Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,3

wouldn’t it? I think I prefer to live at the level of what the British call muddle. Muddle with occasional squinting at something that might be called clarity in the distance, so as not to despair.

Sincerely,

Frances

December 6, 1957

Dear Frances—

Points taken. My enthusiasm over finding someone with whom to talk these things over got the better of me.

My sin is poetizing. Can you tell?

As much as you protest, I think I have a better understanding now of the H.S.

Why do you despair?

Italy has ceased to be musical. It now feels decrepit and entombing, and I’m glad to be leaving next week. I’m not even taking pleasure in the fact that my Italian is now as musical as my German is serviceable. I don’t feel indolent anymore either; I feel crushed by effort. I feel that I’m toting slabs of marble around from second guess to second guess.

I have sinned against us—I have spoken of work. Give me a penance.

When I come back I’ll be living in Boston with Ted, a friend of mine—a college roommate whom I call my brother. I’m going to be teaching some classes at Harvard. I’ll also be the editor of the Charles Review. I am looking forward to being back in Boston. I’m not looking forward to being that close again to my parents, but I think I can keep their genteel philistinism at bay. Send me your next letter at the address on the back of this page.

In fact, send me some of that novel you’re working on. I command you.

Yours,

Bernard

December 15, 1957

Bernard—

Please enjoy this postcard depicting Philadelphia’s storied art museum and the mighty Schuylkill. Now you do not ever have to visit.

I hope that you are settling down in Boston. I hope that your marble slabs have become fleshly and alive again.

Oh, I don’t despair of anything. At least right now. I was being hyperbolic. If I did despair, I probably wouldn’t tell you of it, for your sake and mine! And God’s. If I described my despair I would be poetizing and legitimizing it. And I’m not Dostoevsky.

I won’t send you some of the novel just yet—it is still percolating. But I am flattered that you want to see it at all.

Penances are God’s purview, not mine. Instead, I will wish you a merry Christmas. Love and joy come to you, and to your wassail too.

Sincerely,

Frances

January 1, 1958

Dear Frances—

Happy new year! It is 1958. Do you care?

I have turned my book in. Now I am in that terrible period between labors, waiting for editorial orders, pacing the apartment like Hamlet waiting for his father’s ghost. Although I have begun to write what may be poems for the next one, I can’t throw myself into them quite yet. The lines are an insubordinate gang of children who have sized their father up and found him feckless. The only thing to do with this restlessness is talk and drink. Or box. I went to a gym a few times when I was at Harvard, thinking I would take it up, but I quickly abandoned that scheme. “Did you forget your bloomers?” a gentleman once said to me while we were sparring. I knocked him flat and never went back, knowing that I would have wanted to punch me, too, had I been a regular and spied my Ivied, ivory self sauntering through the door. If I didn’t have to teach in a few days, and I keep forgetting that I do, I would probably get on a bus or a plane and hope to be invigorated by foreign context. I thought I had tired of Italy, but now—in frigid, colorless Boston, clouds like lesions, having had a dispiriting dinner with my parents, museum pieces already, immobilized by their complacencies—I wish I were there again, where history hung in the air like incense after a Mass, still alive, where around every corner there lurked a spiritual or architectural delight.

Here is a delight: the prospect of getting to know you better. To that end:

Frances, where in this world have you been besides London?

Where in this world would you like to go?

Have you been reading anything you like? Anything you loathe?

What is your confirmation name, and why?

The gospels or Paul?

Or is that the wrong question entirely?

Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy? Or neither, and instead the whole of Shakespeare?

Or is that the wrong question entirely?

James Baldwin? (Say yes.)

Gossip—in the hierarchy of sins, I’d put it a step or two below venial, wouldn’t you?

Whose food did you most want