The House by the Sea Read online

  The other day a letter came from an unknown man who was moved to write to me about my father, after reading the poems about him in my Collected Poems. He says, “I took one course under George Sarton as an undergraduate at Harvard. He was for me a model of what a scholar should be and what I wanted to be. Although he was fantastically learned, he took such joy in his study that it was never labored or pedantic, but rather a means of grace. He was utterly modest and self-effacing: I think he never got over his surprise that so many students wanted to hear him speak on the history of science. And he was kind: when I was in military service in India in 1944 he twice wrote to me, something no other professor did.”

  The writer apologized for writing fifteen years after my father’s death, but this letter, keeping a memory green, is far more precious now than it would have been fifteen years ago. So for the second time this year people have come to me to speak of one or the other of my parents with vivid memories they wanted to share.

  Monday, February 24th

  A LOVELY SPRING rain slanting down … it seems that we had our whole winter in the first two weeks of February, and I feel a little deprived! A huge flock of evening grosbeaks is around now—they are winter residents but did not discover my feeders till a week ago. I found gentle Tamas happily tearing apart the bloody corpse of a gray squirrel which Bramble must have caught, as I had seen her with it under a bush. I forget how sharp and cruel their teeth are when it comes to their own natural life, they who are so gentle with me.

  I agreed last summer to be an adviser to two women working for PhD’s in Union Graduate School. This is a plan whereby students can work wherever they are, meeting their advisers once a year for a week’s discussion. Norma is working on personal journals and keeping one as she goes along. Karen is trying to get at a deeper analysis of women through myth. (She began with Medusa and Athene.) Every now and then, without warning, their work in progress arrives. I spent two days last week on Norma’s. It has led me to think a good deal more than I ever have about what keeping a journal is like and what it demands of the writer. I do not believe that keeping a journal is for the young. There is always the danger of bending over oneself like Narcissus and drowning in self-indulgence. If a journal is to have any value either for the writer or any potential reader, the writer must be able to be objective about what he experiences on the pulse. For the whole point of a journal is this seizing events on the wing. Yet the substance will come not from narration but from the examination of experience, and an attempt, at least, to reduce it to essence. Secondly—and this is curious—what delights the reader in a journal is often minute particulars. Very few young people observe anything except themselves very closely. Then the context—by that I mean all that one brings to an experience of reading and thinking and feeling—is apt to be thin for the young. And, to get to the nub, I guess what I am suggesting is that rarely is there enough of a self there.

  Norma wants to, and has already written a lot, on what she calls “Journal in Retrospect” to accompany her daily journal. (Incidentally I don’t believe one can write every day) and we are having a hassle over defining the terms. I feel there is a huge difference between autobiography (which her “Journal in Retrospect” is) and the journal. Autobiography is the story of a life or a childhood written, summoned back, long after its events took place. Autobiography is “what I remember,” whereas a journal has to do with “what I am now, at this instant.” I hope Norma can find a way to intertwine the two. Often a present experience brings back something out of the past which is suddenly seen in a new light. That, I think, works.

  Besides all this, last week also brought pages and pages of the bibliography of my work that Lenora Blouin has been working on for over a year. I must check it and am slowly unwrapping little magazines and anthologies that have not been unpacked since I moved. It is rather amusing to do all this, but not when I am quite as harried by other things as I am now.

  My first lecture is on Thursday at the University of New Hampshire. They want discussion afterward on what it is like to be a woman poet. So off we go again! I must put everything together this morning.

  Wednesday, February 26th

  THIS SPRING weather makes one dream … today great clouds shot through with light; so, just now, the ocean was dark with a long shining band halfway to the horizon.

  The Julian Huxley I knew and loved is beginning to emerge again after the shock of seeing him, old and crotchety, last October. Yesterday I had a letter from a Swedish friend who remembered us one summer before 1940 at Grundlsee in Austria: “One of the most vivid pictures I have is when, standing in a group of guests in front of the verandah where we ate, I saw you and Julian Huxley descending through the pine forest. You were both tall, slender, dark, beautiful, and radiating vigour and harmony—an impression I have never forgotten.” I read this with shame, startled into memory of the good times we shared, how time had silted them over!

  Tuesday, March 4th

  ROSALIND GREENE is dead. Her grandson called me at ten last night to say that that long life (she was well into her nineties) has come to an end. There have been too many deaths lately and I feel the wind at my back as, one after another, my parents’ generation leaves the earth.

  “They are all gone into the world of light,

  And I alone sit lingering here …”

  It’s not that I want to die myself, Heaven knows, but the basic pattern of a life changes radically when there is no one left, for instance, who remembers one as a child. Each such death is an earthquake that buries a little more of the past forever.

  Like Céline, Rosalind is bound into my childhood. Those summers at River Houslin on the salt marshes of Rowley! What happy memories! Chasing Jeannie, the goat, who so often escaped to the marsh; swimming in deep nooks when the tide was high; sliding down haystacks (forbidden!); being taught to ride on his polo ponies by Uncle Frank Frothingham; inventing horrible practical jokes to tease the older generation, Joy and Francesca (a few years older than Katrine and I)—I was enchanted by the Greene atmosphere, enchanted to be part of the family on holiday, to be taken in to the drama in which they lived, even enchanted by Rosalind’s coming each night to say a prayer with each child, although she was clearly “acting a part.” After all, she had dreamed of being an actress, and might well have been a great one if her brother had not stood squarely in her path and told her he would shoot her if she ever set foot on a stage as a professional! She obeyed in fact, but in truth she acted her whole life out as though she were on a stage playing a heroic part.

  Rosalind was a great beauty, one of the few women I have ever seen whom I would call that, and though her four daughters were all beauties, none had her glamour … the carriage of a queen and sapphire blue eyes.

  As I think of her, in all her complexity and fascination, I cannot help thinking of her in literary terms—what a heroine she would have been for Henry James! He would have unraveled the figure in the tapestry with absorbed interest. Because I knew her as a child and all through my life, because I admired and loved her, it is not easy for me to unravel it. But one thread is clearly visible. She lived consciously by the device of noblesse oblige, by the aristocratic ethos. She never complained about physical disabilities, even when crippled by arthritis in her old age; she lived frugally and gave extravagantly; she was an exhilarating friend to people of many backgrounds, men and women.

  All through her life Rosalind wrote poems. She might have been a good poet had she taken herself seriously enough, been willing to take the risk of criticism. But I observed that for her children, also, too high a standard of taste ate away a stirring ambition like acid on an etching plate. One was not permitted to be clumsy or to fail … and an artist has to face awkwardness and failure in the very process of making his talent grow. Every one of the girls was brilliant. Katrine might have been a really good painter. But all were short-circuited by their mother’s standards, too high, even ruthless toward beginning efforts. Rosalind was in many ways a te
rrifying mother. What kind of mother is it who expects a dinner party to be given in her honor when on a brief visit to her daughter? And expects to be the prima donna?

  Friday, March 7th

  WHENEVER I go “inland,” as I did yesterday to Cambridge for Rosalind’s funeral, I am aware of the ice-locked ponds and lakes and rivers, and what a joy it is to live all winter now by “open water.” Inland the ponds are all white-gray, while here I look out on the brilliant blue of the ocean against the sad prespring browns and grays. It is a constant lift for the eyes.

  The funeral was in Christ Church in Cambridge, immaculate, austere, seventeenth-century church. I got there early, on purpose, moved at once to tears by the blue iris and anemones which seemed to express perfectly the flame, the blue flame of Rosalind herself. In the front pew at first there were only Joy, Rosalind’s only remaining daughter, and little Francesca in pigtails, one of Rosalind’s great-grandchildren. I had minded terribly that anyone should be called Francesca when this child was born, after her grandmother Francesca’s death, Francesca whom I loved so much and who was so beautiful! But now that so many of that family are dead, I felt suddenly the sweetness of something carried on into life through the generations, and I was glad for little Francesca, whispering and smiling, and unaware of all the tragic deaths we had come to mourn.

  Later at the gathering at 10 Longfellow Park, Joy and I talked for a few moments, as we always have, in perfect communion. For thirty years or more I had talked with the daughters, trying to fathom the mystery of their mother. Katrine, so often fierce in her rejection, determined at the end to die her own death in her own way, not allowing Rosalind to “take over,” as she had Francesca during her long last illness. Rosalind had not been a good mother, but she had been a wonderful grandmother and when I uttered something of this, Joy answered, “Yes, the grandchildren got the glow; we were burned.”

  So much erupted in me at these words that I wanted to get away at once to think them over. “For me, Rosalind was a hero,” I had heard a young man say just a few moments before.

  Sunday, March 16th

  I HAVE SOME sort of low-grade infection and finally went to see Dr. Rosenfeld on Friday … so now I am stuffed with antibiotics and am a large heavy bag of resistance to any effort whatsoever. Giving up has it rewards—yesterday I lay around all day, sometimes on my bed upstairs, sometimes on the chaise longue on the porch, looking at the flowers. I enjoyed the lovely rooms in which I live, the light, the spaciousness, and read a little in Francis Huxley’s book on The Way of the Sacred which came in the mail yesterday. It is full of taut, dense definitions which one can ponder for a few minutes before proceeding.

  Two days ago the purple finches came back … lovely to lie still and watch the wings coming and going from the feeders. Masses of evening grosbeaks have been here for the past months; now the goldfinches and purple finches are together—such a display of color! After the northeaster that blew in on Friday, bringing a little snow, the mourning dove appeared.

  I did manage to walk Tamas yesterday, our feet the first on the new snow except for one set of tires. We take the same walk every day, about a mile on the dirt roads that circle the big swamp at the back. The road goes through a variety of woodsy scenes, first a grove of hemlock and birches, the birches lovely against the bright blue winter skies. After a while we come to an open field, rising slightly to a huge white pine that defines the scene. What a pleasure to come to these open spaces from the deep woods! Then our road curves away around the swamp and we walk through a tunnel of beeches, and finally turn right at the gate to the property, having come full circle.

  Bramble almost always comes with us, staying about twenty paces behind, but sometimes dashing up, her tail waving, to wind around my legs, or sit up like a little black bear to be stroked. Tamas is much too busy on his multiple scents and errands to pay attention to Bramble, but she often makes a fat tail and rushes past him, inviting a chase.

  This daily expedition is an important part of my life here. It airs my head and clears away the tensions of the morning’s work.

  (Except for two entries from March 16th to May 27th there are blank pages because I was too ill to keep the journal going, and just managed to meet lecture and teaching obligations that included two weeks at Ohio Wesleyan as Carpenter lecturer, and the commencement address at Clark University … that I gave in a whisper!)

  Monday, May 5th

  DARK, cold gray with a high wind … will the spring ever come? How I long for one of those still warm days where you can feel the leaves opening in the sun and the roots stirring below! It’s infernal to have to wait so long this year! The only thing that grows is the grass. It needs cutting already. I suppose it is just as well, because I have no time to garden till after May 11th and the commencement address at Clark is over, the last ordeal after tomorrow, when I speak at New England College.

  But yesterday was a memorable postbirthday celebration, for Dorothy Wallace drove Katharine Taylor here for lunch. K.T. (former head of the Shady Hill School) is eighty-six, a frighteningly thin skeleton, walking gingerly with a cane, but the spirit flaming alive, all her wits as keen as ever, and her wonderful genius for being absolutely with whomever she is with, of all and any age, untouched by time. It was a feast of joyful reunion, for I haven’t seen Dorothy for years or heard her marvelous laughter. They were over an hour late because they got lost and I had waited all that time in the cold at Fosters’, the florists, to show them the way in, and had imagined all sorts of horrors, of course. But all that was forgotten in the warmth and joy of our talk by the fire, drinks, lobsters, and splendid white wine Dorothy had brought. Of course, the sea was gray as usual … I had so hoped it would be blue!

  I again had long dreams about the Huxleys … these recur almost every week since his death. I think about Juliette and long for time to write a real letter. But I am leading an outside-in life until mid-May, with never time to breathe or let down, as far from creation, or even friendship, as it is possible to be without being fatally ill—and, in fact, it feels like an illness to be so far from my inner self.

  The one continuity is Wain’s Samuel Johnson, which I am reading with much pleasure. I went to bed at half past seven last night (it had been a long day), very happy to be in bed with a huge glass jar of pink birthday roses beside me and Tamas and Bramble on the bed. Who could honestly complain about a life such as this? I am the luckiest person in the world.

  I feel this whole year has been a kind of interval. Too many deaths to absorb, and I think I must try to take on fewer lectures from now on. To give even one public lecture makes deep inroads into what I really mean about my life. It is to be “in the world” and that is just what I feel I can refuse to be in …

  Friday, May 23rd

  LAST WEEK I was asked to write a short tribute for Julian Huxley … a memorial service will be held in New York on June 7th. I finally decided to speak of him as a friend and, effort though it was to summon myself, I am glad I made the effort because it forced me to look back on the first years of our friendship, all his kindness to me, and his very great charm. If one digs down into memory, there is often a surprising reversal of feeling—oublieuse mémoire! How much we forget, how much that was fresh and dear gets overlaid! This is what I said:

  “When I went to London as a young woman, just beginning to be published, the Julian Huxleys adopted me and took me into their magic world as a friend. I say “magic” because at that time Julian was Secretary of the Zoological Society and they lived in a large airy apartment over the zoo offices, where it was not unusual to find a lion cub as a fellow guest at tea. Several budgerigars flew about and might light on one’s head, and sometimes Gulliver, the bush baby, moth-soft with huge eyes, sat on the dining room table and sipped dessert from a glass dish no taller than himself.

  “The humans who made part of the society of Huxley friends were as diverse and, to my innocent eyes, as magical as the fauna, comprising such poets as T.S. Eliot, such scien
tists as Solly Zuckerman, painters, the young museum director Kenneth Clark. One never knew whom to expect, nor how the mixture would work, but it was apt to end in gales of laughter and a beautiful sense of intimacy. There was nothing stiff about a party at the Huxleys. Such occasions were both illuminating and fun … how rare!

  “As I evoke that time, nearly forty years ago, I am as overwhelmed as I was then by all that they gave me and by the quality of their friendship, that manifested itself also in practical ways … as when they lent me their apartment at Whipsnade Zoo when I was finishing my first novel. Later on, after the war, I stayed with them in Paris, where Julian was engaged in the strenuous adventure of being the first Secretary General of UNESCO. But the Julian Huxley of the official worlds through which he moved with such distinction was not the Julian I knew, and I can speak only of the latter.

  “I see him most vividly in the country, almost anywhere, and in all seasons, when he might interrupt almost anything to rush off with his bird glasses in pursuit of a bird whose song he had just recognized; I see him leaning against a haystack reading poems aloud and drinking tea from a thermos; I see him lying on the ground holding a collapsible telescope concentrated on a pair of grebes he had just caught doing their mating dance, his ecstasy of delight almost matching theirs. A walk with Julian was an encyclopedic journey among beetles, butterflies, wild flowers and grasses, trees, birds, of course—his precise knowledge was extraordinary and flowed out in impromptu lectures quite unself-consciously. He was not at all pedantic, simply immensely, insatiably curious, like ‘the elephant’s child.’ But his curiosity as a scientist was matched by the sensitivity of a poet’s response to nature and it was these two in combination that made him unique. I think the winning of the Newdigate prize for poetry when he was at Oxford pleased him as much as any honor he ever received.