Tuesday, December 31st

JUDY LEFT a few days ago. For twenty-four hours I felt her absence keenly. Then solitude and all its riches came back to me and I have been writing letters and cards and slowly diminishing the chaos on my desk. It’s a season when one gets spread out almost too thin in too many human directions, but come January first I am determined to batten myself down, tighten up, go inward. I feel the day must be marked by a change of rhythm, by some quiet act of self-determination and self-assertion. Everyone earns such a day after the outpourings of Christmas. We are overextended. Time to pull in the boundaries and lift the drawbridge.

Every day lately I have woken to pure skies and a wide sunrise, cloudless bands of deep orange at the horizon, and every day I have been surprised by the moment when the sun turns my bureau deep rose and lights up a bowl of paper white narcissus. I see them twice, the second time reflected in the mirror; it’s a moment of pure magic.

In the middle of Christmas I had a long letter from Eugenia about Le Gallienne (stimulated by my piece on her genius in a recent issue of Forum).

“I also re-read Le G’s At 33, and her preface to Hedda. Incidentally sometime when we meet we must talk about Ibsen’s women (Anima) as there are bits of the same in all, Hilda Wangel, etc. Le G. is an extraordinary woman. To have achieved what she did at her age is unbelievable. Of course she should have returned to Europe then. It is terrible that so few people know of her here. When I read her preface to Hedda I realized why she says she does not need a psychiatrist. She is quite right. She does not. She is so in touch with every bit of the dramatis personae that she has found and joined a lot of herself. Either these bits were already conscious and became more so by her acting or else they penetrated her as she acted and she saw them. That is really what Jung means when he talks of individuation: knowing all (or as many as possible) of your bits, reactions, responses, different depths, counterpoints, etc. Like all the Great she is tremendously humble because she knows she is a channel for something other than herself, and tremendously arrogant, because she knows she has the channel …”

Then Eugenia speaks of Judy, “Dear, Modiglianish, always there, sensitive, receptive Judy. She was so wonderfully kind and accepting in those years of pain and mess. Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person. I do cherish her so; can one maintain the image of love when so much has gone?”

I guess the answer to that question is, yes, because when one has lived with someone for years, as I did with Judy, something quite intangible is there, as though in the bloodstream, that no change in her changes.