The House by the Sea Read online

  “Again, talking with you, each person or image evoked a million others and it takes time to put them back into place. An avalanche of memories erupts.

  “I found you well. I wish I could have helped you, not now, I wish I could have known what I know now, a long time ago when you might have needed it. I think I understand your rages and I do not see them as a great problem. It is unfortunate that so few analysts don’t know about these things in the U.S. They do here and have for some time. It is not such a difficult problem and it sorrows me that it has caused you grief. You are well and your depth is there, very easy to touch and in some way exposed and unguarded. It must not be mistaken and I am sure many times many people have mistaken it. Perhaps this allowing your own exposure allows so much to get inside, but also it must guard itself from intrusion. One must not confuse generosity (which is allowing exposure) with something that is always there and can be taken for granted. It is a rare gift. It must neither be abused nor betrayed. It is a gift to us, who know you and who are around you, and it must be respected. If you are to survive at all we must help you and somehow I do not feel that those of us who have been near to you have done so. I am sure we have taken you for granted more than once, forgetting that in the artist the child is alive and has to be if the person is an artist. With this I leave you for the moment.”

  Monday, November 18th

  AT DAWN, heavy frost on the grass, a congregation of crows cawing in the woods behind the house … I heard them yesterday on our walk. (I should say the walk, as it is the walk through the woods and around in a circle that I make every morning around twelve with Tamas, and Bramble when she so chooses.) Perhaps there is a wounded deer dying somewhere? I heard the ominous leaden sound of a shot just after dawn. It is the season of dread now, the deer hunting season. On the walk I talk all the time to warn anyone around not to shoot.

  As I drove out with Richard Henry two or three days ago we met a sinister-looking man with a shotgun. I stopped to be sure he understood that the property is posted. He said he was going far into the woods—somewhere not posted, he implied. I know that people need their deer for meat this autumn of soaring prices, but it is hard to describe the fear and horror I felt seeing that shotgun. Anything that moves is in danger. More than the immediate dread, I felt fierce revolt against guns in general and so many people every day who become murderers as if by accident because they have this tremendous power to kill in their hands—a man loses his temper and “bang! bang!” his wife falls dead or his child. How can we accept such a state of affairs? How have we allowed the gun manufacturers to hold us at bay? After all the assassinations and daily “incidents” there is still no gun law. It is almost unbelievable.

  In the perfect silence this morning, not a wave breaking and the ocean absolutely flat and blue, at any moment peace will be shattered by a terrifying explosion. I remember Perley who had hunted as a young man, but in old age no longer wanted to kill. And I have heard of others like him.

  Yet this deer hunting is legitimate. What is far more sinister is the number of children in New York City, fourteen and fifteen, who hunt down old women, exactly as though they were animals, following the human track to its lair, then killing for a few dollars or a TV set. What have we done to our children that such indifference is possible? A total disconnection between the act and the human terror and despair involved?

  A friend telephoned the other day to tell me of her traumatic experience of finding the body of her cat in the road (it happened to me with Bel-Gazou while I was still in Nelson, Bel-Gazou, Bramble’s brother, and the dearest little cat I ever had. And I remember how I howled with pain and outrage like a Jew at the Wailing Wall). “Rigor mortis,” K. said. “It is something I had never experienced.” The whole grief and outrage will be with her for weeks and some part of her will never get over it.

  How to make these boys, so detached from and beyond humanity come into their humanness? Do they have bad dreams afterward? In their sleep do they become human again? It is anomie carried to its farthest limit, the moment when lawlessness has crept into the inmost person and that person is totally detached.

  War does it. My Lai. But we are in a period where torture is taken for granted almost everywhere, and where the so-called civilized peoples must go on eating candy and drinking whiskey while millions die of hunger. So one has to extrapolate the morally indifferent boys to the whole ethos in which they live. And at the root of it all is the lack of imagination. If we had imagined what we were doing in Vietnam it would have had to be stopped. But the images of old women holding shattered babies or of babies screaming ended by passing before our eyes but never penetrating to consciousness where they could be experienced. Are we paying for Vietnam now by seeing our children become monsters?

  I am more and more convinced that in the life of civilizations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that has not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything—ends in anomie. The structures break down and there is nothing to “hold onto.”

  It is understandable that at such times religious fanatics arise and the fundamentalists rise up in fury. Hatred rather than love dominates.

  How does one handle it? The greatest danger, as I see it in myself, is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence—nature, the arts, human love. Maybe that is why the pandas in the London Zoo brought me back to poetry for the first time in two years.

  Tuesday, November 19th

  I HAVE BEEN out in the garden till dusk raking leaves. It was time, as the grass under the big maple had begun to rot. How soothing this task is! I had dreaded it, but I went at it slowly, tasting the air and trying to remember the slowness of Basil de Selincourt’s walk when he did gardening, as he did well into his eighties. As I raked around the climbing roses I pruned out dead wood, and in the circular bed around the big maple (where Tamas likes to lie) I made a discovery—three tiny cyclamens I planted last year have come up at last. One had an infinitesimal bright pink flower. My idea had been a thick bed of them around the tree! I’ll try again, with more plants another year. How timeless a garden is! One thinks in terms of ten years, a hundred …

  Wednesday, November 20th

  A DISMAL DAY, rain, everything leaden. I forgot to say that yesterday when I was hurrying to get to an appointment on time I fell forward on the stairs and wrenched my shoulder. It shook me, because it brought vividly to mind the hazards of living alone. One feels fragile. And I realize that anxiety is never far away because what would happen to Tamas? The cat can get in and out through my bedroom window, but he would be trapped if anything happened to me and it might be days before I was found (Louise Bogan was found lying dead on the floor in her apartment in New York). Such anxiety should keep one alert and I believe that it does, alert and reminding oneself not to hurry. Most domestic accidents happen because someone is hurrying … But on a deeper level than the mundane fact of a possible fall or heart attack I feel sure that after sixty everyone has death in the back of his or her consciousness much of the time.

  Yesterday the mail brought me a mimeographed essay by a Jungian therapist in which she uses Lear’s great speech that begins, “No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison” as a beautiful expression of what growing old can mean. She says,

  “The wisdom of common speech, which we so often miss, speaks to us in the phrase, ‘He is growing old.’ We use it indiscriminately about those who are in truth growing into old age, into the final flowering and meaning of their lives, and about those who are being dragged into it, protesting, resisting, crying out against their inevitable imprisonment. Only to one who can say with his whole being, ‘Come, let’s away to prison,’ do the lines which follow apply.

/>   “ ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.’ We may think of Cordelia in this context as the old man’s inner child—the love and courage, the simplicity, and innocence of his soul, to which suffering has united him.”

  Growing old … what is the opposite of “growing”? I ask myself. “Withering” perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. But there is also an opposite to growth which is regression, in psychoanalytic terms going back to infantile modes of being. And maybe growing old is accepting regression as part of the whole mysterious process. The child in the old person is a precious part of his being able to handle the slow imprisonment. As he is able to do less, he enjoys everything in the present, with a childlike enjoyment. It is a saving grace, and I see it when Judy is with me here.

  Growing old is certainly far easier for people like me who have no job from which to retire at a given age. I can’t stop doing what I have always done, trying to sort out and shape experience. The journal is a good way to do this at a less intense level than by creating a work of art as highly organized as a poem, for instance, or the sustained effort a novel requires. I find it wonderful to have a receptacle into which to pour vivid momentary insights, and a way of ordering day-to-day experience (as opposed to Maslow’s “peak experiences,” which would require poetry). If there is an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication yet at the same time a very personal record, it may be in what E. Bowen said: “One must regard oneself impersonally as an instrument.”

  Monday, November 25th

  ON THE 21st I fasted to be in communion with the 250,000 who did so, especially students in New England. I have felt so strongly that we could not sit passively while so many starve in Africa and I have been miserable for weeks that Ford does nothing and Butz and the others more or less wrecked the food conference in Rome, when some positive action on our part might have lit the fire. It is not enough to send money all the time as we all do. Somehow one has to give part of oneself.

  It was a rainy miserable day and I had a lot of errands to do here and there. By noon I felt rather cross and by six P.M. I was counting the hours to morning! It was a very good experience and I mean to do it again.

  I have nightmares about us Americans, weighed down as we are by “things” and by excessive eating. I read yesterday that Americans eat fifty times the meat the British do, for instance. Overeating makes people logy in a different way from the apathy induced by too little nourishment, but I feel sure that it takes the edge off perception. Many of us are literally weighed down. Who can imagine hunger who has never experienced it, even for one day?

  Friday, November 29th

  A PALE BLUE sea drifting off into the dusk. Raymond, my part-time gardener, came to hill up the roses. He teases me about not trusting him and it is true that by some magic sixth sense he does get things done—at the 11th hour! He rototilled the picking garden just before the snow, while I raked most of the leaves from under the big maple and the flower beds near it.

  It is the day after Thanksgiving. Judy is here, of course, and we had a fine Thanksgiving day. It was cold and windy so that the open fire in the cozy room seemed a necessity rather than a luxury. We had roast chicken, creamed onions that Judy used to make so well, cranberries that Gracie Warner brought when they came, picked from their own bog, Warner squash, and Woodson-Barton potatoes. All these vegetables from neighborly gardens made it a specially blest meal. The chestnut stuffing brought memories of my mother. The mince pie was served on the Bavarian plates (with their bright pink and green flowers) Anne Thorp gave me when she broke up the Cambridge house. In every family memories are woven into a meal like this. It has a solemnity because of them. Our silver forks came from Judy’s mother, the shell pattern, and her mother, I suddenly realized, came from Portland … so it all comes round full circle or nearly.

  On another level, Thanksgiving this year was, for me, the reading of a manuscript, sent out of the blue, to ask my opinion about publication. Do people have any idea what they ask? It seems so simple: tell me what you think of my work. But it is not simple and causes me great anxiety and even anguish. Wholehearted unequivocal praise is what is needed, and what if one cannot honestly give it? That is where the anxiety comes in. I do not pretend to be a critic, except of my own work. I do not wish to be an authority. Is it churlish to resent such demands? This writer is a dancer. What if people constantly came to her door to dance for her and did so because they felt an affinity with her dancing? Would she welcome such interruptions? This request has ended in an uproar inside me of resentment, guilt (because I couldn’t like her work more), and a sense of waste.

  Anyway, yesterday ended very well. Judy and I watched a long “special” on Churchill, and I was happy to see that she could be wholly absorbed over such a long span. She cannot read for even a few minutes any longer.

  It’s hard to realize that for most young people the Battle of Britain, the Normandy beaches, the desert rats—all these things people of my age experienced so deeply—are simply history like the War of the Roses. The best thing the film did was to quote some of Churchill’s orders to his ministers—amazing sense of detail and warmth of imagination about what people were going through. For instance, a recommendation to the Minister of Food that they try to cut down on the bureaucracy about rationing. Moving, too, to see him painting under a big umbrella. And terrifying to see once more how ill Roosevelt looked at Yalta, a ghost of himself.

  Sunday, December 1st

  I WENT TO BED feeling ill and was afraid I had caught the twenty-four-hour flu that is about, but this morning I was able to get up as usual to make our breakfast, do the chores, bring up wood from the cellar, build the fire, change my sheets, empty the wastebaskets. I enjoy these chores when I am feeling well, but today I wanted to lie down and sleep. Finally at 9:30 I did. Judy was out with the dog. When they came back she left him outside and he barked and barked, so rest was out of the question. Finally I called down to ask her to get him in, please. For some reason she didn’t do this. So I ran down and got him in myself, screaming with frustration. One minute later she had let him out and he was barking again! At such times it is as though Judy were possessed by a spirit of nay-saying … I don’t know what else to call it. Her restlessness is getting worse, so I can never come up here now for even an hour without being aware that she is roving around, in and out, and of course these last days I have been terrified that she would go into the woods and get shot, or Tamas get shot (he looks so like a fox).

  Tuesday, December 3rd

  WE WERE PURGED by a magnificent storm all day yesterday. How glorious it was! Fifty-mile gusts of wind driving the waves in, and almost the highest tide on record (did Raymond say fourteen feet?). Judy and I put on boots and raincoats, and Tamas came along, to see the surf at its height. We could hardly stand against the wind, our glasses were covered with salt spray and Tamas’ fur was blown back to the roots. Down at the point we were able to stand for a few moments with those towering waves roaring in to right and left, the whole shore white with foam. It was like an answer to prayer, the outward storm playing out what might have become an inward storm had it not absorbed all the tensions, as it did.

  Indoors we had a nice intimate day with a fire going in the cozy room and I blessed the storm for that too, as I believe it satisfied some deep restlessness in Judy. We even got out for the mail and did some errands in Portsmouth at noon. And I came home with two wonderful letters, one from Bill Brown and one from Betty Voelker, both painters, both living in San Francisco or near it. Of course, Bill goes back thirty-five years in my life; we have struggled along at our separate arts side by side. His letters are always full of magic and joy for me, as when yesterday I read this haunting description of the charm of his routine. He and Paul have won through to such a fertile and fertilizing relationship I almost envy it … and then I think of my solitude and realize again that I am truly married to it and without it would be even more nerve-racked and i
mpossible than I am. Bill writes: “For the last month we’ve been having spectacular sunsets each night. We sit with our drinks in hand and wait like children to see just what he/she up there has prepared. I love all of our daily rituals. Breakfast, the arrival of mad, wild Jimmie (a cat) who still greets us with a snarl instead of a miaow—then Ma Belle’s entrance into the kitchen where she chooses her favorite flavor of Tender Victuals for that day. Then we sit quietly together for 15 minutes (I can’t claim it’s meditation) and off I go to the studio until four or so. Then a shower and a drink and a good dinner by chef Paul, followed by reading or music. It sounds idyllic, but, of course, despair, frustrations, headaches of one kind or another keep us in fighting form.”

  A letter like this makes the day flower. Betty’s too was full of her sense of life and exact observation … “the light is again that champagne like luminosity” … the phrase made me dream.

  Dreams! Since my return from Europe I seem to have been living my life through again in dreams. Last night about ten people, including the Huxleys, Margaret Clapp, wandered in and out of my dreams.