DAPHNE ATHAS ’ 43
her father bought after her mother managed to claim a pre-October 1929 debt.
“It’s a driveway that Carrboro took in, and
for lack of any imagination they named it
after my first name,” said Athas, who constantly reminds you not to leave home
without your imagination.
It is across town and a world away from
the house she calls “the shack,” the old
$18-a-month farmhouse decidedly on the
west side of the Haw-Ephesus (Carrboro,
Chapel Hill) border in the highly autobiographical 1971 novel.
Her mother was from old, old money and
was taught in finishing schools and at the
New England Conservatory of music. Her
father’s immigrant status trumped his education at Ohio University and Harvard Law in
the eyes of his wife’s family. He was a stock
broker in Boston at the time of the crash.
P.C. Athas preceded his family south. He
and his son took a shot at raising tomatoes
out on Raleigh Road while, back in
Gloucester, Daphne and her sisters helped
their mother bake pies and tarts to sell, and
they picked up driftwood by the seaside
mansions to burn in the fireplace.
“Coming here to this place, Chapel Hill,
was fantastic. That was my father because he
wanted us educated. He had a complex
about being educated because he had seen
how women were more or less chattel in
Greece. He had been the immigrant generation, and that’s why he was such a bug on
education — you can get anywhere here, all
you have to do is go and get educated.”
The Athases were a curiosity among the
professors’ kids, because they had the furniture, the books, the baby grand. It was a sort
of general admission ticket to polite Chapel
Hill society but with no spending money.
“We had to figure out how we were
going to college, make money, blah blah
blah blah. So we became bohemians and
also workers, taking every advantage we
could to make a dime.”
A girl would not be getting any scholarships in those days, but a town girl who
loved to read had something of inestimable
value: campus access.
“We owned the University — that’s the
way we felt — you knew all the ins and
outs. Nineteen-forty and ’ 41 might have
been the most formative years of my life,
and [boyfriend] Wayne’s. We got so we could
go back in the stacks. We could take books
out. We lived there because we didn’t want
The Athases were a curiosity among the professors’ kids, because they had
the furniture, the books, the baby grand. It was a sort of general admission
ticket to polite Chapel Hill society but with no spending money.
to be crappy high school students. I became the editor of the
Scroll, which was the literary
magazine. If you were interested
in books and stuff like that you
could go there and get anything.”
Athas was the only woman
in her college classes before the
war started pulling the men out.
She scurried toward her English
degree in three years (“We were
free — the girls in the dorms
had curfews”), and sisters Thalia and
Rachel and brother Homer followed her as
Carolina alumni. Later she would feed off
another heady time in Chapel Hill, when
the newly worldly-wise veterans returned
to finish college. She said of Wayne and
other Carrboro boys, “Because of the war,
the minute you wore a uniform, nobody
knew you were from Carrboro — you
were as good as anybody else.”
She heard about Pearl Harbor from a
blind social work student — her job reading to those students is another puzzle piece
in her development of a keen insight into
language. Every single word had to paint a
picture.“The blind students had their own
language with each other,
especially the ones who
had never seen. One of
them asked me, ‘Why
can’t you see the back
side of an orange?’ Isn’t
that wonderful?”
Athas later taught at
the Perkins School for
the Blind in Watertown,
Mass., and she wrote a
novel about it (The
Fourth World, 1956).
Her generation couldn’t wait to get out
of town. She studied at Harvard to get the
certificate for Perkins, and she worked for a
year for the Office of War Information in
New York. In 1946, she came back “to
scrounge off my family.” She slung some
hash in the basement of Graham Memorial,
and she wrote, publishing her first novel, The
Weather of the Heart, in 1947.
In 1952, she said, “We ditched.” The
postwar years were high season for aspiring
American writers in Europe. She took
$300 she got for an outline of Fourth World
and sailed by herself, eschewing the more
popular Paris for London. “I wasn’t really
