Late yesterday afternoon: Confused by the number of people walking, rushing, crossing, standing, all on our corner of Seventh Street, I froze where I stood, wondering, for the moment, which way to go. This happens to me often in crowds, as though every possible path were closed to me by too many people already occupying them.
Then Irving, the bake shop owner, came out of the Eastern Market carrying a large bag. I watched him as he crossed to the schoolyard, opened his sack, and threw out handfuls of crusts. Suddenly, and in great numbers, a flock of sea gulls arrived to claim the bread. I decided they must be accustomed to his being there every day, so they leave the Potomac River and come inland (like the Moody Beach gulls who used to eat their dinner at McDonald’s on Route 1) to feast on the basketball court of Hine Junior High School.
Political affairs in Washington, D.C., seem more heated, more immediate, more urgent, than when we are in Maine, as if important things were happening down the street, across the park, in the buildings we see from our windows. Even if the candidates now vying for public office are politicking in New Hampshire or Texas, it appears to us nonrepresented residents in the capital that they are in our front yard.
I am stunned at the amount of ‘dirt’ about the private lives, the sexual peccadilloes and twenty-years-ago drug parties, that is the conversational nourishment of every gathering and meal in D.C. Sybil suggests we think about writing an op-ed piece for the Post about the curious fact that the really good senators and governors, those who accomplish a great deal in their official positions, are often the ones whose private lives bear the least scrutiny: Edward Kennedy, Governor Bill Clinton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
February 20: I am struck by a terrible blow of homesickness for the Cove, for the house, for Sargentville, for Maine. Sybil tries to counter it by challenging me to a game of gin rummy. I lose badly. We go out to a late dinner with old friends Tori Hill and Elizabeth Carl. We talk about the improvements to the Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress, which Tori heads, and life at the Episcopal church in which Elizabeth serves as curate. Even their good talk and company, and excellent Vietnamese food at the Queen Bee in Arlington, do not help.
I’ve been wondering about the origin of the clause ‘applauding with one hand.’ The image is evocative—and mysterious. Does it mean halfhearted approval? Or soundless praise? I seem to recall that it is Quaker in origin. When I get home, I shall have to ask Grace Perkinson, one of the few Quakers I know.
In the last month I have published two pieces on Willa Cather, a long review in the Chicago Tribune of the three Library of America volumes published in the last few years (including almost all her work), and a longish review in the Village Voice of Hermione Lee’s excellent study of Cather’s writing, now available in paper. Soon I will be the only living critic of Cather who has not produced a book of her own, only two insignificant journal articles.… Hermione Lee writes to me from England, urging me to write the book I have been planning for so long. But I doubt it will ever come about. Too many good studies have been published since I stopped working on mine and turned to fiction and memoir. Another deplorable result of entering the end zone of one’s life is that projects that once were vital and promising now seem too much, too late, too untoward, too unlikely.
Story I will probably never write, but one that seemed possible at two o’clock this morning: Two poets, young men, live together. The more talented of the two dies at an early age, of AIDS, without publishing any of his work. The other, desperate for recognition, publishes his dead friend’s poems under his own name. The book appears, highly praised, in the Yale Younger Poets series, and the survivor wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry with this, his first book. But, with this volume, he uses up all his friend’s work. Try as he might, in the next two years, he finds he cannot write poetry as good. Cold-bloodedly, not in despair, but determined to ensure his own immortality, and knowing the renown guaranteed to poets who die young by their own hand, he takes his life.
I need to prepare a talk for the Women’s National Democratic Club, to deliver on Tuesday of this week. It has to be something I’ve never said before because Sybil is planning to attend and she has, perforce, heard all the other speeches I have given. In this regard, she is a good influence; for fear of boring her, I am impelled to change the contents every time.
Yesterday I saw something in the book news of the New York Times that interested me, that might work if I used it to introduce what I have been thinking about for some time: the lack of a firm distinction between fiction and nonfiction. For me, fiction always has a strong component of fact, and fact, used successfully in fiction, extends and legitimizes the imaginary.
The Times reports a unique phenomenon. In one week, a book has moved from the nonfiction to the fiction best-seller list. How can this be? Well, it seems that a university press had reprinted what it thought was a memoir of the childhood of an orphaned American Indian named Forest Carter. A first (and only) book, it did very well, and became a best-seller. But it turns out that Forest Carter is not the autobiographical author but instead an American white supremacist named Asa Carter, and not an orphan, who died in 1979. The title on the reprint, The Education of Little Tree, was followed by the words ‘a true story.’ The cover will be remade and those words removed.
Meanwhile the Times has accommodatingly switched the book from its best-seller nonfiction list.
March
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
—Willa Cather
A chap in Iowa City, Paul Mandelbaum, has a curious project in hand. He is collecting juvenilia from contemporary writers. In fact, he wants the first thing they have ever written, if they have a copy of it. He asks me to contribute. I think back to my terrible first story which I entered in a contest held every year (back in the early 1930s, that is) for New York City public high school seniors.
Why did I write it? I remember that I needed some concrete evidence of my suitability to enter college, having been turned down by all the New York City colleges because I had failed the Civics Regents examination, the English 4 Regents, and one other whose subject I forget. So I thought if I could win the contest, I could go back to the rejecters, tell them about the award, and ask for some reconsideration. Maybe.
I should make a full public confession. I failed so many Regents exams because Civics, English, and the other class I can’t remember all met in the afternoon. Too often I was no longer in school by then, having signed myself out of the station at noon, at a door for which I was a warden. In my final high school years I was enamored of the theater, regularly read Variety, the so-called Bible of the legitimate stage, learned where shows were rehearsing, and slipped into the side doors of those theaters after I had sprung myself from school, ‘played hooky’ as we used to say.
I failed the tests because I hadn’t read the books they were based on—simple as that. They were part of statewide assignments. I recall trying to read The Mill on the Floss on my own without success but having no trouble at all with Dr. Martino and Other Stories by William Faulkner that an aunt gave me, a first edition because it had just been published. I still have that copy.
Writing a short story involved no assignments and no attendance. So I was able to do that. To my amazement, I won the contest. Think how bad the other stories must have been when you read what I can remember of the plot of mine. An old man is tired of life. I think I sketched in his life history but I no longer remember it. He has settled his affairs, plowed under his vegetable and flower garden, locked the door to his cottage, and walked to a wharf where he intends to end it all (certainly I must have used that fine old cliché). Seated there he finds a young child, her feet dangling toward the water. He sits beside her and tries to talk to her but she does not respond, indeed, does not appear to be listening. Then she signs to him and he realizes she is ‘deaf and dumb.’ I do remember using that now-outmoded phrase, which I knew because I had a second cous
in in that condition. He was a linotyper for the Herald Tribune.
Wait. There is still more of this stuff. She takes his hand, they leave the wharf, she leads him on a path toward her house. On the way, she picks a wild daisy and gives it to him. The old man goes home, unlocks his door, puts the daisy in a glass of water, and then gets out a tiller to prepare his flower garden.
Terrible. Soupy. Boring. I don’t know if it was well written—I cannot think so. Even though I promised Mr. Mandelbaum I would look for the manuscript, I cannot bring myself to. I cannot believe that publishing something as bad as this has any value at all, unless it would prove to a young, would-be writer that a mediocre start might result in a halfway decent writer.… I send my regrets to Paul Mandelbaum.
Picasso: ‘To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic’.
Yesterday I encountered an acquaintance in the bank in Washington:
‘You look well,’ he said to me.
I replied: ‘So do you.’ What else does one say to a bald old man full of wrinkles but very sun-tanned.
‘I’ve been in Florida.’ Then he laughed. ‘At my age—I’m almost eighty—you no longer go there to find the Fountain of Youth.’
I tell him about a Rumanian gerontologist I read about, Ana Aslam, whose obituary I had just read. She died in Budapest at the age of ninety, and was the head of an institute that offered a treatment called Gerovitae. There, injections were given of a substance she invented, to such notables as Charles de Gaulle, Nikita Khrushchev, Indira Gandhi, Marshal Tito, Konrad Adenauer, and the film stars Lillian Gish and Marlene Dietrich. Aslam must also have given it to herself, for it was reported that at her death she looked thirty years younger.
When the drug was analyzed in this country it was shown to be compounded of procaine, an antidepressant, and a painkiller, nothing more. Its recipients may have felt very good, cheerful, even ebullient, but were not necessarily rendered any younger. True, Adenauer died at ninety-one, Tito at eighty-nine, de Gaulle at eighty. Gandhi was assassinated, so we do not know how effective the treatment might have been for her. ‘You’re as young as you feel’ might have been the operative cliché for Aslam’s Institute.
I think Lillian Gish, now in her nineties, is still alive. I know Marlene Dietrich, now ninety, lives in seclusion. Since she broke one of her fabled legs falling from the stage into the orchestra pit, she has become hermitic. She does not wish to have her old age witnessed by a public that will, in this way, forever remember her as an extraordinarily beautiful young woman.
I wonder: If one prolongs one’s youthful good looks beyond a reasonable age, does one have time to grow slowly accustomed to having lost them?
Dwarf-tossing, a heartless game played in bars in the South, in which midgets are thrown high in the air and caught as one would a ball, is now paralleled by another inhuman phenomenon called ‘Granny-dumping.’ Its causes are senility, extreme old age, desperately poor physical condition, and the exigencies of a bad economy. This week in San Francisco some person brought an elderly woman in a wheelchair to the entrance of a hospital emergency room and left her there. Pinned to her housecoat was a note: ‘Please take care of her.’ In one county of California, physicians report eight such abandonments a week. They occur most frequently in states with large retirement communities: Florida, Texas, and California.
Every day reading the news reminds me of what I often try to forget, the terrible indignity to which old age is subjected. Once it was almost irrelevant to me, a distant and unimaginable state of being. Now it is the final condition in which some of us are destined to live. Such stories, to which in my youth I might have been indifferent, now seem pertinent to the general predicaments of an aging society.
My sister’s affliction, agoraphobia, is the subject of an article on the medical page of the Times. A psychiatrist, Arthur B. Hardy, has given the disease a new, euphemistic name. He calls it Territorial Apprehension. Such retitling is rife in this age of too much talk and a reluctance to call things by their harshly indicative names.
At the flea market last Sunday I acquired a wonderful, doubly useful instrument, a cane with a steel point at its end and a three-sided leather collapsible seat attached to the shaft. Near the top it has a gold band on which is engraved ‘Heidelberg.’ I intend it to use it to keep me from slipping on the ice next winter when I begin my permanent, year-round residency in Sargentville, and to sit on when I grow too weary to walk any further.
Useful new (for me) word: ‘vealy’—meaning immature, as in the condition of veal in comparison to beef (mature).
Maya, my small (vealy?), solemn, beautiful granddaughter came to visit yesterday and stayed to lunch. She was accompanied by her mother, of course, and her omnipresent soiled white blanket. She keeps it in her sight and resorts to it whenever she feels the need for comfort.
Strangely enough, I remember my own baby blanket. It is my earliest memory, so I must have been about four. I don’t remember its color (by that time it may have lost whatever color it once had) but I do know it had a tattered white satin binding and a memorable odor, a sweet, sweaty smell that, I now theorize, must have reminded me of my mother’s breasts, milky, ample flesh, damp and hot with the temperature of her body.
I am touched by the sight of Maya and her comforter. There is a continuity between generations, so strong that something like the memory and possession of such objects may hold together whole generations of grandmothers, mothers, and granddaughters and grandsons. Early today, during Morning Prayer, I recite to myself a short intercessionary prayer, called a suffrage, for Maya, that she grow to be as intelligent as she now is beautiful, and that I be around, at least at the start, to witness it.
At the meat counter in the Eastern Market, I hear a well-dressed young woman tell a well-dressed young man (who smelled pleasantly of after-shave lotion) about a new restaurant at which she had dined the night before. ‘The waiters danced attendance upon us,’ she reported, a phrase I have not heard since I was a girl. It does conjure up a lovely, airy vision of the twenties, a sentence Scott Fitzgerald might have used it to describe Tom Buchanan’s behavior when he was wooing Daisy.
A large gathering of sea gulls lights, for a moment, in the tall grasses growing on the roof of the garage outside the living-room window. Once again I am reminded of how little I know about their habits and their lives. E. B. White knew about geese. He had raised a few, and then gave them up. In The Points of My Compass he writes: ‘I have always envied a goose its look of deep, superior wisdom. I miss the cordiality of geese.’
An acquaintance, a woman named Bunnie, came into the bookstore in Maine last fall. She happens to raise goats near Lubec in Maine, but she too is fond of geese and assured us that they are not silly or foolish.
‘Indeed the goose is a most intelligent fowl,’ she assured us. Oh well, gone is another useful simile.
Wednesday. Noon Mass at St. James. A treat for someone like me who rarely can find a weekday Mass in Maine. I walk the few blocks to the church, passing a number of older persons who say hi or good morning and smile the wide, white grin that belongs only to black faces.
Sybil and I agree that one virtue of living in this city (one of the few) is that the population is not homogenized. In Maine we miss seeing and talking to black friends and acquaintances—David Tilghman, Reggie Wilson, Jerome the detective, Mary at the Market Lunch, Melvin at the Market chicken counter, Debbie our radio-broadcasting friend, the poet Ethelbert—all the welcome faces of color that enliven the whiteness of the Hill’s citizenry and allow us to have a glimpse into their rich culture.
At St. James there is no one but me and the elderly, rotund retired priest, Father Aldrich. No one arrives to serve him, so I move to the front pew to say the responses. I love this old fellow. Goodness shines from his faded blue eyes; his hands and head shake with what seems to be a genuine passion for what he is saying, for the holy act he is performing. Mass takes a little more than half an hour, but it is somehow a pure
time—the cold, empty church, the totally absorbed celebrant, the quiet and dusty air of prayer, time before and after the Mass to myself.
He says: ‘The Lord be with you.’ And I respond: ‘And with thy spirit.’ And somehow, in this simple exchange, we reach a kind of communion unlike any other. Call it spiritual. Call it human.
Tonight we experience another advantage to living here: hearing wonderful chamber music free under the auspices of the Library of Congress. Because of continuing repairs to the Coolidge Auditorium in the library’s main building, the concerts have been moved to the National Academy of Sciences. The acoustics are very good, the program excellent, although I have trouble understanding the difficult Elliott Carter piece. The new second violinist is as expert as his fellows.
Afterwards we are hungry and drive around downtown looking for a place to have a sandwich. Nothing is open. But one of the streets is full of miniskirted ladies of the night. The recession must have affected their trade. After a while two of them hail a cab and are driven away. Others are still there when we leave, waiting for customers.
After Joe Caldwell’s reading from his new novel, The Uncle from Rome, at Lambda Rising bookstore, we have dinner with him, and two of his admirers, our friends Jeff Campbell and Gene Berry (who writes fine letters to literary people, so intriguing that they willingly sign the books he then sends them). During a good Vietnamese dinner, Joe tells two good stories:
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