The life of Gonzalo and Helba is nothing but stagnation. They lie like animals, doing nothing all day, complaining, frightening themselves. Gonzalo does not get his teeth fixed, does not answer his letters, does not see the Communist Party or his friends. Everything rots around them in dirt, neglect, sloppiness.
Meanwhile I struggle to write. I wrote pages on the house of Louise de Vilmorin— the glass house. I finally sent the manuscript to Rae Beamish, the editor. But underneath lies despair.
Kenneth Patchen, whose work Henry admires, moves me because his body has some resemblance to Gonzalo’s, but he is too young, too unformed, naïve. Il n’y a personne. I seek escape—new passion. My life has lost its flame.
I have asked myself whether there is something wrong with me. Henry says, “In dissolution there is life,” but I recoil from dissolution. I struggle against the demons—I struggle for light—desperately—against disease, ugliness, fears, madness, monsters, nightmares.
MAY 4, 1940
Hugh sailed today from Genoa. I do not feel happy at his coming, only grateful that he is out of danger. I can only think that I will be separated from Gonzalo and Henry because Hugh wants a vacation.
I am working on 1000 pages of the abridged diary to give to Caresse Crosby. Dorothy Norman was overwhelmed by it.
I am in debt again—America is monstrous. I close my eyes and ears and I write. I wrote pages on June’s way of talking for the diary.
Gonzalo comes to me to eat with me, to fall asleep in my arms. He found me lacing my jacket, and began unlacing it, gently, tenderly, but the fire has died. It lasted four years, a great deal of time for fire, intensity, fever. In Paris I had a superstitious fear of its transplantation, felt something would happen if we left. Something happened to all of us from the uprooting. Something died in all of us. I can see it in the others. We are only surviving.
MAY 20, 1940
When Hugh returned he said: “I want peace. No more separations. I have missed you too much.” For a week he was extraordinarily possessive, jealous. I got desperate. I was cut off from Gonzalo and Henry and thrown into the bourgeois life again. The luxurious hotel, visitors, dinners, cocktails. I suffocated because I was not wise enough to see it as a phase. Hugh himself revolted, said he could no longer live a life tied to routine, working on Wall Street without trips or escape. But when all this was added to the ugliness of life in New York, I became so desperate I wanted to die. I pulled myself out by writing “The Prison of Fear,” the first writing I have done dictated by hatred. I wrote pages on the bus on my way to Henry. Creatively, I have entered the objective writing Durrell and Henry tried to push me into long ago—but emotionally, I have entered the destruction and dissolution from which I struggled to save others. I have struggled too much. I have been sickened by their poison as I sucked it from their wounds to save them from death. I feel and understand for the first time the pleasure in dissolution. I felt this only once before, with June.
Suddenly I have lost my courage and desire to struggle. I have lost all enthusiasm and faith. Perhaps the war has done this. I suffer with Europe and participate in its agony. Everything seems dark and futile. I have lost my appetite for everything. I pray only for passion, a new passion. Passion can give me life again, otherwise I shall descend into the inferno, because I have nothing to live for. Henry is sad, Gonzalo is ill, Helba is nothing but a burden, Hugo is grey. It seems like we are all ending like Europe is ending, perhaps out of love and sympathy because of our roots there. I understand what I struggle to heal: despair and hatred. Hatred of Helba has inspired the “Rue Dolent,” the “Prison of Fear.” May it liberate me from hatred. Dissolution—I fought against it—always. I was the enemy of destruction, but now it is universal horror and despair, as Henry prophesized for years. Perhaps ours is no longer a personal despair, but a deep, universal one.
MAY 24, 1940
Hugh falls asleep early, around ten. I slip out noiselessly to meet Gonzalo at Park. We wander about or sit in one of those impossible American places where the radio jangles my nerves and the faces of the people are like those of a proletarian nightmare. The news is bad, everywhere there is panic and selfishness. Fear makes people evil. All New York is nothing but a school, a clinic, a factory. In Europe there are machines which deal death and terror. Here there are machines which have already dealt death: Americans are robots—nothing else. I live in a machine with robots. Robots are afraid. Robots commit crimes. Robots write Americans books. Not a human voice anywhere, only voices coming through the radio receiver. The dancing is a parody of the negro’s joyous movements. It is all repulsive and monstrous. The machine in Europe is killing people, and here it is canning them. It would have been better for all of us to die in flames, rather than this kind of death. Hugh is cornered in his dying system of capitalism, and the communists utter fanatical, narrow, crystallized statements, as many deformations and falsities as the others, committing the same crimes for their religion as the Catholic inquisitors did for theirs. Everyone is wrong—the pacifists too, for they are weak. The followers of D. H. Lawrence run away to Guatemala or Mexico. I see the twistedness in communists too, the errors and abuses and dogmatism. In the end I return to my mystical concepts. I see only nature, chaos and horror, and I see only one heaven—in the eternal. I know that communism has appealed to the weak, the bitter, and the deformed beings, but they want it as protection, as relief from responsibility. I see so much ugliness, so much horror, so many monstrosities, that I return to god. The communists are those who are born in matter and cannot believe in the eternal, and they are utopians because there cannot be a world without cruelty, envy and jealousy. Europe is being destroyed, but the demons are never conquered.
MAY 30, 1940
Hugh and I took a furnished apartment at 33 Washington Square West, which gives the illusion of a European quarter, smaller and more intimate than the rest of New York. We are struggling to act as if we were alive.
Gonzalo and I used to have a special caress, like that of cats, howling our needs— his need over mine. Now he says, “Let me lean on your neck.” He takes it like a support. He pretends to lean on me, like this, in a caress of utter helplessness. I am afraid I have only augmented his weakness—no strength has come out of Gonzalo, no creation, nothing. I feel my love dying, my passion. And this, happening now with the war, drives me to despair. I see him in his true light, as the clochard he loves to draw: dirty, unkempt, unshaved, sitting all day on a bench, or sleeping, talking with other clochards. Suffering and death everywhere.
JUNE 11, 1940
The Germans are thirty-six miles from Paris, and as if that were not enough, now Italy is invading France. How I feel all my love for her. We are all tense, guilty, angry, cruel to each other—selfish lives, all of ours, saving our own souls only—why? I am absolutely ready to enter the conflict. I would like to have died for France because of my love of it…simply. People everywhere are at war because they do not live by simple human feelings. I feel for the whole world. I have lived a purely individual life, and I am ashamed, but the same laws of pity by which I lived I can easily carry into the drama of war. In loving, I looked for my pleasure and found mostly suffering. So war is a drama no more terrible than the drama of love, and I am willing to serve and die as I have served and died for the love of individuals. My lovers have killed—at least they have killed me— and I return to the feeling I discovered as a girl: personal life is not important.
JUNE 13, 1940
Desperate at the news. Paris is encircled, about to surrender. Ill with pain, sympathy, a desire to die with the past. My cousin Eduardo is saved, but we have only saved our bodies—the darkness of the world is swallowing us.
One still can only cling to immediate human life, the last little bits of love and devotion. That is all there is; everything else is darkness and chaos and horror. Gonzalo upbraids me for not talking like a Marxist. The whole world will soon be at war, all of us engulfed, even the innocent ones—so many innocent ones, so many who never caused war. Henry was saying if people only would behave with love, generosity, unselfishness, as they sometimes do when death is near.
Gonzalo