Monroe had a very successful journey around Europe, not only got his museum work done but visited twenty rococo churches in Bavaria, and saw Cyril Connolly and Graham Sutherland and Mr. Forster and Edgar and Margaret Wind and Mr. Maugham and Osbert and Edith Sitwell at Remshaw and Pauline at Mouton-Rothschild.
Now Lloyd has settled with the state for the sale of the valley—for much less than he had hoped—and bought the Paul Whiteman property at Rosemont.
The great objection to television—as indeed previously to motion pictures and even to radio broadcasting—the terrible cost of new inventions. Half-invented in the first place; perfected at the expense of the purchasing public; at the general mass expense; with the patents kept under control as they may be most profitably exploited; re-invented when the invention might become cheap—like the sealed envelope of Mr. Singer.
When things cost too much the bankers become the most powerful collaborators.
The police in New York are arresting all the improper younger generation around town night after night. Thus far, in spite of dungarees and tee-shirts, none of my youngsters has been mistaken for a hustler or anything else illegal. Very strange when you read further than the headlines: the city needs seven thousand more cops and they must have increased pay; and by this crusade the mayor and the commissioner intend maximum publicity, until something is voted. Do you suppose we might have political power?
Graffiti: I have never noticed any obscene inscriptions in the men’s room of the Dixie bus station, but now there is one on a large scale. Over the width of the four urinals, just above eye level, there is a large-sized cock and balls, and then two sentences plainly printed: “This is no police station. Get out, you cops.”
I have never really liked Mr. Frost. He has the appearance of a small man enlarged and coarsened, and he seems damp somehow. His manner is fatherly to everyone, perhaps not an affectation, but certainly a habit. I sense (or I fancy) unkindness. The work also suggests this, particularly his sexual puritanism, as though it were something to be proud of.
But how agreeably he expresses everything, even wrongness and eccentricity, with an effect of wealth and sparkle!
1959
JANUARY 26
Marianne Moore praises me for “your taking time, your compartmental competence, your sunny attitude despite annoyances and burdens” which, she thinks, if I become an “impresario,” that is, president of the Institute [of Arts and Letters], “augur happy days.”
Last night I had a long comical nightmare about the Institute election. A great many women’s club women came en masse, disrupted the meeting, prevented Karen Blixen [Isak Dinesen] from speaking, and wouldn’t let me be elected. What a funny animal the subconscious is!
JANUARY 28
I scarcely enjoyed the Maria Callas concert at Carnegie Hall. She sang as loud as possible almost all the time, like a buzz-saw, with a slow tremolo. Manner and appearance of a teenager. Leo Lerman introduced me to her father! He was with Baroness Blixen who wore a tight turban, and looked like the Pharaoh Rameses. I managed to get Baba up the aisle for a few words with her, which pleased her.
Very gratifying note from Douglas Moore: “Ever since I have had anything to do with the Institute you have always been an unfailing direction-finder. Whatever progress we have made has usually come from Wescott inspiration. It is high time you should give up this leadership by proxy and take command.”
FEBRUARY 9
Lunch at Monroe’s with Christopher [Isherwood] and Don [Bachardy], handsome and enthusiastic. Christopher scandalized to hear that Isak Dinesen has even been considered for the Nobel Prize. Huxley should have it, he feels, though he scarcely admires the novels.
FEBRUARY 13
Suddenly I remembered how, before his final operation, I had to get my father to sign the paper absolving the hospital from blame in the event of death on the operating table; and he seemed to be making difficulty about it, impatient awkwardness in his hand as I placed the pen in it. And then he found his voice in spite of his vexation and said, “Oh, my dear son, you have lived with me for fifty years, and still you don’t know which hand I write with.” I had been trying to get him to sign with his right hand. This remembrance gave me a lump in the throat … for I delight in and believe in all the emotions that ride from memory— the greatest of which are bound up in love.
MARCH 1
After lunch I stopped at the Mill [Barbara and Lloyd’s house] to pay my respects to Debo [his niece on her engagement to marry], and on the way home somehow—unimaginably—lost my glasses. I walked all the way down again, and back again, peering along the side of the road—no. So now I must use a pair several years old that make my head ache.
MARCH 4
BBC radio program on American expatriates in Paris after the first World War: A good deal of foolishness has been talked and indeed written about the reasons for our expatriation in the twenties. I especially deride the theory that we were dissatisfied with our native land, as a place that was morally repressed or arid, or that we were maladjusted in the matrix culture, or felt easier or more forceful somewhere abroad.
Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Dos Passos, the composers Virgil Thomson, Roger Sessions, Henry Cowell—poor Fitzgerald is the exception, but he was extremely unlucky, if not accursed, wherever he lived— our subsequent careers back at home show, I think, that we got on well with our compatriots. Indeed we have maintained rather more prominence and power than one might think desirable. The successive younger generations have not pressed us very hard. I wonder why.
My poor mother went all to pieces in my absence—failure of her speech (it is getting worse all the time, and she worsens it by panic), fits of weeping, very hard on Anna, and Lloyd’s secretary, and Baba. I’m afraid I did wrong to commit myself to the lectures in Utah.
MARCH 9
My mother’s speech has been deteriorating—complicated somewhat by an odd choking cough. She is 83. My brother and I were given the confidential report yesterday. Her heart and lungs and other vital organs are in excellent shape—but something less common: a dying of the ninth nerve, which governs all of the mouth and tongue. She will become entirely speechless, and then she will cease to be able to swallow. I shall cancel Utah. Perhaps she cannot go to the new house at all. In any case I shall be the last person to understand what she says, and probably the only person who can steady her as the ordeal develops, so that her behavior at the end shall not be unworthy of her.
MARCH 24
Russell Lynes wants me to point up, amplify—or perhaps clarify without amplifying—my little Isak Dinesen speech, for Harper’s Magazine. He’ll make me work more than it’s worth—but I love to have an editor wanting something—which has been one of my weaknesses, but which might be a strength, if an editor caught on.
APRIL 16
Anna, mopping up under a leaky bit of plumbing: “Water always had been my enemy somehow. It gets the better of my nerves quicker than anything. I’m not kidding, but I don’t know why it is.”
To Robert Phelps: I can’t think when I have received a letter that interested me so much, or gratified me so intensely, in the way of my self-interest. Putting your finger on the mannerism of my writing; seeing through it or beyond it, seeing something in it … You know, until middle age, and after painful experience of inability, it never occurred to me that I was not a novelist of latent power. Then, to confuse me and other interested parties, suddenly I was able to produce Apartment in Athens in six months.
MAY 25
I have been much concerned about the house in Rosemont. I went over there with Monroe, my housekeeper Anna, and John Connolly and a friend of his—we worked hard for four hours, drawing rooms on squared-off paper with measurements. It is time to assign the work to a building contractor. Tomorrow I must go back again with poor Mother, to consider the rooms we call hers.
MAY 30
I am glad to have carbon copies of some letters to post in my three-ring binder notebooks, as of the dat
e of writing, and someday perhaps chop out a lovely paragraph here and there. It’s one thing I am proud of and zealous to teach: my desk methods—I never had any until I was a post-mature man.
JUNE
We are told that Joyce only dreamed once in his lifetime, or only remembered one dream, in which he was the ace of diamonds walking up stairs.
JUNE 5
Forgetfulness is one of the forms my modesty about my writing takes—be it justified or morbid or both—and sometimes it keeps me from productivity. I forget to write, and virtually never forget anything else.
JULY 7
I am inclined to name the new home “Hay-meadows.”
JULY 12
The carpenters and electricians and plumbers have begun work in the stone house at Rosemont (Haymeadows), and three times in the past week I have gone with them at 6:45 a.m. and worked with them most of the day. Today I got John Connolly to take down the running horse weathervane from the spring house—the beginning of the move.
AUGUST 18
Our houses past and future: On Sunday, with a hired local young man and John in the afternoon, I moved five hollies, two azaleas, one large syringa, four little hemlocks, one small Japanese maple, and one dogwood. It was 90 degrees—no time for moving shrubs, but they were in the way of my brother’s bulldozer. I have also transplanted 85 varieties of iris.
Half a dozen lovely postcards from Monroe in Hawaii. He rented a bright yellow car and drove Raymond Mortimer all around Kauai.
AUGUST 19
I told Mother that Elizabeth intended to spend next Saturday at Beulah’s in New York [GW’s sisters]. A violent little expression of sadness passed over her face, and she reached out and scribbled, “I was going to ask Beulah to come out for the weekend.” I gave a good many reasons in a vague way why it would have been hard for her to do so. “I’ll be alone,” she wrote. This I denied with some affectionate asperity. “What do you mean, alone? I will be here. John will be here. Anna will be here.”
“No one to baby me, I guess.” And with her half-dead lips she managed to smile a little.
AUGUST 26
The summer passes blessedly, beautifully; all is well, except the irremediable things; we are sad.
SEPTEMBER 5
All the humidity wafted away last night, and it has been one of those days that you worship, cloudless and fresh, with all the foliage and the grasses greener than ever because of the past rainy month.
Mother had a bad day, choking worse than usual, so I did not dine with the others, but stayed and read to her.
SEPTEMBER 7
A young hawk visited me, not gyring for food but flying straight across very like a speed-boat, but in magical silence, just over the rooftops—I loved him.
SEPTEMBER 15
[Re Robert Phelps’s plan for a collection of Wescott works, “A Windfall.”]
Eminent fellow-writers the world over have honored me with affection, esteem, etc., but not one of them has taken it into his head to write about me. I must be glad of what the gods provide.
Last night, Mother had slipped on a new bath matt and lay there on the floor for almost an hour, afraid that she’d fall again. I must say she took it all very well—always at her best in any emergency or ordeal— and wrote the entire incident down for me on a series of slips of paper. But at the end she began to point mysteriously across the room, and wrote: “Two or three weeks ago I had a spell of seeing shapes of people out of the corner of my eyes.” I expressed interest, with equanimity. “I didn’t let it bother me then,” she wrote, and then added, pointing again, “Now there is a small woman dusting at the foot of my bed.” Hallucinating but not fooled by it.
SEPTEMBER 20
Baba caught Charles in the act of swiping money from her purse. Charles apologized. My brother hopes that oil can somehow be poured on this wildly troubled water and that Charles can be kept on. Lloyd’s extraordinary, almost universal compassion—like cynicism in reverse.
My mother now seems to be fading rapidly. Every day seems to count now. Lloyd and I have decided that we don’t want to leave her alone with Anna. He proposes to spend the night or to ask Elizabeth to do so, when I need to be away. It will be hard for him and intolerable to Elizabeth— but fortunately I haven’t many departures in prospect.
SEPTEMBER 27
Dostoyevsky: “What is hell, oh my brothers? Is it anything but this: that one has become incapable of love?”
It is not love but the lack of love that is blind.
SEPTEMBER 28
[Dr.] Pauline Goger thinks mother not likely to live more than three or four days. She has the Medical Center’s beautiful room, 515, and three handsome affectionate nurses around the clock. Lloyd and I told her that it was necessary to insert a tube in order to feed her, she nodded understandingly, and the fantastic will-power by which she has been living seemed to give way. But then the doctors found themselves unable to do what they had undertaken.
OCTOBER 5
Mother has had a dull day, scarcely noticing anything except the vicissitudes of her dying. I am so sorry for the poor little thing, it’s unspeakable. We are all as nervous as cats about it, including the tired nurses and Dr. Goger. She now gets a massive dose of Thorazine every four hours, and still the one dim angry eye opens, still she raps on the metal fence of the bed with her wedding ring.
OCTOBER 6
I wish mother’s end were gentler, or let me say instead, swifter. But death is a beast; even in an ideal little hospital, which we practically own, it’s rather like the middle ages.
OCTOBER 29
Janet Flanner and Natalia Murray spent last weekend here and we were fond and boisterous, disputatious and humorous. Next week I must be very official—at Cooper Union’s hundredth anniversary convocation, and at the Institute’s Gold Medal dinner meeting; and Monroe is giving a party for Sir Kenneth Clark; and I am squiring Marianne Moore to the Academy of Poets banquet; and, in-between, wooing my publisher and my agent a bit.
Mother remained indomitable, though the hospital thought her at death’s door for days … Tonight I am on duty in her hospital room. In ten days we are going to be able to move her to a luxurious nursing home nearby. And of course it is all to do over again, back to the dark gate which in our modern way we try to keep locked and to get through at the same time.
NOVEMBER 2
Chinese man’s response to an American missionary’s account of the Trinity: “Oh, I see, it is very American. The deity is a committee.”
Re: Journals. What about volume two? Cross that bridge when we come to it. The great overall problem is to enable the shifting, forgetful reader to recall the previous volume, if he has read it—or if he hasn’t, to start with the one just offered him.
A Hundred Affections [a possible book project]: Note: “The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections. They scorn the best I can do to relate them.”—Walt Whitman.
Poor Glenway’s Almanac: Diderot said: “No one steals my life from me. I give it.” Yes, I say, think, this is true of me, for better and worse.
NOVEMBER 14
The past week or ten days have been very difficult or distracted. My poor mother is headed back to the underworld again. Baba and Lloyd are to move to Rosemont on Wednesday and I have promised to help her hang pictures in the great new room there on Sunday. Also, my chief female friend, Pauline de Rothschild, is making her brief annual visit to her native land—she is weekending here now—and it is the first time we have seen her alone since she married the good proprietor at Mouton.
DECEMBER
[Re the four aborted novels.]
I invented some great American plot and form, and often signed a contract, and in due course found myself incapable, and wore myself out or, more important, wore my plot and subject matter out. Thus “The Dream of Mrs. Cleveland,” “The Deadly Friend,” “A Fortune in Jewels,” and “Children of This World.” And to this day I have never been allowed (except by unconstructive old William Maugh
am) to plead insufficient ability, to ask for “A” for effort.
The other night at the Institute my guest of honor, old Edna Ferber, said, “I suppose that you may want to tell me to mind my own business, but I really would like to know why you haven’t written more novels.” And I answered, “In so far as I understand the matter myself, it is because I have not had the talent required.” Whereupon she flew into a temper, so that I had to change the subject to official, Institute business. Everyone does, each according to his prejudice, blaming me for my sex life, or for not having had a university education, or having allowed my family to support me, or for not having been psycho-analyzed, or for having taken my mother to live with me, or something.
It seems to me that Robert Phelps and Bill Maxwell, and some others of the younger generation have asked me for just a little more of what I have already done—what comes easily and naturally.
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