by Gail Godwin
That winter, my mother received a flat brown parcel in the mail. It was from Craven Ravenel in Columbia, South Carolina. It turned out to be an old brown photograph, eight by ten, backed by cardboard, and wrapped carefully in lots of newspaper to safeguard its trip through the postal system. My mother scrutinized the picture, puzzled, then uttered a happy exclamation. There was a letter from the sender. He had been designing an addition for an old cottage on Pawleys Island for a client, and had happened to see this photograph, along with some others, on a wall of the cottage. He told his client he recognized the woman and the girl in that picture and thought the girl, who was grown up and widowed now, might like to see that picture. The client made him a present of it.
“That’s my mother,” my mother said, “and that’s her father and his old friend, who was the Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina at the time. And that little blond girl, looking bored, is me. I remember that summer at Pawleys. I was ten. It was the last summer my grandfather was alive. We all went out on this deep-sea fishing boat, and before we left, the captain took our picture. Then we got out in the ocean and I was sick over the rail, but everybody was real sportsmanlike and pretended not to notice, and after that I was all right again. I even caught a big fish. My grandfather had to help me pull it in, though.”
“You were exactly my age in that picture,” said Becky, studying the face of the girl religiously.
“Charlotte would send her regards if she were here,” Craven Ravenel wrote. “She liked you so much when we met at My Fair Lady. But she’s on a little junket abroad just now. We are separated, but very amicably. The girls visit back and forth between us. How are your two? I wish that you would write to me and let me know how you are.”
When my mother married Craven, after their long-distance courtship, conducted almost entirely by correspondence, we went to live in Columbia, and in the years that followed I became good friends with Charlotte. I liked her better than her daughters—although they were kind to their stepsister; they both seemed to feel it necessary to compensate for their mother’s outspokenness by being as conventional as possible. In a way, Charlotte was like Aunt Mona. They were both women who had gotten married early and then sometime later had decided they had a lot to make up for and couldn’t do it and remain the wives their husbands had married. Aunt Mona was trying to make up for not having had advantages in early life. Charlotte was trying to make up for having had too many advantages. They both did well. Aunt Mona made money, and traveled, and eventually bought a charming villa in Provence, where her twenty-years-younger French lover paints his Cézanne-like landscapes and awaits her with his affections and gourmet cooking whenever she can tear herself away from the real-estate business. I have been to stay with them several times, and they are amazingly compatible. He has very good taste in old furniture, and she has given him a free hand in the decoration of the villa. There are no seafoam-green carpets or plastic runners there. Charlotte took a law degree and went in for Legal Aid and liberal politics—to the chagrin of her ex-debutante friends. Although she recently lost in her second try for Congress, she gave her conservative opponent some sleepless nights, and she says she shall continue to “wave her red flag,” as she puts it, “in the faces of all those ossified old bulls I can’t believe I grew up with.”
“You were wearing a red dress the first time I saw you, in the lobby of that theater,” I told her on a recent visit. We were sitting on the porch of her farmhouse outside Columbia, sipping vodka tonics; she had been drawing me out in that effortless way she has, making me tell her all kinds of things about my life. “You were a bit formidable.”
“Oh, that was my lucky day,” she drawled in her merry contralto. “The day Craven discovered his true love was free, and could let me off the hook.”
“It couldn’t have been that simple, Charlotte.”
“Honey, I’m not saying it was. Craven admired me quite a lot. He still does. But our personalities were miles apart. I knew after a year of marriage that we probably wouldn’t make it to our Golden Anniversary. Craven would be so happy, you know, if he woke up one morning and it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Louise wouldn’t be too upset about it, either; especially not if Craven was there. Whereas I would feel really inconvenienced if such a nightmare occurred. But Craven and I tried; we worked real hard on our marriage. When we ran into you all at My Fair Lady, we had been trying to have ourselves the proverbial second honeymoon, but we were discovering it was just not going to work. Lord, were we kind to each other on that trip! What a godsend it was for Craven when Louise just appeared, like that; it was exactly the thing he needed to help me convince him to give up on us and let me go off and ‘do my own thing,’ as the young say now. And things have worked out pretty well for all of us, don’t you agree? Your mother and Craven will certainly celebrate their Golden, as surely as they live; and Craven couldn’t think more of Jem if he were his own son. And my girls are as proud of you as if you were their blood sister. And look at how my granddaughter Suzie drove up from Randolph-Macon to see you in that play, even though she and her friend could only get standing room. You are Suzie’s idol You’ll make it easier for her to get out, if she ever needs to.”
Yes, Charlotte, things have worked out pretty well for all of us.
Maybe it’s because things have worked out for me that I have the courage and the desire to go back to those days in Clove. (“It wasn’t such a bad time,” my mother was to say of it later. “I remember it as a sort of … pioneer period in my life. Despite sadness and uncertainty, it was … I don’t know … somehow exciting. Do you remember my job? The only job I ever had? I still remember how proud I was the day Barbara Feldman gave me a raise. Her husband was so pleased with us for not making a profit that year, and he could write the whole thing off on his income tax.”)
Maybe it’s because I’m more confident of my own powers now, not so afraid of losing myself, of being molded by other people’s needs of me, of being overwhelmed by them, that I can live in those strange, green days again and willingly be that girl. It sends a lusty surge of renewal through me to recall how completely I was able to be charmed and possessed by that woman. Such possessions are rare now. I mean by another person. The only thing that I can rely on to possess me continually with that degree of ardor is my work. Most of the time I consider this a victory. Sometimes, however, it makes me a little sad.
So, here I am, in the middle of my own life, almost the same age she was then. And it has taken me this long to understand that I lose nothing by acknowledging her influence on me. I can ride back and forth on that yellow school bus now, and stare steadily at the windows of that house, eager for clues that will tell me how she is going on. Fall turns to winter; the lamp is already on in the living room as the bus hurries through the afternoon dusk. Then, I was afraid of imagining in too much detail what she might be thinking or feeling or remembering in that house.
Now, my thoughts go forward to meet hers. I know something of life’s betrayals and stupidities myself; I know the ashy taste of not living up to some part of your dream. I even know the necessity for making constant adjustments to your life story, so you can go on living in it. She and I would have much to talk about now.
But I also know something else that I didn’t know then. As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished. I believe there is quite a good chance that Ursula DeVane, if she is alive today, does not consider herself vanquished.
Now I can say it, despite all that happened: I am glad I knew her. I only wish that she could say the same of me.
THE FINISHING SCHOOL
A Reader’s Guide
GAIL GODWIN
A CONVERSATION WITH
GAIL GODWIN
Rob Neufeld is the book reviewer for the Asheville Citizen-Times and director of the program “Together We Read” in North Carolina. At present, he is editing volume one of Gail Godwin’s diaries.
Rob Neufeld: One of the most distinctive featu
res of your writing is that you keep adding layer after layer of history and attitude to your characters and yet somehow manage to maintain the drama. Is this layering a method of yours?
Gail Godwin: The characters and the places have to be as real as possible. I have to know what the characters are seeing and thinking. I end up developing much more than I use, and sometimes I include passages that I later have to take out. When I started The Finishing School, I had gotten stuck in the opening on the story of how Justin’s grandmother had met her husband. My mother said to me, “I think you need to get back to the drama.”
RN: The Finishing School is just a little over three hundred pages. That’s a nice length for a novel, don’t you think?
GG: I wish I could make the novel I’m working on now that length because I love that length. Father Melancholy’s Daughter was over four hundred pages, but it didn’t feel like it. With my Christina stories [autobiographically based stories that have contributed toward Evenings at Five and other pieces], I’m building one large work that I’m calling The Passion of Christina.
RN: The Finishing School, along with Father Melancholy’s Daughter, are two of the most cohesive yet complex novels I’ve ever read. There are many great novels that aren’t so much of one piece. They have hinges that show. How do you make a long novel that has the continuity of a short tale?
GG: I have been pulling out big chunks of the novel that I’m working on presently—Queen of the Underworld—in order to reposition them or break them up into absorbable pieces. My goal in this novel is to sustain three months of the heroine’s experience, seeing how her mind works—with no foreshadowing allowed. I want the reader to be there with her. I don’t want any sidetracks to slow down the journey, which is very much of-the-moment. Sometimes, I am amazed at how much I discard from my drafts—months of work, including long forays into flashbacks. I ask myself, What is the trajectory I want? Can I put the information across without what Kurt Vonnegut used to call my “sandbagging flashbacks”?
RN: Could you talk a little more about the process by which you maintain continuity?
GG: I make diagrams of my novels with a ruler. I turn a page sideways and write the name of my novel on top. Then, I take a ruler and draw vertical lines to make ten divisions and a horizontal line to make twenty for the number of chapters. I start planning what happens where. If I have a character offstage for too long, I know I have to bring him or her back. I’ve done this with every novel I’ve written since The Perfectionists. It takes me two, three, or fours years to complete a novel. Over that period, you tend to lose track of things, so you have to keep refreshing yourself. I also write myself blue papers (after the kind of paper I’d once used in my typewriter). They’re sermons or pep talks to myself: “Well, Gail, you think you’re stuck. Why? You have a party with thirty Cuban exiles at it. What are they doing? You just have to get to the party and start anywhere—with the food, anything.” Writing The Finishing School, I knew how many chapters it would become because I made notes of which scenes would go where. Since Justin hangs on to Ursula’s every word, I knew I could have Ursula dole out her life story in bits anytime anything suggested something.
RN: Are discarded parts the seeds for other novels and stories?
GG: The one I just threw out was based on something that happened to me at St. Genevieve’s [school]. It was about trying to talk with Cubans. I was sorry to lose it. It was twenty pages long. Then I thought, This would make another good Christina story.
RN: In the beginning of The Finishing School, Justin reveals that Ursula DeVane has “claimed a permanent place in the theater of my unconscious.” Theater is an important concept for you. Madelyn Farley, a key character in Father Melancholy’s Daughter, is a theater designer. Justin Stokes becomes a stage actress. In what ways does the theater of the unconscious resemble theater?
GG: There is a finite stage in the theater of the unconscious. There is a finite number of actors—not fifty, but only five or ten. The story crystallizes into figures of necessity. The drama must be riveting, and the setting has to be a place where you’d want to live for a few hours. Then, there are certain sets that you return to again and again in your imaginative theater, like recurrent dreams. I have Asheville sets. One is St. Mary’s [Episcopal Church]. One is St. Genevieve’s. They don’t represent themselves. They represent points of growth. They stand for attitudes and challenges. You can learn so much from dreams.
[After a couple of moments of silence over the phone]
GG: My cat is vocalizing.
RN: Is that the cat [who becomes a protective spirit in Evenings at Five]?
GG: That’s the cat. I named him Bud in Evenings at Five after my friend, a Jungian analyst. The cat’s real name is Ambrose.
RN: There’s so much fun in the world, isn’t there?
GG: I know it!
RN: Later, I’ll want to talk about your sense of humor. Now, let’s talk about your sense of realism—particularly, how you represent what goes on in people’s minds. Aren’t people’s thoughts at any moment a big mishmash?
GG: Not so much a mishmash. The actual process of thinking has a tempo of its own. It moves very quickly. Try tracing back your present thought to the thoughts that had initially led you to it. At first, you think you’ve gone through some astonishing non sequiturs, but I believe you’ll usually find that they are all ordered in some way. One thing leads to another and you discover patterns. Everyone has his or her very own cloaking pattern. This kind of pattern—which is like storytelling—may involve a tempo, a costume, purposeful omissions, and intuitive progressions. The subconscious is your ally in coming up with fictions.
RN: Ursula DeVane says that her mother haunts her. Is a person’s mind a scary thing?
GG: A person’s mind is full of ghosts, and the main ghosts have real resonance and real power. They have vibrato. Think of how much you’d know about a person if you knew the main ghosts that haunted him or her.
RN: What kind of an adventure is it to create a character and go into his or her mind? Do you see that as an adventure?
GG: That more than anything else is what keeps me wanting to write—to get to understand the mind of anyone. José Ortega y Gasset calls it transmigration into other souls—seeing a situation from the other’s point of view, or trying to. Barbarians don’t do it very much. It’s hopping into someone else’s being and living another life.
RN: On your Web site, under “tips for writers,” you suggest that a person write a story first in the style of Ernest Hemingway and then Anton Chekhov. What would it mean to write a story in the style of Gail Godwin? You seem particularly interested in the idea of transmigration. Justin “becomes” Ursula and “becomes” her fourteen-year-old self. Empathy is important to other characters as well. Justin’s grandfather “becomes” the slaves.
GG: And the snake!
RN: That’s a good trick! At any rate, do you acknowledge that kind of empathy as one of the distinctive features of your work?
GG: Yes. In the novel on which I am now working, Queen of the Underworld, the heroine is a young newspaper reporter in Miami, and she’s staying in a hotel with Cuban exiles. One of the exiles had been an owner of a sugar plantation, but now he’s at the front desk. He doesn’t speak much English. It’s interesting to notice how being an exile changes the way one moves. Your whole posture changes when you don’t speak the language. The reporter then imagines herself in another country as an exile. It’s an exercise in empathy for her.
RN: How do you go about becoming someone else?
GG: I usually start with visualization. I see other people—what they’re wearing, what their gestures are—going onto a train, going into a restaurant. They’re coming in thinking what, I wonder. With Aunt Mona, my first thought was, What kind of person would be the opposite of the kind whom Justin has been raised to admire—someone who is not reserved, who talks all the time about starting with nothing? Then I ask, What would she be like? How would she move, how woul
d she furnish her house? It occurred to me that that character would be Justin’s aunt, and Justin would have to go live with her—with a person who would not have been admired in certain circles in Virginia. Then, I had to visualize Aunt Mona—her birdlike qualities, her earrings. At a house I’d visited once, I had seen plastic paths laid down so you wouldn’t have to walk on the rug. I thought it was bizarre and touching at the same time because it said, “I’m not used to having things that are expensive.” Eventually, I start hitting the levels where I become the person. For example, I see Mona’s sterling qualities. She’s a fighter and wants to better herself. She’s quite generous and warmhearted.
RN: That’s a good acting method. Are you an actress?
GG: Robert [the late composer Robert Starer, Gail’s companion for many years] told me I was.
RN: At one point Justin says about Becky, “One day … I am going to crack the code of Becky.” Is Becky’s story waiting to be told?
GG: Becky’s, no. But there is a certain kind of character who has fascinated me throughout my life—a quiet, inscrutable person who appears to have who-knows-what going on inside. I met a model of this Becky when she was three—and now she’s thirty-two. I can see how she’s doing.
RN: At the end of The Finishing School, you suggest that having multiple personalities—or at least acknowledging them—is the secret to sanity. Going through transformations and acknowledging multiple personalities makes Justin whole.
GG: Yes, I agree. Justin does keep transforming. Being able to acknowledge having many personalities goes against the picture people have of themselves. The trouble with the phrase “multiple personalities” is that people think of cheap movies. You know, the doctor helps someone get rid of all the personalities except one, and that one survives, and then the person is healthy. We need another phrase. I like to say internal cast of characters.
