Monday, May 3rd

MY sixty-fourth birthday, and a singularly happy one. I woke before five to Bramble’s loud purrs and lay there for a while listening to the gentle sigh of the sea. There was dense fog. Tamas licked my hand to suggest that it was time to get up; so I did, in time to catch a vision of gold and purple finches at the feeder. I opened Blue’s presents with my breakfast in bed. She has made an emergency sewing kit for my travels, such an imaginative present, and after breakfast I opened Mary’s present, she who always spoils me terribly, and she the only person now who thinks of the kind of things family give to family … this time, pale blue sheets and a light blue blanket. Lee, Blue, Laurie, Mary-Leigh and Rene all called before nine. Yet, despite all these friends, I am suddenly in tears, thinking of my mother. In the middle of the night I had a strange and rather awful dream about being born, struggle, and fear. I can’t capture it now, but I was aware of Wondelgem, an atmosphere. Joy and pain. Must they always go together?

It is a good birthday because I feel I am coming into my own this year more than ever before. I heard on Saturday that I am to get a third honorary degree, this one from the University of New Hampshire. It’s great fun. For one who only graduated from high school there is a slightly malicious pleasure in it: “I did it my way.”

Maybe the most important reason I feel happy is that I am learning not to push quite so hard—“She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs.” I’m calmer and more sure of myself. That doesn’t mean that anything is solved, only that the conflict is not so destructive. I am thinking of the conflict between art and life, of course … that will never be solved. But I am coming to be more able to do what I can, answer letters when I can, and to have less guilt about what is not done. And perhaps I am happy also because the panic that I would never have another idea for a novel is gone, and I do see my way ahead for another two years.

Yesterday I planted bush sweet pea seeds, a mixed packet of radishes that will mature at different times, a box of forget-me-nots, and one of large white Swiss pansies on the terrace. When I look at the expanse of earth ready to be sown I wonder how I shall ever get it done with guests coming almost every other day this month. I’m going to try a few hills of potatoes just for the fun of it.

On Saturday it took most of the day to take Jill out for lunch in Portsmouth. She is twenty-three, full of life and hope. I have great respect for her, for her passionate sense of being a Jew (she went to Israel for a year all on her own). But I also felt how dangerous it is to be brought up in such a close-knit Jewish society because, outside it, one feels alien. She has landed at the University of New Hampshire, where there happen to be almost no Jewish professors or students. At first I think she felt like a stranger in a foreign land. She is such an open, loving girl that the force of goy society hit her with a wham, and perhaps I can be of some use because she can talk openly with me, and knows that I am sympathetic.

I feel a pang when I realize her illusions about writing professionally (she is on a teaching fellowship that provides time for writing). One must believe in one’s talent to take the long hard push and pull ahead, but a talent is like a plant. At J.’s age it may simply wither if it is not given enough food, sun, tender care. And to give it those things means working at it every day. It is no good at twenty-three to produce a story or two in a year. A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used. Closing the gap between expectation and reality can be painful, but it has to be done sooner or later. The fact is that millions of young people would like to write, but what they dream of is the published book, often skipping over the months and years of very hard work necessary to achieve that end—all that, and luck too. We tend to forget about luck.