middle of night things

What a joy is a middle of night rising: this time, I had some of that cloudy sake and those seaweed thinner than thin crunchy wafers -- these with brown sugar taste -- that melt instantly on your tongue, like the Japanese flowers that blossom instantly in the water. Very Proust. Trying to translate Yves Bonnefoy's writing on his wander through the Louvre in something of his style --how I wish I could. Having tried over the years with various of his superbly elusive poems and writings on art, this time I'd like it to work.

Of course, life keeps seeping in: recommendations here and there, readings of chapters in dissertations, reviewing books you think should be noticed, or swatting through a book you were excited about, and then it got long. Alas, this happened with How to Live, the one about Montaigne, wonderfully conceived, but exuding length, and most recently, with A Man of Misconceptions, about the incredible Athanasius Kircher.  Incredible he was, but it doesn't have the holding power that we all wish our writings and musings would have.. A feeble wish, but a real one. 

the old regime

So when I got up this time -- I like interrupting the sleep hours with an intermission, and it seems to give you a whole other time, not a whole day, maybe, but some time -- I had (I am having now) a piece of ginger, a bordeaux cookie (you know, pepperidge farm --crunchy always) and a glass of milk with a splash of the lesast expensive rum in it -- it was with a feeling of relief. Sure, the world news is always depressing beyond belief, and my beloved son-in-law married to my truly truly brilliant daughter Hilary, doesn't watch or read the news, and that's probably a not-bad idea, but here's the thing of it right now.

I am writing about my grandmother the painter, my iconic ideal of a person who knew how to live, and it turns out that her great-grandmother was a slaveholder in the old south. WHAT? yes, and she wrote a book called white and black under the old regime, yes, with pictures of herself and her husband: the first confederate colonel and then a major general (this is in the wrong army, from most of us's point of view), then a judge, then the president of the University of Alabama.

Now when, years ago, I wanted to find somewhere to publish my then memoir (To the Boathouse, it was called, and, as I just love to tell people, when they sent the proofs to me, saying "we have sent you the proofs of To the Lighthouse, I could only reply, well, I thought it was perfect already-- it wasn't to test their ironic sense, they are a great publishing venture), I suspected that they would HAVE to publish it because of Henry Clayton, my great=great=grandfather having been their president in years, many years, gone by. They did. I still like that book: Yves Bonnefoy said last year it was my best book, well, maybe. Maybe the rest are parasitic on someone else's life and creations: this one surely isn't. But it caused havoc in my personal then-life. Well, some things do that with and to some people. I suppose we just move on.

Anyway, now I am reading this, by Henry Clayton, Colonel  Judge President Henry Clayton's loyal writing wife,  Victoria Virginia Clayton, and thinking how to include some of it in what I am writing about my grandmother, the painter Margaret Walthour Lippitt. (Ah, will I find a publisher for this book about her, with her life from Alabama to Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina, to Paris, to Bremen and the Worpswede painters, to New York and the artistic group at des Artistes on 67th street, and in Lyme, connecticut -- now called "Old Lyme" -- and Linville, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains,  which shingled house and her studio I loved beyond all belief, to  a plantation called Clarendon? some day, I will ask my agent, but I have to write it first, perhaps) , anyway  I HAVE to talk about it a little, and the other night I was having dinner with two friend historians, Meg Crahan and Dorothy O. Helly, and was expostulating about all this. I mean, she kept slaves, and what do I do about this, just not discuss her heritage in Alabama? They were -- as all the women in my women writing women's lives seminar (we meet once a month) have always been -- supportive in every way.
Yes, I have to deal with it.

This reminds me of all those things we go through and watch out children go through: just deal with it, I can hear people say, just deal with it.

Ok, in the daytime, I have to write this chapter today, or it will linger and linger -- I loved reading about the joys of procrastination today in the New York Time when I was waiting for my flu and penumonia shots... But I will have to write it today, or else, why did I get up to write this?

Paris indeed

paris indeed

haven't been writing HERE because of living THERE, as in Paris, for a thesis defense, MUCH ENJOYED, on surrealist exhibitions in North America (and Mexico, some stress upon), from 1930, 31 --first, Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, directed by Chick Austin (whose daughter, Sally Austin, made Joseph Cornell-like boxes, and whose biography, brief, I was asked to write), and then Julien Levy, in New York, more famous, and where the excitement  continued. Dali's entrance into America sent the surrealism publicity into tailspin, AND made the movement more (perhaps alas) acceptable to the cultural atmosphere. Then the really big things, in 1940... 1960, around which this thesis -- interestingly written by Susan Power -- turns. I loved being on the jury, because you get flown over and hotelled for 3 days, AND you get to see the people you wanted to see anyway, AND you feel part of things. And lunch at La Palette, just munching outside... and Le Procope, which I like FAR LESS than the old standby on Monsieur-le-Prince, oh what's it's name, you know if you are reading this, POLIDOR,  no reservations, and then you can rush down the street to the cinema,
 and having breakfast at Le Rostand, across from the Luxembourg gardens, best croissants in Paris, and the hot milk in a little jug...
In fact, it was so grand just wandering around one's Paris streets (for me, only the 5th and the 6th arrondissements), and seeing Marilyn Hacker, great Translator of poetry, Monique Chefdor, world's authority on Eugene Guillevic, the Breton poet, and also Blaise Cendrars, and so on, including my favorite poet living in France, Yves Bonnefoy, and the wonderful art writer, Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat, and staying a bit -- ah, too short, with Marie-Claire Dumas, my French sister, because of her generosity from way back, she who knows everything about Robert Desnos, easily the greatest surrealist poet, to my mind. AND we went to see Pierrette Leveque, who is involved in the rue Blomet, and the idea of Blomet Paradiso, hope someday to have an exhibition about that -- am now writing on Miro and his poet friends...when I dislodge myself from Pierre Reverdy and all the translations of his greatest poems I am gathering....
ah, the joys of caring about poetry!
And now back in New York, how not to love being here? the park and the well everything...