UNHAPPY WIVES AT THE OCEAN’S EDGE
I.
Sometimes, late in the night, she would go into the kitchen to get a glass of water and stand by the dark window listening to the sounds of the crickets, and sometimes she would hear the distant blast of a steamship passing around the key and she would experience a feeling which she could not put into words . . . it was something like the feeling of missing a friend or a train by five minutes.
Gull Key (unpublished manuscript, 1962)
LONDON, 1964
Time was running out. When I looked at my face in London’s mirrors, I was often startled that it wasn’t an old face. In my imagination I already inhabited my future and in this future I was about fifty-five and nothing dramatic had happened. I was alone and working at some menial job in an overcast city to keep body and soul together.
And yet my life after Chapel Hill had been studded with drama: On assignment for a Miami newspaper, I had spent the night in jail with a woman who had murdered her husband and I had flown on a navy plane into the eye of a hurricane. I had been fired by the same newspaper, been married and divorced within the space of five months, sailed to Europe on a freighter, lived in Copenhagen and the Canary Islands, and, for the last two years, in London, where I worked at a glamorous menial government job that Cousin Bill (the mayor from Weaverville) had helped me get. But I felt no further along toward my goal than that downcast younger self trudging across campus after the Knopf turndown and realizing I was simply that year’s model of a young person hungry for success.
But that wasn’t totally true. Out of the ill-considered Miami marriage had come a 210-page novel, Gull Key, my take on Madame Bovary but owing more daily details to Somerset Maugham’s Mrs. Craddock, whose heroine I felt closer to. Also Bertha Craddock read better books than did Emma Bovary. My novel had the added attraction of being set on the ocean—an island with a lighthouse, no less, which shared an ambience with Woolf’s novel, which I had studied in that intensive course at Chapel Hill.
In my novel, a new wife was trapped on this Florida island, already realizing that being married was not the same as wanting to be married. The manuscript of Gull Key had been composed on the best typewriter in my life so far, on the third floor of the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square during the slow summer of 1962, while the permanent quarters of the United States Travel Service (USTS) were being readied for us at the corner of Sackville and Vigo, off Regent Street.
“There was so much time to write on that third floor!” I reminisced to my new colleague, Dorothea, between customers at our handsome new office. Dorothea and I presided behind a counter on the ground floor, which we called the “Fish Bowl” because the showroom was completely glassed in. We’d asked our boss to have panels built beneath the counter so people couldn’t look up our skirts, and, gent that he was, he was crushed that he hadn’t thought of it himself. “While we were over on Grosvenor Square,” I told Dorothea, “most of our English customers preferred to write to us for information about travel in the States rather than come in person to the embassy, so I was able to finish my novel in three months. I don’t think Mr. Miller minded, because I always looked so busy.”
“Sharing their third floor with you for the summer must have driven the CIA crazy,” laughed Dorothea. “All these tweedy mums and dads bumbling into their inner sanctum by mistake: ‘Oh, I say, is this where I inquire about your ninety-nine-day bus ticket across America?’”
Dorothea had replaced my previous colleague, Pat, who had gone back to California to be married. Nixon, who had lost the presidential bid to Kennedy, had attended her wedding. Dorothea was a Radcliffe graduate who had campaigned for both Kennedy brothers when they were running for the Senate; now she was married to her English cousin, a psychiatrist, who made her bitterly unhappy. During slack periods in the Fish Bowl, we entertained each other with marital anecdotes. Dorothea’s husband woke her up one night because she had failed to replace the cap on the toothpaste. I told, exaggerating a little, how I had finally got rid of my husband’s overstaying houseguests by scheduling a fumigation by Orkin. Dorothea had read Gull Key and suggested I put in more humor. (“Like the stories you tell in the office.”) One publisher and one agent had turned it down. The publisher, a Scotsman, invited me to his office, which was right around the corner from our office. He gave me a whisky in front of a crackling coal fire and explained he published only military books now, “but you have a way with worruds and I would like to send this over to my Anglo-American friend, Ursula, who is a literary agent. Her cousin was the very popular American ambassador here during the War.” The Anglo-American agent, a gracious, soft-spoken lady in middle age, gave me a cup of tea in front of a space heater and told me I had a lively narrative gift, though she feared Gull Key would not do well with English publishers. She offered to have a look at anything else I might write.
Then November 22, 1963, came. It was midday in Dallas and suppertime in London. I was at my Chelsea boardinghouse sitting down to the evening meal with the other young professionals (later memorialized in Mr. Bedford) when Andrew (Alexander in the novella) rushed in to announce he’d just heard on “the wireless” that the American president had been shot. “But he’s still alive,” Andrew reported, “and they will know how to save him.” Then Dorothea was phoning me and asking me to get on the train to Dulwich and stay the night with her. The psychiatrist-husband met me at the station. By then Kennedy was dead and Johnson had been sworn in. We heard this on the radio. Dorothea’s husband suggested the three of us play cards, to keep us steady, I suppose, but at last he went off to bed and Dorothea plunged into an eloquent tailspin of homesickness and grief.
Soon after, she bolted from Dulwich and returned to America.
“Don’t stay over there too long,” she scrawled on a postcard from her new job at an American Express in Boston. “And don’t, whatever you do, marry an Englishman or a psychiatrist!”
I signed up for an evening fiction writing course at the City Literary Institute in Holborn. The teacher, Miss Irene Slade, was a lovely lady who worked for the BBC in the daytime. She began by reading stories to us in her mellow broadcasting voice. The first was an early story by Chekhov, “Anyuta,” and the next was “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” the first story Muriel Spark ever wrote, which won a contest, convincing her she could be a writer. Miss Slade had high standards. She returned my first story with a note that said I wrote very engagingly, “but unfortunately I could not see the forest for the trees. There are simply too many asides that divert the flow.” My story was about a quiet, middle-aged woman, sort of based on the Anglo-American literary agent, who works in a travel agency and sends others off to interesting destinations, but never goes anywhere herself. Miss Slade suggested that I write something from the point of view of a person “quite different from yourself,” and I wrote a story about a shy English vicar who meets God during a solitary walk. He writes a book about his experience, becomes an international publishing success, and hits rock bottom while lecturing at a girls’ college in the American South. Miss Slade loved it and asked me to read it aloud to the class. As soon as I began reading, I was overcome with snorts and guffaws and had to keep starting over to control my hilarity.
Afterward, a craggy, rumpled man who always carried his motor scooter helmet under his arm asked Miss Slade and me to join him at the pub next door. Within three months we were married. He was an English psychiatrist.
II.
He spoke in a low, persuasive voice, like a father or a teacher instructing children. His voice was years older than he was. There was something different about him. His craggy features, which could have been bucolic on another, were charged with a zealous, sensitive energy. His black hair had the carelessly combed look of a genius. His dark liquid eyes snapped and glistened from behind his glasses with the fire of one who has seen, and come back from, a vision.
For a long time, Dane had been on the lookout for, if not an actual vision, at least an event charged with meaning which would signal the turning point of her life.
The Perfectionists (1970, submitted in ms. as The Beautiful French Family)
IOWA CITY, 1968
Time had continued to run out, and though I had added a few more colorful chapters to my life history, I was no nearer my goal than that girl who couldn’t stop guffawing while reading her story aloud to Miss Slade’s fiction-writing class in Holborn. Well no, that wasn’t completely true. The story about the English vicar, revised many times during the year and a half of my bleak and peculiar second marriage, got me into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Kurt Vonnegut, my teacher, loved the forty-page story about the hellish Majorcan vacation of an English psychiatrist with his American wife and his three-year-old illegitimate son, who refuses to speak. It was called “The Beautiful French Family” because there was such a family, a reproach to my ill-matched family, staying at the hotel. “Nice,” “First rate!” Vonnegut penciled in the margins. (Though he also penciled in things like “sandbagging flashback!”)
“Should I turn it into a novel?” I asked him in a conference. “No, it’s fine the way it is,” Vonnegut rasped from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, his long, thin Hush Puppies propped on his desk. “Well, I decided to turn it into a novel,” I informed him in our next conference. “Hey, that’s great!” he said. As a teacher, Kurt Vonnegut was easy, magnanimous. He didn’t try to make his students into little Kurt Vonneguts. He respected material unlike his own and was startlingly humble about what he did. (“I write with a big black crayon,” he would write to me later, “while you’re more of an impressionist. I don’t think you have it in you to be crude.”) In his workshop sessions, things always seemed a little looser, a little kinder, a little funnier. In May 1967 he would leave Iowa on a Guggenheim grant to do research in Dresden for Slaughterhouse-Five, his novel in progress, but all that spring I chugged along in creative bliss. A writer I admired had given me the go-ahead. I wrote into the late night and early morning in my Iowa City rooms across the street from the jail, wrote about another wife on an island for whom marriage was not at all like she had imagined. I finished the novel in June, and a New York agent expressed an interest in representing it if I would rewrite it, which I spent the summer doing. But the agent was disappointed in the new draft and regretfully declined to take me on. She said it was too tendentious and not as appealing as the first draft. After looking up tendentious in the dictionary I thought I could smooth out any heavy-handed passages, but how did you go about putting back the appeal in something?
When you were down, it seemed, the insults piled up. Or maybe you were just more vulnerable to them. When I went to renew my driver’s license, the woman on duty frowned at it, then summoned an Iowa state trooper, who led me out in the hall for a talk.
“This birth date has been tampered with,” he said.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because. I didn’t want to be thirty.”
Thank God for the gift of tears and for kind state troopers old enough to be your father.
I gave the new (rejected) draft to my next workshop teacher, who promised to read it as soon as duck hunting season was over. In early December, he told me he had finally read it on a long airplane flight and hadn’t warmed to it much.
“Do you think I’ll ever make it as a writer?” I was desperate enough to plead.
“Gee, Gail, how old are you?”
“Thirty,” I humbly croaked.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, looking sad for me. “I was twenty-four when I published my first novel.”
After the conference with the duck hunter, I entered the Ph.D. program. If I could not be a published writer, maybe I could earn my living teaching literature until I was sixty-five and then I would decide whether I wanted to go on living. To prove myself to the English Department, I agreed to teach an early morning course, Greek Drama for Freshmen Engineers, which was the maverick idea of a tenured professor whom the other professors looked down on because he had written his dissertation on Baron Corvo. Having made a success of this experiment, I was awarded a scholarship and assigned to teach the conventional core lit courses. But those Greek plays, which I had read for the first time the night before bewitching the young engineers while the blood was still fresh in my mind, remained my consummate teaching triumph.
I abandoned the duck hunter for a new workshop teacher, Robert Coover, who announced on the first day of class that he intended to change the shape of American fiction. Students called him the Little Magician. The William Faulkner Foundation had just given Best First Novel award to his Origin of the Brunists, and his classes were stimulating and full of camaraderie. He passed out blue books. “Okay, here’s our setup for today: a fourth-century monk has discovered a new tale by Scheherazade in a codex. Write it however you like, from the monk’s point of view, or you can write Scheherazade’s tale . . . or parts of it.” I was very pleased with my exercise. Having fallen in love with Anglo-Saxon poetry and all things medieval in my graduate courses, I wrote from the point of view of a young monk on the island of Lindisfarne. His fingers are cold as he draws pictures in the margins of the manuscript. He doesn’t know anything about Arabs or Scheherazade, but he likes his drawings and decides to draw the brave little bird singing in the winter cold outside the walls of the scriptorium.
At the end of class the Little Magician collected the blue books, and the following week he passed out mimeographs of a compilation of the abridged contents, arranged by himself. My young monk had made the cut, but he was now part of a metafictional collage. The aim of the modern writer, Coover told us, was to subvert the traditional text and to challenge linearity. “If you as Author are free to take a story anywhere, at any time, and in as many directions as you want, isn’t that your obligation?”
God, no, I thought. But I asked him to read my novel about the unhappy Majorcan vacation: as my teacher it was his obligation. He read it promptly and told me it was publishable and urged me not to seek publication. “It will attract the wrong readers and you’ll be relegated to the domestic-social novelist slot.”
The conference with Coover somehow energized me, and I wrote two stories in a week. The first, “St. George,” was a contemporary story about a lonely graduate student, Gwen, who cracks an egg and finds a tiny dragon and tries to raise it in her apartment. The second, “The Sorrowful Mother,” was written as a tale about a nameless wife and mother who has sequential nightmares about being in a small boat with her husband and little boy and wishing them all dead. As the dreams intensify, she withdraws from her husband and child into a room of her own. When a subsequent dream reveals that they will die in the boat, she waits until they are out of the house and goes on a creative binge. Then she takes a lethal draft and smashes them all to pieces in her final dream. The husband and child return home to a dead mother and a houseful of loving drawings and poems and food.
“You thought I’d like the dragon story best, didn’t you?” said Coover, “but you surpassed yourself in ‘The Sorrowful Mother.’ You have taken this subject as far as it can go. It has a domestic setting, but it is not a domestic story.”
Later I will tell you the fate of this story, which was to become the much-anthologized “A Sorrowful Woman.”
As for “St. George,” it has had a long life as a Selected Short at Symphony Space, read by Jane Curtin (one of the founders of Saturday Night Live). It is available on a CD (Pets!) and was recently reintroduced by Stephen Colbert. For years I had shied away from recordings of my work because of the “southern accents” the producers made the actors imitate. But last year I finally listened to Curtin’s “St. George” (no southern accent) and laughed myself silly. It was astonishing how much an actor with great timing could bring to a written tale.
It was now the fall of 1968, and I wrote for long hours, sometimes late into the night, in my basement office at EPB, as we called the English-Philosophy Building. I had moved fifteen blocks north of campus to a nicer upstairs apartment in a beautiful old Victorian house, but it was too far to walk for meals, so I ate in the student cafeteria. I began a third draft of the Majorcan vacation novel, trying to make it less domestic and social. I got them through customs, then threw out the lifeless pages and treated myself to a respite of clean despair. I would do my job each day, teach my core classes, go to my graduate classes, fulfill my assignments, write my stories for the Little Magician, write because I couldn’t help writing, but live without publishing hopes.
In the morning I walked the fifteen blocks to EPB without publishing hopes and at night I walked back to the rooms that were laid out like those of Gwen the lonely graduate student who had fed St. George the dragon Woolworth pearls until he grew too big for the apartment. As the author of that story I had been able to resolve how Gwen could free a dragon the size of a small bear into a more suitable environment and get on with her life, but I couldn’t see a way out of my own dilemma. Writing had lived inside me since I was a little girl, and the need to write had continued to grow like a beast, but how to give it the room it needed and not become a bitter human being?