Allen ( Paterson, New Jersey) to Jack (Mexico City)                

Saturday Night, July 8, 1950

Dearest Jack:

      If you are in any ennui or doldrums, lift up your heart, there IS something new under the sun.  I have started into a new season, choosing women as my theme.  I love Helen Parker, and she loves me, as far  as the feeble efforts to understanding of three days spent with her  in Provincetown can discover.  Many  of my fears and imaginations and dun rags fell from me after the first night I slept with  her, when we understood that we wanted each other and began a love affair, with all the trimmings of Eros and memory and  nearly impossible transportation problems.

      She  is  very great, every way--at last, a beautiful intelligent  woman who has  been around and bears the scars of every type of knowledge and yet  struggles with the serpent  knowing  full  well the loneliness of  being  left  with the apple of knowledge and the snake only.  We talk and  talk, I entertain  her in grand manner  with my best groomed Hungarian manner, and I  play Levinsky-on-thetrollycar, or mad  hipster with cosmic vibrations, and then, O wonder, I am  like myself,  and we  talk on seriously and intimately without  irony  about all sorts of  subjects, from the most obscure  metaphysical through a gamut to the  natural  self; then  we  screw, and  I am all man and full  of  love, and then  we smoke and talk some more, and sleep, and  get  up and eat, etc.

      The  first days  after I  lost  my cherry--does  everybody feel like that?  I wandered around in the  most benign and courteous  stupor of delight at the perfection  of nature; I  felt  the ease and relief of knowledge that all the maddening walls of  Heaven were finally down, that all my olden aking corridors were traveled  out of, that all my queerness was a camp, unnecessary,  morbid, so lacking  in completion and  sharing  of love as to be almost as bad as impotence and celibacy, which  it practically was, anyway.  And  the fantasies I began having about all sorts of girls, for the first time freely and with  the knowledge  that they were satisfiable.

      Ah Jack, I always said that I would be a great lover some day.  I  am,  I  am at last.  My lady  is so  fine  that  none compare.   And how can she  resist me?  I'm old, I'm full of love, when I'm  aroused I'm  like a veritable bull  of tenderness; I have no pride of heart, I  know all about all the worlds, I'm poetic, I'm antipoetic, I'm  a labor leader, I'm  a  madman, I'm a  man, I've got one.  And  I have no illusions, and like a virgin I have all of them,  I'm wise,  I'm simple. And she, she's a great old  woman with a beautiful face and a perfect fair body that everybody in the neighborhood calls a whore.   She's so sharp, and  she never makes me shudder. She don't want war, she  wants love....

      By god, I've been canorked with a feather!

      Tell Bill my fright as he described it is quite accurate, and it took me a long time to get over it; but it was also a fear of having put my money on the wrong horse spiritually and sexually; and I was frightened when I discovered that I had, though the race was not yet over; and my bet had consequences to others besides myself--such a responsibility! yet!