beautiful image. Sometimes when we talk I feel that we are trying to grasp her reality. She is unreal even to us, even to you who have possessed her, and to me, whom she has kissed."
Hugo reads one of my old journals, the John Erskine period, Boulevard Suchet, and almost sobs with pity for me, realizing that I was living in The House of the Dead. I did not succeed in resuscitating him until he almost lost me to John and to suicide.
More letters from Henry, parts of his book as he writes it, quotations, notes while listening to Debussy and Ravel, on the back of menus of small restaurants in shabby quarters. A torrent of realism. Too much of it in proportion to imagination, which is growing smaller. He will not sacrifice a moment of life to his work. He is always rushing and writing about work and in the end never really tackling it, writing more letters than books, doing more investigating than actual creation. Yet the form of his last book, discursive, a chain of associations, reminiscences is very good. He has assimilated his Proust, minus the poetry and the music.
I have dipped into obscenity, dirt, and his world of "shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch" and am on the way up again. The symphonic concert today confirmed my mood of detachment. Again and again I have traversed the regions of realism and found them arid. And again I return to poetry. I write to June. It is almost impossible. I can't find words. I make such a violent effort of the imagination to reach out to her, to my image of her. And when I come home, Emilia says, "There is a letter for the Señorita." I run upstairs, hoping it is a letter from Henry.
I want to be a strong poet, as strong as Henry and John are in their realism. I want to combat them, to invade and annihilate them. What baffles me about Henry and what attracts me are the flashes of imagination, the flashes of insight, and the flashes of dreams. Fugitive. And the depths. Rub off the German realist, the man who "stands for shit," as Wambly Bald says to him, and you get a lusty imagist. At moments he can say the most delicate or profound things. But his softness is dangerous, because when he writes he does not write with love, he writes to caricature, to attack, to ridicule, to destroy, to rebel. He is always against something. Anger incites him. I am always for something. Anger poisons me. I love, I love, I love.
Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.
I spent a tense, harrowing day yesterday with Eduardo, who resuscitates the past. He was the first man I loved. He was weak, sexually. I suffered from his weakness, I know now. That pain was buried. It was newly aroused when we met again two years ago. It was buried again.
I have had masculine elements in me always, knowing exactly what I want, but not until John Erskine did I love strong men; I loved weak or timorous, overfine men. Eduardo's vagueness, indecision, ethereal love, and Hugo's frightened love caused me torment and bewilderment. I acted delicately and yet as a man. It would have been more feminine to have been satisfied with the passion of other admirers, but I insisted on my own selection, on a fineness of nature which I found in a man weaker than I was. I suffered deeply from my own forwardness as a woman. As a man, I would have been glad to have what I desired.
Now Hugo is strong, but I am afraid it is too late. The masculine in me has made too much progress. Now even if Eduardo wanted to live with me (and yesterday he was tormented by an impotent jealousy), we couldn't do so because creatively I am stronger than he is, and he couldn't bear it. I have discovered the joy of a masculine direction of my life by my courting of June. Also I have discovered the terrible joy of dying, of disintegrating.
Sitting by the fire with Hugo last night, I
Hugo reads one of my old journals, the John Erskine period, Boulevard Suchet, and almost sobs with pity for me, realizing that I was living in The House of the Dead. I did not succeed in resuscitating him until he almost lost me to John and to suicide.
More letters from Henry, parts of his book as he writes it, quotations, notes while listening to Debussy and Ravel, on the back of menus of small restaurants in shabby quarters. A torrent of realism. Too much of it in proportion to imagination, which is growing smaller. He will not sacrifice a moment of life to his work. He is always rushing and writing about work and in the end never really tackling it, writing more letters than books, doing more investigating than actual creation. Yet the form of his last book, discursive, a chain of associations, reminiscences is very good. He has assimilated his Proust, minus the poetry and the music.
I have dipped into obscenity, dirt, and his world of "shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch" and am on the way up again. The symphonic concert today confirmed my mood of detachment. Again and again I have traversed the regions of realism and found them arid. And again I return to poetry. I write to June. It is almost impossible. I can't find words. I make such a violent effort of the imagination to reach out to her, to my image of her. And when I come home, Emilia says, "There is a letter for the Señorita." I run upstairs, hoping it is a letter from Henry.
I want to be a strong poet, as strong as Henry and John are in their realism. I want to combat them, to invade and annihilate them. What baffles me about Henry and what attracts me are the flashes of imagination, the flashes of insight, and the flashes of dreams. Fugitive. And the depths. Rub off the German realist, the man who "stands for shit," as Wambly Bald says to him, and you get a lusty imagist. At moments he can say the most delicate or profound things. But his softness is dangerous, because when he writes he does not write with love, he writes to caricature, to attack, to ridicule, to destroy, to rebel. He is always against something. Anger incites him. I am always for something. Anger poisons me. I love, I love, I love.
Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.
I spent a tense, harrowing day yesterday with Eduardo, who resuscitates the past. He was the first man I loved. He was weak, sexually. I suffered from his weakness, I know now. That pain was buried. It was newly aroused when we met again two years ago. It was buried again.
I have had masculine elements in me always, knowing exactly what I want, but not until John Erskine did I love strong men; I loved weak or timorous, overfine men. Eduardo's vagueness, indecision, ethereal love, and Hugo's frightened love caused me torment and bewilderment. I acted delicately and yet as a man. It would have been more feminine to have been satisfied with the passion of other admirers, but I insisted on my own selection, on a fineness of nature which I found in a man weaker than I was. I suffered deeply from my own forwardness as a woman. As a man, I would have been glad to have what I desired.
Now Hugo is strong, but I am afraid it is too late. The masculine in me has made too much progress. Now even if Eduardo wanted to live with me (and yesterday he was tormented by an impotent jealousy), we couldn't do so because creatively I am stronger than he is, and he couldn't bear it. I have discovered the joy of a masculine direction of my life by my courting of June. Also I have discovered the terrible joy of dying, of disintegrating.
Sitting by the fire with Hugo last night, I
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