The Making of a Writer

by Gail Godwin

  JUNE 11

  It is a beautiful summer’s day and will also be a beautiful summer’s night with late blue sky & dark stretches of buildings, the drone of airplanes & the river, flowing on & on. It has been a hot day in London town. Going into the Piccadilly subway, I thought: I won’t be the first to go down these stairs and I won’t be the last.

  The office is endured. Dorothea is upstairs on the switchboard and Doreen floats quietly in a haze of too much Patou, 339 caught in the act of being late by Herr Miller.

  PAIN ENDS WHERE ART BEGINS

  Motto for June.

  Battersea Pleasure Gardens340 were achieved and within the hour I know that Robin will be writing a poem about it.

  And tonight—the orange & lemon lanterns, the sighing trees. Purple sky in a puddle of water fountains (like Bazaar International at West Palm Beach) and periwinkle blues, hollyhocks, parrots & fortune-tellers. Popular tunes blaring from an amusement ride (and I think of Ambrose—no longer the Mose of Carolina Beach, but the much better Ambrose in white suit & fictional reality). A bench painted pink and a tree house. Robin made me go on the Roto: you are plastered against a wall by centrifugal force. (The thing is to keep your eyes closed.) The moment when I knew I couldn’t do it—the moment when I did do it. And afterwards the triumph was so good, it made my mouth dry.

  These long, light summer nights. Soon the Equinox. Then the slow subtle fading away. Funny I didn’t notice the skies last year. I want to be a good person, to have a strong will but not be inflexible; to court joy; to develop humor and loyalty and patience; to learn to say less when no words improve the situation.

  Robin (flexing his muscles, presenting himself): “Made in England.”

  “What do you do, Mr. Challis?”341

  “I’m a try-er.”

  “Oh. Ha, ha. No, I mean, what do you really do?”

  JUNE 14

  “Ambrose.” Can’t be as tender as Death in the Family.342 I have to work out my own breakthrough.

  Alden told me about how (this is the last indulgence in subjectivism) they discussed me on the Rifle Range at Bisley. They discussed my writing and Gordon said—when he got home—“I think I’ll call Gail & ask her if she wants to go out.” Then Bobbie343 called & invited him to dinner, so he went.

  JUNE 15

  Last night (or early this morning) I dreamed that B. & I were playing golf on a new and excellent golf course that I had discovered as a result of working for the Travel Service. I had gotten away from work after some argument with Doreen & Dorothea.

  I woke up because someone was knocking at my door & it was Stella saying cheerily, “I’ve got bad news.” It was a letter from her lawyer in Asheville saying that B. “committed matrimony” sometime in May. Thus fell one of my most solidly built houses. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can surprise me now. Gordon could be eloping with his Bobbie this very minute. I could be fired Monday. The Travel Service could be shut down. My family could die in a fire. I realize now that there is no person in this world that I can absolutely count on.

  I went over to Battersea Pleasure Gardens and heard the pipe organ on the Wonder Boat, watched the people on the rides, the gray river lapping against the rocks . . . Now, I am very tired. I want to rest, to get out of this body & into another. I cannot kill myself over B. or anyone else. I cannot stop going if any of my family dies. I cannot confide my innermost beliefs & emotions to casual people. I cannot let this introspective dervish go one step farther. I am tired of speaking & telling & giving myself away. I am tired of letting people know what counts with me. I am tired of basing my minutes & hours on the faint chance that someone may want to see me.

  Somewhere I took a choice between utter & complete commitment to knowledge & truth and limited (but secure) happiness. And I must have chosen the search, for here I am with a million memories, a little wisdom & a soul that still—somehow—says yes. I may be in a room of my own & have absolutely nobody in the world to share this search with. But I just cannot be bothered anymore.

  JUNE 16

  Reread Father Webbe’s letter. “You forsake your vision at the peril of your soul.” And I know this to be true as well as I know I have seen a glimpse of the better way. I cannot afford to end my stories with the death. They must:

  hit home enough to communicate to the reader, “I’ve been through this, too”;

  suggest a way of human action to lift one out of the many temporary ruts into which we fall.

  JUNE 17

  I need, about now, to be put away in a TB sanitarium or sent to jail (like O. Henry).344 This, I am afraid, is the drastic measure it will take to get it all down. Tomorrow will be number 26 for number one. Gordon doesn’t know what day he will be spending with me.

  Isabel345 frowns: “I should nebber ha’ come to London. Now I see so much. The people are so free in the government. I cannot ’splain it to my husband. He will not understand. I was different before I left. But now I am more different.”

  JUNE 18

  Before dinner the ring of the bell

  I love my life

  JUNE 20

  Bought two new notebooks today & one will be used purely impersonally. I have a dull-thud headache. Remind me to write of the slow, steady, painstaking ways Doreen wins her points.

  JUNE 21

  It is June 21, the longest day of the year, & I am lying in a semilight room listening to a sad French song. I do not understand the words, but I know it is about striving and being let down, & striving. I am looking out upon a pair of chimney tops and thinking, “I should walk by the river, because it is the longest day,” but whether I will or won’t doesn’t really matter. Or does it? I hear children calling (after their supper) and the birds and another French song. I have been out drinking with Robin & Dorothea & Griffith even, and came home lying in a taxi. Everyone ate silently because it was Friday night (hark, an airplane) & we were all slowly becoming accustomed to our separate reliefs. The planes, the planes, I should go out and walk. If I do, I will be celebrating, marking the turning point.

  JUNE 22

  I feel better already. The Wests at the beginning of their third respective marriages—finally to each other—found a turtle one day while walking in the fields of Bedford, New York. They named him Mr. Bedford and took him back to their rooftop flat on Sixty-sixth Street in New York City. Mr. Bedford slept in the rooftop garden and at night would come clunking down the stairs—a kind of combined crawl-fall—and into their bedroom, where he slept. It took him hours to follow them from room to room, and sometimes, by the time he had gotten to one room, they had already left for another. One day, Mr. W. found Mr. Bedford half buried in the hot tar on the roof. It took three hours of concentrated effort, using a bottle of turpentine, fingers, and a spoon. When the Wests had parties, sometimes Mr. W. would fix a lighted candle on the top of Mr. Bedford’s shell and he would come marching in all aglow, making the ladies scream. He ate flies, lettuce leaves, and meat. When the Wests went to Elba on a Greek boat, taking Mr. Bedford—in a hatbox—the bartender on board tried to interest the turtle in whiskey, but Mr. Bedford was not the drinking sort. The family flourished in Elba until, one day, Mr. Bedford fell from a second-story window during one of his prowlings & cracked his shell. Mr. W. was again to the rescue with iodine and adhesive tape. The shell grew back but Mr. B.’s legs remained slightly paralyzed despite Mr. W.’s faithful massages.

  One day, some friends came to take the Wests’ picture for the front of a Christmas card. The Wests & their dog and Mr. B. all were posed looking out of a window. Afterward, Mr. B. was left to lie in the sun. But when he didn’t come in by nighttime, Mrs. W. got worried & went to look. But he was nowhere to be found, though they both looked under every leaf & vine & rock. It was agreed that a dog had probably carried him away and dropped him somewhere too far from home for his paralyzed legs to return him. Mrs. West cried for several days because Mr. B., besides being an unusually faithful, intelligent character, also had been the last link with another
era, the days when they had gone walking in the fields of Bedford, New York.

  Sensitive to pitfalls and false leads in life, Godwin was, at an early age, aware that she was the protagonist in her own psychological odyssey. Her first e forts at journal keeping were, she tells, “to trace every recordable thing about a certain eighth-grade teacher.” Idealists must often go on instinct in their quests. The recognition of a role model is a valuable instinct.

  In the next journal part, titled “The Illumined Moment,” Gail encounters Carl Jung, whose self-examining, well-informed, and courageous life provides an inspiring example. In a similar spirit of inquiry, Gail has kept journals regularly for five and a half decades and counting, through periods of self-doubt and exhaustion. The effort represents a faith in the outcome—personal and professional—and a lack of faith in one’s defensive ego’s ability to embrace the mystery of its own existence unaided.

  Gail’s journals were a way for her both to record her adventure— from the job at Mayview Manor and her transatlantic journey through Klampenborg, Las Palmas, and London—and to survive it. “Be your own savior, confidante, best friend,” Gail advises journal keepers.

  Journal keeping as Gail practices it is a method of living a religious life, conceived nondoctrinally. “Eventually,” she continues with her advice, “it becomes a ritual.” The second voice that the journal keeper establishes is not only a cheerleading friend, but also a trusted truth seeker. “To be a true journal keeper,” Gail says, “you have to have a confidential relation to yourself. A diarist divides herself into two. One confides to the other. One strengthens the other. One questions, challenges, taunts, and comforts the other.”

  She quotes George Herbert, “Dresse and undresse thy soul.”346

  One of the beauties of this “religious” ritual is that it is sympathetic as well as encouraging. Thus, Gail strikes the following chords in her advice:

  You do not have to give a blow-by-blow account.

  Chronology, consistency, and accountability are not required.

  You do not need to write complete sentences.

  Put down what you can—a phrase, a picture; later, it will connect to related memories.

  For every phrase, try writing a companion phrase, packed with specific details.

  Don’t make anything into an assignment.

  Realize you have seasons. (There are times when I fill up a three-hundred-page journal in a month and a half—after Robert died— and times when a three-hundred-page journal lasts more than a year.)

  Assess yourself—where you’ve been straight and where crooked.

  Write at least a line or two every day—or not—but when you do write again, comment on the “not” day.

  Gail is not only using her journals for personal reasons, she is using them to further her creative writing. Consequently, reflections and observations alternate with professional judgments about books and drafts of stories. Put on the page, the parts interact and produce answers that had not originally been in the author’s mind.

  The test of this theory is not only the published stories we see gestating in Gail’s journals—in the spring of 1963 alone, “An Intermediate Stop,” “The Angry Year,” and “Mr. Bedford”—but also the not-yet-published stories that gaze up at us from Gail’s journal pages. Robin and Alden, tormentedpals, do quite a dance. The Ambrose story, which found some expression in Violet Clay and in manuscript form in the 1966 unpublished novel-as-journal “The Possibilitarian,”347 contains unresolved tensions. The Gordon phenomenon sits like a cat on a tree limb.

  When writers sit down to tell a story, do they rely on memories and chronological narration, on descriptions and character sketches? Or do they depend upon something more syncretic, something more chemical and quickening—an idea nourished by passion and by deeply felt understanding, something life-giving?

  Part eleven

  THE ILLUMINED MOMENT

  Old Church Street, London

  JUNE 22–JULY 19, 1963

  A lot has been said about the experience that Gail has gained in her quest to be a masterful writer. After a nearly two-year foray into an alien environment and writer’s laboratory, she finds herself, following her twenty-sixth birthday: hooked into the concept that her era is suffering an epochal loss of purpose; ornery about workplace pettiness; unsure about her own instinct that her personal material might serve to enlighten others; insomniac; and attuned to how one’s biases and ideals limit one’s vision.

  It is time for an illumined moment. What we find in this journal part are some of young Gail Godwin’s clearest articulations about her own purpose.

  “What is incredible,” Gail writes on June 22, “is how one can, through the process of memory, imperfect as it is, conjure up lost days, and then, by writing, reshape them so that they are more meaningful than at the time when one is experiencing them.” She is sure that her “selfish motive” provides a model for others walled in by fears and passions.

  “The inner motive might just be this,” she writes, “to go back and examine the past, remove the pain by changing it into form and thus free ourselves for the next battle. For how can we be expected to distill the significance from every day if we are living that day passionately?”

  Freeing oneself for the next battle is such a key concept that it deserves reemphasis. There are no final solutions, only solutions that allow one to proceed to the next—what?—challenge, engagement, rite of passage, transformation. In fictional terms, this means: Plots should never be pat. Godwin’s generous recognition of ever-branching themes leads to resolutions that are musical, but not pat.

  Anyway, what is the meaning of a literature of despair? Despair is silent. After all, silence itself is sense if the eyes speak. True despair is agony, tomb or abyss. If it speaks, analyzes, especially if it writes, immediately a brother stretches forth his hand to us, the tree is justified, love is born. A literature of despair is a contradiction in terms.

  —ALBERT CAMUS348

  TERGIVERSATION

  Desertion of a cause—a shift, subterfuge (L. tergum, back + versare, to turn).

  For at the bottom of the tergiversation of the present age is vis inertiae. And everyone without passion congratulates himself upon being the first to discover it, and so become cleverer still.

  —KIERKEGAARD349

  JUNE 22, 1963

  Three thousand words from ten till eleven. It comes so fast when it does come, but I cannot sustain it for long. What is incredible is how one can, through the process of memory, imperfect as it is, conjure up lost days, and then, by writing, reshape them so that they are more meaningful than at the time when one is experiencing them. What a thought. Is this the selfish motive for art? The outward motive is to reach a hand across to the less articulate to guide them in defining their various alleviations. For only if they are recognized as being alleviations and not ends in themselves can we continue on toward the real purpose and pursue the main search. But the inner motive might just be this: to go back and examine the past, remove the pain by changing it into form and thus free ourselves for the next battle. For how can we be expected to distill the significance from every day if we are living that day passionately? Passion must have an object & often the object is not what will remain significant in time. I really do believe that passionately is the only way to spend a good day . . . and I am further justified if I can go back later, retracing my steps and picking up the scattered significances like dropped coins and, without the impediment of that same passion, weave them into a continuation, a form, a bridge of learning between then and now.

  At least this has not been a wasted Saturday—read Robert Nathan’s The Wilderness Stone350 & James’s Daisy Miller.351 Just shows how the mores of one culture can be tragically misinterpreted by one who has been brought up to observe the mores of another culture. There was just a time, right before dinner and after dinner, when the light was fading on summer day number two and the couples were making their plans on how to buy time for a
nother Saturday night. Old Church Street came alive with people on their way to somewhere else and I looked out over the window box of geraniums and up at the chimney pots against a fading sky . . . And I almost succumbed when Andrew’s friend wanted me to come with them for drinks. “Why not,” said Andrew. “You can get drunk. Then time will pass quicker.” But the old formulas don’t work anymore, not when I know the bitter taste of an ennui-brewed mixture. It never fails to catch in your throat the next morning.

  Before I began to write tonight, I experienced an almost overwhelming loathing for my project. It took sheer will to throw me into that “once upon a time.” I think one main drawback is that I never think it’s going to be good enough, but ours is only the trying & you forsake your vision at the peril of your soul. So, as long as I feel the need to write down things, I must go on using up paper & ballpoint pens.

  In spite of people like Doreen, etc., I believe that I am potentially and innately a good person. I believe that I will go far in my search. I believe I will be given the chance to prove my capacity for love to some man who can comprehend it all. The thing is to fill up the silences and the spaces with my unflagging belief in my own purpose on this earth.

  JUNE 23

  Jung says in his autobiography352 that each of us has two sides, which play against each other until the end. There is the number one side, which is what we are in the eyes of the world, our parents’ product, successful in studies, profession, or marriage, or unsuccessful, judged wholly by this. The number two side is how we see ourselves in relation to God, the universe, flowers, mountains, and ideas. Sometimes in moments of exceptional serenity, like four o’clock this afternoon, when I came upstairs and went guiltlessly to sleep, I glimpse the eternity of the number two side. I know that I am never alone because in my highest moments I am thinking thoughts that others of my kind have thought in the past or will think in the future. And I see myself as part of a link in a chain. I know that these people once did, or will, take me into consideration— just as I have taken them.