Tuesday, March 16th

I LIE AROUND enjoying the house, the flowers, wishing I could summon the energy to unpack and sort out the books from Judy’s, sitting up here at my desk for an hour or so, accomplishing very little. At such times the old conflict between art and life becomes acute. I am nagged and probed by doubts and fears about my work … shall I ever have an idea for another novel? And if I don’t, how shall I live? I begin to understand Louise Bogan’s panic in the last years of her life, the honors coming at last, but a diminishing power to create dogging her mind and depression creeping in. I have written no poems since January and what I did then seems to me negligible.

This morning in bed I picked up Rilke’s letters and opened to February 11th, 1922 (?), the day after he had finished the last of the Elegies in that great storm of creation, just after the Sonnets to Orpheus had seized him and been written. This happened after years of silence—long thinking and feeling—an excruciating tension of patience. My fear is that I am going slack. It is too easy to lie around, enjoying life at its purest and simplest, watching the downy woodpecker at the feeder, looking out to sea, rough and troubled today as a northeaster builds up and darkens the sky. I could immerse myself in such things for hours. But if all tension slips away, if one becomes simply a sentient being without the desire even to note down what is happening, in my case the reason for existence has gone too. I can justify this beautiful place and my life here only if, because of it, I am able to give through my work.

But life does always come in with some pressing gift or need. Eugenia sent me Melanie Klein’s fascinating book on Envy and Gratitude. It has given me a rather frightening insight into recent behavior of my own. I gave away a lot of money last year, mostly in gifts to friends and then quite unexpectedly I began to needle these friends because I had not (I felt) been thanked. Then I began to get into a real panic about earning, about paying the income tax, a whole neurotic fugue about money. All this seemed very unlike my usual self. So I was shocked into recognition when I read the following in Melanie Klein: “Even the fact that generosity is often insufficiently appreciated does not necessarily undermine the ability to give. By contrast, with people in whom this feeling of inner wealth and strength is not sufficiently established, bouts of generosity are often followed by an exaggerated need for appreciation and gratitude, and consequently by persecutory anxieties of having been impoverished and robbed.” How glad I am to understand a little about this at last! For it is true that I have felt impoverished and frightened about the future ever since I made one large gift. And now I suspect that it is all part of panic about my work, the fear that I cannot earn it back.

LATER

The storm has come, with wild white veils, high wind. I can’t see the ocean … really it is thrilling to be so isolated in such a fierce white wilderness of a world. I forgot to say earlier this morning that sometimes these days there are marvelous things on PBS. Last night I saw Archie MacLeish talking with Moyers for an hour. Archie is eighty-three, his face as smooth as a smooth stone. What a wonderful way to grow old, not to wrinkle, but just the opposite, to seem washed clear, down to an essence. I was moved when he reacted strongly to a question about poets and politics, reminding Bill Moyers that Yeats had only become a great poet after 1916 when he became passionately involved. I have always been attacked for writing political poems, first by Conrad Aiken years ago, then of course by Louise Bogan (some of this argument is in our letters). Bad rhetorical poetry is just as bad as any bad poetry and I think the question is how deeply moved one has been, whether the political poem can come from the subconscious or reach the subconscious to be fertilized. At Notre Dame I was asked to read the Kali poem—I have not done that often—and I think it did work. But why worry? One does what one can, and one does what one must. At the moment the inspiration for any poem at all would be a present from the gods.