He has come from simple stock: Austro-hungarian parents. He lives in Warren, Ohio, in a heterodox neighborhood of negroes, jews, germans, and other immigrants. He played baseball with the neighborhood kids all the time, all day, every day, stole things, built fires after dark and listened to the older guys tell stories. He doesn't know how to swim at all, because once when he was going swimming his uncle who was living with him told him he would be a laughing stock in his bathing suit because he was chubby. To this day he hates teasing, razzing, and "playing games". He says his father came over here, worked in the steel mines, saw no future in it, moved to Warren, Ohio, married at 28, and was a "Pool-playing bum." He says he doesn't know his father at all, and his mother not much better. Always his mother was inhibiting and fearful: no, don't do this; no you can't go out; no you can't ride your bike until such-and-such an age in the street. She cried always when he went away to school. Now she has a job and is happier with the "girls" in the shop. As for his brother Ted (who is 6' tall, a good build, goodlooking, and a crack swimmer and almost 25) he says he dislikes him. Why? Because Ted has no self-discipline, drinks, smokes, and spends money "whoring around." He is always asking for money, and Myron and his father chipped in and bought him a car, and the only letter he wrote to Myron all year was one asking for money. Seems like he envies his kid brother who is going to Yale and also signing big baseball contracts. Myron says he has profited by every one of his brother's mistakes: Inside his brother must feel like a heel.

  Now Myron, he never went out all during high school: didn't have a car, worked hard to earn money. First year at Yale he was afraid of flunking out, worked all the time, had only two dates, by accident or persuasion with a wealthy Vassar girl. Signed baseball contract with tigers, wrote prize-winning freshman English essay. Used to think girls could never learn the stuff he did at school. Never thought about marriage at all, until about this last year-even now the prospect seems amazingly far off in the future. Perry and Bob seem to have brought the subject closer to his thoughts. To him, his intellectual achievement is his first pride; baseball record the second. For these excellences he has gotten rewards. The reward-value makes them desirable. At Yale he has spent "minus $200" - his scholarship has more than taken care of everything. He paid $3000 income tax on his baseball earnings. For this he has received praise: this makes continuing to do well along these lines desirable. (Compare: my analogous success in school and in writing.) Above all, he wants to be a "man": independent and secure financially. He wants to be a good doctor, to plunge into life, to know about life, not to just sit back and philosophize. (Ironically, Dick now has swung to my way of thinking about literature, criticism, and writing - away from the mere science and calculation of living.) Doctoring would seem to combine prestige, financial well-being and intellectual stimulation. That is what he wants: power in those respects. Money: he had to grub for it when he was a kid. Intellectual life: his parents had no schooling: "Every step puts another barrier between him and his family." Does he need love, admiration, encouragement? Don't we all? He gets discouraged, too. He came up here saturday after lunch planning to go back that night - I persuaded him to stay over, and he did. (He isn't domineering at all, he says, and would never force his will on anyone. N.B.) Evidently he was in a self-depreciating mood, when he came. I like telling him nice true things about himself; I hope it makes him a little happy. I do not think he gets excited about things: he knows what he wants quite well and also how he can get it. Lovely.

  Now enough factual background statement. He and I: sat in the living room, at Rahar's," at the coffee shop" and talked and did-not-talk as we pleased. He hates sitting: likes to talk walking. (N.B also) He sat next to me with his arm around me, warm and close and comfortable. Kissed me, too. Long and goodly saturday we stood on the porch in the rain, him pulling me against his body, and shutting his eyes and kissing me gently and for a long time, with his mouth moving softly on mine. I think I am a good deal more experienced in varieties of kisses than he is: I better be careful I don't shock him or make him think he needs more experience, because I like him this way, and perhaps subtly I can let him know how other ways I like to be kissed. He also carries me places in his arms, and I feel so feminine and light, even with my cast, it is so good to let the world black out quite and the equilibrium tilt inside my head: the carrying is a symbol of his virility: to me. Why do I like him so: more so than dick (so I don't even want to go up and see dick at the end of February)? He is like me in many ways: even the attitude about marriage, unromantic, practical, and reasonable, is like mine. In the long run, that is good, if difficult. I have a rather peculiar feeling that if I use my intelligence and pragmatism that I can become desirable and necessary to him. Maybe that is a damn illusion. Even though he says he is against the attitude that a woman is a prize possession, he likes them good-looking, and pretty intelligent. How do I like men? Hell, depends for what purpose. Everything from the worldly roué to the young innocent. But in the long run, I like not having to worry about what money can buy (sort of let's out teachers, even though they do live in academic circles & have summers off.) I like keen intelligence and intellectual curiosity: probably a professional man: doctor, lawyer, engineer, would do the trick. And a lot more. Giant, superman: mental and physical. He is these. Physically he meets all requirements (clearer skin is the only possible flaw.) Mentally, he is pretty great. The only terrible thing is: I am not sure I will ever know him really: I must see him in a lot of situations before I decide how he reacts, how he is inside. But somehow I am forcibly drawn to him. His lacks: no "family" prestige, etc., bother me not a whit. After all, having none myself, that sort of thing isn't important. Hell, I guess I just like him quite alot!

  February 12: snow again this morning, suddenly and deep. Myron's letter and post card Tuesday: unbelievably heartening: picture of car, associated with our possible future adventures together in faring forth into the world: "to the lonely sea and the skies / to the fields and brooks and plains of paradise." also a recognition of the amazing correlation and concordance of our eclectic ideologies. and an expressed desire to see me again before prom: all totaling a rather optimistic prognosis of the coming spring!

  I was beginning to have to discipline my unrestrained thought-orientation toward him. then the handsome intelligent newly unpinned gordon" came, and there was a therapeutic amherst saturday with rain plastering the snow outside, and the fire, and waxen candled champagne bottles and rombergand-musical records, and joyce-discussion, and chicken dinner at Valentine's, and the tentative and too-talked about kiss: and the hope of sometime again maybe: all restored perspective. and just as I was congratulating myself on no longer being a victim, the myronic reply - to encourage my sense of victory over situations. at least now, magically transfigured by my charming amherstian interlude, I may the better manage as I see fit the new haven paragon.

  oddly enough, myron is the first and only boy so far I would say "yes" to if marriage were brought up! I don't think I ever really considered Bob, and only considered dick and perry, although at one time I despaired of meeting any boys excelling them, and so felt obliged to walk off with either one or the other. and now, quite intellectually and coolly (I hope I don't deceive myself here) I would consider judiciously the thought of living with him the rest of my life: I guess I am "coming of age," or something.

  dick is out because of innumerable reasons: cut-throat competitiveness, pride, self-love and fear for ego, hereditary liabilities, lack of virginity, short (for me) stockiness - all of which, although perhaps not obvious on a spot appraisal, would increase the potential of corroding a creative felicitious partnership. perry I know too well; we take each other forgranted; there would be no discovery of personality there. perhaps, if I had met him as shirley did, it might have worked. but he is a little too blindly idealistic for me, I think.

  myron, now, I do not know as earthly well as I do those two ergo, I am blind to his faults and weaknesses so far. but I can generalize beyond my own experience to a certain extent. why does he mostly appeal: because of the power of his promise and the promise of his power: he wants very hard what I want very hard: (and I am no longer the crackpot idealist who will eat red beans in a tenement all her life): I like theater, books, concerts, paintings, travel - all of which cost more than intangible dreams can buy. I like brilliance intellectually: he has that. and he likes the sun. and he thinks with me toward life.

  power: he offers that. I am strong, in spite of being childish and weak now and then. but I am strong, individual thinking, for all that. I need a strong mate: I do not want to accidentally crush and subdue him like a steamroller as I would have Bob, certainly. I must find a strong potential powerful mate who can counter my vibrant dynamic self: sexual and intellectual, and while comradely, I must admire him: respect and admiration must equate with the object of my love (that is where the remnants of paternal, godlike qualities come in.) I do not want to be primarily a mother: mine cannot be a pitying and forgiving-black-sheep love: so out with the young handsome puppies: the phil McCurdy's,n the Bob Cochran's - they are exquisite and lovely fun, but there is no future in them.

  physically: myron is a hercules: carrying = symbolic: example of my tenderer femininity. more skilled than I, he excells in baseball, skating - and so on. while lean and lithe and athletic - appearing myself, I cannot stomach the fleshy, flabbiness of a male effete - myron is lean, hard and clean (no smoking, no drinking.) and I think he always will be.

  mentally: he has a photographic memory, to all practical purposes - scientific to the core - a good balance - yet he appreciates and understands the most idealistic poetry - and is uniquely sensitive to literary beauty. (I have decided I cannot marry a writer or an artist - after gordon, I see how dangerous the conflict of egos would be - especially if the wife got all the acceptances!) so here we have a scientist, appreciative of the creative arts: lovely. my writing could proceed well, if it proceeds at all, in such a non-competitive and benevolent frame, contrariwise, for him I would enjoy, I think, home-making and pleasing his taste in food - while continuing to serve as a life force - physically and mentally stimulating and sustaining.

  ah, me - I sit here in the (cold) bluegreying of (cold) winter twilight calmly rationally pondering the wonder of this thing that has come upon me: hoping I do not want primarily to escape dick and "show" perry, to merely conquer the avowedly unconquerable. but rather marveling that my doubts are not more than they are, checking off in the squares of my tacit general and particular requirements one after the other, I find that in respect to the important things (mind, philosophy of life, physical appeal and pureness) he lacks hardly anything, so cool, so rational, I add up the balance slate and the total decides that I just might let myself learn to love him: if I am capable of that much maligned emotion. at least I am sure that physical attraction was not the root, but rather the future flowering of this most lovely organically unified plant of ideas-and-emotions. because it would have to take a pretty potent sex-maniac to ween me from Dick's increasingly satisfying physical ritual - and the sexual attraction can start to grow, now that I know the intellectual attraction is well-begun.

  and so I undertake my journeyings into the ways of vulnerability again, and of what I define as love ...

  February 18: "Oh, I would like to get in a car and be driven off into the mountains to a cabin on a wind-howling hill and be raped in a huge lust like a cave woman, fighting, screaming, biting in a ferocious ecstasy of orgasm .... " That sounds nice, doesn't it? Really delicate and feminine .... Do you think passionate people subconsciously consider a physical disability as an attack on sexual powers? I wonder at my morbid obsession with day-dreams this past month."

  Always him. Damn, what is the matter with me? Is it because I want somebody to orient myself about that I'm drawn to him, or am I drawn to him because he is exactly the sort of person I want to orient myself about? He is coming in a shiny new green car this weekend: the car is to him, I think, a symbol of power, manhood and independence and freedom from limitations. It is our means to travel, to see the world. And God, it is also a secure private room where I want very badly to tell him how I am entranced by his mind and his body. I want very much to hold the strength of his broad back to me and to shut my eyes and go away on the good slow black tide of his kisses. I could not want him so much if I did not become so stimulated by his brilliant thinking mind. Will Saturday ever ever come? The time must pass, but ah, how it drags, limps, loiters, stalls, procrastinates. Every minute tumbles haphazardly along the obstacle course of day and night, and I am weary of counting them as they pass ...

  February 20: Reading critical books about Yeats all day today, meals in bed, and the good corn-thickened soup and tuna salad, lush with mayonnaise and pink succulent laced shreds of meat, and sliced quarters of hardboiled egg, slick rubbery white crescents cradling the brilliant yellow powdery yolk, cool long gulps of milk, the savory brown resilience of ginger bread - and tonight the warm glutinous cheese-curded macaroni, green lima beans mealy and good on the tongue, and a sweet syrupy mash of peach slices. Somehow I am very thirsty, always, and the leg feels queer. Yesterday the Doctor Chrisman" cut it out of the cast and lifted the white plaster lid like a gravedigger opening a sealed coffin. The corpse of my leg lay there, horrible, dark with clotted curls of black hair, discolored yellow, wasted shapeless by a two month interment. I felt very cold and exposed and vulnerable, and the Xrays showed "it wasn't completely mended." Whirlpool bath at infirmary, and the skin flaking off raw and white and sore. Scraped at it with a razor at home gritting teeth at ugly thing: didn't want to claim it. Almost fell on stairs, stumbled on leg, felt sharp tingling pain. Not completely mended. Does that mean I don't walk on it for another month? Or do I bury the poor orphaned half-dead thing in another cast? Stepped on it today. Lightning didn't strike; didn't fall to floor. Queer: interim and rehabilitation is the worst, also indefiniteness. Classes missed, Myron called (voice and senses leave me when I talk to him suddenly on phone) car maybe not coming tomorrow, another falling of towers and toppling of masonry. I feel stuffy, as if there were not enough air to breathe - hot, and uneasy. Two months of no exercise have made me weak and plegmatic mentally and physically. On the short walk from here to the libe I drink the cold pure night air and the clear unbelievably delicate crescent-moonlight with a greedy reverence. Days are bizarre collections of hothouse languidities, mystical and poignant sensuous quotations (white thy fambles, red thy gan, and thy quarrons dainty is ... " Dark, liquid loveliness of words half dimly understood.) Wrote first villanelle today and yesterday; another angle on the passage of time: tried to juxtapose the eternal paradox of ephemeral mortal beauty and eternal passage of time - a few puns: "plot" (course as well as with cunning) and "shemes" (patterns as well as treachery.) What I've been getting around to saying all this time is: want to quote from Yeats book something that struck me *: re Dryden's translation of Lucretius: "The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul." "Sexual intercourse is an attempt to solve the eternal antinomy, doomed to failure because it takes place only on one side of the gulf." Swedenborg: "The sexual intercourse of angels is a conflagration of the whole being ..."

  - February 25. Yesterday the vindication of the dream fantasies began. Tuesday, it was, and I dressed in white pleated wool skirt and stark black jersey, playing bridge, tense, excited, waiting. He didn't come and didn't come and didn't come. The last certitude, the last bulwark tumbled - his arrival in the new car was stalled in a malicious perpetual future. Upstairs, after four hours of waiting, frantic car-watching, typing, hot-and-cold tremors ("He is dead," I thought. "He has cracked up somewhere.") Every phone call was a surge of desperate hope, the falling of hope, - as always the wrong name was called - and then, after I had flung myself in futile aching rage on the bed, resolving sickly not to eat, not to look anymore down the road teaming with cars driven by the wrong people, I heard someone yell "Syl, a visitor." Unbelieving I rose, brushed away the scalding tears, and walked down to him. Outside: The Car: sleekly light blue, white-walled tires, dark blue top - inside, spacious and glassed. Driving then, trying for the mountains in the twilight, getting lost, turning, circling, finally to Look Park:" deserted, bleak, solitary, the black of frost hearted trees, bluesilver of moontissued snow, dark winding of road to a turnoff, water running black through icebanks, moon giddy, tinseling the world. Stop: and with the stop, the clock of the universe halted quite, and the breathing slowed easily rhythmic. Pulling me lightly to him, a kiss, experimental, tender, and then he circled me with his lean, ironsinewed arms until I ecstatically could not breathe, and always his mouth moving over mine more sweet and wetly and insistent than I could wish. all the words we said on letterpaper - religious, philosophical, physical ideas - and the complete concordance there, we said with our hungry mouths. Playfully wrestling we began then, and he twisting me rebelling to him, hurting good and hardly my arms, bending them behind me and pulling me fighting across him to lie helpless, laughing breathless, head cracked sudden down against windowsill, hard, stars springing out, and he kissing and kissing my mouth through my tumbled hair, turning me to him so I lay full upon him, along the length of his strong torso, breasts aching against the hard flatness of his fleshtaut ribs, stomach over the heat of his loins, and legs parted, alternating between his, down he pulled me, hand at the small of my back, holding my head down to his continual kissing mouth. god, the ineluctable sweetness of the lean, firm flesh, and after, his head at my breast held, blindly leaning against the tender pointed slopes. all translated into the language of the limbs. I am obsessed by his sweet look, soft gentle-eyed at me, and his most endearing goodbye kiss. Now, always, the fading image rises in my head of the good full lying close to the strength and heat of him ... god, let me make this powerful passion part of a rich, eclectic whole ...