the Roundhouse in the university at Kensington, where I have acquired a position as cleaner.
I am staying with Lanie at her brother’s place. He and his wife are polite, well-off, no kids, perfectly happy with their middle-class way of life (stockbroker or something; she’s an art teacher). I can stay indefinitely, so I think I’ll just work here through the summer and see how I feel then.
Why am I not living in bliss with dear Antony? He didn’t say a word, I had to work it out for myself. He’s been offered a job at Kuringai National Park as a Ranger—collecting tolls at the gate, actually, but it appeals to some fantasy of the outdoors life. I’ve never met anyone (apart from you) less like the outdoors type. I’m fed up with his cowardice and dishonesty, and mean to have it out with him when he gets back from looking at the Park. The situation is unbearable—I’ll have to bail out soon.
Before he hitched up to the Park, he and I and Francine went out to dinner in a trendy Paddington pub. Painful. She kept making claims on him, taking his arm, sort of shoving me out of the picture. Not that I minded really. Just so sad that she’s this clingy. I drifted off and talked to lots of other people, and finally got invited to a party while the other two went crabbily home. Antony realized that he wasn’t so essential to me as he’d imagined.
I feel rather desolated, don’t know what to do with myself. So frustrated, reading and going to gallery exhibitions, unable to express myself in any of these arts that involve me so intensely. There’s no outlet. I’m frightened of going mad again. The only solution I can think of is suicide which is so selfish but…
I got the bus over to Double Bay and took that John Barth book back to Henry for you. He’s working on an encyclopedia at the moment and sent his sympathies for your dreary job. Maybe you could write and see if he could put some freelance encyclopedia writing your way?
I’ve joined a group called the Women’s Liberation & Revolution Group which is beaut. I’ve always maintained that woman is the underdog and it’s time to bite back. Read some quite interesting literature on the topic, including a thing on the Vaginal Orgasm which refutes the myth that the vagina rather than the clitoris is the site of orgasm—it’s supposed to be one of the most insensitive organs in the body. If that’s true, it’s strange that men don’t have one.
Very impressed with Mailer’s Armies of the Night. The way he is allied with and simultaneously alienated from the Movement. How his ego reciprocates etc.
A movie I saw on the Black Power movement ( Uptight ) threw me into confusion. The notion that the Negroes have tried everything conciliatory that they can came through strongly. The only option left is violence. But even if they succeed, what then? Massacre and counter-massacre? “It doesn’t matter if we are killed, we were born dead.” The audience didn’t appear to be greatly affected. They’d done their “thing” by going. Back to the dope and the telly. People in Australia just ignore so much—it’s very exasperating.
Got a letter from Margie informing Lanie and me that a man is the answer to all our problems. How can such an intelligent woman be so naive. Settle down with babies and ignore everything.
So life goes on, week by week, hour by hour, stuffing food down our throats to survive week by week. Until my next epistle, all my love,
Caroline
P.S. Had a chance to take some LSD but decided against it.
A DOG’S WIFE
…eight
I suspect that what brought Fiona around in the end was the flamboyant song and dance my father laid on when the word reached him in Hollywood or at whatever banal location he was shooting his latest depredation. My desire to marry he found innately disagreeable, as who would not having entered that singular state fourteen times. (It’d eventuated that his wife was, in fact, a woman, though only just. Had the rules
I am staying with Lanie at her brother’s place. He and his wife are polite, well-off, no kids, perfectly happy with their middle-class way of life (stockbroker or something; she’s an art teacher). I can stay indefinitely, so I think I’ll just work here through the summer and see how I feel then.
Why am I not living in bliss with dear Antony? He didn’t say a word, I had to work it out for myself. He’s been offered a job at Kuringai National Park as a Ranger—collecting tolls at the gate, actually, but it appeals to some fantasy of the outdoors life. I’ve never met anyone (apart from you) less like the outdoors type. I’m fed up with his cowardice and dishonesty, and mean to have it out with him when he gets back from looking at the Park. The situation is unbearable—I’ll have to bail out soon.
Before he hitched up to the Park, he and I and Francine went out to dinner in a trendy Paddington pub. Painful. She kept making claims on him, taking his arm, sort of shoving me out of the picture. Not that I minded really. Just so sad that she’s this clingy. I drifted off and talked to lots of other people, and finally got invited to a party while the other two went crabbily home. Antony realized that he wasn’t so essential to me as he’d imagined.
I feel rather desolated, don’t know what to do with myself. So frustrated, reading and going to gallery exhibitions, unable to express myself in any of these arts that involve me so intensely. There’s no outlet. I’m frightened of going mad again. The only solution I can think of is suicide which is so selfish but…
I got the bus over to Double Bay and took that John Barth book back to Henry for you. He’s working on an encyclopedia at the moment and sent his sympathies for your dreary job. Maybe you could write and see if he could put some freelance encyclopedia writing your way?
I’ve joined a group called the Women’s Liberation & Revolution Group which is beaut. I’ve always maintained that woman is the underdog and it’s time to bite back. Read some quite interesting literature on the topic, including a thing on the Vaginal Orgasm which refutes the myth that the vagina rather than the clitoris is the site of orgasm—it’s supposed to be one of the most insensitive organs in the body. If that’s true, it’s strange that men don’t have one.
Very impressed with Mailer’s Armies of the Night. The way he is allied with and simultaneously alienated from the Movement. How his ego reciprocates etc.
A movie I saw on the Black Power movement ( Uptight ) threw me into confusion. The notion that the Negroes have tried everything conciliatory that they can came through strongly. The only option left is violence. But even if they succeed, what then? Massacre and counter-massacre? “It doesn’t matter if we are killed, we were born dead.” The audience didn’t appear to be greatly affected. They’d done their “thing” by going. Back to the dope and the telly. People in Australia just ignore so much—it’s very exasperating.
Got a letter from Margie informing Lanie and me that a man is the answer to all our problems. How can such an intelligent woman be so naive. Settle down with babies and ignore everything.
So life goes on, week by week, hour by hour, stuffing food down our throats to survive week by week. Until my next epistle, all my love,
Caroline
P.S. Had a chance to take some LSD but decided against it.
A DOG’S WIFE
…eight
I suspect that what brought Fiona around in the end was the flamboyant song and dance my father laid on when the word reached him in Hollywood or at whatever banal location he was shooting his latest depredation. My desire to marry he found innately disagreeable, as who would not having entered that singular state fourteen times. (It’d eventuated that his wife was, in fact, a woman, though only just. Had the rules
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