by Gail Godwin
AUGUST 8 • Thursday
I just thought: If I wanted to get rid of Gordon, I would simply hand over my stack of journals from 1961 onward. By the time he read through the first one, he would be shocked. I cannot forget Gordon’s statement re Ingmar Bergman: “I don’t understand mad people and I don’t want to.”
With so much sunshine in my memory, how could I have bet on nonsense?
—ALBERT CAMUS, NOTEBOOKS, 1935–1942
Sometimes small things, past happenings, flash across my memory and I am astonished by who I am and what I have done. The dangerous thing is to judge myself by the standards of other people.
AUGUST 9
Just like old times again—me, myself, and I—with diversions of catching 19s and 22s13 to work; Robin and Henry came for lunch to dredge up old times, which are better left undredged. Next week: a press party for the governor of Florida.14 Fall is coming and again there are many possibilities.
I don’t know whether I am becoming eccentric or losing my mind or whether I really am right. Robin15 came to dinner at my invitation and expense, spent two hours talking to the Portuguese woman in a variety of French-Spanish-English. I could not join in, but sat and smiled for a few hours. At 10:30, I went out for a walk. When I came back, Robin had been looking for me, and we went to a pub where there were two old friends of his who just got married. They had much to talk over. At intervals, Robin would say: “Gail is bored. I’ve behaved badly tonight. She gave me a meal and then I spent two hours talking to somebody else.” When we left the pub, Robin said: “Why can’t you make the effort to talk to people, etc.” He was incensed. I tried to explain that he hadn’t introduced me. He said he had. We parted none the unhappier for parting.
AUGUST 11
I have often wondered how big an indulgence this journal is—especially when I am recording the comings and goings of men. Gianni Schicchi16 is playing … I have a Madeira hangover. Last night I sorted out my writing and did a little bit of revision.
TO BARBARA’S IN Hampstead for coffee and pancakes. Now, there’s an interesting girl. Very selective, good taste, fighting her South African origins a little too fiercely. We listened to Negro spirituals, drank coffee, looked at her brass rubbings, and discussed things one ought to discuss. That’s the point about Barbara. One feels one is doing so many worthy things. I am sure the man who marries her will do so because he thinks she is the type of girl one ought to marry.17
AUGUST 13
One would have a great advantage over his dark devils if he could predict when which of them were due to turn up. I think I have a special cycle—of course, Hilda18 would chalk it up to my astrological chart. At certain times, I am obsessed with the passing of time, wrinkles, aging, becoming unattractive to men. It is at these times that I tend to be possessive, shortsighted, a real “leaner.” At other times, time is relatively unimportant. Just living, hearing airplane sounds, going out, chatting with the Wests, etc., is enough. And then there are periods like tonight—INTERIM periods, mid-swing between cycles. I am not terribly upset or intense about anything. People seem fairly remote. I have written well today. I wrote last night—suddenly I am not tired after dinner. I bought a £3 tome on Thomas Wolfe, which I could not afford. Tonight I am going to enjoy my dinner, do my exercises, write the final paragraph of “Bay Bridge,”19 maybe set my hair, and read The Window of Memory,20 which is an academic study of Wolfe and how he wrote.
A man was in today from the Pennsylvania Tourist Board. He pointed out a town called Intercourse, Pa., on the map.
LATER FINISHED “BAY BRIDGE.” It is exciting to see yourself progressing in the work you want to do. I am learning to convey feelings through the use of words—or the careful nonuse of them. The scene where they are crying at the drive-in is exactly as I want it—the sudden shift from him to her of possession of the upper hand.
THERE ARE CERTAIN things I still want to convey, especially in “Bright Eyes,” which will be the longest story in the volume: (1) the feeling of knowing you have lost, but being grateful for the quality of awareness which allows you to experience such a degree of pain; (2) the feeling you get while living through a happy moment—when you refer back to the past when you had anticipated this moment, and when you look toward the future when you won’t have it any longer; (3) the feeling of sex when you love somebody—but doesn’t everybody try to describe this sooner or later?; (4) the feeling of frustration when you are trying to become a complete, integrated person and everyone else seems so far ahead; (5) the feeling of that awful unquiet shadow that suddenly appears over a day and for no reason at all.
“Bright Eyes” will be the main story and yes, I have been lazy in describing him.21 I will have to go back and try again.
Then “Bay Bridge”—the beginning of womanhood.
Then “Mourning”;—the ending is weak.
Then “Wesley Phipps”22—the room scene is weak.
Then “The Happy Couple”23—to fill up space. Is that right?
Other things that I want to do: exploit, define, name, place this ever-shifting contest between men and women.
AUGUST 14 • Wednesday
Gordon and John and I had dinner at Barbara’s. She really laid on a spread. I begin to like her. She is good-natured, quiet, calm, courteous; and she appreciates good things. A description of the contents of her bed-sitter in Hampstead would be an adequate description of her. She read DHL’s poem “Snake”24 aloud, and it was beautiful. Not many people can read poetry aloud. John made a chart entitled “Ball Pressure” for measuring the attributes of women. You get 10 or up to 10 points for each attribute and the highest score is 100. He lists: (1) personality, (2) character, (3) overall appeal, (4) facial beauty, (5) body beauty, (6) compatibility, (7) conversation (you can lose 10 points here), (8) intelligence, (9) sex appeal, (10) cleanliness. Alden25 is back from driving a tractor in Denmark. He walked into the office and there was immediate joy from me. He is so alive, so aware, yet so beautifully detached. As John says: He just floats around the world minding his own business. And Gordon says: “He’ll be a good doctor. He won’t make any money because he’ll go around saying, ‘Ah, that’s okay, never mind the payment, let’s just have a drink instead.’ ”
AUGUST 18 • Sunday
I can quite see how, in about ten years’ time, I come home from a Sunday afternoon walk, look in the mirror, add up my assets and liabilities, and then put a bullet through my head after the manner of MWG.26 I am certain I know something of what he felt. I must put all of this down before I can even hope to go out tonight. I want to understand these huge inferiority complexes of mine. How, in crowds and on buses, passing my reflection in shop windows I feel so ugly, so inadequate. Naturally, I realize that this is not the whole truth. As Alden (happy boy!) says about himself: Some people have told me I’m handsome, others that I’m homely as hell. So I just accept the supposition that I fall somewhere between those two extremes and that some people are going to go for me and others aren’t.
But anyway, to try to define the indefinable. Today is like fall. I am visited with all the end-of-summer sadness, the vestigial back-to-school eagerness. I awoke at 1:00 p.m. feeling that nothing was real, that all my senses had tricked me, and that I did not know another human being and never would.
AUGUST 22
I may remark … that though in that early time I seem to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for that of somebody else, on the assumed certainty of gaining by the bargain, I fail to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons—in the measure open to children of spirit I had rather a positive lack of the passion and thereby, I suppose, a lack of spirit, since if jealousy bears, as I think, on what one sees one’s companions able to do—as against one’s falling short—envy, as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them.
—HENRY JAMES, NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER27
YOU
DO GET bogged down in him.
What he was after was the apprehension of that “condensed and heightened form of reality” he called legend.
But Wolfe’s work is not important merely because it can be read as social history. He raised his autobiographical hero above the level of realism to become an archetypal figure engaged in the quest for self-discovery and forced constantly to readjust his focus on life as he went along.
—RICHARD KENNEDY, THE WINDOW OF MEMORY
Write simple sentences. Report. Don’t moralize. No pretensions. I am always afraid I am going to bore people and that is why I sometimes go to the clever-arty extreme.
—
A SENSE OF FRUSTRATION BECAUSE:
I have “Bay Bridge” finished but it is lacking in something;
I need to put some good hard labor into “Wesley Phipps”;
I need to finish “Bright Eyes” and I’m scared of the Hyde Park scene.28
The Moviegoer was based on an outline of [Søren Kierkegaard’s] Sickness unto Death. I must write about going to the movies alone and why it is so good.29
AUGUST 23
Today a well-dressed middle-aged couple came in. I immediately detected “Deep South” accent and asked where they came from. “New Oah-leans,” they said proudly. “We live right behind the Cotton Bowl stadium.” I asked them if they’d read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. They exchanged looks and their faces closed to me. “I just don’t understand how anyone can read that book,” she said, more to him than to me. It turns out they had met Percy and his wife for tea. “He hasn’t been well.” She went on to say that none of her friends had been able to make “head nor tail” of the book and that Percy certainly hadn’t done himself proud. “I can’t imagine where he got his ideas,” she said. “From the gutter probably. Now if you want to read a book that will give you a picture of the real South, go and get Lanterns on the Levee30 by his uncle, William Alexander Percy. I want you to write that down. It’s been so nice talking to you.”
—
THERE IS A NEW form in writing. It is often in the present tense, it has a wide scope, yet it is disciplined and concise and easy to read.31 Big theme for a big story: ties based on conscious relatedness may someday replace those of blood and soil. This is what has bothered me for so long, my “homelessness.” I consider my home the place I am and the people whom I admire and with whom I associate.
AUGUST 24
Saw Chips with Everything with Barbara. She lacks a certain vitality. I enjoyed the play. The main character, an upper-class son of a general “toughing it” in the ranks of the RAF, reminded me of Paul T. in Miami.32
AUGUST 25
A colorless, seasonless Sunday. I am sure the weather is like this in purgatory. Wrote all morning and afternoon. Then went to see Bardot in Warrior’s Rest with Andrew and Anne Rose.33 American voices dubbed in, so that a French girl, lounging in the ruins of Rome (or somewhere), is able to say: “Still carryin’ the torch?” And at the end the hero, with three days of beard stubble, comes to Bardot, dressed in black and pale, wandering among the ruins of an old church. “I give up!” he cries. “I want to join the human race. Make me live. Marry me! Marry me!” The music swells. Bardot looks heavenward. He kneels and buries his unshaven face in her lap. Her platinum-tipped fingernails grip his scalp. She has got her man.
I am about to write the ending to “Ambrose.” I undress, putting on lace pajamas. I see my naked body in the mirror and I think: I want to be undressing to get into bed with a man.
After she leaves Father Flynn, she returns to school, stopping at the ABC store …34
I write and write and write. Stayed home with a cold. Writing and dozing, having disturbing dreams. The only reality I have is the writing. I expand my perception as I write. I know my stories are on the side of people now. Just stay away from the sentimental. USTS provides me with a practical place to go in the daytime. I could become so lost in my dreams.
The dream I had, while living with Doug, about my father coming to see us on an empty bus. Doug wouldn’t let him in—so he got back on the bus and drove it away.
The Honeymoon
—
The jet plane—the girl and her husband sitting on the plane. She is dressed in a black wool dress, black hat, pearls, new everything—underwear, etc. She is slightly displeased with him because he has on an old ankle-length overcoat. His reason is that he only visits his parents in Canada once a year and buying a new overcoat would be silly. She gets a little nauseated on the plane. They talk, mostly about the wedding and their various friends’ reactions to their gifts, etc. From time to time, she returns to her book. She is reading ___ (something he would call intellectual).
THE FEELING HERE THAT COMES OVER HER: THE DULLED RELISH OF POSSESSION. She tries to pinpoint just when the change took place, goes back over the wedding, the words. A friend had told her, “I never saw such love in anyone’s eyes as yours.”
The relatives meet them at the Detroit airport. His mother and father are old. The sister is not chic and her dress is too long. The girl feels the sister eyeing her as she walks ahead up the ramp.
Now the details, the details—
The bedroom—all his old pictures and things representing a time when she was not there. Hockey picture taken in 1936! She was not even born. The striped pajamas. The newness of everything, her luggage. The stifled lovemaking at night. Parents in the next room. “I’m doing all right by you, aren’t I?” The strangeness of the contents in the medicine cabinet, Canadian labels.35
She could still recall her feeling back when, in stores, she would say “… for my husband.” But when he took her up to his old office and introduced her as “my wife,” she felt embarrassed, as if they were perpetrating some kind of fraud.
The tenuousness! The just-missed element of it all! Somehow, the way it could have been must be brought out, too.
They were hardly twenty thousand feet in the air on the Miami—Detroit flight when Evan36 intimated to the man sharing their triple seat that they had just gotten married.
The point of this story is to show the horror of a simulacrum of marriage compared to the validity of a true marriage. They are not truly married. There was none of the waiting, the drifting into the love of a real marriage.
She had very sincere eyes. The pastor had looked at her, taking her at eye-value, saying, “Yes, I think you mean it.”
The Canadian TV—the Vikings—Evan’s mother’s story of her marriage. “I never took my ring off.”
Show the way something could be by writing HOW IT ISN’T.
On the way home they begin planning the redecoration of their house. She is impatient, clinging to the prospect of varnishes and baseboards, paint and nails. They would build a fortress around themselves, and when it was acceptable, beautiful, stylish and clean, maybe then the awaited guest (love) would come—
AUGUST 28
Somehow, in spite of the bad taste in my mouth from several insincerities (what is the word I want?—sort of a blemish on the day), I feel that I am a lucky person in that people usually give me the benefit of the doubt. It looks as if I’ll be going to the U.S.A. in October whether I planned it or no. Mr. Miller called his bank manager and told me, “We’ll see that you get home.”
One hundred and fifty thousand Negroes peacefully demonstrated in D.C., and the Wests and I watched on Telstar and felt involved.37
AUGUST 29
Something of the glamorous days returns tonight, wafted along on a cloud of hair spray, listening to the BBC. I have a few good years left of being a handsome desirable. My hair is growing out—I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror in the hotel in New Orleans, waiting for Cliff to come, and before a mirror in a motel in Pompano Beach while A. snoozed on the double bed.38 He is the only lover I ever had who dared to steal one of my journals. What a good one he threw into the sea!
“One of those very unfortunate things has happened. The cellist has broken a string.”39
&nb
sp; I WANT TO redo “Roxanne”40 in the third person.
After Ginny met Ruth Day at the Embassy party in Copenhagen, she got a big kick out of writing letters home to South Carolina.
And another story, which I will enjoy doing: “A Shipboard Romance.”
Both these stories can be short novels—worked on simultaneously to fit my dichotomous work-system—“Roxanne” when I am feeling the civil liberties pangs; “Shipboard Romance” as an outlet to get in those dissertations about the lonely woman’s search for the perfect man.
AUGUST 30
Otherworldly music coming over the radio—I got so imbedded, I had to return to the sanctuary of all Chelsea escapists—the cinema. Saw North by Northwest again. The last time was with Doug. What impressed me was how much detail I didn’t notice last time. Walked home in the rain—stupid me—whet the sinuses. Gordon is on his way back to London. He will actually be back on Sunday night and barring the unforeseen (a beautiful girl in Jersey; an accident) he will appear at Grosvenor House for the reception for Chief Spotted Back of Nebraska.41