After the Stroke (5 page)

Life in the country is always a battle against nature, so to speak. For example, this has been the worst year for winterkill since I came here nearly fifteen years ago. The tree peonies, my pride and joy, have almost no buds and are about half the size they were. Red squirrels ate almost all the buds of the big white rhododendron at the back—the day after I had seen how big and fat the buds were and rejoiced. Mice, voles or chipmunks ate fifty tulip bulbs from the terrace border, twenty from the shady border where the begonias are, twenty at least from the narrow upper border on the terrace. Only along the fence about twenty survived. Fifty were eaten in one end of the picking garden. Altogether a disastrous year.

I have reached again a hard place in my illnesses. I am on the edge of anger all the time. Lonely, desperately when no one is here, and then exhausted if anyone is. I seem to be an impossible person who, as Marynia Farnham used to say about certain people, should be shot at dawn.

All the people who have always had instant response from me still expect to—and they are not few. So instead of keeping this journal, I try to answer—and instead of answering well as I used to, break down and cry because I can't.

I have not been able to listen to music since early January but now I have put the Fauré
Requiem
on, and as I listen I see I must listen. I must get celestial food again and try to live on another plane, get down deep enough so all this doesn't matter.

Monday, June 2

Last night we went over to Beverly and Mary-Leigh so Pat could see
World of Light
, the beautiful documentary film Martha Wheelock and Marita Simpson made about me some years ago. It was during a thunderstorm which lasted for
five hours.
I went home after the film and left Pat to be introduced to Mary-Leigh's and Beverly's treasure house of paintings and works of art. With the wild storm outside it seemed rather a long visit, so at eleven I called and suggested she had better come home. At times lately I sound and behave like my grandmother who could be rather sharp. Oh dear. Pierrot was a great help, unafraid of the blazing flashes of lightning and roars of thunder, he lay on his back beside me purring loudly.

Wednesday, June 4

During one of our long good talks I said to Pat, “I must somehow get onto another plane”—and this morning when I woke at five I decided to lie there and think of all the good things in my life now. One is surely waking in my wide bedroom, with its casement windows (which I believe resemble those at Wondelgem where I used to wake as a baby) and sense of space and light. The light I see first is the brilliant blue and red of the stained glass phoenix which hangs high up on the glass door to the outdoor porch. Then if I look to the left my eyes rest on “the hills of home,” an abstract painting over the fireplace that Anne Woodson painted using, as though buried under those hills, ancient slate headstones from the Nelson cemetery. Above the hills, a solid blue sky.

The big curtains at the windows are drawn these days as it is light so very early.

On my left is a round turntable with rows of medicines on the top and two layers of books below—and these days a square wicker stool also covered with books. Medawar's autobiography these nights, interesting and lively, but not to be compared with Juliette's as a work of art. There is Mary Barnard's new book of poems written around the astral myths, and Henry Taylor's
The Flying Change
which has just won the Pulitzer prize—how happy I was when I read that he had won it, and he writes me that it came as a
total
surprise!

I read it through in one sitting with tears streaming down my cheeks to be with true poetry again—and have just gone back to the last lines of the title poem:

I see that age will make my hands a sieve;

But for a moment the shifting world suspends

its flight and leans toward the sun once more,

as if to interrupt its mindless plunge

through works and days that will not come again.

I hold myself immobile in bright air,

sustained in time astride the flying change.

Above the round table there are two calendars of the English countryside which I always order and always enjoy and somehow
need
—for England and these landscapes are in my bones.

Pat said she felt at home here partly because I and the house are so European, and I felt at home with her for the same reason.

Thursday, June 5

After the lovely moments of waking comes the reluctant tug every morning to get up and get going. It is now nearly half past nine and the “getting going” has taken almost three hours—partly because Eleanor Perkins is here cleaning and I have to tidy things up a bit more than usual. I went downstairs at a little after six to let Tamas out, set the tray for my breakfast (cream of wheat this morning), fetch the bird feeder from the garage, refill and hang it up. Then I offered Pierrot breakfast which he didn't want, eager to go out and chase chipmunks.

I then went back to bed and dozed for an hour. Finally got up at seven, made my breakfast and, with Tamas preceding me, carried the tray up to have it in bed. Tamas lies beside me and wants to lick the bowl, and is given small treats, dog snacks, meanwhile. A friend who saw my tray all set and didn't know about this asked, “Do you eat dog biscuits for breakfast?”

That time in bed after drinking my
café au lait
is precious. I sometimes lie there thinking for a half hour. Today I had to get up, before I was ready, to tidy up the guest room (take vases of dead flowers down, etc.) and wash the week's towels in the washer on this floor. That was a bright thing I did for once (I am such a bad housekeeper)—to have it installed so nearby.

Then I still had to wash my breakfast dishes, rearrange flowers—I picked a few Star of Bethlehem, and five English bluebells to make a little magic, and added in some tiny lavender carnations I found at Foster's yesterday. It worked.

Soon there will be peonies to pick in my garden. But the chipmunks have decimated the rhododendruns. It is
very
hard to accept this, as it would have been a glorious year and so much else suffered during this hard winter.

Writing this account of morning chores does make me see that I am better—although, when I finally got up the two steep flights of stairs to my study, I felt that strange drained exhaustion as though energy were a solid substance and had suddenly melted away.

Tomorrow I see Dr. Petrovich and we'll see what he has to say. I can't remember what it was like to feel
well.

Friday, June 6

A dismal dark day, raining hard. Pierrot, who is in a state of ecstasy and frustration chasing the chipmunks he never catches, wanted to go out into the wet wild world, and out he is.

I went to sleep thinking of Sakharov and woke up thinking of him, what being locked away in Gorky and totally vulnerable means—at least once the KGB has come and tortured him. This could happen at any moment. One hears that he is close to being a saint, the most gentle man imaginable.

Amnesty International's twenty-fifth anniversary yesterday. They have a remarkable record partly because they single out individuals and put up an intense barrage over him or her. Millions of others, not chosen, have no hope of course. I find I give to A.I. all I can.

If only Sakharov could be freed!

Animals and birds, except for the shrike, a bird who impales small birds in order to eat them later, as far as I know do not torture each other, and especially do not torture members of their own species. The fact that man does and has done for centuries remains horrifying—and of course we know more and more about what amounts to sexual torture within marriages. Give a person power over another person and the ease with which he uses it to punish is staggering—hardly aware of what he is doing—and if I use the masculine pronoun here it is because in spite of feminism so many women lack power because in our society money is power. I see it so clearly in my parents' marriage—the absolute power the money he earned gave my father when my mother was doing all the housework and he never realized what food, clothes, etc. cost. It is hard for me to forgive—

So let me turn away and toward old age, the Fourth Season, as it has been called. How many times lately someone my age or older has said “if they had told us what it would be like we would have opted out”. Both Polly Starr and Molly Howe, roughly ten years older than I, have had implants which have
not
restored the vision so far. Eleanor Blair, now ninety-two, and legally blind, broke her left wrist and learned to cook with one hand—her faithful cleaning woman comes every morning on the way to work to help her do her hair and dress. Charles Feldstein's wife, Janice, has some dreadful trouble with her legs and has to be in a wheel chair. Annie Caldwell, poor dear, has had to suffer a hugely swollen arm after her mastectomy.

Among all my old friends only Patience Ross, who was my English agent as well as my friend since the thirties, is rejoicing. But there is the change over from the long years with her friend Louise Porter to a happy new companionship. Patience says, “I only
feel
old physically. Life continues full of discoveries, some being made
so late.
(But I can't agree with Oscar Wilde!) I'm hideously lazy and self-indulgent and enjoy, enjoy—”

I've been going back to Ruth Pitter in my mind and reread a poem I have loved:

An Old Woman Speaks of the Moon

She was urgent to speak of the moon: she offered delight

And wondering praise to be shared by the girl in the shop,

Lauding the goddess who blessed her each sleepless night

Greater and brighter till full: but the girl could not stop.

She turned and looked up in my face, and hastened to cry

How beautiful was the orb, how the constant glow

Comforted in the cold night the old waking eye:

How fortunate she, whose lodging was placed that so

She in the lonely night, in her lonely age,

She from her poor lean bed might behold the undying

Letter of loveliness written on heaven's page,

The sharp silver arrows leap down to where she was lying.

The dying spoke love to the immortal, the foul to the fair,

The withered to the still-flowering, the bound to the free:

The nipped worm to the silver swan that sails through the air:

And I took it as good, and a happy omen to me.
*

*
The Spirit Watches
, Macmillan, 1940.

Saturday, June 7

Rainy, foggy like yesterday—dismal weather for early June and I feel low, pushed by the need to be up here at my desk.

The lowest day for a long time.

Monday, June 9

It gave me a shot in the arm to offer a glass of champagne to three women who had been at the H.D. centennial celebration at Orono this week. It was Diana Collecott who had asked to come and Silvia Dobson and her friend had offered to drive her here on their way to Philadelphia. After all the rain and loneliness I felt warmed by their pleasure in being here. And what a delight to learn that D.C. teaches me at Durham University in England in a course on American women poets! She talked a lot about my correspondence with H.D. I had forgotten how many letters there were—but she wondered why there were comparatively few from H.D. Now Nancy has helped me find four more in various books of hers. What would I do without Nancy who knows where everything is?

Today at last a clear June day—it seems unbelievable, for it is only the second time this spring that I have picked flowers. I went down to the annual bed because the yellow day lily that always flowers first is in flower, and picked some and a dark purple iris. I seem to have escaped through the long wet grass without a tick. They are extremely healthy and numerous this year. To this I was alerted when I discovered a whole covey in Tamas's poor ears. After that Nancy and I check him every morning, and I do it at night too. Apparently the cat, white as he is, does
not
attract. That is a real help as his fur is so long and thick.

Diana, with whom I had lunch alone, says the poems are really getting through in England—partly because the paperback
Selected Poems of May Sarton
can be bought (she assigned it in her course)—and she was excited about possibly publishing the H.D.-Bryher-Sarton correspondence and had copied out parts of my letters to Bryher about H.D.'s poems.

Janice came at four for a good catch-up—I have not seen her for ages—and to weed her vegetables (she is using half the annual bed), and brought me the first fruits, two radishes, when she had finished.

It was a good day but I was pretty tired by the middle of lunch. I could not eat at all—only a glass of milk and a pretence of eating a clam roll. Pierrot had a little nap with me and that was a great help.

Afternoon

A moment of pure joy, as I lay in the
chaise longue
for a few minutes—it was four. The afternoon light struck two sprigs of mountain laurel, so richly white, in a brilliant blue glass vase—the whole room was filled with their presence and I just lay there and looked. Duffy who sent arbutus in April (what a miracle its pungent scent seemed) had sent the mountain laurel in a box.

Tuesday, June 10

A pure June day. An early pale pink single peony is out and I picked two, and one velvety deep blue Siberian iris this afternoon. But it is a dismal afternoon inside me, so tired I am of never feeling well; I expect the double dose of Amiodoroni is beginning to poison my system. It does not, however, give me the violent cramps Lanoxin did, thank heaven. I am on the fourth day of seven on the double dose.

This afternoon I felt too sick to be able to rest. It has gone on so long, five months and a half, that is why it gets to me—and so little hope. Why do I trust Dr. Petrovich? He has been talking about electric shock for months. Is he just an experimenter with drugs? I do not feel I am being treated as a whole person or that he has the slightest idea what it is for me not to be able to work.