees four years later.

In January 1977, she finally got an idea "about a girl living with people who were different, and thought she was different, but allowed her to stay because she was taking care of an old man with a withered arm." That would be Auel's heroine, Ayla, orphaned at age 5 by an earthquake and taken in by a clan of Neanderthals. The old man became Creb, the clan's shaman.

"I wondered if I could write a short story. You know, I can't," she said. This being a Mensa audience, there was laughter at the joke she hadn't quite finished telling. "Long I can do."

She researched everything she could find about the period, but also practiced some of the skills herself. "I had to do hands-on; took a course on cold-weather survival; how to survive on Mount Hood in winter. Tanning hide with brains, squished by hand. Instructor likes to do it with a blender, we had to do it right. Hides became flexible; who thought of this first? Learned to find wild food."

That's the interesting question, isn't it - who thought of this first? In the books, Ayla tames a wolf and a horse, something that historically probably happened much later, and certainly not to the same teenaged girl living alone. And she's given credit for other innovations that were developed in various areas over a long period of time. But these things did happen, somewhere and sometime, and even if it is all fiction, Auel says, "I like to think it could be true."

She just set out to tell the best story she could, and when it was told she had 200,000 words, about 800 typed pages. She found an agent who was willing to look at the manuscript, liked it and eventually auctioned off the North American hardcover rights for $130,000.

That was about 40 million copies ago. The most recent book, The Shelters of Stone, has been translated into more than 30 languages and was No. 1 in sales in 15 different countries.

The book is set in the Dordogne, in France, the site of the Lascaux cave paintings. "All of the places mentioned in Shelters of Stone actually exist, and you can visit them," Auel said. And she and Ray have visited many of them, since over the years the books have been appearing Jean and Ray have come to know many of the people who are experts in the field, and have been invited to the sites where they work. Though researchers do not always agree with her imaginative reconstruction of what Neanderthals were like, "I try to leave an out for the scientists; they say, well, it's kind of off the wall, but it makes for an interesting story."

Indeed it does. In the first book, Ayla bears a son whose father is a clan member. And here's a little tidbit Auel offered for those impatiently waiting for the next book. "Ayla won't ever see her son again, but she'll find out something about him." I look forward to finding out too.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the News. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 892-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.