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5/26/54
Alcoholism for the writer: He carries around his wonderful gift. It is the only sure thing, and it is stronger than any bank. He can sit down any time, and with a modicum of peace of mind, write more beautifully than 999,999,999 people out of 1,000,000,000. So he drinks away the afternoons. The gift is there. It will not go. No, only something else will come: death.
9/21/54
Oh, the imaginative, the too imaginative men, who are always in love, but never requited, only noticed, boasted, their flowers and dedications received! Like Beethoven, Gide perhaps, Goethe, all the impulsive ones, who instinctively want to hitch the tail of their rocket onto something that remains on earth, before they take off into pure space. Such people cannot live without being constantly in love. Requited or not doesn’t matter. It is a sine qua non of their creativity, their happiness of course, and their existence.
I lay with her looking at the stars. I am extremely conscious of the stars, the fact that the Great Dipper, perceived by the Chinese, is flying apart at a fantastic rate, and still, at the time of my death, will be seen to be no further scattered than it is today. Well, with her, it didn’t matter, I knew that she, and I, would be dead, or near it, in another thirty years or less. It didn’t matter, because I had discovered something with her that I had never known before. It was like a secret, a secret of living. It was peace. It was something at the core, beyond life and death, living and dying. It was something happy, because it was true and eternal, even more eternal than those stars. I hope I can be excused for saying more eternal, since we human beings cannot entirely understand the word eternal, anyway. With her, I was suffused with more beauty than I could discover on any trips to Greece or to the Louvre. With her, I knew more pleasure (which is happiness) than I should ever know with Plato, Sappho, Aristotle, or Alfred Whitehead. (Plato! All you say I should have. I had!) Her body between my hands! Her lips accessible turned to me. And that sadness waiting, Ovid, when we were done.
3/30/55
The making of a book, from the germinating idea. You look ahead, two, four or five hours a day, and progress what seems like one inch on the plot. The brain refuses to advance into thin air, consciously, just as one would refuse consciously to walk off the edge of a precipice above Niagara Falls. Then in the other more relaxed and unaware hours of the day, one does advance. One steps off the precipice. A new stretch is gained. The plot advances. The characters solidify. And one can always depend upon it, the subconscious. The book will grow, as long as one concentrates those two or four hours, as long as one is, oneself, alive and living.
4/30/55
The irking dissatisfaction of living with someone whom one is not thoroughly in love with, does not love thoroughly and unquestioningly. Ah, that nagging inner question, that defiant exclamation: “Surely I am not fated to live with her the rest of my life! I can’t believe I am fated to live this!” What irks the honest man and the honest artist (a redundant term!) is that inevitably, if he is human and kind, the world—for him will be seen through the eyes of the person whom he does not entirely trust, and whose imperfections (nothing but dishonesties) he has already tried hundreds of times to correct and explain away, without success. To be bound to a warped and dishonest person, to be emotionally bound, is like being compelled to wear distorting glasses the rest of one’s life. An unbearable fate for an artist! The world is difficult enough to bring into perspective, even seen purely!
7/3/55
Maturity descends like a slowly collapsing cake, enveloping the individual, pinning his arms, pinning his legs, making walking difficult. Maturity makes one look at a new landscape and say, “well, it’s not bad, it’s not good—but I wouldn’t know what changes to make in it.” Maturity makes you make allowances for everything, makes you forgive the wrong things (because other mature persons do), makes you much too sensible to attempt the difficult. Makes you stop trying practically everything, because you have had time to see something like it done better somewhere else. Worst of all, maturity destroys the self, and makes you like everybody else. Unless, of course, you have the wisdom to become an eccentric. Maturity on the other hand makes you see so many sides and reasons for everything (a form of truth, to be sure) that the direct response becomes impossible—even to things worth responding directly to.
11/15/55
N.W. [Natica Waterbury]. She will make some desperate marriage at 38, perhaps, which won’t last, but if it lasts two years may give her (or her age will) that poise and confidence in her own special personality, which she so badly needs. She is so far superior to most in an intellectual and idealistic sense. She thinks and questions, and most of us do not, most of us live nearer to the animal level. It is this inquiring and this doubt (with consequent indecision) which I most admire in her and which will always make me love her. It is the big sine qua non of civilization, of the emergence of the human race from the more bestial organisms on earth. She can never be ignoble, whatever happens to her, however the buffetings of life force her to behave. She has that which Shakespeare meant when he compared men to angels.
7/13/56
Life—existence—getting along with people—or even getting along totally with oneself—is a matter of compromise. A platitude. But the wisdom (or the stupidity) depends on the things one compromises with, and also one’s sense of humor, or detachment, or earnestness, in compromising. It is the most important and the most difficult art in the world. But it is for people who have chosen happiness, alone. It is not really for artists, though they have to compromise, too (e.g. when they greet their cranky landladies; or do they always? No). One must either know instinctively when and how much to compromise, or one must have an intellectual system worked out about it. One must compromise the whole way, with a sense of humor and an absolute, beautiful conviction that one is not compromising oneself in doing so; or else one must be grim and equally well defined, saying basically I shall not compromise any more than is necessary for me to keep myself out of jail. But there are times when one should go to jail, prefers to go to jail. This is really the Endless Circle, the rat-race of Twentieth Century America.
1/18/57
My growing problem since 1951: (in Riesman’s terms) from inner-directed (ambitious, idealistic, self-driving, diary-keeping) I have become somewhat other-directed; and this is against my nature, or at least my nature until the age of thirty. Among its manifestations (which irritate the inner-directed side of me) are carelessness about money, looseness of morals in sex and drinking, smoking, abandonment of daily exercises (physical), abandonment of diary keeping, perhaps over tolerance of the mediocre in people and in art (this has its good side and is hard to make a judgment about), laziness (sporadic) about my own work, and a general lowering of sights in my themes. Time something was done about it. Something in between inner and outer, if possible.
9/29/57
On concentrating. (For The Writer possibly). A small matter, concentrating. But how many young writers can do it? It is not a new typewriter, a cushion in the chair, even necessarily stimulating or tranquilizing music playing. For most people, it is a guarantee of privacy. One cannot tell someone how to write a novel, the ingredients. One can only tell if they are not there. Privacy. An expensive thing in the modern world. How many young writers give themselves a chance? It is considered eccentric to like to be alone. Yet for such a short time, either a stay at a country cottage, or absolute quiet for six hours a day produce far more than the trouble costs. Take yourself seriously. Set a routine. Once you are alone, relax and behave as you will. Stand still for a moment and relish the novel sensation of knowing that you are utterly alone and will not be disturbed by a ringing telephone, a baby’s cry, an order from a boss, a groan or a whine from a spouse. Privacy is expensive. Perhaps it costs somebody else something. Relish it. But don’t feel guilty about having it. Take it as your due. Indulge yourself in everything that can possibly contribute to your writing. For instance, in the height of composition, which may last a week, a month, three months, you may not feel like writing personal letters. Don’t write them. Personal letters take something out of you, something of creative energy. It may be also that you cannot read other people’s fiction, however inspiring, or however much you may admire the author and wish to emulate him or her. To read a novel over a period of days means that you carry around in your head an emotionally charged atmosphere, a whole stage full of characters. While you are writing a book, you must carry around your own stage full of characters with their emotional charges. You have no room for another stage.
11/27/58
By the age of forty, one has amassed so many associations with music, colors, sounds, tastes, words, that it is possible to foresee life becoming unbearable. Every Beethoven sonata drags a nightmare in its wake. Every scent that women wear brings tears and trembling.