by Gail Godwin
HARPER & ROW
Phone ringing. People coming up to me in the hall. “Congratulations.” And yes, I love it, though in a subdued sort of way.
Yes. I know what they mean about love. Yes, it does ache. It limits one’s freedom. (All this in “Morningside,” which I hope to finish before Christmas.)
I am teaching and looking out my window, and I see Vulcan coming across from the Union—and wonder how I ever could have preferred big men. He’s so small, erect, dapper, and, as Pitty Pat28 remarked, “so pure in his printer’s apron.”
We go out Tuesday in his new rebuilt Jaguar. All this pulls at the soul. The feel of his hair, I know it. The white stitching on his blue shirt. He’s so intensely drawn for me. I suppose he now eclipses all other styles for me. All I can do now is show the affection I feel, keep my own boundaries, and let the seasons take their course.
HARPER & ROW
1. When consulting the I Ching, the questioner throws three coins six times to produce a hexagram (six lines) that matches up with any of sixty-four universal conditions. It indicates the present state of the matter being inquired about. A hexagram that has one or more “changing lines”—lines containing three yins (6) or three yangs (9)—generates a second hexagram that predicts how the situation will evolve.
2. Miguel Condé, an artist, and his wife, Carola Schisel, loved to entertain.
3. Gail’s uncle William had looked after her following her father’s suicide in 1958. William suffered from depression, for which he underwent electroshock treatments at Duke Hospital when it became unbearable, and then returned to work. He had recently given up smoking, “cold turkey.”
4. The wife of English professor Robert Scholes.
5. In Gail’s story “His House,” a man tells a woman about his house, and they visit it. It’s the middle one of three identical structures on a city block. The front door is locked, so they look over a wall and the woman sees that the man’s house is a facade between two substantial structures. Below the facade, a train roars through a tunnel. She feels “cold, wise, lonely old, and clean.” “Why?” she asks. “I didn’t build it,” he replies. This story was published in The Stone Wall Book of Short Fictions, edited by Bobert Coover and Kent Dixon (1973), a hand-printed limited edition of 325 copies.
6. This existential expression about sense of purpose is brought to the understanding of Theo Quick, the noble, despairing, suicidal brother in Gail’s novel A Southern Family. He says, “Look up there at all those stars … Some of them are so far away that they stopped burning thousands of years ago, only we don’t know it yet … What if it doesn’t add up to anything? What if there are no patterns or meanings? What if there’s nothing to understand?”
7. Lucy Rosenthal, author of several novels, including The Ticket Out, had been a student, like Gail, in the Writers’ Workshop.
8. The Kennedy assassination coincided with and may have precipitated Gail’s awareness of the apathy into which she was letting herself sink regarding her unsatisfactory relationship with Gordon W.
9. Iowa City had a state liquor store where, Gail recalls, “you could buy only the basics, and the staff frowned at you if you asked questions about the qualities of a wine.” Rock Island, across the Mississippi River in Illinois, had all the fancy stuff. The island is the site of the former village of Saukenuk, birthplace of Black Hawk.
10. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, published in 1965, depicts a Gypsy boy who learns that humans are essentially violent.
11. The story “Blue,” about a failed artist, is lost.
12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, born Gayatri Chakravorty in Calcutta, India, taught at the University of Iowa while completing her PhD at Cornell University. She was then married to Talbot Spivak. Later she gained international prominence as a scholar and translator of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, and she authored a founding text of postcolonialism, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
13. It’s the condition that Eliott, the metaphysical scholar, has in an extreme form in Gail’s story “The Legacy of the Motes.”
14. Sam Hamod, now a published poet, received a PhD from the University of Iowa, where he attended the Writers’ Workshop.
15. “Abyss” encourages diving into a situation that is, at any rate, unavoidable.
16. The Owl and the Nightingale, composed in Middle English circa 1200, is a verse debate between two birds about moral philosophy.
17. “The Illumined Moment” became “An Intermediate Stop” and was published in North American Review and then in Dream Children.
18. This occurs in chapter 6 of The Perfectionists. Dane, the disenchanted wife on vacation with her husband, John, and stepson, Robin, in Majorca, gets an invitation to go riding at Count Bartoleme’s stables. John has her take Robin with her. Miraculously, the count coaxes the resentful, withdrawn boy to ride a horse, and is successful until he lifts him to take him back to Dane. Robin has a tantrum and kicks the count in the groin.
19. W. was an English professor.
20. Frederick P. W. McDowell was the chairman of Gail’s doctoral committee. She says that in retrospect he was the most valuable of her teachers, “because he let me know what was available in literature and kept his ego out of it.”
21. While Frank Cole, Gail’s stepfather, was building the family’s next home in Asheville, the Coles lived in a rented house.
22. Jane’s pregnancy was well advanced.
23. Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes, published in 1936, is a novel that has achieved long-lasting acclaim and cult status. Its heroine, attracted to her bestial self, has three doomed love affairs—two with women—and cannot accommodate a doctor’s counsel to unify her civilized and primordial selves.
24. The Philobiblon is a book that Richard de Bury (1281–1345), who served as bishop of Durham and high chancellor of England, worked on until the end of his life. In it he explains his love of books and the principles of book collecting.
25. “Morningside” was published in a rewritten form, as “Last Summer on Pelican Island,” in USA Today, August 4, 1995. The magazine’s Summer Fiction Series also included stories by Stephen King, Alice Hoffman, Rita Dove, Julia Alvarez, and Walter Mosley. Gail’s story begins with a young woman, Evvie, breaking off a marriage at the last minute and then having her grandmother, “Van” (for Evangeline), take her to an inn on Pelican Island, where Van’s family had taken vacations. Van tells Mr. Mayberry, a friend, about the time she’d realized with surprise that her island nanny—a woman who she’d felt had been a part of her—was black like the servants back home. Ewie, as it turns out, elopes with and marries her fiancé, having witnessed the pleasure that Van had conversing with Mayberry.
26. John Bowers was an aspiring writer whom Gail had met in London. He went on to publish novels, as well as a memoir titled The Colony, about life in an all-male writers’ colony established by James Jones’s mentor, Lowney Turner Handy, with proceeds from From Here to Eternity. Bowers married and kept a weekend cabin in Phoenicia, New York; he and his wife were good friends of Gail Godwin and Robert Starer in Woodstock.
27. Gail awakened on the morning of her triumph with a throbbing jaw. She rushed to the dentist, who, she says, “looked and looked and x-rayed and found—nothing. He gave me a few codeine tablets and off I went to get used to this new thing I must have despaired of ever happening.”
28. “Pitty Pat,” whom Gail had recently met, was Patricia Hampl, poet and memoirist, who would become a longtime friend.
Part eight
THE
WRITER’S CONTRACT
Iowa City
DECEMBER 13, 1968, TO MARCH 11, 1969
DECEMBER 13, 1968
I am glad for this calmness. Jordan said, “Kim told me you’d sold a book. He said something about celebrating.”
Bitter cold. Face still sore from phantom toothache. Real deep winter. Coover wrote in my file that I had a brilliant mind.
Vulcan is taking his children to Chicago this weekend. I thought he�
��d gone today but I saw his car. I’m going to read tonight, rewrite the rest of the vicar story. Relax.
Byron heard. Came in and invited me for a beer. A nice thing is my stability when nobody comes or calls. I have me and my book and confidence in myself. Relax and listen to people. Relax. Relax. Relax.
DECEMBER 15
I don’t think I’ll ever again be unconscious of adversity and fate, even in the midst of something good. Four more days—at last, I’ll go home in triumph, like Faulkner wanting the man at the grocery store to hear about his Nobel.
DECEMBER 16
I was profoundly disgusted by everything today. Coffee machine out of cups, coffee pours out on the floor. Hong Kong flu on the periphery. Bernie, my ride to the airport, has deserted me. The airlines charge $5 tax, I’m totally broke, and will have to overdraw. I hope I get away with it.
Bernie’s friend Jeremy is taking me to the airport—smooth, cool, decadent Jeremy. And Vulcan, poor he, with haggard Monday face—no joy—he meets me in the hall, up all weekend babysitting with his kids. I think he’s preparing to renege on tomorrow night.
DECEMBER 17 • 2:00 p.m.
Let’s see: Where to begin? Tonight is the night Vulcan’s supposed to take me out to celebrate. Why do I think he won’t? Because his car was broken down, and is being fixed. Because he had sat all weekend beside his sick child.
So I came home, I suppose, so that I would not have to confront him, so he would not have to face me. He can call and say, “Look …,” and I can do whatever I please with my face, and be charitable with my words. It is conceivable that he will not call. His way of keeping the world at bay may be to flee and then apologize when it’s too late. He can do things on impulse, but if he has a space in which to think it over, he retreats back into the known. The things that won’t give him pain: his work, his routine.
He asked me to dinner on an impulse. Then postponed it the next day. I’m glad I came home so that he can call here if he remembers. If he does not call, then I won’t be quite as charitable. At least, through all this, I will know more about him.
I wrote. I turned the light off and imagined how I would feel if I were in his position. Trying to imagine this took all my energy, and I fell asleep.
At three he called, and I expected the worst, but he still wanted to come, even without his car. So, he’s bringing food here, which is much more relaxed.
It’s been so long since I scrubbed the toilet for anyone. The place looks comfortable, nice.
I told him I dreamed I was looking in the window at him, and he was sitting at a desk, his head buried in his hands. “God, you understand me subconsciously,” he said. I told him about Holger Danske.1 Such ha-ha-ing you never heard. I told him about Coover coming down to my office to congratulate me for selling my novel then saying it might not be good for me, and me bursting into tears.
Vulcan said, “If you’d done that to me, I’d have been out of there in a shot.”
I said, “That’s because you know more about women, you’re experienced with women.”
He said, “I’m not experienced with women. In fact, I think I’m impotent.”
Ha, ha, dear reader.
I said, to cover my surprise, “Well, I’d be impotent, too, only I can get away with pretending.”
He said, “Well, I’ll go now and bury my head in my hands.”
“And I’ll hurry over and look in the window.”
All in all, it’s been a good week. Thank you, God.
DECEMBER 18
I’ve got to turn this into art (or notes for later art) before it turns me into life. Has anyone discovered where the true focus lies in romantic love? Today I thought: Might it not lie in one’s own mirror reflection? (I went and looked into the bathroom mirror and watched myself cry.) Or in one’s own temporary needs as dramatized through the imagination and then projected upon a suitable person? I’ll make a story of these last twenty-four hours. First, I must write it personally so that in the finished form it can be left out. It’s my salvation: to strain it free from the impurities and pain of individual experience and give it over to myth.
I wonder if there are two people in me: the woman and the writer. The woman comes back to her apartment after the night of the affair, counts his cigarette butts in the ashtray and prolongs emptying it, goes into the bedroom, puts her face into the pillow he slept on, locates the faint oil-smell of his hair, weeps then at: his absence? The passing of time? The vulnerability of humanity? The mystery and poignancy of being in this world?
She weeps and knows she is nothing when judged on this basis, and yet she is most strangely alive. She goes over his words, which she has saved from the edge of her drunkenness last night to sort and sift and interpret today.
I’m glad you’re a good writer.
Why can’t you be natural with me?
I’ll tell you. There are many reasons. First of all: animal attraction. Second: You can’t tell me you let me come here like this and lie in this bed and have not given one thought to a future. And there are three thousand and eighty-eight reasons why it wouldn’t work, and you’ve thought about these, too.
I’d turn you into a painter again.
Don’t you see? While it’s this way, it’s all right. But if it turned into something else, I’d start eroding you. Why? Because I can’t be good to anyone while hating myself. I’d start chipping away at you. I don’t like myself and therefore I don’t like anyone getting superior. I’d keep undermining you. You’re a masochist and I’m cruel, and that’s why it’s bad.
You’re better than me.
Do you mind if I stay here and sleep?
AND YET: BE SENSIBLE. Be a writer for a minute, the cataloger of loves. Remember how you loved the mortality in the spent face of Sandy cherished the green circles under his eyes. Remember the agony of nostalgia when contemplating Claude’s slim, small, taut body. Where are those feelings now?
The coffee cup—not yet emptied—stands by the ashtray.
All night, the light shining in the window, the dog barking. The garbage men came.
“What? What?” He jerks awake.
“Nothing. Just the garbage men.”
I can reach out in my own bed and touch him. How can I sleep and waste my consciousness of the time when he is next to me? When the light begins to come in stronger, I sneak looks at his face. Arm flung up and across his head. Hair, dark brown, thin, mashed down on his forehead. Beard is shaggy, straight, and has gray in it. He is a youth in his innocent sleep, an old man laid out on his bier. He is here, now, beside me. Now? As I write? No, but perhaps more now than then. All those human things we grow weary of in those we love, I loved in him. The choking snores, the age creeping up on his face, the slackening of muscle tone. A mole on his back. The morning breath. Even our failed attempt.
And, you know, he’s probably right. He’s offering you his defenses, warning what’s behind them. Will you persist?
Yes. But with importunate advances, wordiness. How he hates my wordiness at the wrong time. Hold tight to yourself. Love and dignity. Quiet affection.
LATER, WORKED LIKE HELL from 6:30 to midnight. Started rewriting “Drive Back”—no, it’s not sorted enough—went on to “Uncle,” rewrote that; and rewrote “Liza,” which is, was, and always will be an incest story. I did this so that I could leave these stories with him: “Sorrowful,” “Uncle,” “Liza,” “Illumined,” “Blue,” “His House,” and “St. George.”
I think this is the best thing I can do. He asked. So I give him my seven best pieces. In doing so, I give him the themes that mean most to me. I’m in effect offering him a sort of spiritual dowry, which he can either accept or reject. If he can’t stand the themes of my work, better to know it now because I can’t thrive on adverse criticism. If he likes them, all the better. He admires quality; he’s strict with himself.
He told me how he came to Iowa and suddenly stopped writing. He took some academic courses and dried up. At dinner, he kept getting up, c
oming around to my chair, kissing me. I can’t complain of his lack of affection.
He told me how, when he came here twelve years ago, he realized he didn’t fit in anywhere. “I didn’t have a business,” like the husband-and-wife owners of Things & Things. So he decided to “create [his] own circle.” He and his wife entertained a lot. “We gave two lavish parties a year.” His work is his identity.
I remember the October morning when I saw his picture in the DI2 and wanted to keep it, but threw it away as a good-luck omen toward getting the man instead.
Jane Casey brought us together at a dinner party. He took it from that point. He is pursuing slowly cursing himself every step of the way. But it is progressing.
His work. It’s what he has, and he knows it. When I asked what color a certain book was, he thought I meant the paper and said, “Buff,” proudly. Also, he prides himself on being a bit of the mystery man: “They try to figure out what I do with my spare time.” He hangs out with Bender, Kelly, Irwin, Harper.3 Goes to committee meetings. Plays bridge. Has lunch with the faculty. I suppose he’s bound to feel something about all those PhDs.
This much I’ve finally realized: My worth resides in me and not in the man I “catch.” I’ll leave him the stories with an affectionate note. Major themes: Men have let me down, and I construct my meaning in the emptiness they’ve left behind. Imagination—art, religion—triumphs over reality.
If he is to be a good critic for me, he must have areas in which he is my superior. I must go on being superior in my own areas so that he can be proud.
JANUARY 2, 1969 • [After returning from a visit home to Asheville for Christmas]
I’m back. With more energy, it seems, more taste for the household chores I couldn’t do before. Good to be alone. Mother: “How awful, that you can be that far away in so short a time.” Tomorrow, get my house in order, start to write.