A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956–1984

1956–1959

– G lenway Wescott’s earlier collection of journals, titled Continual Lessons, ends in December 1955 with the death of photographer George Platt Lynes at the age of forty-eight. Lynes had remained a close friend after the breakup of the three-way relationship between himself, Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler in 1943. As this journal begins in 1956, Wescott is dealing with the details of that untimely passing. He’s also concerned with the health of his friend Dr. Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex Research in Indiana, and in June he travels to the Institute (as well as to Utah, to give college lectures). His last serious attempt at a new novel, “Children of ThisWorld,” ended a few years earlier—good autobiographical fiction that came to a dead end. In the late 1950s he is frustrated again in his writing projects, with literary essays being one outlet. As always, his social life is often too rich for writing discipline, with friends such as Baroness Pauline de Rothschild (formerly the famous American fashion designer Pauline Potter), novelist Katherine Anne Porter, NewYorker writers Janet Flanner andWilliam Maxwell, SundayTimes critic Raymond Mortimer, poets Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan and the Sitwells, author William Somerset Maugham, and many others. His grants and awards work for the National Institute of Arts and Letters takes up more and more of his time, and he is elected president at the end of the decade. Wescott’s partner, Monroe Wheeler, is at the height 7 8 1956–1959 of his career as director of publications and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. The two bring together their fascinating worlds during the evenings at Wheeler’s 410 Park Avenue apartment, a classic art and literary salon. Away from the city, they have their Stone-blossom home on the large gentleman’s farm of Glenway’s brother Lloyd and his wife Barbara (“Baba”) in Hampton, New Jersey. Glenway spends more time there while Monroe works in the city and travels to arrange exhibits. By the end of the 1950s, the Wescott clan will be forced to leave their land for another farm—as the state plans to turn the valley into a reservoir—and Wheeler will change his city home in another move. One constant is the relationship of Wescott and Wheeler, even with younger lovers in the picture—John Connolly (an ex-Marine) for Glenway, and first Bill Miller (formerly “handsomest man of the forties”) and then poet and artist Ralph Pomeroy for Monroe. (The pseudonym for John Connolly in the earlier Continual Lessons journals was Ronald Neil.) Wescott also has a relationship with Will Chandlee, who becomes a loyal friend. Toward the end of the decade, the young writer and editor Robert Phelps convincesWescott to plan a collection of his shorter works called “AWindfall.”This leads to years of collaboration, and while “AWindfall” is endlessly postponed, other books emerge for both men. Country, city, family, and literature continue to be Wescott’s great concerns. In the months after Lynes’s death, Wescott is involved with his friend’s legacy, securing photos and negatives for Lynes’s executor, artist Bernard Perlin (a longtime friend of Wescott), and helping Lincoln Kirstein plan a book of Lynes’s ballet photography.  january 1956 George Platt Lynes: The erotic dreams he always had at daybreak—I was always ashamed to ask about them. The worst of death: the unaskable questions.  1956–1959 9 Mother: She is, I think, like one of the great queens.Which one? Perhaps Catherine the Great. The simplicity, the subtlety, the amorousness, the autocracy. I wonder if others who know her, even her other children, think or feel any such thing. february 3 Maurice Chevalier, explaining to a reporter the fact that he is on the wagon these days, said, “On the verge of my 67th year”—I think in fact he is older than that—“I sing wine and I drink water.”  “Mary Butts’ Image of Me.”When I lived inVillefranche I disobeyed and bitterly disappointed the English fiction-writer Mary Butts [GW slept with her brother Tony], who had been my friend for years, so that her friendship turned to witchcraft. For quite a while after she returned to England, perhaps until she died, she thrust needles into a wax image of me. Friends that we had in common used to report this anxiously; and I would brag that my personal magic was more...