MAY
My “Talks with Thornton Wilder” retyped in order to let Thornton and Isabel read it on their transatlantic liner. They never wrote me about it. Isabel insisted on my inserting four or five lines about his shrinking from publicity (vide Images of Truth, page 255).
MAY 14
K.A.P. [Katherine Anne Porter] and I were very good on television yesterday—an entire hour, with only one moderator, and no buttinskis.
K.A.P.’s favorite quotation: “It doth make a difference whence cometh a man’s joy.”—St. Augustine.
JUNE 21
Haymeadows, 5 a.m.: For two or three days I have had three mocking birds fighting a good deal of the time, with great snappings-out of their white edged fans, like Kabuki actors. Now one of them is singing in competition with my brown thrushes, making noise enough for me to hear through the door and above the radio.
JUNE 30
Mrs. Lesser, the little 85-year-old German bluestocking who has been the principle translator for the Institute for Sex Research all these years, confided to me that she hadn’t read my books until this year—obliged to rest her eyes when not earning a living—and they made her suffer at the same time that they aroused her admiration and gave her pleasure. “There are always such horrible things in your books. I keep wondering, why, why?” I wanted to know what horrible things: the burial of Rosalia, the feeding of Lucy, the feeble-mindedness of little Leda. Her daughter the psychiatrist’s wife, protested, “But, mother, how can you be shocked by things like that, when you have been dealing with real horrors for Dr. Kinsey for so many years?” She brushed this aside: “Oh, my dear, all that really isn’t very bad.”
JULY 14
Chez Felicia Geffen, Pawling, New York. Literary life in Fairfield County: The Cheevers and Philip Roth at the Cowleys’ last night. The Harold Strausses and the John Herseys and the Matthew Josephsons and Charles Miller tonight.
Love life and writing: I wrote the second half of The Apple of the Eye and all of The Grandmothers during an ideal conjugality; The Pilgrim Hawk in an interval of a love affair that was thrilling in intercourse but humiliating and boring in every other way. But Apartment in Athens came at the end of a desert in my life, eighteen months of only grief and masturbation. Good work is more to be relied on to lead to good sex than vice versa.
AUGUST
Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Baker, in Los Angeles, June 1, 1926; died August 4, 1962. The cause of her death apparently was accidental. Having become extremely addicted to Nembutal, she took a maximum dose of presumably fifteen or twenty capsules; then she was awakened by a phone call, couldn’t get back to sleep, and befuddled by the first lot, perhaps also by champagne, forgot and took another fifteen or twenty; perhaps tried to call for help, died with the telephone in her hand. She had had great misfortunes earlier that year: The Misfits, the cruel film that her husband Arthur Miller wrote for her and about her; her loss of him to another woman, Cartier Brésson’s friend, Inge Morath; suspension by the studio in the midst of a film, charged with malingering—she had misfortune all her life (vide the Time profile) but just before her death her career had taken an upward turn, and she seemed optimistic.
AUGUST 14
[Re A Windfall.]
My anthology as re-planned with editor Walter Bradbury: “The Babe’s Bed”; “The Rescuer”; “The Sight of a Dead Body”; “A Feeling about Henry James”; “The Moral of F. Scott Fitzgerald”; “A Transatlantic Glance”; “A Series of Letters”; “Fifteen Fables”; “A Writer’s Collection of Paintings”; “Pissarro’s Paris”; “Poor Greuse”; “Mr. Auerbach in Paris”; “The Frenchman Six Feet Three”; “The Love of New York”; “A Picture of Country Life”; “A Dust-Basket”; “The Stallions”; “The Valley Submerged.”
Hemingway and I were never friends; only friendly acquaintances, less and less friendly. Though proud and somewhat spoiled, on the crest of the wave of youthful success—my family chronicle, The Grandmothers, got the Harper Prize in 1927—I ardently admired the epoch-making artistry of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises … a master stylist in his way— extreme colloquialism, make-believe illiteracy—he charmed a generation of educators, and is partly responsible for the damage that lexicographers and specialists in linguistics have been doing to our language in recent years.
AUGUST 15
The Penn Station men’s room: As I went across to pee, a man behind me said, “Come on, Glenway, let me help you.” I turned, surprised, and saw that it was a young father with a very small son, almost too small for the urinal … I had never known or heard anyone named Glenway, except the grandson of my father’s civil war buddy who was named after me, and who killed someone in his teens and had to serve a prison sentence. Perhaps the father of this manly little fellow is one of my readers, I was too shy to ask him.
My sister Katherine and her husband drove here from Wisconsin for a farewell visit before moving to San Francisco, and my other sisters fore-gathered—the entire complement of siblings and remaining in-laws and Bruce and Dorothy and Monroe. You can imagine the noise, etc.; and of course I had to cook, and everyone followed me into the kitchen to talk or be talked to.
An occasion in another way as well, in that Beulah brought the first copy of Images of Truth. And for two days I have been laboring over my address books to assemble a list of illustrious authors and another list of perhaps influential professors and a vast list of out-of-town people to whom Harpers will send announcements. Furthermore, they want to give me a promotion party, which they almost never do nowadays. But surely it is good for the morale of the house—all the long term Harper employees who have had to explain to all and sundry why I haven’t been producing books all the time. This is the season when the extinct volcanoes have begun to erupt fire and brimstone and honey and perhaps even money: Porter, Hughes, et al.
Small Boy in Borrowed Plumage: It has been a blissful pleasure to write Images of Truth (except the Mann)—like a small child, an imaginative, self-dramatizing child, who has got into the family clothes closet, and paraded up and down in his father’s top hat, his mother’s feathers and furs, his sister’s high heels—that is, the pearls of K.A.P.’s condesa, the pearls of Colette’s Lea, the red tights of Mann’s Mephistopheles, Thornton Wilder’s trench coat, the toga of Julius Caesar. I have never had so much fun writing a book.
SEPT. 4
[Cape Cod, to K. A. Porter in Washington, D.C.]
Dearest Porter: On our way Capeward for the traditional weekend with Mrs. Crane, we found Cyrilly Abels and her husband in the train, and they gave us the awful news of your trouble and broken bones … Oh, my poor blessed bothered tired genius-ridden friend, the good fairies bringing you the recompense for so many years’ endeavor [Ship of Fools] have really behaved worse than harpies; harpies in reverse!
SEPTEMBER 6
E. E. Cummings’ death oppresses me. Katherine Anne fell down her Southern-type stairway and broke seven ribs, perhaps due to having tried to drown her sorrows one day last week. Are we perhaps turning out to be a lost generation after all?
SEPT. 7
Isak Dinesen’s death, announced to me on the telephone by Beulah. It made me cry; with a backlog of grief due to Porter’s falling downstairs, the deaths of Cummings and Faulkner, even Marilyn Monroe’s solemn cautionary events, symbolic of deadly bad luck.
OCTOBER 26
[With K. A. Porter in Washington, D.C.]
Katherine Anne kept asking me last night: “How much money am I going to have: is it thirty-six hundred a month or thirty-six thousand a year?”—and at one point she misspoke: “thirty-six thousand a month.” Money matters are not real to her, that is, not factual. Her making fun of herself for not being allowed to get hold of all the money that Ship of Fools is making for her: “Whine, whine, whine! Now I’m going to stop it. If I ever say one more word about money, you just slap me.”
When I got back from luncheon she was fast asleep and I had to cancel her dentist appointment. Presently she came down
stairs, got me to agree to drink a little champagne with our dinner. She of course did all the drinking, scarcely any of the eating; repeatedly transferring spoonfuls of chicken and rice from her plate to my plate.
OCTOBER 30
[A note from publicist Tom Sullivan.]
“The WOR telecast ‘Meet the Author: Glenway Wescott with Katherine Anne Porter,’ screened October 7, attracted a remarkable half million viewers in New York.”
NOVEMBER
Portland. No one on earth is as affected as the immature American male. The way our boys, and many of our homosexuals old enough to know better, arrange their genitals in tight denim trousers corresponds almost exactly to the wearing of cod pieces at the end of the middle ages when they no longer served any useful purpose.
NOVEMBER 29
James Thurber: “Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”
NOVEMBER 30
Milwaukee. Reading selections from Whitman in Wisconsin: Magical, purely poetical gift, like Tennyson’s. It means less than I used to read into it—only his courage about eroticism is very admirable, and that based (I suppose) on his self-assurance of relative innocence, that is, scarcely having done anything. For probably he was a masturbator for the most part, like Henry James, like Thoreau.
DECEMBER 1
Night before last, having missed my train to Milwaukee by four minutes (the ladies having hung onto my coattails too long, then driven too slow), and I was sitting in the Union Station, two and half hours to wait for the next train, there came a deaf mute boy, handing out cards to everyone on the waiting room benches, returning a few minutes later to take them back or to receive one’s contribution—poorly but neatly dressed, sturdy but not fleshy, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, self-respecting, lonely-looking.
The only enemy of quality in this country these days is, I believe, quantity. The number of books—400 a year at Harpers—the high rental of book store real estate, ditto book warehouse space—everyone concerned naturally eager to get one’s book out of the way.
DECEMBER 3
Madison, Wisconsin. Paul Engle, introducing me, read the first two paragraphs of The Grandmothers: Alwyn’s trying to discern a trace, amid the melon vines, of the foundation of the house in which his father had been born. He added, “I think that, all his life, Glenway has been looking for his birthplace.”
I replied: “Paul Engle’s introduction stirs my mind and touches my heart. As to the deeper implications of what I suppose he meant to imply, there is a coincidence that may interest you. Last week when I lectured in Milwaukee, I spoke of wanting to drive up to Kewaskum, in Washington County, to Farmington Township, to Orchard Grove, to Valley Farm, to revisit the house I was born in, which I last visited in 1935. I was told that it lately had burned to the ground. I offer this as a matter of fact and sentiment and coincidence, not as a symbol. Nothing really symbolic about it—I think.”
The America of DC3’s, never seen from the road or the train or the jet plane. Someday I’d enjoy traversing the entire continent in little hops, sitting in the tail seat as to see under the wings.
Pretty hill country around Ottumwa, Iowa, breaking up the great fertile rectangles of black earth, tawny stubble, winter grains, dark thistle, strong little water courses, eroded pastures, contour planting. Further on, as we crossed into Missouri, noble old woodlots reduced to noble groves with brown and golden winter sod in the vacant spaces. Lorraine-like.
DECEMBER 8
Paul G. reports that a large part of the respectable male population of Bloomington gave a stag dinner party to raise money for the Boy Scouts, with obscene motion pictures after dinner. All concerned, or almost all, would favor rigid censorship of books and pictures and the performing arts, indeed, inhumane prison sentences for purveyors and performers of erotica.
DECEMBER 27
Strange as it may seem, El Greco had a friend familiar enough to criticize him for spending all his life brooding, pondering and perhaps sulking in a dirty, stuffy, dark-curtained room, and to propose his coming out for a walk. “No,” said the great visionary painter, “No, the sunlight would disturb the light that is shining within me.”
I should not have stayed away quite so long. I couldn’t resist Bloomington and Charlottesville, favorite universities. Now I have exactly four months to produce a book-length text [A Windfall]—and my strong perceptive bossy new editor is insisting on seeing an incomplete, unfinished version of “The Stallions” within a couple of weeks, so that, if we decide against it for our immediate purposes of autumn publishing, there may still be time for me to produce something else. What else? Since I got back I have been having nightmares about this—I mean, literally; bad dreams.
How far back one could trace my almost incapacitating self-consciousness, fits of vanity interspersed if not offset by painful slumps.
1963
JANUARY
On May 8, 1932, the New York Herald Tribune “Books” published a review of my Fear and Trembling by Isabel Patterson, the only respectful review it had, and they illustrated it with Cocteau’s flattering drawing of me, made in 1926.
Last week, a neighbor lady, moving into an old house in Rosemont, found those yellowed pages on the floor of the attic, recognized me, and brought them to me.
JANUARY 5
Against the urgency brought to bear upon young university professors to “publish.” It tends to lower standards or to imply, in the application of strict criteria to the work of main extra-academic body of contemporary literature, a certain insincerity.
As their publications are not, as a rule, successful in book form, it is conducive to the envious, almost paranoid disposition which is one of the worst features of university life, at least in the area of literature and the arts—conducive also to provincialism.
Teachers should be encouraged to feel that education is the greatest of all intellectual activities, as indeed it is the most fundamental.
JANUARY 20
The most obvious thing in the world about me, my life, my work: I am not going to have time enough to write all I could and should write; I am not going to have energy enough to work as many hours a day as I should like.
FEBRUARY
Stories of Pavlik [Tchelitchev]: Our quarrel about George Platt Lynes (1943); our quarrel about Peter Watson (1947); his peacemaking letter and gift of a 1925 portrait drawing, after George died.
FEBRUARY 1
A good kind of scientist: Wilson Alwyn Bentley, the snowflake man, 1865–1934, a Vermont farmer’s son, poor and celibate, who devoted his life to the study of snow-crystals, accumulating evidence that they are almost all hexagonal and no two are exactly alike.
One storm in 1928 brought him a hundred new types of crystal formation snowflakes. In 1931 the American Meteorological Society subsidized the publication of his lifework, Snow Crystals, whereupon he died.
In late afternoon light a fine partridge sat amid the black twigs of the apple tree closest to the house, silhouetted against the pallor of the snow. At twilight, a horned owl in flight swept softly from tree to tree.
FEBRUARY 4
Elizabeth, New Jersey looks rather like a suburb of Paris, that is to say, like certain paintings by Utrillo.
FEBRUARY 6
William Inge, after extreme adverse criticism and a brief run of his “Natural Affection,” went charging around the country, demoralized. My dear John Connolly, employed as his secretary-chauffeur, sent me a picture postcard of the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, now a museum, with this message: “If I were put up on the block here, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Plans have changed five times so far.”
FEBRUARY 18
There is this equation in post-mature sexuality: The effect of asking, and getting a negative answer, is a youthful feeling, however sorrowful. Not asking is what ages one.
FEBRUARY 19
I blithely committed myself to delivering my story of animal love, “The Stallions,” not later than May 1st and presently I g
row creative about it, perhaps too creative. It got longer, took in some additional characters and episodes, and now I am behind schedule.
MARCH 1
[Philadelphia.]
A birthday dinner for Stephen Spender at Henry McIlhenny’s. I sat on Lady Diana Cooper’s left. Beautiful still, though masked-looking. Beautiful soft voice. She has just returned from Washington. The president’s favorite sister, Mrs. Shriver, guided her through the White House, and later in the week he himself came to dinner with her at the [Joseph] Alsops’.
She dotes on the president and covers all the family with a blanket fondness, even the attorney general and his wife. (Come to think of it, she didn’t mention the president’s wife.)
MARCH 6
I despise the administrators of the Noble Prize, not only for certain frivolities and sentimentalities in their selection of men of letters, but for not giving the Peace Prize to Jean Monnet, just now.
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