by Gail Godwin
Walking back down Grosvenor Street—under the temporary structure for a building which has been the same ever since I first walked down that street—I saw the large portion of hours I have spent trying to be things other people wanted me to be. I saw myself at the rugby dance Saturday night—trying to pretend I loved twisting; trying to fake it that I was a golden girl. I saw myself fawning in front of the Wests, compromising, saying I liked people I didn’t like, making their standards mine. I saw myself in all the many clothes I’ve worn that I didn’t like but were “in style.” I saw myself fitting my conversation to Doreen’s pace, and wondering if Dorothea thought I was bright. Trying to squeeze myself in to fit their patterns, trying to spread myself out to fit their image. From now on, I plan to say what I mean. If I feel it will be awkward or will not accomplish any purpose, I will not speak at all. But under no account will I be a chameleon.
Today I began a book of short stories and suddenly became impatient with the author because he was explaining to me. I didn’t want to hear what everyone’s motives were. I wanted to watch [the characters] working and playing at life and then (as I do in the daytime) try to figure them out. Also I was angry with him for giving me no new images. I then turned to John Updike as to an old friend.
“Burton received the silver.” That is all. This is about a clerical man at the dentist’s. If John Updike had been afraid the public would not understand, he could have added, disastrously, “as he would the Holy Communion wafer.” Thus spoiling everything.59
SEPTEMBER 19
Another wasted night. Early to bed. Insomnia. At 4:00 a.m., Chelsea Old Church clock strikes. I have never gone so long at a job without a break. I need to unwind among people I feel perfectly safe with, people who have known me from the cradle up and who can always be depended upon to open the door, no matter what disgrace I am coming from. In London, or indeed anywhere except Asheville, I have no one person who will take me as I am. That, I suppose, is what B. meant when he said last fall: “I have no one, no one in the world, who will let me be what and where I have to be.”
If I put the detail in my stories that I do into my letters to Mother, I would be made.
SEPTEMBER 24
What is existentialism?
Many of us had our first news of this philosophy from some rather bizarre and bohemian settings in Paris after World War II.
“This new philosophy …”
“But it’s not. It’s very old.”
—
MODERN SOCIETY BECOMES a kind of bureaucratically organized flight from the self, a flight into which everybody can easily drift. More than a century ago, Kierkegaard railed against the depersonalizing forces of modern society far more powerfully than do Riesman and Whyte.60 Same line of criticism developed more subtly by Ortega y Gasset, Jaspers, Marcel, and Buber.61
Kierkegaard insisted on the necessity of faith as a vital act beyond reason. Beyond this message as a Christian apologist, Kierkegaard brought to the attention of philosophers and psychologists the fact that human existence can never be totally enclosed in any system. To exist as an individual is to strive, change, develop, stand open to the future, and be incomplete—while a system, by its very nature, is closed, complete, static, dead.
Life is lived forward and understood backward, says Kierkegaard. If we were ever to understand it completely, we would have to be already dead, without a future and with no untried and novel possibilities before us.62
Our lives become meaningful to the degree that we bind together tomorrow, today, and yesterday in an active whole.
SEPTEMBER 25 • 11:20 p.m.
Going home in one week and one day. The most I can expect is that it will clear the air. I will break away from the horrible routine of USTS. Next spring, I must return to the U.S.A. Otherwise I see myself living safely in England, uninvolved in the history making of my own country subjecting my heritage to one abortive romance after another with Englishmen who cannot understand or appreciate my way of being.
NINETY THOUSAND COPIES of the Denning Report come out at midnight.63 People have actually been queuing outside the stationery store since afternoon!!
SEPTEMBER 28 • Saturday
A peculiarly annoying day. I wish I could identify this anxiety that follows me periodically like a black cloud. Woke up at 7:30 a.m., feeling about a thousand years old. Faced the mirror and felt “the panic”—the lines encroach and, what is more, there are already gray hairs. (Yet the girl at the Chelsea Public Library asked whether I was over twenty-one.) Went to the hairdressers and had my hair straightened—then took a taxi to the Guildhall for the Lord Mayor’s election and left my Jung book in the back of the taxi. Hell.
The election was colorful, objectively interesting, and packed with history. Mr. Haydon64 volunteered information and introduced me to a former Lord Mayor with steel blue eyes and a wry smile who pressed some dried flowers into my hand “to keep you from getting the plague.” But, sitting in the Guildhall, facing the sun-touched bronze figure of Churchill, all I could think was: Where is Gordon now? Is he at Bisley? Why didn’t he call and tell me what had been decided? How he would enjoy this election! He takes such objective interest in everything. Also, I knew Mr. Haydon probably faced a lonely evening (that’s why he reads and travels so much) and I hate to feel I am prolonging the agony or abetting other peoples’ loneliness. I think the kind of person who does not show his loneliness is most pleasant to be with. Not that Mr. Haydon pressed me; it was his very carefulness not to press that showed how lonely he must be. He has learned just how little you may demand of others.
Then home on the bus—the usual sense of release as soon as I was out of his company—and to the Chelsea Public Library. But oh, Christ, prevent me from becoming one of these solitary-intellectual types, wandering the smoky streets with an armload of psychology books—a type I am fast becoming.
Ah, God, all those books on personality and finding God; and all the people, on their knees, searching the shelves for weekend comfort. One day I am going to write about this awful loneliness, describe it—the weekends especially. It’s like this all over the world: Chapel Hill, Miami, London. The only times I have not been a victim were in situations where I have been working very hard (Blowing Rock) or doing something physical, or during those (brief) times—when?—when I have been spending time with someone I loved. But usually then I was simply putting off my inadequacies until a later date. As with Shelley B., I would shortchange my classes, my studies, even my loyalties, to be with him. Then, in turn, after the weekend, I would be left to cope with my own deficiencies.
After dinner
It is almost nine. Gianni Schicchi on the radio. Paul T.65 We merge our pasts with our futures.
How sick, disgusted, and confused I am. Finished my short story “Mourning” with no flourishing sense of triumph, hitting the typewriter key with a bang like the pianist’s final chord. I doubt my powers, my reality in this world of other people. It seems that I delude myself in every relationship I have. I project my own inadequacies and fears and worst faults on the Wests, on Doreen. I am so filled with panic. God, look at the facts. I am twenty-six years old, with no visible achievement in either of the fields about which I spend the most time thinking. I have not sold one written word. I have not been or become suitable to be loved by the sort of person I find suitable. And the one book that had some of the answers, I left in a taxi.66 Christ. Help me. I don’t think I can get much lower.
SEPTEMBER 30
The end of a terrible, trying month, full of self-doubt, brash actions, and much struggling and growing. That is one month I wouldn’t repeat even if it meant being five years younger-looking. Bach choir singing. And if I didn’t have these notebooks in which to pour out my fears, I’d probably be much worse off. I was thinking of what it is everybody fears. It isn’t poverty—that is a challenge. It is boredom, monotony, everydayness. That is the killer. That’s why I go to so many movies. That’s why I hated the Miami Herald. That’s why I coul
dn’t stand Key Biscayne longer than five months. That’s why I kept moving around, and why I have always gotten tired of things quickly. I burst in with no restraint, take my fill, and then go on to something else.
Now that I know my conscious enemy, what can I do about it? What steps does one take?
Let the subconscious work on this awhile—
Hiatus
Gail Writes About a Gap in Her Journal
OCTOBER 1, 1963, TO NOVEMBER 16, 1963
—
I went to the U.S. for the first two weeks of October 1963. There is no record in my journal. The following hiatus, from October 1 until the November 17 entry is a mystery to me. That’s a month and two weeks of silence.
Perhaps I kept a travel journal of the two weeks in America, but I don’t recall doing so. I do recall isolated events and the mood of that trip, and perhaps that offers some clues.
I was very much divided, baffled, and uncertain about whether I had hit a dead spot in my life or had taken a serious wrong turn at some point in the past year. Had I stayed in England too long? Where was the jolt or the bolt from the blue that could set me on my road again? What was my road?
Anyway: the visit home. Asheville in October was as seductive as ever. The air, skies, colors, mountains. I enjoyed my family, snuggled into the old smells and conversational cadences. My baby brother Rebel was five then, and would crawl silently and stealthily from his room to mine; we’d lie there hugging until his father woke and dragged him away. This was sometimes repeated three times a night.
The big difference in Asheville 1963 was that B., though still there, was not there for me anymore. Stella [Anderson], who had just gotten engaged to Don Trapp, came into Asheville from her home in Brevard and we went to “look at” B.’s new wife. Stella said someone told her that the wife was working at, I think, the Chamber of Commerce as a greeter. Stella and I went in and pretended to be looking for various tourist attractions. The young woman was very warm and helpful and beautiful. A real beauty! A stone in my heart!
Then Stella and I went back into the October sunshine, and she lectured me from the pedestal of her new happiness that I need only be myself and all would follow.
But what was “myself”?
I flew down to Raleigh and spent a week with my uncle William, the bachelor judge.67 He took me around to see all his cohorts and our relatives.
And then it was over and I flew back to London, which was already smoked up and chilled with early dusks and oncoming winter. “Go-or-stay, go-or-stay” was the indecisive mantra to which my shoes marched—from and to the bus stops, to and from work.
I resolved to go back to America “in the spring.” But then I’d pause and cross-examine myself: Go back to what? You don’t even have the hope of a job there. Go back to whom?
And so on, into the fog season. London still had pea-soupers, though they would soon be extinct.68
Then Kennedy was shot. The November 22 entry in my journal is short. I was stunned. No details, but I can still relive them. It’s dinnertime at the Wests’. Most of the “inmates” are at the table. Andrew, who has been listening to the BBC in his room, comes running up the stairs: “I say, Gail. Your president has been shot.” We bolted our dinner, and Andrew drove me to the American Embassy on Grosvenor Square. A huge crowd was gathered, listening to transistor radios for word of the president’s condition. “Don’t worry, Gail,” said Andrew. “The Americans can fix anything.”
But they couldn’t fix that.
In the weeks that followed, priorities shifted. My turmoil over an evasive Englishman whose habits I deplored seemed, in retrospect, some sort of aberration on my part. Come spring, I decided, I would definitely go home. If I was to be a tragic failure, let me at least do it on my own turf, where the air was finer and I would not need a special visa to work.
1. The National Rifle Association of Great Britain is located in Bisley. Major shooting meets took place there.
2. Doreen, Gail’s immediate supervisor at the U.S. Travel Service office, is a complex character: a disorganized boss, a thirty-plus unmarried woman who dreams of finding the right man, and a former “air hostess” who has adopted the calmness of that job title.
3. Dorothea was a coworker at the U.S. Travel Service office whose marriage of respect and affection, but not passion, provided one of many models for Gail. Dorothea and Gail shared many confidential observations.
4. The Henley Sailing Club was formed in 1896 at Cordery’s Boatyard in Shiplake, about thirty miles west of London, on the river Thames. In 1962, the club was expanded to include a bar. Gail met Gordon Wrigley in April 1963. He was a research engineer, specializing in ceramics, and the great-nephew of the founder of the William Wrigley Jr. Company, famous for its spearmint gum. As he admitted to Gail, Gordon had a habit of analyzing and categorizing people.
5. White City Stadium was built in 1908 for the Olympics. In 1927, it was modified to accommodate greyhound racing. In 1947, it began hosting horse shows. The stadium was demolished in 1985 for a complex of BBC buildings.
6. Gail was reading The Prime of Life, the second volume of de Beauvoir’s memoirs; it documents de Beauvoir’s unmarried relationship with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as well as her responses to the rise of Hitler and the onslaught of World War II.
7. Douglas Kennedy, Gail’s ex-husband, a photographer on the Miami Herald.
8. Marya Mannes wrote feature articles and art criticism for The New Yorker and for The Reporter (a leading political and cultural magazine that ran from 1949 through 1968). She often cautioned against the suppression of women’s creativity in the United States, and made an envying comparison to Soviet women in order to goad her compatriots into relaxing their gender biases.
9. Gail rented a room in a boardinghouse run by Mr. and Mrs. West, a couple declined in fortune, who missed the days of British colonial nobility. Except for a period living alone in her own apartment, November 1962 to May 1963, Gail had stayed with the Wests and their collection of boarders in three different houses. Her 1983 novella “Mr. Bedford” is based upon her time with the Wests.
10. Gail wrote an article chronicling her journey to Berlin and her interrogation by East German police; it appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times in November 1961.
11. John was Gordon’s roommate.
12. Gordon was also seeing a younger girl named Bobbie, with whom he went on camping trips.
13. The 19 and 22 London bus lines served Chelsea.
14. Cecil Farris Bryant was the governor of Florida at the time.
15. Gail met Robin in January 1963 at the travel office. He was an exuberant friend who, however, grew sour when people didn’t play along with his larks.
16. In Gianni Schicchi, a comic opera composed by Giacomo Puccini, the title character falsifies a will for a disinherited family and, in doing so, sneakily bequeaths valuable property to himself, thus providing a dowry for his lovesick daughter. In Godwin’s novel Violet Clay, Minerva, the owner of a woodland retreat, tells Violet how she’d sung Schubert songs and the daughter’s aria from Gianni Schicchi at her parents’ parties.
17. In December 1964, Gordon, who had moved to Rugby, became engaged to Barbara.
18. Hilda was a palmist in London whom Gail had seen from time to time.
19. “Bay Bridge” was a story based on Gail’s first love, who had joined the Air Force and then come to “claim her,” she says, in 1955. Their engagement was broken when Gail reconnected with her father, who sent her to Peace College. The story has been lost.
20. In The Window of Memory (1962), Richard Kennedy reconstructs Thomas Wolfe’s development as a writer, beginning in 1928, at which point Wolfe had written more than half a million words and published nothing. Though Gail could strongly identify with Wolfe’s desire to encompass the world and his recognition of epic material in his hometown (Asheville, North Carolina—also Gail’s), she did not share his epic style.
21. “Bright Eyes” portrayed a preacher on a soapbo
x at Hyde Park Corner in London, and the memories of a disastrous affair his screed arouses in a passing American girl.
22. “Wesley Phipps” was a short story that Gail wrote about a man who returns to his family’s business after a year of dreaming. The story is lost.
23. Gail based “The Happy Couple” on a sinister young American couple whom she’d met in London. The husband kept giving away the wife’s secrets.
24. In D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” the poet feels honored by a snake’s use of his water-trough, but then throws a log at it in a fit of revulsion, thus revealing the beast’s godliness and his own pettiness. In 2003, the poem appeared in Snakes: An Anthology of Serpent Tales (edited by Willee Lewis) along with Godwin’s piece “My Snakes.” There, Godwin shares with Lawrence, and evidently with Barbara, too, a reverence for the animal, which she relates through a series of vignettes—from her reading of Kipling’s The Jungle Book to a shared admiration of a large garter snake with her late companion Robert Starer.
25. Alden James, a Canadian, had come to London to study medicine. He was a friend of Robin’s, and a man’s man, riding motorcycles, camping out, smoking cigars, doing the Hemingway thing, including expressing anguish over women.
26. Mose Winston Godwin, Gail’s father, committed suicide on January 9, 1958, twenty years after Gail’s mother had divorced him, and three years after he had reentered Gail’s life in a supportive way following her high school graduation. “Mourning,” one of the stories Gail noted on August 13 that she was developing, reflects on this subject, as does Gail’s novel Violet Clay, in which the heroine’s uncle, Ambrose Clay, commits suicide.
27. James’s autobiographical work Notes of a Son and Brother was published in 1914. James died in 1916.
28. “Sometimes crazed people,” such as the street preacher in “Bright Eyes,” “make the kind of sense for which you haven’t got the courage,” Gail notes.
