Thursday, January 8th

MY HOPE that I would have a whole series of empty days, days without interruption, days in which to think and laze, (for creation depends as much on laziness as on hard work), was, of course, impossible. Three days ago in the morning a young woman called Jody who had written me in November to say she might turn up, hitchhiking from Ohio, phoned from Portland and asked to come over. I’m afraid I was not exactly welcoming … I felt dismay at the prospect, and never got back to work that morning.

She came yesterday, in workman’s boots, overalls, a thin short coat (how not freeze to death at below zero yesterday here?), and a tam-o’-shanter, carrying the usual canvas tote over her shoulder. And I was suddenly delighted!

I met her at Foster’s and drove her in over what is now a nearly impassable road on foot, and very slippery even in a car, every rut glare ice. I was delighted because Jody, unlike anyone I have ever met, perhaps represents a new breed. She is not, I feel sure, unique in her thirst for rootless wandering from place to place—Berkeley for a time, then New Orleans, now perhaps Boston. In her knapsack three of my books and a slim blue notebook in which she jots down poems. I liked her face at once, the quirky mouth and keen blue eyes behind huge gold-rimmed glasses, mousy hair all over the place.

Setting her down here in front of the big fireplace in the library, I felt disgustingly rich and safe. But after all I am over sixty and she is twenty-three. When I was twenty-three I too wandered (though in those days only real bums hitchhiked) and had many love affairs and worried about them. But there are differences. Jody takes LSD now and then. I think she takes it when she gets scared, scared of herself and where she is going, and realizes that time is running out. Soon she will be twenty-five, then thirty.

When I asked her why she thought my work attracted the young now (as it had not before), she answered, “Because it’s so trippy” (that was about the poems, many of which she could quote from memory, especially the Santa Fe one “Meditation in Sunlight,” which she had read when on LSD). And when I asked what she meant by that, she said, “Cosmic, relating.” I suppose that intensity of feeling plus detachment (the detachment of the craftsman) is a little like LSD in its effect. I explained that I couldn’t take drugs because I had to keep my mind clear and to tamper with it would be too frightening.

She spoke warmly about her father (a mechanic) and mother, but feels stifled in the small college town where she grew up—and that I understand perfectly. That orange has been sucked dry. Her brother is “brilliant, but close to becoming an alcoholic.” What does he want out of life? “To be loved.”

She is religious, was tempted to join a Christian commune in Columbus, and may still do so. Under the anarchic life rooted nowhere there is, of course, a tremendous hunger for roots and for community. I suggested that, since she takes odd jobs just to keep alive, why not take a meaningful job such as working in a nursing home or insane asylum?

As we talked, I came to a fresh understanding about dedication and responsibility. How hope to find roots without taking the far greater risk of commitment? Far greater even than the risks attendant upon an unrooted, floating-free life that may, at first glance, appear “adventurous” and/or “dangerous”? The leap into commitment, in love, or in work, or in religion, demands far greater courage. It is just from that that Jody draws back, because she isn’t sure enough of anything. What one fears for such a person is an accidental taking root simply because of circumstances … at the moment Jody is staying with a friend in Portland and next door lives a man alone with his two small children. Perhaps in the five days Jody has been there, he has fallen in love with her. He is a mechanic and she is drawn to this kind of nonintellectual. What if she “floats” into a permanent relationship there? Finds herself caught (because, after all, why not settle down?) bringing up another woman’s children, almost by accident, no real commitment having been made at first?

Jody has not even begun to realize what being dedicated (I prefer that word to the overused “committed”) to an art means. She jots down poem ideas, but never revises, never breaks it down, uses it as she uses everything else for a moment’s interest or kick. The writing of poems is the best way I know to understand what is really going on inside the psyche, but to do it you have to use your mind and you have to look at it as a craft not a self-indulgence. There is a huge gulf here between Jody and myself at her age. For I was writing poems and I knew that in doing that I was serving something greater than myself, or at least other than myself. One does not “find oneself by pursuing one’s self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some discipline or routine (even the routine of making beds) who one is and wants to be.

At four I drove Jody back to Route I and left her there, by the snowy barrier left by the ploughs. I felt like a mother who has to let her daughter go, even into danger, must not hold her back, but I left her there with an awful pang. I had slipped some chocolates into her knapsack and gave her a warm mohair scarf. But what else had I given? Not good advice—that comes a dime a dozen. But perhaps (I hope) the sign that one may be rooted and surrounded by plants and beautiful objects and still not be a square, still be alive and open.

And what did I learn? That it’s all very well to shut myself up to write poems, but life is going to break down the wall—and it had better!