Wed 23 Feb 72 – 10:30 PM Fight with Bruce. He accuses me of not making his music of “the first importance.” (It isn’t. We are.) I watch him leave from the window, wanting to call him back and apologize but I would cry and that would only make things worse. They are going to the studio to smoke dope since I won’t let them smoke it here. Bruce is very much a when-in-Romer. He is very insulted when I tell him he would have signed right up with the Hitler Jugend but of course he would have. (Totally explains how he wound up in Vietnam. Also why my father likes him.) Bruce agrees with people he doesn’t agree with just to “smooth things over” conversationally. This puts our relationship in a horrifying new light. When I first met him I was amazed how our tastes and ambitions and philosophies were exactly the same. What miracle, I thought. Hallelujah! But he was just agreeing with me to make me like him. What a dolt I was. Now, since he is the only one bringing in money so my writing is of no importance. Then there’s the housework problem – he’ll be damned if he’ll do any and I loathe it to. Fortunately this apt is small but the prospect of moving into a vast estate with Bud & Honor is not setting my heart ablaze. I’m on the second day of my diet and diets are intrinsically depressing. There’s a lot of preparing food I can’t eat and watching others eat it and I hate that. Been feeling unbeautiful all day. Plus now that we are married Bruce never compliments me any more. This is a surprise somehow. But I can see it from his point of view. I am now just part of the furniture and he takes it all for granted. Plus there’s sex. If I can’t come before he does I don’t get to – he goes right to sleep. Annoying. Reading Eric Ambler’s Journey Into Fear and enjoying it in spite of the fact that I would never have trusted the people the protagonist trusted. He’s going to end with a knife in his ribs – duh! But it’s very well written. I can learn from this guy. Don’t feel like taking a walk. 9:00 PM Sat 26 Feb 72 I’ve GOT to take a walk tonight. Have been very good on my diet but tonight I forked in too much chili. Expensive 40 min call with A to find out what she thought of my stories when Chloe and Mrs. Stone are silent as the grave. She liked Dreamer better for the exact right reasons. Each of us cheered the other up. Reading Margaret Drabble’s Garrick Year. Exact same plot as Waterfall, really. (Which I liked SO much.) It’s the handling makes it different. I think an American editor would have told her to stop analyzing everything. Character says she never had an orgasm till after children were born!!! (With some people it works the exact opposite.) Good reason (I guess) for fixation on children. 2:15 AM Thu 1 Mar 72 Tamsin depresses me by returning my essay The Journey of Dorothy Sayers with the comment that it should be more like a New Yorker profile! What do I do with that? I really don’t want to study NY profiles but I guess I have to. Should I be paying this woman money? Then she tells me I should write for children and gives me a copy of The Treasure at Green Knowe, which is much better than I feared. (I really like the idea of instinctive natural” religion – sort of Sredni Vashtar. I can do a lot with that. Cheered up by first advance of money from lawyer – not that much but B buys a $650 stereo system and I spend $30 on second hand sofa. Reading Penzoldt’s The Supernatural in Fiction. He is very Freudian. Everything explained by an infant trauma. Passed 800 in our Oh Hell marathon game.
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1:00 AM Tues 25 Jan 72
Received a nice letter from Toss Sheffield my high school pash wondering what I’m up to! Should I tell him? Feel like griping about Mencken (whom he’s writing his thesis on.) Everything about Mencken enrages me – the Pilsner, Sara, you name it. Anyway it’s nice to be remembered. He says he’ll “never forget” me. Him & Devon; but what good is being unforgettable? Imagine a story with all my old boyfriends showing up at hospital where I’ve been in an accident – getting to know each other and going out drinking together.(The heck with me.) It could happen. We bought a new puppy (Spitz) and are considering moving to an abandoned turkey farm. Chloe pleads with me not to be a hermit but I like it. Bruce played Johns Hopkins coffeehouse to shouts of “encore”! Reading More Work for the Undertaker but decided I really do not like Allingham. She’s no Sayers (still my favorite). Mon 30 Jan 72 Apparently we are stuck forever in student housing – no one will rent to us because we have no income. Our “expectations” fail to impress them. Bud is angling to buy a property together where the four of us can live – Honor less enthused but Bud keeps getting Bruce excited about huge houses & properties in upstate NY going for a song. Bruce’s latest passion is painting – enormous abstracts. Also flying – he has enrolled for lessons at Friendship but when he went for the first lesson it was too windy to go up. He is painting now – I just got off the phone with Avril – who is depressed although still as zany and humorous as ever. She wants me to help “free” her from school – M & D are making her see a psychiatrist who is a very depressed man himself, sitting behind an ancient popcorn machine to which he gestures hopelessly, muttering, “Youth. Youth.” School equally hopeless – the teachers have given up being adults. They went on a camping trip where all the teachers disappeared leaving the kids alone together. A did end up in the sleeping bag of some guy but he cried all night and nothing happened. She wants to just get her GED and get out of that place. I warn her that anything I try to do will send Mom in the opposite direction. She blames me for really strange things I have nothing to do with. The less I say the better. (Maybe different once we can pay them back.) Memories made me write a story about Toss I am happy with: Dreamer. Don’t want B to read it though because it’s about a boy who wishes his parents were dead! New puppy (Weasel) sleeping on the floor looks like a little pig. Reading Simenon’s The Train highly recommended by Bruce. I am not so sure. A bit disgusted with the French. On the other hand any writing about sex gets me enflamed and Bruce is never in the mood except at night. He played the Junior College Presidential dinner at the Sheraton – spent my time wandering the halls with the other girlfriends. Perfect place for Charlie Chan to discover a body. Mon 7 Feb 72 More trouble with “camp followers” lured by the glamour of the rock life (and the maybe someday lure of Big Money.) Tristan now wants to be paid. We didn’t want him in the first place. They put him off telling him to wait till they’re making $1000 a month. Wed 15 Feb 72 Snowing all day! Only just stopped (quarter to 8.) Spent my morning at college Xeroxing my two stories Travel Fever and Dreamer. 3 versions of Toss story – think I like the Young Fascist version better. Toss himself wouldn’t like it at all, but the muse seldom has a real relationship to the Finished Product. What a wad of MSS. Took copies to Chloe who is working at The Manor. I feel embarrassed around her – like I am in the presence of an old lover. (Finally let B read it – he prefers the “crazy” version. He would.) Come home to find band meeting deep in band business. B is buying a Fiat sportscar – blue – the first new car I will ever have owned. This is good because I currently have to open hood to start Volvo. They have decided to record at ITI studios in Baltimore –right on Rt 83 – much cheaper than NYC. 3 times as much studio time for the same amount of money plus one free song if they like the way it’s mixed. I don’t dare say anything while the others are here but the minute I get B alone I will have LOTS of suggestions. (I think he ought to dump this band since he is the talented one.) My latest story – A Charitable Institution – is going nowhere fast – I have to figure out the character of the murderers - so I crack open Haight’s George Eliot. Feeling more forgiving that she didn’t more actively champion women’s’ rights – it simply wasn’t in her nature. But I find her philosophy of suffering depressing. The men of her time were insufferably arrogant! All this “Beauty” garbage (usually spoken by some man who looks like the back end of a hippopotamus.) Poor Marian! It bothered her all her life. Mom and Dad back from the Paris Peace Conference. They bought a Picasso! Pewter Hill night of Mon 21 Feb 72 I feel like Mrs. Gaskell – she was always complaining about her pens. This place filled with alarums and excursions. Auntie Beulah pitched herself down the basement stairs and landed on her noggin – no bones broken but she has two big lumps on a head that wasn’t working too well to begin with. (Her favorite TV being Lawrence Welk and/or the Republican convention – anything’s better than talking to her – she says “women” don’t need “liberation” and it’s just something our generation “made up”.) Frantic phoning around for doctors and ambulances; I say why? Let her go ”into the good night”. This exposes to raw air poor Mom’s last nerve – Mom has been trying to get Auntie B into a nursing home for months now but the old lady rejects every possibility, including the expensive and the glamorous. She persists in countermanding orders to the maid and gardener and sabotaging food prep – the Maxim she put in the percolator yesterday almost sent Dad into cardiac arrest. Mom wants to get Dad to “retire’ to Maine – she is sick of the “young things who don’t believe in marriage” sitting agog at his feet. I cannot believe any sane young woman would look at Dad as a sexual target. On the other hand there are a lot of insane women – of every age – out there. (More than there are witches, in my estimation. Probably driven insane by – wait for it – MEN!) I don’t understand how a person who believes in heaven can get herself into such a state of gibbering fear over the prospect of death. She’s 86 years old – you’d think the inevitability of the whole thing would have sunk in by now. But apparently the older they get the worse they are. Maybe the best way is to go like Mrs. V – insult and abuse one moment – “lights out” the next. (Of course it was rough on Nana. But that actually makes my case.) Went skiing today, sledding last night, going to Marlys tomorrow. Didn’t get to talk to Avril half as much as I wanted but then I never do. She is so funny. She has wonderful stories about her psychiatrist. He wrote a sex book for teenagers that has to be seen to be believed. Mom and Dad like him because his “politics” are right (i.e. everyone is hopeless; the throne room is empty; all authority is Corrupt.) Dad insists our phones are being bugged and he yells into the phone at the men he imagines are listening in ‘ “Why don’t some of you get off the line so the rest of us can hear something!” Mom rolls her eyes and gazes northwards longingly. Got a good idea for a story – a girl skier - notably unreliable - sees a frozen baby beside the trail but when she gets people to go back of course there’s nothing there… Tues. 10 Jan 1972
Here I am married and all. Not sure if I can go into it I have such conflicting feelings about it. Can’t believe it’s been three weeks since I wrote here last. It’s like a Diary Freeze is settling in. Must break it, but some things can only be handled as fiction and I have a horrible feeling my wedding is one of those things. Fiction has design and meaning; real lie is just a mess. Maybe I should start backwards. Today Bruce and I went to see a dilapidated house we might want to live in, in a forgotten neighborhood off Edmondson Ave. 5 bedrooms $300 a month utilities included. Hmm. Definitely have to leave this place – must conserve our cash if we want European honeymoon on top of album (which costs more like 17,18 thousand.) Landlords raising the rates $200. Is this even legal? I feel like I have all responsibility, no actual power. Dad has involved a college friend who assembles songbooks to ask his opinion – he said you just have to play and play in coffee houses till someone notices you, making an album would be the worst thing in the world. Thanks a lot. Dad went all the way into NYC to talk to the production engineer – who insists we can sell the finished master to a record company. No Problemo. Dad’s getting Over-involved (he LIKED the engineer) and I hear the music from Psycho playing repetitively in my head. I am NOT the one with the knife. We came back from a Completely Unsatisfactory Honeymoon last Thurs. about noon. Bruce carried me across the threshold and I immediately burst into tears. Naturally he was concerned. Was it the pile of thank you notes I have to write for such bizarre presents? Was it the mold on the refrigerator, the dust on the walls? Was it the latest story rejection saying my story IS NOT FINISHED? OK, maybe it was that. The “honeymoon” was staying in Tristan Eckles’ father’s ski chalet in Vermont. Except we didn’t have it to ourselves! Tristan was there with a passel of his druggie acquaintances. He was sure this would be the “finishing touch” that would launch him from roadie to agent (which he pines to be.) Instead he is now my enemy for life. Bruce says he has to take “just a social sip”. So I spend my “honeymoon” stumbling through the snow alone. Bruce promises me we will go to Europe this summer – he did a music tour of the Brit Isles and has many connections, contacts, fond memories. The wedding itself just had to be suffered through. My harpsichordist got snowed in and I had to use a pianist instead. The meetinghouse was candlelit so no pictures came out. Genevieve’s husband lectured Mom that she should not let the caterers serve veal (it was delicious.) It was New Year’s Day so everyone wanted to spend dinner watching football. My hair looked stupid although the rest of me was pretty. Bruce looked magnificent but he muffed his vows and I have the unsettling feeling I’ve made all the promises here. I got drunk on white port and the weather was appalling. Other than that, everything’s peachy. Johnson’s Life of Scott very sad. He needed money so badly and was in so much pain at the end – made everyone he knew promise not to read his books because they were trash! Even Johnson apologizes for them. Unbearable. Mon. 17 Jan 72 – St. Petersburg Fla. Here’s a place we didn’t expect to be. Bruce’s mother DIED. Neighbors heard nothing for days – police finally broke in Thurs night to find Mrs. Vill dead in bed and grandmother unconscious on bathroom floor. (She is still in hospital but has not regained consciousness and is NOT going to pull through. She is over 90 so no one is surprised.) We heard the news at 11 pm – got a 1:15 plane from Dulles – met Bud and his girlfriend Honor at Bay Front Med Center. Everyone is mystified and in a state of shock – Mr. V projected such an impression of strength & health. Grabbed the first book I could find – unfortunately it is Julian Franklin’s Death by Enchantment in which he insists modern witchcraft is a Real Thing and women do it to men all the time. (And to him, apparently – he died 1970 the moment this was published.) He says men can be witches but doesn’t offer examples of any. If men are the Dominant Group why are they so afraid of us? Is a puzzle. I think the death of Mrs. Vill absolutely disproves Franklin’s theory – a real witch she would have lasted longer (and she tried so hard). Honor and I cleaned the bathroom floor (ugh – crime scene) while Bud and Bruce went through their mother’s valuables – an old green ammunition case. No funeral instructions and a will dated 1962! No will for Nana and no insurance policy. (Bruce very surprised – his dad sold insurance and left his Mom a hefty sum and Mrs. V lectured EVERYONE to buy insurance.) A Mrs. Hopkins came over with coffeecake and made coffee for everybody, which Honor found much fault with. (It was delicious – very gloppy the way I like it.) Honor is a disgruntled hippie chick with an obesity problem – nobody lives their lives well enough to suit her so she has to take precious moments out of her busy day to correct us all the time. (She is graduating in “Interior Design”.) She promised to show Mrs. Hopkins how to make Decent Health Food if she ever has a moment. She must have been more than a match for the Evil Mrs. V – I’m sorry I never had the delight of observing them together. (She says Mrs. V gave her giant underpants for Christmas, she gave Mrs. V Sex After Sixty!!! Har har.) Bruce found an unwitnessed, unsigned will in the jewelry box – unclear whether this is legal. Hospital called. Nana died – blood clot in the bowel. Mrs. V had “massive heart attack” nothing could have stopped. In a bureau drawer B found an early attempt at pornography he’d written at age 13. She’d worked him over about it but kept it through 5 moves!!! Interesting. I wanted just one item – a gorgeously huge steel art deco pin of a hart leaping through a circle. A scarf pin I guess. Very pretty. Thurs night – 20 Jan – airborne Will is legal but there’s a worse problem. Mrs. V combined all hers and Nan’s assets so she wouldn’t have to “bother” with probate when Nana died – but she died first – so Nana is her heir! And Nana – who died intestate – has more heirs than Mrs. V had, who designated just the two sons. So not clear what they will get. But boys put house & furniture up for sale – they will get something. I made B promise to pay Dad back. Get him off my case. Reading Thurber & White’s Is Sex Necessary hoping for a laugh but it’s not funny at all. More men “trapped” by women. They’re obviously intensely jealous of us. I think it’s just so weird. 30th St Station – Phila 5 Dec 71
Meeting B in NYC to see Liv Taylor – Beloved Bruce! The gears mesh fine at the other end – we’ll have to run. Very successful day shopping with Mom – though it was an uphill battle – she kept reading to me from Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch which I totally do not get. Women are neutered? Not allowed to be feminine? I think we are drowning in femininity if anything – seems the opposite of the Feminine Mystique but Mom really enjoying being the Trendy One talking about how weddings are so hopelessly old fashioned, rigid, ritualistic, etc. and I am embracing a Dying Form. We went to two horrifying wedding dress stores where they treat the whole operation like you’re buying a casket to inter yourself in – finally Mom suggested Ann Pakadrooni in Bryn Mawr – perfect. I bought a copy of an Edwardian wedding dress with exploding sleeves and big medallions of lace on the most beautiful off-white watered moiré – and I didn’t stop there. I bought a Victorian brown velvet riding habit for Avril’s maid of honor dress and a gorgeous “mother of the bride” dress for Mom – sapphire velvet top and gold brocade skirt. Very Russian. She kept complaining it was “not her” and she’s going to give it to me after the ceremony – I said Fine. At least that’s done and she won’t show up in a gray suit looking like she’s going to the airport. Reading Delderfield’s Green Gauntlet. Pretty sure I won’t finish. And I was so looking forward to it – falling into a long novel like a stone into a well. Makes me long for Trollope. This writer is way too obvious. I don’t like being pushed and manipulated. I reject your mug preachery, Mr. Delderfield. (It’s not that a sexist can’t write good novel. Look at Tolstoy.) Fri. Night 10 Dec 71 I’m in Chap 5 of Shirley Jackson’s Road through the Wall and I still don’t get it. Very thankful not to be living in the 30’s. I know what Shirley Jackson can do. I can feel her holding back, trying to make this impersonal. Feeling tense and unfulfilled in my personal life. Can’t write. Just want to get this over with. I’m convinced when I’m finally Alysse Vill-Aallyn I’ll be a different person. Bruce wants me to read The Bell Jar, says Plath is just like me. Had her hymen ripped and everything. Yeah, but she committed suicide, I say. I’m much more likely to murder someone. He says, you’re not as strong as you think. Haunting words. We’re writing a film script together – The Plastic Bag. 5:30 AM Sat 18 Dec 71 Been up all this horrible night. Long day of having Bs suit fitted – we had it made (red velvet) because he couldn’t find anything he liked. Complex stuff: lace shirt, lace jabot, gold satin brocade vest. With his long dark hair in a ponytail he’s a vision. Just falling asleep when Mrs V calls cancelling her airfare, Bud’s airfare, the rehearsal dinner. She’s upset because she told Bud he would have to stay home and take care of Old Mrs E and couldn’t be best man and Bruce told her the best man was more important to the wedding than the mother of the groom. So now nobody’s coming. Bud can’t afford to come himself and he wants to bring his hunting dogs. What is it with these people that there’s no one in the universe who can look after their Treasures for 48 Hours. Bruce is trying to unsnarl it but its OK with me if it stays snarled. They seem like an awful family. Subjected Bruce to a battery of tests from The Open & Closed Mind and he comes out sane. Tried reading The Red House Mystery but rejected it when I figured out main gimmick by p. 40 – why do Eng books told from servants point of view only show how mean, vulgar, scatty and superstitious they are? Why is this “entertainment”? Too too Kiplingesque. |
Alysse Aallyn
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