Tuesday, March 30th

JUDY HAS BEEN HERE for the weekend, for the first time since Christmas. The weather was beautiful, though windy and cold, but at least the ocean was that marvelous shining blue under blue skies. After twenty-four hours I began to feel the awful woe, like a rising tide. Yet, in a way, it was a good time. It’s only the relentless truth of her condition that gradually permeates everything for me after some hours with her. It makes me feel abandoned and desperately lonely, lonely partly because I believe no one can quite understand who has not experienced it what it is to lose through senility the person closest to you.

On Sunday morning we paid a call on Elizabeth Knies Pevear—she had asked me to come to be given a copy of her poems, at last out (a charming small book where she appears with two other poets, published by the Alice James group). After twelve years of marriage to Richard (also a poet), they are having a time apart, E. living in the Garretts’ house on the river. How hard it is to make a living as a poet … or to be a poet and produce enough with a full-time job too! E. works at Strawbery Banke, doing publicity for them, and Richard at the Marina here. I have the greatest respect for them both. E. is a real poet but she has found being a wife and a jobholder makes it next to impossible to get anything of her own done. We talked about it—how a woman almost inevitably finds herself doing most of the housework, for instance. During this time alone she has occasionally asked one man friend or other over for dinner … but of course she gets the dinner, waits on him, etcetera. I felt the same thing and was horrified at myself at Notre Dame—the instinctual giving way to a man. Stanley Kunitz, Bob Haas, and I were to answer questions one morning. About a hundred students showed up. The men were late, so I plunged in and we had got quite a lively discussion going about being a woman writer. The minute the men joined me, I found myself deferring (especially to Stanley, that gentlest of men); I heard the very tone of my voice changed. Other people noticed it, and we laughed about it at a party that night.

What is it to be a woman? I have been thinking a lot about this lately because of Karen Elias-Button’s PhD thesis (I am an adjunct for her at Union Graduate University) that uses mythology and comes out over and over again with how male-oriented mythology is. We are born and bred reading about Eurydice, the passive, who has to be rescued by Orpheus, and so on. Leda!

But mythology cannot be artificially created. We have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves, and that must include our own instincts both for kinds of nurturing and kinds of self-preservation. This cannot be done against men, and that’s the real problem. It is what makes me less than enthusiastic about a good deal of feminist literature at present. It is not either/or. It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.

When I think of myself, I realize how singular a life mine has been, since through luck or through will, through having a viable talent (viable in that it provided me with a raison d’être and eventually a place in the world), I have never really had to work any of this out. My deep conflict has had to do with my work.