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PARTISAN REVIEW
sparverius
is the falcon for ladies in the old manuals of hawking:
I have one, residing in the spinnery behind my barn in New Jer–
sey. As it departs helter-skelter, as my eyes bid it farewell, I wonder
whether, in its native emptiness, high up, out of earshot, it gives
a little laugh, as our dear conversational poetess sometimes did,
one of her sentences having gone up and up until she lost track
of it or control
"of
it.
Precision was another of her delectations, another of her
ways of delighting us, along with compactness and objectivity:
objectivity in the sense of dedication to the object as such, to a
good many categories of objects with almost impartial enthusiasm.
She herself was a concentrate, all of a piece; but her world was
exceedingly faceted. In this she seems the exact opposite of Frost.
She may well be called conservative but never conventional, and
never vague or sentimental. Can I give an instance of this fine
point? Well, this, for example:
I
sometimes wish that I were an
iris hybridizer; I envy the man who conceived and produced
grapefruit, and the man who developed Bibb lettuce out of lesser
salads. Whereas myoid friend, eschewing flowers and fruit as
indeed old-timey, stock-in-trade of the professional romancer,
listed for us as things that she would like to have invented " the
zipper fastener, epoxy glue, the collapsible dustpan," and that
eight-shaped stitch with which the outer leather is drawn tight
on a baseball. She seemed to live in a blissfulness of noticing
things. For example, in 1962 she voyaged to Italy, and what did
she notice in the Cathedral of Saint Pantaloon, one of the physi–
cian saints, in Ravillo? That all six of the lions guarding the
pulpit were equally bowlegged but that each had a different face,
and that their sexes were evenly matched, three and three. What
in the world would she observe next?
Though all this shows a sense of humor, in a way, it went
beyond sophistication and intellectual jokes, farther and farther
beyond as the years passed. She had much of that gaiety that Yeats
extolled in his theory of tragedy, an exalted, almost exuberant
submissiveness to what is, what must be-and I refer, and she
thus responded, not only to the major fatalities but to meannesses,
wastes, leaks, vulgarities of our everyday life. They were a jest
to
her as well as a weariness unto death.
I remember that my grandmother knew an older woman in
Iowa who had experienced a famous tornado in infancy. Her
