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5/7/50
It is freedom, which muddles a man up. I am not advocating totalitarianism. But a writer must learn how to impose his own totalitarianisms upon himself, himself being sole governor, knowing that he is free to change discipline and routine after due process of altering within himself his legislation.
JULY 4, 1951
Tonight I felt fat, old, I heard my heart and felt mortal as mortal can be. It startled me so, I had a hard time getting to sleep. I was alone, a physical body that one day would run down and die and be buried. So I thought. It was dreadful. And unforgettable. Thirty—what a turning point. I remember Natalia’s saying in Capri: “Thirty? You don’t begin to live until you are 30.” Tonight. My movie opened, I believe.
8/31/51
As to plot: to what end is individual man tending? What does he want or aim for? To leave his son with a better established business than his father left him? To die wealthy? To enjoy life as soon as possible, and as much as possible? To win the love of a certain woman? To acquire fame as a scientist? A writer? A musical comedy singer? To visit every country in the world? (No, that passes.) To understand the world as a philosopher? Most people in my book have forgotten, gradually and in the abrasive rush of time, the sharp pricking edges, the arresting colors, of their original ambitions. Their ambitions are like old lost loves, pricking them to dull attention in the middle of a drink, of a conversation, with a dulled recognition. “That is mine,” they realize suddenly, as they would think on seeing a photograph of the girl they once slept with: “She was mine once!” To make a plot of individual objectives and to see them lost and forgotten, that is logically the plot of The Sleepless Night. Carry the reader on as the ambitions carry the characters on for certain periods of time. Then simple life takes over.
10/4/51
Autumns in the heart, and old tragedy, tears, the echo of pain and the hollow echo of a cry aloud in the midst of weeping. I stared at her until I no longer knew her or her name, knew only her form and her bones and the shadows at the sockets of her eyes, and then I began to draw, while the radio played a Chopin étude. Oh how beautifully my pen behaved! The autumn came swiftly, a rising shadow of night, telling me, one day you will no longer be with her, whom you love now, but your hand in drawing, your talent and your desire, your courage, your selflessness, your happiness when you draw, these will always be with you, be you seventy and toothless, poor and alone, but she? She under the light now—I can hear her breathing—she will be gone, and worse, almost forgotten. The tragic chorus chanted in my heart, and I followed the distant play closely, tears coming to my eyes.
5/7/52
With these serious people, these bons vivants, who take so much more seriously their amusements, their aesthetic surroundings, than any artist takes his work or his creative process, the creative process begins to atrophy in their presence, for the curious reason that their pursuit of pleasure is so business like. And once they have it—pleasant café-bars, shopping-centers, an efficient maid, a garden, sunlight, then life, instead of relaxing, becomes shopping, getting repairs done, planning, anxiously, next summer’s vacation: in short, the element of pleasing, of amusement, goes out of the artist companion, and he can no longer find his proper plane. Amusement, entertainment, via writing, disappears in a fantastic world somewhere far away. As is usual, the paradox in this fascinates me.
MAY 8, 1952
More and more often I think back on Joan S., and feel my leaving her for Ginnie was the greatest mistake I ever made, both emotionally, and for my career. There is doubtless something like this in everyone’s life. That is why life on earth is not entirely heaven. Nor entirely hell, thanks to these pleasures snatched, even if paid for so dearly.
10/28/52
The really depressing thing about being depressed is that one’s own thoughts and their obvious courses (into all the little cul-de-sacs of impossibility) are so ordinary. To a much stupider man than myself, the same thoughts would occur, one realizes. And worst of all, the same emotions! A human creature, torn apart on the old rack of indecision and ambivalence of desire, is like any dog hesitating between the fleeing squirrel and the terrified, paralyzed rabbit—and losing both!
8/18/53
It is curious that in the most interesting periods of one’s life, one never writes one’s diary. There are some things that even a writer cannot put down in words (at the time). He shrinks from putting them down. And what a loss! Like a lot of outrageous, apparently senseless losses in nature, due to an assumed superabundance in nature. Even experience is superabundant, but it is at times more difficult to ferret out—that is, in dull times—than in more dramatic times. But the value of diaries is their dramatic periods, when one has “perhaps” shrunk from setting down the weakness, the vagaries, the changes of mind, the cowardices, the shameful hatreds, the little lies carried out or not, which form one’s true character.
9/3/53
An artist will always drink, even when he is happy (that is when he is working well and with a woman he loves) because he will always think of the woman he saw last week, or the woman who is a hundred or three thousand miles away, with whom he might have been happier, or just as happy. If he did not think of this, he would not be an artist, suffering with imagination.
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.