by Gail Godwin
NOVEMBER 18
Sunday—it gets easier and pleasanter to be alone. Edwards did the floors. The place looks decent, but I mustn’t go overboard. If I got it finished perfectly, then it would trap me. If B. has meant it all this time, then I won’t be in England after April or May. I was sitting at my desk this afternoon and it came in a flash of intuition that he has known all this time.234 Little snatches of memory fell into place (or did I FORCE them into an ill-fitting symmetry?). The phone call that morning when I was working in Blowing Rock: “I looked in the Sunday paper and saw a picture that looked like you and thought you were getting married again. You’re not getting married again, are you?” And: “There’s nothing negative about this relationship.” Only I know I made a huge mistake spending my one free weekend in Asheville with L. That is the last time I will ever allow pity to overrule good judgment. B: “Don’t ever think I don’t have feelings. Just because they don’t show doesn’t mean they’re not there.” And: “We’ll have a den and a study and you can come home and write.”
But: can B. make my life in Asheville? For I would NOT be a Junior Leaguer, country clubber, etc. I would have only the relationship with B. and my own amusements.
He once said, “I’d give up my freedom if I were in danger of losing you.”
Soon it will be time to write. There is absolutely no excuse not to now. I love the subways underneath my floor. It’s the Oxford Circus, Bond Street, Marble Arch run—the Central Line. Thursday, Thanksgiving. I shall (1) paint this desk, do other things to be done, (2) buy scatter cushions, (3) get gold, purple madras & white braid for sofa cover, (4) buy an adapter, (5) buy a low table for other room—very cheap—get a BASKET.
I am going to stop worrying about money. The only thing I owe to anyone is $200 to the U.S. government.
NOVEMBER 20
TUESDAY
Each morning I start off so full of zest and beginnings. Walked through Rupert Street at noon, wide-eyed at the vendors’ stalls, thinking, What marvelous eating if one had the desire. I hope I can cook for James this winter. He will be a good weekend companion if nothing else. As of tonight, Peter W. goes off the list. It was a bad gamble, there is nothing I can do about it—and keep my dignity—so better forget. Came dangerously near exploding in Doreen’s presence over a silly remark I was supposed to have said to a customer. For survival in that job, I must put down these remembrance points: (1) it’s a cushy job, (2) without which I would not have a penny in the world, (3) I must do my best at it—at least appear to, (4) I must be pleasant, but quit talking to everybody. Too much boredom leads to exchanging confidences. Better not to. This I must do, or all else fails.
Finished Women in Love. If nothing else, PW gave me that. It was my need to read something he had read, to connect myself with him through a common object. Big Ben is chiming over my transistor, 235 the train is running underneath. China is pushing into India.236 I feel smothered by space in this flat. I think now I shall shut off the other room. I am in a state of dangerous calm about B.’s reaction to my letter, which he should receive tomorrow or Friday, since Thanksgiving is a holiday. Will he save me? If he doesn’t, there must be a complete break—I hate to think of the life without him always there in writing distance. But if I feel this way & he has any real relation to me, he will want to do it too. AM I RUNNING AWAY AGAIN? Was the English winter a factor? Peter W.’s flagrant evil rejection after his commitment? Pat Farmer’s influence?237 The desire to “nest” whetted by the furnishing of this flat? Now is the time to be brutally honest. And what of the writing? That gnaws. What is the answer? I think, first, to get past caring about people’s reaction to my writing, but to satisfy myself . . .
NOVEMBER 21
WEDNESDAY
Tomorrow is a holiday. Painted a desk (so-so). When will I learn? You can’t break the rules until you’re a pro.238 Mr. Smith, the servants’ chef at Buckingham Palace, re the efficiency survey: Some bloke was taking Queen Victoria her bottle of Scotch until twenty-five years after she was dead.
Reading Lawrence’s biography by Harry Moore.239 That remark PW made on the last night. “Do you think it helps to live in one place all your life and write about that place?” I think, instead of being a detriment, it is very definitely an asset. Your vision becomes sharper because the distractions are fewer—or is that true?
I sat in that office again, it began to grow dark, the ceiling lights got redder and redder in the bank across the street. I wondered what in hell Peter W. was up to, until I finally decided that any rebuff, any ridicule, any loss of dignity would be better than this maddening ignorance. So I wrote him a note, typewritten, unsigned, which said: “Not that I don’t mind the other implications, but to start someone on DHL and then disappear at question time is inexcusable. Or was the Givenchy too rich for your blood?” That last to injure his male pride. Mysteries madden me. He is probably a sickening little overeducated boy. I didn’t like his narrow ankles or the green socks or the same suit every time I saw him. I thought he was much too serious about everything. I didn’t really like his looks. What I do like is the fact that I can’t look him in the eye for very long without gravitating toward him in spite of a definite revulsion. At least, action, for me, is better than suspense. If I don’t hear from him NOW, I’ll know he found me loathsome or “clever” (“I hate clever women”). But I’ve got to get him down to human proportions.
After my “renovations” tomorrow, I am doing nothing but (1) writing, (2) eating, (3) sleeping, (4) saving money.
This is a dark period. If I can’t concentrate on any one thing, I will have to write snatches—to practice. I must learn to get real people (who are always unbelievable) down on paper.
NOVEMBER 23
FRIDAY
Thanksgiving was pleasant—pale sun and not too cold. Spent money, made curtains, & saw Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, 240 which I didn’t understand completely. But he stripped a subject down to its rare nakedness. Sometimes I think ambiguity is a virtue. People insist upon reading their own meaning into things anyway.
This journal has no earthly use or interest to anyone but Number One. I remember looking through James’s night book, where he had recorded ideas and epigrams at random. Most of them just missed the boat. I could understand how he’d felt so clever at the time of coining them.
Walking home tonight I asked myself, Could it possibly get any worse? I think one must find out his capacity for solitude. I am always adamant about being alone when I know I am in a house with other people. And it’s another thing to be alone in a town where you have friends, commitments, where you only have to pick up a telephone. But I’d like to see old recluse B. living alone in London with no Asheville Country Club set, no small coterie of social elite to tide him over. Music, he says, and golf, and good hard work are the panaceas. One or all of them is/are effective. What are some more? Good creative activity. Try to forge something shapely and valuable from this experience. Wondering (on this same walk home, instead of shrinking from the rain, I finally stuck my face into it and let it come at me) what attitude one could take regarding these purgatory periods. I decided that this, more than anything, shows one’s progress along the road. One must first stop dividing time into units, whether one is having a “good period” or a “bad period.” It does not help to say “This has gone on for three weeks, will it last another?” or “In two weeks, I’ll be doing such & such” or “This time two weeks ago, I was doing such & such . . .”
Then one must gather around oneself all available resources: namely whatever work is at hand, however menial, whatever experiences are open to one, however limited. Then one must function & partake, function & partake, without hoping for more, without regretting the times there had been more, simply keeping the machine in running condition, leaving oneself spread out not expectantly but availably for any unforeseen “extra” which might come along, thus breaking the chain of bad luck—for the time being.
I know how I must write now—it only remain
s to start somewhere and keep at it until I regain the lost confidence.
Peter W. was a good lesson. Something to remember: When you detect the spark, don’t treat it carelessly. If I had been more human at that time (October 10–11), I might have kept a valuable friend and who knows what else? But the habit of James was too strong. And yet I can’t think PW will never make a reappearance—could I be that boring?
NOVEMBER 25
SUNDAY
Do I have the courage to write? I do everything to put it off. I am afraid to get close to it—afraid of what I might say. This weekend: Preparing for a two-day abyss of loneliness, I stocked up on wine, groceries, made lists of chores to be done. I walked miles, went to the Tate, roamed through the huddles of lost causes in Hyde Park.241 But I never got free; I was always thinking: I am doing something; look, I am spending my day; I am gathering impressions; I am not wasting my time.
At the Tate, he had something but I was not sure what.242 A kind of elemental form, color stacked against color. But how sick I am of these thin-lipped esthetes with their ragged hair who glibly shoot out statements like “Those colors, rather Braque-ish, don’t you think.” These people used to frighten me in America. Now that I see them pouring out from the source, I would not bother to answer them—unless, perhaps, just to say cooly, abstractedly: “I don’t like to talk about art.” In Hyde Park there were various outcasts on platforms & stepladders; as soon as one mounted, a curious crowd gathered. Refreshments were being sold, & I think most people simply come to snicker.
This week will be rugged, wet & physically demoralizing—calling on agents.243 I saw D.’s little list for Monday’s meeting—she is going to give each of us a little project. The humiliation of having someone I consider an inferior in every way bossing me. Last night I dreamed consecutive terrors—Beverly Paulson reappeared (she is like D.) to tell me not to use the good pillowcases. I said, “Oh, I won’t,” knowing I had one on the bed at that moment. “But you have one on the bed now,” she said chidingly, triumphantly. Then I dreamed I had TB and had to be sent away for a year—then Franchelle lied & said we had a school holiday & I got terribly behind in my work.
Oh, I crave the plan for a book in which I can exorcise all these people. The trouble with anything faintly autobiographical is that it is so unreal. I have moved in so many groups of people, gone to so many places, that it is impossible to regionalize. Even in the relationship (basic) between boy & girl, I find I start leaving things out because they are preposterous & do not pertain to my story and then the whole story ravels away to nothing.
Even during my “active” weekend, I searched for my mad rusty-haired little journalist. I have spent so much time building my image of him, he could not possibly live up to it. He is another Rupert Birkin (who was Lawrence’s idealized version of himself!). He is the strange, silent boy in the raincoat walking down Fleet Street with some highly unreadable paperback under his arm; he has a sullen, bright Swedish mistress waiting for him in his flat, where she whiles away his absences by making copper enamel ashtrays. He never utters a foolish statement. He has a partly finished manuscript on his desk and at this he works lovingly, sparingly, in the nighttime to a background of Mahler, Berlioz, Stravinsky, Bartók, and perhaps Beethoven when he needs soothing. I have thought of every reason why nothing came after that night. I suppose the most logical but hardest to face is that he saw nothing else he wanted. “You’re uncertain of yourself, aren’t you?” he forced me to admit.
“And you?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Are you saying that because you mean it or because you know I would hate you if you said anything else?”
He thought a minute and said: “Because I mean it.”
A woman sat down at my table in the Tate restaurant and smiled at me, helping herself to a sugar cube. I got up and left. It is not the companionship of a woman, nor of smart, attractive people. I want one man who is a mystery to me, who will worship me and give some direction to my life. But, what is there to worship? I suppose James is back now. He may call this week and we will have dinner and talk the old merry-go-round things into the ground. Then I won’t see him for two more weeks. B.’s positiveness cancels James out. What did I love about him? Or was it just the shock of my first educated Englishman with his feminine-tinged thought processes? I think we loved each other because it vaunted our own egos—yet it was never as good even toward the end of the summer. I don’t want to talk about his things anymore. I want something bigger. Something that will trail off in wonder and detour to sex.
What really fabulous men have I known in the last five years? How many times have I been submerged?
S. Burman and Bill Hamilton—Chapel Hill
Paul Trinchieri—Miami
AF—Pompano
B.—Asheville
Niels—Copenhagen
Antonio—Las Palmas
James—London
Will there be a next, or will it stop with B.? Are there to be no affairs?
When there is no one to talk to and nothing to expect, one must either bury oneself in a creative fury, have a good book, do something.
A passage from Aïda—B. sitting through the performance in the Blowing Rock Theater—those long dusky summer evenings, B. putt-putting around the curve in the old Ford convertible, slouching over the banister, unseen by me in my waitress uniform, talking tripe with the other girls. Blowing Rock was a specially good segment. The air was so fresh, it took your breath away, the work was purely physical & exhausting. The nights driving by myself in the Falcon, listening that time to Rachmaninoff ’s Third, knowing that the power was turned on, that I was about to have great adventures. And they have been good, at that. The freighter to Oslo & Copenhagen. The motor trip to Berlin. The bus trip from Copenhagen down through Germany, Colmar, Nîmes (“God, you go to the most unheard-of places”) & on over the Pyrenees to Barcelona—Berlioz’s Fantastique, second movement. The brief hell in Málaga. The cold interiors of churches—then on to Las Palmas—the balmy night air as the taxi rattled around the curves, the taste of almond & apricot pastries, the appalling white of my legs as I took off my stockings that first night. Antonio & I made the bed together because it was late. “I can only let you have this room until tomorrow,” he said. His teeth were broken & uneven. But his eyes had that hot brown fire of a real tropical giant. “Don’t worry, I won’t put you out on the street,” he added. It was healing, unlike any other place I had been & he took good care of me. Bananas, sandy beaches; the other language; & then on to London, which I cursed and anticipated. And B., sitting across from me in the Dogwood Room at Grove Park Inn. Jotted down the entire year on a napkin. At first I saw a little story in everything. It was all new & fascinating because I could still view it from the other side, my former longing-for-adventure side. Then, one day, my way of living became the most natural thing. The boy in J.’s Greenwich Village apartment who said “God, aren’t you excited? You’re leaving for London in forty-five minutes!” seemed so overdramatic. But, fortunately or unfortunately, I had to come back to London in order to realize I was finished with it. I had to taste the sleepless fatigue after jetting into the sunrise and waiting for James at the airport for an hour. I had to return & distribute all my presents and be welcomed back to the expatriate fold. I had to see the English winter for myself. I had to have this experience of living in a foreign country by myself with no human companionship to lean on; and be forced by the sheer absence of anything else to face my own predicament. I honestly saw, sitting in the kitchen in Happy Valley, savoring every minute of that too-short vacation, that I must come back to England & finish here, finish what—I don’t know.
At times I seem to myself so incredibly narrow, so immature, so full of childish visions had at one time or another by every gray-faced intellectual under forty. I wonder, to what extent do I really care about pleasing other people? The writing, for instance. Do I want to write & try to publish “almosts” or to keep hitting for that real
transfusion from life to paper? . . . Yet something still hankers to be said. I don’t know the answers to anything—& I don’t know where emotion stops being emotion & becomes emotionalism. I do know certain things have the power to elicit passion in me over & over again. There was something in that Copenhagen winter that I want to go back to. And there was something sinister & horrible, a reckoning, in that Málaga hotel room, and again there is the haunting balmy sensuality of Las Palmas, except at the end when I reduced it to a waiting period—the awful fight in the hotel room in Tenerife, the closed in feeling, then waking up the next morning and seeing the great white Teide244 outside the window & realizing it was there the night before & knowing that it would have made a difference had I known. And then the smoky Sundays, listening to the BBC, reading novels by the fire, being puzzled by England & the Englishman. James made a period all by himself—the strange half-relationship matched the strange half-summer—wet, green, dreamy—never really warm, never really bright. The half-people at the lake. Old Church Street, the Thames. The many times I told James “I adore you” because I thought he needed to be adored. But it was good to dream together, to write in comfort, to rebel in safety.
NOVEMBER 26
As long as there is this outlet, I can survive. There are worse things than being in a room by oneself. These journals, while seemingly over-personal & dead-end, are a panacea—and may, someday, serve as references when I find a route.
Today, there occurred a situation so typically feminine that I must record it in its entirety. It involves the four of us at work.
Doreen came down at 9: 30 carrying her usual scatter-mass of notes, spiral tablet, brochures & timetables & called her meeting to order. The meeting consisted of herself, Pat & me, since BH was late. She came straight to the point. She said, “G. & I had a little talk Friday & I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I know no one likes little ‘Joe’ jobs but, quite honestly, that’s all there’s been to give anybody.” She then gave me charge of the files, adding sweetly, “It’s a big job & you’ll get credit for it.” Then she said we weren’t going to replace Pat when she left. “Also, Gail said you’d all discussed it among yourselves how irresponsible I am, and I’d like for you to tell me how I am irresponsible.” This was really a nasty jolt for so early in the morning. As Pat said later, “Here I was, on a Monday morning, feeling wonderfully businesslike, untouched & impersonal, and crash! Down comes this large dose of female pettiness. I thought for a minute I was back at the sorority house. Only there, I could refuse to attend meetings.” But we bore up pretty well & didn’t retreat very much, but told her in hot ill-devised little stammers what she’d asked for: why we thought she was irresponsible. Then Betty Hughes came in, looking pink, flustered & not too very sorry about being late. She had obviously had a very satisfying tumble in the sack with her strong-chinned Mississippi husband. It took her, under these circumstances, several minutes to recover from Doreen’s very personal inquest. She stood her ground better than any of us, having spent the entire weekend (except for those moments) discussing it with Howard. She listed, one, two, three—it was quite refreshing. P. & I have a tendency to stammer. Fortunately, this uncomfortable little discussion was interrupted by a summons from Miller for Doreen to attend a meeting upstairs.