That rare world seems far away in this bustling one of the first day of school. Sunday went to Charles’s departure, Monday to going over the children’s clothes in preparation for Tuesday which was an expedition to Stamford for fall and winter clothes. (Every other mother had the same idea—Best’s was jammed.) But today the winter routine has started and the house is quite peaceful, after eight a.m. and before 3:30 p.m.
Anyway, I think my new year started in Ashfield. I don’t believe I can give you an adequate sense of what it did for me. I have been trying, in my mind, to express it for Con. I suppose it is really a renewed sense of one’s capacity for joy that it gave me.
(Anne has just come back from school. She had her first French lesson. “We learned to say le professeur!”)
Joy in the external world first: the overflowing apple trees, the lush grass, the ferns, the pine needles, the birch trees on your hill in the middle of all those dark pines. Delight in sheer living too. The food. (How did you get shad roe in September?) The salad. The wood-fire, the linen sheets to sleep in, and then the excitement of talking and listening to people.
(Scott has just come to give me his change from the school lunch. The moon-flower bud has bent its swan-neck in its effort to follow the sun across the sky.)
All this was true last year, of course, but this year I was hungrier and more grateful. Also there was more ease. I have decided, thinking about it on the way down, that the “needles and pins” feelings I have listening to M. Léger’s* conversation is not really—or entirely—due to shyness or fear of being inadequate, but it is simply a feeling generic to poetry. Real poetry is, of course, not soft and flowery, but pierces intuitively to the naked nerve. That is why, whether he is talking about the frigate bird or his mother riding through a tropical storm or the diet of hummingbirds, it is always exciting. One is shocked to a new image in a flash of lightning. I must try reading his poetry with this kind of receptivity. One gets into the bad habit when young, when adolescent, of reading poetry in order to find mirrored one’s own feelings or to be lulled into acceptance of one’s own feelings, when it really should bring “not peace but a sword.”
But there was peace at Ashfield too, given by you. I don’t mean a pillow kind of peace; I think it is, among other things, the absence of trivia. You live, and you permit others to live, very vividly in the real things about you—the cats! the Brussels sprouts, the toadstools—so that one feels very rooted to the earth. Then one lives in the world of human relationships, ideas, books, etc. But that in-between world of mechanical trivia that occupies so much of most people’s lives does not seem to exist. It really is an extraordinary atmosphere and does give a deep sense of “comparative and intermittent peace.”
You, of course, as you say, are different in Ashfield. Or perhaps I noticed the difference more, or perhaps it was something new—a sense of being not afraid of being vulnerable (was this what the man waiting for the train with you saw?). I hope I can achieve it sometime.
The sun is now behind the trees. The moon-bud looks less strained. Perhaps it won’t open tonight after all. I must stop this rambling and interrupted letter. (A chickadee is sitting in the moon-flower’s world.) I hope Italy does for you what my time in Ashfield did for me.
December 28th, 1955 [DIARY]
There has been a pressure on me all fall that makes me feel constantly uneasy & inadequate. It is, I think, a double pressure—trying to adjust to—or disregard (I can’t decide which) the roles thrust upon me by Mother’s death and by the great success of the book. Both these two public changes demand or seem to demand something of me which I am unwilling to give & resent being demanded. (Why should I carry on Mother’s role—her public role?—I am not in the least like her.) (Why should I take on the role of “Foremost Woman of the Year” with its hypocritical saccharine overtones—just because of a book I wrote & meant—but have outgrown?)
I feel imprisoned in these two false pictures the world has of me—& yet unable to—as I should if I am honest about disliking the roles & believing I should not play them—disregard them. The unanswered & unfulfilled demands in both areas make me feel thoroughly inadequate & guilty.
Added to which—just practically—they take so much time to fight against—say no to—etc.—so much time—thought—energy—that they use up the extra time I have and the delicate balance of being wife-mother-writer is thrown again.
One needs leisure to write & leisure presupposes—demands—money—and the ability & free conscience to use it (I have the money but don’t feel free enough to use it wisely enough to obtain the necessary leisure). Leisure also must be accompanied with a free conscience as regards the demands of family & friends—not to speak of the world—clamoring on one’s door.
This I have felt all fall & resented. Fame (in this country) just practically makes it very cumbersome to live one’s life. In a subtler & more destructive way it makes it very difficult to be oneself—to change—to grow.
One is frozen in the picture the world has of you. If you move out of that picture they resent it—much as a friend resents your moving out of his or her concept of you (or a wife or a husband). The artist—if he stays alive—has got to keep moving out of these picture frames set around him.* He must break picture after picture—frame after frame. Only the people who don’t frame you, can you remain faithful to in any way.
My discomfort in the frames has manifested itself all fall. The mail nauseates me—the requests—the letters asking me to speak—awarding me degrees, etc., etc. All nice enough—but basically all, or most of them, are fixatives to shellac me into their frame.
The sincere letters are sometimes different & interest me—if the writers tell about themselves & their lives—but there are too many to read them all—& the sheer mass knocks out the pleasure of finding the real ones.
All of it seems to me to impede life & growth & discovery—clog up the streams.
January 13th, 1956 [DIARY]
… Yesterday was a bad day for requests. We had a wire, an angry letter, & a request from Pantheon (besides 2–3 other requests in the mail for speaking). C. blows up at Kyrill*—so he told me later on—on the telephone, I go off to the house feeling paranoid about the wire, the sarcastic letter, etc.… I must either give up writing or get hardened—or live a life of constant escape—or write to be published after death.
Monday, January 16th, 1956 [DIARY]
C. has been laid low for three days with a fever & some kind of infection in the glands. His temperature is quite high—102—at night & he feels flat—very unusual for him. He is such a hard person to do anything for—comes down for meals—won’t take medicine—or call a doctor. (Perhaps he is right—he seems to be shaking it off.) His inactivity somehow equates him with me & brings us closer in a strange way.
I have had a full weekend. Children’s trips & always a difficult letter to write. Yesterday a.m. writing Leland Hayward† I could not help them with C.’s film. Kurt Wolff comes for lunch. We discuss the book of poems,‡ especially the last one, “On a Photograph” with his poetry editor’s criticisms. Some helpful—some too literal … Kurt takes the two copies of “The Uncle” & “Aunt Harriet.”§ He is bewildered, I think, that I do not get more work done on the novel. Here too there is pressure.
I try to explain—my ordinary life as a woman—with three children at home & a husband demanding a certain amount—is so delicately balanced I can just find time to work if nothing else is thrown in.
But add just one thing—Christmas—the extra work due to problems of being an executor of ECM—or the extra mail & having to say No to a number of demands—the apple cart is upset.
Scott’s Cove
February 9th, 1956
Dearest Land,
We have just picked up your letter, early, from the post office. Your father and I have both read it. There is not time for me to write you the kind of letter I would like—I will do that from Canada, I hope—because I have only 3/4 hour before we start
to leave, but I want to drop a letter in the mailbox as we go so you can have our first reactions and not be wondering, “What the hell are they going to say to that letter?!”
There are many, many things to say. That was a thoughtful and honest letter and it brings up much to think about, and it shows that you have been thinking—churning things over, questioning, weighing, and trying to do it as sincerely and honestly as possible. I can’t answer all of these thoughts here. It will take me some thinking. But certain things can be, and should be, said right off the bat.
You are not “disappointing” us and you are not “letting us down.” Nor do we feel you have or are wasting our money. I am sure from your letter that you have “learned” many things—perhaps not just the things you expected, but you have learned certain things about life today, and you have learned things about yourself and other people which are invaluable lessons and which can help you all your life. I think you can learn still more by analyzing the situation and yourself in relation to it before you leave it.
We are not disappointed because we do not feel that college marks* are a criterion of character or intelligence or success in life. (I will have to come back to this point, because getting through college with passing marks may help one, of course, may be valuable in the world’s eyes. But it is not an invaluable criterion.) We are both highly doubtful of the mass-production education of today, applied with pressure to the amassing of facts: knowledge, not wisdom. We are both of us very sympathetic to your reaction to the pressure routine of this year. I wrote much the same kind of thing to my parents my freshman year (and college was far easier then), and as you know, your father just left college. I felt there was no time for thought, for life, for any kind of creative work, and I got so I couldn’t sleep, find time to be out of doors, etc. I was pressed by my father and mother who felt this was a “wonderful opportunity” and that “I would always regret leaving,” and by the inner compulsion and humiliation that my sister had done well and loved it and been the perfect college girl ahead of me (more popular with boys too!). I was pretty much pressured into staying in college.
It is hard to say now whether it was a mistake or not. What I do know is that I should not have gone to the same college as my sister. I should not have felt I had to compete with her or live up to her, or to my mother and father in college. It took me many, many years to realize I had my own gifts and they were utterly different from either of my sisters. (And Con was summa cum laude, and Dwight was a scholar, Phi Beta Kappa. I was the poorest student of the family.) I am telling you all this because I think some of your feeling of “letting us down,” “failure,” depression, etc. (which worries me much more than your marks or your wanting to leave), is bound up with your very natural and similar feeling that you must live up to Jon!
Jon has his own gifts. You have yours—and you have great gifts. They must be used and you must, and will, find the environment that gives them scope. Jon wasn’t so perfectly suited to Stanford but, as he once said to me, he was more of a conformist; you are more apt to question and rebel. Rebellion can be a sign of great strength. I am proud of you for seeing the shortcomings of your situation and facing the fact that you’re not getting anything out of it—and that most people’s shocked answers about the value of college education are merely conventional and have no thought behind them. Rebellion is often healthy and I feel it maybe is in your case. But it must be used wisely, like any kind of explosive material. It can teach you much. Ask yourself, with that incentive of rebelliousness as a spur, what it is you are rebelling against? And what toward? Don’t let rebelliousness simply blow you out of a bad situation into a worse one. Try to make the transition smooth. It is a waste to use all that gunpowder to blow yourself out of college and leave a hole and broken bric-a-brac in the process.
If it is the best thing for you to leave—and it may well be—try, if you can, to tie things up so that your next step won’t be too difficult or wasteful. A B and even a C can count for a lot; a finished course, even with a D, makes for a smoother transition into the next step you want to take—infinitely easier if you want to transfer to A&M or another college. Maybe you don’t want to transfer. All this you must discuss with your father: the draft, etc. I hope you will wait to talk it over with him before taking definite action. I think he feels sympathetically toward your attitude and can help you toward the next step.
If you can, don’t go on at this pace—let up a little—even the marks. Set a limit for yourself. Work just so hard, and then get out and away from it. Accept the fact that you’re not an A-student or a B-student. It doesn’t mean you have a lower intelligence—you’re not in that narrow groove, that’s all. Use your intelligence to live balancedly. I will add more to this—
Mother.
P.S. One more thing: you are not lazy. You have shown that you can work hard and long at difficult jobs—new and green and all-to-learn, as you did this summer on the ranch, when you felt the work was worthwhile and you liked it. You have that behind you and you can be proud of it. It is a good record. And we were proud of you. But, as you yourself know, the ability to take hard physical work is not enough to make one a successful rancher. It is not enough to escape into hard physical activity day by day. One must have some kind of broader vision of the whole project and the world into which it fits, what you are working toward. This is what you need some kind of broader education and/or training for. We—and you—must figure out how best to get this for you.
I could write you another long letter on the “unreality” feelings you describe, both at college and at home. I think it is a very natural feeling and it is really, I think, a sign of growth and great change going on in you. Actually, it is not the world which is an unreality, but yourself. You are going through such big changes that you are a stranger to yourself and therefore to the world around you. You do not know what to do because you do not know who you are. When you know yourself, then the course of action will proceed inevitably from that core—and not as escape action but action which expresses you. I am sure you will find this, dear Land, and I do not really worry. Only I know how upsetting these periods are and I would like to help you if I could. I wish you could fly back at the first chance and talk this all over with me—or perhaps I should fly out. Let me know. In the meantime, I love you very much and I believe in you and I am behind you.
Darien, Conn.
May 11th, 1956
Dear Monte,*
I didn’t realize you were counting on my opinion of the Reader’s Digest article. By the time I read it, it had already gone to them, so it seemed a waste of time to comment on it. But for what it is worth, this is what I think.
First of all, I see no great objection to it from our (the family’s) point of view, but I think it is just as well it wasn’t accepted, as it now stands, for your sake. It isn’t, of course, Reader’s Digest material. The Digest does not print poetry at all—which is your true medium. It avoids subtleties, delicate writing, innuendos, images, quotations. Your writing is full of these.
I don’t agree with your friend’s criticism of the title for the piece on Mother: “Her Victory of Happiness.” It is, I think, as you thought, a good Reader’s Digest title, and very true of her. Her happiness was a victory. But you do not make this clear. For this woman who wrote you, “I have had a happy life”—what was her life like? Have you ever stopped to think?
She started poor and in delicate health. Her twin sister died and they were afraid she would too. She wore clothes passed on to her by richer relatives and depended on them for vacations. She longed to go to college, but was considered too delicate, and it was expensive. But her desire for life, her hold on life, was so great that she got there (teaching school and tutoring for extra money). She did well and became strong and discovered her talents. She wanted to write, but before she could develop her talents and reputation, she married a poor and struggling lawyer. She put everything she had into housekeeping and budgeting and child care. Like all moth
ers, she was too busy to write. Later, she threw herself whole-heartedly into her husband’s and children’s lives. In middle life, when things had opened up for her, and her husband had become well known and successful and she might enjoy some of these hard-won benefits, she lost, in quick succession, her husband, her first grandchild, and her oldest daughter, and her son was stricken by long illness that was then thought (though she never believed it and it turned out not to be) incurable. But she did not write or act despairingly, or live despairingly, or even stop to feel sorry for herself. She went on with a life of service to wide circles of education, welfare organizations, etc. until her death. You were right in your title: her happiness was a victory.
As I write, I realize you couldn’t have known all this. You only knew her in a very brief period and limited life, at Next Day Hill at the end of her life. What could you know of the struggle, except intuitively? You are a poet and your intuitive feeling about her is in your title.
Because I don’t write doesn’t mean that I don’t think of you with sympathy and compassion. I simply do not write letters to anyone any more except my immediate family. Correspondence, like social life, is one of the things I have had to give up in favor of the things I feel a duty to concentrate on: my husband, my children, the wider family that has fallen to me since Mother’s death—and my writing. Writing books must take the place of correspondence. You, who are yourself so dedicated to writing, must understand this choice.
Little House, Darien