A Heaven of Words

by Glenway Wescott

  DECEMBER 25

  I am having to spend this entire day at the nursing home. We have two nurses in eight hour shifts, besides the staff of the establishment. But two of them are feuding, in consequence of which the day shifts have gone unscheduled; and Mother has caught cold and her strength and morale have sunk very low. The Christmas confusion is no time for hammering and chiseling my Thomas Mann essay, so I have been reviewing “A Windfall” and pondering the arrangement … I got Monroe to read “The Stallions”—in fact Ralph Pomeroy read it aloud to him— and he says it is admirable, thinks it will not shock anyone unduly.

  [At the top of a loose page above eight indecipherable penciled words.]

  Mother’s last words perhaps—Christmas week 1959.

  1960–1964

  THE NEW DECADE IS FIRST MARKED by the death of Josephine Wescott on January 4, and then by the move from Stone-blossom to Haymeadows, which is completed in April. In the city, Wheeler finds a more suitable apartment, number 8M at 251 East Fifty-First Street at Second Avenue, where he and Wescott will host their memorable gatherings for almost three more decades.

  As president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Wescott becomes increasingly involved in high-profile literary politics and in the business of awards and grants. Despite endless planning with Robert Phelps for a retrospective collection, “A Windfall,” he postpones the volume in February 1961, partly because he wants to use some material in a 1962 book of literary essays and reminiscences. Images of Truth is a well-received work on the art of fiction, with personal perspectives on the life and work of Katherine Anne Porter, W. Somerset Maugham, Isak Dinesen, Colette, Thornton Wilder, and Thomas Mann. This leads to book tours and television appearances, sometimes with Katherine Anne Porter, who has her great success with Ship of Fools.

  Wescott promises his publisher to follow up with a reshuffled “A Windfall” anthology, but when it involves finishing a long-delayed story, “The Stallions,” fiction once more becomes a stumbling block and a dead end. Still, Robert Phelps, whose own career blossoms with works on Colette and Cocteau, remains devoted to Wescott’s work and eventually will edit the first book of journals, up to 1955.

  Among the post-1955 journals on these pages are interesting comments on the passing of such notables as Hemingway, Cocteau, Marilyn Monroe, and John F. Kennedy. Wescott’s articles in Life and Atlantic Monthly and frequent 1963–65 New York Herald Tribune book reviews keep him in the public eye. Also, he’s included in a July 1963 Esquire issue on the American literary scene, photographed with contemporaries such as Dawn Powell, Malcolm Cowley, Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, and Man Ray.

  Family and farm life, as well as the New York social world, absorb most of his time. Meanwhile, Barbara is an important patron of the arts, and Lloyd Wescott takes on appointed positions for New Jersey’s succession of Democratic governors. As president of the State Board of Control for prisons, he sometimes finds work for released convicts from a nearby women’s prison. One colorful and permanent farmhand is Ethel “Bunny” Sohl, who dresses as a man and who, in 1938 with a girlfriend-accomplice, had robbed and murdered a bus driver. A behavioral problem at first, Ethel’s loyalty is won over by a few private pages written by Glenway. He sometimes refers to her as “our transvestite murderess.” Influenced by his younger friends, he re-visits the gay enclaves of Fire Island, where his crowd sunbathed nude in the twenties. He also becomes angered to the point of “cop hatred” by police harassment of young gays in the pre-Stonewall years.

  Despite his urban celebrity and his comfortable country life at Haymeadows, he remains “a bird in a golden cage.” Any income from writing is quickly claimed by needs and debt. As a cosmopolitan man who speaks French, has many British friends, and loves the museums of Europe, it is a shame how little he travels—only one European trip since 1938! His sympathy for writers down on their luck influences grants he proposes at the Institute, and he tries to interest the federal government in small pensions for retired writers in need. In the October–November 1962 Authors Guild Bulletin he writes of the indifferent reception his idea got at the Wingspread Foundation arts conference that June—where he realized he was speaking to an audience of well-salaried professors. He also states that literature is not helped by mountains of critical academic books written in academic language.

  1960

  JANUARY 18

  Mother’s deathbed, and the strain of not being able to help her in any way, has confused me in my relations and connections with the rest of the world.

  FEBRUARY 7

  I miss her painfully, though of course I forbid myself to grieve, because her life was nothing but a heroism and a sorrow at the last. But now I am impatient to move to the new house in Rosemont.

  She seemed to have very little concept of a heaven, but sometimes I thought that her spirit longed to get back to Wisconsin. She wearied of all of us here because we could not help her.

  APRIL 6

  From Seneca, as quoted by Montaigne: “Why do we never make a frank declaration of our vices? Because we are still too much absorbed in them. One has to be wide-awake in order to tell one’s dream.”

  APRIL 7

  This weekend, with John C[onnolly] and a boy with one of those box-like Volkswagen delivery-wagons and Lloyd’s Ethel with a small truck, we shall move the pictures and vases and the contents of my study. Next Tuesday and Wednesday I work with a packer: books, dishes, etc. Next Thursday, a van and four men will take the furniture. Next Friday, a van and three men will empty the attics. Thus, on April 20 I’ll be resident at Haymeadows, Rosemont, New Jersey.

  JUNE 23

  Haymeadows. My farcical insolvency (I really cannot regard it as tragical) continues bumpety-bump. Lloyd undertook to question Baba about her having pulled the skids out from under me. Meanwhile he said that he would cover the overdraft—and for this or that reason left a part of it uncovered. More angry-looking yellow slips from my bank, and more unpaid bills including Anna’s wages. I have one dollar. I gave Anna a simplified account of the situation—I couldn’t not do so.

  Meanwhile the Wescott show goes on, as it must, I suppose. Lloyd had four hundred farmers at the barn last night; over the plush-green weedless forage crops bejeweled with fireflies I could hear his beautiful voice, making a speech, the point of which was that you cannot make money farming without a large investment. Monroe, broken-backed still but braver than in New York, paces around the lawn with me, arguing about the placement of trees. Tomorrow John is bringing a husky Southern boy to help me lay some more flagstones; and tomorrow there is to be a picnic for sixteen beside the swimming pool—Leon and Debo’s farewell party. [Niece Debo at age 18 married Dr. Leon Prockop.]

  I try to imagine putting it in a novel form—like what? Like Balzac, for the play of passions and the desperate theme of money? Like Jane Austen, for the pettiness and the pleasant manner (except between Monroe and me), for the terrible family togetherness, and the domination of beautiful, over-flattered, opinionated, philanthropic women. But neither Balzac nor Austen could have coped with it, or even understood it.

  I live novels instead of writing them.

  JULY 13

  Fire Island: Laurie Douglas and Tennessee Williams and Bill Flores and Martin Snyder were there, among others. I found myself conscious of being a sort of celebrity, with amiable handsome young persons paying me attention; and I played the part for them: tolerant, a little startling, fatherly, humorous.

  Friday evening we dined somewhat grandly at Peggy Fears’ in the Pines. The combination of Miss Fears and me, veterans of the twenties, drinking champagne together, amused Bill Miller.

  Meanwhile what I loved, as always—since 1924—was the island itself— the ancient hollies with gray and white bark; the dunes by moonlight like mountains in the pseudo distance; the spaces of almost sterile sand seemingly afloat here and there like clouds amid the dark blueberries— Shakespeare-like, Tempest-like.

  Haymeadows: Never any news here except t
he wild life: a fox with three cubs, a quail with five chicks, a doe with two spotted fawns. Ethel found an infant corn snake in their deep freeze. The mocking bird no longer vocalizes on Baba’s aerial, but when I go down there to dine, it comes to meet me, half way up the road, and escorts me with its odd helicopter-like flight from post to post.

  A lovely weasel considered living with us in the spring: a Least Weasel (Mustela rixosa)—dancing slowly along, holding his head up like a snake; of the softest umber color, with a cream-white bib. It dug a small round hole by the doorway. Then it went away forever.

  JULY 20

  Last night after a late dinner in Lambertville, we came upon a rehearsal and drill of a bugle corps at the large playground, about thirty buglers and a half dozen drummers and a violent unimaginative drill-master putting them through extraordinarily complex marching patterns with sudden silences, then sudden ear-splitting silvery outbursts, up and down and to and fro in the warm half light—a thunderstorm in the offing—husky small town youngish bodies, some stripped to the waist, one pitch-black. In the background in muggy warm darkness, little children (their children, no doubt) ecstatic in swings. A sort of heaven, with cherubim, I thought.

  JULY 21

  Robert Phelps came to see me night before last, and stayed until this morning. He and his wife are half-separating; he is going to Yaddo and she to Rome. I gather that he is in love with a young poet, but he confided nothing in detail. I talked wisely about all that sort of thing in general. I didn’t want to talk much about my writing or my problematic economics. A strange relationship.

  AUGUST 22

  I went to the Medical Center for my annual checkup … and Dr. Goger put me on a thousand calorie diet until I have lost fifteen pounds. In one week I have lost ten pounds. As my brother said last night: “more self-indulgent than anyone, more self-disciplining than anyone.” I wish I could manage my talent as well as my vices.

  AUGUST 24

  The other morning I came down for my caffeineless coffee and hardboiled egg before Anna arose, and stood gazing out from the kitchen. There descended five or six blue jays, onto the flagstone terrace and into the overhanging maple tree. And to my amazement the kestrel whom I have seen in the air at some distance dive-bombed them twice, first by himself, then with his female; and having cleared the place, sat for a while on the great ash stump. I have never been so close to a hawk not caged, and he is one of the loveliest-looking, with his tail feathers of burning brown, and blue-gray shoulders, and fantastic little mask.

  AUGUST 30

  Tennessee Williams: I have known him only slightly but for many years, and I like him. My impression is that he is a rugged and rather happy-natured man, certainly not a sufferer—except now and then from exhaustion, and perhaps from drinking too much and taking the usual pick-up pills and calm-down pills when he has been working himself to death. The habit of over-working is not, to my way of thinking, a psychopathological trait in a creative man. He is not a self-expressive creative man, but somewhat like Maugham and G. B. Shaw and such, audience-minded. When he holds these press conferences about his psychology and his inspiration, etc., though I suppose he speaks sincerely, according to his lights, the point is to promote whatever play he has coming up.

  ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER 8

  Monroe sweet-talked his way out of the Medical Center sooner than expected, and is to be here for a fortnight, for medication and repose. Evidently no cancer. Slight hepatitis, which cleared up immediately … So now he is pretending to have retired, and (I note) if he ever does retire with as much energy as he has now, he’ll be the death of me. For example, he insisted on painting the fore-edges of all the bookshelves white. In consequence, now I have all my books on the floor, to be put back before I forget which heap is which.

  NOVEMBER 13

  I dined at [William] Inge’s [apartment] with the little movie star Sal Mineo, a sort of pocket version of Mark Pagano [a GW intimate], but with complexities instead of mystery; a devotee of Carroll Righter as well as other occultisms, and just lately an aficionado of bullfighting. He has been in the Exodus film in Palestine, and returned via the high spots of Europe. In Rome he had clothes made. “Aren’t you making the trousers too tight?” he asked the tailor. “But why not? If you’ve got it, why not show it?” was the tailor’s retort. So the little star, with something to show indeed, went for a walk up and down the Via Veneto, and returned in laughing enthusiasm. “Make me a dozen pair, as fast as you can.” He told us all this with a delicate touch-me-not air, and occasional heterosexual references; wonderfully funny—but I am afraid that Hollywood society would make me nervous.

  THANKSGIVING DAY, NOVEMBER 24

  Last week I had an erotic dream of John Cheever; very surprising choice of partner. When I hindered him from sucking me, he exclaimed in his rather scornful, chuckling voice (unmistakably his), “Oh. Ha, ha! I have long suspected that you were a self-satisfier!” He had a brawny, difficult, yet enjoyable penis. But a couple of foolish young women arrived and, though without seeming to take notice of our activity, interrupted it. It was a long dream, with a good many supernumeraries, of that same raffish type, Greenwich Villagers, etc., and everything that happened seemed a little comic.

  DECEMBER 7

  My lecture, “Memories of the Twenties,” at City College seemed somehow the hardest work in the world—I hated having to cut it down to the time allotted, between two clanging academic bells.

  I stayed at Monroe’s new apartment, 251 East 51st Street, in order to move furniture this way and that, to rearrange his books, and to hang some pictures—partly to give handsomeness to our dinner party, partly to lure poor Monroe into reconciling himself to staying there … this will be the equivalent of a housewarming.

  DECEMBER 13

  The humorousness of our modern American vulgarity: “New York News, Sunday Coloroto Magazine”: Jayne Mansfield, an actress with celebrated breasts, and her Hungarian-born husband, Mickey Hargitay, a former Mr. Universe, have a Romeo and Juliet balcony projecting from the bedroom floor of their Sunset Boulevard house into the “palatial” living room. This means a great deal to them because they are still lovers. She lies face down on the floor with a Chihuahua, kicking up her heels, while he reads aloud to her, with his shoes off.

  DECEMBER 14

  Americans: Alger Hiss still looks familiar to people who encounter him on the street and now and then someone speaks to him. For example: “Pardon me, but aren’t you Charles Van Doren?”

  DECEMBER 25

  To Monroe: I am ashamed to offer you a promise to work harder and better—I have done that so many times, in vain. What I will offer now is a sacrifice of pride—I am going to try for quantity (in a way), that is, to resign myself to a more modest, easier level of work. Perhaps the muses will grant me more inspiration than I deserve, for your sake. It brings tears to my eyes to think of it.

  DECEMBER 31

  I am one of those unreasonable persons who desires to live forever— and therefore, having had the greater part of my share of time, I no longer exactly enjoy changes of date, anniversaries, etc. Instead I delight in any sort of feeling that existence, for me, is all of a piece; that the Now reflects and echoes and answers and illuminates the Then.

  1961

  JANUARY 1

  “Happy New Year, dearest,” said my dearest. I replied courageously, “What I want is a productive year. I have had my share of happiness.”

  JANUARY 3

  The Christmas snow has melted just a little and refrozen. Before sunrise, soft clouds in the southeast turned bright pink, and suddenly the entire lawn and the meadow reflected it, pale glassy pink and shiny, attracting my attention at the kitchen table where I sat at work.

  JANUARY 6

  In Portland with John Yeon and his friend Jim Gamwell. We’re going to the ocean this noon, to Cannon Beach near Seaside about eighty miles from this city. In about a week’s time we plan to go to San Francisco for a long weekend … Then on January 17 to Evan
ston, chez Monroe’s parents, 639 Forest Avenue—and on January 19 to Bloomington [Indiana, to visit Mrs. Kinsey].

  JANUARY 10

  Cannon Beach: No spark of eroticism among us, evidently, alas. We are all three shy, and if one of us were not, we might enjoy each other, but the relationships are too delicate and the situation too cloistral and rigid, for any experimentation and impulsiveness.

  JANUARY 11

  Cannon Beach: The first clear evening since I got here—an inspiring sunset. There were ten rows of slow breakers with great stripes of lavender and pale green between them, and they brushed themselves out very thinly up the moist beach, lace-edged. After, the sun settled into a long cloud almost indistinguishable from the distant sea, a powerful brightness spewing along it, like a serpent, like a fallen thunderbolt.

  One reason I came, I suppose—a deep buried-reason—is that in 1932 Baba invited me to go to China with her and Monroe, and I declined because I was homesick for America, and because I had resolved once more to write another novel. In fact I got almost no work done, and was dismal. And now perhaps I shall never see that great part of the world, and I have always been ashamed of my proud would-be virtuousness.