Читать книгу Jay to Bee - Janet Frame - Страница 8
ОглавлениеDECEMBER
8. Baltimore December 1
Dear Bee,
First, the business news.
We decided to adopt the conservative approach: to call for and print selected testimonials with photographs if possible, in a nation-wide advertising campaign. The response so far is fair-good although we expect a rise in sales towards the Christmas Season. We are glad that our clients on the West Coast are solidly behind us and we affix a sample of our advertising technique.
The paintings are beautiful. I can’t decide which is my favourite as my preference changes. I had Ride in the Desert and Pedestrian Crossing propped where I could see them. Ride in the Desert is so fluid, poetic and full of light that falls not, as in many paintings, where the artist chooses it shall fall but where the light itself decides and that means of course that the conspiracy of painter and light is total—one becomes the other; maybe this sounds silly.
I’m not a painter, mister, but I know what I like and what I feel. I remember I used to think that people’s thoughts came startlingly out of the back of their head and when I suggested this I was laughed at; but how pleased I was many years later to read in a Chekhov story that when a person has his back to you, if you know him, you know the thoughts from glancing at the back of his head—well, not thoughts, feelings. One knows the rider here as one knows the character in a good novel and one sees so much in the back view and shape. I like the way you treat people and their environment as equals, as beings with no barriers* [footnote: Without barriers natural digestion, with barriers, cannibalism.] between them. This painting is sad, I think, but it’s also full of the bliss of being in a world where man, rock, tree, sky spring from the same source and are untroubled by trying to separate themselves, rather 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
assisting at bungalow’s birth.
We are the grim foreboders
of a treeless tasteless earth.
You will be having lunch now, sitting outside under the butterflies, and Paul will be there, and Ned will be lounging around with his fur sticking out—I’ve never seen a cat whose fur sticks out in so many directions at once, he looks like a black and white thistle-ball, the kind that we used to call ‘robbers’, and ‘one o’clocks’. I suddenly remember that in my little house in Dunedin I’m not entirely catless—there’s a neighbour’s cat comes to visit me, and when I am downstairs doing my washing in the oldfashioned washing-tubs the cat climbs on the edge of the tub and hits at the water with his paws. I thought at first it was a materialized dream-cat and I was disappointed when I discovered it belonged to a neighbour.
I’m looking forward to Yaddo where I shall be able to walk outside in the woods in the snow and I expect that my new novel will be filled with snow. I am comforted and enclosed by my preliminary vision and I shall try desperately to keep it whole while I reach out to find the words but I know from experience its depressing fragility. Did you ever read a story by William Saroyan, ‘The Sunday Zeppelin’, in which some children see an advertisement trying to sell a zeppelin with an illustration of two children away up in the sky inside their zeppelin, calling out, Goodbye World. And when they send for the actual thing it turns out to be made of tissue-paper and it tears the first time they try to use it.
Lolo (the Sumatran visitor) said that for many many years his tribe was forbidden to make any music. Music and dancing were exclusively religious and when the Dutch missionaries came to the country, as they forbade the practice of animism they also forbade the practice of music, and dancing. One can’t believe that the missionaries were entirely obeyed, but the story is still of desolation and murder.
No limericks today.
I look often at your and Paul’s catalogue—I wish I had seen all the photographs in the gallery. More of this in another letter: I mean that I am trying to describe their effect in words, just because I like to do this. I hope an angel continues to guard your work.
I’m enclosing a Dunedin picture, not very good. It’s near where I live.
J
11. until 30th December, c/o Money, (Baltimore) from January 3rd until February 18th, c/o Yaddo after that whoopee.
Dear Bill,
Hello again. It was wonderful to hear your voice in the wilderness. It’s very early morning, outside is cold with a sprinkling of snow with more promised, inside is too warm.
John Money is getting ready to fly away for Christmas. His Sumatran friend flew away yesterday—he was a nice gentle quiet man, a nuclear physicist who will return in a couple of years to his village and tribe and primitive living. I wonder what will become of him. Indirectly, you have made his life more fruitful, Bill. I’ve been spending much time listening to music and tinkering (ghastly word but accurate description) at the piano—I do miss your music (and you) terribly—and Lolo joined in the interest, and now he is returning to his midWestern University and its pretty lonely life, he is going to study the piano in his spare time.
I have received what is usually called the ‘Yaddo information’. It is so full of dire warnings and promises of peril that I wonder if this is not a psychological device to prepare the artists to do their best work?
Quote:
in this bad weather it is important for guests to get there no later than three. Taxis, in bad driving weather, often refuse to come inside the grounds and this makes for real difficulties . . . we ask guests who are in the early stages of a cold to please delay their arrival until there is no danger to other guests . . .
And so on. A dangerous place, Yaddo. I shall have a little more privacy than when I was there before as they are giving me an artist’s (painter’s) studio outside.
I’ve had an eloquent fan letter from a French student who is writing a thesis on my work. It is hard to know what to say in reply, particularly as one always has in mind the perfection of Rilke’s replies to the young poet. This young man is now inspired to become a writer. He asks me—‘If you could send me an advice which could be put across the untrue and traffic-jammed roads of literature, pointing to the darkest lanes leading to the essential and deepest part of man it would be a landmark, a milestone, a witness tree in my future . . .’ What can one say to that?
I’ve also had a letter from the representative of the ‘anonymous business group’ in New Zealand, reminding me that my budget seems very strictly minimal . . .
I’m still on Pacific Time. Ewig.aa
German word for eternity—common in Rilke and Goethe
I played a Hindemith Horn Concerto; and of course every day I play [in margin: Lili Kraus plays it!] a little Schubert. The only Sonata here, the A Major is beautiful. I play the Impromptus over and over and each time I discover so much in them and I change my allegiance from one to the other. They are true poems. Instead of having total allegiance to the feelings aroused by the music I now feel moved by special groups of notes and by the silence between changes from one note-mass to another. Well, they’re all heartbreakers. I remember that when my sister’s small son began to learn to play the piano he said, Mummy why do my eyes get all prickly when I play the piano and hear the music?
Down with sentiment. Up with so much.
More later. I must wash.
I’ll even look around for The Heart of Darkness . . .
I have just received a cable from N.Z. telling me that Pocket Mirror has won the yearly award for literary achievement—200 dollars.
Blah blah
What are you doing what are you
painting how is the piano are there
still butterflies is the new fir
tree growing does the Pacific
still flow Ned likewise
are you alive and real is my
constant communication too
constant say hello to Paul
who is very wise have you
had your laughter ration
every day
That was a lovely walk
we 3 had in the hills among
the mountain lions and the
live oaks and I think often
of it and I like your paintings on the wall. The nude group in
a circle on a hill top—is it twilight
12. as from Yaddo, but really now from Baltimore where the wind is raging outside
Hello Bill,
I was very happy to get the letters and to know that your work is—well I don’t know how to finish that sentence . . . I like to hear about it and I really do study the catalogues I have here. I agree with most of what Jo says in her write-up, except the idea that it is ‘devoid of the tragic view of life’: for instance the painting, Muscatine Diver, is full of agony and helplessness. There is the trust that Jo writes of but it is the trust of man in his own helplessness, and surely this is a view into or out of a place of tragedy . . . don’t mind my inflated meanderings. I feel this, though. I suppose you have to bear with what people say of your work. Remember we were talking of Francis Bacon and his distorted mirror-faces? It occurs to me that they’re also people caught in a world without gravity (g), in wind-tunnels of outer space—are there winds in outer space?
In your paintings people grow like plants out of their surroundings, they are their surroundings, and as with the woman and the dog (this is how I see that) they divide into different species and still be part one of the other. In the scene of the woman and the deer the woman is the deer and the deer is the tree.
In Paul’s paintings the objects seem to be gifts or visitors out of the sky, perfectly formed as the egg is perfectly formed, a life-gift or visitor. Gifts stay or are retrieved by the giver; visitors leave. Paul traps them in bottles and glasses and in a human skull; in postcards and books and sometimes just in an area of colour—or on a crucifix: I think this is very exciting.
Now read on:
Christmas came and went. I was alone in the house with a cheesecake and every few hours I hacked at it until it gradually diminished. I enjoyed the quietness. Jo called from South Hadley and as usual had a delightful tale—how Rural Violence trapped her in the basement when she was hanging out her undies, offered her a huge glass of whisky which she drank and then she was drunk for three days . . . Elnora called from Philadelphia where she was surrounded by people, I think, a nephew of eight and a niece of four. She seemed to be engaged in playing chasing games and my imagination quailed at the thought of her rushing up and down the stairs chasing and being chased, as she said was happening. I’m going to New York on Tuesday and I’ll be with Elnora until I’m due at Yaddo on January 5th.
I look forward to getting a New Year portrait! Mine may be delayed—well I don’t know how long they take to print & I haven’t put in my choice yet.
You’re right about F. in the W. (my way of saying lewdly Faces in the Water). I mean it’s written & that’s that. Were I writing it today I should make many changes. You may not believe this but I purposely omitted much & ‘toned’ it down so as not to make it too grim. I haven’t read it for years but I remember the people I wrote of and thinking of them from time to time I am still moved by their plight. I think that was hardest—to see so much suffering.
Enough.
I’m sending you a copy of the story that will be in the New Yorker some time, I don’t know when. The funny marks, including the E at the top are merit marks, I suppose, & E is lowest. They’re holding it because it is not a fashionable story—I think.
O to be in Santa Barbara, not in Baltimore,
for whoever wakes in Santa Barbara sees through the patio door,
dear cunning Ned about to shower
his urine on the paradise flower.
And after morning when mid-morning follows
& the vitamins have been taken in swift swallows,
see where the apricot-cat becomes a menace
to Ned as he contemplates the stones of Venice.
Love
J
a German word for eternity—common in Rilke and Goethe
