And, now having neatly disposed of Hem and Miller, which is a kind of a bitchy thing, but all writers are bitches clothed in articles of the sun, and I am sad because we are all such bitches, all so unreal, and maybe it comes back to the thing I was thinking during the then years drunken blackness: that real men don’t WRITE. But, if they don’t, WHERE ARE THEY? I have looked, everywhere. [* * *]

p.s. I guess The Old Man and the Sea was presented in ONE installment in Life. no matter; same god damn thing.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

December 18, 1963

I, too, am shot. They have machine gunned me down with their labors and I have bought their plan, god damn them, I’ve got to get the horses moving, no rich women around I can bear…12 hours of madness a night, left shoulder, arm and neck, I mean right shoulder arm and neck about paralyzed and then insomnia, go back moth-eyed and white to the spider mouth and they suck again, and as you can see all this is making me a withered crank…. Like the old poem, or something like it: we need time to stop and stare* and blow cigar smoke in the air. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

December 25, 1963

Christmas night and they’ve battered their heads together until they are silly and they’ve smiled themselves silly and vomited on the floor, 98% of them amateur drinkers, amateur Christians, amateur human beings; and I got 4 more books yesterday and lined them up with the other, they stand there, each one different, each one a piece of something, and they are FOR SALE, anybody can have one for $10, double the price on the jacket, for this is the cost of the paper alone (to me), and the labor and the poems and all else is FREE. Yet how can you put a price on anything like this? [* * *] You and I don’t have much to do with money because we know that money is beside the point, except enough of it to keep you alive so that you can do something else BESIDE $$$. This is what you’ve done bringing out this book in this way, and when I hang a $10 on it, it is not an insult, just enough to allow me to KEEP ALL THE BOOKS because I like them lined up against the wall, although I did give one away to Sherman because I am supposed to get one back of his wherein I did the foreword and I wonder what in the hell I said in the foreword like some John William Corrington who did o.k. but luckily I do not wear hats.

• 1964 •

[To Ann Bauman]

January 2, 1964