Diana of the Dunes, page 13
I finally got Dr. A.’s book out for him—proofreading and all. He was very patient in the process and grateful after it. Unless his hopes prove vain, he will send me money enough to live on while here and probably to get started on again in Chicago.
As to working with you, I’m not counting on it, and—having got back to my normal state of poise and philosophy—shall take whatever outcome eventualizes as the best of all possible outcomes.
But you said once you didn’t see how I could be—as I said I was—interested in the book. And I wanted to say how that was.
I am very much interested—and always have been—in sex problems, though primarily in somewhat different phases of them, I suppose, from those that especially interest you. And so I really value the opportunity to get acquainted with the literature, and still more with the information you have personally.
Have you paid much attention to what I call diffused sex? That is, sex feeling that is so transformed and disguised that it is not recognized sex feeling at all. I think, for instance, that Mrs. Humphrey Ward—and oodles of dames who let rooms are full of diffused masochism.
That, together with the possibility of working in good light and air—makes me feel that I should prefer working with you at a few dollars a week to a job with four or five times as much salary in an ordinary office.
But I dare say I am a thing of the past in your busy days. I have though—on suitable occasions—thought of you. For instance, the first two or three weeks I went in bathing every day, and not daring to go in deep alone, thought how nice it would be if you were here to take me far out into the lake.
There have been many other times too—L. Times when I would say—What—and is it really you again? quoth she.
I again—why, what did you expect? quoth he.
Finds Few Worth While.
Toward Sunset
Dear L.: There are a few in this world who will say truly what they think, and still fewer perhaps what mental processes—observatory or expressive—are accurate enough to make their opinions of any value. I do have considerable respect for your critical qualities—your criticism of L.S.’s article confirmed it—you see when you really give me the benefit of them. Which is not so often as it might be. Does “stimulation” as you say (I think I have asked this better in an unsent letter) spoil a friendship for you? If so, I hope I have ceased to exert it for you.
From this sheltered nook the sunset is just an almost white brilliant in the west, pinkish in the east. I have just climbed the slope in the east. There the lake is seen in a wide sweep and the horizon is banked with blue clouds, with an intense pink above them in the east to northeast. The sunset is not brilliant.
I have been—for me—just a little depressed the last few days—ever since I came up here, perhaps; but think it has been due entirely to physical causes—food and thin clothing. How glorious this outdoor life is—how good life feels and tastes and smells down close to the great elemental things; this blazing fire, with the white brilliance in the west, just one star (Venus or Jupiter?) high up in the southeast, the dull white snow patches in the hollow and on the southern slopes, and the snow-flecks brown of the western slope, and the light gone for writing and the time come for supper.
Meets Beach Hermit.
Saturday, Dec. 4
(Addendum to next to last installment)
Dear L.:
Just don’t imagine that I spend my days and nights up here going in bathing (I did go in yesterday, but I’d like to see myself going in just now with the frost still in the air), climbing hills to gaze at views and wiggling my toes before the fire. Far from it.
I shall have great tales to tell when I get home, if I care to tell them, of the man I met when I went for water at the big pump a mile from here—quite in the style of Isaac and Rebecca; of the hermit down the beach, with his warm cottage—which he early extended me a genial invitation for inclement nights and his cheery little cupboard with its smoked herring, which he has caught and smoked himself—and fine wine and whisky; the man who came from the train with me the day I arrived—the day that was crowded with thoughts of ending it all—and the man I met on the sands last Saturday: the six men who came down to fish Thanksgiving night, and invite me to the fish supper on the beach—(I liked them, especially the witty one, who, himself being Irish, “just hates Swedes!”).
The world is so full of such WONDERFUL men.
How COULDN’T a woman be happy, sweet Len?
This represents a delicately subdued but prolonged smacking of the lips.
Letter Spoils Mood
Toward Sunset
I actually copied the business letter to L. with the above nonsense this morning and took it to town to mail with a note to Dr. A. The postman had gone, so I came back with the letters and two quarts of milk and went to my old place. I built a fire, had much bread and cheese and a little coffee, and the day is nearly gone.
There was a letter for me from Dr. A., which, hastily read, spoiled my mood. Yet as I read it again there was no reason why it should. He assures me he has understood my case from the first—my abilities call for a better position. That statement revived the feeling which had made me almost loathe myself while I was doing the work: that I should be reduced, stooping to such means of earning money—what a prostitution of my powers! Not that the doctor is consciously dishonorable, or perhaps really worse than the most eminent in his line: but I don’t believe in him intellectually.
I hope Dr. A.’s remark, that his last letter had answered all three of mine and that this was to be on a different subject, meant that he would send me two or three dollars at least again next week. But I shall send him the reminding note and trust that I shall be fed. It wouldn’t take much fasting to unfit me for this life I feel sure, delightful as it is under the right conditions.
(Another installment of the diary will be printed in an early issue of the Herald and Examiner).
CHICAGO HERALD AND EXAMINER
TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 1918
“DIANA OF THE DUNES SAYS ‘L’ BROUGHT HER
SUNSHINE”
Alice Gray, the University of Chicago girl who fled from routine to live “the free life,” became the “mysterious nymph” of the Indiana wilds along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
In the first installment from her diary in the Herald and Examiner she told of the many primitive things she found to interest her.
In the second installment she dissected the soul of a woman as it was given to her to see it and disclosed the romantic side of nature as shown in the wilds.
Her diary, which she regards as a substitute for society, continued from yesterday, reads:
Dear L.: You said I hadn’t been in the right soil. I’m inclined to think it would be more accurate to say I haven’t been in any soil at all for a long, long time. Except for books—and that, of course, is a noble exception—and they almost exclusively from a tolerably distant past—I feel as if I had nothing valuable and sustaining coming to me from without. I have lived from within and drawn all my strength and power from myself. My environment has been the source only of irritation and perhaps a little poison.
Until you came! Yes, you gave me a touch of sunshine, and society, and interest, and kindly humanity.
To be sure, I have often had the promise of those things—which generally proved illusory and disappointing and even harmful—like drinking sea water for thirst. And so I doubted and mistrusted you, too, and was ready to see selfishness and appellation—not economic. I hadn’t thought of that, but emotion.
Well, and did you decide that I was a weariness and a nothingness and a striving after wind—that I had nothing for you, or so little that it wasn’t worth getting out? Would friendship for me be too costly to you? Then, of course, I shouldn’t want it and it wouldn’t really be friendship.
I often think we might mean a great deal to each other, that we can understand each other and value each other, and help each other in strength and cheer, as few persons can perhaps one another, and almost none either of us. [sic]
I felt—though I never said it to you—when I was so discontented with my environment, that yours was not right either. Martha or Uncle Dave or some one else always came along just when you were ready for work. My idea of a little flat, with the solitude and isolation and freedom I prize so highly for myself, meant also the right place for you to work. As John Morley says of Mme. du Chatelet, the “divine Emily” of Voltaire, she poured a cloud about her hero, like an Homeric goddess; and Morley thought she could not have done a better thing for Voltaire—who, by the way, was much annoyed by the police of his day. Although it was from his friends, not his foes, that the divine Emily was wont to snatch him. Every house has its atmosphere, which favors either work or idleness, says Morley; and the house of Mme. du Chatelet had an atmosphere of hard work. She, by the way, the translator of Newton—in a day when that meant high attainments—died of a venereal disease caught from a stray lover—a certain duke, I believe, and Morley says the sexual irregularities of that circle, the atmosphere of whose house was hard work, were due, not to their inclinations, but to the belief that virginity was Christian, and hence despicable, if not damnable. The same conviction produced “La Pucelle,” with its—to us—amazing misunderstandings of Joan of Arc.
Don’t you think a house with an atmosphere of work would be good for both of us? For we both can work, I know, and I haven’t worked for a long, long time—really never as I could and as would be good for me. And you? In spurts on indifferent things?
But perhaps your work is really what you have been doing—probably it is social, stirring, mixing with people. And the concentrated, abstracted, solitary activity which is my real atmosphere—without which I shall never really live at all—might not suit you in the least.
No, I have not lived. Is that why, at nearly the same age, I FEEL so young, and you so old? I think of myself as on the threshold, just starting in life—to the great amusement, I know, of a certain type of person. But that was Plato’s idea of thirty—the end of “school,” the leisurely preparatory period, and the beginning of active life.
I have had the feeling all along, as Wordsworth says of his Cambridge days—the feeling “that I was not for that place nor for that hour.”
And I have let myself be exploited frightfully—from a too delicate sense of honor and responsibility for the environment I was in. For the quality of whatever work I do, my conscience is an inexorable taskmaster.
Sunday, Dec. 5
I am beginning to think a little—or rather look at the subject a little; it can hardly be called thinking—as to what I shall do when I get back. I really have no plans, no projects, and no hopes, as well as no expectations. I don’t know whether L. means to go on with his book or wants me to help him if he does, or whether it would be a good thing for me to do that work. I am interested in the subject and would like to get familiar with the literature and with his own information, theories, ideals and ethics on the subjects. I haven’t fully made up my mind as to him; I do not regard him as negligible or inferior, a sort of chimpanzee, as I do many people. I believe I should like to try it.
So perhaps after all my hope is that L. and I shall get to work together after Christmas and that I shall work from that into some independent writing. He might get me started on some live subject where I could produce something—as M.L. said I should have been doing long ago—for which there is a demand.
Wednesday, Dec. 8
Hurrah for the good old doctor! Two dollars! Also a dear good letter from L.—and he wanted me—was looking for me! I don’t know how long the job would have lasted, but doubtless I was better off here.
He hopes in his letter that “life may be kind to me.”
I don’t believe the world is, or will be, very kind to me—though I don’t wish to underestimate what it has given me. And I should really like to know whether I should call L. unkind or the reverse. I can’t make up my mind as to that. But God is kind—I feel that. What bitter experiences and unkind treatment are changed into blessed and precious things. For instance, if I had not been desperate I should not have thought of coming up here; and how wonderful, how unspeakably healing and sanctifying it has been living in all this beauty and this keenly vital air and in the blessed solitude.
And now forever a sadder and a wiser woman—let me forget that acridly chemical atmosphere—even corrosive atmosphere that I knew—now that I am living in the world that belongs to me and to which I belong.
As I sat by the fire last night I thought how wonderful it is, this beauty, so simple, so elemental, yet so inexhaustible and so varied—no two fires alike, any more than two leaves. And then I thought how I am reproved doubtless by most of the people who think of me at all—which isn’t many—as wasting time here; and, then, how necessary to the spirit are these hours of quiet and unemployment, of basking in some “loved presence.” The critic who justified the “almost intolerably” slow movement of one of Goethe’s novels as corresponding to the temporal lengthiness of life itself hit a great truth: if we find it tedious it is because—as the moralists say—we are wrong; or else we are in the wrong position.
But I hold that there should be great quantities, vast reaches of this slowness in life, and if we work efficiently and with our might when we do work, and prune off as we should the foolish futilities in which most of us are prone to branch out, we shall all be able to afford the time for this depthgiving solitude and leisure.
How hysteria and all unwholesomeness flee away in this life! The great, calm, unconcerned dunes, the tonic, icy air, or the glad glaze playing about the gargoyle forms of the smooth old wood—declare that “all is beauty.”
[Another installment of the diary will be printed in the early issue of the Herald and Examiner.]
CHICAGO HERALD AND EXAMINER
THURSDAY, JUNE 6, 1918
“DIANA OF DUNES LOSES FEAR OF MEN: CONTINUED
FROM YESTERDAY”
Spends 3 Days in Bed.
Monday, Feb. 14
Two weeks since I have written! I don’t know what I have done except bring up wood and go to town a few times and spend some cheerful evenings and a few chilly ones by the stove here.
Last week I spent three full days in bed—Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday—scarcely turning over for thirty-six hours or so. I was perfectly well, but thought the rest would do me good and followed my instinct.
Friday I walked to Oak Hill and while waiting for Mrs. Larson to come home with my groceries I had the first good look I have had of myself in some time. To tell the truth, I was rather shocked. My eyes seemed to have a rather wild, strained look as if the life I was leading were very wearing on me. I said to myself that I would be afraid if I met myself alone at the crossroad in the moonlight. However, I was not so bad with my hat and coat on.
Opposite of Gentleman.
Toward Sunset.
I have been trying to think of the opposite of gentleman in the highest spiritual sense of that word, as ineffectually as I have yet sought the opposite of “earnest and reliable.” Yet there seems to me there is such a word, not quite “vulgar, low or mean,” not quite so definite as “churl.” I have wondered if that word when found would not apply to L. I wonder if he is not, intellectually, a bit of a charlatan, with his pouncings upon foreheads which he refuses to elucidate and his certainties about the relations of appetite for food to sexual life. I know he lets his own desires bias him more than he realizes in his interpretation of other people’s needs: common, perhaps, that trait.
The trouble with me the last few years is that I haven’t been doing my own work; I have let my strength go into the perplexity as to what I ought to do. The periods when I turned from that barren perplexity as to what I ought to do, when I felt I must do something to earn my living, and yet couldn’t think of what to do. The periods when I turned from that barren perplexity to read Balzac and Flaubert now seem oases in the desert. If I had had faith and gone on energetically with either mathematics, or logic, or ethics, or literature, or politics, or any combination of two or more of the five, or anything else under the sun, doubtless it would have been well with me.
Up here at least I have dismissed my foolish fears and made some progress in the art of not worrying. What joyous country may lie around a turn in the road which seemed to be running straight up to a precipice, I have learned this Winter. God grant I may make a more vigorous use of the rest of my life and my powers in the light of that knowledge.
Loses Fear of Men.
I was ready to use the negation of gentlemen for L. because of his suspicious and unworthy interpretations—his unwillingness to credit the ideal and the honorable and the generous in others (not that he is always that, but I felt he would be in certain lines). Perhaps it is because I have been too slow to develop the aristocratic and chivalrous virtues myself that I have stood off suspicious of man and life. A hard experience may make the most honorable gentleman suspicious and pessimistic in his attitude toward people, but however unfair and insulting one may feel his estimate of one’s self, one will always feel that he is open-minded to the exonerating evidence, since he must believe from his own character—in the actuality of disinterested honor. While to the variet—the moral Philistine—what is the use of talking? He will only say—or think—“Methinks the lady doth protest too much” and sink deeper in the slough of suspicion.
But I have grasped some valuable things from this sojourn in the wilderness. Chiefly a new faith in men, or rather a confidence in my essential safety with them, a new ability to get good from all sorts and conditions of them. I feel sure, someway, that I shall always be a braver and stronger woman than I was before last Fall; better able by far to take things as they come and do my work, to—
Argue not
Against heaven’s hand or will, nor
hate a jot
Of heart or hope, but will bear up and steer,
