Monday, June 21st

DAMP HEAT with no saving rain goes on and begins to be enervating. How glad I am that I invested in an air conditioner for this one room at the top of the house, for it means that I can work. Last summer sweat poured down onto the page.

Blue Jenkins has been here since Friday afternoon, and yesterday we had a lovely walk (there was a little wind off the ocean) along the Marginal Way, smelling the wild roses, and pinching bay leaves to get their sweet wild scent, sitting on the immemorial benches (shades of my childhood summers at Ogunquit) to watch a silken sea break into soft lacy fans against the rocks. It is hypnotic … I longed to sit there for hours.

Ogunquit was a magic place for me as a child, when every summer beginning in 1917 for about ten years Lucy Stanton lent us her studio for one month. We ate at the old High Rock Hotel, so it was a real holiday for my mother. Both she and my father loved to swim, and we used to walk along the Marginal Way to one of the rocky coves, the charm being those jagged rocks standing up from soft white sand. I know of no other place that combines the two. I haunted the local library and gradually borrowed and read through all the Waverly novels, taking them out one by one in a closely- printed edition with a musty smell, usually climbing up a pine tree and sitting there most uncomfortably. I wonder why reading in a tree is such a pleasure! There must be something atavistic about it—I can still smell the pine gum and feel its stickiness on my fingers. It is all so present to me that it is quite a shock to find old photographs and realize, looking at my father’s stiff white collars and my mother’s big hats, and her bathing costume which included long black stockings, how long ago it really was.

Ever since the meeting in Newton for Karen’s terminar on her thesis, Medusa’s Daughters, A Study of Women’s Consciousness in Myth and Poetry, I have been thinking over our conversation about mothers and daughters and that this is the unexplored subject both in literature and psychology—fathers and daughters, yes, mothers and sons, yes; but mothers and daughters? It is coming out now in poetry, in Anne Sexton for one, of course, and most of what comes out is dark and tangled. But it all must be examined by each of us and Karen’s book is very helpful. I am moved to copy out a passage from her preface:

“The Great Mother’s maternal force has often been characterized as grasping, even paralysing, its effect sometimes damaging to the maturing child. This dark side of the ‘mother,’ whose face is Medusa’s own, has found its way into male mythology and psychology as the female dragon, the Stone Mother, the castrating terror whose powers must be permanently destroyed to enable the male ‘hero’ to attain maturity. For women, however, the figure of Medusa takes on a more complex significance. The ‘mother,’ who represents for the male the childhood world he will eventually leave behind, also comes to signify for the female the adulthood she must move toward and eventually adopt. Thus, the mother /daughter relationship can turn into a maze of mirrors, whose reflexive entanglements the daughter may find it difficult, or impossible, to escape. To move beyond these dark entanglements, it is imperative that we, as Medusa’s daughters, work not to destroy her but to incorporate her, to gain access to her creative, matriarchal powers which are both ancient and our own.”

The discussion in Newton took place sometime after a friend on the telephone said to me, “You must write more about your mother,” and I have been thinking about this also off and on. I always felt that I was incorporating my mother and her very strong influence in all my work … as though in a way I could bring the creative force in me to full flower as the fulfillment she had never been able to have because she was married and so much of her creative energy after her thirtieth year went into helping support my father and me, literally (by earning money through designing furniture, clothes, and other things.) and metaphysically by the sheer energy that went into her being the pivot of the two complex, demanding lives in her care. It is usual for daughters to be a little in love with their fathers; I was always a little in love with my mother. For my father and I were rivals, I now see, and in many ways he was also her child.

I have heard more than once daughters of a powerful mother say with extreme bitterness, “I hate my mother!” They had been swallowed up or molded into the person their mothers demanded, or prevented from their own authentic being by unconscious pressures from their mothers. I never felt any of that. I felt that my mother was my dearest and best friend, and so she treated me, and so I treated her. There was only one flaw in what was otherwise so vitalizing and good, that she confided her marital difficulties to me, so that my love for my father (though never my respect) was short-circuited at quite an early age, and did not flow back until after my mother was dead, when the “rivals” at last became friends, though never intimate friends. My father could make me extremely angry up to the end. I cannot remember ever being angry with my mother, for she truly and absolutely understood, even when she was quite critical, as she often was, and with good reason. But that is just the point—my father’s criticism was erratic, irrational, came from my disappointing him in some way. (“Why don’t you marry?” he shouted at me when I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight and in the middle of a devastating love for a woman. I rushed at him and beat his chest with my fists, then ran out of the house.) My mother’s criticisms came from her understanding of me and my needs, not hers. The only demand she ever made of me was that I become authentically myself, even when that meant leaving home at seventeen and going, perilously, into what I thought would be a life in the theatre.