by Gail Godwin
168. This quote from the beginning of Look Homeward, Angel also includes the line “our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.” See Appendix 2, on literary influences.
169. Forty-nine Mossup Place was a chic new restaurant a half mile northeast of Tregunter Road, just outside Chelsea in Brompton, heading toward Buckingham Palace.
170. At the Miami Herald, assistant Lauderdale Bureau Chief Paulson had been Gail’s nemesis. By this time, Gail had learned not to be ruled solely by her emotions, and thus be trapped in a predetermined fate.
171. Gail was responsible for having a large stock of travel-related materials to give out to potential tourists. Beverly Miller was Gail’s boss at the U.S. Travel Service.
172. Dmitri Shostakovich completed his Symphony no. 11 in G Minor in 1957. Taking Tsar Nicholas II’s 1905 massacre of Russian protestors as his text, he incorporated many workers’ songs, some of which Gail had been hearing on recordings by the Red Army Choir.
173. The “new house” Eugenio refers to in his note to Gail is 21 Old Church Street in Chelsea, which the Wests had just rented to resituate their displaced “youth brothel.”
174. This was the story of Gail’s short marriage to Douglas Kennedy in Miami.
175. Michel, like Andrew, was responding to instances of well-off people’s excesses. He was adding another example, gifts given to people upon their retirement.
176. The movie, based on James Leo Herlihy’s novel, which Gail had liked, was adapted by playwright William Inge. Warren Beatty starred as the incorrigible stud who betrays both his lover and his brother.
177. Atlantic Monthly published two very short stories by young writers in each issue, and awarded a monetary prize to the best one in each six-month period. Atlantic Monthly surpassed the New Yorker at the time for its representation of fiction.
178. François Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim features a woman who maintains a relationship with two men, who are friends. She is both flirtatious and palsy, and seemingly mysterious, eventually leading her consorts to a mysterious tragic ending.
179. George was the U.S. Travel Service chauffeur.
180. Monie was Gail’s maternal grandmother.
181. At the age of three in Weaverville, Gail swallowed a goldfish and was rushed to the hospital. “Here it comes,” said the doctor. At age fourteen, she wrote a story about the incident, “Red Letter Day.” The grandmother in the story, by forbidding her intellectually advanced three-year-old granddaughter to drink from the fishbowl, makes her feel that she is unfairly being treated like a child. Her hunger for experience becomes do-or-die. She drinks the entire contents of the bowl and then swallows sleeping pills. When the doctor pumps her stomach, a goldfish pops out, and he faints. Back home, the girl again puts the world of imagination above the real world by pretending to be an insurrectionist, crying, “Down with Prince Albert!” and igniting curtains with a flaming hearth broom. A few years later, Gail wrote the story “The Accomplice,” in which a similar theme is developed. Innocently, a convent-school girl enacts a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace, yelling “Charge” as she runs upstairs, and is punished for her uncontrolled imagination.
182. Lucan was a rakish character in a new story that James had just begun.
183. They’re listening to the Red Army Choir.
184. After using ballpoints for a long time, Gail experimented with a fountain pen that had beckoned to her at W. H. Smith. A large ink blot on the July 4 page signifies her struggle with the new medium. She avoided messes by writing in a back-slanting way until July 23, when she returned to ballpoints.
185. Tregunter Road, on which Gail’s lodging was situated, led into Redcliffe Gardens, a larger thoroughfare in Chelsea and a neighborhood that had been built on the old Redcliffe Estate. The development of the estate had been engineered in the 1860s by architects George and Henry Godwin, namesakes whom Gail is happy to adopt, but with whom she has not made a documented connection. The status of the area, distinguished by Georgian brownstones, has fluctuated over the years, and it is now quite fashionable. In 1966, Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune and pal to the Beatles, died in a car crash in Redcliffe Gardens, inspiring one of the lyrics in the song “A Day in the Life”: “He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed.”
186. Gail’s journals are at times expressions of encouragement from her “cowriter,” her other self. She uses the code phrase “PBWM,” a prayer meaning “Please be with me,” in her journals today.
187. Gail had submitted a part of “Gull Key” to Atlantic Monthly for Atlantic First.
188. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were in the waterskiing club. Gail based a funny scene in “Mr. Bedford” on the arrival of a similarly royal couple at the club’s skiing pond, a water-filled quarry outside of London. As the couple drive up in their Bentley, the heroine, Carrie, overhears someone grumble about how the f-ing Joneses are going to monopolize the pool. Carrie assumes that the couple’s name is Effing-Jones.
189. “Wentworth Talon”was an alias that Gail made up for herself on this occasion. “Wentworth” sounded aristocratic to her, and “Talon” represented the need to hold on. Gail’s joy at writing verse is also evident in A Southern Family, in which Julia, history professor and best friend of the novelist Clare, composes playground rhymes on mordant subjects.
190. The Black Lion, one of several pubs near the Wests’ place, was their favorite.
191. Style, published in 1955 and republished in 1962, is a writers’ book, full of charming asides on various aspects of the narrator’s voice. Lucas takes a long time moving from one point to another, enjoying, as he does, his own style in explicating good style.
192. The travel notebook was one that Gail was required to fill out for her job.
193. The Twin Sisters in Amsterdam was a nightclub.
194. Gail’s territory was the north of England. She traveled first-class by train, carrying Mr. Miller’s briefcase, and visited travel agents, distributing information about trips to the United States.
195. The Premise was a show by an off-Broadway improvisational theater group of the same name that crossed the Atlantic and played for six months in London. Gene Hackman was part of the troupe at that time, and he credits it with teaching him how to make people laugh through the use of timing, delivery, and voice.
196. Gail had returned from her trip to Yorkshire. She quotes the Robert Louis Stevenson poem “Requiem,” which is engraved on his tombstone. The last two lines are “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.”
197. The appearance of tourists with kangaroo pins on their lapels signaled a long and exhausting day to come. Australians wanting to travel to America generally required the retrieval and perusal of dozens of brochures and train schedules. After that, the Travel Service agents had to log the interactions in their reports.
198. September 1961 had marked the end of Gail’s time at Mayview Manor. At that point she had reflected, “And I must think of last September, about this time. How far I was from here! In spirit, in confidence, in every way, I came back from that navy reconnaissance flight into Donna.”
199. Eric Glass was a London literary agent.
200. Stella Anderson, Gail’s good friend from Chapel Hill, was arriving in London to stay at 21 Old Church Street for an indefinite period while she had surgery on her leg.
201. “Kim” was a story that Gail was beginning to write based on a formidable little girl in second grade at St. Genevieve’s. This character later inspired the creation of Freddy Stratton in A Southern Family as well as Lisa Gudger in “Over the Mountain,” a short story published only in the anthology Evening Games: Chronicles of Parents and Children (Penguin, 1986). In the latter tale, the young protagonist says of a problematic classmate,
202. This passage and the one following are from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, chapter 13. Gail astutely zeroes in on Durrellian ideas, namel
y, that one’s personality changes depending on who’s doing the viewing and on when in their lives they’re doing the viewing.
203. The Children’s Hour, Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play about two teachers rumored by a malicious child to be lesbians, encountered severe censorship and heavy editing when director William Wyler made it into the movie These Three in 1936. In 1961, Wyler chose to remake the movie, and it was released as The Children’s Hour in the United States and The Loudest Whisper in Great Britain.
204. Gail, at this time, felt that Proust sacrificed plot too much in his efforts to represent characters’ multilevel thoughts.
205. The Wests had given Gail the master bedroom at 21 Old Church Street.
206. Viridiana, a 1961 film by cult celebrity Luis Buñuel, tells the story of a saintlike woman who immerses herself in a society of beggars in order to help them.
207. In a weak moment, Gail had agreed to share her room with Isabel, whom Shell Oil was sending to the Wests from Madrid to improve her English.
208. Justice Walk is the walkway directly across the street from 21 Old Church Street.
209. Mother Hardee was an early fictional name for Mother Winters.
210. Oskar Kokoschka, along with Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, formed an early twentieth-century triumvirate of avant-garde Viennese artists. Kokoschka’s violent expressionism—in his paintings as well as his theater pieces—set him apart.
211. Numela was an Indian girl whom Andrew was dating.
212. “Nannie’s kitchen” was Mrs. West’s term for the basement floor “kitchen,” where the boarders made tea. It was outfitted with a hot plate and sink. Mrs. West’s upstairs kitchen was off-limits, and the refrigerator was padlocked—wisely, Gail says.
213. The R. referred to here is a woman whose unbalanced marriage eventually ended in tragedy.
214. Letting Go, Philip Roth’s second published work and first novel, involves a narrator, Gabriel Wallach, whose empathetic nature and fear of emotional commitment leads him to meddle in others’ lives. One of the main characters in whom he takes an interest is Libby Herz, an uneasily married woman. Gail saw in Libby a variation of the story of Bentley, a woman trapped in a marriage.
215. GV and BP were the George Vanderbilt and the Battery Park, tall brick hotels in downtown Asheville that served as the sites of conventions and club meetings as well as lodgings for medium-budget travelers.
216. B. went into the military with the expectation that being an officer and a gentleman would not involve petty duties and attitudes. He had never experienced being treated as a servant and ultimately he learned to bide his time until he was the one giving the orders.
217. Happy Valley was, at the time, a new subdivision east of Asheville in which Gail’s stepfather, Frank Cole, built houses. There, he provided his family—Gail’s mother and
218. The day before, on October 22, President Kennedy made an announcement that the Soviet Union was building missile bases in Cuba; on October 23, he ordered a naval blockade of Cuba.
219. Haileybury is a boys’ boarding school. When James was a student there, boys were required to take cold baths.
220. Peter W. was a reporter on a London newspaper and a former student of F. R. Leauis’s at Cambridge.
221. D. H. Lawrence published The Rainbow, his fourth novel, in 1915, when he was thirty. Stepping away from his autobiographical third novel, Sons and Lovers, to portray a family straddling the years of the Industrial Revolution, he felt he had achieved a literary landmark. Embracing three generations, Lawrence placed Ursula Brangwen, granddaughter of stolid, earthy Tom Brangwen, in a key position, for it is she who provides the link to Women in Love and who represents women’s struggle for equality in society and within marriage.
222. Charles and Jill were a mismatched couple that Gail knew. Jill had once been considered a child prodigy ballerina, but she lost that promise, gaining weight, and no longer danced. She had been unhappy, Gail knew, and now Jill was facing the rejection of Charles’s French family, who opposed Charles’s marriage to her despite Jill’s efforts to prove her merit. She had moved to Paris to learn French, but to no avail. When Gail went shopping in Paris, already feeling like a “lout-ess,” Gail says, in comparison to the couture-sophisticated French women, Jill went with her, making the experience a depressing one, for Jill had no money. Gail took advantage of the revolution in femininity and perfume that had developed in France at this time. Her appreciation of this is revealed in this journal part.
223. Gail is referring to making a down payment on her own apartment, away from the Wests.
224. Five days later, Gail would write her grandmother, Monie, “I am sorry to say that I am not leaving the Wests on friendly terms.”
225. Godwin’s story “Roxanne” was never published, and no copy of the manuscript survives.
226. The Brothers Four were one of the most popular groups propelling the “folk revival” movement from 1959 to 1964. The movement involved the “discovery” of traditional Southern mountain music as well as the development of the college-campus circuit for musicians.
227. This Peter is not Gail’s journalist acquaintance, Peter W., but a young boarder at 21 Old Church Street. He fell in love with Stella, which caused Peter’s parents to make a fuss and the Wests to turn against Stella.
228. The Republican Party began making steady gains in the South in 1962, turning away from race and developing such key issues as budgetary conservatism and decentralized government. Lawrence Brown, Buncombe County sheriff and, to some, a feared political boss, was defeated in that year, and Kathleen started the Republican Women of Asheville. She became enamored of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican candidate for president in 1964.
229. Brahms’s Sonata no. 3 in D minor for Violin and Piano is a masterpiece of sustained passion within the normally conservative chamber music form.
230. James was the only man with a Gemini astrological sign with whom she had formed a close relationship.
231. Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, was a huge hit in England.
232. Edwards was the handyman for 5 Green Street, Mayfair.
233. The Southrons were Gail’s landlords at 5 Green Street.
234. Gail believes that B. has known for a long while that he’s wanted Gail for a permanent relationship.
235. Gail is referring to her transistor radio.
236. On October 20, 1962, China attacked India along the Himalayan border following the failure of efforts to negotiate disputed territory.
237. Pat Farmer was one of the three original guides at the U.S. Travel Service office along with Gail and Betty Hughes. Pat left to marry her Mexican boyfriend, Betty married Howard Melton, and Gail stayed the longest.
238. Gail skipped the primer coat.
239. Harry T. Moore’s biography, The Intelligent Heart: The Story of D. H. Lawrence, originally published in 1954. Moore was also a scholar of Lawrence Durrell and Henry James.
240. Happy Days, Samuel Beckett’s 1961 play, presents a woman, Winnie, buried in sand amid a scorched, postnuclear environment. The play’s circular dramatic monologue, creating suspense without a plotline, corresponds to musical form.
241. Gail is referring to people preaching from soapboxes, and their listeners.
242. The artist in question was Jean Arp (1887–1966), of whose works there had been a special exhibit. He was cofounder of Dada and later a Surrealist.
243. Gail had to pack a suitcase with brochures and go door to door like a salesman. Women generally didn’t go door to door except to sell cosmetics. Gail presented herself at travel agencies wearing a tweed suit, scarf, high heels, stockings, and black kid gloves.
244. Seeing “the great white Teide,” the Canary Islands’ snow-topped volcanic mountain, Pico de Teide, made the fight Gail had with Antonio seem trivial in comparison.
245. Esse quam videre, “to be rather than to seem,” is the state motto of North Carolina.
246. W.C., or Westminster C
ity, where Gail was distributing travel information, is the borough in London that contains Great Britain’s government offices, its major shopping district, the clothing industry, Westminster Abbey, the major art galleries, and Paddington Station.
247. How the West Was Won represented the apotheosis of certain cultural trends in America. It was filmed in Cinerama format, in which three projectors were used to show what had been recorded on three cameras at once. Based on a seven-article series published in Life magazine, the movie attempted to tell the American story through the story of the West, and it did so with a confidence in Manifest Destiny that would not survive the American public’s disillusionment with the Vietnam War.
248. A Kiss of Death is a drink that mixes Scotch with tequila and dark rum.
249. Having both is enjoying the experience of being outside looking in and being inside having the direct experiences.
250. Gail’s objection to Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools was its subjugation of characterization to ideas.
251. On the main drag in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, married couples would promenade, and Gail had noticed that the women were often pregnant.
252. The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer’s film based on the 1959 Richard Condon novel, uses flashbacks to portray the discovery by a soldier (played by Frank Sinatra) that his fellow POW (Laurence Harvey) has been brainwashed to kill. The revelation about how governments work was deemed controversial enough to have the American government stop its production. President Kennedy gave the go-ahead to the film. Then, after Kennedy’s assassination a year later, the film was taken out of distribution.
253. “Miss Shining Light” is Doreen.
254. Ma Griffe, a woody, mossy fragrance, was developed by Carven in 1946.
255. McK. was a travel agent.
256. In Time and Western Man, published in 1927, Wyndham Lewis viciously attacked such writers as James Joyce and Ezra Pound, who had helped him in his career, and set himself apart from what he considered a deadening modern tradition.