by Gail Godwin
MARCH 4
Miss E. N. has it all figured out. She doesn’t tell her age. I know it, but she doesn’t think I know it. I found out something, though, through casual conversation. (Sometimes I ramble good-naturedly to people and act silly and laugh and make rash statements. Then, thinking they have less to fear, they open up—and open up some more.)
I said, “You can meet lots of men in London, you know.” She got her “determined look” and said through her teeth, “Why do you think I wanted to come here?” She said: “I think Mr. Miller tends to choose the people in this office rather carefully. Everyone here seems to be intelligent and with a mind of their own.” Then she explained to me how she had seen Englishmen looking at her on the Underground: “First they put their newspaper in front of them; then they hold it up and look at your bottom half; then they lower it and look at your top half.” She’s a small person with jet-black hair, which she wears in her own inimitable style—sort of an elongated duck cut. Her hips are extremely low slung and her ankles are sturdy. Her eyes are set close together and they are dark and small. Nice teeth and skin, no lines. I can’t imagine her kissing a man really wholeheartedly.
Steve rang this morning, first coming through on Mr. Miller’s line. I rang him back, thinking: He’s at home sculpting and Andy’s asked him to ask me to dinner tonight or something.
“Steve?”
“Oh, Gail. Actually …”
“How are you?”
“Well, actually, I rang on the spur of the moment. It seems Jay Weed told Mrs. Blackman that I’m pushing things and Mrs. Blackman has written my mother.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes.”
“Oh, why don’t they leave us alone?”
“I know. That’s what Andy and I were saying last night.”
“Yes. We can do fine if everyone will just stop pushing.”
“Well, but wait. That’s not all. You see, last night I wrote her [Jay] a letter in Old English, illustrated with cartoons and imploring her to come down next weekend.”
“Did you mail it?”
“Yes, this morning. So she’ll get it today. If you see her, maybe you could just tell her I have a silly sense of humor.”
“But what did she tell the Blackmans for?”
“I don’t know. Just because I asked her to tea and asked her if she was coming down next weekend.”
“Well, what did your mother say?”
“Well, actually I think it’s a good thing in a way because it seems to have restored her sense of humor. She said one of her sons was too slow and the other was too fast and ruined things, so she’s washing her hands of both of them.”
Then we got on the subject of me and Andy and the interferences. The whole conversation was interrupted at various (crucial) stages by vacationers seeking advice on their trips to the U.S.A.
“I’m up in my studio cutting pieces of metal to bits.”
“Well, I wish I had something to cut. Can’t you send me some metal?”
“Ha, ha.”
“You know, I think I’ll write about this whole thing.”
“Yes, I know. But nobody’d believe it. They’d say it was too improbable. You know, the best thing to do when things get like this is to put on a pair of old boots and go for a seven-mile hike. But I don’t suppose girls do that.”
“Oh, I’m going to a horror film tonight. Get out of it all completely.”
“Listen. Tell you what. I have an evening class. I’ll meet you afterward for a drink.”
“Do you think that would be a good idea, Steve?”
“No, it probably wouldn’t.”
“There’s no use making things more complicated than they already are.”
“No, you’re quite right.”
“Oh, Steve. Let’s you and Andy join a monastery and I’ll join a convent.”
“Well, let’s leave a connecting tunnel just in case.”
WHEN I GOT HOME, there was an envelope with a Putney postmark on the hall table.
It was a cartoon, drawn by Andy, entitled “Nightmare.” It was a picture of Old Church Street and his minivan turned to a pumpkin.
—
I’VE SAVED THINGS to do this weekend. Pack two boxes. Work out finances. Clean out envelopes. Send in income tax. I’ll give Andy the madras bedspread, the towel, the pictures, the glasses. Last night I dreamed I was wearing Andy’s greyhound sweater and for some reason (he did something loveable) I said, without thinking, “I love you.” Then I thought, Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. Then I said, “Why did you do it?” He replied, “Because I love you.”
MARCH 5
Saw Fellini’s 8½, which was one of those pictures within a picture. The theme: Can I justify making a work of art out of important milestones, mistakes, happinesses, and disappointments in my life?
IF I CAN STAY more or less true to myself, then I’ll at least be going in a direction; or is it as B. used to say: “Make sure your clipper is the smoothest and best-sailing of the lot, even though there is no direction in the sailing. Devote all your time to steering your ship with no time spared looking back at water over the dam.”
MARCH 15
Back again to the notebook. Patterns, everything. A rainy Sunday. Thank God. One thing I love and hate about England is its bad weather. Listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. “Could ye not watch with me one hour?”32 I think I’ll go again this year.
The dream of Friday night / Saturday morning:
I was returning home from a journey, back to Asheville, on a bicycle. There were several roads, one leading uphill and around the mountain (very similar to the approach of 1000 Sunset Drive) and I decided to try it. The pedaling was difficult and I think, just at the crest, I got off and started walking. Then, for some reason, I became afraid and decided not to follow that path. Then I saw a ledge jutting out from the rock.
On the underside of this ledge there were some little houses which I knew were the long-sought-for “upside-down cliff dwellings built by some ancient peoples.” I had come on them by accident. Then (prompted by some voice) I knocked on the door of one of these little dwellings and a tiny man emerged and poured water into a slate container. He handed the container to me and I drank the water.
Last night the associate members of the Wasps (those who support the team but were never old Wasps themselves) gave a dance which was an utter flop—wrong lighting, no enthusiasm, middle-aged couples trying to “carry it” by twisting in outdated frocks. I admired Andy’s determination to do his part in making it better. He forced me to dance—and he’s no great dancer—and he stayed till the band played “God Save the Queen.” He has got character.
MARCH 19 • Thursday, 11:00 p.m.
Tonight—and five nights out of ten—I feel simply grateful for small favors. Having an evening finally end was a favor.
The Lunn Poly travel promotion evening at the Victory Club.33 First a deadly dinner with Elizabeth and Doreen at the English-Speaking Union. How nice to come home in a taxi with a splitting headache, take a hot bath, and get into bed.
MAILED DR. MILLENDER’S data on Mittenwald today.34 The genuine pleasure in being able to do something for someone who has done so much for you.
That day when Steve and I had been walking back to Basimore Cottage in the drizzle—Andy running on ahead toward his hot bath after the squash game (he had worried half the day before about how he was going to get his exercise)—and I said to Steve: “I wish I could write like D. H. Lawrence.”
I WENT INTO THE new Gill’s bookshop on Oxford Street. It was clean and spacious but had lost the very charm that a bit of dust and crowded shelves had given to it. And alas there were no notebooks.
GORDON LANDSBOROUGH, surrounded by four girls, telling us how he had once saved Spike Milligan’s life by reading his manuscript when he was at a “low point” and sending him a telegram: “There’s not a dry seat in the house.” At 11:30 this morning the sun came out; Andy called and said, “How about some lunch?�
� He knows what he is doing, he calls the plays. “How about the Crown?” He knows what he is going to do and he remembers things. “You made your speech last night.” “How did you remember?” “I always remember things that interest me.” Sometimes he doesn’t appreciate my sarcasm. I must stop it. It’s just nervousness. I want to write over Easter. Now that this notebook is ending, I want a flourish.
FOR NOW, JUST LIVING is enough. At this period, I am concerned mainly with looking good for Andy and his rugby team and the Lancaster Gate team he’s captain of on Sunday. He even asked his instructor if he could bring along “attachments.” Passing a Danish restaurant whose window featured two porcelain figures making love, I said: “That’s what I feel like doing now.” He said: “Wouldn’t you feel uncomfortable against that cold porcelain?”
MARCH 23
Saturday: rugby in the rain; Sunday: rugby in the rain. Each day had a charm of its own. Perhaps Sunday was one of our best days. Down to Guildford on the coach, intermittent rain and sun, patches of countryside, suburban towns (ugly) … the rustic clubhouse. The ladies’ room with chintz curtains, mirrors; the Saracen captain’s girlfriend, Jenny. “I’d like you to meet Jenny,” he said, helping her out of the car. I saw immediately that she was pretty. She had all the best that England can put into its girls and none of the worst—poised, discreet, ladylike but warm, curious, jovial. She looked a little bit like Stuart P. and this added to the fascination. I asked her where she worked and she said, “Oh, I’m a secretary for the British gov’t.” Finally I found out that her working address is 10 Downing Street. She told of Kennedy last summer at [Prime Minister Harold] Macmillan’s country home, coming across the lawn to her and saying: “Oh, you’re the secretary. I’ve heard a lot about you.” And the little boys in red mackintoshes lining the drive, saluting him in the rain—how he got out of the car and spoke to each of them.
Andy was a good captain, although it annoyed me the way he kept yelling, “Well done, Bill!” “Come on boys, we’ve got to go through! We’re going through!” “Feet! Feet!” But he enjoyed it—made two tries and won the game. Afterward was a tea on long picnic-type tables and then drinking in the bar for four hours till the poor bus driver put his foot down. I sat on a beer keg and listened and was spoken to, on and off, when rugby wasn’t being discussed. But I honestly didn’t mind. A Welshman with blue eyes said: “Are you sure you aren’t bored? Are you sure you aren’t thinking, Ah, I’ve wasted a whole Sunday when I could have had Andy to myself?” “You know women,” I said. “That’s the difference between public and state schools,” he said. The Welsh contingent was singing, to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Lloyd George knew my father; Father knew Lloyd George.”
MUSIC: “ISN’T IT ROMANTIC” from the Black Satin album, popular the summer of Marty and Lakeside Inn. I have so many lives. And at a quiet time here in bed listening to airplanes, I can think, right before dropping off to sleep, about Copenhagen.
The Missing Journal
Gail Writes About the Journal for the Period
MARCH 24, 1964, TO JANUARY 30, 1965
—
This volume of The Making of a Writer has opened with what had been my twelfth journal book since I started my adventures as a writer. As presented here in Part 1 and Part 2, the journal book covers the period July 23, 1963, to March 23, 1964. In Part 3 my journals pick up again, covering late January to March 18, 1965, when I filled in the blank pages of that twelfth book; then in Part 4 they jump to a fourteenth journal book for the period from March 20, 1965, to February 12, 1966.
Unlike the famous missing floor in hotels, there really was a journal 13, but I left it behind with the Wests in a box with some clothes until I could settle into my new rented flat on Beaufort Street in Chelsea. Why did I never retrieve the box? I was within walking distance of it and often took walks after work. Beaufort Street to Oakley Gardens was less than a ten-minute stroll. The clothes must have been dispensable. But the journal covering the period from late March of 1964 to January of 1965—why was it dispensable? Looking back and guessing, some forty years later, I think I may have been less than straightforward with my journal during the months Andy and I were engaged. I suspect I omitted many troubling and rebellious thoughts and wrote what I thought I ought to be thinking. The part of me I left out was undoubtedly the part that knew all along I was not going to make that marriage.
The Wests had moved us into the Oakley Gardens house in the late spring of 1964. It was the most grand and spacious house yet. I was newly engaged to Andy Hurst. We planned to marry the following spring. There were some things to be worked out, the foremost one being the blot of my divorce, since we wanted an Anglican church wedding. Meanwhile, we basked in the prospect of a long engagement. The courtship intrigues were over and we could relax and enjoy the long summer days.
At Oakley Gardens, I was given the choice downstairs room overlooking a walled garden on the condition that I share the window with the Wests’ elegant, moody Siamese cat, Enrico. Enrico was to be allowed to go in and out of the window whenever he scratched, and I was to provide door-opening services to and from my room, as well. Enrico and I coexisted through the long summer and autumn and into the early winter of 1964. We outlasted my engagement to Andy.
I would bet that if the missing journal 13 ever comes to light, the most honest and readable entries will be about the love-hate power struggle between Enrico and me.
1. Gordon Landsborough was a publisher of action novels and military histories who had an office near the U.S. Travel Service office. He took an interest in Gail’s work—particularly her first novel, “Gull Key” (unpublished)—and recommended her to an agent, Ursula Winant.
2. This Gordon is Gail’s soon-to-end romantic interest, Gordon Wrigley.
3. The Well-Beloved (1897) was Thomas Hardy’s last published novel, a satirical fable about a sculptor who seeks a series of idealized women. Its setting is an unspoiled island off the southern coast of England.
4. Rowntree was an established candy manufacturer.
5. Petticoat Lane Market, a bazaar of stall merchants, grew out of the garment district in East London. It was two blocks east of the local traffic artery, Bishopsgate, and people had to park on the other side.
6. De was Gail’s scent of choice after she’d interviewed Deeda Blair, the American ambassador’s wife, whose signature perfume it was, in Denmark.
7. Jung published Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, an overview of the new study of the unconscious, in 1917, and revised it several times subsequently.
8. Jane Clifford, an English professor, the protagonist in Gail’s 1974 novel The Odd Woman, consults George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch for clues to how an intelligent woman might define herself.
9. Luchino Visconti made a classic movie based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), the story of the passing of an era in Sicily as modern Italy absorbed traditional society.
10. In 1958, when Epitaph for Dixie by Harry S. Ashmore was published, northerners had a bias against southerners that was closer to abolitionist feelings than to twentieth-century ones; and Ashmore was in a perfect position to know. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, he became the editor of two Southern newspapers—the Charlotte News and the Arkansas Gazette—then left the business to campaign for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate criticized by northerners for opposing the abrupt imposition of civil rights laws on the South. By 1963, Barry Goldwater, Arizona Republican, had begun to win over long-standing southern Democrats. It is in this light that Gail’s mother had liked Goldwater. Many northern Democrats were patronizing toward southerners.
11. Frank Crowther was a bookish friend from Chapel Hill who took a civil service job at the USTS in Washington. He was one of the Chapel Hill friends who continued to keep in touch with Gail.
12. Jack “Tucson” Malone was a homeless man who was writing his memoirs at the post office. Gail typed them for him on the IBM Selectric
at the U.S. Travel Service. Selections from them were published in The Daily Mail.
13. “Frowsy” was the son of Gail’s former landlord, Rolf Høiass, a widower, and lived in the Høiass house near Copenhagen during Gail’s three months there at the beginning of her time abroad. Frowsy proved to be a good friend with a mischievous sense of humor, and Gail never tired of him, though the tension in the household was high.
14. Steve Hurst, a sculptor in metals, taught an art class in London.
15. “Still Life” by John Updike, which appeared in Pigeon Feathers (1962), describes an American art student’s miscalculation of the mind of an English girl who is his classmate.
16. Golders Green is a nineteenth-century suburb that developed into a wealthy Jewish neighborhood in the 1950s.
17. Ermina Luxon was the wife of Norval Neil Luxon, dean of the School of Journalism at Chapel Hill. Gail stayed for a while in their home after having had a run-in with the dean of women and being put on probation for having kept a dog in her room.
18. See Gail’s story “Over the Mountain,” published in Antaeus no. 49/50 (Spring/Summer 1983) and anthologized in Evening Games: Chronicles of Parents and Children, edited by Alberto Manguel (Penguin Books, 1986).
19. Peter Perry worked as a liaison between travel agents and news sources.
20. Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd opened in its revised and now classic form on January 9, 1964, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
21. Marmaduke Pickthall, a writer admired by D. H. Lawrence, translated the Qur’an into English. Tracing his ancestry to a knight in William the Conqueror’s service, Pickthall became a British Muslim.
22. “Gull Key” is a novel that Gail had completed in 1962. It concerns a woman negotiating a marriage that is going wrong and, at the same time, developing herself as an artist by relating to her environment. Though confined to a Florida island community, the woman senses an outlet in its historic lighthouse. The manuscript is now part of the Gail Godwin Papers held in the Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.