AUGUST 9
Two types of humanity: Those who are lunatically faithful to another, self-neglecting, though often harmful to others, and those who are lunatically devoted to themselves—instinct ridden, incorrigible. Of course I am thinking of the extremes—degrees of unreasonable devotedness that is often destructive to the beloved, and degrees of selfishness that is ruinous to one’s interests and hopes, and defeats even its own ends.
AUGUST 27
[To Pauline de Rothschild.]
Barbara thinks me some sort of saint: “the most Christian man on earth,” she said the other evening, and did not understand that my blushing signified anger. In Monroe’s opinion I am not a saint but a martyr. Neither of them, I’m afraid, takes me very seriously as a philosopher.
AUGUST 30
Old Misia Sert, in her foolish, proud forgetful memoirs, expresses her regret that when Renoir was painting her she would never let him look at her breasts.
“Open your dress a little more, oh, please. Good Lord, it’s a crime not to let your breast be seen,” said Renoir. She says that more than once he was on the verge of weeping. Prudery and silliness and stupidity, she explained. Perhaps also a kind of intimate stinginess, I should have thought. How many less fortunate women have been more generous, women and men and boys.
This brought tears to my eyes—tears of gratitude.
“The Boy from Hackettstown.” I had a date with John and when I took the precaution of telephoning him from the corner I could tell by his veiled tone of voice that he was having intercourse. I said, “Shall I go and do some shopping before I come up?”
“No, no, come right away. Hurry.”
He opened the door sideways, naked as I expected, somewhat covering his erection, and in the middle of the room stood a ravishing boy of extraordinary beauty. The beauty of his face, with rather pouting lips, was like one of the female movie stars of the twenties, the more feminine because of the confused emotions: lust, lust just consummated, and the lust still to come, and the surprise of my arrival. The body of a boy but not immature, and a tremendous tapering phallus, swinging out in front of him, and standing up superbly without provocation or touch.
“This is Don,” John said.
OCTOBER 8
I live here in luxury, perhaps even more enjoyable for those who visit me, than for permanent and over-domesticated me. My dear family has pauperized me grandly, and for love of literature as well as of me, and not entirely in vain. It is a golden, not just a gilded cage. But now not only have I wearied of it, but I am no longer managing well.
It seems to me that I might give it all up, except that it would mean forcing my aged mother, no less spoiled than I, to go and live in a poor nursing home. As it is at present, I owe my dentist eight hundred dollars; I have just borrowed one hundred and fifty dollars from my best friend; I have not bought a phonograph record for six months; I am tired of my old clothes, etc. I am purposely not explaining one or two things in a more pathetic category, concerning one or two persons whom I dearly love. But the chief grievance of my life is that I can never travel. Only once since the war have I been out of my New York-New Jersey runway for more than a fortnight. Only once since the war have I voyaged to Europe, and then I had to work while there, and to come back sooner than I wished.
OCTOBER 15
The fire of my life has been a little too flaring, and with too many irons in it. Monroe is in bad health, in constant pain. Perhaps it may be one of those nervous inflammations like the shingles he had in 1953, but this time it is mainly in his chest. I haven’t been able to get him to the Medical Center for fundamental tests. Sometimes stoicism is a form of fear—he stands the pain in order not to think of the danger.
At seven a.m., the incomparable colors of leaves due to the long draught—yellow and gold and vermillion maroon and red and pink, drowned in mist like the milkiest opal with the most wondrous fires within.
OCTOBER 21
[To Louise Bogan.]
A solemnity: I have failed you, as a horse you put your money on at The New Yorker, though the inspiration still holds good for me … It has been a bad year and continues in the same way. The trouble is that I can’t find time to write, or do I mean energy? I write more letters than anything else, most of them dutiful or compulsive. Doubtless I read more than is virtuous for me to do, in my circumstances; I rationalize that.
NOVEMBER 4
Censorship: Gogol in a letter, in 1833: “My pen keeps writing things the censorship will never pass … All that remains for me to do is to think of a subject so innocent that it will not hurt the feelings even of a policeman. My mind seems paralyzed.”
One of my favorite bits of literary legend: As Guillaume Apollinaire lay dying, a multitude came down his street shouting, “Mort a Guillaume!” This struck terror to the sick man’s mind. Had he in his singular career outraged public opinion more than he knew? Or could these be spirits of the damned, delegated to get him and escort him to his damnation? In fact, that day was November 9, 1918, and the outcry was against another Guillaume: the Kaiser Guillaume II.
NOVEMBER 22
Barbara’s father: “Francis B. Harrison Dies; Ex-Governor of the Philip pines” (New York Herald Tribune).
DECEMBER 6
Old Letter Found: When we were moving out of 410 Park Avenue today, December 6, 1957, I found this in Monroe’s large closet, behind the wardrobe: “Dearest of all, only worthy: All this is an illusion, as mystics say—what matters is what lasts.
“I want to remind you of me (as I am always reminded of you)—not the episodic present; but me as a grubby, sickly, deathly, bluffing farm-boy as I came to Evanston in 1919, or (if you like) me as a cold, talented, rich, trustworthy, illustrative old man, as I may be before long if you will keep serene for me, to our joint advantage. That fascinates—the rest is just a matter of ‘chic,’ of romantic social sense, of pastime.—Your Gl”
1958
JANUARY 20
My talent—oh, there ought to be a less pretentious word for it!— is like some deplorable sort of shrub or vine that blossoms only on last year’s wood; but meanwhile its new growth is so incessant and fast that it all lies in its own shadow and tangle. I can’t keep up with it. Year after year before I get the necessary pruning done, autumn comes, winter comes.
Perhaps in my case genius would be a less pretentious word than talent. Remember Paul Valery’s grim epigram: “Talent without genius isn’t much. Genius without talent is nothing at all.”
FEBRUARY 1
Cold War: For us Americans nowadays the death’s head at the feast is a terrific appetizer. Doom that we foresee and resign ourselves to— what is to be done about it anyway?—justifies us in our headlong enjoyments, our cult of leisure.
The trouble with hope is that it entails hard work.
FEBRUARY 5
410 Park Avenue has been demolished and Monroe has moved to 215 East 79 Street—which has been hard, as he has had acute spinal arthritis all winter. We shall have another year of Stone-blossom [before the valley is turned into a reservoir]; probably not longer, as things are now moving. Young engineers fuss around our hilltops, drilling down to where they think there may be caves, and exploding little charges of dynamite in the depths.
FEBRUARY 12
I have been unhappy but peaceable—only not peaceable with my poor beloved Monroe. The move to 215 East 79 Street demoralized him, although as his friends come there and admire the art and the bibelots against the white walls, everything clean and tidy, he reconciles himself bit by bit—O great mirror of worldliness! Fatigue is the worst of it—no taxis around the Museum at the end of the day, the buses too full even to stop, the subway crowd clenching around his arthritic back like a huge fist.
I seem to have given up sex, not just circumstantially, frustrated, in the maze of my nature, with the hindrances and the shortcomings, and too many rules of the game—all of which is an old story—but now also by a certain decisiveness arrived at in my head and/or m
y heart, as it has seemed almost suddenly—which is new. Loss of courage; due mainly to the miserable experiences of several friends; perhaps due to age, chilling and weakening—a feeling (not without its component of rejoicing, or at least thanksgiving) that I have used up my share of good luck; and very great concern for Monroe—one more misfortune or disillusionment at this point would floor him.
In re the onset of old age—non-hope and wisdom: Lord Byron: “’Tis time this heart should be unmoved / Since others it has ceased to move.”
FEBRUARY 21
What castrates perhaps more than anything? The superior woman’s judging of her man, disapproving, disrespecting, but persisting in loving him, as though disqualification did not matter.
Blame without rejection constitutes ownership. To be given pleasure or comfort or help from—to give pleasure, etc. to—one who judges you, with incessant indefinite reprieve instead of punishment.
Forster’s great general shortcoming: A kind of absent-mindedness amid his brilliance—as though bemused by his own figures of speech and mixed feelings—shifting from an almost frivolous realism to an almost irresponsible mysticism. He whisks away from things that happen not to inspire him—or are they things that he doesn’t know, hasn’t in mind any experience to refer to and build on?
MARCH 1
John and Joseph S. arrived by the late train. Love-making in front of the fire. I was inhibited by not wanting to spoil J’s pleasure. Anxiety about his shyness. I came away before the last act of their copulation. A good many young men who are manly and—in spite of passivity and eroticism—who think of themselves that way, mind being watched while being fucked.
MARCH 18
My dear John is now employed by our most prosperous playwright, William Inge, as secretary, majordomo, chauffeur, and solitude-dispeller— nothing to be read between the lines—and they are in Florida this week.
Shadow lives only in light. There are delicate pangs of vulnerability and self-criticism which occur only amid the joyousness of being in love.
MARCH 21
A Hustler: At Ed Jorgerson’s very large party of muscle-builders, Fire Islanders, giddy boys, and old friends, there were two hustlers, pointed out to me as such. One was of singular beauty, Aubrey Beardsley-like, but husky, and a little crazy with narcissism, who went away with Blair Rogers; the other a great big dark low-class boy, so coarse and soft that he seemed blurred, as though due to a defect in one’s eyesight. He was well enough dressed in the conventional fashion of the evening: chino cloth trousers and tee-shirt, with a jumbo dragon tattoo on his thick right biceps. He said to me in his spongy, shapeless voice, scarcely more than a consonant per word, “Don’ I know you? Din’nh you pi’ me up one night a’ t’huh Wagon Wheel? You look jus’ like the guy. I made fifty bucks tha’ night. Jeez, it was crazy.”
MARCH 31
I think that relations between men usually have some time limit, a certain number of years beyond which it is not naturally for them to run, unless they are based on something other than the romance and the sexual enjoyment—mutual vocation, or economics, or sometimes society, something regarded as more important than happiness. As to the romantic quarrelings and separations, our analysis is apt to cover the how; not the why.
APRIL 2
At Monroe’s apartment. I have begun to believe that I shall never get any more important writing done. My main reason for coming to town was to have lunch with William Maxwell, for whom I promised to write three or four stories for The New Yorker as soon as I could clear my desk of the Wilder essay and other erroneous enterprises. That was more than a year ago and my desk is still unclear.
I sometimes deliberately mislead editors about work in progress, or work not progressing, because their interest may have an abortive effect.
APRIL 7
Barbara has exchanged the not-strong Pissarro, plus a Picasso plus a Renoir drawing plus a tiny Bonnard plus a Soutine plus the Kirchner that I thought of as “mine,” for a Gauguin portrait of a little boy priced at $100,000, worth about half that. Now she has a notion of re-swapping it.
Miniature: Audubon. On the back of Audubon’s watercolor of the cottontail rabbit, he noted that it was his only solace on the day his little daughter died. (I found this in Julian Huxley’s review of Audubon’s Annals, edited by Alice Ford.)
MAY 20
On my birthday my mother had another little stroke. Her speech was affected; also one foot or perhaps I should say one leg, a rather lurching step. She has recovered admirably, but of course it frightened her, and made her more dependent, with tears and new problems—it has made work for me, as psychiatrist as well as lady’s maid.
Then on May 12, Baba had a coronary thrombosis—almost half the heart muscle affected, and she must lie abed in the hospital and elsewhere for many months. She has always had great recuperative powers … Just now she is acting rather like a general shot in the leg during a battle, wildly giving orders from a stretcher-cot in the rear.
JUNE
News clipping: “Maugham Revisits Boyhood School, Canterbury, England” (UPI). Somerset Maugham, the author, now 84, revisited yesterday King’s School, where he once attended, and told the pupils: ‘I am very, very old and I shall never see you again.’”
[Newspaper photo of] Somerset Maugham: A face of the utmost interest as to the mask-like form and fine texture, brushwork strokes of experience and length of life.
Something Japanese about it, kabuki theater? Only in the dark draughts man of wrinkles deeply incised, with emotional significance not always recognized. The Japanese characterize their dramatic personae by spasms and grimaces, and they aim to affright or to amaze (perhaps also in a way to amuse). In Maugham’s case the emotions have settled; the expression on his face is a residence; his will-power has become habitual.
“Scarlet tanagers.” Just as I woke up this very cloudy morning, two extreme rednesses in my window made me blink; upon the pale green foliage of the sycamore tree fiery-red coals. I could not believe my eyes— only three or four yards from my bed, it was a pair of scarlet tanagers. For years and years I have not seen any. Like flames borne through the air on black plumed wings.
JULY 28
A great many things about me and my everyday life, morning, noon and night, month after month, year in and year out, manifest or at least indicate fictive talent, novelist’s temperament—but preclude my accomplishing anything along that line in any large continuous form.
Most of the time in my little world I am the one most able to imagine what needs doing or saying, therefore I almost always have something to do or say, or at least to begin or attempt. I do not love my dear ones as much as they love me but I understand them better than they understand me; therefore I am the chief sufferer from our various contestations of will-power, confrontations of our respective points of view. Tout comprendre est tout pardonner. My feeling of emotional, sensual, and (sentimental) loneliness is like an itch, a goad, a scourge; I am restlessness personified. I cannot sit still long enough to accomplish anything; furthermore, in point of fact, I am never alone enough, long enough. I am the slowest worker in the world, but if I am ever to succeed I must do as much in an hour or two before daybreak as the average writer does in a day. I must do as much in a day, when I happen to have peace of mind and no house-guests, as the average writer does in a week.
What is the worst thought in the dead of night, or in depression during the day? It is time leaking away into eternity, lifetime going to waste.
AUGUST 29
Katherine Anne [Porter] is in a happy mood—in town to have herself photographed for the jacket of Ship of Fools. She now says the novel is done, done—“only it has to be copied, in triplicate, and of course I have to put in little bits here and there, and I really can’t do more than six or seven pages a day.” Suspense—but of course when a work of art approaches its completion, one can devise some strength and health from it.
SEPTEMBER 10
The strangest evening with Paul
Gebhard [of the Institute for Sex Research]. He came at 6:30 and we talked alone until 8 when Will Chandlee arrived to dine with us—and then we talked until 2! So shy and modest, almost dull, until he had his dinner and drink; then inquisitive, mysterious, mercurial—questioning me a great deal. I think he expects some great preachment or uplift from me—and I do know some things that he needs to hear.
OCTOBER 17
Chickens have a language consisting of 13 sayings, but some of it is rooster talk, some hen talk; only eight phrases are common to both sexes. It is all instinctive, non-learned, inborn. Indeed at least two of their utterances are prenatal. You can hear them inside the egg, just before it hatches, holding your ear to the cracked shell: something about the horror of feeling cold, something about the delight of the temperature going up. But, I must say, I detect a certain sentimentality in calling this language—it is an audible exteriorization of emotions. The essence of language is insincerity—the possibility of it, the means of it.
OCTOBER 29
A Heaven of Words Page 4
