Wednesday, March 17th

ABOUT A FOOT of snow fell, and drifted, so most of the terrace is snowed in up to the wall … quite a storm! I got up at six and shoveled a path for Tamas, filled the bird feeders, then went back to bed for a snooze with Bramble, who has a great capacity for sleeping all through a storm.

It is when the world outside is totally wintry that the plant window becomes a kind of magic: the cinerarias are still wonderful, also a white cyclamen with a purple throat.

I got distracted about Yeats yesterday and forgot to go on to two things connected with that evening’s TV pleasures. Seeing Archie sitting by the big pond in Conway brought back a vivid memory of my day with them there years ago. I had driven over from Nelson. We walked down to the pond before lunch and had a swim—among the trout! It’s a beautiful secret place with tall trees around it and a brook running through, and all that day Ada and Archie and I shared such a perfect communion and so much joy that I felt I must never go back. Perfection, as I wrote Archie yesterday, cannot be repeated. The lilies were in flower in Ada’s formal garden. Everywhere I saw the signs of their work together over many years to create this place that is both formal and casual. An unforgettable day!

Later that evening (looking at TV) there was an hour with Kenneth Clark on an Edwardian childhood. There are similarities between the two men, each having created a world of elegance out of self-made rather than inherited taste (Kenneth Clark’s environment was rich and vulgar, as he said himself—pool playing, gambling at Monte Carlo, and a series of hideous big houses here and there), each having a genius for friendship, but differing in that Clark has not had to suffer the agony of the creator in the same way as MacLeish. Moyers probed for the “agony” and Archie answered so well … yes, there had been tragedy in his life, the death of a brother in World War I, and of a son … but these sorrows can be absorbed and accepted, he suggested, weaving themselves into a life, becoming part of its richness and meaning. The true agony, Archie said, has been in the work itself, the struggle with that.

A long letter from Charles Barber in England came yesterday. He is beginning to feel the need, after a very rich year abroad, to get back to roots. “Living in a foreign country is so exhausting in that one’s vision is so enlarged and is constantly being demanded of …” and “being stared at constantly, the butt of unfunny cross-culture jokes and all that nonsense loses its novelty after a while.” I recognized those feelings very well. In spite of everything, the European attitude toward Americans is one of barely concealed disdain. “But you don’t seem like an American!” is the greatest compliment. I used to react violently to that!

Charles is also fed up with the academic life, with analysis of works of art that ends by short-circuting creation.