The Making of a Writer

by Gail Godwin

  A few months later, I was “promoted” to the Herald’s Fort Lauderdale office. The bureau chief, Keith, told me I had a flair for leads.

  One of my masterpieces was: “A pair of flaming under shorts saved the life of Richard Dolan, who was lost in the Everglades for three days and three nights.” But as time went on, I pleased Keith and his assistant, the Broward women’s page editor, less and less. They certainly had their justifications. I let my boredom show. There wasn’t enough to do. After I had completed my one or two assignments for the day, I actually took frequent trips to the hairdresser down the block, and came back freshly coiffed, and even with different shades of hair. I acted out the role of the flighty starlet who was headed back to Miami as soon as her trial period in the bureaus was over.

  The following spring, Neuharth sent me and a few others from the Miami office to start the Pompano office. This was a heady time. We were all young and ambitious, and we had lovely expense accounts. We had a hand in every aspect of newspaper production, including page makeup, and still had energy left over for late-night drinking and midnight ocean swims.

  Then in June I was returned to Fort Lauderdale. I didn’t know it, but this was my last chance. If Keith gave the okay, I could stay in the Broward bureau. One day in August of 1960, I found Keith’s note in my typewriter.

  I have spent more time working and worrying over your future than I have spent on the entire rest of the staff combined. I must confess I’ve been a failure. I apologize for my mistakes. But the fact remains that I cannot see any further benefit from my e forts or yours and I am convinced it would be to your benefit to find someplace to “start over.” This has been harsher than I intended it to be. I really feel badly that I have failed to make a good reporter out of obviously promising material. I hope you can use this experience somewhere but I’m afraid you won’t do it successfully until you look facts in the face and at the same time quit expecting to get to the moon in one day.

  KLB

  After Keith told Miami that he had given up on me, the powers there called me back to Miami to fill in for several people who were on vacation. My goose was cooked, but somehow I managed to withhold this knowledge from myself. I was going to show them!

  I performed brilliantly during that respite period back in Miami, sometimes having six bylines a day. They sent me into Hurricane Donna with the Navy. My story had the banner headline and a photo of me. “This has been a real Gail Godwin day,” said Marie Anderson, the Miami women’s editor, passing me in the hall.

  Several days later, Neuharth called me into a meeting in the boardroom with a few other solemn editors and said they were going to “help me find another job.” Neuharth said the deciding factor had been my impatience to come back to Miami when others, more seasoned, had been waiting their turn for years. He said, naming a worthy bureau person in Fort Lauderdale, “Why, X wakes up every morning praying this will be the day he’s called back to Miami.”

  Though Neuharth suggested I might try writing fiction, he said he was not suggesting I switch careers: he was going to help me find another newspaper job and give me good references. But I went to pieces and the gents left me in the boardroom, weeping in my upright chair. Neuharth had tucked the envelope with my generous severance pay under my thigh since I had refused to take it from his hand.

  SEPTEMBER 6

  Drove to the Ranch House Restaurant (across a little bridge, pine paneled, pine tables, Swiss-looking curtains, voluptuous marigolds bursting from tiny glass vases, a look of regimented pomp). Had breakfast with poor W, who insisted on coming along. He is so sad. Prefaces every remark with “I’m the type of person that”—and I’m the type of person that can’t stand that. Bought Errol Flynn’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways, 13 which I shall read in the dining room. The Doctors come tomorrow night: dinner/breakfast/lunch/dinner/breakfast/lunch/dinner/ breakfast. Eight meals—and then freedom.

  And the boys downstairs have Nina Simone14 crooning away in her husky, equatorial passion. This screen is patched and rusty, my linen is dirty because Mrs. Young15 won’t give us any more now. But where else can I lie almost ON TOP of the trees and look to a future, enjoy the past, and relish the present?

  A hot bath in L’Heure Bleu, 16 a half-quart of Budweiser, and voici moi under the blue blanket out of it again.

  Saint Genevieve’s17 in the midafternoon, sitting by a window in the early spring, trying to do algebra, listening instead to Mozart by some advanced piano student on the third floor—the student pausing to think—then fingers rippling again over the keyboard.

  Sitting in Howard Johnson’s on the hill between Durham & Chapel Hill, watching the cars, talking—talking with Bill Hamilton, Martin, Uncle Wm, Ronnie, Shelley.18

  Walking across campus that last year, knowing it was my last, savoring every minute of it. Looking out of the Tar Heel19 office windows from the vantage point of F.’s lap. What kept us writing each other so faithfully all these months, ’59, ’60, ’61? I never loved him. But I lent him money, took him to dinner, bought him books, called him, mailed him letters, did his errands. I think he is the example in my life of true friendship. I never betrayed him (even when the CIA man came to Key Biscayne and asked me what I knew) and he would never betray me. I remember when he and I drove to Durham in the rain to see Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He had a Coke and popcorn and he condescended to let me hold on to his thickly sweatered arm.

  Tonight Sande & I formed a “team” to wait on the internal mediciners (most people are so uncouth—it looks as if doctors could honor their title by wearing coats and ties to dinner, by being polite to their wives and to the waitress, and eat their soup correctly, tipping the spoon away from them). I don’t think I would marry a doctor. All they know is the science they practice. I think I would prefer a lawyer, a writer (a good one), a newspaperman (in an executive position), or a competent, serious-minded playboy who just played well.

  SEPTEMBER 7

  10: 30 P.M.

  Fatigue is the very opposite of buoyancy. When I am in a state of fatigue, everything about me wants to go down instead of up. It is a sinking, dull, heavy, gray-black, dirty ache. It makes me do things haphazardly, dangerously, cutting corners, surly and undeliberate. It wipes out all other thoughts: sex, art, ambition, love, hate.

  Tonight—I have the worst case of fatigue I have ever experienced in my life.

  This afternoon there was a note in my car. (They always get so attentive right at the end, like Bill H. handing me my diploma at Chapel Hill and kissing me.) I followed the directions of the note and went to his family’s chalet and took a shower with some of his mother’s spice soap.20 Then we sat on the porch watching the golfers below us zigzagging around in their electric carts. He read the financial section of the New York Times and told me about some bad stocks he’d bought. Then we read the sailing dates together and licked our chops over names like Leonardo da Vinci, 21 Tangiers, Honduras, Marseilles, Macao, Gibraltar, Napoli, Brazil, Alexandria, Antwerp. He told me about the little Italian man who invented the double-entry bookkeeping method while he was auditing the books for the building of a new cathedral. I ate honeydew melon and curled my toes in his lap, and decided it would be a long time before I got this close to such pure, healthy handsomeness again. Later, I sat alone in my “sidewalk café,”22 drinking muddy coffee, eating a greasy hamburger, watching the clock, and playing “Raindrops” and “I Apologize” on the jukebox over and over again.

  “I just might come to Asheville to see you,” he said. And then: “Let’s make a clean pact. No tears, okay?”

  “You’re just saying that to make sure you say it first and to hide your own feelings,” I said.

  “I have to keep one step ahead of you,” he said.

  He’s not ripe yet, but he’s all right.

  God, I am so tired.

  SEPTEMBER 11

  ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

  The summer cares are over and I am setting about preparing for a trip—happy occupation! Tonig
ht: Ask B. if I can spend a whole day writing at his house. Want to finish “Halcyone and the Lighthouse,”23 “Lazarus” & “I Always Will.” I think I could do it in one or two complete days.

  Bought a fine book, Malcolm Lowry, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.24 Fantastic, multileveled feel of life conveyed. I am now reading about the sea voyage from Canada around the Gulf of Mexico to Rotterdam.

  The margins are filled with passages from the “Ancient Mariner.”

  I want to go to St. Genevieve’s and talk to Mother Winters25 before long.

  SEPTEMBER 13

  There is no place—absolutely no place—like Asheville in the fall. Even the expressway isn’t so bad. It affords visions one could see no other way. And the white chunks of houses nudging against the pockets of the mountains. And the country women stepping out of trucks in front of the Citizen-Times, their weathered faces hopeful, this week’s “Coin-word” entry clutched in their pocketbook hand. And Mosleys is still on College Street. And I love it all. The people are kind of a humorous appendage. Not all the people. Just the silly country-club set and the asses I grew up with.

  Now, this afternoon—the essence. And I escaped again. What I am trying to say is that there are two poles warring inside: the one when I sit in libraries on sunny afternoons and read about people like Salinger26 and wish . . . the other when I am inside of someone I love just for a minute and would sell the libraries of the world not to go outside again. As noted by the above passages, I got out of hand and bought another book. Read in Fielding’s about politeness in Denmark. Never never refuse a skål, 27 even though your belly bursts, and keep your eyes riveted.

  And when you meet someone on the street you have spent previous time with you say, first of all, not “Hello” but “Thank you for the wonderful time we had together the last time I saw you.”

  SEPTEMBER 23

  Night before last, when I chose between leaving my family and losing my sanity, I went uptown and parked down in front of the courthouse under a tree in the park. I watched the policemen’s “changing of the guard” (riding off two by two in squatty little green & white patrol cars, looking ever so self-satisfied). And listened, smelled, and watched the sounds of Asheville as I had never done before. What struck me was the peculiar charm of the clash of architectural types and periods. The Jackson Building, with its elongated spire, reminding one of a king’s crown seen in a mirror which distorts things so they look long and thin; the pink & bronze city hall; the gray ugly courthouse whose lighted barred windows, where human forms sway during the night, fascinated me as a child; the dirty little buildings where the bondsmen collect their money with smug, red faces; the squarish-jutting irregularity of Pack Square; the click-click (hollow sound) of billiard balls from an upstairs window painted green; the ex-bakery which now sells cheap clothing; Finkelstein’s pawnshop, almost turned respectable with the accumulation of years; the Library, which saved my life in May.28

  SEPTEMBER 25

  Now Calmness. Confidence. Tomorrow will be an interesting day. Anyway, tomorrow morning I get all dolled up and drive to the airport, and when Voit Gilmore29 steps off the plane, no matter how many ominous-looking people are waiting, I will approach him first and say: “Mr. Gilmore? Welcome to Asheville.”

  Acceptable topics:

  The SR30 article on him.

  How excited everyone is over the new U.S. Travel Service.

  Home of Miss America.31

  Know something about the Forestry Celebration Act. Weeks Act.32

  Let him know that if there is nothing open in Europe, I would love to work in Washington.

  Traveled a lot.

  And my Miami Herald clippings will just happen to be resting expectantly in the Bank of Asheville briefcase in the back seat.

  OCTOBER 2

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Aside from my constant companion (the headache in my left temple), I feel perfect and am lying here after a hot bath uncoiling. I guess the thing that makes me happiest about the entire morning is that I got through an ordeal all on my own and got past the personnel office on my own steam. Besides that, I have an assignment for the Post. I was actually asked to write something—a profile on Bill Blair’s new wife. I can use Voit Gilmore’s name to get in there: “Tell them you know me, and tell them you are going to be with the Travel Service.” (He looked tired today.)

  OCTOBER 3

  NEW YORK CITY

  Bev Miller—who will head the Travel Service in London, I liked very much. Big, straightforward, no pretense, just a man with a good grip on things, none of this “nifty” business. I went up to a new office still in the process of being constructed. He was very cordial to me and I must say that I was struck by the naturalness of his approach. He was the first one to detail this business for me, instead of making it sound like a fairy tale. I told him what he could expect from me; he told me what I could expect from the Travel Service. He asked me about my job at the Herald, my public-speaking ability (said my Southern accent would be an “attraction,” which he liked), my capacity for dealing with people, working with women, researching; he asked me how long I wanted to stay in Europe, where in the U.S. I had been, if I had any money of my own, if I thought I could make it on the small pay. This point, he stressed, was what concerned him most.

  Frankly, what I see in this is a job with a future. I can even see myself as a young executive. I have grown up ten years in the last year. I can tell the difference in the way I react during stress. Oh yes, he said he didn’t want any brash young teenagers in a conservative place like Britain. I don’t blame him. So anyway, I am going to get in touch with him “by November tenth at latest.”

  “Well, it looks to me that you have the qualifications and we might work something out,” he said.

  The train ride early in the day, bumbling around Penn Station in the rain, getting bled by porters, having all these calamities, all of this, was worth this timely meeting with him. I think these men realize that I have not failed once to be at the right place at the right time. Gilmore at the airport, at his office between interviews, meeting Bev Miller just before he went to meet Gilmore. I think I have passed the entrance exam; now we must wait and see. There is no use to get frantic. And so I’m not going to.

  Had dinner with a lady lawyer who is also a lieutenant colonel in the Army. Tried to commission me on the spot. But at least I didn’t eat alone and pick up a man or something.

  Bought volume 1 of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or33 —a Danish philosopher and something to bury myself in until Friday when my ship sails (I hope).

  Also—visit the consul of Denmark.

  OCTOBER 4

  Alone, alone in a large large city. Tried my new “life on $5 a day”— breakfast: coffee and danish, 40¢—then felt so proud of myself I went into Macy’s and bought a lipstick which cost $3.11. “Cellular Bronze.” What I dislike most about NYC is its nasal sound.

  I have discovered that courtesy goes far anywhere, especially with waiters, policemen, agents, desk clerks, etc. A sympathetic smile saying “I just know what you’re having to put up with and I certainly don’t want to inconvenience you any more than necessary.” A nice little hairdresser from Barcelona who grew up with Garcia Lorca did my hair and gave me some addresses. Tonight I go out with Stu’s cousin. Just hope he’s suitable and not one of these “bright young men” with tight tight pants who smirk at the universe. If he’s just as nice as McKee, 34 it’ll be fine. Just the fact that I’ll be having dinner with someone is fine, and if I don’t like him, I can just come home early. God, have I changed since June 1959, when I last embarked on a strange new experience.35

  Part two

  TAKING LEAVE

  Aboard SS Oklahoma,

  Hoboken, New Jersey, to Copenhagen, Denmark

  OCTOBER 6–30, 1961

  Aboard the SS Oklahoma, Gail launches the first major character of her newly christened career: Halcyone Harper, whose ocean passage follows by one year her breakup with a sea
captain. The tale combines unabashed romance with a deft handling of the theme of land- and sea-consciousness.

  The sky was black and I worshiped romance and wanted you to kiss me.

  In such a manner, Gail Godwin, writing in her journal on October 9, addresses Captain C., the American sea captain whom she’d once loved. Whereas she will yield to romance on occasion throughout her trip, she dedicates herself to writing about it and to discovering what shape its story might take.

  By invoking Captain C., she prepares herself to enter the mind of her protagonist, and thus compose her story. “What I need to do is just start— and not mind the ending,” she tells herself. “The beginning—the way it really happened—will prophesy the end.”

  On her fourth day aboard the ship, Gail went to work, inspired by a remembered kiss. Half an hour later, she had profited several pages of writing by her frenzy. She then stopped to give herself advice: “Leave out parts which you found boring, don’t worry about other stories and how they are written. The idea is here.”

  A story dictates its own design. A writer can know the design in advance without knowing the ending.

  Speaking about her sixth novel, The Finishing School, for instance, Gail has said that she had known that the teenage protagonist, Justin, was going to be the agent of another character’s death, but she didn’t know until the end which character would die and she didn’t know how Justin would cause the event. Working out the plot is a process of discovery.

  In 1961, writing about romance, Gail was coming to terms with a number of animating spirits in her life. Her mother, Kathleen Cole, was a writer of romances, whose literary and professional career had not been granted full flowering. Also, young Gail imagined that a man’s love might carry her to a heightened sense of being.

  Gail Godwin has said: “In my earlier books, I was working out how independent women can be independent and still manage to love and be loved. The Odd Woman, Glass People, The Perfectionists. That was my initial concern. I’ve solved it to my satisfaction.”