A Heaven of Words

by Glenway Wescott

East 51st Street. Thoughtlessly at 7:20 a.m. I happened to turn on the desk lamp in Monroe’s bedroom, rousing him from his last hour of sleep, his worst hour of arthritic torture. He reproved me and I begged his pardon. Then I told him, “I feel like a new man today.”

  How proud I was of his monosyllabic response. “Good!”

  MAY 14

  I might have gone to a new movie at the Jewel but didn’t because Monroe said he might call. Then I fell asleep and the telephone rang and I thought it was Monroe, but at the same time believed that I was dreaming. It was John Stevenson, here for just 24 hours, with an early engagement with his big boss, and another engagement in Los Angeles tomorrow afternoon—too tired even to summon one of his playmates. Then Doris phoned to thank Monroe for a gift.

  We’re all separated; a funny feeling. This for Monroe with love and sorrow, and promise.

  My family in our New Jersey abode has for some time been haunted by a criminal lunatic, divorced at last [from Lloyd and Barbara’s daughter Debo] but still hanging around, threatening arson, and in fact a week ago attempting arson, and I, by my poor brother’s miscalculation, have been cast in the role of the lunatic’s chief enemy.

  Haunted, haunted once more by the possibilities of arson.

  JULY 4

  Almost everything has happened to me in my long slow-moving life, now climaxing and coming to a close faster and faster and faster.

  NOVEMBER 21

  Said Saki, the author of cruelly funny stories which, strange as it seems to me now, I enjoyed reading in my mysterious youth, “Most writers are happy, if at all, only on the days that they write.”

  1982

  FEBRUARY 11

  Thomas de Quincey remark: “What luxury I lived in for half a century, writing well, and less well, reading all sorts of literature, and never having to keep house.”

  Elena Gerhardt [a famous German singer and early friend]: Elena had Greek goddess features and pulled her hair tightly up from her noble brow. Skirts were obligatorily short in 1923–24; she had shapely legs. She was beautifully corseted and when she sang her arms just reached around her full torso, so full of breath-control, and her fingers joined to hold open a little opera prompt-book that I never saw her look at. And just below the song book she wore a large round bouquet of orchids, slightly trembling with her soprano notes.

  Note: My dearest Mon, Perhaps I will have fallen asleep before you get back. Make a noise in the library, unless you are too sleepy.

  APRIL 9

  For months and months, just before I wake up, I dream that I am myself and that I am about to die, and before that happens I must write something that Monroe hasn’t already read, something as good as Kipling and Hardy and Henry James.

  It was right and proper of me not to let Monroe ask Brooke Astor to include me in her dinner party—but damn it, I wish I had been wrong and improper.

  MAY 30

  It touches me how many indefatigable captions illustrated by the New Yorker cartoonists apply to me, as to my melancholy, apathy, my shame. For instance: “Most of Glenway’s ideas never see the light of day.”

  “The press of my foot to the earth / springs a hundred affections, / They scorn the best I can do to relate them.”—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself.”

  No need, perhaps no possibility of explaining my many ill-starred enterprises, sorry abandonments.

  JUNE 5. 2:45 A.M.

  “Give me an old man’s frenzy,” Yeats exclaimed somewhere. Could it have been in one of the letters to Dorothy Wellesley, or perhaps Dramatis Personae? Would that I could plan, or even hope, to find time to read and re-read his never exactly collected works of prose and poetry. The greatest lyric poet—leaving out the playwrights and the epic narrators.

  The moral of this fragmentary piece: Give me a reasonable and enforceable agenda, pre-auroral before daybreak.

  DAY AFTER LABOR DAY, 5:20 A.M.

  To Monroe: Have I told you what I want carved on my tombstone, if anything? “Always, in every way, I bit off more than I could chew.”

  OCTOBER 21

  I got up at 12:30 a.m., tormented by John Stevenson having distanced me.

  NOVEMBER 30

  A good bit of the structure of my life and lifework caved in yesterday when my great Monroe gently, confidently, reported his nightmare about my publishing “The Glimpse Beneath the Door,” that is, letting Ralph Pomeroy publish it.

  1983

  JANUARY 26

  Monroe: Just lately, in his sickness, whereas he is faultlessly kind to great ladies and young men, he seems to look down on me. I dare say that it is mostly my fault. One of my most troublesome faults is getting my feelings hurt. Can I cure it?

  I am afraid of the dark and I may say that it is afraid of me.

  FEBRUARY 13

  This is my lifelong Monroe’s 84th birthday.

  How we have suffered and made one another suffer for circa six months in the entire mysterious matter of David Rockefeller’s commissioning him to write a brief but all too capacious foreword to the catalogue of his European pictures—his and his wife’s—due to his inability to write any such thing and his wild determination not to give up writing, and due to my conceit and masochistic hope of helping him!

  MARCH 23

  It has always stirred my mind to notice what gaping distances that have taken place in the lifework of a good many painters.

  I have invented certain forms: the family tree [The Grandmothers]; the Mozartesque opera without music [The Pilgrim Hawk], what the French know as legende chorée.

  APRIL 28

  Three or four times in the year gone by, Monroe has fallen face down and from head to foot. A seizure of some sort. On the eve of his departure for Geneva, Munich and Vienna, with his whirlwind International Council, it happened once more, worse than before, cutting his forehead, on West 54th Street in front of George Rey’s restaurant. G.R. sent a waiter with a towel and put him in a taxi. His arrival at 251 frightened me indescribably. Anatole arrived and tagged after him to Lenox Hill Emergency Ward. They sent him home to New Jersey to the specialists in my brother’s hospital and our good family doctor.

  No one is desperate, not even I, least of all the sporadically bleeding octogenarian himself, and he persists in driving his old Cadillac to and fro.

  I said to him, “Your optimism is so powerful that it amounts to heroism and frightens all the rest of us. You often fail to report truthfully, even to your own physician.”

  He replied, firmly, “I like the way I am.”

  Love in my case, at this phase of life, amounts mostly to gratitude and admiration.

  JULY, 4:15 A.M.

  Sometimes it seems in the morning darkness that I could seize and love the first glimpses of my latest small subject matter, and work with it word-by-word, play with it nonstop—until my elderly fatigue and physical weakness envelopes me.

  SEPTEMBER 2

  Good advice from a moribund great lady who asked, “Oh Glenway, are you as kind as you are courteous?”

  I suffered what the French call “Un coup de vieux,” translated by me as “a wallop of old.”

  [A note to Monroe.]

  Dear—I didn’t wake you because you need sleep. I love you and upon waking found myself happy thereby. Until this evening—G.

  1984

  MEMORIAL DAY

  Is it possible that I may fail to ever write again? Again and again in the early morning I take a page of the pale pink paper that delights me, punched three times for my habitual three-ring binders, and then what?

  Afterword

  WESCOTT NEVER BELIEVED he would outlive Wheeler, even though Monroe had suffered with arthritis and other problems for the past two decades while Glenway remained relatively healthy. Now it was Glenway marooned at Haymeadows while Monroe kept up his city routine and international travel. To compensate, Monroe would report on their beloved New York City Ballet, the dinner parties, and museum news. Though Glenway’s correspondence was over, Monroe sent cheerful postcards
from abroad.

  Looking to the future, John Connolly and Ivan Ashby bought the Haymeadows house from Lloyd and spent weekends there more often. At other times friends visited and found Glenway fairly well, speaking a bit haltingly but with clarity, wit, and humor—and with an excellent memory of past conversations and events. Nothing was getting resolved with the journals, and Lloyd and Monroe had most of the bankers boxes of material stored in the loft of the nearby garage, formerly a barn. In February 1986, Glenway experienced a mild heart attack and spent several days at Hunterdon Medical Center, at 2100Wescott Drive. There he told John Stevenson, “I disgrace myself with loneliness and boredom and vexation.” He’d like to come to the city and have a party, he said.

  Wescott’s last birthday was on Friday, April 11, 1986, and a local newspaper reported that he celebrated with family and friends at a restaurant in New Hope. The next day John Stevenson and I drove out to visit. At just that time Arbor House had published a handsome new edition of The Grandmothers with a cover illustration of Wescott’s autobiographical character, young Alwyn Tower. Glenway had heard about it but not seen it and we brought a whole boxful, along with other birthday gifts. In jacket and bright lavender tie, Glenway was pleased by the attractive new book and—coming as it did, out of nowhere—seemed to put to rest any worries about the journals, though he knew they’d be posthumous. He took a phone call of congratulations about the book and replied, “I had nothing to do with it. It came through the trees, looking for me.” When he was asked to sign a few books, his hand could only manage a shaky scrawl, which upset him. Then he went for a ride to see his favorite country lane, Laurel Road in New Hope. With a smile he said, “I dreamed of it last night, but I didn’t think that would be enough to bring it on.” He also enjoyed a visit to a public flower garden and lunch in Lambertville.

  In May, Wescott’s doctors gave him a pacemaker and he was stable through the summer, with the care of Lloyd, Monroe, and Anatole; John Connolly and Ivan; and Lloyd’s faithful staff: Dorothy, Jerome, and Ethel.

  In early October he suffered a stroke that affected his speech and mobility. He was home in two weeks and recovered slightly in the coming months. His bed was moved down to their library, by a window overlooking the fields. Still living in California, temporary executor John Stevenson visited in January 1987 for an emotional reunion. Then he met with Lloyd and a family lawyer to help settle affairs.

  On Sunday night, February 22, Glenway passed away at home. Among the newspaper tributes, the New York Times referred to him as “one of the last of the major American expatriate writers who lived in France in the 1920s and 1930s,” and the Times of London stated, “He will be remembered as long as fiction is read.” On March 11, he was remembered at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with speakers including Jane Gunther, Russell Lynes, and William Maxwell, and piano pieces performed by Ned Rorem.

  Within forty-eight hours of Wescott’s passing, Wheeler suffered a stroke. After a long rehabilitation he lived at his New York apartment and made his last trip to Europe in late July 1988. He passed away on August 14 and was honored by a large gathering at the Museum of Modern Art on November 3. Lloyd died at home on Christmas Eve 1990. Continual Lessons, Wescott’s journals of 1937 to 1955, appeared shortly afterward.

  At Haymeadows, a small, nearly hidden, centuries-old farmers’ graveyard has a large marble marker, listing the names of the Wescott clan, including Glenway and Monroe.

  Postscript: In his memorial speech for Wescott, William Maxwell said Glenway was wrong to punish himself about not publishing more. He should have finished more of his nonfiction projects, true. But no writer can produce more quality novels than he or she is able. Of his four novels, three are high art, and the other, Apartment in Athens, was a bestseller and is now an award-winning movie by producer/director Ruggero Dipaola. They are reprinted often enough, including in many foreign-language editions. And there are the journals. No writer could ask for more.

  A Glossary of Glenway Wescott’s Contemporaries

  Cyrilly Abels (1903–75). Mademoiselle editor, later a literary agent.

  Edward Albee (b. 1928). Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright best known for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  Joseph Alsop (1910–89). Played by John Lithgow in the 2012 play The Columnist, a powerful Washington insider who hid his homosexuality despite Senator Joe McCarthy and Soviet spies.

  Lou Ames. Television show producer, including NBC’s Today Show.

  Louis Armstrong (1901–71). “Satchmo,” the great New Orleans trumpet player and singer.

  Brooke Astor (1902–2007). Socialite and philanthropist, especially favoring the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Public Library. She once saved the Jefferson Library in Greenwich Village after a phone call from Wescott. Monroe Wheeler used to accompany her to the ballet and visit her “Holly Hill” country estate.

  W. H. Auden (1907–73). British-American poet, one of the century’s greats. Wescott discusses one of his most important poems, “September 1, 1939,” in a March 1980 entry.

  Don Bachardy (b. 1934). American portrait artist and longtime companion to Christopher Isherwood.

  George Balanchine (1904–83). Russian-American preeminent choreographer. Cofounder and balletmaster of the New York City Ballet.

  Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (b. 1934). Poet, writer, critic, and educator.

  Samuel Barber (1910–81). Acclaimed composer, twice awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

  Maurice Baring (1874–1945). British poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist, and translator.

  Djuna Barnes (1892–1982). Influential novelist, poet, and playwright.

  Sir Cecil Beaton (1904–80). British portrait and fashion photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer.

  Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007). Swedish director, producer, and writer.

  Connie Bessie (1918–85). Radio and television producer, then a Newsweek editor. She was a friend of Mary Hemingway and a favorite of Wescott at his 1970s readings of his journals.

  Isabel Bishop (1902–88). Painter and graphic artist.

  Louise Bogan (1897–1970). Poet who also reviewed poetry for the New Yorker. U.S. Poet Laureate in 1945.

  Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). Argentine short story writer, translator, essayist, and poet.

  Marie-Louise Bousquet (1886–1975). Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar.

  Coburn Britton (1936–97). Poet, publisher, and founder of Prose journal.

  William Burroughs (1914–97). Central figure among the Beats; novelist, short story writer, and spoken word performer.

  Mary Butts (1890–1937). British novelist, modernist, and student of Aleister Crowley.

  Witter Bynner (1881–1968). Santa Fe poet, writer, and scholar.

  Paul Cadmus (1904–99). Influential American “magical-realist” artist. Brother-in-law of Lincoln Kirstein and a friend of Wescott, Wheeler, George Platt Lynes, E. M. Forster, and many more.

  (Sir Thomas Henry) Hall Caine (1853–1931). British novelist and playwright.

  Alexander Calder (1898–1976). American sculptor and artist.

  Joseph Campbell (1904–87). Mythologist, writer, and lecturer. Author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

  Cass Canfield (1897–1986). One of America’s great literary editors and publishers, at Harpers.

  Truman Capote (1924–84). American author best known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, the scandalous Answered Prayers, and many movie adaptations.

  Henri Cartier Brésson (1908–2004). Highly acclaimed French photographer.

  Willa Cather (1873–1947). Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist of the Great Plains.

  Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933). Renowned Greek poet.

  John Cheever (1912–82). Acclaimed novelist and short story writer.

  Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972). French actor, singer, and entertainer.

  Eleanor Clark (1913–96). Author and National Book Award winner. Wife of poet, novelist, and
critic Robert Penn Warren.

  Lord Kenneth Clark (1903–83). British author and broadcaster. As a museum director and art historian a friend of Monroe Wheeler.

  Jean Cocteau (1899–1963). French artist, novelist, poet, playwright, and filmmaker. Best known for films such as Les Enfants Terribles, Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus.

  (Sidonie-Gabrielle) Colette (1873–1954). The French novelist inspired Wescott, who wrote essays about her and the introduction to Short Novels of Colette.

  Padraic Colum (1881–1972). Irish poet, novelist, playwright, biographer, and children’s book author.

  Cyril Connolly (1903–74). Literary critic, author, and editor of the literary magazine Horizon.

  Lady Diana Cooper (1892–1986). British socialite and actress, renowned for her beauty.

  Bill Cosby (b. 1937). Comedian, actor, author, and educator.

  Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989). Literary critic, novelist, and poet.

  Josephine (Porter Boardman) Crane (1873–1972). Socialite and patron of the arts, co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum and a founder of the Museum of Modern Art. She was known for her literary salons at 820 Fifth Avenue, New York, and at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

  Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). British occultist, mystic, magician, and poet.

  E. E. Cummings (1894–1962). Poet, playwright, and novelist. Longtime famous resident at 4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York.