by Gail Godwin
The two-bit radio is playing:
When people ask of me
what would you like to be
now that you’re not a kid anymore
. . . I know just what to say . . .
I want to be Bobby’s girl.
And that’s about it.
James came by bringing a Christmas gift, a Scots beret. We spent Xmas Eve Day together, inflicting our silences on each other.
The upshot of all this is that I see that I haven’t progressed as far as I thought.
Part eight
MY FATHER’S SOUL
Green Street, London
JANUARY 2–FEBRUARY 16, 1963
As this chapter in her journal opens, Gail finds herself alone in her “hermitage” on Green Street after having cleared away the traces of holiday parties. Her situation demands creative output, yet the project on which she has labored, “Gull Key,” seems wrong. She needs to decide whether to continue working on “Gull Key” or to seek a new project.
Gail Godwin has said in interviews that she lives constantly in the shadow of failure, and it seems that her interviewers have misunderstood her attitude. It is not modesty. It is combativeness. Trap Godwin in an emotional, circumstantial, or writer’s block and watch the reaction. She redoublesher ingenuity to find a way out, making sacrifices.
Gail’s most remarkable embarkation happens on February 9, after she tells herself, “I must not take second-best plots, almost-stories. All my heroes& heroines must be looking for the main root. Not, not an offshoot, a facet, but the mainspring.” The injunction comes on an auspicious day, which she marks in her journal as being the fifth anniversary of her father’s death by suicide.
She then produces a story about a college girl’s trip to a priest to reveal her anguish over the suicide of her father and the fate of his soul. Looking back on the swirl of Gail’s concerns, experiences, and e forts in early 1963, it is easier now than it had been within the moment to see that the father-story was the one that was ready for expression.
Gail’s postholiday solitude in her Green Street lodgings re-creates the circumstances of her aloneness at the University of North Carolina duringmidterm break, when she had had to digest the news of her father’s death. The vacuum, by itself, invites spirits.
JANUARY 2, 1963
No. 5 Green Street is once again a hermitage. The party glasses are washed, all my possessions are in place, & there is only the ticking of the clock, the rumble of the underground to keep me company.
I had a New Year’s Eve party & it was a fabulous success. No one went home senseless. James, drunk in a cool invisible way, sang “Beale Street Blues,”258 many verses, with a voice fashioned from the incredible will that comes with alcohol. He just got promoted to secretary of the Rank Organisation. He was complaining bitterly, but was secretly flattered. Whenever I hear the bagpipes, I’ll think of that night—for we had a real piper & the men in skirts almost outnumbered the pants.
Now I am here again, working toward that unconquerable soul B. preaches.
Ah, I have borrowed too long.259 I must get my thoughts in order.
I am rewriting “Gull Key,” salvaging a small bit of it, keeping the framework, illuminating characters & adding others.
Is Gull Key a place or a state of mind?
Reading over the other, 260 it seems so simple and shallow.
I want to hold the real flavor of Miami—a city of no return where you lose sight of values & mount the whirling dervish, the dangerous half-truth infallibility that comes over one in dark cocktail bars after too many gin & tonics. What was it that made the old ways so alluring? I can only find out as I write it.
If Beale Street could talk, if Beale Street could talk,
Married men would have to take their beds and walk,
Except one or two who never drink booze,
And the blind man on the corner singing “Beale Street Blues!”
My visual images are so strong.
JANUARY 5
A day of staying in. I began the study of logic.261 Used my good old college study habits, underlining sentences, but I couldn’t do the riddles at the end of the chapter. I mean, the reasoning problems. Reread Franny & Zooey. I found myself laughing out loud, or discovering a new meaning in some simple phrase like “wringing wet.” The man has that genius.
JANUARY 14
Last night I was lying here in the dark wondering if there was a man in my life that I truly couldn’t live without. There wasn’t. What I then felt was no sense of deprivation.
I went to a palmist yesterday. She told me exactly what had happened, but we shall see.
The electricity was off when I came home, so I turned around & went to the Baker Classic to see Jane Eyre. It had Liz Taylor as a child & Margaret O’Brien as a baby and Orson Welles as a very Edward Rochester–desirable cynic.262 I tried to analyze what it was about the character he portrayed, or, more than that, his facial expressions, that made me long for that perfect love and at the same time thank heaven that I was still free to search. What is it that I so definitely want in a man & see only at times—even if it is a character in a hackneyed, romanticized film?
Was it the peculiar glint in his eyes?
His sharp jaded wit?
What, what, what?
No, it’s not B., either. The nearest person I can think of is BH. What is it? Is it only possible in a film, in a book written by a lonely old maid? Do men like this exist only in the tortured minds of lonely women?
I am feeling so otherworldly, so afloat in possibilities. There’s something about cities at night. I think now I shall turn off the light and think . . .
JANUARY 20
. . . This weekend I spent with H., whom I met last Tuesday. Actually, I met him (he says) at the Canadian Government Tourist Office party, but I chose not to acknowledge him until last Tuesday. I have paid closer attention to this relationship, and—more important—its beginning stages, than ever before. I am trying to find out when the music stops. Yet, it may be too late for such clinical procedures, for this is the first relationship I have had with anybody who I considered had just as much right to live as I did.
In the past, there has been a time when the person’s resources were exhausted and anything further I gave was given out of pity, habit, or just plain old loneliness.
Ever since that first evening at Royal Festival Hall, I have been looking for a flaw that will allow me to discount him. I do not have far to look if it is a simple flaw I seek. He has several of the type I have never allowed before. He has a nervous tic, which is apparent to everyone. (But I have found, by a hidden watchfulness, that when he is in his own element, explaining something to me, listening to the second movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, eating a steak, showing physical affection, this nervous flaw subsides.) He is going bald. He is losing his beautiful reddish curly hair, it will be gone within five years. I think how he must have looked as his school’s number-one sprinter, red hair streaming in the wind like Mercury. Speaking of Mercury, he is early Gemini.
I have tried and tried to categorize. When he took me to his room and showed me a collection of theater & concert programs covering a space of ten years & a span of miles from San Francisco to London, I felt a little sickening twinge (after all, he was proud of this collection). I thought I had found an irreconcilable flaw at last. So that was why he went to all of those concerts, to collect the programs. But, even while feeling this, I knew it wasn’t so. That might have been my motive once upon a time, but not his.
Here is a man to whom money is not important, grand achievements are not important; just so he earns enough to enjoy the use of his five senses & to appreciate the genius of others. I think he is one of the few people who may have guessed right about himself. There are no self-delusions, H. is H., and I must take care not to try to inflict my goals upon him. He would be impervious and un-inflicted—if there is such a word. If I want to be a great writer and believe in myself, then it is my busin
ess and only I can achieve my self-set goal—if I achieve it. And if he enjoys his present work, his present life, his present location, that is his business. It isn’t as if he never showed initiative or curiosity. His thirty-three years of history read proudly for any twentieth-century man:
a Jew who remembers it but does not dwell upon it;
an educated man who does not forget those who made it possible;
an army man who went after a commission and got it;
a traveler who made up his mind to try other cities, live there, work there, and did; who decided after two years that London was his city and returned to live & work there & has never second-guessed himself.
So, according to my standards, H. is a good man, a moral man, a man who carries his security inside himself.
His French windows had red velvet, floor-length curtains which, when opened, revealed a garden covered with snow. I sank into the velvet armchair & read & stopped & looked out at the snow drifting by, the occasional bird scavenging for food in the thick snow, listening to Brahms’s Second, Fourth, Mahler’s Resurrection; and he was always in touching distance, yet he does not give himself away. He does not demand too much, admit too much. I miss him already & won’t see him until Benvenuto Cellini on Wednesday. He may not be the love of my life, but he is not a fool, does not fake his life, & we will be close, quiet friends.
(“I hesitated to ask you to see King Lear, or to go out with me, because I thought you were much younger than you were.”)
H. has already booked seats for Paris—April 13, 14, 15, 16. If I can only keep this on a calm basis & not try to devour him. God, we’ll have a time in Paris . . . (ha, ha).263
JANUARY 21
Veeraswamys264 for lunch. My tongue is still sweating. Mr. Miller got more money & more people, whatever that is supposed to mean. Peter W. called again, I wonder what his game is. I talked with Hilda, my palmist, on the telephone. She, too, is a human being. “Ah, Gail, it’s so good to hear your voice!” Clairvoyant or not, she is lonely and needs the conversation & communication of kindred spirits.
JANUARY 23
Continued cold. The fog (smog) returns on little cat feet. Today I met a publisher265 & he placed his electric heater at my feet & told me I could write. Peter W., called away on busy-business, will return tomorrow at teatime. I am beginning to suspect he is ridiculous. Wonder why the change of heart after the passionate farewell? I refuse to worry about money before I am actually hungry. Letter from Kathleen. “A good, full life.”266 What a family of individuals they are. I can now say “they,” looking on them from here, enjoying them.
What to write next, now that I have the man who will always read it.267 (“One woman whose manuscript I’d rejected came in one day & asked me if I knew of a man about fifty years old who needed a wife.”) I must go through my journals. Why is every subject I think of so womanish? (“A good writer never ‘settles for’ anything.”)
I was impatient with H. tonight. Did he sense it? And yet he’s 100 percent person. Lately, I have decided there are several other nice people in the world besides myself.
JANUARY 26
No. I have not been faithful to the record lately. Partially recovered after a second bout with flu. I have had several male nurses to assist. Peter W. dropped by yesterday about 5: 30 but I was already occupied. It did him a world of good. The best line to take with someone like him is that of humor. It’s the only way. He is forever on the brink of losing touch and I told him so.
Re the Writing:
Don’t be false with yourself now. Don’t wax all Jamesian but remember your heritage. Keep moving. Keep alive. Don’t be poisoned by the English reserve.
Don’t write with an eye cocked for the reader.
I am bulging with the life force. I don’t think I’ll ever make any one person a matter of life & death again.
Gail beagling. Gail ran, walked, and ran, following the beagles in search of a prey she never identified. “We went the day after Kennedy’s assassination, “ Gail recalls, “and I cried a lot, running through the fields.”
Release your fanatic grip on it, & it, so recently struggling in the opposite direction, boomerangs—practically breaking its neck to get back to you.
JANUARY 27
Dragged myself out of bed & to work. Everybody said, “Oh, but you shouldn’t have . . .” So I came back home. Mr. Miller came around at 1: 30 & said he was sending his own doctor by later. It is times like this when you see the real value of someone. He exacts a good bit from his staff, but he’s there when they need him. I am enjoying the unreality of being sick. My ears are stopped up & I can’t hear too much noise. The good things of life crowd round, pressing for admittance. Not yet, I say. Play it cool. A publisher thinks I can write, Peter W. has come back, I work for a man like Beverly Miller, & this is my life. So much is possible on this day of all days.
There are plenty of half-people, looters, qualifiers. Why not smoke out the rarities and set them to words?
JANUARY 28
Read . . . inhale . . . swallow . . . sniff . . . John Updike . . . lunch . . . nose drops . . . Wuthering Heights. Could I have enjoyed this complete aloneness five years ago? One year ago? Tick, tick . . . hammer, hammer . . . another building rises out of London’s crowded ugly architecture. What are they all doing at the office? I’m glad I’m not there. James came by last night. At first, I was almost impatient for him to go. But we faithfully dredged up memories and built a temporary platform on which we sat, ate, and drank. One beautiful moment: when he lay stretched on the rug, leafing through a book, unconsciously graceful and young—for thirty-eight.
Miller’s doctor is making a new girl out of me. There is a concert Thursday & a new “smart” play Friday. I think James has terrible taste in plays. He always chooses something very clever-clever. This one is about a man who turns into a bed-sitting room & about “fallout hampers” from Fortnum & Mason.268
JANUARY 29—OR IS IT 30?
The Dear Doctor informed me that he & Miller conspired to have me spend the week in bed. I am ashamed because I have not been writing. Nothing seems worth the effort of putting down. I have no strange romantic tales like the Brontë sisters because I have satisfied my tastes for the strange & romantic in the world of the real. I cannot write like Steinbeck because I’m not close enough to the earth. I don’t know one town intimately like Carson McCullers or D. H. Lawrence. Surely there is a place in the searchings of literature for The Great Sampler. I have hungered all day for the simplest conversation with another human being. Even Stuart the Scotsman was welcome last night. Peter W. hasn’t shown, & oh God! It’s only ten till eight. Where are all my dear, kind friends? If I think any more thoughts, I will go insane. I even resorted to cleaning out drawers.
I know what is wrong. I cannot stand to write about anything that is not myself—how much have I lost by failing to look around me instead of inward, always inward?
SHIT.
AN EXERCISE IN PORNOGRAPHY
I am getting tired of reading, hearing, practicing, and talking sex. Although I have not reached the Platonic state of one of my closest friends, a cynical Englishman of forty who proclaims sex is a function, no more or less noble than defecating, I am ready to cry “False!” to almost any statement anybody may choose to utter about this wearisome subject. Politics, religion, segregation, nuclear disarmament—what
chance have they after the first gregarious hours of a cocktail party? In the end, the clusters break up into smaller molecular units. Number One takes over and it is like watching the reorganization of germs under a microscope.
I have been able to read for twenty years. At the age of eleven, I was informed of the reproductive process by a thirteen-year-old friend named Eugene who lived in the same apartment house. After that time, everything I read took on a new aspect. In books, the characters were no longer divided into good & bad; strong & weak; rich & poor—but they were either men or women. The men, whether they be called Hamlet, Heathcliff, Captain
Marvel, or Heidi’s grandfather, were the ones who “put it into” the women. The women, Scarlett O’Hara, Jane Eyre, Emma Bovary, existed for the inevitable occasion when it would be put into them. This sounds crude. I don’t have the guts to read it over because I would be shocked & put down the pen, rip out the page, and rip out the unsavory thoughts. But no! Dear Reader, you clamor for just this sort of thing. You read out of the corner of your eye, the same way that you look at the victims of traffic accidents. You determine by your impeccable taste just what books will top the best-seller list. And to you, gentle reader, this book, a truthful, unbiased, unabridged account of my sexual research for the last five years, is affectionately dedicated. No fear of peeking ahead into future chapters with your nibbling eyes, hoping to spot the morsels without putting in honest reading time. I promise you satisfaction in every page. God, how you all worship a good lay.
THE GREAT SAMPLER
(To save you further speculation, I am one of the second category—the ones that have it put into them.)
JANUARY 31
After almost a solid week spent in the sometimes confused but never boring GGK, 269 I am beginning to get my bearings. I have tomorrow, Saturday & Sunday to think. Then the floating has to stop. I must begin somewhere.
Retrace all these notebooks & find what is significant in them.
What is sad is to read what I wrote about James one year ago. And he is taking me out tomorrow night. It isn’t sad that we are unexciting to each other now, but it is sad that I could have written that last year to be read this year. Always telescoping, telescoping into past & future.