The body of a finch on the roof outside our bedroom window has been there since the late spring. Now it is gone. Blown away or resurrected? I cannot tell. The little corpse had lost its color in death, so I have no way of knowing whether it was a gold or purple finch that had crashed so recklessly (I assume) against the glass of the window, broken its neck, and fallen a few feet to the roof of the screened porch.
The thought of resurrection and an afterlife is central to my faith. I have always been able to grant those supernatural certainties to the Christ whose entire life, from his virgin birth on, was so extraordinary. But I’ve had some trouble assuming they would be part of the end of a life as ordinary and sin-ridden as mine.
Still, some wise unbelievers have granted the possibility of these occurrences to themselves. On his deathbed, the brilliant cynic and atheist Voltaire saw a lamp flare up. ‘What, the flames already?’ he asked. When agnostic Disraeli lay dying, the mourning widow Queen Victoria proposed to visit his bedside. ‘Why should I see her?’ he told his attendant. ‘She will only want to give me a message for Albert.’
And another: One of my recent correspondents, one of those who scolded me for my pessimism, sent me a sentence, said to be Goronwy Rees’s last words, in 1979, to his son Daniel: ‘What shall I do next?’
She did not tell me who Goronwy Rees was.
Telephone report from Ron King about the Down East AIDS Network walk last month. Six thousand dollars was raised, many people participated in Ellsworth, the food that Sybil solicited from area merchants and two groups of friends gathered was sufficient for the walkers and volunteers, and very good. This success marks a significant change in awareness of the need for concern and care on the part of a hitherto indifferent community.
I have finished Hard Times and moved on to Bleak House. My cherished set of Dickens, in many volumes because each novel is separated into three or four small books, bound in blue cloth with bright gold stamping, once belonged to a woman named Mary S. White. Her name is neatly stamped on the flyleaf of every one of the thirty-six or so books. I think she read them all, for there are minor blemishes on some pages, here a light thumb mark, there a trace of tiny bits of food that have dropped into the gutter.
There is a pleasure in reading books that belonged to someone else. Clearly, Mary S. White enjoyed these books before me. I fantasize about her life: She was an elderly spinster, a New Englander (I found the books in the Owl Pen, a bookstore outside of Greenwich, New York) who lived alone after the death of her parents, whom she cared for during their long lives. Delicately built, she favored small books that fit comfortably into her tiny hands. I see her seated alone at five in the evening, in an upright chair at her small, round dining-room table, drinking tea and eating a buttered scone, a few crumbs of which have dropped into the margin of, say, Pickwick Papers. When I get to it, I will surely find them.
Out of volume three of Bleak House falls Mary S. White’s posthumous gift to me, a yellowed clipping. It is undated but seems to be from a New York daily newspaper at the turn of the century:
A lady lately visited New York city, and saw one day on the sidewalk a ragged, cold, and hungry little girl, gazing wistfully at some cake in a shop window. She stopped, and taking the little one by the hand led her into the store. Though she was aware that bread might be better for the child than cake, yet desiring to gratify the shivering and forlorn one, she bought and gave her the cake she wanted. She then took her to another place, where she presented her a shawl and other articles of comfort. The grateful little creature looked the benevolent lady up full in the face and with artless simplicity said, ‘Are you God’s wife?’
BEAUTIFUL INCIDENT is the story’s headline; it is a sentimental little tale that might be written today, made linguistically contemporary, if the little girl were to ask the kind lady: ‘Are you God?’
The plea for the use of plain words when writing English prose is common, not limited to William Strunk’s popular The Elements of Style. Among Sybil’s purchases yesterday for the bookstore was a 1988 paperback of a book, Plain Words, on the subject by Sir Ernest Gowers, first published in 1954. Gowers advised writers to prefer ‘get’ or ‘buy’ or ‘win’ to ‘acquire,’ to use ‘rich’ in place of ‘affluent.’ ‘Near’ he finds preferable to ‘adjacent.’
About ‘adjust’ and ‘alter’ he says, ‘If you mean “change,” say so.’ He derides ‘analogous’; it is a starchy word for ‘like.’ He instructs us to substitute ‘clear,’ ‘plain,’ ‘obvious’ for ‘apparent,’ and ‘find out’ for ‘ascertain.’
This list is chosen from the list for the letter A in Gowers’s dictionary of short verbal preferences. Fifty more pages follow, for the rest of the alphabet. But I fear that if we forcibly removed fancy words from the speech and writings of most people (including me), we would leave them almost speechless, and certainly unable to compose a letter, a term paper, or a review. For ‘compose’ here I should have used ‘write.’
I must take this good advice more often. For ‘linguistically contemporary’ in my journal entry before this one I should have said ‘up-to-date.’
Last night we had a small dinner party for friends. There was much good, witty talk, in which I tried to participate but found it hard. When I am alone I find I can go days without needing to say a word to anyone. Talking is clearly social mucilage, silence a threat to sociability. Recently, I looked through Aleister Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend in the bookstore and copied out: ‘People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn’t, for the most part; on the contrary, it’s a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking.’
Coming back from a brief visit to May Sarton in York: We found her weak, thin, in pain, but gallantly working on a new journal to be published on her eightieth birthday and determined to live and write despite her dismaying infirmities. We stop off Route I at Moody Beach where my family and I spent many summers when the children were young. We pull into the Hazeltines’ driveway. Their house is closed up and shuttered—they have gone to Florida for the winter, we are told. We walk out onto the great, flat expanse of a most beautiful beach and a boundless ocean.
Sybil observes that it looks huge after the relative limitation, almost confinement, of our Cove. Our water is bounded by the rough meadow in front and green banks on either side. It is usually calm; the coming and going of tides are hardly audible.… But here at Moody there is almost no end to the vast carpet of sand and blanket of water, except at the horizon that joins the sky at a great distance. It is the difference between mortality of the Cove and the immortality of the ocean, between backyard and continent.
For me, Moody, which lies between Ogunquit and Wells at the southern end of Maine, is the Ur-beach. It was where I renewed my love of the sea, which had been lost or buried in my memory from the time I was six and went with my family for the summer to the ocean at Atlantic City. Then, without warning, in the next summer I was sent to a girls’ camp in the mountains, beside a lake, and learned, I remember keenly, the disappointment of limitation. After a few years at camp, I was able to swim about one mile to the far bank of the lake, a feat common to most of the ‘intermediate’ swimmers, as we were called, but one that, to my mind, fatally diminished the glory of Crystal Lake. If I could swim it, it was too small.
Reluctantly, I came away from Moody Beach. It was like leaving the immeasurable cosmos for a two-foot yardstick at home. Thinking about May on the journey north, I realized how fortunate she is, in a way, to have a lovely pond at the right side of her property, where herons and egrets come regularly, and the wild ocean at the foot of her meadow. Her place is endowed both with the pleasure of the closed circle and with the infinite immensity of the sea.
I have always loved Moody and, as well, its name. There is a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ about Parson Hooper, whose sad history, Hawthorne tells us in a note to the story, is based on ‘another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody of Yo
rk, Maine.’ Without too much substantiating evidence, I like to think that Moody Beach is named for the clergyman who wore a black veil over his face to cover his guilt ever since his early life when, by accident, he was responsible for the death of a beloved woman. Or so the story suggests.
Outside of Wells, we go to a yard sale, one of hundreds held all over Maine on weekends. We stop at every one we pass, looking for books and, at the same time, inspecting all the artifacts of Mainers’ lives spread out on rickety card tables and boards and trestles: odd pieces of chipped porcelain, old burned pots and pans, plastic wall decorations and knickknacks of every description, as well as rusty, interesting old tools, kerosene lamps, ships’ parts, and always, used clothes of every size, clean but very worn.
I find a small, battered Peter Pauper ‘gift’ book copy of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. I buy it for fifty cents to read during the four hours we have yet to drive, ignoring Sybil’s reminder that I already own two copies, one in Maine, the other in the apartment in Washington.
Sybil is driving (as she usually does, because of her profound, but justifiable, distrust of my poor reflexes and absentmindedness), so I read aloud to her from the book:
‘Youth changes its tastes by force of passion; age retains its tastes by force of habit.’
We debate the truth of this aphorism. I am of the opinion that it is certainly clever but, to my mind, like much else that is clever, in error. I have retained my passionate, youthful tastes throughout my life, regrettably. But my physical capacity to enjoy them diminishes and then leaves me, with age. Rich food and hard drink are no longer easily digestible, music and theater are less available because of the failure of my ears, of becoming ‘hard of hearing,’ as we used to say. Reading is more difficult as my eyesight weakens. My old love of swimming is not enough to overcome my body’s debility. And the joys of sex? They are gone when opportunities and hormones diminish; they join the dubious pleasures of nostalgia and memory that we all must settle for.
I read the rest of the book to myself while Sybil listens to a country-music station, and I try my best not to hear it. La Rochefoucauld’s maxims are like acupuncture, small stings on the skin, producing a modicum of pain and some subcutaneous pleasure.
We are home. A light, powdery snow has fallen during our two-day absence, turning the roughness of the meadow into a smooth expanse. We watch the evening news, listening to reports of Anita Hill’s testimony before a Senate committee. We want to find out if her accusation of sexual harassment against a Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, will stand in the way of his appointment. Who has lied? Why? There are no answers, only a growing sense, for both of us, that Thomas is not a suitable or credible candidate for so high, so important, a position.
The news moves on to other Senate business. I grow bored and find myself meditating on a frivolous observation: Senator Paul Simon’s earlobes. They seem uncommonly large buttons of flesh that descend from his ears, almost organs in themselves.
This trivial matter sends me into the bathroom to inspect my own ears, something I cannot remember having done since my girlhood. Ah, there I see: mine too are now changed. Instead of the small, smooth globes I remember, now there is flabby flesh scored by vertical lines, to accompany, I suppose, the vertical lines that have worked their way into the flesh at the sides of my mouth, marks of disillusion and pessimism now echoed in aging earlobes. I remember that my friend Kay Boyle has worn large circular white earrings ever since she was a girl. On the jacket of her latest book, written at eighty-five, she is still wearing them. If I had thought of doing this earlier, I would have been prepared to hide my newfound defect.
This morning’s mail brought the Knopf catalogue for next season. In it I find that Deborah Digges, a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop when last I taught there, has written a 224-page memoir. How old can she be? Is it easier to write a memoir when one does not have to go back very far for one’s memories?
My niece, Laurie Danziger, writes to ask if I will collaborate with her on a book about children of agoraphobic mothers. Her mother suffered from this illness, from the time she was eighteen until she died of cancer at forty-two. Laurie, now almost forty, has had serious psychological problems ever since her mother’s early death, and she must see a causal connection to her mother’s agoraphobia.
I wish I could help her, but the truth is, I cannot conceive of collaborating with anyone. I tell her I am the most hermitic of writers, finding it hard to write if anyone is in the next room to me, or even in the same house. After I mail the letter, I seem to remember that Evelyn Waugh said something about this, and go to my Waugh shelf to find his remark: ‘I could never understand how two men can write a book together; to me that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.’
The gulls have disappeared from the Cove. Do they migrate? I realize how little I know about the lives of gulls, those beautiful shorebirds that are my neighbors all through the spring, summer, and fall. I walk over to the bookstore and borrow Frank Graham’s book on the subject, published in 1978. It begins by describing an expedition that went out to Eastern Egg Rock Island, Maine, in order to poison a portion of the black-backed gulls there. It seems that a colony of puffins, who were killed or driven off the coast of Maine by 1907, is to be reestablished on that island. But now it is overpopulated by gulls, whose growth was encouraged by ‘a careless civilization’s wastes.’ When the book was written the gulls had reached ‘pest proportions.’
I’m uncertain what wastes he is talking about. I’m sure he does not mean the leftover fried clams that used to feed the gulls at McDonald’s near Wells, Maine. How big is ‘pest proportions’? Who is being bothered?
Ornithologists went ashore at the island and destroyed the eggs in a hundred nests. Then a tragic scene was played out. ‘The first of the gulls began their descent on spread wings, eager to resume brooding on the eggs they had abandoned as we came ashore.’ Graham does not describe what follows, but I can imagine: The returning parents find only desolation and destruction. Their unborn offspring have been reduced to an unsavory mixture of albumen, yolk, and embryonic feathers.… Terrible. Coming to the book to learn about life, I discover death and destruction.
Henry Beston, the naturalist, is quoted by Graham on wild creatures: ‘They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.’
Laws protect gulls, like other birds, I have always thought. But not always so. We devise ways to trick them. Graham says waterfowlers mount carved gulls on their boats as ‘confidence decoys.’ Ducks and geese seem to know that gulls are not shot, so they cultivate their company ‘under the delusion that that they too will come under the protective umbrella.’ Artificial bird facsimiles are sometimes intended to alarm and chase away other birds, like the metal owl Barbara and Sam Wheeler mounted on their New York windowsill to discourage the pigeons. The omnipresent New York birds are back, I think, having conquered their fears and discovered that the owl was a sham menace.
Man can kill protected creatures, it would appear, or their unborn progeny, in order to give the opportunity for life to another variety of bird. Perhaps unfairly, it reminds me of euthanasia as urged upon us by those who believe the chronically ill and very aged ought to ‘give way,’ the euphemism for ‘allow themselves to be put away,’ in the interests of the young.
Should it not also remind me of abortion, a practice that, in theory, I support?
In Graham I learn that e.e. cummings said of penguins: ‘Their wings are to swim with.’
All these details are very interesting in themselves, but I come to the end of Graham’s book on gulls without finding out if they migrate. I have acquired some very fine phrases like ‘prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth’ and ‘confidence decoys,’ as well as a nice image of swimming with wings, but no answers.
Washington: Under silent protest, even though it is
only for four days, I have had to leave Sargentville to go to Washington for a Phi Beta Kappa meeting. Alone in the elaborate hotel the night before the gathering, I turn on all the lights in the Madison Hotel’s two-room suite because of the unfamiliar corners and doors and pull the drapes against the sights and sounds of Connecticut Avenue.
Before the meetings begin, I decide to have a solitary dinner with the Washington Post, at a K Street Chinese restaurant. I walk through the broad, almost empty downtown streets, deserted by their hordes of daytime workers, and now occupied by a few homeless men who have settled down for the night in doorways.
An elegantly dressed man with a furled umbrella he is using as a walking stick passes me. He looks exhausted and wary, determined not to look to the right or the left and carrying his newspaper rolled under his arm. He seems vaguely familiar to me. An employee of Dean, Witter where I once invested some money? The headwaiter of a restaurant I once frequented? When he comes close he lowers his head as if to avoid any possible contact, and pushes on.
An old black man huddled in an Army blanket in a doorway laughs, in a mad sort of way, as I pass him and says, ‘Hy-yuh.’ I say ‘Hi’ and manage a weak smile.
The distraught, the frightened, the senile, and the mad are all around us on the streets of this city, making me think of all the possible paths to being sick and old I have thus far been spared. On the plane this morning I sat across from an elderly couple who, as the plane took off, and again when it landed, held hands. Her hands were disfigured by hugely swollen knuckles; when the attendant came by with ‘a snack,’ she was not able to lift the tray from the arm of her seat. Throughout the trip her husband was mute and stared ahead unblinkingly. Something was clearly wrong with him.
Extra Innings Page 8
