by Gail Godwin
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE, CHILDHOOD’S END
Lucifer’s “I will not serve” may be comparable to the assertion of the Ego.
Jung’s idea: The Trinity is really four, the Devil being the fourth side. The way to salvation might be: Get free from the total unconscious, develop Lucifer (in the sense of the intellect, not in the sense of sinning), then, with Lucifer’s help, go back and incorporate the Great Unknown, fit the pattern together.
DECEMBER 16 • Midnight
Ian: I just realized what you’ve been up to. You’ve been dramatizing Lucifer all your life.
TO BE DONE: Work out the myth the way I want. Don’t try and make any decisions about what to do with this knowledge. Remember Jung’s danger of identification with any of the archetypes (some people dramatize their father, mother, etc.). I simply picked the devil.
DECEMBER 29
Things have been happening so fast (inside me) that today I don’t know whether I’m nearer madness than ever, or nearer serenity. Underlying my dreams for the past two weeks has been a commentary from some new awareness.
One night I dreamed of going mad and saw and felt what it would be like. In the dream, Ian said: You are now near to finding out what it is that you really worship. That something was my evil. Then this “something” began attacking my sanity. My face became numb and I started sinking down and becoming unconscious. I screamed—“Get me to a psychiatrist”—then woke, woke Ian, and talked to him for some time.
I am now aware of dramatizations I perform almost daily in my life:
the “cruel” valence
the “unmoved” valence
the “tearful” valence
the “angry” valence20
Today, walking home from a checkup at the hospital, I carried on a half-dozen arguments with various people who were “attacking me.” However, I also (for the first time in my life) sat back and observed myself, smiling calmly like the Buddha.
JANUARY 1, 1966
No two characters can be alike, but there are “types.”
Example, last night: Ian and I trying to describe or to name someone who would have certain characteristics—a person who would be bell-like, clear, joyous, with so much energy to spare that he/she could function effortlessly. We tried to think of examples in life, in literature.
I can think of plenty of the dark types—they, too, are fascinating. Heathcliff, Rochester, Birkin (though he saw how it should be, as did Lawrence himself), Nietzsche. But where do we find those rare, golden individuals—JFK was probably near enough. Do I know anyone? No, this kind of clarity gets muddied up even as early as early childhood.
OH, THE PERILS of being oneself. I see why so many decide for a nice comfortable persona—but wait a minute. Don’t I change like a chameleon when the situation demands it? Yes, but this is my style.
For me to be straightforward would be the biggest lie of all. My way is weaving cunningly through mazes, not chopping down the mazes with a razor-straight, unyielding disposition (like Ian). That is why so many of my battles have been with people who trumpeted honesty above all other virtues.
I think it is right (for me, anyway) to put out empathy waves to another person, even if it means camouflaging my own opinions for a while—something that Ian won’t do. This is why he comes to an absolute standstill in some of his relationships. He won’t let up on his integrity long enough for the other person to be comfortable—but that is his style.
WEAVING THROUGH THE MAZES—getting “killed” once for each mistake before going a different route next time—like Al Barker in Rogue Moon. He was the first man to get successfully through all the traps of the Great Unknown.21
That is the way for me—
What little knowledge we have, really. It would be so easy to cotton to Hubbard or Jung or Ian, and say, yes, life can be explained by eight dynamics or seven levels or six archetypes—all this is true, yet there is always more, always an extra piece that doesn’t fit in.
What kills me is to hear profound music all around me and know that I am not (yet?) equal to profundity—I can’t ride Ian piggyback into heaven. I’ve got to work out my own categories, find my own salvation. My temptation is to take his sweat after it is fashioned into ready-mades and try to wear it as my own. No wonder it sometimes doesn’t fit, as close as our ideas may be.
Dear God, don’t let me be another MWG,22 babbling great nothings after a few drinks, running off to Florida (or its equivalent) every time responsibility raises its disagreeable head. If I could only avoid that fate—being a dreamer, a half-fashioner of poetry who somehow floats away into dreamy sunsets and evaporates with the fumes of alcohol.
SO IAN’S MOTHER rides off all parceled and be-diamonded in her minicab, and I of all the people in this universe know what she thinks. I can’t tell Ian, because he would feel—no matter how hard he tried not to—“How dare you understand my own mother better than me?” But I do. She let down her sticky prickles and showed me how it was with her. I would not like to have been Ian’s mother—and one day Alan will show Ian just how it feels.
I MUST DO SOMETHING with that old manuscript [“Mourning”]—if I could only understand MW’s failure to live, to become, then I could use his drops of blood as stepping stones to the life he couldn’t reach.
JANUARY 5
Ian and I had another fight—as of old, a really bad one. I always start hating him and wanting to twist the knife: What can I say that can hurt him? This is senseless.
BACK AT “THE PLACE”—USTS.23 Those people have nothing to do with me. I have nausea and a headache that runs all the way up my back and branches out all over my head.
In two hours, Ian will be home. I’ll cook a late supper and try to be alert. I must at least try. At the moment, it’s impossible to tell him everything I feel because it would only make him worse.
How I wish he wouldn’t use those Scientology words. They sound sillier than ever. I’m afraid my curiosity about it—taking the course—has got him all gung-ho again. He clings to things like that as if he were a drowning man. Doesn’t he see that he’s outgrown their solutions?
Hubbard’s trick, it seems to me, is to keep waving the promised land in front of his pupils until they become addicts. I don’t think Hubbard is malicious. I just think he’s played God too long to remain fair (e.g., his vague answer to Ian regarding Power Processing).24 Hubbard has a lot of the circus about him. He loves circus people, he’ll say himself.
How I wish Ian would be able to sustain his efforts. At first I kept excusing him, thinking it was my bitchiness that may have depressed him, but the pattern was there long before I was.
If anything keeps him from being a great man, it will be just this “Let me see, how do I feel today?” But if that’s the best he can do, I must shut up and not make it worse.
What a headache. God, I hurt in so many ways. I am really alone now.
JANUARY 16
Dreams of machinery and evil cannibalistic men; marriage with gray-haired successes; wading through strange cabbage country forsaking Ian for various animus figures—seeing hints everywhere, pointers labeled “Meaningful!”
But meaningful of what?
A grand plot for a grand novel fades before my eyes. Inchoate thoughts bubble up and overwhelm my good sense. I want to protest to everybody, and as I rant, I see the glint in their eyes that reads: “What is she going on about? What ‘by-passed charge’ has she?25 What cause is she championing? Really!”
JUST READ A BOOK by the occult-woman, Dion Fortune.26 A lot of it disgusted me—as a certain type of ecstatic ranting does—but she, too, speaks of opposites being parts of the same thing, the dynamic impetus of woman and the receptive in man both being as important as the passive woman and the positive man. The sex suggestion made me remember feeling passion in certain conditions. The night on Old Church Street, in the narrow bedroom overlooking the garden—was it Gordon himself or something I felt “about” him? And at age fifteen, reading the rituals in Quo V
adis.
IT JUST CAME to me that Jung’s sexual side remained underdeveloped; he cut loose from the earth too soon and spent his life in myths and the Great Unknown.
JANUARY 19
Who am I not fighting?
MY MARRIAGE IS one of the biggest unrealities in my life. Gail Marshall, who is she? I’ve had so many names. Perhaps that’s part of the trouble.
Who is this husband of mine, this man who puts me on my guard the minute he comes anywhere near me? I’ve taken him at his word that he was in good condition, but is he? He can’t manage ordinary situations, can’t walk into a room with grace or confidence—always the twitchy little smile hovers about his face, like an uncertain sun going in and out of clouds. The only way he seems to be able to sustain any effort is for somebody to shame him into it. And his girlfriends abide with us now and forevermore. He has no new friends, so has to cling to the old ones.
How can I feel married to a man whose style is so totally alien to mine?
He’s a wonderful pilgrim to have with me on the journey but I can’t feel proud of him. He comes into the USTS office wearing a smelly old coat. He has that uncertain look.
Like tonight in HASI [Hubbard Association of Scientologists, International]—I waited to see him before class. Anne came up the stairs, her huge teeth leading the way, and sure enough he followed. He’d had dinner with her and some other Scientologists in a restaurant. He came in and saw me and said “Oh, hello” and some other formalities with the usual number of stops and uncertainties—like I was someone whose name he couldn’t remember. I said, “Who did you have dinner with?” and he got all defensive and said, “Oh … some people,” and then gradually let it out. I said jokingly “You philander the minute I let you out of my sight.” Even old phony-baloney Voit Gilmore could have handled that one. So then I said, “Have you written anything today that I can read?” He said, “Yes, but not that you can read.” Then I said, “Did you know Michael called me a bitch this morning?” He said, “Oh?” I said, “Did he say anything to you about it?” He said, “Not that I can repeat.” I ask you, is that a husband? He sounds more like a very nervous U.S. State Department official talking to a Russian newspaper reporter.
But somewhere in the records, it’s written in ink that I am his legal wife.
FEBRUARY 6
When I’m getting along well, like a patient who has been cured, I forget the dark side, which may be in need of a boost sometime. I was typing Ian’s book when I thought: I must record the experiences I’ve been having.
There are higher states which one can achieve, having gotten lower problems out of the way first. I just listened to Beethoven’s Pastoral and for the first time really heard music. I was so clean of my usual ruminations that I could concentrate completely on the music.
All this clarity I’m having, I want to preserve it. Short stories shorn of vanity might be the answer. Try “The Confession at St. Mary’s”27 for a start—
Daffodils—their wet, springy, turfy look—so tight, so fresh, a student flower.
Wet turf. Library smelling of newsprint.
The way to fast—St. Thomas Aquinas.
Priest—an athlete by proportion and stance (he can’t die).
So real—St. Patrick all in green and athletic; St. John, “the favorite,” pale and delicate.
What sins had I to put down?
Children at eleven or twelve are so clear. They have just about solved the problems of childhood and are not yet into the muck of adolescence.
FEBRUARY 6
Ian off in the woods by himself.
Listening to A Sea Symphony (by Ralph Vaughan Williams), I decide to go for a walk over old territory [the Chelsea embankment]—the river high, the sky showing signs of life. Somehow, I do not enjoy this walk as I should. The other times, when I’d taken the walk, I’d always come back the same way—and I am doing it all over again.
So I crossed over and ambled silently down Sunday streets with no traffic—up Flood Street and by the Chelsea Town Hall; met James Montgomerie for the first time in three years.28 Any spark of creativity or mischief or spontaneity that flickered in him when I knew him is now dead. Even Ian and all his therapy could not save him. He even tried the old cocktail party armor on me. I just stood there and talked to him and looked at him, and he didn’t show one fraction of anything but guardedness. What was he afraid of? That I would try to hoist him off to a coffee shop, love him for hours? Finally, we parted with relief after speaking for a decent interval.
He’d asked all the proper questions, hadn’t volunteered much. “Why, Gail, this is your old haunt.” Yes, and I felt haunted by all my old Sunday depressions. They accumulated on the walk until the air was thick with them.
FEBRUARY 11
Dreamed of Aunt Sophie giving a party—and I had no good clothes—threw together something mismatched, but passable—met Frank’s aunt Lona, on the way; she’d been to the party and was going back—she looked terrible in a country getup that wouldn’t have passed anywhere—Woolworth jewelry and a flour-sack skirt and sleeveless blouse. She said, “They’re all so dressed in there, do I look all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’ve got a sleeveless frock and jewelry, that’s what they wear.”
She seemed reassured. “I didn’t want to get thrown out,” she said.
So I went down to the cloakroom, hoping to fix myself up before Aunt Sophie saw me—but there she was, having her hair combed by a slavish attendant. I noticed Aunt Sophie’s unsightly feet—her face was still powerful but her neck was wrinkled as a rooster’s and she wore a plain print dress.
“I’ve been wondering why you hadn’t come,” she said. “Oh, what a nice tennis skirt you have on. Margaret is here, she’s holding up well under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?” I asked, feeling chilled for my uncle Johnny.
“Didn’t you hear,” she cried, “about the tube coffin?”
“No. Mother didn’t tell me.”
“Well, Johnny got caught in a tube at the plant and was spun round and round for hours, until he died …”
This dream was strong enough to stay with me all morning. I was back in the year 1954, visiting my rich relatives in Alabama and resuffering all the humiliation of being the poor cousin “who made good grades.” I worked up an anger at all of them for not recognizing my things, the games I excelled at. I was uncertain of my right to be different and tried playing life in their style. No wonder I floundered in a halfway mode and was not anything.
AND MY ANGER has extended to HASI. How dare they accept Hubbard’s word as gospel without doing a little searching on their own? How dare they not want to know about other viewpoints?
It seems to me that one can write anything meaningfully if one has a viewpoint. George Eliot, Henry James, Jane Austen, all had their framework. Secure in their moral certainty, they spent their time creating characters and situations to dramatize and point up their structures.
In any story I write, a viewpoint is needed. A viewpoint gives to a selection of incidents (and characters involved) a meaning all its own.
OH, GOD, HOW LONG, how long?
FEBRUARY 12
Depressed all day, apathetic. But this evening I worked out more things about writing. I want my characters to solve their life problems in a new and more effective way. There are several forms for the combinations I want.
I. THE DILEMMA. What is the moral thing for the individual to do? (Lydgate or Bulstrode in Middlemarch; Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady.) The tragedy is when he knows what he must do and can’t do it. Is it moral to reduce one’s awareness? How detached can one be and still remain human?
II. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF? An imaginary situation is conceived, and then characters react to that situation. There’s the datum, and then the variables.
III. SLICE OF LIFE. Social realism. The way it is without offering any solution or suggestion. A key phase, as in Portrait of the Artist. Heightened awareness, as in The Wav
es.
IV. DIDACTIC. Philosophy in novel form: Ayn Rand, Sartre, de Sade, Lawrence.
Story idea: “Movers”29
—
“Merrymount.”
“Hmph,” said Rachel. “It sounds like a girls’ riding academy. I should think Olympus Hall would’ve been more apt.”
1. Michael Joseph was a British publisher of scholarly books, including, in 1966, the first bound reproductions of Audubon prints in color. “Mushrooms and Men” was never published.
2. Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955. For its tenth anniversary, Walt Disney held a beauty pageant to crown a “Miss Disneyland Tencentennial.”
3. This is a fictional embellishment. Gail’s father, who had committed suicide, had never sent money.
4. See The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963, Part 8, “My Father’s Soul.”
5. “Gull Key.” See January 24, 1964, note.
6. Hutchinson & Company published works of history science, and literature—usually of a scholarly nature—but also some popular fiction. For instance, in 1965 it published Love Holds the Cards by Barbara Cartland and The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler.
7. Bunny and his wife, Thelma—Bentley’s neighbors in “Gull Key”—had moved to Gull Key from Tahiti after Bunny had failed at writing a novel and Thelma had become pregnant. Bunny became an insurance salesman, and Thelma broke out of the housewife mold by taking art classes.
