The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  29. Gail has a passion for the movies, and many are cited throughout her journals. Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, published in 1961, became a celebrated example of southern existentialism.

  30. In his autobiography Lanterns on the Levee (1941), William Alexander Percy—Greenville, Mississippi, poet and lawyer—depicted the erosion of southern aristocratic values in the tide of business corruption. While fighting the Ku Klux Klan, W. A. Percy maintained a belief in white racial superiority and paternalism. He adopted his young cousins, Walker Percy and Walker’s two brothers, when their mother died driving off a bridge. Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, set in New Orleans, presents a stockbroker—Binx Boiling—who, despite his urge to do noble things, cannot connect to noblesse oblige. His sense of unreality is moored in movie watching.

  31. The year 1963 saw the publication of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; John Updike’s The Centaur; J. D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction; Mary McCarthy’s The Group; James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time; and Joyce Carol Oates’s first book, By the North Gate.

  32. Paul Trinchieri was a friend who introduced Gail to opera.

  33. Andrew Baker was a fellow boarder in the Chelsea house. Artistic, music-loving, enamored of James Bond movies, in debt to his housemates, he inspired the character of Alexander in Gail’s novella “Mr. Bedford.” Anne Rose was his girlfriend.

  34. Here, Gail begins to work on the story “Mourning,” alternately titled “Father Flynn” and “Ambrose,” based on her reaction to news of her father’s suicide.

  35. Gail will make great use of surveys of room furnishings throughout her fictional career. See Clare’s reading of her stepfather’s house in A Southern Family (chapter 3), Emma’s view of Tess’s houseboat in Queen of the Underworld (chapter 5), John Empson’s apartment in The Perfectionists (chapter 5), and the Eastons’ bedroom in “Mr. Bedford.” On September 3, 1961, Gail had made this note: “Marya Mannes says to look around a man’s apartment to determine what he is.” (The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963).

  36. Evan is also the name of the husband in “Gull Key” Gail’s 1962 unpublished novel.

  37. The August 28, 1963, March on Washington culminated a summer of thousands of civil rights demonstrations and was timed to influence Congress to vote for the Civil Rights Bill. Some counted the number of participants at five hundred thousand, the largest political demonstration in the United States up to that time. An estimated 25 percent of the demonstrators were white.

  38. Cliff and A. were two former love interests, one a ship’s captain Gail had known in 1959, the other a fellow reporter on the Miami Herald in 1960.

  39. During a BBC music program, a cellist had broken a string.

  40. “Roxanne” was a novel that Gail had been writing for two years, based on her friend Lorraine O’Grady. A light-skinned African-American, Lorraine confronted Gail’s southern heritage and its racial divisions. They first met at Ambassador William Blair’s reception for Marian Anderson in Copenhagen, October 1961, and then became each other’s confidante and opposite.

  41. Mrs. Frank Morrison, wife of the governor of Nebraska, led a tourism and trade promotion group from her state to Europe. Chief Spotted Back Hamilton, an Omaha Indian and performer of ceremonial songs, was one of twenty-nine in the entourage.

  42. Bettina (Simone Micheline Bodin Graziani), a Givenchy model and worldwide celebrity in the 1950s, had been the mistress of Prince Ali Khan, a jet-setting Ismaili Muslim.

  43. Gaert, a friend of Gail’s in Denmark, often provided good company. Blond-haired and soft-voiced, he aspired to be an artist.

  44. Carnaval, a piano composition by Robert Schumann, had appealed to both Gail and Gaert for its virtuoso variations that break away from a courtly theme. The music opens Gail’s novel Violet Clay.

  45. In Gail’s unpublished novel “Gull Key,” Bentley Lewis prepares dinner for her new husband, Evan, to the music of the Brahms concerto. The Rondo finale matches Bentley’s excitement as she prepares to reveal to Evan the beginning of her locally set novel, The Lighthouse.

  46. Shelley Burman had been the chief resident surgeon at Chapel Hill University Hospital with whom Gail had had a stormy relationship (see “The Angry Year” in Mr. Bedford and the Muses).

  47. Father Gale D. Webbe had been rector of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Asheville and prepared Gail for confirmation when she was eleven. In his book The Night and Nothing, he wrote about man’s connection beyond his self with eternity. Shortly Gail will find this book, just published, in Hatchards Bookshop.

  48. “Everydayness is the enemy” Binx Boiling says in Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, which Gail had read five months previously. That idea is one aspect of existentialism that strikes Gail; yet she seeks something more meaningful than momentary purpose in life, something more in the form of a design.

  49. PROs are the records of the British Public Record Office.

  50. Gordon had said that Sheila and her roommates lived on hot air, not with a sense of independence and a vocation (see The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963, entry for May 13, 1963).

  51. “When the golden sun sinks in the hills” is the first line in the song “Little Grey Home in the West,” which had a “There’s No Place Like Home” theme and was a favorite during World War II.

  52. “Serendipiter” was a current term; in 1961, Gay Talese had published New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey, based on articles he’d written for Esquire about the city’s unnoticed denizens.

  53. John Bowers, a writer living in Greenwich Village, was a friend and confidant.

  54. Alec Guinness was appearing at the Royal Court in Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, for which he received the London Theatre Critics Award for best actor.

  55. “The chipmunk” was the assistant manager at Mayview Manor, the Blowing Rock, North Carolina, resort at which Gail worked in the summer of 1961 to earn money for her passage to Europe. He was young, rich, and eager; and Gail came to appreciate his intensive campaign to win her approval.

  56. Franchelle, Rebel, and Tommy were Gail’s siblings by her mother and stepfather, Frank Cole.

  57. In her 1987 novel A Southern Family, Gail describes Lily and Ralph Quick’s acquisition of a female puppy to start Ralph’s “clan of dogs.” One puppy licks Clare, the heroine, and is chosen for liking the family rather than necessarily for being liked. “Better take love where you can find it,” Ralph, the stepfather, says.

  58. Stella Anderson, Gail’s good friend from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, arrived in London to stay at the Wests’ boardinghouse in September 1962. The character Arden Speer in Gail’s novella “Mr. Bedford” is based partly on her.

  59. John Updike’s story “Dentistry and Doubt” had been published in The New Yorker and included in his first book of short stories, The Same Door (1959). Burton, an American minister especially sensitive to moral dilemmas, reflects on such subjects as the value of pain and the competitive birds he sees in the dentist’s backyard. The short work proved to be a big inspiration, Gail says, for her story “An Intermediate Stop” (the others being Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s controversial Honest to God and Gail’s memory of a charismatic Scottish preacher who had led a retreat at Peace College during her junior year). Burton’s meditations also resonate with Father Walter Gower’s in Gail’s 1991 novel Father Melancholy’s Daughter: “He recognized … that in his very thinking of his own humility he was guilty of pride, and his immediate recognition of it as pride was foundation for further, subtler egotism.”

  60. The malaise that people felt, as reflected in unfulfilling relationships and questions about identity gained credibility in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956).

  61. Karl Jaspers, author of Keason and Existence (1935), was a major proponent of the idea that a complete system of philosophy isn’t possible, since things are always in the process of becoming. Gabriel-Honoré Marcel,
author of The Mystery of Being (1951), also attacked reductionism, and related the method to modern, bureaucratic society. He focused on interactions and moments of decision, donning the mantle of Søren Kierkegaard and Jaspers. Martin Buber was an earlier, theological Jewish writer whose landmark book I and Thou (1923) broke down the division between subject and object, and shaped a philosophy of transformation.

  62. Gail has embraced aspects of existentialism that she can wed to her own views, and that emerge in future works. Her attraction to José Ortega y Gasset’s ideas about “transmigrations of the soul” into the feelings of others was prefigured in her childhood writings—for instance her composition “The Autobiography of a Tin Cup,” told from the cup’s viewpoint, and fulfilled in such passages as Violet Clay’s reimagining of her uncle’s suicide in Violet Clay. The fluidity of past, present, and future is a recurrent theme in Gail’s work. “The human mind … is a chronic time traveler,” Margaret muses in Evensong, and it has the ability to pull the human body along “like a wagon, with its entire load of sensory equipment.” The open-endedness of one’s fate finds witty expression in Queen of the Underworld, in which Don Waldo Navarro, an exiled Cuban author, reveals that the title of his memoir, Destinos y Desatinos, demonstrates that the mere addition of the letter a turns destinies into blunders.

  63. Conservative sexual mores took a hit when John Profumo, British secretary of war, was exposed having an affair with bombshell Christine Keeler, who’d also slept with a Soviet naval officer. Lord Denning’s report gave details.

  64. Mr. Haydon visited the offices of USTS and called himself “the Alchemist.” He belonged to the Guild of Goldsmiths. He had invited Gail to the Lord Mayor’s swearing in and the luncheon to follow in the Guildhall.

  65. Paul Trinchieri, Gail’s opera-loving friend.

  66. Gail is referring to Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

  67. William Godwin, Gail’s father’s older brother, was a Selma, North Carolina, district judge.

  68. Five years later, the Extensive Clean Air Act in Great Britain marked the end of the London fog that coal burning had produced for many years.

  Part two

  BROTHERS AND LOVERS

  London

  NOVEMBER 17, 1963, TO MARCH 23, 1964

  NOVEMBER 17

  Gordon Landsborough1 (drinking his Bell’s whiskey at the London Scottish Football Club after London Scottish lost to Richmond): “You know. I’ve found many times that people who aren’t very intelligent are endowed with a distinct cleverness, a kind of shrewdness, but that isn’t the word I want …”

  Gordon2 (seizing the description, seeing perhaps himself?): “Could that word not be ‘common sense’?”

  Landsborough (as an almost imperceptible flicker of disappointment flits across his sharp countenance): “Well, common sense, yes, but that isn’t quite the word I meant. It’s a sort of canniness that usually causes them to succeed. And then you find some person really brimming over with intelligence (here there is the unmistakable love-of-excellence light in his eyes), but they lack that shrewdness and are complete failures in the world.” He left soon after this.

  Sunday afternoon

  It is raining, mid-November. Leaves are scattered across the enclosed courtyard. The remaining plants in the yellow flower boxes are flattened by the rain. Inside Andrew’s “hut,” Chopin is playing on the BBC. Andrew fumbles through his bookshelf. “Read Thomas Hardy. The Well-Beloved.3 Everyone should read one of his at least. No, I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember liking it. Look, can you lend me four shillings? I’ll go out and buy some cigarettes and chocolates. Would you like some chocolates?”

  “I used to know Rowntree—he was from York, too,”4 Andrew says, apropos of the after-dinner mints.

  A pause. The Well-Beloved begins: “The peninsula carved by Time out of a single stone, whereon most of the following scenes are laid, has been for centuries immemorial the home of a curious and well-nigh distinct people, cherishing strange beliefs and singular customs, now for the most part obsolescent.” The cadence of the words blends with the watery London Sunday where there is a strange sense of being nowhere at all.

  Andrew (changing over from radio to record player): “Here, listen to this. It’s Italian pop. The composer had gone on his honeymoon and fell in love with a waiter in the hotel. Some trouble developed and so he wrote this song to the waiter.” It is a catchy tune. Life is not so bad after all, at least for the duration of an LP disc. Then it is over. Andrew is sitting in his straight-backed gilded chair: “You know, life is fucking awful, any way you look at it. When you think of it, you’re bloody lucky just to have made it to another weekend. That’s why I really can’t take this idea of security seriously.” He goes out and comes back much happier with a pack of Herbert Tareytons and some expensive after-dinner mints.

  Something thrilling about driving through the rain in an open sports car. You are in motion against the elements. Petticoat Lane.5 “You kill yourself for a parking spot on the other side of Bishopsgate, get out and walk through the rain, spoil your clothes, work up a bad temper to mill about in a throng of subhumans bartering for plastic balls, colored shoelaces, and toy submarines.” Onward Sunday Anxiety. Waiting for the curtain to go up on the cinema at Warner’s, we listen to the live organ playing “Dancing in the Dark.” Andrew: “Think how many of us would be put at ease if they would fasten a little brass cross on the front of the curtain. That would make everything all right.”

  —

  IMAGINE A ROOM still filled with the idea of someone who is no longer there. And imagine that the idea is more comfortable than the actual presence of the person. Robin lying across the single bed, the first three buttons of his gray-green shirt undone. He has a broad, hairy chest. On the table at the foot of this bed, under the lamp, is an eight-by-six-inch matte-finish photograph of Robin in the throes of the London Scottish vs. Cambridge match. He has a murderous look as he bears down upon his opponent. “Yes, I do believe in love,” he is saying. “But I think it’s a compromise, like they all say. For instance, if you and I were married, or living together (this hastily appended), I would do things that would drive you up the wall. And you would certainly irritate the hell out of me at times. But that doesn’t mean you don’t like the person. Oh, I’m sleepy. What is that perfume, De?6 The one I bought for you in France? I’ll have to remember that. Come here and kiss me.”

  NOVEMBER 19

  Two American girls overheard in a pub:

  “Listen, did … When you were going with David, did he ever tell you he loved you?”

  “No.”

  “Ah! Just as I thought. See!”

  “Why, does Jack never say it either?”

  “No. It’s just the same as you. Saturday night I made such a fool of myself. For the millionth time. Let me tell you.”

  “Do you have a match?”

  “No. Yes. Wait, let me look. No.”

  “I’ll be right back. I want to hear this.”

  “Yes, I want …”

  “Now. Where were you Saturday night?”

  “I made an absolute ass of myself. I want to tell you from the beginning. Maybe you can help me. We started out completely impersonal, you see. I hadn’t seen him for two weeks and I felt ‘on top,’ so to speak, because I was safe in the knowledge that he had called twice and I had been out each time.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So, we were standing at the bar of the rugby club, talking about something ‘safe,’ I forget what. I was so proud of myself. I had gotten through the entire game without making one allusion to ‘us.’ Then he began speaking of going sailing the next day and I immediately felt left out. I said, ‘Oh, take me with you.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if I go. Of course, I might not go.’ ‘Then let’s do something,’ I persisted. ‘I know, we could drive to Cambridge. I’ve never been to Cambridge.’ ‘I like Oxford better,’ he said. ‘Well! Then let’s drive to Oxford.’ It seemed settled. Then, some minutes lat
er, I brought it up again: ‘When we go to Oxford tomorrow …’ Then he said: ‘I’m not sure. I have a lot to do.’ ‘Why don’t you like me?’ I asked. ‘I like you,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t love you.’ ‘Oh, that’s lovely. That’s flattering. Why not?’ ‘I don’t want to love anyone. I stop myself before I ever do.’ ‘Well, do you think you ever could love me?’ ‘I don’t know. I want to be friends with you.’ ‘But I don’t want to be friends!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I think I could love you.’ ‘Oh, that would be a waste if we couldn’t be friends.’ ‘Look, could you ever love me?’ ‘I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. I was having such a nice evening. Look at all these people. It’s times like this when people begin thinking of themselves. It’s the one time they should be detached, outside it.’ ‘Don’t you miss me?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘But you can get along without me?’ ‘I can get along without anybody. I don’t want to be tied down. If I did get married, it would be to some bloody insignificant little woman.’ ‘But why!’ ‘Housekeeper.’ ‘Then why don’t you sleep with me?’ ‘I can’t sleep with people I respect. Just those I know there’s no danger of my getting close to. I could never sleep with a woman before I married her’ ‘But if you’re not going to marry me, why can’t you sleep with me?’ ‘Because I’m still working on it.’ ‘On what?’ ‘Marrying you.’ ‘Well, how long will you be working on it?’ ‘Probably till you marry someone else.’ ‘God. Why don’t you tell me yes or no? Let me be free!’ ‘I don’t know. And you’re free.’ It went on and on like this.”

  “God, it sounds just like the conversations I had with David. Only with us it went on for three years and I used to throw up afterward.”

  “What finally happened?”

  “I wrote him that I was marrying George in London. I was so tired of emotional things. I just wanted to be a housekeeper, a simple woman. He wrote back and said for me to name the day and place, anywhere in Europe, and he’d be there.”