17 March 1956
Dear Philip—

Something quite astonishing has occurred. No, I haven't fallen either in or out of love, in any literal sense; I haven't changed jobs; I haven't been offered a contract for my novel. On the contrary, just about a month ago I wrote a letter to the agent, asking him to put the manuscript on the shelf – and this decision, which I was able to arrive at only little by little and at the cost of some slight ego-mortification, appears to have precipitated what was to follow. Launched it, rather – it wasn't a plunge but simply a casting-off, in the nautical sense and possibly the theological as well. I had not only admitted that the novel would have to be rewritten from the beginning if it were ever to satisfy me; I had also admitted that though I knew to a certain extent what needed to be done, I was not at all sure that I was, or ever would be, capable of doing it.

This was a pretty hard admission, but once I had brought myself to the point of making it, it no longer seemed painful, but almost a kind of relief. Since the new year began I had found myself so unaccountably happy, so confidently sociable, that I had come to wonder whether my particular talent was for writing at all, whether it wasn't something far more modest but probably more satisfying, and just possibly somewhat less usual – a talent for living, for being happy. (I begin to think now that such a talent is after all much more prevalent than I suspected – but this is to anticipate. But I see you skipping lines already, or at least wishing the creature would come to the point. But the creature is garrulous, you know, and besides the point, if you skip at all, is likely to become invisible. Patience and forbearance, I pray – I threatened a long letter, and it is barely started.) [...]

New paragraph. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Having written my letter, I signed, sealed and stamped it and deposited it in a corner mail-box to forestall any temptation to backslide, procrastinate and possibly change my mind. Then I took the subway to Overlook Terrace, to pay that visit to the Cloisters which I wrote you, I think, about being frustrated from paying earlier in the week. I forget if you have ever been there. If not, the next time you come to New York a visit is absolutely required. It's a beautiful place, both in its contents and in its location. On a sunny afternoon, as this one was, its location high on a bluff above the Hudson, facing the Palisades, is bathed in light, both direct and reflected. There are ramparts where you can walk in the open, and inside there are gardens where, just as I had hoped, some hothouse daffodils and crocuses and narcissus were already in bloom – the Cloisters proper. Or rather, not proper – a true cloister does not exist in any aggregate, but is simply an enclosed courtyard, quite generally, if not always, open at its center to the elements, and attached to a church or a monastery – a place not for formal worship, but simply for walking and meditation. Rockefeller money has made a museum of various elements of a number of cloisters, most of them from different regions in France, and there are odd pieces of painting, sculpture, stained glass, metalwork, enamel, and so on, dating to the middle ages. These, and above all tapestries. The really glorious treasure is a roomful of these which have to do with the mythological hunt for the unicorn. I have always loved them – everybody does – but on that afternoon I felt that I had discovered them for the first time. Before then I had been inclined to regard tapestry, even so marvelous a specimen of it, as a minor art, a sort of inferior brand of painting. But on that afternoon, while I wandered in and out, visually speaking, among the little wild strawberries, the bluebells and daisies and periwinkles and dozens of other flowers (so faithfully rendered that nearly all have been botanically identified) which are woven into the background of each of the scenes of the hunt, for the very reason that it was a composite work rather than that of a single individual – and not only composite but anonymous; not only the weavers, but the designer and even the place of origin are unknown, and even for whom it was commissioned is a matter of conjecture – I found it more satisfactory than painting. I don't know that I was intellectually conscious of any reason for this preference; I don't know that I was intellectually conscious of anything except thorough enjoyment. The place was full of people, most of whom had cameras and who appeared to have come primarily for the purpose of taking snapshots of each other; even so, I didn't mind them in the least. When it came time for the regular Sunday program of transcribed medieval music, I found myself a stone, instead of a chair, to sit on, and watched them file in. And after a while, when the first Kyrie started, I stopped watching the people and simply concentrated on listening to the music and watching the sunlight come in at a thirteenth-century window. The Kyrie, which of course is a cry for mercy, and the sun on the stone, a purely physical phenomenon, seemed while I listened to have some affinity, almost to be one and the same thing. After a while, when the music changed to something else, I was mildly aware that while this was going on I had – perhaps for no more than an instant, but there is no measuring this kind of experience – entirely forgotten my own existence. It is the sort of thing that has happened to me a few times in my life, but always before in moments of great excitement and with a kind of incredulity surrounding it like an iron ring. This time there was no iron ring, no excitement, no surprise even, but a serenity so complete that I hardly thought about it just then, I simply took it for granted. Possibly this is what is supposed to take place at baptism – but if baptism it was, it wasn't of water, but of light. By this time it was late afternoon, and with the reflection from the river so bright that you could barely look at it directly, the whole hilltop, the whole world was fairly brimming with radiance. I walked around for a while, looked at the people, and walked to the subway, rather tired, and yet rested too, and pleased with everything.

New paragraph. That evening my friend Peter called, full of things he wanted to talk about, and I told him to come by. You almost met him once; on that evening when we went to the concert in Washington Square, and I had no idea he was around, he spotted us walking, too far away to be hailed. Perhaps it was just as well, at the time. Since our extremely odd first meeting in Paris, when we sat in cafes, engaged in a sort of double monologue, a contest to see who could out-talk the other, both more interested in our own thoughts than in the other's, and since his sudden reappearance in New York, when – both of us somewhat older and surer of ourselves, though not so very sure at that – we resumed the double monologue, we have gradually arrived, through a number of rather tense and quarrelsome vicissitudes, at something approaching that living equilibrium that is perfect friendship. So long as a relationship is alive I suppose new tensions must arise and be resolved, but it appears that since the new year began – significantly, he came by for a while on New Year's Day – the last lingering traces of distrust have disappeared. Not being involved in any romantic sense, we have been able to share each other's fears and frustrations, and, more and more, each other's enthusiasms; but behind all this, until very recently, there still lurked a suspicion on my part that he might be nothing more, after all, than a somewhat promiscuous, irresponsible and pretentious, working-class-Italian ne'er-do-well (God!), and on his, I rather suspect, that I was nothing more than a priggishly literary, pretentious, white-collar-middle-class American fraud (wow!) Just before Christmas, in fact, we arrived at a kind of deadlock. I forget exactly the terms of the argument, but I went on secretly fuming at him, even though I appeared to have won, until he did something so characteristic and so perfect that all the fuming simply went out of me: I had been reading the letters of Keats, which sent me back to the poetry; I remarked that I had never read all of Endymion, and couldn't, because I didn't own the complete poems. A few days later he appeared with a Poetical Works of Keats, dated 1865, which he had picked up in a bookstall in Florence. It had cost him only a few lire, and it was certainly no sacrifice for him to give it away, but it was his own purely spontaneous gesture; and besides, between the leaves were some pressed flowers – a piece of red may and a magnolia petal he had picked up in Lerici, and also a violet, some sprigs of lilac, and what appears to have been a carnation, which has left its ghost printed on the pages, and dating to when and where nobody, now, will ever know.... Well. Peter was full, that evening, of a strange book about Quattrocento stone-carving which I had lent him, though I haven't yet read it. It came from the girl in England who owned half of the antique taxi in which I went south through France, and to make connections with whom I had come back to Paris when I met Peter (how the connections and interconnections do multiply! I hadn't thought of that one until just now); she has since married the owner of the other half of the taxi, though the taxi itself was long since sold, and they now have a Bugatti (Italian racing model) and a baby, and ever since I saw the book in her apartment in London and was fascinated by it she had been trying to get around to send me a copy of it. And the odd thing is that though I haven't actually read the book myself, I seem already to know it better than if I had, from hearing Peter talk about it. He knows it now practically by heart, and something from it must have been behind, or in, my feeling about the affinity between the music of the Kyrie and the light on the stone. Do you begin to see what I mean about weavers and tapestry? I think I only begin to see it myself. Anyhow, we both talked, that evening, and we both listened, though my main enthusiasm was still for the tapestries and his for Quattrocento stone carving; and I read him some of the letters of Katherine Mansfield, with which I had for a while been almost excruciatingly involved, simply because they are so beautiful, and were both so carried away by her description of a nightmare journey to Marseilles, a sea-storm on the Riviera, and the morning when she first coughed up blood, read Keats, and knew she was going to die, that we came out of it blinking, not quite sure where we were. The fear of death is what more than anything else gives her letters their beauty, and I had found myself almost envying the intensity even of her fear – though the truth is that I have felt something like it at times, and it is not a thing one ought to envy. But it was as though, that afternoon, any possibility of envy like this had been obliterated. It was only by degrees that I began to be able to describe to myself the experience which was not a temporary extinction of personality, but the opposite: for the first time in my life, without even knowing that I knew it, I had been without fear. This is the negative way of stating it. The positive statement has ramifications which are still unfolding, and for all I know they will go on unfolding forever. I did not know that this was what had happened until I began to describe my afternoon in the journal which I have been keeping (Peter's suggestion) faithfully but spasmodically since New Year's. Before I had finished the entry it interested me so much that I decided to try to make a short story out of it, purely for the exercise. And then something happened which I could absolutely never have predicted: I have not altogether recovered yet from the surprise, though I suppose I shall get used to it in time. Quite as though they had a will of their own, the sentences broke in a way that was not my usual style at all. Rather frightened, I must admit, for the moment, I let them break. The next thing I knew, they had begun to reach out for rhymes. This frightened me almost more, until I discovered that finding a rhyme could be almost as natural a process as the resolution of a dominant chord: I didn't have to look for them, they simply came. Now I have not even so much as a thought of wanting to write poetry since I was about sixteen and produced the usual sixteen-year-old effusions. I associated writing in verse with adolescence; there was a time, even, when I stopped reading poetry, though that was terminated a good while back. So here I am, writing a long poem. It is already something like five hundred lines, and though the end appears to be in sight, I am not sure. When it is finished – as I now feel it absolutely must be by Easter at the latest – you shall see it, if you want to. What I am to do with it otherwise, I haven't the faintest idea. What it appears to be, anyhow, is a kind of natural history of belief – religious belief, which is after all the only real kind. Because, having discovered what it was to be without fear, I also discovered that everything, in a way that is complex but entire and simple, made sense.

At which point, you will not be surprised to learn (if indeed you have not long ago done likewise) I did fall by the wayside. It is now Monday, and there has intervened an absolute mountain of snow. It snowed all day yesterday and all day today, and the way it leans, banked a foot deep, against the window-panes, is straight out of Emily Brontë [Clampitt misquotes slightly]:

Cold in the earth! the snow piled deep above thee,
Far, far removed in the cold of the dreary grave,
My only love, have I forgot to love thee . . .

Not that I echo any such sentiment. The Brontés are a kind of family apotheosis of the death-wish, and Emily was the apotheosis of the apotheosis – Wuthering Heights is one long cry to be buried and reunited with the earth. So of course she had to die early – it was her wish. This just came to me. I feel as if I could write a whole history of English literature, and know just where to place everybody in it, with hardly any trouble at all. The reason being, apparently, that I feel I am in it. This will be true whether or not I am recognized now, or remembered later – and though (however many rash statements I may make) I don't think I ordinarily make rash predictions, I feel that this may happen too. I suppose you can preserve this as a piece of documentary evidence, whichever way it turns out. But I have been walking around in places familiar to Blake and Shelley, and I don't know who else. I have a vague idea that I may share a family resemblance with those two, though they are not my masters. I think I know now who those masters are: Thoreau is the first and Dante the last, and in between, oddly, and yet not so oddly, there is Henry James; and they are, all three, of the kingdom of heaven. But this is something I don't really ask anybody else to understand, and it doesn't especially matter.

I have finished my poem. I finished it early last evening – there will be lines that need tidying up here and there, but otherwise it is complete – flat on my back, because I was simply too done in to go on sitting up. There was something quite uncanny about winding it up in the middle of a driving snowstorm, since it is a poem about light and the end of winter, and here was the season, quite unaccountably and quite unpredicted, reversing itself; it seemed like a conscious and deliberate challenge to what the thing I was doing had to say. Of course this is pure subjectivity, but it is still uncanny, the more so since the storm appears to have been purely local – people were skiing in bright sunlight in the Catskills. And at about four a.m. I was awakened – as any number of other people seem to have been (no, I exaggerate – I heard of two, and I make three) – by what must have been something like the crack of doom. Because there was thunder along with this blizzard. We had the first installment of it on Friday night (respite on Saturday for the St. Patrick's Day parade), and in the middle of the snow there came a really blinding flash (I know of three people besides me who saw that), which I halfway believed, in the split second before thunder ensued, and the return of common sense, might be the beginning of the end of the world. You must really be sure now that I have gone mad. I am just as sure that I haven't. I went into this production a quasi-reactionary, quasi-obscurantist, quasi-orthodox half-believer, and I have emerged a heterodox total believer in the unity of being, in grace, in ultimate human progress, and the absolute freedom of the will. This last was the most surprising discovery – I didn't really know what I thought until I found it coming out this way:

But let light speak:
Know that the will
Is, and was ever, free:
Free at the verge of time, free in the weak,
Primeval, floating cell,
For whom the urge to be
Came not as a command, but as a call.

I looked up what Rachel Carson had to say about the presumed origin of life, and found the intuition confirmed – not that anybody really knows, of course. But it now seems to me that the whole notion of command is [a] piece of human machinery – I would almost say masculine machinery, since the intuition is an extremely feminine one. It seems to me absolutely clear that the beginning of organic existence could not have willed, or imposed on the inorganic, but that it was simply a response to light:

Light, not whose ordination
But whose slow touch slowly awoke
Life, from the dim, the slumbering, the scarcely dreaming sea —

all of which seems highly extraordinary, not because I invented it, but because I didn't invent it – it simply came to me as something which must be so. I also find that I believe, though I could never explain it, the Christian doctrine. I don't mean the dogma. That is machinery that came later. It started with St. Paul, I suppose. Jesus himself had no interest whatever in dogma – what dogma already existed, he seems to have been against. All of which isn't quite fair – I am showing you the horse before the cart, and the cart is after all what one has to see first, since anything of this sort must be approached from behind – otherwise one would be moving backwards. I must sound devilishly witty, but if it is wit, I assure you it isn't devilish – it is simply that I have come upon, all of a sudden, the hidden power of language. The poem hasn't been properly copied out yet, so I can't send it to you now. Anyhow, it is powerful long for any poem written in the twentieth century – something like fourteen single-spaced typewritten pages, or somewhere near seven hundred lines, if I estimate it correctly. How, and even whether, it will manage to get published, I haven't the faintest idea, and so far I don't much care. It can be passed around in manuscript. Nobody buys or reads poetry by living authors, except Eliot, anyhow. The critics get copies sent to them free.

Meanwhile, I am absolutely tuckered out, and to make matters still more tuckering, I am absolutely seething with ideas. The revision of the novel is only one of them. I would like to go to bed for a week, and read about nothing but geology – I have just begun devouring a textbook on the subject whole, in between re-reading, mainly on the subway, the Purgatorio – but I doubt if I actually would, even if it could be managed. Simply living is much too exciting. In the midst of all this – scribbling out lines on little scraps of paper on the subway and during my lunch hour, and even in between answering letters at work – I have been seeing all kinds of people, talking about everything under the sun, hearing the first song sparrow and spotting the first robin and tracking a whick-whick-whicking cardinal to its perch in the top of a tree, discovering spaghetti with green sauce (fresh basil leaves simmered in butter) at an honest-to-goodness workingman's trattoria south of Washington Square, cooking what I must say was a marvelous meal for Peter and his friend Mary (my friend now too, in remarkably short order – the girl who lived in Baghdad, about whom I think I wrote you). What a time we had! The pièce de resistance was a rare roast beef, and we opened a thirty-year-old Burgundy that had, as it happened, just begun to turn to sugar – but it was the kind of calculated risk that only adds a fillip to the occasion by being a fiasco – and we made collages (little framed, pasted-up pictures, you know) out of some pressed leaves and flowers that I had brought back, tenderly preserved between the pages of guidebooks, from Austria and the south of England, and we talked and talked and talked until one o'clock in the morning, and I read them as far as I had got with the then work in progress (with one exception, a gloomy young friend from of old, who tempered and improved it by challenging it with his own uneasy unbelief, nobody else even knows about it so far). But I can't go on like this. I have to go to bed and get ten hours' sleep, and you have already been detained overtime, if you have got this far.

I do wish you would tell me, though, what on earth is going on at that church at Des Moines. If it is really as odious a piece of power-jockeying as Daddy quite unwittingly makes it sound, I should think he would be well out of it. It begins to sound as though none, absolutely none, of these people cared for what the truth about anything might be, but only for holding onto the driver's seat. I suppose I am much too impatient with internecine squabbles, but what good does any of it do anybody? They talk about the mote and the beam, but do any of them actually go off and sit in a corner and let the still small voice have its say? Are any of them really honest with themselves? I feel somehow that Daddy may be letting himself be used. And of course I can't say so – I can't seem to say anything to him lately that I really mean, in fact. The trouble is probably that my feelings have not got over being hurt – not my feelings really, but my tiresome ego, which I really ought to know better than, but which I don't always seem quite able to manage – my ego has not got over being given that book by Milton Mayer for Christmas. I cannot be charitable toward the fellow. He is a charlatan, a show-off, a journalist who dresses up a perfectly voracious, scared, mixed-up need to think well himself in the costume of – oh, I don't know what: liberalism, humanitarianism, it's hard to make out what kind of motley he even thinks it is. He is dishonest. He is so dishonest that he even has to confess to his readers on the other side of the Atlantic that he did not confess to those Germans he went to pry into the psychoses of that he was a Jew, simply because somebody advised him not to – and thinks this makes him honest. And yet, for some inscrutable reason, Daddy approves of him. And I can't tell him in so many words what I really think, though I am convinced that it is true, because it would wound his ego. In fact, I already have, by simply hinting at disapproval. Of course it's complicated still further by my own absolute perverseness in sending him that naughty I, Claudius book for Christmas. Poor man, he read it. He can't for the life of him see why I sent it to him. I know why, now that the damage is done: it's the same thing on both sides, we're still trying to make each other over. You see, apprehending the unity of being doesn't solve one's problems, it only makes one see how many problems there are. Ought one to wound the ego of one's own parent, of whom one is deeply fond and to whom one is endlessly beholden, in the interest of impartiality? Terrible dilemma. I begin to sound as though I wanted you to function as the conciliating intermediary – a burden that should be imposed only on somebody who has no problems, so please don't think I expect you to attempt any such thing. Actually, I just want to unburden myself concerning a subject I don't know how to handle. Maybe, if I stop being impatient, it will come to me, all in good time. Because another part of this queer revelation I seem to have had is that haste, impatience to accomplish anything, is simply the product of fear, and fear is the root of every evil – what I call the primordial sin.

But now this absolutely must not go on any longer. Do please write sometime, whether what I have heaved in your direction like a ton of bricks is assimilable or not. It's a great comfort, as I have said before, to have a brother one can heave things in the direction of. You know, I have to talk – it helps me to think (a joke Eliot put into a dialogue of critics once, but it happens to be perfectly true). I have probably been tedious, but I have a practically unshakable confidence that if so I shall be forgiven. Is it spring out there yet? I have pussy-willows on my mantel now, by the way, which helps.

Love,
Amy

Love, Amy:
The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt
edited by Willard Spiegelman

Columbia University Press
New York

Copyright © 2005 Columbia University Press.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt — Hardcover
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