A week later (August 22), still in your mother’s Newark apartment, with Bob P. surely gone now, a rambling letter of six pages that begins oddly, pretentiously, with a number of chopped-up sentences: “Here. I am here. Sitting. Begin I will, but slowly, for I feel myself telling myself that I shall go on for a while, perhaps too long a while … You shall hear, here, before I say what I have sat to say, bits and scraps, odds and ends, what one calls news, or chatter, but what I call, perhaps you too … ‘warming up,’ which is, I assure you, merely a figure of speech, for certainly I am already quite warm (it’s summer, you know).” After some morbid remarks about the horror and inevitability of death, you suddenly shift course and declare your intention to speak only of cheerful things. “As I walked down Putney Mountain not too long ago, having climbed atop the tip, it suddenly came to me, so to speak in a flash, that is, I became cognizant of the one truly comic thing in the world. That is not to say that many things are not comic. But they are not purely comic, for they all have their tragic side. But this is always comic, neverfail. It is the fart. Laugh if you will, but that only reinforces my argument. Yes, it is always funny, can never be taken seriously. The most delightful of all man’s foibles.” Then, after another sudden shift “(I paused to light a cigarette—thus the hiatus in my ever even path of thought),” you announce that you have recently bought a copy of Finnegans Wake. “Thinking that I would probably never read it, I picked it up and began to read. I have had trouble putting it down. Not that it is easily understandable, but it is true fun. You have read some of it, haven’t you? Much there.” A few sentences later: “I have a great deal of work to do on the play. Having just started writing again yesterday, after not looking at it for 2 weeks, it tells me that I have much to do.” The manuscript of that early effort has been lost, but the statement is proof that you were earnestly writing back then, that you already thought of yourself as a writer (or future writer). Then, no doubt in answer to a question asked by Lydia in a letter responding to your previous letter: “North Truro is the beach we went to. We arrived at six o’clock—the time. I especially liked the shadows in the footprints.” A bit further on, you are offering advice, commenting on something she must have said in her letter: “… to get going again, to write, you must meditate, in the real sense of the word. Honest, painful. Then the hidden things will come out. You must forget the everyday Lydia, your sister’s Lydia, your parents’ Lydia, Paul’s Lydia—but then you will be able to come back to them, without loss of ‘inspiration’ next time. It’s not that the two worlds are incompatible, but that you must realize their interconnections.” Finally, as you approach the last page of the letter, you tell her that you are expressing yourself badly. “So difficult. You see, I am infinitely confused about the whole business of life. All turned upside-down, shaken, shattered. I know it will always be so—the confusion. And how I hated myself for telling you about the goodness of life … when you called me here the night you were ill. What’s the point? Why live? I don’t want to muck about. In the end, I believe, more strongly than I believe in anything else, that the only thing that matters at all is love. Ah, the old clichés … But that is what I believe. Believe. Yes. I. Believe. Lost if without it. Life a miserably bad joke if without it.”
You were temporarily holed up at your mother’s place because the lease you had signed on a New York apartment (311 West 107th Street) would not be going into effect until the first week of September. On August thirtieth, you report that you have thrown out your play—“all 140 pages”—but not the idea, and that you have started something in prose, “using elements of the play as the nucleus.” As for your mental state, it would appear that you were languishing in one of the deep funks that often came over you during your days as an undergraduate. “Living here, in Newark, in this stuffy apartment, is intolerable. Usually I am quite silent. Sometimes irritable. No peace. All murmuring inside me. (That word, ‘murmur,’ is one of the most beautiful in English.) … My senses are particularly keen now, everything is perceived more acutely. I have been eating little for the past several weeks … extreme melancholy, but strange things have been stirring within me. I feel as if I am grasping the roots of something very important.” Unfortunately, what that thing was is never explained, and by the following week you were moving into your new apartment, which you shared with your friend Peter Schubert—the first apartment either one of you ever occupied on your own: the next step forward into independence and adulthood. After that, no more letters until the following June, a nine-month gap in the chronicle …
You remember your second year at Columbia as a time of bad dreams and struggle, marked by an ever-growing conviction that the world was disintegrating before your eyes. It wasn’t just the war in Vietnam, which had become so large and murderous by then that there were days when it was hard to think about anything else, it was also the dirt and decay in the streets of your neighborhood, the mad, disheveled people staggering along the sidewalks of Morningside Heights, and it was also the drugs that were ruining the lives of people close to you, your former roommate to begin with, followed by the death of a high school friend from a heroin overdose, and then, immediately after the conclusion of the spring semester, it was also the Six-Day War in the Middle East, which alarmed you deeply, so deeply that during the short time when the outcome of the war was in doubt you actively entertained the notion of enlisting in the Israeli army, for Israel was not a problematical country for you back then, you still looked upon it as a secular, socialist state with no blood on its hands, and then, some weeks after that, it was also the riots in Newark, the city where you were born, the city where your mother and sister and stepfather still lived, the spontaneous outbreak of race warfare between the black population and the white police force that killed more than twenty people, injured more than seven hundred, led to fifteen hundred arrests, burned buildings to the ground, and caused so much damage that even now, forty-five years later, Newark still hasn’t fully recovered from the self-destructive fury of those violent confrontations. Yes, you struggled to stay on your feet all through that difficult year, you were in continual danger of losing your balance, but nevertheless you kept inching along, staying on top of your schoolwork and doing as much writing as you could. Most of what you wrote came to nothing, but not every word, not every sentence, and 1967 was the first year in which you produced some lines and phrases and paragraphs that ultimately found their way into your published work. Bits that appeared in your first book of poems, for example (Unearth, finished in 1972), and much later, when you were putting together your Collected Poems (2004), you saw fit to include a short prose text written when you were twenty, “Notes from a Composition Book,” a series of thirteen philosophical propositions, the first of which reads: The world is in my head. My body is in the world. You still stand by that paradox, which was an attempt to capture the strange doubleness of being alive, the inexorable union of inner and outer that accompanies each beat of a person’s heart from birth until death. 1966–67: a year of much reading, perhaps more reading than at any other moment in your life. Not just the poets, but the philosophers as well. Berkeley and Hume from the eighteenth century, for example, but also Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty from the twentieth. You see traces of all four thinkers in those two sentences of yours, but in the end it was Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology that said the most to you, his vision of the embodied self that still says the most to you.
You were dying to get away. Once the spring semester was over, the last place you wanted to be was in hot, foul-smelling New York, and since you had saved up some money from your part-time work as a page at Columbia’s Butler Library, you had the wherewithal to forgo a summer job and strike out on your own. Maine sounded like a good bet, and so you opened a map of Maine and looked for the remotest spot you could find, which turned out to be a town called Dennysville, a small village about eighty miles east of Bangor and thirty miles west of Eastport (the easternmost city in America, just across the bay from Canada). You
chose Dennysville because you’d learned that decent accommodations could be found there at the Dennys River Inn, which charged only six dollars a day (three hot meals included), and so off you went to Dennysville, an eighteen-hour trip by bus, and during the long ride and the long pause in Bangor as you waited for a connecting bus, you plowed through several books, among them Kafka’s Amerika, which was the last work of his you still hadn’t read—an ideal companion for your journey into the unknown. You wanted to isolate yourself as thoroughly as possible because you had started writing a novel, and it was your juvenile belief (or romantic belief, or misconstrued belief) that novels should be written in isolation. This was your first attempt at a novel, the first of several attempts that would preoccupy you until the end of the 1960s and through the better part of 1970, but of course you were not capable of writing a novel when you were twenty, or twenty-one, or twenty-two, you were too young and inexperienced, your ideas were still evolving and therefore continually in flux, so you failed, failed again and again, and yet when you look back on those failures now, you don’t consider them to have been a waste of time, for in the hundreds of pages you wrote during those years, perhaps as many as a thousand pages (all scribbled out by hand in notebooks, in the nearly illegible writing of your youth), there were the nascent germs of three novels you would later manage to finish (City of Glass, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace), and when you returned to writing fiction in your early thirties, you went back to those old notebooks and plundered them for material, sometimes lifting out whole sentences and paragraphs, which then surfaced—years after they had been written—in those newly reconfigured novels. So there you were in June of 1967, on your way to the Dennys River Inn in Dennysville, Maine, about to sequester yourself in a small room with Quinn, the hero of your book,1 and the fine old white clapboard house where you lived for the next three weeks, the house that had been converted into an inn, was empty except for you and the owners, a retired couple in their mid-seventies from Springfield, Massachusetts, Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey. From the beginning of your stay to the end, you were the only guest. The Dennys River is apparently well known in angling circles as the one river in America where freshwater salmon fishing can be practiced at a certain time of year (the details are a bit vague to you now), and even though your visit coincided with that time of year, which was normally the high season for the Dennys River Inn, the fish weren’t running in 1967, and the fishermen had stayed home. Both Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey were kind to you, and they did everything in their power to make you feel welcome. The plump, cheerful, talkative Mrs. Godfrey was a first-rate cook, and she fed you abundantly, always offering you seconds, and even thirds if you asked for them. The lean and gimpy Mr. Godfrey took you on excursions to Eastport and the local Indian reservation and told you stories about serving in the U.S. Army in 1916, posted at the Mexican border to guard against raids by Pancho Villa, who never showed up, turning Mr. Godfrey’s stint as a private into “a real vacation.” Yes, they were good, kind people, and if you ever found yourself in a similar situation today, you would probably exult in it and throw yourself into your work, but the extreme isolation was too much for you at twenty, you couldn’t handle it, you were lonely and restless (thinking about sex), and the writing did not go well. On top of that, it was the moment of the Six-Day War, and instead of sitting upstairs in your room to work on your soon-to-be aborted book, there were many afternoons when you couldn’t resist going down to the living room to sit in front of the television with the Godfreys and watch the latest reports about the war. Just four letters have survived from that trip to Maine, none of them very long, written in short, telegraphic sentences—brief dispatches from the back of beyond.
JUNE 7: Back to zero. Threw out 15 pages—what I had done so far … Much despair. I’m back to where I was several months ago—sketching a long story (short novel?) … I only hope that I am up to it. It will be very difficult to pull off—as most things are. Right now there is little optimism in me.
Torn by the whole Middle East mess—have been watching the Canadian TV broadcasts of the U.N.—a horrible spectacle of backhanded diplomacy and weak-minded hypocrisy. I’m seriously thinking about going to Israel, only the trouble might be over before I could leave. It can’t last too long, unless it becomes a world war …
Here the weather has been cool and windy. I’ve taken to walking around the cemetery, which is on a hill that looks out onto a field, and beyond, a dense wood—one strange tombstone: Harry C. and his wife Lulu. Today, as I was walking, I saw two things that struck me—Two black horses in a field, standing close together, in love. As Wright says: “There is no loneliness like theirs.” Also, a little farther on: 2 trees, so close together that one leans on the other between two branches and looks as if it were being embraced …
JUNE 8: I’m glad you liked Törless.2 But don’t be discouraged about being a woman. It’s a fine profession. Last night I was reading Blake—he said—“Backbiting, Undermining, Circumventing, and whatever is Negative is Vice. But the origin of the mistake in Lavater and his contemporaries is, They suppose Woman’s Love is Sin; in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are sin.”
Further on, undoubtedly answering a request to provide a reading list of French books, you suggest a few novelists—Pinget, Beckett, Sarraute, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, and Céline—but add that she should read only one or two of them and then turn to French poetry: “… buy the Penguin Book of French Verse: 19th century—& also the one for the 20th century—and read: Vigny, Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Lafargue. Then in the 20th-century book read: Valéry, Jacob, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Éluard, Breton, Aragon, Ponge, Michaux, Desnos, Char, Bonnefoy.—In my opinion the French have done more for poetry than the novel, except for Flaubert and Proust.”3
JUNE 14: Very strange, very strange—Yesterday, I finally got to Eastport … Mr. Godfrey had to drive there … You must see this town—there’s nothing like it—a real ghost town, many many broken buildings, all of them old, some from Revolutionary times—¾ of the people are on govt. welfare—the bay is there, the gulls—Canada right across. Old brick buildings—stores for sale … The biggest five and ten was called BECKETT … Also, in what I’m writing now the main character’s name is Quinn—and sure enough, there was a house that said The Quinns …