delayed by a funeral until tomorrow) now has its full complement of winter guests all settling down to write and paint in the mornings and afternoons and to have their scrumptious meal in the evenings at the ten-place table presided over by Granville Hicks (Pricks for Kicks!) and Dorothy Hicks, to whom, as I said on the telephone when I talked to you (I happening to be passing by the telephone at the time), I must now render charity. Their post is a temporary one, for a year until the new permanent director is appointed, and they have the difficult task of trying to change a few of the Yaddo traditions, against opposition from the army of housemaids and perhaps tradition itself. They too are appalled by the warning notices everywhere—Danger. Do Not. Beware.—and are even trying to change the tradition of having all the doors locked. Their custom of arriving at five thirty for cocktails at which we are more or less expected to appear arises from their natural delight in having a drink before dinner (don’t we all? Ah, sweet charity) and as Granville has to drive here (they have an apartment in Saratoga) and prefers not to be a drunken driver—well they must drink here. The after-dinner conversation which I now no longer attend is still in force. I’m glad though that I have struck (I think) a blow for individuality. Now when the Hicks say the formal phrase, ‘Shall we take our coffee into the other room?’ Dorothy adds, knowing there is at least one who will not be taking her coffee into the other room—‘at least those of you who would like to’. My absence is accepted now, and others, I’m sure, feel more free about leaving.
Cheers for Pioneer Janet, the innovator of the planet. Groans. Groans.
To continue with sweet charity, where was I—oh the prospective new directors had dinner with us on Sunday evening and (thank god they are not retired critics, though I think he ran a small press for the C.I.A. . . . in the days when everyone was doing things for the C.I.A . . ..) he seems a good type, quiet, practical, a good grasp of facts and needs—something in the style of George Kendall. I don’t know if he will be the permanent director. His wife rather resembles someone out of the film The Manchurian Candidate.
What a snob-place this is. Last week my story ‘Winter Garden’ appeared in the New Yorker and ever since then G Hicks has been very sweet to me; his wife too . . .
Yesterday Norman Podhoritz, editor of Commentary arrived. Also Freya Manfred, a young poet (as company for the young only painter), an unsophisticated Midwestern version of Alan’s Frankie; very pleasant. It’s so fascinating to see all the artists’ shyness (artists are terribly shy people aren’t they?) rise to the surface when new people arrive. You could even detect it in Kenneth B. He became a diffident elderly man who glanced apprehensively from time to time (as we all did) at the newcomers. I like Alfred Kazin, as I also liked his wife Ann.
Jo and Elnora called the other evening—one on each of the MacDowell phones and with much giggling we arranged that I would come up to Peterborough-South Hadley (Mark driving me from Springfield) on 15th from New York, stay overnight and return the next day to New York with Jo who has some business there; and I’d see Elnora too on my visit. I’m leaving here on the 11th to stay in Elnora’s apartment, and I’ve told Elnora I won’t receive mail there (she would have had to make complicated mail arrangements as all mail is forwarded to her at Mac-Dowell), so I’ll be letterless (though not phoneless) in New York. I’ll be there until 20th Feb when I go down to Baltimore (staying with J Money) for a medical check with a doctor in town there; and wait around some days for results and so on, I suppose. If I can afford it I’ll go back to New York . . . but it would be best to fly from Baltimore early in March—but I will let you know exactly—it depends on my female physical complications, as the Victorian ladies would say. How coy and charitable I have become during my stay at Yaddo!
I phoned Jo and Elnora last evening (also as I happened to be passing by the telephone) and they seem indestructible. I caught Jo (and perhaps Elnora) in the act of playing pool with the suave gentleman who first answered the phone, so it looks as if they are anagramless in MacDowell. Jo says she has finished her play or will finish it before she leaves; that is marvellous. She said Alan Lelchuk called at MacDowell a few days ago bringing Philip Roth with him and they spent a while in Jo’s studio.
I’ve sent away a selection of 70 poems to my publisher; they’re not much good, and need to be worked at; some were written here, many at MacDowell. Kenneth Burke asked to see some poems of mine and I showed him three (the first time in my life I’ve ever shown poems to a critic) and he read them so carefully and wrote a detailed two-page note which in itself reads like a poem e.g. (quote) ‘the last two lines are as quintessential as a Delphic Oracle’ (he was probably drunk . . . ). I had included one about The Dead as a kind of message to him because that is his problem just now and I was heartened to see that he wrote, ‘And the closing two lines are good emotional bookkeeping. As long as we have to live, that’s the best we can ask for, as regards the past’. It was presumptuous of me, I suppose, because he’s such a rich man intellectually that I’m sure grief for him is not so much a loss as a gain, a kind of bookkeeping, to use his own term, where he makes an emotional and intellectual profit. And when he read my story in the New Yorker he brought me a poem he had written about his dead wife.
I love the idea of trying to translate the French poem! You must be telepathic.
I made a very free sort of translation of the swan poem; not very competently.
A swan glides upon the water
as on a shimmering mirror
accompanied by its image.
Thus in certain moments a loved
being mirrored like the swan moves
upon the restless waters of
our soul, becoming as it glides
our joy casting its inseparable
shadow of dark dread. [in margin: Rewrite—teacher.]
Very corny, with the ‘as it glides’ pretty irrelevant, and the references to soul not made complex enough.
I have sent separately a spare Adaptable Man and a spare Scented Gardens.
Crazy love— J
25. Yaddo January 31
Dear Bill,
Hello on Schubert’s birthday. Hello with an enclosure of infantile pornographia which, because I am infantile and enjoy being infantile, I had fun doing.
Thaw is here, I’m weary, and I’m leaving here now on February 11th, early morning, having had courage to say that business matters called, which they do, but it is wonderful to know I have seven fewer dinners to sit at and pre-dinner cocktails to be more or less obliged to attend. It really is awfully stuffy having literary people around all the time discussing this and that book—at dinner Malcolm, the young black painter who is dying of boredom began, ‘There was a young man from Venus’, and someone said, ‘Now now Malcolm that’s not nice’ and the subject was quickly changed to How Writers Can Make a Living, with Granville Hicks lecturing me fiercely, so fiercely I blushed and looked scared, on being willing to send stories to the New Yorker when they ask for them. I stammered and stuttered, but if I had burst out with, ‘A frightened young tailor from Boston’ . . .!
I hope I’m going to Elnora’s apartment to stay about ten days and I hope I’ll see both Jo and Elnora in New York. I’m making a visit to Baltimore for a medical check-up and then returning to Elnora’s apt. I’ll let you know when I’m flying West—it will probably be from Baltimore as it’s easier to use the airport and take off in time—it will be early March, I daresay. Dare I? I dreamed last night that I came to Santa Barbara and the sky was filled with butterflies and as I watched them the colour fell from their wings, they turned grey and white, and they began to devour me . . . interpret at your peril . . .