July 25 – Chickens being duly counted, hatched, and I at the Cantors’.64 Life: full, rich, long, part of the family, growing to know them and their quietnesses, their laughters, their convictions, and always subtly probing, questioning, the core – Christian Science. (And thinking how Catholics are indoctrinated, and how hard to argue with are these then also.) Not argue, but discuss. They start with one major premise – an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God consisting of: Abstract qualities; perfect realities: Love, Life, Mind, Truth, Soul, Spirit, Principle. God is perfect and made man in his image, i.e.: perfect. God is not anthropomorphic – i.e. not like man, corporeal. If god made man perfect, where did sickness, disease and death come from? From “mortal mind,” from error, the figment of matter being myth, rising like “mist” (see Genesis) to cloud the truth, which is God. So Jesus came to heal man of sickness and sin & return him to Godliness, perfection, wholeness. If God is all and real and spirit, there can be no logical admission of error as real, as that would imply god is not omnipotent and everywhere, but had a rival, thus error is unreal. God is the only reality. Mind over matter, real over unreal, truth over error – and so on.
I would argue, or discuss, on their premise. More stimulating that way. A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all. If matter is unreal, if we are imprisoned in these clay carcasses, if disease is imaginary and unreal (Billy cries: “I hurt my elbow.” She says: “Know the truth. You are God’s child. Could God’s child be hurt? Of course not. God has no elbows, no body. Know the truth and the truth will make you free.”) if this is all so, then why pamper your “illness”. Some devout Christian Scientists don’t, and have let their wives or husbands die of cancer, for example. But these say “Error is trying to talk …” and let their children stay in bed if they “don’t feel well.” Also have their teeth filled. Now that, to me, seems illogical. It is all very well to say they don’t have “enough understanding of the truth,” and that Christian Science (C.S.) also stands for “common sense,” but isn’t that a tacit admission that matter, even if an illusion, is a pretty potent one? And that they are victims of it’s tyranny? According to Mrs. C., any one, no matter how simple, can practice Christian Science by thinking about God first, and his divine unchanging spiritual qualities. And God gave man dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air. Hence man can vanquish the serpent of fear, turning it into a rod again, casting out fear, sickness, disease.
Now that I ponder over it, I do see a sudden neat edifice of logic, and I do agree with some of their generalizations in spite of the fact that I am philosophically at the other end of the pole, – a “matter worshiper.”
First, I do believe that “thinking makes it so” and that “attitude is everything.” This the Christian Scientists seem to use to illustrate the power of real mind (divine) over unreal mind (mortal). I believe that there is a realm (abstractly, hypothetically, of course) of absolute fact. Something IS. And that, in our poor human lingo, would be the “truth.” (But as far as I am concerned, that truth is matter, not spirit.) However, to each individual man, viewing facets, slivers, fragments of this whole truth (which must be) through his own particular grotesque glass of distortion, the truth will be, for him, a mere magnification and personal fallible interpretation of the special facet, sliver or fragment he sees. No man can ever grasp the whole impersonal neutrality of a universe. That is hidden under the mists of subjectivity. We are merely variously constructed sounding boards for the noise of the pine tree falling (proverbially) in the forest. The sound is potential, even if no one is there to hear it. Just as radio programs are all around us, clogging the air, needing only a certain sensitive mechanism to make them a reality, a fact. So what is reality? The definition is so arbitrary. It could be the basic truth, the fact of matter, impersonal, neutral. Or it could be, for each individual, what that individual chooses to make of his corner of the world. Looking at the world through the distorted colored lens of the individual, one might see only a few objects clearly – a math problem, a clock, a jet plane. Even the neutral things seen would be colored by personal attitudes toward them. Reasoning deductively you would come to think, after picking up, squinting through, and putting down a number of these human lenses, that reality is relative, depending on what lens you look through. Each person, banging into the facts, neutral, impersonal in themselves (like the Death of someone) – interprets, alters, becomes obsessed with personal biases or attitutes, transmuting the objective reality into something quite personal (like the death of My Father = tears, sorrow, weeping, dolorous tints, numbing of certain areas of sensation and perception about the stream of life moving about one …) Hence, “Thinking makes it so.” We all live in own dream-worlds and make and re-make our own personal realities with tender and loving care. And my dream-world – how much more valid, how much nearer to the truth is it than that of these people? Valid for me, perhaps – even though it is not metaphysical. Even if I do consider mucous and sinus real – and medical schools have been instituted to cure through medication such machinations of “error and mortal mind.” If they believe in life-after-death in a heavenly spiritual realm, what a pleasant solace it is for them – and what individual strength it can give. Why quibble: “It is absurd. It isn’t so.” For me, it isn’t so, and I turn to hide irreverent laughter when Susan, constipated, gets a lesson instead of a laxative. But for them, it is so, absolutely so. And thus individuals construct absolutely real dream Kingdoms – paradoxically all “true” although mutually exclusive at the same time. My dream-bubble of reality exists side by side with theirs, without breaking fragmentarily asunder. We live and move together in the realm of concrete experience, harmoniously, motivated and propelled by our own dream-realities. And even that idea of mine is no doubt itself an artificial dream-reality.
Man labors in laboratories to discover the truth, the unchanging fact. Yet what the head knows, the senses contradict. And who is to malign the senses, calling them false? Pick your winners, your own sides – concept (mind) says railroad tracks are parallel and never meet. Percept (sense: here, eyes) say railroad tracks meet at the distant point where one can plainly see that they converge. Which is true? Both concept and percept. Yes. And man can integrate the two as best he can, or choose one in preference of the other. He is “lord of the counter positions.” He has been given dominion.
I wonder now, on August 6, lying here on my white bed, listening to the rain: slant long and hard on the roof outside my windows coming down liquidly, drippingly plural and generous from the low gray skies, fluently saying what I choose to make it say. Slanting down the screen in milky, translucent streams, prolific, uncaringly beneficent, it heals or annoys, (as we humans choose to translate it.) And I love it because of the sound, and the gray pluvial walls of it dropping down, closing in. Not knowing why. Not dissecting my liking or feeling, not being materialistic or matter-of-fact, but mystic – I will use vague elusive words like “rapport,” “affinity,” for the calm pleasure I feel welling up in me.
We perceive things through the concrete object and illustration. We see, we smell, we taste, we touch, we hear – and the abstract words are synthesized from the realms of concrete experience – from all the men kissing all the girls and all the mothers suckling all their babies, we get “love” – the abstract concept, and in turn apply it to the concrete individual percept: a particular individual man kisses a particular individual girl and says “I love you.” They are “in love”: in the abstract realm where their concrete acts harmonize with the atmosphere, synthetic- and man-made though it be. –
Paradox again. Two mutually exclusive and contradictory adjectives are applied at the same time to the universe. And this phrase is again a unique insight into the repetitious and varied universe man has woken up in and begun to work at transforming into something he can call his own. We are all men, but as different as we are similar – as opposite as we are alike. We know a thing by its opposite corollary: hot by having experienced cold; good, by having decided what is bad; love by hate.
And yet Art says there are certain absolute moral standards in society approved of by all – that all is not relative as I would seem to imply. For instance, that nowhere is it “good” to do a friend dirt behind his back, kill him, for instance. All right – if a “friend” is defined as one with whom one has established a very close, personal attachment of love and understanding, it would be frowned on to injure him in anyway – but if he were going mad, this hypothetical friend, would you do what was requested by society and sent him to an asylum, or be true to his pitiful demented pleading and let him stay free as long as you could. Or, if he had defied the law, would your first loyalty be to him or to the welfare of the community? All questions being merely theoretical. And just for the record, consider all the potential “friends” we slaughter off in war, just because they are arbitrarily labeled “enemy.”
Is everything we do an attempt to choose between the lesser of two evils? Is man, in this sense, born in original sin? Or perhaps just born into a world of “sin,” sin being the tragic dilemma of making wrong or less wrong choices, with nothing to approve or condone the choice – nothing but the fruits of the choice and attendant action to decree whether the choice was good or bad. And even, then, always, the doubt.
In bed, bathed, and the good rain coming down again – liquidly slopping down the shingled roof outside my window. All today it has come down, in its enclosing wetness, and at last I am in bed, propped up comfortably by pillows – listening to it spurting and drenching – and all the different timbers of tone – and syncopation. The rapping on the resonant gutters – hard, metallic. The rush of a stream down the drain pipe splattering flat on the earth, wearing away a small gully – the musical falling of itself, tinkling faintly on the tin garbage pails in a high pitched tattoo. And it seems that always in August I am more aware of the rain. A year ago it came down on my porch and the lawn and the flat gray sea beyond at the Mayos – closing me in the great house in the day, talking to me alone in my room in the evening as I sat alone in bed writing; surveying my kingdom from my throne: the lone streetlight on the corner, hanging solitary in a nimbus of light, and beyond it the gray indistinguishable fog and the rain sound blending with the wash of the sea. It shut me in a rock cave with Dick on Marblehead beach, drenching, soaking, and we threw rocks at a rusted tin can until it stopped coming down viciously and churning the sea to a flayed whiteness.
Two years ago August rain fell on me and Ilo, walking side by side, wordless, toward the barn. And it was raining when I came out from the loft, crying, my mouth bruised where he had kissed me. Rain closed about the windows of the car Emile and I rode home in, and fell outside the kitchen where we stood, in the dark, with the smell of linoleum, and the water always falling on the leaves outside the screen.
Three years ago, the hot, sticky August rain fell big and wet as I sat listlessly on my porch at home, crying over the way summer would not come again – never the same. The first story in print65 came from that “never again” refrain beat out by the rain. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
I walked in the backdoor of “Lorania’s Bookmobile”, and my red slicker shed rivulets of water on the floor as I bent my head, scanning titles, while Val was talking to people up front. I sat on the floor then, looking at poetry books and the brightly covered, good clear-printed Modern Library editions. She was alone then, and remembered me.
So I asked her about a lot of things – how she got writing and where published, and where worked. She talked nicely to me – – – cynical, hardbitten, with a sneer, and then a quick look, a smile, soft fleetingly, that said she understood about how I was critical of my story, didn’t like it now as much, and how it was best writing actually, the process, not the product. So she told me about the four page (1000 words a day) deal. No time limit – there’s the catch. You don’t have a time limit, it’s the produce that counts. 365,000 words in a year is a hell of a lot of words. I start this fall. Four pages a day.
She is small, skinny, sallow, with black hair done up in back in a bun and braids under a visor khaki cap. A pointed face, glasses, and a dry, sarcastic drawl. Cats she has, in her shack, red-painted (she says) and no phone. Signs of loneliness? Of living too long with Val Gendron? Who to talk to? Who? I will find out. I will be no Val Gendron. But I will make a good part of Val Gendron part of me – someday. And the coffee grounds can be left out. For good. She has said I may visit her: a pilgrimage: — to my First Author.
Beat on the tin roofs with spears of rain, lord. Harry the steel cities with claps of thunder. Fling, fling thy light crackling across the face of the stone skytowers. They will hear not, they will see not, neither will they understand.
For they have built the walls of their citadels of steel, and their temples of rock, and they dwell within. Also have they lit the dark with colored neons, and the streets are lanced with shooting stars. More loudly knock, oh lord; with thy clarion blast flare aweful at the gates. Light, oh lord, sear white throbs and crack the skies; they will not hear.
Vain flash the proud lights in the city of man, red, blue, green and yellow and white. Color of apple, color of grape, of pear, of corn. Clear flash the proud lights, lord, and your far wheeling beacons pale, those far fixed stars, and the planets withered, shrunken, twirl in their forgotten orbits, pale, lord, in the light-bleached sky. In the white cold glare from the city of man.
Vain sound the proud horns in the city of man, sax, trombone, jazz, blues. Color of love, color of mourning, color of hot, color of crying. And all your noisy rains and thunders can not quench his inwardness. Down bangs the window where rain rattles in, and in the steamy haze within, loudly brazen the bands begin.
Ride in the sun crashing light victorious or hold back your rain. Cry in anger or in sorrow at the lost world, the mistaken ones. They are working. They will have you yet in harness.
“Oh, yes,” he said, opening the door. She got in, tying the red silk scarf over her hair and settling low and comfortable beside him. It was strange, riding cradled so open, so near the ground.
Roaring through the fog they went careening along the shore highway, with the blur of fog closing them in, shredding in the light of far and few street lamps, Glow milky as of moonrise heralded coming cars, looming two yellow globes of light, coming, and then two red points of brightness dwindling behind.
Around corners the squeal of wheels. The car braces, leans, tilts back again. An Esso station looms light ahead. Lights marking out an area of brilliance by the roadside, and the red and black and white sign clear and printed saying gasoline suddenly and coherently in the lonely and spaceless dark. Slows by, then gone behind in a shriveling puddle of light.
They are laughing and he is singing loudly some dirty songs. He is in a glee club somewhere she thinks.
“You know,” he looks down at her. “I don’t even know your name.” He is grinning, his face lean and boyish behind the glasses.
“What!” she laughs and tells him. After all, what has a name got to do with this night and fog? She would gladly be a Marcia or an Elaine or Doris being still she and riding still with this boy in an M-G.
So now he knows her name, and things are very conventional. He tells her he is a bastard. He is singing loudly, and he has just turned seventeen. Every other word he swears. He’s old for seventeen, and he tells her she is cute.
She is feeling at this point, very maternal. It is occuring to her that she is almost three years older than he is, and she feels quite suddenly older, with a wealth of all kinds of life and experience behind her. The feeling grows big in her.
“I am very tired,” he tells her. “You drive a while.” He stops the car by the endless road, a hollowed out drive, and they trade seats. She gets used to the feel of the little car, good little red shiny MG. And her foot goes down on the accelerator.
By now his head is on her shoulder and his feet up on the door, knees bent, dangling over. He is drinking beer and sharing it with her, feeding her potato chips, and sleepily singing on her shoulder.
“You know,” he is saying, “I used to raise hell with women. Petting and all that stuff. I’ve been out with some sluts, and ask any girl in Flushing about my reputation and she’ll tell you …”
“So, now what?” the girl is asking, feeling her eyes straight on the road and on the tunnel of light carving out of the dark ahead as they go.
“So now it’s different. Like you. First thing I saw, you were sweet and intelligent. Not every blonde has got brains, you know. It’s your personality, I like. Not sex. You’re no raving tearing beauty.”
He doesn’t know that last could hurt a little if she let it. But it doesn’t because she doesn’t.
She is thinking of how, even though she started late, there have been all the mouths and all the hands belonging to all the boys without faces and some with faces … some with blurred faces, indistinct now, far back.
“Have you ever liked two boys at once?” he is asking. “I mean both a lot at once for something. Like now I like Andy, she’s as sweet as they come, and nice. But I like you. You’re funny as hell, and cute. And there’s that red head in the Dairy Bar. Wonder if she’s working tonight …”
He is going on and on. God, the girl is thinking, absently letting her hand run through his hair, patting his head cradled in the hollow of her shoulder. He is drowsy, his head falls, grazing her breast. She would like to stop, to cradle his head. God, she is thinking, he is so terribly young, so terribly beginning.
Already she feels jaded. Weary, and gladly tired and old. Driving nowhere in the fog with his young head sleepily on her shoulder she feels the pulse of the motor beneath her foot, and the goodness of the speed, devouring the dark and the long lasting road. The time is going and she wants to keep it. Driving on around into the morning of the world with this beautiful-and-damned boy slumbering on her shoulder.
He is talking now. “You know,” he says, “you have met a lot of boys like me and I have never before met any body like you. You’ve got it.”
“What have I got?”
“I don’t know. You’ve just got it.” He is leaning his head over toward her, looking intense and baffled.
She feels like smiling at him, and her smile is tender. “You have such a long while ahead of you. It makes me quite dizzy to think of all the beautiful young girls now growing up that are ahead of you. And I will be growing older all the while they are growing up.”
“I don’t care.” He leans over and kisses her hand on the steering wheel. Her voice had been, at that last remark, bright and edged with fear. “I don’t care. I like you. You’re sweet.”
“No,” she says, “it is all right now. But just for now. Because it is getting late. All the time it is getting late.”
So they are near the house where she is living, and she drives up in the driveway.
“You can walk me to the door,” she says. He is still groggy and sleepy, shaking his head. All at once he says oh and puts his arms around her.
She pushes him back, her hands against his chest, her mouth saying: no, not this as she looks at his mouth young and tender asking please, lips asking please. It is much better, she thinks, this way because of how now I am on the top directing both of us. Even the girl in me that would like to lead you into warm ways of love. Any girl, andy maybe, or any other little girl you can neck with or pet. But not me. It is much better, this way.
“All right,” he says, “I am not hungry, though. I do not want you to think that I am hungry.”
On the way to the door he staggers a little; she steadies him by the arm. “On two cans of that stuff only,” he says bewildered. “Say, would like the rest of that case. Keep them in the icebox or something?”
“No,” she says laughing. “They don’t think I drink. You keep them. Don’t let them go to waste.”
“I can’t,” he says. “If mother found them she’d kill me. You know how mother’s are,” he finishes apologetically.
’Yeah,” she says softly. “Sure, I know.” You kid. You wonderful damn confused kid, she thinks. Me an old college woman, and you a prep school boy. God, the years, the years. I can count them now in two’s and three’s. Where have they gone so fast? Eaten by the raw swollen wind of time. Like the M-G ate up all that big nothingness of dark road. Don’t go away, you passionate sweet swearing guy. Let me hold you, holding meanwhile the gone-far young tender sharp years.
“Good-night,” he says, “but not good-bye.”
“Good-night,” she says, all at once grateful that it is not quite yet the almost goodbye she had been fearing.
—
August 17 – Band Concert on Friday. Even from the house you can hear them playing, and the man’s voice echoing across the lawn lots. There is first the rhythmic “tum-ta-tum-ta-tum-ta” beat of the drums, and then the band begins. Susan is quietly excited, her green eyes big and still with the wonder of all the colored balloons bobbing and dipping, and Billy squeals, skipping along in his little red-checked shirt and dungarees, pointing at the band stand that comes into view as we walk over the hill into the natural park amphitheater, into the area of light.
It is already twilight, and we spread our blanket on the hill side, settling down to listen. Behind the black outlines of the pines there is the fading afterglow, translucent, golden, of the setting sun, and the circle around the bandstand is dark with crowds of people on the grass. Children are always running, skipping, in and out of the grassy spot of brilliance surrounding the stand, trailing the large colored balloons, yellow, red, and blue. Somehow a green balloon gets loose, rising and turning on currents of air above the tops of the trees. There is a chorus of ohs and heads turn, watching the gleaming green balloon ascending, growing smaller and smaller, a fleck of green – lost at last against the darkening night sky. In the bushes, dark and wet with dew, the crickets are crying, shrill and sweet.
“I’m very glad …” the band leader steps up to the microphone, a townsman, special tonight, master-of-ceremonies in his white suit and gold braid, smiling out at the crowds of summer folk, “I’m very happy to see so many here tonight, more even than last week, looks like. We’ve arranged a very special program tonight, and we’ll start with a Gershwin medley …” There is applause, and with an amiable grin the leader turns to face the band, his baton raised. A moment of silence, then the downbeat.
Seated on the circular white platform, gallant, all of them, in their red and blue uniforms and caps, the band breaks out into a jazzy version of “Liza”. There is the flash of light, gold, silver, gleaming in darts and sparkles on the brass instrument. No one pays them, they are volunteers, from the town. But the boys love music, and tonight, in their bright uniforms, they are the crown princes of melody, seated in the circle of white-gold light, playing valiantly to the assembled crowds.
On the hill opposite an orange light flares as someone lights a match. There is the buttery salt smell of popcorn, and the children are sitting very still, moving a little, nodding in time to the beat of the music, unconsciously graceful. A little blonde girl toddles out in the arena of light where later the children will dance. She is dressed for best in a pink organdy skirt and top, a bonnet over her fair curls; she is balancing a large pink balloon, and sets a weaving course for the steps of the band stand. The dark figure of a man, her father, detaches itself from the shadow and steps forward to retrieve the little girl. There is a low undercurrent of friendly understanding laughter.
Lilting, swinging from one familiar Gershwin melody into another, the band plays on. For a mile around the cars are parked, and the people are all there in their summer suits and dresses – the old grayhaired couples, the old women in groups, like gentle lavendar scented butterflies, softly, slowly talking. During the day you can see them rocking to and fro in green wicker chairs on all the wide verandas of all the tourist homes in town. Tonight is a big night for them, with the lights and crowds and the lilting melodies that remind them, wistfully, sweetly, of dances, of gay times years, who knows how many years ago? So they sit now, silent for a little, lost deep in reveries, entranced by the music, swinging now into a Strauss waltz. One small, fragile gray-haired lady is humming the melody softly to herself, her thin sweet voice quavering a little.
And the kids, all of them, will dance, keeping time to music, chorusing “Now We Go Looby-Loo” and then the teen-age couples will come out in the arena, and there will be waltzes, dark sky over, and the lights soft and the good big summer feeling inside you with the light gentle and the night cool and friendly. Always with the queer regret, blurring all the other summers into a fine nostalgic brew – distilling all the tart sweetnesses into this one, with the sea of music skipping over the time, and the feeling in you very warm and it is our town, we all together, very sweet, all summer light, sometimes almost tearful because it is so moving all the time. The fluid color the fluid sound, toward its ending. (“Into many a green valley, drifts the appalling snow./ Time breaks the threaded dances and the diver’s brilliant bow.”) And now I am sitting here crying almost because suddenly I am knowing in my head and feeling in my guts what those words mean when I did not know the full impact of them in the beginning, but merely their mystic beauty.
So it all moves in the pageant toward the ending, it’s own ending. Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers. For all the writing, for all the invention of engines to express & convey & capture life, it is the living of it that is the gimmick. It goes by, and whatever dream you use to dope up the pains and hurts, it goes. Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. You’ve only got so long to live. You’re getting your dream. Things are working, blind forces, no personal spiritual beneficent ones except your own intelligence and the good will of a few other fools and fellow humans. So hit it while it’s hot.
I sit down in small kitchen. Wallpaper is brown background – colored Pennsylvania Dutch looking pattern. Dirty dishes on floor. Two cats: Prudence, a snooty black, sultry green-eyed Persian blood, and O’Hara. Ash-trays full of cigarettes. She smokes 2 cartons of Wings (cheap, non-advertised) a week. Can’t taste, no palate left.
So I look around. She likes to cook – stews & ragouts especially. Things with wine. There is a shelf of cook-books over the refrigerator. Also a shelf of spices. She unscrews them and I smell each as she says, “Thyme, Basil, Marjoram …” and so on. There is also a preserving closet – jams, jellies, apple butter, beach plums. She picks and cans. Wild, sweet, tart, clear in glasses.
Outside is the garden. Neat grass lot reclaimed from pine woods. Flowers – some phlox, zinnias. Overgrown weeds in vegetables because of time Bookmobile job takes. There are strawberries, raspberries, peppers, beans, tomatoes, all in beds, squared off neat and clean-cut.
We take cake she has bought, a heap of green grapes, from the refrigerator. She grinds coffee, the smell is great, and we sit around waiting for the pot to boil. Meanwhile Prudence licks some frosting off the cake. Val cuts that part off, saves it for O’Hara. When the coffee is ready we climb the steep Cape Cod stairs to the workshop she has made herself.
It is all book shelves over the walls, Williamsburg blue-gray, and cream yellow. A rug she is braiding is on the floor, and balls of wool rag in a basket. A studio couch, a typewriter. Piles of manuscripts around, in boxes, on her desk. We sit cross legged on the floor, and start pouring ourselves cup after cup of coffee. I am a pig and have three hunks of cake. The four black kittens Prue is nursing come in and skitter around like black scritches of playful fluff. They are nosey, lean into my coffee cup, sneeze at the hot strong stuff and go skittering across the floor. One goes to sleep inside the edge of my skirt where it makes a comfortable fold on the floor.
I hear about agent’s – Ann Elmo. Something-and-Otis. I read “Miss Henderson’s Marriage.” I like pace, tempo. I think it is a shade dull, characters don’t come across human – oh, indefinable quality. But construction has poise, balance. Enviable by me at this stage. Also look through files of correspondence between her & agents. She’s got “Haitian Holiday” on her mind. Novelette about bastard girl, too. So many stories! So much published.
“Bill” teaches C.W. at N.Y.U. Stories about him. Wm. Byron Mowery. Also about bank-job. Funny – hysterical. She pounds plush job out by publishing House Organ. Quits. Money too important. Not her own baby. House and garden are.
Knows Rachel Carson. Woods Hole. She has hit a jackpot, still goes around like Val, old jalop, old clothes, got a hit here and doesn’t know what to do with this thing, people telling her how to write, but she is working on something now.… like good writer, enmeshed in present problem. Doesn’t feed off leaf of laurel.
The kittens, the books all over, she has built and painted, the braided rug unfinished. A provider. The stories, and the winters. A ride back at midnight, talk about Evita Peron. (Whore or courtesan, she put on a great little show. Val likes skyrockets. Pretty, cute.)
Writing work. Writer builds illusion for man-on-street: shroud of mystery – no one wants to think their emotions can be played with, roused, by literary learned craft & intention. No one wants to think: this guy can reach inside & yank my heart because he wants to keep his pot boiling. So when they ask where the writer gets his ideas: “I lie on my couch; God speaks to me. Inspiration.” That satisfies.
Yelling above the jalop motor. Home, coffee-drunk. Exhilarated. (Can’t stop thinking I am just beginning. In 10 years I will be 30 and not ancient and maybe good. Hope. Prospects. Work, though, and I love it. Delivering babies. Maybe even both kinds. Val grinning at me in the faint light, face in shadow, tough talk, but good to me. I will write her from Smith. I will work, maybe drive down wintertime and visit. Maybe take Dick even. God, she has been great to me. Tonight best yet. All the boys, all the longing, then this perfection. Perfect love, whole living.)
She had a cricket in the wall and it creaked and chirped. She said build a good life. I wonder. I like her, yet not as blindly as could be – I can be critical. But she has lived, sold, produced. And how much she has already begun to teach me.
—
August 20 – I am an outlet. The parents no longer understand their children. He is twenty-two and of voting age. Their ideas are brittle and too noble. (Al told me I would be a prude at 40. Let this be a warning unto me. And let me remember for the children I have.) They are too solicitous too late. Because he and she were virgins they are glad but afraid for the young ones. Afraid because suddenly of something. We do not know just what. But it is too late for one (and I can understand because in me too the fire of destruction flares blood hot and as for all the ideals I had, they are broken, malleable now, for compromise and rationalization. The ways to hell on earth are easy, and one can always cross out hell and scribble in heaven. So much sweeter that way.)
He is proud, strong, defiant. On the defensive. He will not speak. He could say: something is bothering you, but he will not. He is too proud. They pry; they go along when he takes a girl home from work. They ask: what kind of a girl is she? He says: she is free, white and twenty-two. He goes to bed immediately after. Before he falls asleep he hears his mother and brother whispering outside. He is proud in his impotent silent rage.
She said to me: I am worried about him: His brother says he is lonely. (She wants me to stay there after I get through work. I would like to but do not dare to.) Her husband has retreated from me. It is the story he takes to heart, stiffening in one reading all the reserve I had melted so carefully. Becoming all at once again cold and unresponsive. “For heavens sake,” the wife says as he stands there impassive, “can’t you kiss her!” So I throw myself in a bear hug quick at him and say “There.” There.
Talking at the light with the young one I think how both struggles and pettinesses we iron out so somehow. Talking, kisses, warm hands and talk of breasts, soft and tender and hard strongness. Creative play and light laughter and warm richness, ineffable richness flooding where from? Not just sex, not just familiarity, but partly. Because there has been cold, sterile, desperate devouring, and not this warm, full, flowing over in loving laughter. Food and nourishment, replenishing the beaten blue and black mind and bodies, desiring more, yet somehow satisfying even without fulfilling. Each an outlet for the other. For him, a lighthouse sending out an intermittent flash – centering desire on an attainable goal. For me – a growing cultivation of my body and the vague unobjectified hungers, aroused for instance this afternoon in the boat with a boy two years younger than I, blue-eyed, crewcut, lean, tan, beautifully built, muscles firm and neat and body so tender young and lovely I must caress the neck unwisely, kiss the lips once or twice. But one could not pull head to breast and keep the dream. Always the dream. Loving two boys in one day differently for different times. Kissing both and loving both. Honest, true, yet at least one would become cynical, a little bitter, seeing me with the other. Not understanding how a girl could be honest at one hour with one and at another place later with another. But so it is for her. And so it will be.
August 21 – 1:30 a.m. The boat sailed in the fresh wind out into the bay, and the boy and girl were young and lovely. She riper, golden, older than he. But he lean, tall, virile and unshaven. Laughing in wind and sunlight across the blue of the bay. Reaching the long island beach they moor the boat, he swimming out from it beautifully and cleanly, cleaving the water strong and straight. God, how young he comes up from the sea: a Paris, lean and how windbitten. Laughing, teeth white, they race over the dunes, the witchgrass sharp under their bare feet. Over to where the blue of the Atlantic blinding straight ahead. Towels on sand, picnic opened, they gorge young and hungry on cheese and ham and mustard and coleslaw and tomatoes and peaches and gingerale, filling full their stomachs, lying and eating the savory good food in the sun, lying warm and curled after, drowsy. Head on her stomach he lies back, she running long tenderly moving fingers through his hair, cut short, soft. Carefully rapacious and hungry her fingers move along his cheek. They read aloud then from “Science and Health” about marriage and spirit, she wondering inside at the paradox of delusion: how he can deny matter and flesh as real when one can make such healthful beauty out of them – how he can be inconsistent and admire beauty of flesh, calling her cream and honey because of her skin and white bathing suit. She cannot, she has decided, undermine or take away his faith. She must somehow cultivate and work through this which means so much to him. Because no matter what he labels the highest good in him, spirit or otherwise, that is what she wants to bring out.
So he tells her that she brings out the quality of love in him, and she says he brings out strength and power. They caress each other companionably, sunwarmed backs, and a quick kiss. Flesh, flesh, lovely warm young tender real flesh. He would like to see her in 30 years – after he has made a lot of money. He will buy a beach buggy. A boat. He will take her for rides. They will live in a house overlooking the sea. They want, in a sudden splurge of altruism, to do things for each other. Perhaps, if she suddenly needs him, she will lift the phone receiver and will say: “Operator, this is very important, I must speak right away to Bob.” And somewhere in the world Bob will lift the receiver and say “Operator, give me a girl named Sylvia.” And the operator will say: “Sylvia is here, on the line.”
Oh, how foolish, how pathetic. She is laughing on the way back, and he. He saying: I think we both found something we didn’t expect to find, and she thinking: yes, you my vulnerable flesh, and me your tearing rending young strange idealism which I would tender and nourish to keep from all the pretty sexy girls that will wear your sharpness to a dull, flat, bored edge. Five years of college. What will they do to you? And all the while the water goes by, you so fleeting, the two of us so hopeless, and why do I love you so jealously? Wanting a promise, even though it must be broken, that you will remember me. Why? Because I suddenly grow old. And you so young. I want to remember, hold, and cherish for a little. No future in it. Soon the distance will be more apparent than the strange rapport. And I will not, as Al said (or rationalized) kill the illusion and the dream of our brief span of being together. No passion, and little pain. No more meetings and a clean quick death. Summer gone, you young darling, and I an older, wising woman. But God, your young lean face and body and reaching mind! Always I see you in the red low little M-G racing in the night, and against the blue sky on the bow standing proud in the sun – to leave you with an ideal of a girl – let me do that for you!
Friday – August 22 – And so it will be. I come in around midnight, there’s no telling with the wind blowing, and the wide night with the stars clear – and the lovely fleshly warmth and somehow close to tears because of giving him the ideal, the girl idea which he can always have with him. She is nonexistent, this girl he considers beautiful, soft, loving, intelligent perfection. She is a dream-vision I perhaps conjured up unwittingly, but “There is nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so.” For him, perfection with the name Sylvia exists. And so she is.
How to explain how I feel I owe him a great deal. He is so lean, intent, and young – and his mouth so sure and tender, closely moving over mine, he leaning back, looking tenderly and talking long, saying: If we can only learn together, study together these things, finding truth, unchanging. God, if only I could do something for you, anywhere, any time; reach out to me. I wouldn’t care if you were pregnant, or had both legs amputated. I want so to help you.
And I, my throat thick and husky with awe and tenderness, loving terribly at once his young, dear, clean-cut idealistic faith: seeing in it the salvation of him from so much of the repetitive meaningless rot in the world –: I say: but you have done so much, Bobby, for me. Just being with you this little, learning with you. You have so much, so many potentials I can see. You are not the wiseguy in your best self, but so much more – fine and strong. No matter what the name of the girl will be, the one you go through life learning and living with – you know how love can be. (And I am listening to my voice go on – wondering how I can say these things: anything to keep whole his terrible dangerous precarious exquisite dream of perfection, of truth. We all in this world need something to cling to for a center of calm. I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh – you, to me, are blindly denying, in your spiritual monism, the antithetic dualisms of the universe which I see as real. But we both have our dreams. And it is how we live here that matters – not the motivating force which varies so radically.)
Bob, we say we may never meet again – no bathos here, no sentamentalism. Both of us strong, young, intelligent – separating to sure good lives, overcoming obstacles with power inherent in us, going on to good friendly warm circles. Good to be apart – with the strange and paradoxical separateness forever. Because we meet, and read aloud, and kiss sweetly, lips so right and wonderful I could cry to think I have made you love me. Oh, convert I can never be, but there is something here in your faith that gives you strength, I will give that faith impetus. I see, if I can plant with you the rightness of it all, you may believe always – in great trial more strongly.
And I, remembering your face in the dark, with the equal measured light from the Lighthouse shining, wheeling, catching in sharp light and shadow the terrible beauty of your lean cheek and slender jaw, and relinquishing you to the dark, only to catch you up again – I am full of a tender maternal, protecting love, warm and full, how full and rich. Your head, bending, nuzzling in the warm hollow of my shoulder, and I, with my fingers firm, tracing the strong line of your young neck. You say: God, if only I could tell you how much you mean to me. How I used to date girls and grab here and there and have a good selfish time. But it is so different with you. You are so sweet and gentle, the way I thought you would be. I love you. You are so beautiful and you bring out so much in me. You make me feel like a king.”
So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead, and above the sheaves of yellow stars, shoals of cold bright pieces of light, and the great wind, blowing always cold gulps and gusts of air, big and soft in the tree leaves, hushing, miracles are happening, and I, strange and elated with a new wonder, child-like in my sudden power, look with eyes large in love and amazement at this intent lovely face so earnest, so close to mine.
I cannot bear to leave you, because you will forget, I will forget, except for perhaps once or twice a brief sharp sear of pain as a word, a laugh, a thought of truth, will cut like a knife at all that will have happened after now, bringing clear and wistful to mind the remembering of these few hours, night and day – and us so young, (even though older and apart I am from you – but somehow motherly and wising, seeing how by making you dream you love me in my beginning understanding – how thereby I can plant in you the seeds of your own brand of faith and strength. (I love you physically, dear guy, sweet one, your body and your keen quick mind – and mentally, and God knows why else. But it’s true, what they say about turning from older guys, after learning from them, to the younger ones – and when, Bob my love, you are gone, there will be Phil to take your place – though he is not so well-versed in the art of love as you, nor yet so old for his chronological years.)
But of all the nights, rushing backward along the rocket-track of your experience and receding into the dark of your past subconsciousness, remember, remember how he trusting looked long and sweetly at you out of the dark at the door with all the wild wind in the dark grasses, and how love was there in his face – making you, miraculously, the dream girl and woman, sister and sweetheart, mother and spiritual mistress. You walked in, laughter, tears, welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?
All the young growing and testing and being once burned and twice shy and not knowing what to do, or where, or when to be how. And then this, the sudden intuitive flash, the sudden knowing when it is right to render up a dream, to speak so, to love so. It comes ripe in you suddenly and there is the taste of wisdom, aged full and mellow-flavored. You have gotten drunk and elated on the young firm tart green of early apples, and never wanted other. But the first ripened apple breaks open its fruit on the palate, and the sweet, savory juice floods in vindication into the hungry mouth, lyric lovely on the tongue.
Oh honey ancient gathered from the garden of rare weed and strange wild plant, years pass and you grow golden clear in the tree, shedding fragrance of wisdom upon the lovely summer air. (You have taken a drink from a wild fountain … “and all the wells of the valley / will never seem fresh or clear / all for that drink of mountain water / in the feathery green of the year.” Not so, not so, for in parable the wells of the valley are sweet in their ripeness, and I will not cry forever, over the young wild spurting fountains – not forever.
August 25 – “Look, honey,” she said, very firm, very deliberate, “when I don’t want to be kissed, I don’t get myself kissed. I’m a big girl now; I can take care of myself.”
The guy grinned. “You know,” he said with a laugh, “I’m awfully glad to hear you can take care of yourself with me. Because I’ve been out with a lot of girls who sure as hell couldn’t.”
– So you walked into the kitchen that saturday morning, (it being cold bright blue August,) lean, a little stooped, in a blue shirt, and Mrs. C. said, “Attila68 this is Sylvia” while you said ignoring, “My name is Attila,” with your trace of accent, the slight slur, the nasal inflection. Breakfast, then, with the toast and jam, bacon and coffee, all good-smelling and warm, with outside the sun-bright pieces of the day waiting. You talking with all, and I listening, thinking, oh, I want a lot to grow to know you.
And subsequently, during day and night and day again, talking, looking, exchanging laughter. Your hair long, black, combed back, and your eyes, the most wonderful part when flashing back a look of appreciative understanding, dark to blackness, blazing laughter. There is the indefinable alien air about you – not just your deep voice and uniquely lovely inflections, but an attitude toward life, a laughing wit, a comprehension of war, of escape, deep rooted – your graceful athletic build, strong, lean, resilient. The muscles in your thighs and calves are taut, powerful. Behind our playful beach wrestling there was the leashed iron fury of your potential strength.
You rode on the back of the beachwagon to Nauset with Joan and me, us asking about Hungary, your life, of how you got kicked out of the University by the Communists and got the five-year scholarship to Northeastern. At Nauset, you in tight blue trunks, eating hot pork chops, frankfurts, potato salad, playing with the children, your foreign accent pleasant and lyrical to the ear. Throwing ball, then, arm arcing back, sending the white ball unbelievably high, far, hard. A walk then, down the beach and back. Jogging home in the beachwagon, I now in back between Marvie and you, cold, legs dangling – You let me wear your sweater – the white cable-stitch one your mother made for you. It feels good on me, I warm and wearing something of yours.
Home, changed to dry clothes, I must go shopping. You come, I driving, and Susan with us for company. You come, carrying the bundles, I loaning you ¢10c to buy a comb at the Five & Ten. Going by the A & P there are a few boy clerks standing around outside by the stand. I go by not looking, and there is a moan. “That moan,” say you, “was for your legs.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I was looking,” you say.
It is very good and quite wonderful walking with you down the bright Chatham streets with the sun bright, thick creamy light on the colored storefronts, and all the summer people in their queer clothes – brown ladies in silk print dresses and ropes of white jewelry; girls in colored shorts – red, green, blue; bright tan faces, golden, bronze, pink, beige – all ripe with sun-color, moving easily and free in the summer sun. It is a very happy time for me with you walking there along beside me – a sort of “blutbrüderschaft” having been performed between we two – I wearing as mine your sweater and I buying you a comb, you carrying my bundles, I driving us both home in the long shiny green-and-gold-wood-crossed beach wagon. At home you are very gracious, very charming to everyone. After supper we put on records while we do dishes, and suddenly we are dancing, you and I, on the smooth shining linoleum. A strange look darkens murkily on Mrs. C’s face. “You are holding her too close, Attila,” she says. “She can’t follow that way.”
I look at you and murmer, laughing, “I learned your way. You know that.” You laugh assent. There is the rhythmic leading of your legs with mine, my body against yours, suddenly very comfortable; we still being strangers; dancing gives us, in society, this strange prerogative of studiedly casual embrace.
“What?” I ask.
“You are from the naturalist school of philosophy and you don’t like women drivers.”
You say: “You are dis-inviting me.”
I say: “I am not, what do you mean?”
You say: “When an American says: ‘I want to see you sometime’ it means the same as saying: ‘I don’t give a damn if I ever see you again at all.’ ”
In the mirror, undressing, I look at the rather impish and mobile face that grins back at me, thinking: oh, growing to be a woman, to learn the art of subtle power! As long as men have ideals, as long as they are vulnerable, there is this power to create a dream for them.
Laughing, crying, I talk to Bobby. He would like me for a mother. I hold his head in my arms, looking down, tenderly, smiling, listening to his wild idealistic ravings, wondering at the miraculous youngness of him as he tells me how beautiful, how intelligent he finds me, how I have changed him, how we will someday live on a ranch or a desert island, and he will want me to write and be happy, and raise a hockey team.
Oh, God, what woman does not like to be told how wonderful she is, to see adoration naked in a young beautiful boy’s eyes, to feel she can be young in her wisdom, in her intuitive feeling for the rightness of the situation. How powerful, how full of love I feel, honestly, for you, dear guy. And how they smiled at us in the Sou’wester – the cynical sweet little woman waitress, – thinking how crazy in love we were, holding hands over a cheeseburger, laughing, intense, serious, taking our empty cups of coffee back in the kitchen for more, and smiling at all the people, not caring what they thought, only us, being young, beautiful, and maybe not too damned.
Going out, I am warm, bubbling inside like a savory pot of coffee, down the stairs I skip, stretching my arms gladly to the stars. God, I have a long way to go before I am ready to say to one: it is you I will take and give to for the rest of my days. There are so many days, I think, and I have spent six weeks of days among how many men and boys: first of the summer: Lloyd Fisher; Clark Williams (reading Eliot), Ray Wunderlich (philosophical-medical night walk); Phil Brawner (those lovely gay effervescent evenings); Jim McNealy69 (the Esplanade and Louisberg Square at midnight); Art Kramer (plays, dinners, tea and pedantry;) Marvy Cantor (talk and a dance or two); Attila Kassay (dancing, swimming and a premature abortive attempt at a kiss – and a promise of a future); dear Bob Cochran (the M-G, sailing, theater, music circus, visits, readings); Chuck Dudley (motor picnic, long brotherly-sisterly talks.) And Dick, the recurring main theme. Always there, in the bass, or background, always if faintly, and then coming rich and sweet into strong melody again, the resolution of cacophony, and the ingenious weaving of all the rich and strange and exotic and erratic secondary themes into one rich full orchestration.
“I am a part of all that I have met.” To you, all, whether or not you know, having wandered into the tissue of my life, and out again, you have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something. There is nothing but that it will suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Through me transmuted.
Oh, I bite, I bite on life like a sharp apple. Playing it like a fish, I am happy. And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more – to learning. Always.
I have a well, deep, clear, and tartly sweet, of living. All the names, already, and the places. And I am nowhere near the ending. I feel, I must make a list, a diagram, a will, a tribute, to all of you who have fed my growing. Mrs. Morrill70 (“You will have a happy life”) Bob (“Be happy, I know you will, I know I don’t have to worry about you”), Sue Slye71 (“You’ll get the greatest guy, and you’ll have the cutest blonde kids”), and Mr. Cantor (“All I can say is the fellow who gets you will be a very fortunate guy” –) Oh, all of you, all of you with your faith in my potential: I love you all, I will give of myself, my joy, for I have so much, so terribly much.
And if I have learned nothing else, it is to listen and to love: everyone. A humanitarian, faith in man’s potential for good. And a compassion for his weaknesses, his so-called original sins. World compounded of dualities, and man the compromising angelic devil.
In the car we laughed miracles of love and incredulous tenderness. Outside a woman wove down the street, her hair frizzed and bushy, her face ugly with hate, yelling at the man, who was faceless: “No more of your bull shit, why should I listen to your shitty talk …” I laugh, and say: stop, stop, you fools, or the sky will crumble and the forty-day rains begin, falling relentless from the angry heavens. And your car will not save you, nor your tardy repentance. Hush, hush your vile talk, he is being won from you.
And the world goes by creaking at the joints. You, dear, think you are in love with me. Yet you are not lost. There will be a million women. I am glad to be the first, tacking the gay standard as high as I can reach. You can match it, go beyond it someday, Bobby.
Hell, you deserve more than being in the Ladies’ Home Journal. If only I could get you in the Atlantic: “The Kid Colossus.” I will aim at the highest, too. A plot. Like “Knife-like, Flower-like,” only different. To prove what. To begin where, to end where – from what point of view. Oh, I will brood this year to find the form for the content.
Val said: visualize, emotionalize, afterwards. Beginning writers work from the sense impressions, forget cold realistic organization. First get the cold objective plot scene set. Rigid. Then write the damn thing after lying on the couch and visualizing, whipping it to white heat, to life again, the life of the art, the form, not longer formless without frame of reference.
The wind continues by and by, and tomorrow there will be packing and tentative fare wells and Bob and Chuck and Dick – and rest and sleep. Packing, going, sad, glad, lonely for past: moving through so much continuous loveliness, proud to face present uprooting and stoic study program. Eager always still for the promising future which, even if twenty years are gone, is not the final word, nor the stiffening of old uncreative age. Always the promise, the hope, the dream, amid whatever poverty, war, disease and adversity – always persists the credulous human vision, of something better than that which is.
The first day of rigor being over, I am torn between a multitude of conflicting emotions and insights. There is the grim pleasure that I managed to complete my page quota. There is the hysteric and persistent fear that I do not understand all I read, that my water-level of comprehension is a good deal lower than it would be if I were taking the course slowly, step by step, under the guidance of a competent instructor.
There is the urge to procrastinate, to escape from the rigid cage of study routine I have made for myself. It lures my by a multitude of enchanting distractions; it beckons in the form of magazines, gay colorful stories and pictures; it seeks to simulate hunger, calling me to lose myself in the rationalization of continuous and nervous eating; it comes over the telephone, through young male voices, asking me, (unknowingly) to come and do delightful things. Everywhere I turn, distraction beckons. It whispers: “How easy, to give up: excuses, you have good excuses. You were working, you were sick. Take a gut, plan to waste 6 hours per week next year. Forget about Phy. Sci. 19372 and enjoy these last three weeks before the busy delightful whirl of college again begins.”
To hell with you, I say. I have begun to work. My skin is broken out from subconscious anxiety and tension, self-induced. Nothing is more difficult than lashing a vagrant mind suddenly into long self-imposed stints of concentration. But I will learn a few things from this mass of material. I will read and ponder over my 70 page quota per day. That should take 10 days, approximately. I will then allow 5 days for writing, meditating and typing. It shouldn’t be as hard as I make it seem, once I get accustomed to the discipline I myself invented. A few evenings a week I will allow myself a date, providing I get my quota done in due schedule
Today would be an absorbing study if I were good at stream-of-consciousness. My mind tried every trick to elude the prosaic task at hand. I got ideas for stories; the burning desire to revise recent poems and send them out flared bright; I suddenly decided in a spurt of clairvoyance that I would of course marry the other brother, and spent a good deal of time reasoning out pros and cons of one vs. the other. I picked up a magazine, hurtled into a story, rushed through, and came up for air feeling slightly sick and very naughty, getting an almost perverse pleasure when I realized 20 precious minutes were gone. The phone rang and I actually fell downstairs in my eagerness to answer it – symbolically running away from my duties – glad for any reasonably valid excuse.
And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bed early – postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape –. It seems that every year I wince and grovel through an obstacle course that looks quite formidable. Remember how tense I was last fall about the driver’s license? The Smith Club tea speech? To be sure, I can always sneak out of this, but I won’t let myself. It is an absorbing test of will-power – and of the conflicting wills that make up my psyche.
This fall, again, he asked me not to be too nice to him, because he would be susceptible. I acquiesed, laughing, telling him I was interested in boys as people, conquests in humanity, not in romance. A week ago we were reading on the double bed, and we fell asleep side-by-side. Drowsily half-wakened, I turned, warm and damp with sleep, and he was lying beside me, his face buried in the pillow, his arms tight around it, his skin a bronze tan, and the red of his hair like strands of copper. Suddenly tender, I thought, (remembering the way his face had been always young and understanding, shy, gentle, idealistic – and intelligent): “This is the one! After all the whirl and excitement and gay passionate flames, this is the one I will choose to come home to! The proverbial boy next door!”
Why? Why? Because he is a virgin? Because I want terribly to believe in pure idealism? Because I want, as all women do, to be loved devotedly, without fear of jealousy as I grow old, and the young pretty women continue to parade by? Because I believe we are both perfectionists? Because I see suddenly how he has grown, breaking the neat mold I made for him a while back? I would work hard – a home, children, and free lancing. I would work hard to preserve the idealism in him. And what a strange errand that is in today’s world!
Why deny the other? I am taking him for granted. I am becoming patronizing, not seeing all that his keen mind contains. There is a barrier between. I see only the surface, thickened over now, with all the deep, passionate tensions and competative drives flickering ominously below. With him I would compete. Is it because I say subconsciously: “All right, I can’t match you in sex experience, even though I would like to. But I’ll show you I can beat you in other ways.” Would not that horrible sickening jealousy and cynical relativism of last fall fester still in me – no matter how illogical or logical the cause of it? I can only guess. I think I have forgotten those women who sickened me so then. But I am not sure.
And so it is. I suddenly for no apparent reason think: I will marry the one with the red hair because I can leave the blond one alone better, and will not feel a little sad when there is his wife, the other woman. Whereas, the red-haired one always calls to me, and I am always wanting to be tender to him. Tall, lean, tweedy, I said. Here he is, only the red-hair is unique. And he does not smoke a pipe. Or read poetry. But there is the pleasant certitude of the familiar. And that is the security that is so tempting.
Will I ever fling myself into the multitudinous perils and uncertainties of life with a passionate Constantine;73 a witty and sardonic and tempestuous Attila; a proud, wealthy aristocratic Philip? They enchant, they fascinate: I could carve myself to the new worlds they imply. But is it not the tragedy of man to be the reactionary, the conservative, and to always choose the certainty of daily bread above the light airy inconsistencies of foreign pastries?
(“There are times,” the young man told me softly, “when a man wishes a woman were a whore.”) A vile dull evening. A horrible movie, both of us disgusted, staying in out of the rain, sleepy, critical. Driving in the roadster jaunty, bored through the Boston streets with the after-movie crowds thronging crosswalks, and the pink, green, blue, yellow neons all lighted blur in the streets, wet, smooth puddled black. Bored, cross, all wrong. Why do I not wear heels … because I look like such a bobby soxer in flat shoes? I am young, naive, childish, sixteen emotionally. My reactions are too obvious, too excitable easily. I gush over trivia, embroidering problematically on mere cold factual phenomena. I build too much him on a pedestal breathless with admiration (“Oh, really, yes, yes, go on …”) And I freeze at a touch. Ah, I am also twice fishing for compliments, and I would deny it with vehemence but for the fact that I am caught – subconscious though my line may be, and he is, damn him, too right. All that is wrong, it appears, is “that we have not gotten drunk together.” There is a wall. We have inhibitions. And I force him into acting with my absurd overflowing enthusiasms. They are absurd, and I am acting – because I feel peculiar. He is foreign, alien, yet the different cultural and moral backgrounds we draw upon do not seem to matter too badly. Perhaps I am on the defensive, who knows. Over-reacting to the situation with a false burst of effusiveness. Because I want to conquer the cosmopolitan alien before I return to the rustic boy-next-door. (Feminine vanity?) Is not my first desperate rush of enthusiasm (remarked upon formerly by Dick) a vestige of my old fear of people running away, leaving me, forcing me to be alone? Is it not a device subconsciously calculated to interest, to hold, to retain my partner, be it male or female? (I remember when Nancy Colson walked me home from Scouts in Winthrop with another girl. They would always run away giggling together when I started to tell them a story. I did not understand. Bewildered, breathless, I would run after them. And then I learned that they had arranged to run away so they wouldn’t have to listen to my lengthy, dull rambling.) I will cultivate restraint. I will stop being a loud-mouthed puppy that falls all over people in a frantic effort to attract them. I want desperately to be liked. I have gone through a long period of awkward, self-conscious unpopularity. Although I could be called an extrovert now, there are still recurrent traces of my old inferiority complex. I put new people on a pedestal, worshipping them for their surprising kindness to me, for their benevolent notice. How many silver-plated statues have I erected, only to humanize them as I grew to know their vulnerable frailties – ? (John Hall,74 Bob Riedeman, Mr. Crockett, Marcia Brown, Constantine, Attila … The list could go on and on … Some stay remembered giants because not fully known: Mrs. Koffka, Doctor Booth,75 Miss Drew,76 Francesca Raccioppi77 … yet even they have weaknesses, flaws, biases, blind spots.)
So I will prove to him I am not the shy respectable naive fool he thinks me. We park, and I, drowsing on his shoulder, am very glad to see the dark road and the leaves all around. I am sleepy and feel very sexy in my black velvet dress. So I just stay relaxed not saying anything, and he leans down and kisses me on the mouth for a long lovely while. I do not care, I will stop thinking. He kisses very nicely, and I will enjoy being kissed for what it is. I am growing quite warm and desiring, and his hands are good and strong behind my back, holding me to him, and I like to wait while his mouth kisses my neck, moving down to where my neckline goes deep, and my breasts hurt swollen a little, waiting for his hands to begin, and my hair is falling loose over my bare shoulders, and my mouth is soft and wet and wanting under his. For a long time no one says anything. Then he says: “Well, what do you know, a woman is being born.”
“Are you surprised?”
“No.” Simply.
“I didn’t think you would be. I guess I am trying to prove something. We haven’t gotten drunk.”
“We didn’t need to.”
“But you said …”
“I know I said. It was a dirty thing to say, wasn’t it?”
Stymied. I want to say: There is a purpose, a future. This is for some goal, some end. But it wasn’t. The end was coition, physically. But I wasn’t having any of that. I was being pragmatic. I felt like being kissed, petted, made love to. I would take it as far as I wanted to. To hell with him. I am not a tease, nor a whore – he could go home unsatisfied, rape a stranger, I didn’t care. He had tried, chivalrously, (knowing a woman would be insulted if he didn’t.) He is smart. He knows what he can expect from me. So he can take the consequences of associating with me.
To him I would perhaps be a dead end. No intercourse, just a halfway deal. But I am not yet the smart woman who can keep her reputation and be a highclass whore on the side. Not yet, anyway. Incredulous, (he wanted to know my address) I listened to him say: I am not just going to sit here and watch you disappear without knowing where to …
Everything but: What a pretty compromise between technical virginity and practical satisfaction!
Problems it resolves and arouses: I will go to Paris, to Austria, during vacations. England will be the jumping-off place. I will bicycle all over England on weekends. No summer hosteling with the dull drudging miles, weariness, and inability to enjoy the heights of life – but perhaps a stay in the city at a cheap Inn – travel with a friend. Then back to England. I will write; stories, maybe even a novel. I think I will do graduate work in Philosophy. I am going to do it.
Main fear, nagging: men. I am in love with two brothers, embarrassingly so. I will leave. Unless I am lucky, both may give way to marrying while I am gone so I will come back to a big void. On the other hand, I may fall in love, have an affair with someone over “there.” I need a year to get perspective, to free myself before I decide to be “of human bondage.” And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness. I want to eat my cake abroad and come home and find it securely on the doorstep if I still choose to accept it for the rest of my life. I am gambling. The workings of my destiny will be revealing the years hence.
Today a dream was planted: a name: England. A desire: study abroad. A course of action directed toward this end.
Sitting in the gray room, all blurred around the edges, candlelight shafting in, warmly in arms of him, placid, content, drowsy, yet alert and awake, the greatness of the day and the import of the time broke in upon me with a flash of joy and fear. I was going away to England out of the warm secure circle to prove something. There would be the going away and the coming back, and whatever would greet me on returning, I would take stoically, accepting the responsibility of my own will, be it free or predetermined by my nature and circumstances.
Outside the window it was dark, and the light from the kitchen was on the undersides of the tree leaves. It was all stark and unmoving, black, edged with the light. The tree was tall and filled the dark bigness of the window square. I had never felt so happy in that particular way. I was escaping, going away; from what? I had a semisecret aim, and I would extend the cycle of sterility and creation. Gathering forces into a tight tense ball for the artistic leap. Into what? The Atlantic? A novel? Dreams, private dreams. But if I work? And always work to think, and know, and practice technique always?
He fed me orange juice, half a cold peach, and kisses. Read from “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Enormous Room.” Sleepy, candle light, and both feeling glad and warm and constructive … for once not mad cross-fire annihilation and destruction, willful and diabolic. Bourgeois. Middle-class. But life is long. And it is the long-run that balances the short flare of interest and passion. The long prosaic loaf of daily bread. But who to eat it with, and when to begin?
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won’t matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes. (Mrs. McNab: “There was a force working.”)
November 3 – God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain and the damn little men across the street pounding on the roof with picks and axes and chisels, and the acrid hellish stench of tar. I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good. The mail bell rang and I jerked myself up to answer it. A letter from Dick. Sick with envy, I read it, thinking of him lying up there, rested, fed, taken care of, free to explore the books and thoughts at any whim. I thought of the myriad of physical duties I had to perform: write Prouty;78 Life back to Cal;79 write-up Press Board; call Marcia. The list mounted, obstacle after fiendish obstacle, they jarred, they leered, they fell apart in chaos, and the revulsion, the desire to end the pointless round of objects, of things, of actions, rose higher. To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism. The simple way out of all the little brick dead ends we scratch our nails against. Irony it is to see Dick raised, lifted to the pinnacles of irresponsibility to anything but care of his body – to feel his mind soaring, reaching, and mine caged, crying, impotent, self-reviling, an imposter. How to justify myself, my bold, brave humanitarian faith? My world falls apart, crumbles, “The center does not hold.” There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation.
I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom – I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is no where to go – not home, where I would blubber and cry, a grotesque fool, into my mother’s skirts – not to men where I want more than ever now the stern, final, paternal directive – not to church which is liberal, free – no, I turn wearily to the totalitarian dictatorship where I am absolved of all personal responsibility and can sacrifice myself in a “splurge of altruism” on the altar of the Cause with a capital “C.”
Now I sit here, crying almost, afraid, seeing the finger writing my hollow futility on the wall, damning me – god, where is the integrating force going to come from? My life up till now seems messy, inconclusive, disorganized: I arranged my courses wrong, played my strategy without unifying rules – got excited at my own potentialities, yet amputated some to serve others. I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness – and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming “Traitor, sinner, imposter.”
I can begin to see the compulsion for admitting original sin, for adoring Hitler, for taking opium. I have long wanted to read and explore the theories of philosophy, psychology, national, religious, & primitive consciousness, but it seems now too late for anything – I am a conglomerate garbage heap of loose ends – selfish, scared, contemplating devoting the rest of my life to a cause – going naked to send clothes to the needy, escaping to a convent, into hypochondria, into religious mysticism, into the waves – anywhere, anywhere, where the burden, the terrifying hellish weight of self-responsibility and ultimate self-judgment is lifted. I can see ahead only into dark, sordid alleys, where the dregs, the sludge, the filth of my life lies, unglorified, unchanged – transfigured by nothing: no nobility, not even the illusion of a dream.
Reality is what I make it. That is what I have said I believed. Then I look at the hell I am wallowing in, nerves paralyzed, action nullified – fear, envy, hate: all the corrosive emotions of insecurity biting away at my sensitive guts. Time, experience: the colossal wave, sweeping tidal over me, drowning, drowning. How can I ever find that permanence, that continuity with past and future, that communication with other human beings that I crave? Can I ever honestly accept an artificial imposed solution? How can I justify, how can I rationalize the rest of my life away?
The most terrifying realization is that so many millions in the world would like to be in my place: I am not ugly, not an imbecile, not poor, not crippled – I am, in fact, living in the free, spoiled, pampered country of America and going for hardly any money at all to one of the best colleges. I have earned $1000 in the last three years by writing. Hundreds of dreaming ambitious girls would like to be in my place. They write me letters, asking if they may correspond with me. Five years ago, if I could have seen myself now: at Smith (instead of Wellesley) with seven acceptances from Seventeen & one from Mlle, with a few lovely clothes, and one intelligent, handsome boy – I would have said: That is all I could ever ask!
And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments. Why did Virginia Woolf commit suicide? Or Sara Teasdale – or the other brilliant women – neurotic? Was their writing sublimation (oh horrible word) of deep, basic desires? If only I knew. If only I knew how high I could set my goals, my requirements for my life! I am in the position of a blind girl playing with a slide-ruler of values. I am now at the nadir of my calculating powers.
The future? God – will it get worse & worse? Will I never travel, never integrate my life, never have purpose, meaning? Never have time – long stretches, to investigate ideas, philosophy – to articulate the vague seething desires in me? Will I be a secretary – a self-rationalizing, uninspired housewife, secretly jealous of my husband’s ability to grow intellectually & professionally while I am impeded – will I submerge my embarrassing desires & aspirations, refuse to face myself, and go either mad or become neurotic?
Whom can I talk to? Get advice from? No one. A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money. And I won’t take advice, even if I want it. I’ll kill myself. I am beyond help. No one here has time to probe, to aid me in understanding myself … so many others are worse off than I. How can I selfishly demand help, solace, guidance? No, it is my own mess, and even if now I have lost my sense of perspective, thereby my creative sense of humor, I will not let myself get sick, go mad, or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else’s shoulder. Masks are the order of the day – and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair. I will begin to think again, and to act according to the way I think. Attitude is a pitifully relative and capracious quality to base a faith on. Like the proverbial sand, it slides, founders, sucks me down to hell.
At present, the last thing I can do is be objective, self-critical, diagnostic – but I do know that my philosophy is too subjective, relative & personal to be strong and creative in all circumstances. It is fine in fair weather, but it dissolves when the forty day rains come. I must submerge it before a larger, transcending goal or craft. What that is I cannot not now imagine.
—
November 14 – All right, this is it. For the first time (since I heard about Dick) I have broken down and cried, and talked, and cried and talked again. I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth. I have been needing, more than anything, to talk to somebody, to spill out all the tight, jealous, envious, apprehensive neurotic tensions in me: resentments at not being abroad; recriminations about missing the chance to get out of taking a routine science course; wish-dreams about the courses I could have taken instead – this year, last year, the year before; loneliness at having my two main outlets: Marcia and Dick, removed, distant, gone; jealousy, falling apart of my creative attitude toward life, emptiness, intensified by the pathetic, weak, nasal, negative, critical, inarticulate, fumbling approach – grotesque almost – of one who shall be nameless.
All right, tonight, after good pizza, chianti, hot coffee and laughter, I went upstairs to the green, white and red room which is light, and vitality and Marcia. There, on the bed, she touched the soft spot, the one vulnerable spot in the hard, frozen, acrid little core in me, and I could cry. God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis. I talked, and began to remember how I was before, how integrated, how positive, how rich – rooming with Marcia last year was one of the most vital experiences of my life. I shall never forget the passionate discussions, the clear articulate arguments: what ecstasy compared to the shrill, whining, stumbling of this one who lies, breasts full and drooping, eyes drooping, mouth drooping. God!
I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I’d better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this. Sick with conflict, destructive negative emotions, frozen into disintegration I was, refusing to articulate, to spew forth these emotions – they festered in me, growing big, distorted, like pus-bloated sores. Small problems, mentions of someone else’s felicity, evidence of someone else’s talents, frightened me, making me react hollowly, fighting jealousy, envy, hate. Feeling myself fall apart, decay, rot, and the laurels wither and fall away, and my past sins and omissions strike me with full punishment and import. All this, all this foul, gangrenous, sludge ate away at my insides. Silent, insidious.
Until tonight, touching me, letting me be unproud and cry, she talked and listened, and the tightness relaxed that bound my ribs, that gripped my stomach. Escapist, cheater, I was, betraying a trust, a creative pledge to affirm life, hell and heaven, mud and marble.
It must be fatigue, lack of a sense of proportion, that makes me procrastinate and fear my science course. Damn, I can catch up and keep up in it. It may unduly emphasize details, I might be taking soc or Shakespeare or German, but hell, it was my mistake, and I’ve got to cut being a spoiled child about it. No mother is around to absolve me of my burdens, so I retreat in a numb womb of purposeless business with no integration whatsoever.
I rode home at 11:30 tonight, forcing great gulps of frosty air into my lungs, looking at the stars, up behind the black bare trees, and gasping at Orion. How long, how long since I noticed stars; no longer, now, mere inane pinpricks on a smothering sky of cheap cloth – but symbols, islands of light, soft, mysterious, hard, cold – all things, as much as I made them.
And Dick is recriminating himself, readjusting, trying to grow, too. And not living in the luxurious erotic Garden of Eden I imagined, either.
And so I rehabilitate myself – staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction – than to lose it in slumber. I had lost all perspective; I was wandering in a desperate purgatory (with a gray man in a gray boat in a gray river: an apathetic Charon dawdling upon a passionless phlegmatic River Styx … and a petulant Christ child bawling on the train …). The orange sun was a flat pasted disc on an smoky, acrid sky. Hell was the Grand Central subway on Sunday morning. And I was doomed to burn in ice, numb, cold, revolving in crystal, neutral, passive vacuums, void of sensation.
Tomorrow I will finish my science, start my creative writing story. It will be, I think about a weak, tense, nervous girl becoming the victim of the self-centered love of a man who is the spoiled pet of his mother. There will be an analogy, a symbol, perhaps, of a moth being consumed in the fire. I don’t know, something. I will start slowly, for there must be sleep, and work, and more sleep, to rebuild again the higher towers. Remember: “People still live in houses.” The word, quite lovely, “terminal.” And the thought of all the books I must read this summer: The idea of fate, character, destiny, “free will.”
You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again. Let there be continuity at least – a core of consistency – even if your philosophy must be always a moving dynamic dialectic. The thesis is the easy time, the happy time. The antithesis threatens annihilation. The synthesis is the consummate problem.
How many futures – (how many different deaths I can die?) How am I a child? An adult? A woman? My fears, my loves, my lusts – vague, nebulous. And yet, think, think, think – and keep this of tonight, this holy, miraculous resuscitation of the creative integrating blind optimism which was dead, frozen, gone quite away.
To love, to be loved. By one; by humanity. I am afraid of love, of sacrifice on the altar. I am going to think, to grow, to sally forth, please, please, unafraid. Tonight, biking home toward midnight, talking to myself, sense of trap, of time, rolled the stone of inertia away from the tomb.
Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens. Now a love, a faith, an affirmation is conceived in me like an embryo. The gestation may be a while in producing, but the fertilization has come to pass.
Goodnight, oh Big Good Book.
Tuesday – November 18.
You are crucified by your own limitations. Your blind choices cannot be changed; they are now irrevocable. You have had chances; you have not taken them. You are wallowing in original sin; your limitations. You cannot even decide to take a walk in the country: you are not sure whether it is an escape or a refreshing cure from cooping yourself in your room all day. You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately, cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell – if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.
January 10, 1953: Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within. Eddie wrote me after my last honest letter saying I had better go to get psychiatric treatment to root out the sources of my terrible problems. I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists. But all I need is sleep, a constructive attitude, and a little good luck. So unbelievably much has happened since I last wrote in here:
Thanksgiving I met a man80 I could want to see again and again. I spent three days with him up here at house dance. I got a sinus infection for a week. I saw Dick, went to Saranac81 with him, and broke my leg skiing. I decided again that I could never live with him ever.
Now midyears approach. I haye exams to work for, papers to write. There is snow and ice and I have a broken leg to drag around for two hellish months.
Dick and I are doomed to compete always and never cooperate. I can’t explain the qualities in us that aggravate our passionate jealousies, but I feel he wants to prove his virile dominance (e.g. In his writings, women have no personalities but are merely sex machines on which he displays his prowess in sexual technique; he grew a mustache and said if he shaved it off because I wanted him to it would be a sign of weakness and submission.) And, looking back on our relationship together I see now clearly the pattern of my continual desperate striving to measure up to what I thought were his standards of athletic ability, etc. Always I panted after him on a bicycle. Another thing, with him, although he always led and set the pace for sexual play, I never felt that I was feminine (implying a certain physical fragility – so a boy could masterfully pick up his girl and carry her, for instance.) Granted, I felt a seductive woman, but wearing flat heels always, feeling physically his equal in size, disturbed me. If I am going to be a woman, fine. But I want to experience my feminity to the utmost. Seeing him after two months, I no longer felt the desire flame up in me. I didn’t particularly want him to touch me. For one thing, since he can’t kiss me at all, I have the feeling (purely mental) that his mouth is a source of poisonous tuberculosis germs, and, therefore, unclean. I am, therefore, physically aloof. Also, I don’t feel any emotion toward him – no longer the passionate, nervous, tense, sex-motivated hunger that I know was reciprocal. I don’t love him, I never did. I don’t think I deluded myself, except during that lovely Freshman spring when I made him into a golden god physically, morally, and mentally. Again I attribute my first attraction to a naive idealism. And now, I feel a new eagerness at the potential getting-to-know this new man: a different, more sensible, rational, realistic eagerness which is not cynical, but rather creative. I think I am ready to accept him right away as a human, fallible being. And to make myself always worthy of him as I can. Will I ever see him again? Will it work out? I don’t know. I only know I feel about him the way I doubted I could feel about any man after Dick.
What do I see in him? Power, strength. Yes. I admire these qualities. Mentally and physically he is a giant. I looked at his face, heard him say my name, once, that Sunday, more lyrically than I could wish: he was a stranger, yet there was a flash of recognition, a sudden intuitive awareness: I would like to get to know this man; I could give a lot to him; I could perhaps learn what love was. I felt reserves of power, creative good, and strength in me that I had never been consciously aware of. I did much with him: talked over pizza, played in the stage props of alleyways, quoted poetry, drove into strange countries of snow, looked at pictures, ate ham and eggs in diners, walked about the mental hospital listening to the hoarse screaming before going to the cocktail party, danced, walked Sunday for a late breakfast downtown, and then out into the country, talking, my hand in his, and I went up in an airplane, shooting into the third dimension with the pilot we met, and he waited for me, walked back then together along the railroad tracks, spent hours drowsing by the fire in the livingroom. And then he went, and I went to the infirmary.
Objective account, what? But no mention of the glory, the joy, the exultation of being alive with him, to the fullest extent. I would like to see him much again, talk to him, see plays with him. Funny, but I’d like to go easy on the sexual part. I’m not impatient, the way I was two years, four years ago. I know we’d get along fine as far as sex is concerned; I just don’t want to rush it ahead of the mental companionship. As far as I know, we are intellectually extremely compatible, or at least we are so potentially. God, I want to get to know him. If I could build an ideal and creative life with him, or someone like him, I would feel I had lived a testimony of constructive faith in a hell of a world. And our reality would be our heaven. Please: I dream of talking to him again, under apple trees at night in the hills of orchards; talking; quoting poetry; and making a good life. Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen.
January 12 – Again, I can not help muse upon the imprisonment of the individual in the cell of her own limitations. Now that I am condemned to a consistantly small radius of activity – mainly my room, I am aware more than ever of the fact that I don’t know any of the girls in this house. Oh, I see them on the surface, gossip occasionally and friendily, but still, I have known none of them really – nor what ideas motivate them, drive them. I am as distant from the girls in my class as I could be. The few whom I feel I’d like to be close with hardly speak to me from force of habit. My circle of acquaintances has dwindled to a small faithful handful of people. The vast rich resources of Smith personalities lies untapped. Now I am resolved that this spring will be different. I will go to Haven, Albright, Wallace, Northrop, Gillett,82 and begin to renew my acquaintances with the girls there. I will invite them to supper. I will bike to Browns83 more often. I will try to get to know my faculty better. I will see Maria (I know no one in the quad!) Once again I will be the cheerful, gay, friendly person that I am really inside, and then, perhaps by some miracle, I will feel closer to my housemates. I am obsessed by my cast as a concrete symbol of my limitations and separation from others. I would like to write a symbolic allegory about a person who would not assert her will and communicate with others, but who always believed she was unaccepted, apart. Desperately, In an effort to be part of a certain group she breaks her leg skiing and has a morbid fear that her leg will not mend properly. When the cast is taken off, her leg has withered, and she shrivels up into dust, or something.
Anyhow, I shall chalk this first semester up as a nadir of every aspect of my life – scholastic, social, spiritual. I moved to a new house84 (lost security, friends), catapulted into Chaucer unit85 which took me all semester to adjust to, was forced by my own stupidity to take science, the first course I’ve hated; saw Dick get tuberculosis; lived with a girl who, compared to Marcia, appalled me – on all fronts, I foundered. And then the last straw broke my leg.
Now there is over one month left, just verging into the second semester, of this enforced seclusion (which has small delights – a clear winter sunset through the natural iron grillwork of black trees, a street lamp shining through ice-encased branches, blue sky glittering, and sun on ice-crusted snow. Loveliness, loveliness.)
Lights glimmer in faint perhapses on the dark doorsill. The eastern sky promises to lighten grayly: my cast will be off in a month, my exams will be over, perhaps I won’t ever have to open my hated science book again; perhaps the man will want to see me again. That is all. But ah, how I long for the time to ripen fully, and the spring to come again after this long and appalling fall and winter. To come, and the bicycle be brought out, and the again-strong legs to pedal joyous and swiftly into the green, unfolding future! To dance along greening leaves into the sexual sunlight.
Sunday morning. January 18. Awoke to look through blind chink into frozen wildernesses of ice-encased tree branches. Black iron twigs circled with cylinders of ice, exquisite, the frost-thickening of the world, glassed-in, and now later there is the universal dripping as a fuzz-blurred brilliant sun sears through gray layers of cloud, melting the world into liquid falling ice-drops.
The nadir is passed. I know that now. By a miracle of incident and attitude I am happier and more ecstatic at this particular moment than all this year ever (except for the actual ecstasy in time of House Dance weekend.) Again I am compelled to state how I believe that attitude is everything – how the blind, neutral dripping of the trees which I enjoyed intrinsically this early morning is now, suddenly, by mental magic, transmuted into something infinitely rich and ineffably strange, how the dismembered sound fragments integrate suddenly into a unity of music. And why all this sudden plunge upward of ecstasy? I was happier yesterday than ever before, so it is not as if one incident started me on the upgrade. But it certainly acted as a positive catalyst to accelerate the process. First let me tell you about the beginnings of my turning tide. Last time I talked to you, “lights were glimmering in faint perhapses.” Now a few of the perhapses have come true. In every field of my endeavor, in every empty barren cubicle of myself: academic, social, artistic, inter-personal, (and on and on into subdivision after subdivision). There is the upswing, the turning, the sprouting of creative life again. I have gone through my winter solstice, and the dying god of life and fertility is reborn. In fact, my personal seasonal life is two months ahead of the spring equinox this year!
First of all, I have only one more science exam (midyear) – after which I need never ever to open the heavy hated puerile tome again! Yes, my petition went through, and I can audit the course (without credit) for the rest of the year: enjoying lectures per se, and doing none of the tedious memory work. This means that I can take the course in Milton next term,86 and concentrate on Modern poetry and creative writing for the rest of the year! Ah, bliss! Ah, joy! Academically, I plan to plunge whole-heartedly into the spring term. Honors gleams scintallant ahead of me!
Then, my vow to be cheerful and jolly about my legs, and gay with the girls in the house has worked wonders. Mirthful attitude is contagious, I find. I laugh they laugh. I feel so much closer to several girls now. Instead of a dastardly hindrance, my leg has become a passport, a revelation. Whole-heartedly I can say now, even with four weeks a head of me: I AM GLAD I BROKE IT! I have never been so shocked into awareness of the fortunate exquisite life I lead as when suddenly I was unable to walk. I realize now that I was really more crippled, mentally, all last fall, than I am, physically, now.
So that is the incipient beginning part of it. I am glad I wrote some of the sick naked hell I went through down in here. Otherwise, from my present vantage point, I could hardly believe it!
And now, the final crowning touch. For weeks I have been obsessed by the idea of him, recalling again and again the apparent intellectual companionship indicated by our one meeting, our few subsequent letters. I thought how hideous it would be if I never saw him again, never got to know him in reality, as I began to know him. I like talking about him, discussing him with other people: a rather obvious sublimation and substitution, that! And now suddenly, as if I conjured him up, the phone rang on the first floor this morning and a clear, silk, suave voice said: “How’s the invalid.” I don’t know what I said. (I screamed inside, gasped, fell in an epileptic froth of ecstasy, mad, insane ecstasy, on the floor, all inside.) “I am in Northampton,” he said. “Let me explain.” He explained.
Up here for the weekend with a girl he met in Akron at a New Years party. He thought it would be nice to come see me this evening as she had to sing in Vespers. Nice, oh very nice. Inside I wondered: what is she like? Lovely? Brilliant? Oh, what?
“I got your letter Monday saying you were back here,” he said. “Perry told me you would be home for about two weeks. I made this date quite a while back.”
Oh, don’t explain, you inconsistent boy. You have no obligations, no responsibility toward me at all, at all. Only except for the fact that you could very possibly be the first and last man I was willing to make myself vuner-able for; to love, in the deepest, richest, intellectual and physical sense of the trite banal word! You made the date before you knew about my leg, no doubt. Perhaps Perry told you it would be noble to visit me. Perhaps you thought it would be a damn nice gesture since you didn’t have anything better to do.
At any rate, I don’t care. I am going to see you, maybe for once and all, thats up to you (damn, its always up to you) and that is all I ask. Sure, I’d like more. But this few houred-brief dropping from the clouds, from another girls plane, is a miracle to me in itself. I will remember mother’s letter. If the French women can be bewitching reclining on a divan, so can I. I will be lovely, vivacious, witty, the very best me that I always want to be with you. Damn, oh damn. Every minute passing is all at once an unbelievable and doubtful century of agony and anticipation. I am not hungry. I am lean, taut, eager. God damn, I want to hoard the time with you like money. Now, ahead it lies. Seven hours hence. Each hour a savoring, an exquisite tasting of delight. The bell has rung for Pavlov’s dogs, and the salivation has begun.
Never mind, dear Syl. He has proved, if nothing more, that beyond Dick there is another range of men. If this one goes, he will have served, to heighten me: “I am a part of all that I have met.” I could orient myself about him. I have so much I want to give and share! God, I overflow with the vitality and ecstasy of being alive! Please, let me be casual and gay and right with him now. It will be gone too soon, and now there may be a never-nothing-no-hope-here-sign tacked up on the front-door of my left ventricle. God. I shall soon know.
Monday afternoon: January 19, 1953:
All right, the crisis is past. Miraculous, and quite unbelievably I have in my head now the certitude of a reality that will come to pass in a month and a half: a wonderful trade-in for a nightly ritual of dream fantasias! I am going to that magnificent event, the Yale Junior Prom with him: with the one boy in the whole college I give a damn about. And a very tender damn, at that! Anyway, it is not the fact of the Prom that delights (although it is a symbolic traditional weekend, in my own experience, too!) but mainly the idea of being with a stimulating, brilliant, magnificent male for three days of conventional and unconventional companionship! God, can I wait! Yes, damn it. I can! Think of seven weeks (instead of hours) of anticipation! (God, what a life – living in the future and the past and existing merely in the present.) I will work like a fanatical intellectual for the next month and a half. That is the benefit of having some definite occasion to look forward to in the sequence of time: you can orient your energies to work purposefully, knowing that, in the logic of the continual clock, the time of rejoicing will come around and you will live through it. (And then, damn it, it will of course be gone.) When there is no such future oasis in the desert of time, it is like living on a slide ruler of calculated dream fantasies. In my mind, for so long, now, I have kissed him, talked with him, and decided I am capable of love again, if I decide to make myself vulnerable again. Now I know that I will see him again. He didn’t have to ask me to the prom. I honestly had inured myself to thinking I might never see him again. Then, yesterday, after the phone call, I was afraid: I thought: how terrible to renew again the physical image, to hurt myself on the edges of this resuscitated reality, only to fall back again into the futile never-never Land of Dreams.
He came early. I was in my bathrobe typing my dialogue paper when Debbie rushed into the room: “A man to see you.” “O.K. I’ll be down in ten minutes.” “Ten?” “Five.” Shaking I hurried to get dressed. I wanted to run down immediately to see him. I couldn’t find my black velvet skirt. Damn. There it was. Aqua cashmere, pearls, hair back demure behind ears. God, how kindled, how incandescent a man can make a starved woman! It was fifteen minutes.
I came down the back stairs and walked up behind him in my cast, leaving my crutch in the hallway. “Hello, Myron.” He was looking up the front stairs waiting for me. He looked eager and happy. He must have had a nice weekend with that other girl.
We sat on the couch in the livingroom and talked for an hour before supper. It was a little tense, and the silences were now and then a little jerky, but it was all right, and we teased and played. Suppertime he was quiet. After, the other boy called up: “tell Myron I’ll be over in five minutes.” “All right,” I said, feeling sick. I hung up.
“He says he’ll be over in five minutes. Myron, I can’t bear it.” I felt too vulnerable, too pleading, saying that.
We sat on a trunk in the side hall. He looked, clinically serious, down at my cast. “When will that be off?” he said determinedly. Hope flickered. “Oh, the first week in February, maybe the second.” “I mean exactly when.” “Well, by the middle of February.” Still looking down: “Do you think you could dance, say by March 6?” A great champagne-colored bubble exploded inside me. “Sure, why?” How amazingly casual of me! “Yale Junior Prom. Would you like to dance then?” “Depends on who with?” “You could dance with Tommy Dorsey. He’s playing.” “He’s not tall enough.” “How about me, then.” Hesitatingly: “Oh, I’d love to, really …” “But what,” he said quickly. “But I will!” The words bubbled out of me like colored lanterns. I actually hugged him impulsively. He seemed surprisingly glad: “I’ll be proud to have you.” Then he talked of getting tickets to a play at the Schubert,87 and taking a bus to the ocean. I could hardly talk, I was so ecstatic. And then the boy came. I saw Myron to the door. He was grinning: “I won’t write to ask you again, then. It’s verbal, that’s enough. It’s better that way.” “Fine.” “About letters …” “Oh, don’t bother, if you’ve got exams coming up.” “No, it’s not that. It’s just that when I write you I want it to be my best, not just conventional. I want it to say something.” “Anything, as long as it’s you.”
I put on his hat, back far on his head, so his hair showed, and he stood there, boyish, grinning. “Goodbye.” Goodbye, and that was that for a month and a half. I wandered dazedly through the house and everybody kept saying: “Sylvia, that’s wonderful.” “I’m so glad you’re going!” One nice thing about living with a hundred girls – excitement shared is multiplied a hundred times!
January 22 – Thursday – This simply has to stop! I am surely working myself into an induced state of excitement and obsession. There are reasons for this, obvious reasons. One, I have been deprived of sexual activity for long unnatural months now and it is only normal that I transfer my daily and nightly sex fantasies to the one male I have been seeing lately. Remember Al Haverman88 last house dance: that is a case history for you. That sudden rapport, that sudden attraction and transference of physical adoration – remember how you screamed ecstatically over Constantine, and shivered over Attila, and talked heatedly with the handsome entomologist on the bus. Remember all this, and think coolly: why do you react the way you are reacting. Ask yourself coldly: am I rationalizing?
I have taken to retreating to bed in the long afternoons, pulling down the blinds and filtering out the light, lying warm and soft and sexual under the resilient light quilt and dreaming of him and talking to him. All right, I work well and hard most of the time; I am probably at my peak of sexual desire, and I should not wonder at my smouldering passion. So why not? Because, you fool, he doesn’t realize how you are transmuting him in your mind into a strong, brilliant man who desires you mentally & physically. And being as he will continue quite unaware of his role in your mind, you cannot expect him to fulfil that role in life. You must not let yourself be disappointed. Remember, you consider “love” a most intricate and complex word; and among its manifold meanings is that of vulnerability arising from shared weaknesses. There is a time for everything; and you must beware your predilection for green apples. They may be sweet and tart and new and early, it’s about time you learned to wait for the season of harvest. Take it slow, please. He is to be no engine for your ecstasy. Not yet, anyway.
Now why all this obsession with him; why this taking out and rereading a million times of letters? Well, it’s like this. You weren’t planning on seeing him for eight weeks, and now, suddenly and miraculously, all at once, he is writing that he would like to see you midsemester weekend, just a bit over a week away. The very suggestion of being with him so soon is almost unbearable in its intensity of gladness that you are overcome.
All right, you are intensely excited when you are with him. But it is, emphatically, not just sex or the prospect of sex that intrigues. You have gone out with handsomer, cavalierly boys – witness Phil, Attila, Constantine. You kissed them, laughed with them, and didn’t mind leaving them. Why? Because they didn’t offer a future? Maybe. But also because you know damn well that sex isn’t ever enough for you. You want a brilliant mind that you can stimulate, but that you can also honestly look up to. And this one has it. He combines the loving gentleness of Bob with the athletic good cleanness of John Hall, and towers above the minds of them all, even Dick. Mentally he satisfies; physically he satisfies. Granted, there is a wide range of men in colleges all over the United States who would also satisfy, but this one you have met in actuality, and you are not going to waste your life in wishful thinking over the golden-man. You are no golden-woman yourself – just a rather vivacious human one!
It is rather blissful to share witty talk and intelligent letters with a man who is also three-dimensionally satisfactory as this one is. Eddie revolts me physically; I would vomit if he tried to kiss me. Dick is suddenly too stocky, too heavy, too short, making me always feel oxish. Not so this one. He even combines my favorite elements of Perry with a sort of clever observant worldliness that I enjoy infinitely.
What is he like? describe him to me, you say! I can not! He speaks slowly and soft, with a peculiar individual enunciation on each syllable, and his eyes are light-gray or green. His skin is not too good; he wears glasses. But he has deep-set eyes and a broad bone-structured forehead. I try to remember the turnings of his head, but I cannot. I have not studied his features long enough.
We have years of talking and acres of living to do yet before we even begin to know each other. Will we ever? I wonder. I wonder terribly. Am I afraid my life lacks organization? Am I scared to choose my path after college? Do I want to crawl into the gigantic paternal embrace of a mental colossus? A little, maybe. I’m not sure. But I think that I am much less a child than I was two, and oh yes four, years ago. I am learning how to compromise the wild dream ideals and the necessary realities without such screaming pain. My seventeen-year-old radical self would perhaps be horrified at this; but I am becoming wiser, I hope. I accept the idea of a creative marriage now as I never did before; I believe I could paint, write, and keep a home and husband too. Ambitious, wot? I also believe I probably wouldn’t die at the act of “confining” myself to one man for fifty years. Oh, it is a great huge enormous decision, but the freeing of the self is part of this, too. I must stay aware of this: I could be more of a prisoner as an older, tense, cynical career girl than as a richly creative wife and mother who is always growing intellectually – who is committed to certain ideals and purposes shared with her mate. This could be heaven if we made it such. If choices must be made, they might as well be made gladly. So there.
And with him there would be a great, evolving, intellectual dignity to life. I am sure of it. I can walk tall and proud beside him in my body and in my mind. How will it work out? I don’t know. In one year, two years, I will look back at the blind-alleys I wander in now and smile and think: My! how inevitable this past seems now that was once upon a time my very uncertain future!
(God, I am beginning to sound like Henley: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”) Well, yes, the leg has been an escape. All the pamperings given to the tuberculosis patient, and none of the eternities of loneliness. Very neat compromise: no jobs, no work but the scholastic minimum. Good food, sleep, company, and solitude. And best of all, after I go through the gruelling task of learning how to walk again, I’ll be ready to assume the world: press board, smith review, classes et. al. Oh, it’ll be a tough month first semester, but then it will be suddenly, miraculously, Junior Prom, and then bang! Spring vacation (which I shall spend wholly at home, writing, reading modern poetry and Milton! See Dick? Damned if I am! He can go rape and/or suavely seduce Anne. To hell.)
As for minute joys: I think this book ricochets between the feminine burbling I hate and the posed cynicism I would shun. One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering. I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. “A passionate, fragmentary girl,” maybe?
As for minute joys: as I was saying: do you realize the illicit sensuous delight I get from picking my nose? I always have, ever since I was a child – there are so many subtle variations of sensation. A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger can catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucous in the nostril and draw them out to be looked at, crumbled between fingers, and flicked to the floor in minute crusts. Or a heavier, determined forefinger can reach up and smear down-and-out the soft, resilient, elastic greenish-yellow smallish blobs of mucous, roll them round and jelly-like between thumb and fore finger, and spread them on the under surface of a desk or chair where they will harden into organic crusts. How many desks and chairs have I thus secretively befouled since childhood? Or sometimes there will be blood mingled with the mucous: in dry brown scabs, or bright sudden wet red on the finger that scraped too rudely the nasal membranes. God, what a sexual satisfaction! It is absorbing to look with new sudden eyes on the old worn habits: to see a sudden luxurious and pestilential “snot-green sea,” and shiver with the shock of recognition.
January 26 – Monday morning: January dry, hard, glittering, cold, and the wicked naked beauty of the scraped blue skies and the sun sparks ricocheting jazzily off car rooftops. Last night it was cold, suddenly, the loud big wind riproaring down from some no-man’s land of snow, and battering and blundering against windowframes, rocking them in their sockets, and barging into the flapping blinds, and shouldering through the brittle crackling trees: damned if I’m going to be raped by the North wind. I get up and close the window in the cold bare dark, and jump back desperately into bed, curling into a fetal position and warming my frigid hands between my thighs. This morning: I knew it would be this way: like before the old Botany exams when I got a sudden obsession to write in here: anything to put it off, studying. Oh, I was going to be a good girl and start studying yesterday, and go to the libe this morning. No soap; no sir. What do I do? Secretly try on dresses of one-who-shall-be-nameless to see if I can work up a new combination this weekend. Lovely! Damn you: procrastinator!
Lying in bed per usual this morning, under the big light resilient feather puff, I started worrying about how I should have taken all different courses here: 4 years of German, Psychology instead of Botany, Philosophy instead of Religion! God, I felt sick, or started to; life is so only-once, so single-chancish! It all depends on your arranging and synchronizing it so that when opportunity knocks you’re right there waiting with your hand on the door knob. If I had known then what I do now, (i.e., that I would like to go to graduate school) I never would have concentrated so on English and Art. Koffka was right: college is no time for the would-be scholar to specialize. Graduate school is the place for that. And now I don’t want to take grad study in English: I can carry English on myself after the specializing I have done in Honors here. Honors is fine if you can’t go to graduate school and want to experience a microcosm of it. But now I would like to go on in either philosophy or psychology! Writing on the side (she says ambitiously.) But to write you have to live, don’t you? Should I, then, get a job: in publishing company or factory or office? After all, I should be able to observe life intelligently and intuitively, and experience in living is something I’ll never get in the idealized scholastic environment of graduate school where food and shelter are provided “gratis” if one is brilliant enough! As far as grad school goes, the most ideal sounds like Johns Hopkins where I could be taking elementary language and psych courses while doing intense work in English, or writing. I don’t know of any other place where one could do that. Of course, there is always the ambitious project of trying for a Fulbright to England (only a million people want them; no competition, really.) This scheme would offer advantages yet nebulous, and equally vague disadvantages (one, most obvious, being the severing of American acquaintanceships for a dangerous year.) I would no doubt be able to travel during vacations, and learn to be quite independent. Who knows? It is all so uncertain. The two main other places I would consider are Radcliffe (near home, Harvard, but the program is nowhere as flexible as Johns Hopkins) or Columbia (New York, New Haven, and free culture, if men are around to take you to plays.) I have no desire to go west, even middle-west. For one thing, I might as well go “all the way” and head for England and Europe – or stay East, where education can’t be beat. Really, I do want at least another year of education before I start living. Once I break the connection with school life it’ll be hard getting back – on scholarship.
So that looks like it: Application (maybe) for a Fulbright, and if I don’t get it, application for a scholarship to summer school in Britain and travel a bit after that, (maybe.) Johns Hopkins, or possibly Columbia as an alternate – and (maybe) I’ll have to work my senior summer and plan to go abroad the next summer. After that: what? A job, obviously. Marriage, I hope, by the time I’m twenty-five, at least. Work in psychology, sociology, or bookishness.
I don’t want to use higher education as an escape from responsibility, but I feel there is so much more awareness I should have before plunging onto the field of battle. This summer I must do gallons of reading in psych, philosophy – english: I have a colossal list of books. Why, oh why, in all those camp and social summers didn’t I read more purposive lasting books instead of the young girl’s novels? I suppose, though, that learning to get along with farm hands and Christian Scientists is at least, if not more, important than learning about Kant’s categorical imperative. Still and all, I should like also in addition to be aware of the imperative!
Now that I talk this out with myself, the past doesn’t look so deformed, nor the future so black. How much more hope I have now than my Mary Ventura (and how much less hope for freedom to wander than any casual glittering millionaire!) A philosophical attitude: a drinking and living of life to the lees: please don’t let me stop thinking and start blindly frightendly accepting! I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of non-feeling, or stop questioning and criticising life and take the easy way out. To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.
11 a.m. Still going on, ignoring science, peering out the window for mail. This morning also in bed I started dragging the still, stagnant, putridly and potently rich sea of my subconscious. I want to work at putting together the complex mosaic of my childhood: to practice capturing feelings and experiences from the nebulous seething of memory and yank them out into black-and-white on the typewriter. Like in my attempt: “The Two Gods of Alice Denway.”
Remember Florence-across-the-street, who had orange Japanese lanterns in her garden that used to crumple in your fingers with a dry crinkling sound? Remember how you used to lock the bathroom door (they told you not to because it might stick, and then the firemen would have to come in the window and get you,) and squat in fascinated discovery over the hand mirror on the floor and defecate? God, start remembering all the things; all the little things!
friday: january 29: 6 p.m. after science exam: everything is lovely lately. i am getting trite, a cliché coming true. a moonhappy night pouringlight on the dew. banalitybanalitybanality. hell damn bitch shit piss corruption: i have so many books i am perishing to read in my bookcase. hours-and-hours-and-hours- and hours. i could be caught in a bombastic blithering blizzard of rhetoric but no … the lyric abstrusities of auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. the good gray conservative obliterating snow. smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. and come out transformed. lose yourself in a numb dumb snowdaubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had. god, the allusive illusions of the song of the cold: “If winter comes can spring be … we’re nearer to spring than we were in september i heard a bird sing in the dark of december”, january, febmar, aprimay, apricots, beneath the bough. and thou, there has always furthermore in addition inescapably and forever got to be a thou. otherwise there is no i because i am what other people interpret me as being and am nothing if there were no people. (like the sound of the hack-neyed tree falling axed by old saws in the proverbial forest.)
i am reading “ulysses.” god, it is unbelievably semantically big, great, mind cracking, and even webster’s is a sterile impotent enuch as far as conceiving words goes.…” (excerpt from a letter)
monday, february 2, 1953: all right, I now have a neat, tautskinned white baseball, red laced; that says my-name-and-his on it. he also, if it matters, likes breaded pork chops, prime ribs of roast beef, and good meats. (honestly, I am so disgusted with my mentality. I am not deep, I don’t work, I revel and go lax with physical comforts. I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.) he knows what he wants, and how to get it and that he can get it. the main problem is to make him want and need me. only I don’t even know if his is the life I want to put on. we sat and talked 24-hours split in half between two days. did I get to know him better? I think so. getting to know anybody is a hideous complex job. he, for all he says he is not deep, has strong powerful depths of motivation. from his telling me about his childhood environment, I can see the origin of his strong drives for success, security, power of intelligence, and financial independence. (He wants these things very hard). without the benefit of psychology courses I can intuitively and rationally understand his wanting these things. what could I be to him to fill in his needs: I could be a spontaneous, fertile, creative, motivating, encouraging force, and never let him go sterile or too discouraged. I could try to symbolize a vital creative beauty, a delight in life – god, who knows what? Does he need a woman? Seems offhand not, at least for four or five years. Eventually he seems to want a home and family. Beastly encouraging. If he did “love” some girl (he says he never has – has been only physically infatuated) I think his love would be more delightful and self-understanding than, say, Perry’s. Perry wants to be loved and adored; a woman who reflects his glory lovingly he labels his “love,” and endows her with all the wonderful qualities of his ideal. That is a euphemistic unrational egoistic love, in certain respects. Myron, I hope, and think, would more consciously question all the practical aspects of the relationship. I want to put down a few observations here about him so that later I can add to them and make a sort of pattern for his personality so I can understand him better, even if he is generally reticent.
He has come from simple stock: Austro-hungarian parents. He lives in Warren, Ohio, in a heterodox neighborhood of negroes, jews, germans, and other immigrants. He played baseball with the neighborhood kids all the time, all day, every day, stole things, built fires after dark and listened to the older guys tell stories. He doesn’t know how to swim at all, because once when he was going swimming his uncle who was living with him told him he would be a laughing stock in his bathing suit because he was chubby. To this day he hates teasing, razzing, and “playing games”. He says his father came over here, worked in the steel mines, saw no future in it, moved to Warren, Ohio, married at 28, and was a “Pool-playing bum.” He says he doesn’t know his father at all, and his mother not much better. Always his mother was inhibiting and fearful: no, don’t do this; no you can’t go out; no you can’t ride your bike until such-and-such an age in the street. She cried always when he went away to school. Now she has a job and is happier with the “girls” in the shop. As for his brother Ted (who is 6’ tall, a good build, good-looking, and a crack swimmer and almost 25) he says he dislikes him. Why? Because Ted has no self-discipline, drinks, smokes, and spends money “whoring around.” He is always asking for money, and Myron and his father chipped in and bought him a car, and the only letter he wrote to Myron all year was one asking for money. Seems like he envies his kid brother who is going to Yale and also signing big baseball contracts. Myron says he has profited by every one of his brother’s mistakes: Inside his brother must feel like a heel.
Now Myron, he never went out all during high school: didn’t have a car, worked hard to earn money. First year at Yale he was afraid of flunking out, worked all the time, had only two dates, by accident or persuasion with a wealthy Vassar girl. Signed baseball contract with tigers, wrote prize-winning freshman English essay. Used to think girls could never learn the stuff he did at school. Never thought about marriage at all, until about this last year – even now the prospect seems amazingly far off in the future. Perry and Bob seem to have brought the subject closer to his thoughts. To him, his intellectual achievement is his first pride; baseball record the second. For these excellences he has gotten rewards. The reward-value makes them desirable. At Yale he has spent “minus $200” – his scholarship has more than taken care of everything. He paid $3000 income tax on his baseball earnings. For this he has received praise: this makes continuing to do well along these lines desirable. (Compare: my analogous success in school and in writing.) Above all, he wants to be a “man”: independent and secure financially. He wants to be a good doctor, to plunge into life, to know about life, not to just sit back and philosophize. (Ironically, Dick now has swung to my way of thinking about literature, criticism, and writing – away from the mere science and calculation of living.) Doctoring would seem to combine prestige, financial well-being and intellectual stimulation. That is what he wants: power in those respects. Money: he had to grub for it when he was a kid. Intellectual life: his parents had no schooling: “Every step puts another barrier between him and his family.” Does he need love, admiration, encouragement? Don’t we all? He gets discouraged, too. He came up here saturday after lunch planning to go back that night – I persuaded him to stay over, and he did. (He isn’t domineering at all, he says, and would never force his will on anyone. N.B.) Evidently he was in a self-depreciating mood, when he came. I like telling him nice true things about himself; I hope it makes him a little happy. I do not think he gets excited about things: he knows what he wants quite well and also how he can get it. Lovely.
Now enough factual background statement. He and I: sat in the living room, at Rahar’s,89 at the coffee shop90 and talked and did-not-talk as we pleased. He hates sitting: likes to talk walking. (N.B also) He sat next to me with his arm around me, warm and close and comfortable. Kissed me, too. Long and goodly saturday we stood on the porch in the rain, him pulling me against his body, and shutting his eyes and kissing me gently and for a long time, with his mouth moving softly on mine. I think I am a good deal more experienced in varieties of kisses than he is: I better be careful I don’t shock him or make him think he needs more experience, because I like him this way, and perhaps subtly I can let him know how other ways I like to be kissed. He also carries me places in his arms, and I feel so feminine and light, even with my cast, it is so good to let the world black out quite and the equilibrium tilt inside my head: the carrying is a symbol of his virility: to me. Why do I like him so: more so than dick (so I don’t even want to go up and see dick at the end of February)? He is like me in many ways: even the attitude about marriage, unromantic, practical, and reasonable, is like mine. In the long run, that is good, if difficult. I have a rather peculiar feeling that if I use my intelligence and pragmatism that I can become desirable and necessary to him. Maybe that is a damn illusion. Even though he says he is against the attitude that a woman is a prize possession, he likes them good-looking, and pretty intelligent. How do I like men? Hell, depends for what purpose. Everything from the worldly roué to the young innocent. But in the long run, I like not having to worry about what money can buy (sort of let’s out teachers, even though they do live in academic circles & have summers off.) I like keen intelligence and intellectual curiosity: probably a professional man: doctor, lawyer, engineer, would do the trick. And a lot more. Giant, superman: mental and physical. He is these. Physically he meets all requirements (clearer skin is the only possible flaw.) Mentally, he is pretty great. The only terrible thing is: I am not sure I will ever know him really: I must see him in a lot of situations before I decide how he reacts, how he is inside. But somehow I am forcibly drawn to him. His lacks: no “family” prestige, etc., bother me not a whit. After all, having none myself, that sort of thing isn’t important. Hell, I guess I just like him quite alot!
February 12: snow again this morning, suddenly and deep. Myron’s letter and post card Tuesday: unbelievably heartening: picture of car, associated with our possible future adventures together in faring forth into the world: “to the lonely sea and the skies / to the fields and brooks and plains of paradise.” also a recognition of the amazing correlation and concordance of our eclectic ideologies. and an expressed desire to see me again before prom: all totaling a rather optimistic prognosis of the coming spring!
I was beginning to have to discipline my unrestrained thought-orientation toward him. then the handsome intelligent newly unpinned gordon91 came, and there was a therapeutic amherst saturday with rain plastering the snow outside, and the fire, and waxen candled champagne bottles and romberg-and-musical records, and joyce-discussion, and chicken dinner at Valentine’s, and the tentative and too-talked about kiss: and the hope of sometime again maybe: all restored perspective. and just as I was congratulating myself on no longer being a victim, the myronic reply – to encourage my sense of victory over situations. at least now, magically transfigured by my charming amherstian interlude, I may the better manage as I see fit the new haven paragon.
oddly enough, myron is the first and only boy so far I would say “yes” to if marriage were brought up! I don’t think I ever really considered Bob, and only considered dick and perry, although at one time I despaired of meeting any boys excelling them, and so felt obliged to walk off with either one or the other. and now, quite intellectually and coolly (I hope I don’t deceive myself here) I would consider judiciously the thought of living with him the rest of my life: I guess I am “coming of age,” or something.
dick is out because of innumerable reasons: cut-throat competitiveness, pride, self-love and fear for ego, hereditary liabilities, lack of virginity, short (for me) stockiness – all of which, although perhaps not obvious on a spot appraisal, would increase the potential of corroding a creative felicitious partnership. perry I know too well; we take each other forgranted; there would be no discovery of personality there. perhaps, if I had met him as shirley did, it might have worked. but he is a little too blindly idealistic for me, I think.
myron, now, I do not know as earthly well as I do those two ergo, I am blind to his faults and weaknesses so far. but I can generalize beyond my own experience to a certain extent. why does he mostly appeal: because of the power of his promise and the promise of his power: he wants very hard what I want very hard: (and I am no longer the crackpot idealist who will eat red beans in a tenement all her life): I like theater, books, concerts, paintings, travel – all of which cost more than intangible dreams can buy. I like brilliance intellectually: he has that. and he likes the sun. and he thinks with me toward life.
power: he offers that. I am strong, in spite of being childish and weak now and then. but I am strong, individual thinking, for all that. I need a strong mate: I do not want to accidentally crush and subdue him like a steamroller as I would have Bob, certainly. I must find a strong potential powerful mate who can counter my vibrant dynamic self: sexual and intellectual. and while comradely, I must admire him: respect and admiration must equate with the object of my love (that is where the remnants of paternal, godlike qualities come in.) I do not want to be primarily a mother: mine cannot be a pitying and forgiving-black-sheep love: so out with the young handsome puppies: the phil McCurdy’s,92 the Bob Cochran’s – they are exquisite and lovely fun, but there is no future in them.
physically: myron is a hercules: carrying = symbolic: example of my tenderer femininity. more skilled than I, he excells in baseball, skating – and so on. while lean and lithe and athletic – appearing myself, I cannot stomach the fleshy, flabbiness of a male effete – myron is lean, hard and clean (no smoking, no drinking.) and I think he always will be.
mentally: he has a photographic memory, to all practical purposes – scientific to the core – a good balance – yet he appreciates and understands the most idealistic poetry – and is uniquely sensitive to literary beauty. (I have decided I cannot marry a writer or an artist – after gordon, I see how dangerous the conflict of egos would be – especially if the wife got all the acceptances!) so here we have a scientist, appreciative of the creative arts: lovely. my writing could proceed well, if it proceeds at all, in such a noncompetitive and benevolent frame. contrariwise, for him I would enjoy, I think, home-making and pleasing his taste in food – while continuing to serve as a life force – physically and mentally stimulating and sustaining.
ah, me – I sit here in the (cold) bluegreying of (cold) winter twilight calmly rationally pondering the wonder of this thing that has come upon me: hoping I do not want primarily to escape dick and “show” perry, to merely conquer the avowedly unconquerable. but rather marveling that my doubts are not more than they are, checking off in the squares of my tacit general and particular requirements one after the other, I find that in respect to the important things (mind, philosophy of life, physical appeal and pureness) he lacks hardly anything, so cool, so rational, I add up the balance slate and the total decides that I just might let myself learn to love him: if I am capable of that much maligned emotion. at least I am sure that physical attraction was not the root, but rather the future flowering of this most lovely organically unified plant of ideas-and-emotions. because it would have to take a pretty potent sex-maniac to ween me from Dick’s increasingly satisfying physical ritual – and the sexual attraction can start to grow, now that I know the intellectual attraction is well-begun.
and so I undertake my journeyings into the ways of vulnerability again, and of what I define as love …
—
February 18: “Oh, I would like to get in a car and be driven off into the mountains to a cabin on a wind-howling hill and be raped in a huge lust like a cave woman, fighting, screaming, biting in a ferocious ecstasy of orgasm.…” That sounds nice, doesn’t it? Really delicate and feminine.… Do you think passionate people subconsciously consider a physical disability as an attack on sexual powers? I wonder at my morbid obsession with daydreams this past month.”
sunday, march 1 – sunlight raying ethereal through the white-net of the new formal bought splurgingly yesterday in a burst of ecstatic rightness, silver high heels are the next purchase – symbolizing my emancipation from walking flatfooted on the ground. silver-winged bodice of strapless floating-net gown: it is unbelievable that it could be so right! comparing the junior prom of this year with the junior prom of two years ago is grossly unfair – the white naive flatfooted puritanism of the innocent kiss then, and the ecstasy of idealism (to topple half a year hence:) against the rational exquisitely mature mental and physical heights of this promising event elude comparison. I want to be silverly beautiful for him: a sylvan goddess. honestly, life for me is certainly a gyre, spiraling up, comprehending and including the past, profiting by it, yet transcending it! I am going to make it my job to see that I never get caught revolving in one final repetitive circle of stagnation. anyhow, god knows when I’ve felt this blissful beaming euphoria, this ineluctable ecstasy! I can’t stop effervescing: I have so many merry little pots bubbling away on the fire of my enthusiasm: myron, future trips, modern poetry, yeats, sitwell, tseliot, whauden, villanelles, maybe Mlle, maybe The New Yorker or the Atlantic (poems sent out make blind hope spring eternal – even if rejections are immanent) spring: biking, breathing, sunning, tanning. All so lovely and potential. yesterday: a case in point. at one o’clock he arrived, grinning widely, eager, appreciative, tall, tweedly jacketed, shoulders bulking broad. in the blindingly clear cut sun we set forth, driving jauntily along the curving country road to vermont: red sunflanked barns, spare fields, purplish blue mountains, ascetic white churchspires, greenblack fir trees, higher and higher: stopping by the side of the road to peer into maplesyrup buckets tapping trees, tasting the clear liquid, he carrying me back to the car: “How high shall I toss you?” “To the moon.” god, the bliss of being lightly thrown in the air, caught, held. riding back then to mount tom, sun setting redly, moon suddenly rising unbelievably clatteringly clear and white through birch trees, he pulling me again to him (“let’s face it, syl, you were just built for a tall man.”) dark, strong undulating whirlpools of shuteyed warmth kisses lithe slender limbs mingling moonstriking he quoting shakespeare “If I profane this holy shrine whereon I touch” honest sadly plaintive, transient moment, and I now sit remembering how incredibly haunting it all was, faint from hunger, sleep, and crushed breathless to the thrust of his strong young lovely body. it has been so long – seven months at least, since I have felt the good black tides of lust drown and bathe me into relaxed slumbrous quiesence. lying the length of him, kissed and cherished in his arms: how can I come back to the necessary intellectual disciplines of the real world again? when the equally real world in my head sucks me jealously back into dreams, reconstructions and projections of being with him – reiterating “Ya know, syl, I like doing things with you, you’re so appreciative.” incredulous at the miracle of being so happy with him. and even when he says how tiresome it would be to settle down with one woman, and how he could envision only trading them in year after year for a new one like a car. since I superficially feel the same way about men, and since I am not scared of being undesirable physically or mentally, or unmarried, I can agree heartily and revel in the unentangling freedom of us both. laughingly I shall some time ask him when he will trade me in. oh, even if he does, the world will not end, and I am somehow irrationally sure he won’t! god, girl, get to work: you’ve a milton exam to study for, a 20-page Drew paper to write, and hell knows what-all else. and you simply can’t wait till next weekend: oh, you’ll never be a junior phi bete96 at this rate, cutie. (“I’m just a sentimentalist at heart,” he said after singing “Overhead the moon is beaming …”) damn you, shut this book and stop thinking about him … I can’t: I want want want to go back and live that hour over again. mike mike mike: I burnt my mouth on cheese and tomato pizza with you after 12 hours of no food, went sleepily sensibly to bed early to wake euphorically with the sun this morning, blissful and gay and rested and optimistic. (to work, thou crass sluggard!)
March 8 – letter excerpt:
“Firstly of all I was horrified to hear that the dear bearshooting imaginative adorable very lovable bright southernaccented sandy97 I knew for such a little nice while is gone away. it is unjust, unnecessary, and difficult to comprehend. if it was god’s will it is a very stupid arbitrary blood thirsty god, and I do not like him or believe in him or respect him because he is more foolish and mean than we are and has no sense of proportion of what people are good for living and what people are unfit. it is perhaps very good that there is another potential lynn coming to receive some of the love that sandy flourished in. the work and mind and food and love given to a child for growing, and then the sudden going away to where we don’t know, we wish somewhere that would save the part we loved, but can’t really believe that, and so say it was blind chance and rail against the arbitrariness of it. nothing being there to do but weep, or stand shocked silent by the sudden end, the shattered glass and toppling masonry, the ruin of all space, of a potential universe, and put away the fragments left, and begin the cycle of growth over and over again, birth and death, birth and death. oh the tireless amazing unbelievably creative urge of we weary fallible battered humans. all this sorrow, injustice, war, blood lust, and still we persist in hopefully, faithfully, bringing forth children into the world. I loved that boy sandy, and all the sprouting of goodness and fineness in him. I love the lynns, and wish I could articulate my sorrow, or give them a microcosm of the great huge understanding and sympathy they deserve …
April 9 – “If only something would happen?” Something being the revelation that transfigures existence; works a miraculous presto-chango upon the mundane mortal world – turning the toads and cockroaches back into handsome fairy princes, the Clark Kents into Superman – that calls unexpectedly up on the phone and says: “Your name has just been picked from a hat, like a rabbit, and we are giving you a million dollars”, – or that announces in a sudden telegram: “Congratulations! Lady Rockefeller has just died and left you several estates and an enchanted source of continual private income”. But instead, day after day, there are hardboiled eggs instead of frog legs for breakfast, and doubts and worries buzz and sting like the evil’s in Pandora’s box.
Factors: something did happen. Russell Lynes on Harper’s bought 3 poems (“Doomsday,” “Go Get the Goodly Squab” and “To Eva Descending the Stair”) for $100. Signifying what? first real professional acceptance, God, and all the possibilities: to keep cracking open my mind and my vocabulary breaking myself into larger more magnanimous orbits of understanding. Things have been happening like a chain of fire crackers, but every brilliant explosive fact must have a legitimate cause & effect. Editor of Smith Review this morning: the one office on campus I coveted; back to balance about psychology; prospect of Harvard Summer School – holiday tables under the trees. New York and Ray (and neurology & brilliance) this weekend. New Haven and Mike (sun, beach, strong good love) the next.
Tonight, spring, plural, fertile, offering up clean green leaf whorls to a soft moon covered with fuzz-fractured clouds, and god, the listening to Auden98 read in Drew’s front living room, and vivid questioning, darting scintillant wit. My Plato! pedestrian I! And Drew, (exuberant exquisitely frail intelligent Elizabeth) saying, “Now that is really difficult.”
Auden tossing his big head back with a twist of wide ugly grinning lips, his sandy hair, his coarse tweedy brown jacket, his burlap-textured voice and the crackling brilliant utterances – the naughty mischievous boy genius, and the inconsistent white hairless skin of his legs, and the short puffy stubbed fingers – and the carpet slippers – beer he drank, and smoked Lucky Strikes in a black holder, gesticulating with a white new cigarette in his hands, holding matches, talking in a gravelly incisive tone about how Caliban is the natural bestial projection, Ariel the creative imaginative, and all the intricate lyrical abstruosities of their love and cleavage, art and life, the mirror and the sea. God, god, the stature of the man. And next week, in trembling audacity, I approach him with a sheaf of the poems. Oh, god, if this is life, half heard, glimpsed, smelled, with beer and cheese sandwiches and the god-eyed tall-minded ones, let me never go blind, or get shut off from the agony of learning, the horrible pain of trying to understand.
Tonight: the unforgettable snatching of toothpicks and olive pits from the tables of the ambrosial gods!
May 5 – and what the hell do you think you can decide upon, act upon, or base your personal philosophy upon if at the sight of a tall reticent poetic genius named Gordon you feel sick, tense, excited, overthrown, eager, wanting to redeem horrible infirmary impression, hot and cold and desperately near tears. first you were almost going to condescend to marry M. even if he had bad skin, barbarian parents, cold calculating drives, male vanity and a rather unimaginative and rather prosaic way of making love while writing out chemistry formulas. then you heard about him making out with that empty-headed intense superficial childish and sexy bitch who cried and fought all one weekend with his roommate (whom she yelled at you that she loved desperately.) O.K., so he asked you first and you refused, so she is aggressive and flatters his male vanity, so you are most interested in his carrying-on as soon as you demur – maybe retaliation was his motive, maybe just plain hedonism? so you are disillusioned – why? because, you hypocrite, he is just as bad as you are! unscrupulous, vain, fickle, and hedonistic! so this weekend (coming) you are going to see him half a day later than planned, and how are you going to act? depends on what you want. but you aren’t sure, and you aren’t sure what he wants or needs either, so get down off your high horse and be fair. you know damn well that as soon as he confined himself to you, you’d be off with other dates, playing your damn sweet innocent song: “oh, but I don’t want to confine myself to one person either! how well we’ll get along!” so he makes out with her in the presence of your best friend – he’d be a dunce to think she wouldn’t tell you. and he is no dunce, you do care. your vanity is hurt. that is superficial & negligible. what hurts most is your naive faith in his pureness, (which paradoxically you forgot in the surprising and passionate proficiency of the thin, much weaker Ray just three nights ago.) oh god, there is no faith or permanance or solace in love unless – unless – the mind adores, the body adores – and yet the fear is always there in my mind: tomorrow it will all be different – tomorrow I will hate the way he chuckles at a joke, or combs his hair with a dirty pocket comb. tomorrow he will see that my nose is fat and my skin is sallow, and we will both be two ugly, vain, selfish, hedonistic dissatisfied people, and the wine, and colored lights, and heated intelligent conversations will all be a fairy-tale inspired pipe dream, and the bitten apple of love will translate itself into discarded feces. tomorrow we’ll start running again after the leering clockwork chameleon that looks like the prince or princess in the fairytales, but turns into a warted toad or a pincered cockroach when touched by mortal hands. where, where, to find that quality I long for that will grow goodly and green for fifty years – is it mind? then Ray has mind, with a weaker body; thin, with no height, and you think of flat shoes, all your life long feeling big and swollen, lying like mother earth on your back and being raped by a humming entranced insect and begetting thousands of little white eggs in a gravel pit. and you think of Florida and sun, constraints of his society, loud clothes, all shrinking, paling, before the mind, and he perhaps fickley loving delicate butterfly-like women of the insect kind. but there was the expert moving of his hands and head and tongue and the surprised knowledge that honest love could ignore defects and discrepancies of matter in the presence of lightening-crackling mind. once I thought I could live with him too. god, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts. the doubts of past convictions only cast aspersions on present assurances and maliciously suggest that those, too, shall pass into the realm of the null and void: – and then tonight the sight of the poetic one, the wanting … what? to conquer? to talk? this first … after the “don’t kill me when you make love to me” … echoing in my ears. all these boys I love pieces of, and 3 years ago that would have been fine. but now, there is not one I know well enough, surely enough, to say, if asked: “O.K., here is a certificate guaranteeing that a Smith Phi-Bete-to-be, (maybe) potential minor poetess & story writer, one-time dilettante artist, reasonably healthy and attractive, alive, thinking, tall, sensuous, powerful, colorful white woman, age 21, is handing you 50 years during which she will love your faults, honor your bestialities, obey your whimsies, ignore your mistresses, nurse your progeny, paper the walls of your house with flowers, and adore you as her dying mortal god, conceive babies and new recipes in labor and travail, and remain faithful to you until you both rot and the inevitable synesthesia of death sets in.” I have to be terribly sure it (marriage) is neither a glamorous gamble nor an ephemeral escape. I know none of these three boys well enough to give prognosis for a lifetime, even a vague general one. I would have to live with a personality over a period of frequent contact … the only boy I know really well is the one I know well enough that I can never marry nor love. oh a love, a growing sharing would be so good, so uncomplex. and in these rapid most complex days of speed, mood, and psychology, it is relatively impossible to “know” anyone, as it is impossible to “know” oneself. suddenly everyone else is very married and happy, and one is very alone, and bitter about eating a boiled tasteless egg by oneself every morning and painting on a red mouth to smile oh-so-sweetly at the world with.
one relies so on single symbols which supposedly presage large assumptions. he goes to ballets, ergo he must be sensitive & artistic. he quotes poetry, ergo he must be a kindred spirit. he reads joyce, ergo he must be a genius.
let’s face it, I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren’t many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero.
If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it. I want to live hard and good with a hard, good man. clean, brilliant and strong is how and with whom I want to live. and tonight, oh god, (I think) that I am mortal, unthinking, unworthy – and that the three men on the fringe are too far off in time and space and too like unloves and faithless, and though love be a day, I am afraid it will be only that; and though love be a day, I am afraid also that it will be more.
what to do? think & create & love people & give of self like mad. go outward in love and creation and maybe you will fall into knowing what you want simultaneously as what you want walks by your picket gate singing a never-again song with a nonchalant catch-me-quick hat aslant back on his head and a book of “how life is a flea circus” under his einstein arm. 
May 13 – today I bought a raincoat – no, that was yesterday – yesterday I bought a raincoat with a frivolous pink lining that does good to my eyes because I have never ever had anything pink-colored, and it was much too expensive – I bought it with a month’s news office pay, and soon I will not have any money to do anything more with because I am buying clothes because I love them and they are exactly right, if I pay enough. And I feel dry and a bit sick whenever I say “I’ll take it” and the smiling woman goes away with my money because she doesn’t know I really don’t have money at all at all. For three villanelles I have a blue-and-white pin-striped cotton cord suit dress, a black silk date dress and a grey raincoat with a frivolous pink lining.
I am lucky: I am at Smith because I wanted it and worked for it. I am going to be a Guest Editor on Mlle in June because I wanted it and worked for it. I am being published in Harper’s because I wanted it and worked for it. Luckily I could translate wish to reality by the work.
But now, although I am a pragmatic machiavellian at heart, I find the 3 men in my life distant because I acted first and post mortemed afterward. I did not think clearly: “I want this; I must do thus to obtain this. I will hence do thus. Ergo, I shall get what I want.” Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.
Is anyone anywhere happy? No, not unless they are living in a dream or in an artifice that they or someone else has made. For a time I was lulled in the arms of a blind optimism with breasts full of champagne and nipples made of caviar. I thought she was true, and that the true was the beautiful. But the true is the ugly mixed up everywhere, like a peck of dirt scattered through your life. The true is that there is no security, no artifice to stop the unsavory changes, the rat race, the death unwish – the winged chariot, the horns and motors, the Devil in the clock. Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods, but a rather pedestrian pair of muddled suburbanites who, no mater how bumblingly they tried, never could quite understand how or why you grew up to your 21st birthday. Love is not this if you make it something creatively other. But most of you are not very good at making things. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” What a pat speech. Why do my beheld beauties vanish and deform themselves as soon as I look twice.
I want to love somebody because I want to be loved. In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of the wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home. I have lived in boxes above, below, and down the hall from girls who think hard, feel similarly, and long companionably, and I have not bothered to cultivate them because I did not want to, could not, sacrifice the time. People know who I am, and the harder I try to know who they are, the more I forget their names – I want to be alone, and yet there are times when the liquid eye and the cognizant grin of a small monkey would send me into a crying fit of brotherly love. I work and think alone. I live with people, and act. I love and cherish both. If I knew now what I wanted I would know when I saw it, who he was.
I want to write because I have the urge to excell in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. Love is an illusion, but I would willingly fall for it if I could believe in it. Now everything seems either far and sad and cold, like a piece of shale at the bottom of a canyon – or warm and near and unthinking, like the pink dogwood. God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am and why I accept 4 years of food, shelter, and exams and papers without questioning more than I do. I am tired, banal, and now I am getting not only monosyllabic but also tautological. Tomorrow is another day toward death, (which can never happen to me because I am I which spells invulnerable.) Over orange juice & coffee even the embryonic suicide brightens visibly. —
a.m. Right now you are sick in your head. You have called Marcia, cancelled room & she is relieved. It would have been a struggle, living there – and yet you would go calling up the director – asking to reverse a decision. Four girls would think you were unbalanced, selfish, crazy. Four girls with jobs & talk & friends. You fool – you are afraid of being alone with you own mind. You just better learn to know yourself, to make sure decisions before it is too late. 3 months, you think, scared to death. You want to call that man – You earned enough money to go. Why don’t you go? Stop thinking selfishly of razors & self-wounds & going out and ending it all. Your room is not your prison. You are. And Smith cannot cure you; no one has the power to cure you but yourself. Be an introvert for 3 months – stop thinking of noise, names, dances – you could have bought it. The price of all this is high. Neurotic women. Fie. Get a job. Learn shorthand at night. NOTHING EVER REMAINS THE SAME–.
Out of it, kid. You are making monumental obstacles of what should be taken for granted – living on a past reputation –
New York: pain, parties, work. And Gary and ptomaine – and José the cruel Peruvian and Carol vomiting outside the door all over the floor – and interviews for TV shows, & competition, and beautiful models and Miss Abels:103 (capable, and heaven knows what else.) And now this: shock. Utter nihilistic shock.
Read a story: Think. You can. You must, moreover, not continually run away while asleep – forget details – ignore problems – shut walls up between you & the world & all the gay bright girls –: please, think – snap out of this. Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind. You must not seek escape like this. You must think.
July 11 – Friday still. A willing, creative girl with a sense of humor, and three potential jobs, I am now, though. Thumbing desperately through Want Ads, I’ve considered becoming a painter of parchment lamp shades, a file clerk, a typist: Anything to give me that intangible-self-respect. Somehow I feel a great need for having a Job, no matter what, no matter how unremunerative. So I answered an add in the Townsman for “a highschool girl who likes to write” and ended up with Mrs. Williams, an aggressive and humerous widowed real-estate agent. (Never will I forget that amazing Wednesday with her which I started unsuspectingly enough with an interview at 10:30 and ended, somewhat exhausted, at 4:30, after having met and talked with her other interviewees – the Court’s (Janet and the unforgettable fat, wheezy brown-eyed doughy intellectual Mrs.), the professors wife; and met Crazy Grace, the scatterbrained housekeeper who talked to herself all the time and thought she could sell houses because she sold germicides once and “It takes a lot of personality, selling germicides.” – there were the trips down town, the going through two houses – one with a busy mother and her babies, to sell for $18,900, and one with a clover-grown lawn that the fat, lethargic TV listening Raymond would never get around to mowing … for $20,500. There were the trips to new houses, the talking with builders and watching Mrs. Williams’ aggressive, admirably unscrupulous methods of playing on every possible angle, no matter how shifty. All this, and a black-and-white float in Hopkins to cool our perspiring and sticky psyches. So I could be a Girl Friday for her all summer, maybe not earning anything, unless there should be a sale: seeing houses, wheedling builders, writing add copy, and even showing people houses if I got advanced enough. Veddy fascinating, if financially nebulous. Second is the possibility that Mrs. Williams herself will get me another job as waitress during the summer at the place where her daughter is working. That, however, is an off chance, in spite of the fact that she is best friends with the head of the Inn. The third and most promising job is one I read in the classified section of the Christian Science Monitor – a mother in Chatham (of all the strategic places – near Dick, Art, etc.!) wants a “neat, intelligent college-age girl of pleasing personality” to help with her two children. Sounds great. That’s me. So I call, make an appointment for an interview this weekend, and it all sounds veddy promising – a quiet house evenings to study in, out of doors with the children, slower living, and just about as much pay as I’d make at the Belmont – we shall however, not yet count our chickens!
And as for myself, I perceive all through the senses – mind among them. I must read up on the neural theories, the complexities. Someday, they will be understood. I have that confidence in the mind and intellectual curiosity of man. “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” So paltry, and so colossal. So puny and so potential.
“Everything is the same but different.”
August 8 – Friday – 9:45 p.m.
August 9. Today I was alone with Joan, Sue and Bill. Mrs. Cantor gone. Car mine, and planning of meals and time allotment, it was good. Flowers – zinnias gold and rust and umber – pink and white and lavendar – bought in rash armfuls at a flower stand for guests this weekend. Four dozen eggs, beige, oval, full of protein – farm produce, where there was hay sweetly damp in a loft, a cow, and chickens. Three children chanting loudly in singsong from the car window. Lunch then: good tunafish salad, tomatoes, crackers, cheese, and milk. So in the afternoon, late, with the rain still coming down, I left the children down with Joanie – and escaped in the Beachwagon to Chatham town. Inching the shiny green machine through the rainpuddled narrow streets to the town parking lot I felt an evil sense of victory and freedom. I was going to see 
August 10 – Always washed and bathed with the rain coming down. Thunder tonight. (“Lord, lord, though ridest.”) Whistling over the mulberry trees thou goest. Lord, thy children are jaded, and their ears go flat with sound. Marveling in the thunder rumbling of thy voice no longer – they hear not, and the omens of the white gull and the flayed oak are as naught to their purblind sight. The prophecy in the thunder, the foreshadowings of the leaves quivering white, the dismay of the grass bent in the merciless wind are naught, lord.
August 12
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August 19 – 1. a.m. Face it kid, you’ve had a hell of a lot of good breaks. No 
Same time. After Val. God, the talk. First, her “shack” – red half-house with white trim, and her slouching thin and grubby in the doorway grinning. Plaid shirt, paint-stained levis. I walk in, feeling big and new and too clean. She is washing clothes in a basin. Dirty old clothes. Hot water gotten from kettle on stove.
“We have a lot in common. You just said two things I agree with,” you say.
You are a 
I say: “I want to see you again sometime.”
As for the husband: how cold, how material and objective I am. Also, how hypothetical! The hypothesis being that I could have either if I chose: and I actually believe I could convince either! I began with the youngest: a time of tender idealism, serious conversation. I believe I have kissed him 
Today was good. Mr. Crockett for two and one half hours in the afternoon, and after long talking in his green pine garden over sherry I got the flash of insight, the after-college objective. It is a frightening and wonderful thing: a year of graduate study in 
Dinner at Nortons, warm, glowing aqua candles, bright sudden pink-petaled yellow-centered asters. Swordfish and sour cream broiled (with Perry pink-faced bending over testing the taste.) Hollandaise and broccoli. Grape pie and icecream, rich, warm. And port, sharp, sweet, startling gulped with a sudden good sting behind the eyes and a relaxing into easy laughter. Good scalding black coffee. And Dick and I at home an evening, mutually warm, rich, seething with peace. “La Mer” often while dishes were done, and while sleepily relaxing by candle light. The music, going on, disturbing, haunting, ineffably strange and deeply moving, with all the great blind surging of the sea, and the thin flashes of sound, of light, of insight.
January 24 … Saturday morning, and I am at the old game of catching time between my fingers as it is running, forever running, away. This last week has been a blissful relaxation: breakfast in bed, a slow, languid getting up, reading modern poetry, seeing an excellent play “Bell, Book and Candle” in Springfield, having leisure time to write witty letters – oh, all this. And now the sensuous delight of sitting warm and clear-eyed at my desk, looking out of the window into the thick, steamy, rain-lashed dripping air, and hearing the cars slithering by, and the persistent scritch of shovels on cement, scraping away the slush. All is muted and blurred with thaw, and there is the fresh wet pregnant smell of earth again that makes me long for spring (again.) And I have taken to reading the muscular packed verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins again: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God …” and then again: “How to keep – is there any, any, is there none such, nowhere known, some bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep / Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty … from vanishing away?” Yes, obsessed, as always, with the vanishing of time!
February 20: Reading critical books about Yeats all day today, 
– February 25. Yesterday the vindication of the dream fantasies began. 
April 27 – Listen and shut up, oh, ye of little faith. On one certain evening in a certain year 1953 a certain complex of pitched tensions, physiological urges, and mental dragonflies combined to fill one mortal imperfect Eve with a fierce full rightness, force and determination corresponding to the ecstasy experienced by the starving saint on the desert who feels the crackling cool drops of God on his tongue and sees the green angels sprouting up like dandelion greens, prolific and infinitely unexpected.
May 14 – tonight after ushering at “