Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt

Now I can hardly remember yesterday. I have been ashore twice since the last installment—last evening just at sunset, for a three-hour exploration, and again bright and early today for a longer one by daylight. It is a beautiful town, the old part built of rosy-gold stone, with a vast, towering cathedral with Gothic towers and buttresses dominating it, and a Moorish castle at the top of a hill covered with bright green pines. Along the quay are gardens full of pink oleanders and plots of calla lilies; there are little white doves with pink eyes nesting in the walls, and bats flying about at dusk, and red-and-yellow carriages drawn by black Spanish horses clopping along the boulevards, which often have a promenade along the middle; also fountains playing, and curving narrow streets with doors opening into lovely courtyards with wrought-iron screens and palms planted inside. The cathedral is simply vast, with red-yellow-and-blue stained glass; and we heard the most wonderful singing of the mass there, by a whole choir of priests, that I ever heard anywhere. Everywhere we went, also, there were minor adventures, mostly revolving around not being able to sort out the few Spanish words one ever knew from the Italian one is so busily chattering on shipboard. But Spanish people are basically courteous, as well as beautiful to look at; I never saw so many flashing smiles as we met among these dark-eyed, long-lashed, gentle people. Getting to the Moorish castle was something of an expedition, which we finally managed by bus and on foot; and when we came down we dropped into a tiny restaurant for a glass of Spanish sherry and a sandwich (which incidentally was wonderful, as food in Palma seems generally to be). It turned out to be full of British expatriates, and the proprietor first took us for English people; when he found out where we really came from, we had a lecture on U.S. Foreign policy—and learned, incidentally, that people over here don’t like Nixon and consider Eisenhower a failure, and, ergo, think Kennedy will be elected. I found it quite flattering to be addressed so frankly, though my cabin-mate from Atlanta was, apparently, just a bit startled.

The Constitution is still in the harbor, but we came off it yesterday afternoon—in the midst of a longshoremen’s strike, so I found myself carrying my own bag. Since the last installment we have anchored at Cannes, on the French Riviera, for a day. I can’t say I cared for the place, which is more like Miami Beach than anything else. But Naples, strike or no strike, is something else. Ginny, the girl from my table, is staying with me, and we have a room with a balcony overlooking that famous Bay—which is just as beautiful as reputation makes it—a perfect half-circle of blue water, full of boats, with tiers of tall houses, tawny yellow and brick-red, rising along the slope, and Vesuvius in the background. By night the slopes are like a nest of fireflies. The traffic is fierce—buses, taxis, big and little cars, and dozens of hornet-voiced motor scooters, rushing past all night long. All the same, I slept well, and after having spent the afternoon getting off the pier and the evening putting one of our Italian friends, who goes on to Genoa, back on the ship, I hope today will bring some proper sight-seeing.

This was interrupted, as always seems to be happening. I am now in Pavia, a university town a few miles south of Milan, and it is now Sunday evening, and I am just about to settle down to sleep off all the wining and dining of the last forty-eight hours. The dinner party for eighteen proved so delightful that I scarcely took proper notice of the sweet soufflé and champagne with which it ended, what with the sparkling conversation of the Italian legal philosophers on either side of me, and the Oxford graduate and the teacher from Ohio State just down the line. Dining at the Villa Serbelloni is a real experience. One comes down a long marble hall and a deeply carpeted flight of marble stairs, at the foot of which Vincenzo, the butler, is waiting to direct the guests to the column room—a sort of glassed-in verandah—where there are drinks beforehand. (And it is not good form there to be late.) Presently Vincenzo comes in to announce that dinner is served, and shows the way. Outside the vast paneled and silk-hung dining room there is a seating plan, to make finding places easier. At each place last night there were three glasses—one for the mineral water which is used for drinking purposes at the Villa, one for red wine, with the roast duck, and the other for the champagne. After dessert the party moved to one of several drawing-rooms for coffee and liqueurs, and the conversation goes on. Last night, after the dinner guests had gone, Anne and I and two Americans went down the hill to another house (once a monastery) on the villa grounds, where we joined a party consisting of the director’s secretary, a Greek girl brought up in Italy, and two young Italians from Milan. One of them works, of all things, in the Supermarket business—there are already two in Milan, and one will open soon in Florence. I expressed proper shock, in my stumbling and gesticulating brand of Italian, but he couldn’t see why I objected. It was after midnight before we could get away, and the bells on the lake had struck 2 a.m. before I had myself packed and could go to bed; and Anne and I were up again before seven to catch a ferry across the lake, where there was an English church. It was pouring rain again—after gorgeous September weather on Saturday—and we were the only passengers. We came back in a still heavier downpour, and went to mass at the church in Bellagio, where a handsome priest delivered an elegantly impassioned sermon of which I could make neither head nor tail, and Anne herself said she couldn’t follow. Before lunch Anne’s father showed us the wine-cellar—the first honest-to-goodness one I ever saw. There were seven at lunch, including an Italian professor and his American-born wife, and a Rockefeller Foundation geneticist and agronomist from Mexico City, with his wife, who turned out to be from Iowa! In their honor we were served corn-on-the-cob from the Villa gardens, and I have seldom eaten better. The Villa gardens also produce pears, apples, and quantities of grapes—these latter are just now ripening, and there was great fun raiding the vines on our way up and down hill—as well as a profusion of flowers, which decorate every room in the house. Altogether, I never stayed in any place so magnificent. It was a rather strange occasion, since when Anne and I left together this afternoon she was on her way to England, probably never to come back, possibly never to see her father again. (Her mother is already in England.) We had a wonderful time, exploring the Villa gardens, the woods above and the little fishing village below, and playing duets on our recorders in a ruined castle at the very top of the Villa grounds. Coming up from Naples to Milan, incidentally, was an adventure in itself. We splurged and came by Wagons-lits—the deluxe European Pullman which is hardly less than a hotel on wheels, but instead of eating in the diner we carried aboard a shopping-bag full of bread, wine, and cheese, and made merry over those in picnic style. The afternoon before we headed north—to continue proceeding backward—we went south to Paestum, where there is a splendid Greek temple, wonderfully well preserved. [ … ]

Coming back to Italy is less of an adventure than the first visit, but in a way that makes it more interesting. In Florence I went back to my old pensione of nine years ago—run, that is, by the same plump, effusive little lady, and the same star boarder, one Signor Dino, on hand, but now at a new and grander address, with maids and a boy to serve the meals, and with more hot water, so a bath is less of a project, though on the other hand it is less picturesque and I preferred the old location. Anyhow, it was an experience to be welcomed back with open arms, and mealtimes were always lively—what with French, German, Swiss, and Italian people—and me—conversing in whatever common languages they were able to discover. I find that I understand both French and German fairly well, but whenever I open my mouth to speak in anything but English, it comes out Italian! The food at the pensione was, if anything, better, and I discovered that, as before, in Italy I am always hungry. Actually the cooking is quite simple—soups, spaghetti or some other form of pasta, beefsteak or veal cutlet cooked in olive oil, lettuce and tomato salad (you mix your own oil-and-vinegar dressing at the table, and the olive oil is superb), crusty Italian bread, and a first course of pears and grapes (these are wonderful, just now), and sometimes cheese. The famous lunch of this noon consisted of a Roman specialty, saltimbocca, which turns out to be veal skewered together with thin slices of ham, with some green herbs (basil or sage) in between, and a butter sauce over all. Delicious!

My impression of Italy by this time is that it is much more prosperous than nine years ago, and much more casual about tourists. Also, at this season, there are relatively few Americans. The language one hears most often, aside from Italian, is German, and I am taken for German or Swiss almost constantly—American never. I don’t know what that means. Anyhow, they know I’m not Italian because I wear my skirts so long. Here, they are literally up to the knees. Also, Italian girls now go around without any lipstick but a great deal of black about the eyes, and what with the hair-styles in vogue (which are indescribable) they mainly look as though they had neither slept nor combed their hair for at least forty-eight hours. The effect is undeniably striking, but hardly becoming—so I dare say it will pass ere long.

I am so glad to hear that Beth is liking her job—that is just about the best news I could have. Thanks again for forwarding the various messages. The postcards from my elusive friend Mary are most tantalizing—I keep on missing her, it would seem, but she has postponed leaving Italy so often by this time that I may connect with her yet, I suppose. As for the letter from Barbados, it could hardly be from anybody but my old friend Father Morralé—the English priest who instructed me before I was confirmed—and so I would dearly love to have it, if you will send it on. Evidently he has moved, and I suppose the mimeographed letter is by way of bringing his friends up to date.

The rains, happily, appear to be over, and one could not ask for more perfect weather than the last three days in Florence and now here in Rome—bright and warm in the middle of the day, with just a hint of a nip in it, and pleasantly cool at night. There has been so much rain all summer that in the Po Valley and around Florence the countryside is as green as in spring. Only the grapes ones sees ripening everywhere give the season away.

29 September—Rome goes on being exhausting—I’ve just come from another expedition, on foot, which must have taken me five or six miles—to St. Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls, a disappointment in itself, despite the ancient associations, but on the way I found the little cemetery where Keats and Shelley are buried, and that was very much worth finding. Tomorrow I leave for Assisi; after that Ravenna, and thence northward by way of Salzburg. But probably c/o American Express in Paris will be the safest address to write to, say, through the 15th of October.

Wonderful, wonderful to find letters waiting! I arrived here this morning via the Orient Express, a romantic cross-continental train that starts out somewhere the other side of Budapest and winds up in Paris—and made a bee-line, as nearly as one can make a bee-line in a city as confusing as Paris, after nine years, for American Express, where I was rewarded with news, after a long dearth. It begins to be a long time since I last wrote—though perhaps Beth will have shared my letter to her from Assisi. After I wrote, things there became increasingly more exciting, on account of the feast of St. Francis, which commemorates the day of his death, on the 4th of October. For a couple of evenings beforehand there were two-hour-long vesper services, with wonderful choirs of Franciscan monks, augmented by a boys’ choir as well—singing and singing and singing I don’t know what all, with a small forest of candles lighting up the frescos on the walls of the low-ceilinged, vaulted church which has been built just above the tomb of the saint; and afterwards throngs and swarms of people, pilgrims and sightseers, milling around outside, but still not spoiling the serene and peaceful atmosphere that is part of the town, and makes it unlike any other I ever saw. On the eve of the feast there were also torches lighted and blazing above the medieval gates, and from the walls of the fortress on the hill above the town; and the bells simply rang and rang and rang, a veritable orchestra of bells, for I don’t know how long without stopping. Later that evening there was a midnight mass—again with a Franciscan choir—in the great church down the hill from Assisi itself, which has been built above the little chapel where St. Francis died. I went down for it on foot—though it is in the neighborhood of three miles each way—with a Swiss girl who was also staying at the convent. It was a perfectly beautiful night, very still and mild, and with a full moon in a dark-blue sky—and to look up from the road down into the valley and see Assisi, all white and still, perched there on its hillside—was worth the trip in itself. The next day there were more festivities, with a cardinal celebrating mass, and dressed in the most sumptuously jeweled vestments I ever saw—all of which may seem an odd way to remember the saint who fell in love with Lady Poverty, but then, what is one to do? Once again, the church and the whole town were swarming with visitors; but still I was able to walk out through the city gates, along a road lined with cypresses, and have the whole stupendous landscape, as undisturbed as ever, spread out like a map at my feet. I never wanted so much to be a painter as at Assisi. It is certainly one of the most enchanting places I ever visited, and I was never more reluctant to leave than I was that day when I gathered my belongings together and caught a train for Florence—a bit of backtracking which was necessary to get to Ravenna, where I had made up my mind to go. Actually, I was in Florence only overnight, and once again missed my friend Mary, it now appears—she was there looking for me, while I thought she was already on her way back to New York.

Anyhow, early the next morning I took a bus from Florence over the Appenines, up a long series of loops and curves, very wild and picturesque, through oak and chestnut forests and high cleared spaces, now and then, where sheep and goats were grazing with a shepherd on hand to see that they didn’t go over a cliff. Then gradually down on the other side, into the plains where the Po and Adige and other rivers drain into the Adriatic. Ravenna, where I made an overnight stop, is some miles inland, but the feel of the sea is there, even though what you see are mainly canals and fields of sugar beets, and here and there a grove or avenue of the bright-green, round-topped pines which are characteristic of the coastal region. Ravenna is a very ancient town, going back to pagan times; Theodoric the Ostrogoth is buried there, as is Dante, who went there as an exile from Florence; and what I found wonderful to think of is that the mosaics for which the town is chiefly noted were already there, and already old (they date to the sixth century, he lived in the thirteenth) when Dante was there—and he saw them! They are one of the most astonishing sights I ever met with—still bright and fresh, and hardly restored at all, after well over a thousand years. The loveliest mosaics, and the loveliest of the churches, were once again a three-mile hike out into the country, and since the excursion buses had stopped running I started out on foot. As it happened, a kindly man gave me a lift part of the way in his car going out; but coming back I walked all the way, in the midst of a constant procession of passing cars, trucks, and bicycles—the latter still being the commonest mode of travel there, and indeed in most of Italy. As if the mosaics and the tomb of Dante weren’t enough, Ravenna also offered the best eating (if you except the Villa Serbelloni, which is a category all by itself) I met anywhere in Italy. A wonderful place—and to think I debated whether to go there at all!

From Ravenna I proceeded to Padua, also a very ancient town, with I think the oldest university in Italy (though Italian towns are very jealous of their antiquity in this respect, and I believe more than one lays claim to that superlative). I had been there before, for part of a day when Joe Goodman and I made an excursion from Venice to look at the Giotto frescos for which it is famous, and wonderful as those were in themselves, I had thought I didn’t care for Padua itself. This time, though, I quite fell in love with it, and with the people there, who seemed to me the most exquisitely courteous, even courtly, of all the cities I ever visited. Things like a little girl sharing her umbrella with me in the drenching downpour I found myself caught in; and the girl in a shop I went into, who seemed to be showing me what was for sale—beautiful, expensive Venetian glass, and Italian, French and English porcelain—not in order to sell me anything, but simply because it was so beautiful; and the man in a bank who noted on my passport, when he changed a traveler’s check, that I had put myself down as a “writer,” and wished me success. Part of this may be the fact that Padua is not a tourist town, in the way Rome and Florence are, and so their attitude toward the occasional stranger is to regard him as a sort of guest rather than a source of income. It is also, I decided this time, very beautiful, with many arcaded streets—I suppose intended to keep off the sun in summer, but useful also when one is caught in a downpour. Actually, that rainy night I didn’t stay in Padua, but deposited my heavy luggage at the station and then caught a local bus up-country to Asolo, a little hill town about which I had learned from one of the postcards you forwarded, from the elusive Mary. Going up there was really an adventure. By the time the bus pulled up the long hill leading to the town it was after eight o’clock, my feet were soaked, I had no hotel reservation and the one place I knew the name of turned out to be closed; so there was some floundering about in the rain before I found a room—always a slightly weird experience in a town you have never seen, and all the more so in a town so medieval that it had no streetlights, and in pouring rain. However, I did finally find where to lay my head, and even cajoled a meal out of the kitchen, late as it was; and when morning came, I discovered that the view beyond the shutters of that otherwise dismal room was too stupendously, romantically beautiful, almost, to be believed. Once again, this is a very old town, also with arcaded streets, and built on the slopes of a hill radiating outward and down rather like the rays of a starfish, on dozens of different levels, so that there are views, views, views, in every direction. All sorts of people have come there through the centuries—Robert Browning was one, and his poem Asolando (which I have never read) was one of them. I spent the morning exploring Asolo, then caught the bus back to Padua, where I wandered around until dark; then to a hotel for my last night in Italy, and up in the morning at five to catch a train over the Alps to Salzburg. I arrived there (after a delightful ride, ten hours long, but hardly tiring, through mile after mile of mountain landscape) late in the afternoon on Saturday, and stayed until Tuesday evening (last night, though now it seems an age away. [ … ] I think after a month or so I would have been fairly chattering in German—it began to come back to me after a bit of the habit of talking Italian wore off—but here I am, once again, having to switch to French! More later, must stop now.

It really is time I wrote you a letter, and now I have the most impromptu, unexpected, one-thing-after-another day of the whole journey to report, and that was a Sunday at that. I find it hard even to remember the name of this town, which I hadn’t so much as heard of until the day before yesterday, and which in fact I have hardly seen, in the tourist sense of the word, even now. I came here from Oxford—another story, except that it is every bit as wonderful as I always thought—yesterday afternoon on a bus, which arrived after dark, in streaming rain, and set me down at the door of a pub, where I stood dripping for a minute or two before darting out and, happily, finding the entrance of what turned out to be a very nice hotel, where they did have a room, charmingly furnished, where you put sixpence in a slot to turn on a gas fire, and where they put a hot water bottle into the bed for you. This morning, happily, the rain seemed to be over, and I headed for the parish church, where two kindly ladies took me in hand and set me down with them. It was like that all day long, most improbably. After I had had a good solid English breakfast—porridge, bacon, sausage, tomato, toast and marmalade—I put on my boots and set out on foot for the real reason for my coming to Chepstow—Tintern Abbey. I hadn’t even known exactly where it was, until a nice young man at the bus headquarters in Oxford looked it up for me; but on a map in the hotel lobby I found the route to take to Tintern—a distance of some five miles, but I have walked so much in the last several weeks that it no longer sounds formidable. What I didn’t know, until I was actually in it, was that the road led through Tintern Forest, a wild, steep, lovely region which has been set aside as a national reserve. It made me think, a bit, of the redwood forest we drove through that Sunday on our way to San Francisco—though in place of the redwoods and Douglas firs there were yew trees, mixed with beech, and with here and there a holly tree, and ferns and ivy covering the ground and often the trunks of the trees. There were also still some flowers in bloom—there has been no frost to speak of—and to give you an idea I enclose a few botanical specimens. By the time I came out of the forest the sun had gone, and it was definitely raining again. I had just caught sight of Tintern Abbey itself when a car slowed down and the very nice-looking woman at the wheel asked if I would like a lift. I told her I had just come out to see the Abbey, but she said why didn’t I come along first and have a drink with her and her husband; so I did, and in the end they also gave me lunch, and a most delightful time. She turned out to be an ex-entertainer (piano) who had met her husband, a civil engineer, while she was playing for troops in Korea; and they had traveled a good deal, and had last lived in Somaliland, but a few months ago they had bought this house, which was—part of it—three hundred years old. It had a lovely view of wooded hills, and the valley of the Wye River, which was just below their terrace. There were swans on the river (one sees them everywhere in England at this time of year) and I looked at them through binoculars to find out from the bills, which kind they were. After feeding me an enormous lunch of steak and chips (as they call French-fries over here), green peas, tomatoes, apple pie and custard, with a mug of excellent beer brewed by the hostess herself, she drove me back to the Abbey, and since it was literally pouring rain by then, waited in her car while I looked round, and then drove me back to Chepstow. The abbey itself is indescribably lovely—roofless and vast, with great pointed windows, the glass long gone but some of the stone tracery still remaining. The stone a warm, rosy tone, encrusted with green and gray lichens, and with bunches of ferns growing high up in the angles of some of the mouldings, and against a background of wooded hills on either side of the Wye, altogether one of the most thrilling places I have ever seen, and romantic even in pouring rain.

Since all this is on the very border of Wales proper, it occurred to me that I still might have a chance to hear Welsh people singing. The man at the gateway to the Abbey told me I would probably have to go to Newport, a matter of fifteen or so miles from Chepstow, so go to Newport I did, after having told the man in the bus station what I wanted to do there and being shown the church notices in Saturday’s newspaper. To make sure I was getting off at the right place, I asked a girl on the bus, who immediately recognized from my accent that I was American (they always do), and volunteered to show me to wherever I was going. She didn’t know where the Ebenezer Welsh Presbyterian Church might be, but brought a policeman into the inquiry, and as it turned out that she and a friend were going in the same direction, she invited me under her umbrella, we all hopped aboard a bus and then off again and into a coffee bar which turned out to be directly across the street from the Ebenezer chapel. The chapel itself was still dark, and the man behind the counter at the coffee bar was then enlisted to keep watch and let me know when the lights went on. Well, they didn’t go on and they didn’t go on, and meanwhile everybody in the vicinity knew that I had come down to Newport on purpose to hear people singing in Welsh, and since all the pubs are closed on a Sunday in this part of Britain, there was no chance to go and hear them singing there, as they do when they get drinking, and I was beginning to fear the expedition had been in vain. However, there was an unexpected diversion: a very handsome boy suddenly appeared, and almost before he sat down with us I learned that he was Italian! Finding an Italian is always a pleasure, because trying to talk to them in Italian is such fun; and the next thing I knew, here came another Italian, and another, and immediately they also had to be told that I was American and had come down to Newport to go to the Welsh church, and they thought I must be very religious, and I said no, it wasn’t that, it was that I wanted to hear people singing in Welsh, and this bewildered them still more, but it didn’t prevent them from being very friendly, and I learned that they came to England to become apprentices because jobs are still relatively scarce in Italy, but of course they talk all the time about bella Italia and how in England it always rains—and outside it was pouring harder than ever. Among all the Italians who kept coming in were two very good-looking Negroes, one of whom was soon drawn into the conversation, and it turned out that he was from Somalia, and so we all sat counting up the nationalities, and marveling over them, and there was the question of whether the girl who had brought me here, and who was Monmouthshire-born, was properly English or properly Welsh (she said she was English, but the others said no, Welsh), and this is what always happens when Monmouthshire is mentioned, and the Italians started telling me all the Welsh words they knew, and then, finally, lights were seen in the Ebenezer chapel, and I shook hands all round, and the Italians said I should pray for them, and I darted across the way and into the church, where I was handed a hymnbook which, sure enough, was all in Welsh, and I slipped into a pew and waited for things to start. There was an organ directly behind the pulpit, which wheezed whenever it was turned on, but no choir, for the reason that in a Welsh church the congregation is the choir. It really is true that they all sing, without direction, and in wonderful polyphonic harmony, as naturally, almost, as a baby cries or a flower grows. After a couple of hymns and a very long prayer by the minister, a ruddy and portly man in a clerical collar, and another hymn, the sermon began, and as I had suspected in advance, it turned out to be just about the longest sermon I ever listened to. And I really did listen, even though it was all in Welsh with an English phrase thrown in now and then for emphasis, but from those English phrases and the very graphic gestures of the preacher, I understood quite well that he was talking about the prophet Amos, and how he said, “I will put a plumbline among my people Israel.” How many times over I saw that plumbline being suspended from the pulpit I did not try to count—that would have been rude anyhow—but I began to think a little uneasily of the hotel back in Chepstow, and to wonder whether I should be getting back there before its doors closed for the night, as they do at a quite early hour in these provincial towns, and I am afraid I began to fidget. But slowly, circuitously, and with more suspending of plumblines, eloquent pauses, vehement gestures, shutting of Bible, shutting of prayerbook, at last, somehow, the preaching came to an end; and bang! after one more hymn (in which, surreptitiously, I joined in) the service was over. Immediately all the ladies in my vicinity converged and addressed me in Welsh. I explained that I did not speak Welsh, but that I had come down from Chepstow—“From Chepstow! This lady’s come down from Chepstow!”—and then ventured to add that I was from the United States. For once I had the satisfaction of seeing people register surprise. Before I got out of the church I must have shaken hands with half the congregation, while the word went buzzing around, and by the time I got to the door I found myself confronted by the pastor—“I hear you came from the United States”—and so I admitted that I did, and that I had wanted to hear people sing in Welsh, and I was highly satisfied, indeed I had loved it; and as far as I could see nobody was offended, though the pastor was amazed that I should have found my way down here, and how had I done it, and as I told him, I left him still shaking his head in amazement; and I did get back to Chepstow before the hotel doors closed, and now—it is Monday morning by this time—I am about to head for Dorchester, and so abruptly I shall end this breathless bit of illegibility.

So physids are snails! I allowed as how they might be, from a reference some time back. I find it a bit hard transferring allegiance to them from the amphipods, but I suppose that is a matter of not having met them personally. On the other hand, I once wrote a story in which the central character (in a manner of speaking) was a snail, so you see I am not unacquainted with their peculiar molluscan charm.

Thank you so much for the blue, blue hepatica—my favorite hue of that delectable species, and to think of a whole hillside of them! And bloodroot! I have had moments of feeling nature-deprived, there on 12th Street, and of missing spring in Iowa most acutely. Spring in New York has been as cold and dank as it possibly could be, and the wonder is that the green things managed to come out at all. Out here, I am being consoled by dogwood in full bloom, not to mention jack-in-the-pulpits, sweet williams, and wood thrushes. There is also said to be a sandpiper down by the pond, but I haven’t seen it yet.

To justify a long weekend in the country, I’ve brought along some books to review for the Audubon Society. One of them is a treatise on the monarch butterfly, by one of my favorite entomologists—he was the man who, in the interests of science, had various volunteers eating butterflies and comparing their taste sensations. He admits that the experiment doesn’t prove decisively that the theory of Batesian mimicry either is or is not valid, but I do love its thoroughgoing-ness. Of course there is a good deal in this book about the butterfly trees at Pacific Grove, including a mention of Sweet Thursday and Steinbeck’s charming (but erroneous) notion of monarchs drunk on Monterey-pinesap brew. As to the whole vexed question of whether or not monarchs migrate back, I am still in suspense and darkness, but hope to find out before I find myself assigned an encyclopedia article on the subject.

In that project I have progressed part-way into the B’s. Picture me struggling to digest Simpson, Tiffany, and Pittendrigh in order to turn out a thousand-word essay on Biology ! It is the biochemical part that really gives me trouble. I loved doing Bees, and of course with Birds I felt quite at home. Do remember that this is a simple-minded sort of Encyclopedia. [ … ]

The new novice was received yesterday, in a very thrilling ceremony, and there was a party (or as near as a convent ever gets to a party) afterward, with punch and coffee and doughnuts. Later, wandering about the grounds, I met the novice, who told me of her difficulties with the new costume—long sleeves that get into things, bonnet and collar that make chewing and swallowing precarious, and so forth. We had a long conversation about all kinds of things; from now on, I learned, she is not supposed to talk to “seculars” until she is a full-fledged sister. This morning, after dishwashing, she couldn’t find her veil! (It comes off for household chores.)

Did I tell you that I have started a new novel? A first draft of a first chapter is now extant.

Your letter arrived just after my return from a somewhat extended holiday, which once again took me across the continent. It all came about because I had promised a friend that I would stand up with her at her wedding—which for various reasons had to be in Berkeley, California, where she and her husband were to be living. So late in August I headed west, stopping to see a brother in Minnesota and my parents and sister in Iowa, and then joining my friend and her then fiancé in Nebraska. From there the three of us started out by car on what may have been a unique sort of expedition—a wedding trip before the wedding, with me acting as bridesmaid, duenna, and I don’t know what else. We took along sleeping bags (no tent) and camped out, building fires to cook over, tucking sagebrush under our pillows, nearly freezing one night high in the Colorado mountains, and eating one last picnic in the middle of a Nevada dust storm. It was all a bit crazy, but just the sort of traveling I love, in spite of the discomforts, and since we were all still speaking to each other by the time we got to Berkeley it was clearly a success. The wedding went off happily, and when it was over I headed south for my first look at Los Angeles. I didn’t see a film studio or go to Disneyland, but I did walk in an orange grove, and was taken for a swim in one of those backyard pools you hear about—a particularly delightful swim since I was just about to board a train after a hot, dusty day of sightseeing. That part of California is really a desert, and much of it is rather frightful—but even the frightful part of it is interesting, and thanks to some cousins who entertained me, I had a fine time. But the best part of the trip, so far as sightseeing goes, was still to come. I traveled back by way of the Grand Canyon, a truly magnificent sight—I spent a whole day there, tramping about the rim of the canyon and even going a little of the way down into it, and even after a night on the train it was so exhilarating that I left feeling happy and rested. After another night on the train, I stopped off again at Santa Fe, New Mexico—a very old town where I stayed a couple of days, and wished I didn’t have to leave at all. I didn’t know there was a town like it in the United States. People there still speak Spanish, but it isn’t at all like Spain or even much like Mexico. All the architecture is adobe, in the style of the Indian pueblos, and there are many trees even though that is desert country, and the air is wonderfully clear and sparkling, with deep blue skies and great towering clouds. It’s seven thousand feet up, but there are still higher mountains all around. I made an excursion to an Indian pueblo, where things go on much as they have for hundreds of years—nobody knows how old it is—and though the Indians drive cars they still wrap themselves in blankets like Arab burnooses, and speak their own language among themselves. If you ever come to the U.S., you must see the Southwest!

Altogether the trip lasted nearly five weeks, and after that I was mostly in a great dither, trying to catch up with things—and in what now seems hardly any time at all, I was heading back for Iowa once more. This came about because of a great family reunion at my parents’ house—all three of my brothers and their families, my sister and I were all in the same place at the same time for the first time in longer than we can remember—twenty years or more, it must be, even though we had all seen each other at various times and we number sixteen—the youngest being an enchanting baby girl of six months, who quickly became everybody’s favorite (but all the children are delightful). Somehow, room was found for all of us in my parents’ house, and there was much chatter and playing of recorders—those little wooden flutes I may have mentioned, of which there are now at least five among us—and singing around the piano, and a certain amount of confusion in the kitchen, where preparing meals for so many was generally a cooperative project. On the Sunday before Christmas the crowd was swelled to forty-five (I’m told—I never got around to counting) when a great horde of aunts and uncles and cousins appeared from various places. They brought the trimmings; we did the turkeys—two fifteen-pound ones—and the mashed potatoes and the dessert. After attending to that operation, Christmas dinner for the sixteen plus three guests was a simple matter! Most of the crowd left the day after, but since my mother has been troubled with a lame back and was rather exhausted afterward, I stayed on until just after New Year’s, madly finishing up a piece of ghost-writing (yes, I’ve even gotten into that sort of thing!) that was due, in between trying to invent new ways of serving up left-over turkey. Except for a quart or so of broth made from the bones, it had finally all been used up by the time I left. [ … ]

This will be only an installment, but if I don’t begin now I’ll have lost track of things completely. The fourth day at sea, it’s hardly possible to remember when the trip began, with all there is to take in. This is a fascinating ship, and in lots of ways the best I ever traveled on. After all, the Greeks have been sailors for a very long time, so they should know how to run a ship! And my impression of the Greeks, from being surrounded by them, is of a charming people, warm-hearted and dignified at the same time. One of my cabin mates is a grandmother, returning from a visit to her children in the States, who speaks nothing but Greek—literally. I think I know more Greek words than she does English ones. We manage to communicate somehow, and get along very well. Another cabin mate is a Russian exile, also a grandmother, who also speaks Greek and knows a very few words of English—a beautiful woman, the sort one imagines a grand duchess would be. The third cabin mate is a lady from Naples who speaks some Greek and some English; she is very lively and chic, and we communicate in a wildly haphazard mixture of French, English, and Greek phrases when they happen to come out (she has a Greek father, I believe). We are all crammed together in the smallest cabin for four imaginable, where we stumble over each other’s luggage, and each other, and where there is only one ladder between the two of us in upper berths (I traded my original lower with the Russian lady, and it is fine once I am up there, but so high that I am marooned without the ladder). Fortunately, the weather has been quite calm (though there are a good many people who have been seasick), and we have been spared hearing moanings and groanings from the other berths. We have a delightful cabin steward named Giorgos, who speaks English and is very encouraging about one’s stumbling efforts at Greek. (“Kalimera-sas,” for Good morning; “Efkaristo” for thank you, “Ti kanis?” for How are you? “Poli-kala,” for Very well, and so on.) And every afternoon there is a half-hour Greek class, where we learn phrases and are being taught to sing “Never on Sunday” in Greek! I never saw a ship so organized; there are even something called Social Discussions—and an Iowa-born man and his wife told me they went, and the first one was about the benefits of the unpolished-rice diet! There are also classes in Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish. Since the ship goes to Haifa, there are many Israelis and American Jews aboard—many of them orthodox, with full beards and skullcaps (yarmulkas) on the backs of their heads. They have a staff rabbi, a kosher kitchen, and a synagogue of their own; today at lunch there was an announcement in Yiddish (or maybe Hebrew) about the Sabbath eve services.

Also, of course, there are many Greek orthodox people, including a wonderful patriarch who wears a black cassock, a handsome silvery beard, and long hair, done up in a knot—one of the most splendid-looking men I ever saw. On Sunday I am hoping to go to the Greek orthodox church service with my Greek cabin mate—if I can manage to explain to her! And who knows? Maybe the patriarch will conduct it—or maybe there are still other Greek orthodox priests aboard.

By some chance or other, I am at the captain’s table—not the ship’s master, but the staff captain who presides over tourist class. Most of my table mates are Greek-American girls, some of them quite beautiful and all very nice. There is also a young Greek-American who has a Greek wife waiting for him in Athens, and who is growing a beard. Also, an American couple from California, who are very funny and keep things lively; and he is growing a beard too. The captain himself, I am sorry to say, is so solemn that he is really quite dull; but he isn’t always there, and besides we have a wonderful waiter, by the name of Demetrios, who is called Jimmy. There is about three times as much food as most of us can eat—except for the Greek-American, who was a cook in the Navy, and who orders seconds of everything, and winds up with four portions of ice cream! He told me at the beginning that he was going to Greece to climb mountains, but there begins to be some question whether he will have any wind left! He has a cabin mate who is about twenty-one and also a cook, and who makes puns at a rate that would leave Daddy behind in the dust. For a couple of hours last night he had all of us convulsed; and this morning while I was dozing in my deck chair there he was again, with more of the same.

Bringing my borrowed typewriter into the writing room turns out to be as infallible a way of meeting people as going out to walk the dog or take the baby for an airing. People under the impression that I was some kind of public stenographer have come by, and thus far I have obliged with notes to relatives in Cliffside, New Jersey, an itemized list of things a nice little man from Hollywood had had stolen from his luggage, to be witnessed by the purser, and two long letters dictated by a polylingual Israeli to friends in the U.S., one of them a strip-tease dancer in Dallas! This young man is writing down everything he sees going on in a huge diary—in Hebrew. There is obviously material enough there for a book, and from what he has to say it would be fascinating to read.

So much has gone on since the previous installment that I hardly know where to begin. For one thing, after several gray days the sun began coming out, and it began to be warm enough even after dark to go out on deck and stay there for hours—so since then the typewriter has been less occupied. But the Greek lessons are progressing—not only the afternoon class, but private sessions with three teachers, no less, who by sheer chance have deck chairs next to mine. I don’t mean they are professional teachers; but they are all Greeks, and full of enthusiasm about helping their pupil along. Also, there was the costume ball on Saturday night. I hadn’t planned to go at all, but late that afternoon the Greek-American and his cabin mate (both of whom, for some unfathomable reason, are called Pat) summoned me with a plan; they would go dressed as doctors, and they would carry me in on a stretcher with a sheet over me, and a life jacket under that, as a corpse hauled in from overboard! Well, we didn’t win a prize, but people laughed and laughed, and so did we. The next morning I went to a two-hour Greek Orthodox service, complete with incense and a choir of officers and waiters. Even in a crowded ship’s auditorium, with a makeshift altar set up on the stage, it was a wonderful and thrilling occasion and every-now-and-then I picked out a word of liturgical Greek. Yesterday, after a week at sea, we docked at Lisbon, where we went ashore for a few hours. I went on a conducted tour which was rather a disappointment; we spent most of it sitting in the bus, and got into only one church; but the afternoon was redeemed at the last minute by a dash along the waterfront with a Turkish girl, the ship’s Italian hostess, and one of the Pats. We found a wine shop where we drank Port and Muscatel straight from the wooden casks, and were given a sample of calimares (squid, and very good). We barely made it back to the ship in time to sail! This morning we came within sight of Africa and then passed through the strait of Gibraltar, in beautiful calm, bright weather. By now I am just sunburned enough that I have to come in for a while. The company is better and better, now that people are getting to know each other, and I get less and less sleep, but feel fine, and make up for it by eating. The food also gets better and better—more and more Greek dishes, which are the best on the menu. At my table the captain has ceased to appear, but the esprit is better than ever, and our waiter promises to take us all on a picnic after we reach Athens.

We docked this morning, and I am now established in my hotel room and have even made a two-or-three-mile walking tour, getting lost in my usual fashion, in order to get my bearings. During that time I discovered that I could order lunch, have a cup of coffee in a tiny place in the shadow of the Acropolis, and purchase a bunch of sweet peas (great pink, scarlet, and crimson ones, which along with all sorts of other flowers are for sale in stalls all over town—all of them in blazing colors) with no trouble whatever. My Greek teachers have served me well—and while I was waiting for my luggage to come off the ship I learned the numbers from twenty to a hundred, which I suddenly realized I hadn’t bothered to do.

But I mustn’t get started on Greece until I’ve retraced my steps a bit—or I’ll have forgotten what went before. Without doubt this has been the most thoroughly delightful crossing I ever made. Things went on getting better and better when it began to seem that they couldn’t be any more enchanting. That fabulous day when we entered the Straits of Gibraltar and found ourselves in a blue, calm Mediterranean, ended with a Mediterranean sunset—all rose and indigo with glowing bands of clouds across the west after the sun went down. The day ended, but the night went on and on, and a good deal of it was spent on deck, singing under the stars, with an interlude below, in a part of the ship where the fun didn’t begin until midnight, when a Greek band started playing and the Greeks danced in their own exuberant fashion—a kind of blend of English country dancing and Russian gymnastics. I finally turned in around three, but was up again by eight and on deck before breakfast. With the Mediterranean all around, and the blue Mediterranean sky overhead, it seemed a pity to be indoors even for meals. As a result, by this time I am browner than I’ve been in years.

The sequence of days is a bit scrambled in my mind, but the fun went on, especially at meals—which also got better and better. We had filet mignon once and sirloin steak another time, both times with champagne in addition to the mild white wine that was always on the table. In Lisbon, just before I returned to the ship I bought a bottle of tawny Port, which we had the next evening with our dessert. On the evening after that, one of the Greek girls had a birthday, and a couple of other people contributed Lancers, a sparkling Portuguese rosé which is delightful. In fact I believe that night we had champagne too! This begins to sound like the diary of an alcoholic, but for some reason the sea air kept all the alcohol from doing any noticeable damage. To add to the ship’s attraction the bars on the ship had the cheapest drinks imaginable—twenty cents for a glass of Ouzo, the Greek anise liqueur which costs about $7 a bottle in the States. That is, sometimes it was twenty cents; sometimes thirty or forty if the bartender thought you could afford it—the Greeks were a bit inscrutable about it. But for whatever reason, I usually got charged the minimum. A single Ouzo, sip by sip, would last me through a two-hour conversation.

Fairly early on Thursday, the 6th, absolutely everybody was on deck as we came in sight of the Italian coast. We hadn’t seen much of Spain except the Rock of Gibraltar (with schools of porpoises following us as we came into the Strait), and it had been dark when we came within sight of the coast of Sardinia. In the usual confusing manner of approaching coastlines, what I was sure must be Vesuvius turned out to be isle of Ischia, a somewhat less famous twin of Capri—rocky, barren and sparsely inhabited, with terraced vineyards and with a fortress guarding the approach to the Bay of Naples. We saw Capri too, but not at such close range. I begin to wonder whether the sky over that bay ever is the bright blue you hear about. When I last approached it—from a more northerly direction, five years ago—it was September, and it was hazy. A Fulbright scholar who came aboard at Lisbon told me that it was generally hazy in the summer, but that in spring it ought to be clear. Well, it was, but we could just make out the great cone of the volcano looming above the crescent shape of the bay, and there were clouds that led me to wonder whether it might even be going to rain. There were debates about what to wear, and a second thought decided me to put on the one coat I have with me, namely my raincoat. Dorothy Bereny, my table mate from Los Angeles, appeared in a very Californiesque costume, topped off by a wonderful hat made entirely of great floppy flowers. As it turned out, that hat made the entire afternoon an adventure for the six, seven or eight of us—the number varied from time to time—who decided to join forces. We started out as six, and at the quay (my idea) we hired two carrozzas, those clopping horse-drawn carriages that tourists ride in in every European city. I was the only one in the party who claimed to know any Italian, and trying to learn Greek had made that little pretty dim, so the bargaining was not very expert; but for a dollar apiece we were jounced and jolted along the main thoroughfares, including the curving street along the bay, for an hour or so. But if we were rubberneckers, the flowery hat caused us to be rubbernecked at in turn, in the most gratifying fashion; and since Dorothy is quite beautiful even without the hat, there were second looks as well. Or maybe it’s just that Neapolitans aren’t blasé about parties of tourists. Anyhow, we left the carrozzas and set out in search of a café that looked right; and before we found it we had added two more people to our party—one of them an elderly Englishman named Olly who joined us at Lisbon, the other our waiter, Jimmy. We found a sidewalk café, where we were accosted by the usual collection of Neapolitan beggars, and where we ate sfogliate, a kind of pastry which is a specialty of the region (I remembered it from the last time), and drank vermouth and Campari and Strega and such like (though I am afraid that one of the Pats ordered Coca-Cola). While we were sitting there, lo it began to rain. So we moved inside the café, where we found a couple of very black Moroccans wearing white-and-gold leather fezzes and speaking French—and also a cat. I seemed to remember that in Italy all cats are called Bobby (or it may be all dogs—I wish I could remember), and when I tried it, it did seem to work! Finally it stopped raining, and I asked the waiter whether there was a bus to the Funiculare, an underground railway leading to the top of one of the two peaks that are a part of the city of Naples. He said that the Funiculare itself was only five or six minutes away on foot, so we started out. The idea was to get to the top of the hill, where there is a fortress and also a monastery, for the view of Vesuvius and the bay. We inquired once or twice, and it stood to reason that if one headed up, it could hardly be anything but the right way. After five or six minutes we hadn’t found the Funiculare, but we were unmistakably going up. The streets had turned into flights of steps, with cross streets intersecting them, narrower than most alleys in any other city. We looked into doorways and saw how people lived; and the people who lived there came out to stare at all of us, but chiefly at Dorothy and her flowery hat. Old women came up and touched it, and children danced all around and called out “Money, money”—but we didn’t give them any, except to the ones who told us the way to the Funiculare. As somebody said, it was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. We were a bit giddy in the first place after so many days on a rolling ship, and as we climbed things got gayer and gayer, even though we had been climbing for twenty minutes with no sign of the Funiculare. Since I was the one who had gotten everybody into this, there were a good many remarks flung in my direction; but if the rest of them were having half as much fun as I was, there was nothing to regret—and at least some of the party were, I am pretty sure. Finally we got to what was unmistakably a station of the Funiculare, and I had the fun of buying round-trip tickets for everybody. The train itself turned out to be a cross between a subway and a San Francisco cable car—it travels at such a steep angle that the cars are built in steps. At the end of the line we got out, and began asking people the way to the view. We found one view, in what was now a very respectable middle-class residential section, but it wasn’t the view—Vesuvius was out of sight. So we began inquiring again, and a very small boy who was passing out handbills for a movie house or something volunteered to be our guide. I found out that his name was Maurizio and that he was eleven years old; he looked about seven. We conversed about the beautiful city of Naples, and whether America was as beautiful, and I told him sadly that it wasn’t. Italians almost invariably talk like this; unlike Americans, the word beautiful comes naturally to them—and not without reason. I had forgotten how utterly beautiful, and even more how utterly full of life, Naples was. Being in Italy again had the same effect on me as before. (I am afraid that most of the people I have met on the ship take me for about twenty-five, if that—and mostly I felt about fifteen. All of which made for some amusing but harmless complications.) Somewhere along the way we were joined by another guide—a full-grown one this time, who explained that he was employed by the cameo factory. I was dubious about this, but he was very eager, and also Maurizio by now was farther and farther from home; so finally we dismissed Maurizio with a couple of hundred lire, and proceeded with the new guide to the cameo factory. It wasn’t really a factory—just a tiny place with one man at work and some showcases full of finished wares. They were pretty but hardly inexpensive, and none of us bought anything, but the detour was made worth my own while because the salesman was one of those blonde, blue-eyed Italian boys I found so irresistible in the north of Italy—and he seemed to know all about that, and greeted me accordingly. He was a Neapolitan, too—or anyhow he said he was. Most of them are olive-skinned and dark-haired. Finally we got away from the cameos, and walked along under the castle wall, where swallows were skimming about, and a few boys playing ball on the steep grassy slope just above our heads. The view, when we finally came to it, had Vesuvius, the bay, and the roofs of the city lying below us, and just below our feet was a tangle of grapevines, on a very steep slope, an orange tree with ripe fruit among the leaves, and—a somehow typically earthy touch—a large pig tethered to a tree. By then the sun had just set, and it had begun to rain a little once more. Our new guide—who told us that his name was Johnny, and that he had helped the Americans during the German occupation, when he was about fifteen—showed us the way to a different station on the Funiculare, which took us all the way down to where we should have caught it in the first place. By then it was nearly half-past seven, and the ship was scheduled to sail at eight; but we went back to the pier on foot, and just made it aboard—all of us pretty exuberant over our adventure. By then it was almost dark, and we were treated to a spectacular view of the Bay of Naples. Up at the top of the peak of Vomero the monastery was floodlit, so that it stood out and showed exactly where we had been. And the great crescent curve of the beach was a necklace of lights about the water of the bay. As if that weren’t enough, there was a new moon half hidden but every now and then breaking through the clouds. The effect was indescribably grand and romantic all at once. Naturally, we found ourselves breaking into Santa Lucia and Funiculi Funicula (which incidentally, according to our guide Johnny, was written about that very Funiculare). Then we had to go down to dinner; but between courses I ran out on deck for another look, and while I stood there all choked up, somebody called from the deck above, “Put a coat on!” There isn’t much privacy on an ocean liner, for anybody who wants to go and have a little private cry over things being just too beautiful to be quite believed!

During the night we passed the volcanic island of Stromboli. A few passengers either got up or stayed up all night to see it; but I wasn’t one of them, alas. One of the enterprising ones told me about the red glow that proved it was in eruption. When I got up, around seven, we were already docked in the harbor at Messina, on the Sicilian side of the strait known mythologically as Scylla and Charybdis. The passengers for Messina had already disembarked, and the rest of us had no chance to go ashore; but at least we had a good view of the town, with its domed churches and tawny facades, rising steeply against a mountain backdrop dotted with umbrella pines and monasteries, whose bells could be heard clanging in the distance. The Sicilians have a look of their own—small, brown people with leathery faces. For a while after we pulled out we had a view of the coast of Italy—still green in places with spring vegetation, and with terraces of vineyards here and there. On deck the day was the warmest and brightest yet, though it turned chilly around sunset. I was exhausted from the Naples expedition, and had every intention of going to bed directly after dinner; but what with an Ouzo after dinner, and turning the clocks up an hour, it was half-past eleven when I turned in. Even so, I asked the night steward to wake me at five, so as not to miss the earliest possible view of the isles of Greece. Some of us had talked about staying up all night, and one Greek-American I found on deck in the morning apparently had—or was that the Harvard boy on his way to Haifa? Anyhow, at half-past five I was looking at a sunrise that explained all those repeated references in Homer to Rosy-fingered Dawn. (Incidentally, to give an idea of the mood aboard, one day I took my Greek anthology up on deck and read aloud from the Odyssey—the part about Odysseus and the Cyclops and his cave full of cheeses and wineskins and his flock of sheep; it applied remarkably well to the fare on board.) Some unnamed island stood silhouetted against that rosy sky, and there were other rocky shapes rising from the sea—all the work of Poseidon the earth-shaper, as those of us who were seeing them for the first time couldn’t help but tell each other. A flock of gulls followed screaming in the wake of the ship, and every now and then (ever since we entered the Mediterranean, in fact) there would be a stray swallow flitting about. The first identifiable island turned out to be Hydra (the Greeks pronounce it Idthra), and while we watched I read in my guidebook that its wealthy families got their start, several centuries ago, as pirates. After a while the Peloponnesus itself came into view, and Rosy-fingered Dawn was at work on its highest peaks—which, astonishingly, had snow on them. I hadn’t realized that the Taygetos were quite so high. Then we passed Poros and Aegina, and the harbor of Salamis where the Persians were defeated, and finally, in the somewhat hazy distance, the harbor of Piraeus came into view. I had a hill all picked out that I was sure must be the Acropolis, but once again it turned out to be one of those mistaken notions. We did finally have an exceedingly hazy view of a hill, standing out against a higher, darker one, and with a blotch of white, which I was told was the Acropolis and the first sight of the Parthenon; but it was far too remote and dim to be at all spectacular. The excitement that morning was so great that I could hardly eat, and if my table mates hadn’t urged me on I might not even have tried. By the time we pulled into the harbor, the ship’s band was playing with a fervor that would have stirred the most sluggish pulse, and people were screaming from the deck to other people on the tugs that pulled us in, and there were more screams and waving from the pier, with a good many tears shed.

I think I had better bring this to an end. It’s now Sunday afternoon; I’ve been in Athens only a little over twenty-four hours, and there is already so much to tell that it had better be saved for a separate installment. I’ll just say that the Acropolis is harder to see than you might think; about seven miles of walking all around it has given me my bearings and a pretty good idea of the city, but I’m saving the Acropolis itself—working up to it by easy stages as it were. Also that wild poppies are everywhere, great splashes and splotches of red among the grass and under the pines and cypresses; and nearly everywhere you go, the air has a whiff of orange blossom. Now I must stop.

Where to begin and how to tell about it all! I hope, anyhow, that you got my card from—I think it was Delphi. It probably said that that was the most beautiful place in the world—which is what I thought and which it may indeed be—a stupendous place, awesome as an oracle should be, and at the same time peacefully idyllic, with olive groves, barley fields, donkeys coming clop-clop ting-ting-ting underneath the balcony of one’s hotel room twice a day, on their way to and from the mountain pastures; soaring cliffs, pine groves, wild flowers everywhere, and the music of the Castalian spring, sacred to Apollo and the Muses, cascading down from the snows of Mt. Parnassus. Another couple of thousand feet down—a breathtaking drop—was the sea, or more precisely the Gulf of Corinth. On a ferry across the gulf, bound I didn’t yet know quite where, I was so immediately surrounded by a busload of students from Salonika, who descended like a flock of birds from nowhere and were my constant companions for the rest of the trip—though not one of them spoke a word of English—that I hadn’t even a chance to notice the scenery. They were on a class tour with three of their teachers, likewise non-English-speaking, and in no time they had invited me to ride in their bus to Olympia. They also adopted a German couple, with whom I got to be great friends. Well, in Olympia I rode a donkey, listened to the nightingales and the frogs (which in Greece do indeed say “Brek-ek-ek-ek-ex co-ax, co-ax,” just as Aristophanes said they did), said goodbye to the students and then to the German couple, and set out for what was supposed to be Mycenae on a local bus. Local buses in Greece being an inscrutable and unpredictable phenomenon, I wound up instead at Nauplia, on the coast—where lo and behold, there again were the students from Salonika! After a gleeful reunion and more farewells on the quay, I went out at dinnertime (which in Greece isn’t until around nine), and the next thing I knew, there was another reunion, in a tavern under a grape arbor. I wound up having dinner with the whole crowd, and buying wine for them all; and they gave me a rose, and there were toasts upon toasts, and things got merrier and merrier, until they had simply taken over the place, and people gathered round outside and came to lean out of their windows to watch while they [sang] and did the dances of Macedonia. It was one of those unforgettable things that simply happen; but there is something about Greece, that makes for happenings, I can’t say just what. Just the other day I had a letter, in beautiful French, from one of the crowd, an eighteen-year-old whose name—honestly—is Calliope, recalling the whole adventure, and with a snapshot taken in the ruins at Olympia that brought it all back.

Well, things went on happening. I went island-hopping; I mean really—for eight days I spent a good deal of my time getting on and off boats, and they weren’t cruise ships; just the ordinary everyday ones that the Greeks get about on. I went first to Mykonos, and from there over to Delos for half a day, and it was all wild, improbable and romantic. I found a room in a house by a windmill, overlooking the water; it cost me a dollar a day, and was lined with family ikons, and there were lilies in a vase underneath them, and a terrace shaded by giant geraniums (California-like, as things can be in Greece) just outside the window, where I ate my breakfast. Beginning on Delos, there was a brief, confused, forever unforgettable sort of romance with somebody who turned out to be called Vassilis, involving skylarks and scrambling around among rocky little farms and talking (of all things) about etymology. But he went back to Athens, and I went to Samos, where I stayed for a day, riding about on the local buses, and saw the coast of Turkey, rising blue and unlikely across the water from a lonely plain where a single column remains standing of what was once a great temple of Hera. Then I decided to go to Naxos—because of the Ariadne story, because the guidebook said it had “no tourist amenities,” and also because it was hard to get to. The complications that ensued would take too long to relate; but finally, at five o’clock in the morning, from the porthole of an old tub with a starboard list, which I halfway expected to sink before it landed, I had my first view of a white town, rising out of the Aegean in the rosy light of dawn, against a wild backdrop of mountain scenery, and it was almost too romantic to be believed. After that, even Crete, which is pretty wild itself, was a bit of a letdown. I had only a day and a half on Naxos, and it never ceased to be strange. The roads were the worst yet, and after an all-day expedition in a hired car to look at fallen statues in the middle of nowhere, abandoned Byzantine churches, and ancient towers where people still live, and mile after mile of plunging mountain scenery, the miracle was that any of us were still alive. Well, I could go on and on. I spent four days in Crete; finally got to Mycenae and also to Epidauros, where I watched a rehearsal in the ancient theater; and then headed north, via Salzburg and Paris. For a couple of days I lived in luxury at Monica’s; then on to London, where I arrived in pouring rain during Ascot Week, with no roof over my head. But I had a great time, even being stranded. From there I went to Cambridge, Norwich, Lincoln, Oxford—still my favorite city of them all—visited my friend who is now a Benedictine nun at her abbey in Kent; and wound up on the Sussex coast, visiting two sets of old friends; and sailed from Southampton at the beginning of July. Before I’d quite settled down again, I made a frivolous expedition to Maine, where my brother had a house for a month, in an enchanting spot not too far from the Audubon Maine Camp (which I didn’t see). And since then, a month-long writing jag—interspersed with a few editorial jobs that had to be done—has brought me to the end of the novel I’d been working on at odd times for the past couple of years. There is still the revising and copying on the final chapters; Lippincott has the first fifteen, and what may happen there is no telling. [ … ]

Well, so much for that sort of thing. My agent entered the novel I finished last fall in a contest sponsored by Putnam, McCall’s, Fawcett Publishing, and Warner Brothers—total take guaranteed at about $210,000. I told her I thought it was pretty silly, but to go ahead. I was right. The ms. came back; so did thirty-five hundred others. Nobody won the prize. Can you imagine a novel that would satisfy all those customers and still sound like literature? So my heart isn’t broken.

The last I heard, my agent had had a brainstorm and sent the thing to Henry Fonda, who seems to be producing movies these days. Well, anyhow she likes the book. At best the audience for it is probably quite small, so whether any publisher will care to bother remains to be seen. Meanwhile, in time available from making a sort of living I’m onto something rather different, about Greece—travel sketches I guess one would call them for lack of a better name, vaguely in the manner of Freya Stark. It all started when I decided to find out who Apollo was, and what he had to do with Dionysus. The result was a foray into mythology that started with buying Robert Graves’s Penguin books on the subject, and has led deeper and deeper into all sort of odd byways—such as the amber route and woodpecker-gods and the magic bird-wheel and the mountain dancers of the Bacchae. I’m reading Euripides and Pindar and Hesiod and Theocritus and having a great time with them all. But of course the whole thing is a bit far out, so whether it can really be called a travel book at all remains to be seen. I’ve got it about half finished, anyhow, and never had more fun writing anything.

My latest adventure, if one can call it that, has been standing in line for tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet for five hours. I’m on S. Hurok’s mailing list, and it wasn’t until I’d offered to send off a check so that a little cousin of mine, new in New York, could go with me, that I looked again and saw that he wasn’t accepting mail orders. What he did offer was a little private sale for his customers at the Metropolitan’s box office. Well, his mailing list is a long one, and the little private sale had attracted a line that went pretty far around the block by the time I got there. But once in the line, the longer one stayed the harder it became to give up and drop out—so there I was, stuck. By the end of five hours a certain amount of camaraderie had developed, and we began to realize that we hardly knew any more what we were there for. Most odd. The most distinguished of the people I talked to, in my opinion, was a boy in a fisherman’s sweater who had just come from waiting in line for a Horowitz concert. I’m not sure how long he’d been in it, but it had started forming on Saturday afternoon, and this was Monday. Truly, there are all kinds of madness. Anyhow, I got my two tickets; they were for Don Quixote, which turned out not to have much of the Don in it but was a great show all the same. It is sad to think that that was my last visit to the old Met, ever. I’d become a real opera buff, this last season. I even braved Parsifal—and do you know, I loved it! [ … ]

I have gone on working for David Schoenbrun, who is getting out a book and various articles and every now and then asks for some raw material for a speech as well. And I have also gone into politicking, to the extent of joining the local Reform Democratic club and spending hours at headquarters attending to the various drudgeries of getting a canvassers’ list together. This week, for the first time, I went canvassing. I was terrified of the prospect, but it turns out to be a great adventure. People invite you in and will hardly let you go, and the voices that growl “Not interested” from behind the door are no more than one out of ten. There are now fifteen New York City Democratic clubs that have voted to back Senator McCarthy, and needless to say the one I’ve thrown my lot in with is one of those. And the people are about as far removed from my old notion of a clubhouse gang as any lot of people can be. As a result, though I follow the war new with a horrified fascination (I never thought I would have a clue about military strategy, and now look) as what looks like a re-play of the French debacle in the 1950’s unrolls—as a result, I am more cheerful than I was a year ago, when I was too busy being upset to follow very much of what was happening. I’ve just finished reading the Kennan memoirs, which I recommend as one of the best things I’ve ever read on U.S. foreign policy, as well as a fascinating look into the inner workings of a personality that would have baffled me totally, met face to face. Aside from that and a novel of sorts called The Maze Maker, on the myth of Daedalus—very good, and indeed totally relevant, as I already knew Greek myth, properly approached, to be—my reading these last months has been mostly the New York Times and reference stuff on the National Liberation Front and the people in Hanoi (e.g., a biography of Ho Chi Minh in French, and a very good book too). The opera and the ballet are too much trouble to get to, and I’ve been rushing about so that I’ve almost forgotten how to cook. [ … ]

Anyhow, partly because of the effect it had on him, he has since defected from the McCarthy ranks. We had a long, long ambulatory conversation on the subject the night of the California primary. So I was already in a state of upset when I heard the news [of Robert Kennedy's assassination] the next morning, and it was days before I could bring myself to go near headquarters again. I finally went back, and found that everybody had been badly shaken, so things can never be as they were before the terrible things started happening. But the campaign goes on. I’m to “open the polls” for the primary tomorrow at my own polling place—whatever that means. I suppose as a poll-watcher or something. Tonight there is a meeting to find out.

Then after the primary, on Wednesday morning early, I’m taking a bus to Washington with the Poor People’s Campaign people. And on Thursday I’m to fly to Iowa for ten days in those parts. I have to be back again by the first of July, and will be tied here by an assignment until the end of August. I’ve never seen a year rush past as this one has—I can hardly remember what month it is, most of the time. [ … ]

[ … ] As you know, things in this country have been in a pretty distressing state all year, and on that score I have had nothing to be cheerful about. But strangely enough, in the midst of all sorts of despair and forebodings about what is to become of things, I can say that in some ways I never had a better year. It all started after Senator McCarthy announced that he was running for President, and I decided to join the campaign. As you know, I had been more and more distressed over the war in Vietnam, and it was a relief to have something to do besides joining demonstrations and writing letters to Congressmen. My first step was to join a neighborhood political club that had just voted to support McCarthy for the nomination—and from then on my whole way of life was suddenly transformed. I found myself doing things I’d never supposed I could do, such as handing out buttons and collecting money on street corners, and going from door to door to collect signatures so as to get the candidate’s name on the ballot. In fact, for five weeks in April and May, nearly all my evenings were spent ringing doorbells, rain or shine—usually with a delightful unbarbered youngster from whom I learned more than I could have any other way about what his generation were thinking. In the process, I also got to know my own neighborhood as I never had before. We were so successful, or so dogged anyhow, that we were then sent into other districts—but my own remained the friendliest, the most varied, and the most fun. Besides, I spent a good many of the daylight hours as a volunteer researcher, reading and taking notes on reams of Congressional testimony and back issues of the New York Times. Looking back, I still can’t understand how I managed to make a living—but even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have missed the campaign. Of course the spectacle of the Democratic convention in Chicago was pretty traumatic—the more so for me since I kept seeing people I knew hauled off the convention floor, or protesting something or other that somebody had done. Some people I knew were jailed, and I talked to one staff member who had been in the McCarthy suite at the hotel when the police arrived at 5 a.m. and started beating people up. It was all pretty grim, but I think most of us had the same feeling—that it was worth being involved in, and there will be more to be involved in. Meanwhile, anyhow, I found myself elected to the executive committee of the local political club, and no sooner was the convention over than I went to work for Paul O’Dwyer, who was running for the Senate, and for another candidate the club was supporting. So once again, up until the election in November, I found myself running around night after night, trying to get out the vote. This time I was given two districts to take charge of, which meant rounding up a team, getting them together, stuffing literature under doors of apartment houses, and more doorbell-ringing. O’Dwyer lost very badly, which grieved me since he was a sort of heir of the McCarthy campaign; but our other candidate won, and so there was some celebrating to do—in fact, I think I never drank so much champagne in one evening! Even better than the champagne party, though, was another post-election festivity which I had more of a hand in: one member of my team, a law professor with a big apartment on Fifth Avenue [Harold Korn], who likes to give parties, and I decided to get our people together just for the sake of getting together. He supplied the liquor and I took care of the food, and together we produced a Sangria punch, among other things. In the middle of the evening I brought out a quiche Lorraine, straight from the oven, which was promptly devoured; and there were cheeses and a paté which I’d put together earlier. By the time we finished inviting people, the guest list had grown to about forty, and there were a couple of crashers neither of us could account for—but whom I couldn’t really object to, since their presence seemed to be a tribute. If my own experience is any gauge, the affair was a success—I had a great time, though I’d expected to be too anxious for that. I finally got home at half-past four a.m., after we’d washed up all the glasses and otherwise disposed of the debris—and even so, the next day I went out and handed out leaflets about the California grape strike, the latest cause around here. Through all of this, as you can imagine, I’ve gotten to know any number of people, the like of whom I’d never have met any other way, and some of them very much worth knowing. I’ve also gotten involved in some fierce intra-party squabbles—this is what happens when you get into politics—and there have been some angry scenes, with the satisfaction of being able to kiss and make up afterward—at least with some of the squabblers. [ … ]

This won’t be the letter I meant to write, but at least it’s typed—the day having arrived when I admit to being unable to read my own scrawl when it’s more than half a day old. First of all, condolences over the Constitution. I can imagine what that must have been like, better than I might have before, as a consequence of something like total immersion in politics—this being the latest phase in my ever-changing career, or more precisely education. What I mean is, I’m in it enough to have gotten into some fierce internecine disagreements, and lost one of them—over whether or not to endorse, even tepidly, Humphrey-Muskie over Nixon-Agnew. I guess I shall have to explain that I was against—stubbornly enough that I actually voted for Dick Gregory. You see what a radical I’m turning into—or more precisely, to use a word that already begins to sound faintly obsolete—an unreconstructed dove. From a quasi-recluse as late as a year ago, when I was immersed in reading and note-taking on Vietnam for David Schoenbrun, I’ve become a nighttime gadabout, and do you know what, it agrees with me! Imagine me as an election captain in not one but two E.D.’s, launching a sort of guerrilla operation to stuff literature under doors in a building I’d once been thrown out of, and succeeding. Or imagine me, after the election, throwing a party along with another member of my team, an N.Y.U. law professor, for no very precise reason except to bring a few of the dissidents together (but in the end including people from the opposite faction) and [here it turns] out a huge success. But that isn’t all. In the midst of all the running around at night—which goes on even now, with the election all but forgotten, but things like the grape boycott and rent control rising up in its place—I’m also on the biggest poetry-writing binge in my history. Behind it all is the great love of this mad year, with whom I rang doorbells in the spring but who has since defected from the whole thing—very, very young, but articulate as the young seldom know how to be, and likewise gentle, and at the same time radical as only the young are, perhaps, even nowadays. In sort, I never felt more alive. I enclose a sample of what’s been coming out of all this—one of a series of memorials to people I’d been fond of, and one that was a joy to write as such things aren’t always. I hope you might like it. [ … ]

This week especially. I’ve been involved in the Moratorium, as you probably won’t be surprised to hear, and there have been meetings and telephoning to plan and round up volunteers. Last Saturday we were already on street comers, handing out leaflets and buttons; and I could tell that it was going to be a big thing, because the buttons kept running out. It was like the beginning of the McCarthy campaign, only bigger. On Wednesday my job was to send out crews of people with leaflets and buttons and black armbands to set up card tables around the Village—and already at eight that morning I had almost more volunteers than I could give assignments to. We ran out of black armbands almost immediately, and a volunteer went off to look for black ribbon; by noon there wasn’t any more to be had anywhere in the neighborhood—and we’d taken in about $350 in contributions. Counting out the change and depositing it in the bank took us about an hour. There were rallies all day long, all over town. I got into the one where Senator McCarthy and Mayor Lindsay spoke; an hour before it began, the park was already full, and we kept being packed in tighter and tighter. It wound up just at sunset, with the cast of Hair taking their place on the speakers’ platform. Judy Collins was there, and Peter and Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, and a lot of other people.

At the end of that rally I came downtown and joined a sort of straggling procession into Washington Square Park, with everybody carrying lighted candles. Under the arch, people were reading the names of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. It was very quiet and strange, with a little sliver of new moon just about to go down in the background. After a while the whole procession started uptown to Rockefeller Center, carrying candles and pretty much stopping traffic. I wanted to go too, but after having been on my feet all day I concluded that I’d never make it. [ … ]

In the midst of everything else, a Black and Brown Caucus has appeared at St. Mark’s, and a couple of Sundays ago they startled all the rest of us by getting up and reading a list of demands and asking those who supported them to walk out of the service. Most of the congregation finally did, and ever since then there have been meetings and telephone calls and a lot of confusion and noise, and nobody knows when, if ever, things are going to settle down again. I think it was a good thing, but some people are still hurt and angry and wanting to know why it happened.

[According to Philip Clampitt, this event may have signaled the beginning of the end of Amy’s active involvement with the Episcopal Church. She had been a fervent church-going Anglo-Catholic for a number of years, but eventually became disillusioned because of her opposition to the Vietnam War. This event might have helped make the break inevitable. See her letter to David Quint, October 25, 1980]

[ … ] I was in Washington two weeks ago, and had it in mind that I might at least talk to you on the phone, but didn’t manage even that. It was a beautiful thing altogether. Were you in for any of it, I wonder? I came down with a busload from St. Mark’s, arriving around four a.m. on the Saturday, and almost immediately we joined the March Against Death. While we were en route it was dawn and then sunrise flaming gold behind the Capitol. I walked with a little girl, a tenth-grader whose last name I never learned, and I carried the name of one Norman Livingston of Michigan. The mood and ambiance of the whole thing were very strange—a funeral march that was also a celebration, lighthearted on the surface but with a solemnity that went down, down—and all day long it was like that. Woodstock, only cold, I had pronounced before the big march got under way. The thought was a cliché before the day was over. Late in the afternoon I wandered into a church—Epiphany, at 13th and G—that was indeed a kind of epiphany. Marchers were sleeping, sitting, quietly talking, sharing wine from a jug and cocoa from a vat in the kitchen, everywhere. The sanctuary was all very churchy with stained glass and Tudor beams and polished candlesticks and flowers on the altar for Sunday, and it had marchers sleeping in the pews. When I settled into one myself, a young man raised himself from the one in front to ask if I had a cigarette. I was never so sorry not to be able to oblige, but then again it didn’t matter. It was like a vision of paradise; it was also like rats or refugees taking over—in flight from a catastrophe yet to come. What I mean to say is that no questions were asked, nobody was subjected to any ordeal of acceptance or rejection, there was no ego any more. Outside, in that freezing weather, roses and camellias were still in bloom. I came back to New York and wept, telling Hal about it. It’s the kids, I kept saying—what is to become of them?

All sorts of things have been going on, of course. The Lindsay campaign. The grape boycott, again. Black Power (also Brown) rising up at St. Mark’s, in the shape of a minority caucus that one Sunday morning invited sympathizers with a list of demands to walk out of the service with them. It took me about a second to know what to do, and in a way it was a relief to be asked to take a position. But the congregation is still trying to pick up the pieces, and those of us who would like to lend our support to the caucus are having a hell of time getting together enough to do it. (The way white people turn on one another in times of upheaval is really scary; we trust each other so little—which is one reason that epiphany in Washington upset me so.) Personally I go on finding all kinds of satisfactions. (Like starting to wear pants to dress up in—I mean to church and the theater, yet. It’s a real emancipation, for some reason, and not because I’ve joined the Women’s Liberation Movement either.) The main one is being with Hal. It wouldn’t be quite accurate any more to say that we’ve each kept our independence, I suppose, since we’re together a good deal these days. But there is such ease and harmony that it feels like freedom, and by some miracle we don’t get on each other’s nerves the way people who are close so often do. We went to hear the Incredible String Band just after I got back in September, and expect to hear them again in a couple of weeks—this time in the company of a friend of his who is now hooked, as a result of an evening here when we built a fire and sat on the floor looking at it and listening to records for hours and hours. [ … ]

Altogether, the year just past has been one of the busiest ever for me. I can’t remember what I may have written about such things as working to re-elect Mayor Lindsay (and meeting the man himself, one sweltering summer afternoon, when a group of us were invited to let him know our views; I let other people do the talking, but it was fascinating to watch him, sitting at the head of the table, rumpled and sweating in his shirtsleeves, and I came away liking him very much; also, incidentally, he is even better-looking in person than in photographs). On election day I worked from six a.m. until after the polls closed, and then was foolish enough to make the journey uptown to Lindsay headquarters, where thousands of campaign volunteers were already crowding around the doors and there obviously wasn’t a chance of getting in without being trampled or trampling someone else; so, again, foolishly, I wound up watching television until the small hours instead of calling it a day and going straight to bed. Almost immediately, of course, those of us who supported the Mayor began finding things we were unhappy about his having done or not done. But at least it was nice to work for a candidate and have him win for once.

In August my parents celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and there was another gathering of the Clampitts in Iowa for that occasion. As always, it was fun being together and seeing the younger generation under one roof and getting along remarkably well; and the big celebration, with about a hundred people there, went off happily and was fun in itself. There were people I hadn’t seen since I was a child, and whom I would never have recognized but who knew me. One special pleasure for me was having the assignment of arranging the flowers—and thanks to my father’s thriving garden, there were bowls and vases of them on every table and in every nook by the time I’d finished! From Iowa I traveled west to Colorado, for a few days with some good friends who live in sight of the Rockies. It’s another world out there, and New York seemed really far away, under that deep blue sky where every afternoon great masses of white clouds would pile up, ending sometimes with a thunderstorm at sunset, and with sprinklers going to keep the grass green in the back yard, and a grape arbor to sit under. One afternoon we got into the car and drove into the mountains, along a winding track through evergreen and aspen forest and then above timberline, where there were glaciers and stupendous views and the air is thin but exhilarating as wine. [ … ]

[ … ] Did I write you that I went to Washington for the November march? It was one of the unforgettable experiences of my life, of a poetic kind that I used to associate with far-off foreign places (such as I’ve largely lost the wish to go to any more). I went with a busload that left from St. Mark’s Place at midnight (whiffs of pot being wafted from the back, and the clergyman who was our marshal taking that in perfect stride), and was lucky enough to sleep a good deal of the way. We got to Arlington cemetery around four a.m., and very soon had taken our names and candles and were making the four-mile hike across the Potomac and past the White House. It was freezing cold as it can be in Washington, and there was a wind like a knife of ice, but the marshals who were posted along the way, wrapped up in blankets and shivering but beaming, kept the mood buoyant above the solemnity. I was carrying the name of one Norman Livingston, of Michigan. Walking beside me was a little girl, a tenth-grader who had come down with her parents and another couple, and who needed a partner, since by the time we got there the number of marchers exceeded the number of men killed and villages destroyed. Walking through the nation’s capital at dawn, with the name of a person you know nothing else about, and with lines of people all doing the same thing, is simply an experience not quite any other. When we’d finally deposited the names in the coffins at the foot of the Capitol, we went another mile or so to a church, where volunteers were ladling out coffee and there was a place to get warm and nap for a few minutes (in a chair, or propped against the wall—though there were so many people that nobody was supposed to stay very long). By half-past nine or so we were on our way again, to join the big march; and by then all of Washington was a march. Already I was saying it was like Woodstock, only cold; and the thought had soon become a cliché, because everybody had the same thought—but that was part of the experience. Hanging over us all was the possibility of tear gas and a stampede; but somehow that made us cheerful and relaxed, as we huddled together or linked arms to keep with the people we’d come with, and also just to keep warm. We were on the Mall for a couple of hours before joining the march, and it was well after noon before we got to the Monument. By then there were so many people that we were too far away from the loudspeakers to hear anything, and anyhow the rally seemed an anticlimax.

Around three I left, intending to look for a cab to take me to some friends whom I’d spoken to over the phone while we were at the church. There weren’t any, and neither were there any policemen to tell me which bus to take, and so eventually I found my way to another church—having heard a marcher’s remark, just ahead of me, that suggested it was open to such as we. It was a place I’d never seen before, with a kind of sheltered garden walk leading to the entrance to the parish house, a few yards back from the street, and even in that bitter cold there were roses and camellias still in bloom, and a little fountain, and I remember stopping to sniff the camellias, which were pale pink and somehow dreamlike. There was a sign on the door that said “Full-Sorry” but I concluded it had been put up the night before, and went inside, and from then on it was a scene from a painting that you may have seen at the Metropolitan Museum, a Giovanni di Paolo version of paradise. There were people everywhere, sitting on the steps, and in little groups in corridors and hallways (one group with a jug of wine), or sleeping curled up or stretched out in what must have been a Sunday school classroom, and ladling out coffee and cocoa in the kitchen. I had thought I might find somebody I might ask directions of, but clearly we were all strangers together, and it was so unnecessary to speak to anyone to explain who you were and what you might be doing there, that I didn’t want to break the spell. In the main part of the church, everything was set up for Sunday morning—candlesticks polished, flowers on the altar—and people were sleeping in the pews. I suddenly realized that what I needed was a nap; and as I settled down with my handbag for a pillow, somebody in the one just ahead raised his head and asked if I had a cigarette. It was once that I wished I hadn’t quit smoking. I don’t know whether I’ve conveyed the sense of community, but it was in such contrast to the up-tight propriety of the arrangements, and so exactly in tune with what being a believer ought to be, that I still haven’t stopped marveling. It was also weirdly like a refugee camp—a thought that didn’t become explicit until afterward, when I was trying to explain the scene. If there hadn’t been so much since to keep me on the move, I might have put it into a poem—but it’s there anyhow.

Now I’m involved in so many things that may or may not have any effect—plans to have perpetual reading of the names of men killed in Vietnam at the Church of the Ascension, as they’re already doing at Riverside; plans for a local Friends of Welfare Rights, and a marching on Albany to demand that cuts in the welfare budget last year be restored—that I’m out more evenings than I’m in, and the result is, among other things, that I don’t get letters written. The whole inflation thing is blowing up into what may become a taxpayers’ revolt; for example, there are protests against the latest increase in the subway fare that consist of having people hold the exit doors open while hundreds go through (some of whom, of course, but not all, get arrested). And as a result of the research project I’m on now as a way of earning a sort of living, it becomes clearer and clearer that the inflation is simply the result of pouring money, manpower and resources into fighting and preparing for wars and more wars. Everybody knows it in a vague way; but what to do? I agree with you about the ex-poor boy in the White House. Your budget figures aren’t far from the one I tried for a week in July. What impressed me most about the experiment was that it took so much time deciding what I could afford and what to do with that little bit. My own good fortune continues to be that I pay so little rent; otherwise my whole style of life would have to be revised. Most people I know have stopped buying steak because of inflation; but it is a pleasure nobody should have to be without altogether, and there is something wrong with an economy where it is happening to so many. [ … ]

Ditto the trip to Washington, as an educational venture if for no other reason. The driver of the VW Microbus is one of those ageless contemporaries one meets on such ventures, and we yakked all the way down on the front seat, while the law students we took along did the same in the back. On the return journey things got more homogenized, with various interesting developments; for half an hour or so I found myself taking on all three of them about the need for radical change (young people can be so conservative, I find), and in a Howard Johnson’s they took the two of us on, the way males will, at the testing-of-equanimity game. I guess we passed; anyhow everything wound up friendly. There was some agreement over whether going down there had really accomplished anything, since Congress seems to be one of those self-perpetuating institutions that are just about incapable of doing anything more than perpetuate themselves. The ones who agree congratulate you and caution against rocking the boat too much; the ones who don’t remain intractable. The greatest single satisfaction, for me, was in so infuriating a hawk from Illinois that he kicked over the waste basket—saying, as we sailed out that if we were under the spell of the New York Times there wasn’t much he could do.

I was not much more than back, and beginning to feel depressed over the pointlessness of that kind of satisfaction, when I stumbled into a new thing—giving aid and comfort to a squatters’ movement. Six families had been taking refuge in vacant apartments in buildings a hospital wants to demolish to make way for a nurses’ residence; and to ward off the cops, a crew of volunteers were rounded up to stay with them around the clock. As a result, I became part of a kind of floating household, consisting of a very young couple, the Rodriguezes, and their black-eyed year-old daughter, and a dozen or so supporters. We sat around on mattresses donated by kindly neighbors (the Rodriguezes had been robbed three times, and the last time had cleaned them out entirely), and rapped about all sorts of things—women’s lib, collectives, child care, and characters in the peace movement—while a fairly steady procession of reporters, tape recorders, TV cameras, and other visitors more or less sinister passed through. What is going to happen finally, nobody knows; but the hospital officials remain adamant despite all pleas, so next Wednesday the squatters are presumably to be evicted; and so it may be that this time, after a good many misses, I may get arrested. For criminal trespassing. I’ll let you know.

As if that weren’t enough, there was a traumatic evening in which an old friend/enemy of Hal’s used his immunity as a psychiatrist to play the hostility game, and afterward it took twelve hours of groping misery and rage to establish just what had been done, and to whom, and why. Once that had been done, I was my silly self again. It was a close call, and to emerge finally unscathed a kind of miracle. Having been through it, I marvel that anything ever goes right. Rage is in the air we breathe, and to be free after twelve hours’ imprisonment is to know what that kind of freedom really means. [ … ]

It’s a little bit like living a page out of Camus—or I think that’s what it’s like, having had The Myth of Sisyphus for years without being able to get through it: everything that could go wrong seems to be doing so, and you don’t expect to accomplish much, but there is a peculiar happiness in banding together and refusing to take it all lying down. So much has been going on that I haven’t gotten out of the city—unless you count a bus trip one night out to Far Rockaway, to picket a recalcitrant landlord on his own doorstep—since early June, when I joined a lobbying trip to Washington and spent a couple of days telling Congressmen what we thought of the invasion of Cambodia. It may be that I’ll get away for a couple of days at the beach this next week, to get some sun and have another go at Camus. Thanks very much, meanwhile, for the issues of the Atlantic; I read the article about Kissinger, which was interesting, and will get to Mr. Sammler’s Planet one of these days.

[ … ] You guessed it. I’ve now been in jail, the honest-to-God lockup, and what’s more that was my second arrest. The first time, there were so many women with children that they herded us all into a City bus and kept us there all morning (three helmeted policemen in the back looking silly, plus a couple of policewomen looking mean) while they made up the papers. It’s the squatters’ movement I’m into these days, and the main satisfaction is the feeling that it’s doing something positive, if temporary, on behalf of people who have been officially pushed around for years. The building I first helped people move into is now the subject of negotiations with the City and the landlord, and it begins to seem that the squatters are going to be allowed to live there. The other is a different scene; the landlord is part of a really rotten outfit who are buying up buildings all over the Village and emptying them of tenants by all sorts of ugly means simply as a speculative operation. So there have been no negotiations, and we are probably going to have a full-scale trial in December (charges against most of us the first time were dropped). Also, that second time, I got the feel of what jail is like—we were there only part of a day, but that is long enough and grim enough, even for a high-spirited crew. We were joined toward the end by four prostitutes, one of whom was a good-natured sort who was feeling good and soon had us all listening in fascination to her account of how they do business. There were several Women’s Lib types in the crowd, and they get along well with prostitutes. Meeting people is a great thing about all these operations. There is more education going on than in four years of college, just getting into things. So I can well understand Joanie’s dissatisfaction. I hope she can find her way into something satisfying.

Reading over the quotation from my letter, I don’t wonder that it made no sense. It was important, though, and it was on my mind when I wrote and so it got in in that cryptic form. What happened was that Hal and I had dinner with a couple he knew and I hadn’t met—an old school friend of his who is now a psychiatrist up in the suburbs, and the friend’s wife. I knew nothing at all about the background or anything more than this; but feeling very relaxed and open, I promptly got into some kind of political argument with the psychiatrist, the exact sequence of which I’ve now for-gotten—except that at one point Hal echoed a remark by his friend to the effect that I was biased, whereupon I felt cornered and angry and showed it without saying a word. At this point we were on the sidewalk on our way to a restaurant, and Hal, who is very sensitive about such things, fell back with me to ask what was the matter and I told him I was hurt. So he told the two others to go on to the restaurant, and we walked around the block while I told him I thought he had been unfair, and he acknowledged that it was so. This was the first time I can remember that I’ve produced such an incident in the company of people I’d never met before. Quite naturally, the other two were put on edge by it, even though we were both composed and shrugged the whole thing off when we went to join them. And from then on the evening was one unmitigated misery. By the time we left the restaurant I was close to tears again, after another attack by the psychiatrist, in which his wife sided with him—earlier she had seemed to take my side in the arguments, or anyhow I had felt she agreed with me in a general way—an attack followed by one of those absolutely crushing coups de grâce—“Amy, we need more people with your idealism” (read, as targets and scratching-posts for other people’s hard-nosed-realist aggression) that only hostile people know how to deliver. By this time Hal was totally on my side, and I knew it, but by the time we were finally rid of the other two and had breathed a sigh of relief, we were also both so upset that we ended up quarreling. The thing was, or seemed to be, finally resolved—but the next day it broke out again, in a form that took on the camouflage of my being so depressed over the state of the world that I simply couldn’t stop crying. I remember Hal’s saying maybe it was time I went to a psychiatrist, and my wondering if it had come to that while declaring that he knew I couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t until I was on my way out to a party I had said I would help with, where he was supposed to join me later, and to which neither of us now had any wish to go, that we got down to what the trouble really was. I finally deciphered my depression as unassuaged anger, and the tears as the mode the anger took in paying him back for hurting me—even though I already knew he acknowledged that he had done it and was genuinely sorry. (This is one of the many beautiful things about Hal—that he can be sorry without any defensiveness, any urge to hit back.) And then, finally, he told me several things which his natural discretion—another beautiful thing about him—had kept him from mentioning. One was that the same kind of thing had happened a few years ago, when his psychiatrist friend had made the same kind of attack on a young girl whom Hal had brought to meet them. That led to the conclusion that his friend really had some kind of thing against women, and also that attacking a woman companion was in fact an indirect attack on Hal himself, for reasons that don’t need to be gone into for purposes of this discussion. Having cleared away that much emotional confusion, we were finally both calm enough to go to the party together, have a good time, and discover afterward that harmony had been restored. What I had discovered so vividly was how hard it is to be entirely truthful, even with the best will and with those one cares most about. What so often seems to happen is that unassuaged anger goes on festering for weeks, months, even years. That was what my remark about rage being in the air we breathe was all about. I have lived through several long sieges of that kind of rage, and I know other people who have. Truthfulness between people is so very seldom complete; and yet if there is not complete truthfulness, there can hardly be complete trust. And the reason truthfulness between people is so rare is that it is even harder to be completely honest with oneself. I never really expected to meet and be close to anyone who made truthfulness easier, the way Hal does. This isn’t to say that we don’t quarrel, or that it isn’t painful when we do; but thus far the quarreling has been bearable because there has been some way of resolving it other than mere armed truce.

The switch in typewriters indicates a lapse of forty-eight hours, during which the newsletter has been run off, the weather has changed from unseasonably hot to seasonably cool, and a busload of us have made an odd Sunday-afternoon expedition into the borough of Queens to picket the five bad brothers whose real-estate firm had us thrown out of the last building we moved squatters into. We took along a coolerful of Sangria, Pepsi and milk for the kids, a hamperful of sandwiches, and a sheaf of signs, and on the way out we composed new lyrics to our repertory of housing-action songs—e.g.

Kalimian is their name;

Elias lives in this house—

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME!

At rents we can afford,

And if we don’t get it,

We discovered that two of the five villains had moved to grander places, farther out on Long Island, and the other three were conspicuously not at home; but the neighbors were surprisingly sympathetic. One told us that the landlord family next door had been expecting us (there had been a story in The Village Voice mentioning our plans, among other things) and had fled to avoid a confrontation; one actually made a contribution to our treasury. It was a demonstration—if that is even the word—totally unlike any other I’ve been a party to. Everything was so quiet among those winding suburban roads, those masses of trees and shrubbery and pseudo-Tudor architecture nesting among them, that it subdued even us; there was hardly a soul to be seen (for one thing, the day had turned cool and rainy), and we had the feeling that we were the first real excitement to intrude since the houses went up. [ … ]

Thank you very much for Soul on Ice. It would be an interesting document even if he weren’t as good a writer as he is—and at his best he is also very much my own kind of writer. Prison documents in general have acquired a particular meaning for me, I think since I last wrote; anyhow, as a result of another move-on, I have had the experience of spending several hours in jail. Relatively speaking, we were well treated—the women’s section of the Criminal Courts building is far less crowded than the men’s, and for most of our stay the twelve of us females who’d been arrested together had no company but our own. Toward the end we were joined by four hookers, one of whom was smart and cheerful and soon had us all listening with rapt attention to her account of how things go in that trade. Since several of the people in our party were into Women’s Liberation, whose hallmark is solidarity with anything female, the rapport was excellent. We were there long enough to sample the fare, and it was so dreadful that I wonder anyone survives; and even in those four hours the sense of being cut off from the world was acute and did something to our attitudes, the result of which was that we behaved and felt generally like kids in the second grade being kept after school. Seeing forty or fifty people we knew when we were finally led into the courtroom was sweet, and made it easier for our attorneys to get us off on our own recognizances, with no bail. The case finally came to court just a couple of weeks ago, and we got off unscathed—guilty of a reduced plea, with no criminal record or anything like that. In the meantime there have been more actions, though the policy now is not to get arrested—and at least some of the people we helped move in are apparently going to be allowed to stay, or anyhow be given some kind of decent housing. The official policy has now reached the proportions of a scandal, with hundreds of families being put up, on taxpayers’ money, in firetrap hotels that charge by the head, $5.50 per day. As a result of his handling of this, and of the situation in the city jails, I’ve lost all faith in Mayor Lindsay. For the time being, though, I’m deeper into politics than ever: the insurgent faction is pretty much in control of the Reform Democratic club I joined back in the days of the McCarthy campaign and have been involved with ever since—you remember the party I took you to; it’s those people—and the arch-housing-activist has just been elected president, which means that a good deal of my spare time for the next year will be going in that direction. So there hasn’t been much time for writing or reflection—though I did manage a piece of verse that I’ll send along—or even for planned-ahead entertainment such as going to the theater. The main thing in that department lately was being taken to hear Beverly Sills in Lucia—an absolutely gripping performance, quite aside from the ravishing things she does with her voice. [ … ]

For Christmas I finally got as far as Boston, where it snowed almost continually and it was a pleasure to be inside watching it come down, or out walking through the lovely muffled stillness of it. There was also the pleasure of finding out that the younger generation, even out in suburbia, are just as simpatico as I like to imagine, and as Charles Reich finds them. He—though most of us have only read the excerpt from The Greening of America in the New Yorker, if that—and Kate Millett and Ramsey Clark are the writers people I know are talking about these days. I met Ramsey Clark, as a matter of fact; he has taken an apartment in the Village, and there are people promoting him as a presidential candidate. He seemed to me very genuine, and his book confirmed the impression. [ … ]

“It is a source of infinite wonder to me how General Westmoreland, for example, could continue to come back every time repeating exactly the same phrases, impervious to the lessons that were learned. The official military line for as long as I can remember is that the Viet Cong meant to cut the country into two pieces. Now, why should they want to do that when they already have cut it into fifty pieces? … Our blindness here really reflects the predominance of our traditional concepts, under which you measure success and failure by the control of territories…. Vietnam is more than a failure of policy. It is really a very critical failure of the American philosophy of international relations…. When one is asked for advice, the constant American tendency has been to respond by looking for a gimmick. Every year we had a new program in Vietnam, and we have carried out each program with the obsessive certainty that it was the ultimate solution to the problem…. I feel that we have to make a really prayerful assessment of what we went in there for, not to pin blame on any people or particular set of conditions but to assess the whole procedure and concepts that us involved there….”

It is hard not to wonder, given the continued programs of destruction in Vietnam and the accelerated destruction in Laos—not to mention the entry into Cambodia and the suffering inflicted there on the people of a neutral country—given that continued destruction, is it possible that the “prayerful assessment” of which you spoke has in fact been made, now that you are in a position to deal with the matters of policy? And if it has been made, why have our troops not been withdrawn—or, at the very least, why has no timetable of withdrawal been offered? Since recent public opinion polls indicate that a majority of Americans now favors some such timetable, even the argument that the problem is one of public reaction at home seems hardly applicable. Is it asking too much to wonder whether you even remember what you once said about a failure of the American philosophy of international relations? Or to wonder whether, as an intellectual, you have encountered the kind of thinking offered by Lewis Mumford when he observes that “… unfortunately our time has produced many … who have been willing to do at a safe distance, with napalm or atom bombs … what the exterminators at Belsen and Auschwitz did by old-fashioned handicraft methods. The latter were slower in execution, but far more thrifty in carefully conserving the by-products—the human wastes, the gold from the teeth, the fat, the bone mean for fertilizers—even the skin for lampshades. In every country, there are now countless Eichmanns in administrative offices, in business corporations, in universities, in laboratories, in the armed forces: orderly obedient people, ready to carry out any officially sanctioned fantasy, however dehumanized and debased …”

It has been suggested by some observers that one of the reasons for the accelerated bombing of Laos since November 1968 is simply that with the bombing of North Vietnam at an end, it gave pilots who would otherwise have been unemployed something to do. I am not being facetious about this. If there was a better reason, I should like to know what it was—once the bombing of Laos was admitted to taking place at all—that it was necessary to interdict the flow of supplies along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Now we are told that a ground invasion is necessary because the supplies were still getting through—in short, the bombing had not achieved its objective. It is very hard to be patient with this kind of reasoning. And it would never have occurred to me to write one more letter to a high public official had it not been for your thoughtful assessment in 1968 of the problem that is now your especial concern.

What is the concept that guides our policy in Vietnam? Is there a new policy? Or is there a policy at all to explain what has been done to the people of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia? If there is some member of your staff who is not content to be one of Mr. Mumford’s administrative Eichmanns, I should deeply appreciate the courtesy of a reply.

Guess what—my father was given an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters at Grinnell! This spring was his sixtieth commencement reunion—and my thirtieth, horrid thought. I went out for Commencement itself, to see him get the degree. It was for his work with the American Friends Service Committee, especially with resettling refugees. Joe Wall read the citations, and I had a chance to talk with him briefly afterward. He was looking really better than when we were students. Also I saw Henry Laden, who is librarian there now. My nephew David was just winding up his second year there—taking Math and Russian, doing a special project on Camus, and earning money playing violin in the Des Moines symphony—and it was a joy to see him. There were several nonconformists who didn’t wear caps and gowns, others (my father spotted them in the procession, or I wouldn’t have known) who went barefoot, and altogether a prettier lot of girls I think I never saw.

I didn’t stick around for the class reunion, which I’m not sure I would have been up to anyhow—though having reported going to join as my contribution to society has brought up my stock in a perverse sort of way. I really think it was that that finally got me over my inability to get up and say anything to an audience. As though it were a shorthand kind of identity: Oh, she’s the one that keeps getting arrested. I forget if you will have heard about the third arrest, but I guess not. It was relatively unpremeditated—happened back in February, when some welfare families took over a not-quite-finished apartment building intended for middle-income residents, and a couple of us who’d come in with them discovered five black mothers who weren’t leaving (they’d been living in one of those Welfare Hotels, which you will have heard about) and decided they could use some company. We never went to jail, thank goodness, but were kept at the police precinct for long enough that I got pretty obstreperous. When the case finally came up in courts, we got off again with minor guilty pleas, free to get into more mischief whenever we chose—and the defense attorney gave a statement that made the whole courtroom sit up and take notice. Eventually the mothers got apartments in public housing, but not without a long sojourn in a church basement that I won’t go into because it is so depressing.

I have been reading Lewis Mumford’s Pentagon of Power—a project that occupied me piecemeal over more than six months—and think he has more to say than just about anybody else who is writing these days. More recently, I’ve discovered the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Very disturbing but also very, very good. Do you know her, I wonder? I may include a copy of a piece I wrote to get the disturbance out of my system. The last one before that dates to January, and goes like this:

of her, and hid her image in a shrine

they said was holy. She was Hera then

or Mary—goddess or mother of a god,

not this lost object found and exhibited

to score a point before the microphone

where scurrying bureaucrats assemble. On

her lap her youngest looks already old.

of splendor’s ruin, worn expressionless

by the long fraud that spans the centuries,

she sits and holds her baby. Others shout,

“They’re using her!” Past hope, past righteousness

she endures, too tired even to accuse.

The gloom is closing in outside again, for the third time today. Do write.

The whole experience proved eminently worth going through—including a night in the D.C. jail, sleeping four in a four-by-eight-foot cell. Altogether there were about forty of us women, and a somewhat larger number of men. The morale was still bubbling next morning, when they transferred us to the courthouse lockup to wait for arraignment. The Park Police who arrested us were generally decorous and even friendly. The worst moment came during the processing—altogether, it took six hours to dispose of the whole crowd—and I realized that I was about to have my fingerprints taken. After that, even the mug shot—full face and profile, with the numbers around your neck—wasn’t too upsetting. (New York criminal courts are less efficient and also much more disagreeable.) And the thing we got arrested for—lying as if dead for half an hour in front of the White House gate, surrounded by other bodies, and watching the cloud formation overhead—was restful and even happy. It wasn’t until I’d been back in New York overnight that I discovered how tired I was. A lovely, lovely lot of people were what made the difference.

Did I write you that the New York Times published my “Existential Choice” poem? I got twenty-five dollars for it—the check was waiting in my mailbox when I got home. [ … ]

But as a result, I got back to New York after the second trip to Iowa in less than a month (all the way by bus both times) with a large index to finish and an editing job behind schedule because of that. I finally caught up only yesterday, having worked fairly steadily through both holidays—which was just as well, since I found that I wasn’t in the mood for celebrations. But I did enjoy the trips by bus. It’s a way of having solitude without feeling like a recluse—in fact, when the weather turns snowy and schedules get fouled up, things aboard become very sociable indeed.

Some of my best ideas seem to come while I’m traveling somewhere. [ … ]

[ … ] For me, 1975 began in something of a whirl of being sociable. I spent Christmas very quietly in New York, roasting a duck for Hal, who is my chief companion nowadays, and playing records. (I’d gone to Boston earlier in December to help my brother and his wife celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, with a reunion of the original wedding party, or most of it, and a little side trip to join a demonstration in downtown Boston—almost like the old peace movement days, but not quite.) After going to a series of parties, Hal and I gave one ourselves on New Year’s Eve—just eight people, but we fed them so it was something of a project, with my first try at Chinese cooking (shrimp with onions, celery, green peppers, and carrots, stir-fried, and a great success), a salad of endive, watercress, and walnuts, and a frozen lemon soufflé. The mixture of guests was a bit experimental too—a civil court judge and his wife, a cousin of Hal’s and her schoolteacher husband, who happens to be black, a very young friend of ours who’s studying philosophy at Brown and a friend of hers whom we hadn’t met, who’d spent a year studying classics in Athens and hopes to go back. It turned out to be a successful evening. Then, just a few days later, we gave an after-concert party for Igor Kipnis, the harpsichordist whose wife is an old friend of mine, and who was making his debut with the New York Philharmonic. Since Hal’s apartment is just across Central Park from Lincoln Center, it seemed a logical place to gather afterward. The artist got a steak (he doesn’t eat dinner before a concert) and for the rest, there was spinach quiche (my own recipe) and something called Esau’s Mess of Pottage, which I found in a Metropolitan Museum cookbook—lentils, rice, and onions all cooked up together, with raw vegetables around the edge. That’s the kind of cooking I’m into these days—lentils, salads, home-made granola. The concert was a success, with good reviews all round—the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, with a long, rarely played cadenza for the harpsichord, a de Falla concerto for harpsichord, flute, oboe, and I forget what else, and finally a Bartok symphony without harpsichord—but Avery Fisher Hall is bad acoustically, and we were in one of the worst spots.

Just before the holidays, I acquired a long black cape with a red silk lining, made for me by a friend who has a dressmaking shop on the Lower East Side—or what people now call the East Village. We’d gotten to know each other in one of my series of short-lived group projects—the neighborhood government one—and have kept in touch. The cape is pretty spectacular, and great fun to go swooping around in. To go with it, I found a pair of purple suede boots on sale—last year’s style, apparently—and now I have all the clothes I need for a while. Except that I may try making a patchwork skirt out of scraps I never discarded, and having made a series of patchwork pillows for various people, I’m intrigued by the notion of doing something more complicated. I’m also in the process of getting ready to repaint my apartment—patching plaster, scraping old paint, et cetera. After mid-January, I go back to work on the Franklin project; meanwhile, I’m earning a living with a couple of editing jobs. I’m going to the country tomorrow to work on them while Hal grades exam papers.

So that’s what I’ve been into lately. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote before Christmas, but it was probably gloomy because I always am around that time. As soon as the days begin getting longer, I begin feeling better, though there certainly can’t be any objective reason, these days. My rent has gone up again and prices in the supermarkets are dreadful, but thus far my own fortunes haven’t suffered the way some people’s have. I haven’t read nearly as many books lately as you have. The latest recent one has been All God’s Dangers, an Alabama sharecropper’s memoirs as taped and edited by Theodore Rosengarten—a marvelous piece of history. I’m writing to a prisoner in Florida. My first prison correspondent, a native of Brooklyn, is now out on parole and at last word had a couple of part-time jobs and was pretty together. [ … ]

I enjoyed hearing about Xanthippe. I love cats and a lot of people I know own them, so I have the fun of being around them without the responsibility of another mouth to feed.

About lentils: I’ve discovered that cooked with onion, carrot, celery, and tomatoes, with a bay leaf and a few cloves for seasoning, they’re delicious; and there are various other permutations. I’ve never yet done them with the standard ham bone, but sometimes boil the broth out of leftover chicken bones and use that as a base. Combined with brown rice, they become a better source of protein. Esau’s Mess of Pottage is very simple: you boil a cup or so of lentils for fifteen or twenty minutes in a quart or more of water, add an equal amount of brown rice and boil the whole thing for another half hour or more, or until the ingredients are done, cook a cupful of chopped or sliced onions in a generous amount of oil until they’re transparent, mix the whole thing together and chill it well (salt and pepper to taste). There are all kinds of seasoning possibilities in the way of herbs and spices, and you could add lemon juice and make a sort of salad.

About granola: it never comes out twice the same, but the general idea goes like this: you pour about a third of a cup of peanut or corn oil into a large baking pan with an equal amount of honey, add a generous pinch of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and heat and stir the whole thing over a flame until it gets thin; then you stir in (in approximately that order) a cupful of sesame seeds; a cupful of sunflower seeds; a cupful of soy grits or soy nuts (for nutritional purposes; I don’t think they add anything to the flavor); two cups of untoasted wheat germ; a cupful of unsweetened grated coconut (or sweetened, but it’s expensive); a handful, around 1/4 cup, of chopped raw cashew nuts (I’ve used almonds and walnuts too, but cashews taste best); and around four cups of rolled oats. Mix it ingredient by ingredient, so that the first dry ones in are fairly well coated with the wet ingredients, and bake in a 350 oven for around an hour, taking the pan out to stir everything carefully, so as to brown it evenly, every ten or fifteen minutes. The cape isn’t quite as fluid as the picture, being quite heavy, but I’m flattered to be imagined in anything so dashing. One of these days I’ll have a snapshot of me in it so you can get a less romantic idea of the actuality. Meanwhile, I’ll enclose a new poem, just hatched. It’s about an aunt of mine who died not long ago.

You’re more into new books than I am. The latest I’ve gotten to have been Sphere by A. R. Ammons—a real discovery—and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, which is unclassifiable and in fact indescribable, a real trip in more than one sense of the word. [ … ]

It’s just after eight a.m. on this Monday morning, and breakfast is long over, the housekeeping chores attended to, such as they are, and I’ve been outside to gather daisies, buttercups, orange hawkweed, red clover, and assorted other things growing just outside the door. It’s like that up here—the exceptional thing about this morning being that it’s already warm. Up until the middle of last week, fog, rain, and chilly weather in various sequences had been the rule, and layers of sweaters the obligatory costume. When the sun came out for a while, we would venture off on a small expedition in the immediate vicinity—to Cranberry Point, which is all wind and surf and exposed rock, with a stretch of tundra behind it, or to a small uninhabited island that can be reached only at low tide, via a strip of sand and shingle beach, where we’ve found a delightful little moss-cushioned perch underneath a lone spruce tree that is perfect for picnics, with a view of the sandbar so we won’t forget and find ourselves marooned. On less inviting days, we’ve made short expeditions by car, exploring side roads and the little towns up the coast. This past weekend, we took the ferry across the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia and did some exploring over there. The high point was Grand Pre, which is so totally unlike anything I’d seen or been expecting hereabouts that I found myself thinking of Paestum and the ruined temple of Hera on the island of Samos. It’s actually below sea level, with dikes holding off the sea at high tide, very still and a bit sad. It’s also very French, with a little church built of dark stone rising among alleys of neatly clipped hedge, poplars and very old willow trees, with an apple orchard and the most gorgeous flowering borders I ever saw. The whole thing is a national monument, and whoever maintains it must really love the place. All around are prosperous-looking farms and more orchards, and what looked like local people were coming with picnic baskets just to stretch out on the grass and relax, as we did for an hour or two before reluctantly moving on. We stayed overnight and spent part of a day in Halifax, which is a real city and very attractive, but the best thing about the whole trip was getting back to Corea—where to a series of astonishing light effects, including the spectral one on foggy nights when the almost-extinguished lights across the inlet reminded me of an Albert Ryder moonscape, we now added our first sight of the open sea glimmering in the distance in the light of an actual full moon.

In the midst of all this, I’ve been getting work done, believe it or not. There are no distractions other than those of the place itself, and there are times when spending a day indoors at the typewriter is the pleasantest thing imaginable—such as the day when a southeast gale blew all day long, making the house creak like a ship at sea. The one local event since we got here has been a rummage sale last week, at which a food counter was featured. Remembering your report of finds at rummage sales—I hadn’t been to one in I don’t know when—as well as seeing it as offering a glimpse of the working of the community, I made a point of going. Though I arrived too late for the home-made pies—it seemed somehow a bit forward to be waiting outside the Grange Hall when the doors opened—I did find a couple of shirts in my size (one of them a boy’s, and those are the best kind) and a cotton velour pullover for all of $1.40, as well as a brief look at a local function.

Meanwhile, we hear rumors that the heat in New York is breaking all records—not to mention the fiscal crisis, which people up here do tend to bring up, but which to us seems quite unreal and certainly not worth discussing—and it is hard to believe that we’re ever going back there. We’ve gotten a week’s extension of our stay, since the next tenants aren’t arriving until later, so we’ll be here until July 7! [ … ]

A parcel from you has arrived safely, and I hope for the same for a small one for you mailed from St. Cloud, Minnesota, while I was visiting my brother out there, earlier this month. My brother took care of it, at one of those twenty-four-hour do-it-yourself post office windows that seem to proliferate out there. I suppose the reason I don’t quite trust them is that I saw how the latest in computerized banking worked in that town: you put a card into a slot, punch some code letters, and supposedly have money delivered to you—only the money wasn’t forthcoming until some scurrying bank employees were called upon. Otherwise, though, it’s a nice town—prairie landscape, lots of snow, ranch-style houses, healthy kids—and it’s only a little over an hour from Minneapolis, which looks good and is vouched for by all kinds of people. I only saw it from the window of a Greyhound bus. Minnesota was the second stop on a little tour of the Midwest, catching up with various branches of the family. The first was in Ferndale, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where my youngest brother and his family live—including my niece Holly, who is now nine and a great personality—loves trolls and penguins, has strong opinions on just about everything (purple, orange, and pink are her favorite colors, and the day I arrived she had managed to get them all into one ensemble), composes impromptu on the piano, and was quite equal to a tour of the Hermitage paintings from Leningrad, which happened to be at the Detroit museum, and, wonderful in a Clampitt, isn’t at all shy. I don’t know what in the world she is going to grow up into, but I am finding her as (the youngest Clampitt) interesting as her cousin David, who is now in New York studying violin at Manhattan School of Music.—Anyhow, from Minnesota I took another bus to Des Moines, for a visit with my mother and sister. My mother isn’t very well, and living in a nursing home isn’t the greatest life imaginable; but her friends are there, including a couple of great people she’s gotten to know right there. Since I came back, it seems that the house where my parents lived in Des Moines, which is a regional headquarters of the American Friends Service Committee, has been blown up, presumably by a bomb—though who can have planted it isn’t at all clear. Things do get weirder and weirder. But while I was out there, the Midwest seemed quite peaceful, and I enjoyed riding buses through that wide-open landscape.

The New York Public Library Christmas card isn’t an accident. It occurred to me that because a good deal of my working life over the past year and a half had been spent there, this was a cause worth supporting to that extent. The main event of the past six months was finally winding up the Franklin project; the research is finished, the book is written, and all would be well except that there has been some sort of shakeup at Simon & Schuster and there is no telling whether they will publish it or not, notwithstanding the auction and the whopping advance involved. Publishing is in a bad way these days, and conglomerates are buying up publishing houses right and left; Gulf & Western now owns S&S. It’s a good book, though, so it would be nice to have the whole thing straightened out. When and if, anyhow, it’s to be called Benjamin Franklin: Agent of the Revolution, and David Schoenbrun is the author.

Hal has a half-year sabbatical beginning very shortly, and if current plans go forward, we are going to Europe in the spring. We have space on the Leonardo da Vinci—one of the few transatlantic liners still operating, and then only for a few crossings—for the 28th of March, and if it’s not too expensive we may spend a couple of months over there, revisiting places like Italy and England and exploring others new to both of us, such as Vienna and Amsterdam. But given the times, one never knows. [ … ]

The first letter of the new year—which may suggest the kind of holiday season it’s been, and why I’ve been so long in acknowledging your Christmas remembrance. The parcel arrived safely some time ago, just as I was about to leave for Iowa on a visit to my mother—though I waited until Christmas eve to open it. I was reminded of the bow you were wearing in your hair the day you first came to Audubon House. No, I know it’s not the same one, but it does look like you, as it does like me. Very becoming, in fact, and I’m pleased to have it. Thank you very much. [ … ] Once I was back in New York, I found myself just a little bit busier than I needed to be, if not busier than I’ve ever been in my life, with a couple of editing projects. The result was that the holidays went next to ignored. Hal came down here for supper on Christmas Eve, and we built a fire and read aloud from Isaiah, as a sort of Jewish-Christian compromise. On New Year’s Eve he read to me from Little Dorrit (reading aloud from Dickens is a sort of continuing project, since we spent a winter doing Bleak House, several years ago). But I was asleep by ten-thirty from sheer fatigue, and back at work on my manuscript early the next day. The current one is a big book by Peter Farb, whom you may remember from Audubon Society days, called The Human Equation. It has just about everything imaginable in it, and is a sort of natural history of the human species. The editing still isn’t finished, but I’m near enough to the end to risk taking some time off to write letters. When that’s done, I have some relatively small research projects to attend to before plunging into the next big one—reading about the French Underground during World War II for a new Schoenbrun Book. It will mean spending at least some weeks in Washington, going through documents from the OSS that are now in the National Archives. I wish I were more enthusiastic about spending all that time down there—it turns out that I’m just not keen on being away from New York, so I’ll probably be coming back here for weekends. Arrangements for a place to stay remain be be made, though I have a few leads.

On the subway, and when snatching a free few minutes, I’m reading The Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel—a marvelous, dense, vivid, sweeping piece of history interwoven with geography. I’ve also read most of Humboldt’s Gift, and liked it much the best of the Bellow novels I’ve read; very funny. I’ve hardly been to the theater or anything of that sort—partly because for a good deal of the fall I was still recuperating from the trouble in July (I think I wrote you about that), and then there was just too much to do. But Hal and I did see the National Theater of Greece when they were here in November, doing Oedipus at Colonus in modern Greek. Very grand and strange. [ … ]

How soon I’ll be back in Washington remains unclear, since the xeroxing at the Archives is evidently proceeding at its usual pace; I’ve gotten just one small package, naturally of material I least need just now. Meanwhile, in my old disorganized way, I’m working on and off at the New York Public Library—as I explained to Mr. Newman over the phone when he begged to know where in the world I’d been. I’ve also done some wandering around, buying a lavender T-shirt and a new plant with pink-and-green leaves, and encouraging Hal in his long-deferred project of getting a little thinner around the middle. But after those clear-cut days of catching the bus with all the government people, morning and evening, I find it a bit difficult to account for where the time has gone. Understand, I’m not feeling guilty, just vague. Today I met with my man at Dutton, and the terms of the agreement have been set to everyone’s satisfaction. I did say, on my own initiative, that I’d keep a record on my calendar of the days I put in for him; but at least I don’t have to tot up totals of hours, as I’ve always had to do (or nearly always) in working for publishers.

The day after I got back, Hal and I went out to New Jersey (Milburn, to be precise, on the other side of Newark) to a dinner party. I found myself sitting next to what I understood was a famous constitutional lawyer, who was carrying on alarmingly about rounding up all the animals that are ripping off the little old ladies. After a while he put his arm around me and said, ‘What do you think?” (From across the table, he’d been taken on by a vigorous opponent.) I said, “I’m a liberal,” which disposed of that subject. Later, somebody told us that the noted constitutional lawyer had been, and perhaps still was, a Marxist. Which explains some of him, perhaps. He’s also married to an Englishwoman who struck me as one of the most consummate snobs I ever met up with—which grieved me still more, since I don’t like anybody giving England a bad name. Last Saturday we went to a rather different sort of party. It was given by one of Hal’s law students, who is so rich that she simply took over a restaurant for the occasion, a place called Crawdaddy’s, just west of Grand Central Station. There was a bar and you could get oysters at one end and Mexican food at the other; but we’d just had dinner, so I settled for a glass of white wine which I didn’t finish. There was also a band, and pretty soon the place was so crowded that conversation became impossible. We stayed long enough to greet an old friend—the only person there I really knew—and got ourselves away. What I rather like about it is that I was wearing my espadrilles, and there were all these dressy people. (It’s that New York thing I told you about; being underdressed is the best way of keeping one’s perspective.) [ … ]

I’ve started reading Simone Weil: A Life by Simone Petrement—partly because Simone Weil had some small part in the French Resistance, mainly because I’ve been curious about her for a long time and came across a copy of the book at half price in the Strand Bookstore. I’ve also tidied up the poem I was struggling with on your typewriter when you came in on Palm Sunday. Here is the non-carbon copy:

and, underfoot, the sown constellations

of violet and periwinkle, the wild

tulip, poignant and sanguinary,

and dandelions blowsily unbuttoning,

grew up somehow, side by side

with order—the gardener’s imperative—

the cultivated, peculiarly human taste

for committing martyrdom. Now, hardened

and lapidary, it embalms

the torturer’s ingenuity, renders adorable

the horrid instruments of the Passion: never mind

whose howls, still not quite trembled under

by the feet of choirboys (sing,

my tongue, the glorious battle, sing

the winning of the fray) go on

out there among the olives,

applebloom, clipped boxwood, yew,

whitethorn, wych elm,

But since getting it down, I’ve heard Elizabeth Bishop reading her poems and being interviewed on the radio—and she is so wonderful in a plain-as-an-old-shoe kind of way that I don’t think so much of what I do. She has a new book, Geography III, which I’ve got to get, obviously. [ … ]

There is no excuse for this not writing you—none. The cartoon and clipping, with your characteristically self-effacing note, arrived safely, and there was no excuse then either. Especially since I think of you so much and so fondly, and a piece of me is still permanently lodged there on Connecticut Avenue. We’ve been here nearly a week now, and are so settled in that it’s as though we’d always lived here—though it’s only this morning that I’ve made myself get out the typewriter and open up communications. For one thing, we’re not getting any mail. Not even the New York Times, which we’re paying to have sent. And it is a bit sheepish-making to arrive at the post office, beaming hopefully, and be told that there isn’t anything. Better at least to bring something to be mailed. Of course the walk is good for us, and the weather has been so persistently bright and breezy that it’s a crime not to be out walking. We’re in what turns out to be a rather small house, very snug and busy with fishnet and the skeletal remains of starfish and sea urchins, plus all manner of what Hal refers to as Little Chotchkas (spelling probably off a little). Also oil paintings in large numbers; among many other things, our landlady does them. She also brings over things such as fresh-baked peanut-butter cookies and homemade wine. She is what her husband refers to as a “full-blooded Italian.” He on the other hand is pure Yankee, and reminds me in many ways of my father. They have, of all things, a couple of goats. I could hardly believe it when, our first evening, I heard that small bleat from somewhere in the back. We’re in sight of water, including a lighthouse and various islands, with woods at our back. There are lots of mosquitoes, but thus far no blackflies, the real horror of these parts. We’ve already pulled off a small adventure. Very early in the week, we started off on a walk and ended up crossing the exposed sandbar that turns our picnic island into a temporary peninsula. Discovering that the sandbar that connects it still more temporarily with yet another island, known as the Outer Bar, was above water, we achieved our ambition of getting onto it. After climbing around for a while, we suddenly realized that the tide was coming in and that our second sandbar was under water. For a few minutes we debated whether to stay and wait for the next low tide, subsisting on such wild strawberries as we might find, but then decided on getting our feet wet. For anybody else, all this may sound tame, but we’re both so easily alarmed that we felt exceedingly intrepid. And our landlord made us feel more so by admitting that he’d been to the Outer Bar only twice himself. [ … ] We’re reading Little Dorrit—still!—aloud, and I’m just about to finish the biography of Simone Weil that I’ve been reading off and on for weeks. I don’t know of any twentieth-century figure I admire more. Do you know of her at all?

Actually, despite the bright weather I’ve gotten some work done—mainly editing a Dutton manuscript. Tonight we’re going in to Ellsworth, the nearest real town, for a performance of Così fan tutte—after not being near the opera in New York for years. We seem to be living mainly on such things as blueberry pie, strawberry shortcake, and crabmeat—as being less bother than lobster and just as good….

Hal and I spent the month of July in Corea, our hideaway on the coast of Maine—in a different house since the one we stayed in first has been sold—and have already spoken for still another one for next June. It was beautiful there in July, and what was a heat wave elsewhere meant simply a lot of bright, warm days—also a lot of wild blueberries to be had for the picking, so we lived on them, most notably in blueberry pancakes. But in many ways I still prefer June, when the summer people haven’t yet arrived, and the spring flowers are still in bloom.

All through the fall, I was just busy enough—mainly with reading manuscripts for Dutton and editing a few of them—but not too busy to do something I’d been thinking about but never quite dared to, namely enroll in a poetry workshop at the New School. One is naturally a little uneasy about being cut down or in some way mortally wounded by such a thing; but it turned out not only to be fairly painless but stimulating in a way I would never have predicted. The instructor is a very young poet who is a bit of a jock and who I think disapproves of the kind of thing I do; we argue a lot, but there is enough mutual respect so we may manage to wind up the course as friends. He also writes plays, and last Saturday I went to hear a reading by a group who are considering one of his for a production—the first such thing I’d ever been to, and extremely interesting. The whole class also went to a poetry reading a few weeks back—Mark Strand was the featured reader, and very good indeed—and I’m wondering whether I may finally get up courage enough to try exposing my own work when there’s occasion for it. Anyhow, I’ve been writing great quantities, even when there wasn’t really time. I’ll enclose a couple of samples.

“Cut Flowers” is from a series about my stay in the hospital a year and half ago. It’s a sample of the kind of thing the workshop instructor doesn’t really like: but some people do, and I hope you may be one of them. [ … ]

First there was chicken with cashews and various vegetables; then a steamed sea bass with ginger, scallions, and black beans; and then Szechuan pork, a somewhat peppery dish. We wound up with a buche de Noël somebody else had brought. Stir-fry cooking is so much fun that Hal and I are really into it now; I’m going to do a moo-shu pork this evening before we go off to a New Year’s Eve party in New Jersey.

A couple of evenings ago I did something entirely new for me—namely, read my own poetry to an audience of strangers. I would never have gotten up courage, I imagine, if it hadn’t been for the workshop I’ve been in. My instructor was to be the featured reader at one of these things, which go on all over town, mainly in the back room of pubs or restaurants, and had mentioned that there would be what’s called an “open reading” afterward. So I made up my mind that now was the time. Hal went with me, and beforehand I did a little practicing with the help of his tape recorder. As a result, I wasn’t in the least anxious, I apparently could be heard, and the applause at the end surprised me. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of becoming a per-former—which is what reading one’s own stuff amounts to—I expect I’ll look for more occasions. And since the workshop was so stimulating, I may also look for another one to join for the spring semester. [ … ]

Which leads me to the thought of you being in two plays at once, and your mention of the fun it is even to try out. I can appreciate the feeling much more vividly now than I would have before December 29, when I did what I’d hardly quite believed I was going to go through with, namely reading my own poems to a roomful of strangers. Barbara, I did it! I may have mentioned that my poetry workshop man was to be the featured reader in the back room of this pub, and had mentioned that there would be an open reading afterward. (These things go on all over town, it appears.) To prepare myself, I practiced with Hal’s tape recorder, got myself to slow down and keep my voice up, in other words to develop a performance. I read just three poems, but I could feel the attention—and Hal said afterward he thought I got more applause than anyone after the featured reader. I know the amount and duration of it surprised me. And I wasn’t in the least agitated, before, during or after. It’s a heady pleasure all right, and ever since I’ve been casting about for the prospect of doing it again. So it was all the more delightful to think of you rehearsing for two plays at once!!

And now I’m writing like crazy—six new poems in the first seven days of the new year, including two of them written on the same day. [ … ]

I’m still writing new things, though not at the same dizzy pace. I’ll send one of two recent ones. The news is that one of the January poems is going to see print—in the New Yorker! It was my boss at Dutton’s doing really—he sent a few to Howard Moss, who sent them back with a very thoughtful letter asking to see more; so Jack sent another one I’d left with him, and that’s the one they’ve accepted. It’s called “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews”—I can’t remember whether it was one I sent you, though I don’t think so, and since there are going to be some changes in punctuation I don’t have a good copy just now. Meanwhile I’ve sent them another batch, and we’ll see. Incidentally, I’m going to take your advice and try “Dancers Exercising” on Poetry.

It snows and snows. Hal and I have taken up jogging and isometric exercises, as led by an out-of-work actor. I even got running shoes and a leotard! We had a musical afternoon on Sunday—my nephew and three other string players, doing Schubert for a select few of us. It’s a very heady experience, like going back to the days of Count Esterhazy, and altogether different from hearing it in a concert hall or on records.

You mentioned, in your previous letter, Arthur Mitchell and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. I’ve never seen the group perform in person, but I did see a television program about the school where the dancers are trained, a year or so ago. The dancing was very fine. Of course I remember Arthur Mitchell himself from the earlier days of what’s now the New York City Ballet. Since I wrote last, Hal and I have been twice to see it. On the first of those evenings, we happened onto a premiere of a new Balanchine work, to the Kammermusik No. 2 (I think) of Hindemith. It was very exciting, and is still being discussed by the dance critics. The audience that evening was full of dancers, and “Mr. B” himself finally came onto the stage to take a bow—the first time, so far as I can remember, that I’ve seen him do that. On the more recent evening at the City Ballet, along with some newer works there was La Valse, which I first saw with Tanaquil Leclerq, all those years ago, doing the part of the Girl in White, and have seen I don’t know how many times since; and the magic was still there, though what I saw in the ballet itself this time was somewhat different from the other times. I wrote a poem about it which I’m venturing to send, hoping that you won’t be offended by the little excerpt concerning St. Audrey at the beginning (according to my own book on the lives of the saints, her career was entirely given over to piety, quite unlike the dictionary version). In fact, I’ll send a couple of others having to do in one way or another with dancers. Perhaps—though I can’t be sure—they’ll make more sense than the long one about the Jersey meadows. I’m not sure I can clarify that one, but possibly an account of how it came to be written may help. The idea first came to me last spring, when I was making weekly trips to and from Washington, and each time found myself looking with a mixture of loathing and fascination at a scene which I think must have been familiar to you once—the lowlands between the Hudson and the Watchung Ridge, into which the train emerges almost immediately after leaving the tunnel from Penn Station. Eventually, I suppose, the waterways will be filled entirely with a sort of soil—what they call landfill, which always seems to contain a large proportion of compacted garbage. For the time being, there are still fairly large patches of reeds, for which the botanical name is Phragmites—tall, dense, and graceful in their own way, with great tufted plumes that linger through the winter. All the ugliness and waste that seem an inescapable part of urban living appeared to be concentrated in those lowlands—chemical plants, refineries, junkyards—and this made the gracefulness of the reeds somehow precious, and it seemed to me, week after week, that something was there waiting to be said. When I suddenly woke up to the realization that reeds of the genus Phragmites were the ones used in antiquity to make simple pipes, and that such pipes were originally used to accompany elegiac poetry, I seemed to know in a vague way what it was that wanted to be said, or perhaps more accurately that I myself wanted to say—it was to lament the waste and ugliness, and in the process to say something about what poetry might do but somehow doesn’t. I don’t know how successfully I did any of this, but it was satisfying to have gotten some of those things set down. I haven’t read it over lately, and haven’t yet ventured to send it anywhere.—Oh yes, one more thing: the scene in Milburn is a dinner party I went to one weekend, and transcribes fairly accurately what in fact took place—as well as the kind of thing one hears sometime so-called liberals saying these days.—In the meantime, I’ve been writing more poetry than ever before. For a while, even though I had a good deal of work to do, I was writing one or more pieces every day. Lately they’ve come more slowly, but there still seem to be more ideas than I can quite catch up with. And sometime before too long, I don’t yet know just when, one of these new things is going to appear in the New Yorker. This has just happened, and my boss at Dutton is really responsible for bringing it to the attention of the poetry editor there, who’s asked to see more (having also turned down several others); and that of course is an encouragement.

I was greatly interested to hear about your correspondence with the Polish nun, and about her fascination with nineteenth-century English novels and “lost causes.” I’m wondering whether George Eliot would be one of her favorites. Last summer while we were in Maine, Hal read Middlemarch for the first time, and was so eager to talk about it that I re-read it myself. It seemed to me more than ever, in its own sober and patient way, one of the greatest novels ever written. No one has ever written more powerfully of the drama of the inner life or of the complexity of human character (“a process and an unfolding,” she called it). And there is this extraordinary passage which you may know, but having just lately copied it out, I pass it along: “If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”—Again thanks to Hal’s company, I’ve come to an appreciation of Dickens that I didn’t always have. I may have mentioned that one winter several years ago we read Bleak House aloud to each other. Last summer we finished Little Dorrit, which in some ways I liked even better. We have Our Mutual Friend and Martin Chuzzlewit waiting for whenever there is leisure to begin a new reading project.

I hadn’t realized how easily one slips into jargon—which is what “spring list,” which you found puzzling, really amounts to. I didn’t even use it correctly; what I should have been talking about was the “fall list”—in less cryptic terms, the books that are scheduled to be published between September and the end of the year. The printing process seems to take longer and longer, with the result that if a book is to be out by September, the manuscript needs to be edited and ready for the printer by January. Hence the rush around the Christmas holidays to get manuscripts that have just come in edited in time. Something like a lull may be about to descend, and it will be welcome.—As for the snowy weather that was reported from New York, I welcomed the first big storm with a certain glee; there’s still a child in me that enjoys watching the snow come down and the prospect of the total disruption that comes in the wake of a blizzard. By the time the biggest snowstorm of the year arrived, and lasted something like thirty-six hours, I was somewhat bored by it all. There was no hardship for me; for some, the cold became a problem. Now, I can report the very first crocuses already in bloom in a Village garden. And I send my very best wishes, as always, for a blessed Easter.

This has been what Hal and I speak of as a Grum Easter Sunday, all day long—with the result that we’ve stayed in all day. Otherwise we would have been out—can you believe this?—jogging. Yes, we’re really into it. We go twice a week, once privately as a pair, and the other time with a larger group, for exercises followed by running, as led by an out-of-work actor one of Hal’s former students discovered. I wouldn’t care for the whole thing quite as much if the leader weren’t so sunny and patient and beautiful to look at. I’m learning a whole new set of ways to get that great muscle tone your doctor exclaimed over, as I remember; we do pliés and relevés and various stretching exercises, for which I even bought a leotard. Also running shoes. Nobody believes this when I tell it.

There is other news. I forget whether I mentioned that Jack, my boss at Dutton, volunteered to send some poems to Howard Moss, the poetry editor at the New Yorker. Well, anyhow he did, and the upshot is that they’re going to publish one of them! It’s called “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews” and I don’t believe I’ve sent it to you; it’s fairly recent, and has to do with a bog in Maine. The other day the check came, and it appears that they must pay by the word: one hundred eighty-two smackers for one little poem! It now becomes clear why everybody wants to get into that magazine. They’ve asked to see more and sent those back, saying send still others—which I’m about to do. I don’t know yet just when I can expect to see the one they accepted in print, but since they apparently send out proofs beforehand to the author, I’ll let you know beforehand.—No, I never had a chance to read the long Jersey Meadows poem to the class or anywhere, except to my nephew and his roommate one night when they were at Hal’s. It’s a good one to sort of cut loose with, and it appeared to go over well with them. I haven’t yet sent it anywhere, but am getting ready to try some magazine that runs long things soon.

Most of the time I find it hard to believe it’s close to a year since, for instance, that day when you and the diffident Mr. Cork went out looking for wild flowers. The new crop will be appearing soon, I suppose—likewise all those wonderful fragrant pale yellow jonquils at Johnny and Sandy’s little house in the woods. It grieved me, as though I were entitled to any such reaction, to hear that they’ve left it for Florida. Of course I don’t know Florida. But I’ve seen the little house, and loved it for being so absolutely one-of-a-kind. [ … ]

Domesticity around here got a little complicated for a while, when we began having visitations, all unannounced, from an old girlfriend of Hal’s who either is in the process of going crazy or has been that way all along. She has no means of support, and lately has been going through a pattern of appearing unannounced on the doorsteps of various friends and relatives and, it would seem, staying put until they’re provoked into throwing her out. She even did something of the sort with her psychiatrist—who, according to her own account, finally called the police. She brings little presents—bialys, a bottle of Perrier water—and talks plausibly enough, in a muted sort of way; and she drives around in a car that belongs to a long-suffering friend who took her into her household in a radical feminist community up in New Hampshire. Hal has a number of somewhat crazy friends—he likes people who’re just a bit crazy, or he wouldn’t put up with me—and for a long time he didn’t see this one as any crazier than the rest of us. For the moment the visitations have stopped, but if she appears in Maine I won’t be surprised.

Our friend from Harvard, whom one might imagine to be sanity personified but who is full of quirks, was down a few weekends back, and we had another of those magical Sunday brunches—asparagus hollandaise, croissants, and strawberries. I can’t remember now much of what was talked about, except that I’d just gotten a proof of my poem from the New Yorker and read him some others, which he responded to most satisfactorily. For a while it seemed as though they were about to take another poem; they professed to like it enough to ask me to revise the ending, which they thought was wrong; so I did, but the revised ending didn’t please them either, though they continue to ask to see more things. Now I’m not sure whether I think the original or the revised ending is better, and I’m about to impose on you to the extent of sending both for your opinion. Eventually I’ll send it somewhere else, once I decide which version. [ … ]

I’ve just written Alfred, who sent me this funny Peanuts congratulations card back in August. The mail has been coming in from all over, surprisingly—in fact, it turns out that the best thing about getting into print is hearing from people. From the likes of Stuart Gerry Brown, for instance. Remember him? He’s now emeritus at the University of Hawaii. And one of my high school classmates, whose son-in-law came across the poem and passed it along. and I just this week got word from the New Yorker that they’re taking “The Cove”—I think it was in the set I sent you. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll throw diffidence aside and mention what the poetry editor said. He said deciding on that one was a matter of “winnowing the gold from the gold.” Thus bolstered, I’ve sent off some things to the Atlantic—including an updated version of the penguin poem. Your comment about the previous ones persuaded me that something had to be done, and just the other day I came up with something. I hope you’ll approve, never mind what the Atlantic does.

I’m still struggling with the manuscript I was groaning over when you were here. The author has been to China and come back, and we’re now waiting for something like revision number four of the final chapter. Also, nobody can agree on a title. It’s been a long haul, but not quite as tedious as having to deal with another author, more recently. The other day, when he raised questions that could have been cleared up weeks ago if he’d been paying attention, I told him over the phone that I was finding things “a little bit tiresome.” How about that for assertiveness? He clearly hadn’t expected such insubordination from a mere copy editor (which is what he sees me as). But I think that one is all attended to, and for the first time in weeks I’m feeling close to caught up—hence getting down to letter-writing is in order. [ … ]

Hal is fine, aside from struggles with the revision of the famous Article. A couple of weeks ago we both thought it was finished. Now he decides it isn’t—not finely enough crafted, has to be developed. On the other hand, there is a Supreme Court case coming up which bears directly on his subject, so he’s got to get it into print. But he has his own ineffably high standards, and it’s no use telling a scholarly type that his standards are possibly too high—it’s worse than telling an artist such a thing, I suppose.

Well, and how is Mr. Newman, and how is John Edgerton, and how, indeed, is the diffident Mr. Cork? But above all, how are you?

Your letter of away back in April was so full of specially meaningful things, to which my delayed response was that I must answer it as soon as possible—and now I’m dismayed to realize how much time has passed, and what I’m writing is a Christmas letter as well as the answer I intended! You wrote, anyhow, a lot about dancing, and how as a “responding motion” it is also an expression of religious feeling. This is a thought I’ve had more and more lately—I remember saying to Hal, as one of those jokes that underneath are perfectly serious, “Life is dance.” As I’ve mentioned, I think, we listen to a great deal of music, and often we start moving around the room in response to it—an unstiffening, on my part, that has been a long time in taking place but is not too late, even so. What you wrote about the young girl with whom you danced to Vivaldi, fluttering and spinning to the flute imitating the gold-finch, is specially poignant because that discovering of muscles, and feeling the discovery translated into joy, is so real for me. I have a trace of regret, I suppose, that I didn’t unstiffen soon enough to study ballet—an art I’ve admired most intensely ever since I watched Tanaquil Leclerq and others like her in those very early days, before Balanchine was a household word, and long before his works were being done on television (as some of them were just a few evenings ago—“The Prodigal Son,” with an extraordinary performancec by Mikhail Baryshnikov, and a newer production to a Gluck “Chaconne”). Anyhow, as the next best thing, you may be surprised to hear that I’ve moved a step in that direction. Twice a week, these days, Hal and I do exercises—mainly limbering-up, Yoga-like stretching ones, but with some things such as pliés and relevés thrown in—with a delightful young man whom we’ve gotten to know, after which we put on runners’ shoes and run for a mile or two, along the East River or the drives in Central Park. Physical fitness has become a kind of mania around here in recent months, and it’s a bit embarrassing to find oneself caught up in a fad; but we look on the fad as simply a coincidence. (Did you know, by the way, that back in October, something over ten thousand people, both men and women, took part in a marathon run around New York City? It wasn’t the first such marathon, but it was the first with such numbers—and still hardly believable, though I watched a little of it from one spot on the East Side. The runners went through all kinds of neighborhoods, including Harlem, and seem to have been welcomed everywhere.) Anyhow, among other things I’ve been shown how to “turn out” for a proper arabesque—and as a result I have all the more respect for the training a dancer must go through.

All this being so, you can see why images of dancers or submerged references to dancing have a way of cropping up when I write poetry—as I’ve gone on doing fairly regularly over the past few months. I’ll enclose one I wrote in Maine this summer, called “The Tides,” that’s an example of what I mean—along with a photocopy of the one the New Yorker had accepted when I wrote you last. (They’ve since bought three others—and the Atlantic Monthly and the American Scholar have each bought one—all very gratifying, of course.) I must confess to a twinge of dismay at your reference to the sarcasm you found in some things I’ve sent, as not fitting in with your own picture of me. Of course you’re quite right to speak of this, and I’m not in the least offended, just a bit bemused. It may have been some effort to build up a somewhat artificial demeanor, thereby suppressing a more mischievous side that’s always been there, that’s at fault. It may also have been some idea that I was grown up now, and not allowed to play any more. Anyhow, the mischief is always lurking—pointing to incongruities and the unacknowledged gaps in what’s supposedly grown-up behavior, and recently I guess I’ve felt freer to let it emerge for what it is. What troubles me is that you seem to be troubled (or even offended? I hope not, but can’t be sure) by what I hadn’t really thought of as sarcasm, but rather as a sort of playful truth-telling. Doris, I seem to remember, called it “sly humor” and seems to regard it as a sort of trademark. Or are we referring to different things? Anyhow, I’m grateful to you for plain speaking, and look forward to more of it.

I’ll include one poem, anyhow, which contains (I think) no sarcasm and hardly any playfulness. It’s called “Letters from Jerusalem” and I’m prompted to send it by your mention of the Reformed Rabbi who had recently visited the Abbey, and your comments on the discipline of living according to the law that is implicit in all of Judaism. This, once again, thrilled me all the more because that subject was just then vividly in my mind, and I think I may in fact have been working on this poem when your letter arrived. For several years now I’ve corresponded with a young man, a friend of my nephew David, who is living in Israel. He comes from a Jewish background but had lived as a secularized Jew, not a religious one, and evidently felt the lack of something more searching and rigorous. We met only a couple of times but felt an immediate affinity (he writes poetry), and there is a certain challenge in trying to account for oneself to something leading a very different kind of life—something I feel whenever I sit down to write to you. (You’re there in my mind, but more than a casual note is called for; there must be time to sit down and take stock, enter into a state of recollection, in fact.) He doesn’t write very often; but last spring, knowing that he was somewhere with a tank division—the great hurdle having been crossed, of having to go into the army, otherwise he couldn’t stay there any longer—I began to be alarmed about what might have happened to him. I got out all of his letters that I could find, and the poem was the result. I’ve since heard from him; he’s back in Jerusalem, studying the Talmud, teaching English and music to earn a living, and troubled by the divisions within Judaism (having opted for the strictest Orthodoxy himself). I was struck, of course, by the parallel of the kind of strictness that he feels drawn to with the life of a Christian religious. I hope what I’ve written will convey some of all this for you. (I sent my friend the poem, and he absorbed it without comment—but with, I suspect, a certain modest chagrin.) [ … ]

Otherwise, there is not much news, except that I’ve finally had a poem accepted by a “little” magazine—actually, it bulks as rather a tome, pays a little, and appears to circulate outside the U.S. It’s called Antaeus, and the thing they took was a bit of whimsy called “Agreeable Monsters.” Just lately I’ve been reading Adrienne Rich’s new book, The Dream of a Common Language. It’s all off-the-deep-end feminist, including a sequence on a lesbian love affair, but less off-putting than I’d expected, and in fact quite beautiful. For Dutton, just lately, I’ve been reading a couple of manuscripts on remote and exotic places, one about Ladakh, a mountainous enclave between Tibet and Kashmir, full of Tantric Buddhist monasteries, where the old ways have pretty much survived until now, and the other an autobiographical book by Wilfred Thesiger, who lived with the Arabs and explored desert and mountain places no European had seen, and escaping with his life by a hair’s-breadth of sheer luck maybe half a dozen times. That’s fun, but not so a real basket case of a manuscript about Edward Weston, for which I’ve been given the assignment of redoing one chapter to show how it might be salvaged—though my own conclusion is already that it can’t be. Even so, working for Dutton is about as pleasant as a job could possibly be.

In Iowa, I found my mother reasonably well for anyone of eighty-seven; there was snow on the ground everywhere but the weather was beautiful, and I managed to get in a three-mile hike, jogging part of the way, meeting one pedestrian the whole time and getting derisive comments from people behind the wheel of cars. We’ve finally gotten some genuine snow hereabouts; it was coming down in big flakes and every tree was outlined in white when I woke up this morning, but it’s already beginning to drip and look sodden by now. Bit by bit, with my exercise man, I’m learning about demi-pointe and rond de jambe and how to “turn out” for a proper ballerina plié. I’ll never go far with any of this, but it’s wonderfully satisfying to be doing it at all.

My mother died early in March. She’d just had her eighty-eighth birthday, and was very frail and tired, and altogether it could have been very much worse. I spent several days in Des Moines, and things were made much easier by a wonderful group of Quakers who had been her friends for years, and whom I now think of as my friends too. After that it seemed as though spring would never come, but today is lovely, and I’ve just finished editing a manuscript I’d been groaning over, and feeling liberated for the moment.

A couple of weeks ago I did, of all things, a poetry reading for a class of art students—actually it was a writing course, at the School of Visual Arts—and had a wonderful time. Everyone was so totally unthreatening that it was almost magical—for which credit must go to the teacher, who has some kind of genius for encouraging people to be themselves. I’d never met her before, but she’d heard about me from my friend Mary, and so the reading was arranged. They even paid me a little something, and there was talk about doing it again sometime. [ … ]

Your letter pleased me more than you can possibly imagine. Since you’re a poet, I wouldn’t be able to say such a thing if it weren’t for our belonging to different generations—and to have evoked such friendliness from a younger poet amounts to nothing less than a milestone. Few things could please me more than to trade poems with someone sympathetic, and so I’m sending along perhaps more than you’ll feel like coping with. I hope you won’t feel swamped, and of course you’re not obliged to read everything in the little book. If you do, you’ll find lots of exercises, throes of self-expression, and all the weight of the grand tradition. Milton, yet! The book [Multitudes, Multitudes] came about mainly because I got to know a young man who was trying, against the tide, to be a letterpress printer; he’s since become a casualty of the economy, and gone back to working for someone other than himself. At the time, though I sent out things occasionally (and got them back), I wasn’t quite ready to go out on a limb and commit myself to being a pro. I think that happened when I read some things in the back room of a pub (an “open reading,” needless to say) and discovered how heady a pleasure it can be to have an audience. One thing that had held me back, I must admit, was that I don’t greatly enjoy the company of literary types—the more literary they are, the more miserable they seem to be as human beings. This isn’t just a complaint, it’s a lament in the elegiac manner. I’ve been fortunate in my friends, and since I earn my living bookishly (half-time editor for E. P. Dutton, freelancing the rest of the time) I have no illusions about authors. My best-friend-and-severest-critic—with whom I’ve shared a house up here in Maine for several summers now—is a lawyer with an ear for music, who takes pleasure in words as much as I do. A very old friend teaches English in Colorado, and we correspond. I couldn’t have gone on writing without those two. But I’ve yearned secretly for a poet I could write to. Editors, it turns out, are too busy—of course, with all those hordes of poets sending in manuscripts, more poets writing than there are readers, it would appear.

Is it W. C. Williams who’s to blame for the current monotony of manner? This is what Howard Moss says, in a nice thing I just came across in The American Poetry Review (where, it strikes me, monotony tends to predominate unduly). Or is it something more pervasive, a general pulling inside oneself because the environment is so bad out there? The other day it occurred to me that a whole generation has been so deadened by rock music that an ear for the music of words may be obsolescent. “You’re in love with words,” I was told (by a poet, yet) in a tone of accusation. What he meant, I guess, was that I tend to use too many of them. So you can see why your letter, with its sweet and generous compliments for what in some quarters is evidently seen as a defect, meant so much.

As for data: I come from the Midwest, went to Grinnell College a long time ago, and have gone through lots of changes, some of them documented in Multitudes, Multitudes. I’m here in this delectably silent and foggy lobstering village (“The Cove” and “Fog” were written here, and the sundew poem’s subject was discovered here) for six weeks, with some manuscripts to edit but also time for other things. The best-friend-and-severest-critic is writing a scholarly article. We listen to lots of music, and once we’ve settled in we’ll probably be reading aloud to each other. One summer it was Dickens—we finished Little Dorrit here, and were almost too broken up by it to speak. This summer it may be George Eliot. Just at the moment I’m reading Silas Marner for—can you imagine?—the first time. Best-friend-and-severest-critic read it in high school! Before that it was The Mill on the Floss, and before that Adam Bede. While I’ve been writing this, the fog that has been moving in and out since we arrived has been dissipating, the water has turned from no-hue to just faintly blue, and Petit Manan lighthouse has shown itself for the first time. Thank you so much, once again, for writing as you have. I do hope you’ll write again, and send your poems.

Along with “The Edge of the Hurricane,” I’ll send something brand new, at least in what I hope is more or less its final form. It had its genesis back in the summer, when I stayed overnight in New Haven with my old friend Doris—you might have met her back in Audubon days—who was at Yale on a summer fellowship, and we made the rounds of the museum exhibitions, including one of rare books. I’ll also enclose a clipping I’d been intending to send, from the Times about your old home town, just in case it hadn’t come your way. I did see the Calvin Trillin piece about Fairhope, and wondered how accurate it was. Your hints about the discussion at the Men’s Club are, to say the least, intriguing. Nothing like a small town for that kind of intensiveness. [ … ]

One reason I intended to write before now is to urge you, if you can possibly find the time, to translate the Hebrew parts of your army journal into English—and in any event, if you can spare a copy, I would love to see the parts that I’m able to read. It seems to me that a record of your experiences might be of interest to many readers, if we can devise some way of getting it into print.

David is getting along well, with an orchestra job that guarantees him an income for a least a year or so. His group is to give a concert at a new hall in Lincoln Center next week, and Hal and I are planning to gather a few people for a party beforehand. Hal is working on a big piece of legal scholarship, and I have gone on writing poetry, having had enough encouragement (three poems in the New Yorker so far, with two others to appear sometime, three in the Atlantic, and a few others coming out in “little” magazines) that there is more energy to keep going. I’ve revised “Letters from Jerusalem,” and plan to send it out one of these days; I’ll put in a copy of the new version, along with one of several other war-and-fire poems I’ve done lately.

I’m afraid this won’t reach you in time for Hanukkah (which I’m going to celebrate along with Hal and his parents this year), but in any event my best wishes for the holiday go with it. Please also convey my best wishes to Adina.

Your comments on the irony of getting so simple-minded a thing accepted by a scholarly publication are the same as my own reaction. I don’t know to this day why they took it; I’ve sent them various others I myself consider more suitable, from time to time, but no luck. I’ll put in a thing or two written just lately, concerned with the scene from Hal’s apartment window. The other night we were jolted by the noise of what I immediately knew was a bomb. It had gone off just outside the Soviet Embassy, two blocks up, and blew out (or in) about half the windows in the apartment house opposite; and though we weren’t quite determined enough to know what had happened to venture outside, we were able to count the number of ambulances, police vans, and unmarked vehicles (the kind with the red light on the roof, and the siren for emergencies) that went by, and pretty much figured out what must have happened. Another neighborhood development—I don’t think I’ve written you about this—is that a townhouse just down the block has been bought by Richard Nixon! A couple of co-op apartment buildings had refused to take him; but this time the only protest (if that is what it was) consisted of a lone figure in a jailbird suit, wearing a Nixon mask, with a suitcase beside him, who appeared a couple of times on the corner of Lexington and 65th. Most people went by without a look, but Hal and I went up to him laughing, whereupon the figure put on an imploring pose and said “Please forgive me,” to which I said I wouldn’t until he paid his taxes. The other day I went by when a couple of men were polishing up the brass on the knocker. Aha, I thought, Nixon retainers—until I got close enough to hear one of them saying “… guilty as sin.” There are some rather phony-looking Christmas wreaths in the windows there now, but I’m not sure it means anybody has moved in. On the other hand, it may mean that we’ll have them right there, within jeering distance, for Christmas! We wonder what we’ve done to deserve this. The New Yorker this week had a properly indignant piece in the Talk of the Town, quoting that terrible man as saying, “no one ever lives in New York; they stay in New York and work in New York”—whereas his heart will “always be in California.” So what is he working up to now, one wonders. The Talk of the Town writer goes on, “If I had a few moments eye to eye with the ex-President, I would resist the temptation to grab his lapels but I would, very firmly, state the case, as follows: Watch it, Buster. You want to move your base of operations here—fine. We didn’t stop Reverend Moon and we won’t stop you. But be warned: Play by the rules, be neighborly, stand back and let the other passengers off, try to show a little enthusiasm for the local sports franchises, don’t smoke in the elevators, act nice, lay off the malicious gossip, and we will too.” Well, maybe we will. I’ll let you know if there are any interesting developments.

To think that your classmates would be so defensive as to take umbrage at anything less than the rah-rah tone of a cheering section! But I suppose those class letters must be regarded as largely a holdover of same. How depressing. Which reminds me that my nephew David—who’s now making a sort of go in New York as a violinist, thanks for the nonce to CETA funding—went to Grinnell, and when I went to his graduation one of his roommates, an honor student, prize-winner for poetry, and so on—for whatever reason couldn’t bring himself to appear at the ceremony at all. Later, over a kind of picnic in the ramshackle house where they were both living, I met him and we became instant friends. Not long afterward he took off for Israel, where he’s lived ever since, and from which he writes fascinating letters that sound like a translation, he’s now so immersed in speaking Hebrew. He’s put in his obligatory two years of military service and lately gotten married. When he first told his classmates he was thinking of going to Israel (being from a secular Jewish family, he wanted to find out where his roots were) the leftists, of whom he was one, were horrified. I suppose they’d be even more horrified now that he’s become a Talmudic scholar, but I find the whole thing thrilling and touching at once. There is, of course, no word of what he’s done in the alumni news.

Speaking of orthodoxy, later today I’m going to celebrate Hanukkah with Hal’s parents—first such holiday doings I’ve ever been invited to. There was a small flurry a while back when his father got it into his head that I might be persuaded to convert, and then they could have a proper daughter-in-law; but they have since been set straight on that, or so Hal says. They’re dear people anyhow. [ … ]

I can also share your dismay over the jaywalking pedestrian. In Maine a couple of summers ago, a kid on a skateboard suddenly darted into the road just as we came over a little rise—and it was just after sunset, to make things scarier. We weren’t going very fast, and Hal managed with great presence of mind to veer around him, but the shaken feeling at what might have happened took—as you observe—a while to get over.

Anyhow, here’s to cheerier times in 1980. Before I forget to mention it, I had a nice letter from Jean Dimond London, of Grinnell class of ’43, who had seen something about my getting into print in the alumni magazine and felt moved to send her felicitations. Unlike most old-grad recollections, which make me cringe, hers were on an identifiable wavelength, which is the more remarkable since we hadn’t known each other at all well. I remember her as extremely pretty and voluptuous, and thus (I supposed) invulnerable to all my own perpetual anxieties and unrequited yearnings—but that’s how wrong one can be. Anyhow, she now lives in Palo Alto but for years had a job in the government. Did you know her at all?

The New Yorker has taken another poem (which I called “Artifacts,” but they want another title—I can’t remember whether it was one I sent you or not), and Howard Moss, the poetry editor, came to dinner. It was just a few days after he’d been to the White House, where he found the President charming, Rosalynn less so. For one thing, the President let it be known that he reads Browning. There wasn’t an awful lot of name-dropping during the evening here—it having been billed as an evening of Mozart, we put on a recording of Così fan tutte and listened almost as much as we talked—but he did tell us about Elizabeth Bowen, with whom he was friendly, and who invited him to Bowen’s Court. He had gone to graduate school at Columbia about the same time I did, and found it just as uninspiring.

They’re painting in the house down the block, and the moving-in (Nixon’s, you know) is said to be imminent, and I realize how unreal the whole prospect still is. I can imagine taking some other route on runs to Central Park, to avoid the spot. A couple of times, incidentally, I’ve run two miles without being totally incapacitated. It does seem that running has become part of my way of life, and I do credit it with more energy than I used to have for getting things done—though part of the credit no doubt goes to being around Hal, and another part to continued pleasant working circumstances. Last night there was a party to celebrate having lived through the Heartbook—I think I wrote you something about the tribulations connected with that one—not, you understand, a party to promote it or anything, just a party. My boss brought champagne, and some people turned up, including the typesetter, whom I’d never seen before. The book looks awful, in my opinion, but it’s useful and may even make money. I’m close to the end of Daniel Deronda, which I started reading back in the fall but never really got into until during the holidays—a real stunner—and have begun reading, of all things, The Interpretation of Dreams. My inclination to do that dates, I believe, to hearing Harold Bloom, the Yale critic and a classmate of Hal’s at Cornell, say that the two great works of literature in this century were it and Remembrance of Things Past. So far, it’s more entertaining than I expected.

Hal is grading exams. Recklessly, he assigned his class to decide a case the Supreme Court was in the midst of deliberating. The decision came down earlier this week. I haven’t heard whether the students are concurring or dissenting. Anyhow, he sends his best.

[ … ] Howard Moss did come to dinner and was very pleasant company. He is somewhat pudgy without being fat, with a massive head and a benign look, behind glasses. One of his longtime friends is James Merrill, whom he calls “Jimmy,” and who even in middle age would fit the description of the ultra-elegant young men in the audience at the Y (I heard him read at a memorial for Elizabeth Bishop, as I may have mentioned). The character of that audience has changed, it seems. The young men look mainly scruffy, and have beards, and there are lots of young women, and a fair amount of feminist swagger among the older ones. As for Anthony Hecht himself, the reports I’ve gotten suggest that he’s developed into more of a mensch: according to my friend at the Atlantic, whose best friend studied with him at Harvard, he was of the generous kind whose main concern is to encourage the writing of good poetry. I got the same kind of report from a friend of mine from politicking days—a maverick lawyer who now spends his time writing, who went to one of those workshops at Bread Loaf, and who said the one person on the staff who struck him as genuinely friendly was Anthony Hecht. He’s still a formalist, but I don’t find him cold (I can’t remember reading anything of his until lately). Howard Moss seems to have been in graduate school at Columbia around the same time I was, and he found it just as uncongenial—the one person he remembered favorably was William York Tindall, the Yeats specialist who also wrote a funny book about D. H. Lawrence. Precisely my reaction. Besides “Artifacts” (now retitled “Salvage”—I’ll enclose a copy), the New Yorker has just lately bought another one on the light side, called “Exmoor”—but the real breakthrough is that that same week, Poetry finally came through—they’re going to publish “Balms.” And the Kenyon Review, which in its second incarnation I find the most interesting of the literary quarterlies I’ve seen, is taking a weightier piece, “Or Consider Prometheus.”