Coming into the End Zone (24 page)

April

The house is having its chimney lined, for the first time in one hundred years. So far as we know there has never been a fire in it, but still, the inspector for the new owners insists it be done before the sale is complete. The repair man informs us that ninety percent of the chimneys in the District of Columbia are unlined. For the two months we have to live here, we will have the expensive distinction of being among the ten percent who have a lined one.

At the same time we have word from the inspector for the Sargentville house we are purchasing that one chimney for the woodstove is unlined, and the other is crumbling and entirely unsafe. We ask our Maine lawyer to see if the owners will make these repairs, or reduce the price of the house. We are quickly informed they will do neither.

Recently we reroofed the Washington house in preparation for sale. At the same time we learn that the roof on the Maine house is about forty years old and has been therapeutically patched many times. Will the owners consider taking six thousand dollars, the estimated cost of replacing the roof, from the purchase price? They will not.

But none of this financial drain changes my desire to sell the house here, and begin to live in Sargentville. If I once insisted that it was too late for me to lead a totally new life, I may have been right, but I would like to try to prove I was wrong. Very rapidly, we fix all the things here that have needed doing for a long time, small matters like door latches, wallpaper replacement, and ironwork repainting, and expensive things like lining the chimney. The house is now in better condition than it has been since we bought it years ago, a state of affairs that makes Sybil think, in her profound ambivalence, that we ought not to sell it. She wants to stay, she loves the house more than the unknown virtues of Maine. I want to go, fearing the ugly vices of life in a threatened city, and wishing to become acquainted, for the rest of my life, with peace and isolation.

No silence exists for twenty miles around great cities like Washington. The space is occupied by the never-ceasing hum and clatter of machines, air conditioners, whistles, elevators, refrigerators, radios, televisions, the clash of bottles and cans, human voices. Almost nowhere can one detect the sound of insects or birds (one may catch sight of them in parks but they seem to be soundless). They are wiped out by the roar, day and night, of traffic, airplanes, sirens. Immediately beyond the twenty-mile outskirts, the circle of another city touches it—there are almost no places of silence left between cities. The greatest ecological failure in my lifetime has been the loss of quiet, a disappearance as soul-wearying as the dirty junkyard that the industrial, ruined earth has become.

For me there are two saddening consolations. In my youth I trusted the earth to be eternally safe and everlastingly beautiful. The thought of death was bitter, because the fine things I loved in the natural world would go on while I would disappear. Everything beautiful—the pure, enlivening air, the leaves in their metamorphosing glory, the strong, solid Palisades hills and the light-grey waters of the Hudson River, the night (even in Manhattan where I grew up) filled with stars and moonlight, the fresh, brave faces of flowers and the strong, aspiring branches of trees on Riverside Drive, in Van Cortlandt Park, in Central Park (the ‘country' of my childhood)—would endure. But I would not be here to see it all.

The consolation: What I so loved has gone, and I may outlive even the little that remains in isolated places far from the cities. The tragedy of modern life is that human beings, for a short time, may be here after natural beauty has disappeared from their earth.

The other consolation: I am slowly losing my hearing, so the omnipresent cacophony is largely lost on me.

Another deprivation: The luxury of ample space has been taken away from us. Too many persons enter the urban world, too fast, and die too slowly.
Lebensraum
has shrunk until we cannot move or turn around without knocking elbows, stumbling over the feet of others, breathing their exhaled breath. The Great Meadow of Central Park is now a sea of bodies and dust. Stretched-out sunbathers on the nation's beaches obscure from view every inch of sand. Mountain roads and national parks have become a trail of campers and live-in cars. Restaurants are fast-food troughs for millions of the population always in motion. Every space is taken, as in a mall parking lot. In cities we are each frozen into the space of our own dimensions, limited to the measurements in life of what will be our containers in death.

I read today that C. S. Lewis thought
A Slip of the Tongue
would be a good title for a short novel. As far as I can tell he never used it. It occurs to me it might also be a suitable title for a memoir.

On television I see Mary McCarthy talking about her Vassar friend, the poet Elizabeth Bishop. I notice Mary's instant, icy smile, so often present when I interviewed her in Paris in 1966 for a book. George Grosz saw the same smile on Lenin's face. ‘It doesn't mean a smile,' he said. I am fascinated by it. It represents, I think, an unsuccessful attempt to soften a harsh, bluntly stated judgment. Last summer, twenty-two years after the book I wrote about her, which she so disliked, appeared, I encountered Mary for the first time in an outdoor market in Blue Hill.

‘Hello, Mary,' I said. ‘Do you remember me?'

Her smile flashed and then, like a worn-out bulb, disappeared instantly.

‘Unpleasantly,' she said.

It didn't mean a smile.

I hear from Isaac Wheeler, my grandson, that he is trying to decide on a college to attend in the fall. Sybil, a Swarthmore alumna, hopes he will go there, because she believes his strong social conscience (he is the only teenager on the board of the War Resisters League) will be received hospitably on that campus. Isaac liked his visit to Yale, his father's school. I think it will not matter too much which college he chooses. He is a sensitive, bright, hardworking, inquisitive, talented young man, who loves his family in particular and the human family in general. He will learn wherever he goes. In the process, I hope he will not lose his scorn for bald ambition, fraud, and pretension, his vow never to engage in war, his concern for the displaced, the mistreated, the homeless, the outsiders. At Stuyvesant High School in New York, he organized a day for Civil Rights for Gays and Lesbians. He and his friends who worked with him are not gay, but he thought students should be made aware of the injustice of such denial to that segment of the population.

Despite the unpleasant clichés of the doting grandmother that I try to avoid, I am proud of him. He represents the only immortality I am likely to achieve. I wish I were leaving him a more civilized, livable, just, and decent world. But I have faith that he will do what he can, somehow, to try to improve it.

Today, while there is still money left in my Washington account, I sent checks to the two artists' colonies I have attended, Yaddo and MacDowell. Not very large checks, but something to signify my gratitude for the time and space they granted me in the past. It is unlikely I shall ever return to them, because it appears I have at long last acquired a clone of those blessed places, where I can work undisturbed, can find the peace that often, for me, produces good prose, and can luxuriate in uncrowded, private space.

MacDowell: It was the first colony I ever attended, the first time I knew the virtues of living and working among artists whose whole attention was focused on their work. MacDowell is on the outskirts of the small town of Peterborough, New Hampshire. It is a wooded compound of small cabins for work, and a few larger buildings for living, eating, playing. There is communal breakfast, and then a long, almost timeless-seeming day, unbroken by the presence of anything but oneself, the fire one has built against the early-morning cold, and the lunch basket left quietly on the steps.

Whenever the muse vanished, or inspiration gave out, or my back grew tired of sitting at a typewriter in a camp chair, I would close the damper in the fireplace, pat the growing pile of manuscript fondly, pull the door shut, and take off, in the company of like-minded writers, artists, and composers, for the fire pond, where we swam without the encumbrance of clothing, or a nearby lake (there seemed to be hundreds of them all around us). Dinner was a convivial time, with wine at some tables provided by a more affluent guest. After dinner we talked around the great fireplace in the Hall while some skillful gamesters played an incomprehensible (to me) game called cowboy pool.

Some colonists (as we were called) went into town, where there was one hotel bar, or to a movie house that seemed to show the same film the entire time I was there. Others went back to their studios to work. Still others went early to bed, alone or with a friend, claiming a desire to rise very early and get to work. Whatever it was one did, it was in good company, with good companions, people I was to know from the end of my stay until now.

We wore our oldest and most mismatched clothes at the Colony. I remember only two exceptions to this practice: writer Jerre Mangione, who wore fine suits and a silk ascot at the neck, as befitted the elegant Sicilian he was, and Grace Glueck, who wrote art news for the
New York Times
and dressed in ‘outfits,' as they used to be called, everything matching, and wore stockings and heeled shoes while the rest of us shuffled around in sneakers and L. L. Bean woodsman's clothes.

But the work I was able to do in those silent woods! Out of sight of other studios, steeped in the pleasure of knowing I would be entirely alone with whatever was inside me that had to come out, for eight hours. I was in the Baetz Studio on my first visit, working on a novel called
The Missing Person
. It moved along slowly. I could not understand why my progress was not greater. Then I realized that every morning, compulsively, before I started to write, I sat on the cot and read the dedicatory plaque over the fireplace. It said that this studio had been erected in memory of Anna Baehr, nurse to Edward MacDowell during his long, last illness and devoted friend to Marian MacDowell after his death. I can't vouch for the words verbatim (I've never been back to it since that summer), but this was the sense of what was written on the plaque.

One afternoon I walked to the graves of the MacDowells. Carved on a large, impressive stone were their names and their dates, revealing the fact that Marian had survived Edward by almost fifty years. I could not find Anna Baehr's grave. (In the novel I was to bury her at the foot of the MacLarens/MacDowells, with the words
LOVE AND DUTY
engraved on her small, flat stone.)

Every morning, rereading the plaque, I wondered: Why did the composer die so young, what was the premature illness that Anna Baehr nursed him through, why did Anna stay on, what was her life like at the Colony with Marian, what was Marian's long afterlife like? I became so preoccupied with these questions that, hardly aware of it, I sat on the cot for longer periods of time each morning, making fictions of the three lives, one of whom must have been in the studio I now worked in, at least for its dedication.

I stopped working on
The Missing Person
. My head had filled with invented stories about the MacDowells (now called the MacLarens in my fiction), the nurse, the Colony (moved to Saratoga in the early years of this century to take advantage of the fashionable atmosphere), the people they might have known, the intermingling of their lives and their loves.

In a month I wrote the first half of the story. I finished that draft, another, and then another in other places. But the aura of the Colony was in my head and, I suppose, in my hand when I worked on
Chamber Music
. I believe that without the real place, this could not have happened. My novel belongs to those lovely woods as much as it belongs to me.

Yaddo: On the edge of Saratoga Springs, within earshot of the Northway that runs from Albany to farther upstate New York, it is a colony much in the spirit of MacDowell, but different in that its surroundings are elegant. Most of the guests (here called Fellows) live, literally, in a mansion, left to the colony by Kathryn Trask in memory of her husband and four dead children, all of whose tragic spirits seem to inhabit the large common rooms and many fine, old-fashioned bedrooms. The spacious bathrooms are marble. The veranda looks out on vast lawns and a rose garden, to which the public is invited during the day. But it is separated from the mansion and its lawn by strict signs. Having drinks on the veranda before dinner, and coffee after it, we would look down at people straggling across the lower lawn, looking up at us, and pointing. We felt like some sort of curious aristocracy, not a common experience for writers, painters, composers. It was ego-elevating, it was lovely.

I worked in spaces off my bedroom, once in a room Carson McCullers used, another time in a room in which William Carlos Williams wrote a section of
Paterson
. On my last visit, two years after John Cheever's death, I was given his customary bedroom and study. The first night a small brown bird flew about in the rafters, settled on a bust of Caesar, and left when I opened the screen on a window. I knew who it was: Cheever himself, returned to see who was sleeping in his bed and occupying his desk. I worked well that summer, on
The Magician's Girl
, with the spirit of John Cheever giving me support and courage.

What makes Yaddo, and other colonies, of course, valuable is the company you keep. Here I met John Leggett. My long association with the Iowa Writers Workshop was the result of the afternoon we sat beside the Yaddo pool. He said, ‘Have you ever thought of teaching writing?'

‘Writing,'
I said, with all the scorn that a longtime professor of literature can summon up. ‘How in the world does one teach writing?'

As I recall, he let that question pass. Instead he asked when I would be able to get a semester off from American University to come to Iowa City. In a year, I thought. So it came about. I have no idea what those workshop students may have learned from me, but I learned the answer to my question. In the long, tough, highly critical workshops held once a week in that happy place, in the presence of those enormously talented students, you simply hold their coats while they go at it.