I reread Camus’ The Stranger the other night and once again this appeared to me to be the perfect antidote for what was essentially wrong with the resolve in Crime and Punishment. It is so good that others do this work for us so that we do not have to do it ourselves.

Children outside gyrating, seeing grass and mystery and freedom, and parental tyranny too; but they (the holy children) will be melded down, they become me: an old man at 4 o’clock in the afternoon writing tea-leaf thoughts in a vestibule that smells of bacon and frogs and tumbling silence.

From now until the end of the book, the letters all bear the new address given in the following letter.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

May 1, 1964

We have moved to—

5126 ¼ De Longpre Ave.

Los Angeles 27, Calif.

Old 1623 is gone and it was a magic number and a magic place, but after 6 years there is some wear and tear especially after no repairs or replacements of any sort. However, the landowners and their serfs (managers) always holler, charge too much and feel as if they were doing you a favor. Narrow-minded bigots that you have to sneak women past and not be seen drunk and not do this and not do that etc. etc.; all this time you are sharing the place with rats and bugs and old churchly women who poke and grovel and skitter and clog the halls of your brain, ugghg. They even called the police on me one night (a couple of years back) and I held them off through the door chain and talked them away. Anyway, don’t send any mail there as it may never reach me. They are pissed because I threw a few glasses of whiskey against the walls, bled on the rug & almost died several times and because the water pipes broke continually in the walls and they had to rip their walls open and I was there, usually in bed hungover sick unhappy with their pipes and their bodies their intrusions upon my tiniest of moments. May those whore-hating finks rot before they reach hell. I have spoken. [* * *]

I don’t know where to get a Village Voice; if you manage to get an extra copy do send on—this address. It is more difficult, I suppose, to be a discovered poet; you’ve got to carry the load on your soul-back and when you sit down to a typer you are supposed to do it. I’d rather be loose, even bad-loose. The name in lights thing is good, of course, especially when you’re feeling down—you let yourself taste a little, like a drink, only you know that it doesn’t change the living life…a few more door-knockers, but these soon go away when you don’t walk upside down from the ceiling. [* * *]