A Heaven of Words Read online

  FEBRUARY 5

  Note: A basic difference between homosexual and heterosexual. Double maleness emboldens, and makes the enactment of erotic fantasy more extreme. Doubtless, the heterosexual male is stimulated by indecency—but the female keeps checking it by her relative disinclination, her sense of desire to be respected etc., whereas males egg one another on, the voyeur encounters the exhibitionist, etc.

  FEBRUARY 7

  There has been a mysterious lull in Thornton Wilder’s fiction-writing in the last ten years, as indeed my own. Oughtn’t I to understand it? Yes, but creativity bewilders one, even a little creativity. I do seem to see him more objectively than I see myself, but all in chiaroscuro, as in certain portraits by Rembrandt, golden in the center and either very profound or strangely empty in the corners of the canvas. A part of what I take to be his problem is ever present in my mind, about my own writing, in the way of my daily and hourly fits and starts, my endless planning and re-planning.

  There is nothing stranger than life, unless it is literature.

  FEBRUARY 8

  “Are there not lovely books forgotten—perhaps buried alive by accident?” Somerset Maugham’s terrible bit of worldly wisdom about best sellers and posterity. Indeed, not all best sellers last—but almost all the books that are not best sellers are forgotten, out of print, unread— except Wuthering Heights.

  Johann Adolph Hasse, the Saxon composer, Bach’s friend, and as famous in his century as Handel and Gluck: how great was he? Perhaps it is hard to tell: for all the work of two-thirds of his lifetime was destroyed in the siege of Dresden in 1760, as he was preparing it for publication.

  FEBRUARY 13

  A little airy snowstorm. All the air is pallid with it. Black fruit of birds in or on the old thorn-hedge … This is one of my little exercises in image-making; a kind of thing that I begin innocently enough, just jotting something down, but that then fascinates me for half an hour, half an hour wasted. A kind of thing that is quite worthless until it has been made perfect, if possible. Thus, in the realm of poetry rather than prose; or on the borderline, which is risky, arid, and un-remunerative.

  FEBRUARY 15

  GW and Monroe Wheeler: We construct our lives, each of us his own, and both of us one another’s, little by little, straw by straw, because bricks can’t be made without straw, and then brick by brick. Likewise our self-destruction and mutual destructiveness.

  FEBRUARY 20

  Do you know what a “gaze hound” is? I have learned today, in Newsweek’s report of the Westminster Kennel Show: It is the Afghan, and the meaning is literal: it hunts by sight, not scent.

  MARCH 1

  My old house is precarious, and the way of life in it, numerous and disorderly—partly in rebellion against the number of little problems that are arbitrarily assigned to me by so many people, against the flattery and self-flattery that must have been involved all these years in my willingness to try to be helpful in so many instances and to give so much advice. Even to speak about things, even to hear about them, even to know and think, seems to distract me from my literature, to tire me and embitter me.

  At a poetry recital arranged by the Poet Laureate, Edith Sitwell and T. S. Eliot were seated directly behind Queen Elizabeth. Among other readings on the program, John Gielgud undertook Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” and did it badly. Afterward Mr. Eliot said to Edith, “I wished to give you a nudge, but I dared not, for fear of catching my cuff-links in the Queen’s pearls.”

  Re Osbert and Edith Sitwell. Spoonerism: Yes, it is in the dictionary, I looked it up. It is the reversal of syllables by slip of the tongue, constant and pathological in some cases. It happens to me once in a while. I wonder what brings it on. This morning, in casual reference to our dear Sitwells, I called them Oddith and Eesbert. At which my guests laughed, thinking it a witticism.

  In 1923, at twenty-two, I was taken to Edith’s flat in Bayswater at tea-time. I left behind a walking stick of cherry wood that I was fond of. Next afternoon, without notice, I returned and knocked on the door; a solecism. The tall poetess in a tone of apology, haughty and insincere, told me that she had already presented it to another transatlantic visitor even younger than I, to get it out of the way. Standing there in the hallway as briefly as possible for purposes of farewell, I felt sure that I could see my dear cherry wood in a corner behind some umbrellas.

  One memory arouses another, adjacent in the mind which is always half asleep. During World War II, she and one or both of her brothers, perhaps partly for fun, brought a law suit against an unfavorable book reviewer, arguing that as they were professional poets, it affected their livelihood. And indeed they were accorded damages, not much but an outrage, I thought.

  This angered me, despite the quantity of worse things going on in the world, and I solemnly swore that I would not resume our slight but protracted friendship if occasion arose after the war.

  Night before last, dining at Monroe’s apartment, basking in Edith and Osbert’s obvious but well-circumscribed affection, smiling through and through at their powers of entertainment—even their looks and grand attire were humorous—suddenly I recalled that vow and gave a shiver. How weak my character is, almost always!

  Strange names are a part of their notorious charm, which exasperates some people. In (I think) the eighteenth century, one of them was Sir Sitwell Sitwell. They have charmed one another down through several centuries.

  MARCH 22

  I went to town with Baba yesterday and she came within an inch of committing another of her follies: a Pissarro at Sam Salz’s gallery. Then she gave a dinner party at the Astor, and took us all to see the preview of Tennessee Williams’ new play, “Orpheus Descending,” by way of a benefit for the Karen Horney clinic. The play is more important than his previous plays, I think, because it embraces more of the historic reality of the South, not just freakish misbehaving individuals. Miss [Maureen] Stapleton, with a wonderfully pleasing young leading man named Cliff Robertson: the love scene plausible and tender, so that one longed for a happy ending.

  Last Friday at Flemington Junction I caught my foot in some switch contraption and fell and gashed my head and loosened my principal tooth—nine stitches, and who knows what dentistry.

  Good News from Bloomington [the Kinsey Institute] yesterday: the U.S. Public Health Service is underwriting them for three years—specifically unafraid of Congressional investigation, etc.—isn’t that good to know? Not enough money, but maintenance and continuance, and (I suppose) a most respectable endorsement and new prestige.

  Georg von Ihring, “My German” of 1924, protagonist of a never written story, telephoned last week; and with perhaps self-protective instinct I have lost his telephone number. I haven’t seen him since 1933 or heard from him since the war.

  Life is too much, and I have been too sad, and have lived too much in detail, and made mistakes.

  MARCH 26

  Almost three hours in the bus, yielding to Francois [Reichenbach]’s insistence that I see his film at a special showing in a rented studio. It excited and embittered me, because he goes so far, almost to the point of excellence and originality. How can I give him the necessary extra push, teach him the pre-graduate lesson? A talent without aesthetic, a genius with not enough meaning.

  He forces me to go through the motions of advising and helping him, but in vain, in vanity. Vanity on my part also as to my having the power to advise or help.

  APRIL

  Cynicism is rather an ugly state of mind, but it is a weakness to be incapable of it.

  APRIL 11

  Sorrow and excitement on my birthday. All seems in the dark—my many failures and continuing difficulties—though only yesterday I seemed to see my life and vocation more clearly than ever. The dark—just after it has been visited by lightning flashes.

  This is my 56th birthday. No celebration. I have made certain resolutions in re literature and personal life, perhaps more realistically than in other years, certainly more solemn. The
day itself has vexed me: income tax bother again; and two hours with Bernard Perlin who says that he wants to be influenced by me, but then resists all my suggestions; and then the National Institute dinner meeting, with old Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright sermonizing, John O’Hara embarrassed by our old inimicality, my dear and sometimes inspiring Louise Bogan enjoying my jokes. Only one hour of intense pleasure: the nineteenth and twentieth century French pictures from the Sao Paolo Museum on loan at the Metropolitan, especially Cezanne’s great tree, and Madame Cezanne in the raspberry-red dress bathed in blue light.

  APRIL 14

  New Jersey is a-thirst, a-thirst. No help for it now, so Lloyd says and Bruce says: Spruce Run and the Mulhocaway rivers are going to be dammed, just above the village of Clinton, just below their confluence, which will drown us out … It will drown us out, all our fools’ paradise, Lloyd’s farm and Baba’s Mill and Stone-blossom … I wish it were an individual, personal, human need. It isn’t even collectively human … nothing of the kind—the need is for “industrial” water, for Johnson & Johnson, and Johns-Manville, and American Cyanide, et tutti quanti.

  APRIL 18

  To Raymond Mortimer: It is a basic misery of my life, misery and mystery—underneath all the joie de vivre, the prosperity and sensuality and nature worship and music, etc.—in the last decade I must surely have written more letters than literature; and I am not a first-rate letter writer.

  APRIL 19

  I have decided on a life expectancy of ten years. How important this is! How for example it conditions my thinking as to the possibility of the state’s taking all of our valley and submerging it for a water reservoir in (they say) three or four years.

  MAY 1

  The industrial-water prospect and Mother: I approached it so carefully, anxious not to have hidden from her so grave a development, afraid that someone else would spill the beans in the wrong way—whereupon I found that Lloyd had told her some time ago, and she has been “thinking it up and down, up and down.” Her conclusion: that she and I had better move into New York, so that I won’t have to waste so much time and money on buses, etc., and so that her daughters can drop in every few days, and Baba and Lloyd when they come to the city.

  MAY 3

  In his narrow, peculiar aesthetic way, George [Platt Lynes] seems to have had a stronger character than the rest of us—certainly he has the strongest ghost, in my experience.

  MAY 11

  My thoughts in response to Janet Flanner’s saying that I have been cursed with perfectionism: My main difficulty is that I have learned to write as a poet. I compose prose as though it were verse, beginning with the word, the phrase, the image, the cadence—see my last lecture at the University of Utah, “The Great Flaubertian Fallacy.” I am slow, slow, slow. And in the circumstances of my life, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year, frittered away by little interests, temptations, inconveniences, senses of duty, interrupting self-secretary-ship, letter-writing, conversation, and my attachment to persons of stronger character than my own, I never have enough time.

  The other great factor is my universality of interest and sympathy. Promiscuity of the mind. I have never been wedded to any one kind of subject matter.

  MAY 13

  I am an aging genius, with an insufficient talent; now pregnant with certain books that I have been gradually laboring at for years; in extremely unhappy circumstances in some ways; extraordinarily independent but with very little liberty; kept in extraordinary luxury here at home but penniless otherwise; perhaps due to be famous before long, perhaps more apt to fail, to sicken, to disappear from the picture. Yet there are a few things I know more about than anyone else alive.

  Two children talking: “Do you believe in God?” There was a half minute’s pause and the word “Yes,” with a little hesitation, the syllable extended downward. “It’s just like Santa Claus.”

  Let me occasionally write a letter to Santa Claus, thinking of myself as my own Christmas benefactor, no matter when.

  MAY 26

  In a dream last night something happened to my hand and/or my brain so that I could only write initial letters. Again and again I made a capital R with my fingers tightly gripping my pen, and kept endeavoring to go further, to make the rest of a word beginning with R. When I tried to think what word, I came up with several at the same time— rose, riot, rage—and I kept hoping to make a sentence, but I couldn’t. R, R, R. R,R,R,R. Only R, R, R. Only R—R—R!

  [Stone-blossom.]

  Maximum iris, about a week earlier than usual … Hedgerows and wild meadows and hilltops strewn with blackberry, the bramble blossoming in such quantity that its delicate faint scent fills the air.

  JUNE

  Last evening after sunset I went with Lloyd to his wood-lot, the abode of deer: densely wooded acres but narrow, so that from the center of it we could still see the golden evening light, intensified by a field of wheat on one side, and of barley on the other.

  He also had me look at his corn, without one sprig of weed, and smell his perfect hay, some in green swatches, some cured and raked, some in bales. Because I always have to forgive him for thinking his farming is more important than my literature, now and then he likes me to see his ecstatic pleasure in hill and dale. And observation of pleasure is my religion.

  JUNE 10

  [Re Carl Malouf ’s 1940s sex parties.]

  An evening with Carl Malouf, whom a god once inhabited to change my life—or, more exactly, who recognized the lifelong but hitherto unavailing pattern of my sex life.

  Remembrance of one of the last parties we gave together which included certain old friends of mine. They were like sleepwalkers, walking not to any doom of great importance, but to the breakdown of relationships with me, the point of farewell.

  Bill Miller. His unsteady erection, untimely ejaculation, and all the little effects of somewhat dolorous self-consciousness, and so forth, are of interest along with all the rest of sexual reality—vain pursuits, mistaken arrangements, frustrations, waste of time and energy and money, are as significant a part of the picture, as the fulfillment, the marvel, the ecstasy.

  JUNE 15

  Names to remember: darlings of the great Grecians: Atthis, the teen-age girl whom Sappho loved. Antilochus, Nestor’s son, dear to Achilles and Patroclus, buried in the same grave with them. Lais, who Apelles seduced and made a courtesan of.

  JUNE 30

  Homeward bound. At the entrance to the early morning train there stood in farewell position the tag-end of a homosexual connection of some kind: a stout youngish middleclass Manhattanite man of the Madison Avenue type, and a really young, somewhat stoop-shouldered boy. The latter spoke with a kind of unenthusiastic good will, and I caught the tone of his voice, low-class, pessimistic, obedient. Sadness detracted from his good looks, a teenage sad-sack.

  Then in the train the boy gave me a glance, recognizing my homosexuality, which I fancy he might not have done except for his night’s experience, whetting his mind about the matter, wondering if I would be more fun or less fun, more generous, etc. And probably he was also anxiously wondering whether I could recognize his novice, little, tentative, perhaps remediable, homosexuality—hoping and fearing I was sorry for him. I did not like his looks.

  JULY 9

  At the Institute for Sex Research: Erotic dream at 3 a.m.—how rarely I have erotic dreams!—A.C.K. [Alfred Kinsey] and Michael [Miksche] and two girls. A.C.K. exactly as in reality. Not the least perversion or even impropriety—as in Section XX of the Female volume.

  JULY 28

  This is the most mysterious time of my entire life: some shrouded fate constantly perceptible but never quite comprehensible; some sense of everything changing, well or woe, foreboding or euphoria, pregnancy or malignancy … I am holding my breath, I am afraid even to be pessimistic. It is as though I were in a prison cell, in the darkest hour before dawn—I keep hearing footsteps, I keep hearing keys—and I have no way of knowing if it is my executioner or my rescuer.
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br />   JULY 30

  Gore Vidal, ever the same odd character: intelligent but inaccurate; virtuous in a way but cheap; with the great pusillanimity of wanting to have, trying to have, even succeeding in having, his cake, while at the same time eating it; and with the bothering question of whether he does not sometimes simply lie. He used to pretend to be younger than he actually was. In the suggestion of his having had to earn a living by his pen, also pretended? Monroe thinks he has a little independent income.

  AUGUST 1

  [Re the death of Tchelitchev.]

  Pavlik died last night. I am afraid. I am weary.

  AUGUST 8

  An image of old age as I can imagine experiencing it myself: Walt Whitman, old, was sitting by himself on his porch; there were a number of young people in the house, and one of them suggested his coming in and joining them. “No, dearie,” he said, “I love to hear your laughter, but I don’t care for your talk.”