"Do you know of any couples in literature where the reader likes both equally?"


Perhaps out of nostalgia for her native North Carolina mountains, Gail Godwin lives in Woodstock, N.Y., in a big new house on a hilltop with a sweeping view of the Hudson Valley -- and an approach road so precipitous that grown men on icy winter afternoons have been known to turn pale, their hands frozen to the steering wheel.

It was on just such a recent afternoon, with a sudden snow squall leaving a glistening layer on that treacherous road, that PW came calling and, true to cowardly form, declined to venture further. A phone call brought Godwin sailing down the hill in her four-wheel-drive, and with only a hint of astonishment that it should seem impassable (she is nothing if not the soul of Southern courtesy), she whisked her visitor safely up.

The house, which she shares with her companion of nearly 30 years, the celebrated composer Robert Starer, was built largely on the huge success of two novels -- A Mother and Two Daughters (Viking, 1982) and A Southern Family (Morrow, 1987) -- that transformed Godwin from a critically cherished writer with a loyal but limited readership to one who commanded long runs on the hardcover and paperback bestseller lists.

It is a huge place, boasting a large central living space with a cathedral ceiling, a small indoor pool where Godwin determinedly swims every day, and a pair of staircases at each end leading to upper rooms. One of these leads to her study, a bright room lined with books (her own, in multifarious editions, and a superb literary reference library), a computer and its assorted clutter, and a spacious recliner.

Godwin is a slight, attractive woman with a generous mouth, rosy cheeks and a cloud of dark hair, still not greatly changed from the somewhat watchful young woman who looked out from the jacket of the first book on which she had her portrait: Violet Clay, published by Knopf in 1978. That was the last of a series of early novels (The Perfectionists, Glass People and The Odd Woman) that, with psychological insight and some wit, told of decidedly unconventional young women struggling to come to terms with themselves and their circumstances.

How has she changed over the years? "I'm interested now in different things," she says in her quiet, Southern-inflected voice, which seems to alternate between a slight interrogative rise and a more declarative downward sweep. "I don't fret as much as I did. I got through a lot of material over the years. Now I'm up to something else."

That "something else" seems to be an increasing interest in the spiritual side of her characters. In Father Melancholy's Daughter (Morrow, 1991) Godwin introduced Margaret Gower as the daughter of an Episcopal minister trying to come to terms with the disappearance of her mother in her childhood. (She had run off with another woman to live in New York; the notion of a missing parent runs through much of Godwin's work, an echo of her own abandonment by her father in her infancy.) But it was Walter, the rector, who took over as the book's center of interest. "I found that writing about him was where I wanted to be," she says. Now, in her latest novel, Evensong, just out from Ballantine, she has created what she calls "my first sequel."

Margaret has taken holy orders, has a parish in the Carolina mountains, and has married Adrian Bonner, the rather glum, uptight and considerably older counselor she had been smitten with in the previous book. Margaret's creator is well aware that many readers will find it an unsuitable marriage for the vivacious, life-affirming young minister. "Jonathan Yardley [the Washington Post critic who has been a vocal admirer of Godwin's work] wrote me to say he hoped Margaret wouldn't take up with Adrian," she laughs. "But I knew she'd marry him."

In a witty article written for the Valentine's Day issue of the Washington Post Book World, Godwin discusses marriages in literature that the reader knows will be disastrous, but into which the hero (or, more frequently, heroine) enters anyway. She cites Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch and Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady as supreme examples; Godwin's mind moves easily, and with pleasure, among the giants of 19th-century literature, and her capacious and thoughtful humanism offers much in common with them. She also confesses that her Ballantine editor, none other than president Linda Grey herself, couldn't stand Adrian, and urged her to make Margaret's attraction to him more comprehensible.

But for Godwin, whose characters tend to make their own way regardless of any schematic impetus on her part, "They're there together," and there was nothing to be done about it. "In any case, do you know of any couples in literature where the reader likes both of them equally?" she demands.

The spiritual element in her fiction over the last decade (The Good Husband, Ballantine, 1994, was about the mysterious workings of selflessness in the face of bitter mortality) seems to have derived rather naturally from her early experiences. "The two men I knew in childhood were both priests, one who was a published writer, and another at my convent school. While I was there I thought for a time I might become a nun, but I was romanticizing it. People would say they'd been chosen, which always sounded a little vain to me."

But isn't Margaret Bonner, in Evensong, rather like Godwin herself in her mixture of mysticism and clear-headed practicality? "Margaret's very solid, and I've put some of my hard-earned maturity into her. I'd like to be like her, but she's not me," she smiles, but with firmness. And despite the wealth of detail with which a woman minister's life is portrayed (surely a first in contemporary fiction), Godwin could not conceive becoming a minister herself, though she is active in the affairs of her local Episcopal parish, and was planning shortly to preach a lay sermon, her first, at its church. "I couldn't stand the scrutiny," she asserts, as someone who enjoys wine and has a sometimes bawdy sense of humor.

But she is certainly interested in the spiritual life, like her protagonist -- and like her, concedes "we know nothing about God. She never calls it Him, and nor would I. We're both happier with a concept that is not a person." Returning after many years to the church she had known as a young girl, she found it "so changed. There's so much wonderful religious scholarship now, all saying basically the same thing -- that there's a great human-heartedness, whether in the Tao or Jesus-an ongoing reality, and you might as well get in tune with it. If you make your heart pure, that spirit can be a visitor, or a live-in companion."

A First Nonfiction Project

A SPIRITED SEQUEL: Godwin's heroine takes holy orders, and a husband.

Evensong, perhaps reflecting the struggle to enhance poor Adrian Bonner, was late in delivery -- "I missed two deadlines, and felt awful about it" -- but now Godwin is involved in two projects at once-one of them, remarkably for her, a nonfiction work. Also without precedent, it came about as the result of an editor's suggestion. Hamilton Cain, at Avon, had shared with Godwin's longtime agent, John Hawkins, his notion for a book that would trace the history of the heart as an idea, in literature, art and religion. Hawkins passed the idea along to his client, thinking it might interest her. "I thought it was a wonderful idea, but I was in the middle of a new novel, so I asked to think about it for three days," Godwin recalls. She soon persuaded herself it was something after her own heart, and agreed to do it, against another deadline: It has to be completed by July, so that Avon can have it out for Valentine's Day 2000.

She is already deep into it, showing notebooks full of handwritten references and citations, even sketches. Linda Grey has been "very nice" about letting her off her contractual obligations at Ballantine so that she can proceed with Heart: The History of an Idea, she says. "After all, they have first refusal on my next -- isn't that such an awful term?"

The novel that was interrupted is, she says, a feminine version of Joseph Conrad's masterly novella The Secret Sharer. "You search me out and know me," Godwin quotes, her eyes shining. "Isn't that tremendous? I think it will be something going toward the edge, like The Finishing School [one of her smaller novels, published by Viking in 1985], something like a minor key in music, slightly disturbing sounds that show you all isn't sweetness and light."

Godwin's publishing history has involved half-a-dozen publishers, to whom she has been steered by Hawkins, whom she describes with a laugh as "the only consistent thing in my publishing life." First published by David Segal at Harper &Row, she migrated with him to Knopf for several books, then to Viking for Mother when they promised to break her out, and succeeded. It was there, she said, that she encountered the late Alan Williams, whom she still regards as the best editor she ever had. (She even put a loving portrait of him into Southern Family.) Five years at Morrow ended with an auction between Stephen Rubin at Doubleday and Susan Petersen, then at Ballantine, for Good Husband, which Petersen won. The idea had been to have Bob Wyatt, an old friend and Woodstock neighbor, be her Ballantine editor, but when he quit, and with Petersen moving on to Riverhead, Linda Grey inherited her. "She's a former English teacher, you know, and she's helped me no end with Evensong." Godwin is particularly delighted that her entire uvre is now available, thanks to Ballantine, in trade paperback.

The question is inevitable: How d s a writer like Godwin, who achieved a huge degree of success without compromising her own high standards, adjust to the fact that, in terms of sales, she is no longer the draw she once was? "I wish I knew," she says frankly, without pretending, as some writers might, that nothing has changed. "I've wondered whether something in the sales process is different now. Perhaps now you have to print hundreds of thousands of copies and really push it to make an impact. The volume is turned up so high. Publishers have to see themselves as businesses, in a way they never used to, and the idea of books as product must drive them crazy. And perhaps I just take too long between books."

Still, there are bright spots. Godwin has always been a favorite of reading clubs, and Ballantine's First Look program, which sends readers' copies to booksellers for comment, shows she has many devoted readers among the independents.

Godwin is by no means a cloistered writer, although she is a distinctly private person. In her early years she was an instructor at Iowa's celebrated Writers' Workshop, where she made lifelong friends of John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut. She continues to take part in such workshops; has served as chairman of the fiction judges for the National Book Awards; co-edited the Best American Short Stories for Houghton Mifflin; written an introduction to the Pushcart Prize annual, in which she extolled the virtues of small presses (she even launched one of her own, a tiny house called St. Hilda's Press, to do religion books); and even, atypically for a front-rank novelist, d s some fiction reviewing. She will also do a selective tour for Evensong, consisting mostly of appearances at bookstores and libraries where she knows the people, an interview on NPR's Fresh Air -- and, of course, that lay sermon at St. Gregory's, her local parish church, in early March, which will be on a text from the novel.

Which text? She isn't sure. Her interviewer suggests a scene in which Rev. Margaret Bonner is offering pastoral succor to, and finding an instant bond with, a woman whose husband has just died -- an atheist, as it happens. The scene is graceful, touching, and offers a vast sense of the possibility of goodness. "You're right!" she exclaims, and makes a note to herself, before driving her visitor back down the hill in the early darkness.