Keats’ last words. Joseph Severn had never seen anyone die. It is thought that Keats knew this, and in the ultimate hour felt sorry for him.
“Severn, lift me up. I am dying!”
Then, in the goodness of his heart, he added, “Don’t be afraid.”
OCTOBER 31
Said [Joseph] Addison, wittily, in his elderly manner, “We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.”
What it does, if we give it any thought—difficult to do perhaps in this age of apocalyptic science—is to remind us to write in language most likely to endure, that is, to continue to go on meaning more or less what it means to us, not in the jargon arbitrarily developed by university professors for their specialized intramural publications, not in the improvisational humorous small talk of immigrants and other such autodidacts, not in frivolous slang.
Language has a heart, a core, a slow mainstream, which is sacred.
NOVEMBER 6
[Re delivering erotic Tchelitchev illustrations to the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana.]
I feel foolish about this expedition—Pavlik [Tchelitchev] bewitched … There has been a hex, beginning at the airport where I caught a happy-go-lucky TWA boy misrouting my bag to Bloomington, Illinois. Fog over Indiana; cancellation of the Lake Central plane at the last minute. From Chicago on I have been circumstantially teamed up with two traveling salesmen and a physical fitness professor—and sure enough, they have been talking about sex, Playboy Club bunnies, whores in Panama, etc., before daybreak. Needless to say, I have been worried, profoundly worried about the drawings, with the shifting of the bag from one public carrier to another. I wasn’t allowed to carry it in my hand.
NOVEMBER 7
[From the New York Times.]
“High Court in New Jersey Overturns A Ban on Homosexuals in Bars.”
NOVEMBER 22
The Death of the President. For some time I have thought of the young president with profound compassion—certainly he must have felt bitterly frustrated, disappointed and discouraged on account of the failure of his government program due to public apathy, due to the necessities of the rebelliousness of the Negroes and concomitantly to the defiance of the Southern branch of his party—or to some insolent powerful dictatorship and shift of power in Europe.
And so pessimistic have I grown that my first or second thought upon the news of his death was, “Oh, he’s well out of it!” Weak of me, certainly; and in fact I do believe that he might have been hopeful of a turn of the political tide and better luck in his second administration.
I cannot think of any death in history so pathetic. Keats for example, though he might have become a Shakespeare, had become a Keats.
One of the inner seeds of fascism: My unwillingness to believe that the man who killed Kennedy was the communist or ex-communist, pro-Castro lunatic whom the Dallas police apprehended, my longing to believe (so to speak) the opposite. If there is to be any uncertainty or long drawn-out investigation, I kept thinking, would it not be a good thing to blame or at least suspect some segregationist, some John Bircher, some Goldwaterite?
Certainly I do not trust the Dallas police. Is this because I am homosexual, and therefore an outlaw, and consequently a cop-hater?
I keep remembering the burning of the Reichstag, the trial of Martin van der Lubbe, et seq.
In this dear land of the (mostly) free, better about heterosexual morals than anything else, what would have happened if the assassin had been a jealous husband or honor-minded father or brother?
Mrs. Kennedy, arriving at the White House from Arlington Hospital with her husband’s body—not until 3:30 a.m. (of course it took the morticians hours to “restore” his bullet-torn face, for the viewing by his family and high government officials)—still wore the bright-colored dress she had worn for the parade in Dallas, still blood-stained.
NOVEMBER 28
[To Janet Flanner with GW’s review of Colette’s The Blue Lantern.]
Somewhat new inspiration. Last year’s book seems to have emancipated me from being expected to write great novels, a mug’s game for so many years. (What a weak character!) The same people who used to bully me and scold me about my fiction writing now constantly demand book reviews. And I guess it’s time to do something different from either fiction or criticism.
NOVEMBER 29
Foolishness of love in matters of public interest, citizenship, etc: I find myself resenting President Johnson for so promptly going to work glamorizing the moon project by re-naming Cape Canaveral Cape Kennedy, diverting my mind from the fact that it was President Kennedy’s dear project in the first place.
Though I ardently disapproved when Kennedy first started it, and since, I took it for granted—because I loved him—that he had good reason for it. I seem not to give his distinguished successor the benefit of the doubt—because I do not love him.
DECEMBER
To shame or punish a book because it stimulates the sexual appetite is as silly as to forbid a tragedy to make you cry, a comedy to make you laugh, or a piece of music to make you dance. I believe in the physical responses that the arts may elicit, i.e., tears, laughter, exaltation of patriotism, sexual arousal—only not in disproportion or excess but in moderation and proportion, not sobbing sentimentality, not belly laughter, nor riot or assassination or rape.
DECEMBER 5
Note that a good many receptive anal fuckers clean their anuses before making love—just as women cleanse the vagina.
Note that oral-genital intercourse developed as a widespread technique in the U.S. because of the greater availability of running hot water and soap.
DECEMBER 8
Discipline is a god, though indeed sometimes a possessive, jealous, maddening god. By saving time it permits more time for work, pleasure, and rest. It instills self-esteem. It gives us courage.
DECEMBER 20
[Re declining a magazine editor’s request for a piece on Cocteau.]
Cocteau was one of my oldest friends, and his death has saddened me, although I am glad that he got out of life while still in the midst of it, with work in hand, with friends in close contact. It would have been sad for him to lie bedridden with senses impaired.
Someday I hope to write something about him, in a book, with other remembrances.
DECEMBER 26
Sometimes I think it might be easier to write a bestseller—like [Mary] McCarthy or Nabokov or Mailer—than to inch along toward the grave as I have been doing with a series of little challenges, séances of the intellect, love-affairs of the pen, invisible chess games; a kind of poet without verse. The trouble is that I hate the very idea of writing what I wouldn’t enjoy reading.
1964
JANUARY 21
Certainly, in my case, career and sexuality and economics and family relationships are all exceptional—but for the life of my mind, the range of my reading and my mediation and my scribbling, literary and epistolary, sometimes seem to me fantastic; perhaps increasingly so. Age is not a simplifying factor.
JANUARY 25
Earl and Walter and David: The simplest continuous single act of intercourse, four men as mutually engaged as ardently as any heterosexual coupling, about half an hour of continuous action, with one change of position, and my own oral-genital activity the same throughout. No sort of conscious indecency or self-conscious eroticism: friendliness and sense of beauty predominant over everything, everything except sexual sensation and arousal and, finally, orgasm.
JANUARY 27
Katherine Anne this morning reminded me of an amusing exchange between us years ago. She had spoken of her desire to make a great deal of money if and when she got Ship of Fools done. “But you’re bound to be disappointed in that way,” I said. “At least in this country, the best things in life are free.”
To which she replied, “I have had all the things that money can’t buy. Now I’d like to see what a little money can do for me.”
Just
before Ship of Fools appeared, Christopher Isherwood said to me, “I hope for her sake that it isn’t too successful.”
“But why?”
“She has made too many enemies in the literary life, but even they have treated her somewhat indulgently because of her loneliness and hardships and penury. If they find that on top of her glamour and glory and influence, she has money, real money, they will tear her to pieces.”
FEBRUARY 8
[On translating.]
In the course of our Colette telecast (Katherine Anne Porter and Anita Loos and I on “Camera Three”) the subject of translation came up. I said, as I always do, that no one ever takes enough trouble or devotes enough time to it. As a rule it is hack-work, and poorly paid. There is nothing impossible to translate, except for the most complex verse forms: rhyme and rhythm and meter in addition to meaning and feeling really do defeat us. When we care about literary work in a foreign language, we are likely to love and prize and take delight especially in passages that express not only the temperament, message and feeling of the subject matter but passages that uniquely illustrate the spirit of the language. In other words, the least translatable authors are prose writers who are most like poets. But, by the same token, if you understand the language you are translating from and master the language you are translating into, you will come upon compensatory passages, lucky breaks: some things lend themselves to a foreign language more easily than in their original form.
MARCH 2
My Tchelitchev painting The Lion Boy: He isn’t erotic for me any more (except for instance, in conversation)—I sometimes wish he were. I only see the blue and the gold, and feel the dreaminess of the gaze of his sentimental face.
APRIL
The Apple of the Eye penciled ms. in notebooks: I like to show this manuscript because it is picturesque and because I am stubborn. It was my first prose publication—I was 23—and I still like it. Recently I took the stenographer’s tablet out of an old box for the benefit of a university man who had undertaken a Ph.D. thesis about me, and saw the torn condition of the first tablet. It shocked me. Who had been at it? Why? Then it gave me goose-flesh of remembrance: in a hotel bedroom in Munich, in 1922, during a quarrel with my beloved Monroe, I myself had torn it and flung it on the floor.
APRIL 4–5
The young are, above all, self-seeking. What a good word that is, meaning something very different from self-centered or selfish. They want and need to discover themselves, to learn to know themselves. Sometimes we can see at a glance deep things and future things that will take them a long time and great fusses (painful to all concerned) to find out. No matter; es muss sein; they can’t learn much from us; they have to experiment with themselves and with us.
APRIL 24
Marianne Moore made a public appearance with Auden, introducing him before one of his lectures. “I cannot be meritorious,” she told him, “but I will be brief; only five minutes.”
“Three minutes would be better,” he firmly answered.
As it is well known that he always wants to do all the talking, we all laughed. Monroe sprang to defend him. “But, Marianne, he only wanted to make it easier for you.” Sir Kenneth Clark exclaimed, “Monroe, what a diplomat you are! And quick as a flash!”
Marianne wasn’t as well satisfied with Wystan, as usual: “Well, he was unrestrained, barroom-like!” She said afterward, “I wanted to say bawdy, but felt ashamed to. Barroom was a euphemism.”
APRIL 30
Hemingway, I seem to remember, used to hold that a well-constructed sentence could be easily understood without commas, etc.; therefore he forbade himself to put any in until the last revision. Syntax as simple as that, I think, leads to a certain monotonousness, repetitiousness, as in his case indeed; sometimes hypnotic in effect, sometimes soporific.
Sometimes it seems to me that my very own, very personal punctuation is most important for the conveyance of the rhythm of what I write, the breath of life. Is that because I read aloud so much, perhaps too much?
Every magazine, every publisher, has its own rules and tries to maintain some uniformity. I yield to them but irritably, and sometimes with a bad conscious, aesthetically speaking.
MAY 3
Monroe’s enthusiasm about the style of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast— a pang of jealousy. I mean to say, rivalry. He remarks that the spell of the subject matter of Paris in the twenties affected him so that he was able to revert to his way of writing at that time; better than the way he wrote in recent years.
MAY 4
Almost all afternoon with Monroe, driving up the Delaware River on the Pennsylvania side, and down the Delaware on the New Jersey side, which is his delight—as it were a kind of loving intercourse. Every shade and nuance of infant green everywhere, and the apple orchards and the various ornamental Japanese fruit trees or fruit shrubs all in blossom.
How desperate it is to think that one’s springs are numbered!
MAY 5
A long, tiring day—correcting the galleys of my Maugham foreword; copying the list of Tchelitchevs in the gallery of Modern Art exhibition that I’d like to have photographed, and composing a persuasive letter to Carl Weinhardt about this; trotting down to Baba’s and hastily putting up plastic-coated wire for her clematises to grow on (not a moment too soon, as they are shooting up, all self-entangled); driving to Trenton with Ethel, trying to work in the train, but dozing all the way to town; then shopping, and cooking dinner at John’s for Adair and George Howard as well as ourselves; letting John tell me his troubles, which cheered him up and saddened me; falling into bed, dead-tired.
MAY 9
Last night at the opera, returning to her box after intermission, the First Lady Mrs. Johnson stood graciously gesturing in acknowledgement of the general applause, then sat down—and just there, where she chose to sit, there was no chair. No harm done.
Someone used to say that one could distinguish between born royalty and any parvenu by their way of sitting down. The Empress Euginie would swiftly, though dignifiedly, glance behind her; Queen Victoria always calmly lowered her little body as it might have been in thin air, never doubting that some courtier or servitor would instantly advance whatever she was to sit on or in. The Democratic First Lady landed on the floor but rose with a pleasant smile and, said the newscaster on WOR, with no lapse of dignity.
This reminds me of an even less formal state of American manners. Baba’s Aunt Harriet, Mrs. Charles B. Alexander, who was a Crocker (the robber-baron’s daughter) came to lunch in Rambouillet in 1931. She was in her eighties and the Rambouillet dining room floor was highly waxed. She took my arm, from the vast living room floor across the hall, into the dining room. Just as I was about to put up her chair, she turned and gave me a piercing glance. “Now don’t you pull that chair out from under me,” she said earnestly. Perhaps in 1849 very old ladies were sometimes subjected to practical jokes by 30-year-old friends of the family.
MAY 16
The verbal culture, oratory, sermons, lectures, was so much more important than the forms of literature in early nineteenth century America. Van Wyck Brooks quotes Harriet Beecher Stowe (from her novel Dred): “If ever a woman feels proud of her lover, it is when she sees him as a successful public speaker.”
MAY 21
Guggenheim Museum. Ladies at the Tchelitchev exhibition: one lady to another, “See, this same boy’s picture over and over. Must have been a relative.” Referring to Charles Henri Ford of course.
MAY 23
Samoan fire-dancers in a church in San Francisco set fire to themselves and their audience—half a dozen in their audience incinerated, a hundred injured.
Helena Rubenstein, confronted in the night by three masked thieves with knives, snapped, “I am an old woman, ready to die if you wish to kill me. But I will not let you rob me.” They tied her to a chair, but found nothing and left without injury and without any loot.
JUNE 14
All morning and for a while in the afternoon I helped
ghost-write Monroe’s biographical outline of Bonnard. In the afternoon John drove me to Delatush’s Holly Nursery in Robbins and helped me plant two good-sized Maryland Dwarf Hollies. Dinner on the north lawn under the black walnut tree for Monroe and John and Lloyd and Baba: casserole-roasted veal in the Dutch oven—marinated in white wine, one half cup of wine, one half cup of water, one quarter cup of peanut oil, with a tablespoon of finely cut-up rosemary. Mashed potatoes, green beans vinaigrette, Lambertville bread, strawberries with powdered sugar.
JUNE 23
Surprise party for Lloyd’s eight years of service as President of the State Board of Control: Governor Hughes said that Lloyd might very properly be called the first citizen of New Jersey. The Commissioner thanked Barbara on behalf of the unfortunates in the state institutions, the officers and staff of the department, and the citizenry at large, for cheerfully, nobly sacrificing so much of his companionship pro bono publicum. Nobly, yes, but not very cheerfully.
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