The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  And later I slipped and said “I love you”—in a context, of course—and then, like a neurotic, was sorry. I think it impressed-scared him. “Let’s go to bed,” he said. Once or twice at the party, he held my hand. He betrayed me to a friend—“She’s dangerous!”—and then said, “I want to walk outside and kiss you.” But he got busy with people. I left with the Foxes. Vulcan comes out on the porch and calls me back. “Gail!” He kisses me on the porch.

  ABOUT THE CHEMISTRY

  He says, “I’m my own bottleneck.”

  Is tired, driven, pushed, black-coffee-drinking,

  & still prefers to collapse at the Condés’

  to being energetic with me.

  Maybe he’s afraid it will go too fast and

  he’ll be stuck down in the basement with me for

  another three years. I don’t blame him.

  Can I condemn his caution? How can I expect him to suddenly

  shift me to center stage, spotlight me, dim the lights on all his past

  habits, past loves, acquaintances, loyalties? The most I can do is

  do what I have to, intersecting weekly at free crossroads

  in his life, dropping a smile, an idea

  an inspiration when I do see him. The

  real thing is, If I’m the sort of

  person who interests him, he’ll show

  interest. About the chemistry, that

  is a matter over which we have no

  control. There is or is not the attraction.

  Oh yes, one more thing. He wants me to read his novella. That is no small thing.

  Friday, John Hawkins comes to Iowa to visit clients Willie Nolledo and Kent Dixon and to look for new talent. Saturday I do the laundry.

  NOVEMBER 14

  Rain. And I am angry and depressed with circumstances. Write away little loner, suffer, suffer, suffer. “Ah, to be great, you have to suffer.” Damn rain. Iowa City. I want Vulcan to pour me drinks, talk with me, take me to bed. I want it now that I’ve finished “His House,” no small achievement.5 Backing off, he is perhaps playing subtle games for self-preservation, instigated by his psychiatrist.

  I meet him as I rush to class. “There she is … the picture of …”

  “Late as usual” is all I have time to say. So he echoes, “Late as usual.”

  At the coffee machine, late afternoon. I say, “Are you still working hard?”

  He says, “Yes, but last night I got snockered at home. It was fun.”

  I wanted to ask, “By yourself?” But was stunned, and mumbled something about what I was going to do next. “Let me get you some coffee, I hope,” he says.

  Damn it, here I am cataloging with great interpretation a meaningless exchange at the EPB’s equivalent of a water cooler! Shit. I refuse to play those games. Can’t. He’s so jaded-looking, those circles under the eyes. He’s a mean, sleek animal, sharp-toothed when in danger of being attacked. He says, “I’m a sadist when I have to be.” He has a beautiful secretary, young and flawless in the flesh. It is nice looking into that world-weary, sarcastic face, but knowing my own penchant for unhappiness, I am not going to lie down in front of him. He would probably run over me.

  10:30 in the evening

  It’s so true that one has nothing, really, except what one makes of this vast black void. This is a short-term lease among the stars.6 All right. Work, then, but it must be meaningful, generative work. Work for work’s sake is not enough.

  At the moment, it’s bad because: I have finished a span of work and now wish to rejoice, and I can’t. And, I have no way of knowing what’s on this man’s mind. So why not act as I did before there was anybody?

  I feel paralyzed till I know whether anyone will want the novel. At such an edge of my life.

  NOVEMBER 16 • Saturday, 11:50 a.m.

  More excitement than ever, best and worst kinds. Every one of my childhood neuroses is blooming. Jane calls at 9:30 a.m. and we talk for an hour—John Hawkins was at their house last night, Bill Keogh brought him by, and, furious not to have been invited, I say all the unsaid things about their “snobbery” and “jealousy” and she cries. She excuses herself to get a Coke and comes back and I lambast her some more. We both go at it. She: “But you’re my friend. You’re not my best friend, but …” I think we both learned a lot.

  So much I could write here, but very little that I need to write for the purposes of my book. I have to focus on the book and write two hundred more pages, and it’s got to be top quality. Dane has got to be everything. The book must keep readers on the edge of their seats. It must not be a word too much.

  Excerpt from The Perfectionists

  (Harper & Row, 1970), Chapter Five

  [Dane criticizes her husband.]

  “Would it be compromising our perfect marriage if you spent more time displaying your attractive qualities and left the inner mess for yourself, to tinker with in your spare time?”

  “You don’t seem to distinguish between mess and the natural disorder that precedes growth,” he retorted angrily. “Where is the girl who wanted visions, who could cite with such relish the crises of great saints? What kind of mess was it when Saint Paul fell off his horse and writhed in the dust and stood up a transformed man? I suppose that disgusts you, too.”

  “You have all the saints on your side. I know that. Intellectually. But I still feel disgust. And it separates me from you. Saint Paul knew better than to come home and tell his wife. He knew better, for the sort of man he was, than to take a wife.”

  12:05 Sunday morning [November 17]

  I want to hibernate. So much meaningless drivel. I can’t talk to Vulcan without being shy, jittery, falsely cheerful. I’d rather give it all up.

  Hawkins is back to New York with my forty-eight pages and it’s up to the higher powers. I’m so sick of the English-Philosophy Building, the classes, the whole rigmarole. Everybody’s in the same boat, sick of themselves and everyone else.

  NOVEMBER 17 • Sunday night

  Wrote fourteen pages today. I know this woman Dane now. I know the man. I can keep control.

  Tomorrow: Xerox pages for Coover; do Antony and Cleo, Act II, for my Core class; read Tristan for my medieval course.

  NOVEMBER 18

  The mighty oak toppled with virus. Or else my body, a bon gourmet, has refused to put up with any more junk. Rallying now. Such odd half dreams all day: pedestrian, long, boring conversations with people over the mechanics of things.

  Rosenthal7 called, gave me some news which explained things, about Vulcan’s former marriage. He propositions when drunk, wiggles out of an assignation when sober. He works like crazy, long hours alone at his job, then goes home and drinks himself to sleep. The tension is taken off. Now I know it’s not me, but his own fears.

  NOVEMBER 19

  I’m so woeful, I have to smile. Fingers chewed to bits, face broken out, hair lank and greasy, legs unshaved, fillings about to fall out.

  Coover gave me the greatest compliment, considering who he is: My imagination is so alive. These days—when my hallucinations under fever are so dull and mechanical.

  Jane Casey hurt with me, possibly I eat Thanksgiving dinner alone. That, my dear, is the price you pay. Vulcan bounces in twice today, once in the morning in his printer’s apron, once in the evening all cocked out in his russet turtleneck en route to a faculty drink-meeting, coming in, dancing out, leaving me with nothing.

  NOVEMBER 20

  It’s been two weeks almost and he hasn’t repeated his invitation. Maybe he’s not for me, and how nice it never got off to a rip-roaring illusion of a start. Naturally, in a dearth like this town’s, everything fairly attractive and suave is going to become a minor god. Remember my own incredible lapses in taste. I do know I need a change from that terrible English building—paper cups thrown on floors, sinister noise of floor waxers bumping off elevators.

  LETTER FROM JOHN HAWKINS: Morrow upped the $250 offer of an option, but too late. John thinks we can do better somewhe
re else.

  NOVEMBER 21

  From suicidal back to human via Kent. I can’t discount those people who are always there when I need them. Coover didn’t like my novel; he read the whole thing, not just the forty-eight rewritten pages John took back to N.Y. He was afraid it would get published and read by the wrong people and that would be the end of me.

  Robert Coover was the advisor in the Writers’ Workshop with whom Gail had a love-hate relationship. He also taught a graduate course titled “Ancient Exemplary Fictions,” in which Gail was enrolled in the fall of 1968. Gail remembers him as “a formidable little magician who encouraged us to play games; he loathed realism in fiction, particularly anything to do with interpersonal relations.” One assignment for “Ancient Exemplary Fictions” was to write from the point of view of a seventh-century Irish monk who had just discovered an ancient manuscript that turns out to be: Scheherazade’s last tale! Coover’s end-of-course test question was: “If the original leap from interjectional language to objectification was based on magic, is the search for reality behind language still based on the same impulse? How does language communicate the ineffable?”

  The question represents a gauntlet through which Gail had to pass to gain acceptance in her writers’ community. It also reveals a way of looking at things that had enchanted a generation in the 1960s. Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, then just out, exemplifies this worldview. Based on a concept from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, it embraces the idea that humans are evolving from one stage of living (functional, with language used as a tool of communication) to a higher one (transcendental, with language helping people get above matter). In the future, the idea goes, humans will become more consciousness than being, and will connect with a universal mind.

  “Childhood’s End changed my whole way of thinking,” Gail wrote in her term paper. But still there was a problem with going along Coover’s path. It involved reducing characters to symbols. Gail eventually sought to reveal the design of universal consciousness through something more character-based, the personal problems of identifiable individuals.

  In a letter that she would write to Coover on January 29, 1969, Gail pinpointed the technique that would bridge his and her methods. “I am not afraid of crossing the boundaries between what our age calls ‘fantasy’ and what it calls ‘reality,’ ” she stated. “I also see the things gesture can accomplish after all the interpretations are dead and gone. The Green Knight can pick up his severed head and stalk out of Arthur’s hall as many times as he likes and all the interpretations of all the sensibilities in the world will not lessen the charm of his action … I believe the gesture may be the way I can express the ineffable.”

  NOVEMBER 22

  Five years since Kennedy died. Dear old England. It was on a Saturday the day after, when we went beagling—Gordon L., Gordon W., and I—and I was finally able to break the Gordon W. spell.8

  Rock Island today9 I bought wines, liqueurs, whiskeys. Saw Vulcan briefly this a.m. in the basement, told him I was spinning off to R.I.—offered to get him something. He accepted—one Compari. I told him just enough about Coover, and he was actually involved in a conversation with me—then he was called to the phone. I disappeared before he got back.

  Tomorrow: groceries, writing, read Tristan.

  NOVEMBER 23

  There are some nice wineglasses in Younker’s for $1 each. Have spent some money since yesterday to make my life bearable. A long note from Jane left by her in my typewriter. It’s okay. I think I can even stand Thanksgiving alone. Read all weekend at 501 North Dubuque. I’ve broken my habit of not staying here. Booze, food, books. I’m making a stew.

  NOVEMBER 24

  Leisured late—Bloody Marys—and ambled off to my office to read Antony and Cleopatra for my Core class. Beef tartare at Kent’s with banana daiquiris and wine. Back. Read fairy tales for Coover and started writing one.

  Condense through use of imagery.

  The washed-out greeny horror of supermarkets, the piped-in music. I’m what comes after Whiter Than White. Our “religion” of cleanliness corresponds to hatred and fear of the Negro.

  She’s the one that gets the shadow’s extra kick. It only talks when she bathes in it. New sensations, and not all of them nice. She wants whiter than white at the beginning—celestial.

  Almost back to my old self. It’s taken me almost a month to get over the man in the basement. Dentist tomorrow. Reminds me of pain and death and getting old. Nervous about Hawkins, about the book. O God, let something nice happen soon.

  NOVEMBER 25 • Monday

  Came home at four—drank, ate, slept, read The Painted Bird.10 I dreamed I was not invited to another party. I’m not on the faculty, and this leaves me to the mercy of friends who remember. I feel so trapped in my situation, I could cry out in despair.

  NOVEMBER 26

  The Phoenix reborn. Wrote first good draft of “Blue,”11 which may be a milestone. Silence from New York.

  Shortly before twelve, Vulcan reentered my life with renewed vigor. I was able to speak with no giddiness about something serious—the Coover problem, how he admires my “great imagination” but deplores the kind of novel I am perpetrating—and he sat down, read another letter (from the editor at Morrow to John, offering more $, but saying how he’d change things in the novel), and went away promising more.

  Tonight he came again, sat down, talked about several more subjects. I told him dentist stories. We talked of Kafka’s suffering. He’s off to play bridge with the boys, says he’d rather have cocktails Negrita with me.

  I say, Let me ask you five questions about yourself. Do you take sleeping pills? No, I drink. Do you read science fiction? Do you take basically an optimistic or pessimistic view of the world? He backs out of the office in his chair. He says he wants to keep I Ching to ask it a few more questions. I say “If you’ll give me a Xerox copy of the questions.” He says, “You!”

  He says, “Are you going to be around for the holidays?” Yes. So there.

  NOVEMBER 28, THANKSGIVING

  In a few hours, I go to the Dixons’ to drink banana daiquiris and eat dinner and drink wine, and I’ll be bored by all but Bev, who is at least making an attempt to be interesting by losing her mind.

  Came home, couldn’t read Kafka or Frankenstein, could only lie in bed, insomniac, and think petty thoughts. What thoughts I think—of God, my novel, words, love, discipline, meaningful despair. Listen to my thoughts (I tried to derail them, but they came back, whistling on that endless track): I thought of all the people who would have Christmas parties and not invite me. I went on to think of all the things the faculty and local Workshop crowd would say to me and then behind my back in the halls of EPB. (See how limited the area, even?) Then I caught myself practicing false little conversations with Vulcan. And then thoughts of me getting older and unattractive and ending up alone. These thoughts don’t do anything but keep me awake—and drain my self-respect. I’ve got to finish this novel, stick to the original premise of exploring this woman’s personality. About the insolubles—age, disease, death—use them as motifs in the writing, but don’t dwell on them.

  NOVEMBER 29

  This was an exemplary day during which war waged within me, and the artist emerged in the heavy hours. But just. Did not want to wake—I somehow knew what was destined to go into my mailbox.

  I dreamed of leading Coover astray in an elegant bookshop. He was dressed in tights, like a court jester. We had gone there because, after lecturing me on piecing short fictions together with a long one (he thought this a good idea), he admonished me for getting behind on the class bulletin board. Apparently, he took pride in this. It was an extension of his identity. I said I didn’t want to do it till I had beautiful porcelain colored letters, and I knew where we could get some. I enticed him into going to this place I’d visited before. He became entranced by a little glass elephant with a rider. He saw this figure as an emblem of himself. I encouraged him to buy it
. We giggled. I went off, came back, and he was still entranced. I talked him into buying it, then we looked at the price—$11. “That can’t be right.” It wasn’t. The parts were priced separately, and when added together, totaled something like a fantastic $183. Of course, he could not buy it. I was embarrassed. Then I saw some new bookplates with the pictures of authors on them. I decided to buy Professor [Gayatri] Spivak12 the Yeats one, and maybe also the Valéry if the shop carried them.

  In the morning mail: the letter I dreamed I’d get. Hal Scharlatt at Random House waxes to Hawkins over how beautifully I write—a born storyteller; intelligent feeling—but feels the subject and location of my book are too remote. He’s afraid we can’t sell enough copies.

  Bless John’s heart, his upbeat letter accompanying it. He is so good, I hope he doesn’t go cold on me as Lynn did.

  Went to the office, couldn’t do anything. I am beginning to learn secrets about how to ward off breakdown. First of all, I am more neurotic in the daytime. Today, my muscae volitantes13 (seen against the white wall) were driving me to distraction. I felt removed from my concentration because of the intervention of faulty eyes. The building is deserted. I go see Kent, who is cool, to say the least. He walks out and leaves me to go to Hamod’s office.14 I realize I didn’t want to see him anyway; he is only something to chafe against. I go back downstairs. All I can manage is the I Ching.