The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  “What did you do?”

  “I wrote him back and told him to go to hell. Then I married George. David was married this past summer.”

  “Oh, how awful.”

  “But it doesn’t bother me. Really. It bothers me a lot more when other men I know get married.”

  “Then what do you think is the best thing to do with these men who are so … detached? Give them up?”

  “Yes, I think so. I think there isn’t any other way, really. You see, it’s a condition they have. It wouldn’t end with marriage. The difference was there at the beginning only you didn’t see it or didn’t want to. I don’t think you have a choice, really.”

  Jung’s two essays.7

  Middlemarch.8

  Expanding a small item of observation into a meaningful moment.

  NOVEMBER 22

  Kennedy is dead. The statesmen have paid their tributes and everything seems ephemeral. People are already speaking of LBJ—the new president. It has been organized hour by hour who shall view the body. The headlines are worded. Life goes on. One commentator said: “This nation still lives.”

  NOVEMBER 26

  Events both personal and international have skimmed off the non-valid from my life and I’m going to try and record what does matter and what I must do. I got back my faith in a surprisingly easy way, through typing (because I said I would) an extremely tedious and wordy MS of Robin’s, due for publication in his Marine magazine. The combination of doing something for somebody else plus sticking to it when I was about to despair—or procrastinate—did the trick. A much saner person, I went down to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. I feel the same fire to live, absorb, learn, move, and do that I’d felt in Copenhagen, awake night after night, listening to the electric trains shuttle into Klampenborg station, knowing the ocean was outside also.

  A lot of the sentimental is tied up in my grief over John Kennedy’s assassination. I don’t really deserve to eulogize or call it “grief.” I didn’t even go out and vote three years ago on Key Biscayne. Doug didn’t either. Afterward, we sheepishly discussed it, justified it by saying we didn’t want either candidate. But even then I felt the charm and the new life of the administration of JFK. They were fascinating to read about, young, interested in the arts and the intellect, rich and fashionable. And these three years, for me, have been an era when I dared to move, do new things, go and live in Europe, take chances, burn bridges, aim high. Now that era is over and I feel it is time for me to go home again. Dorothea (when she was at Radcliffe, she campaigned for him as senator) feels it worse. The best thing that came out of her grief was when she said: “We can carry it on a little bit simply by refusing to hate. Every time you start hating, just remember …”

  Though somewhat garbled, these touchstones emerge. Not only from this crisis, so much bigger than my little personal grievances, but also from recent events on a smaller scale, i.e., the beagling meet on Saturday with Landsborough and Gordon. It was an epitaph to a really wasted (and unrequited) passion, resulting in a confident hatred of such apathy in myself.

  I do not need to see Gordon again.

  DECEMBER 5

  A moment out for a progress report. Tonight the house was still, the Wests having gone out in full plumage to the premiere of the film made from Lampedusa’s Leopard.9 Sat in front of the fire and read (Ashmore’s An Epitaph for Dixie),10 but couldn’t really concentrate as long as anyone else was in the room. Well-organized, very English Daphne was sitting in the yellow chair pasting on her new false fingernails.

  Riding to work in the morning, I am pleased to find I am facing outward again. I am not in love with anyone and I depend on no one for the completion of a happy day. Sometimes I have double glimpses of myself, however, and it almost kills me. I see the mortal and the eternal standing in each other’s skin. Most of the time they are merged in a fairly acceptable whole. But tonight, for instance, as I was bending over to move the heater, the one slipped awry. The eternal (which is neither man nor woman but a little of each; which concerns itself with large rather than petty matters; which has a deep and genuine desire to help humanity) was separated from the mortal, a twenty-six-and-a-half-year-old female, no longer in the blossom, yet in the late bloom, who fights a losing battle with the destroyers of skin tissue and hair color, who cares about appearance and the mating ritual.

  Glimpses such as this are soul-rending. How I loathe the thought of dying.

  DECEMBER 6

  Letter from Frank and Kathleen really putting me in my place for joining the mass hysteria. Saw George (the ex-USTS chauffeur) in the pub. I went over and kissed him. He looked frightened to death. Then, recovering, he told me he’d found a £20-a-week job as chief mourner at a Shepherds Bush mortuary.

  DECEMBER 9

  This weekend, Beckenham, Kent. Remodeled coach house and Robin’s amazon family slightly tipsy and strong. Franco–Anglo Saxon blood (Challis and Jones special mixture) high in their wide cheeks. Robin’s red, square hand around mine. He, his mother, and I listen to “Have Some Madeira, M’ Dear,” a song from a 1957 hit revue. The last time I heard it was in Shelley B.’s little house in Chapel Hill. The song bridged two times and I saw that I had done what I would have wished to do five years ago.

  Later, lying in front of the dying fire. He is so easy to be with, so big, so comfortable. I always remember I am in the presence of a man.

  The dialectic shifts. Dorothea thinks Robin is boring. And Andrew. Just in the heat of my hate-Andrew swing, Andrew comes out with: “What’s the answer?” On TV is a cad who has returned to his loving and broad-minded wife. Daphne has gone to get the milk. “I know the answer,” says Andrew. “It’s to try to get a little more and a little more unselfish as you go. But you can’t do it out of do-goodishness and you can’t do it because you’ve heard happy people are unselfish people and you want to be happy. It’s damn difficult to get less selfish.”

  DECEMBER 16

  If I am destined for another bout with the Diary, with catalogings of self, then at least let it simply aim to describe what is in the process of going on rather than to draw any sweeping conclusions. Conclusions look so silly when you read them over later. Whoops. Here come the carolers. The first note of “Silent Night” sounds, the doorbell rings, the needy box is extended. Salvation Army. Oxfam. Veterans. Lorraine came, typical to fashion at 11:00 p.m., into Southampton.

  We talked and I found—after she’d recounted all her recent experiences—that she was still acting out the same patterns and hadn’t changed at all in spite of the fact that she kept telling me how much she had changed. I found myself angry at her upon her arrival and whenever we were with other people. I do not admire her—perhaps we are too much alike in some ways—but I like being with her. Perhaps it’s because of the freedom we give each other for self-exploration. We can be selfish to a greater extent because we recognize the other doesn’t regard this as a fault. Thus I like to listen to her for hours and offer my suggestions because I know my turn is coming and her suggestions will help me as much as mine help her. Because—this is it—we are alike and while we can’t see ourselves properly, we can damn well spot the faults in the other. Thus when she tells me: “You have a great capacity for guilt. You look for situations which will make you uncomfortable, and if you can’t find any you create a nice guilt-triggered situation.”

  I can look back and see the Shelley B. and Frank Crowther11 Rathskellar scene plus all the numerous triangles I have contrived and then have been beaten by. The John Bowers and Lorraine situation in N.Y.: I promised them both all of myself in one day and ended up slighting each.

  I fit myself into scenes where I’ll come off badly or won’t measure up. (Robin: “You’re your own worst enemy.”) The party I gave Saturday night. I knew the Wests wouldn’t approve and I knew I’d have to be a policeman about the furniture, carpets, etc.

  Of course, one of the biggest bad showings was my 1962 October homecoming when I was considering marrying B. and arranged it so
I’d spend the first weekend with Uncle William and the second with L.! I was miserable at both places and lost B.

  Then at work: Doreen provides a wonderful weapon with which I can castigate myself as often as I like. I know where she stands on most things, so I know how to deviate and thus rouse her ire. I am remembering that dream I had about the dog. He was my watchdog, my guilt complex, my conscience. I saw something strange, something I didn’t understand, and so I sicced him on to it—only to find it was innocent with bewilderment when it looked up, dying, at me.

  I MET ANOTHER ONE. I’d say this one rates about 90 percent. I think I spoiled it by being aggressive.

  DECEMBER 17

  Back into the whirlpool. Measuring life in terms of a particular appointment with a man. But maybe it is not too late. Maybe I still have an hour or so in which to assert the truths formed in the noninvolved weeks of November. I get off the track when I get all perturbed about time (Robin calls it “your forty-years-from-now depression”), when I start trying to be what I think everyone thinks I ought to be. This new one is no sluggish Gordon. He saw something he liked Saturday night and came back Sunday to follow it up. “He’s definitely courting,” said Lorraine. And if he is, he has already fashioned the image that he will worship. Why not just drift along and be soft and loving, and not give any great exhibition of intellectualism to scare him off.

  DECEMBER 22

  “No wonder you drive men away,” says Lorraine. “No matter how much they like you, you finally exhaust them. You force them to become involved in your own cataclysmic little dervish. I don’t know why I’ve stayed as long as I have. You’re not easy to be a friend to. You seem to lack the power to love. In Copenhagen, for instance, I gave you my number and you didn’t telephone. Then, when I saw you in Drop-In, you said, ‘I didn’t think you really meant it.’ I found you a place to live because I knew how it was to be alone in a new country. When I left Copenhagen, you didn’t even go to see me off. That hurt. Then when you wrote to say you’d be in N.C., I telephoned you from Boston. I arranged to come down to see you in N.Y. And what did you give me? We had one hour alone together in Penn Station. One hour! And then you ask me after I’ve scarcely gotten off the boat: Why do you keep up with your friends—to use them? If that were so, why did I not break off from you long ago? But in spite of everything, I haven’t because I like you. And it hurts me to hear your friends speak of you: ‘Gail’s all right, but …’ You constantly embark on this self-defacing scheme and pretty soon they are going along with all the bad things you say about yourself.”

  AND EVEN WITH THE New One, Andy [Hurst]. He is doing everything. He is pursuing. He is admiring. All I have to do is shut up and consider him. But there is this perverse longing to berate myself.

  Eight hours later

  Almost midnight and I have got to get this all down—all or nothing. Lorraine came at three and Andy and Steve showed up promptly at five. I served them very bad tea. The fire was blazing and Lorraine and Steve (Andy’s older brother—the most adjusted artist I have ever seen) held the floor. Subjects: Cairo—Alexandria—The [Alexandria] Quartet—was it or was it not great?—Cuban agriculture—Czechoslovakian commitment to the Communist line—the Danes and their Viking gods. (Here Lorraine gave me a plug: “You know, Gail said to me in Denmark, ‘The Danes do have a religion. They have their Viking gods.’ ”) Steve: “Don’t you feel at some times that some figure is messing up your life? Some sort of god or something?” Andy: “Yes, I think Diana, the goddess of chastity, has been interfering with yours lately.” Steve is more practical, less sensually attractive, more intuitive and better-read. Andy is shyer, quiet. They seem to get along beautifully and to complement each other. Andy has the sense of humor. Both are Oxford educated. They are neither insular nor “boned up” in only one subject.

  Do Jack Malone’s12 typing.

  CHRISTMAS NIGHT

  Alone and comfortable in a warm room. Lorraine is out with her policeman—the Buckingham Palace Guards winked at her from under their great fur hats. Her travel adventures put Fielding and Frommer to shame. Frowsy13 has lost Birgit. The Christmas card said: “No I am not married damn! Birgit has found another and told me goodbye. It has been a lousy year.”

  Lorraine and I have spent a great deal of time lying on this bed talking.

  Re Andy: “When they like you, there is none of this plotting and scheming.”

  Dorothea has quit USTS and is leaving Griffith.

  JANUARY 1, 1964 • 1:30 a.m.

  This is the quietest and soberest New Year’s I’ve spent in several years. Green Street last year, Copenhagen the year before, Miami, Miami, Miami before that. I’m home in bed, not drunk, not depressed, and not expecting any more from this life than I’ve got. Perhaps the highlight of this evening was when Andy’s brother Steve said: “I want you to meet Christine and see what you think. Because I’d accept your judgment.”

  JANUARY 2

  I never thought I’d be glad to see Doreen back, but I will be. Dorothea half-dead with cold and husband trouble. Out of the hell, Andy’s voice on the telephone asking if he can meet me next door at the pub tomorrow night. As if he were afraid ever to ask me for the same day.

  Said Dorothea: “You want lots of men and a man senses this. As for me, I’m just the opposite. And, you know, people were always asking me to marry them.”

  Andy’s mother wrote a note to thank me for my note. I feel a Tightness about that family. They appreciate the qualities I have been taught to appreciate.

  JANUARY 3

  Andy standing over the stove in the small kitchen, turning the sausages with his thumb and forefinger. I glimpse the gold signet ring on his little finger and this symbolizes, somehow to me, the unobtainable.

  Steve is talking to me. He is telling me he has written a novel and is writing another. He is describing a Cornish dissenter in the art class.14 Andy stands, shoulders hunched, neck bent forward in his usual stance. Something princely about the shape of his head with close-cropped reddish-gold hair. In this kitchen, there is physical magnetism and the intuitive interplay of two minds—it takes both of them to provide this. Steve has read the Updike story that I gave them and says the man is deadly accurate.15 I think: This is the first time I can remember giving somebody a story and having them read it so quickly. Then Andy pipes up. He has read it, too. Last night before he went to sleep. So many thoughts come crowding in now. So Andy has read it. What is more, he saw things in it that I liked. The very things that made me like the story. He got the tone of the afternoon at Oxford, the presence of things. I am thinking: I must not underestimate this one. Then we laugh some more and Steve goes to drill a hole in a pipe for one of his metal sculptures. Andy begins kissing me in his way that can mean anything. It is his way and I am sure he has looked at many more girls in this blinking, breathless way.

  JANUARY 10

  After a quiet dinner with Eva from Liechtenstein and a cozy chat with the Wests (“Do you want to know something about Panama, Gail?”), I retired to my room to plow on through Jung’s Two Essays. Andy rang at 9:30, first speaking to Mrs. West. He was home alone and had gone to sleep after washing his own supper dishes.

  The first night I met him, he went to sleep. My first impression of him when Robin brought him to my party at 21 Old Church Street was that he was a good-natured, athletic chap. By the end of the evening, we were paired off. Lorraine and Charlie were upstairs in my room. Robin had taken Anne Jeffries back to Golders Green16 in Charlie’s car. The drunken Irish rugby players had been persuaded to leave. I was fed up. I brought my coat down by the fire in the living room and got under it and went to sleep. Andy—who was no more than a pointed chin and large gray-sweatered shoulders—tried to kiss me. I wouldn’t let him. He persisted. So I turned my back and went to sleep. Then he stretched out, his arms spread-eagled, and went to sleep half on the chair, snoring. He said later that, at the end of the party, I accompanied him to the door, kissed him, and said I liked his sweater and I hop
ed he wasn’t bored.

  WHAT COMES OUT of this hazy first part of the winter is simply this: I am learning how to live and I perhaps never would have learned had I stayed at home. Nothing is a matter of either/or but—as Father Webbe says—both/and. The important thing is, Mrs. Luxon17 in her womanly wisdom remarked: Be yourself, but be polite. That was B.’s parting advice at the airport: “If you’re in any situation that frightens you because you feel inferior, just be courteous.” And Andy’s observation: “She was one of those nervous English girls, who, if you paid her a compliment, would get so embarrassed she would answer something gauche.” Then there is Lorraine’s advice: “Be honest with yourself, enough so to admit your basic dishonesty.”

  JANUARY 12

  Yesterday was one of those days when almost all the pro- and anti-elements were present, given to me (as to any heroine) to do with as I pleased. First of all, this question of nervousness. What is at stake? Am I proceeding cautiously down the same wrong road again? As Steve said, “What worries me is, do you think we’re doomed to keep repeating certain patterns all our lives?”

  They came to lunch—the Hurst brothers—the beginning of twelve hours à trois. I resent Steve’s presence, and yet I know he is an admirer and helps ease the tension. Why do I resent him? Because he takes part of Andy from me. They have known each other twenty-seven years, have grown up together, and understand each other as only brothers can. What is that understanding like? I don’t know. Someday I’ll ask Rebel and Tommy. I would think, however, it’s something sacred and inviolable. I would never try to turn one against the other. Like, when we were eating, I teased Andy about something and he made a “hen” noise to Steve. “You’ll have to excuse our mystical signals,” he said. “Downright childish, if you ask me,” Steve answered. How much do these brothers talk? A lot, I think. I would be flattering myself if I thought they kept me untouched in their morning conversations. I know the treacheries women friends are capable of working upon a man. Perhaps Andy and Steve are “working as a team.” Perhaps Andy has said to Steve: “Find out for me.” Thus when Steve dances with me at the Hampstead dinner party and we discuss what we always end up discussing—“How to find someone who understands”—I should guard my tongue. He is convincing himself that Christine is the girl for him. “But are you looking for a girl with an absence of negative qualities rather than a presence of positive ones?” I asked. “You may be right,” he answered. “Well, there’s a big difference,” I said. We were sitting in the rugby stands—the “Andrew Charles Brunei Hurst fan club”—his mother and her friend on the other side.