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 The Third and Only Way 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2021 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/thirdonlyway01 bevi 
 
The Third and Only Way 
 Ax REFLECTIONS ON STAYING ALIVE 
 
 Helen Bevington 
 
 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 1996 
 
© 1996 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of 
 America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ap- 
 
 pear on the last printed page of this book. 
 
 The following reviews originally appeared in the New York Times Book Review and are 
 reprinted here by permission: “A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, by Leslie Lin- 
 der” (July 18, 1971); “A Thousand Pardons, by Katinka Loeser” (October 3, 1982); “Lorelei 
 Two, My Life with Conrad Aiken, by Clarissa Lorenz” (May 22, 1983); “The Letters of John 
 Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, selected and edited by C. A. Hankin” (Novem- 
 ber 13, 1983); “To the Is-Land, autobiography by Janet Frame” and “An Angel at My Table 
 autobiography by Janet Frame book two” (October 7, 1984); “What Are People For? essays 
 by Wendell Berry” (April 15, 1990); “The Mind of the Traveler, from Gilgamesh to Global 
 Tourism, by Eric J. Leed” (1991). 
 
 “Anecdote of a Jar,” from Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens, © 1923 and renewed 1951 by 
 
 Wallace Stevens is reprinted here by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 
 
7 
 
 for David, with love 
 

 
7 
 
 Must I leave the words unsaid 
 
 (Then what are words for?) 
 
 Hold my tongue, play dead, unheave my breast, 
 Spin cobwebs in my head, 
 
 Forget the rest? 
 
 Not bloody likely. 
 
wire & 
 
 
 
a 
 
 Contents 
 
 PARTI The Third Way 1 
 
 1 Chekhov’s Way 19 
 “The Happy Life” 20 
 Saint Francis of Assisi 22 
 Confessions of Saint Augustine 23 
 Marcus Aurelius 24 
 Happy Pepys 26 
 
 2 Ways toLove 28 
 
 3. Uncommon Women and Their Ways 36 
 Flannery O’Connor 37 
 Mary McCarthy 39 
 Lorelei Two 40 
 Simone de Beauvoir 42 
 Virginia Woolf 43 
 Beatrix Potter 45 
 Lucy Stone 46 
 Augusta Leigh 48 
 Claire Clairmont 50 
 Lady Blessington 52 
 Lady Holland 54 
 Lady Ottoline Morrell 56 
 Joanna Southcott 57 
 Madame Blavatsky 59 
 Margaret Fuller 60 
 Fanny Brawne 61 
 Jane Austen 63 
 The Duchess of Marlborough 65 
 
x Contents 
 
 Nell Gwyn 66 
 Ninon de Lenclos 68 
 Aphra Behn 70 
 Sappho 72 
 
 4 The Way with Words 75 
 Two Lives 75 
 Janet Frame’s Story 79 
 Two Accounts 82 
 Writers at Work 84 
 Being a Writer 85 
 Writing Charley Smith’s Girl 87 
 Three Poets 88 
 “Anecdote of the Jar” 90 
 Self-Portraits 91 
 The Face Painter 93 
 Light Verse 94 
 Saint Cecilia and Alexander the Great 96 
 Nice Poets 98 
 Bad Poets 101 
 Recognition 103 
 A Talent for Looking 105 
 Rasselas and Candide 105 
 “Poor Goldy” 106 
 What Are People For? 107 
 
 PART II The Only Way 109 
 “And Yet” 124 
 “When I Was Born and Full of Beans” 124 
 “The Woman Whose Birthday Was Charlemagne’s” 124 
 “One Goes Abreast” 125 
 
 5 Reunion 126 
 
 6 Colette’s Way 129 
 A Thousand Pardons 130 
 
Contents xi 
 
 Héloise 132 
 Two Deaths 135 
 “A Memorandum of It” 136 
 
 7 Looking Back 138 
 A Memory of Steve 138 
 The Ten Childhoods 142 
 The History of Malden 144 
 Charley and the Model T 151 
 Happy Endings 152 
 Shelley on Love 154 
 Life in Middlemarch 156 
 The Rhines and ESP 158 
 Indians on the Eno 160 
 The Three Arts Club 161 
 Caroline Gordon at Home 163 
 Quentin Bell 165 
 Hildegarde and Company 167 
 Late Night Thoughts 169 
 Winds at Mt. Airy 170 
 The Big Bang 170 
 Gardens 172 
 “Colors Like Green. Yellow. Blue” 173 
 Subject: Trees 173 
 
 8 Ways of Travel 176 
 On The Mind of the Traveler 176 
 Tourist vs. Traveler 178 
 Claude Lévi-Strauss on Travel 179 
 “Journey Proud” 180 
 The Return of Jan Morris 181 
 The Tour to the Hebrides 181 
 The Stratford Festival 185 
 Much Ado at the University of Chicago 189 
 Blue Sheep and Snow Leopards 189 
 
xii Contents 
 
 Islands 192 
 
 A Quick Trip to Arizona 194 
 The Laughter Must Be Kept 203 
 The Anatomy of Melancholy 204 
 “The Rejoicers” 206 
 
 Postscript: End of Story 207 
 “And Things Are As I Think They Are” 209 
 
Ax | 
 
 The Third Way 
 
A The date is November 1980. As it happens I’m writing just now, in 
 this particular month and year, for a reader who has shown a passing 
 interest in my life and admits to being doubtful as to how it will turn 
 out—the reader being myself. B., my husband, used to laugh at me for 
 never failing to ask “What happened next?” after he had told whatever 
 was on his mind, say, about running into the provost in the A & P and 
 discussing the price of peaches. 
 
 “Nothing happened! That’s it,” B. would groan and shake his head. 
 “Why do you always ask one question too many?” 
 
 “Did the provost buy the peaches?” 
 
 “T don’t know. He went his way and I went mine.” 
 
 “Good. I like to know how a story ends.” 
 
 Having written three volumes of autobiography, I see it’s high time 
 to wind things up. Leonard Woolf is an example of a man who was still 
 winding them up at eighty-eight in his fifth volume of memoirs. Garru- 
 lous by then, forgetful, repetitive, he went blindly on to record a singular 
 lack of events, and no conclusions. 
 
 My first volume, Charley Smith’s Girl, ended with the words “There 
 must be a third way.” Two other ways were my mother’s and my father’s, 
 the way they lived and died. My mother, Lizzie, divorced from Charley 
 when I was two and unaware that I had a father, lived alone from the time 
 I left for college and a life of my own. She lived strong and valiant in her 
 solitude till nearly ninety, seeming to confirm the claim that life is worth 
 living. Granted longevity, she wore a pink rose in her hat and didn’t con- 
 sider herself old. She survived without lament, not happy but acceptant, 
 when it was clear there was no other way. I said once, “You have cour- 
 age,” and she replied, “It takes courage.” I thought that wasn’t enough. 
 
The Third Way 3 
 
 I blamed her that her friends fell away when in fact they died, that she 
 had few resources beyond a little gardening, a little music; and like Hetty 
 Green hoarded her money against the day fast approaching when time 
 would topple her. It seemed to me a poor choice of survival, as if she had 
 a choice. “My soul and body!” she would cry. “What more can I do?” 
 
 My father, Charley, gave up his life and died in despair, affirming the 
 need to despair. Though he lived not alone but with his son Boyce, one 
 morning he turned his face to the wall and, beyond human reach, never 
 spoke or left his bed again. Charley’s way was suicide, slow suicide. Four 
 years earlier his beloved second wife, Boyce’s mother, had died. Charley 
 struggled with grief, trying alcohol then drugs, till finding this earth 
 without her unacceptable, he refused to live, he willed himself to die. It 
 was a cold message to leave behind. 
 
 To escape both destinies, I meant to find a third way, of neither solitude 
 nor despair. An obligation to myself was to be happy, or not to be un- 
 happy; I would use my wits to take the way neither Lizzie nor Charley 
 had found. Why did I think that I alone would escape? Instead, against 
 my will I am solitary like my mother and suicidal like my father, both the 
 one and the other. Without having found it or knowing where to look, I 
 still believe there must be a third way. 
 
 For a while I thought it was the knack of saying like Robert Herrick, 
 “Tumble me down and I will sit upon my ruins (smiling yet).” Herrick 
 defied fortune from his fallen state, which, as the future tense of the poem 
 clearly shows, he hadn’t yet tumbled into — and indeed never did. In some 
 1,400 poems, he wrote of love, the pleasures of love, the need for love, 
 yet lived comfortably a bachelor all his life. When I surveyed what ruins I 
 might sit upon — my house and five acres, my typewriter, my Oldsmobile, 
 my bank account —I could see that a smile of undefeat would be bold but 
 probably ironic. Besides, would it be possible to smile? 
 
 It was the idea of sitting alone on anything that baffled me. How do you 
 accept aloneness, the kind without reprieve? Camus said, in the opening 
 words of The Myth of Sisyphus, “There is only one philosophical prob- 
 
4 The Third Way 
 
 lem which is truly serious: it is suicide.” In an alien world where man’s 
 condition is absurd, why shouldn't he seek to escape? Finally Camus re- 
 jected suicide, with its stark answer, when he realized he wasn’t alone as 
 he rolled his heavy stone again and again to the top of the mountain. 
 Though the senseless toil would never end, it was shared, the absurdity 
 of it was shared. Hell was at least sociable, with plenty of company in the 
 brotherhood of the damned. Camus reflected, oddly enough, “One must 
 imagine Sisyphus happy” —happy, that is, to be alive. Five years later at 
 only forty-seven, Camus was killed in an automobile accident. 
 
 George Herbert wrote, “By all means use sometimes to be alone. 
 Salute thyself.” The catch there is in the word “sometimes.” Change it to 
 “always,” to Chaucer’s “allone withouten any compaignye,’ and you end 
 the celebration. Wordsworth knew “the bliss of solitude” surrounded by 
 four adoring women: his wife Mary, sister Dorothy, daughter Dora, sister- 
 in-law Sara. Keats found the highest bliss (he says in “Solitude”) “When 
 to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.” Or as Cummings sang, “We're 
 wonderful one times one.” 
 
 Yet the men I most admire—Thoreau, Gilbert White of Selborne, 
 Montaigne—were solitary. Thoreau lost no opportunity to crow about it: 
 “T thrive best on solitude,” “I love to be alone.” He lived to himself com- 
 panionable and free, not recluse but rebel, and the world pleased him the 
 better for being simplified. Mr. White of Selborne took in Mrs. Snooke’s 
 tortoise for company and made a list of 120 birds visible and audible in 
 
 » « 
 
 his Hampshire countryside. Montaigne climbed to his tower, surrounded 
 himself with a thousand books, and wrote, in his essay “Of Solitude,” 
 “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself.” 
 Though he had considered suicide, his solution finally lay in acceptance. 
 There was no martyrdom in it, no resignation. On the contrary, there was 
 contentment and, as Thoreau said, “an immense appetite for solitude.” 
 Each man found the answer in himself. 
 
 When I was nine years old my father Charley told me what I had to 
 do. On one of the few occasions that we were together and he took time 
 to give any thought to my future, he handed me the key to happiness that 
 
The Third Way 5 
 
 he admitted had been of no use to him. It would make my fortune, be my 
 inheritance, bring me thriving and content. “Be lucky,” he said. “That’s 
 the whole secret. Just keep in mind what you want and latch on to it. Be 
 smart, have it your own way. That’s the trick, my girl. Be lucky.” 
 
 Well, Charley, what do you think of your daughter’s luck now? Am I 
 going to swing it any better than you did? 
 
 The obligation not to be unhappy—it makes sense as a provident way, 
 not found by chance or available for the asking. There are the nights of 
 sweating panic when tomorrow can’t be imagined, and you wait it out till 
 daylight to begin another day. You marvel at the terror of existence. 
 
 My son Philip telephoned from the Cleveland Clinic Hospital early 
 one night last August, and he said quietly, “The pain is unbearable.” He 
 had said it before, whispered it, “terrible, terrible,” the same words. “May 
 I come?” I asked, as I always asked, but this time he answered, “No, not 
 yet.” During the past months and years I had been with him often, as 
 often as he would allow—staying at the Park Plaza across from the hos- 
 pital for four weeks in July, watching him as he fought to live. Unable to 
 work or read or write, he was losing ground. | talked with his doctors, 
 who refused to make a prognosis. After a series of operations, tests, ex- 
 periments with new drugs, consultations, blood transfusions, the doctors 
 told Phil his life expectancy was unknown: he could die at any time—in 
 an hour, in a day—or he could live for years. One of them said to me, 
 “Phil meets life with honor, in a class of heroes by himself. He conquers 
 on his own terms.” This time it was too late. He was without expectancy. 
 And so was I. 
 
 We talked every night by phone; his voice was all I had, not even the 
 letters he wrote in his mind to tell me how it was. This night I said, as 
 I always said, “I love you,” and he said, “I love you too,” and the con- 
 nection was broken. He may have broken it himself. I called him back 
 immediately and he answered, “Phil Bevington.” 
 
 “I just wanted to say goodnight. I love you, Phil Bevington.” 
 
 “T love you,” he said, and his voice was calm. Shortly afterward he took 
 
6 The Third Way 
 
 the overdose of Seconal. The suicide notes were dated Sunday, the day 
 before. They revealed nothing. 
 
 He left, and I do not know what it cost him, alone in a hospital room. 
 I only know he was finally destroyed. It was a senseless automobile acci- 
 dent. As a graduate student at Duke he had accepted a ride home in a 
 friend’s new Volkswagen after a lecture. The little car had gone out of 
 control, swerved, and crashed into a tree. From the impact Phil’s back 
 was broken. He was barely breathing with, they figured at the emergency 
 room at Duke Hospital, about five minutes left to live. He was twenty- 
 two. 
 
 Yet he survived for more than twenty years, fighting an extraordinary 
 battle—an indestructible man. By that time he had his work as a nuclear 
 physicist and professor at Case Western Reserve, he had his family, he 
 held on. His work was his life. Though he did lose in the end, it is the 
 suffering that is unthinkable. The doctors called it intractable pain, the 
 kind they had no skill to lessen. He was brave, he was my son, he was de- 
 stroyed. No one speaks in his voice, he does not exist. The words I wrote 
 at the time of the accident, “He will live!” proved to be wrong, an intol- 
 erable lie. His death makes the thought of survival a mockery. 
 
 But one does survive. To go on living thereafter hardly beckons—it 
 looms. At this moment the only survival I know is through words, 
 with their insufficiency, their imprecision; the distraction of words, other 
 people’s words and my own concerning their fate and mine. My three 
 solitaries— Thoreau, Mr. White of Selborne, Montaigne—were word 
 men, givers of testimony. None wrote for the world’s opinion, but they 
 were sedulous in keeping journals to note their grounds for existing. They 
 had only the time being to set it down, and they did. In the end it may 
 depend on a blank piece of paper. 
 
 Enid Bagnold, who wrote her autobiography at eighty, drew a picture 
 of a writer in old age sitting alone at a table lost in her game of solitaire. 
 She goes on carefully piling word on word till, with a faint smile on her 
 lips, she falls dead face down on her pack of words. 
 
The Third Way 7 
 
 Solitude is cured by love, work, death, these alone. There are those who 
 choose work as the least unrewarding of the three and become the great 
 practitioners. “Leonardo, why do you give yourself so much trouble?” he 
 was asked. The only time Pliny the Elder didn’t work was while taking 
 a bath. At his meals a servant read to him as he made copious notes 
 on stars, wind, rain, trees, plants, fish, birds, beasts, insects, and man- 
 kind. Working all night, wearing mittens for warmth, he claimed to have 
 gathered twenty thousand facts from some two thousand volumes, freely 
 combining the false with the true since he believed everything he read 
 and his love of the marvelous spurred him on. From tireless research 
 Pliny recorded the existence of mermaids and centaurs, of men with dog’s 
 heads who bark. He noted the magic power of turnips to cure cold feet, 
 thistles boiled in water to bring about male children, the carrot to induce 
 lust. He learned that a head cold clears up if you kiss a mule’s muzzle, 
 that none among mortals is happy, though fortune deals lavishly with the 
 man who is not unhappy. His curiosity cost Pliny his life. He died with a 
 pillow tied round his head, suffocated by falling ashes while studiously 
 observing Vesuvius erupt at Pompeii. He had no information in his notes 
 about love. 
 
 In his Italian Journey Goethe said he was a person who lived in order 
 to work. Violently seasick on the voyage there, he lay in his cabin and 
 polished off the first two acts of Tasso. In his diary Max Frisch wrote, 
 “Work is the only thing that preserves me from terror.” In her diary Vir- 
 ginia Woolf defined the worthlessness of work except as refuge, a means 
 to keep the worker alive. Katherine Mansfield wrote in her journal, “Life 
 without work —I would commit suicide.” 
 
 I too have a bottle of Seconal beside my bed. I said I wouldn'’t live if he 
 didn’t, I would die when he did. But I didn’t die, I was left behind (weep 
 for the dead, my father and my son. And for me in between). Nightmares 
 follow me like the Eumenides lest I imagine I can escape. In a dream | 
 compose a suicide note asking forgiveness, but no one is there to forgive. 
 My reason is simple, it is grief, but does one die of it? Charley did. 
 
 Yeats said he would be content to live it all again in this “frog-spawn 
 
8 The Third Way 
 
 of a blind man’s ditch.” I write his words knowing they are not mine. For 
 these months I’ve tried, but I have lost accommodation, I am running 
 out of choices. How can I not give up? 
 
 He died three months ago, and August becomes November. The preci- 
 pice is there, available if one is obliged to look for it. Seneca said to the 
 unhappy slave, “Do you see the precipice?” 
 
 Suicide is deeper than any hurt, devastating to the lives of others. 
 People are quick to call it cowardice: “One doesn’t do that sort of thing,” 
 they said of Hedda Gabler when she shot herself. Yet it can become a nec- 
 essary choice. I understand that. I can’t wish him alive; for him death was 
 a rational decision finally arrived at. It was the only way. In my dream he 
 is on his feet, dressed in a business suit, saying, “I have to go now. Hang 
 in there, Helen.” 
 
 For me, if there is another way I must find it alone. Or is the third way 
 Philip’s way? 
 
 We are the love seekers. Auden wrote a great line: “We must love one 
 another or die,” and then said he didn’t mean it. I wonder that the three 
 solitaries got along so well without it, flourished and rejoiced. “Do what 
 you love,” Thoreau said. “Pursue your life.” But he didn’t say the pursuit 
 might be of love itself. White of Selborne stayed celibate, unmarried. In 
 his naturalist’s journal he kept the entries on love to the amorous dalli- 
 ance of greenfinches, bees pollinating his cucumbers, rams paying court 
 to the ewes under an August moon. 
 
 Nature lovers appear able simply to love nature and call that love 
 enough. (Wordsworth: “Nature to me was all in all.”) Thoreau preferred 
 otters, woodchucks, and loons to the company of men: “I love nature 
 partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him.” When W. H. 
 Hudson read White’s Selborne at fifteen and began a journal inspired by 
 White, he spent solitary days on the Argentine pampas putting into words 
 the rapturous experience of hearing birdsong. (In Green Mansions, Rima 
 chirped like a bird.) Already at fifteen he was amazed by his intense feel- 
 ing for nature, 
 
The Third Way 9 
 
 which was a mystery to me, especially at certain moments, when it would 
 come upon me with a sudden rush. So powerful it was, so unaccountable, 
 I was actually afraid of it, yet I would go out of my way to seek it... . And 
 I would ask myself: what does it mean? 
 
 To discover what it meant became the work of his life. “I imagine that 
 Thoreau was such a one,” he said. 
 
 Montaigne — the third solitary — clung to his dearest friend, La Boétie, 
 suicidal at his death “which is the death of me.” For wife and daughter 
 there are no expressions in his essays of affection or longing. His mar- 
 riage was dull. He had no son. He forgot how many children he had lost, 
 “two or three” (of six daughters only Léonor lived). He advised cutting 
 loose from the painful ties that bind us to others—“I try to have no ex- 
 press need of anyone” —and sought detachment lest he be made incon- 
 solable by loss. He chose instead to love life and cultivate it. Life was his 
 affair of the heart, not the love of another whom one must always lose. 
 But is it enough to love only life? only nature? to give up people entirely? 
 Shake your head, Montaigne. 
 
 I don’t believe in celibacy. By the evidence, love and work are a necessary 
 combination. Yeats said it in “Adam’s Curse,’ written to Maud Gonne 
 when he was thirty-seven and hopelessly in love. In the poem he reminds 
 her of a night at summer’s end when he, Maud, and her sister Kathleen 
 (“That beautiful mild woman, your close friend”) sat talking together. 
 Yeats had just said a little bitterly what hard work poetry is, though one 
 must pretend it comes spontaneous and easy. You might better get down 
 on your knees and scrub floors or break stones for a living, 
 
 For to articulate sweet sounds together 
 Is to work harder than all these, and yet 
 Be thought an idler by the noisy set. 
 
 Then that beautiful mild woman, Kathleen, said the same was true of 
 being a woman —you worked hard at being beautiful. Yeats replied that 
 everything since Eden, through Adam’s curse, was hard work, even love. 
 
10 The Third Way 
 
 Love itself was labor, an art requiring high courtesy and learning, un- 
 appreciated these days and made to seem idle enough. 
 
 And they were silent, gazing at the fragile shell of a moon. Maud 
 Gonne said nothing, her thoughts perhaps as sad as his own. In the labor 
 of love he had failed, but so had she. She, who was called the most beauti- 
 ful woman in Ireland, would go on being beautiful, he would go on writ- 
 ing poems to her, but in the third way they had grown weary-hearted. At 
 the end he speaks only to her, the unattainable: 
 
 I had a thought for no one’s but your ears: 
 
 That you were beautiful, and that I strove 
 
 To love you in the old high way of love; 
 
 That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown 
 As weary-hearted as that hollow moon. 
 
 (The next year, 1903, she married John MacBride, whom Yeats called “a 
 drunken, vainglorious lout.” He himself married a plain girl at fifty-two.) 
 
 So far I haven’t asked a woman about the way she took, in the light of 
 whose life I might measure my own—Jane Austen, say—for a clue. She 
 never married or had a real love affair, but neither did she live alone or 
 sleep alone. Cassandra, her sister, her other self, shared her life (“I tell 
 you everything”) and suffered her death. 
 
 Madame de Sévigné, 1,555 of whose letters survive, had too much soli- 
 tude on her hands, too much need of her child for whom her love knew 
 no limits. She wished her heart were as warm toward God as it was 
 toward Francoise. When Francoise became the Comtesse de Grignan and 
 left Paris to live in Provence, her mother, standing at a window watching 
 the carriage depart, wanted to throw herself to her death. She sobbed for 
 five hours. “It requires more courage than I possess,” she wrote, “to bow 
 to this tragic destiny.” 
 
 Colette, from her own acquaintance with love, tried to do without it. 
 As a child she was secure in her mother’s love, told by her “You are my 
 golden sun.” But marriage with Willy taught her there are no certain- 
 ties; she learned to despise herself for being a deceived, rejected wife. “To 
 
The Third Way 1 
 
 endure without happiness and not to droop, not to pine, is a pursuit in 
 itself, you might almost say a profession.” It helped to have an orderly 
 mind, a sense of discipline, tenacity in a makeshift world. On her own 
 she made painful experiments in love affairs with both sexes. She hated 
 to write and said so, but writing freed her from reliance on other people. 
 “The freedom to live untied to others” — Colette wanted that. 
 
 Yeats called it tragic joy that says life is absurd and accepts the tragedy. At 
 least it’s better than Rimbaud’s “I believe myself in hell; hence I am there.” 
 
 The obligation not to be unhappy: F. L. Lucas, writer and lecturer at 
 Cambridge University, had the curiosity to try, in the essay “Happiness,” 
 to locate the elusive thing. He began with those in the past who were 
 miserable, who claimed toil and care as their lot. Dr. Johnson (though he 
 said it’s the business of a wise man to be happy) wouldn’t live one week 
 of his life over again “in a world bursting with sin and sorrow.” Coleridge 
 at thirty said, “I do not know what it is to have one happy moment.” 
 Tolstoy counted fewer than fourteen happy days, Anatole France denied 
 having une heure, un jour. Poor Stendhal cried, “Happy, I would have 
 been charming.” 
 
 Such confessions Lucas found astounding and dismal. Why is happi- 
 ness so difficult to come by? The lament is always in the air, a persistent 
 echo from Ecclesiastes to Lear. No one can exaggerate the suffering man 
 has known, yet surprisingly scant is reliable testimony as to how much 
 happiness exists. 
 
 What are the causes, Lucas asked, the sources of happiness? What 
 makes one happy? He never found out. After a search doomed to defeat 
 he only suggests ways of being happier than not: 
 
 Health —a first requirement. 
 
 A calmly balanced imperturbability — not a cause but a condition. 
 
 Freedom from fear — not a source but a proviso. 
 
 Vitality. An excess of stamina, a kind of thriving: “There are distinct ad- 
 vantages in being tough.” 
 
 The ability to accept the way things are, the mind not tormenting itself. 
 
12. The Third Way 
 
 Activity. Always to have some work at hand. 
 
 Love, if you can get it: “One truth is the unreality of many human rela- 
 tionships. It is perilous to risk one’s heart on a single person.” 
 
 Last of all, laughter. Like Montaigne, who said “I do nothing without 
 gaiety.” Like Sydney Smith, who, though he never recovered from the 
 death of his son, chose laughter over tears, advocating “Short views, 
 for God’s sake, short views.” 
 
 Horace defined a happy man: 
 
 Happy the man, and happy he alone, 
 
 He, who can call today his own: 
 
 He who, secure within, can say, 
 
 Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today. 
 
 Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, 
 
 The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. 
 
 So did Matthew Arnold (writing about Goethe): 
 
 And he was happy, if to know 
 Causes of things, and far below 
 His feet to see the lurid flow 
 
 Of terror, and insane distress, 
 And headlong fate, be happiness. 
 
 “Happy is the man,” said Wordsworth, 
 
 Who only misses what I missed, who falls 
 No lower than I fell. 
 
 What am I saying? There is really no escape. The writers I quote are 
 dead, yesterday’s people, silent before such words as Auden left behind: 
 “There is nothing to say. There never has been. There is no way out. There 
 never was.” (When her disciples asked the Cumean sibyl, given eternal 
 life and shriveled to nothing in a glass, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she 
 answered, “I want to die.”) 
 
The Third Way 13 
 
 In the meantime 
 There are the bills to be paid. 
 
 In the meantime, in the isolation of the countryside I write not to redeem 
 the time but to cancel it. Writing is work, a way of lifting a finger, and 
 nothing is more solitary. I’ve written it before: the dogwoods, mocking- 
 birds, white house on the hill, the life with B., the life with two sons till 
 they went off to Exeter and Harvard and found their wives and found 
 their professions. Except that now I’m not living my life, I’m recording it. 
 “Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?” asked Virginia Woolf in her 
 diary. I’m not good at making sense of it, the way one falters, circum- 
 scribed by loss, wrestling with words for something one no longer wants 
 to say, words to shut out the silence. 
 
 “It was not,” said Eliot, “what one had expected.” It was not “the long 
 hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity.” The serenity becomes the tur- 
 moil as the seasons change. And there is, it seems to me, a limited value 
 in living with yesterdays when the persistent, ineradicable memory is of 
 loss, and the time is always now with its bewilderment and pain. 
 
 Lying awake, calculating the future, 
 
 Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel 
 
 And piece together the past and the future, 
 
 Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, 
 The future futureless. 
 
 (“I was much further out than you thought,” wrote the poet Stevie 
 Smith. “And not waving but drowning.”) 
 
 Once years ago B. and I went to Europe for six months leaving the front 
 door unlocked. When we returned, there was a sheet of paper taped to 
 the door that said, “I came in Saturday night and took a bath because my 
 well was out of prime,” signed by a neighbor. Since then, as the country- 
 side has turned criminal along with other communities, the doors are 
 
14. The Third Way 
 
 locked and bolted, each house a fort with alarm systems, watchdogs, gun, 
 each occupant a target—not a world to face alone. After four break-ins, 
 after being threatened one night at gunpoint, I am warned by Detective 
 Atkins in the kindliest way, “I strongly urge you to sell your house and 
 move into town. It isn’t safe out here, you're too vulnerable, too isolated. 
 I don’t want your life on my conscience.” 
 
 Staying alive becomes a predicament in an age of fear when the planet 
 itself appears bent on suicide, and survival comes to mean survival of the 
 human race. Can one even choose to live or die in a nuclear age when 
 we have the power to destroy the world in an hour, as Hiroshima was 
 leveled in nine seconds? One’s plight is everyman’s; death is the death of 
 mankind. F. O. Matthiessen wrote in a note that he left in his hotel room 
 before he jumped to his death, “How much the state of the world has to 
 do with my state of mind I do not know.” Before his death Saint-Exupéry 
 wrote, “I hate my own time with all my heart.” “Why was I born,” asked 
 Shaw, “with such contemporaries?” 
 
 It is harder than before to count the benevolences and mercies, to notice 
 things before the eyes, customary things, focus the mind on them. In a 
 gallery of exhibits one is distracted by racing thoughts, losing sight of 
 what one lives by. William Carlos Williams could write about a glass of 
 parsley, the plums in the icebox, the cat in the flowerpot (and say con- 
 fidently of Emily Dickinson, “I was a better poet”). Nothing he encoun- 
 tered was too familiar or too nasty for notation. “No ideas but in things,” 
 he said: 
 
 Things and things unmentionable, 
 
 the sink with the waste farina in it and 
 lumps of rancid meat, milk-bottle tops: have 
 here a tranquility and loveliness. 
 
 Emily Dickinson never wrote like that! Wouldn’t it be funny if she had? 
 Williams said he dealt with the particular to get at the universal, just 
 as she did, but her selection was more fastidious. Still, an unworthy ob- 
 
The Third Way 15 
 
 ject like a mud puddle appealed to Cummings, who wrote of childhood 
 “when the world was puddle-wonderful.” Wordsworth had a puddle of 
 his own that he carefully measured from side to side: “Tis three feet long 
 and two feet wide.” 
 
 How much curiosity does it take? How much interest in puffballs? 
 W. H. Hudson watched a London sparrow so closely he knew it from 
 every other sparrow when it hopped by. The immediacy of a thing rec- 
 ommends it, if one will stop to look. Today I saw a copperhead slither 
 across the lawn with a bird in its mouth. Other sightings included a dead 
 bee, a bluebottle fly — minor distractions, not main events. I said I wanted 
 a living tree for company in my living room. A generous man, overhear- 
 ing, potted and brought me a leafy bamboo that reaches to the ceiling. 
 Now I need a panda, by nature solitary, to come and live with me. Pandas 
 love bamboo. 
 
 I might look more steadfastly at human beings (instead of exclusively 
 at dead writers) to concentrate the mind. People are what they seem to 
 be. On television they are pictures talking. When I watch on Masterpiece 
 Theatre Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, I see four reserved people con- 
 quering each circumstance as it appears. In that steady tale nobody dies 
 or breaks his heart, and I make a memorandum of it. That is not to say 
 Henry James knew entirely what life and love were about. His desk at 
 Lamb House had a secret compartment that, when he died, was found to 
 contain a prescription for eyeglasses and a remedy for gout. 
 
 When I watch War and Peace, Andrei says, “To be happy one must 
 
 » « 
 
 believe in the possibility of happiness.” “Meanwhile my life drifts on,” 
 
 Pierre tells himself. “There’s nothing left to happen.” 
 
 Le coeur oublie: no, 1 don’t believe the heart forgets. The most one can 
 hope is to take heart again. I’ve gone so far as to join a class in aerobic 
 dancing —to which I returned a week after Philip died—to take heart, 
 so to speak, by counting heartbeats between spurts of dancing to rev up 
 the pulse, keep in touch with the cardiovascular system. Our instructor 
 Beverly shows you how high you can leap if you try. With her we perform 
 
16 The Third Way 
 
 the Cha-Cha and the Teaberry Shuffle in a romp to shake off age, heft, 
 heartache, a tendency to list and droop. Beverly believes in the heart’s re- 
 silience. 
 
 I must remind you I am talking about staying alive. 
 
 Then he stood the cans on the bunkroom table and started opening 
 them. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “the purpose of life is to stay 
 alive and to keep on staying alive as long as you possibly can.” (Joseph 
 Mitchell, “The Fishermen’) 
 
 So that’s it. The reason for staying alive is that you have the habit. But 
 is it reason enough? Whatever I do, I can’t turn into a placid old person 
 in a rocking chair or a retirement home. If I could I would live season- 
 ably, without fear or panic in a state approaching calm; but the idea of 
 calm exists in a sitting cat. 
 
 It is a question, now 
 Of final belief. So, say that final belief 
 Must be a fiction. It is time to choose. 
 
 In this world, “this invented world,” Wallace Stevens said, “we live by 
 our ability to create the necessary fictions.” He illustrated his meaning by 
 such phrases as the fiction of the leaves, the moonlight fiction, the fiction 
 of the mind, the fiction of an absolute. “The final belief,” he said, “is to 
 believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing 
 else.” To him poetry was a supreme fiction. So was God. 
 
 Final beliefs or fictions: 
 
 It is an illusion that we were ever alive, / Lived in the houses of mothers. — 
 Stevens 
 
 The main thing is to know how to endure. — Chekhov 
 
 One is born, and one dies. And always there are people enough. — Karel 
 Capek 
 
 And appraisals: 
 
 That the strategy of survival may be to recover the attainable things, like 
 
The Third Way 17 
 
 equilibrium; to learn acceptance, accommodate grief, give it house- 
 room, let it rage itself out; to try gradually to back off from the preci- 
 pice. 
 
 That each grief is absolute. There is no preparation in having been hurt 
 before. Each loss starts with an incredulous NO! 
 
 That one’s sorrow is not the world’s sorrow, or the neighbors’. The world 
 is of necessity indifferent. (Mr. Zuss: “Oh, there’s always someone play- 
 ing Job. Anyone can play that part.”) 
 
 That living is a hazardous enterprise. Nobody is unique in finding it 
 threatening, even fatal. 
 
 Believe that there are compensations in being alone. 
 
 But it is better to belong to someone. 
 
 Take note of the smell of grass, and by such improvisation seek the dis- 
 traction of things. (Gilbert White in his journal: “Clouds fly different 
 ways.” “Green woodpecker laughs at all the world.”) 
 
 Believe that tomorrow is a day also. Tomorrow and tomorrow. 
 
 It is late to store up admonitions. Yet without them one may as well ab- 
 dicate altogether. Tonight on television I tuned in to somebody saying 
 to his friend Sheila, “Don’t worry, Sheila. You're alive, you're alive.” I 
 switched channels to a man deep in a harangue about rules of behavior. 
 You must make no mistakes, he was saying. You must maintain perfect 
 accuracy of judgment. You must exert your authority or you fail. Turned 
 out he was talking about playing a bagpipe. 
 
 It is late to seek definitions. On April 20, 1904, two months before he 
 died, Chekhov wrote to his wife Olga: “You ask what is life? That is just 
 the same as asking what is a carrot. A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more 
 is known about it.” 
 
 Before his life became unendurable, Philip wrote me a letter that said, “I 
 seem to be ready for another try at survival. I like that word, it’s par- 
 ticularly appropriate for our time, that and peace. The best word of all, 
 though, is love.” 
 
 I know now that the third way is Philip’s way, which is to stay alive as 
 
18 The Third Way 
 
 long as one can, to survive as well as one can. The third way is the courage 
 to live and the courage to die. 
 
 “Whoever is alone will stay alone,” wrote Rilke. “Will sit, read, write 
 long letters through the evening.” 
 
 And here I am, here I am. 
 
1A 
 
 Chekhov's Way 
 
 Chekhov, so soon to die, stayed a happy man. The letters he wrote, some 
 four thousand that survive, show him cheerful, basically a man who liked 
 wine, pretty women, and the sound of church bells. In the end, church 
 bells were all that remained of his faith. 
 
 You would call his life hard. He wrote, “There was no childhood in 
 my childhood” —a time of poverty with beatings from a harsh father, son 
 of a serf. Chekhov had his first hemorrhage at twenty-four, the year he 
 graduated in medicine from Moscow University. He died of tuberculosis 
 at forty-four, three years after marrying the actress Olga Knipper of the 
 Moscow Art Theatre, from whom he lived apart, forced to seek a warm 
 climate in the Crimea. From his thousand stories and five plays of Russian 
 life, one is easily deceived into thinking him melancholy, depressed by life 
 and despairing of the people in it. Tolstoy told him, “As you know I de- 
 test Shakespeare. Well, your plays are worse than his.” Chekhov laughed. 
 Aware of the pathos of existence, the loneliness, the boredom, he said, “I 
 only wished to tell people honestly, “Look at yourselves, see how badly 
 and boringly you live!” His story “Happiness,” a favorite of his, says 
 there is happiness enough in the world if you know how to find it. 
 
 In the country, where he loved to stay, he would announce, “I am a 
 
 » « 
 
 man who enjoys life,” “I am thriving to the marrow of my bones.” The 
 birds sang indefatigably, the smell of freshly cut hay intoxicated him: 
 “One has only to sit beside a haystack in order to imagine oneself in the 
 embraces of a naked woman.” In his thirties he bought a rundown estate 
 of 675 acres in Melikhovo to escape an apartment in Moscow and the 
 solitude he hated. (“When I’m alone, for some reason I become terri- 
 fied.”) Here he brought his parents, brothers, beloved sister Masha, and 
 
 endless guests; here he planted cherry trees, felt joy: “At moments I am 
 
20 The Third Way 
 
 so happy that I pull myself up and remind myself of my creditors.” But 
 he spent his nights coughing. 
 
 Chekhov loved the theater, the characters in his plays and the actors 
 who portrayed them: “So I, after dining with the star, was aware of a halo 
 round my head for two days afterward.” His wit never failed him, his love 
 of laughter that saved him from despair. Much as he believed in the ne- 
 cessity of work (“You must work, you know, and never stop your whole 
 life through”), he would drop it for a party, gathering a company of revel- 
 ers round him. “When I become rich,” he wrote, “I shall have a harem in 
 which I shall keep fat naked women, with their buttocks painted green.” 
 
 He had no intention of marrying, kept hidden the fact that he was 
 coughing up blood. In 1899 he was condemned to stay most of the year 
 in Yalta, from which with the success of The Seagull he wrote, “If I did 
 not have to live in Yalta, this winter would be the happiest of my life.” He 
 knew he had not long to live: “My friend, you forget I’m a doctor.” When 
 he relented and became the husband of Olga Knipper, he addressed her 
 in hundreds of letters, pouring out endearments to my unusual wife, my 
 exquisite missus, my sweet delightful Knippschitz. “And you, why are you 
 depressed?” he asked her. “What are you depressed about? You are living, 
 working, hoping, drinking. ... What more do you want?” 
 
 Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard, written in 1904 while he 
 struggled to stay alive, was performed as a tragedy of empty, trivial lives, 
 a fact that hurt him, a misinterpretation of its meaning: “I call the play 
 a comedy, in places even a farce” (though he also cried, “One must not 
 
 » 
 I 
 
 live such a life!”) An hour before his death he improvised a story that 
 made Olga laugh heartily. The doctor came in and ordered champagne. 
 “Ich sterbe,” he whispered to the doctor. To Olga he said smiling, “It’s a 
 long while since I have drunk champagne,” drained his glass to the last 
 
 drop, lay back in his bed, and died. 
 The Happy Life 
 
 Martial, the things that do attain 
 The happy life be these, I find: 
 
Chekhov’s Way 21 
 
 The riches left, not got with pain; 
 
 The fruitful ground, the quiet mind, 
 The equal friend, no grudge, no strife; 
 No charge of rule nor governance; 
 Without disease the healthy life; 
 
 The household of continuance, 
 
 The mean diet, no delicate fare; 
 
 True wisdom joined with simpleness; 
 The night discharged of all care, 
 Where wine the wit may not oppress; 
 The chaste wife, wise, without debate; 
 Such sleep as may beguile the night; 
 Contented with thine own estate, 
 
 Nor wish for death nor fear his might. — Surrey 
 
 Henry Howard, proud, haughty, fiery-tempered Earl of Surrey—not 
 a word of this beautiful poem fitted his tragic life. As a translation of 
 Martial, who wrote in favor of the simple life (and in disgust with Rome 
 retired at forty-eight to the country), it corrects Martial’s stoical epigram 
 XLVII, “Ad Seipsum,” reminding him that the joys of such a life include 
 the possession of a chaste wife, which Martial almost certainly never had. 
 
 An aristocrat of royal blood who was intended to marry Princess 
 Mary, future queen of England, Surrey was more elegant than simple, 
 more arrogant than wise, “the most foolish and proud boy that is in En- 
 gland.” As courtier he witnessed the downfall of his cousin Anne Boleyn, 
 Henry VIII’s second wife; saw his other cousin Catherine Howard, Henry 
 VIIPs fifth wife, put to death; and with reason trembled for his own fate. 
 (“Too dearly had I bought my green and youthful years.”) The power- 
 ful family of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, whom Surrey treated as 
 vulgar upstarts, successfully plotted his downfall as another victim of the 
 king’s wrath. Before he was thirty he was trapped among enemies in court 
 intrigue that, through his hauteur and pride, caused his death. On frivo- 
 lous, trumped-up charges—that he favored Catholics, that he had eaten 
 
22 The Third Way 
 
 meat during Lent, that he had recklessly broken windows in London—he 
 was imprisoned in the Tower, accused of a plot to murder the king, tried 
 for high treason, and condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered 
 at Tyburn. Finally, in a more honorable kind of death which befitted his 
 rank, he was beheaded on Tower Hill. 
 
 In 1557, ten years after his death, forty of Surrey’s love songs and son- 
 nets, including this poem, “The Happy Life,” were published in Tottel’s 
 Miscellany “to the honor of the English tongue.” “We resteth here,” he 
 wrote, “that quick could never rest.” 
 
 Saint Francis of Assisi. Maybe because it’s April, now eight 
 months since Philip’s death, I think of this man. He was happy, the Pover- 
 ello, so in love with life that the legends surrounding him ought to be 
 true. One story has him singing duets with a nightingale. The bird would 
 trill a phrase and he would repeat it, two jongleurs de Dieu lifting their 
 voices antiphonally till Francis ran out of breath. A nightingale can out- 
 sing a saint. 
 
 Born eight hundred years ago, he was a little man with black eyes who 
 wore bells on his ankles to warn crickets to avoid being stepped on. He 
 talked to stones and trod on them with care, removed the worms from 
 his path and set them by the wayside, ordered honey and wine for the 
 bees to see them through the winter, invited a cicada into his cell and 
 chirped to encourage her. A lamb followed him to church and together 
 they heard the Mass. 
 
 The quality of courtesy in Saint Francis was not strained. Because he 
 loved fire, he wouldn’t extinguish a candle. He showed marked civility 
 toward all things great and small: people, animals, trees, flowers, stones, 
 the wind and the rain. He exhorted the cornfields and vineyards to love 
 God. He taught Sister Cow to genuflect. He preached to the sparrows of 
 Alviano; Giotto painted him informing the birds of the gospel of love. 
 
 He reproved the Wolf of Gubbio for eating people. “Come to me, 
 Brother Wolf,” he said; and the hungry wolf that had terrorized the town 
 of Gubbio (near Assisi) lay down at his feet, put its paw in his hand, 
 and solemnly promised to behave itself and become a Christian. J. R. H. 
 
Chekhov’s Way 23 
 
 Moorman says in his book Saint Francis of Assisi, “What could be more 
 convincing than the story of the Wolf of Gubbio?” 
 
 The Confessions. 1 wonder what Wallace Stevens meant when he 
 said, “I would sacrifice a great deal to be a Saint Augustine.” My own rea- 
 son for revering this man is that he asked God in the days before his con- 
 version, “Make me chaste and continent, but not yet.” Till now I’d never 
 read The Confessions or known the extent of his dallying —this bishop of 
 Hippo, church father and saint, who hadn’t wanted to give up the flesh 
 too soon. 
 
 He was born in 354 in a Roman town, Tagaste, when the Roman Em- 
 pire had become officially Christian under the mighty Constantine. The 
 days of persecution were over and his mother Monica was a practicing 
 Christian, his father a pagan baptized on his deathbed. In this story of 
 his sensuality and his penitence, written when he was about forty-five, 
 Augustine wants you to believe that at sixteen he was already a sinner, 
 wild and licentious and free, who looked at the girls and, my goodness, 
 “boiled over” and “seethed as does the sea” with wanton desire. More- 
 over, he was a thief who once stole some pears from an orchard. He recalls 
 with shame how, late one night in Tagaste, he and his friends invaded a 
 nearby orchard and plucked the fruit, not to eat but to throw at the swine 
 merely for the fun of it. 
 
 Then, he continues, “to Carthage I came, where a cauldron of unholy 
 loves bubbled up all around me.” Augustine’s father sent him at seven- 
 teen to school in Carthage to study rhetoric. There, “inflated with arro- 
 gance and the madness of lust,” he sought to learn about love, going to 
 stage plays which only added to the fire of his passions when the lovers 
 displayed their own. “Such was my life!” he cries of it, one spent in un- 
 godly yearnings, “in love with loving.” He took a mistress, and they un- 
 intentionally had a son whom he named Adeodatus, meaning “by God 
 given.” For fifteen years he lived with her unwed, and the insistent need 
 “to love and be loved was sweet to me.” Meanwhile he taught rhetoric 
 and eloquence in Carthage, in Rome, and in Milan. It was in Milan that 
 the miracle of conversion happened when, deeply troubled, one day in 
 
24 The Third Way 
 
 the year 387 at thirty-three, Augustine rushed into the garden, flung him- 
 self under a fig tree, and, in a passion of weeping, poured out his guilty 
 heart to God: “But thou, O Lord, how long? How long, Lord? wilt thou 
 be angry forever?” 
 
 And a voice said to him, “Take up and read.” And he took up and read 
 the letter of Paul to the Romans (13:13-14): “Not in rioting and drunken- 
 ness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, put 
 on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify 
 its lusts.” 
 
 The endearing part is that it took him so long. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius. He will tell me. The end to seek in life is not 
 happiness, he said. It is peace of mind. Years ago when I came across the 
 Meditations, 1 copied out passages that made sense to me. They make 
 sense to me now. He wrote his one book, not in Latin but in Greek and 
 called it To Myself—a strangely detached yet intimate diary for man or 
 emperor to keep, to remind himself, “Let it be in no man’s power to say 
 that in you there is no simplicity and no goodness. Make it a lie for any- 
 one to think this of you, for who can hinder you from being both simple 
 and good?” 
 
 Though he adhered throughout his days to the Stoic doctrine— one of 
 reason, impassivity, restraint, self-discipline— Marcus Aurelius kept in- 
 tact a belief in the essential goodness of life. In a time of universal cor- 
 ruption he was virtuous, with a sense of decency that led him to be in- 
 dulgent of the lack of it in others. He rid himself of anger. So real was 
 his tolerance, so sparing of rebuke, that he blamed himself for his own 
 indignation. “Why am I troubled in spirit?” he asked. “Why should I be 
 indignant?” 
 
 Forbearance carried him far toward an insolent wife, Faustina, a wan- 
 ton who disgraced him openly with her lusts and infidelities (while in his 
 book he thanked the gods for so obedient and faithful a wife). Toward 
 Commodus, his incurably vicious son, he was too forgiving, too indul- 
 gent. According to Lempriére, Commodus in his degenerate youth cor- 
 rupted his own sisters and, as emperor at nineteen upon his father’s 
 
Chekhov's Way 25 
 
 death in 180 a.p., “kept three hundred women, and as many boys, for his 
 The intervals of lust,” said Gibbon, “were filled up 
 
 » « 
 
 licentious pleasures. 
 with the basest amusements.” When his debauchery and drunkenness led 
 to insanity, Commodus proclaimed himself Hercules the god, carried a 
 club, and wore a lion’s skin over his purple and gold-embroidered robes. 
 He fought gladiators and killed wild beasts in the Roman arena. Hero- 
 dian of Antioch, who in his history of Rome asserts that he was an eye- 
 witness, claims that Commodus killed one hundred lions with one hun- 
 dred javelins, never missing a throw. He walked naked in public to the 
 shame and horror of his people, becoming so hated for his demented an- 
 tics and cruelty that his sister Lucilla conspired with a group of senators 
 to assassinate him —a plot that failed. At thirty-one Commodus was poi- 
 soned by Marcia, the favorite of his mistresses, then strangled to death 
 by a wrestler of the court. His reign of thirteen terrible years began the 
 decline and fall of the Roman Empire. 
 
 Yet Marcus Aurelius’s diary is without complaint of his bestial son 
 (whom possibly he may not have fathered). Instead it is a record of a 
 man’s philosophy, concerned with his inner life and filled with com- 
 munings to steady himself to be the way he wanted to be. They are 
 his day-to-day thoughts hastily noted for his study and reflection, often 
 on the battlefield during the years spent fighting the barbaric Germanic 
 tribes who attacked the frontiers. He hated war and loved peace. He 
 sought understanding of others with compassion in his heart, a mod- 
 est man to whom goodness was simply a matter of obeying reason. He 
 has been likened to Saint Francis of Assisi. But Francis lived with God. 
 Matthew Arnold called Marcus Aurelius “perhaps the most beautiful 
 figure in history.” John Stuart Mill likened him to Jesus Christ —a dubi- 
 ous comparison that made Marcus seem holy, a very god, as he was not, 
 and a Christian when in fact he disliked Christians. He was born a cen- 
 tury after Christ was crucified. 
 
 Withal, in spite of his charity he was not a saint, not blind to the ways 
 of the world and the people in it, who, he once wrote, are like little dogs 
 biting one another. “Every morning repeat to yourself, today I shall meet 
 with a talebearer, an ingrate, and a bully; with treachery, envy, and self- 
 
26 The Third Way 
 
 ishness. It is no surprise men are like this. How can any of them harm 
 me? For none can involve me in shame save myself.” 
 
 Short is the time that remains to you of life, he told himself—a mere 
 hairbreadth of time before you are dust, without hope of eternal life after 
 death, consigned to nothingness, to oblivion. Therefore, always take the 
 short way, for the way of nature is short. Live as on a mountain, it mat- 
 ters not whether here or there. Nothing can make you think what is false 
 or do what is wrong. And if the forces of evil finally become too many 
 and too imperious so that you are not free, “kill yourself,” he said. “No 
 one can prevent that.” 
 
 “Very little,” he wrote, as if to give himself more assurance, “very little 
 is needed to make a happy life.” 
 
 Happy Pepys. Three hundred years ago Pepys was a man who 
 played the flageolet and lute, took physic, took a bribe, had a boil under 
 his chin, buried his pet canary, fondled the girls, kissed Mary Mercer and 
 Bagwell the carpenter’s pretty wife, dreamed of Lady Castlemaine in his 
 arms, sang madrigals, and wrote, “I think I may reckon myself as happy 
 a man as any is in the world.” 
 
 Hospitable, too. For breakfast one New Year’s Day, he gave his guests 
 “a barrel of oysters, a dish of neat’s tongues, a dish of anchovies, wine of 
 all sorts and Northdown ale. And now, I am in good esteem with every- 
 body, I think!” He got nits in his periwig, caught cold from having his 
 ears washed, lived through the bubonic plague (“God preserve us all!”) 
 and the Great Fire, which reached his lane and singed the cat. Dalliance 
 with the housemaid Deb Willet, for which his little wife came at him 
 with a poker, caused “the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this 
 world.” As one who hated to be unquiet at home, he sometimes wished 
 himself single, and sorely regretted the time he blacked his wife’s eye. 
 
 Having made peace with her and acquired a leather coach with coach- 
 man and two black horses, gained prosperity plus a worrisome pain in 
 his eyes, on May 31, 1669, aged thirty-six, Pepys closed his book halfway 
 through his life, closing a door on the rest of life and death still left to tell. 
 A world of his own disappeared from view. Elizabeth died the following 
 
Chekhov’s Way 27 
 
 November —the pretty French girl he married when she was fifteen, he 
 twenty-two, penniless and in love. She died six months after he stopped 
 taking note of her teasing, her jealous fury, her pies and tarts in the house 
 in Seething Lane. And he never told his grief. 
 
 When I remarked to the librarian of Magdalene College, Cambridge — 
 Pepys’s college where the six volumes of his diary and his three thousand 
 books are kept in his own carved bookcases — that I had been coming to 
 this room off and on since 1936, he said in surprise, “Is there something 
 you are looking for?” 
 
 “I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever it is, I always find it.” And Pepys 
 as well. 
 
2 
 
 ‘Ways to Love 
 
 Love and work, I said, these alone . . . And so it has to be. The third way 
 becomes inevitably a search for love—that being the way of the world. 
 Yet all the while the question remains, where do you look for something 
 you can no longer define, that by now seems like a youthful illusion? Is 
 it really the flesh that continues to matter most, or does one settle finally 
 for something called the mind? The body or the soul? Poetry itself could 
 never exist without its passionate involvement in such a predicament. As 
 Campion reminded us, 
 
 Never love unless you can 
 Bear with all the faults of man. 
 
 Andrew Marvell was a man whose passion was for gardens, so obsessed 
 by the color green that he would reduce the world to it, “Annihilating all 
 that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.” He was a solitary man 
 who chose “to live in Paradise alone” without a wife, without a love af- 
 fair; an invisible man of few words who believed prudently “not to write 
 at all is much the safer course in life.” The best choice was to sit idle at 
 home and not be laughed at. Little is known of his private life. The son of 
 a Yorkshire parson, he became Milton’s assistant in the Commonwealth, 
 was elected to Parliament, and died in London at fifty-seven. His poems, 
 a handful of lyrics found among his effects, were published three years 
 later, apparently by his landlady. Milton knew him for more than twenty 
 years and said he was a man of singular desert; he didn’t say Marvell was 
 a poet. 
 
 But the other Marvell, the poet, had a head full of couplets, a heart 
 fastened on love “begotten by despair / Upon impossibility.” “To His Coy 
 
Ways to Love 29 
 
 Mistress” is a poem of sexual desire so urgent, explicit, direct, witty that 
 it’s impossible not to wish him luck in seducing her, to wonder why she 
 has hesitated this long. In our time, his plea would be “To His Girl Who 
 Holds Out instead of Going to Bed with Him.” But if she is reluctant, Mar- 
 vell is a patient lover; he would prolong the wooing to the end of time: 
 
 I would 
 Love you ten years before the Flood, 
 And you should if you please refuse 
 Till the conversion of the Jews. 
 
 She deserves to be possessed at such a rate, and he’s the man to do it. She 
 is worth waiting for. But there isn’t time; her body and his lust will not 
 survive the grave. Soon worms will end that long-preserved virginity, it 
 will be too late for love in the vast eternity ahead. 
 
 If his simple logic persuades her, there’s nothing to worry about. Mar- 
 vell doesn’t chide or beg or threaten to kill himself. He is playful but im- 
 passioned, sincere in wanting her now, trying to win her through laugh- 
 ter. And laughing, as she must, no doubt she will agree. Together they 
 will outwit time and the tomb—two splendid lovers, still young in all 
 their beauty and strength. 
 
 But I wish I knew the man who wrote that love poem. And the girl 
 too—if in fact she ever existed. 
 
 Like Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” John Crowe Ransom’s poem “The 
 Equilibrists” is witty and frustrated by love. Both describe a familiar 
 problem of trying to get a girl into bed, though Marvell is himself the 
 yearning lover, Ransom the concerned bystander. 
 
 Ransom’s couple are rapturously in love, lusting for each other. Wher- 
 ever the lover goes he is obsessed by longing for her body’s fragrance, its 
 whiteness and beauty inviting his embrace. Her mouth is a “quaint ori- 
 fice” from which come hot kisses, accompanied by the cold forbidding 
 words spiraling down like gray doves from the ivory tower of her mind, 
 an officious tower that says No. Her body is a lily field beseeching him to 
 
30 ©The Third Way 
 
 pluck and bruise and wear the lilies. Her eyes speak love, saying pay no 
 heed to the cruel words, take the lilies. But again the gaunt mind releases 
 the doves crying honor, honor, telling him go away, leave me alone, let 
 us never meet again. 
 
 A terrible predicament. You expect honor among thieves, but honor 
 between lovers, keeping them apart? In anger the poet steps into the 
 poem to consider this “torture of equilibrium,” which seems to him de- 
 plorable: 
 
 Ah, the strict lovers, they are ruined now! 
 I cried in anger. 
 
 Unable to give each other up or yield to their passion, they stay sus- 
 pended halfway between —two acrobats, equilibrists on a tightrope, bal- 
 anced precariously. Observing them, perplexed by their plight, the poet 
 resolves to intervene and force them to a decision to escape this gal- 
 lows where they hang, asking with a “puddled brow,” which do you want, 
 heaven or hell? Is it honor in heaven, spiritual union and a bodiless mar- 
 riage? Or dishonor in hell, rending each other’s flesh, insatiable, unsatis- 
 fied? Great lovers choose hell. Either choice is wrong; each means the loss 
 of something precious, the body or the soul. 
 
 In the end he is convinced that the lovers are right, the conflict is unre- 
 solvable. As he watches them twirling each in his orbit, he sees with new 
 tolerance and insight how beautifully they are balanced, radiant in their 
 hot lust and cold honor, a splendid achievement. Don’t judge them, let 
 them be. So he fashions their tomb, to which they will come unchanged, 
 and writes an epitaph in their praise: Go on spinning forever as you are. 
 Keep the strict balance between fire and ice, body and soul, passion and 
 honor, heaven and hell: 
 
 Equilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light; 
 Close, but untouching in each other’s sight; 
 Mouldered the lips and ashy the tall skull, 
 Let them lie perilous and beautiful. 
 
Ways to Love 31 
 
 Yet when all is said, it is her mouth that means yes, her skull that says 
 no; his mind has been more receptive. Marvell and Ransom are perfect 
 gentlemen, though Ransom isn’t the one tempted. It’s the lady who raises 
 all the fuss. 
 
 Richard Wilbur’s poem “Love Calls Us To the Things of This World” is 
 another love story with a problem, its title from Saint Augustine. A man 
 is roused in his apartment early one morning by the sound of straining 
 pulleys of a clothes line. He opens his eyes and falls back to sleep, while 
 his astounded soul, spirited awake, hangs in the air briefly suspended 
 from his body. Through the window the soul sees, high in the air, the 
 washing on the line: 
 
 Outside the open window 
 The morning air is all awash with angels. 
 
 In the clean clothes with no bodies in them, the soul is aware of angels 
 like itself, some in bedsheets, some in blouses, some in smocks. They 
 swell in the breeze, rising and swaying, flying in place. The wind makes 
 them breathe and fills the clothing with joy. They move and stay, like 
 white pure water. 
 
 But the body is about to wake up. The soul shrinks from what it must 
 face united with the flesh, when its purity will be defiled by the rape of 
 everyday, its innocence punctually ravished. The soul has other needs. It 
 prefers the angelic state, to be clean and good. It cries, “Oh, let there be 
 nothing on earth but laundry.” 
 
 As the day begins, the soul accepts the impure state and descends once 
 more to join the body, by “bitter love” called to the things of this world. 
 The man wakes, yawns, rises. He speaks in a loud imperative voice: Take 
 down the clothes from the line, let them be filled with bodies, let the an- 
 gels become men. Even thieves wear clean linen, for we all go clothed 
 in our immortal souls. Lovers go sweetly dressed to be betrayed by love. 
 Nuns, wearing the habits of faith, strive to keep the difficult balance be- 
 tween body and soul. 
 
32 The Third Way 
 
 Yeats wrote of the same conflict in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” where 
 at first the dominant soul has the better of the argument, summoning the 
 body to climb the penitential stair and withdraw to the tower of the spirit: 
 
 I summon to the winding ancient stair; 
 Set all your mind upon the steep ascent. 
 
 But the obstinate self chooses to stay where it is, in the midst of life, hold- 
 ing fast to an ancient sword wrapped in a piece of silk dress — emblems of 
 love and war. The soul is incredulous that the imagination of a man long 
 past his prime should cling to the flesh when he is promised deliverance 
 from the crime of birth and death, sexuality, the sins of the world. What 
 the soul is offering is heavenly glory. 
 
 All pretense of debate is dropped; the self meditates alone on the 
 “crime” of mortality that the soul would save him from. He doesn’t want 
 deliverance. He asserts the right to live, to suffer and endure, and in a 
 sickening review — from the ignominy of boyhood to the man among his 
 enemies — faces the failure, the malice, the hate, the loss of love that life 
 contains. Without hesitation the self elects not heaven but earth as the 
 only choice: 
 
 I am content to follow to its source 
 Every event in action or in thought; 
 Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! 
 When such as I cast out remorse 
 
 So great a sweetness flows into the breast 
 We must laugh and we must sing, 
 
 We are blest by everything, 
 
 Everything we look upon is blest. 
 
 Triumphantly he accepts every event and casts out all shame or guilt 
 for his part in it. Quick to claim the flesh, to be alive, the victorious self 
 is in a state of blessedness. Soul has lost the debate. 
 
 And yet, said John Donne, what is the problem? The conflict of body and 
 soul is resolvable. In “The Ecstasy” he shows what love finally is, why 
 
Ways to Love 33 
 
 there is no need to choose between them since both are mortal. Love is 
 oneness, achieved when two lovers become one body and one soul. 
 
 In a dialogue of one, Donne reminds his beloved what has happened 
 to them —of a day of ecstasy when they sat and then lay on a bank of vio- 
 lets, gripping hands, gazing into each other’s eyes. So complete was their 
 union that their souls were suspended between them, equal and identi- 
 cal. If a bystander who understood the language of love were listening, 
 he wouldn’t know which soul spoke. In one voice the lovers said, 
 
 This ecstasy doth unperplex 
 (We said) and tell us what we love 
 
 At that moment they knew it wasn’t sex (or sex alone) that had changed 
 them into one. When their bodies had become one body, their souls be- 
 came one soul, like a violet multiplied and grown in size. They knew 
 finally what love is; they were indivisible, nothing could separate them, 
 they would never be lonely again. 
 
 But, he tells her, let’s not forget to thank our bodies since they were 
 the first to unite us: 
 
 We owe them thanks, because they thus 
 Did us, to us, at first convey. 
 
 Only through the body’s passion could the soul respond. The flesh is 
 the teacher. The body is the book. Therefore, any lover listening now 
 wouldn’t note a change in us when again we make love. It is the same 
 either way, the union of body and soul. 
 
 (I remember one student’s dazed interpretation of “The Ecstasy”: 
 “Holding hands is fine, but sex is not all there is to love.”) 
 
 I’m puzzled, though, as an onlooker myself. In “The Equilibrists” Ran- 
 som never says why his two lovers can’t have it both ways, body and 
 soul, but must stop halfway between heaven and hell, deprived of both. 
 As a poet he appears to know less of hell than Dante, less of heaven than 
 Milton. 
 
 In Paradise Lost, when Adam talks in Eden with the resplendent arch- 
 
34 The Third Way 
 
 angel Raphael, whose six wings are downy gold, he learns a lot about 
 angels while Raphael, admitting he is hungry, eats his lunch “with keen 
 dispatch.” Angels, it appears, have real bodies, real appetites. Differing 
 from man only in wearing wings, “they hear, see, smell, touch, taste, di- 
 gest, assimilate.” And fight wars. When Adam asks how they express their 
 love, “by looks only, or do they mix / Irradiance?” Raphael, blushing 
 rosy red, answers, “Let it suffice thee that thou know’st / Us happy, and 
 without love no happiness know’st.” What of the body you enjoy, he tells 
 Adam, we enjoy, “and obstacle find none / Of membrane, joint, or limb, 
 exclusive bars.” Angels embrace and “total they mix,” flesh with flesh, 
 soul with soul. 
 
 Ransom tells his lovers otherwise, assuring them that there is no love- 
 making in heaven. In hell, on the other hand, lovers feed upon the body, 
 “infatuate of the flesh upon the bones.” Rending each other when they 
 kiss, “the pieces kiss again—no end to this.” 
 
 Dante had a better acquaintance with hell. In Canto 5 of the Inferno he 
 
 tells the love story of Paolo and Francesca. As he descends the levels of 
 hell, Dante finds the two together in the second circle, where carnal lovers 
 
 are punished in an eternal tempest, blown by hurricane winds as strong as 
 their passions. A whirling multitude of lovers sweeps by (including Cleo- 
 patra, Helen of Troy, Dido, Paris, Tristan of Lyonesse) and among them 
 Dante recognizes two figures fluttering in the wind whose tragic death he 
 knows well. Francesca, the daughter of the lord of Ravenna, was married 
 to Giovanni Malatesta of Rimini, a hunchback ugly and deformed. On 
 a day in 1285, when Dante was twenty, Giovanni found his wife with his 
 handsome younger brother Paolo and in a rage stabbed them to death. 
 As Dante wrote the poem the murderer was still alive. 
 
 In the name of love, Dante asks for their story. Francesca speaks, while 
 the wind is quieted and Paolo, silent beside her, weeps. She tells how 
 “love led us to one death.” They were alone without fear of discovery, 
 reading together a tale of the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere. As 
 Lancelot kissed his loved one, then Paolo, whose name she never speaks 
 aloud, 
 
Ways to Love 35 
 
 Then he whom naught can sever from me now 
 Forever, kissed my mouth, all quivering. 
 Upon that day we read no more therein. 
 
 The book revealed their love to them and brought them to damnation. 
 Dante, a living man among the dead, is so moved to pity by the sight of 
 the grieving lovers that he faints, collapsing in a swoon like death, heart- 
 struck at the pain and power of love. 
 
 In Dante’s hell all sinners are bodiless, mere shades or wraiths cast- 
 ing no shadow. For eternal punishment the lovers remember and know 
 bodily desire. They feel the same love as before but they cannot make it. 
 There is, says Francesca da Rimini, “no greater pain.” 
 
 In his unfinished sculpture, The Gate of Hell, Rodin originally had Dante 
 sitting at hell’s gate (who as The Thinker now sits alone in Rodin’s Pari- 
 sian garden). In the sculpture Dante is deep in thought, studying the 
 two figures, Paolo and Francesca, wrapped nakedly in a sensual embrace 
 (who are now the lovers in his celebrated statue The Kiss). If Rodin read 
 Dante, he must have preferred to show his lovers happy in the flesh. 
 
3S 
 
 Uncommon Women and Their Ways 
 
 Joyce Carol Oates, appearing on television in an interview, presents her- 
 self as a thin, unsmiling writer, pale and wan as a Dickens waif. “We can’t 
 be judged by our appearance,” she says, adding she doesn’t have sex ap- 
 peal and makes no effort to charm. Her voice trails off, no louder than a 
 falling leaf. 
 
 All of which has little to do with her writing or her habit of re- 
 porting the murderousness of people’s lives in tales of violence, suicide, 
 madness, even cannibalism. She merely reminds me of my theory, wisely 
 abandoned as short on evidence, about the female in literature, that odd 
 women become writers or that writing causes women to become oddly 
 out of focus. I used to tot up the recluses and spinsters of Victoria’s time 
 —Emily Bronté, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson—and deplore the 
 fact they hadn’t become wives and mothers, healthy and well-adjusted. 
 The talented ones in our time too seemed out of sync, retiring souls living 
 sheltered and unwed in a Southern town, like Eudora Welty; spinsters 
 monstrous fat like Amy Lowell, fey like Marianne Moore, flaky like Edith 
 Sitwell, mad like Gertrude Stein; women embattled like Mary McCarthy, 
 oversexed like Erica Jong, suicidal like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne 
 Sexton. 
 
 It’s clear I needed to make in a more charitable spirit a new list of 
 uncommon women, odd no doubt (not necessarily writers), who have 
 themselves found a way to live and to die. I wanted to know the way each 
 went and how it turned out. Was it a good life, as good as any? “One isn’t 
 born a woman,” said Simone de Beauvoir. “One becomes a woman.” 
 
 There isn’t a false Cressida among them, or a Dolores whose sins were 
 seventy times seven. Yet all, being human, were hard beset. Being female, 
 they reveal the size of the predicament, even how to survive it. “Dear 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 37 
 
 Christopher,” wrote Freya Stark to a sympathetic friend, “I always wonder 
 why it should be derogatory to behave like a woman when one is one.” 
 
 But in saying so I seem to forget a more urgent reason for writing about 
 these uncommon women and their lives—and about other people and 
 other lives—the reason for writing at all. It’s the only way I know to es- 
 cape the solitude that attacks me, the fear of being without occupation, 
 the terror of living for a lifetime alone. Through the company of others, 
 but most of all through books and more books —always books to ban- 
 ish the clouds — you can begin to look more closely at someone else’s life, 
 where it is going and finally how it ends. 
 
 At thirty-eight, Montaigne retired to the isolation of his tower, sur- 
 rounded himself with a thousand books, then discovered that just read- 
 ing them passively, or scribbling notes in the margin, was never enough. 
 He had to put into his own words and apply to his own life what these 
 figures he met —from Socrates to Seneca—revealed and what sense they 
 made: such as how to deal with solitude, how to live appropriately, or 
 how not to live at all. He read books too about love — Rabelais, Catullus, 
 the Decameron, the Kisses of Johannes Secundus—and it was altogether 
 a haphazard plan. It was a random search without method, fragmentary 
 and piecemeal, to find his own way by asking the way of others, quoting 
 from them, speaking their minds “to speak my own mind better.” Some 
 of his essays, he said, were off the mark, went roaming and made less 
 sense than he intended. Some of them “smelled a little foreign,” as if left 
 wholly to chance, as if he had carelessly lost his way and strayed from his 
 subject. But in the end all led to the same conclusion. Montaigne’s own 
 book that resulted contained the words, “It is myself that I portray.” 
 
 Flannery O'Connor. Her father died of lupus when she was fif- 
 teen, after which she and her mother Regina moved to Milledgeville, 
 Georgia, where she went to high school and college for a “sorry” edu- 
 cation that didn’t teach her to spell or use a dictionary: “I never sense 
 I am spelling something incorrectly and so don’t look up the words” — 
 
38 The Third Way 
 
 like Hemmenway, teasespoon, champaine, Phillopino—or the grammar, 
 “I have done forgot.” At twenty-five she became ill with lupus, and her 
 mother moved the two of them to a dairy farm a few miles outside of 
 town. Flannery kept thirty peacocks, got around on crutches, and in 1964 
 at thirty-nine died. She never had a love affair. “There won't be any bi- 
 ographies of me,” she said, “because lives spent between the house and 
 the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” 
 
 You write, she said, what you can. She wrote, not out of experience, 
 with little available, but out of a bizarre imagination. “All my stories 
 are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to 
 support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, bru- 
 tal, etc.” Hard, hopeless, brutal they are, dealing with psychopaths and 
 freaks — violent, grotesque, and invented. The distortion, she said, is in- 
 tentional. Set in the rural South, they end usually in a shattering death, 
 as if no other solution occurred to her. 
 
 One of her best stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” tells of the 
 terrorizing and slaughter of a stupid but harmless family of six—father, 
 mother, grandmother, two children, and the baby—casually killed on 
 their way to Florida because they happen to be where an escaped mur- 
 derer, the Misfit, runs into them. (The cat survives.) After wiping them 
 out one by one he says, “It’s no real pleasure in life.” But to portray 
 this mass murderer as gaining, at that moment, an insight into his own 
 nature and his rejection of Christ is too easy. Nor is his terrified victim 
 the grandmother allowed time to experience the supposed mercy at the 
 hand of God that redeems her soul before she is shot. The disturbing 
 story is fiction, contrived and implausible (even if such crimes do occur 
 in real life) —the picking off of a family in meaningless deaths. Flannery 
 O’Connor intended it to fit her belief in divine clemency and grace. As 
 a devout Catholic she meant to tell in her horror stories the relation 
 of a person to God, and the meaning of suffering and redemption. The 
 peacocks that “wallowed” in her mother’s flower beds became a Christ 
 symbol. But she was a victim of circumstance, unable to use her talent to 
 write of encounters she never had. It’s a great loss. Her personal letters 
 are better informed about the real world she lived in, outspoken about 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 39 
 
 her own plight. In them a warm and honest woman finds the words to 
 explain and accept who she is, not ever having to invent. 
 
 Mary McCarthy. She said she believed in indignation as an in- 
 dispensable trait of character. She believed in wit, lucidity, and a capacity 
 for being outraged. Quick to lay about her, Mary McCarthy tended to 
 skewer people and flay them. The very thought of Lillian Hellman an- 
 noyed her. “I said once,” she told Dick Cavett in a famous interview, “that 
 every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.” Her disparaging 
 word for John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general, was turnipy. At vari- 
 ous times she had it in for J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, and God. She 
 didn’t believe in the hereafter, in marriage (though married four times), 
 Women’s Lib, or the Kennedys. She was totally against being born again. 
 That’s how vexed she was, fit to be tied. Katherine Anne Porter said she 
 was “the worst-tempered woman in American letters.” 
 
 Her willingness to expose people, show them up, pay them back, 
 meant she hurt them deliberately. The eight girls of the Class of 1933 (her 
 own class) at Vassar who found themselves portrayed in her novel The 
 Group had reason to resent and hate her for the damaging revelations she 
 made about their private lives after graduation. She dealt freely with their 
 marriages, their contraceptive devices and sexual involvements — the de- 
 flowering of Dottie, the impotence of somebody’s husband, the lesbian- 
 ism of Lakey, the suicide of Kay. It wasn’t only her wicked tongue that 
 betrayed her, it was her lack of compassion. Mary McCarthy was obsessed 
 with what she called “the integrity of sheer fact,” with telling the whole 
 truth regardless of the harm it did. With her reckless candor in giving the 
 facts, she revealed more facts than were pertinent, more than one wanted 
 to know. She ignored the need in life and letters for selectivity. 
 
 In her last book, Intellectual Memoirs, a thin piece of autobiography 
 concerned with two years spent in Greenwich Village, from 1936 to 1938, 
 and not published till after her death of lung cancer in 1989, she says, 
 “I was forthright and fearless, and I was gaining a certain renown for 
 it.” What a bashing it is to leave behind: a jumble of forgotten names 
 and seedy relationships, of collisions, bruises, pricks, stabs, blows, and 
 
40 The Third Way 
 
 bleeding encounters. Hard to believe is that in her seventies, terminally 
 ill and close to death, Mary McCarthy was still angry and resentful; that 
 she found such scarifying details worth telling. These are the messy love 
 affairs of fifty years ago, the drinking bouts, the squabbles spitefully re- 
 ported, the failed unions with Philip Rahv and Edmund Wilson (who did 
 become her second husband), the infidelities, the promiscuity. 
 
 “It was getting rather alarming,” she wrote. “I realized one day that in 
 twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men. Though slightly 
 scared by what things were coming to, I did not feel promiscuous. . . . 
 None of my partners, the reader will be relieved to hear, had a venereal 
 disease.” 
 
 This to be remembered by. 
 
 Lorelei Two is the title of the book, the name Conrad Aiken 
 gave the second of his three wives in his memoir Ushant. The others were 
 Lorelei One and Lorelei Three. What he began in Ushant (“You shan’t” 
 or “Thou shalt not”) as an obcure account of himself as the character D., 
 a Ulysses on a steamer voyage threatened by sirens and shipwreck, be- 
 comes in the present volume an explicit story of a real shipwreck—his 
 second marriage as told by Lorelei Two. The nickname wasn’t playful or 
 teasing; he meant that women are sirens who trap men. 
 
 Clarissa Lorenz, her real name, reveals to any in doubt how harrowing 
 it is to live with a genius, especially a dedicated poet. She had heard praise 
 of perfect wives, such as Dostoyevski’s and Carl Sandburg’s, who subli- 
 mated themselves to their mates. When she met George Bernard Shaw 
 and listened to his monologue, she marveled at Charlotte’s silence, at the 
 inner turmoil a wife must suffer in a famed man’s shadow. Face to face 
 with Thomas Hardy’s widow, she wondered why so many literary men’s 
 wives have limp handshakes. “Unfortunately,” she says, “artists have a 
 domestic streak and long for family life. That’s the hitch.” 
 
 The two met in 1926 when she interviewed him for the Boston Eve- 
 ning Transcript, what Aiken called “the fatal interview,” from which she 
 walked away that foggy night telling herself “I’m in love.” She didn’t 
 know he was married and the father of three young children, whom he 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 41 
 
 would abandon for her. Nor did she know, and he didn’t tell her, of the 
 tragedy of his childhood that traumatized his life, bringing terror, guilt, 
 despair. It happened one night in Savannah — Aiken was eleven — when 
 he heard his mother’s half-stifled scream, the sound of his father’s voice 
 counting to three, and two loud shots. Alone he tiptoed into the dark 
 room “where the two bodies lay motionless and apart, and, finding them 
 dead, found himself possessed of them forever.” 
 
 Clarissa asks herself why, after a stormy three-year “courtship through 
 a wringer,” she consented to marry him. When she became pregnant, he 
 arranged against her will for an abortion. In jealous rages similar to his 
 father’s he accused her of promiscuity, a siren by whom, he wrote, “I shall 
 be driven to murder.” After his divorce they were married in Rutherford, 
 New Jersey, with William Carlos Williams and his wife as witnesses. At 
 the marriage license window, Aiken explained to the clerk that he was an 
 adulterer. “Hell, aren’t we all?” said the clerk. 
 
 They moved to England, where without consulting her Aiken leased 
 Jeake’s House, Sussex, the same house where he had lived with his first 
 wife and eventually would live with Lorelei Three. The place was damp 
 and cold, deathwatch beetles ticked in the wood, yet he allowed noth- 
 ing to be changed. “I intend to run this marriage. Is that clear?” “Crystal 
 clear,” she said. Malcolm Lowry turned up from Cambridge University to 
 spend vacations as a paying guest — Aiken’s protégé and drinking com- 
 panion with whom Clarissa associated sprees and catastrophe, though 
 Aiken told her all good writers drink. By the second year of their mar- 
 riage he said, “I don’t really need you any more” —a shy austere man 
 whom, unaccountably to herself, she truly loved. 
 
 In the turbulent summer of 1932 he feared he was going mad: “My 
 father’s death should have freed me, but it didn’t. ’'ve been dreaming 
 again and again of killing myself. I shouldn’t really be alive.” On a night 
 when tensions mounted, she escaped the house and went to a movie. 
 Halfway through the picture she had a premonition of danger, in panic 
 ran all the way home to find he had turned on the gas and was lying un- 
 conscious on the kitchen floor. In Ushant he narrates the attempted sui- 
 cide differently. Lorelei having gone to the cinema, he says, D. sat down to 
 
42 The Third Way 
 
 read an article by Wyndham Lewis, which he found excruciatingly funny, 
 and with the gas rings and oven fizzing behind him awaited the end, per- 
 fectly serene. She appeared in the nick of time, he says, only because she 
 had already seen the second feature. 
 
 “Why had I hung on so long?” Clarissa asks. The man who fell in love 
 with her was the poet who found marriage intolerable: “I could never rec- 
 oncile the tyrant with the poet who wrote ‘Senlin’ and ‘Punch. ” (But did 
 she remember Punch’s sad cry, “Was there in all this wide world never / 
 One woman I might love for ever?”) 
 
 She fled to America alone in 1936. Nearly fifty years later, after Conrad 
 Aiken’s death in 1973, she wrote this story from the wounding evidence 
 in her diary. She says she wrote for clarification, to admit her share of the 
 guilt. His parting shot had been, “It’s all your fault, and you know it.” 
 
 Yet I wonder why she chose to keep the pain of memory alive —or why 
 confessional writing deals so exclusively with hurts given and received. 
 Aiken in a veiled fashion had elected to tell the unhappy tale himself, 
 though it happened, he says in Ushant, “Far away, and long ago. And so 
 many ships between, so many ships between.” 
 
 Simone de Beauvoir. Writing is the loneliest occupation, she 
 believed. “Solitude is a form of death.” In her last years she lived a re- 
 cluse with hands constantly clenched, la malheureuse, alone in a Paris 
 apartment with her collection of dolls. Unfriendly critics called her the 
 “Grande Sartreuse,” who wrote in four volumes her claim to an exalted 
 life with Sartre. For fifty years till his death at seventy-four, they worked, 
 talked, loved, traveled together, and she told herself, “I was not in his 
 class.” In The Prime of Life she traces their history when existence was 
 shaped by her love for him, his dominance over her, their times spent in 
 endless talk at the Deux Magots and Café de Flore. Brought up a strict 
 Catholic, she turned from God to Sartre, accepting his values, the condi- 
 tions he imposed: the freedom to love others, the obligation to be hon- 
 est and conceal nothing. Theirs would be a necessary love, he said, with 
 other affairs contingent to it. They would take out “two-year leases,” after 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 43 
 
 which each would go his own way for two years, then return for another 
 two-year union. The arrangement caused her heartbreak and terror but 
 she never gave up. She would keep him at any cost. “My trust in him was 
 so complete that he supplied me with the sort of absolute unfailing secu- 
 rity that I had once had from my parents, or from God.” There was no 
 word of regret that she never had a child. 
 
 Arthur Koestler said his walleyed friend Sartre looked like “a malevo- 
 lent goblin or gargoyle,” with goggling eyes and misshapen body. He also 
 said, “The tragic end was the falling out of Sartre with Simone before 
 his death.” 
 
 Six years later in 1986, she died, “in a cloud of depression, alcohol and 
 Valium,” according to a piece in the Times Literary Supplement. It said 
 that the image of Sartre and her as lifelong lovers was one she largely cre- 
 ated herself: “There is no evidence of his ever having given up anything 
 for her, not his time, not his work, and most certainly never a woman.” 
 During his countless love affairs he was indifferent to her, sometimes 
 openly cruel. People remember her sitting alone in a Paris café, drinking 
 and weeping without him. The image she created was a facade, the pre- 
 tense of a happy love. 
 
 Sartre’s famous play No Exit must have hurt her with its definition 
 of what he thought hell to be: other people (“Lenfer, c’est les autres”). 
 Hell is a room with no exit, a cheap bare hotel room where a cowardly 
 man is condemned to spend forever in the company of two jarring, hate- 
 ful, threatening women—never to escape through all eternity, never for 
 a moment to be alone. 
 
 His autobiographical volume, Words, ends, “My sole concern has been 
 to save myself.” 
 
 Virginia Woolf. In 1953 Leonard Woolf published her Writer’s 
 Diary in one discreet volume. Twenty-five years later, the real diary began 
 to appear in five volumes, edited with exhaustive footnotes and a formi- 
 dable index. She called herself a diariser and didn’t intend it to be pub- 
 lished: “Who’s going to read all this scribble?” Quentin Bell’s introduc- 
 
44 The Third Way 
 
 tion praises it as a major work of historical importance, a masterpiece: 
 “It is, in fact, one of the great diaries of the world.” It isn’t. 
 
 Such copious details of daily living—the servant problem, bursting 
 waterpipes, reports of the weather—don’t transform her into a self- 
 revealer. To be a great diary like Pepys’s, whatever it has to say must be 
 entire, concealing nothing. Mrs. Woolf at thirty-three, three years mar- 
 ried, revealed of her life only its surfaces. She stayed, as was her nature, 
 private and invisible even to herself. The diary begins January 1, 1915, and 
 stops abruptly after six weeks because of a severe mental breakdown, to 
 be resumed the following October. Two years before, she had tried to kill 
 herself, then starve herself to death. Her grave illness in 1915 was her third 
 attack of madness, second attempt at suicide. No hint of these depths ap- 
 pears in her hasty entries, though she says, “I intend to keep full notes 
 of my ups and downs.” She records small happenings, the fact her watch 
 stopped, she broke her spectacles, “I began today to treat my corn” and 
 fifteen days later, “My corn is cured.” Volume 1 ends: “We [Leonard and I] 
 think we now deserve some good luck. Yet I daresay we’re the happiest 
 couple in England.” How happy does she mean? She was a frigid wife who 
 abhorred sex, far from willing to confess it, who had told him when they 
 married in 1912, “I feel no physical attraction to you.” 
 
 Throughout the five volumes there is her enormous curiosity about 
 people—friend, acquaintance, passerby —of whom she writes with little 
 mercy. Her love of gossip is inquisitive, devaluing, malicious. Some called 
 it “obsessive malice” toward her fellow writers. Clive Bell is intolerably 
 dull, David Garnett an over-educated prig, Max Beerbohm a Cheshire 
 cat, Rose Macaulay “lean as a rake, wispy, and frittered,” E. M. Forster 
 “milder than the breath of a cow.” T. S. Eliot is muffin-faced. Harold 
 Nicolson has a mind that bounces when he drops it. Edith Sitwell, grown 
 very fat, powders herself thickly, wears a turban and looks like an ivory 
 elephant. 
 
 “How many friends have I got?” she asks; the number of her “unde- 
 luded” friends is very small. Lytton Strachey occurs to her, but he hasn't 
 an interesting mind, she isn’t interested in what he writes. “I am alarmed 
 by my own cruelty to my friends” (even more by her friends’ cruelty to 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 45 
 
 her, especially when she published a book: “It occurs to me how I’m dis- 
 liked, how I’m laughed at”). 
 
 On May 18, 1933, on a visit to Italy, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary of 
 sitting by an open window overlooking the Bay of Spezia in which Shelley 
 was drowned: “Mrs. Shelley and Jane Williams walked up and down the 
 balcony of the house next door waiting while Shelley’s body rolled round 
 with pearls — it is the best deathbed place I’ve ever seen.” 
 
 Eight years later she found her own deathbed in the Ouse River near 
 her home. 
 
 Beatrix Potter. Today I bought a Peter Rabbit book to give to a 
 child because it occurred to me that Beatrix Potter was said to think as 
 a child, to know all her life what it was like to be five years old. She was 
 five 125 years ago. I wondered if Peter Rabbit was holding his own these 
 days with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Kermit the Frog, and Miss 
 Piggy. Beatrix Potter wrote tales of Mrs. Tittlemouse and Squirrel Nutkin 
 to please herself “because I never grew up.” The secret diary she kept till 
 age thirty goes on about mice and especially rabbits— Benjamin Bunny, 
 whom she took walking on a leash and fed gooseberries and hot buttered 
 toast. Her own Peter Rabbit was Benjamin’s cousin. She never went to 
 school (“thank goodness my education was neglected”). She made rail- 
 way journeys accompanied by a rabbit hutch, a mouse Hunca Munca, a 
 pet frog Punch, a hedgehog Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle who enjoyed travel rest- 
 ing on her knee. 
 
 Her animals were copied from life though they stood upright in her 
 drawings, wearing mufflers, poke bonnets, and shoes. (Birds, she found, 
 didn’t look well in clothes.) At thirty-five she published the first Peter 
 Rabbit with twenty-six to follow. Each was a child’s size, five-by-four 
 inches, and cost a shilling because “all my little friends are shilling 
 people.” At forty, a spinster who believed in fairies, she bought Hill Top 
 Farm in the Lake Country, grew sick of rabbits as shallow creatures and 
 gave her love to Tom Kitten, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Pig-wig who fol- 
 lowed at her heels and slept in a basket beside her bed. 
 
46 The Third Way 
 
 Then surprisingly in 1913, aged forty-seven, Miss Potter married a 
 North Country man, William Heelis of Sawrey, and became a sheep 
 farmer. Her character changed: “It does not do to be sentimental on a 
 farm.” From a shameless dealer in Victorian whimsy she turned into a 
 prickly, obstinate, no-nonsense woman who hated rats, who for the next 
 thirty years till her death in 1943 raised sheep and ate mutton, a sharp 
 dealer at sheep fairs. She became stout, wore tweeds, and wrote no more 
 of “those damned little books,” having in fact grown up. On the last 
 Christmas of her life, she and William had a stewed rabbit for dinner. 
 
 I am in favor of growing up, as I had done before reading Beatrix Pot- 
 ter. One summer night during a terrific thunderstorm in the country, 
 I read aloud the story of Peter Rabbit to three small children huddled 
 together whimpering in my lap: ““Now, my dears,’ said old Mrs. Rab- 
 bit, ‘you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into 
 Mr. McGregor’s garden.” And I thought, as the thunder crashed and the 
 wind howled around us, “My God, Mr. McGregor, what’s going on here?” 
 
 Rabbit By Owllight 
 
 My rabbit dares not eat the crocuses, 
 Engrossed as he must be in appetite 
 
 Far greedier than his own, 
 
 Listening, like me, to hungry shadows, 
 Hearing above his head the famished owl 
 Whose craving to devour shivers the owllight. 
 Run, rabbit, run. Your rabbit fears are rabbit, 
 Mine are me. 
 
 (“All thoughts of a turtle are turtle and of a rabbit, rabbits.” — Emerson) 
 
 Lucy Stone. | kept my maiden name after I was married, and 
 for this show of independence was teased, sometimes rebuked, as a Lucy 
 Stoner. Finally I gave up the role of Miss Smith because it was a nuisance, 
 people doubted that I was married, the mailman was permanently con- 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 47 
 
 fused. Most of all I refused to saddle a child with a hyphenated name or 
 link him with only one parent. 
 
 Lucy Stone was far more dedicated. When she was born in 1818 on 
 a Massachusetts farm, the eighth of nine children, her mother who had 
 milked eight cows the night before said, “Oh dear! I am sorry it is a girl. 
 A woman’s life is so hard!” Lucy grew up indignant at the way her harsh 
 father ruled the household. When she read in the Bible “Thy desire shall 
 be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee,’ she made up her mind 
 not to marry. 
 
 While a student at Oberlin she conceived the idea that a woman 
 should keep her own name and identity. At twenty-five she paid her way 
 through college, doing housework at three cents an hour in the Ladies’ 
 Hall. During the four years, she had one good dress and, with no help 
 from her father, no money to return home. After graduation she began 
 lecturing over the country on slavery and women’s rights, twin problems 
 in her mind since marriage was itself a form of slavery. In her day women 
 didn’t appear on public platforms; for her views she was expelled from 
 her church in Massachusetts. Hostile audiences threw pepper or doused 
 her with a hose. Once she was hit in the head by a prayerbook. 
 
 The man Lucy married at thirty-seven was Henry Blackwell, owner of 
 a hardware store in Cincinnati. Henry courted her for two years before 
 she reluctantly consented. Attracted as she was to this man, himself an 
 advocate of women’s right to equality, she found the idea of marriage in- 
 tolerable, a suffocating form of death. Before saying yes Lucy consulted 
 lawyers who assured her there was no law requiring her to take her hus- 
 band’s name. At the wedding the two read aloud and signed the Protest, 
 written by Henry. It declared that no obedience was implied, that the wife 
 was an independent, rational being with absolute equality before God 
 and the law. Lucy was now Mrs. Stone, said to be the first woman to refuse 
 her husband’s name. Harriet Beecher Stowe expressed pained amaze- 
 ment. Many thought the marriage illegal, objected to it as immoral, and 
 addressed her as Mrs. Blackwell. 
 
 The marriage lasted thirty-eight companionable years. Lucy made an 
 
48 The Third Way 
 
 excellent loving wife, an admirable homemaker, for which she was re- 
 proved by Susan B. Anthony, who called her a little dunce for being do- 
 mesticated. She started a newspaper, The Woman's Journal, advocating 
 women’s suffrage. When their child Alice was born, she was given both 
 their names, though Henry said she should be called Stone if his wife 
 wished. 
 
 Lucy died of cancer in 1893 at seventy-five, and Henry went on without 
 her, still introduced as Lucy’s husband. Alice never married but dedicated 
 her life to the cause of women. More than twenty years after Lucy’s death, 
 the Lucy Stone League was formed (and disappeared, like the Ladies’ Aid 
 Society), whose sole purpose was to persuade married women to keep 
 their maiden name. And though I never joined, I was glad to be recog- 
 nized as a Lucy Stoner. 
 
 In Philip Larkin’s poem “Maiden Name” he sadly deplores (to one he 
 knew as a girl) the fact that “marrying left your maiden name disused.” 
 Since the wedding ceremony, when you were “confused by law with some- 
 one else,” your own name has no longer meant you, your face, your voice, 
 your grace. Who are you, anyway? 
 
 Augusta Leigh. Byron and Augusta Leigh had the same father, 
 “Mad Jack,” who had eloped with the wife of Lord Carmarthen and, 
 after her divorce, married her shortly before the birth of their daughter 
 Augusta in 1783. In 1785, now a widower, Mad Jack married Catherine 
 Gordon, a Scottish girl with a small fortune and terrible temper who be- 
 came Byron’s mother. 
 
 Augusta, four years older than Byron, grew up an orphan after their 
 father died. She and Byron met when he was about sixteen and corre- 
 sponded affectionately (“a Friend in whom I can confide,” he wrote). 
 Augusta married her first cousin, George Leigh, while Byron was at 
 Trinity College, Cambridge. “She married a fool,” he said, one who mis- 
 treated and neglected her, with whom she lived in dire financial straits at 
 Six-Mile Bottom, a hamlet not far from Cambridge. 
 
 When Augusta paid an unexpected visit to Byron in London in June 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 49 
 
 1813, she had three small children at home and a bankrupt husband. She 
 was twenty-nine, amiable, “soft and voluptuous,” with dark hair and large 
 soulful eyes, adoring of her brother, full of chatter and laughter at his wit. 
 During the three weeks she stayed with him, they went about to the the- 
 ater and to balls, inseparable, delighted with each other’s company. On 
 Augusta’s return home, Byron visited her twice and after the second visit 
 took her back with him to London. They were together in July when she 
 found she was pregnant. 
 
 Though Augusta clearly assented in their love affair, Byron, obsessed 
 by her, took the blame himself. Ridden by guilt, he confessed his folly to 
 his dear friend Lady Melbourne who, tolerant of his other scandalous af- 
 fairs (most recently with her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb), was 
 horrified at incest and greatly alarmed. Byron considered eloping with his 
 sister to the Continent but delayed any action till, in December, Augusta 
 came again to London and he carried her off to Newstead Abbey where 
 they stayed snowbound, in seclusion till nearly February. The woman he 
 loved was, says Byron’s biographer, Leslie Marchand, “amoral as a rabbit 
 and silly as a goose.” 
 
 On April 15, 1814, at Six-Mile Bottom, Augusta gave birth to a daugh- 
 ter, Elizabeth Medora Leigh, and called her Medora (the name of the 
 Corsair’s beloved in Byron’s poem of the preceding year). That Byron 
 was the father is all but certain, though he never acknowledged her or 
 provided for her as he did Allegra, his child by Claire Clairmont. It may 
 well be that he was loath to admit proof of incest. In any case, he and 
 Augusta agreed he should take a wife, whom she attempted to find for 
 him. Over her objection that Annabella Milbanke was not rich enough 
 and too straitlaced, Byron proposed to Annabella and married her. Their 
 miserable union ended in separation a year later after the birth of Byron’s 
 only legitimate child, named for his sister Augusta Ada. On January 14, 
 1816, having ordered Annabella to return to her parents and take the 
 baby with her, Byron saw his wife and daughter for the last time, in the 
 London house where he sat with Augusta. Three months later, while talk 
 of the scandal raged about him, he left England for exile in Italy, never 
 to return. Three years later he was writing to Augusta from Venice: “We 
 
50 The Third Way 
 
 may have been wrong — but I repent of nothing except that accursed mar- 
 riage —and your refusing to continue to love me as you had loved me.” 
 He swore he was incapable of real love for any other human being. 
 
 Augusta lived on at Six-Mile Bottom with her husband and, eventu- 
 ally, seven children. She died at sixty-eight. 
 
 Much of Medora’s short life was catastrophic. As she revealed in her 
 autobiography, published twenty years after her death, both her older 
 sister Georgiana and Annabella had discovered and disclosed to her the 
 fact that Byron was her father. He died on her tenth birthday—a man 
 she never knew. Before she was fifteen, Medora was raped by Georgiana’s 
 husband, Henry Trevanion, who, after Georgiana hastily moved out and 
 left them in France together, forced Medora to live with him. In poverty 
 and ill-health, completely in his power and abandoned by her family, she 
 submitted to him for a period of ten years till she escaped. By him she 
 had three pregnancies and one surviving child, Marie. 
 
 For most of those years all communication ceased between Augusta 
 and her young daughter. Medora wrote that her mother disliked her, 
 in anger blamed her alone for Henry’s brutal treatment. Always bitter 
 and accusing, Augusta coldly rejected her, even persecuted her. In 1848 
 Medora, still in France, married a young French soldier, Jean-Louis Tail- 
 lefer, and the next year, aged thirty-four, she died, forgiving her uncaring 
 mother and believing to the end, for what it was worth, that she was 
 Byron’s child. 
 
 Before he died, Byron wrote to his estranged wife, Lady Byron, concern- 
 ing his unpublished memoirs (the 400-page manuscript that his friend 
 Hobhouse burned at Byron’s death): “It is no great pleasure to have 
 lived —and less to live over again the details of existence.” 
 
 To his publisher John Murray he wrote, “I have left out all my loves.” 
 
 Claire Clairmont. Byron admitted to his friend Hobhouse “the 
 carnal knowledge of Miss C.” To another friend, Douglas Kinnaird, he 
 wrote, “I never loved nor pretended to love her, but a man is a man, and 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 51 
 
 if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours, there is but one 
 way.” He called her “that odd-headed girl” who offered herself to him 
 shortly before he left England for good, beset by his own failures in living 
 and loving. 
 
 Claire was the stepdaughter of William Godwin. Her widowed mother 
 was a London neighbor of Godwin’s who married him after his first wife, 
 Mary Wollstonecraft, died in childbirth, leaving a daughter Mary nearly 
 the same age as Claire. 
 
 When Mary suddenly eloped with Shelley to France in 1814, Claire, at 
 fifteen, went along and, nearly two years later, returned with them penni- 
 less to England. She wasn’t a pretty girl but a lively one, with black hair 
 and rather heavy features, inclined to be bold and theatrical, tenacious 
 in getting her way. At seventeen, having written in her journal, “When 
 will something happen to me?” she sent a flood of letters to Byron be- 
 ginning, “An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you.” Soon she 
 proposed that he spend a night with her and, for no better reason, he 
 obliged her and did. During his final week in England, at seven o'clock 
 on a night early in April 1816, they met somewhere outside London in a 
 sexual encounter that, according to Claire, lasted ten minutes. The fol- 
 lowing Monday Byron left for Switzerland with no intention of continu- 
 ing the affair or ever seeing her again. 
 
 But Claire was not only determined, she was probably pregnant. She 
 set herself to follow after Byron and, on May 8, induced Mary and Shelley, 
 who had never met Byron, to go with her to Switzerland to be near him. 
 They arrived in Geneva ten days before Byron did and spent the sum- 
 mer in a villa not far from his Villa Diodati. There he saw them often and 
 carelessly resumed relations with Claire till August when in disgust he 
 broke off completely with her and wrote Augusta, “Now, dearest, I have 
 put an end to it.” Claire was persuaded by Shelley and Mary to go with 
 them to England to bear the child that Byron believed was his, though 
 “whether this impregnation took place before I left England or since I do 
 not know.” Allegra was born in Bath on January 12, 1817, Byron’s third 
 daughter. But when Shelley and Mary returned to Italy a year later with 
 
52 The Third Way 
 
 the mother and child in tow, Byron refused point-blank to see Claire. 
 Allegra was taken by a nurse to his palazzo in Venice where he said he 
 would bring her up himself. His first proposal was that his sister Augusta 
 care for her at Six-Mile Bottom. 
 
 Allegra was a beautiful little girl who resembled her father, with blue 
 eyes and a dimple in her chin like his. In time he grew fond of her. Yet 
 after he met and fell in love with Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, and moved 
 to Ravenna to live with her and her husband, Allegra became a prob- 
 lem. She was four when he found it convenient to put her in a convent 
 near Ravenna to be brought up a Roman Catholic. From that day neither 
 Byron nor Claire saw her again, though Claire — denied access to the con- 
 vent — frantically begged Shelley to help her kidnap the child from the 
 nuns. Allegra died in the convent of typhus fever on April 20, 1822. She 
 was five years old. Claire blamed Byron for her death. 
 
 That year Shelley was drowned, Byron died two years later in Greece. 
 Claire, at twenty-four, desperately unhappy, left Italy for Vienna and a 
 lonely life abroad as a governess. Those ten minutes of passion, she wrote 
 her friend Jane Williams, “have discomposed the rest of my life.” 
 
 Lady Blessington. A long time ago I copied out a remark of Lady 
 Blessington’s (in a letter to Bulwer-Lytton) and never forgot it: “There 
 are so few before whom one would condescend to appear otherwise than 
 happy.’ I didn’t know then who Lady Blessington was, other than a friend 
 of Byron’s. But the words stayed in my head as sensible advice, not arro- 
 gant as perhaps they really were (you hear the lofty tone in condescend), 
 but rather a reflection on the kindest way to spare people a recital of 
 one’s woes. 
 
 Without doubt Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, had unhappiness 
 to hide. Born in Tipperary in 1789 to a life of wretched poverty, she was 
 the child of a savage, drunken father, sold by him into marriage at fif- 
 teen with a brute named Farmer who beat and misused her. From him 
 she escaped to live for five years with a Captain Jenkins before, in a 
 drunken stupor, Farmer fell from a window in London and was killed. 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 53 
 
 A few months later she married a friend of Jenkins, the Earl of Blessing- 
 ton, a rich, indulgent, affectionate husband, though it appears that from 
 the sexual abuse she received as a girl, Lady Blessington was incapable of 
 passionate love for any man. 
 
 She was very beautiful, known as the loveliest woman in England, “the 
 most gorgeous Lady B,” with shining dark hair, white forehead, lustrous 
 eyes. She was intelligent and amusing. At first London society shunned 
 her as a harlot, till through wealth, extravagance, good nature she made 
 her house in St. James’s Square a gathering place of the elite, a rival of 
 Holland House. On an evening in 1821, a young Frenchman, Count Alfred 
 d’Orsay, came to a Blessington party. He was twenty, slim, athletic, hand- 
 some, exquisitely dressed, and with a disastrous charm. While it seems 
 likely that Lady Blessington, at thirty-one, never took d’Orsay for a lover, 
 she kept him at her side in a lasting intimacy, and he became a perma- 
 nent member of the household. There he stayed for the next twenty-eight 
 years till she died in his arms. 
 
 Soon after they met, d’Orsay persuaded the Blessingtons to go with 
 him to the Continent. During the nine weeks they spent in Genoa, where 
 Byron had settled for a few months in the Casa Saluzzo with his mistress 
 Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington and Byron became close compan- 
 ions, riding, dining together —though she wrote in her diary of their first 
 meeting, “I have seen Lord Byron; and am disappointed.” He didn’t look 
 like a romantic poet. He was short instead of tall and commanding, frail, 
 emaciated, his coat too large, his hair streaked with gray. She found him 
 vain, vulgar, gossipy, and irresistible, and was pleased to take down and 
 publish after his death her Conversations with the poet, a book that, in 
 four hundred pages, gave her impressions of his personality and opin- 
 ions. Byron wrote Thomas Moore that he thought Lady B very literary, 
 very pretty (but told Augusta she was vain and affected). When he left 
 for Greece in June 1823, “I have a presentment I shall die there,” he said, 
 and tears ran down his face at parting with her. Guiccioli was furiously 
 jealous, but she needn’t have been. She was, said Byron, “my last love, my 
 last passion.” 
 
54 The Third Way 
 
 In 1829 Lord Blessington died abroad, and his widow returned to a 
 hostile London accompanied by d’Orsay. The world of gossip buzzed with 
 talk of the “Blessington Circus.” Men of consequence —like the young 
 Disraeli— frequented her salon but the ladies kept aloof (though one of 
 her guests was Countess Guiccioli). While in Genoa, Blessington had 
 added a codicil to his will giving his estate to d’Orsay, of whom he was 
 genuinely fond, provided d’Orsay marry one or the other of Blessing- 
 ton’s two daughters by a former marriage. When d’Orsay obediently 
 married Harriet, a schoolgirl of fifteen, after promising Lady Blessington 
 that there would be no consummation of the marriage for the next four 
 years, then society assumed that Lady Blessington, as jealous mistress, 
 had made this demand. The truth was that, remembering her own youth, 
 she wanted to spare the child bride. By 1831, when d’Orsay’s marriage to 
 the unhappy Harriet collapsed and she fled from the ménage, it was Lady 
 Blessington who was blamed. Greville’s Diary repeats the common gos- 
 sip that, besides d’Orsay, she had been “very intimate” with Byron as well 
 as Walter Savage Landor, whose Conversations were imaginary and who 
 had a vile temper and a wife and four children. 
 
 For the next twenty heartbreak years, Lady Blessington wrote novels 
 feverishly to keep her home at Gore House and pay the debts incurred 
 by d’Orsay, childlike in his irresponsibility, a glass of fashion, a reckless 
 gambler. Jane Carlyle said he looked as resplendent as a diamond beetle. 
 When he fled to France from his creditors in 1849, Lady Blessington, stout 
 and old and exhausted, sold at a twelve-day auction all her possessions 
 and followed him to Paris, where shortly she died. The once glittering 
 dandy was left shattered by the loss. 
 
 Lady Holland. The best thing to be said of Lady Holland’s fa- 
 mous dinner parties was that Sydney Smith was a frequent guest who 
 brought down the house in uproarious laughter, the most amusing diner- 
 out in London (to Byron “the loudest wit I was ever deafened with”). 
 “Some of the best and happiest days of my life I have spent under your 
 roof,” he wrote his dear Lady Holland, who during the first forty years 
 of the nineteenth century ruled at Holland House over the most brilliant 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 55 
 
 and distinguished collection of Whigs of the time and, as their imperious 
 hostess, put them soundly in their place. 
 
 As Elizabeth Lady Webster, married at sixteen to an elderly baronet 
 whose dullness she found unendurable, she had eloped with young Lord 
 Holland and borne him a son before a divorce was granted by the House 
 of Lords and they could be married. Now the proud wife of an extremely 
 wealthy baron who adored her, she returned with him to Holland House 
 in Kensington and set to work making it a gathering place for the lead- 
 ing statesmen, writers, and artists, the rich and the prestigious, provided 
 they were not Tories. Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, Jeremy Bentham, 
 Byron, Walter Scott, Prime Minister Melbourne (who was said to laugh 
 more and at less than anyone there), each and all were received nightly 
 and sometimes left the house in a fury. She treated them with arrogance, 
 snubbed and ordered them about with a royal air that outdid Napo- 
 leon (for whom she developed a passion) —she was dictatorial, short- 
 tempered, on occasion rude and insolent. The experience of dining with 
 her could be terrifying. She would irritably rearrange the seating of her 
 guests in the middle of a meal or turn them out of the house for wear- 
 ing scent. At her overcrowded dinner parties, all male (where once she 
 squeezed sixteen into a table for nine), she was quick to silence even Mac- 
 aulay, a man never known to stop talking: “Now, Macaulay, we have had 
 enough of this.” She subdued Samuel Rogers by saying, “Your poetry is 
 bad enough, so pray be sparing of your prose.” One night she dropped 
 her fan so many times that Count d’Orsay, seated next to her, after obedi- 
 ently picking it up suggested he just sit on the floor and wait for it to fall. 
 When she commanded Sydney Smith—the wittiest man present, whom 
 she always placed at her side, the only one allowed to tease her — “Ring 
 the bell, Sydney,” he answered, “Oh yes, and shall I sweep the floor?” 
 
 Smith laughed at her high-handedness and rebuked her for her way- 
 ward manners as London’s hostess. A London shop, he said, sold pills 
 especially for those guests suffering from wounded pride. Yet with affec- 
 tion lifelong he declared his love of the lady and her gracious husband: 
 “She is very handsome, very clever, and } think very agreeable. Lord Hol- 
 land is quite delightful. I really never saw such a man. In addition to this, 
 
56 The Third Way 
 
 think of him possessing Holland House and that he reposes every eve- 
 ning on that beautiful structure of flesh and blood Lady H.” 
 
 Lady Ottoline Morrell. She too was a London hostess, known 
 for her hospitality in the 1920s toward the clannish Bloomsbury group, 
 though never a member of it (much as she longed to be). Born an aristo- 
 crat, half-sister of the Duke of Portland, married to the Liberal MP Philip 
 Morrell, Lady Ottoline yearned to be a writer and cultivated writers, 
 particularly poets. These she lured to her Venetian red drawing room 
 at 44 Bedford Square and showered with attention and gifts of choco- 
 late, tobacco, and silk cushions. Each morning she wrote notes in sepia 
 ink to invite talented, artistic, famous people to her Thursday evenings 
 and Thursday afternoon teas. At Garsington Manor, her country home 
 in Oxfordshire, she welcomed them with open arms and lavish devo- 
 tion. 
 
 And for her pains D. H. Lawrence caricatured her in Women in Love 
 as Hermione Roddice, a domineering, repulsive woman with “a terrible 
 void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her.” Aldous Huxley mocked her 
 in Crome Yellow as Priscilla Wimbush, with “a massive projecting nose 
 and little greenish eyes.” Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf attended 
 her parties and openly ridiculed her, finding her absurd, a silly noodle. 
 In Bloomsbury she was known as “the Ott.” Virginia Woolf confided to 
 her diary concerning her book Mrs. Dalloway, “I want to bring in the de- 
 spicableness of people like Ott.” 
 
 David Cecil said she was both handsome and grotesque. She was very 
 tall, “like a giraffe!” Nijinsky exclaimed when he met her. She towered 
 over people and suffocated them. Her nose was too long, her jaw jutted 
 out, she had orange-colored hair. Her barking voice sounded at times a 
 queer nasal moan with what Stephen Spender called “horn-like blasts.” 
 She wore brightly colored, spectacular attire that made her look, said 
 Virginia Woolf, “as garish as a strumpet,” or “decorative as an Austrian 
 baroque church,” or “like a Spanish galleon hung with golden coins, & 
 lovely silken sails.” She dressed like a cossack or a shepherdess with crook 
 or wore huge ostrich-feathered hats, billowing dresses, shawls and tas- 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 57 
 
 sels, and went, said Lytton Strachey, “thickly encrusted with pearls and 
 diamonds.” 
 
 Bizarre as Lady Ottoline was, men were fascinated by her. And she 
 acquired many friends—Herbert Asquith, Ramsay MacDonald, Henry 
 James, Max Beerbohm, Yeats—and many lovers, from Axel Munthe to 
 Augustus John to Bertrand Russell, the most ardent, who over the years 
 from 1910 to 1916 wrote her more than two thousand letters. In them, as 
 many as five a day, he declared his passion to be beyond passion and more 
 than he could live with, “almost overmastering,” and himself driven out 
 of his mind. “I love you,” said Russell, “and everything else is dross,” of- 
 fended though he was by her startling taste, her excessive use of scent and 
 powder, her long thin face that looked to him “something like a horse,” 
 her hair the color of marmalade. She was twice his height. 
 
 As for Ottoline in this consuming love affair, she found Russell’s inten- 
 sity intemperate and alarming, the passion flattering but too turbulent, 
 “a scorching flame,” he wrote, “lighting up all the splendours and terrors 
 of the world.” Yet there was something strongly appealing about her that 
 made him without conscience or remorse abandon his wife Alys, threaten 
 suicide, and urge Ottoline to leave her devoted husband — something lov- 
 able, warm and enveloping and always kind. With her, said Russell, “life 
 seemed all that it might be, but hardly ever is.” 
 
 In his autobiography Russell claims that he was ninety-four before he 
 
 finally learned what ecstasy really is. In a dedicatory verse “To Edith,” his 
 
 fourth wife whom he married in old age, he says that with her he found 
 
 it at last. And he knew to his amazement “what life and love may be.” 
 Ecstasy, at ninety-four? 
 
 Joanna Southcott. She was a woman who rocks the mind. In her 
 time she gained a good deal of public notice in England by announcing, 
 at the age of sixty-four, that she was pregnant by the Holy Ghost and 
 would be delivered on October 19, 1814, of a son to be named Shiloh, the 
 Prince of Peace. Joanna identified herself as “the woman clothed with the 
 sun” referred to in Revelation 12: 
 
58 The Third Way 
 
 And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with 
 the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of 
 twelve stars: 
 
 And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be 
 delivered... 
 
 And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a 
 rod of iron. 
 
 Joanna Southcott was born in 1750, a Devonshire farmer’s daughter, a 
 Methodist, for many years of her life a domestic servant. From the time 
 she was forty-two, she heard heavenly voices telling her that God had 
 called her to be his prophet of the Second Coming and his “true and 
 faithful Bride.” When she reached sixty-four a voice said, “Order twelve 
 gowns for thy wedding.” By her doggerel prophecies and claims that filled 
 sixty-five books and pamphlets, and by her seals (slips of paper signed 
 with her name, and charged for, that “sealed in” the believers with the 
 promise of eternal life), she had attracted a following of 100,000 South- 
 cottians that lasted throughout the century, who awaited the coming of 
 the new Messiah in stunned belief. Her son would conquer Satan, with 
 whom Joanna had personal battles. She revealed the story of her divine 
 conception in her ungrammatical and incoherent book, Prophecies an- 
 nouncing the Birth of the Prince of Peace. 
 
 In October 1813 she said she experienced “a powerful visitation” upon 
 her body, and by Christmas, while she meditated the role of the Virgin 
 Mary, she felt a movement in her womb. As her body swelled to huge pro- 
 portions, her followers showered gifts upon the expected child, including 
 lace caps, embroidered bibs, silver cups, and a handsome satinwood crib 
 ornamented with gold and lined with blue satin. 
 
 Ballads about Joanna and the blessed event were sung in the streets. 
 Byron noted her attempt to establish herself as Mrs. Trinity. Seventeen 
 of the twenty-one doctors who examined her agreed she was pregnant, 
 though she refused to allow an internal examination. On the date set, 
 exactly a year later, October 19, Shiloh failed to appear after she suf- 
 fered labor pains. What the public had greeted with mocking laughter as 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 59 
 
 the “divine afflatus” turned out to be dropsy. Instead of giving birth, on 
 October 29 Joanna Southcott slipped into death. 
 
 Madame Blavatsky. She was less lovable a fraud than Joanna 
 Southcott. And I would never have tried to read her incoherent memoirs 
 or the murky Isis Unveiled if Yeats hadn’t joined the Theosophical Society, 
 which Madame Blavatsky founded, and if I hadn’t been teaching Yeats. 
 
 Helena Blavatsky, a Russian occultist born in 1831, was at seventeen 
 married to an elderly man named Blavatsky whom she left after a few 
 months. Thereafter, though she had a second husband, an unknown 
 number of lovers, and a son named Yuri, she declared she was a virgin 
 and wore what her followers called her halo of virginity. An imposing 
 woman, large and grossly fat, untidy and bad-tempered, she claimed to 
 have spent seven years in Tibet where she was initiated into the occult. 
 She became a medium, prominent among spiritualists in America—her 
 home for six years—and in her séances produced, in swirls of ecto- 
 plasm, two Tibetan emanations named Koot-Hoomi and Morya as her 
 controls. When eventually she came to London after a stay in India, she 
 was exposed as a fraud and accomplished impostor by the Theosophical 
 Society for Psychical Research. Ten years earlier, in 1875, Madame Bla- 
 vatsky had founded the Theosophical Society (theosophy meaning the 
 wisdom of God) which charged a five-dollar initiation fee to join the as- 
 piring brotherhood of man. By that time she considered herself messianic 
 with insight into the nature of the divine, and had gained so many willing 
 believers over the world that at her death she had a following of 100,000 
 (the same number as Joanna Southcott) which persists to this day. 
 
 Yeats met Madame Blavatsky at her house on Lansdowne Road in 
 South London just after the Society for Psychical Research had reported 
 her trickery. He found an old woman in a loose, dark dress chain- 
 smoking cigarettes and playing solitaire. Yeats at twenty-one, pale and 
 dreamy, was not to be deterred. He was already able to see ghosts and 
 astral manifestations, such as six little green elephants tagging along be- 
 hind him on a London street. Mystical phenomena obsessed him, and 
 theosophy was, he thought, the place to look. Unfortunately his zeal for 
 
60 The Third Way 
 
 magic, astrology, the taking of horoscopes, the telling of fortunes by Tarot 
 cards, reincarnation, Rosicrucianism, spiritualism, the Spiritus Mundi, 
 and various lunatic approaches to the supernatural, tried Madame Bla- 
 vatsky’s nerves and made her fearful of further investigation. One night 
 in a secret ceremony Yeats, with a group of followers, burned a flower to 
 ashes and tried by spells to bring it back to life. After two years of bear- 
 ing with his erratic behavior, Madame had her assistant ask him to resign 
 from the society. Yeats did so reluctantly, for he admired her as “a sort 
 of female Dr. Johnson” and found her psychic powers impressive. But it 
 wasn’t a total loss; he had already been initiated into the Hermetic Order 
 of the Golden Dawn. 
 
 Madame Blavatsky died in her bed in 1891. She was cremated and her 
 ashes were divided into three parts: one portion went to India, one to 
 New York, while the third stayed inactive in London until it was dropped 
 into the Ganges by her devoted pupil, Mrs. Annie Besant, on a visit to 
 India. So what good to theosophy is she now, like all Gaul divided into 
 three parts? 
 
 The Mountainous Me. Margaret Fuller, the American writer 
 and feminist, was ever a talker, who for years conducted in a trumpet- 
 ing voice conversation classes for Boston ladies ($20 for ten lessons). At 
 Elizabeth Peabody’s house she taught them to read Kant, asserting their 
 right to equality with men while maintaining their superiority as women. 
 “Men disappoint me so,” said Margaret Fuller. “I find no intellect com- 
 parable to my own.” 
 
 Her lofty sense of womanhood was too much for Horace Greeley, who 
 in 1844 invited Miss Fuller to write literary criticism for the New York 
 Tribune. When she visited in his home, Greeley would bow and repeat a 
 ringing phrase from her feminist tract Woman in the Nineteenth Century: 
 “Let them be sea captains if they will!” as he politely held the door open 
 for her to sweep past him into the room. 
 
 Born in Massachusetts, Margaret was educated by her father who had 
 her reading Ovid before she was eight. Over the years she developed into 
 a leading intellectual with a strict air of mind over matter. As editor of 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 61 
 
 The Dial she was known as the Priestess of Transcendentalism. Except 
 for Carlyle, she generally impressed men; Carlyle, whom she visited in 
 Chelsea, snubbed and cowed her. She complained that he allowed no 
 one a chance to talk but rushed at his opponent with an onset of words, 
 a torment of sound. Whitman admired her militant feminism. Thoreau 
 thought her a woman worth listening to. James Russell Lowell found for- 
 midable her relentless self-esteem, her capital J and infinite me. She chal- 
 lenged Longfellow’s claim to be a poet. Hawthorne caricatured her as 
 the queenly Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance. But it was Emerson who 
 called her “The Mountainous Me” and after meeting her in 1836 when 
 she was twenty-six wrote in his journal: “Her extreme plainness, a trick of 
 incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, the nasal tone of her voice, 
 all repelled; and I said to myself we shall never get far.” 
 
 They got far. Soon he was writing of “strange, cold-warm, attractive- 
 repelling conversations with Margaret,” whom he now respected, revered, 
 loved. She reminded him of godlike figures — Ceres, Proserpine, most of 
 all Minerva, goddess of wisdom —as she reminded herself. James Russell 
 Lowell wrote, “She always keeps asking if I don’t observe a / Particular 
 likeness ’twixt her and Minerva.” 
 
 “I myself am more divine than any I see,” she told Emerson, who 
 was inclined to believe her. She had a purifying mind, he said, and great 
 powers of speech. 
 
 Margaret Fuller in Chelsea 
 
 I can accept the world, the plan 
 Allotted to the race of man. 
 
 But Margaret Fuller’s brag was worse. 
 She could accept the universe. 
 Carlyle said, “By God, she’d better!” 
 And so did everyone who met her. 
 
 Fanny Brawne. It was a brief romance; they were very young. 
 Keats met Fanny in November 1818, just before his brother Tom died 
 
62 The Third Way 
 
 of tuberculosis. He first mentions her in a letter of December 16 to his 
 brother George in America: she was eighteen, “beautiful and elegant, 
 graceful, silly, fashionable and strange.” He was twenty-three, haunted by 
 her, fearful of being rebuffed. On Christmas day Keats had dinner at Elm 
 Cottage in Hampstead with Fanny, her widowed mother, brother and sis- 
 ter. Three years after his death, Fanny wrote his sister Fanny Keats that it 
 had been the happiest day of her life. 
 
 In April the Brawnes moved into the other half of the house in Went- 
 worth Place where Keats now lived with his friend Charles Brown. Brown 
 disliked Fanny, a feeling he didn’t hide, calling her “an artful bad-hearted 
 girl.” She had a reputation of being a giddy flirt, frivolous, quick-tongued, 
 a stylish girl who loved clothes. Keats told her to her face she was a minx. 
 
 In that miraculous spring of his greatest poetry, 1819, by May he and 
 Fanny walked daily on the Heath; by midsummer his health was failing 
 with symptoms in his lungs. He lived in poverty and despair, consumed 
 by love and growing jealousy. In the “Ode to Fanny” he asks, “Who now, 
 with greedy looks, eats up my feast?” The famous love letters begin in 
 July, the “flint-worded” letters, hysterical in their passion (“Yourself— 
 your soul—in pity give me all”) though he was never to become her 
 lover. “Ask yourself, my love,” he wrote, “whether you are not very cruel 
 to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom.” The thought of 
 her was torture: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your 
 loveliness and the hour of my death.” “I cannot exist without you,” he 
 wrote. “I cannot breathe without you.” 
 
 By December they were secretly engaged. Sometime in December 
 Keats addressed to her the agonized lines without a title: 
 
 This living hand, now warm and capable 
 
 Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold 
 
 And in the icy silence of the tomb, 
 
 So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights 
 
 That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood 
 So in my veins red life might stream again, 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 63 
 
 And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is— 
 I hold it towards you. 
 
 A few weeks later, February 3, 1820, while sitting on top of a coach 
 from London to Hampstead, he had the severe hemorrhage that spelled 
 his fate. In his bed he said to Brown, “I know the colour of that blood— 
 it is arterial blood—I cannot be deceived in that colour—that drop of 
 blood is my death-warrant —I must die.” His one concern was for Fanny, 
 who refused to break the engagement when he offered to release her. He 
 sent her a note daily as he lay ill indoors, catching sight of her lingering 
 outside his window, refusing to allow her near him. Soon came violent 
 palpitations, more hemorrhages. In one of his last letters to Fanny he 
 said, “I am tormented day and night. They talk of my going to Italy,” then 
 attacked her in frantic protests, “You do not know what it is to love... . 
 How have you passed this month? Who have you smiled with?” 
 
 On September 13 Keats sailed for Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. 
 From Rome he wrote, “I can bear to die. I cannot bear to leave her. O 
 God! God! Everything reminds me of her.” He wouldn’t write her now or 
 open her letters, none of which have survived. Five months later he died 
 in Severn’s arms. He was twenty-five. 
 
 After his death Fanny wrote to Fanny Keats, “I have not got over it 
 and never shall.” She wore mourning for him for years. “Had only he re- 
 turned from Italy,” she said, “I should have been his wife.” Twelve years 
 later she married Louis Lindo, went to live on the Continent, and had 
 three children. She died in 1865. 
 
 Jane Austen. Lord David Cecil has written a Portrait of Jane 
 Austen without attempting a new way of depicting her—no revelation, 
 no fresh insight into her character, no painting her portrait anew. His ex- 
 cuse for still another book is that he loves her, not as cultist or Janeite but 
 as one at home in her world of three or four families in a Hampshire vil- 
 lage (which was obviously not his world as a Cecil and an Oxford don). 
 My portrait of her, if I could make orfe, would be of a wit, a playful, 
 
64 The Third Way 
 
 feminine wit. There was fun in her (“I dearly love a laugh”). She laughed 
 and teased and gossiped—“I am still a cat when I see a mouse” —with- 
 out the cutting malice Virginia Woolf betrayed (who said of David Cecil, 
 a man she knew socially, that he had no juice in him). In her letters to 
 her sister, written in a neat hand but abominably spelled (cloathes, veiw, 
 greive), Jane loved to make Cassandra laugh. “Mr. Robert Mascall eats a 
 great deal of butter,” she wrote. “I respect Mrs. Chamberlayne for doing 
 her hair well, but cannot feel a more tender sentiment.” “Miss Langley is 
 like any other short girl, with a broad nose and wide mouth, fashionable 
 dress and exposed bosom.” 
 
 Hers was an uneventful life in a provincial setting. Of a quiet visit to 
 
 » « 
 
 Ashe Park she wrote, “You express so little anxiety about my being mur- 
 dered under Ashe Park copse by Mrs. Hubert’s servant that I have a great 
 mind not to tell you whether I was or not.” On a dull evening there, 
 spent unhappily téte-a-téte with an egregious Mr. Holder, “I said two 
 or three amusing things,” she reported, “and Mr. Holder made a few in- 
 famous puns.” 
 
 At a ball in Bath, May 12, 1801—a more stylish affair than she was used 
 to—Jane spotted a Miss Twistleton, “and I am proud to say that I have a 
 very good eye at an Adultress, for though repeatedly assured that another 
 in the same party was the She, I fixed upon the right one from the first. 
 She was highly rouged, and looked rather quietly and contentedly silly 
 than anything else.” 
 
 Well aware of her feminine nature and quick to admit her weakness 
 for balls, visits, paying calls, chatter, shopping, needlework, a velvet bon- 
 net or a muslin gown, Jane never took herself seriously or undertook to 
 discuss public events. “You know,” she ran on to Cassandra, “how inter- 
 esting the purchase of a sponge cake is to me.” “I long to know whether 
 you are buying stockings or what you are doing.” “My black cap was 
 openly admired by Mrs. Lefroy, and secretly I imagine by everybody else 
 
 » « 
 
 » « 
 
 in the room.” 
 
 To the one with whom she shared her life, she could laugh at her own 
 failings, particularly a youthful habit of scribbling novels, of which her 
 sister showed no jealousy or had reason to. “I think,” Jane wrote, “I can 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 65 
 
 boast myself with all possible vanity the most unlearned and uninformed 
 being that ever dared to be an authoress.” And Cassandra at her em- 
 broidery or fine satin stitch only smiled, not tempted in the least to be 
 another one herself. 
 
 Modest as she was, Jane would no doubt be impatient at the num- 
 ber of biographies forever written about her and her simple life. When 
 Southey’s Life of Nelson appeared in 1813 she complained to Cassandra, 
 “I am tired of lives of Nelson, being as I never read any.” 
 
 The Duchess of Marlborough. She was a duchess but she was no 
 lady. For the last time, God willing, I’ve read a life of the divine and ter- 
 rible Sarah (Virginia Cowles, The Great Marlborough and His Duchess), 
 who stays immortal partly because she behaved so abominably, partly 
 because in spite of it she was truly loved. Sarah Jennings was a girl of fif- 
 teen, a maid of honor to Princess Anne at St. James’s Palace, when John 
 Churchill fell in love with her. She had flashing blue eyes, honey-colored 
 hair, the temper of a devil, and he should have stayed clear of her. John 
 was exceptionally handsome; his mistress, Lady Castlemaine by whom he 
 had a child, was also the King’s mistress. He should have looked higher 
 for a wife, everyone said. Stricken with love of this quarrelsome girl—a 
 born fighter who taunted and scorned him—for several years he wooed 
 Sarah Jennings till she came to love him utterly in return. 
 
 They were happy, though Marlborough, a disciplined, courteous, 
 silent man, had to endure Sarah’s intemperance, her sound and fury. She 
 threw things. In her most celebrated rage she seized scissors and spite- 
 fully cut off her hair of which he was so proud. Though John said not 
 a word, after his death she found the hair locked in his strongbox, kept 
 those many years. 
 
 She was implacable, a dangerous friend, an unforgiving enemy. Prin- 
 cess Anne adored her as her closest companion, required her presence as 
 Lady of the Bedchamber, wrote her notes twice a day: “If I writt whole 
 volumes I could never express how well I love you.” When Anne became 
 Queen of England in 1702, Sarah boasted in her memoirs, “From this 
 time I began to be looked upon as a person of consequence.” Her sense 
 
66 The Third Way 
 
 of power went to her head and with bullying she dominated the queen, 
 once ordering her to be quiet, till the constant bickering and unbearable 
 rudeness alienated even shy, sickly Anne, who grew to hate the sight of 
 her. After Abigail Hill had taken her place in the queen’s affections, Sarah 
 furiously accused them of a lesbian relationship. The bitter estrangement 
 that followed led to Sarah and her husband, one of England’s greatest 
 generals, the magnificent hero of Ramillies and Blenheim, being dis- 
 missed from the court, a final fall from grace. 
 
 Sarah was a bad mother, cold, nagging, hostile to her daughters as she 
 had been to her own mother. Of the seven children she bore, two boys 
 and five girls, only two daughters, Henrietta and Mary, were alive when 
 Marlborough —a pitiable wreck, broken in body and mind — died in 1722. 
 Sarah, who survived him by twenty-five years, never saw her daughters 
 again but lived aggrieved and grieving, in animosity toward them that 
 they cordially returned. She wrote An Account of the Cruell Usage of My 
 Children and, full of venom, kept a list of the “detestables” whom she 
 most hated. When she died at Blenheim Palace, bored with living, in 
 her eighty-fifth year, no member of her family was with her. The richest 
 woman in Europe, she had revised her will twenty-six times. In lonely 
 old age she said, “If I could have walked out of this world I would have 
 departed long ago.” 
 
 She was a terror, outrageous yet capable of the loyalty and love she 
 peremptorily demanded of others, that her beloved Lord Marl never 
 ceased to give. The worst enemy she had was herself. 
 
 ‘Nell Gwyn. “Let not poor Nelly starve,” said Charles II on his 
 deathbed, caring with his last breath for her above his many mistresses. 
 She was the English actress Nell Gwyn, born in 1650 in an alley off Drury 
 Lane and brought up in a bawdy house kept by her mother, where as a 
 child she served drinks to the customers. At fifteen she was a poor but 
 pretty girl of the streets, selling oranges in the pit of the king’s theater 
 when a leading actor, Charles Hart, noticed her, made her his mistress, 
 and helped her to become a member of the Drury Lane Company. (With 
 the Restoration, two theaters were now open, and women for the first 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 67 
 
 time were permitted on the stage.) Before long Nell Gwyn was delight- 
 ing London as a comedienne, singer and dancer, whom Pepys, a con- 
 stant playgoer, loudly applauded in all but serious roles. Of her acting in 
 Dryden’s Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen (which Pepys saw three times) 
 he wrote, “The truth is there is a comical part done by Nell, which is 
 Florimel, that I never can hope ever to see the like done again, by man 
 or woman.” After seeing her in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Humorous 
 Lieutenant, to him a silly play, he was glad of the chance to meet and kiss 
 her, “and a mighty pretty soul she is.” By October 5, 1667, Pepys knew this 
 seventeen-year-old well enough to go “to the women’s shift room where 
 Nell was dressing herself, and was all unready, and is very pretty, prettier 
 than I thought.” Witty, too, though at times no more than “a bold merry 
 slut” who cursed and painted her face, whose base companions and lewd 
 talk made him mad. 
 
 For four years Nell acted steadily in the king’s playhouse, the Drury 
 Lane, except for a brief absence when she went to live in the fashionable 
 resort of Epsom as mistress of Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, a man of 
 pleasure and dissipation, crony of the king, composer of the popular bal- 
 lad “To all you ladies now at land / We men at sea indite.” Before she was 
 nineteen she had caught the fancy of King Charles himself, whose pur- 
 suit was so successful that her last appearance on the London stage —in 
 Dryden’s Conquest of Granada—was delayed some months till after the 
 birth of his child in 1670. 
 
 Nell Gwyn was a small slender girl with a good figure and reddish 
 brown hair. Sir Peter Lely painted her as a reclining naked Venus with 
 Cupid at her side. She was said to be full of wild fun and loud laugh- 
 ter, reckless, impudent, on occasion riotous, but always good-humored. 
 Being illiterate, she could barely sign her initials to letters written for 
 her. Charles, the merry monarch, whose passions they said stayed in the 
 lower regions, loved her for her high spirits and unspoiled, undemand- 
 ing nature. She never pretended to be more than she was. She never 
 made scenes as Lady Castlemaine did, or put on airs like the Duchess 
 of Portsmouth, nor was she unfaithful to him like the Duchess of Maza- 
 rin. Nell behaved generously except to her Catholic rival the Duchess of 
 
68 The Third Way 
 
 Portsmouth, whom she disliked and ridiculed. One day when Nell was 
 riding in her gilded coach and was insulted by a mob that mistook her 
 for the Duchess, she leaned out the window and said pleasantly, “Pray, 
 good people, be civil. | am the Protestant whore!” 
 
 She had two sons by the king: the first, named for him, was made Duke 
 of St. Albans; the second, James, died at the age of nine. Charles freely 
 gave her his amiable company and a fine house in the town of Windsor 
 to live in extravagantly; and their easy affection lasted for seventeen years 
 till his death. Amply provided for by his final wish, Nell died still mourn- 
 ing him two years later at the age of thirty-seven. 
 
 ‘Ninon de Lenclos. She was the grande cocotte of the seventeenth 
 century, famed for her beauty and wit, neither of which she possessed 
 to any marked degree. Her pictures show her rather plain and insipid, 
 though they lie about her charms. She was superb in bed, with such ca- 
 pacity to please, such perfect good humor that her career grew lengthy 
 enough as to seem preposterous. She was, for example, the mistress of 
 Madame de Sévigné’s husband, of Madame de Sévigné’s son, eventually 
 (it was said) of Madame de Sévigné’s grandson — she seemed to run in the 
 family. Ninon’s ability to stay young was her secret; it helped that she suf- 
 fered no remorse. Her prolonged youthfulness became the talk of Paris, 
 arousing endless conjecture, not to say envy. They called her evergreen. 
 What were her beauty secrets, her creams and concoctions, her magic 
 formula? Rumor spread that when she was eighteen a mysterious Man in 
 Black brought her a phial of rose-colored liquid, of which she used one 
 drop in her bath to keep fresh and vigorous to old age. The real answer 
 didn’t satisfy the gossips—that she was provident of her life, exercised, 
 ate sparingly, drank only water except for the soup she made with cham- 
 pagne, got lots of sleep, and, an unusual habit in her time, bathed daily. 
 She was fastidious and elegant; she wore black satin corsets, and her bed- 
 room was yellow and gold. “I keep young,” she once said, “because I love 
 neither gambling, nor wine, nor women.” 
 
 Ninon was born in Paris in 1620 and named Anne. Her mother in- 
 tended her for a nunnery, but her father gave her books of philosophy, 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 69 
 
 urged her to read Montaigne. She lost her virginity at fifteen to a rascal. 
 At nineteen, with her mother dead and her father in exile after killing a 
 man, left completely alone she sought solace briefly in the spiritual life, 
 which through lack of conviction she was unable to find. A Jesuit told her, 
 “Then, mademoiselle, until you find conviction, offer heaven your in- 
 credulity.” Instead, she learned to speak several languages, to sing, dance, 
 play the lute, converse, shun lamentation and self-pity, to amuse and be 
 amused. 
 
 Just as she avoided becoming a nun, Ninon escaped being a bride. She 
 made it clear she had no wish to marry, lacking the vocation. She lost 
 her heart often, loved deeply but never long, at most three months. In 
 friendship she was constant. Out of wedlock she had a son whom she sel- 
 dom saw. 
 
 Her succession of lovers and valued friends, of whose number she evi- 
 dently kept count, ranged among the most illustrious men of the Grand 
 Siécle: from wits to poets, from the Great Condé (with whom she spoke 
 Latin in bed), La Rochefoucauld, the crippled poet Scarron, to Saint- 
 Evremond, who loved her through most of the seventeenth century and 
 into the eighteenth. To Saint-Evremond, who wrote that Nature, benevo- 
 lent and wise, had shaped Ninon’s soul, she wrote in old age, “I learn with 
 pleasure that my soul is dearer to you than my body. .. . As a matter of 
 fact, my body is no longer worthy of attention.” Moliére frequented her 
 salon and discussed his ideas for plays with her (she suggested the plot 
 of Tartuffe). She may have turned down Cardinal Richelieu. At thirty-five 
 she opened a School for Gallantry in her fashionable Paris salon in the 
 Rue de Tournelles to teach young aristocrats the art of love and perhaps 
 practice her theories with some of them (“It needs a hundred times more 
 skill to make love than to command any army”). As soon as she could 
 afford to, she accepted no money for her favors but gave freely her true 
 affection. 
 
 Ninon wrote one book, La coquette vengée (in which she defended her 
 own conduct). She met old age with spirit and intelligence, accepting her 
 wrinkles when they came, though she wished God had put them on the 
 soles of her feet. At eighty she is said to have inspired a young abbé with 
 
70 The Third Way 
 
 passion; when she told him her age he replied that it did nothing to lessen 
 his desire. On the night of her death she composed these lines: “Since I 
 am old enough to die, / Why should I longer wish to live?” She died in 
 Paris at near ninety and was praised for her chastity, having renounced 
 by this time the practice of love. 
 
 As was the custom of the day, the French queen kept a skull in her bou- 
 doir to pray to, lighting it with tapers and adorning it with ribbons and 
 pearls. The skull before which she prayed was said to be that of Ninon de 
 Lenclos. 
 
 The Incomparable Aphra. In her lifetime they called Aphra 
 Behn incomparable to revile her as a disgrace to her sex. There was no- 
 body to compare her to. 
 
 She was approaching thirty when she found her true vocation as the 
 first Englishwoman to earn her living as a professional writer. Most re- 
 cently she had been a spy in Antwerp, employed by Charles II at the 
 outbreak of the Dutch War to ferret out traitors to the English cause. As 
 a secret agent she was a disaster. In January 1667 she returned to England 
 a penniless widow, in total misery and despair. They threw her into New- 
 gate debtors’ prison. 
 
 It was then, taking stock, that Aphra Behn resolved to dedicate her 
 life to Pleasure and Poetry. Having made the choice, she lost no time 
 in emerging as a woman of pleasure and a writer of frailty and wit. As 
 the author of fifteen more or less indecent plays and several novels, she 
 shocked even Restoration London by her bawdy comedies that harped 
 on sex, such as The Forced Marriage that made her famous; The Amor- 
 ous Prince; The Rover; Sir Patient Fancy (whose prologue begins, “Oh, the 
 great blessing of a little wit!”). Pope later remarked she put all her charac- 
 ters to bed. By trying to write like the men, Dryden said, she scandalized 
 the modesty of the female sex. V. Sackville-West wrote in admiration, 
 “She never made any bones about her conviction that love was the pleas- 
 antest thing in the world.” 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 71 
 
 Her volume of poems, Love Letters to a Gentleman, was addressed to 
 John Hoyle, described in a contemporary record as “an atheist, a sod- 
 omite professed, a corrupter of youth, and a blasphemer of Christ.” He 
 was killed in a tavern brawl in 1692. While she claimed to be desperately 
 in love with him, her mocking poem “The Disappointment” concerns a 
 lover’s impotence: 
 
 He saw how at her length she lay: 
 
 He saw her rising bosom bare; 
 
 Her loose thin robes, through which appear 
 A shape designed for love and play: 
 Abandoned by her pride and shame 
 
 She does her softest joys dispense, 
 
 Off’ring her virgin innocence 
 
 A victim to love’s sacred flame; 
 
 While the o’er-ravished shepherd lies 
 Unable to perform the sacrifice. 
 
 They called her a lewd harlot. Yet when she died in 1689 she was buried 
 in Westminster Abbey under a black marble slab engraved with John 
 Hoyle’s couplet: “Here lies a proof that wit can never be / Defence enough 
 against mortality.” I say in mild reproach that Aphra Behn’s comedies are 
 bawdy but unreadable. If she saw in London, as seems likely, Wycherley’s 
 The Country Wife, she must have envied its brilliant indecency, the wit of 
 the lustful Mr. Horner only pretending to be impotent in order to seduce 
 the ladies. 
 
 The Calling of Aphra Behn 
 
 She was a lady in mid-career. 
 
 Half was over. Her thirtieth year 
 Beckoned. Discreetly she scanned the view 
 And seeing nothing but wanting to, 
 
 Like a gold sunrise, piqued by the lack 
 
72 The Third Way 
 
 Of rosy vistas forward or back, 
 
 She paid the matter exalted thought, 
 Possibly longer than women ought, 
 
 And said, “Henceforth, my life shall be 
 Given to Pleasure and Poetry.” 
 
 Then the days grew merrier than they were, 
 Although her verses were singular 
 
 And certain folly engaged her leisure, 
 
 But I can’t deny it gave her pleasure. 
 
 She proved her mettle, she found her calling, 
 The wind was chill, a sere leaf falling, 
 
 Half was over. Half would remain 
 
 To crown the talents of Aphra Behn. 
 
 For Pleasure and Poetry half was ample, 
 And I am smitten by her example. 
 
 Sappho. It’s a pity the lesbians have claimed Sappho, when like 
 other Greek poets she accepted love simply as love and was credited with 
 being enamored of men as well as women. 
 
 From her nine books of lyric verse, a few scraps and fragments remain. 
 She is said to have married a wealthy man named Cercolas and to have 
 had at least one child, a daughter named Cleis (“I have a little daughter, 
 
 » « 
 
 like a golden flower.” “My own, my Cleis, darling child”). 
 
 An ode of twenty-eight lines — an invocation to Aphrodite not to break 
 her heart—and four stanzas of a second ode survive, enough with the 
 fragments of papyrus, some found lining Egyptian tombs, to prove that 
 Sappho was an immortal love poet. She frequently wrote songs to cele- 
 brate marriage; no wedding was complete unless Sappho praised it (“To 
 what, dear bridegroom, may I rightly liken thee? — To a slender sapling”). 
 Her songs are never coarse or indelicate. 
 
 Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean in the sixth 
 century before Christ. She was small and dark, attractive less in body than 
 in grace. She became a teacher of young schoolgirls in the arts of poetry, 
 music, dancing, and with some of them she fell in love. Anactoria, about 
 
Uncommon Women and Their Ways 73 
 
 whom she wrote, married and moved to Lydia: “So, Anactoria, you go 
 away with what calm carelessness of sorrow.” Another was Atthis, though 
 to Atthis she said, “You seemed to me a small, ungainly child.” A lament 
 was for darling Timas, another for Dica, both of whom died young be- 
 fore they could be wed. Sappho sounds too maternal to be a corrupter 
 of maidenhood. She insists that her love for these girls is pure and en- 
 during. 
 
 The legend persists through the centuries that she died for love by 
 throwing herself off a cliff into the Ionian Sea because she was rejected 
 by a young man named Phaon. (Ovid in the Heroides wrote of her aban- 
 doned by her lover Phaon.) Without further proof, the story is dismissed 
 by scholars as romantic invention. Yet she did write, “With love of a slen- 
 der youth I am overwhelmed by Aphrodite.” 
 
 She was called unmatchable, the only woman given a place among the 
 immortals. In her time her fame equaled Homer’s; she was regarded as 
 both poet and philosopher. Aristotle lauded her wisdom, Plato named 
 her the tenth Muse. She exists in quotations by writers inspired by her 
 language. Her contemporary in Lesbos, the lyric poet Alcaeus, praised 
 Sappho as holy and pure. Catullus copied her in his love poems to Les- 
 bia. Ben Jonson, Lyly in his play Sappho and Phao, Madame de Staél in 
 Sapho, Herrick, Wordsworth paid her homage. Byron cried, “The isles of 
 Greece! where burning Sappho loved and sung.” 
 
 Centuries after her death the accusations were made that condemned 
 Sappho as immoral. Pope was one who took her name in vain, “As who 
 knows Sappho laughs at other whores.” Since the late nineteenth cen- 
 tury the kind of love attributed to her has been called lesbian. The word 
 sapphism dates from 1890, homosexual from 1892. Daudet’s novel Sapho 
 (of a young man’s passion for a prostitute) helped to degrade her name, 
 as did Pierre Louys’s glorification of Sapphic love, erotic and licentious. 
 Swinburne’s distortions harmed her by making her guilty of perversion. 
 When he wrote “Anactoria” and the “Sapphics” it was in praise and ex- 
 travagant imitation. He has “the Lesbians kissing across their smitten 
 lutes ... mouth to mouth.” He has Sappho say, “I could eat thy breasts 
 like honey.” He called her his sister. 
 
74 The Third Way 
 
 It seems unfair to identify her with lesbianism, a word used without 
 regard for Sappho the poet or her home in Mitylene on Lesbos, the island 
 of mosques and monasteries. She loved roses. She understood solitude 
 and the need for love. She wrote, “It is midnight, the hours are passing, 
 passing. Time is on his way; and yet I lie alone.” 
 
ro 
 
 The Way with Words 
 
 Samuel Beckett was asked late in life what he was working on. “Senilities,” 
 he replied. What else would Beckett say? It was a word natural to him (and 
 welcome to it) in his last-ditch humor, an undoing word that fitted his 
 way of blasting life and declaring to the end his low opinion of its worth. 
 
 So one proceeds, as Richard Wilbur says, “by words and the defeat of 
 words,” thankful for any word in the book that sounds undefeated. Philip 
 Larkin took a dim view of anybody’s being able to use them honestly and 
 fairly, to put the world into words, so to speak. Even in bed with a loved 
 one, he said, it becomes more and more difficult to find the right words 
 that are “at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind.” Yet, 
 however they falter and deceive or fill us with high-sounding hope (so 
 many words to say a simple thing), they’re all we’ve got to point the way, 
 to tell us 
 
 ... this is what it is like, 
 or what it is like in words. — Carol Ann Duffy 
 
 Two Lives. I’ve been reading the letters, never before published, 
 that John Middleton Murry wrote to Katherine Mansfield during the 
 eleven years he was her lover and then husband. Though he wrote every 
 day during their long separations, this collection contains no more than 
 half the letters because his words were at times so distressing that Kath- 
 erine destroyed the evidence. After her death in 1923, Murry published 
 her letters, from which he removed some too painful to print. He wrote 
 a confessional autobiography, Between Two Worlds, to perfect her image 
 and improve his own, gave public lectures about her, and bared his soul 
 till he was accused of exploiting his dead wife. Everybody took a poke at 
 him. He came to be known as “the best-hated man of letters in the coun- 
 
76 The Third Way 
 
 try,” mocked by Bertrand Russell who found Murry beastly; by D. H. 
 Lawrence who called him a coward, an obscene bug, a mud-worm; by 
 Virginia Woolf to whom he was a cheat, a posturing Byronic little man 
 bleating his confessions to absolve himself of blame. 
 
 These letters, appearing sixty years after Katherine Mansfield’s death, 
 help to alter the concept of Murry as the villain of the piece. They even 
 things up a little between two miserable people, badly mated, destined 
 to hurt each other through a profound difference in their natures—she 
 fighting for her life, making a frantic cry for all he couldn't give. Their 
 love stayed as constant as their helplessness. Five months before she died, 
 Katherine wrote in a letter to be read after her death, “In spite of every- 
 thing— how happy we have been! I feel no other lovers have walked the 
 earth together more joyfully—in spite of all.” 
 
 When they first met in December 1911, Murry was a nervous, shy 
 Oxford undergraduate of twenty-two, editor of a short-lived periodical 
 Rhythm for which he had accepted one of her stories. Katherine, ten 
 months older, filled Murry with awe at her sophistication, beauty, and 
 caustic wit. She was already married to George Borden (whom she had 
 left the morning following their wedding night), and she had had several 
 love affairs, a miscarriage, a stillborn child. By his fifth respectful letter, 
 Murry had begun the apologies typical of him: “Sorry I was so boring — 
 can’t be helped.” At her urging he moved to London to share her flat at 69 
 Clovelly Mansions, where after a few weeks she — always the aggressor — 
 asked, “Why don’t you make me your mistress?” to which, lying on the 
 bed and waving his legs in the air, Murry replied, “I feel it would spoil — 
 everything.” When he did become her lover, inept in his timidity, and 
 the landlord discovering they weren’t married evicted them, they moved 
 from one squalid flat to another, to Buckinghamshire, to Paris. 
 
 It was an odd, insecure, teetering affair from which neither could with- 
 draw. In February 1915 Katherine decided to leave Murry to join a new 
 lover, Murry’s poet friend Francis Carco, in the war zone in France, and 
 without demur Murry saw her off at the boat train. “I’m not sad, or mis- 
 erable, darling—only just vaguely uncomfortable,” he wrote that night, 
 adding he was coming down with a cold. When she returned ten days 
 
The Way with Words 77 
 
 later, disillusioned by the adventure, Murry was busy buying furniture for 
 another flat for them and putting up shelves in the kitchen. “O Tiggle,” 
 he wrote, “we are the lovers of the world. We are the lovers that were 
 dreamed by God.” 
 
 Katherine’s fatal illness, not diagnosed till December 1917, marked the 
 start of the nightmare. It lasted with little respite for the next five years, 
 separated them while she sought a cure away from England and grew 
 steadily worse, more lonely, more terrified, more demanding of his love. 
 The few happy times were spent when he could join her briefly in the 
 south of France, in Italy, in Switzerland. 
 
 After George Borden divorced her in 1918, Katherine returned to Lon- 
 don seriously ill. On May 3 she and Murry were married at the registry 
 office though, as she wrote from Cornwall to which six weeks later she 
 had fled, it was but part of the nightmare: “You never once held me in 
 your arms and called me your wife.” Murry replied, “My soul was struck 
 dumb with terror at your illness.” In her devouring need of him, she 
 bitterly resented his ability to live without her, his passivity, his unwill- 
 ingness to touch her. She accused him of wanting to be rid of her. He 
 could only protest, “When I see you sick & ailing, I die.” Close to ner- 
 vous collapse himself, he wrote, “I’m a mean little sneak, but it can’t be 
 helped.” 
 
 Early in 1919 Murry became editor of the Athenaeum and prospered, 
 while Katherine went to stay on the Italian Riviera, this time accompa- 
 nied by her faithful friend Ida Baker. His unfeeling letters enraged her 
 by their hurried tone, obtuseness, self-absorption, self-pity. She wrote of 
 spitting blood and he wrote of being constipated, “no figs that’s what it 
 is.” He called her “old girl” and issued daily bulletins on their cats. Yet 
 at the same time he was hunting a dream house to buy for her, where he 
 promised they might settle down in peace and love and have babies. 
 
 Worn by reunions and separations, as her new husband death beck- 
 oned (and Murry’s anguish mounted with a sense of guilt at having 
 failed her), in October 1922 Katherine left suddenly for Fontainebleau 
 and wired her farewell. She had lost faith in Murry and her doctors. She 
 sought the spiritual cure offered by the mystic healer and occultist Gur- 
 
78 The Third Way 
 
 djieff, a step Murry couldn’t understand or condone. Communication all 
 but ceased between them. When on January 5, 1923, Katherine sent for 
 him (“I hope you will decide to come, my dearest”), Murry, overjoyed 
 to be asked, arrived four days later at the colony in Fontainebleau, Gur- 
 djieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. They spent a 
 happy afternoon about which Murry revealed, “She told me she had felt 
 that her love for me had had to die. . . but now at last, she said, ‘My love 
 *” At ten o’clock that 
 night, while climbing the stairs with him to her room, she had a violent 
 hemorrhage and died. Murry was thirty-three with half his life over. He 
 was to have three more wives. 
 
 His letters, placed beside Katherine’s, become eloquent of his side of 
 
 for you has all come back to me, greater than ever. 
 
 the story. By their admissions they portray a weak man, indecisive and 
 afraid, who might have given more of himself, might have prolonged 
 Katherine’s life by staying at her side. But he wasn’t like that. In his inade- 
 quate way he was loyal and persistently loving, with an unfailing belief in 
 her as a writer, encouraging till she cried, “Do not overpraise me.” After 
 the often tormented years as her lover, he chose to marry her when, had 
 he been the coward he was called, he might have refused. Katherine, for 
 her part, chose him again and again, always for love. 
 
 I met Middleton Murry one night in the 1930s at Brown House on the up- 
 town campus of New York University, when the English Department that 
 occupied President Brown’s former mansion invited him to come to the 
 small front parlor and tell us about Katherine Mansfield. She had been 
 dead ten years, and Murry was on an extended lecture tour in America. 
 We considered him no great shakes as a visiting celebrity except as the 
 husband of a writer everyone knew and liked. 
 
 Murry was a little man in a dark suit, black-haired and spectacled, 
 whose voice, I remember, was small and nonassertive. He spoke for an 
 hour in praise of her writing. But of Katherine the person, her life with 
 him and without him, her struggle to stay alive so poignantly revealed in 
 her letters and journals, he had no words. It was impossible to think of 
 this small, reserved Englishman as a stormy lover or a stricken one. “I’m 
 
The Way with Words 79 
 
 a very dull dog,” he had told her. It was hard to believe he had known 
 her intimately or at all. 
 
 Afterward, when I stood beside him in the crowded room and tried 
 to thank him, he shrugged and turned away, saying, “It’s what you asked 
 for.” My impression of Middleton Murry that night was to wish for her 
 sake she had been luckier. 
 
 Janet Frame’s Story. In her autobiography To the Is-Land, the 
 New Zealand writer Janet Frame makes a map of her childhood to dis- 
 cover where it went. It went from Dunedin, where she was born in 1924, 
 to the small town of Oamaru on South Island. Her strict father, George, 
 was a railway engineer who played the bagpipes. Her mother, Lottie, a 
 former housemaid in Katherine Mansfield’s home in Wellington, wrote 
 poems and sold them from door to door. Janet’s red hair rose in a tangle 
 from her head; she had freckles, shabby clothes that affirmed her poverty, 
 and she had “tics and terrors.” In spite of quarrels and Dad’s thrashings, 
 the family was a closely knit one from which Janet grew apart, angered 
 by her mother’s unfathomable serenity. Her brother Bruddie, an epilep- 
 tic, suffered violent rages brought on by his father’s mockery. When Janet 
 was thirteen, her sister Myrtle, a strong swimmer, was found drowned 
 in the Oamaru Public Baths. “At first I was glad, thinking there’d be no 
 more quarrels, cryings, thrashings, with Dad trying to control her and us 
 listening frightened, pitying, and crying, too.” The years ahead in high 
 school were cruel. Clad in her patched school tunic, without friends, she 
 felt a desolation that she had no words for. 
 
 Volume two, An Angel at My Table, begins with a lonely troubled girl 
 traveling to the city of Dunedin, where at nineteen she was to enter the 
 Teachers’ Training College. As the train approached the town of Seacliff, 
 she caught a glimpse of the “loony” asylum, like a dark castle between 
 two hills. “We had no loonies in our family,” she reflected, unaware how 
 soon she would be committed to that stark community of the insane. 
 
 At Dunedin she stayed in a tiny cottage with Aunty Isy and her hus- 
 band, Uncle George, who lay upstairs dying of cancer. So timid Janet 
 was, too shy to sit with her aunt at the table, she ate alone in the scullery. 
 
80 The Third Way 
 
 Matters grew worse when her younger sister Isabel arrived to enter the 
 college and share a room with Janet at Aunty Isy’s. Made of sterner stuff, 
 Isabel rebelled, complained of being starved and frozen, acquired a boy- 
 friend, went generally wild till, in the final explosion, Aunty Isy ordered 
 them both to move. Separated from Isabel, ashamed and rejected, Janet 
 was more than ever alone. 
 
 After two unhappy years she was to spend a probationary year teach- 
 ing the second grade at Arthur Street School, Dunedin. All went well till 
 the day the inspector entered her class unannounced to pass on her quali- 
 fication. Murmuring an excuse, Janet fled in panic from the room out of 
 the school, never to return. Her despair at another failure of courage led 
 her to attempt suicide by swallowing a packet of aspirin, sure she would 
 die. Instead, she found a job washing dishes in the cafeteria at the Uni- 
 versity. To a psychology professor, whose course she enrolled in, she con- 
 fided in writing, “Perhaps I should mention a recent attempt at suicide,” 
 and found herself whisked off to the Dunedin hospital, confined to a psy- 
 chiatric ward. When her mother came to take her home, Janet screamed 
 at her to go away and her mother left saying, “But she’s such a happy per- 
 son.” They sent her to Seacliff, the “loony” asylum, where, without tests, 
 she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and declared officially insane. 
 
 For eight years she was in and out of mental hospitals, given some two 
 hundred shock treatments that were like executions, put on probation 
 for brief periods during which she worked in hotels as maid or waitress. 
 From them she would escape by committing herself to another hospital, 
 at Christchurch, at Auckland, where “the squalor and inhumanity were 
 almost indescribable.” The tragedy of Isabel’s death by drowning, repeat- 
 ing Myrtle’s death ten years earlier, led Janet to the edge of madness. 
 Nothing was left but the obsessive need to write; and writing saved her 
 life. Just as she was to undergo a lobotomy, the superintendent of the hos- 
 pital, impressed by a newspaper account of an award Janet had won, had 
 her discharged and sent home. But she had become a nonperson. 
 
 This was 1954, Janet was thirty. When the New Zealand writer Frank 
 Sargeson, who seemed to her an old man in old clothes, offered her 
 
The Way with Words 81 
 
 an army hut in his Auckland garden, she stayed with him for eighteen 
 months and wrote the novel Owls Do Cry, whose narrator is a patient in 
 a mental hospital. It brought her a grant to travel, but before she could 
 leave the country her sanity was investigated; the conclusion was reached 
 that eight years of her life had been senselessly lost. From there she had 
 to find her way alone. 
 
 About angels. A question to ask Janet Frame is the meaning of her title 
 taken from Rilke, An Angel at My Table: how to interpret Rilke’s symbol. 
 Angels appear and vanish throughout his poetry—from the early songs 
 to the late French poems to the “Duino Elegies” —as either a guardian 
 angel, a creative spirit of the imagination, or a terrible apparition of a 
 higher reality, close to God. “Who are the angels?” the second elegy be- 
 gins. “Every angel is terrible” (which seems to be her meaning), since in 
 our ordinary mortal world we are aware of our need of these beings from 
 a world beyond our reach. The angel at our table appears but momently, 
 leaving behind his presence. As Rilke says, 
 
 This imperceptible exchange 
 
 that makes us tremble 
 
 becomes the inheritance of an angel 
 without belonging to us. 
 
 Are angels visible only to poets? 
 
 Blake saw a tree full of angels in Peckham Rye. Emily Dickinson said, 
 “Angels rent the house next ours.” Wallace Stevens knew one who paid 
 visits (though in “Evening without Angels” he asks why you and | need 
 seraphim when “bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare”). In his 
 “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” we peasants welcome the angel at our 
 door, not easily recognized since he wears no white wings, gold crown, or 
 lukewarm halo. A figure half seen, he is the necessary angel of this earth 
 in whose sight we see the earth freed of its dreary “man-locked” appear- 
 
82 The Third Way 
 
 ance. For a moment he is there, and instantly vanishing leaves behind his 
 radiance. 
 
 I’m still waiting for a visit. Only demons so far, though in 1989 Pope 
 John Paul II announced that angels do exist. (“Now I will believe that 
 there are unicorns” — The Tempest) 
 
 Two Accounts. Two autobiographies that include each other in 
 their story are Ingmar Bergman’s recent narrative of his life, The Magic 
 Lantern, and Liv Ullmann’s tale of her life with him, titled Changing. 
 Together they show how useful it is to write about yourself, if only to give 
 someone else your version of what happened. 
 
 When Bergman read Liv Ullmann’s account of their consuming love 
 affair, they had been separated for years. Now he learned for the first 
 time her view of the relationship. They had met and fallen in love in 1966 
 when Bergman was filming his twenty-sixth picture, Persona (in which 
 Liv Ullmann was cast with Bibi Andersson), a tale of two women and 
 their withdrawal to a distant shore and identification with each other. 
 Bergman made the film one summer the three of them spent on location 
 at Far6, a bleak, rocky island off Sweden in the Baltic Sea. The look of it 
 so greatly appealed to him as his own choice of landscape that he has- 
 tened to buy land there and build a house for Liv and him, and for their 
 child born the following spring. 
 
 In her autobiography Liv says she wanted to write of this “encounter 
 on an island. A man who changed my life.” She describes the island of 
 Far6 that, except for a brief flowering in the summer, was nothing but 
 stunted trees, sheep, rocks, wind, and bitter cold. For Bergman, Faré 
 was a Safe retreat. For Liv it was a prison, more barren and lonely than 
 any place she had known. After five years of it, the day came when she 
 gathered up her daughter and fled. 
 
 In his autobiography Bergman writes of their love affair in words less 
 emotional than hers, terse and matter-of-fact: “During the filming of Per- 
 sona, Liv and I were overwhelmed by passion. With monumental lack of 
 judgment, I built the house with the idea of a mutual existence on the 
 island. I forgot to ask Liv what she thought. I managed to find out later 
 
The Way with Words 83 
 
 from her book Changing. On the whole her testimony is, I think, affec- 
 tionately correct. She stayed for a few years. We fought our demons as 
 best we could.” 
 
 Elsewhere he lists his demons: desire, torment, guilt, anxiety, fear, and 
 rage. Liv calls hers bitterness, hate, loneliness, despair. She writes, “No 
 one could be as angry as Ingmar. Possibly I.” 
 
 Only when the affair was over did they become friends. In 1975, after 
 playing Nora in a New York production of A Doll’s House, Liv went back 
 to Sweden to work with him on the film Face to Face, a searing tale of 
 dream and reality in which she has a complete breakdown and tries to 
 commit suicide. To be with Ingmar brought her stretches of happiness, 
 and though they clashed and quarreled he told her, “I could never have 
 made this film without you.” In her diary she wrote, “I knew that I could 
 never leave him, and in a way I never have.” 
 
 By now Liv must have read his book, the autobiography that accords 
 her so small a space, so brief a period of his life. It reveals a difficult abra- 
 sive man, who from an unhappy childhood in a Lutheran parsonage has 
 lived in the midst of commotion, self-conflict, and pain. His first love 
 was always the theater (“a powerfully erotic business”) and the making 
 of films that were the signature of himself, often wounding pictures from 
 his life—Scenes from a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander of the boy that is 
 Ingmar. As a man of strong sexuality, he was almost as wholly involved 
 with women, from one tortured marriage or relationship to another till 
 he acquired many wives, many children, many problems. At one period 
 in his impoverished thirties, he was trying to support three families at 
 once: his first wife, Else, and their daughter; his wife at the time, Ellen, 
 and their four children; his mistress, Gun, who was already pregnant. 
 After he married and divorced Gun, whose son was Ingmar; after an affair 
 with Harriet and one with Bibi Andersson, Liv’s friend; after marriage to 
 Kabi, a concert pianist, whose son was Daniel—then came Liv and their 
 daughter Linn, Bergman’s eighth and last child. 
 
 His fifth and last wife, Ingrid, lives with him on the island of Faré, 
 where Liv visited them one summer when Linn was to spend a holiday 
 with her father and his new wife. Liv writes of the moment of arrival: 
 
84 The Third Way 
 
 “Ingrid, the wife, stands in the doorway. She is tan and happy.” Liv notes 
 that nothing is changed, Ingrid hasn’t even rearranged the furniture. She 
 adds, “I like her for that. She has not tried to remove me from this place. 
 Ingmar is here.” 
 
 Writers at Work. Diane Ackerman has an interesting essay in 
 the New York Times Book Review on the work habits of writers—how 
 Amy Lowell and George Sand smoked cigars to make them creative, how 
 Colette began the day by picking fleas from her cat. I too like to know 
 the facts about writers and their habits, whether Virginia Woolf wrote 
 standing up, Victor Hugo wrote naked, or Benjamin Franklin wrote while 
 soaking in a bathtub. Like Miss Ackerman I’ve spent hours of my life 
 in such research and can help her out as to the number of cups of tea 
 Dr. Johnson drank at a sitting. She says twenty-five. Robert Louis Steven- 
 son in “Aes Triplex” said he “didn’t recoil before twenty-seven individual 
 cups of tea.” Johnson wasn’t being literary at teatime but sociable with 
 an unquenchable thirst and staying power. He described himself as “a 
 hardened and shameless tea-drinker . . . who with tea amuses the eve- 
 ning, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.” 
 Mrs. Thrale, as his hostess, had a teapot that held three quarts. 
 
 Miss Ackerman writes of Wordsworth as a walker who got his inspira- 
 tion from walking, but she omits the statistics. DeQuincy calculated that 
 by middle age Wordsworth had walked 180,000 miles and concluded he 
 must have lived a life of unclouded happiness. With Dorothy at his side 
 he composed aloud while walking, once muttering the whole of “Tintern 
 Abbey.” The neighbors called it his booing about. 
 
 A while ago, I reviewed a book by Phyllis Bartlett, Poems in Process, 
 in which she asks, “How do poets get their thoughts on paper?” She had 
 gone through diaries, letters, biographies to track down their work habits, 
 seeking to pinpoint the seasons, the weather, the time of day, the place, 
 the conditions, and the state of mind that affected poets most. What I 
 learned, if I didn’t know already, was that getting down to work was the 
 worst part. Rilke said, “I feel that to work is to live without dying,” then 
 delayed the moment to begin. It was a life, he said, full of abysses. 
 
The Way with Words 85 
 
 Wine or gin often helped. And prayer. A seasonal urge led Milton 
 to write in winter, Keats in spring, Burns autumn, Shelley the summer 
 months. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples to get him going. 
 Coleridge told Southey, “When a man is unhappy, he writes damned bad 
 poetry, I find.” 
 
 As for the prose writers, they’re notional too. Jane Austen wrote in the 
 family parlor, Montaigne in a tower, Cervantes in prison. Proust built 
 a cork-lined room to escape distraction. Willa Cather read the Bible. 
 Colette would write only on blue paper, by artificial light, and in her bare 
 feet. She refused to take an aspirin lest it dim her mind. So far as I know 
 such dithering about makes little difference—whether a person writes in 
 a gazebo or cupola, lying on a sofa or standing on his head. Yet my choice 
 of work habits would be to avoid at all cost writing like George Sand, a 
 great scribbler of 109 volumes, who kept at it ten hours at a stretch with- 
 out pause, erasure, or nourishment, and sent the manuscript off to the 
 printer without reading it over. She would finish one novel and, damn 
 the torpedoes, start another in the same hour, though she said, “I write 
 as others might do gardening.” Flaubert, on the contrary, sat all day with 
 his head in his hands, waiting for the right word. 
 
 The real problem, of course, is how to account for the need to write at 
 all, especially when nobody asked you to. 
 
 Being a Writer. Gertrude Stein tried to rid herself of nouns, as 
 she explained in “How Writing Is Written,” which at showing how not to 
 she was better than anybody. Years ago I vowed never to try prose, find- 
 ing verse risk enough. Prose would spill out horizontally and multiply, 
 and it does. Words are tricksters and contrivances I spend my life remov- 
 ing (Jules Renard: “I am afflicted with prose the way I was once afflicted 
 with verse. When this is over, in what shall I write?). 
 
 Somehow a writer is always out of luck, an easy target if not a victim. 
 Max Frisch, the Swiss novelist, knew the self-exposure involved in writ- 
 ing anything, the price a writer pays: 
 
 Yesterday morning in the Odeon [a Berlin café] I heard someone at a 
 neighboring table mention my name. I was aware that the man, who does 
 
86 The Third Way 
 
 not know me, spoke my name in a tone of real hatred —not just contempt 
 but hatred. Should I have introduced myself? I did not do that, but paid 
 my bill, took up my coat and left. Often enough one hates oneself. All the 
 same, I have to admit that I am upset when I see this hatred in someone 
 else, a stranger. .. . There is no argument against hatred. — Sketchbook, 
 1946-49 
 
 In Frisch’s later Sketchbook, 1966-71, that painful incident was still 
 heavy on his mind—the memory of finding himself hated without ap- 
 parent reason. “If I had now to draw up a balance,” he wrote, “there is 
 nobody at the moment whom I hate.” “But do you love anybody?” he 
 asked himself. “Only when one loves can one bear it.” And he quoted 
 Brecht’s poem “To Posterity”: “Alas, we who wished to lay the foundation 
 of kindness / Could not ourselves be kind.” 
 
 He made a list of twenty-six things he loved and was thankful for, 
 
 among them: 
 
 his mother 
 
 having children of his own 
 
 his meeting with Bertolt Brecht 
 
 all women, “yes, on the whole, all of them” 
 a bad memory for his errors and omissions 
 the fact that ambition declines 
 
 his passport 
 
 (My own list is the same if you substitute Bertrand Russell for Brecht, 
 and all men, of course, for women.) 
 
 To Frisch there was no difference between living and writing about it, 
 concerned as he became with determining the kind of man he was—cer- 
 tainly not the man people took him for. In his most searching novel, I’m 
 Not Stiller, he considers the character of Stiller, who denies he is the self 
 he’s said to be, is accused of being. 
 
 To Frisch writing was the same as breathing, neither one an “undiluted 
 pleasure.” But in the summer of 1990 when he learned that he had a ter- 
 minal illness, he stopped short because now there was nothing to say. 
 
The Way with Words 87 
 
 Death is not lived through, no way has been found to describe it, “and I 
 don’t want to do it either.” 
 
 Writing Charley Smith's Girl. When my book Charley Smith's 
 Girl was published in 1965, my editor Henry Simon thought it would 
 make a good movie. To him Charley was a purely fictional character, 
 Goodtime Charley, a card, a man larger than life and sometimes funnier. 
 Without telling me, Henry sent the book to a film producer he knew in 
 Hollywood and almost got it accepted. The answer came back they were 
 interested — Charley was a character full of moxie, but the story needed 
 elaborating to show him off, the wilder the better. If the author would 
 consider giving him more to do, there was a chance Charley might be de- 
 veloped into, say, another W. C. Fields. 
 
 The idea was alarming. “No way,” I wrote Henry. “No way!” I had told 
 the truth about Charley, the little I knew of him. I wouldn’t want him 
 laughed at (though in a way he was like W. C. Fields or Pagliacci, part 
 funny man, part incurably depressed by the world and everybody in it). 
 I couldn’t have invented him, I wouldn’t make up lies about him now. 
 Besides, I was Charley’s girl; it was of my father and me I had written — 
 Charley who left my mother when I was two and never came back. I grew 
 up without him, though by the time I had to write about it, I knew how 
 greatly I resembled him, how much I belonged to him. By then Charley 
 was dead. I wanted to state the facts. And the thing I remembered and 
 loved most about him was his laughter. 
 
 Had I written a novel instead, same cast of characters, it would have been 
 fiction, invented, imagined, untrue. It wouldn’t have been Charley. Like 
 any autobiographical novel it would have a shape of its own. (One such 
 novelist said recently in an interview, “I needed a sibling. So I invented 
 Freddie.”) God only knows what liberties one takes in creating one’s life. 
 
 I remember Nancy Hale’s mother reading Nancy’s autobiography, A 
 New England Girlhood, and asking in bewilderment, “Damask napkins? 
 Why ever did you write about damask napkins?” 
 
 “Because I like damask napkins,” Nancy said. 
 
88 The Third Way 
 
 “But we never had such a thing in our house.” 
 
 I remember hearing Peter Taylor read his short story “Demons” that 
 had to do with the voices he heard as a child of seven. One voice was their 
 black cook saying, as he sat on the toilet, “Are you going to sit on that 
 Christmas tree all day?” One said, “Ruins. Ruins.” Another said, “There 
 is no one god. And there was no beginning and there will be no end.” 
 Peter claimed that the voices he heard are heard by all children. I asked 
 him about it afterward, if he meant these memories to be true, or if it 
 was the story that mattered. He said instantly, “It’s always the story that 
 matters.” He was a storyteller. 
 
 Henry Simon assumed Charley Smith’s Girl was a story. But in writ- 
 ing about myself, though I found, like Montaigne, the subject barren and 
 thin, I didn’t make it up, for one thing lacking the imagination. Even as 
 a bookish child I was not fanciful. I never lived in a dream world or be- 
 lieved in hell or Santa Claus (who couldn’t in any case have squeezed 
 down our stovepipe). I never gave my dolls names; my mother had to 
 name my cat, Moses Dudley (for a black man she knew in the South). I 
 never told myself stories. I never heard voices. 
 
 “Let’s pretend,” my playmate Alice used to say. 
 
 “Pretend like we’re girls,” I would agree. 
 
 From the start I was looking for one thing: the reality, the way things 
 are, or as Wallace Stevens said, “Nothing beyond reality. Within it every- 
 thing.” I was writing for the reason Robert Lowell gave in his next to last 
 poem “Epilogue.” All that he wrote, Lowell said, was paralyzed by fact. 
 All was misalliance, all was mistaken, “yet why not say what happened?” 
 He prayed for the grace of accuracy. 
 
 Since it was fact I was after, to his words I added, “and nothing to be 
 gained by never saying.” 
 
 Three Poets. My students used to say after poetry class, “But 
 
 how can you possibly believe them all?” I wondered myself. 
 One poet was Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who wrote with 
 an overwhelming sense of God manifest in all things. He looked at the 
 visible proof: the dappled skies, the azure-hung hills, the shining earth, 
 
The Way with Words 89 
 
 and everywhere he saw a God-lit, God-centered world. “Look at the 
 stars!” he cried, “look, look up at the skies!” On an autumn day he lifted 
 his eyes to the silk-sack clouds and the wind-walks, half hurled off his 
 feet by the glory of it. In the light of the world that was God, the answer 
 was always the same: “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
 Praise him.” 
 
 But near the end of Hopkins’s life, in the last five years, he who had 
 known the ecstasy knew the terror. He had lost God. And the light went 
 out, there was only the pitch dark. He had failed, he was forsaken, given a 
 taste of damnation; God had turned his back and abandoned him. With 
 this judgment upon him Hopkins wrote the six terrible sonnets, poems 
 of desolation, panic at God’s wrath and the loss of the light: “I wake and 
 feel the fell of dark, not day, / What hours, O what black hours we have 
 spent / This night!” A night that was eternity. 
 
 “No worst,” he said, “there is none.” 
 
 Wallace Stevens, too, saw the light of the world lit by the sun and gra- 
 ciously apparent. But the sun was not God. (“To my way of thinking, the 
 idea of God is an instance of benign illusion.”) In his poem of an unbe- 
 liever, “Sunday Morning,” this was the sun’s day, the source of light and 
 life. His faith was the faith of men who are mortal and perish: “We live in 
 an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night, / Or island 
 solitude, unsponsored, free.” Divinity, he said, must live within oneself, 
 in an awareness of the changing seasons, “passions of rain, or moods in 
 falling snow,” in the transient grievings and elations of existence. 
 
 For to be free was to live unaided, without superstition or myth in a 
 devotion to the sun that was “not as a god but as a god might be.” Begin, 
 he said, by perceiving “the inconceivable idea of the sun.” 
 
 “Of course,” Stevens said, “Eliot and I are dead opposites.” Stevens was 
 no wasteland poet. Eliot said, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” 
 He called the world a sunless place, a desert made up of Prufrocks and 
 Sweeneys who exist in a hell of boredom and loneliness where love has 
 failed. Like them you and I live our empty, defeated lives, and the only 
 
90 The Third Way 
 
 answer we hear is Sweeney’s: “Birth, and copulation, and death, that’s all, 
 that’s all, that’s all, that’s all.” 
 To escape the wasteland, the cactus land, Eliot showed the way, or 
 
 his way —one of suffering, penitence, ordeal—that led through the dark 
 night of the soul out of the hell of The Waste Land through the purgatory 
 
 of Ash Wednesday to the end of the journey, the Four Quartets, and the 
 light of the garden where love is, “and the fire and the rose are one.” 
 
 It was Eliot’s Divine Comedy. It was the way Dante took in 1300, early 
 one morning on the Thursday before Easter, when (he began) “Midway 
 in the journey of my life, I found me in a dark wood where the right way 
 was lost.” It was the start of Dante’s struggling climb from hell, the In- 
 ferno, up the penitential mountain of the Purgatorio to reach the Paradiso 
 where “all my will was moved by love” in the garden of the multifoliate 
 rose and the light of God. 
 
 But the worlds of Hopkins, Eliot, Stevens— these three —only prove that 
 a real poet defines a world entirely his own, each different from the rest. 
 He makes a region for his words to inhabit, a country of the mind, a cli- 
 mate, a scene visible to him and to me. And the greater the poet, the 
 braver is that world: Chaucer’s world, Dante’s hell, Milton’s paradise. Un- 
 less he creates one for himself (as Auden did not, as Ezra Pound did not), 
 his signature lacks a clear identity. 
 
 After class the students would ask, “Which do you really believe?” —as 
 if you had to choose one and only one, either of faith or unfaith. “I believe 
 them all three,” I said. “Each man described the world as it looked to him.” 
 
 What more can a poet say? 
 
 Anecdote of the Jar 
 
 I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
 And round it was, upon a hill. 
 It made the slovenly wilderness 
 Surround that hill. 
 
The Way with Words 91 
 
 The wilderness rose up to it, 
 
 And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
 The jar was round upon the ground 
 And tall and of a port in air. 
 
 It took dominion everywhere. 
 
 The jar was gray and bare. 
 
 It did not give of bird or bush, 
 
 Like nothing else in Tennessee. — Wallace Stevens 
 
 This simple anecdote tells what man can do to create order in the 
 world. In it, “I,” the artificer, has placed a small, ordinary jar on a hill in 
 Tennessee, and the jar has imposed a necessary order on a chaotic land- 
 scape. It has tamed the sprawling wilderness and, by being round, made 
 it surround the hill. Stevens’s jar is plain and gray and bare but pos- 
 sesses authority, an air of command. Like Keats’s Grecian urn, it is still 
 but speaks; like Eliot’s Chinese jar, it is still but moves. It has pattern and 
 shape, a symmetry made by human hands that, by its presence, holds in 
 check the wild disorder of nature. It alone defines the scene as no bird or 
 bush belonging to the natural world can do. 
 
 Stevens, a man with a rage for order, a connoisseur of chaos, might 
 well have said, “I placed a poem in Tennessee” —this plain, gray, bare 
 poem. And it did the same thing. It took dominion everywhere. 
 
 Self-Portraits. To leaf through a volume of Five Hundred Self- 
 Portraits is like reading autobiography —the artist narrated by himself. 
 With mirror in hand to do himself justice, he appears in fancy dress: 
 Diirer as Christ, Whistler astrut, Dante Gabriel Rossetti the perfect Pre- 
 Raphaelite, Modigliani an eloganted Pierrot. Inquiring, “Who am I?” he 
 is Sir Joshua Reynolds shading his eyes to look; he is Chardin with glasses 
 perched on the end of his nose; Hogarth posed with pug dog Trump and 
 the volumes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift; Ingres in youth and age; 
 Monet behind a white beard; van Gogh with one ear. Each gives a power- 
 ful sense of the artist alive before his canvas. 
 
92 The Third Way 
 
 Rembrandt painted ninety-seven portraits of himself, the first at 
 twenty-two with tousled curly hair and round inquiring eyes; the last in 
 1669, the year he died at sixty-three. They are full face, grave, unsmil- 
 ing (how tiresome to pose with a perpetual grin on one’s face). He wears 
 large dashing hats or small cushiony caps, is adorned with gold chains or 
 a single earring. Only once is he joyous, a cavalier in a plumed hat with 
 Saskia on his knee. 
 
 Misfortune aged him. Saskia died in 1642 after bearing four children, 
 three of whom died in infancy, his son Titus as a youth. Rembrandt had 
 a child by his servant Hendrickje that caused public scandal. In the evil 
 days that followed he found himself a ruined man, stripped of possessions 
 including friends. Still he painted self-portraits, defining who he was. 
 The face has grown battered, the wrinkles deepen round his tired eyes 
 and bulbous nose. The look is stolid, not confessing his faults or deny- 
 ing them, though twice he portrayed himself in scenes from the death of 
 Christ as one sharing the guilt. In the Elevation he is a soldier struggling 
 to erect the cross. In Descent from the Cross he stands on a ladder next to 
 the hand of the dead Christ. 
 
 The obsession with recording themselves— Rembrandt, van Gogh, 
 Goya, Picasso, Cezanne — reminds me of Montaigne, whose endless study 
 was himself. Montaigne said he would gladly paint his portrait full-length 
 “entire and wholly naked.” Yeats found more enterprise in walking naked; 
 Robert Lowell exposed himself “naked in a raincoat”; Theodore Roethke 
 cried, “I’m naked to the bone,” though few painters go that far baring 
 all. Mondrian in shame shot his portrait full of holes. Suzanne Valedon 
 painted herself in a bitter likeness, one of self-hatred. Georgia O’Keefte 
 said, “I find that I have painted my life without knowing” — but does she 
 mean this is O’Keeffe in pictures of clam shells and jimsonweed that re- 
 semble a vulva? In her Pelvis with Moon? 
 
 A writer is naturally a self-portrait painter. Unlike the artist he can 
 start at the outset, with birth and mewling infancy—as his beginnings 
 were drawn by Richard Steele: “I was bred by hand, and ate nothing but 
 milk till I was a twelvemonth old; from which time I was observed to de- 
 light in pudding and potatoes.” Steele grew in size to become “all width 
 
The Way with Words 93 
 
 and no length.” The painter at his easel could take the portrait from there. 
 
 “The mirror above all,” said Leonardo, “the mirror is our teacher.” 
 Some critics think the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait, resembling the one 
 he painted as a wrinkled, white-haired old man—a mirror image of 
 Leonardo’s enigmatic Gioconda smile. 
 
 How Would You Paint This Portrait? 
 
 By nature concupiscible but mild, 
 
 He was safe and sound, a square with rounded corners, 
 A brow not high, not low, of middling size — 
 
 The tenor of whose ways was always even, 
 
 Whose soul was naked while his well-dressed mind 
 And well-shod foot moved confidently forward, 
 Whose best was level and whose edge unfrayed, 
 
 A vapor of a man, an ablative person, 
 
 Though not, I think, an ablative absolute. 
 
 Self-portrait by Henry James: “I look as if I had swallowed a wasp.” 
 Whitman: “I go bathe and admire myself.” John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait 
 the face / Riding at anchor.” 
 
 », 
 
 in a Convex Mirror”: 
 My own portrait: “Je suis un pot cassé” (Psalms 31:12). 
 
 The Face Painter. It must be his name— Gainsborough — that 
 seems to fit a painter of imposing dignity and elegance. He was said to 
 be tall, fair, and handsome. But a new biography by Jack Lindsay shows 
 him up as a good-natured rebel and carouser, a pursuer as he admitted of 
 “fool’s pleasures,” a hard drinker and womanizer, fond of whores, actors, 
 and tavern keepers. Literary men were his aversion. He detested read- 
 ing books. 
 
 Gainsborough called himself a “face painter” and cursed the drudgery 
 of the “face business” by which he made a living. The need to paint the 
 rich and famous in their finery angered him; he had no taste for the fash- 
 ionable society of Bath and London, though among his sitters were the 
 Duchess of Devonshire and the exquisite Mrs. Perdita Robinson who was 
 
94 The Third Way 
 
 adored by the Prince of Wales. He was a master of portraiture. And the 
 ladies he scorned were, in eight hundred portraits, delicate, fragile crea- 
 tures in silks and satins to whom he gave grace and felicity; the men tall, 
 well-bred, distinguished aristocrats. They said he produced strikingly 
 exact likenesses that were character studies as well, yet to very few did he 
 trouble to add his signature. Among them were the most famous figures 
 of his time: Richardson, Sterne, Garrick, Sheridan, Mrs. Siddons, Burke, 
 Dr. Johnson. 
 
 Above all he wanted to paint landscapes, for which there was no mar- 
 ket. His own were stacked in his studio, unsold, though like Turner and 
 Constable he was a great landscape painter, a watcher of the skies. The 
 English countryside represented a way of life he loved. Sick of fine por- 
 traits and their sitters, even the immortal Blue Boy (who was an iron- 
 monger’s son), he yearned to “walk off to some sweet village where I can 
 paint landscapes,” and people them with simple country figures — shep- 
 herd boys, the Peasant Girl Gathering Sticks, the Cottage Girl with a Bowl 
 of Milk. His skies to match, said one critic, were “rich with fervid clouds.” 
 
 Both Gainsborough and Constable were from Suffolk, a half-century 
 apart. While sketching in Suffolk Constable wrote, “I fancy I see Gains- 
 borough in every hedge and hollow tree.” 
 
 Light Verse. Bill Harmon gave me a volume he has edited, The 
 Oxford Book of American Light Verse, without saying what light verse 
 really is beyond a collection of nonsense verse, parodies, flytings, limer- 
 icks, vers de société, burlesques, nursery rhymes, ditties, doggerel, puns, 
 jingles, grafhti, and tin-eared poems. 
 
 In A Bowl of Bishop, Morris Bishop, practitioner, provided a definition 
 of light verse as a mid-form between sober and comic, between playful 
 and sublime. John Donne wrote light verse in “Go and Catch a Falling 
 Star” and poetry in “The Ecstasy.” You find it in the Greek Anthology, in 
 Horace, Chaucer, Skelton, Shakespeare, Herrick, Marvell, Byron, Burns, 
 Yeats, Auden, Frost. When real poets write it you say it’s poetry, except 
 when T. S. Eliot makes up rhymes about cats. 
 
The Way with Words 95 
 
 Light verse is deft, aiming at lightwit. It is a way of looking and a way 
 of saying, its concern less with trivia than with love and taxes. It observes 
 people irreverently with laughter oftener than tears, witty about woe, as 
 in Frances Cornford’s 
 
 O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, 
 Missing so much and so much? 
 O fat white woman whom nobody loves, 
 
 though Sylvia Plath defined her terrifying poem “Daddy” in childish 
 singsong as light verse, and Dorothy Parker neatly listed the ways to com- 
 mit suicide: “Guns aren’t lawful, / Nooses give, / Gas smells awful, / You 
 might as well live.” Robert Lowell was contemptuous of it, scorning to 
 contribute to the New Yorker because “some of their poetry is light verse.” 
 John Updike says coolly, “I write no light verse now . . . light verse died,” 
 and purges his own of rhyme and meter, settling for very flat prose, as in 
 “Living with a Wife,” 
 
 it [life] stays as unaccountable 
 as the underpants set to soak 
 in the bowl where I brush my teeth. 
 
 Light verse is Robert Herrick saying 
 
 Tumble me down, and I will sit 
 Upon my ruins (smiling yet). 
 
 It is John Donne making love “To his mistress going to bed,” 
 
 License my roving hands, and let them go, 
 Before, behind, between, above, below, 
 O my America! my newfoundland, 
 My kingdome, safeliest when with one man mand, 
 My myne of precious stones, my emperie, 
 How blest am I in this discovering thee! 
 
96 The Third Way 
 
 To enter in these bonds is to be free; 
 Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. 
 
 In our time it is E. B. White (the last of the light versifiers) on the mys- 
 tery of love: 
 
 Animal love is the marvelous force 
 
 Marsupials take as a matter of course; 
 
 You find it in Aryan, Mongol, Norse, 
 
 In beetle, tarantula, ostrich, horse; 
 
 It creeps in the grasses and blows in the gorse, 
 
 It’s something all sponges were bound to endorse — 
 And only in humans it causes remorse. 
 
 “I like the poetic gait,” Montaigne said, “by leaps and gambols” — the 
 light fantastic, a sauts et a gambades. 
 
 Saint Cecilia and Alexander the Great. Dryden’s famous “Ode 
 to St. Cecilia’s Day” seems to me splendid, boisterous light verse, comic 
 too. In David Daiches’s opinion, “It is fine verbal fireworks, but in the 
 last analysis rather cheap stuff.” Mark Van Doren called it “immortal rag- 
 time.” Dryden himself was greatly relieved when all the town declared 
 it the best of his poetry, written, Dryden said, when he was an old man 
 of sixty-six and thought it the best but, being old, “mistrusted my own 
 judgment.” 
 
 His odd choice was to bring St. Cecilia into it. She was a Christian 
 martyr put to death in Rome in the second century and venerated for 
 a thousand years. According to legend, she vowed her virginity to God 
 and inspired the love of an angel. In Dryden’s time on St. Cecilia’s day, 
 November 22, a festival was held during which an original ode set to 
 music was performed in her honor. Dryden wrote two odes to St. Cecilia 
 to praise her purity and the power of music. In the second more famous 
 one, 1697, better known as “Alexander’s Feast,” he was stirred by an event 
 that scarcely added luster to her memory. 
 
The Way with Words 97 
 
 The tale of Alexander the Great celebrates his conquest of Persia at a 
 royal banquet—a godlike hero “aloft in awful state” seated on his new 
 throne with Thais at his side, the Athenian courtesan who had accompa- 
 nied him to Asia. Alexander, far gone in wine, drunken and riotous, was 
 decked out in a garland of roses and myrtle round his head, leering at his 
 mistress with Dryden’s full approval, 
 
 Happy, happy, happy pair! 
 None but the brave, 
 
 None but the brave, 
 None but the brave deserves the fair. 
 
 As the orgy increased in tempo, Alexander grew vain in his pride and 
 fought his battles over again, weeping maudlin tears as “thrice he slew 
 the slain.” And greater his passion grew each time he looked upon Thais, 
 who sat like a blooming Eastern bride beside him, till vanquished by 
 love and wine he sank upon her breast and “stamped an image of him- 
 self,’ then fell into a drunken slumber. Jarred suddenly awake by cries 
 of “Revenge, revenge!” from his followers, Alexander sprang up, seized 
 a flaming torch and, led by Thais eager for her own revenge against the 
 Persians, staggered off to set fire to Persepolis. 
 
 Unaware, of course, of these secular antics — such rage and such lust — 
 “at last divine Cecilia came” (that would be four centuries later from 
 Rome), and unlike old Timotheus, Alexander’s musician who had sung 
 to the lyre and roused him to these excesses, she sat quietly down to play 
 a little organ music. 
 
 In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer told the tale of Saint Cecilia more 
 soberly, giving it to the Second Nun to relate the Christian legend: how 
 this “maide and martyr” beseeched God “to kepe hir maydenhede,” and 
 was tortured and put to death by a Roman magistrate. 
 
 Married against her will to Valerian, a pagan, on her wedding night 
 Cecilia cried out, “O sweet and beloved spouse, I have an angel that loves 
 me and if you touch me he will slay you,” to which Valerian replied, “Let 
 
98 The Third Way 
 
 me see that angel. If he is a real angel I will do as you ask.” But first he had 
 to be baptized a Christian by Pope Urban I himself, after which the angel 
 came to stand beside Cecilia, holding crowns for them both of roses and 
 lilies from heaven. Valerian not only promised to leave his wife a virgin 
 but persuaded his brother to become a Christian too and be baptized by 
 the pope. 
 
 When shortly the brothers were arrested and beheaded for their crime, 
 the Roman prefect Almachius said to Cecilia, “What manner of woman 
 are you?” and ordered her put into a bath where she sat over red flames a 
 night and a day, sweating not a drop. Such defiance provoked Almachius 
 into sending for a torturer, who hit her with an ax three times and all 
 but beheaded her. For three days Cecilia lived in agony and died without 
 once having heard of Alexander the Great. 
 
 Persepolis was burned twenty-three centuries ago. Plutarch says Alexan- 
 der soon repented setting fire to what was now his palace and Persia his 
 kingdom, the mightiest empire on earth. Seven years after that famous 
 feast, having married a Persian princess, in 323 B.c. he died at not yet 
 thirty-three and was buried in a gold coffin. He had sought glory in con- 
 quest and never lost a battle. What he wanted was the world. 
 
 Thais prospered also as the mistress of the king of Egypt, the first 
 Ptolemy, who had been one of Alexander’s generals. As his faithful wife, 
 she bore him seven children. 
 
 ‘Nice Poets. Anthony Hecht reminds me to be on the lookout 
 for nice poets. In an essay in the New York Times Book Review, he says 
 that contemporary poets are an unpleasant lot, with bad manners and 
 nothing to say, naming a few exceptions all dead: Elizabeth Bishop, Mari- 
 anne Moore, Conrad Aiken. “I believe there are a few nice poets still alive 
 and writing, but they are in the distinct minority.” That’s a new criterion: 
 never ask if a poet is any good, only if he’s nice or not nice. 
 
 Back in the 1970s, when I used to complain to my students about 
 the fallen state of poetry, it still passed as indispensable, having to do, 
 
The Way with Words 99 
 
 Wallace Stevens said, with self-preservation. It still was distinguishable 
 from prose. A dozen years later a reviewer in the Times Literary Supple- 
 ment was saying favorably of D. J. Enright’s poems, “Enright is anxious 
 to keep poetry out of his poetry.” The critic Geoffrey Grigson was count- 
 ing on his fingers how many poets were left since the deaths of Yeats and 
 Eliot: “no major poets, no good poets at all, perhaps only six middling 
 poets worth attending to, and forty or fifty bad poets who must be called 
 inept, tedious, silly, pretentious, unintelligible.” In spite of his outcry, the 
 TLS went right on printing bad poems, some of which reminded me of 
 Brecht’s Baal where the poet compares life to a privy, as in these open- 
 ing lines: “Groping back to bed after a piss,” by Philip Larkin; James 
 One night I strode from you to ease my bowels”; William 
 Empson’s “And now she cleans her teeth into the lake.” 
 
 > (<9 
 
 Simmons’s 
 
 Eileen Simpson’s memoir, Poets in Their Youth, found modern poets 
 anything but nice in the way they lived and the way they bowed out. As 
 the former wife of John Berryman she knew them well, some of the like- 
 liest, when they flourished in ferocious competition, quarrels, discord — 
 Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Delmore 
 Schwartz—a generation of poets now dead, all casualties, whose lives 
 ended tragically in alcoholism, madness, despair, suicide. Lowell thought 
 there was a curse on his generation. Berryman found “something evil 
 stalking us poets.” 
 
 This is an old complaint. In 1606 the Elizabethan Barnabe Rich got 
 after the poets in a book titled Faultes, Faultes, and Nothing Else but 
 Faultes. “We have such a number of Bastard Poets in these days,” he 
 said. “Some will write a whole volume neither in rime nor reason.” He 
 called it a lame halting age of rude limping lines — the age of Shakespeare, 
 Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Campion, the young 
 John Donne. 
 
 Possibly Barnabe Rich had the poet Barnabe Barnes on his mind, who 
 published in 1593, as was the fashion, a collection of love sonnets. In one 
 sonnet Barnes is so carried away that he wishes he could be dissolved in 
 his mistress’s drinking glass, travel to her heart, and emerge once more 
 
100 The Third Way 
 
 “through pleasure’s part.” In a Latin epigram, Campion wrote, “Perhaps 
 you'll reach her heart; but Barnes what a fine lover you'll be when they 
 fish you out of a chamber pot.” 
 
 These days, Anthony Hecht doesn’t see any solution to poetry, just 
 finds himself in the same racket. He sounds nice. 
 
 Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited shows that the novelists can be un- 
 pleasant too, with the rudeness of a schoolboy. His opening chapters are 
 brilliantly puerile, with Sebastian Flyte and his friend Charles Ryder as 
 snobbish undergraduates at Oxford in the golden 1920s. But for me the 
 story descends to concern with Sebastian’s failure as a son in a wealthy 
 Roman Catholic family and as a man, the breakdown of his character in 
 alcoholism, decay, ultimate damnation. 
 
 It is the same problem that so greatly disturbed E. M. Forster —the 
 inability of England’s sons to grow up. Forster called it “the undevel- 
 oped heart.” The Times Literary Supplement calls it “a traditional English 
 malady.” Cyril Connolly called it a Theory of Permanent Adolescence. In 
 America we call it the Peter Pan “I won't grow up, I won’t grow up” or 
 Little Boy Blue syndrome, of those who remain schoolboys for life. 
 
 Sebastian clings to his nanny and his teddy bear, a lost child disposed 
 of by Waugh. 
 
 In A Doll’s House, likewise, Nora makes problematic her ever growing 
 up into womanhood. Ibsen was writing about “the new woman” in 1879 
 when she had far to go. Nora’s husband tells her fondly what she is: 
 a “typical woman,” a spendthrift, featherbrain, butterfly, his sweet little 
 songbird, a child with childish ways. That’s how she has behaved in the 
 eight years of their marriage while bearing his three children. Light- 
 hearted, full of capers, she wears her hair in a braid down her back, 
 giggles and pouts, romps and teases, clapping her hands, performing 
 tricks playful as a squirrel, assuring him she wants only to please and 
 obey him. “I'll be an elf and dance in the moonlight for you, Torvald!” 
 Secretly Nora is beset by terror that Torvald will find out she has bor- 
 
The Way with Words 101 
 
 rowed money from a moneylender and forged her father’s name. On 
 Christmas Eve she fibs, dances the tarantella, dresses for a masquerade 
 party, and considers suicide. When Torvald hears of her crime, he flies 
 into a rage, branding her a liar and hypocrite—till realizing he is safe 
 from discovery he grandly forgives his foolish child. 
 
 It is then Nora faces the truth about her marriage and her littlegirl- 
 hood: that she who was her father’s doll has for eight years been living in 
 a doll’s house with doll children. “That’s why I’m leaving you,” she tells 
 Torvald, blaming him. “I am a human being. My duty is to myself.” That 
 very night she does leave him—saying no word to her three children 
 whom she may never see again—and walks out the door free, a woman, 
 grown up at last. 
 
 Or is she running away, still a child? 
 
 Dickens: “No children for me” (he had ten). “Give me grown-ups.” 
 William Steig: “I don’t think anybody’s grown up.” 
 
 Bad Poets. Martin Tupper is forgot. Yet his rise and fall as a bad 
 poet was phenomenal, nothing like it in the history of English literature. 
 As late as 1933 the Oxford English Dictionary carried the entries Tup- 
 perian, Tupperish, Tupperism, Tupperize. Then they were summarily re- 
 moved since nobody would be expected to know their meaning, and the 
 Oxford English Dictionary of Quotations reduced its thirty-five quotations 
 of Tupper to one platitude: “A good book is the best of friends, the same 
 today and forever.” His rise to fame, when he became a household word, 
 was as sensational as his fall through heartless laughter was complete. 
 
 In 1838 Martin Tupper produced Proverbial Philosophy, “A Book of 
 Thoughts and Arguments” that dealt in jogging verse with moraliz- 
 ing about Christian love, marriage, friendship, hearth and home, all in 
 high-sounding inanities. He called it “My soul’s own son, dear image 
 of my mind.” The astonishing success it had led to more excesses, such 
 as continuing Coleridge’s unfinished “Christabel,” which Tupper titled 
 “Geraldine”: 
 
102. The Third Way 
 
 Her mouth grows wide, and her face falls in, 
 
 And her beautiful brow becomes flat and thin. . . 
 A serpent monster, scaly and green, 
 
 Horrors! —can this be Geraldine? 
 
 As versifier for public occasions like the Crimean War, Tupper had a 
 genuine admirer in Queen Victoria, who invited him to Windsor Castle 
 to read his works. He became a celebrity whom millions read, the au- 
 thor of what grew to thirty-nine volumes. His pious lines were carved 
 on tombstones. In 1851 he made a triumphant visit to America, where 
 Nathaniel P. Willis told him, “Your name is a classic amongst us.” Long- 
 fellow regarded him “pure as the driven snow” and wasn’t fooling. Tup- 
 per had dinner at the White House with President Millard Fillmore and 
 called on P. T. Barnum. 
 
 But the tremendous popularity waned and sank when people tired of 
 his preachiness. He was made the butt of ridicule, becoming “the most 
 parodied author in English or any other language,” a national joke that 
 Punch took pains to expose and revile. Hawthorne visited him in England 
 and declared him “the vainest little man of all little men, the ass of asses.” 
 Victoria’s admiration cooled. Yet blinded by vanity Tupper applied to be 
 knighted. He prepared to be made the next poet laureate at the death of 
 Wordsworth. He wrote his autobiography, My Life As An Author, which 
 contained the prediction that his name would never die. 
 
 So let Tupper live, at least as an amateur inventor who was the creator 
 of the glass bottle top, the kind that screws on: 
 
 He left a bottle top for us. 
 In that was Tupper glorious. 
 
 During his tenure as England’s poet laureate from 1972 to 1984, John 
 Betjeman aroused a certain amount of righteous indignation. Maybe so 
 brilliant a light-verse writer was never meant to be a laureate. Betjeman 
 carried about a teddy bear named Archie, and the London Times dubbed 
 him “a teddy bear to the nation.” He showed you can’t turn light verse 
 
The Way with Words 103 
 
 into solemn music. In his “Ode to Westminster Abbey,” the speaker ad- 
 dresses God: 
 
 Now I feel a little better 
 What a treat to hear Thy Word, 
 Where the bones of leading statesmen 
 Have so often been interr’d. 
 And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait 
 Because I have a luncheon date. 
 
 Recognition. Five English professors had lunch together in the 
 faculty dining room on East Campus. We talked about recognition, a 
 subject I brought up because it worries me. Were I still teaching, faced 
 with students demanding to know what’s the good of studying English 
 literature compared with learning computer techniques, I would have to 
 answer “recognition.” 
 
 I said that a professor had stopped me in the hall after reading a piece 
 of mine in the Atlantic titled “Three Nice People” (Sir Thomas More, Ben 
 Jonson, Sydney Smith) to ask, “Your maiden name was Smith, wasn’t it? 
 Was Sydney Smith your grandfather?” My colleagues shook their heads: 
 “Who is Sydney Smith?” Unrecognized by the illuminati? This was differ- 
 ent, I thought, from what Calvin Trillin calls selective ignorance, different 
 too from Virginia Woolf’s possessive awareness in her diary: “I’m read- 
 ing Sydney Smith—his life—with only one wish in the world: that I’d 
 married him. Isn’t it odd when the rumble tumble of time turns up some 
 entirely lovable man?” Macaulay called him “the Smith of Smiths.” 
 
 Leonard Bacon, a college professor who died in 1954, wrote, in Semi- 
 Centennial, “It is necessary to read Chaucer, whereas civilized intercourse 
 is possible between reasonable persons without a special knowledge of 
 Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde.” I would call this selective ignorance, choos- 
 ing whom to be ignorant of, though it needn’t be that selective. What 
 about not knowing the Hermit of Hampole? 
 
 How much recognition does it take? What acquaintance with language 
 
104 The Third Way 
 
 itself? Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, says, “Literature has become a 
 regional dialect spoken only in the universities.” But if a student limits 
 his pursuit to offbeat excursions in Science Fiction, how can he know 
 such regional poets as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, or the author of 
 “Go, Lovely Rose”? He’s impoverished in the midst of plenty. 
 
 No doubt the Symbolists asked too much recognition. When The 
 Waste Land appeared in 1922, Eliot was accused of expecting an alarming 
 degree of comprehension from his readers. In a poem of 433 lines were 
 quotations from and allusions to thirty-five writers, with passages in six 
 languages to describe our world as a wasteland and our plight in living 
 in it. Eliot tried to give a sense of human history and human failure, of 
 wastelands found in all tongues, all literatures, all times. A poem that 
 borrowed from Dante, the Bible, Shakespeare, Virgil, Saint Augustine, 
 Spenser, Wagner, Baudelaire, Goldsmith, the Jacobean dramatists proved 
 so dense that Eliot was persuaded to add footnotes. But the fifty notes he 
 tacked on were more obscure than the poem, with quotations in Latin 
 from Ovid, in French from Baudelaire, in German from Hermann Hesse, 
 in Italian from Dante, in Sanskrit from a Upanishad. Eliot himself de- 
 plored the notes as “bogus scholarship.” 
 
 It’s a modern Symbolist epic enormous in scope, written in a short- 
 hand that, when it came to light, many thought a spoof or hoax (“a grunt 
 would serve equally well”). Amy Lowell said “I think it is a piece of tripe.” 
 William Carlos Williams called it “the great catastrophe to our letters.” 
 Arnold Bennett asked Eliot if the notes were a lark or serious. “Serious,” 
 said Eliot. 
 
 To my students, The Waste Land gave recognition that some were sure 
 had changed their lives, though one student admitted ruefully, “I was 
 happier not knowing what it has to say.” 
 
 It is difficult 
 
 to get the news from poems 
 
 yet men die miserably every day 
 
 for lack 
 
 of what is found there. — William Carlos Williams 
 
The Way with Words 105 
 
 A Talent for Looking. What one needs of course is a talent for 
 looking. When I saw a copy of John Pope-Hennessy’s recent book, Learn- 
 ing to Look, I snatched it up, thinking here it is! the place to look and 
 learn how to. 
 
 Pope-Hennessy’s credentials are good. He has good eyesight. Like 
 Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, he is one of the primary art his- 
 torians of the century. He has devoted his life to studying works of art, 
 especially Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, most of all Dona- 
 tello. In the art world he is known as the Pope. 
 
 To look at art or anything else, he says, “Nothing makes one feel so 
 unclean as simulating enthusiasm” (unlike Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose 
 advice was “to feign a relish till we find a relish come”). In all honesty 
 he allows himself certain prejudices and blind spots, such as Rubens who 
 makes him uneasy, van Gogh whom he dislikes (my own prejudices are 
 art nouveau and Hieronymus Bosch). He used to find contemporary art 
 a source of pleasure when it consisted of Picasso, Matisse, and Gertrude 
 Stein. But these days the avant-garde is to him stale and dull (Gore Vidal: 
 “What garde were they avant to?”) He is devoted to Siena and Florence, 
 where he now lives, as repositories of Italian art; and as a boy was happy 
 looking at butterflies. 
 
 Objects, Pope-Hennessy says, mean more to him than people. With an 
 object your relationship may be kept whole and last forever, more satis- 
 fying than with a person, more constant. As this book (which is mostly a 
 catalogue of paintings that delight him) conclusively shows, there is only 
 one way to look at what you see, and that is the Pope-Hennessy way. It 
 is a simple imperative: Look! closely, steadily, and long. Make passionate 
 your sense of looking till at last you see them plain— Memling, Vermeer, 
 Monet, the world and the bo tree. 
 
 But why not apply the same formula to people (with an eye like Aunt 
 Mary Emerson’s that went through and through you like a needle)? 
 
 Rasselas and Candide. Dr. Johnson wasn’t much ofa storyteller, 
 but in his little tale of Rasselas he sounds like Voltaire on the subject of 
 happiness in the best of all possible worlds. The two books, published 
 
106 The Third Way 
 
 in the same year, 1759, agree in their view of that world—as a place of 
 pure evil and the cruelty of man. Voltaire, at least, managed to be witty 
 about it. 
 
 Rasselas was a young prince of Abyssinia, who lived in an earthly para- 
 dise in Happy Valley where no sorrows existed. There he knew the riches 
 of a palace that stood, in Dr. Johnson’s lapidary language, “from cen- 
 tury to century deriding the solstitial rains and equinoctial hurricanes, 
 without need of reparation.” But Rasselas was unhappy in paradise, so 
 weary of its “soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose” that he decided to 
 run away and look for the real thing. Together with his sister and the 
 philosopher Imlac, he escaped through a tunnel and came to Egypt, to 
 the everyday world of discord and utter misery. Here he found no sign 
 of happiness, only the human condition in a calamitous state—empty, 
 ridiculous, wretchedly unhappy —as wise old Imlac could have told him 
 in the first place. 
 
 Like Voltaire’s Candide and his philosopher Pangloss (who was an 
 optimist and so a fool), Rasselas went forth on a quest for what every man 
 wants without catching even a whiff of it. The search failed for them both; 
 happiness was unobtainable. Candide, after being beaten and enslaved in 
 a world of evil, disillusioned by malice, greed, and stupidity, sensibly re- 
 turned home to cultivate his garden. Rasselas also resolved to give up the 
 search, though what he did next is untold since the story breaks off with, 
 in Johnson’s words, a “conclusion in which nothing is concluded.” Per- 
 haps there was no more to say. Whether Rasselas found his way back to 
 the Happy Valley —or whether there ever was on this earth a Happy Val- 
 ley —I seriously doubt. So, presumably, did Dr. Johnson. 
 
 Poor Goldy 
 
 “Goldsmith is a fool, the more wearing for having some sense.” 
 
 —from a letter of Horace Walpole 
 
 He was a little man, with bulging forehead, 
 Face marked by smallpox, dressed in gaudy fashion, 
 Decked out in great wig, peach-bloom coat and breeches — 
 
The Way with Words 107 
 
 A strutter when he walked, his cane gold-headed, 
 Full of himself and pleading to be noticed. 
 
 For, risen at last to fame and intimacy 
 
 With men of wit — Burke, Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds — 
 As one who had been nameless among beggars 
 
 He prattled and spoke foolishly, indifferent 
 
 To truth, with an impassioned tendency 
 
 To say the wrong thing, pert and ludicrous. 
 
 (“A Man extremely odd,” said Mrs. Thrale.) 
 Taking him for a dunce, his wit for vanity, 
 
 His ways for childishness, they called him fool, 
 Dolt, simpleton, a laughingstock, a blunderer. 
 (“Sir, he knows nothing,” thundered Dr. Johnson.) 
 Yet at his death they gathered on his stair, 
 Weeping for one who wrote so like an angel, 
 
 As if an angel possibly could write 
 
 Like Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 What Are People For? A London doctor on television recently 
 defined an eccentric as one who tries to make people happy and wants 
 the world to be a better place. By this measure Wendell Berry is an eccen- 
 tric who, faced with an ailing world, offers his services to make people 
 happy in it. In a collection of essays, What Are People For? he gives some 
 disquieting facts leading to a cautious answer. Certainly people are good 
 for something. 
 
 Wendell Berry is, he says, a country person, who some years ago 
 turned from academic life to his native Henry County, Kentucky, on the 
 Kentucky River beside which his grandfather once had a farm. There as 
 a farmer bent on humanizing the world, he writes of the early influences 
 on him in that place—of Thoreau, who wanted his own world kept free; 
 of Huckleberry Finn, a regional tale “about a world I know, or knew” as 
 a boy on the Kentucky, part of the river system of the Mississippi. His 
 countryside was at one time good farming country, with farms diversi- 
 fied yet small enough to be owned by those tending such farms. Now it 
 
108 The Third Way 
 
 is not. His conclusion is, “We have nearly destroyed American farming, 
 and in the process have nearly destroyed our country.” We are living, he 
 says, among punishments and ruins. 
 
 Since World War II, the popular view has been that there are too many 
 people on the farm, a consensus that has driven too many to the city to 
 become the unemployed. Some say these people deserve to fail because 
 they don’t produce enough. The economy prescribes rationalized plunder 
 and abuse of the land, which “had never been more exploitive than it is 
 now.” The soil erodes, the air is poisoned, woodlands are wasted, indus- 
 trial farming brings exhaustion to the land. If you live in the country as 
 Berry does, you think about these failures. What people are for is to live 
 not as predators but as stewards to cherish and preserve the planet. 
 
 The extent of his concern appears in his alarm over the computer, in 
 his rejection of machines as a pestilence. Each time he sees a television 
 set he resolves not to own anything so stupefying. He regrets having to 
 use a car and travel by plane. He pictures himself as a writer who never 
 touches a typewriter, a farmer who works with horses and hates a chain- 
 saw, a lover of nature who laments having damaged his land when he 
 hired a man with a bulldozer to dig a small pond halfway up his hillside. 
 The woods floor slipped into the pond and left a lasting scar. 
 
 He lives on a river polluted by the eastern Kentucky coal mines and 
 by the cities. Walking sadly round his county, he sees the piles of im- 
 perishable trash, the landfill that receives daily fifty to sixty truckloads 
 of garbage from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York. He sees the fallen 
 barns and empty houses, and he thinks of the country people who “con- 
 nive in their own ruin,” not only victims but perpetrators — people who 
 once were good neighbors attached to the soil. So a place loses its mem- 
 ory of itself. 
 
 In an economy that corrupts and rejects the land, where everyone is a 
 loser and catastrophe a logical end, Berry’s voice is loud in anger. What 
 are people for? People on this earth are here to save each other, to replace 
 a destructive way of life with a return to nature, “the supreme farmer.” 
 For that is where the trouble lies. 
 
a JU 
 
 The Only Way 
 
A> The date is April 1991. More than ten years have passed since 
 Philip’s death. Between that day and this, through these pages among 
 these books, writing it as I lived it, where has the search for a third 
 way taken me? Sometimes it seems only in the direction of the sharpest 
 pointed stick. And yet, random though the search, the issue itself remains 
 the same. By staying alive, what have I learned? What way have I still to 
 go? Thoreau said it for me, “If we are alive, let us go about our business.” 
 
 The thing is, I have this lifelong habit of writing, as people do, to see 
 what I have to say. (Jane Austen: “If I say all that I have to say, I hope I 
 have no reason to hang myself.”) By now I must have said it all before. Yet 
 at eighty-five, with another book in print that should in simple futurity be 
 my last, I must try again. The reason isn’t hard to find: my age baffles me. 
 
 Lear, for instance, at fourscore and upwards, had grown old and frail, 
 too old to be of sound judgment: 
 
 a? 
 
 Tis the infirmity of his age,” Regan 
 said. “Yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.” Too late the proud 
 king realized the poor unaccommodated man he was, lacking the wis- 
 dom one would like to associate with old men, lacking the humility. And 
 for this he was made to suffer and die of heartbreak, while Kent asked 
 sorrowfully, “Is this the promised end?” Goethe once said, “An aged man 
 is always a King Lear,” a hanger-on, rejected by his children, toppled in 
 his pride, taught the one thing he can’t demand or expect in this world, 
 which is love. 
 
 “Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men,” wrote Eliot in the Four 
 Quartets, “but rather of their folly.” Inexorably, he found, the years fail to 
 bring what one had anticipated, “the long hoped for calm, the autumnal 
 serenity, and the wisdom of age.” Instead the way is in a dark bramble 
 wood, where allowance for the blind must be made. In his poem “Geron- 
 
The Only Way 111 
 
 tion,” Eliot described a little old man, neither wise nor heroic, who has 
 given nothing and got nothing in return, an old man stiffening in a de- 
 cayed house, saying to himself, “I have lost my passion. I have lost my 
 sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch” —an old man driven by the winds 
 to a sleepy corner. 
 
 Still, there is always the trying (“for us there is only the trying,” Eliot 
 said), followed by the end of trying that Lear knew. My contemporaries 
 appear to know, as they totter down the pike to a nursing or retirement 
 home, the truth that “men must endure their going hence,” that whatever 
 else they had hoped for, whatever road they took, this is where it ends. 
 The question that puzzles me is, do J know? 
 
 Maybe it’s resignation still to be learned. Maybe, since poets tend to 
 disagree, there’s another way of looking. “Grant me an old man’s frenzy,” 
 wrote Yeats. “Myself I must remake.” Twenty years earlier he had con- 
 cluded, “An aged man is but a paltry thing,” a scarecrow on a stick for 
 whom the world has no place. Now in his last poems he saw himself as a 
 wild old wicked man, a warty old guy mad about women, ready to relive 
 his youth upon a woman’s breast. “Who can know the year, my dear, / 
 When an old man’s blood grows cold?” 
 
 Being an old woman isn’t that easy. Whether one approves the flesh 
 and its clamor as Yeats did depends on one’s ability to please; on whether, 
 say, one more closely resembles a sylph or a tea cosy. Robert Louis Steven- 
 son’s advice in “Crabbed Age and Youth” was to be seasonable, to act 
 one’s age— whatever performance that is supposed to be—fulfilling the 
 role of Grandma Moses or Whistler’s mother. Or a senior citizen in her 
 golden years. 
 
 In any case I can pass myself off as an authority on the twentieth cen- 
 tury, having been born about the time of the coming of the ice cream 
 cone and the teddy bear, the airplane, the Model T, Elinor Glyn on a tiger 
 skin, and Mother’s Day. There were forty-five states then; nobody walked 
 on the moon or split the atom. The universe consisted of the Milky Way. 
 It was the Age of Optimism and Innocence, the dear old Golden Rule 
 days of Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal. At my birth the twentieth century 
 
12 The Only Way 
 
 was six years old, some forty years after the Civil War. In my childhood 
 I knew the white-haired, blue-coated veterans of the Grand Army of the 
 Republic and joined them at the yearly beanbake in the Grange Hall, 
 where we ate cold beans and hardtack on tin plates, and the old soldiers 
 squatted round an artificial campfire to sing war songs, “Tenting tonight, 
 tenting on the old camp ground.” 
 
 So if I boast of having begun life in the first decade and survived to 
 the last, who can deny me a panoramic view? As recording secretary, one 
 really ought to hang on till the end of a thousand-year cycle and the close 
 of a fabulous century, about which Bertrand Russell predicted that, fol- 
 lowing the certainty of nuclear war and the holocaust, the world wouldn't 
 even exist. 
 
 I'd hate to take on the twenty-first. 
 
 Or suppose in the time left I’m content to laugh and tell old tales and 
 write epiphanies to mockingbirds. (My yard man says, “Write about your 
 man with the lawnmower.”) Or turn into a dotty old character in a rock- 
 ing chair, sitting out the performance. Or join God’s Remnant Group that 
 meets Sundays. Or even fall for a slippered pantaloon. The person I once 
 was is still me, the customary self for whom nothing’s changed, as Rilke 
 said, “neither the sugar bowl, nor the glass of wine” — though it’s harder 
 now to climb trees, less tempting to chase wild geese. “My great ambition 
 is not to grow cross,” wrote Horace Walpole, and died at eighty plagued 
 with gout, as cranky and difficult as he ever was. Well along in years, May 
 Sarton woke one day to find herself abandoned, devalued and dwindled, 
 “less accepted and acceptable.” Whereupon she promptly wrote a book 
 about it, a journal of solitude, herself At Seventy, to count over and claim 
 her possessions — the flowers, the friends, Bramble the cat and Tamas the 
 dog who slept with her—and to relive the dailiness of life (with notations 
 like “It being Sunday, I changed the bed”). 
 
 I too am rich in everydays. 
 
 How rich that may be is a matter of opinion. Testimonials abound that 
 old age is not the cool of the evening but more like an incurable malady. 
 Some say a shipwreck. The artist Suzanne Valadon looked in a mirror 
 
The Only Way 113 
 
 and made a bitter portrait of herself at sixty-three as a bleak old woman, 
 full of wrinkles and weariness and self-hatred. I wish she might have said, 
 “My glass shall not persuade me I am old.” 
 
 Samuel Beckett dealt with the declining years by simply putting his 
 old folks into garbage cans. 
 
 After she died at eighty-one, Colette’s husband, Maurice Goudeket, wrote 
 a silly book, The Delights of Growing Old. “Say to yourself,” he wrote, “I 
 am breathing, so I am happy.” Jules Renard said yes, that’s all it takes: 
 “Every morning upon waking you should say: I see, I hear, I move. I am 
 not in pain. Thank you. Life is lovely.” 
 
 Such ready answers from the yea-sayers discourage me so much I went 
 to consult my friend Dr. Brown, who diagnosed the problem: depres- 
 sion (a hole in the soul). Ah, I said, but there are the stratagems, the 
 snatched and intermittent moments, though I had to admit that any- 
 one who winces this spring at the white flowering dogwood is depressed. 
 “Don’t apologize,” he said. I asked him to prescribe what Rosa (who used 
 to work for me) swore by, a little jolt medicine. 
 
 Better, I thought, to heed a melancholic like Dr. Johnson, who in old 
 age sensibly took time by the forelock. “I fancy that I grow light and airy,” 
 he said to Mrs. Thrale. “A man that does not begin to grow light and airy 
 at seventy is certainly losing time if he intends ever to be light and airy.” 
 
 Always the contradictions: this self saying “I won't give in,” that self say- 
 ing “You already have.” Yeats, aware of his quarrel with himself, wrote a 
 poem “Vacillation” to account for the way life is lived between extremi- 
 ties, in unresolved conflict between youth and age, sex and love, self and 
 soul, remorse and blazing happiness, between being blessed and being 
 cursed. In the end he called it the human way and took care to show how 
 human he was. For all to hear, he claimed there was more enterprise in 
 walking naked, yet advised Lady Gregory, “Be secret and take defeat.” He 
 found he had not only a self but multiple selves: an anti-self, an inner 
 self, a double self and a triple self, none of them in accord, and so wore 
 
14 The Only Way 
 
 masks and gave himself three separate names and identities: Michael Ro- 
 bartes, Owen Aherne, Red Hanrahan. 
 
 Yeats discarded his religion yet clamored to believe in God, pursuing 
 the occult, inventing in A Vision a whole cosmology to take the place of 
 a Christian heaven. He personally communed with ghosts yet doubted 
 their existence. He loved Maud Gonne yet hated her shrill ways as a 
 political agitator who preached violence, just as he loved and hated Ire- 
 land, my “fool-driven land.” He sailed to Byzantium yet never went. He 
 sought his soul yet to the last sided with the flesh, even though “You 
 think it horrible that lust and rage / Should dance attention upon my old 
 age.” Let me die, he prayed, “a foolish, passionate man.” And he called 
 it vacillation—a state so well adapted to the contradictions and con- 
 flicts of this world, and of his own nature, that he first titled the poem 
 “Wisdom.” The quarrel with oneself, he said, is poetry. It is a definition 
 of life. 
 
 While writing recently The World and the Bo Tree, I came upon a consis- 
 tency in myself, a pattern formed back in graduate school when I spent 
 most of an innocent year reading the fourteen volumes of Thoreau’s jour- 
 nal. Though concerned with nature (wildflowers, winter birds, bullfrogs), 
 Thoreau’s subject was himself. It was about a way to live. While alive, 
 he was thought provokingly shiftless and queer: Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 said he nibbled his asparagus at the wrong end. But his provident way 
 of seeking peace of mind up there in Concord seemed to me reasonable. 
 “Simplify, simplify,” he cried, an answer similar to Einstein’s, who said 
 that everything should be made as simple as possible (as simple as E = 
 mc’). Thoreau’s housing needs were few. His way was nonattachment to 
 possessions, clearing the mind of clutter in an untidy world, living at ease 
 with oneself, “no more lonely than the loon in the pond.” It’s the answer 
 that prompts me as a minimalist to murmur “Peace” over the morning 
 news, my solution to world confusion and riot. 
 
 I found it defined in Eliot’s poetry as in Yeats’s poetry, in their symbol 
 of the ceaselessly turning wheel (night and day, the seasons, the cycles of 
 birth and death), the frantic wheel of being from which, Eliot wrote, if you 
 
The Only Way 115 
 
 care enough you seek a way to the still center, to “a condition of complete 
 simplicity (costing not less than everything).” Escape from the same cir- 
 cling wheel Buddha offered to the five disciples in the Deer Park — the ever 
 turning, suffering world from which he found the way to the still center. 
 
 “There, perhaps,” wrote Christopher Fry, “by a serene elimination of 
 three-quarters of the earth, you can exist beside the still waters.” 
 
 Is the cry always in the air? Just now when I switched on the radio, a 
 lusty voice was belting out a rock number popular on the charts, plead- 
 ing for clearer directions and an even break. “Show me the way,” it went, 
 “show me the way and take my confusion away. Give me the courage and 
 strength to believe I'll get there some day.” 
 
 To sit and write, I said. To stand alone. To keep the forked end down. To 
 travel light, carrying the body along (in Fry’s words) because of its senti- 
 mental value. Needless to say there were other ways to go (Billy Graham: 
 “T really believe I am going to a literal heaven”), each in his own direction 
 — including headlong in the wrong direction. As Shaw said “The wrong 
 road always goes somewhere.” Once while driving over strange roads, a 
 friend of mine stopped at a fork, uncertain which road to take. She took 
 the right-hand one, then called out to a man at work on construction: 
 
 “Am I going the right way?” 
 
 He thought a while. “That depends, lady,” he said, “on where the hell 
 it is you want to get to.” 
 
 (Yogi Berra: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”) 
 
 Hemingway said he would go his way or not at all. He demanded as 
 his due three things from life: good food, good work, good time in bed. 
 When he lost these, not to be found again, he shot himself. Faulkner said 
 of this death, “I don’t like a man that takes the short way home.” 
 
 Someone asked John Cheever why he chose to write. He replied with- 
 out hesitation, “to try to make sense of my life.” But the journals he kept 
 for thirty years made no sense of the catapulting way he took—of alco- 
 hol, sex, drugs—that went blindly, unswervingly nowhere. Too late he 
 cried, “Oh, to be so much better a man than I happen to be.” 
 
 Yet the search goes on, because it has to. Jeremy Bentham helpfully 
 
16 ~The Only Way 
 
 listed fourteen kinds of pleasure the whole world feels and fourteen kinds 
 of pain. And he came out even. 
 
 Eventually Thoreau told why he went to Walden for his sojourn in the 
 woods: to find a way (which Whittier called “wicked and heathenish”) 
 because “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” After 
 two years of the solitude more companionable than the world outside, he 
 wrote, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.” When he 
 had found what he went for and had several more lives to live, he moved 
 the two miles back to Concord to his mother’s cooking and Mr. Emer- 
 son’s talk (a friend of his who liked to say, “Let us be men instead of 
 woodchucks”). But he hadn’t much time or many lives left. After Walden 
 was published in 1854, Thoreau lived eight more years, kept busy ob- 
 serving meanwhile how seeds are dispersed by the chickadees. When he 
 died he was planning further travel in Concord, studying the seasons and 
 “learning the language of these fields.” 
 
 This morning, picking up Walden, I wondered if Thoreau still told me 
 what I wanted to do in my own numbered days. “Do what you love,” he 
 said. “Pursue your life.” He didn’t say how to exactly, only how he did so 
 himself. I counted the things I’d be giving up if I left this countryside — 
 the pine woods and meadow, the five white-tailed deer wandering over 
 my dooryard, the peepers in the pond, the scarlet azaleas at the door and 
 scarlet cardinals perched on the clothesline. I counted the roominess, 
 with space to pursue my life, out here on Guess Road (wherever it may 
 be going). 
 
 And I thought of the time B. and the boys and I paid a visit to Walden 
 Pond, went swimming in it, then stood at the edge where his one-room 
 cabin had been that Thoreau borrowed an axe to build. It reminded me 
 of Sad6’s haiku: “My poor hut in spring / True, there is nothing in it— / 
 There is everything!” I wondered how often Thoreau returned to this 
 spot to look at his contentment again. 
 
 So far I'd sooner live under a lone pine tree than in a retirement home. 
 Not so my friends who chose to move this year into The Forest at Duke, 
 
The Only Way 117 
 
 a massive 42-acre retirement community just opened on Pickett Road. 
 Many are retired professors seeking permanent retirement, aware the 
 time has come to say, like Paulina at the end of The Winter’s Tale, “I, an 
 old turtle, will wing me to some withered bough.” 
 
 As a dovecote to fly to for refuge, it’s a costly haven if it means not to 
 be on your own again. You may in years past have traveled to the ends of 
 the earth, but this is the end of the road. Whether your house is the House 
 of Atreus or a Sabine farm, you rid yourself of it (except for the framed 
 family pictures) in exchange for a resting place where everyone is old, no 
 children play, no birds sing. The signs beckon, “This is the way the world 
 ends,” in good hands, secure in the shelter that is there, in comfortable 
 quarters till you die, one meal a day on the house, croquet for exercise, 
 long-term nursing care as needed. No one works at a retirement home. 
 
 At least one of my friends is optimistic the arrangement will prove 
 idyllic. “It will be like going away to college,” she said. 
 
 It’s hard to catch on. There is, I think, little use in reliving the past and 
 no point in calculating the future, since neither exists. The time is always 
 now, but now doesn’t exist either, being of zero duration. Who can claim 
 that time stands still? Or delays its operations? I marveled at first why the 
 movie Driving Miss Daisy was so entertaining when it concerned pro- 
 gressive old age, ending futureless with Miss Daisy institutionalized in a 
 home, deprived of most of her wits, being fed by her chauffeur a piece 
 of pumpkin pie. As Jessica Tandy, herself in her eighties, played the part, 
 Miss Daisy was a bossy old girl, willful and intolerant, who learned from 
 the black man the values of courtesy, loyalty, true affection. Not a sen- 
 timental tale, often funny (provided you don’t identify with Daisy), it 
 viewed lightly the spectacle of deterioration, a sorry sight unless looked 
 at with an easy mind. For if one can look and laugh, what does the answer 
 matter? The laughter must be kept. It must be kept. 
 
 But what laughter? More and more the absurdity seems to mock us, 
 you and me, for trying so hard. Such recent hellgazers as Camus, Sartre, 
 Samuel Beckett have brought the matter closer to our attention after 
 
18 The Only Way 
 
 calling human existence absurd and receiving the Nobel Prize for it. In 
 his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus considered the absurdity —heroic 
 man surrounded by the unknown in a godless universe wholly indiffer- 
 ent to him. The more he is deprived of certainty, the more he continues 
 to believe in his salvation and a life everlasting, in himself as the center 
 of creation, in the efficacy of prayer, in the stars absorbed in his destiny 
 and daily offering their guidance. Sartre stated in Being and Nothingness 
 his view of man’s plight in a world where “nothing, absolutely nothing, 
 justifies his existence.” Accepting the fact, Sartre believed, is a necessary 
 condition of being alive—the ultimate reality. 
 
 Beckett found man not only absurd but trivial, a loser. In Waiting for 
 Godot, two sad sacks unable to save themselves wait for — what? for mean- 
 ing, help, deliverance. But the waiting is pointless since whoever they wait 
 for will not come and presumably doesn’t exist. Their best solution is sui- 
 cide. Beckett made an absurdity of being born when we must die, thrown 
 into existence without asking for it, ending in senility and the inane fu- 
 tility of living—as in Endgame, with Hamm, a blind old man dying in a 
 collapsed world. Nothingness has a dull plot. 
 
 If the laughter is there, it sounds like a cry for help. When the Theatre 
 of the Absurd, influenced by Camus, Sartre, Beckett, sprang up in the 50’s 
 and 60’s, it presented the absurdity with ridicule and derision, in black 
 humor, “comedies of dread,” “comedies of menace.” Life is laughable, 
 Harold Pinter declared, because it makes no sense, filled with the isola- 
 tion that his plays, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, convey in a terrifying 
 world without purpose or meaning. Eugene Ionesco, who dramatized the 
 same world, said, “Personally, I regard existence as a misfortune.” In his 
 Rhinoceros men turn into rhinos. In The Chairs two old people on an 
 island await the arrival of important guests, and the stage fills with empty 
 chairs. 
 
 This is humorless stuff that overplays the tragedy, a way of look- 
 ing whose novelty has rather worn off. Which is the better way, Sydney 
 Smith’s amused laughter or Kafka’s loss of the castle, Kierkegaard’s fear 
 and trembling? With either choice, the joke is obviously on us. We are 
 the “quick comedians” who are guilty of inventing paradise, and should 
 
The Only Way 119 
 
 be able to laugh at ourselves and at our cheek. For if this is a tale told by 
 idiot or shaggy dog, not to see the joke is to be the butt of it. The only 
 remedy is laughter that is an admission and an acceptance. 
 
 Democritus found the condition of man absurd and laughed. 
 
 Heraclitus found it absurd and his eyes filled with tears. 
 
 Montaigne saw the absurdity and agreed with Democritus: man is the 
 fool of the farce. His solution was a scandalous serenity: “I do noth- 
 ing without gaiety.” Careless of salvation, he put his faith in being alive 
 among the available pleasures, which he enumerated. Order was one, I 
 remember, and cleanliness and kisses and good conversation. 
 
 Lightly was the way Sydney Smith regarded his state, notably the plight 
 of being old—“a bore, I admit, for you are left for execution, and are 
 daily expecting the death warrant.” To him the world was still an enter- 
 taining place. Though at the time he could neither walk nor breathe, “in 
 other particulars,” he said, “am well.” Though he had retired from busi- 
 ness as a diner-out and was eating nothing he liked and doing nothing 
 he wished, “I am careless and good-humoured,” he wrote Lady Holland, 
 “at least good-humoured for me.” 
 
 It was Sir Thomas More’s way to “die merrily,” taking leave as he went 
 to the scaffold to be beheaded: “I pray you, see me safe up, and for my 
 coming down let me shift for myself.” Others have been nearly as im- 
 perturbed. Montaigne said, “Let death find me planting my cabbages.” 
 With only months to live, Dr. Johnson resolved to learn Dutch. A month 
 before he died Yeats wrote, “I do nothing but write verse.” Socrates, con- 
 demned to death, turned to a musician: “Teach me your song.” 
 
 “What use, when you are going to die?” 
 
 “So as to know it before I die.” 
 
 “Are you afraid to die, Spartacus?” 
 
 “No more than I was to be born.” 
 
 But death is part of the inquiry. Everything I meant to do and haven’t 
 yet done, like climbing the Matterhorn, requires being veritably alive 
 rather than face to face with extinction. Yet the question I always used 
 
120 The Only Way 
 
 to ask now answers itself: “How does the story end?” When his wife 
 Katherine died, E. B. White told a friend, “I am just a little man in a 
 ten-room house, with nowhere to go but on.” Matisse (who had said, 
 “Loeuvre est paradis”) in his seventies sat in a wheelchair no longer able 
 to paint, making hundreds of paper cutouts. Harold Nicolson, called by 
 The Times “a professional human being,” wrote at seventy, “I always have 
 the feeling, considering that we live in a world of chaos and transition, I 
 ought to be more unhappy than I am,” and died in ruins at eighty-two 
 oblivious of the world that had delighted him. Clive Bell, whom I knew, 
 Vanessa’s husband, died a senile old man who talked baby talk and went 
 around with his fly unzipped. Henry James on his deathbed traced words 
 with his fingers on the bedsheets. May Sarton at eighty wrote Endgame 
 with its mocking title to say she was undone: “So this is the beginning of 
 a new journal of a woman who now knows she will never get well.” (She 
 died in July 1995.) 
 
 All of which must be borne in mind—not, however, forgetting the 
 wild old wicked men like Yeats, wherever they are, with eyes “glittering 
 and gay,” who scandalously defer the day of reckoning. On Masterpiece 
 Theatre last night, in the film Summer’s Lease, John Gielgud played to the 
 hilt the comic part (sometimes referred to as “Old Couchez Avec”) of a 
 jaunty old goat spending the summer in Italy, still crazy about women, 
 brazen and unrepentant. 
 
 In an interview David Frost recently had with him, Gielgud at eighty- 
 seven looked indestructible, reminiscing with an unfailing memory, sit- 
 ting bald, big-nosed, and erect during Frost’s probing, his face full of 
 laughter as he reflected, “It is marvelous not to be blind or deaf or dotty.” 
 He appears in commercials for champagne. Last year at eighty-six he did 
 his first nude scene. His exhibitionism, he says, is rampant as ever, but 
 with no need to outwit or outlive anybody. Aware that old characters 
 become caricatures of themselves, he has less dread of death than of be- 
 coming an old guru, treated with awe. When Frost inquired what were 
 his favorite lines, Gielgud quoted Hamlet asking Horatio, at the end of 
 the play: Since no man knows what the future will bring, what does an 
 
The Only Way 121 
 
 early death matter? “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it 
 will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.” 
 
 George Sand set Flaubert’s teeth on edge when she defined old age as 
 “the happiest and most propitious part of life.” No doubt he winced at 
 Robert Browning, who in the same year was shouting “Grow old along 
 with me! / The best is yet to be.” As pious optimists, both were putting 
 us on; nobody likes to be old, no one ages like vintage wine. George 
 Sand’s outrageous claim at sixty-two of having reached the time when 
 old age “reveals itself in all its sweetness” was meant to impress Flaubert. 
 A grandmother with her nights of passion behind her and fires abated, 
 she enjoyed assuring him that the close of life was the happiest and best. 
 He didn’t have to believe her, it being a flat-out lie. 
 
 Yet the opposite view (Cyril Connolly: “Decay along with me, / The 
 worst is yet to be”) seems equally wrong. Muriel Spark was forty-one 
 when she published her condescending satiric novel of old age, Memento 
 Mori, whose infirm characters are between seventy-nine and ninety- 
 three, twelve of them females confined to the Maud Long Medical Ward, 
 ready for the scrap heap and all called Granny. At intervals most of 
 Mrs. Spark’s cast receive a mysterious phone call, a voice saying “Re- 
 member you must die” —a fact of life, you would think, each had got 
 wind of by now. But they respond to this black humor by making no 
 sense of the message, confused and vulnerable as they are, absorbed most 
 unbecomingly in the long defeat, stricken with every known ill of old 
 age from arthritis, cataracts, deafness, incontinence, impotence, brittle 
 bones, tremors, stroke, to humiliation and despair, senility, loss of their 
 faculties. (Walt Whitman also listed constipation and ungracious gloom.) 
 They haven’t even compassion for each other; love is entirely missing. 
 In the end they die, everyone dies, which may be a record Muriel Spark 
 has set, killing off all her characters, more than the dead in King Lear. A 
 funeral with cremation is fittingly included. In this macabre novel, pre- 
 occupied with death and meant to amuse, the one remedy for the plight 
 of ripe old age is to avoid reaching it—or to become like the single alert 
 
122 The Only Way 
 
 individual, Miss Jean Taylor, at eighty-two profoundly religious therefore 
 peaceful and acceptant, resigned to awaiting the last things, “death, judg- 
 ment, heaven and hell.” 
 
 The critics agreed in calling the book comic. 
 
 I remember my mother undaunted and scrappy at eighty-five, thinking 
 herself ageless. It was other people, the wizened old codgers and duffers, 
 who had lived too long and become grunts (or become public monu- 
 ments, like the old man in Conrad’s story: “He must be eighty-five today. 
 The calmness of advanced age gives a solemnity to his manner”). There 
 was nothing solemn about my mother. “I have a bone in my leg,” she 
 would complain if someone inquired too solicitously about her health. 
 Her memory had grown so conveniently flexible that she recalled what 
 she wanted to of the past, the way it ought to have been, especially the 
 ideal Victorian childhood and her youth as a Gibson girl with starched 
 bosom and pompadour. Even her slang harked back: bumbershoot, cur- 
 rent in 1896 when Lizzie was twenty; skedaddle, the whole caboodle. 
 Though occasionally irate at the way the world had gone to the dogs and 
 threatened her with the poorhouse (at the inroads too made by beer, sex, 
 mashers, short skirts, Sunday movies, the pope, and Woodrow Wilson), 
 she was unsinkable. There was no defeat in her, no giving in. She liked 
 being alive, age couldn’t wither her, longevity became her. More fearless 
 than God-fearing, she met death with scorn as unworthy of notice, and 
 died believing she would live to pay her electric bill and sweep the snow 
 from her sidewalk. From her hospital bed with almost her last breath she 
 said, “I'll be home by Christmas.” 
 
 Like her I live alone, less eventfully than could be called a lifetime burn- 
 ing in every moment. I sawa program on PBS the other night about “the 
 nighttime activities of the sea turtle,” and they appeared few, strikingly 
 similar to my own. Stay tuned. The world, of course, is judgmental, offer- 
 ing kind discouragement. It would assign me a lessened if not submerged 
 role fitting to my years, would disqualify me, help me across the street; 
 with deference, put me in my place; with patient concern advise and ad- 
 
The Only Way 123 
 
 monish me to fasten my seat belt. Though I still enjoy aerobic dancing 
 to the “Salty Dog Rag” —a last try to be airborne—I’m treated with un- 
 bearable respect and occasional alarm for remaining upright. I have no 
 defense against solicitude. Age is diminution, what more to say of it? (in 
 Frost’s words, “What to make of a diminished thing?”). 
 
 “You know, Helen,” people tell me, “you’re remarkable for your age.” 
 And I stop at the bakery for some poppy-seed rolls and wonder how 
 lucky I am, and whether I’m getting to be like the old woman in Lafcadio 
 Hearn’s story who lost her dumplings—which, alas, appears more than 
 likely when, on the way home, at the filling station for gas I say to Ben 
 Crabtree, “Please fill up my carburetor.” 
 
 “With what, ma’am?” 
 
 “Water, of course.” 
 
 He looks under the hood without cracking a smile. “Carburetor’s full, 
 ma’am.” 
 
 As for the obligation not to be unhappy, not even God manages that. We 
 both quail a lot. For years I hated my solitude, having no talent for it, 
 till it came to seem less a predicament than a company of one, nature’s 
 beneficent plan to set me free —free, that is, of undue hope of a new dis- 
 pensation, free not to care. Most of all, not to care. 
 
 Whatever way it was I intended to go—what third way I had in mind to 
 take and presumably am taking (there being fourteen ways to Sunday) — 
 I must be practically there. Into the third act, so to speak. At least I know, 
 however the performance ends, the laughter must be kept. I know that 
 the only way—for me, I mean —is to accept the absurdity, even though I 
 forget it all the time and leave the laughter to the gods (who, said Plato, 
 love a joke). Now when my son David phones I say, “Fine, everything’s 
 fine,” which is true enough without going so far as the actor Herbert 
 Beerbohm Tree each time someone asked “How are you, Mr. Tree?” “I, 
 oh, I’m radiant!” he cried. 
 
 The thing perhaps is to keep a firm grip on the devices at hand— 
 the books, typewriter, and corner of my study where the sun streams in, 
 plus five acres available for cross-country travel with meanders along the 
 
124 The Only Way 
 
 way. “In my room the world is beyond my understanding,” wrote Wallace 
 Stevens. “But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four trees and 
 a cloud.” 
 
 “The thing perhaps is,” said Cummings, “to eat flowers and not to be 
 afraid.” 
 
 And Yet 
 
 And yet it’s always so: 
 
 The way you try to outwit nemesis 
 And laugh at doom, mock fate, show 
 Disrespect for wrath, escape 
 
 Your destiny. But, look, it’s only 
 
 Part of the jest, the same absurdity. 
 And I’m the one to know. 
 
 When I Was Born and Full of Beans 
 
 Oklahoma wasn’t a state 
 
 And the Model T wasn’t a flivver, 
 
 The heavens roared, the earth did shake 
 
 In San Francisco’s great earthquake, 
 
 And Proust had his bedroom lined with cork, 
 And Ibsen died. On this glorious date, 
 
 I distinctly remember my father singing 
 “Come, Josephine, in my flying machine,” 
 Which, scared of flying, he didn’t mean, 
 
 And my mother’s name was Lizzie. 
 
 The Woman Whose Birthday Was Charlemagne’s 
 
 Having grown lately younger than I am, 
 Less withered than the self I used to be 
 With sagging soul and wrinkled in my mind, 
 
The Only Way 125 
 
 Now young like Yeats’s wild old wicked man, 
 A thing of flesh, a foolish passionate crone, 
 All passion spent and plenty more to spend, 
 Negotiable before the night is done— 
 
 Say it’s playacting if you will, 
 
 Iam Duchess of Malfi still. 
 
 (Charlemagne will be 1,250 years old on April 2.) 
 
 One Goes Abreast 
 
 You ask me where I am going. 
 Quoting from Don Quixote 
 
 I answer honestly, 
 
 “That is as it may turn out.” 
 
 I leave the matter hopeful 
 
 Like the man in Sandburg’s poem 
 Who, asked the unfathomable question, 
 Answers, “Omaha.” 
 
 Yet in a strait so narrow 
 (Quoting now from Shakespeare) 
 Who knows the destination 
 Where one but goes abreast? 
 
5 
 
 Reunion 
 
 While flying this June to my college reunion, I began John Updike’s latest 
 novel, Rabbit at Rest, which starts off with Rabbit Angstrom in a Florida 
 airport feeling something ominous threatening him that was “his own 
 death, shaped like an airplane.” Poor scared Rabbit —staring down the 
 sky at old age and dissolution, thinking there is no mercy —was giving up 
 the rabbit chase at fifty-six. And all the while here I was staving off equally 
 ominous thoughts at the idea of returning for my sixty-fifth reunion —as 
 if with any sense of propriety one would want to. What possessed me to 
 make this improbable journey? 
 
 Anne met me at the airport in Elmira, New York, bringing with her 
 Tebe, another member of the Class of 1926, who was waiting unnerved 
 out in the car. I hadn’t seen either of them since I was eighteen. So when 
 a little old white-haired lady stood nearby peering uncertainly about, I 
 assumed it had to be Anne (once tall, raven-haired and beautiful), who 
 with a start greeted me and then forgot where she had parked the car as 
 I forgot I had to go and pick up my suitcase. The same startled reunion 
 occurred with Tebe, murmuring her name to introduce herself. I loved 
 them both for being alive, keeping their identity, presumably their sanity, 
 against heavy odds in these going-on-a-hundred years. Luckily we had 
 all three become great talkers, given our big chance now to hark back to 
 the twenties. 
 
 I was there as an impostor, having left Elmira College at the end of 
 sophomore year to transfer to another school, another discipline. I had 
 gone in the first place to this upstate woman’s college sixty miles from 
 home because I had a full scholarship, but chiefly because there were 
 the four of us who entered together — Lucy, Tebe, Dottie, and I—friends 
 since childhood. We lived that first year in Dwight Cottage on the edge of 
 campus, and my roommate Dottie and I (only we two) amused ourselves 
 
Reunion 127 
 
 as if we were away at summer camp, breaking the rules, messing around, 
 blithe and noisy. For two years we managed to have it both ways: to stay 
 on the honor roll and to learn as little as possible from our professors ex- 
 cept in English courses. I had rebelled at home against my mother’s strict 
 rule, and I rebelled, often at real inconvenience, at Elmira for the plea- 
 sure of it. “But you were so young,” Anne said today. I was sixteen, old 
 enough to know better. Yet this afternoon as we took a quick tour of the 
 place and I saw Cowles Hall again beside the lake, and Dwight Cottage 
 now somebody’s private residence, I reflected that Elmira hadn’t been 
 such a bad choice. It had given me time in the midst of friends and com- 
 panions to grow up a little before facing the consequences at a big school 
 like the University of Chicago. 
 
 Instead of a fool’s errand, the reunion wasn’t so bad either; in a strange 
 way it justified itself. If you can’t go home again, maybe you shouldn't try 
 until it no longer matters that you can’t, until nothing remains either of 
 sadness or regret. I went back to learn about the passing of time, if there 
 was anything good to say about it. I went, being curious, to see how the 
 Class of 1926 had turned out; and the result was what you’d expect, the 
 same way everybody in Philadelphia or Upper Sandusky turns out. In- 
 evitably I was most aware of the ones lately dead, who had also returned 
 for their reunion—Lucy, Dottie, Louise, and the rest. Twelve of us from 
 a class of three hundred showed up in the flesh, several escorted by their 
 daughters who with a steadying hand kept them on track. A few were 
 vague, frail and bewildered, staring with trembling lips and questioning 
 eyes. “Jesus loves you,” one said to me. But as the most venerable group 
 there, we attended the functions—which meant riding around campus 
 on mechanized carts driven by deferential students chosen to give us life 
 support. And we accepted praise for apparent survival, in particular Betty 
 Humeston, who flew in from California to prove she was alive: her name 
 had been listed in the Alumni News in the obituary column. 
 
 Dottie and I left Elmira together, she never to attend college again, 
 and now she was dead of leukemia. I missed her suddenly, her laughter, 
 her joyous mockery of the passing scene. She would have loved the noon 
 picnic on the lawn with beer and balloons, the go-cart candlelight proces- 
 
128 The Only Way 
 
 sion to serenade the President, the President’s reception where we were 
 plied with gin and tonic, the class dinner with choice of wines where no- 
 body knew the words to Alma Mater. She would have agreed we’d wasted 
 time breaking the 101 rules in the Gray Book when today Elmira gave the 
 student “the chance to be himself” with no rules to break, chock full of 
 freedoms. Though begun as a pioneer woman’s college in 1855, twenty 
 years ago it became coeducational. And the three of us who shared a suite 
 in Peary Hall this weekend were struck by the sight on our floor of one 
 toilet labeled Men, the other Women, a proximity of the sexes that Dottie 
 and I would have applauded, but what would our mothers say? 
 
 As it happenened, any lessons in conduct I meant to profit by were not 
 being offered this year at Elmira: how not to grow too visibly geriatric, not 
 to become through time’s undoing a cliché, a lingerer — forgetful, repeti- 
 tious, deaf, out of it. My two companions were widowed old ladies who 
 hadn’t yet caved in. Long ago I had escaped Elmira and gone my own 
 way, and they had not. They had conformed, obeyed the rules. But in the 
 end had it made any difference? Tebe, stout and spectacled, lived alone 
 now on the family farm where she was born and grew up; Anne was a 
 CPA in her hometown who still read the Wall Street Journal. We all three 
 drove Oldsmobiles. We no longer used words like “swell” and “you said 
 a mouthful” and “the cat’s pajamas.” Nor did we talk much of impon- 
 derables. They at least were churchgoing and conservative. They gave me 
 fond salutation and farewell, offering consolation from my peers but no 
 real remedy for being my age and single. We made no plan to meet again. 
 
 Had my roommate Dottie been alive beside me, I would have whis- 
 pered the answer in her ear, “Only to gods in heaven comes no old age, 
 nor death of anything.” And we would have laughed aloud at our pre- 
 dicament. 
 
6a 
 
 Colette's Way 
 
 Of her seventy-three books Colette’s masterpiece is surely Chéri, a novel 
 I read again the other day and found wiser than ever in understanding. 
 Trust Colette to know how it feels for an older woman to fall in love with a 
 man half her age or younger. She was fifty-two, enough like her character 
 Léa to play the part when Chéri was adapted for the stage—the story of a 
 love affair between the aging courtesan Léa and the twenty-year-old son 
 of her friend Charlotte Peloux. Chéri she calls him, a handsome young 
 gigolo, spoiled, vain, childishly demanding, accustomed to taking what 
 he wants. The difference in their ages defines the plot when what should 
 have been a passing affair turns into a liaison of six years, finally into 
 incurable love from which neither can be free. With Chéri’s marriage, ar- 
 ranged by his mother to a young heiress, Edmée, who bores and wearies 
 him, Léa struggles to release herself from the unbearable loss, to accept 
 the end of her lovemaking, her youthfulness, her love. After months of 
 separation, one night Chéri suddenly appears, throwing himself sobbing 
 upon her, and for the first time they declare their love and Léa lets herself 
 believe he has returned to her forever: “How stupid I was not to under- 
 stand that you were my love, the love, the great love which only comes 
 once.” Léa is cruelly mistaken. In the morning Chéri sees her as she is, 
 betrayed by daylight, with a double chin and wrinkled neck. At his in- 
 stinctive withdrawal Léa cries, “You came here and found an old woman” 
 and sends him out of her life: “Quick, child, quick, go hunt your youth. 
 I love you. It’s too late.” The book ends with Chéri walking quickly away 
 like a man escaping from prison. 
 
 Six years later (after meeting Maurice Goudeket, nearly twenty years 
 younger than she), Colette wrote a sequel, La fin de Chéri, as if she 
 needed to make clearer to herself a point already made, to say again what 
 a woman’s aging can do to love. Five years have passed since Chéri left 
 
130 ~The Only Way 
 
 Léa’s bed, and the accidental meeting between them, cleverly arranged 
 by his conniving mother, is a fatal one. The time is 1919. Léa, now in her 
 sixties, has deliberately allowed herself to grow into an immensely stout, 
 wrinkled, gray-haired, elderly lady. She has accepted old age, she has 
 embraced her fate with a terrible finality, who never before went with- 
 out makeup, who said of her appearance, “Naked, if one wishes, but not 
 half-dressed.” Old and sexless, Léa is inaccessible, beyond desire, beyond 
 reach and beyond recall. With this knowledge, Chéri, now thirty years 
 old, leaves her for the last time. He wants to cry out, “Stop! Show me 
 your real self.” But that Léa no longer exists. In his grief, Chéri spends the 
 final month of his life listening to the reminiscences of an old and miser- 
 able woman, La Copine, another of his mother’s friends. Then he shoots 
 himself. 
 
 The tale is tragic and is meant to be. Colette recognizes the ultimate 
 way that love, however deep and eternal, can be denied. But she didn’t let 
 it frighten her. When she married Maurice Goudeket she was sixty-two 
 and arthritic. 
 
 A Thousand Pardons. The only mystery in Katinka Loeser’s 
 book is its title. A thousand pardons for what? I looked it up in concor- 
 dances as possibly a quotation from Shakespeare or the Bible, phoned 
 the New York Times Book Review (who had asked me to review it) to see 
 what they thought it meant, who phoned the publisher at Atheneum, 
 who didn’t know either and phoned the author, who said in some sur- 
 prise, “It’s just something you say.” 
 
 So, a thousand pardons for what? She can’t mean “Excuse me for 
 living” when she gives unassailable proof she has found by this time a 
 way to live in an autumnal world. Maybe it’s something she says when 
 she steps on a cat. 
 
 Katinka Loeser didn’t invent the quiet days and four seasons of the 
 later years she writes about, the azaleas at the doorstep, the two white cats 
 winding round her feet, her husband—the writer Peter De Vries —wan- 
 dering in and out of her house and her consciousness, the children grown 
 
Colette’s Way 131 
 
 and gone from home. Though in these pieces she may call him Gladstone 
 and herself Betsy, it’s always the same man, same woman, same cats. She 
 begins, “What has happened here is this: there’s been a lot of rain.” She 
 ought to start weeding the garden. Last year seven deer entered the yard 
 and ate the lilies. Her friend Louise phones she has lung cancer, and Betsy 
 listens, slowly replaces the phone. 
 
 Take care, the book says, to live it up while you can, as long as you can. 
 They have been burglarized twice but Gladstone refuses to let her buy a 
 gun; the cats are no good as watchdogs. After the second break-in they 
 add an alarm system, a main alarm with alarms to alarm it, and people 
 say “Take care.” She lets a cat in, the alarm goes off, the police arrive and 
 say “Take care.” Then the phone rings. Her friend who has cancer is call- 
 ing, and Betsy tells her “Take care.” 
 
 She lives her days conscious of their terrible brevity and need to be 
 counted. On a September morning, “My heart sinks as I begin to under- 
 stand that this is going to be what is called a perfect day.” In the mailbox 
 will be nothing but Christmas catalogues, the soup will boil over, the roof 
 will leak, the rain will remind her how she abjured salvation when as a 
 child she watched baptism by submersion. Salvation was a condition that 
 left you sopping wet. Suddenly she says, “Louise’s house is empty now, 
 what shall I do with the telephone number?” 
 
 Or it’s February, a month for which she has no respect and reduces to 
 a scornful “Feb” because nothing happens in it. Gladstone’s birthday is 
 in Feb, but since he deplores birthdays they observe the occasion by his 
 inviting her to his weekly trip to the dump. She glances in her closet, says 
 she hasn’t a thing to wear. “We don’t dress,” he tells her. Or it’s Sunday, 
 when she lies in bed to work the acrostic in the Sunday paper, and Glad- 
 stone in his faded yellow pajamas looks “like a frayed stalk of last week’s 
 celery.” At dusk they go to a neighborhood cocktail party that is of less 
 consequence than the walk home, when she directs the flashlight as Glad- 
 stone collects litter along the road and drops it into a garbage bag. He 
 has, she reflects sadly, “the hopeless ideal of an impeccable earth.” But so 
 has she, or nearly. 
 
132 The Only Way 
 
 Is she begging our pardon for that? More likely it’s for holding on 
 fiercely with both hands to what she’s got—the two of them together — 
 taking care to keep it that way while she still can. 
 
 On September 25, 1993, Peter De Vries died of pneumonia at his home in 
 Westport, Connecticut. 
 
 Héloise. I’m like the old lady who loved the word Mesopotamia. 
 
 I think with longing of world’s ends but sit at home with a book and travel 
 
 tonight to the Paris of eight centuries ago — like Colette who read her way 
 
 round the world, and Emily Dickinson who read herself out of Amherst. 
 
 Héloise was an uncommon woman whom the medieval poet of the 
 Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun, called beyond compare: 
 
 By my soul I do not believe 
 That another like her ever lived. 
 
 She was born about 1100 of noble family, attended a convent school 
 near Paris where she showed exceptional gifts, and at seventeen went to 
 live with her uncle Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame, in a cloister of the 
 cathedral. 
 
 Héloise was beautiful, “a combination of everything that can rouse a 
 man to love.” The man who loved her and wrote these words, Peter Abe- 
 lard, was the son of a Breton nobleman, a scholar and philosopher pro- 
 ficient in logic and dialectic. For years he had wandered from school to 
 school before coming to teach at Notre Dame. At thirty-seven, a School- 
 man at the height of his fame, Abelard persuaded Canon Fulbert to take 
 him to live in his house and become the tutor of his talented young niece. 
 Till then Abelard had led a life of continence — that is, till he saw Héloise 
 and, as he wrote in Historia calamitatum, the tale of his misfortunes, “T 
 was consumed with the fever of arrogance and lust.” She made no at- 
 tempt to resist the advances of this handsome scholar, his eloquence or 
 his passion. From the moment she saw him she loved him. Day and night 
 they were left together, and on the pretext of studying, wrote Abelard, 
 “we gave ourselves unreservedly to love.” 
 
Colette’s Way 133 
 
 His students saw the change in their teacher, who composed love 
 poems (none have survived) that were circulated till everyone knew of 
 the affair except simple, trusting Fulbert. Several months passed before 
 the lovers were caught, probably by Fulbert, in the act of love, and Abe- 
 lard was ordered from the house. When Heloise realized she was preg- 
 nant, she sent word secretly to him “with transports of joy.” 
 
 On a night when Canon Fulbert was away from home, Abelard entered 
 the house and, clothing her in a nun’s habit, spirited Heloise to Brittany, 
 where his sister Denyse gladly welcomed her. In due time she gave birth 
 to a son whom she named Peter Astrolabe. Meanwhile, Fulbert was like a 
 man crazed with grief and fury at her disappearance. Five or six months 
 later, after the baby was born, Abelard sought him out to make apology 
 and offer reparation by marrying Héloise—on one condition, that the 
 marriage be kept secret “so that I might suffer no loss of reputation.” With 
 Fulbert’s quick consent, Abelard set out again for Brittany to tell Héloise 
 the joyful news and make her his wife. To his dismay she refused, crying 
 “Of a certainty we shall both be destroyed.” He must remain bound to 
 her by love not duty. Only when he forced her did she return with him to 
 Paris, leaving the child behind. They were married in the presence of Ful- 
 bert, who soon broke his promise to keep the fact secret. Defying him, 
 Héloise denied it was true, “swearing by all the gods that nothing could 
 be more false.” To escape Fulbert’s wrath, Abelard sent her to Argenteuil, 
 the convent where she had been schooled, obliging her to wear the nun’s 
 habit —an act Fulbert angrily interpreted as Abelard’s attempt to be rid 
 of his wife. One dark night the old man with some others broke into Abe- 
 lard’s room, and as he described explicitly in the Historia, “they cut off 
 those parts of my body with which I had committed the offense of which 
 they complained, and then they fled.” Abelard’s shame was worse than the 
 agony he suffered; his carefully kept reputation was gone. It was a public 
 catastrophe so terrible that, when two of the assailants were caught, they 
 were savagely punished, their eyes put out, their genitals cut off. 
 
 The only course open to the disgraced lovers was to enter the monas- 
 tic life, though since Héloise at his command took her vows first, Abelard 
 was blamed for having driven her to it. At twenty she became a nun, not 
 
134 The Only Way 
 
 for God but for him; on that day she went to the altar sobbing. Aware 
 that “God holds eunuchs in abomination,” Abelard, at forty, retired to the 
 abbey at St. Denis, where he found life in a monastery intolerable. After 
 rousing deep hostility and hatred, slandered and charged with heresy, he 
 fled by night and sought a desert place near Troyes where he built a chapel 
 of stalks and reeds and turned hermit. When his students discovered 
 where he was, they rebuilt the oratory named by Abelard the Paraclete 
 (the Holy Ghost). But again he found no peace. Again he fled to another 
 refuge, St. Gildas in Brittany, where as abbot for ten years he endured 
 the monks and their concubines, “their vile and untameable way of life.” 
 He roused further hatred by his most famous book, Sic et non (Yes and 
 No), in which he listed 158 points of Christian doctrine and 158 contra- 
 dictions of it. One of them was “that faith should be founded on human 
 reason.” Yes and no. There he wrote his confession and self-portrait, the 
 Historia. 
 
 Héloise as prioress was expelled by force with her nuns from the con- 
 vent at Argenteuil. Abelard, accused of being still lustful for her, estab- 
 lished her as abbess of a nunnery at the abandoned Paraclete, where she 
 shut herself in her cell and prayed. In passionate letters wracked by desire, 
 she declared her absolute and undying love, while Abelard advised her 
 to accept their role of brother and sister, her role as the bride of Christ. 
 “You alone I love,” she wrote, “I am still young and full of life. I love you 
 more than ever and suffer bitterly from living a life for which I have no 
 vocation.” 
 
 At St. Gildas the monks tried to kill Abelard with poison. He fell from 
 his horse, breaking a bone in his neck. In 1142 he died, an old and bro- 
 ken man, and his body, carried in secrecy to the Paraclete, was given 
 to Héloise. When she died and was buried in his tomb, legend says he 
 opened his arms to receive her. They now lie together in the cemetery of 
 Pere Lachaise in Paris. 
 
 In a foreword to the Historia calamitatum—which he wrote not to 
 Héloise (who read it in tears), but as a letter to a friend to justify God’s 
 judgment in punishing him—he says, “in comparing your sorrows with 
 
Colette’s Way 135 
 
 mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but 
 of small account, and so shall you come to bear them more easily.” 
 Three hundred years later Francois Villon asked, where are they now? 
 
 Where’s Héloise, the learned nun 
 
 For whose sake Abelard, I ween, 
 
 Lost manhood and put priesthood on?... 
 Mother of God, where are they then? 
 
 But where are the snows of yesteryear? 
 
 Two Deaths. In 1983 Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia com- 
 mitted suicide in their house in Montpelier Square, London. Koestler was 
 found sitting in an armchair with a brandy in his hand. Cynthia lay near 
 him on a sofa, a whiskey on the table beside her. Each had taken a fatal 
 overdose of barbiturates. 
 
 Koestler, who believed in euthanasia, was seventy-seven, suffering 
 from Parkinson’s disease and leukemia, both in a terminal stage. Cynthia 
 was twenty-two years younger, in good health. At the end of his farewell 
 note she had typed, “I should have liked to finish my account of working 
 for Arthur. . .. However, I cannot live without him, despite certain inner 
 resources.” A manuscript of their love story, published as Stranger on the 
 Square, was found among the papers on Koestler’s desk. It is their com- 
 bined autobiography, written in alternate chapters by the two of them. 
 Cynthia, a pretty girl from South Africa, then living in Paris, had an- 
 swered an advertisement and become Koestler’s secretary in 1949, while 
 he was living with the beautiful Mamaine Paget. He was the celebrated 
 author of Darkness at Noon, an ex-Communist who had served the party 
 till revulsion set in. Having fallen in love with him, Cynthia stayed on for 
 the next six years, separated from him briefly when she left to seek other 
 jobs, even to marry unsuccessfully in an attempt to forget her love for this 
 man. Mamaine, who married and divorced him, died in 1954. In 1955, on 
 receiving Koestler’s telegram in New York where she had fled, Cynthia 
 gave up her job and hurried back to London, ecstatic at the thought that 
 
136 The Only Way 
 
 he needed her. Ten years later they were married and spent the rest of 
 their lives in the house in Montpelier Square. 
 
 Koestler was an excessive drinker whose depressions were frequent, 
 love affairs numerous, rages formidable. From the start he treated 
 Cynthia with indifference as hired help. When she became his mistress he 
 showed a callous lack of tenderness; she had two abortions because he re- 
 fused to have children. If at last he recognized her devotion and returned 
 her love, in their combined account the stranger of the title is Koestler, 
 who lived with a permanent sense of exile and self-destruction. The tale 
 is Cynthia’s, her loyalty and her loss. 
 
 In his novel The Gladiators Koestler wrote, in the words of Spartacus, 
 
 >» 
 
 ““Anyone can live—but dying is an art and takes some learning. 
 
 Jorges Luis Borges set the date of his eighty-fourth birthday, August 24, 
 1983, for his suicide. Six years earlier he had written a short story with 
 this date for title in which he described taking his own life. As he ex- 
 plained later, “I have thought about suicide many times. I wrote the story 
 in 1977 and selected a date I believed would most certainly be posterior 
 to my death.” In the story he swallows a bottle of pills and sits on a bed 
 in a hotel room waiting with relief for death to escape the humiliation 
 of being old. He had written a poem “My Suicide” to say “I will die and 
 with me the sum / of the intolerable universe.” 
 
 On the date itself when he became eighty-four, Borges decided against 
 taking the step: “Laziness and cowardice prevent me. Why should I kill 
 myself? Time is killing me. Besides, I am constantly falling in love.” 
 
 Two years later, aware he was dying, Borges married his secretary in 
 April 1986 and died in June of cancer of the liver. 
 
 I’m haunted by his words in “Remorse”: 
 
 I have committed the worst sin of all 
 That a man can commit. I have not been 
 
 Happy. 
 
Colette’s Way 137 
 
 A Memorandum of Tt 
 
 Say, Helen, are you unaware 
 How changed the sky is, how unbeckoning 
 The days are, how less bright the air? (You've noticed.) 
 
 O lady, reckoning how late, 
 How late the hour is, have you flipped the page 
 To where no words are? And no date? (You’ve done that too.) 
 
 Then add this memorandum, Helen, 
 
 Remindful of a world that ended: 
 
 Say that my love for him was true, 
 
 Say that my patch of sky was splendid. (I'll see to it tomorrow.) 
 
7 
 
 Looking Back 
 
 “Margaret, are you grieving 
 Over Goldengrove unleaving?” 
 
 There was a day while Philip and I were together when he reminded me 
 that, after the dozen years since his father’s death, it wasn’t B. I grieved 
 for. “One lets go,” he said. Without thinking I said aloud the last line of 
 Hopkins’s poem, one we both knew, written to a young child, Margaret, 
 whom he discovered one autumn day weeping over a Goldengrove and 
 the falling of its golden leaves. 
 
 Hopkins asks himself the meaning of her tears. Is it for the dying 
 leaves in the death of the year that the child weeps? No, not that. Some- 
 thing else. Her grief is the grief we all share, “the blight man was born 
 for.” Young and innocent as she is, unaware of the reason for her sadness, 
 she weeps for her own mortality: 
 
 “It is Margaret you mourn for.” 
 
 A Memory of Steve. | think often of his face from out of the 
 past. How did it happen, how could so unaccountable a thing have hap- 
 pened? And whatever became of Steve? 
 
 He was a graduate student at Columbia University when I was a gradu- 
 ate student. Since he was starting work that fall toward a Ph.D. in psy- 
 chology and I was in English, we might never have met save for the fact 
 that each of us had a job three mornings a week in the Home Study De- 
 partment. This was a correspondence school offering college courses by 
 mail that Columbia ran for a number of years before dropping it from 
 the curriculum. I was a typist who copied the mail-order lessons in, 
 say, Biblical Literature or the Contemporary Novel that the instructors 
 had scribbled out for us to send their students in Waukegan, Illinois, or 
 
Looking Back 139 
 
 maybe Brooklyn. Steve handled the mailing of materials and textbooks. 
 Our friendship began with the scorn we shared for this poor excuse for 
 an education. We used to walk from the building together at one o’clock, 
 storming at Home Study, the nerve of them promising to teach you child 
 psychology or the history of art by mail. I don’t recall why we thought it 
 couldn't be done. Then Steve would ask me to lunch and I would refuse 
 because I was on my way to meet B. 
 
 I was in love with B. and nothing, nobody else mattered. Steve was a 
 nice guy, two years older than I. He was twenty-two, sandy-haired, blue- 
 eyed, tall and athletic, bright, funny besides. He made me laugh even 
 when he was serious. 
 
 “What is the most important thing in the world?” he asked one day, 
 and when I hesitated to say love because I didn’t want to bring that up, 
 he answered for me. 
 
 “Perhaps you are.” 
 
 Just graduated from Stanford, Steve was without friends in this first 
 time east. Each Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday morning at 9:00 I would 
 find him waiting outside the office building to walk up the stairs with me. 
 When he passed my desk during the day, he would wait till I looked up 
 from the typewriter. 
 
 “Will you go to a movie with me tonight?” 
 
 “Sorry, Steve, I can’t.” 
 
 “Why not?” 
 
 “T have a date.” 
 
 One Saturday morning in November he failed to appear on the front 
 steps, nor was he in the mailing room upstairs. “Is Steve sick?” I asked, 
 but nobody knew. Just before noon I glanced up to find him standing in 
 his leather jacket at my desk. He was weeping. 
 
 “Oh my God, Steve!” 
 
 “Come out in the hall a minute,” he said. “Something’s happened.” 
 
 In the empty corridor he tried to speak. “My father—” he began and 
 choked on the words. 
 
 “What is it? Your father, is he ill?” 
 
 “No, it’s not that. My father phoned me. He called this morning from 
 
140 The Only Way 
 
 Palo Alto. I was still asleep. He said—” Steve gasped and the tears ran 
 down his face. “He said my mother was killed last night, my mother and 
 my kid sister Margaret. They were driving home on the freeway, and they 
 were hit head-on, and they were both killed instantly. They’re dead! My 
 mother is dead and my sister is dead, and, Jesus Christ, what am I going 
 to do?” 
 
 He gripped my hands. “We'll find out about trains,” I said. “We have 
 to get you home, Steve. I'll go down to Grand Central with you.” 
 
 “But I can’t go! That’s it, I can’t. Dad said I wasn’t to come home, it 
 takes too long to get there, I wasn’t to spend the money. He said, ‘I’m 
 counting on you, Steve. There’s nothing you can do. Hold on, go to your 
 classes, stay where you are. I'll take care of everything. He was crying 
 too. He’s alone now, I’m his son and he won't let me come home.” Sud- 
 denly Steve threw his arms around me. “Don’t leave me,” he said. “I can’t 
 take it alone.” 
 
 “T'll get my coat.” 
 
 We walked out the building and down the street, hand gripping hand, 
 saying nothing. At Broadway and 116th Street, we went down the stairs 
 and took the first subway train, riding pressed close together, staring in a 
 trance at the floor. At 14th Street we got off and began an aimless wander- 
 ing, following the narrow streets through the Village, through Washing- 
 ton Park, up Fifth Avenue, where we passed Brentano’s and I remembered 
 a book I wanted to buy for B. My God, B.! It was already three o’clock! 
 How would I explain my disappearance this afternoon? I looked over at 
 Steve stumbling along, and he looked into my eyes and shook his head. 
 “I wish I could help,” I said, but all he said was “Stay with me.” Never let- 
 ting go of hands, we went on till it began to grow dark and I said, “Steve, 
 I’ve got to go now.” We had walked for six hours all the way back to 116th 
 Street, and I left him standing in front of John Jay Hall where he lived. 
 “Will you be all right?” I asked. For answer he pulled me to him and 
 kissed me hard on the mouth. Then I ran across campus to my room and 
 phoned B. 
 
 That weekend I tried but failed to reach Steve in his dorm. He didn’t 
 return my messages. I imagined him walking the streets. It scared me to 
 
Looking Back 141 
 
 think of him sweating it out alone. Tuesday morning he wasn’t waiting on 
 the steps; he was already upstairs sorting the mail. When I said to him, 
 “Steve, can we talk?” he didn’t look up or answer, nor did he come near 
 my desk that day or the next. I knew it was grief, and I grieved with him. 
 I knew I had let him down, I had failed him. On Saturday he quit his job 
 at Home Study. I didn’t see him again. 
 
 Not till the following June. B. and I had spent the year working, study- 
 ing together, being in love. During the last week of school, a graduate 
 student we knew, Ann Lefler, gave a farewell party in her small apart- 
 ment. As it happened, the first person I saw on our arrival was Steve. He 
 was standing near the door, talking to a tall, attractive girl, very blonde 
 and tanned, who clung to him as if she didn’t mean to let go, and he was 
 laughing in her face like the old Steve. I was genuinely glad to see him. 
 
 “Steve! It’s you!” 
 
 He turned with a start, hesitated, and slowly took the hand I offered. I 
 introduced him to B. who had never seen him before and probably didn’t 
 remember who he was. Then Steve said in a low voice, with marked re- 
 straint, “I want you to meet my date. Actually she’s my sister. This is my 
 sister Margaret.” 
 
 “Margaret?” I said. 
 
 “My sister,” he said. 
 
 “From California?” 
 
 “Oh yes,” she broke in eagerly, glancing up at Steve. “I’ve never in my 
 life been to New York before. My mother and I came just last night to 
 take Steve back home for the summer. It’s been such a long year without 
 my big brother.” 
 
 Before B. and I left the party, I managed to follow Steve into the 
 kitchen and catch him for a moment alone. 
 
 “Why did you do it?” I asked. “That’s all I want to know.” 
 
 His face was stony. He moved away toward the door, then turned back 
 with a shrug. “I don’t know myself,” he said. “I honestly can’t talk about 
 it. I’m sorry, God, you don’t know how sorry. It was a terrible, terrible 
 thing to do.” 
 
 He stopped and stood absolutely still. I put my hand on his arm. 
 
142 The Only Way 
 
 “Please, Steve,” I said. “Why?” He stared at me and started over. 
 
 “I don’t know why. I was lonely, I guess, sort of desperate. I was so 
 damned unhappy I —well, I did this crazy thing. I tried to imagine what 
 some really awful grief would be like, the worst possible thing that could 
 happen, losing someone like that, tearing your heart out. You know I’m 
 in psychology.” 
 
 He tried to laugh and looked down, avoiding my eyes. “But that wasn’t 
 the only reason. It wasn’t even the real reason.” 
 
 “What was it, Steve?” 
 
 “I wanted you to love me.” 
 
 The Ten Childhoods. It was a strange journey I took with B. 
 back to the scene of his childhoods. He had ten childhoods. To none of 
 them had he returned till a notion to revisit struck him in the middle of a 
 heat wave one scorching July. (Hemingway called it “chasing yesterdays.”) 
 On the trip in the Chrysler from North Carolina to southeastern Ohio, 
 where the ten childhoods occurred within an area of three or four inches 
 on the Ohio map, B. considered the profit and loss of being a Methodist 
 minister’s son. “The thing is, you move on every year or so to a new par- 
 sonage and start over,” he said. “Without a hometown you have nowhere 
 to grow up. You're free, the cat who walks by himself.” 
 
 I was a Methodist minister’s daughter, born in a parsonage like B., and 
 well I knew my father’s restless habit of changing pulpits. It puzzled me 
 that the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Baptist preachers stayed put into 
 mumbling old age. Only Methodists kept on the go. After his fourth or 
 fifth move, my father resigned from his church and the Methodist Con- 
 ference. He gave up and left for good to become a traveling salesman. My 
 mother turned Episcopalian. 
 
 We had another thing in common, B. and I. He was born on the Ohio 
 River at Powhatan Point that in his day flourished as a river hamlet and 
 steamboat landing. I was born on the banks of the Susquehanna. Since 
 neither of us stayed long enough to acquire a memory of our birthplace — 
 my parents left town when I was two weeks old, B. left with his at two 
 months—we spent that first day river-minded, walking beside the Ohio 
 
Looking Back 143 
 
 in the companionable present and sweltering heat. He hadn’t abandoned 
 me yet to return to his beginnings. 
 
 For the next week we lingered in nine more Ohio towns — Centerville, 
 Beverly, Bethesda, Kimbolton, Newport (pop. 450), Senecaville (pop. 
 586), and so on—each village so like the last in Ohio’s countryside that 
 I forgot on arrival where we were. Each looked denominational, strictly 
 Protestant. Beside the white frame M. E. Church pointing its thin spire 
 into the eye of the Lord would be the cramped parsonage with front 
 porch and porch swing, window box of pink petunias. Nobody waited 
 hand outstretched to make us welcome. Over the years Methodists had 
 come and gone in a quick turnover. We spoke to nobody. 
 
 Yet at each stop on the tour of B.’s childhoods, he left me behind and 
 went back alone, and I had no way of following him. It was queer how 
 his memories and my lack of them separated us, as hadn’t happened in 
 our travels before. I was bored with the itinerant Methodists. To forget 
 the heat I tried to cool off with a line of Yeats: “My barren thoughts have 
 chilled me to the bone.” Inside each church were the bare pews, imita- 
 tion stained-glass windows, American flag, lectern with open Bible, last 
 Sunday’s tiger lilies dead in a fluted vase. 
 
 For B. the scene might be Sunday morning, the service about to start, 
 his father entering the pulpit as he, the new preacher’s son, rushed tardily 
 down the center aisle. A foot was stuck out to trip him. Falling on his 
 face, he jumped up and yanked a boy to the aisle where they fought, kick- 
 ing and sprawling, till a vestryman pulled them apart. A preacher’s kid 
 was marked for a sissy. B. had to clarify from the start who he was, which 
 he established weekdays when he had to wheel his baby sister down the 
 street in her carriage. It took a lot of scrapping to defend his name. 
 
 On the fifth day—I think Lore City, Ohio—while we stood before the 
 Methodist parsonage, B. whistled and pointed to the yard between his 
 house and the next. “There’s the spot where I tried to rape Marie,” he 
 said, “in broad daylight.” He was about ten. I stared dutifully but all I 
 saw was a patch of grass. 
 
 “You're kidding.” 
 
 “Yes,” he said. “But I knew what it was you had to do. Marie was 
 
144 The Only Way 
 
 the girl next door and I liked her a lot. After school we played catch or 
 wrestled, till the day I threw her on her back and pulled up her dress. 
 She whacked me hard and ran in her house. She yelled from the back 
 door, ‘You think you’re smart, the new preacher’s boy and all. You're just 
 dumb, I hate you. So go on home!’ She never spoke to me again.” 
 
 “Did you mind?” 
 
 “T minded.” 
 
 In Flushing, Ohio, we searched for a corner grocery where B., now in 
 high school, had worked after school as delivery boy. It was an empty 
 shop on Main Street, and as we peered through the dirty windowpane 
 I glimpsed the sweat on my face. B. saw himself rushing out the store 
 one winter afternoon with arms full of groceries, bumping head-on into 
 a customer. “Hey, babe!” she cried, catching him in her arms. He looked 
 up and recognized her—the one and only town whore. Everybody in 
 Flushing knew who she was. 
 
 “Hold on,” she cried, hugging him and the bags to her plump body. 
 “So you're the new preacher’s son. I hear your name is Merle. Well, lover 
 boy, that happens to be my name too.” She kissed the top of his head. “So 
 we'll have to call you Little Merle and me Big Merle.” 
 
 B. pulled away and ran for the door. The storekeeper and several cus- 
 tomers hooted with laughter. “Oh, lover boy,” they yelled after him. 
 “We'll have to call you Little Merle and her Big Merle.” 
 
 The name stuck. Even when people didn’t say it, he knew they wanted 
 to. He was Little Merle in that town till his father’s next charge took the 
 family to Loudonville, last of the ten childhoods. Here the presiding elder 
 came to Sunday dinner and prayed that, like John Wesley, B. would be- 
 come a Methodist preacher and toil in the Lord’s vineyards. “Amen,” said 
 B.’s father. 
 
 “Are you glad we went?” I asked when the journey was over. 
 
 “The effect was sobering,” B. said. “It was a mad and monstrous plan.” 
 
 The History of Malden. More and more my survival on this 
 earth amazes me. Yet guilty as I am of the role of longstayer, I’ve sel- 
 
Looking Back 145 
 
 dom thought of the survival of my ancestors, each of whom existed long 
 enough to become my progenitor, no easy task in their own threatened 
 times. 
 
 But recently I happened to look into The History of Malden, 1633- 
 1785 by D. P. Corey, a book my father sent me years ago with the 
 admonition to prize it. Charley loved genealogy, which was odd con- 
 sidering his name was Smith. The fact was, he told me—though I 
 couldn’t have cared less at the time—my great-great-great-great-great- 
 great-great-great-great-grandfather, William Sargent, was in the book as 
 one of the founders of Malden, Massachusetts (now a suburb of Boston). 
 William, born 1602 during the reign of Elizabeth, arrived from England 
 in 1638 with his third wife, Sarah, and two daughters. He was made a free- 
 man of the Massachusetts Bay Colony under Governor Winthrop, who 
 eight years before had brought the company of Puritans to the new world. 
 By 1640 William had acquired a farm of twenty acres at the brow of Sar- 
 gent’s Hill—a settlement of a dozen Puritan families that in 1649 became 
 the town of Malden. That year Charles I was beheaded, Governor Win- 
 throp died, and there was a great mortality among the children in New 
 England. 
 
 When I belatedly examined this ponderous book, full of Sargents (with 
 lovely names like Delight, Relief, Thankful), I opened it toward the end 
 and came upon young Jacob Sargent, sixth generation from William. I 
 saw how heroic he was to have become my ancestor. Jacob was a boy 
 not sixteen when, on April 19, 1775, as one of the Minutemen of Malden 
 he marched out of town to the beat of Cousin Winslow Sargent’s drum. 
 Early that morning a horseman had come galloping along Medford Road 
 crying, “The regulars are out!” While the meetinghouse bell rang, the 
 Minutemen were mustered on the green in front of Kettell’s Tavern, four 
 or five Sargents among the seventy-four in Captain Blaney’s Company. 
 The women and children followed after till they disappeared out of sight 
 up the hill. At the juncture of Lexington and Medford roads they halted 
 to take captive several British soldiers. Jacob survived that day of skir- 
 mishes known as the Lexington Alarm, fought in the lines at Boston, 
 
146 The Only Way 
 
 married young Lydia Paine of Malden in February 1781, and fathered 
 nine children. His second child was my great-great-grandmother Sally 
 Sargent. 
 
 It was a close call for me, since on the same day in 1775 John Ray- 
 mond, on my mother’s side, was killed in Lexington, a dozen miles from 
 Malden. John Raymond was forty-four, a private in Captain Parker’s 
 Company of Minutemen who lined up, some sixty or seventy, the morn- 
 ing of April 19 on the village green to try to stop the eight hundred British 
 regulars sent out from Boston by General Gage. The struggle lasted a few 
 minutes, eight Americans were killed, and the British moved on to Con- 
 cord, where at the bridge five hundred Minutemen confronted them and 
 drove them in disorder back to Lexington. On the retreat they stopped 
 at Munroe’s Tavern to dress their wounded. Since the tavern keeper had 
 fled, somehow they rounded up and compelled John Raymond, who was 
 lame, to serve them, drank freely and became noisy and quarrelsome. As 
 he was attempting to escape by the side door, they shot and killed him 
 “in a brutal and cowardly manner” (Charles Hudson, History of Lexing- 
 ton). John Raymond’s body was found a few yards from the tavern. 
 
 His youngest child, Isaac, was five years old. Luckily he survived to 
 marry Rebecca Livermore, whose father Jason of nearby Weston, Mas- 
 sachusetts, in the same county of Middlesex, had been a Minuteman in 
 Phineas Moore’s Company. Jason also marched on April 19 and fought at 
 Bunker Hill on June 17, having already risked his life in the French and 
 Indian War. Like the other patriots in my family tree, he came as near as 
 any to shaking me out of its branches. 
 
 Hooked by now, I turned back and started over with Great-something- 
 William Sargent, whose father Roger was mayor of Northampton, En- 
 gland. In 1626 Roger wrote in his will, “I give my five silver spoons to 
 my five children viz. to my sons Joseph John William and to my daugh- 
 ters Elizabeth and Dorothy, desiring that they live together in love and 
 help each other.” Whether or not the silver spoon crossed the Atlantic to 
 reach William, he never saw his family again. In the new town of Malden 
 with its meetinghouse in “uncouth wilderness,” William became the lay 
 
Looking Back 147 
 
 preacher. “They had a godly Christian named W. Sarjant who did preach 
 the Word unto them till the year 1650,” wrote Edward Johnson in his his- 
 tory of New England, The Wonder-Working Providence, 1654. William was 
 not allowed to baptize or administer the bread and wine but could ex- 
 hort the flock, hearten the wavering, and visit the sick. 
 
 In 1650 the people of Malden acquired their first pastor, Marmaduke 
 Mathews, a fiery Welshman, graduate of All Soul’s Oxford, who lasted 
 one year before he was summoned by the General Court of Massachusetts 
 to answer twenty-two accusations of offensive and heretical remarks in 
 his sermons. One remark was: “When the body of Christ was lifted up on 
 his cross his soul was in hell what in hell? yea in hell, in that hell where the 
 devil rules and reigns.” Despite such “unfettered” oratory, Mathews was 
 held by the town in high esteem; a petition in his behalf, defending the 
 right to free speech, bore the names of thirty-six wives and mothers, Mrs. 
 Sargent among them. Another signer was Thankslord Shepperd. Never- 
 theless a committee of the court, one of them Anne Bradstreet’s husband 
 Simon and another Edward Johnson, who said, “Christ cannot trash in- 
 dure,” censured Mathews and imposed a fine on the church of £50, which 
 they indignantly resented and for ten years didn’t pay. After Mathews’s 
 hurried departure for Wales, William Sargent again filled in in the pulpit. 
 Since the sermons lasted two hours, he must have done a lot of exhorting. 
 
 Into this state of upheaval came young Michael Wigglesworth, age 
 twenty-four, born in Yorkshire and brought as a child in 1638 (the year 
 William Sargent migrated) to New England. He was a Harvard graduate 
 and strict Puritan whose Calvinist theology was more disquieting than 
 Mathews’s so-called “miscarriages” and far less cheerful, though Wiggles- 
 worth said in his diary that one of his corruptions was frothiness. Cotton 
 Mather introduced him, “From Cambridge the Star made his remove, till 
 he comes to dispense his sweet influences upon thee, O Malden!” (Later 
 Mather called him “a little feeble shadow of a man.”) Malden, soon disen- 
 chanted, was less than grateful. From the day he arrived in 1656, reprov- 
 ing them for “lightness and mad mirth,” Wigglesworth caused rebellion 
 among his parishioners. After two years he was complaining to the Lord: 
 “How long, Lord, wilt thou be angry with us? What? for ever? of what 
 
148 The Only Way 
 
 will you do with this poor sinful afflicted people? What meaneth the heat 
 of this great indignation? where is thy zeal and thy strength; the sound- 
 ing of thy bowels (Lord!) are they restrained?” 
 
 Though Wigglesworth remained their pastor forty-nine years till his 
 death in 1705, the clamorings were loud and frequent that he lay down 
 his office. He was accounted a burden, a sickly man —who fathered eight 
 children, outlived two wives and married a third—a confirmed invalid 
 with a weak voice and chronic sore throat (not ailing but conceited, they 
 said), often absent from service. For years the town didn’t pay him a 
 salary. Wigglesworth replied to his congregation by writing in 224 stan- 
 zas the lurid Day of Doom, the day of wrath to remind those poor sinners 
 how they will quake on Judgment Day: 
 
 They wring their hands, their caitiff hands, 
 and gnash their teeth for terror; 
 They cry, they roar for anguish sore, 
 and gnaw their tongues for horror. 
 But get away without delay; 
 Christ pities not your cry. 
 Depart to hell; there may you yell 
 and roar eternally. 
 
 Go to hell, he told them. (How did Grandfather Sargent like being 
 told he was a naked sinner, one of the damned “wallowing in all kind 
 of sin”? It must have tried his soul.) This was the great American epic 
 of the seventeenth century. England had Milton, New England had 
 Wigglesworth. From Malden it shook to its depths the Puritan world, 
 and Wigglesworth was invited to become president of Harvard. 
 
 William Sargent moved to Barnstable (to get away from Wiggles- 
 worth?) and was made a freeman of the Plymouth colony. He died in 1682 
 after forty-four turbulent years in America. His eldest son, John, born 
 in Malden in 1639, married Deborah Hillier of Barnstable, thus mingling 
 Puritan and Pilgrim blood in his descendants. John returned to Malden, 
 took part as one of twenty-three men from Malden in King Philip’s war 
 with the Narragansett Indians, became a selectman, and had fifteen chil- 
 
Looking Back 149 
 
 dren. In 1692 when he was fifty-three, the insanity of witchcraft attacked 
 Salem, where after sensational trials 115 were accused of demonic powers 
 and 23 witches and warlocks put to death. The madness spread over New 
 England; forty towns were party to it. Malden among them. Elizabeth 
 Fosdick and Elizabeth Paine (an ancestor of Lydia Paine who married 
 Jacob Sargent) were two arrested on a charge of witchcraft, which allows 
 me to claim descent from a witch. Just how far Michael Wigglesworth 
 supported the witch hunt is unknown, though Samuel Sewall, a judge 
 at the Salem trials, was his good friend, as were Cotton Mather and his 
 father Increase, who believed in witches (and the Bible said, “Thou shalt 
 not suffer a witch to live” Exodus 22:18). A few months before his death 
 Wigglesworth wrote in a trembling hand to Increase Mather, “I fear that 
 innocent blood hath been shed: & that many have had their hands de- 
 filed therewith.” Whatever my forebears thought of witches, or the wrath 
 of God and the power of Satan, they left no comment behind. 
 Wigglesworth was followed fifteen years later by young Joseph Emer- 
 son, who in 1721 married Mary Moody, and the happy couple occupied 
 Wigglesworth’s house that was infested with big black bugs. It was put in 
 “good repaire” by Jabez Sargent, the joiner, grandson of John. Three years 
 later it burned to the ground, and Mr. Emerson preached a daylong ser- 
 mon on Job. Unlike Wigglesworth, he was free of infirmities, missing only 
 two Sundays in forty-six years. He prayed every night that no descendant 
 of his might become rich. But I’m not his descendant. Ralph Waldo is. 
 
 Beholden as I am to these ancestors for persistence in living, I regret their 
 oversight in leaving no words behind to say how it was done. It’s too late 
 for Tom Spaulding, my mother’s grandfather, to testify as to how he bore 
 his terrible sojourn in Libby Prison during the Civil War. On August 30, 
 1862, age forty-one, this hardy farmer from Broome County, New York, 
 left his wife Narcissa, and four small daughters (like the four in Little 
 Women) to join the 161st New York Volunteer Infantry. Two years later he 
 was captured by the Confederates and from suffering and starvation died 
 soon after the war ended. 
 
 As a child I was told about infamous Libby Prison by my great-aunt 
 
150 The Only Way 
 
 Net, one of Tom Spaulding’s daughters, who as a young girl had nursed 
 her dying father. She never tired of the appalling tale. Libby, second only 
 in horror to Andersonville, was a former warehouse beside the James 
 River in Richmond, Virginia, a three-story building full of rats, where 
 some thousand Union soldiers at a time were held and, covered with 
 vermin, thousands died of untreated wounds, starvation, smallpox. On 
 the bare floor a man was allotted just space for his body. Though Lin- 
 coln said, “Leave it as a monument,” after the war the prison was sold, 
 dismantled, moved brick by brick (600,000, carefully numbered) to Chi- 
 cago, and rebuilt to become the popular Libby Prison War Museum, a 
 house of horrors where they sold wooden napkin rings from the original 
 flooring, bloodstains and all. 
 
 The prison diary of Lieut. Colonel F. F. Cavada (Libby Life: Experiences 
 of a Prisoner of War in Richmond, Va., 1863-64) describes the loathesome, 
 foul-smelling hell Libby was. He arrived to find men lying backed in 
 rows in a suffocating room, “a host of shoeless, shirtless, shameless spec- 
 tres,” mummies recalled to live again “as if it were an unearthed ceme- 
 tery.” The life was inhuman—the awful tedium, the hunger — desperate 
 men jammed together, jostling, wrangling over morsels of food. After 
 rumors of attempted escapes, the inmates were counted and recounted at 
 frequent intervals, forbidden to go near the windows. “The shooting of 
 prisoners at the windows continues,” wrote Cavada. “The sentinels seem 
 to consider it very fine sport.” He was aghast at the implacable hatred 
 shown the North with the streets outside the prison crowded with sight- 
 seers come to jeer at the Yankees. 
 
 One more ancestor I never met was Elizabeth Raymond, my mother’s 
 grandmother, who in the 1850s was known and sought after as “the hand- 
 somest widow in Tioga County, N.Y.” She would be as sorry as I to leave 
 it at that. I stare at the daguerrotype of a handsome, buxom lady in a silk 
 dress, deeply regretful that I know her face but not her fortune, how she 
 talked, what she liked to eat, what love affairs if any. Her son was another 
 John Raymond, my grandfather, who played the ocarina, married Tom 
 
Looking Back 151 
 
 Spaulding’s daughter Effie Ann, and was too young to go to the Civil War. 
 
 Most inscrutable of the lot are Charley and Lizzie, my parents. What 
 wouldn't I give to read the hidden history of their young lives, all the 
 passion and, afterward, all the grief. But in the telling they'd be bound 
 to admit that having me was the last thing they intended —a child never 
 meant to be born of their faltering marriage. With them as progenitors, I 
 was at the greatest possible risk of not seeing the light of day. 
 
 Ginter Grass, From the Diary of a Snail: “I’m an accident, who has 
 accidentally survived.” 
 
 Charley and the Model T. My father Charley was a man who 
 owned a Model T. It was his pride and punishment, his first automobile 
 and Henry Ford’s first, one of fifteen million cars he built after 1908 “for 
 the great multitude” and sold for five hundred dollars. The last Model T 
 appeared in 1927, scrapped and soon obsolete, replaced by the new four- 
 door Model A. Charley bought his headstrong beast about 1911 when the 
 Model T, while scarcely a Pierce Arrow, was hailed as “without doubt 
 the greatest creation in automobiles ever placed before a people.” E. B. 
 White wrote in “Farewell, My Lovely!” —his love song to the Model T he 
 bought in 1922—that it was practically the American scene, the miracle 
 God had wrought. Tearing along at ten miles an hour, it still frightened 
 horses off the road. Charley loved his stylish little runabout with a pas- 
 sion, convinced though he was that the car had it in for him and meant 
 to break his arm or knock him down and run over him. Machines took 
 strong exception to Charley, and his fear of them he strongly conveyed 
 to me. The Model T scared the living daylights out of both of us. 
 
 Before attempting to start his Tin Lizzie (not named for my mother, he 
 said), he would pat and smooth the coat of its black erect body the way he 
 used to quiet his race horse, summoning up courage —it took courage — 
 to show who was master. Soon a crowd gathered to wonder and admire, 
 while I, a child of five (on a visit to my grandparents), sat enthroned and 
 uneasy high on the front seat with my hat on, waiting for my father to 
 take us for a joyride. At last he would roll up his sleeves, reach over the 
 
152 The Only Way 
 
 wheel to set the spark, squat in front of the engine, groan aloud, and in- 
 sert the crank. For the next minutes he cranked and sweated, while the 
 car played dead and nothing happened, till suddenly with a roar coming 
 alive, it would lunge forward like an angry bull—and me screaming and 
 Charley yelling bloody murder and leaping into the ditch. As he picked 
 himself up, cursing and feeling around for broken bones, the little car, 
 now trembling on all four cylinders with obvious readiness for the road, 
 quivered and shook as if about to tear off toward eternity without him. 
 “Pull on the emergency brake!” Charley would yell at me, waving his 
 arms, as I, not knowing what on earth to do, began to sob. Just then the 
 flivver with a sad little explosion would give up and die, and I would 
 jump out in a hurry and run for dear life into the house. 
 
 “Come on back, baby! Let’s go!” Charley would shout as he cranked it 
 again and it caught hold a second time, and he would race back and hurl 
 himself headlong into the driver’s seat. And it would die. 
 
 Happy Endings. I remember a night years ago when B. stood up 
 in the middle of a movie and said aloud, “This is the damnedest most im- 
 moral piece I’ve ever seen in my life,” and sat down. The audience didn’t 
 applaud or turn round to glare at him. They went on watching the pic- 
 ture and at the end filed out without asking B. what was wrong with it. 
 The manipulation of the plot exasperated him, the immorality of the 
 lies it told about people. It concerned a young couple— Doris Day and 
 Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk—who detested each other on sight and 
 battled their way through reels of pure contempt, insult, and mayhem, 
 only to fall into each other’s arms in permanent bliss. It happens all the 
 while except in real life. Recently I saw “Terms of Endearment,” with 
 Shirley MacLaine in the role of a spoiled, possessive, dyed-blonde widow 
 whom children fear, who intimidates her daughter and fights with her 
 next-door neighbor (Jack Nicholson), a middle-aged lecher and alco- 
 holic. The daughter escapes into marriage and three children in Iowa, 
 dies of cancer, and leaves her children to Mother. Mother marries the 
 fruitcake —the lush she has loathed for fifteen years as he has avoided her 
 like poison—and together they prepare to bring up the little ones in ten- 
 
Looking Back 153 
 
 der loving care. The Oscars it won proclaimed it the best picture of the 
 year, sure to warm your heart. 
 
 Even Jane Austen had trouble creating characters who end happily in a 
 perfect union with the right mate. Only in Pride and Prejudice, it seems 
 to me, does Elizabeth Bennet come close to making sense of marrying 
 Mr. Darcy and he of marrying her. 
 
 From one miserable evening spent at a ball where Fitzwilliam Darcy is 
 present, Elizabeth considers him “the proudest, most disagreeable man 
 in the world.” At first sight of Elizabeth he says, loudly enough for her to 
 overhear, “She is tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me.” Of- 
 fended by further examples of his icy conceit, the most she can feel for 
 this “hateful man” is aversion and a deeply rooted dislike. When partway 
 through the novel Darcy, having stared at her at intervals, tells her that 
 though he has struggled against it he loves her and proposes to make her 
 his wife, she rejects him indignantly. She calls him patronizing. He calls 
 her uncivil. They quarrel. She says, “You could not have made me the 
 offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to 
 accept it.” 
 
 Meant for each other, they have merely to change their attitude com- 
 pletely; the novel depends on it. But can they reverse their natures? Darcy 
 shows undeniable improvement in manners. Elizabeth, falling in love, 
 is ashamed of herself for having rightly questioned his character. Yet to 
 make this marriage succeed, they must reform their ways and remodel 
 their lives. Darcy must accept with good grace her faulty upbringing and 
 family that he finds vulgar. Elizabeth will require training in decorum 
 for union with a mate of superior social rank; she must learn to control 
 her laughter to match his reserve. Jane Austen liked Elizabeth best of her 
 heroines (though she never really objected to any of their shortcomings). 
 
 On the other hand, Emma Woodhouse will make an unmanageable wife. 
 Charming as she is, she has a fault that increases with age, a well-meaning 
 desire to meddle in other people’s lives. She is an officious arranger of 
 matches for people who don’t match, and Mr. Knightley is annoyed with 
 
154 The Only Way 
 
 her. He reprimands her, disapproving of her blind schemes to marry 
 Harriet Smith off to several of the wrong men. “Emma,” he says, “you 
 have been no friend to Harriet Smith!” In the end she is repentant, but is 
 she cured or curable? 
 
 Mr. Knightley, a sensible man seventeen years older than she, will be a 
 patient husband, like a father to Emma, but his patience will be tried. He 
 will leave his handsome Abbey to move in with Emma and her father, a 
 fussy old hypochondriac who says things like “Let us all take a little gruel 
 together” and “An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome.” Imagine the 
 three each night at dinner. 
 
 The poorest bet is little Fanny Price. I doubt if she will survive marriage, 
 so timid and fragile is she, a bundle of nerves, the most agitated heroine 
 in fiction. Fanny sinks to the ground if looked at, her cheeks flush scarlet, 
 her mind is disordered, her heart fails. If she ventures to step outside the 
 house she is “knocked up,” Jane Austen’s felicitous phrase for collapsing 
 from exhaustion. 
 
 At Mansfield Park, where she was taken in as a poor relation, nobody 
 notices her for nearly nine years—not the heedless young people, not 
 her indolent aunt Lady Bertram, who treats her as a housemaid, not her 
 cruel aunt Mrs. Norris—nobody but Cousin Edmund, who pities little 
 Fanny and is brotherly kind. She loves Edmund, but fearful of betraying 
 her emotions “in some unpardonable excess” suffers in silence and low 
 spirits when, with a singular lack of tact, he urges her to marry his friend 
 Henry Crawford while he himself plans to possess Mary Crawford, who 
 has no wish to wed a future clergyman. In the end Fanny is left the win- 
 ner, glowing with gratitude, to fill the role of Edmund’s wife. She seems 
 unequal to the nuptials. 
 
 B. totally approved of Jane Austen, and so do I. He didn’t call her im- 
 moral at all. She simply liked happy endings. 
 
 Shelley on Love. Today I found on the bookshelf an old vol- 
 ume of Shelley—the slim green leather Oxford edition I gave B. when 
 
Looking Back 155 
 
 we were graduate students at Columbia. It looked scuffed and worn, as 
 well it might since he carried it in his coat pocket the way Shelley carried 
 Sophocles. Because of the green ribbon marking the place, the book in 
 my hand fell open to “Epipsychidion.” 
 
 God, I hated that poem. As I sat down to read it again, recalling its 
 six hundred gasping lines (“I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!”), I won- 
 dered how it would sound to me now. Shelley wrote the poem while he 
 and Mary were living in Pisa to an Italian girl, Emilia Viviani. Emilia’s 
 father, governor of Pisa, had placed her in the convent of St. Anna where, 
 a “prisoner” for nearly three years, she awaited at nineteen the com- 
 pletion of marriage plans made against her will. Needless to say, Emilia 
 appealed instantly to Shelley, this “poor captive bird” with her exquisite 
 young beauty, faultless features, dark eyes, mass of black hair, and vola- 
 tile romantic nature. He was in agony over her sufferings, an emotion 
 Mary not only didn’t share but thought ridiculous. Mary was a possessive 
 wife. Her pride was hurt by his infatuation, her feelings were wounded 
 by the poem, which never mentions her. She called it his Italian Pla- 
 tonics. 
 
 Shelley probably wrote “Epipyschidion” — inventing the title from the 
 Greek epi (on) and psychidion (little soul) —during February 1821, after 
 two months of visits to Emilia and ardent letters between them. It was 
 published without his name, only a hundred copies, in which he pre- 
 tended that the lines were by a fictional poet “wounded and weak and 
 panting” who had died in Florence. Though the theme purports to be pla- 
 tonic love, one reviewer took it for a defense of marrying one’s sister and 
 attributed it to Byron. In breathless couplets Shelley addresses Emily as 
 a seraph from heaven, an ideal of perfection beyond his reach (“Spouse! 
 Sister! Angel! O too late Beloved! O too soon adored, by me!”), but nearly 
 a third of the poem deals with an amorous scheme to elope with her to 
 a far-off island (“Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?”) There 
 they will achieve a unique union with Emily both vestal sister and bride 
 (“Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, / And our veins beat 
 together”). The day never came. Emilia was reluctantly married on Sep- 
 tember 8 of that year, without inviting the Shelleys to the wedding. Ten 
 
156 The Only Way 
 
 months later, on July 8, Shelley drowned in the Bay of Spezia. It remained 
 a poem of exalted desire. 
 
 All his life Shelley held the view that it’s possible for a man to love 
 more than one woman at a time, especially if one of them is the sister 
 of his soul (as Elizabeth Hitchener had been when he was married to 
 Harriet, as Mary was when he left Harriet to elope with her). He rejected 
 the idea that love need be limited to a single being and described mar- 
 riage, chained to one person, as “the dreariest and the longest journey.” 
 Mary the Moon of his world, Emilia the Sun were adored simultaneously 
 for different qualities: “True love in this differs from gold and clay, / That 
 to divide is not to take away.” This he believed. 
 
 And so did B. But whether a woman can love equally two men at once 
 never came up between us. 
 
 Life in Middlemarch. Now that a movie is made of it, readers 
 turn to the novel, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, many for the first time 
 after its neglect for more than a century. It has been a keepsake in my 
 family for years. B. and I practically started married life by disagreeing 
 over that book, happily opposed. B. loved to tease me about his superior 
 recognition of its worth, since he was not only a Victorian scholar but 
 born in Victoria’s reign. I claimed to look at its imperfections with a 
 fuller awareness because I knew a lot more than he did about women. B. 
 considered Middlemarch the greatest novel of the nineteenth century. 
 
 “Better than Anna Karenina?” I would cry. “Better than Madame 
 Bovary? Come on.” 
 
 “Why not? Prove me wrong.” 
 
 “Better than Jane Austen? Oh no, not Jane Austen!” 
 
 I complained of its wordiness, its high-minded concern for propriety, 
 its moral rectitude. “There isn’t any adultery in it,” I would say. And he 
 would laugh. And so would I. 
 
 When B. became terminally ill for those many months, the one book 
 he allowed me to read to him was Middlemarch. He especially liked its 
 humor: Mrs. Cadwallader saying to the rector: “These charitable people 
 
Looking Back 157 
 
 never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it and got the 
 colic.” He found Dorothea Brooke adorable, even after her two recklessly 
 bad marriages the wisest and most beautiful of heroines, comparable to 
 Saint Theresa of Avila as George Eliot said she was. He would lie on the 
 sofa absorbed in the plot he knew so well while I read on day after day 
 that long hot summer, till the day came when I looked up and he had 
 stopped listening. He had slipped into the coma from which he never re- 
 gained consciousness. Shortly after his death, B.’s graduate students held 
 a ceremony one afternoon in the Rare Book Room of the main library, 
 where they presented to Duke University in his name and memory a first 
 edition of Middlemarch. 
 
 Thirty years later I’ve read it again, marveling this time at the monumen- 
 tal novel it is, at its abundant life, and at how much I had missed. George 
 Eliot was a great writer, powerful in recreating a world clearly identifiable 
 as her own. But to praise her as another Jane Austen, as the critics are set 
 on doing, seems extravagant, since she is exactly what Jane Austen was 
 not —heavyhanded. Lacking is the Austen wit and lightness of touch, the 
 clarity of language, the brevity. To compare George Eliot to Henry James 
 would be more like it. 
 
 But it’s the portrait of Dorothea Brooke as a woman that concerns me 
 still, the extraordinary lack of judgment she shows that is so contradic- 
 tory to her strong moral character. The story moves at a deliberate pace 
 through three years of Dorothea’s adult life in the provincial town of 
 Middlemarch, just before the Reform Bill of 1832. She and her sister are 
 living in the care of their genial uncle Brooke, and Dorothea is presented 
 at nineteen as a highly intelligent, mature, strong-willed girl who knows 
 her own mind. She is also ardent. Yet when Mr. Casaubon comes wooing, 
 a dried-up old bookworm more than twice her age, she is attracted by 
 what she thinks is his intellect, and imagines that marrying him would 
 be like marrying Pascal! 
 
 The brief courtship is timid and dreary. As for the passion he ex- 
 hibits: “Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to 
 
158 The Only Way 
 
 a plunge which his stream would afford him.” Was ever a wooing so pale 
 and loveless? asks the narrator. “Has any one ever pinched into the pilu- 
 lous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?” 
 
 On their disastrous honeymoon in Rome, which Casaubon spends in- 
 specting manuscripts in the Vatican, Dorothea realizes to her dismay 
 what she has got for a mate, a dull, sterile pedant who dreams of foot- 
 notes. Disillusioned and unhappy, she is saved from despair by Casau- 
 bon’s attractive second cousin, Will Ladislaw, a romantically inclined 
 young man whose smile should have warned her away. It was, Eliot says, 
 “a gush of inward light illuminating the transparent skin as well as the 
 eyes, and playing about every curve and line as if some Ariel were touch- 
 ing them with a new charm, and banishing forever the traces of moodi- 
 ness.” 
 
 The nightmare marriage spent in Casaubon’s house in the village, 
 where he shuts himself in his library “to chew a cud of erudite mis- 
 take,” lasts for eighteen months till Casaubon dies—after revising his 
 will denying Dorothea his fortune if she marries Ladislaw, whom he de- 
 tests. Dorothea, widowed at twenty-one, finds herself in love with Ladis- 
 law, by whose shallow nature she is not deterred. Another man in town, 
 Dr. Lydgate (who also chooses the wrong mate) would have been more 
 suitable, more her equal intellectually. But Dorothea is no good at pick- 
 ing husbands. She gives up Casaubon’s money, marries the impoverished 
 Ladislaw, and ends a contented housewife, her mental capacities never 
 tested, the life she intended never fulfilled. 
 
 “We are all of us born in moral stupidity,” says George Eliot, a trace of 
 which appears to linger in Dorothea’s makeup, leaving her not as bright 
 as she might be. Even as an innocent child she believed in “the gratitude 
 of wasps.” 
 
 The Rhines and ESP. When B. and I moved to Durham, N.C., 
 in the 1940s, we lived in a white house in Tuscaloosa Forest —a wooded 
 section of town—that J. B. Rhine and his wife Louisa had owned. He was 
 the founder of parapsychology, a professor at Duke who devoted most of 
 
Looking Back 159 
 
 his academic life to investigating psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, 
 clairvoyance, precognition, communication with the dead. J. B.'s main 
 laboratory experiments were with a deck of twenty-five playing cards 
 with five different symbols by which he tested people, often Duke stu- 
 dents for what he called their extrasensory perception, or the ability to 
 name the correct symbol without seeing the card. He also visited haunted 
 houses, interviewed mediums and once a talking horse. Unfortunately, 
 from these inquiries he found no way, nor has one been found, to predict 
 or control a psychic event, no way to show that the dead can speak. 
 
 In the Rhines’ former house where we lived for several years, we found 
 ESP cards under the linoleum but experienced no hauntings or other dis- 
 turbances. J. B. and Louisa became our good friends who never asked us 
 to submit to testing our psychic powers. In London one year we heard 
 J. B. speak at the annual meeting of the Society for Psychical Research, 
 where he explained his scientific experiments and was respectfully re- 
 ceived, though the year before they had enjoyed a more lively talk on 
 “Apparitions.” Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler were two of the many 
 followers interested at that time in parapsychology. We used to dine at 
 the Rhine home with mediums and poets, with “sensitives” like Eileen 
 Garrett who sought out the Rhines to reveal their personal intimations 
 of immortality, though neither Rhine ever professed to have a psychic 
 happening or glimpse into the unknown. Louisa was a matter-of-fact, 
 sensible, non-mystical woman who nevertheless became tireless in her 
 search. Sceptical at first and wary of psychics and their claims, she once 
 told me that the mass of evidence she had collected of people possessing 
 such powers was too overwhelming to be denied. J. B. was a warm, lov- 
 able, generous man, convinced that these frontiers of the mind exist and 
 knowledge of them can be put to everyday use. 
 
 Then one day Louisa phoned to ask us to dinner on Saturday night 
 and to beg a special favor of me. Their honored guest that evening was to 
 be the wife of a newspaper man in New York who had recently died and 
 was sending back reams of his own poems from the Other Side by means 
 of a Ouija board. After the lady’s reading of his posthumous works to the 
 
160 The Only Way 
 
 assembled group, Louisa wanted me to discuss these poems and criticize 
 them in any way I liked, not necessarily, she said, for any message they 
 might carry from the grave. 
 
 I couldn’t do that. The Rhines said they understood and were forgiv- 
 ing, but we weren’t invited again. 
 
 Indians on the Eno. In New Mexico where the nuclear bomb 
 was born, I heard people say, “Let’s give the country back to the Indi- 
 ans.” They meant the Pueblos, Navajos, Zuni—the peaceful first settlers 
 who would not in a thousand years have blown up the earth they loved, 
 which rightly belonged to them. 
 
 My land is Indian land. I give them credit for Indian summer in this 
 countryside. Three hundred years ago the Eno Indians lived where I live, 
 a mighty insignificant Sioux tribe for whom the Eno River below my 
 house is named. Like the little stream, barely negotiable in a canoe, they 
 didn’t amount to much. They hunted bear, venison, wild turkey, an occa- 
 sional bison in my pine woods, fished in the Eno, and disappeared in a 
 mist nobody knows where. I see them of a morning roaming Indian file 
 over the dooryard, the last man scuffing the earth to hide their tracks. In 
 1670 John Lederer, a German explorer, came upon the tent village of Eno 
 Indians and said they were small and thievish and slung stones. In 1701 
 young John Lawson, a surveyor from Charleston, found them a friendly 
 tribe whose chief was Eno Will. Lawson invited him to become a Chris- 
 tian, and wrote, “Eno Will was of the best and most agreeable Temper 
 that ever I met with in an Indian.” 
 
 When the white settlers first came to North Carolina in the seven- 
 teenth century, already located east of here was a tribe of the Iroquois, 
 the savage Tuscaroras, who lived in some fifteen settlements along the 
 banks of the Neuse River. By 1700 the Indians had become bitterly re- 
 sentful of the colonists, who, they claimed, cheated them of their tribal 
 lands, raped their women, kidnapped their people and sold them into 
 slavery. On September 22, 1711, five hundred Tuscarora warriors, divided 
 into parties, descended on the unsuspecting settlers, and the bloody Tus- 
 carora War began that lasted nearly three years, killing several hundred 
 
Looking Back 161 
 
 settlers and thousands of the Tuscaroras. Their first victim was John Law- 
 son, whom they seized and, during an all-night dance round a huge fire, 
 tortured to death by sticking pine splinters into his body from head to 
 toe and lighting them one by one to turn him into a flaming torch. 
 
 Finally defeated, the Tuscaroras fled north to New York State where 
 they joined the Iroquois. And the poor Eno Indians may have fled after 
 them and lost their tribal unity, though in 1733 William Byrd, colonial 
 gentleman of Virginia, who had purchased 20,000 acres of land in North 
 Carolina and named it the Land of Eden, came one day upon Eno Will. 
 By his reckoning seventy-eight years old, Eno Will offered to conduct 
 Byrd to a silver mine on the Eno River. Byrd gave him a bottle of rum 
 instead “to comfort his heart.” We haven't found the silver yet. 
 
 One positive good I know about the Eno Indians (true, they say, of 
 the Apaches and other tribes) is that they would have nothing whatever 
 to do with their mother-in-law. She wasn’t allowed near their person or 
 permitted to live with her married daughter or even speak to her son-in- 
 law — one sure way of keeping the peace. 
 
 The Three Arts Club. Fifty years ago Nan Cole, wife of the pro- 
 vost at Duke, started a little club with the ambitious name Three Arts. It 
 differed from other clubs in town in that everyone invited to join was an 
 artist, musician, or writer and was asked to bring what she had on hand 
 to show, perform, or read at the monthly meetings. 
 
 The wonder is, the club still meets fifty years later. From the start 
 twenty young women, many of them faculty wives, ignored the perils of 
 talent under scrutiny and settled for sociability, unlimited approval, and 
 unrestrained praise. Three arts at a time proved too many to argue about. 
 Nobody claimed to be expert in all three—able to paint a watercolor, 
 play a Byrd tune, and write a verse simultaneously — which lessened the 
 competition. As Camus said, “Life is too short for afternoon teas.” Our 
 afternoon teas were too short for passing judgment on three arts before 
 supper. 
 
 We settled for enjoyment of each other. Now, among the artists, Lib, 
 Ruth, Nadine show their paintings and we brood over them, hearing 
 
162 The Only Way 
 
 about acrylics and collages, endorsing everything in sight and calling it 
 beautiful. Joan, who works in stained glass, creates in her studio full- 
 length figures of Mary Magdalene and St. Francis, the saints and the 
 apostles. Eventually she’ll have to build a church to hold them. Sylvia 
 is an internationally known weaver of tapestries, whose living room is 
 graced by an enormous loom and the walls by her huge designs. When 
 asked how, with house, husband, children and outdoor pool, she man- 
 ages to weave twelve hours a day, she replies, “I am disciplined.” Sally 
 is a well-known potter. Florence is a sculptor in marble, molding with 
 loving hands and chisel her smooth gray abstract forms. Shirley molds 
 out of cloth stuffed with cotton (“soft sculpture”) nearly life-size figures 
 of Leda and the Swan, a herd of buffalo heads with Buffalo Bill dead cen- 
 ter, a group of banana trees, and, my favorite, Aphrodite emerging from 
 the foam on a large artichoke. 
 
 The musicians are professionals who may arrange a program together 
 — Ruth and Junita on two pianos—or Sylvia plays her violin, Nancy her 
 cello. For a while we had a recorder group, followed by a harpist fol- 
 lowed by a flutist. Two are composers: Lola, who sets Shakespeare’s songs 
 to modern arrangements; Barbara, who composes devotional hymns and 
 has written a cookbook. 
 
 The writers remain the least ready to perform, for the reason, it’s 
 said, that all writers hate to write and avoid getting started. Once under 
 way they will read of an afternoon a whole play, like Ginny, or chap- 
 ters of a novel, like Betsy. Lee’s musical comedy, The Scandalous Mrs. 
 Jack, was given a stage production in Raleigh; Fanny’s bestselling novel, 
 Good Morning, Miss Dove, became a Hollywood movie. Babs is an es- 
 sayist, Mena a biographer of General Julian S. Carr, Camilla publishes 
 short stories, Julie writes paperback romances that sell in supermarkets. 
 Two are newspaper women: Jerry, an editorial writer, makes portraits of 
 people; Betty, who reviews books, reads us excerpts from her journal. 
 
 For a while I lamented the lack of criticism that reduces everything 
 to a show-and-tell exercise greeted with applause. After teaching creative 
 writing for years at Duke, I expected some comment at our sessions ac- 
 companied by free advice. But by now I’m glad to get away with under- 
 
Looking Back 163 
 
 mining the arts by, say, a travelogue of Tibet or Lapland—places nobody 
 but me could be dragged to. Only once did I disturb the peace with some- 
 thing I read. That time I chose two accounts of unhappy marriages, the 
 tale of Héloise and Abelard, and the story of Efe Gray’s union with John 
 Ruskin. Everyone was quietly attentive till I reached the part where Effie 
 learned why her marriage had not been consummated. Well! Voices were 
 raised, confusion and tumult descended. The plight of poor Héloise and 
 her unmanned husband was forgot. Instead a public debate began, fol- 
 lowed by the airing of strong views on the delicate subject of Effie’s pubic 
 hair and Ruskin’s objection to it. I don’t recall what the upshot was— 
 whether the final vote went for or against Effie, only that it took me sev- 
 eral days to recover from the to-do and laugh about it. Up to then I was 
 flummoxed. 
 
 According to the art historian Anne Hollander, “Pubic hair is an ex- 
 tremely ambiguous and illusive subject to pursue.” Though in modern 
 art the dark triangle is frequently displayed, in classical art, both painting 
 and sculpture, it was a way of distinguishing the sexes: males had pubic 
 hair, even under the fig leaf. Females did not. 
 
 In real life it has long been considered inelegant by ladies of quality, for 
 example, courtesans and strippers. (A famous exception was Lady Caro- 
 line Lamb, who for love of Byron enclosed in a letter a gift of her pubic 
 hair and requested his in exchange.) 
 
 “But from classical times onward,” writes Ms. Hollander, “the har- 
 mony of the female body seemed to require the absence of hair.” So John 
 Ruskin must have thought. 
 
 Caroline Gordon at Home. | recall meeting Caroline Gordon, 
 
 Allen Tate’s wife, one evening in Durham. When we were introduced she 
 
 gave me a scrutinizing look, frowned, turned abruptly to her hostess, and 
 said, “May I have two aspirins, please?” 
 
 Now Caroline Gordon is dead, and left is a collection of letters to 
 
 her friend Sally Wood, 1924-1937, to whom she sent hurried, dashed-off 
 
 notes concerning domestic events like “Cousin Sis is quite well except for 
 
164 The Only Way 
 
 a rash on her stomach.” It’s clear from them that she should have written 
 a memoir of her tumultuous days with Allen Tate, when a generation of 
 writers invaded their household and her struggle with the literary tem- 
 perament was a losing one. “When I think of all the people I’ve had here,” 
 she wrote Sally, “feeding them on a shoe string . . .” well, it was hectic, it 
 was infuriating. “I’ve never seen anything like the way they come. I have 
 gotten a bit bitter about it.” 
 
 The letters begin the year the Tates were married and lived on Mor- 
 ton Street in New York, trying unsuccessfully to support themselves by 
 writing. After they fled to an isolated farmhouse in upstate New York, 
 Hart Crane moved in with them for several months while writing “The 
 Bridge,” and proved so exasperating a guest that they reached a pass of 
 not speaking but of shoving notes to each other under the door. “Hart is 
 a fine poet,” Caroline wrote, “but God save me from ever having another 
 romantic in the house.” Robert Penn Warren brought his fiancée and 
 stayed six weeks, till she nearly threw them both out the window. Her 
 husband Allen, a dedicated Southern Agrarian, showed a respectful in- 
 difference to nature and refused to hoe the garden. In a “fiendishly” cold 
 winter there were times when they didn’t eat. 
 
 Then Allen got a Guggenheim and they spent a year in Paris, coming 
 home in 1930 to a house overlooking the Cumberland River in Tennes- 
 see that Allen’s brother Ben helped them buy. Caroline called it Ben- 
 folly in his honor. Near Nashville, it became a gathering place for young 
 poets from Vanderbilt, besides such regular boarders as Edmund Wil- 
 son, Malcolm Cowley, Katherine Anne Porter who stayed five weeks too 
 many. Caroline did the cooking while she worked on her fourth novel. In 
 each room of the house someone was writing a book, pounding a type- 
 writer with frenzied industry. Or they would sit immovable at the table 
 arguing from lunch to dinner. Life with the Tates was no game of tiddly- 
 winks. It was exhausting. 
 
 One hot summer in 1937 Robert Lowell arrived at the gate. Told by 
 Caroline, “I’m sorry. There’s no place to put you unless we put up a tent 
 on the lawn,” next day he set up a Sears Roebuck tent under a lotus 
 
Looking Back 165 
 
 tree and camped there for three months, loudly declaiming his poetry 
 through the night. Ford Madox Ford, with his mistress Janice Biala and 
 Janice’s sister-in-law (to whom Ford dictated a thousand words a day) 
 were already settled in for two months with the Tates. Ford, who was 
 sixty-three and suffered from insomnia, indigestion, gout, and a deep 
 loathing of Southern cooking, was so enraged by Lowell that he ignored 
 his presence. At table Ford, refusing to eat, tore up and threw pieces of 
 bread about. He called the Tates intellectual desperadoes. They said he 
 flushed the toilet too much. As for his mistress, Caroline wrote, “I took 
 Janice by the horns last night before she had time to get really obnox- 
 ious.” It cost Caroline months to recover from the Ford visit. Allen told 
 her she had a homicidal complex. 
 
 Out of her encounters with superegos, their squabbles and strife, she 
 came to hold strong views of writers in general, in the flesh, and under- 
 foot. Faulkner, she said, was a piece of cheese. Ellen Glasgow was a grand 
 old girl. She regarded E. E. Cummings as one of the greatest bores that 
 ever lived. Robert Lowell deeply offended by giving her a list of her hus- 
 band’s love affairs. She couldn’t abide Louise Bogan. No one dared men- 
 tion in her presence the author of Gone with the Wind. Hart Crane’s sui- 
 cide was, she said when she read it in the papers, an inevitable end of 
 such a life. He left a note saying the world had no place for poets. 
 
 Had she chosen to, Caroline Gordon could have made an illuminat- 
 ing report of the literary life in America of which she was so consciously 
 a part. With memories like these, too bad she didn’t. 
 
 Quentin Bell. He was a shy young man when I met him at 
 Charleston, his home in Sussex outside London. You wouldn't guess he 
 was Vanessa's son, when she was so beautiful—strangely beautiful, even 
 sensual in old age, with gray hair parted in the middle and drawn severely 
 back, granny glasses down her nose, her stooped self huddled in a rocker. 
 Quentin’s mistake was to resemble his father, the art critic Clive Bell— 
 reddish-haired, stout and round-faced—when he might have inherited 
 his mother’s looks and his father’s inextinguishable desire to be amusing. 
 
166 The Only Way 
 
 At lunch that day Quentin’s silence matched Vanessa’s own, while Clive 
 entertained with scandalous gossip, gleeful at his indiscretions. Duncan 
 Grant, who lived with Vanessa (as Clive did not, a guest like B. and me), 
 helped with the serving of Clive’s gift of pheasants, and paid polite atten- 
 tion while his lovely face stayed grave when he was supposed to laugh. 
 In this household of professional artists, Quentin appeared slightly out 
 of it. He had no formal education, never attended school, and his artis- 
 tic talent lay in the making of pots. Julian, his older brother killed in the 
 Spanish Civil War, was a promising poet adored by Vanessa and end- 
 lessly grieved for, whose poems she brought out like jewels and asked us 
 to read. Angelica, her daughter by Duncan Grant, was married and away. 
 
 Ten years later Quentin surprised us by turning up without warning 
 one day to visit us in North Carolina. He had grown large and impressive 
 with a red beard. B. said he looked like Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Quentin 
 was still a potter. More than that, he was a serene guest who laughed 
 easily and endeared himself, who obediently downed six martinis (re- 
 maining calm) when we took him to a cocktail party, an absorbing talker 
 with forceful views on art who admired our house and made no men- 
 tion of its peculiar lack of pots. By the time we visited them in England, 
 Quentin was married and living in Yorkshire, a Professor of Fine Art at 
 the University of Leeds, where, in order to hire him, they had to give him 
 an honorary degree. His wife was the exceptionally beautiful Ann Olivier, 
 cousin of Laurence Olivier and daughter of Hugh Popham, Keeper of 
 Prints at the British Museum. I loved being with them, loved their lively, 
 amusing company, their niceness. They had three young children and a 
 rumpled house that reminded me of Vanessa’s careless one, with the addi- 
 tion of Quentin’s splendid pots. He had found exactly the life he wanted. 
 He was a happy man, a merry one in his home, a historian of Blooms- 
 bury engaged in writing a biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf, whose 
 large portrait painted by Vanessa hung over our bed. 
 
 Now years later, Quentin and I have lost touch. “Dear Helen,” he wrote 
 when B. died, “is it any consolation to you to know that no one who ever 
 knew you and Bev could have failed to love you?” Only yesterday I came 
 
Looking Back 167 
 
 across an article about Quentin in the Architectural Review that calls him 
 a voice from the past, “the gentle thinking potter of Sussex.” A picture of 
 him shows a dismayingly ancient fellow with white, wispy hair and a long 
 white beard, leaning on a cane, sitting content among his pots. He and 
 his wife live in a house only a mile from Charleston where we first met. 
 In the article that discusses him as a successful artist, he is quoted as say- 
 ing, “I put myself somewhere in between cake decorating and Raphael. 
 And since I’m not Raphael it’s best to stick to pottery.” Dear Quentin. 
 
 Hildegarde and Company. On a night in the 1930s B. and I went 
 to hear an entrancing salon singer named Hildegarde in a New York 
 nightclub. We thought she was French by her accent, especially when she 
 sang “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” and she added a Parisian air of elegance 
 dressed in a long white gown and full-length gloves, tossing about a large 
 chiffon handkerchief. We had just heard Toscanini conduct the Philhar- 
 monic in the Beethoven Seventh that night at Carnegie Hall. Afterward 
 we took a cab to the Savoy-Plaza, and it was no letdown to listen to 
 Hildegarde, who was the Incomparable (she said so herself), like Tosca- 
 nini highly professional, with absolute confidence she was the greatest. 
 
 Now I see by the papers that Hildegarde is turning up sixty years later, 
 at eighty-five (“I’m still here”), singing at the Russian Tea Room in New 
 York, elegant as ever tossing her handkerchief like a banner with the 
 strange device, Excelsior! pleasing the crowd with “The Last Time I Saw 
 Paris.” They say she hails from Wisconsin. 
 
 Ginger Rogers is another such veteran from the 30’s—the one who 
 danced with Fred Astaire—whom you needn'’t trust to a lingering mem- 
 ory of. She is visible on television these nights not only in an old movie 
 (Top Hat) as the young dancer she was sixty years ago, but also live on 
 the screen to talk about her recent autobiography, Ginger, still the star — 
 pink, smiling, spectacled, five times married, and fifty pounds heavier. 
 Or Katherine Hepburn comes on full of years, trembling with palsy, 
 as abundantly herself as if she had stepped out of Woman of the Year 
 with Spencer Tracy, dead these many years. It’s a kind of screen magic 
 
168 The Only Way 
 
 that makes me wish I could watch Queen Elizabeth I as she danced 
 with the Earl of Essex four hundred years ago. We could if we had the 
 tapes. 
 
 Hepburn at eighty-four is interviewed on 20-20 by Barbara Walters 
 because she has completed her autobiography titled simply Me (me, she 
 says, is all she thinks about). She lives alone in an eight-bedroom house 
 filled with pictures of Spencer Tracy, the love of her life. Her affair with 
 him, a married man, lasted twenty-seven years (“I don’t approve of mar- 
 riage”). In her late role of survivor, she told Barbara Walters, she never 
 cries, owes her longevity to a one-track mind. In Me she says, “I’m like 
 the Statue of Liberty to a lot of people.” 
 
 Martha Graham, who died last April at ninety-six, dictated her auto- 
 biography, Blood Memory, claiming always to have been possessed with 
 herself (is this the secret to longevity?). Her impulse from childhood was 
 to be better than the best, a goddess, and she danced with this in mind. 
 She never married her lovers (except for a brief union with her partner, 
 Erick Hawkins) but kept the person of Martha Graham strictly singular. 
 “She was really God-driven or devil-driven, whichever side you want to 
 take,” said one of her dancers. Another said, “She took our insides out,” 
 cuffing and slapping them around to get what she wanted. 
 
 When old age came, “Martha,” they told her, “you are not a goddess, 
 you are not immortal,” and advised her to accept the fact. 
 
 “The hell I will,” she said. 
 
 For some reason, old age has become a timely subject, the most popu- 
 lar concern since the Gulf War. Tonight on Prime Time Live with Diane 
 Sawyer, the talk was of “Life after Ninety,” as if such an eventuality were 
 likely or even advisable. Two questions asked but left in considerable 
 doubt were: “How old can you be and still function as a human being?” 
 and “How does it feel to be eighty or ninety?” (The answer to that is, 
 you have to get there first, and the feeling is one of impermanence.) On 
 the show they produced in fair preservation a ninety-year-old man who 
 trots round a track every day and takes multiple vitamins but revealed no 
 
Looking Back 169 
 
 further activity, and an old woman who lifts weights and looked for her 
 years as imperishable as Monet’s plump wife of a pastry cook. 
 
 Where will I get by making these respectful notes of old-timers and Aged 
 P’s? Answer: older. It just takes time. 
 
 Time will say nothing but I told you so, 
 
 Time only knows the price we have to pay, 
 
 If I could tell you I would let you know. 
 —W. H. Auden 
 
 Late ‘Night Thoughts. Lewis Thomas’s books used to overflow 
 with faith in life and whatever keeps one sane. These days he seems to be 
 going nuts. In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Sym- 
 phony (which in its emotional intensity he cannot now bear to listen to), 
 he looks at the current scene, at the world’s apparent intention if not de- 
 termination to self-destruct: “What I cannot imagine is what it would be 
 like to be young. How do the young stand it? How can they keep their 
 sanity? If I were very young, sixteen or seventeen years old, I think I 
 would begin, perhaps very slowly and imperceptibly, to go crazy.” 
 
 He might listen to Bach instead, to “Ich habe genug” or the Coffee 
 Cantata that says, “Don’t our children give us a hundred thousand head- 
 aches!” 
 
 E. B. White remarked in a letter that the feeling one is going nuts is 
 a common sensation in this century: “I myself no longer take sanity as 
 seriously as I used to and have felt a whole lot better since dropping it for 
 the hot potato it is.” 
 
 Later night thoughts (3:00 a.M.): the ships that pass in the night are no 
 longer your usual run of traffic but a stormy sea of dreadnoughts, de- 
 stroyers, and a few scared windjammers. Yet 
 
 It is useless to worry, 
 Wakeful while the long night goes. —Tu Fu, “One Hundred Worries” 
 
170 The Only Way 
 
 (Tu Fu is known to have said, about 1,229 years ago, “It will certainly 
 rain, which impels me to write this poem.”) 
 
 Winds at Mt. Airy. “We just thought the Lord had raptured us 
 all,” said Rev. Winford Davis when tornadic winds and williwaws blew 
 the roof clean off his church in Mt. Airy, N.C. as the service was about to 
 start. The moment of rapture was upon them and glory at hand, a pre- 
 lude to the Second Coming. They the Chosen any minute now would 
 lift off and soar homeward to heaven as the sinful world beneath ended 
 in Armageddon and everlasting hellfire. Otherwise such stormy weather 
 had to be construed as sign of God’s wrath, or the overdoing of divine 
 intervention (if a so-called act of God is to be blamed on God). The roof- 
 lifting tempest that exalted Rev. Davis and his flock right out of their 
 seats came after a wasteland summer in the Bible Belt, thunder without 
 rain. The last I heard they were still stuck in Mt. Airy, building a new 
 roof. 
 
 It reminded me of a story told by Washington columnist George Will 
 about a man falling from a cliff who managed to clutch at a root that 
 saved him from plunging to certain death on the rocks far below. But 
 there he was, hanging on, unable to climb back to safety. He shouted, 
 “Is anyone up there?” And the voice of God answered him to have faith 
 and pray, then he could safely let go and land unhurt. The man took 
 another look down at the rocks and raging surf and yelled, “Is anyone 
 else up there?” 
 
 The Big Bang. It was a pleasure the other Sunday to listen to 
 Murray Gell-Mann being interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS. It was like 
 going to church and feeling reverential. Gell-Mann is the particle physi- 
 cist who discovered the quark and gave it a name from Joyce’s Finnegans 
 Wake, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” He now leads a group in Santa 
 Fe that make bold investigations into the nature of the universe, such as 
 what was there before the big bang? And why a big bang anyway? 
 About mid-century the cosmologist Fred Hoyle invented the term 
 
Looking Back 171 
 
 Big Bang to mock and ridicule the childish idea of a universe sponta- 
 neously created by the explosion of a fireball. A better understanding of 
 the theory came along in the 1960s. By 1976 Stephen Weinberg had writ- 
 ten The First Three Minutes to describe the moment of creation (while 
 reflecting, “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also 
 seems pointless”). In 1988 Stephen Hawking published The History of 
 Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes, presenting his theory of the origin 
 of our world of time and space, his belief that the big bang did happen 
 and that bottomless black holes do exist that swallow up the stars. But if 
 a universe was already there before the big bang occurred, as Hawking 
 says it was, then has it always been there, a limitless universe that never 
 began and will never end? And if it was never created yet does exist, why 
 does it exist? Why do we exist? (Or, as Samuel Beckett said, “Why is there 
 not nothing?”) Hawking writes, “I am still trying to understand how the 
 universe works, why it is the way it is, and why it exists at all. I think 
 there is a reasonable chance we may succeed in the first two aims, but I 
 am not so optimistic about finding why.” (If Philip were alive, he too as a 
 physicist would be asking the how and why of the universe.) 
 
 Yet in the New York Times of June 3, 1991, the big bang theory was reported 
 to be in deep trouble. That year Eric J. Lerner published The Big Bang 
 Never Happened—which excited no public lament. A sweeping revolu- 
 tion was said to be taking place, as great as the upheavals when Coperni- 
 cus and Galileo redefined the solar system. The big bang theory appeared 
 to be crumbling like the Ptolemaic system that lasted for 1,500 years. 
 
 A year later, April 23, 1992, the New York Times announced, as if the 
 question had never come up, that the big bang did happen. It said a 
 spacecraft had obtained pictures of wispy clouds that indicated an explo- 
 sion had led to the formation of stars and galaxies fifteen billion years 
 ago. Hawking called it “the discovery of the century, if not of all time.” 
 The astrophysicist George Smoot said, “If youre religious, it’s like look- 
 ing into the face of God.” I hope he will tell us frankly if that is what he 
 is doing. 
 
172 The Only Way 
 
 (Einstein said: “What really interests me is whether God had any 
 choice in the creation of the world.”) 
 
 Like Carl Sagan and the astronomers, Murray Gell-Mann finds it un- 
 thinkable that, in a universe of a hundred billion galaxies where our sun 
 is insignificant among countless suns, ours alone should have intelligent 
 life. Yet so far there is no evidence. His words ended the Sunday morning 
 service: “Life in such a universe is not so remarkable. It could be snuffed 
 out on this planet and never be missed.” 
 
 Gardens. Spenser wrote in his Shepheardes Calender, “Strew me 
 the ground with daffadowndillies,” and it was April. Four hundred years 
 later it’s April in my garden, where a pale daffodil or two struggles to 
 strew the ground. Wordsworth said he saw ten thousand at a glance. I 
 need him here to do the counting. 
 
 Tulips in the Duke gardens are the peacocks of spring. They wait till 
 daffodils are gone before, blinding and vainglorious, they make their dis- 
 play. In eighteenth-century England tulips bore proud names like “Alex- 
 ander the Great” and “The Duke of Marlborough.” One of the proudest 
 in our gardens is “Jewel of Spring.” Another is “Mrs. J. T. Scheepers,” 
 which if I were a tulip I would resent. (More so if I were the Whoopi 
 Goldberg rose.) 
 
 The New York Times recommends a blue flower garden for summer. 
 I'd like a garden of perpetual blue, a clarity of blue where bluebirds, blue 
 jays, and indigo buntings met their match. Colette said God was stingy 
 when he handed out blue flowers. But there would be plenty of Delft blue 
 larkspur, Alice blue forget-me-nots, China blue asters, wild iris, bache- 
 lor’s buttons, bellflowers, bluets, morning glories, gentians, bluebonnets, 
 cornflowers, a little periwinkle, a tub of blue hydrangeas, Monet’s water- 
 lilies, and someone on hand to say, “There is a garden in her face, where 
 bluebells and white lilies blow.” 
 
 Wallace Stevens: “God, what a thing blue is!” 
 Andrew Marvell: “No white nor red was ever seen 
 
Looking Back 173 
 
 So amorous as this lovely green.” 
 
 van Gogh: “I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by 
 means of red and green and yellow.” 
 
 Wallace Stevens: “All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.” 
 
 Colors Like Green. Yellow. Blue 
 
 The journey began with water music. 
 
 “Never go back!” it wailed like an oboe 
 
 As we left in a woodwind up the winding sealanes. 
 And my dress was Paris green. 
 
 Mornings that sunflowered in the sun 
 
 By evening light were primroses. 
 
 In all Provence as van Gogh told someone, 
 “How lovely yellow is!” 
 
 I wore the blue gloves in the Church of the Madeleine, 
 My folded hands like doves, 
 
 And they were blue as lapis lazuli, 
 
 Spiritual like me. 
 
 I wore them in the Musée du Jeu de Paume, 
 And they were sunstruck, skylit as midday. 
 They had become 
 
 Blue as a Renoir, blue as a Monet. 
 
 I wore them on the Boulevard Saint-Michel 
 And there, as well, 
 
 They were the spit and counterpart 
 
 Of the blue gentians in a flower cart. 
 
 The blue du pays, the blue of the locale— 
 The gloves you bought me on the Rue Royale. 
 
 Subject: Trees. “Suche apple tre, suche frute.” 
 The importance of trees began with the trees of Paradise, planted by 
 
174 The Only Way 
 
 God (“But only God can make a tree”). Everywhere in Eden, says Milton, 
 grew the noblest and fairest of trees laden with blossom and fruit at the 
 same time, while in their midst rose the Tree of Life, blooming with am- 
 brosial fruit of golden hue. And next to life, 
 
 Our death, the Tree of Knowledge, grew fast by, 
 Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill. 
 
 Adam stood under the apple tree beside the accommodating fig that hid 
 his nakedness—the same Tree of Death on which Christ was crucified 
 (“Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree” Acts 5:30). 
 
 Lucian praised a similar paradise, the Elysian Fields, a place of bliss 
 without suffering, where the fields grew homemade bread, the trees were 
 shining glass, and the fruit they bore were cups filled with wine. There 
 Persephone walked under a pomegranate tree and, as Ovid told the story, 
 
 She had been hungry wandering in the gardens, 
 Poor simple child, and plucked from the leaning bough 
 A pomegranate 
 
 and ate the forbidden fruit exactly as Eve did when she lost paradise. 
 
 My mind is full of trees. My cedars are the Cedars of Lebanon, my 
 sycamore is the tree that the Persian king Xerxes fell madly in love with 
 and halted his army to contemplate its loveliness. Confucius’s tree is the 
 mulberry, in the hollow of which he was born. Keats sat under a mul- 
 berry and heard a nightingale. Buddha was a veritable tree man, born 
 under a sal tree, enlightened under a bo tree, dead beneath the shade of 
 two sal trees. Plato walked under a plane tree, conceiving the meaning of 
 Platonic love, while Sir Isaac Newton stood under an apple and was hit 
 on the head, grasping the laws of gravitation. Judas hanged himself on an 
 elder. Augustine flung himself under a fig tree to talk with God and re- 
 pent his sins. George Herbert wrote, “I read, and sigh, and wish I were a 
 tree,” just as the nymph Daphne sighed and fled when Apollo attempted 
 to ravish her and, wishing to stay a virgin, she cried out to the pitying 
 gods. Suddenly her breasts turned to bark and her arms to branches, her 
 feet were rooted to the ground, her head became a treetop. Apollo looked 
 
Looking Back 175 
 
 with love at this laurel tree and embraced and kissed it, and the laurel 
 seemed to consent, to be saying yes oh yes. Sir Thomas Browne wished 
 we were all propagated like trees. 
 
 Hercules climbed the trees of the Hesperides to gather golden apples. 
 From the bough of an oak Aeneas plucked the prophetic leaves before 
 descending into hell. Druids, who prayed to trees, went to live in oak 
 groves where mistletoe grew to which they made human sacrifice. Zeus 
 himself dwelt in a mighty oak and rustled its leaves with answers at the 
 oracle of Dodona. Noah’s dove carried a leaf in its mouth from an olive 
 tree, and the rain ended. 
 
 Aristotle said trees are aware of us, in their wisdom possess reason to 
 inspire us with noble passions. Yet the philosopher’s tree doesn’t exist. 
 The yew tree, quite without reason, promises eternal life. “Stones have 
 been known to move, and trees to speak,” says Macbeth, but when they 
 speak it is of man’s murderous ways. Gods themselves once lived in trees, 
 but where, O Lord, where are they now? 
 
 “These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.” 
 
8 AS 
 
 Ways of Travel 
 
 You might guess offhand that a book called The Mind of the Traveler was 
 written by a traveler to describe his journeys on this planet and their 
 effect on his mind. But the subtitle, From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, 
 quickly enlarges the picture far beyond one man’s experience. In his pref- 
 ace Eric Leed says his study of travel began with his first trip in 1942 
 in his mother’s womb from Hawaii to Montana. The only other trip he 
 mentions taking was to Rochester, New York. There as a graduate stu- 
 dent he began the manifestly inward journey that taught him “how to use 
 the books.” 
 
 This is no guidebook for the tourist. It’s a historian’s account, rich 
 in material, of travel through the ages, the nature of the journey and 
 the mind transformed by what it encountered. Mr. Leed is the traveler 
 who never went, content in the library to read the words of those who 
 have traveled or thought about it—a voluminous report by Plato, Seneca, 
 Pliny, the Venerable Bede, Marco Polo, Captain Cook, Darwin, Henry 
 James, Einstein, Jack Kerouac, and Joan Didion, to name but a few. He 
 quotes Socrates, who told Phaedrus, “For only hold up before me... a 
 book, and you may lead me all around Attica, and over the wide world.” 
 
 One certainty Mr. Leed has reached is that travel is no longer heroic. 
 Everyone travels, though one’s right to is a recent freedom for the com- 
 mon man. Times were different in The Epic of Gilgamesh (about 2000 B.c.) 
 that tells of a young Sumerian king who sets forth on a heroic journey be- 
 cause a god has revealed that his human fate is to die. On a journey of ex- 
 treme peril and suffering he learns the truth, that there is no eternal youth 
 or life everlasting, and returns home to weep and carve his tale upon 
 a stone. In Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century epic poem Yvain, the 
 knight rides out on his palfrey to achieve glory and win the lady, but in 
 the process is humbled, becomes temporarily mad, and gains some hard- 
 
Ways of Travel 177 
 
 won self-knowledge. In our time Mr. Leed finds a redefinition of the quest 
 by Alexander Kinglake, a wellborn Englishman who, in the classic Eothen 
 (1844) travels on horseback through the Middle East in search of himself 
 “free from the stale civilization of Europe,” an escape that ultimately fails. 
 By this testing of self, through penance, exile, clash with the unknown, 
 the traveler has sought valiantly to know who he is, what world he in- 
 habits. Goethe in Italy sought to discover “myself in the objects I see.” 
 
 Montaigne said it was the journey and not the arrival anywhere that 
 matters. In the ancient world, years of wandering were thought an ap- 
 propriate, even necessary choice of philosophers, those looking for the 
 meaning of life. They were not undertaken lightly or for pleasure, but to 
 inform and illuminate the mind. Philosophical travel was a way of ex- 
 ploring the past — first in Egypt, believed to be the place from which all 
 culture and civilization sprang; then in the Holy Land as a hallowed place 
 of pilgrimage. There were the Crusaders, who extended the boundary 
 of Christendom, after them the wandering scholars of the Middle Ages, 
 who in their love of knowledge looked for enlightenment wherever it 
 might lead. With the invention of printing, a reason existed for humanis- 
 tic travel in pursuit of book learning, which led to the Renaissance. With 
 the discovery of the New World of the Americas came new distances to 
 explore that would expand the mind. Even the idea of the Grand Tour, 
 in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was one of self-improvement, 
 the education of the gentleman who, fresh from Oxford or Cambridge ac- 
 companied by his tutor, was expected to copy the manners of the upper 
 classes and keep a journal of his itinerary. William Cowper observed: 
 “How much a dunce that has been sent to roam / Excels a dunce that has 
 been kept at home!” 
 
 From the Grand Tourist emerged the plain tourist, whose travel be- 
 came global but whose tastes, limited to mere pleasure — acquiring sou- 
 venirs and sending postcards — proved him at best idle, purposeless, and 
 consequently despised. Meanwhile, four centuries of scientific travel, of 
 examining nature, identifying fossils and early man, led to Darwin and 
 his voyages on the Beagle, to the discovery of evolution, and to the great 
 scientific expeditions of the twentieth century. At the size of his subject, 
 
178 The Only Way 
 
 Mr. Leed confesses a feeling of vertigo; he omits travel to outer space or 
 a glance moonward. 
 
 As time went on, travelers no longer brought back fabulous tales but 
 facts no less staggering. Of course they found—wherever they went or 
 why —no earthly paradise or utopian world of peace and accord, nor did 
 they leave it that way. Those like the Vikings by plunder and conquest, 
 or military invaders by war and occupation, remind us that the traveler 
 throughout history has been not only a threat to world peace, but exclu- 
 sively male. On his own dark errand, he was also bent on what Mr. Leed 
 calls the “spermatic journey in which the male seed is broadcast” that has 
 long served to populate other worlds. 
 
 Nowadays in an age of mass tourism, departure is more unevent- 
 ful, easy and commonplace, engaged in indiscriminately by men and 
 women become little children on their way to Disneyland. Eric Leed 
 doesn’t pause long for the history of tourism or tour groups, their iden- 
 tity or character, which, being less than heroic, philosophical, or scien- 
 tific, leaves little to say. Nevertheless he believes travel is broadening, the 
 journey to elsewhere a natural impulse and worth the trouble—a search 
 for answers, a part of life. It’s encouraging to see how one’s own travel 
 through his book tends to broaden the mind. 
 
 Tourist vs. Traveler. If there is a difference between a tourist and 
 a traveler, which one am I? Tourists complain, travelers enjoy. A tourist is 
 by custom discontent; if the trip were to Nirvana, he would object to the 
 expense. Unwilling to be pleased, the tourist suffers from other tourists 
 and the injustices of travel that give him a head cold or jet lag, whereas a 
 traveler is a pleasurist who stays healthy at high altitudes and on stormy 
 seas. He learns to say hello—“bula” in Fiji and “jambo” in Kenya—with 
 the same broad smile and, when the times comes, “kwaheri” in Swahili, 
 goodbye, always goodbye. He enjoys the local fare: vichyssoise Vichy, 
 lima beams in Lima, Chateauneuf-du-Pape at Chateauneuf-du-Pape. He 
 never loses his passport. Instead of souvenirs he takes home a piece of 
 English landscape or the memory of a Degas; or collects a small magic 
 stone from Merlin’s cave in Tintagel, worry beads from Athens, a leaf of 
 
Ways of Travel 179 
 
 the bo tree from Benares, a pebble from Niagara Falls. He avoids exces- 
 sive expectation and blames nobody for mishaps, not even God. 
 
 In his travel books, Paul Theroux notes that travelers are optimists and 
 chooses the other kind, “I cultivated complainers.” Americans, he says, 
 are famous for complaining. Like him. 
 
 Travel was originally the same word as travail, meaning work or torture. 
 It had stern purpose behind it and wasn’t meant to amuse. Camus in his 
 Notebooks reflects, “There is no pleasure in traveling and I look upon it as 
 an occasion for spiritual testing.” Yet one needn’t be a Marco Polo or one 
 of the Three Magi. One needn't shun pleasure. Travel these days is classed 
 as light entertainment taken for relaxation and escape, and till lately was 
 affordable (my travel guide of the 1960s was Europe on Five Dollars a 
 Day). If it lacks a goal such as world conquest or enlightenment; if the 
 sights (museums, monuments, McDonald’s) soon fade like old snapshots 
 and places blur till Pavia becomes Piacenza—who was looking for the 
 Holy Grail? (The mad poet, John Clare, was looking for the horizon, and 
 one day he found it.) 
 
 Graham Greene, in Travels with My Aunt, wrote of Uncle Jo who 
 “wanted to make his life last longer. So he decided on a tour round the 
 world.” Like Uncle Jo I’ve traveled to extend my life—and been to para- 
 dise at least twice—partly also to escape from solitude, partly because I 
 like to live out of a suitcase. It’s one way to reduce the number of posses- 
 sions you need to live by, and to avoid acquiring souvenirs that only add 
 bulk to the store. 
 
 But people differ in their taste for travel. Once when I was about to 
 leave for the South Seas, a friend of mine asked in genuine pity, “Why in 
 God’s name would anyone want to go to Tahiti?” 
 
 Claude Lévi-Strauss on Travel. This anthropologist begins his 
 travel book about Brazil, Tristes Tropiques, “I hate travel and explorers.” 
 He sounds fed up, bent on discouraging a desire to see Brazil, which to 
 him means hardship and fatigue, and to read travel books, which are 
 delusory. “What do we find in travel books?” he asks, denouncing them 
 
180 The Only Way 
 
 as accounts of “trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings.” So 
 he writes this book and forbids me to read it. He thinks travelers should 
 be made to stay put and not bore people. 
 
 Lévi-Strauss was probably bored young, like me, by travelers and their 
 tales. As a child I sat through one too many of Burton Holmes’s 8,000 
 travelogues with lantern slides that made the world a dull place. I leafed 
 through too many copies of National Geographic, searching in vain for 
 an instructive view of really naked South Sea natives. In college in a re- 
 quired course in Religion, which consisted largely of pictures projected 
 on a screen of Egypt and the Holy Land, at first sight of a camel I would 
 slip down from my chair and on hands and knees crawl out of the dark- 
 ened room and down the hall, followed rather noisily by my roommate 
 Dottie. In North Carolina a lady traveler I knew, home from her annual 
 European tour, would summon us to her house and spend the evening 
 showing her slides of what turned out to be, repeatedly and unaccount- 
 ably, the battlefield of Waterloo. When she paused in her lecture, unable 
 to identify the next slide, someone would call out “Waterloo,” till we grew 
 weak with smothered laughter. 
 
 After such encounters, a body might well, like Lévi-Strauss, come to 
 question the advantages of travel. “I hate museums,” wrote Thoreau, a 
 reluctant traveler, adding, “How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if 
 he could?” 
 
 Journey Proud 
 
 My head is in a nimbus cloud. 
 
 Who makes a journey is journey proud 
 And will not sleep this night in his bed, 
 But on strangers’ linen 
 
 Lay his head, 
 
 And by small contrary winds is shaken 
 At this poor folly undertaken. 
 
 His hand is aspen, his mind aflutter, 
 He pales at the sight of bread and butter, 
 
Ways of Travel 181 
 
 Yearns to be missed and sighs aloud, 
 Being tremulous 
 
 And journey proud 
 
 And temporarily askew — 
 
 Like me at the thought of leaving you. 
 
 The Return of Jan Morris. A world traveler for half her days, 
 one of the wandering kind, Jan Morris has come back to Wales. As a way 
 of life, she admits to two addictions: traveling and staying at home, each 
 of which can be done well or badly. She is as glad to be back as her house 
 is infatuated with her presence, purring a loud welcome accompanied by 
 the two Abyssinian cats. Her house, she says, is her very self, like her 
 “properly egotistical,” frankly reflecting her own style and personality. 
 “Trefan Morys is unmistakably, indeed brazenly, me.” 
 
 Trefan Morys is the converted stables of a former eighteenth-century 
 manor house, built in 1774 of rough, gigantic stones. It consists of two 
 huge living rooms, one above the other, each forty-two feet long to hold 
 her 30,000 books. The front door is Welsh blue. Upstairs, in a corner 
 of the room, stands her tombstone, suitably carved with her name and 
 ready for instant use. 
 
 Much as Jan Morris loved to explore other worlds, other places, other 
 states of mind—the Taj Mahal, Venice, Oxford, Kashmir, Indianapolis, 
 and the fall of Queen Victoria’s empire —all splendid spectacles arranged 
 for her benefit (though as a traveler without complaint, she says the basic 
 rule is you can’t see everything) —in the end she loves her house the 
 most. Long it has stood, beaming with expectation, marking the years 
 like the patient tombstone awaiting her return. “And I am going to die in 
 it, I hope.” Home is the sailor, home from sea. 
 
 The Tour to the Hebrides. The only pictures on my wall worth 
 bidding for at Sotheby’s are three contemporary prints made by Thomas 
 Rowlandson in 1786. I found them in New York one day in the 1930s in 
 a secondhand bookshop on Fourth Avenue. They turned up in a torn 
 folder among an assortment of oddments clearly discarded as junk, and 
 
182 The Only Way 
 
 the price marked on the outside was twenty-five cents each. I picked out 
 the four grimiest—the Rowlandsons—and took them to the bookseller 
 at his desk. “How much?” I said. He barely glanced up. “Four for a dol- 
 lar,” he said, as if I couldn’t add. Call it affordable art. 
 
 Thomas Rowlandson was born in 1756, the son of a London merchant, 
 and died in 1827 at seventy, leaving behind some ten thousand water- 
 colors, drawings, prints of eighteenth-century life. As a serious painter, a 
 devotee of Rubens, he made endless studies of trees, gardens, and lovely 
 ladies, as well as a set of etchings for the Vicar of Wakefield and three 
 books of drawings of the immensely popular Dr. Syntax, a character he 
 invented. But most of all Rowlandson was a caricaturist, the cleverest of 
 his day, one whom Goya imitated. His ridicule of high and low life, coarse 
 and sottish as it often was—from willing wenches to blowsy beldames, 
 from tavern scenes to dogfights — gained him a place next to Hogarth in 
 English comic art. V. S. Pritchett once observed that to Rowlandson the 
 human race were cattle and swine, but that was obvious hyperbole. 
 
 In 1786 E. Jackson, the bookseller, printed Picturesque Beauties of Bos- 
 well containing twenty plates by Rowlandson. It appeared a year after 
 Boswell had published his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, the three- 
 month journey he and Dr. Johnson took in 1773. Rowlandson’s method 
 as illustrator was to copy a passage from the Journal that amused him 
 and place his cartoon above it. His satire was never cruel or gross. It 
 was comic. 
 
 The first of my three prints (I gave the fourth to a friend) is of Dr. John- 
 son arriving in Edinburgh on Saturday evening, August 14, 1773, where 
 Boswell met his coach at Boyd’s Inn and proudly escorted the great man 
 to his home. It was Dr. Johnson’s first visit, at sixty-three, to the Scotland 
 he disliked and the Scots he despised as barbarians. Boswell was thirty- 
 two: 
 
 Mr. Johnson and I walked arm in arm up the High Street to my house 
 in James Court; it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being as- 
 sailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh.— As we marched along, he 
 grumbled in my ear, “I smell you in the dark.” Vide Journal P.13 
 
Ways of Travel 183 
 
 Rowlandson has drawn Dr. Johnson as his lumbering self, clad in boots 
 and a greatcoat and hat, carrying a big oak stick. He is holding his finger 
 to his nose, grumbling in Boswell’s ear “I smell you in the dark,” while 
 Boswell the showman prances along beside him, highly gratified to be in 
 such illustrious company. 
 
 The second print takes the two of them next day inside Boswell’s 
 house with his family, where Mrs. Boswell has tea ready for the guest, 
 which (to quote Boswell) “it was well known he delighted to drink at all 
 hours.” Boswell hovers over Dr. Johnson’s chair with a copy of Ogden’s 
 Sermons on Prayer in his hands and a fatuous beam on his face, as the 
 baby Veronica leans out of her nurse’s arms and snatches Dr. Johnson’s 
 large bushy wig off his bald head. Johnson frowns heavily at the liberty 
 while Mrs. Boswell and the servants titter at the child’s antics. The cap- 
 tion says, 
 
 Mr. Johnson was pleased with my daughter Veronica, then a child of about 
 four months old. She had the appearance of listening to him. His motions 
 seemed to her to be intended for her amusement, and when he stopped 
 she fluttered and made a little infantine noise and a kind of signal for him 
 to begin again. She would be held close to him, which was a proof from 
 simple nature that his figure was not horrid. Her fondness for him en- 
 deared her still more to me, and I declared she should have five hundred 
 pounds of additional fortune. Vide Journal P.17 
 
 Veronica was then Boswell’s only child. But Rowlandson has imagined 
 the wig pulling, which never happened, nor did Boswell keep his promise 
 to reward her, since soon he had four other children to provide for. Each 
 night Mrs. Boswell gave up her bed to Dr. Johnson, though they didn’t 
 hit it off. She disliked him on sight for his uncouth manners and objected 
 to Boswell’s traveling with him. 
 
 For the next three days Boswell led his friend on a walking tour 
 of Edinburgh. On August 18 they set off by carriage north through 
 Aberdeen to Inverness, and there changed to horseback. At the west 
 coast they crossed by boat to Skye and the Hebrides and spent a month 
 rambling over the western islands in “vigorous exertion” in cold and 
 
184 The Only Way 
 
 stormy weather, even sleeping in barns—all of which Dr. Johnson faced 
 with extraordinary good nature, displaying both fortitude and endur- 
 ance. 
 
 For some reason, perhaps embarrassment, Boswell failed to mention 
 in his journal the most dramatic incident of the tour (a tale told by one 
 who witnessed it) which occurred at Inverness on August 29. That night 
 at the inn some local people dropped by to meet the great Dr. Johnson. 
 At supper he entertained them in high spirits by describing a remarkable 
 animal discovered only three years before in Australia called the kanga- 
 roo. While they stared in stunned amazement, he raised his huge bulk 
 from his chair, put out his hands like paws, gathered his coattails round 
 him to resemble a pouch, and in two or three leaps bounded across the 
 room in imitation of a kangaroo. The pity is, Rowlandson never knew of 
 that solo performance. 
 
 In the third drawing it’s a month later, September 26, when they are 
 in the Hebrides. The young laird of the Isle of Coll, who was conducting 
 them in the islands, had taken them in an open boat in wind and rain to 
 Coll. On arrival Dr. Johnson went right to bed, while Boswell stayed up 
 drinking the Saturday night away, merrier and merrier, till at five in the 
 morning he staggered to bed. In the caption, Boswell with a hangover 
 confesses his shame to his journal: 
 
 I awaked at noon with a severe headache. I was much vexed that I should 
 have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr. John- 
 son.— When I rose, I went into Dr. Johnson’s room, and taking up Mrs. 
 MacKinnon’s prayerbook, I opened it at the twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 
 in the epistle for which I read, “And be not drunk with wine, wherein 
 there is excess.” Some would have taken this as a divine interposition. 
 Vide Journal p. 318 
 
 Rowlandson has placed Boswell at a table opposite Dr. Johnson with the 
 open prayerbook before him, his finger pointing to the divine rebuke. He 
 holds his aching head with a white cloth tied round it, and his expression 
 is woeful. Above his head is a framed picture of a fat pig, while peeping 
 from his pocket is Ogden’s Sermons on Prayer. In the Journal, a penitent 
 
Ways of Travel 185 
 
 Boswell told Dr. Johnson they had kept him up all hours last night. “No,” 
 said Dr. Johnson mildly, “you kept them up, you drunken dog.” 
 
 In November, with the journey over, they returned to Edinburgh and 
 Johnson took the coach back to London. It had been a success, a holiday 
 for them both: Johnson had talked a lot, Boswell had basked in his com- 
 pany. 
 
 When the Rowlandson cartoons of the tour appeared in 1786, Johnson 
 had been dead two years. He had published his version of the trip, A Jour- 
 ney to the Western Islands of Scotland, a descriptive account with moral 
 reflections, compared with Boswell’s pretty dry and uneventful. Earlier 
 he had written, in The Idler, “It may, I think, be justly observed that few 
 books disappoint their readers more than the narrations of travelers.” 
 
 Yet he remembered those three months with the Scots as among the 
 best of his life. 
 
 The Stratford Festival. We drove from their summer home in 
 Ohio— David, his wife Peggy, and I—across the Canadian border to 
 Stratford, Ontario, that like Stratford-upon-Avon is a quiet town with a 
 River Avon and the Shakespeare theaters. During the four-day stay we 
 managed to see six plays, and lusted for more. 
 
 The Stratford Festival has the largest theater company in North 
 America. It runs from May to October with daily performances primarily 
 of Shakespeare but other classics as well. The acting and staging are so 
 remarkable that the University of Chicago, for one, sends study tours 
 each summer to Stratford with a professor to discuss the plays and hold 
 picnics beside the Avon. This tour had David, Shakespeare scholar and 
 editor, to do the talking. Fifty playgoers came up from Chicago, and we 
 stayed at a hotel called Twenty-Three Albert Place and frequented Bent- 
 ley’s Pub for the fish and chips. 
 
 The first night’s play was not by Shakespeare but a younger contem- 
 porary, Thomas Middleton, whose The Changeling, in collaboration with 
 William Rowley, is a bloody Jacobean revenge tragedy of unrelieved evil 
 and horror. In it a pretty girl, Beatrice-Joanna, to escape marriage to a 
 man she detests hires the villain De Flores to murder him. The deed done, 
 
186 The Only Way 
 
 De Flores who is obsessed with her takes his payment in raping her, “the 
 murderer of my honour.” Now free to marry her true love Alsemero, but 
 fearful lest he discover she’s not a virgin, Beatrice substitutes her maid on 
 the wedding night, then jealous of the maid in his arms conspires with 
 the unspeakable De Flores to kill the girl. When their guilt is discovered, 
 their degradation complete, De Flores kills them both. The play ends, 
 “All we can do to comfort one another . . . is to no purpose.” (Pepys said 
 when he saw it in 1661, “It takes exceedingly.”) 
 
 As a horror tale The Changeling can still horrify, but its real virtue is 
 that it led, two nights later, to Shakespeare’s tragic Titus Andronicus, the 
 bloodiest, most terrible revenge play of all time. 
 
 Next night in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare lived again, so contem- 
 porary in spirit that he must be constantly rediscovered, reinterpreted, 
 redefined, understood anew. This deeply troubling revenge play seems 
 more controversial than ever—a love comedy so nearly tragic, so in- 
 volved with the meaning of mercy that the title might better have been 
 The Quality of Mercy. As a study in revenge against not a merchant of 
 Venice but a Jewish moneylender, Shylock is the victim. Over the cen- 
 turies he has been cast (like Marlowe’s Barabas, the greedy, unscrupulous 
 Jew of Malta) as a merciless stage villain exacting his pound of flesh; as 
 a low comic buffoon laughed at and dismissed; or most poignantly as a 
 tragic Jew of dignity and humanity without hope of justice in a Christian 
 society. How do we see him now? In Portia’s exalted speech about mercy, 
 there is no denying the irony of her words: the quality of mercy, “an at- 
 tribute to God himself,” is strained to the breaking point. No mercy is 
 shown Shylock, no love, no tolerance, no forgiveness, no justice, only 
 hate, only revenge. He is despised and cast out, forced against his will to 
 become a Christian. Love and friendship triumph for the others but not 
 for Shylock. In our world of the Holocaust, the play appears more than 
 ever anti-Semitic. 
 
 Chekhov’s The Three Sisters brought a change of pace, a splendid perfor- 
 mance intentionally static, as if the three unhappy figures of the sisters 
 
Ways of Travel 187 
 
 were made of stone, trapped in their drab exile in rural Russia, never to 
 escape to the Moscow they yearn for. Chekhov wrote the part of Masha 
 for his actress-wife when he too was exiled in Yalta, denied a return to 
 Moscow and happiness with her. 
 
 Nothing changes for the Prozorov sisters, nothing will come of their 
 impossible dream. In this provincial town far from the world of their 
 childhood, no one will rescue them. Colonel Vershinin, whom Masha 
 loves, tells her as he turns away, “Happiness is not for us and never can 
 be. All we can do is long for it.” 
 
 In the end the three sisters are left standing together, entwined, help- 
 less in the boredom of their lives. Olga, exhausted and careworn, will 
 teach in the high school, Masha the passionate one will stay married to a 
 dull man, Irina’s suitor is killed in a duel. They can only say, as the cur- 
 tain falls, “It does not matter.” 
 
 T. S. Eliot called Titus Andronicus “one of the stupidest and most unin- 
 spired plays ever written.” But he couldn't dispose of it by condescend- 
 ing to something so powerful. Titus is a bloody nightmare, an appall- 
 ing and inhuman study of the nature of evil. When the Roman general 
 Titus returns victorious to Rome after a ten-year war with the Goths, he 
 brings with him Tamora, Queen of the Goths, her lover Aaron the Moor, 
 and her three sons. By killing one son, Titus sets in motion the unstop- 
 pable events that destroy him and leave the stage littered with the dead. 
 Tamora, having married Saturninus, Emperor of Rome, remorseless in 
 her hatred of Titus, enlists the help of her two remaining sons, Deme- 
 trius and Chiron, who rape Titus’s daughter Lavinia, chop off her hands, 
 and cut out her tongue. On finding her mutilated body, feigning mad- 
 ness, Titus slits the throats of Tamora’s sons and at a banquet feeds their 
 flesh in a pie to Tamora before he kills her. Titus then slays his ruined 
 Lavinia to save her from dishonor. Saturninus kills Titus, Lucius (Titus’s 
 remaining son) kills Saturninus and directs the burying alive of Aaron 
 the Moor: “Set his breast deep in earth and famish him.” Used as we are 
 to violence in our time, we are ready witness to rape, mutilation, torture, 
 murder, cannibalism, and death by starvation. 
 
188 The Only Way 
 
 In this, Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus is a King Lear without 
 Lear’s nobility or compassion. Like Lear, Titus is old, infirm of judgment, 
 close to madness, Tamora, “beastlike and devoid of pity,” is depraved 
 like Goneril and Regan, Lavinia is an innocent victim like Cordelia. But 
 Titus, debased by hate, only serves to magnify Lear’s greatness of spirit 
 and Shakespeare’s ability to write a tragedy with love and pity in it. 
 
 In 1957 at the Old Vic in London, Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of 
 Errors were performed together in a double bill—as happened at Strat- 
 ford tonight. In ancient Greece a tragedy filled with terror was sometimes 
 followed by a skit or farce, as if to let the audience laugh and catch its 
 breath, to assure it that life is not entirely the monstrous affair it appears. 
 
 The Comedy of Errors was a lighthearted romp, made of bawdy and 
 slapstick, monkeyshine and mistaken identity compounded by two pairs 
 of identical twins. It was played in a whirlwind of confusion while the 
 cast raced about Ephesus, up and down ramps and through the aisles at 
 top speed. The noise was as great as the versatility of the acting, notably 
 of the actress Lucy Peacock, who this afternoon was Chekhov’s unhappy 
 Masha and tonight became the suffering, mutilated, dying Lavinia and, 
 as convincingly, moments later the lively Luciana in a comic farce, danc- 
 ing about as the beloved of Antipholus of Syracuse. 
 
 On Sunday morning in Stratford we walked in the green park beside the 
 Avon, picnicked by the river, and talked with Seana McKenna, the young 
 and charming Portia of the Merchant of Venice, who told of hours spent 
 asking herself how Portia was to be played, a role that grew less merciful 
 the more she understood it. 
 
 Afterward we went to the Avon Theater for the last of the six plays, A 
 Midsummer Night’s Dream, appropriate for a midsummer’s parting. How 
 could a man as stagestruck as Pepys have called it “the most insipid, 
 ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life”?—a play so well dreamed that 
 it ended, for lunatic, lover, and poet, with all human problems solved 
 in the reality of true love. Thus lightly the turmoil of these four days of 
 blood revenge and man’s inhumanity was dismissed and the heartbreak 
 
Ways of Travel 189 
 
 presumably forgot —save for the echo in our ears, “Lord, what fools. . . 
 what fools!” 
 
 Much Ado at the University of Chicago. David, smiling, sits on 
 the flattop desk in his classroom, book in hand, absorbed in teaching 
 Much Ado about Nothing. It’s not a lecture, it’s a celebration going on 
 of Shakespeare’s comedy, especially the love affair between Beatrice and 
 Benedick. Everyone is laughing at the bickering of the combative lovers 
 being witty at each other’s expense, taunting, and abusive: “What, my 
 dear Lady Disdain!” Benedick asks, “are you yet living?” while Beatrice, 
 sharp-tongued and rude, replies with every word stabbing, “Is it pos- 
 sible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as 
 Signor Benedick?” Benedick swears he can’t endure my Lady Tongue, 
 Beatrice swears she had rather hear her dog bark at a crow. Much ado 
 about nothing. By playacting, pretending dislike, the two manage for 
 much of the play to conceal their love before ardently protesting it: “And 
 Benedick, love on: I will requite thee, taming my wild heart to thy loving 
 hand.” 
 
 I sit in the third row among the undergraduates, laughing with the 
 rest, thinking how different this knowing lovemaking is from Romeo and 
 Juliet’s innocent and tragic passion. And all at once it comes to me! I’m 
 not really here at all. Fora moment I’m back in the 1920s, an undergradu- 
 ate at this university, and everything is exactly the same—same room 
 in Cobb Hall, same play—except that I am eighteen years old listening 
 to the man up front, a young professor named David— David Stevens. 
 Nothing’s changed, nothing at all, except that this other David is my 
 son, teaching the class while the merry war rages on between Beatrice 
 and Benedick, unaware of the incredible experience it is to return to this 
 room and find him here. 
 
 Blue Sheep and Snow Leopards. George Schaller is a writer who 
 makes you believe in his extraordinary way of life and wish he’d take you 
 with him. Among the many scientific expeditions he has made as a zoolo- 
 gist — studying tigers in India, lions in the Serengeti of Tanzania, and 
 
190 The Only Way 
 
 pandas in the Sichuan province of China—the grandest journeys must 
 have been in the Himalayas, where he spent four years altogether climb- 
 ing the sheerest mountains to study wild sheep and goats. “Poets may 
 praise the deer and nightingale,” he wrote in his notebook. “I celebrate 
 the wild goat.” And the wild sheep, he might add, most persistently the 
 blue sheep called bharal, a little-known breed partway between a sheep 
 and a goat. Schaller gathered careful data about them, noting the curls 
 in their horns, examining their droppings to learn what they ate, observ- 
 ing their rut and mating season, most of all trying to discover what hope 
 they had of escaping extinction. In the mountains of central Asia— Kash- 
 mir, Pakistan, India—at altitudes up to 18,000 feet, he would walk alone 
 for hours and days, apart from his porters. In deep snows and icy winds, 
 up snow peaks and over glaciers, he tested the limits of his strength and 
 skill to stay alive, filled sometimes he says “with quiet ecstasy.” “I like 
 solitude,” he reflected alone in the immense stillness, “not loneliness.” He 
 liked for their silence the company of yaks. 
 
 The book Schaller wrote about these Himalayan journeys, Stones of 
 Silence, is by a man in love with his work. Before I came across it, I had 
 read with pleasure Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard about the re- 
 markable adventure he had in the fall of 1973 when Schaller took him 
 along on one of his mountain journeys, this time in Nepal near the 
 Tibetan frontier. On a walk of two hundred miles, Peter declared it his 
 personal mission to catch a glimpse of the snow leopard, an extremely 
 rare and elusive beast that inhabits the region, while Schaller, who was 
 an old hand at spotting snow leopards, pursued the wild blue sheep to be 
 found in the neighborhood when not eaten by snow leopards. Peter was 
 first to publish his book, a highly entertaining account of the quest, which 
 was also an inner search that, as a Zen Buddhist, absorbed him and took 
 up much of his time in meditation and the chanting of Buddhist man- 
 tras. By the end of the journey, in spite of his goal, Peter had never once 
 laid eyes on a snow leopard. He had mystical feelings about the beast and 
 thinks he may have felt its presence, just as once he almost glimpsed the 
 dark shadow of the abominable snowman springing behind a rock. 
 
Ways of Travel 191 
 
 The final chapter of Schaller’s book describes from his point of view 
 this same journey with Peter that took them to the Crystal Mountain and 
 the remote Land of Dolpo on the Tibetan Plateau. Four years earlier, he 
 and Peter had met in the Serengeti where they shared daylong excursions 
 among the plentiful lions, and where his easy charm, Schaller said, made 
 him a pleasant companion. Neither had reckoned, it seems, on the pro- 
 found difference in their natures (and in their quests); or that in the pun- 
 ishing hardships and anxieties ahead they would occasionally get on each 
 other’s nerves—as when Peter tried to persuade Schaller to spend the 
 nights by the campfire composing haiku. Fortunately each man traveled 
 at his own speed while the porters straggled behind, though it’s unclear to 
 me what kept Schaller from getting lost in the white wilderness or losing 
 Peter completely as he wandered off in the snowdrifts or sat in a tree to 
 meditate; or why nobody was ever attacked by a stray yeti or wild sheep. 
 
 Patient and steady as Schaller was, he had certain qualities that might 
 alarm or upset a meditator. “I am teutonically punctual,” he wrote. “I 
 leap out of bed at dawn and in ten minutes am washed, packed, and 
 ready to go (and that is in weather where washing is possible). I find con- 
 tentment in physical exertion and happily race over hills.” At the sight of 
 whole herds of blue sheep, plainly ready to show off their mating habits 
 poised on the highest rocks and sharpest peaks, he could barely contain 
 his joy: “I watch voraciously, elated over every new observation. .. . I 
 want to miss nothing.” 
 
 After two months of rugged travel, on November 18 Peter, grown sud- 
 denly restless, packed up and departed in haste from the mountains, 
 taking with him two guides. Schaller, puzzled but not offended, stayed 
 on, watching his sheep till the December storms and furious winds, plus 
 the danger of being trapped till spring without provisions, obliged him to 
 give up the quest. It had been a good trip, he told himself. He had learned 
 much about the bharal, convinced by now it really was a sheep that in 
 some ways resembled a goat. But a day came of raging blizzards when he 
 and his porters were barely able to make their way down from the heights 
 escaping through a narrow pass to safety beyond the thickening walls of 
 
192 The Only Way 
 
 ice. Up there at the last minute Schaller turned and saw something that 
 gave him particular satisfaction, something white and nearly invisible as 
 it stood watching him in the falling snow. 
 
 It was a snow leopard. 
 
 Islands. Ask a Southerner if he has been to the Thousand 
 Islands, and he will say, “Never heard of them” or “Oh, you mean the 
 Everglades.” But the Florida Everglades are called the Ten Thousand 
 Islands to describe those swampy half-submerged hammocks covered 
 with mangrove trees, whose tangled white roots rise out of the mud soup 
 of a shallow inland sea. On a clear day, the claim is, you can see ten thou- 
 sand birds, though on a boat trip I took through the Everglades I caught 
 sight at most of some white pelicans, a great blue heron flapping over- 
 head, an ibis wading, black cormorant perching, terns flying, a couple of 
 snowy egrets, and young ospreys on their nests in the treetops gaping like 
 baby eagles. Maybe they mean ten thousand seagulls. Except for a sud- 
 den bird squawk, nothing broke the stillness of this dense wilderness fifty 
 to seventy miles wide that used to be home to Seminole Indians. As we 
 twisted among the little nameless islands, a single manatee sunned itself 
 like a beached mermaid resting on the saw grass. 
 
 Southerners are, however, acquainted with Thousand Island Dressing 
 (mayonnaise with chili sauce), which was invented by a millionaire who, 
 early in the century, built an immense Gothic castle on one of the Thou- 
 sand Islands. They are incredibly numerous — these endless isles in the St. 
 Lawrence River—spectacular enough to be one of the world’s wonders. 
 Before I saw them this summer, I assumed the number was grossly exag- 
 gerated—a thousand, I thought, would obliterate the river completely — 
 only to discover there were closer to two thousand islands visible for 
 about fifty-two miles downstream from Lake Ontario. 
 
 Two friends of mine, Chuck and Bertha Osbourn, have a summer 
 home on Wellesley Island, one of the largest and most populous, most 
 extensively wooded, most beautiful, big enough to contain a village — 
 Thousand Islands Park —as well as outlying farms, handsome estates be- 
 
Ways of Travel 193 
 
 side the water, too many golf courses to count. The International Bridge, 
 opened in 1938 between the U.S. and Canada, crosses over this island. 
 The Osbourn house on the village green facing the St. Lawrence was 
 formerly a hotel with ornately carved balconies, which they bought years 
 ago because they had six daughters and needed room, and because they 
 are naturally hospitable. Now with the daughters grown and married, 
 some of the bedrooms are equipped with cribs. Not mine, though. Mine 
 was a spacious room and bath, with a view of the river and the sign No. 21 
 on the door. For forty years Chuck and Bertha have kept the house filled 
 with guests, who are given blueberry pancakes for breakfast and made to 
 feel so much at home that they dream, like me, of staying on and buy- 
 ing a hotel themselves or an entire island. Up there where an island is an 
 island if it has a tree on it, some are for sale, many are privately owned. 
 It was tempting to think about, a whole island, a kingdom to oneself. 
 Since Chuck’s motorboat was anchored in the marina below the house, 
 we spent the warm days speeding up and down the scenic river while 
 David or Sarah (my granddaughter) waterskied behind us, making lordly 
 sweeps across our wake. Sooner or later Chuck would pick out an island 
 he fancied on either the Canadian or the New York State side of the 
 river and anchor there while we explored the place. The one I loved was 
 Camelot, as idyllic as its name and uninhabited, where we climbed for 
 hours along the steep rock face till we had completely circled the island. 
 We would then eat Bertha’s enormous picnic lunch and after a while set 
 out for another island, perhaps Endymion. Chuck seemed to know them 
 all separately, as if he were a man who spent his life discovering islands. 
 One day he took us by boat to Boldt Castle, owned by the millionaire 
 George Boldt, who as a young immigrant from Prussia worked in the 
 kitchens of the Waldorf Astoria and eventually bought the hotel (besides 
 inventing Waldorf Salad). He built the medieval castle on Heart Island in 
 1904 for his adored wife Louise —a massive, many-towered mock-Gothic 
 pile of 120 rooms suggesting immense luxury, with thick granite walls, an 
 Italian garden, a pond for swans, an arched watergate down by the river 
 for his three yachts and anchored houseboat. It was still under construc- 
 
194 The Only Way 
 
 tion when one day Louise suddenly died. A few hours later a telegram ar- 
 rived from New York signed by Boldt, saying “Stop!” and all work on the 
 castle instantly ceased, to be abandoned for good. Three hundred work- 
 men were out of a job. The empty rooms stayed as they were, unpainted, 
 unfurnished, the tapestries, mantelpieces, fine furniture, marble statuary 
 from all over Europe left unopened in their crates. For nearly seventy- 
 five years the forsaken castle stood alone on its island, never once visited 
 by Boldt in his grief, gradually decaying, despoiled by vandals who tore 
 it apart and spread graffiti over the bare walls. 
 
 Now Boldt’s castle is being slowly repaired and restored, while tourists 
 wander in a daze through its huge desolate rooms and vast halls, climb- 
 ing the stately staircase, imagining the splendor that never was. Yet what 
 a monument it remains, after all, to a man’s despair, the loss of the one 
 thing in life he wanted to keep. 
 
 A Quick Trip to Arizona. When my friend H.C. retired, he 
 made a list of seventy-five ways to spend the rest of his life, such as going 
 to Mardi Gras and the Rose Bowl parade, and reading Look Homeward, 
 Angel. In six months he had polished off thirty-five of them and was look- 
 ing round for more. 
 
 I like H.C’s style. He reminded me of a list I made on retirement, 
 which included the Khyber Pass, Arizona, and Saint Augustine’s Confes- 
 sions. | added them up the other day and found at least half attended 
 to, though Antarctica and the Oxford English Dictionary in ten volumes 
 were taking a little longer. 
 
 It seemed time to get going, what with the world changing so fast, 
 with England having retired the shilling and Leningrad calling itself St. 
 Petersburg. Besides, there was Arizona. My friend Marian asked me to 
 accompany her to her son’s wedding in Phoenix in November. “After- 
 ward,” she said, “we can rent a car and drive around the Southwest for a 
 week or two.” It sounded good, a chance to dance at Peter’s wedding and 
 look for Apaches and Frank Lloyd Wright’s spread down there. I began 
 to read the story of Coronado’s search for the Seven Golden Cities, which 
 
Ways of Travel 195 
 
 somewhat resembled the California gold rush three centuries before the 
 Forty-Niners got to it. 
 
 Then I heard a new rock number on the radio, “By the Time I Get to 
 Phoenix.” That would be the day after tomorrow. 
 
 We flew to Phoenix. And the streets were lined with immensely tall 
 cacti—a modern city with a desert air, risen from the ashes of an earlier 
 Indian civilization. At the airport Marian and I rented a brand new four- 
 door Dodge Dynasty that we would take off in after the wedding. We 
 were staying in Tempe, where Peter and Diana live, a suburb of Phoe- 
 nix named for the Vale of Tempe near Mt. Olympus. From our rooms at 
 the Mission Palms Hotel, we gazed down on gardens of palm trees and 
 poinsettias—a summery inn now in November, whose only flaw was it 
 charged a dollar for a cup of hot water and a tea bag. 
 
 This morning Peter and Diana waked, like the rest of us, to the sound 
 of pouring rain. It was the day of their wedding, to be performed in 
 their backyard beside the pool. I’d looked forward to the ceremony, since 
 Peter was a dear friend who wrote me letters in praise of English litera- 
 ture when he was a student at Yale. Now he was a Ph.D. whose specialty 
 was hummingbirds. His bride, also a Ph.D., was into lizards, with a three- 
 year grant to study their gonads, for which purpose she caught the lizards 
 alive. When asked what items they would need to live as man and wife, 
 Diana listed “a nice set of fine glass tumblers to drink Scotch from, cham- 
 pagne glasses, a cappuccino maker, a camp stove, and an electric drill.” 
 
 Though Marian considered hiring a hall in the hotel if the driving rain 
 continued, by four this afternoon we were gathered under clear skies, 
 thirty of us, in the small backyard where a lone hummingbird darted to 
 and fro above our heads, officiating as Peter’s bird. Trees of oranges hung 
 over the fence. We sat huddled together on wooden benches trying not 
 to shiver in the sudden wintry cold. On a porch bare as a meetinghouse, 
 without music since the hummingbird didn’t sing, Peter and Diana were 
 wed by a magistrate in a black robe who pushed them around a bit to 
 improve the arrangement. Diana wore a crown of flowers and a white 
 
196 The Only Way 
 
 lace gown that left her shoulders bare and roused our pity till we could 
 plainly see how warmed she was by Peter’s presence. It looked like a com- 
 mitment for life. 
 
 Afterward we got in our cars and drove to the Desert Botanical Gar- 
 dens where the reception was to be held among the cacti. But the cold 
 hurried us into the Webster Center where we gradually unfroze with the 
 help of champagne, and margaritas drawn from a spigot. After dinner 
 when the four-piece rock band started up, so did the dancing, while ap- 
 propriate among us was John O’Neill, the famous painter of humming- 
 birds, Peter’s friend, who really should have married them. 
 
 Next morning Marian and 1 lit out for Taliesen. Only ten miles from town 
 in the suburb of Scottsdale, it occupies six hundred acres of the Sonoran 
 desert that Frank Lloyd Wright shaped out of desert stone. He and his 
 apprentices in 1937 gathered huge rocks to build his desert sculpture that 
 he said “belonged to the Arizona desert as though it had stood there dur- 
 ing creation.” 
 
 From a distance Taliesen looked like a long red abandoned railway 
 car against the McDowell Mountains, but when we drew near it became 
 an astonishing array of flat buildings with low overhang. It was Wright’s 
 western home where as “resident deity” he lived with his third wife, Olgi- 
 vanna, and a commune of twenty-three young men and women whom 
 he put into tents and allowed no pepper with their meals. We walked 
 through Taliesen with a guide who had been a student there under Wright 
 and loudly praised the egocentricity and imagination of the old man— 
 who had planned a mile-high skyscraper for Chicago, had built “Falling- 
 water” over a waterfall, had created the spectacular Guggenheim Mu- 
 seum in New York of one continuous spiral ramp, and had made Taliesen 
 into a thing of beauty, with its horizontal lines and projecting eaves. I 
 told him what I liked about Wright, that he had changed ordinary little 
 houses into areas without walls or doors, attics or basements, letting in 
 air and light. I liked him for getting rid of clutter. 
 
 Coming back to the hotel that night, we drove through streets lined 
 
Ways of Travel 197 
 
 with cacti turned into Christmas trees, trimmed with hundreds of light 
 bulbs glittering in the dark. 
 
 From there we planned to look for Apaches. But in desert country beyond 
 Tucson we were sidetracked by the immense outdoor Arizona Sonora 
 Desert Museum. As a sight it was irresistible, more visible than the desert 
 itself, furiously alive with assorted desert spiders, centipedes, scorpions, 
 chuckwallas, rattlesnakes, and venomous gila monsters (named for the 
 Gila River), which I hoped Diana wasn’t in the habit of bringing home. 
 The New York Times called it one of the ten best museums in the world, a 
 picture of a desert twice the size of North Carolina, containing only the 
 plants and animals that actually live in the Sonora. 
 
 The acres of cacti made a tremendous spectacle, some like prehistoric 
 beasts, some like towering malevolent giants fifty feet tall, weighing tons, 
 and two hundred years old. Till now I’d thought a cactus was a cactus, 
 but here were endless varieties: the majestic saguaro whose arms curve 
 upward like a pitchfork, the totem pole, organ pipe, strawberry hedge- 
 hog, claret cup, prickly pear—cacti that would blossom in the spring 
 with brilliant gaudy flowers, cacti in which the cactus wren lived and tiny 
 creatures hid themselves. Mesquite grew in thorny thickets, strange yuc- 
 cas flourished — the Joshua tree that seemed to pray, the boojum tree that 
 resembled a carrot twenty feet tall. 
 
 There were the desert birds, the desert trees, the desert animals, even 
 the mountain lion and the Sonora bighorn. But totally unexpected in 
 that place were the Sonora hummingbirds. In a desert! They seemed to 
 be members of the wedding who had followed us here, darting about 
 their tree-lined house —fifty at least we counted, though the docent said 
 twenty, each conspicuously different from the rest: blue-throated, violet- 
 eared, black-chinned hummingbirds. Had they been more than three 
 inches long, they would have terrified us with their piercing beak and 
 wild unpredictable flight. One bad-tempered fellow, a rufous, was shut 
 in a fine-meshed cage to keep him from attacking the world and elimi- 
 nating it. 
 
198 The Only Way 
 
 I'd never have believed a rainless desert world could be so populous 
 and so alive, abundant with hummingbirds. 
 
 Arizona is the Apache state. A thousand years ago the Apaches came 
 down from the north—a ruthless, warlike people who for three centuries 
 fought the white man for possession of land and sky they thought their 
 own. Since the sixteenth century they had resisted the Spaniards, who ar- 
 rived soon after Columbus, they had battled the Mexicans, who in 1821 
 freed themselves from Spain, but most of all, savagely and persistently, 
 they had fought the Americans — especially after 1848 when we won the 
 war with Mexico and took over the territory of the Southwest. Till the 
 final struggle in 1886, when the Apaches led by Geronimo were conquered 
 and put into reservations, they warred with cruelty and cunning to drive 
 us from their homeland. During the gold rush of 1849 when the stampede 
 began through Apache country to the gold fields of California, from their 
 hiding places in the mountains they swept down to plunder and raid, 
 murder and destroy. One of them was the famous Apache chief Cochise, 
 leader of his people, who swore never to surrender to the white man. 
 
 We were now in the Dragoon Mountains, in what was the Cochise 
 Stronghold. He was born in 1812 in these mountains from which he 
 fought, and in them he died. We stopped the car in the lonely snow- 
 covered forest wilderness beside Cochise’s monument, a large tombstone 
 that bore the inscription: “Chief Cochise, greatest of Apache warriors, 
 died June 8, 1874 in this his favorite stronghold, interred secretly by his 
 followers.” 
 
 Then at last we found what we were looking for, a marker beside the 
 road that said “Fort Bowie, 1 /2 miles” —that is, 1 2 miles up. Fort Bowie 
 had been the major military post in this area of the Dragoon Mountains 
 called the Apache Pass. In 1861 Cochise with 700 warriors had briefly 
 commanded the heights of the pass, dislodged only after an all-day fight. 
 In 1862 there at the summit Captain Roberts and his Union soldiers sta- 
 tioned at the fort tried to wipe out Cochise and his close friend, Mangas 
 Coloradas, till in the skirmish Mangas Coloradas was wounded, hit in the 
 chest by a bullet. Cochise didn’t try to fight on without him, the Apaches 
 
Ways of Travel 199 
 
 slipped away. A month or two later, Mangas Coloradas walked alone into 
 an American camp saying he came to make a lasting peace. Instead, he 
 was brutally murdered by the soldiers, his body thrown into a gulley, 
 his head shipped to the Smithsonian. In bitter fury Cochise resumed his 
 war that became a new, twenty-year struggle against the enemy from his 
 stronghold in these mountains. A dozen years later he was stricken and 
 died. After him came the celebrated Apache chief Geronimo, seventeen 
 years younger, who fiercely led his people in their last stand for freedom. 
 
 These were the years the Americans fought for freedom themselves in 
 the Civil War while waging battle to destroy the Apaches. Arizona wanted 
 only to exterminate them; General Sherman strongly advised just leaving 
 Arizona to the Indians. 
 
 Marian parked the car and started up the footpath of the Apache Pass. 
 “You can wait down here if you like,” she said. I stared round me at an 
 empty, silent world; we had seen nobody all day, it was getting on in the 
 afternoon. I decided to stay close to Marian in this business if we were 
 to be overtaken by night. She was better at scaling mountains than I—a 
 fearless traveler who had recently camped out in the Himalayas, ridden 
 the rapids down the Colorado River, canoed for a week in the forty-mile- 
 long Okefenokee Swamp. 
 
 “Wait for me,” I shouted after her. 
 
 Together we climbed the pass, straight up the mountain on a rocky 
 path covered with snow. I kept Marian’s red jacket in view (though it re- 
 minded me of a stop sign), struggling in icy ruts to reach the summit 
 or more likely die in the attempt. Halfway we came to a little fenced-in 
 cemetery, stark and neglected, where among soldiers’ graves a weath- 
 ered stone marked that of a two-year-old son of Geronimo — Little Robe, 
 buried here in 1885, not however killed by the white man as, earlier, 
 Geronimo’s mother, his first wife, and other children had been. 
 
 At Fort Bowie the American flag still waved, but the ranger’s station 
 was closed for the winter, not a soul stirred in this godforgotten place. 
 Nothing remained but the scattered ruins of the old military fort and the 
 memory of bloodshed. It was growing terribly cold and late. Shivering, 
 
200 The Only Way 
 
 we turned and ran, pursued by dead men, down the pass, and silent in 
 the face of such bloody history drove on in the dark. 
 
 Besides Apaches, there were the mining towns. Bisbee was a famous one 
 that, with the working of the Copper Queen Lode in 1877, became the 
 largest mining town in the world, crammed into Mule Pass Gulch on the 
 steep sides of a ravine. With the Copper Queen Mine long since aban- 
 doned, Bisbee was a quiet, emptied little place where we spent the night 
 at the Copper Queen Hotel that claims to have “45 gracious rooms and a 
 long saloon.” In the saloon was a huge painting over the bar of an out- 
 stretched naked Venus with a dazzling white body peered at by a baby 
 Cupid. Bisbee was understandably proud of this grand old hotel where 
 Teddy Roosevelt, General Pershing, and John Wayne slept. I imagined 
 John Wayne swaggering into the saloon and staring fixedly at the Venus. 
 
 Twenty-five miles farther was Tombstone, where silver was discovered 
 in 1877. Left over from the old Wild West, Tombstone consisted of a main 
 street, a covered boardwalk, and a row of one-story saloons still open for 
 business. There was Big Nose Kate’s, once run by Katie Fisher, a frontier 
 barroom prostitute and Doc Holliday’s mistress. There was the O.K. Cor- 
 ral, the Longhorn (formerly the Bucket of Blood), the Lucky Cuss, and 
 so on. The silver rush in 1881 had made Tombstone the worst of Arizona’s 
 boomtowns, the most violent and lawless. Till 1889 when the mines were 
 flooded, well-known gunfighters and outlaws lived here—the consump- 
 tive Doc Holliday, Johnny Ringo, Bat Masterson, the Earp brothers. The 
 O.K. Corral was the scene of a gunfight made historic by the Earps— 
 Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan—plus Holliday, who on October 26, 1881, shot it 
 out with five members of the Clanton gang. Within sixty seconds three 
 Clantons were dead, and Wyatt Earp, like Geronimo, became an Ameri- 
 can folk hero. 
 
 But the wickedest spot in town was the Bird Cage —a combination the- 
 ater, saloon, dance hall, gambling den, and bordello—that never closed 
 its doors for nine years, the bawdiest nightspot from coast to coast. We 
 wandered freely about this faded sink of iniquity, sorry to find missing 
 the fourteen bird cages with their red velvet curtains for the use of the 
 
Ways of Travel 201 
 
 prostitutes. Wyatt Earp met his third wife here, Virgil was shot to death 
 on the second floor. Gone too were the flashy entertainers from New 
 York, such as Eddie Foy and Lotta Crabtree, who performed on the real 
 stage and sang to the customers the popular song, “She’s Only a Bird in 
 a Gilded Cage.” 
 
 Tombstone is called “the town too tough to die,” kept alive and flour- 
 ishing by us tourists. 
 
 Down at the Mexican border we found the Coronado Memorial that 
 marks the point of entry, four centuries ago, of Coronado when he left 
 Mexico in search of the Seven Golden Cities. He was a Spaniard who 
 came to the new world in 1535. When his friend Mendoza, the Viceroy 
 of Mexico, heard rumors of riches to the north— towns, streams, moun- 
 tains of gold—he formed an expedition to search for the Seven Cities of 
 Cibola and asked Coronado to lead it. Coronado, thirty years old, set 
 forth in 1540 with a glorious army of some thousand Spanish soldiers, 
 friendly Mexican-Indians, four priests, strings of mules to carry equip- 
 ment, and fifteen hundred sheep, pigs, goats, cattle to feed them all. His 
 horsemen wore gilded armor with plumed helmets and carried shields, 
 swords, daggers, lances, plus a half-dozen cannon. They nearly perished 
 on the way from the heat alone. 
 
 After five months of travel, at the Gila River Coronado turned north- 
 east to enter what is now New Mexico, and on July 7, 1540, came to Cibola, 
 the reputed region of the seven cities. But the Cibola before his eyes was 
 only a few poor Zuni pueblos, wretched sunbaked Indian villages made 
 of sticks and mud. During two years of occupation among these miser- 
 able towns, Coronado and his men captured and drove the Indians from 
 their homes, ate their food, and kept up a desperate search for gold. The 
 pursuit took them as far north as Kansas, but they found nada, noth- 
 ing. In 1542 he led the straggling expedition back to a cold reception in 
 Mexico. The golden dream had ended in disgrace. 
 
 It was a long stretch north to the Grand Canyon. When one day we 
 reached the final spectacle, I thought of my old professor at Columbia, 
 
202 The Only Way 
 
 Joseph Wood Krutch, who was brave enough to write a book titled simply 
 Grand Canyon. The need to find sufficient adjectives for such an enter- 
 prise would have finished me, but Professor Krutch had no problem with 
 it. He stuck to the facts, poetry enough for him—that the Canyon is a 
 billion years old, growing wider and deeper, though nowhere on earth is 
 there a chasm so wide and deep, so incomprehensible. It began, Krutch 
 said, as a flat plain of two hundred miles along the Colorado River, and 
 in a few more eons would probably through erosion become a flat plain 
 again. The population of the earth, he guessed, could be all but lost in it. 
 The distance across the gorge from rim to rim was a good ten to eigh- 
 teen miles. To me it seemed as large as the solar system. 
 
 As an abyss the Grand Canyon was said, not by Krutch, to humble the 
 soul. People were apt to respond to its awful mightiness by doing some- 
 thing heroic they would soon repent, like riding a mule the mile down 
 the narrow Bright Angel Trail to the bottom and back again, or climbing 
 alone down the canyon wall. People regularly got into trouble, as I read 
 in the newspaper circulated by the Park Service, which reported 750 res- 
 cue operations in the past year of hikers who had to be hauled back up to 
 the top. Others succumbed to fatigue and dehydration, or from leaning 
 too far over the edge. 
 
 Marian and I were in no immediate danger. You had to book a mule 
 a year in advance. We signed in at El Tovar, a hotel with a view of the 
 Canyon and the look of a hunting lodge. All day we walked enrapt along 
 the lookout points of South Rim till the shifting winter light and chang- 
 ing hues — old gold, bronze, copper, topaz, tinges of lavender — faded and 
 ravens swooped in the deepening sky. Indians used to live in caves a mile 
 down there beside the Colorado River, but I wouldn’t go in search of them 
 even if they were Apaches. Anyway, on this sunny day we had come to the 
 end of a thousand-mile journey, and this was the magnificence we found. 
 
 Amazing state, Arizona. 
 
 It had taken time, into December. Next night in Phoenix before our 
 plane left, we had Peter and Diana to dinner at our hotel and were happy 
 to see what an old married pair they had become. 
 
9 
 
 The Laughter Must Be Kept 
 
 Fontenelle wasn’t known to laugh. Described with malice by Voltaire 
 as “le discret Fontenelle,” he lived to be one hundred (1657-1757) and 
 left behind a recipe for longevity: keep the heart cold and the stomach 
 warm. This he did by detaching himself from passion, staying unruffled, 
 untroubled, unmarried. They called him revoltingly heartless, neither 
 laughing nor weeping. His curiosity led him to a profound scepticism of 
 people, their faith, their morality. He was a thinker to a fault. His friend 
 Madame de Tencin placed her hand on his heart and said, “You have 
 nothing there but brain.” 
 
 Alexander Pope never laughed. Sir Isaac Newton is thought to have 
 laughed once in his life. A glacial Chesterfield warned his son against 
 laughter as illiberal and ill-bred, distorting the face and making a dis- 
 agreeable noise. Lord Halifax objected to a smile; he told his daughter 
 to guard against merriment, “few things are more offensive.” She was 
 Chesterfield’s mother. 
 
 Rabelais, drunk on laughter, said he drank no more than a sponge. 
 Sydney Smith, who liked noise and frolic, was laughter holding both his 
 sides. A sidesplitter. He laughed, wrote Hesketh Pearson, “when a comic 
 idea came into his head; he laughed as he put it into words; he joined 
 in the laughter with which it was received.” In our time the Czech writer 
 Milan Kundera calls his unhappy, sex-ridden novel A Book of Laugh- 
 ter and Forgetting. E. B. White writes, “I must read the Book of Job, for 
 laughs.” 
 
 Recently I was invited to join the Fellowship of the Merry Heart, 
 headquarters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It is an honor that I dream not of, 
 perhaps because the word merry goes so far in claiming a heart full of 
 mirth and elation that it sounds slightly archaic, out of tune with our 
 time and with life itself. It used to be a good, understandable word. In 
 
204 The Only Way 
 
 the fifteenth century the seesaw was the merry-totter. A wishbone was a 
 merrythought. A festival was a merrimake. A bastard was a merry begot. 
 Shakespeare used the word more than a hundred times in his plays: 
 Falstaff: “There’s a merry heart! Good Master Silence. . . 
 Silence: “Who, I? I have been merry twice, and once ere now.” 
 
 But of Fontenelle the rumor isn’t strictly true. “Quelquefois,” he said, 
 “jai dit ha ha.” 
 
 La Vie 
 
 La vie est telle 
 Que Fontenelle 
 Quelquefois 
 
 A dit “ha ha,” 
 Lui et moi. 
 
 The Anatomy of Melancholy. In his great study of melancholy, 
 Robert Burton lists the main causes of depression, gloom, misery, and a 
 sinking heart. They are: God, bad angels and devils, witches and magi- 
 cians, stars, old age, parents, and bad diet. To them he adds the pain of 
 love, love melancholy, a common cause of sorrow and despair. According 
 to Burton, the amiable vicar of St. Thomas’s in Oxford, this thing called 
 melancholy is universally present in mankind, a malady in each of us, 
 since “all the world is melancholy or mad.” “Go to Bedlam for examples,” 
 he said. As a collector of notions and oddities, he began his famous and 
 only book, first published in 1621, as a way of lifting his own depression, 
 to escape being “silent, sedentary, solitary.” Finding the subject utterly 
 intoxicating, he then spent the rest of his bachelor life, twenty more 
 years, in elaborating it, rummaging through dusty shelves at Oxford to 
 find more causes of melancholy, more symptoms, and more cures. As a 
 lifework it not only lifted his spirits, but proved to him that the greatest 
 cause of all was idleness or sloth, and the most dependable cure, besides 
 
The Laughter Must Be Kept 205 
 
 fresh air and country living, was keeping busy. The last words he uttered 
 before he died were, “Be not solitary, be not idle.” 
 
 By those who knew him, Burton was said to be lively company, even 
 frisky, even humorous. At least he intended to be. “To play the fool now 
 and then,” he wrote, “is not amiss.” He called himself Democritus Junior, 
 the son of Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher, to whom the true end 
 of life was happiness, and laughter the remedy for the thorn in the flesh. 
 You don’t necessarily die of melancholy but you suffer. Believing this to 
 be what really ails the world, Democritus wore a laughing face. He retired 
 to his garden, where throughout a very long life, according to Juvenal, he 
 was constantly amused by the frailties and follies of humankind. Burton 
 contrasted the laughter of Democritus with the incurable tears of Hera- 
 clitus, known as the Weeping Philosopher from the dismal view he took 
 of the same follies. And it must be said that Heraclitus, the mourner to 
 whom life was no laughing matter, has generally been considered the 
 more observant, the more accurate of the two. (Bertrand Russell: “I find 
 that of all the men that ever lived Heraclitus is the most intimate to me.”) 
 Like Democritus, he retired from the marketplace, not to a sunny garden 
 but to a bleak mountaintop where he fed on grass, then went to live on a 
 dunghill. 
 
 It’s easy to imagine how often Robert Burton laughed, and chose to 
 laugh, as instructive thoughts on the subject came to him, and how dili- 
 gently he hastened to celebrate them in The Anatomy of Melancholy. 
 Such as: 
 
 All poets are mad. 
 
 What Pythagoras said to his scholars of old may be applied to melancholy 
 men: eat no beans. 
 
 One madness is to live like a wretch and die rich. 
 
 Women wear the britches. 
 
 Wine and women go together, those two main plagues and dotages that 
 infatuate and besot people. 
 
 England is a paradise for women and hell for horses. 
 
206 The Only Way 
 
 The Rejoicers 
 
 For laughter, look to Master Rabelais, 
 
 The blithe Montaigne, the rollicking John Gay, 
 And look to Chaucer, affable and mellow, 
 
 To genial Horace, that lighthearted fellow — 
 The revelers. I love a cheerful man, 
 
 Content with fortune and with rhymes that scan 
 To praise retirement or the gaudy town, 
 
 Or quick with prose to set a pleasure down, 
 Above whose disquisition I can hear 
 Consoling answer in the atmosphere 
 
 For you and me, my darling. Look to them 
 Who wore no sorrow like a diadem. 
 
7 
 
 Postscript: End of Story 
 
 “We are poor passing facts,” said Robert Lowell in almost his last poem. 
 As one of these facts, I recently wrote what I intended to be my last book, 
 The World and the Bo Tree. That wasn’t the original title, which was more 
 ambitious: I meant to call it By the Look of Things. From the eminence 
 where I sat, though the visibility was poor, I planned to take one more 
 quick look at existence to see what I thought of it. For one thing, had I 
 lived in vain? Would one actually want to live it again? “To judge whether 
 life itself is or is not worth the trouble of being lived,” said Camus, “that 
 is the basic question of philosophy.” But philosophy’s answer? Hard to 
 say. I only know I barely got through this one alive. 
 
 Santayana was a philosopher. “That life is worth living is the most 
 necessary of assumptions,” he wrote, “and, were it not assumed, would 
 be the most improbable of conclusions.” And yet the simplest and truest 
 philosophy is perhaps found written on ancient Greek tombs: “I was not. 
 I came to be. I am not. I care not.” 
 
 My first title for the book proved to be a large order, so exhaustive 
 it ran me out of words and I settled for the more modest approach of 
 inspecting just one world and one bo tree. Isaac Asimov, who died not 
 long ago, was an example of the tireless investigator of multiple worlds 
 who never for a moment stops looking and telling you what he finds out. 
 Once when Barbara Walters asked Asimov what he would do if he knew 
 he had but six months to live, “Type faster,” he said. Poor man, he died 
 at seventy-two with barely five hundred books written and things by the 
 thousand yet unexamined. 
 
 There were other reminders of mortality, like an appalling item that 
 appeared lately in the Times Literary Supplement to keep me from aspiring 
 further to sum things up. In a piece about wild animals and the need for 
 proper zoos to preserve them in, it said, “We know that half of all living 
 species are about to be wiped out right now” —which included mass ex- 
 
208 Postscript 
 
 tinction of African elephants, mountain gorillas, Manchurian tigers, Si- 
 chuan pandas, Madagascar lemurs, New Zealand kiwis, Bangladesh frogs, 
 plus millions of beetles and might as well include mankind. A bad day 
 too for bananafish. 
 
 Besides, with a failing memory and a growing tendency to dwell less 
 on the eternities than on passing facts— such as the weather, the evening 
 news and anchor man Peter Jennings’ splendid taste in neckties (a new 
 one each night) —it wasn’t easy to say what I was looking at. In an inter- 
 view with Dick Cavett, the poet John Ashbery claimed not to know what 
 he was looking at or what, in fact, he thought when he did look because 
 of an absent mind befuddled by the smell of frying sausages or where he 
 had to be in the next hour. Confusion amounting to a breach of the peace 
 resulted. Doesn’t one want a poet to look where he’s going? 
 
 Just the other day, still seeking a clearer field of vision I asked at the 
 florist’s for a fig tree to take home and sit under—not in the hope it 
 would bear a fig or provide me a fig leaf, but because I find the need in 
 the wilderness of the world, and at this hour, to look for something to sit 
 under (contrary to Robert Graves’ opinion: “to sit / Always beneath the 
 same small tree / Argues a certain lack of wit.” And Mae West’s advice, 
 “There’s no future under a fig tree.”) 
 
 Yet what better place? 
 
 The man had plenty of fig trees in stock, but he warned me about 
 the ficus, which I see is specifically recommended in Micah 4:4, “Every 
 man shall sit under his fig tree,” as the bo tree itself is, Ficus religiosa. 
 While being hardy and long-lived as they come, it is also temperamen- 
 tal, at least as a house plant, and if not content with your company will 
 drop its leaves and play dead. This is the kind of threat the Buddha never 
 faced while sitting under the bo tree when he said, “For me the world 
 no longer matters”; it might have changed the look of nirvana if he had. 
 Nevertheless, I chose a fig tree about five feet tall with shiny green leaves 
 and just room for sitting, not for daliance or entertaining friends. And 
 the man said, “What it wants is light. Give it plenty of light.” That being 
 
Postscript 209 
 
 coincidentally what I too am after, my tree and I will have to look for 
 illumination in the noonday sun, or drop our leaves together. 
 
 In the end, said Wallace Stevens, there is the necessary fiction—the 
 way the world is, and the way you see it; the way things are and the 
 way they seem—for such a little while. There can be at best only hurried 
 glimpses, a version of the thing— people to know scarcely at all, houses 
 to live only temporarily in, windows to polish to brighten the outlook, 
 this earth to learn so little about, the sense of having lived and not lived, 
 the unbearable loss of those we love. 
 
 In the end, he said, “perhaps the truth depends upon a walk around a 
 lake.” Show me the way. 
 
 And Things Are As 1 Think They Are 
 
 I wouldn’t claim we’re deep in clover 
 Or fit as fiddles, you and I, 
 
 Fond, but scarcely fond as pigeons, 
 Young, but not to passersby, 
 
 Weak in the loins, it’s true, diminished 
 To mere handwavings, nonetheless 
 Beyond all this the sweet illusion 
 
 Of love unchanged, enduring. Yes. 
 
@? ai 
 
 
 
7 
 
 Helen Bevington has published many books, including Doctor Johnson’s Water- 
 fall, Nineteen Million Elephants, A Change of Sky, When Found, Make A Verse Of, 
 Charley Smith’s Girl, A Book and a Love Affair, The House Was Quiet and the World 
 Was Calm, Beautiful Lofty People, Along Came the Witch, The Journey Is Every- 
 thing, and The World and the Bo Tree. She has written regularly for the New York 
 Times Book Review, has published light verse in the New Yorker, and has con- 
 tributed to Atlantic Monthly and American Scholar, among other periodicals. For 
 many years she taught at Duke University, as did her late husband, Merle. She is 
 now Professor Emeritus of English at Duke. 
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 
 Bevington, Helen 
 
 The third and only way / Helen Bevington. 
 
 p. cm. 
 
 ISBN 0-8223-1850-4 (acid-free paper) 
 
 1. Bevington, Helen Smith— Biography. 2. Women authors, American—2o0th 
 century—Biography. 3. Aged—Conduct of life. I. Title. 
 
 PS3503.F924Z474 1996 
 
 811'.54—dc20 
 
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