Coming into the End Zone (20 page)

Walking along the beach to our last breakfast at the camp, Sybil and I talked about our house in Washington, as if to prepare ourselves for being gone from here, and back there at the end of this day. Her eyes filled with tears. She said she clings to the house, reluctant to let it go, hating the prospect of change, wishing we didn't have to sell it, feeling it is our one place she thought she would always be secure. I wonder why
I
am not sad about leaving the house, only my studio in the carriage house.

We ate fruit and sweet buns and drank coffee in silence. I believe I knew what she was thinking (presumptuous, surely), and I regretted my own deep and perpetual selfishness. I mourn the passing of the carriage house because
that is where my work is
. I contemplate the end of our residence on North Carolina Avenue without regret because I have always felt an irrational need to break ties when they threaten to be permanent. It is not that I am confident of what life in Maine will be like—the prospect of fixing the house there to make it livable for us is frightening—but that, for a brief period, I will be gone from here and hardly settled there; and that seems to me to be a kind of odd freedom. Sybil has agreed that the first room to be redone in the Maine house will be my study. Once I am settled in it, I will be happy and at home, with my work, my books, my manuscripts, my computer, and the chattering, efficient printer.

Walking back to our tent to pack, I saw, at the edge of the clearing where all the destroyed trees are heaped, the roots of what I thought was a manzanita tree. I remember hearing from a native on St. John in the Virgin Islands that every part of this tree—roots, leaves, flowers, stems—is poisonous. Columbus called its fruit ‘death apple.' To see it dead instead of flourishing made Kailuum's devastation by Gilbert a little less satanic.

On the plane, I talked to a businessman coming home from a conference in Cancún. Twice he rounded off anecdotes about his stay with the same favorite (these days) phrase: ‘The bottom line is …' And once he answered a question with another popular formulation that I have grown tired of: ‘There is good news and bad news. The good news is …' People seize upon these clichés as though they had just thought them up. They use them in place of simple or original rhetoric. I can only hope to live long enough to see such language swell up in volume, explode, die, and disappear.

The flight attendants on the plane had movable wagons that completely filled the aisle. Once they began to serve from them, drinks, and then food, and then drinks again, it was impossible to pass them, to go to the bathroom or, if one was foresighted and made it to the bathroom, to get back to one's seat. An unaccustomed claustrophobic panic welled up in me, caused, perhaps, by two weeks of wandering about in the expanses of ancient cities and living beside the endless sea. Now I was confined to a seat, strapped into it, with two people on one side and the barely mobile wagon on the other. I should have been gracious, I suppose, and accepted this state of affairs as instructive preparation for my return to the city and our narrow Victorian house, walled in by a hundred cartons of books and possessions.

February 22: This morning I learn, through a
Washington Post
obituary, that Rudy von Abele has died. He was a colleague of mine at American University who retired a year or so before I did. He had taught for many years and was an enigmatic figure to me, brilliant, talented, almost a dwarf of a man, with very bad eyes and a great love for the work of Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, German classical music, mystery stories, and young women. He had written one novel I admired,
The Party
, an equally good book of poems published by a university press, and a perceptive study of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Good students trusted and admired him, poor ones feared and misunderstood him.

I never knew him well. Indeed, I thought he rather disliked me. The last time I saw him was at the door to his apartment. I called to tell him I had received an extra copy of the new three-volume critical and synoptic edition of Joyce's
Ulysses
, and would be glad to give it to him. He said, yes, he would like to have it, and told me where he lived. Sybil and I drove to the apartment house on Massachusetts Avenue and rang his bell. He opened the door a crack.

‘I've brought the
Ulysses
,' I said.

‘Thank you,' he said, reached out, took the books, and closed the door. I never saw him again.

Strangely enough, after this curious dismissal, he told his executor to offer his books for sale to Wayward Books after his death. Sybil spoke to his executor today and arranged to pick up the key to the apartment next week and look at the books.

Back in my study. It now begins to resemble a warehouse. The bookcases are bare, the once ample walking space is filled with cartons, pictures and memorabilia are gone from the walls. But packing up in the study is very slow because I keep finding books I have forgotten I had. Today I sat on a pile of cartons to read from a collection of essays by George Bernard Shaw and came upon a typically Shavian view of women. (He is thought by many eager enlisters in the cause to have been an early feminist.)

No fascinating woman ever wants to emancipate her sex. Her object is to gather power into the hands of Man, because she knows she can govern him. She is no more jealous of his nominal supremacy than he himself is jealous of the strength and speed of his horse. Women disguise their strength as womanly weakness, their audacity as womanly timidity, their unscrupulousness as womanly innocence, their impunities as womanly defenselessness; simple men are duped by them, and subtle ones disarmed and intimidated. It is only the proud, straightforward women who wish, not to govern, but to be free.…

A finely shaped piece of rhetoric, saved from patriarchal condescension only by the last sentence.

A letter today from Kay Boyle, who has moved back to the Bay Area, Oakland, to be near her son. She is a miraculous woman, a phoenix, rising up and surviving one almost mortal illness after another. I think of her often, remembering at odd moments in the day the wise things she has said or written to me over the twenty years I have known her. Whenever I start to write in this memoir about my troubles writing
Camp
, the painful rejection of
The Habit
, the strain of trying to remember accurately what I did, I recall her warning that ‘the less writers write about their own work, the better.'

Her unselfish devotion to the well-being of others, to the commonweal, is her most notable characteristic. In her eighties she is still active in Amnesty International, and still is writing. She differs from a writer like Tillie Olsen, who wrote what she had to say in the thirties and has spent the next fifty years nursing her writer's block, caressing her early reputation, and rationalizing her sterility by blaming it on her hard life as a working woman. I remember Kay telling me she once had to write her novels at night in the bathroom perched on the toilet seat, after her six children were cared for and put to bed.

During the Vietnam War, Kay stood on the steps of the Federal Building in San Francisco (with Joan Baez's mother, her good friend) and burned the draft cards of the young men in the crowd. When she came down, she met Tillie, standing on the edge of the gathering, who said: ‘Oh Kay, I so admire you for what you are doing. How I wish I were doing it.'

Kay's response: ‘Why don't you, Tillie?'

Writers' blocks are real and terrible afflictions. I know that. But at times they are the excuse for not wanting to finish the task at hand, or for the discovery that one has nothing more to say, or the result of having wasted the initial, vital energy that began the enterprise, with talk.

So it was with Katherine Anne Porter. Late in her life I went to have tea with her in her apartment in College Park, Maryland. She looked quite wonderful, her white hair beautifully coiffed, her neck decorated with her fine emeralds. I told her I wondered about the fate of her book on Cotton Mather. I had come upon an old catalogue issued by Horace Liveright which advertised a volume by her called
The Devil and Cotton Mather
to appear in the fall of 1927. It read: ‘… Miss Porter has given us an astounding picture of religious ecstasy and righteousness.… as a study of a pious and bigoted figure, this book … is an important document.'

Apparently all that Liveright had in hand when he issued his catalogue was a sketch for the book. He gave Katherine Anne Porter three hundred dollars to complete the research and deliver the ms. Her biographer, Joan Givner, told me Porter had done some research in Salem on the subject she had chosen, under the mistaken notion that Mather was a witch-burner. She was disappointed to find nothing to substantiate her belief. She became aware of the vastness of the already well-documented material; at the same time she discovered that what she had preconceived to be a villainous character was not so. From Bermuda she wrote to Liveright for more money, saying she had by now read more than four hundred books for background on the subject.

She did write three error-ridden chapters that she sent to the publisher, and which appeared in print in small magazines in the forties. Again the same notice of the book appeared in Boni & Liveright's catalogue for 1928. But in 1929 the chapters stopped coming to Liveright. He wrote. She replied four months later, asking him to stop announcing the book. She could not finish it, she said, because of the demands of other work.

In 1934, Robert MacAlmon (Kay Boyle's beloved friend) wrote that Porter was secluded in Paris writing a biography of Cotton Mather. That was the last she was heard from on the subject.

Her reply to my question was angry. She no longer smiled in her wide Southern-belle way. ‘The past is past,' she said, ‘and I'm glad of it. Half of my work is still undone. Actually I've written
ten
chapters of that book. I've given up trying to do it, until all the rest of it can be done at once. I had to stop because the Sacco-Vanzetti case came up and I needed to be active in that.

‘But no one realizes, when they talk of my not doing this or finishing that, that I always had to earn a living as a writer, speaking, journalism, teaching. I wasn't
free
to finish the book. Sometime I will, of course.'

I believe the truth is that she ran out of interest in the subject, very early in the research. Givner agrees, saying she never wanted to write about anything if she could not shape the facts to her way of thinking. All the rest, the excuses, the fifty-year delay, the good intentions, are what a writer uses when the truth is not suitable.

Some writers are encouraged by advances and race on to finish the book. But there are those for whom it is fatal to discuss a work-in-progress or to accept an advance before it is finished. Like my father, for whom promises were always a more than adequate substitute for fulfillment of them.

Over here in the carriage house, alone with my packed possessions and covered, silent computer, I see the light go on in the kitchen in the house, and know that Sybil is home and beginning to fix dinner. I realize I have been here since seven-thirty in the morning and it is now seven-thirty again, time to go through the list of things I must check before I leave this peaceful den. And at the end, a new entry, caused by the visual requirements of the computer's monitor: Change glasses.

What I need to remember is to go through the list carefully, or else I may well burn down this overelectrified little house before I have a chance to move out of it. I do this, nod goodbye to the space I love, go downstairs and across the garden, abandoning my twelve hours of silence. In an old notebook that I put into the box for the University of Virginia this morning I found a sentence by Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch, and greet each other.'

I climb the stairs to the deck, open the kitchen door, and greet Sybil.

All evening we pack books from the dining-room walls. I find a volume I haven't looked at in fifty years, a thin, blue-cloth-covered little book entitled
Notes on a Half Century of United States Naval Ordnance
. One of my commanding officers, Captain Wilbur R. Van Auken, handed it to me when I left his station in Washington, D.C., to go to the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco. It is warmly inscribed, with the identifying letters ‘WAVES, USNR' after my name, and the date, June 1944. Beyond that, I have no memory of him at all. Tonight I tried to read it and found I was able to get only as far as most of the first sentence of his book: ‘This year 1880 in ordnance, under Commodore Jeffers, is selected as it marks the beginning of the manufacture of the first hooped steel, high-powered rifled guns …' I decided to pack the book for the tie to the past it represented. Then I sat down to rest and thought about another commanding officer I reported to after my assignment to the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington.

He too was a captain, retired, and called back to serve in a noncombatant role in the Navy. I cannot remember his name, but I can see his face clearly: fat, puffy, ruddy, a nose that was stippled, suggesting long, heavy drinking. I never saw him smile. I think he must have resented his relatively inactive job and most of all the number of commissioned women (women! In the United States Navy!) under his command.

Our station was in an office building on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco. The day I reported for duty, spic and span in a freshly pressed uniform, my transfer papers stowed in a neat blue folder, was bright and shining with the yellow light I have only seen in that beautiful city on its seven hills. I took the elevator to the sixth floor, taking off my warm hat and gloves, hating to come in out of the lovely day. I was directed to the cubicle of the ‘officer of the deck.' His title, solemnly engraved over his door, was my first hint of the nature of things to come. The
deck?

He was a straight-faced, thin, young lieutenant senior grade. He told me to sit down, and then informed me of the rules of the station and the ritual I was to follow when I reported to the captain. He said the captain called the sixth floor of the office building the ‘ship.'