Peter's story: Because Peter's father was not there (Renate had divorced years ago), we all felt Peter was in part our child. This was emphasized by the fact that he was a dreamer, an artist, a sensitive child. When Dr. Janiger' asked if any one of us knew a child whose parent would be willing to let him try LSD, I thought of Peter because I felt he had been exposed to dreams, to fantasies, to the artists' work around him, and that he would be more prepared for visions and dreams than any child I knew. But I found that Renate had a horror of drugs, and that she expressed her disapproval of drugs so vehemently that this was later to influence events and prevent Peter from admitting that he took drugs at college from his drug-pusher roommate.

  But before college, from the age of seven, he was always drawing, with vivid imagination. He drew mythical drawings, imaginative drawings and also science fiction, automobiles, airplanes. He was truly a modern child. He was used to being the only child among grownups, and Renate's young lovers treated him more like a playmate than a child. At parties and masquerades he invented his own stories and costumes. During the filming of The Pleasure Dome by Kenneth Anger he played a role and was a part of the fantasy.

  He made some very strong drawings which reminded me of a modern version of the sculptures on Mayan architecture. I used them to illustrate the first version of Seduction of the Minotaur [first titled Solar Barque]. The little book looked beautiful.

  He was a dreamer. When he went to school for the first time he heard a distinction made between Jew and Gentile. He questioned his mother. His grandmother was Jewish.

  He also discovered that he preferred his mother to all the little girls in school. He told his mother he would much prefer to sleep with her.

  He had pale blue eyes. Gentle manners. But he was reticent. When Renate went traveling with John on the sailboat, Peter had no way to come and see me. The one time he did come, he was so disturbed by his mother's absence that he did not talk very much. I would see him at the beach. Perhaps because I was his mother's friend he did not confide in me. He was then in trouble. He had difficulty adjusting to college. He consulted a psychiatrist. He did not confide in his mother. As he had always had a dreamy manner, no one noticed a change in him. He was more secretive perhaps, that was all.

  When his mother went to Europe with John he was left in the care of a very conventional family. He was not used to fixed meal hours, fixed hours for coming home, a structured orderly life. There were clashes. He was lonely, he missed his mother's free bohemian life, with the playfulness, the laughter, the openness. When he came to see me, I could not reach him. He was wrapped in a cocoon of reverie which carried him far away from people, and no one could fill the need for his mother.

  No one was aware of the change in him because he had always been pale, and distant. Very little of his feelings showed on the surface. He was outdistancing all of us. He had often heard his mother say she did not believe in drugs, that there were other ways to attain high moods, illuminations and reveries. He took her words as a judgment.

  We all failed to hold him, to pierce his reserve, his elusiveness.

  He was depressed, and went to Mexico with his roommate to buy drugs. He came back and visited Synanon. They told him if he wanted help he had to move in. Again he was afraid of his mother finding out.

  He came to live with Renate. While she was out, he took an overdose of drugs and died in her house.

  Renate went through an agony which was as terrible as the death itself. It was a nightmare from which she could not awaken. John stayed by her side. It was a period of insane grief. She wailed, and wept and lamented. I was not there but her voice over the telephone was a long cry of pain. This was a bitterer sorrow than the ordinary death of a child. It was an unbearable burden on a mother's sense of responsibility for her child. A mother was there to help, to comfort, to rescue, and Renate was capable of all the mother roles, she was essentially maternal. Why had he not turned to her, not reached for her? Why had he gone alone into his final solitude? Why had he died mute and unconfiding, with so much love around him? Why did all connections with others break so that he floated into the void? All of us felt the same way, as if we had failed to hold him. It was too ironic that a son of Renate, who was eminently created for maternity, who was protective, nurturing, full of empathy and devotion, should die by his own will.

  Were there signs we did not read? How near did he feel to life and people? Was he not already remote, detached, and the drugs merely a confirmation of that remoteness? A confirmation of a solitary journey. For if a drug awakens the dreaming man, it does not bring the man nearer to other human beings. It may extend his journey into the unconscious but does not point to the return to human life. How much did he care for the sea, for the sun, for women, for pleasure, for communion with others, for tenderness? Was he gone from all of us long before the final parting?

  If one is not comfortable in human life, one dreams. But these dreams can be fulfilled and create a world that is endurable. His mother's solution. The artist's solution.

  The rippling, the free, the contagious laughter of Renate was never the same again. She has her humor and her ironies, and her tendency to convert every experience into comedy. But underlying it all, there is a part of herself which died with Peter.

  All we could do was to exorcise a guilt she should not have. He had been well loved, protected, and understood. But guilt is not rational. Every suicide raises the question of our responsibility. We question our attentiveness, our care of each other, our communal duties. Were we observant enough, clairvoyant enough, did we listen for the cry of the nightmare, the lament? Did we observe the quiet ones, the remote ones, the silent ones, the mysterious ones? Do we feel we have to keep everyone in life, alive? Rescue each other, dispel each other's phantoms, watch over each other's sleep? Lest one of us sink and vanish beyond help or rescue.

  Diary writing is reduced to a minimum by the bulk of my correspondence. Many letters exchanged with Daisy Aldan, with Gunther on publication matters, more and more publication problems, books being translated into Catalan and Spanish, published in England, in France, all requiring discussions. Correspondence with reviewers, with Alan Swallow, with Nobuko, with Ruth Witt Diamant, who, after being the most popular hostess to all the poets in San Francisco, retired from teaching and embarked bravely on a new career. She took all the tapes of poets' readings to Japan and taught American literature. She wrote expansive letters on life in Japan. There was much correspondence and many visits with Henry Miller over the editing of his Letters and of my Diary. There were many meetings and correspondence with Oliver Evans over his critical study of my work. So much outward activity prevented me from describing, from meditating, from analyzing events. The publication of Henry Miller's letters to me caused a stir and brought reviews and letters. I sat on a panel at San Fernando State College and discovered I was ineffectual on panels. I withdraw from arguments. I can only perform alone. I was trying to get a perfectly edited diary, which gave me a lot of work. Eliminating repetitions. Joaquin read the diary and rectified errors in family history.

  The problem of not hurting others' feelings caused me much distress. Henry was offended by certain statements, and as I said, I wanted to do him justice, not injustice. The discussions ended peacefully, and he gave me a Varda collage. He himself has begun to be concerned at the consequences of his frankness. He fears a libel suit from his first wife and from June. He writes me: "June was in an asylum for two or three years. Out sometime, now, and holds a civil service job for the City of New York. I help her when I can."

  His days of poverty will be over when Grove Press publishes five of his books all at once.

  Alan Swallow has trouble with his leg, an infection of the bone which intermittently responds to antibiotics, and often causes him much pain.

  I have the greatest admiration for Simenon. I read every one of his books. I think he knows more about human nature than any writer I know, he is subtle and a wonderful psychologist. He has the greatest quality of all for a writer, that of not passing judgment on his characters.

  [Spring, 1965]

  A big crowd came to see the new Varda collages at the Brand Library, Glendale. It is a library where they have art shows, art books, recordings and music, the gift of a rich woman. It is an imitation of the Taj Mahal in India. By a coincidence, because we are all supporting an Indian student through college by buying saris made by his father, about six of us were in saris, quite lovely. Harry Partch was there. Varda, white-haired and rosy-skinned, was happy. I read his portrait from Collages, and students showed a film they had made of Varda constructing collages on his houseboat in Sausalito. Afterwards we all went for a snack at Dr. Bob Macy's (Jim Macy's brother). I have not had time to describe Dr. Jim Macy, an immensely skilled eye surgeon who, outside of his science, is interested in drugs, in Zen, in Miller. We call him the hippy doctor. He once brought me an eye in a little box. As we all demonstrated our abilities, he wanted to demonstrate his. He has a Varda gold collage in his office. The gold collages are those I longed to have but could not afford. He is full of humor, pranks, and uses Miller's language freely.

  Friends wanted to publish a magazine devoted to Varda but could not get him to write an autobiography. We know so little about him. Finally he wrote me:

  Facts: Born out of a woman, weight at birth 9 pounds and a half. My head so bulky I had to be pulled into this world with forceps. Immediately out of the womb I started playing with laces on the bed from which my mother inferred that I would be forever irresistibly attracted to women and concerned with their apparel. These are God's truth. More prosaic ones: Studied in Paris. Loathed and despised all my teachers so I changed constantly from one academy to another. At 29 I had my first one man show in London which was a great success. Since then I have lived from my paintings and never more through crime (only very periodically). I have had exhibitions in all the major towns of the U.S.A and in Europe, including London, Paris and Marseilles. Lately the tempo of the exhibitions has increased in speed to the ratio of 3 a year. The FBI is watching me as a crypto-exhibitionist.

  No museum will have any of my work. I am only represented in every home where taste, intelligence and all the refinements of the spiritual and physical voluptuousness are enthroned. But above all I am proud of Rexroth's title for me: a boudoir painter. The most beautiful eyes of America loaded with infinite bliss are feasting on my pictures while museums gather works scientifically and electronically devised by computers previously aerodynamically psychoanalyzed to give the public a pain in the neck. I don't teach anymore. My last class composed mostly of women had an abrupt and violent ending. I dismissed the whole bunch, and without white gloves as is my innate courtesy when dealing with the fair sex. Two or three of the pupils uttered an obscenity so gross and revolting, although all these ladies were of good birth and breeding, that I hesitate to commit it to writing (I have at different times of my life been connected with arrant ruffians and the rabble of the evil quarters of the Mediterranean harbors so it takes a lot to shock me). Nevertheless what I heard from these soft-spoken socialites was topping all profanity. These charming dolls confessed that they still derived pleasure (here I still hesitate to commit to paper this monstrous obscenity), they confessed that they derived pleasure from Rouault and Rembrandt.

  At a musician's house I met Deena Metzger, who looked like the most beautiful of the Biblical women, with her dark hair, suntanned skin, and keen black eyes. We became friends immediately. She and her husband, Dr. Metzger, took me out on their sailing boat. She was writing in a very original way, sometimes mysterious. While writing novels she wrote reviews for the Los Angeles Free Press.

  After reading her first novel, Skin-Shadows/Silence, I wrote Deena:

  I like what you have done. I expected to. But I was not sure how skillfully you could weave this sensory perception of events, with realism, with the unconscious dialogue and the documentary, because it is the problem of writers today which all of us are struggling with. I think you did marvelous things with silences, with images, some almost like a film, the physical world and its taste. I can see why you understood the perception of the senses so well. You have a respect for the image, for sensation, for a receptivity and awareness which seeks to develop other ways of experiencing. The story is strong. At times almost exaggerated as experience is when lived through emotion. You make no pretense at objectivity and detachment, as so many novelists do. In that sense you work as a poet. There is much poetry in the writing. The sea, the animals, the trees, all play a role. They are not backdrops. I like the way it is all woven together, one organically affecting the other, words, people, sounds, images, places ... You would make a good filmwriter. Dialogue both outward and inward. But words not overused or the will or the mind in the D. H. Lawrence definition of modern crime. Go on. And show me more. I think the writing is individual, personal, and original. And today, when we are swamped in mechanical standardized writing, I can't say more. Go on and dare all of it. All the way. In your own way.

  At Dr. Robert Haas' house I meet an editor from Partisan Review, who looks immensely surprised at my appearance and says: "Nature is certainly kind to you."

  I answered: "To make up for the unkindness of Partisan Review."

  So many new friends I have no time to describe. I like Dr. Haas, who is head of U.C.L.A. Extension, Department of Humanities. He is warm and passionate about art. He is married to a charming Japanese woman, Tomi, and has two adorable little girls. He is enthusiastic about his projects, programs, books, and was a devotee of Gertrude Stein when he was a very young student. This devotion was sustained all through his life.

  Today Oliver Evans is coming with his tape recorder and a list of questions. He is now working on House of Incest to which he is giving as much care and meticulousness as if it were Rimbaud or Mallarmé. He is a very conscious analytical critic. He asks me if it was intended, the return motif of the quena, the flute made out of human bones, and later the mention of bones cracking under weight of lovemaking. It is hard to explain how I work unconsciously, trusting, flying blind by some other sense not conscious, and how these accidental coincidences of images happen. Before he began the study of my work I pleaded with him to study the sources of which he knew nothing: surrealism, psychoanalysis.

  [Summer, 1965]

  One of Proust's firmest beliefs was that a writer and his work should not be made to fit together. "A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices. It is not very agreeable to think that when I am dead anyone who chooses will be able to study my manuscripts, compare them with the definitive text, and infer suppositions which will always be false as to my method of work and the evolution of my thought."

  This is what I felt as I read chapters from Oliver's book. I finally wrote to him: '

  I may be wrong, but I had the feeling that you had shifted your ground in the last chapter, from the first inspired concept of my other dimensions to a rather literal base. You are now judging the novels from a conventional, realistic point of view. Everything I say, I mean symbolically as Lawrence did. When I speak of emotional connection with woman, elation, I do not necessarily mean lesbianism. For the first time you apply definitive category, explicit interpretations: lesbian, nymphomaniac, incest. For the first time you have used your reading of the diary to affirm: Djuna is Anaïs Nin. If you are going to relate the novels to the diary you will get involved in errors as the diary unfolds and develops and proves the fiction is not biography. If one writes fiction there are alterations and transpositions. Another thing which distressed me is comparisons with Henry Miller. Miller is a comic writer, not a romantic writer. Winter of Artifice is a tragic book and one does not look for humor in a tragic book. You don't look for Miller comedy in Djuna Barnes or in Kafka. This seeking of humor and caricature was made by critics looking for the wrong thing in my work. I did do a humorous book, Collages, when the themes were light. You once gave me high praise for the poetic passage on dreams. But you can't have surrealism, and then suddenly analyze the plots of the novels by standards of conventional novels. You started by considering the novels as poems. You first approached me as a poet. You cannot apply standards of conventional structure to someone who never worked by those standards. I know what the basic difficulty is: that my roots and influences are not familiar to you, you judge by American literature, native influences. Then you also make personal judgments. You decide that I repudiated my father's salon world because I did not want to share him, but both in the novel and in the diary I made it absolutely clear that the conflict was between bourgeois and bohemian life. I think from now on I should not read chapter by chapter and leave you free to pursue your own interpretations.

  Having done the editing of the diary for the Kinsey Institute and then been faced with the disintegration of the Institute, the impulse to continue editing "for the future" kept me at work. Gradually I began to see how I could edit it for the present. I let others read the pages I had done, first hoping to find a home for the original diaries, then confiding in Swallow and Gunther. One activity would lead to another. The reactions encouraged me. But before I let Gunther show it to publishers there was a crisis.