TWA FLIGHT 34 TO NEW YORK, DECEMBER 1950
After leaving Rupert, I flew to San Francisco to see Mother and my brother Joaquín in Oakland. Last night, I could not sleep at first because I was in my mother’s house, in Joaquín’s bed that he relinquishes to a “guest,” and I was tormented by a strong impulse to return to Rupert instead of proceeding to New York. This impulse, which urges me to return to Rupert, to the core of fire, the center of fusion, is human and tragic, for it runs in absolute opposition to what my wisdom and intelligence tell me. It is the irrational impulse, the primitive impulse that drives me to a body I desire, a hairline and neck that stir me, a hand that melts me, a mouth that makes its designs within my flesh, eyes that direct the tides of my blood, eyelashes that play on my nerves, a voice that commands my heart and haunts me in its absence, words of need and hunger that pursue me: “You are my life.” I hear him rustling papers in his room while I am reading in bed, forcing himself to write forestry reports with the forced concentration of a child applying himself to a hated task—numbers, figures, statistics. His gravity gives him a false responsible air. People thrust responsibilities on him. He fulfills them adequately, so he gets more, but he hates it. His mother asks him to do big landscape jobs at a house she owns and rents out, where he spent his childhood in an American paradise on a hill above Hollywood, born of artificial plants and moving pictures. The house was designed by Lloyd Wright, and it is beautiful. We sacrifice Rupert’s days off to this task and the fantasy of living in the house that he will inherit, but that I know I will never inhabit. Because my father was an erudite musician, I believed he would understand my particular form of music—my writing—but he didn’t, and he didn’t understand my life. Because Lloyd is an imaginative and original architect, I believed he would understand the architecture of my writing, but he does not.
Writing in the diary, I can condense a little of the elusive aspects of this mobile we call our life. And all the while I write, its aspect changes; I find that both my passion for Rupert and my anger at our petty life together distort the truth I seek. If Rupert, because of his neurosis, of his youth, cannot achieve the life we want, only the life he wants, isn’t it true that I cannot achieve it either, that I am still dependent on others to feed, clothe, protect me, and that I therefore must accept what the husband or lover creates for me? I am still only stealing what I want, being unable to create it. I have nothing of my own. From my writing I received perhaps $250 a year, the advance on each book, and no more. I never get paid for my lectures. My records don’t sell, and if they did, Louis and Bebe Barron, who recorded them, would not pay me, not out of dishonesty, but out of mismanagement.
The magazines reject my stories. Those who read me or are devoted to me are concealed from me, a secret society who will not buy the books. And so how can I speak of my life unless it is within the framework made by Hugo or Rupert? Rupert chose a profession before he met me. I did not know him when he was struggling to be an actor in New York (this while I was seeking vainly in Bill what Rupert gave me generously later). The first time Rupert and I were together we became lovers immediately. The second time he drove me out to show me a tree as other young men would accompany me to see a painting in a museum. This tree was beautiful, but it was an ordinary tree. There was also the painting of a tree by Eyvind Earle, his friend who painted many trees. Five years after starting out to be an actor, Rupert printed Christmas cards that sold successfully and kept him fed and Eyvind and Alice in a house of their own in a forest. But this painting of a tree was an ordinary painting. Like finding Rupert’s hands stained by print ink and his nails broken and his skin rough, it touched me, I don’t know why, when neither Miró nor the trees of mythology touched me. It touched me in the same way that two ordinary poplars did when I was seventeen. They stood as sentinels to the path into our house in Richmond Hill, and I addressed them as friends, conversed and sustained a relationship with them. There was, at that time, an Anaïs who could love an ordinary tree that was neither symmetric, nor exotic, nor rare, nor historic, nor unique. This Anaïs led a timid life under the protection and control of her mother, absolutely incapable of building any life at all, except one in writing, enclosed in a diary, nurtured on fantasy, derived of literature and entirely separate from her life on earth, which consisted of playing the role of substitute mother to her younger brothers when the real mother was not at home.
Anaïs was seventeen again when she met a Rupert of twenty-eight, whom promiscuity, an actor’s life, college, or drifting did not mature or spoil, who was lost, defeated, but with his fantasies intact. He failed at marriage, and also, he felt, as an artist. And so together we began again with the tree he drove me to see, the first of many. He was on his way to study them, name them, to get a degree in the knowledge of trees, in the same Ford Model A in which we were going to cross the United States. He would go to college again for a forestry degree. In San Francisco, we were going to spend weekends visiting Big Trees. In Mexico, we were going to take photographs of the oldest trees in the world, two thousand years old. We were going to film cotton trees, orange jacarandas, palms, cactus giants, tequila trees, dead trees. We were going to bring back samples in our pockets. We were going to laugh at the obscenities of the Latin names for trees. We were going to make frenzied love under a pepper tree, make love under a big redwood tree. In the deserts of Utah, by the river, after a swim in the cold water, naked, after making love on the banks, in a place so primitive that we felt as if we were the first man and woman on earth, Rupert packed up a small, one foot high tender child tree from the forest and planted it at the edge of the river, the young tree of our relationship. The tree of life. Our adolescent passion—would it take root, bear leaves, bear fruit, bear flowers, harden, strengthen, become strong? At the moment, in that first year, its fragility, the tree, Rupert, his work, our relationship, seemed utterly fragile. I asked the name of the river. Rupert said, “It’s called Dolores.” Dolores, Dolores, Dolores, Dolorous. Why should it be Dolores?
The tree. The little one grew, at least within us. The roots grew strong, at least within us, wrapping roots that carried the vital sap between the two bodies. Anaïs of seventeen communicating with two ordinary poplars invested with mythological voices can live here in this little house of candor.
The other Anaïs, who moves at times in a bigger and more complex world, does so with effort and with difficulties.
When out of the bed of iridescent desires, I look out the window at trees that belong to a tasteless, empty, and homely America, to one of its communities that could disappear without depriving the world’s reserves of either beauty or human life in their most developed forms. One that truly represents one of the lowest forms of life, one of emptiness in obese upholstery, void in comfort, a vacuum in functional plumbing. The cypresses that do not orchestrate the lights of the valley, cypresses with no history, no dignity conferred by the soul’s convolutions, but only a community of robots producing robots, invading robots. Still, I look upon this from a bed that contains everything concentrated in one jewel, the princess jewel of sensual accord and ecstasy. Then the cypresses without history seem to be looking down not at an ordinary city, but at all the lovers, containing them all, extending them, concentrating in two bodies all the joys of the earth.
Two books were born during our life together. In San Francisco I wrote The Four-Chambered Heart. In Sierra Madre I wrote A Spy in the House of Love.
Rupert did his college work well. He had a four year job to do in two years. We had very little time for friends, for pleasure. He had so many examinations. I helped him with the typing, which