Gail Godwin - The Making of a Writer, Volume 2: Journals, 1963-1969

Also by Gail Godwin

NOVELS

Unfinished Desires (2010)
Queen of the Underworld (2006)
Evenings at Five (2003)
Evensong (1999)
The Good Husband (1994)
Father Melancholys Daughter (1991)
A Southern Family (1987)
The Finishing School (1984)
A Mother and Two Daughters (1982)
Violet Clay (1978)
The Odd Woman (1974)
Glass People (1972)
The Perfectionists (1970)

SHORT STORIES

Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983)
Dream Children (1976)

NONFICTION

The Making of a Writer: Journals, 19611963 (2006)
Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life (2001)

Copyright 2011 by Gail Godwin

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group. a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from Dream Children by Gail Godwin, copyright 1976 and copyright renewed 2004 by Gail Godwin. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Godwin, Gail.
The making of a writer : volume two /
Gail Godwin ; edited by Rob Neufeld.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60438-9
1. Godwin, GailDiaries. 2. Novelists, American20th centuryDiaries. 3. FictionAuthorship. I. Neufeld, Rob. II. Title.
PS3557.0315 Z 468 2006
81354dc22 2005044929

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design: Anna Bauer
Jacket photograph: courtesy of the author

v3.1

To

Kathleen Krahenbuhl Godwin Cole

(19121989)

Mother / Writer

O ur hope from the beginning of this project has been to trace through these early journals the soon or never trajectory in the life of an aspiring writer.

When, when will mine eyes find the light? Prince Tamino beseeches the priests in The Magic Flute. Soon, soon, Youth, or never, comes the ominous choral reply. Which pretty much sums up the tension in Volume 2 of The Making of a Writer: Am I going to get to do what I want to do more than anything? Or will it be a case of my having wanted what could never be?

This second and final volume of The Making of a Writer contains entries from journal notebooks dating from July 23, 1963, to July 6, 1969. The journals in Parts 1 through 5 were written in England; those in Parts 6 through 9, in Iowa City, Iowa.

Volume 1 of The Making of a Writer, published in 2006, opened in the summer of 1961, when, at age twenty-four, after two staggering personal and professional failures (one of each), I started over as a waitress in order to earn money to travel abroad and become a writer. Volume 1 broke off in midsummer of 1963, in London, on a note of reassertion and resolve, although with no concrete proof of my having yet accomplished anything.

Volume 2 of The Making of a Writer continues in the London of 19631965, when I am asking myself whether or not I have overstayed my time in this fascinating city, then suddenly changes gears with a precipitous marriage to an English doctor met in a fiction-writing class. Volume 2 ends in Iowa City, with me as a soon-to-be published novelist.

Apropos of the soon or never cusp, I remember a poignant walk I took with my mother on a visit to Asheville, North Carolina, from Iowa City at the end of the summer of 1968. I was thirty-one, twice divorced, and had been a student in the Iowa Writers Workshop since the spring of 1967. Now I was working toward a doctorate in literature and supporting myself on a teaching fellowship while yearning (a feeling often closer to despairing) for the day when I would be a certified writer, i.e., published. At the end of that summer semester, having passed my Old English exam, I boarded a Greyhound bus and went home to my best friend, my mother, Kathleen. As far back as I remembered, both of us had yearned to be novelists.

I say be novelists, as distinct from write novels, because, at the time I am speaking of, the day of the walk, we had completed seven novels between us: three each and a shared one, entitled The Otherwise Virgins. She wrote the first version, and after shopping it around for several years, bequeathed it to me when I was a junior at Chapel Hill. I still think its a damn good story, she said. Take it and see what you can do with it. I kept the plot and the three womens points of view, updated the college campus from postWorld War II to postKorean War, added my own quirks and sensibilitiesand got off to an inauspicious start by sending it to the same agent who had rejected the first version and remembered the plot and the title. This shared novel, along with our other unpublished novels (including two later ones she wrote), is now in the Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I still think The Otherwise Virgins is a damn good story. I wish I had a hungry young writer to whom I could say: Take it, with my blessing, and see what you can do.

Now, on this afternoon walk, through neighborhood streets of my mothers childhood and mine, we were again talking about the elusive and inexhaustible subject of writing.

On the bus trip from Iowa I had read Colin Wilsons funny, short autobiographical novel Adrift in Soho, which chronicled the apprentice years of some young would-be writers, artists, and anarchists hanging out with one another in postWorld War II London. And now Mother was reading it, and on our walk she was telling me all the things she was enjoying.

And you know what I love most? she said. Some of them are so close to what they want to do, and they dont know how close. But we do.

Gail Godwin

P art one

THE DRAMATIC SELF

London
JULY 23, 1963, TO SEPTEMBER 30, 1963

I n the summer of 1961, twenty-four-year-old Gail Godwin dispatched herself to Europe to become a writer. Having shed both a marriage and a journalism career, she hung her financial well-being on the promise of a job with a soon-to-open U.S. Travel Service office in London.