The House by the Sea (26 page)

Occasionally on TV a small vignette achieves real grace. It happened the other night. We saw a family somewhere in Massachusetts who had collected tons of food for a single destitute family in Mississippi. The start was a question put to three pretty girls who had helped collect food. “How would you feel if someone gave you all that?” “I would be embarrassed,” said one. “I don't know, a little ashamed of needing so much,” said another. Then the cameras shifted to Mississippi, where an old black man was sitting in front of his shack. “How do you feel about all this?” the reporter asked. He scratched his head, then lifted it and smiled. “I feel so proud,” he said.

I've thought about this ever since. What grace in that answer!

Thursday, July 8th

M
UGGY WEATHER
. I feel low in energy, but I had a wonderful time with
The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier
last night in bed, fighting the ‘no-see-ums,” tiny biting insects that I thought at first were
fleas
. Bramble is back on my bed after forty-eight hours away … I did get anxious this time. She went right up to Tamas to be licked when she came back yesterday at breakfast time.

It's a pity to read Monnier in English. Here is one passage that gave me great pleasure (p. 197):

“Lunch with Colette. How is it that was going to come about? Colette is a woman who has a horror of being disturbed. For my part, I have a horror of disturbing—a Colette above all. I love to give pleasure, but I cannot imagine how one can give pleasure to Colette when one is not a flower or an animal, a taste or a scent, a color or music. Her world comes before the human or after the human: it is the kingdom of the Mother, with its great primal fire and its final fires. One dreams of her presence as turning into a white cat, but it would still be necessary never to die, to be an immortal creature, like an Egyptian god.”

Would Colette herself have assented to that last image? I think not. She would not, I think, have wished to be deprived of death. She wanted to have it all,
y compris
old age. (Her best work was done when she was crippled by arthritis in her seventies and eighties.) I wish I could discover those last books,
Le Fanal Bleu
, and the others all over again. I must reread them.

Germaine Lafeuille is coming for lunch … she has never been here and I am very happy to receive her at last. She will feel at home with the furniture from Channing Place—when she was getting her doctorate at Harvard she did some work for my father and often came for Sunday dinner. My father enjoyed her company. He really liked women. Strange to mention this? I believe many men do not.

Saturday, July 10th

C
LEAR AIR
! It was like drinking from a spring to breathe it when I woke up at half past five. All the outlines so sharp, and the pale blue sea defined by a dark blue line at the horizon as I saw it in Greece. It must be weeks since we have had a day unblurred by steamy heat.

Everything is a great joy at the moment … such a pleasure to go down to a tidy garden where the annuals are. And the other day I tidied up the workbench in the garage where all the gardening tools, fertilizers, wheelbarrows, stakes are. It was a wild, sad jumble. Tidying things up clears the mind—that being so, how can I allow such disorder up here? I think because people are more important, so, instead of tidying, I answer a letter. Flowers are more important and their silent cries for water … so I tell myself that maybe in winter I'll get to unpacking the boxes of books from Judy's house, attack the files, but I am not an optimist about ever getting it done!

The other day, bothered by the “no-see-ums” when I lay down to rest for a half hour after lunch, unable to fall asleep, I amused myself listening to all the summer sounds—the leaves stirring like the rustling of taffeta; beyond it the gentle steady roar of the sea, tide rising; but what surprised me was how many birds were singing at that hour, two in the afternoon. First I became aware of the beeble of a wren; then several varied songs by the mockingbird; a sweet burble of goldfinches as they flew past; the robin's call of warning (Bramble must be near by); the jays making their summer call (so much less harsh than their winter screams); and finally a crowd of gulls flying up with loud cries. I lay there for a half hour, listening, and got up refreshed.

Germaine Lafeuille, retired now from Wellesley, is going back to France for a year to make up her mind where to settle—in Europe or in the United States. Talking with her—we had a lovely, casual, happy time—I became nostalgic for Europe, for the kind of friendship that is possible there. Why is it? Germaine is possibly the most detached person I have ever known; she looks like an eleventh-century carved figure on Chartres, an austere beauty that breaks into a charming warmth only when she is talking to an animal, especially a cat. (For once a guest who appreciated Bramble's wild nature more than Tamas' all-loving one!) If she decides to leave here for France, I gathered that she will not be wrenching away from any really intimate friend. It is nature that moves her to the depths.

Tuesday, July 13th

W
E HAVE HAD RAIN
at last, and time opens out since I don't have to water. Yesterday, between showers, I picked some beet tops for supper, and a small handful of French strawberries to put in the hollow of a quarter melon, then at last got at the small beds on top of the wall where the heather is. And before that I put Tamas in the tub and gave him his first bath in nearly a year. I feel ashamed that I have waited so long, but he has no doggy smell at all and his fur shines whether he has a bath or not. He got a thorough wash, sweetened by a thundershower when I put him out, and was still quite damp when we went to bed.

I feel empty after the only blowup for ages and stormy tears on Sunday. Of course, as usual, I overreacted. But why are writers and artists fair game when a craftsman of equivalent stature would never be? It took place on Heidi's boat when we were having drinks and a picnic lunch after a short sail. The builder of it joined us; I went out of my way to be warm, as I admire all I know about him, including the sturdy elegant boat we were in at the moment. I brought him a plate of fried chicken, praised him, admitting my total ignorance of boats, but the pleasure this one gave me. Then somehow literature came in, and I mentioned that the woman's movement had helped enormously to make me accepted and my work read. Perhaps this was the source of irritation, but he began talking about how little he read has any value these days. I reacted like a horse stung by a bee, shouted, and finally left and went home, crying so hard I could hardly see. Absurd? Of course. Yet what if
I
had chosen to say, on meeting
him
for the first time, “The boats I see around are certainly pretty shoddily built!” It is not conceivable that anyone would; yet that is really what he said about writers today. He would not have made a scene, but I would have been treated like a pariah by the other guests and he would have been defended at once.

What is the difference? Perhaps that a craft is easily accessible and literature is not? So there is always a slight resentment because writers are supposed to feel “superior”? Is it the hatred of the intellectual never far from the surface in America? On such occasions I want to run home to “old nurse Europe,” as Eva Le Gallienne calls it. For there is no doubt that the average European has far more respect for artists and writers than Americans do.

Anyway, in total constrast to that disaster, I had a simply heavenly evening on Saturday when Susan and George Garrett came for supper. We sat out in the terrace for drinks, and later watched a huge pale golden moon rise right in the center of the ocean in front of us. They are “my people,” and it was good to be home again with them.

Sunday, July 18th

H
ARD TO DO
anything but stare out at the brilliant blue sea. The air cleared in the night—I even had to pull up a blanket—and now it is the best day in ages. We had rain the day before yesterday and in the emancipation from watering I can garden. So great weedings and prunings are in progress. The lilies are in full glory now, useful indoors because they do not fade, sometimes for as long as two weeks.

It has been a packed week. Mary Tozer was here while the national democratic convention was going on, but in the forty-eight hours we managed one lovely late afternoon sitting on the terrace, watching the birds fly past and the lazy sails on the blue sea. We did stay up to hear Carter's acceptance speech and I'm glad we did. In bed afterward I thought that what he represents is the gentle revolution I talked about in my commencement address at Clark last year. The words “simple” and “compassion” were often used by him, and simple compassion is something we have not seen in government for a very long time, since Lincoln. It is hard to imagine what it will be like, if he is elected—the sense of a real new beginning.

I wonder why the media people still manage to sneer at rather than applaud this man. He did the impossible alone to get the nomination and that in itself is rather marvelous. For once I was disappointed in
Washington Week in Review
, and especially in Peter Lisagor, who appears to be quite cynical about Carter. Is he just too good to be true? “Too true to be good,” as Shaw would have it?

But there is something fundamentally moving about him—the town of Plains itself, his mother who went to India at sixty-eight with the Peace Corps for two years. This is not a
usual
story, though it could only perhaps have taken place in the United States. And if we have a Congress and President working together at last, great things could happen.

There is also a lot of chaffing about “unity,” as though it were a dirty word. The fact is that the unity was forged long before the convention and not imposed as so many commentators have said. Carter saw the women's caucus twice for an hour each time, for instance—that was not brushing opposition aside. It was an attempt to accommodate and to see what was possible. And that is what politics is about.

The Republicans never mention the inner cities. And that is the crucial problem before us. I am greatly pleased about Mondale. Muskie is an “elder statesman” now, and we want fresh, vital, young men in power.

Monday, August 9th

A
LONG LAPSE
because life has been too full to record lately. Now it is raining for the fourth day in a row, and a hurricane warning is out for the New England coast tonight at midnight. I must get candles, lamps, and flashlights ready and take in the furniture from the terrace. Strange to sit and wait … it brings back memories of 1938 in Cambridge when we watched the trees blow down like feathers, and the next day Brattle Street, huge trees lying across it, looked like a gigantic metaphor of war, all those bodies.

From July 29th to August 4th I was at the island with Judy, our yearly pilgrimage. We were unlucky in the three first days of rain … there is no electricity, so the dark weather makes indoors as dark as night. Judy is terribly restless; I could not go to my “workroom” and write a letter in peace, and by the end of the three days and nights I felt desperate. Then on Monday at last the sun came out and we were able to have two great swims in the salt pool—I admired Judy's courage—she even swam across the pool twice on the second round.

The island is a dying world, at least as we knew it, under Anne's command for the past twenty years. Now she is senile too, worse off than Judy. To be the witness of this decline in two women who have been rocks in my life, to feel the quicksand under my feet, was not easy.

But if the island is a dying world it is dying in a gentle light, for Anne is all wound round in love. Two college girls attend her, help her dress, wash her hair, tease her, take her for walks, thus relieving Agnes for part of each day and giving her a chance to go about the business of the island. Agnes is an extraordinary person, nearing seventy herself. But she has chosen to devote herself absolutely to making life comfortable for Anne. It is a full-time job, and is possible only because she has actually transferred her own ego to the task, that is, she gets her joys from Anne's joys. While we were there a lot of trouble was taken, for instance, to bring over from Southwest Harbor a Vassar schoolmate of Anne's, who stayed several hours. When I came downstairs they were singing college songs and surrounded by books of photographs that Agnes had dug out the night before, some of them of Anne playing Cyrano de Bergerac in a performance still remembered as remarkable by those who attended it. So I had lessons in pure love to ponder those days. It is only possible to do what Agnes does if one can lay aside one's own life almost completely. I could never do that. I should be too torn by the responsibility of my work as against the human responsibility. Even in those six days the frustration was acute.

Nothing could have been a greater contrast than that experience at Greenings and what happened yesterday, for yesterday Susie and Ed Kenney came for the day with their two small children, Jamie, six years old, a sturdy explorer of everything from this house and all the objects in it to the beach and all the objects to be found there, and Ann Morrow, three years old, a brave, flirtatious, highly intelligent little girl.

The children got out of the car in a rush of delight, to be hugged and kissed and introduced to Tamas, always a little wary of small children, and then immediately made for the grassy path down to the ocean … and off they ran with Tamas and the student-helper who came with them, and were not seen again for more than an hour. They returned with every pocket of their slickers weighed down with smooth stones, bricks worn into rounds like tennis balls, and by then Tamas was in a state of extreme joy, proved by his racing around the library for several minutes after they got back. He only does that when he is ecstatic.

Meanwhile Susie had had a chance to talk about her recent time at the University of Sussex, delving into the Virginia Woolf material there, and Ed to describe what it had been like alone with the children for three weeks. They spoke more than once of the problem, now Susie is home again, of never seeing each other—I had not imagined that small children, the constant presence, prevent any real talk or connection between their parents—it makes for acute frustration. Of course it does.