Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #WorldsLongestDiary

  • Embattled Love: the diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    3:10 PM – Feb 6 – 80


    Trying to write a new novel plan with a migraine. My writing must never be pedestrian. Calculate I’ll be done Feb 17 so I can leave. 1 week ago I flew to DC to comfort Avril’s depression. Her therapy raises the problem that she feels “worthless”. That’s Quaker schools for you was my comment – they don’t WANT you to feel worth anything! We are particularly Worthless Worms because we were born with So Many Privileges and we STILL refuse to Give our Lives in Service.


    We agree on need to sell the house. (And so I get some much needed cash.) Every night I was gone T called. Moving from here will be the best thing that could happen to our relationship.
    9PM – Bad bad BAD day. Did my exercises – took bath – nothing helps. I seem to have a fever but am afraid to tell T (he called my PARENTS about the pain in my chest! “We’re getting it checked out.” Doc says “Beats me.”)


    Tried reading AWFUL Margery Allingham. That woman is excruciating. Turn to Austen with relief.

    Thu Feb 7 – 80 :9;40 PM
    Good day so far. Wrote 5 letters, cleaned study, reorganized MSS Ophelia Was A Man. Joined the Authors League even though I usually hate things like that. Cut my own hair saving myself at least $50.

    10 PM – the worst happened. T upset that I ate dinner without him, upset that I want to diet “You didn’t get fat eating dinners with ME” (manifestly false) upset that I don’t want to take care of his house “You think you’re too good for housework” and especially upset about the upcoming Mar 3-23 plan (me going east to see agent & publishers) although he DID KNOW. I’ll stay in Grover’s Mill to save cash. I’m not sure he’s heard me even now – he keeps talking about being “separated for a month” and I proved its two weeks to the day. His anger makes me shiver and shake all over. Plus cramps. (Period alas.) He feels all this is a “slap” at his love and care! I thought we weren’t supposed to “lie” but he gets too upset to be truthful to! Thank God my day was a good one or I don’t know how I would bear up. His anger makes me want to scream too but my throat was locked long ago. (See Speechless.) “Go on and let him have it!” eggs on Psychology Today but I think it would be more likely to end a relationship that would be a good one if we could just get back to civilization. Jane Austen a lot more help than Psychology Today.

    3:40 PM Sun 10 Feb 80
    How true it is – if you want to get something you first have to figure out what it is. As these frenzied Newport Days draw to a close I give thanks they are not to be extended. At least Toss has agreed to sell this house (helps that I’m selling mine.)

    Traveling relatives of T’s (a pair of married doctors) looked us up and I could tell they were shocked by the frat house nature of the place as T proudly showed off holes he’d pounded through the walls with a sledgehammer (“real brick!”) I resent doing decorator work to someone else’s taste for no money in the wreck of a rooming house whose nearest neighbor is named “Booger” (I kid you not). Before the arrival of the dogs kids broke in and stole constantly. The dogs slow them down a little but now I worry about the dogs’ safety.


    An old girlfriend of T’s (married) invited us to the Covington House last night – had a marvelous time. She said we look like brother and sister! What a compliment! He looked particularly beautiful last night in his tux – a Greek idol. Sigh.


    Reading Better than Rubies a wonderful book about women’s education.

    Tues 12 Feb 80
    Listening to Scarlatti. My tolerance for winter is definitely over. Feeling at the nadir of my stored-up strength – a bear forced to hibernate overtime. Had the clever idea of inserting short story Erin into Summer as a flashback. I think it works.


    Waiting for T to get there – he’s reading slowly. Another bad fight. When I made the comment that the Grover’s Mill house could be made so nice he looked around his hell hole and snorted incredulously. How could that possibly be when I’m such a bad housekeeper? I reminded him how wonderful MY house in DC was (and is.) Unable to argue with this he made fun of my voice! Low blows. I asked him if I REALLY sounded like that – abashed, he admitted I didn’t. The problem is “Women”. He fears women are manipulative, demanding and illogical. Hard to blame him for thinking so if you’ve met his mother (and his girlfriends.) But he’s not willing to listen to criticism of his mother yet. She’s “losing” him to me. She’ll have to meet his father at graduation.

    (They were divorced six years ago and separated eight before that.) The last time they saw each other was by chance in the Uffizi and she refused to shake his hand. Toss is in a misogynistic panic – I feel like I have all the duties of an old-fashioned wife and he has only as many husbandly duties as he cares to assume. He thinks he’s just “hitting back” against my “slights” which he refuses to acknowledge as the unfortunate honesty he claims to value. Oh well. I haven’t figured out how to explain my viewpoint without unleashing his hostility.


    I look forward to the day when we can talk honestly about this. But we will need some emotional security for that to happen and emotional security means financial security. Let’s just hope one of my book projects pays off.


    Meditation, exercise, bath, dinner with friends.

    11:30 AM – Wed 13 Feb 80
    T. apologizes by bringing me breakfast in bed. Tomorrow is Valentines Day. I have a hangover but last night was worth it – found out some interesting things about T. He was a half hour late, very angry because he’d scratched his car against a stone wall and not pleased when I said I didn’t think expensive bodywork was necessary on a 70,000 mile car. After the guests left he went for me. Said I talk too much and no one else can talk because I’m cooped up all day and that makes me a liability at dinner parties. He said, “I think it’s better to tell you now than say “Shut Up” in public.”
    I said you bet it’s better! If you say “Shut up” to me in public there won’t be a marriage! He says there you go again with the ultimatums. I asked him how he’d feel if I said, “Shut up” to HIM in public! He hadn’t even considered such an awful, unimaginable thing.


    I said I didn’t think my perceptions were so totally askew – I hadn’t “dominated” the discussion or squelched other people’s ideas trying to get them to agree with me the WAY HE DOES. He apologized later and said he fears me being lionized at parties.


    I said it doesn’t look like he has much to worry about yet. Besides, I’m a natural recluse. But so far I’m needing to muster every philosophical, theological and psychological aid I can come up with to deal with my stunning LACK of success.


    I said to Toss I thought the real problem is we are too much alike.

    11:30 PM – End of a long difficult day. I managed my 10 p. but novel is too short and I can’t think of anything more to say. Novella no good! Maybe T will have ideas.

    He came home depressed at getting a D+ in Corporations – I made him a BLT and a Bloody Mary – he ate the sandwich but refused the drink because he still had a Law Review meeting. At 7 PM! When he finally came back we made up entirely for our fight and I was once again thinking, This is the man for me. He said he was upset because I’d commented on how handsome Peter Martins is! I’ve never even met the man! I said I’m jealous of the Playboy magazine in his top left desk drawer!

    Thoroughly discussed my “failure” to settle in here. Said I was subject to “strong loves and few” and it was time for me to love some other place. Made him an enormous dinner of hash browns & eggs and after 2 bourbons apiece we felt pretty good..

    6:10 PM Valentine’s Day – 80
    Great day. Wrote 13 p so I’m up to 156. T working at the paper till midnight. T gave me box of delicious candy & card. Reading Collegiate Women – depressing tale of how the doyennes of domesticity subverted female ed.

    10:20 PM Fri 15 Feb 80
    Wrote a whole chapter – got to stop now or madness will result. Reading magnificent Man Who Cried (Cookson.) Morally quite sophisticated. Cast Harvey Cox’ Seduction of the Spirit away in disgust. Should be called “Harvey’s Closet – here – you clean it.”


    T came home to spinach lasagna and letter from ex (the one he really loved and who didn’t believe in monogamy) that he described as “a howl of agony.” Said she will never get married or have children – spoke slightingly of her own work – and signed herself “love.” I feel for her. T was upset, angry and relieved all at the same time. The crap she put him through dragging home strange men!


    T asked if I would consider living “west of Phila.” I said Sure if it has city access. Hard to beat his old grandparents’ place at Grover’s Mill right between two major cities! (His father was a children’s publisher in the 30’s.) Trustees won’t let Lois sell the house till Mother Louise dies (she is in retirement home.) In the meantime they are letting everything go to hell while hiking their management fees – Lois is suing them – needs T to help.


    Can’t talk about this life to Avril – she is too naïve. If people say they love each other there shouldn’t be any problems is her theory. If there are, then it can’t be love. I feel we all have dragons and we’re going to have to meet – and slay – each other’s.

  • Embattled Love: the diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    1 am Thurs 10 Jan 80


    My 29th birthday, enough to depress anyone. Awakened by call from – of all people, MY FIRT HUSBAND BRUCE. Says he’s married & happy. Good job with Charlotte Observer. Describes himself as “a nostalgia buff.” Does not want to lose touch, wonders what “our biographers” will make of our relationship. I feel as if it all happened to someone else. Friendly but keeping him at arm’s length – he always wants something.

    Crazy card from Devon saying “I love you madly”! Guess we all want what we can’t have. Also, good letter from Maureen. Blackberry accepts poem My Grandmother’s Ghost! T. teases that the $9 I made is “putting him through law school” (it’s cost him $10 so far. Scholarship.)

    I wish our families would JUST GO AWAY and leave us ALONE. Phone call from Avril – she’s definitely leaving D.C.so I put up our house for sale with the realtor who found it for us. Avril’s life still up in the air. Toss lecturing very unsympathetically about what she “should” do – I bit his head off. I don’t dismiss his mother’s problems with smug pronouncements! He apologized, asked if he should fly Avril out here – generous but we really can’t afford it. Mom and Dad are renting her a place in Augusta (Maine capital) which has LOTS of jobs.


    We’ll get through this. I’m making applesauce from dying apples. T’s friend had a paper that needed typing – managed to get it done in time. Itchy vagina/anus from reckless wild sex acting up. Made a delicious dinner – pork chops with my applesauce, green salad & sweet potatoes. Lie flat with yogurt in vagina reading Queen Victoria & Her Daughters. Not bad.


    Toss’s Granma called about family engagement party in March – now T has been on phone with his Mom the past 2 hours.


    Heard Toss yelling and cursing at his mother – then he comes up to tell me we have to “head off” Granma’s engagement party because his Mom doesn’t want to go to any party Granma throws. And she expects T to show “solidarity” with her by being unpleasant, stupid and cruel like she is. I try to explain to him that if she doesn’t want to go she doesn’t have to! She can throw her own party!


    Something is wrong with Rebecca West whose prognostications I can’t read – something distasteful. I just can’t put my finger on it.

    5:30 PM Fri 11 Jan 80
    Difficult, inconclusive day. Thank God for my mysticism – so necessary for an artist. I can just disappear into myself. Writing away to NJ Catholic colleges looking for a study of the mystics I can take this summer. My parents declare themselves appalled. “Mysticism doesn’t exist”. I’m making everything up, as usual.
    8 pages on novel. It is scaring me to death. Why can’t I relax? Be playful? Is it because of my mother’s anger over the father’s death? She really can’t forgive me for “killing” him! I’m so panic stricken over the ending I’ve decided NOT to make an outline.


    Toss got weird postcard from ex-girlfriend. Couldn’t even tell whether she’d received his card or what it meant. Standing outside of my own jealousy, I could see the game is to pretend not caring. Trying to accept his old relationships as a precursor to our love. He is filled with compassion for me over Devon’s weirdness.


    We discussed our children and their allowances as we walked the dogs! Very sweet letter from Beales saying he remembered me more fondly than he remembered himself! Cheered up by a book called Womanpriest.

    Sat 12 Jan 80 – 3:30 PM
    Worked on poetry, (horrible metric problems) read the 12 pages I struggled through on Summer Before Spring – no good. Throws me into a deep depression. I need to expunge all “flowery” writing-class writing. Hemingway the perfect model. Beginning to feel this bombed out cavity of a house is cursed and no project can be completed here. And Toss badmouths my lovely, finished 5 bedroom 3 bath gas piped house in Safe Queens Chapel! But he refuses to move to D.C.


    Bad scene with T when I told him I’d already spent the money he gave me. He doesn’t think $35 necessary for groceries! What’s OK is astronomical long distance phone bills with his family. But I cook and shop! We aspire to high food standards! He would do everything differently – why can’t I learn? I am afraid the real problem is males have their temper tantrums encouraged while little girls’ are relentlessly quashed.


    Accused Toss of caring a lot more about my housework than my writing. He was surprised when I said he doesn’t respect my intellect! He said why not find mentor who DOES appreciate me. Hmm. Here?


    Plowing into Tudor Women. Webb is critical of Harriet Martineau’s “gossip” – he seems to see it as exclusively female. But Pope, Rogers and Jonson said the most awful things about EVERYBODY.


    Poor Dixie having trouble walking – now the dog needs x-rays!

    11:50 PM – Wed 16 Jan 80
    Just finished Bertrand Russell’s autobiography – a bizarre document! His description of dinner with the Stanleys (each member of the family adhering to a different religion) sizes up Victorianism perfectly.


    Got a letter from Guilders College (Brooklyn, NY) saying they would consider me for teaching fellowship in creative writing program is they could see a sample of my writing. Better that than my academic record!

    1:30 AM Sat Jan 19 – 80
    On p 54 of novel!!! T read first 47 p – cried during G’s death!

    5:30 Mon 21 Jan 80
    Fight with T when he suggested I see gynecologist over “my” fungus – like I came up with it all by myself! I’m not the one who’s been using Jock Itch spray for FOREVER. I went upstairs and typed – he came up yelling angrily that “the silent treatment” was “cheap and unfair.” I’m not allowed to think privately, apparently. Toss doesn’t seem to know how he insults people. No wonder, I guess, with a mother like that. For example, he says if we move to NJ how does he know I won’t “take a whim” to live somewhere else? Cried myself to sleep. I thought I’d be happy just living with Toss and writing but I’m not. Worried sick about money and his passion for this disintegrating housewife.

    24 Jan 80
    Problems. T. burst out last night, “I don’t believe in joint checking accounts.” Uh oh, since I have no money. I have to ask him for everything and we go over the receipts. My definition of marriage is total partnership. He also acts like his taste is God ordained; i.e. “Pink doesn’t look good with black” instead of “I don’t like pink with black.” I made notes of things I wanted to argue about (here’s the list: made on a copy of Tom Montag’s Letters Home:


    Our Relationship
    1) my powerlessness – ugly flashbacks of childhood
    2) timing of the wedding
    3) ignoring my needs
    4) my collusion with him – helping him ignore my needs
    5) this endlessly protracted limbo
    6) my humiliation at housecleaning (he bought “me” a vacuum cleaner!)
    7) tears are “an illegal weapon” ie my pain not “allowed”
    8) his anguish: “I’m doing my best!” my guilt
    9) his criticism of me – criticizer becomes “parent”
    10) bad comments on my “job” compared to his “job”
    11) living in Princeton in April?

    Try to make them comments about SITUATION not Toss himself but he refers to them as my “list of non-negotiable demands.” No. Negotiation necessary, I insist. His overstatements quite exhausting.


    Are my points even worth making? I wonder.


    Last night T said lovingly, “I think we’re over our problem.” He told me he was afraid he’d be too upset to study. Wish I could agree!


    Finished Aimee Liu’s devastating Solitaire. (Bad ending though.) But you have to forgive her for throwing her parents a sop at the end. They’re still alive!


    Reading about parent/child battles has lots of relevance to my ongoing struggle with Toss. Finish the poem collection tonight It’s Later Than You Think.

    Maybe I should discuss my current theory of development of love relationships?

    Being in love is “humiliating”, because “NO WAY OUT”. Reminiscent of parent/ child relationships, etc.

  • Embattled Love: the diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Mon 19 Nov 79


    Mike & Lorraine Inzar killed in small plane accident Mom & Dad call to say. This makes Dad majority stockholder (Mike’s stock divided among 5 kids.) Painful thoughts. Lorraine so young! One of her daughters with them too! (Mike was the pilot.) Mom says salutary reminder how easily we can all be “snuffed out.” If I died now how awful!!! Dad wants to go look at Bennington airfield trying to find ANYTHING but pilot error – what could have happened?


    Try to make each day an entity in itself. Yesterday a good day reading V Woolf letters. Can read these again & again. Neither she nor Vita could truly appreciate themselves. But I appreciate them.
    Boiled diary into 5 pages for Yuna. I think we can call this a completely unsuccessful breast-beating exercise. Took dogs walking in park with T, bratwurst for dinner, fantastic lovemaking, sleep. Typical day.

    2 Dec 79
    Maddening depression. My precarious identity under permanent assault, only the cycle of achievement to carry me through. Bride rejected no note of any kind. Devastating. Thought I’d get some direction at least.


    Wrote 2 poems on Rossetti family – sent 40 poems out, wrote 15 family letters.Maybe I should hide my feelings from T. His suggestion I write magazine articles throws me into blacker depression because I would have to:

    1) Learn how to write magazine article
    2) experiment with same
    3) forge relationships!!!

    CRAZY time consuming plus new ways to fail!! Novels are BOILING inside me – can’t get over that THIS IS MY DREAM LIFE – writing full time at home while husband busy with important job. But part-time newspapering pays horribly and he looks forward to law job after graduation. So our timing is off. Let’s hope not FATALLY.

    Thurs. 6 Dec 79
    T compliments me on being “so female” (“in the Jungian sense”). He’s
    beautiful & supportive – he liked my Rossetti poems a lot. Feeling better carefully following my program; hoping I can be the person I want, follow the life I want.

    11:15 PM Thurs 6 Dec 79
    Everything looking up except this diary. Lavallee LIKES Bride and thinks we can sell it. Studying the lives of Saints makes me feel better, so I’m enjoying assembling a calendar of poems called The Spire. Does nothing for my career but provides relief. What if I learned how to pray? Assembling a Christmas wardrobe.


    T. annoyed when I trimmed my public hair! Since he goes down like Jacques Cousteau I should listen. Buying Sutton’s wife Val a sweater for Christmas from Brooks Brothers gives me & T a chance to rationally discuss our differing styles. He accedes to the more imaginative choice.

    11 Dec 79
    Finished Life of Raymond Chandler. Reading about Ottoline Morrell and Katherine Mansfield. Disgusted with poetry and taking a vacation. Bought T. the prettiest Pierre Cardin diamond cufflinks.

    5:30 PM 13 Dec 79 –Thurs
    A good day in spite of a weird pain between my breasts. Tension? Seems better when I move round so not incipient heart attack. Diet?

    Reading Lady Sackville & drinking tea. Phone call from beloved after his Commercial Paper exam. Getting a haircut then home in ½ hr. Mom called to apologize very nicely for sounding “disrespectful” about my work by dismissing it as “ghoulish” and “morbid.”


    We had a nice talk.


    Finished Xmas cards today – 172 cards! T & I had beautiful long talk last night of course followed by spectacular lovemaking. Confiding fears for our relationship. T doesn’t see how this relationship can last when everyone else’s falls off the cliff. I said I worry about hardening myself against him because it’s so difficult to be so open.
    Out shopping today got a flat tire changed by the grocery store employees! Free! Would that happen in the Northeast? Certainly not in DC. Very little sleep last night because of T’s studying – but I didn’t want him to leave the bed. It’s getting dark now – beautiful light over St John’s church. Submitting altered version of The Spire (leaving out sex poems.)

    11:45 AM – Sun 16 Dec 79
    In 15 mins my angel will have been at work for six hours. That’s more than a half day! When he gets here he still has his packing to do. He asked me what about spending summer in Princeton then back here for a year? He knows he can get a job here – his friends have been working on him. I said I’d hate it. Want to get established somewhere before I get pregnant. I have a far better chance of getting a job there than here. He walked in – greeting noises from dogs!

    StormFall Farm – Wed Dec 19 – 79
    Unalloyed pleasure! Sitting at my desk in winter living room (table pushed up to window.) It’s been snowing since we woke up at 10. I saw my new house – where his mother grew up in Grovers’ Mill NJ – very low ceilinged antique farmhouse full of original furniture. Too outdated to rent but fine with me – a whole house of our own! We could have two kids there without being overcrowded! It has some unpleasant dark curtains we could just get rid of. T’s grandmother just went into nursing home for the second time. Looks like this is the last time.


    The only problem is it has no laundry room – perhaps adapt upstairs closet? (Very tiny closets too.)
    Trish & Noah (cousins) & Toss have gone to town – I will walk dogs and then be ALONE.

    Gloriously ALONE. Very close to becoming complete recluse. Just finished N Mitford’s Voltaire in Love. T enormously enjoying Perry Mason whom I read aloud on our long drives.

    Train from NYC 1:40 PM 27 Dec 79 –
    Alarms & Diversions – T & I have just had 2 very intense fights. Guess I didn’t realize the anger than was building up in me. His mother is just so RUDE – I cried in front of her last night for a solid hour feeling sheer helplessness! She is so awful! After she left we managed to come together much chastened. Yesterday we went into New York City to see costumes at the Met – got in an epic traffic jam outside Tiffany’s and could see we weren’t going to make it – got out of the cab and T bought me a ring! Eternity band of diamonds – very sweet. They say if a diamond ever falls out they replace it!


    Celebrated at Sherry Netherland with manhattans and duck pate in lingonberry sauce. Wrote four poems but too exhausted to know if they’re good.

    12:30 AM – Wed 9 Jan 80
    Battling with Byatt’s Virgin In the Garden. This woman asserts a Proustian compass but overwrites dreadfully. T due in ½ hr – at library studying as usual. We had a lovely dinner before he left – spinach soufflé, salad and wine. Took dogs for very pleasant walk.


    T says he loves me so much more every day he can scarcely comprehend it. He was so upset when I said I might not take his name – it was only because he’d been flippant about a previous girlfriend. We are both so sore. Trying to stay open and honest as the emotions blast through.

  • Embattled Love: the diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Fri Oct 12 – 79


    Glorious day. On p 140 of book, 60 to go, 4 days to do them in. The hopelessness of this made me decide to give myself a 3 day vacation – read Rae Foley’s Put Out the Light – so awful I felt actually better. (3rd dud.) I can’t be as bad as I fear! Rush of poetry. Wrote poem about Sylvia Plath – don’t know if I like it yet. Saw Cage aux Folles. Unfeeling card from Genevieve but my annoyance vanishes when I realize she is copying Mom’s icy superiority. Less and less reason to write back honestly. Letter to Devon. T. and I had a long lovely dinner discussing love. I suggest we live on a farm and raise goats.

    Sun. 14 Oct 1979
    Toss seems entirely to understand my confusing depression: just found this note on the bed when I came up: “PAY TO THE ORDER OF ALYSSE AALLYN A WHOLE LOTTA LOVING, KISSING & HUGGING, AVALANCHE OF AFFECTION REDEEMED WHENEVER SHE FEELS INSECURE”. He’s downstairs right now with Jan.


    I don’t know what it is about my family that lays me so low. Unfortunately, this ugly pointless pattern continues into my artistic life. Set up one framework after another, only to lose faith and discard them. Dreamed last night about boyfriend Phil Jervaze of all people – that I was trying to get his phone no.

    Wed 17 Oct 79 7:50 PM
    Somewhat depressed over Bride & Wolves which I “finished”. Prose sluggish and dullsville. I blame Shirley Jackson. She’s too good.

    T & I drink glass of sherry with lemon peel to “celebrate”. Now all the things I didn’t have to think about I have to think about. UGH. Housework & money. Send copy of Devlyn to Lavallee, (agent) try for serial contract. The trouble is they want to hire you to write books you don’t want to write and the more you want to write it the less they want to pay.


    Took Speechless away from Toss. Hard to see it sitting on the floor, day after day. In a month, he’s read only 50 p. Told him he can’t read it anymore. It will be a long time before we can deal with each other fully, but that’s the way life is. Last night felt like the best so far. We had a guest, John Weber, Reed College student to whom Toss was legend. Fun to hear Toss talk about Reed – I was spellbound. Fell in love with him all over again. Made love from 1:30 PM to 3 – I can always make him come twice.

    Fri. 19 Oct 79 – 11:30 AM
    Halfway through re-reading Bride, haven’t thrown up yet. Ravings of a madwoman? Seems determined & plain. Early Dorothy Eden. Too slight? We’ll see. Exhausted. Utterly drained. Can’t imagine writing anything ever again. Worry about money and how alien this town feels. If we were married, would I mind so much being supported? No sex for 2 days – feels like a connection severed.
    5:10 PM
    Reading the novel with a critical eye. Feeling almost suicidal. Seems so bland. Blah. Who the hell cares? I imagine Lavallee calling it “tired.” Could I survive her criticism? Maybe she’ll give helpful direction. Storm coming. In a moment take dogs in, feed them. Read Jackson’s Bird’s Nest.

    Mon 22 Oct 79
    All day Saturday spent at Keeneland. The men were watching the horses, I was watching the politics between 3 law students. Home I went back to reading diaries with a view to making a book – too awful. T’s gay friend Basil to dinner – he just wouldn’t leave – he doesn’t like our new relationship either. I got too drunk. Toss wrote Mom & Dad a lovely letter today about how he’s going to “take care” of me. Happiness. Toss studying at law library.

    Tues. 23 Oct 79 7:45 PM
    Had to call the police on youths loitering by my car in our driveway. Outdoor lights didn’t discourage them. Trying to see what tape deck I have. Couldn’t take my walk. No way of getting out of 7 more months here. Kids moved on thank God.


    Cheering myself up with Zegger’s May Sinclair. More relieving than reading about poor Shirley Jackson. May rejected the system that gripped her. I feel like I interrupted my career (such as it was) to clean T’s house. I was a Disgraced Exotic Dancer probably getting too old anyway. Horrible. Think I have flu or something.

    Thurs 25 Oct 79
    Still feeling sick but just finished Honor Arundel’s Blanket Word and feel tremendous! Maybe I should write adolescent novels. Studying Awful Men in E. Bowen’s & R. Lehmann’s work. I prefer Monica Dickens who at least can handle resolution.

    Thurs 1 Nov 79
    I have been lucky to attract much love in my life. Genevieve met Danni Wisefield 5 years ago who asked, Are you related to Alysse Aallyn? Remembered me perfectly with so much love! Undeserved. Wonder if she ever went to that Swiss convent her parents threatened her with.
    Avril met Preston Pugh in an art gallery – he came up to her and reminisced lovingly about ME! Devon saw Avril dancing in a Concord, NH club and asked, “Are you related to Alysse Aallyn?”

    Mon 5 Nov 79 5:30 PM
    In the grips of a depression I can’t get out of. Cruel & disturbing, Toss left to go study, so I can’t bother him. Frightens me. Should go to library and take out pile of books. Some of the strength you need to be a writer is sheer stupidity. Doesn’t do to be too sensitive. I am happy with Toss but we do have communication problems. Don’t want drama with Families of Origin to traumatize our communication style.

    Toss asked me to make curtains for the entire house. I didn’t want to. Finally, when I announced I was ready, he suggested batiste half-panels I thought would look dumb. Not real curtains at all! We looked and looked at fabric, couldn’t agree on anything. He kept dragging out the batiste panels. Long ones aren’t so bad but I feel corralled. They come ready made, he needs my approval why? Just wants me to fulfill his vision? I couldn’t explain my anger. Why pretend you’re equal when only one has veto power?

    Keep trying like a fiend to gather dignity but everything seems to work me deeper in his debt. He offered a checking acct today! I explained he will have to put money in it. One of my financial gambits better work out.

    11:45 AM 16 Nov 79
    When to diarize? Mornings are for work, evenings I’m exhausted, nights for lovemaking. Merrill called to say she’s pregnant! Fun if our kids could be the same age. I bought wonderful African-patterned sheets on sale, sewed on rings (2 hrs needlework listening to Purcell’s Fairy Queen). They look FABULOUS and really dress the place up but T worries they’re “not good taste.” Who’s he trying to please? His mother and father have imaginative décor in their homes. (His Dad’s a fauvist painter!!!) It’s just so weird.


    Speechless should be done by Feb – submit Harper Awards? Feel completely inert. July/Aug wedding?

  • Embattled Love: The Diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    21 Sept 79


    Sex scene carries me to p. 201. Completely wiped out. Trying to read Eleanor Clark’s The Ball. Really in the mood for Edgar Allan Poe. Dinner with friends last night after T’s successful presentation – drank too much but didn’t get crazy. Still, angry at my lack of self-control. Gears shift so suddenly. The closer T gets the greater my terror. Well, we will lay new patterns down. Think T was proud of me – I was proud of him. But there’s too much going on. I am starting to feel voiceless like the people in my novel.

    26 Sept 79 –
    Hooks Lane chapter in crisis – not satisfied with it at all. Leave it and keep going.
    T said we must go to Philadelphia to see his mother. She was so depressed she went to a therapist who told her, “You have no support system.”


    Left Kentucky at 3 PM got to Phila 1:30 AM. Drive thoroughly pleasurable. His mother in very bad shape. Dreading upcoming weddings and her ex-husband’s family. We helped I think – T said he was very proud of me.


    Home to find Mary Ellen haunting the place – she can’t go back to that house and Jan doesn’t understand. Tried Catholic priest but nothing has worked. The little dog’s rash is worse and whole house a frightening mess. I feel exhausted. My youngest sister Avril calls very depressed – “Mr. Honesty” Dave has been lying to her and seeing another girl. Why am I not surprised? Says she wants to move too. Maybe Maine to be closer to Mom & Dad? I say she needs to rise up & denounce these rotten creeps. If she decides to go I can sell my Queens Chapel house!
    My lack of $$ starting to sting. After IBM and car insurance I have $150!!! Must sell the car, no other way.


    T had nightmare he married previous Bad Girlfriend Christy then saw me thru chain-link fence realized he’d made a terrible mistake!


    Much better evening than day. Ran a little, tomorrow we’ll do more. Shrimp chow mein, red pears, white wine.


    T got two letters from old girlfriends “checking in” to change his mind about marrying me. He says, “Alysse, you saved me from second best.”

    27 Sept 79
    Tremendously depressed about Speechless. How does anything ever get written? I’d ask somebody’s opinion but who do I respect? I can’t think of anybody unfortunately. Part III far too short. But I can’t “pad.” My house party at the Kimball’s now seems dumb. Phila trip screwed me up.
    Maybe just write gothic from scratch. Something crazy.

    Helluva eye opener reading adolescent diaries: how did I survive? Maybe I didn’t! Can one EVER tell the truth? Keep going back to my time in Massachusetts and molester Uncle Burt. Ugh. Aunt Nina let me read Mom & Dad’s letters (I WAS TWELVE) but told me not to let them know because “it would ruin their Christmas.” Uncle B lectured me about responsibility while copping a feel. Ulterior Motive Ranch.

    29 Sept 79
    Cheered up by finding complete synopsis of Bride & Wolves I can use! A little manic but not as extreme say as The Big Sleep. Complete with Evil Psychiatrist. I’m dropping him – Lover Ned’s all the evil I think I need.

    Mon 1 Oct 79
    Thoroughly enjoyable day lounging about reading Lofts’ Queens of England. Made 15 chap plan – finish Bride in 2 weeks!!


    Wonderful dinner with the Macafees last night – dull food but they told me Toss is WAY more physically affectionate with me than he ever was with other girlfriends! Hehehe. Milestone sex.

    Tues 2 Oct 79
    Reading Cookson’s The Girl for gothic insights. Thomas Hardy she is not. She is even more depressing than he ever was.


    Only got thru 10 p breaking my schedule as usual. Should I bring Kitten back from the dead? Can’t decide. Feel I am laying the foundation for the whole rest of my career. Shouldn’t be hard to earn $10,000 a year! Right? I feel better already.


    Good long run with T last night. Received 16 novels from Detective Book Club.

    Thurs Oct 4, 79
    Workday blown by farewell lunch party at Goldberg’s hotel. Tomorrow there’s a wedding at 2! Can’t believe 2 glasses wine gave me this sour headache.


    Should read no more of my diaries. Think my parents skipped their own adolescence. EX Ferrars’ In at the Kill a BIG disappointment. She should lose her membership in Detective Club for that one!! Boresville. #2 was Lucky to be Alive by Alice Cromie – another DUD! Makes Dorothy Eden look like Shakespeare. Starting to worry about modern publishing. Is my taste fatally out of whack with the rest of the world? That’s scary. I like to think I’m writing a “thriller”. Wish I had jewels I could sell.

    6 Oct 79
    Bride shaping up well, a “loose bag for anything” I want to throw in (Woolf.) 6 chaps so far – think I can get 60,000 words without too much trouble.


    Think I am jealous of this house – we painted 6 to 9. Toss definitely runs himself too hard. Chase elected him to ANOTHER position as well as law review editor.


    Last night I made dinner – fillet of sole in sherry, sour cream & chives with broccoli & salad. Jan showed up for dinner – luckily there was plenty – both praised my cooking extravagantly. Wine flowed. Discussed celibacy of clergy. I blame greed – church wants to own everything, like Ma Bell. Jan wants to spend the night (Mary Ellen’s at her mother’s) so he can watch Foreign Correspondent (he and Mary Ellen don’t approve of TV so have to use other people’s). He offered to help paint.


    Dinner – running – bath – reading – lovemaking – satisfying routine.


    Then today the wedding – can’t believe I survived it. Ex girlfriends Christina, Mindy & Cindy all there commenting on my lavender lace dress. Had only my burnt sienna leather jacket to wear over it. (Couldn’t afford to buy anything new.) Toss criticized the dress as “an old lady dress” on the hanger but admitted it looks nice on.


    Waiting for our ride while drinking sherry T said my face with makeup was “over defined.” I began to feel alarmed but too late to do anything about it! He said I sometimes dressed and made up as if I were 10 yrs older and had flaws to cover instead of “being a very beautiful woman” but he was afraid to tell me about it because of my feelings about my parents (their criticism I guess.) He said, “at least you don’t powder yourself any more like Marcel Marceau”! (I explained stage makeup is OBVIOUSLY different.)


    I said I was sorry he felt that way and particularly sorry he chose THAT moment to bring it up! I’m sure Mindy, Cindy & Christina were satisfied we were on the “outs”.


    Endlessly long super religious wedding. I was in a stew. I don’t even wear eyeliner! I wish he had given me some money but would I have used it on clothes & makeup? Probably not – I prefer writing and “staying alive”!


    So much emotionalism in the service I cried and he apologized. He said he was so proud of me and wanted everyone to feel the same. No more makeup for me. Financial savings!


    At the dull reception (bad jitterbug music) he formally introduced me to Christy who was COMPLETELY different from what I expected – at least a foot taller than Toss and very elegant (no makeup, alas.) After I came out of the ladies, T said Christina asked him to dance but he declined; “She had her chance.” He could NEVER have married her – a Professional Virgin. (She teaches at a Catholic school.) Impossible.


    Had to go shopping at Kroger’s after wedding for food – we were feeling better but he couldn’t stop justifying himself. Something about how “physically perfect” I am but not “psychologically perfect”! Made me sorry I’ve been honest with him – my parents are normal compared to his parents! I told him he’s lacking in charity.


    That shut him up.


    What is to become of this young, earnest couple? Life is short, marriage long. This engagement going on too long? I tell Toss I think we are separated by a thin membrane from understanding each other. This is me – trying hard to see you – on the other side. I am beginning to accept parts of him I wouldn’t have recognized in a police lineup.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Tues 7 May 68


    Frustrated & mixed up. “Only a clear pool gives beautiful reflections”. (Says the Artist from The Cat That Went to Heaven. Fave book from childhood.) Shall I blame my period? I can’t imagine ever enrolling in any other school, EVER or jumping through hoops like these again.


    Going to Tartuffe with Frank Edmunds; strictly as friends. (I paid for my own chicken. His French is very weak; I had to tell him “hors de combat” does NOT refer to prostitutes.) Rehearsing every spare moment for The American Dream – I’m Granny. Doing a “voice” – channeling my own Granny. But it’s not fun being someone else so I guess that proves I’m never an actress. Worry even in my sleep. Master Gwill gave me an A for To Bed In the Afternoon and said he will submit it to ProSem. I told him not to bother and sure enough, Toss Sheffield turned it down like a bedspread. Toss over to my table (with apologetic ice cream) to explain why. He wants “vignettes”. (Quelle “Belle Epoque!) He says the audience shouldn’t know how they’re supposed to feel. Much more artistic if they didn’t feel anything.)


    He told me to start my own magazine! But he seems to be considering adopting me. That could lead to something. He’s got the most gorgeous long straight blond hair that makes me shiver. Good body, perfect nose. He has a brain. And he is a hermit. (Fingers crossed.) He says that he loves me and he hates me but refuses to elucidate. He came to sit at my table tonight and brought me ice cream.


    Need to go to bed so I can worry. “Darkness, darkness, be my pillow…”

    Wed 8 May 68
    Starting to feel more happy & confident. It’s a shame I’m so dependent on men but don’t know if it’s fixable. Maybe it’s like a vitamin – got to have it or you get scurvy.


    My father suggests I skip graduation and go to a Yugoslavian work camp! Five hundred dollars difference he says. Miss Senior Parties? So I only get the bad part of this place? I say No and No.

    10:40 PM – Just learned the most horrible thing! Toss telling everyone I “tried to seduce him!!!” Writing an angry KOB right now. I invited him sailing and that is NOT tantamount to seduction in my universe!!! Telling him sailing invite is REVOKED!!

    Casey asks what I’m writing and I say, “The truth.” She has forbidden me to discuss her with you ANY MORE.


    “I’m going to write my own diary,” she grumbles. So I tell her to get on with it and stop her bellyaching! If people COULD, they WOULD. NoDoz to keep from sleeping when I ought to be studying.


    Toss has gorgeous male body, which he sheathes in corduroy & sharp-starched French-cuff shirts. Wears an Eng tweed vest on ALL occasions. He knows the sight of him makes me throb. This is why I must be extra cruel.

    Fri 31 May 68
    Attempting to muffle my triumph while sitting in Fr after giving Front of Class rept on Duttilleul. Free at last, thank God I’m free at last!


    Sheffield puzzles me to put it mildly. Invited him to work with me in the ice cream store but he sent Gary Long who is sweet & dumb & no threat to anyone. Then he shows up at the end to help me close. Tells me all about his father whom he deeply admires.


    Isn’t father worship a good sign in a boy? Or not? He brought Casper the Grasper’s note about my “professional level” Granny. Best performance he’s seen at the school. Wonder if C realizes this is the same girl he stabbed almost to death with a rose pin years ago? Probably not – he’s totally gaga and at least 100. Sheffield says he talks to all the boys about masturbation.

    Sun 2 June 68
    “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…”


    Toss’ eighteenth birthday. I was his gift – he ate my throat and whispered through my hair and studied with the Engineering Marvel that is a push-up bra (he mispronounces as “brazier.”)
    Started off in the AM at the lakehouse. White clothed tables, Japanese lanterns, très chichi. T took me into the center of the lake on a canoe ride while I ate my breakfast. When it started to rain he took off his pink shirt. Oh my. Oh to scale the white cliffs of Sheffield…


    Played tennis, sat together at lunch, collapsed side by side in a barley field. Then climbed to the treehouse in Boy Wood where he told me how beautiful my hands are and complimented my “lioness” hair. We undressed each other. Aaahhh… Roses for some very cold November. He shuddered over my breasts. His sweat is delicious. We licked each other clean of every childhood scrape & pain. I felt like crying from sheer happiness. This was the moment I’ve been looking for. I would have made love with him there & then but the Doberman did not drop the sirloin. Preston a terribly inferior lover compared to T…


    He knelt at my feet to put on my shoes.


    Only minutes left to dress for banquet – wore my short short SHORT hot Wore my Indian bells sundress with matching bikini. T. wore 3-piece suit and looked like turn of the century banking scion. Terrible speeches, badly planned. All on the subject of individual vs. society!!! Hard thing to toast.


    The dance was VERY good. (Band tremendous.) Did a lot of sherbet eating and cookie consuming. (Shawn asked to dance once – very sporting I thought.)


    Casey & Robt both sick in infirmary!

    Sun 9 June 68
    T really saved my senior year! I owe him so much! Casey & I rushed through our room like whirlwinds, packing! I dragged Avril in for “moral support”. Pool party at the Cocks’. “I thought you didn’t like parties,” I said to T. He said, “I want to be where you are.”


    Changed into a dancing dress with huge flowing sleeves. 2 kinds of salad, French bread, fried chicken, chocolate cake saying CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 68. Security guard insisted T wear a tie – he put his belt around his neck. We lay in the same lounge chair. Paradise. This life is enough for me! Immortality would KILL me all over again! We danced & danced. I have enough. I am enough.

    Clove Hill Conference Center Tues 11 June 68
    Sprawled out in the Meditation section of the “Senescence Manor” Library; an obligatory “way station” on the way to Europe. They are training us how NOT to be Ugly Americans.
    I’m supposed to be “meditating” so here goes. Last night was so perfect. One of the happiest nights of my life.


    After dinner Francie Parks, Matt R., Toss & I drive in Someone’s Father’s Car to coat & tie affair at the Bellamy’s. Everyone but Toss & me seek a quiet corner to smoke dope. Why waste this glorious evening? Plumly Survivors, Unite. Is this a boat in which we haphazardly drift together or a trap we fell short-sightedly into?

    The latter, I guess because T & I flee as soon as possible to explore the grounds while a very good cover band plays “Shotgun” & “Hitchhike”.


    I wore my blue gauze skirt and Very Tight Satin Vest that Doesn’t Need a Shirt (but Miss Womrath would say IT DID.) T. skirting control SEVERAL TIMES sobbing with apology & passion while the male bullfrogs shrieked, groaned & screamed. Toss liberated a whole quart of vanilla ice cream from the Bellamy freezer, which we polished off between us; then Eggs Benedict & sticky buns were served! We danced it off.


    T’s parents arrived – I said goodbye to Casey who seemed happy enough with John M. Duke Droyer agreed to ride with us to the Sheffield party. T’s parents seem very young – Mrs Sheffield showing off her lime green shoes. Crowded into the back Toss strokes my stomach tenderly, whispers, “I love Alysse Aallyn” into my ear.


    Toss’ house is a railroad magnate’s nooky little Bavarian castle set into the Pennsylvania countryside. Paintings everywhere by Toss’ father – who’s an undercover artist posing as an investment advisor. Fauve paintings – some very good. Mrs. Sheffield showed me to my puffily pink-quilted room – sharing with the absent Francie – but I wasn’t ready to sleep, especially since they had a pool. Swim!


    Holding each other under water so exciting. We dried each other off and he gave me the tour, including the basements (which go on and on) where he has his darkroom and ending up at the Recently Acquired Matisse. That was where we took off our bathing suits and collapsed in a pile of cushions, wet hair and hot towels…just as Matt R and Francie P came in! Both acted like this is an everyday occurrence – we are graduates after all! What can they do to us now? Finally staggered off to bed.


    Toss woke me at ten for breakfast (said he couldn’t wait any more) and I met his brother David (13). Toss’ mother seemed annoyed about something like she had forgotten we were there. T & I walked Duke to the leafy little train station. I kissed him goodbye – (who knows when I’ll see him again?) and Toss mentioned that – by the way the senior boys had unanimously voted me Girl Most Likely to Get Married First.


    Compliment? I think it is if you realize it REALLY means “Girl Most Likely to be Proposed To.” T. didn’t know it but this poured balm on my still bubbling wounds inflicted by the Rumor Mill.

    Thurs. 13 June 68 – JFK International Airport
    Plane late, but meal vouchers also delayed, so forced to buy myself cheeseburger & Danish with my coffee. Now that vouchers have arrived I’m not hungry so might as well waste it on bourbon & ginger ale! In spite of the glares of the white suited headwaiter. I have an excellent view of the takeoff fields.


    So where had I got to? Steak with T & parents on their lawn? They look to me for clues to the Toss they’ve never met. But the more T’s dad likes me & tries to please the more onerous the Mom finds my presence! An exactly matched pair of counterweights! Will I look across a lawn someday at the girl who steals my son’s love from me?


    I am very much aware that I was only given food & a place to sleep because I’m Current Choice of the Eldest Son.


    Strange how people’s lives intertwine and they upset each other’s timetables.
    Alysse wants to go to Europe.
    Toss wants to go to Oregon.


    Cruel twist of fate – everyone gets the thing they don’t want any more. We are governed by the shadows of our former selves.


    Hungry after all – I eat Vichyssoise & cherrystone clams. (Excellent clams.)
    T. took me back to Pewter Hill by train because he doesn’t have his license. We went out for Chinese food with Genevieve and her husband (it was his 21st birthday) and G’s Plumly roommate Clarice. I would prefer to be alone with Toss – when we are around other people I always start to fear I’m making the whole thing up.


    Toss missed his train (thank God) and spent the night. Played “sardines” – PH a very good house for that. I am the all time winner. Dad woke me & I woke Toss & ironed his shirt (pretty inefficiently I’m afraid.) Chinese eggs, (Dad calls it “slumgullion”) orange juice & coffee.


    Toss rode on the train as far as he could go before he had to take a different connection. We kissed goodbye with people staring – I was suddenly shy.


    These Clove Hill work campers are all cigarette smoking college types. I stood out like a sore thumb with my matching red luggage. The doctors refused to give my smallpox shot because of “oozing lesions” (poison ivy) wrote all over my passport instead.


    We have to attend lectures, & choose a job. I chose “Gardening” my mother would be so proud – worked in the leek garden until my knees were black. Washed dishes after lunch, then washed my hair.


    After the last conference of the evening, Toss called. It was a living pain to hear his voice. I said, “The hell with this – when’s the next train out of here?” He said, “I’m coming.”


    We ran through backyards and over fences to his parents’ house. I said I’d like to quit the American Virginity Rat race. Went to the cabana (he says his mother is sick) and played John Wesley Hardin. Met his 15 yr old brother – taller but not as handsome.


    Toss admitted he’s a virgin too, but “we’re not protected.” Is mutual masturbation making love? I don’t know how to make it satisfying – I am not there yet. He admitted I was there to his father who drove me back.


    Awoke early to pack, grabbed a sandwich for breakfast. Our Icelandic flight cancelled (bomb threat) so we are flying Iberian.


    Used graduation money to call Toss at 3:30. He is such a darling. Truly and magnificently humble (unjustly scorned word.) Owe him a 10-page letter. But –

    Instead I wrote a poem:

    LEAVING THE COVEN

    A craven of cronies stood
    Between us & God –
    God hated short skirts, God
    Demanded clones.

    A damnation of judges
    Stood between us &
    Knowledge; claimed truth exists in
    Servicing others.

    A clowder of cretins
    Stood between us &
    Art: “Don’t be disturbing”
    “Never trust instincts.”

    You escaped from
    The oubliette; rescuing me –
    So I could grow up
    And write you this poem.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Southwark Theatre School – Thur. 21 Mar 68


    Here’s the theatre where I serve my Indentured Seniors Project. Hem hem Mr. Green is late. I’ve forgotten how to sleep. It’s just not happening. Quit coffee, tried Sominex, nothing doing. Sitting in lobby of theatre school waiting for appointment. Wish I didn’t have to keep a journal the fathead faculty can read about my Theatre Experiences. I will write The Truth here and Dress it up later.
    Sitting next to me in an armchair is the best looking thing I’ve seen in a month of Sundays – peacenik with red gold hair & mustache named Dale Whitman.


    Dylan Green strides in – receding hairline, round cheeks, hypnotic light eyes. Very attractive. Now watching them rehearse O’Casey’s Bedtime Story: Love it. I could watch rehearsals forever. Painting with people. Is that a job? Unfortunately actresses need to be seen and I wish I were invisible. How can one love fashion so much yet not want to be seen? Dr. Gilmour says I am an “enigma”. Green’s an excellent director; working on actors “mood”.


    Love writing on trains. Things always look brighter. At Plumly dreaming & reflecting are criminal offenses. Must travel by train: crying for no reason in the car makes M & D think I’m psychotic.


    Mon 25 Mar 68
    Feel like a lonely drifter. $200 and go directly to jail. Trying to live exclusively in the present. Preston hot & cold, asks me to “give him more time.” That pisses me off just thinking about it; then he gets beggy. Don’t like him or me. He’s a placeholder. This is all my fault: I want subtle, skeptical doubting people and so that’s what I get! Ambivalent confusion. Think I’ll do my nails.


    Tues. 26 Mar 68
    Train to Radnor where I’m staying with the Carnahans while M & D & A cruise Virgin Islands. Hope I never arrive I like the journey so much. Carnahans very dull. Dislike her, have crush on him. She talks and talks – everything is Freudian. Any object you could grasp, touch or pick up is a penis; vaginas are negative space and no one thinks about them! He listens mournfully. Drinking.


    Dancing class this AM at Southwark in leotard too big for me. Still it was fun. Release in a way, if they didn’t have so many mirrors and it was so painfully obvious I am the worst in the class. Guess my “lessons” with that hungry friend of Mom’s didn’t count.


    Wanted to sit in on David Margulies’ rehearsal of Oresteia but Ron Reston made me sit in office & answer phones. Ron Bruncati asked me out to Art Museum show. I said OK. He’s bald and old enough to be my father but he is a director and its all grist.


    And now for my emotional state – aha! Caught you with a bored expression. Bought a chocolate Easter egg at the station and now I’m going to eat it SLOWLY.


    Wed 27 Mar 68
    Ron Roston gave me some typing but Ellen Roston’s machine is broken so take an early lunch hour. (Use Sam’s machine when he’s done.) God what a year it’s been. God I would like to destroy this book. Just flipping through it is sheer psychological torture. But can’t destroy – probably for the same reason I’m compelled to finish all that’s on my plate.


    Can’t write on the train any more: people are too fascinating. I want to ride in all directions as far as it goes. Just looking. (Is that a job?) Every stop would be a different story.


    Bruncati picked me up ( not before I made date with interesting bearded character in acting class – Jack Foster.) Told me all about his boring Roman Catholic upbringing. He ordered alcohol for me – but they turned him down.


    Yawned through art museum show – very dull except pen drawings. Pretty sure Bruncati realizes we’re no match. He was driving me up the hill to our house – amazed there was so much land in the middle of town asked, “Do you really live here or are you just trying to get me into the woods?” Har har. (He did not attack me.)


    As soon as Avril gets back from Virgin Islands we’ll go see Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence. (She will be so tan and I will be so jealous.) Reading Julie de Carneilhan – strange little masterpiece. Worship Colette.


    The Carnahans pester me to take a cab at night but there’s never one there – I walk from station and no one’s raped me yet. Turn cartwheels and climb trees. I’ll see if they can take me home Sun night – my laundry’s becoming a menace.


    April Fool’s Day – Mon 68
    Reading Terminal crying my eyes out with everyone staring and that’s no joke. Want to crawl into a hot bath and die. Seems like I will never be much more than a squishy rag. Just opened my purse and NOTHING was there! No wallet, no ticket, no money, nothing!! I can’t WALK to Pewter Hill!!! Left my wallet locked up in Southwark office! Borrow dime from nice man to call home, of course no one’s there. Call the Coxes instead. Good old Theo hope he loves me.

    Thurs 4 Apr 68 – Southwark Theatre School
    Dropped into Goody’s on the way here to pick up a Donovan record for Genevieve’s birthday. Easy day so far. I get to write rejection letters to amazingly accomplished actors pretending I’m Ron – including the lady from Gilligan’s Island. If this doesn’t discourage an aspiring actor, nothing will. Flirting with Dale Whitman – I love his hair. Wonder if he’s red gold & fuzzy all over. Preston walked in all young and ill at ease – I saw him through Dale’s eyes. Ouch! When he wants me I don’t want him and when I want him he doesn’t want me. Impasse. Dancing with Jack Foster last night – easy, happy guy. But he told me “Ball’s in your court” and I don’t like it there. He’s a doper, alas.

    5 Apr Fri 68 – Train to Queen Lane

    O Brave New World
    Meteorological Report: Looks like rain.
    Fashion Report: Looks like I’ve got a run in my stocking.


    Importance of Being Earnest seen with Preston. A particularly bad Lady Bracknell. Preston desperately clutched my hand to the inside of his leg (wish he’d put his hand on MY leg occasionally.) He argues that polygamy is man’s natural state. Says “Look at dogs.” Told him to look at wolves, foxes (some birds). All news to him; which is bad news for his “progressive school”. Then off to the Electric Factory. Strobe lights. Pandora’s Box (they stank) & Electric Light Orchestra. (Good.) Preston and I tried getting into the same “leaning box” but a “security guard” jumps at us. What on earth is the point of the boxes then!!!


    Preston angry at me because I wouldn’t let him come in at home. Good thing! Dad (just in from the Chesapeake) mixing daiquiris (gave me one!) and wanting to talk.


    “You’re getting to be a big girl,” he says insultingly.
    I gave him my Big Girl on Daiquiris Smile. ( Daiquiris are good.)
    “How are you fixed for birth control?”
    Fatally uncool. I staggered. Recovered.
    “I’m still a virgin.” (In spite of them rather than because of them.)
    He skipped right over that. He said Dr. Rhodes could fit me with a diaphragm. I said, “I hear those interfere with sexual pleasure.”


    He said, “No, no no. We’ve been using one for years.”
    Mom came in and to my surprise chimed in so this was a staged event.
    “You were born because of a diaphragm,” she said meaningfully.
    Dad said, “How about the loop? Looks like a question mark. You don’t want to be changing diapers at theatre school.”


    That’ll never happen! If I couldn’t get an abortion I’d throw myself down the stairs. I said, “I think you have to have already had a kid to use those things. There’s always the pill.”


    At this point Mom became predictably upset. She hates the pill because you don’t have to struggle with it. And if you don’t have to struggle with sex – then she bursts into tears. So I’ll never find out why sex needs to be a struggle. Dad admitted it was my date with 33-year-old Ron that blew the alarm.


    Thurs 12:28 PM 11 Apr 68
    Day of for Martin Luther King’s funeral. Watched it on TV. After 200 years looks like the rot is all the way through. Preston came over to invite me to see Paul Butterfield and Jesse Colin Young – too good to resist. Says he has been accepted at Haverford, Columbia & Chicago. Nice to have a future. Ended up wrestling on the floor. He got my shirt off but why do boys find bras such complex engineering problems That’s as far as we went. Watched the Academy Awards – Dustin Hoffman is a darling. (Listening to Tim Buckley. Will not be your Summer Princess or your Midnight Maiden. I will be your Sundown Angel.) Reading Madame Sarah. She was a big failure at the beginning of her career. Some comfort.


    Read To Bed in the Afternoon to mom – she laughed the whole time. About child molestation and frigidity? I said, it’s not supposed to be a comedy – she said, “But it’s so funny!” A prophet is without honor, etc. etc. Time to shake the sand off my new, elegantly spurred leather boots.


    Thurs 25 Apr 68 – Plumly
    Trying to learn a little self-reliance but it seems there’s nothing there. No wonder people take drugs. If there was a confidence pill I’d be seriously tempted. Unfortunately on alcohol I am only silly. Sweet loving letter from Devon who has decided to go into politics. I told him all the women would vote for him! He promised to invite me to Paris when he’s ambassador to France – I said it’s a deal. Lying in the sun reading Citizen Hearst.

    9PM- relaxing in the Listening Room (no talking. My new favorite spot.) Handel’s Israel in Egypt. At least the music in this Institution for the Severely Disturbed is good. Catharsis! Feeling extremely good nose to grindstone finishing all my work.


    Mom coming for Alumni Day – no Dad. She took me to the Cocked Hat to buy Lanz dress for prom. Long and white with thick lace cuffs, very pretty. Senior boys have banded together to “go stag – refusing old fashioned dating enslavement” so I was forced (pride) to import Preston. I’m sure he thinks I’m madly in love with him. I always want people to fall in love with me and when they do I am repulsed. But at least I can be polite.


    Put aside Sybille Bedford’s Favorite of the Gods. Bland. Generation of messed up women. Now why would I want to read about THAT here in my prison cell??? Writing porn exotique under my current nom de plume Kathryn Klavier-Scott.


    French Class – 11:l0 AM Tues 30 Apr 68
    Finished test in 10 mins. Great letter from Merrill saying underneath my “blaze of emotions is a core of strength.” Reassuring. I love her so much. It’s hard not to worry about how false everything feels. I understand the boys’ fears, I really do, I don’t want to commit to something awful & irrevocable either. Old young, make female we are all at total cross-purposes with each other. Language fails us. Poetry? Art? Try to think of a way. Want to run through an art gallery in a nude leotard trailing a colored scarf. It could be my own work: enormously enlarged letters – fragments of “ransom notes” but you can’t tell where or when to make the “drop” so the precious thing is bound to die. (Saw it in a dream.) But I don’t want to go to Art school!!! (Not that they’d let me in anyway.) Then what? “Center down” as the old Quakers say.


    Mom & Dad offer me trip to Europe for graduation if I work in a peacenik work project. Sent me a list of possibles. All the obviously, desperate starving places. But Sweden’s also on the list! I want to go to Ireland. (NOT on list.) Reading short stories of Sean O’Faolain.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Sat 18 Feb 68


    Wish I didn’t have breasts. I don’t like them. They make me feel like Somebody’s Mother. I would prefer to be flat chested. No sex since JULY. Bought a bottle of New York champagne from Laura for $8 and locked it in my trunk. Not sure what I’m saving it for. Kate Moody signed me up for Operation Match. I got a list of 4 names and I told Casey “I’m going to get us a date. “ So I called the first name on the list – Craig Crawford, a U of Penn student with an apartment. So that’s good! He answered his phone! “Must be a loser if he’s home on Sat night” said the loser home on Sat night. He had company but told me not to worry, “I think she’s in the bathroom.”


    He turned out to be absolutely charming, all American, ROTC. By no means a lost cause. Said he’d gone out with 2 girls through Operation Match and one of them spoke no English. I asked for a millionaire (Kate asked for me.)


    I said, “Craig, will you be my millionaire?”


    He said, “I want to be. Help me make my million.” Asked me out for Fri. I said sure if he can get a date for my friend. So – a reason for champagne.


    Tues. 20 Feb 68
    Mom came Sun night and took me & Casey out to dinner. Unfortunately she brought a Lame Duck Boarder – one of her “pretend children” some shockingly ugly girl she feels sorry for. I bewailed my barren existence. She told me I’m just “dissatisfied” not miserable. I told her about our date Fri night and she insisted Craig & Unknown Boy have dinner with the family! I told her Impossible. Not wanting to contradict her at dinner I called her up later and ruined it by crying. I SO want to be THERE and not HERE. She thinks I’m the worst spoiled child ever.


    Paris Match said Bonnie & Clyde “encourages crime” and Pauline Kael said “those sawdust heads missed the point.” I like her.


    1:15 AM Sun 25 Feb 68
    The date was AWFUL. Just horribly, incredibly, irredeemably AWFUL. Craig was FAT (why didn’t Kate ask for someone thin?) and his friend was SHORT, with very glisteny wet slicked back hair. But still better looking than Craig.

    The evening was so awful there’s no point in describing it. Shared a bottle of Almaden during a decent dinner (eggplant, mushrooms, chicken livers) but when the boys saw we were presentable all they wanted was to get us drunk. The only way this could have been worse would be if it all happened at Pewter Hill. Casey was no help – she’s been in that convent too long! She just went all glassy-eyed on me. The boys wanted to go to their apt and drink and she was all for it! I tried hard to talk them into The Electric Factory and thought I’d succeeded but they said, “Ha, we lied, we’re going to the apt.” Talked them into the Trauma – they stayed 10mins. So we ended up at their apt after all where Casey & Friend made out and danced while I parried pass after pass from Craig who finally gave us and lay with his head in my lap psychoanalyzing me. “You’re restless because you’ve never had roots.”


    I had to call a cab before they agreed to take us home. Asked us to fraternity party Sat. Casey wants to go! (I talked her out of it later, thank God.)


    We no sooner get home than Mom’s psychosis raises its ugly head, how starved and desperate I am so I will never get anyone good. That same woman who accused me of “going to meet boys” when I was trying to bike ride to Trevallion, who accused Merrill of “living in sin with Bill Saint” (they weren’t) and said Genevieve’s husband wasn’t “clean.” Just weird. So embarrassing with Casey there.


    Then Dad came in and asked me “how’s school” like an uncle who hadn’t seen me for twelve years and I burst into tears. A mess all around. This dating stuff SHOULD be easy but its so not. You’d think Mom would be all for “Operation Match” – as long as people are honest it should work. (My advice: ask for a photo.) But no. It shows you want to date and that is evil.


    Wed 28 Feb 68
    Called Devon this evening – knew I shouldn’t have but I was so depressed. I’d invited Preston to the Mar 5 dance but he said he can’t go. Has to be in a play. Invited e to the play and asked me out for the 22nd instead. I agreed to that but it’s not The Dance. Called Devon to feel something – anything – he said he was glad I called and happy to speak to me. Thought I called to wish him happy birthday! (So I said I had.) He apologized for his letters said they were “written in moments of weakness.” I said they were very romantic. I felt better then, but worse after. He HAS a girlfriend (more than one) there is no point to this. Wrote a poem, Considering the Chill Factor. Hopeless couple who can’t connect.

    CONSIDERING THE CHILL FACTOR 
    Considering the chill factor
    As I always try to do
    The day was hot
    Too hot for love or war.
    We sit in restaurants.  I pick
    The blue veined shrimp
    He picks the black-veined news.
    Outside drunkards
    Carom off the plexiglass like  entertaining fish.
    “They envy us”
    and Andrew says
    “How nice.”
    I see a couple coming in; she holds him up
    As I so often upheld you.
    I know that touch
    surgeons who
     manipulate the dying.
    She wears my dress
    the one I wore the day you
    Shamed me
    Stuck me sizzling to the sidewalk
    Shamed us both
    with those red red stains.
    Andrew  I don’t think
    I ever have forgiven you.
    Andrew says
    “How nice” 
    he lays his coffee spoon upon the cloth
    I hate the brown stain 
    it spreads like murder
    Like the bad smell of death
    Breeding fumes as we do
    Corpses in the sun.
    I rise to speak
    Shrimp spewing from my mouth like
    Parasites.
    “We have always been
    so happy, you and I.”

    Mon 4 March 68
    I’ve learned my lesson: when this huge book is used up I WILL GET A SMALL ONE. Gave up on March dance, called Preston and said I’d go to his play if he’ll go to the Electric Factory with me, Casey & Kip and champagne supper after at Pewter Hill. Mom likes Preston because his parents are her friends so she should behave herself. Rich parents used to give their sons peasant girls to practice the facts of life on and Mom is giving Preston to me. He has a nice bass voice, but something festers in his soul. I’m going to find it and poke at it. Mom wanted to invite Brice to dinner! I had to tell her the truth about him so she wouldn’t but if I thought I’d get points from her for spurning his dark desires I was wrong. Everything’s my fault because of clothes & personality.
    Past midnight – I write by flashlight. Casey talking in her sleep.


    Hard to read Spark’s Mandelbaum Gate after Genet. Spark is trapped by her form, defeated by her subject and killed by her characters. Ho hum.


    Casey & I started a film company – Gryphon Enterprises – to film my movie ideas. Marquis de Sade (of all people’s!) Eugenie de Franval is a terrific story (without the moralizing obviously) – also Donleavy’s Singular Man. Working on my scripts. Also wrote a short story – Odalisque – about a teenager robbing her own “Christina-esque” boat. Can’t use it for English because Master Gwill hates “plot” on principle. Gives the highest grades to character studies & mood pieces. For him I wrote To Bed In the Afternoon dialog of a frigid woman with her doctor.
    Sunday into the city to see Pinter’s The Lover – excellently done.


    Tues 5 Mar 68
    Benson builds a new philosophy in Defense of Homosexuality – happens to be my philosophy as well. One caveat: “the freedom of the subjective person to do as he pleases is overruled by the freedom of the responsible person to do as me must.” Who’s subjective and who’s responsible? For that matter, who’s free.


    Benson knows he’s in enemy territory so he follows every argument to infinity: no loose ends. Do women take to lesbianism the way men take to homosexuality or are men just appalling lovers? Take Craig Crawford for example. #1 he’s hideous, #2 he WANTS to be drunk. Any rational sexy girl would start to look good if you’d had too much of that. At the moment I can’t imagine ever wanting to bear children but who knows maybe someday … At the moment 69ing sounds impossible. (Casey & I discuss.)


    Merrill writes she “spontaneously aborted” after a month of pregnancy. Depressed her. I hastily replied that since all Aallyn girls are built to be Earth Mothers so she need have no fear.
    I can see my senior thesis needs to be a “book report: What’s Out There”. They will downgrade me for not expressing my view but they would downgrade me more if I did express it so Lesser of Two Evils…


    Wed 6 Mar 68
    Wonder if I can sit in a chair for auditions. Dr Gilmour says not. Don’t know what to do with this lump of a body of mine. I should be taking dance EACH DAY. What if I recite my poem?


    Got a full weekend permission, there’s a wonder (before lowering of the financial boom.) I have overdrawn 3 times!!! Think of all the starving children in Asia and I spent $4 on a bottle of hair conditioner.


    Like to think I am free from all the ridiculous dating taboos like “girls can’t call boys” so I phoned Preston. He’s an unpolished diamond – delighted to speak to me. He’s tall, intelligent, sensitive, thin, witty, friendly, etc. Plans to go to Harvard, run for everything & rule the world. So what if he doesn’t actually attend to this school? The less he knows of me the better, considering what people around here seem to think.


    1 AM Sat 9 Mar 68
    Twelve hours and my Wretched Audition will be over with. Numb with Dread. Chances very strongly that they will hate me, I will hate them, we will hate each other. I don’t see how I can stand any more rules. But everyone tells me I have to audition at Juilliard so audition at Juilliard I weakly do. Preston and I discussed it thoroughly fifteen mins ago. Nice to have someone to confide in. I impulsively invited him to the operetta and he impulsively accepted. Will he fear being Managed, like Shawn and chafe at it sorely? Insist on “spontaneity” while my calendar goes soggy from disuse? We’ll bomb that bridge when we come to it.


    Thinking about Devon all afternoon. “So sweetly cold, so deadly fair!!!” (Byron) Really stupid. It’s like those chicks fixating on the first beak they see.


    Plumly – Sun 10 Mar 68
    “A character’s recognition, through the force of circumstance of the truth about himself is one of the classic themes of comedy” Walter Allen, NY Times Book Review.


    Me at Juilliard. Get ready to laugh. I panicked at the institutionality of it all. Don’t want a building; was hoping for an ocean or a green field. Got through the audition but they’re going to hate me. John Housman told me to “pretend I was in the shower” and I froze. What the hell did THAT mean? Well, I didn’t figure it out. Should I strip? I sang instead which I’m fairly certain is NOT what he meant.


    Depression not helped by Preston’s inept kisses, his damp limp hand throughout Guys & Dolls. Everyone envious of us as a “beautiful couple” but I couldn’t get him to apply pressure. Uh oh. This bodes ill, ill, ill for everything else. In memory Shawn tears apart my Lurex stockings to kiss my blue-veined legs.


    I looked good I have to say. I wore a gorgeous white and silver glittery dress, white stockings and white six-strap heels. The most glorious part of the entire evening was fleeing this lousy institution in his father’s car instead of returning to my sex-starved roommate (same gender as me!)


    We wander in the park at 1 AM in parka & boots over party wear. Steam rising out of the ground looked like Fall of the House of Usher. I climbed the rock wall to the art museum while Preston stared at me. Alas, he is no fun. A mad-haired spectacle was I. He says my nerves look like Francis Scott Key’s flag which is probably right. But I was NOT in the mood for psychoanalysis. Will I survive this place? Because it is winning.


    Thinking about Devon all afternoon. “So sweetly cold, so deadly fair!!!” (Byron) Really stupid. It’s like those chicks fixating on the first beak they see.


    “A character’s recognition, through the force of circumstance of the truth about himself is one of the classic themes of comedy” Walter Allen, NY Times Book Review.


    That’s me at Juilliard. Get ready to laugh. I panicked at the institutionality of it all. Don’t want a building; was hoping for an ocean or a green field. Got through the audition but they’re going to hate me. John Housman told me to “pretend I was in the shower” and I froze. What the hell did THAT mean? Well, I didn’t figure it out. Should I strip? I sang instead which I’m fairly certain is NOT what he meant.


    Depression not helped by Preston’s inept kisses, his damp limp hand throughout Guys & Dolls. Everyone envious of us as a “beautiful couple” but I couldn’t get him to apply pressure. Uh oh. This bodes ill, ill, ill for everything else. In memory Shawn tears apart my Lurex stockings to kiss my blue-veined legs.


    I looked good I have to say. I wore a gorgeous white and silver glittery dress, white stockings and white six-strap heels. The most glorious part of the entire evening was fleeing this lousy institution in his father’s car instead of returning to my sex-starved roommate (same sex as me!)


    We wander in the park at 1 AM in parka & boots over party wear. Steam rising out of the ground looked like Fall of the House of Usher. I climbed the rock wall to the art museum while Preston stared at me. Alas, he is no fun. A mad-haired spectacle was I. He says my nerves look like Francis Scott Key’s flag which is probably right. But I was NOT in the mood for psychoanalysis. Will I survive this place? Because it is winning.


    Preston said he liked the sound of my dress. At least. He brought me the candy bar that used to be my favorite. It no longer is.


    Tues 12 Mar 68
    It is SNOWING outside. Final proof the world’s gone mad. Yesterday so spring-like Casey & I played tennis. Sat I lay in the lower field coated with Bain de Soleil!
    Vibrating like a wire over second mug of gray coffee.


    Thurs. 14 Mar 68
    Last day before vacances and I seem to have a fever. Sore throat ripped by endless scream, ears popping, the works. Getting out of class the only benefit. So no date for me. (Word for the day: Nacré. Means mother of pearl. Oh so beautiful. )


    No date, but perhaps champagne. Casey and I looked at this enormous bottle (a magnum) and decided it was just what the doctor ordered. Invited Rob Severn (English exchange student) and Bob Burke (black eyebrows, long golden hair from Kenya or someplace) down to the Greenwood to drink it with us. They said they’d be delighted. Smuggled it in a Gimbels shopping bag. It was gone in about 10 mins! (Very grapey stuff.) Did make me feel better however. Unfortunately Burke threw me to the ground, tried to drag me to a shed and stuck his hand right up under my turtleneck. We are in the same weight class: I successfully fought him off.


    Severn offered to show him how to behave, I said “please” and he kissed me beautifully. Very nice. I was regretfully forced to tell him I had probably given him typhoid but it was thoughtful of him to risk it. He invited Casey into the shed; she went. Burke said he would like typhoid too. I had to say no. I guess I am not as starved as I thought I was.

    Pewter Hill – Sun. Midnight 17 Mar 68
    Just read my diary for ’67 instead of writing my Special Project paper. Nauseating. What a boring idiotic little child I was. Pathetic. There is anguish associated with diaries and no mistake. This poor body is one raw nerve. Preston came over last night, I was too weak to make the first move so No Move Was Made. Shouldn’t there be SOMETHING between fighting for your life and fainting from boredom?


    Saw his Yeomen of the Guard last night – Preston a very fetching spear-carrier. We saw Closely Watched Trains, came home, made coffee & hamburgers. I told him he didn’t miss anything with the champagne. Was a movie about a shy boy’s fear of impotence the best possible choice? (The best thing about it: Czechs don’t use extras, they use people.) Tried to discuss film (did not like it as much as Loves of a Blonde) but could hear Mom & Dad humping upstairs. Probably working on some kind of manual the doctor gave them. Thanks folks. Preston obviously embarrassed left early.

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Sun 21 Jan 68


    “We are but a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass…” Jesse Colin Young


    Casey & I took a 2-hour walk past the Granolithic into the orchards and fields. Now I sit at my wobbly desk looking out of the window at a world warped by radiator fumes. Where will I be a year from now when some other poor wretch sits chained to this piece of lumber? Already I’ve escaped, imagining its spring and hot, and I’m wearing a short blue dress. It’s the tea party at Master Gwill’s after Hamlet (I played Gertrude) and Shawn and I are in love. Ah, memories.


    McKenzie compliments me on my dress when I go into dinner – did I just buy it? God now, I said. I’ve had it 2 years.


    Lucky you, she says, to have a closetful of beautiful clothes you never wear. I remember when you used to pull out eight things and ask me what to wear for Beales…


    Shudder at THAT memory! Beales was constitutionally unpleasable. He used to get so angry! I now see that is a pathetic state of affairs.


    Wed 24 Jan 68
    Diaries are a horror. I could write and write and write and never get it all said. Plus I sometimes feel like a Current President forced to continue the policies of the Last President. Why can’ I be completely fresh & new? Original? Well, it wouldn’t be a diary, that’s why, it would just be a Notebook and guess what? I have plenty of those.

    Diaries

    I don’t remember anything
    I’m an amnesiac so
    I wrote it down
    Stuffed in my closet
    Among discarded ballgowns
    (smells much the same)
    utterly useless but
    too beautiful to throw away
    I only recall
    The act of writing
    An up and over downtime scrawl
    As I recall the surgeon
    Cutting at my face
    tugging splitting flesh
    he peeled the wastage out.
    I recall fierce
    Liftoff
    In the writing
    Too much dig is waste
    It’s only what remains that’s
    Valuable.

    Three tests in my next three classes. I don’t have to worry about French – no matter how poorly I do everyone will always do worse – but History – “Manifest Destiny” – I have not studied at all.

    Then there’s the outrage of philosophy where I have to pander to a lot of theories I can’t accept.

    Contrary to Plato there is no actual “truth”. Some things are just truer than other things. It is truer that I am at Plumly than In Paris, for example. Also, meaning changes – a fact that bothered Plato but does not bother me in the least. I mean, of course.


    Plato is deeply obnoxious. He says somewhere exists a “perfect” everything – a perfect cat for example – yet “beauty” is a matter of opinion. This makes my brain bubble. I suspect my perfect cat and Plato’s cat are different animals. My perfect cat would eat his perfect cat.

    Don’t even get me started about math; the only part I respect are Imaginary Numbers. Socrates said it best: to hell with the universe.


    Reading Huxley’s Point Counterpoint about which the only thing I like is its name. He falls into every literary trap there is; too many places, people, names. Everyone seems to want to write a Panorama of Modern Civilization. This is Tolstoy’s fault. Cakes & Ale made me gnash my teeth. Yesterday I finished Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Shawn’s recommendation). Feel sorry for the guy; a brilliant boy suffering from over education. He seeks freedom, meaning and – women, who have to wear high heels while they make love. They HAVE to! Otherwise he’ll TANTRUM!


    Dinner at Master Gwill’s. The boys are punishing me for what I “did” to Dan. Except for Ed, Chip & Martin. They are always nice. Unfortunately my efforts to become a Noble Savage fail. Can think about nothing but food & sex. Worked Miss Lissome over at coffee, disagreeing with everything she said.


    Sat. 27 Jan 68 – Pewter Hill

    Movie orgy! Casey and I awake to NO bells, NO workjobs, NO faculty screams of abuse. Instead, peace, classical music, fresh grapefruit, good coffee, English muffins. (At Plumly only seniors are allowed to have coffee. You wait for four years lusting in you heart and then when you get it you realize it’s AWFUL. But you’re too proud and exhausted to tell the others.)


    Last night we saw The Graduate – true true true plus wild & romantic. (Dustin Hoffman dead ringer for Beales.) This afternoon How I Won the War with John Lennon. Then Casey wants to run around Rittenhouse Square Seeing and Being seen and I want to sit in a café and stare. I don’t get my identity back that fast, is all. “You always ruin my fun,” she pouts.


    Mon 29 Jan 68

    Listening to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Casey starts sobbing incoherently. She says she waits and waits but no one ever comes. I know what just what she means. Instead of protesting my fate I draw thirteen flowers on my upper thigh. Thirteen. “The thing of it is” – fine Pinteresque phrase – the thing of it is I should be DIETING but my only joy is food. Conundrum.


    Trying to do my senior thesis on Sex Offenders (Kinsey) but they are the dullest people you can possibly imagine. (Psychopathia Sexualis way more interesting.) “6% attempted intromission”. Learned one good word: “pudenda”. “Dearest Theobald, the spring pudenda are in full flower! How I wish you could be here to see them!” Or possibly, “Pudenda Pottencrest felt a premonitory shiver as she crossed the threshold of the old house…”

    Bertrand Russell says we need sex so we can concentrate on our studies but who listens to him? Insomnia. Ginger Man nauseatingly self-conscious. Tried Growing Up Absurd but Paul Goodman (author) told me it was only for boys because girls don’t have problems. News to me. He keeps wailing about advertising but in my view (judging from New York Times Mag & New Yorker) the ads are a lot more interesting (and subtler) than the articles.


    Several interesting letters from Devon in one envelope. The first, “written in a moment of weakness” looks like he was drunk. He’s romantic, I’ll give him that, in an Elvira Madigan kind of way. Dad was furious that those two committed suicide. He said if you really loved somebody you’d do anything to keep them alive and I think I prefer his philosophy. For Devon everything is Hopeless. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. He is in search of Plato’s perfect mountain, perfect skis, perfect run, perfect physical conditioning and its nothing but failure, failure, failure. Cheery. Do I love him only because he’s beautiful? No, he’s intelligent, too. (Amherst.) But he’s TOO beautiful…I don’t need to pursue Plato’s Perfect Skier. Think I found him. But can a boy from an all-boy family and a girl from an all-girl family be friends? I think I want to love someone who knows nothing of my past. When I say, “I was such an ugly child,” I don’t want them chiming in, “You sure were.”


    I won’t write back. (Tactics.)


    Fri 2 Feb 68

    Silenced. No library “privileges”. Can’t ask Miss Womrath for a favor, my parents for money or discuss “college plans” with Miss Liveright. This school stopped being “the school for me” long about my sophomore year but my parents refuse to hear it. If only Mom were more like Daddy – if I got expelled he would just accept it. How to rip the lid off all this fake coziness? Plumly hates artists (on principle! “Self indulgent!”) Well, they can mete out punishment (detention hall) but my mind is mine alone. Genevieve hated this place by the time she left (attacked me for believing the very things she spent freshman – sophomore year drilling into me!) but she wasn’t honest about it (and she got into Wellesley) so M & D think it was “a big success”. (At Wellesley she studied psych; calls M & D “schizophrenic”. But not to their faces.)


    Just recovering from a long crying session (as you can probably tell.) Hate all my classes and slept through study hall. “We shouldn’t have all these warped people in charge of everything” says Casey. Amen, sister. Detention hall’s in the collecting room – no one can sleep in there. Rush hour at the Gare St Lazare.


    Mon. 5 Feb 68
    Pewter Hill Sunday lunch, Avril helping me learn Aston’s lobotomy speech. Acting like skiing, building from the inside out. Horrible cold bath – water-heating system not working (as usual which Mom the Masochist refuses to believe. “You need to let it run,” she says. Believe me I have let it run.) Marcel Marceau in town – we got to go. Some new pieces. Ran into Dr Gilmour on the way out, she said she was HOPING I would get to see this!!!


    Called into Miss Womrath’s office for cutting Vespers. She says the Student of Yesteryear would Never Have Dreamed, etc. She just wants me to grovel, which she won’t get. I am appalled that this place is run by these strange inhuman beings. (Miss Beeston is senile but since she “only teaches French” they don’t care.) Boys are suspended for long hair and thirty years ago they were suspended for crew cuts!! Finished Avalon – everybody settled for less than they had dreamed of in their youth. And Quiet Flows the Don next.


    Wed 7 Feb 68
    Liked Pinter’s The Basement so much I want to make a movie of it. Such insane simplicity!


    Sun 11 Feb 68
    Casey was babysitting for Master Gwill – went over to watch Jean Claude Killy ski in the Olympics. Exciting! Le Superman! Everyone comparing him and Karl Schranz but I say there’s no comparison. Sat NYC trip! Everything that COULD go wrong yesterday, WENT. Unfortunately station wagon had no heat and my feet were freezing. 12 degrees outside!!! Refused to sit with Peter who called me an “incorrigible bitch”. (Like all shy boys once you finally get them talking you can’t get in a word edgewise.)


    Toured the Met, saw all the Greek stuff and more medieval stuff than is good for me then met with the others for lunch. Bought two candy bars to beef up boxed lunch. Then the Ballet of Don Quixote. The plot is: Quixote & Panza watch everybody dance! I kid you not! Costumes pretty good, but bordering on Tyrolean as if extras wandered in from another show. Still, I’d go to the theatre every night if I could.


    Vol I of “The Don” NOT making me want to plunge into Vol II. Prefer Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (unreadable intro by Sartre. Turns out I am not an existentialist.)


    Mon 12 Feb 68
    2 Plumly students killed & 2 injured in bad accident on the turnpike yesterday – truck jumped the median. People I talked to are lying dead in a morgue someplace. First class was a “memorial” – we sat silent. I try to think holy thoughts — difficult looking right at the harpies on the facing bench.


    11:20 PM Fifty pages into The Golden Bough. Don’t see how his logic operates. And it’s the source of my Bible Independent Study!!


    Tues 13 Feb 1968
    Third period study hall. Struggling with Bible. Do not believe in God or an afterlife but if I was blind would I disbelieve in the world others tell me is there? But religion I reject utterly.


    Thurs 15 Feb 68
    A typical Thurs morning meeting – exercise in amateur rebellion & spiritual emptiness. Girls Collection seated first. On Sundays we can sit co-ed, on Thursdays we are segregated. Casey and I sit together (illegally- you’re supposed to sit the way you came in.) I guess we’re supposed to be grateful we don’t have to kneel on peas on the frozen flagstones.

    My “prosperity” Chinese medallion chain (probably not real gold) is in hundreds of knots so at least I have something interesting to occupy myself. (Usually I sleep). “No fingernails” I think disgustedly as I pick at the chain.


    DeeDee shoots to her feet; she wants to talk about Vietnam; has to get it right out or she’ll be too nervous. (She’s against it.) Drone, drone. Tries to tie the Viet Cong and our Recent Dead in some kind of incomprehensible pretzel.


    Deep silence follows. I finish the chain and put it on. Susie Thos ahead of me is pretending to be bent over in deep meditation but is secretly conversing with the girl next to her. People shuffle, sigh and scratch their necks.


    Maggie Brown drawing a flower on her leg while the harridans seethe. Sarah Gould leaps to her feet. She is a “kook” and dates “kooks”. Rambling question (to God?) about how “making out is an expression of love and how can love ever be wrong?”


    Miss Womrath tries to re-start her heart, discovers she doesn’t have one. I admire Sarah for laying herself open to attack. Also for her athletic body, which we are all, admiring. Somebody else stands up to distinguish between “kissing” and “making out.” Kissing good, making out bad. Lips good, hands worse.


    Charity Dellabrook vaults to her feet. She was all happy this morning she says but she feels guilty about being happy around all these somber faces.


    Fri 16 Feb 68
    Finished Our Lady over breakfast; turning it over in my mind. I think it’s one of the most exciting books I’ve ever read for it insights into the creative brain. Honesty and originality are the only words for Genet. I neither thought these characters depraved nor pitied them. I’d call Maggie of Mill on the Floss more “perverted” than Divine. Readers deserve to be trusted (Pinter is expert at this.) So exciting makes me want to rush to the typewriter and work on “Dr Stavanger.”

  • Wild With Possibility: teen diaries of Alysse Aallyn

    Just after midnight Fri 3 Nov 67


    Writing by candlelight on my desk’s dark blue blotter. Need to get to bed by one – 45 mins. Loafed hideously through study hall – did manage to finish Nick & Alex. Tried Gertrude Lawrence’s autobio but she is just too stupid – plucked every hair of her eyebrows and said “Darling” all the time ugh. Turned to Princess but got only as far as the annulment chapter before I realized she is just not leveling with us. All this “Dr. M” stuff. Dr. Mabuse? Sometimes there are things we won’t even admit to ourselves (Nietzsche says our own treasure is the last we dig up.)

    Poor Alexandra – what did she get for her icons and prayers? Rasputin! “Sunny” was married to “Bloody Nicholas”! We should neither envy nor condemn. Human beings are poor wet butterflies crawling along the grass, flapping useless wings in terror. Marie at least seemed to know she was a broodmare. Poor Marie, bruised by her cloth of silver corsets. Poor Grand Duchesses unprotected by their diamond armor… at least I have my privacy. Seems so precious now!

    20 short days we move into Pewter Hill! Can’t wait to sit at my desk at the top of the house watching dusk creep across the park! If the air is pregnant with snow I will have all that I need for Perfect Happiness.

    Sun 5 Nov 67
    Quite a weekend. Saw Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and Bonnie and Clyde the latter leading to a very unpleasant date with Vincent Plevins where he lay with his head in my lap for an hour and a half and sobbed about his childhood. I’m ashamed & horrified & planning to never mention it again – hoping he feels the same.

    B & C is a work of art – Casey wept at the end – I controlled myself with Iron Will (I’m especially ugly when I cry.) Certainly puts the sting back into death. Warren Beatty forgot a couple times he wasn’t playing Splendor in the Grass but that woman who played Blanche was very good. Gnomish CW with his squirming mouth & elusive eyes. The film defies discussion. Violence turning people into animals. Master Gwill went on and on about guns being phallic symbols while I tried very hard not to listen.

    Didn’t like the opening – just another naked dissatisfied blonde – but at least the love scenes were beautifully controlled. “Hollywood” was resisted.  PM says no one will fall for “triumph over impotence” at the end. I’m not sure. Surely it represents their safety with each other rather than actual sex act. To me the most beautiful scene in the film is when Bonnie has “the blues” and Clyde puts his whole hand over her face. They need each other – love emanates from each desperate being.

    None of us agreed on The Final Look. PM = “panic”. Jack B = “We’ve got to keep driving”. I think they said different things – Clyde = “it’s over” and Bonnie = “I’m here with you. We’ll die together.”

    Master Gwill took us out for ice cream after the film but Jack couldn’t stop yammering. The Truth is SILENCE.

    Fri play rehearsal was cancelled so I hitched a ride to Media Station with Lindles. After a brisk walk from the Queen Lane Station I arrived at the house at 5:45. Dad immediately shoved a glass of wine into my hand.

    Matt Romer called me up – offered to drive me back and see Don’t Look Back. I really wanted to see it but Dan has taught me how miserable I can be with someone I don’t like. Still, Matt said a lot of kids were coming so I agreed. Hope Matt didn’t think I was avoiding him but I was. He asked why I was so silent: “Thinking about the movie.”

    We were late getting back – had to call Casey to check me in. I’ve got to stop being honest and start to LIE she warns me. She is probably right since all I get for my honor is a pile of detens.
    James Cleland of Duke U in chapel for Vespers. He was adorable – he’s all for “individualizing” religion says they’re all the same anyway! He ruefully observed that the older you get the more you need it.

    I think people over-estimate their own resiliency. B & C couldn’t see what they were getting into. We are never as free as we think we are. I used to not understand why people kill themselves when the world is so wonderful and you can always start over. But now I see it’s a question of the Rot – how far it has gotten. Once you have polluted your soul there may be no turning back.

    Mon. 6 Nov 67
    I tried to sleep. Finished Princess, checked a few references with N&A, then lay listening to the girls calling each other down the halls like lovebirds. The inner life of a private school.
    Closest to miserable depression today in quite awhile. My headache filed me with such agony my whole body shook. Recalling when M & D wouldn’t allow aspirin because “you don’t need to be all drugged up!” (They disapprove of throat drops also.)

    Out on the courts my hands were beet red and would not hold a racket. Hit the ball your racket spins. Felt like an animal on a treadmill! Nasty tennis. Run around the courts – a bit better – back in my room for orange tea. Reading about the Trials of the Russian Aristocracy. They were a bunch of idiots who don’t know where money comes from, sad to say.

    Tues. 7 Nov 67
    50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution! I was timer at hockey giving me the opportunity to write two letters while sitting hunched in a blanket. Not a bad job. Any job that allows writing is a good job. Also details of Eisenhower’s visit (he landed his helicopter on the lawn!) including movies seen & books read. Etc etc. Acquitted self of All Social Obligation.

    (Toss Sheffield asked Eisenhower what’s a soldier to do when asked to fight in an unjust war? Ex-Pres waffled.)

    How I wished that I’d brought YOU. You wouldn’t think an old paper notebook could affect one’s life so profoundly, would you? Yet you have. For example, I can’t write letters unless I haven’t written here! Not only do I hate repeating myself – I don’t know what I think until I see it written HERE. Maybe what I need is a piece of carbon paper…Note to Self…

    I remember being jealous of people who did NOT keep diaries I felt like such a slave. Breathed a sigh of relief as the SS France sailed past the statue of Liberty – certain I’d made my last entry ever. The Morocco diaries require an Iron Stomach to reread. But I spoke too soon – I was addicted! I have reached the supreme peak of egoism: nothing happens unless I write it down.

    Wed. 8 Nov 67
    Things never work out the way they are planned! This eve I was going to get so much done. Wash hair & set, do homework and reading. Instead I waste time talking to people. Suddenly got the idea for short story called To Bed In the Afternoon about a frigid woman. I tried to write it all down – typewriter ribbon all screwed up. I give her grandfather Granny’s bedroom, which I can clearly see.

    Matt Romer playing Husband #2 calls up to ask me to help him with his part. Put him off – grabbed Eva La Gallienne’s autobio put myself under the hairdryer and start to read. Awful. Dull in the Extreme. Mom & Dad off to NYC to see Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead the lucky devils. Nothing to show for 3 hrs but clean hair ad a foul temper. I could have worked on Christmas cards! When I break promises to myself I fear I am becoming flighty.

    Miss Cluny gave me & Casey a pineapple that made our mouths bleed. Now I am struggling with the correspondence of Mrs Patrick Campbell & GB Shaw but I am having trouble keeping the 900 characters straight. They would rather scald their souls then open them to one another. Much fashionably empty Evelyn Waugh double-talk.

    Sun 12 Nov 67
    Getting upset over people. Hate to see Aynsley turning into a bigoted old lady but she is. At dorm meeting we all plead for unlimited late lights and faculty shoots it down every time. Aynsley sides with them! She snapped at me “You yourself have acted terrible after getting what you want” right in front of everyone! Uh oh! This is my roommate!


    She told Casey she felt sorry for C if she roomed with me because I hadn’t “grown up.” Well I don’t plan to turn into Miss Womrath if that’s what growing up amounts to! I was just seething! Aynsley herself hasn’t an iota of personal discipline and always needs help to do her homework! (Which I don’t give her so she is constantly in Lindles’ or McKenzie’s rooms.)


    Certain Sarah Lawrence won’t let her in Casey also is a slave to convention (she has nightmares about college entrance exams) – kowtowing frantically to the sadistic old women who run this place. Makes me burn to even TRY to please these old bags. But they won’t let me room by myself! Damn.


    Tues 13 Nov 67
    Senior Play went remarkably well (although my mother commented loudly that I had never held a broom in my life which is NOT TRUE.) Fun driving around Philly after though Far from the Madding Crowd no good. Terence Stamp couldn’t save it.


    Today on the other hand was One of Those Days. Master Gwill insisted I rewrite my paper on The Lark misunderstanding every point I tried to make. (I thought it was funny to write my paper in the style of the play. He did not.) I don’t think I CAN write criticism. All his compliments were just sops to my disappointment. Had that awful, “I’m going to cry” feeling but I couldn’t get away from Master Gwill who kept stumbling after me still talking and making things worse.


    Tried to excuse myself saying I’d had a rough day – more compliments emptier and emptier – God it was awful. He obviously thinks I’m a helpless birdbrain. I was 20 mins late to History but he gave me a note.


    Everyone could tell I’d been crying! Awful. I am always morbidly ashamed and at war with myself after these outbursts. I guess I am insanely moody – one day all smiles and Tra la la the next deepest, darkest gloom. Guess I am too emotional to be a true intellectual. Maybe no creative person can look at reality in a dispassionate light. Why should we want to?


    A journal such as this presents the ridiculous side of life much as I try to embroider & give it meaning. Success? Failure? Only I can solve this conundrum.


    Thursday, 16 November 1967
    Oh wherefore in my heart that was so hard hast thou these tender places made to come? (For Kip. From me, courtesy of Shakespeare.)


    Senior Checkout in the New Gym. We stood around and bounced tennis balls while I thought, there must be more to life than this. Then we ran around the floor several times. If I had a scrap of honesty left in my being I would have walked out. But I’ve been too well indoctrinated. I gritted my teeth and thought, if I waited four years I can wait a half hour, but baby, mentally I’m already gone.
    In a Russian mood reading Clara Milich and Oblomov. Oblomov is delightful – the scenes between Zahar and his master make me laugh out loud.


    Kip and I have been on a collision course for the past few months. We keep colliding, veering off, going to other people. I stopped answering Bloy’s letters so he wrote to the school to find out where I am! Then he wrote me a really angry letter. Then he sent me a picture of him and his girlfriend dressed up for a dance. She’s the exact opposite of me in every known human way, so you go figure it out. I’m ”off “ relationships right now.


    Monday, 27 November 1967
    English next period – quel nightmare. That is an all Herman Melville class – love him or leave him, with a teacher who does not allow a “careful disorderliness” about the enterprise.


    Thanksgiving was wonderful. I gave thanks for my unorthodox family, my excellent education (I make up the deficits) my inquiring mind, interesting face and good figure. Avril and I went for a walk and locked ourselves out. I had to climb the rose trellis and get in the third-floor bathroom.


    I decided to kill sentimentality and destroyed all my love-letters – even from Dan who wrote the best ones so far. Not Reed’s KOBs though – they’re not really about me but they’re too good on their own to destroy. I’m sure he didn’t even keep copies, just tossed them off in free verse.


    I read the whole of To Die at Noone and Kip and Preston both “dropped in” to see what condition my condition was in – both unfortunately on the same night. So, it was duel a trois with neither of them wanting to be the first to leave and Kip talking about how he was going to Harvard early placement (wrestling scholarship) and trying to make Preston, who attends a high school so hopelessly progressive that they have no grades – feel bad.


    Finally Kip had to go first because he had his father’s car (Preston takes train.) So I made out with Preston till about two in the morning as a kind of frustration-revenge-rage thing. He said he loved me and I liked hearing it, but I couldn’t honestly say it back. Reading Easty’s Method Acting. If I did things his way I’d go insane.