Little House (Cooler on!)
August 26th, 1961
D.D.
I am very glad to have the galley*—and the little note tucked inside—and have been reading it in the evenings. It reads very smoothly and swiftly, though one wants to reread the succinct and wise bits, like that on medical education—the whole of education, it is. I am aware, reading it, of your wisdom and how rare the really wise are—like Judge Hand,† who is now gone. So few like him, and you, who are wise and gay.
I am back at my desk again and it is a great relief. I go each morning, with interruptions: trunks arriving, children coming or going, men to cut grass, etc. It took some time to get into it again. I am struggling with some positive final conclusion for Francis and it is difficult. However it is good to be struggling!
It is very hot and humid here and one wakes as if one hadn’t breathed enough all night. However it gets better as the day goes on and gets hotter but less humid.
I have also accomplished quite a lot, in and out of the house. Reeve and I saw Rosemary Hall. It is a top-notch school with a good young alert headmistress who came from Concord Academy. She seemed fresh, spontaneous, sensible, warm and friendly, as well as awake to all the best in a scholarly approach. It is only college preparatory—and nice girls. Reeve will have to commute by train or car but is so relieved not to have to go to Darien High. I said I hoped her father would approve. “It’s expensive, you know.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “Then he won’t let me go.” I said I thought he would. (I am determined that she go, but want his approval if possible.)
“What can we say?” she went on.
“I think he will understand in terms of the environment,” I said.
“Oh, I know,” Reeve said suddenly. “I have a friend—a very nice girl—who’s been seduced three times!” I must have looked shocked, for she added, “She used to be a nice girl.” I agreed this would be a telling point with her father!
Scott has made his college tour and seems quite interested in colleges in the U.S., especially since the draft board says he’s less likely to be drafted if he’s in college in this country. Anne arrives Monday. Her letter says she feels much better and less panicky.
This must go—I am stealing morning time to write and shouldn’t. The big house is full of young: Scott and a friend, Reeve and a friend, and the Victrola going all day and night! I let them do their own breakfast, picnic on cold things, noon, and cook a hot easy supper at night. Ernestine came for one night while the children were away. We had fun and laughed.
Last night we (children and I) swam under the half-eclipsed moon, phosphorescence streaming from our fingers. This is reviving and my knee feels better.
I hope you are getting a rest and some fun?
Fall 1961 [DIARY]
Weeks have gone by again. No diary writing. Life becomes less vivid when I’m not writing in my diary. And yet I don’t let myself use “good writing time”—that is, mornings, for diary writing, except when I’ve come to the end of a period of book-writing, a temporary surcease, like this weekend.
I have been revising chapters steadily to get them in shape for Helen to see. She is now over here from Europe for two or three weeks. I need a fresh eye on this book very much. It’s one’s vision that flags, not one’s will power. As long as I can see something to do, to change, insert, or rewrite, then I’m hopeful. (“This will change it, this will make the difference!”) But when I can’t see, and feel it is all uniformly poor, then I am depressed. Compared to the vision I had of it originally, so many years ago, it seems like a total failure. But then, I always feel this way at the end of every book. One outgrows books in the process of writing. One outgrows the problems in them, which become stale, bromidic, unimportant. As Jung says somewhere, we don’t solve problems, we outgrow them.
I have certainly learned a great deal in the writing. It is not a novel, of course, though it is fictional. I have written a series of essays on love, marriage, relationships, etc., and put these into the mouths of not very real characters, speaking for me. But neither the characters nor the situations are real ones from my life. They are extrapolations of characters and situations. The writer of fiction extrapolates from tiny items in his own or other people’s lives, observed around him. Sometimes extrapolations are false, even in the scientific world; how much more so, then, in the world of fiction? Yet it is also true that you do not need to drink a pitcher of water, wine, or milk, to know the taste.
At this point of despair in writing, one says to oneself: Then, if it is so poor, why not throw it away? Why finish it? The answer to this, I suppose, lies in that saying of Isak Dinesen I have thought of so many times in the past three or four years, “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, without faith and without hope, suddenly the work will finish itself.” One goes on working “without faith and without hope.” And yet, if one works like that, “every day a little,” surely, that is faith?
I wonder always when I reread the quotation if she didn’t mean “without fear,” and often substitute “fear” for “faith.” (But perhaps Isak Dinesen was one of those people who have no fear?) It is fear that is so crippling to me: fear of failure, fear of mistakes, fear of criticism. One must work without fear as well as without hope. Perhaps both are pride, and certainly external to the heart of work. One shouldn’t think externally, in terms of results, rewards, or punishments. One ought to be immersed in the process and not dissipate the focus by imagining someone looking over one’s own shoulder: reader, critic or family, or even one’s own self-conscious self.
Another way of saying it would be that the writer must stay centered in the moment. Both fear and hope are in the future and one should not be thinking of the future. To write one must be steeped in the present. Is this what she meant?
Helen came out last week to go over the manuscript with me and took the copy in to Harcourt Brace for another editor to read. She feels I should stop working at it and put it into galleys. She says I am just afraid to let it go. This is true, of course. While she was here I felt buoyed up by her presence: such a rare person, understanding, sensitive, perceptive and yet very strong and direct.
But when I put her on the train for New York, I felt sunk. To lose both Helen and my manuscript, both the mother and the child, in one blow, was an amputation, almost a physical one. I did not know what to do with myself, and could hardly get through my day.
Christmas at Aspen 1961 [DIARY]
I am sitting on my bunk bed on the top floor of the big ski-barn at Aspen. The young have gone out skiing despite the snow which is gently falling—breathing, I want to say—around us, shutting us off from the outer world, muffling all sounds, enclosing us in a world of our own, like sleep or night. I am waiting for the snow to ease off slightly before I venture out. I’m afraid I’ve become a fair-weather skier. I have to see to ski, and am not limber enough to take the bumps blind, as the young do. But what a joy it is, still, to feel oneself dancing downhill on powder snow, a delight in being alive, a sense, or an illusion, of being young and free. How can the young appreciate this? They have it anyway, daily.
We have been here a week. CAL delivered the manuscript of my book, ready for galleys, on the way to the plane. How quickly all those weeks of work dropped behind as the plane roared off. I haven’t had a minute to think of it since, immersed in this intense family atmosphere. We met our two older boys and their wives and families in this halfway point for a Christmas reunion.
After the cloistered cell of the writer, this is a plunge back into the world of motherhood and grandmotherhood, acting as housekeeper, shopper, cook and babysitter—with many helping hands. We are thirty relatives in all, in a huge rented barn: seven small children, four grandparents, two grand-aunts, fourteen to fifteen young adults, a great-grandmother and an infant baby. This last, my latest grandchild, only two weeks old, spreads a glow of divinity from her basket in the cente
r of the turmoil.
This huge family reunion is, in a way, a grandmother’s dream. (Also, I may add, occasionally a nightmare!) How we long to have our grown-up family again under one roof for celebrations. It is the dream of the old family homestead that some of us had in our youth, the tradition of welcoming the children and grandchildren back for Christmas or Thanksgiving. “Over the hills in an open sleigh, to Grandmother’s house we go,” I used to read in my childhood primer.
It is now only a dream because it has become almost impossible. Family homesteads large enough to welcome several families are rare. Grandmothers no longer have “hired hands” to help them. Children are scattered too far for a journey home by sleigh. Travel is expensive and cumbersome for the young. It was different in my mother’s childhood. She lived in her grandmother’s big house until she was nine. And when she was a grandmother, she was still able to carry on the tradition, welcoming her children and grandchildren back into a big house. Even then it was rare; in my generation, it is almost unknown.
But the tradition remains, a nostalgic memory to be lived out on special occasions like this.
Three or four years now, we have repeated our family reunion at Aspen. I begin to realize how short is the period when one can unite one’s grown-up family. In a few years the new families become too large and too scattered. Even their interests become too scattered. As time goes by they have no longer as much in common to unite them. They cease to feel as strongly about the old family homestead; they are creating new centers of their own. Is this why we middle-aged mothers make such an effort to create this kind of occasion—because it is something that is slipping from us?
January 16th, 1962 [DIARY]
We flew back from Aspen on January 1st, to find the galleys waiting for me in the piled-up mail on the hall table, along with masses of unopened Christmas cards, bills and letters. The bills I pulled out, and a few letters, but the Christmas cards are still unopened. Everything had to be pushed aside to correct the galleys and return them as soon as possible to the publisher. Another two weeks of intense work: reading, cutting, changing.
It is strange how different a book looks in galleys—actually, the first time you see it in print. All kinds of faults, passed over in the typewritten manuscript, jump out of the printed page. CAL has gone over the galleys, page by page, making lists of technical errors, thousands of small details, commas, repetitions, roughness in sound or construction. His eye and ear are very good, and his lists stimulate me to make ones of my own. In the end one no longer sees the book as a whole. There is nothing left but shreds of fiber. Fiber by fiber, one has torn it apart.
In periods like this, time seems suspended; life held at bay. One does not look ahead either with dread or anticipation; one simply lives from day to day, from galley-page to galley-page, those long flopping scrolls rolling over the desk. Then there comes the day when one goes over the penciled corrections in ink. No more rubbing out and changing, now. One glues down the last typewritten inserts, seals the big envelopes and drops them in the mailbox. One can do no more. At this point I have become completely blind and have no idea what I have written.
Amey* called me up two days after the galleys were mailed. She had seen a big advertisement in the newspaper for the magazine serialization. “Well, I see you’re splashed all over the papers again,” she started out acidly.
I cringed. “Yes,” I said, “I nearly fainted myself when I saw that ad.”
“What kind of a book is it?” she went on curiously.
“I really don’t know,” I said truthfully, groping for a label. “It’s a lot of people’s thoughts at a wedding.”
“I hope they’re nice people?” she asked crisply.
“Some of them are,” I ventured.
(With alarm) “It’s not a nasty book, is it?”
Oh dear, I do dread her seeing it. It isn’t only that she may think she is the model for “Aunt Harriet” (she isn’t). Even if none of the characters are taken from life, there are always a certain number of scrips and scraps from the past that offend relatives. And the talk about sex and morality, coming from me, will shock her. (“She knows better,” I can hear her comment.)
Well, it’s too late now. The manuscript is in the hands of the publisher. I always want to hide in a hole at this point. But it isn’t that I am ashamed of what I have written. It’s partly the old business of having been brought up to “be a good girl” and to want to please everyone. One knows, at fifty, that pleasing everyone is not only impossible but undesirable. But the old conditioning remains: dreading people’s dislike, scorn or disapproval. And with me there is another subtle illogical factor. Instinctively, I find myself feeling that all publishing is indecent exposure. If one could, one would like to write and write and never have it seen. Or perhaps the artist wants to publish and the woman wants to hide.
I remember once seeing an explanation of this odd feminine reaction in a book by a Jungian. The writer said that woman so instinctively wants to be veiled, hidden, in the background, that it is almost a violation of her nature to expose herself as she must if she comes out openly with a work of art. Rilke touches on the same theme, less clinically, when he says of woman, “She, whose strength has always lain in her being found.”
January 30th, 1962 [DIARY]
These last weeks have been a hiatus, one of those desert stretches in which nothing happens or grows. When the galleys left and CAL went abroad at the same time, I felt a sudden let-down. The pressure of the last weeks—even months—has been constant working toward a set goal, finishing the book.
Now the goal is reached, the book done. Where am I? Nowhere, I find, to my surprise. My husband is away, my children back in school, and my book off my hands. I feel lost, at loose ends. With no mark ahead, I walk unsteadily.
I remember once, on an early flying trip out west, we landed on a flat mesa above the De Chelly, Del Muerto Canyon. We walked along the plateau until we found a trail we had seen from the air, followed it, clambering down a steep serpentine gully and along the river bank below to the cave dwellings under the cliffs. After spending the day exploring caves, we climbed back up the cliff and retraced the trail toward our plane. It was a long day and I was tired, but I was able to walk swiftly and steadily as long as there was a trail. When it petered out at the end, I hardly had the strength to lift my feet, and kept stumbling over mesquite and stones. It is like this now. I am off the trail and keep tripping over small stones and weeds. I do not clearly know where I am going.
I have tried, putting on city clothes, going into New York, seeing friends for lunch, accepting every invitation that came my way. A great success at first. It seems helpful to externalize oneself. (See, I look like a different person, one says, glancing in the mirror.) In reality, one cuts oneself in half. One locks up the unhappy goose girl in the cellar and then, putting on a new face and new clothes, goes out into the world. One talks and laughs, takes interest in other people. (See, I’m being quite gay—I’m fine!) But all the time the goose girl is crying in the cellar.
Finally, one realizes that friends can be just as much of a distraction as duties. One cannot find oneself here, either. Neither duties nor distractions cure the rootless feeling, and I find I need roots very badly. I try to find mine in home, children, and writing. But with only one child left at home, my husband away, and no work at the moment, I feel very adrift.
One cannot root oneself in friends, although old friends do give one a temporary sense of home, a substitute for roots. But it is not fair to use them as lifelines. It is an exploitation of one’s friends, a denial of friendship. Sharing is permissible; leaning is not.
But actually this is just as true of the relationship with husband and children. You cannot demand that they give you security. This too is exploitation. Perhaps we are not meant to find roots in anything or anyone outside ourselves.
Of course, there are always the small daily joys that keep me alive. I make a game sometimes of counting them: waki
ng in the morning to the sound of wood-doves, lying in bed a moment longer watching the patterns of sunlight rippling through the Venetian blinds onto the opposite wall, golden coins piling up and spilling over endlessly. The first cup of coffee and the walk to the Little House; the glint of bare twigs against burnished winter sky. Skating in the afternoon on a neighbor’s pond, bright figures spinning on the slatey ice. The paper narcissus in the living room that has just flowered and smells like spring. Reeve playing her guitar in the kitchen as I make supper or clear up. Listening to a radio concert at night, propped up in bed, or reading a good book before I go to sleep. I’m in the middle of An Experiment in Mindfulness, by Shattuck, the account of a British admiral who spent a month in a Buddhist meditation center—a very precise, practical, unfuzzy investigation of attempts to control and observe the mind. One realizes how little control we in the West actually have of the mind (as opposed to how much we can cram into it) and how much we could learn from the East, especially in the realm of intuition and the unconscious. How to use the unconscious and keep in touch with it. I am certainly out of touch with mine.
Kennedy Dinner
Sunday, May 13th, 1962
D.D.
We came back yesterday from Washington. I still feel a bit dizzy from the party. It was really quite a lot of fun, though not at all what I expected. It was an enormous party—about two hundred people—very well managed and quite gay and beautiful. There were really so many people that it was like a large reception, and when you saw someone you knew you felt like throwing your arms around them. I practically fell into the arms of the David Rockefellers, the MacLeishes, the Légers (St.-John Perse), René D’Harnoncourt, Alfred Frankfurter (editor of Art News), Thornton Wilder, etc.*
CAL and I took a taxi to the White House after taking the shuttle down from New York, and after picking up CAL’s newly made “black tie” outfit on Pennsylvania Ave. It was about five p.m. and the downstairs rooms of the White House were full of people arranging flowers and moving chairs about. We waited in a small reception room (it had two Cézannes in it) next to the big cleared ballroom where the Isaac Stern Trio was practicing in their shirtsleeves for the concert they were to give after dinner. Mrs. Kennedy’s secretary then came and greeted us—a gay, informal, pretty woman with quite a line—and took us in the elevator up to our rooms: “The Queen’s room for Mrs. L. and the Lincoln room for Mr. L.”
Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986 Page 23
