2 May 1968
[journal]
Mad Murray - talking about the men in Athens, "They really do undress
you and when you're naked they put their hand in their pocket." And
the lesbian who took the photograph of a tree upside down in marsh water,
who "gets so excited about your body that you can't stand it, like
a man." The Italian who drugged her so that she woke up being stroked
gently, all night, in a hotel, "even between the legs," saying
"piccola Maddelena, piccola Maddelena." Talking about home in
Winnipeg: "I go through the rooms and see myself in the mirror and
I feel really superfluous, I look more like a pudding than usual."
Then she goes home, leather jacket and brown pants, boots, her hair down
her back and the bookbag twisted around her neck so that she can ride the
bicycle.
I'm in bed. I've finished both psychology courses. My mind is free. Now
what will I do with it.
[undated letter]
The last few weeks of exams very quite bad. I didn't work very hard,
but in spite of it, I would wake up at 5 or 6 a.m. with my heart pounding,
thinking of what I still had to do. I wrote one exam on May 1, having already
written five of them, then another on the 2nd, then spent the 3rd and 4th
fleeing by reading a novel, feeling intensely anxious and guilty because
I knew I should be studying, then spent the 5th writing a philosophy essay
that had been due on the 4th, and rushed it to the professor's house by
10 p.m. in first draft, then studied for a philosophy comprehensive exam
that I wrote from 2 to 5 on Monday May 6, then rushed straight to the law
office for an interview.
Oh yes, on Saturday night I'd gone babysitting for the Coxes, one of
Greg's very young political science professors. On Sunday Mrs Cox had phoned
to say that a law professor who was visiting them might have a job for me
and would I speak to him. So ol' Hugh Lawford got onto the phone and arranged
to see me right after my exam. He's a good looking man, about forty, very
defensive but uncomfortably intelligent - he started off by asking whether
there was anything I wanted to know; I asked if I could start in two weeks.
He looked surprised. He asked if I could type and then sat me down to prove
it - the typewriter was an electric one and the keys were spaced differently
from my little portable. Moreover I had stage fright and my hand was shaking
violently. I goofed of course, couldn't even copy the first line correctly.
Then he announced that he hadn't really been testing my typing at all, really
only whether I watched carefully and noticed the details since accuracy
was essential to his sort of work etc. As it happened I had noticed
the detail but my typewriter ran away from me and I'd made a mistake that
made it look as if I hadn't.
He asked me about languages, since the job includes researching in other
languages - I said French, German, and enough Italian and Spanish to make
it out. So he got me some Portuguese to read, which I managed. Then he got
out a bundle of papers and said "I'm deluged with applications for
this job" and began counting them, "One, two, eight," commenting
about their qualifications as he went. "What makes you think I should
hire you rather than these?" I said, "It would save you interviewing
them all." He said "I have interviewed them all, my dear."
Then he asked if he could take me anywhere on his way home. As he dropped
me off at Greg's place on Clergy Street, I said "Should I leave you
a temporary address?" and he said "I don't think I have anything
to say to you - just show up on Monday morning in two weeks."
Wow!
At Greg's place - chaos - we are moving. Most of the big things Greg
had already taken over to 28 Maitland St Apt #6 but now we had to gather
up and sort the small things. We were still doing it at 9:30 when two old
ladies registering voters and two of our friends came over. We soon had
the friends helping and then as we were making tea, two more friends came
and so we didn't manage to get up at five next day as we'd wanted, to leave
on this trip - we didn't get away until 10:30 in fact, but you see how packed
together things have been. I'm lending you our log, enclosed, nearly up
to date.
I haven't heard from Judy for a long time although Paul wrote about the
store - we are going out to the post office now so I'll send you this.
[travel log]
Tuesday 7 May
Thousand Islands, northern New York State along the end of Lake Ontario.
Color - ghostly white-blossomed trees on the slopes, pale yellow green lit
like gas flame, brown-red-orange sticky new red maple leaves folded up like
bats' wings, lawns covered with dandelions, new lilac. A scattering of grave
stones on a hill covered with thin tall trees, lying in the filtered green
light. A weathered blue and green house with a rough door, flashing past.
Farms with hilly pastures, Sackets Harbour, Pulaski, Weedsport [?], Auburn,
with gracious Eastern houses, huge, encircled by verandahs, cornered or
decorated with towers, laced over with wood carving. Wide streets, old trees
and large front lawns, all lying in nearly complete silence, few people
around.
These northern New York State towns are archetypal - 1890's. Old brick
buildings on Main Street, still held by the families that built them then.
Southern New York, a strange architectural variation - high rooms with symmetrically
posed rectangular windows, small and covered with iron grating. Northern
Pennsylvania, Athens, Towanda, Muncy, barns painted red with ornate Gothic
slatted windows painted white and distributed over the façade symmetrically.
Apples and Bavarian rye bread. Remembered the camera left in the garbage
can!
Camping near Louisburg and Mifflinburg in a deserted campsite, cold,
remembered last year's first cold night at Cowen's Gap near McConnellsburg.
Hills. Stopped for gas at a Shell station beside a river, low branches,
the broad river sparkling like sequins as if it were without motion, light
reverberating between green branches and green lawn. Skipped from happiness,
looking in the dusty gas station window.
Winters State Park by 7:30, near Mifflinburg, very cold. We put up the
tent and ate lettuce and tuna sandwiches on the leftover Bavarian rye, crawled
into the tent and slept in a sweater, a shirt, Michel's ski jacket, tights,
socks, jeans, under two sleeping bags. Noisy birds - no ranger, although
we were apprehensive about not paying the two dollars. Jets going to Washington
sounded like a ranger's truck - Greg would sit bolt upright if he heard
one.
Weds
Mifflinburg is not far from Gettysburg - the familiar orchard hills,
faded apple blossoms turning brown among the new leaves. The square of the
town with its pseudo-Civil War business buildings. The Howard Johnston across
from one of the battlefield areas left us a whole pot of coffee - sunshine
this time. Then the road toward Washington, past the peach orchard that
stood during the war (not the same trees) and was riddled with bullets.
One small corner of Maryland with fierce traffic signs. Greg had a yearning
for peanut butter and banana sandwiches so we stopped at an A & P and
then sat on a roadside eating - very thick chunky peanut butter and thick
slices of banana, with trucks zooming by and whistling.
Over the Ptomac at Point of Rocks, and into Virginia. After 95 miles
a stop for breakfast at a roadside table, down a series of small roads (skillful
navigation from me), huge rich farms, dairy and beef, hills, prosperous
barns and houses close to the road, flowering bushes, battlefield sites
- Manassas. Where pastures lie now, the soil is becoming red.
Near Orange, in the afternoon, the area where Madison lived, called Montpelier.
We couldn't find the plantation house, but followed a red dirt road to a
cemetery, small and square, enclosed by a fence and a drive, all enclosed
by hedges, where Madison and Dolly are buried and neighbours and relatives,
among the flowering bushes. Two thoroughbred horses came to the fence to
eat parts of the hedge, a big chestnut and a beautiful black with a huge
head. The cemetery and the horses were a beautiful pocket of quiet. Because
of the horses, the old gentry seemed to be alive and perhaps living in the
clump of huge trees on a hill where a flash of white might have been the
mansion.
The small back roads from Madison's Montpelier to Jefferson's Monticello
were narrow, winding, hilly - through the most luxurious farming land, surely,
in all of North America: red soil, in loose, almost oily furrows, colors
from deep russet to rust, to almost pure orange, with streaks of almost
yellow - the sensuosity of those reds and the fierce green grass and the
ancient looking trees of all varieties, in all shades of green, the flashes
of white pillared mansions, even of an Elizabethan brick palace, on the
hills hidden in huge oaks, with winding white rail fences marking the lanes,
Aberdeen Angus cattle lying under the trees like panthers!
Then Monticello, Jefferson's house on the top of a hill from which you
can see twenty miles in all directions at least, maybe to Washington when
the day is clear. He planned the house, built it with nails and bricks made
on his property, lived there with his wife and servants and two daughters
for fifty or sixty years - his wife died after ten years, of course. From
the letters displayed in the house it was obvious that he was a brilliant
man, inventive, imaginative, but cold and sickeningly principled - one of
the letters to his daughter Peggy when she was ten or eleven was little
more than a lecture on decorum and propriety; I disliked him for that letter!
The house was classical, symmetrical, with beautiful windows at both
ends that could be opened ingeniously into doors onto the garden. His apartment
had a library, sitting room, study, sun porch, skylight, bedroom, upstairs
closet, inset bed, revolving chair and revolving table. His wife's room
and his daughter's rooms were single tight small rooms with set-in beds
and fireplaces - not difficult to tell who was important in that family.
The house shows an obsession with ingenious efficiency, but although it
is beautiful in parts, it has very little charm.
The huge front hall with its perfect symmetry had on the ceiling what
our ugly guide called an "iggle an' stahs" and a silly frieze
of Etruscan-looking dragons, along with Classical Greek egg-and-dart. The
slaves worked in kitchen, laundry and stable units half-buried in the ground.
There was even a smoke house - now white-washed perfectly and hung with
rather foul-smelling hams. The priv' was connected by underground passage
to an outside opening in the garden, a pulley hauled a basin from the toilet
to a handy slave through this passageway. The slave then cleaned up.
The garden had a fishpond - not for fun, but to keep fish fresh. The
best things about Monticello now are the huge old trees, tulip poplars with
yellow green tulip flowers and a copper beech. And the view out over that
lush red farmland shaped into hill-slope plantations. I love the thought
of Monticello - a place planned by one person, where everything, carriages,
furniture, dinnerware pattern, curtains, is planned by the same man - and
where little tricks like automatically opening dining room doors betray
the man's ingenuity, but I don't like Jefferson himself much - his poor
daughter.
After Monticello, another small road past Ash Lawn where Munro lived
(another president). By now it was late afternoon. The farms became poorer,
the soil grey-red, houses often more like the shanties of the south. At
nightfall we were near Holiday Lake State Park near Appomattox - a camping
spot on a hill with long-leaf pines and a big noise of bullfrogs below in
the lake. I saw a water snake wriggling across the water with only its black
head above the surface. I had thought it was the wet black nose of a little
furry animal. The warden and his wife came up and talked for a long time
about their subscriptions to magazines in a caricature of a Southern accent,
"Law, ain't it jess' ."
I was fast asleep and seemed to be dreaming about a siren. I woke gradually
to discover with terror that the siren-sound was real and was coming from
my side of our tiny pup-tent - how-ooo, how-ooooooo, how-oooooo - very loud.
"Greg, wake up, what's that noise." Greg, still asleep, "Oh
I thought that was you." "Greg, I think it's a wolf," snuffling
sounds outside near the ground, lapping sounds, "he's lapping at our
dishwater." I got the flashlight, finally unzipping the door. We heard
no more snuffling noises but we didn't hear it leaving either and I lay
anxiously awake for a while expecting it to come through the canvas at my
throat, hearing other howls in the distance. G says it was a dog.
Thursday
We were out by 6:30, half an hour later than yesterday. Just before Appomattox
was another small square cemetery with thirteen small stone markers: twelve
Confederate men and a Union man. Near here Lee surrendered to Grant, to
end the Civil War - a metal plaque told how "7000 soldiers who had
fought gallantly for the cause they believed to be right, were surrendered,"
etc. We picked a spray of lilac and soon found ourselves following school
buses on back roads. At Brookneal we followed one load of white junior high
school kids for a long time. They waved and smiled. In these early morning
towns we saw mostly negroes, sitting on the wall in front of the courthouse,
waiting on corners. Near South Boston we stopped for gas and coffee at a
small country place. I said I wanted tea, please - he, the wide-mouthed
mean looking Southern café manager, said incredulously, "Hawt
tea?" As we were sipping and reading the local newspaper we saw two
negro boys in another section of the café that had its own side door
and was joined [to our side] only through a door into the kitchen - a jukebox
from this section played loud soul music - it must have been a segregated
café.
Row crops, sprouts hardly visible, must be tobacco.
Into North Carolina, on a bigger highway, motels and golf courses, a
resort centre, Southern Pines, many long-needle pines on sandy soil, little
farming. At Chapel Hill we'd bought apples at an IGA and had ridden past
the university. Now we ate the apples and drove fast to get to Hunting Island
by nightfall.
Got into Southern Carolina near Hamlet on the road to Cheraw. Toward
central South Carolina, swamp country, black water, bogs and all. At Lake
Marion nothing but huge billboards advertising motels and souvenir shops,
pecan brittle at Lynch's, fireworks and alligator goods at Lloyd's, Pecan
Pie Imported Free, Stuckey's candies and preserved kumquats. Live oaks with
Spanish moss draggling like dirty beards from their branches. Santee, St
George, Yemassee (Indians rose here and massacred Beaufort residents including
Colonel Bull's wife), Gardens Corner and finally Beaufort with its white
verandah mansions and fishing boats, and the bridge crossing the Sound toward
Hunting Island, past very poor shacks (sharecroppers?) with many children
spilling out of the one room onto crooked verandahs, the shacks usually
set barefaced in the midst of a grey dusty field, but often with a decent
car in the yard.
At last, Hunting Island, across a causeway running above reeds
and feeding white herons. The road going back among palmetto and pine to
the white sand beach and a good camping spot with water and two tables -
sand, blackberries on the ground, green chameleons, 'coons knocking over
the garbage the first night here (now we tie the can upright against a tree
and old Coon gets in but can't knock it over), white crabs, a Marine helicopter,
and a sturdy brown warden whose refrain when he collects money is "Good
to see yew."
Friday
Woke up at 6 a.m. by habit and went down to look at the ocean sun coming
dimly through the clouds, a grey mist and big rollers bringing in high tide.
We went in and rocked with the big waves, washed around by foam and grey
sunlight, knocked over by the heavy top of the waves as they heave over
and smash into foam, disoriented, made dizzy by the conflicting directions
of wave and undertow and the dizzy patterns of foam, and the sometimes dazzle
of light coming flat onto the water from the sun nearly at the horizon.
Went to a country store across the causeway to get some white gas for
the stove. There was a sunburned tattooed Marine with a fat chest, rows
of candy in glass jars, brown bananas, postcards. We mailed Rudy's postcard
from there. Then we got back and had breakfast and got out our big suitcase
full of books. Greg is reading Omensetter's Luck by Gass, and I,
Styron's Set This House on Fire, both very American books by American
authors. Sat out reading them until noon, then went back out for a swimming
lesson.
Sunbathing on the sand between the pickup-stick piles of palmetto
and pine trunks uprooted by high tides and flung over on their sides. Five
years ago a hurricane tore out a sandbar at the end of the island; with
the sandbar gone, the current brings the waves into land with a fierce twist
that eats up 100 feet of coast a year and sucks it into the sea. Black root-stubble
makes swimming treacherous for 50' of beach at high tide and leaves hulks
of grotesque sculpture at night when the tide is out and we can see fishing
boat lights miles away. The Gulf Stream is only thirty miles out, the water
is warm. Soft, wet winds after nightfall, smelling salty as clams.
Weekend campers beginning to set up, fires all along the strip of trees,
huge shadows on the walls of tents with Coleman lanterns inside, putting
the people inside on exhibition. Many very small children. And at the next
campsite back, a strange accumulation of very ugly women, each with her
own car. The typical specimen has short muscular legs, bottom and thighs
fat as a drumstick, no bust and no waist, short prosaic hair, no makeup.
Because they were so ugly I thought at first they must be a religious group
(why else would so many ugly people band together?), then that they were
perhaps nurses on holiday. But the level of humor they shrieked back at
each other in their shrill Southern accents suggested a sub-nurse intelligence.
More and more arrived - they ate and ate and laughed and turned on a 6-hour
long tape of Perry Como and Chorus singing Old Favorites. They wore shockingly
unbeautiful things - flamingo pink pedal pushers sweat-tight, and so on.
Most of them had a queer hobbling running gait and gestures like aggressive
men.
We stared at them for a while and they stared back and ate. We went to
bed after reading inside the tent until late (ten) by the light of the Coleman
lantern, to the sound of track #14 of Perry Como and Chorus on one side,
the neighbour's daschund on the other, and a boy playing guitar near the
rear flap.
Eggs-in-the-hole for dinner, Greg-made and good.
Saturday - swimming again, in the same magical early morning foam and
mist. Bananas for breakfast, Greg finished his chili from the night before.
More novel-reading and then a trip into Beaufort to buy groceries. At the
Piggly Wiggly supermarket the parking lot was hot, packed, with hundreds
of negroes leaning against the sides of their cars saying hello to their
friends, watching each other going by all in their going-to-town clothes.
Inside, it was even more packed. We stood in line crushed with negro
ladies, mostly very fat, nearly all the older ones in sneakers. Most wore
cotton dresses and the really old ones wore hats with their sneakers. Young
girls dress colorfully, sometimes with fishnet stockings very dramatic against
their dark legs. One young girl wore a pink and white dress woven in silvered
thread; another wore an old brocade cocktail dress with a brown lace overskirt
sagging down past her knees. Some of the children are very pretty. The negroes'
fat tends to be distributed differently than the whites' - it flows into
huge rolling bottoms and breasts, where the white madame has padded shoulders
and thighs and a round stomach, but flat bottom and breasts.
Eventually we got out - a pale blue beautiful sunhat, $1.19, I bought
- we looked for a straw hat for Greg but didn't find one and I pretended
to be mad at his reticence - then we went back to the public library, a
cool place full of magazines, and read - then, on the advice of the old
veteran on crutches who took charge of the desk, went several streets over
to see the church of St Helena parish (1715) with its graveyard - peace,
trees, old brick walls around family plots, flat tombs, a few little brick
houses. The church very simple and beautiful with its doors open onto the
green garden and someone playing the organ - plaques on the wall paying
tribute to church members, one of them a young lieutenant in the Confederate
forces, killed in 1866, who had been a vestryman.
Heat and quiet in the town, huge white or brick houses along the reedy
oyster-smelling waterfront, some of them almost hidden by the trees planted
centuries ago and hung with moss in thick weedy curtains.
On the way back to Hunting Island a stop at the Itty Bitty Pet Farm to
buy a cold watermelon from a revolting ex-Marine, tattooed like the other
one, full of hearty good cheer and reeking bad jokes. His 'pet farm' had
a possum though, fast asleep with five or six babies in a fur ball. A 'coon
in the next cage prowled back and forth in front of the wire, clawing out
with his nervous small hands, pacing and clawing, looking frantic.
Back at camp, I cut the watermelon (large) in half and ate all of it,
the WHOLE watermelon, by myself (Greg doesn't like it), reading and spitting
seeds at the same time, very happy. I've always wanted an unshared watermelon.
Meanwhile Greg ate a whole bag of peanuts.
More of those girls next door, even uglier, more new cars, more shouts,
more Perry Como. Are they phys ed teachers, to be so hefty? No, they'd be
in better shape.
Those people down the row, in the Nomad trailer, are watching television.
Wind tonight, a full moon scraping through thin fast clouds, noise of waves,
all those fires, I've finished the book, it was good and I'm lonely.
Sunday
Swim again, early, to wash off the stickiness of a hot morning and a
sandy bed. Jell-O Instant Pudding for breakfast, different packages for
each of us, chocolate for Greg. We're both burned in patches and I've come
out in my usual salt-water spring rash but my face is tanned and has lost
its lumpish winter look. While Greg is away phoning his parents, one of
the neighbours comes over, the woman with the three pretty children, to
talk. Her husband is taking a Famous Writer's Course because he wants to
retire at thirty five, two years from now. The woman is a Yankee but she's
lived in South Carolina for six years and thinks the negroes are so lazy,
"We don't want people like that to have rights." She has
taken a Napoleon Hill self-improvement course but she's quite attractive,
slim and in good shape. So is her husband.
I see that one of the ugly females is there alone now, broiling steaks,
so I go over to ask her. Obvious - they are woman Marines, based at Parris
Island near here, a famous recruiting depot, where the men are disciplined
so they'll be able to land on any beach in the world, etc. Nearly everyone
has packed up and gone away, they have to be at work tomorrow.
- At night, a fire under two palmettos and a pine. Marshmallows and queer
grey American wieners, pine leaves moving very lightly in black silhoette
above, rows of thin tall pine stems and short palm trunks with the typical
burst of stiff leaves at the top, broken dry leaves hanging down, dry flower
stalks breaking the round form like an invasion from another plant. There
are a few other fires, but no Perry Como, no television. Greg talks about
baseball as we sit with our backs against a palm looking into the fire with
arms around each other. A very big moon lying behind the row of trees across
the road lining the beach, thin low clouds running past it but not managing
to cover it
May 19
[letter]
We came back today to find piles of mail stuffed under our door, sat
and spread it on the black table and read it - now it's long past our usual
sleeping time: 10:30. Lilacs in the living room, Schumann and Kinderscenen,
the garden still outside the bedroom window, dim flowering bushes and the
thought of the summer's bicycle at night. It's a good house and I'm excited.
Greg and I have been happy, maybe more than ever.
June
[journal]
I came home from Montreal on the train this morning; it was raining as
I came to the station but I felt happy because of both Madeleine and Peter
- and even the apartment and Jean-Claude and Maria and Francois with his
drunk angry Ida. Even now lying in Greg's bed wondering if I'm pregnant,
I feel the sleeplessness at the pit of my stomach as a fullness and a loss.
The row of heavy buildings standing wet under this morning's sky close to
the train and then passing further on the locus of a slow curve - webs of
concrete roadway white-on-blue. Myself back to the rear wall with a seat
to myself, walking with my shoulders back, feeling my cheek line in its
place, fencing glances. And then writing what I will recopy later, with
the excitement stirring in my stomach all the way to Kingston through the
crisp bland morning country wet and green like celery.
When I came into Montreal on Saturday it was the same - wet country,
and then the uneven line of black buildings, and the mountain. St André
with dirty children flinging garbage at each other beside a corner store.
975 at the top of a winding outside stairway, Mad come to the door in a
sarong, naked underneath it. Richard Partington looking as though he'd sucked
his cheeks in, moving beautifully (his friend Jean-Claude and he walking
away to telephone on Sunday, the same size, shaped nearly alike with their
hard shoulders and square buttocks, Richard in the kitchen this morning,
moving lightly on the balls of his feet, wearing a black sweater and white
pants). I was feeling kisses on my lower lip just now - that was later.
Mad and I drank wine. Bill McGee came in in black with a black lace tie,
needing only a long thin moustache and a forked beard - with him was a boy
whose name I didn't remember, who looked slant-lashed and young, like a
young Greek homosexual who never surely existed. Mad and Richard and I went
to a Greek dinner in what was almost a taverna, almost with sawdust on the
floor.
6th June
[journal]
Harcourt tonight showed Culloden to a group of friends - I went
in my Bill McGee pants, black sweater, black shawl, black scarf, toreador
shoes. Harcourt spoke to me in the hall, sitting on a bench, with his hair
shiny - I wanted to touch it and him. He said "We have our best conversations
in halls. A kind of charge builds up the times between these few conversations."
He didn't look at me as he spoke. I wanted to put my arms around him.
Upstairs Arnold was across the room, as I looked for him and started
across toward him, confusion of two people giving up their seats so I could
sit beside him. Both of our faces lit. I recalled my dream last night -
it was startling to see his face like it. He had come upstairs sweating
after trying unsuccessfully to make Judy - I was jealous, yelled at him
for not wanting me - then he was gone but he came back troubled, wanting
to make up - it was like Al's "I thought of you more as a person."
As the light went off for the first reel I said "I dreamed about you
last night." Then the roar of drums, bagpipes, battle. As they came
on again he said "Was it a good dream?"
He wrote some notes in the library upstairs, I went onto the balcony
and sang some jazz. We walked back here, planned lights, ate carrot sticks
and cheese, talked, finally put the table between us. Talked of being nervous
with each other, laughed, felt close eventually, smoked a cigarette between
the two of us and touched hands passing it, with only one light left in
the corner. His room in Winnipeg, rubber plant and piano, paintings. When
he left he said "I feel good." Catfish escaped when he opened
the door, "I'm sorry the magic is gone" as a joke. A moment when
I took back the cat that was close, him going downstairs, "That was
a mean thing to say, 'The magic is gone.'" Something is moving so that
I can get to people now.
[undated letter]
Again, and this seems to be true every time I've written you lately,
I've just come back from a Toronto weekend. Greg had arranged to go to a
concert in Stratford (Duke Ellington) on Sunday afternoon with a friend
and I went along as far as Toronto. (On the way we stopped near Peterborough
to buy wild blueberries at a road stand, "picked off the mountain,"
behind a shack by a nine year old and his brother.
Toronto - saw Paul, Joanne, Jay, Tony Tugwell and his Andrea, Victoria.
Paul is such good company. They had just received letters from you. The
red carbon is very difficult to read.
I haven't said anything about your scholarship! Greg phoned me at work
when he got the mail in the morning and I ended up announcing the news to
the roomful of research assistants. Peter Dyck was very pleased and said
he would send you a medal. He's very affectionate to Christine - they act
very newlywed and he's astonishingly sweet. As Paul says, it happens to
all our best madmen. You'll see him in Edmonton next year and you'll like
Christine although I don't, very much, mostly because she has tamed Peter
and thereby ruined our electricity I suppose.
How good for you that you can go to stay in Edmonton with Rudy!
One of my last year's philosophers, Sartre, says that when a person actively
realizes that he is a set of possibilities and not a role set or expected
by others - in other words, when he sees clearly that even in whatever situation
he is he chooses himself and must constantly reevaluate and decide what
he wants to be - then he lives creatively and often in great uncertainty
and anxiety. Inevitably, because he realizes how important, unique, and
fragile his own life is to him - and that no choice once made can ever be
irrevocable - he has to constantly rechoose it or else change. But he is
responsible for himself.
I have some reservations about Sartre and existentialism generally, but
the painfulness of freedom is easy to understand. But maybe your painfulness
is your unfreedom to get away from what you hate or at least are alienated
from. Maybe you need to think about whether or not you don't hate or resent
coming back to the old narrow life, maybe your resentment comes out in a
rash. It seems clear and logical to me but I know that my own hatred for
that life makes it seem maybe over obvious to me. But anyway, maybe there
is something to the freedom and anxiety hypothesis in your case, because
now that you've become the 'me' person it has always been your right to
be, you are vulnerable to the resentments and high-strungnesses of 'me'
people. Congratulations.
About the letter to Kelvin that you sent me a carbon of, no I haven't
been avoiding the subject - just waiting for a time with more time. Your
analysis of Father's identification with his mother and the conflict following
it, and causing him to deny himself. When you say he had urges toward self
destruction after the mill failed, do you mean that he thought about suicide?
When you say "During this time part of me died that took years to bring
back to life again" what do you mean exactly? (I know partly.)
I never realized that all our going-without, the sordidness of the way
we lived, was a sacrifice of what we had toward having more - I always sincerely
thought it was there-just-isn't-any. No wonder we don't really like to accept
things from Father now - it would be a little like accepting repayment of
a loan never agreed to in the beginning and accepting as payment what is
only a token and not the full price at all. Rather righteous indignation,
than token justice!
Donne - I love his language, his "batter my heart." You talk
of the "woman who, desiring to be loved and freed from an intolerable
relationship, yet feels she must be imprisoned in order to be kept to the
man."
I gather you prefer Blake to Browning? I've always liked Browning's way
of making truth personal rather than absolute - it is the struggle and conflict
that interest me - the "white radiance of eternity" has never
held any appeal to me at all. (For more examples of Browning's way of making
truth personal and partial you may have time someday to read Durrell's Alexandria
Quartet - a favorite of Judy and Paul as well as me. Paul was mentioning
his enjoyment of the last two books on Sunday.) (Maybe one of the courses
in English you take next year could be a modern novels course. I don't know
if you'd like it or if you're ready for it - you'd learn from it though
- and I'd be eager to hear your response to some of those I find so expressive
myself or parts of myself or my potential future self.)
Anyway, like Browning, it is the individual personality that prevents
me from seeing anything appealing in an absorption into the being of God.
Strangely, even when I was at my most religious as a child, the idea of
God never interested me, only an intense self consciousness of what was
expected of me in behaviour, thoughts, dedication, etc. (Caliban upon
Setbos with its brilliant characterization of the barely emerged brain
- if it can be said to have a character at all - and its perfect choice
of words is my favorite Browning poem.)
I know nothing about Blake and so haven't given him a chance to convince
me, but for me opacity, finitude, separation, physicality are not demonic
but themselves dynamic and creative. I tend to evaluate a poet's philosophic
value by his ability to sing finitude, separation, and the physical - his
"negative capability" which is Shelley's phrase meaning the ability
to live without despair or credal commitment but to create without them,
out of the material of ambiguities, mysteries, dusty answers and
inconsistencies themselves. (That was Stauffer on Yeats, partly.) And I
love Yeats for that reason. Or listen to Durrell in Bitter Lemons: "We
had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and
time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything."
- But your Browning and Blake is an excellent essay, well written
and well thought out - so you do have a logical mind!
Greg will give you his own comments on the sociology paper - it must
have been an absorbing process of thinking-out. Everybody should be able
to learn to do sociological analysis of their own cultural roots I think.
What interested you most in the paper? I can guess - it was the sections
about the church learning to become religious again after so many years
of being a reactionary cultural rather than emotional bond.
I've been a long time writing partly because I've been preoccupied with
personal problems - the usual - getting along with people. But the problem
has changed a little. This time it is not the old business of disliking
everyone, but rather of liking several people and not knowing what to do
about it. I don't know how much I've told you. There's Peter Harcourt, who
I love and to whom I am special. There is also physical attraction, rare
for me, to complicate our ability to be friends easily, as we'd like to
be, as well as the fact that he is an extremely complex person and makes
me more complex when I'm with him.
I also like and admire his wife, who is a beautiful and intelligent woman
who unfortunately grew up with a ridiculously low sense of her own value
and at the same time a fierce self possessive pride. She's thirty six, nearer
your age than mine, but she says she identifies with me. At the same time
I have trouble getting easily closer to her as well, I'm not sure why, I
think perhaps because she overvalues or overestimates me in some ways. Or
I don't know why.
Then there is Marilyn Cox, married to one of Greg's very young politics
professors. I babysit her two beautiful girls, four and five years old.
She's a graduate student in English, doing her Masters thesis on a woman
novelist I like very much, Doris Lessing. She's very pretty, bright, imaginative
- a gourmet cook, a charming conversationalist - but she has a reserve I
can't thaw. And then there is Arnold Desser, a graduate student in English
as well. Thin, black-bearded, nervous, ambitious - he's going to the London
School of Film Technique and has already done an educational film, in Manitoba.
He's from Winkler - one of the members of the Jewish community there existing
rather uneasily beside the Mennonite community. We understand, like, and
stimulate each other, but he is uncomfortable because of Greg (I suppose
because the liking and understanding and stimulation has a definite and
delightful male-female undertow) and so doesn't act easily and casually
as a friend either. It flatters me in a way, but I miss him when he's nervously
overcompensating by talking only to Greg.
And Greg - there are times when he's preoccupied with his work and I
miss him - or (because he can't be everything to me, not even him! when
I miss what he isn't and wish for a somebody with a something-I-don't-know-what).
This long long sheet is a contribution to you from my working life -
it is computer type-out paper that is ordinarily fed into the computer keyboard
automatically. More next week. Very busy.
9 July
Greg away in Ottawa - Peter Harcourt on the telephone, the smiling tension
of us both - my skin radiant with steam - he challenges me, his stubborn
painful nibbling at me. I want to touch him, begin by putting a hand along
the inside of his forearm tomorrow as we walk to the faculty club, sometime
lie beside him in the dark exchanging intimacies about our good lives, comfortable
for once, not so comfortable all the time but only on special nights. I've
begun to think about affairs, taking it for granted that I'm married well
enough now to be unfaithful in my way - I suppose a faithful way; Peter
Harcourt, first choice. What could I give him - I know tenderness, I could
make him feel himself body under the baggy things he wears. What could we
have - after a while I'd be comfortable with him, I could laugh at him.
Sometime surely I will be someone's mistress, I don't feel ready for Peter,
I'd need to be with him going across a country in a car, with my knee along
his flank like the first brilliant day with Rasheed going west. Our tension
is like the first days in the strawberry field with Frank - it would go
away if he assumed, like Frank, that we must be lovers. Frank at the beginning
- when he put his arms around me on the last day of the berry season and
I watched from behind my own left shoulder, impassive. I know how to cherish
a man since then. I could cherish Peter Harcourt without needing his patience
as I need Greg's, because of Greg. And I could tell Greg about it, Peter
could tell Joan. After all, I do feel grown up enough, I wonder if I should
do anything. He would have to avoid scandal, my university professor. Mad
makes me ambitious - but if it would make Joan unhappy? No it would have
to be a cherishing holiday that we could leave whistling when we went home.
There is next winter. I could grow out of my petulance at not being his
first last only most important. That soprano-trumpet Jauchtzet Gott in
Allen Länden, what I would be if I could. Greg came home from Victoria
full of things for me; I sobbed stiffly in my corner because of my imperfect
body; he said, "Now can't I just love you."
11 July
Woke up early from an uneasy sleep this morning, Peter Harcourt putting
his arms around me saying "It's me, Peter."
Fine thin body soft at the middle, a strange boy shape coming back from
the bathroom with the red hall light behind him. The incessant movement
of his hand pushing across my breasts or over my bottom, worrying me because
it seemed automatic. And this morning when I only wanted to sleep - in his
gentle way he made my body tense toward him in spite of my uncourageous
desire to turn my back and go to sleep.
It worked, I feel easier with him. I think he may feel less easy.
At the Faculty Club at lunch, on the steps, I asked him if I should have
asked him to see me when he telephoned - implicit agreement to be something
personal to him at last. He came to Cox's when I was babysitting, sat across
the room and drank three large scotches. Marilyn and David came back, I
had given ambivalent cues - told them all that Greg wasn't' coming back
from Ottawa until today or tomorrow but insisted on wanting to go to Patrick's
house to see "Bill McGee's friend." Peter Harcourt - silly man!
- said he would drive me. His car was at home of course. We would put the
bicycle in the back. In the meantime I should leave it on the grass. Had
I seen the newly furnished furniture? I must come in.
The piano room, he plays a little Bach and explains it, but I become
restless. He says he's tight, and he's on a monologue that cheats me. I'm
nearly squeezed off the bench. He won't play Sati, can't find him, can't
play him. Shouldn't play Mozart in this state. "Danny understand me
better than Joan does, Joan knows it and it annoys her." His friend
in London that I would like.
Went upstairs, were turning off lights in the hall. He said "I want
to put my arms around you" in his blurred flat foxy voice. We stood
leaning together at the door and he said "I want you to stay here with
me, do you know that?" I said I wanted him to come to my place and
it was both because of the Bach and the blue blanket and what I had written,
and because I would feel stronger there. He said he wanted to have me there
"because it's a place I know" but would come. "But we won't
try too hard," I said. "I'm glad you said that because (what?)
maybe we'll just hug each other."
He was funny about insisting on getting the bicycle himself, I held it
with one hand as we drove in his turquoise open car, it looked like a strange
spoked propeller, the one wheel standing crookedly upright above the back
seat. Feeling of a strange trip, unreality and silliness of our getting
into a car and putting a bicycle into the back in order to go to bed. But
at my place I became brisk, snapping on lights, winding the clock, pulling
curtains "but leaving a little so we can see what kind of day it is
tomorrow," finding the record, stringing out the long speaker cord
and finally throwing my clothes into the basket after having cut off his
beginnings of taking my clothes off. Sat on the end of the bed not looking
as he took his off.
Then we rolled together awkwardly, we were worried and strange. He lay
back and talked with the back of his hand on his forehead; I don't remember
myself, I think I was passive and quiet. He said he was confused, all his
women were mindless, that was what he liked about them; save respect for
Joan, his woman. "If I were twenty five I'd ask you to be my woman.
I wouldn't be any good for you if I were twenty five." He was gentle,
insincere, clever, like Mike, seductive, but sometimes himself as if blindly.
When I had listened impatiently to his monologue on the piano bench,
he said, finally, "We were talking, before, but I can't, now."
He seemed surprised at my - willingness? Energy, to begin with? He is definite
about important feelings as though they were unimportant - "I loved
you that night, tonight too." "She said she hated me for three
years." "I guess I've been in love with you since the beginning"
- like our afternoon row around the lake: when he was rowing without talking,
I asked what he was thinking, he said "How lovely you are," but
mechanically, so that I was chilled, but the lake water ran in its many
colors close in by the shore where the trees reflect - the islands with
their pine trees, black fish over the slab of rock slanting out from the
island, where the water was warm and yellowish; his skin is freckled and
brown, I remembered the car ride toward Lost Bay Lake, farms, clover, colts,
children piling hay in the heat, things I had wanted to exclaim to him,
improvising a blues lyric in the back seat to myself - and felt happy in
spite of his chilling "How lovely you are."
What it was like that night, morning, afternoon - I hardly remember.
When he put his arms around me it never occurred to me that I might not
want to stay with him. It certainly was not lust - that is for myself as
posterity - but relief - we'll lie in bed together without clothes and at
last the tension will be gone, we'll be bedded down, immobile and committed
to our immobilization for at least tonight, good, we'll see.
So he came, silent ride, will it rain? The narrow stairway - how do my
legs look from the back? What does he see? That hitching movement when I
move onto my right foot? The light, the record, what did we say, "This
is my room, there's my life on the wall." "I always have my own
room too."
While whipping my clothes off I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror
- waist curving in sharply when I was bare to the waist. How did that come
about. "What are you doing?" "Stringing out the speaker so
we can listen in bed."
Small embrace by the window and he begins to unbutton my blouse - I never
thought he'd like to, only that slow undressing is awkward, get the shyness
over, I'm not being seduced, I'm leaping. There he is, hanging, but he does
have a hard-on. Talks incoherently in bed, his language is repetitive and
strange, "those shits." Gradually he's back.
Sunday
All of these days are mixing here and in my mind, repetitions, the drive
through Gananoque, through Lansdowne, almost to the marina and then down
the crooked hardtop road, then the gravel road and finally the trail down
to the lake, the same smells of clover and of evergreen, the same rising
euphoria half made of the uncertainty of seeing Peter again and not knowing
what to expect or offer - with happiness because of the last time I saw
him. They weren't there.
But this evening he came - I'm sleepy - sat on a black chair by the table,
I moved from chair to stool to floor to kitchen to get milk, he stayed where
he was and only when Greg went to the library, moved to the chair above
my footstool and put his hand over mine and said "I don't know what
to do with you - whether I should hug you or whether it would infringe."
I sat on his lap, looked at his beautiful face, solemnity, blue pointed
eyes, rust-freckle-tan face, untouched, awake, new. He said "I
know I overvalue you, because of the idealization, women but at the same
time I think I really see you." "She says she doesn't feel safe
with me." "It was the same at breakfast. I felt you would be ready
to define it negatively then unless I defined it very positively."
So Tuesday - it has occurred to me for the first time that I might make
the journal work, or rather that I might make it a work for myself - disciplined
work that I do against myself but for something.
A failure of nerve about Peter. Joan did it, I don't know if purposely.
We went to the lake to see if she was unhappy, and she said "Peter's
affairs are an occupational hazard of being married to him." "He
says he doesn't remember anything about your night together." "He
has always been looking for the woman who would be stimulating, and at the
same time feel about sex like a man. I don't think he has ever found her."
She was wearing a teeshirt and light blue jeans, hair in two tails, tanned
arms, tanned face, bare feet. Pretty. Open? I said "And you too, because
I like you and I don't know what to do about it." She said, "That's
fine, because I like you and I don't know what to do about it." I'm
desolate and have disappointed Greg again, by sleeping in my own room among
the moths and spiders and cats.
Thursday
See three pages written at work. Must write that at the cottage Joan
took us silent (me nervous) through the house to the chairs, spread towels
on them because there had been a storm (we had it on the 401), poured us
wine, and Greg finally said "Well we thought we should come out and
see you," and I leapt, "I had assumed you didn't mind but Lawford
took me aside yesterday and said you did, so I didn't want to talk to him
anymore and so we came to see what you really think." And she said
very slowly with her glass in her hand "Well Lawford was wrong and
you were right," then that terrible line about occupational hazards.
We talked about ourselves and about her marriage and the times she doesn't
tell Peter about (if I used this to think about her I might be able to make
her feel more herself, what Peter says - what Harcourt says - she
does for us all). She is funny!
As he says, "sense of ceremony can lend to what might otherwise
be a commonplace scene the feeling of intense personal involvement,"
"importance of ritual in combating," that is his linear thinking.
Dear Peter Harcourt, those pointed eyes are completely corner to corner,
he has no iris distinctly, only pointed blue steady burning out of that
copper brown face.
Sunday morning
Dream: a white shape growing larger coming to the surface of the water
along a beach, swimming up like a fish - became a boat drawn up on the beach,
beautifully constructed with a metal plate under the prow, pointed outward.
Across the water a long thin line of ground, island or shore, trees, groups
of people in twos or threes staring across toward us, facing forward in
a line, men hanging by their necks from low branches of the trees, profile
toward us. We were to cross toward them, we didn't want to, we were there
among the people who had now turned toward us, someone told us we were to
stand hip to hip and dance, we ground quietly along as he told us to, and
I noticed that the faces were similar, white, plain, quiet, individual but
all undistinguished, a blond with thin eyebrows. All had shadows around
the eyes, lips strongly outlined, I realized they were dead.
Later a long Viking ship seemed drawn up along the flank of our dancing
group. The sound of arrows - I realized that the dead were flying into position
on the ship as long shining wire rigging, individually. I knew that I would
also become one of the wires, felt myself fly through the air and saw the
rigging around me bright as tinsel in a pattern of very strong thin wires
- not as an actual rigging but as a web that covered the ship from stern
to prow in a complex pattern of peaks - but I think only lengthwise - the
pattern was not so much that of peaks but of strings in a many-stringed
musical instrument with a high bridge.
Wednesday, last day of July
A high wind, the water is roaring under the soft steady scratching of
leaves outside the window of my room. Coffee yogourt half frozen, Greg in
the next room reading before he sleeps. In the living room, black table
and chairs, a jar of dill on the table showing brighter green at the bottom
through the glass and water, a small glass of furry purple flowers, the
row of green bottles along the window ledge some with flowers and some empty.
Mad's butterfly.
Mad was here since Saturday night, with Pierre Léger, his ugly
face with the long nose, his mouth in profile, the row of stitches under
his eye looking like ashes or cancer, his thin hair flat and stiff over
his ears - stains like milk stains on his bellbottoms, smart rust brown
jacket elegantly cut long, yellow large collared shirt and Madeleine's printed
blue and purple scarf as cravat. The smile, the smell of decay, his thin
long legs, round shoulders, flat square bottom. Mad wrote "And in the
morning he knew how to move me although I had to keep my eyes closed because
of that face." Going away, this afternoon, Pierre kissed me ritualistically
front, side, opposite side - while Mad came around and kissed my neck, twice,
smiling like the da Vinci St John the Baptist when I turned. Pierrot's poem
attached.
I've put on the wall one of the Gauguin prints Mad gave me this afternoon
(with Laura Nyro singing) with "I like you so much and I've hardly
seen you at all. I'm not going to come like this again." - A dark brown
girl sitting naked in a blue chair, legs crossed, arms along the sides of
the chair, face forward. She's shaped like Mad, there's a monkey at her
feet which is a Mad-object and not one of mine. Most of the weekend she
wore her dirty purple shirt and my striped skirt, bare feet, wild hair.
My head is full of pictures -
Arnold cut me at the film - Ivan the Terrible Part II.
My journals from age twelve are full of men - Father, the dream boys
in black leather jackets, Frank, Jerry, Peter Dyck, Greg, Don - and those
other things which I barely understand now - Peter Martillo and the yeast
infection I've got from him! I don't know what I was doing - those others
a little like it, irrational, literary stupid things that turned out badly
- Alain, Jean-Jacques Gaté, Charles, Ferdinand. Bill. People like
Rasheed and Alain and Jean-Jacques I do understand, it wasn't all literary,
no. Respect and compassion because somethings in them got to me, they were
real to me. Now - Peter Martillo, stupidity, but why was I casting around
away from Greg? Suddenly Peter Harcourt. Suddenly Arnold Desser. All of
those new leaves larded into my book - new man leaves! I want (yes!) to
tell Arnold "You are him. Because of your surprises and your Jewish
take-offs and your seriousness and your idiot laugh and your ugly eyes you're
him."
William Street, September 3, Tuesday
Eventually he stayed as long as he could, but by now he is back in Toronto
at his sister's house. His plane leaves early Saturday morning. How am I
going to remember how he felt this morning and at noon when I moved my hands
over him to remember.
Monday
A week I don't remember exactly. My room is different. We had the narrow
bed in the alcove, where the sun and flies found us by seven in the morning,
and where I could see him as soon as I opened the door at noon. I would
wake with his bare back next to me and his face grimacing because of the
flies that landed on his ear, his arm. Stiff hair like paintbrush bristles,
separated into stiff tufts when he woke, stiff beard too, but thin and curled
so that it lay away from his face in stiff curves and swirls with skin showing
under it. Mouth with a ridge along its lower lip, making a slanted ledge.
Oil on his ugly blunt nose, ringed eyes opening, usually crossly, as I waited
to see what the mood would have become during the night, with our perilous
achieved peace of the night before lost into nothing, to remake. That Monday
night my resentment at his not seeming to care that it was our last, I sat
looking at the fountain until it was too cold, was in the bathtub and wouldn't
play when he came in with what he later called his one-man happy show. Revolting.
Fraudulent. I brushed my hair fiercely, he mocked, joked, but finally was
silent too. He said come lie down beside me and I did but he seemed not
really to want me there. Finally - "Why do you have to choose tonight
to feel separate?" With the familiar desolate cramped stomach.
We managed to grope back together again and we made love - he was especially
pleased, more than ever, and I held onto him, happy that he had been so
happy - we had made something. But then we worked at me - and I was humiliated
at having to be worked at so long, felt as though I had destroyed the mood,
destroyed the achievement. He was impatient and we went to sleep. I woke
from a bitter dream of saying angry goodbye to a boy I didn't know, didn't
recognize.
Had to go to work, was angry, still tasting the bitterness of the dream
in my mouth, didn't kiss A as I left although I wasn't sure he would be
there when I came back. But through the morning I became increasingly happy
and certain, until, at eleven, I rushed back to William Street to find him
still sleeping, the sun moved further along the wall. I held him, his back
was turned, and when he woke for a minute, I left - bought coffee, milk,
grapes, pears in the market, buns and cinnamon rolls - and came back overflowing
with something, happiness at his being there, so that I could bring him
food, happiness because of the day with its sun and the leaves turning red
on the maple across from my kitchen window. Made the café-au-lait,
put pears and grapes into the glass bowl and sat with my foot on his, eating
with him. He was silent but I loved him exuberantly. Do you realize that
I'm sitting here smiling to myself because it's noon and this is completely
platonic and I really love you. He was a little desolate. I wanted to hold
him fiercely (joyfully) but I said I feel so much like roughing you up.
Don't rough me up. Should I gentle you? Gentle me. So I held him and didn't
mind his sad quiet separateness at that moment, but held him and gentled
him, hands all along his body, the hook at his hip, the curve along his
side, his neck and forearm, his thin hard shanks, his squared-off bottom.
The solid white-flesh wings covering his breastbone queerly (his Nureyev
pose!).
Then when he went into the bathroom to dress I suddenly felt the beginning
of the familiar desolation myself and I was out the door, the fifteen minutes
are up, goodbye, and down the stairs, door shut. But he ran after me and
jumped off the step, got to my bicycle before me; we had smiled during the
chase. But he was serious - shoulder against mine. "Thanks." Taxi
driver stopped before crossing the street. Have a good day. Have a good
life. He walked back and past the door down the street, didn't look back
as I got onto the bicycle and rode away.
But I looked back. He was moved, the line of his shoulders.
I wondered, when I came home, whether he would have left the note - the
words to "In My Life" typed carefully and put into an envelope
with my name on it - he had - he was gone - and there was the guitar dressed
and stuffed to look like me, with shawl, flower, Mexican dress, bulging
round breasts, little fork legs. He ran down the steps calling "But
I still have something to tell you."
Tuesday September 10
Greg comes, hangs around, is lonely for me but I am indifferent; he sat
on the edge of the tub as I sanded and scrubbed, insisted (but quietly)
that I take him seriously.
There is such a strong detailed insistent pattern around him, all the
time we had; his face and its expression now comes to me immediately and
sharply because I know it so well. I really love Greg - I should be able
to keep him as well. I'll lose him to his next woman or to a year without
seeing him.
I'm afraid that my month with Arnold wasn't long enough, that he has
been able to go away without taking an image of me that reminds him of the
lack of me. I don't know whether I want him to remember me or not - remember,
yes, impatiently, I admit that he will for a while - but to long for
me? I only long for him from time to time, and then safely, without deciding
whether I would have stayed with him or whether he would have wanted to
stay with me, or whether I would have wanted to work at having him want
to stay with me. It has occurred to me that I would have, to both . It has
never occurred to me before. I was hurt when he said, that Sunday afternoon
in my room at Maitland, You're good, you're not marrying good, but you're
good. Now - this came to me in the middle of my explaining it to Greg -
I've discovered a small suggestion of alternative in myself and I must learn
about it, I was something different with Arnold, but it changed.
My room sets up echoes of him - I write a little nearly every night.
Echoes of what we said, what we might have said, wanted to say, should have
said. Desser.
Saturday
Greg has a new girl and I'm hurt. She has a moist nineteenth century
young sort of sexiness, long red hair, warm skin, pointed blue eyes. I found
him at her place this morning, drinking tea: thin body with a big bottom,
little breasts, no underclothes. He kept darting looks at her and seems
happy. I feel betrayed - my face has been looking so battered these last
days, twenty three seems old and I an ugly twenty three - he really should
have loved me more to make up for my loving him too little, what does he
know about it all, he's well adjusted and modern and has never had a feeling
for more than fifteen minutes. I'm hurt because it comes so easily to him
- he sees, lusts for, reaches for, misses or succeeds, is delighted by female
bodies and so uncomplicatedly can enjoy them. It's so easy for him and so
difficult and rare for me.
I stopped to see him one evening when I was living with Arnold and noticed
a pocketbook he was reading lying on his bed, sat down and began to read
it. Pornography - spankings, voyeurism, master-servant, three-at-a-time,
all in powdered wigs in some French chateau. Effective - I was bottom-warmed
and giggling when Greg came in, and I said something like "Look what
I found!" "For Christ's sake!" he shouted with so much humiliation
and pain in his voice that I realized what I had done in abandoning him
sexually; I realized it with complete surprise - I was shocked at my own
tactlessness, naivete. I was touched by Greg, as I'm always touched, stricken
a little, when he really feels pain, he does it so simply, without any self
dramatization.
The morning in summer when I heard on the radio that Robert Kennedy had
been shot and was in critical condition - I was in the big chair at 28 Maitland
Street, morning light coming off the lake through the window. Greg came
in; I said "Listen." He sat on the arm of the chair and listened
in silence. Then his big heavy body went rigid and he began to cry. I put
my arms around him and he lay against me heavily, leaning into me without
any reserve. I held him and felt his tears on my neck, feeling great tenderness
for him, but no grief of my own.
When I went to work I could not stay in the room with the radio repeating
its accounts of the shooting like a bewildered crowd. The people in the
office came to ask why I'd gone away alone, defensively as though I had
rejected them - refused to include them in something important in my life.
I was surprised that they understood so well.
Then one night Greg said "We aren't young anymore" - because
of Kennedy, the South, Viet Nam: he said it so honestly, so sadly, that
I respected him and honoured him - felt a little as though he were the priest
dispatching a terrible, necessary, ritual; self-elected, brave enough to
choose and pronounce the ceremony of recognition: "We aren't young
any more."
Agee in a letter to Father Flye, 28 June 1938: "This may simply
mean that he who moves beyond the safety of the rules finds himself inevitably
in the 'tragedy' of the 'human situation,' which rules have been built to
avoid or anaesthetize, and which must be undertaken without anaesthetic;
but I am suspicious of laying pity and grief and sadness to such a general,
fatal source rather than to a source for which I am personally responsible."
And "sexual love as sacrament and one of the close centres of existence."
And "Gaiety is the sign of the intelligent man."
I get lonely for A when I see his women - when I sat beside Bronwen [Wallace]
at The General Line tonight and saw her cat-yellow hair and her narrow
shoulders I wanted to put my arms around her.
I thought especially of the night he came back - we were on the roof
and felt separate, I walked down the fire escape onto the lower roof - that
was the beginning of the misery half of our loving. He went inside, into
my place; and eventually I went back up the iron stairs, into the hall,
down the steps and out of the building and began to run toward Maitland
Street. When I had reached the next block Arnold called me from the corner
and as I stopped to look back at him, came toward me. He took my wrist and
led me back, all the way to my room, neither of us saying anything. But
I felt as though I had been reached; we had done something.
raw forming volume 8
- raw forming volume 7: august 1967 - september 1968
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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