The House by the Sea Read online

  Monday, February 3rd

  HELEN HOWE is dead. It was quite a shock to come upon the obit in the Times yesterday. Such a strange impersonal way to learn of a death! I felt a pang that I had not been with her these last weeks, been with her in my consciousness. I knew she was ill, but not that it was to be fatal, and I had heard from Polly Starr that she was home from the hospital. Since Judy is here for a few days, I have had no time to take in this death. I feel knocked over the head.

  I saw Helen for the last time last summer, when she took me over to Northeast Harbor from the island to read poems for Mrs. Belmont and a few of Mrs. B.’s friends. On the way she drew to the side of the road and we had a little talk about her problems with her new book—whether to make it straight autobiography, whether to use letters. She had been going through hundreds of her brother Mark’s letters. She, Mark, and Quincy were all articulate and witty correspondents and I had looked forward to what she would do with this rich material. Yet, of course, there were problems as there always are when one is turning life into art … how much can one tell? What is to be left out and for what reasons? Delightful and tender as The Gentle Americans was for the average reader, Helen was attacked after it appeared by some of its subjects, and suffered over this. I have never known a more conflicted writer.

  Partly, perhaps, the satirist who is not cruel by nature has special problems. One side of him sees the grotesque—his genius is to caricature—but the censor-conscience or the censor-kindness is always out to short-circuit the impulse.

  Overshadowed by two brilliant brothers, I think Helen never came into herself with complete assent to her own being. She was too thin-skinned, too insecure to dare her full capacity. But, oh, what a charming person!

  As I write I hear the inflection of her voice, the quick tempo that would suddenly stop in a laugh or a little gasp at her own daring. I see her stepping off the boat at Greenings Island in a panama hat with a dark blue scarf tied around it, a navy sweater, and white pleated skirt, looking so elegant, an Edith Wharton lady. She was tiny (her mother called her three children “my race of dwarfs”) and that added to her charm.

  How we used to laugh … Helen, Mark, Polly, Johnny Ames, and I! I have never known that kind of gaiety except with them. And all, except Polly, dead now.

  Tuesday, February 4th

  FOUR BELOW ZERO this morning of dazzling sunlight! The ocean steams, it is so much warmer than the air. Two nights ago I was woken at three by a rare sound here—a cat fight, a great yowling and howling. Bramble was out, so of course I listened rather anxiously. I have a bad cold and didn’t dare go out into the cold as I normally would have done. Then I realized that sleeping Tamas might be a help, and sure enough he dashed down the stairs ahead of me, already barking, and flew to the rescue when I commanded, “Tamas, go out and get your cat!” In about three minutes I heard his short bark that means, “Let me in” and there was the shepherd with his sheep! As Judy keeps saying, “You couldn’t have found a better dog.” When she comes—a little more restless each time as her powers of concentration diminish—it is Tamas who plays with her and demands to be taken for walks; they go out a dozen times a day, a sweet sight as I watch them walking down the field.

  The winter here has its own joys. One of them is that I see such a wide perimeter of ocean. Once the leaves are out, about half of what I see now from my bed is screened off. I have associated seaside places with few trees but here the house is backed by tall white and Japanese pines and there are maples and oaks at each side. The blue ocean seen through the branches is especially beautiful.

  Last night I dreamed of Louise Bogan, a good sign, I think, as it means the subconscious is already at work on the portrait I hope to begin tomorrow. Judy leaves today.

  There was an interesting interview with Liv Ullman in the Times. One senses her rare honesty. What comes through as so real in her performances comes through because she is real. “Miss Ullman said that countless friends and fans, including some homosexuals, have written her to say that they felt they were eavesdropping on their own relationships when they saw ‘Scenes from a Marriage,’ and it had depressed them.

  “I don’t think one should be without hope, though,” said Miss Ullman, who lives in Oslo with her mother and eight-year-old daughter by Ingmar Bergman (the two have never been married but once lived together and are now close friends). “I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone.”

  Miss Ullman feels that the pressure for a woman not to live alone—or to be alone—is great. Whenever she goes into a restaurant alone, for instance, she hides with a book in a “tiny corner table where no one will stare at me.”

  “Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they’ve got to get hold of someone to prove they’re worth while,” she said, sweeping the air with her arm and clapping her fist into her palm. “If they do decide to be alone, part of their loneliness will come from outside, rather than inside. Society will pity them, look down on them.”

  And later in the interview she talks about guilt. She has a “bad conscience” about spending so much time away from her daughter Linn. “That’s because all my life I’ve read in books that a mother should stay home with her child. I try to convince myself that one way of life is not right for all people, that maybe it’s good for me and my child to live the way we do. Yet it goes very deep, this guilt, and I always feel somewhere that I’m doing something wrong.”

  Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman, I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not one feminine characteristic. A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always a little on the defensive.

  Thursday, February 6th

  AT LAST the snowy world I have been longing for! It has snowed since yesterday morning, off and on, and now comes down fast, slanting in the wind. The sea is high with deep huge waves, not ruffled on the surface, but great dark threatening combers that rise high over the field and then crash—white fountains above the white snow. The silence is broken now by the great steady roar, and this is something new for me—the snow and a rough sea together.

  Yesterday I went out for the mail early, right after breakfast, to be sure to be able to get out, and it’s well that I did so. I brought back orange and white and pale amber-colored tulips and a few iris … what is more entrancing than spring flowers in a snowstorm?

  I began the piece on Louise Bogan, again as with Bowen taken up at once into a whirlpool of feelings and sensations as all those meetings well up and must be sorted out and pondered for the seeds of truth in them.

  It has to be faced, no doubt, that there is some conflict in any human relationship of depth. Between Louise and me there was conflict because I felt that she should have left The New Yorker long before she did … it became almost an obsession with me that she was allowing her gifts as poet to be cluttered up by all those books of other people’s poems, even though at the end she reviewed very few. Still, they “came in” and forced the analytic side of her nature to take over.

  Saturday, February 8th, four P.M.

  A CALM DARK BLUE sea beyond the white field, every bush and tree casting a blue shadow as the sun begins to set.

  On the horizon a large white ship … a Russian trawler perhaps? We see a few oil freighters but rarely a ship that looks like this. I am feeling overcharged … a very intense life here alone these past days. For one thing, the arrival of Charles Richie’s Journal of the war years came … I devoured it after lunch, hunting down everything he says about his meetings with Elizabeth Bowen.

  Yesterday the mail brought me the news that Céline has died. She was over ninety and had been miserable for the past year, not able to walk, very deaf … I saw her twice when I was in Brussels last October and even though I sat at a little stool at her feet and she leaned forward in her armchair, she could not underst
and what I said and exhausted herself talking. It made me terribly sad not to be able to communicate. Too late! She looked like a poor sad old monkey. Yet the vitality, the will to live, was still there, and in these last years she had begun to write poems and handed me the notebook so that I could read a few, but I could not decipher her hand. I was to have seen her a third time, but became ill myself—perhaps subconsciously on purpose. We both knew the third would have been a final good-bye. The poems were very sentimental … J. showed me one. Does that matter? No. What matters was the marvelous spring of the spirit still wanting and needing to express itself.

  I shall write a portrait of Céline as I really knew her. There is a fictional portrait, for she appears as Mélanie in The Bridge of Years. But that was romanticized—not on purpose, but perhaps because one cannot tell the whole truth about anyone while they are still alive. Also, actual human beings are always more complex than one can possibly manage in fiction.

  Now what I think of is the warmth and love she gave me when I was seven or eight and we spent a winter with the Limbosches near Brussels. Céline was a real earth mother and my own mother was not that at all. I see her, lying in bed, in her plain white nightgown, surrounded and engulfed by all of us children, her three daughters and her son and me, whom she always called “my eldest,” all of us clean and pink from our baths lying about as close to her as we each could get, waiting for her to read to us for a half hour. It was Nils Holgersson, as I remember, that enthralled us that winter.

  She was very dominating and ordered us about like a commanding general. But at that age I rather enjoyed it, more perhaps than had I been her own child. There is a great deal to think about. As Jacqueline said in a short dignified note, “C’est une page de tournée, et quelle page.…

  “Bien que nous souhaitions pour elle de ne plus devoir endurer cette pénible décrépitude, une fois partie, on est écrasé par l’irrémédiable.”

  The fact is that it is very much harder to believe in immortality when the person has become diminished by very old age, as both Julian Huxley and Céline had when I saw them in the autumn.

  All we can pray is not to outlive the self. Yet my guess is that we make our deaths, even when senile. Céline, at least, was still always imagining that she could help someone, did think of others, most recently to try to find a way to give one of her nurses her heart’s desire … a harp!

  Among the letters today were two from strangers—one from England to thank me for As We Are Now. “I am very old, nearly ninety-one, but I am most happily placed. My own dread is that I might find it necessary to go into an old people’s home. At present I am in my beloved old farmhouse, restricted to driving in a radius of three miles, very deaf, very lame, but with sight just as good as ever. So I live largely in books. I still do a little mild gardening, perched on a stool. Life owes me nothing. I’ve had pretty well everything I wanted—my share of trouble, of course. But one gets overcharged with experience.” The other is from a young American girl, and after telling me what a solitary she has always been, she says, “I don’t know exactly how to tie in my ‘true story’ with what I want to say but for a year now I’ve been reading and re-reading your work (now I am ending a second reading of Kinds of Love) and it made me feel good to be a woman, feel good to have nerves, and eyes and all sorts of sensory enjoyment in full operation. It feels good to be alone and enjoy the person I am …” There is more, and then it ends, “Thank you for making old age and old people real and a continuation of life.”

  This is a day when I wish there were someone with whom I could talk over and share all that has poured in.

  Friday, February 14th

  A BEAUTIFUL DAY! Zero when I went down this morning at a little after six … such a peaceful gray and rosy sunrise, the Isles of Shoals floating as they sometimes seem to do. Winter has really come at last, with below-zero weather, or snow, every day. There is nothing I like better.

  Yesterday as I drove across the causeway en route to get the mail, a kingfisher flew low right in front of me. I have only seen one once before. Birds are an important part of my life here, especially in winter. The feeders are outside the closed-in porch where I have my meals, read, and look at TV when I am downstairs. Lately a flock of evening grosbeaks comes and goes among the chickadees, three sparrows, and goldfinches. A pair of downy woodpeckers and a pair each of small and large nuthatches are regulars, a few jays (they have been depleted since the capillary disease last year that destroyed hundreds). One or two starlings and/or grackles show up now and then. Both red squirrels (enchanting) and gray (huge!) devour tons of seed. On these very still, very cold days the constant motion has a tonic effect, a little like music in the air, all those wings. It would be deathly still without them.

  As I look down from this study window, I see below the terrace a charming lacing in loops and circles of Tamas and Bramble’s tracks through the snow. Beyond the low wall that defines the garden, the field is untrammeled, dazzling white. And the ocean now dark bright blue, sequined by the sun in a great swath to the south toward the islands.

  Why is blue the color? Does any other excite in the same way? Blue flowers—gentians in an Alpine meadow, delphinium in the summer garden, forget-me-nots, bachelor’s buttons among the annuals—always seem the most fabulous, the most precious. And I’m afraid I have always been drawn to blue-eyed people! Lapis lazuli; the much paler marvelous blues used by Fra Angelico (“Fra Angelico blue,” I have heard it called by my mother); the very blue shadows on snow; bluebirds. I thought of this as I drove across the causeway when I saw the kingfisher, his flash of blue, and rejoiced to see blue water after the gray days.

  I am struggling still with the portrait of Louise. Sometimes I think it is just plain no good. But how touched and charmed I was when one of her blue slips of paper slid out from the poems, and proved to be a list of all the flowers in one of “May’s bouquets”!

  Monday, February 17th

  THE COLD has let up in the last twenty-four hours. Amazing how the release makes itself felt as tiredness at first. The animals want to be outdoors all the time, now that it is 32° instead of 22°, or 10°, or zero, as it was all last week. The cat scoots up trees, and races around, waving her tail. The dog by comparison seems a little subdued like me and is snoozing on the doorsill. It didn’t rain enough yesterday to wash away the snow, I am happy to note. The sea is ruffled in a massive way, no whitecaps; it looks as impenetrable and shining as bronze. Valentine freesias and yellow roses on my desk are still exquisite. At this season freesia is the flower, with its delicious scent and airy delicate trumpets.

  On Saturday, February 15th, I was looking at the six o’clock news when Julian Huxley’s face appeared on the screen. Of course, I knew what that meant. He died at home, I hope peacefully. Although I have prayed that he might slip away, death when it comes is always a shock to the survivors. I burst into tears. And Tamas, asleep in the front hall, immediately got up and came, very concerned, to lick my tears.

  All night I tossed about and couldn’t sleep for the memories and images of Julian and Juliette that rose up. When I was working on my first novel they lent me their apartment at Whipsnade (the zoo outside London). In the daytime there were lots of people about (the apartment was over a very good restaurant), but at night there was total silence except for the animal sounds … the peacock’s scream, the distant roar of a lion or tiger, the wolves howling in the wolf wood. My days were heavenly, workful, but whenever I needed a break I had the whole zoo to explore. The wallabies were free to roam, gentle creatures, with occasionally a baby looking out of its mother’s pocket. I took a sketchbook around and sometimes spent an hour drawing a bear or some other creature. I have no talent, but drawing something makes one really look at it, and that was the point for me—a meditation on “bear.”

  The tensions are beginning to build up … lectures ahead, promises made … my blessed concentrated peace is almost at an end till the autumn comes again. This afternoon a minister is coming t
o see me from some distance away. I do hope he has not come to “convert” me. He wrote a friend to ask whether I believed in God and this visitation appears to be the result of a letter I wrote her to answer his question. Why is it that religious people so often badger and needle one? In my experience people who assert their religion are so very rarely religious in their actions. The saints I have known, Sister Maria Stella, the contemplative, Sister Mary David, who is doing such wonderful work among the very poor Blacks near Beaufort, never talk about religion and, above all, never put emotional pressure on others.

  Tuesday, February 18th

  A LUGUBRIOUS DAY, warm, raining hard—the road out will be a morass. I did Mr. Palmer an injustice. He turned out to be a liberal, warm, kind man. He came really to tell me how delighted he had been to discover my work last summer. He was born in Maine, his father in the “wood business.” And I loved his talk about this father, now retired, who brought himself a house on two acres near Augusta, “one acre of lawn in front and one acre of garden in the back.” Strange how a phrase like that can set one dreaming! I enjoyed the hour and a half very much. I have been feeling tired and dull, having chewed my own fat for maybe a little too long lately. One thing that Mr. Palmer said that touched me was that people who do not read the Bible would miss a great deal in reading my work. I suppose there are a good many unconscious references and all this goes back to the Shady Hill School. Children who do not learn psalms by heart and are not steeped in the Bible are, in several ways, illiterate.