The House by the Sea (21 page)

L
ATER

The storm has come, with wild white veils, high wind. I can't see the ocean … really it is thrilling to be so isolated in such a fierce white wilderness of a world. I forgot to say earlier this morning that sometimes these days there are marvelous things on PBS. Last night I saw Archie MacLeish talking with Moyers for an hour. Archie is eighty-three, his face as smooth as a smooth stone. What a wonderful way to grow old, not to wrinkle, but just the opposite, to seem washed clear, down to an essence. I was moved when he reacted strongly to a question about poets and politics, reminding Bill Moyers that Yeats had only become a great poet after 1916 when he became passionately involved. I have always been attacked for writing political poems, first by Conrad Aiken years ago, then of course by Louise Bogan (some of this argument is in our letters). Bad rhetorical poetry is just as bad as any bad poetry and I think the question is how deeply moved one has been, whether the political poem can come from the subconscious or reach the subconscious to be
fertilized
. At Notre Dame I was asked to read the Kali poem—I have not done that often—and I think it
did
work. But why worry? One does what one can, and one does what one
must
. At the moment the inspiration for any poem at all would be a present from the gods.

Wednesday, March 17th

A
BOUT A FOOT
of snow fell, and drifted, so most of the terrace is snowed in up to the wall … quite a storm! I got up at six and shoveled a path for Tamas, filled the bird feeders, then went back to bed for a snooze with Bramble, who has a great capacity for sleeping all through a storm.

It is when the world outside is totally wintry that the plant window becomes a kind of magic: the cinerarias are still wonderful, also a white cyclamen with a purple throat.

I got distracted about Yeats yesterday and forgot to go on to two things connected with that evening's TV pleasures. Seeing Archie sitting by the big pond in Conway brought back a vivid memory of my day with them there years ago. I had driven over from Nelson. We walked down to the pond before lunch and had a swim—among the trout! It's a beautiful secret place with tall trees around it and a brook running through, and all that day Ada and Archie and I shared such a perfect communion and so much joy that I felt I must never go back. Perfection, as I wrote Archie yesterday, cannot be repeated. The lilies were in flower in Ada's formal garden. Everywhere I saw the signs of their work together over many years to create this place that is both formal and casual. An unforgettable day!

Later that evening (looking at TV) there was an hour with Kenneth Clark on an Edwardian childhood. There are similarities between the two men, each having created a world of elegance out of self-made rather than inherited taste (Kenneth Clark's environment was rich and vulgar, as he said himself—pool playing, gambling at Monte Carlo, and a series of hideous big houses here and there), each having a genius for friendship, but differing in that Clark has not had to suffer the agony of the creator in the same way as MacLeish. Moyers probed for the “agony” and Archie answered so well … yes, there had been tragedy in his life, the death of a brother in World War I, and of a son … but these sorrows can be absorbed and accepted, he suggested, weaving themselves into a life, becoming part of its richness and meaning. The true agony, Archie said, has been in the work itself, the struggle with that.

A long letter from Charles Barber in England came yesterday. He is beginning to feel the need, after a very rich year abroad, to get back to roots. “Living in a foreign country is so exhausting in that one's vision is so enlarged and is constantly being demanded of …” and “being stared at constantly, the butt of unfunny cross-culture jokes and all that nonsense loses its novelty after a while.” I recognized those feelings very well. In spite of everything, the European attitude toward Americans is one of barely concealed disdain. “But you don't seem like an American!” is the greatest compliment. I used to react violently to that!

Charles is also fed up with the academic life, with analysis of works of art that ends by short-circuting creation.

Friday, March 19th

B
Y AN ODD COINCIDENCE
I came upon a paragraph from Ruskin's
A Joy Forever
that I had been looking for for years. It turned up in an old journal I uncovered in a box of the books from Wright Street. The coincidence is that I found it this morning, with young Morgan Mead coming for lunch to celebrate his first story's having sold to
Yankee
.

“For it is only the young,” Ruskin writes, “who can receive much reward from men's praise; the old, when they are great, get too far beyond and above you to care what you think of them.

“You may urge them then with sympathy, and surround them with acclamation, but they will doubt your pleasure and despise your praise. You might have cheered them in their race through the asphodel meadows of their youth; you might have brought the proud bright scarlet to their faces, if you had but cried once to them. ‘Well done,' as they dashed up to the first goal of their early ambition. But now their pleasure is in memory, and their ambition is in Heaven. They can be kind to you, but you can nevermore be kind to them.”

Of course, on the other hand, it is Heaven not to care, or to feel secure enough no longer to crave praise. I fear I never shall.

I was so afraid that I might not be wildly enthusiastic about Morgan's story, but I was. I found it full of charm and truth; I feel he is a novelist—he manages in this short story to weave such a rich web, to evoke so much between the lines. It made me happy to be able to tell him this.

Altogether a lovely day, though it began with thick wet snow, nearly two inches, and I was awfully afraid he wouldn't make it from Hartford. We are real friends in that we can talk about everything very freely and I know he enjoys me as much as I enjoy him. Our yearly meetings are true festivals. There are nearly forty years between us—amazing!

Thursday, March 25th

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
in a year or more I set out for a lecture in lovely warm sunny weather and had good weather the whole three days … I really can hardly believe it. In New York forsythia is out and the magnolias in front of the public library are just on the brink.

I talked and read poems on the theme of “An Experience of Solitude” at the College of Mount St. Vincent in Riverdale.

I was away only for two nights, but it seemed ages. I was very glad to get home yesterday afternoon to warm wind, spring air, a rough blue sea … and a few tiny early crocuses as well as snowdrops to welcome me.

It is time I caught on to the fact that people who say, “I make no demands” are the ones, of course, who, whether they know it or not, are out for the blood in one's body, are out to catch the soul, and to dominate a life. The least they demand (but that is everything) is one's
attention
.

Tuesday, March 30th

J
UDY HAS BEEN HERE
for the weekend, for the first time since Christmas. The weather was beautiful, though windy and cold, but at least the ocean was that marvelous shining blue under blue skies. After twenty-four hours I began to feel the awful woe, like a rising tide. Yet, in a way, it was a good time. It's only the relentless truth of her condition that gradually permeates everything for me after some hours with her. It makes me feel abandoned and desperately lonely, lonely partly because I believe no one can quite understand who has not experienced it what it is to lose through senility the person closest to you.

On Sunday morning we paid a call on Elizabeth Knies Pevear—she had asked me to come to be given a copy of her poems, at last out (a charming small book where she appears with two other poets, published by the Alice James group). After twelve years of marriage to Richard (also a poet), they are having a time apart, E. living in the Garretts' house on the river. How hard it is to make a living as a poet … or to be a poet and produce enough with a full-time job too! E. works at Strawbery Banke, doing publicity for them, and Richard at the Marina here. I have the greatest respect for them both. E. is a
real
poet but she has found being a wife and a jobholder makes it next to impossible to get anything of her own done. We talked about it—how a woman almost inevitably finds herself doing most of the housework, for instance. During this time alone she has occasionally asked one man friend or other over for dinner … but of course
she
gets the dinner, waits on him, etcetera. I felt the same thing and was horrified at myself at Notre Dame—the instinctual giving way to a man. Stanley Kunitz, Bob Haas, and I were to answer questions one morning. About a hundred students showed up. The men were late, so I plunged in and we had got quite a lively discussion going about being a woman writer. The minute the men joined me, I found myself deferring (especially to Stanley, that gentlest of men); I heard the very tone of my voice changed. Other people noticed it, and we laughed about it at a party that night.

What is it to be a woman? I have been thinking a lot about this lately because of Karen Elias-Button's PhD thesis (I am an adjunct for her at Union Graduate University) that uses mythology and comes out over and over again with how male-oriented mythology is. We are born and bred reading about Eurydice, the passive, who has to be rescued by Orpheus, and so on. Leda!

But mythology cannot be
artificially
created. We have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves, and that must include our own instincts both for kinds of nurturing and kinds of self-preservation. This cannot be done
against
men, and that's the real problem. It is what makes me less than enthusiastic about a good deal of feminist literature at present. It is not either/or. It cannot be woman
against
man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.

When I think of myself, I realize how singular a life mine has been, since through luck or through will, through having a viable talent (viable in that it provided me with a raison d'être and eventually a place in the world), I have never really had to work any of this out. My deep conflict has had to do with my work.

Wednesday, March 31st

Y
ESTERDAY
for the first time this spring I went out and did a little raking—raking leaves off a place where I have planted a row of crocuses this year. Then I took some salt hay off the upper border, and luckily I did so, for the white heather is in flower. I brought in a few branches of forsythia in bud.

Today is a gentle gray day, with rain expected, but I hope to manage an hour's work outdoors before it comes, at least fertilize the azaleas. The flat sentences perfectly express my dull state of mind. I feel like sowing-mix in which some random seeds may have been planted, but none have “taken.” There are only vague stirrings about a new novel, though I long for an imaginary world in which to live again. I have missed having a novel going these past months. Maybe that is really the reason for a long period of moderate depression. I enjoy life but without great enthusiasm.

Friday, April 9th

D
EAD TIRED
. Yesterday, home from three days at the University of Oklahoma. I felt a little crazy, unable to concentrate, wandering around holding myself together. It is, anyway, the hardest season in New England, “the cruellest month” not because the lilacs are in flower but because they are not … nor is anything else except a few crocuses. It's a gray cold world, and I feel old and cold myself.

The expenditure of every ounce of psychic energy I have—which is what these quick lectures-cum-classes-cum-concentrated-social-life demand when I meet perhaps one hundred new people, each of whom feels we are old friends because they have read the books—is bound to boomerang, of course. The bad thing now is that I have an overnight trip to Clark University next week and the following week Vassar and New York—dinner with Carol is the carrot I hold before me—if ever I reach it!

The time in Oklahoma was a surprise and a great pleasure, or many great pleasures of rather differing sorts. What I had not expected was so much beauty and style … on my first evening being taken around a tiny but exquisite garden, full of corners where strawberries grow, dark purple iris in clumps here and there, many ornamental trees. Jim Yoch is an exceedingly civilized young man, a man of many gifts (his field is the Renaissance and he has all his students acting scenes from Shakespeare in class). Sensitivity to other people is quite rare in the degree to which one feels it in him.

I was not surprised but deeply moved by the open tilled fields and the great skies … and the air wonderfully fresh like a cool white wine the whole time I was there. One has to get used to a whole town where there are few houses of more than one story, a horizontal town, the residential streets rich in trees. I enjoyed the change of pace, the slowness of speech, unhurried response in hotels and restaurants. Only
I
was pressed, rushing from one class or luncheon to another, envying the students lying around on the grass.

What I had not expected was to find such a fine enthusiastic group of young women instructors and graduate students, deep into the
Journal
and
Mrs. Stevens
and
As We Are Now
. The audience for the poetry reading was not large, but the discussion next day for two hours with groups of students, men and women, who came and went as their classes permitted, was one of the best I have ever experienced. They are keenly involved in Woman's Lib (Adrienne Rich has been there this year) in the most authentic way, that is, trying to direct their own lives into channels where they can be fruitful as individuals, yet also marry and have children. They are living it all on the pulse, which means they cannot be arbitrary and merely theoretical. It did me good to realize that I can be helpful, that everything that has been so lonely in my own struggle is now very much in the air and
relevant
.