The House by the Sea (3 page)

Yesterday the mail brought me a mimeographed essay by a Jungian therapist in which she uses Lear's great speech that begins, “No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison” as a beautiful expression of what growing old can mean. She says,

“The wisdom of common speech, which we so often miss, speaks to us in the phrase, ‘He is growing old.' We use it indiscriminately about those who are in truth
growing
into old age, into the final flowering and meaning of their lives, and about those who are being dragged into it, protesting, resisting, crying out against their inevitable imprisonment. Only to one who can say with his whole being, ‘Come, let's away to prison,' do the lines which follow apply.

“ ‘We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.' We may think of Cordelia in this context as the old man's inner child—the love and courage, the simplicity, and innocence of his soul, to which suffering has united him.”

Growing
old … what is the opposite of “growing”? I ask myself. “Withering” perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. But there is also an opposite to growth which is regression, in psychoanalytic terms going back to infantile modes of being. And maybe growing old is accepting regression as part of the whole mysterious process. The child in the old person is a precious part of his being able to handle the slow imprisonment. As he is able to do less, he enjoys everything in the present, with a childlike enjoyment. It is a saving grace, and I see it when Judy is with me here.

Growing old is certainly far easier for people like me who have no job from which to retire at a given age. I can't stop doing what I have always done, trying to sort out and shape experience. The journal is a good way to do this at a less intense level than by creating a work of art as highly organized as a poem, for instance, or the sustained effort a novel requires. I find it wonderful to have a receptacle into which to pour vivid momentary insights, and a way of ordering day-to-day experience (as opposed to Maslow's “peak experiences,” which would require poetry). If there is an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication yet at the same time a very personal record, it may be in what E. Bowen said: “One must regard oneself impersonally as an instrument.”

Monday, November 25th

O
N THE
21st I fasted to be in communion with the 250,000 who did so, especially students in New England. I have felt so strongly that we could not sit passively while so many starve in Africa and I have been miserable for weeks that Ford does nothing and Butz and the others more or less wrecked the food conference in Rome, when some positive action on our part might have lit the fire. It is not enough to send money all the time as we all do. Somehow one has to give part of oneself.

It was a rainy miserable day and I had a lot of errands to do here and there. By noon I felt rather cross and by six
P.M.
I was counting the hours to morning! It was a very good experience and I mean to do it again.

I have nightmares about us Americans, weighed down as we are by “things” and by excessive eating. I read yesterday that Americans eat fifty times the meat the British do, for instance. Overeating makes people logy in a different way from the apathy induced by too little nourishment, but I feel sure that it takes the edge off perception. Many of us are literally weighed down. Who can imagine hunger who has never experienced it, even for one day?

Friday, November 29th

A
PALE BLUE
sea drifting off into the dusk. Raymond, my part-time gardener, came to hill up the roses. He teases me about not trusting him and it is true that by some magic sixth sense he does get things done—at the 11th hour! He rototilled the picking garden just before the snow, while I raked most of the leaves from under the big maple and the flower beds near it.

It is the day after Thanksgiving. Judy is here, of course, and we had a fine Thanksgiving day. It was cold and windy so that the open fire in the cozy room seemed a necessity rather than a luxury. We had roast chicken, creamed onions that Judy used to make so well, cranberries that Gracie Warner brought when they came, picked from their own bog, Warner squash, and Woodson-Barton potatoes. All these vegetables from neighborly gardens made it a specially blest meal. The chestnut stuffing brought memories of my mother. The mince pie was served on the Bavarian plates (with their bright pink and green flowers) Anne Thorp gave me when she broke up the Cambridge house. In every family memories are woven into a meal like this. It has a solemnity because of them. Our silver forks came from Judy's mother, the shell pattern, and her mother, I suddenly realized, came from Portland … so it all comes round full circle or nearly.

On another level, Thanksgiving this year was, for me, the reading of a manuscript, sent out of the blue, to ask my opinion about publication. Do people have any idea what they ask? It seems so simple: tell me what you think of my work. But it is not simple and causes me great anxiety and even anguish. Wholehearted unequivocal praise is what is needed, and what if one cannot honestly give it? That is where the anxiety comes in. I do not pretend to be a critic, except of my own work. I do not wish to be an authority. Is it churlish to resent such demands? This writer is a dancer. What if people constantly came to her door to dance for her and did so because they felt an affinity with her dancing? Would she welcome such interruptions? This request has ended in an uproar inside me of resentment, guilt (because I couldn't like her work more), and a sense of waste.

Anyway, yesterday ended very well. Judy and I watched a long “special” on Churchill, and I was happy to see that she could be wholly absorbed over such a long span. She cannot read for even a few minutes any longer.

It's hard to realize that for most young people the Battle of Britain, the Normandy beaches, the desert rats—all these things people of my age experienced so deeply—are simply history like the War of the Roses. The best thing the film did was to quote some of Churchill's orders to his ministers—amazing sense of detail and warmth of imagination about what people were going through. For instance, a recommendation to the Minister of Food that they try to cut down on the bureaucracy about rationing. Moving, too, to see him painting under a big umbrella. And terrifying to see once more how ill Roosevelt looked at Yalta, a ghost of himself.

Sunday, December 1st

I
WENT TO BED
feeling ill and was afraid I had caught the twenty-four-hour flu that is about, but this morning I was able to get up as usual to make our breakfast, do the chores, bring up wood from the cellar, build the fire, change my sheets, empty the wastebaskets. I enjoy these chores when I am feeling well, but today I wanted to lie down and sleep. Finally at 9:30 I did. Judy was out with the dog. When they came back she left him outside and he barked and barked, so rest was out of the question. Finally I called down to ask her to get him in, please. For some reason she didn't do this. So I ran down and got him in myself, screaming with frustration. One minute later she had let him out and he was barking again! At such times it is as though Judy were possessed by a spirit of nay-saying … I don't know what else to call it. Her restlessness is getting worse, so I can never come up here now for even an hour without being aware that she is roving around, in and out, and of course these last days I have been terrified that she would go into the woods and get shot, or Tamas get shot (he looks so like a fox).

Tuesday, December 3rd

W
E WERE PURGED
by a magnificent storm all day yesterday. How glorious it was! Fifty-mile gusts of wind driving the waves in, and almost the highest tide on record (did Raymond say fourteen feet?). Judy and I put on boots and raincoats, and Tamas came along, to see the surf at its height. We could hardly stand against the wind, our glasses were covered with salt spray and Tamas' fur was blown back to the roots. Down at the point we were able to stand for a few moments with those towering waves roaring in to right and left, the whole shore white with foam. It was like an answer to prayer, the outward storm playing out what might have become an inward storm had it not absorbed all the tensions, as it did.

Indoors we had a nice intimate day with a fire going in the cozy room and I blessed the storm for that too, as I believe it satisfied some deep restlessness in Judy. We even got out for the mail and did some errands in Portsmouth at noon. And I came home with two wonderful letters, one from Bill Brown and one from Betty Voelker, both painters, both living in San Francisco or near it. Of course, Bill goes back thirty-five years in my life; we have struggled along at our separate arts side by side. His letters are always full of magic and joy for me, as when yesterday I read this haunting description of the charm of his routine. He and Paul have won through to such a fertile and fertilizing relationship I almost envy it … and then I think of my solitude and realize again that I am truly married to it and without it would be even more nerve-racked and impossible than I am. Bill writes: “For the last month we've been having spectacular sunsets each night. We sit with our drinks in hand and wait like children to see just what he/she up there has prepared. I love all of our daily rituals. Breakfast, the arrival of mad, wild Jimmie (a cat) who still greets us with a snarl instead of a miaow—then Ma Belle's entrance into the kitchen where she chooses her favorite flavor of Tender Victuals for that day. Then we sit quietly together for 15 minutes (I can't claim it's meditation) and off I go to the studio until four or so. Then a shower and a drink and a good dinner by chef Paul, followed by reading or music. It sounds idyllic, but, of course, despair, frustrations, headaches of one kind or another keep us in fighting form.”

A letter like this makes the day flower. Betty's too was full of her sense of life and exact observation … “the light is again that champagne like luminosity” … the phrase made me dream.

Dreams! Since my return from Europe I seem to have been living my life through again in dreams. Last night about ten people, including the Huxleys, Margaret Clapp, wandered in and out of my dreams.

Bramble, who is not a lap cat, now every night at about one creeps up and lies on my chest, kneading me firmly (and sometimes painfully) while she purrs extremely loudly. The slow taming of this wild creature has been fascinating.

Wednesday, December 4th

T
HIS IS
the latest I've ever planted bulbs but Raymond finally did dig a little bed over the wall and it seemed too bad not to use it, so I bought eighteen tulips this morning and set them in this afternoon under a pure blue sky—it was cold! One understands how animals scurry about preparing for winter. I have been doing the same thing for weeks, getting the storm windows put up, yesterday my snow tires, getting in extra seed for the birds (sunflower at $15.50 for 50 pounds is staggering!), firewood. And today I paid $211.00 for the November oil for the furnace. I tremble a little, for if I don't write a book a year it just wouldn't be possible to live here.

It is beautiful up here in my study in the afternoons, the sky over the sea reflecting the sunset and the great arc of the ocean all around me. In the mornings I have to pull the curtains, for the light dazzles.

Thursday, December 5th

T
EMPERATURE
10° above this morning.

I have a leaden feeling when I wake up and need to shake myself awake like a dog. But the lead is in my mind, of course. It is not only the coming on of winter, but the coming on of old age that I shore up against these days. At all ages we are learning how precarious life is, as it slowly penetrates consciousness that we live in a dying civilization. It was dreadfully borne in on me when the UN allowed Arafat, a holster showing under his shirt, to speak, and so sanctified the most brutal terrorist organization in the world. At that moment something went out of us all in the West. Trust that the generality of nations would stand, at least theoretically, for justice under law? “The Age of Terror,” Paul Johnson calls this one in the
New Statesman
(November 29). Now the truth is out after The Age of Anxiety when we felt vaguely uncomfortable and alarmed. Now the truth is out—there is no court of higher appeal, no public generality to express revolt. We are all in the same boat and the boat is commanded by thugs.

Johnson says,

“Here we come to the essence of the argument. No state throughout history has had completely clean hands. What marks the progress of civilization is the systematic recognition of laws, the identification and punishment of crime, and the reprobation of the offender. A civilized society is one which sees evil in itself and provides means to eliminate it, where the voice of conscience is active. The horrific record of Britain's indiscriminate bombing of Germany is in part redeemed by the protests of Bishop Bell of Chichester. The brutalization of Vietnam by the United States is balanced by the critical millions who eventually brought it to an end. We need not despair at the devastating events of our times so long as we retain the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, between law and disorder, between justice and crime, and proclaim these distinctions from the roof-tops.

“The tragedy of the UN is that the distinctions have been first blurred, then wholly abandoned; and that its judgements are now delivered not according to any recognized set of principles, however inadequate, but solely in response to the pressures of political and racial groupings. Racialism is condemned in South Africa but applauded in Uganda; and the fruits of aggression are denied or blessed according to the race and political leanings of those to whom they accrue. Thus the UN has become a kind of kangaroo court; far from protecting international order, it undermines it. Not even the wretched League of Nations gave a welcome and a platform to Hitler.”