‘You Don’t Know What Is In You ‘Til You Try’

Gail Godwin spent formative years of her childhood in Western North Carolina. A keynote speaker at the 2018 Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, she was kind enough to share with Smoky Mountain Living some thoughts on her upbringing and childhood in these beautiful mountains.

Early years: College Street, Weaverville

When I was six, going on seven, we moved to Asheville from Weaverville, where my mother, her mother, and I had been living across the street from my grandmother’s first cousin, who was the mayor of the town. He must have represented familial authority for me, because my earliest attempt at a story was about Ollie, a henpecked husband who finds his wife has invited the mayor of the town for dinner. Alas, this is the same man Ollie hit over the head earlier in the day with an umbrella. And now Ollie must face the music because this man is in his house.

I typed at six and wrote at six because that’s what my mother did when she wasn’t commuting to and from work as a wartime reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times. On weekends she wrote (and sold!) love stories for what were then called the pulp magazines. She was coached in her efforts by a fellow reporter  and successful pulp writer (detective and adventure), Mr. C.R. Sumner, who held evening sessions for aspiring writers. My story about Ollie was submitted to Child Life in a manila envelope addressed by my mother and including the requisite SASE. The editors sent a kindly worded rejection.

I mention all this just to show how central writing and being a writer was to me from very early years. When we walked to town in Weaverville, Mother would point out a house where O. Henry lived. (“But his real name was William Sydney Porter,” she hastened to add.)

After we moved to Asheville, my grandmother might point out someone on the street and say, “Tom Wolfe put him in his book.” Down the block lived a little girl whose mother, Martha Osborne, had done secretarial work for Wolfe when he rented a local cabin after he had become famous. When we passed a certain place on Montford in the car, someone would point out that Zelda Fitzgerald had burned to death there.

In Weaverville, I was not allowed to go to first grade because Mother had taught briefly in the county schools and said the boys were too rough. They pushed a little girl out of a playground swing and broke her arm. So I stayed home on College Street and read and wrote and drew pictures. Much later it struck me as odd that no authority from the school system had come to our house, but nobody did.

Age 7-11: 286 Charlotte Street, Asheville

In 1944, we moved to Asheville because Mother now had three jobs there. As a reporter at the Citizen-Times, she had the Oteen Hospital for wounded servicemen beat, the visiting dignitaries beat, and the Julia Wolfe beat (whenever Tom Wolfe’s mother remembered something important.) Mother escorted Mrs. Roosevelt when the first lady came to visit the servicemen, and was amazed, the second time round, when the first lady remembered my name. Mother’s second job was teaching the upper students at the Plonk School for Creative Arts, which was across the street from our Charlotte Street address. Her third job was teaching the junior college girls at Saint Genevieve’s of the Pines.

In September of 1944, I entered the second grade at St. Genevieve’s and remained a student there through ninth grade. Again, it wasn’t until years later that I realized how profoundly that school, that place, those nuns, the way they taught us, has shaped my life and saved me in certain ways. When I was in my early 70s I wrote a long novel that tried to capture the  essence of this school. I named the novel The Red Nun: a Tale of Unfinished Desires and will never forgive myself for caving in at the last minute to the  publisher. (“Nobody wants to read a book about nuns.”) It remains out there on the shelves as Unfinished Desires (2009) though I have dreams of republishing it someday under its rightful name.

Outdoors

I will never know what it was like to grow up immersed in the splendors of our mountains. As a child, my outdoor life consisted of two summers of Girl Scout Camp near Mt. Mitchell at the Carolina Hemlocks campground, which had been built during the Depression. I learned to swim where the South Toe River flows slow and deep around a bend. The distance across which I thrashed was only about 20 feet, but it remains a triumphant moment of my life. I was the last to accomplish this and was loudly cheered by my fellow campers. I still hear them when I swim laps in my pool today. Mt. Mitchell was memorable to me because Stuart Pegram blew on the campfire and fainted and had to be carried down to the camp station wagon by a handsome forest ranger. 

My outdoor life on Charlotte Street was Mother driving us to Beaver Lake, which had a nice sandy beach, or me lying on top of our 1937 Oldsmobile, hidden by the leaves of the Charlotte Street trees, which was sort of like being in a jungle, reading Kipling’s Kim.

My Mountain Teachers

Father Webbe

My good fortune as an adult was to have two guides into the interiors of my native mountains when I was old enough to want to see what I had missed. One guide was a clergyman transplanted to our mountains, the other a St. Genevieve’s classmate who had gone out to see the world and returned to teach at Mars Hill College and explore the outdoors she had missed as a child.

Father Gale Webbe, my childhood rector at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, had grown up in Summit, New Jersey, and spent his early priesthood in Kansas. A North Carolina clergyman passing through Kansas  reported that a church boarding school for boys in Asheville was looking for a chaplain. Webbe applied and got the job. From New Jersey, he and some high school friends had visited the Outer Banks, but he had no idea of what awaited him in the mountains.

“I didn’t know then that, 500 miles westward, North Carolina soared heavenward in the mighty upthrust of the Southern Appalachians with Mount Mitchell brooding over all and the French Broad River somehow snaking its way through them on its journey to the Mississippi. I could not know then that there, in and around Asheville, I was to find my permanent home here below, and in that land, among its people.”

— Gale D. Webbe, Sawdust and Incense, Worlds that Shape a Priest, St. Hilda’s Press, 1989.

Father Webbe was in his 80s and I was in my 50s when we began our serious treks to the places he had discovered when he came to Asheville. He introduced me to the spell of deep, fragrant woods, the elusive little wildflowers, overlooked unless you were particularly looking. We had picnics by cold rushing waters, like Little River, and I selected a talismanic water-rounded rock to take back to Woodstock where it graces my study along with a stone from Lindisfarne and a chestnut from Isaak Dinesen’s grave. We visited the trout fisheries, and walked through the Joyce Kilmer Forest with its “talking trees.” 

The advantage of being an adult was that I listened and looked and was interested in learning how the Smoky Mountains had come to be from someone who also had learned it as an adult. The bonus was the many hours in my old mentor’s company and the things we discussed. Father Webbe had prepared me for confirmation at St. Mary’s in 1948, written a book about despair, The Night and Nothing, which I found newly published in Hatchard’s bookstore in London in 1963, thus initiating our 30-year-long correspondence. During our mountain ventures in the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s, our dialogues simply continued. I remember driving us back from the Pisgah Inn, and my old mentor saying suddenly, “What interests me now is ‘unfinished sympathy.’”

Pat Merchant Verhulst

Pat became my lifetime friend in second grade when she helped me into my leggings so I would not miss the St. Genevieve’s school bus home. I spoke with her on the phone as I was writing this.

“Other than Girl Scout camp, what was your experience of nature as a child?” I asked.

“Well, my sister and I would get into the back seat of the family car and Daddy would drive up the Parkway and pull over at an overlook, and Mother would say, ‘Look at that view!’ Then Daddy would turn around and drive us home.”

Pat spent her early adulthood with an Air Force pilot husband in Iceland, then traveled in Europe, went to graduate school in Austin, taught at Fairleigh Dickinson in New Jersey, married a second time and experienced the Greenwich Village life, then returned to North Carolina to teach English at Mars Hill College from the early 1970s until her retirement. Friends introduced her to the choice hiking places in the Smoky and Blue Ridge mountains, and after I finished graduate school in Iowa City, we began our hikes whenever I visited Asheville to see my family. Knowing my disinclination for arduous pastimes, Pat broke me in with moderate climbs promising great rewards at the top, starting with Craggy Gardens, whose winding trail leads through rhododendron thickets up to Craggy Dome with its 360-degree view. Henceforth she led me up difficult, less-trodden trails, which always ended in a picnic and friend-talk as wide-ranging as the spectacular views.

“That place, what was it called, Ogle Meadows?” I asked in our recent phone conversation between Woodstock and Mars Hill, “It was a flat meadow on top of the world and we had our conversation about how to become powerfully old?”

“The place you put in your book? Ah, that was a sacred place. It was the peak of our climbs, it was us at our peak. Then I drove you back down to the ghastly reality happening at your family’s house. The place was called Ogle Meadows. You can’t go up there anymore. It’s a private subdivision.”

That afternoon is memorialized in A Southern Family (1987) in the second chapter, titled “Olympians,” a chapter that begins with Clare asking, “How did you ever find this place, Julia? A meadow on top of a mountain! The air up here is like champagne. Why didn’t we know about this spot when we were growing up?” 

Clare is thinking:

...I have liked this other person, not a member of my family, and exactly my age (plus one week) for almost my whole lifetime [...] And now, lying beside her on the dry grass while a hawk curious about our presence circles over us against the bright blue sky as we resume—with some relish—our annual dialogue on the subject of aging.

The old friends have their conversation, which extends into witchery, gossip, reminiscences, the powers of the spiritual life, and ambition. They then descend from the mountaintop, rescue a turtle crossing the highway, and return to the afternoon horror unfolding on Quick’s Hill, where Clare’s sweet half-brother, Theo, and his fiancee have been found dead in a car from close-range shotgun wounds, and the family will never know for sure whether Theo pulled the trigger on both of them.

St. Genevieve’s (1944-1953)

Once-removed influences

When we talk about influences, the people and the places that have shaped our character, or have made us the particular writer we turned out to be, we have to consider the “once-removed influences,” as well. For instance, take the nuns of St. Genevieve’s. In 1944, those women who came from Ireland, France, Belgium, and Germany outnumbered the ones from Boston, Chicago, Charleston, and Asheville. So I experienced the mountains through their perspectives, too. They were the outside voices alerting me to things about where I lived that I had never considered. It’s not like this in other places, these voices kept reminding me.

The spot on which Mother Malloy and Mother Ravenel stood commanded a panorama of mountain ranges stacked one behind the other, their hues fading from deep smoky purple into the milk blue of the horizon. Below them was Mountain City, its downtown buildings and curving river twinkling with late-afternoon sun. A solitary hawk dipped and soared, riding the airstreams above them. Mother Malloy was in the midst of composing a suitable line of praise for the school’s picturesque view when Mother Ravenel, off on another tack, rendered the effort unnecessary.

“And next year we’ll be taking on the boys.”

“The boys?”

“Newman Hall for grades one through eight, and Maturin Hall for the high school. Though there’s still some lobbying going on about calling the upper grades ‘forms,’ like the prep schools and the English public schools.”

—Unfinished Desires, 2009 (Headmistress Mother Ravenel is showing the campus to young Mother Malloy, who has just arrived on the train from Boston.)

When you entered the school gates of St. Genevieve’s and approached the three-storied Victorian building along a driveway lined with Norway spruces, it felt like being transported into another place and time. The food was different, the accents were different, and the standards and expectations regarding yourself were often different from the home you had just left. Time seemed to slow down, silence was the rule rather than the exception.

Silence in the classrooms, silence in the hallways, silence until you raised your hand or were called upon, the exception being recreation period on the playground.

I think back to those silent school bus rides to and from home. A nun rode on the side-seat in front. We were not allowed to talk or even exchange notes. We were separate little solitary selves, gazing out the bus windows and keeping company with the dramas inside our heads. Such spans of uninterrupted silence in today’s childhood world are rare, if not extinct. It was aboard that bus that I watched my fourth grade teacher Mother Corbett reading a composition book with my handwritten stories in it. I could see only the profile of her veiled head, but she looked intent, and after she finished she turned her face to me and mouthed the words: very good. She was my first reader. Inside all that silence and discipline, the nuns had time for us. That was their job. They had given up marriage and families and the clamor and hustle of the world, and often their countries, in order to serve God by teaching us. 

Another kind of once-removed influence

A writer is influenced by people and places, and, in turn, the writer creates fictional beings and landscapes who will take on aspects of the originals. 

But then the order reverses itself and the characters begin to enlighten the writer about things she needs to understand. I love it when this happens.

As I was struggling to put into words the profound and lasting ways St. Genevieve’s has influenced my life—(Strong moral center? “You don’t know what is in you ‘til you try!”) I realized that the essence of what I was looking for had already been written by one of my characters, 80-year-old Mother Ravenel, as she writes her historical memoir about Mt. St. Gabriel’s Academy and her life as a student, nun, and headmistress there.

In her memoir, Mother Ravenel enlarges on the concept of ‘Holy daring,” which was formulated by the school’s foundress “who had great independence and vitality and was seeking strenuous ways to serve God.”

Mother Ravenel writes in her memoir: 

Now, mere ‘daring’ in itself can lead to folly and destruction of one’s mission. [...] Which is where the ‘holy’ part of ‘holy daring’ comes in. Holy daring lets itself be guided by divine improvisation. And divine improvisation is a matter of being in service to a work larger than yourself ...

“...Another of our foundress’s alluring phrases … was ‘a woman’s freedom in God.’ I’m sure you remember that one! [but] I never went into much detail … Over the years, some of you would seek me out after our ‘Moral Guidance’ sessions, and say, ‘Please, Mother, I want to hear more about this holy daring and a woman’s freedom in God.’ And to those of you I thought were ready, I doled it out with discretion.”

—Unfinished Desires (2009)

• Strong moral center

• You don’t know what is in you ‘til you try!

• Holy Daring

• Divine improvisation

• Being in service to a work larger than yourself

• A woman’s freedom in God

That’s quite an adequate list for a young girl to build on!