Saturday, February 8th, four P.M.

A CALM DARK BLUE sea beyond the white field, every bush and tree casting a blue shadow as the sun begins to set.

On the horizon a large white ship … a Russian trawler perhaps? We see a few oil freighters but rarely a ship that looks like this. I am feeling overcharged … a very intense life here alone these past days. For one thing, the arrival of Charles Richie’s Journal of the war years came … I devoured it after lunch, hunting down everything he says about his meetings with Elizabeth Bowen.

Yesterday the mail brought me the news that Céline has died. She was over ninety and had been miserable for the past year, not able to walk, very deaf … I saw her twice when I was in Brussels last October and even though I sat at a little stool at her feet and she leaned forward in her armchair, she could not understand what I said and exhausted herself talking. It made me terribly sad not to be able to communicate. Too late! She looked like a poor sad old monkey. Yet the vitality, the will to live, was still there, and in these last years she had begun to write poems and handed me the notebook so that I could read a few, but I could not decipher her hand. I was to have seen her a third time, but became ill myself—perhaps subconsciously on purpose. We both knew the third would have been a final good-bye. The poems were very sentimental … J. showed me one. Does that matter? No. What matters was the marvelous spring of the spirit still wanting and needing to express itself.

I shall write a portrait of Céline as I really knew her. There is a fictional portrait, for she appears as Mélanie in The Bridge of Years. But that was romanticized—not on purpose, but perhaps because one cannot tell the whole truth about anyone while they are still alive. Also, actual human beings are always more complex than one can possibly manage in fiction.

Now what I think of is the warmth and love she gave me when I was seven or eight and we spent a winter with the Limbosches near Brussels. Céline was a real earth mother and my own mother was not that at all. I see her, lying in bed, in her plain white nightgown, surrounded and engulfed by all of us children, her three daughters and her son and me, whom she always called “my eldest,” all of us clean and pink from our baths lying about as close to her as we each could get, waiting for her to read to us for a half hour. It was Nils Holgersson, as I remember, that enthralled us that winter.

She was very dominating and ordered us about like a commanding general. But at that age I rather enjoyed it, more perhaps than had I been her own child. There is a great deal to think about. As Jacqueline said in a short dignified note, “C’est une page de tournée, et quelle page.…

“Bien que nous souhaitions pour elle de ne plus devoir endurer cette pénible décrépitude, une fois partie, on est écrasé par l’irrémédiable.”

The fact is that it is very much harder to believe in immortality when the person has become diminished by very old age, as both Julian Huxley and Céline had when I saw them in the autumn.

All we can pray is not to outlive the self. Yet my guess is that we make our deaths, even when senile. Céline, at least, was still always imagining that she could help someone, did think of others, most recently to try to find a way to give one of her nurses her heart’s desire … a harp!

Among the letters today were two from strangers—one from England to thank me for As We Are Now. “I am very old, nearly ninety-one, but I am most happily placed. My own dread is that I might find it necessary to go into an old people’s home. At present I am in my beloved old farmhouse, restricted to driving in a radius of three miles, very deaf, very lame, but with sight just as good as ever. So I live largely in books. I still do a little mild gardening, perched on a stool. Life owes me nothing. I’ve had pretty well everything I wanted—my share of trouble, of course. But one gets overcharged with experience.” The other is from a young American girl, and after telling me what a solitary she has always been, she says, “I don’t know exactly how to tie in my ‘true story’ with what I want to say but for a year now I’ve been reading and re-reading your work (now I am ending a second reading of Kinds of Love) and it made me feel good to be a woman, feel good to have nerves, and eyes and all sorts of sensory enjoyment in full operation. It feels good to be alone and enjoy the person I am …” There is more, and then it ends, “Thank you for making old age and old people real and a continuation of life.”

This is a day when I wish there were someone with whom I could talk over and share all that has poured in.