by Gail Godwin
DID TWO THOUSAND WORDS from seven to ten, taking a break for oyster stew. I will rewrite this book. I am finding a difference already. First, the sustained underlying sense of humor. The slight detachment. And the characters are going to be deeper than those others.
Evan is going to be a certain brand of “the best America has to offer.” Not the eastern school brand. The Midwest transplant who makes good.
Bentley is inclined to frequent “flights,” distracted, still at that stage where she hasn’t completely become herself and therefore needs constant aids: daydreams, soul searching, etc. She has a desire to fulfill some role, but isn’t sure which. She’s always after something new.
But where does the island fit in? The inhabitants?
The coming of the Englishman makes her see these people and her environment from a new outsider’s view. The irony is, she eventually sees Evan for his real worth—but loses him. If he insists on a divorce for her one offense, he would be narrow.
We have to see why Evan chose her, as well as why she chose him.
Now, the Englishman. An unknown quantity. It is her first contact with the European mind: refined, reflective, cynical.
It isn’t just an exercise. It’s a story of innocence craving experience: and then, experienced, seeking—too late—a return to innocence. Gull Key: Garden of Eden.
What kind of man is Geoffrey Sykes [the Englishman]? This is one of the keys. He’s a complainer, a cynic, a malcontent; a brilliant, charming Old World type. The difference between the moral view and the aesthetic. You reach a point where you crave to return to the moral.
APRIL 17–18, EASTER WEEKEND • Beaufort Street
It is time I moved out of this flat. It has stopped being a clean-limned ivory tower and has become a haven where two distraught Americans can put things off for a little longer.
Sandy needs his solitude, too. He must go home for five hours and read, and make his model airplanes. In Battersea Park yesterday, surrounded by high-powered New Yorkers—Gillett and his little hat and camera;10 the Queen of the 1965 New York World’s Fair (“I’m so upset. I broke my favorite fingernail.”)—Sandy was a slow orange blur of retarded action. No incentive. But he did finish his book. He has no ulterior motives, plays no games. He isn’t deviously trying to get something. He’s just riding along. My tiny good voice says: “Is this what you’ve come to? Have you no will? Can you not hold out for someone with will?” Then the other voice answers: “Like who? Everything has its penalties. To be the type of man he is—‘I’m always touching you, if not physically, then mentally’—he had to forfeit some of those other qualities.”
AFTER EASTER
Of course, I am once again verging on being homeless—but Barbara Frey’s11 voice comforted me: “Oh, I say!” She is going to let me know. Six months. Good God, what a godsend. But let’s not even hope.
THE GHOST OF SANDY roams this flat. On the sofa, reading. Eating an apple or making coffee. His model airplane is here. He made himself at home, always cleared the table, washed dishes, turned off heaters.
“It’s nice having you here.”
“Well, I like it, too, honey. So that’s fine.”
Speech rhythm a bit like Uncle William’s.
APRIL 22
This evening, standing in the door of the launderette, waiting for my sheets to dry, I watched spring come back for the second time this year. Imperceptibly, the vapors and temperatures shifted. Suddenly one finds oneself in the wrong clothes. London weather teaches people stoicism.
I have a list of things half said. What salvation can I offer the world?
The first way to universalize love experience is to be minutely specific about voice tones. I read a book today where the lover spoke like anyone. You could not determine what sort of man he was by his actions or words. The authoress told you in long philosophical paragraphs.
SANDY, HE’S MAKING a model airplane, which he carries to the Baker Street Classic Cinema in a paper bag. It is Monday, the last afternoon of the holiday, blustery. We are going to see a Frank Sinatra movie [the romantic comedy Marriage on the Rocks]. Afterward, the rain. The long Tube rides, the buses. “Have you brought a book?” He puts his stamp on all of London for me, and when he leaves, he takes London with him.
“What did you have for lunch?” I asked him.
“Oh, I have the same thing over and over again. I’ve just gotten in the habit. Toasted ham and cheese and some tomato soup. I like it.”
I used to say: Just let me get this man in the bag, then I’ll write. It doesn’t work that way.
APRIL 29
I suppose it is good to read other people’s unpublished stuff. It teaches a good lesson—namely, that putting down personal experiences, meaningful as they are to us, doesn’t mean a damn to anyone else until they are transformed into something that produces a universal emotion.
The major novelists … count … in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.
—F. R. LEAVIS, THE GREAT TRADITION:
GEORGE ELIOT, HENRY JAMES, JOSEPH CONRAD
I have the seeds of destruction in me. Ambrose had them.12 I am attracted to people who have them. The pleasant lugubriousness of sitting in a pub with a fellow failure and discussing how much your failures have in common. As much as it hurts, the truth is this: Succeeding is evident only from what has been done—not from what is shown, thought, sensed, or dreamed, but done.
The story: a man and a woman and his little daughter. The point is, it is Ginny on Sunday. Sundays are for Ginny. “Ginny on Sunday.”
It was London’s first lovely spring day of the year. [As it was] a Sunday as well, families, couples, dog owners, and lone walkers filled the gardens. Near to the Round Pond, there was a man, a woman, and a little girl of about four. All three were sharing the man’s mackintosh, which was spread on the grass.
How the woman has dreaded Sunday mornings, when he says: “Got to be up early to pick up Ginny.” She tries to be understanding. After all, was she not the daughter of divorced parents? Was she not a Sunday child? But the fact that she is makes it impossible for her to accept this threesome—precisely because she remembers triumphing over her father’s women. She reads herself into Ginny, and it is fatal.
APRIL 30
Asking questions and not listening for an answer form the keynote of this day’s gloom. “Hush,” said Sandy. “You asked me once and I said I didn’t want to talk about it.” He was sharp for the first time (about his book). I had the good sense to shut up.
THE PSYCHIATRIST [Ian] has written a story called “Sampson.” It is good. It comes pouring out. And this is what is sad. He writes better than Sandy. He has more to say.
MAY 5
I’m having a date with Andy on Sunday and the old thrill is back. He asked me proper. It will be good to be with Andy on the side of order rather than chaos, for a change.
A NUMINOUS CONVERSATION with the psychiatrist on Monday night.13 Next morning, he takes me on the back of his motor scooter to Battersea for breakfast in a truckers’ café.
SITTING IN THE WRITING class on Tuesday night, I look at the back of the psychiatrist’s head. How I used to fear his ridicule. Now I know I have achieved him. “Diary of a Seducer.”14 Andy? Sandy? Once B. said, “You want a carbon copy of yourself.” I found one in Sandy. Which side am I not being true to? Writing—Andy—Sandy—Ian.
MAY 7
Almost flying apart at the seams—
Moving day tomorrow.15
Just when the old ghosts become friends, we must accustom ourselves to new ones. Gordon called to ask travel advice. He’s married to Barbara. All that agonizing for nothing. I could have been doing something else.
I’ve thrown out a lot of my writing. I know what’s good now. How tight it’s got to be. My big enemies are anger, proneness to depression, and laziness. These
notebooks are a waste of time. I have to produce now. No more anger.
In July, Gail married Dr. Ian Marshall at the Chelsea Registry Office and moved to his flat on Beaufort Street. Gail wrote little between May and September; she was almost always together with Ian, talking or studying. “In the first months of the marriage,” she later recalled, “I actually sat on the sofa and took notes while Ian talked!”
SEPTEMBER 20
Four years ago tonight, I was in Asheville and fed up with my family.16 What was the matter that time? It seems I am always fighting with somebody. I could not stay with Monie. (She was pressing in on me with too much love. Dear Monie. I wouldn’t spurn it now.) And I was having some battle with Kathleen and Frank. So the result was, I tore off in my little car and went and sat in the lower part of Pack Square, in the autumn darkness, glowering, feeling alienated and unable to get along with anybody. I sat in my dark car and gradually became coolly and intensely satisfied, watching the familiar scene from a place from which I’d never watched it before: seeing the policemen changing shifts, the hodgepodge of small town architectural pretensions; listening to the billiard balls; feeling slightly scared (bad part of town, dark); feeling sad, misunderstood, betrayed; and wanting B.—feeling that this new travel adventure of mine would entitle me to his sympathy.
Now it is four years later. I have been places I lusted to be in. I have had the job I wanted, the independence, the money to spend, the glamour, the change, the complete freedom to be as selfish as I like. I look slightly less young, more drawn in the face, but better groomed. I have read a lot more books much more thoroughly. I have still not become a great writer. I am wishing tonight to be in the embrace of my family, to be kind to Frank, to let Monie pay me all the attention she desires.
Self of four years ago, let me fill you in as you sit in your little white car in the bosom of your town, in the crisp, clean fall night. Let me tell you the news—what happens to people like you.
I am married again—to a man of thirty-four (today is his thirty-fourth birthday). He is a dark, turbulent individual who is a little bit too much of himself to fit in anywhere or to make me comfortable. In his absence I can cope with him. But his reality, his presence, fills me with awe, confusion, and revulsion all at once. He is brilliant, he is the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. It bothers me that he has loved me too much. He watches me with soulful brown eyes from behind his glasses (chipped in the right lens from a somersault he turned on Hampstead Heath two years ago). The brown eyes dart, taking me in. Without his glasses, the brown eyes blur with joy—he was too joyous, too naked when he loved me. Now I have alienated him, he has drawn himself in. From his wounds he will manufacture new independence. He is estranged and hurt. He has locked himself against me and cannot open if he tried. I have split his male’s pride and must now wait until he repairs it, as an animal tends its wounds.
Meanwhile, I have got to do a little growing, be honest with myself, and decide what is to happen next. I don’t know how far I’ll get.
Why did I marry him?
—I wanted to marry, I was getting worried that I would grow old alone, that nobody wanted me.
—His mind fascinated me. He gave me new ideas, set my mind soaring.
—His quick falling-in-love impressed me. This is the way I liked things to be done—quick, clean, dangerous.
—I liked the fact he was a doctor and I could tell my friends I was married to a psychiatrist. But the fact is, he does not practice medicine now, he does not take patients at the moment, he is tied up with Scientology—a noncreditable organization, even though the ideas are good. He has no persona—he is not the kindly psychiatrist in the pressed suit who is capable of disinterested love. He is a jittery brown-eyed lad who is uncertain, moody, and unfulfilled—and I am making it worse.
Hiatus
Gail Looks Back on a Period of Journal-Writing Silence
AUTUMN 1965
—
In October of 1965, after three months of marriage, I took Ian to Asheville to meet my mother and stepfather and young brothers and sister. It was a confusing, unreal visit.
There was a big photo in the Asheville paper of me hand-in-hand with my new husband, with the notice, “Dr. and Mrs. Ian Marshall; Dr. Marshall is a practicing psychiatrist in London.” We looked like the svelte, ideal couple. A girlfriend’s mother phoned me to say I had “done well.” She only wished her daughter had been a little more choosy for her second husband.
Mother baited Ian and he did not show up at his best. He seemed out of his element with her. The children were afraid of him; he held seven-year-old Rebel upside down to make him be quiet—the only thing Rebel remembers about Gail’s strange husband from England.
Ian liked Frank Cole best. He thought Frank was a man whose potential and keen intelligence had been thwarted and blocked by the circumstances of his life. During our two weeks with the Coles, we went on outings as an extended family—to the Blue Ridge Parkway; to the beach in Charleston, South Carolina. Ian and I rode in the back of the station wagon with the children.
When Frank hit his twelve-year-old daughter for sassing him, Ian and my grandmother covered their eyes and moaned. I felt right back in the old family trap with no grown man to protect me.
Ian and I went for walks, on Frank’s land, and I berated him for getting caught up in Scientology. I wanted him to go back to being a conventional MD psychiatrist.
The sunny day we left Asheville for our return trip to London, I felt like Persephone returning to the Underworld with Hades. When we were aboard the Asheville–New York plane, waiting for it to take off, I had a sobbing fit. Then I looked across the aisle and there, of all people, sat Voit Gilmore, head of the USTS, smiling his perpetual smile. I had to get myself under control and introduce him to Ian.
DECEMBER 9
Why have I pursued the courses I have pursued? Was it me devising the action—did my decisions come from within, or without? Could it be that someone other than the center me pursued the courses, studied, read to reach some conclusion? If so, then the person who gets saved isn’t going to be me at all. I will simply have dedicated my time, body and emotional energy toward saving a false self—and the barren real me will remain at the starting gate.
Now I am married. The world cannot touch me. I go shopping by myself. I see no friends other than Pauline. I see her because I need an audience at least once a week. I like Mary (“I love your clothes—what an exciting drawing—what excellent taste!”).17 These things matter to me! I think of the friends I have in the world—Lorraine O’Grady Freeman (she did it!) is the nearest kin. How few people there are whom I admire.
DECEMBER 12
Rainy Sunday—sore throat—cleaning out Ian’s filthy kitchen for Mr. Maten to paint tomorrow—old pastry mixes—dusty cereal boxes—jars full of half-dissolved things. I had a scene with Michael in the kitchen. Michael the Mess lies in bed all day, leaves cigarette ashes on the carpet, and leaves used razor blades on the bathroom edges for little fingers to cut themselves on. Michael says he needs a place to put his photo equipment. Can he have a cupboard shelf? Ian says yes, if you’ll keep it there and not on top of the refrigerator. Michael says, “You’re going all Daddy-ish.” I can see Ian’s been strained. I started chanting “Pompous ass, pompous ass” to allay some of the tension, to balance Ian’s roughness. Then everybody disappears, Mary to crunch her apple, Michael to sulk and feel trod upon. Ian goes, too. I keep chanting. Then Ian returns with his scraggly lip-out look I hate so much. The dark, puffy look—puffed up with childish stubbornness—“Did you really mean I was a pompous ass?” No, of course not. I explain. He wants to discuss it, “work through” it, “mend the A-R-C break.”18 I want to clean the kitchen so that he can put away his emotions long enough to help me. Split—–rupture—now I am locked in this nasty little bedroom where I have spent so many horrible hours dreaming bad dreams, worrying that I had cancer, imagining and cataloging all the possible catastrophes that might happen to
me. It is 3:10 on a rainy Sunday—nothing in the papers, Alan [Ian’s three-year-old son, who spent weekends with us] filthy from being scrubbed back and forth across the carpet to show him we love him. Emotions drag you down.
DECEMBER 15
Now it is beginning to make patterns as I wanted.
FRUITLESS YEARS SEARCHING in philosophy books for answers to my practical problem—trying to solve physical problems, communication problems, bad mechanical problems with the archetypes. Now I am seeing the variety of tools; which tool to use for what. Several gold mines, lately, have led to new vistas: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, with its maxims, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.19
Accept the fact that there may be other frameworks, universes of thought where none of your old premises will work. Only an open mind can be ready for a revision of known laws.
“We believe—it is only a theory—that the Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere. When it knew that you were almost ready, it sent us here to do its bidding, to prepare you for the transformation that is now at hand.”
—The Overlords’ message to humans in
CHILDHOOD’S END, by ARTHUR C. CLARKE
It was a tribute to the Overlords’ psychology, and to their careful years of preparation, that only a few people fainted. Yet there could have been fewer still, anywhere in the world, who did not feel the ancient terror brush for one awful instant against their minds before reason banished it forever. There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail—all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body, and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm.
