by Gail Godwin
APRIL 1
When Dane cleans out her purse, she finds the ball Mrs. Hurst gave to Robin.2 Keep Dane’s dialogue sparse. She’s not an “oh dear” and “oh, well” kind of talker. Also, besides the creation of Dane (who, according to Jeremy, is a symbol larger than me and is capable of running away with me), I am saying farewell to John in this book, and therefore want to realize him for the companion he could have been (sexless companion). I want to enjoy in the remaining scenes in the book John’s capability for entertaining someone on the metaphysical level. Like the little games Ian and I played for four or five days during the worst fog in London, when he took on my “education.” The children-playing-together level. Again, sexless. No mother (which every adult wife has to be at times). No father (which every adult husband has to be at times).
APRIL 2
I’ve been letting the days drift by in housekeeping pursuits, listening to music. Finished Sons and Lovers, and went back to Flannery O’Connor. Too many excellences. Where do I fit in?
I feel I must suffer toward the end of the book. Take a lesson from Lawrence’s excellent dialogue—the Baxter Dawes scene—unpredictable but right.3
Perhaps I write less in the journal because there’s Jeremy to talk to.
Robin is dead—dead to her. Perhaps he had never lived.4
APRIL 4
I have ten days starting tomorrow to finish the book, and I am worried, worried. I am going to probe for the experience of things, what is left in terms of scenes.
Polly-and-Dane confrontation. I have to know what each wants. John had written about her as if he’d given up hope. Polly says nice room. Dane says she was just reading something John had given her. Polly’s dream—I have got to be Polly, and see what she’d try to do, say. Polly forces confrontation.
John brings Dane a little saint, wrapped up. He’s agreed to go dancing, so Dane is stuck. She unwraps the present and sees what she can have with John. Penelope and Robin stop and talk to the French family. Dane is jealous. That was supposed to be me talking to the Frenchwoman.
The dance scene. Dane “feels” Karl.
The morning—the balcony and clean-out scenes. Robin’s ball in Dane’s pocketbook.
Beach scene.
Finale.
APRIL 6
The Pinter play displaced by the baseball game. I called the TV station in Davenport to complain, ended up shouting “Fuck baseball!” and hanging up in the poor man’s face. Page 196 of the book. I think modestly: It’s D. H. Lawrence at his best. Tomorrow I do the remainder of the saint scene.
Penelope and Robin and the Frenchwoman. Dane has almost a visceral jealousy for the child (and for the kind of woman she had wanted to be on the holiday). Like thinking you have a vicious, aloof dog, and suddenly he climbs docilely into a stranger’s lap. From now until the end, she has to gravitate toward the child. Everything else must recede from her. She and he are the final couple.
Should finish the novel tomorrow. Can’t say what it is. All I hope at this point is that it fulfills its own expectations. I go achingly painstakingly carefully. Like a caterpillar. Am I a storyteller? Is it a good read? Are there a lot of deflections?
In the previous draft, there is so much archness. I am writing down to the reader. The whole thing is a novel being a novel.
Tomorrow: Dane idealizes herself to Polly for the last time. She decides that the swim to the fort with John will save her marriage. Have little notices of Robin from time to time. Karl comes (make this condensed). John comes. Dane decides not to swim. Lunch. The child humiliates her over the glass of water.
Rewrite “St. George” for Cosmopolitan.
APRIL 14
Page 9 of “St. George,” with the Junius Adams5 letter beside me. My people are evolving in the round. Without Coover to make me feel guilty for being clear. I shouldn’t be afraid to give background, tell things, if necessary. Emphasis on having a pet—how it fills your life. “If she can find a way to make it work,” writes Adams, “we would be very interested in it and I would certainly recommend it for purchase.”
After her lover, Silas, leaves her, Gwen, the heroine of “St. George,” finds that the dragon that she’d found in a grocery store egg has grown, through her pampering, and become a monstrosity. She tries killing it kindly with beer and a knockout clout, but falters halfway and succeeds only in making the dragon sick. Gwen calls her gone-away lover for help. The romantic hero arrives. The antic tone of Gail’s allegory enabled her to incorporate the editor’s wish for a romance ending.
Excerpt from “St. George,” Published
in Cosmopolitan (September 1969)
—
The doorbell rang. At last! Gwen ran to open it and threw herself at six-foot-three of reassuring bulk. Silas was suntanned and smiling puzzledly. After she had mauled him for a few moments, he said: “Where’s the sick animal? Did you get yourself a cat?”
“Listen, Silas, let me explain before we go in …”
APRIL 15
Jeremy is right: Don’t think about the future, do what has to be done toward it, but don’t sit around indulging in a lot of what-ifs. Finished St. G. It’s much more coherent. The secret is knowing what you mean before you start, then throwing out the right hints.
J. is having a writing slump, unable to believe in himself. His style of dejection is an easy one to live with: he simply withdraws, goes remote, has a bit less to give. But remains polite and thoughtful. I am grateful for the lovely living conditions. I am able to give more to my writing. It’s more straightforward and generous. Having fewer defenses myself, I no longer need to play hide-and-seek with a reader.
APRIL 16
I sat with a student by the river. He said: “I don’t want to bloat your ego, but you and this Western Civ. teacher I have are the only people who ever made me feel like I was in, quote, ‘school.’ ”
I talked with Coover about his movie. He is the most unpersonal man I’ve ever known. He never deals in personalities. I typed ten pages of the novel.
The student says: “Apathy waits for me to sit down in a chair. After that comes depression. When I’m depressed, I have a journal I write in. I never write in it when I’m happy.” His father is an electrician. His mother is Irish Catholic. He’s been athletic all his life.
Last night, alone here in the house, I dreamed I was having a nightmare. It got so turbulent, I decided to scream so that Mother and Frank would come. I screamed through the nightmare’s nightmare, and through the nightmare, and woke up screaming. Only Virginia the cat. Did she hear or not? The awful disappointment when I realized no one would come to comfort me.
Virginia is snoring.
APRIL 18
Lucy Rosenthal called from New York. She met my editor, David Segal. Both drunk, they talked about me. She told him she thought I was a born novelist and that I had a “certain eye” for things. He wanted to know if I was academic—said my outline read that way. She said, “No, she must have been on a tear.” Anyway, I really enjoyed talking to her.
I’m ruthlessly last-drafting. It must be sparse. It must fit together like a puzzle. It must be convincing and have intensity.
I would like to write a truly Gothic novel, the sort of thing I look to, find titillating. Somehow Uncle William might be the key.6 Uncle William in that dream, growing younger by the minute.
APRIL 23
Moon outside at the top of the sky.
Jeremy finished his novel. Terrifying last sentence!
John H. called to say Cosmo had bought “St. George” for $1,000.
Peculiar state of mind.
Lawrence Durrell said: Art is easy; it is life I find difficult. I understand this.
It tears me apart, relating to people. Jeremy is relatively easy because wherever he walks it’s with ten inches of space around him.
Called Mother. A certain retentive note. Oh, God. That hurts. That tiny reservation.
APRIL 25
Keep the visceral tension between Dane and the ch
ild. Also, it’s about time for a passage of good writing: the watcher theme. “I would have made a good God.” Imagine John telling Polly.7 Go back and get the feel of the island.
Went to Coover’s film matinee in the old armory building. All the people who “mattered” were there—afraid they might miss the latest thing. He’s really onto this gesture thing.
APRIL 27 • Sunday—daylight saving time
Four years ago, Ian and Audrey from Miss Slade’s writing class came to tea. I should have this book finished next Sunday, May 4. Then devote myself to Monsieur Teste for Spivak’s comp. lit. course. And teaching my plays for Core.
Page 153, final draft. From this point on, Dane is comforted more and more by the child so that the disappointment at the end really is disappointment. Hint that he sort of grows into her lover, then rejects her. The child becomes the center of her hope, her little god. He can resurrect her. At this point she cannot tolerate “the child” in anything.
He would speak in his hour. He would give her the word.
Levels of presentation. Statement (like those stories that can be expressed in a single sentence, and don’t have to be written). Rendering, description, experience, metaphor, symbol. Find the intangible space beneath.
A new and very delicate development in The Perfectionists: Dane ends up with only the rejecting child as an object to venerate.
How could the child hurt her, humiliate her? He reflects whatever people want to see. They use him to achieve their own ends. Karl pours the water. The child shoots her a little look of triumph. Penelope: “Did you see that?”8
MARCH 28
Kent’s little son Kevin tells this story: “A little boy lived alone. His grandmother had dived. His grandfather had dived. His mother had dived and his father was eaten by a giant. He lived there alone till the turnamites came …”
MAY 4
Last chapter. I simply don’t know how it’s working. She’s tidying up now, like an automaton, no feeling left for John. She cleans her purse. Ticket stubs—goodbye to illusions. Unsharpened pencil—nothing wrong with it that sharpening won’t fix (throw it out). Keys to her office and her old apartment. Tennis ball.
Evening
I didn’t finish as planned but it was a mature gesture on my part. Approximately ten more pages to go. They have to clinch the deal.
As John goes off to sea, she thinks about him drowning—a substantial fantasy.
The child’s aha! His spite-look must be eloquent so that what follows can simply follow action by action.
Somebody soaked poor Virginia. She’s licking herself into shape.
Before a person like Dane breaks out—flowers—she pulls herself tighter and tighter. She throws excess baggage overboard.
The last-minute John-Dane conversation. Motifs: flower in her head. The circle—“Where am I in it?” Ramón Lull [the island saint]. Child’s eyes.
In the final draft, John proposes that Dane accompany him on a two-mile swim to an island with a ruined fort. Dane gives no response, and when John splashes off she imagines the scene in which John’s corpse is brought back. Karl breaks her reverie with an invitation for everyone to go up to the terrace, where Robin has his tantrum at not being obeyed in his mute demand for water. Dane takes him up to their room and spanks him for not saying, “Mommy, I want some water.” She clamps her mouth on his to possess him, then comes “to herself in pure, perfect peace.”
Excerpt from The Perfectionists (Harper & Row, 1970)
—
When she could gather her energies, she crawled from the small form, looking down at the mottled face at just the precise moment when the blue eyes hardened against her in a decision far beyond their years. She slid from the cot and made her way dazed, toward the closed doors leading to the balcony. The hollow eyes of Ramón Lull watched her impassively from the dresser.
MAY 11
So that book is on its way back to New York.
I am trying to get my mind together for a paper—and then for the next book, which will take off in another direction: more symbolic, more fantasy, more chances. There is something deeper than relationships, a foaming swirl below them. This is not just a book about a white girl and a black girl.9 It would be the exploring of a certain kind of synthesis. Can the one plant her dreams in the other? It is how the dreams would fail if replanted. I want to explore what I want to explore.
Eagdyth. Edith. Her name: Lenora. Lenore.10
My Copenhagen Alexandria Quartet.
A story about the relationship between two interesting women has more potential than same between two men.
Lenore: “I would hate to be on my deathbed and suddenly realize I hadn’t known fully what it really meant to be me.”
MAY 14 • Wednesday
I’m in limbo as I wait for another father figure’s approval. David Segal.
Hawkins called first thing Monday to say he’d read the book, and it worried him that John didn’t really have that much influence over Dane.
Then the check came from him today, via Cosmo, with a note saying he felt like a dog for having upset me so early in the day. Suddenly, this evening, I started writing again: “1000 Sunset Drive.” That summer, when everything shifted and a young girl grew a carapace.11
MAY 19
I have been retreating into my little white bedroom. Hawkins due to call with Segal’s reaction to my book. I feel and don’t feel that this absolves me from doing anything. “1000 Sunset Drive” is telling me things I didn’t know. That house on the top of the mountain! Children are like bombs that will one day go off.
MAY 23
Good, good day. Much to record. First, a few watchwords from thirteenth-century mystic Ramón Lull:
The Beloved revealed Himself to His Lover. Clothed in new and scarlet robes. He stretched out His arms to embrace him; He inclined His head to kiss him; and He remained on high that he might ever seek Him.
—RAMÓN LULL, THE BOOK OF THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED
Segal has taken the book as is and is sending it to the copy editor. It will be published in the spring of 1970. Must get a photo made and send my dedication.12
Vulcan read it. He wanted Dane to leave! So did Hawkins!13 I figure that the only men who have read the book right—Chap Freeman, Jeremy, Segal—are the ones who know me intimately or not at all. So good to see Vulcan. In a soft, spring green shirt. He suddenly appeared in the doorway of the English office. I was stricken. The old Romantic in me awakened. We went down to my office and talked—kissed at the end, with my student crouched outside the door. A hundred years from now people will accept the fact that we’re not monogamous. I said to him (as he talked about whether to go back to his wife): I don’t care because I feel I’ve got you, too. I feel we’re bound up together somehow. He fulfills my requirements for the unattainable beloved—and with luck we can keep him unattainable.
He said the best writing in my book came when Dane was thinking of Penelope’s swimming over the Caves of Atlantis. Showing the depths of personality through metaphor.
MAY 25
Read Heather Ross Miller’s Gone a Hundred Miles14 and envied her knowledge of nature, her simplicity, her ability to make a fable.
That terrible feeling, in writing, when you know you’re skimming the surface when there are millions of things crying out to be! The pondering of an object, then sending your rays around it. The apprehending of it without destroying it entirely.
MAY 27
John Hawkins sold two of Ace Baber’s stories to Playboy. What a year! Pete Neill sold his novel to Viking.15 Nolan Porterfield sold his to a subsidiary of Harper’s.16 I sold mine to H&R and a story to Cosmo. Will any one of us make a dent in the future? I’m worried about Jeremy. Things are happening all around him (I know how that feels) and he’s bound to this terrible job.
October 1968: Got an agent for forty-eight pages.
May 20, 1969: Book accepted complete.
Seven months
JUNE 16
Reg
istered for the Faulkner seminar with Fredericks and for “Narrative Genres” with Spivak.
Jeremy took me to get the driver’s license. I ended up in tears. They persecuted me for changing my birth date on my old license. I found a sympathetic patrolman and told him how I couldn’t stand being over thirty. So it ended up a joke with all of them laughing. Dinner with the Dixons. They saw my old professor Walter Spearman in Chapel Hill and he praised me. I feel so free here—in spirit. I can pursue what I like. The writing: I’m dissatisfied with all that isn’t valid. The novel will have to be reapproached. Next I’m going to do a short story. “Where Does a Tornado Convalesce?”
JUNE 17
A feeling like walking on eggs. It’s all too good. Any moment the gods could send their thunderbolt. Why can’t I accept the good times as easily as the bad? Read up on the characteristics of tornadoes.
JULY 5
“Tornado” turned into an abortive novel. Since my last entry I seem to have been in the funnel of a tornado. Couldn’t decide what I was interested in. Spent two weeks writing junk, autobiography. Finally spent a day reading various stuff: medieval, mystical, Jung. Almost started a story about citizens’ attacks on universities in the 1300s. It came to nothing. Then I decided I had to do something. I decided on the story of the mistress who is fascinated by the wife, and when the wife goes, the mistress’s interest also goes. So I have worked for several days on that, a new frame growing in the form of the art of warfare: “Nicole: Highlights of a Memorable Campaign.”