by Gail Godwin
257. B. had told Gail by phone that he was not ready to commit and didn’t think she was ready, either.
258. Memphis blues music became very popular in the 1960s, thanks in part to B. B. King, whose initials stand for “Beale (Street) Boy.” “Beale Street Blues,” written by J. C. Handy in 1919, celebrates unrepressed life in the district and includes the lines:
259. Gail is being conscious of her use of time.
260. Gail started writing “Gull Key” fresh.
261. Gail was searching for a book on logic that improved upon the lessons she had received in a class at Chapel Hill. She may have been inspired, in part, by her confrontation with Peter W., who had a degree in philosophy and logic.
262. Edward Rochester, in the film version of Jane Eyre, conforms to one idea that Gail has of the ideal man. His cultured cynicism is so alluring that neither his disloyalty to his lunatic wife nor his disability (blindness caused by a climactic house fire) makes him unappealing as a marriage candidate. In this journal part, Gail views her relationships with men in many lights. In the next entry (January 20), she analyzes the character of and her attraction to H., whom she’d recently met, noting her concern about “when the music stops.” His morality is his strongest point, though there are traces of his former physical beauty as a red-haired sprinter. Eight days later, James visits her—while she’s in the midst of reading Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s melodrama about a passionate and vengeful lover—and presents himself as a male ideal free of sexual expectations. A week passes; Gail begins to write a story that balances her experiences with Neils and Antonio, with whom the physical component was key.
263. The “ha, ha” was written in later as a postscript to the trip. “We didn’t get along in Paris,” Gail notes. “His twitch was worse than ever and he accused me of picking at my face and scalp. I was envious of all the perfectly groomed Frenchwomen, and disenchanted with H., as he with me.”
264. Veeraswamys was considered the best Indian restaurant in England, and was the oldest, having been established in 1926.
265. Gordon Landsborough, publisher of action novels and military histories, had an office around the corner from the U.S. Travel Service agency. He became interested in Gail’s work and recommended her to his friend Ursula Winant, a literary agent. He also took
266. “A good, full life” is the fairy-tale wish passed on to the prodigal daughter by her mother, who did not necessarily experience such a blessing herself.
267. Gail is referring to Gordon Landsborough.
268. The play is The Bed Sitting Room by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan of Goon Show fame. It features characters who experience disconnected absurdities amid postnuclear British ruins, including one character’s transformation into a bed-sitting room.
269. Gail Godwin Kennedy.
270. Mose Godwin.
271. Jack M. was a law student at Chapel Hill, an ex-Marine, and an older man. He was the inspiration for Jack Krazowski, the experienced outsider in “The Angry Year” who offers the heroine, Janie Lewis, an alternative to her appealing yet dishonest relationship with Graham, president of his fraternity. Janie, sensing the challenges of the 1960s, becomes angry with herself for caring about what others think and for tending toward conformity.
272. James Jensen, whose given name was Dmitri, was the son of an English engineer who had emigrated to Communist Russia. See the fuller entry on him on February 16 in this journal part.
273. Lyons Corner House had emerged in 1909 as the only place in England to which people could go to nurse a cup of coffee in the morning. In 1954, with the end of food rationing, the chain began serving quick meals, such as “grill and cheese,” prior to the entry of McDonald’s and Burger King into the country.
274. My Way of Life is a pocketbook compendium of the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, “simplified for everyone,” the subtitle indicates.
275. Gail’s reading of The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, consciously addressed her feelings of aloneness, awakened in her by the anniversary of her father’s death, as well as by her precarious status as an independent woman abroad.
276. The full manuscript of “Mourning” has not survived.
277. Shortly, Gail will change the name of her heroine from Beth Learner to Lee Bradshaw.
278. Gail has begun to expand her short story “Mourning” to novel length. Readers will recognize the name Ambrose. It is the name of the heroine’s uncle in Violet Clay. He, like the father in “Mourning,” commits suicide. Here, Gail considers beginning “Mourning” with Ambrose’s family’s reaction to the news of Lee’s father’s death. In Violet Clay, the mention of Uncle Ambrose’s death is delayed. Preceding it are Violet’s memory of working in his studio as a budding artist, and her recollection, while drunk after a career setback, of his welcome when she’d arrived in New York City. The news of his death eventually comes to Violet via a telephone call that awakens her from an alcoholic blackout.
279. The entry breaks off at this point.
280. This Sporting Life was a 1963 film featuring Richard Harris in his first starring role. He played a coal miner’s son who rises above his circumstances to become a celebrated rugby player. The game brutalizes him, and his resentful anger both inflames and saps.
281. Henry James’s massive, late-career novel The Golden Bowl portrays four individuals who negotiate what easily could have become nasty conflicts within their close unit. The relief that this book offered Gail, after seeing a brutal movie and while feeling assaulted by aloneness, is equivocal. It violated both romantic love and father-daughter closeness, and it represented the kind of security found in safe marriages.
282. Betty Hughes Melton was one of Gail’s coworkers at the U.S. Travel Service. Her husband, Howard, was employed at the London School of Economics for a year. They were returning home to the States to begin their home life; the coziness of their relationship had tempted Gail at times.
283. Some of the material about the daughter’s rediscovery of her biological father made it into Godwin’s short story “Old Lovegood Girls,” included in the Ballantine Reader’s Circle edition, Evenings at Five: A Novel and Five Stories (2004). Regarding her rescue by a stranger, Godwin’s eighteen-year-old narrator, Christina, says, “I was still panting hard from my close brush with downward mobility.” She notes her stepfather’s unsure job status, her mother’s pregnancy with her second child by her new husband, and her own failure to enroll in a college. Christina’s invitation to her graduation reaches her father at a fatefully receptive moment. “It struck him suddenly,” she muses, “that I might be a credit to him.” Later he says, “I’m glad I found you while you were still fresh and unspoiled by life.” Their time spent on a beach, which occupies a substantial part of “Mourning,” contributes only to an aside in “Old Lovegood Girls.” In the aside, Christina tells how she had invented short stories for her English teacher, Fiona Petrie, in order to attract Miss Petrie to her father. In reaction to one story—about “a girl and her father lying on the beach, discussing how thankful they were to have been reunited”—Miss Petrie comments, “This moved me very much.” The story concluded with the father murmuring, against the sound of the waves, “Now I feel I have something to be good for again.”
284. Gail is composing her story by assembling vivid segments, capturing what she can on the fly. Of note is the way that Lee Bradshaw reveres her father before going to sleep. In Violet Clay, Godwin worked a major change in approach. Idolatry became the province of Ambrose’s girlfriends, for whom he was the Byronic hero. The daughter figure, now the niece, strives to empathize with him—to live through him—rather than admire him at a distance. This powerful tendency is developed to the utmost extent in Violet Clay and comes to a head when Violet visits and then takes possession of her dead uncle’s bungalow.
285. La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s landmark film, follows a journalist on a surreal journey through a depersonalized modern city—a kind of nightwal
k or dreamwalk.
286. Alden James, a Canadian, was a medical student who had come to London for both studies and play. Gail, Robin Challis (a man whom Gail met at her office), and he sought each other out for solace and went on camping trips together.
287. Black Nativity is a gospel play that was written by famed African-American poet Langston Hughes in 1961. It inspires hand-clapping to such songs as “This Little Light of Mine.”
288. Winant is the literary agent who had taken an interest in Gail’s work a month before, when Gail had presented “Gull Key” to her. Preparing to send her “Mourning,” Gail had not been aware that Winant’s father had, like Gail’s own and like the character in the story, committed suicide.
289. Tennessee Williams was staying at the hotel while The Night of the Iguana was playing at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in 1959.
290. Displaced persons.
291. In The Perfectionists, Dane Empson encounters a similar specter in a dark church in a very different context. On a resort island, Dane walks out on her husband, John, following a disturbing experience with his monstrous little son, and recalls the time she had walked out on him after having met his estranged mother. After a lonesome lunch, she takes refuge in a church, which reminds her of her non-churchgoing father and her mother’s abandonment of him. She sits down in a pew, contemplating how her marriage has fallen short of the “Big Event” for which she’d longed. “Frowning hard into the incense-laden murk, she met a pair of wise black eyes staring back at her. She practically leaped out of her skin. It was an old priest, spying on her from behind a statue of the Virgin Mary. Momentarily, she expected him to whisk down the aisle and accuse her of something. But when he saw he’d been seen, he hurried away, a quick black wraith, into the restricted sanctity of the chancel.”
292. James Baldwin’s Another Country was a controversial book when it was published in 1962, drawing both extreme praise and condemnation, whereby Gail was alerted to its value. The title suggests another point of interest to her—the novel’s concern with displaced people, including those wandering in a large city and those going overseas.
293. Madame Tussaud’s first wax figures—of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin—were eerie enough with their arrested liveliness. In 1844, Tussaud added her museum’s Chamber of Horrors, featuring French Revolution victims and serial-murder characters, achieving a level of unequalled ghoulishness.
294. Bruce Hogg, a British official, visited the travel office on business occasionally. Gail remembers him particularly for the phrase “I blotted my copybook.”
295. The format of the lines replicates the handwritten entries in the journal.
296. “Dancing in the Dark,” a 1941 song by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, was a favorite of swing bandleader Artie Shaw, and was featured in the film musical The Band Wagon (1953), which starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. The “fold their tents” quote is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Day Is Done,” which also contains the lines:
I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me
That my soul cannot resist.
Gail is assembling pieces that evoke her subject and that complement, as it turns out, her experience of a nightwalk.
297. Godwin keenly illustrates her interest in and invulnerability to suicide in Violet Clay. Violet scares and angers a neighbor who sees her put Uncle Ambrose’s gun to her head in an apparent reenactment. Yet the gun was not loaded, and Violet was attempting to understand her uncle. Understanding suicide saves the heroine from feeling suicidal.
298. Jensen was a serious writer and lecturer. See the February 16, 1963, entry.
299. Marty was a man whom Gail had known in Miami.
300. Gail is sketching out a script that she and Dorothea, the new girl at work, were writing for a BBC production.
301. The Barley Mow is the pub at which Gail had come to know James (Dmitri) Jensen. See the February 16, 1963, entry.
302. Ruislip, a U.S. Air Force base outside of London, was where U.S. government personnel had been required to undergo regular physicals.
303. Griffith, an English psychiatrist, was Dorothea’s husband.
304. The Physicists was a new play by the nihilist Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Dürrenmatt, as a youth, had rejected the orthodoxy of his father, a pastor, and the bourgeois mediocrity of his hometown, Bern. The world of professional art, which he’d hoped to enter, rejected him and his fantastical illustrations. He immersed himself in philosophical studies and wrote stories, including “The Torturer,” in which God is the protagonist. At age twenty-six, in 1947, he wrote his first two plays to be produced on stage. They were greeted with audience jeers and critical acclaim. In The Physicists, Dürrenmatt turned his attention to the Cold War and nuclear arms. In his worldview, accidents and human nature lead to the worst possible outcomes, and no story is complete until it takes that final step.
305. Lee’s Court is an address in Mayfair, near the U.S. Embassy.
306. Gail initially thought Gordon was twenty-five, later learned he was twenty-eight and emended her journal.
307. Henry is the intellectually secure music-lover whom Gail had met in January. See the January 20, 1963, entry, in which the anticipated Paris trip bears the wry postscript “ha, ha.”
308. After an “Oh God” with a capital G, Gail clearly refers to a lowercase god. The building up she has to do is the work of someone who idealizes or fashions her man.
309. “Rush” was a story about a young woman, Janie Lewis, who transfers from a junior college to a university, only to find herself both attracted to and repelled by the elite clubbishness there. Fifteen years later, Gail’s rewrite of the story, retitled “The Angry Year,” secured publication in McCall’s. “I went to sorority parties as a rushee,” Janie says at the outset, harking back to the earlier title. Gail’s new title highlighted the connection between the character’s rebellious nature and the spirit of the times. “There were new things . . . to be angry about,” she reveals at one point. “The sixties were coming.” Ultimately, the protagonist realizes that her anger was also directed at her conformist self.
310. “Music at Midnight” was a program aired on BBC.
311. Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet uses variations on just a few haunting themes to create drama and pathos, combining the Russian interest in expressive melody with the Western European one in overall design.
312. Ronnie was the Chapel Hill friend who had taken care of Gail’s dog when the dean of women evicted the animal from Gail’s dorm.
313. In “Mr. Bedford,” Godwin alters actual events substantially to design her drama. The dinner with the Wests, characterized here as a regrounding, does not serve that function in the fictional account. Instead Carrie, the narrator, connects with Mrs. Easton over a beer after Mrs. Easton has tracked her down at the Travel Office. The confidences shared lead Carrie to reflect, “I am still far from ‘figuring out’ the Eastons.” In the fiction, Carrie is loveless and meets a romantic man at a party the night before she goes over to the Eastons’ house—in other words, much later than in Godwin’s actual life. The concurrence produces in her the feeling of “achieving a true relationship to time.” Carrie’s fate turns out to be a subtle one—a revelation about the Eastons that enables her to translate life into literature. As a salute to this understanding, Godwin has Carrie lose the manuscript of her precious novel—not the Ambrose story Gail had actually been working on at the time, but a story about a failed marriage in the Florida Keys. Goodbye, “Gull Key”; hello, more evolved self.
314. Conrad Hilton’s new hotel in London was an act of evangelism, spreading the gospel of American materialism and security to a world consumed with Cold War bad news. The London Hilton, at a height of 405 feet, became, in 1963, the tallest building in the city, outreaching St. Paul’s Cathedral and overlooking Buckingham Pala
ce.
315. Richard Joseph was a well-known author of books and syndicated columns on travel as well as an Esquire editor. In Gail’s office, he was a celebrity.
316. The Thistle was a cozy pub located at the corner of Sackville and Vigo Streets, next door to the U.S. Travel Service.
317. In the Guy de Maupassant horror tale “The Horla,” a madman comes to believe that an invisible demon is tormenting him and that the specter will expand his influence to take over mankind.
318. Father Liston was the resident priest at St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines.
319. Andrew had been dating Numela since as early as September 27, 1962.
320. Gail is referring to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, an expository poem about timelessness and art.
321. The Hansen boy had shared a room in a hostel with Gail and had tried continually to sponge off of her.
322. The Outsider was the title of the English edition of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, translated as The Stranger in the American edition.
323. Jill was the friend who had gone with Gail to Paris in October 1962. (See the footnote for the October 31, 1962, entry, and also see May 7 in this journal part.)
324. From T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “East Coker,” section 5, stanza 2, lines 8–12.
325. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” section 5, stanza 1, line 18.
326. This story would find published form, as “An Intermediate Stop,” in North American Review. Gail finished the first draft of it on March 18, 1965, calling it “The Illumined Moment—and Consequences.”
327. With Alden and Robin, Gail is listening to The Three-Cornered Hat, a ballet created by Manuel de Falla at the urging of Sergey Diaghilev and staged in 1919 with sets by Pablo Picasso. Even in 1963, it would be considered exotic with its takes on the fandango, seguidilla, and Gypsy jota; and with its combination of fanfare, melody, sound effects, classical allusions, and French impressionism.
328. Robin had engaged in a bout of drinking in the basement bar of the American Embassy along with Gail, Alden, and Dorothea. Gail reflects, “Nobody was at their best, but Robin got particularly sour and earned Dorothea’s harsh comment, ‘He makes me feel unquiet.’”