A Heaven of Words

by Glenway Wescott

  JUNE 7

  Fear yesterday, disgust today, brought on by the headlines in the Times. For example, our new Roman Catholic archbishop, appointed by President Johnson to a commission to investigate the causes of our assassinations and to recommend remedies, along with Eric Hoffer, our dear old authoritarian longshoreman aphoristic-writer, and ex-President Eisenhower’s brother—more spankings for boys and girls by their fathers and mothers I suppose—the archbishop says this morning that “we must shun va-lence” (that’s the way President Johnson pronounces it).

  Of course fools are always quicker to express themselves in the heat of historic events than those of talent and good sense.

  JUNE 13

  On Monday I slipped over the edge of an asphalt walk on a turkey farm and fractured the base of the fifth metatarsal bone in my left foot. I have a plaster cast from the bottom of my foot up almost to my knee and am, and shall be for another fortnight, on crutches, which I do not manage well. But I must fly up to Schenectady day after tomorrow, to be given an honorary degree by Union College the following morning.

  JUNE 17

  Before luncheon at the college president’s house, I stood on one foot for half an hour. After luncheon I had to talk non-stop with good young Frank Gado … a true teacher, impassioned about literature; my literature a specialty of his.

  After dinner, back to the Albany County Airport. Robert Phelps with his obstreperous kindness met me at LaGuardia, with wheelchair.

  JUNE 30

  I helped Barbara give a grand al fresco dinner for sixty neighboring grandees in support of her Trenton museum; co-host and floor show: elderly juvenile disabled literary brother-in-law on his pogo stick from table to table in the green-striped tent. Come to think of it, my entire family is indomitable, and how!

  JULY 4

  A good deal of the time lawyers’ language is intentionally confusing, so as to require the services of fellow lawyers to interpret and apply it. But sometimes it goes to the other extreme: bulldozing expressiveness, glaringly unmistakable. The prosecuting attorney representing New York City in preventing Bertrand Russell’s professorship at City College declared that his lifelong work was, “lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venomous, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber.”

  JULY 11

  Fears are strange and complex, and (I suppose) idiosyncratic more often than not—courage ditto—mingling the physiological and the mnemonic and the imaginary. My fear of heights seems to be bodily; I don’t think of it, but suddenly a pain punches up in my testicles, even on John’s familiar and beautiful balcony. My fear of the air has to do with our human insolence in being there at all, as though we were gods; the Greeks called this hubris. My fear of the sea is awe; it is the oblivion out of which we are brought to birth, into which we die duly, no exceptions, which is religious, isn’t it? Religious imaginativeness conditioned by childhood memory. My poor father, whom I resented and distrusted, tried to teach me to swim by main force; I used to vomit in anticipation and never learned. Then, too, I have never forgotten my horror of the sinking of the Titanic; I went down across the lawn to the post box, and read the headline in the newspaper, read it in a loud voice to my grandmother standing on the porch; she spread her arms and clapped her hands and cried, “O merciful God!”

  Did you ever hear one of our Negro ballads entitled “Go Down, Titanic”? The world champion boxer, Jack Johnson, a sensational man with a white wife, intended to return to the U.S. on that maiden voyage; at the last moment his passage was cancelled for the obvious reason of segregation. The song expressed that perhaps merciful God had lost patience on that occasion.

  Young Americans not only pass a large part of their life with rock and roll songs in their ears but make a cult of it. Do they understand the words of hit-parade songs all the way through, or is it a matter of vague mysterious catchy phrase chanted over and over, which is the case for me—as it were, liturgical music.

  JULY 22

  As Monroe and I sat on the terrace, eating cheese and crackers and salad and red raspberries, the bright-colored doe wandered out to the south meadow, at peace except for her white tail rapidly fighting the flies. Then out of the spinney came her twin fawns who caught sight of her afar, ran to her, slowed up around her circularly. A little later, an extra fawn, smaller than the others, still spotted, raced out of the spinney, between us and the barn, calling for help at the top of its voice, half bleat, half bark, and disappeared into the corn field. Why? I have never seen an infant ruminant so alarmed. It returned after a while, silent, but still unhappy. I sat there, ashamed of my recent emotions; my life so fortunate, whatever its crises.

  [Re the journal of Denton Welch:]

  He was an exquisitely gifted youngster whom a violent motorist crushed when he was riding a bicycle, who then devoted his remaining few years, bed-ridden and anguished, to an account of the joy of living, self-expressive sensuousness and malicious humor. That also shamed me, with a lesson more applicable than the panic of the small wild animal minus its mother.

  JULY 27

  I went to town to dine with Monroe and with Marianne Moore, night before last. We never see her now, without the thought that it may be the last time. She is fantastically frail, although also fantastically unreduced in mind and charm. Monroe took us to the Plaza, the vast old-English room looking out on Central Park—a perfect place for the occasion … She has just finished a poem but hasn’t sold it yet; her poetry editor at the New Yorker is vacationing on Fire Island. She has been commissioned to write a text about Central Park to accompany beautiful color photographs; she will be paid one thousand dollars. Fancy working to the day of one’s death like that—glorious!

  JULY 31

  Oh, perfectionism and the sin of pride! I haven’t been greatly tormented by these weaknesses in my life and human relations, but art is a great folly—especially when one has had more opportunity than talent, more esteem than success.

  AUGUST 2

  I dined alone with Lloyd and Barbara. We took a walk to look at the new Holsteins; Lloyd is beginning to love them. I often wonder if I would be a more productive author if I had a simple or simplifying mind like his; perhaps a contradiction in terms. It is all a kind of Garden of Eden, with a bit of snake in each of us, where (I suppose) it belongs.

  AUGUST 6

  The Republican Convention: A shocking spectacle, ballyhoo and carnival—it is an American tradition, like letting the children play while their parents are in the kitchen quarreling and cooking. But it seems worse now that it is all put-on and a show for the great mass media, directed by professionals at vast expense. Rockefeller is attractive and honest, and in his way a humanist, but so much less gifted than Nixon as a politician, one might even say less intelligent, and with amateurish advisors. Nixon does not wish to be reactionary, not any more, but his mind is so commonplace, his frequentations for years have been so low-level, that he will slip back into reaction, almost be forced back.

  AUGUST 10

  We are having our worst hot weather, steaming and enfeebling. As soon as Monroe got back from Venezuela, dead tired, his Museum asked him to go to Australia. The new National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, almost a decade in the making, is to open its doors with exceeding sociabilities and formalities. Monroe hates the assignment, too tired and too hurried, but is proud of it in a way, and thinks of it, in principle, as incumbent upon the emeritus man, in self-defense against the take-over generation.

  AUGUST 13

  (L., J., D.)—A small orgy of familiar friends, four of us who haven’t been together for more than a year since last summer. Pot and a dildo, humor and affection, courtesy and respect for one another, mutual criticisms, all sorts of differences notwithstanding, confidence and orgasms.

  AUGUST 23

  Homeward bound from Washington, D.C. Very mixed feelings about my visit. Katherine Anne has lost weight and seemed stronger than in May … We “worked” assiduously, and I felt pleased, given the bitter stupidity I
had fallen into about the entire project … She declared that as the volume of letters was my conception in the beginning and has only gone forward by my effort, if there is to be a renegotiation of the contract it is to be upward, in my favor; not downward. This I shall take with a grain of salt until the very day.

  SEPTEMBER 1

  What a luxury: my relationship with the commonplace of nature. My doe with one of her twin fawns and the extra fawn were softly grazing in the north meadow. Where was the other twin? The extra one kept its tail up while grazing. I went toward them when all their backs were turned, but they seemed able to hear my footsteps. Then six almost mature hen pheasants flew up with a great whir.

  SEPTEMBER 12–13

  I often think of two immortal youngsters who didn’t even have lasting art; they were dancers. A Greek boy whose gravestone was found near Antibes, on the Riviera where I lived. “Septentrion”—and I think they’re not sure whether that first word meant “one who came from the North” or whether it was his name—“Septentrion, aged twelve, danced and gave pleasure.” An Egyptian girl, who lies or used to lie in the Musée Guimet in Paris, a teenage mummy with a good-sized bouquet of ancient brown roses still in her arms. Anatole France was inspired to write the novel Thais, which Massenet took for the libretto of his opera of the same name. Which novel and opera prompted Maugham to write his story on Sadie Thompson, “Rain.”

  SEPTEMBER 24

  To Anita Loos: My cocktail party for Robin Maugham: The noble lord arrived tight, in a nice, funny way until the end of the evening. But Monroe disliked it, and that made me nervous and perhaps ineffective in my role of host or half-host. The strangest thing: Robin Maugham is animated, indeed possessed, by nothing in the world but ruthless revenge and pecuniary aspiration by means of it. Hell hath no fury like a nephew scorned! What a plot—better than anything that I shall be able to bring into my little memoir, romance of the literary art; and perhaps, no doubt, that is the “controversial” scenario he is preparing for Embassy Pictures.

  SEPTEMBER 25

  A journalist asked Jean Cocteau, “If your house were on fire and you could only take one thing, what would it be?” He answered, “I’d take the fire.”

  OCTOBER 3

  Funny: Margot Hentoff, a Village Voice writer, reviewing Tom Wolfe’s two recent books scathingly, remarks that his fatuously tough hard-bitten style is often reminiscent of Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde.”

  OCTOBER 6

  [From the GW interview with the Trenton Times.]

  “It’s absurd, isn’t it? In a country where there is so much security for the distinguished professors of the other learned professions, science, medicine—there are thousands of full professors who have permanent tenure, who are supported in such a way that they cannot be in want in their old age. On the other hand we’ve writers, composers, architects, painters and sculptors, some of whom are world famous and absolutely impoverished in their old age. They outlive their earning capacity and it’s not only pathetic but I think it’s a disgrace to a great art loving, literature loving, education loving plutocracy, you know, that art is just not a first-rate career. Families could say, ‘Don’t go into that; you’ll end up in the street.’ A lot of them do.”

  OCTOBER 12

  I saw myself on television the other evening, and was amazed. I look quite old and fat, but (I felt, amazingly) pleasant; a matter of peaceful, subtle, humorous, affectionate expressions—physique of a sea lion, but with a dolphin’s intelligence.

  OCTOBER 13

  Marvelous ability of some writers, especially French writers, to belittle and besmirch our human plight. Lèautaud says, for example, “I haven’t seen anything very great in life except its cruelty and stupidity.” If that was the truth of the life he knew from start to finish, not just a final disillusionment, what did he live for and how could he endure his impoverished lonely fate?

  Last night’s lecture was a sort of failure. Despite the pleasant telecast, and two full interviews in the Trenton papers, there were only about seventy-five people in an auditorium that seats four or five hundred. To console me, Ethel tells me that “Satch-mo,” Louis Armstrong, also found Trenton cold.

  OCTOBER 18

  In the Penn Station, three little white boys were tinkering with a candy dispenser, at 7 a.m.! Were they criminals, trying to loosen the coins out of it, or had the mechanism itself wickedly taken their nickels and dimes? A baldish young man, not handsome but respectable-looking, stood at one of the new urinals, brandishing an erection, at 7 a.m.! The men’s room in the old station was, as you might say, virtuous, with high partitions; whereas the new installations have maximum exposure, facilitating improprieties—one wonders whose design that was, and why.

  OCTOBER 25

  Pauline and Philippe de Rothschild have to be answered; nothing could be more difficult or emotionally disturbing. They want me to spend about half of each year, for perhaps five years, at Mouton and in Holland and Norway. They truly believe that my work would go better if I were living their life than it has gone in the situation that I have gradually committed myself to in New Jersey. I cannot simply say no; I must explain myself and my life in some measure, in gratitude and for reference in the years to come. Meanwhile, Monroe has determined that I am to deliver the volume of Porter letters to her and to her publishers before I go abroad at the end of December. It will scarcely be possible, but I must knock myself out in the attempt.

  OCTOBER 28

  In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine: a profile of B. B. King, the so-called King of the Blues, sorrowful and humorous both in his life and in his repertory, and an important interview with Herbert Marcuse, an elderly professor of German origin now in vogue as the chief dissident of the intellectual establishment.

  A strange truth: the homosexual minority is closer to the Negro minority in the U.S. than it is to the Jewish minority. I am closer to, let us say, B. B. King than to Norman Mailer. Norman Mailer is closer to Marcuse than I am. This has nothing to do with lifework or aesthetics. B. B. King and I have been repressed and frustrated. Marcuse is revolutionary, but is a successful, highly paid establishment figure.

  NOVEMBER 3

  Auden on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “Better than your wildest dreams.” How good is that? One of the elements of discomfort in one’s admiration of this high-ranking poet: he is insincere as well as hypocritical. He says things just for effect. In a tone of strong conviction he indulges in rhetorical devices.

  Worse than one’s wildest dreams.…

  NOVEMBER 5

  I have never finished any book that I have been contracted to write— I remember Cass Canfield’s shocked look when I told him this, in response to his inquiry about “The Old Party,” when it first began to be behind schedule—as soon as I sit down at my writing table I am apt to be seized by some inspiration having nothing to do with the book supposedly in progress, sometimes by several inspirations at once. Let me just jot something down, an aide-memoir I say to myself; and away I go—with that mingling of the reminiscent and the visionary and the verbal which is my talent.

  NOVEMBER 6

  The election has made me as nervous as a cat, as anxious as a crystal gazer. [Hubert] Humphrey, if he surprises everyone and gets elected, will not make a very strong or very original president. Nixon, on the other hand, will do his best, beginning with perhaps a better cabinet than H.H.H. could muster. But his cleverness and discipline in the daily routines of politicians have gone to his head; he terribly lacks judgment; in two minutes flat he will make the most dangerous mistakes, already has done so.

  NOVEMBER 14

  Shameful selfish cry: I want a record changer, I want all the recordings: Schubert, Strauss, Fauré, Poulenc.

  NOVEMBER 23

  My grandmother Wescott, large, plain, profound woman, would go outdoors to greet every new moon, walking up and down along the fence west of the house, looking up at it. “I always think of all my loved ones looking up at it at the same ti
me, wherever they are; even those who are dead,” she would say.

  NOVEMBER 25

  One of the odd details of literary history: it was the authoress of Uncle Tom’s Cabin who first published the tale of Byron’s incest, which was what the French call a secret de polichinelle, 18 years after the beloved sister Augusta’s death, nine years after the horrified wife Lady Byron’s. It was the last mentioned who told Harriet Beecher Stowe about it.

  NOVEMBER 30

  Said Mark Twain: “Truth is stranger than fiction—because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”

  Tolstoy’s last words: “The truth … very much … I love truth.”

  DECEMBER

  Aphorism: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”—Emperor Charles V.

  DECEMBER 27