by Gail Godwin
Woman next door mowing lawn. Is there any better smell? It would make one delay suicide.
Gail then makes a list of her completed stories, seven of which will be published in magazines, and one, “His House,” in Coover’s anthology with Merker’s Stone Wall Press. There is yet no inkling of what would be her second published book, the novel Glass People.
Sorrowful Woman
Blue
Uncle
St. George
Illumined Moment and Consequences
Legacy of the Motes
Liza’s Leaf Tower
The Dandelion, a Hardy Soul, Far from Its Proper Home
His House
Some Aspects of Time Travel
The notion of being dead, all except for one’s mind and spirit—something I want to pursue.
RE “NICOLE”: What things about an absent wife would fascinate me? Healthy ego. Someone who is supremely herself. She has ESP. She’s a good mother. Plays with her children.
WATCHING THE “GIRLS” PLAY. Jeremy’s Virginia and my new kitten. Flannery. The little one is like a cartoon cat. They provide our life here.
JULY 6
I try not to worry about this writing trouble. Maybe I am developing. Also, there is no longer Coover to impress and rebel against. Tomorrow, I must make some headway. “Nicole” is basically a good story. I’m just not sure about the form. Also the woman is not as fascinating as I would like. In addition, I’m terrified I won’t finish it. I think I’d better get back to the source. What was truly interesting about the first story I wanted to tell?
Jeremy in to lecture me on my pessimism.
Rain … rain … rain.
I HAVE BEEN too damn lazy.
1. Gail will put a reference to Persona into a scene just preceding Polly’s visit to Dane. Dane is contemplating joining her stepson, Robin, in judgmental muteness, and she recalls a movie: “One time she had seen an Ingmar Bergman film about a woman who wouldn’t talk. She drove everyone around her mad—including the nurse.”
2. Gail did include the purse-cleaning scene in her published manuscript. In one paragraph, she characterizes Dane’s life through fourteen garbage-bound objects found in the purse, including the tennis ball she had forgotten to give Robin.
3. In Sons and Lovers, Baxter Dawes is the estranged husband of Clara, with whom the reeling hero, Paul Morel, is having an affair.
4. Gail is questioning her development of the seemingly judgmental, mute, tantrum-throwing boy in The Perfectionists.
5. Junius Adams had been the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, and loved the “St. George” story. Yet he wanted Gail to add a human love interest at the end. Gail gave Silas his chance: he freed the dragon and came back for his reward.
6. Gail has been contemplating a story based on Uncle William, the bachelor judge, for many years. The story would turn toward a young girl whose mother engages in a “protecting marriage” with the fictional judge.
7. Gail will not include the “I would have made a good God” line in her final work. Instead, she has John talk with Polly about astronomy and physics—collapsed stars and relativity. The second topic opens up Polly’s wish for an alternate existence.
8. In the published book, it’s Dane’s task to pour the water, which she refuses to do for Robin because he’s pointing and not speaking. Karl is involved in serving Dane a glass of Dubonnet and rubbing Penelope’s leg under the table.
9. Once again, Gail ponders writing about her friendship with Lorraine O’Grady Freeman and about Copenhagen.
10. In exploring the white girl’s background in her new story idea, Gail goes to an eleventh-century woman, Eagdyth, granddaughter of Alfred the Great; daughter of Godwin, Earl of Wessex; childless wife of Edward the Confessor; and, later in life, a nun.
11. The impetus for this story will lie dormant until 2009, when Gail begins her fourteenth novel, Flora, about an eleven-year-old girl and her companion-tutor living alone on top of a mountain in the summer of 1945, while her father is away, engaged in secret work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
12. The dedication is to Gail’s mother: “To Kathleen Krahenbuhl Cole.”
13. These two readers identified with Dane, a sympathetic protagonist, who, however, is presented as being monstrous.
14. Gone a Hundred Miles, published in 1968, was Heather Ross Miller’s fourth book. A previous novel, Tenants of the House, won the top North Carolina fiction award—the Sir Walter Raleigh Award.
15. Peter Neill published the novel, A Time Piece, with Grossman Publishers, a Viking imprint, in 1970.
16. Nolan Porterfield published the novel, A Way of Knowing, with Harper’s Magazine Press in 1971.
AFTERWORD
The final entry of Part 9, “Completion,” ends with a self-scolding. The thirty-two-year-old diarist, whose first novel is now scheduled for publication, is dismayed that she can’t plunge right into a second novel. She can’t even begin a simple story. She’s uncertain about the form the story should take, and the fascinating character has ceased to fascinate. Suddenly she is afraid. What if she starts a story and can’t finish it? She concludes that her biggest problem has been laziness.
She will continue to scold herself for this failing during the next forty years of her writing life just as she will continue to keep diaries that chronicle the drama of a self trying to figure out how to live.
And so we come to the completion of this two-volume project, begun when Rob Neufeld agreed to help me shape the journals of my apprentice years (1961–1969) into something useful for other writers, not only those starting out but those committed for life. “I know with what kind of hunger certain people go to writers’ accounts of their development,” Rob wrote to me, after I had sent him the first two notebooks covering my 1961 waitressing summer in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, followed by the October freighter voyage and my first months in Copenhagen with a rented typewriter. “I can see that you offer a number of things—first an opportunity to identify with an emerging writer … and then there are the life choices, also critical and dramatic. There’s so much more—commentary on other authors; examples of ways to sketch character portraits; good writing clues; witticisms; concerns about fleeting time, self-traps, and the writing market; insights into themes and motifs in your work; and connections to projects that might bear fruit in various forms in future works.”
I hope these volumes have kept you company in all the above-mentioned ways and that they have emboldened you in your pursuits. I’ll never forget the surge of resolve I felt, in the early 1960s, when reading some advice from Isak Dinesen. I can’t quote it verbatim, but her message to other writers was this: If you keep working on something faithfully, even without hope, one day the work will get itself finished. And only this morning, I was heartened by this passage in Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary (the same paperback copy I was reading on the banks of the Iowa River in the fall of 1968): “I am old; I am ugly; I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.” She wrote this on Saturday, March 20, 1926, when she was all of forty-six.
I am only now writing out my mind. What a wonderful goal to reach!
Recently, after my friend John Bowers (whom you’ve encountered in these pages) gave a reading from his new novel, Love in Tennessee, I asked him how he had achieved such a fearless narrative tone. “You write,” I said, “as though you weren’t afraid of anything.” Always the modest humorist, John replied: “It’s simple, Gail. I’m old now and all these people are dead. They won’t mind if I re-create them for the purposes of my story.”
Four years ago, a Jungian analyst asked me, “What would you write if you weren’t afraid?” This happened to be during the time when I was culling my 1963–1969 journal notebooks to put together volume two of The Making of a Writer. Browsing through the dispiriting fall days of 1968, I came across the October 2 dream of entering a house “where my future was” and discovering in its basement a single thin volume of my work e
ntitled Unpublished Prosperity: Nine Essays.
This long-ago dream, recorded during one of the low points of my life, inspired me to begin a new kind of notebook, a dark sidekick to my traditional journals. In this notebook, which I call Unpublished Desperations, I practice “writing without being afraid.” I pen umbrages and screeds, brazen out essays about things and people that haunt and baffle me, make up stories reimagining or exploding my past, coax dead people into arguments and dialogues. In these pieces (“Vicious and Holy,” “Scared in Woodstock,” “Your Loss, Not Mine,” “Work on What Has Been Spoiled,” “The Naked Nun”), I dig under rocks and find unlikely treasures, some of which I have been able to transfer, still wriggly and wet with life, into published work.
Thus the writing life goes on: the steady chronicling and keeping track, the digging and unearthing, the reshaping and the using up of the material that is yours alone, until you realize you have been—for how long now?—writing out your mind.
Gail Godwin
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Rob Neufeld for his sagacious editing of the 1961–1969 journals for The Making of a Writer. If the diarist wrote an entry about a Dinesen story or a Camus essay he wouldn’t commit himself to a comment or a footnote until he, too, had read it. His footnotes are a cultural history in themselves. The Lord Mayor of London, Christine Keeler, Chief Spotted Back, the 19 and 22 bus lines, the Bisley shooting range: They meant something to the diarist, but the present reader needs to be apprised of the who and the what in order to appreciate the why.
When Jane Toby began transcribing the handwritten journals on to disks in 2004, I would go carefully through each notebook, marking in blue ink the passages to be typed and instructing her to “skip over” the rest of the material. But after a while we achieved such empathy of purpose that I started giving her the notebooks unmarked. I found that I got a better perspective on the project if she transcribed the entire notebook for me to edit on screen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GAIL GODWIN is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels, including A Mother and Two Daughters, Violet Clay, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband, Evenings at Five, and Unfinished Desires. She is also the author of The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963, edited by Rob Neufeld. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has written libretti for ten musical works with the composer Robert Starer. She lives in Woodstock, New York.
ROB NEUFELD is a librarian and a book critic for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He founded the Together We Read program for Western North Carolina.
