377
PARTISAN REVIEW
shake it, I declined it.. .it is best to avoid the beginnings of
evil.
That luminous complex
house-stubborn-bare
is illustrated, is
almost enacted, by the two houses I'm lucky enough to spend
time in every summer. Each in its own way (or her way-who
said the house was the mother?), the house in Vermont and the
house in Maine silently discourse about the relation of interiors to
the way we think of time and work.
First, the house in Maine, on Squirrel Island, where my
\
husband spent his boyhood summers and where we now go for
~
two weeks in July. This house has a mildly museum-like air, but
the museum is an inhabited one. No velvet cord prevents people
from sitting on the chairs; everything is well used, even shabby
with use. Yet the living room is a period piece, and there is an
unwritten law against using the best china. It is easy to envision
the denizens of the house a couple of generations back, eating
with this silverware, rocking on this porch, rinsing off sandy
children and grandchildren in set tubs (a term coined, as far as I
know, by George's grandmother-certainly I've never heard it
used of any place but here).
This house demands and gets a good deal of care in order to
maintain its gently paradoxical air of inviolate hospitality. It has
most certainly not been stripped bare, in Seferic terms; neither
does it grow stubborn. Use me, it seems to say-on my own
terms, and with care, but do fill me with life. Or with fleshly
life-for the house is thronged with ghosts, sometimes nearly
visible. Last summer our son, then aged three, invented the term
"dream machine," as an invisible contraption somewhere in the
eaves of the master bedroom. I thought ofJames Merrill's phrase
about the strange bed "whose recurring dream we are." Dreams
and ghosts are thick on the ground here-a sign, if any is
needed, that far from being bare or stubborn, the house is teem–
ing with the moist night-blossoming flora of the oneiric. Being
on an island helps; so does being apparently exempted from
time. The house, like the island itself, is enclosed and other, like
a dream; memorable and forgettable, like a dream; unreal and
vivid, like a dream; a lucky gift or anxious burden, like a dream.
It may seem odd that this very quality of fullness, of not be–
ing stripped bare or stubborn, does not translate, in terms of time,
