The Tightrope Walker: Autobiographical Writings of Anne Wilkinson 9781442682443

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Editorial Note
Acknowledgments
Chronology
The Journals
Poems
The Autobiography
Notes
Glossary of Persons
Index

Citation preview

THE TIGHTROPE WALKER

High as fear The tightrope, Thin as silk the string My feet are walking walking Collected Poems, 140

I've always been a tightrope walker (a foolish occupation for one terrified of heights) but now the rope has shrunk to string and I sway, paralysed, almost wishing the string would break and make an end of my circus. Journals, 15 April 1950

The Tightrope Walker Autobiographical Writings of Anne Wilkinson

Edited by Joan Coldwell

U N I V E R S I T Y OF T O R O N T O PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1992 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada The Writings of Anne Wilkinson Copyright held by Alan G. Wilkinson ISBN 0-8020-5745-4 Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Wilkinson, Anne, 1910-1961 The tightrope walker Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-5745-4 1. Wilkinson, Anne, 1910-1961 - Biography. 2. Poets, Canadian (English) — 2Oth century — Biography. I. Coldwell, Joan. II. Title. ps8545.142Z53 1992 c811'.54 PR9I99.3.W55Z47 1992

C92-093801-9

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

INTRODUCTION / vii EDITORIAL NOTE / xix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / xxi CHRONOLOGY / xxiii

The Journals / 1 Poems I 151 The Autobiography / 163

NOTES / 249 GLOSSARY OF PERSONS / 259 INDEX / 267 Illustrations following page 162

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Introduction

'I am constantly in love with life and always on the brink of despair,' Anne Wilkinson wrote in her journal on 22 March 1954. In the two volumes of poetry published in her lifetime we find the same dichotomy: her verse sparkles with pleasure in a range of sensual experience but it is also often tinged with sadness and pain. One of her best-known poems, 'Lens,' speaks of this duality: her poet's eye is blessed with moments of radiant vision but it must also unflinchingly record 'the mutiny within.' Such tension also pervades the two forms of life writing brought together in this volume. Journals and autobiography together create a delightful picture of the sources of pleasure in Anne Wilkinson's life, especially her family, landscapes of trees, lawns, flowers, and water, books of all sorts, travel abroad, and the writing of poetry. A darker side of the journals reveals the physical pain of illness, the nightmare of doomed relationships, grief at the death of her beloved mother, and her dread of failure as a poet. They record the struggle to keep her balance on an emotional tightrope, to cling to the love of life that is so apparent in some of her poetry and to reject the despair that at times almost overwhelmed her. Read together, the journals and autobiography provide contrasting and complementary insights into a creative woman's act of self-definition. By the time of her death in 1961 at the age of fifty, Anne Wilkinson had established a strong reputation as one of Canada's most promising poets. Her two books of poetry, Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955), were praised by critics as influential as Northrop Frye, Desmond Pacey, and Earle Birney; after her death A.J.M. Smith edited The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson (1968), with a highly appreciative introduction. She had also written a history of her Osier ancestors in Lions in the Way (1956), a children's story Swann and Daphne (1960), and

Introduction an autobiographical essay Tour Corners of My World' (1961), which is a shortened version of the memoir published here. This achievement had not come easily. Anne Wilkinson did not begin to write poetry seriously until she was in her mid-thirties, when writing had to compete for attention with the care of her husband and their three young children. Although she belonged to a wealthy family where there were always servants to smooth the household way, she nevertheless experienced that conflict between the demands of motherhood and the demands of art so often experienced by less financially privileged women. Her family background created some difficulties in itself, as she tried to keep a balance between the social duties expected of a strikingly beautiful and charming woman and the intensely private life of the poet she knew herself to be. The poet's mother was the youngest child of Sir Edmund Boyd Osier, president of the Dominion Bank and a director of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In his Toronto mansion, Craigleigh, Anne Wilkinson spent some of her most impressionable years, from nine to fourteen. Here she enjoyed one of the last of the grand Edwardian lifestyles, with governesses for lessons at home, flowers from the greenhouses to fill the house, and a chauffeur to take her and her friends to the movies. Here too she was surrounded by members of a very large, close-knit family, with prestigious connections to the worlds of finance, law, politics, and medicine (the eminent physician Sir William Osier was her great-uncle). There was also always Roches Point, the estate on Lake Simcoe which had been in the family since 1885. Sir Edmund had given the main house, Beechcroft, to his son Gordon, The Lodge to his daughter Mary (Anne's mother), and part of the property to his daughter Annabel (Amo), who with her husband built Cottage-in-the-Field. Anne Wilkinson was later to write a number of poems and journal entries in her mother's lakeside cottage close by The Lodge. Every summer the family gathered at Roches Point, with cousins coming and going, so that it seemed as if generations past and present were one continuum, intricately linked to this setting which the poet thought of as her only real home. Although membership in this large family carried with it many privileges which Anne Wilkinson greatly enjoyed, it sometimes created in her a sense of claustrophobia. As her poem 'Summer Acres' implies, she was proud of her ancestry but also felt restricted by her inheritance of particular qualities of character and a clearly defined social role. It was partly in order to exorcize the family ghosts that, at her psychiatrist's suggestion, she undertook the writing of Lions in the Way, a family history stretching viii

Introduction from the life of the founding parents in Cornwall in the early nineteenth century to the death of Sir William Osier at the end of 1919. The epilogue describes her own days at Craigleigh during the almost five years she spent there until Sir Edmund's death. Coming from such a socially elite and self-sufficient world, Anne Wilkinson worked in almost complete isolation from any literary community. In 1946, the year of her first published poems as an adult, she wrote in a letter that she knew no one who liked poetry. This was not strictly true. Her mother, a great reader and a patron of the arts, showed her daughter's work to the eminent poet E. J. Pratt, who then encouraged and advised her; her good friend Muriel Douglas, who had a degree in English and French, planned an anthology of Canadian poetry with her; and she had other friends, such as the musician Marcus Adeney, who also wrote poetry. But it was only after her first book was published in 1951 that she began to meet other professional poets regularly and to feel herself part of the literary world. Within a very short time she counted among her friends the Montreal poets F.R. Scott, A J.M. Smith, P.K. Page, and Louis Dudek, the English poet and editor Howard Sergeant, Ontario poets James Reaney, Margaret Avison, Raymond Souster, Patrick Anderson, and W.W.E. Ross, and the west coast editor of Contemporary Verse, Alan Crawley. Her initial distance from the literary world came partly from the fact that her formal education had been eccentric and sporadic. She did not grow up with a circle of like-minded friends such as one makes at school and university, nor with a standard curriculum to provide a common fund of literary references. Essentially she taught herself through wide and voracious reading, building up her own stock of eclectic and sometimes curiously obscure imagery. There were books everywhere in her mother's house and she herself collected a sizeable library, ordering new books from England as soon as they were published. The journals record something of her wide-ranging interests, from her favourite Jane Austen, all of whose novels she read and reread, to philosophy, the Greek classics, the New Testament, poetry, and fiction. In her forties she took Greek lessons so that she might read Homer in the original: she longed to write an epic that would attempt to bridge the gap between Homer and Joyce. She read aloud to her children the books that had delighted her as a child, The Wind in the Willows and The Princess and the Goblin as well as later classics such as Swallows and Amazons, and used in her own poetry the rhythms and images of the nursery rhymes she taught them. She was also periodically confined to bed by painful illnesses, some of which, as she suspected, were probably psychosomatic in origin. Her pleaix

Introduction sure in the outdoors, source of so much of her poetry, and dedication to the hard work of writing were often thwarted by such debilitating conditions as arthritis, pericarditis, and the lung cancer that eventually killed her. Although she showed nervous symptoms from childhood, her psychic distress was most extreme when her marriage disintegrated, with her husband's bouts of heavy drinking increasing the 'nightmare and strain' of what were also her ten most productive years as a poet. Anne Wilkinson began to keep a journal in the late 1940S, when she embarked on her poetic career. Often she used a school exercise book, as if to underscore the fact that here she practised writing when inspiration failed: 'it puts me in touch with words and the strays wandering in my head and before I know it I'm off on another expedition of language' (1 January 1954). She experimented with prose style, frequently polishing sentence structures by crossing out words and phrases and substituting more effective ones. The journals offered an escape from loneliness, as she proposed to 'write naturally as one talks to a friend' (1 June 1949). At first, she followed the method she admired in the journals of Andre Gide, mixing observations (often quite trite) on the weather and family activities with lists of books read, pertinent quotations, and philosophic ruminations, sometimes on the same subjects Gide tackled. As life at home became more difficult, she used the journals as a kind of therapy, trying to understand her personality and prevent its collapse: 'I write an inward jargon of a woman barricaded with cardboard' (2 February 1949). When she later read Virginia Woolf 's A Writer's Diary (1953), she felt a 'painful kinship' with a woman whose social background and psychological make-up had much in common with her own: 'as if I am her untalented younger sister — so much her sister, herself, that I could have written the book — if I could write' (29 December 1953). After this, her journal entries grew more intensely self-aware and were used more often for experimenting with drafts of poems. Anne Wilkinson also wrote short stories when poetic inspiration failed, though she considered this an inferior kind of writing: 'I am angry that they come and the poetry is hidden' (7 July 1949). Even so, she thought well enough of them to submit at least one to The New Yorker (it was rejected) and to send several to Alan Crawley for his response (largely unfavourable). It seems that none of the story manuscripts has survived. The journals provide the only remaining evidence of this aspect of her work: the entry for 5 May 1950 gives a detailed account of the macabre plot of'The Children.' x

Introduction The death of her mother early in 1956 marked a turning-point in Anne Wilkinson's life. She was so devastated by the loss of the person closest to her that for fourteen months she could write nothing at all, not even in the journals. Then, when she attended the burial of her cook in the churchyard where her mother was buried, she found herself finally able to express her grief. The release is reflected in her determination to write a more formal life story, an autobiography that would recreate a lost world of childhood centred on her mother. This work, with its poetic rather than logical sequence of events, steadily evokes the sense of closeness to her mother, every chapter beginning with some reference to her. That bond had been intensified by the death of her barrister father, George Gibbons, in 1919, when Anne was only nine years old (she says eight in the autobiography, though she had in fact passed her ninth birthday). For most of her married life she had lived near her mother, either in Toronto or at Roches Point, and had relied on her always for support and encouragement with her writing as well as in her personal life. That she considered her mother her 'best friend, in a contemporary sense as well as in the maternal,' is acknowledged in a moving exchange of last letters between mother and daughter (included here at the end of the journals). 'I am filled with amazed pride,' writes Mrs Boyd, 'that George and I, plus various ancestors, produced a poet, and it has not been easy for you to fulfill that side of your nature in an environment not conducive to it. It is wonderful what a place you have made for yourself among the writers.' Her mother's death from multiple sclerosis, the same disease that killed her father, was the catalyst for the autobiography, which Anne Wilkinson intended as a tribute to her parents and their gift of an extraordinarily varied and idyllic childhood. Unlike the journals, the autobiography was meant for publication, was in fact offered to the Macmillan Company of Canada, and was being revised at the time of Anne Wilkinson's death. It is probable that she was too ill to finish the revisions, the last chapter in particular being sketchy and disordered. She did complete an abridged version of the first four chapters for the periodical The Tamarack Review, where it was published just after her death; it was later reprinted in A.J.M. Smith's edition of her Collected Poems in 1968. This long essay entitled 'Four Corners of My World' tightens the story to cover only episodes from her growing up in London, Ontario, Roches Point, Toronto, and California. These passages are considerably shortened and their style polished; nothing at all is included from the final three chapters. One unrevised and unplaced paragraph in the manuscript, marked 'put at end of book — enlarge,' xi

Introduction comments wryly on this process of abridgment: This summer I am not in the Lodge [at Roches Point] but in the cottage close by, and the sound of the lake can be heard in every room. I wear another self when I am here, a self composed of the years since I was married. At the Lodge I am a cross between my childhood and my mother; and there, a year ago, I was writing this chronicle which, since then, has grown in reverse, becoming smaller and smaller. A year from now it may have dwindled quite away. I will know, when there is only one page left, that I have almost finished.

Although she did not write this memoir until the last years of her life, spurred to it by her mother's death, she had been planning it for some time. The journal entry for 12 June 1948 speaks of wanting to start a book to be called 'The Grandfathers,' about the 'two divisions of childhood two worlds.' On 25 June she notes that she has had the book in mind for years. The work always reflected the two sides of her family, and the conflicting 'romantic' (Gibbons) and 'classical' (Osier) natures she felt she had inherited from them, but it expanded to include descriptions of various homes and schools, as well as much about her travels abroad. The title she gave to the manuscript when it was sent to Macmillan's was 'The Curate's Egg.' The once-current phrase 'Good in parts, like the curate's egg' originated in an early Punch cartoon. A new curate, embarrassed when the bishop asks if the breakfast egg is to his liking, dares not say that it is bad and stammers 'Parts of it are excellent.' The self-deprecating joke is typical of Anne Wilkinson, as is its ambiguity: is it her writing that is 'good in parts' or is it her life? The journals and autobiography together cover much of Anne Wilkinson's life story, from birth to five years before her death. The autobiography, although not presented chronologically, tells of her birth, her early years in London, where her father's liberal politics seemed at odds with the exclusiveness of his family connections, and the shattering of her childhood paradise when her father died. There is much about her days at Craigleigh and Roches Point, while the opening chapter tells of her life with her mother, brother, and sister in a winter retreat near Santa Barbara, California. The autobiography also describes Anne's erratic schooldays. Her mother was interested in new educational theories, even to the extent of trying to create for her children one of the first Montessori classes in xii

Introduction Canada. As a teenager Anne briefly attended the 'progressive' Ojai Valley School near Santa Barbara, also newly founded and only in its second year. The theories (John Dewey via Edward Yeomans) on which this California school was based seemed to promise an environment well suited to the highly sensitive, nature-loving girl for whom the American west coast represented a kind of Eden. Sunshine, story-telling, a family atmosphere, and adult conversation produced some positive results, though these were modified by her lack of the carpentry skills that were an essential part of the school's requirements. Her account of schooldays there, and at the far less prestigious Edgewood School in Greenwich, Connecticut (where, however, she qualified for acceptance to Swarthmore College), is a comic portrait of the artist as a young woman. The final chapters of the autobiography tell briefly of the days at a finishing school in Paris. Here she suffered her worst bout of the homesickness that always afflicted her when away from her mother and from The Lodge at Roches Point, the house that she most associated with her. The story ends with a kind of travelogue that includes vivid descriptions of scenes, characters, and events in Italy and Egypt, and closes with the narrator's decision to marry. In neither the autobiography nor the journals does she describe the first fifteen years of her marriage. This was a time when, after a 'society' wedding on a windy July day in the flower-garden at Roches Point, she was busy with the pleasures and duties of a young wife. She accompanied her husband, Dr F. Robert Wilkinson, to London and New York for his post-graduate medical training, and was with him when he spent a year recovering from tuberculosis of the lungs in a sanatorium at Gravenhurst, Ontario. She gave birth to four children, two of whom died soon after birth; following the death of the first baby the Wilkinsons adopted a daughter. Her concentration on writing began soon after she lost the second baby in 1943; the journals take up the story some four years after this traumatic loss, which, as she said, marked her passage out of youth. The journals cover eight years of her life as the devoted mother of young children, a period that coincided with her emergence as a poet and her entry into Canadian literary circles. It was also, to her great distress, the time when her marriage slowly fell apart, with all the concomitant strain on the family. She did all she could to try and hold the marriage together, seeking out medical specialists to help with her husband's severe depressions, and undergoing psychiatric counselling herself. The Wilkinsons were divorced in 1954; Dr Wilkinson remarried, xiii

Introduction his second wife being a much younger woman, a nurse who had cared for him in hospital after the separation. The journals record Anne Wilkinson's reflections on all these events, as well as her almost mystical response to the natural world at Roches Point and her delight in travel abroad. She stopped writing the journals just five years before her death, devoting her creative energies then to the autobiography and to Swann and Daphne, her last book. During this period she served on the editorial board of The Tamarack Review, the literary quarterly founded by Robert Weaver in 1956, to which she also gave financial support. Dr Wilkinson took his own life in Sarnia in 1959, the day after his mother died. In the same week Anne Wilkinson had an operation to remove one lung because of cancer. For almost two years she led a quiet life, reading and seeing a few friends. Her daughter Heather, having completed her nurse's training in Montreal, returned to live with her mother during her final months. Anne Wilkinson died in the Toronto General Hospital on 10 May 1961. Her loss was felt keenly in the literary world, where her poetry was seen to hold great promise. Robert Weaver dedicated the summer 1961 edition of The Tamarack Review to her memory, and Robert Fulford wrote in The Toronto Star of 23 May of her 'intelligence, wit, humane tolerance, warm generosity.' It is possible to read Anne Wilkinson's story, as recounted in the autobiography and the journals, in chronological sequence. Those who wish to do so should turn first to the autobiography in the second part of this book. I have chosen to present the material in the order of writing, primarily because the person created to be the autobiography's subject develops in part out of the experiences recorded in the journals. Readers who are interested in the styles of genres previously judged to be sub-literary and marginal, such as women's personal writing in diaries and memoirs, may here observe the interdependence of the different forms. Whereas the journals offer random, highly personal and spontaneous reflections on self, poetry, family, and society, the autobiography consciously and artistically contrives to create a distanced self, the result of that private scrutiny. The word 'private' inevitably raises the question of the ethics of publishing documents such as journals. It is a particularly thorny issue in this case because the writer belonged to a socially prominent family accustomed to keeping its personal matters secret even from one another. There are distressing details of marital cruelty and of the emotional weakxiv

Introduction ness of her well-respected surgeon-husband. The author also alludes to her love affairs with such prominent Canadian authors as F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith (whose biographers have usually omitted all references to them). How can one justify the intrusion? The first, and perhaps to many the only convincing, reply is the service of literature. The journals illuminate Anne Wilkinson's poetry, sometimes by showing the specific thought-processes or incidents that led to particular poems, such as 'Lake Song' and 'Boys and Girls,' more generally by creating an understanding of her mind and its workings. As a fragment of Canadian literary history, they also give a sense of the experience of women poets in a period when male patronage was essential to success. Such patronage was often of the most beneficial and constructive kind, as in the case of Alan Crawley's helpful advice and encouragement when he accepted Anne Wilkinson's poems for publication in his periodical Contemporary Verse. At other times, the men undoubtedly took advantage of the situation, as Anne Wilkinson herself came to recognize when she commented on her escape from one particular literary harem (25 May 1954). The journals are also a valuable record of social history, complementing the autobiography's formal account of an earlier era when the family enjoyed one of the last remnants of the grand Edwardian way of life. The full glory of her grandfather's Toronto estate, described in the autobiography and the epilogue to Lions in the Way from her childhood memory of living there, had passed into history by the time Anne Wilkinson established her own Rosedale home. Even so, the family still observed many of its rituals and enjoyed many of its privileges. Where the autobiography makes self-conscious statements about the poet's attitude to these privileges, the journals reveal, by their very casualness, an often more telling and convincing picture of the life of wealthy Toronto society in the 1940S and 1950S. Women's private narratives have not until recently played a prominent part in accounts of social history. Anne Wilkinson's journals add another piece to the steadily growing patchwork which allows us to see what the realities of life have been for all sorts and conditions of women. Through an intimate awareness of one individual in a particular, never-to-berepeated time and place, we are able to understand more about ourselves and our own world. The journals are remarkable for their commentary on a number of themes central to contemporary theories about women's ways of experiencing life. They speak of a sense of fragmentation and are themselves fragments, reflecting the conflict Anne Wilkinson felt between xv

Introduction her roles as mother and poet, between the Osier and Gibbons strains of her personality, between her craving for men's admiration and love and the acknowledgment that her greatest strength came from women — women writers (especially Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf), women friends such as Muriel Douglas and especially her mother and aunts, of whom she wrote that it was 'a heaven sent blessing to have been born in the radius of their light' (12 May 1949). Her painful reflections on marriage also seem to anticipate present-day theories, notably in her frequently expressed and obviously erroneous belief that she was responsible for the failure of the partnership, that all would have been well if only she had been a 'normal' woman instead of a poet. When in the autobiography Anne Wilkinson attempts to gain some distance by creating an objective self, it is again the misfit, the rebel, who dominates. She had this characterization in mind for some time: 'My own childhood and family with myself as villain' (8 February 1950). Thus the autobiography presents an unduly nervous child, scorned by betteradjusted siblings for her nightmares and easy tears, a naughty schoolgirl almost expelled from even the most progressive of schools, a wild adventurer who would attempt escapades far beyond her ability to carry through, a prankster who could always be persuaded to flout authority. Through this literary convention of the rogue, a lovable and perfectly familiar figure, the narrator achieves a manageable distance from the writer of the journals, who felt that her childhood self had been 'weak and despicable,' the source of her present sense of inadequacy and alienation. (A different version of the outsider figure is projected in Anne Wilkinson's Swann and Daphne, which deals whimsically with physical and spiritual difference in a children's story of metamorphosis.) There is something picaresque, too, about the structure of the autobiography, with its tales of apparently endless wanderings around North America and Europe. The author accounts for the moves to sunny climes as a quest for better health, her mother's or her own; later, travel is supposed to be educational and eventually to provide a breathing-space in which decisions could be made about a choice of husband. Underlying this pattern is a longing for rootedness, a desire for a real home instead of a succession of houses. In the journals (7 July 1952), Anne Wilkinson noted that every poem she had written in the past year contained the word 'home'; she spoke also of paying undue attention to the decoration of her houses to compensate for their not being homes. The autobiography ends like a traditional Victorian novel, where a woman's choice between two suitors is resolved in marriage, beyond xvi

Introduction which no further action seems possible. Curiously, though, there is no discussion of the options, no depiction of the two men to allow the reader to form an opinion. The aimless wandering around Europe that she creates in her story seems an odd way of reaching a decision on so important a matter and the final choice, as presented in the fiction, is apparently arbitrary. It is clear that this is a fictionalized version of events; the author's discomfort over her own tampering with 'facts' is suggested by the false starts in this chapter, the many re-positionings of episodes, and the incompleteness of it. What is withheld from a story is often, of course, as important as what is told: behind the laconic comment on the 'great rejoicing' at her wedding lies that pain in her own failure in the marriage which is so frequently expressed in the journals. When read in light of these personal writings, Anne Wilkinson's poetry is seen more clearly to be in itself an autobiographical act. 'Summer Acres,' which opens both Counterpoint to Sleep and the Collected Poems, is found to be in every detail an introduction to the family in its Roches Point setting; 'Lake Song' is a sensuous evocation of that particular place but it is also, as the journals note (13 July 1948), a characteristic longing for the security of the mother's care. The laments of 'Carol' and 'Dirge' are obviously related to the break-up of her marriage, the excitement of 'Swimming Lesson' and 'Strangers' to particular love affairs. 'Nursery Rhyme' and 'A Sorrow of Stones' may be read as meditations on the deaths of her babies and her mother, while the many poems about 'the trough / And pitch of pain' reflect her own physical and emotional experience. 'As long as I can utilize what happens to me, it doesn't matter too much whether it is good or bad. The great thing is to feed the hungry furnace that lies within' (6 February 1950). The autobiographical writings presented here vividly bring to light the experiences that fed the hungry furnace of Anne Wilkinson's imagination, the source of some of the most stylistically accomplished, sensitive, and moving poetry of our time.

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Editorial Note

Anne Wilkinson's handwritten journals, in the possession of her son Alan G. Wilkinson, are in seven volumes, some in simple soft-cover exercise books, most in hard-cover, one being a silver-coloured album of the kind used for photographs. The typewritten manuscript of the autobiography, housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Libary of the University of Toronto, is the version edited by the Macmillan Publishing Company of Canada. Anne Wilkinson's alterations are sometimes pasted over the original, sometimes handwritten above her deletions. The transcription of both texts follows the manuscripts as closely and completely as possible. Anne Wilkinson's handwriting in the journals is perfectly legible, except for an occasional scribble, and I have had to guess at only two words (indicated by a question mark in square brackets). I have corrected the rare spelling mistakes, which were obviously slips of the pen, and have added or altered punctuation where necessary for the sense. The printing of Roches Point has been standardized by omitting the apostrophe Anne Wilkinson and others often used, to keep it consistent with the way she had the name printed in 'Four Corners of My World.' My aim has been to make the text easily readable, without too many annotations. Unfortunately the journals make frequent reference by first name only to a great many family members, some of whom share the same name. Those most often mentioned, together with Anne Wilkinson's close friends, are identified in the Glossary of Persons at the end of the book. People encountered only once or twice are identified in the endnotes, whenever it is helpful to the narrative to know who they are. When the text makes their identity clear, I have not added further information, nor have I elaborated on the names of children, servants,

Editorial Note casual acquaintances at parties, or medical associates of Dr Robert Wilkinson, except where these were important to Anne Wilkinson's experience. Square brackets have been used for editorial additions designed to clarify references to people, places, and books. The text of the autobiography is wholly reproduced, with missing sections noted. In the original, some chapters are untitled; others are merely the place names, 'Roches Point,' 'Edgewood.' I have supplied titles, using phrases from within each chapter that seem to capture something of their tone. A couple of sentences have been omitted from the journals (indicated by [...]). There remain, however, some remarks that are bound to be painful for some readers. If publication of the journals is to be justified at all, it must be for the help they can be to an understanding of Anne Wilkinson's poetry, of the woman who created it, and of her readers themselves, who might recognize in her situation something of their own dilemmas. To edit too much of this sensitive material would be to distort the truth of Anne Wilkinson's experience and perpetuate the kind of silence and secrecy that caused some of her distress in the first place. I apologize for any hurt that may be inflicted by this editorial decision. References to the poems are to The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir, edited by A. J.M. Smith (Toronto: Macmillan 1968).

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Acknowledgments

Research into the 'four corners' of Anne Wilkinson's world has been an entirely pleasurable voyage of discovery and I owe a great debt of thanks to those of her family and friends who made it so. Alan Wilkinson invited me to undertake this project in the first place and he has been an unfailing source of help and support. It is by his kind permission, as Anne Wilkinson's literary executor, that the manuscript materials, photographs, and poems are reproduced. I am grateful to Heather (Wilkinson) Kontaxopoulos, who kindly recreated some scenes of her mother's life for me. Alan and Bunty Gibbons answered my seemingly endless questions and gave me access to family photographs and documents. I thank them for their patience and gracious hospitality, and especially for enabling me to experience something of life at Roches Point. Peggy McIntyre provided additional family background; Mary Hazeland created a delightful picture of the childhood pleasures at Roches Point; Andrew Hazeland gave a fund of information about Anne Wilkinson's acquaintances in Ottawa and Toronto; David Ham filled in some details of Dr Arthur Ham's circle. To Muriel Douglas I am indebted for her special-understanding of Anne Wilkinson as a friend during the period covered by the journals. Members of Anne Wilkinson's literary circle have also been generous with their reminiscences, in particular Louis Dudek, Kildare Dobbs, Douglas LePan, P.K. Page, William Toye, and Phyllis Webb. For information about poetry readings and publication in London, I am grateful to Dr Lionel Monteith, former editor of Poetry Commonwealth, and Dr Bruce Meyer, whose doctoral research at McMaster University dealt with this material. The resources of many institutions were made available to me and my

Acknowledgements thanks go to the following: the Eldon House staff of the London Historical Museums Association; Mrs Richard Harber, director of the Howard School, Montecito, California; Mrs Leo T. McMahon, president of the Montecito History Committee; Mr Michael Hermes and Mr Michael Hall-Mounsey of the Ojai Valley School; Reverend Wayne Carney, rector of Christ Church, Roches Point; Dr Desmond Neill, former librarian of Massey College; the staff of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, the Queen's University Archives, and the Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University. The Arts Research Board of McMaster University provided generous financial assistance. I thank Julie Hickcox and Patti Haygarth for their work as research assistants, Marilyn Rose, Ann Hutchison, and James Carley for research guidance, Connie Brim and Diane Miles for help with transcription, and Pat Fraser for taking on extra duties in the McMaster Women's Studies Office to give me time to finish this book. The expert advice and assistance given by Ann Saddlemyer at every stage of the work require more thanks than I can give. Finally, to my patient editor Gerald Hallowell, affectionate gratitude for his enthusiasm for this project and his painstaking work to bring it to light.

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Chronology

1910 Anne Cochran born 21 September, the second child of Mary Elizabeth Lamond Osier and George Sutton Gibbons, a lawyer from London, Ontario, at Craigleigh, the Toronto home of her maternal grandfather Sir Edmund Boyd Osier 1914 Briefly educated by the Montessori method in a nursery school her mother established at home in London; visited England with all her family, returning shortly after war was declared; in England met her great-uncle, the famous physician Sir William Osier, Regius professor of Medicine, Oxford University 1915 Sir Edmund transferred his country property at Roches Point on Lake

Simcoe to three of his children, Anne's mother receiving The Lodge, and most summers after this were spent at Roches Point

1916 Spent the winter in Bermuda 1917 Father defeated as Liberal candidate for London, Ontario, in the

federal election

1917-18 First winter in Montecito, California 1918-19 During the winter months, attended the Howard School at Montecito, a private school (still in existence) run by three Canadian women; attended intermittently until 1922

1919 Death of father from multiple sclerosis; moved with her mother,

Chronology brother Alan Osier (b. 1908), and sister Mary Elizabeth (Betty, b. 1911) to live at Craigleigh, Toronto; educated privately there by governesses

1924 Death of Sir Edmund Osier 1924-5 Completed ninth grade at the Ojai Valley School, California, a progressive school (still in existence) founded by Edward Yeomans

1926 Mother married Dr Edmund Boyd; family visited England again 1927 'Contentment by Anne Gibbons (age 14)' published in Singing Youth: An Anthology of Poems by Children, edited by Mabel Mountsier (New York: Harper Bros. 1927) 1926-8 Attended the Edgewood School, Greenwich, Connecticut; passed the College Board examinations and was offered a place (never taken up) at Swarthmore College

1928 Attended a finishing school in Paris, followed by Christmash in Rome 1929 Contracted typhoid fever on vacation in Egypt and was ill for several weeks in Luxor 1931 Travelled with family to Italy and France 1932 Married 23 July in the garden of The Lodge at Roches Point to Dr Frederick Robert Wilkinson, a pediatric surgeon; lived in London, England, for a year, where her husband took advanced medical training 1933-4 Husband recovered from tuberculosis of the lungs in a sanatorium at Gravenhurst, Ontario

1934 Moved to New York City, where her husband engaged in further medical study 1935 Son Robert Jeremy born in New York City 1938 Daughter Heather Anne adopted

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1939 Moved to Toronto, where her husband was surgeon on staff at the Hospital for Sick Children

1941 Son Alan Gurd born in Toronto 1946 Seven poems published in the literary journal Reading and two in Canadian Poetry Magazine", developed rheumatoid arthritis

1947 Began to write journal; published six poems in Contemporary Verse, the first of several appearances in subsequent issues

1949 Became literary editor of Here and Now; visited England and attended a reading of some of her poems in London

1951

Published her first collection of poems, Counterpoint to Sleep (Montreal: First Statement Press)

1953 Seriously ill with pericarditis,

an infection of the membrane surround-

ing the heart

1954 Divorced from Dr Robert Wilkinson 1955 Nine of her poems broadcast on CBC radio; attended the Canadian

Writers' Conference at Queen's University, Kingston; published her second collection of verse, The Hangman Ties the Holly (Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.)

1956 Mother died; published Lions in the Way (Toronto: Macmillan), a history of her pioneer ancestors, with an epilogue about her childhood at Craigleigh; became a founding editor and patron of the literary quarterly The Tamarack Review

1959 Operation for lung cancer; former husband died 1960 Published a children's book, Swann and Daphne (Toronto: Oxford University Press); some of her poems were included in The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse

1961 Died 10 May, at the Toronto General Hospital; her autobiographical

XXV

Chronology essay 'Four Corners of My World' was published, with a memorial tribute, in The Tamarack Review, no. 20

1962 The First Five Years: A Selection from the Tamarack Review, edited by Robert Weaver (Toronto: Oxford University Press) dedicated to Anne Wilkinson 1968 Publication of The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir, edited, with an introduction, by A.J.M. Smith (Toronto: Macmillan) 1990 Publication of The Poetry of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir, introduction by Joan Coldwell (Toronto: Exile Editions)

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In my dark room the years Lie in solution, Develop film by film. Slow at first and dim Their shadows bite On the fine white pulp of paper. Collected Poems, 49

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1947 Dec. 31 '47

I know nothing about 1948 except that I start it ill, without 'great expectations.' Andre Gide said 'O Lord permit me to want only one thing and to want it constantly.' O Lord me too - but other people want a hundred things from me and for me.1

1948 Jan. ist '48 A prison — flesh for walls and bones do hinge the door that sickness locks. E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel dances - read it all on Christmas Day. Stendhal has the virtue and vice of diamonds. Finished Le Rouge et Le Noir recently. Jan. cont. Am in a minority of one in regard to Rebecca West's Meaning of Treason. My high regard for [West's] Black Lamb, Grey Falcon led me to expect more. She does not emphasize the deepest meaning of treason: forsaking the way of love for the way of hate. Thomas Mann is no traitor. He fought for men, against his country (with his pen). All the characters depicted by Miss West are traitors but the reasons she stresses are secondary not primary. Their first offense is that they betrayed men of good will everywhere not just their fellow Englishmen. Miss West believes there has been too little Patriotism in the Democracies. There has been too much even there. If, between the wars, the Democracies had worked for democracy, would we have had to stress patriotism? Patriotism is a drug, difficult to remove from the body when an overdose be given or taken - e.g. Germany. To read the Bible for the first time at the age of 37 is an odd experience. A tremendous fresh experience but also full of echoes; for even without reading the Bible we know it. It is incorporated in so much of the world's literature that almost nowhere is it unfamiliar.

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Am in the New Testament now - prefer Mark and Matthew's version of Christ's last words. 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' to Luke's 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.' I believe him to be a man, rather than the son of God. Believing him a man makes him more remarkable. What couldn't we do if we were the sons of God?

Jan '48 People, usually Anglo-Saxons, complain that Russian novelists lack humour. Is it a necessary component of art? Would it be in place in Dachau, say, or Belsen? Mightn't they reappear in a work of art? The Anglo-Saxon assumes that every situation can be relieved by what he terms 'a saving sense of humour.' We are timid now-a-days with tragedy and need the boxing gloves of humour to ward off tragic blows a practical attitude but a limiting factor in the English novel. I find it more tonic to be irritable than gentle - to be gende would make me woe-begone. It is surprising how acute negative joy can be — the ecstacy of being alone for 48 hours.

Jan '48 I have sentimental or Byronic streaks in me that let weather play an undue part in colouring my days. It should be easier to laugh at oneself than at other people. A laugh at one's own expense can be charged; when we laugh at another he pays on the spot, in cash. Every hero justifies humanity and makes more bearable our lot. John Counsell makes it impossible for me to think of my disability as a disability. His courage gives courage to those who need it as he does, and to those of us who need it hardly at all. Don Matthews too is a heartening example of good cheer in adversity.2 Why can't we be good when we don't need courage?

Jan '48 I have no use for quacks and a healthy distrust of doctors. Ethics of illness: How much discomfort and inconvenience is one justified in imposing on others in the chance that a body may recover or improve? How much if there is no hope? I take for granted the things others do for me.

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1948

Sons and Lovers — D.H.Lawrence Flowers wander through every page. It is drenched with flowers and death and I smell them both. Read Osbert Sitwell's Great Morning immediately after Sons and Lovers. Both settings - Derbyshire; time - before 1914. People will be reading about the son of the miner for longer I think - though Sitwell shows genius whenever his father steps on the stage. The parts about London society, extraordinarily dull and uninspired. Left Hand, Right Hand and The Scarlet Tree, both more diverting. Must read poetry again. It's queer that it's the only thing I want to write — my interests in reading are much broader, fortunately. I love to attempt in words (verse) to express the peculiar bitterness of 'sensation' when experienced by a too conscious personality. Sensation is natural and happy only in the being whose cerebretonia is asleep.

Jan 26 '48 Reread most of Jane Austen for about the loth time. Whenever I start to drown I put out my hand and Jane pulls me up on her raft where I stay until the water recedes. The raft is growing weaker, though, from being used too often. Sense and wit are the rarest qualities, more healing than tears. Indeed Jane, I love you - for yourself and because you are my guardian angel. You save me from excess when excess would be dangerous. I have never read you in peace of mind. Someday I will sit down, when I am happy, and read and be happier still. The sudden felicity - unattached to circumstance or persons — is the saving factor. The magnificent blessing of sunshine or three words in perfect order or the joy that for no reason at all the heart is singing. For these I give thanks.

Jan^ist Icy weather outside. Fog of illness and spirits inside. Alan so sick and his lips so scarlet. Winter walls us in. I feel cut off— living on an island - I could call for help. Would someone hear and come? But my throat won't open, my tongue can't shape the words. It is too lonely, even for me. Tomorrow is the ist of Feb. One month of 1948 gone with nothing accomplished and a general feeling of recession physically, mentally.

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Feb4th The lovely peace, when the hustle and bustle of acute illness subsides into convalescence. It is in the house itself, in the walls, floating down from ceilings and rising from floors.3 Alan himself is chirping like a spring Robin. Out yesterday for lunch. Heard good news of a friend. In spite of snow and cold it is possible again to visualize Spring. Febsth Is it ever any use to explain oneself to another? Men explain themselves to the world through endless confessions; have, perhaps, been understood by the world — but has any man ever felt himself understood by an individual? Only in the first fog of mutual love — then for a brief span a man and woman judge each other and are satisfied that they have met justice. Trollope's Autobiography certainly explains the author to the public — not more than his novels, though. Robertson Davies' Diary of Samuel Marchbanks strained in its wit. Not quite as amusing as the author thinks. I kept hearing him chuckle. Feb loth This afternoon the three children were back at school. The first time en masse since Christmas. For a week now — good nights, and a feeling of well being is creeping into my blood almost in spite of myself. Sudden small rush of happiness today left me wondering what I shall do if, in every sense, I recover. If put in the sun for a year I would be whole again. Convinced for so long that my sun had gone out, is it possible now to get heat from a less personal orb? Reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. After fighting a sense of panic, produced by the first 100 pages, find I can read it almost objectively. The second book of an author who overwhelms me is always easier than the first; I am armed and prepared to save myself from annihilation. I noticed it particularly in Kafka; when reading The Castle (after The Trial), my temperature did not drop so close to zero — and of course being forewarned I was well equipped with hot water bottles.

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Feb i^th

Reading Crime and Punishment I feel repeatedly — this is an old story to me. I knew every line of it before I knew the book existed.4 Have seldom been more pleased than today when I read Robin's letter asking me to be god-mother to his daughter. I feel re-instated somehow; brought back into territory where there is love.5 I cannot imagine why B. brought me violets and pansies too — unless he felt deliberately malicious. He knows what they stand for to me and as he is not insensitive what else can I think? Tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day. The children are delighted — J, of course, scoffs at hearts and the like. With the house set to normal again (children well and at school) I've tried to feel my way back to poetry. A bit at a time, like the first bathe of summer in a cold lake — a toe and then an ankle and then a long wait before wading to the knees - suddenly this afternoon I was able to duck and swim a few hesitant strokes. Feb sist

After listening to all the delicious pleasures that various people are giving up for Lent, have decided on the opposite theory. I'll add something — Resolve to write for a minimum of two hours a day until Easter. Worked five hours yesterday and three already today and the evening is not yet here. Have wondered recently, what kind of a poet I am anyway. Feel that I've achieved no facility in the last year. I still write in my original laborious fashion — getting a germ of an idea or a line and building (and tearing down) from there. If anything I am slower than ever and the results are no better, if as good as two or three years ago. Feb 22 Two and a half hours work today. Read three or four short stories by Kay Boyle. She overwrites; is sensitive about too many things at the same time. A character, or rather, a person in a state of high tension is usually overwhelmed by one emotion and oblivious to everything else except the leg of a chair or some other equally trivial entity. She is good but toofemale. Women seem to exude their sex (in the arts) far more pungently than men. We rarely say of a male writer: 'How masculine' - in fact we don't think about his sex at all in most cases. If only the same could be said of pen-minded women!

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The Journals

The earth is covered with ice today — not ice over snow over earth. But ice next to the skin of the earth. It always worries me. Snow is such a safe, soft cover for the waiting green but ice looks cruel, as if it would kill the roots in their sleep. I am restless and anxious for Spring. Feb 24th Found the beginnings of a journal I started Jan igth '47! There are only two dates entered but the material is of enough interest to me still to copy it down here — or at least a part. Feb s6th Must leave this space for the above mentioned excerpts - Have not the patience to write them out. [One blank page follows: A.W. apparently never found patience for the copying out.] Feb 26th The resolution to write for a minimum of two hours a day, I keep, usually stretching it to four or five. Already I feel more limber and enthusiasm rises, day by day. With health returning, a number of other blessings come rushing in. I realized tonight, fun was here, in my house — in and with my three children. Walked up the hill a little way through February puddles and smelled the earth's promise.

Feb 2g One does not acquire philosophy from philosophers but when one has achieved a little philosophy on one's own one derives pleasure from them. Have been reading Plato. Heard Oscar's songs this afternoon. He has achieved something and I too by having my words glorified by his music.6 March ist The earth is covered with snow. Under the snow is ice. Under the ice is earth and the earth is resdess. A week ago the water was racing down the hill and the south banks were bare. I read that daffodils were blooming in the English woods, that Paris was in bud, the middle of last month. Of course they need

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1948

the Spring. The temp, in New Orleans yesterday was 80. Jeremy in bed since Saturday with flu. Such a good boy. March wth Everyone has had it except R. He has a bad sinus. Alan very sick for three days — temp went to 105. Heather a reasonably mild bout. Mrs Kelly very miserable. I had it mildly and now a streaming cold. Mum got off to Vancouver — with flu. If only I or the children were well! It's the combination that is bad. Read [Hemingway's] The Sun Also Rises, after twenty years. It isn't good enough to survive its imitators — seems incredibly romantic and ridiculous in spots. The Poetic Image by C. Day Lewis - valuable to me because I have so much to learn - I don't know what accomplished poets would think of it. Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One is the brightest flame among contemporary novels — I should think — although I have read so few. By contemporary I mean the last twelve months or so. It is far superior to my mind than Brideshead Revisited and more like his early work. March 75 Children back at school. Read [George Meredith's] The Egoist and [Emily Bronte's] Wuthering Heights last week. Wonderful contrast! March 2oth After twenty four hours of rain, a day of warm sunshine — sat on the terrace for the first time this year — watched the children wallow in mud on the vacant lot next door, and Mr Barrow, busy with our first spring tidying. Mind, more than usual, the fact that I can't use my legs and have to watch, watch, watch, instead of do. But it was a glorious day and we had a bonfire of rubbish and the first of the double windows came down and the cardinal is back and I have a thousand plans for the garden and the tulips are just visible through the earth. Bob sick. April ^rd Baby blizzards on and off all day - as if winter could really scare us now! It shakes a weakened fist and the sun laughs at its dying anger without pity.

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Have been a little too active again; Easter holidays and Bob's two weeks in bed made rest difficult and I felt so well. The world is so enchanting to a stranger — a drive through city streets is a journey to a foreign land. My house has been my country for so long that I am Marco Polo every time I leave it. I am more and less vulnerable than people think me. I can imagine the necessity for suicide but cannot embrace the idea of living in defeat. April 5th Jean and Marcus Adeney drove me to the Point and we supervised the men as they staked the plot for the cottage. It will be moved in two weeks or thereabout. A lovely, lovely day — warm and soft dull sunshine over everything. We had a picnic on the cottage steps — read poetry (mine) and talked in a pleasant wild fashion. Am stiff and in some pain tonight but it was a Marco Polo voyage and Lake Simcoe 'The Shalimar' with the ice just waiting for a good wind to blow it away — where? Where does the ice go? Down I suppose but it doesn't look like that. It looks as if it was being blown to another water, a water waiting and ready for winter. Reading fitfully - Plato — poetry. A great deal of Plato is poetry and I want more and more and more of the Greeks. On reading this journal find I have pitifully few subjects — the seasons — books I have read — the fluctuating health of my family. But are there many more inside four walls — mostly I have been inside. April 29 These days I am poking my nose outside my cave — the willows are green, daffodils are yellow again and the sun's around so much. I feel sure he's fallen in love with the North. Saw The Glass Menagerie last night - my second play in a year. Tennessee Williams is bursting with poetry and talent but the play dragged and seemed more suited to a one act affair. Read Virginia Woolf s The Moment and Other Essays. Her reputation is lying fallow in the inevitable lull between the first cheers and the later evaluation. There is no doubt in my mind - her work will survive. Reading Kierkegaard's Either/Or. Last Sunday R and the children and I went to Roches Point and viewed die miracle of our transported house — the cottage has become

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The Journals

1948

a palace - with a private lake in the foreground, a private wood to the north, a kingly setting. David, John and J. spent the day in the boat Alan and Peter fished from the shore, examined frog-spawn in the pool and played in the hut.7 May ist Glanced through the famous Kinsey report last night.8 Had no idea so much had been done by so many so often! Feel it is not a book I'll really read - sex divorced from its context soon palls. May $th Am continually amazed at die pleasure people gain in giving when the gift deprives them of nothing (diough it may inconvenience someone else). It seems to me that the nature that loves to give could only achieve rest when it gave what it could hardly bear to part widi. But I know nothing about it — I am a receiver. From Jalalu'd-din Rumi 'I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as an animal and I was man. What should I fear? When was I less by dying?'9 Write 'A layman's view on the modern doctor' Kierkegaard 'There is something treacherous in wishing to be merely an observer."0 May -jth 'Hit the silk,' airman's expression for parachuting. May §th Bob left this morning for the Mayo clinic. Arthritis in left wrist. J. has started a regime of bed at 7.30 p.m. and rest all Sat. and Sun. morning. May nth A test of true love for a Torontonian: If you can walk down Yonge St. with your beloved and still think man's world is a thing of beauty, it's love. I can't. Had four women for lunch - an unheard of performance. Liked my sex afterwards. They were gay, spirited and unintellectual.

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The Journals

The painters have left. For a week I'll be crucified every time the children leave a dirty fingerprint on walls or woodwork. In two weeks I won't care. Have ordered a print of 'The Old King' by Roualt. Am greedy for a beautiful house and a magic garden. Not another house. This is the house. Not another garden. This will be the garden. But I feel greedy. I am the woman who drools for another cream puff or the miser slipping gold against gold. I desire certain effects — inside and out — I'd care less, be moderate in my appetite if I had a home.

May 14 I have great difficulty in verse, putting in the periods. I can't bear/ bare the full stop - the panic of a finished sentence, to which I can add nothing; can't suddenly throw it up or down but have to say good-by. An ideal poem perhaps goes from beginning to end with no punctuation — each word so perfectly in place that everyone knows instinctively where to pause. Until I can write the perfect poem I'd better be meticulous about punctuation! Bob is coming home to-night. 5 days at the Mayo Clinic. May i?th. Sunday Sick again. It is so much my own fault that I am perturbed and remember, uncomfortably, Meninger's book Man against Himself. If I lead the life of an invalid I am well - but when I am well I can't bear the life of an invalid. Today we were to go to St. Catharine's to lunch with Turk and Christine [Robinson]. A joyful prospect — sun, the blossoms at their glorious best and the pleasantest people. Instead bed. Bob had three (North) English surgeons for supper - I came down in my dressing gown. We had fun. I was too gay. May igth Spent the morning with the painters trying to get the right colour for the sitting room. Won't know whether I've succeeded until the whole room is done. May igth Good and sick. Sitting room a nice colour though.

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1948

June ist I have so little talent for making children happy that I must be extra careful to do more than my duty. A few days up for lunch and dinner — a morning or two on the terrace in the sun and then of all things - flu! I am like old, overstretched elastic — even though I laugh, every month or so, I don't really think anything's funny! The Wilkinsons' predicament is nearing a climax. What will happen? What should I fight for? Have I the will or energy or enough love left to fight for anything? Granted that I have an unfortunate emotional equipment, an inadequate one to meet the ordinary stress and strain of life, it has not served me too badly - I have at least used every ounce of my small ration of courage. I feel humble and ashamed compared to the good and brave. I feel exhilarated when I think of what I am compared to what I was 5 — 1 0 — 1 5 - 2 0 years ago. I'm like a flawed machine that goes and functions reasonably only when the driver is constantly vigilant. I am the machine and the driver and my success is so small that it would look lonely on the head of a pin. I have a microscope and when I need reassurance I look through to the head of a pin and I think I see it. Kierkegaard: 'He who will not attend to realities gets phantoms to fight with.' June 2nd My poetry has changed its tune and its technique in the last two years. Until two years ago most of my verse was written in short lines, very condensed and had the virtue of simplicity of words even if the idea was complex. During the last two years I have experimented with longer lines, more elaborate imagery and much longer poems. Many of my early verses were epigrammatical - they were almost always terse. I have no idea whether or not I am succeeding in my present experiments but I have no choice. I can no longer write in the manner of the early ones. If a great critic said, 'The early vein is the vein for you, and your best' I would be powerless to go back to it. The style and mood of my poetry may change again (I hope so: I'd hate to stick) but it is not something over which I have control. I can work harder over each particular line but I cannot change my general approach when once on a given road. The road will end as all roads do or lead to cross-roads

13

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The Journals

where the power of choice will return; in the meantime I have to content myself with the scenery I find within my eyes' limit. June 8th Alan is the most energetic and passionate of the children. He goes till he drops. The day is too short. He makes fantastic plans and tries, in his own way, to carry them through. Heather eats sweet food in the most sensuous way, licking the spoon with an expression of ecstasy on her face. She is aware and receptive to colour, rhythm and taste. She is not at home with words. Jeremy is in love with words, indiscriminately: advertizing slogans — comics — Shakespeare. But I can tell it is the words that fascinate him, more than the idea. Finished the second volume of Andre Gide's Journal - good contrast to Either/ Or which preceded it. Must get one of his novels. I am both fascinated and oppressed by his personality. Amazed at his quantity of work when almost every page of the journal says 'impossible to write' or words to that effect. . Read Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March today. It has had lukewarm reviews. I am enchanted by it — a little pool of civilized writing. Must read Plutarch's Lives. Have written nothing for a week or more. Reread the June ist entry and find it false. I mistake my desire to achieve integrity, character, for the fait accompli. I am nowhere near it. I am the ugly woman who dreams of being beautiful. June gth Alan's temp 101 at noon — normal at 4 p.m. Feel an act of will necessary on my part for return of health. My evil lassitude is as much mental as physical. I should divide the day between reading, writing and sewing - a whole day or many days of nothing but mental exercise and the body rebels. Not that my mental exercise is consistently strenuous but the rest of me grows restive watching the intellect get all the attention. I have observed that women whose blood runs fastest in their heads are less intelligent, less at home in the world than those endowed with normal circulation. There is an intelligence of the body - of the hands and feet and belly, skin and bowel. Health itself sometimes seems to be a kind of intelligence.

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1948

Andre Gide's Journal Vol. 11 [342-3] 'The Greeks who, not only in the multitude of their statues but also in themselves, left us such a beautiful image of humanity, recognized as many gods as there are instincts, and the problem for them was to keep the inner Olympus in equilibrium, not to subjugate and subdue any of the gods.' June 12 Elaborate sometime on Jesus, son of God, versus Jesus, son of Man. Jesus, son of man, is a miracle (not of course in a supernatural sense); Jesus son of God (for those who believe in God) is surely a natural phenomenon and unmiraculous. In their subconscious even the theologists believe him to be the son of man — they show it in their amazement at his works, his words and his being. Yet as the son of God why should they be amazed? Surely nothing is surprising from the son of God. It is as the son of man that he deserves our wonder and our love. The wind is blowing up a religious revival. Instead of resurrecting the son of God we should raise the son of man and rejoice. A son of man has lived thus, we should say, therefore it is possible that another man may live thus, and another and another. Start a new book; title it 'The Grandfathers'; divide it into two parts — London - Lornehurst etc and Toronto — Graigleigh, Roches Point. Write everything about the two divisions of childhood — two worlds.11 Having read the whole of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu a year ago, I read Harold March's The Two Worlds of Marcel Proust all in a gulp; I was hungry to know more about the author who, to me, wrote with the clarity of water running over a stony bed. The first page of Proust, where he talks of his fear of the night, of his need for his mother, of the desolation when she has at last said good-night, were to me, remembrance of things past. From then on nothing he said was incomprehensible — I shared with him a despicable and weak childhood. It seems more a matter of luck than good management that I escaped somewhat from my own neuroticism. Now, with my arthritis, I wonder if I am going back to the pattern of my childhood, as Proust did with his asthma. I despise his personality; have no pity for him, for the terrible weakness in the pit of his will - these traits are too familiar and indigenous for me to regard them with indulgence - and yet I am enchanted, incapable of being bored by anything he wrote. I am

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ashamed — a little — at my love. Harold March says he is an author for introverts. Tolstoy is the great extroverted novelist — in spite of my unbounded admiration I can be bored at stretches of Tolstoy. When Proust almost bores me it is through his endless repetition rather than the thing itself. The emotion of jealousy, for instance, is analyzed ad infinitum until the reader screams or puts down the book — and yet that is the way of jealousy — going over and over the same absurd suspicions — it ends by being effective writing. June 55 Roches Point The first night in our moved cottage. The lake is splashing on the rocks thirty feet from the verandah where I live and sleep. J. and Donald [the children's tutor] worked on the boats all day — Alan and Heather all over the place. The sound of the water is lovely. I won't read or write all summer —just listen until my ears have memorized every tune of the lake - the crescendo of storms and the slow movement of placid waters. If I write it will be only of water — even my dreams will echo the lull of the waves. I must start 'The Grandfathers' [see June 12] - I have had the book in my mind for years. I wonder if it will write easily. July 5th Ten days gone by and I've done nothing but look at and listen to the lake. I open a book. I cannot read the words — I try to write. I have nothing to say. Is it a mental slump? A lazy drifting from my objective — general disintegration? Or am I convalescing from a winter of psychological strain and a too cerebral life? I am almost happy enough to believe the latter and yet a sense of guilt torments me when I'm not writing — I am already willing to give up this pastoral peace for the pain and stimulus of a poem in the making. I am tied, paralysed by the music of the lake. There is a thunder storm across the lake. Vicious zags of lightning break the black sky. I wonder whether I'll sleep the night through on my verandah. What a dreadfully uncontemporary person I am! (The lights go out - and on.) To be so violently affected by weather and water and wind and earth when I should only be moved by man and his relation to man!

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July 6th The waves are beating against the rocks to-night with the sound of the sea. July gth Have been so discouraged in recent years at the low level of education in the so-called upper classes that I began almost to doubt die democratic way — which works out in more education for everyone and no, almost no, educated people. The principle applies to every department of life. But there is no alternative worth trying. We must broaden the democratic path and hope that in years to come, learning will again be esteemed. July nth Jeremy's birthday. His principal present, the puppy, is still two weeks away. He is an ungrasping person about material things and only wants things diat really suit him. He is not acquisitive like Alan who adores lots and lots of things, more for the feeling of richness than for their use to him. I love to find a virtue in J. (he has many) but he can be such a bad boy. Trouble again with him over Heather. My evenings alone on my verandah by the lake have almost a quality of ecstacy about them. I can hardly bear to go to sleep and miss a note of the waves. The moon on the water is an extra these nights. I spend hours of the day on the rocks; half in the lake and half on the shore; sun and shade - warmth and coolth. The days have been very hot but with shade and water and the sound of water and a general drowzing of the mind I am content. Am writing 'Lake Song' — haven't read anything to speak of for weeks. Bunty and her babies and Mum are the only people I see outside the children. They add to the peace and sweetness, or rather, they are a large part of the happiness. I am so lazy about people that my instinct is to stay with those who are already a part of me. The people who acccept me and whom I love — no fuss or bother. I can't keep up with friends — I never want to see them often enough for them to feel important to me. Probably I hate the responsibilities of friendship. When I was a child, until the age of fourteen or fifteen, I knew I was odd. Then my physical characteristics pulled me over into the general world. I was attractive or pretty or something recognizable to other

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people. I belonged. I loved it. But it wasn't real — a sort of borrowed time when I played at being a member of society. I am now the child again. The poet. July 12 Spectacular thunder storm, 5.30 p.m.-y.so.p.m. The lake a vicious jungle green. First it broke from the South-East with rain and wind and thunder and lightning. Then quiet. Then it crashed again from the North-West; the rain and thunder and lightning came all of a piece. Alan was frightened but good; he pretends hard to enjoy it. Jeremy really loves storms. I'm like Alan. Heather was at Judy's.12 Had dinner at home — am stiff and tired. Went to bed right afterwards. July 13 There is surely a clue in the poem I am writing ['Lake Song']. It is the first love poem I have written and the lover is the sound of lake water! Is the cradle the thing I seek? A cradle to sleep in, not a cradle to rock. The lake is delicious tonight — the air has cooled and a temperate north-wind blows. The water splashes lazily on the rocks - quite distinct and noisier than the plish plash of the hot nights but still it is a slow sleepy sound. Trouble with the children. The tutor falling off in his duties, or is it that I am stiff and sore and easily irritated? I'll stay quiet quiet tomorrow. July 14 The lake is flooded with moon-shine. The lake has a thousand beauties under the sun, a million by night. My 'Lake Song' is nearly finished. I like it (now).131 am very sore again and must stick to bed for a while. A lovely, hot sun, cool N. breeze of a day. A sparkling night. I am a night poet. I understand the night. Has anyone ever lived by a lake before? I doubt it. July 15 Another bright clear day. Read Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Very stiff (me, not Agamemnon). The husbands arrive tomorrow. I have been so happy for three weeks. Why am I not well? I believed felicity would cure me. The lake is quiet tonight — not silent though. I feel bereaved when it is dumb. I have literally fallen in love with the lake. I already dread the day I'll leave it. 18

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July igth Robin and Pat [Harris] dropped in on their way to The Briars.14 Continue reading Greek plays. Mrs Wilkinson comes to-morrow. Weather good. Terrible nightmare last night. I woke up screaming. The release from fear came when I heard the lake and realized where I was. Fear returned, or the ghost of fear, when I realized who I was. The nightmare has echoed all through today. July soth The lake (and all that goes with it - sight, sound and smell) washes away the vicious intellectual droppings of the mind. I live on the feeble ticking of my intellect. I spend a large part of my life listening (reading) to the big ticks of great intellects. But I know each tick is the whip of the slave-master. The glory of the world is perceived through the senses. I love the summer. Summer pours honey on all five senses. Summer is full of Greek Gods. Winter is run by the Christians. July 22 William Alan'5 christened this afternoon in the presence of thirty odd relations (not odd-peculiar; odd-more or less.) Mutt'6 had cake and icecream for the young and champagne for the elderly. I am glad to be elderly today! The standing around bunged up my joints. I really can do nothing that involves locomotion but won't admit it. I'll be damned if I'll be an armchair visitor. Tomorrow is the sixteenth anniversary of our marriage. July 24 The only remarkable thing about the wedding anniversary was my mother-in-law, aged 79 3/4. She gallantly ate her first snail — smiled and continued to eat snails. Today, a strong Northwester drove me into the house. The only day indoors since we arrived. J's seven-week old English cocker [Chief Whitefoot] arrived yesterday. To my surprise I am the prime offender among a house of puppy-o-philes. I watch his antics by the hour as if I had never seen a puppy or a baby before. I'm a sailboat 'in irons.' I seem incapable of entering into the children's lives or going off on my own life of the imagination. The latter

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isolates me still farther from my fellows and a sense of guilt keeps me, temporarily, from pursuing it - and yet I do nothing positive in the human line — I drift 'in irons.' Mrs W.'s visit seems to be a success. The children love her and she looks well, relaxed. I am out on the verandah again (n p.m.) and the waves, exhausted from the long raging of the wind, are falling on the rocks below me. Storms are stimulating but a two or three day blow wears out the eardrums and the mind and senses are oppressed. Mine, at least, can't shout louder than the steady roar of wind in the trees, wind and water crashing in the ears. Perhaps, because it numbs senses and spirit, it is good for sleep. It smothers the sound of ghosts. Augs I can do nothing that demands more than fifteen consecutive minutes of concentration. The puppy demands airing four times an hour and if I fail, the house needs cleaning. Stu and Susie [Osier] took us out on the Brigalia for a picnic supper yesterday. Lovely to watch the sun set and the stars come out from the deck of a sail boat. The breeze went down with the sun and we had to chug home. Jeremy left with Hugh Cayley'7 this morning for Muskoka. My legs are so well. I am able to trot around quite normally. Poor Kitty [Tattersall] is ill — dreadful to be ill. Calamitous to be poor and ill. My only writing these days is in this notebook. Alan and Bunty and the beautiful babies left yesterday. The Lodge and Mum are deserted. Aug^th Moving about more and more. Walk to Beechcroft with no effort.18 The weather is cool and cloudy and we should be baking in the sun to store up heat for the winter. Aug 6th

Anne MacKinnon's19 wedding — very traditional — pleasing to one's sense of form - old stone church — choir boys - party for the servants in the community hall — reception at the MacKinnons' — exacdy like all the family weddings. Anne very beautiful.

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Tomorrow we go to Muskoka. My legs are good legs and I wonder if there was ever anything the matter with them. Weather cool and blowy. I'm bundled up in sweater and dressing gown, in bed on the verandah. Decided not to go to the evening party at the MacKinnons' — more laziness than lack of health.

Aug ii Last weekend in Muskoka with the Hams and the Sheards.20 Pleasant party atmosphere and long boat rides about the lakes. Storm this afternoon and grumbling thunder all evening. Helen Gunn here — also Betty, Susannah and Maudie Ferguson. Mr Cox left yesterday.21 Aug i3th Helen Gunn left at noon. At 4 p.m. I found a red maple leaf. I always tell her summer is gone when she goes. I can usually prove it by sending her an autumn leaf as witness. Read the second issue of Here and Now.™ James Reaney is quite extraordinary. I am acutely interested in his future. A poem and an excerpt from his coming novel in Here and Now both shout with macabre exuberance. The weather stays cool and blowy. David [Osier's] boat and buoy broke loose yesterday and their whereabouts is still a mystery. J. comes home tomorrow. I am perfectly well. Maudie Ferguson a charming person. Aug 15

Drove to the Chapmans' this afternoon. Waded with Romany in the lake and admired the beautiful driftwood, as white as bones lying in the desert. Some, like sculpture of things known; others in the bizarre shapes of the unknown, dream creatures. A painter could paint nothing but driftwood and have infinite variety. The American artist someone [Georgia] O'Keefe paints bones and shells on the desert. I'm sure she paints driftwood too. Two warm summer days in a row ending in a thunder-storm. It crashed down on the Chapmans' when we were having tea. It reached

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Roches Point this evening. Now there is nothing left but gentle rain and dripping cedars and lake lappings. I'd shrivel and die in Arizona or any arid place. They are regions to be visited so that one can learn about colour; but they leave the nerves raw. Rain is sedative. I talk of summer rain. When winter conies I dream of the dry lands or the hot moist sea shores. Egypt was so exciting visually that Naples and the neighbouring coast seemed banal in comparison. Yet my nose and my skin have never forgotten their hatred of the Egyptian dust — a dust that seems to be made of the very bones of the dead. It invades the pores of the living as if to accustom them to their fate. It coats the eyes and the nose and the throat with the remains of slave and Pharaoh, goat and camel, ox and donkey and Arab, plus four thousand years of their combined excretion. Yet the eye and the ear learned so much. Light and shadow on the desert at any o'clock. It gives an aesthetic impact and approach to mortality. And the ear heard strange chants. At the Chapmans' this afternoon, 90 or 99 year old Mrs Dennison remarked (before the storm) 'the thunder has been so poor this year.' Later she clapped her hands when a terrible crack ripped the rest of us from our chairs. They say she loves things to happen. Bemoans the lackadaisical rumble of weather in the distance. She wants it here and now. Augig Now that my legs really work I can hardly bear to sit down. I gallop all over the place — am always thinking up tasks that will involve activity for the reclaimed joints. Chief Whitefoot keeps me cantering and I'm enchanted with housework and going anywhere as long as I walk to anywhere. Am trying a few poems. Lyric and pastoral and short. I have never, even as an adolescent, been more infatuated with summer and Roches Point - the openness after a shut-in winter. Leaves and bark and moss on bark and the whole tree - grass and flowers and the nose back in its old hunting-ground. Above all, the lake and the sound of it on the rocks at the foot of my bed. Now I lay me down to sleep Water lapping at my feet If I should die before I wake I'll die to music from the lake.

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The 11.30 p.m. train goes by across the lake. The sad, lost sound of its whistle has crossed the water at the same time ever since I can remember - the one train that is never late. Is it death going North, on time? Aug 20th Clear warm day. A day to devote to the day itself. A clear cool-warm night. All the stars are out and a full moon. The end of summer sounds are here — cicadas and insect hummings instead of birds singing. Swam twice. Aug 21

Another day to melt the last fingers of ice in the shady places of the soul. Hot and clear with a little breeze. J. had the boys for a corn roast this evening. Alan and Heather have a tree house on the bank by the lake. I write a little lazy poetry - green song, nothing more. The lake is lovely to the skin — cool and gentle after the rowdy sun. Aug 23

My pen is back. Aunt Marjorie and Jane's two little girls came for the afternoon.23 Time makes bad things better and good things worser! Hot and humid. The lake is warm. I love any weather except cold weather. Am overwhelmed today by the poor quality of me. My life seems to be a series of mistakes — mistakes due to my personality; character mistakes - unrelated to circumstance. Every day is an effort to live down the mortification of the day before and every day is a fresh mortification. Aug 30

A week of extreme heat ended last night. Toronto hit 100 one day and the high nineties for the other six. On Mum's verandah the peak was 90 - in the village 100. Lucy and Frank [Little] were here for the weekend - wonderful examples of health and zest for life. They played golf - the rest of us lay in the lake most of the day. Hugh Cayley's party this afternoon. Thirty-one children ranging in age from three to sixteen. Am walking a lot - complete cure. Called on Mrs Puxley this evening.

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Sept. 2nd

Have written four poems in two months; have walked over the line into good health. Have worshipped at the altar of Pan, sucking in through my pores the rejoicing of the lively elements. Donald [the tutor] leaves tomorrow - the only boil on the body of the summer. I am intolerant. He is alright but I don't like him, have become incapable of giving him even the passing mark which he may deserve. Played golf yesterday. Five holes in masterly fashion. An experiment after ten years. Have a boil on my behind. Sept. 6th

J. and I are here alone. H. and Alan and Rab went back this afternoon. Five Douglas's came for the day on Sat. Aunt Lorna and Robin and Pat [Harris] at Mutt's for the weekend. Packed yesterday. Truck arrived at 8.30 a.m. Today - twenty-two people here for cocktails before lunch. Shoved two reluctant children and reluctant husband and Mrs Kelly into the car at 5 p.m. Cocktails at Susie [Osier's] at 6 p.m. Bed 10 p.m. Jeremy disgusted that he has to leave his tent and be company for me in the house. Weather and water still warm. Sept. 7th

Sailed with J. this morning. He is exalted on water. The harder the wind blows the gayer he becomes. He almost shouts for joy at waves and gusts of wind. I try not to show that I am a stranger in his country. I want these four days to be endless and memorable. It is my holiday; my opportunity for quiet, alone-living. I am not nearly ready to go back to town. It rained this afternoon - but not enough. Thunder in the distance. Sept. 8th Surely the eternal anguish is: what shall I write after I have finished the work on hand? I can never imagine that I will have a new desire or a new idea. The pain is worse when the present material is almost completed with nothing else in embryo. Sailed with J. this morning. Perfect day — N.W. breeze — warm enough - swam at Beechcroft this afternoon. Aunt Amo, Hugh, Bill came to dinner. Only four more days. Church last Sunday.

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Sept. 10 The moon is back on the lake. The circle is complete. It was there the first week of the summer and again when we are saying the painful good-bye. A strange weather day. Lovely bright cool early morning. All the earmarks of a day for sailing. J. and Hugh were bailing Stu's boat, prior to setting out in the ten footer, when a black cloud appeared from nowhere. Ten minutes later, a small hurricane and heavy rain. Fortunately they had Charlie instead of the canoe and made shore, soaking but safe. Rab and H. and A. arrived for dinner. The Puxleys came in for a few minutes. Must ask him about Pacifism and the New Testament. Toronto, Sept igth We left on a glorious hot September day. The light itself is golden in September. Toronto is hot and parched and my ears are homesick for the sound of water and a brick house seems a prison. J. goes to Upper Canada [College] the day after tomorrow. Chief is asleep under my bed. The little ones are at school. Sept 15 J's first day at school rather less of an ordeal than he expected. The sports begin tomorrow. Shopped all morning. Heather and I had our hair done this afternoon. Home at 6.30 after collecting Chief from the Vet's where he was wormed and innoculated. No pain, no fatigue (me, not Chief). R. seems depressed. Finished Antigone. Work a little everyday on a short, difficult poem 'Chez 1'Ame' — only fifteen lines and I've struggled with it for weeks.24 I wonder if I ever have a success with anything that comes with such creakings. Sept 19 Drove to St. Catharines yesterday afternoon. A frightful motor accident on the Queen Elizabeth Highway near Bronte, stopped us for half an hour or so. Bob had nothing medical with him so could do little.We arrived about fifteen minutes after the smash. One man, dead, lying on the road. His wife, badly injured, had been carried to the sidewalk. Two

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men cut and streaming blood lay beside her. Crowds of curious bystanders staring at the dead and wounded who waited an hour for an ambulance and morphine. Dinner and the night at the Robinsons'. Saw the two sweet babies and had a pleasant time. I never achieved a holiday spirit, though — I could think of nothing but the accident — its immediate horror and all the implications it would have for an unknown number of people. A truck hit an old cheap car, head on. The man in the car (probably poor) is dead - his wife, perhaps crippled for life — she may have children etc. The truck driver was the least hurt — the man with him, more seriously. The suddenness with which a group of people can be ruined! Sept 21 Happy birthday. Everyone gay and good. Read in the paper yesterday about the motor accident. The man with the truck-driver died the next day. He was a Polish D.P. — he escaped from unknown horrors in Europe to die of injuries incurred on the Queen Elizabeth Way. J. is hating Upper Canada and loving his home. Alan is zizzy [?] all the time. Heather has days of sweetness and days devoted to sulking. Chief is a lion cub — there is little of the docile spaniel about him. The garden is beginning to have a shape at last. The heat is over, temporarily at least, and today was as a Canadian day in September should be. Cool and still and sunny. The rain of two nights ago brought the earth back to life again — a short reprieve before winter freezes it for the long sleep. I really hate Toronto — above and below the jokes about it. The fantastic ugliness of the not even fantastic. Incredible mediocre ugliness - No - the mediocre can't be called the incredible. Call it the home of righteous mediocrity. Righteousness, it goes without saying, is estimable, but it must be superlative to out-shine the pleasantest forms of vice. Sept 29 'There is but one world in common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep each turns away into a world of his own' — Heraclitus. Found the above in Van Doren's Liberal Education - a book of worth and charm.25

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Oct ist

Jeremy is finding school almost unbearable. The fault lies in the school and in the child. He is too rigidly unadaptable and yet he is being asked to adapt to an idiotic pattern. I am so tired I do not think That sleep in death can rest me.26 Oct. 12

Leave for London, Ont. tomorrow — on to Sarnia on Friday. Hectic few days making a thousand arrangements re. the children — shopping — dentist — hair etc. Many presents to buy for London and Sarnia relations. Took the children to the circus on Saturday. Alan doesn't really like it. He always thinks the lions are going to eat the lion tamer or, worse, escape and eat him. He hates the bangs and keeps his hands over his ears throughout, is over-anxious about the trapeze acts; in short reacts exactly as I did to the circus thirty years ago. I am only now able to be detached and appreciate the circus with my eyes — the colour and patterns of movement and the ancient ritualistic form of the circus. It retains much that is as old as history and is fanatically traditional. Oct 25

The days romp by with such a racket I've no time or quiet to write in my journal. In all the bustle I can't hear my unborn poems. Here and Now want five for their next two issues but it is doubtful whether there'll be even one more number. The lake and summer seem years away. Nov 3

Lunched at the Art Gallery. Big exhibition of Lawren Harris27 - covering every period. A wonderful way to see an artist. The last room with his latest and abstract work is the room to which I'll return. Was so impressed I almost felt that the only art that will arouse my curiosity in future will be abstract. Am well. Every day is a holiday.

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Nov 4

Rab left for Philadelphia this evening — the taxi didn't come. We rushed to the station in our own car, rain rushing down, time rushing on, amid the confusion of lights on wet pavements, the falling leaves reminding us of life and death. J's report came today - appalling. I am seriously worried about him — his air of dismal resignation, caring about nothing — no motivation, no anything. What will become of him? What can I do? Am not writing at all. Am greedy to be after years of emotional negation. When I write I renounce all close human relationships — I am away, away, and only half-conscious of the people I love. I have come back, after a long journey. How long will I stay? It is better for my family when I bury the poet. Nov 79

The days have melted away in joy at being well and active. Lovely walks in the ravine with Chief- the weather has been soft and warm. Yesterday sat on the terrace in the pale sun. Sally LePan came for lunch. My first play of the season - [Shaw's] Man and Superman with Maurice Evans. Altogether great fun. Read [Thomas Mann's] The Magic Mountain at last. Its two main themes — Time and psychosomatic disease — are, and have been for years, themes in which I am passionately interested. It is surely a book with gigantic implications - a magnificent philosophical novel. Am reading Butcher and Lang's Odyssey. All the weary weight of The Magic Mountain and the contemporary world is blown away by the winds of the wine-dark sea! Nov 27

Am writing again - a poem that is going easily for a change-first line 'It takes a student of hell to gauge heaven's climate.' The stimulus came from Here and Now and their interest in my manuscript. Have just finished Butcher and Lang's Odyssey. Wonderful joyful reading. I love both the primitive and the super-sophisticated. The Bible and the Greeks should be read continually by people who read Proust and Kafka and Sartre etc. — though I hardly count Sartre — unless his other works are superior to The Age of Reason. The point I am trying to make is this: to the minds beguiled by all the twisting paths,

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the Greeks and the Bible are tonic - give them the vitamins they need. Heather, Alan and I went to Eaton's to see Santa Glaus. We failed so dismally to get through the traffic to see the parade that I promised them Eaton's instead. I realized how unsophisticated they are (in the bobby-socks sense) when I found they had never been on an escalator! The weather is still soft and reluctant to hurt us. Dec -jth

Sat. aft., all day Sunday and Monday morning at Roches Point — Muriel, Monteath, Rab and I. The perfection was brought within human limits by Bob's anger at [my] leaving the lunch party in an unceremonious fashion. I see his point. I'm a nuisance - temperamentally and physically. I shouldn't have gone to the lunch in the first place. I was too tired. But it must be irritating to have a wife who never can do the usual thing. Bob very depressed. J. has really frightful cold. Must go to work on trying to persuade the powers that be to change his school. It is bad for his beginner's soul to be so unhappy. Souls should go into tragedy gradually! Am writing two poems — Heaven's Weather — ADAM and God through the Looking Glass.28 Read A.M. Klein's 'The Rocking Chair' this evening. Really first rate. Roosevelt and Hopkins takes much of my reading time at the moment.29 My blind love of Roosevelt is not suffering and I am therefore happy and think it a grand book - which of course it is from any standpoint. The weather has been magic — not tricks — pure quill magic. Saturday was as warm as May and the country looked like a pussy cat purring in front of an unexpected fire. A misty, gentle fire, lighting up the beautiful bare branches of the trees and seducing the lake with promises of Spring in December. The year is almost up. My journal will soon have its first birthday. I write in it much less now that I am well. It is a commonplace that we are driven to communicate our troubles but let the normal go unsung. I still have the apprehension of a skater on thin ice - both in health and in domestic relations. It keeps me thin. Dec ijth Read The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. Resented its length. The Russians and the Americans are strangely alike. The Naked and the

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Dead might easily have been written by a Russian. It couldn't have been written by an Englishman. Caught the family cold at last. A good thing really for it is keeping me out of the shops and saving me from the fatigue that settles out in joints. Elsie [her maid] is finishing my Christmas shopping. Luckily most of it is done. J. has been in the house for three or four weeks with a tremendous gargantuan cold. It is drying up slowly, as the lowlands dry after weeks of rain. Rab in bed for one week. It is settled that J. will give up sports and remain at Upper Canada this year. I don't know whether we are wise or not. Christmas parcels and Christmas cards are mailed and we are in the little lull before the last minute flurry of the tree and the forgotten friend. The three months since we left Roches Point have rocketed by. Dec 18

Alan G's birthday. I am so glad he is married and involved. J. goes to Sarnia tomorrow.30 It will give him a much needed escape from his family. Bob needs to shake us too. When I think how urgent my own need is to get away, three or four times a year - and men are more urgently pressed. Women are hemmed in from birth - and in varying degrees acclimatize. They are hemmed in by their bodies, their function as mothers and, in the middle class, by circumstance. The working-man's wife isn't so much hemmed in as jailed to her environment. Men try to keep the illusion of freedom and fret more at reality. Have a cold — also a little lumbago - a rather wistful combination! Wrapped Christmas presents all afternoon — little fiddly presents the children had bought for their dear(?) ones. Dec 28

The year that started in midnight panic is almost ended. It has been, after all, rich and various and its end is more triumphant than its beginning. At Christmas there was family love. Bob and Alan were wrapped in flu and penicillin but we were united in spite of ague. Dinner at Aunt Amo's as magnificent a ritual as ever. Presents in our bedroom with the sick, instead of in the living room by the Christmas tree. A Happy Christmas. But every year I yearn for a Christmas with the stress on Jesus instead of Santa Glaus. But I was reared a pagan and am selfconscious with the Christian mythology.

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1949

Jeremy went to The Messiah with Kitty [Tattersall] tonight. I heard it on the radio. The simple, magnificent glory to God music makes me nostalgic for other times. Reading Essays of Montaigne — finished Edith Sitwell's Notebook on Shakespeare this afternoon. Will make the backbone of my winter re-reading Shakespeare, the Bible and the Greeks. For one month I have occupied myself with our peculiarly complicated Christmas, the children's holidays and the sick. My conscience is clear and at the first opportunity I'll forsake my family (in spirit) and write the hundred poems pushing through the hard crust of my skull. Jan 8th is Alan's birthday - after that, barring the almost inevitable family colds and flu, I'll be free for a few hours a day. I am like a bride waiting for the church bells! The only cloud — trouble between J. and Rab — I must be patient with both of them. We plan to go to Roches Point on Friday. Bob's health makes the prospect unlikely. Two or three cold, cold days at Christmas. Mild again now, rainy and a dreamy fog quietening the city. I love soft weather; all dove-like things. P.K. Page came to see us. The most beautiful creature. She is what you imagine a poet to be. I am not a modern poet. I am a poet dreaming of a world so opposite to ours that I cannot even bear to use contemporary symbolism. The airplane will be outmoded when I want my words to be read; but Hiroshima's fire will last as long as man. To scribble at night is to say one wise word to a hundred foolish. 1949 Jan ^th

We left Toronto for Roches Point at 4.15 on New Year's Eve. It was dark before five and the biggest blizzard of the year hit us, full on, about Richmond Hill. The rest of the drive was a ghostly crawling through swirling snow — visibility zero — worse than a fog because the rhythms of the circling snow were hypnotic, anaesthesia to be fought all the way. Bob looked really wretched when we arrived but we felt so triumphant to be there at all that the evening was gay. The blizzard blew all night and all the next day. We were properly snowed in and the children - everyone - rejoiced. On Sunday and Monday the su shone on a white breathless world. I went alone to the evening service - Bob still not up to going out. The Puxleys came down later in the

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evening and we had most excellent conversation. Chief made three new canine friends. J. had John Kerr for companionship — the littles had the Puxleys. It was a good start for 1949. Dinner tonight at the Ignatieffs for Osbert Sitwell.3' He lectures at Hart House afterward. Reading Montaigne's Essays with the greatest delight. Jan 77

Started work on several poems simultaneously about two weeks ago. The pattern is irritatingly familiar. The first heaven flowing rush — this is it! A week later the desolation of knowing that this not only is not 'it,' but is atrocious, has no relation, except for the odd line, to poetry. Then the slow laborious reworking. Reread Dylan Thomas one evening and felt a fool to even try, privately, to write poetry. After a week of discouragement and hard work to no purpose — a new period of inspiration. Now I'm in the flats of middle age — I know I can make something out of them but it will be a far smaller achievement than the first splendid lightning, the necessary dream. It is always the same. The winter continues mild, a gentle season for the Northlands. I love its pity, but the children are sad, and anxious to feel its rage. Finished Herbert Read's essays, A Coat of Many Colours. Chief demolished Churchill's The Gathering Storm this afternoon. I couldn't have got through it in so short a time, even by pushing myself! Alan's postponed party on Sat. Eight little eight-year-olds need the big wide open spaces. Muriel and I graced the opening of Morley Callaghan's play To Tell the Truth on Fri. and to T....T—T it wasn't up to much. He is so much bigger and better than some of his literary output.32 Resolution: write this journal at least three times a week. Jan 20th Still walk through the ravine with Chief almost every morning. Two nights ago a great wind storm brought down hundreds of brittle branches and some trees. No snow — the weather cooler but still milder than the usual Jan. Am learning all the crackly noises wind makes in frozen winter things. Worked hard for the past week or two. Have four new poems in something resembling their final state.

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Jan 26 On Sunday the LePans and Catherine Harmon and Paul Arthur came for a drink and stayed for scrambled eggs and the evening. Douglas L.P. a quite remarkable person. Am near the end of the four poems I started early in December. I always work better with several going at once — too long concentration on one and you cease to see it. Hopping back and forth keeps me fresh even after three or four hours' work. Snow today — the first since Jan ist. Walked in the ravine with Chief. Went to a tea for Brownies' mothers. Read Everyday Psychiatry by Campbell on Arthur Ham's advice. Good - also The Dark Sisters by Rhys — above average novel — A Coat of Many Colours by Herbert Read — essays - continue with Montaigne.

Feb 2 Still writing every afternoon. New poem started and finished in a day unheard of for me - Morning Song. I doubt that I'll change it ['I did!' pencilled in margin]. The other four are still in a fluid state, though near the end. Reading Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, some poetry, Montaigne's Essays. Nice letter from Alan Crawley yesterday. Wants a few for his next C.V. I hope he really does and doesn't feel obliged because he's nice and knows Mum.33 Pat and Robin [Harris] here last weekend. Dear people. Dinner at Aunt Amo's on Monday — I will be lost when I no longer have the sanctuary that my mother and my aunts provide. Dinners, cocktail parties, etc. clutter up the weeks. Aunt Amo's are unique and leave one refreshed. But how to avoid the ritual of entertaining and being entertained in general? I want to remain, for the sake of my family, within the natural limits of acceptable behaviour. As it is I frequently trespass into foreign territory to the distress of Rab. He dreamed me into a queen a hundred years ago and is not reconciled to my cold anarchy. If I write always of the personal in this hausfrau's diary, it is not because I am unconscious of the Time, the angst time in which we live, but because I am annihilated in one level of my being, by it. It is because I cannot pledge my faith, right or left or in the swampy middle. I can't decide. Am I pacifist? Am I practical or visionary? Benjamin Franklin or Blake? I cannot reconcile my thinking to reality. I am slow to condemn because I wonder - what

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would I have done? I am quick to condemn (on general principles) because nothing but total love is tolerable. And then I remember how little and how late I love. I am divorced, irresponsible, have forsaken the world I live in. I write an inward jargon of a woman barricaded with cardboard. Is it any wonder I haven't found a publisher?

Feb gth Chief disappeared last Sat. On Monday we heard he had been killed. J. flooded with grief. I miss him too. He occupied so much of my day. He was a gay cheery soul and the whole household seems to have slumped into gloom. Rab depressed encore. Have a sudden sense of impatience with the great bulk of contemporary writing of the so-called 'serious' type. It (the moderns) is already academic and o so solemn. Those who attempt the simple are thin to the vanishing point. But the greater number, in poetry, are obscure, tortuous and torturing. They give the impression of poets flaying themselves into feeling; paraplegic poets cutting off their legs and begging the pain to come. I'm sick of all these harrowed little fellows dropping their guts on paper! I've been a prime offender but fortunately am little read. The Robinsons were here last weekend. Gallic Club meeting. Bunty and Alan and George were at Mutts. George is a real flower of a child. They are rare, these children idealized by nature into the essence of childhood. FebiS Extraordinary winter. The tulips pointed through the earth in January - today is an April rush of spring. Heard the cardinal when I went out to inspect and tidy the garden. Finished Thomas Merton's Autobiography and T.S. Eliot's Collected Essays. Delighted to return to the vigor and health of Montaigne. Am reading for Here and Now. Nervous. Rab encore, toujours, depressed.

Feb 24 Meeting of Here and Now on Tuesday night in the big living room. If the magazine goes on it appears to be settled that I am to be the literary editor - Catherine Harmon, Editor. They have more confidence in me than I have in myself. Sent off my winter's work to Alan Crawley today.

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'When I reread I blush at what I've written; For many things I see which even I, being judge, account but fit to be erased.' (Ovid)34 We go to the Point tomorrow. Feb28 The trouble with us all is that we write as if we were writing obituaries. There is no green thumb in most of contemporary writing. James Reaney may have it. If he has, he is blessed. Read The Oasis by Mary McCarthy this afternoon - Horizon's choice for '48. It is almost spectacularly well written but it is another obituary. If I am to be a reader for Here and Now, the prime element I'll look for is the green thumb — passion and generative force. I have no use whatever for the great bulk of the 'death and bones' in which I've specialized. There is a sickly 'mortician' air in our literature. I do not agree with Cyril Connolly in his editorial on The Oasis. His delight in its positive, non-gloomy approach. It is a beautifully written corpse. Writers must do something with their heads - chop them off if necessary. Poor D.H.L[awrence]! He struggled against that cerebral St. Vitus. It got him nowhere. I have the disease, yet am physician enough to know of what I am dying. Weekend at Roches Point. Lake, a mirror. Ice-boating and skating for the children. Mutt came. Pleasant weekend. Weather — sun and cold the first day — mild, variable the second. Snow today — two or three inches. Re-read my winter's work this evening - discouraged. Yet there is a new point of view creeping in. It is the talent that is lacking. The change and growth and death of my personality could be material for poetry, to a poet. I have the essential flux - I am short on skill and profundity. March 14 A foot of snow four days ago has given us our first real taste of winter since early Jan. Have just completed my first short story. It seems to me to have merit but then anything I write, while it is still warm so to speak, enraptures me! Recent reading includes Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, Gerald Kersh: The Story of the Flea, Ceremony of Innocence, by Elizabeth Webster, Deeper into the Forest by Roy Daniells - Szigeti's Autobiography — Letters by Proust - and still Montaigne. Elizabeth Bowen, deeply satisfying - Ceremony of Innocence, brilliant, witty, satirical and at the same

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time compassionate — a remarkable combination. Heather in bed three days with a cold. Doctors' dinner here last Friday. Lunch tomorrow with Jean Adeney. If all goes well we go to Roches Point on Friday. I still miss Chief. We have been dismal and dull since he was killed. The old troubles are upon us once again. His melancholy creeps into every nook and cranny of the house. Read Siegfried Bassoon's Meredith — with mild enjoyment. Poor little Bunty had a miscarriage last week. The child bearing years are hard and we are young when we endure them — the fortitude of middle age is not there to bolster us. When I remember my own uncurbed, my selfish grief when our first child died [in 1937], I am ashamed and yet I would not want youth as self-controlled as I have learned to be. When the second baby died [in 1943], I had grown enough not to feel waves of anger against fate. On the other hand, his death was the day I ceased to be young. And isn't youth, after all, a sweeter thing than the more moderate despair of middle age? So Bunty, though I weep for you, I envy you. You are still in the thick of love, overwhelmed at times by the calamities of creation, but still a functioning part of the core of life. March 25 The naturally good are never artists. They may, by their very goodness, be works of art but they lack the feeling for evil which, in the artist, is as essential as is the feeling for good. The individual with an approximate balance of good and evil in his nature has the necessary tension, the spring from which to catapult his dream. Roches Point last weekend. Cold clear weather with a wonderful strong sun making sugar of the snow. Muriel and Monteath came with us - and J. Heather and Alan had more pressing engagements in town. Alan in bed all this week with flu. Mutt left yesterday for Ottawa. Bunty in town. Dorothy Maynor sang my Night Song at Eaton's on Thursday. Ronald Hambleton in his review in The Globe spoke well of the words but thinks Oscar over-accentuates the macabre in his music.35 Reading Proust's letters. The last few days have been real spring. Warm rains and mild sunshine and the earth sending heaven up into our noses. Mum has a new dog. Four months old Corgi. J. and I are taking him out in Mutt's absence. Very sweet.

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March 29 J. developed flu on Sunday — I have a cold. Alan up but not back at school yet. Mild damp weather continues. April 6 Roches Point yesterday with Muriel — the dearest companion imaginable for a day in the country or anywhere else. We started out to the loud trumpet of the sun but by noon the skies were gray and the expedition didn't provide the sun bath we expected. Picnic'd on the beach below our cottage. Ice soft and green and ready to leave. Where? Little rivers wind in and out of the frozen lake. Wild ducks, swimming in a stretch of open water, beat their wings and fly away, at the sound of our voices. Wrote to Dr Kanner last week.36 Have heard nothing. The tension in the house is acute. Thunder rumbles in the distance or breaks, ferociously. We all sizzle with the heat and strain of a short circuit somewhere. I dreamed last night a tiger stalked the halls. Tea this afternoon with Catherine [Harmon] and Paul [Arthur]. I am not writing, I am not reading. My corridors are choked with demons and I, too tired in my soul, to battle through them to work or pleasure. I am afraid. All day and all night I am afraid. April goth Rab left for Baltimore tonight to see Dr Kanner. My trip the previous week has borne fruit. How can I say fruit — I have no conception of the nature, the issue of all this. The accumulated strain of the last six years has left me lifeless, uncreative. Unhappiness alone can't kill the creative impulse, indeed can be a stimulus, but long periods of strain kill even unhappiness — debilitate the soul. I have purposely smothered my feelings in order to survive - I find I have little feeling left. Is the price of survival emotional paraplegia? Bought Joyce's Ulysses in Baltimore. It is poetry. Why wasn't he a poet? Why did he try to force that torrential poetic skylarking into prose? Reread Homer's Odyssey this winter. How tragic the juxtaposition of the two. The morning man beside Joyce's modern midnight soul, waiting for the twelfth chime of the bells. The exact parallel is the happy, consciousless small child, and his later self, forty, drunk and in

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tears. It does not seem, in tracing the history of man, that mankind is growing old gracefully. The two Ulysses seem to complete the circle. It is hard to imagine going on from there. If I could write an epic poem I'd write about the journey between the two Ulysses — try and discover and disclose what happened to him as he wandered through those thousands of years, trace the roads to his victories and to his disintegration. But I am no epic poet. Someone should do it. There is not much more to be said by Western man except the summing up. Ulysses from the cradle of the Mediterranean to the grave of the Pacific (Hollywood). Aunt Ellie, Mutt and I went to Roches Point on Wednesday. Mild with sudden sun and periods of quiescent cloudiness. There is sweet rest with the Osiers. How I have struggled and hoped to be my mother's child rather than my father's. And yet I am, and as long as I am, I will be the child of both. It is almost a struggle between the classic and the romantic. My mother's family stands for the first, my father's for the second and I, with strong baroque in my veins, struggle for the Parthenon. May 12 A hot week in the beginning of May and spring collapsed into summer. The daffodils came and went in a flash - Muriel and I went to Roches Point last Friday — Bob, Mon, and the children joined us on Sat. Wonderful weather but when we returned on Sunday the visual spring had vanished. We need rain badly. The apple tree at the front of the house has never had such a glorious profusion of blossoms. The house is painted (outside) at last and our external shell looks fresh and in good health. Inside it is another matter. Poor R. Poor J. The Annex is being painted inside and out. I haven't written anything for weeks — or months. Things are so uncertain chez nous that it takes all my wit and emotions to continue in our daily strain. Aunt Ellie leaves tonight for England. I was sad, saying goodbye. She is 73. It is sad when people who are 73 say goodbye. Mutt, Aunt Amo and Aunt Ellie - a heaven sent blessing to have been born in the radius of their light. Now, to start a second volume. The first is a tedious affair. May 15, 1949 It is only when one is surprised at one's own imagination (in an attempted work of art) that there is any possibility that what one has created is

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good. If it appears within the limits of what you know about yourself and your capabilities, throw it way. If it cannot surprise the author it is unlikely that it will be a revelation to the reader. An enthusiastic letter today from Alan Crawley re. my first short story 'The Landlord' - I knew it was good. It surprised me! I will be sad though if I turn out to have more talent in prose than in poetry. The weather remains unbelievably hot. After a long and gentle autumn, a short and gentle winter followed by an early spring. Already we've had a month of summer. Roches Point on Tues. with Aunt Amo and Mutt. The blossoms on the back road, thicker and whiter and closer to the blue sky than ever before. Rab ill all last week - Alan tummy flu on Monday - J. has had a bad cold. I am tired. I sleep badly and eat too little. Even felt my joints today. A storm is gathering somewhere in the heavens and yet there is a feeling in the air that it will break elsewhere. And how we need rain. The hillside is parched. May 25 Roches Point for long weekend with Mutt and the family. The woods are full of violets and forget-me-nots. Muriel and Mon and their children came for the 24th — I transplanted lily of the valley and periwinkle from Beechcroft to our bank - also clumps of forget-me-nots and violets. The four country days revived me. I slept and ate and took in gallons of lake air. Monty [Mutt's dog] enjoyed it hugely, particularly the frog which he ate alive. The painters are busy in the cottage, Bunn [the gardener] and his etceteras are busy on the land and the whole countryside is sweet with lilac and honeysuckle. The apple blossoms are nearly done, most of them lying, a perishable white carpet, on the earth. Went with Mutt to see the Vaughan's and the McLean's gardens in Bayview.37 Magnificent situations - good formal gardens but rather poor park planting. Read a charming book on Horace by Alfred Noyes and a translation from French — Henri Bosco's Tlieotime Farm - a book perfectly suited to land lovers. June ist Tomorrow Muriel and I go to the Point for the day. I am out of touch with my journal. Must get to know it again so that I'll feel at ease, write naturally as one talks to a friend.

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Junes Rab has a longing for dogmatic certainties - is tortured because he hasn't found them. He has an odd idea that creation should be run by just and reasonable laws. Why does he expect so much from life? He is neither just nor reasonable - and I and most of us resemble him in those two points. Why is he so indignant at creation? He burns with the injustice of infants born deformed or idiots. I sorrow but am grown enough to hold my heart from anger. I plant a bed of flowers and always two or three curl down and die. Trees grow mostly tall and straight but some bend, crippled, by what? Life IS. It seems to me a waste of time to argue with it, to rage against it. For my part I both love and honour the force that produces more whole flowers and children than it produces weaklings and idiots. I wonder if God is not just a ritualistic acceptance of Life. If it is, then every living soul should be a believer. Once you are really conscious of the miraculous oneness of everything, you lose the modern sense of despair. I have never found life more difficult; sadness and strain have been my daily bread for six — seven years and yet — during those years I've found that all to-being [sic] is miracle. I've learned to take at times the long historical view. Now, I don't even believe the atom bomb can wipe out life. And even if it should — a little speck of time has produced a great drama. Every man in his life covers the course of history. The infant is the cave man - still predominantly animal. The child, preGrecian man — fighting and curious. The adolescent is the Greek, with his dreams of perfection, bodily beauty and a mind turned to heaven. Manhood is the Renaissance. Bold, adventurous fulfillment. The Middle Ages are our middle age, full of remorse and guilt and gothic piety. The modern era is a time of premature senility. We're old without the virtues of old age - querulous rather than wise. Hysteria takes the place of prophecy. I go to Roches Point on Saturday. I am thirsty for the country and an interlude of peace. Have written a second short story - 'The Round and the Straight of It' - am doubtful whether it has merit. It is a theme that, quite possibly, should be dealt with in verse. If only Rab was happy. I'd willingly part with half my curiosity and love of this, our earth, if it would cure him.

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June 7

A morning in shops — afternoon writing cheques — Muriel's for tea. Dropped in at Mutt's to see the Parfitts, Aunt Millie, Miss James, Mrs Fitzgerald. Aunt Millie is, after all, the remarkable one at Eldon. After years of being bullied, put upon, her opinion disregarded while her assistance was placidly accepted, she comes out the character, the woman of wisdom, even the wit. Her unselfishness has hidden her other equally delightful qualities. A long short story on Aunt Lorna and Aunt Milly has possibilities. On the other hand it would be the act of a traitor to write it. Here I am, at home again with my journal. I think I should give up writing (verse, short stories) until after Dr Kanner's visit, give up, at least, trying to find peace of mind and time etc. A certain state of grace is necessary now, if I'm to write. It has not always been so - but now I want to say something quite different — and what I want to say demands a state of grace (NOT in the religious sense), a climate where my body is relaxed and I can listen with all my ears to the new song in my head. As a poet, I have never been more aware of miracles; as a person I have never been more beset by worry, magnified almost to the selfpitying aspect of despair. No, the last statement isn't true. I've lost the personal sense of my troubles but I am worn and nervous with worry. June 13 Man. Roches Point

We all came up on Sat. in a real heat wave. The drought goes on and on and the countryside wears the colour of a blighted, vanquished August. The crops shrivel in the fields — the leaves are dry and some falling, as leaves fall, a few here and there at the end of summer. The lawns are brown and britde and scratchy to bare feet. It is a most unhappy, unfruitful June. Rab, Heather and Alan left at 5.30 yesterday. J. and I are alone here. I am cook. Our first day was, gastronomically speaking, a reasonable success. Worked all day, with the exception of an hour after lunch, physically, settling the cottage, cooking, marketing, picking dead-heads. To my surprise, that is what I need. It rids me of my mountainous frustrations, and, in a country environment, brings a little measure of peace. I thought I wanted to come here and rest and read and write. I'm too upset to rest, to concentrate, to write.

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The cottage is going to be charming. Painted inside and out and most of the furniture refinished. If only I'd wake tomorrow to the sound of steady, persistent rain. Catherine Harmon comes up tomorrow and here am I, indifferent to the written word. I don't really want to be literary editor to Here and Now. I said yes from a sense of duty. One should have some public responsibility — or should one? Last night, after the children and Rab left, I spent in a state of panic loneliness, unusual for me. It was not fear of an empty house, it was an overwhelming sensation of being utterly forsaken. I tried, from 10.3011.30, to get Rab by telephone but the line was always busy. And that increased the desolation. I felt like a Kafka character, trying to get through. Have just finished my first I. Compton-Burnett — Men and Wives. I'll send to England for everything she's written as I can't get them here. She is superb. A combination of Sophocles and Jane Austen. June 23 Muriel here for two days. She collapsed last night — a combination of nerves and exhaustion. We were up at 6.45 a.m. this morning as she was determined to catch the 7.30 bus. However, she was much too sick to attempt it. Mon came and drove her home about 10.30. Poor dear sweet Muriel. Zita Cook and Suzanne Kergin and her mother came for lunch.38 Worked hard in the cottage until they arrived and again after they left. Am really tired. Even the legs are sore. Was determined I'd sleep by the lake tonight so packed up all my things and left die Lodge. Three trips did it and now I'm in my big bed on the verandah and the lake is singing. The cottage is beginning to look as I planned it should. The living room is finished and the bedrooms are coming along. Everything is painted inside and out and it is all cool and fresh. June 25 My third night by the lake. It is too still for the gentlest lap. J. and I had dinner with Aunt Amo. She has a nice young man as tutorguardian for the boys. My holiday(?) is over. Tomorrow the rest of the family arrive. I have worked hard, physically, for two weeks but the last few days have seen the tensions gradually dissolving. The first week I was continually on the edge of a crise de nerves. I couldn't relax and 42

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was grateful that there was work to be done. Muriel and I buried the babies on Sunday evening.39 My strange domestic life had made me sicker than I knew — I can't write yet. If I had another week I'd be well. Ever since my visit to Baltimore, more than three months ago, I've had diarrhoea - every day - until I came to Roches Point. The lake is starting to lap again. The house is full of flowers — syringa, sweet peas and delphinium. J. is often inconsiderate and selfish but what can I say? We've given him a dismal and frightening environment for six years. How can I blame him? June 27 To town today to vote. The early results on the radio imply a Liberal victory. Hugely satisfying to know that people aren't impressed, always, everywhere, by bad propaganda. How could we want to change our government when we have had, perhaps, the best government of any country in the world in the last ten years? Am really recovering my equilibrium. Soon I'll be writing again and reading. Hot in town. Pleasant here. We've had three weeks of good steady heat. No rain, alas. June 28 Still hot but I love it. Shopped all morning in Sutton. Worked on a story after lunch. Took the children swimming at 3.30. Painted furniture after tea. Watered the garden. Worked on story after dinner. In and out of lake all day. July ist Almost a solid month of heat and more than a month without rain. The heat is pleasant enough with a lake at your door and a bed on the verandah but drought is heartbreaking. Alan, Bunty and the children arrive this afternoon from Ottawa. Rab and J. and Monteath have gone fishing somewhere near the Sault. The Adeneys were here yesterday for the day and night. The lake is lapping my favourite song - a gentle lull plish plash on the rocks. The moon is waxing, is already half a moon and yellow. I must work. I'm so damn lazy about starting anything new. I'll work happily for hours on an idea once I have it. I hate the process of finding it. Now that I have a few weeks of peace I must collect ideas

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material for the bad months when I'm too emotionally drained to go out and fish for anything. If I don't write a lot, make it an incurable habit, I won't write well. July 2nd Tried, halfheartedly, to write today. Complete barrenness of the imagination but I know it is a lack of habit. These past months I've been too worried and upset to write and the habit has gone. Must try every day until something turns up. Perhaps that's the story: the terrifying quest of the story. I say 'story' poetically because poetically I'm as dry as the poor parched Ontario earth. It is a question of keeping the pen moving, even if only in this journal. I'm lazy, lazy bones. Always, as a woman, my obligations to people (family) absorb my time. Or is that my excuse? Both, I think. I've read almost nothing during the last three months. I want to hear in my head exciting new music, preferably poetry, but if that fails I'd welcome a tune in prose. Today the hottest yet. 87 on Mutt's verandah. At 6 p.m. the wind changed to the North and the air is fresher tonight. Probs: fair and very warm. Roches Point is too populated. It's not that I dislike people but one can have too much of a good thing. I like to meet a human being every mile or so, and I walk slowly. It's a fine thing to be human but one forgets one's humanity in congested areas. I am afraid of my era but perhaps I'd have been afraid of any era. Cannibalism is endemic when it is not, as it is today, epidemic. And I have become almost indifferent to 'the common man' — not so much from callousness as from despair. Material benefits will NOT benefit him as much as I had supposed. I want everyone to be fed and clothed and housed but I know now that that is all it means - food, clothes and a roof. It is no guarantee of the brotherhood of man. Economics aren't the solution, alone. The rich are not more generous than the poor. Capitalism, socialism, all the isms, appear spotty with faults. Where (we look and cannot find) is a way of life in which virtue predominates? July 3rd The drought and heat are assuming mythical stature. New creatures inhabit our new clime. Spiders, suspiciously like Black Widows, are seen at the wharf- moths, unknown in Canada, and, at first mistaken for humming birds, are in everyone's garden, sipping honey, precisely as the

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humming birds sip. The corn is almost ripe. Temp, today 88 with broiling, ferocious sun. On the wharf morning and afternoon. It is heavy and hot even on my verandah at 10.15 P-m- Heather and Judy [Osier] are sleeping in the boathouse. Alan plays with George [Gibbons] all day. July 4 A sprinkle of rain this morning. Clouds kept the day from being unbearably hot. Poor little George is so spoiled he doesn't know whether he's coming or going. J. home this evening from his fishing trip - in good spirits and looks well. One fish. Cooler this evening. Worked on short story. July 7 Relief from heat for three days. No rain. Became the proud possessor of a hose today. Surely heaven consists of watering the dry and thirsty earth. Alan caught 15 fish at Beechcroft but only two were keepers. NorthEast wind gave J. good sailing. 'The Lovers' is finished in the sense that the story is all there — I wish I could write some poetry. About my stories I feel 'well it's better to write something than nothing.' I am angry that they come and the poetry is hidden. And yet they are good and perhaps because I know I can succeed artistically (foul word) in that field, I'll give up my clumsy beloved attempts at verse. I am so lucky. Most people need to be happy. I only need a neutral state, enough peace to be able to write. I have less interest therefore in my personal life. It's only when I'm worn down by worry, R's depression, how he reacts on the children that I begin to founder. July 12 Alan [Gibbons] arrived this evening. The weather has been coolish for almost a week. A lovely rain last Saturday but we need more. Have finished my third short story, 'The Lovers.' I have recaptured the power I had when I wrote the best of my verse - but it (the power) insists on fulfilling itself in prose. I am angry and disappointed but quite helpless to change its direction. After all, the wind may change again. Went to see Dr Farrar on Saturday. It will be more satisfactory if Bob can get straightened out at home, rather than in Baltimore. Was

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surprized at my weakness. I thought I had recovered, in the past month, strength for anything. I was upset, emotionally fatigued after the interview. Driving back to the Point with Kitty [Tattersall], I almost had to stop the car and say 'I can't go on.' I was full of blind unreasonable fear. Pat and Jack Graham40 arrived that night in time for dinner. I struggled to be polite - politeness was all I had left - no love or affection or interest for two dear people whom I love, have affection for, in whom I am interested. J's birthday on Monday. He is a good sweet child - some of the time. Dinner at Aunt Amo's. Her George [the boys' tutor] is a huge success and a most likeable young man. The lake has gone to sleep — not a murmur. On Thursday we go to Edmund M's wedding.4' J«(MJ Town yesterday for the wedding. Grey, cool day with a little drizzle in the afternoon. Dinner with Bob and Monteath at Winston's [restaurant]. On the way to dinner Bob said he had made an u.a.m. appointment for me with Dr. Farrar. Didn't eat dinner. The second effort is never (or was not on this occasion) as difficult as the first. I am reasonably numb. Have given up trying to guess the outcome. Every year I become more incapable of emotion. I am still in love with the lake but the lake is a lover I've had for two summers now. I accept it, accept the song as my natural right, forget it is miraculous. Bunty and Jean looked truly beautiful at the wedding. 'The Landlord' came back from The New Yorker. July 24th Lucy and Frank [Little] here for the weekend. Bob in town, on call. The weather hot but pleasant. Cocktails at the Denny's42 on Sat, at Stu and Susie [Osier's] on Sunday. Late nights and a great deal of talk. Am very fond of my cousins. Frank cut down a cedar by the lake and opened up our view. I am still full of wonder at being beside the lake, at the reformation of the cottage, of being in the country. Have written a fourth short story 'The Devil's Dilemma.' Who will ever publish my uninhibited stories? I think they are good. I know that they are full of imperfections.

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July 28th Hot days and hot nights. Sutton this morning. Swam twice at our own beach with Alan and Peter [Puxley]. Jennifer [Matthews] quarantined. A child in the house where she was staying developed polio. The public beach gets noisier and more crowded. People swimming and shouting at 10.30 p.m. I like them to swim but wonder why they are happier shouting. The train is whistling across the lake. A short storm the day before yesterday brought a violent ten minute rain. Aug isth The sun continues to dominate the season. Last weekend in Muskoka with the Hams. Mon., Tues., Wed. of this week were real scorchers. Kent and Mary Harrison spent the day with us on Thurs.43 Hadn't seen Kent for fifteen years. Completely unchanged in appearance. His wife, whom I had never met, is an unusually attractive and sensitive personality. The temp, dropped to 80 today but the sun is still strong. We are all brown beyond the usual summer tan. I spend between two and three hours a day on the wharf but this year they are happy hours. All the children can swim and I relax, to a point, and love the heat and the water and the colour of lake and sky. Bob has gone to Sarnia for the weekend. One hot morning I got up at six and wandered around the lovely fresh world. J. and I, in the canoe, watched the morning from the water - then a swim and a huge breakfast. Finished Orwell's 1984 this afternoon. Surely there has never been such a frightening book before. It seems impossible to think that the future will produce one of greater horror. It is 'it' - you can't go farther. [Alan Paton's] Cry the Beloved Country, a highly advertised book, is second rate.

Aug 14 Sailed with Stu and Susie all afternoon. Watched the races. Alan was with us and looked as if Paradise had been handed over to him. Writing poetry again. Feel refreshed after my holiday into prose. Am glad I have them both and hope they will be good for each other. Bob is staying in Sarnia until Wednesday. The 'night life' (bugs) are beyond belief tonight. My bed, floor, everything is black with infinitesimal insects. They are down my neck, up my

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nose, under the sheets. If I hadn't been really absorbed in what I've been writing (a poem) I'd find it a little nightmarish. Lovely warm day — not too hot. Mutt went to town for the weekend. Am all alone (except for three children). Nice letter from Alan Crawley today. Oct 14 R.M.S. Caronia Our third day out from New York. I am a fool to have waited 39 years before enjoying an ocean voyage! I used to suffer them, none too gladly, little realizing that they were a blessed suspense from life, a healing interval. Aunt Amo, Jean [Aunt Amo's maid] and I embarked on a hot steamy October day and for thirty six hours the weather was tropical and the sea unruffled as a pond. The air freshened yesterday p.m. but the sun remained. Tonight we're rolling around in fine fashion. The days have already imposed their ritual — breakfast in bed — dress about n, then quickly stretch my body out again on a deck chair — draught lager at 12.45 - lunch 1.15 — then back to the deck chair until 5.30. We go to the bar at 7 and order without fail one dry martini each, then make our way to the dining room where we sup a half bottle of champagne and eat delicate and exotic food. I am a snake that has gone to sleep in the sun. Reading Moby Dick for the second time. London Oct soth

The rest of the voyage we enjoyed good health (dramamine) in spite of heavy seas and strong gales. We arrived in Southampton on Tues Oct 18th at 2.30 p.m. The wind was howling and the rain blurred my first glimpse of the English countryside. The boat train was full of'remembrance of things past' - the same unique little toy carriages and, more surprising still, the same enormous tea. Brown bread and white bread and hot scones and the indescribable English cake as well as a huge assortment of biscuits. It was dark when we got to London and it was raining. A great crowd in the station and in the crowd, Catherine Harmon, come to meet me. I was overwhelmed with delight at seeing her. It is good to arrive and to be welcomed. Aunt Amo had ordered a car to meet us and we persuaded her to go and sit quietly in the Daimler while Jean, Catherine and I collected the luggage from the van. Shortly after seven we were ensconced at the Athenaeum Court, discouraged at first to

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find our rooms were on three separate floors but Jean has now been moved next door to Aunt Amo. Catherine had dinner downstairs with me and Aunt Amo went to bed and had a tray. Paul [Arthur] came in later and we talked Here and Now until 11.15 P-m- by which time I could hardly see. The rough crossing has made the earth temporarily a rolling, cavorting planet. It is no longer terra firma and I sway around like the most drunken of drunken sailors. Yesterday, (Wednesday) we drove in the Daimler to the bank and passed through some of the badly blitzed areas. And yet I am more amazed at how much is left. In the West End so many streets look almost the same and the window boxes are still full of chrysanthemums, and there is an old woman selling flowers at Trafalgar Square where the fountains are playing; their spray is still blown by the wind. There are great fruit stalls everywhere and new paint and a general air of good cheer. Last night did a memorable Pub Crawl with Catherine and Paul and Bernard someone or other. We met at Bernard's old book shop near the British Museum, adjourned to an adjacent Pub for a gin and it, then on to dinner in an Italian restaurant in Soho. Afterwards we visited a series of well known Pubs. The clientele was wondrous strange — sailors, thugs, workingmen and women, prostitutes, artists, homosexuals and visiting Canadians. It was a series of totally new impressions for all my senses except one. Home at midnight with a splitting headache and more tired than I can remember being for many a moon. Slept until ten. National Gallery with Aunt Amo before lunch and then my room and letters until four. It was pouring rain and it seemed a good time for quiet. Short walk then visited Aunt Amo and we had a pleasant dinner after a martini in our room. And so endeth the first forty eight hours in England. p.s. Weather clear both mornings - showers in the afternoon. So far we haven't suffered from cold and have been unbelievably well fed. Oct 22nd

Catherine and I set out at 11.15 yesterday to see the Tower. We took a bus on Piccadilly, sat upstairs and rolled blissfully down to the City through Trafalgar Square, along the Strand, Fleet St. etc. A five minute walk from the bus stop brought us to the Thames, the Tower Bridge and the great sprawling Tower itself. The sun came out and our

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already high spirits rose in steeples to the sky. Carried us up a dozen winding stone staircases without fatigue. We saw everything the public is allowed to see - fat ravens, Beef-Eaters, Raleigh's Walk, the Bloody Tower and much more. Lunched at 2 p.m. at a restaurant just outside the entrance. Revived by food and Bass we moved on to the Tower Dock and embarked in a charming little motor boat, bravely named The Viking. We travelled down (or up?) the Thames to Westminster, under great bridges, beside coal barges and swans, freighters and yachts. London from the river is a great and glorious hodge podge of industry and domes, squalor and steeples. From the Westminster Dock we walked past the Parliament Buildings in search of Wood Street. There was JVO Wood Street. Had I imagined a whole year of my life? Had I never lived in Wood St.? A street cleaner reassured me - Wood St. had been changed to Greater St. Peter St. There stood North Court, unchanged by time or bombs, the same basement restaurant, everything the same except me. We walked through the neighbouring streets and squares and our eyes rejoiced in the lovely Queen Anne houses and the sudden quiet, cloistered atmosphere. The Dean's Yard is unchanged and little boys in grey flannel suits were pouring out of Westminster School as we walked through. Then a quick visit to Westminster Abbey and the cloisters before hailing a taxi and heading, tired and happy, for home (Athenaeum Court). Found Gwynneth [Bowen] in Aunt Amo's room and we sat down to a large tea. Then hot bath followed by cocktails and sandwiches prior to the theatre. Daphne Laureola by James Bridie. Edith Evans and an excellent cast in a charming play. Cold supper and Bass ale in Aunt Amo's room afterward made the perfect end to a perfect day. Oct 24th Aunt Amo and I lunched with Bill Spencer44 at the R.A.G. [Royal Automobile Club] yesterday. Bill, much as I remember him, seventeen years ago. His days are pretty evenly divided between shooting, racing and attending the funerals of distinguished members of the aristocracy. On to Sadlers Wells after lunch where we saw excellent ballet — Les Sylphides, A Sea Change (settings by John Piper) and Facade (music by William Walton). The chill of the theatre was counteracted by the inevitable tea at the intermission. Dinner at the hotel. Paul and Catherine came in afterward and we had a pleasant chat.

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Sunday Woke this morning to a really relentless rain. Our plans for Hampton Court were inevitably postponed. Wrote a little this a.m. to the accompaniment of church bells and a real old timer street singer. Gwynneth came to lunch and we spent the rainy afternoon in the Tate Gallery. Wonderful exhibition of James Pryde (Edinburgh) — saw the Blake watercolours I had fallen in love with seventeen years ago — also the French - Van Gogh etc. and some modern English — Graham Sutherland, Piper etc. Tea at the hotel before embarking for St. John's Wood where I spent the evening with Paul and Catherine in their charming, frigid maisonette. Delightful, happy couple in a suitably romantic setting. Paul cooked an excellent dinner which we washed down with Devon cider. I came home early. Was suddenly strangely depressed soon after I arrived in their paradise. Nostalgia for my own first year of married life in London, and a sudden homesickness for my family, my fireside. I wish for letters. I am glad in a way to be homesick. Home had become so difficult that I was afraid I might never ache to be back.

Oct 25 or 26? Yesterday lunched with Prof. Cox [see note 21] at Dartmouth House after a long walk up Bond St. to Oxford St. and on to I5A Great Cumberland Place. Our old house is still standing but a great deal of the square behind it is in ruins. Tea with Gwynneth in her 4th floor attic room in Kensington. What a lonely, dreary life. Dinner with Aunt Amo and early to bed. Weather magnificent - a pale watery sun all day long. Lunched today with Cathie and Howard Sergeant (poet and Editor of Outposts) at an Indian Restaurant on Regent Street. Howard is using some of my poems in his quarterly. Catherine left us to go to the B.B.C. and I dragged Howard to the Inner Temple and St. Paul's. He is a nice Northcountryman and I like him but he was not happy as a sightseer; when he suggested tea at 4 p.m. I acquiesced and we sat chatting for an hour before joining Lionel Monteith (poet and Editor of Poetry Commonwealth} at a Pub somewhere in Holborn. Then rain and trouble getting a taxi. Arrived at my hotel at six thirty. Met Aunt Amo and Gwynneth unexpectedly at St. Paul's and Aunt Amo tells me Gwynneth remarked 'Well, they were caught out, weren't they?'! The heat is on in the hotel and we are as cozy as possible. 51

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Tomorrow we go to [Fry's] The Lady's Not for Burning and the next night to Shaw's Buoyant Billions. On Friday Cathie gives a literary party for me at her house. On Sat. we leave for Buxton. Lunch at Stratford, a night at Shrewsbury on our way. Oct 2-jlh Bought food and drink at Fortnum and Mason's for Catherine's party, then drove (in the Daimler) to Hampstead with C. Lunched at a third rate tea room then, guide book in hand, explored Church Row, Holly Bush Hill etc. Lovely little Georgian houses in village-like streets. Asked the way to Keats' Grove in a Pub and we were slightly dampened to find it was more than a mile away. With blistered heels and already weary, we set off. The blisters and the weariness were mine, not Catherine's. The arrival was well worth the fleshly pains endured on the walk. Keats's house, set in a garden and the garden bursting with sad, autumn flowers, has all the haunted atmosphere desired by the romantic traveller. I was more enchanted by the exterior than the interior for I am certain Keats's eyes went out more to the trees, to the magnificent and ancient trees, and the soft English sky than in to walls, ceiling and floor. It is a charming street and in Keats's day Hampstead Heath was visible from the windows. We visited the museum and read, in Keats's own writing, his letters to Fanny. When mortal flesh reached breaking point, I enquired where a taxi could be found and received elaborate instructions as to route and the woeful information that it was three quarters of a mile away and mostly uphill. My sentimental pilgrimage dissolved into preoccupation with my blistered heels and on reaching the supposed site of the taxi stand, we almost wept. No taxi, stationary or in motion, to be seen. However a five minute wait brought one ambling into view and we reached the hotel without further diversion. Theatre with Gwynneth and Aunt Amo this evening — Shaw's Buoyant Billions — not Shaw at his best but moderately entertaining. Oct. 28

The bank this morning with Aunt Amo. A joyful day because it brought letters from home. Bought toys for the Buxton children, then lunch and packing. Party tonight at Catherine's. Leave at 10 a.m. tomorrow for Buxton via Shrewsbury.

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Oct 2$th Embarked in the Royal Daimler this morning for points North-West. Pleasant glimpse of the Oxford High on our way to Stratford where we lunched at the Shakespeare Inn, a venerable spot. I rushed out after lunch and took a quick look at Shakespeare's birthplace, Anne Hathaway's cottage and the church where Shakespeare is buried. Then on through the sweet landscapes of Housman's Shropshire Lad to Shrewsbury, where we spend two nights. Tomorrow David [Bowen] gets out of school and if the weather is fine (bright intervals) we'll go to Ludlow and see the castle. Catherine's party {last night) was highly successful and I met a lot of people who think they are very important indeed. Much reading aloud of their own verse (they read mine too, I'll have to admit). Beards and rakish waistcoats were rampant. Howard Sergeant brought me home at a reasonable hour - 12.45.1 wanted to be fresh for pastoral England!

Oct 30 David Bowen, Aunt Amo and I drove to Ludlow this afternoon. Glorious golden sun drenching the Shropshire countryside with almost too much charm. As we neared Ludlow, the hills achieved nearly the proportion of mountains and everywhere a stream or river curled around the slopes. Ludlow, a delightful town. The castle, built of the native pinkish stone, fills every crevice with the green of fern or ivy — an excellent church and pleasant streets, lined with Tudor shops and houses. We had tea at the 'Feathers Inn' — 1540 or thereabouts and a good example of the domestic architecture of that time. Prefer, myself, the later, the Queen Anne and Georgian, to the timbered Tudor but still it is a sweet town set in delightful country. David had dinner with us at the 'Raven' when we returned. He looks sad. A sad child is almost unbearable - both for the child and the adult witness. Tomorrow, Derbyshire and good stone walls and the harsh, beautiful landscape of my dreams. Nov. 2

Wild with delight at my first glimpse of the moors about seven miles before we reached Buxton. Gwendy [Frangopulo, nee Bowen] arrived at the hotel a few minutes after I arrived (we had dropped Aunt Amo at Aunt Ellie's on the way).

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Great reunion. I think we are really both pleased to see each other. Jack, Gwendy and I had dinner downstairs; Aunt Amo quietly in her sitting room. Adjourned to Peggy [BirrelFs, nee Bowen] afterward for an hour or so. Charming children. Yesterday (lovely, sunny day) walked over the golf course hills - tomorrow we'll revisit the Corbar Woods. Drove to Sheffield in the Frangopulos' car this morning, past Haddon Hall, the Peacock Inn and Chatsworth. Marvellous country. Up over the Yorkshire Moors then down into Sheffield where I lunched with Mrs Cox and Keith and Pat.45 Rain on and off all day. I've never seen the average, English working man and his wife look as prosperous as they do today. And in spite of what people say, they look cheerful. Everyone I've spoken to since I arrived has been affable beyond my memories of the English before the war. They are positively friendly these days. I am talking now of shopgirls and maids and bus drivers and waiters etc. The middle class (if the Bowens are representative) are filled with discontent. Had coffee and eclairs at Collinson's [Cafe] yesterday morning! Nov ^rd This a.m. walked through Corbar Woods and over the moors with Gwendy. We lunched with Aunt Amo. Family dinner at the Old Hall. The moors are satisfying to eye, ear (the wind) and nose and the springy turf makes the physical act of walking a delight. The weather is cold and bleak when it isn't pouring with rain. Nov 4th

The gales howl and the clouds stream their woe on Buxton. It all looks and feels like Wuthering Heights and I ache to move south, anywhere to escape the rage and intolerance of these skies. Gwendy had a few Buxtonians in for cocktails and I stayed for dinner. Nov $

Last day in Buxton. Dinner with [Bowen family] Bob, Gwendy, Jack, Peggy, Sandy and Mary at the Cheshire Cheese — charming inn, eight miles from town, in a moorland village. Extraordinary drive over the

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hills through the rain. Suddenly the moon came out for a few seconds and flooded the valley with fantasy. Reminiscent of a John Piper painting. Tea earlier in the day with Bob Bowen in his stone cottage — Chinley Village. Lovely little garden surrounded on three sides by an active gurgling stream. Nov 6

Left Buxton at 9.15 a.m. with Mary. Lovely weather! Good drive to King's Lynn, where I saw her husband [Dr John Harrison] and two children for the first time. Pleasant lunch before catching the train to Cambridge where Kent met me at the station. Tea with Mary and Kent and their three rosy creatures etc. etc.46 Nov 7

Waked at 7.30 by Malcolm [oldest of the three 'rosy creatures'] with my cup of tea. House frigid. Breakfast en famille, then a wonderful walk with Mary and Malcolm through the Cambridge colleges and Backs in dazzling early morning sunshine. The lawns and flowers looked as well loved and cared for as before the war. Drove out to Kent's hospital then back for an early lunch. Caught the i p.m. train for London and arrived at the Athenaeum, pleased with my tour and very glad to be here again. Am really warm tonight. Dinner quietly in Aunt Amo's room and ready for an early night. Sun all day. Nov 14

Literary meeting at Dulwich, Fri ev. Cathie, Paul, Bernard, Howard, Lionel and I went together. Cathie spoke on contemporary Canadian poetry. Readings of Pratt, Birney, Livesay, P.K. [Page], Daniells, Finch, Reaney, Wilkinson, etc. I didn't feel it was a huge success and somehow Catherine seemed more interested in being witty at the expense of the poor poets than keen to show what the best had to say. Nice way to have poetry meetings nevertheless. Good Pub (The Crown and Greyhound] with large upstairs sitting room hired for the occasion. Everyone drank beer before, during and after the lecture which lent a certain mellowness to the procedure. Left the Pub at 10.30 (closing time), walked and bussed to the station, sat, a cold windy half hour, on the platform for the London train which carried us in 12 minutes to London.

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Thursday, Aunt Amo took Michael [Meredith], June Glascow and me in the Daimler to Windsor Castle and Eton. Michael says the Etonians (in their tail coats) convince him that it's a school for waiters. St. George's Chapel the only thing open at Windsor Castle but it is well worth the trip. Walked all around the exterior and enjoyed the lovely view (in the sun) of the Thames from the great terraces. Lunch in Windsor. Tea at Great Fosters. Michael and I spent the whole of today getting our train and plane reservations and the necessary French visas. Started at the Dominion Bank (francs), then Cooks (horrified to be asked for accommodation on less than 24 hours notice), then lunch with Aunt Amo at the Athenaeum Court before tackling the French Consul, which turned out to be the easiest part of our day. Back again to Cooks to pick up our reservation (boat and train going, plane coming back) and the matter was eventually completed at 4.30 p.m. We had started out at 10.45 a - m We leave Victoria Station for Paris at 9.30 tomorrow morning. How ridiculous life is! That I should be going to Paris with Michael Meredith seems both incredible and incongruous and yet it should be fun. He is such a wonderful cowboy boy, a Yankee at King Arthur's Court, in truth a good companion. Nov i6th. Paris The Golden Arrow was a moving Paradise (2nd class) yesterday. Heavy fog in London which cleared gradually as we approached Dover. By the time we were aboard (no customs fuss at all) the sun was shining and the white cliffs gleamed, though Michael pointed out that really they were a dirty grey! Sandwiches, a martini and dramamine insured a pleasant crossing. We were whisked from boat to train at Calais. The customs were on die train, not the dock, so there was no delay. Marvellous first meal in France - yet we were travelling 2nd: hors d'oeuvres, sole, magnificent beef, cheese and fruit. The farmland looked well-loved and flourishing and I was happy to see again the red tiled roofs on houses and barns. The journey was a pleasure from start to finish. We arrived in Paris at 5.30 p.m. without hotel accommodation but with a sizeable list of moderate hostels to try. Our first attempt, the Palais d'Orsay, Left Bank, facing the Seine, succeeded and we were comfortably ensconsed by 6 p.m. or thereabouts. Michael is an entertaining and good companion, alert to all that's going on and sensible withall.

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Dinner at a restaurant in Place Michele, recommended by the concierge as good but inexpensive. The first statement was true! We bolted our heaven-cooked steaks - the first big hunk of meat since I left the ship — gastronomically satisfied but financially impoverished. Michael suggested the Opera after dinner and at my answer, 'I don't like Opera' his face lit up and he confessed he hated it. What a sweet boy to be willing to give one of his three nights in Paris to something he detests because he thought it would please me. He admitted that what he really wanted to see was the Folies Bergeres (what I really wanted was bed!) so off we went. I was so amused at Michael and the whole ridiculous trip that I managed to enjoy myself in spite of real fatigue. This morning we walked to Cooks to cash a travellers cheque - via the Tuilleries, Rue de Rivoli, the Madeleine — lovely — lovely — lovely. Bright sunshine. Took a bus to the Arc de Triomphe then taxied down the Champs Elysees. I dropped Mike at the Eiffel Tower and he joined me an hour later at the hotel for lunch. This aft. a conducted tour of historic Paris! The Louvre, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur etc. etc. Back at 6 p.m. Michael has ventured forth again on a tour of Paris night life but I am beaten and have taken to my bed after a good dinner in the hotel. Tomorrow a conducted tour (10.30—6) of Fontainebleau. What I love about Paris are not the big and special things but the streets, the facades of the houses, the river and the bridges, golden in the sun and silver at night, the lights reflected in the water. It is endlessly beautiful. It is radiant. It is Paradise to the eye. It says 'Life is short. Beauty and Gaiety are all here!' It is hard not to believe the message of Paris.

Nov 77 Fontainebleau! 10 a.m.—7.15 p.m. Frozen from the knees down all day. Delightful drive through the forest, a stage-setting wood designed by a French artist. Lunch at Barbizon. Everyone cold but spirits revived after food and we moved on to the Palace of Fontainebleau. That was the endurance test for tourists. Our guide was nothing if not thorough and lectured to us in French and English for at least ten minutes per royal apartment and surely we saw fifty! Fatigue and cold were the common lot and there was no escape. You could not leave your guide unless you hurled yourself from one of the elegant windows to the stone courtyard below! A short stop at a cafe (cognac!) before driving

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the fifty miles back to Paris in the cold and dark. The bus was of an early and incredibly uncomfortable vintage and by the end of our journey every bone in my body cried for a stretcher. We rushed back to the hotel to wash before joining Gordon Austin {Joyce's fiance) for dinner at the Crillon. Michael had some Canadian Rye to his great delight. He thinks naught of French beverages! Gordon took us to his apartment afterwards where we stayed a short time before heading for the Palais d'Orsay and bed! Nov 18

Flew back (British European Airways) this morning on a plane named Violet! 'I hope not shrinking' said Mike. Pleasant, easy trip, the only casualty being Michael's suitcase which was lost in transit. We lunched with Aunt Amo, then Mike set off for Wales.

MOV ig Aunt Amo and I motored to Oxford for the day. Left London bathed in misty sunshine to find the country in a pea-soup fog. In Oxford we couldn't see across the Christ Church Quad. Looked at the Chapel and then decided we'd better have lunch and head for home. The drive back was bad but we arrived in good time to find London clear as could be. Party tonight. Cathie, Paul, Bernard, Howard and Lionel here for drinks. We all went on to dinner in Soho, then two pubs, then Bernard's flat. I left at i a.m. but the rest of them were settled in for the night.

Nov 20 Lazy morning in bed. St. Martin's in the Field this afternoon - also the Tate [Gallery]. A cold is coming on apace and I'll have dinner in bed. Toronto, Dec 77 The last twelve days in London were clouded by a cold that degenerated into flu and finally pneumonia. We drove to Southampton and boarded the Queen Eflizabeth] at 6.30 p.m. By midnight I was really ill and the following morning transferred to the ship hospital, where I remained until we docked at New York. Bob met us and he and I stayed the night at the Seymour, flying home the following afternoon.

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J

95°

A week in my own bed has done wonders and I am now quite human again. English mail today. Will I ever get used,to being here instead of there? Betty's operation successfully over yesterday. Mutt and Susannah come to Toronto on Thursday. Dec 31

Two months in England were enough to justify calling 1949 a red letter year for A.C.W. Christmas Day (Sunday) we went to Mutt's for mid-day dinner, to Muriel's for tea. The children put on an excellent version of Red Riding Hood - J.'s comment 'Hardly in the classic mode.' The children were suitably joyful over their loot and we all got to bed early in preparation for Aunt Amo's party on Monday night. Alan's debut highly successful. Charades after dinner, led of course by Kitty [Tattersall] and Betty. On Tuesday I succumbed to a cold with fever and have been in bed ever since, with my friend penicillin. Bob and I went to the Point yesterday for the weekend. No snow, no ice.

1950 Jans From Eleanor Roosevelt's This I Remember — 'I never knew him to face life, or any problem that came up, with fear ,..'47 Jan 17 I crawl back to my journal on hands and knees. For two months I have cheated, written no word of truth on its mild and blue lined pages. The storm, the panic-winds subside - I could be amused at my predicament, my emotional absurdity, if I was sure a sick relapse was an impossibility. Dr F[arrar] saved my silly soul. Writing again - half a dozen poems in the making. This and a firm resolve to change and expand my life, never to go back to my sick nunnery, gives me a raft to lean on in the cold waters of home. England put the final sign, the tombstone, on our marriage, giving at the same time a whiff of Easter to my life. The children? J. is unhappy, worried about his parents who now inhabit separate rooms.

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Jan 24 'A room of one's own!' What a glorious thing it is — it automatically becomes 'A room with a view.' The last weeks have been filled with anxiety — about Mutt, about Rab. Their troubles have pushed my own, temporarily at least, into the background. My talks with Dr F. are stimulating, healing, even at times fun. We call him 'Our Farrar who art in heaven.' Dinner last night with Aunt Amo and Jack. Champagne and gaiety before going to [Tennessee Williams's] A Streetcar Named Desire. I had wined and dined too well to be oppressed; managed to take the tragedy, if tragedy it is, philosophically. I have the impression that the impact of the play would be greater if they'd cut a little, tied the strings tighter all around. Its enormous success, however, seems to contradict my view. Setting and atmosphere, excellent. Jan 25 A late spring day. Temp 56 at noon with a soft, warm sun. Muriel and I met at Highland Ave to work but accomplished little.48 Mutt worse again. Dr MacMillan came in and talked and talked. Back here for lunch, tea with the Chaprnans — Mrs C., Miss C., Miss D[ennison], Mrs (96) D., and Howard. Jan 31 Tomorrow I'll begin to see the winter receding, no matter what the weather. February is the queen of winter months. The snow may fall, the temperature drop to nothing but the noonday sun is strong enough to melt the surfaces of life. There are infrequent but sweet and sour reminders of spring. There are days of white and tranquil winter. Writing poetry and about to work seriously on the Anthology. Wish I could get started on a short story. Mutt better but not well. Rab ditto. Snow last night and a crisp world today. The first wintry landscape for weeks. Lunch with Helen Gunn and Mutt at Highland Ave. Tea widi Ottilie Harmon in her new house. How dull are the facts of everyday in Toronto in comparison to a London diary. Good party at the Thomas's on Sat. Morley, the Hams, Martins and other congenial people.

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Feb i

Today was just such a day as I described in this journal last night. Snow and sun with a miraculous illusion of warmth. A day to make the dullest dog gay. Muriel and I met at Highland Ave to work but walked in the ravine instead. After lunch went to BritnelFs [bookstore] and stocked up on Canadian Poetry. Called on Jean Meredith. The Putnam translation of Don Quixote is so excellent that I feel I am reading the original work of art. Heather and Alan back to school this afternoon after mild colds. Feb 2

A dull, grey, purposeless day in comparison to yesterday's splendor. My spirits are as erratic as the weather. Read James Reaney's 'The Red Heart' and L.A. MacKay's 'The 111 Tempered Lover.' Good things in both though they are at opposite poetic poles. Mutt continues on the up grade to health. Feb 5

Spent yesterday trying to pull myself out of a well. Toward everyone I felt 'O what a naughty boy was that to try and drown a poor pussy cat.' A stupid conversation last night with Rab in which I didn't shine, even falsely. Took a sleeping pill (the first for weeks) and slept and slept and slept, until 10 a.m. Today (Sat) I couldn't even find the well when I was thirsty and looking for water (beer was substituted). J. particularly adorable and full of really adult wit. Alan and H. out for tea. J. at G's then on to Don Giovanni. Muriel and Mon came to dinner before going to ditto. Sun all day, another good example of Feb's charm. Writing continuously. If there must be a choice - of losing oneself in love or in one's art — art wins. It is the highest, dearest hope of man to lose himself. Art provides vaster forests than love, though I will not say the woods are greener. Feb 6

A peaceful Sunday. All the family at Mutt's for lunch. Listened to the New York Philharmonic play a lovely Mozart Concerto. Missed the name of the pianist. Tea at the dear Parfitts. Started The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Gary - good, good, good. The advantage of writing (if one is writing) lies in the fact that nothing 61

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is wasted. These hideous years that are a dead loss to Rab, supply me with ideas. As long as I can utilize what happens to me, it doesn't matter too much whether it is good or bad. The great thing is to feed the hungry furnace that lies within. Feb8 A good, gay time with Dr F[arrar] yesterday. Have become attached to him as a person. Love the freedom of talking to someone who knows the situation. His presence dissipates my worries. As I can't recall them when I'm with him, I'm free to enjoy his beautifully disciplined mind on any subject under the sun. Started a short story tonight - it is the merest sketch. My own childhood and family with myself as the villain. Whether I am capable of writing so directly remains to be seen. I prefer another approach. Muriel worries me with her over-preoccupation with my soul.

Feb 12 Rab in New York for the weekend. Party last night at Muriel and Men's. Will Ogilvie and the McCoys. Was my worst, exhibitionist self after being down all day. Vastly entertained by The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Gary. List of recent reading: A Family and a Fortune, Ivy C. Burnett Loving, Henry Green Concluding, Henry Green Eleanor Roosevelt's autobiography [This I Remember] Turvey, Earle Birney The White Goddess, Robert Graves Shadows of Ecstasy, Charles Williams Katherine Mansjield and Others, Middleton Murry Fortune my Foe, Robertson Davies A Mencken Chrestomathy New Directions (1949) Dickens, Hesketh Pearson The Plant in my Window, Ross Parmenter Poetry by Klein, Reaney, Finch, L.A. MacKay Outline, Paul Nash The Lady's Not for Burning, Christopher Fry Don Quixote, New Putnam translation

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Feb 13 Rab back from New York in reasonable good humour. Snow this afternoon.

Feb 77 Letters from Earle Birney and the Canadian Forum asking for new work. Have nothing available to give them. After six weeks of excited effort on half a dozen poems I find they are as flat as Manitoba, completely without vitality, worthless. 'A Moral Tale with a Warning to Lovers' is the only one with possibilities and I am doubtful about publishing it.49 I should be more alive, appreciative of my improved domestic situation. The air is clearer, there is less strain than at any time in the last seven years. I am relatively free. A great deal of the tension has relaxed into indifference. R. is more restrained with the children — and with me. There is much to be thankful for. I go to Montreal and Ottawa next week. When the writing jag is on me, the words seem so vital, alive and flaming I worry in case they'll set the paper they're written on, on fire! A week later, when / am cooler, I look at them and see row upon row of dead, very dead fish. The fish that were jumping in the sea are now too old and stinky to feed to the pigs. The flame that was in me never escaped my fireproof skull. My skull is proof against letting the fire out. It permits a merry blaze, only within its bony walls. It is better to be a good cook than a bad poet. For all I know, it is better to be a good cook than a good poet. After an acute period of work I need a good binge of living. I'd like to go out and make a lot of noise with some congenial fellow-men. Being a mother and being a poet, both need a lot of getting away from — strange sentence, strangely constructed. Read about my days in England, recorded in this journal, tonight. A huge, physical wave of homesickness, travel sickness, call it what you will, covers the spirit, the flesh. Feb 18, i.30 a.m.

It is much nobler for me to stay married to Rab than it is for Rab to stay married to me. He adores the respectable. I haven't one respectable bone in my body.

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Feb igth After last night's pleasant, bingy party (Hams, Gunns, Thomas's) I coasted through Sunday with all the echoes of gaiety still singing round about me. I always feel wonderful after a really late night with congenial people. Even my hangovers tend to be of a jovial variety. Succeeded in making Rab laugh several times during the day, a real feat. Bill and Monica here from 3.30 to 7 — they kept Heather and Alan occupied in various rowdy pursuits, a change from their long hours of irritable boredom yesterday. The weather comes from the north. Real Canadian polar days, made cruel with wind. Tomorrow I see 'our Farrar.' I hope the Labour party will be re-elected in England. Feb 28

Trip to Montreal a success in every way. Arrived I a.m Thurs. The train was three hours late. I went to the Ritz, Muriel to her mother's. Lunched with John Sutherland who is now uncertain about my mss through lack of funds. Dinner at Ottilie Howard's with Marion, Muriel and Ken Gunn.5° Frank Scott and his wife came in afterwards and we listened to the election returns. Frank and I became immediate friends over our common wish to have Labour re-elected. Huge fun all evening. The next day a drink with Frank before lunch in the Ritz bar, then on to Phyllis [Webb?] - Frank, [A.M.] Klein. Muriel came to my room before dinner. Klein impressed me so much that I was in awe of him. Dinner later at O. Howard's with Michael M., Joanna, the Palmer Howards. Left for Ottawa at 8.30 Sat. a.m. Lunched with Bunty and the beautiful babies. Dinner at the Hazelands. Then the climax of the Birds' party. P.K. Page, F.R. Scott, the Douglas LePans, James Wreford etc.5' Frank read two poems by Patrick Anderson, read them as poetry should be read. Lovely, wild spirits prevailed. Party at Alan and Bunty's on Sunday - LePans, P.K., the Jim Georges, Jim Coyne, Allan Anderson, the Hazelands.52 Left Ottawa Mon. afternoon. Train two hours late. Trouble getting a taxi. Arrived home to find J. still quite ill with cold and Rab miserable with sinus — and Dick Tattersall dead. Funeral for the latter this afternoon.

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In the end the aspect of the trip that will remain is the beauty of Montreal and Ottawa. They give me an emotion about Canada that I never feel in Toronto. The aesthetics of snow are endless. March 13 Started work on the Anthology today.53 Feel quite inadequate to the job ahead of me. Sally Stratford54 here for Sunday and Monday. J. back at school yesterday after two weeks at home. Since my return from Ottawa have worked on my own growing batch of embryonic poems, read Infeld's Einstein and his Works, W.Y. TindalPs book on Joyce, Landscape into Art by Kenneth Clark, some Don Quixote and some Old Testament. March 75 Woman's position in the world, even in the modern world, is remarkably inelastic. If she acquires an interest, cultivates a talent outside husband, children and house, she automatically is subject to the qualms of divided loyalties. In the eyes of husband, children and the world, the family should be enough to absorb her. A hobby is permitted but not a passion. Man, on the other hand, takes his family as a side line and is free from censure or guilt to pursue his life's work. The situation arises of course from biological necessity but it results in a situation where one can honestly say 'it is better for a woman to be born with no more than purely domestic or womanly talents. She will be happier so.' In speaking of men it means nothing to say 'He is full of masculine virtue' because masculinity doesn't mean one thing but a thousand. 'She is full of womanly virtue' means that she tends with grace the needs of husband and children, provides good food and keeps the house clean. March 2J This journal has ceased to be a habit. When I've lots to say in verse I forget this prosy book. Spring arrived last Sunday. Rain and wind and sun alternate in quick succession. There are still a few black, humped traces of ice and snow but the greatest part of the earth is exposed mud. The eye is hardly assaulted as yet with glory but the nose rejoices and the ears are filled with the caw of crows and the sweet sensuous song of the cardinal.

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This weekend I go to Ottawa for a further meeting with the poets — reluctantly - somehow I feel it won't be a success. The new regime chez Wilkinson has eased the tension but leaves me restless, unanchored. The homo sap expects so much in his (her) journey through space-time. April 75 Today, April 15, 1950,1 am flooded, drowned, decimated by the fact that I never will achieve character. For seven years it has been my goal. Painfully, slowly, like an invalid learning ballet, I struggled with the elementary steps. A year ago I was confident that I had graduated, at least, from kindergarten; was optimistic about the grades that lay ahead. In seven years I had erected walls of character about as secure as a house of cards. A flick was enough to leave me naked, roofless. At twenty, one might have the courage to start again. At 39 there isn't enough time, or courage. Nature was both prodigal and parsimonious when she produced me. Good looks, imagination, a certain amount of wit, these were mine. Character - a strong, balanced nervous system, a sturdy physique - with not an atom of these am I endowed. Of what earthly (or heavenly) use are my assets without the blessing of the three in which I'm totally deficient? Without the hope, the striving for character, I have nothing left to build on. But surely I'd be a fool to think that what hadn't been achieved in 39 years (with a number of years devoted to conscientious effort) will be achieved in fifty? At the moment I am hit by the white unwelcome light of recognition in regard to my writing. I've been at it nine years and have produced nothing of real worth in prose or poetry. My winter's work (and there is so much of it) is flat and mediocre, worse than second rate. It doesn't rate at all in the world of creation. I have nursed, hugged the illusion that I am an artist, used it as an absolution from sin, excused my uncooperative behaviour, in secret, with the chant 'I am a poet.' I'm not. Not to be a poet, not to have any of that precious substance 'character' makes too many negatives for me to bear, and obviously I have few or no resources with which to withstand the shock of being ordinary in ability and subnormal in ways of grace. I feel defeated on every level of my being. This is the ignominious end of what started, last October, as a joyful new life. I've always been a tightrope walker (a foolish occupation for one terrified of heights) but now the rope has shrunk to string and I sway,

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paralysed, almost wishing the string would break and make an end of my circus.55 Bob and I both recognize that there are more notes on my scale than there are on his. It would be good for us both to realize that my compositions and my performance have not proved that variety ensures superiority. If I could sit down and play the scale of C adequately, using only the white notes of my being, I'd go to sleep happy tonight. It is hard for me to see why Rab is depressed. He has, for the most part, used himself well. I think his confusion comes from the strident music of his a-tonal mate. April 16 As we get older we should get over the need for being clever. Cleverness, for all its charms, is like the peacock's glittering tail and spread in vanity. There is much that is ridiculous in the walk of the proud bird; the head is absurd, even to children, in its preoccupation with a glorious rear. April 77

Rab, in conversation with Dr F[arrar], was asked 'what constitutes, for you, a good life?' He gave a perfect answer, 'To be at peace with myself and with my family and to do my work well,' or words to that effect. Dr F. told him it was as good an answer as he could imagine. I think so too. What I want is another matter, and contributes to our troubles. I want to write twelve, seven, five, even three first-rate poems. I want a hundred things with varying intensity but that is what I want, first and last, passionately. I am obsessed, terrified, by the recognition of my limitations as a writer. I am not second-rate. I do not rate at all. I have nothing more than a belated schoolgirl talent. I can forgive myself all my sins except the sin of sterility. There is something ridiculous about the artist who is impotent to produce a work of art. Such a one as I needs the justification of production as an excuse for being. The time is so short in which to develop oneself and one's talents and most of the time I waste. I have not an atom of pity for myself but a wealth of scorn. If I were only really and truly I, I would triumph. Alas, I am me, and me is always the weak sister of I. Eliot's The Cocktail Party has released me from the influence of Eliot. He is the Waste Land. You cannot write fluently, effectively as a Christian if you hate life. There is no green thrust in his body and his mind tries to destroy the biological colour of our lives.

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April 18 When Truman inherited the Presidency, it was said that his face was indistinguishable from every other face. He was the image of our dentist, butcher, insurance agent etc. Toronto suffers from the same lack of unique personality. It is everywhere and nowhere. I only get acute stimulation from Canada as a separate country when I go to Montreal or Ottawa (I would get it, I'm sure, in the west, perhaps in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick but I haven't the advantage of knowing them). The spirit remains at zero though the weather shows signs of spring. April ig Sent seven poems off to Alan Crawley, asking for an opinion. I won't like it when I get it. Dinner tonight; at Mutt's. Prof. Cox and Aunt Amo and champagne. He improves every time I meet him. April 20 My cold, though ancient, continues to plug or to stream. Mutt and Prof. Cox came in for a drink before dinner. I like him. Bob doesn't. The furnace has taken a new turn for the worse. It spouts water in great gushes from its front onto the floor. Weather coldish, cloudy. Spirits ditto. Am re-working my short stories. After all, they aren't too good as they stand. April 21 The furnace has gone, at last, completely mad. After years of incipient insanity it burst its seams, gushed water, steam, and clouds of black, evil smoke poured from the chimney. A new furnace (si,ooo) will be installed shortly. April 22 I think I've discovered why Dr F. is so important to me. He is the first 'friend' I have ever had, by which I mean he is the first person with whom I can be myself. Most people decide what you are (what they want you to be) and you spend the rest of your life trying to be it — or if you don't, which is usually the case with me, they are hurt, offended; some get mad. I also love the oak tree that grows outside his house. It

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is a venerable giant and conies in the window, adding its stature to the gentle wisdom of the living room. My whole being is relaxed, made free, when I'm accepted, not as good or bad, but as me. Of course, the advantage in such a relationship is one-sided: Dr Farrar gets boredom or a headache. April 27 It is a sad truth that everything that becomes important to me must be given up. Spent the p.m. with Dr. F. I saw clearly what I had seen vaguely for months, that my visits were becoming a form of self-indulgence, a pleasant way to talk and think about myself. For some time I've been drifting farther and farther into absorption with my personality. Dr. F. made it clear, with infinite tact, that I was being a fool. An odd piece of luck made me ask him if he had anything by Dewey that I could borrow. He gave me Human Nature and Conduct. It is the perfect book to turn one from nonsense to common sense. April 30 My trouble with Farrar has been that I have tended to shift my responsibilities onto his shoulders. I should have been busy learning to carry them myself. Certainly it is what he has tried to teach me.

May 5 Last week-end at Roches Point. Cool but reasonably pleasant weather. Read Dewey through twice. On Tuesday we dined at Mutt's — her birthday — Muriel and Allen Meredith and ourselves. Wednesday — Kergins and MacFarlanes here for dinner. Thurs., Miss Hunter and Paul McGoy. Tomorrow we go to Mary Lowry Ross.56 A deep depression all week neutralized by Dewey and an active social life! This evening read Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, in translation, at least, unimpressive. Rilke's poetry gets through the translation. Am mulling over the idea for a short story. Setting: summer, Roches Point or similar environment. Characters: five children; atmosphere: heat — August — cicadas - dry grass - thunder in the distance. Plot: the story opens with the children lying on the grass after swimming. They plan a midnight feast, means of exit from their respective houses, means of procuring food, cigarettes, etc. They talk about the Kinsey Report,

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Princess Margaret, how long they can hold their breath under water etc. The story then moves to the boathouse. The hour is midnight. The storm approaches. One child, a girl, is abnormally apprehensive — this has been indicated from the beginning, in conversation. The others are fed to the teeth with her goings on: would like to leave her out but she, terrified, is more afraid of missing something. The thunder gets closer (build up the storm) — the nervous one wants to go home. The others feel the storm is the highlight of their adventure. The Nervous One becomes hysterical. The others, goaded by the night, the storm, her hysteria and their own electric excitement, threaten to take her out to the field and tie her to the great elm tree (lightning loves a lone tree in a field). Threats turn into action when she screams at a blinding flash, followed by rip-roaring thunder. They drag her (ropes from the boat, flashlights) through the night, tie her to the elm, leave her. The lightning did not hit the tree that night. But in the morning when she's cut down by the grown-ups, she's a blithering idiot. The others play on tiptoe for a day or two. 'There were so many of us,' they say, and soon their voices rise and blot out the memory of screams. In after years, it was only when one or other was feverish, measles or flu, that they panicked, afraid of a light switched on, of noise.

May 7 A Phoenix Too Frequent by Christopher Fry - full of wit and poetry — a contrast to The Cocktail Party. An evening with Mary Lowry Ross where we met Margaret Avison.57 After all the tales of her excessive shyness I was surprised at her charm and apparent ease, /was the one who was scared! Morley [Callaghan] started to warm up just as we left. Dewey's major contributions to me are as follows: the clarity with which he shows that one should never be concerned directly with one's character, an incredibly egotistical preoccupation; that there are no absolutes; that the future is unpredictable and that all one's energies and thought should be devoted to present action; that actions are judged by consequences; that we think and act by habit; that habits can only be changed by opening up new courses of action, by making new habits. Habits can't be willed or wished away or willed or wished into being. A habit that one decides is unprofitable is not discarded, happily, on the discovery that it is undesirable. A new habit must be acquired, which, in time, will squeeze the old habit out.

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Dewey's pen pricks the sickly romanticism that bubbles in our breasts. He says, in effect, we're not built to fly and if our feet don't touch the earth, we will not even walk. He puts 'ideals,' in their accepted sense, down the drain and substitutes the immediate work on hand. The very sensibleness of his philosophy makes it the hardest philosophy to put into effect. It is easier to be a martyr, saint, lecher or pole-sitter than to be a reasonable man. (His definition of a reasonable man is humane: a man whose many impulses are co-ordinated by deliberation with a view to consequences, a view to the tendency of consequences, since the latter are not fixed and inevitable.) His opinion on freedom is equally enlightening. Freedom is not an absolute. To achieve certain valued liberties we must be willing to give up other, less essential ones. There is no ultimate, static end in individual life or in the life of the state or of civilization. There are only present things that need doing and they in turn lead to new situations which will demand new methods of approach. In so far as we (or the world) are alive, we are changing, expanding, contracting. There is no point at which we should aim other than the immediate point that prods us, the branch (leaf in May, bare in December) of today. If we could assimilate Dewey, the psychiatrists would be left in peace. Unfortunately he is not yet my habit. Dr. F. taught me all this and then gave me Dewey to rub it in. May 8

Wrote my short story today. Carried it around in my head for two weeks and then let it write itself. Am pleased with it. It is called 'The Children.' Letter from Alan Crawley. He is enthusiastic about 'Summer Acres,' 'Winter Sketch, Rockcliffe' and 'Folk Tale.' Altogether I feel better about my work. If I have written three acceptable poems this winter (and they are long ones) that should suffice. The rest he thought of no account and how right he is! Some people may need God but the poets only need Alan Crawley! Alan came home with a good report. J. is going to substitute Greek for mathematics! I may have to live out my dreams in my children, after all. May 12. Sunday,

Weekend at Roches Point. The first day of spring. Came home sunburned. The trees still look like April and every growing thing is weeks

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behind schedule. The daffodils and narcissus are still in bloom, a month late. Two blossoms on our magnolia. Helen Gunn at Mutt's. I spent Friday night with them, letting the family go to Roches Point without me. Drove up Sat. for lunch with Muriel, M. and H.

May 16 A summer day. Weeded the lawn this aft. Tea at Muriel's. One blossom on the baby cherry tree. Its first. Filled with spring melancholy, the terrible restlessness of the onlooker who watches the green spears pushing through the earth. The only way to survive spring, unwounded, is to be a green spear. My pen is my green spear and my pen is dry. O God, O Montreal! O Canada, O Canada, O Can a day ..&

May ig Finished 'The Innocents' this afternoon. Alan miserable after his accident yesterday. Hit by a bicycle on McClennan Hill, he came home with both legs badly cut. Today has water on the knee to add to the discomfort. Have no poetry in me at the moment. Alan Crawley enthusiastic about 'Summer Acres,' 'Winter Sketch' and 'A Folk Tale' - the rest is junk. This is the saddest spring. June i My lilacs are so big and bursting and beautiful they deserve the eyes of young lovers, and young lovers' overpowering sense of smell. The honeysuckle thrives, pink and bushy and sweet. Spring came so late this year that we all grew old waiting for it. When the glory arrived we were already yawning. How often I've been hungry and had to wait a few hours beyond my usual meal time only to find my appetite had vanished. It can happen to the seasons too. I feel as if I was living in a hotel, a transitory place of residence. Only Roches Point is home. The house and garden which I have loved may pass, soon, into other hands. Rab and I grow farther and farther apart.

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June 8 Weekend in Ottawa with Betty. Bunty in the hospital. Mutt and I drove down with Jim George and various young men. Finished I. Compton Burnett's Man Servant and Maid Servant. My opinion of her genius does not grow less as I read more. June 16. Roches Point. Rab at meeting in New B[runswick]. Elsie [her maid], Heather and Alan and I came up for the weekend. J. is at Lake Magog. Arrived at 5.30. The lake, the world, was bathed in the terrible green of thunder. The storm broke at 6.15. Short and not too violent. The evening was grey and full of the harsh cries of seagulls. The air was full of them and whole flocks rested on the water near our shore. We are in our new cottage for the first time this season. I am in bed on the verandah and now the wind is up, the air is cool and the waves are lashing the rocks. Spring and I were enemies this year. I forsook my town gardens, felt it was an indefinite, transient piece of land that might wander away from my life at any minute. I was almost afraid I had lost my kinship with earth until I came home. Now I can hardly tell my tongue from the reeds that grow in the lake, my feet from the sod, my hair from the leaves; my skin is composed of moisture dried by the sun.

June 23 We moved up this afternoon. Left town on a hot, sunny, summer's day but thunder clouds rolled down on us before we were fifteen minutes on our way. We passed a tiny, country graveyard at the precise moment a body was being lowered into the earth. Witches were riding their broomsticks although it was not yet night. The storm broke when we reached the Roches Pt Post Office. It rained cows and horses and we sat in the car for ten minutes, waiting for the cloud to seal up again. Thunder, lightning, wind. Here I am but the charm has ceased to work. Jane Austen and Roches Point - for years my safety valves — have lost their power to heal, divert, Jane because I know her off by heart, Roches Pt, I don't know. I think I've moved into another era of my life where my mystic relationship with the elements is waiting to be enlarged by fellowship with people. That's what I'd like to think. The

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truth is I'm in a deplorable slump, am feeling, behaving, reacting like ^. young adolescent. I showed wisdom in those years (the last five or six) when I said (and meant) to Rab, 'I have no further interest in my personal life.' That was sense. Why did I renew my interest in something so unrewarding? The n p.m. train is going by across the lake. The lapping is very gentle tonight, almost imperceptible. fob 3

Ten days here have transformed the climate of my being. Cool, rainy weather for the most part. Bob and Mon came for the weekend. Work in the garden, reading, the children fill my days. Have written nothing for two months. Finished Dante's Inferno, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. fob'5

If the sun shines and the wind drops everyone cheers and laughs at the unexpected gold, glittering and free, at their feet and in their arms and all about them. To date it has been a summer of change and irritability. No sooner does the day make up its mind that after all it is July, the season of heat, of warm and gentle waters, than it turns around and blows the winter back on the pounding wings of the north wind. Even the south wind shouts in this strange season, to hold its own in a summer of warring heavens. I have been reading and reading but suffer a deep paralysis of the pen. The Classical Tradition by Highet. A new translation of The Iliad. Today reread all Dylan Thomas and some Eliot. Tonight the wind is tired after a hard day. It blew creases in our faces and all the hairs on our head are dry, are straws in the wind. Or, is it a womanish summer, always kicking up a fuss and then disarming you with charming promises, warming you with the hope that she'll never be bad again? Jeremy came home four days ago after a month at Lake Magog. I was singing all the way through me to see him and hear his big voice bouncing off our walls. Bob in town this weekend. The Mclntyres make delightful neighbours. The children are enchanting. Margo and James, delectable balls of physical charm, aged 2 and 3. Sarah (almost seven) is a wide awake, vital person.59 Party last night at the Kilgours. O God, O Roches Pt.

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I go to town on Thursday, mainly to see Dr. F. But what shall I say to him? I would like to write a poem composed of skin and flesh and bone. If it included those three primary elements it would also be saturated with what we term spirit. I say 'term' because 'spirit' has no name. We may conjure it in a whole work of art but we can't identify it in a word. But as skin and flesh and bone conceive the spirit, so spirit conceives flesh and skin and bone. It would be a poem of peace, of union after civil war. Life, being, can be perceived through any symbols. Colour will do. The days when even breakfast is black or white. The days when the whole world is broken into primary colours and flashes red, blue, yellow, the days when colours merge to green, purple on the hills and orange crude and sure on the sun. And the murky days when all the colours join to make a grey that seeps even into the red heart of roses, the day when colour dies and spreads its pigment on the bones of our dead passion. Or the songs of birds will do. The robin, red and early for the worm, is the once-born child in every one who was ever from sperm and ova sealed into a womb. And nightingales whose pain is young and sexual, who loads his song with honey from an asp, is barb for every gangling boy. The girl hears him too but her ear is set to catch the breath and beat of the boy. And swallows low in swoops over the acres of water in summer, sail as the soul skims heaven in the days of its ease, The woodpecker's drill is rude in the trees As our axe is cruel to the mineral mines of our minds. We dig for gold, and selling it, impoverish the soil that feeds the skull. And the gull, the contemporary bird whose cries Echo composers caught on a note that calls the end of the world etc. ... Weather: Green thunder when the valves to our hearts plug within on our song's [?] blood. July 24 The day started with a misty rain and worked up to a storm in the late afternoon; then, an uneasy peace for an hour or so, followed by another deluge with all the etceteras — thunder, lightning, wind, the cries of trees. Reading Wordsworth's Prelude, Frazer's The Golden Bough and The Iliad.

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Visitors this summer to date: Monteath Douglas (early in the season), Sally and David Stratford, Peter Puxley, Mary, Andrew and Alex Hazeland, Dorothy and Arthur Ham, Judy Osier, Susannah [Clarke]. Bob, J. and Alan left for Sarnia on Wednesday. Heather, Judy and I lead a peaceful life by the lake. The weather cold, cold, again. After a summery weekend we're back to our chilly norm. Have only been swimming half a dozen times since June. I am the half reluctant owner of'Vicky.'60 Sept 4 Packed for two days. At 4.30 p.m. this afternoon, Bob, the children and the truck were on their way to town. I go in after lunch tomorrow in Vicky. Cocktail party at Aunt Maggie's. Dinner with Betty, Susannah, and Judy. Cold, windy night - my last of the summer beside the lake. Bob's holidays far from successful. Trouble (J. and H.), trouble (Rab and me), trouble (Betty), trouble (Sally and Eve). O dear o dear o dear. But tonight is here and now and the wind blows, the lake splashes and it is very nice indeed. Summer weather summary: cold, rain, intermittent sun. Garden note: flowers and grass happy in the wet, fruit and vegetables ditto except for tomatoes, peppers etc. I ride two horses One so black it greys the nightmare hour One so white it mocks to murk the face of the moon One horse pulls me blind through spaces The other Sept 26. Five days ago I celebrated (or mourned) my fortieth birthday. If there was pain to be felt it was well anaesthetized by a 'fluey cold. All I wanted was a clear chest, my only physical necessity a box of Kleenex. The twenty-two days that have passed since we moved back to town have been coloured by the disturbed emotional state of Eve - Sally, Elsie, Rab etc. etc. I have hardly left the house for three weeks. The first two were spent in cooking (Mrs K.'s holidays, Elsie's collapse) the third, in bed with a violent cold. Next week will, I hope, settle our winter plans.

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Roches Point still seems the most practical as regards the children. Bob in the house for two days with the prevalent bug. Read Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination with great pleasure. Another high reading moment: Venus Observed by Christopher Fry. Joyce Gary's To be a Pilgrim and Herself Surprised helped to while away the tedium of my cold. Now reading the second volume of Don Quixote (Putnam translation). Got off some verse to John Sutherland this afternoon. Studied Greek, a little! Am starting to pick up the scattered seeds of myself with the idea of growing something. Anyway, I need to settle my tattered dandipuff and get back to work. Dec 2Oth, 1950

I start my journal again after three months of estimable silence, and with a whole new world ahead. The new world consists of the ancient. I started the long trek towards a knowledge of the Greek tongue last October. It was love at first sight. From the momentous evening when I learned the alphabet I knew I had found a sphere to enchant and try me — the requisite traits of a lover. Read Boswell's London Journal last week — a wonderful drink, somewhat on the order of rum punch, guzzled on a winter's weekend in the country. Party on Sat. night at the Hams'. Lots of people and most of them drunk. Enjoyed talking to Lotta Fisher.61 She has warmth and imagination and is blessed with only moderate intelligence. Intelligence sits awkwardly on women. The reason is obvious: no one (no man) wants that particular commodity from women and therefore they often appear sterile, as money on a desert island is sterile because there is nothing to buy. Christmas shopping endured without too much pain. A bad autumn in that I had two acute flu-colds in quick succession and, until recently, felt physically depleted. The summer left me tired, but it was quite a nightmare and to have survived it at all proves me something of a seaman. J. continues at Jarvis [Collegiate Institute]. Loves Greek and is far abler than I at same. H. and Alan at Whitney [Public School] and both in good form. Spent a delightful hour with C.B. [Farrar] this afternoon. He wants me to write the story of E.B.O., W.O., B.B.O., and F.O. [the four Osier brothers, subject of Lions in the Way\. I should cooperate but could hardly fit it in with my Hellenic ambitions.

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J. went to a party tonight —Jack McAllister's.6* On his return I asked him if he had enjoyed himself or whether he'd felt a fish out of water. He answered, 'Every now and again my gills craved water.' Pleasant letters recently from Alan Crawley, P.K. Page, Catherine Harmon. Have at last acquired Yeats' Collected Poems and am intimate with his work for the first time. Greek gives me little time to read. The only recent books that stick in my mind are Sitwell's Noble Essences, a couple of Joyce Gary's on children (very good), a book on Freud, Dreams and Poetry, and some magical Christopher Fry. Planted 600 bulbs last October and expect a miraculous spring. Korea should be mentioned but it is hard to know what to say.63 To fight the Chinese seems to me above all stupid. They are not our enemies. If we fight them seriously our real enemies should have an easy time of it. Ten days ago officiated at Tony Mclntyre's christening. Delighted to have such a cherubim for a godson.64 Dec 21, 7950

Clear, still winter's day with only a trace of snow left on the ground. Walked with Mutt and Buttons in the ravine this a.m. Bought candy canes for the children's stockings. Studied Greek for three hours after lunch. Read to Alan. Watching the Christmas shoppers on Eglinton Ave., was aware, almost for the first time, of how young the young looked. It is a prickly shock, like cold water from a shower. At forty I am finally separated from youth. We belong to different races. J. doing very well at Greek. Dec 22 '50

J. passed his Greek exam with 97%. Had my lesson this aft. and write my exam during the holidays. Will be pleased if I get 70%. My excuse being that I have covered twice the ground in less than a term. Muriel and Mon came in for a drink before dinner. They leave for Montreal tomorrow. Rab has a bad cold and is treating it in his usual way. The one disadvantage in learning Greek is that I read almost nothing. I console myself by thinking I'll be reading Homer in the original a year from now.

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Dec. 26th 1950 Dec. 24th, Mutt and Dr. Farrar came for a drink before dinner. I hope he enjoyed it but am not at all sure. Later in the evening Bob and I went to the Wansboroughs' party and from there to the Thomas's. Walked home at 2 a.m. On Christmas Eve called on the Parfitts. Bill Mustard and one (of five children) two year old called on us after dinner.65 Then the usual round of collecting and arranging presents under the Christmas tree, filling stockings etc. Woke up on Christmas morning with a load of depression which I concealed only with difficulty. The children were properly joyful and received the bounty they so fully expected. Dinner at Aunt Amo's — 47 of us — but still the fog enveloped me. Today it is almost gone, the merest mist remains. Weather for two days, almost zero, no snow. Went to the movie 'Harvey' this aft. with Rab and J. The white rabbit walked right out of the theatre with me and says he refuses to go back. He's tired of being exploited by Hollywood and wants to lead a private life again. I'm happy to have him.66 I wonder what has caused the sea-change in my emotions towards Christmas? The children are older, of course, and though the excitement runs high it is directed so shamelessly to 'loot' that it has lost some of its magic. I grieve perhaps because they believe (H. and A.) so firmly that paradise consists of the fulfilment of the desire for concrete things. 1951

Jan. 2nd 1951

Back to Toronto this afternoon after five full days at Roches Point. J., David Osier, Mrs Kelly and I drove up before lunch on Thursday (Heather and Alan were on the train to Ottawa). It was a sparkling day, not too cold but well below freezing. Almost no snow until we got to within ten miles of Roches Point, where we found the earth well covered with a comparatively fresh fall. John Kerr, David andj. happy as larks to be home again. Bob arrived at 9.30 p.m. Friday was another miraculous, still, winter's day. On Saturday we woke to see a soft and lovely snow storm - still no wind. By n a.m. the sky cleared and the sun danced about in the fresh crop of snow flakes all day. The sunset over the ice was a hymn of praise to the North. As J. said, 'Let them have Florida.' Sunday continued in like fashion and we spent New

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Year's Eve at the Bob Kilgours' - Bill and Blair, the Bruce Wests', Stu and Susie, Bobbie L[aidlaw] and Allan Garrow and ourselves.671 expended so much energy trying to be a hearty fellow that I was alive only by the grace of luck on New Year's day. Clear sky, strong south wind and milder. The Lodge warmed up gradually and after the first forty-eight hours I knew it would be a good and comfortable place in which to spend the winter. Today (Tuesday) it rained and the winter glory, tarnished, turned to slush. Drove the Triumph home with J. and David. Lost my way on a detour in heavy fog and found myself on an almost impassable dirt (ice-slush) road. The fog, the strangeness of taking a wrong turning on a highway as familiar as my mother, lent an uncanny, dream-nightmare quality to the adventure. Twice, we almost went into the ditch and as I struggled to find my way back to the highway (always, in fact, going farther and farther from its concrete reality) I filled up with panic. The panic of one who has seen a ghost. Where was I? How could this have happened to me? I was on the road I had travelled all my life and I had lost my way. The fog and the small and perilous road increased the sense of desolation. Eventually I turned around, retraced my passage through no-man's land, rediscovered the highway, and trembling, continued the way back to Toronto. The boys were a little disturbed, particularly David, I think. Studied a bit of Greek, read some poetry, walked and ate and absorbed the peace as a sickly child absorbs the sunlight. Bob ate, drank and slept. I did not read a paper during our winter holiday. Tomorrow I may find the war is WAR. We have lived so long on the precipice of terror that we have lost interest in which day it will happen. The young know it only theoretically, not with their flesh and bone. New Year's resolution: keep this journal marching. Things to be thankful for: the family is still of a piece, Christopher Fry is writing plays, Dr Farrar still lives on Oriole Road, I am brimful of ideas. Jan. 5,1951 Stayed in the house yesterday and today. Acute stiff neck, acquired, I regret to say, from acrobatics on New Year's Eve. Mr Cook came and gave me my [Greek] lesson here. Corrected my exam paper — 80% — I am very pleased. Alan succumbed tonight. High temp. R. came home in one of his less pleasing moods. Weather for three days rain and mild.

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Jan. to Went to see Norman Gwyn68 yesterday with C.B. [Farrar]. A profitable and pleasant session which I have written about elsewhere. Am keen now to do the job [that is, the family history], [The following account of this session with Norman Gwyn is found on four loose pages inserted at the back of the journal for 1951. It provides background information used in Lions in the Way.] Arrived at Norman Gwyn's around 5.30 p.m., with my dear friend C.B. Norman pleasantly welcoming but I was struck by his pale face and his general aura of fragility. We went at once into his study and the conversation moved easily and was soon flowing in the required channels. I suggested that the book should open with a quotation from one of Great Grandmother's letters, written on the Atlantic Ocean, when, as a bride, she was heading for a hamlet in Ontario. The gist of the quotation is 'I hope the dear God sees fit jVOTto bless us with children.' He blessed her with nine, four of whom are to be the subject of the book. Norman gave a vivid description of the young Osier men; reared in Bond Head and Dundas, when they first descended on Toronto (Montreal?) and met the famous Marian [Francis], the lid flew off. With their social life confined either to the primitive backwoods of Bond Head or the only slightly more advanced (this was almost 100 years ago) amenities of Dundas, the travelled, lusty, and to them enormously sophisticated widow in her early twenties had the impact of a Cleopatra on four young Caesars. They came, they saw, but how many of them conquered is not certain. This was surely their first and never to be forgotten taste of mundane civilization. Family life had blessed them with the civilization that teems from books, had blessed them again with a rugged environment, a challenge only to be met by Spartans, and a third time by parents of strict integrity, happily too occupied with necessities to give more than necessities to their vigorous children. Norman mentioned Bfritton] B.[ath]'s early days. He started his career in a shop in Dundas at the age of 16. After some months (or a year) he announced that he was through and intended to study law. He taught himself, in an amazingly short time, all the subjects required for Osgoode. All his life, a wide reader with a remarkable memory. He so

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impressed a Doctor with his knowledge of anatomy and physiology that the M.D. refused to believe that he wasn't a member of the profession. Aunt Chatty referred to the 'terrible time they had had with B.B. over a lady love in London' — said 'all the Osier men are fools about women.' (See John Osier about B.B.). He (B.B.) was a tall teller of tales and both Mum and Norman remember the hair standing upright on their heads when he recounted one of his many famous ghost stories. He was a dark, vivid Celt, with, as Norman put it, Vision.' The pure, patriarchal Uncle Fen [Featherston] had his lighter moments too. In 1914 his friends and family were prepared for his remarriage to an attractive and suitable woman. Instead of following the customary(?) route to bliss he decided on a discreet and separate establishment — to the joint satisfaction of the two parties concerned - but not to his children. Uncle Fen was not only a scholar but he saw to it that his children read and inwardly digested those books which he thought essential to an educated man. Still, I think he was a stern fellow, without the big humanity and humour of my Grandfather. About Grandad [Edmund Boyd] there seems to be no frivolous gossip. He loved Marian. He left school at sixteen and went to work in a bank. At 30 he was a rich man and married for the second time. His first wife and two children died. Norman remembers tales of Grandad at Bond Head (he left for Dundas at 12) sowing and reaping the wheat. He had a childhood comparable [to], but infinitely less luxurious than, the farmer's son today. I remember his intense love of growing things. When he was old and rich, his gardens, greenhouses and conservatory were sights opened to the public twice a year. It was the daily duty of a grandchild to bring a single, rare and beautiful flower to his room, every morning after breakfast. I had not realized before that he loved green things because he had once worked close to and with the earth. Children andflowersmade him happy - in his old age - as a young man he must have loved the whole world. About Uncle Willy we hardly talked. He is already so well known that there will be less that is new to say about him. Vi Gwyn's note about the four brothers at Marian's death bed suggests that the book should be written like this. Perhaps she was as much a challenge to them as the young and virgin Canada (she was, at least, a change from virginity). They (the Osier boys) bore the nickname, 'The Tecumseh Cabbages' - a reference, no doubt, to their rural backwoods manners. By the time

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I knew them they were courtly, erudite men, civilized well beyond the average educated Canadian. [Jan. 10 continued] If anything differentiates me from my average neighbour it is the fact that my pockets are full of matches. Most people have an adequate woodpile in the shed (and mine is not exceptionally big) but they are either short of matches or their matches are wet - anyway, they can't start much of a blaze. My danger is the reverse: I have a superabundance of kindling and matches but I am inclined to run out of wood. O dear o dear o Rab — — what can I do for him? I keep quiet but that is not enough. Reading a delightful book [Rodocanach's] Athens and the Greek Miracle. Working hard at the latter (Greek). Alan's birthday celebrated in cheerful style. Sally [Stratford] was here for the night. Bob has two medical meetings this month. I hope they brighten his liver. J. brought home a good report! 97% in Greek, 90 in Latin, 78 in French, 50—60 in English, comp, and physics.

Jan. 15, 1951 Rab really can't afford to give up smoking, or rather, we can't afford it. His temper is uncertain enough at best. How he behaves in a manner that would shock him if he saw it in someone else. The only good is that he takes it out on me rather than on the children. He goes away on Thursday to a medical meeting. Three days of peace for me and, I hope, fun for him. The coming week is full of pesky duties. Mon. and Tues. afternoon on duty at the new Sick Kids.69 Today (Sun.) worked at Greek, poetry and meals. Helen Gunn at Mutt's. Last night dinner at Aunt Amo's. J. has some intestinal disturbance. Sun yesterday. Clouds today. Temperate. Jan. 24,1951 The last ten days have been what I'm sure my great grandmother would call 'character building days.' Early last week two tiresome days at the Sick Childrens' - doing nothing, but unable to leave a room full of

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babbling women for four hour stretches. Thurs. Bob left for Montreal and Lucerne. Friday, H. and I went to the Sadlers Wells Ballet in the aft. Program: 'Les Patineurs,' 'The Rake's Progress' and 'The Wedding Bouquet.' For some unaccountable reason I did not at any time lose myself in the performance. The fault was mine, not the performers. Sat. a.m. went to the Sick Children's to have a small growth removed from my leg. Farmer somewhat alarmed me by referring to it as a precancerous growth. Spent an unpleasant weekend, though somewhat reassured by A. Ham. On Bob's return he telephoned the Pathological and found everything in order. On Monday went to Norman's with C.B. My pleasure has been reduced (in the past week) to one thing: reading the Osier papers. It is a stupendous pile but the letters are enthralling. Properly edited they should interest the general public. Must now get back to Greek and the mss. [of Counterpoint to Sleep] for John Sutherland.

Feb. 12. After a week of cold the air is mild and grey and the snow races away in sooty streams. Last week was full of social events. Sunday supper at Zita Cook's - the Kergins and ourselves and good food made up the evening. Tues., Heather's ballet at Eaton's. The small, untrained children had great charm. Thurs., lecture at Trinity by Prof. Edison — 'Time and Loneliness.' He spoke too slowly and I itched for the printed page where I can set my own pace. Party afterwards at Dr Walters. Lunched with F.R. Scott on Wed. Pleasant talk. Lunched with Bob and the Hams on Sat. Dinner with the Farmers at the York Club, Sat. Worked reasonably consistently at Greek. No poetry. Go to Montreal soon to see W. Francis70 re. the Osier Book. Finished Greek Studies by Gilbert Murray, also The Legacy of Greece, a collection of articles by various people, Toynbee, Livingstone, Murray etc. April ii Home yesterday after a week divided between Montreal and Ottawa. The skeleton of the trip was boned as follows: arrived M. 7.45 a.m.; after a leisurely breakfast and bath at the Ritz, made my way to the Osier Library where Bill Francis greeted me with his professional affability. In almost no time I knew that we, as people, were permanent strangers. I was oppressed by the facts surrounding the man as well as by his cocoon. 84

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Presumably he is the son of William Osier. It makes me cry out 'How are the mighty fallen.' This insignificant, erudite, unimaginative little man, whose whole life has been spent lighting candles at the shrine of a father whom he will not even acknowledge! The Library itself is a delight and my attention wandered from the quest for information concerning the brothers to the books themselves. After a few hours of half-hearted conversation, intermingled with exploring the bookshelves, I left with a promise to return the next day. The main points of interest re. W[illiam] O[sler] that I learned here were as follows: deeply religious in his youth and all through medical school. Changed from the low church of his father's to High Church while in Montreal. His orthodox beliefs dropped from him gradually as he became more familiar with the scientific thought of the day. Maintained all his life the streak (Celtic?) of mysticism that is hinted at in so much of his writing. In Reid's '... [The Great] Physician,'7' she misquotes him in regard to Revere's death. She has him write a letter to ? that he expects to see Revere before long in the world to come. Bill Francis showed me the actual letter. It is a plain perversion of facts. Data (scarce) on Marian Osier Bath Francis. She had a severe disorder of the heart (huge) which ordinarily causes death at middle age and increases the risk of child bearing. She bore eleven children without more than the usual inconvenience and her case history is written up in [Sir William Osier's] Principles and Practice of Medicine. On one occasion (Bill F. relates), when she was over seventy and had strict instructions from Harold Parsons not to leave her bed owing to a flair up of cardiac trouble, Bill discovered her in the garden digging with a man-sized spade. She was dressed in what he terms a 'tea gown' and when told that she should be in bed, replied 'But I'm not out of bed, Billy.' 'What do you mean,' he asked. 'A woman without her corsets, my dear, is always in bed!' Bill remarked on the fact that he is supposed to look like W.O. and thought it strange because W.O. strongly resembled his mother and W.O. is related to him through Featherstone Osier, his mother's uncle! Aunt Jennette vetted all W.O.'s early papers, lectures etc. Marian Francis was short and after middle age excessively fat. Uncle Willy had a heavy upper lip, the reason given by B. Francis for the ever-present moustache. The story of the coat of arms: the fish at the bottom were put in to try and reconcile Revere (ardent fisherman) to his father's title. Revere was sensitive on the subject of his father's renown.

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Lunched with F.R.S[cott]. Dinner with Ottilie Howard and Marion [Wright — see note 50]. Next day: morning at the Osier Library. Afternoon sightseeing; evening, John Sutherland's party. Left for Ottawa on Friday after another session in the library. Ottawa: stayed with Betty. Very low (Betty, not me). A good time with P.K. [Page] on Monday. Then home. R. very low. April 12 The characteristic that distinguishes me from the usual woman of forty is curiosity, a desire to explore and to learn. My ability is average. My interest is phenomenal. After a month's absence, returned to Greek. Lesson with Mr Cook this afternoon. May 28th May excelled itself. A dazzling month of summer weather and spring foliage. The six hundred bulbs, planted on our hillside last autumn, bloomed in a succession of scillas, narcissi, tulips etc. The iris have started now and the honeysuckle is almost ready to drop. The apple tree by the front door was dense with blossoms and the magnolia attained the mighty number of fifteen flowers. In all, a good spring for gardens —just enough rain. April, of course, was a deluge and gave the ground a good wet start. At Roches Point the lake covered the lower part of the Beechcroft wharf until a few weeks ago. Only one weekend there this spring. Bob away a lot. Chicago, Sarnia and next week a fishing trip. Books recently read: God by Middleton Murry, Biography of the Greek People, The Quest of Proust by Andre Maurois. Have worked hard at Greek and some odd verses for the last six weeks. Am not satisfied with the progress of either. Am really quite stupid at Greek and my verse is clumsy beyond words - no, not beyond, with words, is surely a more apt description. I am astonished at my persistence in a craft of which I am congenitally incapable of mastering even its simplest rudiments. And I am thickheaded in Greek too. Any progress I make is more through my pores than through my intellect. Something has to seep in somewhere and my organs of sweat are more responsive than this limp grey matter. In short, I feel an oaf. Pat Graham was here in April. Her visit brought many things to light, though light is unbecoming to many things. A fine and much loved creature, nonetheless.

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The children are good and nice and deserve full credit. I can't see that they've had much help from their environment. My occasional hours with C.B. are the richest hours I spend with a 'person.' May 29

Greek and gardening. What a self-indulgent life! All the human and political things to be done and I stay at home with my two G's and poetry. Went to the nurses' graduation tonight at Convocation Hall. Dr Morgan made an excellent 'speaker of the evening.' It is a charming sight: the young nurses in their starched white uniforms and aprons, like so many sedate butterflies and the audience filled with admiring fathers and mothers and lovers, fills the air with streamers of tenderness. Poor Rab has a child that is dying. It is a case in which he feels that if he had acted differently it might have survived. And yet he made what seemed, and would no doubt be, nine times out of ten, the best decision. One needs enormous courage to be a doctor, courage plus a working philosophy. I do not count those men doctors who are callous. Rab isn't and therefore the grief in medicine is his anguish. May 31

When a pea soup fog of depression settled on my spirits this a.m., I determined to use the phenomenon and analyze it while I could see and feel each drop of moisture. My judgement of others in the same state is short and final — 'self-pity.' Gould I find any other element when similarly befogged? I searched with microscope and telescope, from x-ray findings and pathological slides — the diagnosis is the same for myself as for my neighbour. By self-indulgence I had lost a whole, beautiful day. The loss is not total because I watched myself carefully throughout; one half of me almost encouraged the disease in order to accurately report on both its causes and manifestations. The reasons which one gives oneself for this sorry state, are irrelevant but the symptoms are fairly constant: one has no friend in all the universe, nothing one has ever done has been worth doing while at the same time no one has ever appreciated one's quite remarkable efforts. The chest is full and heavy and tears are loose and swimming just behind the eyes. I read poetry for an hour and found myself weeping at every verse. But only

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one half of me thought I was exquisitely moved by the poet, the other half knew I was moved by the mauve vomit of self-pity. The odd point is that my observations did not dispel the gloom though perhaps they modified its intensity; what they did do was to confirm my previous belief: that when one lavishes ingots of sympathy on oneself one can hardly expect more of the same from other people. Only fools carry gold to gold mines. To be an ass and know oneself for an ass takes perhaps an inch off the ass's ears. But I am not sure. It looks as if I am overanxious to set myself above the sufferers who won't acknowledge that they suffer from self. Methinks I do protest too much; for what is needed is not only an understanding of human weakness but the courage to reduce weakness in oneself to a small fraction of the whole. Courage and understanding are both so essential to a human way of life that it is foolish to give one priority over the other, but Robert Frost says in 'A Masque of Mercy,' 'The saddest thing in life/ Is that the best thing in it should be courage ...' and later, 'Courage is what it takes and takes the more of/ Because the deeper fear is so eternal.'72 Courage, in its final test, is the extent, the area of loneliness that man can face with equanimity. And no one who lives his three score years and ten is left untried. The artist, as much or more than anyone, is shaken by the bats and witches flapping about in the attic of his solitude. His asset is that he knows his art depends, at least to a point, on loneliness. To describe the miraculous warmth of love one needs the memory of love and years of cold. To see anything clearly you have to have seen it with the inaccurate organ of the eye and then again and again when the eye is shut and the imagination supplies the meaning that the eye has missed. Self pity is a mold, a fungus. June 9 Alan and Jean Crawley arrived last night. Roches Point. June 16

Arrived with J., H., and A. at noon today. First weekend in our own cottage. Glorious heat. After nine days of people it is blessed not to talk but to listen to the lake and the evening ribbons of bird song streaming over the sky. The Crawleys' visit a huge success for me, and I hope for them. They exude a special warmth and by some miracle there was no business of 88

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'getting to know them.' A party at our house included Margaret Avison, Paul Arthur, Sybil Hutchinson, James Reaney, the Lister Sinclairs and the Robert Weavers.73 The Crawleys, Mutt and qurselves — O, and Earle Birney. Reaney, a caricature of Reaney and quite indescribable. Pleasure in all this slightly marred by a bad cold which today's heat is beginning to dissolve. Am on my bed on the verandah and a passing boat has just sent a lovely wash to break on the rocks below. No Greek, no poetry for days. Plan a long poem. Keep notebook of ideas and lines. Decide on theme then play the variations, each thing going a step farther from the original; conclude by bringing the whole thing home. Suggestion i: use the old Ulysses technique. Carry the voyager through the various continents and climates of his being. End with the historical vision that comes alas when age has made it too late for action. Sugg. 2. Try the seven ages of woman! Sugg. 3. Buy a new pen and heaps of linen white paper! Sugg. 4. Urban and rural could be symbols of two opposing forces, intellectual and sensuous. Too obvious. Sugg. 5. Let a character take possession. (Roy Daniells' 'Authority') and write a connected series of poems. BUT DO IT- Write a longishpoem. Work out a complicated problem in poetry, accepting the fact that at best it can only be partially satisfactory and at worst — o - at worst, a bore or a monster. Pratt was right when he said 'What is attempted is important too.'74 One should continually hike over difficult terrain, conscious continually of exorbitant effort. Read the fourth and last volume of Gide's Journal. It completes an amazing testament of integrity. Gide's final words on God agree with ideas I had long since formed but did not think original enough to put in words — that man makes God and must keep God alive, knowing who the creator is — man, not God. Read Ethel Waters 'His Eye is on the Sparrow' - O Land of Hope and Glory! Realize anew how impossible it would be for me to lead a social life and work. My vitality is limited. Continual contact with people exhausts my energies and leaves no power or patience for anything else. Four weeks of work then five days of congenial people, then back to work would be a healthy routine for me. Long periods of work unpunctuated by people is indeed a 'dusty answer.'

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I brought no books with me and so must write all evening. If I had no books I'd be forced to write them. Frogs croak and sing all about me. The train across the lake is due to whistle, (notes: soft thud of snow on snow miller moths cut out the three sections of the New Yorker articles entitled 'The Sea.'75) Delightful hot day. Reread a childhood favorite The Heart of the Ancient Wood — also The Wind in the Willows.^ A spider is crawling up the lamp beside my bed. Through sentimentality I cannot bear being the instrument of death although I am willing enough to hire people to do my murdering for me. June 18. Toronto Though capable of an almost 'total darkness' type of gloom, my senses incline toward the light. My head reads 'doom, doom, doom,' but my eyes and ears and skin say life is another matter - in fact they twit my silly head. June 22 Metamorphosis. On June igth, an arid, inhuman being. On June 2Oth, devoid of thought, but human with sensation and emotion. At the same time I know myself a fool. I am exposed on every flank — vulnerable once more. Surely I have enough endemic trouble. Why do I lay the seeds for an epidemic? The answer is that the lift and lilt to the imagination, the sense of rebirth are forces live enough to spur one on to the inevitable death. Mrs Kelly has left, ill. No cook for summer. What a terrible dependence I have on other people to arrange the mechanics of life. June 23 Dinner at York Club with Aunt Amo, the Merediths and Mutt. Read Christopher Fry's A Sleep of Prisoners. Learned from Buffy [Meredith] that there are ways of feeding a family out of tins. O God, O Montreal. Love is an abiding tragedy. At each fresh appearance of the phenomenon we know we're doomed, yet move like sleep-walkers into the too deep waters. I have only been drowned a few times in my life but have a wholesome dread of the pain involved in resuscitation.

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June 24 Quiet Sunday. Lunch at Mutt's. Miss the discipline of Greek. Miss work. The events of the past three weeks have left me unorganized, used up. I am coasting, waiting for the energy to surge back. O dear, I do want a cook. Can't decide about Christopher Fry's Sleep of Prisoners. Am not always sure what he means. Am beginning to run down, which means I'll soon hit bottom and the bubbles on the surface of the water will herald my journey back to normal — if I get a cook! I am a forlorn ghost when faced with concrete worlds of food. O dear, the food and produce is so inclined to concrete. My shame on the matter is not as great as it once was. Why should a poet be a cook? I do not demand that my cook be also a poet. To remember: there is no 'should' - or 'he ought.' June 2"jth

Excerpt from my old Nursery Rhyme Book: We're all in the dumps, For diamonds are trumps; The kittens are gone to St. Paul's! The babies are bit, The moon's in a fit, And the houses are built without walls. Wilmot Matthews [Aunt Amo's grandson] has polio. He is not seriously ill and the Doctor expects no paralysis. J., the Osiers and of course all the Matthews have been exposed. The summer teems with complications. No cook in sight, either for the Lodge or for us. Bob home period. Alan Gibbons has nephritis. Don't let it be as bad as it sounds.77 The complexion of the world changes so suddenly. It is only the miracle man who has a temperamental thermostat capable of quick adjustment necessary to the violent changes of inner weather. Most of us freeze and burn and freeze again. I dislike anger. In myself and in others. I am angry tonight. And my tongue is sore from biting back a flood of indignation. O let my tongue be bitten through. Justified or unjustified, I pray my anger dies a quiet death. Wilmot is recovering without paralysis. That should be enough to make us thankful as we lie down to sleep on this unhallowed eve. 9i

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I must bear in mind that one aspect of my discontent in domestic turmoil is that I cannot write. And I have things to say that nag me all day long because I'm not saying them. June 28. Roches Point Here. Feel better being close to J. during his quarantine. Thunder on the left. A slow sulky storm brewing. June 2g

The artist must protect himself from reason yet maintain at least a nodding acquaintance with that king. The artist must give imagination acres of liberty yet maintain control of that queen. A thoroughly 'neurotic' day. May ist When the guts are sick with indecision there is no health in head or heart. Every violent emotion — fear, love, pain, paradise, anxiety — throws my chemistry into chaos. I am poisoned by the act of feeling, an emotional invalid. Not to feel = death. To feel (for me) = sickness. When one is ill the moment comes when one hopes for death; it is only one moment among thousands when one hopes for life and health. Thunder and lightning on and off all day. Hot and cold. Four kittens disposed of yesterday. The luxuriance of the summer's growth goes hand in hand with the luxuriance of decay. There is more doom than man or angels dream of. Reread Trilling's The Liberal Imagination with added interest and pleasure. Incapable of work. July 3rd

Actually managed to do one hour's work on Greek! Mrs Robinson78 and her little boy arrived yesterday. I hope they stay. Water, rocking my hearing. J«£"5 The last six days defeat my vocabulary. Montreal - Frank, Alan Cfrawley] and Jean, Art Smith, the Sutherlands. Tropical weather. Windsor Hotel. Corridors. Lobsters. Miraculous voyages under the sea.

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O Canada. Curtains burning. Trains. Red shoes under my arm. Then home with all my blessings falling around me like confetti. Tonight Earle Birney spoke on C.B.C. 'Critically Speaking.' He reviewed Irving Layton, Kay Smith, Norman Levine and Counterpoint to Sleep. I was stunned at the pleasant things he had to say about the latter.79 JulyiS If Rab continues to drink I will leave him. There, I've said it. A difficult marriage, such as ours, demands the utmost in good manners. [...] The glory of the last two days had to end. My husband banged me back on concrete with his customary efficiency. I am more than willing to have a loveless, polite marriage. But he has no manners. July 23 This is the igth anniversary of our marriage. The day has passed peacefully with no mention of that distant event from anyone. Bob was up for the weekend. He was pleasant, and sober. This summer is big with events but has not yet lapsed into being summer in its own right, so to speak. I have no routine of summer. It and I are separate. During the last year I have moved away from my old mystical moods of identification with earth and animals and plants to a more human situation. And a good thing too. But, at odd moments, I am homesick, as an adolescent mourns her childhood, for the peaceful intoxication of fusion with the green growing world, although I came to see it as a dead end, an escape from being a person. Alan, Bunty and the boys arrived on Saturday. It is a joy to have them close at hand for two weeks. Bunty is a poem, while I only struggle to make a poem with words. There hasn't been one warm evening this year. And the days are uncertain, never making up their minds whether to blow hot or cold. 'If you love your love and love is water, love is always at the mercy of the wind. If you love your love and love is like a red red rose, love is always at the mercy of a thorn. If fire is love then love is at the mercy of an ash. If air is love, with hemispheres to roam, then love is lost. If love is all the wetness of the earth, it is, in arid months, Sahara dust, etc.' Am reading Santayana's Dominations and Powers. Every page has poetic passages. I am so enchanted by his powers of writing that I find

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it hard to make intellectual decisions on the contents. No philosopher since Plato has presented his case with so much poetry. Tomorrow go to town to see about the possibility of a new house. July 26 'Precariously balanced between the molecule and the milky way.' The holidays are slipping from me as water slides off the greased feathers of a duck. Have written one poem, 'The Swimming Lesson,'80 ignored my dear dead Greek. Somehow, I don't feel lazy or guilty at my idleness. There are many colours to 'do nothingness' and though my days are vacant of arduous effort, they are multi-coloured, not drab with the grey-dun of inertia. Two days in town this week. The business of the house is still unsettled. I will let others decide. Alan home from camp. A sweet child if ever there was one. I love my sons in a wonderful way. How hideous it must be to be married to a poet, an artist. With the exception of my children, I tend to treat every human relationship, or event, as good working material. I can't help myself. I want to use everything that happens to me. I am a low form of life, a sponge, that sucks in in order to expel. A male artist finds a woman who will worship him and his art. He has a chance. A female A. is a trial and tribulation to her relations and friends. But who can stop me? 'The Swimming Lesson' is going to be good but everything may be worked off by the writing. AugSth Rab, who so hates Roches Point and the atmosphere of his wife's family, is still here. His holidays were to be spent elsewhere. He goes to Sarnia for a week — one out of four. His behaviour towards me becomes daily more boorish. The only reason for his presence that I can think of is that he craves an object or person on whom he can blame his misery. Poor, poor man. I had better stop looking forward to summer. Bob's holidays make it a time of added grief and stress. A simple, worshipful soul might have lulled him through life. Poor man. Bless you. Forgive me the harm I did you in marrying you.

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Aug 16 Bob in Sarnia, Heather and Alan also. Miss the children. Helen Gunn here for the last week. Kenrick for three days. We have had good fun. I have laughed and eaten and slept. Kenrick, a true son of Helen, full of wit and brains and kindness.8' Peg and Bob [Mclntyre] for dinner tonight at Mutt's. A sunny summer's day after three days of alternating drizzle and downpours. Even the democratic robins looked down their beaks at her (him). Toads put on their warts at her approach. Etc. Sept 25. 77 Highland Ave.8* The children and I moved yesterday. It is to be a time of no decisions. The last month is something to describe years from now. The present is a time to work and there is lots to do. Sorting, packing, unpacking, looking for a house, etc. When I am too tired to work I spend an hour or so on Greek and feel refreshed. Little Alan looks ghastly. Oct2Q Five weeks done with. O the insecurity of having no plans, no house, no imaginable future. I swing between yes and no. Sometimes I feel I should grit my teeth and go back and bear it — for the children's sake — but most of the time I know I couldn't bear it, that the children would have to go through the disruption twice. It is a no-man's-land of time. I have no status. The children know and yet have never been told - can't be told until things are decided finally. I can't see my friends because I have no explanation to their questions. I can't say 'we have separated' because until Jan ist there is to be no final decision. Four days in Ottawa helped and hindered. Now the proper blues have set in. The kind that blow over low-lying marsh lands, picking up all the stagnant miseries on their way. I am a naked snail lost without a towering shell. I am guilty in the eyes of my children and in the eyes of my mirror for I am half of their anguish. Bob is the other half and the anguish is that the two halves can neither meet nor merge. In separating I know I am committing a crime - against family and children and courage. If I make it final it will be done in full knowledge of these solemn things and because I haven't the strength to do my duty. This means that separation can

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bring no blessed relief — rather, I will feel like someone who has betrayed friends under torture. I must have my own house soon. Poetry stumbles on. And Greek. I wish I was a woman with female interests, a woman with a genius for making a home and soothing a man, instead of a creature with a passion for hieroglyphics. Men have always seemed to want me rather more than they want the hausfrau type but only because they can't read their own hearts. But we should never lose sight of the glorious, untouchable sun that is love. We must remember how its rays warm and brown us in summer and the special, incredible gold, almost without heat, that spreads October radiance in and about the heart. Never let me write a word about love that is not praise of love. It is only its perversions that sting in my poetry and on my skinny skin. The hare that circles, a vulture beaked and taloned about the dove, poor thing — but beautiful because it is, in the New Testament sense, always poor and therefore able to pass through the eye of a needle. Oct3i The wind howled all day in proper Hallowe'en fashion. The sky had snow in it and the cold crept into all my crevices. Greek lesson this aft. Homer and Xenophon. Such sadness in all my five and lonely senses. J. is a comfort. He is grown up and understands something of what has happened. Heather and Alan have seldom been more difficult — poor darlings - they are cross because they are unhappy and afraid. How can I scold them for what I (we) have done to them. Will they grow up maimed - and in their turn make bad husbands? Heather will surely be a good wife — at least in the fashion of Soames Forsyte's Annette.83 How can one endure what one does to other people? I can understand the Middle Ages and Thomas Mann's Gregorius in The Holy Sinner. He sat on an island rock for seventeen years. I feel his joy in self imposed misery. Why, if I feel like this, can't I go back? Could it be worse? I think so. Imagine walking, running down a street to escape some terror, only to find the street is blind — if you turn you face the terror — you hit your head against the stone instead. It is a terrible shameful thing not to be able to do what one should do. If I could give up myself - my writing, my uniqueness (unique in the sense that we are all unique) — if I could be a saint — for it would take a saint to give up the

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riches I have discovered. But why finish? The devil takes a livelier interest in me than do the angels. Heather and Alan, dressed in this and that, went shelling out; Heather for the last time, I should think. She is caught with one foot in childhood and one in the shoe of [movie star] Betty Grable. She doesn't know whether to play or to be langorous. 1 am surprised at the bright intensity of my loneliness. What elastic feelings I still have! To feel the powerful snap of pain when someone lets go the other end. Better than the slack of string that falls, spiritless, when released. Nov 8

Four days of real winter cold and snow. Have rented a house - furnished — an ugly, happy, sunny house [i Castle Frank Drive]. I do hope we won't fill it with evil spirits. We move in eleven days. Alan still filled with the bad temper that comes from a confused woe.

Nov ii Sorted and packed all day yesterday. It is like reading one's autobiography. All the old letters and photographs etc., material and immaterial record of twenty years. But will I ever break the marriage? Bob is ill with flu. Visited him twice. The first time I sat quietly and listened to a storm of self pity with the odd threat of suicide. I left feeling that though our prospects together seemed worse than ever, I couldn't leave him. He thinks he wants to come back — in Jan. Today he was quieter and we talked pleasantly enough of general matters, until I got up to leave, saying it was lunch time. [Dr] Bill Mustard was to arrive shortly and he wanted me to stay. I told him I couldn't keep my mother's staff waiting for dinner. He turned on me, full of anger, resentment etc. I left. Nov 23

The packers moved in to 267 Rox [borough Street East] this morning. Dr. F[arrar] telephoned last night to say that Bob is determined to move into i Castle Frank Drive on Jan ist.84 I accept his decision with a deep distrust, with a new understanding of that overworked word, despair. Dinner at Aunt Amo's - Kitty [Tattersall], Jack, Mutt and I. We rocked with laughter. Kitty is dying of cancer; Aunt Amo has a lifetime of tragedy in her head and heart; Mutt and I were filled with

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my family troubles. The gaiety was genuine but it was the laughter of people who didn't know where their next laugh was coming from. They went on to the opera. I came home to find the children had quarreled violently and the tears and bitterness equalled anything on the international or matrimonial stage. I sent them to bed and then went to each separately and talked of love and forgiveness — I, who have not enough love or forgiveness to willingly go back to their father. Dr Parfitt died in Boston two days ago. A good Greek. A dear man. Alan Gibbons was here last weekend. Bless him, and bless the Hams. O there are so many honourable, good people that one rejoices in spite of oneself. Without difficulties I would never have known Dr. Farrar, and each great human being whose orbit touches ours enriches us. Greek continues. Homer, Xenophon and some grammar. If I go back to Rab, will I ever write poetry again? A ghastly mismating — for him and for me - but I have said all I have to say on that. I want to mine the vein of gaiety; with Bob I'm gagged and trussed when it comes to digging for gold. What megalomania to think of one's insignificant contribution to poetry when human beings are involved. Poetry is my mania. Tomorrow I have dinner with Rab. In 'dreams of glory' this is what I plan to do - wearing the robe of St Anne and with a faint but not ostentatious halo circling (and muting) my witty head to lovingly welcome him back to the family hearth. This is what I may do — make him-so mad that he won't want to come. We are a fine pair of sinners and no doubt heavenly justice has ordained a fit penance, chained us each to each, with no escape till death us do part. It will be hard on poor old death though - having his sting removed. Reread You Never Can Tell and Man and Superman and Don Juan in Hell, a delight. I think it unlikely that Shaw overestimated himself. He is a great Puritan. At moments he reminds me of Plato. He has the same distrust for the artist without a MESSAGE and yet, like Plato, he is an artist. And it is the artist in him that impells us to listen. Nov28 A chastening day. Bob came up after lunch and blasted at Mutt about me. She was shaking when he left. Went to Whitney to talk over Heath's troubles with the principal and Mr Allan. Hope she will settle down and cause no more disturbance. After dinner Alan let loose on all the things he wasn't allowed to do —

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cap pistols, a bike etc. Then Heath got the curse for the first time. She seemed reasonably serene. Nov 30

High cock a lorum it was a fine beautiful November day. The sun soft and shiny as Spring and the earth melting and wet and ready for resurrection. Poor thing — it's going to get frost and snow and ice instead of daffodils. The beautiful earth has as rough a time of it as the creatures that inhabit her. But o what powers of complaint she has: cut worms in the roses, blighted crops, eroded land and the old reliable corn bore (borer?). When the domestic weather blows hot and cold and hurricanes shake the house, I'd like to expose my wheatfields, beaten and wasted, the pests eating the leaves of my roses, and all the frostbitten flowers. Nature has no inhibitions, can never be civilized, thank god. Which god? The isolation of proximity. Dec 17, i Castle Frank Drive Third night here. I hate my room, the house, the smell, the endless ugly furniture, grinning with dust. I hate myself for being so loaded with ill-will. My guts and my precious little hoard of reasonableness have melted, like pennies in a time of inflation.

1952 Jan5 Heath and Alan in Ottawa. J. spent a week at the Point. I went to Highland Ave. Bob stayed here and gave a party which he did not want me to attend. Christmas was full of snow. Mountains of it. Dinner at Aunt Amo's. April 24 No new poetry for months. I knew I wouldn't write in this house. The winter has been endured. Spring, summer arrived with trumpets and bells ten days ago. After weeks of greyness and rain, six days of real heat and now clear sunny weather, becoming to daffodils and magnolia. Rab has lost twenty pounds since last September. He spent our first month in this house in bed with sinus and many weekends since then

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laid up with one thing or another and the bottle. He is now in a sober mood and the atmosphere has cleared accordingly. We have had noone to the house and have seldom gone out together. I go back with the children to Highland Ave. the end of May. Bob goes to the golf club. Who will live in the new house in the autumn? Thoreau — Walden — page 289: 'I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression ... the commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.' Page 292: 'However mean your life is ... it is not so bad as you are ... The fault finder will find fault in paradise.' Page 351: 'The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world and feeds on his own marrow.' Page 359: 'A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the sea.' I am a woman waiting in a station. I have no destination, avoid the ticket master who would ask 'where to?' I have been dispossessed so long that I'll board the first train that stops. My journey will not be planned - it will be the result of weary waiting on a bench, nausea at the over-heated, ill-ventilated station. One must, in the end, leave the temporary shelter; too often the long cold wait for transportation numbs our sense of choice. We go, finding in the verb reason enough. 'ancient rectitude and vigour of nature ... where the jay still screams.' May 5 Fable for C.B. 'Once upon a time there flew in the world a wild duck travelling south in rough autumnal weather. She made a forced landing at 20 Oriole Gardens, the property of a great naturalist. Seeing her distress, he put out food, and when the wind blew, wet from the east, opened his door and let her warm her feathers at his hearth. As the days grew shorter and the snow determined to stretch its length on the earth, she became more reluctant to leave, afraid of the hazard of clouds and sky. Day by day he tamed her till she settled to a barnyard fowl. But then the naturalist was like a man divided. His professional self was proud that his technique achieved a metamorphosis. The rest of him was bothered by the acquistion of a tame, unwanted duck. He thought continually of applesauce and how, if she'd been younger, she

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might grace a table - then a wave of sad responsibility ruffled whose feathers? The duck, too, took note of the situation. She was tied now to a permanent, amiable quack. Tied by love and gratitude, she must forego her nature. A civil bird, civilian, docile, fenced and fat with accepting scraps, the compromise of beak and claw and wing. She loved her benefactor, she loved a part of civilization, but her feathers lost their colour, her voice its resonance. She was lost in primeval homesickness for life beyond the immediate expediency of man with man. Spring came in a gush of flame. She heaved her domestic body up with memory of wings and over the fence she flapped her inborn dream.

May 6 Thoreau, page 15: 'I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail.' Title for a poem. My hound is lost to the morning scent of game gone over the hill. And though his baying barks the membrane of my ear my whistle mutes its note in deference to his goal, the fox, the bloody brush and trumpet of the kill. My big bay wasn't a bay But a snow white stallion Drinking the dark from a pond Till a host of wild white Whistling swans coasted Down through air, To rest on the night reflected from the stallion's pond. The snow they moved on, the black subconscious water, they tucked their arrogance under their wealth of wings and floated the night away. My bay wasn't a bay but a white wild stallion/the dawn that winged the swans from pool to sky to northern nesting grounds, gave wings to Pegasus, and his hoofs go ringing on clouds. I am devout, a believer, an orthodox pagan.

May 13 I would set up my gods against God. The time is ripe for revolution and the gods have armed themselves, after centuries underground, and are now equipped to depose the dictator. The western world has fought so

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often in the cause of freedom, yet meekly accepts ONE GOD. It is time we reverted to the Grecian tolerance of many. It is odd how enduring certain untruths can be. The idea that matter is mortal but the spirit immortal. We know little of the latter but we do know that the former persists, in one form or another, can't be got rid of. A kidney won't remain eternally a kidney but throughout its many metamorphoses the chain is never broken. The spirit offers us no such evidence. When I see the sky let down the first white flakes of winter, I fill up with doubt, mistrust eternity. When growing sod lies dumb, anaesthetized By ice, I cable Lloyd's for odds on the resurrection. When I lie white as Christmas In a home-made coffin No one guesses my sleeping strength Till April turns me And I breathe and splinter the Narrow confines of my rigid bed. See the winter hold the spool Of summer quiet on an icicleSee the spool of summer sudden Whirl. Its friction melts The rigid axis May 20

New Year's 12.01 a.m. The door shall open on a country bathed in the milky snow of a virgin year. The sky should trumpet tidings of the multiple birth of stars - and we should shed a thousand lairs of skin and meet a revelry of hemispheres with live and tender epidermis. Instead we over-party, fall asleep, our only thanksgiving 'another year killed.' Man's epitaph might well be 'Here lies the killer of time.' Reading the letters of Rilke. A 'natural' poet. May 21

Words heavy with the sediment of time. I would like to found a school based on the five senses. The young are still physically acute and might remain so in maturity if encouraged 102

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to listen for the rhythm, pitch, tune and dissonance of city traffic, birdsong, wind, water and factory whistle; to taste, curiously, lemons, honey, cheese, mushrooms, bread, meat and all the fruits of the earth; to see, minutely, the veins of leaves and grass, growing like Cleopatra's needles all around them, to stretch their eyes for distance, to focus them for the glory under their young noses, to smell, as an animal smells, with all its being; to touch with skin receptive to the endless variety of texture in matter. When the senses are trained and alert, the head looks after itself.85 As we pass through stages of evolution in our mother's womb, from amoeba to fish to small hairy apes, then on to manikin, so we pass through the historic and prehistoric civilizations in our day on earth, the staggering infant caveman, followed by the cruel Aztec, then Babylon at twelve, and Greece, if we are lucky, in our morning man or womanhood; our middle age is Roman, governed by law or vice, depending on temperament; the Middle Ages compass our guilty dreams, the Renaissance, a moment, short, of victory, can burst on any life between the cradle and the grave. The age, termed modern history in the school books, waits, uncategorized — is it senility or a fresh, restless brand of youth? Are we caught in new puddles of creation or consumed in a last sacrificial burial pyre? And is there a phoenix? If I could close my eyes and wish, I'd wish for a new bright instrument to shape my craft; a pen that fountained out the words, unspraying in a torrent all the ancient sediment in each vowel's origin, splashing the page at last with hieroglyphics, new and nourishing as rain on the drought-dry papyrus. Suddenly to be the pen and master of a page! To chain the Bloor Street traffic to a line of hub-bub in a book that rose, in quietness, above its noise. To be or not to be has become irrelevant. The job ahead is to metamorphose my five senses into a Parker '51 [fountain pen]. May 22

As sun baked skin Opens its pores To let the moist night in. June w, Highland Ave. Weekend at Roches Point with J., Alan and Alan's friend Ian. Hams arived Sunday. J. ill. Terrific hurricane-type storm. Window blown in. 103

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Tree down. Mon. brought J. to town. Dr MacM. suspected polio but it seems not to be. These months of waiting — not knowing what I am waiting for have given me a taste of prison. And the anguish of living in other people's houses. The new house [4 Cluny Drive] is like a mirage of water to a thirsty man. The work to be done seems endless. I can't believe it will someday be finished, furnished and inhabited. Will it be lived in and loved? I have been so involved in the trivia of moving and settling and buying a house and planning the alterations and preparing the children's clothes for camp that there has been no interval long enough in which to stop and listen - certainly no stretch of peace in which to organize what I hear into words. Suffering sometimes drives you like wind to pen and paper but eras of grey anxiety and stress have too little life in them to beget anything, as weeks of dull still weather irritate the nerves until they cry to be burned by sun or torn by storm. Pain, caused by a human whom you love, causes a live anguish; pain caused by one whom you have ceased to love is a foul thing and not fit for paint or pen. We write from our humanness, from that special memory or sight that we alone of living creatures possess — the ability to grieve although we are warm and fed, and, at times, the ability to sing in moments of danger. But when our emotions are continually involved in dislike (hate is too repulsive a word) we lose our God-like characteristics and become mouldy as old bread and maggots nibble at our generosity, even in our dreams. June 15 If I was god I'd give me Senses five, precision instruments To chart a way through rock And mossy riddles of antiquity. I'd touch, Taste, smell out heaven and hell, With ears pitched supersonic As a bat's I'd hear; And tawny as a tiger, night And day, my eyes Would stalk the world, A sun dial charts the time If nerve ends lace

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The skin of fingers And are so fine Their tips will clock the pulse of leaves. Didactic blows the long North wind, The East wind whines with rain The West wind blows my blankets off But the South's in my arms again. The West wind whistles when he finds The South wind in my arms. And whistles (blusters threatens) when he learns I hold the south wind, sleeping, in my arms. June 26 '52. Thurs. Brought the children and Mrs Kelly to R. Point on Monday. Went back to town Tuesday. Packed the camp trunks and piled the rest of our belongings into the car and returned this a.m. Heat very hot in Toronto. A lovely breeze dried my sweating bones as soon as I stepped out of the car. Is it more agonizing to be an adolescent or to look after one? The delicate problem of giving them adequate rope, yet not enough to enable them to hang themselves. Heather is feeling her oats — or whatever it is a young girl feels when she causes her mother anxiety. The peonies are nearly over. Syringa bursting out and daisies everywhere. I've never known such a year for daisies. The fields are cumulous with daisies. Put a deck chair in the sun on Mon. and on Friday they are pushing through the cracks. II p.m. The last adolescent has returned. J. badly sunburned from sailing all day in a bathing suit. Applied cold cream to yards and yards of back, then bade the late-comer goodnight. Yet what a blessing responsibility is. Without it we do not know if we exist. With it, we are conscious, for better or worse. And consciousness is the only key we have. J. has just put out his light in his boat-house bunk. The special peace of mothers descends on me when all my children lie, at rest I hope, within my ear's area. Rab goes to [Dr] Kanner in Baltimore, July i8th. Cocktails with Aunt Amo and [her daughter-in-law] Janet. But Oh

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the daisies this fine summer. They run down the bank as if they would move on to the lake and make it another field of conquest. I think the trees in Southern Ontario dominate the landscape. In summer they are such great plumes of glory we forget the lack of proper hills or mountains. I hope I never see the slimy plague of caterpillars eat away their shade. Tonight, at sunset, infinitesimal, translucent clouds flecked the tender pale green opal blue of the sky. The sun went down, a self-contained bright crimson ball, and slowly the wind dropped. Now, there is only a little lapping of water and the leaves hardly turn in their sleep. The moon, new born, shone from the blue green sunset sky. July 7. The Lodge.

Caged in a bedroom. However the wind blows I can't hear the sound of water. I am absurd to care so much. Somehow, somewhere, I will find a house where I can grow and put down roots — or, better still, step beyond the point of needing my own possessions, garden etc. At the moment my broken marriage has so shattered my confidence, my world, that I cling, like a child, to anything familiar. I think that every poem I've written in the last year has the word 'home' in it at least once. A displaced person must be acutely conscious of the psychological dangers. First and foremost the giving up of standards in order to gain some kind of popularity in recompense for losing love. Don't, don't, don't do it. The cocktail parties, the mass get-togethers are no substitute. To desire, after all these years, the approval of the group, will butcher the poetry possible still from my pen. I want now the courage to be me. Now that I have no support and the world is saying I'm some kind of idiot and Bob is Mr Perfection. I know what Bob is like and that should be enough. Let me not stoop to trying to prove something to the public. Now is the time to prove only that I mean what I have said for all these years. Friends are priceless, the public cheap. I hate to see how sensitive I am becoming - afraid of being asked why Bob isn't here — becoming like Bob and concerning myself with the trivia of what people think of me. Perhaps it is useful. Perhaps it makes me more like other people and will make me write from a more acceptable point of view. What a lot I owe to Bob. His irresponsibility on money matters and in his personal behaviour has made me (more or less) responsible. Being a D.P. gives me a sense of sympathy with all the various kinds of D.P.'s in the world. I was too rich and poverty is

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only truly understood by those who have a taste of it. All this is in protest against a big cocktail party and supper at the Cooks (and I love the Cooks). What torture we suffer in the name of pleasure! No, no more. Toronto. July g Mrs Wplkinson] in the hospital with a broken hip. Very low yesterday but Bob reports more cheerful news this evening. From Qacquetta Hawkes'] A Land: ' In bed I can sleep, here I can rest awake.' [p 7] Page n: '... through the shedding of innumerable lives.' Page 12 'lying on Jupiter I'd see a sky radiant with ten moons.'86 The elements are always at work to level the world — sun, rain, frost, peel the mountains etc. July 2Qth Heather and Alan return tomorrow. My pleasure at seeing them will be modified by knowing that before long they must learn of their parents' separation. Two days in town. The house is moving slowly toward completion. In a few weeks the furniture etc. can be installed. The painter is a flop but the house will be livable, cheery, and, after all the growing pains, very much ours. Aug 6

Dear Bunty: the house somehow seems blessed, having had you and Alan and the children in it. The echoes are full of George's solemn and intelligent conversation, of William's queries for 'nails' and 'feeders.' I'm sorry for all the diseases you had but glad to hear from Mum that William has recovered. The house is so spotless I fairly tiptoe about. The lake tonight is like silk. It touches the rocks and the ears as chiffon touches the skin. The people who fail are the people who cannot reconcile themselves to the scut work necessary to any endeavour, in the arts, in the professions or in business or on the land. If we recognize that what we do should be one point high inspiration and nine points drudgery, we'd have a fair chance of success - provided, of course, we were capable of the one point high inspiration.

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Oct i. Cluny Drive. I have become a bore to my friends — Dorothy, Arthur [Ham], a bore to myself, my children, everyone. I live in a world of one obsession. What is to become of Rab? To what extent am I responsible for his present state? for his future? Shall I get a job? Can I make myself write at home? I have no feeling, no source of poetry left in me. My only sensation is a continual feeling of physical nausea. Nothing gets through to me. Sun on my face I don't feel, or rain or kindness and I am almost indifferent to the people who think ill of me. I am nothing but THE PROBLEM and it is insoluble and I go round and round, too dizzy to care. I will advertise in the paper 'Lost: my old cantankerous self that somehow always managed to pull on the bootstraps and save the inner situation. Come back. All is forgiven.' If my ad. is answered, if I salvage anything, I will listen to the music of Mozart and remember what Lister Sinclair said 'More tragic than Beethoven because he writes above the tragedy.' From now on I must write 'above the weather' - I can almost imagine it, but I can no longer conceive of the storm. It is here and the hail and clatter are such that I huddle, with eyes closed, incapable of describing the phenomenon. Bob has talked to four psychiatrists and one physician since July. I would like a day of prayer. I'd pray to Zeus, Poseidon, Athene and Aphrodite to give me back my powers. I would like to make another song. Is there a song in having nothing to say? T.S. Eliot thought so. Or one could be Yeatsian: How new is the morning Rush to work, Ribbon of cars, Garland of sun On the red rimmed eyes of the clerks. How old is the rush to the grave Said the old man. etc. How dear is the noon day break Jostle for pie - (O high is the apple In a lunch obsequious eye) The queue for the grave is quiet Said the old man.

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Oct2I

Roches Point yesterday with Mutt and Muriel. Snow on the ground when we left Toronto but it vanished at the outskirts. A day of fierce beauty. Sun, a wild wind and the trees beside themselves with colour, on the ground and on the branches. I like them best just before the end, when the thinning out process prunes the landscape — almost bare trees in the open fields, then the thick palette of the woods. The lake was oceanic — very green blue — the whole day flamboyant, exhibitionist, but what an exhibit! Bob in the Royal Victoria hospital in Montreal. Bob Cleghorn in charge.87 John Sutherland in town last week. Good party at the [Robert] Weavers. Recent reading: Science and Civilization and The Culture of Cities, both by Lewis Mumford. The second is full of repetition from the first. The last page of a fitfully kept journal. Will start a nice fresh book with fresh paper, and no doubt fill it with stale ideas. My eyes are burning From the smoke of bonfires And the blaze of bonfires crackling On the boughs of trees. I stand in line with poplars Moving slowly north. I line up with the poplars, Heading north and docile wait in shuttered sight For the bandages of snow To cool the inflammation In my autumn eyes. To cool the gaudy speculation Of the membrane With winter's 'no.' Oct 28 '52 [Written on back cover of exercise book] Started writing again today. The great thing about poetry is that it forces honesty on the poet. In poetry I can make no excuses for myself. 109

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The self-fooling drops away. I always write directly from the emotions forced on me by personal experience. And in the writing, the experience is opened up to the light and air. I could substitute the word 'poetry' for 'honour' and mean what most people mean by the latter. My poetry is my 'word of honour.' Nov 4th. 7952 Eisenhower, Stevenson. Both names have three syllables. Today the whole world voted in the secret poll of the heart for one or the other. I voted for Stevenson and the 11.15 p-m. news reports a victory for Eisenhower. [The bottom half of this first page of a new book, a formal silver file resembling a wedding album, is torn off. The centre parts of pages 2 and 3 are also torn out, as are two full pages between 22 December 1952 and 21 December 1953.] Nov 25

This evening, Arthur Ham warned me to be on guard against getting ego-gratification out of calamity. Good advice. It is easy to drift into the mood of 'the special one with the special misfortune.' It is better to get to work than to wallow in others' sympathy, deserved or undeserved. And, from a purely practical point of view, sympathy has a brief life. There is always a new calamity to catch the public fancy. The chronic calamity soon becomes a chronic bore. Dec 6th or thereabout The last verse is always the problem. The Greeks loved the circle and one is tempted to come back to the point from which one started. It is not complete enough. I can only complete a poem by suggesting at the end, to myself and the possible reader, a new direction. I wish a poem to be technically finished but spiritually to have a question mark at the end. The 'final answer' provokes intelligent minds and they will take up axes and chop down dogma - even the dogma of sublime poets. Dante can be burned on the stake of his own certitude. Poetry should perhaps be nothing more than a springboard, a means for the necessary bounce to send imagination up and out into adventure, then down to healing

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waters. Or is it only a means by which certain temperaments adjust to being alive? Words as a ritual for those incapable of prayer. Dec 8th

Xmas shopping. Liza for tea. Robin and Pat [Harris] for dinner tomorrow. Vicky [the Standard Triumph car] belongs to Howard Chapman. I feel tearful at losing her. Even though she hasn't been a member of the family since May. Rosedale school play last night. Alan charming in my blue cape as the herald. He acted well and thought himself most adorable. Which he was. Why not lie on the cold hard floor And learn, along the spine, how soft beds were. Dec. 22. '52

Christmas shopping done. The children bored. No snow, no ice. J. sleeps all day. I am crotchety though goodness knows why. The last two weeks have been relatively peaceful. Even Bob's telephone calls are moderate. I imagine an attendant in the room with him and he is neither abusive nor over-excited. Aunt Amo continues to improve. A strange Christmas for us all — no Elm Ave. dinner. Bob in a hospital. The children suddenly grown up and away from the wild excitement of previous years — even Alan.

1953 Dec 2ist, 1953 Start again. Summary of months. Feb: Bob left the hospital, came to Toronto, returned to Boston. March: Rumours that he wanted a divorce. April: My lawyer telephoned to ask if I was willing to divorce him. Bob wished to remarry - 22 year old nurse who had looked after him at McLeans. Yes, indeed, I said. May: legal paraphernalia. June, July, August: waiting, Roches Point. Two weeks in Toronto, writing — good evenings with intelligent men. Now and again F.S. [Frank Scott]. September: back to town. Pericarditis.88 A week with death in bed with me and I too tired and ill to kick him out. And yet he left. Pain and then incredible fatigue for weeks. The court room. Osgoode [Hall]. Alan [Gibbons], protecting but always without fuss. Bob drunk, so the two

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lawyers said. Consultation with judge. Case allowed to go on. 5 min in the stand, then out of court. Oct. Nov. Dec.: trying to get back physical, mental health. Beaten. Then a small upswing - down again — up — down. Ruined as far as work is concerned. The let-down, reaction, everyone predicted a year ago came with and after the acute illness. The sense of death, will-making, the children's future without a parent, left me almost unconscious of life in my own flesh. I still feel only precariously here, uncertain, not at home, ill at ease. And the manner in which I have chosen to live takes high courage. And I have high courage, in my head and heart, but it does not extend to the highways and byways of my nervous system. We are domestic creatures in the end and want to sit with the beloved in front of the fire and warm our toes and read a book. I am the most timorous and apprehensive of women and my recklessness is a constant source of surprise to me. Knowing my timidity I can almost admire the foolish aspects of my adventurous spirit which dictates to a quivering body. Christmas has come down on me like lead. Again I write a poem on it. Three in three years. Christmas is worse than spring. Christmas means holy families and we were that in my childhood and when my children were young. O Spring is still grand because it goes beyond the holy to the wholly. It belongs to tramps and the dispossessed and lovers. It is not domestic. Xmas is domestic and I am homesick for domesticity though God knows I hate its guts at times, and who wouldn't? There is a season for everything and Christmas is the season for domesticity. Summer is the season to remove all of the head except the mouth and nose. Sit in the garden and eat strawberries or lie in the lake and blow bubbles. Learn through the senses in summer; in winter let the intellect recall what the summer taught. Autumn is another thing. There, you're poised between the body - heart and head - with all the scarlet intimations of life and death, heaped and burning bonfires, inside, outside, everywhere fire and ash and a phoenix. Dec 22nd. '53

Struggled with a new poem for three days. It is dull and has a nasty, phony ring. Feel my poetic ability has dropped to zero. I half know the reason why or at least I have an intimation. I am losing the habit of honest communication with myself. I am on the defensive. Failure in marriage, uneasy suspicions that I may be failing again, have already

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failed, my children. I have no proper pride in myself. I neither work hard nor begin to use my small ability. Time runs away and I am left sitting, wringing my hands because I have a divorce in process or pericarditis or Christmas shopping to distract me from my purpose. I feel continually the yellow taste of selfdisgust puckering my mouth. And all the time I lie and say 'This is all I can do.' I am soft, have become softer. What poem ever came from anything but a hard centre? In this journal I must explore the cabbages under which I'm hiding. The most unpleasant fact, so far brought up to the sun, is this. As a wife I abdicated. Certainly Bob was no great shakes as a husband but if one of us had succeeded, that one might have carried the other. Why shouldn't it have been Anne? I have no faith in my female nature, in the compartment of life where womanly intuition tells us the moment for submission and directs us into a thousand domestic niceties. I know myself ungifted am/lazy. Therefore I feel complete collapse of personality unless I am an artist with a real contribution to make. And what has always been a terrible doubt, in these last weeks mounts to a nightmare. Then what? I think it an approximate truth to say that my inherent melancholy, apprehension etc. has been kept within bounds only by two things: the glorious stir and excitement when I am creating and the discipline imposed by the struggling poem — and, of course, my delight at the physical world and my curiosity. But if I am not a poet? Never was one or have ceased to be one? Could I go on without some sort of creative work with words? That is why I'm frightened to go dry. It is a death sentence. Only great projects interest me. And each poem starts off a king, even though it may end a pauper. I am not too overwhelmed at the thought that time eventually consumes all things, all man's glorious and inglorious works and this very planet itself. My need is to be alert, at work, contributing in some way to my era. To write a good poem is to achieve a kind of brotherhood with all the poets of all the ages who have written good poems, a brotherhood with musicians and painters etc. etc. and for the same reason - and with carpenters and cabinet makers and gardeners, with all men and women who are lit with the love of their craft. There is the high craft of being a wife and a mother but I do not seem to have the feel of it. Perhaps, not too bad with the children but miles below what I desire to be. My limitations as a poet equal the limitations of my head and heart. I have the necessary skill with words, the recklessness. The reason my poetry promises so much and delivers so seldom is explained by a block in n

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my personal development. I no longer need to worry too much about finding suitable language to express my meaning. It is my meaning I must wrestle with. What have I to say? What comes first, second, third? Or when and why does third come first on Tuesday and first come later in the week? I am agin so much. What am I for? Perhaps it can be worked out in this journal. Dec. 23rd Already the journal has helped. I knew this morning why the poem had no relation to poetry. I may even have made it a poem, despite myself. Worked on it most of the afternoon. Another hour or two this evening. If it is not good it does not matter - it can be tossed out as a dream - not a nightmare. Self-pity is as unendurable in music, poetry as it is anywhere else. Always nauseous. I am often guilty. Often. Heather at a dance. J. at movie. Alan in bed. Alan, Bill [Scott] and I decorated the tree. In the end I couldn't resist it. The smell, the lights, the sweet and heavenly absurdity of all the odds and ends. Had the last glorious moment, tossing on the glitter and the tinsel. And now to read Virginia Woolfs Writer's Diary. Present from F. Dec. 24th '53

Quite pleased with poem. Idiom and idea completely changed from original concept. Uneventful day. Chores all done ahead of time. Called on Douglas's - Mutt, Betty, Betty Howe and Marget Northwood89 came in for a drink before dinner. Filled stockings, arranged presents under the Christmas tree. Bath, bed, re-wrote poem. Now that Christmas is here I can bear it. If only I waited for things to happen, instead of living like the coward (who) dies a thousand times. Love people in small doses, work in small doses, food in small doses, love in small doses. A small woman. Small heart, head, stomach, genitals. Dec. 25 '53

Ah. It is over. And it went well. Pleasant morning, opening presents (interrupted by two telephone calls from Bob for the children), lunch at Mutt's, quiet afternoon reading [Walt Kelly's] The Pogo Papers; dinner at Aunt Amo's — only 24 and the better for being small. Don and Jan [Matthews] and their five, all the Merediths, the Clarkes, the Wilkinsons and Mutt. J. superb in tails. Charades and fun.

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Dec. 26th '53 On this date I am always smitten with a passion for order, neatness in the house. After weeks of Christmas clutter I yearn for clean, bare rooms. Re-arranged the confusion in the bookshelves in my bedroom, brought a semblance of order to J.'s masses of records, magazines, pipes, camera equipment, etc. How sad he was at the result. This, and not spring, is the psychological moment for housecleaning. Spring is for gardens and windows. Cocktail party at the Sheards. Wrote seven thank you letters. Children lunched with Bob. Dec 29 '53

Alan in Sarnia and Heather at the Matthews' dance. O the agony of the young. J. so big and clever, so small and frightened. Lunch at Suzanne [Kergin's]. Women talking capital C Culture. Suzanne and I quietly rebellious as they climbed their ladders. Finished V. Woolfs A Writer's Diary. Felt a painful kinship — as if I am her untalented younger sister — but so much her sister, herself, that I could have written the book — if I could write. Also read Helen Waddell's Peter Abelard. Another remarkable woman. Have started Around Theatres by Max Beerbohm - good contrast, with its crisp satiric style. Christmas at least leaves me with fresh reading matter. And my carol is not too bad, may have something of the quality of Benjamin Brittain's 'Ceremony of Carols.' Though I was not conscious of it while writing, I think his music influenced the mood of the poem — archaic - modern. Other recent reading: Douglas LePan's new book of poems,90 Maurois' Life of Georges Sand, a very scholarly life of Buddha, So Little for the Mind, by Hilda Neatby, The Hill of Devi, by E.M. Forster, the new Life and Works of Freud. Did a proper foolish thing today. Had the front of my hair bleached. Horrible. And how I must suffer for months for a childish itch to cut a dash. When my hands are claws will I take to painting my nails red? The last ten years of nightmare and strain, the divorce, the illness, will take years to digest and assimilate — more years than I am likely to have. Relief from powerful tensions has its own problems. The tendency is to invent new ones because that is the familiar environment. If I can only put work first there will be no insurmountable difficulty. But have I ever, will I ever? So equally balanced between strength and weakness the scale balances and I go nowhere. My fear is always that the scale will tip and sink in weakness.

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Dec 30 '53 Only a week to go and the holiday season will be done with. Children will be at home and in bed before midnight. Activities will be routine and I will have leisure to write if leisure is what I need. I wonder. In spite of the endless odds and ends and parties and children's affairs, I managed to write one poem in the last fortnight and have filled some pages of this journal and have read six, eight books. I need to be pushed, to have leisure removed. Then I stir my stumps and say 'This will never do. I must have time to write, to read.' And I make time. Easy life swamps me like an unroasted marshmallow. A life of strain stimulates until it breaks me with some kind of illness. Accept the fact that tension and the disease of intelligence are necessary ingredients of all creation outside the simple, biological. But is there anything simple in biology — in animal reproduction? It is more complex than the most obscure writing of the philosophers. Nothing is simple. The mission of artists is to simplify, show relations. Am in the mood for unadorned poetry. My gift of the gab is hushed and I want to hear what I have to say, not how I say it. I wish J. would come home so that I might sleep. Children are my discipline. Without them I would be two hundred times more lazy, selfindulgent, irresponsible. They keep me within bounds, give my life a pattern, tie me, if only by my little finger, to the proper, respectable world. And what admiration I have for the middle class. It produces the workers, the makers, scientists, poets, teachers, painters, composers, etc. etc. I tell myself over and over and over again because I'm inclined to find they stink. New Year's Eve. w.p.m. Hot bath, bath salts and now in bed. A delicious way to spend a difficult night. Though I once loved Christmas I cannot remember loving more than three or four New Year's Eve parties. And the last of those started years of troubles. Now it is best spent alone. And I can say that 1953 was better than '52, '51, '50, '49, '48, '47, '46 etc., all the way back to '41 - in spite of illness, divorce and the strain of last Jan. Feb. March and April. 1953 at least straightened out a few tangles and Bob and I never saw each other, except briefly in court, during those twelve months. Alan home from Sarnia. J. has gone to the Point. Heather is at a

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party. The house is quiet. Christmas tree and cards have been tossed away. In this peace, surrounded by books and the possibility of a new poem stirring, I can hardly believe that this is the great night for revelry, that the city is teeming with paper hats and horns and policemen and sad and happy drunks. Bunty's baby should soon be born. The days will get longer, the sun braver. Do we need these wild few weeks of festivities to drown our conscious or unconscious terror of a northern winter? Do we wake up after the last hangover and say 'There, we've laid the Arctic wolf for another year?' I don't know. Today the wind howled and crept through every window. Temp, between 15 and 20 but inside or out one was cold from the sound of the wind. No snow, and harsh dust blowing everywhere. Snow appeases the mind and body so that it accepts the chill. Then the world is soft although it glitters. But frozen earth ceases to be earth and becomes mere dirt. And dust storms of frozen dirt fill us with images of a waste land. Let a little snow fall on the new year, like novocaine on the exposed nerves of grass.

'954 Jan ist, 1954 The poem stirred and rushed into being. Title, techniques, form. Early Elizabethan lyric treated in contemporary manner. Serious light verse. This journal begins to serve its purpose. It puts me in touch with words and the strays wandering in my head and before I know it I'm off on another expedition of language. Dinner at the Douglas's. Such a good house to go to. How I will miss them if they go back to Montreal. Bill Mustard called this a.m. Very gloomy about Bob. [...] The snow came while I slept. A small covering but the dust is gone, the cold in some way justified and the mammals reconciled. This country seems to produce few artists. Yet it produces the climate of their inner weather. Great frosts, great rains, great droughts and heat. Perhaps we are not needed where the external world tells the story for us. 'Once upon a time,' we say and crash goes the thunder or down comes a foot of snow. It hardly seems worth while to go on with the tale.

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Jan 2 '54 'Techniques' suddenly seems silly, arch, ugh - . Cocktail party at the Thomas's. Nice people, was sorry to leave for seven o'clock dinner with the children. Heather at party. J. at movie. Alan in bed. Four more days of holidays. Would like to dash into another poem so that my eye and ear will feel cool and dispassionate about the last. 30*5*54 Yesterday, went back to work on the Osier papers after five months desertion. Worked five hours one day, four today. It hit me all of a sudden that the job must be finished, at least to the point where it is fit to be shown to a publisher. Then he can decide whether the material has possibilities. I can't live with myself and this nagging unfinished business. Already feel lighter, happier because I've accepted the fact. Work is the only climate in which I thrive, in which anyone thrives. Knowing this I am surprised at my reluctance to be a busy bee. Don't I want to thrive? Possibly not. When I'm in the swing of writing I read without talent, with half my attention. But if I can't write I read creatively — with speed, awareness and a wide-awake critical sense. Now, after a long afternoon working on the Graigleigh section, I long to slide between the covers of a book and spend the evening on the receiving end of literature. But can I? No. I read a few pages and then take up this journal. When I put this down I'll take up my last poems. And so it goes and I'll be far too stimulated to sleep and curse myself for lack of moderation. Bunty and Alan have another boy [Jack]. All goes well. The U.S. becomes more and more an undesirable among nations. Certain birds that used to migrate to Florida for the winter now refuse to cross the border — cardinals for instance. Heather just home from an evening skating at Rosedale Park. A Dutch doll with two round red spots on her cheeks and her yellow hair. Back to school on Thursday. Jan 6 Worked an hour this morning, four hours this aft. on Osleriana. Again depressed about it. Think it dull, stupid reading. But I know I have to get it to Gray.9' It has to go that far. Writing keys me up so that I can't

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let go of my ideas. Not writing leaves me hopelessly restless and frustrated. Both states leave me sleepless. On this 6th day of Jan., I say I wish I had been born a milkmaid, a churner of yellow butter. I go farther and say I wish I had been born a plant, my growth dependent on the soil, the sun and the rain, almost inanimate and yet alive and here. I can't write. My prose is the dabbling of a schoolgirl. I haven't found a way of saying what I want to say in prose. In poetry I've had odd moments of lightning. My pen makes sticky sentences. They ooze along the page instead of flying as I, sorrowfully, intend. Try again tomorrow. Alan says I look ill, that I have pimples. I am looking old but cannot find the pimples. 'The Stars have not Dealt Me' - A.E. Housman92 The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do: My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two. But oh, my two troubles, they reave me of rest, The brains in my head and the heart in my breast. O grant me the ease that is granted so free, The birthright of multitudes, give it to me, That relish their victuals and rest on their bed With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.

Jan 9 '54 Plugged along at Osier letters, without inspiration or much hope of making a whole out of the odds and ends. Depressed, but in an even sort of way. Rather cross with the children — not for anything they had done or left undone - but only because I feel bereft - bereft of powers I never had - such as writing, organizing a book — bereft of powers I once had a fair share of— powers that go with youth and a small amount of beauty. I feel so old, so physically decrepit. I can't stretch my imagination to thinking of myself in terms of bodily love with a loved one. My marriage lasted too long. It drained me, squeezed me dry forever more. Nothing to do now but write. After all, any experience big enough to kill a whole area of personality should prove a rich mine for the spectator in me. Yet how revolting it would be to make a literary success from a personal failure — like dogs who eat their vomit.

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Jan 10 '54 Sunday. Worked on Osier letters all aft. Hams for drinks and supper. Some poetry at night. That should add up to a good day. I say 'yes>' dutifully.

Jan 12 '54 Lazy day re. Osier papers. Two hours typing while Mum dictated letters of B.B.O. [Britton Bath Osier]. Cold in the head. Hair appointment this a.m. On Thursday, R. Souster, F.R.S., Margaret Avison, W.W.W.W.E. Ross [sic] etc. coming after dinner.w Marcus [Adeney] has decided my house is the place for him between 5.30 p.m. and 8 o'clock every Monday. Alan's paper route hard, cold work. Zero weather for days and people don't pay and he has to go back and back, trying to collect. It is so long since we've had real McCoy Arctic air in these southern parts that I had almost forgotten the look, feel, taste and smell of a 'cold snap.' Cars, blinded by frost and the exhaust spouting great white foam, like so many black whales but the spout, of course, comes from the rear. And the shock and pain to the lungs as the air goes in, sharp as icicles, and the gears of the car, as stiff as rigor mortis, and the hands at the wheel spiked with ten points of pain. And the metallic smell of everything - the world so cold, so frozen, nothing organic survives for the nose to sniff. Pavements, incredibly, are harder. The earth is harder still than pavements and our little fall of snow is like the dry ice used to pack ice cream. The overwhelming sensation is one of both fear and excitement. Fear because this weather is a symbol for heardess cruelty, pain before death without the release of death etc. etc., excitement because one's own liveliness seems more so in contrast to this magnified sterility. To be a breathing being with blood, however sluggish, running through one's veins seems a beautiful though precarious miracle. I would happily forgo this miracle for a week of warm damp weather, weather in which the body merges rather than feels separate from the elements. John White telephoned diis evening.94 What could be done for me etc. Very kind. F.R.S. called the night before last.

Jan 17 '54 Thursday night the poets came. F.R.S., Margaret Avison, Raymond Souster, W.W.E. Ross and Mary, Don Owen, Everett Bovard etc. They

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enjoyed themselves. I thought oh phoo most of the time. What has this to do with poetry and what gobbledygook we talked. Two or three poets together — yes — occasionally. A crowd once or twice a year. Friday lunched with Frank. Explored a second-hand bookshop. Have had a cold all week but not a break-back bronchial streamer. Eleven days and if the Gods smile I'll have an absolute decree. Tired of being nisi. For eleven days I'll work on the tedious, mechanical typing of Osier letters — then I will wait for the I2th. Perhaps I will buy a new dress. More likely I'll write a new poem. On Sat. take Alan to Ridley [College] to see about the possibility of a scholarship. No one seems to have good news of Bob. In and out of San. This time next month he should be married. Good for me. Bad for her. Cold, cold weather again after two carolling spring days. Sent a batch of poems to Robert Weaver, C.B.C., at his request, for a possible series of poetry broadcasts. Readers (for acceptance) Alan Crawley and Northrop Frye. Hope some are accepted. Typed for three hours — B.B.'s letters to Fen [Featherston Osier]. Work, routine brings back a precarious well-being. And whose well-being is not precarious? Max Beerbohm's Around Theatres beguiles me when I am not typing, writing in this journal or revising poems. No new ones on hand. The last I began during the Christmas hell. But seeds are sown. I do not feel dry. My withering only wants a rain, a sun to turn to burgeoning. Jan 20th '54 Day after day plug away at B.B. and F.O.'s letters. Purely mechanical work — deciphering — typing. Nothing but occupational therapy. As such it has been useful — motivated days. But unlike Greek gives no sense of accomplishment. This morning out on errands. The rain and mist brought a sense of claustrophobia — as if the animal and vegetable kingdom was being pressed to earth by the weight and thickness of the air. J. Robin and Pat and I went to Julius Caesar last night (movie).95 Hollywood - very - but reasonable entertainment and all the fun of being super critical afterward. The Christmas poem started a month ago begins to take shape. Physically I am perhaps two thirds of the way back to pre-pericarditis days - have little set backs but in between get waves of feeling alive, active. Endurance still below my shameful par. Eight more days to go. Yet what good will it do? If I get my ABSOLUTE decree I can only look

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at it with suspicion, not being a devotee of absolutes. Will I get something comparable to marriage lines? No one has written seriously about divorce. It deserves the effort of an artist. Jan 25th A few mild days to thaw us — dark, misty, but soft and voluptuous compared to the iron in near zero weather. Extreme cold impresses all my senses with metal - the very blue of the sky is cut from a pale sapphire. I taste metal and I breathe the frosty air and my lungs feel needles of steel — even my eyes weep from those same needles. The world is transformed to an inorganic mass, like the moon. Work goes on. Marietta McPherson telephoned and asked for a poem for the Can. Home Journal Sent one and may get 520.00! Three more days. Jan s-jth No word from Marietta. Have not yet risen or sunk to the C. Home Journal. Have written two short poems - a new mood has set in, short, concise, related to my early poems and yet worlds apart, emotionally. Continue three to four hours work a day on Osier letters. Great snowstorm. Piles and piles of snow. Trees and bushes bent and transfigured by the weight and whiteness of their blossoming. It should be tomorrow. I have one sleeping pill. Shall I take it tonight? No, I think not. Falling snow sets me off on long white roads of mysticism. It falls like opium on the nerves and brings a soft, pale negative peace — that is if you don't have to clear the driveway etc. or struggle through the snarled traffic or plunge through the drifts on foot. I stayed at home all day and watched the snow from windows and yawned as I worked. Feb 3 '54

On this third day of February, 1954 the marriage between F.R. Wilkinson and Anne was dissolved by a decree absolute. I expected the event a week ago, through ignorance of the procedure. After twenty-one and a half years of marriage, unmarried. A wave of relief when Terry [lawyer] telephoned and told me the news, but long-seated tensions take long periods of time to disappear. Took the Osier papers to Macmillans this morning — they will let me know if they are interested within a month. Another tension and doubt-

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less disappointment in the end. I can't imagine any endeavour of mine being successful. Must start my poetry ms on the rounds and try to get it published — no confidence. And J. is a grave worry — lackadaisical, depressed, negative, lazy - takes no responsibility for himself or others. Feb. igth

Stupid week. Laid low with bug (or what?) Monday and Tuesday. Well all day Wed. Thurs. p.m. started to shiver. F. came for scrambled eggs and an evening in front of the fire. On Friday collapsed — called Dr MacM. afraid of pericarditis — nothing discovered but slight fever. I put the whole thing down to an appallingly obvious psychosomatic upset. I am frightened to use myself physically to do a day's work — every twinge about the heart brings apprehension. Can I sensibly plot my days to include exercise as well as writing? Feb /; '54

Yesterday buckets of rain, sleet and snow poured down from morning to night. Today hot sun and a spring wind and everything running with glorious water. Finished Rome and a Villa by Elizabeth Clark. Strange, fascinating book. Am undecided as to its value. Written in the fashionable 'little mag.' manner. May be as good as it occasionally seems. May be nothing but brilliant bad writing. There is such a thing. Tea with G.B. and Joan. Drinks with the Douglas's. Am in such an uncreative state that I almost don't care. It is beginning to seep in that I really am divorced, that those particular responsibilities are over. Bob is out of my life except in relation to the children. We no longer owe each other anything. Past debts are cancelled. Little by little the relief is seeping in. Ray Souster called this eve. Wants me to have another meeting of the 'POETS.' Put him off. Perhaps. Later. Feb 18 '54

Aunt Maggie's dinner at the York Club to settle the disposal of the jointly owned Roches Point property - Stu and Susie's. Those present: Mum, Aunt Amo, our hostess, Stu, Susie, Pat and I. The evening quickly assumed an air of wildest fantasy. Cocktails — champagne — liqueurs reduced to nil the inhibitions of the elders. The sisters-in-law,

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Aunt Amo and Aunt Maggie, old women who had held their tongues (ahem!) for fifty years, suddenly let forth with the stuff that dreams are made of. Resentments politely concealed for decades spouted like burst hydrants. Neither listened to anything, to any constructive plan. They were mad with the taste on their tongues of things too long left unsaid. But such brave spirited fighting cocks - it is impossible to call them hens — made the whole affair a tragi-comedy. They kept, for the most part, their wit and thrust. I was reduced to helpless, hilarious laughter. What an airing of the bedclothes. What a picture of their various, though linked pasts. Stu and Pat, sensible, ready with constructive suggestions, were embarrassed by the whole wild uninhibited exhibition. Susie derived some of the alive, good-bad wonder of it. Mum was the only elder who renounced her generation, remained practical, refused to hurl accusations, names. O it was a glorious brawl and I doubt that harm will come of it, that anyone will bear resentment. They behaved outrageously but something in our nature feels in the outrage a catharsis. And it was done with sets and props, it was on the stage. We called our cabs and dispersed to our immediate homes. Feb 22nd John Gray from Macmillan's telephoned this afternoon. I waited, as he chatted around the subject, for his polite words of doom. Instead, incredibly, he said he was highly interested, that it was to be read by two more people and discussed and that he would call me next week. Now, the suspense — and no work to do until they decide and if they say nay how will I make myself go on? Good party at Suzanne [Kergin's] on Sat. French. Cancer research men — Clarke Noble, Charles LeBlanc etc. Home at 1.30 a.m.

Feb 25 '54 Pre-dinner and dinner with F. He is very pleased about Macmillan's letter that followed John Gray's talk on the telephone. We lunch tomorrow. Weather of late - mildish - a little raw but nice human weather. March ist '54 Rain all day long. Long spikes of rain all day. Restless waiting for Macmillan's to call. Can't settle to poetry. This 'other' has become my

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immediate concern. Last night a gathering of poets at Everett Bovard's house. Little Donnie will have to prove himself a genius to justify his overbearing egotism, his on and on dogmatic Donism. And the strange young female who never adds a word to the general discussion but sits, whispering to the closest male and giggling. And Ray S[ouster], with his good intentions and his gracelessness, struggling earnestly in the cause of something (surely not poetry). And Bovard? What to make of him? Don't like him, don't know why. His wife appeared halfway through the evening. A palely pretty blonde - uninterested in poetry, writing of any kind. She seemed to have sense. Went to Suzanne's for tea. Asked myself. Her gaiety a pleasant contrast to the weather. J. visited his father on Saturday, reluctantly. Beverley wasn't there which was tactful of Bob because J. must be broken in gently. Heather and Alan paid their respects on Sunday. Met Beverley. Game home full of her charms. So that is over. 99% of me is glad that all went well, that they thought her 'perfectly sweet.' i% of me felt a momentary stab. But the pain was short lived. I want their divided house to cause them the least possible pain. If they like Beverley and get on with her it eases things for them. And I am so glad not to have to live with Bob that I too should offer up thanks to his new wife. She alone made possible the complete break. Marcus [Adeney] came to dinner and gave J. a lesson. He is an old family friend and the children are always pleased to see him. March yd Rain then sleet then snow. And a wind as wild as animals tearing their prey to pieces. The picked bones of branches lie where the lions dropped them. The temp, goes down down down and the streets are ice covered by a treacherously thin layer of snow. The world is wailing with pain. Is it the pangs of birth and will the snow be milk tomorrow and the grass sucking? Waiting restlessly for Macmillan's to telephone. They said they wanted to see me this week to talk over the book. No word. Heart sinks. Perhaps the third reader said 'rubbish.' Revising my poetry ms. Dined with Mutt and Aunt Amo at Highland Ave. Pickering Market this morning. What glorious places, these emporiums. The men and women with their metal carriages filled with

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oranges, lemons, cabbages, long pink stalks of rhubarb. And the fish counter bringing the Atlantic to our noses — lobsters, smelts, scallops, kippers, oysters and the respectable haddock. And next it the turkeys, ducks and chickens and then the long bloody counter where Toronto's best meat is surveyed, chosen and bought by Toronto housewives. But the butchers are nice and I am overcoming my nausea at the smell, the look of what I love to eat, provided someone else has cooked it. Shopping, which used to bore me, now enchants me — if only indulged in occasionally. There is so much colour, the people are so lively. When circumstances prevented Great Grandmother [Ellen Osier] from doing something she had planned to do, she always said 'There were lions in the way.' March jth Appointment to see John Gray on Wed. F. in town last Friday. Afternoon, dinner, evening. If Mem. gives me the go-ahead signal I am going to get down to a proper professional schedule - no daytime engagements - household, errands in the morning. Work from 1.30 p.m. to 5.30 five days a week. F. to be the exception and I will make up for it by working Sat or Sun. This waiting and inactivity a curse. Revised and retyped my poetry ms. No new poems in the making. Hideous untethered feeling. What will John Gray say? Bob being tiresome about J. J. good about it but deeply troubled. Monteath, the angel, is going to try and modify the unfortunate aspects of the situation. Today a little chirp of spring. March 8 '54 Went to Rosedale school 'open house.' To look at the work in Alan's classroom and talk to his teacher. Such praise as Alan got. I almost wept. His industry, his good influence on the class etc. etc. Mr Sanderson congratulated me on my son, on the good home influence! I feel proud of Alan, humble about the home influence. But what ambrosia for the parent, worried that divorce and the past years of family troubles would cripple the child. Dinner with Dorothy and Arthur [Ham]. Paid for the divorce. Started to gather data for income tax. Bills. Read old letters — Ellen Osier to her son Featherston.

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March i$th Macmillans have offered me a contract and extensive editorial suggestions. Lots of hard work involved. Good. I swing between being exhilarated and appalled at what is before me. Can I do it? Am I industrious enough? Have I the talent to make it the remarkable book it deserves to be? No time for rejoicing about the book. The house has been a Bob-made Bedlam. He and Beverley telephone the children at all hours. J. in a constant state of distress or anger at going out with them. Rumours drift in that Bob is an infectious case of T.B. Then I hear that Alan gets into bed with him and snuggles. Now I am back in the old routine discussions with lawyer, doctor, Monteath. Everyone trying to solve an unbearable situation. All of us afraid of Bob — what he will do in retaliation if he is thwarted. He has no legal claim of any kind on the children, can only see them if I permit it. Yet we are paralysed. Strange paradox. Bob, a weak man, dictates (often successfully) to everyone. Howard Chapman and a friend dropped in the other day. Robin [Harris] arrived yesterday before I was dressed. Nice to have friends. Monteath a saint. F. telephoned from Montreal. And the children are darlings and I have the book. What a rich life. Stupid of me to be so put out by Bob. But he does upset the children and may even be a menace to their health. March 22nd Too much was crammed into last week. Betty here from Ottawa - in fine spirits. Party for Rubinstein.96 F. Thursday and Friday. The Hams Saturday - all this plus regular work on the book and incessant telephone calls re. Bob and the children - Terry, Dr. MacM., Monteath. J's anxiety and distress. Monteath sees Bob tomorrow. Pray that all goes gently. Otherwise lawyers, mess. I don't know how the book goes. Certainly my suggested title Despite Lions in the Way describes the making of the book as well as the characters in it. Lions stand and growl on every path. Tonight Howard Chapman and a friend came to photograph the living room and hall. A charming person, Howard. And I think he is good. J. has just remarked that 'Spring is too violent a season to appeal to

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his conservative constitution.' I, being a radical, love it. I am constantly in love with life and always on the brink of despair. Love, despair, inevitable companions. If I feed one, the other tugs at my dress. Teed me, I'm hungry too,' it cries. But my horrid child, despair, forces me to write — poems and this embryonic book — these are the drugs with which I put my child to sleep. March 2$th

Monteath talked to Bob. Bob full of terrible blasphemous outbursts against me. Mon hopes he has solved J.'s problem and the telephone. Heather and Alan to see him once a week on Sat. or Sun. This eve., Thurs., Alan called from Bob's apartment. Could he stay to dinner. Yes, yes, I cried. Feel undone, helpless. How can I learn to live with this perpetual grief? I must honour my grief, give it a special, comfortable chair, accept it as a permanent member of the family. Work every day — three and a half to four and a half hours on the book. Bless work, bless, bless, bless. Today was the day of the big spring rain. It slopped down from the sky in careless bucketfuls. For the first time this year the air was steamy when a thin sun shone this afternoon. The earth was in heat and filling with a thousand conceptions. How difficult to be alive, aware to the inward goings on of three very different adolescents. Not that one should be too aware. Only in emergencies do they really want you. For the most part they wish to be secret from their parents at this age. To know the moment when you are wanted is the secret. Sunday, March 27 or thereabouts

Macmillans promised a contract but I have not got it. All my old distrust of that worthy firm is shaking my days and nights. Am afraid of losing my temper, writing or saying something irrevocable. Working seven days a week — three to four hours a day. Depressed with the result. Not what Macm's want. But they will not see a word of it until I see a contract. No poetry until this book is finished. Not for lack of time — there is always time - but because I am entirely immersed in the work at hand. My imagination so preoccupied with the characters, with the organization of the whole that it has no extra, super energy, no desire to be anywhere else.

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Heath, and Alan went to Bob's this aft. They returned, quiet and cross. Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca my book of the year. What a flight. When I think of his poetry I have a vision of black swans with red beaks. In the centre of the vision is one white swan with a black beak. Swans are not mentioned in the poems. Aprils Thurs., Sat., F. In every human relationship there is a point beyond which it is not possible for mortals to trespass. Then conies black trouble to the spirit — well, well, what next? Then readjustment to the human state. The divine is accidental and occasional. Macmillan's contract arrived by mail today. Letter from Alan Grawley. Writing a poem. Aprils Distrust contract. Sent it to F. to vet. Worked on book all afternoon. Read Lorca again right through. Rewrote poem. Am seeing no-one. Days dedicated to family chores and book — evenings to poetry. F., the exception. Am lonely, often besieged in the city of 'black trouble.' But I work. And I have all the various climates of feeling that come with my relationship to F. It is a continuant and the temperature varies from the zero north to this tropical south, with miles of sweet temperate zones between. I am in a fine position for a writer. My island is lonely for a woman. One live ten percent of me wants to be in the thick of things, wants chat and admiration, the sterile stimulus of the social world. I sag and droop when I am not watered by a little gaiety. My energy is limited. I have to choose. Work is my natural colour - the world (in the social sense) my cosmetics. But what woman over thirty, and I am over forty, can afford to forswear cosmetics? Problem? Vision is an onion. One's days are spent peeling layer after layer, until the most delicate, the greenest layer unveils the heart. The artist and the religious mystic are inseparable. They are Siamese twins, joined at the spine. They see so far in opposite directions that their vision meets.

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April gih or 8th Gloom for a week or more. Strange when I work, write, create. Finished the pre-Canada part of the book - 52 pages. Frightened to show it to Macmillan's - not much good. Terrified of middle section. Feel inadequate all round, humanly and every odier way. Writing segregates me, puts a wall around me. No trespassing. I do not wish my germinating ideas interrupted. Art Gallery this morning. Wished I had been alone. Mutt and Muriel. Exciting pictures. Leger, Klee, Chagall etc. My need for isolation fills me with chagrin - for I love many individuals. But at this moment I have to listen to something within - without. For the book, for the poem. I simply cannot fuss with being nice. And anyway I have the children — for whom I am always trying to be that not very palatable thing. Alan high temp. Flu. First day of school he has missed since Sept. J. barks all day — an hysterical, unamused laugh. Reading Rilke - Duino Elegies and Sonnets for Orpheus. Colette — Creatures Great and Small Heather sad because she has not been asked to the T.C.S. (Trinity College School] dance. 0 me o my. April 20th On Mon. I had flu — old-fashioned bad flu. Up on Friday. F. here Fri. and Sat. Felt, feel awful. Have a real post-influenza depression. Thick, sticky blankets of gloom. Impossible to imagine I will ever feel well or cheerful — impossible. Children returned from N.Y. this morning — full of excitement. AndJ. so short-tempered and irritable. Have seen the Hams, Douglas's — nothing, nobody cheers me up! 1 am grey woollen underclothes. I am mildew in a cupboard. I have entertained no-one — given no party all year.

May ii, 1954 Back from Ottawa this morning after ten days away. Left Toronto Friday for Montreal where I planned to stay until Wed. or Thurs. Sat. had dinner and spent the evening with Dudek.97 Charming person. He accidentally divulged information that sent me flying from Montreal the next day. F. drove me to Ottawa where he dumped my bags and

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what was left of me at Betty's. Betty magnificent. I slept, ate, wept and read novels for four days. On the 5th had regained enough equilibrium to go to the Chateau [Laurier Hotel] and do a little work. F. in Ottawa Sun. He telephoned Mon. Passed him on the street. He did not try to see me. The long awaited holiday twisted itself into a sad shape. But if I can stick it, not let myself become involved again, perhaps I am saved from worse and future griefs. Now back to work. C.B.C. accepted six poems — pay $110.00! I feel purged, as if in some strange way the holiday had worked a secret benefit. In Ottawa, between sleep, tears and novels, saw the Gibbons, the Hazelands, Marget Northwood, Maudie Fferguson], Tom Bowles, Edith Grant.98 Weather steamy hot in Montreal, then wet and cold in Ottawa. The countryside at its peak of delicate charm — more like April than May. Bought a picture by [Bruno] Bobak of Vancouver, called 'Frozen Birds.' It expressed for me the poem I could not write will some day write. [May 12]

This page skipped by mistake. Will save it for when I have something good to say. Today is May i2th. How long will it be? It should be today or tomorrow. My life is rich enough. Yet I cannot bring myself to give it a word of praise.

M,ay 13 Pickering Farms this a.m. Met Buffy [Meredith] and we joined forces for a cup of coffee. Worked on book from 1.15 to 5.30. Slowly it moves forward, gathering, despite the proverb, moss. If only I am patient enough to do each section with care, taking the needed endless pains, it will be readable, an addition at least to Ganadiana. Sat. Sun. no work. Today is Monday and the routine was resumed. Friday, dinner with A.[J.M. Smith]; Sat., with A. and John and Gretchen. What is the matter with my heart (How I criticize the same organ in F.!)? I am lively, unbrooding, interested primarily in the book and a poem I am writing. Of course, A. gave me back self-confidence; his common-sense about the whole business ruled out the the delicious role I had planned to play. Chaos everywhere. No wonder there are artists who need to organize, transpose this dizziness into a vision, not of reality, but of a state composed of the concrete but transcending its material.

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Tues. [14 May] The strange euphoria of the last week dissolved this p.m. I see nothing ahead but work work work - I can only do it if stimulated by bouts of excitement. Nothing but dull grey and duty ahead — and I so fond of being merry. This strong streak in me that loves men in spite of the inevitable trouble. I love to kindle and be kindled — to wake up and to awaken — the feeling of being almost off the floor when I walk.

Wed. //j May] Edited letters all afternoon. Am trying to get a picture in my head of the next 100 pages. A great deal of the making of a book is the thinking about it. Only when a pattern suggests itself can the typewriter clatter and the 'thing' progress. Have tentative ideas. Am almost ready for the next plunge - the hardest, most complicated section - piecing together the story of many people over a period of more than 50 years. My god what a thought! If I can do it successfully, I will indeed be a patient work horse. Everything dull. A good thing too for a working mare. Thurs. [16 May] Started new section of the book. The starting is always the same. Days of apprehension — the long minutes of standing, hovering before jumping into icy water. A baby bird perched on my window at the Chateau — terrified to find itself so far above the ground. For five — ten - minutes it struggled to take the plunge back into the unsupporting air - a flap of wings - no - impossible, over and over. I watched its indecision, became its indecision. Suddenly a flap and off- not down to safety but up to more perilous heights. That bird should be watched. He may well become prime minister. Sat. May 22nd. Fine, sunny weather all week. Try and soak up an hour of it every morning. Book all aft. J. has gone to the Point. Am strained and cross. Pressure of book? Pressure? Nothing to say in this journal.

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Sun. May 23 Another warm sunny day. Heather and I alone in the house. Alan at Aunt Amo's. J. at the Point. Sun in the a.m. Work in the p.m. Evening at Mon and Muriel's. The book again seems dull. Reread the second section — 80 odd pages. Was bored. May 25 Book difficult. Confidence gone again. Sunshine and wind. Mutt and Heather at the opera. Britt" came in yesterday and brought me some of B.B.O.'s legal cases. Low and lonely. There is nothing but lonely unless I get other people into trouble. My ego is in a pitiful state — which should make me more acceptable to other people - when it's at its happy norm it puts on too much weight. The book increases my segregation. Am so involved — I work, sleep, spend all my hours working it over, in my head or on paper. No time for small pleasant intercourse with friends and neighbours. Had time for someone I loved, who I felt was a part of the strange creative process. I miss him more than I can say; my imagination is quite desolate. But I do not want to be one of his sad crew of women, threatening suicide, having nervous breakdowns, all of them artists who should be working and can't. I would rather live and work than moan away my days. I am only a small part masochist. Have been reading Malraux's Voices of Silence. Enormous. May 26 Suddenly woke up, realized the enormity of my concentration on self and book. The latter alright up to a point but the two combined add up to neglect of everyone else. I have thought too little about the children, Mutt, friends. Took the day off- shopped for Alan and J. Took Alan to the Doctor this aft. Tea with Mutt. What a whimperer I've been. May 30 Take 100 pages to Macmillan's tomorrow. In a sweat already. Dinner last night with the Hams. It was so good to get out of the house, to laugh. Finished Voices of Silence. No such book has ever been written before.

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May 31 Macmillan's this a.m. Always have such a good time with Mr Gray, Mrs Holland and Mr [Kildare] Dobbs. And yet I am terrified, tell myself in advance to be respectful, quiet and generally well-behaved — but my terror drives me to my most uppish uppishness. I am cheeky — bad — but enjoying myself until I come home and realize the wreck of my good intentions. O well — all they care about is the book and they have dealt with many foolish authors before and are doubtless used to eccentrics. The interviews needle me on — and that is good. I talk big but am as easily crushed as a sleepy winter housefly. Alan finished his term as paper boy. Lovely freedom plus the sense of accomplishment. [More than half of the notebook is left empty at this point and a new one started on 2 August.]

dug 2, '54 Work went badly. Must get the last section (90—100 pages) quickly finished so that I can have it retyped and get a look at it. Probably it will have to be scrapped and started again from a different angle. Any angle would do — what has been done is a hodge podge - no continuity of idea or feeling. Scrappy. Dull. When people ask, 'How is the summer going?' I answer 'It is going.' The trees here give one a great age but no stature. So many I remember when they were two feet grown. Now they are cloud high. I get littler and littler.

Augj. Wet day. Everything moist, clothes, sheets, books, brain. George Eliot 'If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow, or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."00 Sept 19 Mutt in hospital five and a half weeks. She looks so fragile my eyes wince. What the doctors have done to her - milograms, encephalograms, pumping air into her good brain - I am too cowardly to think

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about it. What suffering, what nightmares are endured that the science of medecine may progress! J. going to u.c. [University College, University of Toronto]. McGill requires Maths. He is slipping back into last year's negative habits. Nothing to do but wait and see. The sun came out today after a decade of black weather. Aunt Lorna [Harris] died this afternoon. A landmark gone. Have given in badly this week. Couldn't face Michael [Meredith]'s wedding. Full of tears. My 'pusher' is out of order. I sit on the sidewalk of the road I should travel and past, present and future are one — and unacceptable. If the family sun would shine — even wanly — for six months, I think I could put my pieces together again. Sept. 24.

Mutt out of hospital tomorrow. Have made a kind of peace - a temporary truce — with events and signals.

Nov /j What a succession of events and all with signals for the alert. In Montreal when [Hurricane] Hazel loosed the floods that wrecked Toronto West etc.101 Returned to find Mum worse — weakness now in legs — to find J. had not been attending the univ. for some time. He is back again. Will it last? Heather such a dear sweet child. Considerate, helpful, charming, very pretty. J., when not pulled to pieces by his troubles, also considerate and an excellent companion. Alan came home for a long week-end. School is not the Utopia he imagined but he gets on — reasonably happily - and has acquired a high regard for home! Tonight there is no furnace in our house. After a day of great clangings and hangings the corpse was removed. Tomorrow they promise to install a live one and by evening we may have heat again. Weather mild. Book [Lions in the Way\ came back from Macmillan's three weeks ago with long letter of comments from the Unknown Reader - all unflattering. It took me two weeks to swallow the distasteful medicine. Now I only hope the medicine will produce a cure. Working 4-6 hours a day revising, rewriting. It will be better but how much? I am quite sensible about criticism - really make good use of it - at the same time I suffer to the point of weeping. My writing self simply cannot ignore what is useful assistance in my craft; my personal, worthless self is stung as if by a thousand wasps.

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To write a book about one's family is a more hazardous undertaking, psychologically, than I had realized. Caught between the generation above me (my mother's rapidly failing health) and the generation below me (J.'s precarious equilibrium) I need to escape, in work, from my family. Instead, my work is the family. I feel smothered, all but annihilated, by family, family, family. Now, without F., there is no-one of my generation who is really close to me. A., perhaps, but he is not free to be — and it has to be a man. I try, ineffectually, to be a comfort to my dear brave mother, to my bewildered son. I fail. I need laughter the way some people crave physical exercise. I love to howl with merriment, to double up with it, to have it stream like champagne from my pores. I wish J. would come in. Always at night I am waiting for a teenager to come home. What a teenager I was and how my mother waited! Dec 21

Children all out. Poetry ms finished [The Hangman Ties the Holly] — three copies for Macm. Osier book after first revision is at Macm. When the O. book is finally finished (it must happen sometime) what am I going to do then? Is there any more poetry in me? I want some organized work as well as poetry. A novel? No, but what? Have read very little in the last few months. Get so involved with the writing on hand that I can't leave it alone. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, [David Riesman's] The Lonely Crowd — no poetry. Perhaps the answer to what comes next is reading - lots of poetry, anthropology, books about birds and fish. Without question I need to become a sponge again and take in. I am now so conditioned to putting out that I am inclined to continue, an automatic reflex rather than the creative instinct. Even now I find it difficult not to go over and over my two mss., revising etc. Though I know I should leave them be for the time being. I have 'flu again. Is it caused by anxiety about the book? What Kildare Dobbs will say? The waiting is torture. What masochism makes one write? Each sentence an agony — sweat and sweat — followed by defeat after defeat. The painful thorns of criticism that make one wish never to have been born. The desire to publish and the sense of horror at self exposure. The whole thing a nightmare, purposely entered into. I could stop it at any minute I wished — withdraw my books — alas, the publishers would not give a darn. If one person whose opinion I valued

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would say 'you have real talent,' the isolation, discouragement would be bearable. After another revision the O. book will make a respectable addition to Canadiana — what a flop from the high hopes of publisher and author. I feel I have let Macm.'s down. They bet on me and I didn't win. What a weeper! What a whiner! Alan and Heather are the gayest imaginable youngsters. They are so much a part of the life around them (the life of teenagers) they have no ache to make something. Never, even when I was young and sought after, did I feel myself to be a real bona fide member of any group. I played, for a time, the role expected of me - no more. They are lucky, for it is better to be a part of life than to be forced 'to make' because one cannot merge. Every day it becomes increasingly difficult for me 'to be' - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have lost my knowledge of the tenses and cannot tell 'I am' from 'I was' or 'I will be' - and the muscle of hope is flaccid. Heather and Alan home after an evening with their father. Dear lambs. Dec 24.

Party last night at the Hams. Felt gruesome all day. Joyce and Gordon [Austin?] in for a minute this aft. Tea at Mutt's. Children decorated tree. I simply crawl around - result offlu(?)hangover(P) Both? Yes. No word from Macm's. Makes me dreadfully edgy. The telephone is the fly in the ointment of the children's holidays. It rings and rings and rings and they talk and talk. Feel once more tempted to try for a job — with a magazine. Work without the responsibility of creating would be peaceful. That damn book. How I hate being defeated by it. Well done it could have permanent (a manner of speaking) value. I am an amateur with more gall than talent. How could I, why did I think I could do it? Tomorrow is Christmas. A great many things happened in 1954. The only plus sign on my ledger is that I worked in spite of lions in the way. Dec 28

Alan and William [Gibbons] at Mutt's. William an almost unbearably appealing child. My Alan and I had dinner with them. Heather at a dance. J. at the Messiah. Mutt, in a wheelchair, went to the family Xmas dinner. Triumph.

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Cocktail party at Toronto Club - Don and Jan [Matthews]. Club atmosphere so igth cent, one peered around for ancestors in mustachios and or beards. The actual people present, my contemporaries, looked old, unattractive - as if they had long since stopped growing. Few of them have let a new idea seep through the cranium in twenty years. My Alan a sweet fine child with a well developed sense of humour. Didn't know how much I missed him until he came home. T.E. Lawrence, when in the air force during the last years of his life, wrote to someone of his plan to do some more translations — not original work, because, he said, 'Man should not make,' or words to that effect. How sick he must have been. Could there be a more tragic confession of loss, of despair? He knew there was nothing. Had he lived longer he might have grown to see that the nothing is everything. But I doubt it. He had a canker, somewhere, eating him.

1955 Jans, 1955 Now it is Alan's turn. He is at a dance tonight. Another tomorrow. No word from Macm's. Convinced that I would have heard if they were in any way pleased with the ms. Steeling myself for the blow of their disapproval. In spite of Dante I am not certain that the 'seen arrow slackens its flight.' Have written a new poem ['Daily the Drum'] with George Eliot's quotation as title 'If we had a keen vision' etc. It seems good and bad. Like so much I write it appears eccentric — something I try to avoid but cannot escape. Never do I strive to be 'original.' On the contrary I work to rid myself of a too marked individuality. I do not credit 'originality' or 'individuality' as virtues. In my case they count almost as disabilities. Certainly one must have one's own voice but it should be capable of merging with the larger voice of men (man?). Mine is too insistently me. Freud said 'Dreams all seek to fulfill one wish, which has got transformed into many others. It is the wish to sleep. One dreams so as not to have to wake.' This does not imply the wish for death — only the wish to dream, safe from hard routine of facts demanding action. Is all my writing nothing but a dream world to which I escape from the dreary facts of my existence and the responsibilities involved? Yes. But what of it? So long as responsibilities are not too totally ignored.

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Jan 75. Fri. dinner at Aunt Amo's. Sat. at the Kergins — Claude, Gordon MacNamara, Peggy. Tonight at Gretchen's cocktail party. Enough is enough. Book being typed. I hope this time it will really be off my hands. I am living in a vacuum. Odds and ends to finish but no real work on hand. What shall I do next? What am I thinking? Nothing. What am I feeling? A lot of nonsense. And despair about J. One good thing is to look back on my relationship with F. and to think it did no one any harm. And he has departed from my imagination as miraculously as he entered it. Nothing now could raise that phoenix. Jan ig For the last week the sun has been around, at least fitfully — usually in the morning. Cold but not too. Jan 24 Tomorrow at 2.30 I take three copies of the Osier book to Macmillan's — complete, I hope. Will miss Kildare. Will miss the book and all the long hard work. I want a new job immediately. Holidays are no use to me. I don't know what to do with them. I have turned into one of those igth century characters that found salvation in work, something no-one would have predicted. But how else forget, temporarily, J.'s predicament, Mutt's? Still, I envy the people who can act out their lives instead of writing them out. And to write, seriously, means at least a degree of renouncement. One has to husband one's resources, remain, except for family and dear poets, detached, listening. My physical endurance is below par. I can't stay up late, binge, and work the next day. I can't be with people constandy without feeling some kind of psychic exhaustion. If I am alone too much I grow pale. Finished The Identity of Yeats by Ellmann. What a poet. No one else of our age has touched his best. Eliot in comparison is a dry bone. Yeats is flesh and bone and blood activated by a great vitality — a vitality of feeling and intellect. It is impossible to think of his work as anything but immortal. Eliot may live, may die. Whichever happens the reader will wonder whether he had real feet that walked real streets or whether he sent out small cat-like spies about the city - and wrote his poems from their reports. But still, the early Eliot is each man's waste

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land, his Monday morning, his dirty looking-glass, his nerve's raw edge, the shaking hand on the razor. Recent books: The Bloomsbury Group, The First Decadent, The Book of Beasts, Teats's Letters — reread Eminent Victorians103 - last time I read it I was a child at Craigleigh. Jan 29 In low feather. I wander through the house mooing for my books, like a cow whose calves have been taken to market. After all, the pain of writing is not so great as the pain of not writing. Am doing another unicorn poem. Ever since I hit on the title A Unicorn Runs, I have been obsessed with the beasts.103 A most unsuitable obsession! But poetry is a topsy turvy atmosphere and I want a work-a-day job as well as my 'poet's daily chore.'104 The work-a-day job gives stability to the too frantic imagination. My poetry will go wild again, go into the jungle, unless I have a sober work of prose to keep me within bounds. Read a book on the pygmies in the Congo. Poorly written but the material splendid. All day long felt dismally sorry for myself. A rare event, but I must say I can see its charms! Saying to oneself 'poor poor me' and having the heart burst widi sympathy! Who else can give us such full time, devoted tears? Jan 31 Analysis of'Rites of Innocence.' It may appear 'faerie,' pastiche, but its intent is quite otherwise, though I am well aware that if a poem needs defence it is not a poem. The poet is forever preoccupied with innocence — and the loss of innocence. Everyone is born with it, everyone loses it and some miraculously regain it. The poet must be one of these. Forever losing and, if a true poet, forever being renewed by it. The tension between the two states is an important theme in poetry. Poets must never become philosophic — look what it did to Wordsworth - their wisdom must be the wisdom of the traditional fool, something above and below either common sense or any system of philosophy. Yeats was right when he said he wanted to die 'an angry old man' - or words to that effect.105 In 'Rites of Innocence,' I have tried to say that innocence is of the spirit and that no happy physical act can destroy it. Indeed, it may enhance the innocent vision. The unicorn,

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being god, knew this and therefore laid his head in Amanda's lap. One could go farther and say that even unhappy, black events, physical or emotional or mental do not necessarily destroy innocence. It is like perfect pitch — in a spiritual sense, rare but a fact. If found most commonly in mystics and artists, it also occurs everywhere. [Great-grandmother] Ellen Osier had it. William perhaps. Everyone recognizes the people it inhabits. Could it be made the subject of a long poem? Feb 4 or 5

Am going mad from inactivity. No poetry. No idea for another book. It has all the black qualities of a nightmare. I wonder whether to look for a job — hesitate in the hope I'll start writing something. Goblins inhabit the house and my head; chaos screams through windows or whimpers at the turn of the stairs. Panic will soon be king unless I get to work. If I thought it would help I would pray, on my knees, for a stretch of writing, verse or prose, so long as it demanded long hours, concentration — anything to make abstract the personal, mother of god damn unholy lot of man — J., Mutt, Susie - everyone eventually. Floor boards gape, plaster falls from the ceiling. Smothering comes from above, below, and the walls close in - like pythons they will take what is left. A long poem. About what? And me with a fourth rate talent and no background of scholarship? Feb8 New poem 'Not because the heart is hard.' Perhaps it is banal. I am trying to write a more straightforward verse — not for the sake of the unknown readers (who never enter my imagination while I am writing) but in order to be quite certain myself what it is I am trying to say. I tended to sleep in the happy opium of words for their own sake — a sort of cover-up for the fact that I was often a little vague myself of the poem's foundation. To write simply is the most nerve-wracking style one can adopt — no sleight of hand, nothing to divert attention from the idea-emotion one hopes to convey. Three months since the Osier book was finished and still I write nothing. The O. book turned down by London. In a day or two I'll hear that it has been rejected in the u.s. Am more disappointed for Mum's sake than my own. The whole thing has become a bore, a black bore.

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March 18 Since I last wrote: Mutt much worse — then slight improvement. Went to Ottawa. Alan had his appendix removed. Alan home. Pyloric spasm. J. problem without solution.106 Lucy [Little] here for two nights. Good evening at Robin [Harris]'s. Last night at the Sutherlands - Prof. [Marshall] McLuhan. Am not writing. Have less self-confidence in my ability as a poet, as a writer of prose, than ever before. Heather has flu or German measles. As a writer I feel deplorably old-fashioned. I am not a Roman Catholic [like McLuhan] — I am not passionately interested in technology — in the media of radio, T.V. How can I write anything interesting to my contemporaries? I love the Gods, not God. My only specifically contemporary love is a city at night. The lights and sparkle of the advertisements, the transformation of commerce into high fantasy. I love the little red subway cars that I can see from my bedroom window. March ig Sunday. We all slept until almost ten. A spring and sunny day. Felt a small surge, a rejoicing. Then went to Mutt's for lunch and found her very low — always close to tears. Tried to persuade her she was better in every way than she was a month ago. Failed to convince her, failed to convince myself. Driving home the sun seemed full of deceit. This evening Bob Weaver telephoned about the broadcast of my poems said Kildare did not seem too anxious to read them. Would I read them? No. Would I allow them to choose a good woman reader? Not if I can help it. Quite crushed at Kildare's attitude. Is it his feeling about the poems? Are they not good enough? Is it some aversion he has for me, personally, a dislike of being involved in any way with me? Perhaps his experience as my editor has put him off. He thinks I'm likely to blow my top if all does not suit me. I don't know — but I know I am grieved. If he really doesn't want to read them I think I'll call the whole thing off. April 2 A week ago yesterday, Friday, the Sutherlands brought A.J.M. Smith here, for the evening. Sat., A.J.M. Smith. Monday A.J.M. Smith, then party at the Thomas's. Tuesday A.J.M., Thursday, Friday. Very full of health. The problem for next week — what to do? Call Marietta [MacPherson], Bob Weaver? Job. Have tried to write. Don't know

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how, or even what I want to say. Happy, momentarily, as a woman. Desperate as a writer. No talent, imagination or method. Have written nothing first rate — and at my age I'm not likely to sprout diamonds. My devotion to Macmillans remains. Their devotion to me has reached the vanishing point. April 20, 1955. Toronto.

Broadcast last night of my poems. Miss someone or other read them. Alan back at Ridley. J. and I in bed - fluey colds. Betty with Mutt. Mutt slowly getting worse. But will Betty stay more than four days? No.

1956 June 20, iQ^6. Roches Point.

Once more I am writing from my bed on the verandah and the noise of the water splashing on the rocks is in my ears. It is fourteen months since I have jotted anything down in this journal. Mum is dead, and buried close by in the church graveyard. Now Roches Point belongs to Alan and to me. All winter, since Mum's funeral in January, I have dreaded the return — foolishly because here I remember her in health, as a young woman, and see all about me things that she brought forth. Heather and Alan and Bill [Scott] came with me, and the good Maria. We slept two nights at the Lodge then settled in here. The hawthorns are in bloom (everything is late this year) and in the vegetable garden, giant pale pink poppies, purply blue inside. Daisies grow wherever they can escape the lawnmower. Our first two days were sparkling and cool; today overcast, queer weather — not hot, not cold, but one felt both, alternately. I miss A.J.M. S [mith] — would like to see him walk around the corner and hear him say Hi, d'you still love me?. J. has gone to Rice Lake on an archeological expedition. Hope he writes soon. Hope, hope, hope that all goes well. The long fourteen months when I wrote nothing in these pages (or on any others) were too bad to bear ink. Someday, when they are digested, they may be written about, incorporated into something or other. I have grieved excessively over my mother's illness and death. Consider writing an essay on the mourning customs of different ages and peoples; pointing out that the contemporary western custom of no

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official mourning, business as usual etc., adds to, rather than lessens, our sense of loss, have reasons etc.107 And yet the last year gave me A.J.M. Even if I never see him again, he has added a special bounty to my life, has made my skin shine, and my heart. June 21 A muskrat or some such beasty swam near to shore but dived under water when I tried to get close to him. He returned later and left the water to nibble the grass — again I approached him but he was off, underwater before I could get a good look. Have never seen such a creature in the lake before. A muggy day, disenchanting. But after the sun went down everything delicious. Columbine is a lovely flower — and daisies make me boom with happiness. Perhaps they are my favourite of all flowers - in the same way that Jane Austen is (in one sense) my favourite novelist. She, too, makes me beam. No forecast of rain and rain so badly needed. How I hate drought. And in June when everything is young and should be moist. Peonies everywhere. Alan and Bill are equivalent to two young bulls in the house. Their aggressive young masculinity invades my life like thunder, or hot sun, or the cracking of Arctic ice. Bill is a powerhouse as well as a show off, a pest, and a dear boy. The lake sings softly tonight, my favourite tune. How sweet to think that Eve, when tempted, fell. How else could she know anything at all? But Adam was a queer one, led astray, He said, by woman, yet he won the day. June 23 or 24

It is the same every year. The first few days at Roches Point have all the enchantment of falling in love, of love's ecstatic fulfillment. The miracle of going to sleep only a few feet from splashing water; the bedlam of birds in the morning, the pleasure of seeing familiar faces in the familiar shop where I go for food and mail and the newspaper, a treat to be read with a glass of beer at noon. Yesterday I picked a bunch of peonies — single reds and a few lush double whites with pale pink centres. I stuck them into a round white vase, didn't arrange them 144

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at all, and they are beautiful, as if the hand of god had placed them there. Today it rained and rained. Wonderful for the garden and countryside and good for man. We have had a long stretch of sun and after a while it blisters the nerves, makes one irritable. Rain is a sweet sedative. Tomorrow, the papers say, the sun will shine, and the whole world will wake up new and washed and flowers will double the strength of their scent and grass will have grown a foot and the people will turn porpoise again and play in the water. Alan and Bill left after lunch to go to Toronto; then on the next day to Desbarat's.108 Great louts that they are, but I miss their cheerful hackling, miss watching them eat and eat and eat and the enormous energy they exude. Even when they sleep they sleep hard - for hours and hours, day or night — it's all one to them. Worked three hours this aft. on a review of Merrill Moore's new 397 page tome which I have promised to do for the American Psychiatric Journal.109 Found the stiffjoints in my head beginning to move again. Enjoyed being once more engrossed in something - even a trivial something. No word from J. June 25 J. and a friend arrived for the weekend at midnight. J. looks brown and seems cheery. Relieved and happy to see him as he never writes. At about 3 a.m. on Sunday morning I woke to hear two beasts fighting, it would seem, to the death. I know they weren't dogs or cats but what they were I couldn't guess. Such a din, such ferocity — hyenas I would have supposed if I had been in hyena country — and near the end, the eerie cries and moans of the vanquished. I was so disturbed I stayed awake for hours. Stu, next door, heard them too so I was not dreaming. Could they have been merely coons fighting over a particularly delectable titbit from the garbage? All I know is that the incident was strange, terrifying and in some way obscene. Today a north wind, cool but with a hot sun — a gay day, a day in which no one could be a grump. Have been here a week, a week that has included many moments of happiness. Air, earth and water have half waked me from my long state of apathy. In the months since Mum's death I have been both easily upset and apathetic. I cannot weep for my mother so I weep easily over things that don't matter — not in front of the children of course. Must write that essay on mourning. Went to see Aunt Amo this evening. She has shrunk to nothing.

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Wish I did not love old people so much. Hate to see them suffer — miss them so abominably when they die. June 26 Aunt Ellie died four days ago. The cable was sent to Toronto and never reached me. Another to Stu gave us the news today. Poor darling Aunt Amo. Went over this morning and again this evening. She is the last survivor of Grandad's six children. The news was quite unexpected so presumably Aunt Ellie had a mercifully quick ending. In a year and a half three aunts and my mother died. Two were sisters of my father. My uncles, too, died all in a batch, about ten years ago. Old age is a nightmare. There is nothing gruesome enough that one can imagine about it to equal the actuality. Another impeccable June day. Less wind and warmer, but the air still dry and fresh. Heather left at 4.30 to spend two nights in town before flying to Halifax on Thurs. Elsie will stay with her until she leaves. I miss her sadly, my cosy, comforting child. Finished a review of Merrill Moore's A Doctor's Book of Hours for the American Psychiatric Journal. Know nothing about reviewing and fear it is very amateurish. Still, I might learn. Enjoyed doing it because, in a tiny way, it was a writing job that had to be done. I need a whip held over my head to make me work. A deadline. Even scratching away at this journal helps, limbers me up for other writing. It suddenly occurred to me that the hair-raising fight of the beasts the other night may have been between two coons (or skunks) with rabies, an epidemic this year amongst the wild creatures. That would explain the diabolical sounds - mad animals, like mad humans, can raise the scalp from the skull with their frenzied biting and barking and their terrible howls. June 27 Rain and thunder last night but I only half waked and was far too sleepy to move inside. Today strong winds, hot sun and periods of heavy clouds. In the morning did the marketing, took the laundry to Mrs Bunn, picked strawberries, walked with Maria through the whole property. After lunch fell asleep for an hour then worked on the perennial border for two. After dinner went to the graveyard. Had been there only a few minutes when torrential rain driven by a strong wind lashed me, and the pine trees and all outdoors. Was soaked to the skin 146

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when I got home. Am growing old, for I am sleeping inside tonight, tired of the pounding waves and the wind's howl. The children are off. My first day alone. Bunn [the gardener] very ill - another grave to be dug. July i This morning the sun was shining, but there was an uneasy wind that blew both hot and cold. Felt unreasonably out of sorts all day, edgy, depressed. About 4 p.m. the wind went down, the sky darkened; then darker and darker into a kind of purgatory that was neither night nor day. Then I knew what ailed me. A storm was brewing, had been cooking for hours, and the hours before a storm poison me. Maria and I were alone in the house when it broke. J. and his friend had gone swimming at Beechcroft and I was not overly concerned at first for I knew they could take shelter in the bathing house. Except for the storm two days before my wedding, 23 years ago, I have seen nothing like it. Great trees uprooted, the whole property a mass of broken branches. Only by locking the doors could we keep them closed. The rain swept in through the cracks in the windows, under the doors, till the living room and even the hall were under water. Once the storm comes my head clears, I am ready for action, afraid, but not personally - rather am I awed by the enormous force. But tomorrow I'll be sad when I look at the battered flowers and fallen trees. Curiously, it is the flowers that best survive the tempest. Their fragile stems, flattened, rise up again when the wind goes down, sun comes up. It is the great trees, too strong to bend with the wind, that fall; too heavy to heave their huge limbs up again. Dorothy and Arthur [Ham] here Fri. and Sat. night. The lights went out during the storm and all evening until ten minutes ago we moved in a candle-lit world. It is pleasant and pretty when people are about, and talking. When you are going to bed and hope to read yourself to sleep, it becomes a goblin world where the alphabet dances on the page to the tune of the flickering candle. When the lights came on at 10.30,1 felt released from prison: I was free to read all night, or write in this journal. I had freedom of choice. I felt a surprising elation; wind blowing, waves breaking on the rocks and I, free to turn on the light. It is true that I am peculiarly aware of nature with a small n - but I am not a blind worshipper. My relationship to it is composed of fear, and joy, then fear again.

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Julys Suzanne [Kergin] and Zita [Cook] came for the day yesterday. We had a pleasant time, good weather, Maria's delicious food. This a.m. went to Keswick to open a bank account to deal with the expenses at Roches Point; then on to Sutton for odds and ends. After lunch slept for two hours as I do so often now that I am taking these pills that Dr MacM. ordered for the whole summer. They do wonders in keeping me relaxed but sap my will power. I do no work. Am advised not to think of work this summer, unless it comes naturally; still, a day is incomplete with nothing achieved or attempted. Cool, cloudy, showers today. Tonight still with only the gentlest lapping from the lake. The trees felled by the storm are gradually being cut up and the mess disposed of. For four days the air has been made hideous by the power saws.

July w Tomorrow is J.'s birthday — 21. His days, so far, have not been too happy. I pray for him, quietly — but to whom? A letter from Frank today telling me that Phyllis [Webb] is in Vancouver. I suppose I'll recover. One thing I can't permit myself is long grieving over a lover. That side of my life is a luxury. I must spend myself on the children, and, if possible, writing. Still, I grieve! Weather foul, for days. Heather staying in Chester [Nova Scotia] till the end of the month. Am ashamed at my loneliness. Going to town tomorrow. How good it seems now to think of breathing that dirty air and leaving myself behind. All my forty-five years are here, a rather horrifying accumulation.

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Letters [Found among Anne Wilkinson's papers after her death, these two letters speak of the closeness between mother and daughter that infuses the journals and autobiography.]

103 Roxborough Drive, Toronto August 2nd, 7355

Darling Anne, I wish I had been more communicative when I could talk. There is so much I want to say to you all now when I can't. I can never tell you what you have been to me, especially in the last year, and I wish there were something we could do to make it easier. I have been so proud of you in the way you have faced your long years of unhappiness and strain and just when at last you should have had a respite, you had the worry of Jay — and then me. I have wracked what is left of my brain to think of an easier way for you as far as I am concerned and I cannot find one. You have borne the whole brunt of it, and you must get away to Roches Point. This may go on for ages and you must not feel you should be here every day. Do take turns with Amo when you are both in town. I am filled with amazed pride that George and I, plus various ancestors, produced a poet, and it has not been easy for you to fulfill that side of your nature in an environment not conducive to it. It is wonderful what a place you have made for yourself among the writers. I know Jay will be all right and mostly thanks to you. I was so touched by his thoughtfulness to me, putting on records, seeing that I was not too tired, and finally at n p.m. knocking at the door, coming in and kissing me goodnight. I haven't kissed him for years as I thought he disliked it. I would like to say more but my typing is not much good, but I hope you understand. My love and thanks. Mum

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Letters Roches Point, Aug. 6, '55

Darling Mutt, Though your letter still makes me weep, nonetheless it is the most priceless document I possess — even if undeserved. It would take a book for me to express what you have been to me for the last forty four years. The patience and love with which you handled me through the terrors of my childhood (I so often get cross and bad tempered with Jay); your extraordinary forbearance during my wayward, rebellious adolescence — and your only reward a daughter who has always considered you her best friend, in a contemporary sense as well as in the maternal. Like you and Alan it is impossible for me to say these things in person because of course I would cry and neither of us could bear it. I couldn't bear to leave you yesterday but knew that I'd be little good to you unless I had some sort of change. I dreaded Roches Point because it is entirely linked with you. But I must learn to love it again for the sake of the children and last night when I went to bed with the sound of the lake I thought it might be possible. I slept until Elsie woke me at ten this morning. Everything is brown and baked as if the family acres had gone into mourning for our misfortunes. Stu and Susie's cottage is full of silence on one side; Aunt Amo's house on the other. I called on Aunt Maggie and Phyl this morning and they sent many tender messages to you. The cheerful spot is the wharf. The four little Mclntyres and your beautiful grandsons were as happy as porpoises. I can see why Grandad so loved the company of small children — for though their griefs can be terrible they are filled with innocence and believe in happy endings. Lucy Little when she was last in Toronto answered my wail 'But most people do not love their mothers as you and I,' with great wisdom. She said, 'True, but it only means we have had so much more than they have.' You are so brave and patient and always thinking of us and not your darling self. I am proud of your valour, as I am to be your daughter. Anne

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Poems

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Summer Acres

I These acres breathe my family, Holiday with seventy summers' history. My blood lives here, Sunned and veined three generations red Before my bones were formed. My eyes are wired to the willow That wept for my father, My heart is boughed by the cedar That covers with green limbs the bones of my children, My hands are white with a daisy, sired By the self same flower my grandfather loved; My ears are tied to the tattle of water That echoes the vows of ancestral lovers, My skin is washed by a lather of waves That bathed the blond bodies of uncles and aunts And curled on the long flaxen hair of my mother; My feet step soft on descendants of grass That was barely brushed By the wary boots of a hummingbird woman, The Great Great Grandmother Of my mid-century children. II

September born, reared in the sunset hour, I was the child of old men heavy with honour; I mourned the half mast time of their death and sorrowed A season for leaves, shaking their scarlet flags From green virility of trees.

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As ears spring cartilaged from skulls So my ears spring from the sound of water And the whine of autumn in the family tree. How tired, how tall grow the trees Where the trees and the family are temples Whose columns will tumble, leaf over root to their ruin. Here, in my body's home my heart dyes red The last hard maple in their acres. Where birch and elm and willow turn, Gently bred, to gold against the conifers, I hail my fathers, sing their blood to the leaf.

'54

Carol

I was a lover of turkey and holly But my true love was the Christmas tree We hung our hearts from a green green bough And merry swung the mistletoe We decked the tree with a silver apple And a golden pear, A partridge and a cockle shell And a fair maiden No rose can tell the fumes of myrrh That filled the forest of our day Till fruit and shell and maid fell down And the partridge flew away Now I swing from a brittle twig For the green bough of my true love hid A laily worm. Around my neck The hangman ties the holly.

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Lake Song Willow weep, let the lake lap up your green trickled tears. Water, love, lip the hot roots, cradle the leaf; Turn a new moon on your tongue, water, lick the deaf rocks, With silk of your pebble-pitched song, water, wimple the beach; Water, wash over the feet of the summer-bowed trees, Wash age from the face of the stone. I am a hearer of water; My ears hold the sound and the feel of the sound of it mortally. My skin is in love with lake water, My skin is in love and it sings in the arms of its lover, My skin is the leaf of the willow, My nerves are the roots of the weeping willow tree. My blood is a clot in the stone, The blood of my heart is fused to a pit in the rock; The lips of my lover can wear away stone, My lover Can free the blocked heart; The leaf and the root and the red sap will run with lake water, The arms of my lover will carry me home to the sea.

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Nursery Rhyme

Under the Under the Under the Under the Under the

sky is a tree tree is a stone stone is the grass grass is the earth earth, the small white bones of a child

Under the sky is a tree (And grown since I was here) That marks the stone (And colder than I remember) That marks the grass (And surrendered to weed) That marks the earth (O mother earth indeed) That hides the fine white dust Of a child whose small white bones are lost.

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Unicorn

I went north to read heraldic spoor, Passing on my way, Muskoka, motorBoats, motels, and at the Georgian Bay A snake beside its skin. No unicorn. Someone said its horn had last been seen By moonlight on the northern shore Of Lake Superior, But the only white thing there — a whistling swan. So I came home, empty, quite in despair, Opened my black door and shook the rain From my good eye, and moon And unicorn ran down my tumbling stair.

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I am so tired

I am so tired I do not think Sleep in death can rest me So line my two eternal yards With softest moss Then lengths of bones won't splinter As they toss Or pierce their wooden box To winter Do not let the children Pass my way alone Lest these shaking bones Rattle out their fright At waking in the night

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Lens I

The poet's daily chore Is my long duty; To keep and cherish my good lens For love and war And wasps about the lilies And mutiny within. My woman's eye is weak And veiled with milk; My working eye is muscled With a curious tension, Stretched and open As the eyes of children; Trusting in its vision Even should it see The holy holy spirit gambol Counterheadwise, Lithe and warm as any animal. My woman's iris circles A blind pupil; The poet's eye is crystal, Polished to accept the negative, The contradictions in a proof And the accidental Candour of the shadows; The shutter, oiled and smooth Clicks on the grace of heroes Or on some bestial act When lit with radiance The afterwords the actors speak Give depths to violence,

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Or if the bull is great And the matador And the sword Itself the metaphor. II

In my dark room the years Lie in solution, Develop film by film. Slow at first and dim Their shadows bite On the fine white pulp of paper. An early snap of fire Licking the arms of air I hold against the light, compare The details with a prehistoric view Of land and sea And cradles of mud that rocked The wet and sloth of infancy A stripe of tiger, curled And sleeping on the ribs of reason Prints as clear As Eve and Adam, pearled With sweat, staring at an apple core; And death, in black and white Or politic in green and Easter film, Lands on steely points, a dancer Disciplined to the foolscap stage, The property of poets Who command his robes, expose His moving likeness on the page.

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Mary Osier Gibbons, Anne's mother, 1916

Anne (right) with her brother Alan and sister Betty, c. 1917

George Sutton Gibbons, Anne's father

Anne (right) with Betty and Alan, c. 1922

Bambooland, Montecito, California: 'nondescript and built of wood ... it faced directly on the sea'

The cottage, Roches Point: 'the sound of the lake can be heard in every room'

Beechcroft, Roches Point: Time here flaunts its paradox; rushes by yet never moves an inch'

Anne in Egypt, 1929

Egypt, 1929: 'camels I admired so long as I was not aboard one'; from left to right, May Livingstone, Anne , Betty Gibbons, Mary Boyd

Anne Gibbons

The wedding at The Lodge, Roches Point, 23 July 1932

With Bob and Jeremy, c. 1937

Anne Wilkinson, April 1941

With Jeremy, Heather, and Alan on her knee, 1942

With Alan, 1942

Anne Wilkinson in the early 19505

The Autobiography

i

A clean stick peeled Of twenty paper layers of years Collected Poems, 94

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Chapter One

An Island Safe from Time

I lay beside my mother and watched the moonlit sea through her bedroom window. It breathed, exhaling breakers on the sand, became my drowsiness. I slept. Many times the dark took me by the throat and shook me, and I, surviving, sought the benediction of my mother's presence, her human warmth and the flowery smell of her bed. In early childhood my sister and I had sniffed her often and lovingly. We told her she smelled of roses and lilies and grass. It wasn't a matter of soap or scent; she, as each of us, had a personal smell, individual as eyes or the lines of a hand. Love is blind, we say, but who tells the lover he is led, in part, by the imperious nose? Or that an animosity can be explained by dislike at first smell? When I woke plumes of aromatic mist, salt and scent of eucalyptus, drifted in through the open window. We ate porridge, then eggs, and while we drank our milk the fog lifted and small lizards emerged from hiding places to sun themselves on rocks or the pebbly paths; lovely little reptiles but untamable. Not from fear, I thought, but from indifference. And so I begged a water lizard, a captive in a goldfish bowl with only a rock for land. But his days were sluggish, inscrutable, watery; he paid no heed to man, no more than his cousins who moved with speed of hummingbirds, or lay still as sticks; stiller, for sticks and stones are heartless, and it is the beating heart in animals when they 'freeze' that makes their stillness absolute. Our garden ended in a little cliff, and below it curved the beach and the Pacific Ocean. Behind the house a tall thick cedar hedge hid the single railway track and a road that farther on climbed the foothills. Beyond the foothills rose the mountains, their bare peaks high enough to lose themselves in clouds or to catch the snow before it melted lower down in rain.

The Autobiography Now, as I pull it out of the past, this land seems the whole of my childhood though in the calendar sense it was not. We lived most of the time in Canada; in London, Ontario, until my father's death when I was eight, and then with our maternal grandfather in Toronto. Craigleigh was the name of his house, a ceremonial place and somewhat feudal in that it had a self-sufficiency uncommon to a city dwelling. And Roches Point. There was always Roches Point in the summer; the tall trees and the aunts and uncles and cousins and their reflections in the clear lake water. These were Osier acres and the people my mother's people and here we had a house and we called it home after our father died. Between these points we moved, yet however dear the place toward which we set forth I could not bear the onset of a journey; trains hissing steam in the station while everyone says goodbye goodbye; and their plutonic smell and the whistle wailing through the night. Nor did I care for ships (again I think first of their smell). Yet ships are man-made splendours, and trains are dragons only to the reluctant voyager. I wished to stay forever where I happened to be, a Questing Beast, perhaps, but one in search of home, not of far countries, and we had already spent a summer in England, another in the Maritimes and a winter in Bermuda before we crossed the continent and found Bambooland, for such was the name of our house, unique, insofar as its neighbours had amorous sounding Spanish names to match their pseudo-Spanish architecture. Nondescript and built of wood, by Californian standards it was oldfashioned, and so were the wicker chairs and faded chintz. But it faced directly on the sea, a rarity in that neighbourhood where the railway runs along the coast and only here and there a jutting piece of land escapes and can be lived on. Visitors believed the trains roared through our kitchen; I knew better but sometimes forgot and tried to catch one there. Yesterday I lunched with a friend of my father, and he began to laugh, remembering him. The funniest man I've ever known, he said. My father had black hair and green eyes and a mouth that curled at the corners. My father was gay when he wasn't sombre as black marble. My father was a moody man. So it must have been during our second visit to California that I woke in my mother's bed on a misty morning. My night terror had started with my father's illness and continued after his death. On our return to London two years earlier he was alive, a man possessed, a man with a secret. It is in the stable, he said, and there we found a Shetland pony, saddle, pony cart, and a red sleigh with bells on its harness. We were windy with pride. Our bellies blew up as a horse's does when you tighten 166

An Island Safe from Time the girth. No one else in London had a Shetland pony. We named her Barbara after the city Santa Barbara, five miles distant from Bambooland, and soon grew attached to her though she in no way returned our affection; a cranky, lazy creature whose concern was for her stomach. The child whose father dies young compensates in a measure for this loss by putting in his stead the memory of a parfit gentil knight,1 a being hardly lower than the gods, as safe from time as from all human frailties. With a mother still romantically in love when the real man died, and his friends anxious to tell us picturesque tales of his youth, stories they loved to relate for it was their youth also, it was easy enough for us to create a hero. He was a labour-liberal - therefore a friend of the poor; unconventional, therefore an enemy of the philistine; a 'discomfortable man,' said an Osier great-uncle, meaning he was not a conservative and that his conversation disconcerted by its audacity. At Royal Military College he met my mother's youngest brother and the two became close friends. They made the 'grand tour' together and my uncle swore that by a series of magical tricks our father landed them both in the harem of a Sultan. And once he was denounced from a Methodist pulpit, a fact of which we were especially proud; and not for frequenting harems but for his political views. A thread here, a thread there, and soon we had woven a legendary figure to replace the breathing man. A small boy who had also lost his father said to me, Mother believes that all the best men die young, and I nodded in solemn agreement, as if we had known from the beginning that those whom the gods love ...2 My father was against killing animals for sport but he wore a pink coat and rode to hounds, though only because the London Hunt was drag. Before his marriage he rode with his father and sisters in horseshows, and perhaps this is why, in my Walter Mitty dreams,3 I fancied I enjoyed nothing so much as riding, thinking it of all sports the noblest, as indeed it is, except for sailing. I galloped over fields, taking the highest fences to the applause of more timid hunters, and I did not forget to include in my vision the impeccable cut of my coat or the glossy perfection of my boots. The reality was somewhat different. Riding Barbara could hardly be called riding at all, and we wore whatever we happened to have on. Our legs were usually bare and had we troubled to saddle her there was always something to rub or scratch. But often we rode bareback and the impossible gait of a Shetland joggled the posterior in short quick bumps, up and down, on a spine that somehow escaped the surrounding pads of fat. We soon outgrew her but continued to ride, in California and Canada, on docile

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The Autobiography riding-school hacks. And I continued to dream of livelier mounts, though in fact there was no horse, except one cast in bronze, quiet enough for me. I rode up and down mountain trails, aquiver every rocky foot of the way, and through the then placid Rosedale ravines in Toronto with an equal sense of impending disaster. At fifteen I gave up, except for two John Gilpin-like escapades,4 one in Egypt, one on an Ontario farm. The old itch returned when I watched three Arab horses skim across the desert. To fly on the back of one of these was the event for which I had been born. I hurried to buy jodhpurs in Cairo and the same day set off, an Arab groom in charge, and my romanticism. I trembled, perhaps I shook, but not enough to make my teeth chatter, not until the horse bolted and we streamed over sand at a clip that did justice to my dreams, and I swore to Allah I would not dream again if He, in His mercy, would deliver me from this thundering reality. The groom cursed and shouted, then the distance between us swallowed his voice. Inability to fall off was my sole virtue as a rider, or rather my vice, for fear alone glued me to the saddle, and in the saddle I remained until the horse tired and the angry groom caught and led us back toward the pyramids and the crouching sphinx. A year and a half later, on a country weekend, I did it again. There were hunters in the stable. Three trained horsemen and my cousin Anne [Osier] volunteered to exercise them. I heard myself do likewise. In sandals and cotton slacks I rode for the last time, starting off discreetly enough behind the men until we reached an open field. Horses do not hold me in high regard, or permit me to set the pace, and away we went at full gallop. For a moment I believed myself protected by the fences. We could only go round and round. But this proved false. Up and over into the next field, and I with my eyes tight shut. I opened them briefly when the horse swerved, shot through an open gate that led to the highway, and without slackening his pace headed for home. He stopped at the stable door, where we were met by the other riders who had returned in justifiable concern for a valuable horse. California, because I have never returned, remains intact, an island safe from time. In retrospect I see the colour gold illuminate its people and events, no less than sky and sea and hills. It was always night-time when we came to our journey's end, five miles south of Santa Barbara, and four days and four nights distant from Union Station in Toronto. Here, no station at all, not even a platform, only mimosa and sea, and a few hundred yards along the track, Bambooland. In the dark the nose was first to rejoice at our coming. We breathed. Then the ear revived, 168

An Island Safe from Time and with it the sound of the sea. And so to bed, abysmally drunk. Within a week our mother's beauty wheeled from moon to sun. We shed our Ontario stoppers, the gags in our mouths, the blinkers and ear pads. What more could we ask than a house of our own and freedom to wander on almost country roads or on a beach so long we never reached its end? Even I, with my fractious nature, allowed myself to be myself, a child, rather than a creature haunted by the shadows from a grownup world I could not understand. But more than from sea or sea-air or being outdoors all day, we drew sustenance from our resurrected mother. We waxed or waned according to her health. At Craigleigh, with no distractions, she sometimes fell into quite Victorian declines and lay all day on a sofa. Once she stayed in bed for six bleak months. But not in California. In California she would say, How hungry I am, and smile with surprise, and she made friends who were not relations, and though she may not have loved them as much she had more fun. Sukey, as nurse-housekeeper, came with us from Canada. Yee, the Chinese cook, we found in Santa Barbara. Originally he had been employed in the usual way through an agency, but on subsequent visits he simply turned up and we never discovered how he knew the year, let alone the date of our arrival. Every Wednesday he took a bus to China Town and gambled his wages and smoked opium. On Thursday his serene and smiling face would be a little more so or a little less, depending on the number of pipes and his luck at the tables. He was kind, and often brought presents of lichee nuts, but we did not know him, under the skin. Like the lizards, he belonged to an ancient race and had no smalltalk for barbarians. One day our mother asked us if we would like to go to school. We said yes, not having been. There was one nearby, a small private day-school run by three Canadians, Mrs Howard and her daughters, Miss Esther and Miss Isabelle.5 Miss Isabelle also gave private instruction in sketching and water colours. A new camel-hair brush, twelve clean cubes of colour in my paint box, patient Miss Isabelle. But I cannot make a square sit down on paper. My fingers are blind, though my eye is not and my eye believed that somehow I could recreate this golden landscape. I wrestled with the sinuous curve of the bay and the blue mountains, and I wished also to include the sound of the waves as they broke on the beach and the sucking noise of the sea when it swallowed them back again. Sound was as important as line and colour but my picture gave no echoes and the colours were mud and there was no line at all. Faith, I had 169

The Autobiography heard, could move mountains. Why then could it not paint them, for I had the faith of ten? Even today I occasionally dream a picture, and when I wake, feel the old frustration and curse my stupid hands. I wrote poetry too, but only my mother praised it. Miss Esther said it didn't scan — which meant there was nothing important that I could do well. But we were happy at a school where the classrooms were hardly more than big verandahs and the games we played so faintly organized it seemed they were designed for pleasure rather than discipline. Once, for flagrant disobedience, I was put in a corner with my face to the wall. Unaccustomed to punishment, I burned with the shame of it. Warned against playing near a clump of poison oak, I had jumped up and down in the forbidden bush. I claimed to be immune to its dangers, as proved to be the truth. To flout authority — a trait, an evil spirit that has not yet been exorcized. Had I been a good rider, a painter, a poet, I might have been more docile, but of this I am not certain. A classmate sometimes joins us on our slow exploratory homeward journeys. I am happily popping bubbles of tar that rise on the surface of the road with the hot noon sun when the world turns round with seven words: 'My fourth Daddy is coming home today.' She says it casually, as one might ask a friend to tea. We tell our mother and she explains, vaguely, the somewhat different marriage customs of Californians, and something about divorce. We have heard of birth, marriage and death, never of divorce. All at once we learn that many of our school friends have either too many or too few parents. Our father's death, a hard fact, becomes of a sudden an honourable loss. My father is dead, I say, to some unfortunate who has lost hers, but not to the grave. We learn too about kidnapping. The only child of particularly rich parents comes to school with a bodyguard. He sits outside the classroom during lessons and hovers in the background while we play our childish games, an ominous armed figure, proof this world is not so golden as it seems. Shells are holy to children, cathedrals among their secular playthings. And the sea roars from them still, even when packed in trunks and carried inland across the continent to Ontario. It is afternoon, low tide. My sister and I are six and seven, or maybe eight and nine. Yes, eight and nine because our father seems to be dead. A girl a few years older joins us on the beach. Her father has met our mother and therefore we are supposed to be friends; and so we are, in a guarded sort of way. We head for a cluster of rocks, walking close to the water where the sand is hard and wet. At high tide the rocks are sub170

An Island Safe from Time merged so that now every indentation makes a small aquarium: sea urchins, starfish, sea anemones, and jelly fish. We poke the jellyfish with twigs to make them squirt; gather seaweed, various as flowers in Maytime woods; and ropes of rubbery kelp. The rainy season is over but the river bed, dry for ten months of the year, still carries turbulent brown water to the sea. We leave the rocks and continue along the shore to where the beach is grooved with its channels, tributaries fanning out in veins across the sand; a place for boats or island jumping or simply looking. On the way home we return to the rocks and watch the sea, for the tide has turned; and we watch the sun, already partly submerged in ocean. On these two events we concentrate our senses, and on the angels and cherubims that float among the domes and towers in the sky. Below, the sea is creeping toward our rocks, every breaker running an inch beyond its predecessor. This is our theatre and we know the play by heart. The curtain falls when the sea surrounds us, sky goes out, and we wade through water to the beach; then up the cliff in scented evening air to Bambooland. On the way our new friend tells us her mother is an invalid; but we are uncertain about the word 'invalid.' Better to say nothing in case it means two-headed, in which case she would not want to explain. We say goodbye, for this is not a land of twilight. After the mighty explosion of colour, a smaller explosion of stars. And with the sun goes all warmth. Already we are cold and huddle close to the living room fire. In California we eat our meals with our mother, even dinner. Yee cooks artichokes like no one else. Tonight we have each a young green pyramid with which to play as well as eat, for half the pleasure is in plucking the tapered leaf, dipping the soft pale base in butter, watching the pyramid shrink, stacking the leaves symmetrically round the plate until at last the heart is uncovered, buttered, and eaten with the reverence due to such out of season delicacies as a peacock's tongue or the heart of a virgin. It is not long before we learn the meaning of'invalid.' Mr Hesketh, the father of our friend, invites us for Sunday luncheon, and on the way we listen while our mother explains the elusive nature of his wife's ailment. She never leaves her bed, is wasted and weak, though from no specific disease; very ill, yet not exactly dying. It sounds mysterious, almost as bad as being two-headed. We know, however, that our host owns a herd of goats. And it is the goats we wish to see. The Heskeths live where the foothills begin but no aura of gold lights their big brown house with its blind windows and frozen face. A cluster of oaks besiege it, their Spanish moss choking the long verandahs; moss that has ceased to be moss, 171

The Autobiography become instead the combings of grey witches. Our friend is quiet - not at all the beach person we know. And we are stiff as the tin woodman was when his joints ran out of oil.6 What is the nature of this ghost that stops our mouths and turns our legs to lead? And then, while we sit, puppets, about the dining-room table, I almost see it; and in the form of tears, grey, sticky, the consistency of blood, dripping from walls, furniture, even from the food. I do not yet know who is weeping; husband, daughter or invalid wife. Later we inspect goats, but soberly. When we return to the house our mother has disappeared. Mr Hesketh says his wife has asked to see her. Now she sends for us as well. We can hardly say no thank you, however politely, so follow our silent friend to the sick-room. Blinds are drawn. At first there is nothing to see but the greenish dark; nothing to smell but decay, thick and sweetish sour. Then a bed emerges, and something fleshless forms itself against the pillows. A tiny petulant voice barely reaches our ears. It tells us she eats nothing but lettuce, and of that only a leaf or two a day; and we believe her for she is thin as the dead. Later we learned that she refused to eat, or admit the sun, was bent on destroying herself; her husband and child too, it seemed. So the grey tears came not from one but from three. My brother and sister and I never went back, though our mother occasionally visited the invalid, and every day Mr Hesketh brought goats' milk to our door. Far superior to cows' he said, though our health was not his concern. He hoped to glimpse the glory of our mother. Someone was always saying, how beautiful your mother is, and we were quite aware that people liked to look at her. On Saturday morning, in search of a lost ball, we discovered the garden hedge was hollow. I remember it as cedar but perhaps because it was clipped in a similar fashion, I also see it twelve-feet high and six-feet thick, but I have grown taller and wider and the hedge may have dwindled. Whatever its size I know it contained innumerable tunnels through which we crawled on our bellies. Here and there it opened into rooms, hidey-holes where we sucked oranges and spied on any animals or persons passing the road - a substitute for the secret passageways and caves stumbled on, and with such regularity, by children in books. Trees were significant and not to be taken for granted. Though we did not collect or catalogue leaves, or investigate the ribs and moles of bark, we revered them as the gods of the vegetable kingdom — northern deities in Ontario, and here the southern: feathered pepper tree, cypress and eucalyptus and the myth-laden olive, live-oaks wrapped in shawls of Spanish moss; orange, grapefruit, lemon; in blossom and scent or hung 172

An Island Safe from Time with globes of fruit. Palm trees did not move me except when the wind flapped their clumsy fans in creaky, unfamiliar music. They belong in the true tropics, on a coral island; and they should have it to themselves, for they do not adapt to other foliage. My mother detested snakes and so did I until I learned to distinguish between her likes and dislikes and my own. Even now I do not willingly touch them, and should I come upon one unexpectedly I shudder, which means I always shudder for it is the serpent's nature to be unexpected, arid that is the horror: the thing there but undetected until a ripple of grass, a slither, a blasphemous hiss. But when the shock of the serpent fades I regard a delicate marvel - skin, a masterpiece of Persian enamelling; tongue, a gift from Mars, a fork of lightning, the whole a muscled ribbon of life, an emblem of the well-created. In California I was a child and snakes were wholly serpents and rattlers a commonplace reality, not on the coast, but in the mountains and desert. It was by way of a snake that my brother became, for me, a hero, though I had always known him to be brave. He was fair like our mother and like her had eyes of a blue so brilliant that however dirty he might be he always had the air of being dressed up, as if for some great occasion. My sister and I, more soberly attired, returned from school one day to find him in mortal combat with a python. The battle ended when a well-aimed rock crushed its head. It writhed a long time and then lay still. We watched our brother pull it up the cliff and stretch its length on the path, seven or eight feet of it, and thick as a seven-year sapling. I stared at victor and vanquished. It is not a python, said Alan, it is a particularly large rattler. Whichever it is it doesn't matter. He has saved the lives of his sisters, Sukey, Yee. Our mother was out at the time of the battle but on her return we led her to the corpse. Except for a shudder she could not have been more polite, by which I mean she showed a proper reverence — though she did identify Goliath as a gopher snake and harmless to all except gophers. This information in no way altered the earlier indelible picture of events. I continued to see a python; my brother to wrestle with rattlers in his dreams. Encouraged by the shaking of doctors' heads, my mother believed me to be a delicate child, a belief I devoutly shared; that my 'nerves' were a continuous irritation to my brother and sister, I recognized, but dimly. Everyone suffers, they reasoned, but most refrain from hullabaloo. My burglar phobia disturbed my mother's rest as well as mine, and my brother, having slain one dragon, believed he could exorcize the tyrant who held me prisoner when the lights went out. Shock therapy it is called,

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The Autobiography and while I was taking a bath he hid in my bedroom cupboard and waited there until I had been tucked away for the night. A patient boy, he did not move, not until I drowsed on the edge of sleep. Creak. Silence. Creak. Except for my thumping heart, I am paralysed. Creak. Eight deaths later, with clatter and shout, a giant leaps into the room, and thus releases me, for now I scream and everyone in the house comes flying. But even my mother cannot change the monster back into Alan. When I can speak I say, But I know what Alan looks like. This was huge, a giant. I did not hold his shock therapy against him, perhaps because I never succeeded in transforming the being I had seen to a small boy's stature. My mother, elegant and reserved, delighted in her opposites and found one in Mrs Sykes who lived around the corner from Bambooland. Mrs Sykes was cockney and, true to form, a realist. Mr Sykes, many years older than his wife, sometimes gave us a dime if we passed him on the road, acts we credited to a princely man, a lavish spender. He was rich, English, upper class. Mrs Sykes said so. She also said that in marrying her he had married beneath him. 'But he wasn't getting any younger and he likes his comfort. He wanted a nurse. I wanted a bit of money. But O he's careful, Mary. When we sailed for America we went aboard by different gangplanks; he to first class, me to third. My 'oneymoon,' she'd say, and cry with laughter. It is in my mind that she called her husband Mr Sykes, and at his request, but one never knows exacdy what was there or what one adds. We knew her as a strategist, forever on the alert to keep disturbing elements out of his ken, for he was a man of uninhibited temper. One day she came to our house, greatly agitated. It was during prohibition when a man's cellar and his dearest earthly treasure were synonymous. Someone, a servant, or perhaps a burglar, had left a row of whisky kegs with their taps, not dripping but flowing softly on the cellar floor. Mr Sykes kept strict account of stock on hand and its consumption. He must be told - but when? Wisely, as it turned out, Mrs Sykes procrastinated, hoping to devise a means of bracing him for the blow. A few days later a close friend of the Sykes was killed by a train on the track that ran behind our house. Deaf, people said, hadn't heard the whistle, a tale I did not believe for one could see a long way up and down the track. I knew as well as they that this was suicide. Mrs Sykes heard of the accident before her husband. Well, Mary, she explained later to my mother, it came to me all of a sudden - I'll tell him about Mrs X and the whisky at the same time. It worked very well. Being a gendeman, she said, he could only weep for his friend. 174

An Island Safe from Time On our third visit to California we rented a house half a mile inland in order to escape the fogs that clung to the coast. That was the reason my mother gave for deserting Bambooland but in truth it was for the garden that she proved faithless; six varied acres; an orange grove and one of lemon, rhododendrons and roses and lilies; mimosa, a little bamboo jungle, a live-oak wood and a river bed that filled with rushing water during the rainy season. There was a stable-garage and a gardener's cottage inhabited by an English woman who cared for all the fruit and flowers. She was intelligent and friendly too, and we followed her round while she worked. I talked to her about Heidi7 and Heidi's grandfather, and how he toasted bread and cheese at an open hearth, and didn't she think it sounded good, with goat's milk to drink from a bowl, not a glass? I didn't tell her I had never tasted cheese because my mother believed it an indigestible food, and so she asked us for supper and we toasted bread and cheese and we drank from bowls instead of glasses and I ate so much I was sick all night, or perhaps I was sick from a guilty conscience. Alan now attended a boys' school three miles distant in the foothills. He rode to and fro on a big white horse, a mild sort of beast without distinction. My sister and I returned to Mrs Howard's, over the fence and along a little rutted lane. That year and the following our closest friends were sisters whose widowed mother lived, as we did, in the east and came to California for a few winter months. The boys at school loved the younger one, Amelia, and of their attentions she constantly and bitterly complained. Poor Amelia, I said to my mother, the boys pester her so. They even try to kiss her. She finds life unendurable. My mother laughed. Amelia loves it, she said. You can't tell by what girls SAY unde those circumstances. I knew more about women after that. I also knew more about my mother - how difficult it was going to be to deceive her, though I would try, for deception is one of life's sad certainties. Sometime during these years Wilson joined the family as chauffeur. While we travelled by train to California, he drove the car across the continent. On his way to and fro he learned from cowboys how to handle a lasso. And he sang music-hall hits and soldiers' songs very lustily, though not in our mother's presence. We had worried lest Yee should resent this western intruder, but they hit it off from the start, and it was a pleasure to watch them in the evening, the red-faced portly Canadian and the delicately turned Chinese in his long white coat, playing with the lasso, hour after hour. With Wilson at the wheel we now went farther afield; several times to Los Angeles, an idiot place, or so it appeared in the early twenties; a

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The Autobiography shapeless hotchpotch of cardboard houses, a Disneyland where gas stations were giant mushrooms or Cinderella's pumpkin coach. What might have entranced, shocked. The fantasy was akin to lunacy, the lunacy to nightmare, and I susceptible to all three. We visited the big studios and watched pictures in the making and stared at Stars. It was no part of the script when two blonde actresses tore each other with red claws and snarled obscenities. During the hundred mile drive from Los Angeles to Bambooland, I sat in my corner and wept, while my brother and sister observed me with contemptuous eyes. A very little has always excited me very much and a sharp pleasant as well as a painful stimulus was commonly followed by weeping and sleeplessness. My mother, in an effort to console me in my disability, told me it was the price exacted for owning a sensitive receiving set. And when I was happy, she reminded me, I was exceptionally so. I had not known before that grownup people quarrelled. I took it for granted they didn't, despite evidence to the contrary in books and newspapers. That children fought was self-evident, for my brother and sister and I were very good at it. But children see themselves as perpetual children; adults are adults, were born that way. Two distinct species. Crossing and recrossing the continent we saw many things besides the vast and lonely landscape. At night, from a moving train, I first glimpsed poverty in the lighted rooms of slums. Live people sped by, and tattered laundry, peeling wallpaper, dirt, grease, everything exposed by the glare of unshaded light bulbs. But the scenes unrolled like a film, nothing to touch or smell or taste; a documentary that moved me yet did not penetrate as it would have had I entered with all my senses. Nonetheless, these were the pictures in my head later, during the thirties, when I became concerned with politics and the c.c.F.8 But at nine and ten, and for some years to come, I was nothing more than the victim of my receiving set, and at my wits' end trying to make sense of the messages that came through by night as well as by day. Some were in code, some in foreign languages, and this is every child's preposterous situation. In London, Ontario, and at our grandfather's house in Toronto, religion had been a thing so vague that no one ever made a definite statement about it. In London we had occasionally attended church; in Toronto almost never. When we were small and someone died, our mother told us that he or she had gone to heaven or to perpetual sleep — sometimes one, sometimes the other. Insomnia perhaps had made the words synonymous. She acquiesced in regard to heaven, but advised against believing our nurses' tales of hell. Yet one implies the other and 176

An Island Safe from Time without hell I could not put much stock in heaven. My sister and I said evening prayers; not on our knees in the cold outside our beds, but snug beneath the blankets. Instead of 'Our Father' I said 'Our Farmer,' a natural mistake for a country-loving child. But the important prayer was the God-blessing - father, mother, brother, sister, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and friends. The list was long but I was superstitious and believed the careless omission of a name might bring the unblessed to a hasty death. For many months we prayed with fervor for the recovery of our father. Praying with fervor meant squeezing the eyes shut instead of merely closing them, and the hands were not so much folded in submission to God's will as clenched and ready to hit. When our father died I rattled off my prayers, superstitious still, but nothing more. After an operation I forgot them during the first stuporous night, and on discovering the next day that family and friends were alive and none the worse for my betrayal, I folded up my magic and put it away with the outgrown dolls and teddy bears. My prayers had never been acts of grace, only something comparable to, though less sacred than, the rites of African tribes. My mother, raised on Church of England, family prayers and the bible, lost her faith yet remained nostalgic for the certainties of childhood and sometimes even tried to recapture them. I remember a winter in California when we were regular attendants at the little Episcopalian church a minute or two distant from Bambooland, All-Saints-by-the-Sea its name, and our mother knew and admired the rector.9 A man of intelligence, and with rare spiritual qualities as well, she said. Years since he had lost a leg, above the knee, yet suffered still in the non-existent calf and foot and toes. A ghost leg come to haunt him. I shared his haunt, for it was often in my mind, that no-leg with its positive pain. Before the sermon the children of the congregation left for Sunday school where we were taught, I can't remember what, by a tall young woman with fine black eyes, a friend of our mother to whom we were devoted. But for me the charm of church lay neither in the spirituality of its rector nor in the Sunday school instruction. I went for the medals. Of these there were four classes. To earn the lowest a child must attend on six successive Sundays. But it was the higher medal I desired; one the size of a man's thumb-nail, shaped as a shield, blue and gold. And for this they asked twelve Sundays all in a row. And now to think I cannot recall whether I earned it or not; all that remains is desire, the lust to own this thing, blue and gold, with a pin on the back, something to be worn. Christianity had been presented to us as a matter of ethics rather than 177

The Autobiography a faith, a mystery. And so I sought religion elsewhere, entered a Green Order, a retreat from personality, not mine alone, all personality. Emotions that might have found an outlet in religion expressed themselves in a kind of nature worship. I could sit a long time among green things in a state of exaltation; become at will grass, rock, water, weather as well. Weather could absorb me for hours. Poetry, solitude, the country — these were sufficient to produce a metamorphosis, trance-like states that began when I was ten and continued, intermittently, for thirty years. But at length my Green faith weakened, then scuttled away like a rat to its hole. The human situation demanded something else, though I don't at all know what. At any rate I lost my power to identify myself with whatever took my fancy: tree, rock, grass, ant, chipmunk, bird. Nature be damned. The sun never shone brighter than on the morning my mother choked to death. She died of'natural causes.' It took them two years to kill her, piece by piece. No Nazi ever did a more painstaking job. Worship the mindless enemy? No thank you. Yet, like an atheist Anglican, I go back; only for the beauty of the service, you understand. The service and the singing. A solo today by a bird, a cardinal in a green chapel.

178

Chapter Two

A Corrupter of Paradise

We were quite young, three, four and six, perhaps, when we breathed our first whiff of Progressive Education (capitals essential for this mode of learning); and in London, Ontario, of all places. My mother read Shaw and the Webbs and books on a new speciality, pediatrics, and she read also about education. The Montessori method, though devised by an Italian in Italy, became something of a vogue in the United States.10 When my mother met a graduate of its mysteries she installed her in our nursery and sent across the seas for the elaborate equipment essential to our flowering. Six children of family friends participated in what may well have been the first nursery school in Canada. Touch rather than sight seems to have been the idea, for we spent a great deal of time, eyes closed, sitting crosslegged in a little circle, fingering blocks on which the letters of the alphabet were raised. It was as if we must first learn to read in Braille. We also cut long pink paper streamers and sang Frere Jacques and Au Clair de la Lune, not revolutionary activities at all. By Christmas, or soon after, the school was dead. We lay in bed with our customary bronchial colds, mustard plasters on our chests, kettles puffing aromatic steam, and the snow falling. Then we went to Bermuda for sun and sea. We saw a lot on account of our chests; later we visited strange lands because of unsuitable attachments, or too many. Many years passed before we were again exposed to Progressive Education. During our father's lifetime my sister and I did not go to school, except for one term at Mrs Howard's in California. I learned to read at home and, as many children do, almost spontaneously, for the child with a good ear sings in tune and the child with an eye for print soon gets the hang of it. At my grandfather's house in Toronto we had governesses. Where do you go to school? We don't, we have a governess.

The Autobiography It would be inaccurate to say they taught. They didn't know how. In retrospect they merge into one abject English spinster with a perpetual drop quivering at the tip of a poor pinched nose. My sister and I were made of flint and purposely mistreated them in the hope that they would leave, a hope that was regularly fulfilled. But of what use when the replacement was but a replica of the replaced? Because of my grandfather's failing health we had lived the whole of his last two winters at Craigleigh in Toronto. After his death we returned again to California, though Alan, now at boarding school, could only join us for the Christmas holidays. An article by Edward Yeomans in the Atlantic Monthly launched us on our second venture in Progressive Education. Mr Yeomans had made his fortune in business, and now proposed to spend a part of it creating Eden. He believed in man's natural virtue, that children in an environment of his making would, without restraint, be happy and good. His school was conceived and an heroic effort made to run it on the basis of this assumption. He had read Dewey." He was a man of faith. Though he came from the east and considered the Pacific a second class ocean, he chose a California valley surrounded by mountains as the site for his experiment. Climate decided him. Only in sunshine could children unfold like flowers. And indeed the landscape suited his high purpose. We were somewhat familiar with three of Mr Yeomans' specialities: Shakespeare, Bach and folk song, but of folk dance, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and sailing ships we knew next to nothing. My sister and I studied the prospectus in Toronto. It had little in common with unprogressive schools. To begin with it was co-educational, and co-educational boarding schools were unheard of in Canada. Uncles and aunts shook their heads. It was nonconformist, too, in its indifference to the scholastic requirements of universities, and professed to teach only those subjects which seemed of value to Mr Yeomans and his staff. For this reason it refused pupils of more than fifteen years of age for these, in the end, might resent an Eden that left them unprepared for Harvard or Vassar. We arrived, characteristically, two weeks after the fall term had started, but this was nothing to children who were going to school for almost a full school year, the first in our lives. My mother rented a house in Montecito, one we had never lived in before but close to the old familiar Bambooland and the nameless one with the garden. We are in the car, on our way to the Ojai Valley School. Wilson is driving. No-one speaks, for though we believe we are going to paradise we tremble, as certain priests do when they lie dying. The signposts there 180

A Corrupter of Paradise may be of gold but it's certain the directions will be other than the familiar ones of home. Home is no longer a place, but a mother, Sukey, Wilson, even Yee. Or is it Roches Point? But that is a long way from the Ojai Valley. We drive along the coast for twenty miles, then turn inland and climb the narrow twisting road cut in the side of a mountain. I keep my eyes fast shut, or try to, for it is difficult not to take an occasional peek at the shrubless precipice. Even blind I know the wheels of the car spin only a foot or so from the edge, and the road's surface, gravel; a drive to be endured every Friday and Sunday, for we are weekly boarders, a privilege denied the other children. This, and being Canadian, already sets us a little apart. Now we descend into the big basin, the valley itself, and there in the distance on the left we see the school; in the foreground two low adobe buildings and at right angles to them one made of wood which we identify from the prospectus as the Shop. Set well back from these is a two storey building where the boarders live. Mr Yeomans greets us. He is a shaggy man with clothes to match, and he walks with a sailor's roll. He may be fifty, or five years more, or less. I don't know. Children never do. I listen to the quality of his voice rather than to what he says; it is rough and twangy and compassionate. He has about him an air of nobility. One is immediately afraid for him because he is innocent. I am afraid also for myself for one dreads the people one is bound to hurt. Our mother has already decided in his favour and continues to be captivated by everything and everyone. They treat her royally, a tribute to her beauty and intelligence, but they also know her as a niece of Sir William Osier, still a popular memory in the United States, and this plays a part, a fact of which we are not unaware. How could we be, having lived our lives as children of grandfathers, greatnieces and great-nephew of imposing great-uncles? Thanks to Canadian Pacific connections we never travel in Canada or the u.s. without word being sent ahead to insure that we are specially cared for. No queuing for meals, and only the most courtly attention from custom and immigration officials. Everything oiled. I was in two minds about this. It embarrassed me; I believed I hated it. I wanted to hate it, yet I did not, for I had come to depend on special attention, something easy enough to scorn in theory, but in practice an almost universal pleasure. I was more puritan then than I am today, and judged human frailty, including my own, with little justice and no charity. At the Ojai School I made a first attempt to unfamily my family self. I have made others since but now it is irrelevant, for the family, as a source 181

The Autobiography of special privilege, has long since disappeared. Nonconformity. Energy wasted in pointless rebellion? I think not. It kept the blood circulating, no easy matter when the third generation of a once powerful, still affluent family, tended to be sluggish. A kind of impotent effort to be, like my forefathers, a pioneer even should pioneering end in nothing more than perversity. My mother leaves and we unpack. Every child has a room of its own. There are twenty-five boarders and as many day pupils. Bedrooms open off both sides of a long hall and at the end of the hall a door leads to identical accommodation for the boys. The nights are still mild and we learn we may sleep on the porch that runs across the front of the house. Girls are friendly — yet I am intimidated by their ease with one another, and with themselves. My sister and I are stiff, grownup, and at the same time more childish than these Californian Amazons. I sit and watch their perpetual motion; one bounces a ball with a hundred intricate variations and a rhyme for each. I am entranced, but stir uneasily. How shall I acquit myself among these diverse talents? Another girl turns cartwheels down the narrow runway between the ends of our beds and the low porch wall; someone else is doing magic turns with a skipping-rope. Lights go out at nine but talk goes on. Homesickness begins when I learn the rising bell, very loud, rings at six thirty. The girls on K.P. get up fifteen minutes earlier than that. But what is K.P.? And can I find out without asking? My sister and I lie awake long after the Amazons are stilled with sleep. For the first time in many years I have no fear of the dark. I have learned the first lesson. Not the night, the day. Mr Yeomans felt, and strongly, that fathers and mothers were the only persons suited to the delicate task of caring for young minds and bodies. To qualify for a teaching post in Paradise degrees were therefore less important than one's domestic situation. Marriage, fruitful or with the probability of fruit to come, was the prime requisite. Mr Yeomans and his family lived in a house some distance from the school, but he had installed three couples in the boarders' building, each with a pleasant apartment. Men to teach, women to mother. Mr and Mrs Lejeune, senior teacher and housemother, had as certificates a boy aged six and a girl of ten. The Browns had Joan who was two. The Bells were only three months wed so there was unquestionably hope. The Lejeunes, being English and not yet acclimatized to the American Child, welcomed my sister and me with warmth, for we were closer than our schoolmates, in manner and temperament, to their British norm. Later they changed their minds about me but remained devoted to my sister and she to them. 182

A Corrupter of Paradise Mr Lejeune's intelligent face resembled that of Auden, Aldous Huxley, someone of their ilk. He had bigger teeth than is customary among North Americans, and although his mouth was large it was not sufficiently so to cover them. His grey flannel trousers were on the short side and without much press. His body was lanky, wrists bony, and he toed in, though not to a fault. Somehow all this arranged itself into an attractive whole: an honourable man, gentle and just, innocent like Mr Yeomans, but without the latter's stature. His wife, pretty in a Yardley sort of way, belonged in an English shire, not the Ojai Valley. Mr Lejeune taught a subject to which I cannot give a name. It was to do with how things worked. During the first class I attended he explained why a bell rings when you push the button. He had a button and wires and bits of electricity with which he demonstrated as he went along. I am not one who enjoys the dissection of miracles. So long as the bell rings why ask questions? And now each child must explain the magic and at the same time demonstrate with the dismantled bell. Everyone could do the trick except me. Mr Lejeune dismissed the rest of the class and with commendable patience repeated his demonstration. I concentrated; that is to say, I knit my brow and looked earnest and listened to words I did not hear. For five consecutive days he gave me private bell lessons. Sometimes I could repeat a few sentences, parrot fashion, before relapsing into my customary silence. The situation grew out of all proportion to the matter at hand. Mr Lejeune did not believe me incapable of understanding so simple a procedure and accused me of deliberate stubbornness. He was right about the stubbornness but wrong in thinking it deliberate, for I too was unaware that my mind refused to learn what he had to offer. Why and what is electricity? To this he had no answer. He gave up at last, to our mutual relief, and left me to pick my way through life without a clue as to why a bell rings when you push the button. But the snapping and crackling when two wires touch set me thinking during those awkward lessons, and, since, I marvel at all wires. The Shop was the centre of the school, a low and comely building containing one long room with a fireplace, and smelling sweetly of wood shavings: a carpenter's Paradise. No one can be happy and good unless a part of each day is spent creating with the hands; this is the very core of Mr Yeomans' creed. He was himself a beautiful craftsman and under his guidance beautiful things were made. Nothing arty and crafty about it at all. I have no natural facility with my hands and could not make the simplest assignment, a covered wagon. The wheels were too much for 183

The Autobiography me. Without ability one needs patience. Although Mr Yeomans did not say it in so many words, it was understood between us that I was not destined for either virtue or happiness. But something else happened in the Shop that had nothing to do with skilful hands or even virtue. Twice a week the older children gathered there, and Mr Yeomans read aloud: Walt Whitman, Frost, Chaucer, ballads and the whole of Hamlet. But how to convey the powerful unorthodox manner of his reading, that rough and gentle voice? This big bear of a man was the best Ophelia I have ever heard. But he had a wife, a Boston one, a manager. She had no official position in the school yet seemed always to be there, poking her nose where it wasn't wanted; a woman fond of turning everything into a moral issue. She wore the splendidly dowdy clothes affected by her townswomen, and had a bulk - something other than fat — springs gone perhaps. We did not love her, not even when our mother told us she had good intentions. She wore her virtue without grace or style and thus diminished it. Folk-dancing was taught by the kindergarten teacher, who, by some hideous slip, was still unwed, and likely to remain so. All the boys and some of the girls resented Ye Merrie England of the Maypole and the classes frequently ended in brawls, merry enough in their way but not in line with Mr Yeomans' original conception of the child, the music and the dance. Hey nonny nonny, the singing classes too. In common with most music masters, Mr Bell lacked authority. Under his nervous guidance we sang folk songs, sea chanties and Bach chorales. I could not sing in tune and to compensate for this deficiency became leader of the opposition. His problems were solved, oddly, by tennis. The California championships were played that year in the Ojai Valley village, and a number of us wandered down each afternoon to watch. On one occasion they were short a referee and Mr Bell volunteered. In the middle of a game the players stopped and questioned his decision on a point. They became agitated, rude, and Mr Bell's round pink face grew still pinker and its sweat fogged his rimless glasses. How often I had seen him thus in class. I wished to murder his persecutors, to atone for having been one of them. Ever afterward his choir was a favourite hour of the day, and everyone in it happy and good, momentary proof of Mr Yeomans' faith. I did not learn to sing in tune but forgot this in my pleasure, and raised my voice with the rest: ... Ihude sing cuccu.12 The Amazons thought Mary Lejeune prissy and she regarded her critics as barbarians. This led to crime. A son of the one-legged-spiritual-clergyman composed a letter in which he called her rude but not dirty 184

A Corrupter of Paradise names. Instead of signing his complaint he put a cross and asked me to do likewise. And I did, not giving it a second thought. Someone was always planning something and I was expected to take the initiative in the realm of insubordination, or at least to give it my support. Mary received the letter and the next day Mr Lejeune asked me if I represented one of the crosses, and I said yes. He gave me half an hour on the anonymous letter, the weapon of a sneak, a coward. He spoke with passion, and every word true, like doomsday. The only thing in our defence ... but there is no defence. We acted with intent to injure, although we did not comprehend the depths of our wickedness until we were told. Guilt grew to monstrous dimensions and I knew myself a being denied all possibility of future grace. Many years later, while reading Crime and Punishment, I stopped to question why this book appeared so sinisterly familiar, and the anonymous letter came back, and the dirt that I had known would stick forever; as indeed it has, for in writing this the wretchedness returns. I over-react, a thermometer that reads 100 when the temperature is 65, and zero at the first black frost. A few weeks after our arrival, an epidemic of morning sickness restricted the activities of the house mothers. Mrs Lejeune, Mrs Brown, Mrs Bell, one or all fled daily from the breakfast table. And one by one they relinquished their school duties, preferring their private enterprise to the communal maternity expected of them. Their husbands were obliged to take over. It was they who saw we brushed our teeth and took our baths and kept our rooms neat and clean. To them fell the duty of the goodnight kiss (affection very important). Mr Bell aroused no erotic emotions among the boarders but Mr Lejeune and Mr Brown were less happily situated. All the young females fell in love with one or the other. I loved Mr Brown. A look, a word, a hand on the shoulder — first love's needs are small. He said goodnight to me last of all, and would sit on my bed and talk for a long time before the goodnight kiss. With no formal system of punishment the teachers were at a disadvantage, and their sex did not always stand them in good stead. Because we loved we enjoyed putting them in untenable positions. Should gossip seem preferable to bed we would gather in the commodious bathroom. The door had no lock but we were secure as in a fort. When the young man on duty knocked, ordering us to our rooms, we laughed coquettishly and told him we were staying where we were, that he could not come in because we were naked. Dismissal was the discipline of the classrooom and I soon found myself permanently expelled from all except Mr Brown's. I wandered about or 185

The Autobiography played with two-year-old Joan, or read, affecting to enjoy this embarrassing freedom. Eventually my 'case' was discussed at a faculty meeting and the following day Mr Yeomans called me into the Shop. He looked very serious and told me how sorry he was for the sake of my modier, but nonetheless I must go home for two weeks — to think things over. But my mother is in Arizona, I said, and I can't live alone with Yee. Sukey was there as well, but it seemed the moment for a lie. Mr Yeomans relented and I returned to classes, chastened. As the months went by, the handsome young wives with their swelling bellies gave a quite exceptional air of fecundity to our place of learning. Mr Yeomans, in theory so certain of the blessings of married teachers was, in reality, embarrassed by the presence of burgeoning nature. Despite his belief in the natural life and Walt Whitman and shamelessness, sex provoked him, and his wife believed no good could come of it, though they had two nice boys. When Mr Yeomans chanced upon one of these chastely kissing the nape of a pretty neck, the school rocked, tottered and almost fell, and its principal limped about, a wounded bear. Fortunately the girl was an Amazon, gay and sufficiently co-operative to enjoy the scandal. I would have been expelled, for Mr Yeomans believed me a corrupter of paradise, an unbeliever who could not swallow his dogma or his faith. After all, was I not living proof that his ideals were based on a false premise? He too was beginning to lapse, and it was sad to see him during these moments of doubt when he looked on his school, his teachers and his pupils with jaundiced eye. He loved my sister. She believed wholly, and to her it was the paradise he had intended. Except for being ashamed of me, she was happy. But I was fourteen, no longer a child, and I had no talent for the progressive in education. My hands were simply extensions of my arms, of no practical use. I could not sing. Folk dancing inclined me to laughter. Every week I borrowed books from my mother and brought them to school. I read a lot and no other boarder read at all. Mr Lejeune complained that the books were not suited to my years, but the Browns did not agree and became my allies among the faculty. They were the first adults to treat me as an equal, an event so flattering that I was inevitably enslaved. From them I learned of a new hemisphere. It had nothing to do with Eden. Mrs Brown had majored in philosophy and psychology at Radcliffe, and, though herself admittedly neurotic, she knew all the answers according to the gospel of Freud. I had known intelligent people but she was my first experience of an American female intellectual. I listened, astonished and curious, to her detailed discourses on sex, on 186

A Corrupter of Paradise dreams, on what is disclosed when a person acts in this way or that. She told me about myself; how my night fears were inventions of my subconscious, a means of reaching my mother. I learned a little Freudian jargon and a great many technical details about sex. She explained the functions of sperm and egg, and drew diagrams demonstrating inner tubes and biological minutiae concerning the male and female organs of love. It reminded me of why the bell rings when you push the button. She also told me I resembled her in being neurotic, but as she appeared quite complacent about her state I saw no reason to be over-anxious about mine. Indeed, 'neurotic' sounded important, dignified, altogether preferable to 'Anne's nerves.' She informed me that most married people didn't live happily ever after, a fact I had learned from books though no adult had ever voiced such a heresy in my hearing. And she said her husband was in love with me, that I must not fret on her account because she approved his attachment. Mr Brown, at this moment sitting beside me, my hand in his, beamed and I tried to, for the sake of sophistication, but in truth I was shocked. Matters did not improve when she added that she expected me to learn from her example and to practise an equal tolerance when I too married. I did not dare to think the new morality might prove more burdensome than the old. Everything about the Browns belonged, so far as I was concerned, to a behind-the-looking-glass world, and to believe them I must unbelieve the whole of what I had learned from my mother and her family among whom I had grown up. And as I had come to that age when children disbelieve their parents, I swallowed but could not digest their every word, and thereby suffered a windy distension. I fancied reality had at length been revealed to me. Less than a year ago I had been a nursery child at Craigleigh. Now I could scarcely believe that such a place and its people had ever existed. And so, inevitably, I turned a critical eye on my mother, and after Easter did not return for weekends. She had received my elementary Freudian jargon with something less than enthusiasm. My mother knew nothing of sex, of this I was certain, remembering the Browns' belief that many persons, twenty years wed, remain in ignorance of all except its simplest manifestations. During these months my mother was reading volume after volume by a man named Proust, yet she refrained from laughing at her daughter. The books were in French so I did not take them back to school. During the Christmas holidays my mother suspected I was not well. The Santa Barbara doctor agreed and sent us to a specialist in Los Angeles. Right away I don't like him. A butcher. I see rows and rows of 187

The Autobiography carcasses hanging from rusty hooks. And I smell blood. He asks my mother a great many questions, impertinent personal questions, about me. I must get undressed and he gives me a white cotton coat and tells me to put it on back to front. Now he takes a side of the coat and peeks in, dictating the while to a secretary. He calls my stomach a thin protuberance, my feet flat. I have a marked curvature of the spine, round shoulders. Everything nasty he says of me. When he is done I put on my clothes, very cast down about my corporeal self. It seems the doctor wants me admitted to his hospital for a stay of two months so that under his guidance I may overcome my deformities. I say nothing when my mother tells me this, too surprised to feel disturbed. After a pause she says, impossible. I couldn't leave you alone in Los Angeles. And the doctor says, put her to bed at home then, and find her a physiotherapist in Santa Barbara. But I must wear a brace and orthopaedic shoes. The brace is a thing of many steel bars and leather straps, and when it is on I can only bend from the hips. The shoes are hideous. We drive back to Montecito, very sad, both of us. I spend a month in bed. The white coat and fake modesty of my medical examination reminds me of the different approach on Harley Street. The office of my distinguished consultant was a good sized library, cold in spite of a nice little fire in the grate. After a few random questions the doctor relaxed, put his feet on the fender, and told me to undress. Stay over here, by the fire, he said, it's warmer. No nonsense with white sheets or discreet curtains. By now I had lost my deformities and was, though I say it myself, a fine piece of meat, lean but in no way stringy. I started to strip while he puffed at his pipe and toasted his toes and regarded me. I suffered no pain until I came to remove my girdle, always a graceless act. I hesitated, but not for long. I realized it was a fine point, beyond the comprehension of the average Englishman. Englishmen look at faces. I peeled it off and strolled as nonchalantly as the naked circumstances permitted to the examining table and clambered up. The doctor laid down his pipe and as nonchalantly followed. When I returned to school I felt pretty miserable about my brace and my shoes. And every day the folk-dance teacher supervised my exercises. We perceived no virtue in each other and I went through my routine, limp as a rag doll. Morning and evening I was buckled into and unbuckled out of the disfiguring brace. After a week or two of this discomfort I made a point of dressing early, before the brace-buckler arrived; after breakfast, in a rush of bed-making and room-fixing, it was forgotten, and I would race to class, free of the constricting bars which hung, 188

A Corrupter of Paradise a skeleton, in my cupboard. Nothing could be done about my shoes; my mother had removed my sightly ones. To my schoolmates I must have appeared a queer one, but my capacity to enter wholeheartedly into whatever adventure was brewing, or, if need be, to brew one myself, saved me from isolation. Children commonly uphold a contemporary* who is agin the government, which may have been the reason for the role I played. They nicknamed me Scapey, short for scapegoat, misunderstanding the meaning of the word, and I took care not to enlighten them for I admired these splendid creatures. Big, strong, and golden from the sun, they belonged outdoors, like hunting dogs or horses. When I settled down I discovered school to be a very amusing place, though once in a while I'd boil and bubble, sick of routine and communal living. In a time of frenzy, I sought and found relief in smashing. My soul was so hard bitten with respect for private property that I had perforce to pay hard cash for an offering to my distemper. A friend fell in with the idea and at Woolworth's we bought six thick glass tumblers. We chose the back wall of the boarders' house as the most suitable surface on which to dispatch the expendable. Standing some distance away we threw with all our might, and the cast off frustrations made a satisfactorily angry noise. We felt almost innocent, for we intended to pick up the pieces. Then Mr Lejeune appeared and immediately there are millions without enough to eat and here you are indulging in wanton destruction. I saw his point, though I could not forget the elation that accompanied the first glass I threw. It wasn't so fine throwing the second or third. One was enough. We had been greedy. Choice is as fixed as the illusion that one chooses, and it is senseless now to regret that I preferred to eat the apple in the garden of Eden (by which I mean listening intently to the Browns) than to live at peace with God (Mr Yeomans). But I was curious and the curious are never at ease with God. My sister and I wept when early in May we left for Canada. We could not return. We would be too old. And I had grown to love the mountains as I had loved the sea. Except for Roches Point, I did not love Canada at all.

189

Chapter Three

Uprooted by Storm

The means of alleviating gloom have suffered a change, for a birth in the house is no longer considered an event soothing to the afflicted. Yet that is why I was born at Craigleigh in Toronto. My grandmother had recently died and my mother believed her presence and my arrival would hearten her father. I happened in the best spare bedroom (a room I later admired very much), yet I might easily have been a second-best-bedroom child, for an aunt and uncle, roused to make way for us, dressed without thought to speed. Then a bustle of fresh linen and my mother scarcely under the sheets before I emerged. The doctor arrived presently and could offer nothing but his congratulations. When my mother recovered from bearing, and I from being born, we returned with my father to London, and my two year old brother who did not care for me at all. So far as I remember life began with a blast from a ship's funnel, and my echoing shriek. William, our Osier grandfather's butler-at-home, valet-abroad, picked me up and held me in his arms, and the ship roared again and I stretched my lungs to meet it. Then we watched the crowds on shore, waving and calling goodbye, while the water slowly widened between us and the New York docks. Every subsequent leavetaking had something in it of this first departure. I was three when my brother, sister and I sailed for England in the company of our parents, nurse, two grandfathers, an aunt, and William. June, 1914. But even the grandfathers, men of the world and travelled, were innocent of apprehension, did not suspect that war was imminent, would be a fact before the homeward voyage. I learned to tie a bow in England, and nothing in that country gave me a like joy. And one dark night I met my first tiger. He jumped, a cat, through my bedroom window, but even before the soft thud of his landing

Uprooted by Storm I knew him for what he was. I also met our great-uncle William Osier. We were taken to the dining-room to pay our respects during the elders' Sunday breakfast - six of us, counting cousins. How could I forget? For he gave the whole of his radiant attention. I have an idea, he said, but first you must go to your aunt's bathroom and bring me everything you find in the medicine cupboard — then we shall see what we shall see. Our joy was in no way diminished by our aunt's disapproval. The joke was mainly to please the children but a little to tease his niece because she believed in dosing and he didn't. When pills and syrups and gargles and creams and tonics and shaving soap, toothpaste and unguents and laxatives were set before him, he mixed together a small quantity of each ingredient in a saucer. This, he said, is a cure for every pain, a prescription for immortality. And while he stirred he repeated incantations. All very well, but the moment came when each child must take from the tip of his outstretched spoon a portion of this supernatural formula. Then, having paid for our fun, we retired to the nursery. Some weeks after war was declared we sailed for home, but I have no memory of the overcrowded ship or the uncomfortable voyage, though I suspect I hold it in me still, hidden, yet adding its weight to my distrust of travel. If gold is the colour behind my eyes when I think of California, then grey is for London, Ontario, though why I cannot say, for here we were at ease, at home. Perhaps it is the grey-white brick of the houses, perhaps because I see it in winter, and without sun; perhaps the war contributed a sombreness. My sister and I are returning from an afternoon walk. It is December and the western sky is banked with clouds, black and grey. Our nurse is singing, 'Keep the Home Fires Burning,' a sad song that always moves us close to tears. She comes to the line 'turn the dark clouds inside out ...' and at that exact moment the sun emerges from its shroud, as if at her express command. I take it as an omen from God and later am shocked to find no proclamation of peace. My world was small. Three houses and their inmates: Lornehurst, Eldon and a neighbouring one with children. Lornehurst belonged to our grandfather, Sir George Gibbons. His eldest daughter [Lorna] married Ronald Harris, and Harris and Eldon have been synonymous since 1830. We lived nearby in a high house [536 Ridout Street] topped by a mansard roof, and owned as well the dump across the road, land that fell steeply to the flats below and the Thames river. The family hoped that years of fill would one day make sufficient level ground for building, or

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The Autobiography a park. It was our good fortune to know it in its embryonic state, for there is no richer playground than the varied layers of a growing yet garbageless dump. Old tin cans, bottles, broken and unbroken, little steel grey mountains of cinders, bits and pieces of stoves, and every week a fresh load to be examined. Once I found a pair of corsets, laces and all. We used to sit among this celestial rubbish with our cousins from Eldon, with a rub-a-dub-dub on tin-can drums, and singing Kelly, Kelly, with his buskin belly and his ass all painted green ... As was the custom in those long-ago days, we and our Harris cousins were in the care of nurses, but after the tender years they permitted us to roam, though not too far. A few blocks away was Richmond St. and shops. We spent our pennies at Mr Ranihan's, the grocer. He was a friend of our father and once a year they went away together for a few days' fishing. He did not come to our house, probably wouldn't. Yet he loved us all and we loved him. I have heard it said of my father that he had no emotions about class distinctions to overcome. He was at ease with all sorts, which is not to say that he liked everybody. Eldon still stands and I still go back to this continuing and occasional family meeting-place. It is a house of many faces, a storeroom with layer upon layer of memories; the open house of childhood and youth; later the sombre one that contained my aunt and her illness. Now she is dead and her husband's ninety-year-old sister [Amelia Harris] receives us in the drawing-room and holds the past together by being there, by being alive. The house bulges with things, as a house is apt to when the same family has lived in it for one hundred and twenty seven years. The drawing-room contains seven sofas; Georgian ones and early Victorian love-seats; it absorbs them effordessly, as the hall absorbs elephants' legs and tiger skins and poisoned arrows and spears and swords, an array of firearms and the forest of antlers on its walls. Moose and deer looked down on us with cold glass eyes, eyes that had never seen a fern or tree, yet moved one strangely, as much in their way as the eyes of live gazelles. It seemed they spoke more emphatically for death, not having lived. It was a pleasure of childhood to go big game hunting with Uncle Ronald, the killer and procurer of this treasure. We stalked our prey through the dark L-shaped hall where tiger skins rose in living cats as he guided us on perilous safaris. Later, in our teens, Eldon meant sitting up all night and talking to cousins. Only with our father's family did we roll on the floor and laugh until our ribs cracked. We thought ourselves the funniest people alive and the fact that there were dissenters was a disturbing puzzle, never solved. 192

Uprooted by Storm Eldon is a beautiful house. Lornehurst was not, being typical of houses built by the rich in Western Ontario in the seventies and eighties. They featured towers and were very impressive to children. We loved it for its size, the dark halls and elaborate ugliness, which didn't seem ugly to us, only strange and exotic. We often played in the billiard room at the top of the house. Here a door led to a stair that led to the top of the tower. But the door was locked. Years ago someone had fallen; we did not know who, or if the fall had ended in death. We only knew it would never be opened again, that the tower, our hearts' desire, was forbidden us. My grandfather, or so our mother said, bought pictures by the yard, and for the dining room he had chosen an enormous likeness of a lion; life size it appeared to a child, and one asked oneself, is it prudent to eat right under its nose? The drawing-room contained the necessities of an earlier era; two fireplaces, bow windows, polar bear rugs, lots of little sofas and little chairs; and there was a small dark 'reception room' in which no one was ever received, and a big library where the family lived. And in the library was a picture, a large old-fashioned daguerreotype of a fair young man, and at this I was more afraid to look than at the lion. For once, in the presence of my grandfather, father, and mother, and aunt, I had inquired his identity. Who is that? I asked, nothing more, and all the grownup faces tensed and there was a long hush. I expect it was my mother who told me I was looking at my Uncle Alan who had died before I was born. Later, at home, she said we must never mention his name except to her. A terrible accident, and he the darling of the family. I know, I answered - the tower. He must have fallen from the tower. It was an accident with a gun, she said, and that was all I learned about his death until after I was married and my Eldon House aunt told me the story, or as much of it as there is to tell, for no one knows why he did it, he, the balanced, even-tempered member of that passionate family, or so it was supposed. It happened on the eve of his fraternity initiation. A close friend called to fetch him at his boarding house. The bedroom door was locked. No one answered. When the door was forced they found him dead, a gun at his side. His parents were on the ocean, returning to Canada, and it was my father who met them at the dock, who gave up his chosen profession to become instead a lawyer, a partner in his father's firm. Hereafter, for two years my grandfather journeyed each week to Toronto to question and requestion everyone who had so much as spoken to his unfortunate son. He learned nothing except that this youth who had never owned a gun, who hated shooting, had bought one on the day of his death; yet he continued to search, to probe, in the stubborn

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The Autobiography hope that he could prove this was not suicide. I can't help wondering if the tower was not in some way involved. Did the family remember an accident that in retrospect might be read as an earlier attempt? Or did his son love the tower, sit there meditating? I do not know for certain who fell down. I only know that no one could go up. It is not easy to find undisturbed hours for writing at Roches Point. Too much happens; tornadoes, and today a reluctant septic tank. Gorillas or men, I know not which, came to relieve its congestion. With a suction pump attached to what looked like a huge oil truck, they went to work. Lady, said one, when the operation was completed, we've taken three hundred and fifty gallons of crap from this here tank. You oughta feel good now. Last night, the alarm of finding two men on the fire-escape peering into Maria's room. My Alan was here and we made a lot of noise and they ran away. Then brother Alan came over and said I must report the matter to the police. Three big ones came with torches and found footprints in the flower bed beneath the firescape and said Ah several times. There was obviously nothing to be done and they took their comforting presences elsewhere. Alan and I locked all six doors and went shakily to bed. At midnight someone ran past my bedroom window. Asleep at three. And there are constant arrivals and departures: the young and their friends, which is distracting but pleasant; my own as well, and they demand a certain minimum attention. Human remains are soon disposed of. Not so with trees. One hundred uprooted by a twister. Power saws screech all day, everyday, week after week; like hired mourners they fill the air with excruciating lamentations. And thus I add the excuses for my sloth. And still another. In this place, how detach myself from the past in order to recreate it? Roches Point weaves the tenses into one basket, a basket of sweet smelling grass, the kind an old Indian woman used to bring from Georgina Island in our childhood. But it is not a dear little basket; it is stained with blood, and on one side the grass is twitch. Nonetheless it is whole, round. I cannot say, past, now, to come. Not where I always see the same three generations, the same children in only slightly altered bodies, the parents who have become their own fathers and mothers, and grandparents, kindness coating the bitterness natural to their station in life. I have known a number of old men, and old women too, but I have not known one who did not detest old age; and the intensity of hate increases with the potency of the personality. The old we should doubly love, for their need increases with their loss of time; and I would revere them also, as the

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Uprooted by Storm Chinese honour their elders. But old age, the condition, should be loathed for what it is, corruption. Let no one in my hearing make pretty speeches about the 'twilight of life.' Let them think rather as Yeats did when he said he hoped to die an angry mad old man.'3 My grandfather Gibbons had neither time nor temperament to be an angry mad old man. Though how can I tell? Didn't he have his secret gnawing grief? And anyway children are apt to see or be told the bright side of their forbears. But he was in great vigour until two weeks before he died of pneumonia following a minor operation; a gregarious man of whom it was said the train trip from London to Toronto gave him the exact time necessary to extract the life history from every fellow traveller in his car. He believed (and was not mistaken) that my Osier grandfather could circle the globe without uttering. In the Lornehurst stable, with our father's horse and Darkie, the pony our mother drove, resided the Electric Car. This was an oddity even in those days, even in London, Ontario. It was quite literally a horseless carriage, and ran almost without sound at a maximum speed of five miles an hour. On Sundays in fair weather we went forth with our grandfather in this dowager-on-wheels. People are always saying, so-and-so is quite a character, and I suppose that's what our grandfather was, and a friendly one to boot. He waved to everyone and so did we, and everyone waved to us. The car was open and the pace slow enough to observe persons and objects with the exactitude of pedestrians. We often called on friends of our grandfather, and the most portentous of these expeditions was a journey to a sham castle where Mrs ShawWood dwelt with her parrot. But it wasn't sham to me, that castle; it was the archetype of all castles, and first glimpsed from the long straight driveway bordered by dark steepled spruce trees. We were more than an hour on the way, and there was something of a hill to climb before we reached the gates, and hills were hard on the Electric. But arrive we did and pulled up in front of the nail-studded door. I can no longer distinguish between hostess and parrot. I know they were both present but not which was which. I see a river running through the property, but the image wavers and changes as in dreams. I would doubt its reality had I not later ascertained that such a person existed, that the castle stands there still. I now desired a parrot. A parrot, a small sad-eyed monkey, the organgrinder's kind with cap and red brass-buttoned jacket, and a fawn - these were the pets I hankered after, begged for and was, quite naturally, denied. We always had a dog or dogs and we loved them passionately,

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The Autobiography but they hardly seemed distinct from ourselves, were perhaps idealized extensions of their owners. Monkey, parrot, fawn — the simple symbols of a child. Parrot and monkey: the demonic about which I was and am so curious, and so afraid; fawn, my substitute for lamb. Like everyone else I seek my fortune, and somewhere in my double quest these opposites must cross, and at that point surely is revelation. Or are they horizontal lines? But even these meet in the mind's eye if the track is sufficiently long. I seek my fortune but I have not found it. I am over-ambitious, wish for the difficult grace that reconciles fawn and slobbering idiot, carcass and scavenger, roses and stink-weed. I disbelieved almost as soon as I was conscious of belief. I wouldn't countenance Santa Glaus or fairies, yet I put an imaginative world of my own in their place in which, oddly, I permitted gnomes and brownies to wander, unmolested. We spent a lot of time on a farm, a part of which the family rented; fine wooded acres bounded by three separate waters: the river Thames and two cold rushing streams. Summer rain, warm as milk from the cow, slides through the glistening leaves. We are naked, my brother and sister and I. Naked often in the sun, never before in rain. It runs over us like silk as we clamber out of the icy stream. Off leaves and ferns and skin the water runs, then stops. We gather sticks. Father builds a fire; more smoke at first than fire. Now the yellow tongues begin to eat our offerings of bark and twigs. We crouch beside it, naked still, and in my nose are mingled the smell of bacon, sizzling in a pan, and damp leaf mould. The air is ringing with my mother's love for my father, my father's love for my mother; romantic love, yet love that includes us in its embrace. The bacon is done. My mouth waters. Of such is the kingdom of heaven. I was six, perhaps seven, when I first fell deeply in love. His hair was red; he went to school with my brother; he was our paper boy. For a time he paid me the attention requisite to my happiness, but a day came when he included my sister also in his affection, and on that day I became a victim of love-melancholy. We are eating nursery tea at a table near the big stove whose fire dines on chunks of coal. Our bread is cut in narrow strips, and these we may dip in soft-boiled eggs and thus lap up the running yellow yolk. But my heart is bursting. I do not care for food. Ice cream could not tempt me. I bear it no longer. I weep. Whatever is the matter, child? Unwilling to confess my bleeding pride, I tell nurse I weep for my grandfather who has indeed died recently. Impressed by so proper a grief, she takes me to my parents and leaves me to their consoling arms. Knowing myself false, my sorrows double, and likewise the intensity of my sobbing. So sinful do I 196

Uprooted by Storm feel for taking my grandfather's name in vain, I weep a few tears for him, thereby lessening my woe. Two books of my London childhood I read over and over: Heidi and The Princess and the Goblin.1* Heidi, sentimental and badly written as it is, or seems in translation, held paradise between its covers, a mountain pastoral guarded from the world by an omnipotent grandfather. Mountains are important, too, in The Princess and the Goblin, but here they are a source of evil. And the central symbol is not a grandfather but an endlessly old, forever young grandmother. Mountains, goblins, underground, night — these are the demonic forces that war against the poor miners as well as the princess in the castle. And castle, emblem of security, is undermined at last by digging goblins. A stair without end or beginning, sometimes there, sometimes not; corridors, tower, attic, doves; the magic thread woven by the miraculous grandmother, the moon that hangs from her window to guide the Princess and Curdie from peril — these are the mythical ingredients that illuminate the dark, cast shadows on the light and make the book so rich with stories beneath the story. Surely the most sensuous womb dream in children's fiction is the scene in the grandmother's attic, transformed now to a room from Revelations. The little princess has escaped goblins and underground by following the fine web spun by her grandmother, a thread that leads back to the grandmother. She is scratched, bleeding, frightened. The grandmother (queen of heaven?) floats her in a marble bath, deep as the sea, yet she does not drown. A thousand roses burn on the open hearth and the air is filled with their scent. The princess lies in the healing water and gazes at a blue starstudded ceiling (dome of heaven?) until at length the grandmother lifts her from the bath and into her soft queen's bed, a rose-bed of marvellous dreams. It is not a thing a child forgets. Or have I forgotten? It is years since I read the book. Heidi comforted me, the teddy bear a child takes to bed, a talisman against the dark. The Princess and the Goblin, though less realistic, has more reality, is therefore mysterious. I read it many times. Hans Andersen is almost more than a child can bear. I was always on the point of shouting, Stop! don't tell me any more, but I never did. I submitted, and shivered. And I resented the harsh truth in Alice in Wonderland. That it should be witty made it the more intolerable. What so faithful to life, for instance, as a baby that turns in the jiffy of fifty years to a pig? or the Mad Hatter's tea party, or the croquet game? and the shooting up tall, and the dwindling down? Every night before we went to bed our mother read aloud, and thus I

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The Autobiography have no memory of my pre-book self, how it felt to be me before I had learned to identify myself with heroes, heroines, villains, animals. In London the court house and jail share a common building, a fact I did not learn until I grew up. To us it was simply the jail, a place of fearful yet intense interest. We passed it often on afternoon walks, and one day our nurse, pointing at its battlemented face, remarked, That is where your father works. Too shaken to inquire further, praying it was not generally known, I pondered this new knowledge. I could think of nothing honourable that would take him to jail, day after day, yet there was consolation in the thought that he came home at night, not the common practice of those incarcerated for crime. And he went to the 'office* as well, for I had been there. I was still struggling to reconcile this place of work with honour when, a few months later, my mother took me along in the car to call for my father who was playing tennis somewhere out of town. Our destination proved a bleak grey building at the end of a long driveway. What is it, I inquired. The Insane Asylum. I remember the air, hazy with smoke of burning leaves, my tickling nose, and the feeling my heart would never again resume its normal beat. My father walked toward us, swinging his racquet, and I searched his face for signs of lunacy or crime, or both. But his curly mouth was smiling, my mother's face serene. I felt entitled to hope for the best. A Wishing Chair in a house is the exception rather than the rule, and we recognized our good fortune, boasting of it to less privileged children. It belonged to our father and resembled any other big over-stuffed chair. We observed threads of magic in its dark upholstery but strangers noticed nothing out of the way and we always had to explain. It performed, quite properly, only at the command of its owner, and never more than once or twice a week. We shut our eyes. He talks to the chair. Will a litde magic be acceptable? or is it perhaps exhausted from Saturday's exertions? The chair grumbles but in the end assents. Now it is permissible to open the eyes, to scramble and feel between the deep cushions, grabbing for buried treasure: pennies and nickels and dimes. This pleasing ritual continued until the day I sickened, of scepticism. I tried to exorcise the virus for the game was lucrative. Eve and the apple. Eyes in honour bound to stay fast shut behind clenched fists, opened; I spread my fingers, peeked. How chill the moment. I had only half doubted, after all. The next time the Wishing Chair agreed to perform, I said to my father, I don't want money: I'm going to wish for a parrot. Coldly I observed his distress while he explained that the chair unfortunately produced nothing but money. How 198

Uprooted by Storm strange, I said, and do you suppose it is because you have nothing but money in your pockets? We stared at one another, both of us miserable. Why does she have to spoil everything? Alan knows it's only a game but he plays along. And Betty, she really believed, and now she can't anymore. Damn the child. That is what he must have thought. But even with benevolent intent I resented being duped. Everywhere I looked I found discrepancies between what was SAID and the heart of the matter. Seduced' by that strip-tease abstraction, truth, I wanted to know what was, and what was not. As if anyone could have told me. It is seated in the Wishing Chair that I remember Sir Wilfrid Laurier.15 We were as free to climb over him as over our father and he showed us an affectionate courtesy that snared our hearts for life. I see him as a beautiful elderly angel with glowing hair as a halo. Politics raged around us, yet all I knew was this: our father beaten in his riding, the liberal party defeated, the local newspapers jeering, George, where are your jeans? Taunting my father for being the son of a rich man, for having married the daughter of another - and you for labour, they screamed. I know so much about my legendary father, remember so little about the living man. Perhaps death overshadows everything else about him. He was ill a year before he collapsed, but of what? and so he kept going. It proved in the end to be multiple sclerosis, the insidious paralysis that stalks the heart the long way round — beginning with arms and legs. Recognition struck at Goderich where our parents had rented for the summer a large, dark Victorian house with two acres of old-fashioned garden. Goderich is close to London and it was because of our father's health we were there instead of at Roches Point. It is Friday afternoon. My sister and I are watching for him from the upstairs verandah. We hear his car. Now we see it, but at the wheel - our Japanese chauffeur-gardener, which is strange. He often drives our mother, never our father. Instead of calling to us, or jumping out, my father waits until Toku opens the door and helps him to his feet. He cannot walk unaided, and we watch in silence while they struggle up the path. My father is falling. This clumsy brooding house with its twisted pictures of dragons, its elaborate engravings of hell, becomes a symbol of everyone's despair. Doctors. They all agree on Toronto, the Wellesley Hospital, and we never go back to London at all, except to visit, later, when we are older. Now we live at Craigleigh, our grandfather Osier's world, and though quite a world it is not the same as having one's own. Every afternoon we go to see our father. The hospital smell sickens me.

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The Autobiography Our visits are short for he is too ill and we too ill at ease. We cannot find him, nor can he see his children behind three stiff faces. Our senses tell us he is dying but we do not admit this until one mid-October day, in the Italian garden. Alan is ten, an oracle. Our father will soon be dead, he says; in a few hours, in a week. And he is right. The following day we do not go to the hospital, or the next, or the next. It happens at night and we wake to the sound of voices; unseen people fill the house with murmurs and rustlings. I think of leaves, how they chatter in the hovering thick weather before a storm, cold though the breeze is hot. My sister and I wait, knowing, not knowing. Then Lizzie comes in, the old Craigleigh nurse, and she tells us our father is in heaven. For all that it is so highly recommended we do not think it a good place to be. Betty cries. Tears are expected of me as well, but nothing happens except to my lungs, which fill with stone. My father is no longer a person, only an abstract symbol of grief, our grief for home. Not only is he dead but he has taken our mother's happiness to heaven with him, where by rights he should not need it, and now we are told to be her comfort and joy. And at that I am not good, wanting instead that she should be mine. Already I have developed a capacity for concentrating on self. So this is why I do not care to dwell on London, why I see the colour grey when I say the word. Children transplant happily enough if it is done as a family, intact. But we were uprooted by storm and not bedded back in our own earth. And we are homesick still.

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Chapter Four

The Hour before Decay

It is winter. I stand beside an open grave in a country graveyard. Rain has blurred the snow and blackened the trunks of the tall white pines. Two of my children audibly weep. I feel nothing. No arms or legs, no belly or head or heart. I am reduced to eyes. They watch the slick, mechanical disposal of mortal remains — even here, in a country churchyard. Man hath but a short time to live, and is full of tricks. A blackcoated grave-technician turns a handle, oiled, like himself to respectful silence, and the coffin sinks slowly down. Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God ... and the black-coated one steps forth to perform the ritual sprinkling. Yet it is not earth he holds in his hand but some pale powdery substance manufactured and packaged in cellophane for this purpose. Now, on top of the coffin he spreads bright paddygreen grass, stage grass. It is over. Our gardener (he is also Church Warden) cries at the beauty of it all, especially the bright green grass; and because she has left him a legacy, and because he loved her. So much in common, she and me, he says, and his tears spout as naturally as those of my children. We walk the hundred or so yards to our house where Mrs Kelly prepares food for the mourners, real food. Her husband, too, was once our gardener and lies in the churchyard near my mother. Roches Point. I wish never to return. A thousand miles between it and me are not enough. That same evening I agree to share die property with my brother. Easier to remain than to carry those heavy acres across continent or sea. Here, I witnessed my first summer, as did my mother and brother and sister; and the whole or part of every subsequent summer; hence no beginning, no moment when I observed it consciously for the first time. And the place is tall with tales of grandparents, uncles and aunts, my own generation and that of my children. Under the circumstances it is difficult

The Autobiography to say what happened to whom. As members of primitive tribes experience group rather than individual emotions, likewise our eighty Roches Point summers appear to belong equally to the dead and the living. Time here flaunts its paradox; rushes by yet never moves an inch - a caged squirrel running on its revolving stair. When my grandfather bought Beechcroft it included the main house, a gate-house known as the Lodge, and seventy odd acres of parkland. The nearby village was then wholly rural, and the countryside, to the water's edge, farmland or maple woods or cedar swamp; some distance still in time from Toronto and reached by a series of journeys: first by train to a point south of Barrie, then two miles from station to lakefront, and three more by ferry to the Roches Point government wharf. Later the grandfather's yacht, the Minota, carried family and visitors direct to the Beechcroft dock. And its passengers are still there, in albums and pictures: young women in high Gibson-girl collars and trailing skirts, sedately seated on the deck of the Minota no lounger among them; or on the dock in long flounced bathing dresses, black cotton stockings hiding their legs from the sun's glance, and beside them, suitors and brothers clad in garments resembling flannel underwear, yet beautiful in the eyes of their beloveds, nonetheless. On rainy days we studied these presences in family albums. Under such canopies of clothes did they rejoice and sorrow? They appeared remote as dinosaurs, yet now they seem closer to me than my children, but that is because the snapshots of my childhood are yellowing, too. Cricket, lawn tennis, croquet, golf— these were their sports. But boats, except for almost sea-going yachts, produced in my grandfather such a state of anxiety that sailing was not encouraged. A rowboat close to shore he could endure. One of his daughters remembers an evening paddle with a young man, and its result. They returned an hour beyond the time he expected them (he was inclined to expect one's return fifteen minutes after the departure). No word of reproach, but the next morning his daughter observed him carrying the canoe from the boathouse to the stable, where henceforth it remained. My mother and her sisters inherited or acquired from him this same distrust of water, and I from them. How often I have paced the shore, searching the lake for one of my sons, for a ten foot dinghy bobbing up and down on the curdling waves. When Mr Stennet, an Englishman, built Beechcroft and the Lodge in 1850 or thereabout, he intended to live a country life similar to the one he had left behind. But the Canadian bush did not accord with his dream and he became a schoolmaster and Beechcroft a boys' school. When this enter202

The Hour before Decay prise failed he sold the property to a rich American to whom we owe the nice arrangement of trees, for he engaged Mr Olmstead, the landscape man responsible for Central Park in New York, and bade him make a park here also. His mightiest project — to cover the seventy acres with three feet of rich dark loam - the native soil being light and sandy. It must have come ten miles by barge from the Holland Marsh, the nearest place with a similar earth. To Mr Olmstead we owe the Norway spruce whose lower branches make circular green trains on the paler green of grass. I can't say what happened to the rich American, but when the grandfather bought Beechcroft in the 'eighties it was reduced to a summer hotel. My aunt tells me I am wrong, that the Lodge came first, then Mr Stennet, but I see it the other way round and, after all, it is my story. Before I was born the grandfather divided the property between three of his children. To the eldest son he gave Beechcroft, to my mother, the Lodge. For another daughter and her husband he built a house on the north border of his land; beyond this is Lakehurst, a similar property belonging to her husband's family. The houses are so spaced that none can see its neighbour, and though each member owns certain acres there are no fences except the one that surrounds the whole. The Lodge wanders about in an inconsequential manner, having been twice added to. The original structure is of fieldstone; walls three-feet thick and floors that dip and rise according to the varying states of the sagging foundations. Here the upstairs windows are round, like portholes, our welcoming moons when we come walking home at night. The additions are of shingle and the whole is comely, has a flavour that is generally admired despite its dowdy old-fashioned airs. When we were small our mother refused the conveniences of electricity, and we upheld her, certain the atmosphere would be corrupted by such city fixings. A big wood stove served in the kitchen, and candles lit our way to bed. Behind the kitchen is the woodhouse, but once it was the ice-house. In winter men cut frozen blocks from the lake and stacked them here, with plenty of sawdust for insulation. Sometimes on hot August afternoons my sister and I escaped the sun and sat in this cool dark tranquil place, delighting to emerge into a heat and glare made more intense by our deep freeze siesta. Children are scientists of the senses and experiment even to the point of pain, pricking their fingers and writing their names in blood on boathouse walls. The given reason, bloodbrotherhood in some club or other; the underlying one, desire to see and taste this crimson stuff by which we live. And courage to make the jab. I have passed a whole morning contemplating finger and needle, and, in the end, so slight the

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The Autobiography self-inflicted wound the drop was not sufficient to spell Anne with an 'e,' Our acres were peopled with children, and every morning at eleven we met at the Beechcroft dock to swim; big boys and girls together in a group; little boys in another, lying in a row like small bronze fish and forever shivering; and we, the little girls, kept our designated place in the hierarchy. The 'little boys' were yet senior to us. Sometimes we played together, sometimes not. We varied from year to year, dependent on those mysterious forces that work in children, alternately separating and bringing together the two sexes. The boys had a hut, we, a wigwam; secret male and female dwellings in which on rare occasions we entertained each other. But for the most part we did not meet at close quarters. It was a matter of stalking, of spying from copses, of hiding among the twisted roots of cedars along the wooded shoreline. One day the boys set fire to our wigwam and for a period there was a terrible bitterness between us. Then came a truce when they courted us to exchange 'views,' an occupation beneath my brother's dignity and on these occasions he went fishing with Wilson, or read Shakespeare. We had nothing to show but the bodies of children and no one permitted more than the hastiest glimpse, but the flavour of wickedness was there - as bad, we thought, as smoking, and it did not make us cough. The boys told us jokes we believed to be blasphemously obscene and we felt very sinful, a sensation we enjoyed as it was no more than skin deep, for our parents had never equated sex with evil. The boys were concerned for the future. You'll get 'pure,' they said, when you're twelve or thirteen - all girls do. We vowed we wouldn't, for we knew the label 'pure' to be the most contemptible insult in their vocabulary. They were right, but we could not visualize our future selves; nor did we understand that 'purity' is the shroud of dead innocence. For we were innocent still, not consciously erotic during these secret sessions with the boys, and our belief— that sexual intercourse was performed solely for the purpose of procreation, the number of children in a family denoting the number of times. The boys may have known better. I can't remember exactly how old or young they were. Children read books about adventure, and every day they dream they'll have one. We searched methodically for underground passages, hidden caves, buried treasure, for ghosts. While walking through a farmer's field a dozen mild-eyed cows would change in a trice to a herd of charging bulls, compelling us to race for the nearest fence, hurl ourselves over, breathless with fright, then, saved by the grace of God, we'd turn and see the field all quiet again, cows slowly munching. Only when courage was

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The Hour before Decay high did we visit the haunted house, long since deserted and fifteen minutes distant from the village. Its windows were broken, the front door hung crazily from one hinge, half the roof had gone and weeds flourished, inside as well as out. This was the last resting-place for dust, a spider's paradise, the kingdom-come of bats. Haifa mile away we were fit to faint at the smallest quickening or dying of a breeze, at a shadow cast by a flying bird. Only once had we the temerity to go beyond the hall. We are uncertain in what form the ghost moves, for it is not a wellknown spirit. In fact nobody knows about it except ourselves. We climb the stairs, a step at a time. Halfway up they start to sway and swing. The stairs themselves are haunted, we whisper, not daring to hear the echo of the spoken word — then tumble over each other in our haste to get out before we, too, are bewitched, gone forever from grieving family and friends. Which reminds me of another happy way a child can pass what might otherwise be blighted hours. For instance - my mother says I can't swim just because I complained of a sore throat at breakfast, which naturally I didn't have. No one to play with. All the peoples of the world disport themselves in the lake; so I find an isolated rock far from the madding crowd and the fun begins. I am thrown to my death from a horse, or killed by a lunatic driver, or I drown, far out at sea - preferably all these things — and my crumpled young body is brought to my mother and laid at her feet. How she weeps, how she wishes she had been kinder to her daughter. Soon I am swimming, like Alice, in my own tears. It is absurd to imagine children more devoted to their mother than we to ours, yet such an affection in no way altered the fact that adults were enemies. All the children we knew felt the same way, particularly when they were together and feeling as a group; not bitter enemies (except on occasions), but natural, inevitable ones. And we had no wish to change the status quo. Their greatest offence was in regard to Time, an abstraction they did not in the least understand. They were always ringing bells, or calling, Time for breakfast, Time to get out of the water, Time to go to bed, whereas we, with a more philosophical concept of the clock, knew that Time, in their sense, did not exist. What we happened to be doing was forever, whether it was floating in the mild blue lake, or lying in bed, half asleep, on a summer morning. Slowly but certainly the enemy won, and thereby robbed us of immortality. Before we knew it our hands were shaking bells and calling, Time for dinner, Time to go to bed. The current fashion for parents to be more a brother than a father, more a sister than a mother, is no kindness to the child, but rather an invasion of his private world by the enemy - for so the adult must remain, 205

The Autobiography though I do not mean to imply a malignant one, simply a person whose receiving set is tuned to other channels. The books at the Lodge have a delectable smell, musty and damp and spicy. Mustiness and damp come from the long winter months when the house is unheated, but the delicate scent of spice is not to be accounted for. Here I first read [William Blake's] Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, breathing the poems in through my nose as well as through eyes and ears. 'Tyger tyger burning bright.' At zoos it is the big cats I want to see. Lion, a symphony in a major key, tiger, in a minor. There is an air of candour about the Lion; an aura of mystery surrounds the Tiger. Should anyone ask, have you been in India? I would answer yes, I lived there two years as a child. Over and over I walked its length with Kim and the Holy Man. Later, I was at home in A Passage to India, for those disparate novels, E.M. Forster and Kipling, had India in common, and in both books India takes possession. Echoes from the Marabar Caves echo in Kim also. We liked picnics, particularly those mysterious ones that took place beside a stream in a stagey looking wood. Hard maples, cedar, beech, and by the water, willow trees. We called it the vanishing wood, for, though our mother knew every bump of every road in our vicinity, sometimes it wasn't there. We attributed its supernatural nature to an old man who lived, not in a house, in nobody knew what, perhaps in a cave. Known as the Owl Man, he was as unpredictable as his wood — sometimes there, sometimes not, and though we feared him we always wanted to see him just once more. Today we find the wood. When it is here it seems impossible that sometimes it is not. Alan puts down the picnic basket and opens the gate. We walk a short way through the trees to a clearing by the stream. The trees have not changed their positions; the thistles are real enough to scratch our legs. It is still, that August stillness when the birds have stopped their singing and only an occasional cicada drills in the dry grass. If the Owl Man is here we do not see him. It is a place where it is natural to whisper, like church yet vastly more so, for here the gods are not tamed and harnessed by a human preacher. Why don't you explore the woods? it's too early to eat, says our mother, and we go off, but never deep into the forest. We skirt the edges, peer between the trunks of trees — hoping, fearing, to glimpse the Owl Man. Without the security of our mother's presence we do not wish to meet him face to face. It is not until we are eating hard-boiled eggs on the river bank that he appears, is suddenly among us, an old man with his hair falling to his shoulders and a

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The Hour before Decay beard, bushy and full of twigs and leaves. My mother greets him politely and offers him a sandwich. It disappears behind his beard and he begins to talk. I do not follow the words, only the strange wailings and mutterings of his voice, the oracular gestures, the eyes, wild as their shaggy brows. He is a Presence, one whose dwelling is a sacred grove which he makes manifest only when it suits him. On the drive home my mother says, poor old man, he's quite harmless, you mustn't be afraid. Then I know the wood to be yet more magical than I had believed it, for the Owl Man had appeared in one guise to my mother, in another to me. Watch the road, she says, we often lose our way going to the wood — what if we should lose it coming home? Our Eldon House aunt and uncle and cousins often came to visit at Roches Point. They travelled in a car known as Grandfather, a car already fifteen years old when they bought it though it had not then travelled five thousand miles, for its former owner found the open road not to his taste. It remained with the Harris family another fifteen years, a venerable monster with sufficient room in the back seat to set up a card table, and this, on long journeys, they frequently did. The car was open, and high, and conspicuous by reason of its contours and great age, and when this vision included four people in the back seat, gathered about a card table absorbed in a game of bridge, it produced no small sensation as it rolled through the streets of Toronto and on, north, to Roches Point. But my father's family have never had the slightest objection to being conspicuous, a relief to us, brought up as we were among our mother's people who suspected 'conspicuous' is kissin' kin of the devil. Londoners pride themselves on the eccentric happenings in their city, and it has always seemed to me that they have a greater proportion of these than the more reticent Toronto. The case of a well-known golfer, for instance. Not a pro, just an enthusiast. After his death the mourners, gathered in his house for the funeral, found him dead indeed, though he hardly appeared so, sitting as he was in a chair, his feet on a stool, a familiar figure in his plus-fours, a putter clasped between his hands. Not a Toronto funeral, certainly. And we could not hear too often the tale known as 'Daisy's Baby.' A childless middle-aged woman, twenty five years married to one of London's foremost doctors, surprised herself and others by a persistent increase of girth. At her husband's orders she dieted to the point of pain, and twice daily performed rigorous setting-up exercises. And still she swelled. The baby was born in a farmhouse on the way to Port Stanley whither she was headed with a female friend for a weekend of golf. When

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The Autobiography notified of his son's arrival, her husband, the doctor, then and there died of shock. Whether he felt the undiagnosed pregnancy would ruin his professional standing, or whether ... well, nobody knows why he took it so hard. I do not remember the grandfather at Roches Point, though we have a picture of him there, surrounded by fifteen grandchildren, and we are among them. During our five years at Craigleigh he never came, and for me this was a continuing sorrow. On winter evenings I recounted its delights. Next summer you'll come? I begged. I'm an old man, child; for me there are too many ghosts. But Grandfather, it's your HOME. Don't you love it anymore? I can love it from here, he would answer, while I sat beside him, close to tears, appalled by his words for they revealed his heart and his heart revealed the impasse of old age — no future, and almost gone the courage to look back. I think often of him now, for I, too, suffer at Roches Point a plague of ghosts. We were close friends and passed long hours together, and when we walked it was always hand in hand. I continued to sit on his knee until his last illness, but half my weight I rested on the arm of the chair so as not to tire his old legs. I liked to play with the white curling fringe of hair that fell over the back of his collar, a fringe he wore quite long, it being the only hair he had to show except for great drooping mustachios. Once, in the middle of summer, I was sent from Roches Point to Craigleigh for a few days' visit. A member of the family must always be there, for alone with his staff of servants he would break with melancholy. I am eleven. I promise my mother to keep the grandfather in good spirits, and set off, starchy and pleased. Wilson drives me and sings 'The Bear Went over the Mountain' all the way to Toronto. I find the grandfather sitting on the red tiled terrace from which stone steps lead down to the Italian garden, almost a Secret Garden. In the middle is a pool where goldfish and waterlillies swim, and flower beds contrast with the brick paths to make a formal pattern. With grandfather's help I read the time from the old sundial; then I sit on the round curved edge of the pool and swish the water with my hands, wishing for cherries to eat, or plums. Instead of supper with Lizzie in the billiard room my evening meal will be afternoon tea with grandfather, and a plate of something extra. I wonder what, but am not hopeful, for cook does not strain herself preparing delicacies for the young. Out of the corner of an eye I regard my grandfather. Do I only imagine that he is especially unhappy today? His welfare, once my proud responsibility, is already a heavy load. My arms and legs ache as if I had walked all day and half the night. The air is

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The Hour before Decay sultry, and I, a good barometer, feel my spirits falling. The grandfather is thinking about death, his own that waits for him somewhere close at hand. In the library, his bedroom, here, in this pretty walled garden? And all the other deaths — two wives, two children, brothers and sisters, father and mother and friends. I am hypnotised, paralysed. I have become my grandfather. The years of his life hang themselves on my shoulders yet do not lift the weight from his. William and a parlourmaid bring tea; cinnamon toast, anchovy sandwiches and fruit cake. My extra: cold limp asparagus lying on limp, warm lettuce. Tears. Immediately my grandfather is beside me, wretched on my behalf. What is the trouble? Nothing. He goes indoors and rings the bell for William. William appears and is told to bring Lizzie. Lizzie appears and the grandfather says I am ill and must be put to bed. He comes all the way up to the third floor himself, a place he never visits unless we are measled or mumped. I am not ill, but for once I don't argue. I hide my shame under the bedclothes. I was sent on a mission. I failed. The following day I persuaded the grandfather my health is not in jeopardy; but though I manage not to weep, my spirits remain low. I am accustomed to a Graigleigh full of people; my own family and visiting cousins and the coming and going of uncles and aunts. The silence of the big house makes a noise like a funeral march and the acres of garden and ravine in no way compensate for Roches Point. I hang about Lizzie while she sews and clucks on about Master 'ughie and Master Jack and my mother Miss Mary, the perfect children of another generation. But when I wake at night, fearful of the dark, she is reluctant to share her bed with my shivering self. It isn't 'ealthy for a young person to have an old person near them at night, she says. Why not, I ask, and she answers that the old deplete the young by breathing in their health. Full of implications, this. I was a thin sickly child and Lizzie knew the reason why. All my strength had gone into my long, heavy hair. Inquire Within upon Everything16 was her secular bible. I must try to find an old copy. From it can be learned manners and morals, how to conduct one's self during childbirth, and remedies for every ailment. It may seem superfluous to advise a young woman to 'take off her stays' before giving birth - so my aunt thought, and laughed. But her second baby was born in a hurry, and there she was, not yet unlaced, not even in bed. Which shows you can't mock without the gods hearing. Somewhere in its pages is a chapter on the deportment of Ladies. I only remember the sentence, 'If her teeth be good she should smile but seldom, if bad, not at all.' Probably Lizzie's use of some greasy substance by the name of cocoa butter came from Inquire 209

The Autobiography Within. During the winter, after our baths, she rubbed the stuff all over me and my sister. She said we could absorb its fat and put on weight. A nasty procedure with Lizzie's rough-skinned hands slapping it on, massaging it in, and the smell, not revolting, yet not one to take willingly to bed. Then came spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, or, in spring, a molasses concoction which she said would purify the blood. Hairbrushing was the last bedtime rite. We took turns in a chair before the huge nursery dresser, and there each received the approved one hundred strokes. I liked it when Lizzie talked about her girlhood in England, and the young German - his name must have been Albert for I associate him with the Prince Consort - who asked her hand in marriage. Her family refused. What was good enough for Royalty was not good enough for them. No one else ever asked me, she would end, and I could hear in her voice an unfamiliar note of wistfulness, and we would sigh, thinking of her longlost foreign lover. During this summer visit Graigleigh remained strange to me — as if I had returned after many years instead of several weeks. Alone with the grandfather I aged, became an old woman, my flesh mortal, the skin on my hands dry and wrinkled, my hair white. Old age is and was my particular infection. In its presence I lose my identity in time, become 'a tattered coat upon a stick';'7 an instability that has plagued me so long as I can remember. Across the hall from the vast Craigleigh nursery was a bedroom with pink curtains and a pink carpet — pink where it was not worn away to its brown underside — and two brass beds. One winter my mother slept here, at the top of the house, instead of on the second and grownups' floor. When she came to dress for dinner we would wait impatiendy her call to come and choose what bracelet she should wear, what brooch. While Lizzie does up hooks and helps with her long fair hair, we play with the contents of her jewel box. Our father has been dead two years and now she wears, in the evening, moth-like dresses of chiffon, grey or violet. It is in one of these I see her, seated at her dressing-table, arms uplifted while she places a wreath of silver leaves in the hair that Lizzie has fixed with tortoise-shell hair pins. My mother really prefers to dress herself but she is Lizzie's baby still, her dear Miss Mary, and Lizzie is certain that no one can fasten the clasp of her pearls as she can fasten it, and she likes to tell her what to wear. While she powders Miss Mary's back and shoulders, Miss Mary buffs her nails with a silver buffer. Soft warm light, fluttering moth-like dress, the delicate scent of my mother, and of Yardley's lavender water, the fair image in the looking-glass, Lizzie's 210

The Hour before Decay gentle mutterings from which all trace of scold is gone - images and sounds so mingle that the parts are lost in the whole. Next morning, in bed, her hair in two long plaits, we see our dear and human mother; but at nightfall, when the pink curtains are drawn and the brass beds shine gold in the lamplight, she becomes, like our father, a legendary figure. When our mother lived on the grownups' floor she was tended by Mildred and we did not share the dressing-for-dinner ritual. Mildred was made of whalebone, an unyielding woman of whom we were not fond. It was mortification to us that she was a liberal, the only one in the house except ourselves. She was also a republican, which we felt was extremist. Not that the famility was Royalty-minded. Indeed the grandfather had little regard for the reigning monarch, and when asked to be lieutenant governor he had answered flatly, no. A sissy's job, he told me. Yet we were not republicans: when my sister and I decided Mildred was a traitor we were not so much defending the throne as venting our spleen on an unworthy liberal. So one day when both our mother and grandfather were out we enticed Mildred into a bedroom, having beforehand changed the position of the key from the inside to the outside. It was easy to slip out ahead of her and shut and lock the door. To her indignant demands for freedom we replied, you can't come out until you sing 'God Save the King.' I'll do no such thing, she said. Then stay where you are, we retorted. Mildred was not made of whalebone for nothing, and she was quite prepared to suffer for her principles. After half an hour we began to get nervous. It was not a situation in which we wished to be found by our mother or grandfather, and Mildred was not taking her incarceration quietly. She raided on the door knob, thumped on the door and blasted us this way and that. Nervous or not, we were patient and the victory was ours. Harsh and tuneless, her indignant voice cracked its way through the first verse. More, I cried, don't forget, confound our enemies. Confound was a favourite family word, and an aunt still makes use of it — confound the Americans, she says, and thumps the table. But one verse was enough for Mildred, so we unlocked the door and fled. She did not tell on us, for reasons of pride I suspect, not goodsportsmanship. Tony was the only point of friction between my grandfather and me. I had nagged my mother into giving me a cocker-spaniel puppy for my birthday. My grandfather had reluctantly agreed, but on the miserable condition he was kept outdoors and slept in the stable with Barbara the pony. There had been no such restriction in my mother's youth, but now the grandfather was old, and his frisking grandchildren were enough. I was an undemonstrative child with humans but a maudlin lover of dogs.

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The Autobiography Tony and I exchanged a hundred kisses a day. He listened to troubles. He licked away tears. And of course sometimes he managed to slip into the house and if my grandfather saw him he shook his stick and said, Shoo, skidaddle, out with you, and I would lose my temper and say, Don't you dare speak to my dog like that, and because my grandfather laughed instead of scolding me I would run sobbing from the house, Tony after me. The year my mother lay so long in bed Tony had been left at Roches Point in the care of the gardener and his wife, a dog reduced in stature to a summer pet. One spring evening an aunt took me aside and gently as possible told me of his death. My mother was away, in an American spa. We did not know when she would return or if she would ever be well again. We remembered our father. And so my grief for Tony was immoderate. I lay on my bed and cried, only stopping to get my breath and cry again. Nothing is ours to keep. I knew it now; in bones and blood and sinews and muscles and nerves and skin; in liver and bowels and heart. A truism everybody knows, yet there is a moment for each of us when it changes, becomes the awful truth. If nothing is ours to keep, I must care less, or appear to, and so I started to grow my fragile armour, flippancy. And what I would have done without it I don't know. No thicker perhaps than gauze but still a veil to hide behind. Except for the ever present knowledge that he was old and in poor health and therefore could not wait for us to grow up, the grandfather did very well, so far as I was concerned, as a father substitute. He had no need to discipline, being himself a symbol for authority; a personage in his house and in the outside world. People treated him with the grave respect that gives the dollar more than its due, but he was honoured also as a man of principle. We differed on many points, but the chief of these was politics. The Osiers were Tories, not Progressive Conservatives. We argued interminably, or rather I did. The grandfather listened with indulgent amusement. It is hard to say which was the more bigoted, the Laurier-Liberal grand-daughter or the Tory grandsire. In London we had not been taught to hate the opposing party but during the 1917 elections we had come to do so. At Craigleigh I learned with some surprise that it is possible to love those of a different faith. The Osiers had one very inhibiting rule of conduct. It began, so far as I know, with my great grandmother Ellen Osier, and remained a firm principle with her son William, and likewise with my grandfather Edmund. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. In the billiard room, as constant reminder, was the image of the three monkeys. One covers his eyes, another, his mouth, and the third, his ears. It is no wonder the 212

The Hour before Decay Osiers were renowned as men of few words, no wonder conversation lagged or ceased altogether when Osier sat beside Osier. I used to gaze at those monkeys, thinking they had the best of it. For could not the one whose hands covered his eyes still speak and hear? Each hid one sense only. Each was left with two. It appeared that five hands were necessary to do a proper job, though I was thankful for my limitations. Another family law - never let the sun go down on your wrath — was easy enough for me to observe as my wrath is not the lingering kind. Easy come, easy go. And when we spilt salt at table, spiller and neighbours threw a pinch over their shoulders to insure against future dissension. Alan and Betty and I fought a good deal among ourselves, a fact that never ceased to puzzle and distress our mother, who claimed that she and her brothers and sisters grew up in continuous amity. I do not find this myth a strange one for never have I met with a gentler people, people whose civility was as indigenous as their physical beauty. But was it stern self-discipline after all? For when they grew older I occasionally observed them flicker with irritation; hidden resentments erupting after the long silence-is-golden years. The Roches Point general store is an emporium of vast importance, particularly to children. According to Ambrose Bierce, 'in each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale.''8 Once a week, when we walked to the shop to rid ourselves of Saturday's allowances, tiger slept, ass brayed but gently, nightingale lay as if dead, pig reigned supreme. Our wants were known, and immediately tray upon tray of various and savage-coloured candies were spread before our snuffling snouts. Some were four for a cent, others as high as two. We deliberated, rolling saliva around our mouths with quivering tongues. Each had fifteen cents, enough for a good-sized paper bag of forbidden fruit. For we acted against the law. The law permitted something pure like a stick of barley sugar or a peppermint, one a day. It was not therefore advisable to go home with our loot, which meant it must be eaten at a sitting, aad it always was. And for these orgies we chose the churchyard as picnic ground. It had not then been tidied, and the old gravestones were covered with periwinkle, and where periwinkle had not thrived, lily-ofthe-valley covered the mounds of the dead. Great white pines, virgin pines I have heard people say, shed their needles on the flowers beside the fieldstone church of which we were so fond. It was as familiar to us as the Lodge and we were forever wandering in and out of what we felt to be our private chapel. But on our porcine days we remained outside, sat among the dead and the periwinkle and the lily-of-the-valley, or 213

The Autobiography perched on tombstones, meaning no irreverence. Here we talked and munched and gloated and gagged until we downed our week's fortune. More than once my sister was unaccountably sick on Saturday night, but I do not remember losing a penny's worth. During my teens and early twenties Beechcroft (by which I mean the whole property) was at that golden time, the hour before decay. Trees were giants, lawns good, edges clipped; underfoot the driveways crunched, the gravel smooth and thickly spread. And so it remained until the war. Then labour disappeared, money was busy paying taxes, the Beechcroft uncle died, one of his sons was killed in the war; and all the time the trees were growing older. They can't last forever, uncles were wont to say, then shrug and add, But they'll outlast us. My mother did not shrug. She planted new trees, but the uncles died. After the war neither the people nor the property regained their former grooming, for, as I may have said elsewhere, during the summer months, the people and the property are one. A cousin, a tree - not identical, yet not so different as one might suppose. Nowadays we dress according to our desires. No one aims at perfection anymore, which is natural, as servants, not ourselves, had made the old-fashioned elegance possible. We left the Ojai Valley School in May and in July of the same year Mr Brown came to stay at Roches Point. My mother and Mrs Brown seemed happy to promote this attachment, though their motives were not clear to me then, nor are they now. He was accepted as my visitor and we enjoyed the long summer days together, rarely seeing anyone else except at mealtime. Beside the lake on a small protected beach we talked, or he read poetry aloud, stopping now and then to kiss and caress me, but gently, as if I were a bird, and I lay beside him, half knowing what was in him, half knowing what was in me, but wanting, for the moment, no further revelation. Tyger tyger burning bright. The forest was there, close at hand. I could see it out of the corner of my eye, but I did not turn my head and stare. We went for long drives, swam together; I even rose early in the morning to walk with him through dewy grass, and I bought a compact in Sutton and covered my brown nose with white powder. He stayed two weeks but the whole summer was his, for I dreamed of him when he had gone, and we wrote each other long weekly letters. In two months I would be fifteen and it was time I learned to dance. Mr Brown tried to teach me, though I begged him not to, and always ran away before the lesson was properly begun. I knew it to be an accomplishment beyond the scope of my talents, and I was right, for I never danced really well. Nor did my brother. He pushed his partners about the 214

The Hour before Decay floor with a shuffling gait quite unrelated to the music. Our bodies were too self-conscious, and we, expecting the worst from them, were seldom disappointed. So now I dreamed of dancing as I had once dreamed of riding. I watched myself float with professional lightness down parquet floors of brilliant ballrooms. Today it is ballet, and I am always on my points and possessed of a rare virtuosity. In the autumn we moved to Toronto. My mother had bought a house close to the gates of Craigleigh shortly before the grandfather's death. To be in and out every day, yet to have a place of our own. That had been the idea. But the grandfather died, and we had gone to California, then to Roches Point, and so had never lived in it before. Now there was the question (never answered) of our education to be faced once more. Folkdancing, folk-song and manual training were useless currency in Toronto and our mother feared, and rightly, that we might prove behind in a number of subjects. And so she chose a cram school, a room which contained ten students and our instructor, Mr MacGillicuday, an elderly, evil-smelling man, a boozer, who moved from pupil to pupil, correcting, never explaining. He sat too close and breathed down necks. We suffered this from nine until one o'clock. We could not have endured more. And I felt personally affronted by the ugliness of Toronto. I missed the mountains. There was nothing here to lift up the eyes unto. An older cousin's coming out dance was the most terrible event of the winter. In spite of our years we were asked because it was family. To our elders we appeared politely joyful; among ourselves we muttered darkly. Our dresses for the occasion were made by the seamstress who had clothed us at Craigleigh, where she had come each year for a three-week stay in the autumn and again in the spring. She was half mad, and sometimes wholly so and behind hospital bars. Her conversation, though fantastic and morbid, did not disturb us. We were accustomed to her talk and relished it in a nasty sort of way. But I breathed through my mouth during fittings, for she stank, and of maggots. Speed rather than fine workmanship her goal, which suited us, for what we wanted we wanted right away. We delighted to put on for dinner that which had not been conceived at breakfast time. Our mothers allowed us to choose these first almost grownup evening dresses. Time: the twenties. Fashion: skirts above the knees, belts around the bottom, as today. Anne [Osier] and I decided on red. Red with gold lace for me, red with silver lace for Anne. My mother sighed. Anne's mother sighed. Why did we let them choose? they asked one another.

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The Autobiography The finished products as thrown together by Mrs G., red and gold, red and silver, did not entirely fit the pictures in our heads, but we could not permit ourselves to doubt, for we lived in a state of dread. Yet mingled with the dread was hope. We remembered Cinderella. Anne is staying with us. Our dresses lie on the bed awaiting our trembling bodies. We bathe; then comes the delicate and novel task of shaving under our arms, something we have never done before. The operation completed, I take a bottle of red Odorono, a strong guarantee against sweating, a necessary protection considering the shaken state of our beings. I read on the label NOT to be used for twenty-four hours after shaving. I appeal to Anne. You should have used it this morning, Stupid, is all the sympathy I get. The end of the world is in my stomach. That I had never been born. I will sweat and people will turn from me as from garbage. Now I see my dress for what it is, hideous. I regard my glum face in the mirror, my straight hair. If only I can die, quickly, before the dance begins. Instead, I live. We are actually here in a swarm of lights and people, a babble of music and voices. My head swims and I hold a white programme in my hand, twirling the gold pencil attached to it by a silken cord. One of the 'big boys,' a cousin from Roches Point, asks me for the third dance. I nod, absently. All the big cousins have been told they must dance with us, and when they run out we dance with uncles and our mother's friends. I hear no word my partners speak, for my ears are confused, and my eyes, and my feet also. I observe my sister and Anne, am comforted to see they look no happier than I feel. On the way home my mother asks, well, Chicks, did you have a good time? We cry in unison, marvellous, we've never had such fun. And in a day or two we almost come to believe it. During that winter we became accustomed to the presence of a man who called at our house several evenings a week. I did not give him a suspicious thought for other men had courted our mother without success. When May came round, her birthday month, and with it the news that she intended to marry this person, I was incredulous. It isn't possible, I cried, but from amazement rather than indignation. Were they not beyond the age for love? Companionship is a very nice thing, said my mother, and in my imagination I restricted their relationship to that alone. And I was quick to turn events to my own advantage. I gave her my gracious consent to the marriage on the condition that I could go to boarding school. It will give me time to get used to the idea, I argued, but what I meant was, I don't like Toronto, I want to get off on my own. And so it was settled. 216

The Hour before Decay Early in June we went to Roches Point; my brother and two school friends, my sisters and I and a friend from the cram school. The boys intended to write their matric at the end of the month and I was encouraged to try five of the ten papers. A rural life was supposed to incline us to study. Only my brother worked and he had no need to. My mother was married in the little stone church; the only witnesses, her sister and Sukey, the housekeeper. No one else even knew of their intention except ourselves, and we were off for the day writing exams in Newmarket. While our mother was on her wedding trip, with no one except servants in the house, our merriment kept pace with our unease. We stayed up half the night listening to desolate crooners, or drove through the countryside singing 'Come to Me My Melancholy Baby,' full out. When our mother returned, reports seeped in. I know it was innocent fun, she said, but when you make yourselves conspicuous people get a false impression; and though she was considered, and rightly, a liberal-minded woman, she added, you must not set a poor example to the villagers which makes my youth a million years away. A week later we were on our way to England, all except our stepfather, who planned to join us in August. The trip had been arranged before our mother's decision to marry and though some persons thought it odd that she should leave her husband three weeks after pledging her vows, we did not. The strange thing to us was the two of them together, man and wife. The south of England is a pretty place but to the north I give my allegiance. Through the Brontes and The Secret Garden1^ I had become intimate with moors before ever I saw one. Built-in springs they have, buoyant with gorse and heather, and, like the sea, nothing as far as the eye can reach to stop the traveller, for the low stone walls are easily climbed and never a person to say no; nothing but sheep and big wild birds. And I admired the stark grey villages, the enormous sky. Over the years I came to know Derbyshire well and for its sake I learned to use my legs, walking many miles with my indefatigable cousins. Sometimes we took hampers of food and drove to Dovedale where we picnic'd beside Izaak Walton's stream - water so clear that trout are visible as goldfish in a bowl.20 My aunt [Ellen Osier Bowen], with whom we stayed, took great care of her chauffeur, as if he were a horse. Fifty miles in the morning entitled him to a restful afternoon. Wherever we went we must beware lest we lame the driver, though in truth his legs were sound enough. It was boils he suffered from. 217

The Autobiography I was beginning to look nice, and the fact that my English aunt thought me wicked gave me a measure of self-confidence. But there was nothing stable about this new assurance; it came and went, as it does still, an unpredictable ally. On the return voyage it fell into the sea on the eve of a fancy-dress dance. My mother had taken pains to find a costume to my taste, but it wasn't to my taste and I sat in the cabin and wept. I wouldn't go, nothing would persuade me, though I was persuaded, and by my stepfather. I called him EdWARD because his name was Edmund. He was a true eccentric; individualist is too mild a term for such a fellow. We were both fist-thumpers, noisy dogmatic irrational arguers, and our battles endeared us to one another. I am standing beside him on deck when we enter the St Lawrence. So intense his excitement, he slaps me on the back. Canada, he cries, look! your native land. I remain unmoved. What of it? You feel nothing? he asks, shock in his voice. After months abroad you feel nothing at all when you see your country again? Well, I answer, I like Roches Point. He turns in real distress to my mother. Mary, Canada means NOTHING to your children. Did you know? My mother looks guilty, thinking perhaps of the American school I am about to enter. It isn't her fault, I say, it's just that I've never given it any thought; we've been away so much, you know. And for the following thirteen years I continued to live out of Canada as often as in it, and its past, present and future were no concern of mine. Now that I am become so self-conscious a Canadian, I thank my stepfather for giving me a symbol. When I see the word, Canada, it is the wide St Lawrence and a voice shouting, Look! our native land.

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Chapter Five

Strange Voyages

A friend of my mother, albeit an odd one, recommended a progressive, co-educational school in Connecticut, an eastern Ojai Valley School, or so my mother supposed. Escorted by Sukey I arrived there ten days after the fall term had begun, and a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday. I took at once to the place as landscape; fifteen undulating acres; rocks, a clear cold brook, a wood-lot, and behind the wood-lot a small country road winding through deeper woods and up and down higher hills. Classrooms were contained in a pleasant schoolhouse built for the purpose. The boys lived in a dormitory beyond the playing fields, the girls in what had been an old-fashioned rambling country house. Here the sexes mingled at mealtime, and in their leisure hours shared the living rooms. A repetition of the Ojai Valley? We could not have been more mistaken. My room-mates and two girls next door composed a gang revered for its sophistication. My clothes had been bought in England; grey flannel skirts, sweaters, a reefer overcoat, and for parties a black velvet dress with round lace collar and frilly lace cuffs. These did not accord with my room-mates' apparel, which swung from careless bohemian to something fancy from 42nd St. A gypsy skirt, dangling ear-rings. Else how should life be other than bitter gall? The girls hammered me with questions. Did I drink? Yes, I said, remembering that I was now offered sherry and wine. This reassured them, though I could not see why, for it was some time before I knew what they meant by drink. But for the most part I disappointed my examiners and they made no effort to conceal their not ill-natured contempt. Then Wanda gave me one last chance. Have you ever gone to the limit? she asked. Yes, said Gay, answer us that. What did they mean? Dear God, help me to guess. Then I remembered Lizzie - how often she had

The Autobiography said to me, Miss Hanne, you hare the limit. Nothing to do but take a chance. Yes, I say, often. I don't believe you. Who with? they inquire. My old nurse Lizzie, for one, I reply. They are too astonished to laugh and sit on the bed with their mouths open; gaping at me. The following day at their request I am moved to a single room a long way distant from theirs and they pay me no further attention. Too humiliated to seek friends elsewhere, I shut myself within myself and pretty soon loneliness becomes a disease and I so sick for home I think of nothing except how to die, an inexplicable foolishness for one who should have been thinking of how to reach her temporal, not her eternal home. My bedroom opened onto a small grilled balcony, and often in November rain or sleet I stood there in my nightgown wishing a fatal pneumonia. Yet every morning I awoke with nothing foreign in my chest except the lead of homesickness. Since my death proved unaccommodating I determined on the alternative course - to run away — and my natural good spirits returned with my decision. I made the necessary arrangements without hindrance, for we were free to go shopping in the nearby town. I drew my allowance from the school office and set off to buy a ticket to New York and to make a reservation from New York to Toronto. On the way I meet my old room-mates. Cheered by the thought of escape I confide my plan, and when they gaze at me with interested admiration I know myself a favoured child of the gods. You must let us help you, they say, and linking their arms in mine we continue on our way. Tomorrow, one of them reminds me, we play hockey. Your train leaves at half-past four. Easiest thing in the world to fade from the playing field into the back lane. You'll want a taxi. A day girl can order one to meet you there. Safer than to telephone from school. How will you get your suitcase out? I had not intended to take one but now my departure is a game in which complications add to the sport. For a carton of cigarettes, a sly young gardener can be bribed to carry it out while we are in class and hide it behind a designated bush. And so they arrange it. At the appointed hour I slip away in my gym tunic and running shoes. The taxi is there, and my suitcase. I am on my way. I wish I wasn't. I wanted friends and now I seem to have them — yet my popularity depends not on my presence, but on my departure. I contemplate for the first time the possible results of my action. Will I be expelled? My mother? But I have committed myself. I board the train for New York. The Grand Central Station holds no comfort, and I appear a very strange traveller indeed, with my school clothes and my scared face. If they miss me at school I will be readily identified. I look at the clock. An 220

Strange Voyages hour and a half to wait before I can hide myself in the Toronto train. My quaking stomach demands no food, so I sit on a step of the great wide stairs, eyes on the clock, waiting for the centuries to roll by. Once in my berth, security returns and I go to sleep with visions of joy — my own and that of my family when we embrace on the morrow. But the joy is all in the vision. When I ring the doorbell of our house the parlour maid says, What in the world are you doing here? I rush past her, up the stairs to my mother who I know will be breakfasting in bed. My brother and sister stand in the hall, staring, as if I am a ghost. Only my stepfather looks unconcerned and calls, Hullo, Anne. I open my mother's door and run across the room then stop, for she turns white and her face is lit not with joy, but with alarm. Anne, she cries. I have given no thought to the shock of my unheralded arrival. I have perhaps supposed I would be missed at school, that the girls will confess my destination, that the school will notify my mother. No one has missed me at all. It is my mother on the telephone who informs the headmistress of my absence from school, my presence in Toronto. To 'what is the matter?' I can say nothing except that I had been about to die from homesickness, which is not the truth for it was precisely because I could not die that I had left. I have no tales to tell of the gang; its members I now counted among my friends; I do not mention that drinking to them means bath-tub gin, straight, in the back seat of a car; nor do I share with her my uncertainty as to who is and who is not a virgin. And so, for my character's sake, she decides I must return, at least until Christmas. I alone recognize the irony of her decision, knowing that Edgewood was not, in her sense of the word, a character-building place. The school, it turned out, had no wish to expel me, for its shaky reputation could ill-afford any scandal whatsoever. I remained at home three unfestive days, then Sukey again escorted me to Edgewood, although I pointed out that I had surely proved myself capable of travelling alone, a remark that was not well received. Only EdWARD, being uninvolved, behaved towards me as if nothing untoward had happened. I had indulged in visions of joy on the train to Toronto. On the train to New York my dreams were nightmares of angry teachers, loneliness, isolation. And like the other vision this one, too, worked in reverse. I was embraced by the gang, teachers kissed me, the younger children regarded me as a heroine. At the gang's request I moved in with my old roommates. Ah, I thought, this is a place where vice is rewarded. This is the place for me. 221

The Autobiography My first act was to trade my clothes for the gaudier ones of my friends, or rather, they gave me some of theirs, for during my absence they had divided mine between them. I remained nominal owner of the black velvet dress, although it was borrowed by anyone at any time. A school dance, for instance, occurred shortly after my return, and though I knew no boy to ask, I was assured there would be lots to go round. The gang said, You'll have the loveliest time, until one of them decided to wear my velvet dress. You won't know a soul, they said. Better to stay upstairs than to be a wallflower. I wasn't hard to persuade. I went to bed. I have just now read the many letters I wrote to my mother during the two years I was at Edgewood. A mistake, I think, for I wish to say what I remember, be it true or false in fact. Now it is too late; memory is corrupted by these authentic proofs of what I was. Edgewood was a small school, smaller than it wished to be — forty boarders, perhaps, and fifty day pupils. Of the boarders not more than a baker's dozen were boys, and but one of these, Mark, sufficiently old to be acceptable to the gang. He was our brother, a sad, slim youth who played the guitar and played with the girls, there being no available companions of his years and sex. Many of the students were the children of writers and artists or their hangers-on. Among the parents divorce was the rule rather than the exception, and if Edgewood had a virtue it consisted in providing a home for unwanted children. The school was originally conceived in somewhat the same spirit as that of Mr Yeomans in the Ojai Valley, but without a comparable character as head. It was founded by high-minded, serious, wealthy American women, than which the Rocky Mountains are not more formidable. When I arrived, the school was no longer young, a number of the founders had taken their money and interest elsewhere, and our ears were filled with rumours of approaching bankruptcy. But lack of funds did not altogether account for the seedy air, the general slackness. These were due in part to the headmistress, a wpman whose character remains a mystery. She did not teach; sometimes she appeared for meals, more often not. The girls professed to hate her, I among them - though why I cannot imagine, for she rarely interfered, and in her occasional dealings with us she appeared a kind, neutral, beige-coloured thing who neither liked nor disliked us. In fact she was no head at all and the school drifted, leaderless and poor. Uncertain of their responsibilities, the staff inclined to shut its eyes, omitting, however, to pray. In classrooms the air was brighter. A number of the teachers came from the nearby town and had nothing to do with the boarding-school life, and little idea of the shambles in which we lived.

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Strange Voyages They taught regulation subjects — some very well, all of them adequately. The music, compared to the Ojai School, was mediocre, and the Shop, though large and splendidly equipped, manual training, nothing more. The teacher in charge - a coarse man, yet attractive to women, for I observed how they welcomed his hearty advances — preferred electric saws to the wood on which he operated. He lived in the gatehouse with his wife and eighteen-year-old son, a boy who resembled him in so far as he, too, had a similar animal magnetism. Opposite the gatehouse was the tower; round, of grey stone, not topping a building but starting itself from eardi. Inside, an empty room except for leaves, and a stair that led to the roof and its surrounding battlement. No oracle warned the demoralised staff, the undisciplined children, of the perilous tower, and the neighbouring gatehouse that sheltered father and son. It was from Lydia I first heard talk of the boy. She and Marion shared the room adjoining ours. They were in their last year at school, and Lydia was unquestioned boss, a tall handsome creature with flaxen hair, not really fat but outsize like a Scandinavian goddess. No one ever had, no one ever would, put anything over on that one. Her room-mate Marion was the other side of the coin; soft curling brown hair, soft baby mouth, soft wobbling behind, soft heart — not a 'no' on her tongue, and only four years old when she saw her father shoot her mother's lover. He missed, or at any rate the man lived and he was acquitted. Then divorce, and Marion left to the care of a father now become an angry misanthrope. As I remember he was a doctor, but it may be that I choose this profession for my villains. Whatever he was he did not prosper. I visited with Marion one weekend and found everything — father, house, surroundings - mean and drab. Her mother lived in Manhattan and sold corsets. A succession of lovers, yet not one worthy of the name 'protector.' The persons in my room: Wanda, a solitary soul and given to fierce melancholy and fierce joy, had, so far as I could discover, no family of any kind; Edgewood was home, had adopted her, and thus indebted she could not participate in unlawful activities. Nonetheless she was our confidante, and observed our doings with green, sardonic eyes. For Gay, also, Edgewood was home, but she no slave to conscience. Her mother helped with the housekeeping and the care of the small children, and for these services the school paid a small salary and gave board and education to her daughters. Only Lydia had a background remotely similar to my own, and yet, well, this is Lydia. The boy at the gatehouse fell in love with her, a rare disease in him, for though he boasted of his sexual conquests, love was not commonly an ingredient in his affairs. And Lydia

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The Autobiography was not to be conquered. She had other means of enjoying the situation. She sits on her bed. Two glinting icebergs are her eyes. To an avid audience she describes her pleasure in whetting the already ravenous appetite of the gatehouse boy. She boasts of her technique, his passion. And when his frenzy is sufficient for her greed, the culmination - a slap on the face from her strong white hand. She appears to grow in size as she talks, and her face radiates lascivious joy. He was almost crazy, she sighs, as she comes to the end of her hypnotic tale. But as it turned out, even Lydia had something comparable to grief. She did not like her size. She could not alter her height but determined to reduce her bulk; and this determination ended her days at Edgewood. Pounds dropped off at an alarming rate, and mysteriously, for she ate her meals as usual. She grew pale, nervous, fretful, a fallen amazon; and one day she fainted, a long faint. Her mother came, and a doctor, and Lydia was whisked away, very ill indeed, and the mystery solved. Through an advertisement in a movie mag she had secured quantities of reducing pills, and the pills contained thyroid extract, a substance employed to speed metabolism. Lydia had accelerated hers almost to the point of death. But death was no match for Lydia, and she recovered and married instead the heir to a large fortune. Those who liked her and those who didn't relaxed at her departure. She had a capacity for evil of which she was but half aware, and was the more dangerous for being conventional, 'respectable.' Now we were four, and foolishness rather than vice the common factor. My mother had not intended to send me back to Edgewood after Christmas, but of this I had no inkling before the holidays and by then it was too late. I had, in modern parlance, adjusted to the group, not always a commendable thing to do, and now must plead permission to return to the place I had run from only six months earlier. My gypsy clothes did not help, apparel not suited to Toronto, and my mother felt obliged to re-outfit me with a new conservative wardrobe, a wardrobe I was to barter again for the more exotic possessions of my schoolmates. I talk a good deal about the gatehouse boy. An artist, very talented, but disgusting, nonetheless, I always add. After some days of this my mother says, I believe you are in love with him. I contemplate her with awe and some irritation. How does she know when I have not myself considered this possibility until she speaks? Thus alerted I regard my feelings and their object. One day, sitting close to him, I observe his ugly hands, his dirty nails. I do not like his smell. Saved or doomed? A symptom of effete gentility when the senses are undemocratic, over-fastidious? Yet in this

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Strange Voyages particular instance I was fortunate, for later I learned his hands to be the index of his nature. Meanwhile his father was enjoying a conspicuous affair with a young teacher, herself a smoulderer. All the bad things that happened during my first year at Edgewood related, one way or another, to the father or the son. It was the son who introduced me to Gerald, a twenty-three year old architect with a beautiful voice and a beautiful yellow convertible. I was stunned by my good fortune when he chose me as the light of his life, as were my friends. Everyone remarked his sophistication, his romantic good looks, his car, his great age. We were permitted visitors on Saturday and Sunday, although should the visitor be an unrelated male we were expected to stay within the grounds, a false expectation when there was nothing and no one to stop us from walking through the woods to the road and a waiting car. With Marion and the gatehouse boy we toured the countryside, and should we fail to turn up for a meal our absence passed unnoticed by sleeping authority. I managed to conform and rebel simultaneously, for by conforming to the mores of my schoolmates I was rebelling against those of home. But my transformation was hardly two skins deep. I resembled those Europeans who settle in the East and pride themselves on adopting the native dress, on speaking the language, on a gourmet's knowledge of the food, believing themselves to be en rapport with the country and its people. I could never be more than a self-conscious bohemian, while my comrades were bohemian by the nature of their upbringing, not by deliberate choice. To live outside one's tradition is to be a stranger everywhere, and I was to become doubly foreign for I did not properly 'settle' in one place until I was twenty-eight. On my dressing-table, a picture of my mother. I must eat my cake and have it too, for without her approval I became no more than my shadow. Sometimes I was forced to hide her likeness in the bottom drawer among my sweaters, and there she most certainly was on the weekend I went to New York with Marion to stay with her mother - the object of our visit a night on the town with Gerald and the gatehouse boy. Marion's mother didn't mind what we did. Enjoy yourselves while you're young, she said, and at sixteen we fitted nicely into that category. At Paul Whiteman's, Gerald learned I could not dance. He was amused, I humiliated, for it did not occur to me that it was my youth and inexperience that attracted him. When Paul Whiteman's closed, we travelled north to the farthest reaches of Harlem, moving from dive to dive until the shivering dawn turned even the blackest faces to grey. In the name of fun I passed intolerable hours watching the play of drunken obscenities between prostitutes and their 225

The Autobiography companions; the world a sorrow so huge I believed it would burst me asunder, there, where I sat. It is still in me, tattooed on my mind, as fresh and full of ink today as when I observed, in these sad dregs, our unregenerate selves. We returned, old women, to the apartment, and Marion's mother got up so that we might share the only bed and sleep. Enjoy yourselves while you're young, she said, and closed the door. I missed the library at home and the continuous influx of new books. Gerald brought me his own favourites, and peculiarly suited they were to the florid adolescent taste: Omar Khayyam, Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Salome and De Profundis, Voltaire's Candide, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Edna St Vincent Millay and Rupert Brooke, poets my mother had warned me against. Second-rate she said, but I was receptive now to the second-rate and worse. The illuminating discovery of the year I found for myself— Emily Dickinson - in an anthology of American verse. I persevered with Whitman but to no purpose. At the Ojai School I had secretly dubbed him a windbag, and though I admit a few splendid lines, I have not changed my opinion since. Had our English teacher, Mr Bass, not shown me special favour I would certainly have chosen to be the thorn in his flesh. Virtuous, goodtempered, pompous to a degree, he enjoyed one of those big baritone voices, the kind that makes a man feel so manly. He was continually honouring the school with free recitals and during these, childlike joy lit his face while he listened to stupendous noise of his own making. That the pleasure was his alone we acknowledged with faint applause. The Mr (or Mrs) Basses of this world make fearful demands on the spirit. Their freedom from malice gives them a kind of diplomatic immunity. Protocol requires that they be suffered politely regardless of the itching tongue. The school year might have ended without catastrophe had Marion and Gay been less concerned about my drinking, or rather the lack of it. You mean to say you've never been drunk? Well, you haven't lived, that's all. The gatehouse boy had bought for twenty-five dollars a brokendown Model-T Ford, and it was in this vehicle that my friends decided that I should taste life in the form of bootleg whiskey. The gatehouse boy bought the bottle. He knew where to come by it cheap. It is midnight. What other hour could it be? All strange voyages begin at midnight, the significant hour, distinct from eleven o'clock, or even two, which is the hour of death. Marion and I (Gay has prudently resolved to stay behind) ease ourselves out of a window onto the sloping roof. We shiver because of the cool night air, although it is May, and because of the perilous descent, and because we wish we were in bed,

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Strange Voyages asleep. We climb along the roof until we are directly above the big stone porte cochere. No moon, no stars; everything depends on touch. Somehow we lower ourselves onto its flat roof, and from here it is not difficult to find openings, footholds. We are on the ground. My knees are trembling, I can hardly stand; the terror of the descent hits me, here on solid earth. We walk along the back lane where the Model-T, and in it the gatehouse boy, are waiting. We drive I know not how many miles before the gatehouse boy stops the car. Take a swig, he says. Out of the bottle? Don't you put water with it, or something? Don't be fancy. Take a swig. I put the bottle to my mouth; I take a swig. Throat and mouth are full of hot knives. I splutter. They laugh good-naturedly and I pass the whiskey to them. I am burning all the way down to my stomach. Now it is changed to a big benificent warm glow. Have another swig, says the gatehouse boy. It is easier this time, and I take a mighty gulp. I hear myself shout, Let me out, I want to get out of the car, I want to dance. I am in the middle of the road, I can hear my voice yelling and singing, but I do not feel my arms and legs, though I know they are performing some kind of an Indian war dance. Marion and the gatehouse boy call to me to shut up. I pay them no heed, for I have gone to another land where time is not. Am I dancing for hours or minutes? Someone shouts, Here comes a car. I lurch to the side of the road, I fall. I cannot get up again, ever. I lie very still for I have received news from a long way off that something is the matter with my foot. Pain is bringing me home. Marion and the gatehouse boy drag me onto the floor of the car. I vomit. With every jolt of the Model-T I retch from pain and whiskey. We cannot now return to school as we had left, by way of the roof, so the gatehouse boy drives to the tower. They carry me in and put me to rest on a heap of leaves, then make a bed of leaves for themselves a little way off. Sometimes conscious, sometimes not, but always shaking as one shakes with chill in a high fever. At seven Marion says we must get back to school, and I glimpse the future through a mist of sickness. We can no more escape discovery than I can walk. How honourable of Marion to stay with me when she might so easily have climbed her way to safety. Hopping on one foot or crawling on hands and knees I manage the driveway, then the stairs, then bury myself in bed. Not to think. That I feel death imminent, an eventuality that will relieve me of further disgrace, my cold balm. During the lunch hour Marion and Gay come to inspect my corpse, and what they have to say in no way freshens it. Unseen onlookers had identified us as Edgewood students, have reported the episode to the police, and the police have notified the headmistress. Our misadventure is the talk of the

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The Autobiography town. Edgewood finally and forever disgraced. What are they going to do? Marion does not know. They'll have to expel you, said Gay. Marion shrugs. It's almost June, and I finish then anyway. It won't matter much, she says. What about your father, your mother? I ask. They won't fuss, she says, and looks disconsolate — as if she wished it might be important to them. I drowsed through what remained of the day. No teacher approached. The swelling in my foot and ankle increased, and the pain comforted by absorbing a part of my attention. At length, in the evening, the headmistress appeared. She sat down on the bed and observed me, and it was my good fortune to appear as ill as I felt, for when she spoke it was not harshly. She had learned about my ankle. She took a magnanimous view and concluded I had sufficiently punished myself. Or was it strategy? One never knew. She remained mysterious. No, my mother would not be told, and she had no intention of expelling me. To save the school from further scandal, I suppose, but her motives were a matter of indifference to me. That the family should not know. Reprieve. In five days I had made an astonishing recovery from the ravages of both sin and remorse. 'The Prom was last Saturday,' I wrote to my mother, 'and I looked very beautiful in a pale gold taffeta dress — gold earrings — one gold slipper - one huge ballet slipper and a pair of crutches ... I enjoyed myself immensely ...' But back in the soft bosom of my family the shudders returned, colder for the attention lavished on what was inside that plaster cast. I had the grace to blush when asked, How exactly did you break your ankle? and would mumble something about a slippery rock. And I thought often of what Marion had told me during our painful journey from the tower to the schoolhouse. While I had been lying stuporous on my heap of leaves, she and the gatehouse boy had made love on theirs, and for the first time. I am on my way to visit the Browns. I no longer call them Mr and Mrs, but Everett and Helen. They have rented for the summer a cottage on Cape Cod, close to the Yeomans. Westport next. Everett will certainly be on the platform to meet me. But it is Gerald. Gerald does not approve my visit to the Browns. He and the gatehouse boy have come, he says, to protect me. And where are you staying? I ask. At the Browns, he answers, where else? And we drive without further words to their cottage, an old one, set in a field that runs down to a small bay. When we arrive everyone looks reproachfully at everyone else. Why did you ask them? I inquire of Helen when I get her alone. We didn't. They moved in. At your invitation, we supposed. When I say, No, the air clears between us. I urge the young men to leave but their reply

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Strange Voyages is laughter; and for two days a cold rain forces us to huddle together in the small living-room, a glowering crew except for the babies. Soon I become sick. I eat food only to lose it minutes later. Why do we endure it? Possessed we are, unable to act. On the fourth day the Browns rouse themselves from our community nightmare sufficiently to say, Really, you must go, and they do so, with many a pretty speech about their pleasant visit. After a time I recover a modicum of health, but my relationship with Everett has changed. I am no longer the child entrusted to his rather dubious care, but a young girl courted by young men. And I am afraid, for the emotions Gerald cannot arouse suffuse me in his presence. The Yeomans' elder son provides escape. We sail together, swim off island beaches or lie in the sun and talk. I am happy in this shy company and accept an invitation to visit the following summer. I returned to Roches Point in no way fit to bear the approaching visit of Gerald, the gatehouse boy and Marion. Let Anne see them in her home surroundings, was my mother's not original but well-tested theory. That they should drive, the three of them, from New York, stopping a night on the way, did not endear them to her any more than their appearance on arrival. But after all they were coming to a place named the Lodge, and being American and unfamiliar with southern Ontario they may have pictured a hunting lodge, not a gatehouse. Canada meant moose and bear and snow, and for all three they were suitably attired if not equipped, for they came unarmed. Gerald and the gatehouse boy wore heavy lumberman shirts, open now in deference to the unexpected heat and exposing to my mother's astonished gaze large areas of hairy chests. Below this, jeans and lumberman boots. Marion was similarly attired. Today everyone wears jeans, but in the twenties, flannels, grey or white; shirt; and at table, coat and tie. Days passed as in a comic nightmare, though the comedy did not appear until the whole had been reduced by time. When we swam at the dock each relative appeared to regard them over a pince-nez, yet there was no pince-nez to be seen. It goes to show, Mary, what happens if you send a child to a crazy American school. Trash. Bounders. How can you eat at the same table with them? etc. My visitors on the other hand felt themselves to be in the presence of strange prehistoric creatures. Quaint. Ludicrous as pterodactyls. My mother remained scrupulously polite; I, loyal to my friends, though not without effort, for I was hounded by Marion and the gatehouse boy asking where they could make love. Their rooms were in different wings of the Lodge and they could not very well reach each other by stealth. I hated love, I hated them, I hated my relations. For two

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The Autobiography whole weeks they stayed. We drove through miles of farmland in search of a covering wood for the desperate lovers, while Gerald sulked at my long virtue and I dreamed of an unpeopled desert island. Yet compared to Marion's my summer had been one of sweetness and light. Since our parting at Edgewood she had endured an abortion; not the aseptic Fifth Avenue kind — one without anaesthetic, and performed in the office of an alcoholic doctor. And after, the long trek home to her father's house by subway and ferry and the obligation to carry on as if nothing had happened. She survived the abortion only to find she was sick with gonorrhoea. All this she told me as we sat on the grass beside a blue lake - a summer day without a hint of menace in the air, no evil to be seen or apprehended until on the innocent sky was superimposed the image of Marion's luckless life. She hated her father; her mother could not be depended on. Except for the gatehouse boy she was quite alone. Having met these friends, my family was more than ever anxious that I should not return to Edgewood. They knew me as one incapable of obeying a direct order yet for the most part open to persuasion. Edgewood was the exception. Instinct told me that should I not at this point reject home I would lose the will to do anything but sit on a velvet cushion sucking my silver spoon. And my mother could think of no satisfactory alternative. When she contemplated my probable reaction to Bishop Strachan's School in Toronto and Bishop Strachan's School's probable reaction to me, she gave in. But she wrote to the headmistress to say she was sending me back on the condition that henceforth the teachers would assume responsibility for the whereabouts of pupils at all times. My mother was a very reasonable woman. When I returned, Gay and I, the only survivors of the original gang, were full of good intentions, as was the school, which had about it a new and surprising air of orderliness. I refused to see Gerald (my mother had won after all), preferring a modest collection of young men to one possessive architect, however old. And I worked, determined now to go to Swarthmore College the following September. There is nothing of interest to relate about virtuous school days. And they were virtuous in so far as our sins were lesser ones and remained undetected. I passed my College Board examinations and the Oral at Swarthmore, and when I received an official acceptance letter from the Dean I regarded it with loving amazement, as a mother regards her new-born child. My future was settled for four years, which, at seventeen, means forever. Yet leaving Edgewood was a hard farewell even to one accustomed to

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Strange Voyages frequent partings. Two years — my longest stretch at any school, in any place since I had left, before my father's death, London, Ontario. Here I had learned to be a social being, to feel myself a part of a community however odd; indeed its oddness may have been the reason why it held a place for me. During the last two days of the final term, Gay and I were seldom to be seen except with streaming eyes — as if we had been hired by the pomposities to demonstrate their dearest chestnut: school-days are the happiest days of your lives.

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Chapter Six

Among Nightmares

The nineteenth century customs surrounding death and mourning — widows' weeds, stipulated dates for black, for grey, for lilac; writing paper deeply bordered in black that time reduced in orderly degrees until at last the page was white again; the lugubrious hypocrisy — all these made imperative the twentieth-century reaction against a tradition that had degenerated into a habit of sham. Today we suffer its reverse. Good form has changed its face and now requires the mourner to continue exactly as if his grief, and death, were not. There is no ritual to shelter him, no custom that permits him to avoid, for a time, the buzz of acquaintances, all social events unrelated to friendship or love. And in the struggle to hide his grief he grieves the longer. The various rituals and customs of mourning existed as a catharsis, and that we have abolished them proves we believe ourselves to be especially strong, or that we have ceased to have strong feelings. It is not the ostentation of black that I would reinstate, but rather a respect for proper grief— sympathy for those who, in over-mourning mourn but for themselves, and their appetite for pity resembles the hunger of a man with a tapeworm. In the nineteenth century sex was taboo in general conversation, but there was a great deal of morbid talk about sickness and death and damned souls. Today sex is as general a topic as the weather - but mention death and you will find yourself beyond the pale. Country funerals are still conducted with something of their former gusto. Last week it was Mrs Kelly we buried in the Roches Point churchyard. Thirty years and more she and her husband cared for the Lodge, and after her husband's death she had come to me as cook, though that in no way describes her position in our house. She mothered my children, and me as well, having known my first summer and believing me

Among Nightmares not much changed since. Everyone in the village could tell you hers had been a 'hard life.' Kelly had qualified as a gardener but there his virtue ended. He was a notorious wencher, and the bottle drove him roaring. Once he shot a man, but not quite dead. His sons proved equally irksome, yet Mrs Kelly loved them, forgave them, endured the village gossip, maintained a gentle dignity - in short, a saint. She was a country woman with country wisdoms and country sayings and she 'gave' me a number of poems. Often I have rushed from her presence to jot down a sentence, the turn of a phrase, seeds which sometimes germinated then and there, sometimes lay a year or five, forgotten. There is a good turn-out in the church; familiar faces of the yearround Roches Pointers. Two winters ago and a bit I listened in the same church to the same service for my mother and I recall my drought - a drought so dry that had I been turned upside down and shaken no tears would have fallen from my eyes, whereas now it is with difficulty I hold back a sea full. The 'eulogy,' omitted at our request from the service for my mother, is here the climax and plays a double role, for not only are Mrs Kelly's virtues gathered together and given back to us garlanded with sonorous quotations from the Bible and lesser works, but the living, the surviving sons, are, and not obliquely, chastised from the pulpit. The church fills with the sound of their sobbing, and the service ends with the congregation singing 'Abide with Me' very slowly. Preserve me from Christians, I am saying to myself while the parson berates the poor wretches; then I sense that the congregation enjoys a deep satisfaction, even the sons. This public sorrow and shame they perhaps feel as a kind of atonement, a substitute for the impossible, for changing the nature of their beings. After the ceremony in the graveyard there is a great deal of weeping and talking and an enormous sense of life. An old man beside me murmurs, Fine day for it, good burying weather. He has himself dug many graves. I shake hands with the sons but cannot speak for holding back the flood. Not until I leave do I realize I might have at least given them my tears. Except for this omission I am at peace, for my lesser grief has enabled me, at last, to live my mother's burying. And this is surely it, the thing we seek - to live what happens to us. The following day — a smart town wedding. Good taste and elegance everywhere in evidence. Trinity Chapel, an architectural epithalamium. At the reception a great deal of talking and a nice lot of drinking and no sense of life at all. The genteel tradition - the tradition where 'good form' demands that should a man be weak enough to feel emotion, he will at least be strong enough to hide it.

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The Autobiography The genteel tradition, the dragon I have been fighting since I was fourteen years old. A difficult monster to kill. No flame spurts from its nostrils. Its mouth is closed; usually its eyes. Indeed it hardly seems sporting to cut the head off such an inert beast. Yet this lethargic, cumbersome creature still inhabits and inhibits me, a negative force more damaging to women than to men, and fatal to the artist. My children's generation seem almost free of it, but when I was young its weight was very much felt. A question of learning the innumerable things that 'aren't done'; so negative, so depressing a discipline that many, to be on the safe side, or out of despair, did nothing at all. At Edgewood I lived among people for whom the genteel tradition did not exist. And on my return to Canada I believed this dragon in me dead, was prepared, after a summer at Roches Point, to continue my emancipation at Swarthmore. But I had not taken into account the chameleon that lodged beside the dragon. After a week at home I discarded my eccentric clothes and became instead a fashion plate. I delighted in the young men and girls, genteel-tradition young men and girls, and assured my mother I never wanted to see the dirty neck of bohemia again, and that I intended to marry a lawyer or stockbroker. And I fell in love with a very correct young Englishman and thereupon decided to go to Paris with my sister instead of to college. My relations felt that perhaps I was not so lost as they had feared. Sad, after all my work, not to have even maimed the beast. I am standing on deck waiting for the boat to sail. Paris. Am I certain I have made the right decision? My sister is beside me, and two American girls with whom we share our chaperone, Mrs Tolls. The whistle blows and I remember my three-year-old self, my screams, and the comfort of William's arms. Departure. And these American girls come from California so that when our year is up we will say goodbye and that will be that. Friendly acquaintances. Let them be no more. Rome for Christmas. It sounds very fine, but nonetheless I go to my cabin, tortured still by watching a crowd, their waving handkerchiefs. Farewell, farewell. Paris was not a success. The school, one of those establishments that accommodates eight or ten girls and provides instruction in French, History of Art, and a teacher as guide to galleries and museums, was constricting enough, and we had as well our chaperone, a woman we named the Black Wind. Proust devoted an entire volume to the disease of jealousy, and a volume likewise could be written on the ravages of homesickness. Paris lay stretched about me; for all I cared it might have been a patch of northern tundra. No solace in the Louvre, or the Bois, or patisserie, only in the fact that our mother would join us in Rome for the

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Among Nightmares Christmas holidays. It is not likely I spared her in my letters, for she wrote, some weeks before she sailed, that I might spend the rest of the winter with her, in Italy and Egypt. To Swarthmore I gave no thought; I had not sufficient courage to admit the gravity of my mistake. Things picked up in Rome, though I ailed from a surfeit of churches. It was the surfeit, rather than the churches themselves, that I objected to. And I most enjoyed the outside of things; the Spanish Steps; and rosy terracotta plaster peeling from the walls of houses; a view from a restaurant where all seven hills are visible; cypress trees; Hadrian's Villa; the fountains. Yes, the fountains most of all; but the Forum, too, where green stuff grows among the ruins and broken columns sharpen the sky. Here I relished the solemn look on the faces of those who walked where Caesar had walked before them. The place has a pompous hush of its own. The character of the hush changes. No longer reminiscent, but a silence, tense, alive. There are only six or eight sightseers besides ourselves. Everyone stands still; everyone looks in one direction. Mussolini, on horseback and unattended, rides through the Forum. Our mother had engaged rooms in a pension that occupied a portion of what had formerly been a Roman palace. The floors of the lofty halls were of marble, and my mother's room, and the one I shared with my sister, vast chambers lost in dreams of bygone balls. Lying in bed, one gazed at the distant domed ceiling where cherubim and gods and goddesses disported. The small stoves with their gently burning coals were not sufficient to warm the humans lost in these immensities. But cold no longer killed and I was enchanted by our novel surroundings, these splendid foolish rooms; the pink deities, the stoves, no more than candles lit in their honour. It is now decided that Betty will come to Egypt for a few weeks before she returns to school. We say goodbye to the American girls whom we like, and to the Black Wind whom we don't, and head for Naples, from which port we sail for Alexandria. Our mother had not travelled alone to Rome. A cousin of my father, a spinster who had made herself indispensable to relatives by always being on hand to take charge of a household should the householders wish to to absent themselves, had asked if she might come along.21 My mother could not refuse her companionship, and indeed we were very fond of her, though self-effacement, whatever you want to do, wore us down after a bit. She always hogged the uncomfortable chair, the smallest piece of cake, leaving us to the misery of perpetual debt. I have no recollections of her in Rome. Egypt is not complete without her.

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The Autobiography In those days, before air travel, Cairo seemed an immense way off from Toronto. Try to understand, I would say to myself, that it is the Nile you are looking at. But it remained a river, nothing more, until I knew it later, a long way from the Semiramis Hotel. Just as through selfhypnosis I could 'become' Roches Point, its trees and grass and water, so, when I travelled I tried to become the place, and the stranger the country, the easier perhaps to lose oneself, to be nothing other than the surrounding sights and sounds and smells. Domes and minarets and holy men calling the people to prayer at sundown; children with flies nesting in clusters on their eyelids; the god-like sun, the festering sores exposed for the passer-by's inspection; the peculiar smell of the air, as if the dust itself were composed of the disintegrated bones of all the Pharaohs and all the slaves; the mosques, their breathing colours like a prayer the sun drains off at noon and returns to them at sundown; these no less than the people to be observed - Arabs, Semites, Egyptians, persons from every near-eastern nation, displaced my self and left me free to receive, to live in a suspended state of awareness. After two weeks in Cairo we moved to the Mena House, close to the Sphinx and the pyramids. Here my mother became an ardent camel-rider, and it was her pleasure to take us every morning for a jaunt across the desert. Camels I admired so long as I was not aboard one, but there I always seemed to be, and quite unable to adjust to the pitching and tossing of my craft. Our spinster cousin, from her great height, assumed the expression of her mount but did not otherwise complain; my sister was moderate, not a born camel-woman like our mother, but willing to accept the situation. It was from the back of a cranky camel that I first witnessed the lovely flight of Arab horses, and what that led to I have already recorded [see Chapter i]. I liked very much to ride donkeys. Shortly after my race across the desert we left Cairo to journey up the Nile to Aswan. The dhahabia stopped at intervals to allow its pilgrim passengers to visit the remains of Egypt's past, a kind of houseboat with a few creature comforts, a shelter we feared our cousin would not approve. The cramped staterooms opened onto the deck, and down the deck she must walk to the bathroom, an act offensive to her modesty for reason of the ever-present Arab crew. The East is often said to alter the Western psyche and I would not exclude the Near East from this truth, for our maiden aunt was but an outward symptom, to use a medical analogy, of our disturbed metabolism. She, whose life-long habit it had been to say, O, anything will do for me, had already driven mad the managers of two hotels. Every morning she was at the desk, fretful and distraught,

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Among Nightmares demanding yet another room. Though all the rooms were similar, large and airy and bright, she did not find them so. One was noisy, one immoderately sunny, another dark, a fourth, too cold, and so on. We were both embarrassed and puzzled by this new creature who emerged day by day from the cocoon of a once unassuming, silken, maiden self, yet with our wits about us we would have recognized ourselves in her, and the Marabar Caves. I, for instance, in a tunnel that leads to the heart of a pyramid, people ahead, others pushing from behind, panic'd and somehow beat my way, against the grain, out of some incomprehensible horror. And the senses are constantly assaulted by unveiled physical corruption, by a poverty that changes the very meaning of the word — human beings who have lost the human look because they have no choice but to live like animals, not as animals live in nature, but as they might live in a filthy zoo deserted by its keepers. A one-eyed beggar pulls my coat; I turn, and he rolls up his sleeves to show me the suppurating sores that are his arms. Human excrement is everywhere and the sight of those engaged in ridding themselves of it — though this is a modest spectacle, for while they squat, their voluminous robes conceal the nature of the act. And the white man is hated. No scattering of baksheesh changes the look behind the eyes even when the tongue calls upon Allah to bless the giver. It does not take us long to learn the reason why. An English official complained in our presence that ten years since a law had been passed prohibiting Europeans from carrying whips. Egypt has never been the same since, he said - a lash across the face soon stopped the cheeky beggars. And as he spoke I observed his fingers twitch and fumble for something loved and lost. And thus the traveller suffers shame for being a Westerner, and shame again that pity should be tainted with revulsion at such staggering poverty, such unbandaged malignancies. And worst of all the fear, if only in one's dreams, that one might become the official Englishman. Among this confusion of ideas, as well as of sights and sounds, is it any wonder our cousin went in search of the perfect room, a haven from she knew not exactly what? Once we were aboard the dhahabia the Nile asserted itself. We moved at the speed of a loitering tortoise, and at night, as I remember, lay at anchor, a charming mode of travel. From its deck Egypt appeared without flaw, a landscape stylized as its sculpture and dependent, like Greece, on the quality of its light for drama and variety. I had believed the only sunsets worthy of the name those where the sun is swallowed by the sea, but they have their equal where sun is consumed by sand. More

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The Autobiography than in monuments my interest lay in the life to be observed on either bank; small villages where buffalo or bullocks turned the ancient water wheels; goats with engaging spaniel ears, loose on the dusty roads, as were the scraggy chickens, no bigger than bantams; and children, gathered at the river's edge, who, should we run close to shore, lifted outstretched hands that begged baksheesh, baksheesh. From the deck we could see, but not the sores or the flies eating the eyelids of the babies; we could smell, but not the villages; spectators isolated from the gravity of facts by two small strips of water. But I was already ill, and the first stop - a day's expedition into the desert to see something big you may be sure, bulls, perhaps, many images flanking I have forgotten what — is almost lost to me. We rode donkeys and the jogging gait hurt my head, though it was my seat in the saddle. Air cold, sun too hot. The ship's doctor, an elderly Scot who had taken the job as a means of wintering in a sunny clime, changed his diagnosis from day to day yet never stumbled on the right one. But he was a good man and shared with my mother the burden of nursing. They passed the icy nights seated on the floor of my cabin, their pillows propped up against the wall while I lay among nightmares hardly conscious of their presences. Sometimes I galloped across the desert on a runaway horse; often I was lost in the Cairo bazaars, my only guide the one-eyed beggar with the terrible arms. Luxor was eventually reached, and a white bed in a lofty room with two long windows and a balcony that overlooked a garden of strange and brilliant flowers. Typhoid, says the young English doctor now in charge, and we settle down to wait, for it is a time-consuming sickness. The weeks pass, and as my fever subsides I enjoy moments of translucent peace; content to observe shadows playing on the walls, or to listen to voices from a garden I have not yet seen. To be alive — a delicate morsel rolled about the tongue, or a sweetness slowly sucked. Meanwhile my mother and sister indulged their appetite for antiquities, and the maiden cousin, too, when she was not preoccupied in moving from room to room. Her obsession drove her at last to leave us for a rival hotel at the other end of the garden, where she continued her quest for the holy grail. I, in my sheltered sick-room, had little to remind me of Egypt except the mosquito netting that enclosed my bed and a superstitious dread of the Arab who cleaned my room. One eye was gone and its socket still unhealed, yet it was the remaining eye I feared, the eye that regarded his mop and me with ferocious contempt, or so I believed, though it is not easy for the western eye to read the eye of the East. And 238

Among Nightmares yet, to fit my simple faith he must be good. I judged the Westerners in the Middle East as despots, and therefore wicked, and the peoples on whom they worked their wickedness must, like all under-dogs, be morally spotless. And it remains to this day an effort for me to think of similar problems in less over-simplified terms. When I was able to sit up, the Arab moved my bed close to the big windows that overlooked a garden scraped from the palette of Matisse. Beyond this I could see the desert and a ridge of low hills in the far distance; close to, in a small enclosure, tiny, most beautiful gazelles. Arab gardeners idly raked and clipped. Busy Westerners rushed to tennis courts, achieved their sweat and returned to rush forth presendy to camel races or Pharaoh hunting. On lucky days a snake-charmer performed here for the visitors. He played a little on his pipe and the snakes came - from flower beds and shrubs and some from a great way off. And to the wail of his pipe they danced, coiled and uncoiled, or, with darting tongues, reared as if to strike. Touristy stuff, to be sure. Everyone said so, but I was a tourist, and this was magic, and all magic has in it an element of fake. There is no 'pure magic.' If it is pure it is a miracle, but what a miracle is I don't know. During my illness my mother and I renewed an intimacy that adolescence, though only somewhat, had interrupted. Next to the dreams, the nightmares of fever, I remember most our gaiety, the laughter over nothing at all, and the laughter doubly hilarious with laughter, any movement, forbidden me. I did not learn until later that she had lived those weeks in a torment of anxiety, for though I was often sorry for myself, often cross, I had not yet learned of my mortality. By the end of March the tourist season was almost done. Dhahabias no longer crawled their way up the Nile. Persons wintering in Luxor packed their bags. The air was hot, the sun a blister on the sky. Egypt returned to the Egyptians. And with still some weeks to go before I can travel, we move to the other, smaller hotel, for this one is about to shut its doors until November brings the migrating travellers back again. In these last weeks I touch the skin of Egypt, or rather I am touched by it, branded, for a grain of its sand is still in my right eye. My doctor was young and had promised me two things; the Temple of Luxor by moonlight, and an afternoon on the Nile in a small red-sailed dinghy. He kept his word and in the stillness of a desert night I looked on those great columns, black on one side, on the other illuminated by the moon; a sight that demands of the gazer abstract platitudes relating to time and eternity. I was silent from stubbornness but I was thinking them

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The Autobiography just the same. And one day at sunset we sailed on the Nile, a golden stream. Sun and moon, a landscape composed of light and shadow, uncluttered except for its dogmatic symbols: the river of life supporting on either side its long green children — and the whole encompassed by desert, by death. A hard place to leave, but we did, by train to Cairo, and a few days later sailed from Alexandria on a cruise ship homeward bound for New York. Its passengers herded together in a terrible cosiness as if only in numbers could they protect themselves from the impact of strange lands and historic seas. They reassured each other and themselves with noise, and laughter that from a distance sounded mad. My ears, tuned now to the plaintive wild songs the Arab sings at work, to braying donkeys, and the village calls and cries of Luxor, found the sounds of my native American world as strange as I had, to begin with, those of the East.

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Chapter Seven

Confusions of the Heart

[This chapter is unrevised in the manuscript. It is difficult to sort out the exact order intended and frustrating to find that crucial pages are missing. The material is included here, rough though it is, to bring the narrative to its obviously intended conclusion.] It is almost two years later. I am a crustacean now and wear my soft side in. Flippancy, that once tender veil, has thickened to a shell. I am on another ship, an Italian one where the cabins are rooms and the food of that delicious sort my mother finds indigestible. We are returning to the Mediterranean, and it is my fault. It is because I have inadvertently become engaged to two men, which does not seem a lot to me, considering. Travel is the traditional remedy for confusions of the heart and the suitors have been told not to write, that I will be gone six months, that on my return I will know what is called my own mind. Because I want to marry both, my mother believes I should marry neither. I don't agree. Indeed, at the moment, we can agree on nothing. Just when she thought I was fitting nicely into my Toronto niche (Toronto niches are small and their plaster figures cunningly draped) I had to go and do this. I wish she did not understand me. The thing I like about the fiances is that they don't, and the vision of myself reflected in their eyes is, if not lifelike, most beautiful to behold. Early March. The south Atlantic air, mild as summer. Impossible to mourn. In Sicily a family reunion. My brother, now at Cambridge, will join us for his long Easter holidays; also my sister and her husband, at Cannes since their marriage last November. And Jane is with us. Alan cabled, bring Jane, so we presume another engagement imminent. About this possibility my mother is pleased. Jane is American. Her poise is not

The Autobiography shellac but comes from within. Snow-white she is; black hair, magnolia skin. We stop a day at Gibraltar (Jane buys Chanel No. 5; I, a bottle of My Sin) and another day at Algiers, a white city rising in tiers around a blue bay. Street after street French as the Midi, then turn a corner and Africa is there, the Frenchness gone, a transient whiff of garlic on a continent as far from Europe as the moon. Two policemen accompany the guide who leads us through the small section of the Arab quarter open to tourists. It in no way resembles the Cairo bazaars where merchants sit before their shops among displays of oriental rugs (false and true), bolts of silk, Manchester-made brass, Nottingham trinkets. In these narrow lanes the wares are women. Two French sailors burst from a doorway and after them a half-dressed prostitute, knife in hand, voice raised in a howl of curses. The sailors outdistance her. The police shrug. And everywhere the creak of shutters opening; at each window a face, a voice jeering — perhaps at the police who have told us no 'wanted man' is ever caught so long as he stays within these fortressed walls. The place is a labyrinth, a maze of roofs, of narrow passages and torturous stairs, its heart so hidden that should a Westerner find his way in he would certainly never find his way out again. Quiet. The woman turns and, before shutting her door, spits — at the vanished sailors, the police, at us? The afternoon we spend driving through countryside where the soil is red, as in parts of Devonshire; nothing here to remind me of the austere, abstracted landscape of Egypt. Green is extra green against the brick-red ground. We stop at a grove of trees. I wonder what they are — something feathery, acacias perhaps, or their African counterpart. This is the monkey wood, and we observe them, hundreds and hundreds, going about our business. The noise of a river that crashes down the hill, a miniature Niagara, with spume and whirlpools, is drowned by grunts and squeals and chatter. Why go to Sicily? Why not follow this road into Africa? Instead of Greek ruins, lions and tigers and elephants, and the wild savannahs, and pygmies, and the tall black men, those who have kept their animal wits. My mother, too, is excited by the smell of Africa, and as we return to Algiers and our ship we feel uncomfortable, as if we had refused some great adventure. The dock at Palermo is thick with women and little girls and the scent of the violets they hold in their hands; violets such as I have never seen before; long sturdy stems and flowers too dazzling and big for any pretense of shyness. Palermo is violets and fishing boats in the harbour, cloisters and the intricate marvel of mosaic in byzantine churches. All the 242

Confusions of the Heart conquerors of Sicily are here in the sky line, and in the blood of the people. I am muttering on simply to postpone discussion of the family reunion. Tricky things they are at the best of times. And if you suppose that nothing of importance happened that first day you would be mistaken, though what it was I did not at first exactly know. It concerned Alan and Jane. On the morning after our arrival, and hereafter, wherever they go I am dragged along as well. By Alan and by Jane. Should I demur he fixes me with those bright blue eyes and I understand that he is ordering, not asking. After a week of this, out of the corner of his mouth, he mutters, never leave us alone. Jane and I share a room. Never leave us alone, she says. My mother, sister, brother-in-law, all of them ask me why I stick like grease to my brother, but when I tell them I act under orders they pull down veils, pretend they cannot see. A lover's quarrel. Love. Though no one speaks of it, no one thinks of anything else. Hearts. It seems we have no other organ, and how they bleed, except for the honeymooners' — my mother's for Jane and Alan, Alan's for Jane, Jane's for Alan, and mine for myself. My brother-in-law was of an irritable nature and chafed under the strain of being on his best behaviour, a state he furiously maintained in our mother's presence; but he was only one of several restive members of the family reunion when we set out in two antiquated Daimlers to drive around the island in search of Greece in Sicily. At any rate that is the name we gave to our public search. In private, or perhaps I should say semi-private, we investigated hearts. I lingered now in churches instead of doing them at the quick trot I had years ago developed for this purpose, and my mother remarked, Anne is confusing love with religion. Whatever pose I happened to be striking she teased me out of. If I could be flippant about so serious a state as matrimony, she could save her sympathy for the more deserving. Nonetheless my unpopularity served a purpose. I was the object on which tensions could be released, and when I clowned they laughed, or, if they didn't laugh, they said, For God's sake shut up, and that was healing to their spirits, too. It gave them something to talk about when I bought fine white monogrammed handkerchiefs, a dozen each for the fiances. But twelve will be wasted, my sister said; You ought to be shot, said my brother-in-law; my mother said, O Anne, and I said, I like to be prepared for any emergency. Yes, though they would have sworn to the contrary, I had my place among them. When I think of those meals; six of us, three times a day, for weeks and weeks and weeks - Alan speechless, Jane reticent, my mother a woman of few

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The Autobiography words, my sister gay, but nervously so, always worrying lest her husband's manful self-control break, break, break on thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me.82 It was a good thing there were all those Greek ruins to look at, and B.C. to ponder on. Not that either gave perspective to our small A.D. predicaments. And every day we picnic'd among columns and broken pediments and wild flowers. But there are times when we forget each other, and Love, when the island we have come to see is enough. A doric temple on a hillside above Homer's GaXaaaa. No one here except ourselves and the wildflowers that grow everywhere and compose the floor of the temple. I cannot believe it real in any mundane sense, certain that should I return tomorrow it will be gone, returned to its distant morning, for it has the luminous quality of a vision. Even the flowers appear painted on the grass, meticulously as those in early Italian pictures. This paradise so imposes itself upon our anxious group that we become tranquil figures on a frieze, picnickers in heaven. And hell so close. The same day we drive through isolated villages where poverty is a plague. On every street corner a famished little group, coughing, spitting, inertia in the sag of their heads. And the children — black eyes huge in their wasted faces, and often blood trickling from the corner of a mouth. Hard to keep the mind on B.C. when A.D. is here, trembling, alive. Perhaps it was in Agrigentum that the columns we had come to admire were few but startlingly well-arranged by the not always aesthetic hand of time; tawny in colour like the underside of a lion. And the landscape properly grecian; bare hills, beautifully folded, and a sky that appeared by some trick of light more gold than blue. It may have been from here that we drove to Syracuse over deserted moorland, strangely like Derbyshire, high and lonely. All morning we do not see another car on the road, not even a donkey cart. We stop on a height of land to eat our lunch. My brother-in-law spreads a rug on the ground. He has bided his time. Come and sit here, Anne, he calls, I have the perfect spot for you. No, not there, here, and I, surprised at this special courtesy, sink down on the indicated corner. The long spines of a cactus spear my hand. He shakes his head sadly. I meant them for your seat, he says. A person pierced by a cactus is cousin to the man who slips on a banana peel and, funny or not, the reflex to such sights is laughter. But pain and fury bring tears to my eyes and only my brother-in-law outwardly rejoices. My sister, whose heart is tender, says a thistle would have sufficed. This incident has so absorbed our attention that we do not notice three 244

Confusions of the Heart rather menacing figures until they are among us. Their faces are partly hidden by dirty coloured handkerchiefs and one holds something inside his shirt that he seems to want to hide and show at the same time. Stick'em up, he says, but we are so surprised to hear this small-boy American-Canadian expression that nobody does. For a minute there is silence while they take measure of us and we of them. The chauffeurs have meanwhile disappeared into the back of one of the Daimlers. My brother steps forward, You speak English? he asks, and the one who has or hasn't a gun behind his shirt says, I leev in Chicago five years, stick'em up. But my brother has a way of looking at people, and this time, Stick 'em up did not sound much more threatening than, Have a hot dog. As Alan seemed to know what he was about, the rest of us stood quietly and watched while he removed the cash from our mother's purse, then asked my brother-in-law for the money in his wallet, and likewise stripped his own. This treasure he handed to the head bandit who by now had taken off his mask and was all smiles and bows until his eye fastened on my always conspicuous clip. That! he cried, and my brother without a word handed over the controversial jewel. But when the bandit's roving eye lit on my mother's pearls, he shook his head. The bandit shrugged, OK, OK, he said, and at my brother's request that they now withdraw he complied, but not before all three had thrown kisses to us and called on the Virgin Mary to bless our travels. We were only an hour's drive from Syracuse and my brother-in-law could hardly wait to report these genial bandits to the police. But my brother dissuaded him. We might be stuck for weeks or months in order to give evidence, he said. And except for my clip, we had not lost much. This is a plug for travellers' cheques. That night at dinner, something to talk about. Our spirits had never been better and we celebrated by drinking two bottles of champagne. After Syracuse, Taormina where the eye soon tires of unceasing drama; Etna, the theatre, the Straits of Messina — stagey, grandiloquent, not to be compared to the doric temple on a hillside, or Agrigentum's tawny columns. We sail to Naples, and on the voyage my brother-in-law becomes a man I very much admire, for he has an idea. [Here a page of the typescript is missing, but it is clear that the idea involves the chartering of a private boat.] We go to the docks and meet the crew, two engineers and a cook, as highly recommended as the weather and the islands. My mother is not the only one who is taken aback by the smallness of what we euphemistically call our yacht, a craft with accommodation for two

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The Autobiography couples and no relation whatsoever to those pictured in the pages of fashionable magazines. Only if my mother and Jane and I share a cabin and Alan sleeps in the unspacious saloon can we manage. But Angela is the name of our craft, Cherubim our tubby cook, and the Virgin Mary has been asked to bless our travels — good omens, these. Two days later we set forth on a satin sea. Vesuvius waves a smoke plume in farewell. We stand on deck and gloat, Love forgotten, the differences between us melted by the splendour of our adventure. I bless the fiances for having made possible this enviable voyage. Cherubim brings my mother a cup of tea and an extra cushion and she talks to him in her halting Italian. It is plain to see that she is the chosen one, though his joyful countenance beams alike on the just and the unjust. Dinner is worthy of a real yacht, and Alan has brought aboard a nice selection of wines, and my brother-in-law, a comfortable stock of brandy. And the evening more beautiful than the day, with stars in the water as well as in the sky, and the sea not nurse enough to rock a baby. We stay up late, stretched on deck chairs or leaning over the rail, reluctant to part with something that can never be exactly repeated. And all the next morning passes in the same sweet trance, though the sun is lost in thin grey clouds and the sea has the sullen gleam of pewter - solid enough to walk on, it appears. After lunch, the little captain shakes his head. Bad weather coming. Already the sea is heaving, but gently, as if turning in its sleep. When my mother retires to her bunk, the rest of us look anywhere except at each other, for in each other's eyes we will see our own guilt staring. At four o'clock, rain and wind come like a clap of thunder. The joyful Cherubim clears the deck of furniture, then busies himself in the saloon, stacking and roping down the chairs and tables. We can sit on the floor, there are lots of cushions, he says, Or we can climb into our bunks. Then off he goes to see what he can do for our mother. We prefer the floor and huddle against the walls, everyone seasick, and the yacht a canoe in a North Atlantic gale. Instead of dinner Cherubim brings chicken sandwiches which he insists we eat. Nothing better to be sick on, he says. But he is in despair about our mother, because he can see she has progressed beyond the wholesome stage of easy down, easy up. For her, death or dry land. Along with seasickness, we suffer fear. The wind is getting bigger and stronger, our craft smaller and more frail, a lesser thing than the old Minota of our mother's youth that steamed about the more restricted waters of Lake Simcoe. Alan suggests to Cherubim that better still than chicken sandwiches is 246

Confusions of the Heart champagne with a spoonful of brandy added, and Cherubim says Si, si, very good for the Signora. And for us too, Alan adds. Remarkable the courage stored in one glass of champagne laced with brandy. Deaf-mutes we have been, Jane, Betty and I, hugging our fears. Now we are using the floor as a toboggan slide, coasting from end to end on our backsides. This is what we are doing when the little captain appears at the door and beckons to Alan and my brother-in-law. They follow him out of the room. Whatever he has to say, he does not want to say it in front of females. Jane and Betty and I stare at one another, the champagne dead in us. Cherubim comes in and says we are shipping water, that the crew needs help, and he too is about to disappear when Jane calls, Wait, we need champagne. And don't forget the brandy. Betty and I beg Cherubim to hurry. Si, si, and before we know it, our hearts are stout once more, and for some time we manage to keep them so by adding ever another splash of brandy to our glasses. Excessive valour now displays itself in giggles and the occasional hiccup. Who is Poseidon? we sing, what is he, that all our swains contend him?23 And the angry god raises both fists and brings them crashing down on Angela, and Angela shudders, and then there is a splintering noise, and then we are sober. Angela's motion has changed. We are rolling every which way, no rhythm or direction, as if our craft has suddenly gone mad. Propeller and rudder broken, says Cherubim. Alan comes in, drinks some brandy and leaves without speaking. My brother-in-law refreshes himself a few minutes later. But brandy is no longer enough [Another missing page contained the resolution to this adventure.] We return to Naples, Sorrento for a while, and Rome. A month in Paris. London and Derbyshire. On and on. But in Paris the family reunion was at last dissolved. My sister and her husband and Jane sailed together to New York. My brother returned to Cambridge, unengaged. Only my mother and I continued to wander in the hope that the next place or the next, or time, would reveal my future. We might be wandering yet but for a cable. It left her no choice but to return to Canada, and I married one of the fiances, and on my wedding day there was great rejoicing.

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Notes

THE JOURNALS

I The Journals of Andre Gide, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1947). This quotation from vol. I (3 Jan. 1892) repeats a thought Gide had expressed more fully on 10 June 1891. A.W. clearly had the earlier quotation in mind also: 'One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything and consequently get nothing.' 2 John Counsell, A.W.'s cousin on her father's side, was severely wounded at Dieppe and remained paralyzed for the rest of his life. Don Matthews, Aunt Amo's son, suffered from a damaged leg, the result of a sports injury at Royal Military College. A.W.'s own 'disability' at this time was arthritis, which severely impeded movement. 3 The image of illness invading the fabric of a house is picked up for the description of the invalid Mrs Hesketh in the California section of the Autobiography. 4 In chapter 2 of the Autobiography, A.W. explains how her involvement in a schoolgirl prank caused her to find something 'sinisterly familiar' about Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. 5 A.W. was godmother to Catherine Harris, elder daughter of her Eldon House cousin Robin Harris. See the Autobiography, chapter 3, for an account of Eldon House and its family. 6 Oskar Morawetz, b. 1917, a distinguished composer and later professor of music at the University of Toronto, was a friend of A.W.'s mother. His setting of A.W.'s 'Night Song' was performed in Toronto in March 1949. See below, note 35. 7 David Osier, 1936-91, was the son of A.W.'s cousin Gordon (Stu) Osier.

Notes to the Journals John Kerr was the son of neighbours Bill and Blair Kerr, Peter Puxley the son of the rector of Christ Church, Roches Point. 8 Alfred C. Kinsey et at., Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co. 1948) 9 'The Ascending Soul* by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi may be found in Reynold A. Nicholson, trans, and ed. Rumi) Poet and Mystic (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. 1950), 103. A.W. quotes a prose version of this poem, from an unidentified source. 10 S0ren Kierkegaard, 'Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,' Either/Or, vol. n (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944), 8 ii This is the germ of the idea to be developed, eight or nine years later, into the Autobiography and, later still, into the essay 'Four Corners of My World.' 12 Judith Ann Osier, b. 1938, Heather's friend and schoolmate, was the daughter of A.W.'s cousin Gordon (Stu) Osier. '3 'Lake Song' was first published in Here and Now (June 1949) and reprinted in Counterpoint to Sleep (1951).

14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22

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A resort hotel at Jackson's Point on the shore of Lake Simcoe, a few miles from Roches Point. William Alan Gibbons, b. 1948, was the second son of A.W.'s brother Alan and his wife Bunty. This shortened version of the German word 'Mutter' was A.W.'s usual nickname for her mother, whom she also refers to in the journals as Mum. Hugh Cartwright Cayley, b. 1932, was a grandson of A.W.'s Aunt Amo. Beechcroft was the original house on the Roches Point property purchased by Sir Edmund Osier in 1885. It is an approximately five minutes' walk across the lawns from A.W.'s cottage. Anne MacKinnon was a niece by marriage of A.W.'s Aunt Amo. Dr Arthur Ham was a close family friend and adviser. His cottage was on Lake Rosseau, Ontario. Terrence Sheard, QC, was A.W.'s lawyer. Helen Gunn was a London, Ontario, friend of A.W.'s mother. Maudie Ferguson, who here accompanies A.W.'s sister and niece, was a freelance broadcaster in Ottawa. Mr (Professor) Gordon Cox was the father of two English evacuees who had stayed with A.W.'s mother during the Second World War. The literary journal Here and Now was founded in 1947 and co-edited by Paul Arthur and Catherine Harmon. When these two went to live in England A.W. became literary editor, but the periodical lasted for a total of only four issues.

Notes to the Journals 23 Aunt Marjorie Campbell Counsell (nee Gibbons) was a sister of A.W.'s father; Jane was her daughter. Reduced to fourteen lines, 'Chez 1'Ame' appeared in Here and Now, n, 4 24 (June 1949). 25 Mark Van Doren, Liberal Education (New York: Henry Holt and Company

1943). i?8 26 The first lines of one of A.W.'s earliest published poems, which had appeared in the small magazine Reading, May 1946. 27 Lawren Harris, 1885-1970, founder and leader of the Group of Seven, explored landscape forms in his abstract paintings. 28 'Heaven's Weather* does not seem to have survived, at least under this title. 'ADAM and God through the Looking-Glass' was first published in Contemporary Verse, no. 27 (winter 1948/spring 1949) and reprinted as 'Adam and God' in The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson (1968). 29 A.W. here comments on her reading of Eleanor Roosevelt's autobiography This I Remember (New York: Harper 1949) and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-89. 30 A.W.'s mother-in-law lived at 270 North Vedal Street, Sarnia; her husband and children often spent short holidays there. 1 Sir Francis Osbert Sitwell, 1892-1969, British poet and novelist, was best 3 known for his five-volume autobiography, some of which A.W. comments on in her journal. The dinner hosts were Nicholas Ignatieff, warden of Hart House, University of Toronto, and his wife Helen. 32 Morley Callaghan's To Tell the Truth was performed at the Royal Ontario Museum by the New Play Society, starring Don Harron and directed by J. Mavor Moore. 33 Alan Crawley had been publishing A.W.'s poems in Contemporary Verse since 1946; at A.W.'s instigation, her mother had met Crawley in Vancouver in March 1948. 34 'Multa quiedem scripsi: sed, quae vitiosa putavi, Emendaturis ignibus ipse dedi.' Ovid, Tristia, Book iv, elegy 10 Ronald Hambleton wrote: 'The other song in which the words were of 35 prime importance was in Mr Morawetz's "Nightsong," and his setting will possibly come as somewhat of a shock to those who know the poem. He has over-emphasized the macabre and made it a gruesome witches' dance, thereby missing a good deal of the profundity of the poem, and also its essential simplicity.' (Globe and Mail, Toronto, 25 March, 1949). The poem has not survived under the title 'Night Song.' 36 Dr Kanner was a specialist in nervous disorders at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore.

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Notes to the Journals 37 The homes of two prominent Toronto businessmen, heads of a department store and meat-packing company respectively, in a wealthy suburb of the city. Zita Cook was a Toronto friend with whom A.W. enjoyed visits to the 38 cinema. The Kergins were also from Toronto, friends of both A.W. and her husband. The ashes of A.W.'s daughter born in 1937 and a son born in 1943 had 39 been kept in Toronto. A.W. here carried out her wish to bury them in the garden at Roches Point. See the entry for 14 March 1949 for her grief at their deaths; see also the poem 'Nursery Rhyme,' Collected Poems, 138. 40 Pat Graham, n6e Parfitt, was the daughter of the doctor who had treated Dr Robert Wilkinson for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Gravenhurst in 1933-4. She an£l her father remained A.W.'s good friends thereafter. 4* Edmund Meredith was the brother of A.W.'s sister-in-law Bunty. Jean, mentioned on 15 July as looking beautiful at his wedding to Buffy Evans, was the mother of Bunty and Edmund. 42 Zulu Denny, a Toronto stockbroker, and his wife Jean were neighbours at Roches Point. 43 Dr Kent Harrison was the son of Edna Louise Kent, A.W.'s cousin on her father's side. He was a close friend of Dr Wilkinson and godfather to A.W.'s son Alan. 44 Bill Spencer was a bachelor cousin on the Cochran side of the family (A.W.'s grandmother Osier was the Scottish Anne Farquharson Cochran). 45 Keith and Pat Cox, children of Professor and Mrs Gordon Cox, spent some of the war years as evacuees to Canada, staying in A.W.'s mother's home. They have remained good friends of the family. 46 See note 43 47 Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember, 68 48 A.W. and Muriel Douglas planned to co-edit an anthology of Canadian poetry. The project was never completed. 49 Retitled 'A Folk Tale with a Warning to Lovers,' the poem was published first in Contemporary Verse, no. 32 (summer 1950), and later included in Counterpoint to Sleep. 50 Ottilie Howard was Muriel Douglas's mother, Marion Wright her aunt. Ken (Kenrick) Gunn was Helen Gunn's nephew. 5i James Wreford, geographer and poet, author of Of Time and the Lover (1950), had corresponded with A.W. since 1946, when he wrote to praise her early poems published in the short-lived Toronto journal Reading (edited by Ronald Hambleton). The party was hosted by John and Florence (later Senator) Bird.

252

Notes to the Journals 52 Jim George and Allan Anderson worked for the Department of External Affairs; James Elliott Coyne became governor of the Bank of Canada in 1955. 53 See note 4.8 54 Sally (Mrs David) Stratford was the sister of A.W.'s husband. 55 This is the germ of the idea later developed into the poem 'The Tightrope,' Collected Poems, 140. 56 The Kergins, MacFarlanes, and Paul McCoy were medical friends. Mary Lowry Ross was a journalist for Saturday Night. 57 Margaret Avison (b.igiS) had not yet published her first poetry collection, Winter Sun, which won the Governor-General's Award in 1960. 58 'O God! O Montreal' is the refrain of Samuel Butler's satirical poem 'A Psalm of Montreal' (The Spectator, 18 May 1878). 'O Canada, O Canada, Oh can/A day' is from F.R. Scott's satirical poem 'The Canadian Authors Meet' (1927). 59 Margaret Katherine Osier (Peggy), A.W.'s cousin, married Robert Billo Mclntyre. 60 The nickname of a Standard Triumph car 61 Lotta Dempsey (Mrs Richard Fisher) was a popular journalist, first as editor-in-chief of Chatelaine, then as columnist and feature-writer with The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. After she was widowed, she married A.W.'s friend Dr Arthur Ham. 62 Jack McAllister, later a professor at Ryerson College, had spent summers at Roches Point as tutor to Aunt Amo's grandchildren. At one stage in the Korean war, General MacArthur advocated fighting 63 the Chinese, who had begun to attack in force on 24 November 1950. This unpopular recommendation led to the general's dismissal by President Truman. 64 Anthony Osier Mclntyre, b. 1950, youngest child of A.W.'s cousin Margaret Osier and Robert Mclntyre (Peg and Bob). 65 Dr William Mustard was a surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children. 66 The title character of the Hollywood film Harvey, starring James Stewart, was a rabbit who acted like a human friend. 6? These were summer residents of Roches Point, family and friends. Bill Kerr and his wife Blair owned a cottage behind A.W.'s mother's vegetable garden. Their son John was a friend of Alan Wilkinson. Allan Garrow was a friend of A.W.'s mother. 68 Norman Gwyn was the son of A.W.'s great-aunt Charlotte (Chatty), her grandfather's sister. 69 The Hospital for Sick Children had new premises on University Avenue in Toronto. A.W. briefly did volunteer work there.

253

Notes to the Journals 70 Dr William Francis, librarian of the Osier Library, McGill University, was

the son of Marian Francis, and possibly of her .very close friend Sir William Osier. 7i Edith Gittings Reid's book The Great Physician: A Short Life of Sir William Osier was published by Oxford University Press (New York) in 1931. 72 Robert Frost, A Masque of Mercy (New York: Henry Holt and Company '947). 7. 39

73 Guests at this literary party included writers (Avison, Reaney, and Birney) 74

75 76

77

78 79

80

81 82

83

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and editors (Sinclair, Weaver, and Hutchinson). A.W. received early encouragement from the then well-established poet EJ. Pratt, a professor at Victoria University, University of Toronto. He was a friend of A.W.'s mother; it was probably she who showed him some of her daughter's poems and arranged a meeting. Pratt's encouragement is mentioned in the preamble to A.W.'s first published poems in Reading (1946). The articles by Rachel Carson were extracted from her forthcoming book The Sea around Us; they appeared in The New Yorker in May and June 1951. Both of these childhood favourites, by Charles G.D. Roberts and Kenneth Grahame respectively, are animal stories. The former tells of a girl's friendship with forest creatures, while the latter is a tale of river-dwellers. Nephritis is an inflammation of the kidney, probably in this case caused by infection. Mrs Robinson was apparently the longed-for cook. Earle Birney's CBC review spoke of A.W.'s 'marriage' to language: 'For there is no doubt of her love for it, her witty devotion to the dozen meanings in the simplest word ... She can draw moods from language as oddly sinister as a Charles Addams drawing and thoughts as multiple-faced as a dragonfly's eye. At times she can be forbiddingly cool and cerebral, but she does believe in language and her life with it. She's humorously aware of its limitations and hers, but she knows that the life which language creates may, for all its weedy evanescence, prove to be the most enduring creation of man or woman.' 'Swimming Lesson' employs the underwater imagery of A.W.'s ecstatic reference to time spent with F.R. Scott (see journal entry for 15 July 1951). The poem was first published in The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955). Kenrick was Helen Gunn's nephew but he was like a son to her. 71 Highland Avenue was the Toronto home of A.W.'s mother. A.W. and her children stayed here until mid-December, when they moved into a rented house at i Castle Frank Drive. Soames Forsyte was the central character in John Galsworthy's The Forsyte

Notes to the Journals Saga (1922). Annette, daughter of a Frenchwoman who ran a Soho restaurant, was his second wife; she almost died giving birth to their one child, Fleur. 84 As part of their separation agreement, the Wilkinsons left their home at 267 Roxborough Street East. After a three-month trial period, Dr Wilkinson returned to his family, who were living in a rented house at i Castle Frank Drive. When they left this address in May 1952, the couple separated permanently. This idea eventually became the centre of the long poem 'Letter to My 85 Children,' first published in Contemporary Verse, no. 39 (fall-winter 1952). When printed in The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955), only the first twentyseven lines appeared; A.J.M. Smith included the remaining lines in the Toems from the Notebooks' section of The Collected Poems, and titled them 'Letter to My Children: Postscript.' This gives the false impression that they were two separate poems. For A.W.'s first attempt at the theme, see entry for 15 June 1952. 86 Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land (London: The Cresset Press 1951). A.W. misquotes the final reference, which should read 'lying on Jupiter the sky would be radiant with ten moons.' 8? Dr Robert Allen Cleghorn, formerly a medical colleague of A.W.'s husband in Toronto, was at this time a professor of psychiatry at McGill University. 88 Pericarditis is an inflammation of the membrane surrounding the heart. 89 Marget Northwood worked for the Defence Research Board in Ottawa; Betty Howe was A.W.'s second cousin. 90 Douglas LePan's second volume of poems, The Net and the Sword, was published in 1953 and won the Governor-General's Award. John Gray, president of the Macmillan Company of Canada, was the pub9i lisher of A.W.'s Lions in the Way. 92 'The stars have not dealt me' was first published in Laurence Housman, A.E.H.: Some Poems, Letters and a Personal Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape 1937). 225. 93 The prolific Toronto poet Raymond Souster, b. 1921, whose collection The Colour of the Times won the Governor-General's Award in 1964, edited a volume of imagist poetry, Experiment, 1923-29 (1956) by-his friend W.W.E. Ross, 1894-1966. John White, general manager of CN Telecommunications, was a friend and 94 Muskoka neighbour of Dr Arthur Ham. 95 Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1953 movie version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar starred Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, and Louis Cahern as Julius Caesar.

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Notes to the Journals 96 The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was a friend of A.W.'s mother and sometimes gave recitals at her house. 97 Louis Dudek, b. 1918, poet, editor, and professor of English at McGill University, inadvertently told A.W. of Frank Scott's continuing affair with Phyllis Webb. 98 Edith Grant was a close friend of Mary Hazeland, Tom Bowles an Ottawa bachelor. 99 Britton Bath Osier, QC, a partner in the law firm of Blake, Cassels and Graydon, was a grandson of the Featherstone Osier described in Lions in the Way. 100 This quotation from Chapter xx of George Eliot's Middlemarch is printed as headnote to A.W.'s poem 'Daily the Drum,' Collected Poems, 89. See entry for 3 January 1955. IOI Hurricane Hazel hit Toronto on 15 October 1954, with considerable loss of life and property. IO2 Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians was first published in 1918, the year before A.W. went to live at Craigleigh. The other titles in this list were all recent publications: T.H. White's edition of The Book of Beasts (1956), James Laver's The First Decadent (1955), Allan Wade's edition of Yeats's letters (1955). 103 A.W. originally gave the title 'A Unicorn Runs' to the manuscript collection of poems eventually published as The Hangman Ties the Holly. IO4 Quotation from the first line of A.W.'s poem 'Lens,' published in The Hangman Ties the Holly, see Collected Poems, 48. I05 In his poem 'A Prayer for Old Age,' W.B. Yeats prays to die 'A foolish, passionate man.' A.W. makes this same allusion in the Autobiography. 106 Jeremy was later diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. ID? The 'essay' on mourning took shape as the opening section of Chapter 6 of the Autobiography. 108 Desbarat's, Ontario, is a lakeside community near Sault Ste Marie. The family of Alan Wilkinson's friend Bill Scott had a summer cottage there. Like many people, A.W. misspelled this as Deborah's. 109 A.W.'s review of Merrill Moore's A Doctor's Book of Hours appeared in the October 1957 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, a periodical edited by A.W.'s psychiatrist Dr C.B. Farrar. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Chaucer's 'Prologue' to The Canterbury Tales, line 72 'Those whom the gods love die young.' Byron, Don Juan, Canto iv, xii 3 Danny Kaye starred as hero of the 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I

2

256

Notes to the Autobiography based on a popular short story in James Thurber's book My World - and Welcome to It (1942). An unimposing man, Mitty enjoyed a fantasy life in which he accomplished extraordinarily heroic feats. 4 In William Cowper's 1782 poem 'The Diverting History of John Gilpin,' the unlucky hero is taken for a mad ride through the countryside by an uncontrollable borrowed horse. The Howard School was established in 1912 by Mrs John Fitzgerald 5 Howard. Her daughters Esther and Isabelle succeeded her as head teachers until 1951. The school still flourishes in Montecito, California. 6 The Tin Man is a character played by Jack Haley in the movie The Wizard ofOz (1939), starring Judy Garland. This popular musical was based on the 1900 children's story by Frank Lyman Baum. Johanna Spyri's book Heidi (1881) was one of A.W.'s childhood favourites. 7 Its depiction of a seemingly remote but loving and protective grandfather must have chimed with her own experience. 8 The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was a political coalition of progressive, socialist, and labour groups. Founded in Calgary in 1932, it hoped to bring about economic reforms to help those impoverished by the Depression. In 1961, the CCF was restructured and renamed the New Democratic Party. 9 The Rev. George F. Weld was rector of All Saints-by-the-Sea, Montecito, California, from 1913 to 1933. In the manuscript A.W. mistakenly uses the name of the Roches Point church, calling this Christ Church-by-the-Sea. 10 G.B. Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, members of the socialist Fabian Society, wrote treatises on progressive education in England at the turn of the century. The first American Montessori School (following the methods of Maria Montessori) was founded in 1913. A.W.'s mother was thus adopting very recent educational theories for her children. ii John Dewey, 1859-1952, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, greatly influenced American educational thought. Edward Yeomans' articles following his views appeared in The Atlantic Monthly between 1920 and 1923. The Ojai Valley School, founded in 1923, still adheres to many of Yeomans' educational theories; some of the original buildings, including the Shop and A.W.'s dormitory, are in use today. 12 The chorus of an anonymous medieval English lyric 'Sumer is icomen in.' *3 In his poem 'A Prayer for Old Age' W.B. Yeats prays to die 'A foolish, passionate man.' '4 These are both nineteenth-century novels, enduringly popular with young people. Johanna Spyri's Heidi-was first published in 1881 and George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin in 1871.

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Notes to the Autobiography 15 Sir Wilfrid Laurier, 1841-1919, lawyer, journalist, and politician, was leader of the federal Liberal party from 1887 to 1919, and prime minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911. A.W. here recalls a visit during his vigorous campaign in the December 1917 election, where his party was overwhelmingly defeated. 16 Robert Kemp Philp's popular handbook Inquire Within upon Everything was first published in London in 1856. 17 'An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick,' from W.B. Yeats's poem 'Sailing to Byzantium.' 18 Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Word Book (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1906), 93 The Bronte sisters lived in the Yorkshire village of Haworth and most of 19 their novels are set in the north of England. A children's book by Francis Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, also has a northern moorland setting. 20 The river Dove is described by Izaak Walton in The CompUat Angler (1653) as 'one of the purest crystalline streams.' May Livingstone was the name of the cousin. The character sketch clearly 21 echoes that of the spinster companion in E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. 22 'Break, break, break,' an early poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. 23 A parody of Shakespeare's lines 'Who is Sylvia? what is she?/That all our swains commend her?' The Two Gentlemen of Verona, iv.ii.4O-i

258

Glossary of Persons

This list does not include people mentioned only occasionally: these are identified in endnotes. Names are not annotated in the case of casual acquaintances, or where identity is clear from the context. ADENEY, MARCUS, b. igoo. 'an old family friend'; cellist and founder of the Marcus Adeney String Quartet which performed in Toronto during the 19505; taught music at the University of Toronto 1953—63; also wrote poetry. Wife Jean (Jeanne) chaired Toronto Symphony Orchestra's committee to inaugurate the orchestra's public school concerts. A [Ian], see Wilkinson, Alan Gurd ALAN G., see Gibbons, Alan Osier AMO, see Matthews, Annabel Margaret ARTHUR, PAUL, b. 1924, founding editor, with his future wife Catherine Harmon (while still both students at the University of Toronto), of the literary magazine Here and Now (1947—9). Only four issues appeared but they contained a range of Canadian, British, and American writers. A.W.'s 'The Great Wind' appeared in no. 3, 'Chez 1'Ame,' 'Tower Lullaby,' and 'Lake Song' in no. 4. The magazine was noted for its large, handsome format and elegant design. A.W. was briefly literary editor when Paul Arthur went to England in 1949. BETTY, see Clarke, Mary Elizabeth

Glossary of Persons B[ob], see Wilkinson, Frederick Robert BOWEN, ELLEN (ELLm) PiCTON (nee OSLER) 1876-1956, A.W.'s aunt, her mother's sister; m. Bertram H. Bowen, lived at Corbar Hall, Buxton, Derbyshire, England BOWEN FAMILY: Aunt Ellie Bowen's children, all visited on A.W.'s trip to England in 1949 - Bertram Osier (Bob) 1905-90; Gwynneth Mary 1906-84; Gwendolyn Laura (Gwendy), b. 1909, m. John Frangopulo; Mary, b. 1914, m. John Harrison; Ellen Margaret (Peggy), b. 1918, m. Alexander Birrell BOYD, MARY ELIZABETH [MUTT1] (nee OSLER) 1886-1956, A.W.'s mother;

daughter of Sir Edmund Boyd Osier and Anne Farquharson Cochran; m. (i) George Sutton Gibbons, d. 1919: three children - Alan Osier, b. 1908; Anne Cochran, b. 1910; Mary Elizabeth (Betty), b. 1911; m. (2) Dr Edmund Boyd. The nickname Mutt is a diminutive of the German Mutter (mother). BUNTY, see Gibbons, Marion CALLAGHAN, MORLEY 1903—90, Toronto-born novelist and short story writer; published the first of his many novels, Strange Fugitive, in 1928; also wrote three plays. A.W. records seeing To Tell the Truth in January 1949 CAYLEY, HUGH, husband of A.W.'s cousin Ethel Anne [Nancy] Matthews; their son (b. 1932) also named Hugh G.B., see Farrar, Clarence B. CHAPMAN FAMILY: Alfred and Doris Helen (nee Dennison) were Highland Avenue neighbours as well as Roches Point neighbours; their son Howard, an architect, became friendly with A.W. after her divorce CLARKE, MARY ELIZABETH (nee GIBBONS) 1911-73, A.W.'s younger sister

(Betty); m. Eric Clarke; one adopted daughter, Susannah Elizabeth, b. 1938 CRAWLEY, ALAN 1887-1975, Winnipeg-born lawyer, became blind in 1933 and thereafter pursued a literary career; editor of the west coast 260

Glossary of Persons periodical Contemporary Verse, which published sixteen of A.W.'s poems in various issues. 'Some people may need God but the poets only need Alan Crawley.' His letters to A.W. greatly encouraged her as a beginning writer; he and wife Jean kept up a friendly correspondence for the rest of her life. DOBBS, KILDARE, b. 1923, autobiographer and travel writer; editor at the Macmillan Company of Canada 1953-61; edited A.W.'s Lions in the Way and The Hangman Ties the Holly DOUGLAS, MONTEATH (MON) 1908-86, 'a saint'; economist and close friend of A.W.'s husband from their university days; a great support to A.W. during the time of her marriage breakdown DOUGLAS, MURIEL, b. 1913, 'the dearest companion imaginable for a day in the country or anywhere else'; graduate of McGill (BA, MSW); wife of Monteath Douglas; lived in Toronto during the late 19403 and early 19503; she and A.W. supported each other through the difficulties of their children's early years ELLIE, see Bowen, Ellen Picton ELSIE, the maid and children's nurse F., see Scott, Frank R. FARRAR, CLARENCE B. 1874-1970, professor emeritus, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto; 'the first person with whom I can be myself,' A.W.'s psychiatrist who encouraged her to write Lions in the Way, as editor of The American Journal of Psychiatry commissioned A.W. to write a review (October 1957) of Merrill Moore's A Doctor's Book of Hours GIBBONS, ALAN OSLER, b. 1908, A.W.'s brother; educated St Andrew's School, Toronto, Appleby School, Oakville, University of Toronto, Caius College, Cambridge, Osgoode Hall, Toronto; m. Marion (Bunty) Meredith; children - George Meredith, b. 1946, William Alan, b. 1948, Jack Osier, b. 1954, Mary Jean, b. 1957 GIBBONS, GEORGE BUTTON 1882-1919, A.W.'s father, son of Sir George Christie Gibbons, QC, and Elizabeth (nee Craig) of London, Ont.; 261

Glossary of Persons barrister and aspiring Liberal politician; m. Mary Elizabeth Osier (see Boyd, Mary); died of multiple sclerosis when A.W. was nine GIBBONS, MARION (BUNTY), b. 1920, 'Bunty is poem'; A.W.'s sister-in-law, daughter of Jean and Allen Meredith; m. Alan Osier Gibbons; four children (see Gibbons, Alan Osier) GRAHAM, PAT (nee PARFITT), A.W.'s friend, 'a fine and much loved creature'; daughter of doctor who had treated A.W.'s husband for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Gravenhurst 1933—4; m. Jack Graham GUNN, HELEN, friend of A.W.'s mother, from London, Ont.; a frequent visitor to Roches Point, often accompanied by her nephew Kenrick (Ken) HAM, ARTHUR w., b. 1902, professor of anatomy, University of Toronto; author (with M.B. Salter) of Doctor in the Making and Histology (1950); m. (i) Dorothy, (2) Lotta Dempsey Fisher HARMON, CATHERINE, co-founder with Paul Arthur, whom she later married, of the periodical Here and Now (see Arthur, Paul) HARRIS, AMELIA ARCHANGE (MILLIE) 1868-1959, sister-in-law of A.W.'s

Aunt Lorna, with whom she lived at Eldon House, the Harris family home in London, Ont.; the last resident of the house, 'the character, the woman of wisdom, even the wit' HARRIS, LORNA (nee GIBBONS) 1876-1954, A.W.'s aunt, her father's sister; m. Ronald Harris, co-heir to Eldon House, where she lived with his sister Amelia Harris until her death HARRIS, RONALD BUTTON (ROBIN), b. 1919, A.W.'s cousin, younger son of Aunt Lorna Harris; m. Patricia Gunn (Pat); professor of English and higher education, University of Toronto, also principal of Innis College HAZELAND, MARY (nee KERR), b. 1907, childhood friend of A.W., especially at Roches Point; studied at Ontario College of Art, where A.W. also once took a course in interior design; m. Andrew Hazeland; one daughter

262

Glossary of Persons H[eather], (HEATH), see Wilkinson, Heather J[eremy], see Wilkinson, Robert Jeremy KELLY, ELIZABETH BANNER 1889-1958, A.W.'s cook and a native of Roches Point; husband Lester had been gardener for A.W.'s mother and grandfather LEPAN, DOUGLAS, b. 1914, 'a quite remarkable person'; poet, diplomat, and formerly principal of University College, University of Toronto; winner of the Governor-General's Award for The Net and the Sword (1953) and The Deserter (1964); m. Sally Chambers, A.W.'s friend from teenage years in Toronto LITTLE, LUCY (nee HARRIS), b. 1913, A.W.'s cousin, daughter of Aunt Lorna Harris; m. Frank Little, one of Alan Gibbons's closest friends MATTHEWS, ANNABEL

MARGARET (nee OSLER) 1878-1961, A.W.'s favourite

aunt 'Amo' (see her initials), her mother's sister; m. Wilmot Love Matthews; children — Ethel Anne [Nancy] Farquharson 1904—34, Wilmot Donald 1906—59 MEREDITH, JEAN (nee WRIGHT) 1894-1984, mother of Bunty, A.W.'s sister-in-law; m. Allen Meredith 1889—1975: children - Bunty, b. 1920, Edmund, 1924—80, Michael, b. 1928, Harry, b. 1931. A.W. visited Paris with Michael Meredith in 1949: 'in truth a good companion.' Bufly Meredith (nee Evans), b. 1926, was Edmund's wife. MILLIE, see Harris, Amelia MON, see Douglas, Monteath MURIEL, see Douglas, Muriel MUTT, see Boyd, Mary OSLER, SIR EDMUND BOYD 1845-1924, 'we were close friends and passed long hours together'; A.W.'s maternal grandfather, son of the pioneer Featherstone Lake Osier and Ellen Free Picton Osier 1806-1907; financier, founder of the brokerage firm of Osier and Hammond, president

263

Glossary of Persons of the Dominion Bank, director of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and member of Parliament; m. (i) Isabella Lamond Smith, d. 1869; m. (2) Anne Farquharson Cochran, d. 1910: children - Francis Gordon 1874-1944, Ellen Picton 1876-1956, Annabel Margaret 1878-1961, Edmund Featherstone [Jack] 1880-1945, Hugh Farquharson 1881-1943, Mary Elizabeth 1886-1956 OSLER, GORDON STUART (STU) 1905-64, A.W.'s cousin, son of Francis Gordon Osier; m. (i) Frances Susanna (Susie); (2) Joyce (Timmy) PAGE, P.K., b. 1916, poet and (as P.K. Irwin) painter; won GovernorGeneral's Award for first collection of poetry The Sun and the Moon (1944) and for The Metal and the Flower (1954); m. Arthur Irwin. Wrote to congratulate A.W. on her first published poems and thereafter met and corresponded occasionally. 'The most beautiful creature. She is what you imagine a poet to be.' PUXLEY, REV. H.L., rector of Christ Church, Roches Point 1947—9; later president of the University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. A.W. enjoyed conversations with Puxley and his wife, and their children played together. Peter Puxley, Alan Wilkinson's playmate, became a staff member of CBC Radio. R[ab], see Wilkinson, Frederick Robert REANEY, JAMES, b. 1926, 'quite indescribable'; Ontario poet, playwright, and professor of English at the University of Western Ontario; received Governor-General's Award for his first volume of poetry The Red Heart (1949) and for two subsequent volumes ROBINSON, TURK, surgeon practising in St Catharine's, Ont.; friend of A.W.'s husband from medical school days; wife Christine became a professor at Brock University SCOTT, F[RANK] R. 1899—1985, Montreal poet, lawyer, and politician; with A.J.M. Smith founded influential magazines that did much to shape literary taste in Canada; his Collected Poems won the GovernorGeneral's Award in 1981. A chance meeting with A.W. at a Montreal dinner party led to an intense friendship and love affair 1950-4.

264

Glossary of Persons SMITH, A.J.M. 1902—80, professor of English at Michigan State University; collaborated with F.R. Scott on many literary projects; became A.W.'s lover after her relationship with Scott ended; edited A.W.'s Collected Poems (1968) SUTHERLAND, JOHN 1919-56, Montreal-based editor of nationalist periodical Northern Review which printed a number of A.W.'s poems: his First Statement Press published her first volume Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) TATTERS ALL, KITTY, Toronto music teacher, who also went to Roches Point in the summer to supervise musical and dramatic entertainments for the children; m. Richard (Dick) Tattersall, music teacher at Upper Canada College and a founding member of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club WEAVER, ROBERT, b. 1921, producer, CBC Radio, from 1948 to 1990; founding editor of The Tamarack Review 1956-82, of which A.W. was also an editor and patron WILKINSON, ALAN CURD, b. 1941, A.W.'s younger son, 'a sweet child if ever there was one'; educated Ridley College, Carleton University (BA, English and Philosophy), and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (MA, PhD, Art History); curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Art Gallery of Ontario; author of Henry Moore Remembered (1987); m. Nora Egidi (div.); daughter - Anna Francesca, b. 1965 WILKINSON, FREDERICK ROBERT (RAfi) 1905-59, A.W.'s husband, Son of

Dr F.B. Wilkinson and Mabel (nee Gurd) Wilkinson of Sarnia, Ont.; medical training at the University of Toronto (MD) and at hospitals in London, England, and New York; pediatric surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto 1939-56 WILKINSON, HEATHER, b. 1938, A.W.'s adopted daughter, 'considerate, helpful, charming, very pretty'; graduated in nursing from Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal; m. George Kontaxopoulos; children — Robert Basil, b. 1965, Katherine, b. 1966 WILKINSON, MABEL (nee GURD) 1868-1959, A.W.'s mother-in-law; born and lived all her life in Sarnia, Ont.; m. Dr F.B. Wilkinson; children - Ona, Marjorie, Frederick Robert, and Sarah (Sally)

265

Glossary of Persons WILKINSON, ROBERT JEREMY, b. 1935, A.W.'s elder son, 'an excellent companion'; educated Upper Canada College, Jarvis Collegiate, and University College, University of Toronto; m. Vivian Holstrom

266

Index

Adeney, Jean 10, 36, 43 Adeney, Marcus ix, 10, 43, 120, 125 Aeschylus 18 A Pan] (Alan Gurd Wilkinson) (son) xxv, 5,6,9, n, 14, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39. 4', 45, 47, 59, 61, 64, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83,

88, 94, 95, 96> 97, 98, 99, r 3> 107,

Avison, Margaret ix, 70, 89, 120 Beechcroft (Roches Point) viii, 20, 24, 39, 86, 147, 202-3, 204, 214 Beerbohm, Max 115, 121 Betty (Mary Elizabeth Clarke, nee Gibbons) (sister) xxiv, 21, 59, 73, 76, 86, 114, 127, 131, 143, 170, 173, 180, 182, 186, 189, 190, 191, 196,

I I I , 114, 115, 117, I l 8 , I i g , 120, 121,

199, 200,

125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133,

2l6, 217, 221, 234, 235, 236, 238,

'34, »35. 137, 138, H2, 143, 144, 145, 150, 194 American Psychiatric Journal 145, 146 Amo (Annabel Margaret Matthews, n6e Osier) (aunt) viii, 24, 30, 33,

Bierce, Ambrose 213 Bird, Florence and John 64 Birney, Earle vii, 55, 62, 63, 89, 93 Birrell, Alexander (cousin's husband)

S8, 39, 42, 46, 48, 49, 5°, 51- 52> 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 68, 79, 83, 9°, 9', 97, 99, I05> n i » »4i 123, 124, 125, 133, 139, 145, 146,

149, *5° Anderson, Allan 64 Anderson, Patrick ix, 64 Arthur, Paul 33, 37, 49, 50, 51, 55, 58,89 Austen, Jane ix, xvi, 5, 42, 73, 144 Austin, Gordon and Joyce 58, 137

201, 2O3, 2IO, 213, 214,

241, 243, 244, 247

54 Birrell, Ellen Margaret (nee Bowen) (cousin) 54 Blake, William 33, 51 B[ob] (Dr Frederick Robert Wilkinson) (husband) xiii, xiv, xxiv, xxv, 7, 9, 10, n, 12, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 4^, 47, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86,

Index

87. 91, 93. 94. 95. 97, 98> 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, in, 113, 114, 115, I l 6 , 121, 122, 123, 125,

126, 127, 128, 129, 137 Bobak, Bruno 131 Bosco, Henri 39 Boswell, James 77 Bovard, Everett 120, 125 Bowen, Bertram Osier (cousin) 54, 55 Bowen, David (second cousin) 53 Bowen, Elizabeth 35 Bowen, Ellen Picton (nee Osier) (aunt), 38, 53, 146, 217 Bowen, Gwynneth Mary (cousin), 50.51, 52 Bowles, Tom, 131 Boyd, Dr Edmund (stepfather), xxiv, 216, 217, 218, 221 Boyd, Mary Elizabeth (nee Osier) (mother), see Mutt Boyle, Kay 7 Bridie, James 50 Brittain, Benjamin 115 Bronte, Emily 9 Bunty (Marion Gibbons, nee Meredith) (sister-in-law) 17, 20, 34, 36, 43, 46, 64, 73, 93, 107, 117, 118, '31

Callaghan, Morley 32, 60, 70 Canadian Forum 62 Canadian Home Journal 122 Canadian Poetry Magazine xxv Gary, Joyce 61, 62, 77, 78 Cayley, Hugh Cartwright (second cousin) 20, 23, 25 Chagall, Marc 130 Chapman, Alfred and Doris Helen 21, 22, 60

268

Chapman, Howard 60, in, 127 Churchill, Sir Winston 32 Clark, Elizabeth 123 Clark, Sir Kenneth 65 Clarke, Mary Elizabeth, see Betty Clarke, Susannah Elizabeth (niece) 21, 59, 76, 141 Cleghorn, Dr Robert Allen 109 Colette 130 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 42, 62, 73 Connolly, Cyril 35 Contemporary Verse ix, xv, xxv, 33 Cook, Mr (Greek teacher) 80, 86 Cook, Zita 42, 84, 107, 148 Counsell, John (cousin) 4 Counsell, Marjorie Campbell (nee Gibbons) (aunt) 23 Cox, Gordon 21, 51, 68 Cox, Mrs Gordon 54 Cox, Keith 54 Cox, Patricia 54 Coyne, James Elliott 64 Craigleigh viii, ix, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 15, 118, 168, 171, 176, 179, 180, 187, 190, 199, 208-13, 215 Crawley, Alan ix, x, xv, 33, 34, 39, 48, 68, 71, 72, 78, 88, 89, 92, 121, 129 Crawley, Jean 88, 89, 92 Daniells, Roy 35, 55, 89 Dante 74, no, 138 Davies, Robertson 6, 62 Dempsey, Lotta (Mrs Richard Fisher) 77 Dennison, Mrs 22, 60 Denny, Jean and Zulu 46 Dewey, John xiii, 69, 70, 71, 180 Dickinson, Emily 226 Dobbs, Kildare 134, 136, 139, 142

Index Don Quixote 61, 62, 65 Dostoevsky, Feodor 6, 711 Douglas, Monteath 24, 29, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43. 46, 61, 62, 72, 74, 76, 78, 104, 114, 117, 123, 126, 127, 128,

13°. '33 Douglas, Muriel ix, xvi, 24, 29, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 4i, 42, 43, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 69, 72, 78, 109, 114, 117, 123, 130,133 Dudek, Louis ix, 130 Edgewood School xiii, xxiv, 219-28, 230, 234 Edison, Professor 84 Eisenhower, Dwight D. no Eldon House 41, 191, 192-3, 207 Eliot, George 134, 138 Eliot, T.S. 34, 67, 74, 108, 139 Ellmann, Richard 139 Elsie (maid) 30, 73, 76, 146, 150 Evans, Edith 50 Evans, Maurice 28 Farmer, Dr and Mrs 84 Farrar, Dr Clarence B. 45, 46, 59, 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 87, 97, 98, ioo, 123 Ferguson, Maudie 21, 131 Finch, Robert 55, 62 Forster, E.M. 3, 115 Francis, Marian Osier Bath 81, 82, 85 Francis, William 84-5 Frangopulo, Gwendolyn (Gwendy) Laura (nee Bowen) (cousin) 53, 54 Frangopulo, John (cousin's husband) 54 Franklin, Benjamin 33 Frazer, Sir James 75

Freud, Sigmund 78, 115, 138, 186-7 Frost, Robert 88 Fry, Christopher 52, 62, 70, 77, 78, 80, 90, 91 Frye, Northrop vii, 121 Fulford, Robert xiv Garrow, Allan 80 George, James 64, 73 Gibbons, Alan Osier (brother) xxiv, 20, 30, 34, 43, 45, 64, 91, 93, 98, 107, in, 118, 131, 137, 143, 150, 172, 173-4, '75, l8o> '90, 194, 196, 199, 200, 201, 206, 213, 214, 217, 221, 241, 242,

245, 246,

247

Gibbons, Sir George Christie (grandfather) 191, 193-4, I95> J96 Gibbons, George Meredith (nephew) 34, 45, 107 Gibbons, George Sutton (father) xi, xxiii, 149, 166, 167, 170, 177, 179, 190, 192, 193, 196-7, 198-200, 210, 211, 212, 231

Gibbons, Jack Osier (nephew) 118 Gibbons, William Alan (nephew) 19, 107, 137 Gide, Andre x, 3, 14, 15, 89 Glascow, June 56 Globe and Mail 36 Grable, Betty 97 Graham, Jack 46 Graham, Pat (nee Parfitt) 46, 86 Grant, Edith 131 Graves, Robert 62 Gray, John 118, 124, 126, 134 Green, Henry 62 Gunn, Helen 20, 21, 60, 72, 83, 95 Gunn, Kenrick 64, 95 Gwyn, Charlotte (Chattie) (nee Osier) (great-aunt) 82

269

Index Gwyn, Norman (son of great-aunt) 81, 82, 84 Ham, Dr Arthur 21, 33, 47, 60, 64, 76, 77, 84, 98, 103, 108, no, 120, 126, 127, 130, 133, 137, 147 Ham, Dorothy 21, 47, 60, 64, 76, 77, 84, 98, 103, 108, 120, 126, 127, 130, I33» !37. 147 Hambleton, Ronald 36 Harmon, Catherine 33, 34, 37, 42, 48, 49. 50, 51. 52, 53. 55. 58, ?8 Harmon, Ottilie 60 Harris, Amelia Archange (Millie) 41, 192 Harris, George Henry Ronald (uncle) 191, 192 Harris, Lawren 27 Harris, Lorna Craig (nee Gibbons) (aunt) 24, 41, 135, 191, 207 Harris, Patricia Gunn (cousin's wife) !9> 24» 33» i"» 121 Harris, Ronald Sutton (Robin) (cousin) 7, 19, 24, 33, m, 121, 127, 142 Harrison, Dr John (cousin's husband) 55 Harrison, Dr Kent (cousin) 47, 55 Harrison, Mary (cousin's wife) 47 Harrison, Mary (nee Bowen) (cousin)

54>55 Hawkes,Jacquetta 107 Hazeland, Andrew and Mary 64, 76, J31 H [eather] (Heather Anne Wilkinson, Mrs George Kontaxopoulos) (daughter) xiv, xxiv, 9, 14, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 36, 38, 41, 45, 61, 64, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 84, 88, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 105, 107,

270

114, 115,117,118,125, 128, 129,130, 133. 135> '37, 142, 143, 146, 148 Hemingway, Ernest 9 Heraclitus 26 Here and Now xxv, 21, 27, 28, 34, 35, 42,49 Highet, Gilbert Arthur 74 Holy Bible 3, 28, 29, 31 Homer ix, 37, 78, 96, 98 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 29 Horace 39 Housman, A.E. 53, 119 Howard, Ottilie 64, 86 Howard, Palmer 64 Howard School xxiii, 169-70, 175, 179 Howe, Betty (second cousin) 114 Hutchinson, Sybil 89 Ignatieff, Helen and Nicholas 32 Iliad 74, 75 James, William 74 J[eremy] (Robert Jeremy Wilkinson) (son) xxiv, 7, 9, n, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. 3i» 32, 34. 36, 37, 38, 39. 4i, 42, 43. 45. 46, 47. 59. 6l. 64. 65. 7i. 73, 74. 76, 77, 78, 79. 80, 83, 88, 91, 92, 96, 99, 103, 104, 105, in, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133,

135, i36i J37, !39. 141, 142, 143, H5, *47. !48, 149, 150 Joyce, James ix, 37, 65 Kafka, Franz 6, 28, 43 Kanner, Dr 37, 41, 105 Keats, John, 52 Kelly, Elizabeth Banner (cook) 9, 24, 76, 79, 90, 105, 201, 232-3

Index Kelly, Walt 114 Kergin family 69, 84, 139 Kergin, Suzanne 42, 115, 124, 125, 148 Kerr, BUI and Blair 80 Kersh, Gerald 35 Kierkegaard, S0ren 10, n, 13 Kilgour, Robert 74 Kinsey, Alfred C. 11, 69 Klee, Paul 130 Klein, A.M. 29, 62, 64 Laidlaw, Robert 80 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid 199 Lawrence, D.H. 5, 35 Lawrence, T.E. 138 Layton, Irving 93 Leger, Fernand 130 LePan, Douglas 33, 64, 115 LePan, Sally 28, 33, 64 Levine, Norman 93 Lewis, C. Day 9 Little, Amelia Lucy (nee Harris) (cousin) 23, 46, 142, 150 Little, Frank (cousin's husband) 23, 46 Livesay, Dorothy 55 Livingstone,.May (father's cousin) 237n The Lodge (Roches Point) viii, xii, xiii, xxiii, xxiv, 20, 42, 91, 106, 143, 202, 203, 206, 213, 229, 232 Lorca, Garcia 129 McAllister, Jack 78 McCarthy, Mary 35 MacFarlane family 69 McGoy family 62 McGoy, Paul 69 Mclntyre, Anthony Osier (second cousin) 78

Mclntyre, Margaret (Peggy) Katherine Osier (cousin) 74, 95 Mclntyre, Robert Billo (cousin's husband) 74, 95 MacKay, L.A. 60, 62, MacKinnon, Anne 20 McLuhan, Marshall 142 Macmillan Company of Canada xi, 122, 124,125, 126, 127,128, 129,130, i33» !34, I35» 136, 137, '38, i39» '43 MacMillan, Dr (family doctor) 60, 104, 123, 127, 148 MacNamara, Gordon 139 McPherson, Marietta 122, 142 Mailer, Norman 29 Malraux, Andre 133 Mann, Thomas 28, 33, 96 March, Harold 15, 16 Matthews, Annabel Margaret (nee Osier), see Amo Matthews, Janet (cousin's wife) 114, 138 Matthews, Jennifer Ann (second cousin) 47 Matthews, Wilmot Donald (cousin) 4, 114, 138 Matthews, Wilmot Leslie (second cousin) 91 Maurois, Andre 86, 115 Maynor, Dorothy 36 Meninger, Karl Augustus 12 Meredith, Buffy (nee Evans) 90, 131 Meredith, Edmund 46, 90 Meredith, George 9 Meredith, Jean 46, 61 Meredith, Michael 56, 57, 58, 64, 135 Merton, Thomas 34 Montaigne, Michel de 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 Monteith, Lionel 51, 55, 58

271

Index

Nash, Paul 62 Neatby, Hilda 115 New Yorker 46, 90 Northwood, Marget 114, 131 Noyes, Alfred 39

Osier, Britton Bath (great-uncle) 77, 81, 82, 120, 121, 133 Osier, Britton Bath, QC 133 Osier, David Stuart (second cousin) n, 21, 79, 80 Osier, Sir Edmund Boyd (grandfather) viii, ix, xxiii, xxiv, 77, 82, 150, 168, 180, 195, 199, 202, 203, 208-9, 2H-I2, 215 Osier, Ellen Free Picton (greatgrandmother) 81, 83, 126, 141, 212 Osier, Featherston (great-uncle) 77, 82, 121, 126 Osier, Frances Susanna (cousin's wife) 20, 24, 46, 47, 123, 124, 150 Osier, Francis Gordon (uncle) viii Osier, Gordon Stuart (cousin) 20, 25, 46, 47, 123, 124, 145, 146, 150 Osier, John (cousin) 82 Osier, Judith Ann (second cousin) 18, 45. 76 Osier, Maggie Scott (nee Ramsay) (aunt) 76, 123, 124, 150 Osier, Patrick Cochran (cousin) 123, 124 Osier, Revere (son of great-uncle) 85 Osier, Sir William (great-uncle) viii, ix, xxiii, 77, 82, 85, 141, 181, 191, 212 Ovid 35 Owen, Donald 120, 125 Oxford Book of Canadian Verse xxv

Odyssey 28, 37 Ogilvie, Will 62 Ojai Valley School xiii, xxiv, 180-7, 188-9, 214, 222, 223, 226 O'Keefe, Georgia 21 Orwell, George 47 Osier, Anne Evelyn (cousin) 168, 215-16

Pacey, Desmond vii Page, P.K. ix, 31, 55, 64, 78, 86 Parfitt, Dr 98 Parfitt family 41, 61, 79 Parmenter, Ross 62 Parsons, Harold 85 Paton, Alan 47 Pearson, Hesketh 62

Montessori, Maria i8m Moore, Merrill 145, 146 Morawetz, Oskar 8, 36 Morgan, Dr 87 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 61, 108 Mumford, Lewis 109 Murray, Gilbert 84 Murry, John Middleton 62, 86 Mustard, Dr William, 79, 97, 117 Mutt (Mary Elizabeth Boyd, nee Osier) (mother) viii, xi, xxiii, 9, 17, 19, 20, 24, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 48, 59, 60, Si, 68, 69, 72, 73. 78, 79. 82, 83, 89, 90, 91, 95, 97. 98, 107, 109, 114, 120, 123, 124, 125, 130, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 150, 165, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175. 176, 177. 178. 179. 180, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 193, 196, 197. !98, 199. 200, 201, 202, 203,

205, 206-7, 210, 211, 213, 214,

2l6, 2l8, 22O, 221, 224, 225, 228, 229,

233, 234-5, 236, 238, 239,

241, 243, 245, 246, 247

272

Index Piper John 50, 51, 55 Plato 8, 10, 94, 98 Plutarch 14 Pratt, EJ. ix, 55, 89 Proust, Marcel 15, 16, 28, 35, 36, 187, 234 Pryde, James 51 Puxley, Mrs H.L. 23, 25, 31 Puxley, Rev. H.L. 25, 31 Puxley, Peter n, 47, 76 Rab, see Bob (Dr Frederick Robert Wilkinson) Read, Herbert 32, 33 Reading xxv Reaney, James ix, 21, 35, 55, 61, 62, 89 Reid, Edith Gittings 85 Riesman, David 136 Rilke, Rainer Maria 69, 102, 130 Rimbaud, Arthur 60 Robinson, Christine and Dr Turk 12, 26, 34 Roches Point viii, xi, 10, 15, 16, 22, 30, 31, 35. 36> 37, 38, 39, 4, 41, 43, 44, 69, 7i, 72, 73, 77, 79, 86, 88, 92, 94, 103,105,109, in, 116,123,133,143, 144,148, 149,150, 166,181,189, 194,199, 201-7, 2°8, 212, 213-14, 216, 217, 218, 229, 232-3, 234, 236 Rodocanach, C.P. 83 Roosevelt, Eleanor 29, 59, 62 Ross, Mary Lowry 69, 70, 120 Ross, W.W.E. ix, 120 Roualt, George 12 Rubinstein, Arthur 127 Rumi,Jalalu'd-din 11

Santayana, George 93 Sartre, Jean-Paul 28

Sassoon, Siegfried 36 Scott, F.R. ix, xv, 64, 84, 86, 92, in, 114, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 136, 139, 148 Scott, William 114, 143, 144, 145 Sergeant, Howard ix, 51, 53, 55, 58 Shakespeare, William 14, 31, 53 Shaw, George Bernard 28, 52, 98 Sheard, Terrence 21, 115, 122, 127 Sinclair, Lister 89, 108 Sitwell, Edith 31 Sitwell, Osbert 5, 32, 78 Smith, A.J.M. vii, ix, xi, xv, xxvi, 92, 131, 136, 142, 143, 144 Smith, Kay 93 Sophocles 42 Souster, Raymond ix, 120, 123, 125 Spencer, William 50 Stendhal, Henri Beyle 3 Stevenson, Adlai no Stratford, David 76 Stratford, Sally (nee Wilkinson) (sister-in-law) 65, 76, 83 Sutherland, Graham 51 Sutherland, John 64, 77, 84, 86, 92, 109, 142 Swarthmore College xiii, xxiv, 230,

234, 235 Szigeti, Joseph 35 Tamarack Review xi, xiv, xxv Tattersall, Kitty 20, 31, 46, 59, 97 Tattersall, Richard 64 Thomas, Dylan 32, 74 Thomas family 60, 64, 79, 118, 143 Thoreau, Henry David 100, 101 Tindall, W.Y. 65 Tolstoy, Leo 16 Toronto Star xiv Trilling, Lionel 77, 92

273

Index Trollope, Anthony 6 Truman, Harry S. 68, 78n Van Doren, Mark 26 Van Gogh, Vincent 51 Waddell, Helen 115 Walters, Dr 84 Walton, Izaak 219 Walton, William 50 Wansborough family 79 Waters, Ethel 89 Waugh, Evelyn 9 Weaver, Robert xiv, xxvi, 89, 109, 121,142 Webb, Phyllis 64, 148 Webster, Elizabeth 35 West, Bruce 80 West, Rebecca 3 White, John 120 Whitehead, Alfred North 136 Whitman, Walt 226 Wilder, Thornton 14 Wilkinson, Alan Gurd, see A[lan] Wilkinson, Anne (see also Chronology, xxiii-xxvi), birth of 190; visits England as infant 190—1; lives in London, Ont. 191-200; childhood reading 197-8, 206; death of father xi, 200; winters in California 165-89; attends Howard School 169, 175; attends Ojai Valley School 180-9; childhood summers at Roches Point 203-7; mother remarries 216-18; visits England (1926) 217; attends Edgewood School 219-31; teenage reading 226; finishing school in Paris 234-5; visits Rome 235; visits Egypt 22, 236—40; sick

274

with typhoid fever 238—40; visits Gibraltar 242; Algiers 242; Sicily 242-5; Mediterranean cruise 245-7; wedding of xiii, 147, 247; year in London xiii, 50, 51; deaths of babies xiii, xvii, 36; buries babies 43; suffers from arthritis 10, 18; travels to England (1949) 48-56, 58; reading of poems in England 55; visits Paris 56-8; literary editor of Here and Now 34, 42; seeks pyschiatric counselling 60, 62, 68-9, 77, 87, 100-1; meets F.R. Scott 64; researches Lions in the Way 81-3, 84-5, 118, 119, 121; separation 95; divorce in, 121, 122; suffers pericarditis in; affair with A.J.M. Smith 142, 144; illness of mother 134—5, !42J death of mother xi, xvii, 143-5, 178 201 BOOKS The Collected Poems and a Prose Memoir vii, xi, xvii,xxvi; Counterpoint to Sleep vii, xvii, xxv, 84, 93; The Hangman Ties the Holly vii, xxv, 115, 136; Lions in the Way vii, viii, xv, xxv, 77, 118-22, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, !36> '37, '39. 14*; The Poetry of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir xxvi; Swann and Daphne vii, xiv, xvi, xxv MEMOIRS 'Autobiography' 165-247; 'The Curate's Egg' xii; Tour Corners of My World' viii, xi, xxv; 'Journals' 3-148 LETTERS 149-50

POEMS 'ADAM and God through the Looking Glass' 29; 'Boys and Girls' xv; 'Carol' xvii, 155; 'Chez 1'Ame' 25; 'Contentment' xxiv;

Index 'Daily the Drum' 138; 'A Folktale: with a Warning to Lovers' 71, 72; 'Dirge' xvii; 'I am so tired' 27, 159; 'Heaven's Weather' 29; 'Lake Song' xv, xvii, 17, 18, 156; 'Lens' vii, 160-1; 'A Moral Tale with a Warning to Lovers' 63; 'Morning Song' 33; 'Not because the heart is hard' 141; 'Nursery Rhyme' xvii, 157; 'Rites of Innocence' 140; 'A Sorrow of Stones' xvii; 'Strangers' xvii; 'Summer Acres' viii, xvii, 71, 72, 153—4; 'The Swimming Lesson' xvii, 94; 'Techniques' 118; 'Unicorn' 158; 'Winter Sketch, Rockcliffe' 71, 72 STORIES 'The Children' x, 71; 'The Devil's Dilemma' 46; 'The Innocents' 72; 'The Landlord' 39, 46; 'The Lovers' 45; 'The Round and the Straight of It' 40 Wilkinson, Beverley 125, 127

Wilkinson, Dr Frederick Robert, see B[ob] Wilkinson, Heather Anne, see Hjeather] Wilkinson, Mabel (nee Gurd) (mother-in-law) 19, 20, 107 Wilkinson, Robert Jeremy, see Jferemy] Williams, Charles 62 Williams, Tennessee 10, 60 Woolf, Virginia x, xvi, 10, 114, 115 Wordsworth, William 75, 140 Wreford, James 64 Wright, Marion 64, 86 Xenophon 96, 98 Yeats, William Butler 78, 108, 139,

140. J95 Yeomans, Edward xiii, xxiv, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 189, 222, 228, 229

275