The oddest thing about the Supremes: three very different girls, with contrasting voices, yet always expressing an intensely individual emotion, or narrating a very personal event: “Get out of my life / And let me sleep at night.”
DECEMBER 4
My beautiful niece has just divorced the father of her beautiful little girls and married a man who by all accounts and to all appearances is cruel and dangerous. The divorced one, in a vengeful spirit, with the excuse of extreme anxiety about the babes, is thinking of kidnapping them or otherwise exacting his emotions, one mischief leading to another. I must write him a letter that may have a deterring, calming effect.
Katherine Anne Porter, with a new team of professional advisers around her sick bed, seems inclined to blow up the project of a volume of our lifelong correspondence, on which I have done some work.
The Institute of Sex Research [Kinsey’s successors] is about to begin a consequential study of homosexuality, with government financing, and, under the influence of two new youngish, inexperienced, university sociologists whom I know, is about to make certain mistakes, which I have been asked to counteract.
I am a ridiculous old fellow because, for a writer of my particular talent, the life I lead is ridiculous—or vice versa!
DECEMBER 7
I have, at last, consented to Monroe’s plan, Pauline’s plan, of my going to Mouton [Rothschild] for Christmas week; and therefore I must reduce my life to nothing but Maugham and (if and if and if) love, sex, which helps. Dinner parties and art exhibitions and cocktail parties, and meetings of the Institute and the Academy and the Authors’ Guild and Authors’ League, and sex research, and letter writing, all to be foresworn, bypassed—beginning tomorrow—or day after tomorrow.
DECEMBER 22
The weakness of evil men—and sometimes (it seems) our only defense against them—is that they go too far.
DECEMBER 23
Arriving in London. To Mouton Rothschild tomorrow. This is my first European trip since 1952.
1967
JANUARY 4
Paris, after December 24–January 4 visit to Mouton. Awake at six, in a cold room at the Hotel Vendome. Not having written a simple letter since I left home, not one, I got up for that purpose and made some instant coffee with lukewarm tap water and sat in my overcoat, desultorily reading, then trying to write, but found my talent ruined by the incessant conversation morning, noon and night at Mouton. Just halfway through my obligatory holiday I am homesick, but let me not repine, in order to enjoy the museum-going, Poussins and Rembrandts I have dreamed of seeing.
JANUARY 7
En route by train to meet Pauline de Rothschild in the Hague and Rotterdam. Holland is snow-clad, every twig an inch thick, and wrapped in bright white fog—bright enough, I hope to see Proust’s Vermeer and my Rembrandt (Saul and David).
Monroe looks out the train window, impatient—this is a slow train— then laughs. At what? Sheep thatched with snow.
Paris was unbelievable. The Louvre broke my heart. I went to tea at Marie-Louise Bousquet, who narrated a visit last spring by Brother Pascal, my bygone unavailing Jean Bourgoint. We had drinks with Jacques Guérin, who narrated seventeen years of involvement with Violette Leduc in half a dozen well-practiced anecdotes.
The wonderful thing about traveling with Monroe is that he schedules more than he can endure to do, in fact, more than I would consent to, and then does it; and he conceives it so well that I enjoy it. For example, after the big Picasso show on our last afternoon—he didn’t hesitate to schedule it for the last afternoon—he induced me to visit the Rue de Beaux-Arts, up one side of the street and down the other, when we should have been at the Hotel Vendome getting our bags together, paying our bill.
JANUARY 15
At Haymeadows. My European excursion was partly paid for by Pauline de Rothschild, ten days at their great vineyard, Mouton, and partly by Monroe, recklessly loving and generous. I scarcely wanted to go, as I am in the midst of my Maugham memoir, tired of it and afraid of not getting it done; but they wouldn’t take no for an answer, and it was fantastically worthwhile. My first visit to Paris since 1952, my first journey with Monroe since 1938!
JANUARY 17
Morning after an evening of efficacious love-making (Lou and Larry and Sam)—the first such evening in a month—while putting the apartment in order, while washing the dishes, not only do I desire to record some of the singularities and humors and beauties of the event, but I am inspired to write to Pauline and Katherine Anne, dutifully, and to Clara Svennson (Images of Truth, 161–62) and to Bernard. Would that I could write with several limbs, as Siva dances!
JANUARY 19
Monroe back from Nuremberg; dinner at the Gold Coin—this in a fortune cookie: “Counsel after action is like rain after harvest,” which, with reference to our relations with our youngsters, made us laugh.
JANUARY 22
As David and I were preparing for bed—with warm affection and voluptuousness but no spark to light our sense—the doorbell rang. There, unannounced, a recent playmate of his and Walter’s, not knowing Walter had gone to Rio, wanting pleasure, surprised to find me. Windfall and manna from the heavens.
FEBRUARY 4
My early morning euphoric, brainy talk is Monroe’s delight. But it is an anguish to him if I begin it too soon before he gets his mind in focus, while he is reading his Times.
On the telephone to Robert Phelps, who returned from Paris night before last, I said, “How are you? You must be careful not to fall ill as a result of coming back to the U.S. Inverse patriotism is a kind of pneumonia.”
“Oh,” said Robert, “I’m almost recovered from that.” Note the difference between forty and sixty. It took me three weeks to recover.
Bishop Sheen has on sale in subway stations a good-sized paperback titled Guide to Contentment. I remember that, one Christmas eve during World War II, he began a broadcast by saying, “Almost two thousand years ago tonight, Eternity established its beachhead in Bethlehem.” I mockingly complained of this to Anne McCormick and Padraic Colum, not stopping to think that they were both pious Catholics. Padraic laughed aloud: “Oh, what a vulgar man! I can remember how he first made himself a reputation during World War I. He called the Virgin Mary, ‘the first Gold Star mother in history.’”
FEBRUARY 11
[To Barbara and Lloyd in Mexico City.]
Marianne Moore has had another slight stroke and her guardian angels have provided her with a pretty nurse who sleeps in. We went to see her last week and will do so again this afternoon. We are lunching with Josephine Crane and Padraic Column on Sunday. Our world grows old.
FEBRUARY 24
Velasquez. One of the artists at the court of Philip IV, an academic mannerist of Italian extraction named Vincente Larducho, was especially jealous and disapproving of Velasquez, alluding to him as a “monster of dexterity and naturalness.”
One day the fond king said to Velasquez, “They claim that heads are the only thing you know how to paint.” The young master replied, “This does me great honor, Sire, for to this day I have never seen a head well painted.”
MARCH 11
Due to longevity and intimate communications between the old and the young, the mind sometimes has illusions of striding through time. My father’s grandfather was born in 1800, and in 1902 held me in his arms. Padraic Colum had his first play produced in Dublin the year I was born. Oscar Wilde died in Paris while I was in my mother’s womb.
MARCH 16
Vermeer and Velasquez: Van Gogh, who loved Vermeer, “this strange artist,” speaks of him as characterized by a color scheme of lemon yellow, light blue, and pear grey, plus black and white, whereas Velasquez, for the most part, delighted in black, white and pinkish grey.
Some fool of a collector once upon a time disliked the great pearl in the ear of Vermeer’s Lady with a Lute (now in the Metropolitan) and had a more elaborate earring painted over it.
MARCH 28
[Re the Maugham p
roject.]
I note as I go along that I keep including a good deal of landscape, weather, flora and fauna, and various country still life, which a more formal author would cut out (Maugham himself surely). But just as sensual pleasure is a relief from one’s intellect and will power, nature worship offers a surcease to preoccupation with human nature. Also, in the great wild light of outdoors one can suggest emotion and premonition and mysticism that can scarcely be stated in so many words.
MARCH 31
At Mouton Rothschild we drank seventy wines in ten days, three with lunch, four with dinner, not counting pre-prandial and post-prandial champagne—followed by Paris and Amsterdam and London, three days each. It was a bad idea, with respect to my work. My life, as often before, out of context—but let me not knock it.
APRIL 11
[To Pauline.]
My birthday. On April 11, 1926, I was in Vienna with Monroe—it was very hot, humid, Guardi-looking—and he was ill. I was afraid of his dying then and there. In fact he had a perforated appendix. We got to Vienna just in time.
APRIL 15
One of the few things I really enjoy about being my own housekeeper (bonne à tout faire, to be exact) is putting away washed dishes and utensils, because I am somewhat ambidextrous. Picking up two objects at a time, placing them on the right-hand shelf and the left-hand shelf, whichever is handiest, gives me a pleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach.
APRIL 28
[To Katherine Anne Porter.]
While I was in town, word came that Monroe’s beautiful, ancient, distracted, paralyzed mother had died. So, having got back here with Baba after midnight, I am about to go back, by bus and train, to fly out with Monroe. His saintly, ancient, almost deaf, almost blind father will be deeply stricken.
MAY 8
Lloyd’s erotic curiosity about the sculpture of a multi-armed god and clinging goddess in the Brundage collection in San Francisco—were they actually joined in intercourse or in pre-coital or post-coital embrace? Several times he crouched quickly to glance up under their minimal vestments, but the sound of footsteps of an approaching guard or other museum visitor prevented this. At last he succeeded—they were in coitus, maleness and femaleness, thrust and vessel, were rendered in detail.
MAY 22
The worst aspect of family life for me is a kind of bad manners. I am hot-tempered, and violently intellectual, unintentionally arrogant. Monroe is cold and hypercritical and dictatorial. To put it very simply, I am hot-tempered and he is cold. Baba is in a phase of seething, masochistic irritability, more self-centered than I have ever known her to be. I can understand why; understanding never helps. Better manners, even on my part alone, might help.
MAY 24
[Presenting the Gold Medal for Fiction to Katherine Anne Porter.]
She has never projected herself upon her fictitious characters in the way of hero-worship or villain-hatred; but she had found their characteristics for the most part in the depths of her introspection, on frontiers of personal experience. Someone once asked Flaubert, “Who was Madam Bovary?” “I was!” he answered. “Moi!” Likewise, surely in Ship of Fools, Miss Porter was the fierce girl trying to be in love, the condesa pursued by furies, even the wild children, the Gemini, Ric and Rack, the folk sculptor whittling his miniature animals, for whose burial at sea the spiritual-looking whales passed along the horizon, even, as she herself once said in jest, even the seasick white bulldog.
MAY 26
The gold wig worn by Nijinski in L’Apres-midi d’un Faune is to be sold at Sotheby’s on June 13.
That performance shocked its early audiences. Not only did Diaghilev’s dear dancer electrify the audience by unmistakable pelvic thrusts upon the garment of the nymph, he outfit himself (I remember Cocteau saying) with a conspicuous false penis inside his tight leotards.
I remember during the late thirties a bookseller named Gabriel Wells offered for sale the penis of Napoleon pickled in alcohol (with authenticity documents). It was small. The other day I heard someone refer to its present whereabouts and ownership, but I let the information go in one ear and out the other.
JUNE 2
I have been acting as a go-between in the process of getting Pauline [de Rothschild]’s Russian journal published … unbelievable talks on the telephone, Venice to New York, Haymeadows to the Avenue d’Iéna.
JUNE 29
In newspaper: The manager of a sado-masochistic establishment in New Jersey. Does she not look like Hugh Walpole? A. C. Kinsey one told me that the cruelest sadist he ever discovered was a woman. He made contact with her through an advertisement in The Saturday Review.
JULY 15–16
Grand Adagio: Three matchless performances of sexual love, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, Sunday afternoon. The beauty of their contrasted complexions—B’s sun-darkened Eastern Mediterranean tawnyness, D’s young face, unique in expression, still simple despite his sophistication, his violently sensual life. Continuous desire on all three parts with scarcely any suspense, with no impatience. Two overwhelmingly profound orgasms in my case, in the doorway just out of sight, or almost out of sight.
JULY 29
A good many of my odd pieces of reminiscent prose reveal the fact that in my later life I have become what is called a voyeur. Vicariousness as well as spectatorship. Many a time the facial beauty of one of my dear ones in increasing blissfulness has so seized my imagination that I have missed the exact erotic action. My excitement is apt to be aesthetic, affectionate, psychological; not altogether sexual. My imagination can adopt, borrow and wield the phallus of my friend.
Last night teenagers rioting in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn shouted at Negro policemen: “Take off your black mask. Show us your white face.”
AUGUST 4
George Washington in his will specified that all disputes were to be resolved by three arbitrators who were not to consult any lawyers.
AUGUST 20
[From GW’s presentation of the MacDowell Medal to Marianne Moore.]
In both prose and verse, sincerity is surely one of her key characteristics. Sometimes it is indistinguishable from her spontaneity. Sometimes spontaneity takes the lead and brings about inner circumstances in which to be sincere is the only honorable, indeed the only reasonable attitude the mind can take. Spontaneity dives, sincerity then has to swim.
E. MacKnight Kauffer complained that his wife had never liked Baudelaire, to which Marianne replied, “Well, Edward, neither do I. I put up with him because I have to,” and added, a moment later, perhaps in explanation, “I always need to be helped upward into a more optimistic atmosphere.”
SEPTEMBER 3–4
A very large weekend, though so brief. L. [Larry] and M. [Martin] arrived by bus at noon. I went with Ethel to meet them. After lunch we visited the barns, they swam, I cooked. Baba dined with us and we went to the country fair. After that we sat up very late, talking, talking. Next morning, after I brought them breakfast in bed, they shamelessly began to make love, gladly calling my attention to each other’s beauty and sexual power of intercourse. It was thrilling. It thrilled me.
We dined at Barbara’s and went to the movies.
At about midnight we made love: that is, to be precise, M. fucked L. to climax (L. expressed a desire for the reverse of their roles but Martin insisted), then when he had come, held Larry in his arms while I sucked him to climax. It was wonderful, a ravishing experience, perfect for me, except that it went too fast. No matter. I shall relive it and relive it.
SEPTEMBER 8
Long ago I came upon the fact or fancy that young temple prostitutes in India learn to leap out of bed after intercourse and by a particular vigorous belly dance to prevent conception. Sometimes I am afraid that my muse is like that.
SEPTEMBER 16
To Marjorie Wescott: Think how many novels I have aborted; packages of scribble that took years to write, waste of time! The Pilgrim Hawk took less than four months. Now here I sit, flogging myself through
“The Old Party,” because by chance, I got to be the absolute authority on the subject matter of it (William Maugham), and because it seems likely to make a packet of money which, despite Baba’s wonderful generosity, I need. But I am inclined to think that, in the end, I shall be known not for that, not for The Grandmothers or Apartment in Athens, but for my so-called journal, marginal pages or half-pages about this or that, some of them only half written.
SEPTEMBER 20
Early influences—in reply to a New York City high school principal: On the family farm in Wisconsin books were few and had great impact. Someone gave us the first three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books; after which my sisters and I wanted more of that dream-world, and at age nine or ten I pretended to revisit it in my sleep, and every few days narrated to them what happened there. That must have been the first stirring of a talent for fiction.
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