Prose

5. I’m afraid I agree with you only too well.

I don’t know whether this is due to Brazil, age or what. — However, I feel I could NOT have stayed on in N.Y. And I have been personally very happy here, except for this recurring sense of anxiety and loss. However, one always hopes and hopes. — Now I am hoping a trip will do wonders — and this year so far I have written a lot, for me. Good or bad I can’t say. — (Cal likes the poem in the New York Review, I think, quite a bit—)

I should mention one teacher at Walnut Hill, probably — she later taught at Wellesley. Miss Prentiss — she was an excellent teacher of English for that age (hopelessly romantic!) — and we went read some Shakespeare with her, She helped me even more, probably, by lending me all her books I took a fancy to and admiring my early verse — too much, no doubt.

[There was also an excellent Latin teacher, Miss? The best teacher there, really]

Miss Farwell, the assistant principal, was also very kind to me and had the excellent idea of taking me to some sort of psychiatrist in Boston, — Unfortunately, I clammed up and wouldn’t talk at all. But she had the right idea — too bad it didn’t work.

We were taken to Symphony Concerts, of course — also concerts at Wellesley — where, with through my piano teacher (how awful I’ve forgotten her name) I shook hands with Myra Hess (my teacher’s old teacher — later scorned by Kirkpatrick) and Prokofiev. — P’s wife sang some from “The Love of Three Oranges”,* and that and his way of playing I remember as giving me a whole new idea of music. — Possibly the idea of “irony” in music was a revelation, because at that time I liked his piano pieces best (now they’re not very interesting to me) of my simple repertoire—

I also saw one of the first Calder shows, at Pittsfield, around 1931—his very first mobiles, that had cranks, or little electric motors. We spoke of this show the last time he was here — last year — and it was funny how many of the pieces I could still remember, so it must have made a big impression—

Although I think I have a prize “unhappy childhood”, almost good enough for the text-books — please don’t think I dote on it. — Almost everyone has had, anyway — and since then I have been extremely lucky in many ways. I never had any difficulty getting published — I have had all those helpful awards — I often think I have been praised beyond my due—

Under 3 you speak rather disparagingly of Partisan Review in the late 30’s and 40’s … well, at the time I was writing the poems I like best I was very ignorant politically and I sometimes wish I could recover the dreamy state of consciousness I levd in lived in then — it was better for my work, and I do the world no more good now by knowing a great deal more. I was “left” just because my friends were, mostly — although of course we all felt the effects of the depression profoundly, and ever since noticing the split in my own family and going through my Shelley period, around 16, I had thought of myself as a “socialist.” (I was also a vegetarian until after college, I think! — and I revert to it every once in a while. I don’t advocate it or even believe in it — but they drive the cattle to market here, and after each encounter with one of the cattle trains — you park the car and let the poor beasts pour around you — I give up meat again for a week or so.)

I was always anti-communist, I believe — after one or two John Reed Club affairs. I don’t know whether this was due to my intelligence (No — not intelligence — just instinct and snobbery—) or what — but all the really “red” girls at college (one is taken off cruelly, but very comically in “The Group”) I found too silly — and now they’re the real rich conservatives, in general.

But — before the war — we knew much much less. The purges in the 30’s were what opened most people’s eyes, of course. Here now it is dreadful for me to see young men I know making the same mistake that US intellectuals were making around 1930. How they can is hard to see. — They seem totally unaware of recent history. But Brazil is unbelievably provincial, and also one of its greatest drawbacks to any kind of maturity, I’m afraid, is that it has never been through a war. However — nothing here is explainable in terms that apply in the U S. — But believe me — things are very bad here now, and I may have to leave. Or Lota and I may finally choose to—

Rio, March 23rd, 1964

Dear Anne:

I’ll enclose the fragments of a letter I did write you over a month ago, just to show you I tried. Many things have kept me from answering properly; guests, partly, but mostly I think the political situation, that is keeping everyone on edge now and which, because of Lota’s job and her close connections with the State government in Rio, I can’t forget for a moment. I made tentative reservations to go to England by boat next month, just for a breathing spell, — but just today we have decided to go to Milan in May for the Triennale May 20th we want to see — then I’ll probably stay on and go to England for a month or six weeks alone. Perhaps I’ll be able to see you there then? I think I’ll be visiting friends in Sussex, but staying mostly in London — and perhaps go to Edinburgh, since I have never seen it & want to.

I’m sending back the Chronology pages and I hope you can read my corrections. You have it mostly right, however. Somewhere along the line I had an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship and now I have a Chapelbrook — have had it for over two years but haven’t been able to make any use of it yet. I’m also a member of the Institute of Arts & Letters — but I’m not sure of the date. Although I’m always grateful for all the money I’ve received — considering how little I have accomplished — I feel that none of these names and awards really means too much — however they’ll help fill your page … I’ve answered your questions, too, in a garrulous way — a lot of what I’ve said you don’t need at all, but I’ll let it go because perhaps anything that contributes an “atmosphere” will help you with the writing? I am appalled at how narrow, petty, gloomy, masochistic, even, this kind of condensation of my “life” sounds — but of course I’m sure you know there’s more to life than an outline! — This is just the sketchiest of armatures, really, leaving out so many friends, people, places, events — false beginnings, retreats, mistakes, and so [on].

Yes, quote my remarks on Darwin if you like. I think I said to you, when you asked about Dr. Williams, that one of his poems I admire is “Asphodel, that greeny flower…”? Well, I re-read it the other day and was surprised to see he mentions Darwin, too — not in my sense at all, but he says, “But Darwin / opened our eyes / to the gardens of the world…” I really just got off on Darwin because of my readings about Brazil when I first came here; his first encounter with the “tropics” was on the outskirts of Rio and a lot he says in his letters home about the city and country is still true. Then I became very fond of his writing in general — his book on Coral Island is a beauty, if ever you have a long stretch to read in, — specialized but beautifully worked out. It seems to me that in the world of hate and horror we all inhabit that contemporary artists and writers, some of the “action painters” (although I like them, too), the “beats,” the wildest musicians, etc. — have somehow missed the point — that the real expression of tragedy, or just horror and pathos, lies exactly in man’s ability to construct, to use form. The exquisite form of a tubercular Mozart, say, is more profoundly moving than any wild electronic wail & tells more about that famous “human condition” … But this is an idea it has probably been beyond my gifts to express in poetry.