SATURDAY: SEPTEMBER 26
A clear, fresh day, with the cool nip back again. Newton says Smith classes started Wednesday. Seeing him was enough to bring back my old teaching nightmares: a lounging, bored class, about to be dismissed, me noticing a student ressembling Ellen Bartlett, to whom I had given a C, had a story in the New Yorker (like the story in Mademoiselle about Car'line) and me promising to reconsider her mark on these grounds. Probably a meld of my sense of this vibrant new Ellen Currie, Jean Stafford's New Yorker stories which I'd just been reading, and Newton's recall to the old treadmill.
All the cats are being killed: three of them. The old grumpy one for biting Mrs. Mansions hand. Mrs. Ames' because it cramps her style, and the new white-booted puss because it's a bother: we think we heard George shoot her the other day.
On the back of the screen door of the mansion this morning, as if flung and frozen there, a frost moth: all white furred, legs, body, antennae, with grey and white wings. Lovely exotic esquimau creature.
Listened to Schwartzkopf singing Schubert Lieder last night in the music room. Immensely moved, Who is Sylvia, and "Mein ruh ist hin" recognizable, words here and there: a strong sense of my own past, from which I am alienated by ignorance of language which I find difficult to break through.
Reading much Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford, must go through Katherine Anne Porter. Read "A Worn Path", "Livvie", "The Whistle" aloud. That is a way to feel on my tongue what I admire. "The Interior Castle" a lurid, terrifying recreation of intolerable pain.
Bored at waiting to hear from mail. Two children's books: the Bed Book now seems limited and thin. Max Nix seems rather ordinary. Yet I dream of a transfiguration: a letter of acceptance. No word from H. Holt about poems yet. Robert Frost probably hasn't bothered to say NO yet. I have a queer feeling about them: they can't decide for themselves. So they won't be for it.
Must get into deep stories wherc all experience becomes usable to me. Tell from one person's point of view: start with self and extend outwards: then my life will be fascinating, not a glassed-in cage. If only I could break through in one story. Johnny Panic too much a fantasy. If only I could get it real.
A farm story: Ilo, the Jeness brothers, Mary Coffee. A Mayo story: babysitter in complicated family: the Pillars. A mad story: college would-be suicide. A Double story: involvement with roommate. Once I did one good one, I would break in. The Tattooist story at Sewanee an encouragement. Has a glow now it never would have had otherwise. If only my Cornucopia story could get a climax. It is a rambly diary.
Detail: the pond fish like black willow leaves lying in green glass. A leaf twirling by itself in a still wood. Remember experiences: faithfully: detail. Get college: that glow, that luster. A thing not known again. And I shut experience off. Remember pain. Joy. First love. Disillusion with a heroïne. Live in bright worlds of past, then you will make them up from a feather, a word, the color of an old woman's eye.
A silver pie server story.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten