Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt

As you can imagine, England has been a good deal in everybody’s mind lately, and the English people in the United States have found it vastly amusing to see our excitement on the day the election returns came in. As it happened, Charles Johnson was down from Toronto (what a surprise it was to learn that he was there!) on that very day, when we were taking turns phoning up the New York Times every hour to hear the latest figures—and I must say that he appeared to have far greater equanimity than the rest of us! At any rate, it is a disappointment that it could not have been more decisive, one way or another; but I suppose it does prove what ties there are between the countries, that we should find your election nearly as exciting as our own back in 1948. It happened that about a week beforehand I went to a showing of British information films, and I was particularly delighted with one about what it is like to be a new M. P., with all the traditions that have been going for centuries. There was also one about London’s water supply, with lovely shots of the New River and the source of the Thames in the Cotswolds, and as you may have heard, it could not have been more apropos—because although the heart of New York is an island, the city water supply is in dire danger of being used up! I can’t possibly explain how it happened, but the emergency has its comic aspects. Every Thursday all and sundry are expected to refrain from bathing, shaving, and all water-consuming activities. But the funniest development has come with the Mayor’s announcing that he had called in a rain-making expert for consultation—no, I’m perfectly serious, they can create rain by sprinkling dry ice out of an airplane or something. And immediately there were protests from the mayor of Albany, that this would constitute pilfering from his city’s water supply! So far as I know, the argument has so far not been settled, and meanwhile Dry Thursday continues.

It was pleasant to think of you seeing Moira Shearer dance so soon after I had seen her here. Unfortunately I didn’t see Cinderella, but I did see her in Façade and, as you may know, I saw her in Coppelia at Covent Garden last spring. And I have also been to The Red Shoes, which has been playing steadily in New York for over a year. If you have seen it, you can imagine how exciting I found the opening scenes of the opera house—I very nearly caused a disturbance in my enthusiasm. Naturally I was interested to hear of her marriage, especially since the chapel at Hampton Court was on my itinerary and I remember it vividly.

It has just been announced that one of our native companies, the New York City Ballet, will be performing in England next summer. This is an enormous honor for them, as everybody who saw the Sadler’s Wells company in New York well knows, and I am already a little nervous for them. But they do some delightful things, the best of which is Firebird, with new choreography and costumes to the Stravinsky music. I saw it a week ago; but I’m sorry now that I wasn’t at the performance a couple of evenings ago, for the premiere of a new ballet, Illuminations, with music, choreography and costumes all by Englishmen—Britten, Ashton and Beaton. A friend of mine tells me that it was really gala, with the British Ambassador in the audience and the orchestra playing “God Save the King” along with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

You asked whether I had done any more sewing. Actually I am now in a position to do an enormous amount, because my parents surprised me with a portable sewing machine for Christmas! But somehow I have been so occupied with various other things that I haven’t used it a great deal so far, though I did made myself some new curtains and have the material to make a blouse when I can settle down to it. At least I did launch the thing with something of a flourish—one evening I had a sewing-machine-warming, like a house-warming, you know, to which everybody was required to bring something to sew on. And though a good deal of the work was done by hand, since only one person could use the machine at a time, it seems to have been a success.

Do give my best wishes to everybody, and to Mr. Norton especially, and tell them how often I think of you all and the wonderful time I had. Again, my thanks for such a charming present, and I hope you’ll write again when you have time.

[ … ] I congratulate you on finishing Paradise Lost. I decided a while back that I was going to read it again, but it turned out to be as dull and pompous as the first time, and I haven’t succeeded in getting very far. I always seem to turn to it just when I’m about to go to sleep, which I suppose isn’t fair, but all it seems to do is to put me to sleep entirely. However, one of these days I still mean to tackle it properly. I also intend to read the Bible all the way through. These intentions are prompted by, of all things, an interest in religion which dates, as nearly as I can remember, to my reading of Toynbee just after I got back to New York from Iowa, and which is related to all the cathedrals and altarpieces and religious festivals that puzzled me in Europe. I have just finished, after my own fashion, with looking into the matter of St. Francis, and have written a chapter on Assisi which ends up, somewhat to my own surprise, with the assertion that the tradition of his receiving the Stigmata is a logical necessity! Of course, just when I think I understand religion, I meet up with a real believer who says I am talking nonsense. This happened again just yesterday, when after a couple of martinis Joe Goodman and I and a girl friend of his got into a terrible argument, in which I maintained that religious feeling was everything, the girl that dogma was everything, and Joe took the more complicated position of the skeptical believer. None of us convinced the others of anything. Of course I have a different idea about every week. To follow the process you will have to read my so-called book, in which I am now about to start Chapter Six and thus am about halfway through.

It doesn’t seem likely that the book is going to be published. A literary agent to whom I sent the first three chapters said it was well written but that there was no market for it. The curious thing is that I don’t care very much. It would be nice to make some money, of course, but I have gone ahead writing it and having the time of my life. I haven’t gotten a job and haven’t even looked for one, but though the money is beginning to run rather low even that doesn’t bother me. I can always go to work at Macy’s or something, and probably will, because the idea of a good job in which I should have to work hard chiefly at flattering people and pushing them around now seems too awful to contemplate, and I have discovered that I am really happier with a very little money than I was when I could buy things just for the fun of buying. Of course, I have had my spending jag and have all the clothes I need for a while—I haven’t even had to buy nylons, since I wear them only when I go out—and I can take books out of the public library. I wouldn’t feel this way, either, if I hadn’t first proved that I could hold a job and gotten enough self-respect thereby to make my present frugal existence an act not of defiance but of transcendence. I have the feeling now that I may be going to write a good book—not the one I’m working on, which is simply groundwork and a process of thinking a few things out that has to be gone through first—and that even if I don’t I shan’t feel too badly, because I will have found out that I didn’t have it in me, and if I hadn’t tried I never could be sure.

So far I’ve enjoyed myself so much that it isn’t as if I had given anything up. I’ve never been in a better frame of mind, day after day. Of course Iowa gave me the fidgets, and so, even, did Boston. I suppose I’ve gotten so used to my little spot on West Twelfth Street that I don’t feel at home anywhere except in New York. It’s a wonderful place. I never know any more who is going to appear or what is going to happen. The other evening I got into an argument with a painter, which started out innocently enough and ended up with questions of the condition of the artist in Russia, and what is really the function of the painter. The fellow turned out to be a Marxist, and I hadn’t met any of them for so long that I had almost begun to consider the species extinct. He thought a painter could say something that had nothing to do with painting; that the truth was simple; and that the deep-freeze was no more but no less important than paintings to put on the wall. I thought exactly the opposite: that no good painting could make a simple declarative statement; that the deep-freeze was of less importance than paintings; and that the truth cannot be simplified without being turned into lies. However, there were so many things neither of us were sure about that we didn’t come to blows, but ended up quite amicably, both grateful for the work-out. When I left I had a headache from sheer mental exertion. What was still more interesting was going to look at an exhibition of this same artist’s paintings. They were wonderful! And if any of them made simple declarative statements, these were denied by the richness of the colors and the brushwork. All of which proves nothing except that artists are of all complicated people the most complicated.

Then there was the evening when I listened to a poet reading Yeats aloud, and practically floated out of the window, the effect was so intoxicating. And the party that Joe gave after a performance of his flute sonata, at which I had planned to stay half an hour but actually got home at half-past nine the next morning! We had drifted, half a dozen of us, from Joe’s mother’s to the apartment of a White Russian journalist who believes in absolutely nothing but has a wonderful collection of objects—figures out of Egyptian tombs, Turkish fezzes, Persian shoes and a Mohammedan prayer rug, books in all languages, and musical instruments including African drums, a snake-charmer’s pipe, a musical gourd, and Maracas. I took a lesson in the latter and found them a good deal more difficult than I had supposed they would be, but the musicians in the crowd were presently playing a little concert on the various instruments against a background of Zulu chanting from the phonograph. I found myself drinking brandy and eating cheese-and-baloney sandwiches for breakfast and feeling fine. When it began to be light we got into the journalist’s car and were delivered to various points—one girl to her office, somebody else to Penn Station, and me home. Joe had another, more genteel party the other evening—really a musical soiree, organized around a rehearsal of his new string trio (flute, cello and piano). After they had played it once we listened several times to a tape recording. After that—chamber music in its proper setting—the performance in Town Hall yesterday was something of an anticlimax, but exciting. I found that I was—almost as nervous as the composer himself. [ … ]

I imagine Mrs. Jepp told you that I got a new job. It had become a matter of necessity—I had holes in my shoes and approximately twenty-five dollars to my name. It’s with the Audubon Society, a foundation concerned with wildlife conservation, birds in particular, and I work in the reference library with a delightful, unbusinesslike Frenchwoman who is no more of an ornithologist than I am—so in looking up the answers to people’s questions, piecemeal we find out all kinds of odd things about birds. The people who come in are often slightly crazy too, but frequently very nice—like the man who spends most of his time these days camping out in the Bahamas and Yucatan watching the habits of flamingoes. Before that he was watching the whooping cranes, huge magnificent birds of which there are now only about thirty in existence, and the Society had just published a thick book all about what he learned. Aside from the fact that he usually wears a blue suit with a bright yellow pullover, he looks a good deal more normal than you would expect. There is also a man who is, I am told, the leading authority on bats in the United States, and he looks like any nice young businessman, or perhaps a professor of political science—very difficult to imagine climbing around in caves with a flashlight (if indeed that is what bat specialists do). Then there are bird artists and bird photographers, and once in a while the warden of a bird sanctuary who comes in and immediately engages you in a conversation about the behavior of the reddish egret. You just look very knowing and nod your head a few times and it seems to be all right. [ … ]

But you must be quite bored with bedridden people and their symptoms by this time. I didn’t mean to go into so much detail about the fascinating common cold. The one thing I did that isn’t usually done was to discover Gilbert White. Maybe you know about him—the eighteenth-century Englishman, a clergyman evidently, who wrote The Natural History of Selborne. I read the whole thing, and when I had finished I had the rare feeling of being sorry that there wasn’t any more. He made it his business to note down everything like the habits of cockroaches, the rainfall, the dew, the growth of trees, and the appearances and disappearances of birds, at a time when there was still some doubt about whether migration really occurred. He never did decide for certain whether swallows and swifts actually left the country or merely hibernated somewhere or other. He had a friend who went out with a pitch-pipe and discovered, or thought he had, that all the owls hooted in B-Flat; but then one of them went down to A, so the generalization had to be abandoned. He was the most patient curious man who ever lived, I do believe, and that is his great charm. The one time he seems to [have] been even slightly inclined to pass moral judgments on animal behavior (he was always looking for explanations of why the cuckoo should lay its egg in another bird’s nest, but he never found one, though for a while he thought he had) [ … ] the one creature that seems to have incensed him the least little bit was an old tortoise, and I suppose that was because he had gotten fond of it. He saw it first in another town, where it had been living for a good while, and watched it digging in for the winter, with the speed, he said, of the hour hand on a clock.

Eventually, after a series of references to it, he notes that “the old Sussex tortoise is now become my property.” He dug it up before the end of the hibernation season, carried it back to Selborne, and dug it into his own garden, where he noted that on one day of unseasonable warmth, in February or March, it came out for a while but then retired underground. He noticed that it was as fussy as an old lady about being caught in the rain, and would go for cover though heaven knew that it was as well protected already as one would suppose necessary. And then he exploded that it did seem odd that a creature so torpidly oblivious to delight of any kind should be permitted to drag out so long an existence on earth. Later on he seems to have made amends by noting a few more positive qualities, such as that it did have sense enough to keep from falling down a well when it came to the edge of it. Well, you can see that I have been pretty much obsessed with that tortoise ever since. I have already told one person whom I quite liked but found somewhat exasperating that he was an old Sussex tortoise. The upshot was that I managed to get him to unearth some enthusiasms—Adlai Stevenson, and the ballet, and some novel by John O’Hara, and some other girl who hadn’t anything to say. Of course the last exasperated me all over again, but that was no doubt what I deserved. Anyhow, for the time being “Don’t be an old Sussex tortoise” seems to be my rallying cry. Why are people so afraid of being enthusiastic? I don’t think it’s so much laziness as the fear of turning out to be wrong. But who knows what is right, anyway? If one only feels the right things one might as well not feel anything. Of course one usually is wrong. I’ve been being enthusiastic and getting knocked down and proved wrong for some time now, so that I’m practically used to it.

Now what all this has to do with anything I don’t quite know. I think it was brought on by your almost confessing to envy me for enjoying [Suzanne Langer’s] Philosophy in a New Key and then taking it back, almost and all. I don’t see anything wrong with that—it’s probably healthy, and besides, at your age I would have found the whole thing impenetrable. I’ve forgotten the logical framework already, in fact I had before I finished the book. What I understood I understood through things that had affected me, and I’ve had ten more years to be affected in than you have. You have a far better brain than I do, and you use it. What needs paying attention to now is your feelings, which are undoubtedly there somewhere though you seem to do a wonderful job of traveling miles in order to circumvent them. Does this make you mad? It ought to.

Well, here you are, twenty-three years old tomorrow. I’m late with birthday wishes, but then I always am. These are about the queerest I ever sent anybody, but you see it’s all on account of that old Sussex tortoise.

The whole thing, as I see it, is very closely related to the problem of individual relationships, which is really the problem of expressing one’s feelings, which in turn involves the problem of dominating or being dominated by other people, of hurting and getting hurt. It’s a problem that shows no sign of getting solved; and the terrible, eternal irony is that when one is young and trying to find one’s way around in the shambles of human society, when one is least capable of satisfactory personal relationships is just when one needs them most. The usual short-cut seems to be to avoid getting hurt (a) by being aggressive, and hurting other people first or (b) by being recessive, just letting things slide by. Of course the two can overlap, and I’m not sure which is more common or which is worse. But they both lead to misery, of the most terrible, blind, self-perpetuating kind—a worse misery, really, than the one they were supposed to circumvent. What I am trying to say, of course, is that suffering of one kind or another is not to be avoided, and that honest suffering is much less worse, finally, than any substitute. The day I woke up and really knew this was so—and it wasn’t so terribly long ago, either—I began finally, in a very small way, to be a responsible adult. I’m not sure that the fairly long chronicle of mistakes and emotional crises that went into, and led up to, this private triumph would sound worth while to anybody else, but they were so far as I’m concerned. About the only thing I can be proud of is that I never made the same mistake twice—it was always a new one, and I always emerged knowing a little more than I did before. One has to live with one’s mistakes, either by hiding them away in a closet somewhere or making some use of them. The only alternative to the process of education by trial and error is to take somebody else’s word for everything—I tried that too, with ludicrous consequences—and in the present confused state of things that alternative is probably satisfactory only for an imbecile. Now what all this may or may not have to do with you and Virginia, or any other girl, I haven’t any very clear idea. The thing I had in mind about the old Sussex tortoise was, I guess, to caution you against becoming paralyzed by the fear of injury, either inflicted or received. If you find you are discussing a relationship as a substitute for the relationship itself, and can’t do anything else, then there is probably no point in pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp, but if on the other hand you really do enjoy each other’s company then it ought to be worth while to find some modest basis for continuing it. All of which you perfectly well know already. You have the advantage of an exceptionally good mind. I don’t think the fact makes you really any lonelier than other people, it just makes you more aware of the loneliness which is the fate of absolutely everybody.

There was a whole lot more I meant to say about how I seem to have turned out to be a pacifist in spite of myself—though I do hate the word. That accounts for my finding it impossible to go back into business of any kind, where so much energy, at least of mine, was used up in fights of the most trivial kind. It used to be that a day wasn’t complete if I didn’t lose my temper, less and less privately as time went on. I walked all over people and had quite a few of them scared of me, and for a while it was fun of a perverse sort; but there were also quite a few people I was scared of. The difference now is that I don’t think I’m really scared of anybody; and the people I can’t like I’m mostly just sorry for. Of course people hate having anybody genuinely sorry for them (as distinguished from just feeling guilty about them, as if their plight were one’s own fault), so the only thing I have found to do is avoid them. Fortunately, the Audubon Society makes that pretty easy. It’s not an ideal solution but it seems to be the best I’m capable of, for the time being anyway. It means a certain sense of isolation, but that is only sad instead of being bitter and having to blame somebody. I think I understand that as the essence of pacifism—well, say Christianity, which is the same thing really—not blaming anybody. But it’s a thing that can’t be imposed from the outside; it just has to happen. But I’m getting too tired to follow these observations much further. You’re right; letter-writing can be exhausting. [ … ]

One of the few disadvantages of living alone, it has just occurred to me, is that when one thinks one may have lost one’s voice there is no way to find out except by talking to oneself. At a quarter past two this morning, though I find the recollection slightly incredible, I was shouting my head off in Pooh-Bah’s lament from The Mikado while skipping up Bleecker Street in the company of several people who had a similar inclination to shout their heads off, though at the party we had just come from we had been doing exactly that for at least an hour. I now suspect that the singing had gone on too long and merrily, because when I finally got up a while ago and felt the inclination to burst into song (a Burl Ives lament I had just thought of), all I could raise was a hoarse squeak. The question now is, can I talk? Evidently I am not going to find out until this evening when I go out to dinner, because I simply cannot bring myself to say anything out loud with nobody but me around to hear it. This dilemma, aggravated by not being able to sing, has produced an irresistible urge to communicate. All of which is the long-drawn-out explanation of this letter. I am not sure which of us owes the other one one at this point, and that being the case I might just as well break the deadlock. I enjoyed your letter and I’m glad you enjoyed Gatsby, for sending which I had no particular reason except that it’s a good story and one which (unlike the majority of novels which on first reading you can barely put down) stands up under repeated reading. The usual critics’ explanation for the fascination of the character of Gatsby—and he is, of course, fascinating just because he is convincing and incredible both at the same time—is that he represents the American Dream, that peculiar mixed faith in romantic love and the power of money. He is a kind of mythical character, like Faust or Oedipus or the Little Mermaid, and the critics these days are very fond of myths. And so am I.

Though for slightly different specific reasons, I think I have been getting the same feeling lately that you seem to have about psychologists—or at any rate about psychoanalysts. And they are all involved, so far as I can make out, in the creation of another Great American Myth. Since I don’t believe that myths are necessarily lies, this is not so much a condemnation as a rather weary, even wistful objection; because the psychoanalytic myth seems to be that There Is No Sin. Now it is fairly easy to trace the genesis of this proposition which may or may not be true: first there is the idea, which can make things quite messy, that Sex is Sin; so in order to make things less messy, this idea must be rooted out and disposed of, like a stand of poison ivy in a fencerow; and behold, the arduous labor completed, if Sex is not a Sin, there is no Sin. My trouble just now, I suppose, is that I have been reading the Inferno, which is concerned with nothing but sin; and be it noted that in Dante’s system Paolo and Francesca, along with Cleopatra, Dido, and Helen of Troy, whose transgressions were all carnal, are regarded as the least guilty, and their punishment is the exact equivalent of their earthly condition—namely to be driven about eternally by the winds, like a flock of birds, a situation which, if wearisome, is infinitely to be preferred to lying forever in the rain, like the gluttons, or burning forever, like the false counsellors, or being locked forever in the ice, like the traitors. So I suppose the trouble is not with the psychoanalysts alone, but with the nineteenth-century preoccupation which made such a Thing out of sex. But the awful thing that seems to have happened, whosever fault it was, is that the psychoanalyst’s couch has become the lazy sinner’s confessional, where on payment of a large fee excuses are found for all the things one ought not to have done (and they are always the same excuse: that one felt guilty about being human, or in other words one felt, though one knew better, that Sex was a Sin). I had it explained to me again last night that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to make people Accept Themselves; the inference being that they are incapable of change. (“Except a man be born again he shall not enter the kingdom of heaven”—or did I make that up?) The terrible thing is that being Born Again became such a cliché that it had to be rooted out too—oh that terrible nineteenth century, for which, nevertheless, I am coming to have a certain affection, if only in reaction against the reaction against it.) There is something to this effect in [David Riesman’s] The Lonely Crowd, as I remember, in connection with homosexuals, whom psychiatrists often do not try to “cure” but merely to accustom to their inverted habits. It is all very discouraging, anyhow, if one persists in believing in free will. The thing I hold against psychology just now is that by explaining too much it explains nothing, that it becomes, unreal as it is, a substitute for reality, and its version of life is nothing but a lot of empty nutshells and squeezed orange rinds. And more and more I find that the disparity between the way I see these people, believing as I do in the existence of free will, sin and damnation, and the way they see themselves, believing in nothing special, is so great that I can barely communicate with them, except by a kind of wig-wag semaphore conducted in two different languages. Neither of us knows what the other is talking about. There are times when I feel closer to the flamingos, isolated in their salty fastnesses where nothing else can live except the minute plant and animal forms they feed upon; it is as though they had more life in them than most of the people one sees. But of course that is unfair, whether to the people or to the flamingos I’m not quite sure.

The mad Pole I told you about, who made me laugh so much on the train from Boston last spring, was in town this week and called me up. We arranged to meet at the Metropolitan Museum on my lunch hour, carrying respectively, for purposes of identification, the Inferno and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Association. Yes, by golly, there is such a thing, and there was even an article in it about the air-conditioning of space ships! However, on inquiring I was told that an emigration to Mars within at least the next fifty thousand years is not likely, even if anybody wanted to go, for the reason that the expenditure of energy to get a single person there would be more than that required to keep a city in operation here—which is self-evident enough when one thinks about it, but about physics my credulity is boundless. I certainly never met anybody so learned on a train, or just possibly anywhere, and indeed such learning in somebody whose profession is designing rockets to beat the Russians with in the next war is rather disconcerting. However, it was quite easy to keep off that subject while surrounded by the relics of the Italian Renaissance, the portraits and the carved furniture and the altarpieces; they have reopened the European painting galleries at the museum, and I am there practically every lunch hour. There are times when it seems to me that without these evidences of its potentialities I should despair of the human race altogether. This, undoubtedly, is what [Bernard] Berenson’s famous “life-enhancing” label is about; when there is real life behind a work of art, there is the power in it of lifting the spectator beyond himself and into some community of human experience which is beyond time and space; but this is a power which can only be tapped through a process which cannot be taught or entirely explained. I suspect, however, that at bottom it is simply a respect for life in all its forms. I read somewhere about a man who acquired a belief in God, or immortality, or the soul—they all mean approximately the same thing—from watching a “wave” of migrating warblers, and I think I understand this perfectly. Once you really sense the life behind a mass movement like that, or behind a single bird, or behind a single human being, no matter how stupid or miserable, then you know that all the science in the world can never explain it, and you do not ask to have it explained. And implicit in all art, I think, is a respect for this mystery; it is a homage to the inexplicable. Perhaps science is too in its purer forms, but it seems to me that just as often it exploits the mystery without even recognizing that it is mysterious, and that—in the case of psychology—it lays destructive hands on a principle it does not even recognize; it devaluates life by burying the inexplicable under a load of explanations. But I’m becoming indignant, and it’s late, so I’ll stop for now anyway.

It’s startling to discover that your last letter is already a month old. My impulse was, as it always is when I get a letter that says something, to sit down and answer it right away; but not having done that, I find that the time has slid past without being properly accounted for. Your adventures with St. Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli and the philosopher with a materialist base interested me very much. I haven’t read either of the former—certainly not the latter!—though both have been on my tentative list of people to be read sometime. Since I find St. Thomas’s almost-contemporary Dante so congenial—I’m on the Purgatorio now—I can imagine I would share your sympathies on that score, and the comments on Machiavelli as you report them only substantiate my own feelings about the thinness and confusion of popular ideas these days. If you are going to explain away Machiavelli by saying his moral ideas were wrong, or by blaming his environment, you end up by explaining away all of western civilization. Of course the way he was brought up, and the political conditions of fifteenth-century Florence—which is the Florence of the high Renaissance, of Raphael and Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo the Magnificent—entered into his idea of human nature, and certainly there was vice and cruelty and horror tangled up with all the magnificence of that time; but if you are going to pay attention to history at all, you can’t just pick out the parts you like and ignore the rest. I have come to the conclusion, and not a very original one at that, that history is a conflict of interests because human nature is a conflict of interests. We’re all subject to contrary pulls and pressures from without and from within. Probably the most powerful of these pressures are exactly those of which we are least aware. The advantage of a chaotic time like this one—and like so many advantages it is also pretty terrifying—is that to avoid being smothered on the one hand or torn limb from limb on the other, one is forced to examine one’s own assumptions, and to try to understand where they came from. That’s the significance of a book like Suzanne Langer’s, as I understand it: she makes a brief for intuition, which is the living kernel of any system of philosophy. One man’s logic is as good as another’s; I don’t see how it is possible to choose among sets of ideas on the basis of logic alone. In the end, it is what one feels to be true that matters, not the plausibility or the force of the arguments that develop out of what one feels. But as T. S. Eliot pointed out, the hardest thing in the world is to know what one feels: there are so many things one is supposed to feel, that one has been told one is going to feel, that certain people are said to have felt, and so on and on. The whole basis of Roman Catholicism, as I understand it, is that certain things have been felt by certain people which an ordinary believer may never feel except at second hand; again quoting Eliot, we can endure only just so much reality; hence the ritual, which preserves these feelings and keeps them in operation even though they are not individually revived in each worshiper each time the mass is sung. It is pretty hard to argue with this; in a sense it may be considered a more democratic idea than the orthodox democratic notion that everybody has a right to get ahead (and maybe lose his soul in the process). But the truth is, I don’t really believe it. I still believe that it is still possible to discover what one feels, and that until that happens one is not quite alive. There are just too many different systems now, all clamoring to be adhered to, to settle down comfortably with any one of them. One compromises, one acquiesces, one keeps one’s mouth shut—but if one goes on thinking one is not quite defeated. The wear and tear involved is something terrific, but it is better than never having been quite alive.

And the same thing applies to people individually. It is more and more my melancholy observation that in any close relationship either one person dominates with the more or less complete assent of the other, or each tries to dominate the other. The more we are attached to people for what they are, the more we also try to change them. But how much better than that there should have been no relationship at all! When people are grown up enough to recognize the danger in people they like, they are perhaps also grown up enough to sort out what is to be valued from what is a threat to their own integrity. And as far as I’m concerned, recognizing the value of another person is the fundamental human experience. If I didn’t believe that people do reach each other once in a very great while, in spite of all the anguish that is usually mixed up in the process, I don’t suppose I would see very much in Dante, or Rembrandt, or Bergson, or even things in which people aren’t directly involved, such as hearing a song-sparrow in a high wind or finding snowdrops in bloom, as I did one brisk day when I paid a visit to the Cloisters a few weeks back. Otherwise existence would be a treadmill, as it seems to be for a good many people—all labels and no contents. As it is, no day is quite like any other; one doesn’t know exactly where one is going—that seems to rest these days in the hands of the makers of international policy, who don’t know where they’re going either—but at least one is not standing still.

However, I make an effort not to meditate on the H-Bomb, and if I do find myself getting indignant about Senator McCarthy, I try to remember that he has a possible analogue in the Hebrew prophets: he too is a product of his times, a malignant growth which gets its sustenance from the fact that there are a few thousand people too scared to think. Not that I think the Hebrew prophets were all bad, but they certainly were fanatical. If you haven’t read The True Believer, you really should. (I know, I hate having books prescribed to me too; but at least this one is short.)

We had a party, a very civilized party, at the Audubon Society a couple of days ago—an opening, more properly, what the French call a vernissage, of a show of rather insignificant flower paintings by one Redouté, who was court flower painter to Marie Antoinette and who weathered the Revolution to become ditto to the Empresses Josephine and Marie Louise. Most of the people who came were Luxembourgers, including the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Washington from that country, a Monsieur Le Gallais. He looked exactly as such an official from a very small country might be expected to look—rather bald, not very tall, and not so much solemn as expressionless, as though he was afraid all dignity might disappear if he noticed anything to provoke a smile. The other Luxembourgers whose responsibilities weighed less heavily proved quite delightful, and that the Minister’s heart is in the right place I am sure because he thoughtfully provided two cases of Luxembourg wine for the occasion. He didn’t drink any of it himself, as I remember, but that was again probably because the dignity of Luxembourg was too much on his mind. Anyway, it turned out to be a fine party. For one thing the weather favored us—sunny, and rather headily in the seventies, all of a sudden, so that it was possible to open the window onto our little balcony. And there were roses on the tea-table and roses on the mantelpiece and roses—mostly, mixed in with humbler growths such as a thistle and a twig of Ribes, I’ll have you know, which looked so real you could practically smell it—all around the walls. And then there was the wine, a Moselle, very light and with a flowery bouquet, exactly right for a warm spring afternoon. It arrived in the morning, brought by the Luxembourger who had arranged the show and the head of the consulate in New York, and they came back into the serving pantry and found me polishing the silver tea-service (really the maid’s job, but we weren’t sure the maid would have time or even if she would show up). No ceremony about them. In fact, they pried open the cases with a pair of scissors and insisted that we must open a bottle right away to see how it tasted. Even before lunch, it tasted fine. When the party began I was put in charge of it, to see that everybody had enough and nobody was permitted to drink too much. There turned out to be only one offender—he had that abject, alcoholic look around the eyes, and after about the tenth glass I began pointedly evading him. Everybody else—and long after the Minister had made his speech and departed there were people who stayed and stayed—was drinking for fun, not from necessity. I didn’t ever realize until I got home at around eight o’clock that I was completely exhausted—too tired to eat, though all I had had since lunch, besides the wine, was a tea sandwich and a cookie or two. Monica and I had agreed just beforehand, when the third in a succession of maids contracted for and then incapacitated, came down at the eleventh hour with acute appendicitis and sent a message from the operating table, that we would never go through with another exhibition. The final substitute maid, located for us by a catering establishment, luckily arrived—a stately creature named Rose, who asked me if this was going to be a Social Register affair or just people who liked the birds, and confided that her girl-friend had been waitress the other evening at an affair which included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He was, according to the girl-friend, Just Charming. The girl-friend had wanted Rose to help her, but unfortunately she was working somewhere else, and she was so sorry. I told Monica about the Duke and Duchess afterward. “Those cockroaches!” she said. In her set, the famous pair are deplored as parasites and publicity-seekers. The real quality don’t need to have their names in the papers, is the idea; it is only the pseudo-society one hears anything about. It is a little like the story Henry James told about the Henry Adamses, who, living in Washington, decided to give a party and said, “Let’s be vulgar—let’s invite the President!” However, nothing makes Monica more furious than to be introduced as the Countess de la Salle—her own self-esteem is sufficient, so I guess she has a right to look down on the Duke and Duchess if she wants to.

I will send off to you very shortly a copy of Pettingill’s Guide to Bird Finding West of the Mississippi, a sort of un-birthday present which really isn’t from me but from my friend Leona, at whose apartment you may remember having dinner, and who gets copies of all Oxford books by virtue of her job editing them. There are a number of interesting things about Iowa—though I notice that a review in Iowa Bird Life complains about the McGregor district being left out—such as directions about seeing the piece of authentic prairie near Cherokee: nobody allowed in without the permission and the company of the owner: and a vivid summary of the changes in the landscape since the white man moved in.

It’s rather chilly again, which is a nuisance. In Central Park the robins seem to be pairing up, and I’ve seen a flicker and a couple of phoebes, but the weather is all wrong for catching birds on their way through. A couple of months back I saw a small flock of what turned out to be American mergansers on the Reservoir—both males and females, scudding and bobbing along at a great rate. There are always gulls, up until sometime in May when they will all go off to breed, and lately they have become very vocal—I even hear them at work with the windows closed, and from that distance they sound rather like killdeers. Niko Tinbergen, the student of instinct and animal behavior who is an expert on the three-spined stickleback as well as the herring gull, and who is almost as good a writer as David Lack, has a new book out on the herring gull’s world, which I intend to read. Peterson’s guide to the birds of Europe is also out and seems to be universally admired, though one English reviewer complains mildly that this is the third book in a year whose jacket claims it to be illustrated by the greatest living bird artist. I happen to know that Peterson was greatly set up by this bit of blurb-writing; whether he believes it or not I don’t know, but I certainly don’t, though he is unquestionably the greatest living bird-popularizer. Anyhow, it is certainly a good book to have around, and was just what I needed the other day when Joe Goodman called up to ask what kind of bird the zumaya was; it was in a Lorca poem he had set to music and which was now being translated. Turned out to be a night-heron—I found this equivalent in a French book, lacking Peterson. Joe was busy turning out Lenten motets at the time; I suppose he still is. He said he had sent Mamma some piano pieces he had recently composed. I owe the Goodmans an invitation; must call them up. [ … ]

My adverse feelings about psychoanalysis are based on what I know of it at second hand. In New York it has become a cult; there are all those jokes about it only because it is taken so seriously. In certain sections of the career world it is hardly normal not to be in the process; it becomes no longer a cure but a way of life. I tried very hard to believe that it could be beneficial, mainly because of a particular instance—Cecile. You remember her, I am sure. She is an extremely gifted and likable girl and I owe her a great deal; for a long time I had considered her my closest friend, at least of my own sex, and I think she considered me likewise. But a day came, a few months back, when to my horror I saw all the things coming back which I had excused in her as part of her neurosis, and I could no longer excuse them. I could not excuse them because her very friendship had become a threat. I won’t go into the details, which on the surface were so trivial that they explain nothing anyhow, but I saw that we disagreed fundamentally. We disagreed about what was real. And the only way I could go on being a friend of hers was to agree with her. Conversely, if I insisted on my own version I could no longer be her friend. It was the first absolute defeat I had met with since I began thinking for myself, and it was a terrible thing. How can I explain it? I saw that she was no less miserable than she had been five or more years ago, when she began her analysis; she had not changed; she was, if anything, more riddled by the envy and self-pity that had been there all the time; she hadn’t learned a thing, and she had spent heaven knows how many thousands of dollars without even finding this out. For this I don’t think her analysts were to blame; she has had two of them, the first of whom gave up and the second of whom, so far as I can make out, simply lowered the sights. She wanted to change, possibly, but not very much. I don’t say this is what is in store for you; your problem is not in the least like hers, and I think you are capable of more honesty, which is a prime requisite if one is to be helped by a professional man concerning one’s private difficulties. But having in a sense lived through this ordeal, and come to the shocking conclusion that I had lent my support to a worthless cause, I suppose I tremble a little at the thought of anyone’s embarking upon it. For myself, the alternative is preferable. I am pretty sure I have been through the alternative, and I am not sorry; but it seems to me quite possible that some people, perhaps most people, would not envy me the experience, and that they would recommend the third possibility, which is inertia, conformity, capitulation, security, etc., in short a quiet form of self-annihilation, as the most satisfactory answer to the immemorial problem of what to do with one’s life.

But the alternative? It is less systematic than the methods of the analyst, but as I understand those methods it is the same thing. It consists of being broken, smashed, shattered, torn apart—whatever words you like, none of them is too strong—and then, if the process is to have any significance, made whole. He that loseth his life shall find it; except a man be born again he shall not enter the kingdom of heaven—it’s a biblical matter, only biblical terms quite express it. It is exposing the live kernel which, at any rate according to Christian theology, exists at the center of every human being. I am not certain whether I think this live kernel is actually in some people killed or perverted very early and thus rendered past redemption—which is a modification of the Calvinist notion, I suppose, and there is something to be said for the realism of their gloomy scheme of things—and that this possibility of early destruction or perversion explains a failure like Cecile’s. (Of course it is possible that in the months since I removed myself from her life something has happened.) But the live kernel—it can be given all kinds of names, but I prefer the simplest one: love. What I mean by it is not passion, not sentiment, not altruism; they are all substitutes for the real thing, which I can only describe as a kind of stillness before the unknown. This sounds like mysticism, and I guess it is; but life is a mystery, despite all the brazen know-nothing-know-it-alls who keep telling us otherwise.

However, I didn’t really mean to start on a disquisition. I really meant to try to tell you about me. Being the older sister, and having both an inordinate pride and an inordinate wish not to offend anybody or to get in anybody’s way, I have gotten into the habit of keeping my own counsel. If I seldom give advice, knowing how unwelcome it generally is, as well as how useless, I still more seldom ask for it. This does not mean, though, that I have not many times been bewildered, miserable, and desperately alone, or that I have not done any number of things I was ashamed of. I am not so ashamed of them as I used to be—in fact I have pretty well forgiven myself once I began to understand why I did them, and however painful and costly my various mistakes may have been—there were all kinds of them—none of them was ever fatal or, indeed, useless; I learned something every time, and so far as I can make out I never made quite the same mistake twice. So perhaps they were not mistakes—call them experiments, part of the process of becoming educated. Out of all this welter has evolved, only half consciously, a set of principles. They will probably sound pretty negative, since they constitute a reaction against prevailing tendencies, all of which I recognize in myself: never to exert power for its own sake; never to cultivate anybody or anything for the sake of a possible future advantage; never to blame anybody without assuming a share of the blame myself; never to make claims on anybody else; to yield gracefully and with equal grace to be firm, and not to be swayed by other people’s ideas of what is important. But to act on such a set of principles one has to know what is important to oneself; and one has to know that the right thing to do very frequently turns out to be the thing that is supposed to be wrong. This is particularly true of the most private relationships. Generosity, sincerity, spontaneity, according to the going canon are to be avoided, since they make you vulnerable; somebody is liable to take advantage of you, you are going to get hurt. But you forget the prevailing canon, because being yourself seemed temporarily more important; and of course the wiseacres were right all along—you do get hurt. Being yourself is not the way to get ahead. If you really want to get ahead, you had better stop wanting to be yourself. It’s too bad, but—the truth is, it costs too much. This is the theme of any number of novels: the lament for the life that was lost by saving it.

Well, I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I had some latent ambitions that did not consist in getting ahead. It is true that I very much wanted to make a fairly impressive marriage, in order to have seemed to have arrived, in the eyes of other people—and what other people thought has always been of great importance, odd as it may seem. On the other hand, I wanted a great romance; I wanted to know what it felt like to be tragic; I wanted the impossible. And the extraordinary thing is that without calculating in the least, I got it. I got two big romances, plus a number of small interludes that were in various degrees exciting, amusing and painful, plus a couple of more extended involvements that were none of these and were the hardest of all to get out of. That, I suppose, is what is meant by having been around. It would probably not have been possible anywhere else but in New York. I still vaguely thought, up until quite recently, that I would end up settling down like anybody else. Now I don’t suppose that is very likely. The great romance turned out to be too wonderful. It proved something I wanted to believe without quite supposing I ever would—namely that people are not interchangeable; for certain rare ones there are no substitutes, and rather than the substitute that might be possible one would prefer nothing at all. This is all very much on my mind because I read your letter on the subway on the way back from Grand Central, where I had just put the uninterchangeable young man on the train. This has been going on for quite a while, and I thought I knew all there was to know about farewells on station platforms, and all about being tragic, and all about love; but by this time we had even got past the tragedy and the histrionics. I don’t understand it at all. There is nothing quite like it in any of the books I have read, so it isn’t simply a matter of life trying to be like literature. But it is something that must have no official existence, since officially it would be nothing but a social outrage. The label means nothing only because what lies behind it is so much more real—it’s the whole mystery and tragedy of discovering what it means to reach another human being. Of course the whole thing is a risk; it always was; but so is life, if one is to find out anything about it. There is still the chance that I shall end up being beaten and embittered, though there seems less chance of it the more things go on developing unexpectedly, as they continue to do. From what I have observed I know more about being happy than most people; but the direct corollary is that I also know more about what it is to suffer. And, though I do my best not to offend more conventional people, I am not conventional. So whatever wisdom I may have to offer comes out of having done the wrong things. And there is a good deal to be said for abiding by the conventions, unless one is prepared for all kinds of anguish and even trouble. I really don’t know what to tell anybody, except that thinking and feeling as a separate human being instead of letting society think and feel through one, is hard work, and one cannot expect to be thanked for doing it.

Perhaps you had guessed something like this; I have never known exactly what the accepted version of myself was, if there is such a thing. Anyhow, my standards are severe, if peculiar, and according to them I rate you very highly. It seems to me possible that this spent and invaded feeling which you seem to have is a step forward, even though it may seem like the opposite. Nothing needs to be a step backward; it is simply moving in a new direction, and you can never know in advance what it may lead to. As I said at the beginning, I am not in the least qualified to say whether you ought or ought not to get psychoanalyzed. It is bound to be disagreeable, but so are so many other things.

There were barn swallows in Central Park the other day—beautiful sight. Heaven knows where they came from. Also, there is a scarlet tanager which I have seen on four different occasions, and the warblers are passing through, so I spend my lunch hours in the open these days when it isn’t pouring rain. The horse-chestnuts are in bloom, and precisely on Shakespeare’s birthday I finally succeeded in finding the Shakespeare garden, where there were violets and even one rather spindly little Iowa sort of bluebell, along with bluebells of the English sort, and narcissus, and a mulberry tree from Stratford. The gulls are still making a lot of noise, but I learned from Peterson when he was in the other day the reason why—they’re laughing gulls, which moved in about the time the herring gulls left. We hear them screaming maniacally every afternoon through our open window. “Listen to the laughing gulls,” I remarked to a girl who came down to the library the other day. “What are they laughing at?” she wanted to know. Monica had the answer: “Human stupidity.” And sometimes, watching them cruise over the reservoir, having the time of their lives, I almost believe it. Well, do write, and if you feel like coming to New York for your vacation, or part of it, please come—I can put you up some way, even if it means mending that old camp cot.

The book was lent me by an Italian-American painter whom I met in Paris, and who fined me five hundred francs at the time because I told him I guessed he was a genius. I hadn’t heard from him since, but he turned up one day a few weeks back and now I am buying on the installment plan (the five hundred francs was the first installment, retroactive) a painting I haven’t yet seen because so far as I know it isn’t even started; and meanwhile we are trading books—he has my Toynbee, Volume Three…. Today I bought three pink peonies from a little boy who sells them by the subway; the smell reminds me of wet June days in Iowa, just after school was out. Then I went into a second-hand bookstore and bought the Confessions of St. Augustine in a paperback edition, and a Greek grammar. I have decided to see if I can’t learn enough to be able to read Sophocles in a Loeb parallel edition, the way I have been reading Dante. I’m well into the Purgatorio—and after all, D. H. Lawrence isn’t necessarily the last word. You might, though, look into Sons and Lovers. It’s beautiful, dreadful, and finally infuriating, but probably very great. Oh, and there is also Stendahl—I just finished The Red and the Black—but I advise you to leave him alone. He ain’t healthy.

[ … ] Of course I very much appreciated your letter, on which I won’t comment further since I’m hardly qualified in the circumstances. What moves me to write is a conclusion I have gradually been coming to for years and years and which now strikes me more forcibly than ever—namely, that people are a lot stupider than practically anybody thinks they are. Maybe it would be more precise to say, than I used to think they were. And by stupidity I mean not the inability to think but the refusal to, on the assumption that other people know what they are talking about. The most striking example I can think of is what has happened over the last several months to people’s opinions of Senator McCarthy. I distinctly remember, early in the year, reading one of Rovere’s Letters from Washington in the New Yorker, and shuddering at the statement from this very intelligent reporter that in the minds of many people McC. was “perhaps the most original and daring politician since Franklin Roosevelt.” The implication was that if Rovere himself hadn’t invented the opinion (I almost suspect he did), he at any rate shared it; he sounded very gloomy indeed, away last January. At the time I was still maintaining (not having read enough in the newspapers to be carried away by the despair that seemed to grip everybody well-informed) that McCarthy was a stupid man. I remember saying this to my friends Leona and Phoebe (you met them), and they said oh no, McCarthy was smart—as though stupidity and evident paucity of intellect were two different things entirely, and there was just no hope of triumph over that kind of smartness. Well. A couple of weeks back, in an exceptionally moving as well as delightful Letter from Washington, Rovere described what was going on in the meetings of the Senate committee appointed to consider the move to censure McC. From the tone and the details of the description of McCarthy’s appearance before that committee it was clear that Rovere thought the Senator was stupid, and the implication was very close to being that stupidity and paucity of intellect were the same thing after all. Did Rovere remember that eight or nine months [ago] or earlier he had characterized this odious but stupid man as “perhaps the most original and daring politician since Franklin Roosevelt”? There is no way of knowing, but one is certainly entitled to wonder. A further Well. A few evenings ago Leona was here; the McCarthy issue was already so dead that we mentioned it only in passing, but clearly she no longer thought McCarthy was smart. I didn’t bother to remind her that she had once thought so, so I don’t know whether she remembered that she ever had; but I wonder. And Leona is an extremely intelligent girl, as quick as anybody I know to detect a cant phrase in most quarters; but she reads the papers, which I begin to think is the best way of keeping oneself confused about what is going on in the world. Anyhow, we sat here agreeing that people are stupid, and that we had been stupid ourselves to believe what most of them said most of the time. (While we were agreeing, my mouse came right out into the open, and sat there in the space between the stove and the icebox, looking at us; no doubt it was thinking the same thing, since on the kitchen shelf sat a trap delectably baited with Swiss cheese; as if people thought any self-respecting mouse couldn’t see right through that one!) And yet it isn’t that the world is made up of stupid people. Look at those six Senators who had hardly been heard of, and who were thus supposed to be the easiest thing in the world for McCarthy to make mincemeat of. They were not stupid. On the contrary, they are the first proof we have had for quite a while that there is any intelligence in the Senate, or maybe even in the whole Government. Eisenhower’s trouble isn’t stupidity—it’s fear. And it was his fear that gave everybody else an excuse for being afraid. When one looks back on this year, it seems an extraordinary one—and yet the same kind of demonstration of fear of thinking for oneself has been going on for years: people being so scared of being wrong that they don’t let themselves know when they are right. I suppose there is no cure for the majority: self-interest breeds fear, and fear breeds snobbery and a closed mind, and at that self-interest is probably a solider hub for society to turn on than self-denial, though either one is dangerous without the other. I guess what moves me now is mainly indignation at my own stupidity: that I should have listened for so long to the gospels of a frightened, pious snobbery when all the time I knew better, if I had only had the courage to see with my own eyes! The East is full of snobs and bluffers and advertising men, and the Midwest takes orders from the East, all the time quaking in the boots of an imaginary inferiority. In my now fairly extensive acquaintance the number of people who give any sign of confidence in the brains they were born with is outrageously small. You are one of that small number. Now I am going to sound like an exhorter, though I have no wish to be one (anybody so ill-advised as to attempt to follow in my footsteps would deserve everything that happened to him, and would enjoy none of it; and happily I have no desire to found a cult, though at moments I wonder whether I am not the happiest person in the world)—I am going to stick my neck out and say, as one believer in free inquiry to another, that I think you would make a very good teacher. This is not a piece of advice, it is simply an opinion; it is conceivable that the same statement might be made to me (though I can’t recall that it ever has) but it would not send me back to finish up my master’s degree.

A chickadee just now flew up and perched on the fire escape, announced its identity, and flew away. There have been chickadees in the garden underneath my windows for the last week now. I don’t recall having seen any there before, and this was certainly the first time one has come as close as the fire escape while I was around—though I have seen kinglets, myrtle warblers and thrushes down there after a big night in the migration season. The migration in Central Park has gone somewhat kerflooey because of peculiar weather: after a warm night there never seems to be much doing, and for the last week the nights have been unseasonably, indeed almost disagreeably warm. However, one day I saw young black-throated green warblers by the dozen in one tiny area—perching all over trees and bushes, running all over the ground, chasing grasshoppers and butterflies, and letting me get so close that I could see every detail of their immature plumage. I don’t think they knew the difference between a human being and a tree, though none of them actually used me for a perch—I couldn’t stand still long enough, too much to see. I also got my first good look at a Parula warbler—beautiful little thing—and at a red-breasted nuthatch.

I’ve been too busy writing (I’m on chapter nine now, something like seventy thousands words written and the half-way mark only just coming into sight) to do a great deal of reading, and Greek has had to go entirely by the boards though I expect to get back to it some day. However, I’ve managed a few snippets from the Greek historians as translated by Toynbee (another paperback), a novel of dreadful precocity called Bonjour Tristesse, written by an eighteen-year-old girl and currently a best-seller in France, which I sailed through with no trouble, and the first few poems in the Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire—here I look up absolutely every word I’m not sure of, the only way to read poetry in a foreign language and a good way of increasing one’s vocabulary besides; and, for exercise of a different kind, a couple of books by extreme conservatives. The first was a thing called Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver, published in 1948 by the University of Chicago Press, and it was not only one of the most literate, it was one of the most serious, and thus impressive, books of recent vintage I have read. His contention is that the world went wrong back around the end of the fourteenth century, with William of Occam and the doctrine of nominalism. (To be sure I had this right, I have just consulted Webster, who says “the doctrine that there are no universal essences in reality, and that the mind can frame no single concept or image corresponding to any general term,” and the Concise Oxford, which puts it more succinctly, “doctrine that universals or abstract concepts are mere names.”) From the denial of any transcendent reality, he says, come the evils which riddle our culture: with the kind of detached moderation which only makes them seem more awful, he catalogues them as Fragmentation and Obsession, Egotism in Work and Art, the Great Stereopticon (by which he means the popular press and all the other means by which the vested interests of the age perpetuate selected images of life which they wish to have imitated), and the Spoiled-Child Psychology (“the scientists have given him the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have…. The spoiled child has not been made to see the relationship between effort and reward. He wants things, but he regards payment as an imposition or as an expression of malice by those who withold for it…. He has been given the notion that progress is automatic, and hence he is not prepared to understand impediments; and the right to pursue happiness he has not unnaturally translated into a right to have happiness, like a right to the franchise. If all this had been couched in terms of spiritual insight, the case would be different, but when he is taught that happiness is obtainable in a world limited to surfaces, he is being prepared for that disillusionment and resentment which lay behind the mass psychosis of fascism…. The Stereopticon has so shielded him from sight of the abysses that he conceives the world to be a fairly simple machine, which, with a bit of intelligent tinkering, can be made to go…. But the mysteries are always intruding, so that even the best designed machine has been unable to effect a continuous operation. No less than his ancestors, he finds himself up against toil and trouble. Since this was not nominated in the bond, he suspects evildoers and takes the childish course of blaming individuals for things inseparable from the human condition. The truth is that he has never been brought to see what it is to be a man.”) All of which seems to me very profoundly true, the more because, until the repeated intrusion of the mysteries shook me loose, I was at least halfway committed to the Spoiled-Child Psychology myself. As might be expected, this man is so thorough-going a conservative that he sees nothing good in jazz or non-objective painting, that he believes more than half seriously that women should not smoke or drink, and that he is committed to the institution of private property. And there is no doubt that, simply because he means what he says, this is a much solider book than the one I wrote you about before, The Uses of the Past, which was in itself a much more serious book than most books which attempt to set forth the point of view of liberalism are. I even wondered whether I was turning out to be a conservative, in spite of my private conviction that the institution of private property is a pernicious nuisance; for private convictions are based on private experience, and private experience is not universal. I thought, in short, that what is best for one not being best for all, I perhaps ought to set aside my own romantic individualism as too special to mean anything. This may or may not be so; however, I followed Mr. Weaver with a book by another writer of a similar stripe—but oh, what a different color! This was God and Man at Yale, which I promised Monica I would read after having admitted that what other people said about it was really not sufficient basis to condemn its author on. I read it, striving to keep an open mind, though that was a dull and disagreeable task. Buckley quotes Weaver at one point, but it is clear that he does not understand his own sources of authority, if indeed he has read them. It is a terrible tattle-tale sort of book, by a young man who does not believe in free inquiry, and certainly would not agree with the following statement, also by Weaver: “The virtue of the splendid tradition of chivalry was that it took formal cognizance of the right to existence not only of inferiors but also of enemies. The modern formula of unconditional surrender—used first against nature and then against peoples—impiously puts man in the place of God by usurping unlimited right to dispose of the lives of others. Chivalry was a most practical expression of the basic brotherhood of man. But to have enough imagination to see into other lives and enough piety to realize that their existence is a part of beneficent creation is the very foundation of human community. There appear to be two types of whom this kind of charity is unthinkable: the barbarian who would destroy what is different because it is different, and the neurotic, who always reaches out for control of others, probably because his own integration has been lost. However that may be, the shortsightedness which will not grant substance to other people or other personalities is just that intolerance which finds the different minderwertig…. Not until we have admitted that personality, like nature, has an origin that we cannot account for are we likely to desist from parricide and fratricide.” If this is not liberalism, that is because most liberals are incapable of such open-mindedness. Certainly that Buckley fellow is no liberal; he is no gentleman either, he is a barbarian. If private property has no more graceful defenders than Mr. Buckley, there is no hope for it that I can see. It occurs to me that these days most reactionaries are barbarians and most liberals are neurotics, and neither one of them has any self-confidence. I guess there is no use trying to decide whether I am a liberal or a conservative. I am not quite sure but that I am more nominalist than realist: there may be universals, but all I am sure of is that there are individuals and that each one is unique because it is an individual, though back of it there must be some transcendant reality from which they unfold as the leaves on a tree.

Well, this has gone on long enough. I am not totally preoccupied with the eternal verities—the other day I at least took time off from them long enough to buy a new dress I had happened to see in an ad (black, very chic, very svelte, and the first real dress I’ve bought in years and years) and which I suppose I shall wear when I go to hear the Rosenkavalier, finally, a couple of weeks hence. Also, I sent the New Yorker a remark I overheard at the pier when I went to see Annabel and Arthur off (“He keeps oysters. He puts in a thing so it doesn’t come out pearls, it comes out diamonds”—I swear it, that’s what the man said), and the New Yorker has sent me a check for five dollars. And this seems to be a most satisfactory achievement.

All this talk about the polar ice cap breaking up is premature, I’ve decided. I’d begun to think so yesterday, when I woke up to find it snowing, and at eight o’clock this morning, when the Weather Bureau reported a reading of zero, I was sure of it. There wasn’t a proper amount of heat at work, but it could have been worse so I didn’t bother to go out to lunch; and after lunch I spent an hour or so writing a letter to a little girl in Guttenberg, Iowa, who wrote in asking us to settle an argument about whether or not man was descended from the ape. This is probably going to be my favorite answer-to-a-question for a while. In the first place, it was going to be a letter for Monica, who is a Catholic, to sign, and it also had to be a letter whose contents I myself approved of; in the second place, I had never before so much as looked inside the Origin of Species. Well, if I do say so the finished product wasn’t bad; Monica found nothing in it to quarrel with, and I had looked at the Origin of Species and even quoted a couple of sentences each from the first and last chapters—discovering in the process that Darwin got the idea of writing it during the voyage of the Beagle, spent five years collecting and meditating on facts before setting down an outline of his theory, and fifteen more writing the book itself, and finished it in a spirit of audacity tempered by reverence. Of course the substance of the letter, which ran to two pages, was that we do not know. What the little girl in Guttenberg may make of it is, of course, another matter, but I feel as if I had put in a good day’s work on that letter alone.

Yesterday it snowed all day long. Since I had brought a sandwich I wasn’t going to go out at noon then either, until Monica dared me to because I say I believe in principle in getting a little fresh air in the middle of the day. And of course the principle is absolutely right. I went stamping through the snow into Central Park, watched the gulls riding white-on-white through the snow over the reservoir, heard the noise of water gurgling against the fringes of an open patch in the ice, and thought of Thoreau describing the spring thaw on Walden Pond. One understands perfectly, hiking through the snow on one’s lunch hour, what Thoreau was up to. One also understands why people go to church, though one prefers, oneself, to continue staying away (which is why it is possible for a non-conformist born and bred and confirmed by any amount of experience, to write a letter on the origin of species which a Catholic will sign). The most delightful and startling part of that twenty minutes’ tramp, however, was more specific—it had to do with the color red. In the midst of all the degrees of white and gray and no-color that you get in a snowstorm, here was this little gray tree with a few red berries on it—some kind of hawthorn or holly. It was pretty enough in itself, but it happened that I had just been reading Bob Allen’s flamingo manuscript (for the purpose of straightening out the commas and the thats and whiches, ostensibly) and had just come to the discussion of the difference in intensity of color between the European and the West Indian species—a question I had wondered about and had tentatively supposed, as it turned out Huxley had suggested, must be one of diet (more carotene in West Indian shrimps, or something). It turns out, though, after all the researches into stomach contents, et cetera, that the diet theory doesn’t hold up. Why the European bird should be pale pink and the West Indian one bright scarlet, they simply don’t know. Actually, sober scientific monograph though it is, with no effort to dress it up for lay consumption, the flamingo manuscript is not only fascinating—in all its painstaking accuracy it is fundamentally poetic. This is partly because it is very well-written, mainly because it is the product of an imagination that sees not only facts but meanings and relations, all part of some marvelous whole. The purpose in gathering all these facts was to find out what might be done, if anything, to save the few remaining West Indian flamingo colonies from extinction; and the conclusion is, not much. The problem turns out to be a human almost more than an ornithological one: one reason the flamingos in the Bahamas have been nearly wiped out—aside from things like being buzzed by low-flying planes, which have been known to scare away several thousand incubating birds from their nests—is that since some kind of disease attacked the sponge fisheries off which the natives made their living heretofore, they have been so nearly reduced to starvation that they kill or catch (very difficult, this latter) the birds, which aren’t very good eating, simply to keep alive. It’s sad, but it’s real. Well, you see why I like working for the Audubon Society.

On my way home from work in the snow I paused in front of the second-hand bookshop which opened up a year or so back in a little hole-in-the-wall on Twelfth Street—the one where I bought my Greek grammar, and, more recently, a set of Gibbon for three-fifty, and where one usually gets into a very intense literary discussion every time one wanders in, though I don’t know who these people are at all. I didn’t have it in mind to buy anything, but there was a window display on Henry James—a couple of minor first editions, a couple of pictures, and some lovingly selected quotations about him from Conrad and T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis; and since for years I have regarded Henry James as a sort of private guiding light as well as probably the greatest American novelist, there was nothing to do but drop in and pay my respects (almost the way a properly brought up Catholic will bend the knee before the altar every time he enters a church). There was nobody there but one of the partners, and pretty soon (he is, whoever he is, exceedingly learned, and I had hitherto thought, rather pedantic—but I guess I was wrong) we were talking about historians and I was realizing that after I finish Trevelyan’s History of England (which has sent me straight back to Shakespeare—the two Richards and both parts of Henry IV so far) I have got to read Macaulay and Carlyle—not for the facts, which I never retain in any detail for very long, but for the qualities of their minds. Presently we had got around to James again, and to the inexhaustibility of his quality of mind—every time I reread anything, as I have just reread The Wings of the Dove, I have the feeling that I hadn’t really understood it before, and this seems to be the experience of everybody who cares for him at all. (One of those lovingly selected quotes, I forget from whom, called him the most intelligent man of his generation—a queer kind of superlative, but possibly true.) Then the phone rang—somebody telling the partner to get a move on, dinner was getting cold. I made my apologies, to the partner and the cook, and bolted into my Italian greengrocer’s (easier to say than fruit-and-vegetable store), where there was the usual conversation: Che dice? Fa freddo, no? Lei piace il neve? Quando scendi, si, ma non doppo…. Due pampelmi…. Pampelmi? Si, si, you know, grepfroot … Ah! pampelmi! E che ciu’? (This, I guess, is Sicilian, and what Italian I know is Florentine. Sometimes I wish I had never started all this, or else that I knew the words for a few things besides vegetables; it isn’t conversation, it’s a ritual.)

By the time I got in—the conversation in the bookstore had gone on for at least forty-five minutes, it turned out—I was about ready to call it a day, in fact I was so tired that I read Shakespeare until half-past eleven because I was too lazy to close the book and go to bed.

The night before I had been at a party and hadn’t got to bed until one—a very decorous and really rather dull party, where I didn’t know very many of the people, most of whom were English; and I always forget, such are the manners of well-bred English people when one meets them at such affairs, that it is just their way of self-defense, that really I love the English and that really I consider theirs the only civilized country in the world. The only conversation I had all evening that deserved the name—conversation, as distinguished from chitchat and showing off—turned about the Salinger story in the then current New Yorker, the one about the girl named Franny who had gone in for religious exercises. One of the people who had read it, and who professed a great admiration for Salinger, said he just didn’t get it; several other people considered it an inferior sample, with too much talk and not enough happening; one girl, rather to my surprise—and I think she had understood the story better than anybody else—said, “Yes, of course there are girls who go to pieces like that—and who wouldn’t, with that awful guy!” I hadn’t thought of the guy as awful myself, but simply as the victim of something awful—which is hardly a distinction. Anyhow, it’s a very good story, and a very symptomatic, if frantic one—one always has the feeling about a story by Salinger that he doesn’t understand what is happening very well himself, he is simply compelled to set the thing down, and whenever he sets anything down it is with such helpless anguish and outraged innocence that by the end of it he has you tied up in knots and gasping with indignation too. The interesting thing to me about this Franny story is that it deals with the same thing precisely that Henry James invariably deals with—the search for a pure heart. What makes James a great writer and Salinger a merely touching one is a matter of intelligence, of seeing things whole. Read James sometime. Not now. He makes great demands on your attention, as a great writer should, and there are still people who say he never really dealt with Life.

You see what’s the matter. I’m defending myself against the success of a writer like Salinger, whose appeal consists precisely in that he feels confusion, communicates confusion, and in a sense justifies it; he doesn’t ask you to think, but asks you, on the contrary, to feel along with him how utterly useless it is to think at all. Now I deliver a large chunk of manuscript to my agent and am told, in effect, that it is cold and detached and lacking in feeling—good writing, oh yes, beautiful writing, but he very much doubts that it would sell. One has to fight rather hard for a little while against this unhappy prognosis, knowing that the feeling is there, else there would have been no incentive to write in the first place, and that intelligence and self-control are in effect being condemned as defects, that depth has been written off as mere detachment. Well, enough of this. My friend Peter, the one I bought the painting of, came around the other evening and listened to a couple of chapters. He is as Latin as I am Anglo-Saxon and so touchy that he is likely to take offense at the most innocent statement, such as that per-haps—just perhaps, since I had been reading Shakespeare—the English Renaissance was more wonderful even than the Italian. He got so excited that I had to say immediately that I wasn’t sure I thought so, simply to avoid a pointless argument. But when it comes to art we respect each other, and if he knows the real thing when he sees it, that’s the important satisfaction—or an important one. The main one is still that I know what I am doing, and I have to do it, for quite other than market considerations. In fact, I’m fidgeting now because there have been too many distractions all week to leave any energy for writing, and the weekend was shot to pieces because of a birthday party that didn’t break up until half-past three—to everybody’s astonishment, because it was such a very good party that the entire conception of time had simply evaporated. But such parties are few and far between, and too many of them would leave no energy for anything else.

I haven’t said a word about your letter, which I was very happy to have and which made perfect sense in spite of your professed anxiety about it. As for your not knowing whether you prefer being alone or with other people, I doubt whether anybody ever does except for a few very rare souls who are entirely contemplative and a few others who either can’t stand to be alone a minute or who end up flagellating their sociability by turning hermit (and that last is a rather dubious analysis which I have no business making). So far as I can make out, solitude sharpens and refines one’s taste for company, and just so much company renews the taste for solitude—Toynbee’s theory of withdrawal-and-return, which he got from the Chinese—and the balance between them is something that works itself out as one goes along. The main thing is not to be anxious about it, or if one is anxious to translate the anxiety into something more positive. [ … ]

[ … ] It’s a great relief to know that you’ve stopped seeing the psychiatrist. In my rasher moments, as you know, I’m opposed to the whole business, or anyway I’m likely to say I am. Actually what opinion I have is mainly prejudice, and though prejudices are generally based on something real, if irrational, when one looks at them closely one discovers that one is simply emphasizing one thing at the expense of something else. What bothers me about psychiatry, or one thing that bothers me (aside from the pious quackery that goes on, after all, in any profession) is that it is one more artificial manipulation, like enriched bread, homogenized milk, personalized whiskey bottles … I’ve just thought of a new slogan they might use: Your shirt is sanforized [sic]; are you psychoanalyzed? Of course the analogy with medicine is more reasonable: the introduction of an artificial process in order to prevent a natural one from becoming fatal. One can’t quarrel with the theory. But in nine cases out of ten, I suspect, what medicine is able to do has no essential bearing on the outcome: the course of the disease may be speeded up, the discomfort may be alleviated, and there is a certain security for the patient in the fact that he is being attended to, but that is really all. But if the behavior of viruses and bacilli is complex and full of mysteries, the metabolism of a particular human personality is a thousand times more so; and whether psychotherapy, which so far as I can make out is simply an attempt to reproduce in the laboratory the very complex and mysterious process of change from helpless egotism to responsibility—or in old-fashioned terms, of having one’s soul saved, of being born again—whether psychotherapy has ever actually accomplished anything of the sort, I have my doubts. The really bad cases I suspect are past cure, and the milder ones are probably cured mainly by natural processes. But so long as you have seen for yourself that there are limits to what the artificial process is able to solve, it’s probably a good thing to have found out about. It’s like that thing Emerson said about going to Harvard College, which I am so fond of quoting: it’s a good thing to have gone there, if only to see for oneself how little it amounts to.

As for your not wanting to go into the teaching profession, I can understand it very well, since I think I feel pretty much the same way about it. One doesn’t want to be pushing other people around, with so much pushing-around going on already all over the place. It was the same thing that made me decide I couldn’t go back into the publishing business, or any other business: I didn’t want to go on telling people to buy books I wouldn’t have bought myself. The only redeeming feature about the job I did at the Oxford Press—aside from the people I met, and the fact that it sent me to England, both of which had incalculable effects on the entire course of my life—was that there was a certain latitude for creativeness. I set my own standards for the kind of thing I turned out, but I finally had to admit to myself that however much the result might be admired, there was no proof that those standards had any effect on what I was supposed to be doing, namely to sell more books. All the good taste and originality were just trimming, and they were costing money which, whether the people who paid my salary cared or not, I felt guilty about; so either it was a matter of turning completely cynical or simply pulling up stakes and starting over. Of course I didn’t have this all thought out when I left to go to Europe, or even after I came back; but I see now that this is what it amounted to. And it isn’t that I don’t believe in the publishing business, since anybody who cares about literature as I do has to believe in it; nor do I doubt that there are people in it who care as sincerely, and who have the satisfaction of accomplishing something in cooperation with other people—which is, after all, the only real satisfaction. But I had, as I still have, a horror of turning professional, of having a label stuck on me which sooner or later might have eaten in and become more then skin-deep. It is one my own peculiar difficulties that while on the one hand I don’t want to push other people around, on the other, and even more intensely, I don’t want to do what I’m told unless I myself see a reason for it. And it isn’t just that I can’t conform; there was a time, in fact, when I conformed all too easily, with the result that I was usually conforming to several totally different patterns at once. Most incapacitating. Then there was a period when I made a real effort to pull myself together and to be like all the other middle-class young people I knew. It was fun while it lasted, but it didn’t last very long, because I soon discovered that most of them were even more confused than I was, and that the pattern I thought was there simply didn’t exist. This is why I found The Lonely Crowd so interesting; I’d been through it, and I knew what Riesman was talking about. Still, it was a painful thing to have pulled out of it, since being lonely by oneself, though it has its ultimate rewards, is much more acute than being lonely along with a lot of other people who are too bewildered to know how lonely they actually are. Now, though I have stopped being quite so belligerent about it most of the time, since vague masses and blocs of people don’t scare me any longer, I am a non-conformist through and through and I don’t see how I could have been happy being anything else. Within limits, I do pretty much as I like. For instance, I like being poor, relatively speaking; and it is a great victory not to have been made to find a job where I would simply be pushing other people around for no reason except the money and the prestige attached. There are very few people in this country, I honestly believe, who value money for itself; or for the purely material advantages it can buy, half as much as for the purely ideal effect it has in the eyes of other people. I couldn’t have seen this, I suppose, without having earned enough to buy a few clothes, see a few plays, and go abroad; and I suppose I might feel hampered by my present relative poverty if I didn’t regard it as poverty by choice. But then I am a nonconformist. If one is going to bring up a family it is not so easy. Then, if one’s children are not to grow up puzzled, defensive, perhaps miserable, one has to pay more attention to what other people think—how much attention I really don’t know, and I doubt whether anybody knows.

But I didn’t mean to go on at such length about my own brand of nonconformity, which ought not to be taken as a model even supposing anybody wanted to try. (It’s not an entirely negative attitude, in fact it is positively based on what I owe to quite a number of very different people. I don’t consider myself a rebel, but a small, oddly shaped, not quite dispensable buttress in the architecture of society.) (Second parenthetical note: in the middle of the last sentence my friend Peter called up to say that while sitting in a cafe with some people at two o’clock in the morning he had had a revelation. It was almost exactly the same thing.) What I started out to say was that sooner or later you are going to have to come to a decision about what you want and what you can do without. There is not much point in giving advice, since such decisions are largely unconscious and are generally made, I suspect, long before we know anything about them. This does not mean that I doubt the existence of free will, or the enormous part that chance can play in what becomes of us; I think each of us is born with some essential nature, which is not mechanistically determined, which may be shaped to some degree by outward circumstances and even ruined by them, but is not governed by them altogether; even being ruined, I think, involves a certain choice. I am a fatalist in that I believe we become what we are; but I am also not a fatalist, because I also believe that we are what we become. I suppose this is pretty close to Bergson’s Creative Evolution. An organic interpretation of things makes more sense to me than a purely mechanistic one; but even the physicists, or one school of them, seem to believe now that there is not an absolutely demonstrable connection between cause and effect—which I take to mean that there must be some kind of free will even within the atom. But I keep getting off the track. You are going to have to decide, sooner or later, such things as a) the relative importance of what you think compared with what other people think, or seem to think; b) where you want to live; c) whether you would rather deal mainly with people—as you would in business, teaching, law, medicine, or almost any of the professions—or with things—as you would in engineering, scientific research, or farming. Your particular problem, of course, is that you don’t want to specialize, and while I see no hurry about it unless the thing you want to do more than anything else is to settle down and start raising a family, the fact remains that you will have to specialize eventually. Santayana said, talking about Goethe, that one can’t be anything without being something in particular, though I suppose that the longer one is allowed to postpone specializing, the less chance there is of getting stuck in the wrong niche. In thinking about the things you might do, my first thought was that the ideal recommendation would be for you to go to Europe for several months, just to wander around and get your bearings; but on second thought I am not sure this would solve anything. In my own case it worked because it threw me back on my own critical powers, whose functioning up to then had been obstructed by timidity and a lot of rather mixed-up enthusiasm; whereas your own very exceptional critical faculty doesn’t appear to be obstructed by enthusiasm, but quite the reverse. (I may be entirely wrong about this last statement.) Europe opened a whole new dimension for me: it cured me finally of the belief in material progress which denies reality to the past, with the result that I stopped trying to live entirely in the present, which, as the Red Queen told Alice, is a pretty poor, thin way of doing things if one is inclined to think at all; and since all my ideas seem to come out of concrete, first-hand experience, I don’t see how this could have happened in any other way. I see no reason why you shouldn’t simply float around for a while, if you can find the means and that is what you feel like doing; though if you combined the floating with some private project, such as reading every word somebody like Thoreau or Jane Austen or Milton or Shakespeare ever wrote, or bringing your list of birds past the six hundred mark, I should think it would be more satisfactory, since some of the discipline of specialization would be involved. Until one imposes some limits on one’s freedom one is not really free at all; and there has got to be freedom if existence is to make any sense. [ … ]

The other day during my lunch-hour wanderings in Central Park I saw a chickadee fly down off a limb and eat out of a man’s hand. (I should have asked him whether he was a card-carrying member of the Human Ornithological Perch Society, or H.O.P.S. as it is more generally referred to, but I didn’t think to do it at the time.) Actually, the man was trying to interest a cardinal which happened to be singing from a branch rather higher up, and which would have none of him, when the chickadee flew down. Of course, all the squirrels and even the English sparrows in the immediate vicinity were exceptionally tame, and were all running around every which way, along with a lot of singing grackles and one magnificent mallard duck that was swimming around a little pond; the green-necked bird in the water, the red one in the tree, and all the iridescent blue and purple grackles with their yellow eyes, were as astonishing a sight, if one really saw them, as could be imagined. The laughing gulls are back on the reservoir, and despite a cold rainy day yesterday and really fierce windy one today, the cherry trees along the reservoir should be out before the end of the week. I am also keeping track of things in the Shakespeare Garden, which I had never been able to discover until last year on, by a happy coincidence, Shakespeare’s supposed birthday, the twenty-third of April; by which time the daffodils had finished blooming and the violets and bluebells were out. The daffodils are up out of the ground now, but the last time I looked there was no sign of bloom yet. They have a mulberry tree there which is a scion of another mulberry in Stratford; whether it was there in the sixteenth century or not I don’t know for sure. [ … ]

[ … ] Your letters have a way of arriving with a timing that seems almost fatal now and then, and this latest has been one of those. In fact, there is nobody I would rather have heard from, since it found me in one of those states of exaltation when I would like to communicate, if there were anybody around to whom I could make sense; but since there generally isn’t, all I can do is contain myself. If I can’t get a book published, I sometimes think it may be because I have already lived one—and however much I believe in literature, I still put life first. About ten days ago, just at the moment when it was the thing I wanted most, my young man—I mean the young man; he isn’t really mine, he’s just himself—phoned me from Vancouver, and the next thing I knew here we were again, riding the Staten Island Ferry, sitting in a bar and putting to rest the ghost of some awful thing more fundamental even than a quarrel that had been haunting the place since we last sat there a couple of years ago. I took a day off from work and we hired a car and went to the beach, but otherwise there was no signal to the world at large that for a few days I was leading that absolutely romantic existence that everybody wants but that even I, romantic as I am, had never quite believed could happen. One can’t keep it up for very long at a time, and one wouldn’t want to, I guess, even if one could; there are, after all, other things in the world than being completely, serenely happy in the company of one other person. But so much has gone into this—so many separations, hundreds and even thousands of miles, and so much misery which somehow never quite turned bitter, with moments and even hours when I wondered how I was going to keep from throwing myself out of the window, and simply so much time, during which we have seen each other change from a couple of scared, uncertain children into something like self-respecting adults—so much has gone into it since a particular instant, years ago now, when I had a rather frightened presentiment that something was happening that I couldn’t help, and that I would never be the same again, (of course one can have such a presentiment only if one wants or at least halfway expects it)—so much has happened, I keep trying to say, that having at last discovered how to be happy seems a privilege that is warranted. Otherwise the implicit disapproval of the world at large would get in the way. One has to be very sure of what one wants, and one has to be very fortunate besides, if one is to be happy while breaking all the rules. I don’t know what all this proves; the only advice to be drawn from it seems to be not to break the rules if one can possibly avoid it; but if I had the choice to make over again, I would still have broken the rules. The thing I am most conscious of sacrificing is any possibility of explaining myself to other people. Perhaps it is the inevitable price one pays, whatever the circumstances, for finding the one person with whom one can be completely oneself. The result is that people, consciously or unconsciously, tell me things about themselves; I don’t think they know why they do it, but I know—it’s because they feel safe with me. It’s an enormous compliment, of course, though it still leaves one rather solitary. So here I am confiding in you. I can’t tell you what a comfort it is to be able to do that, since as you know there is nobody else in the family who has any notion—unless, which I think doubtful, they have simply guessed—and it would only worry them if they did. I sometimes have the feeling that it is my career to put together the broken halves of something that seems to have split apart because of growing too fast—if it didn’t sound so presumptuous, I would call that thing our national consciousness: on the one hand the old, rigid, fatalistic sense of evil and damnation, and on the other the reckless and frantic effort to smash it, kill it, get away from it somehow which only ends up in a sense that nothing means anything after all. If I have succeeded after a fashion, and by what I almost think must be the grace of God, in becoming a whole person, maybe that is all I can hope to do. Of course I would still like to carry it over into a book that a few hundred people might read with appreciation, but it begins to appear that in the book I have been working on anyway it simply isn’t going to work. Scribner’s turned it down with the most lukewarm half-praise (“intelligent and sensitive, but needs something to give it urgency”), and now there is a letter from Knopf which says the same thing, though with a more percipient editorial conscience: they wish it had more pace, more of an outward story line; as it stands (and no doubt for the author’s purposes it is right as it stands) it is not likely to engage a sufficient number of readers to encourage them to take it on. I suppose it may be flattering myself somewhat, but I take what solace I can in thinking that this is close to an admission that the fault is less mine than it is all those unengageable readers’. (“Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?” in the words of that sonnet of Shakespeare’s which has been ringing in my ears for almost as long as I can remember. After all, it isn’t enough to be personally happy; one still wants to do something.) If I knew how, I suppose I would give up fiction and try writing theology instead. But nobody pays any attention to that either, unless there is a prescription in it, Norman Vincent Peale fashion. The only prescription I can see right now is to use one’s head, and seeing the pass some people have come to by doing presumably that, I’m not sure but that this is also bad advice at times. [ … ]

This will, I hope, be more in the nature of a reply to your letter, as well as an effort to make amends for that rather egotistical outburst of last week. If I had been born a Catholic, I should be doing penance; in fact, I think at moments I rather wish I had been, but since I wasn’t, I have made do with reading some ten cantos of Dante. Oh, you know how I exaggerate things. But the truth is, I needed taking down a peg. I was getting smug about my own unique and fascinating existence, and when I wrote you—though partly it was to share an experience with a sympathetic auditor—I was showing off a little, I’m afraid, and I was also, more than a little, whistling in the dark. I think I already knew that my protests at being put, slightly drunk, on the subway, were really against the operation of ordinary human laws, from which even my unique and fascinating self is not exempt. Getting what one wanted, even when one pays a pound or two of flesh for it in advance, and particularly when it turned out to be more wonderful than one had dreamed it could be, is something one goes right on paying for, in one way or another. It’s nobody’s fault, and the anguish is the more acute because nobody can be blamed. Things change; one’s self changes; other people change; and none of it can be stopped. I know just what Shelley meant with his O world! O life! O time!—and he was younger than I am when he said it. Fortunately, that wonderful sonnet of Shakespeare has also been echoing in my mind—“O no, it is an ever-fixed mark”—even while I was reminding myself that Paolo and Francesca were placed in hell, and rightly so. Disillusion is one thing, but cynicism is quite another. But here I go getting solemn again. I am not offering any moral precept about romance, and certainly not in the manner of Mr. Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, which spends something like six hundred pages telling a soggy and frowzy tale which arrives at no better conclusion than that none of it should ever have happened. It was almost enough to smother any wish one might have to join the company of the successful novelists. I was sore enough about Bonjour Tristesse, but at least that one was short. No, I still stick to romance; it hurts, but it also sharpens one’s moral wits, if one has any to begin with.

Actually, there has been a lot else to think about besides one’s very private affairs. Just now I had a call from a girl whom I took an immediate liking to, the first and only time I saw her, several weeks ago. I don’t know very many girls any more; I get fidgety in their company, and have trouble finding anything to talk about. But this girl, Mary [Russel], is an artist; she is just back from three years abroad, and she comes from Nebraska. She is a friend of my friend Peter’s [Peter Marcasiano, the painter whom Amy met in Paris the previous year], from the time they were at the Art Students’ League together, and since he had read me some of her letters from Baghdad and Florence and Amsterdam and such places, I had already a little the feeling that I knew her. Anyhow, just after she came back he brought her around for dinner, and it was an eminently satisfactory occasion. I made a soufflé which, I have to confess, was better than I thought a soufflé could be, and after the strawberry tarts and espresso coffee we sat around talking and talking until two o’clock in the morning, mostly about painting but about a good deal, at least in snatches, besides. And it wasn’t just intellectual talk, than which there is nothing more unsatisfactory. Such evenings don’t happen very often. Anyhow, I’m having lunch with Mary tomorrow. Peter tells me she is usually rather shy and silent, and I only hope my chatter won’t scare her back into it again. [ … ]

I re-read Wuthering Heights the other day. Marvelous. For certain moods anyhow. And there is the Brancusi sculpture show, to which I have been five times, so now when I go I have to chat like a habitué with the guard. He told me it was much the most successful show the Guggenheim Museum has yet had—you remember, we went there during lunch when you were last here; there was a Cézanne then, I forget what else. I wandered in the first time by accident, not having any particular interest in Brancusi, and discovered by degrees that I was being astonished as I never had been by anything modern, or any sculpture, before. I have recommended the show to several people, and they all seem to have had the same experience. It’s hard to describe precisely what its effect is, or how it happens; but when I came out of it the first time I felt as if I could fly. A great deal of smoothing and simplifying and polishing has gone into it; there are often several versions, differing only slightly, of the same thing; and the materials, which have been treated with such care, are delicious—polished brass, alabaster, yellow marble; and then there are some things made out of old pieces of wood that are in some ways the most marvelous of all. And yet this is the first real museum show Brancusi has ever had; for years, it seems, he has been working away in Paris, bitter at being neglected. He must be close to seventy by now. [ … ]

It all started out with having to come down with a cold in the head just in time to collapse miserably into bed on Friday night. There I stayed all day Saturday. I got myself up yesterday, only to discover that my brains were like tallow, and that there was nothing to be done but to go on reading. So by today, with the cold nearly gone except for two queer hollow patches somewhere behind the cheekbones, I was simply gorged and sated with literature. Really, books can be quite tiresome. Besides, my kitchen tap is dripping again, and the apartment next door is inhabited by a vivacious creature who the minute she comes in turns on the radio and starts calling people up on the telephone, and her voice is just penetrating enough so that the intonations all come through the wall but the words remain behind and so there is the eternal mystery of whether it is always the same person or one of fifty different people at the end of the wire, and what on earth is so merrily, or so indignantly (for one can’t be sure either of the intonations themselves) being talked about. Of course, it is also possible that there is somebody else there whose voice doesn’t penetrate the walls, or that she is an actress rehearsing, or that she is simply mad and talking to herself. One could go similarly mad with such speculations. So, remembering hungrily the cowslips and bluebells growing under medlar trees at the Cloisters, and likewise the snowdrops blowing in a March wind under an apple tree, I thought this morning that the thing for me to do would be to get on the subway and go up there. Then I thought of the chilly tapestry corridors one has to pass through before one reaches the gardens, and it hardly seemed worth while. Then I thought of taking along Book One of The Faerie Queene for the subway, to get me into a proper mood to look at the tapestries too, and decided I must go after all. Then I remembered that this was Monday, and the Cloisters would be closed. It was all exceedingly frustrating. I went out anyhow, forgetting my library card though I had it in mind to see if I could get the first volume of the letters of Katherine Mansfield, having finished the second, and discovered that anyhow the library was closed so I could not even see if the first volume was on the shelves. The only other real mission I had was to buy some buttons to sew on a little yellow dress, originally intended for Joe Goodman’s daughter Meredith, which I have ended up making for her little sister Alison since Meredith has gotten too big meanwhile for the amount of material there was (I’m not even sure, in fact, that Alison won’t have outgrown it by the time it is delivered, at this rate). I found these in a dime store, along with a lot of demented parakeets and forced azaleas in pots too small for them and floorwalkers shrieking at sassy salesgirls, and sassy salesgirls talking back to impatient customers, and squalling children being shouted at by their mothers, and shriveled old women shuffling along in somebody else’s shoes. I also went into a female haberdashery, since I remembered that I needed some stockings, and there was a Negress six feet tall, with her hair dyed red, behind the counter. A sale was going on, and the place was full of pawing women, for any one of whom, I suppose, hairdressers, foundation garments, and eyebrow tweezers are indispensable, whether or not the rent is paid or their souls are their own or in a hockshop somewhere. I also went into a bookstore, not because I really wanted to, and bought a paperbound book of thirty translated Spanish poems for seventy-five cents, because this seemed a venture calling for support, and for ninety-five cents another paperback of Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog for I’m not quite sure what reason, since now that he is dead it is a little late to be lending one’s support, and they collected a fairly tidy sum, I understand, to take care of his widow and three children. I have never read any of his poetry. Once I went to hear him read it; he was already quite rumpled and roly-poly and not at all romantic-looking any more, with red wine spilled down the front of his seersucker jacket, and he said he was sick of everybody’s poetry including his own, so what he read was prose—and that is what P.O.T.A. etc. turns out to be, more of same. But oh, how he read it! He had the true voice of the bard. A girl I met not long afterward had been there, and she and her girl-friend got up and walked out in indignation, as though he had meant to shock them personally. I forget now just what it was that made them so indignant, but the prose anyway is all very much in the same key, in fact it is almost all on the same note, a rather monotonously cavorting exuberance, with human figures, very much alive but about the size of sand-fleas hopping through the waves along the shore. According to the jacket of this book I just bought, he didn’t believe in New York but he loved Third Avenue. Poor man, it may be just as well that he died when he did; the bars are still there, but now that they have taken the El down you can’t tell it from any other avenue. He used to hang out at a place called the White Horse, where I used to go, but I never saw him there, and I still remember the week he died, and the appropriately dismal and alcoholic surroundings in which I heard the news. The reason I don’t believe in New York right now, though—and how furious it makes me to have to admit that I don’t believe in it, even as a place for me—is the flowers. Not being able to see snowdrops under an apple or cowslips under a medlar tree, I walked past a flower market, hoping to find a little slip of something I might take home as a substitute. But it was the same thing all over again, and that gets worse every season: hybridized monsters such as never belonged in nature, raised under glass and fed on hormones. Not only are they determined to produce a blue carnation if it kills them, just because there is no such thing in nature and thus is certain to be hideous; but even the natural colors have become quite unnatural. Daffodils and mimosas are only technically distinguishable, otherwise they are the same—mealy and bloated, and approximately the hue of dried egg yolk. Freesias and cyclamens have had all the scent inflated out of them, and violets are an enormous, flat, meaningless purple. There is no sense of fitness, no art, no respect for life. Really, I do feel ready to blow my top. I suppose when things start sprouting in the open air I’ll get over it, and that the trouble, aside from a cold in the head and a three-day weekend wasted, is simply impatience to have the winter end. [ … ]