Insomnia or The Devil at Large

The affair was a Los Angeles fable: the world-famous author of the banned books, widowed of his legend and pushing eighty, undone by a nightclub singer-pianist four decades younger. He courted her extravagantly, married her in 1967 — his fifth marriage — and got, by his own bewildered account, a companion who remained affectionately, immovably elsewhere. The nights the marriage kept him awake he spent at the work table, and the insomnia became a studio: watercolor after watercolor, captioned in his looping hand, self-mocking and lovelorn by turns.

The Webbs' Loujon Press — the New Orleans perfectionists who made books like reliquaries — issued the first Insomnia in 1970 as a limited portfolio; Doubleday's 1974 edition put the confession within general reach. What makes it more than a curiosity is the candor: the shelf's great connoisseur of desire reporting, without flinching, what desire does to an old man — the vanity, the absurdity, the gratitude. The devil at large of the title is the old familiar one; the news is that he never retires.

A three-part confession in prose — the meeting, the marriage, the sleepless aftermath — interleaved with the Insomnia watercolors: dream-figures, caricatures, and love-graffiti painted through the small hours, their scrawled captions half prayer and half punchline. The text runs on the late voice's frankness about its own foolishness; the paintings say what the frankness can't.

Short, strange, and best read in one sitting — preferably late, in sympathy with its hours of composition.