You will just have to explain to the Feydys that your father never goes to any ceremonies of any kind, hates them, etc., didn’t go to my sisters’ or his own son’s wedding (Land’s). And it wasn’t that he didn’t approve of Susie and her family. That wedding could hardly have been more simple: out of doors, no one there but family and a few of Land and Susie’s young friends in Barbara and Jon’s garden. I think it is hard, and will be hard to explain to the Feydys, that it isn’t that he doesn’t approve, or like Julien etc. But perhaps, if he makes a visit first, they’ll understand better. But anyway, write him and do your best to persuade him.…
Scott’s Cove
Saturday, October 26th, 1963
Darling Ansy,
You wrote a beautiful letter to your father. He was pleased and said it was a lovely letter and very thoughtful and considerate. He did not give me his verdict but my prognosis is good!
I also talked to him about the announcements (as well as to Aunt Margot, who said you couldn’t invite people to a wedding unless you expected them to turn up. Father also feels this way, feels “announce” is OK, especially since you are so far away, etc.). Father said he would like to see anything that went out under his name, to check it: would like it very simple and no title (Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. etc. announce the marriage of etc.), something like that. He will send none to his friends but complies (to my surprise!) to your desire for it. Otherwise thinks it in the unnecessary complication dept.
I feel quite shaken by the sudden death of Kurt Wolff in Germany due to a traffic accident.* He was taking a walk and was pinned to a wall by a truck-trailer turning around. He did not, however, suffer very much—was rushed in a stretcher to the hospital (next door) where, lying on a bed, he asked for a glass of brandy and for them to telephone his wife at the hotel and tell her that he was “all right.” He died within three hours, in her arms (unconscious for all but the first half hour) of “internal injuries” (probably internal hemorrhage).
It seems a very brutal death for such an extraordinary gentle and elegant man (elegant in the spirit as well as mind and taste), and terribly tragic and ironic for Helen, who has for years protected him from the effort of opening elevator doors or uncorking wine bottles! Helen will leave Locarno and come back to the U.S. and continue her work as an editor for Harcourt Brace. She was, of course, prepared for his sudden death for years, but not this way. How strange life is. He was buried there in Marbach where they had stopped for the night—an old university town Kurt was fond of (he met Pasternak there). It was Schiller’s birthplace and he died in the Schiller Hospital. Helen is, as one would have expected her to be, magnificent about it (according to Bill Jovanovich, who flew over for the service). I have asked her to spend Christmas with me—us—in the chalet, but she may be in the U.S. by then.
I think of you all the time, darling.
Saturday, November 23rd, 1963
Dearest Ansy,
I have just received your letter of November 21st (so fast!), relieving my mind and heart very much about you. I suppose I got too worried but Reeve’s message, somewhat garbled over the telephone, came on me with a double weight since I was already very worried about your depressed note to me. And also since I was in the midst of one of your father’s “last weeks” of instructions and warnings, and we disagreed so strongly about the wedding expenses. Actually, now that I have said firmly—in fact, I fear, stubbornly—what I want to do (it always comes down to that—I can never argue it logically), and now he has written you how and why he disapproves, I think it will all simmer down (as Scott’s crisis did last summer) and actually he won’t object very much to what I’m doing on the expenses (which God knows are not high for such an occasion). He will feel better once he is off, and once he talks to you and meets the Feydys.
I want to take this down to the post office immediately, so I can’t write much. We are all reeling with the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination, barely twenty-four hours old. One cannot grasp that it happened, and happened here in America. Although the violence in America is just under the surface, happily covered up most of the time by our mystique of the great big happy welcoming generous open-armed nation. When violence erupts as it does in murders, bombings, etc. in the South or stranglings in Boston or muggings in New York, we are terribly shocked. The nation is terribly shocked by this, and the shock is right and perhaps therapeutic for us. We should look at our violence with shock and recognize it and deal with it.
I am anxious to come over early anyway—if it fits into your plans—but not if it stops you having a holiday with Julien in Les Rieux.
I think it is very natural for you to feel depressed there in Paris, making all your preparations for marriage all alone—or at least without your family. (And to be looked at always as a foreigner and stranger gets very depressing, if it’s done with such a sense of stigma: “You are so different”—“This is so difficult”—etc.) The only thing I can say is you would, I think, have been just as unhappy in a different way had you been preparing for a wedding over here with your family but separated from Julien. As it is, everything you are doing now is getting to know your in-laws and the setting you must deal with better. It will all help you in your life in the future with Julien and his family. It is a plus and not a minus in your new life.
It is sleeting outside. Reeve is here with a Harvard freshman to go to the Yale-Harvard game (now called off because of Pres. Kennedy’s death). The paper didn’t come today and since I don’t like listening to the radio all the time, I feel quite isolated.
New House
Day after Thanksgiving 1963
Dearest Ansy,
I have now received a very nice letter from Mme Feydy in answer to mine, and your letter enclosing the checks. I can see how you were startled by the total disagreement between your father’s letter and mine. And it certainly is unpleasant to be juggled back and forth between your parents just before your wedding but there seemed to be no alternative except that of my agreeing when I felt he was wrong, which I could not and cannot do. So here come the two checks back again! You have done what you could to set things right and I am sure your father will be pleased by your action. But I am going to be stubborn and sentimental. I want to pay for your wedding expenses and please keep your money to pay for a trip home next year. You will need it. I really think, now all the proper gestures have been made, your father will feel it is all right, or at least not mind too much.
We had a quite peaceful Thanksgiving in the new house with Uncle Dwight, Rhidian, Reeve and Jimmy Miller.* That is all. We were saddened by a wire telling us of Aunt Amey’s death (she died Thanksgiving morning) and yet I could not help but be thankful for her that she could go swiftly and peacefully. We are all going to a service for her tomorrow in New York.
This letter keeps being interrupted. Reeve, Rhidian, Betsy O’Hara,† and a roommate have just all come into my bedroom. (There is no privacy in this house!)
The country is beginning to breathe again. For four days everything seemed to stop. Time stopped. People couldn’t do anything. It was like a paralysis. One could do nothing but watch television or listen to broadcasts. I watched the funeral cortege at Mina Curtiss’s for four hours!‡ And I only saw half of it. It started at 10:30 and went on till 4:30. As well as the procession, one saw the service inside the Cathedral and the graveside service. Despite the television and radio commentators, it was very moving and done with great dignity and beauty and real feeling. Mrs. Kennedy, who has a great sense of form and beauty as well as dignity and feeling and sensitivity, was responsible for this, one feels. The form was infused with a reality and was not just pomp and show. She was quite magnificent.
Everyone feels that Johnson has taken hold with strength, vigor and dignity. And there is a sense of unity that followed the shock, that he has drawn on. He is not as brilliant as Kennedy, not an intellectual, but able and courageous and experienced, and since he is quite a simple, direct and warm man, may be able to put throu
gh some of the things Kennedy envisioned.
This is a somewhat distracted letter. It is pouring outside—a sodden dark and quite gloomy day. But we need the rain.
Monday after Thanksgiving 1963
Dear Helen [Wolff],
We have moved—hence this long silence on my part. Also, of course, the events of the last fortnight have had a paralyzing effect on everyone. It is almost impossible to convey the impression of shock and stupefaction that overtook everyone at Kennedy’s assassination. (I cannot write you a long letter about this, but we will talk about it soon, I hope. I thought about you, because it must have been hard to be out of the country at such a time—bearing the shock, horror and uncertainty all alone, with no American to talk to—but, of course, really, no Kurt to talk to.)
Despite the silence, I have thought of you so very much—even through all the throes of moving (what one loses—what one finds!). The sense of uprooting, the sense of the meaninglessness of possessions (when not grouped in a living room—expressing a spiritual reality). The painfulness of the dismantling is only bearable if one is doing it for someone else—to create a new home. For you it is so much harder. You will create it again, and it will be a haven for Christian* and your many friends, but it is a heartbreaking task.
People write letters of comfort or condolence when death first strikes, but it seems to me this is when one needs them least. One feels so very close to the person who has gone in the first days. One is almost buoyed up by them, and by the sense of all-pervading love poured out for them and for you. But the long bleak months follow, of learning to live alone. I wonder one can even walk—like a new baby. Part of one has really died with the other and one must learn all over again—how to walk, how to speak, how to think, alone.
I know that you will learn. Kurt envisioned this, I am sure, and what you would do—what ability you had. He once spoke to me (at the time of the break from Pantheon) of what a young woman you were, and what ability you had, and how you had a career ahead of you—should not be stopped and restricted.
The closeness of your relationship with Kurt—humanly, professionally, every way—makes (or must make) these months agonizing. An amputation has taken place. But this very closeness will perhaps quite unconsciously make the work easier—(or perhaps that is not the right word). The grafting that took place will enable you to carry on his work far better than you can envisage and your own work will be enriched.
I think of a line from C. Day Lewis in A Time to Dance, a long poem in memory of some fallen airmen. Do you remember it? One line I particularly loved and have said to myself at times, I repeat for you though the adjective is wrong: “He bore transplanting into common ground.” You are very uncommon ground, Dear Helen, but the spirit of what I mean is in that line.
I have not thanked you for your wonderful letter—which came so swiftly and comforted me so much—both for you and for him. How like Kurt are the lines from his notebook. No, I didn’t give them to him, but I know them. He certainly lived them. Maria’s* words, scribbled on the back, allowed me to cry (“And I knew he was gone forever and we must go on living without his warmth and gentleness”).
I am grateful that you could sob and laugh and be angry and make jokes and listen to Bach. It is the only way. Kurt was the completely rounded person—grief for him must be as rounded and complete as this.
On our plans: I am expecting you for Christmas and you will put no one out. The chalet is warm and cozy and plenty of hot water etc. Perhaps there will be a service and some music in Vevey we could go to. Perhaps we could walk in the woods behind the chalet.
A heartful to you—
Anne
Chalet—Monts-de-Corsier
January 1st, 1964
Dear Barbara and Jon and Susie and Land,
I will have to resort to a joint letter since I will not have time to write all of you—or in fact to write adequately all I would like to about Anne’s wedding even in this letter. This is about the first time I have sat down since I arrived on this side of the ocean December 16th. Your father met me in Geneva. No sign of the mountains, very cold, and snow on the foothills. We picked up provisions on the way to the chalet which was warm and cozy, though still without rugs. Your father got a wire the next morning and was called to a Pan Am meeting in Bordeaux and took off almost immediately in his VW. We called Anne in Paris and arranged to have Scott come and drive me to the Dordogne three days later in the second VW.
Friday a.m. I set off for Lausanne in the VW and met Scott who had come on by train—all the planes were full. I was very grateful to him for coming since it was a long snowy and icy fifteen-hour trip across the Jura mountains and the Massif Central to the Dordogne. Also, it was a wonderful chance to talk to Scott, which was worth a lot to me.
It is such a good chance to talk in a long car drive. Actually Scott and I did all our talking in the first hour—and very good talking—and hardly said anything after that. It was a long, hard, and slippery drive, and we saw almost as many accidents as cars.
We did not reach Les Rieux that evening, which Scott had planned, because of bad roads all the way, but stopped en route in a snowy French town and continued the next a.m. The snow continued until about an hour from Perigueux (their nearest big town) and then it seemed quite springlike in looks: grass was green, cabbages in the fields. We had elaborate instructions and a hand-drawn map from Anne. When we got to the dirt road there was a huge cardboard sign painted by Anne with an arrow, “Les Rieux → Father & Scott turn here!” Looking up the dirt road, we saw two figures leaping up and down: Anne and Jacqueline.* Anne was in corduroy riding trousers, Robin Hood–ish boots and a heavy fisherman’s sweater, yellow with blue trim, and a tight knitted cap pulled over her blond short hair. Julien, Jacqueline, Pierre (their brother) and Hélène (his fiancée) all came out. (Scott had met them in Paris.) It was sunny but very cold.
It is a great big yellow stone manor, with two wings, a courtyard, some abandoned barns and sheds, making an L-shaped house. It looks out over sloping fields, old orchards, vineyards that have been let go and the gentle valley and hills of that part of the world. Inside: big high-ceilinged rooms, wide stairs, open fireplaces in every room—No heat at all! Floors wide—old oak. A big bare summery house. Big windows, lots of light, no rugs, not much furniture, but some very beautiful pieces. Our bedroom had in it a huge old Spanish bed, a built-in armoire, a table, one old chair, an eighteenth century harpsichord (all painted with flowery scenes, Watteau-esque painting), and a fireplace! (Thank God!)
The rooms were bright, reminding one of the kind of rooms that must have been behind those window paintings of Matisse (you know, one always has one’s back to the room, in those paintings, and one is looking out of the half-open French-door windows)! Also there were many glints of memories of other places (only Jon will remember): Illiec,* perhaps, the sense of a little chateau lost in the country or St. Gildas (where the Carrels† lived) with its walled garden. Only all bigger and more generous. But not formal at all. Open, careless, warm and welcoming, and all (the grounds) slightly neglected. The kind of a house children run through dropping coats and hats and boots and baskets in the hall (like North Haven).
Also the kind of house one hears music echoing in. There were three or four pianos in the house. We followed the music one night and found Julien playing a piano, Anne accompanying him on the flute, and Jacqueline curled up on the bed (the only piece of furniture in the room besides the piano) listening. There was an enormous old tuba on the mantel of the fireplace.
Then M. and Mme. Feydy arrived with their huge Egyptian cat. Fires were lit in every room. The boys carried up wood. Supper was started in the big kitchen. This was covered (on the floor) with rough old bricks and had a huge fireplace one could get inside of. A big spit for turning roasts, etc., and a rack for drying towels.
Anne and Julien got in their VW and went off to Bordeaux to meet Reeve and Connie who were (supposedly) arriving at 6:28. I asked to help in the kitchen
but was not (yet) allowed so went up to my cold room and wondered what I could do till suppertime. The bed was too cold to get into and the bathroom was an icebox. I couldn’t feel my hands when I washed them. I finally put blankets on the floor in front of the fire and lay down on them and under them, where your father found me about 6:30.
Your father was delighted with the house: its isolation, its primitive quality (B-r-r-r-r-r!) (“Like Minnesota!”) and the challenge was a spur to him. He rushed down and brought up wood, built an enormous fire, got a basin out of the car so I could wash in front of the fire, got more blankets out, and soon we went down to supper at a big table in the living room. The women all sat with their backs to the fire, men opposite (in heavy sweaters!).
Supper was interrupted by a call from Julien from Bordeaux, the message being that Reeve was not on the train. Then it came out that Reeve and Connie were both on the train, but it was very jammed. Connie got out first and Reeve stayed inside to hand the baggage, including skis, out of the window. But before she could get out, the train started moving and they wouldn’t let her off. So on she went to Bayonne, the next stop—some three to four hours ahead—without luggage or even a pocketbook—no money! Julien and Anne got hold of the station master, wired Bayonne, had Reeve paged and told to take the next train back—and all expenses paid! Actually Reeve was befriended by four Spanish soldiers who told her to go right on to the border and they would put her on a train back! However, as she sat in the train in the Bayonne station, her friends heard her paged and rushed her off the train back onto a Bordeaux one. Some seven hours later she arrived back in Bordeaux. Anne and Julien and Connie greeted her and rushed her back to Les Rieux. They arrived at dawn and slept till lunch time.
Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986 Page 26
