The House by the Sea Read online

  C.’s husband is doing well himself as an artist, a slow thoughtful producer of one major work a year. He and she both teach, she as a poorly paid instructor, he as a full professor. So far this has worked just because she is, in a way, a student. But he said once, “Don’t get too good or I’d mind.” She is his rock and he is very dependent. The fantasies of woman as lover come, I feel certain, from C.’s need for something that nourishes her. She is the mother, as it were, of three people now. Now and then they have a cleaning woman come in, and David likes to cook, so they take turns; but otherwise the household work rests on C. She told me that one day when the cleaning woman was there, C. was in her room painting and she suddenly thought, “This is what it is like for David all the time.” It seemed an extraordinary luxury to be able to work at her painting while someone else cleaned.

  Friday, May 28th

  IN THIS MONTH of festivities, with guests nearly every day and the garden itself a festival, I have come to see that my hunch that the time has come for me to have many loves and no love, to rejoice in this diffused focus instead of longing for the intense but narrowing vision of passionate commitment to one person … that hunch was foretelling of a new kind of happiness. It is here, I welcome it, and feel very rich and blest.

  Wednesday, June 2nd

  LAST WEEKEND I was at Colby College to get an honorary doctorate, and spent the night in China with Ed Kenney and Susie and their two little children, Jamie and Anne, five and two, respectively. Anne at two is already an enchantress, using every feminine wile to get what she wants; Jamie at five interested in things rather than people. He was delighted by the magnetic frogs I had brought, and explained to me the difference between toads and frogs. I enjoyed the whole evening tremendously, starting with a slow walk around the village by China Lake in the evening light, lilacs in full bloom and many charming small old houses one could dream of living in.

  The Kenneys have bought an old house with the rare charm (for New England) of standing a hundred yards back from the road with a long lawn in front of it … this space and the great trees along each side give it an English look. Susie had cooked an epicurean meal, including salmon mousse in a fish shape, and afterward we talked until midnight. These two both teach, both write, and inevitably their life, with two small children to bring up, is one of constant struggle for the time and the energy it requires. I admire their courage, and once more feel the pang of what such lives cost, and whether it will be possible, especially for Susie, to do what she hopes to do as a writer. If there are “beautiful people,” they are not Jacqueline Kennedy but these two!

  Friday, June 4th

  DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY I began to feel quite queer after pushing hard to get a small weeding job done in the garden. Lee Blair was coming for dinner, but after my bath I felt absolutely “gone” and had to lie down. I got through dinner like a person in a dream, and only when I was in bed feeling feverish, discovered that I had 102° fever. So I guess sheer exhaustion has finally set in. I spent yesterday in bed, being ministered to by Lee. It was wonderful that she was here, to fetch the mail, bring me chicken soup, walk Tamas, and fill the house with her silent, beautiful presence. How I wish she could find the house she dreams of finding!

  Sunday, June 6th

  I COMPLAINED TO LEE that no one really looks at the garden. Her answer was accurate, “You do the garden for yourself, after all.” Yes, I do, but I also long to give it, and in this it is very much like poetry—that is, I would write poems whether anyone looked at them or not, but I hope someone will. This is not an easy garden because much of it is in shade. I used to be amused in Nelson because the neighbors always spoke of “your gardens,” meaning the many borders and plots of flowers. But there I did have a showy perennial border against the old barn wall, and here the perennial border is below the terrace and almost strangled now by euonymus and ivy above and below—“Ivy gripped the Steps,” as E. Bowen titled one of her stories. I have worked very hard here now for three years, with little to show for the hours and hours of blood and sweat, if not tears.

  Do I spend too much time at this ephemeral task? In spring, summer, and autumn I work harder at it than at writing, and I expect that looks crazy, but what it does is balance all the anxieties and tensions and keep me sane. Sanity (plus flowers) does make sense.

  Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone. What will can do, and the only thing it can do, is make time in which to do it. Young poets, enraged because they don’t get published right away, confuse what will can do and what it can’t. It can’t make a tree peony grow to twelve feet in a year or two, and it can’t force the attention of editors and publishers. What it can do is create the space necessary for achievement, little by little. I thought of this when reading yesterday the review of Leslie Farber’s new book by Anatole Broyard in the Times. A. B.’s first two paragraphs are as follows:

  “ ‘The attempt of the will to do the work of the imagination:’ W. B. Yeats applied this phrase to an incorrect approach to life. Ours, he says, is the age of the disordered will. It is our conceit that no human possibility is beyond our conscious will. T.S. Eliot had something similar in mind when he said that the bad poet is conscious when he should be unconscious and unconscious when he should be conscious.

  “Trying to will what cannot be willed, according to Mr. Farber, brings on anxiety, and this anxiety, in turn, cripples our other faculties so that we are left with nothing but anxiety about anxiety, a double unease. Among the things we try to will are happiness, creativity, love, sex, and immortality.”

  Thursday, June 10th

  WE ARE HAVING a heat wave and the garden is popping at last. Today a huge white Papaver poppy is out below the terrace, and one of the tree peonies in flower for the first time, a double flower, deep yellow flecked with orange. The iris are coming out one by one, each royal and delicate. Four pink rugosa roses scent the whole porch. Yesterday I finished putting out the last of the twenty-two tuberous begonias I have been growing under lights since March. Raymond came and finished the hedge clipping, so at last the garden looks as it should … I sigh with pleasure. A formal garden that looks ragged makes me nervous.

  I have been meaning to copy out here M.’s description of her son’s wedding that took place in British Columbia at an Indian friend’s there. Ash was named High Eagle and his bride Dancing Moon during the ceremony. M. spoke these words:

  “On this day of luminosities and reflection, I greet you, High Eagle: first born of the love and joy of our youth, opener of the womb: in a sense you bear all our springs. The peace and hope and strength which flood you now, you have been soaring towards all your life. As your spirit rises I see how right Basil was to place you in the morning quadrant of the heavens. May we remember always the enlightenment of this entire experience. High Eagle, beloved Ash, bringer of the light of our future, may your home be blessed by children, your own and those who find you in their need. I honor you, High Eagle, you who flew into and through the threshold of our love.”

  It was the phrase “opener of the womb” that has made me think ever since … it is such a grand image.

  The last of the three commencements was on Monday, after a delightful dinner at President Reynolds’ house the night before, and, perhaps because it was the last, I enjoyed it most of all. The platform, built on the steps of a pillared neoclassic building overlooked the graduating class and audience and out on wineglass elms against another classic building. Just looking at all that beauty of elms lifted my spirits. But the best was the presence of a grand piano on the stage—Mary Lou Williams, who was also receiving a doctorate, had asked whether she could offer thanks for the honor by playing, and so she did, magnificently. Her face is ageless, a strong broad very dark face, somber as she plays, until without any apparent reason it is literally flooded with light by a smile. She played a composition of her own. It was a real “happening” to hear such brilliant jazz at a commencement.

 
Now the three doctoral hoods—this one a beautiful scarlet and white—hang over a chair near the ancestor’s portrait. I hope he is proud!

  Sunday, June 13th

  ON FRIDAY I went down to Cambridge to spend the night at Olivia Constable’s before Karen’s terminar for Union Graduate School, and in spite of 90° degree heat, I fell in love all over again with leafy Cambridge, with the gardens and spacious old houses. My feet felt at home on the pavements as I walked from Craigie Street to see Anne Thorp and Agnes at The Barn. Children were playing in a fountain in front of what used to be Denman Ross’s house, and I drank in the great copper beeches, the elms, the arbors of roses, and at Anne’s a tulip tree in flower—I don’t believe I have ever seen one before. It all felt like home, and of course was home through all my childhood. But last Friday it had real magic for me again.

  Olivia’s old mansard-roofed house spoke to my very bones—everything, from the masses of books in my bedroom (that used to be W.G.’s) to the old-fashioned bathtub, the presence everywhere of beautiful things, and, above all, the unself-conscious slightly shabby (but always elegant) air of every room, and the old incontinent bassets who are kept from going upstairs and from the drawing room by wooden child’s fences, the huge tabby cat. Such quality of life!

  During the night the temperature dropped at last, and in the morning I lay in my bed in perfect bliss watching the light on leaves. The next morning there was a splendid discussion around Karen’s thesis.

  Monday, June 21st

  DAMP HEAT with no saving rain goes on and begins to be enervating. How glad I am that I invested in an air conditioner for this one room at the top of the house, for it means that I can work. Last summer sweat poured down onto the page.

  Blue Jenkins has been here since Friday afternoon, and yesterday we had a lovely walk (there was a little wind off the ocean) along the Marginal Way, smelling the wild roses, and pinching bay leaves to get their sweet wild scent, sitting on the immemorial benches (shades of my childhood summers at Ogunquit) to watch a silken sea break into soft lacy fans against the rocks. It is hypnotic … I longed to sit there for hours.

  Ogunquit was a magic place for me as a child, when every summer beginning in 1917 for about ten years Lucy Stanton lent us her studio for one month. We ate at the old High Rock Hotel, so it was a real holiday for my mother. Both she and my father loved to swim, and we used to walk along the Marginal Way to one of the rocky coves, the charm being those jagged rocks standing up from soft white sand. I know of no other place that combines the two. I haunted the local library and gradually borrowed and read through all the Waverly novels, taking them out one by one in a closely- printed edition with a musty smell, usually climbing up a pine tree and sitting there most uncomfortably. I wonder why reading in a tree is such a pleasure! There must be something atavistic about it—I can still smell the pine gum and feel its stickiness on my fingers. It is all so present to me that it is quite a shock to find old photographs and realize, looking at my father’s stiff white collars and my mother’s big hats, and her bathing costume which included long black stockings, how long ago it really was.

  Ever since the meeting in Newton for Karen’s terminar on her thesis, Medusa’s Daughters, A Study of Women’s Consciousness in Myth and Poetry, I have been thinking over our conversation about mothers and daughters and that this is the unexplored subject both in literature and psychology—fathers and daughters, yes, mothers and sons, yes; but mothers and daughters? It is coming out now in poetry, in Anne Sexton for one, of course, and most of what comes out is dark and tangled. But it all must be examined by each of us and Karen’s book is very helpful. I am moved to copy out a passage from her preface:

  “The Great Mother’s maternal force has often been characterized as grasping, even paralysing, its effect sometimes damaging to the maturing child. This dark side of the ‘mother,’ whose face is Medusa’s own, has found its way into male mythology and psychology as the female dragon, the Stone Mother, the castrating terror whose powers must be permanently destroyed to enable the male ‘hero’ to attain maturity. For women, however, the figure of Medusa takes on a more complex significance. The ‘mother,’ who represents for the male the childhood world he will eventually leave behind, also comes to signify for the female the adulthood she must move toward and eventually adopt. Thus, the mother /daughter relationship can turn into a maze of mirrors, whose reflexive entanglements the daughter may find it difficult, or impossible, to escape. To move beyond these dark entanglements, it is imperative that we, as Medusa’s daughters, work not to destroy her but to incorporate her, to gain access to her creative, matriarchal powers which are both ancient and our own.”

  The discussion in Newton took place sometime after a friend on the telephone said to me, “You must write more about your mother,” and I have been thinking about this also off and on. I always felt that I was incorporating my mother and her very strong influence in all my work … as though in a way I could bring the creative force in me to full flower as the fulfillment she had never been able to have because she was married and so much of her creative energy after her thirtieth year went into helping support my father and me, literally (by earning money through designing furniture, clothes, and other things.) and metaphysically by the sheer energy that went into her being the pivot of the two complex, demanding lives in her care. It is usual for daughters to be a little in love with their fathers; I was always a little in love with my mother. For my father and I were rivals, I now see, and in many ways he was also her child.

  I have heard more than once daughters of a powerful mother say with extreme bitterness, “I hate my mother!” They had been swallowed up or molded into the person their mothers demanded, or prevented from their own authentic being by unconscious pressures from their mothers. I never felt any of that. I felt that my mother was my dearest and best friend, and so she treated me, and so I treated her. There was only one flaw in what was otherwise so vitalizing and good, that she confided her marital difficulties to me, so that my love for my father (though never my respect) was short-circuited at quite an early age, and did not flow back until after my mother was dead, when the “rivals” at last became friends, though never intimate friends. My father could make me extremely angry up to the end. I cannot remember ever being angry with my mother, for she truly and absolutely understood, even when she was quite critical, as she often was, and with good reason. But that is just the point—my father’s criticism was erratic, irrational, came from my disappointing him in some way. (“Why don’t you marry?” he shouted at me when I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight and in the middle of a devastating love for a woman. I rushed at him and beat his chest with my fists, then ran out of the house.) My mother’s criticisms came from her understanding of me and my needs, not hers. The only demand she ever made of me was that I become authentically myself, even when that meant leaving home at seventeen and going, perilously, into what I thought would be a life in the theatre.

  Saturday, July 3rd

  AT LAST we had some rain, really good gentle rain, for two days. Eleanor Blair was here, but she felt as I did the charm of the misty gray world, how green the greens look when wet, and we had a lovely time. She is one of the few people who come here who really looks at everything, and especially the flowers, so the whole house comes alive for me as she wanders around, seeing the furniture I brought from Judy’s, the new books, a painting, even my new blue enamel tea kettle that Laurie gave me for my birthday.

  She is also a fine example of a woman who never married but has nothing of the “spinster” about her. Lying in bed this morning I thought about Lucy Stanton and how she too, unmarried, was a fulfilled person, long before the woman’s movement. Of course, she was an artist and Eleanor is not. What makes the spinster is fear of life.

  It’s a great pleasure to go down to the annual and vegetable garden these days—for the first time since I came here, it is fairly tidy because of the hay mulch. Last year I was ashamed of the weeds, so thick tha
t the beets never grew beyond an inch. Now the beets look healthy. We are having peas tonight when Bev and Mary-Leigh come for a cold salmon supper.

  The roses are splendid now, but even better, the Japanese iris, as élancé and elegant as a heron (were it a bird not a flower). I have a deep purple one and a white one in a vase downstairs and catch my breath each time I go by.

  Monday, July 5th

  THE FIELD has its summer dress of tall, blond grasses that ripple in the wind. And in the woods the pirola is out, its precise white flowers standing out along each stem. It grew around Lucy Stanton’s studio in Ogunquit, one of the first wild flowers I grew to know and love as a child, and it has a special quality because it comes so much later than all the other charming small wood flowers. But if the pirola is out, so are the deerflies! Poor Tamas, his head abuzz, stands and waits for me to drive them off with bunches of bracken, and as he stops about every ten seconds, our walk is rather an ordeal. Bramble leaps into the air, batting with both paws to get rid of them, then goes under a bush and refuses to follow us a step farther.

  Yesterday was the bicentennial. The whole day was thrilling to watch on TV, as the cameras moved in and out all over the country, and back again and again to the glorious Tall Ships making their way up the Hudson … the man who initiated that did more for the country than any government-organized celebration, even the fireworks, could possibly have done. I started watching at 8 A.M. and then went up to write letters for a couple of hours before Jo Neilson came to share cold salmon and peas from the garden. It was good to have someone to share it all with. Walter Cronkite was superb on the all-day marathon. He was able to communicate joy from the moment he said, beaming, at 8 A.M. “Happy birthday to us,” with such warmth that it brought tears to my eyes. It was so grand the way cameras were out in small towns, as well as cities, the only disaster Ford’s incredibly dull, cliché-ridden speech which he read in a monotone, stumbling over words, as usual.