by Gail Godwin
But then the American pragmatism takes over and makes the number two side seem as unreal and as unsubstantial as smoke dreams. I awake and I think no longer of time eternal but of the unforgiving minute; I think not of my relationship to the great try-ers but of those around me in my immediate sphere. I think of my age, twenty-six, and I become afraid that I will never marry again. I feel sometimes—indeed in my true moments—that I was never married anyway. I don’t feel that any part of me was left down there in Key Biscayne. I never felt like Mrs. Anybody and I sometimes think I am perpetuating a great big lie when I tell someone I have been married. Because, at times, it is a reassurance. It was done once & it can—feasibly—be done again.
So it is six o’clock. Soon the supper hour. Then the hours that tax my number two self out of shape. The attempt at writing to assert my independence. And then the fading of the sky to the short night. And the prospect of a day at work and homecoming and supper and waiting. Sometimes I see such a great gap between me and all the people I know. I fool myself that they understand something of what I am saying. The Wests. Andrew. Robin. Gordon. But I am aware even when I attribute to them this understanding that I am fooling myself. I see, for instance. What Gordon is and all he can be. He can never, never even begin to understand. Remember Doug. Remember Doug. He just couldn’t listen. I began to talk to him in his terms. And then, of course, they win, because number two language cannot be translated into number one talk. I am tired of giving out samples of my soul for people to examine at their leisure and return to me slightly handled, and none the wiser. The old anger is coming back.
Another weekend dying fast and tomorrow the ritual of killing eight hours at work in order to get back to Chelsea and kill five or six more. There are always all sorts of hopes. A new person. Oh, hell, I am absolutely fed up with my everlasting laziness, my vacillation of purpose . . .
JUNE 24
Robin said: I haven’t seen you in such a spirit since your party. Alden is back from a two-week sojourn in Dublin pubs.
While visiting travel agents today, I suddenly “switched sides.” Instead of thinking, What are they thinking of me? I started thinking, What do I really think of them? Quick way to eradicate a neurosis.
JUNE 25
Rain, and I like it. All day the wind whistled in the office (faulty construction; steel & glass at the corner of Sackville & Vigo). Now it has stopped as suddenly as it started. Today the debit pile was heaped high. One of those mornings when the egg is runny, some shopper picks your stocking with her go-to-market basket. BH wrote Doreen a letter (they all write her after they leave in spite of the names they call her when they are there). Jill called, bringing with her that indescribable, corrupt feeling, that splayed, disintegrated sensation. She has moved back to Charles’s flat in Lowndes Square & thinks (hopes) she is going to have a baby.
So, on the day went & I remained detached and undemolished. Except for the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach & I cannot really wish my future to be free of that. If I can just learn to hold myself together in the very bad times when the world encroaches, when I pick up a magazine & see an article entitled “What to Do if You’re 25 and Still Single,” etc., then the good times will take care of themselves. Letter from Frank today, which I will have to keep. Several very striking observations. It’s hard to believe that soon he will be forty. I met him almost twenty years ago. Good lord. My mother’s second marriage has lasted sixteen years! He said I had gained a peace within myself, he could tell from the letters, and again lauded patience. Patience, it is true, is a virtue. But so is action. What a hell of an assignment: Learn to balance patience with action.
There may be something to writing around the thing you want to say, thus leaving more to the powers of imagination.
Smell of charcoal steak. Sun on the chimney tops.
Water glistening on leaves. Sound of traffic down
on the Embankment and the airplane. My friend the airplane.
Embrace these moments when you don’t particularly want to be anywhere else. I suppose it is a sort of prayer. It is good to be calm inside & know it has not been caused by any outside influence. And today’s calm is produced by only one thing.
MY UNCONQUERABLE SOUL353
jocosely—
marplot—
moral obliquities—
I dreamed last night of hailing a taxi to
go I don’t know where & then going to sleep &
then waking and having to pay an enormous bill.354
Why, why don’t I overcome this? It’s nothing
but a neurosis.
I could have gotten up & walked at four in the morning &
redeemed myself.
But I lay there under the bedcovers & didn’t
do anything at all.
JUNE 26
Was haunted all day by the taxi dream. (So symbolic! A warning against wasting time.) I’ve had warning dreams before. They are peculiarly lucid. Also the “dawn chorus” this morning, chiding me, urging me to redeem myself by getting up & dressing, but I didn’t. Crises change from day to day, yet in the end it’s only one person who is responsible: me. As I exchange & discard Maxims for Better Living, a few keep cropping up.
Do what can be done; be silent about the rest.
Preserve an implacably calm exterior. Show this to world. They aren’t listening anyway. If, by chance, an exception comes along who wants to listen, then he will make it known.
Don’t get overwhelmed by otherworldliness. One can think so much and then certainty wavers, inner calm turns to disquietude.
I think if there must be a choice in any matter whatsoever, the guiding light should be TO KNOW as opposed to not knowing.
Saw a plane coming down, landing lights on red tail blinking. Heading toward the landing strip at London airport.
Hastings355 & I went to see Jack Lemmon & Lee Remick in Wine & Roses356 —about alcoholics & nothing spared. Came home & Mr. West was sitting alone in the dark room facing a blaring TV. There was an empty cider bottle on top of the phone pad.
JUNE 27
Robin: “All I can say is this: It’s like buying antiques. Name your price and then walk out. If they want to sell, they’ll call after you. If they don’t call after you, keep walking.”
JUNE 28
A long week over which hung a cloud of “floating anxiety”—it was everywhere, nameless, ambiguous. In the high-ceilinged panels of the P & Orient passenger office on Cockspur Street, in the watery sunshine up & down Pall Mall, in the tone of a receptionist’s voice, in the wicker chairs of the ladies’ room at the Ceylon Tea Center, in the too-light-and-airy, perfume-and-salad dining room populated by female lunchers. In some cases I could name it. The wicker chairs brought back the afternoons at the Grove Street YWCA where Monie worked in her first job to accrue some social security. I would sit in the lounge overlooking trees & a weedy garden & thumb through magazines, gnawed by the vague restlessness that comes from wishing you were somewhere else. The dining room at the Ceylon Tea Center had the same trivial and fastidious odor of the Jordan Marsh Rooftop Restaurant in Miami where Eleanor Sherman and I would eat, glad to be away from our husbands. But other twinges of the week I cannot name. It is all so tied up, one with the other. The honeysuckle smell in Paultons Square, strong and nostalgic, after the daylong rain, and I was six years old again in Asheville and walking up that short street, Bond Street, behind Emily Osborne’s vine-covered house. Sometimes you could hear her mother playing the piano, defiant quick tunes; this was before she started parachute jumping.357 We are the sum of all our summers.
JUNE 30
Tomorrow July begins & I am better equipped to deal with life than I was in June. Stella has been up in the room. We have been discussing writer’s blocks & the Wests. Came to several conclusions today after unearthing some of my writing. I overwork things. For instance, the short story on Ambrose was much better than the entire fifteen-hundred-word novel-beginning. It is important to know just when a sto
ry rates novel form & when it would be better as a short story.
My biggest drawbacks are lack of faith in myself & laziness. There is also something else which might be called a neurosis—that is, I feel positively repelled by the thought of writing at certain times. This could be that the material has not “jelled” in the subconscious & that I am pushing things. There are several things—ideas, subjects, problems—I would like to get down sooner or later. One of them is, I was thinking tonight, the problem (and solution) of resolving reality with our preconceived image of it. This can be shown over & over again in the case of people & places: i.e., going to a new country to find yourself—and not finding the dream—and, most of all (my biggest groan), fashioning your man & then watching one after another fall short. WHO, WHO have I ever really known well whom I didn’t lose faith in? One was B., but he’s not there anymore. What about all the rest on whom I spent eons of tears & time?
Last night I dreamed of ostracism by Stuart Pegram (a recurrent dream—she must represent society to me).358 She was saying she had ten invitations to graduation parties & I was so hurt because I didn’t have any. Then I saw Captain Carlson and I went up to him and said: Look, please marry me. I think we could make a go of it because you’re away all the time (being a sea captain) and I wouldn’t get tired of you.
JULY 1
One comes back again & again to the last fortress—oneself. I am weary of love games & I am weary of the intricacies of myself. To kill this writer’s block, I shall begin with short stories (really short & then on from there). Also, I will only write, not think about them before or after I write. Don’t mention the name of the story in these notebooks or discuss what I am trying to do. Robin brought me Le De perfume from France.
JULY 3
Lately I have been feeling guilty about keeping a journal. Nobody I know keeps one. I look over my shoulder and think: Who is that crazy girl sitting in her window and putting down versions of things that are happening to her? Here I sit, putting down little pieces of people. But nevertheless: I must. I must. Have been thinking a lot lately about “ideal people”—what makes a good person—and about action vs. reflection. Results of this thinking follow presently. Tomorrow is a holiday for us Americans & how glad I am of it.
Being alone more & more dominates the texture of my life. Who can understand, if I tell them, the completeness of sitting in the open window looking at the darkening evening sky over the chimney tops (all odd assorted shapes pointing crooked fingers into the sky) and listening to a sad, powerful, exultant symphony all the better because I do not know what it is and therefore know that I like it because I like it & not because I have been conditioned to like it. And, in that brief segment of time, when the jet streaked upward into my sky, the takeoff light in its belly blinking every five seconds, I saw the whole sum of my life and was glad for it. But I did not begin to write of this.
JULY 5
It is a thought that perhaps I am neurotic & have resolved my neuroses by using these notebooks. I want to say so much. Like right now, sitting in the window, having walked pokily to & from buses & changed into slacks & cleaned my face with witch hazel, I am very much resolved. The garden below is full of flowers & I am for a minute full of the same promise that I felt at Blowing Rock the summer of ’61. Yes, there are still barriers, but I am learning; oh, brother, am I learning. At 4: 00 p.m. today, I temporarily “cracked” under the strain of trying to diet & having to be in talking distance of Doreen W. for six hours at least. What does matter is that I’ve decided to make a small assessment of everything as it stands and then work from that. Incidentally, part of this assessment will be to record that some things cannot, will not be assessed by pen & paper & that these same things make up most of the magic so it’s just as well.
JULY 6
Finished “Wesley Phipps”!359 My writer’s block is gone. And I am free for one & a half more days. Tonight—Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, 360 with Ralph Richardson. Going with Stella.
JULY 7
The Wests have gone to the Connaught Hotel for dinner with old friends.361 Andrew & Anna Rosa are together in her room. Stella is reading or writing. Isabella is visiting her friend Mercedes. Hastings & little Robert have gone to a pub, hoping they can slip through the age barrier and get a drink. Leonardo362 has gone to see Boccaccio ’70, 363 which the cousin of his father helped to produce. I am filled with that tight impotent rage which comes from depending for my happiness upon the actions of another.
This is indeed a time of sustained rage and I will fight like hell not to let it break out & expose its ugly face to the world. It is tension, tension everywhere I turn. Tension at work. My lungs actually fill with loathing when I unlock that blue door every morning. Then Doreen enters and Dorothea enters and the tug-of-war begins. I imagine a lot of it. I probably imagine most of it. I see in every word Doreen addresses to me a kind of moral reproach. And whenever they go out to lunch together, I am positive they are in league against me. If only I could not see them at all & just work steadily through the day, but the job involves constant shifting so that each of us can attend to all her extracurriculars. Then, I waste away all of my energy on defenses, hate-waves, etc. What could I not do if these stops were removed!
I believe very strongly in building up powers of various sorts (not the least of which is self-discipline). What the hell was that last clause for? “Not the least of which”—MY GOD. So: for the thousandth and ninety-millionth time I will try to reshape the material of my existence so it will be satisfactory. I can only use what I know of myself, some of what I have read, & what I have observed about other people.
The stalemates are these: On one hand, there is what I want; on the other, there is what I have. How much can I resolve of what I want with what I have?
I want to write what I have seen & felt in such a way that it can help other people “name” their own perceptions & feelings. I want to marry again, I do not like the life of a boarder, a celibate, a single girl. I want a man in bed with me at night. I want to share meaningful & pleasant experiences with a man.
Now: In my present circumstances, I am working away eight hours of energy and frustration over a job I do not like & people I do not like. I am wasting countless hours on a man who is not sure of his own feelings & who does not see me as much as I think is enough.
Added factor: I have no desire to leave London.
As I am an alien in this country, it will be difficult to find another job. But: I must try every possibility. If UPI says no, the AP, and so on down the line.
Then there is the man situation. Robin will not do, in spite of the fact I sometimes like to delude myself into thinking he would. The problem is to meet other men. But how? Thought: Attend night school—hope for a face across the room at the next party—just forget the hurry and don’t panic.
Meanwhile, here are the toothpick resolutions upon which I will base my existence this week. Just to get out of the rut.
Look good every day this week (even if it means ironing & washing & polishing shoes at night).
Make it a point of honor to work unceasingly at the office until every little letter has been answered, every letter filed; perhaps rewrite some sheets on American cities or offer to. Be as unoffending as possible & as impersonally pleasant. This will also be a good test to see if I am imagining things in people’s attitudes towards me. The worst part of this job is the segment of time in which I am completely and utterly bored & feel guilty because I know there is something to be done.
Retype “Wesley,” doing it the best I can & then starting on something else. What? Since I have decided from now on to write only what I feel & how I feel it, why not write the story of Gordon & myself? Condensed, of course. Only this afternoon, I was reading a story in the New Yorker which was a simple (but intricate & clever) account of a young girl’s unhappy affair with her older cousin’s husband.
Stereotyped plots told with new insight are not bad. In fact, the reason thi
ngs are stereotyped is because they are such common human situations.
So, briefly, here is the story of a woman who is very much the acter, the do-er—and a man who is a reflector, a wait-er. It is further complicated by the fact that she is American and he is English & that neither of them know for certain whether traits are personal or nationalistic. But where does it all lead, anyway? The spaces between meetings contain the bulk of the story; as soon as they separate they continue refashioning each other.
All that’s needed in the Wesley scene is to rewrite the description of the room—tighten it up—& take the picture off the wall—describe the look he gave me—the acknowledgment of a shared exhilaration.
11: 00 P.M.
Monday Monday’ll soon be here
Then we’ll put away our fear,
For, for eight consecutive hours,
We’ll misuse our latent powers
And when evensong is heard
We return to wait for word.
—refrain—
Happy Happy Ennui
Sailing down the River Me
Please pour me a glass of wine
Please be handsome; say you’re mine.
(How I love to be afloat
Just so you will steer the boat.)
When we reach the other bank
You will get your word of thanks—
Thanks.
Splash.
Soon it’s time to go to bed
Thank you! Thank you now I’m dead.
JULY 8
Got the core of Wesley’s room. Bought Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Thought about Gordon and thought up things to say when I see him again. Came to blows with Doreen. (“Why can’t we have Detroit Hotels?” “Because I haven’t got around to doing them yet.”) Etc. I could do a stage performance on her mannerisms. My God, how she repeats herself. Wrote to Franchelle at camp.364 Wrote to Kathleen an SOS about the job & about Gordon’s indifference. Going out with Jim Jensen tonight. How good to be able to talk the way I like to talk for a change. His mind fascinates me. Gordon will not seem so central as long as there are other diversions.