interactive student edition

UNIT 1
Personal Writing

Prompted by a photographic session for the jacket of her new book, writer Gail Godwin confesses her feelings,
thoughts, and fantasies about an important aspect of herself that she presents to the world: her face. As you
read, pay attention to how Godwin combines her expressed desire for privacy with her careful self-presentation.
Then try the activities in Linking Writing and Literature, on page 48.

by Gail Godwin

T
he day has turned out well. More
importantly for our purposes, so has
my hair. Some years ago I stopped
trying to subdue it into the current fashion,
and it has since rewarded me by catching
the light and air and using them to frame
my face for command performances like
today.
The photographer arrives on the noon bus
and wants to begin work right away. Out of a
cleverly packed kit he brings forth cameras,
lights, meters, a tripod, and even a white
umbrella. During a session of warm-up shots
I pose self-consciously on a chaise longue
while he tells me how he went to photograph
Auden once and, after only two frames, the
great poet rose and said, “All right. That’s
enough, young man.”
“Oh god!” I cry, forgetting “my face” for a
few seconds. “What did you do?”

40 Unit 1 Personal Writing

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“I was lucky that day. Words saved me. I
said, ‘But Mr. Auden, in my profession I don’t
get a chance to revise.’ He looked at me for a
minute and then said, ‘All right,’ and sat down
again. The only trouble was, he sat down too
fast and fell off the chair. But we did get some
good pictures, and after the session was over
he said, ‘If you’ll come back again, young
man, I’ll cook you a chicken dinner.’ ”
I move to my desk, to recline against the
deluxe sprawl of my new IBM and the fading
rhododendron blossoms outside the window.
The photographer has set up a spotlight and
opens the white umbrella. The combination,
he explains, makes the face soak up the light.
It “fills out the face” with a youthful luminos-
ity. If the need ever arises, he tells me, I can
substitute a piece of white poster paper. “Put
it on a surface just below your face and it will
send up the light in a nice way.”
Last week a different photographer walked
me into the woods and told me to get com-
fortable on a rock I had sat down on, in a
patch of dappled shade. She retreated on tip-
toe and lurked some distance away where she
crouched and waited, like a nature lover stalk-
ing a shy animal. The woods grew still. My
hair engaged in a little dance with the breeze.
A gnat cruised loudly past my face. What is
she waiting for, I thought, watching the face
of the photographer. She pursed her lips, she
hummed to herself, she smiled mysteriously,
she squinted her eyes. I grew almost bored.
Then I relaxed and began thinking my own
thoughts. Click, she went then. Click. Click.
This photographer stands on a chair
behind the white umbrella and asks: “When
do you look most like you like to look?”
And I think of myself, alone sometimes in
this house, how I’ll take little intermissions at
the bathroom mirror, arranging my face until
it suits me. There is a look I like. But has any-
body ever seen it? If someone did, would that
person say, “Ah, what an interesting woman,”
or, if he/she knew me, “Ah, yes, that’s Gail.”
Or: “Why is that woman posing?” Or: “Why
on earth is Gail making that strange face?”
Personal Writing
One time, when I was little, I was watching
my mother put the finishing touches on the
face she was taking out into the world that
day. Suddenly I saw her mirror image com-
pose itself into a frightening look. Her eyes
widened and gazed into some sorrowful
romantic distance; her nostrils dilated; her
full lips spread into a weird close-mouthed
smile. I knew that, to her, this was her favorite
image of herself; I could tell by a kind of
relaxed triumph that came over her. “Stop
that!” I cried. “Stop looking like that,” for, as
long as she did, my mother was lost to me.
As I think these thoughts, the photogra-
pher who evoked them with his question
takes about a dozen pictures. Later, when I
am going over his contacts, I search in vain
for my secret favorite look that I have been
able to create at the bathroom mirror. What
did I expect: that he would be able to evoke
the look by getting me to recall the look?
There are other looks—by which I mean
acceptable versions of my face—but I don’t
see that one. Or perhaps it’s there, but it looks
different turned around. After all, the mirror
shows us the reverse of the self others see.
Stand in front of the mirror with someone
whose face you know well. His face in the
mirror will not look quite the same. It may
even look strange to you. Yet this is the face
he sees every day. What would be strange for
him would be to see his face as you see it at its
most familiar.
It is not because I am beautiful, or notori-
ous, or even because my face is unusual, that
two professional photographers have chosen
to ride four hours on the bus, at their own
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expense, to imprint its image on a dozen rolls
of film. No, it is merely because I am an
American author soon to have another book
published.
I don’t know exactly when this practice
Personal Writing
began of making the contemporary writer a
visual object, but it has occurred during my
lifetime. During my youthful reading, I rarely
knew what the writers looked like—except for
the highly visible Hemingway, with his white
beard and bare, stocky chest. There was still, I
recall, a certain impish elusiveness about
writers. They effaced themselves from your
imagination, leaving the field free for their
characters and their stories. As late as 1970,
when my first novel was being published and
the editor called to ask did I want my picture
on the jacket, I replied at once, “Oh, I don’t
think my picture will help the book.” I dis-
tinctly remember feeling that I would forfeit
some of the mystery of a new fictional voice if
my face appeared on the book.
My face did not appear on my second
novel, either. This novel was about a beautiful
woman, so beautiful that stronger, unbeauti-
ful people need her for their various purposes
and thus make her their prisoner. The cover
artist wisely chose not to depict the particular
face of any beautiful woman. If my face had
appeared on the back of the book, some skep-
tical reader might surely have inquired: “What
does she know about the problems of being
extraordinarily beautiful?”
At the editor’s suggestion, my third novel
did carry my photograph. I was a little disap-
pointed at the one he chose from the contact
sheets, but he seemed to feel it would “go well
with the book.” The heroine of that novel was
a woman of 32, intelligent, romantic, and
insecure. When she catches a glimpse of her
face in a tilted mirror above her beautiful
42 Unit 1 Personal Writing
grandmother’s coffin, it shocks her. (“It
always did when she faced a mirror unexpect-
edly. It was too alert, too tense, too transpar-
ent in what its owner felt.”) The photo the
editor chose was that of an intelligent-looking
woman in her thirties with a closed mouth
that stops just short of a smile; she has large,
rather dreamy eyes, but their effect is dimin-
ished by the pronounced worry line that
slashes her brow. My mother hated that pic-
ture; she couldn’t understand why I would
allow anyone to publish a picture that “makes
you look old, and not even pretty.” The pic-
ture startled her: in it, her daughter was lost
to her.
Though I have learned not to agonize every
time I come across some face of mine that
fails to do justice to my wit, charm, and pro-
fundity, I still harbor a deep desire for invisi-
bility. In my second novel, Francesca, the
beautiful woman, goes to work briefly as the
amanuensis (really the cleaning girl) for the
ugly “M,” a writer who has shaved her head.
“M” tells Francesca that she shaved her head
so that she would stop looking in the mirror
and notice more things about the world.
What “M” meant, of course, was that for
an artist there is great value in being invisible.
Only when you can stop looking at yourself
do you become capable of filling other bod-
ies. Keats, praising this trait in Shakespeare,
called it Negative Capability. . . .
[O]ne wonders what Jane Austen’s com-
ments might have been, had she looked down
from Writers’ Heaven several months ago and
observed the confusion attendant on a paper-
back release of her early writings. In the first
place, she might not have been all that pleased
to have her juvenilia published; in the second
place, there is her name—she who always
signed her works “by A Lady”; in the third
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place, there is a picture of the author, in
a little oval vignette, above the
title, Love and Freindship
(sic). . . . but wait a
If you are beautiful,
moment, who is this
the world comes to you;
beautiful, full-bosomed
woman in her low-cut
gown? One thing for but if you have imagination,
certain: It’s not our
Jane. But it took the you can summon
president of the Jane
Austen Society to point this the world.
out to the embarrassed pub-
lisher, who then tracked the error
down to the New York Public Library, which
had been housing an incorrectly labeled
impostress in Jane’s file: a portrait of Sarah
Austin, a nineteenth-century translator. (Now
plain Jane, thin lips pursed, wearing her
house cap and high-necked frock, has been
instated in her rightful place; but one won-
ders about that filing error: wishful thinking
on somebody’s part? After all, Jane has turned
out to be a star, and oughtn’t a star to look
like that pretty lady in the low dress?)
It is time to go through my contact sheets
and select one image of myself to appear on
the back of my new novel and another image
to serve as my “publicity” photo. As I crouch,
with magnifying glass over these myriad me’s,
ruminations and emotions as varied as the
poses play through my mind.
1. Would even Lord Byron have been able
to face his contact sheets without spasms of
self-loathing?
2. A quote from a painter in my fourth
novel: “They say people make their faces
after a certain age, but it is also true that
before a certain age people’s faces help to
make them.” If, as a teen-ager, I had had my
decade’s version of, say, Brooke Shields’ face,
what would I be doing today?
Beautiful faces effortlessly
open the secrets of other
hearts and minds. An
alternative route to
Personal Writing
these secrets—which I
always knew I
wanted—is via the
effort of imagination.
If you are beautiful, the
world comes to you; but
if you have imagination,
you can summon the world.
3. Only once in my life has my
face opened doors. This was when my
favorite uncle William lay dying in the hos-
pital. An extremely popular figure in the
community, his room was being besieged by
friends, acquaintances, old girlfriends, high-
way patrolmen, preachers, other judges and
lawyers, and a few curiosity seekers. The
doctor gave orders that no one but family
(and the Reigning Girlfriend) be admitted,
and then only for brief sessions. All who
were admitted had to be screened by the
nurse on duty at the time. But never I. “You
can go on in,” all the nurses who had never
seen me before would say, “anyone can see
you’re one of them.”
I have the Godwin face. I have many of
my mother’s expressions (her sad-romantic
gaze; her “polite” look, which is an incongru-
ous combination of silly, pursed mouth and
wide, furious eyes; her weird, close-mouthed
smile and flaring nostrils when she is being
beautiful), but it is the face of my father’s
family, his lineal features that I see in my
photographs—just as, sometimes amused,
sometimes alarmed, I see myself in old pho-
tographs of his family. There is a sister, in
her eighties now, whose girlhood snapshots
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could pass for some of mine, and, what is
even more scary, I have only to sit beside
her—queenly, sarcastic old doyen—at a fam-
ily reunion, and have a preview of myself, at
age eighty-three, holding court, as she
Personal Writing
answers questions about her house (“Yes, it’s
on the market, but so far nobody’s been able
to afford it”), accepts compliments on her
daughter’s food (“Well of course Christine’s
table is full of good things; she learned some-
thing at my house”), and on her own skin
(“Yes, I’ve got the pure Powell skin of our
mother’s family; poor Mose and William got
the old sallow Godwin skin”). As I watch her
(just now an obsequious cousin has flung
himself to his knees beside her and cries,
“Hail, Matriarch!”) I think: well, I have the
nice Powell skin, too, and I also have the
large, slashed brow and forehead that will
soon make the top part of my face look like a
patriarch, as hers does now; and I, too, have
the long, heavy cheeks that are one day going
to shake like an angry bulldog’s when I’m on
my soapbox, but she has lasted (as I intend
to), and she still works every day (as I intend
to), and she does add to a party (as I hope I
shall, at her age).
4. A quote from my heroine’s friend in my
third novel: “You are the type of person who
will never be able to see your own face. Your
face is a series of impressions, of moods. It
will always give more pleasure to others than
to yourself.”
5. An unvoiced expletive as I X out with a
black crayon a certain frame. (“P.S. If there
are any frames that you would not like to be
seen, please X out on contact sheet,” the
Photographer-with-the-White-Umbrella has
instructed.) Oh, Thomas Pynchon was so
shrewd! But it is too late for me to refuse to
pose, to steal my image back from old high
44 Unit 1 Personal Writing
school files. It is too late for me to be the
wise, invisible genie-author, laughing over the
reader’s shoulder.
I will also never look like a star. (If my
work should last, what high-cheekboned,
swan-necked, smooth-browed impostress will
some visual idealist sneak into my file?) What
many a reader will see while reading my
books is—let’s face it—a younger version of
Aunt Thelma posing as my mother. All I can
do, at this stage, is to be myself (so the
encroaching old face will at least signify the
intrinsic me) and to use the black crayon
when it is offered: try not to be caught in
public with my eyes squeezed shut, with a
drink in my hand, or simpering like a fool.
6. A frequent quote from my grand-
mother. “Fools’ names and fools’ faces are
often seen in public places.”
Though the writer in me aspires to the
invisibility that will grant me the freedom to
imagine myself into anybody, to become
Nobody watching and describing the parade
of life, the egoist in me hankers for that
instant, visible glamour which reveals me a
Somebody the moment I enter a room. And,
to a degree, the American consumer in me
retains a childlike faith in the miracle-work-
ing properties of products which, if dotted at
the strategic pulse points, thrown across the
shoulder or buttoned or belted in the latest
fashion, or slathered on my pure Powell skin,
will make a roomful of strangers stand up
and chant in chorus: “Who is that woman
who just came in?”
At home alone with my muse, I wear a uni-
form of old corduroys with the wales rubbed
smooth, and any old sweater or shirt. But
when I go into the city, I start worrying the
day before about how to dress that woman
who will always startle me from at least one
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Odilon Redon, My Face, c. 1895–1900
plate-glass window. One day, I keep vowing,
when I have purchased all the right things, I
will be able to see Somebody striding along
beside me in that window and glimpse at last
a glamorous version of myself.
Like the majority of people, my attitude
towards my looks wobbles wildly between
vanity and despair. But, providentially, my
vocation always saves me. In my study, I am
Personal Writing
invisible. I’m a free-floating consciousness
able to go anywhere and see anything without
being observed in return. Even when I’m
thinking well or lost in the contemplation of
other lives, I am temporarily “refined out of
existence.”
Not long ago, in a moment of anxious van-
ity (“If I start today, I can keep what I have”)
I sent off to California for an eighteen-dollar
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book on face-lifting through exer-
cise. (“For women and men
over twenty-one,” the tact- ... could I count
ful subhead explained.)
Back came a pink vol- on myself to devote
Personal Writing
ume weighing several
pounds and sealed in
plastic. I tore off the
fifteen minutes a day ... to
plastic, read the grudg-
ing praise of a promi- making faces at myself
nent plastic surgeon (after
all, this book was going to in a mirror?
take away some of his business,
wasn’t it?), and began leafing through
the exercises, turning first to my “trouble
spots”: LOWER CHEEKS, JOWLS, SCOWL.
I began to despair. Knowing my aversion to
boredom and routine, could I count on
myself to devote fifteen minutes a day for the
rest of my life to making faces at myself in a
mirror? . . .
Knowing, at this point, that I would proba-
bly never open this book again, I transferred
my interest to the one really ghoulish aspect
of the book and lost myself in its contempla-
tion. On each page where the pretty model
was doing her exercise to iron out crows’ feet,
guard against turkey neck, or restore youthful
fullness to the lips, there was an inset of an
older woman’s face—rather, that part of her
face that was in shambles because she had
failed to do this particular exercise.
The photos were all of the same poor
woman, and I found myself imagining her
life. Who was she? (I should point out that
she was not grotesque; if you saw her on the
street, if you noticed her at all, you would
think: just a plain woman, late sixties/early
seventies, who hasn’t had an interesting life or
taken very good care of herself.) But how had
she come to lend her face to these pictures?
46 Unit 1 Personal Writing
Did anyone tell her beforehand,
“You are going to represent
the face women don’t want
to have”? Was she paid
well? More money, or
less, than the pretty
model? Did they just
pick her off the street
(a California bag lady,
glad for the cash), or
was she, perhaps, a very
well-to-do model whose
specialty was admonitory pho-
tographs? Was she—it was possible—
the author’s mother? (“Hey, Mom, I have a ter-
rific proposition for you. It will benefit
thousands of women, put bucks into our joint
account, and you and I will always know I
love your dear face just the way it is.”)
Where was “I” at this moment? Somewhere
in California, in a room I was beginning to
furnish. Where was the American female,
fourth decade, of the incipient bulldog
demeanor? Invisible.
I watched Bill Moyers interviewing Dame
Rebecca West, age 89, at her home in London.
Before and during the interview, the network
flashed portraits and photographs of the
author in her earlier incarnations: baby sister,
young militant, companion of H. G. Wells,
banker’s wife, woman of accomplishment
receiving her honor from the Queen. In all of
these stills, you could trace a family resem-
blance, a continuity-in-retrospect, to the liv-
ing female Knight on the screen, in her long
gown and her pearl choker which tugged at
her neck like a self-imposed leash. She was
“being good” tonight, but not too good. She
made the camera wait while she took her time
formulating her answers or remembering the
past; she exerted no effort to impress, she
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even went so far as to demur, or agree
politely, if the interviewer switched topics
suddenly, or put words into her mouth. She
seemed, much of the time, to have become
invisible to herself: she was just one big, fluid,
rapid mind browsing confidently among
whatever ideas were put before her. At one
point, because she is hard of hearing, she
lunged towards Moyers to catch the tail end of
his remark, and—for a second—her large
head was transformed into a lionlike figure:
she became visually, on camera, a sort of
mythical beast, heraldic of her accumulated
strengths.
Since then, I have been planning my
heraldic visage; it’s much more fun than
doing the exercises in the pink book. I’ve been
imagining little scenarios to go with my
eighty-year-old mastiff-face. Here is one:
I will have worked very hard at my craft,
and because its attendant exercises in
Negative Capability have become the priority
of my life, I will have rendered myself invisi-
ble to me (for large portions of a given day)
and visible to others in the various guises
they will create for me. To some, I will be a
wrinkled old lady (but not as wrinkled as
Auden, if I keep using my creams); but to
those who see me as a Lady of Letters, my
face will have become emblematic of my style
(“Don’t you just love the thoughts that roam
that gashed forehead of hers? And the way her
cheeks quiver with sensitivity or rumble with a
wicked wit!”).
When the young photographers come, one
Personal Writing
of them will be after a certain distinctive
pouch nobody has quite done justice to on
film; another will try to make me shut my
eyes or giggle and spill my drink; while
another, aspiring to Mythical Photography,
will wait for the appearance of my beast in
the lens.
I will pose some, wearing a gown of laven-
der-gray (no jewelry), and reclining among
my books and memory artifacts on some dra-
matic but comfy piece of furniture. One owes
an audience a few stage props.
I will get rid of the boring ones quickly by
a polite sarcasm or succinct withdrawal of my
Presence. (“You look tired, young woman.”
“That will do, young man.”)
But if they are swift-witted and charming
and very agreeable to me, I will let them tarry
while I ruminate aloud, until, through the fis-
sures and gravitational drifts of my old face,
they can glimpse the shapes and visions
behind it.
I may write something sweet into the fly-
leaf of one of my books for them. And invite
them to stay for supper.
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 “ The fragrant orchid:
Into a butterfly’s wings
It breathes the incense.
50
—Bashō,
“Haiku for Four Seasons,”
translated by Makoto Ueda
”