Monday, October 27th

THE MARVELOUS WEATHER goes on, and still no hard frost. I came back from a reading at Dartmouth, two nights away, yesterday afternoon and was able to pick some last bunches of flowers for the house … such joys! Now it is a windless day, a glittering ocean, so brilliant one cannot see the blue for the dazzle.

At Dartmouth, though all went well and I find Noel Perrin just as oddly charming as I did when we met at Yaddo I felt all my old horror at the academic atmosphere, the tremendous hazards involved, because an effective professor must be a performer, I suppose. A college is a closed world, a breeding ground for prima donnas. Noel is not like any of that, thank goodness. And the next day he, Ed Kenney, and I had a solemn walk up a steep field to converse with some cows and then along an old millrace, rich tumbling waters because of the deluge the day before.

On the drive home I had a brief glimpse of the Warners (heartwarming like a tonic) and then stopped at Lotte Jacobi’s for lunch. The best thing of the weekend was a bowl of salad—the small dark-green lettuce leaves, strewn about with brilliant orange nasturtiums and two marigolds … it tasted as delicious as it looked. Lotte is just back from a show of her photographs in Philadelphia and must have been tired, but as always we had a long good talk. She always manages to set everything in proportion for me again.

I’m dreadfully anxious about the book and must get to work now. The reward will be planting lily bulbs this afternoon.