by Gail Godwin
I AM GETTING rid of my mechanisms by becoming aware of them. Today in the session, it was as if I looked around the room and saw all my “existing conditions” sitting in the chairs, wearing hats. All my aberrations—Mr. Lying, Mr. Exaggeration, Mr. Procrastination, Mr. Protest, Mr. In-a-Hurry etc. I laughed and laughed and then wanted to cry.
And yet there is something still to come. I saw it (during Hanna’s excellent management—she handles me like an experienced horse trainer handles an unruly horse) in the image of a hole, and at the bottom of the hole, dark water. Only when you get to the water, you find it is not dark blue at all, like you thought. That is the shadow—the shadow I make—from looking down the hole. The water itself is clear.
HANNA’S A COOL ANGEL with absolutely no dramatizations that I can see.
THIS WEEK I STARTED auditing. Got a tough one, Mrs. Wenda P., thirty-seven. Hatchet face. Bitch “Bank.”10 Valence: “I am a tough one. Nobody can help me.” The first night it was like being pushed down a ski slope, unsure of my skis.
The second night: locked up in a cage with a tiger, knowing nothing about tigers.
Tonight, a vast improvement. She did the CCH 2 as a young woman, holding herself proudly.11 She had had her hair done. She was helpful, looked at me after a supreme effort (embarrassment), and wept to relief on the question “If you could talk to a child, what would you talk about?”
“Look at that wall … Thank you.”
“Walk over to that wall … Thank you.”
“With your right hand, touch that wall … Thank you.”
“Turn around … Thank you.”
Wenda is a dominant woman, yet she accepts force and control. She has had two stillborn babies. She has a mentally deficient daughter. She is tied up emotionally with images of freedom—running through the grass in the sunshine. She, too, is having the “busy” dreams. I had them when I began the Sci y. The unconscious is getting ready for housecleaning.
MAY 5
I am auditing a young man named Guy H., who is part Indian. He is worried about being acceptable to people, can’t go in Tubes alone or into restaurants, is still haunted by an early homosexual experience he had as a child: “Did I enjoy it? Am I enough of a man? Yet I am good at sports, and have a wife and son.” What miserable messes we all are.
Lunch in the Chelsea Potter with Michael, who is Chelsea personified. Then driving around in his battered car to kinky dress shops owned by friends of his. Rain. The sweet flowers in Blake’s. Michael gives me a good perspective on Ian. He has known him longer than I have.
Ian is strange to me. He does not live completely in the world of mammals. He is part fish or bird or rare creature who is not really at home with people or dogs. The way he carefully made friends with Michelle’s poodle the other night.
MAY 9
Ambrose [in a new story “The Possibilitarian”] reading, reading, yet never really understanding. The feeling, the music, and the twilights and sunsets are absorbed without needing to know the words.
ANNE, IAN’S Scientology colleague and former girlfriend, is here for the weekend. Her form of courage: All her life she has made herself do the very thing of which she was most afraid. “It’s like being in a very fast car, going round steep curves. I can do nothing about the speed—it is constant—but I have learned very good control of the curves. Now, after all these years, it is paying dividends. I am beset by my demon, but, in comparison, the things most people fear are nothing for me to confront.” Her two examples:
Fifteen years old—vacationing in Ireland—rode a wild horse on a beach. He threw her. Her mother came down to the beach and made a racket. “I thought of that horse for a whole year. I knew I had to ride him. The next year we came back. I rode him every day. I loved that horse. I’ll never forget him. I was always just a little bit afraid of him. I used to pick blackberries for him.
“Between my junior and senior year at university, I stayed with a French couple. When I went back to Oxford, I thought of that man for the entire year. The day I graduated, I packed my bags, bought a ticket to Paris. When I arrived in Paris, I picked up the telephone and called him. I said, ‘I want to see you!’ This went on for three years. I went back and forth between England and Paris, staying in little hotels, with all my belongings in two suitcases. Of course, I could not live at home.”
WRITE A SHORT NOVEL about Vertical Lives, and how the Horizontal livers miss the point.12
—
RIDING IN THE BACK of the van with Ian and Anne and friends in front, on the way to dinner in Earls Court, a gloom suddenly materialized. It was as if the little dark spirits were all around me, buzz, buzz, there in the back of the van. I breathed their sweet poison and surrendered all my resistance. I was naked, powerless, gloomy, and without hope. It was comforting, in a way.
MAY 14
“Tell me an existing condition.”
I am floating down the river on a barge that knows where it is going. It is nighttime and warm. On the banks of the river stand people, places, and ideas that have dogged me all my life—all my wrong concepts, all my dramatizations, all my favorite things—they are all personified and wearing strange hats and dumpy clothes. They wave to me as I go by.
Ambrose:
“In this mammalian world I have moved tentatively, not quite sure of the games the mammals were able to play to such a sophisticated degree. I was much more at home being a kind of bird-cum-fish—sometimes sliding through oceanic caverns, at home in watery dream worlds; other times soaring with a bird’s-eye view. No, I never felt at home with the mammals, though I loved them and envied them.”
I don’t dare to breathe. The insight is coming of itself.
“I have attained my visions through bonded bourbon. However, I can see another way: through a kind of supersonic alertness. One could concentrate, focus, make his consciousness a precision instrument. It is too late for me. My tips are too blunted for any change. But for another, however … ah!”
Once again it is time for Rachel’s summer visit Ambrose, her father, in the beach cottage he has rented for the two of them, slips smartly into his white linen suit, slaps his cheeks with aftershave, and prepares to meet the train.
Or:
Once again it is time for Rachel’s summer visit. Ambrose, her father, newly settled in with suitcase and fishing gear in the beach cottage he has rented for the two of them, slips smartly into his cream linen suit and prepares to meet the evening train. He is nervous and as alert as a boy on his first date. This is partly because his daughter’s style fascinates him, partly because he has not had one drink since lunch. This summer, things are going to be different.
There are six stages of consciousness one goes through with LSD. The stages always follow in the same order, although not all people reach stage 6: (1) things get brighter, cleaner; (2) the physical universe is seen in a new way; (3) ideas combine in new ways; (4) one reexperiences past lives; (5) you perceive GPMs;13 (6) you achieve whiteness, mystical attainment.
IAN HAS MADE the mathematical discovery of the century.
MICHAEL: “I think men are saved because they can get enthusiastic about odd little hobbies, metalwork or electricity; also, I think they can hear the fairies sing. I can be on a bus or walking down the street when, bringgg! I hear the celestial music and am wafted right out of the intensity-ridden world.”
Ambrose has heard the fairies sing.
As Gail approaches the end of her HASI involvement, she reworks her character Ambrose, the benighted father figure in “The Ruptured Link.” Some of the material would eventually be used in Gail’s first published novel, The Perfectionists. Psychotherapist John Empson, the featured husband in that book, tells his wife, Dane, “I am pretty sure I have found the basic pattern of human thought.” He shows how a hundred values and their opposites are arranged in a snowflake pattern, representing a spiritual progression that is laid with despair-inducing traps.
MAY 22
What is a word that would describe th
e state of mind when you visualize how something might have been, accompanied by nostalgia, resignation, and a quiet acceptance. Not “regret,” because that implies sadness. Just: “That is how it is.”
AMBROSE AS A DIARY of the gulf between action and thought. He can visualize but can’t convert his visions into actual energies. Some ball bearing or spring seems to be left out of his makeup.
Drank too much at our party. Spent the day lying in bed looking out at a blazing green bush (if fire were green, Ian said), and then watching the patterns of the shadows of its leaves on the wall inside. I seemed to withdraw into my world of images and abandon any idea of sharing them with anybody.
IAN: “I COULD PLAY chess in my head, only couldn’t see the board. But I could feel where the pieces were, like they were moving on my chest.”
WRITE DOWN THE basic ideas about what you think a “cult,” an applied philosophy, can do to people in different stages of knowing about a subject. Describe these different states.
SECRETS OF AUDITING: Get two poles into the situation so that preclear can be one mass viewing another mass. Ask questions that turn generalities into specifics. Cut down randomity.14 Get preclear to identify things in his bank, compartmentalize them, get outside of them, and increase his ability to put in his own itsa line.15
FINAL AIM OF PROCESSING—no further need to itsa.
Hiatus
Gail Fills in a Significant Gap Undocumented by Journals
MAY 23, 1966, TO MARCH 4, 1968
—
Now we come to a critical block of time and there is no record of it. How did that happen? Well, after May 22, 1966, due to lack of privacy first in London and then back in the U.S.A., I stopped keeping the journals. As soon as I arrived in Iowa City, Iowa, in January 1967, and had a place of my own, I began again. But alas, those first Iowa notebooks16 were discovered in early 1968 by a jealous poet, who threw them into the Iowa River. He said it was his symbolic way of destroying my past. Luckily for my other journals, they were still back in London with Ian.
So the day-to-day chronicling of those months is gone. Unlike my letters, which were written to project various personas (the adventuresome traveler, the needy daughter, etc.), the journals stayed grounded, for the most part, in a desperate honesty. If I couldn’t confide in them, I risked losing track of myself. And therein lies their value for me today. It is impossible to gloss over or misremember what is recorded in your own handwriting of forty years before.
However, if you have followed me this far, I owe you some fill-in for what has been lost.
—
AFTER I GOT “Power Processed” at East Grinstead in May 1966, I became an apprentice “auditor” (under supervision) at HASI in London. Soon after that, we took a two-week vacation to Cala D’or in Majorca. At first it was to be Ian, myself, and Ian’s three-year-old son, Alan. The vacation was to be Alan’s transition between leaving his foster home and coming to live with us. Then Ian invited Pauline, a secretary at USTS, and Penrose, a young woman we had met at a recent Mensa conference. Ian paid their expenses and in return they were supposed to help out with the little boy. If it had been a math problem, it might have worked out, but we were five human beings. The child stuck to me or to Ian and shrieked bloody murder if we tried to leave him with either of the “P.s.” It was a ghastly vacation. Out of it, as a pearl comes out of an oyster’s pain, came the story “The Beautiful French Family” (in our hotel, there was such a family, whose graceful, sensual actuality served as our daily reproach), which later became the novel The Perfectionists.
When we returned to London, the marriage was pretty much done for. Likewise, I realized I was not fit to raise this child, perhaps not any child. In those early summer weeks back in London, I was very morose. I did not resume my auditing duties at HASI. I had stopped keeping a journal ever since the morning when I returned to our Chelsea quarters unexpectedly and found Ian all set up at the dining table with a mug of coffee and my stack of journals. (As I remember it—or misremember it—I expressed moral outrage and he calmly replied that they were interesting to read and revealed things about me it was important for him to know.)
My moroseness grew into full-blown depression until, one summer day in our garden under an ancient mulberry tree, hoping to root out my source of unhappiness, Ian tried a Scientology technique on me in which the auditor asks the client the same question over and over again until he or she answers the truth. This was measured by an “e-meter,” Scientology’s version of a lie detector, devised from two V8 juice cans stripped of their labels and wired to a galvanometer. When the client clutching the cans finally speaks the truth, the needle on the meter stops jiggling around and floats. The client is supposed to feel a floating sense of relief as well. We weren’t using the apparatus—Ian said he could read me as accurately as the V8 juice cans—but he kept repeating the question “Why can’t you be a writer?” until I finally answered, “Because I’m afraid I might fail.” At which point I felt a wonderful sense of release and we agreed the experiment had been a success.
Soon after, I felt an urgent desire to visit my family in North Carolina. Ian bought the round-trip ticket, and I set off with little more than a change of clothes and a bathing suit. I was never to return but apparently couldn’t let myself know this yet: I had to make my getaway in stages, in one small, conscious increment after another.
(A later story, “A Sorrowful Woman,” came out of my futile attempts at mothering in the spring of 1966. One raw afternoon when Ian and I and the child were walking glumly in the country, I started fantasizing about a wife and mother who simply retreated. Went into her room and wouldn’t come out. Every night her husband, a doctor, gave her a sleeping potion so she could speed away to dreamland. At the time, Ian was doling out nightly potions to me—a brown liquid that was so fast you could feel yourself losing consciousness. A pleasant rehearsal for death. I think it was chloral hydrate. It was the same recipe as the one that Dr. Brown doles out to his sleepless wife, the ex-madam, in Queen of the Underworld.)
I SPENT THE SUMMER back in the Cole compound—they had yet another new house in a wooded enclave called Huckleberry Cove, outside Asheville. (My stepfather, a contractor, liked to “build up”; of their frequent moves, Mother would joke, “He knows how I hate to clean house, so he keeps building me new ones.”) Weeks turned into a month. I saw old friends, enjoyed my little half-siblings, shared a room with my fifteen-year-old sister, whom I found both fey and avidly curious about every aspect of my life. She asked me to describe our London flat, and as I was describing the sofa (an unpleasant chartreuse) I knew I never wanted to sit on it again. I regaled my mother with tales of the Scientology experience. When I got to the crucial part in Power Processing where my auditor had led me through a “disconnection” with my main “suppressive person” (in my case, it turned out to be God), Mother uttered a savage snort and said, “Well, if I were you, I’d go off by myself right now and reconnect with Him.”
(A final word about my brush with Scientology. All these years later, I am still struck by its vitality of language and occasional bursts of wisdom: an “overrun” to describe a behavior that you have grown beyond: or Hubbard’s Buddhist-like “native state,” the ultimate level of his Eight Dynamics, which is being able to experience self and world simultaneously without losing the will to act.)
IN LATE AUGUST, still reluctant to return to England, I went to Manhattan, at the age of twenty-nine, and looked for a “temporary job,” the kind of job suited to someone of twenty-one. (Francesca in Glass People and Violet in Violet Clay endured some of my humiliations, but they were younger.) At last I got a job in a roomful of proofreaders at McKinsey & Company, the management-consulting firm on Park Avenue. As long as you worked, the company fed you—anything available through take-out menus. I stayed late many evenings and dined sumptuously. You worked in tandem with another proofreader, reading consultants’ reports aloud to each other. It was a comfortable room with great views of Lower Manhat
tan. I was living in a residence hotel on East Fifty-first Street, the Pickwick Arms. My room, with shared bathroom, was $35 a week. Then someone at McKinsey suggested I take a test. I did well on it, and the personnel director told me I could go into management training. She was totally nonplussed when I left to take a job as fact-checker at The Saturday Evening Post for less money. In my windowless cubicle at the Post, I typed furtively in my spare time on a story about a newly married couple’s wretched vacation in Majorca with the doctor-husband’s three-year-old illegitimate son. At night I read library books chosen to keep up my courage and verve (all of Henry Miller, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and fiction by a caustic fabulist of the current state of planet Earth named Kurt Vonnegut Jr.).
Then I received an unexpected legacy of $5,000 from an uncle in Alabama. It simply arrived in an envelope from a lawyer. My old friend from Copenhagen, Lorraine O’Grady, was then at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with her new husband, Chap Freeman, a filmmaker, and she wrote urging me to apply to the Workshop. The story that got me in—by the skin of my teeth, reported candid Lorraine: “She has some kinks,” the admissions committee said, “but we’ll work them out of her”—was the one about the vicar, written in Miss Slade’s class in London.
AS FOR THE 1961–1966 journals left behind in London, Ian returned them to me after our final judgment of divorce in the General County Court of Buncombe County in Asheville on April 17, 1968. Ian was not required to be present, but the judge had a letter from him. Harry DuMont was my attorney, and the plaintiff was “hereby permitted to resume her maiden name of Gail Godwin.” In a moment of symbolic synchronicity my old boyfriend and mentor B., an attorney, happened to be in the courthouse at the time, and he “sat in” on my divorce. “Ah me, the halcyon days,” was his comment when the two of us spoke briefly afterward.
