The House by the Sea Page 7

  “Outdoors he occasionally relaxed; the compulsive energy that drove him, sometimes too fast, in too many directions, seemed to compose itself. Then I caught glimpses of the philosopher who could absorb tons of specific information, sort it out, and synthesize the minute particulars into theory and vision. Perhaps he was driven and drove himself so hard because taking the long view of evolution meant that he was acutely aware of his own time as a time of emergency when man, who had come so far, so bravely, might risk annihilation. The long view, in fact, commanded haste, commanded that constant warnings be uttered, that he himself not rest while such major human problems as population growth remained unsolved.

  “Whatever the reason, he did drive himself unmercifully. The immense verve, the childlike humor (he found almost any joke irresistible and had a vast repertoire to draw on), the quick response to a person or a landscape or an idea, were counterpointed by periods of self-doubt and near despair. Without Juliette at his side, her patience and wisdom, would he have survived? With her at his side the phoenix was able to rise again from more than one little death.

  “What can one say of such a complex genius in a few minutes? The first word that springs to my mind is ‘generosity.’ When we met, I was twenty-five and Julian was fifty, but he treated me as an equal—what could be more generous than that? And what I knew in my life touched thousands of others in a thousand ways. Let me close with four lines by Julian Huxley, a poem he titled ‘The Old Home’:

  Like sudden blossom on the naked trees

  Memories shoot; the place is all alive

  With questing thoughts that like Spring-quickened bees

  Find and bear back remembrance to my hive.”

  Tuesday, May 27th

  SPRING is at its apogee now with the flowering cherries and apple out in the garden and tulips … glorious! And I’m happy that Helen Milbank came for lunch … she has not seen me here before. And I think she really did understand why I don’t miss Nelson. For me it was an enormous pleasure, and I realized after she left how starved I am for this kind of conversation, conversation rich in knowledge and wisdom, held in a large frame of reference, about things that really matter.

  At last I have the name of a throat and nose man in Boston and an appointment for the day after tomorrow. I am sick and tired of never feeling well and of having to force myself to do the ordinary things … the extraordinary things, such as sowing the annuals, have required beating myself. It has been a joyless spring, I must say. Not helped by the fact that Raymond has too much on his hands and simply has not done the essential. When Helen Milbank was here, the lovely curving path down to the sea that gives the whole place a special charm had not even been cut. Now that the fruit trees are in flower, it is dismal to look out at the formal part of the lawn and see it covered with dandelions gone to seed, the grass five inches tall. The character of the place is its mixture of formal beauty and natural beauty, and I really minded when that special quality was not there. But yesterday Raymond did at last cut the lawn and oh, the pleasure it is to look out at it now, like a piece of music that had been garbled and is again singing clear!

  Monday, June 2nd

  A NEW BEGINNING, for at last I feel better. I knew it two days ago when I gardened with enjoyment for the first time this spring. Until now the garden has seemed a kind of dragon lying in wait each afternoon, a dragon I had to battle with. But it was a pleasure to plant six little tomato plants and two boxes of pansies and one of pale blue lobelia for a shady border.

  Today is a perfect June day, hazy pale blue sea, rich green of field, and the leaves fresh and new. I have done a little work, a little revising on the Bogan piece and some thinking about the whole book as I prepare to plunge into work again after two months, nearly three, of public performances and general bother and trepidation. How marvelous it was to forget time for an hour!

  I am not better because of the specialist … he was unimpressed by three months of sore throat and thinks it is Actifet, prescribed by the doctor here, that has been responsible for such lassitude. His chief advice was to drink eight glasses of water a day. I am doing that faithfully.

  Am a bit tired this morning, because at eleven or so last night Bramble mewed at the window and I let her in, not realizing that she was carrying a small creature in her mouth. She proceeded to play with it, purring very loudly all the time and making the special miaow cats do for their kittens. I lay there in a sweat of horror, hoping the thumping and skittering around would soon be over. But apparently she had not harmed the creature—and she went off to lie down. What do do? I finally got up and put Bramble out, closing the doors into the hall; then I opened the screen door to the porch, hoping the creature would find its way out. (Luckily there were no mosquitoes around in the rain.) Every half hour I turned on the light. Finally I saw by Tamas’ pricked ears that the creature was still there; following his direction, I looked to the right and there it was—incredibly soft, plushy, with large dark eyes, hanging on the lattice back of a straight chair. I think it was a flying squirrel, but I’m still not sure. I got up, took the fireplace broom and gently prodded it, hoping to direct it toward the door. Instead, it flew under my bed, climbed up into the revolving bookcase beside the bed, and lay there on top of the books in a tiny cranny of space. More waiting. Then I got an empty shoe box and tried to prod it gently into that, which succeeded, except that it leapt out before I could get to the door. At long last at two A.M. I saw it scuttle safely out. Whew!

  Tamas behaved like a perfect gentleman, as he sensed that I was anxious and wanted to protect the creature. Normally he would have jumped off the bed and barked. He is really an angel.

  Saturday, June 7th

  EVERY NOW AND THEN I stop to think about this strange year when I have been dealing almost entirely with the past because of so many deaths on the one hand and on the other the book of portraits I am now working at. Not by accident in this context I spend a half hour every morning after my breakfast in bed, reading piles of Rosalind Greene’s poems and short prose pieces (she had asked me to be her literary executor sometime ago—how could I refuse?)

  I think of her generosity toward me in the theatre days, how she fought for us when we rented a house in Dublin and the summer residents looked askance at what appeared to them a group of hippies (though that was long before the word “hippie” had come into circulation). What a supportive friend she has always been!

  I knew it would be painful to go over hundreds of her poems, and it is. She was talented but she did not learn anything over the years. The poetry is too abstract and generalized. She never discovered the power of a strong metaphor to lead her to the truth. So what remains is a little theatrical and a little self-indulgent and makes me very sad and at the same time cluttered up. Poetry is revolting unless it is good poetry. “I too dislike it,” as Marianne Moore said. But I am hoping to winnow out perhaps fifty that could be privately printed for the grandchildren.

  At the same time what is constantly in my heart is that these poems do not do Rosalind justice. She was grand and complex, courageous, passionate … everything except self-aware … and the poems are dim beside her light as a person. What would they mean to someone who had not known her sapphire eyes, the lift of her chin, her theatrical Bostonian way of speaking, the “Brahmin” personified, though she came from Philadelphia?

  While I am doing this, I am also beginning the portrait of Céline Limbosch, and have been startled to realize how alike these two great women were, though at first glance so different. Céline too had illusions about her powers as a writer and found comfort in her very old age in writing extremely bad poetry. Perhaps they were both actors, unaware that they were playing a role, and in each case this characteristic destroyed any natural relationship with their daughters. I can hear the violence with which sometimes these daughters spoke of their mothers—actual hatred. Céline was much more obviously dominating and possessive, but each as a mother marked her children with a deep and deeply resented mark.
Each had an ingrained sense of superiority—Rosalind’s the classic noblesse oblige and Céline’s a kind of moral superiority as well as intellectual pretentiousness. I see all this clearly; yet I loved both these women, and because I was not a child of either, our relationships were truly nourishing and life-giving. In very different households they gave me, each of them, family life as a child when this was what I craved—to be part of a real “family.”

  Because I am thinking so much about the past these days I have come to see that the past is always changing, is never static, never “placed” forever like a book on a shelf. As we grow and change, we understand things and the people who have influenced us in new ways.

  Only very recently have I come to see and to accept that Louise Bogan really never believed in my work as poet or as novelist. I couldn’t face this even a few years ago, and never did while I knew her, for I always hoped for the saving word then. Now I can accept it, partly because I have a firmer hold on my work and far more self-assurance than I did. And perhaps it was harder for Louise to accept or praise me than it is for me now to accept that she could not.

  Also, we understand more about old age and about the fears and problems of the aging artist or person than we did when they were alive—we stand in their shoes. For example, it never occurred to me for an instant that when over sixty I might cease to write poems. I never imagined that river could go dry—yet it has.

  Today, gentle roar of the sea after a big storm yesterday … it is pale blue, with points sparkling here and there, over the green field, as green as a field in a dream.

  I had an adventure yesterday at the height of the storm, for when I started the car up after doing the weekly shopping in Kittery, the windshield wipers did not work, and I drove the whole way home, about fifteen miles along a very winding road, peering through a sort of waterfall. It was interesting to discover that this can be done.

  I have had a wild hope that Juliette Huxley, who is in New York for a memorial service for Julian, might come here for a few days. At once the beauties of this place became vivid to me. I walked around in love with the house, the view, the formal garden, and the delightful rooms, imagining how Juliette would walk around and be happy she had decided to come. But she telephoned to say it was impossible. Then I realized how very very rarely I can share what I have here with anyone whom I can wait for with that joyous expectation that makes life thrilling again.

  But I am finding real joy in gardening, now that I am well. I put in early cabbages and twenty-four miniature glads just before the storm, and, thank goodness, Raymond came that day and cut the front lawn. It all looks as it should now, almost for the first time this spring.

  Monday, June 9th

  AT LAST the sun! It has been a strange spring, so very cold much of May, and now in June temperature of 55° yesterday after days of dark clouds and rain. It’s good weather for transplanting and weeding, and yesterday I got one big job done—taking out and planting the geraniums and three of the amaryllis for the summer, so the plant window is no longer a disorderly bunch of plants and has some form again. I have really suffered this spring from the disorder outside and in. At the height of the daffodils, which are one of the glories of the place, Raymond had not cut the long grass just over the wall, where there are big clumps, and when the cherry was in flower, the lawn was a disaster area of long grass and dandelion gone to seed. Now the hedges all need clipping. These are his jobs … I have my hands full with the actual flower gardens, the annuals which need weeding dreadfully, and so on.

  The problem is that he is a year younger than I am (our birthdays close together in May) and takes on more work than he can do—especially rototilling over a hundred gardens—and this is at the season when his “regulars” need him most. There is no solution but patience. Nevertheless, clutter makes me feel cross and at sixes and sevens.

  A friend in California sent me a book written by a psychic who apparently is helping her sort out her talents and goals. As is often true, I feel sure that the doctor herself has unique gifts, but she writes very badly and I nearly stopped reading. I’m glad I went on, for there is a chapter of ways in which energy gets dissipated that I found illuminating, especially as regards people she calls “sappers.”

  “The sensitive,” Dr. Shafica Karagulla says, “describes the sappers as having closed-in energy fields. Such individuals may be totally unaware of their energy pull on other people. They simply feel better when they are in the company of more vital people. Any individual who remains in the vicinity of the sapper for long begins to feel desparately exhausted for no reason he can understand. This baffles and bewilders him. Eventually a deep instinct for self-preservation causes the victim of the sapper to feel an irresistible desire to get away. He may attribute this to any one of a number of reasons. By the time this happens he is usually feeling an unreasoning irritation with the sapper.”

  I have experienced this many times in my life, and I’m glad to understand why.

  Thursday, June 12th

  ALL THESE DAYS the woods have been full of surprises as the spring flowers blossom, one by one. My favorite, the strong, geometrical white bunch berry with its five-pointed stars is out now, and of course the lady’s slippers—suddenly I see them, standing among the fallen leaves of autumn or on pine needles, so elegant I catch my breath.

  These nights are full of the summer sounds, tree frogs peeping till late, over the slow pulse of the waves … I am woken up nearly every day about three A.M. by Bramble mewing at the screened window. So I have to get up and open the door onto the deck outside my room, always in fear and trembling, because lately she brings in tiny baby animals she has caught and carries like kittens in her mouth. There was the flying squirrel, and yesterday at six she came with a tiny perfect baby rabbit. It was unharmed.

  What to do? I had slept badly and really was upset and bewildered, but I got up and found a box, set the soft dear creature in it (those perfect tiny ears!), put on rubber boots and a coat over my pajamas, and took the car. After driving a mile I put the rabbit out in a field. Will it be able to fend for itself?

  Yesterday and the day before have been perfect June days, clear, cool, the greens still so alive. But until the iris comes out there is very little to pick in the garden. I stole a little honeysuckle from the edge of the road just to have something to make the porch more festive, as it was Nancy Woodson’s eighteenth birthday and they were all coming for lobster salad and champagne. I enjoyed getting everything ready … and thinking about Nancy and her brother Tommy. It is good to know she is going to be able to do what she really wants to do after just barely graduating from high school. She is not a student, as Tommy is, but she is an artist and she has been accepted at Monserrat. So suddenly everything that must have felt closed against her and impossible to manage opens up.

  They were an hour later than expected (Anne had had an unexpected caller) and it was a marvelous hour for me. The chairs are out on the terrace and for about half an hour I lay on the chaise longue, looking out over the field to a calm blue sea, listening to the birds … a purple finch even came down to drink out of Tamas’ flat water dish on the terrace wall (he stands up to drink out of it; it was supposed to be for the birds, but this is the first time I have seen one come) … watching the tree swallows fly back and forth over the field (they are nesting in one of the birdhouses). Bramble came and curled up on the flagstone a few yards away. Tamas lay at my feet, and the whole atmosphere breathed peace. I basked.

  But thin high clouds began to darken the sky just a little, and a small wind made it suddenly chilly. So I got up and did a lot of small jobs I have had in mind for ages. I sprayed Malathion on two Martha Washington geraniums I put out the other day because they had white fly. I potted some more of the tiny Achimenes bulbs I am experimenting with under lights, and then I did quite a bit of clipping on the terrace.

  Friday, June 13th

  THE WOODSONS and Barbara Barton did finally arrive a little after four, Nancy ravishing
in a wide straw hat, denim skirt, and simple short-sleeved white blouse, her long pale gold hair, the perfect oval of her face, the clear blue eyes, all making her look like a charming Impressionist painting. At last the braces have gone from Tommy’s teeth! He looked a little wan, perhaps because he is working hard for a biology exam—later on he went up to my study to cram for an hour. Anne, Barbara, and I wrapped up in sweaters stayed out on the terrace till nearly seven, sipping scotch and drinking in the peaceful blue sea and green field. Nancy had decided to go in, so I lit the fire in the cozy room for her and she curled up with the Illustrated London News. Tommy upstairs, Nancy downstairs … I enjoyed the idea of the house with children in it, and of our communion as separate people. It felt more intimate than when they were sitting rather stiffly with us on the terrace. Finally we all gobbled up lobster salad, sitting around the fire, and talked a little about how one’s view of people changes with time—I am experiencing this with A World of Light, of course.

  Yesterday and today, dismal downpour all day long and all last night. I had hoped to do hours of peaceful gardening and catch up; instead, I feel dull and sleepy, and have not been able to overcome a reluctance, a holding back, before the portrait of Céline. The difficulty is, as usual, the complexity—and why not? I knew her for sixty years and in that time both she and I changed. The golden world she inhabited for me when I was a small child changed to a silver one in her middle age, when I began to be conscious of her terrible possessiveness and inability to see herself, and finally to a sad leaden one when she had to go on too long doing all the work, when the bitterness against her children grew painful to witness. Thank heavens, the very end, the last years, did have a warm sunset glow about them, after the house was sold and she moved into Brussels.