by Gail Godwin
8. Jurg was a Swiss banker whom Gail had been seeing occasionally.
9. Cyril Connolly was the most influential literary voice in England; he had cofounded the epochal literary magazine Horizon and edited it from 1939 to 1950, and then served as a book critic for the London Sunday Times.
10. Charles Gillett was the president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau and the president of the National Association of Travel Organizations.
11. Barbara Frey was the owner of the Beaufort Street flat that Gail was renting.
12. Ambrose is the father who commits suicide in Gail’s story “Mourning.”
13. In Jungian terminology, “numinous” refers to heightened or altered consciousness.
14. “Diary of a Seducer” is a part of Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. In it, Kierkegaard imagines an aesthete who, with calculation and charm, enjoys a woman by making her yield herself to him completely, and then moves on. Gail had been reading it at the start of her European sojourn—in October 1961—and had commented, “It should be required reading for all girls before they reach their eighteenth year.”
15. Gail was moving to a riverfront flat on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. She stayed only two months.
16. On September 21, 1961, Gail sat in Pack Square in Asheville, two weeks before her departure for Europe, reflecting that she was “choosing between leaving [her] family and losing [her] sanity.”
17. Ian rented out a room in his flat to a photographer named Michael and his girlfriend. Mary.
18. An “ARC break” is a Scientology term for a sudden break in “affinity, reality and communication” with someone.
19. The Waves was a radical fictional experiment by Woolf, as she had six characters interact and progress as if they were part of a single organism, while the story is told in a succession of short monologues.
20. A “valence” in the terminology of Scientology is a borrowed personality, a substitute for one’s true self, which one uses to act out prescribed dramas.
21. Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys was a finalist for the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel in 1961. In it, scientists are able to create duplicates of characters that then negotiate a deadly maze. Whenever a duplicate dies in a trap, the original person, maintained in state of suspended animation, goes a little more insane. The hero, Al Barker, finds a way to traverse the hero’s psychological purgatory.
22. Mose Winston Godwin, Gail’s father.
23. Mr. Miller had asked Gail to come back as a contract worker and write a travel handbook for the U.S. Travel Service.
24. Ian and Gail were involved with Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard at the onset of his major educational project in psychic healing at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, Sussex. The overall goal was to “clear the planet” by clearing individuals of irrational impulses. Though the center had been established in 1959, it wasn’t until 1966 that Hubbard instituted Power Processing, a profitable method of “auditing” and training people in achieving a state of Clear.
25. “By-passed charge” is the Scientology term for mental energy that has gone awry.
26. Dion Fortune was the founder of the Society of the Inner Light and the author of many books, including The Mystical Qabalah (1935) and The Cosmic Doctrine (1949).
27. See “Possible Sins,” in the Ballantine Reader’s Circle edition of Evenings at Five: A Novel and Five New Stories. Gail wrote this story of her first confession many years after, but this 1966 journal entry was the first impetus for it.
28. In April 1962, Gail had become attached to James Montgomerie, an attentive, never-married, thirty-eight-year-old lawyer employed by the Rank Organization (a media business machine, and hotel conglomerate). He had been so dissatisfied with his bureaucratic job, he was thinking of leaving the company—partly to focus on his writing.
29. Gail was beginning a story about her proposed visit to Saint Hill Manor, the headquarters for advanced studies in Scientology.
Part five
THE OUTSIDER
1 Argyll Mansions, London, and
Saint Hill, East Grinstead, Sussex
MARCH 21, 1966, TO MAY 22, 1966
In the mid-1960s, Gail’s contemporaries sought to confront a deep-seated social malaise by probing their subconscious depths. Caught up in the human-improvement phenomenon, Gail assembled around her key texts related to such topics as the essential self, freedom from prejudice, and heightened experience. One of the books was The Outsider, Colin Wilson’s 1956 survey of writers and artists who sought heartfulness (to use a term featured in Gail’s 2001 book Heart). She referred to these books while exploring the cloistered world of Scientology, into which she had been drawn through discussions with her husband, Ian Marshall.
[UNDATED, 1966]
I am married to Ian Marshall.
“I simply sat and watched him with the queerest, deepest sweetest sense in the world—the sense of an ache that had stopped … I myself at least was somehow off the ground. He was already where I had been.”
“And where were you?” the Brother amusedly asked.
“Just on the sofa always, leaning back on the cushion and feeling a delicious ease. He was already me.”
“And who were you?” the Brother continued.
“Nobody. That was the fun.”
—HENRY JAMES, “The Great Good Place”
By March 1966, Ian Marshall had become wholly committed to Scientology, and had involved Gail. They’d enrolled in all-day courses at the Hubbard Association of Scientologists, International (HASI) in London; it was a place that demanded submission to a group and a process.
Although she was fascinated by some of the tenets of Scientology, Gail was also making an effort to save her marriage by sampling her husband’s passionate interest. She tried salvaging from Scientology theories that might excite her imagination. She took a stab at that process with a story idea, “The Woman Who Killed Plants,” and explicated it with Scientology terminology.
The Woman Who Killed Plants
—
A woman sets up a flat—she’s married—and, of course, buys a plant, or is given a plant. It dies. She gets another, thinking nothing of it. It also dies. This goes on for a while until she gets angry that these plants keep dying on her. She consults people about it. They advise various things. She does them—but to no avail. If the plants don’t die, they grow in weird ways—it’s the absence of this woman’s life-giving force (she has no YIN).
“You have to have a yen for growing plants.” (Fifth dynamic, Tone 40 on an object.)1
“Tone” is any level of survival—or state of being—on the tone scale of the L. Ron Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation. “Tone 40” means intention without reservation or limit. Have her sit down and talk to it (a plant)—the fifth dynamic. One day, her little stepson overhears, comes in and helps. She’s always had too much logos, or dignity, to talk to a plant before. They do this every day for a while. What is happening is that she is warming up to life by contacting it—she gets into empathy with it. Her little stepson, who has always been dutiful but slightly suspicious, warms up to her. Before, he had only given her the outward signs of a filial affection with the adherence of someone who has signed a contract and is determined to stick by it graciously. All his witty, childish originalities, and all his outbursts of joy or rage, were saved for his father.
OTHER STORY IDEAS:
Someone who dramatizes all the time—strip the dramatizations away and you have a person who is “just himself.”2 He does not go around having to create an effect on people—he may be rather quiet—but he is effective. He is totally freed from the need to be admired or noticed by others.
The Know-to-Mystery Scale also has possibilities.3
“Why mother!” said Lou [the heroine] impatiently, “I think one gets so tired of your men with mind, as you call it. There are so many of that sort of clever men … It seems to me there’s something else besides mind and cleverness, or niceness or cleanness. Perhaps it is
the animal. Just think of St. Mawr! … He seems afar greater mystery to me than a clever man. He’s a horse. Why can’t one say in the same way, of a man: He’s a man?”
—D. H. LAWRENCE, “St. Mawr”
MARCH 21
How to avoid fanaticism in Scientology: Don’t be intellectually isolated: don’t stop reading good books; don’t stop caring about aesthetic growth. Remember H. James, Colin Wilson, D. H. Lawrence, etc.
The [great good] place represents no less than the still center of one’s own being, access to which is generally obstructed by innumerable irrelevancies … The whole dream in this case becomes a verbalized representation of that trance-like state, the SAMADHI of Indian tradition, in which man is face to face with his Self and which opens his eyes to the heart of things.
—KRISHNA BALDEV VAID,
TECHNIQUE IN THE TALES OF HENRY JAMES
Have friends who are intellectually stimulated by interests outside Sci y. Remember, the compulsion to know can get you into trouble. Do not need help from any one source. Do not look on HASI as a place to relax, be accepted, run back to. Keep up other standards which HASI neglects.
HOW DO PEOPLE respond to a cult?
Repression—I don’t want to think about it, it’s dangerous.
Suppression—Keep it down! Wipe it out!
Dramatization—It’s all! I’m saved! It’s the way.
Understanding—I’m not stuck in a viewpoint. I can create new viewpoints at will.
Movers
—
A newspaper reporter sent to investigate a cult doesn’t come back. “The seeds of fanaticism were always in him,” said Sullivan, “I just wasn’t being observant.”
Of course! Isn’t it logical that anyone who could hate a subject with the intensity he could, might also suddenly go into reverse with equal intensity? Look at St. Paul, for instance. Cases are strung out all through history.
“I just wasn’t looking.”
Fanaticism is getting stuck in a viewpoint, losing the ability to see from a distance. You become a viewpoint, lose all your space.
Sullivan sends a second reporter to investigate. This reporter is known for his extreme, academic care in being as objective as possible. He seems to have a built-in proboscis for ferreting out reality from unreal situations.
Note the myths and fairy tales in which the hero has to search for something precious in a dangerous place. There is always the fear of being sucked in, of flying too close to the sun.
“Voyage to Arcturus”4—What is true, what is false? Sometimes one masquerades as the other.
THE THREE HINDU fundamental states of the human spirit: Sattva: loftiness, goodness; Rajas: manifestation, struggle, and dynamism; Tamas: obscurity and brute instinct.
Sattva attaches man to happiness, rajas to action, and tamas, shrouding knowledge, attaches him to heedlessness. Sattva prevails, O Bharata, having overcome rajas and tamas; rajas, when it has overpowered sattva and tamas; likewise tamas reigns when sattva and rajas are crushed.
—THE BHAGAVAD GITA, translated by Mahadev Desai
Read Professor George A. Kelly, Ohio State University, about Personal Construct Theory.5
Let us consider the case of the person who is construed by his neighbors in such a way that he is expected to do certain things. Whenever he fails to perform according to their expectations he finds them acting as if he had threatened them. He has. Now he may start to fancy himself as an unpredictable person … In order to maintain his pose he may have to construe himself as a “shocking” person. Thus, even though he rejects the expectancies of his neighbors as being invalid, he has had to construe himself in relation to those expectations.
—GEORGE A. KELLY, A THEORY OF PERSONALITY:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS
In a half-dream this morning, I started “writing” a story and realized it was about a mile off the ground, high-flown and pretentious. Not touching the ground at any point.
APRIL 8 • Good Friday
I thought of that other Good Friday, in 1951:
A spring day with an earthy smell, everything fresh, the daffodils coming up all around St. Mary’s Church, and a very few of us at the afternoon service. Father Webbe was in black cassock. He went through the Stations of the Cross, all around the church and then, just before three, when Christ died, he knelt down, a humble athlete, and his body looked truly sorrowful. Good Friday was never the same after that one. For one thing, I have lost my religious fervor. But it was beautiful while it lasted.
—
LATELY, I HAVE BEEN dreaming on a new plane. Whether it’s Sci y’s influence, or all the science fiction and Colin Wilson, I don’t know. But in the dreams, I and others are learning how to evolve into a better species.
If one could truly rid himself of his aberrations and projections, then he could recognize when he picks up other people’s emotions. He would be able to distinguish them from his own. Thus, the gradual growth of ESP.
ELLEN A., A HASI classmate, said: “I didn’t want the baby. I’d finished that cycle of action. He was an overrun.6 I knew it was wrong to have him. I was going against my own reality to have him.”
IN THE TAXI COMING HOME, I realized that no therapy, including Power Processing, could solve my problem if one intention belonged to me and the counterintention belonged to someone else. Only with problems where both the intention and counterintention belong to a single person can the pressure be relieved.
For instance, I think I can do something about my writing because the opposition lies within, but about other things—liking sex with Ian: feeling motherly and loving his son—these may not be for me to solve. In fact, if only Ian didn’t mind, I would feel perfectly happy accepting what is.
About the problem with Alan. The only children I could love and tolerate were my kin, because I felt they were tied up with me somehow. I could never love Alan the way I do Rebel7—even though I haven’t seen Rebel often. I understand how he operates. Alan is a silent, morose little person. I haven’t the slightest idea what he’s thinking, and I consider him mainly as a threat to my freedom.
Yes, this is the way it is: I feel totally outside everybody’s group.
I can’t “go back” to N.C. (in spirit, or as a way of living). The past is dead. I can’t agree with their way—it isn’t wide enough. On the other hand, I will never merge into a partnership with Ian as he wants it; he is alien to me, too. I never have felt totally at home here.
ELIA GOLLER AT the Mensa conference I went to with Ian, after I had been telling him how I’d like to live in Arizona, and describing the end of Lawrence’s story “St. Mawr”: “I know what’s wrong with you. You just don’t like your fellow humans.”
But I’m not unhappy all alone out here, the only nonmember of Mensa. If only people would not protest. Couldn’t Ian and I come to some arrangement where we could live together but not merge?
“So I have told him. I said this evening, when no one was about: ‘Rico dear, listen to me seriously. I can’t stand these people. If you ask me to endure another week of them, I shall either become ill, or insult them … I tell you, I shall just make a break, like St Mawr, if I don’t get out … Won’t you come with me to America, to the South-west?’ ”
“I don’t hate men because they’re men … I dislike them because they’re not men enough: babies, and playboys, and poor things showing off all the time, even to themselves. I don’t say I’m any better. I only wish, with all my soul, that some men were bigger and stronger and deeper than I am … There’s something else for me … It’s here, in this landscape.”
—LOU WITT, heroine of “St. Mawr,” by D. H. Lawrence
Next week: Power Processing—keep notes.8
APRIL 12–13 • At Saint Hill, East Grinstead
First impression: big tree in the front of the manor. I feel resentful that Hubbard should have such a tree. Waiting. Waiting. Cold and damp. “Suppressive” bandied in the atmosphere. College days have been overru
n. Let me out of here.
APRIL 15
What have you done? What was that a solution to? What have you not said? What was that a solution to? Masturbation—what kind of release do you feel that was? What is a nonsource? Did you notice perceptics9 were clearer?
What is a source? Water, fire, mother, the snake Uroborus. But what are mine? Is there nothing I can go back to, that I lived out of?
Many things now return—a ballroom on a summer’s night full of Russian counts, all long ago.
My source is the imagination.
THE CENTER OF ONE’S own being is capable of illimitable energy—colors, pictures, patterns, answers.
APRIL 19
In the mechanism of Saint Hill is the seed of a totalitarian government. I am getting a taste of the outrage an individual feels, the muffled protest against a looter of the spirit.
Mrs. Marshall and Ian in the dining room of the Regent Palace fight over the bill in a way my family never could—each with the confident aggression that he/she means to pay.
—
WHAT IF THE “DOORS of perception” were cleansed? Have they ever been? Is there a way? Has Hubbard found it?
APRIL 27
“Tell me an existing condition. Tell me how you have handled it.”
YOU HAVE BEEN connected to: Freudian psychotherapy, analytical psychology, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, existentialism, the Methodist church, the Presbyterian, Catholic, Episcopal, tranquilizers, smoking marijuana.