The House by the Sea (19 page)

Tuesday, February 3rd

I
DID WRITE
the poem and it was, altogether, a good day in that wild wind. When I took Tamas down to the rocks to watch the surf, we had to run back—I was afraid he would be blown into the sea! After writing the poem I spent an hour cutting and reading aloud from
As We Are Now
for the evening at Notre Dame University when, at their suggestion, I shall take half the hour for that and half for poems. It's an experiment … I have never before read prose for an audience in such a sustained way. But the book is, as one critic pointed out, a
récit
, so it should work. I was a little dismayed to see at what a pitch of intensity it lives, that book. Now three years later that kind of intensity, which came from anguish, is so remote that I can hardly imagine how it felt. I am far happier now, but in some ways less alive, and I miss that acute aliveness. I enjoy everything tremendously—the sea, the flowers, my life here, the animals—but I am seldom at the pitch of ecstasy, and I sometimes feel that my mind itself has lost its edge. That is not something that can be changed by will. It may be that I am entering a new phase, the simple letting go that means old age. I no longer think, for instance, of buying a piece of furniture or a rug … why add to the
things
here? There is no longer a great deal of time. I have been moderately acquisitive, but am not any longer. That is all to the good!

The other day, seeing an old man in a car, I thought for a moment that he was an old woman. Is it true that in old age many old men begin to look like old women and many old women like old men? I believe it is. Women grow less vain; the character comes out in their faces, and men—sometimes anyway—having laid aside the cruel push of ambition, become gentler. I remember Perley Cole telling me that he could no longer shoot a deer; yet as a young man he thought nothing of it. One of the good elements in old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

This has been a winter of reading biographies, lately Christopher Sykes' curious one on his friend Evelyn Waugh; it is such a discursive book, yet almost nothing is said about Waugh's marriage, his children, his home life. We see him at White's, his club in London, insulting or being insulted or imagining he is being insulted, and on journeys with his men friends. Many conversations are recorded verbatim—his rudeness really was like an illness—but we do not know the man at all by the end. What came through to me most was the enormous protection it is to belong to an élite, the comfort of being “clubbable.” It is something I have never known. But I am well aware that what the “group” requires is a willingness to be bored for hours at a time. The fun and games of any group are excessively boring in the long run, and I think this applies even to such comparatively useful “groups” as garden clubs.

There was one jewel in the Waugh book that I want to keep—Helena's prayer to the Three Magi:

“Like me, you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. For you the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed and new defiant light blazed among the disconcerted stars.

“How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

“You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

“Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than the ox or the ass.

“You are my especial patrons, and patrons of all latecomers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

“Dear cousins, pray for me, and for my poor overloaded son. May he, too, before the end find kneeling-place in the straw. Pray for the great, lest they perish utterly. And pray for Lactanius and Marcias and the young poets of Treves and for the souls of my wild, blind ancestors; for their sly foe Odysseus and for the great Longinus.

“For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

Thursday, February 5th

T
EN ABOVE ZERO
when I got up, amazed to find it so cold as the sunrise had looked springlike, and yesterday was quite warm, over 32°, with no wind. We shall have a real snow tonight, they say. It will be welcome. I am tired of the hateful hard ice everywhere. “We shall walk in velvet shoes” again at last.

I am reading Golda Meir's biography. People say we lack heros, but here, surely, is one, the rocklike, all-of-a-piece, great, humble woman. I have had to read this book slowly, because at times it is simply too painful to face the omnipresent desire to push Israel down and if possible to destroy it. We are full of self-congratulation, these days of the bicentennial, about the heroic battles of independence two hundred years ago. But however powerful the British were, their bases were thousands of miles and months of sea travel away. The Israelis, with almost no arms, faced immediate war with powerful well-armed neighbors on their doorsills, and not only did they win, but within the next five years had to deal with 600,000 refugees from Europe and Yemen, of diverse backgrounds, illiteracy, wholly diverse cultures … had to create housing, jobs, schools—all this with their backs to the wall financially and in every way. What they have accomplished in twenty years is simply beyond belief. But one senses that
always
they are treated by the international community with a kind of contempt, treated as
expendable
. They have done a great deal for Arabs within and outside their borders (hundreds of children have been operated on in Jewish hospitals, for instance, for nothing). But what have the Arabs ever done for the Jews but spread hatred against them, use the Palestinian refugees as propaganda, keeping them in temporary camps to foment disorder and hatred? The hatred is sickening. How, after the holocaust, is there
still
no pity? And, above all, no
expressed
admiration? The Arab propaganda should be countered with all that the Israelis have done for the Arabs.

Is Israel itself to become another Warsaw? I have not spoken about this before, but I must say that fear about Israel is never out of my mind and has not been for months.

Sunday, February 8th

A
FTER ANOTHER DAY
entirely alone in the bleak cold, some sort of breakthrough that has been coming since Christmas happened. I think it had to. I wept torrents of tears—even the cat got up and came and looked down at me (I was in bed by nine), while Tamas licked my eyes frantically. But animals are not enough. I am simply too isolated and starved. And it is not the easiest thing to solve … there are people I could call, who would gladly come and have dinner if I invited them. But that becomes a great effort, breaks into my meditations, destroys all real work for the day; so it is not a solution. What I need is “family” and by that I mean a family on whom I could drop in sometimes, with whom I could share a meal informally, someone with whom I could go for a walk. Without Heidi, with whom I have lunch once a week, I would be absolutely desolate.

I hesitate to offer invitations far ahead, because what if I was at work on a poem suddenly? I feel I have to keep the channels uncluttered—that is my first responsibility. Vincent Hepp comes tonight. He is a person with whom I can talk about the great impersonal problems such as Israel, and I look forward to seeing him; yet this imminent visit has changed the color of the week in an absurd way. I have been “preparing” and that has taken time and energy. Only people who live alone, as alone as I am here in winter, can understand the agitation that “entertaining” even a single guest induces.

When I am depressed I realize very well that everything I do, such as tending the flowers, talking to the animals, walking with them, is a kind of wall against woe. A substitute, for what? For one person who would focus this beautiful world for me … and I think that that will not happen again. It some ways I do not want it to happen. I am beginning a new phase. Perhaps one must always feel absolutely naked and abandoned and desolate to be ready for the inner world to open again. Perhaps one has to
dare
that. This morning I feel better for having let the woe in, for admitting what I have tried for weeks to refuse to admit—loneliness like starvation.

Thursday, February 12th

A
GLORIOUS DAY
, shining blue sea, just a few small white clouds sailing along in the sky … the détente caused by warmer weather is amost unbelievable. I feel lighter in every way.

Vincent and I had some hours of real exchange, more, strangely enough, about human relations than about the “world situation.” I was startled by his acceptance of hostility and tension as the inevitable in family life. How hard it is for us to admit this! I think everyone lives by some illusions, but the illusions do not help. On the contrary, they make us feel guilty before any stress, as though it were some personal disgrace. I was amazed when Vincent simply took hostility for granted, something not so much to be dealt with as simply to “wait out,” as one waits for a rainstorm to blow off in time. He stopped here overnight on his way to take two of his sons to Halifax for the final paper signing that will mean they can get jobs in America and live here without having to go to Canada every now and then to get back in. Of course, it is frightfully expensive and just another sign of how bureaucracy works to devour lives and substance.

I was quite alarmed when he said unequivocally, apropos of my sense of isolation, “But you are a leader and you must know that.” I have never thought of myself as a “leader” since the 1930s, when I was responsible for a small theatre company. A “leader” surely presupposes some group or cadre that he is “leading.” Can a shepherd without sheep be called a shepherd? I think I was startled because my whole bent is toward not admitting the idea of an élite, of believing that to become more and more human (as I wish to do) means just the opposite, to admit all the ways in which one fails, to join with others in a great invisible community of the nonleaders and the nonled, simply plain human beings in a universal struggle to survive with grace.

The British Empire was founded on the conception of élites. Bloomsbury thrived on the sense of its “specialness.” To what extent does one have to “belong” to “become” someone? I should like to prove that it can be done in almost total isolation from groups in general and in particular. But of course the price is high. And one must have a pretty tough core to be willing to pay it.

Monday, February 23rd

B
ACK TO A NORMALLY
cool day, after this disconcerting week of very warm damp weather, and back from four days at the Notre Dame University literary festival. I went in fear and trembling, exhilarated by the prospect of meeting Louis Simpson, Stanley Kunitz, and Galway Kinnell, as I see so few poets, and these are all three ones for whom I have respect—fearful that I would not fulfill Michelle Quinn's expectations. The festival is run by the sophomore class … they choose the writers they want, and Michelle, the sophomore chairman, had especially wanted me to come.

It turned out to be a true festival, everyone filled with love and joy. Such an audience! Standing room only, with six hundred seated in a charming auditorium. Louis Simpson had been so fine the night before, the wry delicate tone so very different from mine—I wondered how my work would stand up, especially as I was reading from
As We Are Now
, as well as poems. It did … dear Michelle was sobbing as the applause swelled and swelled, and I remembered how when I was her age I did that sometimes in the Old Civic Repertory days, weeping from a kind of joy. What moved me most, perhaps, was the way some of the women professors and instructors came to thank me, saying, “You don't know what you have done for
us
.” (I was the only woman writer at the festival).

That was one part of the experience. The other, even more important to me, was to hear those three good poets read. I have been starved for that, to feel myself part of the communion of poets again, to learn from my peers. It gave me a new sense of confidence in what I am doing now—not in strict form. I saw very well how such poems can have momentum and thrust, and even float the hearer on their music. Reading Kinnell on the plane home I came upon this, part 4 of
Spindrift:

I sit listening

To the surf as it falls.

The power and inexhaustible freshness of the sea,

The suck and inner boom

As a wave tears free and crashes back

In overlapping thunders going away down the beach.

It is the most we know of time,

And it is our undermusic of eternity.

Many doors opened for me during the four days, among them someone giving me Tillich's
The Shaking of the Foundations
after we had been talking in the student coffee shop and eating doughnuts. It sounds like nothing—a casual meeting with a young man and a young woman, both instructors at the university. But in that atmosphere of the festival it had great force. I needed this book. It has solved (the chapter called “Waiting” especially) something that has been troubling me for a very long time. It has helped me back to a state of grace.