Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt

New paragraph. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Having written my letter, I signed, sealed and stamped it and deposited it in a corner mail-box to forestall any temptation to backslide, procrastinate and possibly change my mind. Then I took the subway to Overlook Terrace, to pay that visit to the Cloisters which I wrote you, I think, about being frustrated from paying earlier in the week. I forget if you have ever been there. If not, the next time you come to New York a visit is absolutely required. It’s a beautiful place, both in its contents and in its location. On a sunny afternoon, as this one was, its location high on a bluff above the Hudson, facing the Palisades, is bathed in light, both direct and reflected. There are ramparts where you can walk in the open, and inside there are gardens where, just as I had hoped, some hothouse daffodils and crocuses and narcissus were already in bloom—the Cloisters proper. Or rather, not proper—a true cloister does not exist in any aggregate, but is simply an enclosed courtyard, quite generally, if not always, open at its center to the elements, and attached to a church or a monastery—a place not for formal worship, but simply for walking and meditation. Rockefeller money has made a museum of various elements of a number of cloisters, most of them from different regions in France, and there are odd pieces of painting, sculpture, stained glass, metalwork, enamel, and so on, dating to the middle ages. These, and above all tapestries. The really glorious treasure is a roomful of these which have to do with the mythological hunt for the unicorn. I have always loved them—everybody does—but on that afternoon I felt that I had discovered them for the first time. Before then I had been inclined to regard tapestry, even so marvelous a specimen of it, as a minor art, a sort of inferior brand of painting. But on that afternoon, while I wandered in and out, visually speaking, among the little wild strawberries, the bluebells and daisies and periwinkles and dozens of other flowers (so faithfully rendered that nearly all have been botanically identified) which are woven into the background of each of the scenes of the hunt, for the very reason that it was a composite work rather than that of a single individual—and not only composite but anonymous; not only the weavers, but the designer and even the place of origin are unknown, and even for whom it was commissioned is a matter of conjecture—I found it more satisfactory than painting. I don’t know that I was intellectually conscious of any reason for this preference; I don’t know that I was intellectually conscious of anything except thorough enjoyment. The place was full of people, most of whom had cameras and who appeared to have come primarily for the purpose of taking snapshots of each other; even so, I didn’t mind them in the least. When it came time for the regular Sunday program of transcribed medieval music, I found myself a stone, instead of a chair, to sit on, and watched them file in. And after a while, when the first Kyrie started, I stopped watching the people and simply concentrated on listening to the music and watching the sunlight come in at a thirteenth-century window. The Kyrie, which of course is a cry for mercy, and the sun on the stone, a purely physical phenomenon, seemed while I listened to have some affinity, almost to be one and the same thing. After a while, when the music changed to something else, I was mildly aware that while this was going on I had—perhaps for no more than an instant, but there is no measuring this kind of experience—entirely forgotten my own existence. It is the sort of thing that has happened to me a few times in my life, but always before in moments of great excitement and with a kind of incredulity surrounding it like an iron ring. This time there was no iron ring, no excitement, no surprise even, but a serenity so complete that I hardly thought about it just then, I simply took it for granted. Possibly this is what is supposed to take place at baptism—but if baptism it was, it wasn’t of water, but of light. By this time it was late afternoon, and with the reflection from the river so bright that you could barely look at it directly, the whole hilltop, the whole world was fairly brimming with radiance. I walked around for a while, looked at the people, and walked to the subway, rather tired, and yet rested too, and pleased with everything.

New paragraph. That evening my friend Peter called, full of things he wanted to talk about, and I told him to come by. You almost met him once; on that evening when we went to the concert in Washington Square, and I had no idea he was around, he spotted us walking, too far away to be hailed. Perhaps it was just as well, at the time. Since our extremely odd first meeting in Paris, when we sat in cafes, engaged in a sort of double monologue, a contest to see who could out-talk the other, both more interested in our own thoughts than in the other’s, and since his sudden reappearance in New York, when—both of us somewhat older and surer of ourselves, though not so very sure at that—we resumed the double monologue, we have gradually arrived, through a number of rather tense and quarrelsome vicissitudes, at something approaching that living equilibrium that is perfect friendship. So long as a relationship is alive I suppose new tensions must arise and be resolved, but it appears that since the new year began—significantly, he came by for a while on New Year’s Day—the last lingering traces of distrust have disappeared. Not being involved in any romantic sense, we have been able to share each other’s fears and frustrations, and, more and more, each other’s enthusiasms; but behind all this, until very recently, there still lurked a suspicion on my part that he might be nothing more, after all, than a somewhat promiscuous, irresponsible and pretentious, working-class-Italian ne’er-do-well (God!), and on his, I rather suspect, that I was nothing more than a priggishly literary, pretentious, white-collar-middle-class American fraud (wow!) Just before Christmas, in fact, we arrived at a kind of deadlock. I forget exactly the terms of the argument, but I went on secretly fuming at him, even though I appeared to have won, until he did something so characteristic and so perfect that all the fuming simply went out of me: I had been reading the letters of Keats, which sent me back to the poetry; I remarked that I had never read all of Endymion, and couldn’t, because I didn’t own the complete poems. A few days later he appeared with a Poetical Works of Keats, dated 1865, which he had picked up in a bookstall in Florence. It had cost him only a few lire, and it was certainly no sacrifice for him to give it away, but it was his own purely spontaneous gesture; and besides, between the leaves were some pressed flowers—a piece of red may and a magnolia petal he had picked up in Lerici, and also a violet, some sprigs of lilac, and what appears to have been a carnation, which has left its ghost printed on the pages, and dating to when and where nobody, now, will ever know…. Well. Peter was full, that evening, of a strange book about Quattrocento stone-carving which I had lent him, though I haven’t yet read it. It came from the girl in England who owned half of the antique taxi in which I went south through France, and to make connections with whom I had come back to Paris when I met Peter (how the connections and interconnections do multiply! I hadn’t thought of that one until just now); she has since married the owner of the other half of the taxi, though the taxi itself was long since sold, and they now have a Bugatti (Italian racing model) and a baby, and ever since I saw the book in her apartment in London and was fascinated by it she had been trying to get around to send me a copy of it. And the odd thing is that though I haven’t actually read the book myself, I seem already to know it better than if I had, from hearing Peter talk about it. He knows it now practically by heart, and something from it must have been behind, or in, my feeling about the affinity between the music of the Kyrie and the light on the stone. Do you begin to see what I mean about weavers and tapestry? I think I only begin to see it myself. Anyhow, we both talked, that evening, and we both listened, though my main enthusiasm was still for the tapestries and his for Quattrocento stone carving; and I read him some of the letters of Katherine Mansfield, with which I had for a while been almost excruciatingly involved, simply because they are so beautiful, and were both so carried away by her description of a nightmare journey to Marseilles, a sea-storm on the Riviera, and the morning when she first coughed up blood, read Keats, and knew she was going to die, that we came out of it blinking, not quite sure where we were. The fear of death is what more than anything else gives her letters their beauty, and I had found myself almost envying the intensity even of her fear—though the truth is that I have felt something like it at times, and it is not a thing one ought to envy. But it was as though, that afternoon, any possibility of envy like this had been obliterated. It was only by degrees that I began to be able to describe to myself the experience which was not a temporary extinction of personality, but the opposite: for the first time in my life, without even knowing that I knew it, I had been without fear. This is the negative way of stating it. The positive statement has ramifications which are still unfolding, and for all I know they will go on unfolding forever. I did not know that this was what had happened until I began to describe my afternoon in the journal which I have been keeping (Peter’s suggestion) faithfully but spasmodically since New Year’s. Before I had finished the entry it interested me so much that I decided to try to make a short story out of it, purely for the exercise. And then something happened which I could absolutely never have predicted: I have not altogether recovered yet from the surprise, though I suppose I shall get used to it in time. Quite as though they had a will of their own, the sentences broke in a way that was not my usual style at all. Rather frightened, I must admit, for the moment, I let them break. The next thing I knew, they had begun to reach out for rhymes. This frightened me almost more, until I discovered that finding a rhyme could be almost as natural a process as the resolution of a dominant chord: I didn’t have to look for them, they simply came. Now I have not even so much as thought of wanting to write poetry since I was about sixteen and produced the usual sixteen-year-old effusions. I associated writing in verse with adolescence; there was a time, even, when I stopped reading poetry, though that was terminated a good while back. So here I am, writing a long poem. It is already something like five hundred lines, and though the end appears to be in sight, I am not sure. When it is finished—as I now feel it absolutely must be by Easter at the latest—you shall see it, if you want to. What I am to do with it otherwise, I haven’t the faintest idea. What it appears to be, anyhow, is a kind of natural history of belief—religious belief, which is after all the only real kind. Because, having discovered what it was to be without fear, I also discovered that everything, in a way that is complex but entire and simple, made sense.

At which point, you will not be surprised to learn (if indeed you have not long ago done likewise) I did fall by the wayside. It is now Monday, and there has intervened an absolute mountain of snow. It snowed all day yesterday and all day today, and the way it leans, banked a foot deep, against the window-panes, is straight out of Emily Brontë Clampitt misquotes slightly]:

Cold in the earth! the snow piled deep above thee,

Far, far removed in the cold of the dreary grave,

My only love, have I forgot to love thee …

I have finished my poem. I finished it early last evening—there will be lines that need tidying up here and there, but otherwise it is complete—flat on my back, because I was simply too done in to go on sitting up. There was something quite uncanny about winding it up in the middle of a driving snowstorm, since it is a poem about light and the end of winter, and here was the season, quite unaccountably and quite unpredicted, reversing itself; it seemed like a conscious and deliberate challenge to what the thing I was doing had to say. Of course this is pure subjectivity, but it is still uncanny, the more so since the storm appears to have been purely local—people were skiing in bright sunlight in the Catskills. And at about four a.m. I was awakened—as any number of other people seem to have been (no, I exaggerate—I heard of two, and I make three)—by what must have been something like the crack of doom. Because there was thunder along with this blizzard. We had the first installment of it on Friday night (respite on Saturday for the St. Patrick’s Day parade), and in the middle of the snow there came a really blinding flash (I know of three people besides me who saw that), which I halfway believed, in the split second before thunder ensued, and the return of common sense, might be the beginning of the end of the world. You must really be sure now that I have gone mad. I am just as sure that I haven’t. I went into this production a quasi-reactionary, quasi-obscurantist, quasi-orthodox half-believer, and I have emerged a heterodox total believer in the unity of being, in grace, in ultimate human progress, and the absolute freedom of the will. This last was the most surprising discovery—I didn’t really know what I thought until I found it coming out this way:

But let light speak:

Is, and was ever, free:

Free at the verge of time, free in the weak,

Primeval, floating cell,

For whom the urge to be

Came not as a command, but as a call.

Light, not whose ordination

But whose slow touch slowly awoke

Life, from the dim, the slumbering, the scarcely dreaming sea—

Meanwhile, I am absolutely tuckered out, and to make matters still more tuckering, I am absolutely seething with ideas. The revision of the novel is only one of them. I would like to go to bed for a week, and read about nothing but geology—I have just begun devouring a textbook on the subject whole, in between re-reading, mainly on the subway, the Purgatorio—but I doubt if I actually would, even if it could be managed. Simply living is much too exciting. In the midst of all this—scribbling out lines on little scraps of paper on the subway and during my lunch hour, and even in between answering letters at work—I have been seeing all kinds of people, talking about everything under the sun, hearing the first song sparrow and spotting the first robin and tracking a whick-whick-whicking cardinal to its perch in the top of a tree, discovering spaghetti with green sauce (fresh basil leaves simmered in butter) at an honest-to-goodness workingman’s trattoria south of Washington Square, cooking what I must say was a marvelous meal for Peter and his friend Mary (my friend now too, in remarkably short order—the girl who lived in Baghdad, about whom I think I wrote you). What a time we had! The pièce de resistance was a rare roast beef, and we opened a thirty-year-old Burgundy that had, as it happened, just begun to turn to sugar—but it was the kind of calculated risk that only adds a fillip to the occasion by being a fiasco—and we made collages (little framed, pasted-up pictures, you know) out of some pressed leaves and flowers that I had brought back, tenderly preserved between the pages of guidebooks, from Austria and the south of England, and we talked and talked and talked until one o’clock in the morning, and I read them as far as I had got with the then work in progress (with one exception, a gloomy young friend from of old, who tempered and improved it by challenging it with his own uneasy unbelief, nobody else even knows about it so far). But I can’t go on like this. I have to go to bed and get ten hours’ sleep, and you have already been detained overtime, if you have got this far.

I do wish you would tell me, though, what on earth is going on at that church at Des Moines. If it is really as odious a piece of power-jockeying as Daddy quite unwittingly makes it sound, I should think he would be well out of it. It begins to sound as though none, absolutely none, of these people cared for what the truth about anything might be, but only for holding onto the driver’s seat. I suppose I am much too impatient with internecine squabbles, but what good does any of it do anybody? They talk about the mote and the beam, but do any of them actually go off and sit in a corner and let the still small voice have its say? Are any of them really honest with themselves? I feel somehow that Daddy may be letting himself be used. And of course I can’t say so—I can’t seem to say anything to him lately that I really mean, in fact. The trouble is probably that my feelings have not got over being hurt—not my feelings really, but my tiresome ego, which I really ought to know better than, but which I don’t always seem quite able to manage—my ego has not got over being given that book by Milton Mayer for Christmas. I cannot be charitable toward the fellow. He is a charlatan, a show-off, a journalist who dresses up a perfectly voracious, scared, mixed-up need to think well of himself in the costume of—oh, I don’t know what: liberalism, humanitarianism, it’s hard to make out what kind of motley he even thinks it is. He is dishonest. He is so dishonest that he even has to confess to his readers on the other side of the Atlantic that he did not confess to those Germans he went to pry into the psychoses of that he was a Jew, simply because somebody advised him not to—and thinks this makes him honest. And yet, for some inscrutable reason, Daddy approves of him. And I can’t tell him in so many words what I really think, though I am convinced that it is true, because it would wound his ego. In fact, I already have, by simply hinting at disapproval. Of course it’s complicated still further by my own absolute perverseness in sending him that naughty I, Claudius book for Christmas. Poor man, he read it. He can’t for the life of him see why I sent it to him. I know why, now that the damage is done: it’s the same thing on both sides, we’re still trying to make each other over. You see, apprehending the unity of being doesn’t solve one’s problems, it only makes one see how many problems there are. Ought one to wound the ego of one’s own parent, of whom one is deeply fond and to whom one is endlessly beholden, in the interest of impartiality? Terrible dilemma. I begin to sound as though I wanted you to function as the conciliating intermediary—a burden that should be imposed only on somebody who has no problems, so please don’t think I expect you to attempt any such thing. Actually, I just want to unburden myself concerning a subject I don’t know how to handle. Maybe, if I stop being impatient, it will come to me, all in good time. Because another part of this queer revelation I seem to have had is that haste, impatience to accomplish anything, is simply the product of fear, and fear is the root of every evil—what I call the primordial sin.

But now this absolutely must not go on any longer. Do please write sometime, whether what I have heaved in your direction like a ton of bricks is assimilable or not. It’s a great comfort, as I have said before, to have a brother one can heave things in the direction of. You know, I have to talk—it helps me to think (a joke Eliot put into a dialogue of critics once, but it happens to be perfectly true). I have probably been tedious, but I have a practically unshakable confidence that if so I shall be forgiven. Is it spring out there yet? I have pussy-willows on my mantel now, by the way, which helps.

[ … ] I have just been through one of the strangest weeks in my life, one which I could never have predicted and which nevertheless seems to have been foreshadowed by a thing I discovered several years back, and which I suppose has never quite been out of my mind since. This was a footnote to the first volume of Toynbee, which in turn was taken from what I believe is only a footnote to William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience; anyhow, it came from a letter which a woman, a personal friend of James’s, had written describing her sensations during an operation for which she had not been given a sufficient anesthetic. I can’t quote it, but it was a very beautiful, almost Biblical image of intense pain, which became visual, a kind of wheel of fire. I was struck by it, as Toynbee evidently also had been, and when shortly afterward I found myself involved in a minor but extremely uncomfortable sort of betrayal, the passage seemed to catch fire in my own mind, and I thought something like this: My vocation is to stand just a little more than one is supposed to stand. And that seems to be what has happened ever since. Joined with what turns out to be the Categorical imperative, it is what might be called a philosophy. Of course one can’t speak of it really, and I don’t know that I have ever tried to in so many words. But I assure you it has no connection whatever with what is called a Martyr Complex—a thing I despise. It is only the corollary of very great and increasing happiness, and I do not regard myself as martyred but as privileged, to an extent I could not have imagined in advance.

There is probably some connection between all this and a feeling I have had more and more distinctly—odd as it may sound from a professed believer in science and ultimate human progress—that one day I might be going to join a church. I’m not sure what church, or whether the feeling is anything more than a temporary manifestation, but I have noticed a faint wish to observe the fasts and a kind of thirst for liturgy, which is no doubt partly just from being around people like Monica, who is a devout Roman Catholic, and the Goodmans, who are equally devout Anglo-Catholics; one respects their observances, after a while, to the point where one would like to share them. Last Sunday afternoon I went to St. Luke’s, the little Anglican church a few blocks south of me, where Joe’s mass—specially composed for them—was being sung, along with one of Mozart. I was in rather too exultant a mood, the lingering effect of having finished the poem apparently, to listen in the proper spirit to this mass of Joe’s, which is a very tense, difficult, I would say almost painful composition; I have listened more worshipfully to recorded masses, such as the Mozart Requiem. In short, I was a little, and quite unjustifiably, puffed up with my own accomplishments. But since that afternoon I have been to church five times, not counting dropping into a couple where no services were going on, yesterday. I don’t yet know exactly what all this means, if anything. It might not have happened at all if I had not found myself involved in a terrible and totally unexpected new argument with Peter. Just when I thought an equilibrium had been reached! One never knows, that’s all.

This happened on Monday evening. It wasn’t an ordinary argument, and neither of us lost our tempers; I simply found myself sitting perfectly still for fifteen minutes, not even consciously angry, while he did the same. It is impossible to say what I then thought it was about; the truth seems to be that each one of us had somehow become an absolutely implacable threat to the other. I didn’t even realize how furious I was until the next day, and by the end of it I was so worn out from sheer rage that I went to bed at eight o’clock and was still tired out the next morning—tired, and no less in a rage. That was when I started going to church, hoping that might straighten me out. It didn’t: all I could see was how tyrannical, irresponsible and utterly egotistical Peter was, and how furious I was that he couldn’t see it too. It is like living in hell—I’ve been through states like this before, for totally different reasons, which I can only describe as being in a state of mortal sin. The thing that makes it so terrible is one’s own helplessness—one is in a trap with the door shut, apparently from the outside. By Thursday, after seeming to diminish, it had only got worse, and though I don’t make a practice of discussing my own affairs with Monica, I tried to tell her about it, partly to explain why I had been so cross all week. She has a very low opinion of artists—having been married to an intellectual with analogous characteristics, she feels that they are incapable of really experiencing anything, and that they prey upon those whose experience is genuine, and so, though her sympathy was of the most intelligent kind (really, she is one of the most intelligent, as well as generous, people I have ever known), she was hardly the one to defend Peter against my rage. And I couldn’t possibly explain to her that it has been very necessary for me to believe in art, and in artists whatever their shortcomings, and that this, and not any personal attachment, was what made my state of mind so terrible. I didn’t care, for myself, whether I ever saw him again; his attention is nothing my self-esteem requires; and moreover I knew I probably would see, or hear from, him very shortly, and the problem of what I would do or say was there, staring me in the face. After work that afternoon, in a pouring rain, I went with Monica to a very beautiful, very crowded church; she lent me her little French prayerbook, more to amuse me than anything else, but even in French the prayers seemed to help—plus the stained glass, plus the liturgy, though we were behind a column and couldn’t see anything that was happening directly in front of the altar. I left just as the communion was beginning, and on my way home, on the subway, the solution came to me. The next time I heard from him I would simply say that before I saw him I wanted him to do one thing for me—I wanted him to go into a Catholic church and say a good Catholic prayer for my state of mortal sin. It came to me as a perfectly honest way out of a predicament, though in no time it had come to seem almost diabolically clever—Peter being one of those pagan Latin Catholics who say they are Catholic, and are, but who haven’t been to confession in years and years and don’t seem to feel in the least guilty about it. I gloated a little, but still I felt better. The next day, Good Friday, I went twice to church, as well as to the dentist, but I was in a much more cheerful mood. That is, until Peter called.

This was at nine o’clock or so, just as I was about to go to bed. I had been reading George Fox’s Journal, trying to find my bearings from a different quarter, and planned to go on reading it until I went to sleep. But that call changed everything. If I was still furious with him, my fury was nothing to his with me. It was that slow kind of thing that seeps out like pitch, a little at a time, so that at first I didn’t even realize what it was. The conversation was rather long; we both acknowledged being in a rage all week, but this in no way cleared the air; it only made everything ten times worse; until finally, when I told him what I wanted him to do, he answered in a voice that was as near pure hate as anything I ever had directed against me, that he wouldn’t—my state of mortal sin wasn’t his problem. Nothing was his problem, it seemed, not even his own sins. He was a humanist. He wasn’t interested in—At which point I said goodbye, and hung up. For a few minutes after that I was as near going literally out of my mind as has ever happened. I felt as if I had just engaged in a battle with the devil himself, and that the devil had won. I, who was determined to believe that evil is not real, but simply, in the fashion of St. Thomas and Dante, that it was good gone astray, had come to the point where evil seemed not only real, but a positive force. I knew that weakness had made him talk in this way, and still this weakness had beaten me. But I also realized that I was no longer angry; there was simply a kind of vacuum where the anger had been, in which I seemed to feel nothing at all. Then I fell asleep.

When I woke up again, sometime after midnight, my state of mind had changed in a curious way. I was puzzled by the paradox of having benefited in so many ways from knowing Peter, of being surrounded by all kinds of mementoes of our friendship, none of which I had any urge to destroy. There was a book which I would have to send back, and I began composing a letter to go along with it, in which I would acknowledge that there was no mending this breach, but which would also be a kind of requiem for an association which, it now appeared, must inevitably have ended in one way or another, and a statement of indebtedness for past favors. If this was only a partial victory, at least it wasn’t a defeat—I was out of my state of mortal sin. This seemed to me to be an almost miraculous achievement. And while I was thinking this, the phone rang. It was Peter. He had been to church; he had said a prayer; he wasn’t mad any more. I could hardly believe my ears, and I still wasn’t sure, until I saw him today, that either of us had got through the battle unscathed. But apparently we have, until another one comes along—except we may be both chastened enough to avoid any further head-on collisions. Is this not strange? One might argue that the argument, since we got past it, meant nothing; on the contrary, it meant everything. But now I have to stop. Time for bed. I’ll add a postscript later.

I’m not sure how much sense any of this may make. Possibly it is the kind of thing one ought to set down in a journal and let it go at that—but somehow I don’t feel inclined to talk to myself about such matters any more. I am no less certain that there is a very real significance behind what took the outward shape of a private quarrel and reconciliation; and the best single word I can find for that significance is Grace. Where does the strength to overcome one’s hate and anger come from? One can say that it comes from within, but ultimately this is not true at all; alone one can do nothing; ultimately it must come from without. If there had been no Roman Catholic church in the background, to which one could refer, not for moral authority—moral authority is not enough—but as a kind of reservoir of the strength and patience one did not possess alone—if there had been no such reservoir to draw upon when one’s own resources gave out, then I should have lost this particular struggle with Peter and, more important, with myself, and something would have died or, at the very least, gone into a kind of paralyzed cold storage. It is because of experiences like this—there have been several, though none of them quite so violent or concentrated before—that I have begun to find myself able to believe that a phenomenon such as St. Francis receiving the stigmata, could have occurred, and that the Resurrection itself could have occurred, entirely within the framework of natural law; and since it is possible to believe that such things could occur, the next step is surely to believe that they did occur. I have never read Aquinas, but I imagine this is pretty much what he says. The thing that gets in the way is simply an insufficient faith—not so much on the part of the honest doubters, who after all serve truth—but insufficient faith on the part of the self-styled faithful. I think this is what is wrong with organized religion generally, both Catholic and Protestant, but I suspect it is worse in the latter. The world is full of organizers wanting to hurry a lot of converts into the fold, apparently in order to convince themselves that what they say is what they believe. If they really believed, they would not require any phalanx of cohorts and allies, because they would no longer have any reason to fear an enemy. I am quite sure that my own long, proud, stubborn resistance to anything bearing the name of religion can be explained as an unconscious determination not to be, me, accessory to what looked from the outside like a total fraud. George Fox was bothered by the same thing—the difference being that he was a mystic from his childhood on up; and though he was perhaps a little too quick to judge the sincerity of absolutely everybody else, at bottom he was right—outward form alone can never create an inward certainty, though as a reforming radical he could not recognize that there can be great virtue and great satisfaction in the observance of outward forms also.

Maybe this is all part of the same thing, but from what you say about Beth, for the first time in a long while I begin to think there may be hope for her recovery. I didn’t quite dare to write this to the folks, but this gradual kind of improvement somehow sounds as if it might be the real thing.

The weather has gone foggy and nondescript again, and foghorns are wailing on the river. However, this noon I was cheered to hear a song sparrow, gracing a particular spot between Fifth Avenue and the reservoir where I have listened for it from February to August for the last two or three years. Whether it was the same bird this time I’m not quite sure; the song was not the one I remembered, but of course most of these birds have several songs; possibly it may be a descendant re-establishing claim to an ancestral freehold. Last spring for a while I listened to it or its predecessor, as the case may be, asserting itself against a rival newcomer, a few trees down the cinder path, but it is my impression that the original squatter won out. Now I must really end this. Keep the poem for the time being anyway; I might ask for the copy back sometime, but no hurry.

[ … ] Since I last wrote you I have finished a critical essay on Henry James and started another poem—in strict terza rima, the scheme used in the Divine Comedy and I must say a very difficult one—which I’m not sure how soon I may be able to finish. Sometime, I hope. I have also seen a blue-gray gnatcatcher (first one for me) and three scarlet tanagers. There are scarlet tanagers all over, for some reason to me entirely inexplicable. I wish I had kept track of all the phone calls we have had from people who have seen one or several, imagined it to be some rare and exotic species, and have called up to find out what it was. Oh, the calls—they are odder and odder, and more and more delightful, or perhaps it is only my own state of mind. Also, I might mention that Eugene Kinkead, who wrote that profile on the microbiologist for the New Yorker, was in a couple of times this last week to do research for some kind of article on birds around Manhattan. I didn’t ask just what—one feels one oughtn’t, as though this were one of the mysteries—but I did find a few things for him which he seemed not to have known about previously, and was most politely thanked. He is a rather beefy, red-faced, blue-eyed fellow with a somewhat worried look, which I rather imagine all New Yorker writers have. (I have found out, if you care for such incidental intelligence, that Our Man Stanley is a fiction, but that one of their research staff, one Stanley Eichelbaum by name, who calls us up occasionally about this or that, is introduced as Our Man Stanley at parties, furthermore that, having a doctorate in French from Columbia and feeling accordingly somewhat frustrated, he doesn’t like it.) I have been on one bird-watching picnic in Central Park with this very organized girl I have gotten to know, and who does about three times as much as most people, in spite of (perhaps also because of) having had polio and wearing a brace. Most extraordinary. She has been to England, where she saw a most astonishing amount, and is now arranging herself for a trip to Sweden one of these years—a part of the arranging being a course in Swedish, in which she seems to have done so well that the instructor, himself a Swede, has invited her to collaborate with him on a beginning textbook in the subject. She takes extraordinarily good color photographs and one of her projects has been a day-by-day canvass of the birds in a small area of the park near where she lives—where, most astonishingly, she saw what must have been the same blue-gray gnatcatcher that I saw in an entirely different part of the park—at least we both think so, since both times it was in the company of a magnolia warbler. We didn’t do too badly in our count, though the warbler season was only just beginning.

The truth is, I can’t now remember all the things I had it in mind one time or another to tell you about. One of them was that I found your name in the April issue of Audubon Field Notes, which carries the report of the Christmas Bird Count. Things have been happening so fast, and even for me so surprisingly, that details come and go without being entirely kept track of. Today, anyhow, two things of particular significance have occurred—I finished reading the Paradiso, and I took the first definite step toward becoming a member of the Anglican communion, that is, I spoke to the Vicar at St. Luke’s about an appointment with somebody on the staff some time this week. Actually, I feel as though I were already a member, but I suppose it isn’t as simple as that. In fact it isn’t simple at all, in one sense. Whatever has been happening to me, as far as I can understand it, is from a psychological point of view no doubt extremely complex, but that there is a psychological point of view bothers me very little, if at all. I believe I have really begun to cease to feel complicated. Since Easter I have been to St. Luke’s every Sunday, and in that time it may be that I have changed even more than I am myself entirely aware. What I do know is that I have never been happier, and that I look forward to Sunday morning, and in particular to that point in the mass (the Agnus Dei) at which, if I understand it properly, the Crucifixion takes place all over again. I suppose it may be still that I dwell too much on the Crucifixion—after all, I haven’t yet taken communion, which is the real culmination of the service. The only instruction I have had is from reading Dante, from listening to any number of recorded masses or parts thereof, and from human experience—my own, I mean, and some of that seems (I mean this in all humility) to have involved something more than human. You have heard from me quite a bit about the experiences I especially have in mind. The quarrel with Peter was no doubt the immediately crucial one. It appears now (I hope I may be wrong, but I have no confidence any more that this may be so) that the aftermath of that quarrel and reconciliation is a sad one. I’m not at all sure I shall see Peter again, and the saddest part of it is that I hardly care any more. This may sound callous, though I don’t think it is so much that as it is simply exhaustion and disillusion. It was very important for me to believe in him so long as I didn’t believe in something that transcended either one of us. And if it wasn’t altogether wrong to do so, it wasn’t altogether right either—it was a kind of heresy, a substitution of a part for the whole. The truth is that Peter hates the poem, after having been enthusiastic about it—which wouldn’t matter if it weren’t that he hates it for the implications, which I didn’t myself see entirely until after it was finished. And since he hates the poem for its implications, it follows that he must hate me. Of course the boundary between hatred and affection in people who have been very close is a very tenuous one always, and there comes a point at which both parties must work very hard to keep from trying to destroy each other. Both parties—I see now that one can rarely if ever do it alone. I believe I can honestly say that I did my best; I cared as long as I could, and then I simply had to stop caring. Of course he may change yet—what I have to guard against now is assuming that he is done for because there was nothing more I could do, and becoming merely self-righteous about it. It may seem odd that with this kind of problem before me I should still be able to speak of my own happiness—it may even sound sinful. I don’t believe it really is. To try to do anything more would be, I think, to try to impose my own will on another person who is, in fact, free, though a central part of our quarrel is that I believe in freedom and he doesn’t—mainly, so far as I can make out, because he doesn’t wish to. However, the end of this may be not yet—I see more and more how little one is able to predict about anybody.

This conversion of mine—you see I have no doubt that it is a conversion in the radical meaning of the word—has its somewhat comic aspect, I shall hasten to say before anybody else does. Aside from Peter, and aside from what I have written you about the preliminary events, I hadn’t mentioned it to anybody until a week ago, when I saw Annabel and Arthur for the first time since their return from three months in South Africa and Europe. And there all of a sudden at the dinner table I found myself telling Arthur that I thought I was going to join the Church of England. I could do it without sounding too silly since Arthur is Church of England himself, and has moreover a brother who is very High Church indeed. But Annabel was quite astonished, and the Australian who was sitting next to me and whom I had never seen before in my life was simply bewildered. There ensued a conversation, full of interruptings and confusion, about the differences between the Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Anglican creed and the Church of Rome—a matter which used to puzzle me but in which at the moment I am not even very much interested, since it is what all the creeds have in common, rather than their differences, that really matters. I hope it won’t shock you very much if I say that I seem to regard myself as at least a proto-Catholic. It isn’t an intellectual matter at all. I supposed at first that I would find the articles of the Creed, as it is given in the prayerbook and as it is sung by both choir and congregation, an intellectual stumbling-block; but without being able to explain anything, I find myself joining in when it is sung, by a wish that also seems to be a necessity. I think I was sure of this a couple of weeks back, when the sermon—I listen to every word of the sermon, which to be sure is only a not very long part of a long service—had to do with precisely what it was that made one a member of the church, and not simply a person who believed, who followed the Christian teachings and who hoped for better things. The difference, the priest said, was prayer. Without prayer—and incidentally one is on one’s knees for a large part of the service in the Anglican church—one who behaved well would become merely self-righteous, and one who believed and hoped for better things merely a utopian. And the entire liturgy, he went on to say, is prayer—the one prayer, really, since it embraces in one community undertaking all individual prayers. I have come to realize that for a good deal of my life I have been praying, or at least trying to pray, without quite knowing it. I suppose that the patient on the psychiatrist’s couch, if he is being helped at all, is trying to pray. It isn’t words at all, but an attitude of mind, of waiting and hoping. I never could stand hearing people pray aloud because it always sounded insincere and self-righteous—not that it necessarily was, I suppose. But if I have come very near to regarding all of protestantism as a heresy, it is because most protestant churches seem to be more interested in persuading more people that what they say is so than in anything else. It is as though the only way they could prove that what they say is so was by getting converts. In other words, protestantism seems more a religion of despair, of fear and gloom, than of joy and thanksgiving. A good deal of this impression may be subjective, I imagine, dating as it does to a time when I regarded religion as an interference with my own most egotistical intentions. But the fact remains that I have found what I must have been looking for for a very long time in the liturgy and nowhere else. It is one of the mysteries that somehow joy should come out of pain and suffering. I do hope I’m not being tiresome about this. You must know that I mean every word of it. I don’t do things by halves, it seems—which is presumably why all this has been so long in coming.

It is quite clear to me that it has come to a large extent by way of that long love-affair which you have heard a little bit about. Nobody can know very much about me who doesn’t know about that—and since for most people it would have to be explained, and I can’t explain it even to myself altogether, I suppose nobody ever will know very much, or at least not very many people. There is no doubt some sin in being so secretive so far as the rest of the world is concerned, but curiously enough—curious at least from the protestant point of view—the sin isn’t hypocrisy. It is pride. I don’t know yet how this is finally to be dealt with, or solved, if it ever is. Because what I thought might be true—that what has been happening was what the psychologists call, with just a faint sneer, Sublimation—(not that I minded the sneer in the least, you understand)—isn’t the whole explanation. This last week I have seen the young man again. Of course I told him what had been on my mind, and moreover he believed me—because it has always been that we both told the truth and there was always this mysterious trust of each other, in spite of seeing each other only two or three times a year, very briefly, and in spite (on my side at least) of having been almost unendurably hurt. Almost, but not quite. There was always, even at the very worst, something that kept what I felt from turning into bitterness. The strange and quite unexpected thing was that these latest developments didn’t come between us, as they seem to have between Peter and me—on the contrary, they brought us closer than ever before. I don’t know quite where what is wrong about this leaves off and what is right begins. Graham Greene, I believe, is supposed to have had something to say on the subject, but I don’t like Graham Greene and refuse to read him. All I know is that love is the only name I can give to the unseen unifying principle in which by a kind of necessity I seem to have come to believe, and that if it hadn’t been for this particular love, which though I am quite sure now that it isn’t mainly carnal and never was, is even now, or at any rate expresses itself as, partly that—if it hadn’t been for this particular love I find it impossible to imagine that I should ever have found what lay beyond it. Again, I hope you’ll forgive me if I am being tiresome. I feel somehow that this needs to be put on record, though I’m not exactly sure just why. [ … ]

Since I got back I have re-read The Scarlet Letter (as well as Young Goodman Brown), and found it an extraordinarily satisfactory accomplishment. It is the sort of thing one can hardly quarrel with or raise objections to, so complete and self-contained a thing it is, and so wonderfully compressed. I tried to read it with particular attention to the style, but even that is hard to isolate and so to characterize at all. It has been suggested that its sociable tone comes not from genuine sociability but simply from the fact that it is one half of a divided soul talking to the other half. The question of whom the author is addressing, and in what spirit, is anyway an interesting one to consider. Probably most writers these days do talk to themselves—usually in an almost violently hostile tone. Now take St. Augustine, whose Confessions I am reading—his whole account is a sort of open letter to the Creator. When I tried reading the Confessions a couple of years back, I found these continual apostrophizings distracting and hysterical, and finally gave up after a chapter or two. But the truth is, the sum total of what he had to say could be addressed nowhere else, without some falseness getting in the way. A great sinner had become a saint, and his attitude toward the sum total of reality had become, one can only suppose, that of continual and uninterrupted prayer. I find it one of the most engrossing documents I have ever read. He seems absolutely contemporary, partly because he is dealing with eternal matters, also because he was probably as acute an analytical psychologist as ever lived—an analytical psychologist with the advantage of knowing what Eternity consisted of.

I have had another visit with Father Morralee, and I am still astonished that there should have been such people around in this day and age (and I am ready to believe now that there must be many like him) without my ever suspecting it. He appeared this time in khaki shorts and Norfolk jacket, which did startle me a little—he was just back from a day in the country, and hadn’t had time to change—the very picture of an English sporting gentleman, full of wry good humor. But inside half an hour he had gone from the subject of transubstantiation, on which I asked to have the Anglican position cleared up, into some of the mysteries. Without his explicitly saying so, or my asking, it became clear, really luminous, that he is certain of personal immortality. In the Sursum corda (Lift up your hearts, etc.), and the Sanctus that follows, and which he evidently regards as the climax of the mass, he said that on certain occasions there is what he calls a tremendous pressure—the actual presence of spirits gone before. I listened both astonished and enthralled, really too humbled to ask, Do I believe this? But the answer seems to be that I must—not because such a proposition can be proved, but neither simply because (as Tertullian is supposed to have said) it is impossible. The truth is, I was beginning to act, long before I was aware of believing anything of the sort, as though it might be so. I had enough experiences of a telepathic sort, which I was never able to assign to mere coincidence, to pave the way for a more radical extension of consciousness. I do not think anything of the sort will ever be proved in a laboratory, for all of Mr. J. B. Rhyne, and I devoutly hope not. The laboratory is not life. No matter how conscientious an effort is made to reproduce all the analogous conditions, the effort will fail. There is something about the purely scientific attitude which precludes its dealing with anything more than the attributes (the “accidents” of St. Thomas Aquinas) of reality. It seems to me curious how the timid materialist superstitions should have persisted in the prevailing attitude of an age which lives under the hypothesis that matter and energy are inseparable, that matter, indeed, is energy, and that this depends more desperately than ever in history upon what it has never seen, touched, tasted, or experienced except as a report of a completely incredible explosion. The difficulty seems to be that the world has no faith in an unknowable power which it has nevertheless had to accept, and so it sits shivering while the human aspect of this same formula of matter-equated-with-energy twists itself in all sorts of contortions of hate and envy and despair which are only, as Dante observed, defects of love—and so, since it thinks things are hopeless, it makes them so. Not that it really does altogether. I have also just read a brief history of the church, from which it seems clear to me that in many ways things are still better than they ever were, even in this miserable civilization. [ … ]

It was very good to have all the scattered pieces of information pulled together in a single narrative that puts them into proportion and relation with each other. I feel more strongly than ever how right T.S. Eliot was to emphasize Tradition, as a thing that at the same time remains, continually growing and being added to while remaining unchanged in substance. It seems the only way I could feel that I belonged to anything was to reach back into the past, really to become immersed in it. There seemed really no other way of coming to be a part of the present. So I don’t feel in the least estranged or cut off from my immediate Quaker inheritance. I see the church now as all one, including all the denominational offshoots. Each of them no doubt served and still serves a purpose, and what they have in common is one and the same thing, and that is what really counts.

I am to be confirmed as soon as an appointment with the Bishop can be arranged. Meanwhile, I can also say that what I didn’t think could happen has happened, quite naturally—Peter and I have made peace. He came to see me just after I got back, for the first time in a couple of months, and we were perfectly candid with each other without any necessity for quarreling. We can’t be friends any more on the old pagan terms, but at least I have stopped feeling indignant with him and he has stopped trying to battle with the Holy Spirit; so far as I am concerned, the Holy Spirit has won and he will let it be so. I do hope I don’t sound sanctimonious about this—it really is the truth. [ … ]

[ … ] Well, I have got this far without saying a word about religion—at least I don’t think I have, and if I haven’t it must be some kind of a record. From now on I fear you won’t hear much about anything else. Since I last wrote you I have finally been confirmed; Father Morralee has gone back to England and has been missed by me, I dare say, more than by anybody else, though he is one of those people whom everybody loves; and I have been paid a pastoral call by Father Moore, the young curate whose sermons I have admired so much and whom I despaired of ever telling so, and whom I now regard as an old friend. Between him and the nuns, who used to scare me rather but with whom I am now on the most sociable terms, I feel very much looked after, even without Father Morralee around, and it is a kind of being looked after that is not in the least intrusive or even, in any ordinary sense, very personal. The very satisfactory thing about St. Luke’s is being able to come and go without saying a word to anybody, or even having anybody notice that you happen to be there; it’s understood that whoever is there, is there for other reasons than sociability. However, since I have been helping the sisters in the sacristy on Saturdays, I now know the ins and outs of getting the chalice and vestments and altar candles ready for the Sunday services, and the other day I finally found out what their names were. They flattered me very much one week by asking me if I could be at the church at half-past six one weekday morning—too complicated to explain, but what it amounted to was substituting for one of them so that another one could make a retreat. That was before the time changed back, and when my alarm went off at six it was pitch dark. I was so afraid of sleeping through it that of course I woke up a couple of times before it did. It was barely beginning to be light when I slipped into the church, and the whole thing was as much an adventure as if it had been Paris in the middle ages. But of course that is true of every one of the services—all the centuries are your next-door neighbors when you are in the presence of eternity. I have now discovered the evening service which is said every day at six p.m., which is very English, and which is meditative instead of being dramatic like the morning mass. There is a psalm for each day, and two passages from the Bible are read—one from the Old Testament, one from the New. I now realize that, exactly as with poetry, the way to develop a feeling for the Bible is not to read it but to hear it read. For some reason which probably wouldn’t be too difficult to explain psychologically, the ear is closer than the eye to direct intuition—another way of saying why even the churches that eschew gorgeous vestments and throw up their hands in horror at the idea of incense, do not dispense entirely with music. In this the Conservative Quakers are at least consistent, and it is a consistency I respect the more I think of it, though I doubt that it is conducive to success with any but a very small minority. From my observations I would say that the forte of Quakerism has become largely secular—which is fine for those who would rather be busy doing things, but which leaves no outlet for the less matter-of-fact side of human nature except a kind of emotional restlessness which can do all kinds of mischief. [ … ]

It is now Wednesday, and a good deal of the foregoing must sound pretty stale by this time. I didn’t like so many things popping one after the other, but it wasn’t until Monday morning’s news from Hungary that I felt really shaken—even though I seemed to have known all along that this was exactly what would happen. I cast my vote for [Adlai] Stevenson—though without any very profound conviction—and otherwise followed the editorial recommendations of the New York Times (in fact I bought three papers on Monday, and discovered that the Times is the only paper around that has anything in it), with the result that there was a good deal of hopping back and forth across party lines on my ballot. It still makes me nervous to vote, and I never quite believe that I haven’t done something to keep my vote from counting at all; but at the same time the idea of all these people standing solemnly in line waiting to exercise their franchise, and of being one of them, I find quite thrilling—and always did, even in my most pessimistic days. Monica rented a television set especially to be able to watch the post-election vigil, and stayed up until three a.m.; I went to bed at midnight, with no excitement whatever, though today I felt as worn out as though I had been through it all myself. I did talk to Annabel, whom you may remember meeting at the U.N., during the evening. She and her husband both still work there, and have recently moved into an apartment practically next door. She said that since things started to happen there has been a steady stream of people working until all hours and then dropping in to sleep on the floor; of course at the U.N. nobody talks or thinks of anything else these days. But I could hardly feel more in it if I were there myself. If I ever thought I had withdrawn from the world—the world, that is, where headlines happen—the result seems to have been that I now find myself inextricably interconnected. There is a woman who helped us half-days in the library, up until August, when she left because her husband had taken a professorship at the university in Jerusalem. She is Russian-Roumanian by birth, educated in Paris, Jewish by tradition though (she confessed to me) without any beliefs; her husband, who is very orthodox, does the praying. As a result she is what I would call the unhappiest sort of materialist; the only thing she really seemed to care about was clothes; and the state of her waistline—and flowers. This last I could almost say was her redemption. While Monica was away I got to know her quite well; it took some effort, since she was rather a touchy sort, but in an odd way I became quite fond of her, and promised to write to her. I was just about to get around to it when all this started to happen, and now it seems really imperative, if I can think just what to say, to let her know that the connection is there. Having known her, it is easier to sympathize with the curious mixture of stubbornness and scrupulosity that makes Israel behave in the however tiresome way it has these last few days. And on the other hand there is Mary Russel, my friend Peter’s friend (I ran into him on the street last night, by the way, as I knew I was bound to do sooner or later, and was relieved to discover how fond I still am of him in spite of all the hard thoughts I have had about him). Mary is the girl who lived in Baghdad; her parents are still there, and of course I thought of her immediately when the news came from the Middle East. I went by the Metropolitan Museum, where she works part time, to see how she was; she wasn’t alarmed about her parents just yet, but she was obviously quite worked up and declared that she didn’t care what the British and French did, she was pro-Arab. She also turned out to be almost violently pro-Stevenson; in short—being an artist and an emotional girl generally, though it doesn’t always show, and with a real feeling for the Middle East which it isn’t fair to discount just because one doesn’t have it oneself—she was very much involved, and in a state. And then there is Monica, who said rather softly, while everybody was talking bitterly about how impossibly the British and the French had behaved, that though we absolutely had to stay out, after all the French built the Suez Canal, and she couldn’t help sympathizing. I had just got off the bus, that rainy morning last week, with some mention of the English umbrella I had left at home, and the Irish-American woman from the Audubon staff who happened to be on it had exploded, “Oh, don’t speak of the English this morning!” I said it was all a dreadful, dreadful shame; but of course I was thinking of the people in England who in different ways, more or less personal, are dearer to me than almost anybody else. In view of all this, one neither needs nor can afford, as an individual and a U.S. citizen, to have a distinct and separate point of view. It occurs to me that this is the one country left in the world where national self-interest, as a thing in itself, simply has no meaning. Maybe that is our hope. Monica—though she talks like what used to be labeled an isolationist—seems to think so. I never saw an adopted citizen who loved this country the way she does; and it may be that she has a better idea of what it is like than the people who were born here.

There is one more thing to be said, and I was reminding myself of it when I realized that there was no possibility of hiding from the headlines any more, whether I read the papers or not. Whatever ingenious and frightful new forms of violence the human race may dare to use, it cannot do anything more unthinkable than it has already done, not quite two thousand years ago, when once and for all time it attempted no less than to kill God. The attempt was a success; and like all destructive successes it failed. The attempts go on being made, in the form of materialism, nationalism, and plain ordinary selfishness, but there is no possibility now that any of them can succeed. There is something more real than matter, and anybody who has ever cared about anything—which must include everybody—knows that it is so, whatever he may think he thinks to the contrary; and the louder and more insistent the arguments against any such supreme reality, the less weight they actually carry. The only way to make sense out of anything is to know that it is only a part of something that contains it all, and from which the only separation is self-destruction. But there is no point in explaining the self-explanatory. Besides, if I am to get up and go to mass in the morning it is time for bed. If I sound pontifical, please excuse it—and do write soon.

[ … ] It was also nice to hear about the weather. I love weather, as I have said before, and can never hear enough about what it is doing. So long as the news doesn’t arrive in the form of a complaint anyhow, as yours certainly didn’t. Oh dear, you’ve gone and seen another sparrow hawk, and I, who would like to get within nodding distance of one almost as much as I would of a screech owl on the branch of an evergreen, that answers when one calls to it, have never so much as been sure of seeing one from a distance. I have this predilection for owls—related, I expect, to my ancient one for cats—and it keeps on growing. I don’t know quite what it is about them. I no longer regard owls as horrid hooting things or as mopers that do to the moon complain (leave it to the English poets of the graveyard-and-belfry school to put such notions into one’s literary head) but rather as the Greeks must have—birds of Athena, with those great knowing luminous orbs, alert and at the same time so soft and so mutedly gorgeous in coloring. Now, I have really gone off the deep end on the subject, this time. Part of this stems from having seen Don Eckelberry, the artist for the Pough guides and various other things, who does owls possibly better then any other bird—having seen Eckelberry act like an owl. He can also act a boat-billed heron, or a groove-billed ani, or practically anything avian. Which of course explains why his work is so pixyishly satisfactory. He comes around the Audubon Society quite often, and immediately all work is set aside and the occasion becomes a picnic. As an artist he is better than Peterson (Peterson himself wistfully says so) but since he is of my own generation I’ve never regarded him with the same kind of awe and so it is still more delightful to realize what a gift he has and to see it developing on the spot, as it were. By the way, they’ve discovered a nineteen-year-old named Fenwick Lansdowne, up in Victoria, British Columbia, who goes around on crutches and paints with his left hand because of an attack of polio when he was a baby, and who has been painting pictures of birds, and selling them to the neighbors, since he was about six; and already he is being compared with Audubon. Even from reproductions, his stuff is astonishing, and completely original; so I dare say they may be right about him. Also, the other day somebody presented the Audubon Society with an original Audubon Elephant Folio—a beautiful set, each of the four volumes so heavy that it takes two men to lift it, so that for several days it was just sitting there on the library table—insured for twenty-five thousand dollars, to be sure, but all the same I rather trembled until we finally got it moved to a somewhat more sequestered spot. They are beautiful things, those plates—every time I look I am overwhelmed all over again. Also, while I am on such subjects, I should mention that Bob Allen, the one and only Robert P., and still the pick of all the bird people, has a book out which will not get the attention it deserves, I suppose—On the Trail of Vanishing Birds is the title. Look at it if you have a chance. You met him, I think. They don’t come more genuine, and he is the chief reward, I do believe, in being connected with the Audubon Society. [ … ]

But I have a thousand things to communicate, and all this last just got in on the spur of [the] moment, without prior intention. I started to talk about the weather. I meant to go on to say that spring here has been late, as I gather it has been out there too (after all, they do tell me a thing or two)—the cherry trees all of ten days behind schedule, and rain, rain, rain, occasionally mixed with and turning into snow. However, after all this chill and dank tail-end of more westerly blizzards and tornadoes, it would seem that spring has arrived, just in time for Easter. According to my own private time-table it arrived, in fact, yesterday, Good Friday, sometime between twelve and three. At least, when I emerged from three long florid hours (most of them spent standing) of the Passion According to St. Matthew as amplified by Bach, interspersed with some equally florid and far less commendable preaching, I found it for the first time this year too warm for a coat; the sun had come out; the cherry-trees along the Central Park reservoir were in full bloom, the Norway maples likewise; robins were singing all along the block, and laughing gulls laughing their heads off from a blue sky—and for sheer joy, mind you, not in derision. Add the fact that one is slightly light-headed from fasting—or one’s slightly modified version thereof—and that Holy Week has been a week of drama such as one never imagined being both witness of and participant in, and the impression of a sudden emergence from winter into spring, given any encouragement at all, is no doubt explained. I have to set it down before I forget what it was like, and though it is the kind of thing that might seem more fittingly set down in a journal, I neither can nor, I am pretty sure, should keep a journal. One of the things I have realized while Lent was in progress was that I enjoy solitude so much that it becomes something very like self-indulgence for that very reason. I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to be lonely, and this somehow makes it a responsibility to be sociable. Which, again, is an aside. Do bear with me if you can. You have heard about Holy Week, that fantastically black and furious week I spent a year ago, and so now there is nothing for it but that you should hear the sequel. How intelligible it may be I have no idea, but I have to set it down. I hardly supposed I was still capable of such astonishment, but it all goes to prove that one never knows.

Actually, one has to go back a little and to speak of Lent in general. I can tell you, as it would not be quite proper to tell anybody else, that in addition to giving up sweets I resolved to go to mass every morning, and managed to do it. Even the priests don’t know—or anyway I trust they don’t—since there are four of them conducting the services, one at a time on weekdays; and if they did know they wouldn’t be particularly impressed. It’s a thing people do, and that’s about all. It meant going to bed rather earlier than usual, and though it wasn’t really hard there was a point when I debated with myself about whether I should give it up. That was when I discovered that a cold I thought I had licked had taken its revenge in the form of post-nasal drip (very fashionable these days) and low blood pressure, and though I woke up feeling fine I could hardly drag myself home at the end of the day, and moreover wasn’t getting things done out of sheer lassitude. Well, I was prescribed some reeking vitamin capsules, and they turned the trick just in time. (I would not ask any doctor’s advice about getting up an hour earlier and going half a dozen blocks and back before breakfast, out of sheer stubbornness, I suppose.) And I learned something, whether or not there was any point in this particular form of discipline. (As for giving up sweets, I didn’t lose weight, I gained; and as for no meat on Wednesday or Friday, I ate more meat than I ever did before in between; and even when I was tired I was never freer from aches and pains of any description. So much for the hazard to one’s health.) What I learned had to do with the letter and the spirit of discipline. If one does things only when one feels like it, even though the thing itself is commendable, there is nothing especially commendable in doing it. Yet it is often argued, and I have argued myself, that only spontaneous acts are genuine. I don’t think so any more. On the other hand, if one does a thing, finishes something one started, mechanically, because it is required by somebody or something else (and thus is regarded as a means to an end), or because one has decided to require it of oneself (and thus it comes to be regarded not as a means but as an end), one has done nothing particularly commendable either. Somewhere in between incoherently spontaneous behavior—which is bound to be irresponsible—and absolute inflexible rigor—which is at least apt to be just as irresponsible, and more dangerously so, since it makes no response to change, and there is always change—there is, of all things, the Golden Mean. One begins to see how much there is in Aristotle, after all, and why people like St. Thomas Aquinas referred back to him again and again. I have been reading Aquinas again these past few days, and what impressed me this time was the flexible instrument he made of his logic. I suppose logic is nothing more, really, than a way of expressing relations, and of arranging ideas in some kind of perspective so they come out undistorted and whole. But I am getting sidetracked again. What I am trying to say does have some bearing, I think, on theological matters in general, and on why denominations, and congregations, and individuals, go stale, or ossify, or simply fall to pieces. One must commit oneself, but if even within the commitment one does not go on growing, one is in a worse state than before—like that terrifying parable of the one devil that was driven out and the seven devils that stepped in and took its place. This is the thing that makes evangelical protestantism so dangerous, and I dare say that the same thing threatens the church of Rome; the one banks everything on a single individual act of commitment, and the other banks everything on a sort of machine for making people good. But I must not get sidetracked. At this rate it will be Holy Week a year from now before I get around to the one just past.

Anyhow, up until Palm Sunday I was so doggedly carrying out discipline that I had practically forgotten what I was supposedly doing it for. It’s true that on Sundays there was a penitential procession to remind one, and two Sundays ago presto! all the crucifixes and other images veiled in purple. And then on Palm Sunday one suddenly woke up. There were palms for everybody, and then there was a procession—the procession, really. It went up to the altar, doubled back a couple of times, disappeared through a side door; a long wait; and then thump! thump! thump! three loud knocks at the back. Everybody looks around; the verger opens up; in they come, singing what is known as the Vexilla regis, the most magnificent of all the processional hymns. It would look silly, of course, if it weren’t for the procession with palms into Jerusalem whose nineteen-hundred-and-somethingth anniversary was being commemorated; and of course if one doesn’t believe that there was any such procession there is no reason to pay any attention to Palm Sunday at all. Well, that was one surprise; but there was more to come. After the Kyrie, as at every high mass, came the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel for the day. Ordinarily both are sung in what I think would be called plainchant; all on one note except for a change of pitch at the end of a quotation or a question. This time, when the procession of acolytes with candles and censers moved down from the altar into the choir for the gospel (a little ritual all in itself) I was astonished to realize that something different was going on: instead of one priest reading the account of the passion from St. Matthew, all three of them were taking part—the senior priest as narrator, one of the two curates reading the words of Pilate, Judas, and the other disciples, and the other the few words of Christ—and these few were sung softly, almost expressionlessly, which is really the only way such words ought to be rendered, and makes the drama all but unbearable. And when the choir joined in with the voices of the mob, a chill went down my spine. After that, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion could only be an anti-climax. The thing about it is, you can listen to the whole thing, and be quite enraptured by all the gorgeous airs and choruses, particularly when they are sung well, without paying the least attention to what they are about; and no matter how well the Christus is sung, that part is all but smothered under the interpolations. That is the baroque for you; it takes up a lot of space, it commands a lot of attention, but it has puffed itself hollow. And meanwhile, the Palm Sunday gospel has gone on quietly being sung, year after year, by priests who are not professional musicians and so, happily, they do not collect an audience for the wrong reasons. Well, maybe on Easter they do. And not only the grandest choral music, of course, is a more or less direct offshoot of the liturgy, but also the entire theater. Everybody knows this but nobody remembers it, until a thing like being in church on Palm Sunday shocks him into realizing for the first time how far the prodigal hath strayed without the faintest recollection whose offspring it is. I tell you, things are all, all, all mixed up and out of proportion for having forgotten their origin and been brought up imagining that they made themselves. Literally. Self-made men. People who change their names. Children ashamed of their parents. But I didn’t mean to begin a sermon. I must get on.

Well, after Palm Sunday there were the gospels for Monday and Tuesday, which were just about as long. Among other things, I learned more about the Bible in this last week, just from listening and following in the prayerbook, than in my whole career up to now. Things begin to swallow you up; the whole world seems to have gone liturgical. Even the weather cooperates. It rains and rains. On Wednesday night there was a service for the whole of Trinity Parish, of which St. Luke’s is just one of anyway half a dozen chapels, downtown at St. Paul’s, the oldest church on Manhattan. Of course I got lost, though I have been past the place any number of times on pagan weekend prowls, and arrived late, but that didn’t prevent the service from having its effect. If Lent in general is penitential, that was nothing to what one has become by the time that hour was over. Inside, St. Paul’s is full of antique crystal chandeliers that tremble every time a subway train rumbles underneath (why they didn’t all shatter long ago I can’t imagine); outside, there is a churchyard full of slate headstones fallen sideways. Everything is dripping; people carry umbrellas; one’s feet are slightly damp. And yet there is no gloom; the odd thing about penitence is that it is exactly the opposite; it is only when one is ashamed of being ashamed, or afraid of making a blunder (not of committing a sin, mind you—the prevailing fear is of being made a fool of, not of doing harm), that the gloom enters in. People are saying hello, though I recognize hardly anybody; I find myself with a little knot of them heading toward the subway, walking next to a girl who tells me her name is Hazel Johnson and that she is from Illinois. She has a face as plain as her name, but with something so engaging about it that she is one of those people it is literally a pleasure to meet.

Then comes Maundy Thursday, as the Anglicans call it—the day of the washing of the disciples’ feet and the institution of the Eucharist at the last supper. This is a day of continuous vigil beside the altars, which are a last blaze of light before the darkness of Good Friday. White flowers; seven-branched candlesticks; after six weeks of purple, the priest comes out in a vestment of white brocade, and the sight is like a drink of water after a long drought. And of course the excitement is the more intense, and the effect the more startling, because of the absolute pitch-black that is about to fall. In the evening, up until ten o’clock, the candles on the little side altar are still blazing; but the lamps in front of the main altar have gone out, and the darkness there yawns like the mouth of a cave—almost, I would say, like the Pit itself. This evening the service is non-liturgical; the priest doesn’t even enter the pulpit, but sits at the head of the center aisle, and after a hymn or two, simply talks—meditates aloud, really. The vicar at St. Luke’s, being the kind of person he is, never really does any other kind of preaching, even from the pulpit. He never wags his head or waves his arms; he scarcely even raises his voice, and quite often he speaks with his eyes closed. It is a style that takes some getting used to, since it has no formal organization that you can follow; but once one is used to it, the sort of thing that passes for preaching in most places sounds hollow and frantic by comparison. I have no idea what he said, except that he quoted from Dr. Samuel Johnson and that he talked about charity, and that there could be no mistaking that he wasn’t just using the word, he was communicating the meaning behind it. There must be many such people, quietly going about their business in places that don’t get into the papers, and having an effect that doesn’t show; it is, after all, what churches are for.

And then, Good Friday. In the morning the altars are bare; the gospel is read, but there are no masses, no candles, no sign of life; man has condemned God, mocked at Him, spat in His face, and hung Him up to die as a malefactor. For the three hours before the final “It is finished,” in churches all over town there is preaching of one sort or another, or such substitutes as the Bach St. Matthew Passion I happened to hear; and again in the evening, there is the singing of the Reproaches: O my people, what have I done unto thee? The altars are still dark, but the veils have been torn from the crucifixes, and a great scarlet one is lying on the steps in front of the main altar; this is carried in procession about the church during the service, while a strange hymn, almost like a ballad, is sung, and then it is put back in the same place. By the time I left after this service, being in church had come to seem the normal condition of existence; I had gotten so accustomed to it, in fact, that (it is now the day after Easter, by the way) the normal, i.e. unecclesiastical, existence still seems rather strange. I got up early on Saturday morning for another altar service, at which, besides the priest, only the three nuns attached to the parish and one other girl were present; and after that, as prearranged, the other girl and I followed the nuns back to their house for breakfast. They were keeping the silence which is part of their rule at that hour, so they could only smile and nod and point out the daffodils and the one red tulip in their back yard. Inside, they showed us into the front room, where a little table was laid for two. We weren’t quite sure whether we ought to break the silence ourselves, and not being so adept at signs, compromised by passing the butter in whispers. When the nuns had finished saying the office at their own little altar, and having their own breakfast, we washed the dishes while they went to say another office—a good deal of the life of people in religious orders seems to be spent in this way—and then we all headed for the sacristy, where we spent the morning polishing all the silver, laying vestments, and arranging the multitudes of flowers. The odd thing is that on the Saturday before Easter a year ago, after the look into the pit of hell that literally hurled me into the church, I wandered into St. Luke’s in the middle of the afternoon and saw these same nuns and this same girl putting the lilies into place. When I told them this they said “Why didn’t you come up? We certainly could have used you!” Very odd. They haven’t very much sense of time—it comes from being used to a sense of eternity, I expect—and hardly remembered that a year ago they didn’t even know me. We finished just as Lent officially came to an end, at noon, and Ann and I were sent home with an armload apiece of white carnations and snapdragons left over from Maundy Thursday. After I had had lunch, cleaned house and gone to the grocery store I went back for confession, and stayed for the lighting of the Paschal candle, a ceremony just as startling, and possibly still more ancient than the Palm Sunday procession; it is based, so far as I can understand, on the Old Testament prophecies, and is full of references to fire. Immediately after that came the blessing of the baptismal font, which again is full of Old Testament references, all of these to water. It is all elemental in much the same way as the idea of sacrifice and the spilling of blood—the function of the altar that seems to be universal in all primitive religions, and is so old that it may be regarded as prehistoric—and as recurrent as the myth of the slain youth, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, or however he Is called, whose death and rebirth was regarded as intimately connected with, or as a personification of, the cycle of the seasons and the death and rebirth of vegetation. If one wants to use such analogies to destroy the validity of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, well, then one will do it; but the paradox is that all these analogies can equally well be regarded as substantiating it. This I believe is the view of Jung, if that makes any difference; so far as ultimate validity goes, I don’t suppose for a minute that it does. There are some things that are truer than any late-comer’s gloss upon what they mean; when they are, what they mean doesn’t matter.

Space to indicate the passage of time. It is now Friday after Easter, which day took a gorgeous leap forward from spring straight into summer. The temperature rose to the eighties, and the retarded trees sprang into leaf overnight. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more glorious day, and the celebration at St. Luke’s, for all that it was crowded with people in new spring wardrobes—I had new clothes myself, for that matter, and for the first time I saw how right the symbolism is, however it may be misused by vanity—the whole service was yet one more culminating astonishment. There is no doubt in my mind now that the forty days of discipline are a great piece of wisdom on the part of the church, and if I was not quite convinced before of the value of confession, I am now. The last lingering suspicion that it might be merely self-manipulation, and the last tight little fear of playing into the hands of authority, of having one’s individuality crushed by the weight of the priestly hierarchy, seems to have vanished. Absolution is not an imaginary event; it happens, one doesn’t know just how and one doesn’t need to know. One only knows that it [is] nothing willed from within; it comes from without; it isn’t willed at all, it is simply given. One makes no bargain, one asks nothing, one simply admits the truth, and the truth, once admitted, comes as a totally unexpected radiance of certainty. Even memory, which is a kind of holding on to what one cherishes and fears to lose because it is cherished, no longer seems important; one can let go even of that, and the letting go becomes one more step toward immortality: he that loseth his life shall find it. But probably there is no use trying to put into one’s own feeble words what the saints of all the ages have been saying, that there is a benevolence at the heart of reality which only fear keeps anyone from experiencing directly.

But now I really must bring this to an end. All week I have been—for me—exceedingly social, which in this case means having people to dinner; hence the interruption in this all but interminable report. There are all kinds of things I had it in mind to mention, but they can wait for another time. Do write.

[ … ] Of course I don’t object to the psychotherapy. In the first place I don’t really know a thing about it, but if it can help anybody to get over being afraid, which is chiefly what prevents people from putting first things first and makes them feel pointless and thwarted as a consequence, so far as I can make out—then I can’t be otherwise than in favor of it. The way I feel about it is a little the way I feel about Mr. Norman Vincent Peale and his Positive Thinking—I’m all in favor of positive thinking, and I don’t know that Mr. Peale is as stupid as his detractors make him out to be; what I object to is Peale-ism, that glib sort of rubbish that gets thrown around by mixed-up people who are always running after the Latest Thing. (Did you, by the way, read that latest Salinger story that took up practically a whole New Yorker about a month ago? One ferocious tidbit in a generally ferocious piece, I don’t know if you can call it story, is a passing reference to one Claude Vincent Smathers or something, who has just written a book called God Is My Hobby. That’s what I mean.) But really now, about this Autoconditioning business. The title is enough: it belongs in the trash basket with all the other gimmicks that look so shiny and are no use whatever. As if the Latest Thing were really the Latest Thing to end All Latest Things. (Now we’re getting eschatological.) Won’t the human race ever learn? Doesn’t it want to learn? Anybody who issues a testimonial about a system called Autoconditioning is not interested in putting first things first, but only in putting the latest thing first. Excuse all this fulmination, but REALLY! The trouble with Democracy is that if a thing gets into the papers, or even onto a book jacket, it immediately becomes immutable. This being because after all one man’s opinion is as good as another’s; the main thing is to have the Latest one. Of course those stupid things don’t do any direct harm; the harm they do is devaluative. If a thing goes over, then it must be a Latest Thing; therefore it has Status, until something else supersedes it; Has Status having superseded Is Good as a form of approbation. Now I know Daddy knows better, but there are people who have been gimmicked out of taking anything but keeping up with the Latest Thing seriously, by our wonderful all-embracing system of advertisement and so-called communication. Do you remember Dr. T. J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby? Actually that was the only thing I remembered, when I went back to it the other day. After the poor car dealer’s wife has been killed on the highway, he looks out of the window and sees “the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.” “God sees everything,” he says, and the man with him assures him that it’s just an advertisement. And really this is the crucial passage in the whole book, whether Fitzgerald meant it to be or not.

To get back to psychotherapy and to Norman Vincent Peale’s positive thinking, what is generally wrong, I suspect, is the motivation. Everybody ought to think positively, and everybody ought to know about a complex that has tied a knot in him somewhere, but if he undertakes any such thing with an idea of what he is going to get out of it, ten to one he isn’t going to get what he wants or if he does, he’ll find that it wasn’t worth wanting. Everything is so calculated these days. So manipulated. Things are done not as things worth doing in themselves, but as means to something else. People all sitting around feeling their own pulses, getting outside themselves so they can look back in and see where they’ve been. People trying to make themselves over. People ashamed of being what they are. People so anxious about what other people think that they can’t perform an honest act or think an honest thought. I’ve been through it; I know. It’s terrible. Terrible!

Really, I don’t know what’s come over me. On rather, I do, but I didn’t expect it to burst forth in quite this way. No, it isn’t a theological crisis; the Incarnation never seemed to me more of a fact, however frantic I may sound. But I have quite suddenly gone to pieces in a rather complicated way, and I find myself in the midst of coming to a decision just possibly as crucial as any I ever made. The awful part is that one can never be sure at the time just how crucial it is. The whole thing is thrilling, and one has no wish to run away from it, but all the same it is a good deal of a strain.

A strain, apparently, is what I have been under for the past several weeks. One can’t go around having religious experiences, taking a night course, getting ready to take over a new job, working at least mentally on a novel, and all the while thinking one is equal to everything, indefinitely, and have it otherwise, whether one is aware of the fact or not. I wasn’t. I’m not sure whether I wrote you, but you may have heard, that Monica is going back to France—permanently, so far as she knows. I’d known that there was the possibility for a year or so, and while (as she perfectly well knew) I had no wish to see her go, it was understood that I would take over her job if it should happen. There really was no discussion, and there was no question in my own mind but that this was the right and normal thing for me to do. I’d handled things in her absence, after all, to everybody’s satisfaction, for months at a time, and after five years I know my way around the library pretty nearly as well as she does. I’d also proved to my own satisfaction, since we took on a half-time clerical worker about a year and a half ago, that I could give directions quite adequately, and I can say without boasting that these people (we’ve had a series of three, and have just taken on a fourth), by the time they left (always for reasons of their own that had nothing to do with the job) were quite fond of me. I realize now that it wasn’t easy, and it contributed to the strain that I put getting along with them as individuals above efficiency. I still think this is right, but whether it is good administration I’m not sure. Besides which, patience is not my strong point. But with Monica in charge, I managed a sort of detachment that made it a lot easier, and when I did get exasperated I’m afraid I was inclined to take it out on her. We have been through so many arguments, large and small, and have gotten to know each other so well, by this time, that being simply polite to each other, day in and day out, would have been both absurd and impossible. Well. A couple of weeks ago the bottom fell out of everything. I discovered that for no very distinct reason I was as cross as a bear; all day long I kept telling everybody I was, and not to pay any attention to what I said, but this didn’t prevent me from being rude and perverse to absolutely everybody; until without any warning, late in the afternoon, I broke down entirely and started to cry. This sort of thing has happened to me once before in my life, and then I knew exactly why it was, so that I wasn’t really surprised; but this time, since there didn’t seem to be any particular reason, I was horribly startled and quite scared. Monica, who fortunately was the only one around just then, began consoling me and telling me she had been every bit as scared as I was when she started in at the Audubon Society. But I couldn’t believe the job had anything to do with it; when I finally concluded that it must have a good deal, I realized that being equal to everything is not only a matter of volition, and that there are times when volition itself gives way—rather a shock to one’s determination to be self-sufficient. I was pretty shaky over the whole weekend that followed, but it appeared that I had pulled myself together by Monday morning. All during the week I was interviewing prospects for the job as my assistant. I did a pretty good job of it, but by evening I was generally so tired that it was all I could do to wash up the dinner dishes before I went to bed. On Friday Monica was out, and all day long I was talking to people or listening to them talk—candidates for the job, garrulous visitors, and the senior vice president, a man whom I cannot like or respect and whose job it is to butter people up, either to get rid of them or to get something out of them. In my interview with him I permitted myself to be buttered out of taking an extra week without pay along with my vacation, which was to begin that day. Since he is a man who has no real authority, it doesn’t much matter why he performed that little act; but in the terms he used, there was nothing to do gracefully but bow down and accept it. And with such people one must be graceful at all costs; one can’t tell the truth, since for them there is no such thing. The upshot was that I was to come in on the next Monday after all. I had said I wanted the extra week because I was tired; it would have been stupid to mention that I also hoped to make some progress on the novel, which for weeks now has been at a complete standstill because I was too tired by the time the weekend came around. It seemed, at the time of the interview, a concession of no importance, and I was quite startled to find myself in tears again as soon as I had a minute to myself. All during the weekend it was like that; I had wild thoughts of handing in my resignation, which I couldn’t believe were serious—until late on Sunday it came to me, with almost the shock of a revelation, that quite possibly they were. When that dawned upon me, for the first time in weeks I felt like myself again; I felt tired, but relieved and quite at peace.

Since then I have talked about this with Monica, with a doctor, and with a priest—nobody else. So until I have committed myself, one way or the other, this is going to be another of those confidences with which I seem compelled to burden you from time to time. Burden, of course, isn’t quite the right word, since a burden is a thing one minds, and I seem to feel quite sure that you won’t. When she had heard the story and seen how agitated I was—I still get agitated when I start thinking the decision isn’t final, and that I might stay on after all—Monica ordered me home to calm down and rest up. Before I went, I saw a doctor, who found nothing wrong except nerves, prescribed a mild sedative (though there was nothing wrong with either my sleep or my appetite), and congratulated me on the promotion. When I saw him a second time—of course doctors can be quite obliging, and I suspect them of telling the patient mainly what the patient wants to hear—he granted that I had been trying to do too much, and that I would have to give up something. Which thing? The job? The novel? Helping the nuns, and going to mass twice or three times during the week? Well, no doctor can tell one that. In fact, nobody can. Nevertheless, after two days of being lazy, and hating myself during every minute, I went to see a priest. Not that I expected him to make a decision for me—I should have had no respect for him if he had—but I did want to hear what he would say on the question of whether the idea of giving up the job was simply an evasion of responsibility. There is a school of thought, after all—a very protestant one—which identifies the right thing with what is hardest or most distasteful. Father Weed didn’t for a minute think so. He is a very remote man, even an abrupt one—I don’t know that I ever saw anybody who was personally so shy. Which is probably why he is so good a priest—he puts everything into his function. He talked, of course, about the will of God, as priests do and must—but then I used the term myself before I was quite aware that I believed in it. And he said he would pray over the matter. Now the reason I decided to talk to him was that he had said in a sermon that in praying for people one must guard against being possessive—every individual soul has a destiny with which it is no one else’s place to interfere, and all one can do is to care about that soul, as it were, in the presence of the truth, or the highest good, or however one chooses to refer to what is eternal. That, after all, is what charity means—anything else is spurious and out of proportion. You see how much such an attitude has in common with the true scientific one—not to demand, but without any constricting preconceptions simply to wait and see. And as far as I am concerned, that is what prayer is, and all it is—simply doing one’s best to drop all preconceptions, and trusting what comes by way of illumination. Anything else is putting pressure on, and trying to bend the will of God to one’s own. I think the reason I held out so long against Christianity was that I couldn’t see the distinction between the will of God and doing what other people expect. I had got it into my head that to be Christlike was to be pliant and ineffectual—always give in, be nice, tell everybody the lies they want to hear. In other words, to be a conventional prig. Christ himself, of course, was nothing of the sort. He said what was true, and most of the time it wasn’t at all what people wanted to hear. The confusion, of course, is between pretending to love everybody, which only comes out as interference, and really doing it; and about the nearest one can come, as a selfish human being, most of the time is to restrain oneself from interference, even mentally. It is devilish hard.

What has this to do with the question that has been exercising me this last week? Nothing directly, perhaps, but it is related somehow to the question of vocation. When I joined the church I was ready to give up all my notions of being a writer. I no longer regard writers as glamorous and enviable people; in general, I would say that they are vain, silly, and above all unhappy. Fame and success, if they come, are no satisfaction except to a rapacious vanity; and if one has more serious aims than simply being noticed, the disappointment is perhaps more painful still. The really important work is mostly done, I suspect, by people whose names never get into the papers. And yet, if the developments of the last couple of weeks mean anything, they must mean that a writer is what I was meant to be. It seems to me now that I have lulled myself with the notion that I could straddle the issue, and follow two professions at once. Some people have done it, and I guess I thought that what some people have done, I could do too. All the time, I have been putting money in the bank, with the idea of making a trip abroad without giving up the job or the novel either; and for two springs in succession that plan has come to nothing. Now I see that even a week’s leave of absence is something I can’t arrange, and to finagle which I have no aptitude and still less desire. I have enough now to live on, in my own frugal way, for six months and more. If I handle a job as a department head, even so minor a one as this, successfully, I shall have to put that first, with the prospect that I shall have very little energy for anything else. I’m not a born administrator; I’d even rather write my own letters than dictate them. I’m pretty good at needling a superior, and at keeping calm while she gets upset; but I now see that that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t find myself getting just as upset in her place. I haven’t interviewed anybody yet who really seemed fitted for the job as my assistant except one little girl who happens to be colored and toward whom I should probably feel protective and compunctious, even should the president think it advisable to risk the complications that might ensue. This may sound priggish and hypocritical; so far as I can make out, it isn’t. There are people who enjoy creating issues of this sort, and flinging themselves in the face of possible prejudice; I’m not one of them. I’ve even discovered that my judgment has ceased to function, and that interviewing prospects is harder and harder to carry off decisively. And the thought of all the projects of cataloging and arranging, which I was eager to get at, has become simply suffocating when I bring myself to face it at all.

On the other hand, I foresee the reaction—just as she was settling down to be respectable, look at her! The whole thing all over again. Whatever did she join the church for, then? Since the whole idea came like such a bolt to me, I sympathize, and can hardly expect any other kind of reaction. And the only answer I can give is that this is what comes of putting first things first. Is it self-indulgence, after all? I have gone to mass three times over it, and each time I have come out certain that I cannot do otherwise than turn in my resignation and risk whatever follows. It’s nothing rational; but the really important decisions I have ever made were none of them conscious. I’ve never tried so hard before to think a thing through, but it seems no use.

As I say, I don’t complain; I find the whole thing very alive-making. When it’s settled, I’ll let you know.

All right, be different and don’t join the family reunion this fall! No, that’s wrong of me—it’s putting on pressure in reverse, which is the very worst kind. All the same, it would be fun if you came. Whatever you do do, anyhow, please write. And good luck with the psychotherapy!

As for the Letters, they are even better than I expected. I find St. Paul hard to read in the King James version, partly because of the oxlike stupor of long familiarity dating back to sermons half-heard under duress, and a long-standing notion of a distinctly unpalatable personality behind them. Here, they sound like—they are—real letters, and they are exhilarating and sometimes startling to read. To take for a sample, from the first letter to Corinth: “Are you really unable to find among your number one man with enough sense to decide a dispute between one and another of you, or must one brother resort to the law against another and that before those who have no faith in Christ? It is surely obvious that something must be seriously wrong in your Church for you to be having lawsuits at all. Why not let yourself be wronged or cheated? For when you go to law against your brother you yourself do him wrong, for you cheat him of Christian love and forgiveness.” Dynamite—and as true as when it was written in spite of the different, and particular, circumstances that called forth this advice. It is a wonderful book to have, and I am indebted to you for it.

Christmas was beginning to seem rather a long time ago, but I have just come from a most extraordinary pageant that sent one straight back into the mood of the holiday. This was a twelfth-century work called The Play of Daniel, which until last year, when it was done at the Cloisters, had not been done for centuries. It is sung in Latin, with an added narration by W. H. Auden, and the production altogether can only be described as a labor of love. This year it has been revived in a Gothic-style church uptown, which must seat a couple of thousand people, and it was packed, with standees in the aisles. It is the sort of thing that can only be done, really, in a church, since that was where it was originally done. The remarkable thing about it is the attitude of naive wonder which is the only way one can respond to it at all, and it would be very difficult not to respond; and one feels that this is the way it felt to be burghers of Beauvais back in the thirteenth century. The whole Daniel story is there, beginning with Belshazzar’s feast, and the dancing lions that try to maul him and are a comic touch that seems exactly right, and at the very end comes the prophecy, with a gorgeous angel which seems to have stepped out of a painted annunciation scene and to be just about to retreat into it again as the final Gregorian Te Deum ends and the play is over. I don’t think I ever saw more beautiful costumes, ever.

It is now Sunday, and in a little while I shall be going up to the Carnegie Recital Hall to hear a flute concert featuring Bach, Mozart, Poulenc, and Goodman. Joe says this will be the first time he will hear his own flute-and-piano sonata; it has been done several times, but always with him as the pianist. He is very busy these days with teaching, private pupils, and commissions—the latest a cycle of songs for tenor and chamber orchestra, to be performed abroad next summer. I went out there for dinner on Twelfth Night, and found the tree still up and the children clamoring to be read aloud to before I was quite inside the door. Meredith is growing tall, has her hair shorn, and is missing some front teeth—six is an awkward age generally; but she goes to dancing school and is unmistakably musical. Alison, who used to run and hide when I came, is now as affectionate as the others; and Christopher is such a cheerful little boy that it is hard to believe that he is temperamental too. We had one of those sybarite meals—chicken under a luscious sauce made with whipped cream, if you please, and the most magnificent white Burgundy wine I ever drank (Chassagne-Montrachet, if you will excuse a touch of the connoisseur).

Don’t tell anybody, but I think I may be working up to leaving my job one of these days. The old urge began to recur last fall, was shelved temporarily because there was too much else to do, but now I find it cropping up again. And now it begins to seem pointless, if I am ever going to finish that novel, to postpone taking the time off to do it. Do you have any idea what the family reaction would be? Because I really don’t wish to defy anybody, though braving a little mild disapproval would probably be bracing. Things at the Audubon Society are almost too easy, and there is beginning to be just enough prestige to spoil me a little. The chief deterrent is a combination of plain ordinary timidity with the idea which is dinned into one constantly by priests and members of religious orders (more by implication than accusation, but all the more effective for that reason) that too much solitude is unwholesome, frivolous, and even downright wicked—and of course having a job to which one has to go daily is a rigorous guarantee against solitude. However, I begin to be surrounded by such guarantees from other quarters—the church above all, and the Community of St. John Baptist of which I am now formally an associate, and more and more people of various sorts and conditions. As you can see, I am still mulling the thing over in my mind, but one of these days I have got to make it up, before the indecision begins to be wicked in itself. [ … ]

[ … ] I’m sorry about your state of mind, and only wish (in spite of your explicit statement that you didn’t want advice) that I had some nice, sparkling remedy to propose. A tendency to states of depression is probably partly constitutional, I suspect, and it appears to run in the family—in fact it is so common that one could almost as well say that it runs in the human race. (I swear the play on words was not intentional—it just happened.) There is something, after all, in that old theory of the humors—did you ever look into The Anatomy of Melancholy? If you remember, Grandpa described in his memoir an acute state of depression he once went through. I suppose knowing it is not uncommon doesn’t make the condition any less real, but perhaps it may make it a little easier to live with. I am reminded, somehow, of a piece of advice which the author of The Cloud of Unknowing gives his would-be contemplative, to the effect that one way of coping with distractions is simply to stop struggling with them, to “cower down under them as a captive, or a coward overcome in battle, to feel yourself overcome forever.” And it is remarkable how well it works. When I see myself getting irritated or upset over things that happen, I say, “that isn’t really me, out there, reacting like that; whoever it is, I’m just going to ignore it.” I realize that ignoring depression isn’t so simple a matter; it’s like a load of lead by comparison with a pinprick. But still I think there may be something in the idea of total non-resistance, even when the adversary weighs a ton. My guess is (and it can only be a guess) that this sense of a burden coupled with feelings of panic—which I gather is what you are referring to—must come from some accumulated pressure, partly environmental, partly inherited, which says you have to accomplish something, you have to have something to show for it, you have to justify your having been brought into the world at all. Whereas the truth of the matter is, you don’t have to do any such thing. Your existence is justified already, whatever you do or don’t do. And the worst thing in the world that can happen is to be continually afraid of what might happen, either because of or in spite of what you do or don’t do. Nothing anybody does is really that important. There—I start out analyzing and end up delivering a sermon. Please excuse. I have no idea, of course, whether it applies at all.

My friend Gene from across the hall is dead. This happened less than a month ago. A couple of months before that he had gone to Baltimore, where he married for the third time (first in this country)—an old friend of his who used to live in New York and whom I knew slightly. Everything seemed to be fine, and then one Sunday he had a heart attack, and died before his wife finished phoning for the doctor. Matthias and the younger boy, Hannes (who came over from Austria something over a year ago and has the apartment now) drove down to Pennsylvania, where they had the funeral, and took me along. It was somehow more like an escapade than anything so solemn as a man’s last rites—we got up at three a.m. to start out, because Matthias was sure we would get lost, and since I had been to the ballet (of which more later) that evening I had only a couple of hours of sleep. As it turned out, we had the turnpikes practically to ourselves, and we didn’t get lost, so it was only five, and just beginning to be light, when we pulled into the Philadelphia suburb where we were expected to appear at around eight. So we had breakfast of hot cakes in a diner and then drove around listening to the birds singing in the early morning—cardinals, robins, song sparrows, and in one enchanting place where we stopped, dozens of white-throats, each one singing its wistful, dreaming little song—a perfect rain of little flute-notes, the like of which I never heard before. Then we went to Gene’s niece’s house, and from there we drove out into Chester County, which is Pennsylvania Dutch country, full of rolling hills and tidy, settled-looking farms. The funeral, such as it was, was in one of those farmhouses, the in-laws’ family place, where he had been for the weekend when he died. It was a heavenly place, with flowers blooming everywhere—apple-trees, dogwood, violets, bluebells, buttercups, narcissus—and all dripping, and all the more fragrant, from a rain in the night. Since I hadn’t been to a funeral in about twenty-five years, I had forgotten the excruciating embarrassment which is about the only feeling possible under the same roof with the mortal remains of one deceased. Ceremony is the only thing that can possibly mitigate the embarrassment—one is embarrassed, precisely, because of the absence of any suitable form to follow. Some records of Bach were played on a phonograph which there was some trouble in persuading to warm up properly, and then two of the numerous brothers-in-law made little speeches which were all the more embarrassing because they were in such desperately sincere good taste. At the grave it was better. The sun had finally come out, for one thing, and then there was a minister who read from the book of Job and the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans, which make the act of mourning bearable. Afterward there was an enormous lunch at the niece’s house, and much gay conversation with the numerous in-laws, and after they had gone Hannes and Matthias and I sat in the back yard under a dogwood tree, soaking up sunshine, before we finally started back. The truth is, it had been a delightful day, and it proved to me that to sorrow and to rejoice at the same time are not incompatible, they are actually part of the same thing; and as for the escapade-like character of taking a day off from work and getting up at three in the morning and driving around listening to white-throated sparrows, the whole thing was eminently fitting because it was so like Gene himself. The strange thing continues to be that I can’t really grasp the idea that he is dead.

For the past few weeks it has been just one musical event after another. First there was the Bolshoi Ballet, whom [sic] I saw twice—and can count myself fortunate, even though the great Ulanova wasn’t dancing either time. There is no company in the world to compare with it, whatever quibbles and qualifications occur to the reviewers, and there hasn’t been a public response to compare with what happened here, ever—S. Hurok, who brought them over, finally hired Madison Square Garden for an extra week, and people were standing in line all day long for chances, at opera-house prices, to see them there. I suppose it is because my musical memory is so vague and fuzzy that I find ballet more exciting than pure music in a concert-hall—it is music in visible human form. And as for theater, a dancer can be as eloquent in a single gesture as most actors are in a thousand words—it’s the dispensing with speech (a clumsy business, words, after all) that makes the language of pure movement so expressive. However, I go on liking music, and hearing a good deal of it—a harpsichord concert and a new opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe, on a single Saturday, and then a couple of evenings ago I heard the Handel oratorio Israel in Egypt at Carnegie Hall, with a contralto soloist who had a voice like Marian Anderson’s, and a chorus of a hundred or so, plus harpsichord (which you couldn’t hear) and organ (which could be heard now and then, such as in the passage where the Red Sea rolls over the pursuing Egyptians). It is certainly not much like the Messiah, and I was startled by some very graphic passages, such as the hissing and humming that describes the plague of flies. Most exciting, though, was hearing Joe Goodman’s new trio for piano, flute and violin, which he and a couple of his colleagues played last Saturday at the Union Theological Seminary, to a small-but-select audience in a little auditorium somewhere among the labyrinthine passages of that hive of Presbyterianism, Niebuhrianism, and neo-Calvinism (if that is what it is). Anyhow, Joe has some pupils up there, and so the concert was arranged. The new trio is really brilliant—a somber theme that somehow works itself up into a most electrifying tarantella, and then a slow movement; but it’s all of a piece, and very satisfying. Connie thinks it’s the best thing he has done yet, and I agree. And the audience obviously liked it. [ … ]

But I must assure you before I go any further that Renée is still snug and safe in your apartment and the roof is still intact. She came down for dinner the other evening, your letter having spurred me to call her as I had been intending to do for weeks. I read her some parts from your letter, about “Zozzo” and your itinerary through the north of Italy—which reminded her of a tour she and a friend took through the region, staying mainly in convents, and her mention of some sisters in Verona reminded me in turn that I had caught a glimpse of those same sisters on my brief visit there, and then we were off: oh to be in the north of Italy, bathing in the peacock-crystalline waters of Lake Garda, smelling the grapes and the peaches and gathering wild blackberries along the roadsides! I dug out my old journal and managed to decipher the following from the entry for Verona: “… at lunch in the vacant dining room a garrulous waiter with a red nose told me positively there would be a temporale before evening … and sure enough, when I came down at five after another nap, a leaden bank of cloud was rolling up behind the hills to the east; but the sun still shone, and eventually nothing came of it. I followed the Corso Cavour vaguely and found my way across a temporary bridge over the gray-green, swirling flood of the Adige, then up zigzagging flights of steps past the Roman theatre, under an aisle of cypresses and to the crest of the hill of San Pietro. Some nuns with white butterfly headdresses were leading a procession of small boys with shaven heads somewhere or other. Over a low stone wall the town spread out, cloven by the curving river, with red roofs and the sharp peaks of Lombard towers and campaniles, striped rose and white with alternate stringcourses of brick and limestone. I passed a farmhouse with dahlias in bloom and walked along a quiet road under the old fortress walls, where tangles of greenish-flowered clematis grew and I could smell but not see the ripening grapes on the terraces beyond the wall. It was very still, very rich with late summer growth. Coming back, I heard the treble voices of choir boys rehearsing, over and over, a chant I found myself recalling afterward at Dezenzano …” Oh, to hear that chant again!—but just what it was is now past remembering (though strangely prophetic) and so I shall never know. Gregorian, no doubt. I could spend my life listening to Gregorian chants. Music is a complete mystery to me, a closed door technically, and yet it opens the very gates of paradise in a way nothing else quite does. Especially sixteenth-century music and Gregorian chant.

I know that feeling of panic you speak of, about places left behind and what has become of them in one’s absence. In Perugia, I think it was, after weeks of seeing no newspapers, I bought a Paris Herald, and was appalled. The amours of Hollywood stars, sex orgies among high school students in Indiana—that was all that seemed to be left of the U.S.A., and I could hardly believe it was my own country and never wanted to go back at all.

As for New York being a mess, it always has been and I can’t see that things are much different, or any worse, than they ever were. There has been a great but (to me) incomprehensible hullabaloo over contracts for public housing—it would appear that even Robert Moses is involved in it somehow, and the mayor is full of wrath but can’t get to the bottom of it either. A little earlier, there was another and even noisier hullabaloo when this same Moses, for some reason that was never clear, decided that there should be no more free Shakespeare in Central Park. Finally, though, that young fellow Joseph Papp, who produces the plays if you remember, took the matter to court, and one happy day the Daily News carried the headline: LET BARD IN, COURT TELLS MOSES. So now they are doing Julius Caesar, and the crowds are bigger than ever. I haven’t been to any of the summer performances, but last winter I saw them do Antony and Cleopatra indoors, and found it better than the production I once saw with Katharine Cornell…. Also, the Monday evening concerts in Washington Square are on again, though I haven’t been there either so far. At the first there was a large to-do, with much speechmaking and such gymnastics as perching a quartet on the top of Washington Square monument (where nobody could see them, according to the newspaper account I happened to read), in honor of the official closing of the Square to traffic last winter. There has been a strike at the A. & P.—of which I have gradually become a part-time customer—but it has now been settled, and the reopening was attended with about as much pomp and glee as a coronation and the news that Queen Elizabeth is expecting her third, combined. The Weather Bureau, when you call, now gives what is called a temperature-humidity index; originally it was given the name of Discomfort Index, but as you can imagine, that was received with universal indignation. The purpose of this innovation is said to be to let employers in non-air-conditioned places know when their employees are entitled to be sent home early. As for the weather—well, you know summer in New York, only some summers are more so. This one has been wet. It rained just about every day for something like two weeks—and often not once a day, but several times, in violent tropical downpours, with wind and lightning. As a result of one of those storms, a tree I was fond of is no more; it was a locust or acacia, the kind with many rounded feathery leaves and those drooping creamy clusters of blossoms, late in May, and it was in the garden a door or two down from me, so that I had to lean out on my fire escape to see it. Alas. I planted a windowbox with nasturtiums and they grew and have even, with great effort, produced a few somewhat stunted flowers. But life on a fire escape is hard, and the odds are against them. They are always either too wet or too dry, and a couple of times, after a night-long, pouring rain, I had to drain off the water in which they were standing up to their necks, poor things. There have been some hot days, not too many, and there have been at least two really spectacular sunsets—the kind with vast arching fans of cloud, rose and violet, that stretched for miles, and made me wonder how far one would have to travel to get from one end to the other of what was going on overhead. As you know, the amount of accessible sky here on Twelfth Street is a never-ending delight and satisfaction, and the view of chimneys and windows and rooftops and of that small jungle of a garden underneath is the sort of thing that grows, like a garden, the more intensively it is cultivated.

Oh, and I have slightly redecorated the apartment. It is gayer than it was, with a new couch-cover printed all over with Italianate arches and doorways in black and white, and a couple of rose-red cushions to set them off. This happened because by what seemed a ghastly mistake at the time, the walls got painted a sort of mauve, and since I hadn’t the fortitude to make an issue about it the situation could only be retrieved by getting all the old browns and greens out of sight. And in the end, of course, it is much improved.

I have been having a wonderful four weeks of being right here, enjoying the décor within and the view without, cooking dinner for somebody now and then, and—writing. Yes, after having once again finally abandoned the novel as a dead duck and a lost cause, I found that it hadn’t heard the death sentence after all. With some trepidation I got the Audubon Society to let me take a two weeks’ leave of absence in addition to the two of paid vacation, and except for a weekend at the convent in New Jersey at the very beginning, I have spent it all right here. I must say that the life agrees with me—an ordered, early-rising, industrious but unhurried existence, with one’s main energy going into the work to be done but still capable of being diverted to quite different considerations without—or at least very little—sense of rupture or strain. The book is now, if I keep it to the volume and symmetry it has in my mind, about two-thirds finished. I am over the hump; the stumbling-block which kept me writing and re-writing the same episode over and over without getting it right, and which led me to think it had already been worked over too long, simply evaporated, and one morning, in the space of perhaps ten minutes, the resolution I had despaired of achieving simply opened up like a map, as though it had always been there. Sometimes it scares me. A couple of days ago I found myself immersed in a broth of such sheer frightfulness and misery that I thought both the story and I would drown in it, and hardly dared to go on. But the next morning saw us both safely through. I don’t know yet, but I think I shall most probably leave my job to finish it; after which, if all goes well, I shall head—at last, at last—for Europe. But that could hardly be before you are back here—probably not before spring.

As I think I wrote you, I made a real try at not wanting to be a writer, and that was pretty certainly a good thing. I am not as afraid now as I was (I suppose without quite knowing it) of one day having to admit that I wasn’t one; and not being afraid now goes for the possibility of failure too. The curious thing about this kind of voluntary relinquishment—or anyhow attempt at relinquishment—is that one emerges with renewed confidence: not in oneself, precisely, so much as in the nature of things. It is something like going to confession, which basically is nothing but an exercise, a rigorous one, in seeing things not the way they might or ought to be but simply as they are. It seems to me, or has seemed a good deal of the time these last four weeks, that writing fiction is simply the job in which whatever working energy I have finds itself most at home, which is perhaps another way of saying it is the job I can do best. Well, one never knows. Vocation is a curious thing. A girl I know, who came to New York determined to be an actress, after four or five years of trying, had no sooner given up the idea and gone back to Minnesota than she discovered what seems to be a vocation to a religious order. It has been a most astounding thing to see happen, and quite humbling, really, and I suppose along with the excitement there is bound to be a little twinge of wistfulness about seeing, or rather not seeing, one’s own way so clearly. Anyhow, at moments I catch a glimpse of Another Novel, piling up like a thunderhead behind the one I am working on now. Actually, the germ of it is not new; it has been lying there, more or less dormant, for several years, and it necessitates another look at Europe before it can be begun. Well, we shall see.

I am very eager to see your new paintings, and I am also delighted to know that “you-know-who” has sold some of his work and done some new ones. As for your seeing him, I hardly supposed you would fail to, sooner or later—later rather than sooner, though, I would have said. As for his knowing nothing about the blessing of apartments, either his memory or my imagination—or both—is being unreliable. I could have sworn that he had told me about being at home when the priest came to bless the house in Jersey City. Anyhow, it is fine that he has been to Greece…. As for the lost Giorgione, I imagine you thought of going to Berenson (he is still alive, isn’t he?) and decided against it. No doubt at his great age he would be capricious as well as formidable. But there must be somebody. This is all most exciting, and I shall be waiting to hear of further developments. [ … ]

I can’t remember what I may have been doing, except that I have been seeing quite a lot of people, have been to a movie (“Wild Strawberries,” which is in Swedish), and have formally resigned my job. I told them I planned to leave the middle of November, and I have written Beth that I thought I would come out to Iowa right after that and stay at least over Thanksgiving. The people at the Audubon Society whom I have told understand that my reason for leaving is a family matter, and that really is what it turns out to be, even if I hadn’t quite planned it that way. I think it was your letter that decided me finally. I don’t know what, if anything, I may be able to offer in the way of comfort and assistance, but having already made up my mind to leave the job, I at least can come feeling free and unpressed for time, as well as—quite strongly—that this is what I should be doing.

I have now had letters from both Mamma and Daddy, both mainly about Beth, and all that is clear is that the situation at home is too complicated to go on with everybody there at once. Possibly I am wrong, but I think Beth’s erratic ups and downs may be a good sign, however hard they undoubtedly are on everybody else. Certainly it is more normal to have such ups and downs, and to express them, than to remain in a state of apathy and submission, while heaven only knows what is shoved down into the subconscious regions. Apparently part of any mental illness involves some kind of attrition of the normal inhibitions of reason and social pressure, so that the patient goes around deprived of the social “skin” worn by people who have not suffered this attrition; so things he does often look funny to people for whom the “skin” is second nature. The question would seem to be whether Beth can learn to reason, or to accept the reasoning of other people. The reason she can’t accept Mamma’s kind of “reasoning,” I think, is that it isn’t reasonable—that is, it is dictated by anxiety, and for some reason disturbed people are quicker to detect and exploit anxiety, even, than normal ones. And of course a clear-cut disagreement about how she is to be handled leaves the door wide open to an impossible situation. Mamma is a dear, good person who in some ways is easier to sympathize with than Daddy, but she can be maddeningly irritating—and I say this as one who has been around rarely, and then mainly in ideal circumstances. She is irritating because she is anxious; anxiety is what keeps her awake at nights, that keeps her from paying attention to what is said, so she asks silly questions, and then one gets impatient, and she gets defensive. Anyhow, this is what has happened to me, and so far as reason and social inhibitions are concerned I guess I am fairly normal. It is the failing of anxious people to be always trying to control things they can’t control; actually, I think, they suffer from a kind of infection of the social skin, a hypertrophy rather than an atrophy, so it is no wonder that they and people who are just the opposite make life unbearable for each other.

All of which is sheer theorizing, and perhaps both mistaken and useless. I’m not sure that I agree with Daddy’s hands-off, let-her-learn-by-her-mistakes-policy either; if her reasoning power is permanently impaired, I suppose she can’t be expected to learn. But I do think his attitude is right. If she can be handled firmly, well and good; but if not, then above all she must not be fussed at.

And who ever heard of a mother who didn’t fuss at her daughters? I’ve certainly had at least a dose of it in my day, and it wasn’t until I had enough self-confidence to stop trying to be formidable that it ceased to bother me.

What I have in mind, anyhow, may turn out to be completely impractical, but my idea in coming out is to at least explore the possibility of taking an apartment somewhere in Des Moines, not too near but not too far from Grand Avenue, and having Beth live there with me. I don’t plan to mention this to Mamma or Daddy until I’ve had a chance to see how Beth reacts to the idea, and in general I want to avoid discussing her with them as much as I can. I think one of her troubles may be the endless discussing of her case while she is in the house, of which she can’t but be aware whether she actually overhears it or not; and I know I have been a party to discussions of her at which she was visibly present, simply because Mamma and I didn’t agree about something concerning her. It may turn out that I can’t get along with her myself, but I can’t be sure without seeing her and finding out. It occurred to me that sharing an apartment, if one could be found that I could afford, might even have advantages both ways: if she is able to go on working, she might be able to contribute something, which might give her more incentive to go to work regularly, and that would give me just that much more leeway to finish my novel. She would be out of Mamma’s hair, but they would be near enough so I could call on them if I had to. What I have no idea about is whether a small furnished apartment with a short lease, or no lease at all, would be easily found in Des Moines, and what kind of rent I would have to pay. If you know anything about such things, I do wish you would let me know.

It must be interesting to see Italy again, after England, and to observe what difference it makes in one’s point of view. Or perhaps, knowing Italy as you do, you were not troubled by the sense of being pulled in opposite directions, of having to make up one’s mind which one really loved. A most childish internal conflict, no doubt—as though one could have only one Real Friend. It sounds rather like those dormitory sessions in which it was solemnly debated whether one could Really Be In Love with more than one boy at a time. All the same, it bothered me, until one sad, sad autumn day when I stood in Oxford, with the leaves falling and a fine rain misting down, and missed my train back to London because looking at the Radcliffe Camera I suddenly thought of Rome, and burst into tears at the very complicatedness of things—whereupon the conflict was resolved.

All of which does seem quite far away and long ago. Things here have been happening so fast that there is scarcely time to think, much less brood or give oneself over to nostalgia. I am definitely leaving my job, probably around the middle of November. There is a great sense of relief about having that settled, though I have even less idea than I expected to of what may be in store. My first move will be a trip out to Iowa, where the question of what is to be done about, with, or for my sister has now become a bit urgent. It seems clear that having her at home is simply too much of a burden on my mother, who, poor dear, has borne the strain so nobly all these years; and it has occurred to me that a possible solution, at least temporarily, would be for me to find an apartment in Des Moines and have my sister stay with me while I finish the novel. Whether there is a chance that such an arrangement might succeed, I won’t know until I have gone out there, talked to the doctors, et cetera. It occurred to me that if I did leave New York for six months or longer, Renée might take my apartment—that is, if you had returned to your own apartment in the meantime. I haven’t mentioned this to Renée (though the thought of her staying here when and if I went abroad did come up, a couple of months back), but I expect to see her this week and will probably talk with her about it then. It would be a great comfort to have her here, if I did leave.

In the meantime, there has been a series of autumnal visitations—fun, but exhausting: my brother Philip early in September, my mother last weekend, my Boston brother with his wife and their eight-year-old next weekend. And now Monica, my old boss, is here from Paris—more madly exhilarating to be around than ever, and now, her mother having died early this year, she is in her own words Filthy Rich, and so—in addition to giving an ornithological cocktail party or two, as of old—she is going to take me to lunch at Twenty-One—which means that I must calm my nerves and recoup my appetite, if all that food is to be done justice to. New York seems fuller and fuller of people to try to keep up with, which means less and less time for solitude, that dangerous luxury—or is it a necessity after all? I read when I am too tired for anything else, but there is no energy for writing, at this present pace. The weather has been weird—day after day the summer holds on, trees are still green, and it would be, if it weren’t for the shortening days and southering sun, hard to remember what part of the year it is supposed to be. My mother and I saw La Traviata, which gave me to think again of Italian gesture and bravura, but before I could puzzle out and predicate the thought, whatever it was, I was caught up in the next preoccupation. And so it goes. I see you strolling by the Arno in the Italian autumn, of which (I suddenly realize) I know nothing except that passage out of Milton which describes the legions of fallen angels,

In Vallombrosa, where t ‘Etrurian shades

High overarch’t imbower …

Life had a picture story about Tuscany some weeks back. Perhaps you saw it. All a bit melodramatic, but then I suppose the Renaissance was that way. Must collect that elusive thought—the one La Traviata scared out of hiding. I suspect it must have been somewhat theological. [ … ]

[ … ] The other morning, I got up before the sun and went to church, and I walked back up the street afterward with the most delightful old priest who told me his name was Father Flye (he is actually quite famous in the vicinity, and I had heard about him but never met him until he introduced himself), who left me feeling so cheerful, in spite of its having started out a gray, sullen sort of day, that when I got back here to Twelfth Street and saw (first) a French steamship, the Liberté, moving up the Hudson without making a sound, and then (second) a tiny little bird with a yellow stripe on its head—to get back to the beginning, or something like the beginning, of this interminable sentence, I felt that it was somehow all Father Flye’s doing. I mean the golden-crowned kinglet (for it was none other) was down below my fife escape, hopping and lisping in that faint little voice, in the top of one of the catalpa trees—not actually indoors. But the next thing I realized was that the catalpa trees were alive with birds—kinglets both golden and ruby-crowned, nuthatches, white-throated sparrows, brown creepers, a woodpecker (downy, I think), juncos, and I forget what else. When I got to work I phoned a friend of mine who patrols a piece of Central Park, and told her to be sure to go out that day. In the evening there were some people here to dinner—non-birdwatchers—and while we were just getting ready for dessert the bird-watching friend called to report. At the mention of brown creepers, the non-bird-watchers at the table became vastly amused, and the next thing I knew they had invented a game involving brown creepers. I couldn’t see very well what they were doing, but I gather their idea of a brown creeper was a very stealthy military maneuver that sneaks up from behind. It is just about as odd that there should be a brown creeper, I suppose, as that there should be a priest named Father Flye. At least a man in a hospital, whom he went to call on, thought it was so odd that he said he had to get up to see a man named Flye. Around the same church, it was pointed out to me, there are all sorts of natural history references—a Father Weed and a Father Leach. But I don’t know that any of this is any odder than that there should be a Mary Cramblitt and an Amy Clampitt in the same apartment house. [ … ]

[ … ] You must be on your way to becoming an expert on spending Christmas in foreign parts—as I anyhow must still call them. There is something to be said, anyhow, for spending Christmas away from the rush and general short-temperedness that mark it here. (Or is it the same even in Florence?) I shan’t be having a family Christmas myself this year, as it turns out—I’m here in New York, will go to midnight mass on the eve, and on the day itself to the convent in New Jersey, there to stay overnight; then back to New York for an hour or so, and then I am off for Iowa. Yes, I am going, with the idea of staying for six months, after which I have no idea what may happen. So Renée will take my apartment here, and I shall be sharing one in Des Moines with my sister—presumably, though she has said neither yes nor no to the suggestion, but is waiting, I think, to be sure I really mean it. I spent Thanksgiving out there, finding her much better than I had been led to expect, and having a fine time generally. This was the first time I had seen Iowa in winter since 1951, and it seemed almost strange, and strangely beautiful. The very things I fled from are now attractive, and I think I can be happy there, though at moments I am still torn at the thought of leaving the east, Manhattan, and West 12th Street behind. But one must go back to one’s native heath, prairie or back alley and set foot thereon once again, and I feel singularly fortunate in having such ground to set foot on. [ … ]

[ … ] As you can see, I have an address of my own (or rather my sister and I have it together), in which I am not only quite settled but very happily so. Des Moines itself is so strange to me in some ways that I might almost be visiting a new country. Living first in rural and then in the most metropolitan of surroundings does not prepare one for life in a medium-sized city—which may possibly be why, happy as I am day after day, I continue to have an almost uncanny sense of detachment. Partly I suppose it is the blissful fact of not having to go to an office every day; partly it is the almost unbelievable quietness of my particular location; but I find myself wondering from time to time whether I shall ever again feel as though I lived anywhere the way I came to feel, in all those years, about West Twelfth Street, which is still so vivid to me, whenever I choose to think of it, that I am hardly conscious of missing it. The things I miss are relatively inconsequential. Who would have supposed that one could hunger and thirst as I have, simply for the pleasure of being in a bookstore filled with paperbacks most of which one has not and moreover never will read, most likely? And yet when I found myself in Iowa City, seeing my brother Philip get his Master’s degree, a few weeks back, it was to such a bookstore that I made a bee-line, dragging sister, brother, and brother’s brand-new fiancée (a lovely girl, and so exactly the right one that I occasionally marvel, even now) in the peremptory fashion for which I am known among my family, if not outside it, and where—to get back to the Iowa Book and Supply Company—I spent an afternoon of bliss. Iowa City, being a university town primarily, seems to me much less strange than Des Moines, and in certain ways more attractive, though I have no real yearning to live there either. For one thing, it contains and in a gentle way is dominated by the Old Capitol, which so far as I know is the architectural gem of a state otherwise notorious for barns, silos, windmills and public monstrosities—a modest, almost eighteenth-century building (it is like New York City Hall on a smaller scale) in native limestone, built above the river from whose bluffs the limestone came. And the limestone has a golden tinge which might almost be Italian. Also, in a university town pedestrians are still not quite the solitary oddity they are here. Nobody walks; one has the feeling that feet are about to become vestigial, like the appendix. Sidewalks already are. Crossing a main thoroughfare is, in a somewhat different way, almost as formidable an undertaking as around the Étoile—the difference being in the utter solitariness thereof. But as you will understand, this is more in the nature of a gloss than a complaint. Inconveniences—such as those posed by being a dogged Anglo-Catholic in a family of Quakers, in a city of “low” churches (which means Communion only at eight a.m., most Sundays) and buses which operate, if at all, on a schedule I have yet to comprehend—have a way of turning into adventures and of heightening one’s delight in what one would otherwise take for granted: being offered a ride on a morning of zero weather, with frost making halos about every least plume of smoke, and falling from every tree in a Dantean shower, and cardinals caroling from the branches thereof as though spring were already come, and after that the vestments, the candles, the cross, and the words of the prayerbook, and then the sacrament itself…. We are living in a three-room apartment above a garage, overlooking a wooded ravine which in turn slopes down toward the Raccoon River. Through the trees—mainly oak, ash, and catalpa—we have a view in three directions toward the hills on the opposite bank. Rock Island trains pass through the valley, and to me they sound almost invariably like tugboats on the Hudson, hooting before one is quite awake on a foggy morning in New York. And I have discovered, this morning when I went out to refill the bird feeder, that on a still day one can hear bells. They come, presumably, from the Roman Catholic cathedral downtown, and it is a commentary on the taste of that edifice and of R.C. piety in general that they should be followed by chimes playing “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” All the same, bells are bells. Do you remember Redentore, in Venice, that played Three Blind Mice, all out of tune, at five a.m. of an already blinding summer day? My friend Anne, whom I mentioned, I think, in my last letter, wrote me from Zurich of the bells there, bells all over the city ringing at nightfall, and that reminded me of bells in Oxford and bells in Florence, where the campanile of Santo Spirito was part of the view from my pensione window. She is still in Italy, or somewhere about Europe; she told her parents at Christmas that she planned to join a religious order in June, and so her parents persuaded her to stay and she is now being shown the World with a vengeance by a baffled father. Her address is Anne Marshall, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Lago di Como, if you should happen to find yourself in the vicinity. She is a blessedly lovely girl. [The story of Anne Marshall is the basis for “Rain at Bellagio” in The Kingfisher.] As for the novel: it goes, to date, better than I hoped it might. The quiet and the detachment are ideal for that; or perhaps it is the novel which accounts for the detachment. There is hardly any struggle; it just comes, like grace—which is, I suppose, what being able to do it at all amounts to. I believe it may be finished in the six months I gave myself. After that, I have no plans, no distinct ideas of plans even. My brother is to be married on the 12th of June. After that, sooner or later, I shall probably be back in New York—but for how long, at present there is no way of telling. [ … ]

It was the first day of spring when you wrote, and though at the time it seemed highly improbably, spring here has now blossomed into a riotous and incontrovertible fact. Here on the banks of the Raccoon River whole hillsides, whole front lawns are carpeted with bells and stars and minute, embroidered, sky-blue faces. It has been the Iowa spring I remembered from my childhood, only more so. Such blossoming, such bird-song—across my typewriter this morning come the voices of veeries and white-throated sparrows (such wistful notes of linked-sweetness-long-drawn-out that I decline to believe they could really be construed as avian no-trespassing signs), of robins, mourning doves, cardinals, bubbling-over wrens, and whicking flickers, among others. Those flickers, in fact, had me on the point of addressing a dickey-bird letter to the Audubon Society, asking whether it would be lawful for me to shoot the starling which has been engaging in a campaign to dislodge the new-wedded whicking pair from a certain nesting hole which I with my own eyes saw papa flicker excavating, with admirable energy and persistence, of a period of several days. I tell myself, as the Audubon Society would no doubt do, that the starlings merely know a good thing when they see it, and were not themselves witnesses to the excavation thereof. However, it appears that the flickers are going to win, and that truth, justice, and prior property rights may yet prevail.

I have become so preoccupied what such goings-on that one would expect progress on the manuscript to suffer. All the same, I am now within fifty pages of retyping and revising the first draft, which was done on the first of April, and now I must go down and buy some more Corrasable Bond before I can proceed further. I was even able to take a week’s holiday from the manuscript while I went to visit Doris in Lincoln. From there we drove to Kansas City early on the morning of Good Friday, and there wound up Holy Week in the high-church style to which St. Luke’s had accustomed me, and which is one thing I miss in Des Moines. We also explored, also feasted, and now I am crazy about Kansas City. Nobody told me it had any charm, but it turns out to be full of it. Also, it has a magnificent art gallery with a magnificent collection of Italian paintings, among other things which we never got around to looking at. Also, a church in the shape of a fish, which nevertheless has something of the soaring architectural grandeur of the Popes’ palace at Avignon. Also, the best steaks anybody could ask for, at astonishingly low prices—I never ate a better filet mignon, and the whole dinner came to two dollars. Also, one can order cocktails in a restaurant—and the exhilaration of that fact can only be appreciated by one who has been living some three months in a dry state: you feel civilized and cosmopolitan, a certified adult. As a piquant touch, the city’s tornado warnings were going off just as we finished our dinner—all the civil defense sirens wailing overhead, squad cars patrolling the streets and shooing pedestrians indoors, and over it all is an ominous dead calm, and one sits drinking a brandy, quite calmly except for a queer feeling at the pit of one’s stomach, and looking out now and then to see whether the debris has started to fall. In the end the funnels that had been sighted never touched ground, and one had all the excitement with none of the discomfort of disasters and acts of God.

Back in Lincoln, I got a taste of graduate-school atmosphere for the first time in years, and found it vastly preferable to Columbia’s. One thing that would have entertained you, I think, was a faculty round table at which it was announced that a member of the philosophy department was to discuss Wittgenstein. You know who he was—the ex-Logical-Positivist who taught at Cambridge and had such an influence, though he published next to nothing. What this Professor Bousma proceeded to do, however, was to read, first, an excerpt from Berkeley on knowledge-derived-via-sensation (a constellation of vagueness, that phrase, at which Wittgenstein would have shuddered, but you know what I mean), and after that, a longer excerpt from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, in which the Berkleyan theory was refuted, in the opinion of Johnson himself, by his proceeding vigorously to kick a stone. From these two excerpts he then proceeded to read a paper in which, in words largely of one syllable, the Berkeleyan theory was delicately but at great length pummeled, kicked, trounced, and rolled over and over and over. At the beginning everybody laughed, but by the end of twenty-five minutes of this people were starting to get mad. There was an intermission, and the meeting was thrown open for discussion. It was almost impossible to open one’s mouth without being delicately, even gaily, strung up and hanged by one’s own slightly ill-chosen words. Having prudently abstained from opening my own mouth, I found it all vastly entertaining, and even those who got themselves strung up admitted that they had learned thereby something about the method of Wittgenstein. The next day, the English department coffee room, where people seem to spend a remarkable amount of time, buzzed all day long with some of the best talk I ever heard anywhere, and all of it stemming from the performance of the night before, and I went away much cheered at the state of at least one sector of the academic world.