12:01 6 Jan 69 “Night of the Salamander”
(Symbol of art to Osbert Sitwell.) Such depthless loneliness that last night I had to sleep in my sister’s room. Mom gave me a copy of John Lehmann’s Sitwell study, Nest of Tigers. How did she know? Fabulous, fabulous book. Shouting with recognition as I salute long-lost friends in the mad Sitwellian world. Their sense of themselves as artists rescued them from the prison of their times. Full to bursting with plans, ides & crazy intensities. Also a desire to please and a too-thorough knowledge of my own faults that keep mocking my ideals and exaggerating my failures. Trying to rid myself of a morality based on The Most Efficient Middle Class Consumption Unit. Snow across the park, all the way to the lights of my century, my city. We are hosting a Russian schoolteacher – humiliated myself when she was describing the “lost, over-privileged generation” by running weeping from the room. I am not fit company. I am the rat within the cage. Now I have to convince myself I’m sane so I can go on. 8 Jan 69 Lovely letter from Devon. Says he misses me, says needs me. He does NOT say he loves me. (I am trying to write a love story where the word “love” does not occur. 12 Jan 69 To New York City by train to audition at Theatre in the Square Theatre School (very famous) and San Diego College of the Arts East Coast auditions (they are brand new. First year of acting school is next year! Audition was in a hotel room where I had to kneel on the carpet in front of people sitting in armchairs! Still, they were super friendly. Circle much more disorganized –got the definite feeling they’d take anybody. I have gradually in the past few months been sorting my writings and shoving off into a chest of drawers all the cast-off ideas, theories and dreams from age nine onward. It’s really only the sheer volume of the thing that saves it from destruction – all that work! In ONE notebook I’m trying to assemble “all the things that went right” even if its only a few words. Serious descriptive writing I do worst – satire is my best. I like fantasy, distortion, exaggeration, but I was shocked to read the first few pages of No Champagne for Me. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to writing about prep school as it actually existed with all its destructive potential. I well recall writing it the spring of my senior year, one afternoon after tennis, sitting in my dorm room with Casey. Alas – it’s a flash in the pan that goes nowhere. I’m no child genius. 1:25 AM 5 Feb 69- Wed Devon invited me to Winter Carnival at Amherst! I was astounded. Shows you can have a big effect on people without even knowing it. Says I can stay at his fraternity (of which he is president) and he will pick me up at airport. Suddenly I am afraid to see him again. In Colette, loneliness is a duty. Am I afraid of loving him or of love itself? Shock! I think I’m afraid of winding up frustrated… I’m afraid of crumbling before him like a biscuit.
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Alysse Aallyn
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