After the Stroke (11 page)

I love writing to Juliette, but she is really the only correspondent I look forward to answering.

Friday, August 22

Because I am well I no longer suffer from the acute loneliness I felt all spring and summer until now. Loneliness because in spite of all the kindnesses and concern of so many friends there was no one who could fill the hole at the center of my being—only myself could fill it by becoming whole again. It was loneliness in essence for the
self.
Now that I can work, taking up the healthy rhythm of the days, I am not at all lonely. It means not writing letters in the afternoon but going out-of-doors to the garden, and having a bath when I come in, dirty and somehow relieved, as though the chaos here in my study had fallen into place and it did not matter too much that so many people have been left unanswered.

Yesterday I pulled out a lot of the nicotiana and the big opium poppies—which have sown themselves here every summer—so the garden, which was being smothered, has some neat borders of flowers again. Imagine waiting for annuals till late August!

It is, I realized suddenly, my eye that suffers from disorder and lack of form, so giving the garden some form again was deeply satisfying whereas the untidy drawers and cupboards do not really bother me, because they do not disturb the eye, and only occasionally the back of my mind.

When I was ill I resented that I had some years ago called old age an “ascension” in an essay which appeared on the Op Ed page in the
Times.
It did seem too ironic for words, but I believe there is some truth in it as I go back to it now. The ascension is possible when all that has to be given up can be
gladly
given up—because other things have become more important. I panted halfway up the stairs, but I also was able to sit and watch light change in the porch for an hour and be truly attentive to it, not plagued by what I “ought” to be doing.

But the body is part of our identity, and its afflictions and discontents, its donkey-like refusal to do what “ought” to be done, destroys self-respect. The wrinkles that write a lifetime into a face like a letter to the young are dismaying when one looks into a mirror. But this is the test, isn't it? How contemptuous I have been of women who try to look younger than they are! How beautiful an old face has been to me! So if I mind the wrinkles now it is because I have failed to ascend
inside
to what is happening
inside
—and that is a great adventure and challenge, perhaps the greatest in a lifetime—not sparing the rich or the famous, a part of accepting the human condition. At least, being well, I may be able to do better at it now than even a month ago.

Saturday, August 23

Yesterday a rather “too much” day. Anne Tremearne came late to photograph me because of the awful traffic, and I was nervous and on edge when she got here with a box of strawberries and lovely thin beans from her garden.

I need a publicity photo badly so I
hope
she did well with my old face.

I took her out to lunch and on the way she noted a wild tall purple orchid by the roadside—Anne notices everything—later a large white egret in the salt marsh. I have only seen small ones.

After lunch she took me to the post office and the IGA. When I got home I found there was a slip saying an Express Mail was at the post office, so I started out early to pick it up before meeting Marilyn Mumford from Bucknell University and Karen Elias from upstate New York. I had a bottle of champagne for them in the fridge. It was a celebration of their meeting and becoming friends, partly through their both knowing me. I was one of Karen's adjuncts when she got her Ph.D. from Union College, and Marilyn I feel is an old friend too, since Bucknell gave me—
and
Carol Heilbrun—honorary degrees two years ago.

The express was not a letter but Eda's new book,
Oh, To Be 50 Again!
, which I opened to the dedication page and discovered that she has dedicated it to me and another friend. I am touched.

Karen, Marilyn and I had a splendid talk about everything under the sun. But after dinner at Dockside it was around nine and I felt awfully tired.

It is better
not
to have two social occasions in one day if possible. But of course August is
the
month when people pour in to Maine.

The weather has changed to a gritty wind, lowering sky—and I hope it may rain tonight. But I feel low and depressed—and only the animals are any comfort.

Sunday, August 24

It did rain and all feels fresh today—with a lovely European sky, big clouds with sun breaking through them—it occurs to me that this is not an effect we often see in Maine. There is often fog or a closed pewter-gray sky, or a clear blue one, but rarely the cumulous clouds, light-shot, which make me think of Suffolk and of Belgium where the sky is rarely still and clouds come and go all the time.

Eda LeShan speaks to the point in her book when she talks about the necessity to break habits that encrust themselves sometimes over the spring waters of a life. I think I must not allow myself to be imprisoned by my compulsive need to answer so many people—but the problem is old friends who are, many of them, far away, and keeping in touch with
them
is important. It is again my old problem of the immense number of beloved people who have entered my life for sixty years or so. I want to respond always, but the frenzied push-push-push has to go now. How does one break such an ingrained habit with so much guilt and pressure held in it?

Some years ago I went to Larry LeShan for four sessions as a patient to get his wise help about this. He tried to persuade me that I did not
have
to answer everyone, that the letters were answers to my books. It did help—but I fear I was not wholly convinced. My mind accepts the reality, my heart was warmed by his kindness, but somehow the spirit was
not
quite ready to give this compulsion up!

Monday, August 25

A brilliant autumnal day with autumn's dark blue ocean and again some architectural clouds edged gold moving across the blue. The wind whistles around the house and I think of chrysanthemum plants and just called Edythe to see if she would have lunch with me and go and find some—although the traffic is bound to be bad.

I am immersed in Eda's book, full of anecdotes and the wonders and alarms of a first coming to terms with what old age will bring—for she was sixty-three when she wrote it, and it was like the touch of autumn I feel in the air today. Maybe that's when one can write best of autumn. Now I do not want to write about old age because I am there, I suppose. Yet I know that the challenge through a thicket of physical problems is to believe in ascension still and manage to throw the crutches away, so to speak, and the more helpless in some ways, the more of a triumph to keep carting away non-essential things and climbing towards death in naked joy.

Having uttered that I must admit that when I was ill I could not think about clothes at all, and now, yesterday, ordered a stunning purple suede jacket! But maybe the ascension can't do with crutches but does do with looking as well as possible.

The Nickleby reviews are splendid! I'm so glad for Pat Keen and the whole cast. The
Times
review ended:

For its entire duration, it enraptures the audience in a romantic, but throbbingly real world, moving us with an eloquent moral tale of the possibilities of redemption and regeneration.

Tuesday, August 26

Such autumn in the air—it is exhilarating! Another “first” since my healing—I watered the terrace beds. I had dreaded it, dreaded being out of breath after moving the sprayer around, running upstairs to turn water off and on, etc., but I did it with ease. Before that I had done some more pruning and clipping. The garden is mine again. All spring and summer I did not even notice what was going on. I couldn't bear to have abandoned it. Karen worked hard and I wish she could see that at last the annuals are flowering—and the purple, pink and white phlox flooding the terrace beds with color.

Thursday, August 28

On Tuesday Edythe and I went on an expedition to get chrysanthemums at a place in Wells on Route I—it was a glorious, sunny, windy day—and I felt quite drunk trying to choose three chrysanthemums—I was after spoon ones or daisies, the two kinds I like best. I did buy a Comanche blue flower which grows wild around here, a heavenly blue like a small daisy, three asters as they appear to have been decimated last winter. We had lunch nearby, lobster stew and strawberry shortcake, and then after going home and an hour's rest I went out determined to plant them. The earth was very hard in spite of my watering, so it was more of a job than I had imagined it would be, but I got it done so all were safely “in” when it rained hard yesterday. But I have a feeling the fibrillation is back—and it may be that I forced things a little.

When one has not been able to walk for months, taking life at a fast run is not a good idea—and that is what I have been doing! Oh dear—

Yesterday I got my flights set for October and November—and it all begins to feel real. Then I began to think about what poems to read on the theme of Ordeals and Rebirths which I shall be doing in Indianapolis and in Louisville. So the engine begins to hum.

Tamas, Pierrot and I had swordfish for supper—what an extravagance! But we all three agreed it was very good indeed—and for me the added pleasure of a glass of the Vouvray Pat Keen gave me.

Friday, August 29

Brad Daziel came at five-thirty to talk over work on his essay on the letters to me he has been reading—a very perceptive job, but as he later admitted he had not really studied any of the material after
Faithful Are The Wounds.
I had hoped he would start with three fat folders labelled “Total Work” for in the last twenty years or more I get fewer and fewer letters about one book that has struck a reader, and more and more from women and men who have read them all. Brad has had a hard year for personal reasons and I think he bogged down about halfway through—and this is a pity because the most interesting letters
are
about the whole work. Maybe when things are better he will be able to go back.

He is the most loveable person imaginable—and combines that rare enthusiasm for the work of art with great percipience in judging and assessing it,
never
to display his own cleverness, I might add. I have the sense that critics write for critics these days—to be admired by each other—and rather look down on the creative artist who is rarely as clever as they are, but goes far deeper, Adrienne Rich, for example.

Later

I feel awfully exhausted, have cramps—the old merry-go-round or sad-go-round again? I hope it's only a passing “bad day.”

Sunday, August 31

My father's birthday. He would be one hundred and one—hard to believe. Susan Sherman, so imaginative, sent me a little “Belgian” package with tisane, marzipan pigs
and
crystallized violets and a truly wonderful letter to help me celebrate the day. It is true, as she says, that I have celebrated him and his values, but it was also true—and still is—that there is a residue of bitterness at his lack of real understanding when it came to my mother. Still, I look at his photograph in my dressing room every day and am moved by that beautiful sensitive yet wide mouth, by the sensitivity in the eyes and by the great dome of a forehead. He was a whole man,
“en-tier
,” not ambivalent, I think, and that is rare. The intellect so fine-tuned and encyclopedic in knowledge, the heart so innocent and unaware! It is we who were ambivalent about
him
—so I see him whole and rejoice that I had such a father.

I slept very well last night till two—and then after three for another three hours. I do think the fibrillation has stopped—so I even dared get on a stool and reach up for the bird feeder wire after filling both of them, then picked flowers, the snapdragons are magnificent these days, washed sheets and made the bed up fresh, and now it is nearly ten so I must write out the usual messages for Edythe and Nancy who will hold the fort while I'm away.

It's a perfect summer day, and the sea so calm I missed the sound of waves all night.

Harwich, Tuesday, September 2

What an adventure for me after nine months not away overnight except to the hospitals to set out early and swing out on Route 95 and then 128—the traffic low going south as I had hoped it would be—and to come after three hours into Rene Morgan's beneficent atmosphere again at Harwich. She built this small delightful house when she retired at sixty-five, doing a bit of the work herself, and in these ten years, during her yearly stays from April to October, she has made it look as though it has always been here. Tall pines around it, a pond below, of which one catches a glimpse now and then.

How comforting to unpack in the guest room I know so well and then feel that I am allowed to let down, rest, obligated in no way. As a guest one often feels obligated, it seems to me, and it takes a genius of love to blow that all away. So right now I sit and write while Rene gets lunch. Perfect peace.

I hope I can put together the poems for my reading at Hermitage in Indianapolis October eleventh and in Louisville November twenty-second, “Ordeals and Rebirths”—perhaps epiphanies would be a better word.

It is an epiphany to be here—and I feel very relaxed and sleepy. I am rather glad it is a gray day.

Saturday, September 6

Rene is the most wonderful friend, cooking all the meals as though it was nothing at all—she is a little older than I but has been through two years of ordeal with Guillain-Barré syndrome. We went on little drives, one to Pleasant Bay, and Orleans, and the never-failing charm of the Cape touched me again.

At night it was almost too still, not a cricket to be heard, and I missed the breathing and rumble of the ocean.