far too cerebral to last. Electronic music is intellectual, idea-oriented, elitist in the worst sense of the word, a trivial minor growth out of Charles Ives…as if contemporarypoets were to content themselves with “developing” a single aspect of Whitman…without an awareness of his true teaching: that one is oneself, an individual, not a mere copy of another. So there is a kind of “modern” music, avant-garde in intention, that blends in seamlessly with stray noises of the city (not nature: nature isn’t random)…music reduced to approximately the emotional value of words. But music is so much more than words…! It is connective tissue, pulsebeats between words, a para-or meta-language, far too precious to be reduced to ideas. But when I listen to a sprightly charming work by Rorem or Copland, and even Poulenc, and then listen to a work by…(unfair, yes, but let us say Mahler, not wishing to say Mozart or Bach)…I am aware of the depressing, colossal problems the modern composer must face, which the modern writer hasn’t had to face…. Thank God I am not a composer…what could be more merciless, more difficult, and more thankless? All the musics are simultaneous now: the classical, the “primitive,” the electronic, the very popular. Not so with literature, really. Not really. The next novel by Saul Bellow will not be in raw competition with Crime and Punishment ; but the next work by Rorem, if played by a symphony, will be juxtaposed with the usual “great” works…and cannot fail to risk censure for seeming unforgivably different.
[…]
The first issue of the magazine now out; being mailed; Ray and I both quite pleased with it. Ray did most of the work, suffered most of the frustrations, the initial idea of the magazine being—I suppose—my own; but of my hundreds of brilliant ideas, how many are actually brought into the visible world?
The unheralded editors of our time….
John Martin of Black Sparrow, for instance. Working constantly, for love of what he does, for—I gather—not very much money. The work is so absorbing, bringing out a magazine, a constant daily and even hourly challenge—the pleasure in a sense already guaranteed (there will be an issue!—it will appear!)—so one need not worry. And then, too, magazines are generally not reviewed as books are. The editors provide a structure in which others are presented. Being an editor is agreeable in a waythat being a writer is not always, for one’s own writing is the presentation, and one cannot be dissociated from it…though of course all art is a “gift” to the culture, and the artist is ultimately detached from it. No choice about that.
Publication date of The Goddess and Other Women , and New Heaven , New Earth, * sometime in early December. The book of essays is my least ambiguous book, very moral and very serious, absolutely “my heart laid bare”; it should not be misunderstood as most of my other books are. The Goddess has stories I cannot look at, except by paging through the book with a pretense of casualness…so painful are certain lines, certain paragraphs…the dialogue springing out to the eye, and my astonishment that these words are going to be read by other people …. The book is, even more than most of the others, a curious mixture of “fiction” and “fictionalized life.” What upsets me because it is intimate, what pleases me because it is impersonal, art-work rather than journal, would appear to the reader unfamiliar with my life as more or less the same; what is “real” indistinguishable from what is “imagination.” I will consider myself free of the events behind those tales when I can read them as a casual reader, unable to distinguish and uninterested in distinguishing “reality” and “imagination.”
November 22, 1974. Luncheon with old friends—Liz, Kay, Marge † —at a French restaurant in downtown Detroit—all of us in high spirits—why?—Kay having
[…]
The first issue of the magazine now out; being mailed; Ray and I both quite pleased with it. Ray did most of the work, suffered most of the frustrations, the initial idea of the magazine being—I suppose—my own; but of my hundreds of brilliant ideas, how many are actually brought into the visible world?
The unheralded editors of our time….
John Martin of Black Sparrow, for instance. Working constantly, for love of what he does, for—I gather—not very much money. The work is so absorbing, bringing out a magazine, a constant daily and even hourly challenge—the pleasure in a sense already guaranteed (there will be an issue!—it will appear!)—so one need not worry. And then, too, magazines are generally not reviewed as books are. The editors provide a structure in which others are presented. Being an editor is agreeable in a waythat being a writer is not always, for one’s own writing is the presentation, and one cannot be dissociated from it…though of course all art is a “gift” to the culture, and the artist is ultimately detached from it. No choice about that.
Publication date of The Goddess and Other Women , and New Heaven , New Earth, * sometime in early December. The book of essays is my least ambiguous book, very moral and very serious, absolutely “my heart laid bare”; it should not be misunderstood as most of my other books are. The Goddess has stories I cannot look at, except by paging through the book with a pretense of casualness…so painful are certain lines, certain paragraphs…the dialogue springing out to the eye, and my astonishment that these words are going to be read by other people …. The book is, even more than most of the others, a curious mixture of “fiction” and “fictionalized life.” What upsets me because it is intimate, what pleases me because it is impersonal, art-work rather than journal, would appear to the reader unfamiliar with my life as more or less the same; what is “real” indistinguishable from what is “imagination.” I will consider myself free of the events behind those tales when I can read them as a casual reader, unable to distinguish and uninterested in distinguishing “reality” and “imagination.”
November 22, 1974. Luncheon with old friends—Liz, Kay, Marge † —at a French restaurant in downtown Detroit—all of us in high spirits—why?—Kay having
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