NOVEMBER 14, 1941
Talk with Henry, who is disturbed by the news that his first wife Beatrice believes he has made money under a pseudonym and is inquiring as to his whereabouts to see him for unpaid alimony (amounting now to $20,000) and by the news that his daughter suffers from epilepsy.
When the past haunts him he wants to run away. When he wants to run away he wants me to do it with him. Then he is faced with a recurrent doubt he has of my ultimately breaking with my past to follow him. Now and then he says: “And when we do get a big sum of money, you won’t come. What will be your excuse then?”
Then tenderly, half playfully, I deflect the question as I always have, by pointing out how catastrophic it would be if I had not remained exactly where I am to be his guardian angel. I said: “You know, you always talk about faith, about everything coming out well, about your having no anxiety, but you know all the time that why you have faith is because I never let you fall or go hungry. If I dropped dead today you would be completely helpless again.” (Last year he made $1000 and of this owes $500 to the publisher.) “I do not reproach you. But I know you are a dreamer, a child, and I know too you have had bad luck with your two publishers.” (Jack Kahane was a dishonest and avaricious exploiter and now so is James Laughlin.) “I must continue to be what I am, where I am. I have given you a taste of freedom, traveling. I expect you to want it again, to get restless. I know you hate New York. When you can’t bear it anymore you can go away for a few months, but for me it is impossible.”
Henry said: “If I ever become aware that each move I make is a sacrifice for you and that my trip was the cause of your slaving for Ruder, I’ll go crazy.”
It is always the same answer. When they become aware (Gonzalo too, periodically) they become desperate, tear their hair, feel guilty, but that is all. They cannot remedy it. They can only protect themselves from the awareness, seek to be blind to it. In all these lives they have made the mad breaks, run away, traveled without money, but each move, instead of freeing them, has closed upon them like a net. The abandoned wife seeks retribution. The unpaid landlord keeps the trunks and most precious possessions. The starvation creates an endless trend of maladies. The papers not in order lands them in jail. The editor treated anarchically avenges himself. Nature avenges herself. Those from whom they begged, borrowed, stole, exploited, avenge themselves.
Henry took me with fervor after the talk, then said: “I did pretty well for a depressed man!” The illness of his daughter he looks at as a punishment too. Poor Henry.
When I say they are innocent it is because they are unaware. I can see in Henry the inability to grasp the reality of money. It’s as if the basic concrete fact they cannot see, as the poets cannot see biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics. And that is why I justify or excuse them. As they become aware they always become sad. It is so much like the process of the child becoming aware of the evil in the world, of duties. I see in their eyes first of all clarity and gayety that goes with irresponsibility, then slowly a sadness which I hate to cause. Only when I was cornered and unable to do more have I dared to say to Henry: “In seeking to fulfill your dream of traveling, I have made you less able to accept the limitations which today are universal. Today we have to be in America. Even if you had a fortune you could not tour the world.”
NOVEMBER 19, 1941
A week of disillusion. When my back is turned Robert uses my telephone to call up Massachusetts—one dollar for me to pay. Miss Steloff and Rae Beamish put in their pockets checks received for The Winter of Artifice which Beamish did not print, breaking his contract with me. Henry continues to moralize in the American book. Dorothy Norman believes her dreams are works of genius and receives me, marveling at her own work. She returns volumes 51 to 54 unread after asking for them and keeping them for six months. Gonzalo now wants to work, but when I asked Dorothy if she could advance me $200 for a press and that Gonzalo, in exchange for this, would do a piece of print for her worth twice as much, she immediately demurred and shrank. Suddenly I feel an immense fatigue. When I lose faith, when my eyes are opened, then for me it is like death.
Monday morning Virginia came with typed diary pages. I wrote eighty pages for Ruder. To help those who needed money, I spread the writing of erotica recklessly and reached a point of danger to myself. I bear the responsibility of their writing, supplying paper, arranging meetings, interceding for advances, advising, correcting, and the brunt of the rejections and Ruder’s complaints. The only moment of pleasure is when I carry in my pocket the money so eagerly, so desperately awaited by the hungry poets.
Seon Givens telephones (she was working at the Gotham Book Shop, met a rich young man, may marry him and become a publisher). “I love The Winter of Artifice. I want to do something of yours.” She has the fervor and the love that it takes to do things.
NOVEMBER 23, 1941
Dr. Jacobson: “You’ve lost five pounds in three weeks. There’s nothing I can do for you. You’re spending yourself so fast no amount of injections can help you recuperate. Your heart is strained. You have to rest, eat at home, get calm.”
Trembling, taut, vibrating, exhausted. Stayed home two days, revised Winter of Artifice for Seon Givens and Wayne Harris, the delightful and intelligent young couple, my future publishers. Seon was born on the Island of Aaron, masculine, exuberant, Harris is feminine and like Durrell in appearance. Their understanding of my work is exceptional.
NOVEMBER 26, 1941
Successful tea at the New School for Hugo’s exhibit. Paul Rosenfeld bought a print. The warm bloom of many friends—the Imbs, Caresse, Kay Boyle, Eduardo, Frances Steloff, Lucia and Francesco Cristofanetti. Hugo expansive, glowing, Jupiterean, with a healthy color, warmth, efflorescence. Grateful to me, telling me: “You created it all.”
I can only see my future work as a completion, for each day I see more…even looking back into the past, the figures do not grow less distinct, but infinitely more meaningful… Often I look back, from the Eduardo of today to the youthful one. Today he is thirty-seven but he looks youthful, he looks innocent, and, but for hardly perceptible signs, like a man of twenty-seven. He is graceful, charming, golden. Only now and then I catch the suddenly loose, lax expression of the child, the decadent immaturity. Then it is as if he were deteriorating as a perverse child might and not a man, as if I caught the contortions of the baby’s face when it is about to cry, the feeling of lack of control of the muscles, the too easily opened mouth, the disintegrated laughter. Then again he can easily hide this, and I see the suave man who still can deceive women as to his tastes, as he never has effeminate gestures, but merely the actor’s smoothness. So women are still drawn to him. Luise said: “He is like the first man I loved. He is quite beautiful.” Caresse preferred him to George Barker. Robert was warmed by his glow until he discovered the child where he was looking for a firm, severe father, and an analyst where he desired a poet. To cover up his timidity and paralysis in writing, he puts forward frightening edifices of quotations. He is practically drowned in research work. He thinks the source of his statements will be questioned. He seeks reinforcement and stilts.
I REMEMBERED THIS
My first erotic feeling
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 26, 1941
Notes on future work: While writing the erotica I remembered this: In Brussels we lived in a two-storied house. I was seven or eight years old then. My father always took us to the attic to be whipped. He did not want my mother to hear us. She would interfere and get angry at him, and