The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  WRITER AT WORK:

  “THE POSSIBILITARIAN”

  The Gail Godwin Papers, held in the Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, includes typed manuscripts of Gail’s unpublished short novel “The Possibilitarian,” also called “The Ruptured Link,” and an earlier, handwritten manuscript, “The Gift of Insight,” with notes. The manuscripts, when combined with Gail’s journals, provide valuable insights into the making of a writer.

  The journals show us that the origin of “The Possibilitarian” was not the desire to rework the stories she had previously designed around the subject of her father. Instead, the germ was philosophical.

  On May 9, 1966, she’d written: “Write a short novel about Vertical Lives”—that is, lives driven by enlightenment rather than purpose. This becomes a rallying cry for Ambrose Bradshaw, the protagonist of “The Possibilitarian,” whose diary entries record the week during which he hoped to impart the gift of his vision to his visiting sixteen-year-old daughter.

  “I will give her the vertical perspective her mother can’t,” he writes. “I will explain myself to her so that she, too, will see those arrow-like consistencies which make a frivolous life take on meaning.”

  Five days later in her journal, Gail comes up with the central plot line: a daughter spends a week with her father at his rented beach house. “Once again it is time for Rachel’s summer visit,” she jots down. Soon afterward, Gail settles on the idea of writing Ambrose’s story as his diary “of the gulf between action and thought.”

  A perusal of Gail’s notes for new works reveals how, starting with a few oppositions, she generates a host of associations that lead to a story design. For example, her reading of D. H Lawrence’s “St. Mawr,” noted a few times in the journals from 1966, attaches itself to Ambrose’s mind-set and provides a refrain about his search for animal-like living-in-the-moment.

  Scientology, which was much on Gail’s mind at the time, also became fodder for her fiction. She made use of some of its precepts.

  In her handwritten story draft, “The Gift of Insight,” Gail wrote her story on the right-hand pages of her notebook, and various reflections and references on the left. Page 12 features the scene in which Ambrose floats off in a sea of thought as well as water and for gets about Rachel, who has disappeared to join a group of admiring surfers. The facing page is philosophy—ideas drawn from William James (The Principles of Psychology) and L. Ron Hubbard.

  Gail was interested in James’s examination of the gap between wishing something and willing to do something. James writes that in order for an act to proceed, there can’t be any conflicting notion in the doer’s mind. That’s where Hubbard and Scientology come in. “The whole secret of auditing,” Gail notes, is “removing mental conflict.”

  In Hubbard’s scheme, people react to traumas by reenacting the dramas that trouble them. This both clouds their perception and distracts their attention. Once he or she is freed, what can a person achieve? That’s Ambrose’s question, for he’s dissatisfied with the “two-dimensional” world of success-oriented people, yet unable to achieve success as a dreamer.

  “The Gift of Insight” ends, after 66 pages, with Ambrose continuing to dwell on his daughter, whom he idolizes. Thinking of her makes him want to be a winner. She is the Coppertone girl, and yet she is half-him, and therefore perhaps his link to normalcy.

  “The Possibilitarian,” 141 pages long, resolves Ambrose’s conflict in a different way than “The Gift of Insight.” Ambrose is no longer latching on to his vision of Rachel to save himself. Instead, he’s getting drunk; writing a letter to his sister, whose quest for independence has led to loneliness; and writing a story about a fictionalized Rachel who gets her own ride to the bus station when she finds her father too hungover to drive.

  You might say that “The Possibilitarian” didn’t make it to full term because the ending was too short on hope. Gail, at this time, is very clear in her wish to create a literature that provides enlightenment.

  Regarding the use of her own life for fiction, Gail has already taken a stand. In a note following the “The Gift of Insight” in her notebook, she instructs herself:

  “The person who cherishes and values his ideals above reality can only grow or create to a certain level. After that, he gets ‘hung up’ because his ideas and creations no longer evolve from the source. Reality is three-dimensioned and has endless interpretations. Any one interpretation is only two-dimensional. A genius or real creative person creates and interprets from reality—the source—and thus gets some of it in his vision.”

  Because of Gail’s method, any one episode or relationship in her life can result in multiple versions, all very different in content and theme. Ambrose Bradshaw in the short story “Mourning” (begun on the fifth anniversary of Gail’s father’s suicide) appears in the daughter’s flashbacks after his funeral. One flashback is to their time together on a beach.

  “Mourning” was never published, but the theme of a daughter trying to understand the mind of a father figure who has committed suicide is victoriously taken up in Gail’s novel Violet Clay. Ambrose, the heroine’s uncle, is greatly fleshed out and transformed into a largely successful man before his decline and suicide, and the heroine, Violet, finds an empowering set of answers for herself.

  The short story “Old Lovegood Girls” (published in the Ballantine paperback edition of Evenings at Five) has the benighted, semi-alcoholic father visiting his daughter, Christina, during her first year of college. The focus is on Christina, and how she fulfills the father’s hopes that she will have the strength to battle the world.

  Ambrose in “The Possibilitarian” had begun, as already noted, with a philosophical dilemma, and the character grew out of Gail’s time at a Scientology retreat. Gail’s notes and story reveal that she consulted a large number of books to build the novel’s framework.

  The Brothers Karamazov provided a clue regarding Ambrose’s attraction to his own dreams. The Night and Nothing by Father Gale D. Webbe of Asheville gave substance to the notion of three-dimensional living. The eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po provided a portrait of a poet awakening from drunkenness. L. Ron Hubbard’s science fiction—about spirits from outer space who, having inhabited human bodies long ago, forget who they are—worked well for her within the context of human psychology. Existentialist novelists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus inspired the creation of one of the most intriguing characters in “The Possibilitarian”: the fugitive murderer, Lamar Wilkinson.

  Ambrose, running a used car lot, and expecting to find clues to his quest even there, feels he has found one when Wilkinson arrives to sell his car. Ambrose talks about the experience at a high society party, which he attends with Rachel, who’s dating the host’s grandson. The scene is described in the following excerpt from the novel, told in Ambrose’s voice.

  Excerpt from

  “The Possibilitarian,”

  Unpublished Manuscript,

  1966

  —

  A middle-aged woman, bearing a heavily lacquered beehive hairstyle over her tired face, approaches us. She has gone adrift in the crowd and alights upon us gratefully. “What do you think about that awful murder business in Knoxville?”

  “What happened?” I ask, feeling sorry for her. Adrift, with no vitality of her own, she must offer a sensation as an entrée into conversation.

  “You mean you haven’t been following it in the papers?” she asks, incredulous, her voice high, but grateful.

  “Miz Roe, this is Mr. Bradshaw,” says Liza. “He and his daughter are vacationing at Ocean City, too.”

  “Oh, I see!” cries Mrs. Roe, eager to be told what to see.

  To me, Liza explains, “Secretary of Commerce and Mrs. Roe are down from Washington.”

  “So I understand,” I say, smiling at the lady. She relaxes a little with this identification as if now she remembers who she is.

  “What about the murder?” I persist. The bourbon ha
s long since gone to work, dampening down any stubborn dry growth of inhibition that happens to be around. I want to hear something sensational and shocking. I want to be shocked out of this somnolent, slow conversation.

  “Well, it’s just terrible, really, Mr. Bradshaw,” Mrs. Roe, touching my arm, confides. “This perfectly normal wife and mother of five gets up one morning and shoots her whole family dead. They think the baby might live, but it will never be normal. She just wakes up one morning, puts on a pair of shorts and a shirt, smokes a cigarette, goes and gets her husband’s pistol, and goes around to every room, shooting. The papers say there was blood everywhere. It looked like a butcher shop.”

  “She was mental, of course,” murmurs Liza, lighting herself a cigarette.

  “Well, of course,” says Mrs. Roe, “she must have been. But what puzzles me is, what was she thinking about? How could she do it? How could you want to kill your own family? I just can’t picture the feeling, don’t you know.”

  “Why would you want to?” says Liza, frowning. She does not like this conversation. It has the possibility of leading into those regions that attract and repel her.

  “I think I can tell you,” I say, my voice syrupy-soft with good drink. “It has something to do with reaching a threshold where ordinary rules suddenly lose their reality. The person sees a vision, no matter how diabolic, and must carry it through. Afterwards, he may go back to being as normal as he was before. The action of murder seems to have taken place on a different plane altogether. His own action may seem unreal to him. It exists outside, separately living its own life, accruing its own consequence. I once met a man who had murdered a girl only that morning. He sold his car to me that afternoon. Said he had run into debt in Virginia and was on his way to Miami where he would get some seasonal work. He had all his papers and was a very sensible customer. He was an ex-Marine. Fought at Iwo Jima. I noticed that the back of his shirt was pressed into three sections, military style. I remember he had very clear, calm, slate-gray eyes. He really looked at you, without any tricks. I remember thinking, now here is a man you could really talk to, if only there was time. A couple of hours later, the State Police came. They told me that this man had strangled a girl with a nylon stocking in Newport News that morning. They thought he was on his way to Miami and from there would try to get to Cuba.”

  “My heavens!” exclaims Mrs. Roe. “You must have been terrified when you found out. Doing business with a murderer right there on the same day.”

  “No,” I say, “he was not a murderer when we did business. He was a man selling his car, in order to get away. The murder was somewhere else. It existed in a realm all its own.”

  “You mean you don’t believe in capital punishment, then?” Liza plays nervously with her overloaded silver charm bracelet, smoking intermittently, looking pointedly over us at the dancers, while she listens.

  Then, miraculously, I am suddenly and completely in present time: one of the accomplishments of drinking. It disconnects the living moment from all the dross of past and future, with the bonus of eliminating any problems, as well. Here is the pleasant, damp cool of a lawn near the sea, upon which choice meat roasts and pretty women dance. There is the noise of the combo and soft, controlled laughter, and the crickets when they can get through. Above, the stars move, according to a plan of their own. And here is this sullen girl beside me, who might still be reached, and this tired Washington wife whose fascination for newspaper violence may mirror some healthy trace of it lying dormant beneath her poor, heavy flesh. I see glimpses of larger patterns that will save us all from going back on ourselves and bear us forward to a new and vital awareness. “Of course,” I tell these listening ladies, “the trouble, or at least part of it is, this: We’re all trapped in the stories we tell ourselves. We spend all our energy living up to agreements we have not made but that have been made for us. We have stepped into stories, to ‘play’ them awhile, and then forgot they were stories and think we have to live them. We are like a bunch of people locking themselves up in a cell to play a game called ‘jail’ and then losing the key. After a while, nobody can remember NOT living in jail and they all start believing they’ve always lived there. Do you see what I mean?”

  “My goodness, Mr. Bradshaw, what a philosopher we are,” says Liza, duly blowing a stream of blue smoke skywards and watching me through its screen. Mrs. Roe is silent, worried, fiddling with the damp napkin around the bottom of her glass.

  Then, a space in the night is gone, I sip my drink and dizzily know I was just about onto something big, but missed it. Mrs. Roe is looking at me oddly, all traces of gratitude gone, looking around warily, as if expecting somebody. Liza is making no bones about staring at me, as if she is going to catch me out, at last.

  “Anyway,” I say, compelled to follow whatever it was to its end, “I’m sure it is a thing to be considered. However, it is a bit hard to deshcribe … describe, really.”

  1. The Scientology term “dynamic” means the urge toward life. There are eight dynamics and various corresponding tones that lead from apathy through knowledge to unobstructed experience of self and world. The fifth dynamic is the urge toward survival through animals and plants.

  2. “Dramatizing” in Scientology means acting out a “valence” (powerful force) in an “engram” (traumatic experience). One example that Hubbard gives is the experience of an abused child, who dramatizes the valence of the abuser in reenacting the engram of the abuse experience.

  3. The ultimate state of being in the Know-to-Mystery Scale is the “native state.” It is ranked above belief in deities, and above knowledge. It involves experiencing self and world simultaneously, without losing the will to act.

  4. Colin Wilson called David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) “the greatest novel of the twentieth century” apparently for its imaginative metaphysics rather than its literary merits. The novel’s hero, Maskull, travels to the planet Tormance (which orbits Arcturus) and encounters various races and belief systems before climbing a tower of revelations. With that perspective, he learns that the instinct for pleasure corrupts, and that pain is a truer instrument of evolution.

  5. George Kelly analyzed the ways in which people see and believe what they expect to see and believe, and how, when they’re confounded, they adjust their beliefs as painlessly as possible. Readers of Kelly hoped that people would develop an awareness of their self-deluding processes for their own good. Gail applied her reading of Kelly to her HASI experience.

  6. “Overrun” is a Scientology term for a behavior that belongs to an earlier period of development.

  7. Rebel Cole, the younger of Gail’s two brothers, by her mother and Frank, was seven at the time.

  8. Ian had booked Gail and himself for Power Processing at Saint Hill Manor, the English mecca of Scientology, a Gothic-looking estate formerly belonging to the Maharajah of Jaipur.

  9. “Perceptics” is Scientology’s term for the fifty-seven senses, which include balance and awareness of awareness.

  10. “Bank” is Scientology’s colloquial name for the reactive mind, which stores the irrational responses of a “preclear.”

  11. The CCH 2 is the second of four control-communication-havingness techniques by which an auditor has his “preclear” establish control of his body, improve his communication, and gain a grasp of present-moment reality. The preclear strives to clear himself of things that have taken control of his “thetan,” or essential self. In practice, CCH techniques are repeated to the point of hysteria or hypnosis, so that the preclear begins to break down and communicate secrets.

  12. Gail began working on the short novel “The Ruptured Link,” renamed “The Possibilitarian,” involving a visionary but failed father named Ambrose.

  13. GPM is the Goals Problem Mass, the tightly bound complex of hidden goals underlying people’s aberrations. It is possible to undo the mass through auditing, Scientology proposes.

  14. “Randomity” is a Scientology term referring to the misalig
nment of an organism’s efforts caused by the efforts of other entities.

  15. “Itsa,” short for “it is a,” refers to a preclear’s clear identification of something in response to an auditor’s question. An itsa line is the line of communication between a preclear and his/her own “bank.”

  16. Some of the highlights of the lost diaries are preserved in “Becoming a Writer,” in The Writer on Her Work, vol. 1, ed. Janet Sternberg (Norton, 1981) and “Waltzing with the Black Crayon,” in Evenings at Five: A Novel and Five New Stories (Ballantine, 2004). This was the period when Gail studied with Kurt Vonnegut and José Donoso, and made friends with Jane Barnes, John Casey, David Plimpton, and John Irving. She also decided to stay on at the University of Iowa and do graduate work in literature. She earned a PhD in English in 1970.

  Part six

  GETTING PUBLISHED

  Iowa City, Iowa

  MARCH 5, 1968, TO NOVEMBER 3, 1968

  In the Company of Writers

  Gail Fills in Some Material from the Destroyed Iowa City Journals

  —

  In early January of 1967, I flew from New York to Iowa in a snowstorm. Ozark Airlines lost my luggage (briefly). Lorraine and her husband. Chap Freeman, sheltered me in their commodious lodgings on North Dubuque Street until we found an apartment for me, the top floor of a house, 415 South Capitol, in walking distance to the University, and across the street from the city jail. Lorraine, ensconced in the Workshop, had just finished translating José Donoso’s novel Este domingo from Spanish into English. Chap was getting an MFA in filmmaking.

  Kurt Vonnegut was teaching his last semester in the Workshop and already had one foot out the door. He would shortly learn that he had won a Guggenheim Fellowship and would be on his way to Germany to refresh his memory for his novel in progress, Slaughterhouse-Five. I was devastated when I learned that his Workshop section was overfilled and closed. But others must have been devastated, too, because he agreed to take on a second section. The sections, about fifteen to twenty people, met once a week to critique one another’s mimeographed stories or parts of novels. Jane Barnes submitted a devilish social satire, “Coming of Age in Washington, D.C.” She wore big swooping hats and was engaged to another Vonnegut student, John Casey, who actually had a novel under option by a major publisher. Several years after leaving Iowa, Jane would publish her novel about Lenin’s wife, I, Krupskaya. And then there was David Plimpton, who would be the first of us to have a story appear in a national magazine, and John Irving, already married, with a small son. At his twenty-fifth birthday party, Irving played us a tape of the music (from Carmina Burana) he had chosen for the film score of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears. He hadn’t finished the novel, no publisher or film person had laid eyes on it, but “I often picked out my music ahead of time,” he explained to me years later. “Call it my mayhem confidence.”