by Gail Godwin
From the May 1967 Draft, Titled
“The Beautiful French Family”
—
“All this light. One could easily drown in it, after London,” Dane said, frowning. She rebalanced the stiff little boy on her lap. “It makes you feel exposed.”
“Oh, I want to bathe in it,” said Penelope dramatically. “Absolutely bathe in it.”
The Spanish sun baked the little island, poured boldly through the rear windows of the taxi and impartially touched the four of them. The pale, preoccupied doctor moved his lips silently and constructed something in the air with his long, tapered fingers.
From the Second Draft, the One Rejected by
Gail’s First Agent, Lynn Nesbit
—
“All this light. One could easily drown in it, after London,” Dane said. She stuck her head partly out of the window of the moving taxi and let the dry golden warmth touch her face for a moment. “It makes you feel—”
She stopped, wanting the exact word. She shifted her weight a bit, so the stiff little boy sitting aloofly on her lap might be more comfortable. But he drew up sharply, looking inconvenienced. She turned to John beside her, to see if he’d noticed his son’s latest snub. He hadn’t. He sat staring straight ahead, moving his lips soundlessly and constructing something in the air with his long, tapered fingers.
From The Perfectionists
(Harper & Row, 1970)
The island made her feel exposed. Its colors were raw and primeval: scalding azure sky, burnt sienna earth, leaves of dusty green. The scrutiny of its noon light rooted out the skulking shadow, the secret flaw, and measured these ruthlessly against the ideal. It pained them at first, the people coming from London, which was still sealed in the gloom of winter. They edged sidewise from the cool, dimly lit charter plane into the spotlight glare. They blinked, became conscious of their pallor.
FEBRUARY 13
The novel becomes more and more Dane’s. I may retitle it “The Perfectionist.” I’m trying to catch those exact psychic vibrations. Those sickening quarrels. She is, as Jeremy says, magnificently destructive. She must refuse every attempt John makes at psychological closeness. Why? I understand the dangerous idealism—the acute criticisms because she wants him to be without fault, so that she’ll have him to hide behind.
Talked to Vulcan for over an hour. The freedom is immense. Now, where? When did it change? Perversely, when Jeremy became a possibility. We talked about our crass respect for money, the way we nitpicked at those we were close to, my masochistic fantasies, his sadistic ones. The thing Vulcan has left for me is his wonderful dignity. I do think he knows his dimensions and has accepted them.
I keep seeing Jeremy differently—now bits of the real him, now bits of my fantasy.
How can Coover be bored with interpersonal relationships?
FEBRUARY 16
Once again, the Lucifer bitch has been called in to save my skin. I’m trying to be fair to myself, as well. Uneasy night—anticipating drunken J. redisturbing my sleep; a dream about my students finding me unprepared and going on to educate themselves.
Vulcan teaches me how to behave socially at the country club. J. is in Waterloo, staying with the policeman who’d named his son after Jeremy. I talked with this man on the telephone. Infinitely strong, cool—a Rock of the World, a survivor. Yet, I’ll bet he’s impressed with J., wobbly as he is.
Do I prefer an aristocrat who poses as a down-and-outer, or a middle-class unsteady like myself who has developed an impeccable social manner?
What happened?
I took Jeremy with me to a party to which I’d been invited, given by the secretary to the chairman of the English Department. We sit down by ourselves, not wanting to crush into the mob. Vulcan comes in, remarks audibly: “There’s Gail Godwin, Girl Goddess.” He meets Jeremy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that last name,” Vulcan says. “Gail, I’m going to get another drink,” Jeremy says, “would you like one?” To Vulcan, “Would you?” We begin to have more fun. Kent comes over. He and Jeremy get along.
Sitting in a corner, I start playing with a puppet hanging up. I set him down—he’s a cowboy—and I aim the pistol in his hand at his head. Vulcan, who is standing quite close, suddenly reaches down and hits the puppet, disengaging its suicidal pose. A gesture—in the finest Coover tradition.
We get to the car. Jeremy says, “Oh, hell. Let’s go back.” I say no, we’ve already left. On the way home, I give a pep talk on the Henry James lifestyle: keep your dignity, etc. He was drinking that awful Calvados brandy. I tell him to throw it out. “I’m out of control. Can you help me?” he says. This makes me irritable and I start trying to reason things out. He says he doesn’t like my attitude. Says he has to get away. At this point I am
—scared I’m losing my security: the capable Jeremy:
—bewildered as to why he’s “out of control.”
I say: “You’d better not let me see too much more.”
“Okay,” he says, and stumbles out.
HOW FAR AM I ready to commit to this unknown substance?
I can use last night as a withdrawal point. If Jeremy can take care of himself, THEN is the time to consider can he take care of me.
A week later, Gail and Jeremy set up a new schedule. Though she’s still keeping her apartment at 501 North Dubuque, she sleeps at his house on Rundell Street and writes all day in his study while he sleeps. At this time, he was working four nights a week as a hospital orderly. In mid-March, Gail will give up her apartment and move into Jeremy’s house.
FEBRUARY 23 • Sunday
The writing going well. I work at Jeremy’s. There are no distractions, except for Jeremy’s cat, Virginia, who occasionally jumps smack into everything. Novels mean nothing to HER. J. sleeps all day. So on Tues., Thurs., Sat., Sun., I get up around 10:30, stumble around, [have] coffee, etc., and sit down to MY NEW TYPEWRITER around 11:00, and then write till 3:00 or 4:00. I averaged seventeen pages [a day] this week. I’m going right ahead, intelligently, meanwhile polishing up some of the roughage in the transition chapters, where I went to pieces after I sold the book. I want to go back and do the scene where Dane stays alone in the room, contemplating.
Oh, I wish I understood relationships. I suppose I have one with Jeremy. But there are no illusions. Maybe there shouldn’t be. He is kind. He comes off well socially. He is pretty good at getting along with me. I realize I’m a bitch. I think independent people who keep to themselves a lot don’t need to get a lot of things from someone else: amusement, etc. They have learned to amuse themselves. It is in the other realms—the things you have to share—that a partner comes in handy.
FEBRUARY 24
Ian used to say I was as expedient as a Nazi. At times like tonight I’m not sure. Am I too rough on Jeremy? Or am I “good” for him? So often now I hear echoes of those Ian-me impasses, only now I can understand slightly better. The Jeremy relationship combined with writing the final draft of this novel is really fortuitous. At times we “fight” the chapter I’ve just written.
MARCH 4
These next two months are too vital to mess up with my untalented love affair behavior. The thing is this: I’m behaving wildly badly. Dramatizing old patterns. It looks as though I’m doomed to some of this throughout my life, but the essential thing is to understand why. Then if I want to go on and do it, go on and do it. J. only goes mad periodically—and that’s so minor compared to mine. I think I’ll finish out Lent with a bit of austerity. My side in the thing with J. is too, too shaky. Maybe there’s no hope for me in relationships. I’ve learned over the years to balance by myself, but am not so good with someone else.
I screamed at Jeremy. Somehow I “acted” an anger I didn’t really feel. J. rose to the occasion, held my arm while I was having a tantrum in the kitchen. He looked good, healthy and whole. Always, there comes this lack of restraint on my part, this testing of the other. This dramatizing … of what?
MARCH 4, 196914 • 3:00 p.m.
Five pages of Dane in four hours—about a page an hour, with time out to eat a grapefruit, go for a bicycle ride, prowl around the house. This is about my maximum. I have approximately a hundred more pages to go. At the present pace, it will take two months, not one, to finish, then another month to type and polish. It is choppy in the new parts. Virtually all I have written this month is not only new, but difficult. I still don’t know what it is. If it has appeal, I guess it’s the kind of appeal Women in Love has. In spite of its flaws, it adds dimensions to man-woman relationships in the Western world. I’ve been told by John Hawkins that it is the woman (“You have gotten right inside this woman’s skin”) who carries the book. If so, then my prime function is to tell her truthfully. (“A magnificent destroyer,” in Jeremy’s words—a frightening phenomenon, but she is what she is, and what happens must happen as a result of it. Her actions can’t be judged morally.) Coover felt that my best direction—considering what he felt were the limitations of the novel in this form—lay in providing interesting incidents, one after the other, to keep the thing going. I am in pretty fair control now. I know these characters, what they are supposed to do for and to each other, how they act as foils.
What I wish I did understand better, although it doesn’t worry me unduly when I’ve been producing, is my perversity in personal relationships. Maybe I’m making too much of an issue of it, but some quality of it escapes me, and maybe repetition—making an issue of it—is the only way to get at it.
A pattern such as this: September to December 1968. Dreadfully lonely, lots of writing done, an unbalanced desire for comforts of home, never really comfortable in human terms except when in the tub. Hurry away in the morning: work, work until ten or eleven at night. Walk home, drop. Preoccupation with Vulcan begins mid-October, planted by Janie, who says he’ll do. And now a bit of sexual-interpersonal tension to alleviate the workday. AND an impetus to come early, stay later at the office. How I listen for his footsteps. How I grit my teeth. Curse. Ask the I Ching: Now? Is it now? I get used to being alone. Then angry one day—everyone but me going “home” to supper. Kent to Bev, Ace to Beth, Kim to the Condés—and hovering eternal and ever out of reach: the Caseys, the Caseys, Perle Mestas of the Midwest. At this point, I develop my “mead hall” image. And I take security in being the true anhaga15 out there in the astringent night amid Van Gogh’s swirling stars.
But decide to increase my creature comforts. First, sulfur bath salts. Then to Rock Island for $62 worth of liquor. Then a $16 pouf to rest my weary feet on. Sipping my morning Bloody Mary I am gratified. And here comes Coover, saying, “You—you of all people!” And the gossip drifts back he has said I was one of the three or four best, a brilliant mind. And there was Vulcan, who said, “Put on your jacket and I’ll take you to my place for a drink—if you promise not to attack me.” And Janie to tell it all to. And Hawkins, who, as an agent, has loved me. And the Morrow editor who wanted me but had only $250 to spend. And then popularity. I am “at home” in 68 EPB and sooner or later everyone finds me. Dinners with Kent, who drops nuggets of insight. Fights with Kent, who calls me a ball-crusher. I begin to think I’ll never be attracted to anyone physically. Except possibly Vulcan, who will only neck.
I begin to achieve an exquisite balance as the lone girl who doesn’t belong to anyone and therefore is anyone’s property. There are rumors. I’m a lesbian? Can’t have relationships? (Look at her latest story, “St. George.” Who the hell do you think Gwen is? She’s busy raising dragons, maybe. Wait, she is a dragon!) But she qualified for a PhD and sold her novel (Harper & Row, you can’t sneeze at that), so who cares what perversions she has.
And now: giddiness. Incredulity. It is WORKING. I’ve been accepted in N.Y. and Iowa City. Janie has her baby Maud, and I have a contract. And Vulcan says, of us, “Sure it would be nice, but you’re better than I am and it wouldn’t work in a thousand years.” So I’m still balanced in the single-star state, but the new air is intoxicating. Hurry home and be praised. Collect those debts owed from people like the stepfather, who has said for years to company, “Oh, she writes but she hasn’t published yet.”
Over Christmas in the Coles’ winter-rented house on Country Club Road while the latest of their brand-new houses is being built, I decide: Romantic love does not exist, except by collusion between two deluded idealists. (“If I could once, just once, perceive a person for himself and not in terms of what I needed from him,” said Lorraine at the Holiday Inn.) So, I think, I must mobilize. And at Christmas I talked myself out of Vulcan by writing loose pages and pages like this until I wrote him out of my system.
Back to Iowa, glad to be back, and the writing went soggy on me. Still interested in Vulcan—but now also Jeremy, who had driven me to and from the airport. I’m also irritated by the circumspect silence of Jeremy. Dissipated, you can tell. He is most likely hiding some unpalatable secret, just barely covering it up with the strange routine of his life.
So that is how it stands—the single star contemplating her satellites. But who should I bump into in the elevator, as I’m on my way to Kent’s office? Old Jeremy himself, really looking a mess. So far from my standards of neatness it’s not even upsetting. I consider him beyond repair and determine to explore the wreck. He is nervous, smokes, says he has no roots. He asks me mine. I think about it, and tell him, and I sound pretty good. After he goes, having (and it’s about time!) asked me to “see him,” I actually write: “I’m not neurotic anymore.” Oh, I am so serene in my balance. The next thing to want is to get him to kiss me. What will it be like?
He doesn’t. We float, poised, in our spaces. We pirouette, each for the benefit of the other. But each is wary, wants to prolong the tension. We make a further appointment to enjoy each other’s company.
But prematurely he surprises me one evening in my nightshirt. He shows up at my apartment drunk, mad at his stepfather. I indulge him, thinking: Let him have this as his excuse to visit. I am not afraid of him. He has shown himself to me in his vulnerability. He unbuttons the nightshirt. I am pleasantly aroused. This one is good—in an intuitive way as well as being there in all his virility. But also I think: This strange shadow-eyed wreck might possibly marry me—and the danger is, we’re both free to do it. I mention a farmhouse and he says he wants to send for his horse and live there with me.
He gives me his novel. I’m so afraid he won’t be D. H. Lawrence or Lawrence Durrell that I have trouble reading it. Single spacing hurts my eyes. Some of the writing wanders. Other parts shimmer, but always behind a veil.
Next night: Dinner at a sorority house, invited by one of my students. All my old uptightness about sororities, yet I really like the conventions of such a place. I come home. There’s I., waiting. He left a dinner engagement early because he was impatient to see me. Circles under his eyes are huge. Safety pin in his shirt. Maybe I can sew the wreck back together so that he’ll appear a whole man. But, as in an evil fairy tale, the more I sew, the more there is to sew. He keeps saying, “Come over here, closer.” I keep sewing. Holes keep appearing. Have another drink. Drink. Then mirez le bitch. I go into action, acting out the tenth year of marriage rather than the tenth hour of courtship. How can we hold up, this poor duo? How can we be a “we,” me feeling like I do. I say melodramatically, “Ah, why couldn’t it have lasted? The only reason you want to take care of others is because you can’t face taking care of yourself.” Oh, get rid of this wreck. Thirty years old and what has he got to show for it? Out, out. I talk on, mercilessly. He begins to cry. Goes. Comes back. Goes. I say, you can’t drive, you’ll have a wreck. But my heart is harder than Pharaoh’s. I can’t visualize him dead. Can’t mourn for his passing. Just: Out of my life. Out. Next morning, I go around destroying traces of him. Shake the rugs out the window. Bathe. Yes. He comes back to apologize, gets another print on the rug, leaves his ash. Go out, do something complete.
Now he’s out of my life. Better my phantom affair with Vulcan, my clean white walls, the bath. But it could have be
en nice. Bernie is sad, in that fulfilled way people always are—even the best of us—when their friends come to grief. He relates the gory details: the silent broken man, cat on his lap; remorse.
I try to write him (“Andrew, or The Importance of Gesture”) as having died. I mourn for him through my own flawed art. How does he look when he’s suffering? I want to see. Get him back. I call him. He hesitates. Last trick: I pretend to be crying, hang up the phone. Fifteen minutes later, he’s there. What do I want from him? Who knows? But I don’t want to give him up. We go to the Union for food. He looks ghastly, sleepless, like a mangled wraith. Failure. That destroyed countenance. If only we could have met as young and beautiful people. But where? He might have been at deb balls, but I wasn’t a deb. Can we only come together like this—haggard, sag-faced, our best energies spent?
So, still on my own (more or less), I limp along as part of this flawed couple. The minute something goes wrong, I’ll drop him. He has the advantage Ian had: He can show me to myself.
Schizophrenia sets in. Writing soggy. Can’t get back to the novel. Lean on J. I’m tired of the English-Philosophy Building. I’m tired of solitude. J. can help me hobble through the novel. Maybe he’ll make something of himself. If not, when we reach the outer banks, he will get his word of thanks. Thanks. Splash.
