The House by the Sea (7 page)

I shall write a portrait of Céline as I
really
knew her. There is a fictional portrait, for she appears as Mélanie in
The Bridge of Years
. But that was romanticized—not on purpose, but perhaps because one cannot tell the whole truth about anyone while they are still alive. Also, actual human beings are always more complex than one can possibly manage in fiction.

Now what I think of is the warmth and love she gave me when I was seven or eight and we spent a winter with the Limbosches near Brussels. Céline was a real earth mother and my own mother was not that at all. I see her, lying in bed, in her plain white nightgown, surrounded and engulfed by all of us children, her three daughters and her son and me, whom she always called “my eldest,” all of us clean and pink from our baths lying about as close to her as we each could get, waiting for her to read to us for a half hour. It was Nils Holgersson, as I remember, that enthralled us that winter.

She was very dominating and ordered us about like a commanding general. But at that age I rather enjoyed it, more perhaps than had I been her own child. There is a great deal to think about. As Jacqueline said in a short dignified note, “C'est une page de tournée, et quelle page.…

“Bien que nous souhaitions pour elle de ne plus devoir endurer cette pénible décrépitude, une fois partie, on est écrasé par l'irrémédiable.”

The fact is that it is very much harder to believe in immortality when the person has become diminished by very old age, as both Julian Huxley and Céline had when I saw them in the autumn.

All we can pray is not to outlive the self. Yet my guess is that we make our deaths, even when senile. Céline, at least, was still always imagining that she could help someone, did think of others, most recently to try to find a way to give one of her nurses her heart's desire … a harp!

Among the letters today were two from strangers—one from England to thank me for
As We Are Now
. “I am very old, nearly ninety-one, but I am most happily placed. My own dread is that I might find it necessary to go into an old people's home. At present I am in my beloved old farmhouse, restricted to driving in a radius of three miles, very deaf, very lame, but with sight just as good as ever. So I live largely in books. I still do a little mild gardening, perched on a stool. Life owes me nothing. I've had pretty well everything I wanted—my share of trouble, of course. But one gets overcharged with experience.” The other is from a young American girl, and after telling me what a solitary she has always been, she says, “I don't know exactly how to tie in my ‘true story' with what I want to say but for a year now I've been reading and re-reading your work (now I am ending a second reading of
Kinds of Love
) and it made me feel good to be a woman, feel good to have nerves, and eyes and all sorts of sensory enjoyment in full operation. It feels good to be alone and enjoy the person I am …” There is more, and then it ends, “Thank you for making old age and old people real and a continuation of life.”

This is a day when I wish there were someone with whom I could talk over and share all that has poured in.

Friday, February 14th

A
BEAUTIFUL DAY
! Zero when I went down this morning at a little after six … such a peaceful gray and rosy sunrise, the Isles of Shoals
floating
as they sometimes seem to do. Winter has really come at last, with below-zero weather, or snow, every day. There is nothing I like better.

Yesterday as I drove across the causeway en route to get the mail, a kingfisher flew low right in front of me. I have only seen one once before. Birds are an important part of my life here, especially in winter. The feeders are outside the closed-in porch where I have my meals, read, and look at TV when I am downstairs. Lately a flock of evening grosbeaks comes and goes among the chickadees, three sparrows, and goldfinches. A pair of downy woodpeckers and a pair each of small and large nuthatches are regulars, a few jays (they have been depleted since the capillary disease last year that destroyed hundreds). One or two starlings and/or grackles show up now and then. Both red squirrels (enchanting) and gray (huge!) devour tons of seed. On these very still, very cold days the constant motion has a tonic effect, a little like music in the air, all those wings. It would be deathly still without them.

As I look down from this study window, I see below the terrace a charming lacing in loops and circles of Tamas and Bramble's tracks through the snow. Beyond the low wall that defines the garden, the field is untrammeled, dazzling white. And the ocean now dark bright blue, sequined by the sun in a great swath to the south toward the islands.

Why is blue
the
color? Does any other excite in the same way? Blue flowers—gentians in an Alpine meadow, delphinium in the summer garden, forget-me-nots, bachelor's buttons among the annuals—always seem the most fabulous, the most precious. And I'm afraid I have always been drawn to blue-eyed people! Lapis lazuli; the much paler marvelous blues used by Fra Angelico (“Fra Angelico blue,” I have heard it called by my mother); the very blue shadows on snow; bluebirds. I thought of this as I drove across the causeway when I saw the kingfisher, his flash of blue, and rejoiced to see blue water after the gray days.

I am struggling still with the portrait of Louise. Sometimes I think it is just plain no good. But how touched and charmed I was when one of her blue slips of paper slid out from the poems, and proved to be a list of all the flowers in one of “May's bouquets”!

Monday, February 17th

T
HE COLD
has let up in the last twenty-four hours. Amazing how the release makes itself felt as tiredness at first. The animals want to be outdoors all the time, now that it is 32° instead of 22°, or 10°, or zero, as it was all last week. The cat scoots up trees, and races around, waving her tail. The dog by comparison seems a little subdued like me and is snoozing on the doorsill. It didn't rain enough yesterday to wash away the snow, I am happy to note. The sea is ruffled in a massive way, no whitecaps; it looks as impenetrable and shining as bronze. Valentine freesias and yellow roses on my desk are still exquisite. At this season freesia is
the
flower, with its delicious scent and airy delicate trumpets.

On Saturday, February 15th, I was looking at the six o'clock news when Julian Huxley's face appeared on the screen. Of course, I knew what that meant. He died at home, I hope peacefully. Although I have prayed that he might slip away, death when it comes is always a shock to the survivors. I burst into tears. And Tamas, asleep in the front hall, immediately got up and came, very concerned, to lick my tears.

All night I tossed about and couldn't sleep for the memories and images of Julian and Juliette that rose up. When I was working on my first novel they lent me their apartment at Whipsnade (the zoo outside London). In the daytime there were lots of people about (the apartment was over a very good restaurant), but at night there was total silence except for the animal sounds … the peacock's scream, the distant roar of a lion or tiger, the wolves howling in the wolf wood. My days were heavenly, workful, but whenever I needed a break I had the whole zoo to explore. The wallabies were free to roam, gentle creatures, with occasionally a baby looking out of its mother's pocket. I took a sketchbook around and sometimes spent an hour drawing a bear or some other creature. I have no talent, but drawing something makes one really look at it, and that was the point for me—a meditation on “bear.”

The tensions are beginning to build up … lectures ahead, promises made … my blessed concentrated peace is almost at an end till the autumn comes again. This afternoon a minister is coming to see me from some distance away. I do hope he has not come to “convert” me. He wrote a friend to ask whether I believed in God and this visitation appears to be the result of a letter I wrote her to answer his question. Why is it that religious people so often badger and needle one? In my experience people who assert their religion are so very rarely religious in their actions. The saints I have known, Sister Maria Stella, the contemplative, Sister Mary David, who is doing such wonderful work among the very poor Blacks near Beaufort, never talk about religion and, above all, never put emotional pressure on others.

Tuesday, February 18th

A
LUGUBRIOUS DAY
, warm, raining hard—the road out will be a morass. I did Mr. Palmer an injustice. He turned out to be a liberal, warm, kind man. He came really to tell me how delighted he had been to discover my work last summer. He was born in Maine, his father in the “wood business.” And I loved his talk about this father, now retired, who brought himself a house on two acres near Augusta, “one acre of lawn in front and one acre of garden in the back.” Strange how a phrase like that can set one dreaming! I enjoyed the hour and a half very much. I have been feeling tired and dull, having chewed my own fat for maybe a little too long lately. One thing that Mr. Palmer said that touched me was that people who do not read the Bible would miss a great deal in reading my work. I suppose there are a good many unconscious references and all this goes back to the Shady Hill School. Children who do not learn psalms by heart and are not steeped in the Bible are, in several ways,
illiterate
.

The other day a letter came from an unknown man who was moved to write to me about my father, after reading the poems about him in my
Collected Poems
. He says, “I took one course under George Sarton as an undergraduate at Harvard. He was for me a model of what a scholar should be and what I wanted to be. Although he was fantastically learned, he took such joy in his study that it was never labored or pedantic, but rather a means of grace. He was utterly modest and self-effacing: I think he never got over his surprise that so many students wanted to hear him speak on the history of science. And he was kind: when I was in military service in India in 1944 he twice wrote to me, something no other professor did.”

The writer apologized for writing fifteen years after my father's death, but this letter, keeping a memory green, is far more precious now than it would have been fifteen years ago. So for the second time this year people have come to me to speak of one or the other of my parents with vivid memories they wanted to share.

Monday, February 24th

A
LOVELY SPRING
rain slanting down … it seems that we had our whole winter in the first two weeks of February, and I feel a little deprived! A huge flock of evening grosbeaks is around now—they are winter residents but did not discover my feeders till a week ago. I found gentle Tamas happily tearing apart the bloody corpse of a gray squirrel which Bramble must have caught, as I had seen her with it under a bush. I forget how sharp and cruel their teeth are when it comes to their own natural life, they who are so gentle with me.

I agreed last summer to be an adviser to two women working for PhD's in Union Graduate School. This is a plan whereby students can work wherever they are, meeting their advisers once a year for a week's discussion. Norma is working on personal journals and keeping one as she goes along. Karen is trying to get at a deeper analysis of women through myth. (She began with Medusa and Athene.) Every now and then, without warning, their work in progress arrives. I spent two days last week on Norma's. It has led me to think a good deal more than I ever have about what keeping a journal is like and what it demands of the writer. I do not believe that keeping a journal is for the young. There is always the danger of bending over oneself like Narcissus and drowning in self-indulgence. If a journal is to have any value either for the writer or any potential reader, the writer must be able to be objective about what he experiences
on the pulse
. For the whole point of a journal is this seizing events on the wing. Yet the substance will come not from narration but from the examination of experience, and an attempt, at least, to reduce it to essence. Secondly—and this is curious—what delights the reader in a journal is often minute particulars. Very few young people observe anything except themselves very closely. Then the context—by that I mean all that one brings to an experience of reading and thinking and feeling—is apt to be thin for the young. And, to get to the nub, I guess what I am suggesting is that rarely is there enough of a self
there
.

Norma wants to, and has already written a lot, on what she calls “Journal in Retrospect” to accompany her daily journal. (Incidentally I don't believe one can write
every
day) and we are having a hassle over defining the terms. I feel there is a huge difference between autobiography (which her “Journal in Retrospect” is) and the journal. Autobiography is the story of a life or a childhood written, summoned back, long after its events took place. Autobiography is “what I remember,” whereas a journal has to do with “what I am now, at this instant.” I hope Norma can find a way to intertwine the two. Often a present experience brings back something out of the past which is suddenly seen in a new light. That, I think, works.

Besides all this, last week also brought pages and pages of the bibliography of my work that Lenora Blouin has been working on for over a year. I must check it and am slowly unwrapping little magazines and anthologies that have not been unpacked since I moved. It is rather amusing to do all this, but not when I am quite as harried by other things as I am now.

My first lecture is on Thursday at the University of New Hampshire. They want discussion afterward on what it is like to be a
woman
poet. So off we go again! I must put everything together this morning.

Wednesday, February 26th

T
HIS SPRING
weather makes one dream … today great clouds shot through with light; so, just now, the ocean was dark with a long shining band halfway to the horizon.