The Finishing School (48 page)

[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 would 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.

RN:
Can Justin accept the fact that one of her personalities—or internal characters—is a monster and still be okay?

GG:
If Justin can recognize that then she’ll be able to put it in its place. We all have monsters. Justin’s monster is the ability to close down when she feels herself threatened or being turned into something against her will.

RN:
Let’s talk about how you set the stage for your stories. In
The Finishing School
, you have a kind of score. Chopin’s Scherzo in B-flat minor and Franz Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger” play important parts. How did these pieces come to you?

GG:
The most important piece is the one that Julian plays as an all-clear signal. I heard Robert play that, and it’s diabolic. It summons trouble. Also, it’s very hard to play. Above the sound of gathering force, there’s a cascade of relief. I chose it intuitively.

RN:
Would you be opposed to the book’s being published with a soundtrack?

GG:
It should be. My late editor, Alan Williams, when he called me to talk about
The Finishing School
, played the Scherzo and then came on to talk. Music can express many things that words cannot. Do you know the story “The Jolly Corner” by Henry James? A man comes back to New York and haunts his family’s town house in order to confront the ghost of who he would have been if he had stayed. James’s description of the climactic moment—the meeting of the two—doesn’t work. The ghost comes downstairs and he’s missing two fingers, which is supposed to represent that he had become a powerful business mogul. Music could have made it work better. For an eerie effect, you could tune violins up one whole tone, for instance.

RN:
How have you collaborated with Robert on musical compositions?

GG:
We created twelve works together, including operas.
Magdalen at the Tomb
and
Anna Margarita’s Will
can be heard through links on my Web site,
www.gailgodwin.com
.

RN:
Transformation is an important theme in your work, and it’s an agonizing process for characters. Why is it so hard for people to realize who they’re supposed to be?

GG:
That’s what my new book is about, transformation. The other key word—the heroine’s key word in the book—is usurpation. She has gone through her life resisting usurpation. Other people and forces in her life have been trying to usurp her for their own reasons.

RN:
Is that what Ursula was doing with Justin?

GG:
Yes. Justin was the perfect blank page. Ursula was the most powerful person in her life when she was fourteen. Justin was almost completely drowned in Ursula’s personality until she knowingly drowned, in a sense, in that pond. Even then, you could say that Justin has been controlled by Ursula because she was repeating Ursula’s betrayal of her mother.

RN:
You mark characters’ passages with epiphanies. Do you like that term, “epiphany”?

GG:
The term was drummed into me at graduate school. It belongs to James Joyce. “Shock of recognition” is good, but we need to come up with our own term. The quickening moment—I like that. It has to do with the speeding up of the story, as well as bringing things to life. The quickening moment for Justin—when everything comes together and comes to a head—is when she dives into that pond. She is, among other things, asserting her ability to swim. She is also trying to protect Ursula from being discovered with her lover.

RN:
Just before Justin goes off and instigates the story’s big event, she witnesses the demolition of her subdivision’s old farmhouse. This leads to her getting angry at her mother for her indifference about this, and that leads to her running off to see the DeVanes. The fall of the farmhouse makes the plot work, but is it also symbolic?

GG:
The farmhouse represents the place where Justin could be herself, where she could escape the conformity of her new home. It reminded her of her old home. She had a great need for it. When children who were playing around the farmhouse saw Justin coming, they left the place to her. They recognized a need in her that was so strong, it scared them. It spooked them. The farmhouse is a kind of symbol, but with a good symbol, you never can get to the bottom of it.

RN:
There is a lot of humor in your books. Aunt Mona is a hilarious character.

GG:
I had one person come up to me once and ask me why I was humorless. I’m not. I’m glad you mention the humor. There are levels of humor, and mine tend to lie in the subtler ranges rather than slapstick. Aunt Mona’s funniness comes from her holding on to certain beliefs and habits with great tenacity, so there’s a strength to her weakness. You see her asserting herself over and over again in predictable ways. You look forward to her comment, for instance, that things would have turned out differently for her if she had had others’ advantages. And the contrast between her own terrible decorating style and her image of herself as someone who can give decorating advice is comical.

RN:
That’s right. When Mona warms up to Ursula because of Ursula’s cultural knowledge, she suggests that she and Ursula might become good friends, and that she might give Ursula some decorating tips. It’s very funny.

GG:
In the end, though, Aunt Mona is redeemed from being primarily comic. There’s a seriousness in that.

RN:
People look at your fiction and see that, for instance, the mother characters in the stories are all very different. Yet, they keep wondering about the autobiographical content. How did
The Finishing School
come to light for you?

GG:
It came out of Robert’s and my experience of living in a 250-year-old Dutch farmhouse when we first lived together in 1973. We were not only thrilled by it, but spooked by it. That whole landscape was waiting to be put into a book. For a long time, I had had the idea of an older sister living with her brother in an old house, and a young woman would get involved. At first, my idea for the story had been melodramatic. The girl would be pregnant and the brother and sister would take her in because they wanted a child. They would have researched bee stings in order to figure out how to get rid of the girl. The other thing that inspired me was hearing Robert play the piano. You could hear him playing in the house when you were on the terrace. I once discussed with Robert the possibility of composing a piece for eleven cellos so that we could hear weird music coming out of the house.

RN:
How did you come up with some of the characters’ names? Jem is the name of the boy in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and “Cristiana” suggests Christ, which contrasts with Abel Cristiana’s personality.

GG:
Jem’s short for Jeremy. It’s a good Southern name. I have a feeling that the name Jem had floated into my subconscious from
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Perhaps I was trying to give a little homage. Cristiana is a real big name around here—a Huguenot name—and I love it.

RN:
Does the cover of the 1999 paperback edition of
The Finishing School
accurately portray the hut and pond scenario? How does it compare to this one?

GG:
This new cover is even better. For the previous edition, I had sent a photo of Mohonk for the artist to use. There was no hut in the photo—that was added. This new cover is simply gorgeous, truly strange. You see a window of a hut and you look through it. You then see a vast expanse of field, and you realize that you’re not looking out from the inside of the hut, but you’re looking in from the outside as if into a vision of a vaster life. It relates to putting yourself in another person’s place.

1.
The Finishing School
begins, “Last night I dreamed of Ursula DeVane,” which is reminiscent of the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s novel
Rebecca
: “Last night I dreamed of Manderley.” Is a dream a good starting point for a story? Imagine one of your own dreams. How would you develop it? How does Godwin proceed? (I count nine different tacks she takes in the first six pages before preparing herself for the mantra “Fourteen. Be fourteen again.”)