by Gail Godwin
—HENRI DE TOURVILLE, LETTERS OF DIRECTION: THOUGHTS ON THE SPIRITUAL LIFE FROM THE LETTERS OF THE ABBÉ DE TOURVILLE
Neurotic suffering is an unconscious fraud and has no moral merits, as has real suffering.
—C. G. JUNG, THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY, “Analytical Psychology and Education,” Lecture 1
THE GAME AT Twickenham played in English spring sunshine … the picnic lunch eaten on the roof of the car … my sandwiches … a gradual progressing into the evening. Says Andy: “I think there’s one vital thing for two people who are going to get married. They should have the same sense of humor. And we seem to have.”
Andy about my marriage: “If you hadn’t had that, you might have been brash or naive. I don’t think of that. I just think of you as you. I’m not complaining. I’ll settle for you as you are. Do I appear reluctant?”
FEBRUARY 12
Sometimes his conversation loses me. He goes on and on about things—something today about an attitude toward the Lancaster Gate Grammar School, later something about dogs in Hyde Park, sometimes about Steve and him camping. I am conscious of myself watching him and not listening … All these things could really go into a story. I could write some good stories about the male-female relationship. We went to the Crown. I had given up alcohol for Lent, so I had bitter lemon and a ham sandwich, and he had one beer and two sandwiches.
I learned tonight from Neil, whose brother is a solicitor, that solicitors make £1,000 a year after they are qualified. I am making almost £1,500 now.
Andy gave me hell, in his blushing, polite way, on Sunday. He said I had a habit that annoyed him. “What is it?” I asked, trembling. YOU DON’T FINISH EVERYTHING ON YOUR PLATE, he said. I actually thought he was joking for a minute. He also won’t take taxis and sends aerogrammes.
FEBRUARY 14
Last night I dreamed I was rushing back to register for journalism school. I barely made it, registered, and was then told Dean Luxon had died the night before. I woke up crying.
Tonight was a ghastly affair: Robin, Jack Malone, and myself. Jack talks about himself too much. This is deadly. I came back feeling like a big nothing.
This weekend. I am invited to the country for two days of rest. Why not, then, go and savor it, as if there were not great stakes involved? Enjoy it, watch, learn what there is to be learned, listen to all of them, remember it’s Steve’s birthday weekend, forget completely about feelings.
FEBRUARY 17 • Monday
This weekend at Sandford-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. It has become a kind of ritual now. Mr. H. watching the Wasps29 through his binoculars, presented to him by the Egyptian government; Mrs. H. and myself talking about Steve’s love life, Andy’s childhood, and teas and dinners, occasionally clasping each other and crying, “Oh, pass the ball down! Let Andy have a try!”
He is so intense about his game. He is comical when he runs because his chin juts out. He strides about the field like a penguin. Later in the car, he kissed me and said: “You’re very long-suffering. Not many girls would be that long-suffering.” We rode back to Oxford in harmony clasping hands between gear changes. A small disharmony on the subject of extravagance vs. la philosophie de camping, but it was smoothed over by laughter. Steve’s birthday weekend, and God sent Mrs. Hurst a lovely American girl just for the birthday tea. Jay Weed from Boston: fresh faced; burnished, dipped hair; American legs and clothes. Afterward, Steve and I took her back to Professor and Mrs. Blackman’s, where she is living, and I had access to yet another world. Prof. B. is an expert weed-killing research man (says Jay: Here’s one Weed you’re not going to kill) and Mrs. B. is a sculptress who does stringy satirical figures mocking the Oxford stiffness. The house, their looks, the talk—even Mrs. B.’s matching turquoise slip—bespoke people who knew how to live, but, as I told Andy later, there was still something lacking.
FEBRUARY 19
Lucid letter from Frank about Monie’s heart attack. He told me just the things I wished to know—in terms of spasms and blood clots. It is better to know.
My heart tells me to stick out this nasty job a while longer because the alternative (other than the busy occupation of shifting my home) might be far emptier.
This room is closing round me.
FEBRUARY 21
I have been reading over some of my old work. These flashes come:
There is too much explaining. I treat readers like unsubtle dopes. If I expect to write for subtle people, then I’ve got to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The writing goes on for a little while—smooth, sustained—then a note of whining seeps in, a navelish, melancholy note.
Too long.
I should never write when freshly under the influence of people like H. James and Lawrence. This just isn’t me at all.
Before I go to sleep tonight, something has got to be settled about a project. Even if it’s taking one simple story like “Bay Bridge” and going back and packing all that’s possible into it. It’s got great gaps at the moment. The dialogue isn’t current enough. I don’t let the characters let themselves go.
Oh, God. Some of the old excitement just came back. There is something about motels and open roads—stacks of books in a room on Sunday, papers, omelets, coffee, and marmalade; knowing you’ve been living your life all the way, that you enjoyed it in the past and will enjoy it in the future. Mother wrote today. “It is ridiculous, all this worry about middle age. I won’t have a daughter of mine feeling older than I do.”
Dinner party last night.
Andy. I saw how he’d be with my sleek American people. He will always be a bit rough in sleek groups. He does not look composed. His face reddens. He sits with his shoulders hunched, chin out, chunky and for all the world like a New Zealand farmer. His voice booms out when he’s nervous, he screws up his face. I see his goodness, whereas, perhaps, the showy people don’t. I can offset him as he offsets me—
FEBRUARY 23 • Sunday
Is there to be a breakthrough or not? I feel a positive turbulence of creative energy inside me but it is all dammed up and has no way to get out. I want to describe things as I see them—built up one on top of another, all the innuendoes and implications.
DINNER W. A. TONIGHT. We put the roast on, went for a walk under a clear sky, watched the trains from the bridge, and then went to the Quill—for a drink—then ate. We are finding out about each other, telling our dreams, explaining ourselves, airing discrepancies, perhaps finding out if we can live together. I saw a list he had made for a party he was planning. It had names of people. Then at the bottom it had
A.
G.
S.
Coming back in the car, I told him how I wished I had something purposeful to do after work—something to occupy my time.
“Don’t I?” he asked.
“But I want to stay out of your way while you’re doing your things.”
“Well,” he said, easy as that, “I’ll think of something for you to do.”
Steve had been cutting up a car with an acetylene torch all day; he had been doing his law. Something so comforting …
FEBRUARY 24
Spring is in the air, there were two stars in the sky, it was light at the bus stop—
I feel nauseated with lack of purpose. Just a glimpse through the window today. Dorothea wrote Doreen from America. She’s going to Columbia U., working at American Express, dating congressmen, and coming in with the milkman.
There is something blocking me from writing—
FEBRUARY 25
Get thee behind me, Satan. I’m coming back to life. Something is trying to get me to despair so I’ll write down anything as it comes. It is all mental, all created inside me because of some need, some desperate balancing attempt on the part of my psyche.
Last night, disgusted with myself, I did not feel I had earned the right to take my clothes off and go to sleep. So I left them on, a pink sweater and maroon skirt—this seems important—and I left the light on and I slept. This mor
ning I woke up remembering my dreams and went to work not feeling much differently. It was only as the day progressed that I began to see. There were many dreams, most of them about the nuns at St. Genevieve’s and my mother. My mother (as in the dreams of the night before) was a comrade, she was helping me, boosting me, buying me something like gold earrings. Mother Winters was admiring me. There was an exam to take. I didn’t know it all, but I wasn’t especially worried. Now comes the significant part. I was asked by Mother Leible (I remember her as a strict taskmaster) to do some chalk murals on the blackboard and I thought: I’m not capable of this. But then I remembered another dream (this, in my dream) where, at her command, I began drawing pictures that just came out of my fingers with no effort from me. And I began doing it again. This dream speaks for itself.
Tonight I felt a strong urge to rewrite “Lazarus”30 and do collages. I know also that I must get out of here in June, have two months of sun and fun and go to New York. London is over. I see this as from a hilltop, as Andy once put it. “When you’re on top and can see things clearly, look down and survey the situation and register it. Then when you get down in the depths, you will have the evidence if not the vision.”
FEBRUARY 26
The spiritual man is increasingly becoming aware that his essential satisfactions proceed, not from his life’s being what the surface-minded call “happy” or “sad”—a material success or failure, exciting or drab, gay or tragic—but whether or not his life is constructed on the lines of a sound story. It must have a pattern—a beginning, a middle, and an end. It must in short, have meaning—a too rare overtone only produced when, as it were, the fingers of free will move across the strings of destiny.
—GALE D. WEBBE, THE NIGHT AND NOTHING
This has been a crisis week, starting with Mrs. H.’s letter.
Last night when A. took me to this little Greek restaurant in Netting Hill Gate, I decided he does not have a good sense of timing. Each time he comes to get me, we have to start all over again. He’s stiff. His conversation was so mundane—all about his appetite and what a good night’s sleep he had the night before. He’s not smooth—little subtleties don’t play across his face. So we got back here, I fixed Ovaltine, and we came up here. He told me about his mother: “I think I’ve upset her.” I pretended not to know anything about it. “But what did she do?”
He said she had said arch things, presumptuous things, things that would make a girl think: My God, how am I going to get out of this trap? And make a man want to go to Australia. Then he said, “And I told her all about what you’d had to put up with, about your father and about the newspaper and about your marriage.” Then I said how glad I was that he didn’t care and he said, “That’s all history. What I care about are your LIVING qualities—your warmth and your sympathy. They’re worth a thousand of anything else.” Then I said it was something for us to decide ourselves, every person was different, every couple was different. They had to feel things out. “Let’s just give it plenty of air,” I said. He “couldn’t agree more.” Then he said something about “who could dare try and predict the future?” And then he said something I may have misinterpreted, but it hurt even if it was misinterpreted. He said: “A lot of people think I’m twenty-eight and should be settled; now Steve is settled, he wants to get married, but I’m not settled at all, this is one of the most unsettled periods of my life.”
After he left, I read Father Webbe’s chapter on “decisions,” prayed in a sort of clean, lucid despair, and, after a brief trancelike state, during which I saw the ephemerality of my anguish, went to sleep.
Father Webbe is right: It isn’t the “happy” or “sad” moments or even the anticipation of either that really satisfies. It is the continuum, the pattern and the meaning of a life.
How could I bear the camping trips if they are the way he describes them—savoring a damn cup of coffee, exhausted, after pitching tent. When my idea is a luxury motel, having whiskey in bed listening to music, making love, sleeping late, making love, taking a shower, and having a huge breakfast—then going on to the next town in a streamlined little car. And also plenty of sunshine, new ideas, a New York Times on Sunday kind of life with a steady stream of vitality. And already we have serious disagreements on how money could be spent.
And what do we really talk about?
Could we, for instance, have a conversation comparable to those between me and John Bowers, Frank Crowther, Alden, or Jim Jensen? Or James?
Is it me speaking through these journals? I feel so relieved.
MARCH 2
A Story31
That Sunday morning, the knock on Ginny’s door turned out to be Richard’s mother instead of Richard. Usually on these weekends in the country, Ginny would lie in bed, awake from about seven thirty on (for she was not a heavy sleeper), and attend to the ritual beginnings of the rest of the house.
Richard’s mother always stirred first. She was the breakfast maker and once a month it was her job to fetch the vicar in her green Hillman and drive him to the small, square Norman church in time for eight o’clock Communion.
Richard’s father, learned Egyptologist and civil engineer, then clomped downstairs perhaps a quarter of an hour later and, with his departure to the lower floor, left the upstairs free for Ginny’s hopes. John, the elder son, an artist, Richard’s senior by three years, then took a bath. Ginny’s room, the guest room, was between the Martins’ bedroom and the bathroom. As in many older English houses, there was one room for the tub and washbasin and another for the toilet, as if it wouldn’t be quite proper to have both in the same room.
Oh hell, loosen up, try another tack—
She had not slept well the night before. Things had come to a premature crisis with her and Richard and she now felt in the position of a rejected love, although, when you got right down to it, Richard had said nothing like this. Also, every time she kept dozing off, she ran smack into the beginnings of a nightmare, of indistinct description but evil enough to make her force herself to stay awake most of the night. She had been reading the Penguin classic of Faust, Part I, before she went to sleep. This perhaps triggered it—or was it the ghost from upstairs? The Martins believed in their ghost, but then he stayed in the empty room upstairs.
Richard’s mother rushed into the room and sat down on the bed and put her arms around Ginny. The night before, she’d left a note under Ginny’s pillow: “Good night, God bless you, Ginny darling.”
I am just beginning to intuit something. “I just can’t lose you, I love you just like a daughter. If you go back to America, I’ll have to go, too [Mrs. Hurst wrote].” This is a woman who accepts the fact her husband is eighty-four and she may have a good ten to thirty years to go it alone.
“I just can’t understand it [she went on]. It’s sheer stupidity on his part. He’ll lose you and then he’ll realize. When rugby season is over, he’ll go crazy. There’ll be the long summer and you’ll be gone. He wrote to me this week. It was a lovely letter; then he added up all your qualities almost like 25 percent for this, 60 percent for that. Then he left a small reservation: as if you weren’t a superwoman already! He said he’d never been in love before like this, never so near the brink, but that he needed time to see. I know he’s going to fall for some fairy doll about twenty years old. Or marry one of these English society types. If he can’t rise to this …”
And here is where it went, somehow, too far. It transgressed that thin line that divides well-wishers from lovers. I began wondering whether my loyalty was to her or to myself. And here is my intuition, awful as it seems. It may be false, I hope it is, but I’d be a fool not to take it into consideration. Mrs. H. realizes my value and likes me as a person but does not think she can compete with me for her son. Therefore, her shadow side is trying to exclude me and get Andy back on “safe ground” with a “fairy doll” who will not compete in the mother’s chosen spheres. This is something I can’t utter to anyone. Because the last person on earth to suspect anything would b
e Mrs. H. herself. But she admits that she lives for her sons—and this is indicative.
I felt too close to home while reading a Cheever story in an old New Yorker tonight. It was called “An Educated American Woman,” and it chronicled an American woman who recited French when climbing into bed with her husband, and who chided him for his lack of imagination.
MARCH 3
Spent a pleasant evening talking to Melva—the thirty-eight-year-old wife of the East African gamekeeper who’s staying at no. 21. She is so refreshingly herself. We talked of men—hers, mine—marriage, etc., and I didn’t even wince when she said things like “It’s a fifty-fifty proposition. Give and take.” She was twenty-eight when she married Brian. “I was just having a good time.”
What a contrast in talking to her and to Miss Elizabeth Nethery, the newest addition to our staff at USTS. Miss N. doesn’t like nicknames. She doesn’t like to share flats, she doesn’t read too much because she doesn’t want to mess up her own style of writing. She has no sense of humor, she doesn’t eat lunch. She has analyzed her own handwriting and found herself excitingly neurotic. My handwriting, she said, showed a well-balanced nature (this said condescendingly). She scares me.
