Approaching his cottage By crooked detour, He hears the gruff knocking Of the wolf at the door. His wife and his children Hang riddled with shot, There’s a hex on the cradle And death in the pot.
The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.
Somehow these sluttish nights make me have a violent nunlike passion to write and sequester myself. I shall sequester. I don’t want to see anybody because they are not Ted Hughes and I never have been made a fool of by a man.
I haven’t had an acceptance since October 1st. And I have piles of poems and stories out. Not to mention my book of poems. Even Ted’s letter about winning the contest, with its award details, hasn’t come, so even vicarious pleasure is shorn from me. Bills come.
Hamish said: He is the biggest seducer in Cambridge.
My favourite tree was the Weeping Scholar Tree. I thought it must come from Japan. They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.
I am writing with a blunt pencil tied on a mile-long stick, at something far off over the horizon line. Will I break through someday? At least if I get 300 pages written by the end of May, I’ll have the creaking, gushing skeleton plot of the whole thing.
Then I can write slowly, re-writing each chapter, carefully with a subtle structured style. If I can ever find a subtle structured style.
Only it would help my morale no end to feel it was a good novel.
But will do 5 pages a day until plodding I catch up. Use words as poet uses words. That is it! Gulley Jimson is an artist with words, too – – – or, rather Joyce Cary is. But I must be a word-artist. The.
But no frown of mine Will betray the company I keep.
I didn’t think I deserved it. After all, I wasn’t crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn’t know when to stop.
Why does that green guck still spawn itself endlessly out of my head, dripping and clinging in my throat, my lungs, blocking in glutinous hunks behind my eyes: I feel sometimes I am blowing out the putrescent remains of my own decayed brains.
In life, love gnawed my skin To this white bone; What love did then, love does now: Gnaws me through.
It mightn’t make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.
Listen and shut up, oh, ye of little faith.
Each of these magic seven weeks: writing: not the novel yet, until I’m warmed up.
Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh.
I long for a noble escape from freedom.
And another: perhaps a version of the waitress story: only I haven’t got it here. Make it up. Naturalistic. Jewel prose. Make out little paragraphs of what happens to whom. Then think it clear. Write it.