The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  MARCH 3

  Andy in his smart new coat—looked the real Londoner. Reminded me of Doug in Miami when he came to sign the divorce papers; he was wearing a new suit.

  The snow this morning. Quiet all around. I went to Welbeck Street for my mole killings. Lying on the table, I looked at the snow, some birds, bare twigs of trees. Miss Shepherd, neat in white nurse’s kerchief and uniform, attended to my face with the electric needle—platinum-tipped, 8 shillings per needle—and described her banana boat trip to the Cameroons. At 11:00, I am finished and take another taxi to the office. Elizabeth is in raptures over the snow. Also, she tells me, Officer Banks has already passed. “I think he looked in, but didn’t stop.” I go upstairs and comb my hair, come back, get settled behind the front desk, for once not looking out of the window. “Here he comes,” says Elizabeth. I look up and there comes my policeman, cutting across the street, looking at us. I know he is coming in. He has snow on his shoulders and hat; he brushes it as he comes in and it’s a long stay this time.

  “Come in and melt,” I say.

  “That’s a good idea.” He stands before us, removes his gloves. On the fourth finger of his hand is a signet ring with some initials. Three. Which three? Something. Something Banks. What is his first name? I like not knowing it.

  He stands by the desk and, at first, it is Elizabeth and I together, just as before. We usually ask him questions. Today he tells us he has been on duty since 5:00 a.m. The snow started sometime around 4:00. “Did you see it start?” I ask. “No.” I picture him still asleep in his bed. Does he wear pajamas? Yes, in this country, only a jackass wouldn’t.

  Then I told him about seeing the policeman helping the stalled driver in Mayfair. A curly head bent over the hood. A tall blue hat on the top of the hood. I told it in mock dramatic eulogy. He laughed. I asked him about the police force. How old did one have to be to join? What did they have to do? Crawl under barbed wire fences? Again he laughed. He trained in Hendon, he said.

  Then Dick Prescott enters and the conversation becomes more complicated. There are the four of us, then lapses of Elizabeth and Dick, me and Officer Banks. “Where are you from—London?” I ask. “I was born in Hong Kong,” he says. Then Dick says, “You were born where?” “After that I lived in Australia. Now my parents live in Maidstone, Kent.” None of this was volunteered. I squeezed him like a stubborn tube of toothpaste. Dick pipes in: “You’re getting the third degree.” “I know, it’s always like this when I come in,” says our good policeman.

  Then I am saying how slowly things get done in England. “Someone asks you to dinner a week from next Thursday. You might be dead by then.” Officer Banks comments on how people come back from the States and say how in a hurry everyone is. He makes some clever logical remark about “if you don’t die before next Thursday week.” Then Dick says to me: “When are you going to have that dinner party you promised?” Officer Banks answers for me: “Next Thursday week.” I explain about my flat. “I thought I was going to leave, then decided not to,” etc.

  Then, somehow, it’s only Officer Banks and myself again.

  “Do you live in Earls Court?” he asked. “You mentioned it a while ago.” (I had asked him if he ever did his beat as far as Earls Court.)

  “No, Chelsea. Why, don’t you like it? Your nose turned down.”

  “It couldn’t have, it’s not that long.”

  “Yes, I like Chelsea,” I went on, “because it’s a little different from the ordinary. A bit like the country. And I’m near the river.”

  “I would say somewhere near Sloane Square. To the left of the King’s Road?”

  “No, farther down.”

  “By the—what’s the name of the hospital where the Chelsea pensioners live?”

  “Royal Hospital. No, farther down, Beaufort Street. It’s near Battersea Bridge.”

  “Ah, past the Essoldo Cinema, turn left and go toward the bridge.”

  “Yes. I live in an ugly block of flats, all alike so that if you’ve had a drink …”

  “… you can never find your own.”

  “Yes, exactly! I live on the top floor and on a clear day, and with my glasses, I can see Big Ben. To my left is the river but I have to look out the window and it’s too sooty.”

  “You turn and do—this—and there’s the river.”

  “Yes. Precisely. And across the street there’s the Convent of St. Thomas More. The bells keep ringing every hour so the nuns can go to chapel.”

  “Oh—charming. So you don’t need an alarm clock.”

  “No.” I am temporarily quieted by his quick patter, the good-natured but alert answers.

  “Then how do you get to work?”

  “The 19, 22, or 11 bus. The 19, usually.”

  “Oh.”

  I asked him why he always walked alone when most of the bobbies walked in pairs.

  “I don’t particularly like walking with somebody else. Sure, the time passes quickly, but you aren’t aware of what’s going on.”

  We elucidated at some length on the advantages of aloneness on a beat. I said, “I knew you were different.”

  “Thank you,” he said, snappily, in a tone that was meant to make light of the compliment; but still he took it in.

  Then the phone rang. I had to tell a woman what to wear in San Francisco. I said first [to Officer Banks], “I have a stamp for you,” to keep him from leaving. While I was on the phone, Elizabeth asked him why Trafalgar Square was dark last night. When I hung up, they were talking about Nelson’s birthday.

  “Whose birthday?” I asked.

  “Mine,” said Officer Banks. “What are you going to give me?”—saying this with a meaningful stare.

  “I’ve already given you two stamps,” I said.

  Then, why didn’t I stop? On I went. “But today is also my birthday and you can take me to see the wharves as my present. Ah, please, Officer Banks. We’ve been giving you stamps for an entire year …”

  “Do American women play on feelings the way Englishwomen do?” said Officer Banks to Dick.

  “These two do. Watch ’em. They’re clever.”

  Then Officer Banks addressed himself exclusively to me. “So you’re tired of that Chelsea flat and you want to exchange it for a pub in the East End?” He looked me dead in the eye.

  I looked back. “Yes.”

  “I’ll come for a drink with you in a pub sometime and tell you about these two,” said Dick Prescott.

  “No!” I cried. “Then he’ll never take us!”

  Laughter.

  Exit Officer Banks, smiling. He crosses the street. The snow covers his shoulders and hat once more. He has a brother of twelve who is mad over trains. But so is he—and stamps.

  MARCH 8

  How can you describe the sound of a taxi? Does it vibrate? Yes, a little. But it also clicks. The clicks gain speed and become a purr.

  A spring day—and evening. Elizabeth, Pauline,22 and I sit outdoors at a table at the Sands. Bond Street is our study tonight. My feet are cold, but it is too pleasant to think of leaving. Pauline tells about her automobile accident Saturday night. Elizabeth: “But wasn’t Robert looking where he was going? Had you said something to him …?”

  The policeman passes, doing his steady beat-walk. Clump. Clump. Round-toed shiny black shoes today. They all wear a new silver badge and a headpiece on their helmets. Clump, clump. In the spring dusk of my fourth March in London.

  MARCH 12

  I had a choice between company on the weekend and lying to myself; or being alone. All I had to do was to respond to Andy.

  I feel somehow if I can really master this weekend, then I won’t be so afraid.

  Andy is sleeping with a secretary in his law firm. She is small, dark, with very blue eyes, drives an MG. “Likes classical music and lives in the country.” The way Andy “confessed”—like a proud boy: “Now do you think I’m so holy?”

  STEVE HAS TAKEN Sylvia home for the weekend.23

  WELL, IT’S OVER. I
n my card file along with “Despair.”

  MARCH 13 • Saturday

  During the night I had dreamed of a first-class rejection by Officer Banks. As a symbol, he embodies London. He is a protector of the status quo. He gives first aid to fainting women, wears a silver badge on his tall blue helmet. And the real Officer Banks offers tempting morsels for speculation.

  My dream: I am proposing an outing to Officer Banks. He is politely declining. I press it. Finally he agrees. Then he adds: “You’d better know I plan to be married next year.” He brings his fiancée. I write to Lorraine and ask her advice. She replies: “It’s very clear he does not love you. Get out now if you don’t want to be hurt really badly.”

  I woke up feeling as if it had really happened. The sun was shining. I dressed, put on my new Portuguese handmade walking shoes, and went to town—to the bank in my slacks and sunglasses, hoping at every traffic crossing to see you-know-who. Then to USTS. Doreen is coping gallantly as usual. I offer assistance, and then leave, silently.

  “Where’s Gail?”

  “I don’t know, she was just here.”

  I walk out of my way through Mayfair. Three policemen stand outside the American Embassy. I am sure they are laughing at me. Then through Hyde Park, past the spot where Andy had proposed. I hurry toward a policeman. He quickly crosses the road. I am sure he is evading me. There is probably a notice about me in the station house: “Beware, female huntress, especially keen on policemen.”

  MARCH 14

  Today was easier. Festival Hall tonight—the twenty-seven-year-old Japanese conductor, like a black elf, conducting Berlioz’s Fantastique.24 Then, later, I stand by the window of my flat. “Mondo Cane” on the radio. I feel joyous. I open the window and breathe London. The [Beaufort Street] traffic swishes below. It rained and the streets are wet. I reread the bishop of Woolwich’s article on a godless religion.25 Several things become clear to me. I also read Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul and this helped. If I am a modern, not a phony, then I cannot take refuge in the old ways.

  MARCH 16

  Chink was in town and wanted to have lunch.26 It was one of those colorless, harsh, glarey days that have come to characterize London for me. We went to [Edward Albee’s play] The Goat. Laughed a lot. It takes a bit of getting used to a new conversational pattern. Whereas Andy would take a subject and follow it through, usually working it to death, Chink surprises with his rapid transitions. “I was listening to some Bach last night … A real afternoon ahead of me today …,” etc. His laugh is good, nothing compulsive or hysterical about it, just real.

  I said, “Did you read the article about the bishop of Woolwich in The Sunday Times?” He said, as one who has waited for an opening, “No. What are you doing tonight? I’ll come over and read it.”

  We argued about Chagall. He: “I don’t like him. He doesn’t move me.” I got exasperated and went on about how “it’s a lonely world,” you couldn’t communicate with anyone, etc. He saw some of what I meant, but not all: “In other words [he said], my world is the world of facts, that’s what I’ve been trained for; yours is the world of imagination. You have to decide what you think and then fight for it. But you’re not sure.”

  He seems to be an honorable person with a code. He doesn’t tell things. For instance, he said it was interesting the way he met his boss and the way he went to work for him. I said: “Tell me.” He said: “Not yet. When I know you better, maybe.”

  TONIGHT CLASS. I read my place description. My endings are weak. But on [Miss Slade’s] written criticism was one sentence which will keep me in England: “If you can follow criticism like this, you will do well as a writer.”

  After class, the psychiatrist approached me.27 It turns out he lives across the street from me! I asked him and his girl around for coffee Sunday. He pushed it. I don’t know if they are engaged or what. It doesn’t matter. At last we’ll have some good conversation in this flat. Maybe Peter Perry will come, too—

  MARCH 18

  I am learning what it is to create something meaningful out of my own experiences. Interesting how far I’ve come with the writing. Learning to make every word count.

  Heavy head. I wrote a fifteen-hundred-word story tonight.28

  1. During the period of the missing journal, March 24,1964, to late January 1965, Gail had become engaged to Andy Hurst and had broken her engagement with him. A fight with his mother at their house had precipitated the break, which came as a relief to both Gail and Andy. They laughed about it over an expensive dinner on the way back to London. Andy admitted that he had made “a list of attributes he’d ideally like in a wife,” Gail relates in Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life (Morrow, 2001). “Then,” she writes, “he ranked me on each and averaged out the sum, on a scale of one to ten.” Gail got an 8 overall. “Eight’s no good,” Gail had told him, “especially at the beginning.”

  2. Gail had found Gale D. Webbe’s book The Night and Nothing while plundering the philosophy and religion shelves in Hatchards Bookshop during a lunch hour. “It was a moment of pure serendipity,” Gail says. Her former mentor Father Webbe’s chapter “Decisions” opens: “Between our jumping out of bed in the morning and our falling back into it at night there are, especially in a high-pressure culture, literally hundreds of additional decisions we must make.” Webbe advises making one’s responsibilities a ritual, freeing up God’s energy for one’s soul’s progress. The crux of this chapter, which Gail took to heart, was that one’s essential satisfactions proceed from knowing one’s life is being constructed on the lines of a sound story. “It must have a pattern, a beginning, a middle, and an end. It must, in short, have meaning—a too-rare overtone only produced when, as it were, the fingers of free will move across the strings of destiny.”

  3. “Roxanne” is Gail’s unpublished short novel based on her friend Lorraine. See August 29, 1963, entry.

  4. Winston Churchill died on Sunday, January 24, 1965, following a stroke he’d suffered fifteen days earlier. He lay in state in Westminster Abbey for a few days, the first person since William Gladstone to do so, and more than three hundred thousand people viewed his coffin.

  5. The Girl with Green Eyes, by Edna O’Brien, included as the second novel in O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy in 1964, had originally been published in 1962 as The Lonely Girl. It portrays a girl who falls in love with a sophisticated, married man in Dublin, and experiences some fulfillment before the inevitable disillusionment.

  6. The L-Shaped Room, published in 1960, was Lynn Reid Banks’s debut novel. It follows a young career woman who leaves home upon becoming pregnant and does not return until her pregnancy and sense of self are resolved.

  7. Marty, an older man, had been Gail’s nightclub-owning friend in Miami.

  8. Gail had dated Cliff when she was a reporter in Miami. The first novel she worked on upon embarking for Europe in 1961 involved his character.

  9. In Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is won over by the presentation of Osmond as a man of ultimate refinement and good taste, something to which she aspires.

  10. Charles Cleveland is a cousin by marriage. A Miami attorney, he got Gail her divorce from Douglas Kennedy and sent a token bill to Gail’s stepfather, who refused to pay it.

  11. Shortly before the breakup with Andy, Gail had moved to an upstairs flat by herself on Beaufort Street.

  12. Gail is thinking of returning to the United States.

  13. The British national anthem was played at the end of every performance, and if you didn’t get out quickly enough, you’d have to stand for the duration of the anthem.

  14. The quote is from Thomas Wolfe’s short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” a landmark work in the representation of colloquial, and at times vulgar, language. It was published in The New Yorker on June 15, 1935, and in the collection of Wolfe’s stories From Death to Morning (1935). Years later, Robert Starer, Gail’s life partner, set the story to music for a premiere at Brooklyn Co
llege, where he served on the faculty from 1963 to 1991.

  15. “Briggsie” is Robert Briggs, assistant director of the USTS in London.

  16. “It” is the polarizing subject, Gail’s fight with Andy’s mother.

  17. Gail had begun taking a fiction-writing class at the City Literary Institute in High Holborn.

  18. Gail had gone to a well-known photographer, Lotte Meitner-Graf, on Bond Street for her engagement pictures. The Hursts didn’t like the resulting prints, but Gail bought them anyway. For the purposes of her story, Gail makes the photographer male.

  19. Perry had become Gail’s Sunday walking companion.

  20. Irene Slade, a BBC culture commentator, was Gail’s fiction-writing teacher at the City Literary Institute.

  21. Elizabeth Nethery, Gail’s colleague at the USTS.

  22. Pauline McEvoy was Bob Briggs’s secretary at USTS.

  23. Gail had introduced Sylvia—Robin Challis’s on-and-off girlfriend—to Steve and Andy Hurst.

  24. On March 14, 1965, Seiji Ozawa led the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Symphonie Fantastique in Royal Festival Hall. Also on the program were Reethoven’s Symphony no. 1 and, with Peter Serkin, pianist, Mozart’s Piano Concerto in F.

  25. John A. T. Robinson, the bishop of Woolwich, had written an article in the London Times that related to his book Honest to God (1963), which Gail had read at the time of its publication. The book popularized the writings of Dietrich Ronhoeffer, Rudolph Rultmann, and Paul Tillich. With a first printing of three thousand copies, it created a furor with its unmaking of orthodoxy in the light of modern science; it went on to sell more than a million copies.