I BELIEVED passionately that every human being could be happy. I believed that everybody should pursue his own kind of happiness boldly and positively. Because I happened to have been deprived of what is generally considered necessary for a happy life, I had used all my wits to circumvent my fate, to make something out of nothing. I believed I had discovered in this process a few valuable tricks to outwit fate with, tricks by which I myself had got hold of a most extraordinary joy. My particular kind of joy happened to come through the medium of writing. Because in the midst of the bewilderments of my youth it was that particular door in my mind which I had stumbled upon and escaped through into bliss, it was the writer’s medium which I had learned to know. There were certain conditions necessary to the full experience of that kind of happiness and these I believed I understood and was qualified to establish and to offer in my house. There were also two other kinds of happiness which I believed I understood. I wanted to use my house to provide these three kinds of opportunity for fulfillment, not only for myself, but for any others who wanted them.
My first discovery of the bliss I could experience in writing had happened long before. And when I first discovered that door in my mind I found also that I could not always open it when I wanted to, especially if I wanted to very badly indeed. But after a period of struggle and despair I hit upon an abracadabra which almost never failed to open the door for me. Once safe inside, I worked like a spider, secretly and alone. The only tools I required were a pencil and a block of paper and solitude. Also, for its safety, this joy required a certain kind of understanding and protection on the part of others. This I had never really got, and I wanted a chance to demonstrate it and to give it myself to people like me who needed it.
For although the happiness came out of me like the thread out of a spider, its continued existence was dependent on protection from outside things. It was always in danger of being injured or altogether thwarted, because daily human life is not designed to recognize and guard this curious happiness. Cloisters and monasteries were invented in order to protect the life of the spirit from the life of the world, and any young person who in modern times tries to live the life of the spirit without protection is almost sure to come to grief. When in my case the life of the spirit was injured or thwarted or even threatened I suffered, it seemed, out of all reason. I felt as if a storm or an earthquake had struck my psyche. All of a sudden I felt destroyed, horribly defeated. All life seemed torn to pieces.
Usually this panic of frustration came from a temporary interruption of my working hours caused by personal demands on me which I could not refuse without betraying my own loving and responsible instincts as a human being. Perhaps the reason why my family’s encroachments tortured me so much was because they were all so fond and loving, and yet they seemed to emphasize the absence in my life of the one personal demand canceling all others which is the cry of youth. I was trying to kill my sense of loss in that direction by giving myself with equal passion to the life of the spirit. But I lived in the midst of an affectionate charming family, and I am sure that there is no greater obstacle to a person who is just beginning to be a writer.
I had never heard any discussion of the eternal irreconcilability between the dedicated life and the personal life. But underneath the surface of the small encroachments of my secret life by the people I loved and who loved me I could intuitively feel the existence of a fundamental conflict; and it terrified me because I knew that if I should ever have to face that conflict and if I should fail to defend successfully my right to pursue this life of dedication I should perish. My self, the vital part of me, the precious joy I had discovered, would cease to exist. Although every serious person is expected to feel a responsibility toward his work as well as toward the people he loves, there is a point beyond which his devotion to his work cannot go without arousing the antagonism and jealousy of the people who love him and whom he loves. And as everyone knows, Art is jealous too. This conflict can be as tragic as a civil war, because it is a war of the heart, between people who love each other.
I think perhaps it is a religious war. I am sure that my solitary brooding and writing were a form of worship. I believed that romantic love, if I could have experienced it, would have been a form of worship. Since I was denied that form I had found this lonelier way of expressing my feeling of passionate adoration toward the mystery of life. And just as a young person preparing himself for a religious life must train himself rigorously before he is able to pursue his meditations at regular hours and for any length of time without fatigue or inattention, I had to train myself in my chosen form of devotion before I was capable of giving myself up to it every day for longer and longer periods. Sometimes when I went into my room in the morning I went toward my table with loathing. I hated the little heap of pages, the pencils, the block of paper. They seemed like horrid medicine that was being forced on me. I was very young when I began and my youth rebelled against the unnatural solitude and inactivity and discipline of such a life. But I knew that for me there was no other way. It was only by that particular discipline that I could ever find any path for the mysterious feelings of rebellion and desire that tortured me so. I felt as if half of me was an eager, high-spirited army on prancing horses, all on fire to explore and conquer a rich and unknown land, but held in check on the border because there was no road by which it could enter. And half of me was a division of humble slaves put at work to build the road over which the army could ride. The pain and patience and slow precision needed to build the road were evenly balanced by the fiery impatience of the restive army.
I would sit down at my table with this conflict raging in me. I could use my will to get myself to the table and to keep myself sitting there, but I soon learned that I could not use my will to get myself any farther along. The next thing I learned was that I must lay aside my will. I must depend on the patient humble slaves. I taught myself to sit perfectly still, in passive acquiescent obedience, waiting for whatever was to come. I began to realize at last the important truth, that I, or any other writer or artist, must always remain a humble servant and never assume the part of arrogant master. The prancing army was not me. I was only the one who patiently built the road over which it might ride. As soon as I grasped this my turbulence and my egotistical despair and my will subsided. I learned to be inexhaustibly patient, utterly submissive. At last, after I was able to arrive at this state almost every day, making my mind empty and receptive, my reward would be granted to me. Beginning gradually and imperceptibly the way sleep comes, something would begin to happen on the paper in front of me. The people in my story would begin to move. The place they were in, the rooms, the house, would come alive before me, opening like a flower, mysterious, ravishing. I listened and watched with swiftly mounting excitement and fascination until suddenly it was no longer possible for me to restrain my hand from seizing the pencil.
Until I had striven for humility I could do nothing at all. Therefore it hurt me bitterly to find that in order to make a barricade around the necessary time and solitude within which to serve my religion I had to make myself seem to be anything but humble. I had to let myself be thought conceited and self-centered and ruthless, thus hurting and bewildering not only the people who loved me, but hurting and bewildering my own social and human self as well. I knew that I was not conceited and ruthless. It was only an accident that made me need to appear so, the accident of belonging to a loving and solicitous family who were deeply interested in me. I used to think that if I were poor and alone in the world I should have been at peace, my personal life pared down to the slenderest dimensions, and the life of the imagination grown proportionately large and strong.
Those hours of writing had a shape, a fullness, and a solidity that ordinary hours did not have. They were round and full, like fruit. They were the fruit of each day. Without them the day was barren and sorrowful because it had no meaning. When those hours were rounded and complete each day, if I could have come out of an attic room where I lived alone and anonymous in some poor street in a strange city, I would have walked through the street with the ecstasy still hanging round me, I should have walked in a dream of bliss and goodness looking out upon the world and all its people with wonder and love. My own identity was like a chafing prison that I had escaped from during my magic hours, and even after the hours were gone each day my sense of being free still lingered. My heart went out to the whole world and I became one with it in a flood of joy and understanding. I had never been at home on the earth the way other people were, but now, it seemed, I had found a cure for my homelessness. At last I was at peace, too, like the others.
Alas! this happiness was only a magic spell and it could be broken in an instant, like most magic spells. Any of my family or friends could break it by speaking to me and making me answer them as the familiar Katharine they knew. In a second I could be thrust back into the painful narrow space of the identity that had been created for me by others. I was so young and my escape was so new to me that it seemed to me like a miracle, and whenever it was annulled in this manner I felt a humiliation and a bereavement that I could hardly bear. My happiness seemed to me a very frail and vulnerable treasure. I had not learned then how strong it was. I had not learned how to lay it aside intact so that I could return to it again whenever I desired. I had not discovered that it is possible to move easily back and forth from one world into the other. Then, to me in my ignorance, each world seemed to eclipse the other fatally. When it was my own secret world that disappeared, for all I knew I had lost it forever. That fear almost made me die of grief.
The cruelest thing about the breaking of the spell in those early days was the fact that it was my mother, with her great tenderness and love for me, who broke it. She did it so gently, so unintentionally, it was a pitiful thing. She did it only by the way she treated me when I came out of my seclusion at the end of the morning. The humble searching solicitude in her blue eyes, her unconcealed pity and adoration fixed so intently on me, seemed to drag me back against my will into the body of the cherished invalid child. She had missed me while I was shut in my room, and she longed to have me talk to her and tell her what I had been thinking and writing. She could probably see in my face that I had been transported and refreshed in some strange happy realm, and she imagined that I could take her hand and lead her into it and let her see what I had been seeing. She wanted to share in every experience I had. Because I was so delicate and because I was deformed she believed that I would never leave her behind, even in my imagination, as normal children have to leave their mothers. I realized that she expected my poetry and stories to be the innocent roamings of the child she knew, the kind of work that anyone would expect from a talented, protected little invalid. But just as a very frail woman sometimes gives birth to a very strong child, I felt that I was carrying inside me something which had a robust life and a destiny of its own, unlimited by my physical limitations just as definitely as an unborn child’s life and destiny are not limited by those of its mother. My work could be therefore, and was, a fierce contradiction of anything my mother could imagine that I would do. It was the work of a strong other self hidden inside me, a fast-maturing other self that was not even acquainted with the gentle, childish little invalid, not even politely aware of her. The new self seemed even to be trying to show that the little invalid was only made of papier mâché and had never really lived at all. I was completely absorbed in learning how to take care of this new thing working in me—not to shelter or protect it as the little invalid had been sheltered and protected, but to make it work hard, to exercise and train it and give it room to grow. In doing this I seemed to grow strong too. When my mother encountered me after my morning’s solitude an eclipse had occurred. This new creative ruthless impersonal being had moved entirely across the cherished child’s orbit, and made it disappear. These two could not exist inside the same body at the same time.
Therefore it was impossible at that moment for me to respond to my mother in the way she longed to have me respond. And because it was impossible her insistent yearning solicitude which would force me back into my cage destroyed my happiness, and filled me with a sense of loss and stupid helpless anger. I was too well brought up ever to say angry things to my mother. And as always when anger is not allowed to explode it flooded my interior in a heavy, unhappy, sullen silence, and nothing would come out of me except sad miserable monosyllables. As we sat together at lunch my mother would watch me with increasing compassion and disappointment in her eyes. She was not angry with me, only anxious and bewildered. All through our lunchtime she would try to divert and amuse me. She handled me so carefully that her attempt to help me was always indirect. She never exclaimed, “You seem very strange! What is the matter with you?” Instead, in the face of my stubborn twisted gloom, she would tell me little genre stories, episodes in the kitchen, or something she had read in the paper that morning. To my jangled nerves, keyed up by the morning’s work to an unnatural pitch of sensitivity and criticalness, her little stories only added to my rage and irritation; yet in telling them she herself became in my eyes infinitely touching and lovable because of her willingness to appear stupid if only she could help me. I could see, even across the chasm of my own silence and estrangement, how much more admirable and whole and sweet she was than I. Half an hour before I had been exulting in my own strength and love, and now I felt weak and forlorn. She was so humble and feminine that she almost broke my heart, but all unconsciously she was forcing me to be something that I hated to be, she was making me hate myself, making me change into an ugly-tempered, unnatural and almost masculine child. She laid herself open to me, she offered me all she was and all she could think of, straining to give me even more than she had. On her own ground she was not stupid. She had a classic, scholarly mind. Her intelligence was like crystal, without sediment. She used words with a clarity and precision which I have envied all my life. She was a Greek, a classicist, while I was a sloppy Romantic. And because she lacked the artist’s intuitive knowledge and aggressiveness and originality, which somehow got planted in all her children, she admired us all too humbly. She exaggerated the importance of artistic talent and yet she did not understand the vagaries by which it sought its ends. I could not bear to see her display her own unconsciousness of her much rarer qualities of thinking and feeling or the pathetic misunderstanding by which she blocked my way. I felt like giving a great animal howl of woe and love and pity. But I could not speak, I could never explain to her what I was feeling about us both. Tired and discouraged at last, she would suddenly drop her effort, and say in quiet despair,
“You don’t love me. I can’t make you happy—it’s no use. I don’t understand you.”
That sudden direct cry, which came so rarely from her and meant so much, loosened me and brought a gush of aching helpless words out of me.
“It isn’t anything to do with not loving you,” I cried. “I love you more than you can possibly understand. You’ve got to believe it or I shall die.”
“But you are not happy with me, I can’t seem to make you happy,” she said very gravely.
“I don’t want you to make me happy! I am happy. In myself! I am the happiest person in the world, at times.”
“You don’t seem so. I’m afraid I can’t see it,” she would reply from somewhere far away from me, suffering in a kind of human sadness and loneliness which I had never experienced and did not understand.
“It’s something you can’t see. Nobody can see it, but it is true. It is wonderful!”
“Why can’t you tell me about it then, let me share it with you, if you love me so much?”
When she came to that unanswerable question I would fling myself at her and take her in my arms, struggling to tell her with my caresses what I could never explain in words. She submitted passively. She didn’t like my kind of caresses. They were too violent and therefore untrustworthy. Such behavior as mine, first harshly shutting her away from me, and then ardently wooing her, appealing to her in desperation for her mercy and understanding, had no relation to her conception of love. Hers was the kind of love which seems to me a form of genius. It is so deep and continuous that it makes no unnecessary sound, nor gesture. Like many New Englanders and like the aristocratic Japanese, she regarded intense personal emotion as such a precious sacred thing that it must be kept locked and hidden inside the breast. If it was real and profound it was too overwhelming to be given a direct expression, and only a person who did not really feel it and did not know what it was could be so insensitive as to bring it to the surface voluntarily, or would profane it with the sensuous language of the body. Extreme understatement, entire lack of display, were to her the necessary guarantee of sincerity. Because I was inconsistent, changeable and violent in moments of emotional stress, nothing I said or did at those times ever rang true to her, I realized. In my moments of worst despair she could never quite believe in me.
This scene was repeated at infrequent intervals several times during those years. Each time it happened it had the effect upon me of a heartbreaking surprise and disappointment. For in the interval between I fostered a necessary illusion in myself which was shattered each time this scene took place. It was more than an illusion, it was a belief I had to cling to, that my mother really, in her heart, understood everything about me. But even at the end of the scene, when we kissed and my mother sadly and skeptically said she would try to believe I loved her, nothing was settled. Nothing that either of us could say brought us any nearer to true understanding. But since her desire to give me whatever I wanted was stronger than her desire for her satisfaction she accepted my hours of seclusion, and she submitted in silence to the gradual vanishing of the dependent little daughter who had once been so sunny and companionable, the joy of her heart.
I ought not to tell such a story of hard and obstinate discipline and of the sadness I inflicted by it on my mother and on myself unless I could also say that in time I brought fame and happiness to us both. That is the proper way for such stories to end. But the point of this story is that there was no such brilliant reward for my pain and hers. There was no visible reward.
If I had had success my devotion would have been a very different matter. I would not have needed to be obstinate. I would have been praised and my working hours would have been eagerly and proudly protected. There would have been a genial feeling of elation and importance all round me. But year after year went by and I published almost nothing, and I earned no money, and in spite of it I continued to insist on my hours of work and solitude. I took my routine as seriously as if I had been Flaubert, who said, “I now lead a holy existence, I who was born with so many appetites. But sacred literature has become a part of my very being …” and of whom de Maupassant said, “He had given, from his youth onward, all his life to letters, and he never took it away. He used up his existence in this immoderate, exalted tenderness, passing feverish nights, like a lover trembling with ardor, falling from fatigue after hours of taxing and violent love, and beginning each morning from the time of his waking to give his thought to the well-beloved.”
Sometimes it frightened me. It came over me with a wave almost of horror that after all I was not Flaubert, and that there must be something queer and crazy the matter with me which made me need this perpetual act of devotion so badly. When an interruption came and with it the intolerable malaise I was bewildered and heavy like someone torn out of sleep to whom being awake means painful suffering; and I would beat around stupidly in all directions trying to get relief. Then like a screaming baby who has been taken away from his mother’s nipple for a minute in the midst of suckling and, without knowing what is the matter with him even while he kicks and screams, is hunting with a blind, furious, and true instinct for his mother’s breast until he finds it again, so my instinct working through my blind stupidity would always get me back somehow or other to the infinite breast that was nourishing me, and I would be able to be still and spellbound again.
In accepting and indulging me in what must have seemed to her a joyless form of existence my mother was of course humoring me instead of understanding me. The feeling that I was continuously being humored rather than understood made me uneasy. It made me want to hurry fast and accomplish something that people could see. To be humored in this fashion is to be put under an obligation. It is like living year after year on advances from a hopeful publisher and never turning in a manuscript. I felt that in return for the child I had taken away from her I owed my mother some visible accomplishment that would somehow give me back to her in another form. As year after year passed and I failed to make restitution the sense of my debt became almost unbearable. Finally, because we could not live happily together, I evasively and guiltily parted from her and lived alone. But even when we were apart I continued to long for the luxury and the release of having my mother once fully understand me, instead of humoring me. I wanted her to understand and really believe that the reason why I refused to give myself to the demands of ordinary human life was not because I was selfish but because I was trying to give all of myself to one thing, to the absolute demand of art, which seemed to me very much the same thing as the absolute demand of God. But if ever I tried to explain this feeling I was clumsy and tongue-tied and apologetic before her, and the things I said sounded pretentious and unjustified.
But although I felt driven by the falseness of my situation, and as if I must, must hurry in order to clarify it, something in me kept me from hurrying. I felt in myself a deep regular rhythm in which there was no such thing as haste. It was a rhythm of untroubled, imperturbable, profound, obstinate slowness—regular, exact, and deliberate, like a grandfather’s clock. I felt intuitively that this was my tempo, the one that would bring me whatever experiences or rewards were destined for me. Even if it ate up years of my life before it brought me anything I knew simply that I must obey it.
If it brought at last some visible accomplishment, very good—if it never did I would not complain. It was the root of my life, and without the root there could be no flower. If I yielded to impatience, and to the hungry, human, youthful desire to be known and praised, and if therefore at times I rebelled passionately against that slow inner rhythm which kept me back, then I always felt guilty as if I were wronging something deep and mysterious that had been given into my keeping, and I turned back to my obedience. In allowing myself to be governed by this feeling year after year I had to resist very strong tempting things. In America there was a renaissance in progress, there was a new generation, and it was my own generation, of brilliant young people. I felt as if I were letting myself get left far behind. For to my dismay the talented, talked-of ones kept getting younger and younger. The Dial Magazine had been revived and was of great interest and importance to all the young writers and artists. Inside the front cover each month they printed the age and birthplace of each contributor beside his name. I always dreaded to look at that page because, though at first most of them were a little older than I, very soon they were my own age, and very soon after that they were younger, and when finally they began to be born in 1900 and 1905 it was lucky for my peace of mind that then the Dial’s career ended, and I did not have to look painfully at that page any more.
However, it was impossible even after that for me to be unconscious of the fact that my contemporaries and others much younger were already making names for themselves in the arts. I followed their careers with minute eager attention. I read their literary reviews and articles and bought their works fresh off the press and read all the news about them wherever it appeared. Their books, their exhibitions, their names in print, news of their successes, their parties, marriages, divorces, their departures to Europe, their returnings to New York, excited me through and through. It was like hearing a rousing flare of band music a block away, and it was like being the only child in the block who, hearing it, stood still, while all the other children’s feet went flying. For I had to resist not only the impatient longing to be known and praised for accomplishment, but also the furious, wistful longing to go where the others were in Paris or New York, to mingle with them, and to have the enticing modern experiences that they were having and writing about. But something in me kept telling me that it wasn’t time for me to go yet. I had chosen what had to be, according to my conception and practice of it, the loneliest of arts, and sometimes I had to stop up my ears so that I should not hear the gaiety and excitement of the ones who evidently did not think it was a lonely art.
So I had reached the age of thirty-four, with all my imaginary life and experience recorded in little heaps of unpublished manuscript, with no actual or worldly experience to my name and in an almost nunlike state of innocence. Nothing to show for myself at the age of thirty-four—“I who had been born with so many appetites!” It was a frightening thing. Yet I stubbornly refused to let time frighten me. I had got a harvest to reap from those years, even if it was an invisible one. I had learned to fasten my life to an abstract thing and in doing this I had learned devotion. I had learned to let impatience and despair slide off me—these few simple yet difficult things.
Now I had found my house, and the idea began to dawn on me that I could make it into a divine place where the writer’s way of living would be the normal one. The understanding and protection of those special needs would be established as everyday necessities here in my house, in the midst of a delicious country life. I had read George Sand’s letters to Flaubert written from Nohant where she was living with her son Maurice and her grandchildren, combining her hours of work with her sensitive enjoyment of country life, and with the pleasures which she and the children shared together, their games and marionette shows, their swimming and sailing. It was a life of strength and joy and accomplishment. The writer was mistress of the house and her work marched on. It was the central function of the house, taken for granted like eating meat and vegetables and drinking red wine. It was inconceivable that she should, like me, ever feel apologetic toward anyone for being a writer, or should ever have to explain and adapt her working habits in order to make them intelligible and acceptable to others. It was also inconceivable that she should ever need to use a childish defiance in order to protect her right to do her work and to be wholly and freely herself.
I wanted to create such calm security and happiness not only for myself. I was thinking too of other people unknown to me who were tormented by the same need and unable to satisfy it. I knew there must be many young lonely ones who were trying desperately to guard within themselves a small new fire of devotion to the search for truth and experience through the medium of writing; who did not know what was troubling them in their failure to do it, who lived in such alien surroundings that they had never heard that there were such people as themselves in the world, and who might decide perhaps, in failure, that it was not worth while for that fire to stay alive. I wished my house could be a refuge for such humble, anonymous, groping ones—not only a refuge, but a place of rebirth, a starting point for great destinations.