Frances and Bernard

May 1, 1959

Dear Frances—

Will you smuggle me in more books next weekend? My mother did not bring me the Shakespeare I asked for—she brought some Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr instead. “Your mind must be tired,” she said, “and I don’t think it’ll do to be revving it up with Shakespeare. I know you won’t watch television but I thought some whodunits might be entertaining.”

I can’t stand mysteries. In the same way I can’t stand science fiction. Why pretend we’re somewhere else? Forensics is a feint. Why distract ourselves from the eternal questions with set dressing? Salad dressing.

Would you mind bringing me copies of Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale? My mother offers one pudding and Ted another: Ted says there’s no better time than losing your mind to cleave to the decencies and unremarkable sentences of the Victorian novel, sentences bearing plot to the reader like freight car after freight car carrying cargo to its destination in Leeds. The way he has described the work of Trollope and Gissing and Thackeray, I now want the oasis of decency and plain English the way I want a roast chicken: there is secret opulence in both. Ted says not to worry; if I like these books it doesn’t mean I’ll end up married like him. That broke my heart, to hear Ted already joking but not joking about the death that is marriage. Do you know I have never read Vanity Fair? In my mind I had confused it with your Little Women, but Ted assures me that it’s only a girls’ book if you think Becky Sharp is a role model. It’s really a pirate novel, he says.

The people here are all crushed cigarette stubs of people. Bent, white, ashen, diminished. Myself included.

I sleep the way some people commit suicide.

The priest here is, as you might say, a perfect ninny. He gave me a book by Bishop Sheen. That made me go black for a day or two. I started to think that maybe God is as small as the minds who love him blindly.

All there is to do here is sleep, read, eat, stare out the window, or write Frances a long letter.

I wonder if God is playing a joke on me—the girls here are caricatures of all the women I’ve been with, or wanted to be with. There’s a girl with yellow braids and a severe brow who’s always carrying a copy of Imitation of Christ; a dark-haired girl who touches my feet under the table at meals but ignores me in the hall; a girl with auburn hair who speaks to me only in puns. Now I think I know what the nunnery must have been like for you. The psychiatrist who’s analyzing me will tell you that these girls are all variations on my mother. I don’t want to believe him, because how could I have been so obviously Oedipal? Aren’t we much more than a collective impulse to frustrate and be frustrated? But I wonder now if it’s not free will but the unconscious that we have been given. I wonder what of your mother was encoded in you without your knowing; what of your life is a letter she wrote you that you have just opened and will take your whole life to read.

Love,

Bernard





May 15, 1959

Dear Frances—

Thank you for bringing me those books. How beautiful the sight of you in your green and white striped dress. I suppose you’d say I’m only saying that because I’m in a nut house, and you were the only person who had washed in a week and was not catatonic. But I am going to say it again: how beautiful. Like cream, like clover blossoms. Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you’re thinking bloom upon your face, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather.

I think you have forgiven me. Have you forgiven me?

It’s three in the afternoon, between herdings to and from meals, and I’m finding myself in a moment where I needed to talk to someone I love. I don’t talk much to the other patients here. I don’t really want to talk to anyone here, for fear it is revealed just how deep the similarities are between me and the old woman who pops out of her window every day at noon crying cuckoo across the quad. The narcissism of small differences, I suppose. I am forcing myself to read, even though I have to fight to stay interested past the first few pages. I keep it up, even if an hour goes by between pages, because I don’t want this drug to have the last word on the strength of my spirit. I need to prove to myself that I can willingly inhabit worlds other than my own.

I don’t like to look at myself in the mirror either. I have aged overnight. Some days I look gaunt as El Greco’s Saint James, others I look as bejowled as my grandmother. In general I appear as cratered and evacuated of sense as the moon. My hair annoys me. Full, unruly, standing at attention, suggestive of robust and hardy vegetation, it seems to me an accessory left behind from a costume I’d been renting out. I leave it uncombed as punishment for its mockery of my otherwise gelatinous state. The nurses are always trying to get at it.

But I am very glad to hear that John is delighted by the novel. This is a thought I have been returning to, because it brings me what feels like happiness.

I’ll take my leave now. I only want to keep writing about how beautiful you are, and I do not want to risk your censure. How beautiful, and yet you suffer this Polyphemus groping for you from his dark cave.

Love,

Bernard





May 21, 1959

Dear Bernard—

I will see you in a few days, but I wanted you to have something to read in the meantime that wasn’t a mimeographed sheet telling you what not to take with your orange juice. I want to get this in the last mail, so it will be short.

Please keep reading. I think that is a good idea. I wanted to tell you that I have been reading Cymbeline too—I’ve never read it, which I’m sure you can believe—and in fact I just finished it, so when I see you we will talk about it some. They say it’s a clunker, but I do like this line, from the end: “Pardon’s the word to all.”

I think you look as kind as you have always looked.

Yours,

Frances





PS. Although I think you should let the nurses at your sagebrush.

If only for your mother’s sake. And maybe mine?





June 1, 1959

Dear John—

I hope this letter finds you still enjoying England. If you have found any books over there that merit looking into, would you let me know?

I told you I would write you again about visiting Bernard, so here I am. They’re letting him out on the fifteenth, and it seems like he’s going to stay with his parents for the rest of the summer before moving to New York to take a teaching job at Hunter College. I think this may be one of those times where even ineffectual parents are better than no parents at all. Bernard is just humbled enough now to accept their care, and they seem humbled enough to swallow their objection to his being Bernard instead of an obedient son.

He seems better. Although I have no idea what better means, in this context. I think what I mean is that he seems eager to leave the hospital and resume his life, and that the people who run the hospital are going to let him. I worry about him a little because I sense that he is afraid of himself—that he thinks of himself now as a loaded gun likely to go off at anytime without warning. All I can do is pray for him and try to make him laugh when I see him—and not mind how feeble those two gestures are.

I know Bernard would love to see you when you get back. Your letters have been cheering. If you want to make plans to visit him, let me know and Ted McCoy will drive us out.

Yours,

Frances





July 12, 1959

Dear Claire—

Do you know what heaven must be like? I mean, a child’s conception of heaven—a place you dread being caught dead in because it must be everlastingly quiet and mirthless? It must be like Proper Boston. Which is where Bernard’s parents reside. Every time I took a step in their house I swear I heard the china and silverware rattle—no doubt an alarm to let the ancient Proper Bostonians know that some Irish servant girl’s descendant was trespassing on their grounds, possibly with the intent to burgle—and in the deep silence a grandfather clock ticked off every eternal second. The house looked like the Colonial-era period rooms I remember staring into at the art museum: mahogany chests sitting like thrones in every room, discreet whispers of pewter and white lace. Bernard’s parents were perfectly civil, but they seemed to have no actual life in them. His mother asked questions but didn’t seem to care how you answered, and his father fell asleep at the table just before coffee was brought out. Bernard then woke his father up by whistling through his fingers, which is how he said his father used to wake him up when he was a teenager. “Do you want to give your father a heart attack right now, Bernard?” his mother said, floating toward the table with the coffee tray in a haze of matriarchal serenity. I just let Ted and John make the small talk.

We spent much of the visit in their small backyard, which featured many handsome rosebushes. (I couldn’t help but notice they did not look as bug-eaten as the ones my father always tries to get going in milk cans outside our front door.) I could not say for sure but I thought Bernard seemed rested and close to something like well. He said he was writing, and had written seventy pages of something that didn’t seem a failure. He joked, he listened attentively, he pried some gossip out of John (no man hath greater love than this, that he lay down his scruples for his friend Lazarus). After half an hour or so he sent Ted and John away—“Go talk to my father about the war,” he told them, and they obliged—and then I panicked, wondering if he was going to become romantic. He took my hand, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it with no small amount of grief. I stopped panicking and felt grief too. He kissed my hand even harder, and then eventually set it down on my knee without letting it go. “It’s terrible,” he said. “You answered a letter and befriended a monster.” At this his mother arrived in the yard. She clucked her tongue and both of us looked up, startled. (I have never seen Bernard startled. He’s usually the thing doing the startling.) “Stop that this instant,” she said to him, and I noticed her chin trembling. “You are no such thing.” Neither of us said a word. “Now, would you two like something to drink?” she said. By this time he had composed himself. I didn’t think people’s chins actually trembled, but hers did. “No, thank you, Mother,” he said. And I could tell that he was pleased that she had intervened in some way on his behalf because of the note of gratified surprise in his voice. From what he’s told me, that kind of protective, affectionate rap on the knuckles was rare. We were silent for a few moments, and then he began to stroke my hair, and I let him, even though I thought he might have been trying to push his luck. I didn’t have the heart to crab about it. After a while Ted came into the yard and gave me a look that told me I was doing the right thing. “Time’s up, Dante,” he said. “I came back here because John was too nice to. Come on, reward us by rejoining the household.”

Later there were another few minutes of panic. After lunch, when the men had gone out back to smoke their various tobacco items, I was left alone at the table with Mother Eliot. Who said, as if two hours hadn’t gone by between the yard and lunch: “He’s grown self-pitying. I’ll have none of it.” It’s true that Bernard’s penchant for exaggeration is trying, and it’s true that I was glad she rapped his knuckles so I didn’t have to, but her lack of compassion gave me the crazy thought that I needed to get him home so my aunts could swaddle his convalescence in good cheer. Before I knew what I was doing I heard myself replying: “If there was ever anything to be self-pitying about, losing your mind might be it.” She gave me a look that chilled my blood. At the time I thought it chilled my blood because it did not differ much from the looks Bernard gave me that day in March. There was a kind of glazed fire behind her eyes, and it wiped out any sense that she was speaking to another human being, let alone a human being who had a point worth considering. But now I’m not sure I saw what I thought I did.

I was glad to be in a car with Ted and John shortly after that. Although Bernard did seem very happy to see us. And I was happy to see him that way.

So that is the news. That and the tops of my feet are peeling something fierce because I went out to Rockaway Beach for the day with a girl from work and I forgot to put Coppertone on them. Send me some of your news, and soon.

Love,

Frances





July 12, 1959

Dear Frances—

So now you have seen the Eliot manse. What did it look like through your eyes?

I felt so lucky to have the three of you here. Did you notice the way John gave up the gossip on Carl and Nancy? I actually think John rather enjoyed setting that story out—the way his smile grew deeper and ever more sly at each piece of information he divulged it was as if he were proudly spreading caviar over a very long loaf of pumpernickel for us all.

I think I need to apologize for petting your hair as I did. I do, don’t I?

What is there to say? I miss you already. Now what. My mother is trying to get me to quit smoking by throwing out the packs of cigarettes she finds lying around the house. There are many, because I lose them moving from bedroom to kitchen to yard and I have to buy more to replace them, and so on and so forth. She didn’t like you, I have to say. I find this amusing. “Where did you meet that girl again?” she said yesterday, and I could hear the rest of that thought hanging in the air: It surely wasn’t Smith College. I think she can tell that you take pains not to know your place, and she wants to know who or what encouraged this wildness. I think she can also tell that I love you for it.

I’m glad to be recovering in the summer. Isn’t that silly? I’ve lived most of my life on an academic schedule, so I am used to being set loose to loaf during these months. I can pretend that being set loose to recuperate is not that different. And there are many other people on furlough from their lives now—I can tell myself that I have not fallen too far out of step with the rhythms of reality.

Now that I am off the drug, I can sit in the sun. I come out in the garden every day to celebrate this fact. My mother has just opened a window to tell me to put some zinc on my nose. It is noon now, and I think I may be out here until the sky ripens into a peach-bottomed plum, just because I can.

I would have prayed to be delivered from that drug if I’d had the ability to conceive of words that expressed preference, or hope. I didn’t care that I wasn’t writing because I didn’t care about anything. That was similar to what I’d felt during various depressions—words always out of reach. Words on a shelf too high for my lazy, faithless arms; words blurred and smeared around the sides of the errant crucible that was my mind; words a thing I had been smitten with now betraying me with their dullness. But this was worse. My mind was a ball of steel wool and lard.

When they took me off the drug, I had a few panic attacks, it appears, waiting for my will to return. I did not think it would. But here I am, at my parents’ house, sitting in the sun, in their yard, writing you. I don’t feel cured, but I do feel glad to go to bed without wishing for sleep to extinguish me. I did not think that was possible. I see that I may have my family in me after all—the other day my father said that everyone’s been concerned for my health, but “no one likes a layabout.” I would never have said a thing like that, but I am interested in, I am committed to, as he might say, moving along. It’s not unlike the difference between nausea and health: when you’re well you can’t imagine what it’s like to be ill, you’ve forgotten the exact dimensions of the squirming lassitude, and when you’re ill, you pant for wellness, whose sturdy contours now seem the unimaginable thing. The sane you, the real you—it must have been real, why else the innumerable vivid scenes of leaving your house and ending up exactly where you intended, of speaking swiftly and unselfconsciously and being understood, of being enchanted by small joys, your own and others’? You know it must have been real, but now you are not so sure—that dependable, uninterrupted flow of thought and action now seems a fiction, not your broken mind. But here I am in the yard. Here are birds. I’m writing, and I’ve written more than I thought I would. The neighbors’ sweetly rotund daughter is making a halting mess of Schumann on the piano. And now a church bell comes in, tolling “This Is My Father’s World,” and she gives up the Schumann to play along with hygienic Sunday school zeal. I want to tell her that may be a wise choice, to take refuge from one of the most Romantic of the Romantics in the orderly march of hymns. I close my eyes, then open them, and the scene is fixed; it does not spin or buckle. I close my eyes, then open them, and: the same. So I keep on writing.

Frances, you too are fixed for me, you do not spin. You won’t again, if I can help it.

Neither one of us really wants to speak of what happened now that we are in the light, I can tell, and I think that’s best. Here is one case, Frances dear, in which I am glad of your reticence. I’ve spent enough time lately trying to figure out how my parents, and their parents, and their parents, etc., created the conditions that led me to the hospital. In the beginning I was glad of the chance to blame. When it comes to blaming one’s parents, everyone loves the feel of a lighted torch in the hand, especially when it appears that torch is being handed to you by a Harvard-laureled practitioner of one of the West’s great interpretive frameworks. But that flame died quickly and I felt crushed by the weight of my parents’ blindness. I now feel sorry, somewhat, for my mother and father. I’m trying to feel sorry for them so that I don’t feel sorry for myself.

Don’t feel sorry for me, or afraid of me. Please remain my friend.

Love,

Bernard





July 20, 1959

Dear Bernard—

I was very much moved by your letter.

I will of course remain your friend.

What did I think of the Eliot manse? Well, it was impressive in the way it came off as both austere and lavish. Should there ever be a Marxist revolution on American soil, your parents will be safe, as their people taught them how to hide in plain sight. But really and truly, I was most jealous of your mother’s splendiferous roses. If I one day happen to have a yard all my own, splendiferous rosebushes will be the first order of business. The yellow ones were my favorites—pale and frothy, as if they would smell of eggnog and not roses.

Let’s just say that your mother and I seem to have decided that we will not have a mutual admiration society.

You’re right—I do feel hesitant to talk about what happened. My people, for better and for worse, taught me how to hide what was too difficult to bear. I feel shy as I write to you. I don’t want to say anything that’s beside the point. One of the things I want to say I know is childish, but I mean it with my whole heart: I hope you never have to take Thorazine again.

I want you to feel hope more than you feel despair. That is what I have been praying for.

Yours,

Frances





July 30, 1959

Frances, my dearest dear. My mind might be a little potholed right now, but I think my heart is as sturdy as ever. Don’t handle me lightly. Tell me what you’re thinking.

I have a feeling that after you read this you’re going to take me at my word, and with a vengeance.

When I read your letter and thought about you praying for me, I felt that I needed to confess some thoughts to you. I have been thinking—it is all I can do here—and you are the only person to whom I can write these thoughts. You won’t like them, but I have to confess them to you.

Do you remember what you wrote about Simone Weil? How she wrote that it’s sort of humorous, the line “Our father, who art in heaven”? I am beginning to see that it is indeed humorous. That it is ludicrous. That I was deluded in my imagining that I could communicate with him. I think you, rightly, keep this in mind as a way of remaining humble, of purging your faith of craven obedience—if he can’t answer you, he can’t hold anything over you. I wanted to have this sort of humility and patience myself. Now I think I never did, and so perhaps I really never did receive him.

I have been thinking about the letter you wrote to me after the book came out. You did not say that I was poetizing my love for God, but I see now that’s what I was doing. I wonder how deeply his word had a place in my life. I wonder how deeply he had worked his way in. I wonder what I was doing when I was praying. When the abbot saw me—now I see what he saw.

Who was I praying to? Was I straining, and did the straining lead to silence? Did my straining serve only myself? I wanted to feel something. So I trumpeted loudly, waiting for the selfishness in me to fall. Another Old Testament metaphor: I built myself a god who was not God, who was only myself made boundless. When I review all the things I did while I thought I was in the throes of what I might have called the Holy Spirit, I see everything I did as one more gold earring tossed into the fire. My fervor was self-adornment.

When I think about all my fervor, and realize that God is an image thrown up by my illness, it’s very hard for me to understand my faith as anything other than a fever dream. Especially when I am said to have said what I did during my episode. Faith is now inextricably linked to madness for me. This is a great sorrow. I wish very much for you to believe that it is a great sorrow.

I will never be the sort of person who despises religion.

And my faith also might have been fueled by a great fear—I wanted an ancestry that would not be the meaningless ancestry of my family: blood, land, money. I wanted a lineage, and what better church in which to seek a lineage?

So all of this is seeming very much like fear, obstinacy, vanity, and illness.

To go on in it would be like going on in a marriage after one discovers unfaithfulness. I know some people would dig in to the marriage, would fight for what they believed to be the truth about the marriage, which was that it was a good thing that has been wounded, and they would use their love to stanch the flow. But I see the uselessness of that kind of love now—that love may not be love, but fear. I could not stand under God now with a pure, expectant heart. After all that’s happened, I think my heart still has something pure and hopeful in it—if it didn’t I wouldn’t be writing you. But I don’t want to think that there’s a supernatural tone whose object is to extract purity from me. I went back and read Augustine last week and his own need for God is his own need for God—I am not moved. I am moved by the tenderness with which he comes to philosophic problems of memory, of time, and metaphors of creation, but I do not feel moved to capitulate as he capitulated. I once met a former priest—turned atheist by the war—who told me that every time he read the Confessions he found himself lured back to a desire for belief because of Augustine’s description of a God who would not give up on us. But I am utterly immune to the chords he’s playing.

I am sorry.

Love,

Bernard