Tuesday, February 4th

FOUR BELOW ZERO this morning of dazzling sunlight! The ocean steams, it is so much warmer than the air. Two nights ago I was woken at three by a rare sound here—a cat fight, a great yowling and howling. Bramble was out, so of course I listened rather anxiously. I have a bad cold and didn’t dare go out into the cold as I normally would have done. Then I realized that sleeping Tamas might be a help, and sure enough he dashed down the stairs ahead of me, already barking, and flew to the rescue when I commanded, “Tamas, go out and get your cat!” In about three minutes I heard his short bark that means, “Let me in” and there was the shepherd with his sheep! As Judy keeps saying, “You couldn’t have found a better dog.” When she comes—a little more restless each time as her powers of concentration diminish—it is Tamas who plays with her and demands to be taken for walks; they go out a dozen times a day, a sweet sight as I watch them walking down the field.

The winter here has its own joys. One of them is that I see such a wide perimeter of ocean. Once the leaves are out, about half of what I see now from my bed is screened off. I have associated seaside places with few trees but here the house is backed by tall white and Japanese pines and there are maples and oaks at each side. The blue ocean seen through the branches is especially beautiful.

Last night I dreamed of Louise Bogan, a good sign, I think, as it means the subconscious is already at work on the portrait I hope to begin tomorrow. Judy leaves today.

There was an interesting interview with Liv Ullman in the Times. One senses her rare honesty. What comes through as so real in her performances comes through because she is real. “Miss Ullman said that countless friends and fans, including some homosexuals, have written her to say that they felt they were eavesdropping on their own relationships when they saw ‘Scenes from a Marriage,’ and it had depressed them.

“I don’t think one should be without hope, though,” said Miss Ullman, who lives in Oslo with her mother and eight-year-old daughter by Ingmar Bergman (the two have never been married but once lived together and are now close friends). “I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone.”

Miss Ullman feels that the pressure for a woman not to live alone—or to be alone—is great. Whenever she goes into a restaurant alone, for instance, she hides with a book in a “tiny corner table where no one will stare at me.”

“Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they’ve got to get hold of someone to prove they’re worth while,” she said, sweeping the air with her arm and clapping her fist into her palm. “If they do decide to be alone, part of their loneliness will come from outside, rather than inside. Society will pity them, look down on them.”

And later in the interview she talks about guilt. She has a “bad conscience” about spending so much time away from her daughter Linn. “That’s because all my life I’ve read in books that a mother should stay home with her child. I try to convince myself that one way of life is not right for all people, that maybe it’s good for me and my child to live the way we do. Yet it goes very deep, this guilt, and I always feel somewhere that I’m doing something wrong.”

Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman, I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not one feminine characteristic. A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always a little on the defensive.