Tuesday, October 7th

A LONG HIATUS because these are such great days, and so full, between the garden (I planted fifty tulips day before yesterday) and the rising pressure on the book. I have been working all this week on revising the portrait of my mother that I first wrote ten years ago; yesterday, while trying to find a letter I might use, I came on a snap taken in 1920 at Pemaquid Point. I was eight and I am standing on a rock in bare feet, very straight, solemn, my mouth open, and clearly singing loudly. On the back my mother wrote, “May chantant à la mer—elle a aussi dansé frénétiquement!—La mer par moments l’excite—Elle a dansé et crié la premiére fois qu’elle a été à une plage (en 1916) vraiment comme une petite folle.” I have no memory of this; my memories of the summer at Pemaquid Point are of gloomy dark woods, mushrooms, a long walk to get water every day, and my mother depressed. I remember my terror at the surf on the rocks because a woman had been drowned there, sucked down by a wave, then battered. A place of real fear for me. So it is strange to come upon this totally different picture, and it gave me heart. For, clearly, the sea was a powerful emotional force. So perhaps my dream that it might be the final muse and bring me back to poetry may not be mad after all.

But this photo also made me realize again for the thousandth time since I began A World of Light how tricky memory is. And in how many ways the same experience may be seen, even by the person himself. Yesterday at two P.M., when I was fast asleep, trying to quiet down after a harrowing morning of work and be ready for David Michaud, who was coming at three for a short visit, the front door bell pinged. I got up and staggered down in my stocking feet, thinking it must be a delivery. Instead, an elegant middle-aged woman stood there and said, “I’m from La Jolla and couldn’t resist coming to see you to tell you how much I admire … et cetera.” I was cold with anger, flurried, and said, “Please give me a moment to put on some shoes … I was resting.” It’s strange how very perturbed and jangled I felt, but so far no one has arrived here unannounced, and I hoped it would never happen. I couldn’t shake the anger, and told her and her daughter whom she went to fetch (the daughter had stayed in the car) that I felt it was an imposition, and would they knock on Anne Lindbergh’s door unannounced? “I should have written her a note to ask,” said the woman, “but there was no time, since we are just passing through.” All summer I have been badgered by people who have to come to see me at their convenience, because they are in the region, and I’ve done hardly any good work as a result. I suppose that is why I felt outraged. These last days have been or felt like “my real life” again … the autumn so beautiful, the dark blue sea, and time to myself … it all got ripped to pieces by “a person from Porlock” yesterday.

I slept badly, a night of flotsam and jetsam moving around in my head. At one point I had such a clear vision of Rosalind that it is still vivid. I was really too tired after David left … all I could manage was to pick a few flowers (any night now we’ll have the killing frost).

It is not that I work all day; it is that the work needs space around it. Hurry and flurry break into the deep still place where I can remember and sort out what I want to say about my mother. And this is a rather hard time, because it is still hard to write about her, so I was more than usually vulnerable and exposed.