by Gail Godwin
MAY 12
Mother’s Day, and no red rose for me. But I carry one mentally anyway. This brings me around to thinking about my mother. She did what I think is the right thing. It looks as if we (meaning women) have a choice: free woman or man’s woman. I do not hesitate. I know the beginning of that long road—Sunday afternoons with tea and walks and the papers and a good book. The stylish clothes, the carton of eggs bought at the last possible minute after no one has asked you out to dinner. I do not want to be like Marie A., 329 like Doreen, like all those women who deny the Big Threat. As yet, I don’t know how to resolve the problems of the second way: that of with one man. There are the temptations of other men with their other ways. I love a change. And there are the times when he is away or alone willingly in his own growth.
I don’t like limited people, small tight people. I don’t want to be a cynic or a career woman. If I ever get my writing will back, I know what I want to write. I want to extract the moments in life when man behaves like the human being he is supposed to be; when people make the whole business better for one another—like the moment when Boo Radley emerges in To Kill a Mockingbird. The moment in Anna Karenina with Kitty and her father, & in Lear when Cordelia awakens her father, & in Zooey when Zooey tries to reach Franny.
I am tired of cold, determined, calculated people who make it a code to appear disdainful & sophisticated. (All overused words. They have lost their meaning; they convey too much & nothing at all.)
Later in this interminable Sunday. I am in a kind of limbo where even newspapers & eggs leave me cold. I am depressed with the thought of going back to 21 Old Church Street, yet it seems practical and I still enjoy the Wests. “You must always make your choice & pay the price”— Frank Cole. What frustrates me is that I’ve thrown away £60 several times over. But it will not be this monk’s cell, this absolute retreat from the world where I can do as I damn please.
According to statistics, I should be remarried by June.330 I don’t see the slightest possibility of such a thing. My own determination scares me because I know just what I’m capable of. Yet, reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, 331 I shivered and vowed, “I promise myself to marry as soon as possible.” Anything is better than the life of the lonely girl.
MAY 13
All of life is a series of shifts—of infallibility to utter helplessness; elation to depression; creativity to apathy. Finished Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook. It is supposed to describe “the sickness of our times, the problems of living in the modern world.” But when you finish, you feel let down. Here is this woman who has done & seen so much & who writes so well, but she has let you down. Or am I being an ostrich? A “romanticist”? No. I think it is possible to do more. I see the book I want to write—rather I hear it—as Glenn Miller “heard” his band long before they achieved the Miller sound. I do not think I will prove anything, but I want to say something about human beings who try to be human. I do not want to write “minor stuff.” I do not want to be “new” or “original.” I think it is possible to combine discipline with vitality—
I must go back and rescue “Ambrose.”
At 9: 30, I was beginning to go back & get “Ambrose.” I was at the point (and this is important) of willing withdrawal from the world, I wanted to be back with my project. The doorbell rang and there was Gordon. “Am I welcome?” he said. It was as simple as that. And all the time in between hadn’t counted. All the worrying, all the emotionalizing. It would have happened anyway.
I became nervous in that Dexedrine way & spilled instant coffee all over the kitchen. Apologized, of course (what else could I do?). He said, “I like it.” Notices everything. The envelopes, neatly labeled for packing. “Ambrose.” He said six or seven times, “I’ve been thinking about you a lot.” And I knew he had & I knew a lot more with it. He saw my clippings & read a few & was impressed. Kept asking: “Why did you give it all up—you could have been . . .” I said, “If you’d been me, you would have done the same thing. But you weren’t me & you wouldn’t understand, therefore.” “But why are you living the way you do now? Why were you living in all those countries?” “Looking for my soul,” I said, to make him think I was getting him off the track. “No, you’re too sensible. You’d never lose your soul.” He was awed when I said “Did she tell you to press the spinach between the plates?” (he had called up Cordon Bleu to find out about his spinach) & he said, “Why, yes! Yes. It must have been the same girl who teaches you.” “You’re a romantic,” I said. “That’s what’s printed in the CB cookbooks.” “But she didn’t have to say two plates,” he said.
He has just perfected a ceramic that has been accepted for production & I said, “What are you going to invent next?” “Oh, I think I’ll make something for you. I’ll make you a man.” “That would make a good story,” I said. “The scientist loves a girl so much, he makes her the man she wants & then she marries what he’s made & leaves the scientist alone & unhappy.” “Oh, no. She marries the man & then finds out she’s looking for just the opposite qualities & then she marries the scientist.”
We spoke of the Merry Days of 1660 when Charles II returned to the throne. I quoted that passage from the Duke of York.332 “Women make two mistakes in love: one, they give in too easily; two, they are never really convinced that when a man says he is through with them, he really means it.” And then I asked him what he would have been in that era & he said, “A cavalier.”
“I would have been a woman who was just a woman & who waited. Simple days.”
“That’s the trouble with the modern world . . . ,” he said, & continued as I’d predicted.
“I’d like to be honest twenty-four hours a day with one person,” I said.
“Be honest with me. Tell me about your writing.” I told him about the “sound” I heard—the same thing I wrote earlier in this book. About the human element.
“At least that would be a contribution,” he agreed. He admitted that the hermit life was not on his list & neither was a future of four flatmates. He wants a woman badly, but by God his standards are high.
He said several times, “You’re a good girl. Your mother would be proud if she saw how you are living in London. Not living on hot air like Sheila & those girls. I like that about you. You keep separate.”
MAY 17
Every so often, some friend’s remark, some event makes me aware that I am not the person I ought to be (or want to be) or have in mind for myself. Last night it began. Robin & I in a huff, all the way down Wigmore Street. We were so angry, so entranced with each other’s duplicity, that we walked all the way to Soho. Then when he called the waiter & said, “I want a coarse, hard red wine,” sanity returned. Ravello’s Gran Caruso
= a memory of reconciliation. Although Robin hates people who think in labels. But, anyway, all this talk last night. “You have to put the marker somewhere,” he said. “With you, one has reason to wonder just how much is phony & just how much is real.”
Where do I put the marker in?
Some old collector in me makes me want to list the moments I have known when someone I care about cares about me. Gordon, on the morning of my move from no. 5 back to no. 21: “You seem to have so much energy. That’s what I like about you.” (Helping me lift the tweed coat from the closet.) “You are the kind of person one hopes to know all his lifetime” (down the beginning of King’s Road) & always his “You’re looking good, woman.” And after the boxes had been put away & we went to the Black Lion for a drink: “I think you’ll be spending another winter in England.” Also, he is going to take me to his cottage near Rugby one weekend. He described the people, the ones whose families had lived there for centuries. “You’d like them.” I told him I was impatient. “So am I,” he said. “When I know I’m going to do something, I can’t concentrate on anything else.” He also said, “I have a bad habit of treating people like subjects. I want to get to know all about them and then when I do, I think, ‘Well, now I know all there is to know about him.�
��” He specified that I was excluded from this data processing. “Like Robin,” he said, & what followed was, I am sure, a very deft, subtle advertisement for himself. He had read about Robin’s Kayak Journey through the Barren Lands . . . He had said earlier, “I started to call you & ask you to bring him round to my place for a drink.” Nobody else I know would have had the impersonal touch needed for that remark. Now, in the Black Lion, he said: “Someone like Robin. I’d like to get to know him, find out everything about him, & then I’m pretty sure there’d be not much else to know.” He looked me straight in the eye & I read a challenge. Also, about the Ronald Searle picture, 333 he said the bloated Roman god on the pedestal could be Robin if he didn’t watch his weight. The Wests liked Gordon immediately & Mr. W. walked all the way back to the pub to invite him to lunch, which wasn’t lost on G. even though he couldn’t accept.
I like the way he takes the initiative in pubs. He always orders me brandy, without saying “What do you want?” Or, if I specify Scotch, he says, “Bell’s Scotch, please.”
Walked the Old Walk up the Embankment & recaptured time. I don’t know what there is about those two walks—along the Thames & up Kimberly334 beside the golf course. Those two times, things are almost unbearably real—in a noble sense, in the sense that “Just this is enough.” Just that I have existed up to this point.
Thoughts while walking: One must learn how to measure his own dimensions. This is the difference between people who make you quiet & those who make you unquiet. It has something to do with being acutely conscious of one dimension, one proportion to the exclusion of others. Therefore, when I am with Melanie Miller, I become unquiet about my physical envelope. I look at her nails, her hair, her fashion, & I sum up the hours spent to achieve this end. When I am with Robin, I feel as if I must justify myself in his terms. Many people achieve the effect of seeming well-rounded. This can be deadly because if I do not recognize it, I become caught up in the longing for “a dab of everything”— a small compact box with twelve sample perfumes—“Yes, I play rugby, write a bit, and make money in town during the week.”
MAY 19
Bertrand Russell, in a book entitled The Conquest of Happiness, says that a person is happy in direct proportion to his outside interests. He goes on for some time about introspective people & urges us to seek outside interests, hobbies, people we love. Sitting in the sun, enclosed by the garden wall, a Caravelle slicing the afternoon sky, I thought, “That man is exactly right.” And pitied the unaccomplished in other-directedness. But night falls, I walk along the river and begin wondering. What do these other-directed people think about when they walk along river banks? How does one get outside himself? And yet how I admire them. These people. What can I do to achieve this?
Went back & cleaned out the remnants of 5 Green Street. Already the disintegration process had started. “How drab it all looks. I like my high window in Chelsea much better.” And so one becomes “adaptable,” as they say.
G. wore his kilt on Saturday because he had sent his trousers to the cleaners. He sat on the arm of my chair in a roomful of people & I read RLS’s Travels with a Donkey, 335 while he played with my hair & neck & watched the Manchester register cup finals in soccer. I remember thinking that this was the nearest I’d ever come to being in perfect balance (or conjunction) with a man. There were several enlightening passages in the book. I am glad he likes RLS because of the passage about life under the stars not being complete unless you shared a camp cot with the woman you loved.
RLS says that there is something narrow about people who throw over a friend because he has displayed a fault. I mentioned this to Gordon & he said: “The girl I fall in love with will have faults but I will like them, too. However, I think you’re perfect.”
JUNE 4
My cobalt blue night sky, the chimney tops. All is now. I am suspended here reflecting upon the past & shaping the future. There is so much to get down. Events branch off into introspecting. I walked past the river tonight and wished for G., but knew that he was in his own time; he could come when he chose; that the outcome of ourselves is yet undefinable. And the Fun Fair lights shone in the amusement park across the river and I thought of Ambrose and unfulfilled pleasures.
The Wests were coming out as I was coming in & we went to Phene’s Garden for a drink.336 The Chelsea pubs in summer are magic places with their colored lanterns & overhanging greenery. Mrs. W. had an iced crème de menthe & the color of it made the evening for me. We all three conspired & discussed our marriages. She was with her first husband at a sanitarium in Europe when she met a couple named Adams. Then later, when she was married to her second, they entertained the female Adams (whose father—Davis—had run for the presidency and later was ambassador to the Court of St. James’s), 337 who was divorced from Adams & married to Mr. West. Thus it started. The plots & counterplots. If I had not married Doug Kennedy, I would not have met Gordon W. If Gordon negates that marriage, then he is in effect negating our meeting. He is saying, “It shouldn’t have taken place.”
Weekend camping in the country—Alden & Robin. Alden playing his pipe (flute) under the trees. Robin waging continual war against himself— tossing the knife in the air and catching it until he cut himself to the bone. Then putting on a handkerchief bandage & throwing some more. He, out of his hurt, attacked me. It kills him because he cannot get to me where I live, he cannot destroy one iota of what I have. I cried bitterly out of frustration, but most of all because I wished I were back here away from the wastefulness of it all. Alden got very drunk & lost control. Both of them came in today with tails between their legs.
Mr. West: “. . . and Peggy went up to the Chelsea pensioner & he wanted twenty-five shillings for that postcard.”
Peggy West: “No darling. Four shillings.”
And it goes on, foibles and diatribes. But it is all moving and seeking toward something.
We discussed my copybook blot338 & they advised. I liked asking it & they liked giving it.
“Be quick about it,” says Paul. “It all makes you, equals you, my dear. I don’t feel like a hard roué for having had those first two go-rounds.”
“I only wish I had met Paul first,” says Peggy.
Gordon must know. Mr. West: “Tell him when you’re crossing the street in heavy traffic.”
JUNE 6
Staying up all night at gunpoint is what I deserve. Calmness. Get it all down. I am twenty-six years old (almost), I am going to learn to put good things in writing. I am going to play it straight from the shoulder, only never give myself away at bargain again.
Robin returned Alden’s briefcase today. I went rummaging through it though it was none of my business (I must have inherited this from Monie) and found: (1) a flute, (2) Le Petit Prince, (3) philosophy notes & a paperback of Hume, (4) a wallet with a student ID card, membership to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz, (5) a small journal-like entry on either side of an index card, reading: “I went around tonight all primed to see her. She said she was sick. Was she? Maybe she was. But then again, maybe she wasn’t. Oh damn. Ah, shit. My life revolves around this weakness. Always hoping to reach—what? That happy little prize. That one chance.”
And then, at the bottom in small letters: “Still, after all, I will go on playing it straight from the shoulder.”
—All this for Jill, a girl who isn’t worth him. So, at least I know there is a male in the world who goes through the same agonies as I do. But he is twenty-three. They’ll knock it out of him in ten years. At thirty-three, he’ll be a B.
“Has Gordon mentioned me?” I asked Alden, hating myself.
“Yes.” He laughed. “But the context doesn’t exactly suit your frame of mind now.”
“No, tell me. I’ve got to know. You must tell me.”
“Well, we were all discussing how expensive booze was at the dinner table and I thought this was a good time to get you into the conversation so I mentioned as how you could get it cheap at the PX, and he said, ‘Gosh! I wish I’d remembered t
hat. I would have asked her to dinner tonight.’”
“Oh God, Alden, I’m going to die right here on the spot. Oh God, I can’t take it. Ah, he’ll pay for that.”
“No, no. You can’t do that. You’ve got no evidence of anything at the moment so you’re putting interpretations on minute details. You don’t know anything.”
JUNE 9
SUNDAY
I am almost twenty-six and have only a stamped passport, a photostat-ted copy of a divorce decree, an envelope full of Miami Herald clippings, a rejected novel, and a bill from Internal Revenue for $200 in back taxes to show for it.
The pigeons’ throaty ode; George the bartender at the Black Lion wiping off the counter with a dishcloth, dreaming of his two-eyed football days.
Andrew & I went up the street to the Essoldo to see Mondo Cane, a documentary film of all the unpleasant things going on all over the world— native women suckling pigs; cars being destroyed & smashed into scrap metal; a turtle dazed by radiation, crawling away from the sea & then, in a final hallucination, thinking she is again swimming in the sea; Vic Tanney’s reducing salon; fleshpots. Came home to find Stella looking ghostly & high-strung. The Wests apparently confronted Peter & told him it was an unhealthy relationship, etc., and—with the fumes of gin still on his breath from pre-supper sizzling—forbade Peter to enter Stella’s room again & told him he must be in bed by twelve every night. Said Stella, looking like a painted ghost in a white starched blouse with a Queen Anne collar, deep in eye shadow: “It makes one lose faith in people even though I accepted their oddness at first.” They still owe her £50. She has told them it must be paid when she leaves at the week.
Grieg—coming over the radio—each piano note evoking the idealism-spangled days when I could recite the whole of the death of King Arthur—The old order changeth, yielding place to new—& when I walked up to the hill & out in front of the hospital & watched the tower at Saint Genevieve’s grow dark against the sky & I wish I were there with Mother Winters & all the nuns, going soundlessly down corridors, moving in a world of incense & regular times for everything and living side by side with God.