He is emotional and soft.
Bill did not write me for five months. Did not answer my request for news. And then a letter of desire, not of love. “About love, I don’t know,” he wrote. “But I want you.”
As Rupert won me with a deeper love, warmth, humanity, he detached me from Bill. Bill observed the coolness of my letters, acknowledged that he deserved to lose my love. I did not have the courage to write him: “You have lost my love,” but I felt it. And I would choose Rupert who gives me so much.
I can’t be harsh with Bill because he is twenty, lost and confused. But I bless Rupert for freeing me.
Now Bill cables that he arrives July 15.
LOS ANGELES, JUNE 30, 1948
While Hugo is finishing his analysis and preparing to come July 16, Bill is on his way from Korea.
I work at the story of Gonzalo with mixed feelings of love and pity for the dream of Gonzalo, and a full knowledge of its death. I know how Gonzalo killed it, and I pity him. I have forgotten my torment. There is an enduring love for the dream, with a knowledge of its death. Henry must have thusly buried June again and again with misgiving because the corpse is illumined, as it were, alive by the light of our first illusion, and one is uneasy about burying it, doubting its death. I have remembered Gonzalo with feeling and also the torment of the last years.
LOS ANGELES, JULY 2, 1948
I am exhausted with writing and with the conflict of making a river bed for the flow of the diary so that it may not seem a diary, but a monologue by Djuna in The Four-Chambered Heart. Not yet solved. The diary cannot ever be published. How can it seep into the work, not as a diary, but as a Joyceian flow of inner consciousness? Last night I wanted to give up writing. It seemed wrong to make a story of Gonzalo. I felt the inhumanity of art. I thought of my story of Bill in Children of the Albatross. But it touched his heart. It destroyed nothing. The story of Gonzalo will be perhaps an inspiration of love, a gift to the world, the only thing born of our caresses. It may be its monument, its only enduring image.
Last night, hurt and moved by memories, I was a woman acknowledging the continuity of love. This morning I was an artist, but I had come to terms with the woman and said, “It must be sincere, it must be truthful.” And I worked gravely, sincerely.
I talked with Chiquito by telephone. I want to be with him. He loses nothing by remembrance. He is to me equally magnificent as a lover, warm, tender and interesting, though he had repressed his wildness and he is younger and less free, less asserted than was Gonzalo. In his eyes there are worlds and memories, depths he does not know. He is not harmful to me as Gonzalo was. He is undiscovered, unexplored, and not free, but it is all there, and he manifests it in music and in his love of nature, in his love for me.
Early awakenings, songs of birds, and a gentle sun, downhill to Musso, a hearty, masculine restaurant. Then writing. Rereading volumes 49 to 54.
I never told the truth in Children of the Albatross, an idealized story without the destructive part. Shall I go to the end this time?
One handles the truth like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a slant, deception, treachery. All the writers have concealed more than they have revealed.
Yet, I too do not have the courage to tell all, because of its effect on Hugo and Rupert.
It is not imagination; it is memory, memory that stirs in the blood obscurely at certain spectacles, a city, a mountain, a face. Some are like dormant animals, and atrophied memories, but others feel this extension of themselves into the past, and easily slip into other periods.
The idea of memory is very persistent. I think of it all day. I believe the blood carries cells down through the ages, transmitting physical traits and characteristics. They lie dormant until aroused by a face, a city, a situation. The simple explanation of “we have lived before,” of recognition and familiarity. Racial and collective memory also continues, forming the subconscious.
LOS ANGELES, JULY 6, 1948
Awaiting Hugo and Bill, but without feeling for Bill, only friendship. No feeling for him at all. He has harmed me so much, has given so little of himself. I am nearest to Rupert. I feel him in me, inside me. I can feel the pain, his efforts, his courage up there in the mountains.
Hugo I admire terribly, his courage and effort in analysis, his immense struggle to be happy and free.
Hollywood for me is palms, flowers, flaming eucalyptus, jacaranda, the sun on gleaming cars, slacks and gold sandals, beautiful men and women, but standard, nondescript. Natural beauty of hills, sea, fogs and mists.
A relief to be far from New York, from Gonzalo, enclosure and ill health. I have gained health here. I feel like Rimbaud, that I walked out of my madness, and away from my demon. I am happy, but lazy and uninspired.
Bill telephoned: “Hello! I am on my way to San Francisco. I will be going to the University of California for some courses.”
He had not tried to see me. He was not going to New York. He did not know I was planning to live in San Francisco. I said very casually: “I’ll be there this winter. We may run into each other.”
| July 15, 1948 | Bill Pinckard returns from Korea |
| July 24, 1948 | Los Angeles |
| August 1948 | Move to San Francisco with Rupert |
| October 1948 | Return to New York |
| November 1, 1948 | Albert Mangones |
| December 1948 | Acapulco with Rupert |
A TYPICAL AMERICAN WIFE
1949
SAN FRANCISCO, FEBRUARY 1949
I moved to San Francisco after one more return to New York and attempting to live with Hugo on his houseboat, which he took on Long Island Sound. Was he trying to relive my life? To find me? Or to lure me by offering me what he thought I wanted? At the time I felt completely estranged from him. He was trying for closeness and I could not feel it. My life with him seemed unreal, a role.
He came to San Francisco, before Rupert did. I persuaded him to let me have an apartment there. Our relationship was at its worst then. We could not communicate. Did he think this was the end of it? I did not say so. I merely admitted to needing to be by myself at periods. He let me choose the apartment. He was angry, but we did not break. He left. I fixed it up with furniture from Goodwill and with shelves and glass bricks.
But I had not thought at first of Rupert living in the apartment. I had found a tea house in the back of a big house, in the center of a garden. I could see it from the road, near Ruth Witt Diamond’s house. I thought it would be beautiful for when Rupert came to stay with me on weekends; he was living at International House and going to forestry school at Berkeley. I still thought of the apartment as for me and Hugo. I fixed up the tea house. It was an enormous task. An unkempt old man had lived there, never cleaned it. I had to fill twenty boxes with garbage; for days I carried old newspapers and detritus up the hill for the garbage man. I had a shower built in the cellar. It was poetic. A true Japanese tea house.
Rupert loved it. I painted it, fixed it up, but it was damp. The garden was cold and damp. San Francisco was damp. The sun did not reach it.
By contrast the apartment was spacious, sunny, and with a beautiful open view of the Bay. But I felt Rupert would believe that I could afford the tea house, while he would not believe I could afford the apartment. I began to wish I could tell him about the apartment. So I concocted the following story and here it is:
“Darling Chiquito: I’m writing you instead of waiting to talk with you because sometimes I get intimidated by the big eyes of your conscience, and lose sight of my explanations. When my Americanization process began I was stumped by the following illogical law: I can’t get Americanized unless I’m self-supporting, and I can’t take a job with my present papers because I am