It didn’t mean a smile.
I hear from Isaac Wheeler, my grandson, that he is trying to decide on a college to attend in the fall. Sybil, a Swarthmore alumna, hopes he will go there, because she believes his strong social conscience (he is the only teenager on the board of the War Resisters League) will be received hospitably on that campus. Isaac liked his visit to Yale, his father’s school. I think it will not matter too much which college he chooses. He is a sensitive, bright, hardworking, inquisitive, talented young man, who loves his family in particular and the human family in general. He will learn wherever he goes. In the process, I hope he will not lose his scorn for bald ambition, fraud, and pretension, his vow never to engage in war, his concern for the displaced, the mistreated, the homeless, the outsiders. At Stuyvesant High School in New York, he organized a day for Civil Rights for Gays and Lesbians. He and his friends who worked with him are not gay, but he thought students should be made aware of the injustice of such denial to that segment of the population.
Despite the unpleasant clichés of the doting grandmother that I try to avoid, I am proud of him. He represents the only immortality I am likely to achieve. I wish I were leaving him a more civilized, livable, just, and decent world. But I have faith that he will do what he can, somehow, to try to improve it.
Today, while there is still money left in my Washington account, I sent checks to the two artists’ colonies I have attended, Yaddo and MacDowell. Not very large checks, but something to signify my gratitude for the time and space they granted me in the past. It is unlikely I shall ever return to them, because it appears I have at long last acquired a clone of those blessed places, where I can work undisturbed, can find the peace that often, for me, produces good prose, and can luxuriate in uncrowded, private space.
MacDowell: It was the first colony I ever attended, the first time I knew the virtues of living and working among artists whose whole attention was focused on their work. MacDowell is on the outskirts of the small town of Peterborough, New Hampshire. It is a wooded compound of small cabins for work, and a few larger buildings for living, eating, playing. There is communal breakfast, and then a long, almost timeless-seeming day, unbroken by the presence of anything but oneself, the fire one has built against the early-morning cold, and the lunch basket left quietly on the steps.
Whenever the muse vanished, or inspiration gave out, or my back grew tired of sitting at a typewriter in a camp chair, I would close the damper in the fireplace, pat the growing pile of manuscript fondly, pull the door shut, and take off, in the company of like-minded writers, artists, and composers, for the fire pond, where we swam without the encumbrance of clothing, or a nearby lake (there seemed to be hundreds of them all around us). Dinner was a convivial time, with wine at some tables provided by a more affluent guest. After dinner we talked around the great fireplace in the Hall while some skillful gamesters played an incomprehensible (to me) game called cowboy pool.
Some colonists (as we were called) went into town, where there was one hotel bar, or to a movie house that seemed to show the same film the entire time I was there. Others went back to their studios to work. Still others went early to bed, alone or with a friend, claiming a desire to rise very early and get to work. Whatever it was one did, it was in good company, with good companions, people I was to know from the end of my stay until now.
We wore our oldest and most mismatched clothes at the Colony. I remember only two exceptions to this practice: writer Jerre Mangione, who wore fine suits and a silk ascot at the neck, as befitted the elegant Sicilian he was, and Grace Glueck, who wrote art news for the New York Times and dressed in ‘outfits,’ as they used to be called, everything matching, and wore stockings and heeled shoes while the rest of us shuffled around in sneakers and L. L. Bean woodsman’s clothes.
But the work I was able to do in those silent woods! Out of sight of other studios, steeped in the pleasure of knowing I would be entirely alone with whatever was inside me that had to come out, for eight hours. I was in the Baetz Studio on my first visit, working on a novel called The Missing Person. It moved along slowly. I could not understand why my progress was not greater. Then I realized that every morning, compulsively, before I started to write, I sat on the cot and read the dedicatory plaque over the fireplace. It said that this studio had been erected in memory of Anna Baehr, nurse to Edward MacDowell during his long, last illness and devoted friend to Marian MacDowell after his death. I can’t vouch for the words verbatim (I’ve never been back to it since that summer), but this was the sense of what was written on the plaque.
One afternoon I walked to the graves of the MacDowells. Carved on a large, impressive stone were their names and their dates, revealing the fact that Marian had survived Edward by almost fifty years. I could not find Anna Baehr’s grave. (In the novel I was to bury her at the foot of the MacLarens/MacDowells, with the words LOVE AND DUTY engraved on her small, flat stone.)
Every morning, rereading the plaque, I wondered: Why did the composer die so young, what was the premature illness that Anna Baehr nursed him through, why did Anna stay on, what was her life like at the Colony with Marian, what was Marian’s long afterlife like? I became so preoccupied with these questions that, hardly aware of it, I sat on the cot for longer periods of time each morning, making fictions of the three lives, one of whom must have been in the studio I now worked in, at least for its dedication.
I stopped working on The Missing Person. My head had filled with invented stories about the MacDowells (now called the MacLarens in my fiction), the nurse, the Colony (moved to Saratoga in the early years of this century to take advantage of the fashionable atmosphere), the people they might have known, the intermingling of their lives and their loves.
In a month I wrote the first half of the story. I finished that draft, another, and then another in other places. But the aura of the Colony was in my head and, I suppose, in my hand when I worked on Chamber Music. I believe that without the real place, this could not have happened. My novel belongs to those lovely woods as much as it belongs to me.
Yaddo: On the edge of Saratoga Springs, within earshot of the Northway that runs from Albany to farther upstate New York, it is a colony much in the spirit of MacDowell, but different in that its surroundings are elegant. Most of the guests (here called Fellows) live, literally, in a mansion, left to the colony by Kathryn Trask in memory of her husband and four dead children, all of whose tragic spirits seem to inhabit the large common rooms and many fine, old-fashioned bedrooms. The spacious bathrooms are marble. The veranda looks out on vast lawns and a rose garden, to which the public is invited during the day. But it is separated from the mansion and its lawn by strict signs. Having drinks on the veranda before dinner, and coffee after it, we would look down at people straggling across the lower lawn, looking up at us, and pointing. We felt like some sort of curious aristocracy, not a common experience for writers, painters, composers. It was ego-elevating, it was lovely.
I worked in spaces off my bedroom, once in a room Carson McCullers used, another time in a room in which William Carlos Williams wrote a section of Paterson. On my last visit, two years after John Cheever’s death, I was given his customary bedroom and study. The first night a small brown bird flew about in the rafters, settled on a bust of Caesar, and left when I opened the screen on a window. I knew who it was: Cheever himself, returned to see who was sleeping in his bed and occupying his desk. I worked well that summer, on The Magician’s Girl, with the spirit of John Cheever giving me support and courage.
What makes Yaddo, and other colonies, of course, valuable is the company you keep. Here I met John Leggett. My long association with the Iowa Writers Workshop was the result of the afternoon we sat beside the Yaddo pool. He said, ‘Have you ever thought of teaching writing?’
‘Writing,’ I said, with all the scorn that a longtime professor of literature can summon up. ‘How in the world does one teach writing?’
As I recall, he let that question pass. Inste
ad he asked when I would be able to get a semester off from American University to come to Iowa City. In a year, I thought. So it came about. I have no idea what those workshop students may have learned from me, but I learned the answer to my question. In the long, tough, highly critical workshops held once a week in that happy place, in the presence of those enormously talented students, you simply hold their coats while they go at it.
At Yaddo I met two novelists at the beginning of their careers who are still my friends, Joseph Caldwell and Allan Gurganus. We used to go out drinking together, wandering the fashionable streets in our ragged writer’s clothes (although I remember Allan once bought a battered raccoon coat in a secondhand store and wore it at night regardless of the heat). We talked endlessly about what we were writing, sometimes about the other Fellows and their peculiarities. We became friends despite the difference in our ages—I was at least twenty years older than they. The bond of a common endeavor and the fine, relaxed time after the day’s work wiped out, at least for me, that disparity. And still does.
Now that I know we are soon leaving these Washington streets, I find myself walking more often. There have been weeks when I have not used the car. Serendipitously last night, Sybil brought home a seventeenth-century book by Thomas Fuller, The Holy State. I read here and there in it (I am not fond of religious tracts) and found a fine sentence: ‘Running, leaping, and dancing, the descants on the plainsong of walking, are all excellent exercise.’
Aha. If I am certain I am not being watched, and because I am so excited by the thought of moving to Maine shortly, I may take to running, leaping, and dancing along North Carolina Avenue to the market, the post office, and Wayward Books. Occupied in this way, I may even stop counting my steps.
May
The first stage of the move was accomplished today. Most of our ‘city’ furniture, some of our books, and half of our kitchen and linen supplies are now in an apartment on C Street, around the corner from the bookstore and across the street from the Eastern Market. It is small, but has two balconies which give it a more ample sense. However, one of them looks out at a distant row of trees which will soon be obscured by the upper stories of a corner building to be erected in the summer. The study is a small, viewless room we will share, since Sybil has a computer like mine and will bring it from the store when we return here in the winter.
I have not lived in an apartment for almost twenty years. There is something odd about going home to a lobby, an elevator, another hallway, and then a series of boxes opening into one another, with the same doors, the same fixtures, and two identical bathrooms, the only difference between them being the location of the toilet-paper holder.
Our furniture, rearranged a number of times, and our books all seem to be cramped into these rooms. This is true city living, too much furnishing, too little space. A symbol of the reduction is the absence of the sixteen volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, soon to be making their way on the van to Maine, and the substitution of the two-volume edition, with its 2-point print and magnifying glass.
A handsome young black man comes to install our two telephone lines. It takes a long time to bring the extra line in. He rests now and then, and looks at the walls of books.
‘Have you read all these?’
‘Most of them.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I write.’
‘I’ve often thought of being a writer.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, to make more money. And to sit down while I work.’
‘I think you may make more money doing what you do. And I get tired of sitting down.’
‘You’re kidding. And another reason—you get famous and people recognize you on the street.’
‘Not really. Only if you’re Norman Mailer or Stephen King or someone like that.’
‘Who is Norman Mailer?’
‘A famous writer.’
‘Oh. Well, both phones are now working. I enjoyed the talk.’
‘Thank you. So did I. If you became a writer what would you like to write about?’
‘Anything, anything that makes money. My life, maybe. Well, so long.’
June and July
Maine. In the bookstore van, we start on our way from Washington to Sargentville, stopping to visit the Kosteckis, Sybil’s family outside Philadelphia. There I am given her granddaughter Rachael’s bedroom. The walls are papered with photographs of a boy who appears, I gather, in soap operas. He is Rachael’s love. Her bed had been covered with stuffed animals, now thoughtfully removed for me. I lie on it for some time before I go to sleep, the light on, trying to imagine, or remember, what it was like to be adolescent, protected from my family and the outside world by a wall of toys and pictures of … who was pasted on my wall then? John Gilbert?
We stop the next evening at Jim Hillman’s house in Connecticut, for an hour in his hot tub, a good dinner, much loud talk between argumentative male guests and the host, and sleep. Then it is time to make the last part of the journey north to ‘Plas Newydd,’ as the heroines of The Ladies called their house in Wales: the New Place. But we have decided against calling our house Plas Newydd or even Serious Trouble. It will be the Captain White House, because that is the name painted on our mailbox. We know little about Captain White, but there is a comfortable sense of anonymity and buried history behind the name, so we shall keep it.
The moving van with our furniture and books is traveling a faster, more direct route toward Sargentville. One of the moving men is driving Troilus, my car, loaded with electronic equipment, bed pillows, and boxes of food. I have stayed in the new apartment for a few nights, not long enough to be able to think of it as another home. ‘Home’ will keep, until we travel for three days, six states, 750 miles, and pull into the driveway of the Captain White House.
This move is not without its anxieties for me. One of the most constant is the worry that the view, for which I know we bought the place, will grow dull, static, without interest, after we have looked out at it for a time. Another is that I will not be able to convey my muse from the wondrous little carriage house to the room in Maine I have chosen for a study because its view of the cove is so fine. In less elevated terms, that I won’t be able to write here.
‘Convey’ is a real estate word I have acquired in the last months. We put into our contract a notice that the tin-and-copper chandelier in the carriage house ‘does not convey.’ Cynthia Graae, once a writing student of mine, is the purchaser, with her husband Steven. She loves the carriage house as I do, wants to use it to write, and asked if the muse conveyed.
I suspect my doubts are at the bottom of the dream I had last night at Jimmy’s, summarizing all my old anxieties. It is the beginning of the winter semester. I am about to teach a class of eight students, the only ones who have shown up out of an enrollment of thirty-five. I can’t remember what the course is. I find a paper on my desk which informs me it is Advanced Accounting. Then I discover I have forgotten to wear a blouse. I rush to the back of the room while the real teacher takes the roll. I gather up my bookbag and escape to a room marked FAC ULTY. A tall nun looks in and tells me I don’t belong there. I leave, forgetting my purse. When I get to my car, still partially dressed, I discover I do not have my car keys (they are in the purse). A long search begins for the the faculty room. I need the purse; it has my money in it. I am frightened because I remember I have to call my mother to tell her I’ll be late.
My dream is full of familiar worries from my past. No one will want to take my course. I am unprepared to teach it properly. In my rush not to be late, I have forgotten some necessary article of clothing. I am really not qualified to be a member of a faculty. I will lose everything I need. My mother will worry because I am not home on time. I cannot call her.
A fleeting moment of pleasure comes as I wake, perspiring, from the terrors I have experienced. I have had a glimpse of my mother’s concerned face. She is young and handsome, black-haired and blue-eyed, a beautiful woman whom I loved a
nd who worried about me. But the memory is gone quickly. I am fully awake and flooded with apprehension. What will happen if the place we have bought is uncomfortable, cold, if the furniture does not fit, if the roof leaks, if the cellar is wet, if the view of the cove begins to pale?
I will telephone my mother, who has been dead for thirty-three years, and tell her that I don’t like it here and I will be home as soon as I find my purse. Or maybe I will ask her to come and get me and take me home.
We arrive at the house after noon, almost at the same time as the moving van. The ground, frozen and hard when we had our ‘walk-through’ in April before the closing, is now a morass of mud. The van proceeds down our driveway and immediately sinks into it. Fortunately Ted and Bob have come to meet us and know the proper fellow with a tractor to call. Chains are applied, the van is freed. It is almost three hours, and getting dark, before the moving men can begin to bring in the furniture and cartons. Their tempers shorten; the sixty cartons of books are no longer the light matter they were when they loaded them in Washington. They leave with their check, glad to be gone from us and our treacherous mudhole of an estate.
We are here, not yet home, but here. We eat the dinner our friends have brought, make the bed, and get into it gratefully, not very reassured by the events of the day, too weary to build a case for optimism. Tonight I am so tired that I have no dreams of disaster, no dreams at all. I sleep until five, when I am awakened by a loud thumping outside the window, and discover that two blue jays have landed on the bird feeder erected by the former owners outside our window.
The first morning. We watch the sky lighten as we lie in bed. The water turns from black to blue to green. By six-thirty we are downstairs, having coffee made in our old pot and staring from the kitchen window at a new, transformed view of Billings Cove. But it is very early to be up. We vow to take the bedroom bird feeder down as soon as possible. Sybil reminds me of her former sister-in-law who taught a preschool class and liked to educate her pupils in bird lore. She maintained a feeder for their instruction. Her dislike of jays communicated itself successfully to them. One day a little boy rushed into her classroom and reported: ‘Mrs. Hillman, the fucking jays are back again.’
Coming into the End Zone Page 19