by Gail Godwin
Silas understands, he says, but then vanishes for days, without calling. Subconscious instincts and needs emerge in Gwen’s life. “St. George” crosses into fantasy, as Gwen symbolically gives birth to an impossible child. Cracking an egg for a midnight omelet, she finds a red embryo embedded in the yolk. She discovers that it is a tiny dragon, and she nurtures it until it grows large enough to cause great havoc and needs to be granted its wildness.
NOVEMBER 3
November is never my good month. Gemini fights the removal of light and shudders at the thought of the settling down that winter brings. These last few days I’ve been at my unhappiest. Why? There is not even the astringent honor of being alone. I have Kent to lean on and subsequently torture. I have work to do, and the sooner the better. When I’m writing, the images lift me out of the mire.
Rewrite the Dragon as if Vulcan might read it. I’m engaged in my usual pre-new-affair sickness.
If I were smarter I’d learn a few things: first, not to try to read the minds of strangers; second, not to put my own thoughts into their minds; third, to balance between worship and disgust.
The thing is, I’ll be here for two to three more years, so will Vulcan, so there’s time to find out about each other. Whereas there’s not as much time to break through in the writing—and I’m so near now. See what I can get out of Coover while he’s here in the way of advice, good graces. If he does do the little book with Vulcan’s Stone Wall Press, I can put “Uncle” in, maybe something else short—
A METAMORPHOSIS, PERHAPS—
1. A month and a half later, Ian sent Gail’s journals to her.
2. The “jealous poet,” who didn’t want her past to compete with his claim on her.
3. Here Gail refers to the New American Review, a literary journal that had started in 1967. The editor had praised Gail’s work to Robert Coover, one of Gail’s instructors.
4. Gail’s vicar story, “The Illumined Moment, and Consequences,” later titled “An Intermediate Stop,” went through many revisions before it was published in the North American Review.
5. Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) documented her Richmond, Virginia, society through a series of novels that portrayed unconventional women and overcompensating men caught up by changing traditions and moral drift. In Gail’s 1974 novel The Odd Woman, Jane Clifford’s fellow professor Sonia Marks comments, “Ellen Glasgow makes her men seem such fools. Now there’s a challenge. Barren Ground … It’s the book which tests the mettle of the sincerest militant. Most women can identify with heroines who learn to live without marriage: but not so many want to live without love of any kind.”
6. Charles Aukema later became a professor of English at Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Iowa. He taught creative writing as well as computer applications in writing, including hypertext fiction.
7. See Part 4 of this volume for Gail’s relationship with the red-haired Pan Am public relations officer in London.
8. “It is no small pleasure,” Montaigne writes in this essay, “for one to feele himselfe preserved from the contagion of an age so infected as ours” (John Florio translation; Modern Library, 1933). Montaigne advocated a clean conscience; a life separate from society, if necessary; and natural joy. Regarding repentance: it does not resolve the beautiful and destructive aspects of vice. Leonard Strickland, the admirable father in Gail’s 1982 novel A Mother and Two Daughters, consults Montaigne “about learning to do for conscience’s sake what we now do for glory.” Montaigne’s skepticism about human reason, morality, and constancy was summed up by his motto Que sais-je?—“What do I know?”
9. In Bleak House, Lady Dedlock is the virtuous woman whose long-ago unmarried pregnancy is discovered by an antagonist, who threatens to tell her husband. She is found dead at the grave of her lover by the daughter she thought had died in childbirth.
10. Gail begins a rewrite of “The Beautiful French Family”—later published as The Perfectionists—which she had first completed for Kurt Vonnegut the previous year. With changed character names—Pauline and Sarah instead of Polly and Dane—she is also playing with a satire of her own story which she will title “Sarah’s Gothic Marriage.”
11. In the finished novel, Gail creates a third woman character, who has the affair with Karl, while Pauline/Polly acts as Karl’s wife, and the protagonist (Sarah/Dane) remains conflicted and unsatisfied.
12. John Casey, National Book Award winner in 1989 for his novel Spartina, received his MFA from the Iowa program in 1968.
13. “The Black Monk” by Anton Chekhov chronicles the life of a man—Andrei Kovrin—who is blessed by an encounter with a millennial apparition, but who, because of doubts about his sanity, and loss of faith in his genius, destroys himself and his loved ones. Through his descriptions, Chekhov leaves the question of Kovrin’s true mental state open.
14. Gail thoroughly reworked the story, and her final draft does not contain many passages from the early one. In her rewrite, she made Eliott the agent of his visions, thus strengthening the psychological interpretation of events. The endings of the drafts differ greatly. In the early version, the “wings” vanish from Eliott’s eyes just as he becomes too old to achieve great success, and he dies dreaming of parks. The published story concludes with Eliott in midcareer. He is not a failure and has gained wisdom, if not fame, for there had been precedents for his visions. His motes had disappeared when he’d discovered his giraffe in a Bosch painting. He cries when he finds his exalted condition explicated in George Herbert’s poem “Easter Wings.”
15. Lorraine and her husband, Chap Freeman.
16. This story eventually became part of “Some Side Effects of Time Travel,” published in Paris Review, and was republished in Dream Children.
17. John C. McGalliard was a professor of medieval studies at the University of Iowa. He taught Old English. McGalliard is fictionalized as Dr. MacFarlane in Gail’s story “Some Side Effects of Time Travel.”
18. Burke County is two counties east of Buncombe in the mountains of North Carolina. In fact, Buncombe had been carved from Burke once settlers had pushed farther west in large numbers.
19. Lake McBride State Park.
20. Gael Hammer, a theater arts professor, and his wife Katherine (“Kay”) had befriended Gail.
21. The English-Philosophy Building.
22. The manuscript of “The Man on the Sofa,” held in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC Chapel Hill, bears the notation “End. 22 Feb. 1968.” In it, a married woman narrates the story of her boring marriage, and the appearance of a strange little man on the sofa in her and her husband’s apartment. The police are called. Without being able to determine motive or method, they take the man away. The husband clumsily tries to make an emotional connection based on the excitement, but the woman is dead tired, and goes to bed.
23. Gail met Gordon W. in April 1963. See the journal entry for July 23, 1963, the first entry in this volume.
24. Peter W. was a D. H. Lawrence apostle with whom Gail had had a short relationship in late fall 1962. He modeled himself after Rupert Birkin, a protagonist in Women in Love who idealized natural animal mentality. He impressed Gail until it became clear that his pose was a form of self-absorption by which he tried to control others.
25. The Wanderer is a tenth-century Old English poem in which a warrior speaks of his exile in a wintry sea following a devastating war.
26. Kent Dixon was a Writers’ Workshop student, married to Bev. Gail’s story “Interstices,” published in Dream Children, took its kernel from them.
27. “Dandelion” is the story of an American girl who works in the artificial-flower department of Harrods department store in London. The dandelion becomes a symbol of her desire for an ordinary native life in the sun as opposed to the world of social posturing.
28. See Gail’s account of this visit and her relationship with her mother in Gail’s preface to this volume.
29. Confluence, started by Peter Neill, lasted for one year.
30. Robert Scholes was a professor of literature at the University of Iowa. By 1968, he had published Elements of Fiction and books on James Joyce.
31. Gail enrolled in David Chamberlain’s class, “Medieval English Literature in Translation.”
32. Gail wrote “The Apprentice—Fates” for Robert Coover’s workshop. In it, a writing instructor, Miss Olga Slade, tells her students to fashion a true character from bits of information, representing the process as a kind of witchcraft. One student uses such magic on the instructor herself, capturing her in her drama, and then contemplates creating a further outer shell by writing about herself writing about Miss Slade.
33. Gail taught “Greek Drama for Freshmen Engineers” in the spring of 1967, and two Core Literature classes in the fall of 1968 as part of a teaching fellowship.
34. Gaert had been a friend of Gail’s in Copenhagen in 1961–1962 and was to be a character in a Lawrence Durrell—like novel that Gail considered writing about that city.
35. Evelyn Underbill’s 1911 book Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness distinguishes between a kind of mysticism that is philosophical or occult, and that which is practical and leads to a more creative life. “Where the philosopher guesses and argues,” she writes, “the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram—impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.”
36. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 provided low-interest loans to students.
37. In the dream, Gail rejects the connection with Ethan Allen (patriot of the American Revolution, but also the namesake of the modern-day furniture manufacturer), to assert the connection with Nathan Hale, America’s legendary spy.
38. Ladies’ Home Journal (HJ) did not publish “The Angry Year,” but McCall’s later did. The story is included in Gail’s collection Mr. Bedford and the Muses (Viking, 1983).
39. “Some Side Effects of Time Travel” was eventually published in Paris Review and is included in Dream Children.
40. “A Sorrowful Woman,” Gail’s most anthologized story, would be published first in Esquire. It is included in Dream Children. In 2009 a short feature film was made of it. (See gailgodwin.com for the link to this film.)
41. Jules and Jim is the classic Francois Truffaut movie, released in 1962, about an ill-fated love triangle between two men and a woman.
42. In Canto XIII, Virgil and Dante encounter the spirits of suicides, who have lost their human forms.
43. Gail’s 2010 novel Unfinished Desires would eventually explore this material.
44. Mavis is Ian Marshall’s sister.
45. Jack Malone, the homeless man whose memoirs Gail typed when she was working at the U.S. Travel Service in London.
46. The Magician, Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 film, depicts a charlatan, played by Max von Sydow, who can be seen as comic or menacing.
Part seven
THE VOID AND
THE VALIDATION
Iowa City
NOVEMBER 3, 1968, TO DECEMBER 11, 1968
NOVEMBER 3 • 10:30 p.m.
Bloody Marys for Jane’s baby shower. I came back and slept on the riverbank.
What would make this place a home? Liquor, music, hospitality. 415 South Capitol was shabby, but I made people comfortable there. Some great parties! The curries with the Casey-Plimptons. St. Patrick’s Day when Vonnegut and his wife actually made costumes. Jane was William of Orange; Kurt, St. Patrick. Now, 501 North Dubuque, a step up in the rental world, just needs tall candles, the smell of good food, the smell of me around; but my heart isn’t here. It’s in getting published and being entertained by somebody else.
I studied on and off, 5:00 to 8:30 p.m., down at the office. Kept getting distracted by Vulcan going to and from his printing shop. Trying to read his mind. So I did the I Ching.1 What is the state of affairs? ENTHUSIASM. Then I asked, “What should I do to win him?” Threw six times, was on the verge of looking up the answer, when he stuck his head around the door and said, “How was the baby shower?” He came in and sat down this time. Regarding the Condés,2 he said, “I couldn’t take that kind of life. I have to have some serenity.”
“Ohhh. DO you?” I said.
He said, “Shut that up or …” something.
He said, “Have you ever seen the shop? Would you like to see it?” So down we went. Me and Vulcan. Nerves. His gorgeous yellow suede jacket. Black beard, dignity. Nerves. I talk about his work till he says, “I’m not making much sense, I just got up from a nap.”
I entertain him about Uncle William: the last Godwin, how he had to give up cigarettes.3 I talk some more—about scholars, and how I hate the thought of being one. About the new agent, John Hawkins, and the novel. I say, “I’ll let you work.” He walks me to the door of my office. I say, “I’ll walk you to the Coke machine.” He buys himself a second drink within fifteen minutes. Then he buys me one, so, he says, “you can work better.”
I: “Actually, I was doing the I Ching.” “The what?” He’s interested. Really, no skepticism. Wants to see it, wants to be shown. I show him. Shaking. He asks: “Will I get the ten-thousand-dollar grant from Urbana?” We throw the coins. He comes and stands behind me. He gets ACCUMULATION. He borrows the book. He comes back fifteen minutes later. “That’s a scary book,” he says. “I’d like to know some of the things you asked it.”
“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime,” I said.
“Maybe you won’t,” he said. Left. But he has my property, something in which I’ve invested myself. Why not believe in something good? He has enough dignity to cover a multitude of flaws and it is so good to feel excited about someone again.
NOVEMBER 4
At 11:00 p.m., he comes to the door, says, “You’ll never make it.”
“Yes, I will,” I say.
“I was going to ask you out for a drink, but the I Ching said no, that there would be an obstacle. And there was. Some friends called from out of town. So I have to meet them for drinks.”
“What an original approach,” I said. “Well, I want to do well on this test, so ask again.”
“I will,” he said.
I think his eyes are blue. And he wore short blue shirtsleeves. Now I know I am in his intentions and can let it happen. For my own peace of mind, I must not design my days around it. It has only been the sixth day since meeting him.
NOVEMBER 5 • Tuesday
Shambles of a day. Must subvert ego or die. Don’t talk to people sloppily keep something sacred. Oh, God help me.
NOVEMBER 13
Nothing since November 5? Where to start?
“Your star is in the ascendancy, I’m sure of that,” says Jane.
11:00 p.m.
But I have wet hair and a lot to say. Even in the midst of achievement, excitement, and hard work, there is a great void, and I cannot fill it by myself. At the end of it all, I am lonely. I want to touch, but not indiscriminately. There is someone who interests me, but he is no savior. He’s a wounded bird. If he’s a rock, the rock is built from pain and defenses and might not be hard enough to lean against. I want it all now, but that’s not the way it goes. Things build and fall, shape-shift, grow, metamorphose into new forms. How can I, who have benefited through change and growth, fear or push it now? Last Wednesday night, he took me home to his house for drinks. He told me about his dogs, his Prussian ancestors, his family motto (“Break but don’t bend”), his rebuilt Jaguar, and his best friend’s wife, who’d just committed suicide. He replenished my drinks and did not try to ravish me as surplus entertainment. Kissed me as much as I wanted to kiss him and knew, without my telling him, where I lived.
Friday a letter arrived from John Hawkins in New York telling me he’s interested in representing me. Apologized for asking, but wanted to know how old I was and whether I was English or American! Vulcan wa
s the first to read it.
Vonnegut on a whirlwind reading tour blesses our union in the hall. Saturday night I want to talk with Vulcan so bad, I snub him at a party. He leaves at once. I despair. Kent and Lorraine both crawl on my bed, hang their wishes over me, and despair of me. The next day—Sunday—I see him in the hall and nervously make known my goodwill. He says he’s going to a party after Coover’s reading, and I am miserable because I have not been invited. I think I decided then to go anyway.
I maneuver it, practically collapsing from a resurgence of childhood anxieties. After a terrible initial period, I am befriended and saved by Mrs. Scholes.4 Then he comes over and I’m with him for the rest of the evening. He says, “I know you’ve been dying to talk to me. Now is your three minutes.”
We sit in a corner by the fire. He tells me he goes to a psychiatrist. He tells me I’m dangerous; he can sense it intuitively. “You are a pusher,” he says. “Success is not in my dictionary.” His psychiatrist has a clubfoot.
I say I hope he can talk to me. “I’d like to,” he says, “but how objective can you be? Suppose you fall madly in love with me.”
