The Good Husband - Hardcover

Godwin, Gail

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345372433 ISBN 13: 9780345372437

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1994

Synopsis

As a young woman, brilliant, charismatic, and curious, Marsha Danziger transformed herself into Magda Danvers, taking the academic world by storm. She was already a star when she came upon Francis Lake in a midwestern seminary and married him. It was a mating that seemed perfect. But now Magda's grave illness puts their marriage to its ultimate test. Into this turmoil comes Alice Henry, an old friend whose own marriage is crumbling. Can Magda teach Alice the secret of the good marriage . . . and does she even know the secret any longer herself?

About this title

About the Author

Gail Godwin has taught at Vassar College and Columbia University.

From the Inside Flap

oman, brilliant, charismatic, and curious, Marsha Danziger transformed herself into Magda Danvers, taking the academic world by storm. She was already a star when she came upon Francis Lake in a midwestern seminary and married him. It was a mating that seemed perfect. But now Magda's grave illness puts their marriage to its ultimate test. Into this turmoil comes Alice Henry, an old friend whose own marriage is crumbling. Can Magda teach Alice the secret of the good marriage . . . and does she even know the secret any longer herself?

Reviews

A dying academic, an oblivious house husband, a self-centered Southern writer, and a grieving ex-editor suffer much angst in Godwin's (Father Melancholy's Daughter, 1991, etc.) latest domestic drama--a meditation on marriage in which the prose is always supple but also more than a little dull. Haughty 58-year-old Magda Danvers, an English professor who's still resting on the laurels of the one book she published decades earlier, is holding court from her deathbed, and a gaggle of academics--suck-ups, gossips, parodies all--pay their respects. Magda calls her ovarian cancer her ``Gargoyle'' and the last months of her life her ``Final Examination.'' As she decays, she is waited upon by her husband, Francis Lake, who is 12 years her junior and gave up the priesthood for her. For 25 years Magda has earned the money while unambitious, nonintrospective Francis has kept house and contented himself with basking in her limelight. Alice Henry, whose baby has just choked on his umbilical cord, finds a peculiar solace in Magda's sickroom. Passive-aggressive Alice can't stomach her novelist husband, Hugo, who's 16 years her senior, and wonders if perhaps she married him because she was in love with his writing--after all, she was his editor. As she becomes closer to Magda and Francis and ponders their unlikely union, she falls in love with Francis, who seems totally unaware of her intentions. Hugo, meanwhile, baffled by Alice's hatred, is fighting off writers' block and learns, to his dismay, that his son from a previous marriage is gay. As each undergoes a self-reckoning, Hugo compares the stages of writing a novel with the stages of a marriage, and Magda, referring to a poem by Donne, welcomes death as her ``good husband.'' Godwin is more enamored, and convinced, of Magda's and Hugo's brilliance than her readers will be. Polished, often incisive, but pompous and obvious as well; with none of the bracing acuity of Sue Miller's For Love, which also put relations between the sexes under a microscope. Particularly disappointing for a novelist of Godwin's stature. (First printing of 75,000; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club featured selections; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Two oddly mismatched married couples are the focus of Godwin's (Father Melancholy's Daughter, LJ 2/1/91) powerful new novel. Magda Danvers, once a brilliant literary theorist, now a dying professor at a small private college, is married to "good husband" and former seminarian Francis Lake. "Frannie" devotedly attends to his beloved, impatient older wife while she is dying. Watching this with wonder is Alice, young wife of famous novelist Hugo, who is also teaching at the college. After a botched home birth, Alice and Hugo's baby has died, and their grief has sent the marriage into a frosty decline. Godwin's intensely drawn characters are vividly portrayed during the most intimate times of love, marriage, and death. The result is a winner.
--Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

At the center of Godwin's complex novel of loss and mortality is the flamboyant, penetrating Magda Danvers. She was featured in Time 25 years ago as "the Dark Lady of Visions" when she published her doctoral research on visionary poets and prophets before she had defended it. Now 58 years old, a star professor at a college in upstate New York, Magda is taking her own "final examination" under the tutelage of ovarian cancer. At her side is her thoughtful but unreflective husband, Francis Lake, who left the seminary at age 21 to dedicate himself for nearly a quarter-century to Magda rather than to the Lord. As Magda's condition worsens, another grieving couple is drawn into her orbit: fiftyish southern novelist Hugo Henry, the college's writer-in-residence, and his second wife, Alice, formerly his editor, who have just lost their only child in a tragic home birth. Alice in particular has suffered far too many losses in her 34 years, yet she finds refuge in the Danvers-Lake household. Remarkably, Godwin's story is laced with humor, thanks to Magda's enduring wit and the idiocies of a number of her academic colleagues. A Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection, this subtle, moving meditation on the nature of intimacy and influence, and the differences between good matches and good mates, will have wide appeal. Mary Carroll

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Magda Danvers, the week before Christmas, returned home from surgery at Catskill Hospital and telephoned to her chairman she would not be meeting her classes for second semester. “It seems the Great Uncouth has taken up permanent residence inside me,” she informed him. “Well, I always was a good student; now I must see what I can learn from my final teacher.”
She had many visitors. This was during the first stage of her dying, when she still looked and spoke like her old self. Ray Johnson, the chairman of the English Department at Aurelia College, lost no time in disseminating her audacious remark around campus, and people wanted to go over to the restored Colonial farmhouse their prized teacher shared with her husband, Francis Lake, a devoted, self-effacing man much younger than herself, and see for themselves how Magda would go about learning from her final teacher.
During the remainder of deep winter, Magda held court in her snug upstairs study, crammed with all her books, surrounded by her beloved Blake reproductions. She reclined on the worn leather sofa in a baggy sweater and old tweed trousers and red velvet carpet slippers, an afghan spread over her, her famous mahogany hair floating loose around her shoulders rather than pinned up in its usual fat twist. A fire crackled in the small fireplace, tended by her husband. At regular intervals, Francis would poke his head around the door and ask, “How is the fire doing, my love?” If she replied, “We could use a couple more logs, Frannie,” that was their signal that she was enjoying her visitor, and Francis would slip in unobtrusively and rekindle the fire. If she said, “I think we’ll just let it burn itself out,” that meant the visitor was not contributing enough to the precious time she had left in this world, and Francis was to return in three to five minutes and announce it was time for one of Magda’s obligatory reset periods in the bedroom at the other end of the hall.
Her students came. Suzanne Riley brought Magda her map of the Mountain of Purgatory, Magda’s last class assignment before entering the hospital. “I want you to have the original of this, Professor Danvers. I mad a color photocopy to hand in to Professor Ramirez-Suarez. He’ll be taking your classes second semester while…until…” The girl looked away miserably.
“It’s okay, Suzanne,” Magda soothed her. “We both know what you mean. But this is a gorgeous map. All the detail you put into these figures. I didn’t even assign figures.”
“Well, I am an arts major. At first I dreaded your assignment. You know. All that extra work. I mean, if you’re going to draw a really good map, you have to read the stuff really carefully so you’ll know what to draw. But then it was weird. I got really involved. I always know when I get involved while I’m drawing because my mouth begins to water. If that doesn’t sound too gross.”
Francis Lake poked his head briefly around the door. “How’s the fire doing, Magda?”
“Oh, pile on some more logs,” replied Magda cheerfully. “But first, come and look at this splendid drawing. I want to get it framed as soon as possible and hang it up with my Blakes so I can look at it in the time I’ve got left. A good map of Purgatory fits in perfectly with my present studies. Let’s see, where am I on the Mountain? I’d like to be as far up as the Gluttonous cornice–the warm sins are better–but I’m probably still down in lower Purgatory with the cold and proud. Where do you think I am, Frannie?”
“You’re certainly not cold and proud,” said Francis. “It is a splendid map. I’ll take it down to the framers first thing in the morning, my love.”

First, my grandmother dies, and then my girlfriend breaks up with me, and now I’m losing my favorite teacher,” blubbered the young man, clutching at Magda’s afghan. “This has been the worst year of my life. I’m like, wondering what’s the point of living.” He covered his face with a corner of the afghan, managing to tug it off Magda’s knees in the process, and began to sob in earnest.
Francis Lake’s slim figure materialized at once in the doorway. “How’s the fire doing, Magda?”
“Oh, dying, like everything else in here,” said Magda. “Could you give Rick a Kleenex so he can blow his nose before he goes?”

Ramirez-Suarez paid courtly visits. “We miss you, bright lady. My task this semester is to make Paradise as interesting as Hell. You would have done a much better job with your marvelous viveza. I have been entertaining them a little by reading passages aloud in the Italian. Oh, and I have had to supplement the text with my own notes, which I pass out to them each session. Magda, these young people have no receptivity to allusions. They don’t know who Achilles was. They can’t name the seven deadly sins. Their biblical references are almost nil. Would you believe it, many of them weren’t familiar with the Sermon on the Mount.”
Her husband, smiling, stuck his head in the door.
“Ah, Francis, I have stayed too long and tired out our dearest Magda,” said the dapper little professor, leaping out of his chair.
“I’ll be tireder if you leave me, Tony. Frannie just came to heap more logs on our fire. And then you’ll have some tea with us. After you phoned this morning, Francis went out and bought those lemon squares you like.”
“Oh, dear lady–“
“Sit down, Tony. Haven’t you heard that invalids are always supposed to have their way? You know, I think we ought to propose a new course at Aurelia. A required course, and not just for the liberal-arts majors, either. The catalog description would describe it as ‘The very minimum of people, places, and things you’d better at lest have heard of if you plan to pass yourself off as an educated person.’ And we’d stuff it into them any old-fashioned way we could: forced memorization, pop quizzes, all the dirty old tricks. A two-semester course. We could call it Allusions One, and Allusions Two…”

The chairman of English, Ray Johnson, dropped by regularly, his shining eyes behind the round glasses taking in the minute details of her decline so he could report back to others.
“Tony Ramirez-Suarez said he found you in excellent spirits the other day. You two were cooking up some amusing new course?”
“Allusions One and Two,” said Magda. “ ‘Would you rather drink from the waters of Lethe, the Pierian Spring, or Parnassus’s Waters? Why?’ ‘What did Circe do to men?’ ‘Why did Diana keep to the woods?’ ‘List the seven deadly sins and the four cardinal virtues and the four levels of meaning.’ Just the basic stuff you need if you’re going to read a poem rather than a balance sheet.”
The chairman chuckled knowledgeably. Magda’s mind definitely hadn’t succumbed to the waters of Lethe yet, but her flamboyant dark red hair, he hadn’t failed to notice, now sprouted an untidy inch or more of dead white at the parting. This shocking sign of the arrogant Magda’s deterioration somewhat tempered his resentment of her for baiting him. He could get three out of four levels of meaning, but what the devil were the four cardinal virtues? Parnassus’s waters rang a faint bell from somewhere in his academic past, but what the hell did you get from drinking them?
He changed the subject. “Poor Alice and Hugo Henry. They lost their baby.”
“Oh, no! How?”
“He got tangled in the cord and the oxygen was cut off. Apparently it was going fine until the last minute, Hugo said. He seemed quite shaken when he came to school today. It was a home birth. That Dr. Romero all the mothers love and all the obstetricians hate.”
“Oh, poor lovely Alice. And she was so happy when I was with her at your party in early December. Oh, God, there we both were, laughing and talking together, her with her healthy baby inside her and me with my undiagnosed cancer inside me, both of us oblivious to our fates…”
Francis Lake appeared in the doorway.
“Francis, Alice and Hugo lost their baby.”
“When?”
“Last Thursday,” said Ray Johnson. “But we didn’t know about it until Monday, when Hugo came to meet his classes.” The chairman then repeated the sad details to Magda’s husband.
“Oh, I’m so upset of them,” wailed Magda, clutching at her hair. “Francis, I must write them a letter immediately.”
“After you’ve rested,” Francis told her sternly. “Ray, you won’t mind waiting here until I get Magda settled in her room. Then we’ll go downstairs and have some tea. If you can spare the time.”
“Oh, I can always spare the time for one of your famous teas,” said the chairman, laughing.

January’s calendar flipped over into February, then on into March. Gresham P. Harris, president of Aurelia College, mounted the stairs behind Magda’s husband.
“Last time, we went thataway,” remarked the president lightly when Francis, at the top of the stairs, turned right, not left toward Magda’s study with the nice fire burning.
“Magda is staying in bed today.”
“Oh, I see,” said the president, preparing himself not to show anything as he followed Francis Lake toward a room at the other end of the hallway.
“Magda, Magda,” was all he said, when he saw his brilliant star lying gray and docile under the blanket in the big four-poster bed. She was smal...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345372433
• ISBN 13: 9780345372437
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 468