Author Q&A: Part 3

The Good Husband
by Gail Godwin

(Page 6 of 6)

JMG: The struggle between work and relationships is paramount in the book. Magda is forced to give up her all-consuming work due to her impending death; Alice chooses to do so; Hugo is consumed by his writing; Francis abandons the priesthood for Magda. Must the two opposing forces always be at odds? How can they be reconciled - or, for some characters in The Good Husband, is that simply impossible?

GG: I don't think that they always have to be at odds. If you are very, very fortunate, you find the right work and the right person to go with you. And it certainly helps if that person has work that he or she cares about, as much as you care about yours. Magda is the goal-oriented one - she loves her work and is driven by it. Hugo is the same. Alice needs to get back to work, and indeed she does. And Francis - he is extremely happy at the end of the book when he's bringing something to completion, rebuilding this old seminary into a retreat center. All of these characters feel happier when they are working. Hugo is in hell when he isn't working. So the thing is to aim for both, as Magda would say.

JMG: It's interesting that Magda really is the touchstone of this book for the other characters. Why, in your opinion, does she have such a profound affect on those around her? Is she a personality type that welcomes this affection or disdains it?

GG: She is really the fire that they are all gathering around. They all want some of the excitement and some of the warmth. On page 317, when Ramirez-Suarez is telling his wife why Magda is so compelling, he says that that fire was her passion, and that's what drove her. That's what came out of her and attracted others. And for Francis, it was more compelling than those moribund practices in the seminaries that were killing off young vocations.

When she's in bed trying to figure out who she was, and what she was, she realizes that she has been an arouser; that her vocation, as it was lived out, has been to arouse and inflame others, and not to fulfill. She thinks only art can do that. So she's been totally true to her fire, and it's the reflection of her passion for her particular work that compels these people. Then, of course, she's developed her persona around it. Flamboyant hair, flamboyant clothes.

JMG: Magda refers to her illness as "the Gargoyle," before the reader even knows what, exactly, is ravaging her body. Why did you choose to be vague about what Magda was suffering from until midway into the book, and instead communicate her struggle through literary and classroom references?

GG: Actually, the president of the college reveals that Magda is dying of cancer in the opening pages, when he comes to visit her. She, however, prefers to think of it as a mythical creature. That's her style. As she tells Francis, it amuses her to personify this thing as a living creature in her. She's its enemy, and it needs to munch on her to grow bigger.

JMG: In contrast to Hugo and Magda's strong personalities, Alice and Francis both display passivity. Do you feel that a spirit, a fire, is lacking in them that others have (sometimes in overabundance)? Or are they simply crafted of a different cloth?

GG: They are different. But Alice really had so much loss. Her mother, father, and brother all wiped out at once. She's become kind of punch-drunk, and it's amazing that she got through Princeton and became an editor and even got that far. She could have just lain down and given up all her spirit. I think her work, and then Hugo, and then the hope of resurrecting everything through having a child, and then, last of all, falling in love with Francis: These things kept pulling her out of the abyss, and she made the choices to keep on living.

At the end, Francis has come far enough to realize that he does have his own desires. He wants to do what he wants to do, which is probably going to be more of the same - taking care of other people. But now, he knows that it's his passion.

JMG: He delves into himself, as Magda had always wanted him to do.

GG: Yes. And he even says that, as he's scattering her ashes overboard: "Now I'm finally thinking the way that you always wanted me to think - but too late for you to enjoy it."

JMG: The book features Hugo grappling with the mixed feelings of his South Carolina upbringing and of the character of the "new South," mostly from his perch in New York. As a transplanted Southerner yourself, did you find it cathartic to have a character like him in the novel?

GG: I purged something from my own past with Hugo. For a while, I had to live with a family like the Manigaults, because my stepfather had to move to another town. And so Mother and he left me behind for two months, so I could finish out the school year with this family, and there were many scenes that were like Hugo's ordeals. I didn't fit in. These people - knowingly or not - put me through the tortures that Hugo describes.

JMG: Alice has suffered loss after loss, first of her family, and then of her baby. In which ways is she a tragic figure? How does she cope with the tragedies that surround her? How does she stop "preferring the company of the dead to the living"?

GG: She's not tragic in the classic sense because she didn't bring on her own downfall. She's just been beaten down by one calamity after another. And actually, she copes quite well. She has her breakdown when she needs to, she pulls herself together, and she develops a trade, a skill. And then, at the end, how does she stop preferring the company of the dead to the living? She falls in love. She falls in love with Francis. It doesn't matter whether she gets him or not, because it makes her want to live.

JMG: There's a great deal of writer's block being experienced in this story. Hugo's pen stops cold after the publication of A Month with the Manigaults, while Magda never writes the much-awaited sequel to The Book of Hell. Do Francis and Alice suffer anything that's tantamount to this affliction? Did you ever battle writer's block during the writing of this novel?

GG: I don't think Francis suffers anything tantamount to writer's block. As for Alice, after the death of her child, she can't do anything. During this book, I never once battled writer's block. Before I started this book, I was about three chapters into the book I thought I was going to write, and then, when I got this interest in death, I had to drop it. The times when I've had what they call writer's block, it usually means that the novel was either miscarried or stillborn. I've never had writer's block and then finished a novel. I've had problems. For instance, with Violet Clay, I was trying to make it one kind of novel and it became another. But it still had the same people in it. I had hoped to write what they call a gothic novel, but it became too real for that.

JMG: This book is not a "closed narrative," one where everyone lives happily ever after and all problems are ironed out. Was this a deliberate choice on your part? Do you think that the reader might expect Alice and Francis to begin a relationship? Did you ever ponder a sequel?

GG: I left it open. I knew that Alice and Hugo were going to break up. I knew that Magda was going to die. I wasn't sure about Alice and Francis, because she wanted him so much and he seemed to like having her around. But when it came right down to it, it didn't happen. And many readers wanted it to happen. When this book was in the editorial process, several editors read it over, and one said, "Oh, please, please, I want to see Alice go to the airport and meet Francis when he comes back from the Midwest, where he's been building the retreat center. And I want to see them kiss!" When this reader said that, I thought, "Oh, no, you don't. That's not going to happen." And I never pondered a sequel.

JMG: I'm sure you've been deluged with letters from readers, saying, "Can't there be another book where Alice and Francis get together?"

GG: That happened with Father Melancholy, too. And I said no. Then I ended up writing Evensong [the sequel to Father Melancholy], where the two very unlikely people get together; the younger woman and an older priest get married. So . . .

JMG: So never say never?

GG: Never say never!

JMG: Recently, you've taken a break from novels to tackle non-fiction books. Do you plan on continuing that path? What are you set to write next?

GG: I wrote a short novel, Evenings at Five, which will be out in April. And I'm writing a novel about a young woman who is a journalist - I have a feeling that it will turn into two novels because I want to stay with her for a while longer. I don't think I'll ever do a nonfiction book again. I do love to do short nonfiction pieces. For instance, a friend of mine is publishing an anthology of snake stories, poems, and essays. I offered to write one, because the subject intrigues me, so I'm writing an essay called "My Snakes." Which means research, and it will be nonfiction, but it will be fifteen pages at the most. It's figuring out why I like snakes. I'm just about finished with that.

But for the rest of my life, I want to write novels.

Copyright © 1995 by Gail Godwin.