Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  (Pause while I undo my lunch, slices of turkey, cheese, lettuce, chocolate-iced cake . . . )

  The Director Granville Hicks

  was up to his usual tricks.

  He bought some hormone

  from a Yaddo crone

  and grew himself triple pricks.

  A funny thing happened said Rorem

  today on my way to the forum.

  The thing was my own.

  It stood up full grown

  and laughed without sense or decorum.

  Needless to say no-one dreams I have composed these limericks. I might be expelled.

  More later.

  Hurry Up please it’s time.

  I’m glad you received The Pocket Mirror at last. I posted it on 3rd January! It must have touched down or been laid up for Refuelling at Fergus Falls Minnesota or some other place. It’s full of misprints. Also it lacks dignity and beauty—I long to write a dignified beautiful poem; my tone lapses into banality, I tend to leave the dark places where poems are best made and loiter around in the stereotypes and trivialities.

  Quote from Anatomy of Melancholy:

  ‘Great travail is created for all men: Men’s thoughts and fear of their hearts and the imagination of things they wait for and the day of their death.’

  End of darkness.

  ‘Bees are black with gilt Surcingles—

  Buccaneers of Buzz.’e

  lines by Emily Dickinson

  How nice of Emily to describe your surcingles—what are they?

  Wild Honey.

  More later.

  When would it be convenient for me to touch down at Santa Barbara (Los Angeles?). And shall I stay 12, 22, 32, 42, n2 . . . days? or a2, b2, c2, n2days where (a2 - b2) = (a—b)(a+b) where sin2A plus cos2A equals 1 and sin is not opposite over hypotenuse . . .

  stars for seeing.

  I’ve just had my mail letters from Jo, Sylvie and May Sarton: all very nice indeed. Jo received your glittering rock, as she’ll no doubt tell you or has told you. Both she and Elnora (who’s back at MacDowell) would like me to stay—Jo in South Hadley for a week after Yaddo ‘springs’ me; and Elnora in the N.Y. apartment—oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh. Jo wishes you would come East for us to have a reunion before I go away . . . And I’m very eager to go to Santa Barbara, as Blue Jay seeks reunion with Bee in his own Clover attended by Butterfly, Rose, Bird of Paradise, Paul, Pacific, Ned (the Red) and all the live oaks one two three of Hermosillo Drive plus the mountain lions with their gaping golden bones. Maybe I’ll make a break-out from Yaddo earlier than I thought.

  Dear Brendan Budgeknot, Barry Bracegirdle, enough of this crazy letter which you are under no obligation to answer, I mean not each one of these daily thoughts which fill your mailbox and accompany (with piano) your peanut butter delicacies.

  Love for yourself Paul and Ned

  J

  24. Yaddo January

  Dear Bill,

  Hello from Bill-less Yaddo that (except for the composer, delayed by a funeral until tomorrow) now has its full complement of winter guests all settling down to write and paint in the mornings and afternoons and to have their scrumptious meal in the evenings at the ten-place table presided over by Granville Hicks (Pricks for Kicks!) and Dorothy Hicks, to whom, as I said on the telephone when I talked to you (I happening to be passing by the telephone at the time), I must now render charity. Their post is a temporary one, for a year until the new permanent director is appointed, and they have the difficult task of trying to change a few of the Yaddo traditions, against opposition from the army of housemaids and perhaps tradition itself. They too are appalled by the warning notices everywhere—Danger. Do Not. Beware.—and are even trying to change the tradition of having all the doors locked. Their custom of arriving at five thirty for cocktails at which we are more or less expected to appear arises from their natural delight in having a drink before dinner (don’t we all? Ah, sweet charity) and as Granville has to drive here (they have an apartment in Saratoga) and prefers not to be a drunken driver—well they must drink here. The after-dinner conversation which I now no longer attend is still in force. I’m glad though that I have struck (I think) a blow for individuality. Now when the Hicks say the formal phrase, ‘Shall we take our coffee into the other room?’ Dorothy adds, knowing there is at least one who will not be taking her coffee into the other room—‘at least those of you who would like to’. My absence is accepted now, and others, I’m sure, feel more free about leaving.

  Cheers for Pioneer Janet, the innovator of the planet. Groans. Groans.

  To continue with sweet charity, where was I—oh the prospective new directors had dinner with us on Sunday evening and (thank god they are not retired critics, though I think he ran a small press for the C.I.A. . . . in the days when everyone was doing things for the C.I.A . . ..) he seems a good type, quiet, practical, a good grasp of facts and needs—something in the style of George Kendall. I don’t know if he will be the permanent director. His wife rather resembles someone out of the film The Manchurian Candidate.

  What a snob-place this is. Last week my story ‘Winter Garden’ appeared in the New Yorker and ever since then G Hicks has been very sweet to me; his wife too . . .

  Yesterday Norman Podhoritz, editor of Commentary arrived. Also Freya Manfred, a young poet (as company for the young only painter), an unsophisticated Midwestern version of Alan’s Frankie; very pleasant. It’s so fascinating to see all the artists’ shyness (artists are terribly shy people aren’t they?) rise to the surface when new people arrive. You could even detect it in Kenneth B. He became a diffident elderly man who glanced apprehensively from time to time (as we all did) at the newcomers. I like Alfred Kazin, as I also liked his wife Ann.

  Jo and Elnora called the other evening—one on each of the MacDowell phones and with much giggling we arranged that I would come up to Peterborough-South Hadley (Mark driving me from Springfield) on 15th from New York, stay overnight and return the next day to New York with Jo who has some business there; and I’d see Elnora too on my visit. I’m leaving here on the 11th to stay in Elnora’s apartment, and I’ve told Elnora I won’t receive mail there (she would have had to make complicated mail arrangements as all mail is forwarded to her at Mac-Dowell), so I’ll be letterless (though not phoneless) in New York. I’ll be there until 20th Feb when I go down to Baltimore (staying with J Money) for a medical check with a doctor in town there; and wait around some days for results and so on, I suppose. If I can afford it I’ll go back to New York . . . but it would be best to fly from Baltimore early in March—but I will let you know exactly—it depends on my female physical complications, as the Victorian ladies would say. How coy and charitable I have become during my stay at Yaddo!

  I phoned Jo and Elnora last evening (also as I happened to be passing by the telephone) and they seem indestructible. I caught Jo (and perhaps Elnora) in the act of playing pool with the suave gentleman who first answered the phone, so it looks as if they are anagramless in MacDowell. Jo says she has finished her play or will finish it before she leaves; that is marvellous. She said Alan Lelchuk called at MacDowell a few days ago bringing Philip Roth with him and they spent a while in Jo’s studio.

  I’ve sent away a selection of 70 poems to my publisher; they’re not much good, and need to be worked at; some were written here, many at MacDowell. Kenneth Burke asked to see some poems of mine and I showed him three (the first time in my life I’ve ever shown poems to a critic) and he read them so carefully and wrote a detailed two-page note which in itself reads like a poem e.g. (quote) ‘the last two lines are as quintessential as a Delphic Oracle’ (he was probably drunk . . . ). I had included one about The Dead as a kind of message to him because that is his problem just now and I was heartened to see that he wrote, ‘And the closing two lines are good emotional bookkeeping. As long as we have to live, that’s the best we can ask for, as regards the past’. It was presumptuous of me, I suppose, because he’s such a rich man intellectually that I’m sure grie
f for him is not so much a loss as a gain, a kind of bookkeeping, to use his own term, where he makes an emotional and intellectual profit. And when he read my story in the New Yorker he brought me a poem he had written about his dead wife.

  I love the idea of trying to translate the French poem! You must be telepathic.

  I made a very free sort of translation of the swan poem; not very competently.

  A swan glides upon the water

  as on a shimmering mirror

  accompanied by its image.

  Thus in certain moments a loved

  being mirrored like the swan moves

  upon the restless waters of

  our soul, becoming as it glides

  our joy casting its inseparable

  shadow of dark dread.[in margin: Rewrite—teacher.]

  Very corny, with the ‘as it glides’ pretty irrelevant, and the references to soul not made complex enough.

  stars for comfort.

  I have sent separately a spare Adaptable Man and a spare Scented Gardens.

  Crazy love— J

  25. Yaddo January 31

  Dear Bill,

  Hello on Schubert’s birthday. Hello with an enclosure of infantile pornographia which, because I am infantile and enjoy being infantile, I had fun doing.

  Thaw is here, I’m weary, and I’m leaving here now on February 11th, early morning, having had courage to say that business matters called, which they do, but it is wonderful to know I have seven fewer dinners to sit at and pre-dinner cocktails to be more or less obliged to attend. It really is awfully stuffy having literary people around all the time discussing this and that book—at dinner Malcolm, the young black painter who is dying of boredom began, ‘There was a young man from Venus’, and someone said, ‘Now now Malcolm that’s not nice’ and the subject was quickly changed to How Writers Can Make a Living, with Granville Hicks lecturing me fiercely, so fiercely I blushed and looked scared, on being willing to send stories to the New Yorker when they ask for them. I stammered and stuttered, but if I had burst out with, ‘A frightened young tailor from Boston’ . . .!

  I hope I’m going to Elnora’s apartment to stay about ten days and I hope I’ll see both Jo and Elnora in New York. I’m making a visit to Baltimore for a medical check-up and then returning to Elnora’s apt. I’ll let you know when I’m flying West—it will probably be from Baltimore as it’s easier to use the airport and take off in time—it will be early March, I daresay. Dare I? I dreamed last night that I came to Santa Barbara and the sky was filled with butterflies and as I watched them the colour fell from their wings, they turned grey and white, and they began to devour me . . . interpret at your peril . . .

  Excuse my stupidity today.

  Love from moron J

  FEBRUARY

  26. Yaddo February

  Unrestrained letter.

  O Western Bee

  So Far Far Away

  ‘Gilt-Surcingled, Burnished’

  —I’m Faint

  with Incense of Absence!

  Would I Were

  in thy Home Clover

  Furnished

  with thy Comb Honey—

  Yours Blue Jay

  (who’s taken Over

  the mad Correspondence

  of the Late Fly.)

  (Bee,

  Ignore that Rhyme.

  Fly is alive and Well

  Buzzing to Tell

  of Time

  and Eternity

  —Yours, Emily

  As for Blue Jay—A Crow

  in a Blue Overcoat

  a Bone in Her Throat

  a Cry like a Hornblast

  the Vanity to Know

  that a million Blue Jays

  are the Blue Light Cast

  by Falling Snow.

  Believe me,

  Bee,

  Yours from the Grave,

  Emily.)

  Meals at Yaddo

  – Director Granville Hicks—

  Chocolate Cream Puff—

  the Overthrow

  of the Politics

  of Enough—

  Anarchic Appetite—

  Diet Dethroned—

  Seize the Bright

  Gobful Life-Prop

  – Stomach Moaned—

  Miserable—Stop!

  (Bee,

  (by the Way)

  how’s the Hive today?

  Does Paul still paint

  the Creation of the Butterfly?

  Ned Blossom (bean-pretence)

  in the Pine Tree?)

  J.

  How’s that for lack of (paper) restraint?

  Applications invited for PeeDauntal Scholarships.

  Canine, feline, leonine, bovine, humine applicants welcome.

  27. Yaddo February 5

  The Coordinator,

  Non- and Sub-Think Feelies,

  Santa Barbara

  Dear Coordinator,

  How pleased—ah more than pleased I was to receive your recent letter which was delayed in the Midwest while it was scrutinised by C.I.A. I am eager to join your group and have only a few business ends to tie up (space for lewd drawing) before I fly westward (??) It is now February 5th. I prepare to leave the Super-Think-Tank, just in time forsooth because pshaw! pshaw! the edirot of Commentary has suggested we have reading sessions in the evening . . . of our works.

  To be fair and charitable, I’ll say that last evening was enjoyable (how could it not have been as I had received your prospectus?), with Kenneth Burke reading, soberly, his talk on Creativity which he is giving at the end of this month in Yakema (sp?) Washington State (he returns to Yaddo then to spend a few more months here); a brilliant talk full of brilliant ideas and passion. Unfortunately his audience now consisted of two critics who at question-time needled him rather and did not have the sense to see he was tired—he’d been working hard all day—; after he left, the discussion continued and I did find it interesting—I like good high-class-high-think talk (though I can’t participate myself) especially if what is said reveals the speaker as a thinkie on the surface, by force of circumstance, habit, inclination, but an out-and-out feelie underneath. Besides, I always find it a pleasure to listen to articulate people because I am the most unverbal person.

  That is why, sir, I hasten to join the Feelies, and sub-thinkies. Thinking for me is something completely internal; sometimes I wonder how I ever became a (socalled) writer; again that is why I, an inveterate subthinkie, cannot wait to be welcomed into your exclusive society; and how happy I am to realise that butterflies and cats and mountain lions and even plants and trees are quite naturally a part of that society. Watch Ned and see all the internal thinking that’s going on and not a messy word spoken.

  When I was a child I once had a dress with that pattern; blue;

  I was quite horrified at the idea of the destruction of the paintings. You could have photographed yourself and called the result an avant garde work of art: fire and knife-works instead of earth-works. I thought of Dorian Gray which I read when I was very young as my father had just happened to have bought all O.W.’s books at an auction where he really went to buy a diningroom clock which chimed the quarter-hours.

  Alas, sir, the Peedauntal model as illustrateda has no sex appeal whatsoever, unless of course the buckles fastening it to the leg are diamond or snakeskin. I had in mind something less like an attached bagpipe—though this of course could add to the musical potentiality of the opera which could be written for baritone and peedauntal—a new wind instrument which combined with the natural wind resulting from the glorious High P in the famous aria might bring the house down . . .. I had in mind something less surgical in appearance—though again the surgical element might appeal to rather more people than I suppose; I had thought of a kind of cosmetic accessory, especially in the modern dress version where the peedauntal would be the only dress.

  See Brown’s drawing on page 75

  It looks as if we’ll have to give up the whole enterprise and return t
o the days of peeing down the leg.

  What a beautiful little blue jay you drew. Not at all predatory; rather hesitant-looking.

  I’ve just had a fan letter from someone who read my story in the New Yorker—yes, it’s from a man whose wife died. He writes from the Yale Club in New York—a touching letter which assumes that my name is a nom-de-plume and I am writing from my own experience. He identifies himself so completely with the character in the story that he describes some of the difficulties of his marriage and adds, ‘You seem to have sensed all this’—which indeed I did not do. Such confidences are touching and one feels first of all that their privacy must be respected at all costs. It’s a worry. I understand how some writers burn fan letters without opening them. I’m sure May S would never do this; she would sit down, with the habit learned from her father, as she described it in Plant Dreaming Deep, and answer the letter the same evening. And here I am in a turmoil because I’ve lost that letter from the young man in France, and so haven’t even his address. Oh hell.

  Talking about letters. Any word from you is mountainous to me (forgive the confidence and treat it as a fan-confession).

  I too have notions of Rilkean correspondence but I’d give it up for peanut-butter-feelie in the patio.

  I’ll have to live by correspondence when I get back to New Zealand and I’ll attach a snapping device to my mail box so that the letters are seized immediately the mailman (postman) puts them towards the box, and are thus not blown away in the high winds that sometimes blow in the hilly place where I live. I have ideas of writing long verse letters.