The House by the Sea Page 14

  I do feel marooned here when I am ill. Yesterday it was so very cold I quailed before the necessity to walk Tamas and suddenly decided to ask Richard and Liz Pevear, my poet friends down the road, whether they would get the Times for me and walk Tamas. They did, and sat by the fire for an hour afterward, drinking Christmas Dry Sack; it did me good to have a little talk. Richard has decided to leave the Marina—I am very glad. Like many intellectuals fed up with academia, he thought physical work would be more rewarding than teaching and that he could write at night. Yesterday he spoke of the terrible repetitiveness of the Marina work—painting and readying the boats in winter, painting and putting them away in the fall. (I did not think of it at the time, but it is this repetitiveness that makes housework as dulling—no sooner are the dishes washed than it’s time to get a new meal.) The great thing with any creative work is that it is never repetitive. The problems are always fresh, one is never bored, and it is the same with teaching, I found. What makes the academic world so stultifying is not the teaching, but all the committee work, the politics, and playing for position. The “organization man” in the college world is what makes it deadly.

  While Richard takes time out and feels his way toward what to do, he has accepted an assignment to review a whole batch of poetry books for Hudson Review. He is appalled at how bad most of it turns out to be, and I hope he will try to define in a serious way what has been happening—the slack self-indulgent stuff that passes for poetry these days, and the hammering out the “message” without any care or thought about how it is communicated that has been one of the worst effects of Woman’s Lib. It has stretched like a huge comforting umbrella over all women poets, good or bad. Art cannot be democratic. It’s as if all standards had been blown away! Put in game terms, it would be as though there were no rules to basketball; anyone could play and do anything he chose! Does anyone now ever break down a metaphor and dig out the kernel he or she needs for what he or she has to say? And what true poet or artist of any kind revels in smug self-approval, and is outraged not to get approval from the world on a first or second try?

  I do not wish to be a critic of anyone except myself, but I am sometimes put in the position of having to be one. When I am—someone wants to be recommended for a fellowship and sends me work I cannot feel is worthy, as happened this week—I am miserable for days and have nightmares at night. Perhaps that is the trouble. We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest. But how is a young poet to learn if he gets only praise? I wrote a severe letter. It was costly.

  Wednesday, January 21st

  IT IS an awful effort to get going in the morning. Today I have allowed myself to be distracted by Park’s seed catalogue and now it is nine thirty with nothing done except having made out an order! I woke to a bright orange sunrise and a calm blue sea, determined to talk about the real things that are in my head these days. The first is death, not death itself, but dying and the fear of dying alone. Yet why? Everyone dies alone, however surrounded he may be by loving family and friends. I knew this for the first time when my mother was dying. I felt deeply what courage it took and how little by little she went farther away from us. In a way old age is the same … and I suppose one might think of old age itself as dying, for it too demands the giving up of one attachment to life after another. Toward what end? If one could think of it as a journey toward a real destination other than a total blank, everything might take on meaning again.

  The other night on TV I saw and heard a Dutch woman doctor who has devoted her life to the dying. She is convinced from what she has actually witnessed that death is so beautiful that if pepole knew, there would be hundreds of immediate suicides … she even said that she was fearful of speaking about it. Her evidence is from patients who have crossed the frontier and come back. (Strangely enough, it is exactly what I imagined when I saw that amazingly anguished Lazarus at Chichester and wrote the poem—how terrible it was to have to “come back.”) For years I have not permitted myself to believe in anything but the improbable immortality I might achieve with my work, especially with the poems. But with the growing sense that man is going to destroy himself and the planet or may well do so in the future that hope was burned out. And my life lost its glowing center. If there is no further “life” and life on this planet as we live it about to be extinguished forever, even to works of art we believed would endure, then reason despairs. What keeps us going? I don’t know. I only know that I felt balm as tangible as a liquor moving through my veins when the Dutch doctor spoke glowingly of death not as the end of a journey into nowhere, but as the beginning of a new one. I realized with the force of her words and conviction how depressed I have been for months. It was a real lift.

  What I have been experiencing lately is the sense that whatever I am to learn in the next years is not going to come from friends, that I am really more isolated than I could ever have imagined being … and of course it is partly through my own choice. Lately during this episode of flu I have realized how warming and cozy Nelson was by comparison with this great house in its stupendous landscape, glitteringly isolated. What I have chosen to do here is difficult, but I want to do it. Most of the time I am happy doing it. But there is no doubt that one pays a price in panic for extreme solitude, and lately the panic has swallowed up the joys, at least at moments.

  My other preoccupation is and has been sheer constant pain at the violence and hatred that seems to be the chief motor power, the thing that makes people act in the world today. No doubt it has always been there, but now we know more and are confronted every day on the TV screen and in every newspaper by monstrous acts of vengeance perpetrated by human beings upon fellow human beings. Carol Heilbrun called last night and said apropos of this, “Yes, but it is better now because we do know.” But is it? The effect of the barrage of bad news seems to be to create more and more indifference and apathy. This business of violence can only be handled by me by examining and dealing with it through poetry. Is it laziness that keeps me from getting at it? I wonder sometimes whether the sea may not constantly defuse the intensity without which poetry is impossible for me.

  Yesterday I saw a doctor and am now on an antibiotic. I just hope it will do the trick.

  Thursday, January 22nd

  AT THE END of the afternoon yesterday Raymond came to see how I was getting on, and we sat at the table in the porch and had a little talk. He is dismayed at how little strength he has these days (he is a year younger than I). But it is no wonder, as he had a terribly hard summer between his sister’s depression and his mother’s struggle to keep alive—at ninety-five! One must implore that that poor dear woman may die in her sleep, and soon.

  I had a letter from Jane Stockwood in London. “Age is what shakes one now,” she says, “seeing friends changed and withered, or dead, or struck down by strokes. I rush around as much as ever, but try not to meet my face in the glass.”

  (I have to set against this Jean Dominique telling me when she went almost completely blind that it was terribly strange not to be able to see herself. I do look at my face in the glass every morning when I brush my teeth, but what I see is not dismaying because I don’t care about wrinkles. I see my eyes, and they are very alive.)

  In the evening I watched the first in a series on Aging on TV. There were several short impressionistic art films. One called “Weekend” was very powerful. One sees a very old man being taken on what appears to be an “outing” … his armchair tied to the top of a VW. But after the picnic and a long lazy day, he is left in his armchair, and the family embraces him and leaves him there under a tree in a field. The camera then wanders about the place and we see an old woman, also left sitting in her chair, and two or three more. It is what is often done to the old, as the Eskimos leave them on an ice floe. They are left there to die.

  In all this gloom I must think of Marjorie Bitker, now seventy-five, who plays tennis every day and is writing better than she has ever done before, getting books published, and
leads a very active happy life. There are as many ways of growing old as of being young, and one forgets that sometimes.

  It is very odd to see oneself in the hard light of reality through someone else’s eyes. Auberon Waugh in the Evening Standard in London opens a long sneer of a review of Crucial Conversations, “May Sarton is an American lady of 63 who has been writing novels for 36 years without anyone paying very much attention.” That is the truth; yet it made me laugh, it is such a caricature of how I see myself. I am pondering the idea of a novel where just these discrepancies might be the theme—a powerful personality being tracked down (after his death) by several biographies that give a totally different picture, using the same facts.

  Friday, January 23rd

  TWELVE BELOW ZERO this morning. The pipes in the kitchen and the guest bathroom are frozen. The arctic sea smoke was thick and steaming over the ocean after the sun rose. I sat down and wrote a poem very fast … this is what has not happened until today and always seems like a “possession.”

  The amazing cat went out at eight and will not come in. How can she stand it? The gale, we were told this morning by Don Kent, makes the wind chill -50°! That is what it is to have fur!

  I have a little joke which is that only the rich can afford to stay in New England in winter … the poor go to Florida. My heat bill was $250.00 for December. I just paid the plumber $69.00 for fixing the hot water heater, and now, of course, there’ll be more to pay for unfreezing the pipes.

  Tuesday, January 27th

  A DOLDRUM HERE … today, thick fog against which the lovely shapes of the leafless trees are drawn as though in pencil, faintly. But what a change! It rained all day yesterday, at first freezing rain, and I wondered how I would ever get to the bird feeder with no foothold at all, just ice. But by noon it was just over 30° and the melting began. Counting in the wind chill of 50° below zero last week, we have had a hundred-degree change in the last forty-eight hours! I felt stupefied all day yesterday and accomplished next to nothing. Today too I feel dull, lugging my heavy body up and down stairs, trying to force my empty head to think.

  There was one great joy yesterday—a sketch from Barbara of the phoenix rising that I have commissioned for the garden. It is exactly what I had dreamed, and I can hardly wait to see it set up against the yew tree.

  Monday, February 2nd

  A SUPERSTORM is brewing. Huge waves roll in and break, so there is foam twenty yards out along the rocks. The temperature is still 40°, but it is snowing already in Boston and it will drop fast to 20°, Don Kent said this morning. He also said the barometer at 28.10 was at a record low for February. It’s hard to pull my eyes from the surf—it is low tide; so it will get higher and higher in the next hours. Very exciting! At the moment the sun has burst through, turning the turbulent ocean to silver.

  I am determined to get back to poems today—perhaps one about the cedar waxwings who turned up two or three days ago to eat the small round dark-red berries of the ornamental cherry … such an elegant sight! It reminded me of the Indian paintings where each detail is lovingly rendered and the eye wanders about among a hundred delightful surprises, such as a rabbit or deer behind a flowering bush. Bill Brown and Paul Wonner have a show of their collection of Indian paintings (it goes to several museums in California) and sent me the catalogue. I can spend ten minutes on a single one and understand very well their passion as collectors. The paintings are like poems in the emphasis on concrete detail, on rather formal design, and in the ways in which they are descriptive. I identify with these “lonely Rajput ladies who sing to animals.” I don’t sing to Tamas, but I do sometimes dance, which terrifies him—he runs from place to place as though for shelter and barks his dismay. I must seem to him like some terrifying goddess on a rampage.

  Tuesday, February 3rd

  I DID WRITE the poem and it was, altogether, a good day in that wild wind. When I took Tamas down to the rocks to watch the surf, we had to run back—I was afraid he would be blown into the sea! After writing the poem I spent an hour cutting and reading aloud from As We Are Now for the evening at Notre Dame University when, at their suggestion, I shall take half the hour for that and half for poems. It’s an experiment … I have never before read prose for an audience in such a sustained way. But the book is, as one critic pointed out, a récit, so it should work. I was a little dismayed to see at what a pitch of intensity it lives, that book. Now three years later that kind of intensity, which came from anguish, is so remote that I can hardly imagine how it felt. I am far happier now, but in some ways less alive, and I miss that acute aliveness. I enjoy everything tremendously—the sea, the flowers, my life here, the animals—but I am seldom at the pitch of ecstasy, and I sometimes feel that my mind itself has lost its edge. That is not something that can be changed by will. It may be that I am entering a new phase, the simple letting go that means old age. I no longer think, for instance, of buying a piece of furniture or a rug … why add to the things here? There is no longer a great deal of time. I have been moderately acquisitive, but am not any longer. That is all to the good!

  The other day, seeing an old man in a car, I thought for a moment that he was an old woman. Is it true that in old age many old men begin to look like old women and many old women like old men? I believe it is. Women grow less vain; the character comes out in their faces, and men—sometimes anyway—having laid aside the cruel push of ambition, become gentler. I remember Perley Cole telling me that he could no longer shoot a deer; yet as a young man he thought nothing of it. One of the good elements in old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

  This has been a winter of reading biographies, lately Christopher Sykes’ curious one on his friend Evelyn Waugh; it is such a discursive book, yet almost nothing is said about Waugh’s marriage, his children, his home life. We see him at White’s, his club in London, insulting or being insulted or imagining he is being insulted, and on journeys with his men friends. Many conversations are recorded verbatim—his rudeness really was like an illness—but we do not know the man at all by the end. What came through to me most was the enormous protection it is to belong to an élite, the comfort of being “clubbable.” It is something I have never known. But I am well aware that what the “group” requires is a willingness to be bored for hours at a time. The fun and games of any group are excessively boring in the long run, and I think this applies even to such comparatively useful “groups” as garden clubs.

  There was one jewel in the Waugh book that I want to keep—Helena’s prayer to the Three Magi:

  “Like me, you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. For you the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed and new defiant light blazed among the disconcerted stars.

  “How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

  “You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

  “Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than the ox or the ass.

  “You are my especial patrons, and patrons of all latecomers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

  “Dear cousins, pray for me, and for my poor overloaded son. May he, too, befo
re the end find kneeling-place in the straw. Pray for the great, lest they perish utterly. And pray for Lactanius and Marcias and the young poets of Treves and for the souls of my wild, blind ancestors; for their sly foe Odysseus and for the great Longinus.

  “For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

  Thursday, February 5th

  TEN ABOVE ZERO when I got up, amazed to find it so cold as the sunrise had looked springlike, and yesterday was quite warm, over 32°, with no wind. We shall have a real snow tonight, they say. It will be welcome. I am tired of the hateful hard ice everywhere. “We shall walk in velvet shoes” again at last.

  I am reading Golda Meir’s biography. People say we lack heros, but here, surely, is one, the rocklike, all-of-a-piece, great, humble woman. I have had to read this book slowly, because at times it is simply too painful to face the omnipresent desire to push Israel down and if possible to destroy it. We are full of self-congratulation, these days of the bicentennial, about the heroic battles of independence two hundred years ago. But however powerful the British were, their bases were thousands of miles and months of sea travel away. The Israelis, with almost no arms, faced immediate war with powerful well-armed neighbors on their doorsills, and not only did they win, but within the next five years had to deal with 600,000 refugees from Europe and Yemen, of diverse backgrounds, illiteracy, wholly diverse cultures … had to create housing, jobs, schools—all this with their backs to the wall financially and in every way. What they have accomplished in twenty years is simply beyond belief. But one senses that always they are treated by the international community with a kind of contempt, treated as expendable. They have done a great deal for Arabs within and outside their borders (hundreds of children have been operated on in Jewish hospitals, for instance, for nothing). But what have the Arabs ever done for the Jews but spread hatred against them, use the Palestinian refugees as propaganda, keeping them in temporary camps to foment disorder and hatred? The hatred is sickening. How, after the holocaust, is there still no pity? And, above all, no expressed admiration? The Arab propaganda should be countered with all that the Israelis have done for the Arabs.