Don’t Write. Your communication now is feeding the baby. I will write Jon from Montreal.
Love—Love to all of you,
Grannymouse*
Train to Northampton
February 15th, 1955
Dearest Jon,
I addressed this envelope weeks ago, when I meant to send you and Barbara a copy of the service for Mother. In the middle of the St. Augustine Prayer, I thought of you and your child. “We behold how some things pass away that others may replace them …” And also in the middle of the reading from Pilgrim’s Progress (Christiana! Of course—Christ) I thought you would like to read it. It was not a gloomy service but quite triumphant, as it should have been for Grandma Bee.
Since then Con and I have been absorbed in the terrible process of dissolving the “empire” Mother left behind. We have done a lot of it and I will have to go on alone in March when Con goes back home. I have not taken too many things—most of them seem to me too elegant and delicate for my life or any of you children’s lives! But I have taken some things—with simple lines and strong! A little silver and china. (We haven’t got to the linen yet. Do you need any? There are masses. Sheets—pillowcases—towels—bureau scarves? Let me know if you want me to save you some. I could keep it till you want it.) Also on the furniture and silver, I will keep a certain amount in my house and if and when you want some you can have it. But if there is something you especially think of or want (desk—bureau—dining room table? chairs?), you might let me know.
Janey’s letter made me very happy because she told me how wonderful you had been with Barbara at the time of the baby’s birth, how you had read to her and entered into whatever would help her. The ability to express love through service and action is a great gift. It is a privilege to the giver as well as to the recipient but it is the mark of a truly mature person to be able to express it! And to be free enough to express it.
I dreamed about the baby the other night. She looked like you! Are her eyes really blue? All babies’ eyes are blue for the first few months. I loved your letter about her—and talking to you. It is a breath of fresh spring air.
Love love,
Mother
Scott’s Cove, Darien
[March 1955?]
Dear Mrs. Vining,*
I would like to thank you for the beautiful review of my book in the New York Times book review section. But I have another debt to thank you for first. This November a friend sent me your little anthology with comments: The World in Tune. It came as I was going to my mother’s for Thanksgiving with the children. I tucked it in my bag for that lovely moment of reading before going to sleep. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving my mother had a stroke, which led to her last illness ending in her death in January.
Your little book during these two suspended months was so much more to me than reading. It was meat and drink, or a hand in the dark, or the thread that led Ariadne (was it?) out of the Minotaur’s maze. Not that I think death—or the experience of watching another die—is a dark cave. It was for me quite a magnificent experience. But a map is such a help in a territory where there are few maps. That is what your book did for me, gave me the feeling that someone else had been there before and had seen it from the same angle—in the same light—a confirmation of one’s own vision, of one’s own discovery of an old truth. I was very grateful to you and was able to give the book to my sister and my aunt who were waiting with me and who were equally helped by it.
And I have said nothing about your beautiful review. But I feel you will understand how much it meant to me coming as it did from you who had led the way during the winter. It was a kind of bridge for me between the real world of death to the rather unreal one just now of book publication. I could cross it—thanks to you.
Anne Lindbergh
Little House
Friday a.m. [1955]
D.D.*
I am sitting in the Little House. I have finished the draft of the Psychologist† (absolutely solid thoughts on love, sex, marriage, etc. all through twenty-six pages! Undiluted and rather wild. How Rosen will disapprove! I am rather anxious—though timid about it—to read it to you).
The object of this letter is to copy out for you something I found in my “Notebook File” as I was going through it this morning for new-old material to use in my next character, Frances. It seemed to me very pertinent to your piece on faith. I will copy part of it for you:
Dana and Spontaneity
I say: You do not know how to help him now, but when you are there it will spring out of the moment. You will know. That is your great gift, that spontaneous creative understanding that springs out of the moment itself, the problem itself, when you focus on it.
He said: Yes, that he knew this was his gift. It was hard sometimes to trust it. The young interns would say, “What will you say to her?” and he would say, “But I don’t know. How can I know until I listen to her? How can I know—it must unfold.”
And I went on thinking about it and realizing that this is what life is, or should be: this spontaneous activity springing from the moment creatively. This is faith. This is the God in Homer (which one?), saying to Ulysses’ son when he hesitates, “But how will I speak to Nestor, I have not the gift of words?” And the God replied: “Somewhat thou wilt look in thy own heart and somewhat the God will give thee what to say.”
It is the Quaker saying, “We must move as the way opens”—based on faith, on the premise that “the way” would open. This is Gideon at the walls of Jericho. And David with his stone.
I go on, into Zen philosophy (going with life, etc.), Krishnamurti, and Macmurray, and then go on to “It is in all the great moments of art or creativeness, and in the great moments of love also.”
Then I end up, “But one must have passed through a great deal of discipline before one can reach this point. (See Rilke’s letter on the creation of a poem. He says one must have had a lifetime of experiences and have thought and felt deeply upon them. One must have understood, worked, digested, etc. Then when all that experience, discipline, work, etc. has “become flesh and blood in you”—“nameless and no longer distinguishable,” then comes the first word of a poem.)
Then comes the spontaneous action. But it comes out of that long background of experience, thought, feeling, work, reasoning, etc. This is the ground for one’s faith. This is the “trimming of the branches” which must precede any flowering of the tree (in St.-Ex.’s image). Trimming the branches is an act of faith in the spring and the power of the sap of life. Yes?
Well, I have wandered on. But there is something here. I wish I could talk it all out with you. The essence of your faith seems to me in your saying, “it must unfold.”
I forgot to tell you about Rosen saying, “Well, you know, I’m prejudiced about you. I see you through Rosen-colored glasses!”
Writing this down I think, I hope you don’t see me Atchley as I am?
Darien, Conn. [1955]
Dear Ruth,*
Oh dear, oh dear! Well, anyway, your little Anne was made happy by the dress for a few minutes, at least. I am sorry for all the bitterness. Oh dear. But I didn’t put that bitterness into you or Harold. It is there. It has been there since you were children, just as there is bitterness in me, ready to be touched off by an accidental blunder of a stranger here, there, anywhere. One never knows just when it is coming and what touches it off.
I felt unable to answer your other letter; it was so full of bitterness and bad feeling, a total misunderstanding of what I had meant in my letter of last spring (I still haven’t read all that mail that came while I was in Englewood from unknown people but I do try to pick out the letters from friends, though often these are buried and lost) and total misunderstanding of my life. I just felt hopeless about it: sad and sorry and hopeless. But I thought I could send a present to Anne, a gay extravagant foolish present but a beautiful one. I enjoyed finding it and remember the color of her hair and imagining her in it.
But it was a mist
ake. I am sorry. I think I had better “Drop Dead” or drop out of your life if it makes you both so bitter and unhappy. You see, I cannot write long letters any more, to anyone. Call it time, call it old age, call it weariness and dwindling energy: I haven’t got it any more to give in such profusion! What I have, I give to the children. What is left, I give to writing. And there isn’t anything else left over, a crumb here and there. Of course, crumbs are awful. I can understand your despising them. I am sorry, but the loaf has gone. I wish it hadn’t. I mind too. But there it is.
I think probably it is just as well that you are disillusioned about me. It is a terrible burden you put on people, to dream them up into something they never were or could be and then throw them out for not living up to your dream!
You see me surrounded by people crowding to give me love! I am glutted with it! Heavens! Do you really believe all the people who crowd my life want to give me something? They all—or almost all—want something (even as you and I!). They want money or an autograph or a book, or for me to address their club or church society or meeting, or they want a letter. They want help on their problems, they want understanding, attention, solutions (just as you and I do).
Last year I felt overwhelmed (I was exhausted by the long illness, the split life, the grief of death, and the months of work after). There was the crowd after Mother’s death. It seemed to me everyone wanted something: money or clothes or furniture or possessions. And then that enormous mail on the book—all those people wanting things. And I felt inadequate and squeezed dry, and wondered why they should think I was the fountain of goods or wealth or wisdom or understanding?
But really, now I understand better. I see they don’t really want bureaus and chairs or clothes or books or autographs—or even letters. They all are hungry for love—just like you and me. We all want that little postcard sent to us alone out of free will. Yes, that I understand, and forgive. But I still can’t supply it, except in my own limited world. And I am unwilling to cheat and give false coin to pretend I have love or money or answers for all!
I am most anxious to give to my own children enough love and understanding so that they won’t grow up with an aching void in them—like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one’s life trying, trying to make up for what one didn’t get that was one’s birthright, asking the wrong people for it.
As for your pictures of me sitting here glutted by an excess of love! Dear me, there are other things to envy me. My children first of all: five children and a daughter-in-law and a grandchild. Yes, they are enviable. Or you can envy my money, possessions, fame, and what these things can do for one. These are fair causes of envy.
But surely you don’t equate the Midas touch of money—or the Medusa’s head of fame—with love? Oh no, Ruth.
And as for that crowd of “interesting exciting friends” I live in! Dear me, where are they? Where were they ever? They are not here. You are thinking of Cranbrook*—six weeks that were different from the rest of my life—that you think of as a permanent state.
Yes, one is lonely, and loneliness is the natural state of man. But here and there one touches occasionally people one can communicate with and it is wonderful. It is a great deal. It is worth living for, I think.
In the meantime, there is your Anne and my Reeve, and your Harold and my Charles. This is worth living for too. This is life, in fact. I am glad you are finding a new, free life out west. Your letters before you left sounded so dreading of the break that I was worried for you. But, as I said before, your courage has always been rewarded. And Harold’s courage … perhaps it was more his courage this time? I feel so. And I am glad he has a world equal to his courage and energy.
Now—the morning has gone and mornings should go to work. I am almost fifty and there are still some things I want to write in this life—a few. I can’t say them all.
Little House
Sun., April 24th [1955]
D.D.,
I feel so much better about you, having talked to you this morning. Yesterday, though I did not let myself write, or get to a desk, I thought about you all day and wrote in my mind very emphatic letters to you! All the time: while cleaning house, throwing out old flowers, arranging new, driving Anne to flute lesson and Reeve to buy a paint brush (she and a friend are building a shack in the woods!), I was outside most of the day in shorts and it was warm and lovely, but I was obsessed with pleas and sermons to you. I guess it is just as well I didn’t write them.
This morning—what is left of it—I have cooled down. (My Little House is cold and damp. The stove won’t light and the electric heater is burned out. I have just traipsed back to the house for another.) I am also relieved. I feel you are still there. Yesterday I wasn’t sure. And I also felt frustrated because there seemed to be nothing I could do now—or ever—for you. If I could only give you back some of the strength and hope and faith in life that you always have given me.
I can hear you saying many times: “But Anne, you are ill. If you could get some rest, get by yourself, you would look at it all differently.” I could say it to you, but it would not help you because the cure seems worse than the disease and so you feel trapped and hopeless. I am sure this is partly if not wholly the pain. Pain simply blots out past and future. There is no future and only a very unpleasant now. This is of the nature of pain. I should have remembered that Thursday for you seemed to want no future.
At this point, someone from the outside (a “Dana” for Dana!) should come along and say, “This is my department. You are to do as I say. You are to cut your hours in half. You are to rest. You are to go on a long vacation with a whole new set of friends.” If I were your wife I would be such a tyrant. I would snatch you away, complaining, to some island like St. Croix, where you could do nothing but lie in the sand, drink gin and tonics and occasionally walk by moonlight. You are overtired from years of overwork. Now there is no tragic or terrific emergency to keep you going (all of us whom you were worried about made our various ports or halfway stations), you are having a let-down.
The let-down is natural enough, but the cure is a nightmare. The nightmare has to do with none of us: it is the threatened desertion of work. I can see this and I understand it. I know what your work has been to you, a little. It is meat and drink and sleep and love and home and human relationships and base and creativity and escape and peace. It is, and more so, what my first little house on the point was to me, before the hurricane took it away. It is as if someone said to me: “Your eyes are failing and to prevent total blindness you must stop writing.” The cure is almost worse than the disease. Should I then write the novel and use up all the light that was left? It is hard to work differently. Not to write at high speed, strike the iron while it is hot, etc. But surely you would be advising me to restrain myself: to work a little each day, to make new patterns of work, instead of throwing it all away in one desperate gesture. To preserve the light longer.
You are now at a point in your career—wise enough and experienced enough and adored enough, and yet young enough—to let all that experience and wisdom and creativeness blossom in some of the new philosophies of teaching that you have envisaged and practiced for years. It is a crime if you don’t conserve yourself for this. The people who use you as a crutch will find other crutches. Crutches are replaceable. Originality and creativeness are not. They are very rare!
You have this. Now is your time to use it. Run away. Retire. Stop up your ears. Say you’re going to St. Croix to study tropical diseases. Say you’re under doctor’s orders. Anything. But don’t go on living half-alive. You don’t want to drop that way, do you?
I have said nothing personal. How can I? Let me say only that I am one of those who will not “adjust” to your dropping dead from overwork. My life would be cut in half by the absence of this wonderful communication which has so upheld and enriched and guided and warmed and lit my life (only part of it, alas). No one can, could, or would take your place. Is this n
othing, Dana? Please stay alive. We will have some sharing yet. Perhaps the best, if you will only leave your slave-bench for an hour or two a day!
My love always,
A.
Darien
Saturday, May 7th, 1955
Dearest Con,
I am now at home. I never got to the important things I had to say to you—that I thought out Thursday night lying awake after going into the hospital to see Dana, now flat on his back in the hospital taking tests. He must stay another two weeks. They took a “lumbar test” (testing spinal fluid looking for a possible tumor to explain his constant headaches) which was not entirely satisfactory, though not necessarily negative. So he must lie there another two weeks and then take another test of the same kind. If it is no worse, or better, he can and will, I believe now, go on a six-week vacation—alone. Where is still undecided. If the tests are worse—well, one can’t face that.
Dana himself felt rather better: less headache and more resigned to a vacation and taking it easy, etc. But he is of course in suspense and I felt a kind of desperate heart-ache seeing him there—his life-quality so subdued and myself so raw with the sense of mortality we have been living in. (Of course, he must grow old and die—a fact one never faces about those one loves who are older than oneself.)
Lying in bed at night (sleeplessness for me is due not so much to too much activity as to too little time to think things out alone—too little contemplative life. It takes its toll at night). I realized something very simple and obvious but that I had not faced before: we are now living in the time in our lives when we must lose our parents—all of them, not only our Father and Mother. And to face these years—year after year of goodbyes—is, or seems, unbearable. But it is natural and must be borne and there must be another way of looking at it. We must not be rooted in the past or in our parents—or even in our own loves and fortunes which are so transitory, but in our children. And I mean by this all our children, as I said all our parents. Whoever one can pass on one’s joy and insight and wisdom to, whether it be Smith College, as it was for Mother, or the young who sit at one’s feet hungry for insight, or the people who read what one writes (we are daughters for Mina in this sense), as well as one’s own children. This was the truly rooting quality of my week with Barbara and Jon and their baby, and of your weekends with Saran. It is not just “life carrying on.” It has a more precise and personal and functional meaning: this is how I must function from now on—not looking for shade and windbreak for oneself, but providing it for the young trees growing up at one’s feet. The image is not perfect because it is a function that is both active and passive. While nourishing others you are nourished yourself. I have not really thought it out very well—but now I think I have something to work at.
Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986 Page 15
