1 July 74
Finished Life of Turgenev – these death scenes are killers – like Sir Walter Scott screaming for a solid week – but it gave me a great idea for a novel. T sent his illeg daughter to live on his amour Pauline Viardot’s French estate to kiss her feet and become a holy queen like her. Polinka grew up to absolutely hate Pauline. Cutting and hemming my new white skirt while watching Something to Live For which is carried entirely on the broad shoulders of Ray Milland. Writer should be shot for that ending. No jury would convict me. Start my first week of work tomorrow painless 3 days. Every week after will be 4 days – perfect for writing. Bruce has taken up secret smoking! 4:30 PM – Sun 7 July 74 This is the life – Avril instead of Bruce, and my job is a dream. I’m supposed to be a receptionist for Bonnett & Brandt but they really want me to run blueprints all over town which is OK by me. Something very satisfying about blueprints. (It’s only $58 a week but $58 a week beats broke.) Avril and I are writing a gothic novel together - we’ve got 50 p. so far. Here’s a genre where weirdness is appreciated. Bruce said I was “driving” him out. Paranoia is the price you pay for irresponsibility I guess. I can HEAR his future girlfriends being lectured on how conventional I was, insisting on things like paid bills and flowered curtains. Sun 14 July 74 Tues. was a bad day. I lost my job, my contacts scratched my corneas, Avril took me to the hospital where they gave me Darvon drops. Avril got sympathetic shooting pains in her heart. Bonnett & Brandt tried to hire me full time – agency took me off the job! So I quit agency. I don’t understand why this works for them – unfortunately I was in floods of tears so failed to make a good case for myself. Finished Sjowall’s The Locked Room. Suggests plot of novel I would call Hetaira. Avril and I argue over our Gothic – I say it’s female pornography – our stag movie – she disagrees. Tried writing a letter to B. Should I even attempt it? Tried reading Delderfield – “No nonsense about fashionable ambiguities” says Orville Prescott on the book jacket. And that’s just the problem. Next read Simenon. Can’t sleep so might as well balance checkbooks which is going to be depressing. D’s phone bill $75 because of his radio!!! The radio was supposed to be INSTEAD of phone!!! Sun 28 July 74 Announced our split up to all and sundry. Mom and Dad say “keep them in the loop” in spite of Dad’s lectures on “good wifery” (he’s an expert) which are apparently based on the assumption that Bruce left ME. Devon sent a letter saying he’s started a competitive skiing school. Invited me to visit. Hmmm. Hard not to fantasize. Avril wants me to drive her north. Called Walter to prod publishers – this is taking an eternity. Tamarack, NH – Tues Aug 6 When I arrived at his brother’s house Devon was meditating. He’s just back from Italy. He says he’s not thinner but he looks different – his moustache blonder – the blue of his eyes more intense. Unfortunately he’s so beautiful he appears actually divine. He was wearing his red & white striped running jacket and very short white shorts. Some poor besotted girl came to visit him – the one who taught him Italian – very plain – not much competition. D tells me about his younger brother’s broken engagement. Fluctuating emotions of the male. Uh oh. I try to act cool. He tells me he is physically very shy – goes to a girl’s house to kiss her – can’t make himself do it. Should I just grab him? I refuse. Seems impolitic. He understood about Bruce – doesn’t think I’m crazy. Says he’s been having trouble communicating with me all these years – our dinner with Bruce (the one D brought a girlfriend to) was NOT a success because he had to get drunk to survive it. He says the thought of me RUINED all his college relationships! I’ve got women I’ve never even met furious at me up and down the Atlantic seaboard. 7 Aug 74 D has an apt in his brother’s house – I was upstairs in a ski student bunkbed where I fell asleep after my bath. He woke me up at 8 – his brothers went to the movies. D said he was having trouble keeping his hands off me and he was afraid his brothers would notice. I said they’re too drunk most of the time to know what’s going on. Physical perfection and constant inebriation is their mantra. Devon cooked me a fabulous vegetarian dinner and then we went to bed in his apartment – a king size bed. He said he didn’t want to get “sexual” too fast - I said fine with me but it was so glorious and beautiful we went the whole way. I can’t believe I’ve been torturing myself with Bruce’s “sex-making” all these years and trying to make myself adapt to it – much more satisfying to be worshipped as a goddess! He was so worried after that it wasn’t “safe” – told him about my IUD and he was relieved. Now he’s agonizing about Bruce. We’re not divorced. But I promise him its over. Sat 10 Aug 74 Just back from watching Devon play in a tennis tournament. This is what life’s all about where he comes from. I am so happy I would not have believed it just a few days ago. D’s latest is worry that his brothers will “tell” his parents about us. They will think he split up my marriage! Who can chart the literally endless misconceptions with which we torture our minds? I tell him he KNOWS it isn’t true but he acts like that doesn’t mater if it LOOKS true. It’s his nature to blow hot and cold – I get much better sex if I tell him “Fine – I can sleep by myself” and he attacks me in my 17” bunkbed. If he breaks it they will notice! Not to mention I don’t think there’s a lock on that door! He says our relationship can’t go farther than this. I said it must – all relationships do. Parents tell their kids “Stop growing” but…guess what? I’ve GOT to get some sleep – D wants me to walk a trail with him tomorrow AM to see how many trees need to be removed. He says he’s going to cut every tree himself because his father told him it’s impossible. Mon night 11 PM 12 Aug 74 - MD Almost unconscious with exhaustion. 10 hr drive to Baltimore – picking up dogs doing laundry, futzing in house etc. Last thing D said was he was “glad to get a second chance!” We’ll see what he makes of it. Searched for my parable to send him but couldn’t find it. D. suggested I need to come live in Tamarack. He will “find” me a place because I can’t live with his brothers. (Even he says that house is “poisoning” him.) Everyone gets jobs at the hotels. I don’t like the sound of it. I’m afraid if I do I’ll have to get in line with that poor Italian girl. He says he always retreats from the heat of intense relationships. When he said goodbye to me he kissed my shoulder! Little des he know this “inadequacy” I one of the things I most love about him. 13 Aug 74 Astronomical dentist’s bill –paid my share but sent his to Bruce! He won’t pay it but it makes me feel better. Gas bill $77! I thought $55 was steep! It’s the airconditioning. $400 left at bank (My father would be shocked). – I really must get a job. Threw away all B’s underwear then wrote D a letter. Feel better.
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Shadowe Island 8 Jun 74
Avril remarked to our parents, “Alysse is down on Bruce.” So I guess I’m not fooling anyone. Any attempt to discuss my work with Dad a failure. He “knows it all.” I should do whatever is recommended for success and anything else is “bush league.” Avril says she can’t talk to him about college either. If you don’t study economics at his alma mater you’ve missed the boat. Thinking a lot about death lately – the panic, the surrender, the euphoria. According to the Bangor paper there’s been a rash of tanager deaths from starvation lately. They make look fat but they’re dying. It’s the little Match Girl all over again. One feels we’ll never escape from sorrow. Tues. 11 June 74 Bruce says he wants to fix things up and start over. Intellectually I can see it but emotionally I can’t. We tried making love twice but I couldn’t give myself over to it. I keep hoping lust will just take over but it hasn’t yet. I’ve lost all respect for Bruce. He started reading The Eustace Diamonds because I liked it but soon switched to The Spy Who Loved Me – worst novel of a bad novelist. 8:30 PM – Dad & Bruce doing dishes, Avril reading The New Yorker and thinking of applying to Fleming College in Florence and I am sitting here scribbling. Finally made love to B – for him, not for me. Trying to imagine what sort of job I can get. Thurs. 13 June 74 – MD Arrived home to a letter from Walter’s DAUGHTER. “Sample editing” changing my language to “teen speak.” I have to rave here because I can’t say anything to the poor girl. She isn’t an editor, she isn’t an agent, she’s not my friend (I’ve never met her) she’s a nobody. She and her Dad apparently want me to write Airport. She changed “The busiest hours” to “The busiest times.” That’s how bad it is. All this “difference” I’ve been cultivating all my life I have to drop immediately. I have to go along to get along. I just hope Walter lets me out of my contract. ERIN isn’t perfect. But I like its birthmarks. I need a vacation to recover from my “vacation.” I am pimply and exhausted without even the ghost of a tan. Spent the night at G’s NYC apt on the way back - worked hard to keep her from seeing the friction between me & B but why? I’m kicking myself now. But I’m just so ashamed of the both of us. I certainly can’t discuss my novel so we are reduced to “making conversation.” B. humiliated both of us trying to teach Gs husband to put a topspin on a tennis ball. Awful. B. says he’s 30 lbs overweight and its my fault because I won’ play golf with him. Trying to watch the Emmies with B makes me feel I’m in the day room of the asylum. Before we were married when I heard him telling people they should freeze their dope to concentrate the effect I should have known. Sometimes I wonder if he actually THINKS. Midnight 15 June 74 The brilliant author of the Sandcastle is dead – replaced by Doris Lessing trying to be Muriel Spark. (Accidental Man.) Just awful. What gives? Poor Iris. I would say she has never known love. Reasons I should not divorce Bruce: 1. Dogs greet him with such joy. 2. 3. 4. 5. Venus Freeway liked my book. Need 2 more weeks to decide. Registered at a temp agency. Typing, receptionist blah blah blah. Was offered filing in the basement of Equitable Trust 4pm to midnight $2 an hour! Nix! 17 June 74 Finished Prescott’s Ferdinand & Isabella. Bored by the wars but it’s a masterpiece compared with Mattingly’s Catherine of Aragon. Wed 19 June 74 My period lays me low. Would it be worth it to get Midol? Freshly bathed downstairs waiting to see G Merrill in The Murderers. Thinking a lot about Somerset Maugham lately – his theories on the perfect short story. I think his have a relentless sameness – especially the China ones. Prefer Ivy Compton-Burnett. According to Walter’s daughter I shouldn’t be reading these people. Bruce just said he’s jealous of my diary! That arrested me a bit! I told him I write about the trivia you can’t even talk about. Making a will so he can’t inherit my literary properties. We’re making love again but I’ve realized I can’t live with someone who hasn’t conquered certain problems. He thinks its OK to be fake because “everyone’s” a fake. Bruce sitting stark naked at his radio waiting for his bath to fill. Picture of him shouting “Breaker, Breaker!” should be grounds for divorce in any state in the union. Thurs 20 June 74 New candidate for Worst novel of the year – Lawrence Kamarck’s The Bellringer. How do people get THESE things published? Am I not awful ENOUGH? I really cannot aspire to be more awful. Bruce says our entire problem as a couple boils down to my lack of interest in marijuana. Plus he’s going back to school. So there. Majoring in Dope? I ask him. I worry the problem is financial – neither of us can afford to move out. Taken to walking in the middle of the night – maybe I can get thin this way! Sun night June 23 - 74 Boring evening at the Cub Hill Inn with Shari and her latest amour Chuck talking about Bluegrass Festivals we have known. When we came home I tried hugging B – he said, “What’s the point? You’re just going to get rid of me.” No affection: just sex. I find myself daydreaming about Devon kissing my throat. I think Bruce is going to get rid of himself. His latest idea is taking the rest of our money and going to England to resume his wildly successful musical career. I say wonderful. Better than burying your feelings in cheesecake. Shari works as a nurse’s aide for $2.30 an hour. No skills. Should I apply? Contemplating a gothic novel: Mass at St Secaire. Meeting Avril’s train tomorrow at 7 followed by Chinese food and Peter Cushing in The Beast Must Die! B and I argue about whether she’ll stay a week or a month. He says she’s “snotty” to him. 7:10 PM Sat 2 Dec 72
Bruce touchingly excited about going to a party to meet local people so I am trying to get myself in the mood, but I am in a bad temper from trying to read an awful book by a man named Wight called The Open Door. Three generations of Pennsylvania family’s contact with the supernatural! But when the Hindu, the Persian and the Indian “spirit guides” show up, I’m outta here. Doubleday doesn’t want my gothic. They have a “cheat sheet” about everything that should be in it – dull, dull, dull. I have to admit, I hate these people’s taste. Wonder how I can change it. Bruce says if I would just get “high” I wouldn’t care. Am I going to go all “Puritan” on him tonight? Probably. I’m trying to get MORE, not LESS “me”! But I do feel shaken. One editor returned Don’t Bring Me Down and asked for something more “experimental”. I gamely sent her A Hot Day A Thousand Years Ago but she returned it, wondering why it had to be in the first person. I can scissor up my stuff or I can try to explain better what I’m driving at. I like that last option. Another editor liked Monopoly, but still wouldn’t publish it. (And they wouldn’t have paid me anything if they HAD taken it!!!) So obviously stories are hopeless. Back to the novel. Maybe if I put in enough sex….I’ll be interested to hear what Dad’s friend thinks. 7:05 PM Sun 17 Dec 72 Party as ghastly as I feared. Met a woman with a basement of Mrs. Butterworth bottles (because they’re going to be worth something someday) and a fellow writer who writes the most depressing little “housewife” poems and wants to start a club. Everyone aghast that I’m “all the way out there by myself” when Bruce is away. Tried talking me into signing up to be a substitute teacher. You don’t even need to have graduated from college; all you need is a lung x-ray! Bruce backs them up, the traitor. He says I need real life for my writing and money wouldn’t be bad either. We were arguing about it when a teenage boy pounded on our car hood, insisting on a ride to the hospital “stat” where he can get some Thorazine. (We obliged.) See? Real life. Right there. Bruce gave me such a depressing birthday present I am not looking forward to Christmas. It was an album of the photos he had taken in Vietnam. I knew I had to lie about this one so I praised him to the skies. He thinks he has a third career ahead of him as a rock and roll photojournalist! Then we make love, he comes and falls asleep, I lie there in the dark. Thinking. Fortunately I gave MYSELF a birthday present – Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf which I read in 2 days. I wish it had lasted all year. I was so moved. Tried to explain to Bruce that the mysticism of art is my religion. The dead live, and immortality is all around us. He gives me that “Let’s get you some Thorazine” look. I am obsessed with the notion that VW’s fear of critics led her to over-revise. Her descriptions of the ideas and first drafts sound so much more interesting than the “finished” work. I think she tried to eliminate specifics- to “bland it out” – generalize - the exact opposite of the way you should go – to give critics no purchase. So a lot of her “modernistic” affect is actually fear. She’s wonderfully specific and free in her own criticism. She didn’t want to seem to come to any artistic conclusions – but to obfuscate. Hide herself. I am sympathetic. Don’t know if I have any courage, either. Dad’s friend said my novel should be more like They Shoot Horses Don’t They? Which is just bizarre. Nevertheless, as a favor to my father, he would be willing to sign me to a two year contract. Writer’s Mkt says this isn’t “done”. Still, he has lots of ideas and I’d be willing to meet with him and see what I think, after the holidays. (He lives in Philadelphia and is “retired” - two bad signs right there.) I want to go to Pewter Hill for Christmas but Bud & Honor want to come up here and see the house, in spite of ten-foot snowdrifts and thirty below weather. Family! Bud will bring a garbage bag full of dope and Honor the Interior Decorator is certain to love what I’d done with the place! What could possibly go wrong? The hottest love has the coldest end, says Socrates. I finally get a Bruce poem. TOO LATE IN THE YEAR The mind is double-edged as well as double-eyed She thinks; she stands outside to watch him Sightlessly within; Covering sheets with runes, with Receipts writ by someone else; Plagiarizing loveletters Making a private snow of invisibility; his Sexual ivy casts hawkswing shadows on his bloodhound cheeks; conceals A smile too cautious; Too familiar; In season and out; Nurtured like his scars Deepening into drama. Save him, save him voices cry but I know better; it’s too late for that Too late in the year. Thurs. June 6, 1974 – Racetowne, MD Sitting in the living room, candles lit, carpet vacuumed, waiting for Avril whose visit I desperately need. Troubles with Bruce, as usual. Finished the novel – 359 pages – the love scene which I thought would be easy was hard and the ending which I thought would be had was easy. So many people have questioned my ending I was prepared to find it peculiar myself – strained, effete? But I like it. The childbirth image seems important to me – like lovemaking. So much emotionally was riding on this before going to the island. Thinking of my writing teacher who said, “You are going to be one of the biggies.” Is $15,000 too much to ask? Nobody seems affluent anymore. If Grove doesn’t accept my book I need to get rid of my agent. So desperate for entertainment B and I went to see the Midnight Man in Bel Aire. When I came out of that movie the scent of new mown grass was in the air and miraculously I suddenly felt 17 years old again – like I absolutely have a second chance. How is it everybody isn’t constantly falling to their knees with gratitude and amazement? Any novel is a pale reflection f that eternal joy. I no longer think it’s all my fault for failing to recognize B’s true personality. It’s his fault also. How dumb I was! When I saw him using that “I’m not really here” defense on everybody else didn’t I realize it would INEVITABLY be used against me? If he’s “NOT” really here he should be gone is my present conclusion. He thinks falling into ham radio will save him. I feel most bitter that he can’t even try. Marriage ruined our friendship. 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. |
Alysse Aallyn
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