Another type of musician is Bebe Barron, collaborating with her husband Louis, who composes with electronic sounds, a modern permutation of music born of physics. Bebe is a beautiful young woman with short dark hair, delicate features and large soft dark eyes, who threads her way gracefully through mazes of lights, wires, buttons, turntables, earphones and tubes. She speaks softly, moves about in feminine clothes, unobtrusively sharing in the development of this new intricate science.

  One cold morning on Fourteenth Street Eve met the Becks (Julian Beck and Judith Malina), who for years gave bold and original freedom to productions of their "Living Theatre." They had just bought a building for their theatre, after moving from one loft to another. There are now thirty-eight off-Broadway theatres in New York. This one, the thirty-ninth, proves the strength of the effort made to create an artistic underground to counter the present commercial and conventional values. Many personal sacrifices nourished this now flourishing activity divorced from commerce. These small groups, long dedicated to basic research in the theatre, often in turn nourish a Broadway suffering from an anemia caused by the commonplace. The Becks say: "The theatre is love, dream, ritual, poetry, prose, reality. It is a place of intense experience ... it is a place where the spectator must participate by feeling and comprehending. It is more than entertainment. It is life itself...."

  The most fascinating aspect of life in New York is this artistic underground. Lofts are rented to give exhibitions of paintings, concerts, films, readings, lectures and jazz sessions. They are advertised only by word of mouth. The crowd that attends these loft events is marked by a particular attentiveness, a deeper interest.

  One of the loft sessions was a Symposium of Modern Music. Faced with the highly over-abstract music of John Cage and his European parallels, the crowd not only listened with absorption but demanded afterwards that the composers make clear their intent. A young Swede, newly arrived in the United States, heard this music on Second Avenue, weaving between hoboes and bar-leaners, and joined the group. Coming out with Eve and her friends, he commented: "This is an America we never heard about." This is what Eve has always called the Hidden Face of America, the one Europeans would love and understand.

  From over-distilled sounds to the best jazz in town, the Five Spot on Cooper Square. The crowd does not wish to encounter the peepers and spectators who watch others in Village cafés. The waiters are mostly artists and musicians. Eve and her friends tried to divine their professions. In the group was Maxwell Geismar, the historian of American literature, now preparing a collection of his reviews. When asked if he were a painter the young waiter answered: "No, I am a writer, but I write something which wouldn't interest you. I'm an avant-garde writer."

  At the bookshop two books were placed in Eve's hands: Justine, by Lawrence Durrell, and My Father, My Son, by Edward G. Robinson, Junior.

  Justine is an exceptional adventure into intimate experience, a love affair with characters rarely encountered in modern fiction and with the sensuous, beautiful city of Alexandria. Justine has the deep, warm colors of a Chagall painting and an intoxicating use of language. The blending of humor, skillful analysis, poetic descriptions with realism and surrealism, gives it the smoky, mysterious, enticing quality of multiple dimensions...a voyage to the antipodes of experience. The threads weave in and out as richly as oriental tapestries, as intricate as oriental cities, but with sudden, sharp moments of revelation in the development of relationships which brings them into the focus of our daily experiences among those concerned with moments of truth.

  My Father, My Son is almost at the opposite pole. It is a document of the tragedy of people who cannot relate to each other, who fumble and stumble through all the distortions and errors of non-love and nonunderstanding. The story is an ancient tragedy of failed relationship between parent and child in the modern setting of Hollywood. The unfulfilled demand for total love creates revengefulness, the theme of modern delinquency. It is the environment of Hollywood that contributes to the disaster, through its publicity, which makes caricatures of relationships, destroying intimacy. The book arouses compassion for both parents and son. The ultimate tragedy is the boy's inability to find his own identity so that he can withstand defeats and emptiness. The obsession with retaliation and destruction takes the place of the creation of a world in which he could live.

  In these two books the two worlds oppose each other—one rich, magic, full, the other empty and destructive. Robinson Junior has been able to create compassion for the displaced person who lacks a passport to an inner life.

  Parties ... at the Barrons', where through a soundproof window in their living room one looks upon the science-fiction room of electronic machines.... One sees first of all Geoffrey Holder, the dark dancer, who looks like a Giacometti statue, elongated into supreme grace, so tall that at times he walks into a room with his hands outstretched like those of a blind man, making way for himself as if delicately creating enough space so he will not collide with anyone....

  In one corner James Leo Herlihy sits Buddhist fashion. His play Blue Denim, written in collaboration with Bill Noble, is being rehearsed. Jim is a handsome young man who could act the hero of his own plays.... He has the tense, swift rhythm of New York, and of jazz. His many-faceted talk rushes out in dizzying improvisations with a casual elegance and facility which recalls one of the titles of his stories: "A Breeze from China," but which is of the purest American flavor and origin.

  Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the brilliant historian of mythology, is asserting that mythology expired in the fourteenth century, but all around him are people who, born in the reign of Freudian mythology, know there is a language of the myth we all share after having learned the translation of our dreams....In this room, at this party, symbolism is a familiar guest, no esoteric one. The women assert it by their dressing. The symbolism of women's dressing has so lovingly been recorded by the novelists. Proust gave ten pages to the resemblance between Odette's negligées and the flowers she surrounded herself with through the Paris winters. D. H. Lawrence, without knowing anything of fashions, liked his heroines to wear magenta stockings on days of conflict. And a film star Eve knew owned a multitude of hats. The hats, properly perched on stands, as in all women's dreams of an actress's wardrobe, were never taken down. They required too much audacity. They demanded that a role be played to its maximum perfection. So each time she had reached into the joyous hat exhibit, looked at the treasured hats, she took again the little skullcap, the unobtrusive page and choirboy cap.

  ...The moment when her small hand hesitated, lavishing only a caress over the arrogant feather, the challenging upward tilts, the regal velvets, the labyrinthian veils, the assertive gallant ribbons, the plumage and decorations of triumph, was it self-doubt which reached for the tiny skullcap of the priest, choirboy and scholar?

  The distinction between colorless dressing and dressing to express character, a mood, the richness of a personality is the same one which separates a uniform from the art of dressing. The last originates from a knowledge of one's identity, an awareness of moods, a care for eloquence of body as well as of words. It is inseparable from the art of relationship or the art of living. A choice of scarf, a style of hair, the form of a shoe, a certain color, can play this lyrical note which reveals a woman's inner riches. The art of dress in living is not less valuable than the art of dress on the stage. The art of living is renewal, inventiveness, exploration, an openness to the unexpected, a love of surprises. Eve is not a spectator watching a fashion parade. She knows that even among textiles, she must choose with a feeling for the meaning of her life, the motifs and the patterns, the textures of her life and of those she loves, a harmonization of moods, temperaments and indications of the hidden selves which cannot appear badly dressed.

  The way Jean Erdman, the modern dancer, stood in the middle of the Barrons' room distinguished her from all other women. There was a plumbline perfection to her standing which made other women seem to have collapsed inwardly, achieving what Martha Graham had once described as pelvic consciousness.

  Two kinds of climate are clearly felt in the city of New York. One is the ozonated one which blows from the wide open East River and the United Nations Building. So many windows open upon the world, men of all races walking up and down the wide, windswept steps, all races meeting in the elevators. The visitors from other cities and other countries who are not sitting at the sessions wander in the basement into the shops, which carry objects from all over the world. An international bazaar, with flutes from Yugoslavia, basketry from Mexico, silverware from India, shawls from Persia, painted wood objects from Greece, dolls, spoons, toys. And near to it, a bookshop unlike any other. A network of written communication with the whole world: books in every language, on every subject, studies made by the United Nations of people's vital problems of living. America's gift to other countries here is in terms of technology, how to build bridges, how to develop agriculturally, how to organize communities, how to solve problems of food. A simple example of teaching people to mature economically was the task accomplished by the United Nations representative in Haiti. The Haitians were suffering great poverty, in spite of the fact that their sea contained abundant fish. They lacked fishing boats. They were too poor to construct them. They were helped to build these and to become, ultimately, independent and self-sustaining. It was also an American who discovered that they were painters of marvelous quality. Every year Haitian painters are exhibited in New York. It was he who had a story to tell of what happened during the last floods. American helicopters were picking off people who had been carried off to sea; flying them to Port-au-Prince, where they were given a full meal and a new set of clothes. Soon the fliers became aware that the more people they rescued the more appeared to be swimming in desperate clusters. And soon they realized that some poor Haitians were deliberately throwing themselves into the sea to be rescued, fed and clothed.

  Together with this many-colored, many-flagged world, and the infinite sharing of one's privileges, there also blows upon New York the incandescent climate of jazz. Not only for our pleasure, not only as the truest art born of America, but as a revivifying influence upon American literature. Following the war there was in the novel a period which might kindly be described as "dead." The writing was pale, lifeless, without rhythm or vitality. No need to mention the writers. They were bored, listless, and dealing in clichés. But there was another trend. It first revealed itself in writers writing about jazzmen, such as in Really the Blues, or Solo, a remarkable novel of a jazz musician who clung to his individuality and whom the community destroyed. He carried about a visiting card which stated: "I am the last of the individuals." He was not the last. He was probably one of the jazzmen who was to influence our literature. A long prose poem was used in the film The Wild Party. It was not noticed then, but the stylized beauty of it is apparent today. In Kerouac's On the Road, the lyrical passages have a primitive beauty. All of them are alive. The basic research in American writing does not lie in surrealism, or in the flat dull realism of middle-class novels, but in this original language born of jazz, which has the tempo of American life, its rhythm, its vitality and colorfulness. The resistance to it, to its artistry, its uniqueness, only comes from a fear of freedom, the fear of individuality which has tried to make writing an anonymous, functional utility. New York is experiencing the influence of a climate which blows from the West Coast....

  [Winter, 1957–1958]

  The liberation from guilt caused a rebirth, a freedom from fixation on the past. The past traumas caused crystals in the joints, spiritual arthritis. Suddenly I could relate to everyone, even those who had hurt me. I recaptured old friends like Wallace Fowlie. He hurt me once by leaving me out of his book on surrealism and including Henry Miller. The same people I knew before but could not connect with, I could work with now. I had forgotten to take change into account, a change in them and a change in me. Gunther is now a literary agent and is helping me. He is an intelligent man who loves literature, does translations, worked in films. I connected with Tom Payne. From the very first we talked openly.

  One evening Tom brought Jack Kerouac. Kerouac greeted me in French and kissed me, saying: "You are beautiful." But he was already drunk and it was impossible to talk with him. He put a record of his own reading on the phonograph and listened raptly. It was as if he wanted the recording to speak for him because he was unable to. The telephone rang. Kerouac unhooked it and laid the arm of the telephone against the phonograph. Half an hour later the bell rang. Tom Payne felt it was a distressed friend and that he should leave by the kitchen door. He left. It was his friend at the door, who, hearing Kerouac's recording, felt Tom might be there. Her unhappiness touched me and I consoled her. After a while she left. Then I stayed with Kerouac, who was blubbering. I have an incurable prejudice against drunks. I suggested we go to the Cedar Bar where all our friends were. We sat at the bar. He had heard about my experience with LSD and so he began to pat his breast pocket vehemently and said: "If you have LSD, I have plenty of money to buy it." This offended me. I said: "I only took it once and it was given to me by a doctor." Then I said I had to telephone and I slipped out of the bar. A failed meeting because I am not a drinking partner.

  I can see Tom is under a strain. He is articulate, adroit with words. He is emotional even though the intelligence dominates the feelings. But they are there. Once he spoke of himself as dead. "I am so dead." I suggested he buy the Chinese junk which Walter Trampler got from China. Tom had seen it from his car when he was driving uptown, and he almost drove off the freeway. "That would be a perfect way to live." Was I trying to suggest the way out of reality and restrictions? To make his life a separate poem as my life on the houseboat was for me?

  I spent Sunday tracking down Walter Trampler, who wanted to sell the junk. I visited him with Peggy.

  Excitement. The excitement of being once more in the world, able to act, to be spontaneous, to engage in activities when I had feared my life might end in isolation, the isolation and withdrawal of the wounded.

  A pile of letters in the morning. Discoveries of analysis. Realism and surrealism. "Those are the things we should be discussing, and plans for publishing. Now it is all crises and conflicts."

  "For the moment you need first aid. We will have time for all that later."

  I entrusted Tom with the edited five hundred pages of the diary, to get his opinion of present reaction to it. He carried the box around. But after a few weeks, I quietly took the box back.

  I met the Becks the day they bought their theatre on 14th Street. Judith keeps a diary and has written about Nina. I offered to compare our portraits, but she was reluctant. All these years I admired their audacity, their originality, their experimentation, their incredible courage. I first went to their productions in the Village, and I loaned my name, but the actual plays they put on I did not like: Rexroth and Stein, and others, so I told them how much I admired them and their acting, directing, but not the plays and withdrew my name. But we remained friends.

  The recognition of how much neurosis interfered with my friendships, publications. My vulnerability and touchiness, and immediate withdrawal from the fray. Elation at freedom from this now. I kept telling Bogner of accomplishments. The Grove Press ignored my work and Don Allen was only interested in men writers. Ordinarily I would withdraw, refuse their parties, and erect a wall against them. I was able to drop in with Jim at a cocktail party, invulnerable and indifferent to their intrigues.

  A moment of intolerable pain hearing that Gonzalo in Paris has cancer of the throat. Wilfredo describes the treatment by long radioactive needles through his throat. Hearing this I felt the pain in my own throat. Beautiful Gonzalo who used to say: "I won't be able to bear old age and physical decadence."

  Then came a day of quiet acceptance, which comes from the knowledge of all our dooms, illnesses, and deaths. The intensely personal image of his death is finally dissolved by time and thrown back into some universal ocean where all our pains and deaths are one. We do not die individually but in each of these fragments of the death of those we love. There are days when I count the dead, like a ritual of black magic, as if calling up names and not being too certain mine is not among them.

  The news of Gonzalo's illness came when I was preoccupied with completing my portrait of Henry because I had heard he was very ill.

  I thought aging meant the loss of sensibilities, of vibrations, but I feel more intensely alive than ever. Music pours freely through me, the music by which I know the extent of my receptivity and response. I thought that while parting from the dead or the dying or the sick, one parts with fragments of one's own life. I thought so many deaths would create little cemeteries in me, but I am blessed with continuous aliveness, as if on the contrary, I am to be their preserver. Instead of dying in part with Gonzalo, and as in a great earthquake, seeing nine years of my life sink into death, I feel stronger than ever in my desire to assert Gonzalo's aliveness.

  It is wonderful to lose the angers, the wounds. My scars are vanishing. I thank Dr. Bogner. When Tom told me about his differences with his psychiatrist, I had no qualms because Bogner has not once betrayed the precisions of truths even by a word misplaced, misused or carelessly defined. She is a semanticist. She has a genius for nuances and for expression. She seizes upon one's own confusions, such as mine between the words "activity" and "aggression."

  When Tom first talked about analysis he approached it intellectually. He considered it like a chess game in which the cleverest one wins. But I insisted that was not what it was. You do not match your wits against your surgeon. He has a knowledge you do not have. You have to analyze his knowledge, yes, but not waste time fighting it.