Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,5

behaved badly, but it wasn’t because I thought my gift needed to be fed by it. The most talented students this year think that talent absolves them from discipline. Since none of this talent is large enough to make me feel I need to rescue them from this folly, I sit back and watch them bark and loaf as if they were seals on the rocks in Maine. What do I care? I just finished a book; I’m glad of the vacation. I am now writing every day, and I’d rather not have many other demands made on me.

I’m no moviegoer, but even I can tell Cary Grant is gifted with an obscene amount of elegance—however, I would never have taken you for a fan of anything remotely related to jazz. Although now that I think about it, there is something in you, I believe, that swings. It manifests in your smile.

Children like me too. I intuit that they take me for a bear.

Whom I would have poisoned: that woman who was cannibalizing Ivanhoe! She reminded me a little of my mother.

Here’s a gift for you. I remember you said that you liked Bach, that day we had lunch at the colony. I am sending you this recording of Glenn Gould, which I think you might like quite a bit. (It’s come to this, as I near the end of my third decade: I prefer my angry young men angry with Chopin.) I am particularly enamored of #25.

Yours,

Bernard

January 24, 1958

Dear Bernard—

Thank you so very much for the record. What a lovely gift. I put it on the evening I received it and found myself laying my book aside and just listening. And I’ve been listening to it ever since. It’s like nothing else.

Oh, I remember Lorraine.

Regarding Kerouac, I’m allergic too. The Beats are really nothing more than a troop of malevolent Boy Scouts trying to earn badges for cultural arson. Ahem. To your point about feeling as starched as your father, I say: Why don’t I just take up knitting already? I feel compelled to stress that I always voted for Democrats.

About being self-taught—I’d say that I was self-taught compared to you, being as I was educated by parochial-school nuns and graduated from a college that was not Harvard. But I never have made heroes of writers, so maybe that’s why you’re still writing me.

Other than the Gould, which made me forget we were in the dead of January, I have no news! No anecdotes! I write, I work, I cook, I read in the living room while my father does a crossword puzzle and my sister washes the dishes, and then I retire to my chamber when they turn the television on. To me, the dead of January is to be as feared as the ides of March. But I would like to make a formal request. Would you tell me how you converted? It is something I have been wanting to hear.

Again, thank you for the record.

Yours,

Frances

January 31, 1958

Dear Frances—

I’m still writing you because I want your friendship, silly girl. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I can see where you might characterize yourself as self-taught—from what I can tell, whatever you learned, you learned in spite of your schooling, not because of it—but I’m speaking of the intellectually feral. What I have observed is that you have respect for tradition while not being weighed down by it. You know what you like and who you’ll follow, and when and why and where you’ll part ways. Most of the writers I admire possess this combination of reverence and courage. If you don’t know anything, I tell my students, you at least need to know the rules. But I forget how much trouble I was as a student. I was hellishly belligerent. I once made a young professor of German cry because she refused to accept poems I’d written (in German) as a final exam. I told her that her fanatical adherence to protocol made her a stereotype, which made her a poor ambassador for her country, which needed all the good publicity it could get.

I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

The dead of winter is a terrible thing. Ted and I are throwing a party this weekend to try to distract ourselves from how terrible it truly is. He has just come up to me with a tray full of shot glasses that contain various iterations of a bloody mary he is trying to perfect, and