by William Boyd
It was an agreeable bonus to have Alannah’s whole apartment to ourselves this weekend. I find Alannah very sexy: there’s something fiercely alluring about her astonishing teeth and her perfect, groomed blondeness. Yet her pubic hair is glossily dark brown –seeing her naked, wandering into the bedroom with a pitcher of Martinis and two glasses, I wonder if it’s that dramatic contrast that so stimulates me. Everything about our sex is very orthodox, condom-clad, missionary position, at the moment, but there’s something about her that makes me want to go totally debauched. She’s tall and big boned and has a sharp lawyer’s mind. Very concerned about her children and how they will get to know me (why should I want to get to know them?). She’s witheringly dismissive about her ex-husband (‘a weak, pathetic man’) – another lawyer, as it turns out. Alannah is thirty-five. She has a big apartment on Riverside Drive with a live-in maid. What with her salary and her alimony she’s well off. I’m just glad to be sexually functioning again after the disaster of Paris. I thank the U.S. of A. and its fine confident women. Coming here was the best thing I ever did.
Outridge described me as cyclothymic – a small-scale manic-depressive – which is why, he says, he didn’t give me any electroconvulsive therapy. He’s given me the name and address of a psychiatrist in New York if I feel in need of counselling. But I think his diagnosis is wrong: I’m not a manic-depressive, neither small nor large scale. In Paris I think I was suffering from a long-term, building, nervous breakdown that started when I returned from Switzerland and discovered that Freya and Stella had died. After some three years it was finally detonated by Odile, or rather, was detonated by my failure with Odile. (What’s become of Odile, by the way? I thought she was coming to New York. Must ask Ben.) Now I’m here in New York it’s as if the blinds that had been lowered on my life have all been lifted. Sunlight floods the house.
Thursday, 11 October
Crisp perfect New York day. In the sharply defined shadow and strong sunlight these huge buildings look magnificent – so defiantly non-European. We don’t need your cathedrals and castles, your moated manors and Georgian terraces, they seem to say – we have something entirely different, we speak in a different language, we have our own version of beauty. Take it, or leave it. Comparisons are meaningless and redundant.
Marius turned up at 3.00 this afternoon, having bought four worthless canvases (smears and slashes in primary colours) from some charlatan called Hughes Delahay at $500 a piece. For that amount of money I could have bought a Pollock – if I’d wanted. I remonstrated, gently – our float is dropping rapidly and I haven’t bought a thing – pointing out that in a month or two we wouldn’t be able to give away a Delahay. Logan, he said, patronizingly, you’re too old-world, like Papa, you’ve got to move fast or you won’t ever fit in here in this city. I managed to keep my temper. Ironic comment, given my rhapsody above. I’d better let Ben know what’s going on.
I go to Janet Felzer’s co-op on Jane Street tonight. I kept the invitation from Marius. Tomorrow I move into Cornelia Street.
Friday, 12 October
Saw the first picture I wanted to buy in New York, by a man called Todd Heuber. Janet is keeping it for me. Somehow – we were both very drunk and Janet had given me a pill of some kind – we both managed to end up in bed together at 47th Street. I woke up feeling hellish and heard someone in the bathroom. Then Janet wandered in, naked, and slid into bed. I had a hill-cracking hangover. She snuggled up to me and I realized what had happened. She’s small and bony with a completely flat chest – not really mon truc – but there’s something impish, mischievous and plain bad about her, which is exciting. I went to the ice-box and took out a beer. She said, hey, give me a beer too, I feel like shit as well. So we sat in bed and drank our beer and chatted for half an hour. Neither of us was prepared to vouch for events of the night before, but, in any case, the beer worked and we made love. The sound of traffic on 47th Street. Our beery, belchy kisses. Janet’s funny little monkey face below me, her eyes screwed shut. As I came, she said: don’t think you get any discount on Heuber.
Tuesday, 23 October
Cornelia Street. Wallace cables to say he has a US publisher for Villa – Bucknell, Dunn & Weiss. He urges me to telephone Mr Weiss himself, no less, who is delighted to find that his author is currently residing in New York. Only a $250 advance, but beggars can’t be choosers.
I bought the Heuber for $100 and then bought it again for myself for $300 (our usual 200 per cent mark-up – at least Leeping Fils has finally made a profit on a piece of contemporary art). ‘Earthscape No. 3’, it’s called. A long picture of heavy brown and black slabs of paint, scraped and scored, smoothed and patina-ed. At one of the angled congruences of the slabs there is a rough rhomboid of dirty cream. Maybe it’s because he’s German (his real name is Tabbert Heuber), but Todd’s work has real weight and presence. It has composition. It is completely abstract, however its title encourages a form of figurative interpretation. Only Heuber and a Dutchman called de Kooning really impress. They can both draw. It helps.
Tuesday, 13 November
First really bitterly cold day. Snow flurries and a wind off the icecaps. Cold burning, numbing my cheeks on the walk to the subway. Marius didn’t come in at all yesterday and when I phoned him he said he was working at home. I said, thanks for letting me know – and he replied that as it was his gallery he could decide where he wanted to work, thank you very much. I think Ben has to step in now; things are getting decidedly unpleasant. I can’t sack Marius or give him a barracking – though I make it quite clear what I think. He’s changed since he came to New York – maybe it’s simply because he’s removed from his father’s – stepfather’s –presence. Whenever I saw him in Paris he seemed charming – a bit lazy and feckless, sure – but he’s nothing like that now. He’s cool with me, arrogant and self-satisfied. And yet he does no work. God knows what he gets up to – probably the same as the rest of us –drink, sex, drugs – but at least I show up at the gallery every morning, Monday to Friday. There is a dangerously corrupting element in this city for the unwary: you have to stay on your guard.
Lunch with Ted Weiss. He wants to publish Villa before the end of the year. They’ve bought sheets from England so it’s just a question of binding it up and putting a new jacket on. Weiss is a lean, shrewd, bespectacled intellectual – very dry. ‘We’re going to sell it as an “Existential” novel,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’ ‘Isn’t it all a bit old hat?’ I said. ‘No. Very new hat over here,’ he said.
Monday, 3 December
I slept with Janet again last night. I had to spend the weekend alone – Alannah’s sister and her children were staying with her. So I went to a party at de Nagy’s and Janet was there (and the usual crowd). At the end of the evening, as people were drifting away, Janet said, ‘Can I come home with you?’ And I said, yes, please. Why do you take these risks, Mountstuart? But it’s not a risk. Alannah is a girlfriend, just like Janet: I’ve made no vow of fidelity to either one. But look at you, making all these excuses. You’re blustering – you feel guilty about sleeping with Janet. I’m a 45-year-old, unattached man – I don’t have to hide my love-life or my sex-life away from anyone. So why don’t you tell Alannah all about it, see how broadminded she is? There is no crisis here.
Friday, 14 December
I gave a small party at the gallery for the launch of my book. BD & W invited a few writers and critics along. I asked Greenberg and Frank O’Hara2 and some other literary acquaintances to leaven the art world. I felt oddly proud to see my book stacked up on a central table. Villa has a very simple jacket here: lower case sans serif letters in midnight blue on a coarse oatmeal ground – very Bauhaus, somehow. Frank was taken with the title. ‘The Villa by the Lake. Like it,’ he said. ‘Very simple but with a kind of ring, a resonance to it. Could be a painting by Klee.’ Actually I’m not sure it could, but it was nice of him to make the association. He had another writer friend with him, Herman Keller, who looks like a weightlifte
r (broad shoulders, thick neck, cropped hair) but in fact teaches literature at Princeton. I thought he might be one of Frank’s ‘fag’ friends, but someone told me he wasn’t. Frank likes to make plays for heterosexual men, apparently.
What was interesting was to see how people’s perceptions of me changed as a result of the book being published. No longer another smartly suited Englishman dabbling in the art world but a published author of some longevity (the title page listed my other works). Keller was curious about Cosmopolitans and asked if I was interested in reviewing books for some little magazine he’s involved with –they need someone who can read French. He said he knew Auden and asked if I wanted to meet him. I said I’d love to – but in fact I’m really not that bothered. My old literary world seems so remote now from my New York perspective. Such a small festering pond, with hindsight. And I rather enjoy keeping my distance from it.
Udo Feuerbach came – it was good to see him again. Portly and grey now, his face seamed and jowly. He’s editing a magazine called Art International, which I said sounded like an airline. He picked up Villa and riffled through it. Another book, he said, teuflische virtuosi-tät. We laughed. He has a satyr’s goatee, streaked with grey –makes him look avuncularly evil.
Alannah has asked me to spend Christmas with her family. Her father, a widower, is a retired professor from some women’s university in Connecticut and has a big house on the coast. When I found out that the party would include her sister and her husband and their children I begged off. Said I had to go back to London to see my mother – so I suppose I’d better now.
Ted Weiss said there were good reviews for Villa coming up in the New York Times and the New Yorker. How does he know so far in advance? – but gratifying none the less.
1952
[January]
Spellbrook, nr Pawcatuck, Conn. I got here on the 3rd – I’11 go back to the city on Monday. Alannah’s father, Titus [Fitch], has a large white clapboard house up here in Spellbrook, about five miles from Pawcatuck. It’s set in a grove of larch and maples and is about a twenty-minute walk from the ocean. The sun was out this morning and we strolled down through the meadows towards the shore (there was about three inches of snow on the ground). There are nine of us: me, Titus, Alannah, Arlene, Gail, Kathleen Bundy (Alannah’s older sister), Dalton (Kathleen’s husband) and their children Dalton Jnr (seven to eightish) and Sarah (a toddler). We meandered along the shore, looking in rock pools, a good surf was running, and the kids ran around. Back at home a housekeeper was preparing us a huge lunch. An idyllic morning, marred only by the fact that it is quite plain to me (though to no one else) that Titus Fitch doesn’t like me. He dislikes me for generic reasons, not personal. I am English and he is a dyed-in-the-wool, unapologetic, grade-Α Anglophobe. If I’d been a Negro and he the Grand Vizier of the Ku Klux Klan the animus couldn’t have been more clear cut. I think he’s appalled that his younger daughter has taken up with an Englishman. For the first time in my life I feel the victim of race hatred, like a Jew in Nazi Germany. He refers to me as ‘our English friend’. ‘Perhaps our English friend prefers his steak well done.’ ‘Perhaps our English friend would rather take tea than coffee. Is that the phrase? To “take” tea?’ ‘Our English friend isn’t used to sitting down to dinner with young children. The green baize door and all that.’ The unfriendliness is palpable but the rest of the family just chuckle away. I pointed out this offensive froideur to Alannah and she pooh-poohed it. ‘Nonsense. Daddy’s just like that. He’s a professional crusty old man. Don’t be so sensitive, Logan. Don’t take it personally.’
In any event, it was good to see Alannah out of the city: she loses some of her hard edge out here, her gloss and grooming. Her hair is curly, she has less make-up, wears jeans and big sweaters. The severer planes and angles of her handsome face seem to relax and soften. I find this semi-rural Alannah just as attractive as the New York version.
Fitch is irked by the success of Villa, which, as Ted Weiss predicted, garnered excellent reviews. The Bundys were fulsome. I gave Fitch a copy when I arrived and he put it down on a side table without even glancing at it. He’s a rangy, strong-featured old man in his early seventies, with a thick mop of unruly white hair. He smokes a pipe with pedantic and practised affectation, favours a bow tie and wears tweed jackets with ancient khaki trousers. Sometimes when I glance quickly round I see the undisguised loathing in his eyes before the prickly ‘mein host’ mask is fixed once more.
London was grim. Dark, filthy, cold weather, the population unsmiling and downtrodden. Still like a city at war, somehow. I saw my mother (endlessly complaining) and took her for Xmas lunch at the Savoy. Dick asked me up to Scotland for Hogmanay but I thought it wiser to give my liver a rest and caught the first plane out on January the 1st.
I telephoned Ben from London about the Marius issue and the potential problems I saw ahead and he said he would come over himself as soon as possible. Peter was on his honeymoon in the Caribbean with Gloria Ness-Smith, now the third Mrs Scabius. I had a fairly solitary time. The bunker was warm enough when both gas fires were blazing and I felt as at home there as anywhere. The agency which looks after the place in my absence appears to be doing a competent job.
Talked to Gail Rule for an hour after lunch. A delightful, chatty, open little girl who loves telling jokes – which she can hardly get out, she laughs so much at them herself. I was entranced and then realized why: Stella was her age when I last saw her and I was miserable again from my awful loss. You think it begins to diminish with time, the pain, then it comes back and hits you with a rawness and freshness you had forgotten.
I wanted to make love (I wanted to hold someone, really) and asked Alannah if I could sneak into her room tonight but she thought it was too risky. So we went out for a drive and had some hurried and unsatisfactory sex on the back seat of her car down some lane. I said it was the first time I’d done it in the back of a car. Welcome to America, she said. Obviously a key rite d e passage. What pleased me more when we returned home was to imagine Fitch sniffing the air like a bloodhound, nostril full of the scent of English spunk. Old bastard. It gave me a warm glow all through dinner.
Friday, 7 March
To Todd Heuber’s studio on E. 8th Street. Bought another, a small ‘Earthscape’, for $75. Almost all shadowy, bending browns but scored by a hard horizontal band of lemon at the top, like a bilious stormy dawn light. Talked of Emil Nolde, de Staël and other artists. Heuber knows his stuff. He’s strong, like a young peasant or longshoreman, with a square jutting jaw, pale blue, myopic-seeming eyes.
We went to the Cedar Tavern to drink, not my favourite place – it’s so blazingly brightly lit – but he wanted to celebrate another sale. Pollock, steaming drunk, called him a Nazi but Todd just laughed and said that every now and then he had to beat the shit out of Jackson, just to keep him in his place, but tonight he was feeling benevolent. There were a lot of young women come to gawp at the lions: Heuber, Pollock, Kline, that fraud Zollo – all flaunting their brawny manliness like dunghill cocks. Because of the glaring light everyone looks exhausted, hollow-eyed. The women –Elaine [de Kooning], Grace [Hartington], Sally [Strauss] – were putting back as much booze as the men. It was a sweaty, edgy, sexy atmosphere that had me eyeing the girls like some lecherous satrap. O’Hara came in with Keller. Maybe they are fucking each other? Keller said he’d read Villa twice. ‘Complex, but I’m getting there,’ he said. Phoned Alannah and asked if I could come by for a nightcap – she said Leland was there with the girls but she was free for lunch tomorrow. Phoned Janet – out. So I tried to pick up one of the girls myself but as soon as they discovered I wasn’t a painter they lost interest. There was a dark, thin-wristed one with very long hair that I really fancied and I drunkenly refused to be put off until she said, ‘Beat it, old man.’ Old Man? Jesus, forty-six years old isn’t old. I feel I haven’t even started living properly, yet. That fucking war took six years away from me. So I came home, drank some more and wrote this.
/> Thursday, 8 May
Good reunion at the Waldorf: me, Ben and Peter. The old gang. Peter is over here promoting his new novel The Slaughter of the Innocents. We talked – inevitably, old school chums – about Abbey and our time there. I don’t think Peter and I have physically changed that much – we could still be recognized from schoolboy photos –of course we are all heftier, broader in the beam, but Ben is heavy now, with a round belly and a plump double chin flowing over his collar and looks older than we do. Or so I hope: each one of us is probably thinking identical thoughts about the other. Gloria joined us for coffee. She was looking… rich. Sexily rich. Her voice is strange, over-polite: thet men in a het. Like these English film stars that have been to charm school or had elocution lessons. She said, ‘I’m not spoiling you boys’ party, am I?’ I was glad to see her. She’s one of these people whose entry into a room immediately makes the place more interesting. And she was more than welcome – fond though I am of Peter, he has grown increasingly pleased with the sound of his own voice. He boasted to Ben that he’s bought a Bernard Buffet for £3,000. Ben, diplomatic as ever, congratulated him on his wise investment. Ben was a bit preoccupied: he has promised to resolve the Marius situation over the weekend.
Towards the end of the evening Gloria fixed me with her sceptical ever-so-slightly mocking gaze and said, ‘So what are you up to, Logan?’ I told her I’d just had a book published too. ‘It’s tremendous,’ Peter chipped in, ‘meant to say. Best thing you’ve done.’ He hasn’t read it of course and I can’t complain as I haven’t read any of his since he abandoned his rather good little thrillers for the New Portentousness. ‘Will you send me a copy?’ Gloria asked. ‘We’ve got one at home, darling,’ Peter said. ‘But that’s inscribed to you,’ she said. ‘I want Logan to inscribe one for me, specially.’ I said I’d rather she bought one – I needed every royalty I could get. But as she left she reminded me: ‘Don’t forget that book now.’ I wonder if Peter has finally met his match.