by Gail Godwin
3. Mayview Manor, a 138-room hotel built of native chestnut wood and fieldstone, made Blowing Rock, North Carolina, a mecca for the rich when it was established in 1921. The hotel was closed in 1966 and demolished in 1978.
4. “The Raising of Lazarus,” an unpublished story, imagines a turning point in the life of a playboy. Godwin had begun it in 1959. Although it moves overdescriptively toward a safe ending, it exhibits a number of outstanding features, including the detailed imagining of another person’s intimate life and the integral inclusion of music in a character’s mood and routine. Godwin has appropriated one aspect of Lazarus’s story—his management of a Miami hotel—for her new novel, Queen of the Underworld.
5. “I Always Will,” an early story, no longer survives as a manuscript.
6. L. was the young assistant manager at Mayview Manor.
7. Kenneth Littauer, a New York literary agent, in response to a query from Godwin, had said he’d look at her work. Godwin had turned to him after having sent another agent, Lurton Blassingame, a novel that she had adapted from one of her mother’s works—only to discover that Blassingame had previously represented the original manuscript for her mother. As it turned out, Godwin never sent Littauer anything.
8. At the time, Gail was writing a story titled “Bentley’s Girl,” which depicted a man named Bentley who drained people of their secrets while passively listening and nodding. His victims referred to him as a “terrific conversationalist.”
9. B.’s phrase “the indestructible pyramid” became such a key one in Godwin’s concept of independence and of a patient accumulation of experience and confidence that she used it as the conclusion of her first complete novel “Gull Key” (unpublished).
10. Sergey Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 has a Romantic, Peer Gynt kind of melody that, in Rachmaninoff’s hands, ends up sounding like a brave voice in a raging storm.
11. Marya Mannes, whose 1958 book More in Anger electrified the country with its satire, was a helpful guide. Mannes shared Godwin’s tendency to replace abstract character traits with the habits and possessions of individuals, judiciously observed.
12. On September 7, 1960, Godwin went out with the U.S. Navy’s Hurricane Hunter Squadron to study Hurricane Donna, a landmark weather event with gusts of up to 175 mph. The next day, her article, “I Looked Donna in the Eye—She’s Tough,” was the top story on the front page of the Miami Herald.
13. Flynn’s autobiography, released soon after his death in 1959, had stirred up controversy because of its blurring of fable and fact, objectionable portraits, and candidness about the author’s convictions and obsessions.
14. The African-American pianist and jazz singer grew up poor in Tryon, North Carolina, about thirty miles from Asheville.
15. Mrs. Young, housemother to waiters and waitresses in Gail’s dorm, “monitored our linens and our morals,” Gail says.
16. Jacques Guerlain created the fragrance L’Heure Bleu (the name means “the blue hour”) in 1912.
17. In 1908, a French order of nuns known as the Religious of Christian Education established St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines, a Catholic private school with a nondenominational educational mission, in Asheville. Gail Godwin attended from the second grade through the ninth.
18. Gail’s recollection of her Chapel Hill confidants includes Bill Hamilton, an admired friend; Ronnie, a “playmate,” who boarded Gail’s boxer when the dog had been kicked out of Gail’s dorm; Shelley, a doctor, with whom Gail had had a stormy relationship (for a fictional treatment, see “The Angry Year,” in Mr. Bedford and the Muses); Martin, a Miami Beach hotel director and a mentor; and Uncle William, Gail’s father’s older brother, a Selma, North Carolina, judge who had looked after her following her father’s suicide in 1958.
19. The Daily Tar Heel was and is the official newspaper of the University of North Carolina.
20. “He” was “L.,” the young assistant manager at Mayview Manor (“the chipmunk”— see August 15). Gail had spurned him at first because he was four years her junior and rich. “He went home every night to his family’s chalet,” Gail recalls, “while the other young employees had to put up with the limited amenities of the dorm.” But he persisted, and at the end of the summer she began to “appreciate his fresh good looks, his hunger to take his place in the big world,” and his intensive campaign to win her approval.
21. The Italian ocean liner Leonardo da Vinci was put into service in 1960 as a replacement for the Andrea Doria, sunk in 1956. Financially unsuccessful, the Leonardo was removed from service in 1978 and destroyed by fire in 1980.
22. Gail is referring to a coffee shop in downtown Blowing Rock, where she often had a snack before going on evening duty at Mayview Manor.
23. Godwin’s “Halcyone” story had been inspired by a shipping incident that she had covered as a Miami Herald reporter. It came to encompass her interest in a sea captain and her soon-to-come transatlantic crossing.
24. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, published in 1961 after Lowry’s death, is a collection of his stories. It includes “Through the Panama,” in which a writer voyages to Europe on a freighter, bearing the albatross of literary self-consciousness. Under the Volcano is Lowry’s most celebrated work.
25. Sister Kathleen Winters, or Mother Winters, from Ireland, served as principal of the grammar school at St. Genevieve’s, which Godwin attended from 1944 through 1952.
26. Gail had just bought and read Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger’s novel about alienation from and compassion toward human society.
27. Skål, or “skoal,” is a Scandinavian drinking greeting—a toast—and is derived from the Old Norse word for “bowl.”
28. In the stagnant period in her life, between her divorce and her Mayview Manor stint, Gail took refuge in Pack Memorial Library, then located in an old, Renaissance-style building on Asheville’s historic square. “I haunted the library,” Gail says, “read all the magazines, took out the maximum of books, prowled the ill-lit shelves.”
29. Voit Gilmore, a Winston-Salem native and Chapel Hill graduate, was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to head the U.S. Travel Service in 1961. Gail was hoping to be hired by him.
30. Saturday Review.
31. Maria Beale Fletcher of Asheville had just been selected as Miss America 1962.
32. The U.S. Forest Service celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Weeks Law in 1961. The Weeks Law enabled the government to purchase land for national forests.
33. Either/Or, one of the truly readable great works of philosophy in Western literature, speaks directly to Godwin. Wanting to depict how the person who commits himself to making honest choices achieves a kind of freedom and happiness that the intellectual and the pleasure seeker can only graze, Søren Kierkegaard invents memorable, representative characters. A few of them anticipate kindred souls in Godwin’s fiction: the seducer, for whom every girl is woman in general; the despairer, who either learns to cherish himself or gives up; and the good husband, who performs acts of love every day, sometimes through simple tasks, which, nonetheless, assume great significance in context.
34. McKee was Voit Gilmore’s assistant director in the U.S. Travel Service. Gail enjoyed her dinner with him on her last night in D.C.
35. Godwin, having graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in June 1959, boarded a train and embarked on her Miami Herald adventure. Bruised, over the next two years, by breakups in marriage and career, she came around to summoning a second confidence-charged leap of faith, one that also involved booking passage.
36. Godwin begins Part 2 with an inscription that connects to her father, who—like Richard Cory, the subject of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem—had been a dreamer and a suicide. Robinson, too, had seen himself as a failed dreamer, despite having won three Pulitzer Prizes. He shunned fame and wrote out of a need to express the conflict between his ideals and his perceptions. “This itch for authorship,” he once confessed, “is worse than the devil and spoils a man for any
thing else.”
37. These words form the last line of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” about the legendary sea voyager.
38. The restaurant people—the W.s—are to be distinguished from the young couple the Walshes, whose name is spelled out.
39. Cherry Heering, a brandy made from cherries and crushed cherry pits, was the invention of the eighteenth-century Danish shipowner Peter Heering.
40. Gail and a photographer had been assigned by the Miami Herald to cover the running aground of a freighter, the SS Gloria Dunaif. It was through such an accident that she had met the ship’s captain and formed a relationship.
41. Pursewarden is the accomplished author whom the narrator in Lawrence Durrell’s novel Justine envies. Among his occasional pronouncements is this one: “The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by reference backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not traveling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of the future racing toward one. Anyway, that was my idea . . .”
42. The name that Gail invents for her character refers, first, to sentiments about her halcyon days, or days of calm. It is a nautical term denoting the placid weather that comes amid winter storms to allow the kingfisher to hatch and rear her young on the water. In Greek mythology, Halcyone, or Alcyone, was the daughter of Aeolus, god of the winds. She tried to persuade her mortal husband, Ceyx, not to go to sea to question Apollo about his bad fortune. Ceyx went anyway and died in a storm. Halcyone found his corpse in the tide and transformed herself and him into water birds.
43. The International Longshoremen’s Association.
44. See Appendix 1 for a fuller version of Gail’s drafts for “Halcyone and the Lighthouse.”
45. A famous example of an Atlantic -type story is Katherine Anne Porter’s “Holiday,” published in the magazine in December 1960. “Holiday” is the story of a woman who stays with a German-American family in Texas for a month in order to get some distance on her troubles. She comes to empathize with the family’s handicapped servant, who, it turns out, is the hosts’ eldest daughter.
46. In James’s psychological novel, a governess’s perception of former servants’ malicious ghosts leads to the death of one of her young charges.
47. “What a pity. If I had not had so much Scotch, perhaps I could write the truth.”
48. “Tak,” with a short vowel, often spelled “takk,” means “thank you.”
49. Skagerrak is the name of the part of the North Sea between Norway and Denmark.
50. Contralto Marian Anderson was at the apex of her career in 1961. That year, she had sung the National Anthem at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
51. Fredensborg was a fishing village (it’s now a suburb) near Copenhagen on the island of Zealand, or Sjaelland. The island was named for the seals that populated it as well as for the word “soul,” which, for the natives, was closely related to their totemic animal. Gail was trying to soak in as much culture as possible on her journey. She was willing to use her charms to do so, but not without reserve, as she had declined going to Malmö, the Swedish city across the Ore Sound (Øresund), with the untrustworthy McCullum. Frederiksborg is a county of Denmark. The Ocean Pearl is a cruise ship.
52. The Berlingske Tidende was one of the two major daily newspapers in Denmark, the other being the more socially progressive Politiken, whose offices Gail had seen on her itinerary four days earlier.
53. Deeda Blair’s husband, William McCormick Blair Jr., was the U.S. ambassador to Denmark from 1961 to 1964. Deeda was one of the heroes of public health education in the twentieth century.
54. N. is Niels, a major character in Gail’s Danish experience. He was her love interest—in some ways an ideal Dane, in other ways a troubled exception.
55. The Ny Carlsberg Glypotek is a museum that houses a large and important collection of ancient sculpture as well as a modern collection specializing in works by Auguste Rodin.
56. Paul Dubois (1829–1905) was a French sculptor who twice won the Medal of Honor from the French Academy.
57. Lorraine O’Grady became a longtime friend of Gail’s. They first met at Ambassador William Blair’s reception for Marian Anderson in Denmark, October 1961. An anecdote drawn from that first meeting appears in Godwin’s story “Some Side Effects of Time Travel,” published in Dream Children (1976). Gail and her friend, seated on either side of Copenhagen’s prison warden, heard his mournful opinion about the possible extinction of the Danish language and his meek revelation about Denmark’s most prevalent crime: bicycle theft. Later in the journals, Gail muses about her color blindness regarding Lorraine, a light-skinned African-American, and registers the contrast with the race consciousness of the South.
58. Gail interviewed Deeda Blair, wife of the ambassador, for a freelance spec assignment for the Post. The interview never ran.
59. Rolf Høiaas is transformed into Rolf Engelgard in Godwin’s story “A Cultural Exchange,” published in Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1976). His role as host becomes a spooky interplay of charm and manipulation. Gail notes that the pronunciation of Høiaas “sounds like someone saying, ‘HI-yos?’ with an emphasis on the ‘Hi, ’ as in ‘Hi-yo Silver!’— very musical, with a little upbeat question mark at the end.”
60. King Gorm unified the warring clans of Vikings on Jutland, the mainland part of Denmark, in the early 900s. Old Danish families like tracing their genealogies back to him.
61. A tear also falls down the face of Mr. Engelgard in Gail’s story “A Cultural Exchange.” Godwin places the fictionalized tear-shedding at the Deer Park in Klampenborg as newly arrived Amanda, overwhelmed by the vision of deer bathed in sunset rays, grabs her guide and says, “You certainly do know how to give things a lovely beginning.”
62. Martin Hansen is considered one of the leading post–World War II writers in Denmark. He turned from social realism to fables during the German occupation. His 1950 novel The Liar portrayed the plight of a modern idealist.
63. The French existentialist Albert Camus, like the Dane Kierkegaard, was an early influence on Godwin, reflecting the intellectual climate of the day as well as Gail’s affinity for a state of mind preferred by Danes in general.
64. Eleanor Stem was Gail’s best friend at Peace College in 1958.
65. Klampenborg is a seaside resort town six miles north of Copenhagen. It is most famous for its Deer Park and forest of beech trees.
66. Godwin will chronicle her journey to Berlin, including her interrogation by the East German police, and write an article that will appear in the Asheville Citizen-Times in November 1961.
67. Lars is Frowsy’s given name.
68. “That Was Yesterday,” a song from Milk and Honey, the Jerry Herman musical about an American man and woman who meet in Israel, became a hit in 1961. “And there’s not a chance of a backward glance / Over all the bridges that I’ve burned. / For I was someone else in another time” was a refrain heard repeatedly on the radio.
69. Sanctuary is Tony Richardson’s 1961 movie based on William Faulkner’s novel of the same name. Lee Remick played Temple Drake, who, the movie poster proclaimed, “sank into degradation and rose to seek redemption,” and Yves Montand played Candy, “the Creole lover who taught her the ways of evil.”
70. The Red Army Choir was formed in 1928 with an initial company of twelve performers. Subsequently it grew to a body of over two hundred performers, drawn from amateur art circles within the military. It gained an international reputation for its presentation of folk songs.
71. Glenn Miller’s big band’s theme song was “Moonlight Serenade.” During World War II, it was called America’s second national anthem.
72. Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) lived a few miles north of the Høiass family, also on Strandvej, the oceanfront.
73. Morfar is the Danish word for “maternal grandfather.” Gudrun, a waitress, also lived with the Høiass family.
74. Godwin had acquired a freelance job with a local news agency. She rewrote articles to improve their use of English.
75. “I was completely engaged in living/writing,” Gail recalls about her precious first weeks in Europe, “often not stopping to distinguish one from the other. ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ was to be a collection of Copenhagen experiences that would add up to a novel. I know I typed furiously on that rented typewriter. I can see the single-spaced lines and feel the thin paper.”
76. Deals with the Devil, edited by Basil Davenport, was an anthology published in 1958 by Dodd, Mead.
77. “Roxanne” was a part of Godwin’s novel-in-progress based on her new friend, Lorraine O’Grady.
78. Françoise Sagan’s novels, such as Bonjour Tristesse (1954) and A Certain Smile (1956), were typically 128 pages long.
79. Gail took Niels to Kronborg Castle, immortalized by Shakespeare in Hamlet.
80. “Fluffy,” by Theodore Sturgeon, was published in the March 1947 issue of Weird Tales. It features Ransome, a self-absorbed, perennial houseguest who meets his deadly match in a talking, scheming cat, inappropriately named Fluffy.
81. Christian was Godwin’s fictional name for Niels. His chapter in her novel about Copenhagen corresponds to the novels that make up Lawrence Durrell’s quartet about Alexandria.
82. The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy’s sharp, comic novel about a fearless young woman’s experiences among bohemians in Paris, was a best seller in 1958.
83. J. D. Salinger did not achieve publishing success until he was thirty, in 1949, when the New Yorker published his story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Two years later, Catcher in the Rye defined an innocent, hurt, postwar, psychoanalyzing American nation, and Salinger’s consequent fame drove him into seclusion.
84. The Armenian photographer Yousuf Karsh, whose career spanned half a century, is famous for the portraits he made of such greats as Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein.