The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963 by Gail Godwin

Author:Gail Godwin [Godwin, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Diaries & Journals, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, Fiction, Literary Figures
ISBN: 9780307432421
Google: G2E3Ps1gFVEC
Amazon: B000SIZ5N6
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

And that’s about it.

James came by bringing a Christmas gift, a Scots beret. We spent Xmas Eve Day together, inflicting our silences on each other.

The upshot of all this is that I see that I haven’t progressed as far as I thought.

Part eight

MY FATHER’S SOUL

Green Street, London

JANUARY 2–FEBRUARY 16, 1963

As this chapter in her journal opens, Gail finds herself alone in her “hermitage” on Green Street after having cleared away the traces of holiday parties. Her situation demands creative output, yet the project on which she has labored, “Gull Key,” seems wrong. She needs to decide whether to continue working on “Gull Key” or to seek a new project.

Gail Godwin has said in interviews that she lives constantly in the shadow of failure, and it seems that her interviewers have misunderstood her attitude. It is not modesty. It is combativeness. Trap Godwin in an emotional, circumstantial, or writer’s block and watch the reaction. She redoublesher ingenuity to find a way out, making sacrifices.

Gail’s most remarkable embarkation happens on February 9, after she tells herself, “I must not take second-best plots, almost-stories. All my heroes& heroines must be looking for the main root. Not, not an offshoot, a facet, but the mainspring.” The injunction comes on an auspicious day, which she marks in her journal as being the fifth anniversary of her father’s death by suicide.

She then produces a story about a college girl’s trip to a priest to reveal her anguish over the suicide of her father and the fate of his soul. Looking back on the swirl of Gail’s concerns, experiences, and e forts in early 1963, it is easier now than it had been within the moment to see that the father-story was the one that was ready for expression.

Gail’s postholiday solitude in her Green Street lodgings re-creates the circumstances of her aloneness at the University of North Carolina duringmidterm break, when she had had to digest the news of her father’s death. The vacuum, by itself, invites spirits.

JANUARY 2, 1963

No. 5 Green Street is once again a hermitage. The party glasses are washed, all my possessions are in place, & there is only the ticking of the clock, the rumble of the underground to keep me company.

I had a New Year’s Eve party & it was a fabulous success. No one went home senseless. James, drunk in a cool invisible way, sang “Beale Street Blues,”258 many verses, with a voice fashioned from the incredible will that comes with alcohol. He just got promoted to secretary of the Rank Organisation. He was complaining bitterly, but was secretly flattered. Whenever I hear the bagpipes, I’ll think of that night—for we had a real piper & the men in skirts almost outnumbered the pants.

Now I am here again, working toward that unconquerable soul B. preaches.

Ah, I have borrowed too long.259 I must get my thoughts in order.

I am rewriting “Gull Key,” salvaging a small bit of it, keeping the framework, illuminating characters & adding others.

Is Gull Key a place or a state of mind?

Reading over the other, 260 it seems so simple and shallow.

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