Jay to Bee. Janet Frame
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feeding one from the other. This is in all the paintings in the catalogue (I mean for me) with sometimes a suggestion that plants, rocks, deserts were in the world first and have the right to change man more than he has the right to change them, and the form of change they impose is to make man become them.
The Pedestrian is quite a menacing story. From one angle the hills and slopes resemble benign capes that will protect the pedestrian where man and his machines never will. Yet in another light or view (I felt this after I had looked at the painting for some time) there is a grim suggestion—Look at the pedestrian taking such care in crossing the road and avoiding the traffic when the real terror is in the hills that seem to be following, to overtake and engulf.
There is this movement in all the paintings; nothing is still; nothing is now; it’s all a swirl of yesterday and tomorrow. For instance The White Dog makes one (me) feel that the woman was sitting quietly reading when her right breast suddenly became a little nipple-nosed white dog while she pretended not to notice, while the white dog in its suddenly being claims all the attention.
Well—I could go on and on in this way but I’ll give you a rest, and not mention the other paintings though I like them all and I love having them, or likenesses of them.
[in margin: take no notice of this crazy stuff]
Meanwhile back in Baltimore . . . I continue to use the pornograph as there is a small collection of records, and to sort my papers including one suitcase full of script from the novel I wrote this year and when I see it, so much of it, typed and retyped and reduced I am overpowered—now—with the amount of work I did then.
I’m hoping to go to New York at the end of December and will stay with Elnora some days before I go to Yaddo on the 5th January. I think Jo and Mark are coming to town then, also. I’d give anything for a quick trip to California to restore me before the Yaddo days begin; and with an advance coming up I could make myself afford it.??!!????
No limericks this time. They’re no fun on your own. Your Dunedin and Golden attempts were perfect—what talents we MacDowellites exhibit when there is no-one looking.
Blue Jay
9. Baltimore December
Dear literate live oak, to continue my story,
It’s half-past five in the evening and I’m in the sitting room sitting with my typewriter before me, the Steinway and the foetus on my left, the front door on my right, and I’ve just finished packing a tiny Care Parcel, emergency rations for you to use in the Earthquake or Tidal Wave; and outside it is snowing.
The flight was surprisingly calm considering that the plane’s engines failed on take-off and we were transferred to another plane and then chased by an eighty-five mile an hour wind all the way to Baltimore. The pilot who was old with white hair and probably with furlined arteries, made a marvellous job of flying and landing. I dozed, whiskey-soured, most of the way, with daydreams of my wonderful week in Santa Barbara, and though I’ve been in Baltimore nearly two days now I refuse to relinquish Pacific Time.
A letter from May Sarton was waiting for me. She’s had the ’flu and was feeling groggy, and maybe a bit ethereal: she said nice things about my writing. Elnora also has had a kind of ’flu—I phoned her yesterday to cheer her up by telling her I had a gift for her from you. Also I had a note from Charles Neider who is actually back home after his whirlwind visit to Antarctica.
Last night I played Funeral Music by Hindemith and the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, and today I bought a book to teach me the notes and I’m up to page 30, new broom sweeping clean, and it’s an interesting exercise in self-knowledge, a disillusionment to find that as usual I want everything for nothing and at once. There’s one of the ‘Cinq Doigts’ pieces by Stravinsky here.
Letter is now interrupted. John Money has a visitor from Sumatra and he has just phoned to say they are arriving.
It is now ten p.m. and I’ve ‘retired’ to my little room. I tried to call Jo at MacDowell this evening but they must have been so busily eating they heard nothing but their jaws. So I’m sitting here in my bed wishing I were in the world of the live oaks.
The East seems oxygen-starved and murky after California with the blue skies and the butterflies and beautiful Ned with his fur like feathers. Wherever you live, I think it is naturally a place of many blessings, just because you are there.
Forgive this disconnected (as usual) letter, I am tired, and the clock is ticking in my ear, the phone is ringing but everyone is asleep, everyone is tired, the boardinghouse is full tonight, for the visitor is staying a few days, ah how my battery is worn; it comes from not having had my Vitamins! And to make things worse all the people from the Peedauntal Factory have gone off for the holidays just when a big order has come in from both the White House and the MacDowell colony and I’m nearly crazy trying to decide priorities, whether it’s better for their work and their country for artists or for statesmen to have to pee down their leg. And worst of all, Nixon wants a Peedauntal in the shape of Santa Claus. I know it’s not very businesslike of me but I’ve never really studied how the stupid things are made, I’ve just let the foreman and the workers take over, and now I’m racking my brains to make a paper pattern and threading needles and even trying to knit purl and plain to turn out something. I do know a tailor in Boston who might help . . . except that his needles are apt to go astray.
More of this at the crack of dawn (so to speak) tomorrow before I post this and your Care Parcel.
Dawn has broken. I’m posting this immediately
Love to Paul & Ned & yourself— J
(‘to divide is not to take away’)
10. Baltimore December
Dear Bill,
Hello. It’s midday and I’ve just had a boiled egg for lunch. John M and his Sumatran(?) visitor who has spent the past five years studying at Michigan for his Physics Doctorate, have gone to Washington and from there to a round of Christmas cocktail parties which I declined, as I remembered the boredom of the one and only medical staff party I went to—and of course there was the old problem of describing how long and wide is New Zealand . . . some blockage prevents me from remembering. It seems that when people are ‘in’ the world of an establishment some part of their mental territory becomes a waste land that unlike a normal wilderness that becomes a sanctuary for ideas and feelings ‘of passage’, can support no form of life.
I miss you.
I’m playing a Bach flute suite on the pornograph . . . and now I am playing Fugue in C Minor.
I’ve nothing to say in this letter except that my thoughts are in the little house in Hermosillo Drive and I’m permanently on Pacific Time.
No limericks today.
A small parody.
We are the front-end loaders
we are the movers of earth,
wheel-deep in drainage odours