by Janet Frame
Goodbye now.
Love J
The photos Basil sent are proofs only and I must write to the photographer for any I want. They’re not very good but there will be one or two fair ones. I look forward to your photos, I’m sure they’re a good bargain. I’ll look around for a cut-out body in exchange.
16. Yaddo January 8 —— 518-584-0746 (just in case)*
[footnote: *at 7. – 7.15 p.m. (the time of going to the other room for conversation)]
Dear Bill,
A morning letter. The photos are a delight—you’re an angel to send them. Need I say more?
(Breakfast: choice of cereal, raisins, wheat germ. Orange juice. Eggs anyhow. Coffee. Toast etc.)
The ‘raving old man’ I referred to in my last letter is Kenneth Burke the illustrious critic. He sleeps in the room above me, he’s an insomniac, and he has a preference for listening to allnight radio. He has a sly sense of humour, an unusually humble appraisal of his work, a voice that’s inclined to explode, and one eye that stays in its place while the other rolls around and around.
Already I’ve begun my ‘count-down’ of dinners—only so many left! They’re an ordeal. I just can’t bear dining in the presence of authorities—in this case the new director and his wife. Everything is so formal, everybody so bloody well-behaved, and after dinner we seem to be expected to go to the small room off the diningroom and sit and make conversation. So far I haven’t said a word—oh yes I said one or two last night and regretted them immediately. I almost spoke at dinner when the discussion was about repairing cars and washing machines and so on, the cost, the shoddy workmanship . . . and everyone had spoken—after all, the topic is not intellectually demanding and even MacDowell babies might be expected to speak a line . . . and I had in mind my experience of inserting a new ball-cock into my plumbing at home, and so, with heart beating fast at the contemplation of my daring, I framed, mentally, my opening sentence—‘I once spent all day putting in a new ball-cock’, but every time an opportunity came for me to contribute I panicked and said nothing and so the Yaddo meal-table never heard of my indelicate experience. Later, as we sat staring at each other in the anteroom, with everyone talking except me, I spoke a sentence. The topic was Marisol whom someone described as a disconcerting person because she would go to a party and sit and never speak all evening. I had been reading an article on the (socalled) ‘Tenth Street Painters’ and I murmured, too softly for anyone to hear, ‘There’s a description of her in that article on the Tenth Street Painters’.
‘What? What? What did you say? What? What? What?’
Oh my God! I didn’t have the courage to speak another sentence so I just mumbled and blushed and resolved never to speak again . . .
(Dinner: Pork chops, apple sauce, whipped creamed potatoes, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, carrots. Indian pudding and Ice cream. Coffee and cream.)
Two composers are arriving soon. Douglas Addenbrooke (?) and ?? Rorum which means they will have to open the front library where the grand piano is as the only other piano is in the Pink Room where one composer will live and work. (There are grand pianos of course in the mansion and two other studios which are all closed for the winter.) The Pink Room is Katrina Trask’s former bedroom and overlooks the line of yew trees (I think they’re yew) that lead to her grave.
How does it feel, Bee,
now you’re immortalized,
so prized
by Emily?
A ‘burnished carriage’ put by.
‘Delirious’ incense.
A mad correspondence
with Fly?
A poetic fling,
Clover, Capitals,
Peeps at pistils,
two wings and a sting?
How does it feel, Bee,
to bed a lily?
We of Saratoga Springs and formerly of MacDowell are glad you’re Billy.
Bee! Your photos two
arrived. Was saying yesterday
to myself at Yaddo
that they were due—
I arrived here this week—
I’m settled and at work—
I’m an Awful Hack
– Not only your sweater’s warm and thick—
You’ll get this letter, say,
next week. Reply,
Bee, over rose-hip tea—
Yours, Jay.
I’m shameless.
(Dinner: chicken, cranberry sauce, rice with mushrooms, olives, asparagus, salad and hot rolls. Cream puffs. Coffee and cream.)
I was saving this for my photos but they haven’t arrived.
Goodbye for now & el mismo to you and all at 131 H. Drive.
More again soon!
17. Yaddo January 9
Bee, bear with me—you’d better—
for writing you another letter.
(How’s your ‘burnished carriage’, by the way?
Did you get to visit Fly?)
Alas my battery’s not in its prime
and I can’t keep up this rhyme
—perhaps another time.
I’m sending two scruffy photos—what a bad bargain you’re getting after your own magnificent photos. The one of me in the mirror’s the only one that turned out O.K., and that’s because I’m in shadow. The other is one I took early early in the morning on Grand Central Station after leaving Elnora’s and while I was waiting for the train and I’m still half asleep. At least the MacDowell photo gives you a reminder of Bill Brownia, with sweater and cake-tin and monkey. The flower drawing on the extreme right was made by the fifteen-year old son of the poetb who wrote the ‘Tom Cat’ poem.
James K. Baxter
To try to make up the difference I’m sending you a few pages I don’t want from the proofs of my new novel which I’ve been correcting. Just a taste.
Now.
Now.
I’m preparing my dedication for this book Intensive Care, and I’m thinking of dedicating it to the person who made possible my visit to this country, and the person who will farewell me when I leave. I’m writing to the two people to ask if they mind and whether they want to be initials only or first names or full names.
If the people approve the dedication will read,
If you would be pleased rather than embarrassed or unpleasantly apprehensive do let me know how you would like to appear—as one or two initials or in name? Or what?
I want to get you into a dedication withour embarrassing you (or do I mean without embarrassing myself?) and I think this is the way to do it.
Or I could say something like (if you’d rather not be named) To Sue who made my visit possible, and the live oaks who sheltered me . . . and then you would have to explain now and again to the few people who might read my book that you are actually a live oak!
Any objections, ideas, etc?
(Dinner last evening, pot roast, horseradish sauce, green peas; salad and hot rolls (the salad and hot rolls appear every evening; sometimes it is cornbread); apricot whip which is apricots folded into whipped cream and other riches.)
Ned Rorem the composer arrives today. He has been quoted as saying that Yaddo is a luxurious concentration camp where he could neither camp nor concentrate.
I like also his quote about Beethoven and his wife (though I’m sure Beethoven didn’t have a wife).
Beeth: Don’t leave me darling, you’re my inspiration.
Wife: Me your inspiration? That’s a laugh!
With great self-discipline I was going to wait a few days before posting this but I have to know about the dedication.
Therefore
goodbye
& all kinds of thoughts (fantastic) for you & a helping for
N
& P
from J
18. Yaddo January
Dear B,
Bliss to get your letter which I’ll answer slowly, in instalments so as not to explode your mailbox with my feeling-rays . . . it’s snowing big flakes where this morning it snowed pinhead snow, I ate my lunch here
seven hours ago (it is now four o’clock) and like a horse I’m nibbling lumps of sugar.
So the scene is set.
Meals are out-a-site—huge steaks, turkey (wild), salads of olives and dates embedded with cream cheese and coconut, ginger souffle with whipped cream, coffee-iced cake with strawberries and ice cream . . . squash and green peppers in a swirl of tomato . . .
No I did not know that the F. Bacon painting was called Dread Walking. To myself I had called it The Scapedog (I have it pinned on the wall here) as it seemed to be receiving more dread and terror than it could cope with; but if it is Dread then it must exude Dread upon its surroundings. I’ve thought now that the dread is the dread of being Dread [in margin: ‘not the thing but the effect of it?’], and that is why it is in such anguish. I find it very powerful.
Thank you for the Rilke Poems. I don’t think his French poems are here but they may be in the local library, and they’re certainly in the local college (Skidmore) library which Yaddo guests sometimes use. I do want to read them. I’ve had a whole world of feeling overturned or unburied by reading in the story of Rilke in Paris—how R. was influenced by Valery’s ‘Le Cimetière Marin’, which he read and translated less than a year before he wrote the elegies and sonnets; he and the Muse, I mean. ‘Le Cimetière’ seems to have overwhelmed him.
It is strange to look back to myself as a schoolgirl and remember the pale green book, Ils Ont Chantés, which I loved and read over and over, especially the poem by Valéry, ‘Le Cimetière Marin’. You may observe, even from Yellow Flowers, that I am hooked on cemeteries by the sea. Maybe I’m a necrophiliac: I collect cemeteries as I collect (through necessity) public ‘comfort stations’ which, I suppose, are only another variation of comfort. Rilke liked the poem because to him it was a ‘perfect poem’; I liked it because I liked it and it moved me—but the French are marvellous with sea cemeteries—dead sailors, fishermen. Ici repose.
TUESDAY.
Snowing it was and is not now. The tree-branches seem to have arranged themselves in all kinds of elaborate poses just to show off the shapes of snow lying along them; in one there’s a huge mound of snow like a snow-lion.
I’m not happy here. I haven’t laughed—real laughter—for ages and ages. [in margin: since Santa Barbara] Everything is so formal and serious and everyone is so determined not to spill a clue of irrationality or disorder, and one is reminded all the time that one is a Writer, an Artist—When you are writing do you . . . is this a problem you come across when you’re writing . . . you as a writer would have something to say on this . . . (you’re telling me!)
The Director and his wife (harmless and pleasant in themselves) have before-dinner cocktails with us and dine with us and have after-dinner conversation with us, and everyone chats happily except me. Oh my, it’s grim. [in margin: Hello to Paul] Working conditions in this big studio, however, are excellent. (Last evening beneath the formal after-dinner conversation Walter Aebacher (sp?) a—the?—sculptor told me he read of a Queen of England who built a scaffold so she could copulate with a horse.) I keep imagining what the portrait of Santa Barbara will be like. It is such a rich idea—how much richer to have a city named after a Saint than after a General, yet I suppose the portrait of a city named after a general would yield much that was unexpected and mysterious and terrible; and Saints, too, have their surprises. The Muse is in this somewhere, emerging from Hérodiade and Muzot and the live oaks and the oil derricks and the gaunt hills and the bird of paradise flower. How lucky you are to have a Muse to guard you and prevent you from destroying your own vision! I’ve never cared for the Muse myself—I think of her as a bitch—I think my muse is either an angel—a stray one—a choice of angels or perhaps Pluto, God of the Underworld who carried off Persephone and I’m Persephone transferred from flower-gathering to higher or lower things, mostly lower.
I hope you got the Pocket Mirror I sent. I have a spare ADAPTABLE MAN (title only) and if you like I’ll give you my spare Adaptable Man—it’s a very bad novel but it has a dentist in it—I think I told you about this—based on a dentist I saw only once in my life and inspired by one sentence he spoke to me, ‘Rinse whilst I’m gone’. It also has a minister who is obsessed with St. Cuthbert (as I have been since I met him in Anglo Saxon prose). And not much else.
I tried to get Snowman Snowman and The Reservoir (they’re together handsomely ‘boxed’) when I was at the Braziller office but George B couldn’t find one. I did not know that Alan Lelchuk was very fond of Snowman Snowman. It’s the only book of mine (apart from Faces and Y Flowers, I think) that he’s read. He did say, though, that he’d like a copy of these stories. He’s a ‘fucking arrogant’ young man (Philip Roth’s description of him, quoted by Alan) but I like him. He’s really all trembling sensitivity (or sexitivity, pretty much the same).
I hope Ned has yielded his little cupful by now and is able to go out and about in the garden again.
I called Elnora to say hello. She’s been asleep mostly but I think she will get her book finished when she goes to MacDowell.
I love the little sketches in your letter. More.
‘Un cigne avance sur l’eau . . .’
Our exclusive heart-ray model, transplanted at no extra cost (admittedly, the initial cost is high!) Can be converted instantly for killing (distance no object). A thousand uses, much in little, even your best friends are deceived by it, wear it on your sleeve, in bed, at parties. Do not, however, bend spindle fold or mutilate, use only as directed. Do not burn when empty. Shake before using. Keep in a warm place. Pierce before use. Tear only where indicated. Do not inhale.
[in margin: It is dangerous to exceed the stated dose.]
J
19. Yaddo January
Page One
Dear B,
Dear literate graphic numerate semi-live oaks, Thank you for the inspired drawing of my muse and the inspired collage. Paul, how did you know that I, my other self, (e.g. my muse) was thus exactly conglomerately constituted? I had an impression you were wise but not as wise—as clairvoyant—as that! Though my face is not a cat’s. It is rather more like the face in the collage . . . Hi, it’s me again. The photo is nice and thanks for sending it, though I do look as if I’m holding a false hand and your gestures, Bill, indicate headache or a longing for acromegaly.
Anyway, it was a lovely bonus in the mail, and it cheered me up and made it easier for me to bear, at dinner, (the mail arrived before dinner) the superior snappy tone Granville Hicks adopted when I ventured—ventured to say something. The tone implied, What a moron you are! I really don’t know why I stick it out here—meaning why I put up with it; habit I suppose, and comfort; but I just hate this constant presence of the Directors—oh for the infant days of MacDowell. Maybe I’m in Hell and MacDowell was the First Circle (lulled to happiness) and Yaddo is the Second Circle, and so on. I suppose it’s partly my own constitutional dislike of the presence of institutional authority which makes it difficult.
(My new book will be called Headache or a Longing for Acromegaly.)
Page Two
When I get some Elmersc I will make a poem collage to send you, also a secrets of Yaddo Collage including Instant Measurements of Members (of the Executive). The housekeeper is a True Character. Yaddo is her life. Like Miss Gee in Auden’s poem she wears ‘a purple mac for wet days’ or its equivalent. She has a new deep blue coat especially for wearing to and from West House for her daily work. She is a fierce bedmaker and (to quote a witty guest), ‘You have to get into her bed as if you were a letter getting into an envelope’. She tucks and folds and smoothes.
Brand name of an American glue
The equivalent here of MacDowell’s Rural Violence is a tall dark woodsy-looking fellow called Milton. The staff here are all interesting characters. From time to time Miss Woods, the housekeeper, who, if you make the mistake of calling her Mrs is apt to say with a pitch of excitement in her voice, ‘Excuse me, madame, I’m Miss Woods, I’m a virgin’, will confide in me as a kin
dred spirit (she comes from Liverpool England and regards me as English too), and says darkly, ‘They’re going to weed out all those who don’t work’. With emphasis on the ‘weed out’. ‘Oh yes, madame, there’s going to be a lot of weeding out before next summer. They won’t be allowed to lounge around the swimming pool all day instead of working as they’re supposed to do. They’ll be weeded out.’
The ‘They’ of course are the artists. Temporarily when Miss Woods talks to me, I become ‘We’.
She is fearful of the guests whom she calls ‘The Men’. Although it is ‘the men’ she likes to do things for while the women guests get short shrift, as they say. In the morning she approaches me, looking cautiously about her in case someone might overhear, ‘Miss Frame, madame, have the men gone (to breakfast?). You know madame I don’t like to go to their bathrooms when they’re there. They might be embarrassed. What if they came in and found me!’
Yaddo could be such a fine place if only it did not have this tradition and the determination to keep the tradition of formality. Even one’s thinking is organized by the many notices. One can’t go to the lavatory without being reminded,
This is a small bore plumbing system
and then one is assailed by all kinds of frightful doubts as to whether one is a bore, whether one is a small bore to use the plumbing system, or maybe that somewhere on the estate there are places for large bores to pee. Or one could be a small bore but have a large bore peeing system . . . the possibilities are endlessly confusing.
How warm and soft green the pines are now, with all their snow suddenly washed away in the overnight thaw that brought great blocks of ice as big as automobiles crashing down from the roof. The pines have a spring softness. And the treetrunks are brown instead of that utter black which snowlight gives them.