The House by the Sea Read online

  What is precious, the thread of gold through the whole portrait, is that our relationship remained so warm and loving through all that time. Perhaps that was possible because I came and went and was with her nearly every year, except during the war, for a few weeks, but only as a guest. The wear and tear of life did not touch us.

  I have to note (as a warning to myself?) that yesterday while I was sitting here writing a letter I suddenly felt very queer, nauseated, then a cold sweat. Is that what a heart attack feels like? I was frightened and went down and drank a teaspoon of brandy. The greatest achievement of the day was shortening a pair of pants! I sew so rarely and so clumsily that it makes me laugh.

  Monday, June 16th

  “I OBSERVE others, but I experience myself,” Florida Scott-Maxwell.

  Tuesday, June 17th

  MY THROAT is again very sore. Yesterday I called Dr. Cummings in Boston to try to get help fast, but he is at a meeting for three days. Raymond came yesterday, looking somber, and told me he had already spoken to Mary-Leigh and that he could no longer cut the grass. We have known for some time that he simply was not doing the work, and I’m sure this is the right decision for him. It is a nightmare to be always a little behind, to be badgered by everyone to get this or that done, and not have the strength—and the rainy spring is no help.

  My hope is that he will still help me with the hedge clipping and gardening. He is a really expert gardener and when I first came here that seemed almost incredible luck. He has taught me a great deal in these two years, especially about clipping. I have learned by watching him, how thorough he is, what deep holes he digs when he plants a rosebush, for instance. I’m afraid it will be expensive to get the grass cut, but I can’t do it myself, or I would find time to do nothing else.

  Anyway, despite all, I did a good piece of work yesterday on the portrait of Céline and feel much better about it. In looking up something I thought I could use in Florida Scott-Maxwell I came on this marvelous passage about mothers and children that applies equally to Céline and Rosalind (The Measure of My Days, pp. 16,17):

  “A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe. It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.

  “No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer.”

  Tuesday, June 24th

  A HEAT WAVE … dismal, because everything in the garden is burning up just as it was at its most glorious. The peonies explode in the heat, their petals turned backward. The clematis along the fence has never been so beautiful, starry hosts, white, purple, a strange pale pink; one is almost true blue, one very dark purple, almost black. There have been great tall iris, one a deep blue, one pink with purple falls, just right beside pink peonies and a huge pink lupine. I’m amazed, considering how cold May was, that everything is flourishing.

  I rather like heat; it forces a kind of holiday. Even with the fan going on my desk my fingers stick to the keys. Yesterday I just lay around. At four when a light breeze stirred the stifling air, I did go out for a big weed in the annual garden. I think I’ll have wonderful flowers this year. I’m trying some new kinds, an annual lupine, scabiosa, among them. Of course, they are only an inch high now, encroached upon by seas of grass and weeds. June is the month when everything happens—guests and garden.

  Last week Polly Starr came here overnight. She was so moved by the landscape, the dreamlike path through the field, curving a little (why is it so like a fairy tale, a child’s dream?) that she went out on the porch outside her bedroom and sketched immediately after she arrived! She is an exceedingly appreciative guest. Yet after she left I simply collapsed. Next day a recurrence of the old virus.

  This morning I looked out the stairwell window and saw a wood phoebe and his mate on the telephone wire. What an event!

  Wednesday, June 25th

  WHAT A TANGLE I’m in of flowers and people and letters and life in general! How shall I ever get sorted out and back to work again? But I was vastly cheered by Elizabeth McGreal who said when she was here the other day with Nicky, Tamas’ sister, that she did not try to work in the summer. I do try because writing is the thread of continuity under the tumultuous days.

  The cool came in the night. Tamas, after a supine day yesterday, panting in his nest under the hedge, was so full of beans he insisted on going out at five when Bramble came in. I should have gotten up then and watered the garden, but went back to sleep. Now I have two hoses going in different places, and will move them when I go for the mail. I picked off dead heads of peonies and lupine, and redid the bunches in the house. The roses are just beginning.

  I got up here to my desk at nine and it is now half past ten. I have written a blurb for a rather charming first novel Eric sent me, Harriet Hahn’s The Plantain Season. She does what has seemed to me nearly impossible—write convincingly and touchingly as well as humorously about a young woman’s first sexual experiences.

  Yesterday I achieved nothing except to order iris and tulips—the start of the fall orders. It is a perfect hot-weather occupation, as I get so excited I forget everything and am in bliss. Mary Tozer is here at Dockside and came for a drink before we had dinner over there, and I’ll see her again tonight. A friend who stays near by, but not here, is a good friend indeed! With any guest in the house I cannot feel myself and am constantly on the qui vive. I hope I am thoughtful about people’s needs and comfort, but it is often at the price of composure, and in a short time I begin to feel irritable, as if all my energy were drained out in nonproductive channels. What guests actually want of me is just the real person, not the cook, chauffeur, provider of drinks, and so on.

  Polly seemed quite surprised that I have so little time for work, even at best, and have to battle for it every day. She told me that Molly Howe entertains a lot and still gets a lot of work done and my spirits sank, until she let fall that Molly now has (in Ireland) a cook, chauffeur, and gardener! I lead a multiple life because I like it and I wouldn’t want a cook even if I could afford one. But in summer it means I am on my feet for five or six hours a day because of the garden and maintaining everything—laundry has to be done, food brought in, the everlasting letters answered. I run all day except when I have a long rest in the afternoon. That quiets me down.

  I have learned in these last years to forget the desk and everything on it as soon as I leave this room. The key to being centered seems to be for me to do each thing with absolute concentration, to garden as though that were the essential, then to write in the same way, to meet my friends, perfectly open to what they bring. And most of the time that is how it is.

  Lately I have ended the day with half an hour on the terrace, when the light is beautiful, and the birds fly past, one at a time, always from north to south—robins, the catbird, kingbirds, finches. Why do they all take the same route in the evening? I lie there tremendously awake, and watch it all, and it is heaven.

  Monday, June 30th

  IT IS COOL and windy after an indecisive muggy day yesterday with clouds blowing up; so a storm seemed certain. But it was blown out to sea before a drop of rain fell. Eleanor Blair was here over Friday night and luckily we had splendid clear warm weather. I enjoyed her visit very much. She is eighty-one, or will be in August, and still gardens furiously, drives her car, even washes the sheets at her little house in Wellesley, and cooks for friends! She is an exemplar
for me of how a life can be realized to its utmost without a consuming talent. She has been a teacher, the head of a school, then worked for years at Ginn and Company as a copy editor, and when she was seventy began to take photography seriously (years before, she had partially earned her way through Wellesley taking photographs of her classmates). When she was eighty, she published a book about Wellesley, photographs and text, all her own work. How many people have ever accomplished that at eighty? I felt proud to call her my friend. It was a tonic to see her also because so many of my friends are losing ground mentally, so many that my dream of a happy and fruitful old age seemed an illusion. But here is proof that it need not be so. In many ways Eleanor is more herself than she has ever been.

  This afternoon Morgan Mead, that dear boy, is coming for a talk. And tomorrow Judy for a week.

  Saturday, July 5th

  MARVELOUS DAYS … cool, blue water, the roses out in profusion, the clematis still a glory. But we need rain badly, so I spend an unholy amount of time and energy hauling the hoses around. Judy has been here for five days now, and is a good deal more disoriented; so each day is a multiple lesson for me in handling frustration. It is the repeated little things that get on my nerves … she goes to bed in her underwear unless I am there to be sure she really undresses; in the morning she is very bewildered trying to dress and, if I put out clothes for her, never puts them on, but wanders around digging out something else, packs her suitcase over and over again. The little walks down to the sea with Tamas cannot be allowed any longer, as she has been wandering up onto the Firths’ porch and even to the back door early one morning just as they were letting their huge police dog out. This could be dangerous, although Jud, the big black dog, is gentle and obedient. But, after all, if Tamas is right there practically in his house, it would not be surprising if Jud bit him.

  I had hoped we would have a happy time picking the first peas yesterday … I never managed to have peas exactly for the Fourth in Nelson, so it was a triumph. But Judy didn’t really enjoy it (though she did shell them). Then, while I struggled with masses of crabgrass between the rows of annuals, I suggested she pull out a few easy weeds among the lettuce. When I looked up, I realized she was pulling out the lettuce instead of the weeds! And this had come at the end of so many other small crazy fugues that I cried bitterly. While I was having a bath before getting our supper (salmon and fresh peas), Judy disappeared again. But finally we did have a good half hour watching the evening birds fly over, sitting out on the terrace, and she was delighted by the sailboats gliding up and down in the distance.

  The most difficult thing for me, of course, is that she is here with me but we no longer can share anything. I try to tell her what I am thinking about, but all the reactions now are superficial, glib sentences like, “How interesting!” when she is clearly not paying the slightest attention. After a few days I begin to feel desperately lonely.

  Tuesday, July 8th

  DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY is what it feels like here … I discovered yesterday that Tamas had been bitten about the tail—a deep bite hidden by the thick fur. That means, I guess, that I shall have to stay with Judy every moment when she next conies. It must have happened while she was walking him, as he never leaves the place unless he is off on a walk with a human being. The Firths assure me that the fracas on Sunday (when Judy went down there again despite her promise not to) was not a dogfight, since Jud simply barked from the porch. There was blood on my sheet this morning where Tamas had lain. The vet said the wound was infected, so I had to leave him there and came home absolutely empty and exhausted. I had so counted on this morning to get back to my own center, do some work. But whatever juice there was in the motor has been used up.

  Tamas never comes up here to my study on the third floor, but it’s amazing how aware I am that he is not here.

  A hot muggy gray day.

  One of the marvelous Japanese iris, a huge white one, has opened, and late yesterday afternoon, after taking Judy back to her nursing home and driving on to Cambridge to get some clothes, I made an all-white bunch with some spirea, two white foxgloves, a single late peony, and the noble iris. It is lovely against the smoky gray wall of the porch.

  The catalpas are in flower. There is none on this place, but on a drive with Judy we saw several huge ones, glorious with their large clearly defined leaves and flat white flowers. I think it is one of my favorite trees … there was one in the playground at Shady Hill School when I was a child.

  Also, yesterday afternoon I went out in a passion and fury of being alone at last and extricated rows of onions, beets, and lettuce from such a torture of huge thick weeds, crabgrass, and others that the vegetables had become invisible. If we can have a good rain, and one is expected today or tomorrow, they will revive. I have neglected the vegetables while I tried to get the annuals deweeded and mulched. Vegetables can be purchased, but not the flowers, and they are far more precious to me.

  Friday, July 11th

  VERY DREARY muggy weather, and Tamas is still at the vet’s. It is dismal without him; even self-centered Bramble minds and miaows at me as if to say, “Where has my dog gone?”

  I feel trapped by all the interruptions which have kept me from doing any work all this week. Yesterday I spent an hour rummaging about in the files to try to find a long poem I wrote when I was at Black Mountain College in 1940! By some miracle I did find it, and was interested to see how much of what I felt then about freedom and discipline is still much in my mind, about education, and about democracy itself. So, after all, the request in a letter from a woman who is writing a book on Black Mountain turned out to bring an unexpected benefit, and I am glad I made the effort to hunt the poem out.

  A Letter to the Students of Black Mountain College, written in homage and in faith

  At the heart of life is the flaw, the imperfection

  Without which there would be no motion and no reason

  To continue. At the heart of life is the knowledge of death

  Without which there would be no boundaries and no limitation

  And so no reason for existence or for action—and no time.

  At the heart of life there is silence without which sound

  Would have no meaning, nor music, and we should not hear it—

  And this flaw, this knowledge of death, this background

  Of silence are the form within which life is boundless,

  Everlasting, creating, discarding, destroying, always in flux,

  Always changing, choosing, denying, affirming in order to discover

  The purer Form in which the purer Freedom may have its being.

  Observe the fern uncurling like a steel spring,

  The life implacably held there from bursting out of the strain.

  Does the blood in your veins spill out and be wasted? Everywhere

  The search is the same but it is not a search for Freedom

  For perfect freedom is death, but it is always a search for form,

  The form in which to enclose the freedom and make it live.

  And how much more delicate even than a single fern is the life

  Of a community where you are holding individuals balanced

  Against each other and where not one but all must move in

  His secret direction as swiftly as deeply as possible without

  Interruption, and still, as we are all moving inwardly each

  In his own direction, the community too must be bounded

  And within it is the flaw which keeps it in flux and growing

  And the time-space which encloses it, and the silences

  Without which it could not exist. And you are always seeking

  The exquisite perfect balance between the individual and the whole

  Community and you are asking this question every day which is

  The question of life, the question of all creation and form,

  The question of government and you are bending your wills toward it.

  Now you are buildi
ng a place to enclose your life and your work.

  With your hands you are cutting the rocks, carefully weighing

  And choosing the solitary, the only, the exact one which will fit

  The place for which it is needed, and patiently carefully

  You are judging what weight you must put behind the hammer

  (Neither too much nor too little) to give it the desired form.

  I have seen the perfect rhythm and stability of your working

  Together, one mixing the mortar, one casting the stones with a

  Beautiful slow rhythm into the hands of another and given by him

  Into the hands which will finally, having made a soft bed

  Of cement, lay it firmly there, and upon it another and another,

  Given from earth to truck and from truck to hand and from hand

  To wall where it will stand, enclosing your life and your work,

  Keeping the cold from you and the winds and the rain. This you are

  Building and because it is work of the hands and of the heart

  Because it is well-defined and it is necessary and visible

  The form in which the work shall be done is easy and natural

  And there are no questions. If someone should suddenly drop

  The stone, if someone should break the rhythm, if someone should

  In a moment of passion wrench the planted rock from the wall—

  But no one could do this, you answer. No one could willfully destroy

  What we have built together with so much strain of backs and