From the Sixties—I

Memorial Day. A new notebook. A man wearing a powdered wig and a tricorne carries a bass drum past the liquor store. I do not take my younger son to the parade, as I would have done two years ago. I have grown this old, not to say jumpy. Taking Ben to see “The Bridge on the River Kwai” I think of X, who, suffering from melancholy, walked through the city looking for moving pictures that dealt with cruel and sudden death, torture, earthquakes, floods, and assassinations—with any human misery that would, briefly, make his own burdens seem lighter. And sitting in the movie I wonder if this cafard, this immortal longing, this mysterious and stupendous melancholy from which I seem to suffer is no more than common alcoholism. So I look yearningly at the soft stars, but they will do me no good. I think of moral crises, but when have I known the taste of abstinence and self-discipline?

To describe human misery in all its vastness and intensity without creating an air of disqualification. To trim misery of petulance and morbidity, to give pain some nobility. But can one do this—can one handle tragedy—without some moral authority, some sense of good and evil?

Having drunk less than usual, having, as my father would say, gone light on the hooch, I find myself, for the first time in a long time, free of the cafard. Quarter to nine. Eastern daylight-saving time. It would be pleasant to consider this a simple matter of self-discipline. Thunder and rain in the middle of the afternoon; the first of the month. Our primordial anxiety about drought and its effect on the crops, the crops in this case being three acres of lawn and forty-two rosebushes.

In thinking of the book, I would like to avoid indecency, but to overlook the fact that we have, after a long struggle, achieved a practical degree of sexual candor would be like perching on a stool and writing with a quill pen by candlelight. We have the freedom to describe erotic experience, and it seems irresistible.

The congress of church organists produces fewer odd sticks than I expected. Several of the men would have passed in business; one of them actually appears to be athletic. And one of them—a small man—has a harried or demented look. The women have that look of widowhood or bereftness that sometimes seems to follow a life dedicated to music. Two of them are plump, florid, and dressed in pink. One of them has a liverish face that is deeply and unremittingly incised with pain. She appears to have been crying continuously. The national, cultural, and economic differences in the houses of God are abysmal. The painted memorial windows in the Polish church need repair. The church itself has a vast and institutional bleakness. The Stations of the Cross are bloody and vulgar. The floor is dusty. But, even so, there is something here: the unequalled poetry of our faith, this vast reflection of human nature, the need for prayer, love, the expressiveness of grief. Christ Church in Greenwich is a triumph of wealth and Trinitarianism in this leafy corner of the United States. In preparation for a wedding, florists are tying white stock to the ends of the pews. This scents the air, not with sweetness but with an exciting smell of earth. The stained-glass windows are explicit, gloomy, and dated, but they have, like everything else in this house, the authority of great wealth. There is no baroque foolishness about the organ, no liquid and nostalgic reach. It is straightforward, wrathful, and thunderous, and has in its fainter ranges an echo like some sweetness of remorse. To be buried from this chancel would, it seems, assure one a place in Heaven.

The dog days go on. I read the Hemingway book. This arouses those mixed feelings we endure when some intact part of adolescence clashes with the men we have become. When I was a young man, my absorption in his work was complete. I imitated his person and his style. He writes with the galvanic distortion that gives the illusion of a particular vision; that is, he breaks and re-forms the habitual rhythms of introspection. I think I think his remarks about Scott’s cock are in bad taste, as may be the quarrel between Stein and her friend. I am for some reason embarrassed by his references to walking home on the dry snow and making love.

It was Sadie Hawkins Day at the country club. Women chose their golfing partners and paid for their drinks and their dinner. The double-entendres about balls kept them all laughing merrily from morning until night.

In the men’s room at Grand Central there is a scene not quite comprehended. Two men, I do not see their faces, are pretending to fasten their trousers but are in fact exposing themselves. Presently, the show ends, and they go away, but I am shaken and mystified. Later, while I am having my shoes shined, one of them returns. His whatsit as well as his backside is on display, and the opportunities that he represents seem to me dangerous and fascinating. Here is a means of upsetting the applecart in an intimacy, a word. One could, with a touch, break the laws of the city and the natural world, expose the useless burdens of guilt and remorse, and make some claim for man’s wayward and cataclysmic nature. And for a moment the natural world seems a dark burden of expensive shoes, and garters that bind, tiresome parties and dull loves, commuting trains, coy advertisements, and hard liquor. But I take Federico swimming and find myself happily a member of the lawful world. Decency, courage, resoluteness, all these terms have beauty and meaning. There is a line, but it seems in my case to be a very faint one. I seem to move only on a series of chance recognitions, and when there is nothing recognizable about the face, the clothing, or the conduct I seem threatened by an erotic abyss. The sensible thing is to stay out of such places.

Either my age or some change in my humor makes the heaviness of the air in the valley these days depressing. At three there seems to be some intensification of this. The air appears to be smoky. There is a double note of thunder in the southwest. I observe that should the rain not come, should the storm not break, I would be bitterly disappointed. Then the storm moves around to the east and finally strikes the valley. The air is aromatic the instant the rain falls. Ben cuts a paper airplane for his little brother. The old dog will not leave my side.

There is a flight of black birds, starlings I guess, from the B.s’ woods. They come in twos and threes, in dozens and larger numbers; they seem, like the leaves in autumn, to unwind from the dark woods. This is no season for migration. They cross the sky travelling from the B.s’ woods to the S.s’ in thousands; one had not known there were so many starlings around. My son bets me a penny that we have seen the last of them, and when we have made the bet another flight unwinds. Later, we see swallows in pairs, and, later, bats. The woods that stand all around the sky darken. It is beautiful, I think, more beautiful than the rest of the world, as if some curious competition went on between Tuscany and the Hudson Valley.

A bright, fine day and I accomplish nothing. Ben goes off with his effeminate friend at four. Federico and I walk over to the greenhouse to get some rosemary. We stop to watch a football game. The grass is green, its greenest; the trees are still full-leaved and beginning to color. Such a pure light shines on the cliffs of the river that the shadow, black, seems like a darkness deposited in the stone, on the stone, by the passage of night. It is a handsome scene—the well-dressed men and women, the brilliant red-and-maroon football uniforms against the green playing field. But my son, I notice, is not here—neither he nor his friend—and I wonder where they are. Are they cobbling each other as I sometimes did, in a damp toolshed, while the irrecapturable beauty of the autumn afternoon begins to fade? The beauty of the day seems to add some acuteness to my feeling. As we walk toward the temple of love, Mrs. V. speaks to us. Her face is clear in the autumn light, the features still striking, vigorous, and colorful. She wears a broad-brimmed straw hat, covered with autumn flowers and leaves, that she bought in Spain, she explains, many years ago. “What a beautiful scene,” she says of the football game. “How beautiful motion is, isn’t it? I love trains. I was born and brought up within sight of a railroad track. I like to see the sparks fall off the brake box, the lighted windows reflected in the cove. I can also remember the horsecars. I’m not quite sure whether they were drawn by horses or mules, but they were very light. By jumping up and down on the back you could nearly upset them.” We say goodbye and go on, and she stands by the temple—an old lady, an autumn day, a garden close to ruin. Back at the house, Ben shows up and I ask him angrily to come in for a minute. I ask him why he didn’t go to the football game, why he didn’t have supper with his friends, where he has been. What I claim to feel is that he has turned his back on the beauty of the autumn day, the green playing field, and the decent people, but what I really fear is that he has been indulging in the vices of my own youth, smoking cigarettes and masturbating in the moldy-smelling woods. I ask him why he isn’t out there playing, working as a linesman, bringing water to the players, and I do not seem to remember going to the meadow to play football one day and being overtaken by—what? shyness or cowardice?—and hurrying by so no one would invite me to play. So I seem to pour onto his broad and tender shoulders all my anxiety, my guilt. And yet, for all the depth and bitterness of my feeling—bitterness and tenderness—the scene lacks a degree of reality, the suburban sky seems to reflect a bland, an unserious light. Yes, there is some longing here, some real longing here, for a more tempestuous, more genuine atmosphere. What has gone wrong, that we should all seem to be made of paper and straw? What is the world I wish to achieve for myself and my sons? What would be a better scene for this discourse? God knows. A mountain pass, a long beach, the darkness just before a storm. Why does the man teaching his son to get out a fishing line, as I have done; the gallant old lady reminiscing about horsecars; me pouring onto the shoulders of my fair son the guilty vices of my adolescence—why should we seem to be no better than the characters in a vulgar situation comedy? By turning my head I can see the ancient cliffs of the river, still scored by the volcanic powers that shaped the planet, the days of creation, so why, as we quarrel, as his character is being made or unmade, should the air that my beloved son and I breathe seem so domesticated, so bland, so thin? Let us away to Italy or St. Botolphs.

Tired in the morning, and I tire myself mostly with drink and conviviality. I find the drive tiring, gruelling. I observe the works of man and nature—the fair pastures along the parkway and the grace of the elms. Farther north, some of the maples have colored—these incendiary colors that are so lambent they lie outside the spectrum. Up into the granite hills, the granite mountains, the fine, light air, carrying all the fragrance of the land so clearly, the deep blue of the shadows, rainlights. I kiss Susie goodbye, and wish her good things in Italian. We have already been to church. Let us all make something decent and admirable of our lives. I dine on creamed chicken in a candlelit barn. In bed, my teeth ache, my heart is painful, my chest is sore, my back is lame. I dream that the atomic bomb is exploded somewhere off the Battery. Whose? Ours? I hear the hellish noise and see the mushroom cloud. Many men throw themselves into the harbor, shouting, “Let’s get the hell out of this world.” Mary wants to do this, but I say, “No, no, we will stay alive, we will do something with our lives.” But my skin has begun to burn, and I realize it is too late. I am waked by a church bell that rings all the hours and has a pure and gentle note. I hear all the hours rung but five.

I spend the night with C., and what do I make of this? I seem unashamed, and yet I feel or apprehend the weight of social strictures, the threat of punishment. But I have acted only on my own instincts, tried, discreetly, to relieve my drunken loneliness, my troublesome hunger for sexual tenderness. Perhaps sin has to do with the incident, and I have had this sort of intercourse only three times in my adult life. I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines. It is not my choice that I am alone here and exposed to temptation, but I sincerely hope that this will not happen again. I trust that what I did was not wrong. I trust that I have harmed no one I love. The worst may be that I have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie.

I suppose it is all tied up with my romantic agony. He leaves just before dark, and alone in the living room I feel sick—with what? Sick over a morbid and hopeless love, sick over my inability to resume the life I’ve chosen. We go out for dinner, and Mary, across the room, looks pretty and I remember the hundreds, the thousands of nights when I have sat cheerfully through the anecdotes, the arguments, the games, with the thought of a jolly hour in bed to keep me humorous and alert. But now my vitals seem sapped, I throw bad dice, I despair. But at home Mary takes me in her arms, kindly, tenderly, and I am myself. I have what I want, and waking in the morning, stiff and randy, I am as high as at dusk I was miserable. As I walk up from the station in the cold north wind some dream of love seems to spread out before me, golden ceilings and garlands of fruit, and gigantism and richness. We make love in the afternoon, and now the new house resumes its importance for the first time in months; we talk about painting the kitchen. So there are, I suppose, two faces to this: my fear of being caught in a world that bores me, and the sexual richness of my marriage. I think—foolishly but, nonetheless, with pleasure—of the house, of greeting guests, of pointing out the river view from the terrace. I am back in my own jolly country. Now the image of death is laid, it is insubstantial, and now that it is over, now that I am unafraid, I think that I will write C. a letter. But by doing this wouldn’t I begin the whole cycle again, wouldn’t I betray some incurable taste for melancholy?

The closing; and so I have at last bought a house. Coming home on the train, Mary speaks of the complexity of our lives—the red coat she wore to the hospital in Rome when Federico was born—and it does seem rich and vast, like the history of China. We move books. To Holy Communion, where I first express my gratitude for safe travels, luck with money, love, and children. I pray that our life in the new house will be peaceful and full. I pray to be absolved of my foolishness and to be returned to the liveliness, the acuteness of feeling, that seems to be my best approach to things. I remember walking in the autumn woods six or seven years ago when, in a powerful rush of feeling, I felt that my participation in life was a participation in something vivid and magnificent. It is a dark morning. The window above the altar shows only a few dark colors. Sleet, and, in the afternoon, snow. The driving is bad, we cannot move, and I find the suspense galling.

On Monday we pack. My feelings are mostly confused, painfully so, and are still confused today. On Tuesday the furniture is carted off, but I have no clear feelings about this house, now empty, where we have lived happily and unhappily for so many years. I remember coming to the place alone, with a box of books. I was ten years younger. In the dirty, cold, and empty room I had an enthusiastic vision of a dinner party—lights and pretty women—myself (yes, yes) in dinner clothes, and it all came true. “We gave a dinner party for eighty-five,” I told the young man, “the night before we sailed for Italy.” We eat precooked frozen dinners off tinfoil plates, and I think of a family who customarily do this, and who speak to one another in advertising slogans. “Aren’t these garden-fresh peas in fresh creamery butter delicious?” “And this tangy, zesty Swiss steak is served in such generous portions!” Even the littlest child has something to say along these lines. Even the babe in arms sings a commercial. Mary goes off to sing with A., and I am left alone in what seems to be a haunted house, but haunted by whom? The oil-burner stinks and the fumes are so bad they make the baby ill. S. calls to ask where her husband is. “We’ve married wandering minstrels, haven’t we,” she says, “you and I?” I am sore but keep my temper. On Wednesday morning I wake asking for valor, courage, strength, largeness of spirit, all good things, and seem to have a few of them. We move. The new house is empty, and long after we have put down our rugs and arranged the furniture, long after the friends have come and gone with flowers and wine, after the pictures have been hung and the curtains drawn and the lamps lighted, the image of the empty house—cat smell in the upstairs hallway, and scuffed and faded paint—is much more vivid than all our arranging. The image of emptiness is for me a kind of horror. The lamps and flowers seem transparent. The arrangements go on through Thursday and Friday, and on Friday afternoon the snow begins to fall, and falls steadily for twelve hours. Old Mrs. L. once said that I should not be too sensitive, and I don’t seem to be able to take her advice. My feelings about heating plants are conditioned by the fact that the heating plant in the old house frequently broke down and once blew up. There is a leak in the guest room. The oil-burner seems erratic. I had a drink at half past eight.

More snow. Ben’s school bus is late, and I bring him home. Shovel snow, blessed snow, until half past three, whereupon I drink too much and am unpleasant about the dressing room. Wake in the night to hear the domestic machinery making its own decisions. First the oil-burner, then the icebox, the vacuum pump, the sump pump. I seem less anxious, more thick-skinned, I hope. I hope that inch by inch we will take possession of this house, this place. It does seem to be a struggle. Wake to a dark morning, heavy snow falling. I drive Ben to Scarborough, and there is that fine sense—adrenaline, I guess—my mouth dry but some new reserves seem called on. Mary is unforgiving, and I shovel snow for my good health, and I seem to move, through this simple exercise, from despair into hopefulness. I see the buds on the trees, I can imagine how it will look in the summer, I seem to hear my daughter’s voice from the shore of the pond. I almost—but not quite—get into the beauty of the scene, away from the anxieties, an old man’s rancorous feelings for winter.

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about my sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of my discouragement—I seem to glimpse it in my dreams—my despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window; to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

He was one of those Americans who had suffered in the middle of their lives a serious mental and spiritual breakdown. I have never observed it in any other country. The male menopause is, as we know, an old wives’ tale, a legend, and has nothing to do with the facts of the case. I have seen this trouble overtake so many that we might point out the symptoms. You can single out their faces at the railroad-station bars. They were mostly handsome, but now their handsomeness is harried with worry, and sometimes gin. Mostly, their hands shake. Their friends, if they are left with any, say that X seems to be going through some sort of psychological crisis. It usually begins with sharp discontents about their business life. They have been treated shabbily and cheated out of the promotions and raises they deserved, but their position at this time of life, their security, is too precarious to allow them to express any grievance. They are sick of ball bearings and bedsheets or whatever else it is they sell. Sexually their wives have come to seem unattractive, but they have not been able to find mistresses. Their friends bore them. Their children seem, oftener than not, strange and ungrateful. The financial burdens they have been forced to assume are backbreaking. All of this is true, but none of this would account for the wanton disappointment that engorges them. Something of more magnitude, something much more mysterious than these bare facts would show, has taken place. Valor, lustiness, hope—all these good things seem to have been misplaced.

He finds the noise of his wife’s voice insufferable, he strikes his favorite son with a piece of firewood. He is lost, as lost as anyone on the side of a mountain, and yet the way in which he reached this tragic wilderness is hidden from him and from the rest of us. There is one down near the service bar drinking a beer. Here comes another, in at the door. That man in a silk shirt drinking a Martini is one of them, and there is a fourth gazing at his wristwatch, although it makes no difference to him whether it is three, or four, or five in the afternoon.

I think unconcernedly of C.; I see the idiot grin, the uncut hair, the bohemian suit, the Desert boots, the ungainly shins, the lively body with its restlessness, its thrust—the pure waywardness. And I think of our cloudy feelings about the sexual commerce between men—that it is a legitimate but an unsatisfactory field of investigation, that it is undignified and sometimes comical.

I make no headway, and yet it seems best to come here every day and try. It is not easy. I have had winters before and will have them again, and do not seriously doubt that they will end—the winters—but it is not easy. I am reminded of the weeks and months in Rome when I saw nothing with the right eyes but a cobweb gleaming in the sunlight and an owl flying out of a ruin. Thinking of X, who was tyrannized by a fable of herculean sexual prowess but who was, like the rest of us, clay. The books and stories he read and the movies he saw stated or implied a lurid and nearly continuous eroticism, but when he seized his bony wife in his arms he was mostly frustrated. Why couldn’t he get into the fun, the sport? Why weren’t his days and nights, like every other man’s, a paradise of wenching? Was he growing old? Was this the rumored falling off? Should he stand serenely and watch his leaves fall to the ground? Should he retire, and leave the field to younger men? But if there was some diminishment of prowess there was none of yearning. How he longed for that sensual paradise where he had so happily lived, where the noise of the brook and the sounds of the rain seemed to celebrate the skin.

On Sunday afternoon my only brother comes to call. He is told that if he drinks again he will die, and he is drunk—the bleary eyes, the swollen face, the puffy hands, the drunkard’s paunch. He wants to be alone with me to tell me this story: “The funniest God-damned thing happened to me. They gave me the Boston territory, you know. Well, I was in a bar watching one of those TV debates, and I got so God-damned stinking that I didn’t know what I was doing. I decided that I wanted to see Al Houston so I got into the car and started off and the next thing I knew I was in jail and you know where? In our home town. I was in jail at home. Well, they took away my license and fined me a hundred bucks. It’s the second time. So when they let me go I got a suspended sentence, and you know who was there? Mildred Cunningham. She married Al. You remember her. So I said, ‘Hi, Mildred, I was going out to see Al a couple of nights ago.’ And you know what she said? ‘I buried him six months ago.’ Funniest God-damned thing.” What is involved seems almost beyond my comprehension. He is drunk. He has lost his job and will not be given another. And in his drunkenness he has tried to find a college roommate, an old friend of forty years ago, a homosexual friend for all I know—although this may be an ugly suspicion—and has ended up in the jail of the town where our prominent and respectable parents shaped a life for themselves and for us, and he refers to this whole series of events as an uproarious joke. I think this is insanity. I have been drinking and make my long complaints to Mary, who is most tender, but I do not make love to her, because I think I must carry this through alone.

Looking around me I seem to find an uncommon amount of misery and drunkenness. We are not cold, poor, hungry, lonely, or miserable in any other common way, so why should so many of us struggle to forget our happy lot? Is it the ineradicable strain of guilt and vengefulness in man’s nature?

A warm day; we lunch on the outside steps and my old dick stirs in the sunlight like a hyacinth. Later, in the warmth, taking away wheelbarrow-loads of dead leaves, I am suddenly very tired. I move slowly and painfully, like an old man. Pain seems like a rivet put through my chest into my back. Then I think that I shall not live to see the spring; I shall soon die. “John is dead, he died quite suddenly. Do try to get to the church early. We are so afraid there won’t be room.” My muffled voice rises from the casket: “But I haven’t finished my work. My seven novels, my two plays, and the libretto for an opera. It isn’t done.” The priest tells me to be still. Preparations are made for a crowd, but on the big day the telephone begins to ring: “It’s Binxie’s only chance to play golf. We’re sure John would understand. He was always so carefree.” “It’s Mabel’s only chance to go shopping.” Etc. In the end no one comes. I see the disgusting morbidity of all this, I try to cleanse my mind. If we do not taste death, how will we know the winter from the spring? I paint shutters, cut a little wood, light a fire. The clear light of the fire is appealing; this, and the sound of water, is what I want. How far away from X’s underwear, lying on the floor in a heap. I will have love tonight, I think, fire and water, and I drink to still my anxieties and misgivings, but I fail. I have been in this poor place before, and I shall find my way out.

I wake before daylight in an ecstasy of sereneness. I think that I will have it all back: the green seas of the North Atlantic, the wit and high spirits of a randy life, blue-sky courage, a natural grasp of things. I think that I will have it all back. I dream a pleasant dream with pleasant and unpleasant figures. The most unsavory drops his britches, but, dear God, why should I worry about this anymore? I meet old friends from my childhood. I see a quality of love like a length of cloth, tranquil and unanxious, a fine, sere shade. And I will go out of that dread country where I lie sweating in bed, waiting for the oil-burner to engorge the house with fire, waiting to be crushed by my debts, my groin smarting like a wound. I will have it all back.

Unable to work because of the dark, the cold, and the snow—a pitiable state of affairs—and so I lose a day. At the breakfast table I say, “I don’t understand Susie at all,” and I shiver with unhappiness or despair. “I’ve fed her, bathed her, taken her up in the night, plucked thorns and splinters out of her feet, loved her, taught her to swim, skate, walk on beaches, admire the world, but now when I speak to her she weeps and slams the door, hides in the woods on a fine Sunday morning, seems on the one hand merry and on the other to carry some unanswered question. Is this a glimpse of our inability to understand one another? I seem to know more about a stranger on a train than I know about my only daughter.”

Let us pray for all of those killed or cruelly wounded on throughways, expressways, freeways, and turnpikes. Let us pray for all of those burned or otherwise extinguished in faulty plane landings, midair collisions, and mountainside crashes. Let us pray for all alcoholics measuring out the hours of the day that the Lord hath made in pints and fifths, and let us pray for the man who mistook a shirt button for a Miltown pill and choked to death in a hotel.

Hemingway shot himself yesterday morning. There was a great man. I remember walking down a street in Boston after reading a book of his, and finding the color of the sky, the faces of strangers, and the smells of the city heightened and dramatized. The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage, a quality that I had heard, until I came on his work, extolled by Scoutmasters and others who made it seem a fraud. He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain. There was never, in my time, anyone to compare with him.

I get up at half past six to get breakfast—in a fair humor, I think, but while I am shaving, so to speak, Mary also rises, scowls, coughs, makes small noises of pain, and I speak meanly. “Can I do anything to help you, short of dropping dead?” I am offered no breakfast, so I have none—but that we, at this time of life and time of day, should reënact the bitter and ugly quarrels of our parents, circling angrily around the toaster and the orange-juice squeezer like bent and toothless gladiators exhaling venom, bile, detestation, and petulance in one another’s direction! “Can I make a piece of toast?” “Would you mind waiting until I’ve made mine?” Mother finally grabbing her breakfast plate off the table and eating from the sideboard, her back to the room, tears streaming down her cheeks. Dad sitting at the table asking, “For Christ’s sake, what have I done to deserve this?” “Leave me alone, just leave me alone is all I ask,” says she. “All I want,” he says, “is a boiled egg. Is that too much to ask?” “Well, boil yourself an egg then,” she screams; and this is the full voice of tragedy, the goat cry. “Boil yourself an egg then, but leave me alone.” “But how in hell can I boil an egg,” he shouts, “if you won’t let me use the pot?” “I’d let you use the pot,” she screams, “but you leave it so filthy. I don’t know what it is, but you leave everything you touch covered with filth.” “I bought the pot,” he roars, “the soap, the eggs. I pay the water and the gas bills, and here I sit in my own house unable to boil an egg. Starving.” “Here,” she screams, “eat my breakfast. I can’t eat it. You’ve ruined my appetite. You’ve ruined my day.” She thrusts her breakfast plate at him and drops it on the table. “But I don’t want your breakfast,” he says. “I don’t like fried eggs. I detest fried eggs. Why should I be expected to eat your breakfast?” “Because I can’t eat it,” she screams. “I couldn’t eat anything in an atmosphere like this. Eat my breakfast. Eat it, enjoy it, but shut up and leave me alone.” He pushes the plate away from him, and buries his face in his hands. She takes the plate and throws the fried eggs into the garbage, sobbing horribly. She goes upstairs. The children, who have been waked by this calamitous and heroic dialogue, wonder why this good day that the Lord hath made should seem so calamitous.

Susie due in at 2 A.M. I go to meet the train. This seems the end of the line: trains, bells, whistles, a shrill sound in the air like the trains of France and Italy, hammering somewhere, yellow headlights, showers of golden fire and modest lightnings. A pretty girl sits in the dark cabstand. One more train and her boy will take her home. I go into a bar. Two men play pool. One shoots a good and lucky game and has a most light and simple face and stance, as if life had been for him always a nourishing, uncomplicated, and easily digestible dish. “There’s an extra News and Mirror here,” one says, looking kindly through his spectacles at the others. “You want one?” “What did the daily double pay?” “Seven-fifty.” “You had five, I had four.” “We shoulda got together. I’ll bring the chick over tomorrow night and we’ll have some cherry.” “I got two hanging right here,” says the bartender, jiggling his balls. Drawn, thin, needing a shave, his apron soiled, does he feel the crippling need, mount his old woman, gasping, gasping, gasping? A nice, comfortable place.

A brilliant autumn day. Searching lights. Many vapor trails drawn high, due north. Are these warriors or businessmen eating butterfly shrimp off plastic trays? Is this the end of the earth or a bond to keep it from ending? Hot and cold, brilliance and darkness, the afterglow as fine as anything seen in the mountains; but X, studying the stars, would find in this wall of brilliance a reflection of his own emotional vacuity.

Hurricane watch, they say. Heavy rains after midnight. Gale winds. I wake at three. It is close. No sign of wind and rain. Then I think that I can do it, make sense of it, and recount my list of virtues: valor, saneness, decency, the ability to handle the natural hazards of life.

Mary maldisposta, I think, and I think, after drinking, that in middle age we come into the big scenes; that I am perhaps no longer able to make a rueful joke of my disappointments; that I can no longer carry the burden of her eccentricity; that I must speak loudly; that I must say what I feel. It is not in the light of day that my disappointments are keenest, most painful. It is when staring into the dark, counting the figures on the wallpaper in the beam of light from the children’s bathroom, that I feel my spirits collapse. I can’t be sure that I don’t imagine this, that the fault is not mine. When I see her, come near her, rage and hatred, a curdling sensation, rise up from my feet to the top of my head with the speed of light. I don’t know what happened, and it is one of those situations where scrutiny is not rewarding. The turning point may have come when I asked her if she wasn’t going out for the evening; it may have come when I poured a second drink. I was putting poison in the mole burrows, admiring the brilliance of the afternoon. “See how the cut grass, the last growth of the year, full of clover, takes the light? Isn’t it beautiful?” I ask, but there is no reply. She hurries away from me. So the pleasures of the afternoon are over. I sit down to read. She slams a door. I quiz my son on his homework, heady with self-righteousness. But I cannot lie down beside her and sleep. So I retire to the spare room—the thousands of nights I have spent on sofas! My beloved son has a nightmare at three or four. The cat wakes me, going from room to room, meowing.

And thinking how our origins catch up with us I wonder what I will have to pay on this account. I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more interesting and sometimes more significant. I have turned my eccentric old mother into a woman of wealth and position, and made my father a captain at sea. I have improvised a background for myself—genteel, traditional—and it is generally accepted. But what are the bare facts, if I were to write them? The yellow house, the small north living room with a player piano and, on a card table, a small stage where I made scenery and manipulated puppets. The old mahogany gramophone with its crank, its pitiful power of reproduction. In the dining room, an overhead lamp made from the panels of a mandarin coat. Against the wall, the helm of my father’s sailboat—long gone, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Most of my characters are waited on by maids, but I was usually the one who brought the dishes to the table. My parents were not happy, and I was not happy with them. I was told that he meant to harm me, and I suppose I never forgave him. But my heart seems to have been open and I was innocently, totally in love with G. when I must have been ten or eleven. At twelve I was in love with J., at thirteen in love with F., etc. There was no possibility of requital for my feelings toward my father, and so I looked to other men for the force of censure, challenge, the encouragement that I needed, and was given this abundantly by W. But it seems, in retrospect, to have been almost entirely an improvisation. I have the characteristics of a bastard.

“I’m Lila,” says the waitress, a pleasant woman of forty. “Would you like something from the bar? And here,” she says “is your ice-cold dry Martini, lemon peel, just as you ordered. I’m putting it down with my right hand. That’s quite an effort for me. I’m left-handed. It’s an effort for me to do anything with my right hand. Now, I don’t know whether you’ve been here before—you look familiar—but when you’re ready to order I’d recommend the club steak, the London broil, or the chopped sirloin. With French fries and a tossed green salad. French dressing. Yes, dear.” She is a friend to me, she is a friend to the world, and what I can see so clearly is the daughter or niece she is sending to college. She will major in modern languages and get a job at the U.N. But Lila seems to be a creation of a series of obvious needs. Some man has done her wrong, left her to bring up a fatherless child, but she has learned patience and compassion and—what’s more—that the world is full of lonely, worried, and troubled men, and she makes, in my case, a very successful effort to turn this half-hour lunch into something easygoing and affectionate. And I think also of those people whose position in life seems immovable, of those who seem driven into their thankless pursuits like the nails in the floor. The clerk in the Turkish bath and the three masseurs; the elevator operator on 23rd Street; the old man who sells cigarettes on Second Avenue. You go around the world ten times, marry, divorce, raise your children and see them married, move from here to there, but when you return you find them where you left them, running the elevator, selling new brands of cigarettes. So I must work, and I think I can.

There is no point in my regaling myself with trifling injuries (you reflected on the quality of my mother’s carpets, etc.), nor in my trying to determine what part the past plays in my so easily abraded feelings. What I must face is the small quantity of inferior work I have been turning out. Neither the novel nor the play possesses any form or shape or substance. It is not that I would mind going down in history as an inconsequential writer; it is that I would mind most bitterly going down as a writer who has wasted his gifts in drunkenness, sloth, anger, and petulance. I am no longer dealing with the common disadvantages of need, a poorly lighted room, a stomach ache. I am dealing with time, with alcohol, and with death.

For what it may be worth: hung over on Saturday. Walk in the woods with Ben. Shoot at tin cans. On Sunday the dog wakes at six. She will have to have her breakfast, says Mary, and so I give the dog breakfast. It is not yet light. I try to get back to sleep again in the spare room, but the dog dumps a load on the floor, whines, chews the light cords, etc. I miss church. It is not a good way to begin the day. I drink some gin at half past eleven and Susie and I play recorder duets. I wash the lunch dishes and take care of the boy. I embrace him. My eyes fill with tears. But after playing a little touch football I feel much better. Susie and I cook supper, and I wash the dishes. The dog dumps another load on the floor, and I am enraged. I drive Susie to Mamaroneck and, driving back, regale the dog with my troubles. I plan this morning to go into town and look for apartments. But I do not. Now, I would not want to be the kind of sorehead who rages on about his disappointments but who is too slothful, lazy, drunken, and bilious to get off his arse; who claims to be indifferent to the play of firelight on the panelled walls, but who will endure every sort of humiliation rather than leave his cozy fireside; and yet it seems that some of my indecision is legitimate. I cannot afford an apartment in town, and I have put so much money and time into this house that I am entitled to at least a touch of reluctance about leaving it. So I shall today try to be hopeful and conduct myself like a loving and intelligent adult.

And so it is over as suddenly as it began; at four or five on an overcast afternoon, unseasonably warm for November, her step becomes light, she sings in the hall for the first time in six weeks, and I have my way.

I lay a fire, drink some gin, watching the last rosy light of this winter day pour in at the western windows. These wooden walls, old pictures, yellow silk chairs are what I wanted, so why does my admiration of the scene seem fatuous? In the pinewoods the last light glows like coals. We dine with the B.s, who seem unhappy but not unhappy about being unhappy. On a scrap of paper one reads: i am miserable and i wish my mummy and daddy would not fite. The first day of a new year. I pray to finish the novel by spring.

I have not repaired the shutter on the west window. I have not got sand for the driveway or mixed fuel for the chain saw. I have not taken my clothes to the dry cleaner’s. Cutting into the roast and finding it underdone I have, without saying a word, been able to accomplish a devastating emanation of disgust and disapproval. Serving the flounder I have, by way of petulance, helped the family generously and given myself a boiled potato and a spoonful of grease. I have unjustly accused my wife of unfaithfulness, and called my only and beloved daughter plain and friendless to her face. I have been drunken, dirty, unkind, embittered, and lewd.

I spend the day, as do many others, in watching Glenn orbit on TV, and I torment myself for not working. Once the man is in orbit, the crowds leave the beach. It is always, for me, a moving sight, to see people pick up their sandwich baskets, their towels and folding furniture, and hurry back to the hotel, the motel, the cottage, the bar. Their haste, their intentness, is like the thoughtlessness of life itself; and something will always be forgotten—a pair of sunglasses, an inflatable rubber raft, an old man, a roll of film, a pimply youth with a volume of poetry. They will be remembered briefly as we remember the dead, but no one will go back after dark to look for the sunglasses, or cheer the old man. My heart gives a heave as they hurry off, as if I could see here the forces of life and death. The end of the ballgame, the last hour of the county fair.

Ossining-Tampa. P. and I leave in the fresh morning light. The quiet boy who wants to be a novelist; his little sister carrying a plastic horse; my friend. The heavy morning traffic, the overcrowded roads. The unreality of the massive city in the glancing light. The sense of travel as a sense of painful dislocation. The shabby building at the airport. Windowless. Artificial plants. Benches for waiting. Women in furs. The Florida-bound crowd whom I join so late in life. A man with a copy of Variety, three pretty children, a Scotch nursemaid with a head of long hair. A man with a beret. As soon as we are airborne, the woman on my left takes a plastic kit out of her handbag and begins to paint her nails. The man on my right introduces himself; “Pleased to meet you, John,” he says. “I have a little present I’d like to give you.” He gives me a gilt tie clip containing a thermometer. No, he doesn’t manufacture them. “I just give them away because I like to. I travel a lot. I give away two, three thousand a year. It’s a nice way to make friends, and I like to make friends.” We discuss the people we know who are dying of cancer. He tells me the complete story of his life. Three anticlerical jokes. The lion who says grace, the brigadier, and the cardinal. He seems, telling his life story to a stranger, to be a large slice of my country, my people. The white silk shirts the stewardesses wear have come undone at the back. They keep tucking them in, but they come undone again. A crew member wanders aft. He looks to have a terrible hangover, and I think the stewardess gives him a drink. We rent a car in Tampa, and drive south. Ugliness, but why bother to say so? Don’t forget the fellow with a lighthouse on his front lawn.

Walk along the beach. The sea slams its bulkheads, its doors, shakes its chains. Drink gin in the hot sun and feel very happy. Waking in the morning, I suffer an excruciating melancholy. I long for my wife, I long for my sons. We swim before breakfast. Pelicans, willets. The smell of wood smoke. Bitter. A warm, moonlit night. This, I guess, is a tropical evening, and my love is far away. I wake at two or three. Cats fight. A dog jogs under my window, jingling his rabies and his license tags. Then suddenly I feel for my wife and my sons a great power of love. I don’t swim before breakfast, and, after, I feel lost, melancholy, homesick. I don’t know what it is. I am afraid that something may have happened to my family, although I know that my fears bear no relationship to the truth. I chain-smoke.

We cross a bridge where many old people are fishing. There are so many old. The main highway, the Tamiami Trail, is lined with supermarkets, diners, night clubs, seashell-and-driftwood shops, billboards advertising developments; this is the misspelled, the -burger, the -rama world—herburgers, Steerburgers, Smorgoramas. The pet cemetery and crematorium—animals guaranteed to be buried above water level. Trailer camps stretch for miles under the palm trees. There is a listless air in the back and side streets of Sarasota. The light is bright. It is hot. Old people snooze on bus-stop benches. Turn me around three times and I couldn’t say if I was in Los Angeles or Sarasota. The atmosphere of domesticity seems dense. Mother, father, sister, and brother walk past the little frame house where the Gypsy palmist recites the past and the future. Next door is high colonic irrigation. This atmosphere of domesticity seems to abrade my aloneness. What a fainthearted traveller! We go to a jungle gardens. Admission $1.50. The old sit on benches watching flamingos, egrets. Here again are mother, father, sister, and brother. The warm air seems suffused with their kindliness. An old couple point out to strangers that a white peacock is asleep under a bush. Mostly Southern and Midwestern accents. We drink in one of those places where, on a platform, there is a set of music stands and a trap drum covered with a waterproof. We eat in a Royal Pancake Palace. The customers are mostly old. So back down the Trail, me with a painful feeling of emotional suspense. At home, surrounded by my family, I would say that this was the pain, the bite, of boredom. Now I call it the pain of aloneness. Drink seems to be the only cure. So what I am dealing with may be no more than crude alcoholism. And so I drink to kill the pain, and so I wake again in the night to think of my wife and my children. I seem to call out their names not in longing but in contentment. In the fullness of the hopes I hold out for them. So the day begins with the same pattern of longing, unease, thirst. There are only two more to go. The strangeness of time, the strangeness of personality. And how the figure of a young man in white sneakers, seen at the end of a museum corridor, has in fact no claims on my life or my person as I best know it but seems for a moment to be my executioner; yet the executioner mask may conceal a comely face. The day is overcast, the tide and the sea are high. We go fishing and catch nothing. We drink at twelve sharp and things pick up. We swim in the surf and things shift quickly from pain to pleasure. The high, the noisy sea is more like home, more like my coast. We go to the usual cocktail party; we will have been to seven. A round-faced, small-eyed man says, “By gum, he’s as straight as a piece of string.” Mrs. C. tells me the details of her husband’s death. The wheelchair, the hardening of the arteries—this great, genial athlete; and there might be a scene of women watching flamingos and discussing in detail the death of men. After drinking the time passes easily. Wasn’t it a pleasant day? we ask.

I bring home from church a green length of palm, not strong in the conviction that it is blessed and will bless my house but in an impulse of love. And to write, to get down the church with its yellow, varnished floor; the homely memorial windows commemorating the dead in tearful shades of lavender and blue; the stink of hassocks and pew cushions, precisely like the smell of the cushions in the barn cupola; the discreet perfumery, like flowers smelled from a great distance; the sense that this is some reconstruction of the smells of my childhood; and then, to go a step further, that this is the smell of the turn of the century, some fading distillate of the late eighteen-nineties. But then, moving into this gloom, is the measure of the Mass. The language has the sumptuous magnificence of an Elizabethan procession. The penultimate clauses spread out behind their predicates in breadth and glory, and the muttered responses are emblazoned in crimson and gold. On it moves through the Lamb of God, the Gloria, and the Benediction until the last amen shuts like a door on this verbal pomp; and the drunken priest puts out his lights and hurries back to his gin bottle, hidden among the vestments.

It is not the facts that we can put our fingers on which concern us but the sum of these facts; it is not the data we want but the essence of the data. It is the momentary and overwhelming sense of pathos we experience when we see the congregation turn away clumsily from the chancel; the encouragement we experience when we hear the noise of a stamping mill carried over water; the disturbance we feel when we see misgiving in a child’s face. She is carrying schoolbooks and waiting for the traffic light to change. The carnal and hearty smell of bilge water, the smell of must in the cold pantries of this old house. A continent of feeling lies beyond these. We call them apprehensions, but they have more fact, truth, illumination than the wastebasket, the gunrack, and the cheese knife. Why be afraid of madness? Here is a world to win, to discover.

He could separate from his red-faced and drunken wife, he could conceivably make a life without his beloved children, he could get along without the companionship of his friends, but he could not bring himself to leave his lawns and gardens, he could not part from the porch screens and storm windows that he had repaired and painted, he could not divorce himself from the serpentine brick walk he had laid between the side door and the rose beds. So for him the chains of Prometheus were forged from turf and house paint, copper screening, putty and brick, but they shackled him as sternly as iron.

So here is the day. What do you make of it? A brilliant morning, the light dealt out over the mountainous banks of the river. Cool. As I eat breakfast on the porch, my coffee smokes, the china cup is cold to touch. Last night I read Katherine Anne. How well she catches the essence of herself, the wit, the didactic style, the attractions of elegance. She fastens her slippers, shakes out the folds of her silvery dress, and fastens the belt as she goes out on a note of asperity and command. It is highly feminine, but a solid style. In some of the emotional scenes she strikes with exceptional accuracy that balance between the ritard of observation and the flow of feeling.

Mary maldisposta this morning, but then I think how wonderful it is that this marriage should embrace such a multitude of misunderstandings, storms, infidelities, rivers of tears, and still continue on its way, some of the passengers bruised, but nothing serious.

To get the difference in degrees of feeling at this time of life. It is Memorial Day. My persistent, my only memory of this in the past was of planting a garden at the farm; a garden that I thought, sentimentally, I would never see mature. I must go away. I spaded up the plot, eyed a sack of potatoes, and planted a patch. In the distance, at the four corners, I could hear the drums of the parade, and now and then a bar of music. My mother would have decorated the family graves with cornflowers and daisies. Now, having served four years in an army and seen many good friends killed in battle, I hear again the music of the parade. I try to remember the names of my dead friends. Kennedy? Kenelly? Kovacs? I can’t remember. Up from the river comes the sound of drums, and from time to time a bar of brassy and discordant music. It is very hot. I should scythe the orchard or do other work but I do nothing. It is a holiday, and I seem unable to give the day any other meaning. It is too hot to go fishing, it is too hot to cut the grass. Driving into the village to get a loaf of bread, I see the lines of heavy traffic on the main highway. At four there is a long peal of thunder. It is as though the day had a rigid script, beginning with band music, patriotic speeches, suffocating heat, and idleness, sandwiches and cold drinks, and now the clouds piling up in the northwest and the sound of thunder—all seem a part of some ancient ceremony. I sit on the porch with my sons and watch the storm come down. I have lived through this day a hundred times, it seems, and not a blade of grass has changed. The lightning is yellow. It flashes on the porch like a beam of sunlight. The old dog is frightened and buries her head in my side.

Fred comes. He is now a very heavy man, his girth so swollen that his naturally bellicose walk is close to a waddle. “Hi, guy!” he shouts. I wonder if he has come out to borrow money. “Congratulations on the new car,” he shouts. I explain that the car is borrowed, but I wonder, later, if he believed me. His manner is broad, hearty; and the heartier it grows the more retiring, narrow, and continent I seem. He has been drinking. “What you ought to do—” he begins, and I squirm at being made a receptacle of unwanted information. The more ruinous his life becomes, the more didactic, informative, and overbearing is his manner. “Now listen to me. . . . Let me tell you. . . . I know all about the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. You want me to tell you all about it. I know all there is to know. Just listen. Stop me if I talk too much. You want me to tell you.” But in the end he loses track of the subject, founders, forgets what it was that he was going to explain. There is a rampant force of self-destruction in the man, and I think he has counted so on gin as a painkiller that he has mangled his responsiveness. He has endured many disappointments, indignities, and injustices, and in his determination to rally he has developed a crude mockery of cheerfulness. Everything is wonderful, simply wonderful. Gorgeous. Life is gorgeous, life is wonderful. This is the harshness of despair. “Whatever else I have,” he says, “I have four beautiful children. Loving, wonderful children.” “I like D. very much,” I say, “and he’s very loyal to you.” He lifts his face, swollen now with years of drink, and says, “They’re all loyal to me.” I have seen them scorn and disobey him, and they have all run away from home. There is not a grain of truth in this pitiful claim to love. But now he looks like Mother, a painful and bewildering memory, and I remember our conversations—my struggle for coherence, my desire to put one idea after another, to sort out good from evil, while she skipped, or so it seemed to me, from one wild half-truth to another, from one larcenous prejudice to another. The aim never seemed to be to communicate but to confuse, obstruct, and dismay.

While I am making him some coffee in the kitchen my little son runs in with the news that there is a snake in the yard. I follow him. “There, there!” he cries. I am slow to pick them out, but then I see three lethal pit vipers, writhing in the sun. Two have lost their old skin and are brilliant copper. One is still as dark as a stick. I go to get the shotgun. The gun-shy bitch begins to whimper and bark. The hunting dog begins to bark with joy. My brother, purblind but too vain to wear glasses, stumbles over to the snakes. “I’ll tell you what they are. I know all about snakes. Our place is infested with them. I’ll tell you whether or not they’re dangerous.” Mary begins to laugh at me. “He thinks all snakes are venomous,” she says. “Garter snakes, milk snakes. Please don’t kill them,” she says. “They’re quite harmless.” Before I can clear the yard, the vipers retire into the wall. “Helen Washburn was bitten by a copperhead last year,” Fred says, triumphantly. “That’s a help,” I say bitterly. “Vipers never grow over two feet long,” Mary says, “and one of those snakes was more than two feet. And anyhow, people never die of snakebites.” The vipers are a clear danger to my beloved sons. Why should she be put into such a contradictory humor? She looks up vipers in the encyclopedia and in the snake book. She is saddened at having to admit they are deadly, deathly. It is a personal defeat.

And in Fred’s ungainly walk there is a trace of furtiveness and haste—the hopeful gait of a man who has left a liquor store after having paid for a quart of gin with an unsubstantiated check. Will they call the bank before he gets out the door? Will bells and whistles sound, will somebody shout “Stop that man!”? He enjoys some relief when he gets out the door, but his troubles are not over. He enjoys a further degree of relief when he gets into the car, but his troubles are not over. The car floods, the car won’t start. (“I’m calling to check on the bank balance of Mr. Lemuel Estes.”) The battery, as he grinds the starter, begins to show signs of weakness. Then the motor catches, he backs out into the street, makes a right turn, and, when he feels safe at last, stops the car, screws the top off the bottle, and takes two or three long pulls. Oh, sweet elixir, killer of pain. Gently, gently the world reforms itself into interesting, intense, and natural arrangements. Thomas Paine drank too much. General Grant. Winston Churchill. He is in the company of the truly great. He stops twice on the way home and, having put away nearly a pint, comes into his house with that air of blustering good cheer, that heartiness that deceives no one.

Without the lift of whiskey I wonder if I am not less than intelligent in facing my problems. I am fifty. Can I go on writing stories forever? Why not? I should think of myself in terms not of my age but of my work, which is barely half done. I think that I should move to a hotel, but then I think that I cannot leave my family; my eyes flood with tears, and I empty the whiskey bottle. I should take advantage of my maturity and not be dismayed at the loss of my youth.

I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.

It is after dark—just. A summer night, stars and fireflies. The last night in June. My older son stands on the bridge over the brook with a Roman candle. He is a man now. His voice is deep. He is barefoot and wears chinos. It takes two or three matches to light the fuse. There is a splutter of pink fire, a loud hissing, the colored fire is reflected in the water of the brook and lights the voluminous clouds of smoke that roll off the candle. The light changes from pink to green, from green to red. It makes on the trees and in the heavy air an amphitheatre or sphere of unearthly light. In this I see his beloved face, his figure. I cannot say truthfully that I have never felt anything but love for him. We have quarrelled, he has wet his bed, he has waked strangling from nightmares in which I appeared as a hairy werewolf dripping with gore. But all of this is gone. Now there is nothing between us but love and good-natured admiration. The candle ends with a loud coughing noise and voids a spate of golden stars and a smell of brimstone. He drops the embers into the brook. Then the dark takes over, but I think that I have seen something splendid: this young man, the weird and harmless play of colored light, the dark water of the brook.

The first page of a new journal, and I hope to report here soon that the middle section of the Wapshots has fallen into shape. I expect that I will continue to report here that I drink too much.

The O’Hara book—he is a pro, a gifted man. There is the sense of life being translated, but I think also an extraordinary vein of morbid sexual anxiety. I would like “The Scandal” to be clear of this. I think the difference is between a fascinated horror of life and a vision of life. He is good and rough and not so lacy as me, but I hope to come to better terms.

The firemen’s bazaar. Seven o’clock. A July night. A rusted and battered backstop stands behind the circle of trucks and booths turned in against the gathering darkness like a circle of covered wagons. Parents and children hasten along the roads that lead to the bazaar as if it might all be over before they got there, although in fact they will get there before it has begun. The sumptuary revolution makes me feel old. Both the boys and the girls are wearing skintight pants, and there are many cases of ungainly and sometimes painful tightness. And in the crowd there are reminders of the fact that there are still some farms outside the village limits. I see a red-faced man, a little drunk, followed by an overworked woman who has cut her own hair as well as the hair of the four shabby children that follow. These are the poor; these are the ones who live upstairs over the shoe store, who live in the cottage down by the dump, who can be seen fanning themselves at their windows in the heat. When you leave at six to catch an early plane, these are the ones that you see at dawn, waiting by the bus stop with their sandwiches in a paper bag. But it is the children I enjoy most, watching them ride in mechanical pony carts and airplanes, suspended by chains from a pylon. Their brilliance, this raw material of human goodness. A very plain woman in the last months of pregnancy, who looks out at the scene calmly and with great pride in this proof of the fact that someone has taken her in his arms. Many of the girls have their hair in rollers half concealed by scarves. Like primitive headdresses and, in the darkness, like crowns.

Our relationship remains in suspense. I have neither the boisterousness nor the virility to make the bridge or span between these two unrelated personalities, and I experience that bewilderment which always overtakes me when some obstruction in my sexual life is felt. I cannot reach out. I am afraid I may be rebuffed. I cannot transcend these fears. I glimpse the horrors of incompatibility; the power of lovers to mutilate each other. At nine-thirty my stomach begins to heave. It is difficult to breathe. I should be familiar enough with these symptoms to put them in their place, but they overtake me with such intensity that they seem to be not a part of life but all of life. I feel racked by the visible and the invisible world. My guts are drawn with pain.

Light and shade, pleasant and discordant noises, the singing of the cleaning woman and the thumping sound of the washing machine are dealt like a series of blows. I cannot think of the stories I have to write without a sharpening of this visceral pain. I cannot invent terms or images of repose. I grant myself all the privileges of a liar, but there is no heart in my lies and inventions. There is nothing. There is neither ecstasy nor repose, there is only the forced illusion of these things. The span between living and dying is brief and anguished, and the soul of man is reflected not in snug farmhouses and great monuments but in fourth-string hotel rooms, malodorous and obscure. This is all there is. There is nothing. Tired but sleepless, lewd but alone, hopeless, drunk, sitting at the window on the airshaft in some other country: this is the image of man. I remember those midtown hotels, the Carlton in Frankfurt, the Eden in Rome, the Palace in San Francisco, hotels in Hollywood, Innsbruck, Toledo, Florence. Here is the soul of man, venereal, forlorn, and uprooted. All the rest of it—the cheering lights of morning, sweet music, the towers and the sailboats—are fantastic inventions, evasions, lies, vulgarities, and politenesses poorly invented to conceal the truth.

A day like autumn, the light fresh, the wind sounding loudly in the trees. My family off to the mountains, and God bless them. The best I can do in these three weeks is to work hard and pull the novel into shape. Perhaps I can go abroad in the fall. I must do something about finding a place to work. I cannot go through another winter like last winter.

We rise from sleep all natural men, boisterous, loving, and hopeful, but the dark-faced stranger is waiting at the door, the viper is coiled in the garden, the old man whispers lewdly to the boy, and the woman sits at her table crying.

So in the dark hours, awake, I think of the wind and the rain and in my arms a willing love, her dugs hardened against my chest, her hand where it belongs. The night air is fresh. Daybreak spreads along the westbound highways, lighting the legends on the all-night trucks. Daybreak spreads along the westbound highways, and I shall sleep, I shall sleep. I shall conquer death and anger and fear.

Rows and misunderstandings, and I put them down with the hope of clearing my head. “I think it’s too hot to split wood,” say I. “Well, I don’t,” says Mary. “If it’s not too hot for me to rake, it’s not too hot for you to split wood.” “You do your work,” say I, “and I’ll do mine.” But I am in a bad temper, and I think of the W.s all ordering one another around, working not so much to accomplish anything as to ingratiate themselves with the old king, who was trying, in turn, to ingratiate himself with immortality. At dinner I try to explain my leaving to work on the book. “I feel sorry for you,” says Mary, “your life is so miserable. I really feel sorry for you. I won’t miss you, of course. If you could only figure out what you want.” I cut some edges, but I am angry, and returning to the kitchen I say (at dark), “Can’t you figure out after twenty-five years what it is that I want? I want your love, I want to see the children grow and take up their lives, I want to do a piece of decent work.” I am shouting. Then she says, “I am going away. I will take a little apartment and live there with the children. You are torturing me to death. You are torturing me to death.”

Weeding the peony hedge I hear the windfalls in the orchard; hear them strike the ground, hear them strike against branches as they fall to the ground. The immemorial smell of apples, old as the sea. Mary makes jelly. Up from the kitchen, up the stairs and into all the rooms comes the smell of apples.

It is my wife’s body that I most wish to gentle, it is into her that I most wish to pour myself, but when she is away I seem to have no scruple about spilling it elsewhere. I first see X at the edge of the swimming pool. He is sunbathing, naked, his middle covered by a towel. His voice sounds coarse and unpleasant. He speaks with a slight accent—Italian, perhaps—or perhaps a piece of faulty bridgework. He hogs the best chair, gives out aggressive emanations, says nothing that is not complaining or stupid, and we seem to be natural enemies. But then, a day later, I find him sitting beside me at the table, feel his gaze on me—soft, tender, and pupilless. He touches my shoulder. Suddenly he is all courtesy, kindness, and attention, and I see him in a different light. I see that he is handsome, well knit, but soft enough to do in a pinch. I think that a variety of hints or lures are sent out. He has met me before, he says, with Y, with Z. His soft gaze follows me, settles on me, and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch. If he should put a hand on my thigh I would not remove it; if I should chance to meet him in the shower I would tackle him. But is this itchiness mutual or is it mine alone: is it only my tassel that is up, down, and sore as a boil? Does he sense this or is he thinking about yesterday’s tennis game or a check he hopes to get in the mail? I am determined not to be a supplicant, not to be compromised by my instincts, and so perhaps is he; these are the murderous checks and balances of a flirtation. But then there are the spiritual facts: my high esteem for the world, the knowledge that it is not in me to lead a double life, my love of perseverance, a passionate wish to honor the vows I’ve made to my wife and children. But my itchy member is unconcerned with all of this, and I am afraid that I may succumb to its itchiness. We are urged to take things as they come, to plunge into life, to race after our instincts, to upset the petty canons of decency and cleanliness, and yet if I made it in the shower I could not meet the smiles of the world. I do not like his voice, his mind; I probably will not like his work. I like only that he seems to present or offer himself as a gentle object of sensual convenience. And yet I have been in this country a hundred times before and it is not, as it might seem to be, the valley of the shadow of death. And, whatever the instinctual facts are, there is the fact that I find a double life loathsome, morbid, and anyhow impossible. So I hear in the night the lightest of rain winds, but it does not draw me out of myself, and when I hear the sound of a fine and covering rain my wish to find some peace in this ancient noise seems childish and unseemly compared to the perverse thrust in my middle. But there is some spiritual element in this drive, some hunger to be taken care of—to put down, for an hour, the intolerable burden of total independence. But I have been here before, and in the end it may be nothing, nothing. Why should I be tempted to throw away the vast delights of love for a chance shot in a shower? And I think I share this trouble with most of mankind.

I take a train up the Hudson Valley on a brilliant autumn afternoon. Read, drink. Strike up a conversation with a heavy woman. Decorous. Educated as a schoolteacher, she has an accent that is prim and enlightened. She mistakes me for an Englishman and I lead her on. She is at first afraid of my intentions. Ultimately, I am afraid of hers. She tells me the story of her life: the fortune lost in the crash, her grandfather the judge; she ran for county supervisor on the Democratic ticket, spent a night in the governor’s mansion in Albany. I do not listen carefully, and return to my roomette. I wake at three, bare-arse, my flower stiff as a horn vis-à-vis myself in the long mirror; and I think, Should we bring compassion to the exhibitionist hiding in the bushes of a public park, his pants down around his knees, or lingering in the Y.M.C.A. shower? Is this madness or is it the perversity of mankind? The track joints beat out a jazz bass, versatile, exhilarating, and fleet—some brilliant improvisation on the ardent beating of the heart—and the wind sounds in the brake boxes like the last records Billie Holiday ever made. These blues, these blues. I wake and dress before dawn. Ohio. The country flat. The light, rising in the east, shows the western sky, black as storm clouds.

The old lady sits down. “I will need more butter than that,” she says. Then she leans across the aisle and says, “Excuse me for speaking to you without having been introduced, but to see a happily married couple like you and your husband does my heart so much good that I have to say so. We don’t see many happily married couples these days, do we? I don’t know why it is. My own husband is gone. He went sixteen years ago. It sounds like a long time ago, but for me it seems like a moment. He was a minister . We had a nice congregation in Poughkeepsie. He had never had a sick day in his life. He had never had a toothache, a headache, a cold, he had never had a sick day in his life. Then one morning he woke with this pain in his side. Cancer. I took him to the hospital, but he simply wasted away. I had twelve specialists. When we all knew that the end was near, they let me take him home. He was lying in bed one afternoon and he said, ‘Mother, Mother, will you help me? I want to sit in my chair by the window.’ Well, I put my arms around him to help him to the window, and he went. He went in my arms. I had seven brothers and sisters, but they’re all gone.”

Two women come in. The waiter asks if they had a good trip to New York. “Let’s write it off,” they say gallantly. “Now we’re home. The good old Middle West.” They look out of the window at the fields, houses, pigsties, the distant groves of oak. The train blows its whistle—a minor fifth. A mare with a foal, cows, and pigs run away from the track. All the way across Ohio and Indiana the farm animals are frightened by the train.

I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg, covered with seas and continents, warmed and lighted by the sun. It has churches of indescribable beauty, raised to gods that have never been seen; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and comfortable auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; and thousands or perhaps even millions of museums where man’s drive to celebrate life is recorded. Here the joy of women’s breasts and backsides, the colors of water, the shapes of trees, athletes, dreams, houses, the shapes of ecstasy and dismay, the shape even of an old shoe, are celebrated. Let us rush to see the world. They serve steak there on jet planes, and dance at sea. They have invented musical instruments to express love, peaceableness; to stir the finest memories and aspirations. They have invented games to catch the hearts of young men. They have ceremonies to exalt the love of men and women. They make their vows to music and the sound of bells. They have invented ways to heat their houses in the winter and cool them in the summer. They have even invented engines to cut their grass. They have free schools for the pursuit of knowledge, pools to swim in, zoos, vast manufactories of all kinds. They explore space and the trenches of the seas. Oh, let us rush to see this world.

To put down what I know as well as what I hope to know. To describe my alcoholic thirst beginning at nine in the morning and becoming sometimes unmanageable at eleven-thirty. To describe the humiliation of stealing a drink in the pantry and the galling taste of gin; to write about the weight of discouragement and despair; to write about a nameless dread; to write about the gruelling seizures of unfounded anxiety; to write about the horror of failure. The struggle to recoup an acuteness of feeling, the feeling that a margin of hopefulness has been debauched.

Hung over after the holiday and feeling painfully worn, I go through the motions of waking, eating, dressing. Go to the train. I think on the platform that I may faint, spin around, and fall down, a searing pain in my side. I breathe deeply of the north wind. A. joins me, and I stay close to him in case of trouble. On the train I tell myself, in a kind of panic, the long story of Donna Orieta, including her cocktail party. I have a drink at the Biltmore, where my hand is shaking so that it is difficult to get the glass to my mouth. A young man down the bar gives me a hound-dog look; when we succumb to alcohol we lose our self-esteem all the way down the line. Lunch at the club, where I am blotto, and go to the Biltmore to dry out. It is, as I have said before, a little like Hell. Fifteen or twenty naked men wander around. None of them is comely. The air smells of pine scent, as unlike the freshness of pine as anything in the world. A fat man in the shower soaps his cock. Does he have an erection? I look away.

I skate; I knock a puck around with my son—the pleasures of this simple fleetness, this small prowess. The light on the snowfields, and I see it as I move, all purple and gold. Back here, the library flooded with the last light of day, chrysanthemums, Christmas music on the piano, Ben plays with the manger that we brought from Rome. The setting is nearly perfect, but I seem suspended in it; seem unable either to cast it down or to bring it to a climax. Shall I ask the As, the Bs, the Cs for a drink? Then my narcissism, if that’s what it is, will reach a climax. What a beautiful house, they will say, what a perfectly beautiful house. So the sun goes down, the fields turn blue, I turn on lamps and warm myself at the fire. What do I want: a furnished room, a doorway on a windy street?

A dark, raw day, me cold and depressed. I might bring it off with a narrator; it means a lot of work. Finish the Nabokov, that violet-flavored nightmare. To construct a novel from footnotes is a brilliant eccentricity, but the homosexual king disconcerts me. Mary takes the boys off to see the Nativity play, and I sit around the dining room drinking and playing records; Schumann and Louis Armstrong. I plan a large cocktail party; I write a letter to the Social Register; I give my daughter away in marriage. I should read. I should write. I should translate a page of Italian. But all I do is drink and polish the candlesticks. Oh, to put it down, and to put it down with the known colors of life: the reds of courage, the yellows of love.

I dream that I see my mother, leaving the state capitol in Boston, where she has gone to defend some good cause. She wears a long black coat with a fur collar, a tricorne hat. The flight of steps that separates us appears to be the steps of a Spanish church up which the last of a wedding procession is moving. When the procession has gone I go to my mother. “I’m very tired,” she says, “I’m terribly tired.” Her voice is small, a little cracked. Before I can reach her she falls. Her body begins to roll down the stairs, and I think with horror that she may go all the way, but the fall is stopped; she lies sprawled on the lifts.

During dinner, Susie says, “You have two strings to play. One is the history of the family, the other is your childlike sense of wonder. Both of them are broken.” We quarrel. She cries. I feel sick. We make up, but I feel the generation of that bitterness which overwhelmed me on Christmas Eve. I cannot check it. My first resolve is to ask my family to help me with my drinking. Since I seem unable to handle it myself, I must find someone to help me. My second resolve, and this in a spate of bitterness, is that I will learn to disregard their interference. I think, abysmally bitter, that Orpheus knew he would be torn limb from limb; but he had not guessed that the Harpy would be his daughter. I lose at darts to my son and scold Mary about my dilemma. No money, no place to work in, no chair, even, to sit upon. I wake this morning, remorseful, exhausted, to begin a new year. The sky is the dark blue of high altitude.

Snow lies under the apple trees. We picked very few of the apples, enough for jelly, and now the remaining fruit, withered and golden, lies on the white snow. It seems to be what I expected to see, what I had hoped for, what I remembered. Sanding the driveway with my son, I see, from the top of the hill, the color of the sky and what a paradise it seems to be this morning—the sky sapphire, a show of clouds, the sense of the world in these, its shortest days, as cornered. Later, much later, clouds rise up all around the sky like the walls of a well, but then, when we are coasting, the sun, very low, breaks through this wall, seems to single out windows from which to flash its chill and yellow light, floods the valley and the house with color. I lay a fire in the library, play backgammon with Ben. Go between games to the window to see the outpouring of color, the waxing moon, the evening star.

I struggle with the problems on the last of the book. After lunch I seem in charge of Federico. I read him some rubbish, we walk to the mailbox, at three I make him some lemonade and sneak some gin. Frustrated, I think that I, the novelist, must rock the cradle while Mary, the housewife, corrects, for her pleasure, freshman themes. I read Hannah Arendt on the repulsive moral chaos in Fascist Germany and turn these facts back onto myself. I am the immoralist, and my failure has been the toleration of an intolerable marriage. My fondness for pleasant interiors and the voices of children has destroyed me. I should have breached this contract years ago and run off with some healthy-minded beauty. I must go, I must go, but then I see my son in the orchard and know that I have no freedom from him. Never having known the love of a father has forced me into a love so engulfing and passionate that there is no margin of choice. I cannot resolve the book because I have been irresolute about my own affairs. So these feelings, coming from a variety of directions, center on my slightly intoxicated mind. The immorality of Fascist Germany, Mary’s intellectual enthusiasm, Ben’s manliness, the neglect I received at the hands of my long-dead father, my guilty love of tranquil interiors, and the itchiness in my crotch come together in a ridiculous collision; and I take the toboggan to the top of the hill. The light is fine, the air pure and cold, the sun is setting, and I think that by going down the hill again and again I will purify my feelings, learn to be compassionate. I partly succeed; but I go on drinking gin.

He sat on the edge of his bed, already exhausted before the journey had even begun. What he would have liked, what he dreamed of, was some elixir, some magical, brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step, the gleam in his eye, the joy of life in his heart. He took quantities of pills, but they made no difference in the way he felt. It seemed that he had been tired for years. “Before you go, dear,” his wife called from downstairs, “would you see if you can do something about the kitchen drain?” This reasonable request reminded him of the variety of his responsibilities. He had taken them all on willingly, but his willingness had not produced, as he somehow had thought it might, corresponding stores of energy. Three children in college, the interest and amortization on a twenty-five-thousand-dollar mortgage, an insecure position in business, a loving and impractical wife, a balky heating plant, a leaky roof, a car that needed repairs, a lawn choked with quack grass, a driveway with weeds, and three dying elms on the front lawn seemed, along with the stopped drain, to excite his discouragement. He had taken care of himself for most of his life. He had supported his old parents and indigent relations, raised his family, greased the sump pump, balanced the checkbook, filed the income tax, assuming that an increase in responsibility would develop an increase in confidence, but what he seemed to have developed instead was some spiritual or emotional curvature, like a hod carrier’s back. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he realized that what he wanted was someone who would take care of him. Not for long. He didn’t want to flee, he only wanted a respite—a week, perhaps, in which someone else would grease the sump pump, shine his shoes, and travel with him to Cincinnati. Twice in the last year he had waked alone in a hotel room with an acute pain in the vicinity of his heart. Both times he gave the pain ten minutes to abate before calling the desk clerk, and in both cases the pain had subsided; but this was another tax on his strength, another cause for anxiety, and now he wondered, Would he, tonight, in the hotel in Cincinnati, suffer his pain again?

He could not recall a day recently when he had not suffered some kind of pain; and—what was more painful—he could not recall a day recently when he had enjoyed any sort of unself-conscious repose. He had taken a ten-day vacation on a beach, but he had been, stretched out in the sun, as touchy as a triggered rattrap. He had known—in the past—calm, healthy excitement, the pleasures of physical exhaustion, but all of these seemed to have been lost to him long ago. When had he last felt peaceable, cleanly, and strong? He could not remember. But now it was time to clean the drain, time to go, time to summon the crude energies of nerve; he had nothing else. He went downstairs and used the plunger on the drain. The drain showed some improvement, and he experienced a fleeting contentment at this. “You won’t forget to buy something for Ella’s birthday, will you?” his wife asked as he kissed her goodbye. He walked to the station, step by step. Was this a common condition? Were the pains in his heart, chest, and esophagus, the sense of being harried, the normal terms of his time of life or was he just unlucky? And how would he ever know, since if anyone had asked him how he felt he would have exclaimed, “Fine! Fine? I’ve never felt better!”

Here it is, more or less. There are questions of fact to be clarified and transitions to be improved, and I would like to rewrite the last ten pages, but I don’t see much more than a week’s revision. The typing was done by a Briarcliff housewife and is execrable.

Waking this morning, I think the book so poor that it should not be published. I think, an hour later, that it can’t be so bad. I shall scythe the orchard.

And I think about the past—how orderly, clean, and sensible it seems; above all, how light. I sit in a well-lighted yellow room thinking of the past, but I seem, in relation to the past, to be sitting in darkness. I remember my father, rising at six. He takes a cold bath and goes out to play four holes of golf before breakfast. The links are hilly and there is a fine view of the village and the sea. He dresses for business and eats a hearty breakfast—fish hash with poached eggs and popovers, or some chops. I and the dog walk with him to the station, where he hands me his walking stick and the dog’s leash, and boards the train among his friends and neighbors. The business he transacts in his office is simple and profitable, and at noon he has a bowl of crackers and milk for lunch at his club. He returns on the train at five, and we all get into the Buick and drive to the beach. We have a bathhouse, a simple building on stilts, weathered by the sea winds. There are lockers for dressing, and a fireplace for rainy days. We change and go for a long swim in that green, dark, and briny sea. Then we dress and, smelling of salt, go up the hill to have supper in the cavernous dining room. When supper is over, my mother goes to the telephone. “Good evening, Althea,” she says to the operator. “Would you please ring Mr. Wagner’s ice-cream store?” Mr. Wagner recommends his lemon sherbet, and delivers a quart a few minutes later on a bicycle that rattles and rings in the summer dusk as if it were strung with bells. We have our ice cream on the back lawn, read, play whist, wish on the evening star for a gold watch and chain, kiss one another good night, and go to bed. These seemed to be the beginnings of a world, these days all seemed like mornings, and if there was a single incident that could be used as a turning point it was, I suppose, when my father went out to play an early game of golf and found his dear friend and business associate Mr. Forsythe on the edge of the third fairway hanging dead from a tree.

I wake, feeling myself to be mysteriously at the bottom of the heap, the bottom of something. It is as though a theft had gone on during the night, and I wake to find myself robbed of spirit and vitality. What I seem to feel is that I have lost the hope that love and reason have any persuasiveness in the problems of my marriage; that Mary’s struggle with the past is so strenuous and unequal that it would be absurd to expect civility or pleasantness from her. I go into town. My emotional system, no more complicated than the plumbing in this old house and no more prone to breakdowns, seems to be functioning nicely, and I regard the city in the bright lights of a summer day without a trace of anxiety or combativeness. I lunch with L. and his daughter and read Albee’s play on the homebound local. The play adds its weight to what appears to be a basic distemper. “He is not,” says Mary, “the only person who writes wickedly about women.” This makes me cross, and I cut some grass to improve my feelings. But they remain lamentable. We go off to dinner: gentle people in a spacious house; a wood fire burning on this cool summer night; Japanese lanterns in the garden to celebrate the birth of a grandson. My feeling is that it was I who was invited, not she; that it is my charm, good looks, mobility that have got us asked. This is, of course, repulsive. But during the course of the evening she fires a remark across the room that seems to me vindictive. I think the remark should not have been spoken, and I know that my reaction should not be so passionate, and yet I cannot alter either of these facts. I talk with S. and W. when I come home, and, getting into bed, summon the image of someone more magnanimous and adult than myself whose wisdom and compassion I can imitate. I drink with the B.s on Saturday; too much. Swim with the physicist whose hobby is cabinetwork. He is virtually hairless, soft and open in his approach, an object of suspicion. He tells me he was a star of the Princeton water-polo team. What he was doing at Princeton was not clear. The hot-water system backs again into the radiators, a pipe starts leaking, the oil-burner defuncts, and I do not seem to have the fortitude to regard these matters with the indifference they deserve. As I am about to climb into my wedding bed for a bounce, I am rebuffed. Then for the next hour, loudly and cruelly, I unburden myself of every resentment I have cherished for the last three months. There may be some justification for this, and yet I am so profoundly ashamed of myself in the morning that I am sick, and repeat that old incantation: Valor, beauty, grace with strength, etc. Mary tells me that she could not sleep; that she lay awake, crying, until three. Anyone so cruel will be punished, and yet these drunken outbreaks seem to have some salutary results. One of the mean things that I said was that I do not like to go anywhere with her, and so she will not go with me to lunch. I beseech her, ask her forgiveness, take her in my arms, and, after drinking three gins, go off to lunch. Whether I appear to be drunken and foolish I do not know and do not much care. I enter the locker room at the pool just as a member of the jeunesse dorée drops his tennis shorts and so we are introduced. I find this disconcerting and am inclined to blame him. He seems uncommitted. So I jaw through a stylish lunch. There is a pretty woman in the company. Home, I sit on the terrace; I feel very tired. My heart pains me and is heavy—alcohol, tobacco, anger, or grief—and the future, when I put my mind to it, eludes me. I hold my younger son against me, and this lightens the pain. Gentle horseplay in the dusk. I sit on the stone steps, still warm from the sun, and wait for the evening star. I drink some bourbon and go to bed, to sleep.

So in the morning I say, Leap, my heart, my spirit. Nothing else will do. They must leap.

Mr. Bierstubbe reached deep into Mrs. Zagreb’s dress and lifted out her breasts while she stroked his back and said, “Be good, be a good boy.” Her tits were as big as turkeys, they gleamed like marble and tasted to his thirsty lips as soft and various as the night air. But when he woke on Sunday morning Mrs. Zagreb’s breasts had turned from a treasure into a torment. They seemed to surround him, to fill the air of the room, to follow him, tempt him, dangle and wobble in front of his nose. They followed him to the train, settled themselves beside him, followed him down 43rd Street to his club, and when he had a drink before lunch his hunger for Mrs. Zagreb’s bosoms nearly overwhelmed him.

A. rolls his eyes at his wife and groans, significantly. Well, all right, she says. He strips off his clothes and waits at the side of the bed. She goes down to the kitchen, puts four blankets into the washing machine, blows a fuse, and floods the kitchen. “But why,” he asks, standing in the kitchen door, naked and unaccommodated, “why when I ask you for tenderness do you wash blankets?” “Well, I was afraid I’d forget them,” she says shyly. “Moths might get into them.” She hangs her head. Then he sees something touching and pitiful here, some irresistible wish to be as elusive as a nymph, but she, being much too heavy to sprint through the woods, is reduced to putting blankets in a washing machine. But he would understand that her determination to seem elusive was as strong as the drive in his middle; he would put his arm around her and lead her up the stairs.

I open Nabokov and am charmed by this spectrum of ambiguities, this marvellous atmosphere of untruth; and I am interested in his methods and find them very sympathetic, but his imagery—the shadow of a magician against a shimmery curtain, and all those sugared violets—is not mine. The house I was raised in had its charms, but my father hung his underwear from a nail he had driven into the back of the bathroom door, and while I know something about the Riviera I am not a Russian aristocrat polished in Paris. My prose style will always be to a degree matter-of-fact.

In the 1890s my father chanced to be in Munich, and, either because it pleased him or because he needed money, worked as a model for an architectural sculptor. He must have been a handsome young man and I know that his trunk must have been well developed since, until close to the end of his life, he worked out for an hour each morning with barbells, dumbbells, and Indian clubs. The sculptor portrayed him as a sort of Atlas or male caryatid and incorporated his figure into the façade of the old Königspalast Hotel, which was destroyed by Allied bombing in the forties. I saw the hotel when I took a walking trip with my brother through Germany in 1935 and saw the unmistakable features of my father, holding on his shoulders the lintel of that massive hotel. Later, in Frankfurt, I found my father’s image holding up the balconies and roofs of the Frankfurter Hof. My father was obviously not the model for all these caryatids, but once I had made the association it became obsessive and I had the impression, not unpleasant, that a great many apartment houses, hotels, theatres, and banks were supported by my father’s noble shoulders. The war did surprisingly little damage to buildings of this era, and I seemed, only recently, to encounter my father holding up the façade of a hotel in Yalta. I recognized him again in Kiev, supporting the bow windows of a whole block of apartments. He was everywhere in Vienna and Munich, and in Berlin one saw him maimed, disfigured, and lying in a field of weeds near Checkpoint Charlie. Since he had begun his life on the sunny side of the street, having been employed mostly in supporting those lintels under which the rich and the fashionable passed, it became distressing to see how the light passed from these buildings and neighborhoods and that in time the appearance of my father’s head and naked shoulders usually implied a fourth-rate hotel, a bankrupt department store, an abandoned theatre, or an incipient slum. It was in the end a relief to get back to my place in Kitzbühel, where the buildings are made of wood.

Shea Stadium. A late summer night. In the clubhouse I look around me with arrogance. Who do these people think they are? They think they are who they are. Fathers with sons. Some good-looking women. The sense is that one is having dinner not in a ballpark but in some city on the way to a theatre, which makes the spectacle of the ballpark when one enters it apocalyptic. The sod gleams. This is indeed a park. I think that the task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. The umpires in clericals, sifting out the souls of the players; the faint thunder as ten thousand people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits. The sense of moral judgments embodied in a migratory vastness.

Woolgathering, oh, woolgathering. It is the day of the civil-rights march in Washington. After lunch we drive to a public beach, Croton Point. An abundance of trash cans, turnstiles, ticket windows, men and women in county-park uniforms, worn lawns, pretty willows, water the color of urine, which smells, to my long nose, like an open sewer. A plump lifeguard sits in his tower blowing his whistle, and shouts commands through his electrical megaphone at every infraction of the numerous regulations. It is disconcerting to realize that this gravelly beach, this contaminated bay are all that much of the world knows of these pleasures. I regard the bathhouse with some apprehension. There is a memory here, adolescent, pubescent, of making it with boy chums in the briny chambers; of my friend hanging around the open shower, looking for big ones. Not me, I think. But this seems more an anxiety than a memory, and looking among the few bathers I am struck not with the delights of the flesh but with its mortal boredom, pimply backsides, halitosis, ill tempers.

I horse around with the children and a football. Sharpen a carving knife in the kitchen. Mary gives me a shy and passionate kiss, a loving kiss. My memory is full of holes and craters, but I cannot remember when it last was that Mary made an open declaration of love. So we are one another’s best once more; and it was not so long ago, two or three weeks, that I glumly ate some hard-boiled eggs and thought of her with bitterness and worse.

Ben’s dog dumps three loads on the library floor. In the morning I trash her with a rolled-up magazine. An hour later Ben asks, “Did you notice that Flora has difficulty walking? To get to her feet seems to give her much pain.” So I conclude that I have broken the spine of my son’s beloved pet. I am the sort of man who thinks twice about swatting a fly and when I step on an ant I step on it carefully, to give it no pain. To harm an animal troubles me deeply; to harm an animal loved by my son is crushing. Mary seems to abet my troubles. She reports that my son is in agony; that I might have harmed the bitch, since she has such frail hindquarters. I drink some Scotch, seize a piece of bread and cheese, and stumble out of the house into the woods. I am convinced that I have killed my son’s dog. Regard this man of fifty-one, then, lying in a field, gnawing on a piece of bread, his eyes filled with tears. I have killed my son’s dog; I have killed my son’s affections. It was an accident, but this is no consolation. I walk up the path to the dam, and this simple exercise refreshes my common sense. It may also clear the whiskey in my head. When I return, the dog is better, and when we take her to the veterinary there seems to be nothing wrong with her. So much of one’s vitality is spent on false alarms; and I think, perhaps unjustly, that Mary was able to create an atmosphere of morbid anxiety, something like the mysterious powers her father had to extend a feeling of condemnation and doom over his domain. Is this neurotic, is it, as I once thought, some discernible power of darkness? In the afternoon mail there is a letter saying that two pieces have been bought. I am jubilant, but when I speak the good tidings to Mary she asks, oh, so thinly, “I don’t suppose they bothered to enclose any checks?” I think this is piss, plain piss, and I shout, “What in hell do you expect? In three weeks I make five thousand, revise a novel, and do the housework, the cooking, and the gardening, and when it all turns out successfully you say, ‘I don’t suppose they bothered to include any checks.’ ” Her voice is more in the treble than ever when she says, “I never seem able to say the right thing, do I?” She strays up the driveway. I don’t understand these sea changes, although I have been studying them for twenty-five years. For three weeks we have enjoyed transcendent passion, love, and humor. Now this thinness. I cannot control it—a chance telephone call, a dream, can bring it on. So she wanders away not only from me but from us all.

I would like not to do the Swimmer as Narcissus. The possibility of a man’s becoming infatuated with his own image is there, dramatized by a certain odor of abnormality, but this is like picking out an unsound apple for celebration when the orchard is full of fine specimens. I’ve done it before; I would like to do better. Swimming is a pleasure, a gulping-in of the summer afternoon, high spirits. It is natural and fitting that a man should in some way love himself. So it is natural and fitting that the roof leaks, but it is hardly universal. So the people who drain their pool are merely a threat. By the time he reaches it, the water will be deep enough for a dive. With Pygmalion there is the need to dignify the situation, to make it urgent.

The Swimmer might go through the seasons; I don’t know, but I know it is not Narcissus. Might the seasons change? Might the leaves turn and begin to fall? Might it grow cold? Might there be snow? But what is the meaning of this? One does not grow old in the space of an afternoon. Oh, well, kick it around.

So the battle against hooch and tobacco goes on. I seem, so far as tobacco goes, slightly ahead; it’s tied up with the hooch. When people are sick I think, You might feel a little better if you didn’t smoke quite so much, etc. It is impossible to work.

In church, on my knees before the chancel, I see, with a crushing force, how dependent I am on alcohol. It is an agony, and one not illustrated by these colored windows, stone walls, the ancient costumes of the acolytes. One needs an alkali desert, dry streambeds, a range of cruel mountains. Pick myself up at half past eleven, paddle the kayak with Ben. Waking, high-hearted and randy, I think with scorn of the book. Why should one turn the powers of the imagination onto the subject of a woman having a tragic love affair? Why should one worry about stink-finger, the wanton glance? Throw it out the window.

During the day it seemed to me from time to time that our grief, my own grief, was orgiastic. Walt Whitman being read over the funerary drums. “Hail to the Chief” played to the coffin. The beauty and the sorrow of the widow. I cried like a disappointed child, stuck out my lower lip, screwed up my eyes. He was a splendid man, and the most one can do is take his excellence as an example. What came to me as a surprise was the love he inspired. The perhaps excessive grief, the questions of taste may have expressed the emotional inflexibility, the involuntary hardening of our hearts, the small use we have for tears in our way of life. I was offended at the pride with which the TV announcer described the numerousness of the mourners as if this were competitive, as in a sense I suppose it is. There is something wonderful to be observed here about the goodness of men’s hearts and souls. One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence.

I continue to find it difficult to work here. At eleven I go up to see the services on TV. It is His Eminence Cardinal Cushing, God’s advocate, who, God forgive me, sounds the note of mortal boredom. The rites are arcane, the voice is harsh, the Latin sounds neither living nor dead, and over it all an Italian tenor sings the “Ave Maria,” a piece of music I dislike intensely. I am most moved by the smallness of the President’s coffin. The rush of dignitaries seems comical. Traffic is delayed, as it is everywhere, and it seems that his path to the grave is more tortuous than his way through life. There are the Black Watch pipers, the Air Force pipers, and rifle drill by some Gaels. It might have been simpler, but it is difficult to make choices, I expect, under a burden of grief. I should do this and that, give the hours of my day worth and purpose, but the best I do is stand at the window and watch my sons play football on the grass—Ben favoring Federico, who runs in the wrong direction. M. plays. He seems not effeminate but uncommitted. Knee-high boots, a black leather jacket, a large tail. He is a hat swiper. It is the game he plays. “It’s too bad it happened that way,” he says of the President’s assassination, “but we had to get rid of him.” He calls the other boys “niggers.”

Fred calls. His wife seems to have left him; his daughters are about to leave. “I think I’ll sell this place,” he says. “It seems a little strange to pull up your stakes at my time of life.” What is this, then? A family recollection of ingratitude, loneliness; the cruel denial of every reward. Industrious, unselfish, loving, having fed, clothed, and sent to expensive schools four children, taken his wife to Bermuda each year, he finds himself, at fifty-eight, the beginning of his winter, turned out to a furnished room, cooking his meals on an electric plate over the protests of the landlady.

And yet I think there is some sense that this loneliness is his destiny. Is this my family or is it the family of man? My grandfather is supposed to have died, alone, unknown, a stranger to his wife and his sons, in a furnished room on Charles Street. My own father spent two or three years in his late seventies alone at the farm in Hanover. The only heat was a fireplace; his only companion a half-wit who lived up the road. I lived as a young man in cold, ugly, and forsaken places yearning for a house, a wife, the voices of my sons, and having all of this I find myself, when I am engorged with petulance, thinking that after all, after the Easter-egg hunts and the merry singing at Christmas, after the loving and the surprises and the summer afternoons, after the laughter and the open fires, I will end up cold, alone, dishonored, forgotten by my children, an old man approaching death without a companion. But this must be some part of a man’s sense of destiny. We hold, like a trick of mirrors, an image of some fruitful old age—grandchildren bringing in the harvest—and hold as well a conviction that we shall be forgotten, made to suffer cold and hunger, on our last days in the world.

A review of the “Scandal” seemed to me less an attempt to judge it severely and to give it its rightful place among books than to bring to it a determined generosity and enthusiasm that would make the book a financial success and let us live in peace for a year or so. What moved A. to this generosity, this show of power, in fact, remains in the dark. Again, the cover story in its discretion, its cunning, rendered me as a serious and likable person when I could, on the strength of the evidence, be described as a fat slob enjoying an extraordinary run of luck. To use the word “love” to describe the relationships between men is inappropriate. There is, under the most exhaustive scrutiny, no trace of sexuality in these attachments. We are delighted to look into one another’s faces, but below the neck there is nothing to be observed. We are happy and content together, but when we are separated we never think of one another. These bonds are as strong as any that we form in life, and yet we can pick them up and put them down with perfect irresponsibility. We do not visit one another in the hospital and when we are apart we seldom write letters, but when we are together we experience at least some of the symptoms of what we call love.

The old dog whimpers, cries in pain as she struggles to climb the stairs. She is the first one of us to grow old. In the twenty-five years that Mary and I have lived together we have known very little pain other than the pain of misunderstanding, childbirth, passing indebtedness, and head colds. We have, in fact, known very little in the way of change. We play the same games, walk the same distances, make love with the same frequency. When our parents were sick with age and dying, their care was never our responsibility. So the old bitch, her hindquarters crippled with rheumatism, is my first experience in the care of the infirm. I give her a boost from the rear and her cries of helplessness and misery are the cries of the old. These are the first sounds of real pain that this house, since it became ours, has heard.

Reading “The Enormous Radio” I think, One fault is that I have written too much; that my motivations have sometimes been less than passionate. “Goodbye, My Brother” seems too circumspect, seems small. I like “The Cure,” but this is a look at madness with a superficial resolution—and yet I don’t intend to go any deeper into that storm. What is wrong, where do I fail? I seem neither sane enough nor mad enough. I seem not to have approached a well-defined vision of the world. Can I charge myself with some discoloration, that unclearness I despise in the work of other men? And what should I avoid? Anything contrived, anything less than vital.

Mary has the wind up about driving, and me, too. I take three gin drinks and drive my son to the station in Stamford. He needs a shave. The late-winter afternoon, the late-winter night. We shake hands gravely, although I would like to embrace him. Then I turn back. The sun has set. The winter afterglow is white, a glare. Against this are the greenish gas lamps of the parkway. The six-lane highway is crowded at this hour. The shapes of the trucks are monumental. They make a sound like thunder, and smoke pours from chimneys at their stern. They seem massive, deadly, and have for all their tonnage the wistfulness of obsolescence, as if one saw here in the winter twilight the last hours of the brontosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus rex. The throughway in this winter dusk looks like the end of an epoch. I can drive no faster than my vision and my reflexes, and the common speeds here outstrip these, and I pretend that Breitburd, a Russian, is with me for company. I point out how numerous and powerful are the cars, how well engineered are the highways, etc. I think of the two-lane roads west of Moscow, the log houses, women drawing water from a well. Turning from an unfamiliar road on to one that leads to my house makes such a profound change in my feeling that I see how provincial and domesticated a man I am. I am coming home; I am coming home.

I bucket around the village. Cash a check; buy liquor, a dog collar. The new hardware store is vast and empty and seems to have been empty for months. They will not have the paint you want, the nails you want, the screws you want. “We expect the orders in next week,” says the clerk. He used to work at the hardware store on Spring Street, worked there for twenty years. I ask him if he doesn’t miss the village. He waves his hand toward the window and the view of the river, but his face is suspiciously red. This empty store, this red-faced man with nothing much to do is a piece of life. I go from there to the greenhouse, where the warm air smells of loam and carnations, and everyone, even the dog and the cat, seems very happy. The Z.s seem to have quarrelled. That’s my guess. I buy her a dozen eggs. “That’s all I’ll need for the rest of the week,” she says. But after dark her smallest son comes down the hill with his flashlight to ask for a cup of flour. It is like running up a flag, a call for sympathy, a declaration of the fact that her husband has remained in town for dinner while she bakes biscuits to save the price of bread. The little boy is keenly aware of the importance of this hour, this task. “Did you have a very pleasant Christmas?” he asks as I walk him home in the dark. “Did you receive many gifts?” he asks, thinking himself for a moment a full-grown man. “Thank you very much,” he says when we part at the lighted door. “Thank you very much.”

The old dog; my love. That when we bought her someone pointed out that she was swaybacked and had a rib cage like a barrel. That as a young dog she was disobedient, greedy, and wicked. That she tipped over garbage pails, ripped wash off the clothesline, chewed up shoes of gold and silver, destroyed the babysitter’s only spectacles, and refused to answer any commands; indeed, she seemed to laugh when she was called. She stole our clothing when we were clamming at Coskata, nearly drowned Mary in New Hampshire, and was a hazard on every beach. That she would retrieve a stick once or twice, but after that she would turn her back and pretend not to hear the command “Fetch.” How we left her when we went to Europe, how she nibbled most of the upholstery, how when she heard my voice at the kennel she jumped a fence and hurled herself at me. That the introduction of love in our relationship came that day at Welton Falls. The stream was swollen and knocked her off her feet, and rolled her down a little falls into a pool. Then, when we returned, I hoisted her up in my arms and carried her over while she lapped my face. That with this her feelings toward me seemed to deepen. Her role as a confidante during some quarrelsome months. That my daughter, returning from school, would take her into the woods and pour into her ears her complaints about school, about her father and mother. Then it would be my turn, and then, after the dishes were washed, Mary’s.

The difficulties with upholstered furniture. How she began in her middle age to dislike long walks. Starting up the beach for Coskata she would seem to enjoy herself, but if you took an eye off her she would swing around and gallop back to the house and her place in front of the fire. That she always got to her feet when I entered a room. That she enjoyed men very much and was conspicuously indifferent to women. That her dislikes were marked and she definitely preferred people from traditional and, if possible, wealthy origins. That she had begun to resemble those imperious and somehow mannish women who devilled my youth: the dancing teacher, the banker’s wife, the headmistress of the progressive school I attended. There was a genre of imperious women in the twenties whose hell-for-leather manner made them seem slightly mannish. They were sometimes beautiful, but their airs were predatory and their voices were sometimes quite guttural. The time Susie put her off the jeep and she tried to commit suicide. How when I was alone and heard her wandering through the house my feelings for her were of love and gratitude; that her heavy step put me to sleep. Her difficulties in being photographed. That she barked when I talked loudly to myself. The book-review photograph, her figure arched with greed; the cigarette endorsement in which only her backside could be seen.

A white sky at eight, white as the snow, cloudless and so brilliant that it lifts one’s eyes, with a faint pain, upward.

Lift the weights and look at myself in a mirror, wondering when my muscles will appear. Read Nabokov. The lights of the winter evening shift and now, by chance, the coming of the night seems formidable, some blood memory of the Ice Age. Later, I go out. The temperature is way below zero and the air is unusually dry for this valley. It is that fine cold that seems to frost the hair in your nostrils, and that has some subtle fragrance of its own—faint, keen, and a little like ammonia. I wear only a sweater, but I am not uncomfortable. The timbers of the porch crack in the gathering cold and I am ecstatic. “I want to eat cucumber sandwiches and drink champagne and do it all over again,” he said, and she said, “Good night, my dear, you go to sleep, you go to sleep. Good night, my love.”

After drinking and reading happily for several hours I decide that Federico and I should have a little fresh air. He does not like to coast. He would rather watch mayhem on TV, or dress and undress a soldier doll. I force him out of the house. The orchard is a sheet of ice. The coasting is not only excellent, it is dangerous, but he hates it. He wants to get back to the house. He lies on his sled, dragging his feet, the prow turned uphill. I rattle down the hill, over the little pond and down the path to the woods. I am fifty-two, not drunk but plainly stimulated. Coasting seems to me a simple means of self-expression, a way of getting a little deeper into that last hour of a winter afternoon. I would like to share this with him, teach him to be unafraid, show him that as well as the world of his cozy room and his mother’s box of candy there is the much more beautiful world of the frozen orchard and the late-winter day. But I teach him nothing but dread and boredom, and deepen his distaste for the snow and the cold. He asks a question. I leave it unanswered and go into the house. From the window I see him lying on his sled, thinking wickedly of his father, and I say, “It breaks my heart to see a little boy who takes no pleasure in anything but pushing his head under the sofa cushions. I wish he could learn or be taught some pleasure in running, coasting, etc.” Then there is the question of whether or not he should go to see the James Bond movie. I decide against it, but the looks of reproach aimed at me by him and his mother alter my decision and off we go, when the dishes are done. A light snow is falling. The movie is erotic and gory, and I am angry at a seven-year-old boy’s being exposed to this. Although I have exposed him to similar movies myself. I am very angry, and think that a mother who takes a seven-year-old boy to such a movie should be censured. I hold my tongue but I expect my feelings are not secret.

At the age of seven I conceived an indecent passion for the plaster cast of Venus de Milo that stood on the bookshelf, and, standing on a chair, I tried to look down those draperies that had, for so many centuries, concealed what I desired.

Who wants to fall in love, who wants the waiting for a voice, a footstep, a cough, who would choose this?

So I wake thinking that everything will be nifty. In the mail there is a proof of an advertisement that is mostly a picture of me. I drive into town to get liquor for a party. I think of showing the picture to the liquor dealer, but I do not. I do show it to Mary, who says, “What are they going to do with it, pin it up in the post office?” When I object to the sharpness of this she says it was merely a civil question; there were no implications. I object vigorously. Two days later I still object. Should there be some way of seeing this humorously I would be most grateful. Gin seems to be the only way out. But there does seem to be some dreadful incompatibility between the sharpness of her tongue and my oversensitive, not to say childish, nature. The depth of my feeling seems to lie in the fact that I feel threatened and am, like any sensible man, wary of death. I wish I could forget this; and I shall try.

So one seems to settle down into this darkness. Time has always mended things. The physical changes are most noticeable: the short step with the toes pointed out, the wounded and musical voice, the dark scowl in the hall or the landing where one passes. Susie feels ill and I am afraid I may be to blame, so I retire to the balcony of the movie theatre where, like Estabrook, I have worked out or waited out so many problems of my life, transmuted into Apaches coming over the crest of the hill, beautiful women drinking wine, the collision of automobiles, airplane views of the Southwest. When I return the air is warm. There are no stars; there is nothing to see but darkness. They sit together and seem happy. Susie feels better; her face is clear. It begins to rain. I open the door to hear the sound. There is a single flash of lightning; a single recessive peal of thunder, and these most commonplace sounds make me absurdly happy. I am what I was—randy, light-boned, happy, all of this on the strength of the sound of water. I take a bath, open the window by my bed to hear the rain, curl up like a resentful child, and step into a panoramic and detailed dream where I turn on a water faucet to fill the ornamental pools of some great estate, hear Tallulah Bankhead complaining about her doctor, see a young woman wearing nothing but a brassiere, and am embarrassed by a flux of young writers who seem to be wearing bathing trunks. I make a lame joke.

Good Friday. I neither fast nor make any other observation of this sombre time. I roam from the post office to the church, unsober. The central altar is dark, but on the left the priest has improvised a Mary chapel where there is a blaze of candles and lilies and someone keeps the vigil. I find all this offensive; say my prayers. The day is brilliant for half an hour; clouds come up swiftly from the northwest and now the day is dark.

Easter. As I dress for church the iconography seems more than ever threadbare: the maidenly cross, the funereal lily, the lavender bow pulled off a candy box. How poorly this serves the cataclysm of the Resurrection. All the candles burn. Miss F. has worked day and night on the flower arrangements. The organist, truly raised from the dead, improvises a sort of polymorphous fugue. We raise our voices in some tuneless doggerel about life everlasting. These are earnest people, mostly old, making an organized response to the mysteriousness of life. What point would there be in going to church at daybreak to ridicule the priest? But he does draw a breathtaking parallel between the Resurrection and the invention of television. I hope—I go no further—to avoid anger, meanness, sloth, to be manly; and, should I be unable to mend my affairs, to act with common sense.

Swept by seizures of vertigo, diarrhea, sexual ups and downs, fits of laughter and tears, Mr. X entered into his Gethsemane, the 8:32.

A rainy day in town. I slip into a sort of sexual torpor. Anxiety may be the opening notes of this. On 23rd Street I am hailed by a friend from the Army. We have not met for twenty-three years and we lunch together, talking about the dead. K. was hit by a artillery shell. They never found his dog tags. Etc. We walk uptown in the rain. I am out of sorts. In the window of a store specializing in this sort of thing I see a photograph of a man wearing a cocksack. He seems to have shaved his body. For some reason, the picture strikes me as lighthearted and I think of poor H.

Have mercy upon them; have mercy upon them. The bright and seemly world they despised must, from time to time, have appeared to them as a kingdom. Lovers, men with their sons, the sounds of laughter must have made them desperate. With his hat pulled down over his eyes, his collar turned up for concealment, he studies the pictures of undressed men in a Sixth Avenue store window. They seem both muscular and abandoned He crosses the street to a newsstand that specializes in this sort of thing, he glimpses the photograph of a naked man in a sailor hat, a thin-faced youth who appears to be removing his jockstrap. He goes west now to Broadway, where there is a picture of a naked youth lying in shallow waves, and another with his legs parted. His pursuit takes him up to the Fifties, where there are several newsstands decked with photographs of lewd and naked men. Have mercy upon him.

Board the Century at dusk and ride up the river. One of my reasons for taking a train is to tie on a can, but I am not too successful. The bumpy roadbed gives me a hard-on and I climb down from my berth with the hope that Mary will be awake. She is, it seems, but pretends to sleep. I join her at dawn, when she is downright disagreeable, and rub up against her thigh, watching the Indiana landscape. I think of my last trip—the travelling salesman who fell romantically in love with a large white pig, munching acorns in a grove of oaks. Dear Pig, are you willing? Piggy-wiggy, dear. Later in the day he was stung by lust at the sight of a naked plastic mannequin in a Toledo store window. I remember the horses running away from the train, the children waving, marigolds shining like fire around the doorsteps, a woman glancing out of the window at an automobile dump and exclaiming, sincerely, “Home sweet home!” The country is flat and unlovely. There are automobile dumps, sandlot ball fields, graveyards. The home of Alka-Seltzer. The huge industrial sweep of Gary, with pink ore smoke pushing out of its chimneys with an urgency that seems to me sexual. The slums, the federal housing, Chicago. Mary complains about the smell of the hotel, the smell of the train, the smell of the world.

When we were in college and used to go up to the river, Aunt Mildred used to urge us to swim without trunks. “Who cares about a little thing like that?” she exclaimed, although in the cases of Howie and Jack it was far from little. She used to sit on the pier where we swam. She had cut eye slits into the pillowcase, which she wore over her head to protect her from the ell-flies. She would sit there looking like an ill-dressed member of the Klan, while we porpoised around naked in that fine clear water. One afternoon she showed up with an old-fashioned box camera and without removing her hood snapped pictures of us diving and swimming. I didn’t suppose the pictures would be any good, because of the age of the camera and the difficulty of focussing it through a hole in a pillowcase and I knew that she wouldn’t dare have photographs of naked men developed at the drugstore in Howland. I don’t know where she had the pictures developed and I didn’t see them until thirty years later, when we sold the camp. Mildred was long dead. The pictures had been successful.

I think I think of the book not as narrative but as bulk, texture, color, weight, and size. I would like to shake my composure, to howl, to penetrate. I hope, this day next year, to have another book done.

When we say “Christ, have mercy upon us,” we don’t ask for a literal blessing, I think. We express how merciless we are to ourselves.

Waking, one thinks, The rain will come, and after the rain, my love. First I will hear the sound of water and then the sound of her footsteps on the stone floor of the corridor, the hall. But what is this hall and why does it have a stone floor? Am I involved in towers, moats, stupidities, and fancies, are these the foolish terms in which I phrase love? Troubadours in fancy dress. There is thunder, lightning, and then rain. I hear first the rain and then her voice from the driveway below the house. She is tired and I leave her unmolested, but see, as I get into bed, through the transparent cloth of her nightgown the darkness of her fuzz: fragrant, delicate, it seems to me a flower.

Oh, to be so much a better man than I happen to be.

My difficulties continue, and I can’t determine where the blame lies. I sit in a chair under a tree. It is raining. The rain is light. I can hear it fall on the leaves, but the leaves of the tree make a shelter. I think—I have been drinking—that I must speak with Mary, make some stab at candor and perhaps approach love. This may be tactless and stupid. In any case, I speak. “You’re just making up one of your little stories,” she says. I say that the remark is spinsterish and irrelevant. I speak of those weeks following my return from Russia when I received, for the first time in my marriage, a vocal declaration of love. I ask if she doesn’t remember this; if it wasn’t true. She replies, “I wish you could have seen your face when you asked that.” I cannot settle on any motive for this. Does she think I despise her so deeply that any declaration of love is ridiculous? Or does she mean to say that I am ugly? She claims not. But how cruel it would be for a woman to call her lover ugly. The children return from the movies and I sit with them in what seems to me a fragrance of reasonableness. Returning to bed, I think I shall suffocate.

In the morning there is the familiar anxiety. I fear that I have done and said some irrevocable things; that I have ruined my marriage and exiled myself. I feel both tender and horny. But opening a gin bottle at noon I think that the only declaration of love I have ever received has been rescinded. This is merely at the sight of a gin bottle.

The Skidmore girls, some of them are beautiful. One’s head swims. Watch for the inch or two of thigh you’ll see when they mount their bicycles; watch the bicycle seat press into their backsides. Some of them, much less beautiful, muster a sense of humor and get by on this. Some of them have nothing at all. It is hot, and as in all small towns people complain more bitterly than they would in some larger place. The broad porches are still open, with their straw rugs, wicker furniture, tables with vases full of flowers, copies of the Readers’ Digest, and, at four, a pitcher of nice lemonade. “It’s our outdoors living room,” said Mrs. L. A bridge lamp burns at night. Crossing the park where I once saw a woman steal marigolds I think with sudden love of my son Federico; I think with shame of those quarrels he has overheard. How can he grow straight and courageous as he must in a house where there is so much that is bitter and frigid? I am sorry, I am heartily sorry, my son. I love you and will try to stay at your side. Girls pass with shadowy cheeks, with round cheeks, with no cheeks at all. No dogs bark. Have they passed a leash ordinance? I think of what I may do to C.B., but I won’t put this down. I am plagued by some circulatory distress, a whiskey thirst, and the bitter mystery of my marriage. They all three go hand in hand.

The lollipop clock in front of Edelstein’s jewelry store stopped twelve years ago at five minutes to six. A blizzard was raging and the hands of the clock, still at five minutes to six, solidly commemorate the snow-buried streets, the stalled train, the barely visible street lights, the stillness. The clock in front of what used to be Humber’s hardware store stopped at 9:10 on an April evening when the store caught fire and was gutted. That was ten years ago. The boredom and the aspirations of a small backwater on an April evening belong to the second clock. They sometimes ask, What kind of a town is it where we have two stopped clocks on the main street? It’s that kind of a town.

People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worser, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.

I cut the grass, hoping to improve my spirits, but then I hit the bottle with such vehemence that nothing is gained, much is lost, and this morning I feel sick. I read a biography of Dylan Thomas thinking that I am like Dylan, alcoholic, hopelessly married to a destructive woman, etc. The resemblance stops with alcohol. Once the idea of divorce had occurred to Mr. Halberstrum, he found himself unable to uproot the possibility. It established itself with the tenacity of a thistle. His manifest responsibilities to his children began to seem unreal. He knew how deeply bewildered they would be if he divorced—that this action might be a serious impediment to their growth as men and women—but the ardor with which he dreamed of being free of a way of life that seemed unnaturally debased and crooked made the sufferings of his children distant and powerless. Boarding the 8:23, he thought of divorce. The mountains and the river spoke of divorce. The noise of midtown traffic urged him to divorce. He looked during the business day for associates who had divorced and thought them the happiest of men. He approached his lighted house in the evening with a reluctance that was physical. It was a struggle to climb the stairs. He stooped with despair when he heard her slippers in the upstairs hall. A man with no religious training and no faith at all, he was forced into the emotional and physical attitudes of prayer. “Dear God,” he sobbed, “restore to me my patience, my faith, my powers of love; let me forget the bitterness that has passed; set me free from resentment, petulance, and anger. Amen.” But she had traduced him lengthily twice in a week and responded to his cozening with a swift kick. Now her voice was soft in the evenings, but it did not reach him. Let us pray. ♦