The Making of a Writer, Volume 2

by Gail Godwin

  Wind rattles the windowpanes. The smell of My Sin. Flowers on pillowcases.

  Keep busy—I am trying not to give in again to yearning, howling for a man I hardly know. Think of Claude, of that evening in an Albany bar when he leaned across the table and said: “You know, I really love you. I see you.” And he meant it. And I didn’t think I could contain my joy. And it passed. I stopped loving him as soon as I went out of his milieu and he tried to fly his plane to Iowa to see me and got stopped in Chicago by bad weather and had to arrive on a commercial flight, his pride grounded.

  If there is any resolution, it is to dampen down the ego. Stop fantasizing gratifications. Stop talking about yourself, exaggerating, and feeling “hurt.” Shyness is a form of selfishness.

  JANUARY 3

  What have I done today? Bought food. Traipsed around in minus-ten-degree weather, gotten frostbite on my face. Oh, God. Let me stop and get a drink. I see why anchoresses had to have handbooks written for them.4

  I spent three to seven in the EPB answering correspondence. Then I wrote two more pages of the “final” novel. I don’t like this chapter yet, but will not stop until I capture what I want. I’m not going after anybody this damn semester. All I want to be is self-contained.

  Queer letter from Solotaroff5—very warm, but then said, after much hemming and hawing, he’d decided it was not the story of mine he wanted to buy.6 He said that I would be in NAR “before either of us is much older.”

  John Bowers called. He’s coming to see me on the way back from San Francisco. He met the Harper’s editor who bought my novel, David Segal.7 He said he was “brilliant, world-weary, Jewish. Taciturn. Tired of words. Tired of politics.” John said: Do your thing. It’s going to happen big for you. I can just tell by knowing you. You have a sixth sense about things.

  I am bogged down with Dane in the riding ring scene. It doesn’t have what I want it to have—that hurt that nonphysical people can feel at seeing something physical done beautifully.

  Excerpt from The Perfectionists (Harper & Row, 1970), Chapter 6

  —

  Count Bartolome came and sat beside her. “A splendid sight, two beautiful animals in agreement,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s true,” she replied.

  “Do you ride, senora?”

  “No. My father gave me lessons, but I never could learn. The horse and I never seemed to get together.”

  “Ah, that is a shame. I am sure I could teach you. I would first get you to feel the extensions of the horse: the way he moves, the way he is. All the technique, that is second. Anybody can teach the curve of a leg, the holding of the reins, that’s nothing. One must first get in harmony.”

  JANUARY 4

  For the past half hour, I have been extremely happy. First, I contemplated writing a letter to Solotaroff, and decided to do it. Second, there’s Bach choral music on the radio. And I know that this religious, mystical, spiritual thing is very much a part of my “calling.” I feel near to that. I’m happy to pursue, almost single-mindedly what gives me most satisfaction. My small, local passion brings me nothing but defeat. And there is so much to do.

  Later

  I wonder if I will go through life with a headache. Wrote seven pages, thus finishing the dread riding-ring chapter.

  JANUARY 5

  Well, I wasted another night in hopeless melancholy over my local passion. Ah, if I must persist, I will.

  I came across an Ian remark I had written down. He said that you could judge from the emotional relationships a person found most vital what sort of state he was in.

  I am not going to let this passion affect my life. If it becomes difficult, I shall move my typewriter here and buy a floor lamp, and work at the desk. I can learn from this passion.

  I have gotten fairly adept at waiting out my loneliness. I was thinking how outraged I’d be if I went to the EPB and heard he had died. So much left unsaid.

  Lady, what do you want to say to him? Is it to him or to all the men who have failed you? Most remarks, I admit, are: How much I can do without him. How little he means to me. How very much I would love him if he gave me half a chance.

  Who is the first man in my life I would wish to have made those statements to? Three guesses. Even I know.

  Speaking of him, his brother8 just called. Said he’s sending me a twelve-pound something that I’d like. A ham, a hair dryer, a typewriter? God knows.

  I’m writing the novel. I think I am going to like this chapter. I added a new scene: Dane goes into a church and is frightened by a priest.

  JANUARY 6

  Came home at five in a taxi, sat down, and read J. C. Oates’s new novel straight through.9 I am envious. Her scenes of anguish, violence: just right.

  My local passion, it appears, has been felled by the Hong Kong [flu], I’m scared of getting it, hallucinating by myself. Jane today said: “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you talking about yourself?” I get more satisfaction out of this new way. I would like to reach the point of not depending on anyone. Let’s face it: If I get the H.K. flu, who can I depend on? If I find out tomorrow that old Vulcan went back to his wife because she came over and took care of him during his illness, I’ll be disappointed.

  This snow makes it difficult to get around.

  I want to do the Polly chapter next weekend. I see how few people I want to have around, time-wasters, and I haven’t the time, I’ve wasted too much already. I’m like a house in snow.

  My favorite student dropped by today, her play of mind so much wider than the others’. She’s in love with her father. She’s living in a Gothic-Victorian trap. The tale about her doctor father sewing up her grandmother on the stairs, while she, a girl, held the split forehead together.

  I NEED TO dramatize my writing, one scene after another.

  CHAPTER VII: The church with the spying priest

  Dane applauding Polly when she beats one of her twins

  The talk

  Dane going back as to a new husband, the one she’d told Polly about

  JANUARY 9

  Letter from John Hawkins: “It is a joy to receive a manuscript from you.”

  My crazy-intelligent student stopped me in the bathroom. “Guess what?” she said. “I found my grandmother dead.” We started laughing. Another girl in the bathroom was shocked.

  People started nicking away at me last night and today. The slow eroding away. Jung’s words come back: Every man must have a secret, something he cannot tell anybody. If you give it all out, soon everything is gone. When people go away you feel yourself going with them, off in all directions, and feel alone without yourself to go back to.

  JANUARY 12

  Yesterday the contracts came in. The stark icy night is not so cold.

  I’m having a slump with the rewrite. So, fittingly enough, at the Caseys’ farewell party, I achieved a shallow ambition: to go to a party and be admired by peers. Coover and I go over the contract. Vulcan and I doing our foxy flirting. He’d drift by throughout the evening, and we’d jab at each other.

  Next semester, I just want to write. Beowulf and write.

  JANUARY 15 • 1:20 p.m.

  Where do I begin when probably more has happened than I’ll ever remember or comprehend? I suppose I’ll begin at the end.

  I got up on this iciest of days—radio announcers begging people not to go out—and I kept resetting the alarm clock. I finally got up to prepare my classes. Gael Hammer called to say he and Kaye were iced in.

  I started out, saw ice on the doorstep, on the streets, coating the snow. I saw people losing control—sliding, precariously twisting their poor upright Homo sapiens backs.

  I came back in. I canceled my classes. I totally cleared Jeremy from my house,10 mopped floors, shook rugs out a window, threw away whiskey bottles. Bernie called and said that, after he left me, Jeremy rammed his car into another car and stumbled around, falling on the ice. He couldn’t remember where the car wreck was.

  Then John Hawkins called. How pl
easant it is to hear his rich, deep voice, his taking-care-of-Gail’s-property voice. We talked about the not-making-more-than-$15,000 clause. “I have to protect you against success,” he said, laughing.

  Jeremy came back and apologized. His hands shook, his eyes watered, his reddish hair curled and dripped water. He dirtied up my clean ashtray. His socks (I made him take his shoes off) were so wet he left his prints on the rug.

  Coover is right. Gestures came before the word, and can sometimes be more interesting.

  I told Jeremy I was going into hibernation for a while. I may stay home tomorrow. I’ll get my classes completely prepared and read Piers Plowman11 and Gothic Image.12 Somehow, I’m not so interested in contemplating myself as I am in noting people’s gestures.

  Lorraine called back to say, re Jeremy: “Forgiveness is beside the point. What is important is having pity for ourselves as well as others.”

  I must write Ian for the journals. Send him the money.

  5.00 p.m.

  More about the gesture—Jeremy: a study in gesture.

  People’s ideas about why other people do things must be subjective. Say, Jeremy’s performance last evening. I interpret it my way, Bernie his, the Cooleys theirs, Kent his, and Jeremy his. But which is the most “literary” aspect of all this: my discussion of the events with Bernie, the words changing with each rendition? Or the Jeremy performance itself—Smirnoff in hand, cigarette in other; weaving around in thin, wet shoes; falling in the frozen snow once and again; forgetting where he’d had his accident; ramming his car into another; insulting his friends, having gotten them up in the first place to go chasing him in the sleety snow? Vomiting in the snow, making little puddles of warmth in the treachery of the ice. If only he can vomit enough times, he can warm the world!

  Andrew, or The Importance of Gesture

  —

  “We are a bunch of writers.” Open with a few vicious anecdotes. Then work up to the question. And describe the gesture and end with a question mark.

  THE RADIO JUST announced that garbage collection will be postponed because of the ice.

  “Any community where writers congregate is bound to have its special hang-ups. Also, I think, writers will do anything to get new material.”

  “Recently, there was a tragedy among us, which taught me something really important about the craft.”

  THE CURRENT RIFT among us over sensibility vs. gesture.

  For though myself be a ful vicious man.

  A moral tale yet I you telle can.

  —CHAUCER, THE CANTERBURY TALES, The Pardoner’s Prologue

  Andrew St. Victor, our colleague and companion, has died in his final contact with the ice.

  Andrew, like J., is hooked to the yoke of his formidable history. I want to select a suitable name that can stand by itself. The pragmatic mystic Hugh St. Victor wrote, “Learn all you can. You will find later that nothing is wasted.”

  Another character, Regie, suffers more integrally than any of us. He is the only Jew in the group, but transcends it utterly in his writing.

  GREAT THUNKS in the night outside—pieces of ice breaking loose from corners of eaves and crashing to the ground.

  DEMANDING READERS expect you to spread a foundation of facts upon which you then construct the wildest fantasies.

  It is all ice here today. Andrew is dead. He died instantly, face down, on the ice.

  “He looked,” Regie told me this morning, “like Hamlet must have looked when he was drunk. God, Clare, you should have seen him, just before he crashed, weaving [along] the sidewalk, bottle of Smirnoff’s brandished like a family standard, shirt collar open, jacket unbuttoned.”

  “He weaves even when he’s sober,” I said. “It’s because he walks with his legs so close together. He bought that jacket at Harrods when he was fifteen. Do you realize he had it half his life? I tried to patch the elbows. It was a really nice houndstooth, but he abused it.”

  “A metaphor for himself,” put in Random, who had come over to my apartment to help me clean up the violence and begin making the whole thing into art. Hating ourselves as we went along.

  “I heard that,” said Regie, disgusted. “Can’t Random stop that? Christ, can’t he ever stop? Today. Of all days. I’m getting out. This place is sick.”

  “I know. You’re right,” I said. “God, I can just see him navigating that treacherous ice.”

  “We couldn’t get to him in time. We weren’t drunk enough to be as cavalier. He was rather magnificent You should have seen him.”

  I want to take some classics and personify them, such as The Wanderer—make the old warrior the hero of my story; or Beowulf—what really happened down below.

  “Andrew, or The Importance of Gesture in Fiction”—it’s also an answer to Coover, and an answer to why pure gesture is boring. You have to know who’s playing first.

  JANUARY 16

  Well, that’s the end of that story. Andrew doesn’t die, after all. Clare needed what he has. Also, it hurt me to hurt him.

  I get free tuition next year as well as the scholarship.

  This weekend, I’ll give my all to “The Motes.” I don’t want to write about me at the moment. Vulcan of the black shirt came in and solved my dragon story, “St. George,” for me. I still can’t talk to him completely straight, but I can see him much more as he is. The fact that I don’t follow “he is” with a colon and a typecasting is a hopeful sign. He’ll knock and enter now, and can give good advice, perhaps because he is removed from me emotionally, and can judge the writing.

  “I can’t give advice on that. I can only give advice on matters of taste, like telling a woman how to cook my meals,” he says, fetching the ashtray, in which his cigarette butt joins four of Jeremy’s.

  I wonder when his spell fell, or did it slowly work itself out of my system like a drug? First his warning, then our failure in bed when our defense armors clanked like mad, then my going away at Christmas, then his not being well, and his simply not asking me out. Necking at a party is not the same. Then Jeremy who really did touch me, my guts went out to his kindness, he took time with me, and we didn’t need to make war. The turning point came, I think, when on Tuesday, having lunched with Jeremy and seen Vulcan eating alone, I was able to approach him familiarly in the hall, pat him on the back, and talk to him without wanting anything from him. Vulcan said he was reading my stories slowly, and he was having his assistant read them. “She made me promise not to give them back until she’d finished.” He said, for the first time, “Oh, you do have a sense of humor.” I actually think what we have will last: a steady, uninvolved kind of low-key relationship spiced with a bittersweet flirtation.

  JANUARY 18

  The light in libraries.

  I finish “The Legacy of the Motes” tomorrow. I am getting back my touch, my style. The unconscious world is mingling with the rational. I must go terribly gently on the transition. He decides to take the summer off. He can’t stand reading. Say how he feels psychologically at this time, as if the balance had accrued on the other side and shifted the weights entirely.13

  JANUARY 20

  Vulcan comes to my office today: “I saw you get out of that car. What are you doing? How have you been?” I give him “Motes.” He brings it back at 1:30 and tells me, “I’m learning a lot about you from your stories.” “That’s all right,” I say. “You’re valuable to me. I can stand giving myself away for that.”

  JANUARY 23

  Jeremy’s long legs in Wellingtons, standing in a snowdrift beside the car. It’s hard for me to comprehend someone born at the top who spends the next thirty years climbing down.

  FEBRUARY 3

  Jeremy and I are two of a kind: wanderers, dreamers, snobs, neurotics, the kind who at one time or another, for different reasons, has been threatened by extinction. He wrote an outline for his novel. It was stunning, and I believe he may be better than I know.

  FEBRUARY 4

  On M-W-F, I teach a Core class at 12:30 and have Professo
r Spivak’s at 1:30. Jeremy has his at 1:30, so maybe 2:30 lunch? I write till 9:00 at the office and go home. On Thursday I have nothing, except Workshop at 4:30. On these days, write from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30. Use the evening to prepare for classes or write.

  I’m finishing up “Motes.” Difficulties. Here is a young man who has known nothing but scholarship his whole life. There is a security in this. Scholarship is conquerable. Then, just as he’s rounding out a future for himself, he gets these things in his eyes. The point is: They are not dangerous. But they are limitations on his vision that show/lead him to correct the limitations on his vision, figuratively. They act as correctives to his vision as well as hindrances to his scholarly habits. But it is a violent changeover. He has to learn a whole new way of seeing. He sees a better world through the motes than he did before or will after them.

  For the next month, my novel is my only responsibility. Jeremy will be thinking of his novel. I’m learning so much about why I failed in the previous drafts—my perfection thing turned against me. So, this is the novel I can write. It could be a great book.

  Rewrite the first five to six pages of the novel: more electrifying—hook the reader—more Gothic. Don’t name the places.

  The opening of Gail’s novel, ultimately published as The Perfectionists, kept going through changes. The earlier drafts begin in the taxi from the airport, and they dwell a good bit on Penelope, John’s patient, who’s come to help with nanny duties. The final draft starts in the airport and moves quickly to a mini-crisis: Dane momentarily losing sight of Robin, John’s little son, in the crowd. Here’s a comparison of opening paragraphs.