Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986

  May 15th, 1956 [DIARY]

  I have not written all winter. Now it is full spring: apple blossoms out, a wren building a nest in the exhaust pipe of my little house, a phoebe nesting over the Ford in the garage, warblers flitting among the new leaved branches, the oak pollen flying, the maples and beech very green, the copper beech very pink. Even the oaks have passed the “squirrel’s ear” stage (“When the oak leaves are as big as a squirrel’s ears, then it’s time to plant corn”). The spring has been slow—cold, wet, and very behind. (I say this each year but this year it is really true. Things are behind and have just come out.)

  This year has gone fast and I feel sad to have it unrecorded. (How much of life is unrecorded!) But I have been trying to put my mornings into the book. It goes very slowly, probably because I am working out what I believe as I write. Yesterday, I finished the first very rough draft of Frances, the most complex woman. It has gone through weeks of outlines, then notes, then this first draft. It is a long essay on marriage. The whole book is that. I must now rewrite, condensing, smoothing, and making it less of a sermon. I am not sure I can pull it off. I am really writing essays, notebook or diary material, thoughts on marriage from the points of view of different characters.

  I often feel I should give up trying to put this material (this “something to say”) into fiction and just write notebook pieces or in my diary. (Though a diary would be too personal and not give enough scope.) Fiction is not my field. These people just stand and think for pages at a time; they think in semicolons, in images, in philosophy, in sermons. They preach! However, I must go through a first draft of the whole thing and see.

  [JULY 3RD, 1956, DIARY]*

  I land in San Diego about 7:15 & there is a brown Barbara & a child in her arms—big dark eyes—dark wispy hair, her thumb in her mouth & a little red dirndl on—dancing about on the sidewalk as soon as she is let down.… Soon we are all driving back to their little house & walled garden in Coronado. It is a convenient little two-bedroom, one-story house, right next to another—with adjoining gardens (children & toys & gardens are shared—also juice & milk & picking up, at times).

  Their house is now full of Japanese touches—a potted dwarf pine on their outdoor table—Japanese blue & white plates & bowls on the table—a paper lantern-doll in Christine’s room, water colors on the walls & Barbara’s flower arrangements. I sleep in with Christine—& wake to her gurgling in the morning from her crib (Jon made it, as well as her chest & a beautiful coffee table out of a polished stump).

  It is a happy peaceful life in a small circle—Jon off to the base in the mornings—Christine in her high chair feeding herself or tearing around the rooms—or calling at the garden gate for Debbie next door. I drop into a life of relative inactivity. I am a guest in my son’s home. I am a grandmother. It is strange, restful & delicious (see notes on being a grandmother written on plane).… And I am entranced as by a miracle in watching Christine.… Each move of the child is a miracle, something that never happened before & may never happen again—before my eyes.… First picture of Christine, dancing around, then sitting in her high chair—quiet & expectant for a few seconds. Feeding herself from the unbreakable cereal dish held onto the tray by suction (superb idea!). She does not like to be fed & is very independent.

  I brought her a little blue dirndl with red apron that C. had bought for one of my babies. Big puff sleeves. It fit her perfectly. I also brought a book to sing to her (“Frog Went a Courtin’ ”) and it was a great success. I would sing & she would sit next to me on the bed (“Up! Up!”) or, later, on my lap, & she would turn the pages, pointing out objects she recognized—with—often—unrecognizable words! Soon this book was her favorite. I was her slave. “Book! Book!” she would run to me & take my hand & lead me to the bed—or sofa—(“Up! Up!”) often dragging the big book after her.

  Jon chasing her (“goin’ to catch that baby!”) & her ecstatic crowing delight. Jon giving her a bath & holding her in his arms—wrapped in a big towel—all damp—big-eyed & dark hair a little wispy.

  She runs to Barbara a hundred times a day—not for anything in particular—but simply to express joy or to make sure her mother is there—“Mommee!” And Barbara always answers “Babee!”—& usually takes her in her arms. Then she goes down again happy. “Sometimes when I haven’t time to love her with my arms I love her with my knees!” said Barbara, laughing.…

  I cannot see what I have gone through until I write it down. I am blind without a pencil. And I cannot go ahead with new work until I know where I am. I resent life slipping by in unawareness. It must be savored, understood, analyzed as I go along. Otherwise, I not only walk unsteadily, I cannot work at all. I have no materials to work with, no storehouse of insight to draw from. But it does seem a slow and wasteful process. (Like walking, tapping with a cane.)

  The process, though, of evaluating, allows me to simmer down from a life of action to one of contemplation and eventually, writing. I descend, step by step—page by page—deeper into myself, my core. When I reach the core, then I can write again. Creativity comes out of the refound core.

  July 8th, 1956 [DIARY]

  Perhaps people also connect you to your core, at least if they are close and perceptive adults with whom you can be yourself. This week, I had all those. I went in one night to have supper with Dana and then go to a stadium concert with him. This was relaxed and easy, as it is with Dana now, neither of us wanting or expecting more than the other can give. I had a feeling of detachment, sitting in the open air stadium and walking back with Dana afterwards. There was a wonderful anonymity about it, and casualness, as though we were in a foreign city, Paris or London, taking our time and enjoying life with no pressures and no constructions. Some of this was the actual physical aspect of it. New York on a summer evening has an utterly different quality from its winter aspect; it is spacious, less hurried, casual. (Only the poor or the serious are left in New York in the summer—and strangers, country people visiting it on a vacation.) Perhaps it is this last component that gives it its almost provincial character. Couples walk arm in arm, eat out of doors, linger at corners. The parks and public places like museums and stadiums are full of people enjoying simple pleasures, rather casually, as in Europe. Some of the intensity has left.

  The spaciousness of the Lewisohn Stadium* separates one from the many people it holds. One is aware of the sky, a mackerel sky, dove-colored tonight. It seems to come down and wash through the interstices of city life and we are all bathed in another element. We are separate; we are freer; we move to quieter currents, easily, like fish on the ocean floor. Perhaps for Dana and me this was accentuated since we usually meet in his tight little office, sealed off from the world in a constricted segment of time, artificially walled off from the clamoring pressures of life. The peace of those segmented appointments is like the artificial tranquility of the carefully locked segments of a canal.

  We talk easily—or don’t talk—in perfect understanding. Dana tells me that his great French doctor friend has told him he is like Erasmus: his great gift is illumination. I laugh and agree—and add that Erasmus was my ideal in college, the personification of everything I believed in. I add, ruminating, “I seem to gravitate to two kinds of men in my life, heroes and wise men.”

  “And St.-Ex. came the nearest to being both,” he adds, “and being both was what killed him” (or tore him to pieces). I agree and think more about it. The wise men, of course, are my fathers, but the heroes? Who are they? Where do they come from? Fairy tales? Rosen said they were both the same thing. But I think this is oversimplification and so does Dana.

  We leave before the concert is over, walk part way back to my car and stop and have a limeade in a drugstore on the way. (This is not like Paris or London.) Home early—to C.’s surprise. This too is new leisure.

  Then Thursday I have the Wolffs and Evie and Ammie† and Dana for supper. I want Dana and the Wolffs to meet, and Evie and Ammie know both and are a bridge. As usual, I somewhat we
ar myself out in preparation. We spend the morning preparing three guest rooms: putting away children’s things, clean sheets, towels, extra blankets—it is suddenly cool. And I fix the flowers I did not do the day before. Mrs. Weber goes to shop for extras: brioches and croissants for breakfast, raspberries, cigarettes. Martha is baking a blueberry tart. The house looks quite lovely by noon: pale pink rhododendron in the big window, tiger lilies and blue shut-eyes in the big blue jar at the end of the room, the white man-boy and a white shell with pansies on the table, more rhododendron (I got soaking wet picking them) in the dining room, and—the best arrangement—three rhododendrons—low ones—in the black lacquer box (red inside) on the big red leather desk. I bring up the wine for the steak and put honeysuckle and roses and pansies in little pitchers by all the bedsides.

  Then I go to the Little House for about an hour to simmer down before Evie comes, early, for lunch. We have a late but nice lunch alone, talking furiously as always of our women’s lives. She has been in a three-ring circus of family activities. I think in a way she is like Con; her efficiency in too many ways tempts her into too many things.

  A short rest, then I build a fire. Everything is ready. Evie meets Ammie at the train. C. comes home and goes for the Wolffs. Dana arrives.

  Then the evening is under way. It takes off and I sit back, watching it go—and unable to join very much in it except in smoothing corners, passing or clearing plates, trying to join loose ends of conversation. However, it does go. I think everyone had a good time. Dana sparkled. CAL fenced. Ammie and Dana sparred and appreciated each other’s foils. Evie was the beauty and dazzle, Helen and I quiet appreciators. The Wolffs thought Dana was a wonderful man. (Some envy on the part of Kurt, I suspect—both men specialize in understanding women.)

  And the flowers and the food and the wine were, I hope, the good blending background. When we go to bed, I turn to C. for his comments on the evening. “Well,” he says, as always, “I think that was quite a good evening.”

  “Say it again,” I say, “in a great many different ways!”

  July 9th, 1956 [DIARY]

  A dog day—more showers—dark—very humid and heavy. I start off Mrs. Hart and Mrs. Weber on sorting out slip-covers (ECM’s old ones—slowly the house and closets are clearing) and other odd clearing up jobs, then go off to the Little House. CAL comes up for lunch. He is restless and talking about going off.

  “For how long?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know.”!

  He wants to fly over the line on certain planes he has not flown on before. He will be gone at least two weeks, perhaps three or four. I find I mind, suddenly, being left alone, although I could have gone to Europe with him and stayed in one spot while he flew around. But I elected to stay here and “work.” Now, I feel, irrationally, somewhat abandoned! I find I enjoy the summer slack season, alone with C., working in the Little House all day and clipping or gardening in the late afternoons with him and then supper and music with him in the evenings. I like working alone, but I don’t like evenings alone.

  For C. though, there is not enough action here, or stimulus. He can write better on trips. He needs the trips away; he craves the change. I used to feel this myself. (Though for me, it was escape from certain tensions.) He can work better when it is interspersed with travel and action. These are too stimulating for me, and too distracting. Good for in-between periods, when one is not writing. So I understand and yet cannot help feeling rather sad, let down. (I think this is a good sign in terms of our relationship but how it would startle all the readers of my Gift from the Sea! What! Not like to be alone?!)

  I will, I know, get over this and work better, perhaps, after he has left. I usually do. But I find myself putting on my armor, retreating into the artist, the solitary person who does not need people: a strange transition, from woman to man. After I make the transition, I will, of course, find myself again—the other half of me. But the transition is painful. Is this so with all women who have a profession or creative urge? Or is it just I who am so inflexible, so lumbering about the shift? And then, of course, if I get into my work, I will mind the shift back when he comes home in August and I become a domestic woman again.

  Sunday, July 15th, 1956 [DIARY]

  A beautiful day. C.’s last here. I work the morning at the house. Back for lunch with C. on the porch sitting in the sun, then back to the Little House and work till four. Then C. and I go swimming. He has discovered a pure white bird, the size of a sparrow, in the bushes; it is being fed by a song sparrow. We watch it with glasses—looks like a sparrow but pure white, pinkish beak and feet. An albino? A little bigger than the mother and dependent on her. We lie on the seawall rocks in the sun and then go in for supper.

  Then we sit on our chaise-longues on the porch and watch the ducks and listen to music. I feel quite sad. C. will not be here tomorrow night. I shall be depressed but I shall get over it. He reminds me that he planned this trip around my original thought of going abroad with him. Now I want to stay and work. Yes, too bad.

  [From a letter to Alan Valentine]

  Tuesday, July 17th, 1956

  I have been sitting on the terrace, eating supper alone (to Almaden Grenache and French songs on the radio): an utterly beautiful evening, one of our few. The little cove was mirror still and luminous, a pearly sheen on the water. The far line of Long Island was clear and blue, and the near marsh grass very green in the foreground, with the evening light white-bright on the sides of two or three boats tied up at docks in between. I stayed out until the light on the boats had gone and the gnats had come! I know that Almaden Grenache and French songs lie, but even so it was a delicious evening. Would have liked to communicate it to you, since you like both!

  CAL left yesterday on a rather long trip and I must say I felt quite sad to see him go. As you note in your letter, this is a new departure. Actually, I think living alone at one period of my life was a necessary escape from the anguishing difficulties and burdens of human relations. Now, I find them less anguishing, and the need to go off less necessary. Today, after yesterday’s temporary loneliness, I find being alone quite pleasant. I can work later, not be interrupted, eat when I like, write in the evenings to friends, play music I like, drink what I like, etc. But I wonder, is liking to live alone not simply liking to have one’s own way, bending to no one, listening to no one, planning and following one’s own routine utterly, selfishly? Perhaps it is good for one occasionally, but I no longer think it a higher form of life.

  Chiefly I wanted to talk to you about the Letter (naturally I have mentioned it to no one). I am convinced that you must write it as if no one were ever going to see it. Write it all, as personally and specifically as you can, as deeply and honestly as you can. A “generalized” letter will get you nowhere, because it comes from nowhere. Also forget any idea of publication or readers. One cannot write with someone looking over one’s shoulder (though I do often enough, I am ashamed to say). If you write as honestly and deeply and, as you say, non-cleverly as possible, you will not only find out, I believe, much about your hurt and your own specific problems (the catharsis theory of writing; I don’t really like that word because I don’t believe it is getting rid of it that helps, but illumination about it; in fact, just the opposite of getting rid of it, seeing it; one can absorb it, understand it, live with it), but aside from this, I am sure from this boiling down, the essence will emerge. In fact, I think it is the only true way to reach the universal, through the knot-hole of the personal. So do, do go ahead and write it as it boils up: the hot lava from the unconscious. Don’t stop to observe, criticize, or be “ironic.” Just write it, like a letter, without rereading. Later, one can decide what to do.

  I hope you are coming down sometime? It is so much easier to talk than to write, at least, when you are writing as much as I am these days. I find letters are anathema to me. After I leave my desk I only want to weed, water the chives, swim, liste
n to music, or wash underwear (what an anticlimax).…

  [AUGUST 9TH, 1956, DIARY]

  … I am somewhat thrown when I get back to the house to find I have lost my wedding ring! Why? Where? When? In the past two days somewhere. I search the bed. I have sometimes taken it off in my sleep. But I fear it came off washing—it is quite loose—or more likely still—in swimming.…

  C. always said I would lose it—I have dropped it so many times (in a swimming pool & he dove for it! In a sampan bottom, etc., etc.). He said he had enough of the Central American gold saved to make several more! That helps. But oh I mind—I mind terribly. One fights down the waves of superstition & symbol that rise up like great threatening storm clouds.

  Besides, of course, there is the special anguish of “loss.” Any loss is all loss! The terrible sense of the loss linking you to all other losses—the sense of eternal deprivation.… Something you had is gone—& there is a hole in you—a pit.

  I can do nothing in the evening—except wash underwear! … I wanted to die with it—to be buried with it (“a bracelet of bright gold about the bone”). But I misquote Donne.*

  [JANUARY 13TH, 1957, DIARY]

  … All this means is that I am tired & oversensitive inside—concave instead of convex. It is at such a moment that one is hit by other things that aggravate one’s concaveness—like the three page full-spread attack by John Ciardi—poetry editor of the SRL—on The Unicorn.* The criticism itself is not so unjust (I feel myself that most of the poems—though not all—are trite—jingly—old-fashioned—I have outgrown them) but the attack is so full of personal venom & hostility that I was shocked by it. I always am shocked by violence. And at this moment I felt in it a susceptible quivering core. Why should he attack me with that much personal violence?