Sunday, June 6th

I COMPLAINED TO LEE that no one really looks at the garden. Her answer was accurate, “You do the garden for yourself, after all.” Yes, I do, but I also long to give it, and in this it is very much like poetry—that is, I would write poems whether anyone looked at them or not, but I hope someone will. This is not an easy garden because much of it is in shade. I used to be amused in Nelson because the neighbors always spoke of “your gardens,” meaning the many borders and plots of flowers. But there I did have a showy perennial border against the old barn wall, and here the perennial border is below the terrace and almost strangled now by euonymus and ivy above and below—“Ivy gripped the Steps,” as E. Bowen titled one of her stories. I have worked very hard here now for three years, with little to show for the hours and hours of blood and sweat, if not tears.

Do I spend too much time at this ephemeral task? In spring, summer, and autumn I work harder at it than at writing, and I expect that looks crazy, but what it does is balance all the anxieties and tensions and keep me sane. Sanity (plus flowers) does make sense.

Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone. What will can do, and the only thing it can do, is make time in which to do it. Young poets, enraged because they don’t get published right away, confuse what will can do and what it can’t. It can’t make a tree peony grow to twelve feet in a year or two, and it can’t force the attention of editors and publishers. What it can do is create the space necessary for achievement, little by little. I thought of this when reading yesterday the review of Leslie Farber’s new book by Anatole Broyard in the Times. A. B.’s first two paragraphs are as follows:

“ ‘The attempt of the will to do the work of the imagination:’ W. B. Yeats applied this phrase to an incorrect approach to life. Ours, he says, is the age of the disordered will. It is our conceit that no human possibility is beyond our conscious will. T.S. Eliot had something similar in mind when he said that the bad poet is conscious when he should be unconscious and unconscious when he should be conscious.

“Trying to will what cannot be willed, according to Mr. Farber, brings on anxiety, and this anxiety, in turn, cripples our other faculties so that we are left with nothing but anxiety about anxiety, a double unease. Among the things we try to will are happiness, creativity, love, sex, and immortality.”