The House by the Sea Read online

  We went backstage for a moment and Le G. said, “But you’re white!” I had quite forgotten that she has not seen me since my hair turned from gray to white—and it made me laugh, as she used to call me “Granny” when I was seventeen and an apprentice at the Civic Repertory and spent hours in her dressing room while she made up. Now I am a real Granny!

  The next day I went to Joy Greene Sweet’s to talk about Rosalind. Oh, what a rich time we had over that twenty-four hours! Long quiet talks, and then little visits with Gordon, her husband, who was in bed as the emphysema had flared up after some rather grueling days they had spent closing Rosalind’s house in Cambridge. Memorable meals—supper was trout caught by Gordon, New Zealand spinach (ineffably delicious), tiny potatoes just dug, these from the garden, and elderberry pie which Joy had made in memory of our summers at River Houslin in Rowley when we were children. The house is full of peace and light; every window looks out on long perspectives of lawn and magnificent trees.

  After my nap we went for a walk around the place. They have worked for forty years to make wide paths through the woods (how rare in America, to be able to walk miles through woods in perfect comfort!), woods of white oak, maple, hemlock, and pine with wild dogwood and laurel below. All the way down I had been in a state of great praise for trees … wondering how I could ever live without them, thinking of their comfort, how they nourish and sustain us with their beauty and coolness, their steadfastness, the fact that they will outlive those who plant them. And I understood why old men plant trees.

  Joy looks ten years younger than she did at R.’s funeral … of course, that was a dreadful time as she had flown back from California, leaving Gordon very ill. She said, among many things I want to remember, one thing that struck me where I live—that at our age (she is ten years older than I) what one needs and often lacks are “emotional peers.”

  I got home to a warm welcome from Lee and Tamas … to find the house full of flowers she had picked and arranged, and all sorts of small jobs accomplished, and then we sat and talked and dreamed about the house she loves and hopes to buy, and the new life ahead.

  Saturday, September 6th

  WHERE TO BEGIN? I ask myself each day. I do the chores slowly, try to start out at least on a good steady slow rhythm. Today got up at 6:30 to a subdued autumnal light, the sun diffused through gentle clouds and haze. I changed the sheets on my bed and got the laundry together, then went down and cooked my breakfast—a good one of bacon and some of the small tomatoes Raymond brought yesterday from his garden. (My mother loved this breakfast and I always think of her when I cook it.) Then I went out in rubber boots over my pajamas and picked a few flowers to perk up the bunches. A great joy now, because it’s the first time I have sowed them among the annuals, is the scabiosa, every shade of white, purple, and lavendar, and also the annual lupine. Yesterday I picked two sprays of that, the most astonishing brilliant blue. Any day now we shall have a hard frost and it will all go.

  Susan Garrett called yesterday to ask whether I would like to see some gardens that afternoon, and off we went at half past three with two young women who had kindly wanted to do this for me because they liked my books. It was a delightful expedition, to three gardens, each very different from the other. Mrs. Howells at Kittery Point gave us two night-blooming cereus to watch open after we got home (and they did open at precisely nine—a poignant glory because it comes and goes so fast). I enjoyed the gardens and the delightful women who created them, but my hackles rise always at the attitudes of garden club members. I fear I am unregenerate, or perhaps simply old-fashioned, for I do not really like “arrangements” where too often a kind of ingenuity (using strange leaves or lettuce or a cabbage to be “interesting”) replaces the simple joys of just plain old-fashioned bunches of flowers, which is what I love. I was pleased to note that nowhere did I see such a variety of annuals as I have in my wild, untidy, weedful picking garden here.

  Today young Charles Barber from Ohio comes for lunch. He is on his way to study in England. I do look forward to showing him my habitat, as we met in a strange house (though lovely) when I was out at Ohio Wesleyan.

  So much for the surface of life these past days. But always in the back of my consciousness is terrible woe and anxiety about the death of the spirit in our inner cities. I was grateful to find a moving account about this by Joshua Resnek, a sportswriter from Lynn on the Op-ed page of the Times yesterday. He described a drive through the worst of Brooklyn.

  “We passed row after row of gutted tenements and street upon street of decaying buildings. Each time we looked at a face it was black and there weren’t any smiles, not anywhere. The most noticeable expression was one of a stonelike quality; the steel-fisted, hardened gaze of a people who have, with great difficulty, given up.” And later he says, “The black people we saw in Brooklyn are living in Hell. The system that accommodated the first generation of immigrants and that assimilated the second during the last fifty years is not, today, equipped to perform the moral task of dispensing equality.

  “There is no equality of mind or the spirit, or of the soul in this place. No lingering sense of satisfactions over anything. Not birth. Not the living of life. Not death.”

  Friday, September 12th

  CHARLES BARBER arrived with a huge paper bag containing a melon from his grandfather’s garden in Weston, a squash, peaches, pears, and got off the bus looking well and brown. We had a good day’s talk before I took him to Portsmouth for his bus back, and now he is on his way to England. With so much grief and hard luck around, it is lovely to be with someone on the brink of a great adventure, bursting with joy … and it does seem a miracle that he found a way of getting to college in England, after all.

  I looked at his lovely, but unformed, face, the face of a very young man (he is nineteen) and wondered what life would do to tauten and shape it. He is so open and full of sweetness now, but thought has not yet written anything on his smooth face, nor pain tightened his mouth. I just pray that all goes well for him this year. He earned the money for the flight by being a lifeguard this summer and had a good dose of how most people live. He was teased for bringing books to the pool!

  The splendor of the autumn light is beginning, the sea that dark blue (almost purple one evening), the air like champagne. One day I sat out on the terrace for almost an hour, listening to the silence, watching an occasional monarch butterfly float past, and then the birds on their way to their evening feed at the feeders. Here and there swamp maples are turning, the woods are lit up by these subtle changes, a single bright leaf here or there, the ferns beginning to pale, the bush-blueberries already bright red in leaf. There is still goldenrod everywhere, and the asters are beginning.

  I am ashamed, among all this glory, of the massive weeds in the vegetable garden and am seriously considering trying the deep mulch method, eight inches of spoiled hay, so that nothing gets through except the wanted things. The flower part of the garden is also rather disorderly, but I don’t mind as it is full of color. The cosmos and marigolds go on and on.

  Tuesday, September 16th

  I WAS WOKEN at six by the gentle ripple of what I think must have been an owl’s cry as it flew past. It is quite unlike any other bird sound. It is wonderful to wake up now knowing I have a clear day ahead and can walk to my own rhythm, not hurrying. This afternoon I intend to put up tomatoes … I simply couldn’t bear the rich accumulations yesterday lying in a flat basket on the kitchen counter; so I went to Lesswings and found the wire stand for boiling. I can use the lobster pot. I’ve never done this before, so it is an adventure.

  Anne and Barbara came for supper … a great reunion, as we haven’t seen each other for two months, and there was so much to talk about, to hear and tell, the time simply fled. We had steak for dinner, ratatouille I had made on Sunday, mushrooms (two immense ones I found as I came back yesterday from my walk with Tamas), little potatoes, and an American wine I wanted to try, Great Western’s Chelois. It is a little thin compared to Fre
nch wines, but the aftertaste is delicious.

  Of course, we walked all around the garden first. Anne is one person who comes here who always notices everything I have done. Luckily the gentians are still beautiful in a little corner which has a heather and a heath in it too, and later on will have lavendar colchicum. We went to take a look at the single closed gentian Raymond noticed near the apple orchard—such a thrill! Mary-Leigh in an orange jacket came slowly creeping along on her huge mower, trying it out. It is bright orange, and she looked extremely decorative sitting on it.

  But the best was after we came in and stood for minutes watching the birds at the feeder from the porch window … such a flurry of wings coming and going, and so many birds these days! We saw the two pairs of nuthatches, white- and rose-breasted, chickadees, house finches, goldfinches, a towhee on the ground, a thrush in one of the cherry trees, a vireo and a migrating warbler, greenish-yellow, jays, of course. This morning I caught a glimpse of an immature rose-breasted grosbeak in the pine tree, trying to get up courage to join the other birds at the feeder.

  After supper we sat by the fire and talked about the farm they hope to buy in two years when Anne’s children have left home. How lovely it will be if they are near by! They brought potatoes (rare jewels this year of a bad harvest everywhere) and left with two of the cinerarias I have been growing under lights. They are rich and sturdy with big leaves, but I expect it will be two months before they flower.

  Saturday, September 27th

  THERE DOES SEEM to be some Fate—gremlins? furies?—at work whenever I have to read poems. In April there was a blizzard and I entered Lewiston to read at Bates in two feet of unploughed snow, visibility nil; in late July when I read at Ogunquit it was almost as hot as the day a million hens died in Maine; and now I have been away for five days of torrential rain at Cornell University and then Massapequa, Long Island—terrifying return yesterday, as our plane had to turn back to Hartford and dump us there. After a long wait and no luggage turning up, we went by bus to Boston. The rain was a deluge and there were sudden claps of thunder and lightning so at one point I thought someone had thrown a bomb! I must say that bed, at midnight with a cup of cocoa on a tray, and Tamas by my side, was Heaven!

  The luggage did turn up today and was delivered, so I feel I can settle down at last.

  Monday, September 29th

  THE BLESSING of the sun! A perfect shining blue day at last!

  After I have been away even for a few days this place smites me with its beauty. When I went to fetch the paper yesterday I saw a hummingbird just outside the door stay quite still on a clematis seed … so rare to see one of these darting creatures still for once … his wings folded on his back. He made a curious little sound, tick-tick-tick-tick. Had he thought the shining whorls of the seed were a flower? He sounded quite cross. The Monarch butterflies cluster in droves on the English asters, and it’s a royal sight, the orange and black on the purple flowers. There are a few autumn crocus out here and there.

  Among the magazines piled up when I got back I found a Listener with an excellent review of the Woolf letters by Margaret Drabble. I shall copy some of it to keep hold of what she says about the changing attitude toward V. W. (The Fortitude of V. Woolf, Listener, 18th September):

  “There were those who staunchly, throughout, defended Bloomsbury, counter-attacking by accusing Lawrence and Leavis of envy: envy of the charmed circle, the social connections, the small private incomes. Myself, I plead guilty to envy. Reading Virginia Woolf’s letters is a deeply moving experience, and one of its most moving aspects is the glimpse it provides of a circle which, despite death, madness and suicide, was indeed charmed. Such loyalty, such friends, such love, such conversations and correspondences and journeys, such kindness: who would not envy them their solidarity? … Most writers are solitary and do not move in circles, but there cannot be many of them who do not feel stirred by the image of a golden age where a circle was possible. Bloomsbury provides such an image, and brings tears to the eyes of the outcast: of rage, of envy, of regret, who can say?”

  M.D. goes on to speak of V.W.’s courage and resilience. It is high time that someone did so! Oh, how lucky I was that for a few years just before 1940 I had a little taste of that magic circle! I suppose it created a permanent nostalgia, for here in America I have never found anything like it. The pain and the jealousy are too great among writers here, and even in those days when Eberhart, Wilbur, Ciardi, Holmes, and I got together now and then to read and discuss poems, I always went home devastated and miserable.

  It is next to impossible, I find, to go back into the immediate past when one is keeping a journal. I suppose the very nature of a journal is catching things on the wing … and by the time one has an hour in which to look back, so much else has already happened—such as seeing a kingfisher, a review of Woolf’s letters—that one has no interest in the immediate past.

  The sun was out on my first day in Ithaca, fortunately at least a gleam or two, for Rita Guerlac took me on a walk down one of the gorges (it was Enfield Gorge) near the city. These are deep gorges brooks have worn down through slate cliffs … and that is partly why it is such an amazingly beautiful sight. All I could think of was Poussin, for the cliffs look quite architectural, with wide “steps” carved out, and sometimes clean geometrical edges. The brook flows fast, from one waterfall to another. I looked up the dark cliff side to see a maple, brilliant gold, clinging to a shelf, and, nearer by, exquisite harébells and moss in the crevices. It was like a dream of all the varieties of waterfall, from steep descents in a single narrow spill, to wide falls down under ledges.

  Henry Guerlac had kindly arranged a dinner party in my honor at the Society of the Humanities. I so rarely attend a dinner party these days (have I ever, in fact, been part of society?) that I found it all delightful, especially as I sat beside Ammons, the poet, and felt at home with him at once. He is very shy, a sandy-haired, middle-aged man, who is recovering from winning all the prizes last year … I was quite amused to hear that he feels silenced at this point. Alison Lurie was two chairs away on my left. I really had no chance to talk with her. She looks like a gentle perceptive witch. Part of the charm of the evening was the great paneled room with romantic friezes painted along the ceiling, the formal scene itself, and such a splendid dinner, starting (curiously) with raspberries. I had had lunch with James McConkey and young McCall … I felt quite deprived that Jim was far away at the other end of the table. But for once I went to bed after a social occasion having no remorse for some faux- pas or madness of over-enthusiasm or rage.

  The contrast to all this could not have been greater than the cellar room in the Massapequa, Long Island, library where I read poems the next day … but what a delightful audience it was! I do love reading the poems. It’s like hearing music again … you can hear it in your head, but it is not the same thing as a concert, and poetry only lives and breathes when it is spoken aloud.

  I spent the night at Carol and Jim Heilbrun’s, in their spacious old apartment on Central Park West. They are on the second floor, just at the height of the treetops—such a romantic view! As we sat and talked, I felt perfect happiness and accord … and glanced now and then at Duncan Grant’s self-portrait on one wall and Vanessa Bell’s self-portrait over the mantel. It was moving to see them. (The Bell I had not seen before, as it is a recent acquisition.) I left five of the chapters from the book with Carol—and what a blessing when she told me she had read the Bowen and thought it good. I do not always agree with her, but her judgment means a lot to me, nevertheless. Who else is there whose literary acumen I trust?

  Tuesday, October 7th

  A LONG HIATUS because these are such great days, and so full, between the garden (I planted fifty tulips day before yesterday) and the rising pressure on the book. I have been working all this week on revising the portrait of my mother that I first wrote ten years ago; yesterday, while trying to find a letter I might use, I came on a snap taken in 1920 at Pemaquid Point. I was
eight and I am standing on a rock in bare feet, very straight, solemn, my mouth open, and clearly singing loudly. On the back my mother wrote, “May chantant à la mer—elle a aussi dansé frénétiquement!—La mer par moments l’excite—Elle a dansé et crié la premiére fois qu’elle a été à une plage (en 1916) vraiment comme une petite folle.” I have no memory of this; my memories of the summer at Pemaquid Point are of gloomy dark woods, mushrooms, a long walk to get water every day, and my mother depressed. I remember my terror at the surf on the rocks because a woman had been drowned there, sucked down by a wave, then battered. A place of real fear for me. So it is strange to come upon this totally different picture, and it gave me heart. For, clearly, the sea was a powerful emotional force. So perhaps my dream that it might be the final muse and bring me back to poetry may not be mad after all.

  But this photo also made me realize again for the thousandth time since I began A World of Light how tricky memory is. And in how many ways the same experience may be seen, even by the person himself. Yesterday at two P.M., when I was fast asleep, trying to quiet down after a harrowing morning of work and be ready for David Michaud, who was coming at three for a short visit, the front door bell pinged. I got up and staggered down in my stocking feet, thinking it must be a delivery. Instead, an elegant middle-aged woman stood there and said, “I’m from La Jolla and couldn’t resist coming to see you to tell you how much I admire … et cetera.” I was cold with anger, flurried, and said, “Please give me a moment to put on some shoes … I was resting.” It’s strange how very perturbed and jangled I felt, but so far no one has arrived here unannounced, and I hoped it would never happen. I couldn’t shake the anger, and told her and her daughter whom she went to fetch (the daughter had stayed in the car) that I felt it was an imposition, and would they knock on Anne Lindbergh’s door unannounced? “I should have written her a note to ask,” said the woman, “but there was no time, since we are just passing through.” All summer I have been badgered by people who have to come to see me at their convenience, because they are in the region, and I’ve done hardly any good work as a result. I suppose that is why I felt outraged. These last days have been or felt like “my real life” again … the autumn so beautiful, the dark blue sea, and time to myself … it all got ripped to pieces by “a person from Porlock” yesterday.