In Madrid with Monroe. We had bad luck here, in that the Prado wasn’t open at all on the 24th and 25th, compensated for by warmly diffused sunlight all day long on the 26th. It was worth the entire aller et retour for just the six hours we spent there yesterday, dancing around the great rooms, talking the praises of Velasquez and Goya and the glorious rest: what Titians, what Rubens. Especially joyous for me, preferring the northern Baroque painters to almost all else. My youthful indifference to much of Italian Renaissance has begun to recur.
1969
JANUARY 1
Mouton Rothschild, Pauillac, France: Yesterday was Pauline’s birthday, so that last night’s maximum dinner party had a dual purpose, indeed triple, if you take into account the fact that in France adults exchange gifts áu jour de l’an, not on Christmas Day. On the whole, it seems to me, the great occasion, the week as a whole, has bogged down in its tradition and management somewhat since I was here last. But now Pauline’s housekeeping has gone off a bit—all things are relative—perhaps because she has been, is, ill. And having written her Russian journal has opened a Pandora’s box for her; she is ready for change. Her great long-term invitation to me meant that, among other things: instincts and calculations.
JANUARY 2
Mouton: A world apart, no matter how many friends our hosts, with characteristic willfulness and munificence and cheer, draw here from far and wide. The great salon with its 16th century mantelpiece, expansive floor of pink and white and blue, and large dispersed noble furniture, occupies about a fourth of the second floor of Grand Mouton, and is a hundred feet long. Petite Mouton thrusts its rooftops out of tall trees, a fairy-tale castle. My room overlooks the far right hand corner of the courtyard where the doves are fed, about a hundred; their monotonous Paphian wooing music goes on all day and part of the night.
There has been a natural rivalry and no great liking between Mouton and Lafitte, the chateau and acreage to the north, belonging to Philippe’s cousins; but now (I gather) Mouton has won and in both fact and feeling. The young Baron Eric, after dinner last night, charmed Monroe, who asked of him, “What is your intention in life, your special interest?” “Wine,” he answered, “I want to do for Lafitte what Philippe and Pauline have done for Mouton.”
Last night at about 1:15 a.m., Monroe and Balanchine and I went for a walk in wondrous moonlight; in a very small geometric pool amid the vines the white ducks quacked in an undertone, kept awake by the brightness. The cultivated soil of the vineyards, full of small rounded stones, refracted like magic. Balanchine, who is almost primitively Russian, that is, Georgian, thrust his forefinger straight up and said oracularly, “Snow, snow!” He was right. Before daybreak, I heard my dear doves in some agitation on the window-sill and as I found when I drew the heavy curtains, one had tried to come in and left a foot-track and a soiled tail feather.
Monroe will spend the weekend in Wimborne with Raymond Mortimer and Messrs. [George H. W.] Rylands, [Dennis Christopher] Shawe-Taylor and [Patrick] Trevor Roper. I shall stay here until next Thursday, spend the following weekend in Paris with little or no sociability in prospect—I shall concentrate on pictures: Poussin, Courbet, Monet, Bonnard—then London, return to New York and Haymeadows on the 15th.
JANUARY 6
Last night I heard an owl at about nine o’clock, while I was dressing for dinner—we dine late, like Spaniards—the little flexible flute, quivering down the scale. And it had quivered down only three times when Philippe called me on the telephone, from his bedroom. “Are you listening to the chouette? Didn’t I tell you that we had one? Doesn’t it make a pleasant little screech?”
I noticed that his voice was sad, almost as sad as the chouette’s. But he refrained from telling me, until after dinner, that Pauline’s temperature had gone up again, that he was worried and alarmed.
JANUARY 7
Mouton: The timing and scheduling of everything is uncomfortable for me: dinner at 9:30, and nearer 10:30 sometimes, when Pauline is not confined to bed and makes us wait … Yesterday I got up at 3:15 a.m. and kept scribbling till 9:30. Nothing to eat until then—the servant didn’t get to bed until after midnight either … Of course I eat too much but haven’t put on much weight. Two long walks a day with Philippe—the laborious routine of the country-dwelling leisure classes. We don’t sit down to lunch until 2:30, and usually set out upon the far-flung vineyard pathways as soon as lunch is over.
Only one houseguest left now besides myself, and Pauline’s doctor who came down from Paris late last night. Monroe and Raymond went to London on Friday, which our hostess minded very much, in fact bitterly resented. She has been ill almost all summer, viral pneumonia, on a basis of perhaps irremediable heart trouble; and she shouldn’t have had the house party, certainly not on the scale it developed. On Saturday morning she had a relapse: congestion of her lungs, high fever. I wanted to leave as soon as this happened—but it would have broken her heart and frightened her. Instead I have given up the four days in Paris I had planned. Philippe thinks that it will do her good to talk to me—long anticipated talks—whereas I am afraid that it will be over-stimulating and over-emotional for her. If the doctor agrees with me, I may depart on Friday, via Madrid.
JANUARY 15
Earliest Wescott in Dictionary of National Biography: Captain George Westcott, 1745–1798, captain in Navy, started life as a seaman and fought in the Battle of the Nile—killed by a musket-ball to the throat—monument to him at public expense erected in St. Paul.
Earliest Wheeler: Sir Francis Wheler, 1656–1694, sent by Britain from the Barbados to take Guadeloupe and Martinique away from the French—failed with great losses. Ditto Quebec—another failure—neither was his fault, said the authorities in England, and he was knighted.
JANUARY 23
A hurried dinner at Brooke Astor’s with pleasant guests of some consequence to see a Pinteresque play of psychological obfuscation, moral ambivalence: The Man in the Glass Booth, coarsely performed by a well-known actor, Donald Pleasence—praised by almost all our critics. Our hostess, Monroe, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Mrs. Katherine Graham, Jack Heintz, Arthur Schlesinger, and a superior Englishwoman named Mrs. Daly were all bored by it.
On my way to town, Hella drove me to Trenton where we attended Ethel’s father’s funeral. None of us had ever seen Ethel in skirts until this day.
FEBRUARY 1
I remember one of Monroe’s stories of Edith Sitwell. At the time of her first mortal illness, when she was in a nun’s hospital and resented the routine of waking her up early, for breakfast and bath and medicine, customary in hospitals everywhere. Also, Edith complained, every day there followed promptly a young priest, to hear her confession. “Father, what can I possibly find to confess?” she wanted to know; “an old woman confined to bed surrounded by nuns.”
“Your thoughts, Dame Edith,” he answered. And she answered back, “My thoughts are savage, but they are pure.”
FEBRUARY 5
The best ballets are those that are closest to music, and least explainable in words. Years ago, after the first performance of a ballet of Tudors (was it called “Interplay”?), Balanchine came to our apartment and someone asked him what he thought of it. “Well, ballet is particular art,” he said, in his terse but polite way. “Can portray some things well— like, for example, lovers, and mother and son, and friends, and brother and sister—but cousins! No! Very difficult, very impossible.”
FEBRUARY 17
[Re a New York Times clipping: “Padraic Colum at 87.”]
Compassion toward Padraic, upon whose face, this spring, the shadow of death has appeared for the first time. I believe that, like myself, come what may, he desires to live forever; chiefly for literature’s sake.
Yeats: “Think where man’s glory begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
FEBRUARY 25
Montaigne: “A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.”
Magical taste: a ripe apple seed, perhaps especially the
seed of a yellow apple.
MARCH 18
Turgenev, sick at heart and conscious-stricken at the guillotining of a murderer: “The horses harnessed to the vans and calmly chewing their oats in their nosebags seemed to me at that moment to be the only innocent creatures among us.” The uninventible detail! What joy to come upon it in a review of Raymond Mortimer’s at 4:20 in the morning.
I do not dispute the greatness of Dostoyevsky, when in my moments of thanksgiving for the reading matter of my life I prefer Turgenev, who seems to me nobler. Likewise I prefer Forster to Henry James, Dinesen to Faulkner, etc.
First principal of the art of fiction: It seems to me that every kind of imaginative narrative must pretend to be true—even fairy tales, within the confines of the given text—and with no desire to fool or mislead anyone—but mainly for perspective and norm and life-likeness. The factual reality is the only point of reference to measure plausibility. If you disregard it, there really is nothing to curb your extravagance. If your characters are eight feet tall, why not twenty? If your weather is always perfect, presently you can have no seasons.
APRIL 18
Telephone call from Michael Lifrieri in Chicago—Bill Cockerell having been strangled to death by someone unknown.
MAY 28
Rockefeller Cultural Mission to Latin America on behalf of President Nixon. Governor Rockefeller, with Monroe in his train, has been rioted against in Columbia, my kitchen radio keeps telling me. Oddly enough, I feel no serious premonition.
JUNE 10
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. On the evening of April 1, returning from Miami, we were stacked up for an hour; circled around and around over New York and New Jersey and Long Island—the rivers and bridges and islands from different angles of flight, so that I often felt lost; gradual magic of electricity flowering in the dusk. And then I happened to see the bridge, lights turned on, diamonds on pearly air.
A mystery man—a practitioner of power for power’s sake (Lloyd thinks)—possibly a future political leader: Ralph Nader.
JUNE 14
Monroe, on his purchase of a drawing by a local artist: “It looks like a Chagall. Every amateur painter, one day, paints a good picture—like Richard Pride, and like my father.”
JUNE 15
I am like a banyan tree: What seeds? What fruit? What use?—except to amaze tourists.
[From the Sunday Times of London.]
“There is one thing there are no professionals at, and that is dying.”
JUNE 16
John Connolly’s new television lighting work: John worked a double shift yesterday, and of course it will be double or even triple today. He expected to be paid by David Frost and Company yesterday, for the first time—the lighting engineer who came to work without an invitation! The satisfaction in his voice as he told me this was like fantastic music. John wants me to watch the Apollo launching but I haven’t time or spirit, alas.
9:30 a.m.: I turned on the radio just a little late—the launching sounded like a great drum.
JUNE 18
Last night at dusk, I noted an agitation of rabbits in the shrubby corner of the lawn, and approached them from the back door with binoculars: the mating dance! The bigger of the two sat still until the smaller charged head on, fast—upon which the bigger leapt straight into the air, quite high, and the smaller darted under the leap; again and again, as in a ballet. They both got tired; the bigger lay down on his side, showing his whitish belly, under the low branches of the ilex opaca [holly]; the smaller crouched on the grass, turning her back, and the rays of sunlight gilded her.
JUNE 26
Hermann Hesse translated Thomas Wolfe.
Modesty, humility, almost humiliation: I feel like Victor Hugo—but I work like, let us say, Emily Dickinson, or Emily Brontë.
JUNE 28
Monroe has to attend a State Department briefing this afternoon, and probably dine with one of Governor Rockefeller’s twenty-three other advisors. They leave at 6:45 tomorrow morning, a little timid this time, I gather. The Argentine government isn’t as efficient as the Brazilian dictatorship, and those who set off time-bombs in fourteen supermarkets the other day were certainly professionals.
JULY 1
[After a neighbor’s house fire.]
It happened to Aldous Huxley, toward the end of his life. His California house, like our houses, was full of works of art and literature and letter files and contracts and documents. He was there and stood gazing at the conflagration with his myopic eyes, wringing his hands. Some time later Natasha Spender met him and expressed her sympathy. She reported to me what he said: “At the time I thought I had lost my past. Now I realize that it was my future.” By that time he was in the grip of cancer.
JULY 3
Superstition: Grandmother, the Witch, in Bergman’s The Magician, mumbles this invocation on the way to bed: “He calls you down, he calls you out, beyond the dead, the living, and the living dead, beyond the raised hands.”
JULY 4
A bad bit of symbolism. Not surprisingly, the astronauts intend to plant our flag on the moon. But there is no breeze up there to make it fly. Therefore our government, not counting the cost, has had a special cloth woven with fine wire as well as silk or cotton thread, so as to give the impression of a stiff wind blowing.
My father’s mother, the principal character in my half-fictitious book [The Grandmothers], was a Ross. According to tradition in the family, she was descended from the more or less fictitious flag-seamstress, Betsy.
JULY 13
But how impenetrable is human nature; in its sorrows even stranger than in its felicities, especially in the transitions of age, the seven rivers it has to cross! At some point between insomnias my dream must have whispered words of wisdom—in hypochondriacal and Cassandrine sadness, how come I listened?—one of my lovers, or two, or three, held me tight and kept out my self-criticism. Whatever happened in the subconscious, I am in better spirits than I was yesterday.
JULY 18
En route to Pawling, New York. A hot country, in July and August … Wisconsin was like this; I still quail at the memory of the violence of my father’s fields; I often thought I was going to die. Was it fear of my father and as I awoke into boyhood, resentment of his having intimidated me?
At Stone-blossom, my old mother, observing me in the iris beds, or lugging furniture from room to room, and boxes up and down the attic stairs, would marvel at my strength: “When I think what a delicate, easily exhausted, daydreaming boy you were!”
JULY 28
To Katherine Anne Porter: Poor international Monroe, like a fish on shore, taking a rest before setting out on his next world-itinerary; meanwhile plagued with job offers from all sides; nobody seems to have any thought of paying him for any of it. That’s what retirement means in his walk of life.
AUGUST 7
With Katherine Anne Porter, College Park. She has sent to Switzerland for an expensive target pistol, to be smuggled in. She declares that it is to be used in self-defense if some hoodlum ever breaks into her house. But she is apt to mention it just after she expresses fear of the final chapter of senile deterioration, nightmarish boredom and uselessness. In her renegade way, she is a pious Catholic, conditioned against suicide. But she thinks of it; any violence better than none, in the last impasse.
AUGUST 12
When Lloyd drove me home, rejoicing in the fact that the hybrid corn on the left, which the cloudburst brought to its knees, had straightened itself up, to ripen and be harvested, he said, “We did inherit our love of corn from out father. It was his favorite crop; the dearest thing in nature.” Which made me shiver, with my strangely mixed filial emotions, bereavement no longer painful.
Tonight a simple but evidently skillful locksmith came from Fleming-ton, and as his little wife has lately had a stroke, and is sad and frightened, he brought her along; and she turned out to be an enthusiastic reader of The Grandmothers and Apartment in Athens. We talked while he tinkered. Baba boa
sted to her of my having portrayed her and her French house in The Pilgrim Hawk, which thrilled the locksmith’s wife.
AUGUST 21
Memory itself dreams, sometimes lies. Language itself, in all the poetical past, is invention. The question in the shaping of a story is how to apply imagination, when to loose it.
AUGUST 24
Males have to lie to females quite frequently, I find. Even if we tell them our truths, they are deaf to them, or they mis-listen; and as between men of good will and women of any consequence, our untruths are better than their own, better for them as for us.
LATE SEPTEMBER
[Glenway accompanies Barbara Wescott to London, Paris, and Amsterdam, where the Rijksmuseum was celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of Rembrandt’s death with an exhibit of his paintings and drawings.]
Monroe was very jealous of my going on the Rembrandt pilgrimage with Barbara, while he is in the Mediterranean with Raymond Mortimer and Brooke Astor. He set out before me and I went to Kennedy Airport with him, and in farewell I said, “I shall miss you at the Rembrandt exhibition.” He answered almost solemnly: “It is always a waste now when we do not look at pictures together.”
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