The last few weeks here have been filled with peculiar adventures, all involving John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, who’ve nearly killed me with their dissipations…half-drunk all day and dead-drunk all night, and once, believe it or not, I came to around six in the morning to find King Farouk doing the hula-hula in the middle of Bogart’s bedroom.
This Spanish opera interpreted by a Negro cast as Spanish saints is too divine, both gay and devout and altogether lovely.
I had to sock him down in a poem to stop him from nibbling the eternal edge of my guts.
At times I despair. I see that I’m not fit for anything. They are things from 1921. From 1921, when I was a child. Perhaps someday I will be able to express the extraordinary real drawings that I dream. Now I have a long way to go. I’m far away.
This time I got mad, decided to go down and picket with a sign in front of Times Bldg: I CHALLENGE THE RIGHT OF THE NY TIMES TO BURN MY BOOKS.
You and Jonathan Williams have thrown off the shackles of the sentence and the wide melody. For me the sentence lies in wait—all those prepositions and connectives—like an early spring flood.
It’s strange that you say I’m “too tough” for my “blazing hurry” (that sentence makes no sense, but you know what I mean). People are always telling me I’m tough. Maybe because I’ve survived so much.
Why are people so afraid of being enthusiastic? I don’t think it’s so much laziness as the fear of turning out to be wrong. But who knows what is right anyway? If one only feels the right things one might as well not feel anything…
It is a rare illness, as is everything about me, and I have had it already twice in my life.
But this growing fiction fits so insanely well with fact of life that sometimes I can not stand it, must burst (as I am doing here). And then I ruin it by bad writing. Like trying to be clever—this perhaps because I am afraid to be sincere?
