The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  My story about the English vicar was received by my peers with interest and enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the forty-five-year-old Vonnegut and I had a conference about my long story “The Beautiful French Family.” “I’m thinking of turning it into a novel,” I told him. “Oh, it’s fine as it is,” he said, his gangly length tilted back in its swivel chair, desert boots on the desk, cigarettes and ashtray never far away. In these one-on-one sessions he was as loose and playful as a Zen master. In our next conference I told him I had decided to turn it into a novel anyway. “Great idea!” he said.

  (“All I did in those conferences with you guys,” Vonnegut told me thirty years later, “was to say ‘Trust me. I’m going to reach in—being very careful not to bruise your epiglottis—and catch hold of this little tape inside you, and gently pull it out of you. It’s your tape and it’s the only tape like that in the world.’ ” But I think Vonnegut also consulted his “enthusiasm meter” during those individual conferences. When he sensed you were burning to do something, he affably fanned your flame.)

  By the end of that first semester in Iowa, I had a draft of my novel. Stimulated by proximity to other hungry writers like myself, encouraged by Vonnegut, bolstered by solitude, and having a place of my own and enough money to last me several years if I was very careful, I felt charged with the elated focus of my early twenties when I sailed to Copenhagen.

  By March 5, 1968, when this new journal begins, I had fled from 415 South Capitol to a less convenient temporary apartment to escape the jealous poet who had destroyed my Iowa journals. The first draft of the novel then titled “The Beautiful French Family” had got me an agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said she thought she could sell it if I rewrote it. I had spent the summer of 1967 back in Asheville, North Carolina, doing just this, but Lynn liked the second draft much less, saying I had made it too oblique and she couldn’t place it. So I returned to the Workshop in the fall of 1967, agentless, Vonnegut-less, now almost thirty-one years old, but still hell-bent on becoming a published writer.

  Part 6 we have called “Getting Published,” but it could just as easily have been called “Dark Night of the Soul.”

  MARCH 5, 1968

  Begin again!

  The flabby fifties. The ossified Eisenhower era. Can I overcome being a child of such a time? Yes, but I’ll have to work harder.

  My journals spread all over the world. The Wests will dig one out of their basement. Ian will be able to enjoy about twenty of them over coffee.1 Two drowned in the Iowa River, or so he claims, by Othello.2 I clutch what’s left of my secrets desperately to myself. No one shall take them—whoever tries will be wiped out of my consciousness. I will continue to grow my mad sick flowers in hidden pots.

  MARCH 23

  Frustration. So many good ideas for stories and I have to read other people’s in order to get a degree. But this summer: maybe a breakthrough. NAR3 is interested if I rewrite the poor vicar.4 “He doesn’t have enough character.” Maybe do more with the Time magazine bit to show Lewis looking at himself. And put gestures everywhere, flourishes; and cut down a few pages.

  Lewis: thirty; angular, awkward, blushes easily; losing his hair; walks on his toes; played rugby at college. Very much of the little boy about him. Not a woman-hater, he’s just a late bloomer. There were things he wanted to know first. Have I known a vicar? Yes, the Putney one Andy and I consulted about our marriage. But he was too elusive, sophisticated. Very un-simple. This man’s priesthood is a metaphor for artisthood. He became a priest in order to continue the search, as an artist becomes an artist in order to find things out—out of wonder. Wonder → Vision → Stasis and Sterility → New Wonder. Modernize some of Ellen Glasgow’s plots.5

  During the subsequent three-month gap in the journals, Gail takes and teaches courses, and does a lot of reading. She is able to retreat to an “air-conditioned, locked office in the modern new English building,” to which, she wrote her mother on June 7, “I have moved my books, typewriter, and personal effects such as a bank book, letters, etc. So there is that relief. I am here now, alone, at sundown, having filed my papers, rejection slips, and other bits and pieces from past dealings.”

  Several stories—new ones and ones reworked from two-year-old drafts—issue from her to be submitted to instructors and editors. Her instructors praise her, but the editors withhold their approbation. A number of the stories explore an intense desire to get beyond conventional life and to find an ideal one, which she senses exists. It may exist in fantasy, and be an intellectual achievement; or it may be just the opposite, a shedding of intellect.

  In “The Legacy of the Motes,” a scholar discovers a debilitating yet ultimately revelatory mote in his eye. In “The Man on the Sofa,” a bored couple discovers an enigmatic little man on their living room sofa. In Gail’s vicar story, eventually published as “An Intermediate Stop,” she imagines a religious man who loses his grasp of a powerful vision the more he tries to name and share it.

  Gail’s relationship with the jealous poet she calls Othello is over, give or take a few threats to serve him with restraining orders. But recalling their time together underscores the feelings she has about her defeating need for such relationships. Unpublished at age thirty-one, she feels despair. Her stories are products of her unease; and of her mother’s advice to be bravely honest in her writing and to think a little more about plot; and of the predilection for short, imaginative stories her instructor Robert Coover admires and encourages. Coover had just published The Origin of the Brunists to critical acclaim and declared his intention to “change the shape of American fiction.” He wrote high praise for Gail in her files but warned her against letting realism and her attraction to the novel of manners turn her into “another Updike.”

  Yet during this period Gail begins a careful reworking of “The Beautiful French Family,” begun in spring 1967 under the tutelage of Kurt Vonnegut and rejected in its second draft by the agent Lynn Nesbit. “I think I am going to go back to that story of the woman and the French family. It’s too good to pass up,” she writes her mother on May 26, 1968. She will get another literary agent, John Hawkins, of Paul R. Reynolds, Inc., the oldest literary agency in America, on the basis of forty-eight pages of a third rewrite. Hawkins will sell those pages to David Segal at Harper & Row in December 1968, and the novel, titled The Perfectionists, will be published in 1970. It will feature several fully realized characters, including a husband whose metaphysical brilliance suffers from the same reductionist mania as Scientology.

  PORTION OF LETTER FROM GAIL TO

  KATHLEEN COLE, JUNE 7, 1968

  Dear Mother,

  At the moment, things are rather black, I’ll explain why. Late this afternoon I came to the English building. Nobody was around. I went up to the Workshop shelf, where letters for Workshop people are just lying naked on the shelf. I saw two manila envelopes addressed to Coover. They were from the man he sent off stories to, from the best students in the Workshop. I had to know if I’d gotten anything accepted.

  As the place was deserted, I took the envelopes into the bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and looked inside to see what had been returned. There was a letter on top of the stories to Coover. [The editor] said he was taking two stories: one from Charles Aukema6, who’s had three stories bought this spring, and one from a Philippine boy who has sold his novel to Random House. The editor said: “None of the other people interested us much. Their work seemed either too vague or the writers seemed too immersed in themselves.” He went on to say he felt Aukema had used his form magnificently. Then, at the bottom, he did add: The only story we didn’t take that interested us at all was “Liza’s Leaf Tower” (mine).

  I put the manila envelope, refastened and licked down, upon the shelf, and came down here to my office, shaking like a leaf. The jealousy over Aukema is past now. But what remains is this: The fear that the man was right. That I am behind where I should be at my age. That I have far to go. That I won’t hold out. I’m only just learning to use words,
as you can see from the latest story. My biggest problem in writing is also a big problem in life. That is, a certain vagueness of resolution, a certain moral vagueness, if you like. I am “onto something” but my vision is too muddy to get there.

  This is probably because I am muddy and have been for a long time. That’s why I get into situations like the Othello one, that’s why I marry people I don’t love, why I’ve wasted years fleeing from one alternative to the other, because I had never sat down and faced myself and what I really wanted. I put writing first now.

  JUNE 22

  Summer evening. Age thirty-one. Alone and theoretically liking it. A larger and larger pond of might-have-been-me’s to fish in whenever I please. Others circling their own suns. I sometimes wonder what sun I think I circle, and perhaps if that old vision I used to see of myself—old and alone—when I went walking down Old Church Street after work might still come true. I’ve had so many chances to avoid it, the last one being the wife-of-Dr.-Marshall role. Seems possible now.

  Will I, one day, wake up and recognize my central impetus in life to be a Great Neurosis? I think I had better write all night until I get myself some answers. Summer evenings are heartbreakers. Today’s was infinitesimally shorter. How did I manage to waste my winter energies on a pudgy paranoid whose values negate every real one of mine? “You fat slob,” I said walking along beside him on the street this early afternoon. “You’re no beauty yourself,” he said. Beside the nuclear physics research building, across the street from St. Mary’s Catholic Church, I hit him hard on his clammy perspiring neck. “I’m an old woman!” I said. He hit me back, wildly, on the forearm. I ran from him. He caught up with me in town. I said foolishly at a crossing in front of others, “Don’t come near me; don’t go in my apartment, or I’ll see you arrested.” I escaped again. Into Kresge’s. I had tuna fish in a tomato and a hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream. Saw Othello again striding perturbed through the hot sun: “Did you swear out a peace warrant?” “Yes,” I said. Peace for the moment. Good old lies.

  Still unsettled from my yesterday’s resurrection of Sandy7 I hadn’t been able to write in my sun-filled office. Took my novel outside by the river, lay on the bank with my dress too high. A red-haired boy-man, a workman of some sort, walked below me to the edge of the river. He turned and looked up my dress, and then walked past me, close, up the bank. We spoke. He went back to his plant. I went in. Came out again with Virginia Woolf’s writer’s diary. Went back in. Came out. Five o’clock whistle. He never came back. Wrote two thousand words, not very good Sandy and London data. Walked home.

  JUNE 23 • Sunday

  Lay around shamelessly all day and finished Bleak House. Dickens’s genius I can only stand in awe of—and let as much as I can absorb be an example for my impatient hit-or-miss. Had as hard a time as a dog settling for a snooze in finding a place to read my Montaigne. Giggly pipe-smoking girls in library; my office too lonesome. I wanted strangers passing, life.

  To the Union. Finished “Of Presumption.” Thunderstorm. Started “On Repenting.”8 I might wish for him to be more of a hero, but perhaps that’s his whole point. Lights all went out. I was calm and strangely pleased at first, then annoyed, as I would have to get home somehow.

  Candle-bearers running to and fro in the spooky Union, lightning cracking outside. Finally I wandered out, stood under the shelter. The shrieky teens departed. I noted a blond man noting me in my short smock dress, brown legs, sandals, dark glasses, old maid hairdo. He circled in for the landing. “Think it’ll rain long?”

  I helped him, asked if he was here with a conference (noting his name tag). Yes, computer science. Oh. Did I have a ride? No. Did I want one? Why, how nice, if it’s not too much trouble. Oh, no. New-smelling Mustang. He discreetly fires the questions. We’re at Davenport Street. “Are you married?”

  “Just got unmarried.”

  “Oh.” A little familiar now. “Not much to do in Iowa City in the summer.”

  I say, “Perhaps it’s just as well.”

  He gentlemanly turns the car around so it can be as close as possible to my door. I break the bad news: I have to read Montaigne tonight. But there’s hope. Office 68, my name, curiously alliterative of his, Dale Goddard. Now to Montaigne.

  POOR, POOR Lady Dedlock.9 I liked her so much.

  IAN WROTE LORRAINE and Chap. Lorraine called last night. She’s being very secretive about her “project.” I went back to my office and called Ian. He was really quite impossible. I still hope for perfection in a man. It’s a pastime now, no longer a vocation.

  JUNE 25

  Twenty meager pages done on the novel.10 At least I’m giving some idea of the woman’s character. I started writing at 3:00—finished at 5:30. Two and a half hours. First I type up a rough draft on two foolscap sheets, then I write extensively on four pages of Corrasable Bond.

  The summer flies by, dragging me behind. I am better off a PhD candidate in Iowa at thirty-one than I was as a glorified receptionist in London at twenty-six. Holding the pleasure principle in abeyance a bit better.

  Called Lorraine. She has two new spotted cats: “I haven’t been able to have an emotional reaction to them or even name them. They’re rather mystical.”

  Tomorrow build the Pauline scene. Pauline serves as a link with Sarah’s secular and monastic (Adriatic) life. Pauline is the healthy, unliterary alter ego. She is nearer the earth. She also sees Sarah as Sarah wants to see herself, yet has a control over her in that she refuses to accept ruses or intellectualizing about emotions. She will also follow the marriage—they will “play” to her. We will care about her and she’ll end up having the gratifying but sad affair with Karl.11

  JUNE 27

  Has this month been wasted, or not? It has certainly been the most unpleasant of my life. First I’ll write about it. See what can be saved from the mess, then drink coffee and do my Old English.

  Jane Barnes Casey whets my resentment, although I try to hide it. I wonder: Would she have associated with me if she had grown up in Asheville? She tells of her mother making a room in their “Maine house” with a huge bay window glow red with an exquisite arrangement of curtains. She tells of a sister my age of incredible brain energy who sizzles with electricity, has wild, fuzzy hair and green eyes that have levels of awareness, eyes whose pupils contract or expand depending on whether or not she likes the person she’s with. Sitting by the pool, the sister runs her fingers through her child’s hair. She channels all her energy, paints every morning, cooks lunch for the children, prepares essays on subjects in her mind. Hated Vassar, wrote brilliant literary papers at NYU. The reason these conversations hurt me is due to my own small faith in myself. I feel: If only I’d had the advantages of such an upbringing, of such an education.

  But I had a good education. I was simply too crippled to use it. Look at Ian’s education and money. It was not until he was thirty-four that he was able to function.

  This month I have: gotten rid of Othello, written twenty pages of a novel, learned a little Old English, and read four or five philosophical essays and several novels, including Bleak House. I am going to have to accept my limits: I am not a great powerhouse of energy. I can write two to three pages a day. I will probably never be financially comfortable. I will probably never have a child.

  What I need most now to do is produce some achievement I can be proud of. But somehow one cannot try too hard. John Casey, regarding his aborted book, was told by his editor that he was working too hard.

  Now, let us have some pride. Do OE tonight simply to prove you still have mastery over your will. Get up early, make yourself breakfast. Prepare a lunch to eat in the office. Write all afternoon. Go to the Dixons’ party and look pretty.

  You have your book—and can make of it what you want. Montaigne invented a form to suit himself. Why not suit yourself?

  JUNE 29

  Great wracking thunder early this morning. Went back to Ian in my dream. It was frighteningly realistic. He was ready for me.
Said he planned to get me pregnant at once. He promised a new flat. He was in the old one till September. I remember thinking: He’ll never let me go to my parents’ again. I was just beginning to contemplate re-running away.

  Awful depression. I’m feeling bereft.

  I did have an interesting dream-thought recently. The artist contains his future blossoming. But he must go through a series of stages to reach it. Only by painting bad paintings does he get good.