Wednesday, April 28th

MARY-LEIGH reminded me last night that April 27th is the anniversary of my arrival here! It has been three years, three of the happiest years of my life. I’ll never forget the first night, the 26th, that Tamas, Bramble, and I spent on the daybed in the library, alone in the empty house (the furniture came the next day) in the middle of a wild nor’easter. And the joy it was that when I let the cat out with Tamas, she did come back (I had been told to keep her in for three days). What she did was to sleep in Tamas’ bed, the “security blanket” she needed in a strange new world.

At Vassar the heat wave was abating, but it was still beautiful and warm, and the campus in its full glory of dogwood and every kind of flowering bush and tree. Although I have not been there for forty-one years (that does seem incredible!), it all felt quite familiar. Then I was twenty-three and in the midst of battling to keep the Apprentice Theatre alive. We came up to give a rehearsal performance, but I can’t remember at all what play we chose. This time the moving spirit in getting me to speak was Anne Constantinople of the department of psychology (she has used both The Small Room and Mrs. Stevens in her courses), and the English department was cordial. In fact, I had a lovely time, a good final stop to what has seemed an endless series of public performances since February. Everywhere I go now there is good discussion about women and their lives … Anne C. led a long one the morning after the reading. She picked a phrase of mine, “honoring the work of my father,” to comment that one hears this very rarely these days. Why not, I wonder? We had quite a long discussion about self-regard and how one achieves it. This seems to me a circular argument, for does one not achieve self-regard by doing something one can respect, rather than by turning in to examine one’s self? The great thing is that it is quite acceptable now to talk frankly about what women can give each other, about the Muse (Mrs. Stevens) as a woman for the woman poet, and so on. Woman’s Lib has already changed the ethos in a most remarkable way. But again it all comes down to an examination of what it is to be a woman, and how grooved we all are still in our relation to men—a built-in deference.

At a luncheon in a fine house, sitting atop a steep incline, so it seems to be in the treetops, we had a hot discussion about aggression in men and women. Mr. Daniels, the hostess’ husband (she is head of the English department) appeared to take the view that women are just as aggressive and brutal as men. Yet it is surely on the whole husbands who beat their wives. On the whole it is men who torture (the Times had a horrendous description of torture in Iran that morning) other men and women, though there have been exceptions—in the Nazi camps we now know women were as brutal as the Nazi men. On the whole it is men who indulge in blood sports. Are women just as bloodthirsty? I had been mildly needled for some time, but finally the worm turned, and I said, “Men rape women. There is no way out of that!”

A young Mississipian boy who had been sitting on my right, listening with extreme attention, at that point made a sound of muffled applause. Later when he heard that I was leaving for New York City the next morning by train, he told me he would come and wash the train window so I could see the river. Of course, I thought it was just an idea, but, sure enough, he came along to the station bearing a long-handled sponge and a bottle of Windex! I have never had such a charming send-off … I felt like a queen.

And the whole ride down through a gentle mist was like a dream. The high mountains were often clouded at the tops, so it looked like a Chinese painting. Everywhere the dogwood was in its delicate glory in the wild woods. (Will the two I planted here flower, or were they blighted by the mid-April freeze?) The Victorian river towns, dilapidated, a little lonely now, have immense charm. I wanted to get out and live in Cold Spring, where an abandoned brick house of some distinction would have suited me perfectly.

In a way the whole journey this time was a journey into various pasts—Vassar forty years ago with my company. And the last evening there I spent with Charles Peirce and his wife, Barbara, talking about his great-aunt-godmother, Grace Eliot Dudley, and her house at Vouvray about which I have just written in A World of Light. I had to keep so much out of that chapter about her marriage that it was good to be able to speak about it with someone who had been so moved by her presence and her legend when, after her death, he and Barbara stayed at Le Petit Bois. I felt that Grace would have been happy to see us there, all three, talking of her so raptly in the young Peirces’ beautiful house.

That was one way into the past, and the trip down the Hudson the next day brought back very vividly the Baekelands’ big place near Yonkers, that looked out over the Hudson from a high cliff. Our first vision of America was that river.

The final dip back into the past, a less happy one, was to go back to the Cosmopolitan Club (where Carol Heilbrun kindly put me up) for the first time since our disastrous arrival there, Marynia Farnham and I, after she thought she was leaving New Hampshire for good, six years ago. It was only then, far too late, that I realized she was not quite sane, for when we got there I found out that no shoes at all had been packed in her luggage (she had on a worn pair of snow boots … it was March). She had apparently simply dumped whatever was in her bureau in one suitcase, and a few oddments in another! I felt at the same time panic and acute distress because I had to leave her there and go home myself. My anxiety in the next months, as she wandered up and down the country, dragging her poor whippets with her, in and out of trains, to Florida and to Minnesota and finally back to New Hampshire, was like a mental illness in itself. And that was far from the end of the tragic decline.

It was good to exorcise that time with a lovely long talk with Carol, whom I have not seen for a year. We drank a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé with our dinner and caught up on our lives at last. I’m so happy that she and Jim will be in Cambridge this winter, so I’ll see them now and then. There are very few people in my life now whom I admire as I do them, few from whom I feel I have so much to learn. What I admire about Carol is her cool … she has a detached humorous yet enormously sensitive way of handling her life, and always sets mine into proportion again for me. A great person!

And now it is time I got back to the present, to the horrendous mess on my desk, to planting a rosebush Mary Tozer has sent for my birthday, to resuming my real life, my life here.