I met Stafford once, at the Payne-Whitney Clinic, when she was being treated for alcoholism and shared a suite with my sister, who had had a serious nervous collapse. I remember her as gentle and shaky, with an already ravaged face and sad eyes although she was young. I remember feeling afraid of her, as I was of my sister, wondering when they would break out with symptoms of their illnesses. We walked to the Metropolitan Museum and I recall that they took each other’s hand crossing streets.
In the biography, Stafford is quoted as complaining to her agent that her children’s book was not being ‘pushed’ by her publisher. The verb stopped me. I had a sudden vision of well-dressed publicity people, their hands outstretched, palms flat against a large book, all their weight applied to ‘pushing’ the book.
I know such action is necessary in our time, in an overcrowded publishing world of too many books and too few buyers and readers. But pushing a book strikes me as indecorous and unmannerly. Let the book make its own way, even through the thick forest of competitors, compelling readers by the force of its words and its vision. If it needs much pushing it may not be worth anything. If it is pushed hard, its weaknesses may be revealed to more readers than might ordinarily come upon them. Disappointment sets in; the reader decides to stop buying new books for a while. Disaster all around.
The pushers occupy a large part of the New York publishing world. I have gone to parties hoping to encounter some writing friends, only to be swallowed up in a sea of very young, chattering, elegant publicity people who talked only to each other and made me feel as though I represented a dispensable, better-left-unnoticed part of their world. Of course, in this respect, my evident age may be the cause; publishing has many young pushers to whom elderly writers, I suspect, are useless baggage, no longer ‘on the cutting edge’ of publishing. What a vicious, almost lethal phrase that is.
My old friend Barbara Probst, now in her middle seventies and living near the farm which houses the bookstore she built and ran for many years, now suffers from serious osteoporosis. We stop on our way to Maine to see her. She is wry but cheerful, and determined to conquer her affliction. In the process of turning over in bed, she broke her spine in two places. What infinitely fragile creatures we elderly are. Falls, turns, failures of sight and hearing and mental acuity, we deteriorate almost without noticing it. Or, if we notice, we are filled with unreasonable optimism. Always before we have recovered, come back to normal. Why should it be different now?
We drive on, across a final strip of New York State into Vermont and then New Hampshire, past Peterborough, the town where, years ago, I stayed at an artists’ colony to write my first book of serious fiction. Places have a way of inspiring writers, even when they are there to write another book entirely. I recall that Thornton Wilder, a guest there, wrote Our Town at MacDowell Colony and used Peterborough for Grover’s Corners. In my studio there twelve years ago, I read a dedicatory plaque over the fireplace, thought about it for days, made fiction of its suggestive contents, and then wrote Chamber Music. I owe Peterborough much, I think as we drive along its outskirts, MacDowell Colony even more, and most of all, Baetz Studio, where the idea for a novel was born.
And then, much further on, when we cross the river into Maine, where the air smells of salt and fish, I think how much of my sense of the value of peace and inner serenity I owe to my love for Maine. The color of the air turns from New Hampshire green to the grey of Maine. I feel I am home.
At May Sarton’s secluded house in York on the Maine coast, I look out once again at the rocks, coast, and sea at the bottom of her long pasture. I think of the July, ten years ago, when I worked there on Chamber Music. We visit her for lunch, bringing the crabmeat we all love, and wine. She is in good spirits although she says her health is poor. The medication she takes for heart fibrillation makes her sick. It is hard for her to work and yet, ‘I have a new novel,’ she tells us. A new puppy, irascible and tiny, occupies old Tamas’s space. There is a new cat to take Bramble’s place. May has transferred her love from the revered dead animals to the new lively ones, although she says it hasn’t been easy.
Indomitable about her physical ailments, forthright in her opinions, she leads the lunch conversation about the natural world, her beloved birds, and people, those who visit her, as well as those who oppress her with letters and demands. She has written herself into a corner where, proclaiming her love of solitude, she attracts isolatos who want some part of her time.…
But now that she is ill and age is overtaking her, she understandably wishes she did not live alone. Her neighbors, she feels, do not pay much attention to her.
We leave and start up the coast, thinking of May and her unresolvable predicament: to be old and ill and alone, sometimes frightened, a writer who has written her widely read journals, which express a preference for being alone. She craves critical recognition; the applause of her fans does not seem to be enough.
At last we come to the house in East Blue Hill on Morgan Bay that leads to the sea. We have rented it for the terrible Twelfth.
So. It has arrived, July 12, 1989, the day I find hard to believe in. I have now lived for seventy summers, the season beloved to me for warmth, water, clotheslessness, sun, sand, clear skies. Yet I have forgotten many of those years. I was unaware for too long of much of the time—more than twenty-five thousand days—through which I have moved. Now, I am aware of every moment of every day, especially of the summer days. Now that it is growing late.
The house we have rented for a few weeks is a rambling place, built by the sculptor Lenore Straus, who died recently. Her friend Peggy Danielson, to whom she left it, is here, living in rooms at one end. We have the luxury of the larger set of rooms, which were built by haphazard addition, a process not unlike budding or binary fission. They seem to have grown out of each other. At the same time, the house has the feeling of organic, calculated design as though the interior unity of a devotedly led creative life united the disparate sections.
I establish a routine that, on purpose, will limit my time and space. I consider where I will write in the mornings. As usual it turns out to be in a place outdoors, in the sun, within sight of water, Morgan Bay. The porch is three by five feet, so small that no one can walk in front of me or behind me when I sit there with my clipboard and coffee.
Today I ‘turn’ seventy. A strange verb, suggesting to me what happens to wine when it becomes vinegar. Will I turn in some way other than years? The day is sunny, the water beyond the porch sparkles. A small sailboat is anchored offshore, from this distance looking diminished, like a child’s toy. I remember watching a boy sail just such a boat on the pond for toy boats in Central Park. He pushed it out with a hefty shove, then fell in after it, and had to be pulled out by his nurse, who then spanked him. He cried, not from the punishment, I thought, but because he had dropped the string to the boat when he fell. The boat sailed away into the middle of the pond.
I am so immersed in thoughts of aging that I waste the morning. Sybil comes back from shopping with vegetables for lunch. I smile when I see beets, recalling the short-lived utopian colony Fruitlands, founded by Bronson Alcott in New England. A cardinal rule there was that the colonists were forbidden all ‘devilish’ root vegetables because they grew downward into the soil, while leafy vegetables were acceptable. They ‘aspired.’
When I cannot write, I think about the pleasures of small spaces like this porch. If I have to stay in a large place I immediately reduce it. I do not want a choice of aspects but the limitation of one, so my mind will stay fixed on what I am doing and nothing irrelevant will be suggested to me, no distraction by variety. In one day, I settle into a routine to match the small space. There are whole areas of any new place that I will never explore, certainly never stay in for very long. I have no curiosity about unvisited or unused space, feeling grateful for the protection of the narrow corner I have created.
As a child, when we went to a summer house in Far Rockaway, I had to sit in every chair at least onc
e, open every closet, pee in every bathroom, see the view from every window, before I felt I could settle down for a while and stay. I was adventurous and loved the new and unexplored.
In my teens I remember tramping through the thick woods behind the girls’ camp where I was first a camper and then, later, a counselor, exulting as I put a foot into a tangle of brush. To a city child, it seemed a jungle, and I thought: ‘It may be that I am the first human being ever to stand in this place.’
The newness of everything. The uniqueness of myself and my experience. How sure I was, knowing so little history, of all this. At the end of his life, Ezra Pound observed to a friend: ‘Nothing really matters, does it?’ Today I understand this. At the end, or close to the end, or closer to the end than the beginning, the value of what we once thought mattered is lost to us. Even survival, once so important, money, food, family, country, accomplishment, recognition, fame, even: Pound was right.
He once said to Allen Ginsberg: ‘At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron.’
Today I feel empty and unconcerned, but not moronic or even mad. I have never thought I was mad. I doubt Pound believed it of himself. He must have listened to the diagnosis from the authorities at St. Elizabeths, grimaced at the stupid mistakes he had made by talking too much and thoughtlessly, and decided to say almost nothing aloud for the rest of his life.
Because I cannot make one sentence of progress in my ms, even in sight of calm Morgan Bay, surrounded by silence and solitude, I begin a letter to an Albany friend who writes me long, satisfying letters which I repay with apologetically short notes. I make a mess of the first page, reread what I have written, and see why. These days, my approach to prose is full of ambiguous multiple choices. I write in layers:
thickly
feeds
richly planted with low seaside-like bushes. I believe the bay leads
an impression of
into the ocean. I have a sense of
the sea without its wildness.
suggest to you
I tell you …
olio/mixture
This morning my head is a hodgepodge.… I know too many synonyms.
No, that’s not it. I am too aware of possibilities and cannot make up my mind. How will I settle on one? I am no longer able to do that. I shall let David, the recipient of this letter, choose what he thinks is best, giving him a sense of (impression of?) power, editorial control, what I seem to have lost now as I write.
I write another letter, to Jim McPherson in Iowa City, feeling, in a low place of pain, my thousand miles of distance from him. So I ask him questions to which I do not expect an answer or at least not one for some time. How can it be, I want to pose to him, that I am so close to the end when, a short time ago, I was just beginning?
Writing to Jim, I suddenly remember what I saw in June on the water off Lewes, the fine Delaware beach. I was sitting in a low beach chair at the edge of the sea. A motorboat passed me. In it were three white men. Behind their boat they pulled a tall black man on water skis, a beautiful, dark stick figure against the grey sky and light-blue water. I can see his towline, I can see his graceful body move in response to instructions from someone standing at the stern of the boat. On the third trip past me, he fell. His black head was all I could see of him, a period on the grey sentence of the sea. The boat slowed, maneuvered around him, and, in a moment, stopped. Four white arms reached down and pulled him into the boat.
Another man dived into the water to rescue the skis. The thin black man, apparently very strong, lifted the white man and the skis into the boat. Now filled with a satisfying conglomerate of black and white bodies and heads, the skis sticking up from the stern like sawed-off masts, the boat pulled away.
So it may be with Jim McPherson in lily-white Iowa City: the troubled, often frightened, reclusive writer, scarred by his life in the South, sustained by white- students and many white friends, trying to learn to trust and love ‘amid the alien corn,’ hoping for safety and protection from hereditary white enemies, as he saw it, ‘out there.’
Once, when VCRs first appeared on the market, Jim used a little of his MacArthur windfall to buy about a thousand videocassettes. If his life was threatened, he planned to hole up in his house and spend his time watching films. He believed the assault might come in the near future. Once I borrowed a tape, labeled A Thousand Cranes. When I put it on the machine he had loaned me, it turned out to be Rambo 2. How many of them were in the wrong box? I wondered. How many surprises lay in store for his future days of seclusion?
The terrible Twelfth goes on. I invite Peggy, our host, to share May Sarton’s gift of champagne with us. Friends from up the road, Ted Nowick and Bob Taylor, will come too. I suddenly think: A more suitable way to celebrate this dread event would be alone, not in society. I ought to let go of the cheerful illusions of company and surrender to the true state of old age, remembering Virginia Woolf’s conviction that at bottom we are all alone and lonely.
The sun moves to the other side of the house. I go in to change to slacks and a shirt with sleeves. In the process I do an unusual thing. I look skeptically, exploringly, at my body in the floor-length mirror. In my young years I remember that I enjoyed feeling the firmness of my arms and legs, neck and fingers, chin and breasts. Once the result of such examinations was less reassuring I stopped doing it. Thereafter, I never resorted to a mirror, believing it would be better not to know the truth about change and decline. In my memory of my body nothing had changed.
Now I look, hard. I see the pull of gravity on the soft tissues of my breasts and buttocks. I see the heavy rings that encircle my neck like Ubangi jewelry. I notice bones that seem to have thinned and shrunk. Muscles appear to be watered down. The walls of my abdomen, like Jericho, have softened and now press outward. There is nothing lovely about the sight of me. I have been taught that firm and unlined is beautiful. Shall I try to learn to love what I am left with? I wonder. It would be easier to resolve never again to look into a full-length mirror.
I open mail I have brought with me. A letter asking me to ‘read’ at a conference on creative writing. My first response to the invitation: pleasure, ego gratification. Someone remembers and wants me still. The second: a quick reminder. I dislike reading my work aloud, hearing all the errors that are, too late, cemented into print, noticing the rhetorical slips, the grating infelicities. The sound of my own voice gives a terrible legitimacy to faulty prose. I say no. But thank you for thinking to invite me.
Another letter asks if I am willing to be nominated to the Senate of Phi Beta Kappa. Out of the blue. I have had no connection with the society since I was elected to it fifty years ago. At that time I had to explain to my father, one of this country’s nastiest anti-intellectuals, what PBK was. He laughed, and directed my mother to attend the induction ceremonies, adding that he was far too busy to come out of his haberdashery store on the Bowery to go to ‘Phi Beta Krappa.’ A long, hearty laugh followed that witticism, in which, as I recall, my mother and I did not join.
I say yes, for the usual reason. I always figure I will not be alive when the time comes to do anything about this, or, as likely, I will not be elected. I never say yes to invitations to speak or read or teach if the proposed time is a month or two ahead, believing that there might be a chance I will be living when the time comes. But a year from now is very safe.
I ponder the vast unlikelihood of PBK’s selection of me, after all this time, out of its 300,000 members. Did my name come up on some computer screen, as the result of random choice? My acceptance of the nomination is as unlikely as the coincidence (it seems to me) of its coming upon me. To all this happenstance, I say an unbelieving yes.
Sallie Bingham, whom I have known since we met at the National Book Critics Circle’s yearly meetings (or perhaps it was the National Book Award ceremonies in the early seventies), sends me a copy of The American Voice, a magazine she publishes in Kentucky. There is a small essay of mine in this issue.
When we first knew each other in New York, I had no idea who Sallie was—a daughter of Kentucky’s most famous family, as it turned out—until her family sold its interest in the Louisville Courier-Journal and the story of the family’s internecine war was revealed. I never guessed she was wealthy: my Sallie Bingham? She was shy, unassuming, quite willing to lunch at my suggestion at a grubby sandwich shop. I assumed she was probably in New York on a small budget from the paper for which she worked as book editor.
Now she uses her money to assist women writers and to publish the magazine The American Voice, in which this short, sad piece of mine appears. I read it with dismay, wondering how I could have brought myself to display in print my grief at the deaths of Bill Whitehead, Lazarus, the fish, and the sight of the moribund Florida lions.
This is what I wrote on growing old:
Everyone does who survives. The inevitability of it is offensive to me, but what is to be done? To choose not to is oblivion, and do I want that, yet? No. I prefer half a loaf, a piece of the stale pie, diminishment, a slant of light, to total eclipse. The flowers of my life wilt, they lose their fragrance and their colors, but I cling to them, preferring them to nullity. I hear less, see crookedly, lose weight and height, grow spotted and stolid, placid and inept. A writer named Guy Davenport reminds me that for Edgar Allan Poe time was the unstoppable tread of death. This sound I hear more clearly than once I did, when the steps were muffled by activity and love, or drowned out by my hot pursuit of notice and satisfactions. I used to fly; now I linger or stumble. Once, it was always dawn; now it is twilight.
I collect metaphors for death. Driving down US I toward the flat and unexceptional Florida town of New Smyrna Beach, I pull over onto the shoulder of the road. I get out, and walk toward an elongated boxcar with grillwork at the sides. There, in three narrow cages, are six tired, sick-looking lions, with yellow, aged manes and flabby, ineffectual paws. Their eyes are full of tears. Scabs line their mouths. They lie in sawdust and excrement, haunch forced against haunch, and their flesh hangs upon their bones like drapery.
Coming into the End Zone Page 4