9/28/53

[Allela] Cornell—Why does the artist commit suicide? Because he sees and longs for more intensely than other people what he cannot have—the happy home, the children, the piano, the sunlight on the lawn, the years of satisfying work ahead, each year like the other. The artist cannot make up his mind. The artist is half homosexual. The artist is torn between the partner who challenges and the partner who complies. I am thinking of Cornell, and the Grecian freshness of the world in her childhood, and the successive, warping, educational blights of her adolescence. She loved too much and loved too many, but above all she loved too much. She was wide open, and life, like a tangle of bayonets, guns at cross purposes, loves at cross purposes, hit her right in the heart. She became physically tired with the strain, to the point of delirium and insanity. She came to realize, at thirty, that to be able to paint a beautiful picture did not compensate for the husband or the lover and the children and the domestic, very ordinary peace that was not there. In a moment of exhaustion, when like a suffering Hindu she thought she glimpsed the truth, she drank the nitric acid. It is a beautiful story, really, the first three quarters. Even the last is beautiful in its psychological inevitability. It should be about 250 pages.