A Heaven of Words

by Glenway Wescott

  I rage against our conceited, hypocritical participation in the war in Vietnam. Detestable, disgraceful double standard in all these areas where the cold war erupts into warfare.

  MARCH 19

  Who do you suppose invented the sonnet? Pier della Vigna, the lifelong lover and/or beloved of the very virile, ambisexual Emperor Frederick II. This sex-appealing poet seems not to have been well-born and began life as a lawyer.

  MARCH 22

  [To Raymond Mortimer.]

  Fiction, especially any sort of love story, is bound to be most troublesome for the emancipated, that is to say, free-thinking homosexual man … There aren’t any important homosexual factors in the theme or the action of my story [“The Stallions”]. But with regard to sexual morality in general, according to the life that I have lived, I disagree absolutely and uncompromisingly with the majority of men and women about almost everything.

  MARCH 23

  The second day of spring. Rosy sunrise. The first jubilant exclamations of a robin. There have been two or three at Baba’s all week; this is the first here at Haymeadows.

  Uncommon sight: six deer lying down, in the midst of the meadow, as calm as cattle. I saw them stretch sleepily.

  APRIL

  An almost summery spring, but, this morning, frost and a wind, a wolf of a wind. It seems to me that I have been more neurotic this spring, in the strict precise meaning of the word, than ever before in my life.

  APRIL 5

  Citing Richard Hughes upon his election to honorary membership of the Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters: Playwright and fiction-writer, the author of three novels, A High Wind in Jamaica, In Hazard, and The Fox in the Attic—all three transcending the area of experience that they cover, as important fiction should do, sending the mind backward in time, as on an errand or a pilgrimage, and winging the imagination upward and onward into the future.

  APRIL 26

  I remember a story that Paul Robeson’s wife Essie used to tell about her mother who was almost white (of Jewish extraction with a Sephardim name). She could “pass” and one fine day, when she was a girl, she took it into her head to try it, in a Jim Crow streetcar. Bold little minx, up she went to a seat in front. The darker people seated at the back all recognized her for who she was, but somehow sympathized. They flickered their eyes at her and one another, but without a word or even a smile.

  Essie herself had a friend who really had passed; moved away from Harlem, settled in Brooklyn, married a well-to-do white man. At the time of Paul’s successful concerts, she wanted to visit him backstage at Carnegie Hall, and desperately communicated to Essie, asking not to be recognized, and Paul and Essie let her get away with it.

  This came to my mind when I was thinking of Auden. Now as a Christian, now as a homosexual, he behaves like that, and expects the rest of us to take it kindly, like the darker Negroes at the back of the bus.

  MAY

  [From GW’s foreword in the Catherine Vivano Gallery catalog for the Bernard Perlin exhibit.]

  In the prime of life one has less free will than in younger years, and an increase of the subconscious factor in whatever one undertakes, and by the same token, more power. Certainly if a mature artist is to say anything in his art, it must be something that he has in him, something actually experienced, previously revealed, meditated at leisure: a feast of remembrance.

  MAY 30

  My dear bold thresher (or thresheress) brought his (or her) infant up on the terrace just now, perhaps because I gave them leftover bread yesterday—a long-legged tail-less chick, with tasseled breast already.

  Often I feel that the best of the literary life, in human value and intellectual interest, is to be found in the character and behavior of men and women of letters of the second rank. Geniuses as a rule are too mysterious, too compulsive; idiosyncratic and therefore uninspiring and un-instructive.

  JUNE 15

  [Re Isak Dinesen obituary book.]

  In the contemporary literary life what a lot of work one does for nothing—in vanity of talent, in delusion of its serving some purpose, or in mere fondness for someone.

  JUNE 19

  [To Monroe Wheeler re Ralph Ginzburg.]

  The editor/publisher of Eros, convicted of obscenity on 28 counts, exposing him to a possible sentence of a hundred years in jail, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, quoted Blake: “Children of the future Age / Reading this indignant page, / Know that in a former time / Love! Sweet Love! was thought a crime.”

  Composing my novelette about stallions and mares and boys and girls, behind schedule, I have to let my correspondence lapse; I long for sexual intercourse, or at least some proximity of other’s pleasures, but I make no move; life glides away.

  JUNE 21

  Thrilling obscurities of history: Why did the population of Ireland increase fantastically, by 150 percent, in the half century preceding the famine? In the census year of 1841, it was denser than any other country in Europe. A sort of collective Liebestad. (The Great Hunger, Cecil Woodham-Smith.)

  JUNE 23

  O fragrant world! The hay in the acreage north of the house dying, curing; and south of the house, a very different odor, like a citrus fruit, the hay there only now yielding to the great mower. Elderberry blossoming along the road, and milkweed in the bud, just beginning to attract the butterflies. The honeysuckle has ended, and the clover is going to seed.

  All of this more overpowering as it breathes its farewell than at the peak of sweetness, in full force. Like our own sex life when we have begun to feel our age.

  JUNE 24

  Never has so attractive and sympathetic a man proved so disappointing as our president. His enlightened domestic policies ineffectual against the oligarchy of the Senate; his foreign policies (I’m afraid) just foolish and still, for the most part, Dulles-like.

  JUNE 25

  Ralph Pomeroy’s friend Edward Field very handsome in The Herald Tribune upon publication of his Lamont Prize poems. John said, “Wow!”

  JULY

  I must lunch with Walter Bradbury on Monday, to explain my failure to produce “The Stallions” in time. Of course I shall not pretend that my depression and indolence have all been due to their weak handling of Images of Truth; but I have a point to make. More and more the business of publishing has become a matter of finding ways to spend less and less on authors. As they handled Images in the trade edition, it was really only a build-up for their paperback edition next spring. And for Signet’s Goodbye, Wisconsin paperback next year, of which Harper & Row takes half. Doubtless I’ll not be powerful enough to have better terms in my new contract in the autumn. In a house like H&R, a writer like me is a sort of loss-leader, chargeable in some measure to their institutional advertising.

  JULY 4

  At peace on this historic day, traumatic in my life by coincidence. Certainly in 1915, when, in dread of degeneracy, I bade farewell to E.R.K. [a high school lover], I didn’t think of it as Independence Day; and in 1949 when I screeched and kicked at Lloyd and Monroe on the lawn at Stone-blossom, I had nothing in mind except infuriation against the theories of Dr. Horney applied to me by Baba—I wasn’t aware of being on the verge of new patterns of sex life more comfortable for me than the old hopeless romanticism.…

  If E.R.K. had been the seductive, coercive sort of young male, if my wanting to detach myself from him had challenged and aroused him to exercise all his sex appeal, to have me and to hold me against my will and my better judgment, I think it might have changed my character somewhat. As it happened, in all my misery in the five years after that, I thought of it as deriving from a decision of my own, relevant to a general social injustice and folly—it wasn’t a thing that someone beloved had done to me. And in due course, when Monroe understood the direction of my life, he too made me responsible for my own morality.

  An enchanting evening with Baba last night. We dined by ourselves at the Lambertville House, and talked of the importance of feeling that one is needed by someone: her t
heory. “Even you yourself,” she said, “although your literary vocation gives you a sense of justification and identity, I think you would feel lost if Monroe and I and John did not depend on you in so many ways.” The great factors in my life, I tried to explain to her—the bases of my value-judgments of people close to me—are my admiration and gratitude.

  Then in twilight we drove up through the woods on the far side of the river, where all the vast rhododendrons are in bloom, ghostly unflickering candle-flames, and on our way back, parked the car and walked down the tow-path toward Center Bridge, where the canal too is banked with great foliage and gray-pink flowers. Then I read to her for an hour, the first four of [Francis] Bacon’s Essays—my old interest in them revived by Kitty Bowen’s new biography.

  JULY 17

  As I left Monroe’s apartment on my way to Pennsylvania Station, homeward bound, I saw and heard a couple of handsome, immoral-looking policemen in the lobby, tormenting the doorman with questions. Whatever the matter was, the doorman kept miserably assuring that he knew nothing about it, he hadn’t seen anyone or heard anything.

  I winced at their presence, not only with my usual feeling of cop hatred but because I had under my arm a large conspicuous portfolio containing our Tchelitchev erotic drawings: Tchelitchev at his best and worst.

  JULY 22

  Higher education in the United States constitutes a new vested interest, indeed a new bourgeoisie, against which those of us who love the arts and are determined to live according to creative insights now must defend ourselves.

  With reference to our literary and artistic situation, I said, “The chief enemy of quality is quantity.” “No,” Monroe said, “the chief enemy of quality is novelty.”

  Bernard and I got to talking of our respective household problems, and of the shocking amount of money we spend on our hospitality, food and drink, etc., deploring it but concluding that all things considered, it was worthwhile. “Pleasure lasts on and on,” he said, “in one’s mind, one’s remembrance, one’s art. Nothing else does.”

  AUGUST 2–4

  Notes on weekend with Homer Price: Narcissism, one of the most grievous orientations of the psyche. One may dread involvement with beauties because other people have spoiled them all their lives—but I don’t think that this is the main trouble.

  Extreme subjectivity, self-consciousness, self-absorption, keeps one from the intent observation of others, the intense responses to others. They are disastrously isolated and lonely.

  Objectivity is the third dimension of character.

  AUGUST 9–11

  In re the weekend with Lou: I really personify enlightened selfishness. No one is so obstinate and single-minded in pursuit of his heart’s desire. On the other hand, not many are so enlightened.

  I have got to an age when one is apt to be lonely in company, and not likely to be lonely when alone.

  AUGUST 11

  En route to N.Y. from Woods Hole, Cape Cod: Neither Monroe nor I brought money enough; Josephine Crane no longer keeps cash on hand because she can’t keep her mind on anything; and the Falmouth bank yesterday closed at 2:00 rather than 3:00.

  Our entire visit has been worrisome, demoralized and futile—except for certain beauties of Nantucket architectural and geographical, and Padraic Colum’s new one-act play [Cloughoughter] which he read aloud to us yesterday. Padraic is 82. His first play was produced in Dublin the year I was born, and I think the latest play may well be his most important work, though it is too learnedly historical, too profound in the way it philosophizes, to be successfully performed, even in Ireland. It is mostly about Roger Casement, the patriot whom the British not only hanged for treason but put to shame for homosexuality. He wrote one about Oscar Wilde’s father last year, and intends to do another about Parnell; a trilogy about scandal and the failure of leadership. “That will complete my lifework,” he said yesterday.

  [Re publicity photo of GW on TV Guide page listing the program “Ex Libris,” Channel 4.]

  TV Guide—circulation 400,000—the farthest flung publicity I have ever had.

  SEPTEMBER 3

  [To Monroe.]

  My dearest, for fifteen minutes I have been staring at these envelopes, wondering what is in them, thinking of you, of us both. Forgive me once more.

  I can’t bear to say “I forgive you,” because I can’t bear the thought of blaming you; in a sense I never do—though I suppose my wearying of my life and dread of the future must seem a reproach to you.

  When I harangue you bitterly it is a desperate hope of inducing you to help me out of my unhappiness, to persuade you to bypass my terrible pride and anger. O incommunicable humanity! When I shout it deafens you; when I speak softly you don’t feel that you have to pay attention to my little plans, woes, foibles.

  One thing I am sure of: it is of the utmost urgency for us to develop and practice certain new courtesies and indeed amenities before we get any older, based especially on a recognition of our separateness, our differences of need, of nervous system, of criteria, of habit, and on strict observance of little areas of right and predominance within our co-residence, here or wherever we may be. If we don’t, we’re going to end up like some hateful play by Beckett or Albee or the like: two old codgers down a well or in a mine shaft; their love disgraced, their remaining strength wasted.

  I love you always.

  OCTOBER 11

  What a commotion, in my mind, and on the telephone, with Cocteau’s death, and in the middle of the night, last night, Debo’s second baby girl!

  Monroe has been seeing Tchelitchev’s sister, on my behalf; and of course Cocteau’s friendship goes further back in our lives than any other relationship still surviving.

  Now I must try to apply my mind to my Colette review—if I can get Cocteau out of my mind. The most multifarious man who ever lived— which is not quite the same thing as an huomo universalo—he buzzes in one’s thoughts like a swarm of bees.

  OCTOBER 12

  [Letter to Monroe Wheeler.]

  One of the strangest things about Jean [Cocteau]: Self-concerned though he was, like a sort of prima-donna lawyer in self defense, hawking his work in the way of an old fashioned street vendor with a pushcart full of mixed vegetables (mixed indeed!), living or pretending to live one continuous, lifelong, public or semi-public, pseudo-narcissistic plot, and surely narcissistic enough to be preserved from the very worst, the very greatest excesses of love—still he was not egocentric; in fact extraordinarily extrovert. All his life he kept discovering, “protecting,” tutoring, introducing, championing, promoting, one creative person after another.

  No letter from my dearest—only two small communications from the lover of a young person with whom I may be said to have fallen somewhat in love. How terrible it would be, if this true statement were to be taken as literal truth!

  My brother sometimes speaks interestingly of the relaxed, released, ennobled sensuality of women who have had their change of life; that is, who no longer dread impregnation. Something corresponding to that in my case, because I am not afraid of falling in love, and of being found inadequate, of being made jealous.

  Post-mature state of mind, or perhaps I should say, state of heart, founded on lifelong love that has outlasted desire, and on the abovementioned peculiarity of eroticism without possessiveness, without (in my case, as a rule) even physical possession.

  The new Peter, Paul and Mary hit: “Don’t Think Twice—It’s All Right,” a song of the sorrowfulness or anger of promiscuity, when it is sorrowful or angry (not always). I value it, it touches my heart. It has that trueness to life, even lowly, unlucky, disadvantaged, immature life or lives, which interest me in popular music. Plus, P., P. & M.’s lovely musicality.

  OCTOBER 15

  [Re the posthumous diary of Dag Hammarskjöld.]

  The moral of Hammarskjöld is that it’s not prohibitively difficult to keep from having a bad reputation. A reputation for mysteriousness (or for being a sort of saint or a sort of eunuc
h) arouses the suspicions only of peculiar persons like myself, freakishly speculative, interested in strange types of h. [homosexual] character, strange patterns of h. behavior, in the social context.

  Homosexuality, the greatest of all conspiracies of silence.

  OCTOBER 16

  Aren’t professors presumptuous? The one who has written a book about me [William H. Rueckert] arrives on Monday with not only his wife but, he now tells me, a four-year-old child and an eight-month-old baby and a dog named Burke. He has sent me his book on Kenneth Burke by first class mail, so that I’ll be able to get it read before he arrives, in order to talk to him in a well-read way.

  OCTOBER 23

  At my dinner party, I wanted to tell stories about Cocteau et al, and to question Ned [Rorem], but Truman Capote shouted me down all evening, in his falsetto way, about various crimes and atrocities. As it happens, I have never been with him in all-male society before, and was astonished to find that the subject matter of sex doesn’t interest him at all.