Maybe you could come down around April 7th or 8th (Con* comes from the 2nd → 8th) I must go now—I never take off without thinking of you and our take-off!
Love,
Anne
P.S. Oh, I forgot to say—I also wanted to ask you—for the Marquands—why not fly down and meet me for the weekend in Nassau?! Foolish. Well—we will all miss you.
[Captiva, March 1950]
Dearest Con,
How wonderful to find your letter in the mailbox when I bicycled down at four! (I work now, between ten and one—and sun for a half hour—and then work till four when I meet Ellie* to walk and eat supper.) It is very good and the unconscious (I hope!) is beginning now to work on “The Shells”—the third shell (a double rainbow shell!) of relationships. Hah! No writing, but outlines and ideas sprouting untidily. This is about all I ever take back from Captiva, but it is the creative seeds. I never can manage to weld into form in Captiva. However, this is enough.
Ellie has just left, very considerately since I said I must write postcards, and now I cannot resist writing you. She is sweet and good and loving and lovely and I love her—but perhaps it is the contrast with you, or some subtle form of snobbery or the devil in me, but when she leaves in the evening I want to get drunk or have a cigarette.
It is partly that since I talk to Jim† and her as one—and I can, which is wonderful. Then I get her reactions back, and they are often good and true and right, but they are cloaked in symbolism that leaves me feeling cold, or embarrassed, or even slightly guilty. (The “put-out-your-hand-to-Jesus” school of language.) The other night she prayed out loud for me and C. on the beach and I prayed too—inwardly: Dear God, forgive me for my snobbery and my resentment. Help me to see that this expression is as natural to her as reading poetry is to me—and that her love is real and good, etc.
Why have I such a resistance to Jesus? God is all right, but Jesus comes right out of those Sunday school pictures with the too-sweet glue on the back one pasted into notebooks. It makes me understand Dana’s aversion to religion.
Also, I suppose, I am allergic to immolation at the moment. I just can’t “give all to Christ.” I might to God, though. I feel he would understand and accept one’s unruly emotions. Jesus wouldn’t. Why, I wonder? I feel Jesus is Ellie’s brother and somehow too personal and intimate for me. It’s all a question of semantics, I suppose. And we really are talking about the same thing. But I feel it is not as simple—not as simple as all that. God has a plan. Jesus will save you. Do not resist evil. Throw your arms about him (Jesus and Charles!).
I begin to hanker for a nice dry agnostic like Dana—who will say, “Well now, Anne, to be practical—”
Jim is now with C. and the boys in the Keys somewhere. That is nice. He wrote Ellie he didn’t think C. would get back here Friday. Maybe not—one more day on “The Shells.” “Captiva weather” has returned, all the inhabitants say. The water is soft and milky. I sit and eat breakfast alone on the back porch; your little yellow table and chair sit simply in the sun. I have much too much food to eat up: the cat won’t come for the saucer of sour milk and I make so little headway in the second carton of cottage cheese, and I have that unopened bottle of Dubonnet to drink up alone. Ah well, the guava jelly jar is at last empty and washed and will replace a breakage. And the large wolf spider behind my bed didn’t even move when I made it this morning. He trusts me—it’s nice. I miss you terribly.
Love,
A.
May 31st [1950]
Dear Ruth,*
You see, I also am inarticulate and there are many unwritten letters in me, not only because of my own inner state but because of the compulsion not to put that inner state on paper where it will someday be discovered and misinterpreted and hurt people I cannot bear to hurt.
I cannot write honestly and deeply to you because I am in some kind of turmoil myself, terrible turmoil which I must hide and cannot really understand or dissolve.
When I think of you I think it is better for me not to touch her because her own turmoil is great and my own must seem—even if she could see it—impossible and unreal.
Look, she will say—Anne has everything: happy home life, husband, good children, financial security, love, friendship, beauty, etc. What has she to struggle with? What right has she to be unhappy? If I were only in her shoes, I would be content, serene, constructive, etc.
I also feel that I have, in the past, in trying to help people, only hurt them—that it is a great error to try to help people when you are unsure yourself.
I have become a great deal more honest with myself in the past three years. I can no longer “play God” to people. I do not feel wiser or better or surer than they. I feel I cannot be dishonest with myself or with them. It is unfair. I feel I have so little to give. I feel chiefly terrifically inadequate, and so I withdraw into the only things I feel adequate for—rubbing Scott’s back, soothing Land’s temper, washing Reeve’s face, trying to keep Anne’s heart open, putting a hand occasionally on Jon’s shoulder. And chiefly trying to be, with them, terrifically but deeply honest.
Of course, Land, I say. You hate people at times. Of course you get mad and want to throw everything up. We all do. Everyone has these feelings in them. We hate and we love at the same moment, the same person. Adults are just like children. They have bad days too. When I have a bad day, I hate myself. But one must go on and not inflict too much of one’s feelings on other people.
To Anne I must say—who do you cheat, Anne? When you cheat us about not drinking your milk, when you pour it back into the milk pitcher and pretend you have had it? You only cheat yourself. Your teeth will become soft and full of holes, like mine (I didn’t brush my teeth either, Anne. I pretended I did, but I didn’t)—and that means time at the dentist and pain … fillings, etc.
To Scott I say—Dear Scott, I was afraid of the dark, too. I know. I know what it is to have bad dreams. Grown people are afraid, too, Scott. I am afraid of many things—but you learn. You learn, Scott, that if you look squarely at the thing you are afraid of, it gets less frightening. You even learn what to do about it sometimes.
But if you turn your back on it, it always gets worse—always.
I suppose what I am trying to teach them is to accept themselves, and others, as imperfect—to accept the validity of what they feel, even if it cannot and must not be implemented in outward action where it may be horribly destructive.
But real destructiveness, I feel, comes so much of the time from dishonesty—dishonesty with oneself about what one feels and thinks. We are afraid to admit, even to ourselves, what dreadful and stormy and black depths are in ourselves. We turn the other way. We pretend we are all sweetness and light. And so the ugly things just get bigger and blacker the more they are hidden.
I am glad when the children explode in front of me—when they tell me their fears, their irritations, their hates. I admit to them that I have them too (though I don’t tell them what they are). We all have them. We must learn to deal with them, that is all. We must try to understand, through understanding our own black depths, other people’s black depths, and forgive them for the strange actions that sometimes proceed from them.
I write you about the children because, at the moment, it is the only sphere that I feel adequate to and sure in. It is the lifeline of my life. It is my reason for existence. Of course I live for C. too. But here I am not so sure of what I am doing or whether I am doing right. With the children I feel I am doing as right as I know how at this moment, and this is all anyone can do at any given moment.
To write about you is very difficult. I feel appalled by what you are going through and have been through. I know, though for very different reasons, so much of the same despair, the same wild rebelliousness, the same numbness, the same sense that there is no place for one in this civilization—that one exists in a vacuum, that one can touch no one, that one speaks another language, etc.
And yet, Ruth, I do feel that this rebelliousness and
even the despair is not entirely negative. It is in C. (and was in his book). It is in me. It is in many, many people—all of whom feel lonely and lost and that the times—or they—must be wrong. We do not fit.
… Communication is a great help. To know other people feel the same way and are struggling too. So do write me—when you can, Ruth. Your letters are honest and they echo in me. If I cannot write back it is because I cannot from my life—but not that I don’t feel with you and for you and believe in the life-force in you, even if it is or seems hidden—and always send my love,
Anne
P.S. Dear Ruth—I break this open to say to you what perhaps I should say to myself: letters always help. Your letters help me and your understanding helps me. (Yes, you are right about Ansy. It is adults who make children hide and be devious. Adults and the fears they produce. I try so hard now to keep my children free of fear—of me, anyway—by letting them see I am very imperfect, too.) If I can’t write back exactly in the same way to you it is because so much of what I feel now is underground and must be till it gets clearer and purer. What I feel with the children is not underground and that is why this letter is full of them. They teach me so much, so much, and I feel very close to them, though often very far away from everyone else. (Some of this is just emotional exhaustion. It produces numbness and it is what you are suffering from now, too.)
I must tell you a lovely story about Scott. The other night I was rubbing his back and saying good night and when I finished, Scott started to wriggle down under the bedclothes but he couldn’t get down because I was sitting on the bed. He complained, “I can’t get down!”
“Oh, Scott,” I said, jumping up very quickly. “I’m sorry.” (Overemphatically, as I always do.) “It’s because I’m sitting on your bed, Scott. I’m so sorry!”
Scott looked up at me, smiling, and said, in such an adult way, as if I should know better, “Oh Mother, you don’t have to say ‘I’m sorry.’ I love you so much, Mother, that you don’t have to say ‘I’m sorry’ to me.”
I felt it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to me in my life. And that all the meaning of love was in it. And if he could have learned that from me, perhaps I was not so inadequate.
Scott’s Cove, Darien, Conn.
July 9th, 1950
Dearest C.,
I have just sent off a cable to you saying I would like to postpone my flight two weeks. How I longed to talk to you. Cables are terribly unsatisfactory and I wonder now—in a panic—if you will get it?!! Will you be off in Brittany or Scandinavia or Austria—out of touch for a week?? I figure that probably with the tension in the world—the Korean situation, etc.—you will in all probability be busy in Germany and in touch with the Air Force. I have therefore acted on that and sent you two cables—one to the Air-Attaché Paris and one to Wiesbaden.
Now, to my plans and state here, that made me cable:
I have had a wonderful week. This is perhaps dreadful at first blush to say, in the face of the cloud that hangs over the world—a smoke cloud about to burst into flames. We always knew it was there: the situation does not seem to me appreciably changed. Only it is out in the open—more people see it and are excited about it (the excitement in itself is dangerous, of course). One must plan in the light of it. But actually my wonderful week of quiet, of no people, of writing, of sleeping, of hitting my rhythm again, of writing another long poem (on the Birth of a Moth—tell Jon all the moths are coming out—one a day!), has taken on greater importance—or maybe not importance but validity against the pall of smoke—because I feel I may not have wonderful weeks or months very often in the future, and because against world conflict, inner harmony seems more important than ever. And I believe they are actually more related than we think. Which, actually, is what you are so often saying to me.
This ten days of peace I wish to prolong for another ten days. I realize that I am sacrificing something—seeing you and perhaps Jon—for two weeks. Your plans may be such that you will only have those two weeks free. You may be absorbed in the Air Force, sent to Washington, to Korea etc. But I do not know. I have no inkling of how this crisis has affected you or what it means. And I have to go ahead on my own judgments of the crisis. The Korean situation, I gather, was a well-considered move—no accident. I mean we saw it coming and avoided it as long as possible because militarily it was so difficult, etc. Here we are again—political realities forcing us into military unrealities. Or no—forcing military realities on us which we had not really faced and do not wish to.
What I would like to do is to take another ten days here quietly. Of course I want to finish “The Shells”—or the poem—and then to join you and follow you on your contacts in Europe—if this would be possible. I tried to suggest this in the cable but I left out “if possible” trying to get it all in twenty-five words for $2.50!
I am outlining what I would like. It just would be wonderful, if it were possible, to go over Europe with you—talking to people, gathering information, as we did last summer—talking it over each night and in the car as we went. This summer of all summers, when everything is on the boil, I will be hungry for it.
Of course, I realize I may have missed the chance by delaying it or that it may not be possible. But dear Charles, one must act on one’s moments of grace and this is what I have done. It took great courage, great faith in your understanding, in your backing of me—even in a mistake! Perhaps your letter to me—the only one I have had—has given me the courage and the faith to change my plans. But how I long for word from you, for confirmation, and how I worry lest the cable misses you altogether and you should be waiting at the airport! Nightmares!
And yet—you do understand and like to practice yourself—keep fluid in movement. You also sometimes postpone trips and don’t let me know when you’re appearing. It means, I know, that one must then accept the responsibility of finding the other person unprepared—unable to break his plans, etc. In other words—you may not be able to meet me or be with me, etc.—in two weeks’ time. I must be grown-up and take that chance.
So much love—and to Jon if he is with you. Will write again soon. I am sleeping, now, and swimming in evening.
xo,
A.
Tegernsee, Germany
Monday, August 18th, 1950
Dear Mother,
We arrived here Wednesday night, the chalet farmhouse of an old Norwegian artist, Olaf Gulbransson,* whom we met last year. It is a beautiful spot, halfway up a mountain overlooking the valley and the lake. Mrs. G., a lovely soft-voiced, golden-braided Norwegian, met us at the door in Bavarian skirt and apron, with the word that Jon had been here and we had missed him by two days! He was here a week and G. did two sketches of him—good, but not as good as the one he did of C. last year.
Anyway, it warmed my heart the way both of them spoke of him. “A wunderbar young boy!” he said. And she, “Oh, he is such a charming boy, a charming boy!” I am sure he was well fed and cared for here, stuffed with good Norwegian pancakes and jule-cake.
Germany looks much better than a year ago, so far. Shops full (though expensive). People well fed—better dressed. (New baby carriages & new shopping bags the most obvious—and young people on bicycle camping expeditions everywhere.) But underneath, the despair at the growing cloud of war is very black. They know they have no arms, army, etc. with which to stop Russia and that she can sweep over Europe when she wants to. The French know this too, but it is not quite so close, and every German has immediate knowledge of Russia—relatives in the East Zones or a son or a father or a brother, a prisoner. They know that for them to be occupied by Russia is the end of the world. Many unbelligerent people soberly plan suicide when the Russians come. We cannot really conceive of it. You have to hear Frau G., a calm Norwegian, say quite quietly, “Today when I hear of someone dying I think: it is good, it is perhaps good.”
She tells me of Churchill’s speech at the Council of Europe yesterday suggesting a European army in which Germany shou
ld participate. And that the Germans are not very enthusiastic. They do not want to be the infantry thrown against the Russians. They know Germany will be the battleground and they fear our atomic bombs will drop on them. All the young are anti-war. I suppose we all are. Even the Russians. And us. C. has just arrived with mail from Wiesbaden—good letter from you. I am all for the portrait going to Smith.* It should. How about another portrait for us—in Chinese coat—white hair—very good—a small one? Time for no more.
Love,
A.
Scott’s Cove
Monday, September 25th [1950]
Dearest C. (oh the damp paper—I forgot),
T.† has just driven over to see me and talk Europe and European Rearmament, etc.—was very anxious to get hold of you on what he feels is a most crucial development which might be turned constructively, or might turn destructively if not guided. He feels you are the person over there whom he trusts—your judgment, knowledge, ability, etc.
The children are back in school, except for Land who has his first cold and is in bed. Jim says (over the phone) that he looked pretty thin and wan when he arrived from camp. “You could have pulled him through a key-hole.” But he is fattening up. Reeve volunteered, “I don’t want anything for my birthday except to have Father come home!” Scott has learned to ride Land’s old bicycle and went with me to the Point Saturday—does very well. Anne is going to play the flute in school (if we can rent one through the school). The gas stove has been repaired sufficiently for the new cook to bake in it and roast as well, so I am doing nothing on the electric stove till you come home and something should be done!
This morning we found in the trap that Land had put out to catch a chipmunk in (to tame!) a small skunk. Since Land was incapacitated and I didn’t want him running down in the cold, I picked up the trap, holding the rear end of the skunk away from me, and carried it down onto the grass—opened it up and pointed it downhill to the bushes. The skunk just snuck out as quietly as could be, no fuss and no ammunition! And I am a heroine in everyone’s eyes! But I am not sure the children will let the next one go. They all want a dog—“at least something alive.” Scott has some caterpillars—rather harmless wildlife. Land is determined to catch a chipmunk or a coon. I say, “Wait till Father comes home!”
Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986 Page 8