Renate and John bought a sailboat in Holland and named it Solar Barque. But the voyage through European canals was short. It seems that John did not study navigation seriously, and that Renate was expected to assist in maneuvers which were described in a book in a language unknown to her. John felt the boat would guide itself. In the middle of one river he lost control and Solar Barque began to circle like a dervish while other boats bore down on them. Another time he guided the boat under a historic bridge, too low for the mast, and damaged an ancient treasure, to the great anger of the population. Navigating according to a book written in navigation terms was disastrous. To reach Villefranche they finally put Solar Barque on a train. It was exposed to sun and dry air for days. When it reached Villefranche and was set afloat, it sank immediately. And Renate's latest postcard came from Vienna, saying Solar Barque was in dry dock.

  Though Roger Bloom is serving a life sentence, they evidently consider him a special person. He writes:

  There is so little about a prison worth writing of or about. The everyday existence contains so little change from day to day. I am serving my sixth year here and thanks to Henry Miller, George Dibbern and now you, Anaïs, I have managed to retain a normal life. Last December I was selected by the Warden along with other inmates to go to St. Louis to represent the inmate body in distributing gifts purchased by all of us to the children of two orphanages there in the city. We wore "outside clothing" and were accompanied by two of the Warden's children. There were no guns, fetters, handcuffs or words about "being on our honor." We were just five people bent on a mission of goodwill. During the trip we were interviewed by the Press and on two occasions I was mistaken for the Warden. My gray and white hair had a lot to do with it. Too, we were on TV and altogether we had a wonderful trip. My reason for telling you this is that it became all the more important to me because of the fact that I am serving a life sentence.

  [Fall, 1960]

  Letter to Marguerite:

  I plunged into your book reading at night and all day, everywhere, absorbed, moved, delighted, touched, bemused, hypnotized, lost, opiumized, amused, enchanted, saddened, frightened. It is a world on another planet, yet very intimate, personal, and familiar to me. An extraordinary sweep, depth, dimension, the constant shift between realism and reality, life and death, putting everything in question, extraordinary flights of fantasy, imagery, a gentle kind of humanity which dreamers usually cannot maintain. The love of details for their meaning, glasses, objects worn by Miss Macintosh, the black umbrella, etc. It is so vast a world one cannot write about it all, and especially at first reading one must allow one's self to be swept into it as into a vast ocean. It is cosmic, musical, and immense. Its dimensions engulf smaller voyages, annihilate daily existence, cities, people, noises. It is made for solitude and meditation, for the night. One should read it every night and then go off on your large wingspan, to explore space, the infinite, time, life and death. There is a greatness in it, an absolutism. It took courage to write, to let the imagination run away as the surrealists wanted to do and never did. You yielded to all the waves, the wavelength of the soul, encompassed the wider meshes of the spirit in every shade and tone. Yes, quarter tones like those of Eastern music. Your way will not be easy. I do not predict a nonchalant reading from the lazy ones, the one-dimensional ones. But those who feel as I do will consider this the Bible of poetry, an oceanic world. The key seems to me to be Calderón's La Vida Es Suefio, all is a dream, in the end, boundaries do not exist.

  Resistance to writing is a frequent experience with many writers. Henry Miller in Paris much preferred to write forty-page letters, Durrell writes of preferring to build a wall, and I at times enjoyed printing, bathing the dog, stacking wood for the fireplace, etc., more than writing. But when I am typing a diary (now volume 79) the entire life is re-created and it is such an intense pleasure to recreate a moment of life and love that it is worth the struggle. Often I did not know what I had done, or that I had done it. It was when I seemed most careless and casual that I would miraculously give the sensation I had experienced sur le vif. Writing is a curse only when there are no readers. Almost every other occupation gives more pleasure: cooking, sewing, gardening, swimming, but none of them give you back the life which is flowing away from us every moment.

  Daisy [Aldan] is a loyal friend. We have shared many projects together. We read together at the Maison Française, Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés. She read her translation and I read the original French. It was taped and played on the radio. We shared the vicissitudes of Two Cities, the helping of friends. Daisy is a magnificent poet, of the highest quality, yet she has to publish her poetry herself. Her teacher's salary goes into that. For my sake, she has also endangered her teacher's job. She has unusually gifted students who cannot go to college and will go from this school into their professional work. She made them study Under a Glass Bell stories. They wrote remarkable papers, more understanding than the critics. But one mother came in to object to the "Birth" story, saying she did not want her daughter to read such a tragic story and get the wrong idea about birth. Daisy defended the story well. She showed the mother the five-cent magazines children can buy around the corner from the school with vulgar, sensational stories. She insisted that anything which was written with grace and a sense of meaning and sincerity was better for an adolescent than what they were given to read on the newspaper stands. She won her point, not with the mother, but with the school.

  Letter to Jim:

  Still on that volume 79 and the lines which turned out to be prophetic, "I have a feeling Jim is going to succeed, and his success in the world will fully compensate me for my failure. When he is accepted, I feel it as if he were a mystical son, and I regain my faith in the world. It does not matter if life condemned me to an isolation cell as a writer, at least he will be in it, part of it, at the heart of it."

  This prophecy came true. And it must not concern you as I have fully accepted this and I have given up novel writing. I have decided to enjoy what I have, typing out the diaries for the far-off future, stacking wood, enjoying sunsets and martinis, and forget I am a writer. When I was nine years old I had decided to live for others, and I should have stuck to my decision. But do tell me all the good things that your success has brought you, your pleasures, because as I say, they balance in the books of the mystics.

  When Renate went away to sail on Solar Barque with John, Peter was left in care of an American family. Renate thought that he would be happy because Peter was always asking Renate to give him more of a family existence. He did not realize that with a stable family you have to play your part. He was asked to get up on time for breakfast, to help carry groceries from the market. Meals were at stable hours, the day was planned ahead. Peter lost all his freedom, his spontaneity. He had protested Renate's casual, unplanned life. Now he found himself in an organized life. He fell into a depression.

  Meanwhile John, writes Renate, took guitar lessons from a wispy, lisping Catalonian "music professor." Not only did she have to be present to translate but the professor's large family sat around the room making shoes. When a musical problem came up, they all stopped to interfere in the lesson with Spanish passion and bravado. "We discovered too late that the 'professor' cannot read music, nor does he have an absolute ear for music, and with the exception of flamenco numbers and paso doble he plays everything off key in cacophony. John does not have the heart to quit because he loves the little Catalonian and his shoemaking family and fifty cents a lesson is a small fee. And so he is learning to play a paso doble and one flamenco piece."

  Renate is in Barcelona, which holds so many memories for me, happy memories: Carmen, the Spanish maid who sang all day. Granados, the kindly paternal figure who let my mother teach singing at the Conservatory. A modest but cheerful apartment, with a balcony overlooking the sea. The warmth of the nuns who taught us. The faith in the Virgin who would bring my father back. The view from the balcony. Everything white and sky-blue. Children dancing in the street. Music always.

  Roger Bloom is fighting for parole. I showed his letters to a psychiatrist and obtained an opinion of his character and state of mind, all favorable. He did appear before the Board on his forty-eighth birthday. He was given thirty-five minutes to state his case. For twenty-eight of those forty-eight years, he was involved with the law. Now he feels a changed man.

  I wrote letters:

  Letter To Whom it May Concern:

  I am a writer who studied psychoanalysis and practiced it for two years as assistant to Dr. Otto Rank. I have corresponded with Roger Bloom over a period of years and have had the opportunity to be taken into his confidence both about his past, his family, his background, and his present state of mind and character. I believe he has undergone a great change; a gain in wisdom, understanding, and objectivity about himself. By the cultivation of friendships, reading, and psychological studies, he has gained much insight. I believe he has a fund of natural goodness, humanity, and a desire to help others; he is capable of sympathy, of generosity, and is far from being what is usually described as a natural criminal. He has no cruelty, no selfishness, and no love of violence. He did make a false start, based on youthful rebellion, and understands what motivated him. I have found him thoughtful of others, sensitive to others' feelings, emotionally responsive to kindness and understanding. I trust him.

  What I consider the principal motivation for crime is absent here; he is not revengeful; he is not angry, or bitter. He does not blame society or shift responsibility. He has honestly studied and examined his own character.

  Letters written over such a long period are very revealing. He has written in many moods, also under many kinds of circumstances. I detect no desire to injure others or even to excuse himself and blame others for his past.

  Letter to Miss Bacon:

  I have heard that you are seeking to help Roger Bloom, and I am writing this letter on his behalf. Being a novelist and writing for twenty years, I feel that I am a fairly good judge of character. I have corresponded with Roger Bloom over a period of years. I feel that he has undergone a great change, that he is no longer the person who first entered the jail. I feel he can be very useful to society outside, that he is basically a generous and emotional man. I never detect in any of his letters the kind of attitude he demonstrated as a youth of seventeen. He has grown spiritually, has matured, has maintained a very human relation to people both inside and outside of the jail. All these small details which inevitably betray themselves in a man writing letters are absent in his. He has an understanding of his life, he has been reading a great deal, he has even undergone a kind of self-analysis to understand what motivated his youthful acts. I would trust him.

  May I add that I studied and practiced psychoanalysis under Dr. Otto Rank and that I feel this helped me to distinguish the person who will repeat offenses from the one who has uttery re-created himself into a man with a conscience, awareness, and a control of his life and thinking.

  [Winter, 1960–1961]

  The remarkable fact about Daisy Aldan is that all her education came from hard-won grants and fellowships, that as soon as she won her degrees she began teaching and being self-supporting, that she always printed her own books and Folder, which was an anthology of the best American poets and painters. Her translation of Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés (A Throw of the Dice) was authorized by Gallimard and the heirs of Mallarmé. It was said to be the most untranslatable of poems in any language.

  She visited Varèse, and writes me: "It hurts me to think that this great imagination had to wait so long for recognition, and that even now there is no place in America where his work can be played properly. I sense within him a great restlessness and fear that there is not too much time left. He told me that his life had been like that of a prisoner who sees the sky and the freedom without but remains within his cell."

  It is that she is not only a high-quality poet, one of the greatest integrity, but that she is always devoted to other poets.

  Lawrence Durrell's preface to Justine is similar to one of Proust's letters: "There is a plane geometry, and a geometry of space. And so for me the novel is not only plane psychology but psychology in space and time, I try to isolate.... Such characters will later reveal themselves as different from what they were in the present, different from what one believes them to be, a circumstance which indeed occurs frequently enough in life."

  Letter to poet in prison:

  At Xmas I talked about you to a writer your age, and he became so interested he said he would write you—Robert Baldock—I hope he has. Phoenix promised to send you a Reich book—did he? No, I don't feel you indulge in self-pity at all. The situation is tragic, for you are gifted, and you analyzed so well what takes place when creation fails. But you have all the elements to win as an artist. When you come out, I want you to meet the Living Theatre group, James Herlihy, all the artists of your age who have worked through difficulties, obstructions. Bitterness is the thing to watch—toxic. I watch it in myself; when I see it forming like an abscess, I operate fast. Da Vinci's life, filled with frustrations, humiliations, a million projects defeated by others—but each time one failed, he picked up another. If he could not get a mural order he wanted, he took up the study of anatomy; when his airplane failed, he took up the study of birds; when his patrons poisoned his life, he designed a church, or took up astronomy. We all have plenty of causes for anger, but if we let it grow it becomes war and leads to death of all life. Did you know Genêt no longer needs to steal now that he is fulfilled as a writer? What a writer! You're a fine writer—I can tell from your letters. I take my correspondence wherever I go, and this time could not finish my letter to you. Now I am back with Tennessee Williams' One Arm stories, rereading them. Limited edition. I like his stories and novels better than his last plays which I felt were distorted to the point of vulgarization, what I call the Grand Guignol school, which I saw again when I was in Paris. It belongs to the 1800's. It takes place in a theatre built like a Catholic chapel, all wood and confessionals, and cloistered boxes, etc. Red carpets and old gaslight lamps. It is the old horror story, carried to exaggeration, grotesque and so far beyond belief that it creates laughter. It created a form of writing but one which was never taken seriously. It is always dangerous to go back to these places. One never knows at which point it will die. Well, Grand Guignol has not died yet. In Williams I think it came from his taking symbolism and extending it into action, into literal action (the boys eating the young man, etc.). The curse of American writing is action. The same with our rebellions. And Lindner made this point wonderfully. In Europe our rebellions were against the bourgeois world, or whatever, but they were made to affirm what the individual stood for. Romantic rebels, overthrowing what existed to affirm itself. Here, the rebel goes in a pack, set on destroying but not for any reason at all. Just anger. Surrealism was such a rebellion, preceded by Dadaism. And what did the Beats accomplish? Action in this way becomes meaningless. The cult of action ... To return to Williams; he practically killed symbolism. He had genius for the theatre. But when he sets on the theatre cannibalism, castration, etc., he is profoundly and deeply betraying the symbol. For horror takes the place of feeling. Action takes the place of feeling. It is as empty in the end as the cries, wailings and murders of Medea, killing her children. No, creation begins somewhere else. Where we understand the symbol (the symbolism of the bullfight even, of eating a wafer in place of the Christ, etc.). Not in action certainly. I realize this in Williams with Camino Real. He was burlesquing the dream. Destroying it. For laughs and for chills. At that moment I lost my respect for him. It may have been in reaction against violent action that so many of the modern artists took an interest in Zen. I notice you did too. But I feel that is only a step, a step of suspense, while the meaning of our acts takes shape within ourselves so they might not become suicides. Williams tried to drag us into his suicidal nightmares, castration, etc. His own. There is a difference here with Genêt, who uses violent material but understands it. And in The Balcony reverses the process. Symbolic action to be transposed into living.

  When you are free, what did you think of doing? Prepare all your writing for me to see what we can do with it. Do you need paper, carbons, etc.? Also do what I did as a child, in the diary: analyze in one column what makes you angry, and in another what makes you love and admire. They balance each other. I would do that whenever I was depressed. Even today. I set side by side on my desk a letter from a child of fourteen about my stories, and a letter of rejection from a publisher. And I'm satisfied. Your letter about my work was beautiful. It counts heavily in the balance!

  Letter to Roger Bloom: