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Friday, 1 January 1926
Notes on Dorothy Olsen by Jane Wolfe from a scribbling pad in the hand of Jane Wolfe. Undated. Probably 1926.
I first met D[orothy] O[lsen] on my arrival in La Marsa (Tunis) Feb 3 1926. On practically every occasion that I found myself alone with her in Tunis, or in the dining room after A.C. had gone upstairs (this especially so after the evening meal) she raved about A.C.; that in Paris he had tried to blackmail a former ? ; what she had endured there etc etc; that in Sidi-bou-Said he had run around with Arab boys; that he and Leah [Leah Hirsig] had written surreptitiously to her father, under the name Dr Khaled Khan . . . (2 lines in shorthand). Said the letters were the work of a maniac; she talked of Weida, her life there, what a nightmare it was, esp[ecially] when Beast started taking heroin there, and that that combined with the kitchen work and Leah, proved too much and she wrote P ? O in London stating the above facts, asking him to send her money to get out; that Beast almost killed her in one of the desert tours (I have forgotten the name nor do I remember any reason given for the attack; that at her ? (at the Majestic Hotel, I think) an Arab boy came to her, Dorothy, weeping, saying: "I don't want him. I want him to leave me alone!"
She said she was leaving. She would not remain any longer.
All of the above was stated with great violence and distressed me terribly. But what really annoyed me was the fact that she would rave thus to me, pass through a door, go straight to Beast, and lovingly caress 'my Big Lion". The two did not seem compatible.
As I became more used to these tirades, and conquered my emotional distress, I studied her face, and noticed that her eyes took on a wild excited appearance and that her speech was certainly at times very incoherent. As we sat in the cafe with Bovingdon [?], the day he arrived, waiting after an afternoon in the Souks. In the street car she began raving to Bovingdon about A.C. Starting with "a woman has no soul!", carrying this on for a bit and then passed to statement that A.C. could not teach, that various things were wrong with him. I said to Bovingdon that Dorothy did not understand this part of A.C.'s work. She was quite excited in the tram coming home, addressing violent remarks to me. I did not answer. Later I lay in a deck chair on the verandah, she came out, sat down beside me and said very sweetly "Jane I'm a very bad girl at times; I don't know what makes me do these things."
She passes instantly from violent ravings into laughter, as she sees the humour of a situation or remark, and as quickly plunges into the ravings again.
She certainly drinks too much and smokes unceasingly.
A.M. of the 21. She had two brandies (to my knowledge) and one straight rum. She then drank 2 or 3 glasses of wine at table; and was quite intoxicated on her return from Tunis. I have observed that her morning vomiting always follows to much liquor.
On one occasion in the Cafe ? several Italian schoolboys passed by wearing green and blue velvet capes decked out with many buttons. She immediately went off into a tirade against pederasts, which brightened (? T) into a tirade about p[ederasts] in Tunis, Paris, and some she had known in America.
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