AFTER buying the house and paying for the repairs I planned that I would have enough money left over, if I spent it with care and forethought, to give the house a few rich touches. I was glad that the papering had to wait until spring, because I was planning to spend a luxurious length of time during the winter going to the most expensive shops in Boston where I would gaze and gaze at all sorts of beauties, and go away and come back again and meditate and not make my choice until I had looked at everything.
By using restraint in most things I intended to be joyfully unrestrained in a few. I tried to weigh and balance each improvement in its relation to the whole, in order to make each expenditure count its utmost and make my limited sum of money go as far as possible. For this was always my favorite way of doing things. I could never work with great spirit in any material unless I knew that the amount of it was limited—I had to be hedged in by a boundary of either space or material, in order to awaken the feeling of creative excitement. My favorite problem in any medium was to play freely in a strict boundary. I wanted whatever I was doing to be like a ballet, in which the boundary has to be constantly borne in the mind of the dancer, yet must appear to be forgotten in the passion and caprice of the dance. In order to fill a given limited space with his meaning the artist needs to keep himself controlled and uncontrolled all at the same time—the equilibrium between form and spontaneity must be maintained every moment or the whole thing will be ruined. To make something wonderful out of almost nothing was the favorite magic of my bedridden childhood, a magic which had been bequeathed by the child to the person I afterward became. Although I forgot it over and over, as spoiled grown-up people continually forget the gifts they possessed as unspoiled children, this one which I had enjoyed so many times was always returning to me and seeking me out, it seemed, in order to give me again its special intense satisfaction.
Now, in the enterprise of my house, I had more space and scope and liberty of action than I had ever dreamed of having before. Until now I had been in sole command of my own tools, my own small secret material, but of nothing else. Now I had a great deal, instead of nothing, to work with. Now house and land and money were mine, and I was all alone, planning and directing the work, with nobody to thwart or discourage me. It was a calm unfolding of new powers which I had never dreamed of having. It was most wonderful because it was so calm. But even now I still remembered my boundaries. I kept faithfully turning back and forth from drunken exultation in the unlimited possibilities of my new treasure to sober concentration on the limits represented in my bankbook. This duality, self-imposed, gave me a wonderful feeling of exquisite equilibrium, like walking perfectly calmly in mid-air. It was not the same magic as making something out of nothing. This was a new magic on a larger scale. But even so, one had to remember that it was magic, and that equilibrium was involved and therefore one had to step carefully.
Until I felt this unprecedented elation I had never thought of myself as having any desire to do any of these particular things. In the past I had looked with scorn at any lust for household establishments and possessions. For instance it had always been a mystery to me why people who had fallen in love should feel they must wait before they could fulfill their love till after they had gotten together an elaborate collection of household goods. I should have thought they would have preferred to pick up hastily only the bare essentials of their life together almost like the boy and the girl under the pine tree. I thought that if I were in their place I would prefer to let marriage take me at once to a room in the slums with nothing but a bed and a table and two chairs. For just as Picasso and van Gogh and others, whose painting seems even more alive than things born of the flesh, used to live and work in some barren studio where anything beyond the minimum of physical comfort and adornment seemed a nuisance and obstacle, so, I thought, that subtle love, who is also such an artist and creator and genius, needed only a very plain and simple place in which to make a beautiful and living marriage.
I had believed that the best things are made out of nothing. I was afraid that nothing might come out of too much. The motive of asceticism is to free creative energy, and its function, like that of pruning, is to make for a great flowering. The word asceticism has a harsh sound in our ears because in our time its real creative purpose has been overlooked. Our modern religion has been to possess, not to create. In contrast to this love of possessions, the bareness of my own previous life, which I had instinctively desired and which must have seemed to any observer so terribly mistaken and meager, was as I hoped the preliminary bareness of a branch that needs to be pruned so that its flower when it comes forth at last may be really something to see. For I was at that time secretly and humbly and exclusively intent on my writing. I only, no other, saw then the flower which my pruned branch bore, for I knew it wasn’t good enough yet to show to anyone else. But to me, even then, it was exceedingly beautiful. It was beautiful and exceedingly wonderful, not for what it looked like in the bud, but because I alone knew the great secret about it, that it was really alive. In those years I was secretly “carrying a child,” and I felt as Thomas Hardy felt in the seventies, and I had copied this poem of his in my notebook:
In the seventies I was bearing in my breast, Penned tight,
Certain starry thoughts that threw a magic light … Aye, I bore them in my breast Penned tight.
In the seventies when my neighbors—even my friend Saw me pass,
Heads were shaken, and I heard the word, “Alas …”
In the seventies those who met me did not know Of the vision
That immuned me from the chillings of misprision …
In the seventies naught could darken or destroy it, Locked in me,
Though as delicate as lamp-worm’s lucency;
Neither mist nor murk could weaken or alloy it
In the seventies!—could not darken or destroy it, Locked in me.
I couldn’t have been so rapt and intent if it hadn’t been for my unencumbered, empty, personal life. In contrast to my brothers and sister, who were all married then, I was deeply thankful for all I lacked. I exulted because the lack in my life of any personal meaning or possession heightened the awareness of my mind, just as the bareness of a nun’s cell makes for visions. I had known such a fierce and tremendous craving for life and experience, and had received such a shock at the discovery that it was not meant for me, that I attempted to cast this reality away from me with all the passion with which I would have seized it if I could; and I balanced this violent act of rejection by flinging myself down into my writing, in recompense and adoration, in order that it might become reality’s mystical counterpart.
But at last the time bomb went off which transported me to Castine, made me mistress of a house, and launched me on my great dream of what I was going to do, now that my turn had come. As I studied the figures in my bankbook of my remaining cash, and made lists of the things I was going to buy for the house, the intoxicating pleasure I felt in my possession was a new and astonishing thing.