to poison at the colony?
Have you ever sent a letter you wish you hadn’t?
Or forget all that and—tell me something I might not believe about you.
Yours,
Bernard
January 10, 1958
Dear Bernard—
Although I have yet to turn a book in to a publisher myself, I have a feeling I would experience something very similar. I have been known, at the end of a school year, to spend a good two weeks feeling that if I did not have an exam to take or a paper to write, there was no reason for me to be alive. I get the existential shakes—I’m like one of those small metal wind-up toys that chatter in circles until they peter out, exhausted, and finally keel over. When my existential shakes peter out—gradually I comprehend that no one’s going to phone me at home asking for a twenty-page paper by next Thursday—I can go down the shore with a clear conscience.
Whom did you want to poison at the colony?
Something you might not believe about me? Hmmm. I’m not sure that we’ve known each other long enough to have ideas about what in our characters would prove contradictory! Hmmm. You might not believe that children like me, but they do. Or that I have not been able to stop playing Ella and Louis Again since I received it for Christmas. I feel ill-equipped to discuss just what it is I love in that record—I am the epitome of square, and I know nothing about music—but there is something about the lower register of her voice that makes me feel as if I am afloat in an ocean the color of midnight.
I think writing to a poet may be rubbing off on me, and not for the good.
Here’s something else. I had a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. I was not the kind of girl who had crushes on movie stars—that was my sister, who had a framed picture of Tyrone Power on her dresser. But Grant seemed like someone out of a novel rather than a creature cobbled together on a studio lot. What is it? He is refined but also given to the ridiculous, and the ridiculousness never erases his refinement. Well, I shouldn’t lie. I still have a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. He may be the cement in my relationship with my aunt Peggy. She will say aloud from behind the paper, as if she means to invite everyone in the room and not just me, “An Affair to Remember is playing up over at the Ritz,” and I will say, with feigned nonchalance from behind my book, “What time?” and then we will race out of the house like women who’ve been told he will be there in the flesh.
Both the gospels and Paul; the gospels because they represent God’s faith in our imagination, and Paul because more often than not we are too stupid to use it.
And now you have heard more than enough from me. Please do write soon.
Sincerely,
Frances
January 17, 1958
Dear Frances—
Let us settle this once and for all: I am the epitome of square. In fact, the other day a group of students lovingly accused me of this when they found out I did not own jazz records. I don’t, and I’ll tell you why: it is an agent of agitation, and I’m already agitated enough. It’s not that I don’t like jazz. I wish I could. It’s just that one song is the equivalent of four dozen phone calls to a switchboard that’s already buzzing and sparking like a pinball machine. I’m ten years younger than Kerouac, and yet the response to his book makes me feel that my shirts are as starched as my father’s. Kerouac and I are Catholics, and yet I cringe at his ecstasies: there is nothing revealed by his mysticism but his own psychology. The self-taught always do make me a little impatient because they make idolatries of their heroes, or of their own psyches, that suspend them in artistic adolescence. Lorraine, the kimonoed odalisque whom you may remember from the colony, is an exemplar of this type, with her worship of Colette. I’m not jealous of Kerouac, or perplexed by him—just indifferent. To my students’ chagrin. I think they want me to launch into a philippic declaiming him as a false heir to Rome—want some kind of reactionary grandstanding intellectual contretemps played out in front of them. They also want me to give them permission to behave badly because they are writing poems. I have