JULY 2
In the breezeless heat, a bonfire, like hair standing on end; hair of gold.
JULY 3
I wish that the Fourth of July weekend was over and done with. I am about to be descended upon by two friends from the Southern provinces … I hope they don’t talk Goldwater-ish to my brother. We Wescotts, having sent our grandfather and four great-uncles to the War Between the States, have always had a hankering to pitch in again and finish it up.
JULY 10
What in the world is the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, 507 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY? It caught my eye in the telephone book. There is a Society for Aesthetic Realism, 67 Jane Street; also mystifying.
Careless use of language conducive to error and/or dishonesty, on the radio just now. A news broadcaster, summarizing the most recent U.S. programs for Southeast Asia: “Beefing up our support of the Vietnamese government pacification effort.”
Extraordinary, anonymous lowly persons to be glimpsed in history: The pickpocket in one of the crowds around L.B.J., the campaigning president, intending merely to ply his felonious skill, had his hand shaken by the smiling, indefatigable, fearless great man. Also, the young champion swimmer who always accompanied F.D.R. when he flew abroad, whose assignment was to keep him afloat in the event of a ditching.
JULY 29
[On writing.]
Experience certainly is the main literary matter; more interesting as a rule than invention, more heartwarming than tradition.
To a fifteen-year-old writer:
Begin on a small scale: an episode, an observation, a dialogue, a description. Make your own bricks first, before you begin to blueprint your architecture according to someone’s ideas of what constitutes an essay or a story or a play, or according to your notion of what may be publishable. All that comes later. First, be personal!
AUGUST 12
Michael Miksche with whom I was intimate some years ago killed himself last weekend. My first thought was, “Fancy his not having taken someone with him!” He went mad in 1962 and at one point escaped from the mad-house and telephoned me very alarmingly, with the terrible mad prolixity alternating love and hatred. Released, divorced, doing well at his job, he couldn’t bear what remained of his life.
AUGUST 25
[To Raymond Mortimer.]
Monroe has had a bad year, but it seems to have taken a turn for the better. A sort of menopause of spirit, with vague dark ideas and fitful emotions. No wonder. The unsuccessfulness of his exhausting lecture tour shook him. The prospect of his forced retirement at 65, with his helpless but viable parents using up his small savings, dumbfounded him; and having to evade that issue since last February 13—he was a party to the establishment of the museum regulation about it, years ago—put him to shame. He has begun to think of selling his pictures, which he will hate. So will I; we’re old-fashioned. To much of the art-loving world now, the buying and selling are perhaps more fun than anything.
This improved prospect, as revealed a few weeks ago: the Rockefellers et al have decided to start another fundraising campaign at once, toward building another wing (fun for Philip Johnson); and therefore to keep all the top brass on for three years, regardless of their elderliness.
His Bonnard exhibition will be glorious, and his little biographical essay is just right, I think. I had to help him with it as time pressed, but he told me everything that he wanted to include in it more specifically than ever before, and he didn’t let me make any final revisions.
AUGUST 31
I have a deep-seated stubbornness about when and how and, above all, where I write when a piece of my work is going well, on its last lap. I have tried to break myself of the habit of working in the kitchen. What is the matter with my admirable new study adjacent it? What is wrong with the expensively rebuilt upstairs—just an attic ever since the eighteenth century—even that now has air-conditioning. Yesterday the thermometer stood in the 90s, with smoldering humidity. The kitchen was suffocating, a sort of fiery furnace, but I kept on working there, drudging away until dinner time.
After dinner, to my astonishment and amusement, I noticed that the electric oven had been set to bake, at 350 degrees, all day long. I had used it to heat up a breakfast sweet roll, and forgotten to turn it off.
SEPTEMBER 1
About a month ago one of the brown thrushes who have nested in my syringe bush for three successive years, and who have been daily visitors to my bird feeder at the back door, appeared minus his tail. I haven’t seen him or his mate since and feared that one of the predators got them. I hoped that, having had a good scare, they started their migration south a month earlier this year.
This morning, behold, here he was on the great ash stump, tail all complete. He flew arrow-straight to the syringe bush. Has he been hiding in the spinney, shrinking and sulking while a new plumage developed?
SEPTEMBER 10
Auden: Of course he is a great poet, but a little like Verlaine or the old Wordsworth; one doesn’t esteem him as much as one would like to. One disadvantage of his dread and detestation of confessional texts is that it has frightened him off the subject-matter of the private life, even in his poetry.
SEPTEMBER 22
Small children. My bus to Trenton was half an hour late—a flat tire— and I sat on the white cement doorstep in the sun, and went on writing a day long letter to Robert Phelps about my so-called sketch books and vast letter file. The school bus arrived and deposited near me a pretty little girl aged about eight and a pretty small boy aged five or six. They came close and gazed at me and the little girl asked, “What are you doing?”
“I am writing a letter.”
“Who to? What for?” My simple factual answers to these questions did not interest her. “You have a big bag,” she observed. “What’s in it?”
“All sorts of things. Books. Peaches.”
“Who are the peaches for?”
None of this interested the six-year-old boy. “I wish I had a bicycle,” he said.
“Don’t you like to walk? I’d rather walk than ride a bicycle.”
“Why?”
“When I was about your age I fell off a bicycle and hurt my knee.” I kept from mentioning the fact that the scar on my knee can still be seen. They’d ask to see it.
“Why don’t you like to ride a bicycle?”
“Because I’m afraid I guess.”
He grimaced contemptuously. He was a beautiful little creature.
OCTOBER 6
Anaïs Nin: A famous but not successful, very prolific authoress—best known, I guess, for work not yet published. For many years—perhaps thirty years—she has been keeping a total-recall, shameless, amorous and mystical journal. She is a well-born Cuban American; glamorously good looking in an old fashioned way; ice wouldn’t melt in her mouth, you might think. And yet she is, or has been, a great immoralist. When I first knew her, in Paris, in circa 1930, she was the mistress of Henry Miller! Unimaginable, as in those days he was a sort of disorderly, disheveled, raffish, penniless fellow; one might almost have said, a bum—at any rate, a pre-beatnik. She also, at one time, played a great role in the life of Edmund Wilson, and figures in Memoirs of Hecate County as, if I remember correctly, “the princess with the golden hair.” In the last two or three years she has had a great problem as to which she has consulted me a great deal: how to have her journal preserved for future publication, and at the same time, to make sure that her good husband shall never be allowed to see it.
OCTOBER 15
Will it never end? Yesterday one of the president’s high-ranking aides, Walter Jenkins, had to resign, having been arrested for indecent behavior in the men’s room of the notorious Washington YMCA. He was arrested for a similar offense years ago. He is the father of six children. Will foolish homosexual or ambi-sexual men never cease to involve themselves in public service careers? I suppose the danger of the risks they run excites them—just as the men’s room surreptitiousness, the voyeurism, the exhibiti
onism, intensifies their desire. Of course, his good reputation and peace of mind as the father of six children and White House employee depended on his channeling his homosexual appetite. If he pursued his homosexual contacts in safe circumstances in h. cocktail parties, it would have made scandal. Will this misfortune make the president more tolerant of homosexuals or less tolerant? Was the police officer who made the arrest possibly a Goldwater-ite, or did the Republican National Committee pay him to pursue this quarry?
OCTOBER 23
John Knowles in the street, friendly, almost clinging; unshaven, untidy, as though he had spent the night or indeed several nights in some beatnik’s pad in Greenwich Village.
NOVEMBER 4
Nelson Lansdale [New York Times obituary]: When we first met, I was 38 and he was 24.
The Pilgrim Hawk is dedicated to him. I shall never again want pleasure enough—or be sufficiently capable of pleasure—to pay the price of mortification, insincerity, or boredom that I paid then. It is a marvel: one outlives aspects of oneself.
NOVEMBER 10
A Visit to Priapus, or “Priapus in Maine,” 1938 [unpublished in GW’s lifetime]: I remember that Paul Cadmus delighted in it. Monroe didn’t; I didn’t expect him to—it was too unpublishable, and in its scandalous aspect, foreign to him. George [Platt Lynes] didn’t either, come to think of it, he never liked anything I wrote about sex, which discouraged me. I discourage easily.
In re the gradual planning of a volume of some portion of my sketchbooks and commonplace books, regarding this Maine text as a failure, although I can’t remember when I last read it, thinking that I could easily break it up and enrich the early sketchbook with the bits and pieces, I handed it over to Robert Phelps to read and consider.
On Sunday he telephoned in almost hysterical admiration—he thinks that it is my most original work, as good or almost as good as The Pilgrim Hawk. He rages against the cultural pressures and the general literacy situation (I should say the general moral situation) which have kept me striving and straining to write novels, failing to write a good many— when I have this other unique or at least strange power, form, all my own; subject matter that I understand better than anyone.
NOVEMBER 19
Georgia O’Keeffe says that I have come to resemble Carl Van Vechten, now that I have white hair. Do I like that?
DECEMBER 11
Election to the Academy, from the Institute of Arts and Letters: It reminds me sorrowfully of the dear great men and women whose passing brought about the vacuums that we four, Calder and Cowley and Tate and Wescott, have been elected to fill.
It reminds me of my age, not a great matter in itself, but bad enough, with respect to the work that I have done, the work that I have not yet done. I seem to have been chronically subject to a foolish juvenile feeling, as though I had plenty of time to fulfill my promise. There is no such thing as plenty of time.
DECEMBER 17
Not only do we often talk nonsense about what has influenced us at an early age, mirroring our elders in peering back at it as if it were a crystal ball—when in fact all we have in mind is but looking glass. But a good deal of the time it isn’t calculation or self-flattery, it is forgetfulness.
My hypothesis: Readers of fiction sometimes read for reasons of the intellect, for the message, the uplift, the historical or sociological message—but that soon fades.
Two things last: education, because it is enforced, self-perpetuating. And the pleasure of reading in imagination, reading as a pastime— excitement, dream-reality, laughter, eroticism, vicarious sentiment.
The fiction writer’s pleasure as a rule is the feeling that he is giving pleasure to the reader.
Monroe Wheeler notes: “Glenway before I met him.”
Wescott as one of the emerging Chicago poets at nineteen, in 1920.
From poet to novelist with publication of The Apple of the Eye, 1924.
Wescott publicity photo, c. 1925, Paris.
At the height of expatriate celebrity, Wescott as author of the 1927 bestselling novel, The Grandmothers. (© Estate of George Platt Lynes.)
The Left Bank, Paris, 1930. GW: “my sweet-sour expression, spoiled but virtuous, voluptuous but tough, heartbroken but happy.” (© Estate of George Platt Lynes)
Wescott exploring brother Lloyd and Barbara’s farm in western New Jersey.
Wescott in French sailor shirt at Stone-blossom.
Coney Island: Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, and Katherine Anne Porter.
During a visit to Fire Island, with playful friends George Platt Lynes (standing) and Paul Cadmus.
Monroe Wheeler and mother Josephine Wescott at Stone-blossom
A happy memory of Stone-blossom, Wescott and mother Josephine.
1965–1969
THE MID-SIXTIES ARE A TIME of strength for Wescott, personally and as a public figure. Several of his books are reprinted in paperback, and The Pilgrim Hawk, already in the Dell mass market paperback Six Great Modern Short Novels, is re-released in hardcover by Harper & Brothers. This leads to a respectful review in the New Yorker by Howard Moss that means a great deal to Glenway personally. Still, three new books that could have happened, all in this five-year period, slip away.
Regarding the often-delayed, reorganized “A Windfall,” on December 14, 1965, the renowned editor Cass Canfield writes impatiently, “Please let me know whether there’s anything we can do from the Harper end to facilitate things.” The only major holdup is the long story “The Stallions,” which Wescott needs to expand and finish. Though his fragmentary drafts are beautiful, he struggles with this last serious attempt at fiction. He could substitute something else, but won’t give up. Even years after “A Windfall” is abandoned, he attempts to revive “The Stallions” draft, a hopeless perfectionist. Likewise, his Life magazine piece on Maugham leads to a book contract for the tentatively titled “The Old Party: An American Reminiscence of Somerset Maugham.” He has plenty of material already written and plenty more in mind, but he loses interest in the work and it slips away, even as he sees inferior Maugham memoirs published. Finally, Katherine Anne Porter at the height of her fame suggests he organize a volume of letters, the years of correspondence between Porter and friends Wescott, Wheeler, and Barbara Harrison Wescott. It’s a difficult editing chore but, even so, another contracted book is delayed from one deadline to another until Porter’s editor Seymour Lawrence kills the project. Glenway could have used—rather than a highbrow editor like Canfield and his staff or a highly literary one like Robert Phelps— a ruthless shirt-sleeves editor (like Russell Lynes of Harper’s Magazine) to help with these works.
On the other hand, “The Valley Submerged” (Southern Review, Summer 1965) reveals the aging Wescott at his best in a new form—not literary anecdotes and criticism, but the personal essay; storytelling in spellbinding lyrical prose. The essay about the state’s flooding of Stone-blossom and the surrounding valley is filled with meaning deeper than the waters of Spruce Run Reservoir, and points to fine work up ahead. When Katherine Anne Porter first read a draft of the essay, she wrote, “Your ‘The Valley Submerged’ is in your best vein; I read it fast and then went back and read it slow, and wanted more.”
Wescott’s service at the Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters continues and includes important work for the federal copyright law revisions of 1966. Wheeler avoids mandatory retirement at the Museum of Modern Art by working for the board of trustees in fundraising and foreign travel for exhibits. Monroe’s elderly parents pass away within a two week period. Lloyd survives a serious illness, but he and Glenway lose their sister Marjorie in California. Glenway’s younger companion John Connolly changes his career from secretary to William Inge to lighting engineer for CBS television. In 1967 Connolly takes a partner, British Merchant Marine captain Ivan Ashby, who becomes part of the extended family.
The new Lincoln Center, especially the New York City Ballet, becomes an important part of Wescott and Wheeler’s world. Their social lives remai
n rich, from celebrity dinner parties at Wheeler’s apartment to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza, to the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden. Then at long last Wescott returns to Europe, with trips centered around visits to the Rothschilds for the winter holidays of 1966/67, 1968/69, and the early seventies. Glenway gives his future readers an inside view of the world of Baron Philippe and Baroness Pauline at Mouton Rothschild.
1965
JANUARY 2
Phallus worship. Am I what is called a size queen? Not really. Natural causes of this predilection due to (A) boyhood comparison, and (B) to tumescence itself. Why are straight men less subject to it? Because they are more self-loving, self-centered; also less preoccupied with symbols of sex, fetishes, and more concerned with sexual gratification, sensation and release.
Note that most of those I have desired most were genitally largely endowed—Jacques, Bernard, Samuel, Will, etc.—and most that I have loved were not—M.W., Mark, John, Earl.
JANUARY 3
Someday I’d like to take issue with the matter of whether or not I write for “posterity” more than I should. It was the first insult I ever had to suffer from a fellow-writer, namely Hemingway.
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