The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  I’VE JUST LOCATED why I’m not doing more. I’m using three-quarters of my energy being neurotic, feeling bad, indulging in memories, envying other people. Today I envied my cousin Sophie Marie. Yet, unless I were S-M, I would go stark raving mad with that husband, that dull docile life, chauffeuring Mother from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham, picking up the children, etc. What does she do for herself? Look beautiful. Fix up her house. Shop.

  Since I have to live with my neuroses, let’s see how not to waste time. Keep up with OE one hour every morning; take lunch; write from twelve to three; have a break; write till six; have another break; then spend my evenings reading. That should do it.

  —

  REWRITE “THE LEGACY OF THE MOTES,” remembering Casey’s12 criticism and the Black Monk13—and the actual phenomenon of what happened when I got my own eye motes [muscae volitantes] in London.

  Excerpt from May 26, 1968,

  Draft of “The Legacy of the Motes”

  —

  The park into which he [Eliott] wandered was of dimensions that Van Buren [the librarian who recommended the park] might walk an eternity of lunches to never find. Elegant white giraffes lolloped soundlessly over its thick sward whose stellate dandelions were the size of dinner plates.

  Corresponding Excerpt from

  “The Legacy of the Motes,”

  Published in The Iowa Review (Summer 1972)

  and Dream Children (Knopf 1976)

  —

  At the end of this mews was a vast green park that seemed to stretch to the frontiers of the evening. He walked soundlessly over its sward. The air hummed around him. He suddenly wanted more than anything to lie down, and did … Eliott woke the wings [the winglike motes in his eyes] and sent their soft specters up, over the ground, the trees, to see what they would find. They hovered above a pale spot burgeoning out of the dusk. It came closer, sprouting legs, an undulating tower of a neck, lolloping soundlessly toward him. It was an elegant white giraffe.14

  JUNE 30 • Sunday

  Six p.m. I can certainly claim to having felt better in my life. The consolation of a friend is not to be underestimated. (Why all these ass-backward sentences?)

  I am either in a trough and will have to climb out, or I’m going through the great darkness that precedes enlightenment. I did five pages of the rewrite today. I began thirteen days ago. I have thirty pages of the third draft.

  Called Lorraine. They15 are moving to a rent-controlled apartment in Chicago for $40 a month.

  I must go on. The wheel turns, bringing me an MA with Distinction, rejecting my stories, bringing consolation dreams one night and nightmares the next.

  JULY 5

  I want to write a new story about what it feels like to be a cyclone—“The Life of a Cyclone”16—coming to rest overnight at the Caseys. Will start on it soon. Went to see Dr. Whelan at Student Health. He gave me some sedatives. Did my OE.

  PORTION OF LETTER FROM KATHLEEN COLE

  TO GAIL, JULY 5, 1968

  Your letter was in the mail today, and you are in the depths. Wish I could help but it is difficult for anyone to do so when you are in such a state. All right. You’re displeased with yourself. But no one is ever expected to do more than she can do. If that is all, then it is all. First get some perspective. There’s really only one thing wrong—a tremendous thing to you—nothing published. But it will come—only you’ve got to try another tack, it seems. Yet all the utterly worthless stuff I keep reading or trying to read in books and magazines!

  You’ve got to say something you truly believe. You need, in my opinion, for what it is worth, some more work on plotting. I told you, the story you sent me about the man with the wings in his vision was excellent halfway through, and then you just finished it off any old way. Build a story to the very end. You know all these things, who am I to tell you?

  JULY 6

  I feel like a vegetable. Brutal dreams. I am either hurting the ones I love, or they are hurting me. I need a car. Can’t afford one. I really hate myself—and loathe the world.

  JULY 8

  July 5–8. Awful, awful. I couldn’t move or think or read.

  The dream: being a man who makes up a mystery. He leaves clues about trains, subways, and ferries all over Europe. Then the ruse is up: there’s nothing on the sheet of paper he gives for the daily chase. He is exposed. Shoots himself. There was the urgency of the dream, and then the letdown afterward.

  JULY 10

  Went to Student Health yesterday, got some sleeping pills. Had leisurely dreams. Even in my dreams I was calm; I spoke of how I used to be “uptight,” and a picture of my adolescent self was flashed on the screen. I saw how pale, anxious, and generally unattractive I was.

  Went to see McGalliard17 today. Felt the need of doing something casual. I’m still not casual, I found out. Can I hold out for a PhD?

  Eight pages written on a new story. I’ve decided to write what I like since nobody will publish me anyway.

  New Yorker. Mademoiselle, Epoch.

  PORTION OF LETTER FROM GAIL TO

  KATHLEEN COLE, JULY 10, 1968

  Dear Kathleen:

  Your letter helped. Actually, when I wrote that black missive, I was about to come down with something, which I still have a little bit of. From 4 July to today, a fever, just a degree. Unable to follow the print in a book, got nauseated whenever I tried to retain an idea. Even sleeping was impossible. Went to the hospital. Doctor said it was probably a combination of a virus and overwork. He said, “You should have at least taken a week off after an MA with Distinction.”

  As it was, I took the MA exams, studied for finals, ran away to Lorraine in Chicago, came back, broke up with Othello, moved out, took seven credits for summer school, and wrote four to five hours a day. Then I wondered why I was depressed.

  I’d also lost a lot of weight, so the doctor said, force myself to eat three times a day, and he gave me some mild sleeping tablets. Last night, I had my first night’s rest. Previously, I’d been dreaming, actually dreaming mysteries that I wrote and acted the lead in.

  I went and paid a leisurely visit to Mr. McGalliard, the medieval scholar here who teaches Old English. One day in class, he said the mountain people in his area still said “hit” for “it,” as in Old English. I noted the familiar accent and I called out, “Where you from?” And he said, “Burke County.18 Where you from?” “Buncombe.” Much to the amusement of the class. His family lived in a little town called Connelly Springs. It was mostly McGalliards. There were fourteen children. When they started getting old enough to educate, the family moved to Chapel Hill.

  Well, I’m tired again. Here endeth my leisurely letter. Pray that I regain my energy. I’ll never complain about getting old or getting published if I can just regain my health.

  JULY 16

  I hope I can look back someday and say “What a lot I learned, the summer of ’68,” because that is all that can be said for it. I certainly couldn’t go on like this the rest of my life.

  Went to the State Park19 and swam in the lake with the Hammers.20 Got all hot about getting a car, felt suddenly American again (“How can I live without a new car?”), went back to EPB21 that evening and all of Saturday and Sunday and rewrote “The Man on a Sofa”22 with a happy ending. Today wrote three-quarters of a story about a woman science fiction writer who gets a telephone call from God.

  JULY 20

  A new one. Shy. But secretly sure. The scary combination took me out of town to a real bar, with a fountain, tables, love music. Metaphysical conversation. I think he’s been places I haven’t. He kept on about the mountains. Hope to God they’re not like Ian’s Spanish tree. He takes his PhD comps in October, will be here all next year. I want him all now.

  We climbed out the window of his top-floor flat and looked at the stars. Sexy hand-holding and kissing. The trouble is, I’d rather do it than write about it.

  JULY 22

  Of all my journals since 1961, I have only this one in hand. Lorraine said my
task was to document myself.

  Perhaps I should lower my self-demands, and see how I can cope with the paucity of my existence. Let me start with this: Failing catastrophe, I can hide in a university till sixty-five and maybe then have the courage to kill myself. I will try to keep sane. I will do a little bit each day, I will cultivate my garden. I will not go to pieces in public like AR.

  I suffer from envy of other people and their achievements. I start at the top with Virginia Woolf and proceed to Iris Murdoch and Jane Casey. The only thing that strikes me at the moment, to be fair, is this: These were/are all, to the best of their abilities, creative. But they were/are lucky enough to have husbands to sustain them. I do not believe I can do without a man. I’m not sure I would want to achieve the dubious state of blissful independence.

  The trouble is, I see now how loathsome it would be to accept someone with whom I didn’t feel this sensibility, the sensuality springing from a want to be closer to that other.

  So, what now? The only thing for it, according to the I Ching this evening, is innocence. To be in a state of innocence about what I am today, what I have made of myself. About the events of the past, I can do nothing. I can do something about how I see them, and how I present them to others. I don’t want to trick anyone or throw them off the track of me; but neither do I need to choose for myself the most unflattering spotlight. As a becoming-artist, I should recognize the importance of presentation.

  NOW ABOUT THE new one, let’s call him “Byron.” I don’t want to undercut what we have by analyzing it. I am only going to mention the worst possibilities.

  We were happy, began tentative explorations, spoke of poetry, held hands. We began accruing little memory specimens—e.g., statues that dramatize “Keep your cool.” We have each been hesitant about revealing our pasts; neither of us has asked the other.

  He did ask me why I changed my name. He volunteered that he was once engaged.

  All I know for certain is that it warms and excites me to be near him. I’ve found no faults. I am not looking for them. I know we have differences. He seems at peace with himself (after what struggles?). He is in no hurry to publish; he is not creative on a daily basis, but does write private poems. He comes across as a gentle, rather shy man; but underneath, he’s certain of who he is. He calls himself a confirmed mystic, and wants “to try marriage someday.”

  Gail’s interest in how personalities combine in romantic relationships helps drive some of her early fiction, especially “The Beautiful French Family,” the novel that she had begun working on upon her arrival at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The resulting manuscript, published as The Perfectionists by Harper & Row in 1970, involved a massive reworking of material. Up through May 1969, when she completed the final draft under contract, Gail thinks about and works on The Perfectionists.

  For example, she rewrote a conversation that the novel’s heroine, Dane Empson, has with Polly Heykoop, a friend Dane makes on a family vacation in Majorca. Polly is a free-speaking mother of twin girls, and is dealing with a marriage that has good sex but faulty companionship. Dane has arrived with her psychoanalytical husband, John; Robin, her imperious little stepson, who’s being passed off as her son; and John’s troubled golden-girl patient, Penelope.

  In the early draft, Polly thinks that Robin is Dane’s biological son. In the final draft, Polly reveals that she has learned the truth. Gail increases the tension by making Polly hungrier for friendship, and smarter. Dane is made more circumspect. In the early draft, Dane remarks that her marriage is “of the future.” The final draft reveals more animus. Dane arms herself with her husband’s arguments, and she enjoys triumphing over Polly’s wish to get a confession from her.

  Excerpt from 1967 Draft of

  “The Beautiful French Family”

  —

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Dane said.

  “Why, what do you mean? Just tell me, what is it, objectively that you don’t have? Don’t think me rude for what I’m going to say. But I think you want to be unhappy.”

  “You are possibly right,” said Dane, edging away. For, sometime, during the space of the last moment, she had decided that this was the better, the prouder, admission.

  “Yes, I know,” said Polly. “So, it seems to me, all you have to do is to get a new perspective on things. Then you can start enjoying all you have. Another thing I think: Robin is being affected by your unhappiness. I will never forget that child’s face. It frightened me. Has he always been like that, since birth?”

  “A bit,” said Dane, building once again upon a lie. Sometimes her whole life seemed to her like a city built over a swamp. But to start over became more and more impossible, as new structures were added to the city, and wings and partitions were added to the structures already there. “He’s a very unusual child,” she went on, adding a new wing. “Recently, John had him tested. He has this fabulously high I.Q. We will have to face it. He will never be like other children, the psychologist said.”

  “Golly, what did John say?”

  “Oh, he—agreed. John was a child prodigy, too, you know. He placed in professional chess championships at age twelve; he entered Oxford at sixteen. Naturally, he is not easy to live with,” she went on, feeling yet another edifice rising slowly from the mire. “He is so complicated, he takes so much energy. He needs more than most men. We have such a unique relationship, you see. Not like most married couples. It’s like—well, rather like a marriage of the future—”

  Excerpt from a Later, Undated Draft,

  Titled “The Perfectionists”

  —

  “I sensed this forthrightness about you, at the first, when you were standing there in the road. I thought: With such a friend I could complete myself.”

  “Can’t you complete yourself with your husband?” Dane said, a bit of the tiger herself. “John is my friend,” she added, rather triumphantly. “He’s all the friend I need.”

  “I don’t think you can do it with a husband. If you do, the other suffers. There are certain places where husbands and wives shouldn’t travel together—certain areas—or the whole thing goes blah.”

  “Where?” said Dane. “What places?”

  “In—in that area of analysis about relationships. At least, the relationship you have with each other. As soon as you start analyzing it, you—each of you—lose some of your otherness, the part of the male or female that the other keeps straining for. The unknowable part. I don’t want to know all of Karl. When he comes to me, I sometimes feel he’s a wonderful alien, someone I’ll never interpret, another species altogether. It’s only when we make love that we’re really together. And we’re something else then. We’re something other than either of us. I would never sit around with Karl and say, ‘What is this otherness, dear, that makes you so attractive? Let’s analyze it—A, B, C—and give it a name.’ But the analyzing has to come because I’m a Western woman and because I never know what I think or believe until I’ve thought it aloud to someone else. That somebody shouldn’t be my husband but should be my equal. Maybe even more than me. Has got to understand and contribute and, perhaps, even go beyond. I think you could go beyond the usual limits.”

  “I think your ideas are beautifully antique, Polly. But I can’t agree about this otherness thing. If you are limitless—and all complex people are—then you’ll never touch bottom, you’ll never give yourself away and lose all your mystery—or otherness, as you put it.” This was John’s argument, not her own! But with it, she’d got the other off her back; old Polly had lost the scent, wandering past John’s words in search of a friend.

  JULY 23

  It’s going to be a hard road, says the I Ching. Today was a bungle.

  Byron came to his office, walked around outside my door talking loudly, knocking at Winifred’s door. I finally went up to the third floor because I thought he’d gone to the Union with some people and wanted to look out the window and see who. I came around the corner from the elevator, a
nd he was standing in front of the mailboxes talking to people. I foolishly wheeled and went away, back down the elevator to my office.

  Gael Hammer came to get me and we went to their house. I behaved like AR. “What do you think he’ll do? What do you think it means?”

  Kay took it well. Gael, who acts like a brother, and I love him for it, called from the theater twice to report that Byron was at the theater for the second time this week (last night he went to see The Miser), and was alone. He had greeted Gael sullenly at first, whereas last night it was a cheerful “Enjoyed your party!” Then Gael talked to him at intermission (I write these notebooks to keep my sanity, and make no attempts at literary works of art) and he said he’d thought he’d go see Misalliance Thursday.

  I must do Old English, get an A, my one achievement of the summer. Then go home, write.

  Now I must perform black magic—or rather stick pins in my idol in case the worst happens, one of those neurotic snubs. I refuse to kid myself. Yes, I like Byron and hope something will develop. But, as Lorraine says, “There’s something wrong with everybody, including you.” Alas, here go the pins:

  Gael: “I couldn’t believe it when you brought him in. I’d expected something different. I’ve seen this character creeping around for three years in that Pendleton jacket—there’s something prissy about him. I don’t mean homosexual. He’s got thin lips.”

  I find he reminds me of several previous men. Ian, Gordon W.23 Peter W.24 Also a bit of Rupert Birkin, though the D. H. Lawrence beard helps, and the little speeches about the mountains.

  If he is like Peter W, I can expect a letter: “I do this so that you can live …” The thing he said that gave me the shudders at the time, and is very Peter W.–ish, is his answer to my drunken “You know, you’re terribly nice.” “Careful,” he said. And I felt: That was presumptuous and not charming.