address these days—
November 14th, 1965
Dearest Anne:
You have been hiding your light under a bushel — at least as far as I knew. I am very much impressed with your book and think some of it is wonderful, and all good, and that you have enormous talent. Although I’d like to have seen some of these before, I also think you’re wise to spring the whole book on people like that because it does make much more of an effect. and also shows character, patience, etc. — & patience particularly seems to be a necessary ingredient in writing poetry …
I hope you haven’t been expecting to hear from me long before — I did stay in Minas for over two months to buy a completely unnecessary house, but a beauty — but this is a secret for a while, please. I’ll tell you all about it later. Lota kept forwarding batches of letters she thought were important, but she didn’t send books or magazines, etc., and then at the end she kept a lot of letters because I meant to leave, couldn’t get a plane for a week because of the weather, etc. Your books (I got 2) had been unwrapped, so I don’t know when they were mailed to me. So I’m sorry if I have been indifferent or impolite—
I hadn’t any idea you could write such good poetry and it is such a nice surprise — however, I would have thought you’d write careful & beautiful poems, if you did write them — I just never dreamed of the number or the really high quality. It has really cheered me up a great deal when I rather needed a little cheering, too. I like very much: To My Daughter in a Red Coat, (the last three lines are lovely); Fairy Tale; The Traveller (almost best of all, I think — more later); Nightmare in North Carolina; and the title poem — and lots of others, too, but those are my favorites so far. Why haven’t I seen them, I wonder — well — I get Poetry but don’t always read it carefully I’m afraid — and I used to get Paris Review but finally let it stop — and the others you acknowledge I don’t see — that’s why.
The Fullbright Prof. of American Lit. in Rio this year was so much taken with “The Travellers” he wants to put it in an anthology he and Donald Justice (?? — I think — someone fairly well-known) are doing. His name is Mark Strand — you’ll probably be hearing from him. He borrowed my 2nd copy to study and might like more poems. Also — while I’m on this promotion paragraph — Ashley Brown, one of the founders, and an advising editor still, on SHENANDOAH, thinks he would like to see some chapters of your book on me and perhaps — if Twayne agrees — one could be used in that magazine. It’s Ashley Brown, 921 Gregg St., Columbia, South Carolina, 29201—if you want to write him. I have just sent him your address, too, so probably you’ll hear from him, if you’d rather wait. He was the Fullbright Prof. here last year and we saw a lot of him — very intelligent — I may have mentioned him — I went to Bahia and Ouro Prêto, etc. with him — an excellent traveler. That would be a good place to send some poems, too, I think — send them c/o him Shenandoah & mention me—but then it is better, I suppose, to tackle the more famous ones first — Partisan, N Y Review of Books, Kenyon, or Hudson, etc. — or the New Yorker. (As you know perfectly well.)
“Harvard” is another one I like very much, too. “Winter”, too — particularly the first stanza, very beautiful, I think. I realize I know much more of you now, reading that little note at the end, than I ever did before. (And you know so many boring and unnecessary things about me!)
I brought some letters up with me to answer today but don’t seem to have one from you among them — and I’m not at all sure I really answered your last, that I received in Ouro Prêto, or not. I’ll see when I get back Tuesday. And I’ll try to write again soon. Such a lot of things accumulated because I stayed away so long. I am going to Seattle in January, or the end of December, to be a poet-in-residence for two terms — I’ve been shilly-shallying about this for a long time but finally made up my mind to mostly because I need the money to remodel my house! (1720–30—) supposed to have a treasure buried in the walls — well, I’ll write you about it and send you a picture, too.
This is just to thank you very much for your book and to tell you I really like it very much and am deeply impressed. The poems are all honest and careful and yet have great feeling, I think — I trust them completely! I’m just sorry they didn’t make a prettier book for you. Well, mine, that you may have received by now, is a bit too pretty, I’m afraid. I don’t really like the drawing of me on the back, either — but publishers always insist so on photographs, and if not a photograph of one smoking into one’s typewriter, a collection of mis-leading blurbs — so I decided this was more impersonal, since it doesn’t look much like me, and also would please a lot of Brazilian friends. I’m afraid you’ll find the contents only too familiar, and also very thin — it should be twice the size.
It is so beautiful here I can’t imagine why I want another house. (Well, to save it, for one thing — it’s falling down) — I think Mark would find my view almost Chinese in the ancient way — cascade and waterfall to the right, covered rocks, semi-tropical trees, and a lot of blue agapanthus lilies to the left — all seen through a very fine rain today.
Please write me when you can — to Rio. I have to go back to Ouro Prêto for a week or two before Christmas, to get the work started on the house, — but I’ll be in Rio most of the time until I leave now. I hope you are all well — how’s the daughter?
With much love,
Elizabeth
Sometime I want to go into more details—
APPENDIX: EARLY PROSE
On Being Alone
Perhaps there are ghosts at school, or wicked wolves in hiding on the ridge, or evil spirits that dwell in the depths of the furnace room and grope their sinister way up through the pipes and into our rooms. But we have never seen them. We have lived for two seasons untouched by the slightest hint of the supernatural; there are no haunted houses in the immediate vicinity, and no neglected grave yards — scarcely even a blighted tree, in this spring term, or a barren field to hold before us a symbol of terror and death. Why is it then, when there is nothing to fear, and we have surely outgrown the bogies of our younger days, that so many of us seem to dread being alone? We say to each other, “I hate Sundays; there are so many quiet hours,” or “It must be wonderful to have a roommate, someone to talk to in study hour.” All this is rather strange. Why does being alone, when we have a hundred companions most of the time, present such a great trial, or why should we wish to keep the conversation going so endlessly? The fear of a “quiet hour” alone is greater than the fear of all those innumerable quiet hours alone that are ahead of all of us.
There is a peculiar quality about being alone, an atmosphere that no sounds or persons can ever give. It is as if being with people were the Earth of the mind, the land with its hills and valleys, scent and music: but in being alone, the mind finds its Sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds. But it appears that we are frightened by the first breaking of its waves at our feet, and now we will never go on voyages of discovery, never feel the free winds that have blown over water, and never find the islands of the Imagination, where live who knows what curious beasts and strange peoples? Being alone can be fun; alone the mind can do what it wants to without even the velvet leash of sleep. But we can never understand this while we stand on the shore with our backs to the water and cry after our companions. Perhaps we shall never know the companion in ourselves who is with us all our lives, the nearness of our minds at all times to the rare person whose heart quickens when a bird climbs high and alone in the clear air.