You thought you had left no traces. All the stories and poems you wrote in your boyhood and adolescence have vanished, no more than a few photographs exist of you from your early childhood to your mid-thirties, nearly everything you did and said and thought when you were young has been forgotten, and even if there are many things that you remember, there are more, a thousand times more, that you do not. The letter written to you by Otto Graham when you were turning eight has disappeared. The postcard sent to you by Stan Musial has disappeared. The baseball trophy given to you when you were ten has disappeared. No drawings, no examples of your early handwriting, no class pictures from grade school, no report cards, no summer-camp pictures, no home movies, no team pictures, no letters from friends, parents, or relatives. For a person born in the mid-twentieth century, the era of the inexpensive camera, the postwar boom days when every middle-class American family was gripped by shutterbug fever, your life is the least documented of anyone you have ever known. How could so much have been lost? From the age of five to seventeen, you lived in just two houses with your family, and most of this childhood material was still intact, but after your parents divorced, there were no more fixed addresses. From the age of eighteen until you were in your early thirties, you moved often and traveled light, parking yourself in twelve different places for six months or longer, not to mention innumerable other places for shorter periods of two weeks to four months, and because you were unsettled and often cramped in those places, you left all relics from your past with your mother, your chronically restless mother, who lived with her second husband in half a dozen New Jersey apartments and houses from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, and then, after relocating to southern California, moved every eighteen months in a perpetual buy-sell frenzy for the next decade and a half, purchasing condominiums in order to fix them up and sell at a robust profit (her interior decorating skills were impressive), and with all those comings and goings, all those cartons packed and unpacked over the years, things were inevitably ignored or forgotten, and bit by bit nearly every trace of your early existence was wiped out. You wish now that you had kept a diary, a continuous record of your thoughts, your movements through the world, your conversations with others, your response to books, films, and paintings, your comments on people met and places seen, but you never developed the habit of writing about yourself. You tried to start a journal when you were eighteen, but you stopped after just two days, feeling uncomfortable, self-conscious, confused about the purpose of the undertaking. Until then, you had always considered the act of writing to be a gesture that moved from the inside to the outside, a reaching out toward an other. The words you wrote were destined to be read by someone who was not yourself, a letter to be read by a friend, for example, or a school paper to be read by the teacher who had given you the assignment, or, in the case of your poems and stories, to be read by some unknown person, an imaginary anyone. The problem with the journal was that you didn’t know what person you were supposed to be addressing, whether you were talking to yourself or to someone else, and if it was yourself, how strange and perplexing that seemed, for why bother to tell yourself things you already knew, why take the trouble to revisit things you had just experienced, and if it was someone else, then who was that person and how could addressing someone else be construed as keeping a journal? You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget—and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost.
About two months after you started writing this book, you received a telephone call from your first wife, your ex-wife of the past thirty-four years, fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis. As often happens to literary folk when they approach a certain age, she was preparing to have her papers transferred to a research library, one of those well-ordered archives where scholars can pore over manuscripts and take notes for the books they write about other people’s books. You too have unburdened yourself of vast mountains of paper by doing the same thing—happy to be rid of them, but at the same time happy to know that they are conscientiously cared for by the good people who run the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Lydia then told you that among the papers she was planning to include were all the letters you had written to her, and because the words in those letters belonged to you, even if the physical letters belonged to her, she was going to make copies and send them to you for a look, wanting to know if you felt anything in them was too private or embarrassing for public scrutiny. She would hold back any letter you asked her to, and if the prospect of exposing the ensemble gave you qualms, she could have them all sealed up for a specified number of years—ten, twenty, fifty years after you were both dead. Fair enough. You knew that you had written to her frequently when you were young, especially during a long, fourteen-month separation in 1967–68, when she was in London and you were in Paris and then in New York, but you had no idea how frequently, and when she told you there were about a hundred letters and that they ran to more than five hundred pages, you were astonished by the numbers, flabbergasted that you had devoted so much time and effort to those ancient, all-but-forgotten messages that had flown across seas and continents and were now sitting in a box in upstate New York. Manila envelopes started showing up in the mail, twenty or thirty pages at a time, letters that went all the way back to the summer of 1966, when you were just nineteen, and pushed onward for many years after that, even past the end of your marriage in the late seventies, and as you continued to work on this book, exploring the mental landscape of your boyhood, you were also visiting yourself as a young man, reading words you had written so long ago that you felt as if you were reading the words of a stranger, so distant was that person to you now, so alien, so unformed, with a sloppy, hasty handwriting that does not resemble how you write today, and as you slowly digested the material and put it in chronological order, you understood that this massive pile of paper was the journal you hadn’t been able to write when you were eighteen, that the letters were nothing less than a time capsule of your late adolescence and early adulthood, a sharp, highly focused picture of a period that had largely blurred in your memory—and therefore precious to you, the only door you have ever found that opens directly onto your past.
The early letters are the ones that interest you the most, the ones written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two (1966–69), for in the letters you wrote after your twenty-third birthday you sound older than you did the year before, still young, still unsure of yourself, but recognizable as a fledgling incarnation of the person you are now, and by the winter of the following year, that is, just after you had turned twenty-four, you are manifestly yourself, and both your handwriting and the locutions of your prose are nearly identical to what they are today. Forget twenty-three and twenty-four, then, and all the years that follow. It is the stranger who intrigues you, the floundering boy-man who writes letters from his mother’s apartment in Newark, from a six-dollar-a-day inn in rural Maine (meals included), from a two-dollar-a-day hotel in Paris (meals not included), from a small apartment on West 115th Street in Manhattan, and from his mother’s new house in the woods of Morris County—for you have lost contact with that person, and as you listen to him speak on the page, you scarcely recognize him anymore.
Thousands of words addressed to the same person, the young woman who would eventually become your first wife. You met in the spring of 1966, when she was a freshman at Barnard and you were a freshman at Columbia—products of two radically different worlds. A dark-haired Jewish boy from New Jersey with a public school education and a fair-haired WASP from Northampton, Massachusetts, who had moved to New York at ten or eleven and had been given scholarships to the best private schools—several years at all-girl Brearley in Manhattan, then off to Putney in Vermont for high school. Your father was a scrambling, self-employed businessman with no college education, and her father was a college professor, an esteemed critic who had taught English at Harvard and Smith and was now a member of the Columbia faculty. In no time at all, you were bowled over. She, though not bowled over, was nevertheless curious. What you shared: a passion for books and classical music, a determination to become writers, enthusiasm for the Marx Brothers and other forms of comic mayhem, a love of games (from chess to Ping-Pong to tennis), and alienation from American life—in particular, the Vietnam War. What drove you apart: an imbalance in the chemistry of your affections, fluctuations of desire, unstable resolve. For the most part you were the pursuer, and she alternated between resisting your advances and wanting to be caught, a state of affairs that led to much turmoil in the years between 1966 and 1969, numerous breakups and reconciliations, a constant push and pull that generated both happiness and misery for the two of you. Needless to say, each time you wrote to her you were apart, physically separated for one reason or another, and in letter after letter you devote much space to analyzing the difficulties between the two of you, or suggesting ways to improve them, or trying to work out arrangements for seeing her again, or telling her how much you love her and miss her. By and large, the letters can be considered love letters, but the ups and downs of that love are not what concern you now, and you have no intention of turning these pages into a rehash of the romantic dramas you lived through forty-five years ago, for many other things are discussed in the letters as well, and it is those other things that belong to the project you have been engaged in for the past several months. They are what you will be extracting from the time capsule that has fallen into your hands—what will allow you to go on with the next chapter of this report from the interior.
SUMMER 1966. Your first year at Columbia was behind you now. That was the school you had wanted to go to, not only because it was an excellent college with a strong English department, but because it was in New York, the center of the world for you back then, still the center of the world for you, and the prospect of spending four years in the city was far more appealing to you than being confined to some remote campus, stuck in some rural backwater with nothing to do but study and drink beer. Columbia is a large university, but the undergraduate college is small, just twenty-eight hundred students back then, seven hundred boys per class, and one of the advantages of the Columbia program was that all the courses were taught by professors (full, associate, or assistant) rather than by graduate students or adjuncts, which is the case with most other colleges. Your first English teacher, therefore, was Angus Fletcher, the brilliant young disciple of Northrop Frye, and your first French teacher was Donald Frame, the renowned translator and biographer of Montaigne. By chance, Fletcher taught two of your classes in the fall, Freshman Humanities (a great books course that all students were required to take) and a course devoted to the reading of a single book—which turned out to be Tristram Shandy. Freshman Humanities was without question the most invigorating intellectual challenge of your life so far, a high-dive plunge into a universe of marvels, revelations, and all-encompassing joy—joy you still feel whenever you return to the books you read that year. The first term began with Homer and ended with Virgil, in between there was Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Thucydides, and in the second term you went from Saint Augustine, Dante, Montaigne, and Cervantes all the way to Dostoyevsky. The class was small, everyone chain-smoked and flicked the ashes on the floor, the discussions led by Fletcher were both spirited and provocative, and your life was never the same again. Admittedly, there were aspects of the college experience that were less inspiring to you, dreary patches of forlorn brooding, the ugliness of the dormitory, the institutional coldness of the Columbia administration, but you were in New York, and therefore you could escape whenever you were not sitting in class. One of your boyhood friends started Columbia that year as well, and because all out-of-town freshmen were required to live in dormitories, the two of you shared a room on the eighth floor of Carman Hall. Your friend came from a wealthy family, and rather than attend the local public high school as you had, he’d been sent to a progressive boarding school in Vermont, the same Putney School that Lydia had graduated from. That was how you met her—through your roommate. Through Lydia, you met another Putney graduate, Bob P., who was a freshman at a college in upstate New York, but he came down to the city often enough that spring for the two of you to become friends. A fellow future poet, Bob was an eighteen-year-old boy of great intelligence and sharp, effusive wit, and after the academic year ended, you decided to join forces for the summer, traveling up to the Catskills to work as groundskeepers at the Commodore Hotel (a strange adventure, recounted at some length in Hand to Mouth), and after you quit that job because the pay was too low and they didn’t feed you enough, you went to Bob’s hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, where for the next month or six weeks you lived in his parents’ well-appointed Tudor house and worked in the warehouse of his father’s appliance business. Better pay and better food, and the job was not difficult, for you were exceedingly strong at nineteen and the task of moving around large, heavy boxes was old hat to you by then, since for part of the summer two years earlier you had worked at your aunt and uncle’s appliance store in Westfield, New Jersey (a smaller but similar enterprise, also discussed in Hand to Mouth), and now you were at it again, eight hours a day in a cinder-block building with a cement floor, and all through those hours a radio would be rumbling in the background, filling the dead air of that space with the popular hits of 1966, none more popular than “Strangers in the Night,” as sung by Frank Sinatra, which must have come on a thousand times during the weeks you spent there, a song you heard so often and came to dislike so much that even now, at sixty-five, you have only to hear two bars of that wretched ballad to be thrust back into the summer heat of Youngstown, Ohio. Sometime in early August, you and Bob were given a ride back east, and after a brief stop at your mother’s apartment in Newark, you took off again, this time in the white Chevy you had owned since your junior year of high school, heading north for the woods of Vermont and the beaches of Cape Cod. You can’t remember why you wanted to go to those places, but you enjoyed driving back then, you took pleasure in long car journeys, and perhaps you went simply for the sake of going. On the other hand, you have a dim recollection that Lydia had gone to Cape Cod with her parents, to a house somewhere in Wellfleet, and that you and Bob wanted to show up at her door unannounced and say hello. The moronic gallantry of teenage boys. If you were looking for her, it is certain that you never found her, and after a night spent sleeping outdoors on the beach, you moved on. The first extant letter from the time capsule was written in your mother’s Newark apartment on August fifteenth, just after your return. It begins as follows: “Yes, we have come back. No, it was not much fun. Did we see the ocean? Yes. Did we see Cape Cod? Yes—to the very tip. Did we see Boston? Yes. Twice. Did we see Putney? Yes. The Alumni House? Yes, filled with African students. And the trip, was it restful? No. Did we drive very far? Yes. Over 1000 miles. Are we tired? Yes. Very. Have we been in Newark long? No, several hours. Are we now occupied? Yes. Bob in the shower. Paul on the couch, writing a letter to Lydia. To what end the trip? A woeful tale of misbegotten adventure. Was it educational? Perhaps. Did we pass Wellfleet? Yes. And what did Paul think? Of how much he loved Lydia. In thinking about her, was he objective? Only as far as love allows one to be objective. The nature of his thoughts? Wistful. Infinite sadness. Infinite longing.”
A week later (August 22), still in your mother’s Newark apartment, with Bob P. surely gone now, a rambling letter of six pages that begins oddly, pretentiously, with a number of chopped-up sentences: “Here. I am here. Sitting. Begin I will, but slowly, for I feel myself telling myself that I shall go on for a while, perhaps too long a while … You shall hear, here, before I say what I have sat to say, bits and scraps, odds and ends, what one calls news, or chatter, but what I call, perhaps you too … ‘warming up,’ which is, I assure you, merely a figure of speech, for certainly I am already quite warm (it’s summer, you know).” After some morbid remarks about the horror and inevitability of death, you suddenly shift course and declare your intention to speak only of cheerful things. “As I walked down Putney Mountain not too long ago, having climbed atop the tip, it suddenly came to me, so to speak in a flash, that is, I became cognizant of the one truly comic thing in the world. That is not to say that many things are not comic. But they are not purely comic, for they all have their tragic side. But this is always comic, neverfail. It is the fart. Laugh if you will, but that only reinforces my argument. Yes, it is always funny, can never be taken seriously. The most delightful of all man’s foibles.” Then, after another sudden shift “(I paused to light a cigarette—thus the hiatus in my ever even path of thought),” you announce that you have recently bought a copy of Finnegans Wake. “Thinking that I would probably never read it, I picked it up and began to read. I have had trouble putting it down. Not that it is easily understandable, but it is true fun. You have read some of it, haven’t you? Much there.” A few sentences later: “I have a great deal of work to do on the play. Having just started writing again yesterday, after not looking at it for 2 weeks, it tells me that I have much to do.” The manuscript of that early effort has been lost, but the statement is proof that you were earnestly writing back then, that you already thought of yourself as a writer (or future writer). Then, no doubt in answer to a question asked by Lydia in a letter responding to your previous letter: “North Truro is the beach we went to. We arrived at six o’clock—the time. I especially liked the shadows in the footprints.” A bit further on, you are offering advice, commenting on something she must have said in her letter: “… to get going again, to write, you must meditate, in the real sense of the word. Honest, painful. Then the hidden things will come out. You must forget the everyday Lydia, your sister’s Lydia, your parents’ Lydia, Paul’s Lydia—but then you will be able to come back to them, without loss of ‘inspiration’ next time. It’s not that the two worlds are incompatible, but that you must realize their interconnections.” Finally, as you approach the last page of the letter, you tell her that you are expressing yourself badly. “So difficult. You see, I am infinitely confused about the whole business of life. All turned upside-down, shaken, shattered. I know it will always be so—the confusion. And how I hated myself for telling you about the goodness of life … when you called me here the night you were ill. What’s the point? Why live? I don’t want to muck about. In the end, I believe, more strongly than I believe in anything else, that the only thing that matters at all is love. Ah, the old clichés … But that is what I believe. Believe. Yes. I. Believe. Lost if without it. Life a miserably bad joke if without it.”
You were temporarily holed up at your mother’s place because the lease you had signed on a New York apartment (311 West 107th Street) would not be going into effect until the first week of September. On August thirtieth, you report that you have thrown out your play—“all 140 pages”—but not the idea, and that you have started something in prose, “using elements of the play as the nucleus.” As for your mental state, it would appear that you were languishing in one of the deep funks that often came over you during your days as an undergraduate. “Living here, in Newark, in this stuffy apartment, is intolerable. Usually I am quite silent. Sometimes irritable. No peace. All murmuring inside me. (That word, ‘murmur,’ is one of the most beautiful in English.) … My senses are particularly keen now, everything is perceived more acutely. I have been eating little for the past several weeks … extreme melancholy, but strange things have been stirring within me. I feel as if I am grasping the roots of something very important.” Unfortunately, what that thing was is never explained, and by the following week you were moving into your new apartment, which you shared with your friend Peter Schubert—the first apartment either one of you ever occupied on your own: the next step forward into independence and adulthood. After that, no more letters until the following June, a nine-month gap in the chronicle …
You remember your second year at Columbia as a time of bad dreams and struggle, marked by an ever-growing conviction that the world was disintegrating before your eyes. It wasn’t just the war in Vietnam, which had become so large and murderous by then that there were days when it was hard to think about anything else, it was also the dirt and decay in the streets of your neighborhood, the mad, disheveled people staggering along the sidewalks of Morningside Heights, and it was also the drugs that were ruining the lives of people close to you, your former roommate to begin with, followed by the death of a high school friend from a heroin overdose, and then, immediately after the conclusion of the spring semester, it was also the Six-Day War in the Middle East, which alarmed you deeply, so deeply that during the short time when the outcome of the war was in doubt you actively entertained the notion of enlisting in the Israeli army, for Israel was not a problematical country for you back then, you still looked upon it as a secular, socialist state with no blood on its hands, and then, some weeks after that, it was also the riots in Newark, the city where you were born, the city where your mother and sister and stepfather still lived, the spontaneous outbreak of race warfare between the black population and the white police force that killed more than twenty people, injured more than seven hundred, led to fifteen hundred arrests, burned buildings to the ground, and caused so much damage that even now, forty-five years later, Newark still hasn’t fully recovered from the self-destructive fury of those violent confrontations. Yes, you struggled to stay on your feet all through that difficult year, you were in continual danger of losing your balance, but nevertheless you kept inching along, staying on top of your schoolwork and doing as much writing as you could. Most of what you wrote came to nothing, but not every word, not every sentence, and 1967 was the first year in which you produced some lines and phrases and paragraphs that ultimately found their way into your published work. Bits that appeared in your first book of poems, for example (Unearth, finished in 1972), and much later, when you were putting together your Collected Poems (2004), you saw fit to include a short prose text written when you were twenty, “Notes from a Composition Book,” a series of thirteen philosophical propositions, the first of which reads: The world is in my head. My body is in the world. You still stand by that paradox, which was an attempt to capture the strange doubleness of being alive, the inexorable union of inner and outer that accompanies each beat of a person’s heart from birth until death. 1966–67: a year of much reading, perhaps more reading than at any other moment in your life. Not just the poets, but the philosophers as well. Berkeley and Hume from the eighteenth century, for example, but also Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty from the twentieth. You see traces of all four thinkers in those two sentences of yours, but in the end it was Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology that said the most to you, his vision of the embodied self that still says the most to you.
You were dying to get away. Once the spring semester was over, the last place you wanted to be was in hot, foul-smelling New York, and since you had saved up some money from your part-time work as a page at Columbia’s Butler Library, you had the wherewithal to forgo a summer job and strike out on your own. Maine sounded like a good bet, and so you opened a map of Maine and looked for the remotest spot you could find, which turned out to be a town called Dennysville, a small village about eighty miles east of Bangor and thirty miles west of Eastport (the easternmost city in America, just across the bay from Canada). You chose Dennysville because you’d learned that decent accommodations could be found there at the Dennys River Inn, which charged only six dollars a day (three hot meals included), and so off you went to Dennysville, an eighteen-hour trip by bus, and during the long ride and the long pause in Bangor as you waited for a connecting bus, you plowed through several books, among them Kafka’s Amerika, which was the last work of his you still hadn’t read—an ideal companion for your journey into the unknown. You wanted to isolate yourself as thoroughly as possible because you had started writing a novel, and it was your juvenile belief (or romantic belief, or misconstrued belief) that novels should be written in isolation. This was your first attempt at a novel, the first of several attempts that would preoccupy you until the end of the 1960s and through the better part of 1970, but of course you were not capable of writing a novel when you were twenty, or twenty-one, or twenty-two, you were too young and inexperienced, your ideas were still evolving and therefore continually in flux, so you failed, failed again and again, and yet when you look back on those failures now, you don’t consider them to have been a waste of time, for in the hundreds of pages you wrote during those years, perhaps as many as a thousand pages (all scribbled out by hand in notebooks, in the nearly illegible writing of your youth), there were the nascent germs of three novels you would later manage to finish (City of Glass, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace), and when you returned to writing fiction in your early thirties, you went back to those old notebooks and plundered them for material, sometimes lifting out whole sentences and paragraphs, which then surfaced—years after they had been written—in those newly reconfigured novels. So there you were in June of 1967, on your way to the Dennys River Inn in Dennysville, Maine, about to sequester yourself in a small room with Quinn, the hero of your book,1 and the fine old white clapboard house where you lived for the next three weeks, the house that had been converted into an inn, was empty except for you and the owners, a retired couple in their mid-seventies from Springfield, Massachusetts, Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey. From the beginning of your stay to the end, you were the only guest. The Dennys River is apparently well known in angling circles as the one river in America where freshwater salmon fishing can be practiced at a certain time of year (the details are a bit vague to you now), and even though your visit coincided with that time of year, which was normally the high season for the Dennys River Inn, the fish weren’t running in 1967, and the fishermen had stayed home. Both Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey were kind to you, and they did everything in their power to make you feel welcome. The plump, cheerful, talkative Mrs. Godfrey was a first-rate cook, and she fed you abundantly, always offering you seconds, and even thirds if you asked for them. The lean and gimpy Mr. Godfrey took you on excursions to Eastport and the local Indian reservation and told you stories about serving in the U.S. Army in 1916, posted at the Mexican border to guard against raids by Pancho Villa, who never showed up, turning Mr. Godfrey’s stint as a private into “a real vacation.” Yes, they were good, kind people, and if you ever found yourself in a similar situation today, you would probably exult in it and throw yourself into your work, but the extreme isolation was too much for you at twenty, you couldn’t handle it, you were lonely and restless (thinking about sex), and the writing did not go well. On top of that, it was the moment of the Six-Day War, and instead of sitting upstairs in your room to work on your soon-to-be aborted book, there were many afternoons when you couldn’t resist going down to the living room to sit in front of the television with the Godfreys and watch the latest reports about the war. Just four letters have survived from that trip to Maine, none of them very long, written in short, telegraphic sentences—brief dispatches from the back of beyond.
JUNE 7: Back to zero. Threw out 15 pages—what I had done so far … Much despair. I’m back to where I was several months ago—sketching a long story (short novel?) … I only hope that I am up to it. It will be very difficult to pull off—as most things are. Right now there is little optimism in me.
Torn by the whole Middle East mess—have been watching the Canadian TV broadcasts of the U.N.—a horrible spectacle of backhanded diplomacy and weak-minded hypocrisy. I’m seriously thinking about going to Israel, only the trouble might be over before I could leave. It can’t last too long, unless it becomes a world war …
Here the weather has been cool and windy. I’ve taken to walking around the cemetery, which is on a hill that looks out onto a field, and beyond, a dense wood—one strange tombstone: Harry C. and his wife Lulu. Today, as I was walking, I saw two things that struck me—Two black horses in a field, standing close together, in love. As Wright says: “There is no loneliness like theirs.” Also, a little farther on: 2 trees, so close together that one leans on the other between two branches and looks as if it were being embraced …
JUNE 8: I’m glad you liked Törless.2 But don’t be discouraged about being a woman. It’s a fine profession. Last night I was reading Blake—he said—“Backbiting, Undermining, Circumventing, and whatever is Negative is Vice. But the origin of the mistake in Lavater and his contemporaries is, They suppose Woman’s Love is Sin; in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are sin.”
Further on, undoubtedly answering a request to provide a reading list of French books, you suggest a few novelists—Pinget, Beckett, Sarraute, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, and Céline—but add that she should read only one or two of them and then turn to French poetry: “… buy the Penguin Book of French Verse: 19th century—& also the one for the 20th century—and read: Vigny, Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Lafargue. Then in the 20th-century book read: Valéry, Jacob, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Éluard, Breton, Aragon, Ponge, Michaux, Desnos, Char, Bonnefoy.—In my opinion the French have done more for poetry than the novel, except for Flaubert and Proust.”3
JUNE 14: Very strange, very strange—Yesterday, I finally got to Eastport … Mr. Godfrey had to drive there … You must see this town—there’s nothing like it—a real ghost town, many many broken buildings, all of them old, some from Revolutionary times—¾ of the people are on govt. welfare—the bay is there, the gulls—Canada right across. Old brick buildings—stores for sale … The biggest five and ten was called BECKETT … Also, in what I’m writing now the main character’s name is Quinn—and sure enough, there was a house that said The Quinns …
My writing, I think, will start moving now, after so much floundering—have gotten some good ideas—it will be slow, painful …
JUNE 18: Fragments. I feel uncivilized. My voice is bursting inside my skull. I want you here. All I have is my work—an apotheosis of solitude. Yes, of course, it’s best to be alone—work is better, yes better, the old south wind4 cracks and rages—the air sows ideas that sprout from my fingertips daily—yes, the work is better, a strange novel that I’m writing … yes, it goes well—but when you write letters that make me so sad I want to go back to New York and take off my clothes and dance a foolish dance to make you laugh—Don’t read so many books—you’ll become an old scholar—and speak a garbled tongue. MAKE MUSIC—sing songs to the sun—praise the dead—write requiems for the living—but sing—let your voice metamorphose the air you breathe—makesomething—a poem, a piece of music … man’s salvation is to make with love—
On August first you would be going to Paris, and at that point in mid-June it was all but certain that Lydia would be going as well. You had both signed up for Columbia’s junior year abroad program, and now that the moment of departure was drawing near, your spirits had begun to lift, for you were eagerly looking forward to spending the next ten or twelve months in new surroundings, and you wonder now if those lifting spirits might not have been responsible for the nutty exuberance of your last letter from Maine. As it happened, nothing worked out as you thought it would. You left for Paris at the appointed time, wanting to settle in early, to acclimate yourself to the city before the academic year began, but at the last minute Lydia’s plans changed, for she too had been struggling in the past months, and her parents had decided she should take a leave of absence from Barnard and go to London to stay with her married half sister, who was fourteen years older than she was and lived in a large, comfortable house near Turnham Green. So began the long separation—which dragged on painfully until the last weeks of the following summer.
You have already written about some of the things that happened to you over the course of the next few months (in Hand to Mouth), describing your quarrel with the Columbia administrator in Paris, your impulsive decision to quit the program and drop out of school, the frantic telephone calls in the middle of the night from your mother and stepfather and maternal uncle, urging you to reconsider, to reverse your suicidal decision because of the draft and the loss of your student deferment, and when you told them no, you were not going to reconsider, more calls in the middle of the night begging you to come back to New York and “discuss the situation,” and how you eventually gave in to their pleas and went to New York for what you thought would be just a few days, since you fully intended to return to Paris and go on with your muddled, independent life, but you didn’t return, it would be over three years before you set foot in Paris again, because one man, the dean of undergraduate students, was willing to let you back into Columbia, even though you had missed a considerable portion of the semester, and the kindness and understanding of that one man, Dean Platt, was enough to make you realize how stupidly you had been acting, and so you stayed on in New York and became a student again. You have touched on all these events before, but the letters weren’t available to you then, and there was much that you had forgotten or misremembered when you sat down to write those pages in 1996, even significant things like the date of your return to New York (which you thought was mid-November but was in fact sometime in the second half of October), and now that you have the evidence before you, you can see that you were in much worse shape than your older self had remembered—deeply confused about everything, perhaps even half out of your mind. Not so much in the beginning, but after you decided to drop out of school, you sound lost, lunging first in one direction and then in another, bouncing from one folly to the next, fitfully trying to hold yourself together as you slowly come apart.
AUGUST 3: I met an Egyptian Jew who owns a candy stand in front of St. Germain des Prés, who tried to get me an apartment … but apartments are terribly expensive here—a waste of money. So I’m staying in a hotel room—sunny, well situated, quiet. I’m very happy with it.—Until now I’ve been running around doing thousands of practical things—finally it’s over & I’ll be able to start writing & have some peace.
AUGUST 10: I was very happy to receive your letter—this morning, at about 8:30, in the little café downstairs, as I was taking “my morning coffee” the woman, la patronne, appeared before my still unopened eyes, stuck the letter under my chin (it bristles) and said, in a voice not known for its musicality: “Voilà, monsieur. Pour vous.” Such delight …
PARIS
Madame, in her velvet dress, pauses before the untidy man asleep on the bench, and heaves a sigh. “Charmant.” But there is no one around to appreciate her sympathetic remark.
My room is at the top of a vertiginous staircase, so steep that the street sounds are murmurs …
The girls are wearing their dresses short, la mini-jupe, which, surprisingly, meets with the displeasure of the old men. “Elles ont passé toutes les bornes,”5 said the old Pole. But why cover the nakedness of youth?
Often, when it rains, the sunlight waltzes on the string of a Heraclitian yoyo.6
“Mais monsieur, dans le sac comme ça j’ai pensé qu’ils étaient les ordures.”7 And so the pills to fight my infection were thrown away.
Words become indistinguishable from gestures. The mime and the orator merge. And the writer, darkening his page with ink, becomes a painter …
Each hour the bells of St. Germain des Prés crackle to the streets: “J’ai mille ans, et je serai ici après que vous êtes partis.”8
AUGUST 11: The floor I live on in this hotel—beneath the grayened skylight—is populated with old men who live here permanently. About 5 minutes ago, as I was writing this letter, the old man next door, who comes in every night reeking of wine (I’ve met him coming in several times) knocked on the door—a burnt-out cigarette between his lips, wearing a raggedy bathrobe—and in his rasping voice, overflowing with apologies, asked the time. “Onze heures moins dix.”
AUGUST 12: I smoke “Parisiennes.” You buy them for 18 centimes in tiny blue wrappers of four—that’s 90 centimes for 20. “Gauloises,” the next cheapest, cost 1 F, 35.
If you get up early enough, as I did today (7:45)—the air is gray & cold & rainy: an all-day rain—and go downstairs to the café, you can have your coffee with the men from the market, the ice man, the garbage man, etc. The only curious thing is that these men, rather than taking coffee in the morning (it’s only eight o’clock, remember) imbibe all sorts of exotic liqueurs, mostly wines. It seems to be a custom among old men. The thought of it (drinking at 8 o’clock) is a bit more than I can take.
The rain, in the early morning cold, splatting on the narrow streets … seems to bring everything closer—to each other, to me … Even sounds take on a different quality. The old man’s radio, playing accordion music next door, seems clearer, sadder. Ah—now it’s stopped. For a moment a small vacuum in the air—actually my ears … my mind.
AUGUST 18: Forgive my delay. I know that I promised to write yesterday. However, that became quite impossible … By the middle of the afternoon I had completed half the letter. I then went out, and, contrary to my intentions, returned well after midnight. Not that my late return would have prevented me from completing the letter—far from it! I am thoroughly accustomed to keeping late hours, and under ordinary conditions would have completed it as soon as I had come back to my room. But this particular night, that is to say, last night—the night of the day in question—I found myself in the unliterary position, the non-epistolary condition, of being very drunk. Nevertheless, I was mightily determined to complete the letter, to keep my word. I had even bought an Italian newspaper, in the hope that if I read it for a little while the mental strain of reading that language would sober me up. But alas, the paper was easy to understand, I knew more Italian than I thought I did, and soon, upon the delightfully soft, horizontal plane of my bed (if one speaks generally, poetically, that is, not mentioning the bumps, curves, and sags) my innocent little eyes closed themselves against my will and I was (Let these walls be my judge) asleep. Although I had dreamed of sleeping on a huge round bed, with pale green sheets and heavy, icy quilts and being awakened by the soft scented words of … a maid, young and pretty, with whom I had been carrying on a clandestine affair, although I had dreamed of being awakened by the warm smells of coffee & croissants, the sweet smells of perfume and femininity, I found, in my room, upon awakening, nothing but the smells of dirty feet, and since it is only I who live here, I knew that those feet (and the socks that had enrobed them for many a day) were mine. On top of this strong disappointment, this rude negation of my dreams, I had one of those headaches that so often follow the “night before.” You know those headaches, they feel as if a great gorilla has hold of your head, and every time you move, even the slightest bit, he clubs you with a great wooden mallet. And alas, the headache is still with me, following me wherever I go, as faithful as my shadow.
But I shall not linger on the details of my physical condition. The sun is shining, the day is lovely. Paris, after the long August 15th weekend, is slowly beginning to revive. Within two weeks, I’m sure everything will be back to normal.
I had hoped to write to you about politics—something that has occupied my thoughts a great deal this summer—but find that I don’t have the energy right now—the next letter.
Good news. In my mailbox this morning was a note from Peter. He’s in Paris and coming here at noon—in an hour and a half.9
AUGUST 21: Peter and Sue are here. Also Bob N.… Tonight they’re going to play fiddle music in cafés. That should be, to say the least, quite amusing.
I’ve slowly begun to write again … Also I’ve been reading books on politics and Marxism …
When I think about my future, I get quite confused. I haven’t the vaguest idea about what’s going to happen to me after this year. Stay in France? Elsewhere in Europe? Return to America? Which college in America—Columbia? Afterwards, graduate school? A job? (I’m convinced I’ll never earn much money writing.) Reviews? Translations? Simply starve and write? What about politics? To every one of these questions my answer is: “I don’t know.” The best thing, I suppose, is simply to play it by ear, as they say, although as you know, I can’t hold a tune for very long.
Last night I dreamt that my grandmother had died. I was on the rue de l’Escroquerie (i.e., a dirty business, racket), a dark and wet place—like a resort—but made out of wood—like a log cabin fortress in movies about the U.S. Army in the 1870s. Lots of crooks and thieves around—watches kept appearing on my wrist—at one time I had 6—3 on each wrist. I was with Sue H. looking for Peter … and my mother, who was angry with me. I remember talking to 2 doctors—one was very drunk—about my grandmother. Very strange.
AUGUST 23: The pigeons perch themselves on the roof above my window, through which I can see the slated red roofs of the market below, and to the right, the spires of L’Église St. Sulpice. When the sun shines in the early afternoon the pigeons who take off from the roof cast their shadows on the floor of my room. It seems as if they are in here with me. I feel like St. Francis.
I have been writing. It makes me feel human.
Next door to the hotel is a Free Soup Center. There are twenty in the city, one in each arrondissement. It has been closed during the summer, but I’m sure it will open up again soon. Inside are unpainted tables and chairs. That’s all.
Two nights ago Peter, Bob N., and I went around from café to café playing music. Peter the violin, Bob the guitar, and I a glass (to collect money) and my voice. In one hour we collected 30 Francs. The only people … who mocked and laughed and of course didn’t give anything, were a bunch of Germans. I almost had a fight with one of them. We were ready to quit after earning 20 Francs, but Bob wanted to make it 24, so he could get his rent money, which is 8 Francs. We found ourselves in the Carrefour de l’Odéon—a big empty square. We started walking up the hill towards the theater (it’s the one run by Jean-Louis Barrault) when from a very small café a girl called out to us in an Italian accent (speaking French)—“Don’t go away. We want to hear the violin.” I came back and made a proposition … that we would do 4 songs if we were guaranteed at least 4 Francs. Peter & Bob came back. We talked with them—very pleasantly—it was nice to be off the big streets—and began to play. After the first song we collected about 4 Francs. Just as the second song had begun, a police paddy wagon—filled with cops—drove slowly into the square. “Les flics,” I said. Peter’s face dropped, he stopped playing. We excused ourselves in a frenzy and began to run away. As we were running everybody took money from their pockets, the waiter even gave one Franc, encouraged us to leave for our own health, thanked us, wished us luck … We ran like desperate thieves into the nearest subway. A very dramatic exit and finale. It was an exciting moment.—But I don’t want to do it anymore. First of all, begging is not much fun. It was I who collected the money, took crap from people, talked back, etc.—which left me with a bad feeling. Secondly, because I’m not starving, it’s hypocritical to beg, and takes away, I imagine, from the real beggars who make their living that way. But I must admit that I don’t regret having had the experience.
AUGUST 23 (SECOND LETTER): I often spend my days like this: get up early—between 8 & 9:30. Go downstairs for breakfast, and if you have written, read the letter while I’m eating. Then I go upstairs, write to you, go & mail the letter, take a walk, and come back and write. (I’ve been writing short things—prose—individual pieces of about 5 or 10 pages that can stand alone. I don’t think, at this point, with so little time left before school, that I could work on anything long.) At about one o’clock Peter and Sue get up (they’re living in this hotel until they find an apartment, if they ever do) and I go down with them to eat something. Then I might go out with them or just with Peter—Sue sees Nancy sometimes—or alone—or go back upstairs and write. For instance, yesterday I went with Peter & bought a pair of pants … It’s 6 o’clock now, evenings are usually—a meal in a restaurant & then either sitting around or going to a movie. Then back to my room, where I usually read, or sometimes, if I feel up to it, write again. Then sleep & we begin again.
It was, in almost every way, a perfect life. Absolute freedom in those weeks before the beginning of the fall semester, the luck of having landed in Paris, luck on all fronts, a boy blessed with every advantage, dining out with your friends, watching movies at the Cinémathèque, taking long walks through the city, and yet all during those weeks of blissful indolence you were pining for your absent love across the Channel, tormented by the knowledge that you loved more than you were loved, that you were perhaps not loved at all, deluding yourself with impractical schemes to escape to London to find out where you stood with her, but travel was out of the question, you were living on the tightest of budgets and had no access to any kind of work to augment your income, scratching by on the one-hundred-forty-dollar monthly allowance your father had agreed to send you, a kind gesture on his part, how could you not feel grateful to him for helping you out, and yet even in that time of forty-cent movie tickets and one-dollar meals, a hundred and forty a month was no more than a pittance, for once you deducted your sixty-dollar-a-month rent, you were left with eighty dollars for food and all other necessities, under three dollars a day for everything, and there you are on August twenty-eighth writing that you have the equivalent of seven dollars in your pocket, and one day after (writing in French, for reasons that escape you now) that you are down to your last two dollars. “C’est moche, c’est drôle, mais à ce moment j’ai seulement dix francs. C’est à dire, j’ai deux dollars. Pas beaucoup. Après aujourd’hui je ne sais pas ce que je ferai. J’espère que mon père envoyera l’argent bientôt.”10
AUGUST 28: My writing goes painfully, slowly. Exhaustingly so … I have been very moody—real depression, then optimistic. Things are still swimming. Last night, in a bad mood, I went all the way across the city in the hopes of getting a free meal at a certain cafeteria for which M. had given me a meal ticket. But no luck. The ticket was no longer good. So I went back. In the metro a woman was singing—beautifully, sadly, to herself. It made me terribly sad, that is, sadder …
For 50 cents you can buy a litre of vin ordinaire. I’ve been drinking a bit too much. Often it makes me quite sleepy and I just KONK out.
I want to write a film. Have some really good ideas …
The following week (September 5) another letter that begins in French: Je ne sais plus quoi dire. La pluie tombe toujours, comme une chute de sable sur la mer. La ville est laide. Il fait froid—l’automne a commencé. Jamais deux personnes ne seront ensemble—la chair est invisible, trop loin de toucher. Tout le monde parle sans rien dire, sans paroles, sans sens. Les mouvements des jambes deviennent ivres. Les anges dansent et la merde est partout.
Je ne fais rien. Je n’écris pas, je ne pense pas. Tout est devenu lourd, difficile, pénible. Il n’y a ni commencement de commençant ni fin de finissant. Chaque fois qu’il est détruit, il paraît encore parmi ses propres ruines. Je ne le questionne plus. Une fois fini je retourne et je commence encore. Je me dis, un petit peu plus, n’arrêtes pas maintenant, un petit peu plus et tout changera, et je continue, même si je ne comprends pas pourquoi, je continue, et je pense que chaque fois sera la dernière. Oui, je parle, je force les paroles à sonner (à quoi bon?), ces paroles anciennes, qui ne sont plus les miennes, ces paroles qui tombent sans cesse de ma bouche …11
Seven hours later, past midnight, you return to your room and continue the letter, leaving behind the somber lamentations of the dark, soggy afternoon for a long, free-floating discourse on politics and revolution, a shift of tone that is so abrupt, so absolute, that the effect is quite disturbing. You look at this two-pronged letter as a sign of your growing instability, the first concrete evidence of the mental crash that would threaten you in the days ahead. “I won’t go into the present situation in America,” you begin. “All that is obvious, and can be read in the newspaper every morning. What is important is that some sense be made of the confusion. (My ideas are quite confused themselves, in that I don’t know where to begin—).” You digress at that point, digress before you have even started, pondering whether you can subscribe to the philosophical foundations of Marxism, asking whether there is a pattern to history, questioning whether the dualistic nature of the dialectic is valid, conclude that it isn’t, and then, contradicting your own conclusion, as you ask whether the class struggle is a reality or a fiction, you assert—“probably a reality.” In the next paragraph, you launch an attack against what you call bourgeois philosophy: “Skepticism led to the exaltation of strictly objective methods of describing the universe, such as geometry and logic: think of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant—a glorification of science: which implies such dualities as subject/object, form/content, etc., which are nonexistent. It led to a disassociation between thought & action … and thus in the economic world … to the idea of the worker considered as a machine. The contract of labor was reduced to a contract of capital, rather than a contract between men, which it actually is. It happened because people were, (are), taught to think in terms of abstract ideas. So, for instance, today, very scientific sociological studies can be conducted to determine the efficiency of workers during certain hours of the day, etc. This is dehumanization—for now one doesn’t have a man for so many hours, but so many hours of man—as if he were a machine. The capitalist world is a world of objects rather than people.” It’s not that these words are incoherent, precisely, or that you don’t know what you are talking about, it’s simply that you are going too fast, trying to write a book-length argument in a few pages, probably exhausted, probably a little drunk, without question miserable and lonely, and after you spend the next couple of paragraphs explaining that the oppressed classes in America have not risen up in revolt because the myth of nationalism has deluded them into thinking they are not oppressed, you wrap up your speculations by calling for the middle class to undergo a process of willful self-destruction—“for the middle class youth (for instance us) to nullify the society we have been brought up in——to transcend our class out of shame for what it stands for & join the ranks of the poor & the persecuted races.” You sign the letter: “a sad and semi-paralyzed Paul.”
The next letter you received must have come as a blow, a disappointment, a shock of some kind that was difficult for you to bear. When you write back on September eleventh, you sound chastened and demoralized, not bitter so much as emotionally spent. “The honesty of your letter is equaled only by the new-found honesty of my thoughts—caused, no doubt, by the terrible depression I am going through. Of course everything you say is true. Avoiding the facts in our correspondence (before my trip was canceled) was merely an illusion, a veil I shrouded my eyes with in order to block out the light of real objects so that I could better watch the fantasies that revolved within my head. But imperceptibly the veil began to slip. Now it has bound my feet (around the ankles) and each step I take makes me fall flat on my face. If I wish to walk now, I must be willing to fall as many times as steps I take. Eventually the cloth will break and I will be free, or, which is also likely, I may decide not to get up after one of the falls, simply remain … without any desire to get up again…”
SEPTEMBER 15: I seem to have fallen under the weather (which is just miserable—ugly all-day rains; autumn is coming—the trees are beginning to change colors) with a bad sore throat, cold, and chills. Nevertheless, I’ve been busy preparing to register for courses & exams. I must tell you … that your friend Professor L. is very lazy and very much a bastard—makes it difficult for one to see him, does little to help. It seems (also) that he misinformed us in N.Y. about the program—for much of it will be taking language courses at the foreign branch of the Sorbonne. It doesn’t seem all that inviting. Even Peter, who came to study music, will have to devote most of his time to language courses …
Have been thinking and getting excited about the movies—“film” = THE CINEMA. Have started writing a scenario. Will comment in a future letter …
My dreams have been vivid nearly every night: in one, I was machine-gunned by Nazis, and much to my surprise death was not unpleasant: I floated prone and invisible through the air; in another: naked with a beautiful woman in public places, then in a locked movie house. The double perspective: through my eyes and also objectively—her nakedness was stunning …
The frustrating battle with Professor L. had begun. Perhaps you had been spoiled by your first two years at Columbia, by the inspired and inspiring men you had studied with as a freshman and sophomore in New York, not just the aforementioned Angus Fletcher and Donald Frame (nineteenth-century French poetry the first year, Montaigne seminar the second) but also, among others, Edward Tayler (Milton) and Michael Wood (a bilingual seminar on the novel: George Eliot, Henry James, and James Joyce in English; Flaubert, Stendhal, and Proust in French), and even your adviser, the medievalist A. Kent Hiatt, the acerbic, urbane gentleman with whom you met every semester to discuss which courses you should take, had always treated you with sympathy and encouragement, which meant that you had navigated yourself through one half of your college career with no pedants or stuffed shirts in sight, no bad eggs or disgruntled souls to inflict their unhappiness on you, and then you ran into the brick wall that was Professor L., the bored administrator that was Professor L., and you clashed. Your French was good enough by then for you to be ready for a more serious curriculum than the glorified Berlitz course he was insisting you take. With Peter, the situation was even more preposterous, since his mother was French and he was perfectly fluent, but Peter was less hotheaded than you were, and he was willing to submit to the program for the sake of his studies with Boulanger. Your letter on the fifteenth had announced your dissatisfaction with Professor L., but the discord must have mounted quickly, for just five days later you were on the verge of out-and-out rebellion.
SEPTEMBER 20: Never before have I known such overwhelming confusion … such violent fits of depression. I am now at what is called the crossroads—the most important of my life. Tomorrow, after I see Professor L., I will know for certain one thing—whether or not I stay in Columbia. At this point I am seriously considering dropping out. Unless the program can be improved, I will do it. Professor L. sickens me … I would prefer to remain a student this year so that I could have the time to … think out what I will do afterwards (I have several ideas). But I will not study French grammar for 15 hours a week in order to have that time.
Rather than continue pursuing an academic career which will, no doubt, lead to only more studying, and perhaps, in the end, to teaching (how easy to succumb to that life!), I have decided—a visceral, exciting decision—to get into films—first as scenarist and … eventually as director also. It will be hard going at first, perhaps for quite a while. A matter of writing scenarios (I am doing one now), getting to know people, getting jobs as an assistant, etc. Tomorrow I’m seeing a producer and might possibly get work translating some scripts, for which I can earn a few hundred dollars … If my money is cut off from America, that is, if my father wishes to stop sending money, which I expect, and which is fully justified, something I would feel no rancor about, I would send for the $3,000 I have in the bank and be on my own.
The implications of quitting Columbia are involved and quite serious, for I would eventually lose my student status with the draft …
Tomorrow, the first and most important step will probably be taken. What I will propose to Professor L. is this—I’ll study for the exams for the 1st & 2nd degrees on my own, audit courses at the Sorbonne, and do the project. In effect, it means not taking the language courses which indirectly would prepare me for the exams (which are apparently the most important element in the program—which make it “official”) and, instead, taking real courses at the Sorbonne … However, I don’t think Professor L. will be receptive to the change. In which case I’ll bid him adieu and then be very much on my own.
The whole business has been rather sad. Professor L. gave me a letter saying that it would be enough for me to get my carte de séjour with. So I waited in line for 3 hours today feeling really sick (you should hear my cough) only to be told that because I was still a minor I needed a notarized letter from my father. Really aggravating. You know what I think of bureaucracies—even worse here …
SEPTEMBER 25: Thank you for the drawings and for your support. Everything has not yet been settled. Later today I must call long distance to Columbia to tell them of my plans and ask if the tuition (at least a good part of it) can be refunded. No, Professor L. did not like my idea—but there’s nothing much he can do about it.
In addition to all this school business, I’ve been keeping quite busy … Also … have translated ten poems of Jacques Dupin12 and will send them to Allen13 in N.Y., who said he would most likely be able to get them into Poetry. I could make about $50 for it.
I do not expect my father to give me any more money. Seeing that I have only about $3000 of my own—I have to keep up a source of income, somehow, no matter how minimal it might be.
I am rewriting the scenario of this Mexican woman, the wife of the producer who did Cervantes, in which my old composer friend had a role.14 If and when it is filmed, I will be right in on it—getting the experience I want. She also wants me to translate one of her plays into English—all of which I will get paid for. She’s dark, enchanting, and beautiful—but I don’t trust her. I think her promises are a bit empty. But we shall see. There is a possibility that she can give me the maid’s room in her building—for no charge. I must move, because I can no longer afford the 300 Franc rent in this hotel. I will find out in a few days if I can have the room. It would be a great help. For I don’t care about luxuries (maid’s rooms are traditionally very very small & without water, always on the top floor, and reached by a back stairway).
My plan is this—remain in Paris for some time—write my own scenarios (continuing other writing too), do translations, and get all the experience I can …
SEPTEMBER 27: I won’t say much right now, since it is late, and I am awaiting your reply to my last letter.
However, some facts. I called the dean at Columbia (90 Francs; almost 20 dollars!) and have settled everything with them. The tuition can be returned in full. I have written a formal letter to them. Have also written to my parents—both father and mother. I’m curious to see how they’ll react …
Concerning the film—I am not the chief director, simply an assistant. Right now I am engaged in the monumental task of rewriting the scenario—almost completely. I’m told that Salvador Dalí is eager for one of the parts. That might prove to be interesting. Much of the film takes place in the sewers. Tomorrow afternoon the Mexican woman and I are going down to see them. Apparently, some people are interested in making the film—a young man, with lots of money, wants to produce it. Tomorrow we will also see the chief technician. Still, I am not too optimistic. I feel the whole thing will fizzle. Nevertheless, all remains to be seen.—It’s a strange thing to rewrite somebody else’s work. It seems to be good practice, though.
I feel somewhat liberated, having no school to worry about …
OCTOBER 3:… things are far from ideal—in fact, downright confusing & often extremely depressing. (I’m writing so small because this is my last piece of paper.)—About 4 or 5 days ago I received a phone call in the middle of the night from my mother and stepfather … They seemed very worried about me—and asked me to come back to Newark for 3 or 4 days to “discuss matters.” I said I would, only to avoid senseless arguing over the phone—and the next morning wrote special delivery that I didn’t want to—at all. Going there, especially for such a short time, would utterly destroy my morale. I haven’t heard from them yet. I don’t want to create bad feelings—but will, if I have to. They seemed to be worried most about the draft.
On the brighter side, they told me that Allen was extremely impressed with the Dupin translations I sent him and would certainly get them published …
I see my old composer friend often. He has been ill. Has no money. I buy him food when I can.
The film business is held up until Monday—a question of money. To find out if it will be backed. How I detest the way the “producer” discusses money … So unctuous, obnoxious. He calls everyone “mon cher Monsieur X”—in the most sickening, ass-licking manner imaginable. I’ve rewritten about 1⁄3 of the script—have stopped for the time being. The woman, the author, seems pleased. Tonight I will read it to the director. His name is André S., one of the world’s best technicians—did the desert scenes in Lawrence of Arabia. This will be his first job as chief director—&, I assure you, this film, if it is made, will be nothing like Lawrence of Arabia … At this point everything is very vague—I’m extremely pessimistic.
Will be able to earn several thousand dollars, however, if it does work out. At present, have another translation job, of a play, for which I’ll get about $100, I guess.
I mention all these money matters only because everything is swirling & I’m on my own—a new feeling.
I am writing the scenario for a short film … a “court-métrage.” I’ll be finished in another 5 days or week … I’ll send you a copy. I’d like to do it in England or Ireland in a few months, somehow. A matter of getting to know some technicians, actors, & raising the money …
Am also writing a series of prose poems, called Revisions, a reflection, so to speak, on my past.
All this makes me sound … very busy. Perhaps I am, but I don’t feel it. Most of the time I’m completely alone—in a profound & terrible solitude. In my little room, very cold, either working or pacing or paralyzed with depression. Walks, very lonely walks. And seeing the film people—all of which strikes me as unreal. I eat next to nothing …
I worry about what will become of me. The draft.
About the most exciting thing I did recently was go to a Communist Party rally—a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, was the “special attraction.” I’ve never heard such noise, shouting, screaming, singing …
OCTOBER 9: In answer to your questions: yes, you’re probably right, if I remain obstinate, my parents, or at least my mother, will come to Paris to try to “pound some sense into my head.”—The balloon seller is away, le patron est toujours là, my composer friend I see frequently, but it is usually the other way around, I helping him rather than he helping me. Peter and Sue are still living in the hotel … Peter, though not happy about the program, is playing along because of the possibility of studying with Nadia Boulanger.—I see Peter and Sue quite frequently—we eat many meals together in a very good and extremely cheap Polish restaurant, and nearly every day, at some time or other, Peter & I play pinball together. There are machines in nearly every café. Also, I have gotten them both reading Beckett. Peter has read Murphy and is reading Watt. A few weeks ago, as a treat, Peter & Sue played out the chess match between Mr. Endon and Murphy for me.——As far as other things go, I should get word about the financial situation on the film today. I’m somewhat disenchanted … with the whole business. I’ve been keeping busy, though, with my own scenario. It’s grown into a full-length film. I’ve written about 50 pages so far, between 1⁄3 and ½ finished. Furthermore, I’m quite determined to film it and release it …
OCTOBER 16: I have had some unpleasant news. My parents are getting pretty frantic … and had Allen call—to ask me to go to back to America for a few days—“to talk”—saying that I, whose medium is words, have an unfair advantage over them in letters. That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I told him … I would go. About two days later I received a telegram from my mother, saying that Air France has an undated ticket for me. The next day I realized that I don’t have my health card … and wrote to them, asking them to send it. So, I don’t know exactly when I’ll be leaving—in a week or two, I imagine—but I will be leaving at some time. I’m a bit wary. In my letter I made them promise me a round-trip ticket.
Due to all this upset and imminent moving around, my advice to you is not to write to me until you hear from me again. I would probably not get your letter. I will be moving from here soon. When I’ve returned to Paris, I’ll write to you with my new address.
To continue with news—the film was accepted by Paramount, depending on Dalí’s response. To be filmed in March or April. Dalí will be in Paris on the 25th. Still, the whole thing seems a bit ludicrous to me—the script is not so good, at all.
I have finished my scenario … It took me 3 days to type the bloody thing—70 single-spaced pages. I’m not going to try to film it right away … I want to lock myself up and continue to write—everything, ideas, words … coming without pause. Everything is related to everything else. A universe. I find, now, my capacity for work greater than ever before. I have no trouble sitting all day in my room and writing. I have the freedom of loneliness, and somehow a new lucidity which comes, I think, from not having to worry about school …
You’ll hear from me in 2 weeks or so …
You kept your promise and wrote to her on November third, roughly two weeks later. Not from Paris, however, as you had expected to, but from New York, where your visit of “a few days” stretched on for more than three years. You were back in gloomy Morningside Heights, living across the street from a campus that would become a battleground of sit-ins, protests, and police interventions by the end of April, and when similar student uprisings occurred in Paris just a short time after, you understood that no matter where you had spent that year, you would have found yourself in the middle of a violent storm. Five months after the Columbia revolt, F. W. Dupee, a highly respected English professor in the College (you never studied with him, but you knew him by sight and reputation), published a long, carefully detailed article in the New York Review of Books about the events of the spring. Dupee was sixty-three years old at the time, and if you prefer to cite his article rather than one of the many other reports written by your contemporaries, it is precisely because he wasn’t a student, because he wasn’t a participant in the mayhem, and therefore he could observe what was happening with a certain wisdom and dispassionate calm. At the same time, you would be hard-pressed to think of anyone who has given a better account of the atmosphere on the Columbia campus in the months before the explosion.
“It was one of Columbia’s virtues,” Dupee wrote, “that it allowed its teachers … plenty of intellectual and social freedom and plenty of good students. It is true that my habitual detachment from campus politics had recently broken down as I saw the students growing more and more desperate under the pressures of the War. The War’s large evil was written small in the misery with which they pondered hour by hour the pitiful little list of their options: Vietnam or Canada … or jail! Naturally they were edgy, staying away from classes in droves and staging noisy demonstrations on campus. To all this, the Columbia Administration added further tension. Increasingly capricious in the exercise of its authority, it alternated, in the familiar American way, between the permissive gesture and the threatened crackdown.
“So little unchallenged authority survives anywhere at present, even in the Vatican, that those who think they have authority tend to get ‘hung up’ on it. Many of my fellow teachers shared the Administration’s ‘hang up.’ One of them said to me of the defiant students, ‘As with children, there comes a time when you have to say no to them.’ But the defiant students weren’t children, and saying no meant exposing them to much more than ‘a good spanking.’ The War was doing far more ‘violence’ to the University than they were. Altogether, Columbia (especially the College where I teach and where the big April disturbances began) had been grim throughout the school year. And while nobody—not even the student radicals—expected any such explosion as actually occurred, I would not have been surprised if the year had ended with an epidemic of nervous breakdowns.”
That was the place you returned to, that epicenter of potential nervous breakdowns, and whatever private struggles you might have been going through that year, they cannot be separated from the general sense of doom that hovered in the air around you …
In the letter written on November third, you report that you are back in school, reinstated at Columbia, and that you are about to move into a new apartment (601 West 115th Street) with the modest rent of eighty dollars per month. The person responsible for persuading you to reverse your plans was your Uncle Allen. After your return, you spent several days at his apartment in Manhattan “talking about all kinds of things,” in particular the mess you had made for yourself and your future. You write how good it was to talk to him, praise his intelligence and understanding, and admit that you were wrong to drop out of school—not because school is important to you but because of the war and your opposition to the war, which would have led to much trouble with the draft. By reentering Columbia, you will be able to postpone that battle for another eighteen months.
“I’ve worked out a schedule of 4 courses—2 graduate, 2 undergraduate—only 5 class meetings a week—all on Mon., Tues., & Wed., giving me a four-day weekend. I’ve nearly caught up with the work already…”
NOVEMBER 17: To tell the truth, I really don’t mind being here. Uprooting myself so much … in the past few years, I’ve achieved an equilibrium with my environment: indifference, or to put it better, calm—all places are both good & bad; the important thing is to go about the business of living, to fulfill the inner imperatives that keep me going. About America, the place is such a festering infection, a great boil of troubles … it’s quite exciting to be around.
I stay up til about 4 every night. I did more Dupin translations (about 20 all together now), Allen very pleased, giving them to James Wright—our friend—tomorrow. He is editor of the magazine The Sixties … I hope, in the near future, to do translations of several other poets. I find it a good exercise. Also, revising & expanding my scenario, doing preliminary sketches for other things, fiction … more films. Have been in contact with a filmmaker—now know where to get a cameraman. Must soon start working on raising money. Plus, of course, I’m going to school. So, you see, I’m rather busy …
Read poems of Pierre Reverdy. See films Hunger, Young Törless …
NOVEMBER 23: About the scenario. I have just gotten hold of a typewriter—a huge machine, rented at the price of $6 a month, and have not yet begun the rewriting … only mental revision, addition. The biggest task is the physical work—the typing—there are so many pages. So I won’t send it in the mail right away—rather, bring a copy with me at X-mas … I’ll also bring the Dupin translations, and translations of 2 other French poets: Jaccottet and du Bouchet. I’m doing a little book of the 3 poets for my French course—translations (about 20 poems of each), a general introductory essay, an article on each poet, and commentaries. How academic! But it’s much better than doing an ordinary paper. I have a novel that I’m about to begin. Have also written some poems, which I will send to you in the next letter. They still need a bit of work.
Bad news: received a letter from the Mexican woman. While she was away from Paris, the director and the producer stole the script—rewrote it completely—making it crude & commercial—and signed a contract with Paramount and Dalí to make a million-dollar film. She has been left in the cold, and, needless to say, so have I. Such greed and chicanery. All behind her back. Dalí, she says, is only concerned with money … Perhaps, for me, it is all for the best—being left independent, to my own devices. But I feel sorry for her.
I don’t want to be pedantic, but in answer to your previous questions … read these 2 books by Marx: The German Ideology & The Economic and Philosophic Mss. of 1844. Very precise, very illuminating … And don’t let the Fanon book—The Wretched of the Earth—slip away.
You remember writing the screenplay, the work you refer to as your scenario, which indeed was rather long, close to a hundred single-spaced pages, not so much a movie script as a present-tense narration crammed with minute details about the settings and elaborate descriptions of gestures, pratfalls, and facial expressions, and because it was supposed to be a black-and-white silent film, that is, a film with no dialogue, there were none of the blank spaces one associates with a normal script, and in your memory you can still see what the pages looked like: dense with words, a swarm of black marks with just a few bits of white peeking through, which meant that it was far and away the longest piece of finished work you had ever done. If you are not mistaken, the title of the film was Returns, a dream-like philosophical comedy about an old man wandering around a largely uninhabited landscape looking for his boyhood home and encountering various adventures along the way. You remember thinking it was quite good, but that doesn’t mean your judgment was correct, and even if you hoped to have it produced, you never thought of it as anything more than a novice work, an experiment. What astounds you now is how deluded you were in thinking you could mount a production, how ignorant you were about the ways of filmmaking, how ridiculously naïve and foolishly optimistic you were about the whole business. You knew nothing, absolutely nothing, and unless you had been endowed with a small private fortune to squander on the project, the chances of such a film being made by a twenty-year-old boy were zero, absolutely zero. In any case, by the time you had completed the final version, you were already thinking about other things you wanted to write, and when you weren’t busy with those things, you were busy keeping up with your schoolwork. Some months later, you gave the manuscript to a friend who’d said he wanted to read it, and the manuscript was lost. Xerox machines were new in those days, and you hadn’t been able to afford the expense of making copies, and because you had neglected to use a carbon while typing up the final version, the manuscript that disappeared was the only copy in existence. It made you unhappy, of course, but not desperately unhappy, not crushed or despondent, and before long you stopped thinking about it. Close to twenty-five years would go by before you tiptoed into the world of film again.
DECEMBER 3: I live alone, rarely emerging from my house. Days pass and I do not speak. When I am forced to say something, my voice seems strange to me, rattling like a machine. I go to class only five times a week. Sit, listen, leave. Return home. Weekends, which are four days long, are the most lonely. Then, if I do go out, it is only after midnight, to get drunk or buy groceries.
I work extremely hard, walled in my hiddenness … the novel is an overwhelming undertaking … Poetry is almost a diversion. Film absorbing. School work something to get done.
I don’t know what is driving me … My mind keener, yet more confused. I often feel that I am about to die. Last night I listened to Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony for the first time in almost 2 years. My body shook, I trembled, and … I cried. I couldn’t understand it. As if I had fallen into the void.
It is a solipsistic life. Friendless, bodyless …
Later:
Something nice happened today. About a week ago I gave Allen a copy of the poems I sent to you. Then I forgot about them, was doing other things. Apparently he put them in his pocket and forgot about them too. Today he called and said that last night he did a double-take when he found them in his pocket. He said he was very impressed, that he had almost called last night at 2 in the morning to tell me. I was rather skeptical—I don’t think they’re that good … But he said, no, no, they’re really good & went on with particulars, and said that I should send them to Poetry magazine, because they merit being published. Although I don’t know if I’ll do that, I was flattered by his comments. He said he thought I was really coming along. It’s good to have a little boost like that, especially from him.
DECEMBER 5: It seems that fate is working against us. This is difficult to say, I hope I can, I’ve made myself a bit drunk to be able to face the page. Simply, I won’t be able to come at Christmas. Three reasons, all squeezing in at once to choke me, responsibilities, debts, conflicts. My father, who still controls my bank account until I’m twenty-one, a stupid agreement I consented to years ago, is not going to loosen his fist (my money!), for, as he claims—frivolity. And Norman claims he needs me to launch his campaign—still a nebulous thing—for it must be done soon or not at all.15 And my grandmother, who is rapidly fading, a hideous thing to watch, needs the family around. Each person doing his or her share by spending time with her—which is an arduous ordeal … Because the film fell through, my former pretext for going—since a matter of the heart is necessarily negligible, frivolous, according to them—has vanished. I’m stuck—not yet my own man.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I had counted on it so much—had lived for nothing else. I sit and look at your picture and try to recall your voice …
DECEMBER 18: You say that you want to know the details of my life. I will try to tell you …
I have four courses—“Government C.C.”16 in which we read people like Marx, Lenin, and Sorel … It meets on Mon. & Wed. from 11–12:15, and I hardly ever go—the class is boring, but the reading fine. Second, on Tuesday, from 3–5, I have a seminar called “Oriental Humanities.” Again, the reading is fine—Middle Eastern & Indian philosophy, religion, & poetry—but the class is boring beyond words. Two teachers are there & both are dunces. Nevertheless, the reading is something I probably wouldn’t have done on my own. Wednesday is better. In addition to the C.C., I have 2 other courses—both in the graduate school. The first, from 2–4, is Art History—“Abstract Painting” with Meyer Schapiro … He’s extraordinarily articulate, intelligent, witty, well read. It’s a big lecture (about 200–250 people)—& I just sit back for 2 hrs. & listen to him speak—a real pleasure. Then, from 4–6, I have the other graduate course, in 20th-century French poetry. The reading, of course, is splendid—but the class unfortunately rather ponderous. I’ve been working hard, though—just completed a 25-page paper on 1 15-line poem by Beckett. It was helpful to look at one small thing with such care … Also, as I may have already told you, I’m doing a series of translations—of Dupin, du Bouchet, Bonnefoy, & Jaccottet—four contemporary poets. I’ll be finished sometime during the vacation, which begins next week … About a month & a half ago, Bonnefoy was here and gave a talk, in French, at La Maison Française, on Baudelaire and Mallarmé. An unlikely looking man—tiny, somewhat scrunched up—but a great poet & fine art critic … I was impressed.
Next term will be much better … as far as teachers go, quality of courses. I saw me ol’ pal Edward Tayler the other day to ask if I could take an advanced graduate seminar with him—“English Lyric—1500–1650.” Of course, of course, he said, Delighted to have you … We had a very amusing talk in the confines of his office for about half an hour … Another graduate course will be Aesthetics, philosophy, which promises to be good—another, in French, on Flaubert, given by Enid Starkie, the grand old English dame on leave from Cambridge. Also, in undergraduate—Medieval French literature, and then, a course in contemporary music from Beeson, which I very much want to take. Finally, GYM. It will keep me quite busy—but I don’t really mind—in an odd way I enjoy studying, especially old things—medieval, Renaissance …
I am almost always alone. I stay in my apartment a great deal. Three rooms. Small bedroom and bathroom in the back … Next, the kitchen. Coffee, toast—then into the big living room & my desk, to work. Sometimes, late at night, I go to the West End for some Guinness. I occasionally see L., whose company I enjoy. Once in a while, see the girl and her roommate … both former students of Allen’s. Sometimes they feed me, other times we just talk.
Through Allen, I got to meet … Ruby Cohn, who has written a book on Beckett and is a good friend of his. We met, one morning, about 2 weeks ago, & had a nice talk for about 3 hours …
Allen has been consistently kind to me … & helpful—reading things—helping me get the translations published—encouraging me to send out other things. I may be able to make some money doing translations of some plays for a book of avant-garde European drama that is being planned by a friend of his—he’s putting in the word for me …
More seriously … I live in my writing—it consumes my thoughts. I have many ideas, plans going at once—I think about them all in my spare moments, refining, revising, while concentrating on the particular thing I’m working on at the moment …
Despite all my internal confusion, my loneliness, I have somehow, along the way, acquired … confidence in the writing, in my own ability. That is what sustains me now. I’m a dedicated monk—celibate and all.
My grandmother is rapidly declining—She has caught bronchitis & is now in the hospital. On Friday, because a night nurse could not be hired on such short notice, my mother & I stayed up all night beside her bed—My grandmother could not sleep for even a minute—her suffering is endless, constant. She is totally helpless, Lydia—She cannot move at all—her spine is like jelly—She can only moan and cry. It was an awful awful night—the worst I have ever spent—to have to sit helpless beside such helplessness, such suffering. Death was so close. From the window, slow, silent … boats moved along the darkened East River.—I am just now beginning to recover from the sleeplessness & despair of that night. Fortunately, the bronchitis is beginning to clear up. But she doesn’t have many more months to live. When I left the hospital in the gray, early morning light, I felt a very bitter joy to find myself among the living …
Soon, on New Year’s Eve, I’ll be going to a party—haw!—a party given by Allen. It will be the first one for me in a long time. How strange it will be to be in a crowd again. I hope I … don’t go off in a corner & get drunk, which is my usual behavior at such gatherings. Perhaps it will be so crowded that I’ll be unable to reach a corner.
One of the nicest things since I’ve been back is my continued friendship with Peter—through the mail—his letters truly warm my heart. I don’t deserve such a good friend. With utter kindness & self-sacrifice, he took the time to gather my things & send them to me. Real drudgery, which he did with great humor. The things are now at the airport & will be delivered tomorrow. It will be nice to have my typewriter, notebooks, books … Also, I’ll finally be able to change my pants …
JANUARY 11, 1968: My grandmother has died—the funeral was yesterday—Despite the fact that it was expected, I’m still … shaken. The funeral itself was very upsetting—my grandfather has taken it badly & has done much crying … It all saddens me. Yet, it is certainly better that she no longer go through the hideous torture of the disease.17 And fortunately, she died quietly, in her sleep—it had been feared that she would choke …
The typing of the translations has been completed (160 pages). At great expense I have made one copy—I might be able to make another for free—if so, I’ll send it to you right away—if not, we’ll have to wait until next month when I’m better supplied with pennies …
If you want a really fine, deep laugh—read At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien. Highly recommended.
FEBRUARY 12: A whole month and not a word … I called your mother to see if anything had happened to you. She said your new address was London W. 6. The one you gave me was N. 6. Perhaps this has caused a confusion in the mail rooms.
I have little to say except my 21st birthday came & went with little stir … Never before have I felt so unneeded and unwanted. I live in a vacuum—have nothing to do with anybody—which pains me. I can do nothing but watch others. I need someone.
MARCH 2: Your latest letter … Again, I say to you, don’t worry about me. I’m all right, really. Have no doubts about yourself in relation to me. Let us not raise questions about problems we know cannot be answered at this time. Simply try to live as best you can, now, with whatever your life consists of. I think the closest man can come to the feeling of eternity is by living in the present …
I sometimes shudder to realize that I am unfit to be loved by anyone. That, because of what I guess is an inherent idealism, nothing in the world seems good, that my loneliness is a masochistic desire …
All around me I see … pettiness, stupidity, and hypocrisy … As a result, I see myself becoming intolerant—and, so as not to offend anyone, retreating from society. I hate myself for what I feel to be an impatience with others, and yet I can do nothing about it …
And yet at the same time I yearn to love and be loved, knowing that it is impossible … I think, in some profound way, that I have fled from the real. I … spend most of my time either engaged in or thinking about my writing. Characters, situations, words, I have become them—moving into a vague world of shifting … colors, sounds—devoid of words and sense. At the same time I am convinced that to live is more important than art …
Soon, however, I’ll be faced with a big decision—the draft … If things remain as they are … I will probably go to Canada. I predict much loneliness for myself—worse than I have ever known.
There is a terrible shyness in me that makes even the most simple social situations difficult—a reluctance to speak, a self-consciousness that compounds my loneliness.
I say these things about myself to let you know—because you seemed to want to know. Probably, however, you’re already aware of all this.—My brooding and melancholy are incurable … And yet, I feel myself, at the center, to be strong—that I won’t ever crack, no matter how bad things might get. In a way, this is what frightens me the most …
I have a job translating a series of essays that will give me money to live on over the summer … must think of a good place to go …
MARCH 14: I think you overestimate my idealism. In essence, I feel the same as you—the differences are a result of circumstances more than anything else. It is difficult to want to carry the world within you, here, in New York, America, when everyone is shouting hate, when the war continues to grow at a maniacal pace, when the only individual alternatives for the future are prison or exile. It is the horrible madness around me (I assure you it is real insanity)—necessarily within me too—that makes me despair. I don’t, however, cease to think of people as individuals. That I have never done and will never do. I don’t believe in abstractions. They are the killers, the maimers of the mind …
My life confusing. Revulsion towards school. Sick of books. My mind cluttered. Need the fresh air. Space to clear my mind. Dissipation. Too much drinking. One night so bad I vomited myself to sleep. I murmured, shouted, cried about God. Why does He refuse to manifest Himself? Drunken drivel. I become very witty at times. You’d like that. The border between tragedy and comedy. Sickness unto death. Writing bogged. But still confident. In general it goes well.—A new-found delight in faces. Old women blowing their noses. Watching old men. Today, a baby dog, a pup, so soft I wanted it for myself.—Steaming steel coffee machines. Spittle on the sidewalks. The darkness of the streets at night. The darkness of dreams. Voices merging in crowds. Phrases mingling from different mouths into unconnected absurdities. Faces in class. A word from a radio. My cluttered desk. The disgust with myself for having cut two straight weeks of class. The irony of my having made the dean’s list. The strong desire not to read anymore. To stop listening and begin speaking … to be wed to silence again only at death.
MARCH 29: I have complete confidence in you, despite the tiny rises and falls … you will emerge strong and whole. As for me … I have great difficulty imagining any sort of future for myself, anything at all. Political problems have become so oppressive that such thoughts have become impossible. If confronted with the draft next summer, my decision will be to go to jail—not to Canada.—I can give no rational explanation—merely, that it is the more disdainful action. So, in some peculiar way, I am pressed into thinking immediately about something that really requires much time …
It has been difficult for me to hold steady to the tasks at hand. I have let my school work slide disastrously—soon it will come crashing down on my head. I walk about in a silent frenzy. Watch the street events. Read books that have nothing to do with school. Think about my writing excessively, but have gotten very little done lately. It all seems unreal without you—all a limbo in which I am wallowing until you return. Despair is not the word. A sense of not being alive.
Three weeks after that letter was written, the Columbia uprising began. It proved to be an effective vaccine against the epidemic of nervous breakdowns that was threatening to take over the campus that spring—including your own nervous breakdown. In reading over the letters you wrote in the months leading up to that day (April 23), you are stunned by the depth of your unhappiness, shocked by how close you were to what sounds like absolute disintegration, for in the years that followed memory had blurred the details of that time, and you had somehow managed to soften the pain, to turn a full-blown inner crisis into a dull sort of malaise that you eventually put behind you. Yes, the crisis passed, but only because you made an abrupt about-face and threw in your lot with the protesting students, the first and only time you have ever taken part in a concerted mass action, and the effect of joining in with others seemed to break the spell of misery that had engulfed you, to wake you up and give you a new, more emboldened sense of who you were. On May fourth, in the first letter you wrote after the New York police invaded the campus on the night of April thirtieth, smashing students with billy clubs and arresting seven hundred of them, you report: “… occupied a building, was beaten by the cops, was arrested.” Five paragraphs down you add: “… it is rather difficult to make summer plans right now—because I must appear in court on June 7 & don’t know how long things will drag on. It is even possible … that I will wind up in jail—though I doubt it.” In a three-page letter from May fourteenth, you warn her to stay away from the press, explaining that publications such as Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times have distorted the facts and cannot be trusted. The only reliable source of information is the student paper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, which is about to put together a book of all its articles of the past month, and you will send her a copy as soon as it is available. You then go on to discuss the tactics employed by the students during the sit-ins, saying that the police action was a necessary step in bringing the majority over to their side, that everyone in the buildings knew what was going to happen, that they actively wanted the police to come and behave precisely as they did, for only a display of police violence could lead to the all-university strike that was now in effect. In the next paragraph, you say how pleasantly surprised you were by “the committed attitude of the people in the occupied buildings. Tempers didn’t flare, no one got on anybody else’s nerves. For a week, everybody was busy working for everybody else … For me, who am so skeptical about such things, I had to be part of it in order to learn that it is possible, even for a limited time.” Ten days later, you apologize for not having written again sooner. “Things have remained chaotic and violent—another confrontation with the police two nights ago, which perhaps you have read about.” Two paragraphs down, you say how much you want to go to London, “but until June 7, the day I appear in court to get the date of my trial, I am … unable to make any plans. As soon as I know what will be happening to me, I will give you all information.”
The tone of your letters begins to change after that. The morose, self-absorbed malcontent of the past few months suddenly vanishes, and in his place another, altogether different person starts writing to London. A mysterious transformation, for the outward circumstances of your life were unaltered: the war was the same war, the pending threat of the draft was the same threat, the struggle to find your way was the same struggle—and yet something in you had been let free, and rather than moan about the rottenness of the world, you become playful, jocular (the rambunctious letter of June 20), and vastly more at ease with yourself, as if the events of April and May had given you a jolt of electricity and brought you back to life.
JUNE 11: I have been anxiously waiting to hear from you, but since, after all these weeks, nothing has arrived, I thought I’d take this golden opportunity (the weather has been unbearably hot) to write to you. I shall make my remarks concise and to the point:
1. I miss you very much. I think of you all the time. I hope we can see each other soon.
2. I wonder what you are doing. Are you working or on holiday? Are you in London or elsewhere?
3. I must return to court on 17 July. After that, I probably won’t have to go back until September. I hope & pray that I’ll … manage to leave N.Y.
4. I am fine. I’m beginning to write well … My mind is relaxed.
5. I read much less now than I used to. As a consequence, I am more intelligent and have a better sense of humor …
6. I do not fret about my fate.
7. Have you heard from Peter and/or Sue?
8. Tell me how you feel, what you’ve been doing.
9. If all goes well, I’ll be in London in August.
10. Write me a poem. Dance a polonaise.
11. The single stroke of a saw, cutting into hard wood. It is October. The window shatters in a wheel.
12. Let me do it. It is evening. The musicians are gathering around the symphony, drinking milk.
13. The painting has melted. It is 3 weeks before spring. The farm is dancing in the harbor.
14. Find a good book and read it under water. Socrates was put to death for less. In my dream the broom is a body.
15. Anyone can add and subtract. The grass is redder in the shade. I am not surprised.
16. Why is the bathtub so big? Some drink Pepsi-Cola; others drink Coca-Cola. In the tank the soldier sings a song by Schubert.
17. When we wear sneakers we often think that we are pogo-sticks. It will soon be evening. Then the blindman will blow his nose with a dollar bill.
18. The politicians have fled the country. It is morning, but the air is still dark. At the center of our despair we see words, written upside-down, hanging from the jaws of a pelican.
19. Please find drawing enclosed.
20. Please accept this transmission of my love.
JUNE 20: Madame ma femelle:
At times, when in bondage, we manifest the desire to put the world in our pocket. We walk up & down the street with our companion, the Master of the Bagpipes. Once, as he sat down on our typewriter, preventing us from pursuing our daily labor, he opened a can of beans and said: “What a wise man I am.” His wife, the blind ballerina from Jersey City, stubbed her toe one day on a tank (inside a soldier was playing “Desiccated Embryos”18) and contracted syphilis. Now the people must go to the theater in helicopters. Discounting those times when the radio declares a lunar eclipse, however, no one seems greatly disturbed. For my part, I console myself by turning my pockets inside-out and filling my socks with pennies.
The equator hangs over the back of the chair, a limp and withered cudgel. The mailman enters. The mailman is a Fatman who carries a dead dog at the bottom of his sack. He says: “Ever since I got so fat I have swung my two-foot key-chain in an ever-widening arc. Soon I’ll lasso the globe and eat it as a snack, just as I once ate oranges.” Never has laughter so deflated us. We sit on our toilets, sweating with shame.
At night I attach an upside-down funnel to my head to protect me from the draft that blows through the window. It’s a very clever idea, capable of being conceived only by one who is both chipper and dapper. Everyone I know agrees. Some have even begun to do it themselves. But I know them & therefore have little faith. They start out like a house on fire and end up as nose-pick.
We, madame (ma femelle), your humble servant, have recently formulated plans for a lightning-swift conquest of the world. We hesitate to announce them now, however, for 2 reasons: one, the mails are notoriously dangerous for transferring secret information, and two, you play a vital role in these plans and must hear them in the only decent way known to conquerors: from lips to ear. Humpty-Dumpty, your most devoted servant, therefore anxiously awaits your return to this corner of the universe.
Humpty-Dumpty, madame, nôtre femelle, wishes to convey his complete accord with the private revelations transformed into calligraphic notations for him in your most recent letter. In order to comply with your request, he hereby submits the following synopsis of his daily activities for your scrutiny:
Since it is important to live each day to the fullest, I rise early, at 4:05 A.M. I then run 5 miles in order to keep my body firm & healthy. Panting slightly, I return to my apartment at 4:18 and eat a well-balanced breakfast of crushed glass on toast, porcupine’s blood, and caviar. Feeling more chipper & dapper than ever, I then stride triumphantly into the bathroom, pull down my pants, sit on the toilet, and move my bowels. This activity terminates precisely at 4:31. I then go into the kitchen, pick up the plates I have just eaten off, & throw them on the floor. The Master of the Bagpipes sweeps them up. At 4:32 I arrive at my desk, read what I have written the day before, rip it up, eat it, and then sit, absolutely motionless, for a period of six hours and 18 minutes, waiting to be inspired. Exhausted by these endeavors, I then nap for exactly 4 hours on the couch. I wake up with a start, careful not to laugh, for fear of choking on my syllables and accidentally strangling myself. At 2:50 P.M. I return to my desk and in a great frenzy write in my journal concerning the events of the day thus far, for 10 minutes. At 3:00 I am served a well-balanced meal of beans, macaroni, chili, & horseradish by the blind ballerina. I finish my meal at 3:04 and then leave the house to ride on my bicycle through the park. I return at 5:03 & once again seat myself at my desk and take care of my correspondence. At 5:05 I take my afternoon nap. At 9:13 I am awakened by an orchestra of sirens and screams, which serves notice that dinner is ready. The Master of the Bagpipes and the blind ballerina, his wife, then serve me a well-balanced meal of radios, toasters, and lightbulbs (100 watt). During this meal I read the daily papers from New York, London, Paris, Rome, Prague, & Moscow. I eat the most interesting articles for dessert. From 9:21 to 11:33 I play either ping-pong or billiards with my companion, the Master of the Bagpipes. Then, until midnight, I do sitting-up exercises. At 12:01 I return to my desk and read a good book. I close the book at precisely 3:29. I then write furiously until 4:00. Wearied by the work, I fall asleep at my desk. At 4:02 the Master of the Bagpipes and the blind ballerina pick me up, carry me to my room, and put me to bed. I stir for a little while, but am sleeping deeply and soundly by 4:04.
Signed: the Dwarf.
JULY 9: We must not consider the distance between us as anything more than a transitory pain. We are small children with vivid imaginations that sometimes get the better of us. We awoke from unhappy dreams and sat up in our beds, surrounded by an unending night—night which had always passed so quickly in our sleep—and waited … for the darkness to dissipate into day. Already it is July. In less than a week you will have another birthday … Two days later I’ll go to court for a hearing, and soon after that, perhaps I’ll be in London …
It is late in the afternoon. I am writing to you in order to take a pause from the translations, which I do at a frenetic pace, in order to have done with them. I write at night. Though my emotions have become as erratic as the arms of an over-zealous but inexperienced boxer, my mind moves steadily toward … unexplored territory. Where I am now I do not check my coat, for fear of forgetting my body on the way out. Years of floundering seem to be emerging into a strange & clumsy strength that knows no fears and each day finds connections between elements that are … outlandishly disparate. A methodical spontaneity. A dialectic that excludes nothing.
Not all has gone smoothly, however. Norman, my stepfather, had a very bad heart attack about 2 weeks ago and is still recovering in the hospital. Things seem to be all right now, but they were dangerous for a while. I have spent much time in Newark …
JULY 12: Perhaps you have an exaggerated picture of the extent to which I have changed.—Change (or growth) … is always subtle, and this is no exception. My appearance, except perhaps for an increased thinness (I’ve become quite bony, though I dream of being robust, of looking like Mayakovsky) is the same. I wear the same clothes, I still smoke cigarettes … I still detest parties and continue to feel awkward among large groups of people. As I hinted in the last short letter, the change has been more intellectual than anything else—but of course this manifests itself in my behavior & attitudes: My only categorical imperative is that things must be faced head-on, in their entirety. If something is being overlooked—either willingly or accidentally—then one is living a lie …
Once I thought that art should be … divorced from society … Once I wished to live with my back turned to the world. I see now that this is impossible. Society, too, must be faced—not in the purity of contemplation, but with the intention of acting. But action, when generated from an ethic, often frightens people … because it does not seem to have a one-to-one correspondence to its intention. People are too literal-minded … they cannot think in terms of metaphors. Because left-wing political tactics do not have this one-to-one correspondence (the seizure of a university building, for example), people, in their confusion and fear, think there is some sinister plot or conspiracy at work …
The social revolution must be accompanied by a metaphysical revolution. Men’s minds must be liberated along with their physical existences—if not, any freedom obtained will be false & fleeting. Weapons for achieving & maintaining freedom must be created. This means a courageous stare into the unknown—the transformation of life … ART MUST POUND SAVAGELY ON THE DOORS OF ETERNITY …
Your letter today—the phrase: “I do not want to write to you, in fact, but only to see you again”—applies to me as well. Therefore, I have decided, no matter what, to come to England. I won’t tell you the exact date—I want to make it a surprise. Simply, I’ll be there sometime between July 18 and Aug. 1. So don’t go away during that time.
This, therefore, will be my last letter. You needn’t write again either, if you don’t want to. Just wear a pretty dress each day until I come; smoke as many cigarettes as you wish; and be kind to everyone you meet.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
It seems that she wanted more precise information about your travel plans, which would account for this short note, the last letter written before you left New York and went to London:
JULY 23: I succumb to your request with the humility of a monarch, who, on the advice of his magician, has abdicated his throne in order to join the revolution being waged against him.
30 July. BOAC—flight #500. Arriving, London airport: 7:40 A.M.
P.S. I won my case in court—that is—the hearing: charges were dropped because of insufficient evidence. A technicality. But, under a system in which the LAW is more important than JUSTICE, it would only be naïve to feel cheated.
Thirteen months went by before you wrote to her again. The long separation was over, and once she returned to New York to continue her studies at Barnard, there was no need for letters anymore. Out in the big world, the apocalypse was looming. The war had grown ever larger and more savage, the country was split in half, and new political battles kept breaking out at Columbia during your senior year, with another all-university strike in the spring. The student left had fractured, armed struggle was being plotted on the extreme fringe, and NASA was preparing to send American astronauts to the moon. You graduated on a clear blue morning just before the summer solstice. The following month, you took your army physical at the draft board center in Newark, and when you sat down to write to Lydia on August twenty-third (she had gone back to London for a family visit), you had no idea what would happen to you, no idea if and when you would be called up to serve, no idea if your next address would be a federal prison or an apartment in Morningside Heights. With no fixed plans for the future, you had decided to spend a year as a graduate student in the Comparative Literature department at Columbia. A PhD was out of the question, but you would be able to earn a master’s in that year, and because there would be no tuition to pay and the university had offered you a small stipend (two thousand dollars, about half of what you needed to live on), you figured you would stick around while your fate hung in the balance and Lydia finished her last year at Barnard. For reasons that had everything to do with your indifference (or contempt) toward middle-class life, you planned to supplement your income by working as a taxi driver.
In the long letter that follows, which was the longest one you ever wrote to her—and the only one composed on a typewriter—you were consciously trying to entertain her, turning a series of mundane events into a kind of low-life adventure story, and the ebullient spirit of the writing shows that you were in a happy frame of mind, in spite of the uncertainty you were facing. Still, you find the letter a curious document, since most of what you recount shows you to be a person who does not resemble the person you normally were, doing things you did not normally do (going to a burlesque show on Forty-second Street, sleeping with a girl you picked up in a bar, chatting with tattooed drug dealers), and yet the strangeness and unknowability of that young man interests you now—for that was probably the only time in your life when you made an active effort to let go of yourself, to act with a certain brashness, to shut your eyes and jump—without worrying about where you landed.19
You were spending some time with your mother and stepfather while you searched for a new apartment. The letter was written from their house in Mendham, New Jersey.
AUGUST 23, 1969: I write to you with a heart filled with affection, hands stumbling for the proper keys, a bit of joy, a bit of fatigue. Lately I have taken to writing on the typewriter … Less hesitation, more flow, a quicker discharge, which, despite the mechanical mediation, seems to come closer to the immediacy of my thoughts. I am lying in bed, the typewriter on my legs. It is nearly midnight. I returned from New York about two hours ago, New York … a festering cauldron of human misery, where I had been looking for an apartment and trying to get myself established as a taxi man. First things first. The motor vehicle agency is located at 80 Centre Street, not far from the enormous courthouse where I have spent many an afternoon, both as observer and defendant. (Did I ever tell you of the Fridays I spent with Mitch watching the trials, along with the somber Hasids and the drowsing bums who make a habit of going to those stark air-conditioned rooms every day, as if it were the theater, perched intently in their seats watching the operations of “justice,” the true judges, the indifferent ones, the ones who bear witness to the destinies of countless anonymous others, differentiated only by their docket numbers or by a technical distinction in the nature of their crimes, who watch the way an aesthete looks at a painting or a drunk at television? If not, I will.) The motor vehicle agency is another one of those oversized marble refrigerators, filled with bureaucrats of every sex, size, and gaze, who generally … fall into three categories: tired, irritable old men, tired, cheerful old men, and suspicious women with … painted faces … The procedure for becoming a cab-driver is comprised of several stages: obtaining a chauffeur’s license, obtaining a hack license, getting a job with one of the several hundred companies in the city. My visit to the M.V. department was for the single purpose of fulfilling the first of these requirements. Was I in for a surprise. I had thought I merely had to show up, make an appointment for the written test, and then come back in a day or two, take the test, and get the license. In essence this is what happened, except for one significant detail: the test will not be held until October 6. Yes, yes, once again it is red tape, long waiting lists, confusion, numbers, and forms. I had hoped to be a veteran of the streets by the time you returned … filled with a hundred amusing stories to tell you about my clients to help ease the burden of going back to school. Hélas, it will all have to wait. In the meantime I am forced to dip into my ever-dwindling resources to keep going. In spite of all, as I walked away from Centre Street, past the gate of Manhattan—a monstrous arch gratuitously placed at the end of Chambers Street—I tried to look at the good side of this little setback. If I couldn’t think of a good side, I was determined to invent one, such was my mood that day. I said to myself, well at least you can remain a free man a little longer, at least you can spend time with your writing, at least you can get settled at school first, at least you can find an apartment … So I set out to find an apartment. The odyssey lasted no more than two or three days (I honestly can’t remember, though it only just happened), but it might as well have been two or three years. Before I go into it, however, I should preface my remarks with some background information so that you can better understand the precise quality of the events, the precise state of mind in which I found myself, and the bearing this state of mind had on the events. The day after you left for London I drove into New York to see S. Another one of those exotic trips in the 2CV, a romance of gas fumes, trucks, and sweat, melodies of concrete, viaducts, propane, and steel, the luscious scenery of factories, miniature golf courses, drive-in theaters, used car lots, all the infinitely diverting bagatelles of the northern New Jersey landscape. I met S. at the fluid cleaning house on Fifteenth Street, found him at a metal desk in a little partitioned cubby-hole situated in a type of warehouse, reading the New York Post, a copy of Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind on the corner of the desk, found him in typically buoyant spirits. He was determined not to be destroyed by New York, although he confessed to be already feeling somewhat worn around the edges. We hopped into the car and drove uptown, up Sixth Avenue through the rush-hour traffic, and almost got killed when I manipulated my way alongside another 2CV, driven by an elderly man, who responded to my tooting with comradely smiles and frantic waves of the hand. When we got to S.’s apartment, we sat down to wait for a girl he had met on the plane. Someone who had spent the last two years on a commune in Oregon, who was about to leave on a visit to Alpert’s house in New Hampshire, Alpert, Timothy Leary’s sidekick … I asked S. to fix me up with someone so we wouldn’t be a triangle, which he did, or at least tried to do, but with no success. The girl arrived, proved much more amiable than I had expected. We went out for a Chinese dinner, then took a drive over the Brooklyn Bridge—a first for me, which excited me no end. We walked through Brooklyn Heights for a while, then along the Esplanade, looking at the ships, the tugs, and Manhattan across the water. We sat in a pleasant outdoor café for about an hour, S. and I vaguely engaged, or so it seemed, in a half-hearted competition to impress the girl, who went by the name of Suzette. All in all, I would say the three of us got along very well. We drove to S.’s [mother’s] house in Brighton Beach and then walked down the boardwalk to Coney Island, passing several large clusters of old Jews, huddling in the darkness around “Old Country” singers. For some reason these quiet spectacles, these dottering old people … speaking nothing but Yiddish and Polish, filled me with a dumb despair, which I tried to ignore by laughing. It was like walking into a dream of one’s past, a past seen for the first time, which previously had only been sensed, in the same way twentieth-century Americans sense what the old frontier was like. We came to Coney Island, another first for me. The whole night was like that: stepping among corpses, dead things which I had known only from hearsay, now confronted for the first time in the flesh. It was late on a drizzling weekday night and not many people were about, none of the enormous crowds that one expects to see at Coney Island. A desolation peopled with sleepless perverts, the decay of what is not yet old, blaring radios in empty, metallic arcades, a faint but ugly stench from clattering machines. We did not have much money and … participated little in the festivities, ignored the delights that could have been ours for a quarter. Only a desultory ride on the bumper cars … a fat sadist who rode with one leg hanging out of the car, who smashed us mercilessly time and time again without the slightest smile or grimace, as if he were merely executing an ancient duty, fulfilling the task that had been assigned to him in the earliest days of his youth. We played skee ball and each won a tiny aluminum sheriff’s badge, which we pinned mockingly to our breasts, then walked back to S.’s along the boardwalk, gliding our hands on the rain-slicked metal railing, peering through the slats in the wooden fence of the Aquarium, watching the desperate efforts of an old penguin to hop from one rock to another, stopping for a while beneath a tile-roofed shelter for a cigarette. We drank coffee at S.’s, discussed the infinite superiority of Henry Miller over Kerouac, then drove the girl back to … Queens. It was about three o’clock in the morning. For some unknown reason, S. and I returned to Coney Island. I think it was hunger that brought us back. We ate hot dogs and clams at Nathan’s, a fluorescent receptacle of weary insomniacs. An old bum, a toothless black man, whose voice I could hardly understand, engaged us in conversation for a little while. He was having trouble standing on his feet. We gave him a nickel, told him the time, and he whispered garbled confidences in our ears. Leaving us, he accidentally brushed past a well-dressed young black man, standing at the counter with his brothers and their families, and he, the old man, half in a stupor, half in a rage—a habitual rage, so it seemed—accused the younger man of having pushed him on purpose. Who did he think he was picking on people like that? The younger man would have none of these insults. Furthermore, he was respectable … and would have nothing to do with this old man, this worthless tramp, who might well have been his father. He began to push in earnest, thrusting out his chest like a ruptured peacock, then brought him over to the white policeman standing outside on the street, spewing forth a list of fabricated accusations to this white confessor, as if to say, it is trash like this that gives me my bad name. This little scene seemed significant to me, if only to demonstrate the rift that separates those who should feel closest to one another … The affair ended here, for the cop could not muster much enthusiasm over the case. S. and I went back to his mother’s apartment. We talked about writing until six o’clock, on the verge, I thought, of a real argument. He spoke of order, precision, limited tasks, I of chaos, life, and imperfection, unable to agree with him about the imminent annihilation of the individual. For me the problem of the world is first of all a problem of the self, and the solution can be accomplished only by beginning within and then … moving without. Expression, not mastery, is the key. S., I believe, is still too much of a critic, too absorbed in abstractions that are not counterbalanced by the brute facts of gastral pains. Stick to life, I say. I will make it my motto. Do you agree? Stick to life, no matter how fantastical, repulsive, or agonizing. Above all freedom. Above all dirtying your hands. I was ranting at him like a madman, at once filled with anger and joy, angry that he did not see what I saw, joyful that I had once and for all broken the bond with … academic prattle, with the seduction of neat ideas, with literature spelled with a capital L, elegantly embossed in fancy leather bindings. I’m all right, Lyd, let me assure you, I’m all right. I’m discovering what it … means to be an artist, to be the man who becomes the artist by turning himself inside out. Let me kiss you good night. S. was too tired, he couldn’t keep up with me, we turned in. I slept in his mother’s bedroom, in her nuptial bed of the night before. An odd sensation. I awoke to find my left forearm inflated with an enormous swelling, apparently from some bug, or a bee. Another rainy day. I spent the entire afternoon hunting for apartments in Brooklyn Heights. The St. George Hotel was like a prison; I didn’t hesitate in making my decision. Another hotel, a talk with the black manager about sunlight, windows, breezes, life in the South fifteen years ago, but no vacancies. Agencies, forms, fees, hunger. A series of overpriced, undersized apartments, climaxed by a slow twenty-minute walk with an old Orthodox Jewish broker to see yet another unacceptable place. I told myself to forget about Brooklyn, at least for the time being. Returned to Manhattan, linked up with S. once again. Desperate for girls, for companionship, for the succor of a sympathetic glance. Always futile, these sudden forays into the realm of desire. We spent the entire evening calling up, looking up friends, even the most casual acquaintances, but with no success. A call to Julie was answered by a girl named Aida, who said that Julie had gone to California, or some such place. But her voice was … soothing, and I decided that we should go over there anyway. When we arrived, the door was opened hesitantly by two giggling black fairies, stoned out of consciousness, who said they knew nothing of Aida. Perhaps she was there, talking her heart out in the back room, with her honeyed voice, perhaps breaking into a song or a murmur, but if so I never saw her or heard her again. Midnight. We rouse L. from his bed, nearly asleep, a copy of The Lean Yearson his pillow, yank him from the sheets with boisterous greetings and take him to the car, promising him a visit to an East Side bar. We are slovenly, unshaven, and bedraggled, hardly the ideal men for the mythical East Side cuties we have concocted in our desperation. Besides, we have scarcely ten dollars among us. By the time we arrive the bars are dead. We don’t even bother to go in. What to do? The absurdity of the night is all too glaring to us. We decide on a burlesque, but they have all closed down, so we finish off the misadventure with sandwiches at Ratner’s. Perhaps you understand the peculiar nature of the subterranean attitude. It is absolutely uncaring, absolutely ready to meet any challenge, to suffer any consequences. It is beyond worry, beyond exhilaration, beyond boredom. A total equilibrium, founded on rootlessness, acceptance of oneself, and an unquenchable curiosity. I find it easier and easier to put myself into this frame of mind, to look at everything as if for the first time. This is how you discover the mystery of everything that surrounds you. I was in this frame of mind, am still in it, ready to appreciate even the tiniest things. After I left the M.V. agency, I returned to my grandfather’s apartment, where I had deposited my things, called S., and went uptown to meet him for dinner. We decided, finally, to take in the show at the burlesque theater on 42nd St. between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Outside, a bum nabbed us for seven cents in order to buy a bottle of wine before the liquor store closed, before that little neon sign went out, he said, and promised to drink us a toast. Walking toward the theater, S.’s nerve had already begun to fail him, and he had talked of going to a movie instead. The bum’s interruption only prolonged his waverings. The four-dollar price for a ticket seemed to decide it, and had I not insisted that we go in anyway, in spite of the cost, I am convinced he would have turned around and walked away. I don’t mean to deprecate S. His attitude is fully understandable. I was persistent only because I thought we shouldn’t back down on our plans. It’s a bad habit to get into. So we went in and paid our four dollars to the black woman in the cashier booth, whose little boy sat next to her reading a comic book. The theater was dark and sparsely filled … Middle-aged men mostly, not too disreputable-looking: one even wore a baseball cap with a big B on it. There were forty-five minutes to wait for the next show, and in the meantime movies were being presented, stag films I supposed they’re called, of little or no interest, being nothing more than films of a naked woman writhing on a bed, with frequent full-screen closeups of the cunt. The whole thing was rather boring and lifeless, and the audience showed little interest. There was much coming and going in and out of the theater, and I even heard some snoring from up front. Finally the films stopped, in mid-reel (there is no beginning, middle, or end, and consequently it hardly matters when the projector is shut off) and a woman’s voice with a French accent announced that the show would begin in five minutes. This is what we had come for. Our spirits became somewhat more cheerful. From backstage a live band began to play, with heavy emphasis on a monotonous drum-beat. Again the French voice, this time announcing “the very lovely and very sexy Flaming Lily.” Among the other names that I remember, Amber Mist, Kimono Tokyo, and Sandra Del Rio are the ones I like best. Each girl performs separately, each with her own act, her own costume. Some speak lasciviously to the men in the first row, others do not. Some wear earrings, some wear gloves, some wear stockings. Each body … is different. Some plump, some lean, some juicy, some arid, some pretty, others not. Success, I believe, is not determined by good looks or by dancing skill, but by the ability to communicate with the audience. There is nothing so depressing as to watch an uninspired stripper. It is the lowest form of degradation. The good ones, on the other hand, are a pleasure to observe. Nothing can stop the richness of their souls from coming to the surface. It almost gives you an erection to be in the presence of a woman who so fully appreciates the power of her sex. She can transcend, during her most exalted moments, the demeaning restrictions of her art and establish a startling rapport with her audience, an almost motherly understanding and indulgence of the men before her. I am convinced that the good stripper must be possessed of infinite wisdom and patience … I would like to get to speak to one of them, in particular the French woman, by far the oldest of the lot, who was also the announcer. I was impressed by the way she left the theater after the show, a departure I witnessed only by chance: her arm in the arm of her stocky Puerto Rican boyfriend, her hand holding the hand of her tiny blond-haired daughter. The ladies who inhabit plush air-conditioned apartments and strut in and out of expensive East Side shops, wearing their well-tended beauty like a badge of wealth and prestige, the ladies who dabble in charity, who speak with finely educated voices, who hold responsible positions, drive cars, discuss art, command servants, all these rich American ladies will never hold a candle to this faded-out, heavily painted woman of forty. Though the burlesque show had somewhat repulsed me, I slept well for having seen this woman. The next day I met up with F., and we went out to hunt for apartments. First to the Columbia registry. Nothing. Then to inquire about graduate dormitories. A waiting list of five hundred. Then a vain perusal of the newspapers. It’s getting desperate. Even the residence hotels are filled. I get an application for the International House, begin to complete it, and then rip it up in disgust when I see that they want recommendations from professors, a record of my accomplishments, and a statement of my financial situation. The day passes. I don’t even get to look at an apartment. But F.’s company has been pleasant and my confidence remains intact. S. joins us for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The talk is good, the food is good, and once again I am eating à la chinoise. Afterwards we begin walking up Broadway and S. says he thinks he would like to take a walk. This statement strikes both me and F. as ridiculous, as it is apparent that we are already taking a walk. A round of laughs, chortles for the passersby, the Dapper Dans and their Sweet Susies, the Happy Harrys and their Giggling Glendas, the old ladies and their dogs. We enter the West End with nothing particular in mind. F. and I sat down at the bar with Hugh S., and S. repaired to a table where a friend of his, a girl, was seated. I waved to Claudia T. across the way, talked to Hugh about California, apartments, and typewriters, and F., growing weary, decided to leave. After a while S. came up to me and asked if I would like to take the two girls to the movies. (His friend was sitting with a friend.) I was in no hurry to make any decisions … for I was still drinking my beer and feeling rather tired. I agreed to go over to the table after I had finished my drink. I finish languidly, too interested in my conversation to move with haste. Indifference is perhaps the word I am looking for. S.’s friend turned out to be a chubby girl with a lovely face who went by the unlikely name of Sam. The other girl, J., was from Detroit—accent on the first syllable—and was the owner of a folksy accent, which appealed to me … The girls did not want to go to the movies, which was all right as far as I was concerned. Instead, they wanted to bake a cake, and we were cordially invited … We bought the ingredients in a market several blocks down the street. The checkout girl’s name-plate read: PeeWee T. Their apartment, which was situated above the Japanese restaurant on 105th St., next door to the parlor of Madame Rosalia, had been occupied, we were told, by a strange trio of dope peddlers for the last month. The girls had been away for most of the summer, and the subleasing arrangements had obviously gone awry. Allow me to describe the three of them. First there was Bill, the most talkative and psychotic of the lot, apparently the leader. He was about twenty years old, I would say, wore his hair in the manner of the motorcycle hoods of the nineteen-fifties—DA style—wore a big gold earring in his left ear, and had several tattoos, one of which read: Born to Raise Hell, had been in the army and had been shot in the leg in Korea. Eyes like razor blades; a friendliness that could verge at any moment into violence. We got along splendidly. He told me the story of how he had lost his medals by going AWOL. The story of how his brother had gotten into a motorcycle gang. The stories of drinking and drugs; how he liked nothing better than to get “destroyed” with somebody else. Many stories, too numerous to recount. There was also Ken, the pretty boy of the group, who each night put up his hair in curlers in an effort to undo the effects of a hair-straightening episode. I gathered that he knew the famous Murph the Surf and was wanted in a variety of states for assorted petty crimes. Finally, there was Gary, a quiet, dissipated fellow, who was either the dumbest or the smartest of the three, I could never tell which. We all sat around, waiting for the cake to bake. Henry K. arrived with a friend, having just hitch-hiked from a forestry camp in Michigan, where he had spent the summer in preparation for entering the University of Michigan School of Forestry. The time was passed by filling out a Playboy questionnaire on sex, eating the cake, carrying on. There must have been about ten people there. Finally, Henry K. left. Then his friend left. S. wanted to leave, and I was about to go with him when the girl from Detroit said she would like me to stay. Just like that. So there we were, the two of us sitting on the couch, drinking bourbon, listening to Bill’s disquisition on the drinks of the Orient. He spoke endlessly, I thought he’d never shut up, and my impatience grew in drunkenness, knowing with half-light intuition that the girl was thinking the same thing I was. Finally, he offered to go out to buy some beer. We took this opportunity to begin kissing on the couch … I was surprised to discover that she wore no underwear. Bill returned. I drank a beer with him to be polite, then the girl, who was little and ferocious … took me to her bedroom, and we lay down on the mattress. We made love until dawn, lustily and with no inhibitions. It did me good. I woke refreshed and happy after only four hours sleep. We set out to look for apartments. Another total failure. Late afternoon, we went to the movies, returned to her apartment at about nine to make some dinner. Bill, Ken, and Gary were there, celebrating what they claimed was a big sale of LSD. They wondered if we would mind eating dinner in a restaurant, as they were expecting a visit from another “business associate.” They gave us ten dollars, and we went without any complaints—to the Indian restaurant on 93rd St. for an overpriced meal twice interrupted by a newspaper hawker who uttered only three words, with the voice of a punch-drunk boxer: Screw, Kiss, Fuck. Screw, Kiss, Fuck. Screw, Kiss, Fuck. After dinner we visited L. and stayed until about one-thirty. On the way back to J.’s apartment, we stopped at the house of someone she thought might know about a place for rent. A thirty-eight-year-old Dominican Republic woman, named Isabel, who worked as a Spanish dancer, who never stopped laughing, fat, robust, a sheer joy to talk to. Unfortunately, she had just sublet her place to a pair of seventy-eight-year-old newly-weds. She would be leaving in a few days for Idaho, to live with her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, a farm boy who had gone to Columbia for a year. We got back to 105th St to find the apartment empty, except for a not-too-bright young girl, Anna, who was also living there. She was sitting on the fire escape, visibly upset. She said that the three of them, thinking the guy who had come to the apartment was a cop, had beaten him up—but good—and had then high-tailed out by way of the fire escape. A little later the phone rang and I answered it. It was Joe—the guy who had been beaten up—swearing vengeance on Bill, Ken, and Gary. He had just been to the hospital, gotten ten stitches, and was going to come back tomorrow with his brothers to get even. He told me to give them warning. The girl Anna now changed her story. She said that they knew Joe wasn’t a cop and had invited him up to the apartment—on the pretext of selling him drugs—only to beat him and rob him. A cheap trick. Fortunately for him, he hadn’t brought any money. J. became very frightened and I tried to calm her down. I told her that they probably wouldn’t be coming back, and even if they did, we didn’t have to let them in, and that they wouldn’t want to come in anyway if they knew the others were after them. The next day, Joseph and his brothers took up a constant watch outside the building, but the three musketeers failed to return. Another day of apartment hunting. This time in a car, driven by Sam, from one end of Manhattan to the other, from the Lower East Side to Washington Heights. Another meal at Ratner’s. Knowing that I had no money left, seeing that I had just run out of cigarettes, J. got up from the table and came back with a pack of Luckies. A tiny unsolicited kindness that touched me deeply. Trucks, hippies, sweatshirts, highways, traffic, dusty hallways. In Washington Heights I spoke with a woman about her daughter’s apartment on Claremont Avenue. The daughter, now divorced, was living in St. Thomas and trying to make a new life by opening a dancing school. I would have to wait several days for an answer. J. and I walked around Washington Heights, a blighted, forsaken area … then took the subway one hundred and forty blocks to the Port Authority terminal. There was an hour wait for the bus. I had the runs, and during one of my several trips to the toilet—a harrowing business in that place, because all the queers look through the openings in the stalls to watch you shitting—in this strange public toilet, as big as an emporium, I once again met Henry K. He was just returning from an outing in New Jersey. Seeing him again gave an uncanny symmetry to my brief stay in New York. I had expected never to see him again, and now, within three days, I had seen him twice. We rejoined J. in the waiting room, went to the drugstore where I had a Bromo at the counter. Are you supposed to take them for headaches or stomach aches? Whatever, it was the foulest stuff I had ever tasted, a chalky volcano of vomit. The old black man sitting next to us got a big kick out of the sight of it and couldn’t control his laughter. We went up to the platform, said our good-byes. They were going to go to the movies, I think. I got on the bus and suffered through a ride with a bunch of giggling high school girls who talked of nothing but their grades. During the trip I read an essay by Henry Miller: Letter to All Surrealists Everywhere.
It is morning. It has taken me many hours to write you this one-paragraph letter. I am tired beyond belief, but I had to finish. The birds are going wild, an early morning song, ecstatic and abundant. I’m sure it will be a beautiful day. I’ll sleep through it like a child. I wanted to write you a long letter in order to hold your attention for as long as possible. I have written with love and fatigue. I miss you very much. Will you write to me soon?
Love,
Paul