by Gail Godwin
I don’t know much about him. Home life: very middle class. The remark about his twice-married brother “getting married all the time.” He’s taking five years preparing for the comps, has so far said nothing brilliant, only the usual fairly sensitive literary talk of graduate students. He has asked no questions about my past (which, I must say, I am glad of), but he has not shown any interest in my writing.
Like Gordon, he does what I call Boy Scout activities and seems to find completion in them. Maybe this is common among men, but it annoys me.
Tomorrow, if he comes in, you can expect one of these things to be happening:
Cat and mouse: He is playing a cat-and-mouse game because he wants to get me to care, and he feels insecure.
Fear and withdrawal: He can’t cope with me. I’m too experienced, complex, sophisticated, full of hangups. He’s backing off.
Sadistic impulse: He pursues a girl until she falls, then loses interest.
Gael said, as we passed his house, and I craned around, looking for his car: “Oh, Gail! Don’t look.”
JULY 24 • Morning
This might come in handy for a story. Signs of unrequited love: dry mouth, loss of appetite, hard to swallow, diarrhea, tight feeling in stomach. It’s ’63 all over again. Not only this, but I feel and know that I’m in the thick of an incident that makes me highly neurotic and partial to fantasy.
Poor Byron is being my father + all the men in the past who I feel have turned me down. He is not as much himself, whoever that is, as he is a composite of all my disappointments. I think I better write a bit today to tone all this down.
Evening, 5.40
A kind of nausea pervades the whole summer.
Months of being secure in the attentions of Othello, even though I didn’t love him or like him. Then it was the first year I taught several courses—then the strain of studying for the master’s—and the divorce, which psychologically threw me out of the safety of being “taken.” Then the breakup with Othello, the illness, summer school.
ALL I CAN DO is hold on, preserve my sanity. Anyway, after this school year had begun with the rejection of my novel, I’m pleasantly surprised by an attentive man, who’s on the same hall with me, who inquires after my MA. I talk in my most naturally giddy, abstracted way. I told him how I just wrote a story aimed for Redbook, and how I wanted a car, and an apartment. He says something—his humor is the pun kind, not the witty kind.
He offers to help me choose a car. I tell him how unhappy I am with the book list for the “Pursuit of Happiness” course. (Santayana, etc.) He tells how all the people in one department slept around, played musical beds. And I actually thought, from his expression of distaste, he meant married faculty—but no, he meant graduate students. Then, just before Kay Hammer came to get me for 8½, he blurted out forced-cheerfully “Like to go out for a drink Friday night?” and then couldn’t wait to get out of the office. Wednesday, he didn’t come in.
OLD ENGLISH NOTES. Read Sons and Lovers.
At 6:10, he called. He said, “You haven’t been in your office very much,” and asked if I wanted to go swimming. I invited him to the play.
JULY 25
THE OLD SYNDROME: alone again, and grateful. A journal; a DHL paperback; a bed. A lamp. Enough.
Is everybody in hell, as well as myself? One of the professors has had a nervous breakdown. Cold A. came into my office and opened her soul. She had been having an affair with M. She was going to leave J., then M. dropped her. She’s been suffering since February.
My problem is how to get my mental clamps sharp and tight. I don’t know what to say about this week’s crisis. Within one week, I fell in love then out again. We’d gone to the reservoir and watched the waters crash around six. He has not the play of mind I first suspected. He’s tight about money and somehow prim. He’s not husband material. He’s too hearty, he lets himself get sidetracked by people who don’t matter.
At the Shaw play how irritated I was with him for wearing the Pendleton jacket, for laughing so dutifully at all literary references, for being so tight about having to have his meal at a regulated time.
JULY 26
I’m overwhelmed by the absolute sadness of the lost ideal of the world. Once again, I created a dream and tried to stick it on to a real man. He should have been splendid, brilliant, gentle. I think I’ll write my “Motes” story this weekend—pack the suffering into it. Show how one can change suddenly in the midst of life.
Excerpt from May 26, 1968, Draft of
“The Legacy of the Motes”
—
[After taking the eye drops that Dr. Hunter-Hyde had prescribed for the motes in his eyes, Eliott walks to the park where he had seen visions. In Gail’s early draft, they come in a dream; in her final draft, in his waking life. He never finds the park. In the final draft, he gets drunk, goes to the British Museum Reading Room, and is found lying besotted on the steps by Van Buren, a librarian. In the early draft, Eliott’s withdrawal is more distracted and less painful.]
The examining drops had swollen Eliott’s pupils and blinded him for reading. Knowing Van Buren would see to his stuff, he wandered the elegant vicinity around Hunter-Hyde’s white-faced square and presently came upon another park. It was not his dream park, but it was one step nearer. It had a band concert. A Salvation Army lady with a tambourine sold him a program for threepence. What were they playing? His eyes traveled habitually down the list, which blurred and danced unreadably. He folded the program into a square the size of a small coin and put it in his pocket, next to the cool green bottle. Gazing for a long time at the banks of pink and yellow flowers, he finally made a silent bargain with the muscae [volitantes]. Then he closed his eyes, lay back in the grass, and opened his face to the sun. Beyond the music, he heard the approaching stampede of the beautiful white giraffes.
Excerpt from the Final Draft of “The Legacy of
the Motes,” Published in The Iowa Review
(Summer 1972) and Dream Children (Knopf 1976)
—
[There’s no peaceful sun-gazing in the finished story. Following a dark night of the soul, Eliott faces his own identity, and faints.] Taking a small green bottle from his coat pocket, he squeezed two drops from it into each eye. “Keeping the li’l bastards in abeyance,” he explained, winking at the perplexed attendant, who asked him, didn’t he think he could do with a few hours’ sleep, come in at noon, perhaps?
“Are you kidding? My whole life’s in there on little slips of paper. You haven’t thrown them away, have you? You haven’t put anything back on the shelf?”
Van Buren took him by the arm, assuring him he had not. They went inside. Van Buren delivered Eliott his books and notes intact. Eliott settled himself unsteadily into his place at F5, opened to the title page of his dissertation, and began to scream. Van Buren made his way to him calmly, as though he were merely bringing another book. He led him whimpering past the discreetly lowered eyes of other scholars and out of the circular room, which had slowly begun to spin. He stood by in the Gents while Eliott vomited for a while, then carefully washed his face, looked in the mirror to check himself, and passed out cold.
JULY 27
I don’t know how much longer I can endure this nauseating sensation about everything. Nothing to live for—afraid to die—a failure—unable to find sense among paltry humans. I washed my hair, and I don’t have the strength to wait for it to dry. The words I’m writing seem useless and stupid. Everyone around me has problems.
JULY 29
I must get out. I want to leave clues for friends, in case it’s necessary to trace my point of exit. I almost lost my mind twice—Saturday in Burger Chef. The presence of people doesn’t help. The sensation is like the beginning of fainting—a vertigo—being on the verge of lapsing into a state where you have no control.
In Burger Chef, there were two young boys behind me, talking singsong, attempting to be sinister hippies, drumming their hands on the tabletop à la bongos. I was reading Son
s and Lovers, the part where Mrs. Morel is hit by her husband with the edge of a drawer. The day lay flat, humid, and yellow outside. I knew that I was going to my office. Suddenly I began to slip away. I held on by concentrating on objects—the wall, a corner of the table. Then I went to my office and cried. Jane Casey came and scraped me up and took me home to spend the night at their farmhouse.
Today I got a rejection from Redbook. I spent all afternoon rewriting an old story.
JULY 30
Translating The Wanderer, a beautiful poem.25 “Often he who is solitarily situated (the anhaga) finds grace for himself … Often alone I had to speak of my trouble each morning before dawn. There is none now living to whom I dare clearly speak of my innermost thoughts …” I feel close to him.
PORTION OF LETTER FROM GAIL TO
KATHLEEN COLE, JULY 30, 1968
The Old English exam is next Wednesday, August 7. Afterward, I’m going to take the bus as far as Chicago, sleep at Lorraine’s, and maybe go out on the bus to Asheville the following evening … I want to do some rewriting of the novel. I haven’t touched it since last summer and now begin to see what is wrong with it.
JULY 31
It’s a race now. Can I get out of here without screaming, shattering? Old Byron is on the warpath about Othello disturbing him. He lectures me on “taking a firm stand.” I can see what a pompous husband he’d make.
Othello called him and kept hanging up. So Byron, man of action, has the phone company bug his phone. Then at 9:00 p.m., Othello goes to Byron’s office, apologizes profusely, and begins to “advise” him about me. Byron calls me back. We get into a discussion about gentility, and tradition and form. I find myself upholding things I long ago had stopped believing in. Farther and farther we got away from each other. Then he said, “Well, this doesn’t have to be a soul-searching session,” cutting me off. He’s shy and defensive. I’m shy and defensive. Will I ever get myself organized again, eating decent food, keeping decent hours, being able to read, and to write?
AUGUST 2
Lying fallow, they say. Dinner out at Yokums with Kent and Bev.26 All year, I wanted to be friends with them, and was prevented by Othello’s jealousy. The more I look back on that, the more unreal it is. I see him in the Union, and he is like a caricature.
These days, I collect married couples—the Caseys, the Hammers, the Dixons. They live vicariously through me; I shelter under the sanctity of their marriages.
These days, my thoughts veer from place to place—America, Europe, Iowa City, North Carolina. Let me remember how much I accomplished in the spring of ’67, when I had decided to do one thing.
AUGUST 3 • Saturday morning
The writing business is eating away my skull. I feel it’s the world against me, murmuring, “Not good enough, didn’t quite make it.” Everything else is peripheral, I want it so much. I have no way of knowing: Am I there? Almost there? Today, I’ll finish “The Angry Year,” send it to Redbook tomorrow. Just write honestly, sentence by sentence.
Saturday night
The taste of bad sausages at the Union, the blaring party next door, and a sense of the inelegance of life. All feels tawdry, indiscreet, and sloppy-minded. Just had a forty-five-minute argument with Byron about wealth, welfare, etc. We do not want the same things. He would drive me nutty in no time at all.
AUGUST 4 • Sunday
Alys Chabot has accepted “Liza’s Leaf Tower” for publication in North American Review—should be in print within six months. Already, the liberating feeling has set in. I feel I can slow down, write as I want. Byron and I lay on the riverbank by the English building and watched the lightning flash in the clouds.
I have ceased regarding him as magnanimous, and think of him as parsimonious. I don’t feel he is benevolent, though he thinks of himself as trying to be a good person. He was going to come back for me tonight, late, but somehow, it seemed so cut-and-dried, prescheduled. So I left him a note and came home to share my triumph with the one who has stood by me through dark days: myself. Wednesday, I get out of here and Greyhound it home. Next fall, I can come back with one publication credit, get myself organized, eat good food, exercise, and have Byron as a squire.
AUGUST 5
No, not even that. I picked him apart like a chicken tonight: the false-hearty laugh, the tight-lipped, closed-teeth grin. The beady eyes. Oh, God, what is it about me that hurls myself at such unworthies only to recoil violently afterward? I only want to write, get a good start on the novel at home—write with Coover in mind. I have never felt so bankrupt, so blah about everything.
Fall
1968.
The leaves die—the days shorten,
And I come alive.
SEPTEMBER 17
Back from North Carolina, recharged for the winter, in a nicer new apartment in the same house that Lorraine and Chap lived in. The spirits are friendly at 501 North Dubuque. Confluence took “Dandelion.”27 Welcome back to sanity, relined with a stable madness consisting of many unseen, but more and more friendly, presences. Breakthrough in writing.
PORTION OF LETTER FROM GAIL TO KATHLEEN COLE, SEPTEMBER 17, 1968
Dear Kathleen:
It was a wonderful visit, something I won’t forget. Thanks for so much, but mostly for just being what you are.28
Redbook didn’t accept the story on account of its being set in England and also [the editor] had seen it last year through Lynn Nesbit, but she was full of praise for its style, the characters, etc. Then I was crossing the street this morning and a man who edits a new magazine called Confluence29 (very small, mostly student writers) said he wanted to buy “Dandelion” (only $100). I had sent them an earlier draft. I decided to sell because what I want now is to get myself published as many places as possible. Talent scouts search out these magazines, then offer fellowships, etc. So I told him I had changed the end; he came back to my office, and took the new end, which he liked better. So now I will have two stories in print. The main thing this is doing for me is releasing my ego so I can write what I believe in without so much looking to the “public” for my guideposts. I shall try Redbook soon again; she says she is hungry for student stories set in America. I will probably be able to cook up one with no trouble, since she obviously likes my writing and the content is her only problem—what will Redbook readers read? Confluence comes out in October, I’ll send you a copy. It will hit the stands on October 1, your birthday.
Wrote about forty pages of beautiful stuff at the Freemans’ (I was released); will send you a carbon as soon as I retype … could be a new form.
Her time with the Freemans in Chicago led Gail to write “Some Side Effects of Time Travel.” The story exemplifies what she called a new type of writing for her, a free-flowing chronicle. Published first in Paris Review and later in Dream Children, it is one of the key works of Gail’s late 1960s period. The heroine awakens in her friends’ apartment, not knowing where she is. Her mind goes to thoughts about experiments in narration.
Excerpt from “Some Side Effects of Time Travel,”
Published in Paris Review (Summer 1972) and
Dream Children (Knopf, 1976)
—
Then she remembered. “Ha, I’m improving.” And rose and began writing on a rickety old Remington belonging to her hostess, who had gone to work. Last night she told the host and hostess, “I’ve finally hit upon a method of chronicling myself which won’t bore me to death. I’ll be me at my most entertaining with friends and wine after dinner. I’ll tell it like the Icelanders told their sagas, just narrate, This happened, Thor felt this, and so on, before the dawn of the writer’s self-consciousness. Forget H. James, God love him, and the rules, the expectations of the clever reader, and go searching for myself all over the printed page, like an old-country granny spieling her life, skipping around the years, sidetracking into the really choicy operations, the gall bladder, the hysterectomy, anecdotes about Ebenezer’s drinking and how Maud was never the same since menopause, following her own in
fallible train of intuition like one does on long bus rides or just before falling asleep.”
JUNG SAYS: THE WORD HAPPENS TO US; WE SUFFER IT …
Gretchen had this typed on a note card. Note cards are her way of tabulating and taping a madcap inner and outer world that shapeshifts and self-destructs by the second.
Whenever she gets bored with plotted, pared stories that restrict, leave out, scale down, distort, she shuffles through her vast collection of note cards, written over the heady years, which have no form, no system, no end and no beginning, no one subject or single style, no unifying principle.
These note cards are the nearest she has come to getting outside of time.
SEPTEMBER 19
“The First Diary.” Acts as genesis of a writer and as the Genesis story. He becomes aware of himself—creates light, etc., creatures, fables; gets more preoccupied with effects. He exhausts all possibilities, even if it means letting the other one take over. Evil is born. Describe. Then he finally gets compassionate, tries to stop it, wash it out, start all over. But even the ideas, people, he keeps are “infected.” He decides to go into my story to see how I set them straight. In my story, I call to myself—a former, nobler self—“Why! Why have you forsaken me?”
