Friday, April 9th

DEAD TIRED. Yesterday, home from three days at the University of Oklahoma. I felt a little crazy, unable to concentrate, wandering around holding myself together. It is, anyway, the hardest season in New England, “the cruellest month” not because the lilacs are in flower but because they are not … nor is anything else except a few crocuses. It’s a gray cold world, and I feel old and cold myself.

The expenditure of every ounce of psychic energy I have—which is what these quick lectures-cum-classes-cum-concentrated-social-life demand when I meet perhaps one hundred new people, each of whom feels we are old friends because they have read the books—is bound to boomerang, of course. The bad thing now is that I have an overnight trip to Clark University next week and the following week Vassar and New York—dinner with Carol is the carrot I hold before me—if ever I reach it!

The time in Oklahoma was a surprise and a great pleasure, or many great pleasures of rather differing sorts. What I had not expected was so much beauty and style … on my first evening being taken around a tiny but exquisite garden, full of corners where strawberries grow, dark purple iris in clumps here and there, many ornamental trees. Jim Yoch is an exceedingly civilized young man, a man of many gifts (his field is the Renaissance and he has all his students acting scenes from Shakespeare in class). Sensitivity to other people is quite rare in the degree to which one feels it in him.

I was not surprised but deeply moved by the open tilled fields and the great skies … and the air wonderfully fresh like a cool white wine the whole time I was there. One has to get used to a whole town where there are few houses of more than one story, a horizontal town, the residential streets rich in trees. I enjoyed the change of pace, the slowness of speech, unhurried response in hotels and restaurants. Only I was pressed, rushing from one class or luncheon to another, envying the students lying around on the grass.

What I had not expected was to find such a fine enthusiastic group of young women instructors and graduate students, deep into the Journal and Mrs. Stevens and As We Are Now. The audience for the poetry reading was not large, but the discussion next day for two hours with groups of students, men and women, who came and went as their classes permitted, was one of the best I have ever experienced. They are keenly involved in Woman’s Lib (Adrienne Rich has been there this year) in the most authentic way, that is, trying to direct their own lives into channels where they can be fruitful as individuals, yet also marry and have children. They are living it all on the pulse, which means they cannot be arbitrary and merely theoretical. It did me good to realize that I can be helpful, that everything that has been so lonely in my own struggle is now very much in the air and relevant.

But all the good discussion and the praise (how new to me to find lots of people have read the work!) is at the opposite pole, of course, from creation. And when I come back from these trips I feel depleted in that part of me, empty, and in a curious way desolate—like a woman exhausted by giving birth.