A Heaven of Words Read online

  Overheard: Religious old American lady reminiscing: “I am so grateful to Doctor Bachman. He introduced me to Jesus Christ, and also to the Queen of Romania.”

  FEBRUARY 25

  Anna Braake: One of the drawings in the dining room broke its wire and fell with a clatter. No harm done, but Anna and I hurried from our respective sides of the house to investigate.

  “Spooks,” she said, “spooks!”

  “It’s what the Germans call a poltergeist,” I said.

  “Yes, we had it in one place I worked in Newark, in the kitchen. Oh, it moved things, it broke things, until we had a priest come and sprinkle it with holy water; then it stopped. I don’t believe in things like that, but they’re true.”

  MARCH 31

  Sent to Monroe in London: my memorandum supplementary to his will—how strange! No, not strange; partings have to be a rehearsal for the great aloneness.

  Sometimes one’s love of a person is like an attachment to a place—it is the scene of some great part of one’s life; it is the chief abode of one’s home sweet home.

  APRIL 10

  [Re auction of the late George Platt Lynes’s possessions.]

  I telephoned the Beverly Storage to enquire whether or not George’s things might be seen in the late afternoon, before the sale. “Oh, it’s terrible,” said Mr. Beverly, central European. “We got so much stuff now, we try to put some out in the halls but there’s too much. Maybe we sell some Lynes stuff tomorrow, maybe Wednesday; but maybe we have a better idea, to get a couple of dealers, and sell some stuff in lots all together, then we have more room.”

  This worried me, so in a very tactful and careful way I confided to him that I was an old friend, only interested in some papers, some letters, some snapshot albums, etc. To which he responded most sympathetically, “Oh, you know, we’re not interested in that kind of stuff…”

  I told him that I might try to come to the auction at the time previously specified … I telephoned Bernard [Perlin], whom all this irritated extremely, of course. He undertook to call Russell [Lynes, brother of George].

  If we challenge Russell or inconvenience him too much, perhaps he will just not give Bernard the portrait negatives prior to 1952, or not for a good long while. He told me that he intended to do so, when he was asking me for salable nude negatives—but he has not specified any such intentions to Bernard. It is a dilemma. It is a kind of Balzac plot— Le Cousin Pons? No, Cesar Birrotteau.

  This is the last day of my fifty-fifth year. Certain sorrowful and fascinating things which preoccupy me seem a matter of chance, mischance, not of wear and tear. Thus I see no reason not to wish to live forever. If permitted, I could still solve my problems, justify my pretensions, procrastinations, and other eccentricities.

  APRIL 18

  Anna Braake: I showed her Monroe’s itinerary on a map and what impressed her most was Tokyo, Jakarta, Melbourne and Auckland, Fiji, Honolulu and San Francisco. “Oh, there’s a terrible lot of water all around there, that’s the trouble! It’s a wonder the countries aren’t all drowned.”

  APRIL 24

  George [Platt Lynes] once told me that Alfred Kinsey expressed some surprise at the fact that Tex Smutney and Buddy Stanley never got erections while posing for him, despite the warmth of the bright lights, and the proximities, and voluptuous atmosphere.

  But here—about a half dozen photographs with a sand pile in a studio, intended for some assignment of bathing suits and beach fashion— Buddy has an erection. The erotic effect is very poignant and odd.

  The greater poignancy for me is the mystery of George’s having made the above statement to me. Mystery forever, now that he is dead.

  Upon the death of any longtime and intimate friend, this must be one of the strangest of the ways in which we feel the loss, and the fear of death in general. There are questions that no one except the departed could ever answer. We all have things to tell that no one else can ever be expected to understand or to take an interest in. We begin to formulate one of these questions, our minds start practicing one of these tales in order to tell it well at our next meeting—suddenly we catch ourselves at it; we are facing the abyss of bereavement, of oblivion.

  JUNE 5

  What a combination of pride and amusement I should feel if I could hybridize a new iris! Likewise, if I could coin a word. (The verb “belittle” was an invention of Thomas Jefferson’s.)

  JUNE 7

  Leaving New York for Chicago this Saturday. I shall leave Mother to the bear-hugs of the Jacobs family, lunch at the airport with perhaps Hugh Wilson and a university interviewer; then to spend the night with Monroe’s parents. On to Salt Lake City next day—and extremely occupied there, with eight 90-minute talks to my students, ten obligatory half-hour “coffee breaks,” one obligatory banquet, goodness knows how many novels to peruse and to criticize in tête-à-tête conferences, one public reading of my own fiction (I am inclined to rebel against this, or to play tricks when the time comes), one symposium on the “market” for manuscripts, and my public lecture with slides.

  On to Bloomington [the Institute for Sex Research], from June 23–26. A.C.K. [Alfred Kinsey] keeps complaining almost petulantly of my not giving them more time.

  When Kinsey preaches happiness and the right and proper pursuit in all this matter of love and sex, I wonder about us artists, etc., and I daresay so does he. But for two men to survive together stimulatingly, constructively, they must be well matched; and sameness of age is one of the great factors. Also they must have some mutual interest or enterprise: something more at stake than their pleasure and pride. Then if they are good enough, stoic enough, they stand a chance of outgrowing most of the painfulness and instability in due course, in a conjugal kind of friendship, like mine and Monroe’s.

  Kinsey isn’t old, nevertheless he is nearing the end, with terrible cardiac deterioration. Perhaps the circulation of his blood in his brain is irregular, causing lapses of memory, or recurrences of old patterns, devices, prejudices, fears—it is so in my mother’s case.

  But also the aged develop a new and particular ruthlessness, because they are in such a hurry, with so little time left, with no more of the luck of life—they expect us to forgive them, afterward, when we look back and conceive what they were feeling; and so we shall do, no doubt.

  I am haunted by Willy [W. Somerset Maugham], by the portrait I might do of him. They say he has forbidden us all to do anything of the kind. Does he feel so powerful?

  JUNE 8

  George Platt Lynes: Strange bad news: Bernard has now taken possession of all of his inheritance—and has found only select portrait negatives: only the Lynes family, the dancers, the celebrities, and George’s intimates—none of the ordinary commissioned portraiture; nothing for poor Bernard to sell. Monroe and myself in quantity, for example—but nothing of Lloyd and Barbara and Debo [GW’s niece]. The Tichenors and Chuck [Howard]—not Henry McIlhenny or even J. Wisner. To be interpreted two-fold, of course—bitterness against the bourgeoisie— and intense concern for what will interest posterity. Oh, one of Monroe’s lessons he learned well.

  Ralph Pomeroy is another foolish youth made self-conscious by poetry writing, who therefore is going to have trouble, or make trouble for myself, when it comes to writing prose. In his case the trouble is mainly that he writes verse with exceptional facility, and expects prose to flow still more facilely. In a way, free verse is easier—as Shaw once pointed out—because you can leave little difficulties, freakish syntax, riddlesomeness, ellipses, etc.

  JUNE 10

  Salt Lake City, University of Utah. Yesterday I began the day with a reading, almost a “performance” of The Pilgrim Hawk, abridged to an hour’s length—and I was proud of it. The tragedy of a life like mine is that years pass without producing any such work.

  In Evanston, Monroe’s parents seemed to be happy—their thoughts turn to him with a little flutter, wonderment, and indeed raison d’etre, every few minutes.

  JUNE 14

&nbs
p; University of Utah. The evening is long and lonely—perfect for reading and annotating the poor insignificant typescripts. I haven’t the head or heart for it. Waiting for the evening breeze from the little canyon—it has been 98 again today—I have come up to a bench on the golf course: the green is a comfort.

  This afternoon a bright little rag of a boy who writes poetry helped me bring a shelf full of books up from the lower campus, as I have made a point of hoping that my writers will read a little; and I complained in a mild clever way of the fact that the university does not have [K. A. Porter’s] Noon Wine (I bought a copy for them) or The Pilgrim Hawk or Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa or Osbert [Sitwell]’s memoirs. A little later, as he arranged the others of my selection in the conference secretary’s office, the boy said, “It is surprising how many of these books I or friends of mine happen to own.”

  “That is a comfort to me,” I said.

  “Yes, that is why I told you.”

  “Yes, I know, thank you.”

  Notes on Hemingway. “Father and Son”: Nick Adams—a boy’s loss of virginity with Indian girl, her little brother standing by. Green Hills of Africa: Mainly about killing wild animals, beautifully written—technique extraordinarily suggestive of sexual pornography. Death in the Afternoon: Brief ugly paragraph—anti-homosexuality in re Cocteau and Radiguet. To Have and Have Not: Moving account of a widow’s grief, with reminiscences. “The Sea Change”: Lesbian love. Janet Flanner has referred to this as a fine piece of fiction on the subject. The Sun Also Rises: Crass, self-centered mentality, fantasy of castration, misunderstanding of the heroine.

  JUNE 18

  University of Utah. This is my worst day here (I feel)—perhaps because I am angry at certain persons. I have been spoiling them. The Maugham lecture this morning. Two novels added to my schedule of reading, annotating and consultation—both by important professors’ wives; nice women. Tomorrow Katherine Anne [Porter] in the morning, and the art lecture in the evening—a double-decker day, in order to leave early Friday.

  JUNE 28

  Anna Braake: Our old fool of a crabapple tree, one third of which broke down years ago with excessive weight of apples, over-produced again this year. But fortunately the heat and the drought have weakened the stems, and bushels have already fallen, with a reek of ill-concocted cider. This morning Anna raked them up, to be transported by me to the back fence. “What a terrible lot!” she kept exclaiming. “Poor old tree, she certainly has done her best.

  “I’ll give the Dalrymple’s cows some over the back fence, they’re starved for some green food, but just a few shovels.” She enjoyed our working together. “Your mother should see us corporate. We make a good corporation.”

  Sayings of Anna Braake: “The communists is just like an act-o-pus, you know what I mean, an act-o-pus. It grabs all over the world. Oh, oh, Mr. Wescott, I hate war. You can’t buy noth’n.”

  JULY

  Bill C. angered me, getting Monroe to agree with him as erroneously about some aspect of my sexual morals, so that I picked up one of the little iron tables with murderous impulse—which astonished him, and Mike L., but not me, not Monroe, not much.

  JULY 29

  “Death and the Weary Old Woodcutter.” (New writing of Aesop fable, prompted by Chagall’s etching; finished for Monroe.) An old woodcutter with too great a burden of wood on his back trudged along homeward but still had a long way to go when a stick loosened from the lot and fell, and trying to pick that stick up he let another fall, and in anger and exhaustion threw down the entire load and lay down beside it and wept.

  “I wish I were dead. I cannot bear my burden any more. It is time to die. O death, come and get me. There isn’t any other solution.”

  Down swooped the great angel thus called upon, favorably inclined, like other divinities, toward any sort of prayer we may address to him. Of course he cannot grant them all, but he listens.

  With his old opaque and tearful eyes the woodcutter failed to recognize him. But the mere apparition of a person of such consequence, seemingly interested in his situation, did him a world of good. Perhaps also, while he lay in the path in despair, he had rested a little.

  He said to Death, “Please, sir, help me get my load back up on my shoulders. My home isn’t so very far now. I can make it all right, with just a helping hand.”

  Moral: The death-wish is often only loneliness, and needing to be helped, and wanting a helper.

  AUGUST 3

  Today in the bus there was a beauty: perhaps eighteen or nineteen, sunburned, with Venetian-red hair—a fine straight neck, fine high cheekbones, eyes like a child’s, lips like a girl’s, but a great nose, almost coarse, and heavy sexual-looking hands.

  [August 25: Dr. Kinsey dies of heart failure. Wescott and Wheeler attend the funeral in Indiana.]

  Language is a god, sex is a god, time is a god.

  Fate is a convocation or combination of gods, an entire Olympus.

  OCTOBER 1

  It was delectable here last night. Monroe’s 410 Park Avenue late dinner for Pauline de Rothschild and Diana Vreeland and her husband—the only happy (I mean consequential, future-full) part of the day.

  I want less of everything—and the vacuum to myself for objective retrospection or purely poetical or sensual work.

  OCTOBER 26

  [To Lincoln Kirstein on proposed George Platt Lynes book of ballet photos.]

  My dear Lincoln: Of course I am deeply touched, most favorably impressed, indeed thrilled, by your concept of an anniversary-and-memorial publication as stated (insufficiently) by Monroe … One thing I am especially glad about: the not-funereal aspect of it—George’s death not a finis, only a chapter-ending, part of the continuing ballet record.

  (Alexander) Jensen Yow is one of the young friends whom I especially appreciate—no sexual responsiveness or even compatibility. His attachment to Lincoln Kirstein and Lincoln’s disapproval or mistrust of me has kept us from much frequentation. Not a really impressive person, except for his good looks, perhaps Scandinavian, pink-skinned and golden-haired—not very friendly, maintaining a detachment, rather cat-like. Still he suits the old-fashioned American idea of gentlemanliness: polite with a sort of ardor; never self-assertive but on the other hand not shy. He is an artist, with some aptitude, inclined to the conventional—though perhaps he hasn’t worked hard enough to have proved or disproved anything. Presently he attached himself to Lincoln Kirstein. He thinks of it and sometimes refers to it as a sort of marriage, and certainly some of his feeling toward Lincoln is filial. He lives in the house but bypasses some of the sociability. Lincoln’s wife, by a characteristic seeming ingenuousness or shamelessness, has given the relationship respectability in a way. Everyone thinks it has been good for Lincoln, in his worrisome career and public life, perhaps not specifically influential, but steadying, comforting.

  CHRISTMAS NOTE, 1956

  [Re a MS draft.]

  For my dearest Monroe, this last fruit of a lean year, upon a broken branch but with a deep and live root, and with my true love. Glenway.

  1957

  JANUARY

  [About Marlene Dietrich, 410 Park Avenue neighbor.]

  “Do you see?” said Miss Dietrich when our taxi slowed up in the West 30s on our way to Penn Station, making me look as we stopped amid truckloads of ready-made dresses in the garment district. “There is the little church of my patron saint.”

  “Which is your patron saint?”

  “Foolish, don’t you know? Mary Magdalen.”

  JANUARY 15

  As I sometimes tell surprised college boys and girls in a lecture, one reason for the decline of the forms of fiction is that this has become a period of letter writing. It was one thing that Maugham used to raise hell with me about.

  The essential of the aphoristic form: It shall be terse, brief, neat, and shall give pleasure by the way it is expressed—and arouse in the reader’s mind a good many more examples than it specifies.

  JANUARY 18

&
nbsp; To Paul Gebhard, re Sam Steward: My last important conversation with Dr. Kinsey was about Thornton Wilder—more disapproving, or perhaps I should say more disillusioned, than I remember his having been about any other friend of mine. That same evening I went to Chicago and dined with Sam Steward, and to my surprise (of course I had not reported the K. conversation with him) he gave me an amusing, resentful tale of his having had sex with Wilder passingly in Paris some years ago; no one else has ever told me any such thing.

  JANUARY 21

  Our time as creators falls into seasons. Immaturity is a season; even senescence is a season and can be made to flower somewhat and to bear particular fruit, strange tasting perhaps, but enjoyable by someone, good for something.

  FEBRUARY 1

  What pain is to the body, shame is to the mind.

  FEBRUARY 3

  Always, I have found, a thing to do to alleviate boredom: educate yourself a little about something.