After the Stroke (19 page)

Nashville, Wednesday, November 26

It was a long drive from Louisville yesterday in mist and at times heavy rain, but it did give Vicki and me a chance for a long good talk, as she had offered to drive me here. That and the whole day on Monday when Vicki took me to see Farmington, an exquisite house designed by Jefferson, where Keats Whiting's mother was born. It was then a plantation, but after the war they had to move to Louisville where Keats's mother married a Northerner, and so Keats was brought up in New England.

I felt the same rush of admiration and love for Jefferson's genius as we walked around as I did fifty years ago when I first saw Monticello and wrote:

This legendary house, this dear enchanted tomb,

Once so supremely lived in, and for life designed,

Will none of moldy death nor give it room,

Charged with the presence of a living mind.
*

Down in the cellar where there were Christmas tree ornaments for sale, I bought five little white birds—for of course the fire last year destroyed all the ornaments Judy and I had collected. It seemed a gesture of hope and of recovering to think of a small tree this year, a tree Huldah is sending.

Vicki then drove me a long way through the gentle fields, punctuated by cedars, the many small farms which here at least appear to be flourishing, to the Mother house of the Sisters of Loretto. She had told me about Jeanne Dueber, one of the sisters, and the remarkable gallery of her sculpture we would find there, but I was not prepared for such original and powerful genius. Jeanne Dueber uses chiefly huge branches and roots of fallen trees—holly, sycamore, oak, even willow—which she scavenges and manages to lift somehow into her truck though she is not five feet tall. They are then seasoned for from two to eight years—there was a big pile on the porch of Rhodes Hall, the gallery. And finally she begins to find the heart of a trunk or root and works with it to create huge pieces, sometimes reminiscent of early works of Henry Moore. Jeanne seems to be wholly innocent of how to get financial help, was surprised when I advised her to ask for recommendations! I am determined to do something about this.

Jeanne Dueber is as compact and pared down as her work, and one senses at once that she knows what she is doing, that it has come out of years of very hard work and little support. At first the Sisters used to come and look at her huge pieces and shake their heads. She felt she had “made it” when at last a Sister looked and nodded.

Going there, finding this sensitive genius struggling and creating such marvels was a great adventure. But as I think over the three rich Louisville days, what seems the greatest blessing was to see Hospice there through the eyes of this remarkable young woman, Vicki Runnion.

She told me of an old woman she had visited for two years and for whom, as she lay dying in the hospital, Vicki sang all night—hymns, folk songs. Whenever she finished a song, the old woman opened her eyes and nodded, so Vicki sang on—until the old woman died in peace, companioned to the end.

*
“Monticello” from
Collected Poems;
Norton, 1974.

Nashville, Thanksgiving Day, November 27

A thankful day. I think over all the peak experiences of this autumn, starting with the spirit-nourishing days with the Carmelites. I think of being with Lou and Rene in their all-welcoming house in Albuquerque and Amelie Starkey from Denver coming for supper there before my reading. I think of seeing Beryl and Ted in Santa Fe and a chance at last to talk with Agi, of going to Santuario, so alive with memories of Judy and our days together in Santa Fe. I think of the kindness in Louisville, and the adventure of seeing the work of genius, the heavy roots brought alive by Sister Jeanne Dueber, and of the wonderful talks with Vicki Runnion. And now I am thankful for this life-enhancing friendship with Howie and Mary Boorman, this serene house full of Chinese masterpieces in transparent jade, Peking glass—the great Kwannon who presides. Here I am taken care of as I am nowhere else, and it is precious to be allowed to be a childlike self who lays down every burden today, even to writing at length in this journal, and rests in “worlds of balm.”

We go to Huldah's for the feast; she looked beautiful last night at the party here.

Nashville, Sunday, November 30

Social life, however much fun it is, is not what one wants to talk about in a journal where gossip seems inappropriate. I have been coming to Nashville since Huldah's first invitation ten years ago—and in ten years one has to face the inescapable struggle and tragedies that have happened to people—and the elegant life-enhancing way they manage to survive. Here in Nashville, Martha Lindsey, over eighty, gives a luncheon party for a few of us tomorrow, for instance. At eighty shall I have the
joie de vivre
in me to do that? Grace and Carl Zibart have had their life mutilated by the death of their only son, but she gave a lunch for me, inviting John Halperin and Anne Street, where over Cajun oysters and rice we talked literature excitedly and all agreed that Anne Tyler is a genius. In York I see almost no one who reads, so this kind of talk is a real pleasure.

Mary Boorman has had many illnesses in the past two years. But here she is as luminous and life-giving as ever, like the extraordinary white Christmas cactus in her window which is a delicate snow-white cascade of flowers that take one's breath away.

Nashville, Monday, December 1

I am homesick for Pierrot and, really, for my own life again—for solitude. Yet I have loved being in this beautiful room with its peaceful gray-green walls with time to think about Tamas and to remember him as the extraordinarily sensitive being he was.

A young man who came to the book signing in Louisville gave me two books—Thomas Merton on solitude and Teilhard de Chardin's
Letters From a Traveller.
He wanted to share them with me and I have found Merton nourishing bread. For instance:

To love solitude and to seek it does not mean constantly travelling from one geographical possibility to another. A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary. From that moment, solitude is not potential—it is actual.
*

I believe that my mother experienced this, recognized it, early in her marriage—and that I myself learned it from her. It comes up more than once in her letters. Curiously enough, once it has been admitted, one is no longer lonely.

In his preface Merton says:

In actual fact, society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one's own reality and of one's ability to give himself to society—or to refuse that gift.

When men are merely submerged in a mass of personal human beings pushed around by automatic forces, they lose their true humanity, their integrity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.

So, South Africa, Peru, Chile, etc.

*
Thoughts in Solitude
, by Thomas Merton. Image Bks., 1968.

Thursday, December 4

I got home at one in the morning yesterday—heroic Edythe having driven through a deluge to the airport, brought me home and then drove back to Boxford.

Pierrot was truly glad to see me and, while Edythe and I drank some milk and ate a brownie she had made, he sat on a chair at the table and never took his eyes off me. Then when I finally climbed the stairs to bed, he followed me up and lay on his back beside me purring for a long time before he went down to the end of the bed. Outside it sounded like a hurricane. Wind shook the walls, while rain battered the windows all night. It was so comforting to have Pierrot with me!

But as usual the enormity of what lies in wait for me when I have been away for ten days does depress and yesterday I felt like a mouse under a haystack. Among other things I had two recommendations to write for the Guggenheim Foundation. It took me most of an hour this morning. There are twenty or more dear people to thank for various kindnesses on the trip. I packed and mailed off eight books yesterday to some of them. A beautiful purple suede jacket I had ordered months ago came and proved much too big. Now that I have lost thirty-five pounds I do not intend to look like a purple elephant! But what a chore to repack and send it back.

I wonder when I shall resume playing records—it has seemed impossible. I fear the opening of that door so I allow myself to live in a clutter of the undone.

Today the sun was out—I never saw it in Nashville—but the wind is icy, wind chill below zero is my guess. Nevertheless Pierrot in his luxurious white fur suit was happy to go out.

Saturday, December 6

The problem with my desk is the constant fragmentation—that my mind is a merry-go-round of disparate things I have to do and answer. One is to answer daily requests: “Where can I get a bound copy of
The Fur Person?
” “Do you think keeping a journal is selfish?”—this from a freshman writing on
The House By the Sea.
Planning Christmas. Wrapping presents. I did one for Catherine Claytor this morning.

Yesterday the charming living tree that Huldah sent arrived like a corpse in a long box. But it proved to be a perfect shape, and very much alive, and is now drinking water and seems quite frisky this morning. Also a beautiful wreath came from H.O.M.E.

The sun is shining, Venus very bright in the east when I get up at five in the dark and Pierrot darts out into the dawn, full of energy.

Sunday, December 7

The
Times Literary Supplement
sometimes provides an essay that I can ponder for days. This is true of John Bayley's “An Involuntary Witness” in the November 21, 1986 issue—a review of Donald Davie's
Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric
and Henry Gilford's
Poetry in a Divided World.
The review concerns what the poet's responsibility is. Louise Bogan believed that the poet can't be “political.” We had an argument about this in letters which I presume will be published eventually. I have been torn myself. Perhaps the political poem only succeeds when it comes from deep enough to go beyond rhetoric—the danger. I have been steeped in the personal. For the universal in poetry springs from the archetype within the ultrapersonal. I could not write about torture under the Nazis, for instance, until a cousin died as a result of Gestapo beatings—Jean Sarton. Finally I was able to write “The Tortured.”

Bayley quotes Montale who said that “no writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet “few have achieved communication as well as he did.” Marina Tsvetaeva said the same thing more epigrammatically: “Art is an undertaking in common, performed by solitary people.”

That is what struck me and what I have wanted to think about.

Later Bayley writes: “As with ‘bearing witness', so with ‘isolation'. Both are matters of result rather than intention. Emily Dickinson or Tsvetaeva—or Philip Larkin, come to that—are all examples of the solitary poet, and yet, as Gilford admirably shows about the first two in his chapter on Isolation and Community', they are also poets who create and symbolize the idea of a community, and with whom a community of some sort comes strongly to identify.”

Later

When Tamas died I thought I had seen the end of disasters this year, but now Barbara's sculpture of Persophone rising from the ocean and its curling waves has been blown off the terrace wall and lies in awful shards and pieces on the other side—like some broken corpse. Could it have been done by a frightened deer come to eat branches of the yew to the right of it round the corner? I can't believe this has happened. The destruction of a work of art, new in my experience, is extremely painful I am discovering, for art outlives us—and so it is an attack on the future as well as the present to witness it.

Tuesday, December 9

I was so stirred that I spent three hours writing a poem about the death of Persephone—“Death of the Work of Art”—yesterday morning.

Now it is raining, after snow and freezing rain when I woke up, a rather soothing afternoon. Perhaps it is a peaceful day because I steeped myself in the essay oh Fra Angelico in this month's
Smithsonian
—it was a perfect opening to a day. The brilliance of his serenity which shines with such a special light through the blues, vermilions, fresh greens of his palette. I had not realized how marvelously he drew landscapes—Jerusalem in one painting.

Yesterday I played Mozart's Concerto in C Major while I wrote the poem.

Thursday, December 11

Foolishly, no doubt, I agreed to read the bound proof of a book by Stuart Miller called
Painted In Blood
—
Understanding Europeans
(Atheneum). I had plunged into Halperin's
The Life of Jane Austen
like a pig in clover—and now have had to lay that pleasure aside while I read this negative assessment—negative on the whole—which the European in me does not want to hear. But it is healthy to face the deterioration in manners, for instance, and try to understand the reasons for it. What I miss in the mixture of anecdotes and history is
style
—just that is partly what makes Halperin so engaging, but he is writing from admiration and love as well as knowledge, and there is some sharp edge of grievance and irritation in Miller's book.