The Mortgaged Heart (37 page)

How can one think of a radiant being? I had only seen a picture of her when she was in her twenties: strong, live, wonderfully beautiful, and with one of her Scotch deerhounds in the shade of the African jungle. I had not thought visually about her person. When I met her, she was very, very frail and old but as she talked her face was lit like a candle in an old church. My heart trembled when I saw her fragility.

When she spoke at the Academy dinner that evening, something happened which I had never seen there before. When she finished her talk, every member rose to applaud her.

At the dinner she said she would like to meet Marilyn Monroe. Since I had met Marilyn several times, and since Arthur Miller was at the next table, I told her I thought that could be very easily arranged. So, I had the great honor of inviting my imaginary friend, Isak Dinesen, to meet Marilyn Monroe, with Arthur Miller, for luncheon in my home.

Tanya was a magnificent conversationalist and loved to talk. Marilyn, with her beautiful blue eyes, listened in a "once-upon-a-time-way," as did we all. Tanya talked about her friends Berkley Cole and Dennis Finch-Hatton. She talked always with such warmth that the listeners didn't have to try to interrupt or change her marvelous conversation.

Tanya ate only oysters and drank only champagne. At the luncheon we had many oysters and for the big eaters several large souffles. Arthur asked what doctor put her on that diet of nothing but oysters and champagne. She looked at him and said rather sharply, "Doctor? The doctors are horrified by my diet but I love champagne and I love oysters and they agree with me." Then she added, "It is sad, though, when oysters are not in season, for then I have to turn back to asparagus in those dreary months." Arthur mentioned something about protein and Tanya said, "I don't know anything about that but I am old and I eat what I want and what agrees with me." Then she went back to her reminiscences of friends in Africa.

It was a great delight for her to be with colored people. Ida, my housekeeper, is colored, and so are my yardmen, Jesse and Sam. After lunch everybody danced and sang. A friend of Ida's had brought in a motion picture camera, and there were pictures of Tanya dancing with Marilyn, me dancing with Arthur, and a great round of general dancing. I love to remember this for I never met Tanya again. Since writers seldom write to each other, our communication was infrequent but not vague. She sent me flowers when I was ill and lovely pictures of her cows and her darling dog in Rungsted Kyst.

When I was asked to go to lecture at the Cheltenham Festival in England last year, I wrote Tanya and asked if she could possibly join me in London. I received a letter from Clara that she not only could not come to London but she could scarcely move from room to room. Soon afterward, I read that this most radiant being had died.

In London, Cecil Beaton called me and said he had spent an afternoon with Tanya two weeks before her death. He invited me to tea. I went to Cecil's extraordinary house. The walls of the sitting room were black velvet and there was a magnificent orange portrait of Cecil by Bebe Berard, whom I loved very much, and who died about a decade ago. In that setting I could see vivacious Tanya with her delicate gestures, drinking champagne instead of tea, enchanting her listeners, enjoying her tales of long ago. I can imagine that she would have enjoyed the chic of the decor.

Cecil said that he was in Denmark two weeks before her death and had called Tanya. He told her he had an appointment in Spain. Tanya said then, "Well, that means, Cecil, I will never see you again and it makes me very sad." Thereupon, Cecil broke his appointment in Spain. Before he had time to hire a car to go to Rungsted Kyst, she called back and said, "Cecil, we have always been such good friends and I hate to have our friendship end on such a disappointing note." Cecil said, "I am just leaving for Rungsted Kyst, and I shall see you this afternoon." Tanya met him at the door, and the driver, seeing her, took off his hat and gave her a full bow from the waist. Cecil asked if she was suffering and she said that the drugs they had given her were sufficient and that she was in no pain. Cecil gave me copies of the last photographs of her: aged and exquisite, she was among her beloved possessions, portraits of her ancestors, the chandeliers, and the beautiful old furniture. Clara wrote me later that she was buried under her favorite beech tree near the shore of Rungsted Kyst.

[
Saturday Review,
March 16, 1963]

W
HEN
I
WAS A CHILD
of about four, I was walking with my nurse past a convent. For once, the convent doors were open. And I saw the children eating ice-cream cones, playing on iron swings, and I watched, fascinated. I wanted to go in, but my nurse said no, I was not Catholic. The next day, the gate was shut. But, year by year, I thought of what was going on, of this wonderful party, where I was shut out. I wanted to climb the wall, but I was too little. I beat on the wall once, and I knew all the time that there was a marvelous party going on, but I couldn't get in.

Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. My first book was concerned with this, almost entirely, and all of my books since, in one way or another. Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figures to write about—people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love or receive love—their spiritual isolation.

To understand a work, it is important for the artist to be emotionally right on dead center; to see, to know, to experience the things he is writing about. Long before Harold Clurman, who, bless his heart, directed
The Member of the Wedding,
I think I had directed every fly and gnat in that room years ago.

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

I understand only particles. I understand the characters, but the novel itself is not in focus. The focus comes at random moments which no one can understand, least of all the author. For me, they usually follow great effort. To me, these illuminations are the grace of labor. All of my work has happened this way. It is at once the hazard and the beauty that a writer has to depend on such illuminations. After months of confusion and labor, when the idea has flowered, the collusion is Divine. It always comes from the subconscious and cannot be controlled. For a whole year I worked on
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
without understanding it at all. Each character was talking to a central character, but why, I didn't know. I'd almost decided that the book was no novel, that I should chop it up into short stories. But I could feel the mutilation in my body when I had that idea, and I was in despair. I had been working for five hours and I went outside. Suddenly, as I walked across a road, it occurred to me that Harry Minowitz, the character all the other characters were talking to, was a different man, a deaf mute, and immediately the name was changed to John Singer. The whole focus of the novel was fixed and I was for the first time committed with my whole soul to
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

What to know and what not to know? John Brown, from the American Embassy, was here to visit, and he pointed his long fotefinger and said, "I admire you, Carson, for your ignorance." I said, "Why?" He asked, "When was the Battle of Hastings, and what was it about? When was the Battle of Waterloo, and what was that about?" I said, "John, I don't think I caie much." He said, "That's what I mean. You don't clutter your mind with the facts of life."

When I was nearly finished with
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
my husband mentioned that there was a convention of deaf mutes in a town near-by and he assumed that I would want to go and observe them. I told him that it was the last thing I wanted to do because I already had made my conception of deaf mutes and didn't want it to be disturbed. I presume James Joyce had the same attitude when he lived abroad and never visited his home again, feeling his Dublin was fixed forever—which it is.

A writer's main asset is intuition; too many facts impede intuition. A writer needs to know so many things, but there are so many things he doesn't need to know—he needs to know human things even if they aren't "wholesome," as they call it.

Every day, I read the New York
Daily News,
and very soberly. It is interesting to know the name of the lover's lane where the stabbing took place, and the circumstances which the
New York Times
never reports. In that unsolved murder in Staten Island, it is interesting to know that the doctor and his wife, when they were stabbed, were wearing Mormon nightgowns, three-quarter length. Lizzie Borden's breakfast, on the sweltering summer day she killed her father, was mutton soup. Always details provoke more ideas than any generality could furnish. When Christ was pierced in His
left
side, it is more moving and evocative than if He were just pierced.

One cannot explain accusations of morbidity. A writer can only say he writes from the seed which flowers later in the subconscious. Nature is not abnormal, only lifelessness is abnormal. Anything that pulses and moves and walks around the room, no matter what thing it is doing, is natural and human to a writer. The fact that John Singer, in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
is a deaf-and-dumb man is a symbol, and the fact that Captain Penderton, in
Reflections in a Golden Eye,
is homosexual, is also a symbol, of handicap and impotence. The deaf mute, Singer, is a symbol of infirmity, and he loves a person who is incapable of receiving his love. Symbols suggest the story and theme and incident, and they are so interwoven that one cannot understand consciously where the suggestion begins. I become the characters I write about. I am so immersed in them that their motives are my own. When I write about a thief, I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, "Nothing human is alien to me."

When I wrote the stage version of
The Member of the Wedding,
I was at the time paralyzed, and my outward situation was miserable indeed; but when I finished that script, I wrote to a friend of mine, "Oh, how wonderful it is to be a writer, I have never been so happy...."

When work does not go well, no life is more miserable than that of a writer. But when it does go well, when the illumination has focused a work so that it goes limpidly and flows, there is no gladness like it.

Why does one write? Truly it is financially the most ill-tewarded occupation in the world. My lawyer has figured out how much I made from the book
The Member of the Wedding,
and it is, over the five years I wotked on it, twenty-eight cents a day. Then the irony is, the play
The Member of the Wedding
had made so much money that I've had to give eighty per cent to the government—which I'm happy, or at least
have
to be happy, to do.

It must be that one writes from some subconscious need for communication, for self-expression. Writing is a wandering, dreaming occupation. The intellect is submerged beneath the unconscious—the thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination. Yet writing is not utterly amorphous and unintellectual. Some of the best novels and prose are as exact as a telephone number, but few prose writers can achieve this because of the refinement of passion and poetry that is necessary. I don't like the word prose; it's too prosaic. Good prose should be fused with the light of poetry; prose should be like poetry, poetry should make sense like prose.

***

I like to think of Anne Frank and her immense communication, which was the communication not only of a twelve-year-old child, but a communication of conscience and courage.

Here truly there was isolation, but physical rather than spiritual isolation. Several years ago, Anne Frank's father made an appointment to see me at the Hotel Continental in Paris. We talked together and he asked me if I would dramatize the diary of his daughter. He also gave me the book, which I had not yet read. But as I was reading the book, I was so upset that I broke out in a rash on my hands and feet, and I had to tell him that under the circumstances I could not do the play.

Paradox is a clue to communication, for what is
not
often leads to the awareness of what
is.
Nietzsche once wrote to Cosima Wagner, "If only three people could understand me." Cosima understood him and years later a man called Adolf Hitler built a whole philosophical system around a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. It is paradoxical that a great philosopher like Nietzsche and a great musician like Richard Wagner could have contributed so much to the world's suffering in this century. Partial understanding for an ignorant person is a warped and subjective understanding, and it was with this type of understanding that the philosophy of Nietzsche and the creations of Richard Wagner were the mainstay of Hitler's emotional appeal to the German people. He was able to juggle great ideas into the despair of his time, which we must remember was a real despair.

When someone asks me who has influenced my work, I point to O'Neill, the Russians, Faulkner, Flaubert.
Madame Bovary
seems to be written with divine economy. It is one of the most painfully written novels, and one of the most painfully considered, of any age.
Madame Bovary
is a composite of the realistic voice of Flaubert's century, of the realism versus the romantic mind of his times. In its lucidity and faultless grace, it seems to have flown straight from Flaubert's pen without an interruption in thought. For the first time, he was dealing with his truth as a writer.