The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  Passion. Sitting on his sofa, I watch him cross the room completely enclosed in his own space. Beautiful. His hair has been cut to a thick red thatch. He walks lightly, elegantly, on the balls of his stocking feet. And earlier in the day I have noticed his legs—long, lean, in the Wellingtons. I begin to see him aesthetically.

  A furtive between-semesters fling. I am completely in his space. Wrench myself from EPB. Now Vulcan is alive with interest. I prefer J. now, except for occasional relapses. Vulcan is orderly, finished; even though his dimensions are smaller, he has filled them out. Neat proud Prussian. Family motto: “Break but don’t bend.” Jeremy bends like a willow branch, but in his flexibility is his—perhaps ultimate?—strength.

  Schizophrenia. I’m J.’s girl. I’m everybody’s darling. I’m me and I’m his. Which? Can’t give up my flirtation with Vulcan. I’ve worked hard at it. Isn’t fair, I’ve put so much work into it and it’s just coming to fruition and I don’t want it anymore. As a token gesture of freedom-assertion, I let him kiss me in my office. Last stronghold of being everybody’s darling. Twice a week at least he comes in; before he leaves, kisses me. I don’t enjoy it anymore.

  My friends, one by one, give their Good Housekeeping seal of approval of J. Through their eyes I am able to see: Jeremy’s gentleness, his appealing remoteness, his perceptiveness about human behavior. Certain things become hard to do without—certain gestures of his, things he’s unconscious of. Once I said to Ian, “Why did you fall in love with me?” “That,” he answered, “is something I’ve never told you.” He never told me. I’m glad he didn’t.

  I think my realizable self has gone beyond my conventions and neuroses. If I were to continue what I set out to do (get my perceptions in order, understand myself so I can be one step ahead of Dane), then all is not lost. I am still alone in the sphere that counts most.

  Since I linked up with Jeremy, he has: gone to dentist to see what can be done about the two teeth he knocked out in his bicycle crash and didn’t bother to go back and pick up, had his hair cut, got a tuition rebate, applied for a fellowship, impressed Professor Spivak, and been “recognized” at the Court of the Freemans. I’ve recognized where the strength lies in my novel and in Dane, seen why any relationship for me is going to be hard work, seen why it hasn’t worked before, written fifty-eight difficult pages.

  It is these things people can do for each other. The rest we must do for ourselves. We can’t write each other’s books. He can’t give me a center when I’ve misplaced mine. We can enrich each other, sustain when one needs it. But the relationship can’t, with us, be based on sustaining.

  (Now it is ten past nine in the evening. Five hours and twenty minutes to get myself together. It takes some people twenty-five years of psychoanalysis; still others die separated from themselves; some are born magnificently intact; but I must work with what I have.)

  MARCH 5

  Incredible: reading over the Polly villa scene I wrote July 1967, and rewriting it according to my present standard. Now, I hone in to what is relevant. Before, the whole thing ricocheted like a squash ball. I kept veering off the interesting stuff. Also, I think I was under the influence of the show-not-tell trend. Now I feel no scruples about charting Dane’s thoughts as she thinks them. I want to tell the truth about this marriage, these people.

  A sophomore came in today. She’d read three of D. H. Lawrence’s stories, and she didn’t really understand what was going on. “In ‘In Love,’ there’s this girl who stops loving this boy because he says he loves her. Then he says it was all a joke, so she decides to marry him after all. So did she love him or didn’t she? What was she doing?”

  I am playing to the audience that is interested in working out these strange nuances in human relationships.

  MARCH 6

  I’m doing Roger Rattigan.16 His dialogue will have to be redone. He’s a combination of Robin,17 Merker, and something else. Coover came by my office tonight, like a little boy, to tell me of his latest publishing and cinematic exploits. I was touched and flattered. Vulcan and I fantasized some more about a Virginia–Leonard Woolf future. I can be so awfully honest with him. He with me. Say outrageous things. I talked to swarms of people today—I only hope it hasn’t affected my writing. Kent is so wise, intuitively. He’s a master of nuances. He loves people so much more than I do. The Roger scene can be symbolically strong—the boutique of shabby clothes he runs, etc. He brings up the question: Would people rather have the genuine shabby article or the artifact? The real aristocrat or the phony, who does a so-much-better job?

  MARCH 11

  Page 153 of the final draft. It seems plodding: Dane gets up, Dane sits down, Dane thinks. From February 20 to March 10, I did sixty-five pages of the rewrite. I want this book to be good. But, God! Sometimes it’s such a chore. If I could sell a story, I might believe in myself again.

  1. Holger Danske is a major figure in Danish folklore, emerging in early historical sagas, and widely popularized by Hans Christian Andersen in his fairy tale “Holger Danske.” To the Danes, Holger Danske is the great ancient warrior, aroused from his ages-long sleep at Kronborg Castle by military invasions. To Gail, who spent an impressionable time in Denmark (see The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963), Holger Danske represented the dark side of the Danish soul, holed up in a dark cavern, grim, depressed, and potentially savage.

  2. The Daily Iowan, the student newspaper of the University of Iowa.

  3. Members of the University of Iowa English Department: Paul Bender; William Robert Irwin (eighteenth-century English literature); Robert E. Kelley (Samuel Johnson scholar); John Brammer Harper (an administrator).

  4. In the Middle Ages, particularly in England, religious women sealed themselves away from society and protected their inner lives from external temptations and threats. The Ancrene Riwle, or Ancrene Wisse, written in early Middle English, was created as a guide for a small group of anchoresses.

  5. Theodore (“Ted”) Solotaroff founded the New American Review in 1967 as a way to offer general audiences current, high-quality fiction and cultural journalism. Ian McEwan has called him “the most influential editor of his time,” one who shaped “not only the tastes, but the direction of American writing.”

  6. Probably “Some Side Effects of Time Travel”; see October 4, 1968, entry.

  7. John Gardner called David Segal “one of the best editors America has ever seen, far better than Maxwell Perkins, for example.” Segal had gotten his start with Ted Solotaroff when Solotaroff was at Commentary.

  8. Gail’s generous uncle, William Godwin. Recalls Gail: “It turned out to be a small television set.”

  9. Joyce Carol Oates’s 1968 novel Expensive People was the second in a quartet of novels—sometimes called “The Wonderland Quartet”—about changing American values in her parents’ generation and her own. It tells the story of a boy who, in the 1960s, violently reacts against his parents’ affluence and suburban existence.

  10. Jeremy Shaw, a graduate student in the Writers’ Workshop, was from English landed gentry dating back to 1465. Gail was immediately attracted to his grace and kindness, fascinated to go with him to the university library and find his name and family lineage in Burke’s Landed Gentry, but increasingly troubled by his recklessness and self-destructive behavior. However, after a tumultuous attempt at a love relationship, they ended up peacefully sharing a house in Iowa City from 1969 to 1971 with a growing family of Siamese cats. “If it weren’t for that fortress of a house,” Gail recalls, “I might not have done so well on my doctorate. Jeremy provided me with a sort of monastery and I hope I did the same for him. He also did excellent graduate work. We dated other people, but never brought them to the house.”

  11. Piers Plowman, by William Langland, is a fourteenth-century allegorical poem about a man seeking the true Christian life in a dreamworld.

  12. The Gothic Image (1958), by Emile Mâle, looks at the mind of the French world in the thirteenth century through the iconography of its ch
urches.

  13. The draft of the “Motes” story on which Gail is working devotes a couple of pages to the time her protagonist spends between giving up reading and having the muscae volitantes in his eyes clear up. “Eliott became a park-hunter,” she relates about this interval. In the final version, published in Dream Children, Gail provides only a brief glimpse of his transition, and jumps ahead to a coda that reflects on what had happened to him.

  14. Gail wrote this long entry, also on March 4, on loose-leaf pages, which she tucked into the back of her journal. It is an inventory of her behavior over the past few months.

  15. In her diary entry for July 30, 1968, Gail quotes from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, in which a solitary warrior, the anhaga, “finds grace for himself.” She says she feels close to him. Sorry-hearted, the anhaga in the poem wanders, mindful of hardships and the downfall of kinsmen. Occasionally, in exile, he finds one in the mead hall who knows his people.

  16. This scene is neither in the early drafts nor in the published book. Gail had created an extra scene, involving a hail-fellow-well-met friend of Dane’s, in order to represent Dane’s life before her marriage to John. Though Gail had been pleased with the writing, she determined that the scene took away from the thrust of the novel, and she kept it out.

  17. Robin Challis was Gail’s friend at the U.S. Travel Service office in London in 1963.

  Part nine

  COMPLETION

  Iowa City

  MARCH 12, 1969, TO JULY 6, 1969

  MARCH 12, 1969

  603 Rundell Street. (Trust J. to choose a house on a working-class street with no trace of university faculty or students!)

  GOOD NEW BEGINNING. A novel to finish which is already sold. Moved in with the man. Whatever has to be taken care of under this roof will have two to work on it, not one. I hereby make a promise to stop being a middle-class worrywart. To organize this household so we can live elegantly on little (for instance, Gallo Paisano poured from a decanter).

  MARCH 13

  Housewarming all day. Plenty of space. Page 157 of the novel. Dane has cut herself off from further help. The reason it’s better this time is that Dane is responsible, not little acts of fate. The rest of the book consists of her cutting people off.

  The house feels right. All I have to do from now on is write—the best I know how. Easter: can get a lot done.

  From here on out, John is more interested in the ideal. His problem-solving scheme involves drifting away from human contact.

  MARCH 15

  Five and a half pages. I have a funny attitude toward this writing. There is preoccupation but no joy, like I felt in writing “Blue” or any of the fresh pieces. Bernie Kaplan came by and brought his new story, “A Sea Called Tranquility,” written under tension of three weeks’ love and hate. It was so damned good. So many signs of the true artist there. The complexities of character, the refrain of the baseball game, the harshness of the dialogue, the writing on the bathroom walls juxtaposed against the cosmic and poetic.

  And I’m doomed to Dane another month. Still, she’s earned $1,250 so far, so I’d better not shortchange her. Virginia the cat lying on the bed beside me in this bright white “writing room.” Mail came for me at 603. (Rhymes.) It’s almost four. J. still asleep upstairs. He’ll get his eight hours. Boldts’ party tonight.

  “This woman—you’ve gotten under the skin of this woman.” Page 160-something. About seventy more pages to go. The “closedown” begins after Dane’s blackout. Bring in some weird stuff after this. A lot has to be understood, explained—cutbacks into Dane’s background, more incidents of her marriage. Perhaps another change. Let chapter end with Dane going to bed as soon as they return. No, damn it. Why do little details mess me up so?

  MARCH 17

  Already? Has there been no change since Ian? Has my neurosis won, after all, by urging me toward this situation? What am I to do now if I am living in a house with a man totally unsuited for modern life? Is he some extinct breed having a last foothold in 1969? Well, I’m going to do my novel. What else? I may be the stupidest idiot who ever lived.

  MARCH 21

  He becomes a little more a member of his species, a little less a member of his local group: [Abraham] Maslow on self-actualized people.

  PAGE 178 of The Perfectionists. Ninety pages of pica—27 lines × 12 words per line = 324 [words] per page. Ninety pages of elite—29 lines × 14 words per line = 406 [words] per page. Number of words now = 65,700. I have about twenty-four more pages to go to reach my 75,000-word limit.

  I want the book to have thirteen chapters. Polly—Karma—doppel-ganger—TRUTH that Dane can’t sustain.

  Chapter XIII. In the restaurant Dane cleans out her purse, reads John’s notes overtly. John writing and talking. She can no longer hear him. Their animals will always snarl at each other. Drinks at the bar. Frenchwoman writing letters. Dane sees gulf. Let reader see John as Gothic hero one more time to preserve the tension to the end. Penelope is reading The Brothers Karamazov. Final scene: They have drinks, go up to the room. Dane looks below and sees Penelope stop to talk to the Frenchwoman. What did the two of them talk about? What did they have to say to each other?

  Easter vacation—forty pages, ten days, four pages a day.

  As I was writing the lines about Penelope speaking to the Frenchwoman, and Dane unable to hear the words, I saw where my power lies and the sort of thing I am able to do well.

  The passage that ends with Dane becoming aware of Penelope’s conversation with the Frenchwoman became part of chapter 12 in the published book (not chapter 13, as planned). Gail was engaged in several thorough rewrites of her novel right up to the deadline. Most of the ideas she jotted in her notes on March 21 did not survive a final edit. The chapter does end with Dane going out on the balcony after having retired to her hotel room with John. That passage, which Gail thought represented one of her talents, reveals the process by which a woman comprehends a scene and slowly loses hold of an ideal.

  Excerpt from The Perfectionists (Harper & Row, 1970)

  —

  She wandered back out on the balcony and leaned over the wall. The Frenchman was sitting on his towel, weaving some bits of straw together for the amusement of the two children. The woman stood some distance away, absently playing with her dark hair as she chatted with a handsome blonde woman. This second woman, Dane recognized with a shock, was none other than Penelope. The two of them were talking! Penelope and Dane’s Frenchwoman. How could they? The Frenchwoman did not speak English. Did Penelope speak the Frenchwoman’s language? Incredible. But there they were, down there together: gab-gab-gab. What were they talking about? It diminished the Frenchwoman for Dane. And there was old Penelope, breast-stroking in the warm sea of her life, unconscious of the Frenchwoman who had illumined Dane’s dream. To Penelope, it was just another chitchat with a pretty woman with a husband and children from France. That should have been me down there, thought Dane.

  MARCH 23 • Sunday, 2:20 p.m.

  This is a time when I am extremely unsure about my writing “voice.” It reads to me absurdly simple and flat.

  The cat is being driven frantic by a treeful of birds. Purple and white crocuses are out in the front yard. It’s a wet, cloudy, English-type spring day. Jeremy asleep. I went upstairs and looked at him sleeping on his stomach, his arm jacked up like a grasshopper’s leg. And the shape of the arm, slender, curved, white, made me want to wake him up and say Talk to me, play with me, hold me.

  We went to a dinner party at the Foxes’. Strange interlude with Vulcan, who said, “I’m glad you’ve got something going for you,” and really meant it. He was once the dark possibility and now he’s the benevolent friend. Projections, one and all. What am I to write next? Must follow what is at the very frontier of my interest—I think more feeling for places might help. Inner emotions expressed by exterior landscape. But this book is the thing now. It’s my debut and it’s got to be good.

  MARCH 25

  Went to
Persona, Ingmar Bergman film. I found myself coveting parts of it for the Dane-Polly scenes.1 Next few days will be Sons and Lovers, and entertaining Lorraine.

  Those bare statements and archetypal situations that move us in Bergman’s films also do so in Wuthering Heights, which I finished again. I don’t know how deeply my book lends itself to this. It’s an analytical book. But I must make it reverberate as much as possible. As a particular book, its shape has hardened by now. I will have to finish the book that I began. It’s a book that has slowly explained to me what happened to my marriage and how not to write a book (off the top of your head). I have to struggle with these last scenes and I ought to expect it.

  Cat snores.

  MARCH 30

  Lorraine and Chap in and out, Lorraine being a regular dynamo power-figure and with not much to feed on this time. The power plays were interesting to watch—like her “not liking” Siamese cats. We had one fight yesterday and another at the bus, as it was pulling out. Her last words: “You are going to have to change. I am going to make you. You can’t just be yourself.” I was so glad to see her go. The night she was to come, I got the worst headache of my life—ran a fever. Jeremy is such a noble person. It’s so easy to live with him. His way of relating to people—slowly opening up like a flower, not impinging like a sledge hammer. Had a small dinner party—the Dixons, the Freemans. I smoked pot and got really ill. J. came and lay beside me. Every time I woke and called out, he answered.