A Heaven of Words

by Glenway Wescott

  AUGUST 19

  A. E. Housman. “On the idle hill of summer, / Sleepy with the flow of streams / Far I hear the steady drummer / Drumming like a noise in dreams. / Far and near and low and louder / On the roads of earth go by, / Dear to friends and food for powder, / Soldiers marching, all to die.”

  Housman’s elegiac obsession may not have been all amorous. With a conservative temperament, wounded by his failure as a student at Oxford (no honors, not even a passing grade), in an exceedingly conformist society, he was a pacifist and a radical.

  AUGUST 27

  [Re a youthful photo of Marjorie Wescott.]

  This small snapshot came to light and gave me a bad pang of old mortality. The most beautiful of my sisters, except for an anxious expression verging on a frown. To think of her in the last years of her life defaced and deformed by cancerous lymph glands, a martyr to optimistic, experimental medicine. The only child, grandchild, or great grandchild of our parents to have died, as of this date!

  SEPTEMBER 2

  Going to Fire Island for the wild Labor Day weekend with Janet Flanner and Natalia Murray—that is to say, not just for fun, certainly not for games. On October 25 I am giving a reading of Foster’s post-humous homosexual love story Maurice at the 92nd Street Y in New York. I accepted that invitation without stopping to think that it may be landmark-like in my small personal case, as in the overall trend of moral-cultural events: Wilde’s trial, Lawrence’s floggings, Maugham’s will, the Wolfenden legislation, the [Lytton] Strachey biography, the $135,000 advance to the Institute for Maurice. Wescott the great sheep in sheep’s clothing.

  SEPTEMBER 4

  Fire Island, Labor Day Weekend. Writing at daybreak in an alcove window facing the bay—suddenly a huge black Persian cat passed across my window. Cherry Grove is full of almost-marriages, serious liaisons. One beautiful pair together seven years. The strange morale: a place dedicated to debauchery, characterized by sexual cohesiveness. Tensions, were it not for the meat-rack and the gang bangs. Byrne F. gave his account of having hustled himself to two or three businessmen: “Nothing is easier if you are a beauty, as I was, and I could always get an erection.” Bodybuilders with hard boozy faces and bodies like Greek ephebes. And lower class teenage boys with little paunches. The extreme hedonism, booze and sexual debate, does not necessarily undermine community spirit. Neat, clean, well mannered. More dinner parties or cocktail parties than Newport or Palm Beach.

  SEPTEMBER 9

  To Paul Cadmus: I am busy (and overdue) with a miniature memoir of Forster for the New York Times, marginal to the homosexual novel, and your letter lifted me out of my inferiority complex about it, relieved my aches about it, and ennobled me a little.

  One must never forget the impact of the trial and imprisonment, and moral and economic ruination, of Oscar Wilde upon English writers of the next generation, Housman, Maugham, the Lawrences (both D. H. and T. E.), Strachey, and in a very different and almost saintly way—incapable of scandal and dishonesty—upon Forster.

  Three fourths of the literary remains of Blake were destroyed after his death—not for indecency but for blasphemy.

  Certainly a great many individual human beings have an itch to destroy.

  SEPTEMBER 12

  On Thursday afternoon, walking along the north side of 51st Street between First and Second Avenues, suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was aware of no longer fearing my death. If I was thinking of anything in particular when this idea or sensation occurred, it was wiped clean from my mind. But as I looked back on it and reported it to Monroe, scarcely expecting to be taken seriously, he gave me a joyous smile and fond glance. “Oh, I’m so glad,” he said. “You know, the fear of death is useless, no help to us.” He is a more intense realist than I. The knowledge of the futility of certain emotions like that don’t help either. When they fade from the mind it is, as people used to say, by the grace of God.

  SEPTEMBER 20

  To Isabel Bishop: Did I tell you that we [the Institute of Arts and Letters] got $135,000 in guaranteed royalties from the American book publication of Maurice, given to us by magnanimous Isherwood for an E. M. Forster award.

  News item: Farrar, Straus & Giroux have bought my monster Journal, from 1937 on, and Robert Phelps is editing it for publication … the final transaction and decision took place yesterday. It gives me gooseflesh. Playing my ace in the hole.

  SEPTEMBER 24

  There will have to be a great many more books like Maurice before the homosexual life will cease to be a mystery, with its extreme friendliness, its great gamut of emotions, its erudition of sensualities.

  Almost awe-inspiring calm of my becalmed sex life, leaving a routine of pornography and masturbation, not at all sorrowful or grief-stricken, not unhealthy, which sufficiently alleviates physical tensions. I remind myself of a predatory bird no longer able to swoop or eat.

  What is left? A great sense of beauty, my imagination as voyeuristic as ever, the mind’s eye of memory still keen, tenderness more or less paternal, admiration acute, and haunting anxiety, and a kind of prayerfulness verging almost on religion or love.

  OCTOBER 6

  [Notes on E. M. Forster’s Maurice.]

  There are three great themes in the work. 1. Chronology, with the maturing processes little by little almost scientifically observed, pecking order, arousal patterns, etc.; nuance by nuance, softly stepping, cat-footed from boyhood to the mid-twenties. 2. Intelligence on the increase, as Maurice’s almost sterile, dry, hard temperament is dug into by plow or (rather) by spade and hoe and rake, moistened by the storms of sorrow; extreme conventionality giving way to an almost religious independence and eccentricity. 3. Style and form, animating and sharing the work according to these two developments: the language less and less chatty, more and more lyrical; the scenes as in a play, Maugham-like, giving way to scenes as in an oil painting, Bonnard-like, profoundly colorful and only half representational; post-coital communications between the protagonist, finally, a kind of telepathy.

  OCTOBER 17

  With Barbara to New Canaan for Philip Johnson’s reception at the Glass House. A beautiful house with its three adjoining buildings: the windowless guest house, the underground picture gallery, and the new sculpture museum. Autumn reds and pinks, golden yellow and bronze.

  OCTOBER 31

  A sudden realization, 6:30 a.m., on All Soul’s Day as I buckle down to a fortnight of onerous though proud drudgery, preparing the total text of my so-called Journal 1937–67 to be Xeroxed: I want to write a series of short stories, the same old series (A Santa Fe Scandal, Dear German, The Lieder Singer, The Little Ocean Liner) but with all my new technique.

  O Wescott, beware now, on your last lap, lest your imagined enterprises get to be a disastrous obstacle, as indeed they have been in the past.

  Bill Maxwell’s advice: “Never less than one complete sentence, every morning at about sunrise.”

  NOVEMBER 2

  Yukio Mishima. Any sort of playacting is perilous. So many suicides, intended to manifest the tragic situation and state of mind of the suicidal one, to act out his suffering and bafflement, needing help, needing at least sympathy, not intended to go all the way to death—end fatally by some accident: ingestion of one barbiturate too many because one has previously imbibed one drink too many, etc. Likewise the demise of certain masochists.

  Accidents happen inside the mind as well as in areas of circumstance and physical excess. Until almost the end, I think Mishima may have been showing off, promoting his literary production and dramatizing his political program (à la Hemingway, [Gabriele] D’Annunzio, Colonel Lawrence, Stefan George); then suddenly he went mad, with the last stage set, the sword in his hand, his four companions trained to play their supporting roles.

  A man of astonishing abilities and energies; unattractive to me (in so far as I can judge him, sight unseen)—but liked, not just admired, by discriminating, dear friends of mine.

  NOVEMBER 4

  Five a.m. A s
urprising conclusion, perhaps a decision—great manuscript preserver that I am, the foe of the burners and ostrich-heads:

  The chief legitimate function of university libraries is to keep our manuscripts and documents safe for future biographers and historians.

  NOVEMBER 12

  [A postcard to Bernadine Szold.]

  Dear, very dear Bernadine, I have been reading the reminiscences that you sent Monroe: your gentle, enthusiastic, never intolerant breeze blowing upon my heaped-up autumn leaves. Robert Phelps, at work on my journals 1937–46, is obliging me to remember as much as possible—so much of my miscellaneous writing is around and around the fact or the event, leaving mystery, leaving ego.

  NOVEMBER 15

  Robert [Phelps] was still here when I arrived on Friday and we had another of our bouts of contentiousness. He frankly enjoys them, and baits me. For example, he wants a lot of illustrations, mainly of me—”Your beauty is an important part of the record!”

  He took away 1937–1946 [the journal binders]; all that can be crammed into Volume 1, he thinks.

  A happy weekend with John and Ivan. Lloyd and Baba were in New York for the Horney benefit dinner. We saw Sunday Bloody Sunday: very well done and clever. I wasn’t convinced by the relationship between the woman and the boy.

  I sent Marianne a telegram: “Happy Birthday ever dear friend and great poet whose every re-reading entrances Glenway and Monroe.”

  NOVEMBER 22

  The eighth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. I remember that I happened to be washing dishes, listening to rock and roll on my rasping little Japanese radio, so that I heard the first word of shouting in the street, the gunfire, the first announcement of the death! A few moments later, Earl Butler, on the phone weeping: “Not only have we killed our best president ever, we are providing the worst Texan there is.”

  DECEMBER, COPENHAGEN

  [Re the aborted novel, The Deadly Friend.]

  In 1932 or 1933 George Lynes had wanted to try to write a novel and couldn’t think of a plot. I like a fool invented this implausible love imbroglio, the ugly lover disguised by facial surgery. George soon tired of it, but it caught me and wasted two or three years of my life. Every man his own octopus.

  DECEMBER 5

  Wide awake at 3 a.m., due to the battering of my psyche by the great power-mad librarian, Lola Szladits [curator for the Berg Collection, at the New York Public Library]. Now I am due at the Academy, having maneuvered the happy-natured, handsome, affectionate poet Richard Wilbur into the presidency thereof.

  But it’s not the right sort of life. Let’s start all over again.

  1972

  FEBRUARY

  Marianne [Moore]’s funeral. One of her mottoes was “Rejoice Evermore,” two words extracted from a hymn: varied by her in a lifelong fugue. Let us now play parts in it, in honor of her.

  FEBRUARY 7

  Glimpses of the Past: Upon the day of Marianne’s coffin lying lonesome in the Presbyterian chapel next door to her apartment:

  Said Emerson, senile, at Longfellow’s funeral, passing beside the open coffin, “That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name.”

  FEBRUARY 15

  Began Monroe’s 73rd birthday [February 13] all over again; happier. I must be active somehow, with some bit of writing every day. His problem is going to be in town, and his cities and high society. He will get too tired and perhaps eat and drink too much, and out here at Haymeadows he will be bored. Every day that I spend with him I must think of something to do with him and/or for him.

  MARCH 20

  Half-asleep metaphor: I feel like an old but still promising race horse, taken out into the paddock with his peers, within sight of the track, sound of the crowd, smell of dirt and grass; but laden and bewitched by extra harness and heavy blanket and inexplicable bondage; no injury or pain; only the certain knowledge that he is not to run that day’s race.

  MARCH 26

  Robert [Phelps] said yesterday: “Of course you shall have what you want. But first you must hear what I want. And I feel sure you will want that.” Masterful.

  APRIL 8

  A Persian proverb: “If at noon the king should say, ‘The night is falling,’ it is a wise man who answers, ‘Behold the stars!’”

  APRIL 14

  Poets always go too far: I myself am both my good and bad fortune.

  APRIL 30

  Love-song of doves: Mourning doves, misnamed of course. Their obsessively loving discourse, though soft in texture, carries through the air like a knife: throbbing phrases at the base of the throat, with R’s rolled not as Parisians roll them, but in the way of the Balzac country, where young diplomats go to perfect their French.

  Not many creatures on earth fight their own species to death as humans do, as doves do. Beware of inordinate amorousness.

  MAY 13

  Everyone knows what a novel is, what biographies, autobiographies and memoirs are—but what is a journal? It is an immensity that is always (and has to be) fragmentary.

  Handwriting—graphology. I had a common and low-class handwriting when I was a little boy—it was what I was least good at, and some gentle criticism of my mother’s made me ashamed. I began to print and little by little I developed what might be called a calligraphy, affected in the twenties, very satisfactory after that, but slowly declining now.

  One of the great pitfalls in literature and indeed other arts is conceiving some piece of work in a matter of minutes or hours or days which in fact is going to take months or years to do.

  A good many writers of great consequence have been half hack, half amateur. The word genius must not be applied to us; neither can anyone entirely be ruled out of that category.

  JUNE 4

  To do Volume 1 of my so-called Journals what Giroux wants is to require me to use the better parts of “The Old Party” and the “Portrait Sketch” of Kinsey.

  Re: Robert Giroux. When dealing with superior men one must resign oneself to not knowing what they are working toward, or whether they are acting on instinct.

  JUNE 6

  The theme of Harper’s last bestseller, Love Story: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

  Surely, surely love means the opposite: always, always.

  JUNE 10

  East 51st Street. My tête-à-tête luncheon (with Lou) forcibly interrupted by two plumbers with equipment—the kitchen next door over-flowing, had to be approached from under the sink. What a sad omen of my elderly sexual situation! What a comical bit of symbolism!

  JULY 20

  [To David H.]

  Dear David, I love you fondly. I am grateful to you for pleasures and beauties. I’ll never forget a day in New York. I’ll never forget a night here … the first time I ever saw an orgasm expressed on your beautiful face, starting, peaking, subsiding—that wasn’t very long ago. Tear this up if you like. Or perhaps better still, send it to me for the final volume of my journals and remembrances which is to be entitled A Heaven of Words.

  SEPTEMBER 14

  I think I can say truthfully that I have never begrudged Monroe anything, even when I happened to be burning in inner hell: never envied him.

  Envy must be a sin of old age, in many if not all cases. It must also enter the artist’s temperament in some measure, or vice versa, as it is a matter of imagination.

  SEPTEMBER 22

  Ethel came with the mail a little while ago, shouting in her rasping way about this and that; and just after her departure, she shouted louder than ever, almost frightening. As I ran out I heard sweeter shouts in a chorus over the barn, over the ash trees, and I made out Ethel’s words: “Here they come, Glenway! Here they come! Listen to them!” Two dozen geese, loud and clear, black and white and glassy bright silver in the sunlight. Glory be to God.

  SEPTEMBER 27

  My father’s German brother-in-law was a bank teller and embezzled a bit; relations had to put up a lot of money to keep him from going to j
ail—shocking to me at about ten years of age. Said bank teller was also the father of my 17- or 18-year-old cousin, the first person I ever desired, all night long in the same bed, two or three nights, the first person to hurt my feelings along that line. He set a clock back to get me to bed early, so that he could seduce mother’s hired girl, unwatched.

  Saying goodnight to John, having to pretend that I didn’t know where and why he was going: Sobbing broke out in my mind and heart, but I forbade it; that is, I kept silent, dry, upright, and active around the house—having no right to any such waste of time.

  OCTOBER 7

  What Yeats said of our two greatest writers, Emerson and Whitman: “They are as great as writers can be without a vision of evil.”