OCTOBER 9
The preliminaries of Monroe’s hernia operation, by Dr. Salerno: “Monroe is nervous about this, perhaps because he has seemed to fail in health during the summer, or because his life has grown more pleasurable, so that he is afraid of its getting away from him. He puts his foot on it and growls.”
OCTOBER 11
At dinner Baba was in one of her irritating states of mind. Intensely political these days, not letting me get a word in edgewise for sentence after sentence, with gestures, she pretends that I underestimate McGovern, or worse still, that I non-admire Nixon less vigorously than she does. With defects of the psyche so antithetical, isn’t it a wonder that we have managed so well so close together for thirty years?
OCTOBER 13
The man I have loved most of all, for more than half a century, was born on a Friday the thirteenth of February. Lucky for me and (I dare say) lucky for him.
We have reached the time of life when we must begin to expect bad luck and to learn to put up with it, and not just on Friday. He has in prospect three surgical operations.
OCTOBER 20
The year that Monroe and I went abroad to write, 1925: In Dayton, a small town in Tennessee, a science teacher named Scopes taught evolution, which was against the law. The reactionary state of Tennessee sent for the most famous orator, William Jennings Bryan, to prosecute, and the great brilliant atheist, Clarence Darrow went at his own expense to head up the defense, and ferociously attacked the aging statesman. Five days after the trial, Bryan died—some said that Darrow’s excoriation had destroyed him.
OCTOBER 31
First reading of my sheaf of memories of the 1920s in Prose. What whisks through my mind like the crack of a whip is the question: Do I not overindulge in commas?
NOVEMBER 3
My life has been a great book but, alas, I am weak as a man of letters; a small, slow writer, still too much involved in living to excel in literature, in fact more involved than ever.
NOVEMBER 15
My first cerebral-vascular accident, before the Institute dinner, after which I was to have read “Bill Benet’s Death.”
NOVEMBER 27
While Monroe prepared his café au lait I read to him my hundred-word citation of the new Poet Laureate for election to honorary membership of the Institute and Academy. His comment was in question form: “Haven’t you used the word ‘Everyman’ too often recently?” I railed back at him but without drawing blood or shedding tears.
Monroe’s recent hernia operation was like a miracle. In less than 24 hours he was walking up and down the corridor, in less than four days he was back at Haymeadows, unstitched, sleeping upstairs. All that week I had to fight to keep him from driving his cumbersome old Cadillac. We were wonderfully happy together.
I feel that no man is so nearly “married” to another man as I am to Monroe, and that I could explain this feeling and testify to it in some factual way, so that it would be acceptable.
DECEMBER 2, 6:45 A.M.
Sensational sunrise filling four of my windows, east and south. In the great corner between east and south, plumes of burning flamingo on fire under a vast wing in neighbor Allee’s woodlot and in the great branches of my twin black walnut trees, under a vast wingspread of purple. Due south, bright yellow on the horizon, with five shades of blue above it, interspersed with pink.
DECEMBER 22
Orly Airport, Paris, six hours wait. A pleasant flight, though I slept very little. Bedlam here, due not only to the holiday traffic but to a strike of baggage handlers. I lugged the suitcase around quite a lot but no harm in that, good exercise.
The aging process is an adventure, and ought to be a discipline.
DECEMBER 23
Mouton Rothschild. When we sat down to dinner here last night Philippe’s first topic of conversation was Raymond Mortimer’s Times portrait of Coco Chanel, with self-portraiture at the margins.
“Couldn’t Raymond do an entire book of character studies like that, bringing himself into things now and then?” Philippe asked.
“Of course he could if he thought he could,” I answered presumptively.
Having been indolent for about half a lifetime, it shames me now to beseech and reprove other writers. Raymond has had a laborious life and may not want to work so hard in years to come. For my own part, last summer when I realized what I had signed up for, volume after volume of scribble to be put in order, tidied up and abridged here, amplified there, oh, I sickened with self-pity.
1973
JANUARY 6
Mouton. The Disraeli Pillow: One evening, walking along Park Avenue past a shop, looking into its bright show window—I was in need of a bedspread—I saw a small deluxe pillow embroidered with these four words: “Never Complain Never Explain.”
Had it been the precept of an angel whispered in my ear I should not have been more impressed. It gave me gooseflesh, but I seem not to have taken it to heart in the intervening years. Who’s precept was it? I remember my curiosity. I mentioned it to someone, Lady Cunard, and was told, “Disraeli.”
JANUARY 9
Lisbon, Hotel Mundial. Tomorrow we are going up into the wooded hills, where there are famous little castles, and out toward the open ocean. I scarcely care, having fallen in love with the city as such, almost at first sight. The last such romance in my life, perhaps; Amsterdam, Copenhagen, what else? I fell out of love with Brussels last year, except for Leon’s black boulle and Rubens. Had I not promised Monroe all autumn to travel somewhere with him for a week or ten days, I’d have been ashamed to stop here, with my pen-hand itching to get at certain pages. Thank goodness I did, and thank goodness we opted for a cheap hotel. At Tagus level, with the Visigothic castle overhead, the Phoenician voices rising from the street to our large seventh-floor windows, as ’twere saws sawing, axes chopping … I kept getting up last night and looking down, until almost dawn, then slept; then was aroused by a small rooster, not very virile or strong rooster, but persistent. A voluble population, and they don’t sleep much; they half-run most of the time, catty-corner across the largos and the pracas, and in and out of the side streets. Intently sexual scrutinizes from young men now and then.
JANUARY 16
“Where there is too much, something has been left out.” A Jewish proverb expressing simplistically though perhaps profoundly one of my principles of the literary art.
JANUARY 24
One of my Monroe’s bad habits is addressing envelopes to Pauline, Raymond, Anatole and others containing sometimes clippings, sometimes jottings, and leaving them unmailed. An analgesic for conscience-stricken affections; an aggravation of our Collyer-brothers-disease, packrat-ism.
FEBRUARY 13
Monroe’s 74th birthday, the New York City Ballet.
In the taxi: “Happy Birthday.”
“You are my birthday present; you and those dances. Can there every have been so ravishing a company?”
[Malcolm] Lowry is a one book author, everyone says, and the excellence of that book is accidental because he never learned how to write; he continually started and stopped, commenced and abandoned.
MARCH 1
[Re commemorative stamps of George Gershwin.]
Gershwin, a friendly acquaintance of my youth. In 1925, at a party at Nancy Cunard’s apartment in the Ile St. Louis, he was a pleasant pianist and our almost weirdly beautiful hostess prevailed upon him to play for us. The Duchess de Gramont (Marie Raspoli) talked the while, which flustered the young celebrity. In a strong whisper someone informed her that he was the composer of “Rhapsody in Blue,” not just a professional from a nightclub hired for the occasion. She whispered back contritely in her Italian way.
At another party, in 1927 or 1928, at Carl Van Vechten’s in New York, instead of a duchess we had an opera singer, the contralto Marguerite D’Alvarez, a lush looking giantess. With great curves and sighs and parted lips, she sat beside Gershwin on the piano stool. She would have liked him to accompany her in something from her re
pertory but, unmoved by her ego or her libido, he made her sing “The Man I Love” instead, first in a musical murmur at his elbow, then standing up, with might, like Delilah, like Carmen, like Orpheus. If I remember correctly, it had been written for Funny Face and not used until some later production.
He took notice of me that evening, and afterward we happened to meet in Fifth Avenue and walked along together, when he told me that he wanted to write an opera and needed a theme or a plot. If anything occurred to me, and appealed to him and his brother Ira, he thought, I might try my hand at a libretto.
APRIL 4
Jill Krementz is the type of female that my type of homosexual is enraged by. But she is the best portrait snapshotter in the country.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: Where there is satiric fire, there may be surrealistic smoke.
APRIL 14
James Stewart, the still-celebrated star, once said that “the great thing about movies is that you’re giving people little pieces of time that they will never forget.”
His is the only delectable and emotional, valid counter-tenor voice.
MAY 28
Monroe: Our love life has worked wonders and now another wonder is called for. And strong as each of us is independently, even when ill or in pain, we appear not to have the necessary mutual strength for the next step, the last lap.
JUNE 10
Death of William Inge. A hot, shining Haymeadows Sunday—John and Ivan and Adair here, Monroe joining us at noon. Then Lillian Hall heard the bad news on the radio, telephoned Ethel, who telephoned us.
John’s mixed emotions.
JULY 7
Harry Robbins Haldeman: The worst face in our present nightmare news: the glaring, imploring eyes; the heavily sculptured lips, sagging, taking some secret pleasure, the chin not in the middle, the overall look of headaches due to grinding his teeth.
AUGUST 8
To Thornton Wilder: Dear Thornton, Galley proofs of Theophilus reached me last weekend with a joyous note from Cass [Canfield] … In a depressive passage of my own work in progress (it does progress), I hid it in Monroe’s room for several days, not to be seduced away from myself.
AUGUST 30
My attire in late teens and early manhood was unconventional due to vanity and penury in combination overlapping. I had brought back from New Mexico a cowboy hat, a fawn-colored corduroy suit, and painted boots with high heels. The cape came later. I remember acquiring it very cheap at an auction one summer afternoon in 1921 in or near West Cummington, Massachusetts, along with a red-flowered carpet bag. Upon my first visit to Munich the following summer in 1922, an aggressive porter seized the carpet bag and one or two of the larger suitcases, and when I tipped him he said, “Danke schön, Herr Dichter.” (Poet, writer.) I felt a pleasant glow of pride and then realized how obviously I was dressed the part.
SEPTEMBER 6, 8 A.M.
A fact ever recurrent in my existence and in my thoughts these days, which I hope to elucidate before it gets lost in the shadows of the passage of time: senescence is as interesting as adolescence.
OCTOBER 20
Nixon has compromised with Senators Irvin and Baker in the matter of the tapes. What a bore it has been to have been right about Nixon in re Watergate all this year (that is, to have felt my rightness), and to have been talked down not just by Lloyd and Ivan but by Baba, who regards herself as the only real Nixon-hater.
DECEMBER 3
The other day I went to the spooky, shameless, embarrassing little Jewel Theater in the East Village to re-see a film. It is more active than the other five all-male movie theaters, the young men really cruising, more aggressive, the older men really stubborn, unabashed, less hopeless.
DECEMBER 22
For present purposes of my lifework, last lifework: Sacrifice present experience and the record thereof to the great past, half written and the other half, until now kept secret, wasted.
[Re Jimi Hendrix, the movie.]
I hope that this will still be showing when I return from abroad. At the time of Hendrix’s death, which was at the height of his cult popularity, one could buy a plastic replica of his erect cock, useable I was told.
DECEMBER 27
At Mouton, working on my Don Bachardy foreword, in a storm of creativity. Fascination and drama: what a triangle, Philippe and Pauline and I.
Posing for Don Bachardy: I have known Don Bachardy since he began to be the closest friend of an important friend of mine [Christopher Isherwood]. He was a sprightly figure, fraught with friendly though uneasy smiles. I once saw an infant squirrel taking its first steps down a steep branch, clutching, eyeing the air on either side. In Don’s early look, unlike the squirrel’s, there was neither hunger nor fright, only something of a wild creature’s concentration. He seemed to like every bit of life around him, above him, beneath him; and his own life was a venture, not just an adventure. Especially when his talent started; it challenged him. He drew me in 1964.
DECEMBER 28
Is it safe to say that I lack genius? That grand substantive noun, ambivalent down through the ages, is too great. Talent is too small.
The only important talent I have is memory.
1974
JANUARY 1
One thing that homophile men cannot understand is the fact that he-men and womanly women have the gall to pretend to understand our sex-lives and our way of thinking about love.
MARCH 15
Thomas Moore as a teenager in Edinburgh came upon Robert Burns sweeping the sidewalk in front of his poor dwelling place, and with precocious insolence and wit exclaimed to him with his power of improvisation: “You Scottish loon, / Lay down your broom / And let a man pass by.”
To which Burns, an aging, indeed dying man, still famous but poverty stricken, retorted in even better form: “You Irish ass, / There’s room to pass / Betwixt the all and I.”
APRIL 29
I have talked to Pauline half an hour a day almost every day. Hard work, in terms of my emotions—so many spider webs, invitations and involvements to sidestep, and little cheering fictions kindly intended.
MAY 2
The present is the enemy of the past. In some cases, perhaps most, the reverse is true.
Even with Proust’s remembered emotion, even in that first chapter, he has to keep uncovering it, reclaiming it, from a strange cloud of egocentricity, a befogging forgetfulness. It is what it says it is: a search for a time that was lost.
Glimpses of the past: Mozart’s wife said he was an even better dancer than musician.
AUGUST 15
The Peeper at The David Cinema, West 55th Street, with Monroe, who praised the triangle, especially their post-coital hugs, silky dark heads viewed from the top. Also, he said, “I have never seen such beautiful kissing.”
SEPTEMBER 7
I don’t dream for a moment that I am to outlive Monroe, despite his agony of arthritis, and his lifelong habit of me—the restless, massive silence in which my voice for fifty years has rattled and rattled, gloated and complained. All my life I have believed in the unique excellence of his journal, mosaic-like—only glancing into it now and then, never reading it, except when it came to me from his faraway places in letter-form. And now he hasn’t the courage or the energy or the virtue to put it in order or even to read it.
OCTOBER
[Re pressed red rose in clear cellophane folder.]
The rose that stood in a glass of water on John Stevenson’s round table in Minetta Street Mews, the October 17, 1974 night he cooked hot and sour soup and cubed chicken with almost raw shallots for me, just before my weekend with Pauline at the Ritz, October 18–20.
To John Stevenson: Did I ever tell you how obstinately M.W. pretended not to know which of my principal John’s I might be referring to? Robert Phelps wanted me to nickname you Jeannot, after Cocteau’s most loveable beloved of the mid-twenties [Jean Bourgoint].
[Note card jottings: four examples of undated notes GW wrote on colored index cards during the 1970s, probably
meaning to expand later.]
Anthony Butts: Seen from a taxi cab in a 1938 veil of rain crossing the Place de la Concorde. Great flashback all the way to 1923.
Witter Bynner, 1924 in his fifties, New Mexico, intimacy.
K. A. Porter: Until late in life she understated her age by four years; then shamelessly, unabashedly, happily informed Who’s Who and all and sundry of having done so.
Charles Henri Ford, The Young and Evil, 1933: chapter seven, pp. 79–84, Theodosia = Djuna [Barnes].
Wescott in 1950s publicity photo.
Publication of Images of Truth. GW: “My notion of myself, fairly constant from year to year.” (© Estate of George Platt Lynes)
Wescott’s first days in the house at Haymeadows.
A Heaven of Words Page 22
