Author Q&A

The Good Husband
by Gail Godwin

(Page 4 of 6)

Jennifer Morgan Gray is an editor and writer who lives in New York City.

Jennifer Morgan Gray: The title The Good Husband has many meanings, both literal and figurative. What did you hope to evoke in choosing this title? Were there any others you considered and then abandoned?

Gail Godwin: This is one of the very few novels that I've written where the title came with the idea. I meant the title to be ambiguous, so that the reader would have to start asking, "So just what is a good husband? Who is the good husband in this book? Could it be both of them, or neither?" It was chosen exactly at the time that I thought of creating these four people.

JMG: It's said that authors often write what they know. As an acclaimed author with extensive experience in the world of academia, did you find it liberating to set a novel in a familiar college setting? Did you deliberately insert elements of satire into the situation and the various characters - for example, President Harris and his wife, Leora?

GG: I wrote one other academic novel, The Odd Woman. That was set in one point of view, that of a particular young woman professor, and it was a much more naturalistic treatment of a university. Now, this one has a bit of a satire to it, this college, Aurelia. It's a college where fundraising has gotten the upper hand, and it's the type of college where I thought it would be possible for these types to meet. Hugo Henry gets invited at the last minute; Magda Danvers, if she had become the scholar she started out to be, would be somewhere else, like maybe Columbia.

When I imagined what the president of the college would be like, it did creep over into satire, because fund-raisers do have a way of forgetting the interior and the unseen. But the last we see of President Harris, he's flying toward this wretched literary tour with this bore of a woman he wants to get money out of. He has this serious moment, when he thinks of what he's really interested in, how things going in and out of fashion could ruin whole industries and transform cultural patterns. He would rather have written a book on American cultural patterns instead of spending his life raising money to satisfy other people's egos.

JMG: In the dedication of The Good Husband, you remark, "Francis, Alice, Hugo, and Magda are, I must admit, four stimulating but often puzzling parts of my own character." Which elements of these characters most perplexed you while you were in the process of writing this book? Which aspects of your own personality did you insert into each character? Were there characteristics of each character that you wished to emulate and to make your own?

GG: A wonderful question. On page 353, Hugo is talking to his son's lover and is talking about how writers choose or get chosen by different subjects. And he says to him, "There's something about this story that addresses longings and woes of my own." At the time I was writing this book, my longings and woes were attracted to the subject of death. I had never seen anyone die until right before I wrote this book; my father committed suicide and my mother died in an auto crash. Actually, before I wrote this book, I was working on another one, and then I started visiting this dying professor. He had some of the characteristics I gave Magda - the sense of humor, the acceptance of using his time to die as a time to evaluate his life.

Then I had to make up some more characters! I decided that I wanted to make the dying person a woman because I had read an article by the Jungian analyst June Singer. She said when you get too goal-oriented - and it's ruining your life - just stop for a minute and imagine that you're dying. You're already on your deathbed - you can't pay the bills, you can't go out shopping, somebody else has to take over. All you can do is just lie there and think of what it all meant.

That was the scene that attracted me most, but I couldn't just have a woman lying there by herself in bed. So out of that came all these other creatures. Then I wanted to give her a husband who would seem to serve all of her needs, and yet there's another side to that: Perhaps by serving all of her needs so well, he kept her from taking any more flight. When I got into his personality, I began to love him because he really is one of those human beings who gets satisfaction out of serving the needs that he sees around him - I must say that there's very little of that in me! And yet I started seeing how that could be a very relaxing and fulfilling thing: washing the windows of a monastery or of your own house, making a meal for someone, keeping things clean. The dark side of that is that a person like that often does not want to go into his or her own interior, because it's too scary. So I matched them up well, because they can complement each other and they can goad each other.

Hugo Henry is perhaps the most me. Yes, he's the most me. Any scene that you see him in, I've been there: ruining a vacation in Switzerland because my books weren't in the English bookstore, and always worrying about my literary status. But, thank goodness, having written Hugo and made fun of him a little helped me distance myself from that aspect.

And then finally, the woman Hugo marries, Alice. By being so damaged by what's happened to her, and so passive, Alice also is a clean, soft sheet for things to make impressions on. Her happiest moments in the book seem to come from visiting a woman who is near the end of her life and who has the luxury to figure out what she was, and what's important in life. Magda, of course, comes to the conclusion that she has been an arouser rather than a fulfiller. What is most important, now, is that she order her loves and tally her accounts.

Of course, no one wants to identify with someone who is going to die, but Magda's the one who casts the light so everyone can ask the questions they need to ask in difficult times of transformation.

JMG: How did you manage to integrate humor into what could have been a bleakly depressing novel? Were those moments of levity what guided you through writing a book that's consumed with death?

GG: She's wickedly irreverent. She wants to shine light on things even if it's unflattering. I just finished another short novel that will be out in April and that's all about death. It's called Evenings at Five, and some of the early readers and critics have said that it's funny as well as being sad. But if you're true to what your characters really think and feel and say and do, humor is going to come into it because that's the way life is; that's the way death gets ab- sorbed by the living. In A Southern Family, a long book of mine that also has death in it, they're all going to the funeral and they get into the limousine and realize that one of them has stepped into some dog doo of the dead boy's dog. It rides to the funeral with them. Everyone is so upset - but at the same time, it's funny.

In The Good Husband, I was true to Magda. I also let her say awful things about the people who came to visit and make up provocative letters to adoring researchers whom she can never answer - because she can't read or write anymore.

JMG: The narrative shifts points of view throughout the book, and the story unfolds from several different perspectives. Why did you decide to craft the book in this manner? In your opinion, is there one true narrator, someone you viewed as the true eyes and ears of the story?

GG: Absolutely not. I wanted to go into all of them and to see how far into them I could get. Then I started going into more than the four - I went into the president, into his wife, into the teacher that takes over Magda's class. From the beginning, I wanted to have all the viewpoints. A Southern Family has lots and lots of viewpoints, but most of my books have been with a first-person narrator or third person, but staying in one consciousness.

JMG: It must be interesting for you, then, to see the story through so many different mind-sets.

GG: It is. You think differently. They have different dreams. And they see the same event from different perspectives.

JMG: The Good Husband doesn't seem to support the concept of one perfect soul mate for each individual. In fact, according to Magda, "Mates are not always matches, and matches are not always mates." How did this thought guide you as you were writing? Was it something you considered beforehand, or did it pop up while you were writing?

GG: It popped up when Magda said that. When she's lecturing at the seminary about Blake and his wife, she's explaining about how they were mated well but they were not matches. Mrs. Blake couldn't even read and could not follow William into his imagination. When Magda said that, I realized that I had something: Hugo and Alice are certainly matched, but, reading their scenes closely, neither of them was ever passionate about the other. They admired each other; they could talk about whatever needed to be talked about. She served his needs, and he served hers; she wanted a child, and he wanted an editor. He admired her calmness and her loveliness, while she admired his work. So they were matched, but the passion was left out.

Copyright © 1995 by Gail Godwin.