After the Stroke (7 page)

York Hospital, Sunday, June 29

The second heart conversion was done about eight-thirty yesterday morning—again a success, and feeling so
well
all day, able to breathe and think of what life can be like again, if this time the conversion
sticks.
Heartbeat 84 this morning (it reached 130 after I got to the hospital).

Yesterday I finished the biography of Helen Waddell—and am glad I had it with me. How she grew and “enlarged the place of her tent” yet remained always
centered
in a demanding and illuminating faith in an order in the universe, in a
reason
for what seemed often in her private life like deprivation. She says it often:

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilizing of it. No human soul can for long ignore “the giant agony of the world” and live except indeed the mollusc life, like a barricade upon eternity. (p. 297)

And later in a letter to her sister Meg:

Because if one loves, one really isn't lonely; it is the unloving heart that is always cold, and has no fire to warm itself at. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God”.
Don't tell me there are theological explanations of it—that the love must be “in Christ.” He that loveth—knoweth God. Which means when the heart goes out to anything, it is, in that moment, close to God.

York Hospital, Monday, June 30

A bad night, about three hours sleep because one hour after I was in deep sleep I was wrenched awake by a male nurse to take my blood pressure, etc. It was then eleven (a nurse had done it at nine-thirty). At one-fifteen I asked for another pill, maybe slept by three, and meanwhile went into a tail-spin of depression. To manage such a passive
waiting
life for so many months I have had to bury my real self—and now realize that bringing that real self back is going to be even more difficult than it was to bury it. The fact is that in this state of accidie there is nothing I look forward to, no one I long to see or be with—Bramble haunted me and her loss came back with great poignance. With her death some secret wild place in me has gone. Shall I ever find it again?

The counterpoint for this time of negation and nothingness has been the curious combination of an almost daily call from Pat Keen in Los Angeles with news of
Nicholas Nickleby
, which is having a great and deserved triumph there, and my call to Juliette Huxley. Juliette had the courage at eighty-nine to fly to Crete alone for two weeks. She came home to a heat wave in London! But the reviews of her splendid autobiography are good and she sounded very much on a wave of relief when I called her yesterday morning.

The contrast between these two friends, so much alike in the struggle, and my snail-like existence is ridiculous. I want to be well.

I note a typical hospital day which begins at:

Finally
from 1:30 to 3:00 go fast asleep and have a vivid dream of Louise Bogan

Tuesday, July 1

Home again. I feel disoriented, without an identity. What a strange time this is, all told. Watering the flowers helped. I think one trouble is that I feel disassociated from the garden. Karen is doing such a good job, but it's not my garden these days. I look and admire but am not
connected.

I cooked the salmon for our supper. Edythe will stay over this first night “at home.” Salmon, mayonnaise, boiled potatoes, peas, and hot fudge sauce on vanilla ice cream. A feast, as at the end I could not swallow the hospital food.

Wednesday, July 2

Heavy persistent rain—and it is good to resume my old pattern and routine—to make a small start at least at living my real life again. Pierrot slept beside me, stretched out full length and purring very loudly, and that was a help last night. Now I look at the piles and piles of letters—and wonder—it's an insoluble problem at this point, so maybe just pull one or two out by chance.

I have nothing exhilarating to read at the moment. How impoverished a town York is without a single bookstore! There were two when I first came here. I'm feeling the emptiness of six months with almost no outside stimulation. I haven't been in a shop or bookstore all that time, or out to dinner except once, and have seen only my entourage of Nancy, Edythe and Janice—and Pat the two weeks she was here, in which I was, I'm afraid, mostly in a kind of trance—just trying to keep things going in the house. I do look back with joy on our good long talks at tea time.

Edith Kennedy, the most brilliant conversationalist I have known, used to talk about “the frame of reference.” With most of my friends here, dear as they are, the frame of reference is very small in scope. When it suddenly widens what a joy it is! And I think back to such a moment when I had supper in New York with Marguerite and Jacques Barzun and we were talking of the Mozart film—and he and I leapt together remembering Yvonne Printemps in Sacha Guitry's delicious “Mozart” perhaps fifty years ago in Paris! What a bond to be with someone who remembered it and Printemps' aria:

Si tu m'écris

Dis-moi toujours que tu t'ennuies

horriblement

Mozart sang it in farewell to three court ladies, each of whom might have been his mistress. But which one? That was the piquancy of the scene.

Pat is dear to me partly
because
the frame of reference between us is very wide. She has read enormously—and there is the theater, too—and Jung—and all that a European woman has in her blood.

Thursday, July 3

It's still gray, cold and miserable after yesterday's deluge and I feel tired and cross—bored by this half-life, and not quite ready, perhaps, for a full one.

Pierrot is proving to be a problem—using my bathroom mat at night although he has a pan in my bedroom close by So I again threw the bath mat in the washer—and we shall see. This time I forced him to smell it and spanked him. Meanwhile Tamas, who is always so good, had had diarrhea in the night and there were
three
rugs to clean up downstairs!

But I'm determined to get something done at my desk, for morale's sake.

Friday, July 4

Statue of Liberty day! It has been quite a celebration and I feel proud this time of the media who really made an effort to talk about the hell Ellis Island was. We, my mother and I, came that way and she would never talk about it, she had been so terribly humiliated. The miracle is that the great waves of “foreigners”—Irish, Italians, Greeks, Jews—really have been assimilated. I must say, too, that in spite of my nostalgia for Europe I am glad to be an American. Among other good things, to write in English. But for World War I, I should have been a Belgian poet in a tiny country divided between two languages.

It's been a lovely quiet day; the only sound, the sea gulls crying and the murmur of ocean. I felt rather sick after lunch—dreading the return of that awful feeling from the drug, but maybe it will grow less—and maybe Dr. Petrovich will reduce the dose to one every other day. I think I can handle that.

I'm really getting ready for the fall trips—hoping against hope I shall be able to do them. Rather dismayed to find how far Burlington, Vermont, is—where I'm due September twenty-fourth for a reading. I had imagined Edythe might drive me there. But it looks as though I would have to take a plane from Boston.

Pierrot has been very affectionate all day and last night behaved himself, thank goodness. The great adventure was going for a walk. He bounds or rather tears after or ahead of us, then gets frightened and
wails
until I call him. When a motorcar passed us very slowly he was terrified and disappeared entirely. I called and called, heard no mews—and was quite anxious, but there he was waiting for us when we got home, Tamas and I.

I found a tick under my knee. They have been the worst ever this year, but had seemed to be over lately. How repulsive they are!

Saturday, July 5

An in and out day—but there's no doubt that having to pull oneself together is a help. Heidi had agreed to meet me at Barnacle Billy's for lunch, so I had an incentive to get things done and did a laundry, swept the kitchen, took rubbish down cellar (luckily Raymond was here when I got back from lunch so it was all ready for him to take).

Sunday, July 6

Horbible muggy gray day. I got up full of determination at five-thirty, let Tamas out, made bacon for Sunday breakfast for Tamas and me. Pierrot was out bird watching. After breakfast, put fresh sheets on my bed and washed and folded the dirty ones—and meanwhile had decided to make
ratatouille
before the ingredients Edythe got for me rotted. It took nearly an hour to cut everything up and get it started—so I can finish the cooking tonight now the work is done. All very well, but now it is nine forty-five and I am thinking of taking a nap instead of writing letters!

I had such a good talk with Carol on the phone just before six—she thinks I am right to go out and do poetry readings whatever the risk. That gave me a boost. I think she understands my slow starvation these past months and reading the poems will help give me back the person I have lost.

Carol was interesting about Frances Partridge—saying she was never the central person to
herself
—and that I have been that and am that. Yes, if I can write poetry again—ever again. For to be the central person for oneself implies that one is somehow the servant of something greater than oneself.

Wednesday, July 9

Well, the old heart is out of sync, fibrillating and running about 140 a minute—so I'm back to square one and determined to get Dr. Petrovich to agree on the operation at Massachusetts General which would free me, I hope, from the long struggle.

We are having a heat wave, although today there is less humidity and it is quite bearable.

I must go back to Monday because I got back a little of the magic of this place when all was ready, champagne on ice, glasses, a plate of cookies, for Bill Heyen and Han and Bill Ewart who brought one of their boys. I sat down as I have not done lately, watching the light dancing in the leaves of the lilac, and feeling happy and at peace, glad that friends would soon be here. And such good friends. Bill Heyen is one of the very few poets I know now. I admire his work, tender, deep and authentic as it is, and I love him, great blond man. And of course Bill Ewart is the magician who imagines and prints the Christmas poem for me and once a little book of poems—and will do another tiny book next year. So all was festive for their arrival, even to a blue sea—and we had a good talk. I'm afraid Han, slight and shy, was disappointed in the garden—there is so little to see these days. But the Japanese iris are coming out!

And suddenly this afternoon a huge bunch of flame-colored roses arrived from Laurie Shields way off in San Francisco at the Older Women's League.

Bill's son, who has a sheltie, was dear with Tamas, stroking and talking to him just as though he were a person, as indeed he is.

Lucy just called from Dr. Petrovich's office—he is going to get hold of Dr. Ruskin, the “guru” for this operation, so at last I may get well soon! Unbelievable!

Friday, July 11

But now it seems Dr. Ruskin is away until the end of August—and Dr. P. is trying to get in touch with his assistant, Hasan Caran. I meanwhile feel awfully sick and abandoned this week end, still having to take the infernal medicine. And it is an almost perfect July day, warm and dry, the air so clear everything is in sharp outline.

How can I ever tell all the people who have sent flowers? Today a charming blue and white arrangement in a basket, very pale yellow lilies, iris, some little soft flowers in button-shaped branches that look like a wild flower, and harebells! The latter seem like magic in a florist's bouquet—this one from Dorothy Peck whom I have never met, but we talk occasionally on the phone.