[letter]
18 December 1966
Christmas week begins today, examinations are finished, Judy is to arrive
here today, but there is no snow yet and it seems impossible that it is
Christmas already or at all. Jerry was going to come for Christmas but I
received a telegram (forty eight words) from him saying that he can't -
don't know why. And Paul can't come either - I'm disappointed altho I know
that it is very far to come.
Petercat is nearly full grown, sitting on the bed now with his eyes reflecting
light - he loves to arrange himself on display, pretending to be asleep,
curled against the wings of my brass dragon in the warmth of my reading lamp, or sitting
up chewing the dried ferns in my rose vase. He is going on his first journey
when Olivia takes him home with her to Toronto for the holidays - on the
train, stuffed unwillingly into my duffle bag.
Next day
Judy is here with Joanne, they've brought a large long-needled pine tree
which they found somewhere by crook I think, and it is in the corner of
my room where Peter is climbing into it and around it and craning his neck
at it from the bed like a goose, afraid to jump into it but hesitating -
it is his first experience with a tree.
[O and I] went to the Anglican cathedral last night to hear the choir
singing Christmas carols - a procession of boys in red and white robes with
candles, singing wonderfully; the last song of the service is "Oh Come
all ye Faithful," and in the last verse the entire choir sang a wild
magnificent descant above the voices of the congregation. When we got home,
Judy and Joanne had arrived and hitchhiked in from the railway station -
Greg was with me, and we all went to Hutch's to visit. Hutch is an old friend
of Don and Olivia's - they know him since their work with the Kingston Poverty
Project two summers ago - who lives 'on the other side of the tracks' in
a quite ratty old house usually full of bottles and university students
and puppies and kittens and ex-convicts trying to rehabilitate themselves
to some degree at least. Hutch and his wife Nellie and their long-haired
motorcycle driving son Lexie and their daughter with her baby and their
littlest daughter Puppy are the peculiar family of a surprising number of
semi-wealthy middle-class more-or-less-intellectual students who go to argue
philosophy and Real Life with Hutch who is self educated and very canny.
Even Carmichael, when he runs into an insoluble metaphysical problem in
his work goes over to Hutch's for ideas. Girls go to Nelly for advice. Everyone
sits on the unmatched tiles of the living room floor and drinks very cheap
Canadian wine and scatters ashes. They are good, warm, people.
One of Greg's old friends is a girl named Myrna from a German Iowa town
called Grundy Center - she was telling last night about the little Methodist
church's Christmas programs, with the tree and the bags and recitations
and new dresses and the disgusting presents from Sunday school teachers
- plaques or bookmarks with verses and roses on them. What I remember most
is the tree ornaments that bubbled - some kind of lights I think.
I often remember the desert Christmas too, with the aromatic bushes burning
in the cave and Mother telling stories.
And Mother reading A Christmas Carol every year.
We're going to Toronto on the 24th - lots to tell you then. Have the
packages arrived on time?
[journal]
December 22
"At five o'clock on December 22 we wondered where we would be this
time next year" Greg said. "Write that somewhere." This year
we were lying in bed together tired and crazy about each other - that is,
brushing skin surfaces tight with our tenderness for each other. Since the
holidays I have been sleeping here under the blue blanket, where I am now
although Greg has gone home. Strange Christmas - I love someone: we have
an 'involvement.' What will happen? Where will we be next year? Greg means
- will we be together, or not? Judy and Joanne cooked dinner for us - lasagna
and salad eaten upstairs - and we talked about ourselves. Then Greg went
home. I'll see him right after Christmas but it is strange to walk into
his empty house.
Strange formal passage for a journal; the reality under all of this is
the two nights and an afternoon we've spent making love violently - passionately,
if passion is a fierce tenderness that is at once soft as melted cheese
and desperate as a steel trap - until we were exhausted. It's suddenly important
to me whether he cares or not; it's suddenly strange not to have him here.
I'm suddenly anxious about his small gestures - what does he mean? My skin
is obsessed with him; around my mouth there's a kiss moving invisibly, my
nipples are hard and the pit of my womb remembers what it is like to have
him nursing (I cannot forget his face against my breast) like a calf, butting
and pulling until I want him desperately. This face of his, disturbed and
flushed, with his hair fuzzy, almost blind, happy, confused - intent at
once on himself and on me as I am on myself and on him - what is me is him,
because I'm no more than what he is touching and he is no more than where
he touches me. We sometimes stop and laugh delightedly, kiss each other
smackingly and look down to where we are joined so deep and so well soft
body with hard body, thighs alongside.
Ridiculous to feel almost as tho' I had been a virgin until now - and
even now, I've yet to have an orgasm. It worries me vaguely: but there's
no lack of desire or of pleasure, and I'm troubled only because I feel there
must be something wrong with me if I don't - one problem: being so aroused
without orgasm, though no fault of the man, makes the female - me - perhaps
too vulnerable toward the male: this makes me understand men better, in
their sudden irrational dependencies.
Christmas 1966: reality is different; tonight it's in the churnings and
grindings of guts softened to curd!
We're going to Anne and Harvey's for Christmas Day.
[letter]
Ottawa, December 30
Finally, like you, we are under many feet of snow and the trees are weighed
down with it - the fields all along Highway 17 from Montreal to Ottawa are
smooth and wind-polished, the ditches are full of sculpted drifts, the spruce
are plastered down solidly with snow.
Christmas: Kingston, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and now Ottawa again.
Kingston: the madrigals on one of my records (old Christmas carols) and
a red candle burning in my dragon, a Christmas tree Judy and Joanne found
somewhere and decorated with odds and ends - Peter had never met a tree
before and he went wild, clawing and biting his way up the trunk to the
top, making the branches heave, all with the bell we had tied to his neck
shaking.
The 'family' - Greg, Don, and Olivia - finally dispersed and went home
for the holidays. Your package came too late to share, so the cake is at
home now waiting to be shared when we all get back next week. All the other
goodies - especially the birds nest cookies - were devoured in piggy haste
with a great deal of enjoyment by mostly me.
On Saturday morning of the 24th, I hitchhiked to Toronto, to arrive just
after dark, with the lights in Harvey and Anne's Forest Hill area just beginning
to come on. My suitcase was very heavy with presents, and I was glad to
arrive. Maria and Harvey were outside watching the snow fall. Inside, Anne
had Tooz' and Anderle (now called 'Chin' or 'Sin') underfoot, the kitchen
was overflowing with papers and garbage bags and dishes and art work from
Maria's nursery school.
Tooz would stop in front of the Christmas tree, a huge one covered with
lights, in the arch between the living room and dining room, next to the
fireplace; she'd sit with her legs crossed, staring up at the tree, rapt.
Toozie is an amazingly pretty, happy kid, soft pale hair, huge blue eyes,
button nose, wisp of a New York accent, and all. More of a 'creature' than
a kid, actually. (But Maria, now - she isn't a creature; she's all
kid.)
We had what we traditionally have at Dycks for Christmas Eve, thin pancakes
with sour cherry sauce. Then the two blondes put on new green velvet dresses
with lace collars - both of them thrilled by them, and we went outside to
the steps of a huge stone church, where we sang carols in the cold, with
the carillon pounding the tunes out in the bell tower high above us. It
was snowing large, light flakes out of a bright sky, and it was a classical,
beautiful, glittering moonlit Christmas Eve. Then we went back home and
stuffed the kids into bed with promises of early and magnificent arising
next morning. Then we went downstairs and sat around Harvey's fire in the
fireplace, drinking Glüwin and talking. At midnight Anne and Harvey
started to drag out presents and put them under the tree, writing funny
notes from Santa.
They went presumably to bed, but as I was sitting on the floor reading
I heard a rattling at the door, and there was Anne in her nightgown sneakily
fastening a full stocking on the doorknob. I slept on the living room couch;
so when Maria and Toozie trailed in I knew it was morning but it felt much
too early to be morning. It was 5:30 and I was too tired to raise an arm
to reach for a present; but Maria was eager to help! I'd given Maria and
Toozie a recording of Peter and the Wolf with Nutcracker on
the back side; Anne, a paperback of Justine, one of my favorite books; Harve
and Anne, a bottle of Italian wine; Judy (she came for dinner later) two
very attractive wine glasses. My stocking had in it: an apple, an orange,
a spool of black thread, nuts, and soap. Anne's had a large apple and a
tin of Libby's Peas and Carrots, all Santa had been able to find for her!
Maria found this rather a dubious gift - but plausible, because mothers
want strange things.
I got a strange stack of things: from Greg, a four-record album of Chopin's
Nocturnes, Etudes and Ballades with a book of poetry and a book about Existential
psychoanalysis. From Olivia there was a pair of blue slippers with some
paperbacks, including a many-photograph one about excavations in Greece.
From the Dycks, a pair of glittering blue stockings. From Judy an apple-green
poor-boy sweater. From Paul, the candle you already know about. From Grandma,
an embroidered Mexican bag.
With various presents and wrapping papers heaped over and around me,
I went back to sleep and it was soon time for dinner. Toozie helped lay
the table, and Maria folded the Santa Claus napkins over so that Santa was
divided down the centre.
On Sunday night there was finally a chance to talk to Judy - she seems
very happy, with enough really good friends; she is less closed-up, much
less reticent, full of energy and jollyness. On Monday we went downtown
together, first to the Art Gallery to see some Canadian paintings, and then
to the City Hall square where the bare poplar trees were covered with white
lights and the skating rink full of laughing people. And above, the two
halves of the building curving around the round central hall roof - it's
an exciting building.
Tuesday morning, suitcase a little lighter, but not much, I started out
hitchhiking to Ottawa, where Greg had invited me for a few days. First there
was a six-foot wire fence, topped with barbs, to be gotten over with the
suitcase - and to be gotten over gently, both for the glass in my suitcase
and the disastrous consequences of a rip in my only slacks. A ride all the
way to the Ottawa turn-off with a wonderful French-Canadian carpenter. It
was sunny; there were blue shadows in the snow among the stubble, and the
trees were bare, but pink, orange, blue, rather than grey. When we got to
the corner where Highway 17 turns off to go to Ottawa and the other continues
to Montreal, my French Canadian driver turned off and announced that it
was too cold to be standing beside the road so he'd go to Montreal via Ottawa
- about 100 miles out of his way. He was extraordinary, a bachelor of about
forty, courteous, humorous, perfectly bilingual, the sort of person who
is excellent justification of hitchhiking. As we came near Ottawa on a wide,
straight stretch of Highway 17, the sun set and we could see a huge pink
moon beginning to float up from the bluish treetops along the Gatineau Hills
around the Rideau Valley.
10 Monkland Avenue, a three-storey house among the tall trees lining
an old street near the Rideau Canal. Back door: a huge black cat waiting
to be let in, Greg smelling of a new Christmas-present after-shave lotion,
Mrs Morrison (Greg's mother) red-headed, tall, a little tousled.
The family is interesting. Eric, 15, is alternately polite and cheeky,
always with a friend or three friends. Catherine, 19 I think, red-haired,
a third-year student at York, shy at first but enthusiastically looking
forward to Europe. Greg you know a little about already and you'll hear
much more. Mr Morrison, fifty-something, is rather trim and scholarly-looking
with a grey-streaked moustache, an absent expression and a dry manner of
speaking - he tends to be a little curt or grumpy, I think. He is also Secretary
of the Royal Commission of Bilingualism and Biculturalism: it's unsettling
to sit at a dinner table with him because he is always mentioning casually
some Ottawa Big Name who "dropped in at the office" or "came
round to say hello as I was having lunch." (Even Greg shocks me sometimes:
we were watching a CBC newscast last night. Miniffey, the Canadian newscaster
who takes care of Washington, was just finishing one of his delightful tongue-in-cheek
telecasts, and I said "I like him" very enthusiastically. "I
had dinner at his place in Washington with my father, who's one of his friends.")
None of this is snobbery - it is just that what we find glamorous is his
job, and saying "Mr Pearson and I" is to them what "Mr Sieburt
and I" is to you.
Mrs Morrison is the most interesting of the whole family - she has the
cool, low voice of a radio broadcaster - right! She is one. You've probably
heard her on Trans-Canada Matinee (Jean Morrison, for future reference);
and for the next few weeks you may be able to see her on a CBC-TV series
of ten programs from Africa. The program was produced, directed, written,
by her with the help of an excellent photographer. She spent 7 weeks in
Paris preparing for it. It is shown at 3 p.m. Fridays here, but you probably
won't be able to get it. I'm delighted you have television now, especially
through the winter, because there are a few programs - like the "Ode
to Joy" Beethoven program next Wednesday afternoon - that are as good
as concerts.
Back to Mrs Morrison - she is calm, warm, sensible, a good housekeeper,
an extremely understanding mother, and a seemingly sincere, friendly, hostess,
very likeable. Greg tends to take after her although he is less mature by
about 25 years and has room for improvement.
There are two cats, an enormous grey tabby and an even larger black and
white beauty called Sugar. (Sugar has just swept her tail across my page
leaving a few long black hairs on it.)
The house is full of books - every room except the three bathrooms has
at least one bookshelf where books are classified according to subject:
mathematics on the third floor landing, science fiction in the TV room,
personal books in Cathy's, Eric's and Greg's rooms, novels in Jean's study,
politics and philosophy in Neil's room (Greg has called his parents by their
first names since he was about five - they like it and I do too, but the
children are by no means modern monsters. In fact they are exceptionally
considerate and tolerant!), golf, bridge, wine gourmet, music, poetry, drama,
Canadian fiction and so on are in the living room. Thousands of magazines.
Travel posters.
Good food and well-chosen wine. Order.
Strange and rather foreign way of life.
We went to Montreal for several days to visit one of Greg's friends (in
the windy little white Triumph (which is too light to hold the road well
in slush and snow, feet of it, that poured down over Montreal), looked at
the new subway, and the Place des Arts. Just as we were coming into Montreal
on the superhighway among the tall curve-necked streetlights, a flattened
red moon with orange shadings rose between the lampposts and sank among
the lights into the city as we arrived. The next day was beautiful, with
the snow rising in piles all symmetrically on every round lamp and architectural
knob in the city.
Now it is New Year's Eve and we are back in Ottawa studying before going
back to Kingston maybe Monday. I can smell supper smells - cheese fondu
- coming up the stairwell.
Forgot to tell you that while in Toronto I visited the Howells, whose
family has been expanded again - not only Petercat is there, sleeping on
carpets now, but the old grandfather from Wales has come to Canada so that
Mrs Howell can come home. There is a very funny new rivalry in the family
as a consequence - Granny is jealous of attention given the old man, is
upset if anyone dare mention that she is, after all, only six years
younger than he!
Paul - I'm very happy for the candle and had hoped you'd be as glad for
the Simon and Garfunkle record until Judy told me she'd given you the same
one. I loved the album, by the way, especially "Groovy' which made
me think of you.
[letter]
January 4 1967
It is Wednesday of the new year, and we've just come from the Union where
we watched Seije Ozawa (CBC TV) conducting the Toronto Symphony in Beethoven's
Ode to Joy Ninth. The choral sections were particularly exciting
and the Japanese conductor's small-boy face added something to the music
by his spontaneous expression of it.
Back in Kingston, working ahead for the term that begins next Monday
- HAVE YOU SENT ON THE LOAN APPLICATION FORMS? (Later - yes you have: thank
you for being so prompt.)
Perhaps this is an illusion but this year our correspondence seems completely
to have lost contact - my sparse letters are one cause but it seems to me
that there's a drifting sort of non-contact about your letters too. Are
you busy? Do our ideological differences upset you?
I write little mostly because I have little impulse to write - nothing
is new after two years here, except ideas and work, neither of which are
really communicable. I do little, except work and sleep and talk to the
three friends who are always the same three friends. We live in an extremely
ugly neighbourhood and it rains nearly all the time. We can't afford concerts
for the most part - extreme happiness or unhappiness is easier to talk about
at length than routine and contentment!
Greg and I got back to Kingston from Ottawa yesterday after a rather
wonderful week's holiday in the good-food, carpeted-stairway, friendly-familied
Morrison house. Mrs Morrison continues to be amazing: she has also free-lanced
for Chatelaine and various radio programs including a Project feature
on Pakistan. And it turns out that it was Neil (Mr Morrison) who began the
CBC Farm Forum program. The evening before we left he became quite
mellow and told us very amusingly about his beginnings with CBC - I felt
as tho' I'd had a bit of the sort of catalytic effect on the family that
Rasheed had on ours.
Speaking of Rasheed - have I told you about the dinner party we had just
before Christmas? He and his fiancée, blonde Lucette, invited Judy,
Joanne, and me to dinner. Rasheed, of course, talked, while Lucette cooked.
I like Lucette very much: she is English, sensible, seemingly well balanced,
pretty, and seems to know how to get along with Rasheed's temperament through
a mixture of no-nonsense and affection. Rasheed himself thinks that he has
matured.
After the very excellent dinner we washed dishes, Lucette and I, and
half an hour later, I left, and all the while Rasheed was arguing violently
and sometimes illogically against a point Joanne had made before we'd even
sat down to dinner.
I'm listening to Haydn's Creation again.
One of Greg's friends, Lexie, was over today full of plans for making
a million dollars. Lexie is nineteen, huge, a little pudgy, with large brown
eyes, a moustache, and brown hair flowing down to his shoulders - he is
characteristically dressed in baggy jeans, cowboy boots, a shirt open to
the waist, and a very wide leather belt - he is a skilled welder, he dropped
out of school, he plays rather haphazardly a tall bass fiddle full of holes
and patched together with rubber cement - he speaks slowly, very seriously:
he came in, sat down, gravely accepted a coffee, and began to explain his
plans for finding a French frigate sunk off Wolfe Island Spit with $100,000
in coin and bullion in 1764. Evidently it has never been salvaged - Lex
has some experience diving and he is convinced that he can find and salvage
the wreck, get the money, use the money to finance other expeditions in
the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico, and make his million. What happened?
Greg fell into the plan with great enthusiasm and they went off together
to the library to search through the archives and special collections for
nautical charts or journals dating to 1764 - it appears that Kingston did
not exist. They came up with a book, however, printed in 1929 and never
taken out of the library before, listing all the nautical charts in the
University of Wisconsin library. Lexie then invited us to dinner, which
he made himself - a large pot of clam chowder!
Monday
Two exam papers back today: an 80 in philosophy (theory of knowledge)
and an 86 in abnormal psychology - I'm very pleased!
I want to send you, Mother (and you, Paul) a book called The Outsider
by Colin Wilson, which talks about the particular sort of personality which
does not get along with most social values and so becomes a semi- or complete
eccentric or a self-imposed exile from other people: in short, the book
is about the Epps and Doerksens and suchlike. It is quite exciting to find
characteristics discussed objectively, the very characteristics that we
outsiders always tend to feel are a very personal sickness. I'm also sending
Bertrand Russell's Marriage and Morals (I'm waiting to write a long
reply to your letter) in answer to the book you sent me.
Olivia and Don became unofficially engaged during the holidays - distressing!
Don said to Mr Howell, "Olivia and I are getting married." Says
Mr Howell: "Are you now? And to whom?"
Petercat is back from his red-carpeted holiday at the Howell's, fatter
from scraps of steak and roast beef. What a slob he is, and nearly full
grown too. He lies on his back with his two hind legs stretched a-way far
apart and his front paws dangling slackly forward over his face.
A letter from Frank: he is very sad. His best friend was drowned (in
a hunting accident?) and it was Frank who found his body after it had been
in the water twenty days. He is the most intensely Outside of all the Outsiders
that I know.
Have you ever seen Dr Zivago? The scenery is excellent, thrilling,
and the Revolution with its resulting famine and pillaging is something
you know and would be interested in. Art's parents, the Neufelds of Beamsville,
saw it in Kingston when they came to see Art, and liked it, conservative
Mennonites that they are.
The Mennonite Peace River Country background is really an asset - it
is an area of experience that none of my friends know; at the same time
I do know their backgrounds or am coming to know them as I begin to feel
an Ontario middle class Easterner. I have a foot in both worlds while they
have both firmly in only one.
I remember the sunrises and sunsets you'll be seeing through your dining
room window over the tops of the dark spruce. Ontario skies are very bland
in comparison. My memories of going to school at daybreak on cold winter
mornings are only pleasant now: I see the colors and the wonderful perfection-in-every-detail
of those sunrises and have forgotten the achingly cold feet that didn't
stop throbbing with cold until first recess at school.
[journal]
January 6 1967
What I long for most is strong impulsive energy toward both perception
and action. Passivity is my personal sin.
The Creation is on the turntable upstairs, with a speaker on the second
landing: duet, soprano and tenor and 'cello, I think, excitement like the
colors of a painting elongated outwards in ribbons - tickertape of sound.
Susie [Susan Ksinan] sent a Christmas card with a note: "If you
see a girl with brown hair, brown shoes and a brown suitcase coming down
your street, hide, because it will be me. I'll have decided that Queen's
is the best place for me and that Ellie Epp is the best friend I've ever
had." I remember her large brown shiny body with its breasts like Aphrodite's,
and remember her swimming toward the edge of the pool, turning carefully,
with her large mouth smiling slightly of itself. Her discovery of the world
and all of its details and tastes and smells and personality flavors was
as thrilling for me as it was for her. The sudden love that we understood
in each other: her mixture of arrogance and concern: she was completely
lovely, vanity, selfishness, abruptness; chase-and-turn-about flirt-and-fly
Susie.
January 8
The Outsider, Colin Wilson. I've read it through directly, leaving
it on the chair (with my light clipped to the back of it) to sleep and picking
it up again when I woke. Steppenwolf was my first experience of someone
else admitting to the same isolation that Frank and I had first recognized
in each other. So this is not some terrible thing I have alone - here is
Frank. So we loved each other. Then wandering in Istanbul feeling the ruinous
bestiality in men, where I'd seen only feebleness before, I came upon Steppenwolf
and felt the kinship of this middle-aged misanthropic intellectual, with
myself - now Colin Wilson talks about me and Steppenwolf, Frank, Raskolnikov,
Ivan Karamazov, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, TE Lawrence, James, Shaw,
Barbusse, Sartre, Camus, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Hesse, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy
(Death of Ivan Ilyich), Eliot, Mann, Goethe, Hemingway, Wells, Yeats,
Blake, Fox, Joyce. He even quotes Sartre's passage about the nausea that
overcame him as he stared at the root of a tree in the public gardens, -
the one I had written out in my last journal.
What to say - characteristics of the Outsider -
- Nausea, seeing too much or too deep to be comfortable in buying and
selling social graces; confusion sometimes with people and sometimes with
objects: the spruce trees through the bathroom window in Strasbourg, my
image in the window, wrapped in the green robe, Mitchell's profile, the
last weeks in Paris, the time in Istanbul, yesterday's rage against my friends.
Desire for truth conflicting with despair, compromising relationships. Complete
discomfort with most people and a sullen refusal to make an effort, and
yet pain in being misunderstood even by those who are not important. Lack
of certain expected feelings (Greg), vision of the skeleton and skull beneath
the flesh that makes even friends strange and frightening. "What can
be said to characterize the outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality."
"... a frightening queerness has come into life." (Wells) "Love
is impossible when there is a prevailing sense of unreality." "Freedom
lies in finding a course of action that gives expression to that part (the
part not contented with the trivial) of him...." Hemingway's adventure.
- Woman "... is always more instinctively well adjusted, less susceptible
to the abstract, than the man." Man thinks this is true because he
needs to. He doesn't want a woman with his metaphysical disease because
he wants a cure of it, not companionship in it. Yeats "One man loved
the pilgrim soul in you," is so touching because so much of a woman
is estranged by man when she feels him looking past and around the Outsider
in her for the "docile girl who thought her husband was a genius"
(CW's description of Blake's wife). Nearly always. Frank loved what he knew
of me as an Outsider, but he valued my ability to cherish the world at the
same time - in me this is a part of being an Outsider but in most women
it is not. I think many women cease to be Outside, and so lose their joy
as well, because agony is traditionally a role left to men: comforting,
peace, preoccupation with trivia, are hers, easily learned, immediately
rewarding. I know! Jerry - he loved me, as I loved him, because he recognized
me as an Outsider: we were intensely happy in sharing our recognition, but
we were happy to know the encounter would be brief. Unreality follows joy
and is a necessary precondition to it, and "love is impossible when
there is a prevailing sense of unreality." Greg - honesty, patience,
"springs from indifference to issues of feeling (CW's account of Meursault
telling the girl that her question of whether he loved her meant nothing
to him, but he supposed he didn't.)
We were lying in bed Friday night, my head was full of blowing litter
bits, and he came to lie beside me because he knew I wanted him there. He
talked about how he felt about me - I can't remember exactly why - and about
how he had felt about Leslie. That with both, it had been, first, an anxiety
about succeeding; then a happiness at having succeeded; then a rather bland
pleasure in our company and a fairly complete - and rather disturbing for
him - lack of feeling in our absence. "I felt as tho' I was going on
false pretenses." "Pretences of what? What do you mean?"
"Pretences of feeling more than I actually did. But this is changing.
I think I feel something more solid and lasting."
I was overcome with desolation; and turned to the wall and went to sleep.
In the morning I did not want him to touch me, but ran downstairs to work.
Don and Olivia came home - Olivia was noisily enthusiastic and I was dismayed
at the trap I felt myself to be in: these are all my friends, I'm expected
to like them and to be interested in them - well I don't and I'm not - I
don't like them (look at Greg standing against the doorpost grinning; ugly)
and I'm trapped into pretending to. They'll be hurt if I don't like them:
worse, they'll reject me. I'm Outside again; God, I remember this from so
often long ago and last summer and now - even with them, I must be
outside. Look at how they are foaming and frothing: "We nearly died."
"Everybody was high as kites by then ..." "Don threw this
tantrum ..." "What a fan-ta-stic group of people!"
I went upstairs to pack; it was snowing. It seemed right to be packing
and moving away. I wished I could move far away from everyone I know. Greg
tried to help me with my suitcase, tried to put his arms around me, tried
to make me talk. "Nothing is wrong." Except that I don't like
any of you. "I just want to drop out of the world." I walked home
with two bags, a hair dryer, a purse, in the melting snow. I still don't
like Olivia. The wolf is snarling; I try to be pleasant, but she knows and
she's gone to the boys for the day. She says, she has said before, that
she can't stand strain in the atmosphere. My snarls are nearly audible.
Even Peter keeps clear.
She and Greg discussed me: "These Sisyphians who are really only
trying to get attention." It was a joke but it stings. Bad temper,
faulty adjustment; something wrong with the outsider, not with us. Greg
is Outside to some extent - Olivia is not and never will be, because of
the tenacity of her socialization, I think sometimes without any joy and
rather desperate. Greg too is a social sort of outsider. My unsocialness
is a paralysis, but often my intentions are good. Now they are merely crabbed.
The element of sorry-for-self in the Outsider is often funny - and I
laugh too, but the wolf grinds his teeth nevertheless, at anyone who pets
him or makes as if to or merely might. (Father is nearly all wolf, but wolf
with a superacute conscience.) Friends, friends of friends, none of you
are enough and it seems sad and silly to go on with this game Greg - you
are pleased to be accepted, you're afraid of being left alone again, you
like warm body as much as I do, and so we are lovers without love - is it
enough? Bad temper, faulty adjustment, romanticism, underdevelopment of
the reality principle, but what do you know about joy? I can respond
to you sometimes with great honesty and feeling, both at once.
But are you blind to me? You're good to me. I cannot understand what
we mean to each other. I'm afraid of losing joy in compromise. Comfort of
you and even comforting you aren't enough. One night I said to you "You
are the nearest thing I have to a tree." When this is true you are
right and what we have is enough. We are honest with each other, what we
have is usually good. (But there must be more ...) (If you were beautiful
...)
Hesse. "He is a novelist who used the novel to explore the problem:
What should we do with our lives? The man who is interested to know how
he should live rather than merely taking life as it comes is automatically
an outsider ... He feels sure that there should be a way of living with
the intensity of the artist's creative ecstasy all the time ... We may dismiss
this as romantic wish-thinking but it deserves note as being one of the
consistent ideals of the Outsider." CW calls this the attempt to
gain control. I know about this, the last year in high school, the wandering
in Europe, the rape, the longing for old intensity and the pettish intolerance
of the rest, pattern repeated as long as I can remember, denial and avoidance
when what I want most is abundance of life.
"In 'The Secret Life' we see the outsider cut off from other people
by an intelligence which ruthlessly destroys their values and prevents him
from self expression through his inability to substitute new values."
But "always, there is the tearing, excoriating demand, of pity."
CW of Nijinsky. "Herein lies the cause of his breakdown ... if he happens
to lack the self-assurance that most men pick up in their dealings with
'the world,' his position among other men is made completely false. He has
no reason to credit himself with unusual spiritual maturity, and
still less for refusing to credit other men with it, when their self assurance
impresses on him his own inferiority in respect of intelligence and logic.
If he happens to be young and inexperienced, he has practically no defense
against the world."
"The ideal of Yeats is persistently an Outsider-ideal, persistent
even in romantic Outsiders: solitude, retreat, the attempt to order a small
corner of the "devil-ridden chaos" to one's own satisfaction."
Blake: "If he allows his social relations to delude him into forgetting
his fundamental loneliness, he is living in a fool's paradise" - but
if he remembers his fundamental loneliness, his social relations are destroyed.
It is too difficult for anyone to accept the fact that they are ultimately
not enough. Never will be, never can be.
"There is the romantic Outsider's problem in essence; and there
are the two worlds, the ecstatic vital world of Lohengrin and the dull world
of the schoolboy but there are other artists who can stand with a foot in
both worlds without undue discomfort: Synge, Joyce, Herrick, Shakespeare,
Rabelais." Thomas Wolfe, Walt Whitman.
Blake "uses woman as a symbol of imprisonment, for the female temperament
is literal, practical, down to earth."
"Men are admitted to heaven, not because they have curbed their
passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings."
(Blake Collected Works pg. 842)
"It is the strange faculty (the faculty for yea-saying) that can
see 'a world in a grain of sand,' or in a leaf, just a leaf, slightly brown
at the edges." Greg lacks it. I lose it.
To establish the yea-saying faculty permanently in himself, the Outsider
tries self knowledge, establishing a discipline to overcome his weakness
and self division, making his aim more undivided.
Traherne says he lost his "intimations of immortality" because
of the customs of men who "prized things I did not dream of ... I was
weak and easily guided by their example." Easily confused, I know.
(Centuries of Meditation)
The Outsider has the desire and sometimes the decision to "become
a wanderer, a seeker in a European country, to wear leather clothes"
and to "feed upon bread and water" "so that I might have
all my time clearly to myself." Traherne again. Civilization and superfluities.
The desire to wander in Europe without friends or belongings, to live an
entire life that way, in conflict with the white door's brass knocker and
Christmas wreath.
James in "Varieties of Religious Experience" is said to talk
about "melting moods" - "It is as if our tears broke through
an inveterate inner dam and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral
stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart." The
morning Madame Matter and I both cried into our tubs, and felt so susceptible
to each other: it snowed that evening and I was full of joy.
"Gurdjieff also points out that man wastes an appalling amount of
energy in what he calls 'negative emotion.'"
"The sole means of the beings of planet earth would be to implant
again into their presences a new organ of such properties that everybody
should sense the inevitability of his own death, as well as the death of
everyone else upon whom his eyes or attention rest." (Gurdjieff All
and Everything)
- The Outsider is a book which has thrown a net around an incredible
amount of what is vital but half-submerged in myself. I don't think any
book has ever had so much relevance. The approach is important too: it makes
me realize again the relevance of study.
Colin Wilson was twenty four when he wrote it, sleeping on Hampstead
Heath and writing in the British Museum.
-
Accidia - fits of unreasoning gloom (Petrarch) (who willed to
Boccaccio, "money to buy a warm dressing gown for winter study and
lucubrations by night"). Olivia is to be married in summer. She may
remember to make me a secularized godmother to her children - I would be
pleased. We talked about her preadolescence (Sunday afternoon, making dinner
in the kitchen, sinfully free from work) and especially about Susan.
There is an excerpt from Petrarch's diary in which he describes a stormy
night in Venice. He heard shouting below, ran to his window, and saw ships
casting off: "Their masts considerably overtopped the two corner towers
of my palazzo. And at this moment, with all the stars hidden by clouds,
as my walls and roofs were shaken by the wind, as the sea roared hellishly
below, the ships cast loose from the quay and set forth on their journey.
When I could no longer follow the ships with my eyes, moved and stirred
I picked up my pen again, exclaiming: 'Oh how dear to men is life, and how
little account they take of it!' I had got thus far, and was thinking of
what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking my paper idly with
my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, times
goes on, and I hurry, I drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always
dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen
or stop their ears, they are all dying."
[letter]
January 17
First of all, it seems likely that I'll be home for a large part of the
summer because I have to take two reading courses - ie I have to study on
my own and then come back to Kingston in fall for an examination. Problem:
how can one both work for a living and take two courses? Solution: go home
and mouch from one's parents and pick rocks once in a while to justify one's
meals. None of this is certain yet, but I will definitely be arriving at
some time for a long-to-longer while. I look forward to fields and trees:
the corner of Division and Princess where we live is so ugly!
The letter you sent on after pocketing the stamp was from Madame Degen
of 8 rue des hirondelles; she mentioned that Pierre's (the African boy in
the next room) friend Joseph, who used to visit me with Pierre on Sunday
nights, had graduated from normal school in Strasbourg, been given a directorship
of a collège in Africa, and had been assassinated shortly after arriving
there.
So you want to know about Greg, Mother, and how important he is to me?
He is a political science major, a bit Uncle Harvey's undergraduate field
with an emphasis on sociology rather than history. He's in his final year,
and wants to go to graduate school next year altho he isn't sure he'll get
in. He's built like a football player, between 6'1" and 6'2",
broad shouldered, strong, actually was a football player in high school
- blond, with hair beginning to thin at the top of his head altho he has
just turned twenty four. He wears glasses; when he takes them off I'm confronted
by eyes amazingly blue with a ring of mauve around the pupil. I haven't
made up my mind about whether he's good looking - from some angles, no;
but then again, a very nice mouth and some angles which are extraordinary.
Interests: athletics, politics, theories of any kind, books (a bookworm
from babyhood), music, especially jazz, which adds up to a personality very
different from mine in many ways. He is also easy-going, unaggressive, he
is not easily offended by other people's behaviour, seldom or never loses
his temper, seldom is irritated, is generous, tolerant, and patient, not
because he's self-effacing, but because he realizes that intolerance, impatience,
selfishness, are or would be personal pettiness that only aggravates the
other person's failings. If I do something unreasonable, or am fooling myself
about my motives, tho', he doesn't accept it - he'll point out the unreasonability
quite calmly and convince me to change my ways! He's also very warm without
silliness and without overdoing it.
His really unique quality, and the one that attracts me to him most,
is his straightforwardness, sincerity, lack of defensive strategy. He detests
superficiality in his relationships with other people; and if he decides
someone is worth knowing he doesn't waste time testing their reactions to
him to see whether it is safe. He is not extremely social; but makes
a very good friend. I'm not sure how he became what he is. I think there
is something in the way he was brought up - in a family where ideas are
the greatest interest, which has always been areligious and secure without
great parental authoritarianism; and in which both mother and father are
actively concerned with work that interests them among the comings and goings
of diplomats, politicians, and academics. A very modern family, rather fascinating
because it is so different.
January 18
Philosophy 251. 30 below zero; brilliant sun and a glitter from the lake
which proves that it hasn't frozen over yet. Last night when the light came
slantwise from a near-sunset at four thirty, in a cold free wind, we decided
to walk across the park to the lake - the grass at the edge of the water
was turned to stalks of glass by the clear ice frozen onto it from spray;
the water was green except for the spray flung from their crests to catch
the light; a bank of grey-blue cloud reaching in a solid band high on the
skyline looked like a mountain chain; and the sun outlined a few black trees
in brilliant orange, beside the yacht club where the whole sun-side wall
was turned yellow. An excellent photograph - someday I will have the equipment
and the knowledge to actually take the photographs filed in my mind. I find
the effect of light on form extremely interesting - photography would be
the logical way to extend this interest into an art form.
It is disconcerting to wonder how many desires for skills, for experiences,
will have to be sacrificed to immediate circumstances before I have to die
- even giving up Mexico for next summer seems to be a compromise - but there
is the other consideration of wanting to get my degree next year to be free
to go to graduate school (or to have another Wanderjahr!) the year after.
Have I told you that I'm considering doing graduate school at the University
of London's (England) Maudsley Hospital?
The dress from Grandmother Epp is a very nice one, dark blue, plain,
in a linen-like synthetic fabric - but it is at least a size twenty, much
too large. When I have time I'll remake it. Judy recognized it as one Grandpa
had given Grandma but which Gma had never worn for some reason.
How dull my letters are this year in comparison with last year's -
January 27
And I've only just realized it, with the familiar feeling of having missed
a birthday - two, this time - again. And there are your packages still not
wrapped. You won't mind yours being second hand, Mother? Bill gave it to
me for Christmas and although it's very nice, to tell the truth, I feel
about cardigans the way Father does about high necked pullovers.
Now, the little white shell that is more lace than sweater - that's
lovely. I may have a chance to wear it to a play on Saturday night. What
hours must have gone into it.
And as for Rudy's mug, I was pleasantly surprised by it, both because
I need a mug since forgetting my green one in a train and because it is
so pretty. Since studying demands hundreds of cups of coffee per night it
is in constant use. Unfortunately Petercat has taken a liking to it too
and now that he is strong enough to leap onto my desk I have to watch it
carefully. He has broken two of Olivia's lamps, shredded most of a box of
kleenex on the floor, devoured several flowers and a long piece of string,
lost countless pens and pencils by playing hockey with them on the floor,
left claw marks all the way up the white nylon curtains on the door. He
has a pathetic routine which nearly always works: if one of us gets up earlier,
gives him breakfast, and goes out to class, he wolfs down the food to the
last crumb. Then when the other comes down groggily to make herself breakfast,
Peter wraps himself around her legs, crying piteously, and makes little
dashes from legs to refrigerator to bowl crying more and more loudly, throwing
himself against the cupboard in a frenzy of starvation. "Oh, poor Peter,
that awful female forgot to feed you again" - and he gets another breakfast.
We also suspect that the neighbours feed him before we get up because they
dote on him and usually let him in when they get up to go to work at 6 or
7 a.m. He's become quite large.
[journal]
January 30
Don and Olivia have been fighting, Don broke up with her because his
"only passion is philosophy." There have been sobs, crises of
meaninglessness, furies, folies à deux, theatres of the absurd, consolations
from other friends, concern, anxiety - like a fool I was taken in again.
So was Greg. We leapt on the chance of involvement, and in what we should
have known long ago are sham crises. Reconciliation recurs, communication,
vital humor, humbug; all of what I want with the price of cheap agony.
Good news - Mother has decided to go back to school for the second semester,
and she is committed (ie she has announced intentions) of going on after
that so that she and Father can go away to Africa or Israel and work together.
("We have never really belonged here - do you think we will ever find
a place where we belong?") Perhaps they will; perhaps they will find
that the world is made up of antibodies, antipathies. Especially Father
who "has never wanted or been capable of honesty in his relationships."
He'll probably be an emotional DP wherever he is.
I wonder if I'll be like him. Sometimes with Greg there is a feeling
of belonging, but I lose it and peer at him curiously or suspiciously. "Sometimes
I forget who you are for a moment." He is beginning to be extremely
sensitive to my feelings of alienation. "Are you glad when you find
that it's me?" he asked. I didn't know what to answer: when I know
that it's him I am comfortable because he isn't the Other. When he is the
Other, I don't know whether I want him, whether he's good enough to become
part of me (my relationships are involvements - he is involved in
me, what he is and I accept must pass the most cruel of my standards for
myself; and like Carmichael, I want to be God.)
One morning at breakfast he was reading a book on Lenin, in a desperate
effort to prepare for a class, and I ate rather sullenly, did the dishes,
avoided his arm stretched out to catch me. "But there is something
wrong, unimportant or not." "I was lonesome." "I thought
so."
Thinking about this made me feel what a good relationship we have and
I telephoned him (one thirty a.m.) to tell him so, lying between the layers
of my sleeping bag with only the receiver, the top of my madonna [?] encircling
one of my knees, and a brilliantly colored Walch picture about childhood,
with flowers exploding out of a vase that looks like ice, flowers fading
into a meadow with a white red-roofed house and an orchard tree. Curved
around as foreground are mother in white blouse and blue skirt, small boy,
sister reading aloof, blond boy with boat, and either father or brother,
brown and red, with a pole and a hat; all standing in shadow but seeming
to radiate rather than reflect the colors of light. The boy with the boat
could be Rudy (who sent me a mug full of popcorn for Christmas) or it could
be me in the cold black spring mud of the East Place. I'd really rather
paint my symbols (Unterrecker) than make poetry of them. (Or make films
of them.)
Olivia led us in a three-ring circus one night last week. She sat in
a chair with her blue legs up and the tops of her stockings showing; Don
sat in his large chair with the light on his shoulder; Greg was hunched
forward in the armchair beside the door with his back to me and my feet
under him keeping warm; and I sat wrapped in his bathrobe trying to hold
its edges together. She forced them into acknowledging things they'd said
to her at one time: she forced Don into declaring his "feelings toward
Greg" and toward me (an island "You only see the sweep of the
light from the lighthouse ... you'd like to jump into the current and swim
across, but you never have ... once, in the library?"). She forced
Greg to acknowledge curiosity about Don. Greg was rather pathetic because
he was so concerned that he cannot express himself, and Olivia refuses to
believe what he says about himself. I usually don't either.
Last night, after midnight and safely past Valentine's, I came to see
Greg but while we sat eating peanuts, drinking hot lemonade-scotch, listening
to McGee and Sonny Rollins, silently, I became lonely, lonely, lonely and
went to bed silent and stiff. "What's the matter?" Anxious hand
on my shoulder, sometimes his face buried in my stiff shoulder. Silence,
no words, silent and helpless confusion. "I'm trying to force you into
an explosion." "Do you want a negative reaction?" "Any
kind, negative, positive, as long as it's strong. I want to know there's
something going on there" behind your forehead. Sometimes when
I'm lonely it isn't my body, it's my mind - I want to have a contact.
(I was thinking of Don sitting at his desk looking up radiantly when
I told him how good his valentine to Olivia was: Snoopy and Lucy fighting
with teeth and hair in points, then Snoopy, "I can't stand it any longer,"
gives her a smack. I love him - sometimes the sense of contact that I have
when I watch his face bewilders me; I'm careful of him, I cherish him, I
can't have him, and the light striking through his eyes slantwise makes
him seem insubstantial, almost flame, energy without matter. I've wanted
him for a long time; I must remember to be careful of Greg because if we
were married I would gradually hate his lack of Don's incandescence.) But
I can't say to you, "Talk to me," so I try to force you to.
He flung himself up in bed and shouted "Damn!" and then turned
on his side with his back to me. "When I'm working on an essay I know
I'm there, but my mind is really very mundane. I hate to be so helpless.
When something is bothering you I can't do anything." And then I could
go to sleep with my arm across his waist, my knees curved into the crook
of his knees. What am I doing with him when Don on the stairs below, contorts
my face with tenderness and regret?
[undated letter]
Before me are eight single-spaced pages of lab report with six charts
and a graph; behind me is a sleepless night and an excellent 6 a.m. breakfast;
enclosed is a down-payment on what I owe.
The first two items are connected, yes - after wrestling the lab report
painfully out of scarce and badly-gathered data, I could not sleep and so
I picked up James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to
read myself to sleep. At 5:30 a.m. the book was 3/4 finished and I still
was awake.
Hence, a very large slow breakfast at the Astor as I finished the book,
listened to morning come (faint radio music in the café, taxi drivers
ordering take-out coffees, the usual 6 a.m. habitués exchanging silly
pleasantries about hockey games, repartée between the large snake-haired
waitress and the old short-order cook; silent men coming in with newspapers;
the waitress beginning to hurry, the floor shaking with her running weight;
the restaurant reflected in the long back-wall mirror with a lightening
sky behind it; smoke solid-looking with the cold; a wonderful omelette on
buttery hot toast), and thought of people I like.
Now to reread and submit the lab report and mail your letter; afterwards
to sleep. Petercat sleeps on the red carpet in the hall before our door,
a lion watch-cat. (Last night during a blizzard the downstairs kitchen window
blew open, slamming the door shut with Peter inside. When I let him out
in the morning he mewed furiously at my heels all the way upstairs and as
far as the door when I left for class. When Olivia came back after her 10
a.m. class he mewed her into the kitchen after him and mewed desperate circles
around his water bowl - it was full of solid ice - poor Petercat. He's become
more and more beautiful.
The money order is from the extra money the fed gov't has given me on
second installment. I've figured all my expenses with large margins - I'm
certain not to need it and I'm sure you'll be able to stuff it into some
crack.
This coming week is 'study week,' actually a kind of mid-term 'Easter'
vacation to take some of the pressure off second term studying. Don and
Olivia are going to Don's parents' place in Ottawa; Greg is going home;
and both Neal and Jean Morrison have invited me to go with him - I'll probably
be in Ottawa a few days at least. Maybe in Montreal visiting Richard for
a few days too, if hitchhiking weather is good.
You'll be frozen solidly into mid-February.
[journal]
26 February
None of this is really true either because Greg is something wonderful;
miracle; being with him is both ends of the circle coming together. I like
his chin unshaven, the thin contour of his body, fuzzy hair, warmth, large
feet, regret for petty irritations; I love him, maybe I'll marry him, we're
a couple; we make love with joy, we go to movies, walk, make fudge, lie
in bed, asleep, with a sense of well-being-together. Thinking of him makes
me smile; he's good, he's real, he's a consciousness after all. Responsibility?
Mother says it's childish to have this if you're not willing to take the
responsibility - of what? Of caring for each other in old age and of bringing
up children? What for? We're responsible now - he is if I'm not. Perhaps
we'll stop being responsible when we stop being good together. Is responsibility
doing things you don't want to do? Caring for an old man because you should?
Without spontaneity or joy. Perhaps when I care for an old man I'll thank
him for good times. If I've had no good and spontaneous times, I won't thank
him and I'll leave him and I'll forget him and find some old man who'll
be real and good and close, and either he'll take care of me or I'll take
care of him. Let's not make too much of responsibility. To whom? What for?
Responsibility to show Greg my affection when he needs to know, to tell
him what I love in him, to do nothing that would risk the relationship unless
for a better reason; cherish him consciously, admit it when he's right,
help him become what he wants to become, never retreat into silent rejection,
remember, respond to, learn from; I love him, I forget and remember but
I talk to him and he knows me.
We spent Thursday to Sunday with his family in Ottawa; talked to his
mother about broadcasting over long cups of coffee, slept in the long white
room upstairs, walked around the block in today's brilliant sunshine, drove
twice around the parliament buildings last night (the tall tower floodlit)
(the library windows in bright triangles like a crown, Greg sitting behind
the low wheel large and capable, driving quickly - Olivia says he skis extremely
well), running across a street holding hands, coming in at night in the
black ski sweater and jacket with high color, steaming energy; a warm length
of skin along my back, a chest curved around me when I woke from a nightmare
yesterday morning (I was sitting on a top bunk in a wooden camp cabin in
Viet Nam. An enemy, a girl like us, came in and sat on the bunk opposite.
I calmly carried out our plan while we spoke pleasantly: I wrapped a napalm-soaked
piece of paper in wads of wrapping paper, lit it with a match, and threw
it across to her bunk, and ducked. There was no explosion; the girl had
the bundle in her hands and held it, staring across at me in confusion.
The flames died and ashes fell from her boiled, ruined, hands. I woke and
turned to Greg to tell him - he said "It sounds as tho' your subconscious
is punishing you for not getting along with Olivia?" We went back to
sleep.)
I hitchhiked home from Ottawa thru' a dazzling sun; an old man driving
slowly into Smith Falls told me that he had lost his wife and wanted to
find another, but was shy, didn't drink, hated crowds, and couldn't find
one. "Hope you get a ride," he said. "Hope you get a wife,"
I said. There was a large man listening to Lucille Starr, not talking, and
there was a friendly couple driving all the way into Kingston. The snowy
fields were covered with curved patches of pure ice where the crust had
melted, the trees were covered with snow and the shadows under them were
blue.
When I said goodbye to Mr and Mrs Morrison on the steps beside the living
room I was overcome by silence and they were as well. Mr Morrison only looked
at me strangely and said nothing, Mrs Morrison was smiling and friendly.
- I don't know why they were embarrassed - I was sad long into the afternoon
at the awkwardness of people's goodbyes. I like them, but we had little
to say this visit.
Letters when I got home - Jerry, Bill (written onto two pages of The
Idiot), Rudy and Mother - Mother furious after receiving the 'dirty
mind' letter. I cried, Olivia talked me out of my despair at ever finding
something with my parents again. She accused me of narrow-minded-missionaryizing,
true; of pushing truth too far, for selfish reasons, true; of being more
concerned with getting Mother's justification for my actions than with Mother's
good, true. Mother says immaturity and self-seeking, true.
part 3
- raw forming volume 6: september 1966 - july 1967
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
|