A Heaven of Words
Page 25
AUGUST 25
[To Raymond Mortimer re Baron Philippe de Rothschild.]
I’d like to try to tell you how I feel or what I think about him as of now; accumulated pettiness and finally the deathbed, the several deathbeds. I have always enjoyed him. Except tête-à-tête those obligatory morning walks. One morning he would complain of his wife, trying to get me to try to change her ways for his sake or to his advantage. The morning after, mood change, he begged and maneuvered and wheedled, supposed that I knew a great deal about Pauline before his time or by dint of her confidence. No such thing! I didn’t even prevaricate, as I often do when pressured for secrets, mine or other people’s.
I’ve never known anyone to cover her tracks so well, and she often told me untruths and denied truths, unaffectedly and as it were instinctively. Come to think of it, we talked about this as a part of the nature of womanhood—she brought it up—on our last day together, in Boston.
AUGUST 27
To quote Andy Warhol, dear, dull, ill, indomitable, cynically wise, sordidly successful, “Everyone is a celebrity for 15 minutes.”
OCTOBER
Yesterday’s arrhythmia, pulse, pain, sleep.
Horror, sorrow—not shame but a soft fatalism.
One of my best and also one of my worst metaphors: my Titanic-like talent, my desk always inhabited morning after morning, by little donkey-like literary materials, jottings, sketches, commonplaces, clippings. Whatever my awakening eyes light on I irresistibly and disgracefully fall in love with.
OCTOBER 3
Exactly as the sun thrust up through neighbor Allee’s trees, the great weeping sound of our wild geese circling up from the Wickecheoke Creek and down over the Delaware.
A little later, our cock pheasant, prophetic of frosty weather before long, shouted his way over the almost ripe corn into the spinney, the part of the spinney which hasn’t been enclosed in the tiger cage.
OCTOBER 6
The other night I dreamt that I was Katherine Anne, uncontrollably garrulous. Last night I dreamt that I was Barbara, exhausting herself raising money for her Trenton museum while pneumonia and lymphoma devoured her. What next? I dread Pauline who will softly scold me for not writing.
NOVEMBER
My infancy was, or has become, a dream. Waking me up, lulling me back to sleep, mirroring my fate and my behavior and the choices I have made, and the potentials rejected or neglected, veiling things or confusing one with the other. Theme: fear.
NOVEMBER 7
[Re the death of Janet Flanner.]
This must not be, cannot be, an altogether grief-stricken occasion. In the deterioration of her great old heart, our beloved Janet has had to endure her share of suffering in the last year or two, with worse to come if she had lived longer.
The two large volumes, as edited by Mr. Shawn, are her masterwork, masterpiece. They have the unity and continuity of a great novel, and at the same time they serve superbly as a history of her half century, our half century.
DECEMBER
The great contemporary modern subject matter is the plight of women in love with homosexual men.
DECEMBER 14
Remembrance sometimes is like seeing and hearing ghosts, friendly ghosts. A number of my dead friends were gurus, which went unnoticed because of the energy, stir and originality of their everyday life style, and their sweet humility toward me. Now, dead, they have nothing to do for me except speak, re-speak.
1979
JANUARY 24
In childhood I saw a great comet. Was it Halley’s? It had seemed to me a blunt thrust of celestial flame with a short bushy tail. What I remember is not the event but my effort to find descriptive words for it all the following week or two.
German proverb: “The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people.”
APRIL 3, FIVE O CLOCK A.M.
My state of mind halfway between deep sleep and conscious-stricken reality, conscious failure, is like being a saint.
It isn’t inspiration which would (should) lead to the day’s work, as scheduled, bitten off, promised. It is vision, rotating, sweeping the very top of conscious awareness, the zenith, which leads to, or at least points to, again and again and again, what I find definable as god.
I can testify to the joy and spiritual sustenance of living with art.
If and when I move to a nursing home, I shall take a handful of postcards of my favorite art around the world. If I lose my eyesight, my visual memory is so rich that I can summon up a museum in my mind, hang and re-hang, judge and re-judge. I could in the text list a hundred pictures, any one of which as I lie on my deathbed may bring tears to my eyes, tears of joy.
APRIL 16
I used to say (perhaps I simply believed) that Easter was the only holy day that touched me poignantly, helpfully, sincerely.
Serendipity: a detestably affected word—who invented it? Walpole? [The word was invented by Horace Walpole.]
JUNE 15
My dearest of all: There is a kind of surcease, at least for a few hours or a few days, when we part. It may well be that I shall feel it as I die, if you outlive me.
JUNE 16
I feel that I must communicate with someone (someone not Monroe) freely, frankly, and with some entirety, as to the scope and component parts of my fate and destiny.
JUNE 23
John Stevenson and I are going to a little party in Bond Street for him and Jerry [Rosco] and Terry [Tolkin], and Andrew [Faulk].
JUNE 28
Lincoln [Kirstein] at the ballet, on Balanchine’s coronary by-pass: “It’s like having your tonsils out.”
JUNE 30
One should expect oneself to write efficiently in a room in which miscellany—the worst of all disconnected written or printed material—catches the eye. Some of it may inspire one, but that’s the worst of it, inspiration in any direction, not in line with one’s main work that day. A key-ring loaded with keys, fraught with emotions, and giving rise to anxiety, dread, shame, and waste of time and energy.
JULY 6
Poor over-age Monroe, divided between pain and pain-killers, has to deliver nine pages of promised manuscript to a rotten magazine as his contribution to the MoMA drive, rougher than ever this year, and as soon as he wakes up I must dictate from his scribble while he types it.
I don’t believe in God. He is a killer and, worse still, he is a fool. But I seem to feel sure that there is an eternity, or at least immortality.
JULY 8
Could I provide my poor dangerous beloved with (in every room that we both have access to) a set of light-switches that turn themselves off in two or three minutes?
No. The word “no” in my deteriorated life is like Poe’s crow’s “Nevermore.”
I had to put off writing this for three-quarters of an hour because I couldn’t remember the word “light-switch.” The least of my worries.
Word-consciousness, even negative, conducive to literature.
NOVEMBER 23
My Johnnie: I love him second (I suppose) to my old Monroe. And age is his advantage, with reference to me, as well as his handicap in general. In my case, perhaps only in my case, aged 78½, love consists mainly of gratitude and admiration.
Forever is every hour.
1980–1984
DURING THE EARLY EIGHTIES, Wescott manages to add some final journal material in a sporadic way. It is not a priority, and bouts of poor health lead to a month or months of silence. But he bounces back strongly, repeatedly, as some of these last entries show. Correspondence with some of his favorite friends had bolstered his journal writing in the past, and now those friends are gone. The most recent losses are Katherine Anne Porter, Cecil Beaton, and Raymond Mortimer. The journals book project weighs heavily on his mind, but the motivation to add new entries fades, and then health issues make the act of writing harder, until even some table-top notes to Monroe become precious. After a single 1984 entry the effort comes to a close, though he lives until early 1987.
A few last Wescott pieces appear. To keep up interest in the long-delayed journals, Robert Phelps arranges for a long selection called “Paris 1938” to be featured in the premier issue of Grand Street, Autumn 1981. The melancholy but heartfelt account of Glenway’s return visit to Paris includes his word portraits of Jean Cocteau, Janet Flanner, Nancy Cunard, and legendary entertainer Mistinguett. Drawn from lecture material, “A Succession of Poets” in the Fall 1983 Partisan Review is a fond reminiscence mostly of Marianne Moore, but also of Robert Frost and others.
Wheeler’s health problems are the larger worry for years, especially after he has several serious falls. But in October 1983 they both notice when Glenway—for the first time ever—misspeaks while reading to Monroe. Circulatory problems begin making it harder for him to read, speak, and write. On December 2, he is supposed to introduce his friend Joseph Campbell at the Princeton Club, but to his surprise he can’t get his little speech started. Campbell takes the microphone and gently covers over the awkward moment. During 1984, Glenway makes far fewer trips to the city, yet still manages to attend Monroe’s March 14 party for Baron Rothschild, several lunches with Robert Phelps and other friends, and a December 7 dinner at the Academy of Arts and Letters. Sharing one of the white limousines bringing Academy members home, poet Howard Moss notices that Glenway stumbles badly when getting out of the car at Fifty-First Street.
It becomes increasingly clear that Wescott is fine in the first half of the day, but badly fatigued afterward, and in 1985 he stops coming into the city.
1980
JANUARY
A good deal of old age is error. Sorrowful wit, out of powerful useful mind, corroding away the great matrimony of Monroe Wheeler and myself.
JANUARY 31
How pitifully I wept last night, sitting alone in front of the TV, dismayed by my month-long physical enfeeblement—taken by surprise by the still sweet voice of one of the Andrews Sisters singing one of Richard Rodgers’ best melodies—with the cowardly thought of not having Monroe here beside me for another crucial month.
Imaginary Letter: To Jill Krementz—“Let me alone. I am an old dropout. I can’t be scolded.”
MARCH
W. H. Auden: What exactly happened on September 1, 1939? Hitler’s incomparable army invaded Poland.
Auden must have taken his facile, great timeless pen in hand immediately, as his “September 1, 1939” appeared in the New Republic on October 18, 1939. Rereading it now I am struck by its softly strumming music, its undressed vocabulary, its impact line after line, as it were a comforting, courage-giving hand, a touch of a loving hand, the slap of resentment or of self-criticism. Reminiscent, believe it or not, of “A Day for a Lay.”
Enthusiasm was my attitude upon meeting Auden, soon after his arrival in the United States, and I expected real friendship to ensue. I have been as ashamed of my failure to like some admirable men and women as by their non-response to me: Sandburg, Hemingway, Stein. We did not spend many hours together.
I remember his pronouncing that I surely did not have the temperament to write the great novel—how did he know that?—and saying, perhaps to console me, that it was an overrated category of literature anyway.
MARCH 28
This great old house, Haymeadows, so-named by me when it was surrounded by hay (in recent years it has been corn); never properly divided between Monroe and me, the only theme we have ever fought about—now gradually ceasing to be home for us, naturally—is full of weird agglomerations, collections, abandoned pieces of prose, precious though not very valuable works of art, wonderful photographs of our very own departed photographer, great furniture provided by our departed female partner and benefactor. At the back door, lions and tigers.
MAY 8
Why am I cheered up by the designation of Senator Muskie to be Secretary of State? I remember his weeping when he was in the running for a still higher office and someone insulted his wife. And the way he drank too much at the fundraiser, then fell asleep at the long dais.
Elvis Presley died of coronary arrhythmia.
Is that what I am going to die of? I don’t think so. Of losing my temper perhaps.
MAY 28
Memory, like inspiration, like belief, like eloquence and persuasiveness, has to be controlled and used, or it will run riot and hinder more than it helps.
JUNE 17
Memory is a long-term fairy tale. A good deal of the texture of existence is an interweaving of the present sensation with some part of the life gone by.
Melancholy at the task of boxing and labeling six boxes of my archives of the 1960s.
JUNE 28
Lincoln Kirstein’s confession to me in the early thirties: that he was almost color-blind—hence his love of sculpture ([Gaston] Lachaise, [Elie] Nadelman, [Augustus] St. Gaudeus). Also his liking for realist and surrealist painting with 3-dimensional monochromatic under-painting, that of his brother-in-law [Paul Cadmus], for instance.
JULY 18
I am haunted by a great saying by Jules Renard, misquoted in my memory: Perhaps inspiration results from working. It certainly doesn’t precede it.
AUGUST 4
My last (I hope) will and testament. M.W. reminds me to leave $5,000 to Anatole Pohorilenko. He has left that amount in his will to John Robert Connolly. Also, a matter of great consequence: As we now own jointly, half and half, apartment 8M, 251 East 51st Street, I must bequeath my half to him, as he has bequeathed his half to me.
Identity of my co-executor: John Stevenson.
AUGUST 8
Perhaps the worst thing that happens to me, sometimes more than once a day, is to lose my fountain pen.
I woke up at 2 a.m. and found myself too tired to go back to sleep. Leftover nightmare flowed around me. Fatigue of yesterday led to the fatiguing day ahead. Poor old fool.
AUGUST 13
I am afraid of the dark. Failing to find things, having to bring out and set up my little table and my tape recorder, and to pack and unpack my little luggage, makes me feel feeble-minded, acidic, self-conscious, Monroe-conscious.
AUGUST 29
The trouble with poetry is that, even in its futile mimicry of other poets, it aims at perfection.
Prose is free, free to be honest, to intermingle feelings, thoughts and emotions, free to change its mind.
AUGUST 30
An image of evil. For three days an unkillable large blowfly; presumably a side-effect of the carcasses that Thane Clark feeds his miserable tigers.
SEPTEMBER 9, 6:30 A.M.
My mind in the early morning is lined with mirrors of memory, unavoidably tormented with every sort of egocentricity and realization of myself, past and present and seemingly future.
Visiting with Angels. For days, no for weeks, there have been coincidences that others would think trivial—to my mind, in which super-stitiousness and imagination mix, they have been like a coming and going of spirits in broad daylight, flashes of electric from my fingertip
s when I touch things.
When there is a streak of madness in me, is it possible to foresee what form it would take if it should happen? Sometimes when I think about myself, my inspirations, my sudden connections, my peaceful feeling of uniqueness, I am reminded of William Blake.
DECEMBER 9, 7:30 A.M.
My dearest of all: I am afraid that I am as mad as a hatter. No harm in that, if somehow I can manage to recall the last months or years of our unique life: a double portrait, in your honor.
1981
FEBRUARY 18