In the coffee shop, a waiter drops a tray of dirty dishes into a metal bin from a great height, or so it sounds to me. I am the only one who jumps at the noise, marking me as an outsider, now a citizen of a quieter place who, sixty years ago, gave up her Manhattan citizenship.
In the coffee shop I hear someone behind me begin a sentence with the word ‘unalterably.’ I cannot resist turning around. He is a very pale middle-aged man wearing a bowler hat, a Cambridge University blue-and-white scarf, and a black velvet-lapeled overcoat. I cannot see the lady he is speaking to; her back is to me, and they are about to leave. He passes my table, carrying a rolled copy of the Manchester Guardian. It is chance encounters like this I have left behind in moving to Sargentville, where the chap seated at the counter in the Eggemoggin general store will be dressed in baseball cap, plaid shirt, jeans, and boots, and reading the Bangor Daily News. Unalterably.
I stay in the apartment of my children, the Wheelers, who live on the sixth and top floor of a Morningside Drive building. Last evening the sun set over the low skyscape of Harlem, making that section of the city look quite beautiful: the large windows facing west took it all in. It made me homesick for the morning glory of the Cove.
The apartment is a fine example of what New Yorkers can do when they live in a relatively small space. Sam and Barbara have replaced their old kitchen with a handsome, useful one, almost witty in its clever use of space and color (if black and white are colors). They have covered the walls of the other rooms with good paintings, a Oaxacan quilt, and rubbings from English tombs, and built shelves to display Barbara’s collection of Southern folk pottery and their books and records. While he is away at college, Isaac’s room is now arranged for guests, with a work space for his mother’s computer. Sam’s small study is lined with his linguistic-scholarship books as well as hooks for everyone’s outerwear. If you squint through the small window in this room you can see the spires of Riverside Church and a slice of Amsterdam Avenue.
Sam grinds and brews fresh coffee very early in the morning (my best hours) and then the two of them take off for work, he to his boys’ private school where he teaches Latin, Spanish, and an occasional stint in sex education, and she to Auburn Theological Seminary a few blocks away where she is president.… I settle down to write a speech I have to give this evening, luxuriating in the silence (only at a distance do I hear an occasional siren; my poor hearing rules out whatever other street noises there may be), the comfort of this aerie of an apartment, and the solitude.
Although I am enjoying the silence of the telephone I find myself using it to talk to Jane Emerson, who lives thirty blocks away. She is feeling better, but her strange affliction recurs on occasion. Her appointment to see her neurologist is next month.
In Barbara’s well-lighted bathroom mirror I see, close up and clearly, my wrinkled face. So seldom do I look in a mirror that, for long periods, I am unaware of unsightly changes. Sometimes when I do look to see if I have remembered to comb my hair that morning, I am in such a hurry that I fail to notice very much. I have come to believe that wrinkles must be far more evident (and horrifying) to women born with beautiful faces than to those of us who have never had a reason to inspect closely our plain visages.
In the cab to the airport to return to Maine, I notice how skyscrapers now affect me. I feel the need to withdraw from them in order to protect myself, to move inward and away from their confining, narrow, vertical menace. Recently, when we were driving through the Berkshires, I noticed that mountains act upon me the way Billings Cove does. They decrease my self-centeredness, they draw me out, elevating and extending what I daringly call the soul.
Thinking about the Berkshires reminds me of something I learned the other day: People who drive through these lovely mountains in the fall to see the foliage (and those who do the same thing in Maine) are termed ‘leaf peepers’ by the natives. They are welcomed for their trade but scorned for their obstruction of the highways.
Other nomenclature: At Dartmouth at the beginning of this month, where I went to give two talks to a breakfast (and then a luncheon) audience about the fictional nature of memoirs, diaries, and journals, we were served a dish which I could not identify. Turned out to be a local favorite, made with blended cold beets, and called ‘Red Flannel Hash.’
News reaches us from southern California that our friends Diana and Mary, both librarians at UCLA, have won the state lottery. Their share is seven and one-half million dollars. Sybil, an inveterate buyer of lottery tickets in whatever state she happens to be, gloats. She telephones the winners to congratulate them. What will they do with their prospective riches? Diana says she will buy, first thing, an electric pencil sharpener for her office, something she has always wanted.
Having never known anyone who won money in a lottery, even a small amount of money, I am amazed, and, for the moment, silenced. I have always scorned investing in such enterprises, claiming that they are a fraudulent and seductive way of parting the foolish and the poor from their money. And still … but now …
Sybil decides she will buy tickets when next she is near a state that has a lottery. I decide I will not be moved by Diana and Mary’s incredibly lucky strike. I already own an electric pencil sharpener.
Almost no one in Sargentville or surrounding areas knows about the publication of End Zone, and that is a good thing. I am egotistical enough to enjoy being ‘known,’ but only beyond the radius of about one hundred miles from where I wish to live in peace. Once in a while, someone ‘from away’ brings a copy of the book into the store and asks Sybil if I would sign it. I do, but always I remember the story of Sophie Tucker’s autobiography, which she published herself. We once bought a signed copy of it for the bookstore and asked Bob Emerson, who owns a theater bookstore in New York, what it was worth.
‘Almost nothing. The trick is to find an unsigned copy. That might be worth something.’
If one is concerned for posterity, there is a moral here.
Coming back to Sargentville after the speeches, the bookstore visits, the signings, and the speeches at breakfasts, I am depressed by the thought that everything I have done for more than a week was, somehow, ignoble. Selling, signing books: why does it matter to a reader if the writer has put her name in the book? Parading from place to place, always in behalf of a book that should be making its own way in the world without all the peripheral folderol of ‘appearances,’ feels unworthy. The English have a nice word for it: ‘hedge-born,’ meaning what it says, I suppose, and in general referring to activities that are low or demeaning. Today I feel hedge-born.
I am home. The Cove has waited for me, calm, patient, the last thing I looked at before we drove south to the cities, the first think I sought out when I came back to where I started from.… This morning, two-thirds of the way through the month of October, is heavy with fog and the promise of rain. I watch a crow make her royal progress across our uncut, rough field. Decorously, she acknowledges her constituency, a flock of smaller birds that seem to live in the woodpile we are preparing to burn. She walks on, as somber, black, and erect as a funeral-home director, having made a long ceremonial advance out of Rebecca Peterson’s woods, across our field, and then onto Jeannie Wiggins’s land, out of sight.
I realize how seldom I look for very long at large birds. I tend to be interested in tiny, multicolored visitors to our feeder and to the boxes on the deck, especially purple and gold finches, chickadees, and hummingbirds. Of course I exclaim with pleasure over the presence in the Cove of large water birds like egrets, cormorants, and an occasional osprey. But the crow, with its lustrous black plumage (in some light as iridescent as the hummingbird’s), I take for granted, registering its appearance as a sign of approaching rain, instinctively denigrating it for its murkiness, dismissing it, and then looking at something else.
I had forgotten that Edgar Allan Poe immortalized its cousin the raven, and Wallace Stevens recorded ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’:
I do not know wh
ich to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Gone from sight, the crow’s raucous cry still hangs in the air, reproaching me for my avian prejudice.
There was a pile of mail and books waiting at the post office where Frances, our omniscient postmistress, had saved it in a large box. She handed it out through the door. ‘Glad to be rid of it,’ she said.
There is a letter from Linda Pastan, a poet I have known in Washington for many years. She sends me another story about Tom Victor, the excellent photographer of writers who died a few years ago of AIDS. ‘The day he spent with me taking photographs may have been the most “romantic” I have ever spent. We walked the streets of Manhattan, and he kept running ahead, kneeling down, and snapping pictures. It felt like La Dolce Vita. Tom had a way of making his subjects feel utterly beautiful. “Those cheeks!” I remember he said to me. It was a terrible letdown to travel home, look in the mirror, and see my usual plain face.’
Mixed in with a few commendatory letters there is a good, give-it-to-her-straight note from a lady in Maine (Scarborough) whom I do not know. She informs me that the ‘slow delivery’ of my book reviews on National Public Radio ‘drove me up a wall.’ She read The Ladies, she said, and ‘did not think I would read anything else by you,’ a neat way of expressing her opinion of that book, I thought. She lets me know that she read an interview with me in the Maine Times, and so borrowed End Zone on interlibrary loan. Clearly she did not wish to be saddled with it permanently if it turned out to resemble my aired remarks or The Ladies. Finally, she admits that, to her surprise, she enjoyed it and has even gone so far as to order a copy for a friend. Against all reason and anticipation, I gather.
A long letter from Frederick Manfred, with whom I used to correspond regularly in New Republic days. I remember him as a Siouxlander, a white-haired, unusually tall and handsome
Minnesotan whose novel The Manly-Hearted Woman I reviewed enthusiastically. He comments on my comments in End Zone about Brenda Ueland, a Minnesotan, and another correspondent from those days, whose long, active, loquacious life I admired. He knows much more about her than I do and offers the fascinating suggestion that Sinclair Lewis (another citizen of Minnesota) was the father of her born-out-of wedlock daughter.
I no longer own a copy of Mark Schorer’s life of Lewis, an enormous, detailed work as I recall, so I cannot look Ueland up in the index. It would be interesting to know if this is true. Ueland was a free spirit long before it was fashionable and socially correct to be one. She went to teas at Willa Cather’s apartment in Greenwich Village, wrote for New York magazines, and produced at least two books, one on writing that was reprinted recently, just before her death. She lived on a health-food diet most of her life and climbed mountains after she was eighty.
Manfred himself must now be ‘getting on,’ as they say, but he is still very active. He is reading galleys on a new book, and writing still another. I seem to recall a long list of novels in the front of one of his books. He writes: ‘It’s funny but I have the feeling that I’m only now learning how to do it.’
Birth and death in a day: Wanting to see the last of the afternoon light yesterday (it begins to grow dark here before four), I went out on the deck and caught sight of a black, diaphanous mayfly, a very late comer to the fall lawn scene. I remember that the mayfly’s life span is a day. It was born this morning and now, in the growing afternoon darkness, is on its way to its death.
The sight sends me back to my study, where I search until I find a copy of Thomas Boreman’s Moral Reflections on the Short Life of the Ephemeron. First published in London in 1739, my copy was made by David Godine early (1970) in his notable career as publisher and designer of elegant letterpress books. It has delicate, colored etchings by Lance Hidy, is printed on fine Amalfi paper, hand-bound, and put up in a cloth-covered box made, I think by Arno Werner. I handle it with pleasure. In every sense it is an example of a book that suitably houses its contents.
The introductory paragraph reads this way:
The Ephemeron, or Mayfly, is a common freshwater insect. The nymph grows for two years before it surfaces, sheds its skin, and emerges as a delicate, transparent fly. It is unable to eat, and can only fly and mate during its day of life.…
Trout fishermen and philosophers have both written about the Mayfly.… Aristotle established the Mayfly as a symbol of the shortest-lived animal. Philosophers use it still as a reminder of our vanity and mortality.
I look through the study window to the deck that is now entirely obliterated by the dark. The mayfly I saw must now be dead, or moribund, as was the one Boreman contemplated in the eighteenth century, the ‘dying sage’ who speaks to her fellow flies of her youth in the morning:
What confidence did I repose in the fullness and spring of my joints and in the strength of my pinions! But I have lived enough to nature, and even to glory. Neither will any of you whom I leave behind have equal satisfaction in life in the dark, declining age which I see is already begun.
Tonight I am unaccountably sad. I feel as if I were possessed of what in Hebrew folklore is called a gilgul. The soul of the mayfly seems to have entered into me, and I can think of nothing but the ephemera of time and the permanence of death, of bright life and then the dark, like the blackout at the end of a skit in an inconsequential revue.
Today we planted more bulbs, and accompanied them with mothballs, one ball to a bulb. It may be that the odor will discourage the avaricious squirrels. The ground is cold but very dry. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s line: ‘Mine, O thou lord of life / Send my roots rain.’
I am rereading parts of Hermione Lee’s excellent life of Willa Cather. It is full of original, useful insights, so good that I despair of ever going back to my notes to do the book I once planned. Perhaps it is as well. In the ten or more years that I have been thinking about Cather, I seem to have taken on some of her personal characteristics. Lee remarks upon her ‘grumpy repudiation of the modern world.’ The adjective has now grown familiar: Helen Yglesias, my good novelist friend who lives a few miles away from us in Brooklin and who provides me with much of the literary talk I sometimes crave, calls me ‘grumpy’ in her Women’s Review of Books piece, and I must be, because readers and reviewers detect something of that tone in my book.
Hard as it is to do, I take up End Zone and review my stated dislikes. Now, three years later, the edges of my discontents seem to have softened, perhaps because I am protected against the noise, pollution, crowds. I go, with reluctance, into the world and then come back, full of relief that this place is still here.
Sometimes I worry that I rely too much on this place for my salvation. Have I made a fetish of it, am I obsessed with it? Yet when I am here, I am content, protected, free, less grumpy, I think.…
And then, this morning, as I wrote these last words, there was a knock on the door. A lady who owns the house on the edge of the Point, within sight of the front of our house and across the Cove, asks if Wayward Books will be open today. I tell her Sybil has gone to look at books in Surry and should be back soon. I invite her in to wait.
She tells me that she and her husband occupy the grey house close to the edge of the Reach. They are there a few weekends in the fall and spring, and in the summer. We talk about closing houses for the winter and then she tells me that their house was vandalized last winter. Some young boys from the area (one from Deer Isle) broke in, for some reason decided to trash all the photographs on the wall, broke things but stole nothing, and left. The photographs were old, valuable ones of the Cove, the Point, the Reach, nineteenth-century views of Sargentville and Sedgwick.
So. I have been deluded. There is no absolute safety, even here. Twice trashed in the District of Columbia, we came to the Cove to escape the threat of the destructive city, only to have our neighbor’s house on the Point damaged. I should keep in mind what I once knew but seem t
o have wanted to forget, that Shakespeare’s Henry VI told his soldiers: ‘In ourselves our safety lies.’
Looking through a reprint of an old book, Divine Poems by Francis Quarles, I am reminded that faith offers another security, echoed in Martin Luther’s hymn:
Great God! there is no safety here below;
Thou art my fortress, thou that seem’st my foe.
Resolved to be more cheerful (and not to fall back into the desolation and despair of my seventieth winter), I read my mail. There is a letter from a woman with whom I went to summer camp when we both were teenagers. Helen Mandelbaum has an incredible memory and recalls that I thought up charades for her ‘bunk.’ A camper appears with dirt smeared on her forehead: Soily Temple. And a girl named Ann stands crying. The rest of the bunk touches her slightly as they pass her by: Presbyterian (press by teary Ann). How terrible. No wonder I opted to forget such things. But her memories cheer me up.
After a hasty trip to Washington for bookstore business, we are back in Sargentville. In the short time we stayed in the cool city, we combined our craving for Oriental food with a reunion with Jeff Campbell and Gene Berry, neighbors on the Hill and friends from the days when Sybil ran her shop on Seventh Street. Gene works at the Library of Congress and, until recently, collected first editions by living American authors he had read and admired. Then he would write to them, such charming and beguiling letters that they agreed to sign the volumes he sent. Anne Tyler, M.F.K. Fisher, and Eudora Welty are three I recall his having corresponded with.
But at the Queen Bee, our favorite Vietnamese restaurant across the river in Arlington, he tells us his new passion is collecting antiques. He does not mention any further correspondence with writers, even antique ones, and I am saddened by his defection.… Jeff, his architect friend, is always very patient, very quiet, during Gene’s description of his enthusiasms. It’s hard to know if he shares them, but I think it would be hard not to. Gene’s eyes glow with that peculiar light common to all avid collectors when they talk about their pursuits.
Extra Innings Page 5