The Irrational Season Page 6

  Writing was not easy during those years. I struggled to write under the worst possible conditions, after the children were in bed, often falling asleep at my desk. During the early school years Hugh got up with the children in the morning, so that I could sleep a little later in order to be able to write at night, and without that understanding help I don’t think I could have managed. Even so, it was not easy, particularly when I ventured into new ways of writing. So I was prickly and defensive, because during the near-decade we lived year-round in the country, almost nothing I wrote sold, and rejection slips for work you believe in are bitter indeed.

  I know that I’m a better writer now because of the conflict and frustration of those years, and some of that conflict was in our marriage, and I don’t minimize any of the pain.

  During the years of Hugh’s leaving the theatre forever—thank God forever lasted only nine years—our time together, alone, was the hour before dinner, when we sat in front of the fire and had a quiet drink and talked. At dinnertime we were the whole family, gathered around the table, but the hour before dinner was our quiet hour, our grownup hour, and I do not think that the children felt rejected because of it. But it was a choice, a deliberate choice, and it was part of the structure of the day.

  Even if we had had money for servants, I don’t think I would have wanted anybody else to have brought up our children; I was an only child and for many reasons I did not see a great deal of my parents when I was very young, and this may explain my feelings. But children and store meant that if I were to hope to write, something had to go—lots of things, in fact. I eliminated all kinds of housewifely virtues. Our house was tidy—I cannot write in a filthy nest—but I will never win an award as Housekeeper of the Year. I did not scrub the kitchen floor daily; commercials for various floor waxes, furniture polishes, and window-cleaning sprays go right over my head; they are not within my frame of reference or the seasons of my heart. It is more important that I have at least an hour a day to read and study; that I walk at least a couple of miles a day with the dog—this is thinking and praying time; that I have an hour a day at the piano. Practicing the piano, rather than just playing at it, got eliminated with the advent of our third child; I’m only now properly getting back to it, and playing the piano is one of the best consciousness and memory expanders there is.

  I’m asked with increasing frequency, “But why marry?” a question to be taken seriously, especially when it comes from young people who have seen their parents’ marriages end in divorce, or in constant bickering and hostility, which is almost worse. The desire to make sure that there is integrity in love, that neither partner wants to use or manipulate the other, is a healthy one. But ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Ultimately two people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take.

  I’m glad that I was twenty-seven when Hugh and I married. As I look back on the men I might have married, I shudder. I needed the time not only to wait to meet the man who was to become my husband, but to do enough growing up so that I was a mature enough human being to enter into the depths of a lifelong partnership. I matured slowly, and I know that I was not adult enough before I met Hugh—and hardly, then.

  After all these years I am just beginning to understand the freedom that making a solemn vow before God, making a lifelong commitment to one person, gives each of us. Thirty years ago on a cold morning in January—very cold, it was 18° below zero—when Hugh and I made those vows, we were deliberately, if not very consciously, leaving youth and taking the risk of adulthood and a permanent partnership. It is indeed a fearful gamble. When I looked into the future I knew that there would be more than glorious nights, longed-for babies, someone to come home to. I knew that an actor and a writer are a poor risk. But we had committed ourselves, before a God neither of us was at all sure about, that we wouldn’t quit when the going got rough. If I was not fulfilled by my relationship with this particular man, I couldn’t look around for another. And vice versa. No matter how rough the going got, neither of us was going to opt out.

  Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together, we become a new creature. There are many glorious ways of intercourse besides the sex act, but the emphasis of this country’s culture today is focused on the physical, genital act of sex, rather than love, whole love, and so we’ve lost a lot of these other ways of completion. The intercourse of that quiet hour in front of the fire with my husband; or walking, as we love to do, on the beach, hand touching hand, can be as electrifying as the more obvious forms of love.

  To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take. All the rather pompous sociological jargon about the advisability of trial marriages or short-term relationships as part of the new freedom is in actuality a result of our rejection of freedom and our fear of risk—I had learned this through experience in the Greenwich Village years before I was twenty-seven.

  There isn’t much risk in a one-night stand except venereal disease, and penicillin will cope with that. The pill has almost eliminated the risk of unexpected babies, and liberal abortion laws will take care of the few surprises. In trial or short-term commitment we don’t have to risk all of ourselves; we can hold back.

  If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.

  And there is the risk of failure. It doesn’t always work. There are marriages which for one reason or another simply do not become marriages. There are times when two people who have taken the risk have to accept the brutal fact of failure, and separation, and divorce. But, far too often, people quit simply because the going is rough, and this is almost more sad than the marriage manque.

  It takes a lifetime to learn another person. After all these years I still do not understand Hugh; and he certainly does not understand me. We’re still in the risky process of offering ourselves to each other, and there continue to be times when this is not easy, when the timing isn’t right, when we hurt each other. It takes a lifetime to learn all the varied ways of love, including intercourse. Love-making is like a Bach fugue; you can’t go to the piano and play a fugue the first time you hold your hands out over the keys.

  When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

  John of Kronstadt, a Russian priest of the nineteenth century, counseled his penitents to take their sins of omission and commission, when they get too heavy, and hang them on the cross. I find this extremely helpful, and particularly during the summer when the larger family gathers together and I often cook for a minimum of twelve. We had four summers when we were four generations under one roof—something unusual in this day of small, nuclear families, and something which calls for enormous acceptance and humor from everybody. Sometimes when I hang on the cross something which is too heavy for me, I think of it as being rather like the laundry lines under our apple trees, when I have changed all the sheets in the house. The wind blows through them, the sun shines on them, and when I fold them and bring them in in the evening they smell clean and pure.

  If I could not hang my sins on the cross I might tend to withdraw, to refuse responsibility because I might fail. If I could not hang my sins on the cross, Hugh and I probably wouldn’t still be married. And I would certainly never write a book.

  When Hugh criticizes my writing, no matter how just the criticism, I fight him. He has learned that if he makes a criticism and I say calmly, “Thank you, I see what you mean,” then I have no intention of doing anything about it. But when—as usually happens—I defend the work hotly, when I lose my temper, when I accuse him of wanting to “just cut it all,”
he knows that I have taken what he has said seriously, and that I will do something about it, even if it means six more months of hard work.

  I withdraw from him completely at first, feeling abused and misunderstood. I take the dog and go for a long, furious walk. And then my subconscious creative mind—the dark side of Mercury—gets to work, and when I return I am ready to go back to the typewriter—if not to my husband. By the time I have written a few pages the knowledge that all this unwanted work is going to make for a much better book has me so excited that by dinnertime I’m ready to cook a good-dinner and give Hugh a grateful kiss.

  I’ve learned something else about family and failure and promises: when a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In one way or another, we are all unfaithful to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there is. We do break our most solemn promises, and sometimes we break them when we don’t even realize it. If a marriage has to be the pearly-pink perfection suggested, by commercials for coffee or canned spaghetti sauce or laundry detergents, it is never going to work. A young woman asked me in amazement, “You mean it’s all right to quarrel after you’re married?” I can look at the long years of my marriage with gratitude, and hope for many more, only when I accept our failures.

  If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive. If a friendship makes me love Hugh more, then I can trust that friendship. If it thrusts itself between us, then it should be cut out, and quickly. I’ve had that happen several times, so I know whereof I speak. Sometimes I have realized myself that a friendship was a destructive one. Sometimes Hugh has said, “I don’t think so and so is good for you,” and I’ve resented it, defensively, refused to do anything, and ultimately realized that he was right. It works, of course, both ways.

  On the other hand, we both have rich, deep, abiding friendships which have nourished our marriage and helped it grow. Friendship has become more and more a lost art in a society which feels that in order for a relationship to be fulfilled it must end in bed. A true friendship is always amoureuse; it is part of my human sexuality; each encounter with a friend is a time of creation. I see this most clearly in my professional life. My relationship with my editor has got to be amourous. This doesn’t mean sexual indulgence, though I don’t think that either editor or writer can find the other physically repugnant. It does mean something happening on that non-empirical level, in the mediating band between nightside and sunside. Two editors, reading a manuscript of mine, may make exactly the same comments or suggestions, but with one of them no response whatsoever is evoked in me, whereas with the other, something happens which sets all my little writing wheels and cogs turning. It is not a matter of intellect alone, of an editor knowing what should be done to make a book better; many editors are qualified to do that. But with only a few is the spark set off in me, so that I know what must be done to make a manuscript come alive.

  Not long ago the editor with whom I had done eleven books retired, and I started to work with a new one, and this was not unlike the beginning of a love affair for which I had great expectations, and in which I am rejoicing as they are fulfilled; but it is not in any way an act of unfaithfulness in my marriage, any more than is my husband’s relations with the women he works with on stage and on television—not that such relations cannot be destructive; I’ve seen them be so—but in my definition of marriage they should be nourishing rather than devouring.

  LOVERS APART

  In what, love, does fidelity consist?

  I will be true to you, of course.

  My body’s needs I can resist,

  Come back to you without remorse;

  And you, behind the footlight’s lure,

  Kissing an actress on the stage,

  Will leave her presence there, I’m sure,

  As I my people on the page.

  And yet—I love you, darling, yet

  I sat with someone at a table

  And gloried in our minds that met

  As sometimes strangers’ minds are able

  To leap the bounds of time and space

  And find, in sharing wine and bread

  And light in one another’s face

  And in the words that each has said,

  An intercourse so intimate

  It shook me deeply to the core.

  I said good night, for it was late;

  We parted at my hotel door

  And I went in, turned down the bed

  And took my bath and thought of you

  Leaving the theatre with light tread

  And going off, as you should do,

  To rest, relax, and eat and talk—

  And I lie there and wonder who

  Will wander with you as you walk

  And what you both will say and do.…

  We may not love in emptiness;

  We married in a peopled place;

  The vows we made enrich and bless

  The smile on every stranger’s face,

  And all the years that we have spent

  Give me the joy that makes me able

  To love and laugh with sacrament

  Across a strange and distant table.

  No matter where I am, you are,

  We two are one and bread is broken

  And laughter shared both near and far

  Deepens the promises once spoken

  And strengthens our fidelity

  Although I cannot tell you how,

  But I rejoice in mystery

  And rest upon our marriage vow.

  There’s not as much risk of failure with an editor as in a marriage, but risk there is. A couple of times I’ve plunged into the risk, and the amoureuse-ness has been abortive rather than creative, and the book has never come properly to term. But the risk must be taken if the book is to be born at all. There are writers who do not need editorial help; I am not one of them. I seldom show more than the beginnings of a book before I have a complete rough draft, but then I need help. And to ask for help involves risk, and the danger of failure.

  When I look back on the first years of Hugh’s and my enormous risk of marriage, I marvel that we lasted. Certainly in my ignorance I did everything wrong. I drenched Hugh with my love, gave him all of me in great, overwhelming waves. I, in my turn, had a few things to put up with. However, in our naïveté we unknowingly did one thing which was right, and which I recently found superbly expressed by Rilke: “It is a question in marriage not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems … to exist it is a narrowing … which robs either one … or both of his fullest freedom or development.”

  Somehow or other, Hugh and I have managed to be guardians of each other’s spaces—most of the time—and because of this the spaces between us are not chasms, but creative solitudes. When we blunder, then the spaces are horrendous and solitude turns into the most painful kind of loneliness; but then a willing acceptance can turn the loneliness back into solitude.

  Marriage as defined by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and TV, would seem to include permanance, whereas, paradoxically, Christian marriage is built on impermanence. Like everything else on this earth it will come to an end; one of us will die, and in our society we think of death as failure, as the ultimate failure. And in worldly terms it is. No wonder we tend to extol the amoeba. Live forever, amoeba. Mortal, you will die. That’s cold, stark fact, and there’s nothing romantic about it. Death is the enemy, the last enemy to be defeated, and it is not I—or any scientist—who will defeat it. The defeat of death was prefigured in the Resurrection, and what that means not one of us will know in terms of provable fact while we are in this life. But until we stop thinking of death as failure, we will never have either a theology of
death or an understanding of Christian marriage.

  Sometimes it seems that the Church has forgotten this in its rush to conform to the world. Everything is being made easy for us. Everything is permissible. Divorce and remarriage are almost as unimportant as they are in the secular world, where marriage is a legal contract made before a justice of the peace and not a covenant made before God. I understand casual divorce where the mighty and terrible promises have not been made in the sight of God. And I also understand that sometimes even when the promises are made in good faith, the marriage which follows is not marriage, never has been, or no longer is, and I am glad that the Church is looking on such marriages with more compassion than it used to in the legalistic days. But compassion is not the same thing as permissiveness, and the pendulum, as usual, has swung too far, and no one seems to notice that the sexual permissiveness in the Church hasn’t made a happier people of God. Where little is demanded of the people, the pews become emptier each year. All of us, like our children, want standards upheld for us. If I am not expected to grow and deepen in faithful and chaste love, I’m less likely to be able to stand firm when the tempter comes and tells me it’s really all right to go out to dinner and probably to bed with the attractive man who sits next to me on the plane; it really won’t do anything to my marriage.

  In a sense Hugh and I have an ‘open marriage,’ but it has never involved playing around and making light of our promises. I am free to leave him for a week or more to lecture at universities, to teach at writers’ conferences, conduct retreats, just as he is free to go away from me for weeks at a time with a play or to make a movie. We have a theory that one reason our marriage has lasted so long is that we never eat breakfast together. Hugh likes to emerge slowly in the morning, breakfast, newspaper, crossword puzzle, shave, shower; whereas I, once I have managed the heavy athletic feat of getting my feet out of bed and onto the floor, am ready to talk. So I roll into my clothes, fill my thermos with coffee, call Timothy, and set off for the Cathedral library.