Tuesday, May 25th

THE COLD UNSETTLED WEATHER continues to depress; 40° every night. I must admit it has kept the tulips in flower far longer than usual. There are even a few late ones just coming into bloom.

It has been a very full and nourishing weekend with Catherine Becker here. Nothing is better for me than a painter in the house … she made two charming watercolors while I was out getting my honorary doctorate from the University of New Hampshire on Sunday. I had such a good feeling, leaving a sensitive person to explore the atmosphere here alone, and also it was lovely to come back for once to find a friend to listen to the happenings of my day. We talked at length all through the time she was here about the problems of the woman artist, and as counterpoint I have been reading Karen Elias-Button’s PhD thesis, “Medusa’a Daughters, A Study of Women’s Consciousness in Myth and Poetry.”

In Catherine I see a very strong woman, a woman married to an artist, bringing up two little girls (now fourteen and a half and eleven). I have the sense that she may be finding the way to gather all this into a whole human being of great power and tenderness as an artist and a woman. So in a way she is the pioneer, and like all pioneers she is finding it a hard and troubling path. Her fantasies (and they appear in her work) are all of women, women in passionate relation to each other. So for her, as for me, woman is the Muse, but she is not playing the fantasy out—and more and more I have come to believe that this is the right way. The androgynous side of C. goes into the work, is translated. For me too, I realize more and more that the best muses were the unattainable ones, the ones hence that became part of a private mythology. But can this be sustained in C.? At some point the Muse-woman will become a reality and have to be dealt with on the level of reality. And then what? At present the fantasy is being played out against and with the help of what appears to be (from what I heard from and felt in C.) a wise woman psychiatrist whom she sees once or twice a week.

C.’s husband is doing well himself as an artist, a slow thoughtful producer of one major work a year. He and she both teach, she as a poorly paid instructor, he as a full professor. So far this has worked just because she is, in a way, a student. But he said once, “Don’t get too good or I’d mind.” She is his rock and he is very dependent. The fantasies of woman as lover come, I feel certain, from C.’s need for something that nourishes her. She is the mother, as it were, of three people now. Now and then they have a cleaning woman come in, and David likes to cook, so they take turns; but otherwise the household work rests on C. She told me that one day when the cleaning woman was there, C. was in her room painting and she suddenly thought, “This is what it is like for David all the time.” It seemed an extraordinary luxury to be able to work at her painting while someone else cleaned.