3:20 AM 2 Oct 72 – Stone Orchard, Devil’s Elbow, NY
Bruce is in Stephens Point, Wisconsin. I wrote him a long love letter but he might not get it before he leaves for Brookings. These separations are hard on a literary soul (before we are satisfied with the second draft, they’ve moved on.) He wants to be out under the lights, playing the same song over and over, while I want to sit in my den like a bear. Writing. I am sending Erin, Travel Fever and To Bed in the Afternoon and working on a novel. Finally writing about prep school. False starts & dead ends. Tried putting my Devon stuff together in some kind of tale; hopeless. Nothing I write is as good as his letters, which ought to be published all by themselves. (Wonder how he would feel about it.) A poem about my mother answering the question: what would she do if my father suddenly died? Is turning into a long story. Reading too much criminology (Victoria Lincoln on Lizzie Borden) to be entirely comfortable alone in an empty house. Weasel at least barks – Dixie just smiles foolishly and wags her tail. Beauregard, on the other hand, is evolving into a hell of a ratter. At least the state police know where we are – they showed up to shoo a wandering cow off the porch with road flares and everything. It’s just me except for Mr. Murphy from the phone company (he owns the phone company!!! It’s a party line and he does the installation and his wife is the operator!!!) the plumber putting in the second bathroom (it’s taking up a whole bedroom so it’s going to be palatial) and a guy laying kitchen tile. (We tried indoor-outdoor carpeting they promised to replace if it was “uncleanable”. Weasel throwing up a mess of poorly digested marshrat parts was more than a match for their new technology.) 17 Oct 72 Sitting before a roaring fire – yesterday Bruce astounded me by coming home! I wept for 3 solid hours until he became really concerned and we ended up in a stupid “argument” about whether I’m “happy” or not which pretty much became a demand that I lie to him. I was trying to get him to understand that “working towards something” does make me happy but the something has to be important and matter, something you really want and are trying to visualize, even if its beyond reach. Bruce doesn’t believe in living “in the future” he says you have to live “in the present”. He quotes from Abraham Maslow in a way that tells me he’s been talking to and absorbing the philosophy of, someone else. A mysterious third person in our relationship who doesn’t believe in the future. Uh oh. This person explains life to him while I’m having dinner with Perry Mason and a single glass of wine. Bruce thinks I need “company” and racks his brain for someone to send. We could turn this into a “rest home” for musicians’ abandoned wives & girlfriends! Why don’t I have any friends? What’s wrong with me? I say no, no, no; I love being alone and I don’t want to have to “entertain” or worry about someone else when I should be writing. (Wouldn’t mind Avril, but she’s just taken a horrifying ill-paid job in the candy dept at Gimbel’s of all places. She wept when she got her first paycheck – her millionaire mother tried to comfort her with “money isn’t everything.” ) Finished Becker Lennon’s Lewis Carroll and loved it. My idea of a great biography. Such a relief after Eminent Victorians. I am more and more charmed by these inimitable Victorians – a real surprise considering how they used to repulse me. (Those beards! Those awful clothes!) But I am readying for a long wallow in Ouida and Trollope. Bruce says it will ruin my style, but I tell him, be not afraid…wouldn’t dare write a gothic without Wilkie Collins at my left hand and Saki at my right. 1:10 AM Tues 7 Nov 72 The gothic is a perfect vehicle for drug concerns, it seems to me as I read Sheridan LeFanu. Because it’s all about not being able to trust your own sensations. Tamsin writes that Doubleday is screaming for gothics and will make a contract on the first six chapters. How lovely to make money! Wasn’t Bubbles always telling me I have a “gothic personality”? Dad says he has a friend who’s a literary agent! I must put my prep school novel aside – fun as it is (my Mom character has morphed into a lesbian, mainly so she can have the experience of being the sexual aggressor). My Victorian reading’s been zipping along – Zaturenska’s Christina Rossetti, Strange Stories by Wolff, Sadleir’s Edward & Rosina, a Panorama. Mine eyes dazzle. Wrote what I thought was a good ghost story (The Ghost Room) about the room Dixie refuses to enter. Unfortunately the rejection letters agree with Bruce. Time to get with the program and write the same thing as everybody else. Haven’t I read William Burroughs? Don’t I aspire to be John Cheever or at the very least, Anais Nin? Hardly. Look how seductively the rabbit hole beckons … Wed 8 Nov 72 Sitting in the study under the hairdryer, reading Thackeray rather than writing. Another four years of Nixon. Bruce wants to watch the returns – I am too depressed. Cronkite uses the word “landslide” 300 ties in one hour. All the journalists so smooth and priding themselves on their professionalism and impartiality – I wish they acted like journalists in Thackeray – clutching their heads, weeping and pounding the table and calling each other “sick idiots” and “dissolute maniacs”. I’m trying to rework Brother Rabbit (written in the Scilly Isles.) But where could I send the story of a little girl who wills her brother to turn into a rabbit? Woman’s Day? I’m going to have to start my own magazine and I haven’t the time or money. (Call it “The Midnight Reader”.) Possibly Bruce is right and I am losing touch with reality. But if it’s Walter Cronkite’s reality we can’t part company soon enough for me. Bruce has an “investor”. Some poor guy in Aspen he talked into “lending” him money. He wants me to have dinner with him and his wife in NYC. But I am so afraid this will be another “bad debt” Bruce will pride himself on not paying back (ha ha!). How can I break bread with these people with a straight face? Sun 19 Nov 1972 Feeling ugly, stupid and fat. Writer’s block driving me crazy. Just finished Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye – I like him a lot better than Scott Fitzgerald so possibly Bruce is right and my taste is effectively ruined. Chandler used to sit in a room where he had to write but he couldn’t read. I think if I tried that the straitjacket that has been gunning for me all these years would finally reach up and swallow me. Baking cookies that are somewhat experimental in character since I forgot the recipe. If they need lemon juice, wouldn’t orange juice do? If they are glutinous, just add more flour? We will see.
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Alysse Aallyn
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