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Bill Maxwell also wrote with enthusiasm:
Dear Francis, it’s absolutely marvelous … The effect is of a layer of callous peeled off, leaving something luminous and alive. You can, for the first time, eat the food and touch the people and smell and see everything. And reading it, I am continually reminded that Flaubert was an aesthete, and continually driven to reflect, as Mrs. Woolf was in her novels, “Human life, human life!” It goes on like a refrain behind whatever is happening. It is not like a translation but like a redoing of it in English. The cadences, the diction, the shifting naturalness of the style are all incomparable. And all those glittering effects, as when M. Rouault remembering how his bride rode pillion behind him, looks back and sees that there is nothing on the road. I don’t know why I think Flaubert meant this to mean the total emptying of the past, any more than I know why I think he meant to convey, when Emma is making conversation with Charles and says that she doesn’t enjoy country life, that her destiny is already final and that it is only a matter of a little while and she will have the taste of poison in her mouth. At every point there are these effects, these double-takes, which are new to me, and ravishing. [Harold] Brodkey was so excited he kept groaning for pleasure, and he had read the book twice before and never cared for it. I could paper a room with my favorite passages.
cuuute
Francis’s other projects did not always proceed on the same basis of familiarity. Some would take time to reveal themselves to him. He recorded his thoughts on this in the notes he made of an interview made during lunch at the Café d’Orsay in late 1957 with the poet Pierre Reverdy, whom he had approached in relation to his planned next project on Apollinaire:
I told him how I regard my writing. Like all writers I have things to say, and sometimes these things take the form of a novel, sometimes the form of a biography, or what people call a biography. But I don’t consider myself a biographer de métier. For some reason I find it hard to speak directly, as do writers of novels; perhaps it’s timidy [sic]—I hide behind other people and speak through their mouths. These have to be people capable of expressing my thoughts, preferences, ideals, etc. they are people I come across in my reading—usually by chance. (During this he kept nodding sympathetically, patting my arm—he interrupted only to object to my statement that I “hid” behind other people: “No, he said, you simply express yourself through them.”) At present I don’t know whether Apollinaire is one of those people or not. If I don’t know that he is, I will write nothing about him.
He said, “You are capable of knowing who and what you are—most people are not capable of this—so your decision will be the right one. Your book will probably take a form that you have no idea of in advance, and you will not understand what is happening or why it is happening. That is the only true artistic creation.”
Never in the world, he said, would he have spoken with me this way—“as if we had been friends for twenty years”—if he hadn’t felt about me in a certain way …
I thanked him, told him he’d given me courage, his talk had been precious to me, and had been utterly different from anything I’d imagined in advance. He told me that was the greatest compliment I could pay him.
In her reply, Shirley set out her concerns at some length. Francis’s behaviour had been, from the start, confusing; there was “a sort of detachment that did not fit at all with the fact that he wanted to see me constantly.” The invitation to travel to Spain had been made at a dinner party, “obviously feeling that this had no implications that might prevent its being said before other people.” She added that “in all these weeks of being with me Francis has never so much as held my hand.” A few days before he flew out, Francis sent her a coyly “anonymous” letter, advising “that FS had been involved with another woman when he met me, felt he had committed himself to her, did not know how he could extricate himself—the point being that he would rather have SH. Could I advise?” A correspondence continued in this stylised vein, between “Lo Scrittore” and “La Scrittrice.” Francis began, “A writing friend tells us of meeting a seemingly marvellous writing girl by chance (as much chance as can be present at such moments) at a party given by a far from usual mutual friend,” but he owned that it all now seemed to have been “too good to be true!” and that he felt it might be best “to try to salvage an ‘amitié littéraire’” from it all. Shirley responded:
Lady authoress has statement to make … For her part she may say that she does not believe in Chance. That she has no accompaniment and is in fact sola solissima. That the quasi-accompaniment to the party, while congenial, is of quite other inclinations … She must impress upon her readers … that she is of serious nature in such matters, that her experience in this direction has been of a kind that has tended to keep her sola solissima, always allowing for rare possibilities occurring at parties given by common friends … Scrittrice is trying to think of examples of amitié littéraire …
omg
In the spring of 1963 Shirley was working on her first novel, set in Italy, a tale of romantic love eclipsed by its own waning. The Evening of the Holiday was contracted to Macmillan and Knopf after publication in full in The New Yorker: “On Monday I took my piece of writing to Bill [Maxwell] … and was no sooner home than he telephoned to say he Loves It … Having the thing finished is a tremendous weight off me—it was one of the hardest things I ever had to write … partly because it is a piece about happiness, deliverance etc, and it is harder to elaborate happiness than grief—happiness speaks for itself.” The middle section of the novel, when Sophie and Tancredi reach an equilibrium and accept the chance to love, is the first such moment in her writing. Her earlier stories had chronicled the inevitable pain and the perplexities of love; now she was finding herself confronted with the possibility of reciprocity, lives and hearts coinciding, and had begun to write of that. Over the coming months, in the shadow of ever-shifting relations with Francis, she would compose the later sections of the novel, tracing love’s almost inexplicable decline, itself overtaken by the death of Sophie’s aged aunt.
Back in New York that April, the amitié littéraire continued: Shirley sent Francis a clipping from Housman about the bodily ground of poetry, “a shiver down the spine … constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes”; they went to dinner and to the theatre; and Francis continued to see Margaret. In April he drove Shirley to Ossining, where they had lunch with the Cheevers. Muriel continued to be full of hope about their prospects, but she also raised questions:
Surely, dear Shirlers, there is a very deep feeling floating around between you and Francis and that is something indestructible—that is, if the feelings are loving ones, as they are. I don’t know what or how to think of all you tell me, and perhaps by now developments have happened. You know, I can’t help feeling (but I have a personal bias in this respect) that you might consider asking him whether the “other girl” is male or female. Perhaps this is an absurd idea—forgive it, if so. I can only judge by my poor wee self—how I go falling for that type, time and again, and never, really, for the wholehearted male! If this is too far-fetched and you are sufficiently in love to cope with the conflict, there’s nothing like a real love affair to resolve the problem—any problem—tho’ it gives rise to others. My heart and thoughts are with you, Shirlers dear. All that matters is that you are full of possibilities in life and work. I’m enormously pleased to hear that the novel’s going well, it will be a famous one, born of suffering as the best are—but not too much pain—that’s fatal.
In New York, Shirley was deep in writing. She spent the weeks before leaving for Spain working frantically on The Evening of the Holiday, the first instalment of which had been scheduled for publication in The New Yorker the following month. At that stage it was still called “The Fountain”; it is possible that the change of title was a response to the report Shirley had read of Elena’s last days, the reading of the Leopardi poem that had struck her so tellingly when she’d first read it fifteen years earlier. Shirley was also enjoying the fact as well as the prospect of closer intimacy with Francis and reflecting on the abandoned visit to Rome: “I still feel slightly odd but less so than before; no doubt getting accustomed.” In requesting delay, he was perhaps setting out just the kind of complication—of sensibility, and seriousness—that her earlier relationships had lacked, suggesting grounds on which marriage might start to become thinkable.
Francis was at pains to explain his situation to her. Shirley summarised this later to Muriel:
A lot of remarks about not getting serious, I mustn’t think of this as love, etc. interspersed with displays of emotion, and passionate attention. I not knowing where I was in all this. Constant talk about wife, constant … Then … in tears, said he could not get used to difference in our ages (25 years); that he had had a Personality for a wife before and did not think he wanted it again … Didn’t really know what he wanted, future a great blank. He said he felt towards me as he felt when he was a child at school and someone offered him a prize: he went to pieces because he didn’t know how to handle it. That he had got into such a habit of calculating the future that he didn’t know how things would be if he didn’t work them out in advance.
The uncertainty continued after they returned to New York. “He leaves books, letters, a lock of hair, an Augustus John reproduction that looks like me—phone calls … He doesn’t know what he wants.” Shirley joined him in Connecticut on the first day of summer, they had lunch with his old high school teacher Catherine Wood, and slowly she began to reflect on the appeal of “the ambiguity of F,” having wondered earlier “if the depth, the wish for meaning is only in myself and wished on him in my mind.” She wrote often to Muriel, airing her frustration. “Sometimes he is v sweet and all goes well. Then he goes home and wonders whether he has committed himself to anything, and next time Acts Remote, though he is not much good at that. All very well but I’m getting tired of waiting round for the fcking Judgement of Paris; the Judgement of Shirlers is going to assert itself one of these days…” In mid-July he called at her apartment and they went walking “in the deserted UN garden and saw the espaliered pears … Perfect moment,” a scene she would recall each spring, over and over, through her life, looking back on this as the time “when we began to believe in marrying.” Through these months, Francis was selling some of the artworks he and Beatrice had bought: the Renoir oil, two Picasso etchings, and the Degas pastel (this last for $80,000; his dealer wrote, “it’s a wrench but think of all that pretty money invested in General Motors”). Muriel was convinced that Shirley would soon be “a married lady … and feel sure it will come to pass in the way that’s right for you both. You must hire a housekeeper the very first thing and have plenty of room in the house.” She also advised a more assertive demeanour: “Why don’t you swear at your lover? You’re too ladylike with him by half.” There was to be one last misstep—a wounded outburst from Shirley in early August, after which Francis sent a card, breaking things off once more.
rough
They were back in New York at the end of January, and Francis decided, “even after Fez and Meknes,” not to proceed with Delacroix. Shirley moved into Manhattan House and, as spring approached, sat through the day in the building’s elegant garden, working on her novel. In February she heard of the death of Archie Lyall, alone at a clinic in Zurich, and wrote a tribute for a memorial collection that Archie’s friend Patricia Clarke was putting together, one friendship leading to another; another Solaia connection expanding her world. Francis continued to see his analyst, to Shirley’s consternation. His diary in March records the single word “Pressure.” Shirley remained through her life hostile to psychoanalysis. She set down her thoughts on the subject in her notebook, singling out for rebuke its “lure of authority” and the fact that interpretations were “at expense sometimes of sense of humour or proportion.” Other criticisms were more particular:
Analysis, curiously, does not seem to enlarge subject’s tolerance for frailties of others. Encourages engrossing self-examination of own intricacies, allows subject to imagine these of singular interest to others but does not widen compassion or sense of general requirements. For example, F distressed because of guilt towards first wife due to greater pleasure with me. I, seeing him distressed, ask “Is it because you feel guilty?” Doesn’t feel able to contend, goes to psychiatrist. Back an hour later, much relieved: “It’s just because I feel guilty.” … Absorbed in own irrational distress; oblivious to effect on new wife of pronouncement of this kind combined with trip to psychiatrist one month after wedding.
lolll
In their arguments, she was distressed to find her behaviour echoing her mother’s:
Lean on sink, after days of feigning unawareness or of showing concern; think “I could always die.” Comes, is furious to find tears. We sit down, on floor and sofa. “I asked you if you would look after me” (Harshly). “I think this is one of those times when I need looking after.” (As though there were other times). Utter oblivion to comparable sentiments, requirements. Self-pity, lack of connection … His grief is sacred (But so is everyone’s.) Only true grief is loss of loved one by cancer. Nothing else weighs.—Oh what sorrows everyone experiences, even in their dark imaginings.