A Heaven of Words

by Glenway Wescott

  An aunt in Milwaukee sent us back issues of one of the Hearst magazines in which the popular problem novels of Hall Caine were serialized: The Woman Thou Gavest Me, The Christian. At age 12 it thrilled me to read about moral temptations and religious scruples and other controversial themes.

  At age 16, Walt Whitman was revealed to me, great literature at last, and I composed a series of love letters in the style of his “Song of Myself ” and “Calamus.”

  Then I read all or almost all of the novels of Henry James; another dream-world, devoted to profuse and subtle talkativeness and hot house emotions.

  D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, which reminded me of my mother’s charm and superiority, and of the maladjustments between my farmer father and myself, influenced the novel that I began as a freshman at the University of Chicago, age 18, and finally finished and published six years later.

  OCTOBER 11

  To Philippe de Rothschild: I am in Washington, spending 24 hours with Katherine Anne Porter, who is in declining health. I had to telephone her twice yesterday, mid-morning, to make sure that she felt well enough to be visited, and mid-afternoon, because my train was an hour late. She was asleep both times, and by the time I arrived, at six, she had dropped off again. I had to shout under her bedroom window; her servant didn’t stay the night. But then instantly we had a bottle of champagne and ate wonderfully well. I wish that I could steal away without broaching, what she and her publishers have asked me to broach: the volume of our letters to be edited by me, for remuneration, some of which I have already received and spent. I do not believe it will get done in her lifetime. She lately talked about her revolutionary youth in Mexico to a Mexican journalist who took it down on tape, and (it appears) he has now put words in her mouth, anti-gringo, pro-Villa, pro-Castro; lawsuits or worse are pending.

  NOVEMBER 5

  [From the Sunday Times of London.]

  Cyril Connolly: “We must never let ourselves be ruled by non-enjoyers; the greater their efficiency, the smaller our freedom.”

  NOVEMBER 9

  WOR radio in a commercial about one of its newer interview programs, Joe Franklin: “the Marcel Proust of the entertainment world!” Do they know whereof they speak? It would be amusing to alert them in an anonymous letter. Some poor queen with a swelled head and a compulsive sense of humor might find himself in hot water. Not necessarily.

  Is not J. Edgar Hoover suspect? Alfred Kinsey, apropos of the McCarthy syndrome, by means of his taking sexual histories in and around Washington, knew of homosexuality in high places, which of course he kept mum about.

  In England especially for many years sexual morality has been a class distinction; scandal has consisted of revealing things to the vast world of one’s social inferiors. Twice in the lifetime of some persons still living an aristocratic breach of the peace about homosexuality had brought about revolutionary change. We all owe what liberty we have to Wilde, that vain, histrionic, self-destructive, exhibitionistic playwright. The somewhat similar folly of that ass, Lord Montague of Beaulieu, led directly to the Wolfenden Report and the recent blessed legislation.

  NOVEMBER 15

  [From the New York Times.]

  “Marianne Moore, the poet, is 80 years old today and she’s going to have the sort of birthday party she likes. Monroe Wheeler, a counselor to the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, will take her out with Glenway Wescott, the novelist, and with her brother, Captain John Warner Moore, U.S.N., retired, and his wife.”

  Monroe’s party at the Coffee House Club, with W. H. Auden. Meat and vegetables, ice cream with fresh raspberry sauce and a Royal cake with candles. A bottle of Cos d’Estocarnel, most of which Wystan drank avidly. He scolded me for drinking water. Warner Moore told long unhilarious anecdotes about admirals. Wystan boasted of having outdistanced T. S. Eliot in one particular: he preached in Westminster Abbey last year, which Eliot never managed. Dear senescent Marianne looked pretty, whittled thin by fatigue, and brightly flushed.

  NOVEMBER 25

  At 5:30 a.m., a portion of the moon shown down from a circular iridescence like an art nouveau plate, with a piercing star close by. At six I telephoned Monroe to wish him a good flight to Madison, but as I had been worrying about John, which I do almost incessantly, I dialed his number instead of Monroe’s. His muffled, small voice, like that of a little child not letting itself cry, saddened me more than I shall ever be able to tell.

  Erotic imagery in pop rock songs: “Light My Fire,” which is the title of The Doors’ smash single.

  DECEMBER 5

  Another great sunrise. Stripes of sallow and seemingly stagnant brightness in the winter woods; soft long lavender clouds in the east, and gold in the south. At seven o’clock on the other side of the house, the entire fifty acres of dormant hay and corn stubble, last week’s snow having melted away, is pink.

  The color schemes of Gauguin and Bonnard were found, not invented. Nature worshippers, they waited and watched and seized upon the sublime moments and chance effects, then conveyed the emotions of what they had seen.

  DECEMBER 12

  At 6:30 a.m., homeward bound (via Penn Station and Trenton and the bus to Stockton), in East 55th Street, in a cold but not freezing rain, I met a beautiful boxer dog, with no master anywhere in sight, presumably abandoned or lost. He turned and lifted his fine black-muzzled, white-starred face to me, hopefully. I am not a dog lover but his face in the icy dark downpour moved me.

  In the mid-30s I had to live with a boxer dog and learned to feel some affection for him; but my emotion concerning this dog did not derive from those old circumstances. It was pity for those who love me and need me now, whom I can scarcely help, and it was self-pity, colder and darker than I have known in many years.

  DECEMBER 13

  A Pacific island which sank beneath the waves some years ago reappeared yesterday, while a sea captain witnessed its rebirth.

  Ivan [Ashby] said about my tentative Christmas plans: “After all, it is your house.”

  I must say that I don’t often think of it as mine. No such luck—no such good luck, no such bad luck either.

  DECEMBER 30

  The Verifax [print copier, a Christmas gift from Barbara] demonstrator arrived and put me through my paces for an hour and a half. “Don’t read the instructions! They’ll only confuse you.” Upon which, in a memorized voice, with slangier jargon, he confused me to the point of pain. As I learn by reading rather than hearing, I’ll have to compose instructions of my own, in simple literary English, to be thumb-tacked over the machine for a while. How much abler our inventors are than our designers of mechanism!

  1968

  JANUARY 3

  In several places off the coast of Brittany, the fishermen point to this or that location of the fabulous city of Is, and tell strange tales of it. On very stormy days, they assure you, the tops of its church steeples are seen to appear in the troughs of the waves; and on calm days there rises from the abyss the chiming of its bells, spelling out the appointed hymn of that day.

  It often seems to me that I have at the bottom of my own heart a city of Is in which obstinate bells keep summoning to the holy office of the faith a congregation now deaf to them. Sometimes I pause and bend an ear to these tremendous vibrations, which seem to arise from infinite depths, like voices of another world. Especially at the approach of old age, I took pleasure, during the repose of summer, to harken to these faraway sounds of a vanished Atlantis.

  JANUARY 8

  I am too perverse, too contrary, to hold myself to specific resolutions, but I can now say no to myself. Now I must learn how to say it to other people.

  JANUARY 21

  I went to bed last night exhausted and woke up exhausted, not early. No lovemaking, because the sweet sound of John’s singing in the bathroom while getting ready for bed made Ivan cry, uncontrollably though softly; therefore I left them alone. This is his last weekend here before being returned against his will to his native England.

  FEBR
UARY

  Glimpses of my father, ever-lovely in my mind and heart. As a part-time taxidermist, supplementing the livelihood of a very poor piece of farmland in the winter months, one winter he undertook to preserve someone’s valuable and beloved horse. Assembling and wiring and erecting, inserting beautiful glass eyes and painting the nostrils and muzzle, he took no cognizance of the size of the creature as a life-like mummy— it wouldn’t go through the door! A section of the outer wall had to be removed, then replaced, which wasted a good part of the poor proud taxidermist’s fee.

  FEBRUARY 4

  The fifth anniversary of Jean Cocteau’s death has provoked me to read Opium, the brave book he published in 1930. Although he was writing about an addictive drug, much of what he says could equally apply to marijuana which is generally agreed to be non-addictive:

  “Alcohol provokes fits of madness. Opium provokes fits of wisdom.”

  “After smoking, the body thinks. The smoker has a bird’s eye vide of himself.”

  “Opium lightens the mind. It never makes me witty. It spreads the mind out. It does not gather it up into a point.”

  Cocteau must never be dismissed as camp. Such diamond-precision of utterance has seldom been combined with so wide an aesthetic range.

  “The only possible style,” he once declared, “is the thought made flesh.”

  I delight in little far-flung facts, the poetical content of newspapers and magazines. For example, Keats was only five feet and three-quarters of an inch tall; two and one-quarter inches shorter than Truman Capote.

  FEBRUARY 6

  The life dedicated and devoted to literature is fraught with a strange predestination.

  FEBRUARY 13

  In the train, en route to Bernard’s. This is Monie’s 69th birthday. Inadvertently I woke him up an hour earlier than he wanted. While I packed my bag we talked for half an hour, mostly about my editing of Porter’s letters, because he is going to see her in Washington this afternoon. I telephoned him from the station in extreme uneasiness, to warn him not to undermine my editorial plans and tactics at this point. And I forgot to say, “Happy Birthday.” Rough, hurt, and hurtful stoic that he is now, he will tell me that he’d rather have his anniversaries ignored by one and all. In fact, he is constantly preoccupied with his increasing elderliness, and thinking of it ages him.

  FEBRUARY 20

  En route to Washington, D.C. Yesterday morning I awoke with a sensation of having aged by ten or fifteen years in my sleep. Presumably I had dreamed some extreme aggravation of the facts of my life. No wildness of grief; no tears, not even a lump in my throat; nothing that could have been relieved by talking to Monroe when he woke up. I was philosophical about it, but desolate. I kept thinking: too late now, too late for pleasures of love, too late to write anything more, just time to put my affairs in order. It was like recovering from the anesthesia after a castration; almost worse than that would be at age 67—indeed, I may have had my share of pleasure, but I am still committed to great love, both old and new, and I have things to write, small things perhaps, but fine.

  FEBRUARY 25

  The great hourly daily impediment to my finishing the book that I have promised is not my housekeeping or my family life or my sex life or lack of sex life, or my neurotic habits of mind, resentments and depressions—it is my always having something else to write.

  FEBRUARY 27

  Farmhand Ethel: While waiting for the bus this morning Ethel told me that someone has just made her a present of all the newspaper clippings of her trial for homicide; thrilling for her, especially the photographs of all concerned. She is going to put them in an album, in sleeves of acetate. She has never once told me, or even implied, that she was innocent; but on the other hand, she never shows the least feeling of guilt. In her psychology, there has been atonement; she has “paid her debt to society,” as she herself would express it; the sin has been remitted.

  MARCH 5

  On the worst afternoon of the crash of the stock exchange in 1929, Lady Mendl [Elsie de Wolfe], who had never been beautiful and was then in her seventies, said to a group of friends who had come in for cocktails: “Well, my broker tells me that I lost a million dollars this afternoon. It troubled me at first, but as I have my youth and beauty, it doesn’t matter much, does it?”

  MARCH 16

  One afternoon at the Institute, in my distress about the Vietnam War—I think it was in the spring of 1966—I asked George Kennan, “Can you read the New York Times these days and sit down immediately afterward and write history?”

  “I try to put off reading anything until I have done the day’s work.” He thinned his lips together for a second, then added, “I am afraid that the president of the United States has declared war on history.”

  MARCH 21

  Elizabeth came to dinner at Barbara’s and brought a packet of photographs that I delight in. We look so much alike, all in a row. But sister Marjorie’s not being in the row makes a shocking effect, like a smile minus of a tooth. I look a little drunk in two pictures, and a little like William Buckley—that will keep me from vanity.

  MARCH 22

  There is a time for everything, except youth.

  APRIL 2

  The Emperor Justinian passed laws repressive of homosexuality because he believed, directly or indirectly, it caused earthquakes.

  APRIL 11

  Upon my 67th birthday, left on my pillow in 51st Street: “Dearest of all—Happy Birthday! I can’t believe this is our 49th year together—with so much loving devotion still to come. I adore you—Monie.”

  APRIL 19

  “Frank and explicit; that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.” Said by Disraeli, a number of whose sayings have seemed to me cleverer and truer than Wilde’s.

  MAY 3

  In Portland, with John Yeon. I have never in my life seen anything more gloriously beautiful than the succession of great pointed volcanic mountains of the Cascades: Adams, Rainer, St. Helena’s, Hood, Jefferson—soaring up separately out of dark blueness; snow so pure that the small clouds floating alongside in the sunshine looked gray.

  I could have gone to Brazil with Monroe; I could have visited Pauline and Philippe in their rented Dutch-Renaissance castle—and Rembrandt’s Night Watch is as beautiful as the Cascade Mountains. But in the fiery Indian Summer of my waning life as it has been of late, over-stimulated by what may be last love, I was incapable of going anywhere unless I could envisage a possibility of sexual pleasure; not a probability … an acknowledgement both of my weakness and my strength.

  MAY 21

  At the end of the hard day of the invasion of Barbara’s house and Haymeadows by six hundred symphony-supporting ladies. Lloyd and Baba fed me at Lorenzo’s in Trenton and deposited me at the station, asleep on my feet. I slept in the train, and could scarcely keep awake until Monroe arrived from Rio via Brasilia and Trinidad. He is manifestly happy about the success of his show in the Argentines, publicized like Ringling Brothers’ Circus; happier still to be back with me; girding his loins for his return to Chile, with perhaps a two-weeks’ vacation in Brazil, land of young beauties. He can’t bear, now, to travel for pleasure without a companion, but kindly refrains from pressuring me to go with him this time. How rapidly he had aged all this year—but with improvement in health and strength the while (it has seemed to me). In which antithesis I discern a kind of philosophy, happy for the most part.

  JUNE 6

  After the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy: This dark historic day, I find myself more afraid than sorrowful. It sets a terrible example to evil politicians to see a candidate for the highest office shot down just when the popular vote has gone in his favor. Monroe’s friend Mrs. Parkinson talked with close friends of the Kennedy family yesterday; the doctors had already warned them that, at very best, he would be helplessly crippled, blind, and perhaps worse.

  I didn’t like him, but recognized his bright intellect and g
ood intentions. I hoped that, if Gene McCarthy fell by the wayside, he could wrest the nomination from Humphrey; my brother did not agree.

  A good-looking old wizened black man who shines my shoes at the barbershop said this morning, “This Ay-rab’s been here since he was twelve but he didn’t care nothing about this country; only the Ay-rab troubles, like against the Jews. His whole family weren’t even citizens, just permanent residents; why did this country let them come here like that?” Then he lifted his head from my shoes, with an evangelical smile. “Kennedy was the only one who was for the poor people, all the poor people, not just blacks; and the poor people were for him.”