THIS COLLECTION OPENS in 1941, when Patricia Highsmith introduces the first of her diaries—Diary 1a—to be kept in tandem with her notebooks. On April 14, 1941, she writes, “Je suis fait[e] de deux appétits: l’amour et la pensée [My appetite is twofold: I hunger for love and for thought].” How much experience is needed, she wonders, in order to write about it? To what extent does one side of this equation feed off the other? [...]

1/6/41

One brazen, conceited, decadent, despicable, retrogressive thought for today: I lost myself in a groundless dream, of life in suspension, and third dimension, of my friends and their types—of persons and faces, nameless, only filling spaces—and each one was quite to be expected, where he was—and the picture—which we call “life” or “experience”—was complete—and I saw myself—filling in exactly where I was expected—with no one looking or acting precisely like me. And I liked myself best of all this little group (which was by no means all the world) and I thought how something would be direfully wanting if I were not there.

replied my stepfather with didactic peremptoriness

FEBRUARY 17, 1941

I should be more creative, more original at this age. I tremble to think that I am 20 years old. Nothing! Except for confused emotions. I’m not even in love! I have to finish the ideas I’ve already had. Then the others will come like a rushing river.

3/5/41

It has become a platitude that an artist’s life should be hard, should be blood and sweat, tears and disappointment, struggle and exhaustion. This fight, I believe, should be in his attitude towards the world: his difficulty lies always in keeping himself apart, intellectually and creatively, maintaining his own identity at the same time he identifies himself with society. But in his own work, there should be none of this pain. He creates a thing because he has mastered it and is familiar with it. He produces it easily, having once taken his idea in his bosom. A great struggle in composition is apparent in his work, and shows it to be an artificial, foreign, and most of all, a feeble and unsure thing. Great work has come easily: I do not mean fluently, but easily, from this sense of mastery, and has been later if necessary polished and changed at leisure, and cheerfully.

3/28/41

Just now the world of experience seems more attractive than the world of books I have just stepped out of. I have not closed the door. I have merely left one room and gone into another. I have found a new confidence in myself. I have become a person at last.

4/2/41

Lately I have been wasting time. I have been doing what I should have regarded with the utmost contempt at the age of sixteen. But it has done this for me: It has shown me that an unbookish life can be very useless. It has also shown me how what I have absorbed during my monastic adolescence can be used in a more normal life. And strangely it has made the books more important in one sense: that they are essential not for culture—or background—or scholarship—but to enrich the normal life. These sound like platitudes—at the most, truisms. But it has meant more to me than that, this discovery. I have seen and lived in the real world for the first time in my stupid life.

Possible basis for my weltanschauung. That the childishness is never lost, but adulthood put like a veneer over it.

5/24/41

That night at the party, when I sat down beside you on the couch and we started talking, you might have been anyone else, any of the other people in the room I talked with that night. I can’t say yet what it was exactly that made you suddenly different. But I loved you then, because you were strange. I loved you when you said good night to me. I loved you all the next day, though I couldn’t sleep, or eat, or read, or even think coherently about you. Then when I did see you, I felt stupid, or I felt that you would think me stupid because I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You were so very offhand and wonderful when I first came. We walked out onto the sidewalk down to a dive of a bar, and sat in a booth. And it was then that something fell away from you like a mantle slipped off the shoulders—perhaps I should say like a screen that conceals something not too attractive. I wish I could say what it was. Because if I knew—if it were simple enough to be discovered, I might be able to forget it. I should at least know what to fight, what it is keeping us apart. Perhaps I was shocked because you seemed to give me too much attention. Perhaps I was silly and didn’t want anyone, after all, that I really might have. I don’t know. But I know that after that wonderful evening before, when you hardly spoke to me, and after that sleepless night and that nerve-shaken day, and the counted hours before I finally saw you again—after all that, the change in you, (or in me) was like the sudden, unwelcome awakening from a glorious dream. An awakening on a Monday morning when, with one’s castle and clouds and the silver sea dissolved into a sordid room, one realizes that one has to get up and dress in the cold night in a few minutes and plod through a weary day.

5/25/41

It’s so important that people—especially young people write some poetry during their lives. Even if it is bad poetry. Even if they think they do not like poetry or have no talent for writing it, they should write, and even badly, if it is sincere. And really sincere poetry is seldom bad even if the form is not perfect. But the poetry opens a new vista of the world. It is not so much that we see new things, but that we see old things differently. And this experience is invaluable. It is as soul-shaking as the experience of love. It is more ennobling. It makes philosophers and kings.

6/22/41

There are some people we like instantly, before they have even had a chance to flatter us (which is the greatest encouragement to liking a person), because they have that quality of seeing in us what we desire to be, what we are trying to be, and of not seeing that which we are at the moment. We feel that they understand us, we begin to feel that we have attained what we desire ourselves to be, and being made happy by this we inevitably are very fond of the people who can make us feel this way.

6/21/41

We like to say it is love we search our whole life long, or we like to say it is Fame. But it is neither. It is understanding. We seek forever one other human heart we can touch and who can touch ours. We seek indefatigably like a hungry animal. For our heart is forever lonely. Forever alone. And wherever we feel this understanding may be, in a young girl, a young boy, a feeble old man, or a crone of a woman, in a drunkard, in a prostitute, in a madman, in a child, there we will go, and nothing in the world can hold us back.

7/29/41

What I admire most in an individual is a kind of activity—a liveliness either of mind or body or both—which alone can assure the development of the character I prefer. I believe liveliness and animal energy are the sine qua nons.

AUGUST 15, 1941

[...] I want to sit down at a typewriter in a room all alone. I want long days to mull over what I’ve seen, silent hours to dream out stories that are as delicate, in the first plot germs, as smoke rings. And long evenings, which will be fewer now, I imagine, with Rosalind. [...]

This summer I have climbed, like a struggling Junebug on a fluted lamppost, to a higher ledge. A kind of higher standard, but above all a new hope and confidence. I intend to stay here. Right here and beyond.

AUGUST 26, 1941

[...] I want to do so much. The one moment of discouragement and doubt comes before all one’s things are put away again, when one sees all the old books and thinks that one has read them all and how little one knows anyway, when one sees unfinished manuscripts and thinks of the labors ahead. I am aiming higher than ever before. God or something give me courage, and power!

1/22/42

Able to think only when I have a background, of music, of voices, of lecturing, able to think creatively only in the unconcious, losing the thread when I realize I am following a thread, much addicted to cigarettes and alcohol; shy about emotions of any kind and disturbed at their display; caricaturing my own talents as they lie now, writing facetious (and rather good) doggerel, sketches and perhaps whole books, specializing in takeoffs and pure whimsy and fantasy; highly critical of people, but with a circle of friends as wide as the Tropic of Cancer; subsisting mainly on fruit of citrus nature: rarely going in a church door except to hear Bach or Händel; fond of 18th century literature and music; dabbling in water color and stabbing at sculpture; aiming high and believing myself capable of great things. Falling in love more and more easily and “irrevocably.” Happier still when most alone.

FEBRUARY 6, 1942

Dinner with Hauser, we cooked, haphazardly, and started from scratch. Plenty of liquor. But no magic—no thrill, no beauty—no imagination, no ecstatic present, now perfect in the lift of a glass or a cigarette as I felt with Rosalind! I merely sit there, thinking of what to say next, stuffing my face and pondering on the personal spiel of certain people. He is all very well. I understand him and really like him—but he is as common to me as my bathmat.

2/11/42

Mozart concertos! Aged sixteen in my room at One Bank Street, with the door closed. The piano sings alone, and I lay down my books and close my eyes. One phrase in the slow second movement, with gentle fingertips, touches me like a kiss—I had not noticed the double notes, the dancing phrase in thirds, and it is a revelation—just as a kiss is a revelation from one we have known before, but whose kiss is the new unknown. At sixteen, I lay and asked myself could there be anything ever in the world so wonderfully beautiful, so perfect, as this Mozart concerto? And the answer was, no, not really—only someone might somehow be a concerto.

5/18/42

Creation of the best order comes from the greatest need. Who never has sat on the edge of his bed weeping through the night, conscious of the tongueless voice within him, thirsting after the beautiful tone, the exquisite line of verse, the perfect stroke, the flavor in his mouth that would tell him perfection, does not know what I suffer now, and will never create. Let me be, says my own voice. Let this first painful child deliver itself. Then come, if you will, probe and test and kill me, but I shall never die then. In the air-pockets, in the mountain tops, in the clothes of all mankind, in the rock of the earth and the cement of the pavements, in the waters of the seas I shall be then! But I that am heavy laden now, leave me be. I shall fashion my own tongue out of the dross of the fire, I shall find it buried in the twisted ashes. It will be there for me, it will be like no one else’s. Then I shall speak not greatness, not life, not growth perhaps, not family nor brotherly love, but speak the need of others like me who have not found their tongues, or for whom perhaps there will never be a tongue but mine. The duty is great and the burden is heavy on me, but the work will be the deepest joy on earth. Not life shall I create, not life, but truth above all, as no one has seen it before.

6/3/42

I am too familiar to myself—too old—and rather boring. The avenues of varied goals are closing up. And wherever, even, I commence the long pull anew, I shall have with me the same teeth with the same fillings, the same aches on rainy days, the same wrinkles in my forehead. Is this some chance unfortunate combination of elements in me? In my body? In my brain? This scar upon my finger, this birthmark on my arm—should they have been elsewhere, perhaps half an inch? How would another carry them, and how notice them or how forget them? I feel my grave about my shoulders, the light grows dim never to rise again, my breath is feeble and disinterested. Oh, but I shall live so much longer! And there will be moments, whole weeks, whole years when there will be no grave and no mold-smell. But intervals there will be, too, when I, regaining energy meted by the dry crabbed hand of sleep, of food, of intercourse, will see as though my eyes turned inward to reality, the hollow-orbed face of death, the flaking skin like medieval painted saints, and know then that life is one long business of dying.

6/29/42

The sensation of failing always, leads to this in the still active person: a desire to be “someone else,” the feeling that even with a new and propitious idea, the executor is the same, the executor and artist is “I,” bringing inevitably the old train of faults the old plan of stumble-blocks, makes one want a new inside, a whole new inside.

SEPTEMBER 10, 1942

[...] I am old enough to want to live my own life. I have done experimenting, wasting precious time that is ever running shorter. I should gladly give up—ridiculous phrase—my drinking, dinner going, cocktails, absurdities!

9/27/42

Sometimes I feel so much wiser than my body: then I begin to feel wiser than my head, and finally wonder what it is that feels wiser, that is wiser, which brings me once more to the insolvable problem of what am I? I do not believe in happiness or the so-called normalcy as the ideal of human life. People who are “ideally happy” are ideally stupid. Consequently I do not believe in the remedial work of modern psychiatrists. The greatest contribution they could make to the world and to all its posterity would be to leave abnormal people alone to follow their own noses, stars, lodestones, divining rods, phantasies or what have you.

The world is filled with the peas that have rolled down the center of the board into the most full partition. Psychiatrists spend their time trying to push the odd peas over the barrier into the already crowded mean, in order to make mere regular peas to which they sincerely intend to point with pride. I believe that people should be allowed to go the whole hog with their perversions, abnormalities, unhappinesses and construction or destruction. Mad people are the only active people. They have built the world. Mad people, constructive geniuses, should have only enough normal intelligence to enable them to escape the forces that would normalize them.

OCTOBER 13, 1942

Never before have I been so enraptured with my life! It’s quite an impersonal sensation. It comes when I am alone or with someone, when I am reading a splendid book, looking at an imaginative image, or listening to good music. It came today, with fantastic and sustained force, when I was listening to “Sheep May Safely Graze” by J. S. Bach in a music shop during my lunch hour. It came on even more strongly when I read a page in Mysticism by [Evelyn] Underhill. It’s my faith—it’s my life. There is nothing but art.

Another ordinary day at the office. Miss Weick was moved to the other office. I’m with Goldberg, around whom I can’t smoke as much as I’d like. I am filled with inexpressible happiness. Yet it is sadness too. It is much greater than I. I do not concern myself with my own person: only with my aspirations, my desires, my work. I concern myself with the things I love.FF

If it is pleasant for a time, it is unpleasant eventually by our having to leave it soon, or by invidious comparison which all humans make with something better.

NOVEMBER 24, 1942

[...]

I do not spend enough time thinking when I write. I have a surfeit of ideas and good ideas, but it takes so long to get from them to their actualization. I must change my life.

12/11/42

Sometimes I have the strange belief that there is a remedy for every sensation of discomfort, physical or mental. When I drink water after long thirst, eat food after hungering, or once every five years take bicarbonate of soda for a digestive ailment (nervous indigestion) and when the pain passes in two or three minutes, the dull ache inside of me lifting and disappearing, keep on at my books with the fathomless ingratitude of a young person who has always been healthy, when such things occur then I think one may always make arrangements to stay comfortable all one’s life. And yet this is the very opposite of what I have always believed (since I began believing anything, around the age of fourteen) and what is in my blood to believe. I believe in constant discomfort, varied equally like the ups and downs of a business chart about its line of normalcy, as the natural state of mankind. Therefore these happy, blind, animallike “insights” disturb me.

1/27/43

I came home one night towards midnight, so drunk with alcohol and cigarette and sleepiness that I weaved from one side of the pavement to the other. Out of a Third Avenue bar came a boy and girl about sixteen. “Take care of that cold!” the girl said with all the love, warmth, sacrificial, miraculous power of women throughout the ages! “You take care of it for me!” said the boy. “I will!” as they parted. I followed the girl to her home two blocks away, half trotting over the snow and slush to keep up with her. I almost spoke to her. I loved the sense of fiction in the scene. I should not have remembered very well if I had heard this in soberness. My sodden brain supplied the mood, the style, the atmosphere and the tones unplayed above and below, the multitudinous sketch lines which a writer might have put in before and after, some of which he would have left unsaid, like those I imagined I was seeing and experiencing. Drinking is a fine imitation of the artistic process. The brain jumps directly to that which it seeks always: truth, and the answer to the question, what are we, and what caverns of thought and passion and sensation can we not attain? There is therefore something of the artist in every drunkard and I say God bless them all. The proportion of men drunks to the smaller number of women drunks is parallel to that of the men artists to the women. And perhaps there is something homosexual about the women drunks too: they care not for their appearance, and they have definitely learned to play.

The lineaments of my face establish themselves in handsome sanity and complacency: inside is labefaction and imminent death.

How prosaic to relate this experience, these importunate, irrevocable, ineluctable facts!

7/25/43

My own work is unfinished, and I owe a great debt to all those who have fed and clothed me all these years. I owe a different debt to the one I love best. All the tears I should have shed in a long lifetime are coming now and mean nothing to me. There is no life nor truth without the one I love. There is no optimism and no accomplishment. There is no health and no future.

I have wanted long labors, of detail, and perfection, affection and great care, worthy of past artists. Inspiration is a great arc of momentum, and the momentum is love, and love requited. I cannot speak humbly enough of all the humble things I have to speak of. The absence of you has torn my insides out! I am sick with tears, and sick with the stoppage of my love. My love is greater than I, and dammed up has risen and drowned me! What does this night foretell? A quiet house, a peaceful fireplaced room, with a woman in a long brown velvet dress. What does this foretell?—Good work and healthful days? I don’t believe it, because God has made this moment too poignant, and actually too perfect of its kind. My mouth is bitter and I don’t want to kiss you. No, I am not in command of myself, but love is in command of me, and this love is destructive, though meant to be creative. Never more than at this minute, was I ready to meet the Omnipotent One. Never more fearless, never more proud of myself and never more humbled before this power infinitely greater than I.

10/7/43

How delicate is the scale in which an artist weighs his worth. It must be delicate. There must be no overconfidence in the sustaining of his creative period: there must be confidence only in his honesty, and in nothing else. The reprimand of some slight fault, the polishing of a piece of work, in an evening, instead of the satisfying act of creation, is easily enough to destroy all that gives him joy, courage, pleasure and reward. A wastebasket out of place can do it. A cut in the finger can do it. And only the making of new life can reconstruct the shambles.

10/16/43

Every artist possesses a core—and this core remains forever untouched. Untouched by the lover and the beloved. However much you may love a woman, she can never enter.

God showed a ribald sense of humor when he created the physical body.

4/2/44

I am lonely in the evenings, when the dusk invades my room, so politely, so subtly inviting me to do the things one cannot do alone. Sometimes the desire is in my arms only, and they are hungry like the stomach is hungry, for the solid embrace. Sometimes the desire is in my lips only and I bite it out of them. Sometimes the desire is a ghostly counter part of me, and stands beside me sadly. In the nights I lie and watch the moon on [its] hopeless quest, and learn anew the inexorable equation, my loneliness of one is the loneliness of one plus one and one times one and two.

4/29/44

Art is a stone-faced mountain that we attack again and again, always to be thrown back. We sit long minutes on a rock and look at the mountain with chin in hand, rally ourselves, and attack once more. We break first our noses, then our heads and then our hearts, but our way is in this direction and we cannot turn back. Finally we lie below, prostrate on the ground, and the mountain gives no shade for the flesh or the bones in the hot sun of exposure. And if we are worthy at the last, posterity points to the dents.

6/18/44

Note here: Happy days lead to stagnation of the mind. Happy days even in my opinion, reading, writing, drawing. Nothing has come in the way of ideas in the last two happy days. I used to think such days produced ideas. Now I wonder if frequent disturbance isn’t necessary.

11/14/44

Shall I say I can work when I am most unhappy? Perhaps this is the only way I can dupe myself, the only way that will let me produce any work. Anything, you know, to get one’s mind off oneself.

11/24/44

Perils of a first novel: Every character is one’s self, resulting in an oversoft or overhard treatment, neither of which results in the objective, which is essentially what has made good so much of the writing one has done before.

1/16/45

[...] I have a candle on my coffee table, candles are so beautiful at midday, with the snow’s gray glare and the gloom of the room on the side away from the windows. Henry James sits on a shelf, inviting me to forget my brief and unimportant day and stay with him in a slow moving, rarified world which I know will leave me clean, belonging finally to no time and no place. The radio plays bassoon sonatas. The potential pleasure of this morning, this day, which I feel only in anticipation, is more intoxicating than any substance or any physical sight. Merely to exist is an ecstatic pleasure. How inadequate are all these words, when the physical sensation now makes me taut, wanting to shout, laugh, leap around my room, and at the same time be quiet and learn and feel all I can!

1/8/45

To live one’s life in the best way possible, one must live and move always with a sense of unreality, of drama in the smallest things, as though one lived a poem or a novel, attaching the greatest importance to the route one takes to a favorite restaurant, believing oneself while browsing in a bookshop, capable of being unmade or made, destroyed or reborn, by the choice of literature one makes. In one’s room alone, one should be Dante, Robinson Crusoe, Luther, Jesus Christ, Baudelaire, and in short should be a poet at all times, regarding oneself objectively and the outer world subjectively, compared to which state of mind the reality of the sorrow of a lost love is destructively real and brutal.

a discarded but upright Christmas tree that sits in a corner of the little lawn in my court. The chiaroscuro of its branches half covered with snow suggest the pen lines of an artist

Happy just as I was at nineteen. My brain is a tabula rasa—and life excites me.

5/17/45

The beautiful wonderful sensations of working again, after chaotic idleness that is anything but restful. To hell with the ship-getting-its-keel-back theory! This is literally being on top of the world. By dealing with three characters in a story, one somehow gets atop the entire world, understands all humanity (not in a moment, but in time) and above, beneath, through all, one has regained a momentum like that of the whirling earth and all the solar system, one has acquired a heartbeat.

I am a coruscating pinwheel of delight

7/1/45

For future reference: In case of doldrums of mind or body or both, sterility, depression, inertia, frustration, or the overwhelming sense of time passing and time past, read true detective stories, take suburban train rides, stand a while in Grand Central—do anything that may give a sweeping view of individuals’ lives, the ceaseless activity, the daedal ramifications, the incredible knots of circumstance, the twists and turns in all their lives, which no writer is gifted enough to conceive, sitting in the closeness of his quiet room.

9/8/45

Should like to determine the reason or the host of reasons why I avoid meeting people, encountering them on my walks, why I avoid greeting even the most pleasant acquaintances by crossing the street when I see them far ahead of me on the sidewalk. Perhaps it is, basically, the eternal hypocrisy in me, of which I’ve been aware since about thirteen. I may feel, therefore, that I am never quite myself with others, and hating deceit, constitutionally hating it, avoid its necessity. Then, too, I am sure I feel most contacts insignificant, because the polite phrases—there are layers and layers of polite, semi-polite, not quite natural phrases, which must be stripped away, used up, before one reaches the real person. And how rarely this happens! What troubles me somewhat is the superimposed problem of being in touch with humanity. Flatly, I do not want it.

Ideals wear away, and a mistress apart from home making wife becomes the most pleasant, salubrious, invigorating arrangement

7/25/46

The constant need to retire into oneself—daily, if only for half an hour. It is only because reality bores one finally, becomes tragically, depressingly unsatisfying. To have thought of something fantastic in the midst of reality is not enough. It must be set down. And this is not vanity only. One fears that unless the nodes of growth are fixed, one will not grow higher in the next leap of growth.

10/6/46

The farmer and the poet, providers of our physical and spiritual nourishment, are the least rewarded members of our society. At times it seems writing has only an amusement value. So be it, good enough. Then one is brought, by the death of a friend, at a funeral service, to the realization that these phrases of God’s provision and refuge are not for rare occasions, as we hear them, but for all times and places.

11/4/46

I can never be moderate in anything—not sleeping, eating, working, loving. Who realizes this understands me (who wants to?) but still does not predict me.

11/11/46

Pain sends one wandering into the dusk, the dusk of New York. It is all at once all sadness, all beauty, the soft blue gray of the air (and the gray will win), the yellow white red green lights that hang on the blue grayness like ornaments upon a Christmas tree. For it is near Christmas. Christmas, and the one we love! But she will not be with us. She has never been with us for Christmas and will never be. She is gone, she is dead, and all you have of her are the memories bound up in yourself that you carry on and on through the dusk. All at once this terrible sadness, inarticulate in the terrible beauty of dusk! Sadness so strange and beautiful and perfectly pure itself, it almost produces a kind of happiness. Where shall I not wander in the years to come? Through so many more dusks, beloved!

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 become what he must be, a medium, a pane of glass between God on the one side and man on the other.

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 (a Bistro Night Club) where I was frightfully bored. And when we got home at 11:15, I cried. Suddenly it seemed like everything was impossible. The old story: I want to stay home and read, and she wants to go out. I want her to find someone else for her evenings. Ginnie said that these differences are always canceled out by men and women: that they somehow always go on being happy, etc. And though I can’t recall her words exactly, I knew then that she was right. I am the serious fool. Read P. [Paris] Review until 12:30—about Kafka and people like me, until I felt strong and happy again.

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 oppressive tedium and fatigue about it all—making one’s effort at interest, readiness, simple alertness sour in the mouth. Beware these tireless slaves! How do they do it themselves? (Do you really want to know?) Where are their moments of reality—at the breakfast table, in bed with their wives? Gardening? Washing their cars? Or are they another species of animal that does not need reality?

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.

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 effortlessly. The typewriter is above all alert, sensitive as you are, far more efficient in its tasks. After all, it slept better than you did last night, and just a little longer.

10/23/47

4:00 A.M. I cannot live alone in health. In the night, alone, awake after sleep, I am insane. I read Gertrude Stein. I eat like a Cyclopian giant, only my wine and my whiskey do not make me sleep. I do not desire anyone vaguely or specifically: I merely say, if I had so-and-so, I should not be insane now. I am without discretion, judgment, moral code. There is nothing I would not do, murder, destruction, vile sexual practices. I would also, however, read my Bible. My being is rent with frustration like the curtain before the false temple. Yes, I long to meet a beautiful woman at a tiny black table somewhere, and kiss her hand, and talk of things that would delight her. I long to pare myself as I long to pare my art of the extraneous that corrupts it. It must come first in my work. I drink whiskey to stupefy myself, and regret what it does to my body—fat cells, deterioration of the brain, above all indulgence in a dependence upon materiality when what keeps me awake is a spiritual intangible.

How perfect these nightmarish moments—On awakening to close the green transom

5/15/48

Please try to notice if every artist isn’t ruthless in some way. Even the sweetest of characters have done something, generally because of their creative life, that to the rest of the world is inhuman. Some cases are more obvious, others may be more concealed. I know mine exists, my cruelty. Though where, I cannot precisely say, for I try always to purge myself of evil. Generally it is selfishness in an artist. And because he subjects himself so cheerfully to all kinds of privations for his art, it is difficult for him to see wherein he has been guilty of selfishness. He sees it as selfishness for such an obviously worthy cause, too. Generally, in one form or another, it is a self-preservative selfishness, in regard to his not giving enough of himself to the world or another person.

SEPTEMBER 21, 1949

To the Grotta Azzurra with K. Very cluttered with rowboats, so certainly 50% of the light was obscured. What a shame. Caught the 4:10 bus back to Napoli. Then the parting. And the rushing. Grapes. And a last dinner with K. I in my white suit, which I’d wanted to wear the first evening with her. We dined—indifferently—at the vine balcony restaurant of our first lunch. K. often holds me, looks earnestly into my face, and kisses me on the lips. What does she wish me to say further? (I have said nothing.) She doesn’t wish anything. But mightn’t I? Plans—does K. want them? I know it is I who do not want them. That K. could more easily bear than I could say, I shall come to London next year and we shall live together. No, I don’t not know what I want. With perfect equanimity, I can contemplate nothing but brief affairs—promiscuous ones—in N.Y. And yet I hope for a jolt (of time, in time) to crystallize my desires. I long to write, and dream of its coming out easily as a spider’s web. Now I know why I keep a diary. I am not at peace until I continue the thread into the present. I am interested in analyzing myself, in trying to discover the reasons why I do such & such. I cannot do this without dropping dried peas behind me to help me retrace my course, to point a straight line in the darkness.

OCTOBER 24, 1949

This day completely yielded to being in love with K. What happiness upon admitting it, believing it, fully. The future suddenly spreads wide, revealing a whole golden-pink horizon. I have not been so happy since Ginnie. Jeanne called in at 9. I kissed her finally, chez elle—(why else did she ask me up?) and though she is engaged, to a numbskull, I gather, aged 35, I am quite sure she will be available. The spirit of reconquest, of ego, (of evil) motivates me tonight and tomorrow.

JANUARY 19, 1950

My birthday. 29. Work—I thought that the comics might be stimulating now. Unfortunately not. However, the checks will doubtless be. But the stories—! With the family tonight. martinis, good French wine, presents. And a check over $20 for a macintosh. Couldn’t sleep tonight. I think of Lyne—who tickles my curiosity, that’s all. Isn’t that normal after three weeks together? And I was also thinking about my life. I should be writing now. I cannot possibly justify these two months I plan to work on comics. I don’t get any younger.

was stupidly inveigled into inviting her here.

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.

I think I have suffered a minor relapse this week. I am profoundly and nervously exhausted, eager for the nepenthe of alcohol of an evening if I have a friend to share it with.