Making of a Writer Journals, 1961-1963

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 roomlimp as a reed, physically exhausted to the point of sheer exhilarationas 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 primpincluding [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 "The Raising of Lazarus," an unpublished story, imagines a turning point in the life of a playboy.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 storyhis management of a Miami hotelfor 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 placesthe ideal and the practicalbut 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 beaGodwin, Gail is the author of 'Making of a Writer Journals, 1961-1963', published 2007 under ISBN 9780812974690 and ISBN 0812974697.