Jay to Bee. Janet Frame
a Beethoven Bagatelle.
and that musical gossip, Bach, writing an aural manual of erotic technique between man and silence/God.
My chickadee is alive and well. I read Jude the Obscure, a book of unrelieved gloom and power. May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep is a wise generous book. I saw her, briefly, in town and said I would write her a letter. I am now reading The Idiot (rereading).
Your absence is terrible.
The baby table is grim without you and—this week—without Jo. Basil has taken command of B.T. John Brooks also sits there. And Simon and/or Harrison who has discovered Eunice Golden who gives him a moon—(heartbeat). Elnora has been dieting & thus satisfying the maternal instincts of Sylvie (Who is, What is etc. After Shakespeare & Schubert) & of Jackie.
The Pornograph is back!
The library feels like a tomb. You gave so much, Bill! Look after yourself.
J
4. Baltimore November 26
Dear Bill,
Meanwhile, back in Baltimore . . .
It is half past five and I’m in the sitting-room in a rocking chair listening to the pornograph play the eight Schubert Impromptus. Beside me on one of the slabs of marble filched some years ago from an old cemetery being demolished in downtown Baltimore, are the complete piano works of Schubert which I’ve been reading as I listen. And thus I’ve spent my first day in Baltimore.
The house, once an old shop, is two floors and a basement with the old shop window made into a garden. The rooms are filled with paintings, sculptures, objets d’art. In this room there’s the black Steinway taking up much of the space, the pornograph with its speaker, chairs, daybed, a tree made of golden wire set in a tub of white river-stones, several paintings including a huge one of the X-Ray of a deformed foetus, an Abyssinian mural, African spears and shields, New Guinea carved heads, a ceiling-high cabinet of loot from Thailand, Mexico, Peru. There are musical instruments from the Pacific Islands; an Australian aboriginal pipe, a digiridoo, about three feet long from which it’s hard to get a sound. (‘Put in your digiridoo,’ my mother used to say to my brother when he was little and his thing was hanging out.) There’s also a fine sculpted head of a negro done by a negro sculptor; camel-bells; and odds and ends of various old houses including Scott Fitzgerald’s old mantelpiece. (When several old Baltimore homes were being demolished years ago John Money took out a demolition licence which enabled him to visit the sites and take away anything he cared to have.)
My own small room has three paintings done by one of John M’s former close friends; a Thai Buddha; a row of Peruvian fertility charms, little men with erect penises: seven.
The house has a characteristic smell which I can’t quite describe—it’s the smell of absence; nobody spends the day or much of the evening here and I suppose all the objects have their special kind of breath and sweat with no human smell to mask it. John M sometimes has people to stay, and sometimes throws a party but for the most part he spends his time in his hospital office trying to solve other people’s sex problems.
Now your ‘heartbreaker’ is being played. I am back in the Savidge Libraryaa.
library at MacDowell
My last hours at MacDowell were smooth and uneventful. I had turned in my pepper and salt and cutlery the previous day and thus severed my culinary cord. Jo, Elnora, Sylvie (who left after one game, her quota) and I spent the evening playing anagrams at Mansfield. We made a communal limerick about the Australian arrivalbb (quote—‘the moratorium is a communistic plot’)
The writer, Joan Colebrook, who had been born in Australia, had just arrived at MacDowell
Now Colebrook came from down under
hoping to be rent asunder
but all she could do
was sit on the loo
and make wild Australian thunder.
Earlier in the day I had played the pornograph by myself in the library.
Harrison drove me to the bus stop, I went to Boston to find the Museum of Fine Arts is closed on Mondays, I repaired to the Y and enclose the fruits thereof and will not bore you with a recitation of my thoughts.
I was sitting on one of the pew-like seats in the Boston station when I looked up and saw Henry Chapin in cold blood and real life standing with a small hazel-nut of a woman, evidently his wife. It was a strange experience. His wife looked quite old, like a kind of permanent measurement of Henry. We stood talking a while and he carried my bags for me. What rule is it that says people must stop ‘being’ when they leave places like MacDowell where they have freedom to ‘be’? Henry said that he missed the life at MacDowell and he frowned as if he had changed lives, as if the one he wears now is cramping and doesn’t fit.
Enough of that but it was one of those interesting encounters that stay in mind and return later as fiction.
It is late in the evening now, half-past ten. John M and one of his research assistants, Paul, came home and had a small meal and a large drink and went back to the hospital and won’t be back until past midnight. While they are away I put an iron bar across the door as this is a wild neighbourhood with bottles being smashed around outside and a few street fights.
I wish you and Jack Daniels would walk in now to say hello.
I wonder how your work is going.
I’m wearing your sweater to shreds.
It is now Thanksgiving Day, half-past ten in the morning and I am back in the sitting-room. I have played the pornograph, softly, so as not to disturb my host who is working on a paper in the adjoining room. I have been sorting out my MacDowell writings ready for retyping and I come across lines such as
in the sour taste of morning
we shovel bran-bits into our mouths
and look out of the window at the trees
whose defeat is showing.
Doggerel.
It is hot, airless, quiet here. I wish I could say hello to you.
As stylistic relief I enclose a little clean pornography.
Now back to the heartbreakers.
J
5. Baltimore November