The Making of a Writer

by Gail Godwin

  As her Halcyone story develops, Gail’s diary reveals a young writer learning to navigate the fictional universe. She depends upon her instincts for drama and honest self-appraisal.

  And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.36

  OCTOBER 6, 1961

  2: 00 P.M.

  One of the biggest mysteries is the vast difference between how we imagine something and how it really is. The way I had imagined it is already fading away and the reality replacing it. I thought only in terms of generalities and fanciful swatches from novels and secondhand experiences. Not until I stood on deck watching the stevedores going on with their loading, seeing the cables moving up and down and studying a large red hose turned on full force washing the boards on which I stood did I really claim the new experience for my own. What a way to be thrown out into the world! And I fancied myself a cosmopolitan. Now I can’t even read the sign on my own door:

  PASSAGERERNE FRA DETTE KAMMER

  HØRER VED BAADMAN ØVRE

  TIL REDNINGSBAAD NR. 2.

  And outside some people are managing to have fun. There are more Danish passengers than American ones. The only ones anywhere near my age are a young eccentric couple named Walsh, both twenty-three, who have separate cabins. One Danish man smiled at me and I was indescribably grateful. The stewardess has lines on her forehead and when I asked her what to do for the next five hours she looked very dense and asked, “You vant a drink? A drink?” The steward is blond. My only friend was a stevedore who I wouldn’t have spoken to on shore. He just mailed a letter for me. Loneliness attracts and welcomes strange company. I have inspected the lounge and the map to København (might as well get in the swing here). The lounge has a price list (prisliste) of wines, whiskeys, Cherry Heering & kajafa, and chocolate, two packs of playing cards, and several records—Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, a popular German singer, and lots of Danish stuff.

  I am happy with my room—large, sunny (three portholes), modern sofa & chair (Danish modern, of course) in navy and turquoise, a chest of drawers, a coffee table & bunk in matching wood. The sheets are coarse & the toilet paper very much resembles post office wrapping paper. I looked on my bathroom door and in a little slot was written “Fri.” How nice, I thought, they let you keep track of what day it is. But then I turned the latch and another word appeared in red: “Optage.” I think that means “occupied.” Thus fri doesn’t mean “Friday” at all. It means “free.” I am FRI.

  The couple in the next cabin invited me in for champagne. They are restaurant people going around the world on Arthur Frommer & Norman Ford.

  Thoughts that occur while leaving port:

  If it is true that the more you share with someone else, the greater your variety of experiences together, the closer you become, then doesn’t it follow that if you do many things alone, you should like yourself better?

  Every person must find his own tune in the beat of the engine. For one it may be “Frère Jacques,” for another “Co-ben-havn, Co-ben-havn,” for another the “Mexican Hat Dance.” For me it is the two-beat, iambic pentameter:

  TO STRIVE

  TO SEEK

  TO FIND

  AND NOT

  TO YIELD37

  Oh, those lights, those beacons, those strings of watt-pearls. The black ocean beckons and I remember Pompano and A. and Captain C. standing on the bridge giving orders through a megaphone. This captain wears a dark uniform with braid and stars, but then he couldn’t possibly have the legs Captain C. did when he put on those Indian sandals and khaki shorts.

  Fifteen knots, forty thousand tons into the night. With Captain Johanson at the helm, the sad frantic world behind us, and before us . . .

  OCTOBER 7

  What is the engine saying this morning as I sit here on the brown bench reflecting over the calm nine o’clock sea, feeling the wind, wondering. The engine song is a very soothing sound. It has all the virtues of people we like to know. It is constant—whether we wake at three in the morning or at four, whether we simply come outside blinking the next morning, it is always there. It is multilingual. Every nationality can find his song in the heartbeat of the vessel on which he travels. It is definitely masculine. I wonder if men think so?

  How very calm the sea is. Hazy in the distance. We are traveling with the sun. Is the Director out there too? Surely of all the places he made, the sea must be his secret favorite.

  This atmosphere is excellent for authors. If one can’t write now, one never will. Must have a schedule. Wonder if the stewardess has a typewriter I might borrow.

  Two of the older passengers have laid out their deck chairs with the cobalt & white striped pads. They are bundling down with blankets and snuggling up to the sea.

  One passenger (the port manager from Copenhagen) fell asleep in his deck chair while reading. He lay peacefully for about an hour, breathing evenly, his face turning pink from the sun. Then his wife tip-toed over and covered him up to his chin with a heavy red blanket. She did it with such a tender loving gesture, but he awoke at once.

  Finished Kierkegaard’s “Diary of a Seducer.” It should be required reading for all girls before they reach their eighteenth year. If I have a daughter, which seems unlikely now, I will make her read every sentence and memorize the ending.

  Sleeping and dredging up dreams. After a lunch of salmon, spiced herring, herring in wine, smoked eel with jellied eggs, sardines in oil accompanied by “snaps” (a liqueur with a licorice taste that makes your stomach come alive and burns your tongue) and Carlsberg beer, followed by salami, liver paste, meatballs, and a salad sort of thing creamy with corn & peas, followed by hot potato salad & frankfurter followed by cheese & crackers followed by (I had thrown in the towel long before now) tea & coffee.

  Remind me after dinner to do a sketch of W.s, 38 the restaurant people, at table. Maybe then I will have something more to add.

  The gong! My God. Time to eat again! This hasn’t even digested yet.

  “Danish is a hard language,” explained Esther, “because we eat half our words.” She sold yard goods in Akron, Ohio. Now she goes home to Copenhagen to sell yard goods. This is an interesting woman. She has been beautiful and loved. Yet she wears no ring. She has the middle-age grace of Bergman and Signoret. What is the story here? I can get it, but I must be careful and proceed slowly.

  The Walshes, from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is working on his math doctorate and will study a year in Germany under his math professor. They have been married two years. He is the typical lean and hungry student with myopia, and holes in the elbows of his sweater. We four, Esther, I & the Walshes, sat around after dinner in the lounge & drank coffee (how bitter Danish coffee is) and Cherry Heering39 (after I found out that 1.15 per glass meant only 15¢ of my money). But Esther warned not to go overboard on this attitude.

  “My God! Is that all? I think I’ll have some more.”

  Mrs. W. did not come to dinner. I think she is sick. I get embarrassed when she bills and coos at the table. “Oh! I just love this Danish food! Oh, aren’t you Danes wonderful! Y’know, this is just like Fielding’s said it would be!” Mr. W. talks fast and in his throat and is real nice to everybody and kept eating his venison while the whole table was waiting to skål with Esther’s wine. The only time you must drain your glass is when you drink to the King.

  Tomorrow I must write. I think the best place is on deck—if it’s not too cold. Oh, this is a marvelous tonic. What idiot would take a plane when this way you can acclimate yourself slowly and not be thrown into anything?

  Now the whole ship is breathing. It is getting rougher.

  OCTOBER 8

  Mal de mer from dawn to dusk. But they say you can get used to it. In a soft pensive mood. I have read five hours. Till the rims of my eyes ache. May tomorrow be calmer.

  That big bowl of fruit saved my life.

  OCTOBER 9

  There was a young boy on the lower deck. I could only see him from the top. He was sitting on
the deck, drinking a mug of coffee. His skin was pink and unlined. He must have been all of seventeen. But his arms writhed with snakes and naked belly dancers and flags and names of girls and places. Yes, he is young, but he has already made his commitment to the sea.

  Tonight I buckle down and borrow the Walshes’ typewriter. My weakness is the ear for our American idiom. I am always so busy correcting people’s English that I do not listen to the natural music.

  Captain C., now I understand you. The reason I stopped loving you was because I dragged you off your ship and into my world of newspapers and traffic and motels. If only you were master of this ship. What a love affair we would be having. Still remember that night while the SS Gloria Dunaif was docked at Everglades.40 We stood outside on this same deck and looked at the lights from other ships and from the storage docks & power plants. The sky was black and I worshiped romance and wanted you to kiss me. And you did and it was perfect. I shouldn’t have come to New Orleans that third time. It was all wrong. We ate too much and you told me too much about yourself and you became just another man. And then you mispronounced “taciturn,” making the c hard (just as Esther pronounced “muscle” [“muskel”] at tea today) and it was over. We never should have left the ship. And now you are in Michigan, sitting it out, waiting for another ship. And I am where you belong and suddenly only the good memories are revived.

  “Wednesday was a bad day for Captain C. of the SS Gloria Dunaif.” Another good story right there. What I need to do is just start—and not mind the ending. Do as Pursewarden says.41 This may all resolve itself to a noble end. I am, so to speak, still in the note-taking stage. This story, we’ll call it “Captain Courage” or some such, will bring out the sad thesis of people’s lives never touching at the right time. The beginning THE WAY IT REALLY HAPPENED will prophesy the end. This could be done well. I must develop an inner ear for what must be written at the right time. “Be Sure and Look Up Ben” was definitely a story to be written in a New York hotel room while the horns still honked and the humiliation was still fresh. If I can only recapture the formal wordiness of Captain C.’s letters. Tonight.

  We are to see Newfoundland at eight tomorrow. I am becoming accustomed to the constant rock and shift. It stands to reason that if we are 90 percent water, our bodies should be very much affected by the tides. The trouble with my writing—I am impatient and not willing to wait for the right word.

  By eight o’clock, the morning of July 6 in Fort Lauderdale promised to be unbearable. In the bureau office of the Star, Keith Landridge swirled about in his chair and began typing out the assignment sheet. He knew that most of the stories stacked on the spindle that afternoon would have to be done as vicariously as possible. Reporters became very attached to their telephones since the bureau had gotten air conditioning, he reflected wryly.

  He pecked out the usuals first, habitually, without having to think.

  CITY HALL—REDFERN

  POLICE COURT—HANGER

  COMMISSION MEETING—SMITH

  PORT AUTHORITY—GRAY

  No, Gray was on vacation, he’d have to send Halcyone. Halcyone, the young problem, headache of the bureau, fresh from journalism school, full of delusions of Hemingway, blond and naive. Oh God, deliver one, muttered Landridge, and pecked out HALCYONE42 next to PORT AUTHORITY. Well, we’ll try her. Do her good to get buried in with those dullards one afternoon a week till Gray got back. When she started trying to verbally decorate subjects like cargo and tonnage and ILA43 grievances, she’d lose her illusions fast.44

  Each sentence is torture. I stood up wretched and answered the gong for tea. Esther was there and we were unimpeded by the loud W.s, who simply spoil all real communication by talking so much. I could sense that she was exactly tuned in to my mood and she started off advising me not to take it so hard. She said that once a person begins traveling and seeing the world, they can never never stay home again. The people there don’t understand and they “listen to your talk only with a quarter of an ear. They do not care. But the way you feel tonight is good, because then you are more sensitive to the impressions around you.”

  OCTOBER 13

  Jonah has emerged from the whale three days after the onslaught of a severe North Atlantic storm said to be characteristic of the months of October and November. The ship is a small one, 330 feet, forty thousand tons (not counting cargo), crew of only thirty-six. It rocked and racked and shuddered and reeled. The waves yesterday came up over the captain’s cabin. The W.s have not been out of their room since Wednesday, and when I saw her peering out the door tonight, she was the color of asparagus soup and he had a three-day stubble. Their room reeked of oranges, said to be the worst thing you can possibly eat during an attack of mal de mer. I found fruit, such as plums and grapes, and a simple roast beef sandwich and tea to stay down quite well. But I, too, entertained black thoughts about Danish food during my onslaught. The crew has developed a special storm walk. They look like characters out of a trick movie walking lopsidedly along, their bodies turned to a 45-degree angle. Tonight one of the mess-men spent ten minutes washing out my wastebasket and there was much teasing and carrying on in Danish.

  I don’t know whether to continue my story of Esther or get the W.s down first in a sketch of all-American ludicrousness (ludicry?). Ah well, it will be a long night and I am certainly not going to sleep. Let me mention just that we are off the coast of Greenland, will pass the northernmost tip of Scotland on Monday, stop eight hours in Oslo Tuesday, and twenty-three hours later arrive in Copenhagen.

  Ah yes, the W.s.

  Mr. and Mrs. Joe W. run a restaurant in New Jersey. Here is what they brought, besides their wardrobes, haunted by wash ’n’ wear labels:

  a case of American beer

  4 bottles of Champale, 1 bottle of Scotch, 1 bottle of bourbon

  1 box of Nabisco bacon thins, 1 large bag of potato chips

  tinfoil packages of Sanka and Woolite—the Sanka he would

  happily shake into his cup, add hot water, and murmur gaily,

  “All the comforts of home, eh, dear?”

  a box, a box, of magazines, consisting of:

  four issues of Holiday, with of course the issue on Scandinavia

  Around the World by Freighter, by Norman Ford

  Freighter Days, by Norman Ford

  Europe on $5 a Day, by Arthur Frommer

  1961 edition of Fielding’s Selective Shopping Guide to Europe

  How to Get Along in French, Berlitz

  How to Get Along in Spanish, Berlitz

  How to Get Along in German, Berlitz

  6 Reader’s Digests

  a novel by Isak Dinesen

  the Either part of Either/Or by Kierkegaard

  the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen

  These last three as a sort of “cultural preparation” for when they land in Copenhagen, Joe explains, his apple cheeks lighting up like Christmas lights at his own ingenuity. The Kierkegaard fellow, Joe added, was certainly kind of unclear about things, but he got Esther to teach him to say “Suuren Keer-gart” and went around happily mumbling the Danish philosopher’s name for days.

  Fielding’s Europe, 1959 (a friend had annotated it for them)

  a Scrabble board, with blocks

  2 decks of cards

  2 large bottles of Dramamine

  plus 2 huge empty spiral notebooks—for the W.s’ immemorial logs

  At table, they consider it their bounden duty to show the Danish that America is a friendly country. Who is to say why the Captain was flinching at Irene W.’s shrill giggle as she said, “Oh you Danes! How can you eat so much and not get fat.” Now the Danes, Esther tells me, eat their lunch, their koldbord, this way. They select one thing at a time, say like a sardine, put it on a piece of buttered bread, cut it with their knife and fork, and eat it. Then they butter another piece of bread, look around the table and decide what to make their next open-face sandwich out of.

  “But this Mr. W.,” Esther said. “He is fore
ver passing things.”

  I could see him perfectly, even though I skipped lunch most days.

  Poor Esther and the old couple would just be nibbling their first open-face, when rosy-cheeked Joe would start passing platters.

  “Woncha have some fish, my this looks good, have some fish. Captain think it’s gonna be rough today? Oh, there’ll be a lot of seasickness tomorrow! A storm’s comin’—have some salmon. Esther? Boy is this good. You Danes really put it away, dontcha. Ha.”

  For some reason known to God and his strange selective methods alone, the W.s were the only two Americans who didn’t get seasick. Oh, ho! They were up at dawn to drink their Champale and eat their bacon thins and read Mr. Fielding and watch the storm. They never missed a meal. Mrs. W.’s shrill laughter, as she stumbled down the hall—“Oh, Joe! Isn’t this fun!”—reached all the cabins where the near-dying lay. And this hardy pair again considered it their American duty to go around knocking on all doors, charging in, and “cheering the sick.” The formula was the same for all passengers. First the knock; then the door bursts wide open and flame-haired Irene grins a hideous witch-grin.

  “Whatsa matter with you, honey! Under covers? On an exciting trip like this? You’re missing all the local color.” (Ah yes, local color, that was her forte.)

  And then hubby’s cheery cheeks appear in the background.

  “Miteaswellcomeonangetupandhavadrink,” he booms. “Capnsaysthisisgonnalasteightmoredays.” Not noticing you are swallowing hard now, like a person on the verge of throwing up.

  Mariner Joe W. then proceeds to regale you with tales about how good the lunch was until you see the sardines, eyes open wide, floating in oil; the flat pink slabs of bologna; the goo of the liver paste; the hard, scaly exterior of the smoked eel; the thick mayonnaise base of the cold salad.

  “Let us know if we can do anything for you” chime the friendly W.s as you stumble to the bathroom . . . again.