MARCH 24
Photo of William Burroughs [in Tangiers, by Allen Ginsberg]. To think that this eminent sad personage is admired by my latest and perhaps last beloved!
Is it my duty, might it turn out to be my pleasure, to re-read Naked Lunch? One of the side-effects of love is to broaden one’s horizons, to increase one’s range of interest and feeling, is it not? Not always. There is a statute of limitations.
Is Burroughs, for everyone, as he is for me, aureole-ed with vague tragedy?
MARCH 28
Great saying of Gore Vidal: When asked whether he rewrote his work much, he said, “Oh, always, everything, a great deal. It appears apparently I haven’t always very much to say, but I always find a lot to add.”
The population of the world is expected to reach four billion today, having doubled in fifty years.
APRIL 15
I’m worried about Lloyd’s health. It’s always been based on neurotic optimism, overcoming ulcers, cancers, etc. Now his damned doctors, with ghastly timing, are crunching his courage away, breaking his heart. The point of this is that he may not get his retirement village [project] done. Barbara nibbling away at him. He is bored.
MAY 8
Dylan Thomas: A glimpse and a prejudice. I once saw Dylan Thomas, unappealing. He would have touched one to the heart if one had supposed him misbegotten, injured or sick. But I am one who is merciless about alcoholics—even alcoholics themselves are.
A great genius in both poetry and prose, but as a whole he writes too loosely and doesn’t hold my interest.
JUNE 17
Inscription for Robert Phelps’ copy of the Leete’s Island reissue of A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers: “For Robert, Aaron to my old Moses—holding up the arms of my self-esteem and my love of subject-matter and my belief in publishing and biography, as we both look down into our promised books.”
Horror: Poor Earl, day before yesterday, wrote me a longish, plausible, rather convincing letter—a typed page, single-spaced—announcing that he is about to commit suicide and explaining why. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt like Victor Hugo.
Spring 76 Delight: Bill Maxwell is enraptured by A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers—he had never read it, never even seen it. I am reading his Ancestors, which is exquisitely written.
AUGUST
Remembering: My mother’s incessant feelings of farewell—the flowers, the autumn leaves. Having come to live with me, she wanted to live forever, and indeed did live two or three years longer than expected.
John Stevenson rarely comments, but suddenly happened to say that the overall title [of the proposed journals] didn’t please him: “The All and I.” With no inclination to be influenced, without asking why not, I kept wondering, troubling. My lifelong trouble: not dilatory or procrastinational; indecisive!
NOVEMBER 3
I have been in a kind of almost incapacitating melancholy or melancholies of late, due in part to a cardiovascular slump.
The good news, or at least the reverse of very bad news: the election of Carter.
NOVEMBER 4
An order to myself: Write everything and anything plainer and larger—even the hastiest jottings. What a mercurial mind. …
DECEMBER 16
How I wish I could induce my Monroe to date and identify his jottings, and to use quotation marks.
It is one of my reasons for not wanting to survive him, when my loneliness will turn to curiosity about him, for creative and commemorative purposes.
As it appears now, he cannot teach me anything without unkind nagging, and I cannot teach him anything by any means whatsoever. It’s too bad. We desperately need to learn, in both self-concern and altruism.
DECEMBER 24
Holidays are a matter of the past; literature likewise. On the one hand, nostalgia and the weight of embarrassments; on the other, a transposition of realities that fade and fade into language, which lasts.
1977
JANUARY 17
I stood at the kitchen door, half glass, looking out at the lawn and the upward-sloping cornfield, all plump with snow; furthermore the sky was gray with snow predicted. The paradox of not mentioning to my beloved brother that all the little birds have departed from my back door. Monroe is apt to attribute this to the presence of my three-legged cat.
FEBRUARY 19
In all my life I have only known two people to go mad from love. One was Louise Bogan who did it twice with the same protagonist and was treated at an interval of 25 years by the same psychiatrist in the same sanitarium. The other, as it seems to me now, was I myself.
FEBRUARY 22
When I first met Anaïs Nin in Paris in the twenties or the start of the thirties I did not know that she was a writer. I was told that she had a writer friend named Henry Miller.
Now many of us writers of Anaïs’ generation may envy her in a way: with work in progress to the day of her death, like a phoenix high up on the tree with a host of young and old readers looking up to her, in a nest made of inspiration and experience, fiery with pain, singing her prose. She was amazingly beautiful.
MARCH 2
Lloyd almost pleads with me to dine as many nights a week as I can or will: not to leave Baba alone, not to leave him alone with Baba, not to leave him with the Clarks [Thane and Debo], outnumbered, dead-tired. Bringing me home, Lloyd said in his weakest voice: “Barbara’s health is failing fast now. She has terrible pains in some ribs, and she realizes she has lost her fight.”
MARCH 11
Day before yesterday, I lunched with Bill Maxwell in Gracie Square. He doesn’t love me anymore, which embarrasses him and does something unbeneficial to me.
Yesterday I lunched with Ted Morgan at the Hunam restaurant on his expense account. He found a great file of Willie Maugham’s business records at the Lillie Library. Who, Ted argues, who but Alan [Searle] could have had them and sold them?
Wasn’t I clever to suggest his writing to Rebecca [West]? Two long answers from her. One of Willie’s love affairs was with Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford’s un-legalized wife, says Rebecca.
All very intimidating to me. A biography is an impossible form—everything has to be a fact, or to be made to seem so. Nothing is worth telling unless you can drop the name or names concerned.
MARCH 13, 9:50 P.M.
To Lloyd: I have just had a strange experience. I wanted to do some desk work but felt tired and incompetent, and lay down reading the Times magazine section, listening to the heavy rain on my flat roof and adjacent window, and fell asleep and slept for about an hour. Whereupon I had what I took to be a stroke—breathless, immobilized, struggling to get on my feet, just able to stumble into my study, into the kitchen, into the dining room. I took up the phone to ask the operator to call you—and then I woke up, in bed, that is, on the bed, holding the Times. No sign of it’s having been anything but a bad dream. Pulse normal, eyesight clear, a little nausea, a little fear.
I heard the telephone ringing—thank goodness, it was John Stevenson. He will telephone me in the morning. I must remake my will. I am not afraid. If I were afraid I should write a page to thank you for all that you and Barbara have meant to me—your perfect love and care. I should ask you to remind Monroe that I have loved him exceedingly from 1919 until this day, and he has been able to give me inspiration to write, and may do so again.
Now to bed. I shall read myself to sleep.
[April 7: Barbara Harrison Wescott died in her sleep at Hunterdon County Medical Center.]
MAY 1
From my funeral remarks when we shoveled some of Barbara’s ashes in front of the New Jersey State Museum:
Thankfulness was ever inherent in Barbara’s life and nature. She reveled in projects, and sometimes conceived and started things large and long, beyond her powers of completion. She liked to be helped and she attracted helpers, and repaid them with affection and with praise.
I believe—credo—that the loving person, who has been loved in return, each for th
e other, and then is gone, not only leaves an eternal loneliness, but hallows the environment, the companionship and the activity, in which this love has taken place—the branch of government, the health center, the campus or museum or library, the painting, the writing, in which he or she or they have been engaged.
Goodbye for now, dear friend.
[The Trenton Times, May 2: “400 Celebrate Memory of Barbara H. Wescott.”]
MAY 8
The soft upward whistle of the cardinal.
Baba’s immortality.
The earthsick road and meadows of the farm.
MAY 18
Jane Gunther, more intensely fond than ever, and how lovely looking: her complexion like late winter fog over half melted snow. After dinner Jane told me the desperate story of her forcing John to adopt their schizophrenic son (illegally, prenatally), which he didn’t want to do because of the agonized death of his own son (by Francis). The boy, Nicholas, is in love with and treats her cruelly. What she mainly lives on is John’s morbid little masterpiece [Death Be Not Proud]: teenage cancer, parental grief.
Last night I took John Stevenson to the ballet: A faultless production of “The Goldberg Variations,” which the youngsters have mastered at last, to not quite enough avail. How I enjoy being with John Stevenson when he is happy, which he almost always is.
The other day at the 55th Street movie, for the first time in my life, a well-dressed man almost as old as I reached across two seats and very gently groped my leg. I gave such a jump that it frightened him.
MAY 19
The Wescott-Thane Clark family crisis is worsening; some sort of crisis is due or overdue.
JUNE 28
This is the second day of summer, isn’t it? My parents were married (and I was engendered) seventy-seven years ago. I fear the years ahead.
JULY 16
[Re an advertisement photo of a handsome mover in The Advocate.]
I have fancied that this might be the young trucker who brought Ivan’s boxes from the pier to Haymeadows several years ago, with a husky small partner, whom he obviously was in love with, and by whom he was more deeply still, loved.
Excess of zeal on the small one’s part—the bridge of his nose still half broken from having run into something, for example. Continuous, amused, but serious discipline by the older: “Stop grabbing more than you can hold, damn it!”
Haymeadows seemed heaven to them. I fascinated the elder. I wanted to keep them, at least for a few hours, and perhaps could have done so. Many a time I have kicked myself for my quietism.
AUGUST 19
[Re his journals.]
At some point in this huge patchwork of self-portraiture, somehow, I want to confess my strangenesses. Sorrows. Sexual incapabilities, dislike of my naked body, sense of failure and parasitism, willingness to learn but never being able to stand adverse comment/criticism by those whom I regard as my superiors, devouring nervous energy with underlying fatigue.
What I suffer from now is what my father made me feel when I was a boy.
I suppose that this project of journals and remembrances as a whole is going to kill me. I doubt that I shall live to finish it as it has developed in the fateful influences and interchanges between Robert [Phelps] and me and Bob [Giroux] and Roger [Straus].
Janet Flanner asked me to stay on after her cocktail party broke up, and like a fool I did—there was Natalia [Murray] and she also asked Connie Bessie to stay. All three talked me down, and Janet clung, and Connie clung, and Natalia said, “Now see to it that you don’t drop me, when Janet isn’t here for bait.”
NOVEMBER 2
Monroe inherited a little money from Barbara and has insisted on spending most of it on a swift visit to the Europe of our youth. We shall be in Paris at the Hotel Calais from November 10 through the 15th, then Berlin for a few days—my first visit since Hitler came to power; and Amsterdam and London all the week of November 21–28.
NOVEMBER 7
Newspaper ad: “White Trash—the last gay production ever to be filmed by the Master, Toby Ross.” What does this mean? The last gay production ever to be filmed by the Master. Perhaps six months ago I saw a squib in a newspaper stating that he had been convicted of something having to do with drugs. [Ross later resumed his career after having legal problems.]
NOVEMBER 10
Paris, Hotel de Calais. This room, number one on the mezzanine, which Monroe always asks for and gets, is pure Vuillard. Philippe [de Rothschild] has just sent two dozen pink roses and two dozen white fuschias. Paris spooks me.
Paris until the 16th, then the Museum Hotel, Amsterdam. On Monday the 21st to London, the Ritz, Piccadilly. The last weekend, the 25th to 28th, we have promised Raymond Mortimer: Long Crichel House, Wilbourne, Dorset.
NOVEMBER 14
Lunch and all afternoon with Jacques Guérin, scarcely getting a word in edgewise: his quarrels, his exploits of buying and selling, his treasures … After that, three grand meals with Philippe de Rothschild in thirty-six hours … I wonder if I have the time to see François [Reichenbach]— is our friendship restorable? Has either of us the time for it?
NOVEMBER 24
The Ritz, Piccadilly, London. To Raymond Mortimer’s large but modest country house, shared with a music critic and an ophthalmologist.
The museums with Monroe—what pictures, what pictures, what pictures!
Homesick—home Tuesday. I pray for all, in my way.
NOVEMBER 29
Heathrow Airport, London, to Monroe: My dearest love, Thank you, from the beginning of our grown-up (or growing up) life, down to this date, and as far beyond as fate may determine.
Thank you for this holiday, on its last legs just now. There are ten minutes left before boarding and I can see the post office on the ground floor. Know that if by chance I failed to survive on the way back to you, my last breath, last thought, last gasp, last bit of mortality would amount to just one kiss, to you and by you.
1978
APRIL 12
The first day of my 78th year. Solemn resolve, broken as soon as made: at break of day, while waking up, read nothing not written by me. Then, immediately, write at least one readable page, allowing as much time as I have free that morning. And if I find that I have no talent, no memory, no sense of future—no matter. Then apply myself immediately to drudgeries of everyman’s office or study: dating, sorting, stapling, pasting, filing, empty wastebaskets.
The other day, aged 77, I reread my first novel, obscurely entitled The Apple of the Eye, and regretted for the umpteenth time the thinness of the characterization of Dan, the fictive me, and Mike Bryon, a little better, personifying my earliest love, or perhaps I should say impersonating my first beloved.
APRIL 24, 6:30 A.M.
“Crazy Days of Old Age.”
My life with Monroe suddenly amounted to two lives in one—when did it happen, imperceptibly, six months ago? Now suddenly it has re-divided itself: his agony of arthritis and irrationality of drugs, his successful final sexuality—my blissfulness of body and great final romantic love with no sex whatsoever—his right to do or not to do what happens to please or displease him—my obligation to produce a masterpiece, more than I am capable of, broken on the rack, drawn and quartered. O shame! O vanity!—feeling the entire lesson of my life, the absolute uniqueness of my Self and Destiny. All this is a kind of madness—irreparable epiphany—but perhaps I can slip back out of it and give myself up to work, work, work at last—better late than never.
JUNE
Another twenty-five minutes hunting a fountain pen, with attendant self-belittlement, and blaming others (especially the dearest other of all), with damaging senescent indulgences and stupid grief.
JULY
An observation of myself, immature, aged seventy-seven. I don’t like the taste of coffee, but it medicates me awake. Ideal breakfast: along with the hot, dark stimulant, a good-sized chunk of sacher-torte—my sense of taste is ecstatic for a few minutes with the summer sunrise streaming into my fa
ce.
And during this ecstasy what do I think? I think that I am failing heartbreakingly at all I undertake; not making a fool of myself—would that I were!—just fraudulent, just a disgrace to those who have loved me, those who have helped me, not wisely.
JULY 8
It is better in some ways to be a writer than a painter. One way: we don’t have to share the word “literature” as they do the word “art.”
JULY 19
To Raymond Mortimer: Do forgive Monroe for not writing to you. Every other day he blames himself for not doing so. Let me not suggest that he is “failing”; scarcely even changing, except from hour to hour—despite the arthritic anguish that I cannot even imagine and the really high-ranking analgesics that they have begun to give him. But, but, but—I am afraid that he is losing his epistolary ability. Might it not help if you complained of his not writing to you, sorrowfully, even indignantly? Nothing rusts so rapidly as inactive talent.
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