The Making of a Writer
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329. Marie Anderson was the women’s page editor at the Miami Herald. She and Gail corresponded about “bachelorhood vs. commitment” while Gail was in London.
330. A magazine article stated that if women didn’t remarry within their first three years after a divorce, statistically their chances of remarriage declined greatly.
331. The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, was Doris Lessing’s thirteenth book in as many years. Lessing chose to represent a woman with writer’s block, and one who uses writing to achieve wholeness; yet the overall tone is disappointing, for wholeness involves an adaptation to an ordinary and lonely life.
332. Gail had read Kathleen Windsor’s steamy historical romance Forever Amber in 1952, when she was fifteen. The novel, praised for its historical detail and banned in Boston for its references to sexual acts, illegitimate pregnancies, and abortions, was the number-one fiction best seller in 1945. Its heroine, Amber St. Claire, rises from pregnant street person to favorite mistress of Charles II in Restoration England, reminding one of Nell Gwynn, cited by Gordon in the same conversation.
333. See the April 14, 1962, entry in Part 5.
334. Kimberly Avenue in Asheville passed through Gail’s childhood neighborhood. The street is as wide as a boulevard, with sidewalks and trees on either side. Fine, architecturally various homes grace the west side, while the east side is occupied, in large part, by the Grove Park Inn golf course. The greens rise to the inn itself and Sunset Mountain.
335. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey exemplifies turn-of-the-twentieth-century travel writing with its outdoorsmanship, good humor, and clean, muscular prose.
336. Phene’s Garden was, Gail recalls, “a magical Chelsea pub located deep within a mews and having a fairy-lit back garden.” Leaving her boardinghouse, she’d head up Justice Walk, turn right, then left, and “it seemed to grow out of nowhere.”
337. John William Davis, West Virginia congressman from 1911 to 1913, was ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1918 to 1921 (under Woodrow Wilson), and was the Democratic candidate for president in 1924, losing to Calvin Coolidge in a landslide.
338. “Copybook blot” is a term for a divorce that Gail had picked up from an Englishman.
339. The perfume Joy was introduced in 1930 by Jean Patou to dispel Depression blues and uplift American women who could no longer afford his clothes.
340. The Festival of Britain, created in 1951 to celebrate the centennial of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, included a scientific and cultural exposition as well as the Battersea Pleasure Gardens, which survived as Battersea Fun Fair. The Fun Fair was located across the Thames from Chelsea and featured the Big Dipper roller coaster and the Water Chute, among other rides. It was an immensely popular holiday destination. After a fatal accident on the Big Dipper in 1972, the rides were dismantled.
341. Robin Challis, Gail says, “was larger than life, like a Roman centurion. He had a job in PR or travel, but his main love was playing rugby for the London Scottish team, and collecting antiques. He hadn’t gone to university. From the first, we were cohorts. We behaved toward each other as though we knew the worst about the other, yet he could be extremely insightful as well as kind, and he came up with amazing turns of phrase. He also taught me to be physically braver—such as the time he talked me into riding the whirlabout at the Battersea Amusement Park. He is the first and last person with whom I ever went camping.”
342. James Agee’s A Death in the Family, which Gail had read a few years earlier, reveals the effect that a father’s death has on a family through the narrations of each of its members.
343. Bobbie was Gordon’s young girlfriend, who called him frequently. They went on camping trips.
344. O. Henry—William Sydney Porter, the famed short-story writer—was particularly familiar to Gail because he was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina.
345. Isabel was the Spanish boarder at 21 Church Street. Her husband was a policeman.
346. From “The Temple”: “Summe up at night, what thou hast done by day / And in the morning, what thou hast to do. / Dresse and undresse thy soul: mark the decay / And growth of it.”
347. Gail’s unpublished novel “The Possibilitarian,” also titled “The Ruptured Link,” is one week’s worth of journals kept by “a semialcoholic” named Ambrose during a holiday visit by his daughter. The 142-page manuscript is part of the Gail Godwin Papers, Manuscripts Department, Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
348. From Albert Camus’s Notebooks, 1935–1942, published by Alfred Knopf in 1963.
349. From Kierkegaard’s The Present Age, and Of the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle, translated by Alexander Dru (Harper & Row, 1962).
350. The Wilderness Stone, published in 1961, portrays a young woman who flees back in time to escape the new world order, which includes the threat of nuclear holocaust.
351. Henry James’s Daisy Miller immediately became a sensation when it was published in 1878. The protagonist had been a fresh invention—an innocent, enthusiastic American young woman delighting and dismaying Europeans with her mores.
352. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by C. G. Jung, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (Pantheon, 1963). Gail must have read a review of the Jung autobiography, or glanced at a copy at a bookstore, for it isn’t until July 8 that she purchases the volume.
353. This goes back to Gail’s reflections at the beginning of the journal, when she was absorbing the advice of B. He wrote about the “indestructible pyramid.” On January 2, 1963, the advice still carried weight, for Gail wrote, “Now I am here again, working toward that unconquerable soul B. preaches.”
354. In Violet Clay, the heroine, Violet, recalls her arrival in New York City and how she “began having variations on a nightmare about a taxi.” She’d give the driver her destination—“art”—and would find herself driven into an urban hell by a driverless vehicle; or let off, having forgotten her portfolio; or awakening from a long sleep and being sexually assaulted by the driver in lieu of the $800 fare she doesn’t have.
355. Hastings was a young boarder at 21 Old Church Street who was preparing for Sandhurst.
356. Days of Wine and Roses is an emotionally wrenching movie about a couple destroyed by alcoholism.
357. Martha Osborne, Emily’s mother, worked as one of Thomas Wolfe’s secretaries when he rented a cabin in Chunn’s Cove. She was the inspiration for Taggart McCord in Godwin’s novel A Mother and Two Daughters.
358. Stuart Pegram had been a classmate of Gail’s at St. Genevieve’s. She was the inspiration for the character of Freddy Stratton in A Southern Family.
359. “Wesley Phipps” was a short story that Gail wrote about a man who dreams for a year and then returns to his family’s business. The story is lost.
360. Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author shatters and plays with the line between fiction and reality.
361. The Connaught Hotel, located in the Mayfair district, is a late nineteenth-century hotel that retains the atmosphere of a refined English country house. It has been a favorite lodging and eating place of statesmen and celebrities.
362. Leonardo was an Italian boarder, heir to a sparkling-wine fortune.
363. Four of Italy’s leading filmmakers—Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, and Luchino Visconti—collaborated to produce Boccaccio ’70, a quartet of modern tales inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.
364. Franchelle is Gail’s half sister.
365. Gail has produced the seed of her story “The Illumined Moment—and Consequences” here.
366. Blue Peter rhododendron is a large-leaf rhododendron with light lavender-blue flowers that bloom in the late spring.
367. As Halcyone had made the fateful decision not to stay with the sea captain, she now makes the fateful decision to send her impulsive letter. Story logic dictates that she’ll ha
ve to pay in some way for her idolizing passion, and what follows indicates that Godwin was aware of the drama that was to be born of Halcyone’s abdication of self.
368. At this point, Gail took a short break from writing, and noted about the sea captain’s fate, “No, I just cannot have him ending up selling real estate. But I may have to.”
369. Gail is rewriting the story, starting with Haly’s initial contact with the sea captain.
370. Anthony Adverse was a twelve-hundred-page, best-selling novel by Hervey Allen, depicting an orphan’s rise to fortune as a merchant seaman.
371. Gail stops again and advises herself to rewrite her story. “Correct narrative,” she says, “leave out parts which you found boring, don’t worry about other stories and how they are written. The idea is here. It just has to be smoothed and loved and pampered. The dirty work is over.”
372. Gail has removed the description “those magnificent brown legs rippling with motion,” included in the first gush of writing.
373. Brain coral closes around a female gall crab after she lays her eggs in the coral, trapping her forever.
374. “Gull Key” shared the south Florida environment with “Halcyone and the Lighthouse.”
375. This conversation went as is into the final manuscript of “Gull Key.”
376. Here, and in the next quote, Gail gives her friend B.’s words to Bentley’s stepfather.
GAIL GODWIN is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including A Mother and Two Daughters, The Odd Woman, Violet Clay, and Father Melancholy’s Daughter.
She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She has written libretti for ten musical works with the composer Robert Starer. Currently she is writing her next novel, The Red Nun, and preparing The Making of a Writer, volume II, with Rob Neufeld.
ROB NEUFELD is a librarian and a book reviewer for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He directs the Together We Read program for western North Carolina.
Also by Gail Godwin
FICTION
Queen of the Underworld (2006)
Evenings at Five (2003)
Evensong (1999)
The Good Husband (1994)
Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991)
A Southern Family (1987)
The Finishing School (1984)
A Mother and Two Daughters (1982)
Violet Clay (1978)
The Odd Woman (1974)
Glass People (1972)
The Perfectionists (1970)
SHORT STORIES
Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983)
Dream Children (1976)
NONFICTION
Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life (2001)
2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Gail Godwin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint
previously published material:
Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “Bobby’s Girl,” words and music by Gary Klein
and Henry Hoffman, copyright © 1962 (renewed 1990) by Emi Blackwood Music, Inc.;
excerpt from “That Was Yesterday” from MILK AND HONEY, music and lyric by
Jerry Herman, copyright © 1961 (renewed) by Jerry Herman. All rights controlled by
Jerryco Music Company, exclusive agent: Edwin H. Morris & Company, a division of
MPL Music Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Harcourt, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from “Burnt Norton” from
Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed by
T. S. Eliot; excerpt from “East Coker” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1940
by T. S. Eliot and copyright renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Rights outside of the
United States are administered by Faber and Faber Limited.
Tom Lehrer: Excerpt from “I Hold Your Hand In Mine” by Tom Lehrer, copyright
© 1953 by Tom Lehrer.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Godwin, Gail.
The making of a writer : journals, 1961–1963 /
Gail Godwin; edited by Rob Neufeld.
p. cm.
1. Godwin, Gail—Diaries. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Diaries.
3. Fiction—Authorship. I. Neufeld, Rob. II. Title.
PS3557.0315Z468 2006
813’.54—dc22 2005044929
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