by Gail Godwin
WELL, I AM nice and solitarily situated again, without recourse. The last comparable time was right before I married Ian. Generally, it’s not bad. Yesterday I allowed myself to become more and more like Aesop’s “The Miller, His Son, and His Donkey.” Kent said, “Oh, did you hear? Scholes has let Aukema count Old Norse for four requirements.”30 Byron said, “You’re a fool to take Chamberlain, he tells you how short to cut your toenails before coming to class.”31 I went looking for motorbikes with Kent, remembered Jane saying, “John was unhappy about your getting a motorbike. They’re dangerous.” The tide turned when I went out for a beer with Byron and was finally driven by boredom to stir something up. He retreated, Johnny Panic. Now that I think of it, fear was sparkling in his eyes, and his lips went thin as the edge of paper.
Anyway, I went to sleep feeling totally confused about my academic career.
Should I see Scholes? Or should I go on and take Chamberlain? I went to sleep and my friendly dreams diminished my fear of Scholes by having me have an affair with him. So, I was able to go in today, fix it up to take two courses which would count as four, one of them being Chamberlain’s.
Lunch with Kent, who praises Aukema’s inhuman computer-stories. There is a real vogue for this sort of thing, but I’m still going to try for the essential dimension of feeling. That was what was so short-lived about Byron. So diabolically cold because he was frozen in fear.
SEPTEMBER 21
Lorraine is thirty-four; Ian is thirty-seven today. I went to the office, wrote an eleven-page story, talked to Kent, and walked home, dead tired. Ate perfunctorily and am now in bed at 8:30.
My two stories coming out in Confluence and North American Review mean little; I now want a national magazine. Then I’ll want a novel out. Then I’ll want to start getting a name. Then I’ll care for the critics. Then I’ll start wanting a place for myself in the halls of literature. So the best thing seems to me now is to skip all these intermediate stages and try to write something truly meaningful and original. As for companionship, I’d like a husband, yes, but the wrong husband, no.
SEPTEMBER 22
Finished “The Apprentice—Fates,”32 may refurbish and start sending out to magazines. Mademoiselle, then? I think I’ve had a breakthrough in writing—back to the intuitive, what interests me first.
Tomorrow: first day of teaching.33 Am preparing to collapse from exhaustion. I think I might as well give up on finding a companion-lover.
SEPTEMBER 23
Jane today: “We’ve switched roles. It’s me who’s perturbed and you who sit there calmly chewing your gum and fiddling with your glasses.”
New novel form. Letter about Gaert with dramatis personae at bottom.34 Good thing about this, it can continue changing and growing as I do.
SEPTEMBER 25
Ten till eight, and I’m in bed. New opinion of Coover. That whole experiment-for-experiment’s-sake school. By itself, it’s arid. Something like E. Underbill’s distinction between mystics and metaphysicians.35 As I told Jane, I feel Coover is using God to get further with his own mind and art.
I am divided now about what I want to write—the Saga experiment or a straight Gothic novel about two metaphysicians searching for more knowledge. It’s so bloodless, and that’s why it can’t succeed. Got to have my weekends for writing alone, whatever else happens. Get fifty pages and maybe try to get an option for it.
I miss only one thing now: somebody to eat with at the end of the day. Next story: “Somebody to Eat With.”
OCTOBER 1
One of those days when I feel at the mercy of the world.
Got home and found a $24 bill for library fines and books. Better borrow more money from NDEA.36 Kent, Ace, Jane, all have their own lives. Kent says he’s lonely anyway. Jane is basically happy and pregnant. Ace dabbles in the daytime among the flowers, has his anchor at night. Yet at least I have three fairly akin spirits to talk to, even if it’s no more than fifteen minutes a day. My tendency is to withdraw, withdraw until I get okay again.
OCTOBER 2
I dreamed there was a house where my future was. It was horribly dirty and sooty. I went down a hall and right into a living room—substandard furniture, filthy, no books—a young boy there. Blond. I said, “Do you know if there are any books here?” He said, “No, but downstairs.” He showed me how to climb downstairs, and there was a library of boring, old books—just one bright one, about ducks or animals by Casey. I went into other rooms. Each got cleaner till at last I found a neat study, and in there I found a thin book that was mine.
Unpublished Prosperity: Nine Essays, which somebody in the preface said I’d agonized over. Now there is this busybody woman following me. She has something to do with me—a sort of mother-landlady figure. In search of more books, I go into another room where a huge man is lying on the bed slantwise. He gets up. He is about seven to eight feet tall, a faded athlete. I say, “Are you my husband?” He says, “Yes,” and wearily, affectionately comes toward me. It is as if he can’t understand my tenderness. I think I ask him, “Have I been a bitch?” And he says, “Yes.” We lie down together on a chaise lounge. I discover his false teeth lying on the arm of the chair and, although he has some in his mouth, I want to leave him again. Then the woman comes in. It appears I took her hairbrush. I give it back. She tries to stop my search. She has taken books out of my hand when I was trying to memorize the titles to take back to now. I asked her to write them down, and she wrote them down wrong. There was also a book I wrote about a computer.
Then I go to another room, climb out the window, run across the grass, feeling pursued, and climb into the window of an elegant house. A young Jewish man is in his study writing. He knows me, after being startled. I ask him what else I’ve written. An older woman comes in—his mother, a maid—and tells me, “Oh, that study of Nathan Allen (I think she meant Ethan), and the thing on London,” and she begins to cry. Nathan Hale.37
Gail is searching for a literary form that is of her making. The Writers’ Workshop environment complicated the effort with its mind-set of cliques and literary fads. On June 27, she’d noted that Montaigne had invented a form to suit himself—now why not she?
Repeatedly, she writes of having made breakthroughs, which involve writing that is intuitive, writing that is warm-blooded, and the creation of a design that doesn’t parrot but makes use of the episodes in her life.
When she wrote her mother on September 17 that the forty pages she’d just written—presumably the “Gretchen Saga”—“could be a new form,” Gail was attempting an honesty of presentation through a fictional chronicle. She would employ that approach to some extent in 2004 with the Christina stories in the Ballantine edition of Evenings at Five.
The “Gretchen Saga” did not find publication, except in part in the short story “Some Side Effects of Time Travel.” But the other major work on which she was working—her rewrite of “The Beautiful French Family”—did. This novel represents her breakthrough in warm-bloodedness. As she will write on October 14, she is conceiving the novel to show the characters’ “growing awareness in the full flower of their failure.” The new approach necessitates a new title: “The Perfectionists.”
The neurosis—“flowering within failure”—is everyone’s grand, contradictory, transformational design. And it might lead to solving a great mystery in Gail’s life, the suicide of her idealistic father, evoked by Gail on July 26 when she wrote, “I’m overwhelmed by the absolute sadness of the lost ideal of the world.”
—
OCTOBER 3
I seem to be the third everywhere I go. All my married friends, couples: Hammers, Dixons, Caseys, and Ace Baber, even though he’s with a shadowy stay-at-home. Hammer’s pregnant.
They like to talk about one’s current boyfriend. One doesn’t have one. Ace says: “You’re alone right now, aren’t you? I saw you coming across campus all by yourself at nine thirty this morning.” He said: “You won’t be alone for long.” How many intervals have there been
when I was without a man?
The thing is: Get as much done as possible while I am free. Ace said: “What were your husbands like? How long did it last each time? That’s funny, because I can’t imagine you ever leaving somebody. Walking out on them. Saying, ‘We’re through.’ Like with me, even if you stopped liking me, I can’t imagine you ever saying, ‘I don’t want to see you anymore.’ Not with anyone you’d ever liked. You’re too gentle somehow.”
I give notice to this journal. How long will it be before the next man? Think I’ll go to the MLA conference if it’s in Chicago. That’s where one meets intellectuals. And it’s at Christmas, so those who go will be, some of them, loners. At times I think: If one can just be charitable, that’s what counts.
OCTOBER 4
“It’s the end of the week. Everybody’s gone away to lick their wounds. That’s why you haven’t been able to make contact with anybody.”—Ace
NOW, BACK TO WORK.
“THE ANGRY YEAR” at HJ.38 Very little chance. There’s just a hex.
“The Man on Sofa” at McCall’s.
“Time Travel” at NAR [New American Review]. This was, I’m pretty sure, a mistake, and I will probably get a very cold rejection.39
WROTE PART OF “Sorrowful Mother,”40 which I got from talking with Kent. Next: Write “George.” “St. George” is a pregnancy metaphor. The girl is single, self-sufficient. Scene opens in bed. “He’s growing. He’ll change my life.” Look up dragons.
OCTOBER 6
I’ve been behaving like someone who’s been told she has six months left to live. Got up, researched dragons. It may be my best yet. Went to office. Talked to Kent, finished “The Sorrowful Mother.”
Tomorrow, write the agent John Hawkins, send him glowing rejections from New Yorker for “Illumined Moment” and “Dandelion,” plus “Angry Year” rejections from Cosmo and McCall’s.
OCTOBER 9
Tomorrow, a bit of freedom for writing—the Dragon. Haven’t quite got my girl yet. She’s set up—say she somehow has a house. She rents rooms, has slept with her tenants in the past, but they had gotten too involved. I think she should be working toward some goal she doesn’t want upset—I’ll probably have her be a graduate student, for lack of anything better.
OCTOBER 11
Jules and Jim41 scene yesterday in the parking lot with Kent and Ace. Something to remember when contemplating the lies we tell each other, and the lies we tell ourselves. I have learned much about writing from Kent, and he’s able to do a little bit of what Ian could do, explain me to myself. Some of Ian’s phrases now come back: “Another person’s love can be terribly helpful.” I miss Ian now, but not in a way that would make me go back to that watery sunshine.
OCTOBER 13 • Sunday
At last I am able to set myself a job and do it. Finished “St. George.” Next project is: Get fifty pages—excellent ones—of the novel ready to send to John Hawkins. I am thinking of putting in an odd scene: visit with Ian’s mother and the Jesuits in the ruined garden. I can afford to do surer things now.
Interesting development, it would make a good story. The Kent-Bev thing. After my believing him to be the intelligent, sensitive one, he gives me a piece of work she’s written. Lucid—no, pellucid. Hot-honest. Intelligent and sure.
OCTOBER 14
Awful indigestion. Dinner with Ace and Kent. All sorts of interesting personal politics in which we are less than perfect.
Tomorrow, write novel, now The Perfectionists, a book about intellectuals seeking the illumined life. They make provision for everything but love. The novel shows their growing awareness in the full flower of their failure. About lack of love, Yeats: “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.”
Dane is a voyeur, wants to have a front-row seat in the awareness theater, but does not wish to get implicated. She is painted into a corner, where she is compelled to do something.
OCTOBER 23
So exhausted these days. Came home, smelled egg-rot in the sink from unwashed dishes. Am saving up energy to change the sheets. Am building up my pinnacle of works on which I will later stand. Vicar story in spring 1965. Liza first in summer 1965. These were the seeds.
Coover said he felt “Sorrowful Mother” was my peak, and I had gone to the final shape for that sort of thing. That story is now complete—yet that story was first conceived on a walk with Ian in the summer of 1965. I later wrote the first draft, which is back at 1 Argyll Mansions in London. I have needed this much time to develop my writing.
I want so much to write something thoughtful, warm, strung out—like, I think, my father. The synchronicity aspect. “We’d been on Canto XIII of The Inferno42 in my sophomore lit class when my father, that incorrigible playboy of fifty-one, drove home one snowy afternoon and put an end to everyone’s envy of him.”
The most meaningful experiences:
DATE Story Area of Experience
Elegiac—still to be written St. Genevieve’s43
SPRING 1967 Illumined Moment Peace College; Father Webbe; London
Liza’s Leaf Tower—sold Mavis;44 Ian
Dandelion—sold Gordon; the Caseys; Harrods
Wonderful Story Father
Beautiful French Family Majorca
SUMMER 1967 Angry Year Chapel Hill
Dollar’s Worth of Hygge Copenhagen
FALL 1967 Sacrificium Aukema
Dream of Insurrection Jack;45 Embassy
SPRING 1968 Man on Sofa Ian
Uncle Ian
Motes My neuroses, my eyes, my MA final exhaustion
SUMMER 1968
unfinished manuscripts:
The First Writer-God Coover
Sarah’s Gothic Marriage Ian
Where Does a Tornado Convalesce Jane and John
The Sunday Calyx My breakdown
FALL 1968 Time Travel Bus trip; Freemans; finding form for the complexity of my experience
Apprentice-Fates Story in sci-fi book; Irene Slade; Borges
Sorrowful Mother Ian; Kent and Bev
Dragon Kent; me at 501 N. Dubuque; medieval lit.
NOV. 1968 Blue Gaert; Bluebeard; H. C. Andersen’s “The Shadow”
Morningside Denmark story. “Mrs. Fönss”; Mayview Manor; my mother and Milledge
OCTOBER 24
Your stories pick you.
WENT TO SEE Magician tonight.46 It was a comedy, and anything sinister had to be put in by you. Deposit this in bank.
The magician, the preacher, the charlatan, [L.] Ron Hubbard, the Svengali-Rasputin type interests me. The power of silence and watchful eyes is this: People see whatever they want to see. I may now be able to do this with my book.
A PANTY RAID in progress outside.
OCTOBER 28
I’m just beginning to see, and am glad I haven’t had my “success” yet. I fall to pieces with praise. Went to the Union for breakfast. There in the newsstands was Confluence. I had apoplexy was sure I’d been left out. No, there I was, illustrated with alien photographs—except the first, a field of dandelions. Typos, a sudden intrusion of an alien sentence, a paragraph left out. Father Webbe’s words return: It’s down there now in the naked light of day, for better or worse, to influence our brothers. Then Workshop applauded my story “A Sorrowful Woman” until I was embarrassed. Jane there to steady me. Coover is good to me, sending out my stories, pushing me to the limit. He may publish a book of very short stories with Kim Merker’s Stone Wall Press here. This means, rewrite “Uncle.” The thing now is to be selective.
OCTOBER 31
Well, there’s a new star on the horizon, and again I’m not going to gobble him down only to find he gives me indigestion—or ptomaine poisoning. This one compliments of the Caseys—older, haggard, deep voice—a hand printer, with who-knows-what sad and shameful story to tell. Anyway, we got drunk at dinner, said all the background material straightaway, held hands under the table, walked in the yard, kissed. He said, “Let’s not be drunken about this. There will be other evenings.” And now ther
e’s titillation again in hearing the footsteps come down the hall.
Kim Merker—Vulcan. He came here as a published poet—now he’s a printer with his own press. But slow down, what I wanted was something to keep it from being bleak while I worked. I think I’ll work myself to death for the next three weeks—midterm, then grade papers, then Dragon. If I do everything, there won’t be any time left.
Gail’s search for a lover and companion who would not distract her from her work—or trap her in another conventional relationship—led to her creation of a medieval studies–inspired fantasy, “St. George.” The story begins with a perfect relationship. In Gwen’s life, her lusty, uncomplicated boyfriend Silas, a printer, “had served as her antidote against Love, the disease that had felled all her friends in the midst of whatever they were pursuing and left them handicapped forever after, trapped in mortgaged homes with rather ordinary men, all their grand possibilities extinguished.”
Excerpt from “St. George,” Published in
Cosmopolitan (September 1969)
But tonight, as Silas stood over her bed, buttoning up his shirt, his usual blond, untroubled countenance clouded over and he said, “This isn’t much of a relationship, is it?”
“Of course it’s not!” exclaimed Gwen. Imagine Silas using a word like “relationship.” “It’s not supposed to be one. Relationships take too much libido and right now mine’s all booked up.” She was getting her master’s degree in English next June. Then she could go out and make her demands on the world. Then she could begin to look for someone, her equal or better, with whom to fall in love. Silas was her Now man. She had picked him up in an all-night coffee shop. Having cleared her life of bearded graduate students who wanted to latch on to her psyche like leeches or lie in bed afterward discussing D. H. Lawrence, she had been on the prowl for a simple man, a truck driver, perhaps, a non-soul-sharer she couldn’t get serious about, but who would stand between her and loneliness in this impersonal city.