A Heaven of Words

by Glenway Wescott

  JANUARY 5

  Raymond Mortimer, as he said good night to Monroe, and to a pair of friends with whom they had spent the day in Antigua, said, “Now that I’m old I experience the same ecstasy getting into bed by myself that I used to feel getting into bed with someone else.”

  JANUARY 16

  Cold wind and snow. At daybreak my darling mourning doves took refuge on my back porch. When I went out with a replenishment of birdseed, away they flew with the built-in whistle of their wings.

  JANUARY 29

  One thing that can be said about me at this time of my life: I am not a dried up old boy. Even writing a note to X.—politely vague so that it shan’t make a scandal if read by roommates, friends, et al—I experienced a rosy glow in my center and a notable pre-coital secretion. No fool like an old fool, no wise man like an old wise man.

  A cocktail party story at Anaïs Nin’s: Mrs. Luce bought a Rouault at auction, a head of Christ, in bright stained-glass colors, with a pious expression. When one of the experts informed her that it was not by the master, she said, “No matter. It pleases me because it is such a good likeness.”

  FEBRUARY 7

  My sister Elizabeth is torn with maternal pity and anxiety about nephew Bruce [Hotchkiss] as well as his wife Dorothy. The latter knows the fatal nature of her illness, but has illusions about how long she may cling to life, and doesn’t want to be put in a nursing home. Bruce sleeps on a mattress on the floor near her bed, and she wakes him every little while. He is a shadow of himself; even Dr. Goger is worried about him. She thinks that people don’t know. Isn’t it strange how human beings can adjust to agony, but almost never learn to let life go!

  FEBRUARY 12

  In the page margin of an old rough translation of Valery, words of my own: “bright, energetic fountains.”

  Thus one might begin to write poetry all over again—poetry already written is always the chief inspiration and matrix of poetry to come.

  FEBRUARY 13

  Astounding continuity and confoundedness of my life!—weighing now downward toward my death by glorious contents of memory; everything simultaneous with the present moment. This indeed is the near impossibility of my doing important work in the time I have left—too much comes to mind constantly: fountain, flood, avalanche, torment of leaves, wind in the waste-paper! Little assignments, such as book reviews, keep me in check, but if I open my mind to the large forms of literature, hell breaks loose; and even pages of my journal get unmanageable.

  FEBRUARY 15

  I am tired, tired, tired—not angry, not sorry for myself; but solemn. It is so hard to strike a balance between a healthy maintenance of the (so to speak) youthful aspect of one’s life and the inevitable downgrade, the gradual, continual reduction and privation.

  MARCH 18

  [Re GW’s Life magazine article on W. Somerset Maugham.]

  I could not have let Life magazine’s proposition go by, could I—their four million readers, if they all read; their one thousand bucks, perhaps payable on delivery of text, enabling me to pay Monroe some rent money that I promised, and to catch up on my pledge to Lloyd’s hospital, and to buy a new dinner jacket. But now back to work—the Edith Sitwell review will take all the remaining time, deadline April 1; also I must revise “The Valley Submerged” for the anniversary issue of The Southern Review as promised—and keep the Maugham book [“The Old Party,” planned but not completed] going. Whew!

  MARCH 26

  The Wasp Spared: At 5:10 a.m. in the kitchen, the first wasp of the year, large, silkily black, palpitant. I did not kill him; I took him in my handkerchief and loosed him at the back door in the dark soft rain.

  APRIL 11

  My birthdays henceforth will be days of mourning; never forgetting that they must be too few. I intend to distract myself from their universal grievance by my fortunate means: by writing, writing, writing, and by enjoyment of those I love.

  APRIL 25

  Re “The Stallions”: Yesterday, a pair of teenage lovers, their romance crossed by disapproving parents, indicted suicide notes (“I want to be buried with Jack,” etc.), set fire to a small thicket, lay down amid the flames, and perished, tightly clasped in each other’s arms.

  Suicide notes notwithstanding, one of the local policemen says that they have been trying to ascertain “whether it was a case of mutual suicide or just a tragic accident.”

  Trying to buckle down to “The Stallions,” I have kept wondering whether I can make plausible and convincing the love-death of my teenagers, stark-naked in a parked car, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide gas while having intercourse. Inhibiting neurotic skepticism on the part of both law enforcement officer and would-be fiction writer.

  In the pecking order at my back door only the purple grackles out-rank the brown threshers. The mourning doves and the blue jays do not, though they too are heavy.

  But the chief grackle, whose relations with my beloved couple of threshers I have been observing, is a fool as well as a bully. I have placed food for them in four places; having chased them from one place, he keeps following them to the next place: far sunflower seeds are the blackest, plumpest.

  APRIL 26

  I must go to Washington this week for a day, to cajole some senators about copyright reform, an important new bill, long worked on, coming to the vote—and, at the same time, to try to sweet-talk Katherine Anne Porter into not having me as her literary executor.

  MAY 12

  Back from Union College [in Schenectady, N.Y.], tired. Very little to report about my two days work except that all went well. I stayed in a large Philistine house, circa 1910, with all its ugly furniture, rugs, pictures and books intact; and there was not a single, practicable place at which I could have worked except the kitchen table. I worked hard at it; from 4:30 a.m. to 10 on Tuesday; from 6 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 3 on Wednesday. “Memories of the Twenties” at 11 a.m. on Tuesday and a quizzing by creative students for two hours that afternoon. “Hemingway” at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, with a long, strenuous question period afterward. Lively, well-read courteous boys. Several serious youngish professors.

  JUNE 5, 5:00 A.M.

  Horror, horror! Our current astronauts in their fateful gyration have observed, the WABC newscaster announces, some “space junk,” vestiges (already) of previous flights.

  I asked John whether he had read Balanchine’s credo in last week’s Life. He admitted that he had, and gave me his scowl of extreme indignation.

  “Did its anti-homosexual prejudice vex you?”

  “Yes, of course. Naturally.”

  I then came back at him with an affectionate, mischievous, perhaps mysterious observation. “I suppose I am more tolerant of heterosexuality than you are.”

  JUNE 22

  [To Katherine Anne Porter.]

  I was really tormented by the [Thomas] Wolfe lampoon in the Herald Tribune magazine section, and twice took pen in hand to protest. I angrily put pen down because I regard it as a reprehensible publishing trick. Impecunious or meanly money-grubbing publications send out the rat Controversy on purpose; we chase it back to its hole; and, lo and behold, they have procured contributions from expensive authors, gratis.

  I am the type of pantheist who believes that, generally speaking, even stones are alive. But some stones are dead, and deadly. All day long I have felt the fear of my sister Elizabeth’s illnesses, one thing after another, as in the case of Job, on my mind and in my heart like a dead stone.

  JULY 4

  This morning an adolescent jack rabbit has visited our lawn for the first time; offspring of one of the couples that my brother bought and released last spring.

  His tall ears catch the horizontal eastern light, gleaming snow-white. He sits rather small and round, but in motion unfolds.

  AUGUST 23

  I am going out to the Fair tomorrow with Ned Rorem, to lunch with Lou Ames, and to be taped for the latter’s archives of creative personalities for future NBC use. My thought was to tape and eat and run back to
New York, but it now turns out that Ned has never been to the Fair, and Lou means to arrange a few key visits for us via the V.I.P. lounges, etc. Damn!

  AUGUST 27–30

  Three days and a half at David’s with Walt. God’s plenty; eight separate bouts of lovemaking.

  Thrilling contrast of their bodies from hand to foot: Walt rosy-blond and burly and exceedingly muscular though youthful looking, like a child of giants, or infant Hercules. David darkly sunburned and lean; the small of his back extraordinarily flexible. This is one of the secrets of his virility at 40.

  Corresponding thrilling contrast of their penises; both somehow larger-looking than they are in fact, Walt’s thicker, David’s longer, Walt’s curved upward, David’s almost straight out, the head somewhat weighing down the shaft.

  Thrilling to one’s lips and tongue and throat when gorged by them, the phalanges very sculptural, and the inner sinews very pronounced.

  Which is nobler-looking: a race horse just past his prime, still at the peak of his powers, or a young draft-horse still just in first possession of his strength?

  SEPTEMBER 16

  [To Katherine Anne Porter.]

  My brother is ill, or to put it more exactly, some sort of illness has appeared in the x-rays of his lungs; tuberculosis perhaps. Baba and I are trying not to panic or to be sorry for ourselves. I kept it from Monroe as he flew abroad, in order not to worry him about us.

  The other night Monroe’s flight was delayed for an hour and a half, so we observed his fellow-travelers: about a hundred balmy, daffy, dotty provincial women calling themselves the “Fate Psychic Group,” their bosoms all so labeled.

  I shared a taxi back with two pleasant Chicago businessmen who quizzed me about what business I am in—I never dare to lie—and when I told them the truth one of them asked if I had ever heard of a writer with whom he had gone to school: namely, John Horne Burns. Was it true he committed suicide, he wanted to know. They were thrilled to hear that The Gallery was dedicated to my sister.

  SEPTEMBER 17

  [To Monroe.]

  They sent Lloyd to a famous Doctor Wylie at Presbyterian Hospital, who has a full schedule for a month ahead but will operate just as soon as he can fit him in. Of course we have been thinking of it as cancer but speaking of it as tuberculosis. Last night Lloyd and Baba dined here and he spoke frankly. It may be a kind of tuberculosis that is operable, and they are already giving him the wonder-medication for that; and that is what Lloyd thinks it is or feels it is. The moving thing is to observe that despite his talk this long while, about not wanting to grow old, he now suddenly realized that he wants above all to live forever—like me!— not counting the cost, mustering up every ounce of his strength, every flicker of his spirit, to fight to the death.

  SEPTEMBER 22

  [To Monroe.]

  In a sense all our lives are a unity. We shall all die a little in one another’s deaths. Each of us will survive in the other’s life and mind.

  SEPTEMBER 30

  At the Trenton railroad station, in the large, respectable though untidy men’s room, at the far end of the urinals—I was urinating at the near end—a well-dressed, pleasant-looking youngish man, perhaps a businessman, stood brandishing his large semi-erect cock, half-turned to me, manipulating it in my direction. I only allowed myself one good look at this as I re-zipped my trousers and departed, up the stairs and out to my Lambertville bus. There was only one other person in the men’s room at the time: a skinny young soldier repacking his suitcase, not within sight of the Priapic youngish businessman. Could the latter possibly have preferred elderly me to the young serviceman? Or was I expected to be a catalyst between them, triangularly?

  What a comfort it is, in the autumn of life, to not be overstimulated by trivial eroticisms of this kind, the little everyday pornographics of the American way of life.

  OCTOBER

  Baba told me last night that there would be a great comet in the sky this morning, between moonset and sunrise—now the moon has gone down and the sun is imminent, and I haven’t been able to discover any such thing. Come to think of it, I am always rather blind to things in the sky. Day before yesterday, Baba saw a hundred geese, low and very loud.

  No comet but gold in the sky, silver mist all over the fields—and a passing, non-resident mocking bird, pianissimo.

  The world is so beautiful, and I am such a fool, and I shall always be inconsolable because we all have to die.

  OCTOBER 4

  I took Will Chandlee and Bernard Perlin to the ballet last week with supper afterward. The latter in great looks, excessively lean and vulturine, like one of T. E. Lawrence’s awful Arab band in Seven Pillars of Wisdom; but how heavy drinking, how punitive toward everyone, how conscience-stricken, how sorrowful—I am worried about him. But he reports that his nudes are going forward now apace. It is almost intolerable for an artist to be unfashionable during a boom, the one Jew on whom no manna falls. Will on the other hand at his best: his weight reduced, his pinkness more childlike, his eyes more sparkling, his entire attitude now affectionate. Due, I dare say, to his co-residence with the Persian gentleman. Though he feels caged, nevertheless he gets more pleasure with less roaring around town, more sleep, less drink.

  OCTOBER 5

  Zachary Scott has died in Texas. John tells me that he had a brain tumor operation in mid-summer. It won’t suit Ruth [Ford] to be a widow.

  A long, pathetic and rather daffy talk on the telephone with Porter— she called me. She hadn’t taken in most of the information in my last two letters, and lamented, “Oh, dear, I am afraid that I am losing my memory, I have been so ill, I have so many terrible problems, interruptions and interferences.” Her latest ailments are psoriasis and arthritis. Nevertheless she seemed all set to deliver her lecture at the Library of Congress, and to attend the ensuing reception. I advised her to sit down at a table, or at least to have both table and lectern equipped with microphones, but she said, “Don’t you know, darling, I have emphysema and I can catch my breath better when I am standing up.” Once more, she says that this is to be her very last lecture. Once more she will wear her long white dress and cloud-like blue silk cloak. They are paying her a thousand dollars. She has turned down sixteen other engagements at that fee in the course of the year.

  She concluded with ten or fifteen minutes of violent paranoidal plaintiveness about never having had any prizes or honors, never having been recognized by any of the literary organizations, “not even by that ragbag of yours, what’s it called, that we are now bugging Eleanor Clark into, by main force.”

  OCTOBER 6

  A beautiful little boy named Hank Young who mows my poor lawn has a bow and arrow and goes hunting with the Polish neighbor boys; the bow-and-arrow season has begun. I hope they don’t kill or half-kill the doe who kisses my hand. The human species is unique, I suppose, in that it is both predatory and the opposite.

  I felt positively honored to have Balanchine dance his Don Q for us, once more! How I envy him: an old creative man, in love once more, enacting his age and his passion himself, with the beloved in person in that garish popular theatre full of grand-bourgeoisie.

  It is what I long to be doing now that I too am old (older than Balanchine, am I not?), and there is a tradition and precedent for it in literature, of course—but not for homosexuals; we have no applicable myths, and our up-to-date plots are dangerous, even to innocent bystanders.

  Truman [Capote] says that his “new” form, more or less new—the non-fictitious novel—will serve for a great variety of subject matter. I wonder if he is thinking of homosexuality, probably not. In any event, all our shameless, hard-hitting fiction is about our submerged classes: hustling in Bryant Park or Times Square, kicking prostitutes to death, murder mysteries in Kansas—they are fair prey; they can only fight each other, they can’t fight back at us.

  OCTOBER 15

  Lloyd’s operation: When they finally wheeled Lloyd down the corridor we still had to wait outside his door until
the nurses and the orderly got him settled, with the saline solution in his arm and the little tubes of plumbing under the bed. And then I let Baba go in by herself, but as I stood there, suddenly found myself unintentionally seeing their two faces through the crack in the door; eternal voyeur! I hadn’t moved, the crack just happened. I heard his hoarse croak, asking what Dr. Wylie had removed. “It was a tumor,” she answered, and he made a great grimace, with downward lips, like our mother.

  They had to remove the lower lobe of one lung with the malignant tumor. Baba doesn’t want the six letter word used for the moment, until Lloyd has heard it himself. The surgeon said that he regarded the operation as very successful. The prognosis is good.

  OCTOBER 24

  Did Stendhal really say and/or write, “Beauty is the promise of happiness.” The master of one of the finest, fastest styles in the vast assortment of French literature, surely in some ways he was an ass.

  NOVEMBER 3

  Reply to a fan letter on the reprinting of The Grandmothers: Thank you for your letter. As you may know, an author doesn’t often hear from any reader of an old book, even when it has been republished. To this day I do not understand why I haven’t as many readers as some other writers, or, on the other hand, what makes my own true readers so responsive, so faithful. A mystery, not a complaint.