by Gail Godwin
Inertia impedes. The Kim novel. How long will it take? I feel pressed in. October 1, the Spanish girl comes.207 What guilt, what perversity makes me offer to do the antithesis of what I want? I shall be miserable.
SEPTEMBER 17
There is no way out of it. She comes October 1. If I can’t stand it, I will go to a hotel. James will lend me the money. Tonight we walked till I was ready to drop. He took a taxi back to the flat. He loves me. I must not be a bitch. He had a story rejected by Cosmopolitan.
SEPTEMBER 19
After dinner, Casa Neurotica householders played charades. I will not forget (a) Mrs. West with her paper wig doling out “Justice Walk”;208 (b) Michel laughing so hard about his successful rendition of Winston Churchill (after clanging tongs against the brass fire grate failed to elicit the proper response—“church”—he put his feet on the table, puffed out his cheeks, and made the V sign). It was interesting to see how praise affects him. He warmed to the game immediately, suggesting we introduce it to all forthcoming guests at 21, “now that we are experts.”
Andrew is very artistically inclined. For someone who says “Of all the characters in literature, I would most like to be Swann,” he does all right. Too bad I can’t remember everything he says. Tonight, re Susan: “I am just discovering how miserable it feels when you know you have hurt someone.” He and Michel are always at it. Yet I am sure when Michel goes back to France it will be Andrew more than any of us who will feel the loss.
Returns from the subconscious are beginning to come in the Kim project.
Always after, the whiff of a sweaty tennis shoe, a chlorinated pool, a tube of a certain brand of lipstick elicited in me a distinct feeling of uneasiness. I was again dressing for a gym period (Kim was much better at athletics than I and I always dreaded gym); back at the country club the horrible day of betrayal; standing at the bus stop watching Kim expertly outline her lips . . . The thing to do is to finish the first chapter with Mother Hardee, 209 then just write, start anywhere. Have a little summing-up first. Get the reader sufficiently interested so that he will want to know every detail about Kim.
Some people like Kim are so very definitely themselves; others, like me, write about them.
Framework: that year, eighth grade, interspersed with reassessments.
While it’s true we gradually become disenchanted—the child’s images linger on in the adult mind . . . certain images formed as a child linger on in our adult minds—we are all bound to our pasts.
SEPTEMBER 21
I am falling into a very bad habit of going to bed after dinner; but there is nowhere else to go. I just realized: when the Spanish girl comes I will have no place on earth I can go to be alone. I won’t be able to write at all.
I am in the Wests’ black book—
Everything I say is wrong—
Michel laughs—
The weekend looms—
James is silent.
SEPTEMBER 23
Brisk wintery weekend. I went waterskiing for the last time this season. The water was icy. Saturday, Kokoschka at the Tate, 210 came back in the late afternoon and called James (he said he was going to call me later anyway) . . . We went out to eat (I had already eaten) and then did tape recordings in his flat. He told me a story about a little sea serpent. It was just the kind of story a child would love.
SEPTEMBER 24
Walked the streets for USTS today. Mr. Briggs may play the fool but his mind is in the right place. Had a long talk with Andrew. It is good sometimes to have other people’s views.
SEPTEMBER 26
Wrote out in detail—the anatomy of a habit: James. Was finishing my cold process of mental dissection when he called the office and asked me did I want to go to Cornwall. Resolutions went out the window. I bumbled around and accepted. Stella is fabulous. She is a devil in her own way. It is good to have a girl to talk with about everything.
It will be fun riding down on the train to Cornwall Friday night. Tomorrow I must pack underclothes, slacks, heavy shoes, raincoat.
Things to remember: Bob Briggs cussing the cab driver. (During the last week we have worked together so well. Everyone says we are so alike, which isn’t a compliment for either of us. But we can talk freely and be buffoons.)
Yesterday afternoon: the fall sunshine, Hill Street, and someone walking like James. I turned the corner sharply and headed on to Berkeley Square. I had decided to be strong and give him up. I went into a bookshop and concentrated on titles, hearing a street-accordion man play “Waltzing Matilda.” I felt pangs of endings, loneliness, poignancy, separation, and was incredibly restless. It was as if I caught a glimpse of life passing me by.
Am continuing on “Kim.” It is only that I hit a stale point earlier than in “Gull Key.” It was discouraging but now I’m okay.
SEPTEMBER 27
The pub regulars teeter down Old Church Street at 12: 30 a.m. This is the first time I have been sufficiently awake to hear what they say. Usually their voices have a hollow, dreamlike quality and no matter how I try, I cannot retain the message. James stopped by to pick up my bag. Eugenio is back and I am glad. He is thinner, has a French haircut, and is still the little gentleman. Stella, Eugenio, Andrew, Numela, 211 James, and I sitting in Nannie’s kitchen.212 James is smooth with them all, a slightly amused look on his face. He is always tender with me in public.
SEPTEMBER 30
The weekend in Cornwall was, from a purely personal and imaginative viewpoint, perfect. I will describe it more accurately tomorrow because much of it is good grist for the mill. I think I know two things now: (1) I am in love with J.; (2) it would never possibly work out.
So many nuances of feeling here; so many reinforced impressions.
God, these next two weeks. The Spanish girl coming to share my room.
Part seven
PERSONAL POLITICS
Old Church Street to Green Street, London,
with a Trip to Asheville, North Carolina
OCTOBER 1–DECEMBER 26, 1962
“Why do relationships fall short of the ideal?”
This riddle engaged Godwin as a writer in her mid-twenties. The answer, she discovered, has to do with the pervasive spirit of the times as much as with the complexities of the characters involved.
Enmeshed in her own place and time, Gail had personal riddles to solve as well as sociological ones. She had to figure out how the “Zeitgeist” had trapped and misguided her in her dealings with people. This journal part candidly chronicles Gail’s struggles and ends with the calm assessment, “I see that I haven’t progressed as far as I thought.”
Featured are three romantic interests: B., the Asheville beau, who offered physical passion, material security, and separate existences; James, the British companion, who lacked passion; and Peter W., the intellectual poseur, who put Gail on the defensive with his D. H. Lawrence manifestoes. You could not have a better threesome to represent 1960s turmoil regarding male-female relations.
Nineteen sixty-two had been the year that Helen Gurley Brown hit the best-seller list with Sex and the Single Girl. Popular culture was catching up with intellectuals’ breakdown of gender barriers. The time and place to which many were connected rested on shifting sands.
Gail Godwin was the product of three contending traditions: the modern intellectual tradition, in which she was thoroughly immersed; an upbringing in a three-woman household; and the 1950s South. When Gail wonders if B. will rescue her, when she yearns for a mysterious man who will worship her, and when she contemplates her thoughts about her friend Lorraine’s co fee-colored skin, she is responding to aches conditioned by her foundation culture.
The problem is, the spirit of the times cannot easily be distinguished from intimate aspects of one’s self.
OCTOBER 1, 1962
LONDON
Notebook number 7 in one year. Much must be sorted out. The only thing is to keep pressing on. Letter from B. today. He put a PS: “I say—a masterful letter.” And was perfectly c
orrect in this assumption. The letter began without a date or salutation, discussing the marriage difficulties of a couple at home.
About R. he says: “I like her. She’s college grad, very attractive— rich—intelligent—even though addicted to tranquils—patent medicines— and ‘high strung.’213 I just can’t understand where she got the vain notion that ‘I do’ meant I quit—you take over & entertain me for the next years. She’s the proud cultivator of that women-invented VD emotionalism . . .
“. . . most of all, give him the benefit of the doubt—have confidence—respect—knowing whatever he does or writes in a letter is not calculated to upset you emotionally and doesn’t necessarily have overtones of lack of interest. In summary, stay off his arse emotionally though not physically . . .
“. . . me, I prefer the un’s—unhurried, unmarried, unengaged, unacceptable, unproblemed . . . I only have to keep up with what I’ve got: new sofa payments, car pays, golf balls, physical stamina, and lawsuits. I prefer the simple unhurried life of a complete cynic—”
Masterful!
“. . . Maugham’s remark: Don’t be shocked, reader—your overly dramatic & nauseating search for a meaning to life has been in vain. Life has no meaning.”
Then, one’s moods are affected by one’s position: where I have been the day before, what has been said or done to me. One ought to, I suppose, keep a daily chart over a period of years, recording thereon one’s uppermost needs & desires each day. Thus, if I kept such a record for five years, I could go back and count. If there were more I-am-happy-singles than I-wish-I-were-marrieds, then I would know my best bargain for the greatest number of satisfactory days would be the unmarried state. It’s a great subject.
OCTOBER 3
I have an idea, at last, about what I want to do. It is this: I want to say things on paper that will give expression to my own discoveries and at the same time make a reader richer in perception & enjoyment or awareness of his life. I want to experiment, I want to write the first things of their kind. I do not want the almosts. I do not want a good imitation that reads smoothly but does not bear up under scrutiny. I want to profit from the writing (not so much to “enjoy life,” per se, but to put back into writing what I gain)—my own literary stock market, so to speak. It would help if I had a decent pen.
Eugenio’s mother, Mrs. Martinez-Ostos, came for dinner. She’s the kind of woman that can sit in the center of a room and have the men pressing their cigarette lighters like mad and the women, suddenly quite content with being women, wondering if they should go out and buy her brand of perfume the next day. After dinner I walked down to the Embankment and leaned over the wall and played optical games with the lights and the dark water. I created a few upside-down shimmering worlds aglow with electric-red splashes (from the Hovis clock); quivering white-hot spikes (street lamps reflected); and ghostly houses with two floors of lighted windows sailing over and against watery backgrounds (the buses).
OCTOBER 5
Weighed down with physical exhaustion. Worked on window displays all day. Mr. Miller asked me point-blank if I’d rather do what I’ve been doing these past two weeks. I said yes. He said he’d see if it could be done legally, but it would mean a raise. (!) Bought B. a golf sweater & me a black turtleneck. I sat in a hot tub and read all his old love letters. He does. When I was in the Canaries, he wrote: “I hope you get tired sometime . . .”
OCTOBER 8
Eric Glass sent MS back.
OCTOBER 12
NEWARK AIR TERMINAL, COLUMBUS DAY, 1962
First impression from the air was the incredible number of cars. Shiny blocks of color in mammoth parking lots, or spinning up and down wide-lane concrete highways. The customs official was a young Negro who asked my address, my proposed length of stay in the U.S.A. (the immigration official had said “Welcome home”), and what gifts I had brought. I said only toys & he asked if I would list the value, which I did at $5. He discreetly fingered through my stacks of clothes and then said, “Okay, go on through.” The first thing I did was to buy a large Coke with ice in it (20¢); the second was to buy a New York Herald Tribune in which the major story was that President Kennedy had just approved a postal raise. Stamps will now be 5¢. And then to the bookstore, where I saw all the best sellers I was unable to buy in England. Philip Roth’s Letting Go, 214 The JFK Coloring Book, and even one called The John Birch Society Coloring Book.
I noticed that I was reluctant to speak up in the midst of this cacophony of Americanese. But, then, wasn’t that always the case? And a little apprehension about seeing people I haven’t seen in a year. I have been moving in an outward course. They have been going on with the same lives. Or was that a fair statement?
My chief fear is that, upon arriving home and experiencing the novelty of bright faces, just because I have chosen to be among them, will I then become restless and nervous to be “moving on”? I have already decided after being in New York two hours that I must be submerged in competition—even though it is grueling.
In forty minutes they will call my flight. The last lap of the journey. A strange sense of mastering time. Arriving in New York, it seemed perfectly natural that it was just sunset when in England it would be 11: 00 p.m. One big impression when helicoptering over Manhattan, from Idlewild to Newark: It is really a very small island. After the sprawling, endlessly joined cities within the city of London, this is a breeze.
I don’t think people who see New York from an altitude for the first time will be half as frightened as those deposited at a dark wharf or in between hulking skyscrapers at midday. New York is a must: if only to prove that one isn’t afraid. The heat is about 10 degrees more than expected. I am roasting in my dear old Jaeger tweed suit. There is an Ivy league–looking type stealing glances over my shoulder as I write. The Newark terminal is crowded. Didn’t succumb to the fresh original Lady Manhattan blouses ($13) in a store. God, people are nosey. Water fountains! That’s another asset. Will B. be the same? By that I mean, Will he have grown with me so that he seems the same? At any rate, it should be an interesting experience and certainly one badly needed. The thing is not to let them know if I find I can’t go home again.
OCTOBER 17
Okay, get it all down while it’s all fresh and hot. It will be a long wet London winter. There will be time to hash & rehash the meanings of words, nuances, little actions. I’ve done all the things I set out to do, nagged only by little prickly guilts that I ought to be in more places.
There were the tasteless lunches in GV & BP215 with Kathleen (I look out at my requested view and instead see London); I bought shoes that fit at Edwin Burge, drip-dry blouses. Started on a campaign to rid myself of corns. Waited for—and hated—B. He came at 4: 30 instead of 12: 00 (court case) and we went to Hendersonville, me shooting barbs all the way. But I finally looked out at the Indian colors, the haystacks, the mountains, and thought how silly and pulled out my knives. The dinner at the Little Chef was good. B. drinks Sanka with his meal instead of wine, but B. is a Southerner, U.S.A., not an Italian, Frenchman, or educated Englishman. Somehow he finally started talking. With B., I hang on hungrily, waiting for him to say something personal. It was the Navy first, but that’s what shaped him. (“Before those eighteen months I had no identity.”) It was things like “Goddammit, did you think you could get away without putting croutons in my soup?” and “Goddammit, you mean to say you let us leave the port of Norfolk without filling up the Kotex machine!”
That made B. the man he is today.216 He cried, he clenched his fists, he got off the ship in Oran & bought a box of multicolored Kotex, but he survived and came back with the embryo of his philosophy. And, something I could not understand before, he is a good lawyer & happy in his work. His golf is his creative outlet. Christ, do I want everyone I know to yearn for publication?
But tonight we came as close as we ever will and I ought to busy myself on lonely Sundays during the next few years asking myself if that was close enough. He drove to all the high places,
the places that construct my dream image of Asheville. Beaucatcher Mountain. Sunset Drive. Grove Park Inn. He talked of houses. We saw the lights & felt the same things about the lights. Later, waiting for a traffic light at the end of Charlotte Street, he said, “We’ll have a den and a studio in the second house and you can come home and write.” He put a firm hand on my knee and I was speechless. Then he quickly went on to another topic. All the other was expected.
The first day, a Saturday, he called (I was at Monie’s) and just said, Mmm-mmm. He came later to Happy Valley217 and when I walked into the room the sparks flew.
OCTOBER 21
Both weekends are gone & I have spent them with the wrong people. Called B. & had tearful hysterics over the phone; he said that nothing was that pressing. That was the best advice he could give me but I wouldn’t listen.
Go back to London, live each day, work quietly & intelligently—MAKE A CHANGE.
Write at night; keep sending MSS out.
Remember that if I do my share, then it’s still up to chance & can’t be changed. I’m going to get older & will either win, lose, or get rained out.
OCTOBER 23
—Two more days. Lorraine called from Boston but I wasn’t in. Last night I went to B.’s while he was at Reserve & cataloged all the contents of his apartment. He came in wearing that devastating navy uniform & we talked of Kennedy’s tough move.218 He said, “You never cease to amaze me.”
Lunch with Mother at Grove Park Inn. Think the reason I love this town the way I do is because I learned to appreciate it from a purely objective viewpoint after I no longer lived here. Once that was done, then, appreciating it, I was eager to reinstate myself as a native-born soul.
It is hard to describe it because when I am looking at it I am seeing not only its physical beauty but also reexperiencing the hundreds of other thoughts & attitudes once entertained while looking at this same scene a hundred other times. I would like to live here someday and I would like to live here with him, but so many crosscurrents make things either very simple or completely impossible. I would like to live with him on that mountain, but not now. It would be sudden death. I am not above-it-all enough to freely take action, write, live my own life as well as his. Not yet. From all outward signs, he is safe as can be from the snakelike clutches of local femme fatales. But accidents will happen. There might be a lonely night or a good meal or a careless tumble. He lives to eat. Well, I’ll speak to him before I leave. Let him know my feelings & then smolder over them these next long winter nights. James & the wet, green summer, the trips to Somerset & Cornwall are more a part of another world than I ever realized. That, however, is a good world, and I will go back to it happily—at least for the present. There are good times with James & he & I have an affinity no other couple can match. I know James & James knows me. A pity about all those cold baths at Haileybury.219 There will be more trips this winter & maybe James & I will go away for Christmas.