Halfway to the fisherman’s landing at Dunquin, Margaret saw a massed array of low-slung islands in Dingle Bay. These were the Blaskets, sparsely inhabited by a handful of stout fishermen and their families, who made the mile-and-a-half journey between the mainland and their exposed and forbidding homes in curraghs, tar-black “skin boats” of ancient design which were easy rowing in calm weather and completely useless in a storm. Margaret decided to see the Blaskets for herself, and on Thursday, August 21, left: from Dunquin for a day of exploration. Landing on the largest island, she spent the afternoon hiking in the hills, which were (as it happened) overrun with wild rabbits. By day, there were spectacular views of the rugged mainland; in the evening, local storytellers held forth as of old by a peat fire in the island village.
Margaret’s sojourn in Ireland had a compelling private meaning for her. Historians traced back to Kerry the earliest origins of the Irish people. To identify herself with this place was to reach beyond her immediate family heritage—problematic in some respects as that was—for a more elemental kind of belonging. It was a subordination of the personal to the archetypal, the mythic. And identify Margaret did, as is apparent from a letter written to Michael Strange a few months before her trip:
Anyway Rab, the Bun will try to be very steady and clear headed and orderly and chic and maybe some day some one will love it for its shiny shoes and its tender heart and forgive the mercuric change of mood which is more Celtic than me and is born out of climates and races and oceans that are older than memory and that can no more change than the varying rhythms of the sea.43
Whether by chance or design, she had also come to a part of the world where certain place names might be imagined to have had a private significance for her. The smallest of the Blasket Islands was called Beginish, or Little Island. Twenty miles to the south, in the Atlantic off Bolus Head, a monumental rock mass rose like a tower more than seven hundred feet above sea level. Carved into the rock (by what means no one had been able to determine), a staircase led up most of that height to an ancient Celtic monastery, whose ascetic inhabitants had lived in constant exposure to savage winds. Nothing was known of the fate of these monks; they had disappeared without a trace, probably in the fourteenth century. The name of their heroic island-monastery was Skellig Michael, or Michael’s Rock.
Dingle and the surrounding countryside were also full of the sort of charming incongruities that Margaret appreciated. There was a river that ran directly under a row of houses on its way through town to the sea; another river flowed gently over the narrow stone bridge that had been built to span it. On Upper Main Street, a flat rock nearly as long and wide as a car had been left undisturbed in its ancient resting place and the road built around it.
At Ventry, a short car drive from Dingle, Margaret walked on the beach and swam in chill water reminiscent of the waters off Vinalhaven. Grass and turf swept down to the water’s edge, and one afternoon when she arrived for a swim, the cows in the near field all followed behind her in procession, ambling into the surf to cool themselves in the ninety-degree weather.
Margaret had planned to stay in Dingle for a week, but by the third day she decided to remain at least a week longer in the “enchanted friendly spot” she had found. “There are so many creatures in this town,” she wrote Michael Strange, “it is certain that they would puncture the tires that would try to roll me out of it.”44
As Margaret lingered on in Ireland, the first bound copies of Goodnight Moon arrived in New York.
In the meantime, Michael Strange had left for England on a recital tour. She and Margaret did not arrange to meet in the British Isles, however, and when Margaret returned to New York in late September, Michael was still abroad, with plans to remain out of the country until late November. Throughout the period of her absence, Margaret was troubled by an acute loneliness. Once, in October, she made a pilgrimage of sorts to Greenwich Village, returning to the scene of their first, relatively untroubled years as friends. In a letter to Michael begun later that day, she wrote:
You might as well know . . . what I saw on the streets—You walking down lower Fifth Avenue in the late afternoon seen to meet me. You and I walking down Tenth St. towards Fifth Ave. in the Blackout. You and I in my apartment—and Smoke—among the memories of eight years there. . . . If only somewhere there was a way to sustain this dream—the only reality I have ever known.45
The next evening Margaret reread this melodramatic fragment and, evidently wishing to put a happier face on things, added, “At which point MacConachie gave me a quick and real kick and reminded me that I was very sleepy and off I went.” (MacConachie was one of several jester-like imaginary “creatures” who occasionally ventured an opinion or odd bit of advice in their letters.) The weather in New York was beautiful just then. It was Indian summer. While Michael Strange was away, Margaret was living full-time at Cobble Court. Earlier that day she had put Crispian into the open Chrysler and driven past 186 East End Avenue, on a second pilgrimage; without stopping to go inside, she had circled back to Cobble Court along the East River.
The next morning she attended a children’s concert at Town Hall during which a story of hers, The Little Brass Band, was read with an orchestral setting by Walter Hendl, who conducted members of the New York Philharmonic. The performance was a success, though Margaret complained in a letter to the Authors League that only Hendl was properly credited in the program and associated publicity.46 Back at Cobble Court, she had lunch alone except for Crispian, and was about to take a nap when Pietro burst into the house bent over with an armload of gladiolas, roses, and chrysanthemums. A neighbor of hers, he explained, had died, and the family (before leaving for the country following the funeral) had thought of her and wanted her to have the flowers.
That evening, when Charles Shaw came to dinner, Margaret served a favorite root soup of Michael Strange’s. Inquisitive as always about Michael’s activities, he spoke as well of Hermann Oelrich’s failing health, hoping to pass word through Margaret that a visit from Michael, who had been feuding with her cousin Hermann for some time, would now be welcomed. Margaret, for her part ever the bounteous provider to worthy friends, had a new manuscript for Shaw to illustrate. The remainder of the evening, as she wrote Michael around midnight, was consumed in talk about “a pleasant lot of nothing.”47
Nothingness—absence—was much in her thoughts as she wrote, “Nothing is new with the Bun, and No one is new with the Bun except that it leads its own funny little life more peacefully and doesn’t go out of its own life into things that mean nothing quite so often. And always loves its Rabbit[.] And is your Bun . . .”48
Margaret had meanwhile gotten back into the social whirl of Michael Strange’s circle of family and friends. Despite a bad cold, she attended a party given by Diana Barrymore. Over the last weeks, Margaret wrote in another letter,49 she had been working very hard on “books and records and order,” and on a film version of The Noisy Book (a project that in the end did not materialize). She had overstrained herself and come down with a fever. Still, the company of friends, or the friends of her friend, seemed preferable to the recurring bouts of loneliness that now plagued her.
Diana, wearing a dramatic huckleberry velvet dress, looked “cunning and pretty and young,” Margaret thought. Gypsy Rose Lee, parading showily back and forth, had just put up the outsize revers of her coat when Diana, suddenly returning from the next room, took the measure of her guest and remarked dryly, “For your chins, dear,” leaving the other woman speechless.
Margaret, once the silent observer at gatherings of this kind, had evidently learned a thing or two about acid repartee. When another guest, a young woman who was planning to spend time in Paris, repeatedly pressed a more experienced traveler to recommend her to some “good French family” with whom she might stay, Margaret exploded, “Vraiment you pretentious jeune fille of thirty je-ne-sais-quoi. Fuck off.”
This was the sort of arrow that Michael Strange was so extraordinarily adept at
finding her mark with. It was as though for a moment Margaret had become her friend; at other moments during the long, chatty evening, she had, as she wrote, “kept walking up and down pointing to where Michael should have been and saying Who is that prominent space with the flowing hair and the dark wild eyes, and . . . kept roaring with laughter and when people asked . . . why . . . said The Hero would have just said something brilliant and clever to make me laugh.”
Despite her cold, Margaret stayed on until one-thirty in the morning. The next day, upstairs at Cobble Court, she made herself some chicken lima bean soup, a scrambled egg, and an Old Fashioned, read the papers, and wrote her letter to Michael Strange, to be sent care of the Savoy in London. (Michael had not left an itinerary but was bound to turn up at the Savoy sooner or later.) Margaret urged her to stop on her way back to New York at Benner’s, in Dingle, for a respite. She told again of having savored her own recent stay there, the more so—so she said—for having been there alone.
Barely over her fever a day or two later, she was feeling restless and had begun making plans to visit the Only House for a few days, probably by herself even though in early November the wind-whipped island would be a far from hospitable refuge. A passage from Michael Strange’s last letter had made her unhappy, in need either of escape or reassurance.
Michael had asserted that Margaret had good reason to know that Michael loved her. Margaret wrote back on October 29,
I don’t know that Rab. You only told me once in the past year. . . . And ten days later—Crash—you said you didn’t anymore. . . . There was a time I felt well loved by you and it was the warmest happiest time in my life. And I remember it. And that is all I can honestly say. Since coming back to America I have felt lonlier [sic] than I have ever felt in my life and you might as well know the truth—terribly raw and exposed. That is why I stay alone more and more—And that is why I can’t rest more in a relationship that has lost the certainty it once had. I can rest in my love for you sometime. And I do. It is the center I come back to and revolve about. But loving the unknown becomes lonely sometimes. . . . It is very simple. I do not know that you love me any more.50
That afternoon Margaret had gone downtown to see an exhibition of paintings by Albert Ryder, whose dark, mystic canvasses she had found “so pure, and so true to the halflights of the dream, and the moonlight, and the sea.” Ryder, she wrote, had gone unrecognized as an artist during his lifetime and yet had remained devoted to “his dream.”
“So in my love for you, Michael, I have the dream that is you and I guard it in my heart for you to come back to.—When you will.” What a few lines earlier she had termed “very simple” was in reality not simple at all; Margaret had gone round in these very circles of dejection and wishful longing before.
Listlessly, she put the letter aside, took a Midol tablet, made an Irish coffee for herself, and poured a glass of soda water for a chaser. Then, returning to her letter, she easily escaped into third-person fantasy: “The Bun has disappeared into a small Irish smoke—and flown out the window and only you can find it and bring it back.” And with that she fell asleep.
The next morning, feeling (or so she thought) less frazzled and vulnerable, Margaret set out in her open car for lunch at the Cafe Lafayette with a friend. However, Michael Strange’s indifference toward her continued to gnaw at her, and when she found her path blocked by a crowd gathering in Union Square—traditional rallying ground of union workers, the unemployed, and other political protesters—her own powerlessness and frustration flared up in arrogant rage. Leaning out from behind the windshield, she shouted in a gravelly, muffled, belligerent voice, “Make way for the rich!” and drove on through to her luncheon appointment.51
Margaret amended her latest letter to Michael yet again, this time with a request for a few small luxury items which Michael would be able to purchase at a certain shop on the Boulevard St. Germaine. Then, sealing the envelope but still reluctant to let go of this only link to her friend, she scribbled a last request on the envelope: “Will you bring me a white swans feather from the Thames?” She was, she explained, putting words to Prokofiev’s Ugly Duckling and working on a book called “The Wild Whistling Swan.” She would use the feather for a pen and as her good luck.
In the meantime, Margaret’s efforts at fashioning a text for Prokofiev’s score proceeded haltingly. “Not only can’t I read a note,” she wrote Michael in her next letter, mindful of her friend’s self-proclaimed talent for pairing great music with great words, “but the brain balks at it as at arithmetic. . . . The Bun’s ears are drooping over it.”52 She had put aside plans for a trip to Maine. She was too tired for travel.
But when Margaret continued this latest letter, she was again resolved to appear more cheerful, more in command of herself. “The Old Bun,” she declared had “gone to Newfoundland to rest its fevered head on an iceberg.” A “New Bun” had appeared who was a fatalist of sorts—who knew how to “slow down and laugh” as the world rushed by.
The first weeks of November were taken up with intensive work and more socializing, including another party given by Diana Barrymore, attended by James Montgomery Flagg and Carl Van Vechten among other old friends of Michael’s. “It all looked a little like the 10 Gracie Square parties,” Margaret wrote Michael of the evening, “only . . . the Bun left early.”53
Margaret reported impromptu visits with Diana (who was just then preparing to go on tour as well); a private reception for Pola Negri; an evening at the ballet to see Agnes DeMille’s “Allegro” (“a bum cheap rehash . . . with Our Town Weddings Funerals and Remnants and all the old American wistful stabilities”); a few days in the country with Dorothy and Louis Ripley at their home in Litchfield, Connecticut, with a brief stopover at Under the Hill; and a noisy, glutted night on the town at El Morocco. And more letters were sent to Michael Strange care of the Hotel Savoy, London.
“I started to call you this morning,” Margaret wrote late at night on Sunday, November 9, after returning to Cobble Court. “But then there was an hours [sic] delay so I didn’t and as Shoe-button [like MacConachie, one of the imaginary “creatures”] said—leave the Hero alone in the Foreign Country. You aren’t suposed [sic] to telephone foreign countries across Oceans, and it only disturbed last time.”54
Margaret still belonged to the Buckram Beagles and often joined the group on their Sunday outings when she was not spending the weekend at Under the Hill. But on this particular Sunday her loneliness was such that she had thought better of venturing out with friends: “Stayed in all day and worked. I am so afraid of most people in this lonesome state of mind. Why inflict it on everyone.”
She had nonetheless dropped in at Diana’s, where another guest of the moment asked her to dinner. Although it was a Sunday night, the city streets were jammed with traffic, a circumstance that left her feeling more alone than ever. “The whole world,” she wrote, “is so crazily over detailed. . . . So many big shiny cars and no reall{sic} gaiety—Like people singing with their own voices. . . . Rabbit—you alone seem alive in all this darkness.”
A letter arrived from Michael Strange, written on board a train bound for Paris.55 Too tired to thread her way to the dining car, Michael had made a picnic of some sandwiches that Margaret had had sent over specially. She urged Margaret to calm down and allow herself to feel strengthened and comforted by her love. A marvel of ambiguities, the letter included comments attributed to several of the “creatures,” with news reported by the Baby, someone called Surly, and by Michael Strange, referring to herself in the third person as the Cricket looked on.
At one moment she urged Margaret in a worldly wise, motherly way to be responsive to the overtures of suitable men, even if the gentlemen in question were a bit dull. Earlier she had made a provocative reference to the soft back of her younger friend’s neck. Periodic talk of Margaret’s eventually marrying was yet another facet of their complicated, fundamentally evasive relationship. Michael Strange would one day startle Leonard Weisgard by
taking him aside and with a sigh of exasperation suggesting, “Why don’t you marry Margaret, and take her off my hands?”56
Early the following week, Margaret ate lunch by herself in Central Park while “lookng into the bright eyes of a sparrow in the chrysanthemum boxes.”57 It was a beautiful brisk late-autumn morning with the few remaining leaves on the trees seeming somehow “primordial” to her. “The sparrow,” she wrote Michael back, “kept looking at me and looking for messages.” She then added the following lines from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers. Michael Strange could be counted on to recall the tearful scene at the end of Act I, in which the two strapping young gondoliers, bound for the kingdom of Barataria, exchange a sad farewell with their peasant brides:
“And send me words
By little birds
To comfort me
And Oh my darling
Oh my pet
Whatever else you may forget
In yonder land
Beyond the sea
Don’t forget
Oh don’t forget
You married me—
To which Margaret added, as a hasty afterthought or disclaimer, “The sparrow must be crazy.”
By midweek, a cable had arrived with the news that Michael Strange was feeling ill. Margaret wrote back with words of comfort and encouragment, promising to send over a “tonic of chicken and rice and butter.”58 It was now her turn to adopt a mothering tone. Michael’s brother, Charles Oelrichs, was traveling with her. Urging Michael to “give him my best,” Margaret added,
and tell him to fatten you up a little. . . . I know why, now, parents keep telling their children to keep warm and get fat and not to get wet. It is all they can say to express something poor devils. And yet the Rabbit poet in me has always longed for another language before it is too late—a more fearless baldness of the heart to say the things we never say and the other never knows. Sometimes we ourselves know only too late what we wanted to say. But now I know only by indirectness by writing it into the crystal of the dream in a story or somewhere can it be said where all excess feeling comes to rest. I believe in the excess. The bird who flies too high in the light and whose heart breaks in his song to break again Spring after Spring. I never loved the autumn or the Summer as I love that excess of the Spring. And it is Spring fever I have.
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