My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein
Stutman, Suzanne
the sentence fragments that used to be so arresting but now sometimes seem just a nervous refusal to finish a sentence: See it this way. See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the...
...Be thou ever--and ye will...
...He thought I was the most beautiful woman in the world...
...This formulation of the problem as requiring a global perspective leads me to the conclusion that NATO must either be transformed into a true alliance with reciprocal global obligations--or it should be dissolved...
...However, the requirements of epistolary compression compel me to state my position in summary form...
...love me dearly as I love you...
...It just multiplies in every direction...
...An alliance assumes mutual obligations and undertakings among its members...
...In actual fact, the liters add up to a merry quantity of beer: perhaps two gallons...
...She was a saftig matron of 44, and a successful theatrical designer when his own play Welcome to Our City was rejected by the then reigning lords of the theater...
...One can sit down with the same syntax too many times, just as one can bump into the same heroine once too often...
...Worse still, the very dependency gave rise to increasing anti-Americanism in Europe and, in the U.S., to growing resentment against the failure of Europe to carry its fair share of the burden of its own defense and in maintaining world peace threatened by Soviet global expansionism...
...This global perspective is the optimal answer to Soviet global expansionism...
...of the defense of Europe against Soviet aggression without any reciprocal commitment by Europe to defend U.S...
...She is Molly Bloom...
...It is all very poignant, and it happens all the time, and the stars do not move one millimeter out of their orbits...
...Why did you love him to begin with...
...On the contrary, the Jewish establishment has kept a remarkably cool head in dealing with Jackson's anti-Semitic slurs...
...Oh but I speak to you presently and immanently as I write...
...Here he is, almost 25, writing to his charmer from Baltimore: I'm going down the bay to Norfolk on tonight's boat...
...Was it because he was the most celebrated man who had ever been your lover...
...Aline...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) tion with another oppressed group...
...Throughout, NATO is treated as an "alliance" between the U.S...
...God bless you...
...Slowly and reluctantly but wondering44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 iy, he struggled to learn these rhythms, these breathless devotions, this heartrending simplicity...
...In fact, Tucker makes glaring omissions in regard to Jackson's slurs and to his colleague Louis Farrakhan's praise for Hitler...
...The smell of jet fuel...
...He never really quite caught the hang of it, but he got better at it as he went along: Aline, you must hate death and lies and poison in the people about you, and you must love life...
...My point was that the Democrats' divide-and-conquer strategy is coming apart at the seams, precisely because the more the Democrats try to divide people, the more divisive they become...
...Back to the same of that summer's misery and enchantment when I was seventeen...
...I wrote to you yesterday, to Asheville, and will telegraph tomorrow...
...with sow grunts and belly burlesque...
...rubble gleams when touched by the lights of the carnival...
...From the operations room at the Honolulu airport...
...It is self-deception to believe that halfway measures or cosmetic devices will suffice or that a decision can be long delayed...
...I love you...
...The lout is suggesting that she will always be unfaithful (the " i n " of infidelis was lightly crossed out), and what is a poor woman to do...
...By Bacchus, how the Paul Boytinck ~ a librarian at Bucknell University, and compiler of C.P...
...Aline, 1 have fought it out in blood and agony and loneliness and exile--and 1 am a young man, and if 1 do not work and create now, I will die...
...This will leave Europe to provide for its own defense...
...But do not misunderstand me, or try to break me with threats, or make me begin something that is ended--that is the way of madness and death, 1 will never yield, I will endure loneliness and physical death before I do...
...She is soft and devoted, emollient, not an irascible bone in her body...
...Young Thomas, it must be confessed on the strength of these letters, was somewhat of a bitch...
...Aline, surely you, with your great wisdom, talent, beauty, and character can be as wise as I am about it--t need your help, and I need your friendship, and I need your love and belief--but the time of madness, darkness, passion is over, we can never relive that, we can never live through it again...
...What sort of man was he...
...The friendship he offered her after the affair had run its course was an amiable man's death sentence on an old love affair, and she failed to understand, much less accept, the older Wolfe's inexorable rejection...
...Surely nothing that you gain can be worth what you are inflicting on me...
...The analyses suffer from a serious common defect...
...In the resulting brawl his head was gashed, bloodied, shaved, stitched and eventually mended...
...It made me happy all but the Latin Tag, with the prefix crossed out...
...He began as her wild companion and, God knows, no man ever worked harder to transform an old love affair into a current friendship with as little success...
...I am now good and strong, but they can hurt me by attacking me through something outside of me in which my love is fixed--this is the cheap little New York-gossip method, but it is not your method because you are a great woman...
...The point of my article was simply to dispel the myth that all black voters that turned out for Jackson in the primaries would be happily incorporated into a united Democratic party next fail...
...Harries, as well as regional groups in the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East, and Africa...
...The Republican strategy of finding unifying issues seems far better...
...If I do not hear soon will try to come over to f'md you...
...When you loved him were you promiscuous...
...He continues with the same inimitable charm: Why I would go to China and ther'd be a day between our thoughts, but what's a day...
...You are the most beautiful and glorious person I have ever known, and this is the person that must now speak, and act, and live...
...The word love did not come easily to his lips or his pen, and Aline Berstein, who undoubtedly loved him, suffered many a sophomoric yawp at his hands...
...NATO was and remains a unilateral guarantee by the U.S...
...Of her love and affection there is absolutely no doubt whatever...
...You told me that George Bellows was your lover--for how long was he your lover...
...The fragment, we are told, was never mailed, but I am not so certain...
...The thing to do is to do it [write], and no one can do it but yourself...
...Their affair was begun on a boat, and it continued to have a storm-tossed element about it for years...
...If this silence of yours is only an idea, what is the idea...
...Aline...
...I was in the real flower of my physical self, I was beautiful," she said later...
...Horace Coon (O quite by accident of course, showed up)--This woman, of course, is behind it: she wrecked me, maddened me, and betrayed my love constantly, but she will not leave me alone now...
...and Western Europe...
...But, if it is unacceptable to Western Europe, then the U.S...
...The letters do, however, convince me that Wolfe learned a literary lesson or two from his charming inamorata...
...And where dies faith...
...So tanked up, he naturally found all 6'6" of Thomas Wolfe engaged in a shoving match...
...I hope the whore dies immediately and horribly, I would rejoice at news of this vile woman's death...
...Aline was fond of food and a good cook and a big-breasted, lavishly hipped, delicately boned temptress and Thomas, initiated into her world, often asked other women, out of the blue, with a knowing air, if they were fond of cooking...
...be sane and honest and strong, as 1 have tried to make myself alone in exile...
...Tell me why you thought he died because he could not be a great artist...
...Such is life, as Ned Kelly reportedly said on the gallows...
...There is, finally, a fragment from him to her which makes for curious reading...
...The event graduated to general mayhem...
...She is not amused by the piratical catalogue, and sternly instructs him in the wisdom of this world...
...Was he promiscuous...
...Bernstein...
...He wants to know what objects of her designer's trade she worked with, and why Hamlet should wear this kind of costume and Mercutio that...
...For this, it has adequate human and material resources...
...The surgeons who palliated his final moments bored into his skull, and the intercranial fluid danced, it is said, for the final time: arced 18 inches into the air, confirmed the worst fears of the surgeons (they found millions of tuberculi), and three days later he was dead of miliary tuberculosis of the brain...
...That conclusion, in this exchange of letters, is undeniable...
...The Alliance may also be further expanded to incorporate a "Pacific Community," as proposed by Mr...
...I f the spiritual resources and will are lacking, then, in a showdown, nothing we can do will help anyway (on this point, I am in agreement with Kristol...
...1 may meet the Demon Drink Saturday in Richmond--he, afraid desperately of being alone, but understanding it in me...
...The correspondence therefore gives a strange and lopsided impression...
...There are, perhaps, more mysteries in Aline Bernstein than we will ever know...
...Thomas Wolfe died in 1938, some days before his 38th birthday...
...Do you take this as an indication of my growing laxity...
...has no choice but to proceed on its own to seek a "unilateral globalism" (Kristol...
...This information would blow holes in Tucker's contrived and murky thesis...
...I never say a cruel thing to you in a letter," he asserts...
...MY OTHER LONELINESS: LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE AND ALINE BERNSTEIN Edited by Suzanne Stutman/University of North Carolina Press/S14.95 Paul Boytinck Thomas Wolfe died at the age of 37...
...She is a woman...
...and be beautiful and lovely and good as you alone on this whole earth can be...
...But I know what I know, and that is how dearly I love you and how I am yours within myself...
...Friend wanted reason--I had none, which he couldn't understand...
...NATO and the World In his article, "Conservative Critics of NATO" (TAS, June 1984), Owen Harries gives an accurate account and perceptive critique of the views of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Henry Kissinger on what everyone agrees is "the crisis in NATO...
...These remarks are addressed, not to a chippie of sweet sixteen, but to a matron of 44 whose pores breathe devotion, everlasting love and fidelity in a style of faultless simplicity...
...She is all sweet reasonableness, and pneumatic patient flesh, all swansdown...
...When, when a woman lifts her skirt, behind the door...
...Robin Vigfusson Nutley, New Jersey William Tucker replies: This and other letters charge that my article was too much of an apology for Jackson, and did not go far enough in condemning his anti-Semitism...
...Aline Bernstein died in 1955 at the age of 74...
...The way I care for you is like a cube root...
...Why did you tell me the name of George Bellows and not the name of any other lovers...
...By God, I say that this is good, for poetry must l i v e . . . And more piffle of that kind...
...It created a chronic and parochial dependency on the part of Western Europe with a corresponding loss of will to provide adequately for its own defense not only in Europe but also in other areas vital to Europe's survival (such as the Gulf today...
...Listen: The letter made me so happy, I have been walking on air all day...
...But NATO was not such at its inception and is not such to this day...
...1 have loved you and given the best years of my life to you---do not wantonly and cruelly try to destroy me now: no one can hurt me in myself...
...She is interested in him...
...He can never master that same effortless tone and convey that same affection because, I suspect, he did not have it in himself to do so...
...He wants to know what happens inside her head when she designs, and he wants her to tell him about the process as vividly and simply as she can...
...This may seem obvious now, but at the time Dan Rather was still cheerily asking Walter Mondale if he was going to select Jackson for his Vice President...
...Snow: A Reference Guide and the forthcoming Anthony Burgess: An Annoted Bibliography and Reference Guide...
...The warm rain down on the runways...
...the sea is too wide, too deep, too dark for me ever to reach you with my words...
...You are beautiful and you love life more than anyone i have ever known...
...He is wailing and gnashing his teeth, groaning about his quota of words per day, willing to wound and not afraid to strike, blunt and stupid (in his intelligent way) as a cracker...
...He is all angles and porcupine quills...
...More than anything else Democracy suggests that it is time for Joan Didion to break camp, to realize that this particular vein is exhausted, to have the courage to pack up her enormous talents and once more, for the sake of imagination, head west...
...Within this perspective (for instance), the question of American forces and commitment in the defense of Europe would be linked with certain Western European forces being made available for the global defense of the Alliance...
...There is here, as often in Wolfe, an excess of sound and f u r y - - t h e epistolary equivalent of the one part fiction, ten parts of bastard blankverse ecstasy Bernard DeVoto jeered at in Wolfe's novels--but there are unanswered questions, mysteries, at the heart of this affair...
...Wolfe, and so upset the patient...
...He was jealous, it is true, but jealous over a buxom and bonair woman of the world, and when that object crumbled, grew deaf, and became shrill, he turned into a stonecutter like his father before him, relentlessly lost in patient, heavy labor...
...He wants to know the approximate number of men she has slept with...
...And i think as I go to bed here in ominous midnight that darkness drops, the revelry begins, the flashing lights blaze on the sky, and women, fatal, false, silken, softbreasted cushion-bellied women awake to lust...
...As for China, while the West has apparentl~ lost the chance (which existed briefly) for a strategic relationship, China will nevertheless objectively be a force for world peace since it must continue to oppose Soviet encirclement and its vast modernization program depends on close economic ties with the West into the next century (incidentally, creating an alternative model for the Third World...
...The letters do not convince me that Wolfe loved his lady love...
...A letter designed to warm a woman's heart...
...Tucker stresses over and over again in his article the mythology that surrounds black people...
...She protests, in a correspondence that nearly always breathes her devotion, that "With all your imagination, you do not seem to know how it is to be constantly vilified and beaten by a loved being," but Thomas does not take the sentiment to heart...
...Were you faithful to each other...
...He has become the writer hunting for material, imperious in his own right...
...1 am nearly mad with worry about you...
...A footnote...
...and as Anthony Burgess once wrote, himself a member of the tribe: "A novelist was not, of course, a gentleman...
...The liters add up, he figures, to about a quart...
...He wants her to describe the sensation of sexual intercourse and female orgasm as well as she can...
...The famous Oktoberfest brawl is laid at her feet like a prize bone...
...See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it...
...Scholars speculate at their peril, but I am willing to bet that, in one way or another, through print or words, or rapid deductions from the flutter of an eye, Wolfe got the answers he was after...
...He also states that "the recriminations have been rancorous...
...He drank, he says, seven or eight liters of beer...
...Let him bear in mind the many mythologies that have also enveloped another people, a people that lately seems to be drawing more than their fair share of slander and ill will--from all quarters...
...This arrangement was unavoidable in the aftermath of World War II but, after Europe completed its recovery with generous American assistance, it began to lose all sense...
...Give me some idea of it...
...he is interested in the world, and his own still negligible place in it...
...The truth does not always sing in a birdcage for the ease of mortal man...
...He was a villainous stripling of 24 when he first met Mrs...
...Having c a r e f u l l y followed the debate over the years, I remain dissatisfied...
...He was, after all, a working novelist...
...The sneering lifehating part of the earth, the desolate and empty fools, deny and hate the possibility of such love, but desperse [sic] them and tell them that they lie--I will love you, by God, as long as 1 live, and it will never change...
...He wants to know about her time in childbirth, when she had a hard time of it and repeated the phrase "Who would fardels bear...
...My dear, I have been gone a day, and I still love thee...
...This in turn presupposes that the Alliance will coordinate a global geopolitical strategy, instead of constantly working at cross-purposes (as, say, in Central America...
...She was not allowed to see Wolfe on his deathbed for fear that it would upset his mother, Mrs...
...Elias M. Schwarzbart UN Correspondent Freedom-at-Issue Freedom House New York, New York THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 45...
...She moves along with a limpid, practiced ease which makes his own style appear like a laborious imposture...
...Can you love me as I love you?--i cannot tell you how I love but I know that the thought and meaning of you is like a bullet through my brain...
...Have you been consulting new acquaintances on how to treat old friends...
...He protests from time to time, almost with wonder, that she is the better writer of the two...
...Why did he stop being your lover...
...It is not my point to fix blame here...
...or Western security interests outside of Europe...
...There are plenty of places in the world to get your head cracked and nose broken if that is what you are after...
...Please do not take it ill that l say this, it is not a boast, only a corroborative detail...
...I remember with dull horror that it has been three weeks since 1 wrote you...
...Where does the heart go rotten...
...It was a relief to know you are no longer with your wild companion.You are my wild companion, and 1 hope you will always be so...
...We are loading up with more and more to do...
...It makes for curious reading, this cold hunt for the truth from a woman he had once loved...
...He will say "nothing tawdry, nothing mean, nothing common," but sexual jealousy is eating at his vitals, and he boasts that his "powers of resistance" were never tried by a Belgian floozie, and he is free with casual fragments of pure kindness: Goodbye, Jew...
...Semper [inlfidelis...
...Thank God, I'm alone...
...In addition, he presents his own prescription for "reinvigorating NATO" by strengthening its "politics" and expanding it to incorporate a "Pacific Community...
...Did you feel grief when he died...
...Matters were not helped by mutual vows of fidelity and chastity, harshly exacted by either party to the affair...
...Obsessive love has made her imperious, demanding, frightful...
...Some years later, when he was 30 and she 49, we find the following exchange: I am cabling you today, for God's sake what is the matter with you...
...Aline, be my friend, as I am yours...
...He has gained, he reports to his cool mistress, "a criminal stubble, white scar and a grand unyielding love...
...He wants to know her sexual fantasies...
...Wolfe's response, in his notebooks, testifies to fury: On Monday--July 28 I sent Aline Bernstein, my former mistress, a cablegram, in response to repeated letters and cablegrams of hers, in the last cablegram of which she said "Are you all right: Answer at once, otherwise I am sailing to find you at once"--I had not written this woman since 2 or 3 days after my arrival in France but in answer to these threatening letters & cables I sent the following message: "Aline Bernstein, Armonk, New York--Am Well living Montreux--Tom Wolfe"--I had no answer during interim but today Mr...
Vol. 17 • August 1984 • No. 8
