There are compensations. For instance, when the wind blows at a certain speed, from certain directions, especially the East or North, my end of the house, especially the kitchen, makes music: six or seven whole notes in a row, then silence, then almost the same strange melody, repeated and repeated; loudness and softness more variable than tunefulness—somehow not characteristically American, rather Japanese.
MARCH 30, 6:30 A.M.
Haymeadows. Beautiful winter; porcelain white with shadows of pale blue. The snowstorm had ceased after dinner; starlight when I went to bed. I saw the smallish moon low in the south at about 3:30. At 5:30 the small pre-auroral light seemed brightened by the crystalline surface of the earth, pale green and pale pink over the little sassafras trees, through the aging silver maple.
APRIL 20
This week’s New Yorker in its lead editorial says that the war in Vietnam “has lost even the pretense of purpose, and has become nothing more than a bloody playground for our idealism and our cruelty.” Eloquent words underscored by me.
APRIL 28
Said Aristotle, approvingly quoted by Montaigne, “To be shamefaced is becoming to young people, but disgraceful in old age.”
MAY 5
[Haymeadows.]
Last year for some reason the upper half of both my fields adjacent to the woodlots was changed from hay to corn; which acreage is now being re-plowed. The five-share plow and the three-share plow make an immense possessive sound, handling and turning and purring. The earth is in exquisite condition for this ritual or (I might say) sexual act, just moist enough, not too moist, opening like pages of a book. Blissful intimate earth-odor! Certain large clods in each furrow, polished by the steel, catch the afternoon sunlight.
Along the lane downhill, and in the fringes of the deepening hay, lie many dandelions like gold coins, some mustard like gold dust.
MAY 16
I am sick at heart about the crazy expansion of the war which to all intents and purposes we have lost; disastrous government; mortal and fateful clashes on the campuses and in the Southern cities.
JUNE 3
There is almost something bird-brained in the nature of my talent: brief and swift, with a long-distance eye, a flickering movement, then a soaring movement, and what might be called falcon-feeding, magpie taste. The journal-like but peculiar form of these pages has awakened these characteristics, set them in motion—whither?
I seem to have my heart set—my talent has its heart set—on a flight longer than my heart is apt to last.
Robert Phelps delights in my Fear and Trembling. Style is within my grasp, although perhaps I have devoted more time and energy to it than it is worth.
JUNE 19
Year after year in the 1920s I attempted Balzac and Dostoyevsky, a novel a year, finding faults, missing the point. Then, in each case, the virginity of the mind passed, the great gateways opened, and I read right through the collected works at the rate of about a volume a day (French paperbacks); astounded, bewitched. Shall I try Dickens again?
JULY 3
Hearing is believing. Monroe, at rest in the sun, called to me: “Do you hear a strange musical note, far away? Can it be a bird? Can it be a burglar alarm?”
Two or three notes, it seemed to me, deceleratedly tremulant. It might have been, I thought, a large new egg factory: tens of thousands of hens exercising out of doors, very far away.
Next day we learned that it was the tenth recorded major infestation of the seventeen-year Cicada, in neighbor Allec’s woodlot and up along Federal Twist. “I can’t hardly sleep these nights,” said Walter Zdebski, “they holler so.”
Unique creature, native North American, in the last year of individual life it lays its eggs in twigs of trees, harmlessly. The new generation, when hatched, descends and takes up its abode underground where it feeds on roots for sixteen years and eleven months. It has protruding compound eyes; why? For country dwellers, even close to the big cities, nature is, among other things, a principal amusement.
JULY 7
A useful truism by Alfred N. Whitehead: “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.”
JULY 11
Time [the June 29 issue], along with one of its sincere but soft little essays, entitled “The Silent Generation”—Thornton Wilder’s phrase—has listed about fifty men and women in their 30s, people of consequence and/or celebrities. I found that I admired only six of them: Bill Cosby, LeRoi Jones, Ralph Nader, John D. Rockefeller IV, Philip Roth, John Updike.
AUGUST 7
Sorrow is by its very nature superstitious.
AUGUST 9
As a rule, painters’ signatures are more beautiful than writers’ handwriting. Bernard Perlin has found Miro’s signature on the back of Baba’s picture and photographed it: calm, level, youthful.
AUGUST 10
Monroe always keeps a large bottle of Nembutal and Seconal mixed—more than I think one should have on hand, of this suicidal drug, and age.
The wings of the mourning dove, flying up from the feeding pan, sound like creaking of the tiniest fairy windmill, turning swiftly in the smallest gust of wind.
AUGUST 12
Due to age and irremediable circumstances, sometimes I have to live out days on end like an actor on stage, playing the part of Glenway Wescott, a supporting role.
AUGUST 24
What we really know about Joyce is The Dead and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy—what we understand or seem to understand. Wittgenstein tells us: “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.” He was a lion, he did speak, we have understood only his small talk.
In 1923, my first prose fiction was accepted by The Dial: a sort of brief life nouvelle, a long story of the biographical kind called “Bad Han,” afterward incorporated in my first novel, influenced partly by Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple, heaven help me!—one of the crossroads of my entire life.
I spent an hour reading The Apple of the Eye—I don’t suppose I have done so for twenty years. I felt proud of the descriptive passages, like mediaeval illuminations or Eastern enamel. I wish my young people talked with more sound of voice. The moralizing making a rather childish effort, but it does prefigure that belief in eroticism, or shall I say, belief in amorousness, in which I have persisted. Though I didn’t read it all, I imagine the whole of this work is better than the parts.
AUGUST 29
“The only good thoughts are second thoughts.”—Lloyd Bruce Wescott.
SEPTEMBER 17
I am in trouble with “The Stallions,” as to what Coburn Britton [of Prose] expects on Monday—but I am not sorry. Even clarity is a two-edged sword: I conceive new material, culling one way; I sink into old hollows and dried-up path in the manuscript I began with, culling the other way.
SEPTEMBER 25
Spookiness in everyday life: In the hour before daylight, watering the nine houseplants in the living room, and as I come away from the room, I hear their gurgle as they express themselves behind me in plaintive, individual, very inhuman voices.
OCTOBER 2
The Republicans have a term for their nucleus of electoral strength—hawkish, pro-war, patriotic, militaristic, prudish and puritanical, philistine. The “Silent Majority” they call it, and they make great with the term.
Now in a plausible and right-minded though caustic editorial (NYT, Sept. 26), Gore Vidal reminds us that this combination of words was Homer’s, and in that ancient and poetic use designated the dead.
Presumably some professional speech-writer found it in a dictionary of quotations.
AUTUMN
Mohonk Mountain House, near New Paltz, New York. Cass and Jane Canfield’s two-day party—the opposite of a house party—with dinner-dance in between. With Monroe.
OCTOBER 3
Pauline is still unwell—perhaps always will be. During late June and early July she wrote me a wonderful long letter: half a page a day about convalescence; about pretending to be as good as new, to cheer one
’s friends and family, to flatter any physician.
OCTOBER 4
[To Monroe.]
On the telephone the other day I quoted myself to Bill Maxwell: “I am still subject matter more than I am a writer, or to be more precise, my life as subject matter is far superior to my capabilities as a writer.” And what do you suppose he quoted back to me? Walter Scott’s “One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.”
OCTOBER 10
Monroe spent a couple of days at Mouton last week, during the grape-harvesting. Pauline is as well as can be expected; attested by both the surgeon from New Zealand and the good diagnostician from Boston, who have been there. She is more eccentric than ever, with (I think) a sense of borrowed time. She stays awake almost all night, almost every night, reading and writing; wakes up at 2 p.m., and devotes the afternoon to running the house and to her bathroom and dressing table; first meets her guests at teatime in her bedroom—teatime at 7 p.m.—and dines at ten.
How I hate all this! But I understand; and perhaps no one else does.
OCTOBER 27
[To Lloyd.]
Dearest brother, Having you back on your feet, with an easier look on your face, is like the sun coming out, subsequent to frightening, destructive bad weather.
Now please reform a bit—live in a more elderly way, live longer, all of a piece.
Sometimes I think that there is just one moral principal above all others: moderation.
OCTOBER 30
Life goes on. The seasons come around, revolve and return. Once more a mocking bird is here this afternoon, eating ink-berries, and making up his mind whether or not this is a good winter resort. I must begin again putting out sunflower seeds and fat and hard boiled eggs with some regularity. The little birds will notice at once, and the mocking bird will follow their lead.
The gray squirrels, now that the red squirrel is dead, have moved around the house to the largest, oldest walnut tree. In my dead darling’s day as in the long lifetime of his father, the gray squirrels weren’t allowed to stay on the south side of the house.
When I am a bore, it bores me so that I seem to myself to be going mad. A problem of old age, up ahead: I shall not always have the energy it takes to enjoy dining with Baba, or to take part in the functioning of the Academy/Institute.
NOVEMBER 2, EARLY A.M.
All Soul’s Day. The worst problem of age in my case evidently is going to be euphoria followed by exhaustion. The teenage septuagenarian! I have to overwork in order to concentrate, and of course the life around me is intensely de-concentrating.
NOVEMBER 3
One of the sublime anecdotes in literary history: the day that Balzac, having seen how he could organize what little good fiction he had written at that point with everything that he planned to write thereafter all in the comedie humaine, hastened across Paris to see his sister and announced to her, “Today I have become a genius!” I know my stature and for many years haven’t wanted to be a giant, or at least haven’t regretted not being one. My invoking the greatest novelist who ever lived isn’t paranoid. It is what Monroe calls euphoria. Even in my small post-mature work I see visions of originality.
When Boswell visited Rousseau, he asked, “Is it possible to live amongst other men and retain one’s singularity?” Rousseau said, “Yes, I have done it.”
“But to remain on good terms with them?” Boswell asked. “Oh, if you want to be a wolf,” Rousseau admitted, “you must howl.”
Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra: “I am still a cat if I see a mouse.”
NOVEMBER 9
[To Georgia O’Keeffe.]
Two words about my reaction to your paintings: the thrill of a woman’s paintings, so rare in the entire history of art; the joyous sorrow, the sorrowful delight, of nature worship in that great part of the world where you live, where I spent a year, aged 18–19.
NOVEMBER 15
I wrote a letter to William Maxwell sorting out in my mind the possibility of a book to be made around “The Odor of Rosemary” essay, which my editor at Harpers wants to see in this connection before I go abroad. I telephoned Robert Phelps, ditto, ditto. Some of this, I realize, was just boasting … I’ll have the proofs of Prose magazine, half of it to be read at Wimbledon. It’s a great life if I keep calm enough and get enough sleep. Now to grapple with my strange shipboard acquaintance off the coast of Spain—the breath of my title herb out of sight of land.
Re: “Odor of Rosemary” ms. One more miniature incident having to do with sense of smell. A friend of Monroe’s, Robert Gathorne-Hardy, the poet, Logan Pearsall Smith’s penultimate secretary, gardened somewhat energetically and took pride in some things that he was able to make flourish in Surray. One day to his considerable satisfaction Virginia Woolf visited his garden. He called her attention to a species of fritillary native to some distant clime and foreign soil, white-flowered, fragrant.
The beautiful woman of letters knelt close to the exotic plant and took deep breaths of its unfamiliar fragrance, then looked up at her host and exclaimed, “Oh, it smells like semen!” and blushed, and arose quickly and changed the subject. Robert G-H told Monroe this.
NOVEMBER 20
What a day Tuesday was! I began writing at 4:30 a.m. and continued until 6:15 p.m.—a couple of telephone calls, and food two or three times: a piece of cheese and a small pear. To be capable of that—and without inferiority of literary product—when pushing three score and ten, is remarkable; and for my years ahead, a good omen and a great blessing and reassurance.
I arrived in New York at midnight and kept myself awake until Monroe returned from his sociability toward one a.m. “Are you sleepy?” I demanded. “Not really,” he answered. Whereupon I read the final section of the first half of “The Odor of Rosemary,” twelve pages, and marked the typos and small mistakes and listened to Monroe’s criticism of certain passages. Fatuous old pair that we are, we were thrilled.
NOVEMBER 23
[Re a photo of flamboyantly-dressed heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier with the newspaper caption “The Day After.”]
Captions: the future role of writers (perhaps) in a picture-oriented world.
NOVEMBER 29
The new oil furnace will cost twelve or fifteen hundred dollars. Such are the disadvantages of living in a home instead of a rented apartment. My brother will have to finance it for me, at least for the time being. Such are the advantages and disadvantages of being a mandarin writer, with more genius than talent, and not enough of either; out of season and out of fashion.
DECEMBER 29
Mouton Rothschild. “Decorative Fabrics of Cecil Beaton.” When I referred to this advertisement approvingly with humorous approbation—a propos the hat, a version of which he wears at Mouton—he gave a manner of philosophical groan: “What a ghastly photograph! Oh!”
One of those laborious, self-enriched men who thinks of his way of successful life as having happened to him. I don’t suppose that he is sorry for himself—no such comfort!—but he seems to have no notion that anyone might be envious of him.
DECEMBER 31
[A note card with “Dove of the Holy Spirit” detail from the painting The Virgin of the Annunciation, by Gerard David.]
For beloved Pauline upon her birthday, between one year and another—once more at Mouton—this bird of the holy ghost of good health, also of the holy ghost of literary inspiration—needing no symbol of our affection, as the years have made a habit of it, given proof of it.
1971
JANUARY 1
Mouton Rothschild. Year after year, at exactly 12 midnight—it marks the end of Pauline’s birthday as well as the great change of date—the lights in the 80-foot room are reduced to only Renaissance fireplace light, and the men-servants enter, one bearing a bright candelabra, three with an immense gong with a bass voice, very solemn. Then Philippe and Pauline kiss with gentle formality. Then everyone kisses.
Finally I got through the crowd to Pauline. “I have left y
ou to the last,” I said to her.
“Let us walk down to the end of the room,” she replied. We walked slowly, along the half-circle windows. She asked if I knew what it meant to her to have me work on a book in the chateau of which she is the chatelaine. And I said, “I cannot help equating my good fortune in writing another work with your returning from New Zealand in good health.”
“Oh!” she replied; just the one syllable.
I did not try to express my uneasy self-consciousness in another of its aspects: the present slight flare-up of my talent may die down soon—how soon?—with ashes ahead.
JANUARY 21
Sunrise. When one can no longer keep from thinking of oneself as old, one’s errors, failures and bad luck suddenly grow more oppressive, and more or less break one’s heart. One wants another chance but there isn’t time. Unable to buckle down to my morning’s work, how long had I tried in vain without looking up? I did look up—and saw the sunrise. There was the pre-auroral palette—ethereal ravishing pale colors washed across the south east: steel blue, lemon yellow, lime green, bluish pink, mushroom. Nature is an immortality. Nature is a consolation.
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