The House by the Sea (20 page)

In that same half hour the young man told me that his aunt is Catherine O'Leary, who worked for us as housekeeper for many years in Cambridge, who loved my mother. It is wonderful that I can now write to her and send her
I Knew a Phoenix
. It made me so happy!

Friday, February 27th

S
PRING BEGINS
in the sky—we are having delicate pale blue skies and they reflect on the ocean, so it too is a blue I hardly ever see in the winter. But the earth is sodden and gray, some ice patches still not quite melted. Snowdrops are showing round the big maple! We are certainly being given an early spring (if it lasts!) to make up for harsh old January.

I wonder why it is that “inspirational” writing such as appears in
The Reader's Digest
and in religious magazines so often, far from consoling or “uplifting,” makes me feel angry and upset. Most of the platitudes uttered are true, after all. But the fact is that this kind of superficial piety covers the real thing with a sugary icing meant to make it more palatable. It makes me feel sick. And the sickness is because I feel cheated. It debases God (by making him a kind of universal pal), and sentimentalizes Jesus,
and
—what is most dangerous and unchristian—it makes its communicants feel superior, part of an élite club where the saved can gather, shutting everyone else out. Into all this Tillich enters like a cleansing, ruthless wind. The thing that moved me so deeply when I read
The Shaking of the Foundations
came as an answer to my long anguish over the absence of God. The chapter called “Waiting” begins

“Both the Old and New Testaments describe our existence in relation to God as one of waiting.… The condition of man's relation to God is first of all one of
not
having,
not
seeing,
not
knowing, and
not
grasping. A religion in which this is forgotten, no matter how ecstatic or active or reasonable, replaces God by its own creation of an image of God.… I am convinced that much of the rebellion against Christianity is due to the overt or veiled claim of the Christians to possess God, and therefore, also, to the loss of this element of waiting, so decisive for the prophets and the apostles.… They did not possess God, they waited for Him. For how can God be possessed? Is God a thing that can be grasped and known among other things? Is God less than a human person? We always have to wait for a human being.”

Sunday, March 7th

A
LONG HIATUS
, for I have been in limbo due to a very bad cold (“the worst cold I ever had,” as my father used to say whenever he had a cold) just at a time when I had to make a very great effort and hence couldn't rest. I had to go to Cambridge and take away everything of mine from 14 Wright Street, where Judy and I spent ten happy years before I moved to Nelson. I had left paintings, hundreds of books, and some furniture because I didn't want to spoil that house as long as Judy lived there. Now her nephew (who had been renting it) has bought it and naturally wants to start fresh.

It is touching to see how little the neighborhood has changed. It is still the same folksy jumble of ugly three-decker apartments and small delightful houses, of which 14 Wright Street, a harness-maker's shop one hundred years old, is one. Timmy Warren, Judy's great-nephew, was there to meet me and so was Eleanor Blair, who, now eighty-two years old, had driven from Wellesley through the storm to come and help me. She knew it would be a hard day and it was entirely characteristic for her to make the effort—what a great friend she is! She set to at once, packing the small treasures in the corner cupboard which I am giving Anne Woodson and Barbara for their farm. Timmy had packed all the books, so that huge job I had dreaded had already been accomplished. The worst was finding masses of old photographs and some tiny objects … a small ashtray covered with butterflies that Vladimir Nabokov loved when he was a tenant of ours in another house where Judy and I lived. (I wish Judy had given it to him! It has been broken, and mended, and I threw it away.) The ghost of Tom Jones, our cat, appeared and reappeared in old snapshots … how vividly I remembered him lying in the window box, upside down, as I have described in
The Fur Person!

While we sat in the little parlor having a glass of sherry before lunch, I found myself evoking his great-aunt for Timmy who, after all, hardly knew Judy before she became senile. As I talked, it all came back—our life together in that house and two others in Cambridge before it, for over twenty years, and I was happy to remind myself of the remarkable person she was, her dark eyes that sometimes reflected somber moods and always suggested a strong inner life, as was indeed true, for Judy was a birthright Quaker and, in a most unassuming way, a good example of what being a Quaker means. She carried a heavy teaching load as professor of English literature at Simmons College, corrected papers till late at night, and was off to school by seven in the morning. Nevertheless, she spent many summers of volunteer work for the Quakers, once working with the Japanese Americans we treated so badly during World War II, and, after we met, teaching English with recently emigrated Latvians. Her Quakerhood showed itself in little ways too in her moderation in daily living … she never had more than one drink, for example, one drink for sociability, and that was enough. But, above all, she was a real Quaker in her tolerance of and quiet grace before my extravagance of temperament, and that is partly why our relationship endured.

Judy was born rich in the safe gentle world of West Newton, but by the time she was nineteen, a freshman at Smith College, that world had cracked under her feet in terrible ways—her mother's complete breakdown—she lived out the rest of her life in a sanatorium—and her father's bankruptcy. Charles Matlack was a charming cultivated man who had inherited a fortune with not the slightest trace of business acumen with which to invest it, and the results were tragic. His eldest daughter had married very young, fortunately, but Judy and her younger sister were faced with not only the loss of their mother, but the necessity to earn a living at once. Judy managed to work her way through Smith with the help of scholarships and then embarked on a career of teaching, after a winter at Oxford University, thanks to the generosity of a friend.

Judy always had a genius for friendship, and I think it came partly from her marvelous capacity for really listening to other people. She shared
with
her friends in a rare way, and it was just this that had drawn me to her when we first met as fellow lodgers in Santa Fe.

We had a beautiful life together. In the winter she was away all day while I worked at writing and waited happily for her to come home for tea and a little walk before she went upstairs to read papers and prepare her classes. But in the summer more than once we took off for Europe … one memorable trip after World War II, when we drove down through the Dordogne to the South with two English friends, starved for sunlight and good food and France itself after the long hard years of war in London. And after I moved to Nelson we still spent all holidays together and Judy came to me for a month in the summer. So what is unknitting now, as she grows more and more absent, had been knitted together for many years, and is still the warp and woof, the deepest relationship I have known.

Tuesday, March 9th

I
SAW THE DOCTOR
yesterday … I have the bug and there is nothing to do but
wait
a month, six weeks, he says, to feel better. I panic at the very idea of the lectures ahead, but even more at no work getting done at all. Where have my dreams of poems gone? As for this journal, I break into sweat in my bed at night, thinking how little I manage to get down of significance here—the deep sense I have of dying and of death, for one thing. It is not that I think I am mortally ill, but simply that I feel the heaviness of mortality upon me. I am tending toward the earth, and more so each day, I feel. A profound sense of dissatisfaction with my life (too comfortable, too self-indulgent). The house is a mess, boxes of books from Wright Street standing about everywhere and no energy with which to deal with them. I am torn between two ways to handle this doldrum that has been going on for weeks, really since January, when I did at least get down a few small poems.

The first way is to give in, to enjoy the light on flowers—yesterday white daffodils and white iris in the dusk—to enjoy this beautiful place, rejoice in the animal presences (Bramble at last comes up here to my study and curls up on the daybed—it has taken all these months for Scrabble to be exorcised), to live the slow quiet rhythm of a day as a kind of healing. The other way is to ask a great deal more of myself, to drive myself, and hope to break through into deeper, more valid places.

The only creation I can point to, if it can be called one, is that my dream of having the plant window filled with many-splendored cinerarias has come true. It has taken ten months from seed … ten months of anxiety as the tiny plants grew under lights in the cellar, and were transplanted from flats to peat-moss pots to larger pots … ten months of getting rid of white fly over and over, as well as anxiety during the bitter cold of January. But now they are upstairs. One very intense cobalt blue nourishes me like food. There is a purple one with a white border, a pink one ditto … every shade of pink, even salmon pink, deep red, brilliant magenta (a color I dislike but in the group it flashes out and is beautiful).

A long letter from Camille Mayran, now eighty-seven, made me sad. For almost the first time in our long correspondence I feel an abyss between us … there is too much on which we profoundly disagree, too much that she cannot accept about the world as it is now. And it exhausts me even to contemplate trying to answer her. But what upsets me most was her saying that the French have always separated politics from morality—this apropos of Watergate, which she feels has been made too much of. I would say that once politics and morality are separated, civilizations must crumble. She refuses to grant that the war in Vietnam was wrong, nor accept the conscientious objector as a moral person. How can I find the strength to answer her—and all the other letters strewn about on my desk, waiting like animals to be fed?

Thursday, March 11th

A
REAL MARCH DAY
that began with snow falling and ends now with a sky full of spring clouds and a calm blue sea, the snow melted, and mud to take its place. I did manage to drive to Concord to see Judy, and, as always, I feel so much better for having done so. After a month without seeing her dear old face I feel such a tug, such an inner imperative that I simply have to go.

Two nights ago there was a ninety-minute portrait of Piaf on TV. What a marvelous time I had watching it, hearing all those sad songs again! Some of the comments by her former lovers and associates were illuminating. One used the French word
monstre;
really it should be
un monstre sacré
, I believe. There is no English equivalent that I know of, but I think it means someone larger than life, set apart by genius, whom genius has made impossibly difficult as well as impossibly marvelous. Another said that she needed lovers as one needs
oxygen
and this shook me, for I recognized it as true, even in a small way, of myself … if not lovers, the new person who brings the world to life again, who makes one see freshly again, the magic encounter. It is a long time since I have experienced one. And perhaps I never shall again.

Tuesday, March 16th

I
LIE AROUND
enjoying the house, the flowers, wishing I could summon the energy to unpack and sort out the books from Judy's, sitting up here at my desk for an hour or so, accomplishing very little. At such times the old conflict between art and life becomes acute. I am nagged and probed by doubts and fears about my work … shall I ever have an idea for another novel? And if I don't, how shall I live? I begin to understand Louise Bogan's panic in the last years of her life, the honors coming at last, but a diminishing power to create dogging her mind and depression creeping in. I have written no poems since January and what I did then seems to me negligible.

This morning in bed I picked up Rilke's letters and opened to February 11th, 1922 (?), the day after he had finished the last of the
Elegies
in that great storm of creation, just after the
Sonnets to Orpheus
had seized him and been written. This happened after
years
of silence—long thinking and feeling—an excruciating tension of patience. My fear is that I am going slack. It is too easy to lie around, enjoying life at its purest and simplest, watching the downy woodpecker at the feeder, looking out to sea, rough and troubled today as a northeaster builds up and darkens the sky. I could immerse myself in such things for hours. But if all tension slips away, if one becomes simply a sentient being without the desire even to note down what is happening, in my case the reason for existence has gone too. I can justify this beautiful place and my life here only if, because of it, I am able to give through my work.

But life does always come in with some pressing gift or need. Eugenia sent me Melanie Klein's fascinating book on
Envy and Gratitude
. It has given me a rather frightening insight into recent behavior of my own. I gave away a lot of money last year, mostly in gifts to friends and then quite unexpectedly I began to needle these friends because I had not (I felt) been thanked. Then I began to get into a real panic about earning, about paying the income tax, a whole neurotic fugue about money. All this seemed very unlike my usual self. So I was shocked into recognition when I read the following in Melanie Klein: “Even the fact that generosity is often insufficiently appreciated does not necessarily undermine the ability to give. By contrast, with people in whom this feeling of inner wealth and strength is not sufficiently established, bouts of generosity are often followed by an exaggerated need for appreciation and gratitude, and consequently by persecutory anxieties of having been impoverished and robbed.” How glad I am to understand a little about this at last! For it is true that I have felt impoverished and frightened about the future ever since I made one large gift. And now I suspect that it is all part of panic about my work, the fear that I cannot earn it back.