A Heaven of Words

by Glenway Wescott

  I have had the most privileged literary life; in some ways I am happier in it now than I have been in many years, and I have a deep and particular feeling about the unknown persons I write for.

  NOVEMBER 6

  To a student: I think The Pilgrim Hawk is my most original. Perhaps The Grandmothers is more important, and Apartment in Athens more skillful.

  NOVEMBER 23

  [Re Truman Capote dinner and In Cold Blood.]

  How often writers, perhaps especially American writers, seem less intelligent than what they have written. On the other hand, Truman’s account of how he did it was superb: problems and technicalities of the research particularly, releases from everyone for example, in order not to face libel suits when the movie is made, releases in his name, so that Columbia Pictures will have to mind him to the end.

  Anita Loos telephoned me just now, exuberantly grateful for the evening. “That little man is a giant,” she said. (I agree; he is original, decisive, indefatigable, brave as a lion.) “You are my only connection with the worthwhile world. For the most part I spend my life with trashy people, as indeed Truman does also.”

  DECEMBER 22

  I shall be glad to see the last of 1965, a year of knocking myself out and losing ground.

  1966

  JANUARY 4

  “A Book in a New Form Earns $2 Million for Truman Capote” (New York Times, December 31, 1965): A pleasant reminder of Thornton Wilder’s advice to me—vide p. 255 of Images of Truth—about getting on the news pages, not just the book pages. But this is the first time that anyone ever got a headline in the Times about a literary form. Of course money, nowadays, is the news-worthiest matter; the jackpot that may come about if and when one has played at publicity well enough, long enough. Could he have done it without The New Yorker? He now claims that he could have. Could he have done it without Broadway and Hollywood?

  For my part, the only thing that I am going to be able to pride myself on is having written in such a way as to disqualify myself from the big money. It isn’t a merit; only a distinction, a characteristic.

  JANUARY 7

  My only important complaint of In Cold Blood is his excess of objectivity at the end, his not having the courage to bring himself on stage, witnessing the hangings, conquering the environing society, doing the work, made not only an anticlimax but a blur. A masterwork, nevertheless.

  JANUARY 8

  Beginning to pick up a great number of misplaced or unplaced books around the house, I reread and was charmed by Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson. Late in life, that awful man of genius said, “The first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old.”

  JANUARY 11

  [To Monroe.]

  Janet Flanner asked if you were basically, subterraneously, responsible for the revived interest in Turner, in England as elsewhere—and ditto in Bonnard before that, and in Matisse hereafter. I shouldn’t put it like that; it is a matter of the zeitgeist—you are the one, perhaps the only one, who knows what is going on in the minds of art lovers, and how that relates to what went on in the minds of artists themselves.

  FEBRUARY 7

  Amid the dazzling snow at the back door where I have placed trays of seed and an orange and two tomatoes, approximately four and twenty starlings, and in their midst, one burningly beautiful cardinal.

  FEBRUARY 13

  After television appearance: Eric Goldman asked Janet Flanner to explain the political divisiveness of the French, the plurality of their political parties. Said Janet: “Yes, France reminds you of an orange, segments enclosed in a skin. There is nothing apple-like about it.” When I complimented her later, she asked, “Who said that? It’s very good!”

  “You did.”

  “I did. When?”

  Most talkers listen to themselves.

  FEBRUARY 19

  Foxes mate at the end of January. Purple grackles arrive from the South at the end of February. Indians call February the Hunger Moon.

  FEBRUARY 20

  Thoreau was some sort of prude. Having visited Whitman, he wrote his opinion of Leaves of Grass: “It does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason.”

  Is Marshall McLuhan of the University of Toronto to be taken as seriously as a writer, or is he just a university journalist, experimenting professorial paradox in non-English, so as to impress youngsters?

  MARCH 23

  In memory of Stone-blossom, an image out of Graves’ The Greek Myths. One year we had a blizzard in April. The springtime followed it immediately, with remains of snow still lying on the hilltops like a vast, pale, dead body—over which three vultures kept slowly circling, spiraling.

  MARCH 28

  The way Jesus Christ taught, by means of disjointed sentences or very brief paragraphs, arresting, memorable, sometimes mysterious, was well established in Eastern tradition. It is sometimes called gnomic—the Greek word “gnome” means “a wise saying.” A great deal of our secular, aphoristic literature derives from this. The word oracular—“uttered or delivered as if divinely inspired or infallible; sententious”—is also relevant, but that way folly and religiosity and other darkness lie.

  I love aphorisms as other men love poetry. For my desert island, even in a minimum book bag, Logan Pearsall Smith’s Treasury.

  APRIL 11

  This is my sixty-fifth birthday—the onset of old age recognized by law. “Retirement is the dirtiest word in the language,” as Hemingway told Hotchner. For those of us to whom it doesn’t apply, such as writers, there is a special pang, dread and (sometimes) self-commiseration. No one disqualifies us, no one except ourselves.

  APRIL 13

  Another ill-started morning; let it be a lesson to me, but it is an old refrain in my life and in my mind. Knowledge, including self-knowledge, is only a part of any education process; the other part, which is often decisive, is discipline, practice.

  APRIL 17

  Last night, New York: At the end, three-way orgasm, come to think of it. I lost track of Lou just at the close, and he came a minute or two too soon but stayed in our boy, banging him with all his strong maleness, and sexual kindness—female-trained. I didn’t realize that he had come until afterward, concentrating on my own weary body and watching Don.

  After that, I staggered to my feet and went to the bathroom and came back with a wet warm towel. They hadn’t moved—Lou pressed in all the way and holding tight, blissful, without a sound, not even panting, his eyes bright, full of light; and Don hoarsely whispering something, purring, growling, and indeed they reminded me of my black backdoor cats at Haymeadows.

  APRIL 20

  NYC Ballet: Tchaikovsky-Hayden’s Meditation, Suzanne Farrell and Jacques D’Amboise. This last adagio is one of the greatest experiences of dancing in my lifetime—one of Balanchine’s absolute masterpieces. Thus, in the lyric, amorous expression—beyond the capacities of poetry or any other art—ballet’s uniqueness. Just before dancing it, D’Amboise was invited to say what it meant to him: The Russian sadness, and the fact that Russians take pleasure in feeling sad. Balanchine quickly, quietly contradicted: “That is not so, no pleasure, no enjoyment at all.” I should say the opposite of both: No sadness at all, except that in the rapture of the senses, the double tenderness, two-in-one, there is a kind of heavy-heartedness in the partaking of something eternal. Naturally one wants to be eternal and the heart knows that one cannot. In this sense, the maximum of delight and the maximum of regret, and in great measure one arising from the other.

  APRIL 23

  Dostoyevsky upon his first visit to Italy spent a week in Florence but never once visited the Uffizi; he stayed in his hotel room and read the four volumes of Les Misérables.

  JUNE 2

  The Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters vis-à-vis the National Council on the Arts: We have chosen to be the tail wagged by the federal dog; partly because we haven’t the strength to do our own wagging. Many of us are weary, fo
r one thing, having to moonlight our whole lives.

  We are like a rich heiress (culturally rich) who was in love with Kennedy, fancied herself his fiancée, though he hadn’t exactly popped the question, and is now under pressure to marry a great parvenu.

  JUNE 11–12

  The best kind of happiness is that which can lift one up over a sadness, happiness like wings.

  JUNE 23

  An evening of the kind of sociability that in the course of our lifetime Monroe and I have developed: perfect. Marianne Moore, P. Lal, the Punjabi teacher and poet, Emilienne Dermit [the sister of Cocteau’s companion Edouard], Robert Phelps, and Isaac and Alma Bashevis Singer.

  JULY 30

  At Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Bloomington, Indiana. Lonesome. Because I came here on short notice there was no room for me on the campus. I am in a luxury room in a motor hotel, awake at 5:30 a.m., no breakfast until seven. I am hungry, hungry in more ways than one. Sex at the Institute for Sex Research, at this late date—I first came here in 1949—isn’t very personal or enervating or exalting. I am now a kind of visiting professor, an “authority,” not a guinea pig. But it points me in the amorous direction, like a weather vane, and it is wind, not rain. The tired intellect gets lonesome for the body.

  AUGUST

  An early impression of Cocteau, in my letter to Bernadine Szold, October 6, 1925, Villefranche: “Cocteau is here: cool and subtle fire-works, serious, indolent, and sound. He has the tiniest boat in the harbor, and in billowy pajama pants of waxed black silk, which once belonged to Yvonne George, rows across the sleepy water with a handsome, sturdy boyfriend.”

  AUGUST 25

  Science is tripartile: exploratory, explanatory, experimental. For example, respectively, zoology (including sex research), sociology, nuclear physics.

  SEPTEMBER 1

  Someone has calculated that today we left behind two-thirds of our century, enter into the last third.

  SEPTEMBER 11

  Often we are not able to evaluate the literature and art of our time as posterity will. Keep an open mind, if you can.

  I seem to remember that Poe admired Tennyson, but Felicia Hemans also touched him to the heart. Van Gogh ranked Millet with Rembrandt.

  Enmity makes mistakes; so does friendship. Naturally Sainte-Beuve abhorred Victor Hugo, whose wife he wanted, but he was no less scornful of Balzac and Baudelaire. Flaubert overrated George Sand; Edith Wharton underrated Henry James.

  SEPTEMBER 18

  Monroe was given the Legion of Honor by French President Vincent Auriel on his presidential visit to this country in the spring of 1951. Virgil [Thomson] and Mina [Kirstein Curtiss] also have received it. I envy it and in a way (my way) have deserved it. Too late now.

  For a Frenchman the honor is not great; Tom, Dick and Harry have it. Foreign recipients constitute an elite, interestingly assorted.

  SEPTEMBER 29

  Travel, as I conceive it, desire it, not for sociability—which would take too long and rouse loose floods of unmanageable, unchanneled memory (as in 1952)—but to see things, especially paintings.

  E.g., the Danaë and the Prodigal Son in Leningrad, the Conspiracy in Stockholm.

  OCTOBER 4

  I seem to have lost my M.M. [Marianne Moore] diary.

  Horror! A sort of horror that is apt to be more and more frequent in the great ebb tide of age, but it can be greatly alleviated by using my intellect, devising little devices and disciplines.

  OCTOBER 7

  I learn that there is a fish in Florida, the belted sandfish, which in ten seconds is able to change from male to female—the male striped, the female unstriped—then in ten seconds change back from female to male, according to the circumstances and mood of its lovemaking.

  OCTOBER 20

  [To Janet Flanner.]

  Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball: When I dined alone with Truman last week, he discoursed to me for an hour about what the ball means to him: the dream, the technique, the powerfulness, the expense, and finally, the troubles and quarrels. It is costing him $35,000. A number of his favorite great ladies have been making a terrible issue of being allowed to bring friends or relatives of theirs who are going to have nervous breakdowns if they are left out. He can’t allow them to do so, because it isn’t just a party, it is a creation with its standards and inherent rules, and one of the rules is that no one, no one, was to be included whom he personally did not know and like, and felt liked by. Furthermore, he can have only (sic) five hundred people, because the ballroom at the Plaza has room for only so many tables. To hear him on the subject, one might think it another sort of nonfiction novel, just as fantastically documented as the tragedy of the Clutters; non-written, consisting of flesh and blood and money, and of orchestras black and white, and jet planes from everywhere, and black and/or white ball-dresses, with masks, some of them custom-made, against an all-red background—a vast mosaic of all the components of our civilization, government, finance, the mass media, the arts, international luxury, etc. Every name on his list, he assured me, would signify something to me, even to me, an elderly country mouse—except those who were just pretty girls and their husbands and/or lovers. “I realized that you couldn’t give a ball without a lot of youth and beauty,” Truman said, “and I made a kind of collection of that, little by little.”

  He really isn’t a snob, as I define it, or if he is, it works both ways; he confers, while being conferred upon.

  OCTOBER 23

  The last dream of the old scientist in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries: “I stood by the water and shouted toward the bay, but the warm summer breeze carried away my cries, and they did not reach their destination. Yet I was not sorry about that; I felt on the contrary, rather light-headed.” Does this not somewhat allude to the immortal echo of Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of all?

  As I remember that excellent film referred to the frustrations and shortcomings of his character in old age—alienated from everyone dear to him, of two minds about everything, extremely rational on the one hand, subject to eruptions of black humor and cruelty on the other hand—not a matter of limitations of his life work.

  But it seems to serve as an image of my literary art, with its peaceful sense of the infinite, its strong self-assertion of my rather classical style of writing. The slightness of my success—against the hurly burly of popularity in this our somewhat vulgar era—allows a certain pleasure in the end result, a strange satisfaction and compensatory effect.

  OCTOBER 30

  [Re writers block with “The Old Party.”]

  Sunrise—delayed for an hour, the annual putting back of the clock— a flamboyant sunrise, orange and blue, pink and purple, auguring rain, and I stood staring at it, sick of my Maugham book, disheartened and not really capable.

  “Can they unburn me?” said Joan of Arc (Shaw’s Joan?) appearing to her king in a dream.

  In the glorious, risky enterprise of literature, one makes a distinction between art and craft, between inspiration and skill. But be not misled— both are essential, neither amounts to anything without the other.

  NOVEMBER 1

  Educators, please note (posterity, please note): the vulgarity of a great part of our cultural explosion. Advertisement: “He was generous … timid … stubborn … lonely … impassioned … bitter … and blessed with the most splendid talent of his age. Will you invite Michelangelo into your home for 10 days—while Time Life Books pays his expenses?”

  NOVEMBER 10

  To Marjorie (Wescott) Barrows in San Francisco: “My beloved sister, Lloyd says that you desire to have letters from me, not being capable of much occupation or distracting during your ordeal of illness. It shook me to learn that you now have shingles in and/or around your eyes; horrible herpes zoster! Monroe was affected by it in that same way, years ago. I can’t remember when; he was still at 410 Park Avenue. His doctor said to him: ‘I must warn you of two dangers particular to this disease, because of the demoralizing pain: (a) drug add
iction and (b) suicide.’ Sometimes he would dash out of his apartment, down to the avenue, and up and down; and I would run after him, for fear of his stumbling in front of a car. And yet he recovered from it, in a couple of months. I hope that your doctors are kind, as to the relief of the pain. What’s wrong with a little drug addiction?”

  Going to the opera tonight with Beulah—but how painful our feeling about our dying sister will be!

  NOVEMBER 13

  The crazy boy in Arizona, crazy à la mode, who shot seven women all at the same time in a beauty parlor, killed five of them and was arrested, laughing. Premeditated. One of the two survivors played dead, fooled him. Of course she learned that by reading about the mass murder of the nurses in Chicago. That was probably his point of departure also. He explained that he wanted to make himself known. The worst cliché of the age: identity.