Our first day was happy. But the second day we have the problem of his family, Lloyd and Helen Wright. At first, without knowing me, they were fanatically, irrationally against me. They had no genuine accusations: I was a married woman, older than Rupert (they did not know how much older), an artist (and all artists are egocentric), and foreign. Finally I was presented at the court. Rupert believed I would win them. On Thursday nights we would go to dinner and to quartet playing. Cocktails set them both off into complete irrationality. Lloyd’s brilliance of mind, I believed at first, I could connect with until I discovered him insane—sudden rages, rantings. Helen is psychotic, only hypocritically covered by her false goodness. Rupert is equally illogical, hostile, or else masochistic. Nightmare evenings—Rupert’s mother jealous, petty and mean. Once I left weeping. After that I did not talk. Then Helen began pressuring us “to marry,” meanwhile admitting she had not been able to like me. To prove I love Rupert, I must marry him. I had a responsibility. At this I revolted. On returning home I fainted on the doorstop (rejection by the parents again: mine, Hugo’s, Bill Pinckard’s, now Rupert’s). Just before I fainted I said to myself: “Je suis une femme fatiguée.” After this, I refused to go to the house. Helen also said I could not return until we were married. Thursday became a liberation from the insane asylum—my one free evening to see friends who loved me, Jim Herlihy and George Piffner. Rupert at first rebelled against his family, against the split evening. But I said he must not break with them on my account. Their behavior, however, and my rebellion against it, has weakened the bond between Rupert and his parents. He realizes their love is not love, but domination. If he gives up forestry, they threaten to break with him. They opposed his first girl (an affair of five years) and his marriage (to a cousin of Lloyd’s). His mother is obsessed with the fact that there is too much sex in my books.
The nightmare was partly over. I was over-affected and weakened by the conflict. I had been relieved to escape to New York, but now I was so happy to be with Rupert again. He accepted my refusal to be hypocritically “reconciled” to his family. He went for the music. I visited Jim and George, and we had a lively, phosphorescent talk. George had made a mobile, which he gave me. Jim had written a story. Jim, an aspiring writer I met three years ago, loves me. He cannot find with anyone what he has with me. We talk about this and books and Erich Fromm, psychoanalysis and religion. Rupert arrives around midnight. To many people, he gives the impression of moodiness. He is unpredictable and mystifying. He is either too gentle or too aggressive. He is at times strident and tense, or submissive and over-eager to please strangers. He does not like to share me. He sits beside me and rejoices because Tavi barks at my friends as if they were intruders. “Tavi,” he says, “chase away the invaders.”
He was drunk after Thanksgiving dinner and insisted on driving, could not relinquish control even when in so doing he nearly destroyed himself and me. About this need of control, I am helpless. It manifests itself in the choice of which food I should buy and which market, of which cleaner and which laundry, a car that I cannot have filled with gas or oil without permission, control over which friends are invited and at which house. One day I wanted to go to Hollywood to have my hair tinted. He asked me how long that would take. I said it was difficult to say, as sometimes one late person would delay me. About two hours. And then? One hour for a Turkish bath. “So three hours, not including the drive.” said Rupert. “You leave at one and will be home at six,” not allowing for delays, for walking between the two places, for a stroll down the boulevard, a glance at shop windows. Mad, I thought. This is mad. It brought me back to the first days of my marriage with Hugo—the first day when he insisted on going to the hairdresser with me and waiting for me; when I made plans without consulting him he was certain to change them.
There are times when this does not displease me, when it creates an eternity of closeness like a welding, like one night we left Kay and John Dart and Jim and George at the movies to return alone to Jim’s room to make love, to sleep in each other’s arms. But most of the time, I feel stifled. I have to explain and justify all I do. I have to ask for money. He forgets to cash his checks. He believes that by having very little cash in the house, one spends less. With what explosive relief I occasionally spend my own money, which is not really my own, but Hugo’s, and with what gratitude towards Hugo. There is, then, Rupert’s control of what I “earn” in New York during my absences from home.
I spend half of my day on housework (we are saving for a house or a trip). It leaves me half a day for writing. I wrote A Spy in the House of Love. Finished it in June. It is a book of 200 pages, a full-length portrait of Sabina. But on many days after housework I am too tired to do anything but write a few letters, read and take notes, struggle to repair the damage done by mismanagement of my books. Duell Sloan and Pearce folded up, so I was left without a publisher for Spy. Strauss rejected it, Houghton Mifflin too. Viking Press called it a romantic fantasy that would cause trouble with the censors. Scribner’s turned it down. I feel the failure keenly. My other books were remaindered, so they will soon be unobtainable. Total failure. Should I pretend to die to reassure people that they can dare to approach my work without fear? Should I die so that my manuscripts should sell and my value in the market rise as a rare, lost object?
So after the homecoming orgy, after all the delights, the extremes of the pressures of daily life with Rupert—isolated, dull, prosaic—begin to weave a web that has all the suffocating aspects of a prison. The life is small, a small kingdom Rupert feels equal to manage. It is this knowledge that dissolves my rebellions. But after a week of housework and writing without hope of publication or recognition, I begin to contrive some form of escape. I dream of Paris. I dream of the artist life always denied me because I did not marry artists. I dream of earning $200 a month to be able to travel. But if I had $200 a month, Rupert would put it in the bank to build a house in Los Angeles. I cannot see myself in a house in Los Angeles. Resentment against the vacuity of American life gnaws at me. I feel it when Rupert reads the poisonous Time magazine and listens to radio commentators. I dream of Italy, where the Italian edition of Under a Glass Bell, if not I, is traveling. Rupert shares in these fantasies. If his imagination accompanies mine in this roaming, his fears make him clutch at the kind of work he can perform most adequately, at a home and at me with a desperate need of stability.
The nights, though, are always beautiful. Each part of our bodies finds its nook, its shelter, its core of warmth. Even after reading Time, Rupert’s flavor is something so remote. The American boy goes to sleep with the radio on. But when the lover emerges, it is a lover of consummate skill and fervor. The passion is an ocean large enough to dissolve the American boy until tomorrow, when instead of people, he will choose a movie, and then instead of Nathaniel West, he will read Time (having said that reading West was a task), which puts an end to any expansion of his reading. The American boy is there to stay (candy, pretty girls, Time and radio commentators), but the Welshman in him is a musician who listens to Beethoven with absolute maturity. He possesses emotional and physical depths, sensual depths; the mind alone is unawake. But Cornelia Runyon, the sculptor at sixty-five years of age, the woman aware of transcendence in stone, observes that Rupert is growing, maturing, while also observing my regression into youthfulness, greater physical health and sumptuousness.
There is always an apple pie to be baked for the American boy. If he were not so beautiful, one could be overwhelmed by the traits he has in common with his neurotic father Reginald, which are alarming, if not ugly. Rupert cannot throw away anything. He accumulates useless or worn things. He does not like to give. He is chaotic with his belongings. He loses and breaks and forgets. At sixty-five, his father keeps carbons of old medicine bottles, dirty clothes like a ragpicker, never cleans or washes his belongings, never throws away a paper, forgets and loses what he has accumulated . . .
On