The House by the Sea (6 page)

Wednesday, January 29th

D
ISMAL RAIN
, all the snow melted off. I look out over a brown field to a toneless gray sea, but I have a bunch of spring flowers on my desk—three red and yellow tulips, two each of flat-cupped daffodils (one has brilliant orange cups and yellow petals, one large flat white petals and an orange cup), plus a small spray of mimosa. Why is it that mimosa shrivels in the air? It arrived yesterday all fluffy and alive and has now withered already, all its panache gone.

As I think over those three letters I wrote about yesterday I realize freshly how brave people have to be every day to maintain themselves against all that is asked, against what they have to accept that they can't do (because it goes against the grain too harshly) as well as the courage to do what they can and must do without falling to pieces from exhaustion. The greatest problem of my young married friend is really fatigue … this seems the insuperable
fact
about bringing up small children. There is no rest. If there is hostility toward a husband who is not at home enough to take his share of simply being human, then it all becomes doubly hard to handle, and the “bone loneliness” eats its way into the psyche.

The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it. Most people swallow the unacceptable because it makes life so much easier. At what point does one feel that doing battle, however painful and rending, is necessary? This is the excruciating question. If a woman loves her husband and knows how tired he too is when he comes home from the wrangles and tensions of work, when can she allow herself to demand attention, to put her case squarely before him? There is no good time. For years my mother buried her anger—and sometimes I think she was right to do so, because in his sixties my father was never going to change. Letting the anger out would have made no difference, only upset him, not led to a sudden vision of what he had failed to do and to be for her. So she beat herself inside—and he never grew up.

That is the tragedy. If things are never fought out, it means that somewhere deep down the marriage does not make for growth. Stability has been achieved at a very high price, too high a price, some would feel. I admire my former students who are now married because they have the guts to fight, painful as it is.

Thursday, January 30th

R
AIN ALL DAY
yesterday, brilliant sun and wind today, and snow predicted for tomorrow … that's New England, all right! But truly this is a peculiar winter and makes me feel restless. I love long periods of being enclosed in snow, forced inward. I love the winter and feel we haven't had it. But who knows? We may before April.

People who say they do not want to pick flowers and have them indoors (the idea being, I suppose, that they are more “natural” in the garden than in the house) don't realize that indoors one can really look at a single flower, undistracted, and that this meditation brings great rewards. The flowers on my desk have been lit up one by one as by a spotlight as the sun slowly moves. And once more I am in a kind of ecstasy at the beauty of light through petals … how each vein is seen in relief, the structure suddenly visible. I just noticed that deep in the orange cup of one of these flat-cupped daffodils there is translucent bright green below the stamens.

I come back to my happiness here. I have never been so happy in my life, never for such a sustained period, for I have now been in this house by the sea for a year and a half. I have not said enough about what it is to wake each day to the sunrise and to that great tranquil open space as I lie in my bed, having breakfast, often quietly thinking for a half hour. That morning amplitude, silence, the sea, all make for a radical change in tempo. Or is it, too, that I am growing older, and have become a little less compulsive about “what has to be done”? I am taking everything with greater ease. When I was younger there was far more conflict, conflict about my work, the desperate need to “get through,” and the conflict created by passionate involvement with people. There are compensations for not being in love—solitude grows richer for me every year. It is not a matter of being a recluse … I shall never be that; I enjoy and need my friends too much. But it is a matter of detachment, of not being quite so easily pulled out of my own orbit by violent attraction, of being able to enjoy without needing to possess.

The sixties are marvelous years, because one has become fully oneself by then, but the erosions of old age, erosion of strength, of memory, of physical well-being have not yet begun to frustrate and needle. I am too heavy, but I refuse to worry too much about it. I battle the ethos here in the USA, where concern about being overweight has become a fetish. I sometimes think we are as cruel to old brother ass, the body, as the Chinese used to be who forced women's feet into tiny shoes as a sign of breeding and beauty. “Middle-aged spread” is a very real phenomenon, and why pretend that it is not? I am not so interested in being a dazzling model as in being comfortable inside myself. And that I am.

Monday, February 3rd

H
ELEN HOWE
is dead. It was quite a shock to come upon the obit in the
Times
yesterday. Such a strange impersonal way to learn of a death! I felt a pang that I had not been with her these last weeks, been with her in my consciousness. I knew she was ill, but not that it was to be fatal, and I had heard from Polly Starr that she was home from the hospital. Since Judy is here for a few days, I have had no time to take in this death. I feel knocked over the head.

I saw Helen for the last time last summer, when she took me over to Northeast Harbor from the island to read poems for Mrs. Belmont and a few of Mrs. B.'s friends. On the way she drew to the side of the road and we had a little talk about her problems with her new book—whether to make it straight autobiography, whether to use letters. She had been going through hundreds of her brother Mark's letters. She, Mark, and Quincy were all articulate and witty correspondents and I had looked forward to what she would do with this rich material. Yet, of course, there were problems as there always are when one is turning life into art … how much can one tell? What is to be left out and for what reasons? Delightful and tender as
The Gentle Americans
was for the average reader, Helen was attacked after it appeared by some of its subjects, and suffered over this. I have never known a more conflicted writer.

Partly, perhaps, the satirist who is not cruel by nature has special problems. One side of him sees the grotesque—his genius is to caricature—but the censor-conscience or the censor-kindness is always out to short-circuit the impulse.

Overshadowed by two brilliant brothers, I think Helen never came into herself with complete assent to her own being. She was too thin-skinned, too insecure to dare her full capacity. But, oh, what a charming person!

As I write I hear the inflection of her voice, the quick tempo that would suddenly stop in a laugh or a little gasp at her own daring. I see her stepping off the boat at Greenings Island in a panama hat with a dark blue scarf tied around it, a navy sweater, and white pleated skirt, looking so elegant, an Edith Wharton lady. She was tiny (her mother called her three children “my race of dwarfs”) and that added to her charm.

How we used to laugh … Helen, Mark, Polly, Johnny Ames, and I! I have never known that kind of gaiety except with them. And all, except Polly, dead now.

Tuesday, February 4th

F
OUR BELOW ZERO
this morning of dazzling sunlight! The ocean steams, it is so much warmer than the air. Two nights ago I was woken at three by a rare sound here—a cat fight, a great yowling and howling. Bramble was out, so of course I listened rather anxiously. I have a bad cold and didn't dare go out into the cold as I normally would have done. Then I realized that sleeping Tamas might be a help, and sure enough he dashed down the stairs ahead of me, already barking, and flew to the rescue when I commanded, “Tamas, go out and get your cat!” In about three minutes I heard his short bark that means, “Let me in” and there was the shepherd with his sheep! As Judy keeps saying, “You couldn't have found a better dog.” When she comes—a little more restless each time as her powers of concentration diminish—it is Tamas who plays with her and demands to be taken for walks; they go out a dozen times a day, a sweet sight as I watch them walking down the field.

The winter here has its own joys. One of them is that I see such a wide perimeter of ocean. Once the leaves are out, about half of what I see now from my bed is screened off. I have associated seaside places with few trees but here the house is backed by tall white and Japanese pines and there are maples and oaks at each side. The blue ocean seen through the branches is especially beautiful.

Last night I dreamed of Louise Bogan, a good sign, I think, as it means the subconscious is already at work on the portrait I hope to begin tomorrow. Judy leaves today.

There was an interesting interview with Liv Ullman in the
Times
. One senses her rare honesty. What comes through as so real in her performances comes through because she
is
real. “Miss Ullman said that countless friends and fans, including some homosexuals, have written her to say that they felt they were eavesdropping on their own relationships when they saw ‘Scenes from a Marriage,' and it had depressed them.

“I don't think one should be without hope, though,” said Miss Ullman, who lives in Oslo with her mother and eight-year-old daughter by Ingmar Bergman (the two have never been married but once lived together and are now close friends). “I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone.”

Miss Ullman feels that the pressure for a woman not to live alone—or to be alone—is great. Whenever she goes into a restaurant alone, for instance, she hides with a book in a “tiny corner table where no one will stare at me.”

“Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they've got to get hold of someone to prove they're worth while,” she said, sweeping the air with her arm and clapping her fist into her palm. “If they do decide to be alone, part of their loneliness will come from outside, rather than inside. Society will pity them, look down on them.”

And later in the interview she talks about guilt. She has a “bad conscience” about spending so much time away from her daughter Linn. “That's because all my life I've read in books that a mother should stay home with her child. I try to convince myself that one way of life is not right for all people, that maybe it's good for me and my child to live the way we do. Yet it goes very deep, this guilt, and I always feel somewhere that I'm doing something wrong.”

Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman, I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not one feminine characteristic. A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always a little on the defensive.

Thursday, February 6th

A
T LAST
the snowy world I have been longing for! It has snowed since yesterday morning, off and on, and now comes down fast, slanting in the wind. The sea is high with deep huge waves, not ruffled on the surface, but great dark threatening combers that rise high over the field and then crash—white fountains above the white snow. The silence is broken now by the great steady roar, and this is something new for me—the snow and a rough sea together.

Yesterday I went out for the mail early, right after breakfast, to be sure to be able to get out, and it's well that I did so. I brought back orange and white and pale amber-colored tulips and a few iris … what is more entrancing than spring flowers in a snowstorm?

I began the piece on Louise Bogan, again as with Bowen taken up at once into a whirlpool of feelings and sensations as all those meetings well up and must be sorted out and pondered for the seeds of truth in them.

It has to be faced, no doubt, that there is some conflict in any human relationship of depth. Between Louise and me there was conflict because I felt that she should have left
The New Yorker
long before she did … it became almost an obsession with me that she was allowing her gifts as poet to be cluttered up by all those books of other people's poems, even though at the end she reviewed very few. Still, they “came in” and forced the analytic side of her nature to take over.

Saturday, February 8th, four
P.M
.

A
CALM DARK BLUE
sea beyond the white field, every bush and tree casting a blue shadow as the sun begins to set.

On the horizon a large white ship … a Russian trawler perhaps? We see a few oil freighters but rarely a ship that looks like this. I am feeling overcharged … a very intense life here alone these past days. For one thing, the arrival of Charles Richie's Journal of the war years came … I devoured it after lunch, hunting down everything he says about his meetings with Elizabeth Bowen.

Yesterday the mail brought me the news that Céline has died. She was over ninety and had been miserable for the past year, not able to walk, very deaf … I saw her twice when I was in Brussels last October and even though I sat at a little stool at her feet and she leaned forward in her armchair, she could not understand what I said and exhausted herself talking. It made me terribly sad not to be able to communicate. Too late! She looked like a poor sad old monkey. Yet the vitality, the will to live, was still there, and in these last years she had begun to write poems and handed me the notebook so that I could read a few, but I could not decipher her hand. I was to have seen her a third time, but became ill myself—perhaps subconsciously on purpose. We both knew the third would have been a final good-bye. The poems were very sentimental … J. showed me one. Does that matter? No. What matters was the marvelous spring of the spirit still wanting and needing to express itself.