Activity

9/3/47

Advice to a young writer: approach the typewriter with respect and formality. (Is my hair combed? My lipstick on straight? Above all are my cuffs clean and properly shot?) The typewriter is quick to detect any nuance of irreverence and can retaliate in kind, in double measure, and effortl…

5/11/47

That an individual’s faults are never quite without pardon, unforgivable—this is perhaps the only adult entry I have ever made in these bloody fifteen cahiers.

4/17/47

The essence of unreality in the modern world: (is not nightclubs, but) to look for work in the late afternoon, by appointment even, after having worked at one’s own work all day. Now I know how A.C. [Allela Cornell] felt after a morning’s painting when she called at a comics’ outfit. The…

APRIL 12, 1947

Reading Dostoyevsky’s letters. Wonderful. Too bad I can’t interest G. in them. I give her so much to read—and nothing comes of it. Tonight, she wanted to see “people.” So after dinner at the restaurant, we took the car to see Texas E. Very pleasant time. Later we two went to Soho …

1/31/47

A writer should not think himself a different kind of person from any other, since this is the way to the promontory. He has developed a certain part of himself which is contained in every man: the seeing, the setting down. Only in the realization of this humble and heroic fact can he be…