Frances and Bernard (2 page)

This is also why I fear I can’t talk about the Holy Spirit in a way that will make him visible or present to you. I believe that he is counsel, because that is how Christ described him. To me
counsel
means that he is grace and wisdom. But I’ve never experienced grace and wisdom hovering like a flame over my head, and if I do ever realize that I acted wisely or received foresight clearly because of the Holy Spirit, I will let you know. But I don’t ever want to feel touched or gifted spiritually. Or sense God moving about on the face of my waters. What a burden! Everything would then have to live up to being knocked off a horse by lightning, wouldn’t it? I think I prefer to live at the level of what the British call
muddle.
Muddle with occasional squinting at something that might be called clarity in the distance, so as not to despair.

Sincerely,

Frances

December 6, 1957

Dear Frances—

Points taken. My enthusiasm over finding someone with whom to talk these things over got the better of me.

My sin is poetizing. Can you tell?

As much as you protest, I think I have a better understanding now of the H.S.

Why do you despair?

Italy has ceased to be musical. It now feels decrepit and entombing, and I’m glad to be leaving next week. I’m not even taking pleasure in the fact that my Italian is now as musical as my German is serviceable. I don’t feel indolent anymore either; I feel crushed by effort. I feel that I’m toting slabs of marble around from second guess to second guess.

I have sinned against us—I have spoken of work. Give me a penance.

When I come back I’ll be living in Boston with Ted, a friend of mine—a college roommate whom I call my brother. I’m going to be teaching some classes at Harvard. I’ll also be the editor of the
Charles Review.
I am looking forward to being back in Boston. I’m not looking forward to being that close again to my parents, but I think I can keep their genteel philistinism at bay. Send me your next letter at the address on the back of this page.

In fact, send me some of that novel you’re working on. I command you.

Yours,

Bernard

December 15, 1957

Bernard—

Please enjoy this postcard depicting Philadelphia’s storied art museum and the mighty Schuylkill. Now you do not ever have to visit.

I hope that you are settling down in Boston. I hope that your marble slabs have become fleshly and alive again.

Oh, I don’t despair of anything. At least right now. I was being hyperbolic. If I did despair, I probably wouldn’t tell you of it, for your sake and mine! And God’s. If I described my despair I would be poetizing and legitimizing it. And I’m not Dostoevsky.

I won’t send you some of the novel just yet—it is still percolating. But I am flattered that you want to see it at all.

Penances are God’s purview, not mine. Instead, I will wish you a merry Christmas. Love and joy come to you, and to your wassail too.

Sincerely,

Frances

January 1, 1958

Dear Frances—

Happy new year! It is 1958. Do you care?

I have turned my book in. Now I am in that terrible period between labors, waiting for editorial orders, pacing the apartment like Hamlet waiting for his father’s ghost. Although I have begun to write what may be poems for the next one, I can’t throw myself into them quite yet. The lines are an insubordinate gang of children who have sized their father up and found him feckless. The only thing to do with this restlessness is talk and drink. Or box. I went to a gym a few times when I was at Harvard, thinking I would take it up, but I quickly abandoned that scheme. “Did you forget your bloomers?” a gentleman once said to me while we were sparring. I knocked him flat and never went back, knowing that I would have wanted to punch me, too, had I been a regular and spied my Ivied, ivory self sauntering through the door. If I didn’t have to teach in a few days, and I keep forgetting that I do, I would probably get on a bus or a plane and hope to be invigorated by foreign context. I thought I had tired of Italy, but now—in frigid, colorless Boston, clouds like lesions, having had a dispiriting dinner with my parents, museum pieces already, immobilized by their complacencies—I wish I were there again, where history hung in the air like incense after a Mass, still alive, where around every corner there lurked a spiritual or architectural delight.

Here is a delight: the prospect of getting to know you better. To that end:

Frances, where in this world have you been besides London?

Where in this world would you like to go?

Have you been reading anything you like? Anything you
loathe?

What is your confirmation name, and why?

The gospels or Paul?

Or is that the wrong question entirely?

Paradise Lost
or
The Divine Comedy
? Or neither, and instead the whole of Shakespeare?

Or is that the wrong question entirely?

James Baldwin? (Say yes.)

Gossip—in the hierarchy of sins, I’d put it a step or two below venial, wouldn’t you?

Whose food did you most want to poison at the colony?

Have you ever sent a letter you wish you hadn’t?

Or forget all that and—tell me something I might not believe about you.

Yours,

Bernard

January 10, 1958

Dear Bernard—

Although I have yet to turn a book in to a publisher myself, I have a feeling I would experience something very similar. I have been known, at the end of a school year, to spend a good two weeks feeling that if I did not have an exam to take or a paper to write, there was no reason for me to be alive. I get the existential shakes—I’m like one of those small metal wind-up toys that chatter in circles until they peter out, exhausted, and finally keel over. When my existential shakes peter out—gradually I comprehend that no one’s going to phone me at home asking for a twenty-page paper by next Thursday—I can go down the shore with a clear conscience.

Whom did
you
want to poison at the colony?

Something you might not believe about me? Hmmm. I’m not sure that we’ve known each other long enough to have ideas about what in our characters would prove contradictory! Hmmm. You might not believe that children like me, but they do. Or that I have not been able to stop playing
Ella and Louis Again
since I received it for Christmas. I feel ill-equipped to discuss just what it is I love in that record—I am the epitome of square, and I know nothing about music—but there is something about the lower register of her voice that makes me feel as if I am afloat in an ocean the color of midnight.

I think writing to a poet may be rubbing off on me, and not for the good.

Here’s something else. I had a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. I was not the kind of girl who had crushes on movie stars—that was my sister, who had a framed picture of Tyrone Power on her dresser. But Grant seemed like someone out of a novel rather than a creature cobbled together on a studio lot. What is it? He is refined but also given to the ridiculous, and the ridiculousness never erases his refinement. Well, I shouldn’t lie. I still have a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. He may be the cement in my relationship with my aunt Peggy. She will say aloud from behind the paper, as if she means to invite everyone in the room and not just me, “
An Affair to Remember
is playing up over at the Ritz,” and I will say, with feigned nonchalance from behind my book, “What time?” and then we will race out of the house like women who’ve been told he will be there in the flesh.

Both the gospels
and
Paul; the gospels because they represent God’s faith in our imagination, and Paul because more often than not we are too stupid to use it.

And now you have heard more than enough from me. Please do write soon.

Sincerely,

Frances

January 17, 1958

Dear Frances—

Let us settle this once and for all:
I
am the epitome of square. In fact, the other day a group of students lovingly accused me of this when they found out I did not own jazz records. I don’t, and I’ll tell you why: it is an agent of agitation, and I’m already agitated enough. It’s not that I don’t like jazz. I wish I could. It’s just that one song is the equivalent of four dozen phone calls to a switchboard that’s already buzzing and sparking like a pinball machine. I’m ten years younger than Kerouac, and yet the response to his book makes me feel that my shirts are as starched as my father’s. Kerouac and I are Catholics, and yet I cringe at his ecstasies: there is nothing revealed by his mysticism but his own psychology. The self-taught always do make me a little impatient because they make idolatries of their heroes, or of their own psyches, that suspend them in artistic adolescence. Lorraine, the kimonoed odalisque whom you may remember from the colony, is an exemplar of this type, with her worship of Colette. I’m not jealous of Kerouac, or perplexed by him—just indifferent. To my students’ chagrin. I think they want me to launch into a philippic declaiming him as a false heir to Rome—want some kind of reactionary grandstanding intellectual contretemps played out in front of them. They also want me to give them permission to behave badly because they are writing poems. I have behaved badly, but it wasn’t because I thought my gift needed to be fed by it. The most talented students this year think that talent absolves them from discipline. Since none of this talent is large enough to make me feel I need to rescue them from this folly, I sit back and watch them bark and loaf as if they were seals on the rocks in Maine. What do I care? I just finished a book; I’m glad of the vacation. I am now writing every day, and I’d rather not have many other demands made on me.

I’m no moviegoer, but even I can tell Cary Grant is gifted with an obscene amount of elegance—however, I would never have taken you for a fan of anything remotely related to jazz. Although now that I think about it, there is something in you, I believe, that swings. It manifests in your smile.

Children like me too. I intuit that they take me for a bear.

Whom I would have poisoned: that woman who was cannibalizing
Ivanhoe
! She reminded me a little of my mother.

Here’s a gift for you. I remember you said that you liked Bach, that day we had lunch at the colony. I am sending you this recording of Glenn Gould, which I think you might like quite a bit. (It’s come to this, as I near the end of my third decade: I prefer my angry young men angry with Chopin.) I am particularly enamored of #25.

Yours,

Bernard

January 24, 1958

Dear Bernard—

Thank you so very much for the record. What a lovely gift. I put it on the evening I received it and found myself laying my book aside and just listening. And I’ve been listening to it ever since. It’s like nothing else.

Oh, I remember Lorraine.

Regarding Kerouac, I’m allergic too. The Beats are really nothing more than a troop of malevolent Boy Scouts trying to earn badges for cultural arson. Ahem. To your point about feeling as starched as your father, I say: Why don’t I just take up knitting already? I feel compelled to stress that I always voted for Democrats.

About being self-taught—I’d say that I was self-taught compared to you, being as I was educated by parochial-school nuns and graduated from a college that was not Harvard. But I never have made heroes of writers, so maybe that’s why you’re still writing me.

Other than the Gould, which made me forget we were in the dead of January, I have no news! No anecdotes! I write, I work, I cook, I read in the living room while my father does a crossword puzzle and my sister washes the dishes, and then I retire to my chamber when they turn the television on. To me, the dead of January is to be as feared as the ides of March. But I would like to make a formal request. Would you tell me how you converted? It is something I have been wanting to hear.

Again, thank you for the record.

Yours,

Frances

January 31, 1958

Dear Frances—

I’m still writing you because I want your friendship, silly girl. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I can see where you might characterize yourself as self-taught—from what I can tell, whatever you learned, you learned in spite of your schooling, not because of it—but I’m speaking of the intellectually feral. What I have observed is that you have respect for tradition while not being weighed down by it. You know what you like and who you’ll follow, and when and why and where you’ll part ways. Most of the writers I admire possess this combination of reverence and courage. If you don’t know anything, I tell my students, you at least need to know the rules. But I forget how much trouble I was as a student. I was hellishly belligerent. I once made a young professor of German cry because she refused to accept poems I’d written (in German) as a final exam. I told her that her fanatical adherence to protocol made her a stereotype, which made her a poor ambassador for her country, which needed all the good publicity it could get.

I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

The dead of winter is a terrible thing. Ted and I are throwing a party this weekend to try to distract ourselves from how terrible it truly is. He has just come up to me with a tray full of shot glasses that contain various iterations of a bloody mary he is trying to perfect, and I have been telling him that they all taste like spiked canned soup. Ted says hello. He adds that you should not listen to me on matters of taste, because I have been known to subsist for days on nothing but peanuts and beer, like an alcoholic circus elephant.

I’ll write to you of my conversion in my next letter. I am in no mood to fulminate on paper—I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.

Yours,