Loneliness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I slept until ten-thirty, awoke and watched television while I carefully made up my face (for whom?), went downstairs and gorged myself on a Texas brunch of pancakes, sausages, and grits, put on my bathing suit (which was growing tighter and tighter), and baked in the sun for two hours or so. Then I swam in the pool for five minutes and went back upstairs to confront my “work.” But I found it nearly impossible to work. The loneliness of writing terrified me. I looked for every excuse to escape. I had no sense of myself as a writer and no faith in my ability to write. I could not see then that I had been writing all my life. I had begun composing and illustrating little stories when I was eight. I had kept a journal from the age of ten. I was an avid and ironic letter-writer from age thirteen, and I consciously aped the letters of Keats and G.B.S. throughout my adolescence. At seventeen, when I went to Japan with my parents and sisters, I dragged along my Olivetti portable and spent every evening recapitulating the day’s observations into a loose-leaf notebook. I began to publish poems in small literary magazines during my senior year in college (where I won most of the poetry prizes and edited the literary magazine). And yet despite the obvious fact that I was obsessed with writing, despite publications and despite letters from literary agents asking whether I was “working on a novel,” I didn’t really believe in the seriousness of my commitment at all. Instead, I had allowed myself to be shunted into graduate school. Graduate school was supposed to be safe. Graduate school was supposed to be the thing that you got “under your belt” (like a baby?) before you settled down to writing. What an obvious swindle it now seems! But then it seemed prudent, wise, and responsible. I was such a compulsive good girl that my professors were always dangling fellowships before me. I longed to turn them down but hadn’t the guts to—so I wasted two and a half years on an M.A. and part of a Ph.D. before it occurred to me that graduate school was seriously interfering with my education. Marrying Bennett sprung me from graduate school. I took a leave of absence to follow him into the army. What else could I do? It wasn’t that I wanted to give up my fellowship—it was History giving me a boot in the ass. Marrying Bennett also got me away from New York and away from my mother and away from the Graduate English Department at Columbia and away from my ex-husband and away from my ex-boyfriends—all of whom had come to seem identical in my mind. I wanted out. I wanted escape. And Bennett was the vehicle for it.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Jolly good, jolly good.’ He also indulged the mirror’s grouping of us for a moment, his eye flinching from the stare of the taller Lewis, who hung about behind us. There was evidently a strange, and I thought pathetic, story behind all this. ‘Let’s go into the library,’ Charles said, pushing me forward as a kind of support. ‘We’ll have tea in there, Lewis, please.’ ‘You do realise I’m cleaning the silver?’ Lewis complained. ‘Well, it won’t hurt to have a break—and I’m sure you’d like a cup yourself, you know. Then you can get back to cleaning the silver; what’s left of it.’ Lewis gave him a calculating nod, and retreated without a word. We went on into the room on the left of the front door. Library seemed a grand term for a room that, like all the rooms in the house, was modest-sized; but it was stuffed with books. Some were housed in a handsome break-fronted bookcase with Gothic windows; others furnished shelves and tabletops, or were stacked up like hypocaust pillars across the floor. If the room had once been panelled, it was no more. The walls were white, and above the door a pink and grey pediment had been painted, perhaps as a trompe l’oeil relief; within it classical figures posed, and it was almost with embarrassment that I noticed that exaggerated phalluses protruded in each case from toga and tunic. ‘Funny little chaps, aren’t they?’ said Charles, who was hohumming his way towards a chair. ‘Come and sit down, my dear, and we can have some chit-chat. I’ve had no one to talk to for ages, you see.’ We sat on either side of the empty grate in which a huge jug of bulrushes and peacock feathers stood. Above the mantelpiece, with its little brass carriage clock, hung a life-size chalk drawing of a black boy, just the head and shoulders, a slight smile and large, speaking eyes conveying happiness and loyalty. ‘So, have you been at the Corinthian Club today?’ ‘No—I prefer to go in the evenings. I’ll drop in after I leave here.’ ‘Hmm. There’s more going on in the evenings, wouldn’t you say. Actually, I think it can get too crowded. And some of the people are so rude and hasty, don’t you find? Some young thug called me an old wanker the other day. What do you do—argue or try to be witty? I said I’m way past that, I can assure you. But he didn’t smile, you know. It’s so terrible when people don’t smile. It seems to be a new thing …’ I pictured the old boy’s determined, naked totterings around the changing-room.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  After divorce a surprising number of otherwise well-functioning adults reach out to children for help with their grown-up problems. In Karen’s case, this kind of behavior became the norm, leading her into the role of caretaker child. But in many families, the reversal of parent and child roles is more or less temporary, albeit shocking. One father told me that he revealed all his business and personal plans in Castro-like lectures to his seven-year-old son who “understands everything.” In our playroom, this child’s play consisted of running a Mack truck over a little car. Parents who are otherwise mature and responsible in their social and professional commitments will choose to be vulnerable in front of their children. Suddenly they place tremendous stock in the child’s opinion—even when the child knows absolutely nothing about the issue at hand. Thus the adult will ask for advice about a lover, how and where to live, whether or not to remarry, and whom to choose. Others share their disappointments in love with very young children. I was startled when Sammy, who was four, comforted his grieving mother whose lover had just left by saying, “He shouldn’t quit in the middle. That’s not right.” The parents’ motives are not hard to understand. Even women who choose to leave their marriages and have successful careers will feel alone and beleaguered as they face new responsibilities and have to make decisions alone, without advice from a partner. Men are also depressed and lonely at this time. They need help setting up a home for themselves and to be reassured that their children want to see them. Men and women alike feel isolated and alienated from former friends who may be reluctant to take sides—and thus stay away from both. Other friends are concerned about the cracks in their own marriages and will keep a safe distance. Family members often disapprove of the divorce and do not hesitate to say so. Feeling hurt and defeated, each parent naturally turns to the children as their most loyal confidants. Both rely heavily on their offspring for sympathy and companionship. These youngsters literally help keep the parents going. They are remarkably intuitive about adult depression and protect their parents from pressures outside and inside the home. Twenty-five years after divorce, many men and women still say to me, “I would not have made it except for this child.” Given how emotionally dependent on their children many parents become, it’s not surprising to see bitter custody or visitation fights over who has priority in the child’s life.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We wrote each other a fe w times. I confided to Norman that I was very apprehensive about the reception of Giovanni's Room, and he was good enough to write some very encour aging things about it when it came out. The critics had jumped on him with both their left fe et when he published THE BLACK BOY LOOKS AT THE WHITE BOY 275 The Deer Park-which I still had not read-and this created a kind of bond, or strengthened the bond already existing between us. About a year and several overflowing wastebaskets later, I, too, returned to America, not vastly improved by hav ing been out of it, but not knowing where else to go; and one day, while I was sitting dully in my house, Norman called me from Connecticut. A fe w people were going to be there fo r the weekend-and he wanted me to come, too. We had not seen each other since Paris. Well, I wanted to go, that is, I wanted to see Norman; but I did not want to sec any people, and so the tone of my acceptance was not very enthusiastic. I realized that he fe lt this, but I did not know what to do about it. He gave me train schedules and hung up. Getting to Connecticut would have been no hassle if I could have pulled myself together to get to the train. And I was sorry, as I meandered around my house and time flew and trains left, that I had not been more honest with Norman and told him exactly how I felt. But I had not known how to do this, or it had not really occurred to me to do it, especially not over the phone. So there was another phone call, I fo rget who called whom, which went something like this: N: Don't fe el you have to. I'm not trying to bug you. ]: It's not that. It's just- N: You don't really want to come, do you? ]: I don't really fe el up to it. N: I understand. I guess you just don't like the Connecticut gentry. ]: Well-don't you ever come to the city? N: Sure. We'll see each other. ]: I hope so. I'd like to see you. N: Okay, till then. And he hung up. I thought, I ought to write him a letter, but of course I did nothing of the sort. It was around this time I went South, I think; anyway, we did not sec each other fo r a long time.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced. The American Negro cannot explain to the African what surely seems in himself to be a want of manliness, of racial pride, a maudlin ability to forgive . It is difficult to make clear that he is not seeking to forfeit his birthright as a black man, but that, on the contrary, it is precisely this birthright which he is struggling to recognize and make articulate. Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in relation to his past he is most American, that this depthless alienation fr om oneself and one's people is, in sum, the Amer ican experience. Yet one day he will face his home again; nor can he realis tically expect to find overwhelming changes. In America, it is 90 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON true, the appearance is perpetually changing, each generation greeting with short-lived exultation yet more dazzling addi tions to our renowned fa�ade. But the ghetto, anxiety, bitter ness, and guilt continue to breed their indescribable complex of tensions. What time will bring Americans is at last their own identity. It is on this dangerous voyage and in the same boat that the American Negro will make peace with himself and with the voiceless many thousands gone before him. A Qu estion of Identity T HE AMERICAN student colony in Paris is a social phe nomenon so amorphous as to at once demand and defY the generality. One is far from being in the position of finding not enough to saF0ne-60hlar__iOo mtiCh, and - - everything one fi�g - �_c _ ontradictory. What one wants to know at bot tom,-is what they came to find: to which question there are at least-as many answers as there are faces at the cafe tables. The assumed common denominator, which is their military experience, does not shed on this question as much light as one might hope. For one thing, it becomes impossible, the moment one thinks about it, to predicate the existence of a common experie1� The momerlt one thinks about it, it be comes apparent that there-Is-no such thing.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What he had been speaking of was some thing more direct and less isolated than the line in which my imagination immediately began to move. The distortions used lw African artists to create a work of art are not at all the same distortions which have become one of the principal aims of almo st every artist in the West today. (They are not the same distortions even when they have been copied from Africa.) And this was due entirely to the different situations in which each had his being. Poems and stories, in the only situation I know anything about, were never to ld, except, rarely, to chil dren, and, at the risk of mayhem, in bars. They were written to be read, alone, and by a handful of people at that-there was really beginning to be something suspect in being read lw more than a handful. These creations no mor e insisted on the actual presence of other hu man beings than they de manded the collabor ation of a dancer and a dr um. They could not be said to celebr ate the society any more than the homage which \Vcstcrn artists sometimes receive can be said to have PRINCES AN D POWER S 151 anything to do with society's celebration of a work of art. The only thing in Western life which seemed even faintly to ap proximate Senghor's intense sketch of the creative interde pendence, the active, actual, joyful intercourse obtaining among Afri can artists and what only a Westerner would call their public, was the atmosphere sometimes created among jazz musicians and their fans during, say, a jam session. But the ghastly isolation of the jazz musician, the ne urotic inten sity of his listeners, was proof enough that what Senghor meant when he spoke of social art had no reality whatever in Western life. He was speaking out of his past, which had been lived where art was naturally and spontaneously social, where artistic creation did not presuppose divorce . (Yet he was not there. Here he was, in Paris, speaking the adopted language in which he also wrote his poetr y.) Just what the specific relation of an artist to his cultur e says about that culture is a very pretty question.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This change was vast and deep and sinister. For the first time in human history, a man was reduced not merely to a thing but to a thing the value of which was de termined, absolutely, by that thing's commercial value. That this pragmatic principle dictated the slaughter of the native American, the enslavement of the black and the monumental rape of Africa-to say nothing of creating the wealth of the Western world-no one, I suppose, will now attempt to deny. But this principle also raped and starved Ireland, for ex ample, as well as Latin America, and it controlled the pens of the men who signed the Decla ration of Independence-a doc ument more clearly commercial than moral. This is how, and why, the American Constitution was able to define the slave as three-fifths of a man, from which legal and commercial def inition it legally followed that a black man "had no rights a white man was bound to respect." Ancient maps of the world- when the world was flat-i n form us, concerning that void where America was waiting to be discovered, HERE BE DRAGONS. Dragons may not have been here then, but they arc certainly here now, breathing fire, belching smoke; or, to be less literary and Biblical about it, attempting to intimidate the mores, morals and morality of this particular and peculiar time and place. Nor, since this country is the issue of the entire globe and is also the most powerful nation currently to be found on it, arc we speaking only of this time and place. And it can be said that the mon umental struggles being waged in our time and not only in this place resemble, in awesome ways, the ancient struggle between those who insisted that the world was flat and those who apprehended that it was round. Of course, I cannot possibly imagine what it can be like to have both male and female sexual equipment. That's a load of family jewels to be hauling about, and it seems to me that it must make choice incessant or impossible-or, in terms un available to me, unnecessary. Yet, not to be frivolous concern ing what I know I cannot-or, more probably, dare n0t imagine, I hazard that the physically androgynous state must FREAKS AND AMERIC AN IDE AL OF MAN HOOD 8I 7 create an al l-but-int olerable loneliness, since we all exist, af ter all, and crucially, in the eye of the beholder.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was even lonelier and more vulnerable than I had been before. And the blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatever. I was ju st as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a con gregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stam mer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for ex ample, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their miser y on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto? Perhaps I might have been able to reconcile myself even to this if I had been able to believe that there was any loving-kindness to be found in the haven I represented . But I had been in the pul pit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don't refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquir es houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and qu arters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and 310 THE FI RE NE XT TIME salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love ever ybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all. I was told by a minister, for example, that I should never, on any public convey ance, under any circumstances, rise and give my seat to a white woman. White men never rose for Negro women. Well, that was true enough, in the main-1 saw his point. But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they be haved toward me?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Hamburg was frosty and dry as a bone, and blinding with icc and snow; and the sun, which never came to London, loitered in Ha mburg all day long: iiber alles. Ger mans say that Hamburg is the German city which most resem bles London. It is hard to know, from their tone, whether they arc bragging or complaining, and it did not really remind me of London, lacking London's impressive sprawl; yet, it did confirm my ancient sense of the British and the Germans as cousins. Hamburg looks lik e a city built only for the purposes of affairs of state-an extraordinary sequence of stony fa�ades. It makes one think of trumpets; there should be at least six TO BE BAPTI ZED 4-15 trumpeters on every roof. The people are as friendly as people are in London, and in the same way: with a courtesy as final as the raised drawbridge and as unsettling as the deep moat at one's feet. Behind the fa<;ade, of course, lives the city, fur tive, paranoiac, puritanical, obsessed and in love with what it imagines to be sin-and also with what it imagines to be joy, it being difficult in Western culture to distinguish between these two. The prison was not far from my hotel, and I even tually acquired enough of a sense of direction to be able to walk from one castle to another. All the time I spent in Ham burg was spent between these two fixed points. The hotel was called The Four Seasons; because of the Maynard case, I once called Senator Javits from there; and ran into Pierre Salinger in the lobby once, he on his way out, I on my way in. If he had not been rushing out and if I had known him better, I might have tried to discuss the case with him. I needed help and advice and I have always rather lik ed Mr. Salinger. But I am not very good at buttonholing people, and besides I have learned that it frightens them. It is not an easy matter to be allowed to visit a prisoner. Without the really extraordinary cooperation of my German publishers, I could never have managed it at all.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I certainly didn't feel that, but I had no conceivable relationship to them anymore-that shy, pop-eyed thirteen year old my friend's mother had scolded and loved was no more. I was not the same, but they were, as though they had been trapped, preserved, in that moment in time. They seemed scarcely to have grown any older, my friend and his mother, and they greeted me as they had greeted me years ago, though I was now well past forty and felt every hour of it. My friend and I remained alike only in that neither of us had gained any weight. His face was as boyish as ever, and his voice; only a touch of grey in his hair proved that we were no longer at P.S. 139. And my lif e came with me into their small, dark, unspeakably respectable, in credibly hard-won rooms like the roar of champagne and the odor of brimstone. They still believed in the Lord, but I had quarreled with Him, and offended Him, and walked out of NO NAME IN THE STREE T His house. They didn't smoke, but they knew (from seeing me on telev ision) that I did, and they had placed about the room, in deference to me, those hideous little ash trays which can hold exactly one cigarette butt. And there was a bottle of whiskey, too, and they asked me if I wanted steak or chicken; for, in my travels, I might have learned not to like fried chicken anymore. I said, much relieved to be able to tell the truth, that I preferred chicken. I gave my friend the suit. My friend's stepdaughter is young, considers herself a mil itant, and we had a brief argument concerning Bill Styron's Nat Turner, which I suggested that she read before con demning. This rather shocked the child, whose militancy, like that of many, tends to be a matter of indigestible fury and slogans and quotations. It rather checked the company, which had not imagined that I and a black militant could possibly disagree about anything. But what was most striking about our brief exchange was that it obliquely revealed how little the girl respected her stepfather. She appeared not to respect him at al l. This was not revealed by anything she said to him, but by the fact that she said nothing to him. She barely looked at him. He didn't count.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  They will make the transition easily to having parents in two locales and dividing their days and nights between separate homes in different neighborhoods. Their lives will proceed as before, only much improved as compared to their experience in the predivorce family. This is all supposed to happen regardless of any betrayal, abuse, or abandonment that caused the divorce that left at least one person reeling in pain and one or both parents hardly capable of thinking clearly about their children. The belief that the crisis is temporary underlies the notion that if acceptable legal arrangements for custody, visiting, and child support are made at the time of the divorce and parents are provided with a few lectures, the child will soon be fine. It is a view we have fervently embraced and continue to hold. But it’s misguided. Our willingness to believe this notion has prevented us from giving children and adults the understanding they need to cope with the divorce experience over the long haul. It has kept us from making long-term plans for our children and from acknowledging the fact that their needs change as they grow older. It has prevented us from listening to their serious complaints and easing their suffering. Thankfully, this second myth is also beginning to unravel because of a new voice that is just now emerging on the national scene. That voice belongs to the children of divorce now grown to adulthood. In this book, you will hear them challenge these myths firsthand. Now that they are grown up, have marriages, divorces, and children of their own, they speak with an authority we dare not ignore. Adult children of divorce are telling us loud and clear that their parents’ anger at the time of the breakup is not what matters most. Unless there was violence or abuse or unremitting high conflict, they have dim memories of what transpired during this supposedly critical period. Indeed, as youngsters then and as adults now, all would be profoundly astonished to learn that any judge, attorney, mediator— indeed, anyone at all—had genuinely considered their best interests or wishes at the breakup or at any time since. It’s the many years living in a postdivorce or remarried family that count, according to this first generation to come of age and tell us their experience. It’s feeling sad, lonely, and angry during childhood. It’s traveling on airplanes alone when you’re seven to visit your parent. It’s having no choice about how you spend your time and feeling like a second-class citizen compared with your friends in intact families who have some say about how they spend their weekends and their vacations.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  A gang of boys stood at the top of the steps and cried, in high, fem inine voices, "Is this where the fags meet?" Well. This meant that I certainly could not go back upstairs but would have to take the subway with my friends and get off at another station and maneuver my way home. But one of the gang saw me and, without missing a beat or saying a word to his friends, called my name and came down the steps, throwing one arm around me and asking where I'd been. He had let me know, some time bef ore, that he wanted me to take him home-but I was surprised that he could be so open before his friends, who for their part seemed to find nothing astonishing in this encounter and disappeared, probably in search of other faggots. The boys who are lef t of that time and place are all my age or older. But many of them are dead, and I remember how some of them died-some in the streets, some in the Army, some on the needle, some in jail . Many years later, we man aged, without ever becoming friends-it was too late for that-to be friendly with one another. One of these men and I had a very brief, intense affair shortly before he died. He was on drugs and knew that he could not live long. "What a waste," he said, and he was right. One of them said, "My God, Jimmy, you were moving so fast in those years, you never stopped to talk to me." FREAKS AND AMERIC AN IDE AL OF MAN HOOD 823 I said, "That's right, baby; I didn't stop because I didn't want you to think that I was trying to seduce you." "Man," he said, indescribably, "why didn't you?" But the queer-not yet gay- world was an even more in timidating area of this hall of mirrors. I knew that I was in the hall and present at this company-but the mirrors threw back only brief and distorted fragments of myself . In the first place, as I have said, there were very few black people in the Village in those years, and of that handful, I was decidedly the most improbable. Perhaps, as they say in the theater, I was a hard type to cast; yet I was eager, vulnerable, and lonely. I was terribly shy, but boys are shy. I am saying that I don't think I felt absolutely, irredeemably grotesque nothing that a friendly wave of the wand could n't alter-but I was miserable.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Considering the speed with which we moved fr om the New Deal to World War II, to Yalta, to the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, to Korea, and the House Un-American Ac tivities Committee, this may not be his fault. (One of the last of his films, entitled Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, starring Joan Fontaine, Dana Andrews, and Sydney Blackmer, is an utterly shameless apology for American justice, the work of a defeated man. But, children, yes, it be's that way sometimes.) Lang's concern, or obsession, was with the fact and the effect of human loneliness, and the ways in which we are all responsible for the creation, and the fate, of the isolated mon ster: whom we isolate because we recognize him as living within us. This is what his great German film, M, which launched Peter Lorre, is all about. In the American context, there being no way for him to get to the n igger, he could use only that other American prototype, the criminal, le gangster. The premise of You Only Live Once is that Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is an ex-convict who wants to go "straight": but the society will not allow him to live down, or redeem, his criminal past. This apparently banal situation is thrust upon us with so heavy a hand that one is forced-as I was, even so long ago-to wonder if one is resisting the film or resisting the truth. But, however one may wish to defend oneself THE DEVIL FINDS WORK against Lang's indictment of the small, faceless people, always available for any public ceremony and absent forever fr om any private one, who are society, one is left defenseless before his study of the result, which is the isolation and the doom of the lovers. V cry early in the film we meet the earnest and popular prison chaplain-a priest: we meet him as he pitches the ball to the men who are playing baseball in the prison courtyard. It is a curiously loaded moment, a disturbing image: perhaps only an exiled German, at that period of our history, would have dreamed of so connecting games and slaughter, thus foreshadowing the fate of the accomplice, who is, in this case, the priest. The film does not suggest that the priest's popu larity has anything to do with the religious instruction he, presumably, brings to the men-his popularity is due to his personal qualities, which include a somewhat overworked cheerfulness: and his function, at bottom, is to prepare the men for death. His role, also, is to make the prison more bearable, both for the men in the courtyard and the guard behind the machine gun in the tower.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (Who de cides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other up with razors on Sat urday nights. By this wild process, then, of failure, elimination, and re jection, I, certainly, and most of the people whom I knew got to Europe, and, roughly speaking, "settled" there. Many of us ha\'e returned, but not all: it is important to remember that many expatriates vanish into the hes of their adopted coun try, to be flushed out only, and not always then, by gra\'e international emergency. This applies especially, of course, to women, who, gi,·en the pressures of raising a family, rarely have time to be homesick, or guilty about "escaping" the problems of American life. Their first loyalties, thank hea\'en, are to the men they married and the children they must raise. But I know American couples, too, who ha\'e made their homes in Europe quite happily, and who ha\'e no intention of returning to this country. It is worth obserYing, too, that these people are nearly always marked by a lack of spite or uneasiness concerning this country which quite fails to char acterize what I tend to think of as the "displaced" or ",·isible" expatriate. That is, remarkable as this may sound, it is not necessary to hate this country in order to have a good time somewhere else. In fact, the people who hate this country never manage, except physically, to leave it, and ha,·e a wretched life where,·er they go. And, of course, many of us ha\'e become, in effect, com muters; which is a less improbable state now than it was a decade ago. Many ha,·e neither returned nor stayed, but can be found in Village bars, talking about Europe, or in Euro pean bars, talking about America. Apart fr om the G.I.'s who remained in Europe, thought fully using up all the cheap studios, and nearly all, as it turned out, of the available good will, we , who ha,·e been described (not Yery usefully) as the "new" expatriates, began arri,·ing in Paris around ' 45 , ' +6 , ' +7 , and '48. The character of the influx began to change very radically after that, if only because the newcomers had had the foresight to arm themseh·es with jobs: 66+ OTHER ESSAYS American government jobs, which also meant that they had housing allowances and didn't care how much rent they paid. Neither, of course, did the French landlords, with the results that rents rose astronomically and we who had considered ourselves forever installed in the Latin Quarter found our selves living all over Paris. But this, at least for some of us, turned out to be very healthy and valuable. We were in Paris, after all, because we had presumably put down all formulas and all safety in favor of the chilling unpredictability of ex perience.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Our current relations with the world forcibly suggest that there is more than a little truth to this. What Europe still gives an American-or gave us-is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself No artist can survive without this acceptance. But rare indeed is the Amer ican artist who achieved this without first becoming a wan derer, and then, upon his return to his own country, the loneliest and most blackly distrusted of men. Esquire, July 1961 The Creative Process P ERHAPS the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, nec essarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality-a banality because it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, believed. Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge which can paralyze all action in this world. There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be ex ploited, children to be fed: and none of these things can be done alone. But the conquest of the physical world is not man's only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest; so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place. The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind merely a rustic musing beside some silver lake. The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth or death. It is like the fearful aloneness which one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. Or it is like the aloneness of love, that force and mystery which so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control. I put the matter this way, not out of any desire to create pity for the artist-God forbid!-but to suggest how nearly, after all, is his state the state of everyone, and in an attempt to make vivid his endeavor. The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescap able. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. It is for this reason that all societies have battled with that incorrigible disturber of the peace-the artist. I doubt that future societies will get on with him any better.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  For one thing, champagne has ceased to be drunk out of slippers, and the frivolously colored thousand- franc note is neither as elastic nor as freely spent as it was in the 19 20's. The musicians and sing ers who are here now must work very hard indeed to acquire the polish and style which will land them in the big time. Bearing witness to this eternally tantal izing possibility, per formers whose eminence is unchallenged, like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, occasionally pass through. Some of their ambitious followers are in or near the big time already; others are gaining reputations which have yet to be tested in the States. Gordon Heath , who will be remembered for his per formances as the embattled soldier in Broadway's Deep Are the Roots some seasons back, sings ballads nightly in his own night club on the Rue L'Abbaye; and everyone who comes to Paris these days sooner or later discovers Chez Inez, a night club in the Latin Quarter run by a singer named In ez Cav anaugh, which specializes in fried chicken and jazz. It is at Che z Inez that many an unknown first performs in public , going on thereafter, if not always to greater triumphs, at least to other night clubs, and possibly landing a contract to tour the Riviera during the spring and summer. In general, only the Negro entertainers arc able to maintain a useful and unquestioning comradeship with other Negroes. Their nonperforming, colored countrymen arc, nearly to a man, incomparably more isolated, and it must be conceded that this isolation is deliberate. It is estimated that there arc five hundred American Negroes living in this city, the vast majority of them veterans studying on the G.l. Bill. They arc studying everything from the Sorbonnc's standard Cours de Civilisation Fran faise to abnormal psychology, brain surgery, music, fine arts, and literature. Their isolation from each other 85 86 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON is not difficult to understand if one bears in mind the axiom, unque stioned by American landlords, that Negroes are happy onl y \\'hen they arc kept together. Those driven to break this pattern by leaving the U.S. ghettos not merely have effected a social and physical leave-taking but also have been precipi tated into cruel psychological warfare. It is altogether inevi tabl e that past humiliations should become associated not only \\'ith one's traditional oppressors but also with one's tradi tional kinfi>lk. Thus the sight of a face from home is not invariably a source of joy, but can also quite easily become a source of embar rassment or rage. The American Negro in Paris is forced at last to exercise an undemocratic discrimination rarely practiced by Americans, that of judging his people, duck by duck, and distinguishing them one from another.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  She was thus, in effect, part of an experiment, and though she took it very well and can laugh about it now, she certainly must have had her share of exasperated and lonely moments. The social mobility of a Negro girl, especially in such a setting, is even more severely circumscribed than that of a Negro male, and any lapse or error on her part is tar more dangerous. From Antioch, Coretta eventually came to Boston on a scholarship and by this ti me a certain hoydenish, tomboy quality in her had begun, apparently, to be confirmed. The atmosphere at Antioch had been entirely informal, which pleased Coretta; I gather that at this time in her life she was usually to be seen in sweaters, slacks, and scarves. It was a ferociously formal young man and a ferociously informal young girl who finally got together in Boston. Martin immediately saw through Caretta's disguise, and in formed her on their first or second meeting that she had all the qualities he wanted in a wife. Coretta's understandable tendency was to laugh at this; but this tendency was checked by the rather fr ightening suspicion that he meant it; if he had not meant it, he would not have said it. But a great deal had been invested in Caretta's career as a singer, and she did not feel that she had the right to fail all the people who had done so much to help her. "And I'd certainly never intended to marry a minister. It was true that he didn't seem like any of the OTHER ESSAYS ministers I'd met, but-stili-I thought of how circumscribed my lite might become." By circumscribed, she meant dull; she could not possibly have been more mistaken. What had really happened, in Caretta's case, as in so many others, was that lite had simply refused to recognize her pri vate timetable. She had always intended to marry, but tidily, possibly meeting her husband at the end of a triumphant con cert tour. However, here he was now, exasperatingly early, and she had to rearrange herself around this fact. She and Martin were married on June 18, 1953. By now, naturally, it is she whom Martin sometimes accuses of thinking too much about clothes. "People who arc doing something don't have time to be worried about all that," he has informed her. Well, he certainly ought to know. Coretta King told me that fr om the time she reached Bos ton and all during Martin's courtship, and her own indecision, she yet could not rid herself of a feeling that all that was hap pening had been, somehow, preordained. And one does get an impression, until this point in the King story at least, that inexorable forces which none of us really know anything about were shaping and preparing him for that fateful day in Mont gomery.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  At sundown I went up to the little police parade-ground to see the famous stones—famous, at any rate, to us, & talked about from time to time in Khartoum. There they were, most unmomentous like many famous things, two short pillars of reddish rock, buffed up, & often touched one felt, so that they have a glow like marble. The story as I had heard it was that an Egyptian officer, posted out here for a long time, had gone crazy with the sun & the isolation, shot a colleague & then turned his revolver on himself. It was viewed, certainly, as a warning, but in fact it intrigued me & made me the keener to come, partly because I thrive on the very solitude & emptiness it was meant as a warning against; but also because I never believed the story. Heat & loneliness may have played their part, but for the young man to kill his comrade there must have been some deeper, odder, fiercer reason to it. I see it romantically—one of those intense, amorous Mohammedan friendships that no one talks of or even guesses at in England, but which flourish here with an almost startling luxuriance. One sees them everywhere, in town, among the tribesmen, in my own little retinue, of course … poetical, chivalrous amitiés which none the less must operate on some principle quite beyond the European mind. Perhaps it is just my European mind that insists on this heated little mélodrame—but I see a passion & a festering discontent, a flaring noonday of violence, the remoteness of these stony hills, these fingers & fists thrust up out of the desert, threatening the unspoken balance & courtliness of the affair … Well, we shall never know. The stones were erected in their memory, which suggests that their fellow officers responded to something deeper & more poetic in the case. I liked the stones for their enigma, & stroked them, & wanted them to keep their secret for ever, illegible and dignified. They were still, naturally enough, uncomfortably hot, standing as they do all day long in the parade-ground’s shadowless glare. May 29, 1926: … These friendships … In my happiness here it never strikes me that I have no friends. There are the long monthly letters from home, but like The Times which comes, folded, yellowed and elderly, six weeks late, they seem like reports from a fictional world, improbably stuffed with circumstance. Sitting last night before dinner with a pink gin & listening to Hassan coughing & kicking round the kitchen, my strangeness here suddenly appeared to me, a kind of agoraphobia, a continent wide—just for two or three seconds I had an objective vision of myself, unsheltered by the glowing trance, aerial & romantic as the sunset then was, that at all times absorbs me. I saw how singular I must be for Hassan, & for the new houseboy, Taha.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The parents’ motives are not hard to understand. Even women who choose to leave their marriages and have successful careers will feel alone and beleaguered as they face new responsibilities and have to make decisions alone, without advice from a partner. Men are also depressed and lonely at this time. They need help setting up a home for themselves and to be reassured that their children want to see them. Men and women alike feel isolated and alienated from former friends who may be reluctant to take sides—and thus stay away from both. Other friends are concerned about the cracks in their own marriages and will keep a safe distance. Family members often disapprove of the divorce and do not hesitate to say so. Feeling hurt and defeated, each parent naturally turns to the children as their most loyal confidants. Both rely heavily on their offspring for sympathy and companionship. These youngsters literally help keep the parents going. They are remarkably intuitive about adult depression and protect their parents from pressures outside and inside the home. Twenty-five years after divorce, many men and women still say to me, “I would not have made it except for this child.” Given how emotionally dependent on their children many parents become, it’s not surprising to see bitter custody or visitation fights over who has priority in the child’s life. Many parents come to believe that without that child, they have no one. Their only remaining important life relationship and loyal support lies with that child. Thus the legal battle often has its roots in adult despair and not, as many people think, in the parents’ simple desire to spend more time with the child. Men and women tell me that when the child is with the other parent they become seriously depressed and wander restlessly from room to room unable to bear their loneliness. Sometimes this behavior occurs only during the months following the breakup. But it can also endure, providing the basis for endless litigation over custody and visiting. Such battles may distract parents from their personal misery but they hardly resolve it.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was on the journey back from St Ernest that Matt told me he would be going out of town for a week or two. He said it in so casual a way that I knew it must be something important, into which I shouldn't enquire. "I'll miss you," I said, and was surprised by the truth of my words. He said, "Yeah", in an ambiguous murmur; and after a moment mentioned some business things he hoped I'd look after for him. He fiddled in his breast pocket for a fat roll of notes and tossed it into my lap. I didn't like to count them while I was with him, but I felt a surge of undeserved good luck, whatever was involved. I'd been ignoring the money problem, burning up my good but sparse teaching-fees in drink and wasting my small reserves on romantic unnecessaries like my lobelia shirt—I had sort of decided that after the weekend I would make a decision to decide what to do. Then it turned out we weren't even to spend tonight together; and as he was leaving the next morning I was unexpectedly bereft. I wandered back to my room feeling wild and lonely. An envelope with beautiful, imaginative writing on had been slipped under my door, and lay on the threadbare rug. I tidied away an ashtray, a crusted coffee-mug, a bottle of milk precipitated into caramel grounds beneath faintly blue water—all out of respect to my letter and the capricious hint it gave of a finer life I could be living. I had no real idea who had sent it; I hoped it might be an invitation—someone's offer to look after me for an hour or two. But hardly anyone knew where I lived. I was dying to see Cherif again, but doubted if his writing, which I had never seen, could possibly be so rococo. Marcel's, I knew, was loopy and backward-leaning. And then my first idea came back, against my better judgement: that it was from Luc. Something he was too scared to say to me face to face—a kind of Valentine in a fancy script, or its opposite, the astounding note that said everything must end. It was from Paul Echevin, and I adjusted after a moment to the pleasure of that. Did I want to earn a bit of money by helping him out at the Museum? Sometimes it would be Helene's job of reading a novel in the hall and occasionally selling a ticket or a postcard; mainly it would be paperwork, checking references, proof-reading the English text of the Orst catalogue that he really must get finished before the coming summer, that was so many years overdue.