Across the century, the enduring relationship of Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott.
Wescott friend Baroness Pauline de Rothschild, formerly American fashion designer Pauline Potter.
Family matriarch Barbara Harrison Wescott at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton.
Robert Phelps, devoted editor and generous friend. (with permission of Roger D. Phelps)
Wescott at Haymeadows, 1970s. (with permission of John Connolly)
GW: “A shadow at the back door—in and out of my peripheral vision—a ghost peering in.” (with permission of John Stevenson)
John Stevenson: “This gaze has always looked right through me to my ghost.” (with permission of John Stevenson)
Outdoors at Haymeadows, Wescott, 1980s. (with permission of John Stevenson)
Reflections of a lifetime, Glenway Wescott, 1901–1987. (with permission of John Stevenson)
1975–1979
THROUGHOUT THEIR MID- AND LATE SEVENTIES, Wescott and Wheeler continue the pattern of their lives, with some moderation naturally. Almost heroically, Monroe keeps up his foreign travel for museum exhibits and business, even as he requires strong drugs every day for painful arthritis. Glenway is relatively healthy—“I think of myself as young”—with occasional cardiac slumps that slow his activities and require medication. Late in the decade he sometimes wears a neck brace when a disc problem affects his circulation and balance.
Despite his worrying about Monroe, and their losing many of their famous friends (including Janet Flanner, Anaïs Nin, and Paul Robeson), Wescott still experiences real happiness in these years. He is proud of Monroe’s stoic example, glad for the New York companionship of John Stevenson and a young crowd, as well as the country visits of John Connolly and Ivan Ashby. The hero of his journals project, Robert Phelps, continues to encourage him, interview him, and deal with the publisher. The journals have become an all-encompassing part of his life and legacy. Well over one hundred bankers boxes of material, many organized, some in disarray, make it all seem hopeless at times. But his reading aloud of Phelps’s edited journal selections delights his friends and himself at Monroe’s apartment and at the new East Village loft of John Stevenson. At one reading, Brooke Astor insists that there should also be a volume of the lifelong correspondence of Wescott and Wheeler. Glenway does believe the journals will bring balance and perspective to the highs and lows of his long career. However, in an August 1977 entry he says he will never live to see a book published to the satisfaction of himself, Robert Phelps, and the publisher.
While some of his books were reprinted fairly regularly over the decades, a surprise is the 1977 Leete’s Island Press reissue of the humorous 1932 A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers in its original form with Tchelitchev’s illustrations of the zodiac. (There had been a 1933 Harpers edition that censored the artwork.)
Adding to the complex world of Haymeadows in these years is the fact that four tigers, later joined by two leopards, are kept in a one-acre, high-fenced compound near their house. Barbara and Lloyd Wescott’s daughter Debo is in her second marriage, and husband Thane Clark enjoys these dangerous pets. Glenway humorously says he dreamed the newspaper headline, “Author Eaten by Tigers.” Only after the marriage dissolves are the animals eventually (July 4, 1981) moved to a tiger farm in Florida.
The biggest losses in these years are the two great women in Wescott’s life. Baroness Pauline de Rothschild finally loses her battle with health problems in March 1976 in Santa Barbara, California. Before she takes that last trip, Glenway spends “four magical days” with her at a Boston hospital. And Barbara Harrison Wescott, the matriarch of their extended family, who had supported Glenway for most of his life, succumbs to cancer in April 1977. In May, four hundred honor her as a great patron of the arts at the New Jersey State Museum, including the current and past governors, other politicians, and trustees.
The great partnership continues, however. Wanting Glenway to see Europe again, Monroe takes him on a whirlwind trip to the places of their youth and to their many friends overseas, including Baron Rothschild, filmmaker François Reichenbach, and the French lover of Glenway’s Paris years, Jacques Guérin. In New York and at Haymeadows, they keep up the rich and colorful life they’ve shared.
1975
JANUARY 7
There is in Brussels a red-figured Greek bowl, portraying a boy with wreathed head, perhaps on his way home from a banquet, rapturously masturbating: his head back, shoulders straining like the wing-joints of a bird, phallus at full stretch; and the inscription is “I greet you—I want you.”
JANUARY 22
Having a poor head for dates—indeed for whatever is mathematical or numerical—I like to recall things as contemporaneous or as coming before or after other things.
For example, Goethe was born before Mozart and outlived Byron. Mozart died the year the French Revolution started.
FEBRUARY 2
Once at the close of lovemaking I heard my tired, foolish voice saying, “The best! The best!” and my love replied, in a joyous but stern way, “The best so far!” with sweet laughter.
The moral is—the same in the case of literature as in the case of love—patience! But without wasting any time.
FEBRUARY 8
A blissful night and morning with John Stevenson last Saturday and Sunday. A delightful and amusing party in the south Village last night.
FEBRUARY 19
I spent a happy night at 251 [East Fifty-First Street] just before John Stevenson departed to Texas and Florida conventions, interspersed with some sea and sun. Toward morning I dreamed of my grandmother, and an O-shaped knothole high up on a tree and wild bees in a continuous straight flight to it and honey overflowing down the trunk—a marvel.
FEBRUARY 21
Great mystery of time in old age: Time passing over my head, in and out of my mind, thought and heart; with no perceptible beating of wings, no very dramatic daydreaming or spinnings of narrative. Here I sit for an hour or two hours trying to figure matters of philosophical problems, spellbound by coincidences.
Coincidence can be adorable, like one of the lesser gods.
Poor Glenway’s Almanac: Men and women do most of their reading in their youth, feeling the tides and undercurrents of their prime taking hold of them and bearing them they know not where; and once more, in the autumn years, when looking back on the mysteries, the miracles, the fortunes and misfortunes of their lives—and they seek in literature parallel life stories, insights of writers good and bad which may illuminate their own experience.
FEBRUARY 23
I feel that I now understand my fate; can I make use of my self knowledge?
FEBRUARY 25
Where is my dog-eared Renard? The one that Book World paid to have photographed? It’s the limit. Nothing is going to do my mental health more good than to locate my essentials in this house, and exercise my ability to put my hands on them, and rejoice every time this happens.
MARCH 22
Desperate revulsion against, horror of, my old darling’s concept of order: “Put everything in labeled boxes.” But there are already so many of these, which is a good start, but there is no end to it.
My dream and purpose is to publish, to be published. He seems to me to have no dream except to keep everything, except what will make a suitable present for one of his loved ones, to sell when poverty catches up to us. For example, he has wrapped up, labeled and thrust into a corner the 1945 sterling silver with our combined initials “G+MW”, devised by me, bought with Apartment in Athens money.
MARCH 29
“Memory is the great literary artist.”—Maurice Baring.
[Re photo.]
Teenage Malraux, vulnerable and mean-spirited, with his mad-looking father who in due course took his own life.
It gives me cold chills to think that, however fervently one may dedicate oneself to memory, and to that record of the memorable of both first- and second-hand which is literature, more than half of the All is
wasted on one.
One day Janet [Flanner] sat at the Ritz Bar with Hemingway, and she had been interviewing Malraux who had confided to her the fact of his father’s weak and/or evil end; he had asked her not to write it. She and Hemingway then told each other that their fathers had done likewise.
One afternoon Janet and I gossiped tête-à-tête about some of the byproducts of friendship and sociability in the way of memory. And as we parted with a great hug, she said, “Glenway, the tales we tell each other are better than all the books our friends write, even the books we write ourselves.”
How irregular, how precocious, how dilatory, how successful in improvisation, my book-learning and overall culture has been!
For example, when I wrote Fear and Trembling with tears in my eyes with a sense of its importance to me personally, my talent for fiction fallow all of a sudden—what next?—and historically, the resurgence of Germany’s vanity and cruelty, I hadn’t even heard of Kierkegaard’s otherwise alarmist wondrous work, F&T, named after Goethe.
MARCH 31
Jottings by my dearest of all, rescued by me from his paper-recycle box. Why does he write them, or to be exact, half-write them—no headings or dates; the speakers not identified; as a rule not even quotation marks! They break my heart because I so long for his journal, prepared for publication by him (or by us together)—out of boxes and boxes of aide-mémoirs, a lovely small book—easy.
MAY 13
Today my beloved Monroe is to arrive in London from Florence on his way home. Every thought of him makes me weep; so strangely disabled, so ashamed.
JUNE 10
I attended the opening of Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding” twenty-five years ago, with Carl Malouf and Tommy [Sullivan]. A quarter century has passed and I have a malfunctioning heart, I have aged considerably, and yet I think of myself as young; Carson has been dead for eight years and I think of her as young and I think of that first play of hers as touchingly true to life, at least to her life.
OCTOBER 12
[To Monroe re their household arguments.]
My dearest of all, I can’t win—I’ve known that for a good while; haven’t you? Let us promise each other not to blame ourselves in the hour of death, when it comes, however it comes.
OCTOBER 15
Maugham once said to Monroe, “If Barbara hadn’t spoiled Glenway rotten by letting him have just enough money to eke out a bare living he would have buckled down to become a successful writer, and by this time he would have a little apartment in New York as well as a house in the country, and with a proper staff!”
DECEMBER
Asked one day what she was proudest of, Barbara answered, “I am not proud. I want to be remembered for what I have helped all of you to do.”
1976
JANUARY 1
Just inside the cover of my long-habitual blue ring-binder, I have clipped and pasted a bright-colored three-line advertising slogan: “How to stop worrying and learn to love.”
Worrying is not what I do.
If I were to love anyone more than I already do love my lifelong Monroe, it would destroy me.
Having written at 8:30 a.m. on a bench in the Trenton railway station, looking out at the shadowy graveyard surmounted by dark blue clouds, suffused with white sunshine, I cover my eyes and bow my head and weep like an old man.
Stop worrying and learn more about love than life has taught you.
JANUARY 9
Philippe telephoned once more: Pauline is in prostrate condition, with congested lungs, congested kidneys, the flu hanging on. [Dr.] Bernard Lown insists on her going to Santa Barbara around the 20th for about a month. The more often I write to her the better, Philippe says; it would be easier for me if I could be assured that he wouldn’t be reading what I write. Not crocodile tears; his grief about her, and his love for her, in fact, couldn’t be more genuine. But, oh, what crocodile endearments for my benefit.
JANUARY 11
Dear Tennessee [Williams]: How I have enjoyed your Memoirs! How glad I am of our old friendship! What a good example your present health and ardor and dedication to production and reproduction of your plays all over the place sets lazy, sentimental me!
JANUARY 14
Nothing bites so hard as the worm that turns.
My weakness as an aphorist is that I can’t or won’t stop when I am ahead.
Like lyric poetry, the smallest forms of prose—aphorism, pensée, epigram, maxim, proverb—need not be true to be meritorious.
JANUARY 16
I am giving John Stevenson and Robert Phelps one of my care-package meals in Bond Street tonight, before taping. The latter will put to me a long series of factual questions that he has accumulated, or let me try to narrate in brief or in outline some part of the memoir years 1914–33. It wants to be synopsis more than remembrance, and this technique may help.
JANUARY 17
Two young blacks: one a hustler trying to frighten me into jeopardous intimacy; another, crowded close to me in the jam-packed subway, cruising me—beautiful, elegant, with a small gold earring.
Do Me Evil—the long-awaited Toby Ross film with the visionary child voyeur. Adonis Theater, Eighth Avenue.
JANUARY 27
[The New York Times, December 28, 1975: “Paul Robeson Dead at 77.”]
Dorothy Smith [Lloyd Wescott’s cook] longed to be accompanied to Paul Robeson’s funeral.
First meeting, 1924, someone brought him to a party of Betty Salemme’s in the studio overlooking Washington Square Park—I remember the way he sang then, and at later stages of his career, but I do not see him in my mind’s eye as of that evening. I could tell by the soft pale flicker in our hostess’s eyes that she would joyously take him to bed if that opportunity presented itself. It did.
FEBRUARY
To think that, in 1976, the ones to beat are Capote and Vidal.
FEBRUARY 4
To John Stevenson: Since our afternoons and evenings together—a glorification for me as you listened to so much of my impromptu prose—everything has happened to me. I have worked hard; I have been damaged by anger; I have been ill again, though not alarmingly; I have had my heart not broken but eroded. Strangest of all was a series of mishaps: a furnace cracked open, a floor flooded, a shower of splinters of glass when the refrigerator door opened. I listed them on one of my work-sheets which I entitled: “Weak old man visited by tireless poltergeist.”
FEBRUARY 12
To Pauline de Rothschild: I can’t stand my life. I am too ashamed of myself. If I can’t work several hours more per day and complete more pages or at least more paragraphs per hour I shall take my life. Oh, in fact I can’t do that while Monroe lives on, or while Barbara lives, because she has paid for my strange career of writing. I can’t do it while you live, knowing you will wish to survive to help me to do likewise and to read what I may still write. There are certain younger persons to whom I must in honor set a good example: John #1, who was born the year of The Grandmothers, and John #2, who was born the year of Apartment in Athens.
FEBRUARY 19
[To Raymond Mortimer.]
I had a magical four days in Boston with Pauline, before Philippe arrived. His two or three lengthy calls on the telephone were pessimistic and pathetic; also a little antipathetic, from my personal point of view. I am afraid that her health isn’t holding up as we had hoped. They are in California, and he is coming to New York for two or three days in a fortnight, on his way back to Europe. She will be in Boston for two or three weeks when of course I shall visit her.
FEBRUARY 20
Poor John! John R.C., calling me from his television studio, between acts of a soap opera. Hearing that I was taping tonight, with John Stevenson, along with Robert Phelps, he said, “Now, though not until now, I am jealous.” And I shouted at him as I used to shout at my Monroe.
MARCH 3
I have been perfecting the sample of my Journals that I read at the Academy. Monroe returned from the Gulf of Mexico an
d Jamaica last night: twelve days on an archaeological cruise with Anatole. As he came in the door he said, “If I were you I’d turn that text over to the Academy tomorrow, just as it is; it is no matter.” He made the same recommendation, word for word, a fortnight ago as he went out the door.
I responded, “If you were I, you wouldn’t have written it at all. Much simpler!”
MARCH 7
[A telegram to Baron Philippe de Rothschild on death of Pauline in Santa Barbara that day.]
Thank you for two decades of care and devotion to our darling. Your heartbroken Glenway and Monroe.
MARCH 18
Every so often I find that my imagination is based on fear. My mind excels only at premonition. What a sad, bad inner litany that leads to, when things happen to go wrong.
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