Thursday, February 6th

AT LAST the snowy world I have been longing for! It has snowed since yesterday morning, off and on, and now comes down fast, slanting in the wind. The sea is high with deep huge waves, not ruffled on the surface, but great dark threatening combers that rise high over the field and then crash—white fountains above the white snow. The silence is broken now by the great steady roar, and this is something new for me—the snow and a rough sea together.

Yesterday I went out for the mail early, right after breakfast, to be sure to be able to get out, and it’s well that I did so. I brought back orange and white and pale amber-colored tulips and a few iris … what is more entrancing than spring flowers in a snowstorm?

I began the piece on Louise Bogan, again as with Bowen taken up at once into a whirlpool of feelings and sensations as all those meetings well up and must be sorted out and pondered for the seeds of truth in them.

It has to be faced, no doubt, that there is some conflict in any human relationship of depth. Between Louise and me there was conflict because I felt that she should have left The New Yorker long before she did … it became almost an obsession with me that she was allowing her gifts as poet to be cluttered up by all those books of other people’s poems, even though at the end she reviewed very few. Still, they “came in” and forced the analytic side of her nature to take over.