The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963

Book by Godwin Gail

Part one

THE PREPARATION

Blowing Rock and Asheville, North Carolina;
Washington, D.C.; and New York

AUGUST 12—OCTOBER 4, 1961

On August 8, 1961, with a firm plan very much in mind, a restless twenty-four-year-old Gail Godwin had settled in her dormitory at Mayview Manor, a once-elegant resort in the mountains of western North Carolina. She had taken a job as a waitress at the resort to earn money for the European trip that would inaugurate her creative writing career.
“My room was on the top floor,” Gail now recalls, “and my bed looked out into the trees. The night was clear and spicy with wood smells. It was after the dinner shift and I had bathed and was drinking Hennessey eight-year-old cognac.”

She took out her eight-by-five-inch “Record Book”–which she has said was her “savings account and safety deposit box”–and wrote in a heartfelt way about her father getting drunk in his little brick house and falling asleep on the sofa. Mose W. Godwin was divorced from Gail’s mother, Kathleen, and Gail had spent some time nourishing his sense of hope as he supported her in her first year of college.

The memory would eventually find its best expression in Gail’s story “Old Lovegood Girls.”1 Presently, she penned herself some literary encouragement: “Stand by me oh noble holy inspiration. Let . . . me . . . do . . . it.”

Gail knew she was standing at one of the great turning points in her life. Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had left her hungry for knowledge and opportunity, and the loss of her job as a reporter at the Miami Herald had added both fear and fuel to her resolve. During this period, she had also been married to Herald photographer Douglas Kennedy and divorced five months later, and she was conscious that she hadn’t published anything except for a story in a Chapel Hill literary magazine and her newspaper stories.

The surest proof of her calling to a writer’s life was this persistent sentiment, expressed on August 20: “I want to be everyone who is great; I want to create everything that has ever been created.”2

1. Reprinted in the 2004 Reader’s Circle edition of Evenings at Five.
She wished, in addition to encompassing the world, to be one of its masterful explainers. This is the first revelation encountered in her journals: the extent of her aspirations. It characterizes everything she creates. In this light, her books are revealed as attempts to explore, through dialogue and drama, territory both uncharted and vital. Success in such a journey involves negotiating doubts and embracing risks.

The Gail Godwin encountered in 1961 is both urgently confident and relatively inexperienced. She has begun to survey her universe and to accumulate and organize her impressions. Reading is a key experience in this process, for by knowing what she likes and studying what impresses her, she is able to get a picture of what she, in her unique way, wants to fulfill. We join Gail as she is about to embark upon a remarkable journey.
2. Godwin shared this Faustian urge with Thomas Wolfe, with whom she also shared a hometown–Asheville, North Carolina. In an introduction she wrote in 1990 for a Book-of-the-Month Club reissue of Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, Godwin described her enchantment with his writing and her desire “to capture the whole history of the human heart,” as Wolfe had phrased it. It is also worth noting that when Godwin’s mother, Kathleen, had worked as a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times during World War II, she had been dispatched to the dead novelist’s home “whenever Mrs. Wolfe called up the paper to announce, ‘I have just remembered something else about Tom’ ” (quoted from “Becoming a Writer,” in The Writer on Her Work, volume 1 [W. W. Norton, 1980], a collection of essays edited by Janet Sternburg).

August 12, 1961

Mayview Manor3

Tonight I think I worked physically harder than ever before in my life. Letter from steamship company. Will I really make it to Europe? God, I am going to have trouble sleeping tonight. I will be setting tables all night long. When I left the dining room—limp as a reed, physically exhausted to the point of sheer exhilaration—as soon as the wind cooled my sweat and I had heard a few notes of music from the dance band playing upstairs, I felt free and whole again, completely at ease with myself and confident that I could make it down the hill and just about anywhere else I want to go.

August 14

Write Glamour magazine. Retype “Lazarus”4 and “I Always Will.”5 Be independent, do your job, be involved in your duty.

Rewrote eleven pages of “Lazarus,” existed through two meals, and swam across the pool four times. I have saved $200. I have made about $400. Should be able to get another $200 before September 10 IF I REALLY WORK.

August 15

The bovines will attend Montaldo’s annual fashion show and the models will priss and primp—including [the owner’s] niece with the kinky

3. Mayview Manor, a 138-room hotel built of native chestnut wood and fieldstone, made Blowing Rock, North Carolina, a mecca for the rich when it was established in 1921. The hotel was closed in 1966 and demolished in 1978.

4. “The Raising of Lazarus,” an unpublished story, imagines a turning point in the life of a playboy. Godwin had begun it in 1959. Although it moves overdescriptively toward a safe ending, it exhibits a number of outstanding features, including the detailed imagining of another person’s intimate life and the integral inclusion of music in a character’s mood and routine. Godwin has appropriated one aspect of Lazarus’s story—his management of a Miami hotel—for her new novel, Queen of the Underworld.

5. “I Always Will,” an early story, no longer survives as a manuscript.

hair and the giggle. I will be clad in dirty pink uniform, running my tail off to get the pretty ladies fed their cold fruit plates in the hot, hot sun. The ice will melt in the tea. Marva will do something asinine. My legs will twitch and my makeup will disintegrate. Little L. the chipmunk6 will grin out of the window and slouch against the door watching the fashion show, chompingly confident of his right to be there.
Mail “Lazarus” and “I Always Will” to Littauer’s.7 No matter how much you don’t feel like it.

August 20

“Lazarus” could be an epic. I think I shall send it first to Esquire. Why not? I have a disease. I am trying to think of a word to describe it. It is that I want to be everybody who is great; I want to create everything that has ever been created. I want to own everything that everybody owns. In short, I have a desire for universal acquisition. Just looking at an issue of Esquire arouses a hundred different hungers. I want to have written all the good stories, said all the clever things. I want to buy all the clothes, try all the gourmet suggestions, and travel to all the countries.

As the summer season at Mayview Manor comes to a noisy close, Gail’s journal dwells on the contrast between the ideal world of her imagination and the real world of resort society. Gail needed to be in both places—the ideal and the practical—but the call of the former was more seductive. The quality that bridges the two realms is refinement.

Refinement relates to how one engages with society. In this regard, Gail absorbs the advice of B., her friend and serious beau, about reticence and inner strength. Refinement also bears bitingly upon the affectations

6. L. was the young assistant manager at Mayview Manor.

7. Kenneth Littauer, a New York literary agent, in response to a query from Godwin, had said he’d look at her work. Godwin had turned to him after having sent another agent, Lurton Blassingame, a novel that she had adapted from one of her mother’s works—only to discover that Blassingame had previously represented the original manuscript for her mother. As it turned out, Godwin never sent Littauer anything.

and habits of the upper class, to which Gail, as a kind of Cinderella, has to cater at Mayview Manor.

In her life, Gail experienced being part of many classes. Her search for refinement sometimes leaves both the barbarians and the bourgeoisie behind.

The last aspect of refinement has to do with art and, namely, Gail’s writing. Magically, writing takes the other two types of refinement in hand. In society, Gail was training herself to observe, describe, and ultimately care for anyone and everyone.

Gail had to avoid falling into the observer’s trap—dispassion and, in extreme cases, vampirism (“draining” people of their secrets).8 A writer must find a way to take notes on his or her experiences while remaining a vital participant.

August 26

The girls are dropping out one by one . . . Seven left . . . We started with thirty-five. As soon as they clear out, their faces and voices fade from my memory as quickly as the little light which dwindles into nothing after you turn the TV off.

B. & I had a talk on reticence. I love the way he talks in outline. He doesn’t ramble and he doesn’t forget what he was saying.

“Each year I learn to say less and less.”
I came back to the room and scrubbed myself clean of all those people. It is good to be exposed to troglodytes and their truisms and their bad manners. It makes one aware of the many layers which must be piled one on top of the other to make a sensitive, self-respecting, and aware individual.
In one of B.’s letters he explained that women can’t accomplish security by marrying well and men can’t find it by settling down to a steady job.

8. At the time, Gail was writing a story titled “Bentley’s Girl,” which depicted a man named Bentley who drained people of their secrets while passively listening and nodding. His victims referred to him as a “terrific conversationalist.”

You get it through a long series of personal accomplishments. For some it is easier than for others. Others have to work harder, and yet the harder workers outdistance the greatly talented ones, and then one day you realize you’re carrying your own security in your own being. “If you can do it once, you can do it again, and so rises the indestructible pyramid.”9
It is too early to go to sleep (10:30) and there is a full moon and there is music coming from downstairs and flooding the trees outside my window. And tonight is one of those clear, mystic, confident nights when the words flow. The Rachmaninoff Third10 was coming through from New Orleans as I was driving back from work. I sat in the car and listened and stared at a light and thought, “I will do it, I will do it,” then this suddenly emerged as “I am doing it.” I am there. This summer has been a major achievement in my life. It has been an agony (which started off to mean “contest”).

September 3

Sunday

Marya Mannes11 says to look around a man’s apartment to determine what he is.

If he has Exodus & Advise & Consent on his shelves, Reader’s Digest on his coffee table, the usual ducks flying over the marsh at dawn on his wall, and Andre Kostelanetz in his album stack, you are going to hit bottom pretty quick.

On my many unaccompanied prowls around B.’s lair, I have found that he lives for comfort, for B., and does not surround himself with ar-

9. B.’s phrase “the indestructible pyramid” became such a key one in Godwin’s concept of independence and of a patient accumulation of experience and confidence that she used it as the conclusion of her first complete novel “Gull Key” (unpublished).

10. Sergey Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 has a Romantic, Peer Gynt kind of melody that, in Rachmaninoff’s hands, ends up sounding like a brave voice in a raging storm.

11. Marya Mannes, whose 1958 book More in Anger electrified the country with its satire, was a helpful guide. Mannes shared Godwin’s tendency to replace abstract character traits with the habits and possessions of individuals, judiciously observed.

ticles he does not use just because he thinks he ought to have them. His living room—good solid, heavy furniture, a magnificent desk, uncluttered and organized, a large color photograph of some beautiful golf course in California, pipes with leather bowls, white crème de menthe, vodka, Johnnie Walker. Milk, cheese, and month-old chicken salad in the refrigerator. Well-supplied kitchen. On his reading table (by his bed, not in the living room where everyone can see what he is reading):

the latest Sports Illustrated

Golf Is My Game

Goren’s point count

The Rise and Fall, etc. (which he is reading—“It makes me realize how uneducated I am compared to Shirer and Adolf.”)

Justine (which a girl gave him to read and he has not touched it yet)

the August issue of the North Carolina Diaries of Supreme Court Cases

He has no clock and wakes at will every morning at eight, cooks his own breakfast, goes leisurely uptown to work.

In his closet are several very respectably used sports jackets of tweed & corduroy (he has nothing ostentatiously new), a thick gray cardigan, a slew of good suits—tweed, Oxford gray, navy, etc. And, of course, his white navy shoes with the oil from the decks of the Coral Sea still on the soles.

And the three-foot shoehorn (“If a man bends down every day to put his shoes on, he is more likely to have a heart attack”).

And . . . his duck clothes brush.

September 5

Anyone reading this would think I had absolutely nothing to do besides be by this window and read and sleep and think and write in this book. Well, they would be right. I have never before had this much privacy coupled with security. For the next five days I have absolutely no worries. I have enough money, I am young, healthier than I have ever been in my entire life (I can tell from the way my blood throbs in my face), and I feel excellent when I wake up, I am clean inside and out. And tonight I stood outside on the de-awninged terrace and watched the after-rain clouds snuggle down between the ranges and thanked God for just letting me live. People like me, with antennae, sensitive, alert, and forever feeling, feeling—if they get through a certain period of life (thirteen to twenty-three) when everything hurts, then they embark upon a strange, magnificent epoch when everything is enjoyed—even pain.

And I must think of last September, about this time. How far I was from here! In spirit, in confidence, in every way, I came back from that navy reconnaissance flight into Donna.12 I was worn and haggard and dry mouthed and gritty eyed.

Gail on Getting Fired

During my months in Miami, from June through September of 1959, I was the bright young journalist-in-training. Even after I was sent to the Miami Herald office in Hollywood, Florida, Herald assistant managing editor Al Neuharth, who later in his career founded USA TODAY, phoned me one day to say, “You’re turning into a real newspaper gal. I hope your relationship with us continues for a long time.”

A few months later, I was “promoted” to the Herald’s Fort L...