my other self, (e.g. my muse) was thus exactly conglomerately constituted? I had an impression you were wise but not as wise—as clairvoyant—as that! Though my face is not a cat’s. It is rather more like the face in the collage . . . Hi, it’s me again. The photo is nice and thanks for sending it, though I do look as if I’m holding a false hand and your gestures, Bill, indicate headache or a longing for acromegaly.
Anyway, it was a lovely bonus in the mail, and it cheered me up and made it easier for me to bear, at dinner, (the mail arrived before dinner) the superior snappy tone Granville Hicks adopted when I ventured—ventured to say something. The tone implied, What a moron you are! I really don’t know why I stick it out here—meaning why I put up with it; habit I suppose, and comfort; but I just hate this constant presence of the Directors—oh for the infant days of MacDowell. Maybe I’m in Hell and MacDowell was the First Circle (lulled to happiness) and Yaddo is the Second Circle, and so on. I suppose it’s partly my own constitutional dislike of the presence of institutional authority which makes it difficult.
(My new book will be called Headache or a Longing for Acromegaly.)
When I get some Elmerscc I will make a poem collage to send you, also a secrets of Yaddo Collage including Instant Measurements of Members (of the Executive). The housekeeper is a True Character. Yaddo is her life. Like Miss Gee in Auden’s poem she wears ‘a purple mac for wet days’ or its equivalent. She has a new deep blue coat especially for wearing to and from West House for her daily work. She is a fierce bedmaker and (to quote a witty guest), ‘You have to get into her bed as if you were a letter getting into an envelope’. She tucks and folds and smoothes.
Brand name of an American glue
The equivalent here of MacDowell’s Rural Violence is a tall dark woodsy-looking fellow called Milton. The staff here are all interesting characters. From time to time Miss Woods, the housekeeper, who, if you make the mistake of calling her Mrs is apt to say with a pitch of excitement in her voice, ‘Excuse me, madame, I’m Miss Woods, I’m a virgin’, will confide in me as a kindred spirit (she comes from Liverpool England and regards me as English too), and says darkly, ‘They’re going to weed out all those who don’t work’. With emphasis on the ‘weed out’. ‘Oh yes, madame, there’s going to be a lot of weeding out before next summer. They won’t be allowed to lounge around the swimming pool all day instead of working as they’re supposed to do. They’ll be weeded out.’
The ‘They’ of course are the artists. Temporarily when Miss Woods talks to me, I become ‘We’.
She is fearful of the guests whom she calls ‘The Men’. Although it is ‘the men’ she likes to do things for while the women guests get short shrift, as they say. In the morning she approaches me, looking cautiously about her in case someone might overhear, ‘Miss Frame, madame, have the men gone (to breakfast?). You know madame I don’t like to go to their bathrooms when they’re there. They might be embarrassed. What if they came in and found me!’
Yaddo could be such a fine place if only it did not have this tradition and the determination to keep the tradition of formality. Even one’s thinking is organized by the many notices. One can’t go to the lavatory without being reminded,
This is a small bore plumbing system
and then one is assailed by all kinds of frightful doubts as to whether one is a bore, whether one is a small bore to use the plumbing system, or maybe that somewhere on the estate there are places for large bores to pee. Or one could be a small bore but have a large bore peeing system . . . the possibilities are endlessly confusing.
How warm and soft green the pines are now, with all their snow suddenly washed away in the overnight thaw that brought great blocks of ice as big as automobiles crashing down from the roof. The pines have a spring softness. And the treetrunks are brown instead of that utter black which snowlight gives them.
So goodbye now.
How was Jerry’s show?
And
Love. Fragile. This Way Up.
Open at Above Room Temperature.
Do not Inhale Dispose of Wrappers Carefully.
20. Yaddo January (handwritten)
Dear Bill,
Another letter on my now endless supply of novel writing paper, with 1,000,000,000 thanks for yours & your permission, Bob Battersby, Benedict Beehaven, Ben Beezknee, Brendan Budgeknot. My dedication will read, ‘To Sue Marquand & Bill Brown for the possible & impossible greeting & parting’. Does it sound too crazy? I was going to say, With thanks for the coming and going, but that might have been misinterpreted, or, should I say, interpreted correctly!
How is Santa Barbara behaving at her sittings? I have decided that my muse is half-Pluto & half some God of Light—not that he’s any help to me, he just is & is there to be pondered on. I found May S’s book Mrs S hears the Mermaids Singing & I found it very moving and wise & brave—all emotional words that say nothing much. I like the way her mind works, I like to follow her explorations & insights. Jim Baxter (who wrote the Tom Cat poem) once asked me, Who does a woman use for a Muse? & we had an interesting discussion (I think at that time my mind was on Orpheus—maybe it’s still there). In JB’s poems his wife (a dear friend of mine) becomes the bad witch, the hag, the shrew etc. while his Muse is a mixture of Mary (he is a Roman Catholic convert) and Venus & various Maori goddesses (his wife is Maori).
How did I come to this topic?
Oh. Your portrait of Santa Barbara while your Muse hovers/lurks near to protect you. I wrote some verses about Santa Barbara and I’ll quote a little if you promise not to think it’s too bad which it is!
Desert is near encroaching,
habitual. Painters paint
riders, naked, setting out to challenge
the sun
aware or unaware
of the blade of light already
deep in the back between
the blades of bone.
Painters paint men with
their faces buried in darkness
diving unobserved, alone, into
baptismal darkness
for food they trust is benevolent
just as they believe in
the benevolence of their skin,
the membrane blessed
to meet the onslaught of
water, air, fire
when reasoned evidence
believes not.
Pause for station identification.
Later