Glad to go to Maine and thrilled to leave it. Mary & Debby dancing.  Today’s been eventful – T got my letters and was enormously moved. He says the worst mistake he ever made was burning my teenage letters. We should try to exist without this phoning but can’t help ourselves. Diet going well: I feel good. Struggling with a pile of thank – you letters from our engagement tour.
Castle – 7 PM Fri 25 Aug 79
T. and I separated 11 days already – feels like
eternity. Avril announces she wants her own apt so I should put house on the market. Maybe it’s easier. Flooding small publishers with BloodMemory – feel pessimistic however. 3 poems accepted – 2 by Colorado Woman, 1 by Friends Journal. Doesn’t feel as good as I’d hoped.Â
Struggling with new novel where I try to tell the truth
about Devon. But why should anyone want THAT God knows.
Moving costs $400. I still think I should sell my Fiat.
Rotten crowd tonight. I am bored and jerking like a marionette.
Dancing with crazy Robin and Anne who never stops talking. She says
June’s in the hospital in a full body cast – will never dance again.  Car accident. 2 more sets only – praise God.
Trying to read about Lewis Carroll. Avril says Zach is
threatening to show up. Don’t show up, Zach. I have a headache.
2:30 AM Sun 27 Aug 79 –
There is a God and she likes me. Zach didn’t show.
Long phone call with Toss then walk dogs to think about it.
He is such a powerful person it’s a little disturbing. Said he read my poem (The Duel) to his most erudite friend who was very impressed.Â
We wound up in another argument about my dancing. I can’t bear his slurs so I referenced his past drug use – WE’VE BOTH EXPERIMENTED, ALL RIGHT? He wants me to live without money then complains about selling capital. I told him it’s a “schizophrenic bind.” Didn’t mention how I have to PRY my own stock (it’s in my name!) out of Mom and Dad.
                            Reading an idiotic romance – its very idiocy is refreshing. I see why people get addicted to these. Like looking at maps when you’re lost.Â
Ok they’re only two dimensional but it’s SOMETHING! Clutch it like a talisman.
Crystal Tues 28 Aug 79
Last night dancing. EVER! Celebrate with expensive liqueur chocolates but I’m too enervated to appreciate them. Finished I’m Radcliffe, Fly Me. Ultimately a failure. Fails to explore the inherent corruption of institutional structures.
Horrible night. $5 in tips – they are sick of the sight of me and I refuse to buy new costumes. Word of my approaching marriage leaking out everywhere.
I am scared to death of being dependent on T. I think he could
reassure me but doesn’t know how because if I really showed need for him would I be undesirable? Is a puzzlement.Â
                            I feel like I’m unfastening my suckers from Avril and grabbing onto T! Up here without a net! Then I get mad at myself for being so infantile.
 Can’t I just write and feel powerful? We’ll see! Doubts creeping in! This time next week I’ll be in Kentucky!  Well, I’ve written some good poems lately.
                        Self-confidence atrocity attack. Feel & look rotten. Realizing the extent to which I was fertile soil for my parents’ anxieties.
3:30 Thurs 30 Aug 79
                            Everything done, ready to leave. I’m in shock. Crawled into the bath with a vodka tonic and now I’m feeling better. Trying to figure out how to approach parents for money. Maybe they could give me my own stock as engagement present? Feel I won’t be able to disguise my contempt.Â
This “I’m All Right Jack” no matter WHAT – is mighty convenient for them.
                            I realize any sense of my own helplessness triggers all this Rage: NOT a good sign for T’s and my relationship. He can’t “make” me independent! I must not succumb, or Plath-ize. (She sacrificed herself to the gods of rage.) I’m doing this guy no favors handing him a woman on the edge of breakdown.
4:25PM – My darling just called! Relief! He borrowed a truck from
somebody so although we’ll have to drive separately we won’t have movers or returns to cope with. He’s driving it out here so I can sleep as late as I like which I really need. Impossibly intense happiness. Peace & joy.  Feel we have been standing in a dinghy trying to balance. Equilibrium is everything.
The irrevocableness of marriage. My children mutely applaud my choice. Suffering under the hopelessness of explaining myself to any of T’s friends. Rain. Any excuse not to take a walk (T lives in bad neighborhood.) Feel like a girl in a gothic novel except for the constant sex which makes it a different kind of novel. Break with the past.
Reading Robert Ludlum’s perfectly ludicrous Matarese Circle. In 100 yrs people will wonder how we stomached this stuff. A. and I going to Olney theatre to see The Bat tonight.
Newport KY – Tues 4 Sept. 79
                            Reading old high school love-letters for anything I can use. Blood Memory  now renamed Speechless.
                            T. ebbs in and out of stranger-hood. He told his friends I used to be an exotic dancer – because he won’t “lie” but I think it was a bad idea.Â
One obscene phone call so far.
                            Don’t like the way they stare at me. Last night we made love twice. I especially like to watch him sleeping – the perfection of his profile is heart-rending. But his angers are so weirdly arbitrary. Not with me so far but I am divided on what to do – if I ignore it will it just get worse?
Are we programming that I’ll be reasonable and he’ll be outrageous until there’s no going back? But if I don’t “let it slide” it’s non-stop arguments.Â
                         Went to a famous restaurant to drink mint juleps last night and ended up in an argument about whether he has any misogynistic ideas or not. I proved he did (he thinks women “act stupid”) but that didn’t make him happy!
                            He’s given me the entire third floor of his house with glorious views over the city – I spend most of my time up here. Total furniture: a desk and a lounge chair. It somewhat makes up for the fact that he presented me with a new vacuum cleaner – obviously thinking I’m going to clean for him.
 Uh oh! Misogynistic idea #763. Mostly I am incredibly happy. At about 8 I’ll start the casserole & set the table.Â
Newport, KY: 10:15 AM Wed 5 Sept 79
The electricians wiring my study have been here for 2 hrs driving me insane. T ordered impossibly ugly furniture from Horchow catalog – luckily agreed to send it back. Enjoying A Certain Slant of Light. Point of view not a problem for this writer. Next Drabble’s The Ice Age. Mental project: The Contemporary Novel.
6 Sept 79 – 2 PM
Toss suffering recurring nightmares that I will leave him to go back to DC Can’t reassure him as much as I’d like. Moves upset me to a terrifying degree. Let’s hope the next is last till kids are born. I recall when I moved to Maine to write Devlyn it took me a full month to get my neuroses under control.
4 good pages on book but I still don’t know the plot. So far it’s everyone has no idea what they’re doing which is probably not enough. Molly Lefebrve’s book on Coleridge fascinating.
T & I rose at 8 to go shopping together. Argued over each item; his ideas very rigid. Ultimately we laid in a glorious supply food & drink – I gave him check for my ½. He is slightly alarmed I won’t open a checking acct here. But he did offer me allowance which now he says he can’t afford. Too proud to complain. Must make money writing. Should take a walk right now – wake myself up. But light a little scorching – longing for fall.
12:50 PM Fri Sept 8 – 79
Long letter from Devon full of love and caring – his girlfriend sounds so wrong for him – prudish fundamentalist: what is he thinking? Must we marry our nightmares?
                            Perilously close to a bad argument last night – somehow we got over it.   Trying to treat his ideas with respect. Our family has a ban on displays of anger – his doesn’t! In Sheffield World the angriest person wins because they “care” the most. Or are just willing to behave badly, I suggest.
It makes me angry when he postpones our wedding AGAIN because he needs a big production and he thinks I can’t raise the money. It’s my second wedding: not asking folks to pay. House will sell eventually.
Sometimes he argues against the whole concept of a wedding: says, “a piece of paper doesn’t marry us” BUT IT DOES. I ask, why does a “piece of paper” make him a lawyer? He says, “That’s different – a wedding is for other people.”
“Maybe next summer” does not sound good. Not Thanksgiving (which I think would be the easiest thing) so I suggest spring vacation – he says Sept a year from now! Wants to have a job first. I don’t like this in-between world. I think it is better to get wedding stuff out of the way. Now he’s trying to talk me into living near his mother in the city but I hate cities. Impasse. Seems I don’t need to cut very deeply to stir up ancient pus.
Can’t speed up the intimacy process as much as I want to. Keep having to detangle Mom & Dad’s puritanical creepers out of my own mind!! They give me a headache. At least T is making dinner tonight. If it weren’t for alcohol I don’t know if we’d pull through. Loving Christina Stead’s Miss Herbert.
6:40 PM Long letters to Devon and Merrill, then when T came home I wept for an hour. Apologize. This is heavy work. T shocked me by suggesting we “spend the summer here”- my shocked response showed how much I think I am “camping out.”
Mon. 10 Sept 79 – Finished mad disturbing Miss Herbert then walk in dark with dogs. People’s complex rationalizations for the arcs, crests & troughs of their lives bear no actual relationship to them says Stead, I think I agree. Order & purpose come in a dream – then flash away again. Liked it even better than Dark Places of the Heart. Weird publishers’ blurb says they themselves don’t understand this novel! Poor Stead!
War with my own novel struggles out a snails’ pace of 3 pages a day. Lacking focus. Keep longing to write here like I’m on the verge of some great discovery. Want to read my old diaries – make notes – but that would be a massive undertaking. With NO effect on novel.
                            In the meantime poor T and I continue our struggling course. On Fri. his friend poor Mary Ellen was raped. I told Toss this was a bad neighborhood! I think I’d be scared if I didn’t have dogs. At least no sodomy or blowjobs. Told T she should come stay here when she & husband get back from hospital – she should not have to live in that house again.Â
Last night we lay naked face to face kissing and talking about the amazingness of our love. It is amazing. We’re riding a tiger and trying to tame it.
Saw Marquise of O – came home to delicious steak dinner – took a tour of restored houses. Poor T trying to “sell” me on staying in Kentucky, but I pine for our own Pennsylvania house. So, what is the answer? How does one give true weight to ideas & inchoate aspirations?
To the Conservatory to see plants – then home for fabulous lovemaking. Good weekend.
Tues. 11 Sept 79 –
Every day its catalogue.
Jan & Mary Ellen to dinner – she has black eye but otherwise seems no different. Does not disparage her new (and obviously dangerous) house.
Mom sends separate letters to me & T. I feel she is on “his side” not mine. Obviously “living together” is at the heart of all our problems (secretly, she probably thinks it’s my exhibitionism. Me!)
Reading Self-Starvation about how children make enemies of their own bodies in reaction to growing up. Tremble with recognition. Feel so much hostility from Mom – she doesn’t know what we’re doing but surely I’m corrupting T with my awfulness. Mom said things in her letter she could only know from what I wrote to Genevieve. That outlet stopped. Feeling a rush of mature personal power – I’ve moved beyond them.
Speechless is a horrible, bloody struggle. Writing about things too close to me. Wrote my first seriously bad scene – when they are adults all together.
3:50 PM – Too upset after letter from Genevieve to write. She has been robbed of her honest feelings – she is just pumping up and down on the merry go round. The family decision seems to be that T will get sick of me soon but they can’t decide if that is good or bad. My insistence on having a “real relationship” means I’ll never have one! Silly me. Need to do housework – or something – till I feel better. Shouldn’t try to write when feeling despondent.
Midnight – Bath & Facial. T beautifully aroused – we made love TWICE. He repeated I am only girl he ever wanted to marry. Feel even our most terrible problems being slowly overcome. Routine & diet coming under control.  Dream of the Rood horribly unsuccessful.
12 Sept 79 – Magnificent day only half over. Charting novel – seems “completeable.” Starting research for Demon. No bad mail – no guilt about housecleaning – send off Walt Whitman entry. Sylvia Plath poetic incentive – I can’t put her down.
                                    Waiting for cocktails, I discover a flaw in the divine Miss Elizabeth Bowen. She doesn’t like to admit that she is of the same clay as her characters. Those creatures based on the Mosleys she repudiated utterly as if creatures from another planet. I’ve got news for her.  Creatures from another planet areÂ
not that interesting.
Last night was one of the most traumatic family
Evenings I have ever experienced – I think my eyes are still puffy. I heard we would be having Island People to dinner – he used to be a university president/professor so presumably would be good company – they met because somebody was the bridesmaid of somebody else’s bridesmaid so there is a connection. It started with me wearing a green silk shirt, my denim gauchos and hardly any makeup (yes I wore eyeshadow) and being told by Mom that my “get-up” was “more suitable for a bar.” (All of a sudden she’s an expert on bars.) Â
                               Harvey and Edna turned out to have “heard of my job” –I gather in some commiseration session on Incredibly Unsatisfactory Children – however they refuse to accept that there is any difference between being an exotic dancer and being a stripper (hello! I don’t strip) and somehow Harvey
 segued from castigating  “exotic dancers who try to feel superior to strippers”  to  criticisms of “ total sexual freedom” which apparently means  that  “everybody should jump on everybody.”  Â
                                    I tried to dignify this mess by explaining that it is actually the reverse – in the “old days” under the “ancien regime sexuelle” a dancer could expect to be “jumped on” by “anybody” because of her job (like poor old Degas’ ladies) but that actual freedom for women would mean a world in which one could be a barely clothed dancer (I would think anyone would admit nudity is at least an equally valid way of expressing the art of muscle –Â
line and form as heavily costumed artificial approximations) without it becoming  some sexual signal that one has “lost caste” and therefore privacy and choice. I recommended Susan Brownmiller’s book to this painfully ignorant male (God knows what he taught –  he had never heard of Brownmiller – seems to have her confused with Ti-Grace Atkinson assuming she mustwrite books no self-respecting intellectual would read (maybe he was the type of university president who just brings in wads of cash). Â
                                    He challenged my premise that the ultimate societal freedom would be for unattached females to not to be under the threat of rape every minute. Harvey insisted – with a perfect straight face that women rape men every bit as much as the reverse – “psychologically of course” which he says is just as terrible – and in fact probably even more so since we all know the “physical thing is no big deal” and often does people a “favor”.
 I must say this does not reflect very well on his wife Edna but she was smiling smugly so I think she may have just been too obtuse to follow any of the arguments. Â
                                    I really could not cope with this free-for-all avalanche of idiocy especially when my parents played their trump card – if bars where women sit in front of a drink and watch barely clothed men cavorting don’t exist, therefore this is an antifeminist exercise and my claim to be a feminist is aÂ
sham. I think it was at that point that I burst into tears. Which of course was
totally demeaning. I sorely missed Avril’s assistance – she refused to jump in
 but made peacemaking noises like “you both have a point” (untrue – their “points” are a disgrace). Ugly Harvey apologized – what a monster! but there could be no satisfaction in it for me at that point. Avril went walking with me until they left.
                                    Alas, waiting till they were gone did not end the discussion. Mom and Dad pounced on us to drive home their point that the male animal is a violent dangerous creature barely contained by the civilizing influence of the female.  (Guess they can’t get behind Harvey’s “female rapist” idea.) Of course they are going to rape any female who lets downÂ
her guard for a second and it will all be her fault. (Didn’t Ryder make this case?
  I’m ashamed to share a world with these people.)  Any kind of a sexual display (I guess the beach would certainly qualify) is a declaration of :
“Jump in boys! It’s free today!” At least they recognized Harvey’s
behavior as extreme (“Two drinks and he’s lost” was Dad’s comment.)
Basically, as long as I work at “that bar” I’m the
“lost cause” and if any decent male finds out about it our relationship will be over in a trice. This kind of thing makes me wonder why I bother to visit them.  Fortunately, I’m escaping soon, but the whole ferry reservation problem means one loses the right to fight irretrievably with one’s hosts on this island. Dad’s big mistake was giving me an example of a good marriage as Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett! Â
Did I blow my top! He probably thought I’d listen to him if he produced a literary example. He wasn’t aware that not only were they not married but Mr. Hammett was married to someone else and cheated on poor Hellman whenever he could manage to stay stiff long enough.  (I really didn’t want to “get in” to the alcoholism problem.  Lillian tried to make him seem like a “mentor” but honestly she was just his keeper and bail bondsman.)
11:30 AM Friday, 24 March 78
                                    Staggering down for my first cup of coffee when I heard Harvey’s voice in the kitchen. Thank God I heard it in time – if he had seen me in my baby doll nighty I guess he would have considered himself justified in pinning me immediately to the floor. He brought me a hibiscus flower as a peace offering.
                                    A more significant peace offering came from Mom and Dad who gave us each 100 more shares of stock. I tried to refuse it– they insisted. I warned them I’ll only sell it. Maybe I’ll be able to buy a new car when I get back. I could use it.
Spent last night trying to read Welty’s Bride of Innisfallen, couldn’t get my mind around it. Read Faithful Are the Wounds instead.
Very like a stage play – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Powder Mill Road – home – 8:30 PM Sun 26 March 78
Can’t describe the ecstasy of being in my own
 place. On the island I am hideous – here I am beautiful. The loss of confidence there is so severe as to actually induce delusions. Now that I am back I am ready to tackle my existence brilliantly.  As always.Â
We got in last night in the pouring rain – 11:30 PM
– Avril had coffee and left. I read a soppy love story and slept in my Own Bed.
 Today we did laundry, went to see a bad movie – actors working madly away to no effect. Tomorrow I get mail – hope there’s lots of it.
Did get a beautiful poem out of the island –
Peacock Pavement: The Poet on her walk – submit to Denver
Quarterly – which has been very polite about me lately. They’ve shown an interest in my stuff though nothing has ever been exactly “right.
Alysse Aallyn 