Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt

The Letters of Amy Clampitt

5 March 1950

Dear Barbara [Blay]—

How very nice of you to send the little purse, which arrived with remarkable promptness. You are right about the popularity of plaids, but the clever design is quite unlike anything I ever saw here—it’s so thoroughly Leak-Proof, and what could be more important! I had great fun carrying it shopping with me yesterday, and I’m so pleased to know of your thoughtfulness in finding it for me.

As you can imagine, England has been a good deal in everybody’s mind lately, and the English people in the United States have found it vastly amusing to see our excitement on the day the election returns came in. As it happened, Charles Johnson was down from Toronto (what a surprise it was to learn that he was there!) on that very day, when we were taking turns phoning up the New York Times every hour to hear the latest figures—and I must say that he appeared to have far greater equanimity than the rest of us! At any rate, it is a disappointment that it could not have been more decisive, one way or another; but I suppose it does prove what ties there are between the countries, that we should find your election nearly as exciting as our own back in 1948. It happened that about a week beforehand I went to a showing of British information films, and I was particularly delighted with one about what it is like to be a new M. P., with all the traditions that have been going for centuries. There was also one about London’s water supply, with lovely shots of the New River and the source of the Thames in the Cotswolds, and as you may have heard, it could not have been more apropos—because although the heart of New York is an island, the city water supply is in dire danger of being used up! I can’t possibly explain how it happened, but the emergency has its comic aspects. Every Thursday all and sundry are expected to refrain from bathing, shaving, and all water-consuming activities. But the funniest development has come with the Mayor’s announcing that he had called in a rain-making expert for consultation—no, I’m perfectly serious, they can create rain by sprinkling dry ice out of an airplane or something. And immediately there were protests from the mayor of Albany, that this would constitute pilfering from his city’s water supply! So far as I know, the argument has so far not been settled, and meanwhile Dry Thursday continues.

It was pleasant to think of you seeing Moira Shearer dance so soon after I had seen her here. Unfortunately I didn’t see Cinderella, but I did see her in Façade and, as you may know, I saw her in Coppelia at Covent Garden last spring. And I have also been to The Red Shoes, which has been playing steadily in New York for over a year. If you have seen it, you can imagine how exciting I found the opening scenes of the opera house—I very nearly caused a disturbance in my enthusiasm. Naturally I was interested to hear of her marriage, especially since the chapel at Hampton Court was on my itinerary and I remember it vividly.

It has just been announced that one of our native companies, the New York City Ballet, will be performing in England next summer. This is an enormous honor for them, as everybody who saw the Sadler’s Wells company in New York well knows, and I am already a little nervous for them. But they do some delightful things, the best of which is Firebird, with new choreography and costumes to the Stravinsky music. I saw it a week ago; but I’m sorry now that I wasn’t at the performance a couple of evenings ago, for the premiere of a new ballet, Illuminations, with music, choreography and costumes all by Englishmen—Britten, Ashton and Beaton. A friend of mine tells me that it was really gala, with the British Ambassador in the audience and the orchestra playing God Save the King along with The Star-Spangled Banner.

You asked whether I had done any more sewing. Actually I am now in a position to do an enormous amount, because my parents surprised me with a portable sewing machine for Christmas! But somehow I have been so occupied with various other things that I haven’t used it a great deal so far, though I did made myself some new curtains and have the material to make a blouse when I can settle down to it. At least I did launch the thing with something of a flourish—one evening I had a sewing-machine-warming, like a house-warming, you know, to which everybody was required to bring something to sew on. And though a good deal of the work was done by hand, since only one person could use the machine at a time, it seems to have been a success.

Do give my best wishes to everybody, and to Mr. Norton especially, and tell them how often I think of you all and the wonderful time I had. Again, my thanks for such a charming present, and I hope you’ll write again when you have time.

Yours,

Amy

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13 February 1952

Dear Philip—

[ … ] I congratulate you on finishing Paradise Lost. I decided a while back that I was going to read it again, but it turned out to be as dull and pompous as the first time, and I haven’t succeeded in getting very far. I always seem to turn to it just when I’m about to go to sleep, which I suppose isn’t fair, but all it seems to do is to put me to sleep entirely. However, one of these days I still mean to tackle it properly. I also intend to read the Bible all the way through. These intentions are prompted by, of all things, an interest in religion which dates, as nearly as I can remember, to my reading of Toynbee just after I got back to New York from Iowa, and which is related to all the cathedrals and altarpieces and religious festivals that puzzled me in Europe. I have just finished, after my own fashion, with looking into the matter of St. Francis, and have written a chapter on Assisi which ends up, somewhat to my own surprise, with the assertion that the tradition of his receiving the Stigmata is a logical necessity! Of course, just when I think I understand religion, I meet up with a real believer who says I am talking nonsense. This happened again just yesterday, when after a couple of martinis Joe Goodman and I and a girl friend of his got into a terrible argument, in which I maintained that religious feeling was everything, the girl that dogma was everything, and Joe took the more complicated position of the skeptical believer. None of us convinced the others of anything. Of course I have a different idea about every week. To follow the process you will have to read my so-called book, in which I am now about to start Chapter Six and thus am about halfway through.

It doesn’t seem likely that the book is going to be published. A literary agent to whom I sent the first three chapters said it was well written but that there was no market for it. The curious thing is that I don’t care very much. It would be nice to make some money, of course, but I have gone ahead writing it and having the time of my life. I haven’t gotten a job and haven’t even looked for one, but though the money is beginning to run rather low even that doesn’t bother me. I can always go to work at Macy’s or something, and probably will, because the idea of a good job in which I should have to work hard chiefly at flattering people and pushing them around now seems too awful to contemplate, and I have discovered that I am really happier with a very little money than I was when I could buy things just for the fun of buying. Of course, I have had my spending jag and have all the clothes I need for a while—I haven’t even had to buy nylons, since I wear them only when I go out—and I can take books out of the public library. I wouldn’t feel this way, either, if I hadn’t first proved that I could hold a job and gotten enough self-respect thereby to make my present frugal existence an act not of defiance but of transcendence. I have the feeling now that I may be going to write a good book—not the one I’m working on, which is simply groundwork and a process of thinking a few things out that has to be gone through first—and that even if I don’t I shan’t feel too badly, because I will have found out that I didn’t have it in me, and if I hadn’t tried I never could be sure.

So far I’ve enjoyed myself so much that it isn’t as if I had given anything up. I’ve never been in a better frame of mind, day after day. Of course Iowa gave me the fidgets, and so, even, did Boston. I suppose I’ve gotten so used to my little spot on West Twelfth Street that I don’t feel at home anywhere except in New York. It’s a wonderful place. I never know any more who is going to appear or what is going to happen. The other evening I got into an argument with a painter, which started out innocently enough and ended up with questions of the condition of the artist in Russia, and what is really the function of the painter. The fellow turned out to be a Marxist, and I hadn’t met any of them for so long that I had almost begun to consider the species extinct. He thought a painter could say something that had nothing to do with painting; that the truth was simple; and that the deep-freeze was no more but no less important than paintings to put on the wall. I thought exactly the opposite: that no good painting could make a simple declarative statement; that the deep-freeze was of less importance than paintings; and that the truth cannot be simplified without being turned into lies. However, there were so many things neither of us were sure about that we didn’t come to blows, but ended up quite amicably, both grateful for the work-out. When I left I had a headache from sheer mental exertion. What was still more interesting was going to look at an exhibition of this same artist’s paintings. They were wonderful! And if any of them made simple declarative statements, these were denied by the richness of the colors and the brushwork. All of which proves nothing except that artists are of all complicated people the most complicated.

Then there was the evening when I listened to a poet reading Yeats aloud, and practically floated out of the window, the effect was so intoxicating. And the party that Joe gave after a performance of his flute sonata, at which I had planned to stay half an hour but actually got home at half-past nine the next morning! We had drifted, half a dozen of us, from Joe’s mother’s to the apartment of a White Russian journalist who believes in absolutely nothing but has a wonderful collection of objects—figures out of Egyptian tombs, Turkish fezzes, Persian shoes and a Mohammedan prayer rug, books in all languages, and musical instruments including African drums, a snake-charmer’s pipe, a musical gourd, and Maracas. I took a lesson in the latter and found them a good deal more difficult than I had supposed they would be, but the musicians in the crowd were presently playing a little concert on the various instruments against a background of Zulu chanting from the phonograph. I found myself drinking brandy and eating cheese-and-baloney sandwiches for breakfast and feeling fine. When it began to be light we got into the journalist’s car and were delivered to various points—one girl to her office, somebody else to Penn Station, and me home. Joe had another, more genteel party the other evening—really a musical soiree, organized around a rehearsal of his new string trio (flute, cello and piano). After they had played it once we listened several times to a tape recording. After that—chamber music in its proper setting—the performance in Town Hall yesterday was something of an anticlimax, but exciting. I found that I was—almost as nervous as the composer himself. [ … ]

Love,

Amy

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13 January 1953

Dear Barbara [Blay]–

[ … ] As for the book, it has been finished and revised and looked at rather kindly—so far as I can make out—by several publishers, but none of them has gone so far as to offer a contract. A literary agent is taking care of it for me, so I hear only the nicer comments, of course! I have my doubts about its ever getting published but don’t care too much. The main thing was to have written it, and I’m hoping to get myself organized sufficiently one of these days to write another one. No, the subject is no secret, though it’s a little difficult to explain. The setting is New York, and in general it’s about young people with jobs. Of course there is a love story—there always is, no doubt. If it ever sees print you shall have a copy, and I shan’t even require you to like it!

I imagine Mrs. Jepp told you that I got a new job. It had become a matter of necessity—I had holes in my shoes and approximately twenty-five dollars to my name. It’s with the Audubon Society, a foundation concerned with wildlife conservation, birds in particular, and I work in the reference library with a delightful, unbusinesslike Frenchwoman who is no more of an ornithologist than I am—so in looking up the answers to people’s questions, piecemeal we find out all kinds of odd things about birds. The people who come in are often slightly crazy too, but frequently very nice—like the man who spends most of his time these days camping out in the Bahamas and Yucatan watching the habits of flamingoes. Before that he was watching the whooping cranes, huge magnificent birds of which there are now only about thirty in existence, and the Society had just published a thick book all about what he learned. Aside from the fact that he usually wears a blue suit with a bright yellow pullover, he looks a good deal more normal than you would expect. There is also a man who is, I am told, the leading authority on bats in the United States, and he looks like any nice young businessman, or perhaps a professor of political science—very difficult to imagine climbing around in caves with a flashlight (if indeed that is what bat specialists do). Then there are bird artists and bird photographers, and once in a while the warden of a bird sanctuary who comes in and immediately engages you in a conversation about the behavior of the reddish egret. You just look very knowing and nod your head a few times and it seems to be all right. [ … ]

Love,

Amy

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16 February 1953

Dear Philip—

Your letter arrived on a day when I had given up coping with broken boilers and fifty-degree temperatures at the new Audubon house and gone to bed with a galloping sore throat. It presently turned into a quite conventional cold, thereby upsetting my theory about seasonal immunities, and since the boilers still weren’t fixed I spent four days in bed. I almost said four wonderful days, but they weren’t really, in fact I was so disinclined to get up that I began to wonder uneasily whether I was ever going to; the wonderful thing was that when I did totteringly pull myself together in the middle of Friday afternoon the cold was practically gone. The Kleenex supply had run out, I just remember—that was really why I had to get up. Matthias had meanwhile very kindly gone to the grocery store for me, and on the day before another friend of mine had dropped in and shared a hot toddy—whiskey and lemon juice with boiling water and two cloves—which didn’t do me a bit of good.

But you must be quite bored with bedridden people and their symptoms by this time. I didn’t mean to go into so much detail about the fascinating common cold. The one thing I did that isn’t usually done was to discover Gilbert White. Maybe you know about him—the eighteenth-century Englishman, a clergyman evidently, who wrote The Natural History of Selborne. I read the whole thing, and when I had finished I had the rare feeling of being sorry that there wasn’t any more. He made it his business to note down everything like the habits of cockroaches, the rainfall, the dew, the growth of trees, and the appearances and disappearances of birds, at a time when there was still some doubt about whether migration really occurred. He never did decide for certain whether swallows and swifts actually left the country or merely hibernated somewhere or other. He had a friend who went out with a pitch-pipe and discovered, or thought he had, that all the owls hooted in B-Flat; but then one of them went down to A, so the generalization had to be abandoned. He was the most patient curious man who ever lived, I do believe, and that is his great charm. The one time he seems to [have] been even slightly inclined to pass moral judgments on animal behavior (he was always looking for explanations of why the cuckoo should lay its egg in another bird’s nest, but he never found one, though for a while he thought he had) [ … ] the one creature that seems to have incensed him the least little bit was an old tortoise, and I suppose that was because he had gotten fond of it. He saw it first in another town, where it had been living for a good while, and watched it digging in for the winter, with the speed, he said, of the hour hand on a clock.

Eventually, after a series of references to it, he notes that the old Sussex tortoise is now become my property. He dug it up before the end of the hibernation season, carried it back to Selborne, and dug it into his own garden, where he noted that on one day of unseasonable warmth, in February or March, it came out for a while but then retired underground. He noticed that it was as fussy as an old lady about being caught in the rain, and would go for cover though heaven knew that it was as well protected already as one would suppose necessary. And then he exploded that it did seem odd that a creature so torpidly oblivious to delight of any kind should be permitted to drag out so long an existence on earth. Later on he seems to have made amends by noting a few more positive qualities, such as that it did have sense enough to keep from falling down a well when it came to the edge of it. Well, you can see that I have been pretty much obsessed with that tortoise ever since. I have already told one person whom I quite liked but found somewhat exasperating that he was an old Sussex tortoise. The upshot was that I managed to get him to unearth some enthusiasms—Adlai Stevenson, and the ballet, and some novel by John O’Hara, and some other girl who hadn’t anything to say. Of course the last exasperated me all over again, but that was no doubt what I deserved. Anyhow, for the time being Don’t be an old Sussex tortoise seems to be my rallying cry. Why are people so afraid of being enthusiastic? I don’t think it’s so much laziness as the fear of turning out to be wrong. But who knows what is right, anyway? If one only feels the right things one might as well not feel anything. Of course one usually is wrong. I’ve been being enthusiastic and getting knocked down and proved wrong for some time now, so that I’m practically used to it.

Now what all this has to do with anything I don’t quite know. I think it was brought on by your almost confessing to envy me for enjoying [Suzanne Langer’s] Philosophy in a New Key and then taking it back, almost and all. I don’t see anything wrong with that—it’s probably healthy, and besides, at your age I would have found the whole thing impenetrable. I’ve forgotten the logical framework already, in fact I had before I finished the book. What I understood I understood through things that had affected me, and I’ve had ten more years to be affected in than you have. You have a far better brain than I do, and you use it. What needs paying attention to now is your feelings, which are undoubtedly there somewhere though you seem to do a wonderful job of traveling miles in order to circumvent them. Does this make you mad? It ought to.

Well, here you are, twenty-three years old tomorrow. I’m late with birthday wishes, but then I always am. These are about the queerest I ever sent anybody, but you see it’s all on account of that old Sussex tortoise.

Love,

Amy

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22 April 1953

Dear Philip—

Your letter was indeed appreciated. I found it so stimulating, in fact, that my impulse was to sit down and answer it right away; but if I hadn’t restrained myself the result would have been more than usually incoherent, with all the ideas you had set in motion. You have certainly got down to the real issues, from minority rule and majority rights (i.e. the dictatorship of the vegetariat) on to Ole Debbil Sax (as you will remember Bloody Mary was pleased to pronounce it), and I was especially pleased with your story of bringing a little air-clearing doubt into the smug confusion of the would-be professional pacifists. Than which I think there are few people more tiresome: I know one or two bigots who are actually delightful, but pacifist bigots never are. They are, as somebody once pointed out that free love is, a contradiction in terms, or in other words self-defeating. I doubt that organized pacifism can ever get far, except under the leadership of a saint like Gandhi, because as soon as they constitute a bloc they tend to become belligerents. The thing that saved Gandhi’s movement was the man himself: he didn’t simply have ideas, he was his ideas, as only that great rarity, the true saint, ever completely is. In a real saint thinking, feeling, and doing all follow the same straight line, while the rest of the human race spends most of its time getting tied up in knots.

The whole thing, as I see it, is very closely related to the problem of individual relationships, which is really the problem of expressing one’s feelings, which in turn involves the problem of dominating or being dominated by other people, of hurting and getting hurt. It’s a problem that shows no sign of getting solved; and the terrible, eternal irony is that when one is young and trying to find one’s way around in the shambles of human society, when one is least capable of satisfactory personal relationships is just when one needs them most. The usual short-cut seems to be to avoid getting hurt (a) by being aggressive, and hurting other people first or (b) by being recessive, just letting things slide by. Of course the two can overlap, and I’m not sure which is more common or which is worse. But they both lead to misery, of the most terrible, blind, self-perpetuating kind—a worse misery, really, than the one they were supposed to circumvent. What I am trying to say, of course, is that suffering of one kind or another is not to be avoided, and that honest suffering is much less worse, finally, than any substitute. The day I woke up and really knew this was so—and it wasn’t so terribly long ago, either—I began finally, in a very small way, to be a responsible adult. I’m not sure that the fairly long chronicle of mistakes and emotional crises that went into, and led up to, this private triumph would sound worth while to anybody else, but they were so far as I’m concerned. About the only thing I can be proud of is that I never made the same mistake twice—it was always a new one, and I always emerged knowing a little more than I did before. One has to live with one’s mistakes, either by hiding them away in a closet somewhere or making some use of them. The only alternative to the process of education by trial and error is to take somebody else’s word for everything—I tried that too, with ludicrous consequences—and in the present confused state of things that alternative is probably satisfactory only for an imbecile. Now what all this may or may not have to do with you and Virginia, or any other girl, I haven’t any very clear idea. The thing I had in mind about the old Sussex tortoise was, I guess, to caution you against becoming paralyzed by the fear of injury, either inflicted or received. If you find you are discussing a relationship as a substitute for the relationship itself, and can’t do anything else, then there is probably no point in pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp, but if on the other hand you really do enjoy each other’s company then it ought to be worth while to find some modest basis for continuing it. All of which you perfectly well know already. You have the advantage of an exceptionally good mind. I don’t think the fact makes you really any lonelier than other people, it just makes you more aware of the loneliness which is the fate of absolutely everybody.

There was a whole lot more I meant to say about how I seem to have turned out to be a pacifist in spite of myself—though I do hate the word. That accounts for my finding it impossible to go back into business of any kind, where so much energy, at least of mine, was used up in fights of the most trivial kind. It used to be that a day wasn’t complete if I didn’t lose my temper, less and less privately as time went on. I walked all over people and had quite a few of them scared of me, and for a while it was fun of a perverse sort; but there were also quite a few people I was scared of. The difference now is that I don’t think I’m really scared of anybody; and the people I can’t like I’m mostly just sorry for. Of course people hate having anybody genuinely sorry for them (as distinguished from just feeling guilty about them, as if their plight were one’s own fault), so the only thing I have found to do is avoid them. Fortunately, the Audubon Society makes that pretty easy. It’s not an ideal solution but it seems to be the best I’m capable of, for the time being anyway. It means a certain sense of isolation, but that is only sad instead of being bitter and having to blame somebody. I think I understand that as the essence of pacifism—well, say Christianity, which is the same thing really—not blaming anybody. But it’s a thing that can’t be imposed from the outside; it just has to happen. But I’m getting too tired to follow these observations much further. You’re right; letter-writing can be exhausting. [ … ]

Love,

Amy

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31 January 1954

Dear Philip—

One of the few disadvantages of living alone, it has just occurred to me, is that when one thinks one may have lost one’s voice there is no way to find out except by talking to oneself. At a quarter past two this morning, though I find the recollection slightly incredible, I was shouting my head off in Pooh-Bah’s lament from The Mikado while skipping up Bleecker Street in the company of several people who had a similar inclination to shout their heads off, though at the party we had just come from we had been doing exactly that for at least an hour. I now suspect that the singing had gone on too long and merrily, because when I finally got up a while ago and felt the inclination to burst into song (a Burl Ives lament I had just thought of), all I could raise was a hoarse squeak. The question now is, can I talk? Evidently I am not going to find out until this evening when I go out to dinner, because I simply cannot bring myself to say anything out loud with nobody but me around to hear it. This dilemma, aggravated by not being able to sing, has produced an irresistible urge to communicate. All of which is the long-drawn-out explanation of this letter. I am not sure which of us owes the other one one at this point, and that being the case I might just as well break the deadlock. I enjoyed your letter and I’m glad you enjoyed Gatsby, for sending which I had no particular reason except that it’s a good story and one which (unlike the majority of novels which on first reading you can barely put down) stands up under repeated reading. The usual critics’ explanation for the fascination of the character of Gatsby—and he is, of course, fascinating just because he is convincing and incredible both at the same time—is that he represents the American Dream, that peculiar mixed faith in romantic love and the power of money. He is a kind of mythical character, like Faust or Oedipus or the Little Mermaid, and the critics these days are very fond of myths. And so am I.

Though for slightly different specific reasons, I think I have been getting the same feeling lately that you seem to have about psychologists—or at any rate about psychoanalysts. And they are all involved, so far as I can make out, in the creation of another Great American Myth. Since I don’t believe that myths are necessarily lies, this is not so much a condemnation as a rather weary, even wistful objection; because the psychoanalytic myth seems to be that There Is No Sin. Now it is fairly easy to trace the genesis of this proposition which may or may not be true: first there is the idea, which can make things quite messy, that Sex is Sin; so in order to make things less messy, this idea must be rooted out and disposed of, like a stand of poison ivy in a fencerow; and behold, the arduous labor completed, if Sex is not a Sin, there is no Sin. My trouble just now, I suppose, is that I have been reading the Inferno, which is concerned with nothing but sin; and be it noted that in Dante’s system Paolo and Francesca, along with Cleopatra, Dido, and Helen of Troy, whose transgressions were all carnal, are regarded as the least guilty, and their punishment is the exact equivalent of their earthly condition—namely to be driven about eternally by the winds, like a flock of birds, a situation which, if wearisome, is infinitely to be preferred to lying forever in the rain, like the gluttons, or burning forever, like the false counsellors, or being locked forever in the ice, like the traitors. So I suppose the trouble is not with the psychoanalysts alone, but with the nineteenth-century preoccupation which made such a Thing out of sex. But the awful thing that seems to have happened, whosever fault it was, is that the psychoanalyst’s couch has become the lazy sinner’s confessional, where on payment of a large fee excuses are found for all the things one ought not to have done (and they are always the same excuse: that one felt guilty about being human, or in other words one felt, though one knew better, that Sex was a Sin). I had it explained to me again last night that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to make people Accept Themselves; the inference being that they are incapable of change. (Except a man be born again he shall not enter the kingdom of heaven—or did I make that up?) The terrible thing is that being Born Again became such a cliché that it had to be rooted out too—oh that terrible nineteenth century, for which, nevertheless, I am coming to have a certain affection, if only in reaction against the reaction against it.) There is something to this effect in [David Riesman’s] The Lonely Crowd, as I remember, in connection with homosexuals, whom psychiatrists often do not try to cure but merely to accustom to their inverted habits. It is all very discouraging, anyhow, if one persists in believing in free will. The thing I hold against psychology just now is that by explaining too much it explains nothing, that it becomes, unreal as it is, a substitute for reality, and its version of life is nothing but a lot of empty nutshells and squeezed orange rinds. And more and more I find that the disparity between the way I see these people, believing as I do in the existence of free will, sin and damnation, and the way they see themselves, believing in nothing special, is so great that I can barely communicate with them, except by a kind of wig-wag semaphore conducted in two different languages. Neither of us knows what the other is talking about. There are times when I feel closer to the flamingos, isolated in their salty fastnesses where nothing else can live except the minute plant and animal forms they feed upon; it is as though they had more life in them than most of the people one sees. But of course that is unfair, whether to the people or to the flamingos I’m not quite sure.

Space here to indicate that I did go out to dinner and that I had lost my voice. My whispers got more attention than my normal tone of voice, but I had to choose my remarks carefully and the fact that people hung upon them, and even began talking in whispers themselves, did not make them profound.

The mad Pole I told you about, who made me laugh so much on the train from Boston last spring, was in town this week and called me up. We arranged to meet at the Metropolitan Museum on my lunch hour, carrying respectively, for purposes of identification, the Inferno and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Association. Yes, by golly, there is such a thing, and there was even an article in it about the air-conditioning of space ships! However, on inquiring I was told that an emigration to Mars within at least the next fifty thousand years is not likely, even if anybody wanted to go, for the reason that the expenditure of energy to get a single person there would be more than that required to keep a city in operation here—which is self-evident enough when one thinks about it, but about physics my credulity is boundless. I certainly never met anybody so learned on a train, or just possibly anywhere, and indeed such learning in somebody whose profession is designing rockets to beat the Russians with in the next war is rather disconcerting. However, it was quite easy to keep off that subject while surrounded by the relics of the Italian Renaissance, the portraits and the carved furniture and the altarpieces; they have reopened the European painting galleries at the museum, and I am there practically every lunch hour. There are times when it seems to me that without these evidences of its potentialities I should despair of the human race altogether. This, undoubtedly, is what [Bernard] Berenson’s famous life-enhancing label is about; when there is real life behind a work of art, there is the power in it of lifting the spectator beyond himself and into some community of human experience which is beyond time and space; but this is a power which can only be tapped through a process which cannot be taught or entirely explained. I suspect, however, that at bottom it is simply a respect for life in all its forms. I read somewhere about a man who acquired a belief in God, or immortality, or the soul—they all mean approximately the same thing—from watching a wave of migrating warblers, and I think I understand this perfectly. Once you really sense the life behind a mass movement like that, or behind a single bird, or behind a single human being, no matter how stupid or miserable, then you know that all the science in the world can never explain it, and you do not ask to have it explained. And implicit in all art, I think, is a respect for this mystery; it is a homage to the inexplicable. Perhaps science is too in its purer forms, but it seems to me that just as often it exploits the mystery without even recognizing that it is mysterious, and that—in the case of psychology—it lays destructive hands on a principle it does not even recognize; it devaluates life by burying the inexplicable under a load of explanations. But I’m becoming indignant, and it’s late, so I’ll stop for now anyway.

Love,

Amy

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10 April 1954

Dear Philip—

It’s startling to discover that your last letter is already a month old. My impulse was, as it always is when I get a letter that says something, to sit down and answer it right away; but not having done that, I find that the time has slid past without being properly accounted for. Your adventures with St. Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli and the philosopher with a materialist base interested me very much. I haven’t read either of the former—certainly not the latter!—though both have been on my tentative list of people to be read sometime. Since I find St. Thomas’s almost-contemporary Dante so congenial—I’m on the Purgatorio now—I can imagine I would share your sympathies on that score, and the comments on Machiavelli as you report them only substantiate my own feelings about the thinness and confusion of popular ideas these days. If you are going to explain away Machiavelli by saying his moral ideas were wrong, or by blaming his environment, you end up by explaining away all of western civilization. Of course the way he was brought up, and the political conditions of fifteenth-century Florence—which is the Florence of the high Renaissance, of Raphael and Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo the Magnificent—entered into his idea of human nature, and certainly there was vice and cruelty and horror tangled up with all the magnificence of that time; but if you are going to pay attention to history at all, you can’t just pick out the parts you like and ignore the rest. I have come to the conclusion, and not a very original one at that, that history is a conflict of interests because human nature is a conflict of interests. We’re all subject to contrary pulls and pressures from without and from within. Probably the most powerful of these pressures are exactly those of which we are least aware. The advantage of a chaotic time like this one—and like so many advantages it is also pretty terrifying—is that to avoid being smothered on the one hand or torn limb from limb on the other, one is forced to examine one’s own assumptions, and to try to understand where they came from. That’s the significance of a book like Suzanne Langer’s, as I understand it: she makes a brief for intuition, which is the living kernel of any system of philosophy. One man’s logic is as good as another’s; I don’t see how it is possible to choose among sets of ideas on the basis of logic alone. In the end, it is what one feels to be true that matters, not the plausibility or the force of the arguments that develop out of what one feels. But as T. S. Eliot pointed out, the hardest thing in the world is to know what one feels: there are so many things one is supposed to feel, that one has been told one is going to feel, that certain people are said to have felt, and so on and on. The whole basis of Roman Catholicism, as I understand it, is that certain things have been felt by certain people which an ordinary believer may never feel except at second hand; again quoting Eliot, we can endure only just so much reality; hence the ritual, which preserves these feelings and keeps them in operation even though they are not individually revived in each worshiper each time the mass is sung. It is pretty hard to argue with this; in a sense it may be considered a more democratic idea than the orthodox democratic notion that everybody has a right to get ahead (and maybe lose his soul in the process). But the truth is, I don’t really believe it. I still believe that it is still possible to discover what one feels, and that until that happens one is not quite alive. There are just too many different systems now, all clamoring to be adhered to, to settle down comfortably with any one of them. One compromises, one acquiesces, one keeps one’s mouth shut—but if one goes on thinking one is not quite defeated. The wear and tear involved is something terrific, but it is better than never having been quite alive.

And the same thing applies to people individually. It is more and more my melancholy observation that in any close relationship either one person dominates with the more or less complete assent of the other, or each tries to dominate the other. The more we are attached to people for what they are, the more we also try to change them. But how much better than that there should have been no relationship at all! When people are grown up enough to recognize the danger in people they like, they are perhaps also grown up enough to sort out what is to be valued from what is a threat to their own integrity. And as far as I’m concerned, recognizing the value of another person is the fundamental human experience. If I didn’t believe that