by Gail Godwin
I have:
party Friday night
rewrite “Wesley”—mail
wash clothes
Saturday—Evansky’s for hair
JULY 9
So it is once again ten o’clock. Now the hours outstrip themselves. They fly! All hope of the outside world sending word is gone. These are my hours, the hours when Brother Loneliness steals softly around my bed, turns the pages of my book, crouches beside me and whispers, “Nothing’s so bad after all, is it? You can read and think about all tomorrow’s possibilities. After all, tomorrow anything is possible. Soon it will be eleven, then twelve—then we are justified in going to sleep. And in sleep we meet our other friends, the shadows of what we have been, the mirrors of people we once thought we knew, the threats of those who have become symbols to us, the comfort of the merged ones who offer, in one lump sum, all the love of which we dream.”
There is something not quite aboveboard about swearing off Gordon while he fails to call & clinging to myself, then accepting him without question when he does call & relegating myself to second place— forgetting my pride, my independence, all the things that make me the way I am. This is tantamount to denying all that I am & I won’t have it—I just won’t.
TRY TO LAUGH AT IT
JULY 13
The retreat at Peace College—Dr. Michael Gordon:
“His name was Dr. —— & he
had come all the way from
Edinburgh, Scotland, to
lead the spring retreat
at Juniper College . . .”365
JULY 16
Where do I think all this scratch-scratching in journals will get me? Everywhere, somewhere, or nowhere? Will I learn to put words together? Will I learn to confide to sheets of paper, more harmless than confiding in people? Will I accomplish the desired goal of winning a husband? And—having won him—will I then pour out my disillusionments about him in a later journal? I think so much & a lot of it goes around in circles, eating itself. It is so frustrating to go back & salvage such small rewards. I have only vestiges of what seemed at the time monumental thoughts, but I must keep going.
Last night Isabel & I went to eat at Gordon’s. The boys were all charming, cooking, cleaning up, plying us with conversation, sherry & coffee. I even liked Harry the Australian. He was almost tender with Isabel. Her classic remark of the evening, referring to the freedom in which Anglo-Saxon men lived & traveled in bachelor states: “In Es-pain, the man, he come out from his mother & go under his wife.”
Gordon showed three films of his holidays for the past five years. I think that makes the epitome of all the things he’s done the essence of which I deplore. Yet I accept his shambling, absentminded ways, his smelly socks, his baggy pants, his terrible shoes, his boring habits— Who presumes to show homemade films to guests except the characters in humorousnovels?!
Isabel’s feminine Latin deduction was: I think you are more okay than he. I think he wants to make sure you love him.
Come to some terms re the writing. I think the answer is writing about something outside myself.
Tomorrow I buy something interesting to wear.
Saturday (stick to skirts)—must look my best, even though he doesn’t.
JULY 19
FRIDAY
I have lost sight of my eternal bearings and am suffering the inevitable results. When you forsake the highest point you have ever reached, in the still hours, in the times of truth, then you also forsake the sublime indifference the post offers. I owe it to myself to continue the search. Writing for me is the only way I know to express what I have found on my search. But I won’t be shaken down. I do waver, but I must keep faith. All things have come in the past. Therefore, is there any reason I shouldn’t expect them to come in the future? True, they might NOT come, but is it logical to deduce that because I have won in the past I will lose in the future? Ah! As I sit in the window and look out on the flowers over the fence, wild untampered-with hollyhocks, out of the range of Peter Rhododendron’s clippety-clippety confines, 366 I feel myself coming back, saying, Gail, Gail. Why did you panic? Why did you clutch at straws? Do you not remember: I’m here?
AFTERWORD
The narrative of Part 11 breaks off on a note of reassertion and resolve. So what happens next to the twenty-six-year-old diarist (I sometimes think of my young self in the third person) admiring the hollyhocks from her upstairs window at 21 Old Church Street?
Robin brought a fellow rugby player, Andy Hurst, to Gail’s 1963 Christmas party at 21 Old Church Street and Gail and Andy got engaged in the spring of 1964 and unengaged in the winter of 1964. Gordon married Barbara, a South African girl who had charmed Gail and Gordon with her reading of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake” when they visited her in her bed-sitter.
Gail continued to work at the U.S. Travel Service until July 1965, when she married the English psychiatrist Ian Marshall, whom she’d met in an evening writing class at the City Literary Institute. In 1966, she went back to the States to visit her family and decided not to return. A divorce followed.
After a brief stint in New York as a fact-checker for the Saturday Evening Post, she applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in which her friend Lorraine was enrolled with her new husband, Chap Freeman. In January 1967, at age twenty-nine, still an unpublished writer, Gail flew to Iowa in a snowstorm (the airline lost her luggage).
The work that had gained her admittance to the workshop was “The Illumined Moment—and Consequences.” It is the story begun in July 1963 in London. It is about an English vicar who has a vision of God and loses it in the United States while promoting his best-selling book about the experience. Retitled “An Intermediate Stop,” the story went through many more drafts in Iowa and was at last published in the North American Review, several months before the publication of her novel The Perfectionists by Harper & Row in May 1970. The Perfectionists was drafted under the tutelage of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in the spring of 1967, and went through several rewritings.
Gail Godwin
APPENDIX 1
EXCERPTS FROM
“HALCYONE AND THE LIGHTHOUSE,”
THE NOVEL GAIL GODWIN STARTED IN 1961
Note: Gail began writing “Halcyone and the Lighthouse” in an outpouring of memory and fantasy as she embarked on her inaugural ocean voyage to Europe. She based it, in part, on a romance she had had with a sea captain whom she’d met while on assignment for the Miami Herald a year earlier. The first name of her heroine, Halcyone Harper, was derived from that of a daughter of Aeolus, Greek god of the winds. This mythical mariner’s widow has come to symbolize calmness after a storm. Gail’s novel went through many title and plot changes over several months. Eventually, shedding the sea captain romance, its heroine and setting were transferred to another novel, “Gull Key.”
By eight o’clock, the morning of July 6 in Fort Lauderdale promised to be unbearable. In the bureau office of the Star, Keith Landridge swirled about in his chair and began typing out the assignment sheet. He knew that most of the stories stacked on the spindle that afternoon would have to be done as vicariously as possible. Reporters had become very attached to their telephones since the bureau had gotten air conditioning, he reflected wryly.
He pecked out the usuals first, habitually, without having to think.
CITY HALL—REDFERN
POLICE COURT—HANGER
COMMISSION MEETING—SMITH
PORT AUTHORITY—GRAY
No, Gray was on vacation, he’d have to send Halcyone. Halcyone, the young problem, headache of the bureau, fresh from journalism school, full of delusions of Hemingway, blond and naive. Oh God, deliver one, muttered Landridge, and pecked out HALCYONE next to PORT AUTHORITY. Well, we’ll try her. Do her good to get buried in with those dullards one afternoon a week till Gray got back. When she started trying to verbally decorate subjects like cargo and tonnage and ILA grievances, she’d lose her illusions fast.
Captain Carl Wanderer stirred in his narrow bunk aboar
d the SS Tempest and listened with a congealed throat. Something was wrong. The sound that he had come to know as he did his own heartbeat, the pound which spoke to him with its monotonous soothing night and day for fifteen years, had stopped. The engine was not running and he heard the voices of his men unsure and hesitant and scared. When the first mate knocked and entered without waiting, he knew before he was told. He knew they were not due into Port Everglades for another two hours.
A year later, in October, Halcyone took a freighter to Copenhagen. On the third day out she connected the look of the decks and the engine room and the smell of salt and fuel and fresh paint with memories of Captain Wanderer. She saw him hurtling down the ladders, those magnificent brown legs rippling with motion. She smelled the good male scent of pipe tobacco and took in the crisp sturdiness of his khaki bermudas and shirt. She could hear the harsh bass sounds he uttered: “D’ya have Tuborg beer?” and “Brinkly. Let’s have the men clean the decks today while it’s still nice.” Even: “He was a tak-iturn man, Haly, if y’know what I mean.”
She remembered the scene in the New Orleans restaurant and felt violently ill like a girl who has had too much to drink and too much to eat and too much to say. She wanted him with her now more than anything in the whole world, here now to share with her these thoughts, to feel the life she felt, to explain the sea to her, to give her the confidence she knew was his when no land was in sight. Never had she felt so terrified, so frustrated, and so ashamed. Never had she felt so blocked from her purpose. Because he was gone now and gone a year and you can’t just take out twelve months and push the ends together and make it whole and tidy. No, he was gone and she was angry mostly with herself and secondly with . . . with the way things always seemed to come out, crooked and mismatched.
Finally, about two hours later, she got out some paper and her ballpoint pen and poured out her heart to Captain Wanderer. The letter affected her so much that she cried herself to sleep as the ship pursued its northward course.
When the ship docked for a day of unloading at Oslo she mailed it. She put her return address: Halcyone Harper, American Express, Paris, France, for she calculated it would take him that much time to receive it and answer it.367
All during her travels in Scandinavia and down through the wine-festival country of the Rhine, into Florence where she had some shoes made for herself, into Milan where she heard Il Trovatore for the first time, through Rome’s pinnacles and illusions, down through Spain’s poverty and fantasy, back to Paris, she kept with her at the back of her mind the knowledge that she had something to look forward to.
The letter was there, sure enough, at the Express office in Paris. How could she have doubted it? He never broke a promise. It was five and a half pages long, written on both sides of the thin tissue, which made it very hard to read.
He was so delighted to hear from her, it said, and so glad she had a pleasant voyage. He himself felt there was nothing like the sea. He thought of her often and remembered her saying she wanted to travel. “See, Haly, if a person really wants something bad enough, he or she can make things work out.” (Then she found herself skipping, and she blushed, furious with herself, and forced her eyes to reread the skipped passages.) He was back home in Michigan, he said, and that’s why it had taken him so long to answer her letter, the steamship company had just forwarded it to him, but he answered as soon as he received it. He was kind of “retired” from the sea, now, he explained, as the Tempest’s company had put all their ships under foreign flags to cut down costs. He had a little house and was dabbling a little in real estate now. He wondered if it would be at all possible if, when she finished “exploring the far corners of the earth,” she might come and visit him. He would, of course, send her a round-trip ticket by airplane. “I always cared for you, Haly, and thought you were a little different from the ordinary run of pretty girls. At my time of life, the adventure kind of wears out and a man starts thinking about the pleasures of a home. I don’t know how you feel now, but apparently you must have something in your heart for me or you couldn’t have written a letter like that.”
The letter continued for two more pages and was signed, “With all my love.”
Haly crumpled the letter and stuffed it in her pocketbook and concentrated very hard on a travel poster for Air France. A jet plane was imprinted over the Eiffel tower. She decided she would go find one of those clever little Parisian bars that everybody talked about when they came home, and have herself a good, stiff drink.
The call of the sea was very far away, something that happened to someone else. Nothing seemed very magic, or really very urgent. But in all her dispassion, Haly was aware of one thing she had known before: She had missed it again. Or had it missed her?368
For three days, Halcyone and the photographer went out in the pilot boat morning and evening and sat and waited for a glimpse of Captain Wanderer.369 For the photographer, this elusive mariner represented an insult. He did not like people who would not pose for him. At first, Halcyone simply wondered what the captain of a ship looked like . . . her only acquaintance with such men had been in Anthony Adverse 370 and a few movies starring Errol Flynn. But when Wanderer failed to appear after the third day, he became a personal affront to her, also.
Keith had said blithely, “Go on board and talk to the Captain. Find out what it feels like to be stuck. Get personal impressions, reader interest, you know. This could make a good color story for page one.” Oh, how easy it was to sit in offices and give orders! Ask him how it feels to be stuck.
By the second week, the Tempest had become a local attraction. Swimmers paddled out on rafts and yelled up to the crew. Children stood in the sand and tirelessly watched the big boat sitting helplessly on the reef, unbudged by the tugs that appeared twice a day to pull her free. A giant boat in a bathtub, she was utterly misplaced and out of her element, all dignity gone.
She watched him appear from the cabin and hurl himself effortlessly down the ladder, his bare brown legs rippling with muscle, his heavy sandals twanging against the metal rungs. He wore khaki shorts and shirt, and a pipe hung from the corner of his mouth. His face was a combination of angles and bones and thought-lines and strength.
During the Coast Guard hearings, she did not dare to speak to him. But she was aware of every move he made and she was aware that he was aware of her. That delicious suspense of sitting there and wondering if he would ever speak to her. Her first shock had been seeing him dressed up and noting happily that he knew how to slip that outdoor form into a well-cut suit. His feet looked enormous in cordovans and he wore a black pearl ring on the little finger of his right hand.
On the last day before she went on vacation, she was sitting outside the Port Authority building, waiting to meet the photographer for lunch, when Captain Wanderer approached her, bowed deeply, and, with otherworldly courtesy, said: “Miss Harper, under more happy circumstances, I would consider it my pleasure to take you to lunch. I’m sure you understand.”
When she returned to the bureau, she wrote her story, ran it over the Teletype to the main office, and sat down at her typewriter and wrote a very honest note, which she mailed.
7/20/60
Dear Captain Wanderer:
Please excuse my brashness, but I am leaving for my vacation and will not see you again—therefore I do not have to worry about what you will think. I regret more than anything not being able to know you well. You are the kind of man I’ve always wanted to meet, but seemed to find only in books. (Trite.) Also you have the strongest hands, the most powerful face, and the most beautiful hair that I have ever seen. There. I’ve said it. I just wanted you to know.
Sincerely yours,
Halcyone Harper
(the eager beaver)
During her entire drive up the coast of Florida, Halcyone kept herself occupied by imagining the most intimate scenes between herself and Captain Carl Wanderer. By the time she stopped at a motel to spend the night, she had worked herself into a frenzy of imaginativ
e sensations. She was sure that this man would have been the answer to all of her romantic wishes. And now she would never know.
But she was wrong. When she returned to the bureau two weeks later, she found a message to call the dockmaster at Port Everglades. Before she could call, Keith slouched over to her desk and said, “Well, back from the hills, ha! Want to go back to your old beat? The SS Tempest! Ha.”
“You mean . . . you mean he’s . . . I mean, it’s still stuck?”
“No, they brought her in but she’s being dry-docked. The Captain called you several times while you were away. You better get in touch with ’im. Might be something for us.”
She never tired of him. He admitted her into his quarters and they sat across his writing table for hours, listening to a symphony on the huge shortwave radio, drinking pots of black coffee, which he told her had to be made just right with a pinch of salt and dry mustard among the grounds. He told her about India and measured her foot with a pencil, promising he would send her a pair of sandals the next time he went to Bombay. He spoke of Alexandria and Hong Kong and San Francisco in the same breath. His face, a study in mobility, fascinated her, and once again she was absolutely positive. She was in love. He regarded her with respect and called her “Miss” until she finally grew angry.
Finally, on the last dark night when there was no moon, she kissed him while they stood on the bridge. (He had been explaining to her how the first mate had mistaken the port for Fowey’s Rock.) After that, they went below and drank half a bottle of brandy and he put her to bed in his bunk and made love to her with the hunger of a man who has been at sea for a long time.