JANUARY 25
The nineteenth anniversary of my first meeting with John [Connolly].
JANUARY 31
The great excitements of art in London, December 1970–January 1971. Upon these brief visits, one thing after another in swift succession, I suffer from the great miscellaneous museums. It isn’t surfeit, it is confusion: chameleon on plaid.
My maximum enjoyment of art is with Monroe, although our attitudes differ. Intense momentary experiences are what he seeks, with a very great appetite and some thought of continuing to educate himself; taking refuge, in those consecutive admirations, from pain and disappointment and the fears of prospective old age.
My aesthetic responses at the same time are fewer and colder, with rarer enthusiasm and a ground-base of dislike. I find fault even with the work of the very great masters, when they somehow miss their mark, or when the painting has suffered damage and deterioration. Whole entire schools and periods vex me: i.e. late Hellenism, the peak of the Italian Renaissance, the Vatican, and Versailles especially. It seems that I am neither proud nor ashamed of these limitations of my mind and senses. Upon arrival in a museum what I like to do first is look for and concentrate my senses on a few masterworks comparable to my taste, to saturate my memory—for future reference and introspection and enjoyment, later in due course.
After lunch with Will [Chandlee] on Friday the 15th at Victoria and Albert Museum, “Warrior on Horseback” by Riccio (1470–1532, Padua) was my chosen masterpiece, my thrill. As it strikes me in this great image of the martial romanticism of the Renaissance: the excitement of the horse is so much more beautiful than the rider’s pride and rage. Grimace as a form of rhetoric.
FEBRUARY
[Re a Time photo.]
A patrol of Cambodians returning (with two human heads) from a successful encounter with North Vietnamese military personnel, photograph by a West German named Dieter Ludwig. Perhaps the worst of this strange juncture in history is that it seems quite impossible to know what to think. Our governing class obviously talks irresponsible nonsense all the time, the anti-establishment hasn’t even tried to be rational or historical, and most who have imagination and a realistic habit of mind feel so powerless between the upper and nether millstone that we escape into our private lives and aristocratic fine arts and philanthropics, more or less inarticulate about current needs.
FEBRUARY 12
Envy, need I remind my readers, is one of the seven deadly sins—ancient and slightly obscured by the passage of centuries since their first listing—still worth pondering, but in need of interpretation (sloth, for example) (lust, for example).
FEBRUARY 15
Our fields haven’t been free from snow and ice since the weekend before Christmas; never very deep but never melted, often replenished—and the deer herd together and stalk to and fro day and night in nervous agitation of hunger. John saw about twenty-five yesterday.
FEBRUARY 18
A thrilling and haunting little movie: part of Brentwood’s “Six-Pack.” Brentwood is a Hollywood studio that has been producing hardcore films. Now six of them are showing at the Adonis and the Jewel. The first one is entitled “Right Away, Sir,” and I want to see it again and again.
What a boring thing about pornographic publishing: the hit-and-run distribution—how and where can one get the paperbacks of last month or month before last? Someone has palmed one of my favorites, or perhaps my consort Monroe picked it up and hid it from me (and from himself). He thinks they will be rare books when Nixon gets done with us. “We ought to keep them for our old age,” says he.
I am overcome with frivolity this morning. Euphoria goes before self-hatred; pride before a fall.
FEBRUARY 20
My genius-friend I. B. Singer, whose glory is mainly in English but who writes in Yiddish, was asked at the end of a lecture: “What would you say if you were to meet God face-to-face?”
His answer: “I would ask Him to collaborate with me on some translations.”
I. B. Singer: “It is only a few days since my little parakeet died. I never thought such a little creature could go through such suffering, and for this I will never forgive the Almighty. For this, He can give me no explanations.”
Very few writers have been able to write full-scale, full-length novels in an entirely controlled and poetical way. Flaubert did. Virginia Woolf exhausted herself in a series of vain attempts; but as a rule, life is too short. The spirit is willing, all too willing, but the pen or the typewriter or the Dictaphone is weak.
Camus’ The Stranger is a sort of easel painting; whereas a real old-fashioned novel is like the Sistine Chapel.
Fiction is not the opposite of the truth. Fiction is the opposite of journalism and the opposite of history; a matter of form and function.
FEBRUARY 25
Threads of green are stretching upward in considerable areas of the worn and faded lawn. Day before yesterday, I still saw a patch of gray-white, vestige of snow bank; gone yesterday. Of course we still anticipate some storms, as usual. But this morning, behold, a dozen mourning doves picking at the new grass or at the thawed ground between blade and blade; up they went in their little whistled harmony.
At the present in the northeastern third of the United States (east of the Rockies and north of the Carolinas), there are 25 species of turtles, 16 lizards, and 57 snakes.
MARCH 1
Homeward bound, across town in a taxi cab, Monroe quoted Picasso as saying, “I’d like to be a poor man with a lot of money.”
“How odd,” I said, “what I want, I think, is to be a rich man with no money at all.” Quick as a flash, Monroe said, “Then you must be well satisfied, for, surely, that is what you are.”
MARCH 9
I am apt to blame the Congress even more than the chief executive for our reckless and unsuccessful war-making. For reasons of political expediency and economic advantage they have allowed the development of a vast armament industry, and an overpowering Pentagon, from which comes irresistible pressure on the president, who is more intent on running for office than anything else.
MARCH 15
A shadow at the back door—in and out of my peripheral vision—a ghost peering in. These are the days that lend themselves to premonition and irrationality, and self-indulgence of sadness.
MARCH 18
Baba now has two brilliantly polychromatic, vaporous, radiant Rothkos; three, if you count the little one that Monroe recommended to her in the first place, even if she fails to sell the Corat. Poor little creature, like the dog in Aesop with the bone in its mouth, seeing a second bone reflected in water!
As it seems to me, incessant publication of what Baba calls “the art scene” isn’t good education. One ought to improve the general taste; to discourage the vulgarization and commercialization of the new in art; and to beautify all the settings and scenes of our lives.
MARCH 19
[From the New York Times, March 19.]
A few bits of one of Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides, on a piece of parchment three inches square, a chance purchase by a Duke University professor said to be a milestone in paleography. Parchment has lasted better than papyrus. There are a hundred thousand pieces of papyrus in museums and libraries here and abroad; only about 20 percent of them have been identified and deciphered. Only about three percent of ancient Greek literature has survived; only seven of Sophocles’ 120 plays.
MARCH 21
Willa Cather, that violent, beautiful, not good woman—though a good writer—wrote, “Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember.” By “admire,” did she not mean love?
MARCH 22
Homosexual marriage: The only small talk in the world that I enjoy is the 50-year-long colloquy of G.W.-M.W. It’s one of the elements of my loneliness when he is away.
What’s so good about it? He goes far out into the great world, sometimes very far out, and reports like a dream. I on the other hand keep thinking of things to tell him. But does he
listen? He likes the sound of my voice; I delight in the steely colors of his thought, the warmth of his heart, despite the pain and weariness.
APRIL 2
A strange thing about the lapse of inspiration and talent and creative spirit: sudden depression and fatigue halfway through the day. My handwriting goes to pieces. At daybreak I still have the calligraphy script that I invented as a teenager, because I had been taught badly at the little red school house in Orchard Grove. My shame when I come across recent pages that I myself cannot decipher—though they might be recent—is like madness.
APRIL 11
My birthday—Monroe said, “Well, I’m sorry that you have to be 70 years old, but as it has to be, you must make the best of it; and that you surely do.”
APRIL 12
Yesterday on my birthday an infant climbed out on the family windowsill and fell down nine stories, 90 feet, onto a soft cushion of bushes, and apparently was not harmed. An Easter miracle, said the radio newscaster. A birthday miracle, a good omen.
Emerson: “There are asking eyes, asserting eyes, prowling eyes, and eyes full of fate.” Emerson is one of my guardian angels; our pint-sized Montaigne.
APRIL 16
Alone on the subway platform at 53rd Street and Third Avenue. A good-looking, unkempt, unshaven, lean, poorly dressed youngish man paced up and down, and circled around unsteadily in desperation, perhaps aggravated by drink, talking to himself loudly enough to he heard fifteen or twenty feet away. “I was out there in Vietnam in 1962, four years I was. I saw all that stuff and it was hell.”
I would like to have stayed within sight of him and within earshot—watcher and listener that I am—but surely he would have ceased his self-revelation and changed to some contact with me, panhandling, aggression, politics, pathos. Not, as the youngsters say, my bag.
APRIL 25
It is difficult to envision the horrors of the past. For example, the poor in England by the end of the eighteenth century were held in check by insanely severe petty legislation; the statute books listed two hundred offenses punishable by death—e.g., “planting a tree in Downing Street” and “impersonating a Chelsea pensioner.”
MAY 6
Off to Washington Tuesday noon to dine and stay overnight with K. A. Porter. Lunch with my Authors League colleague, Herman Wouk, and a meeting with Senator [Frank] Church on Wednesday.
Maugham’s little attacks on people were exciting and worth pondering, but Rebecca West’s humor was delectable, even giving pleasure when it mortified the butt of it. When George Davis’ The Opening of the Door, his one and only novel, almost won the Harper Prize in 1931, she reviewed it as an example of my dubious influence on a number of writers of the late twenties: “Mr. Wescott had devised a new way of narrating the life of his native Wisconsin, and the formula is this: There once was a small boy who loved his grandmother so much that when he grew up he wrote and published a novel about a small boy who loved his grandmother so much that …”
Sometimes when lecturing on campus I found it pleasant to begin with this joke. The students seemed to admire me for having the nerve to give an opinion of myself so derogatory.
JULY 2
The small, simple admirable goods and chattels of our beloved immigrant [Ivan Ashby], mostly clothes and books, were delivered on mid-afternoon Friday by two of the most attractive human beings I ever encountered on earth: an erect, great, relaxed, rosy-cheeked, smiling well-spoken young man named Mitchell and a husky eager boy with an almost-healed injury of his nose. They called each other, respectfully, Mitchell and Mitch. They were obviously lovers, unable to take their eyes off each other. At one point, while addressing me about something, with courteous enthusiasm, the elder caressed the younger, with a kind of happy forcefulness, rather more like a brother than a father. He constantly taught and trained him. They were charmed by me, and blissful to be in our luxurious countryside. They had with them a Doberman Pinscher, also blissful.
Almost painfully, though not unhappily, I desired to see them again.
JULY 5
Early yesterday, when I heard Monroe’s bath splash at the top of the stairs and took his orange juice up to him, with several domestic questions, I found him reading Cavafy, and he called my attention to “He Came to Read” in [John] Mavrocordato’s [translation]. “For me,” he said, with a happy ardent note, “this is more erotic than all your indecent books.”
JULY 12
Glorious Yeats, tone-deaf, and color-blind!
JULY 13
I have borrowed this for a new start in life: “Henceforth I seek not good fortune, I myself am good fortune.”—Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road.”
JULY 16
Pauline last winter suggested I write five little volumes, one for each of the senses. I couldn’t do all five; furthermore there are more than five.
JULY 18
Problems of my life, our lives. A group life—without entire group communications; with inner alliances; with secretiveness. For example, Lloyd versus Monroe. For example, Ivan versus Adair [John’s friend].
JULY 30
Empathy: when weeks of dry summer have turned to rain, my feeling about the corn, for the corn, almost as corn.
JULY 31
Re: Monroe. Our fighting is dangerous now. Each of us has strengths and weaknesses, too well matched—the outcome might be just by chance. I so loathe myself for my raging and weeping, at the time and for days afterward, that it verges on self-destruction. I can’t even bear to think of Monroe’s weak position, with strange relentlessness and perhaps egotism pitted against my brutality.
Pace, pace. It is a familiar problem for me, tried in earlier crises—expected to be a good man rather than a vigorous man. Now I consent to whatever enfeeblement as a writer in the final ten years of my literary endeavor—our literary endeavor—may result from another repression of my desires and instincts as they come naturally to me.
Emerson: “Our moods do not believe in each other.”
AUGUST
[Sculptor] Antonio Salemme, born in Gaeta 1892. In 1924 he attempted a small standing nude of me—he never finished it. We also lured each other to bed; that too was unsuccessful.
His beautiful wife Betty, who had a brief affair with Paul Robeson, informed Frances Robbins of my need of money to go abroad and write The Grandmothers, and gave a party which brought us together to wonderful effect.
AUGUST 6
[To Bernadine Szold, re her health.]
As to the martyrdom and perhaps peril of your respiratory condition, what can I say? At our age, as to matters of fact including physiology and psychopathology, destiny has us in its hands; and no one can escape dying. On the other hand, no one has to die more than once. Only we have to suffer.
Whereas the spirit, in its various aspects—goodness of heart and sunniness of disposition; literature and the arts; great causes, such as Lloyd’s reformer’s zeal about hospitals and medical schools, and Barbara’s family philanthropy; stoicism, Monroe’s for example, in re his arthritis; the bravery of the manic-depressive, myself for one, with great intelligence often wasted in emotion and self-concern—the spirit (I say) can rise above illness and ignore the passage of time, a good deal of the time.
Monroe has a new protégé [Anatole Pohorilenko]: a central European of golden good looks, speaking six languages, indefatigably studious and ambitious, a winner! His having a friend is a situation that has always immeasurably helped me—compensating for some of my inadequacies toward my dearest of all.
AUGUST 7
How weakness of character has haunted me—not so much disadvantageous as shaming—a thousand little submissivenesses that have seemed to me all right—but unworthy of the vocation of a man of letters, frittering away my self-respect. For example: Apartment in Athens—to think that I allowed my title to be altered by supposedly expert publishers.
AUGUST 17
“Katherine Anne Porter: confessional conversation: ‘My own loose wanton self.’”
&n
bsp; My dearest of all is a phrase lover. His notes too fragmentary: haiku of the landscape of the mind. But they are beautiful, worth keeping and pondering. I was compulsively sorting a box of clippings, slowly waking up to strains of Mozart, with the light of the day delayed by river fog, when I found the above note, and for various reasons it made my heart ache. How I wish that I could inspire him to put his journal notes in order! In the event of his dying before I do, they will tempt me terribly. Meanwhile I believe he would take both pleasure and pride in the task and the outcome. I must not, cannot, force him to do or not do anything. His strength hates my strength, and perhaps vice versa.
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