Fantasy of roving editor, which I pursued all these years because it meant freedom of movement and an income, which made me write articles under pseudonyms, or articles other people signed, which seemed about to become true with magazines Two Cities and then Eve, and then ended with their failure, was revived by Lila Rosenblum. My friendship with Lila lasted through the years although I saw little of her when I began to stay away from New York. But she was close to Jim Herlihy, to Stanley Haggart, to other friends of mine. She was in ill health but always courageous and spirited. She came to see me in Sierra Madre in a car which had tremors and always made me think of her fragility. Her illness, lupus, was a mystery to me. It was considered fatal. When I first visited her she was bedridden, but her intelligence was lively and her understanding of people accurate.

  Now she was planning a magazine, the kind we all dreamed about. Her enthusiasm, her concepts were so contagious that her friends gave up their jobs in dull places to work on her magazine. Stanley Haggart was to be staff photographer, I the roving editor. Lila had found a designer for the dummy and for our writing paper. She was busy raising the capital. Her father had promised to raise half of it. She was in telephone communication with a young millionaire from Phoenix. Lila herself wrote a profile of Millie Johnstone. Millie's story interested us because she had been a dancer and an artist who had married into Bethlehem Steel. And at first she hated the steel mill as a monster who devoured her husband. She is only there as a nurse to a man shattered by gigantic responsibilities, gigantic ambitions, gigantic projects. We admired how she made her peace with the steel mill. She began to take an interest in it as an artist. She depicted the dramatic scenes of labor in her tapestries. Man in a death struggle with an element which had to be tamed. Then she took an interest in the workmen and initiated reforms. She tried to humanize the absolutely nonhuman offices and hallways. She introduced paintings and sculptures.

  Lila understood the drama behind the luxury and the drama of woman.

  I wrote a profile of the Barrons, as they are composing electronic sounds for Gore Vidal's play, Visit to a Small Planet. Time magazine wrote about them but I wanted to show one can write a lively profile without carbolic acid.

  The magazine will be called Fair Sex, but an intelligent Fair Sex. At last!

  We spent the evening at the apartment of Lila's co-editor, Don Combs. His friend of many years is dying of cancer at twenty-eight. He only has a few weeks to live. We all spontaneously created the illusion that he was essential to the first number, that he had to design the office (he designs stage sets), help select material. He was handsome, and the shock of conceding that this young body would die made our task difficult.

  Lila wrote to me that she had her first meeting with the young millionaire, that he was about twenty-five, that he looked like Gary Cooper, that he had made his first million in copper mines when he was twenty. He would give her enough money for two years, more later if she needed it. He also gave her carte blanche as editor. He left town and would be back in five weeks with his lawyers to sign all the papers. Lila has designed the dummy of the first number. It would have to be a Christmas number now. By pooling all our friends we found we had a distinguished list of contributors: Daisy Aldan, Lesley Blanch, James Leo Herlihy.

  I suggested I would like to do profiles of interesting and creative women. We had one of Millie Johnstone. I could write about Lesley. We are all so hopeful, dreaming of magnificent achievements.

  We waited for the young millionaire from Phoenix to arrive at Lila's apartment with his lawyer to sign the papers. We had bought champagne on "the expense account." I had bought the first transparent plastic umbrella which lit up like a Christmas tree when opened. Tiny bulbs were hidden in bunches of lilac. We were delirious with happiness. I was going to Paris for the Fair Sex. We each had cards printed with our names.

  James Leo Herlihy had promised a story. I was going to write about my favorite women, Kim Stanley, Cornelia Runyon, Jeanne Moreau. Stanley had beautiful photographs of a Fado singer in Portugal.

  The young millionaire from Phoenix never appeared.

  We found out later that he was the gardener for millionaires in Phoenix, that while clipping hedges he heard all these fabulous projects discussed, that this inspired him to play the role for a few weeks, "investing" here and there, over the telephone, and no wonder to all our projects and suggestions he assented with enthusiasm, it was all his dream and ours conjugated, interlocked.

  All those magazines we were going to surpass, outshine, to demonstrate the talents, the intelligence of the Fair Sex. All the dull jobs we abandoned, the treasures we were to discover, neglected books of immense value, so much talent in all of us!

  Letter from Roger Bloom:

  Twenty-nine years ago I first entered prison. I had just passed my twentieth birthday. I had been hitchhiking from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles. A man picked me up in St. Louis and was driving to Oklahoma. We were stopped in a small town south of St. Louis and the driver disappeared. The police arrested me and sent me here for two years because there was something about the car and its contents which loomed darkly. It took six days from the day of arrest until I was a full-fledged inmate of this prison, and retained a bitter attitude for many years. Born March 3, 1912.

  Letter from poet in prison:

  Yes, in six months the abominable walls enclosing the tensions of a gray existence will dissolve and the fade-in will be on brighter forms.... It's kind of you wanting to put me in touch with your friends in case you are not in New York now that freedom is nearer. Having seen so much, experienced so much, how can you be so genuinely sincere, still possess feelings of altruism and compassion when you know what a vile, base, depraved thing man's inherent nature is? When I discovered the cruelty of an ugly world I reacted by becoming more cruel and violent than they—showing them the rebellion of a man though chronologically a boy. Your way "to create a world of your own, peopled with your own people." Yes, you have succeeded...

  Letter to poet in prison:

  ...My only concern is your unhealed anger, and your pessimism, what I call, when I'm guilty of it, hemophilia of the soul, unhealing wounds caused by others' cruelties. But such pains are part of life and your capacity for writing and creating will have to be opposed (as they are in many of us) to self-destruction. For you are too intelligent not to admit destruction is ultimately self-destruction.

  Varda was here yesterday. He has plenty to be bitter about. His joyous and really beautiful collages are never exhibited in San Francisco, where he lives, no museums have any of his collages. But he said yesterday the moment an artist becomes bitter he has ceased to possess his own world, he has gone over to the enemy camp, the enemies of his work, who had intended to embitter him, knowing it kills creativity. Why the present love for big, empty, sterile abstractions, for deserts? When you discovered the cruelty of the world, why did you not join forces with those who strive for beauty and humanity? As a girl I started to give myself to whatever neutralized the ugliness. There is another aspect to man which is not destructive. Destruction is going on all around us, but so is creation. We can choose sides. When you are free return not as you say to the gutter, but to your acting, writing.

  I write to you in a desperate effort to eradicate the feelings of revengefulness for past hurts. I don't feel that you are healed. All of us have been at some time or other humiliated, betrayed, but our real life depends on how we react to such experiences. The tide of violence is too great. I fight it individually as much as I can.

  Interview with Antonin Artaud, a few days before his death, by Claude Nerguy in Pleiades magazine, no. 49 (my translation):

  Ivry ... An iron grille gate, a park. We are at the rest home. I had heard about Artaud, his madness, and had read The Theatre and Its Double. He granted me an interview for this Saturday between ten A.M. and one o'clock. A young guard conducted us towards a small square building. We walked around it before knocking at a small, low door.

  "Yes? Come in! Who is there?"

  The anxious, deep voice surprised us. There was no time lapse between the questions. We entered and the guard introduced us. I was never so startled: a large square room, the floor stained, the bed with holes, one sofa and two armchairs. The closed shutters gave to the room an impression of frightening neglect.

  Artaud is sitting by the fireplace where a wood fire is burning. Dark gray pants, a dirty shirt, open in front, revealing a red scarf around his neck, his hair falling over his eyes, he seems to us to be frightfully emaciated.

  Artaud placed his two index fingers behind his ears searching for a spot for a long time and began to talk. He had memorized my letter! Then he talked: "I have just published three books: Artaud le Morro, Ci-Git and La Culture Indienne. Those you do not have. You could not have them, they are too expensive for you. I asked the publisher to issue the books in a cheaper edition following the de luxe one. I don't know if he has done it. The other one, the third, Van Gogh is not expensive. Buy it." He turned towards us, his hands in front of him, his hair hanging on each side of his fantastic face, pale and suffering, a face incarnating suffering. His blue-green eyes enlarged and staring at the infinite. "My real public are young men of your age, students. They are not speculators. Those I hate." He sat once more by the fire. "You have not read anything else of mine? I came out a few months ago from my asylums, from my insane asylums. I have a hole in my back. The doctors struck me with hammers and bars of iron." I looked at him. It was an extraordinary face in our time, the face of someone having hallucinations, of a passionate nature, a man who might be at the same time a demon. He rose and seized a hammer. My friend and I became anxious but fortunately the cleaning woman reassured us with a smile. Artaud came nearer to us, his eyes dilated, the pupils small and black. "You see, this is the way I test the meter of my poems. It gives them greater force, breath." And he began to strike at a block of wood, his hair growing wild, his lips moist, screaming a poem of which I could only catch the first word: "Cain." It was unbelievable, terrible. This suffering being striking the rhythm with a hammer, these almost inarticulate cries which seemed like the war cry of the Indians, this sort of shout of victory and death in an almost empty room, bare walls facing only one drawing which seemed to be staring at us.

  When the poem was finished, he stopped, exhausted, the hammer, now useless, hung in his hand, and small pieces of wood splattered the floor.

  He went to the table, which served as a desk, covered with papers in disorder, searching through his papers for a copy of La Culture Indienne which he might give us. He did not find it, but he came back with a small sketchbook with a blue cover in which he wrote down his poems. "I draw too. The drawings add strength to the poems. See, there are drawings here and there over all the poems." He leaves the sketchbook with us and takes up the hammer blows again, then he came back to me and said gently and solemnly: "You are looking at the drawings upside down." I feared an explosion and retreated a little. His voice was so strange, with its inflexions of grand seigneur. He took back the sketchbook. "That was a man, and the chains which are killing him came from the infinite. This is a flying machine which has traversed the interplanetary spaces. It is stopped, broken, destroyed." Then he stood facing me and placed one finger on my chest, his left hand holding a drawing, and looked at me. I had the feeling that magnetic waves went through me. He returned the drawing to his table and walked around the room humming. He seemed like an animal in a cage, searching for an exit, and I was reminded of an early poem of his:

  Ah, give us skulls.

  I held out my book for him to sign and taking up his fountain pen he wrote: "To Claude Nerguy, on condition that he be alone because I am an enemy of sexuality, Antonin Artaud."

  He took a package of cigarettes and offered one to each of us, and then took a card out of a package of white cards, wrote a few words on it, handed it to me: "Come Monday evening at the reading of my Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu. This card is strictly personal, as I wrote on it, there will only be three more seats. You, Mademoiselle, can go eight days later, it will be read again."

  We parted and he said: "We'll see you Monday."

  His eyes still shone with a strange sparkle, indescribable, eyes of a seer.

  "Perhaps he died rhyming a death poem on his wood block," said my friend. "I do not dare think of it."

  And she added: "He did not have eyes but a beam of light."

  With Artaud it was the revenge of time. Time gave him his due. But as I do not believe in afterlife, I realize the gift artists make to the world is a selfless one ultimately, and that the knowledge that it may survive the self must be due to a belief in immortality. Or can one really work for those one will never see? Do I ever think of those who will read me after my death? The "self" disappears, as we know from LSD, from anesthesia. The core and center vanish. So if our words or music continue to enter others' bloodstreams they are no longer identifiable. I love Proust and his writing. All I have of him is an essence. It is not Proust or Artaud who will know who loves them.

  Sometimes I think of what the dead would have hated to see if they were still alive, and I am grateful for their death. For my mother's sake, I am glad she did not see the Cuban revolution.

  One night Jack Hirschman invited several people interested in Artaud. But they only love his madness and his use of drugs. They knew nothing of the seven volumes of collected works. Artaud would have repudiated them.

  He was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. He was haunted by the cruelty inherent in life itself. Do people die at the right time? Would Artaud have admired the drugged generation? If in his lifetime he was misunderstood, I do not think he would have preferred what is said and written about him now.

  Ian Hugo's film, Venice, Étude Number One, is a poem of Venice which captures for the first time both Venice and the dreams it arouses. His use of superimpositions expresses the many layers of our impressions: color, textures, dreams, legends and memory. Scenes pass before our eyes in a free, apparently unrelated flow but which resembles the way our imagination and our emotions respond. We accumulate impressions rather as a series of musical moods. Our emotional view of Venice is fluid, symphonic. At times we are aware only of light upon water, of a gliding black gondola, of a square of blue, of laundry fluttering like pennants, of statues coming to life, of red brocade, candlelight and silver-necked gondolas. The film opens with the shadow of a gondolier reflected upon the red flanks of an enormous ship. The gondolas, tied to candy-striped poles, dance, as in a ballet, to the waves created by the ferry boats. A woman's lacy wedding gown in the foreground veils the passing of a funeral gondola. Reflections are a constant theme, gondolas reflected in windows, buildings reflected in the water, people reflected in mirrors, a church spire seen through a heart-shaped, sculptured frieze. The images are in rich tones, with the quality of painting, and are so vivid and sensuous that one can hear the sound of church bells, glass, metal, wood, the sudden windstorm of pigeons flying off, the lapping waters of the canal, the cries of the gondoliers as they warn of their approaching a turn, the barking of dogs, the laughter of children.

  The climax dramatizes the conflict of a city always about to be swallowed by the sea. The cathedrals are reflected in the flood waters and seem to be lying at the bottom of the sea. Blue predominates.

  [Summer, 1961]

  Letter to Roger Bloom:

  They should spend less time on rules and regulations, holding back books and records, typewriters, etc., and more on helping a man find his unused, unknown creative energy, his real self.

  He received and read Lindner's books, Rimbaud's Illuminations, and from someone else, Cast the First Stone, a book about the oldest profession by Judge John Murtagh, Chief Magistrate of N.Y.C.

  I correspond with that wonderful George Dibbern, author of Quest, who is trying to get Roger Bloom paroled to New Zealand. We are collecting reference letters.

  I sent Roger Bloom two recordings of my readings and they were not given to him; they were returned to me. I was disappointed that the Warden did not relent. I do see the sense of some laws but I do not see any sense or usefulness in depriving Roger of something sent by a friend when all I sent inspired him to write and to read. I should think that when they see a man making efforts at expanding, enriching his understanding, they would help. The psychological effect of unjust deprivations is something they should consider.

  Met Tracey Roberts at Kozlenko's one evening. She has vivid red hair, enormous blue eyes, she is both intelligent and emotional. She is slender, and her voice is rich in tones. She illuminated the room, she glowed. I felt she was the essence of all my women characters. When she talks to me over the telephone I never know which of them is going to appear, clear-minded Djuna, vehement Lillian, confused, fragmented Sabina.

  I feel she is Sabina, but not sure yet. She has what I call a Russian beauty, that is, the ice-blue of the eyes, the heavy hair, the translucent skin still convey as much intensity as the dark-eyed, darkhaired Mediterranean.

  She always begins the conversation: "I don't want to be negative . .." but proceeds to manifest just that. She is an exquisite actress, accomplished, seductive, yet she has not reached the status these accomplishments should have produced. Again I am faced with the mystery of self-undoing. I feel it is there but cannot pin it down. Is it when she refuses countless roles offered to her for one reason or another?