But the moral of it all I’m afraid is that I must try to have more money and plan my own vacations. However, this has been wonderfully pleasant and affectionate, and it has been good for me to be away from my desk, perhaps also to be away from those I most love—to whet my appetite, to give me perspective. My heart is very full.
JANUARY 22
[After visiting the Kinsey Institute.]
An especially beloved professor was arrested last week for having engaged in some indecent “pen pal” correspondence, and he attempted suicide in a terrible and grotesque way. I felt the importance of the research as much as ever, and the great courage of this going on without Alfred. I missed him bitterly.
JANUARY 24
[To Paul Gebhard, of the Kinsey Institute.]
In re “pen pal” correspondence: Lytton Strachey used to like to write fanciful obscene letters to certain friends. After his death, Alan Searle (now William Maugham’s secretary) destroyed a packet of them. He told me this and I reproached him for having done so.
FEBRUARY 18
Do not ask yourself whether or not you are happy. As a rule the answer is no. Only admit to yourself that someone or something is giving you pleasure, that you are proud of this or that ability or effort, and then your unhappiness will be mitigated, perhaps forgotten.
FEBRUARY 19
For Baba’s sake even more than his own, Monroe invited Lincoln Kirstein here yesterday. It was a great success, but I found it rather a hardship when I arrived by the early morning train and bus, tired of New York, to find that personification of the great city, storming and joking, irrepressible though pessimistic.
FEBRUARY 20
I enjoyed my two hours with Michael Miksche. He was so happy; he seems exactly corresponding to the concept of himself that he likes best: beautiful baby, beautiful wife, beautiful old ex-lover, even beautiful plump young Irish nurse, concubine-style. Oh, my life was complicated enough without his picking his way back into it. As Monroe once said, “He has a displacement like the Queen Mary!”
Jim Lord lunched here today, in his best form, telling stories of the life abroad, especially the wonderful story of his peasant lover whose heart he broke, who became a monk.
FEBRUARY 22
To Robert Phelps: I feel honor-bound to let you know that I am now inspired not to publish A Windfall as we planned it last year; certainly not at this time. I want to do something else instead … The very thing that appealed to your imagination in your first concept of A Windfall, its constituting a kind of cumulative self-portrait, has come to be absolutely disheartening to me. It is going to be necessary for me to change myself in some ways, soon; therefore this is not a time for me to be exhibiting myself, or even looking at myself in any kind of mirror.
MARCH 7
Spring-song. This year’s first real concert of the birds: orchestral grackles and starlings and various sparrows, and lovely continuous solo of the mocking bird mimus polyglottus, our little dear savage, our “Castro.” Not a hint of his pugnacity in the tone of his voice. In all the arts, even that of birds, style is a strange thing.
APRIL 12
At Institute of Arts and Letters dinner: Robert Frost said, “You’re now one of my oldest friends,” which, I may say, gave me a different feeling of my age than I have ever had before. He explained to the meeting: “I’ve followed him ever since Mrs. Vaughan Moody sent him to see me when he was a 21-year-old boy.”
MAY 1
Washington, DC. Frost’s reading in the State Department auditorium, one of his regular performances, paid for by the members of the President’s cabinet—not worth coming down for, at some expense to the Institute … Our governing class (of which presumably this audience was representative) impressed me as amazingly handsome. Frost was not at his best; he seemed shy—is that possible?—although the audience responded cordially enough … Mr. Udall called him, “Our poet laureate, without portfolio.”
MAY 17
A little letter from Mr. Udall, handwritten in a boyish scrawl, on his Secretary [of the Interior] stationary, with a buffalo in the upper left-hand corner. I copy it exactly: “Dear Glenway, It was a pleasure to get acquainted. We’re moving in the right direction. Who knows, maybe we’ll achieve one of Robert’s goals soon. Regards, Stewart.” Just in case anyone fancies that the Administration is all Harvard or Harvardesque.
MAY 27
One of the profoundest truths about me is that my life is too rich. If I had as many arms as the god Siva and a fountain pen in each hand, it seems to me that I could write six books at once—simultaneously, not just concurrently—easier than I now write one.
MAY 29
I don’t suppose that I shall ever feel sure of the safety of my mss. and letter files again. The burning of Aldous Huxley’s house with all his unpublished work, the image of the firemen having to restrain him by force, as he wept and begged to be allowed to go into the flames to rescue as much as possible, has alarmed me absolutely, permanently.
JUNE 11
Monroe has been rather unwell this weekend but stoically up and about. Jet plane travel gives him bronchitis almost invariably, and at the same time the arthritis gripped his poor back. I wish he could have tiny injections of Novocain like the President.
JUNE 21
Lloyd says that he has never seen hay so heavy as this year’s first cutting in the east and south fields here at Haymeadows. They disappointed him last year; he gave them potash as well as manure.
JUNE 23
The strangest little things remind me of my mother, with realistic evocation and true bereavement: for example, reading in W. S. Lewis’s Walpole lectures that Mary Queen of Scots, the night before her capital punishment, treated one of her feet with a salve. A lump in my throat…
AUGUST 10
I spent two or three days with my dear Felicia Geffen of the Institute, a day and a half with blessed Will Chandlee at Harvard, the inside of a week at old Mrs. Josephine Crane’s at Woods Hole (along with Monroe), an annual event of the past 18 years or so, for sentiment rather than the fun of it.
Before leaving for New England I gave my “Memories of the Twenties” lecture at Columbia. Then Esquire heard of it and wheedled me into correcting and typing the entire 35 pages in two days. Great hurry; for their Christmas issue perhaps. They have declined it, William Morris Agency now informs me.
Pennsylvania Station, early morning. The two vast clocks at the north and south ends of the waiting room labeled in red, “Timed by Benrus”— fourteen minutes apart, south 7:12, north 6:58. No wonder the railroads go bankrupt; the wonder is that there aren’t more train wrecks.
SEPTEMBER 18
In the absence from home of neighbor Reul Tunley, someone entered and stole little objects of art, souvenirs of his world travel, and other belongings. My brother and sister-in-law have never bothered to keep their house locked or even to have proper locks or to carry keys. Baba dined here on Friday night—Lloyd had gone to Boston—and I read to her the report of Tunley’s misfortune in The Democrat. When she got back home later that evening there lay in her bathroom on the tile floor a man’s handkerchief, unidentifiable and inexplicable. Her servants who had been in the kitchen, but not all evening, testified plausibly that neither they nor anyone known to them had entered Baba’s part of the house. It planted seeds of fear—reminiscent of the seeds of jealousy that resulted from the murder of Desdemona by Othello. Would that she could be kept just a little fearful, just enough to motivate her to lock up her glamorous house, jewels, various valuables, and half a million dollars worth of paintings.
OCTOBER 3
The literary life: In the Register of Copyright’s report dated July 1961, the average age of authors at death is 68, the average age of authors at publication of first book, 32, and at their last book, 64.
OCTOBER 11
My first novel, The Apple of the Eye: For a good while I have been struck by the fact that young people who I meet, who take an interest in what I have written, often
prefer it to the rest of my fiction … Is this because they like to discover the less familiar title, less often remembered by their elders? My style in it is more sensuous, and, one might say, more “modern,” less educated, less French; and much of the plot as such is romantic, with Bad Han as an earth-mother, the triangularity of the youngsters, the re-burial in the swamp, etc. It made my reputation overnight.
NOVEMBER 16
Elderly appearance: I take a keen interest in the way literary men and women of my generation have been aging. Even what I see in the mirror interests me, although I am not sure that I can interpret that properly: rather like the sort of North British or Scottish country gentleman, ruddy and silvery, jovial or at least genial, with a look of hot temper gradually mollified by pleasure and gratitude and affection.
There was the change in the late Hemingway’s appearance so recently, the sportsman-dandy giving fond, vain glances over that unique great fan of beard, as tense as a peacock’s tail, suddenly softened by his several irreversible illnesses, but still ever bravely posing for photographers in Spain last summer, like one of Dostoyevsky’s sufferers at the vulgarized bullfights. It scarcely bears thinking of; it is too sad.
Thornton Wilder, like an exalted or inspired army officer. He could play the part of a demagogue or a dictator—in a play on stage; oh, not in reality.
Katherine Anne Porter, the texture of her skin not youthful but with a vivid sort of paleness, and her lustrous, dark, rather melancholy eyes.
Monday Class [lectures at the city home of Josephine Crane]. J. D. Salinger: I should like to say some things to him, as to his plight in the narrative art, between the two stools: his Hemingway-like colloquialism on the one hand, and his high-brow loquaciousness and desperate self-criticism on the other hand, influenced by Henry James.
NOVEMBER 19
One cannot approve the risks that many of my generation have been running in the matter of letting time elapse; feeling everlastingly youthful and mistaking that feeling for a true and probable life expectancy. It is a folly and perhaps a psychopathology. Examining myself severely I realize that I have been pampered by my family, dispensed from having to write for a living; that I have never had any sense of vocation or of genius in the literary way. But when I apply the same criteria to fellow writers, I find that my wonderment only increases.
Poor Katherine Anne Porter, except for the hospitality of writers’ colonies, various grants and fellowships, and teaching courses in creative writing at slave-driving universities, has been dependent on her mere writing talent for a living. Hemingway was obviously a genius type, and a dynamo in the way of energy and vitality as well as ego. Yet, according to Mrs. Hemingway, he left behind thousands of typewritten pages that he had not troubled to put in publishable order, as though he did expect to live forever.
DECEMBER 4
Books I have delighted in during 1961: The Chateau by William Maxwell, Sermons and Soda Water by John O’Hara, and An Only Child by Frank O’Connor. To which let me add an adorable masterpiece of 1960 which I read belatedly, The Leopard by Lampedusa, and another not yet published in this country, The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes.
1962
JANUARY
From William Blake: “Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.”
JANUARY 2
According to [Harley] Granville-Barker, Shakespeare’s preoccupation in all the late plays, implicit in Hamlet and Measure for Measure, explicit after that: “the problem of the re-valuing of good and evil in the light of self-knowledge”—a beautiful and profound statement.
JANUARY 12
First visit to the Barnes collection—incomparable. An effect of adorable good taste and of strange unity or coherence. A love of boldness, of going all out. The Cezannes greater than the Renoirs. The Matisses and Modiglianis supreme.
FEBRUARY 1
A black woman on the bus: “Just let me have enough money to make ends meet. Oh, I tell you, I’d not care about a surplus, not a bit. Someday, yes, someday. But, honey, it won’t be on this earth, not for me.” A sweet virtuous voice; no pathos.
FEBRUARY 17
6 a.m., Ridgefield, CT. At bedtime—my bed in Bernard’s room— blissful triangularity, with an orgasm, though I was at my wit’s end with fatigue. Phallic worship of Bernard a factor in my life for more than twenty years, a factor now (so to speak) reduced to happiness.
The thrilling early daylight is gradually filling Bernard’s wild valley; a cloud recumbent in the swampy woodlot, pitch black tree trunks heavily edged with snow.
When I get caught up in my work for publication, I propose to keep more to journal writing. My small-scale everyday subject matter is more interesting intrinsically than the material I have in mind for books. Also it seems I now have the necessary technique (better late than never) for journal writing.
Hemingway: A little while before his death it was reported in the newspapers that his publishers, Charles Scribner’s Sons, had seen a first draft of a volume of his reminiscences of Paris in the twenties; and a little thrill of apprehension ran through the (not) Lost Generation, along with the prospective pleasure of reading anything by him, even perhaps second-best work.
I hope the work exists—and I hope the Scribners and Mrs. Hemingway will not withhold it too long, even if it is in an incomplete state. Oh, I want to live long enough to read it.
Presumably in this work he will get some things wrong, but he has always been apt to immortalize things as he has conceived them. While his judgments of psychology and morality and social relationships were never very perceptive, he wrote like a veritable necromancer, mirroring his phantoms to the life, echoing their utterances; even if sometimes fictitious and unjust, his small talk was hallucinating and unforgettable.
MARCH 19
I am in a productive fit (high time). During the years and years of my supposed indolence or incompetence, I have been piling up drafts and scribbles and notebooks and letter-files, out of which I now can mine and quarry some books.
APRIL 1
Read first half of my Thomas Mann essay aloud to Baba, Earl and Freddie: It is repetitious because it is argumentative—if I had done it in the light, flashing style of my Colette, Porter, and Wilder essays it would not have been convincing. If it would not have been pompous and grand-eloquent it would have seemed carping and tedious. I am somewhat proud of it but I do not like it. It corresponds too closely to his work, philosophizing and elaborate and ironic. Never again will I let anyone assign a subject to me. My last critical criticism? Probably. I hope so.
APRIL 9
From my interview in Milwaukee Sentinel: “I believe there is more precise truth in a story than in philosophy, preaching and teaching. Stories pacify our wild hearts. Samuel Johnson said, ‘The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’”
APRIL 10
[Re his lecture at the Central Library, Milwaukee.]
In the front row sat a big lug of a teenager with eyebrows like Santiago’s, in elegant skin-tight workpants and sweater, who amazingly delighted in my long Burke-like sentences. When I started one he would lean forward with his lips parted, watching it as though it were a tennis match, and when I got through the syntax without mishap, he would grin from ear to ear, and lean back in his chair, spread his legs with fine basket displayed. A budding writer, I suspect—syntactical sense is one of the signs. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him.
Overheard from a girl in Madison:
“He’s in the army now, but he sends me tape recordings, and I weep buckets about his verbalizations.”
APRIL 12
[To Monroe Wheeler, after visiting Wheeler’s elderly parents in Evanston.]
Dearest of all: I forgot to tell you last night that I have what I think of as a birthday present, discovered on a bookshelf in your old room, brought away without asking your father’s permission: Madame Bovary in French, but published in Vienna, very yellowed paper and fragile
casing, inscribed to me by you in September 1922 with an expression of your belief that I would do something still finer. A formula for heartbreak but a motivation for hard work. In fact I don’t think that I should have accomplished anything if I had not aimed beyond my ability, and aimed optimistically.
APRIL 23
[Visiting the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Bloomington, Indiana.]
Back at my cubicle in the library of the I.S.R. having had only four hours sleep, the buzz hum of fluorescent light tubes, the love-song moaning of pigeons, and the hard whirr of lawn mowers.
I long for a little pleasure, as I always do, especially when I have been confined to my intellect for a long while. I wish I could get into the film archives as well as the bookshelves. But here, more than anywhere else perhaps, I have to act my age.
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