Staff said, “When the anxiety catches you, lie down and think of the analysis. Know you create the myth, the fiction. It is not reality. You are constantly deserting Rupert in your mind because you are afraid to give yourself.”
Rupert Pole in “Cleo,” his Model A Ford, 1947
| July 2, 1947 | New York. Beach with Carter and wife |
| July 3, 1947 | Staff |
| July 5, 1947 | Staff |
| July 6, 1947 | Chinchilito |
| July 7, 1947 | Jacobson |
| July 8, 1947 | Staff |
| July 10, 1947 | Chinchilito |
| July 11, 1947 | Staff |
| July 12, 1947 | Jacobson |
| July 13, 1947 | Staff |
| July 18-27, 1947 | Los Angeles. Rupert Pole |
| July 28, 1947 | Leave Los Angeles |
| July 29, 1947 | Mexico City, alone |
| July 30-September 10, 1947 | Acapulco |
| September 11, 1947 | Left for San Francisco |
| September 13-18, 1947 | Trip to Utah with Rupert |
| October 26, 1947 | Lecture at Black Mountain College; met Jim Herlihy |
| October 28, 1947 | New York. Gotham Book Mart party for Children of the Albatross |
| November 1, 1947 | Albert Mangones |
| November 5-6, 1947 | Bennington lecture |
| November 12, 1947 | Lecture Chicago with Wallace Fowlie |
| November 25, 1947 | Gonzalo Moré |
| November 29, 1947 | Radio broadcast, New York City |
| December 3, 1947 | Lecture at Berkeley |
| December 6, 1947 | Los Angeles to Mexico |
| December 8, 1947 | Bought house in Acapulco |
| December 19, 1947 | Rupert arrives in Acapulco |
LA JOIE
1948
JANUARY 1948
Acapulco
NEW YORK, SPRING 1948
Rupert’s gift to me was a special, selected view of America. The nature was beautiful, full of variety and surprises. Canyons, marshes, fields, rivers, swamps, desert lakes.
During that trip none of his dogmatic traits were revealed to me. True, he talked about a home, wife and nine children, but I did not believe him altogether. We played at my being the other woman, the foreign woman who would lure him away from his home now and then!
I talked about my travels, the panorama of Europe paralleling America, sometimes created out of contrast, sometimes by association. Two warnings my heart did not heed: one, that his life was not interesting, just ordinary; the other, that he did not know or understand his relationships with other women, his lover of four or five years, or his ex-wife. I probed in vain. He gave me a blurred, confused image, with many gaps and black-outs.
Once he was jealous of my abundant mail and threw it on the floor.
I had my difficulties on that trip. My eyes were wind-burnt and caused me much suffering and humiliation. In South Carolina I wanted to quit; I felt homely and inadequate. Rupert was kind. But I realize now that true kindness would have been to put the top up, and that he never did. I had to learn the hard way, to find glasses with sides against the wind, to wear a base of makeup over my eyelids and face as protection.
I also felt utterly tired; we kept a daredevil pace, and this intensity, without pause, made the trip an ordeal.
On that trip I accepted his leadership totally. I did not know the road, the restaurants, the motels, or anything about cars. He was an experienced traveler. So Rupert may have had the illusion that I was easily dominated! I enjoyed his leadership then.
We stopped to see Henry Miller in Big Sur. The road to his home was steep and dangerous, mountain driving, and Rupert’s car wasn’t quite equal to it. But as we climbed, the view of the sea below, the rocks, the pines, was beautiful. The car drove into a courtyard, and there was Henry sitting out of doors, typing. He seemed healthier than in New York. He was proud to own the modest cottage we entered. It was simple and uncluttered, reminiscent of the old Henry’s tidiness. His wife Lepska appeared. There was tension between them. He criticized her. He thought my trip west and to Mexico was a flight from my life in New York, and that he should help me in some way. I made it clear I needed no help.
I should not have visited Miller. As soon as one ceases to know a person intimately, the knowledge of them is from the outside, as if you stood at a window looking in. Intimacy takes trust and faith. That was over.
“See! See!” said Rupert, “See the Lord’s candle cactus flower.” When I saw them I thought: we are nearing his home. It is time for me to return the ring he gave me so that during the trip I would be known as Mrs. Pole. In so many registers all through the United States, Mr. and Mrs. Pole. But when I tried to return the ring Rupert turned his face away: “No, keep it. As a remembrance of the trip.” It was the wedding ring from his marriage to Janie. On the last day of our trip together, entering Los Angeles, he expressed sorrow at the termination of our dream.
“It’s hell,” he said upon awakening to the reality of our parting. But he did not act to hold me, to affix me. He surrendered me. I wept as I sat at the airport, watching him drive away.
There was a honeymoon couple being celebrated, rice was thrown, a champagne bottle was opened, and the cork fell at my feet. I was weeping and looking at the couple. They did not love each other as Rupert and I had loved each other during our eighteen-day trip, yet they were married, secure for years, and that would never happen to us. We were separating, perhaps forever.
“Deep feelings have continuity,” I said to Rupert before leaving, to sustain my faith, but in reality there was nothing to reassure me. He was entering a new profession: two years of university courses to attain a degree as forester, and a forestry job in the summer.
I asked, “What would you have done if I had run away, gone to Europe?”
“I would have dropped my work and pursued you, brought you back. In New York I wasn’t sure you’d come with me.”
“Suppose I hadn’t at the last moment?”
“I would have abducted you.”
As we parted, I was returning a comb, a newspaper, and I said, “Do I have anything else of yours?”
“My heart.”
I returned to New York, to all my nightmares, to find Gonzalo still preying upon me, taking, asking, destroying the last shreds of respect, of illusion. Life with Hugo, insincere, a role. Then came a government injunction that I must leave the United States until a re-entry permit was in order. I left for Acapulco alone. In sensual, drugging Acapulco I wanted Rupert desperately. He haunted me. I haunted him equally. He wrote me that he saw me peeping behind every tree. He wrote of wanting me. He wrote of needing to be with me, but he didn’t write: “I’m coming.”
But just before last Christmas he did come to Acapulco. I had a little home and rented a car. All that I had imagined when I had been there alone took place and was fulfilled. We swam. We made love wildly in the tropical nights, after siestas. We took a trip. He got ill. I nursed him. We lived in rhythm. No clashes. We spent two days in Taxco. The only anguish he caused me was by turning to look at every pretty woman, and once when a Mexican girl stared at him he turned completely to stare back at her as if I were not there.
I am aware of the reality of our relationship. Rupert is kind, responsible and loyal, but he is susceptible to women’s charms. He has an adolescent curiosity and multiple enthusiasms. I am not to expect faithfulness.
Three days at Ensenada. When we got into the car,