shush worthy of the gargoyles at the Bodleian. At lunch afterward I must have asked her one too many questions about Etienne Gilson and she put down her knife and fork in exasperation and said, “Bernard, God is not proctoring an exam!”
She is a girl, but she is also an old man, and I see that there is intractability in her heart that may never be shattered. Perhaps that is because she grew up among women who love harder than they think, and she has strengthened her innate intractability in order to keep tunneling toward a place where she could write undisturbed by the demands of conventional femininity. So she may always think harder than she loves.
I make her smile—in spite of herself, I can tell. This appeals to the part of me that needs a conquest. That is romance enough, I think, in this particular situation. And she is wise. She might have picked that up from the women who raised her, though she might not admit it. I have not met many women who seem wise. I have met women who are shrewd, but that is a different story.
Maybe you’ll meet her soon. I think you’d like her, very much. Maybe we could kidnap her and bring her to Maine and have her cook for us and tease us into submission.
Yours,
Bernard
August 26, 1958
Dear Claire—
Thank you for your letter. I wish you lived here. Or I lived there. Well, no. I don’t think Chicago is for me. Those people are too damn nice! How do you stand it?
Bernard Eliot came to visit this past weekend. I think I can call him a friend. We could not stop talking. Talking to him was like talking to you—only I don’t roll my eyes out of sheer exhaustion when I talk to you. So we talked. We spent five hours in a bar talking, two nights in a row. We talked. We talked, and walked. He thinks walking is “a purification,” and so we walked all the way around the city, setting out from Sixty-Third and Lexington, going down the East Side, curving around the tip of the island, then all the way back up to the West Side and through Central Park and home. He lived here a few years ago and so I did enjoy seeing the city from all different angles, and being shown these angles by someone who knew the ones that made the city look its best. Though I whined a little—you know me, I love to walk, but sometimes my slothful nature makes me want to sit down somewhere and then lie down on the floor with a box of crackers within reach. When I’m done, I’m done. Especially in August. So when I whined too loudly once he put us in a cab and took me for oysters at the Oyster Bar and insisted on buying a bottle of champagne—at the counter, where he told me what he thought I ought to look for in a husband. According to Bernard, and he’s thought a lot about this, I need to marry someone with money, which is not something he believes in usually, but he thinks I have the constitution for it, and the world, he said, needs my books. He says this, of course, having read one chapter of my first and only one. And after he’s heard me say several times that I do not want to marry. If this had come from someone else I would have been offended, but here it amused, because Bernard loves to pontificate and regrets not having had siblings he could pontificate to. His students aren’t enough. Right after he made this pronouncement he gave me a look like a taxidermist trying to decide where to start skinning and said, “I can see exactly how you would have looked in pigtails.” Which means there is no enchantment afoot.
So. We went to the Cloisters. We went to Mass. (He was too boisterous a singer during the Agnus Dei and I elbowed him and reflexively whispered a shush, though I was touched because he really does seem grateful, even desperate, for God’s mercy, and he just elbowed me back and kept singing.) He came to dinner two nights at the henhouse, and the girls ate him up, he was so solicitous of their aspirations, romantic and otherwise. Now, where had they gone to school? Did the young
She is a girl, but she is also an old man, and I see that there is intractability in her heart that may never be shattered. Perhaps that is because she grew up among women who love harder than they think, and she has strengthened her innate intractability in order to keep tunneling toward a place where she could write undisturbed by the demands of conventional femininity. So she may always think harder than she loves.
I make her smile—in spite of herself, I can tell. This appeals to the part of me that needs a conquest. That is romance enough, I think, in this particular situation. And she is wise. She might have picked that up from the women who raised her, though she might not admit it. I have not met many women who seem wise. I have met women who are shrewd, but that is a different story.
Maybe you’ll meet her soon. I think you’d like her, very much. Maybe we could kidnap her and bring her to Maine and have her cook for us and tease us into submission.
Yours,
Bernard
August 26, 1958
Dear Claire—
Thank you for your letter. I wish you lived here. Or I lived there. Well, no. I don’t think Chicago is for me. Those people are too damn nice! How do you stand it?
Bernard Eliot came to visit this past weekend. I think I can call him a friend. We could not stop talking. Talking to him was like talking to you—only I don’t roll my eyes out of sheer exhaustion when I talk to you. So we talked. We spent five hours in a bar talking, two nights in a row. We talked. We talked, and walked. He thinks walking is “a purification,” and so we walked all the way around the city, setting out from Sixty-Third and Lexington, going down the East Side, curving around the tip of the island, then all the way back up to the West Side and through Central Park and home. He lived here a few years ago and so I did enjoy seeing the city from all different angles, and being shown these angles by someone who knew the ones that made the city look its best. Though I whined a little—you know me, I love to walk, but sometimes my slothful nature makes me want to sit down somewhere and then lie down on the floor with a box of crackers within reach. When I’m done, I’m done. Especially in August. So when I whined too loudly once he put us in a cab and took me for oysters at the Oyster Bar and insisted on buying a bottle of champagne—at the counter, where he told me what he thought I ought to look for in a husband. According to Bernard, and he’s thought a lot about this, I need to marry someone with money, which is not something he believes in usually, but he thinks I have the constitution for it, and the world, he said, needs my books. He says this, of course, having read one chapter of my first and only one. And after he’s heard me say several times that I do not want to marry. If this had come from someone else I would have been offended, but here it amused, because Bernard loves to pontificate and regrets not having had siblings he could pontificate to. His students aren’t enough. Right after he made this pronouncement he gave me a look like a taxidermist trying to decide where to start skinning and said, “I can see exactly how you would have looked in pigtails.” Which means there is no enchantment afoot.
So. We went to the Cloisters. We went to Mass. (He was too boisterous a singer during the Agnus Dei and I elbowed him and reflexively whispered a shush, though I was touched because he really does seem grateful, even desperate, for God’s mercy, and he just elbowed me back and kept singing.) He came to dinner two nights at the henhouse, and the girls ate him up, he was so solicitous of their aspirations, romantic and otherwise. Now, where had they gone to school? Did the young
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