Frances pregnant, looks as if I’ll have to move from here, looks like marriage (again) and disorder but hoping for more suave luck and grace to help me this time, I would not hope to be cruel to either woman or child, god give me grace for I am weak and sad and do not feel good, but if any disorder happens…let it be in my life, not theirs. [* * *]

Frances is a good woman, she gets a little snappish and churlish at times but they all do, and I pretend I am asleep or I do not hear and it soon passes over…She kind of has this coffeehouse attitude, appears determined to save and understand all mankind, and this is a kind of obvious and tiring nobility, the other night she fell asleep reading The People’s World, and then she goes to a writers’ workshop, which, of course, is kind of obnoxious to me, always has been; but, then, I have my racetracks and beer and my nice beer drinking friends…It all comes out fairly even, depending upon whose head you are looking out of. Like, I imagine the guys who burned Joan of Arc had some strong ideas of why they were doing it. Ah?

I still feel good that Genet liked the book. He is one of the few geniuses of our flat age, moongone stealing immoral unimmortal cheap age. There seems so little; it is like being locked in a tin room that they are heating up and it gets hotter hotter and then you are just finally a flake of black shit. I speak not of death but of the wearing qualities of our age, the gross similarities. You can speak with a leader of nations or with a cleaner of spittoons and they will tell you the same things, they will look the same. We need more light than this or it gets too dull or drab to go on. Genet does this. He’s like a flower in a coal pit.

Haydn’s symphony #99 on now. I guess I haven’t heard all of Haydn’s symphonies; I guess few men have. It is good to have workmen like this around. It does damn well get hard to move on now and then, to open a door, to get dressed, to take your clothes to the laundry, to think of a way to get money, to try to sleep, to try to love to listen, everything gets hard, it gets harder, and I will not scream when death comes I will look at it like the little faint green lace vines they spread between flowers of large bouquets, and I will go without damage of transition, like a man taking his dog out to walk.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

March 2, 1964