At the moment I can only look a week or two ahead at a time—I suppose it will all get done—somehow.‡
This is long past breakfast and I must get to the day’s work. I hope this last month is not too hard for Barbara. It is so long and difficult and exhausting to be on one’s feet.
I keep saying to CAL, “I think they’ve had enough, now, for a while. I think Barbara needs a rest.”
And he always says, “Now you leave them alone—they know what they’re doing!” I’m sure you do—but I worry anyway—I miss you and love you—will try to write again—will call anyway before we leave—
Love to all,
Mother
Locarno [Switzerland]
Tuesday, February 14th [1961]
D.D.
I am here in Locarno—still rather giddy at the change. Charles drove me down Saturday—just for one night—but it was such a happy day and evening, I quite forgot my pain at missing the weekend of skiing. I guess it wasn’t really the skiing.
Kurt and Helen had visiting them here William Jovanovich, the present head of Harcourt Brace, with whom they have just signed an agreement! He is young, vigorous, intelligent (young man on his way UP!), evidently appreciates Kurt and Helen for what they are, and has offered them enormous freedom to publish their special books within his firm.
By a rare combination of luck we were all here together and Charles was much impressed by the man. They got on very well together. W.J. is an example of one of those extraordinary myths in America. His father was a day laborer in Yugoslavia. They came to America “with tags on them,” according to W.J. (that is, they could speak no English) and lived in Colorado. W.J. worked his way up into Harvard and Harvard graduate school, became a book-seller at Harbrace, and very swiftly worked his way up to be head of it—in his early thirties. Rather fantastic story. As you can see, he has tremendous energy and imagination and—what one wouldn’t expect—perception and sensitivity.
I do hope it is going to work out for Kurt. At the moment, everyone is in a honeymoon stage of excitement over each other. Kurt looks like a different man: alive and back in his world again, with power behind him. And Helen has lost that really painful look of worry and responsibility over Kurt. Charles, of course, was delighted to have it work out that I should return to Harcourt Brace (“The homing pigeon!” as Helen said), and it all seems rather too good to be true.
I have hardly gotten to work in such an atmosphere, but will soon, I hope.
I do eat at my table each morning, but feel almost too giddy: with the sunshine, beauty of the mountains across the lake, the sudden lifting of housework and responsibility, and the general feeling of spring in the air. I can hardly bear to stay indoors and walk for hours up mountain roads with yellow primroses dotting the rocky slopes and violets in crannies and frail pink blossoms suddenly surprising you around a corner. Also the people one meets on the roads are really such a different race from those around Vevey. They are really Italian: warm and relaxed.
The weather cannot last—nor my mood—I know—but it is fun for a change.
Anne is coming Thursday for a scant week—and will play the piano in the mornings (in the ballroom) while I work. Sightseeing or walking evenings.
I am at last attacking the problem of sequence—or cohesion. So far see no solution, but perhaps we can work out something together. I cannot see it whole.
Reeve, whom I called last night, sounded very happy in her pension (“I like it, Mother”) which is a relief. But, as Jean said, “She just seems to have a music-box playing in her all the time”—Must dress for dinner.…
A.
February 15th [1961], a.m.
Just a line to record quite a delirious evening out at a restaurant—supper with Bill Jovanovich (we are all suddenly on first-name basis!), the Wolffs and Erich Remarque.* It was very gay and I refused no “cups.” I wish you had been there to sparkle.
Erich Remarque came in rigidly and punctiliously drunk—if you know what I mean—but loosened up with the steak. Kept calling me “Baby” across the table, with an occasional polite question: “Are you married, Madame?” All of this was so deliciously funny for the rest of us and never annoying—as drunks usually are. Bill J. is very sympathetic and electric—too young for me, though!
Your giddy
A.
Locarno
Wednesday, February 22nd, 1961
D.D.
Your letter to Locarno from the midst of blizzards and catastrophes (two friends very ill and your little Vassar girl with a concussion) made me feel quite sad—what a profession! Yet, of course, it is balanced by the times when you bring the miraculous about, when healing, happiness, usefulness, flowering, springs from your hands. Perhaps the mixture of joy and sorrow, the proportions, are no different from ordinary life (and professions?) but the responsibility is so much greater. And in February it weighs more heavily on you. Are you not going to take some vacation? How about flying over to Paris with Margot! Not impossible, you know, at all. I would come to Paris to see you and what fun we would have!
Of course, I rather feel I’ve had my vacation. We had ten days of dazzling sunshine—warmth, spring flowers opening. The last two have been bad, and today a wet snow is falling suddenly, blanketing out mountains, lake, everything.
Anne leaves tonight after a scant week. It has been a joy to have her and satisfies me that she is getting along all right now in Paris. I have also worked each morning, part of the time alone, and partly with the Wolffs, reading and criticizing the book (we have now finished reading it together—I read it aloud).* A great many things have come out—come clearer. I have not really done much writing here, but living and thinking and reading in such an atmosphere has given me new vision on the book. I see it again with “the eyes of love” since they do. And this—whether it is right or wrong—is more constructive and stimulating.
I feel now I must go back and work over, implement, the insights gained here. Of course, I don’t want to go, and yet I feel the time has come for me to “fly alone.” One knows when one must go back into one’s cell and work. I have, however, kept open in my mind and plans the possibility of coming back sometime in late April or May for a new “shot in the arm,” when I get all blind and unbelieving again, as I do periodically.
Also the possibility of taking two weeks in the summer with them somewhere to “finish it up”—God willing! I do feel very strongly that I must finish this book before I go home to the U.S. sometime this summer. (It will not survive another moving!)
The new head of Harbrace (Jovanovich) also read the book at one reading the day before he left, a fresh eye and ear. He is perceptive and very intelligent, if in some ways perhaps naïve, rather non-introspective: I would think a rather healthy active American executive. I was very nervous and still do not know exactly what impression it made on him (I think he was anxious not to hurt either the Wolffs or me). But he said about the same things to both of us: some of the things please me, others troubled me. He was very moved by it (he said), did not find it monotonous at all. “It was static,” yes, but it had “inner movement” so it carried you along. Found the characters real, except for Aunt Harriet, who was unconvincing to him. “And once there is a character in a book that is unconvincing, it makes you doubt the others.” (Quite a perceptive comment. I always felt she was a stock character, so this doesn’t bother me.) It made him feel terribly sorry for women—all women. He was so glad he was a man! “All the women will cry over it.” (Oh dear! Have I written another feminist tract?)
Well, the only thing I’m going to do on his criticisms is to try and revitalize Aunt Harriet, or cut her down drastically, or cut her out entirely. There are other things to do, of course, at least three or four months of work—as I work, if only I can keep my vision.
But you, now, you need a vacation. Is there no excuse you could use to get abroad between now and August? Some ailing Maharaja or King? No important conference to attend? Don’t say impossible, try to
think of an opening. How good it would be if you and Margot and I could meet in Paris! It’s been such ages since I saw you. But for me to fly back to N.Y. would be too fragmenting, I feel.
Le Coteau–La Tour [Switzerland]*
[Spring 1961]
Dearest Con,
Back in La Tour to my great relief. We got in Sunday night late, driving all the way from Venice (ten hours—Anne drove half of it). Monday was spent recuperating and getting Reeve’s hair cut and some clothes for Paris (Reeve). Yesterday the girls left for Paris—Reeve to have a week with Anne alone, I to be here a week alone, recovering from the worst cold I have had in years (caught in that badly heated fourth-class hotel—that was what was coming on when I wrote you that complaining letter!). Since I haven’t had a cold all winter I really can’t complain, but ten days of sightseeing in Italy is not the way to recover from the flu. It wasn’t warm enough to sit in the sun on a beach, and the hotel rooms were so ugly and gloomy. I couldn’t have borne going to bed for a day even if I’d been urged to. Actually it turned out not to be such a bad vacation (though not the sun-on-a-beach-in-Sicily we had originally planned). CAL stayed with us the whole time—quite a triumph. He must have enjoyed it.
The day with the girls alone here was good, and I had a chance to talk to Anne about going back to Radcliffe next year. After I took them to the station, I bought a new dress and then lots of flowers (quince blossoms and tulips) to make the apartment look gay for Helen Wolff, who arrived from Locarno for the night. I did not realize she had come on an errand of mercy: really just to see me and tell me about the book Kidnap which is coming out in June.* (I was really so moved that Mina and the Wolffs should be so concerned.) Of course I am concerned too. It has such nightmarish explosive material and is hard to gauge what its effect may be—on CAL, the children, the grandchildren and even on me.
I felt chiefly that it was an extremely dangerous book, not so much for us now as for others more in the limelight (the Kennedys, etc.) to publish and sensationalize in the way they are evidently trying to do. There are too many crazy people wandering around to whom such a book and such ideas will appeal. Everyone is endangered by sensationalism in the field of crime.
Of course, this is what the publishers are trying to do—to make sensational headlines, sales, impressions in everyone’s minds. But they may not be successful at all. It may just be a flare-up that burns out quickly. We are now reading their publicity plans. Reader’s Digest and Book-of-the-Month Club talking it up really shocks me. I am, of course, shocked in the way I was originally, shocked at people using crime, tragedy, suffering to get themselves a little attention, as if it were gold instead of blood. It is still incomprehensible to me: politicians standing up beside the ladder to be photographed, etc.* My resentment that tragedy should be smeared by the feet of men. But of course, we have seen much worse examples since our private tragedy: the war, the concentration camps. What horrors were opened up by those years and for so many. It became not the exception: it was the rule.
Tragedy of course passes—or rather the person who suffered it dies and another person lives on, and remembers it as in another life. This does not change what one feels at the exploitation of crime and evil for gain—gain that may cause more crime and evil.
And there are the practical aspects of it—the publicity of such a book. Any publicity makes living in the U.S. more difficult. This is worse than “any” publicity because it heightens to an enormous shadow something that was a part of our lives, now over. How will the shadow affect Jon and his children, Krissie going to school? Reeve back in Darien High School? Anne in Radcliffe? And that store of bitterness built up for so long in CAL? I don’t really feel I can estimate.
Fortunately, neither Jon nor Land has had much publicity. But Jon was brought up in the shadow and it could affect him—perhaps should.… If there is much publicity Krissie should be watched, etc. We will be over here till late August or September and it may easily all have evaporated—or never even come to much.
At this point last night Charles came in the door unexpectedly from Uncle (about whom he is worried and wants to get to a clinic)† and we discussed this book and many things. He relieved my mind quite a lot—doesn’t think it will make much stir. There have been other books on the case.‡ Books don’t touch the publicity of newspapers and he doubts if it will get much newspaper or radio and TV publicity. He sent a note to Jon, but didn’t think it would affect their lives at all. I hope he is right. He doesn’t seem upset about it and says, in any case, nothing can be done about it. To try and stop it brings more publicity to the book.
This letter is already much too long and has been interrupted. I expect to have a quiet week alone (C. will try to get Uncle to a Zurich hospital) until Reeve comes back from Paris. It suddenly seems like home to me, and if it is good weather I can think of nothing nicer than to sit in the sun on my balcony looking out over blooming fruit trees.
I must not go on—C. is off tonight for Zurich.
From Montreux → Venice
April 22nd, 1961
D.D.
I am on the right car on the right train (something I always doubt!) on my way to Venice for a week (with Helen and Kurt and Bill Jovanovich, Hotel Monaco, Grand Canal, Venice). There isn’t time for a letter but that is the address. I will be back in La Tour a week from today.
CAL called me last night from Zurich where he has got Uncle in a hospital undergoing tests. Uncle, now that he has capitulated, is simply delighted with the hospital, doctors, nurses, treatment, etc. (He is getting all the attention he wants, and needs, and always refuses, now forced upon him.) CAL fears he may have something seriously wrong with him.
Scott spent the night in the apartment last night. We had supper and talked a little. He’s quite enamored with Europe—wants to come back. He and Reeve drove me to the station at 7:00 a.m., and Scott keeps the car for the week I’m off (“convenient for dating”!). It is raining—too bad—but I have my rubbers and rain hat (you’ll be glad to hear, I know!) and am sitting in a first-class compartment (Wow! as Anne would say) and am going to stay at a reasonably comfortable hotel. “Not a deluxe hotel,” Kurt writes, “rather bourgeois.” But I’m sure it will be deluxe to me!
I have been buying newspapers furiously (yesterday and earlier) to try to find out what is happening on the U.S.–Cuba situation.* How can the world survive so many appallingly rocky situations!?
April 26th, Venice
Since writing this we have been startled by what Kurt announced to me as “civil war in France.” The French papers are hysterical, the American ominous. It seems most fantastically unreal here in glass-perfect Venice (the sun has come out today!). Or rather, this shimmering world is the unreal one, I am afraid.
April 26th
The latest news today is the collapse of the revolt* and a totally unified France behind De Gaulle. The newspapers of the response in France were quite thrilling to read. Perhaps Anne has lived through a historic moment. At any rate it must have given her a sense of France and of living history that nothing else could do.
April 28th—Last p.m.
Our days have been very full of sightseeing with Kurt or Helen—marvelous guides to Europe. I feel the world of Venice, indeed of Italian art, has been unlocked for me—not to speak of delicious meals, trips by boat around Venice, walks and gondola rides. Bill J. left after three days. He is great fun and we are an easy and sympathetic four. Kurt survives extraordinarily well and plans to go back to the U.S. for a visit in November. Helen has heard of an intricate heart treatment—operation—inserting a wire in the heart …? this is as far as I can follow. They want to go to you for advice on it.
In fact, we have spoken often of you, Helen suggesting, “Couldn’t he be persuaded to join us on one of these trips?” (Kurt has planned out my Italian education—Florence is next.) How lovely it would be! I have been deliciously spoiled on this trip. Breakfast in bed and wine at every meal! It has been a real vacation.
&nb
sp; 11:15, Saturday, April 29th
We are now on the train bound home. I leave Helen and Kurt in Milan and get to Montreux at 7:15 tonight where I hope Scott and Reeve and perhaps Charles will meet me. It is again lowering and rainy as it has been much of the week but we have had some nice days. It hasn’t mattered too much—churches and museums to see. It makes such a difference to see a painting in the church for which it was painted instead of in some museum in another country. (pause for lunch)
6:00 p.m. Back in the Rhône Valley
We are at least a half hour late. I have left the Wolffs at Milan and got on the train for Lausanne: a very crowded train—four Swiss women and an Italian man in my first-class apartment. He is by far the most interesting and charming. I have talked to him a little while the four buxom Swiss look on with some disapproval—or envy? He married a Swiss. I wonder why?
I must finish this scrawl and mail it in the Montreux station. Have been reading Bill Maxwell’s book, The Chateau, about two Americans visiting France after the war. Pleasant, perceptive, and to me very reminiscent of my own over-prickly sensitivity on being a foreigner in France (or Switzerland). But also a bit wispy. Margot says it has had good reviews. It is pleasant reading, as if I’d been with them and been in the company of very nice, sensitive, perceptive and witty people—
A.
P.S. B.J.’s bon mot on Princeton: “The leisure of the theory class.”
Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986 Page 22
