B007RT1UH4 EBOK (24 page)

A very distracting letter from John Snow. I shall show it you; he thinks he is well-off, but you may read it and may understand why I don’t see going back to Harvard, where he is. Very sad.

And Granga and I seem to have got up a regular correspondence! Glad of course that you are passing such a jolly and busy winter. I trust you still attend your ceramic classes in the midst of all that gaiety! Eh?

Since I am on very bad terms with myself—writing going badly, so I have no sympathy
here
—I shall cut short, before I begin railing at something.

Love,

Bill

divination book: probably
The Book of Fate
, ascribed to Napoleon, first published in 1822, reprinted often thereafter, and quoted a few times in
R
(137, 754).

Dostoevski’s
House of the Dead
: documentary novel first published in 1861–62. 35 sides: 78 rpm phonograph records held only about four or five minutes of music per side.

To Edith Gaddis

Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone

[13 March 1948]

dear Mother.

One thing I do not understand. You know, I left N.Y. with comparatively little luggage. And now this room is
littered
. Junk all over the place, and all over the walls, &c. Apparently I am a real candidate for the studio; but I cannot understand how these things just
accummulate
.

This morning I rode into Balboa with the foreman on our job—he says he thinks it will last for 3 or 4 more weeks. And then I find that I cannot get the reduced rate back to the U.S.—that is 40$, the regular rate being 180$! So I guess I shall go up to Costa Rica as tenatively planned. Have recently been reading about Eugene O’Neill—and am furious that one can no longer live as he did—just wandering about, one job, one ship to another. No. To travel now—and this most especially for the woeful American—one must have money, and be ready to pay at every turn. [...]

Well—that little business can wait another couple of weeks—since I am just now getting no writing done at all, only making voluminous notes, and a few sketches for what should be splendid stage sets. (How one wanders, wanders, from one creative world to another—) (And this morning I got from the library a book on plays and two books of plays—perhaps the childhood influence of the ever-beautiful Frances Henderson—). [...]

Love,

W.

Frances Henderson: unidentified.

To Katherine Anne Porter

Panama, R.P.

7 April, 1948.

My dear Miss Porter.

Perhaps you can understand how well your letter was received, how many times read; and how much I want to repay your kindness by trying very hard to write you an honest letter. I find it difficult always (or rather of course make it difficult for myself) to write an honest letter because I am not clear yet about writing a letter, and especially as now when this writing I do is not going well then to write a letter is more strange still because it becomes an outlet which it should not be but the writing should be. Not that the writing is an outlet, but as though the outlet is the purpose. Well when the writing is consistently unsatisfactory then the purpose is all confused, and one may run to letter-writing saying, —Here is what I have to say, you will see how important it is, and what a worthy one I am . . . no, I haven’t quite finished the story, the novel, the play, but meanwhile you must appreciate . . . Well you understand, that it can be like that morass of conversation. And so now often in the middle of a letter I must stop and say, —What filthy little vanity is this, Willie, that you are relishing so. And stop, furious with myself and also the person who does not get the letter. Still it is all wrong, absolutely, to then turn and revel in the idea of not being able to write a letter. You know, I have so many letters from NY that start out, —I started to write you a letter last week, but it turned out to be . . . , and —I have written you twice, and the letters are here unmailed. Well those people are writing to themselves, and would do better to not bother using someone else’s name at the head of the sheet as an excuse. But the vanity of letter-writing, of shouting out for witnesses. I have thought a great deal about this whole insistence on a witness that we all make, that is certainly one reason why so many bad novels are so bad. Much of it seems to be a very American thing too, I see the American with the camera everywhere, that filthy silent witness; and to jump off of the aeroplane when it lands in one country after another: no time to look at the volcano or feel the air except to say to another how hot it is, but (because the ’plane will only be in Guatemala, in Nicaragua, in Costa Rica, for fifteen minutes) that one must get to the counter and send off postal cards with a picture of the volcano he did not see, to witnesses. I have recently finished reading the New Testament, which makes much of witnesses. Now what did Jesus mean, (this is Matthew 9:30, 31, after he has healed a blind man) And their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See that no man know it. But they, when they were departed, spread abroad his fame in all that country. Now certainly the largest reason he carried on these miracles was simply for witnesses, later he charges the apostles as witnesses. No; but getting back, everyone running about insisting on having them. (And that often splendid comedian Jimmy Durante’s —Everybody wants to get into the act. Well.) Certainly a prophet needs witnesses, otherwise the whole thing is to little avail. But the instant a piece of writing takes on the note of, —See what I have done, where I have been, what I have read; but do not forget that these things cannot happen to you but through me . . . well then the whole thing is vile, will not do. And the other side of that dirty coin is all of the snivelling confessionals, they are the most infuriating and it seems to be the way the coin is falling now. Oh, these soft-handed little boys who suffer so with themselves and their boys and ‘men’, I am intolerant. Or of the loneliness of our lot, without a poet of stature that sensibility snivels. But Goethe’s (I do not read German, I have learned some by rote—I am trying to be honest) Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt weiss was Ich leide, Allein und abgetrennt von alle Freude—that that stands up in suffering; or Rilke’s Who if I cried would hear me in the angelic orders. This distinction between loneliness and alone-ness. But to start this bad arguement at its beginning: Did you have trouble with people anticipating you? that an idea which you had discovered and formulated for yourself and then were working to deliver it, find it was not yours (in the mean sense) but (if you thought further, with courage and (if you were not mean) gratitude) eventually yours most because given to all, because perhaps one may have the brass to say it is a truth? Well, and so when you said in your letter of distinguishing loneliness and solitude, I was immediately troubled, even (witness this meanness) offended. Do you understand? As though, what business had you, to offer in some fifteen words, what I discovered finally some six or eight months ago, discovered with such triumph! And really what meaner more unchristian thing than one who would try to covet a truth. And these months past I have been running around pounding the board for recognition of aloneness and (this above all) the incumbent responsibility. Discovery indeed! And then to read Sartre’s
Les Mouches
. This, if ever was, a time to find joy and triumph when truth is shared, and to tear out meanness where it grows, to be Christian. (The only poetry I have been reading here—after the tiresome disappointment of Auden’s
The Age of Anxiety
—is Eliot; and I say this because a line suddenly comes up, —I am no prophet, but here’s no great matter; I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter &c.)

This business of owning an idea, a line, an image. For instance, I remember finding the notion that some people are ‘not big enough for tragedy’, and believe me I have worked it out in a wonderful number of useless words: and then found it in Forster, in one sentence. (That was four or five years ago, I was in college.) But even now it has happened again, this time not a notion but a line, the title I had settled on for this work I am at now is Some people who were naked, that is what I want, it is the whole idea. And then I have just had recommended to read, and finally had the courage to read, a play by Pirandello, the title of course is
Vestire gl’ignudi
, Clothing the Naked. That was a start. Then, his heroine, Ersilia, says (with infinite sadness, but with a smile nevertheless) In that case, I shall not be the woman I was, nor the woman I am, but still another! (My Esme (even the name, you see) was one who was uncertain as to her identity, finally could not stand to be alone (knowing though that aloneness is essential) because without a witness she could not know if she had really done things, and finally loses all concept of being anyone at all) (Ersilia finishes the P—play with, —that I am dead . . . yes, and that I died naked!) My elder protagonist to be one who (exactly in the same manner of Faust, paraphrasus of the circumstances, dog and all) sells himself to the devil (a publisher, entrepreneur) to forge paintings. And to find P—’s protagonist sending the letter to Ersilia signed Faust. Well.

But you will see the whole thing clearly enough to understand that it cannot be simply this disconcerting discovery and relinquishing of ideas. Because there they are anyhow, and not new. And so one is forced to say ‘style’? That word! And what ridiculous arguements, wasteful discussions it brings forth. I remember one, in which I had commented on what a fine style in David Hume; my antogonist started immediately with saying that Hume did not try to write in a style, but the style came about as he wrote writing to say what he had to say. You see where this arguement is going. Two people without style arguing on the same side against eachother; still I would try to say that, now that Hume is through, one reads him and sees an excellent style, after the fact. Glenway Wescott a fine stylist; and Rebecca West extraordinary: (so extraordinary, that once during the most recent war I was working on the
New Yorker
, and one of her pieces, a report on a trial for treason, described with such wondrous style a room in Lords, &c &c, that we could not eventually make out which room she meant: she did not once say, the fact simply wasn’t there in all of that style.) And a preoccupation with style for itself is admittedly ruinous.