The House by the Sea Read online

  Thanks to the sea, to Europe … to God! … I am writing poems again. I can play records. Now I am going to put on the Bach Cello suites, played by Tortelier. They have accompanied me through many days of work in the past. Let it all begin once more, the step-by-step joyful effort to lift a poem out.

  Monday, January 6th

  IT FILLS ME with terror to see that the first week of the New Year is almost over, and what have I done? I did sketch out a poem on New Year’s Day, but I remain dissatisfied, unexhilarated by free verse. Perhaps I can go back and make it better. I have made a start at the portrait of Bowen which produced an earthquake of troubling buried memories, and also astonishment at what was given me, as if by chance, in those years between 1936 and the outbreak of World War II. I am troubled partly by seeing very clearly at my present age how much the young take for granted without a qualm—before thirty one does not know what the creation of a delightful dinner party has cost the hostess in time, energy, thought. It all seems so easy and charming when one is present as a guest, the recipient of bounties one cannot even assess.

  I haven’t yet formulated a way of handling three enterprises at once—this journal, the book of portraits of which Bowen is the first, and poems. But the only thing is to immerse oneself very fast as if a plunge into icy waters and hope to find one can swim one’s way to safety! And that I am about to do.

  Again a serene, cold winter day, brilliant light. The way the sun shines through the petals of pink and white cyclamen in the plant window and lights up a scarlet and a pink poinsettia is one of the rewards of getting up.

  Tuesday, January 7th

  I WOKE LATE … it was nearly seven when Tamas began licking his paws, his gentle way of saying, “It’s time to get up.” I woke to a world thickly enclosed in walls of big-flaked snow falling very fast. Now it is thinner, there is more wind, and it looks as though for the first time in this house I’m to be snowed in for the day. How exciting and moving that is, the exact opposite of an outgoing adventure or expedition! Here the excitement is to be suddenly a self-reliant prisoner, and what opens out is the inner world, the timeless world when my compulsion to go out and get the mail at eleven must be forgotten. How beautiful the white field is in its blur of falling snow, with the delicate black pencil strokes of trees and bushes seen through it! And, of course, the silence, the snow silence, becomes hypnotic if one stops to listen.

  Luckily I remembered to fill the feeder last night. This morning the first thing I saw was a blue jay, his crest up, looking so dandy. There was a goldfinch, dozens of chickadees, and a tree sparrow. The fat gray squirrels fell upon each other as they scrambled away at my tap on the window.

  Here on the third floor I look about me and feel extremely happy. This is a beautiful place to work, the wood paneling such a soft brown. But the great thing is that being so high up (for the house stands on a knoll), I am in the treetops on two sides, and on the third, where I sit, I look out over the field to open sea. It is beautiful to live at the tops of trees, and even more so to look out on such a wide expanse. How lucky I am to be here! I say it every day and it still seems like a miracle … the kindness and imagination of the friends who offered it to me, the tough decision it was for me to leave Nelson. It was the right decision, and I shall never regret it.

  There are hazards in living alone … I admit that I do have some anxiety about falling and not being found for days. I run up and down four flights of stairs all day, and the cellar stairs are steep. I think of Miss Waterman who, in her little house at Folly Cove, fell and broke her hip and was not found for twenty-four hours. Of course, Mary-Leigh would probably notice the absence of light at night, if she knew I was here. And Raymond has a way of turning up by ESP just when I am in dire straits. One day when I was getting dressed for a lecture the zipper at the back of my dress got entangled. I looked out the window and there was Raymond crossing the lawn! Amazing man!

  But by the time one is sixty there is a deeper anxiety that has to be dealt with, and that is the fear of death … or rather, I should say, the fear of dying in some inappropriate or gruesome way, such as long illness requiring care. I sometimes actually sweat when I think of Tamas, should I fall and break my neck, Tamas unable to get out. Why talk about it? I say “talk about it” because these are the things we bury and never do bring out into the open. And what is a journal for if they are never mentioned?

  To a very great extent the quality of life has to do with its delights and anxieties. Without anxiety life would have very little savor. But one does get a sense of the extreme fragility of everything alive—plants, animals, people—all threatened, all so easily snuffed out by overwatering, a predator, a heart attack. The mice Bramble brings in have no mark on them and, I presume, die of fright, poor dears.

  My delights in this place are infinite. So it is fair enough that I suffer from anxiety. But for the last few years I have been highly conscious that from now on I am preparing to die, and must think about it, and try to do it well. When I was young death was a romantic dream, longed for at times of great emotional stress as one longs for sleep. Who could fear it? one asked at nineteen. We fear what we cannot imagine. There is simply no way of imagining what has not yet happened nor been described. We live toward it, not knowing … except that intense love of life has to be matched by greater detachment as one grows older. Or is it that the things one is attached to change?

  At that point I plunged back into Florida Scott-Maxwell’s remarkable book, The Measure of My Days. It is one of the two or three books that have really nourished me in these last four or five years. All of it speaks to me so intimately that I would like to copy out pages. But today I must go on with the portrait of Elizabeth Bowen. It is beginning to go well, to have a momentum. At first I was overwhelmed with the memories, their variety, the problem of how to mold it?

  Monday, January 13th

  WE HAVE BEEN having rather dismal weather, dismal because it is unseasonal, rain instead of snow, warm instead of cold. I feel physically let down, dull, and a little queasy. But I am having a great read at last, the Bedford Aldous Huxley (I had read only Vol. 1), Lady Ottoline’s Memories, and Kenneth Clark’s quite charming autobiography … it is all part of the period I am thinking about as I write the Bowen portrait.

  Kenneth Clark is a very endearing person, sure enough of himself to have no illusions about himself. I marked a passage about the artist and society last night. He is speaking about Graham Sutherland who “did not recoil from smart society,” and he goes on to say, “I am not sure how much this is desirable for an artist.… Bébé Bernard was one of the few painters I have known to have survived (and only just survived) the intoxicating speed of social chatter. The artist must go at his own speed. His whole life is a painful effort to turn himself inside out, and if he gives too much away at the shallow level of social intercourse he may lose the will to attempt a deeper excavation.”

  Sunday, January 19th

  WE HAD a wild rain-and-wind storm yesterday after below zero weather … so strange to wake and find the snow nearly washed away, spring in the air! But tonight will go below zero, they say … so where are we? Buffeted about and exhilarated by these changes. I have neglected this journal partly because letters have piled up again just when I imagined I was nearly in the clear after Christmas; partly because I have been deeply absorbed on the subconscious level by the portrait of Elizabeth Bowen.

  Sybille Bedford is persuasive. By the end of her long biography I have to admit that Aldous does come through as a saint. Perhaps it was not good for him to be so “taken in charge” by Maria, and that Laura, his second wife, who seemed quite callous and selfish about leaving him for long periods, drew from him a greater humanity and, above all, a deeper concept of love as far as he himself was concerned and his capacity for understanding another human being. It is moving that he, such a rational being, did believe that death is a passage and the dying must be helped to make it, chiefly by “letting go.” I believe this and that we
must begin to let go long before we are dying, as he himself did. It happens almost imperceptibly; some things do not seem so important as they did. It is partly the will that must let go, the driver, the implacable wanter and demander. Of course, Tamas is a great help to me because he is waiting for his walk at half past eleven; my instinct to push work a little beyond a feeling of fatigue is short-circuited by a bark; I “let go” and enjoy the letting go. Tamas has done a lot to subdue the compulsive in me.

  I want to think about saints, who they are and who they are not, as far as I am concerned. In the first place, people who want to be saints very rarely are in my experience. The saint must not know he is a saint … he is far too busy thinking about other people. His preoccupations are not primarily with his own saintliness—not at all. (It reminds me of that wonderful statement by an Archbishop of Canterbury that “it is a mistake to believe that God is primarily concerned with religion.”) At the moment I think of Eugénie Dubois, who at eighty still does all the housework and cooking—and, like my own mother, always had had help until she was seventy and help was too expensive—walks miles over cobblestoned roads, (often damp in Belgium) to get in food, but has not allowed what amounts to servitude to dim, for a second, her eager participation in all the life around her, her idealism, her strength and wisdom in being always available to her grandchildren, her openness to all that is in the air if one has the imagination to catch it. (It is like her to have sent me a remarkable French book about the violence of the sixties among youth which suggests that it has been a world revolt against materialism and the distorted values of the industrial world.) She is a flame, and that flame warms and lights everything around her. Yet she is often, I feel sure, close to exhaustion.

  As I thought about her I thought, not for the first time, that the chief problem women have, even now, is that they have to be both Martha and Mary most of the time and these two modes of being are diametrically opposite. I felt at first that in the case of Aldous Huxley it was Maria, his first wife, who seemed truly a saint; now I begin to understand that hers was too deliberate a sacrifice, too conscious a one. Robert Craft goes so far as to suggest in a review of the biography that there must have been a great deal of hostility under that self-immolation.

  The trouble with “conscious” saints is that they sometimes exert what I can only call unholy emotional pressure. I still wince when I think of the pressure that was put on my mother as a child, left with an Episcopal minister and his family one of those years when her father and mother were abroad (Gervase Elwes was an engineer and his work took him to faraway places … Canada, India, Spain). They were determined to “convert” little Eleanor Mabel Elwes. Mabel adored her own father, who was a Fabian, and partly out of loyalty, no doubt, she would not give in—and was treated like a leper in consequence. It is clear that she had some sort of nervous breakdown and perhaps her migraine headaches began at that time. That kind of emotional pressure is wicked.

  I have experienced it several times myself. Some years ago I had a friend who, invited for the day, would announce that she would not eat as she was fasting … I was to pay no attention, and have my lunch! It never occurred to her that this was a kind of emotional pressure that made me ill. The tension of our meetings was quite unbearable; I felt I was being forced toward some act or capitulation which she was demanding of me in God’s name. This is not goodness, for goodness, it seems to me, is always tolerant of the beliefs or nonbeliefs of others. We convert, if we do at all, by being something irresistible, not by demanding something impossible.

  Tuesday, January 28th

  IT IS a queer winter, with a few warm days followed by cold, a few rainy days, then snow, and one can never settle down to good old winter! The crocuses are up … fatal!

  Yesterday I had three letters from three friends, so different in every way that it was startling to find the same problem making for depression. One is a young married woman with two small children and a husband who is a company man. She feels shut out by his work, resents his cavalier way of bringing “friends,” meaning clients, home without warning, but especially their lack of communication because there is never time. He is also away a lot on business. The second is a friend whose husband retired recently; on his retirement they moved away from the town where they had always lived to be near the ocean. He is at a loose end and she feels caught, angry and depressed without being able to define why. The third is a woman professor, quite young, who lives happily with a woman colleague but speaks of her “bone loneliness.”

  “Loneliness” for me is associated with love relationships. We are lonely when there is not perfect communion. In solitude one can achieve a good relationship with oneself. It struck me forcibly that I could never speak of “bone loneliness” now, though I have certainly experienced it when I was in love. And I feel sure that that poignant phrase would have described my mother often.

  Wednesday, January 29th

  DISMAL RAIN, all the snow melted off. I look out over a brown field to a toneless gray sea, but I have a bunch of spring flowers on my desk—three red and yellow tulips, two each of flat-cupped daffodils (one has brilliant orange cups and yellow petals, one large flat white petals and an orange cup), plus a small spray of mimosa. Why is it that mimosa shrivels in the air? It arrived yesterday all fluffy and alive and has now withered already, all its panache gone.

  As I think over those three letters I wrote about yesterday I realize freshly how brave people have to be every day to maintain themselves against all that is asked, against what they have to accept that they can’t do (because it goes against the grain too harshly) as well as the courage to do what they can and must do without falling to pieces from exhaustion. The greatest problem of my young married friend is really fatigue … this seems the insuperable fact about bringing up small children. There is no rest. If there is hostility toward a husband who is not at home enough to take his share of simply being human, then it all becomes doubly hard to handle, and the “bone loneliness” eats its way into the psyche.

  The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it. Most people swallow the unacceptable because it makes life so much easier. At what point does one feel that doing battle, however painful and rending, is necessary? This is the excruciating question. If a woman loves her husband and knows how tired he too is when he comes home from the wrangles and tensions of work, when can she allow herself to demand attention, to put her case squarely before him? There is no good time. For years my mother buried her anger—and sometimes I think she was right to do so, because in his sixties my father was never going to change. Letting the anger out would have made no difference, only upset him, not led to a sudden vision of what he had failed to do and to be for her. So she beat herself inside—and he never grew up.

  That is the tragedy. If things are never fought out, it means that somewhere deep down the marriage does not make for growth. Stability has been achieved at a very high price, too high a price, some would feel. I admire my former students who are now married because they have the guts to fight, painful as it is.

  Thursday, January 30th

  RAIN ALL DAY yesterday, brilliant sun and wind today, and snow predicted for tomorrow … that’s New England, all right! But truly this is a peculiar winter and makes me feel restless. I love long periods of being enclosed in snow, forced inward. I love the winter and feel we haven’t had it. But who knows? We may before April.

  People who say they do not want to pick flowers and have them indoors (the idea being, I suppose, that they are more “natural” in the garden than in the house) don’t realize that indoors one can really look at a single flower, undistracted, and that this meditation brings great rewards. The flowers on my desk have been lit up one by one as by a spotlight as the sun slowly moves. And once more I am in a kind of ecstasy at the beauty of light through petals … how each vein is seen in relief, the stru
cture suddenly visible. I just noticed that deep in the orange cup of one of these flat-cupped daffodils there is translucent bright green below the stamens.

  I come back to my happiness here. I have never been so happy in my life, never for such a sustained period, for I have now been in this house by the sea for a year and a half. I have not said enough about what it is to wake each day to the sunrise and to that great tranquil open space as I lie in my bed, having breakfast, often quietly thinking for a half hour. That morning amplitude, silence, the sea, all make for a radical change in tempo. Or is it, too, that I am growing older, and have become a little less compulsive about “what has to be done”? I am taking everything with greater ease. When I was younger there was far more conflict, conflict about my work, the desperate need to “get through,” and the conflict created by passionate involvement with people. There are compensations for not being in love—solitude grows richer for me every year. It is not a matter of being a recluse … I shall never be that; I enjoy and need my friends too much. But it is a matter of detachment, of not being quite so easily pulled out of my own orbit by violent attraction, of being able to enjoy without needing to possess.

  The sixties are marvelous years, because one has become fully oneself by then, but the erosions of old age, erosion of strength, of memory, of physical well-being have not yet begun to frustrate and needle. I am too heavy, but I refuse to worry too much about it. I battle the ethos here in the USA, where concern about being overweight has become a fetish. I sometimes think we are as cruel to old brother ass, the body, as the Chinese used to be who forced women’s feet into tiny shoes as a sign of breeding and beauty. “Middle-aged spread” is a very real phenomenon, and why pretend that it is not? I am not so interested in being a dazzling model as in being comfortable inside myself. And that I am.