by William Boyd
Ben had gone and Peter and Gloria had ascended to their, doubtless, vast suite and for a moment I was alone in the lobby, putting on my raincoat, when I thought I saw the Duchess of Windsor coming in through the revolving doors. I went rigid – until I realized that it was just another thin New York matron with an over-elaborate hair-do, set like cement. She and the Duke have an apartment here, I remembered. I would have to bear that in mind – give the Waldorf a wide berth in future.
Monday, 12 May
The Marius situation is resolved – on paper anyway. I now run the gallery; Marius reports to me and has to refer all purchases of over $500 to me for approval. He has his own fund to draw on of $5,000 – which will be topped up by Ben. This was all spelt out at a frosty meeting this morning – Marius sulky and aloof. Ben was very firm, almost harsh, and I remembered that, of course, Marius was Sandrine’s son, not his. I hope this pseudo-independence and pseudo-autonomy will satisfy him. I’m a little worried still.
I had an early supper with Alannah and the girls. Gail told a series of jokes that she claims to have made up herself. The best one, which had us aghast for a second, was, ‘How do they tell the alphabet in Brooklyn?’ Recite the alphabet, dear, Alannah said. OK, so how do they recite the alphabet in Brooklyn? ‘Fuckin’ A, fuckin’ B, fuckin’ C,’ Gail said. Alannah was outraged but I was laughing so hard she couldn’t even feign anger. Gail did admit she hadn’t made that one up.
Alannah begged me to come up to Spellbrook for another weekend. I said that quite apart from the fact that her father detested me I resented being treated like an adolescent and being made to sleep apart from her. We were mature adults, we were lovers, why shouldn’t we be in the same room? ‘I’m his youngest daughter,’ she said. ‘He thinks I don’t have sex outside marriage.’ I said that was nonsense. Then I had an idea. If she had to see him regularly, why didn’t we rent our own place near by? She could pop over to him and we could sleep together. Not a bad idea, she said.
Friday, 11 July
Alannah is in Connecticut with the girls for the summer vacation. Marius has gone to Paris and so I watch the stock in sweltering July, thanking the gods for the invention of air conditioning. No business at all this month: every painter in New York seems to be on Long Island. Maybe I should sniff around there.
Janet is back, however, and had a party at her gallery last night. Frank [O’Hara] was there too, impish and irritating, drunk as a skunk and deeply tanned. For half an hour he had me pinned in a corner, yodelling on about some barbarian genius called Pate he had unearthed in Long Island. ‘At last an artist with a brain, thank God.’ Back to Janet’s place. I never plan to sleep with Janet but when she’s in the mood it’s very hard to resist. You’ve got to see my tan, she said. It’s an all-over tan.
Saturday, 16 August
Spellbrook. Alannah thinks she’s found a house about two or three miles from her father near a village called Mystic. I said I liked it already. We drove out this afternoon with Gail and Arlene. It’s a small shingle-walled bungalow set back from the coast road and surrounded by dwarf oaks. It has a gently pitched roof and there’s a long sun porch at the front and a rubble-stone chimney at the side. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, a big living room with an open fire. The long thin kitchen at the rear looks out on a scrubby unkempt garden. It could be sixty years old, Alannah, said, imagining – sweetly – that this would swing it for me, the European, with his centuries of culture. Everything works inside, water, electricity, heating – so we could use it in the winter too. I could see myself in it – effortlessly –but a little alarm bell was ringing in my brain as the four of us walked around it with the realtor. Logan with his proto-family… ‘Look, Logan,’ Gail shouted, ‘there’s a room up here, this could be your den.’ There was a little attic room under the eaves with a shed dormer giving a distant view of Block Island Sound. I thought suddenly of my room in Melville Road and the roofscape of Battersea from its window. My eyes filled with unexpected tears, remembering my old life. Alannah saw and slipped her hand in mine. ‘You’re right. We could be happy here,’ she said. Gail took my other hand. ‘Please, Logan, please.’ ‘It’s a deal,’ I said.
I’ve insisted on paying all the rent – $1,200 a year – which I can’t really afford but it makes the place notionally mine, rather than Alannah’s and mine. Who am I kidding?
Gail said to Fitch tonight, ‘Logan’s renting a house for us at Mystic’ He looked at me darkly: ‘Once a colonial… ‘The old bastard was in sour mood this evening. He and I sat together in silence – the girls in bed, Alannah tidying up in the kitchen – as he fiddled with his pipe kit, scouring the bowl of his preposterous pipe, thumbing in shag.
Then he said, ‘Do you know Bunny Wilson3?’
I said I knew who he was, that I’d read a lot of his books. Another fully paid-up member of the Anglophobe club.
‘A brilliant mind,’ Fitch said, blowing blue scented smoke ceilingward. Then he pointed the stem of his pipe at me. ‘When was the English revolution?’
‘1640. Oliver Cromwell. Execution of Charles I. The Protectorate.’
‘Wrong. It was here in 1787. This is when the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie formed a new society. You’re still ancien régime, always have been since Charles II. The revolution you should have had actually happened here, on the other side of the Atlantic. That’s why you resent us so.’
‘We don’t resent you.’
‘Of course you do. That was Bunny’s point. You now have two distinct anglophone societies that split from a common root in 1785. Ours is revolutionary and republican; yours is for status quo and royalty. That’s why we can never get along.’
‘I’m sorry, but – with the greatest respect – I think that’s utter nonsense.’
‘That’s exactly what I’d expect an Englishman of your class and education to say. Don’t you see?’ He barked a laugh at me. ‘You’ve just gone and made my point.’
I let him ramble on. He really is an objectionable old CAUC.
Sunday, 17 August
I love to use these phrases – ‘with the greatest respect’, ‘in all modesty’, ‘I humbly submit’ – which in fact always imply the complete opposite. I bombard Fitch with them constantly when we argue (it’s beginning to drive Alannah mad) as it allows me to disagree categorically beneath a smug façade of good manners. We had another row about manners at lunch. I said that, in America, good manners were a way of furthering and promoting social contact, whereas in England they were a way of protecting your privacy. He refused to accept my reasoning.
Went into New London to sign the papers on the Mystic house and make the down payment. Alannah is taking over the costs of furnishing, decorating and refurbishment. So much for my independence. Gail and Arlene wrote me a letter saying thank you, which they posted under my door. They’re great girls. I’m very fond of them.
Wednesday, 5 November
To Janet’s gallery for her big show. Heuber has three paintings there, which we should have had but I wouldn’t pay his prices. The inflation in the last six months is worrying – one senses a sudden scramble beginning for these really untested, untried young artists. Anyway, Janet has Barnett Newman and Lee Krasner as well. Smart girl. It was a real party too: Gunpowder, Treason and Plot. Annoyingly the show looks like being a wild success. Frank was raving about his new discovery – Nat Tate, not Pate – all of whose work was sold in a flash. I met this prodigy later: a quiet, tall handsome boy who reminded me of Paulus, my Swiss guard. He stood quietly in a corner drinking Scotch and wearing a grey suit, which I was pleased to see. We were the only two suited men in the room. Heavy dark blond hair. Janet was on fire and said she had been smoking heroin (can one do this?) and urged me to try some. I said I was too old for these games. I bought a Heuber and a Motherwell. No Nat Tates to be had, though I rather liked them – bold, stylized drawings of bridges inspired by Crane’s poem.4 I see what Frank means by brains.
Bumped into Tate as I was leaving and asked if he had anythi
ng for sale privately and he replied, most oddly, that I would have to ask his father. Later Pablo [Janet Felzer’s dog] shat copiously in the middle of the room, so Larry Rivers told me.
Looks like Dwight D.5 is strolling home.
Thursday, 25 December
London. Turpentine Lane. Glum and depressing lunch at Sumner Place with Mother and Encarnación. Mother seems to be fading –alert enough, but now markedly thinner and scrawnier. We ate turkey and sodden grey Brussels sprouts. Encarnación had forgotten to cook the potatoes, so Mother shouted at her, Encarnación said that this English food was disgusting anyway and started to cry –and I made them apologize to each other. I drank the lion’s share of two bottles of red wine (which I’d wisely supplied – the only drink in the house was white rum). I didn’t tell them about Alannah.
I asked Alannah to marry me before I flew here. She said yes, straight away. Tears, laughter, generally overcome. I rather feel she’s been waiting for me to ask for months. On that day, Saturday, I had taken Arlene and Gail for a walk in Central Park. Arlene wanted to go skating. Gail and I sat on the bleachers watching her (she was quite good) and ate pretzels. Gail said, in a serious, considered voice, apropos of nothing, ‘Logan, why don’t you marry Mommy? I’d really like it if you would.’ I huffed and puffed and changed the subject, but that evening over supper (we were alone) I popped the question. It’s true I am very attracted, physically, to Alannah, and I like her but I can’t say, if I’m being honest, that I love her. If you loved her would you still be fucking Janet Felzer? Alannah says she loves me. The problem is that I don’t think I can truly love anyone again, after Freya. But I’m happy, I suppose – more than that: I’m pleased, delighted that we will be married. I’m used to being married; I’m not used to being on my own – being on my own is not a state I welcome or enjoy. The thought lingers, however, that I’m marrying Alannah because it means I’ll have Gail in my life. Perhaps the one I’m in love with is Gail… This is probably very foolish of me: she won’t stay the enchanting, funny five-year-old for ever. Still, carpe diem. Of all people, I should be living by that axiom.
[LMS married Alannah Rule on 14 February 1953 at a quiet civil ceremony attended by a few friends and the children. Titus Fitch had influenza and could not travel, so he claimed.
The New York Journal falls silent now for over two years until it resumes in early 1955. LMS had left his Cornelia Street apartment for Alannah’s on Riverside Drive. The house in Mystic (Mystic House, as he referred to it) proved a much loved contrast to New York. He carried on running the Leeping Fils gallery but the uneasy truce between him and Marius Leeping was showing signs of strain.]
1955
Sunday, 10 April
Mystic House. Warm sunny day. Could be a day in summer. Dogwood in full bloom. I pretend to be reading in the garden but in reality all I’m thinking of is my first drink. Just before 11 a.m., I go into the kitchen and open a beer. No one around so I take a couple of big gulps and top the can up again with bourbon. Back outside into the garden and suddenly the newspaper seems more interesting. ‘Drinking already?’ Alannah says in her best caustic, disapproving voice. ‘It’s just a beer, for Christ’s sake,’ I protest. This keeps me going until noon, when I can legitimately mix a pitcher of Martinis. Alannah has one, I have three. I open a bottle of wine for lunch. In the afternoon I snooze, then go down to the shore and wander around the rocks with the kids. By the time we return home it’s time for a pre-prandial Scotch and soda or two. More wine with the evening meal, a brandy afterwards, and pretty soon it’s time for bed. This is how I survive a Sunday in the country.
Why am I drinking so much? Well, one reason is because on Sunday I know I have to go back to New York on Monday morning. Spirit of place is something I profoundly believe in – which is why I love Mystic House – and the spirit of place of the Upper West Side is just not for me. I hate our apartment; I hate its location and it’s beginning to sour the entire island of Manhattan for me. What combination of factors provokes this? The narrowness of the north-south avenues on the West Side. The unremarkable buildings that line them. The height of said buildings. And there are always too many people on the Upper West Side. We’re too crammed in, the sidewalks always too busy with pedestrians. And then there’s the cold wide expanse of the Hudson. It’s just not for me – my soul shrivels. I’ve suggested moving many times to Alannah but she loves this apartment. Maybe I’m not used to living with two young girls. Maybe I’m not happy.
[June]
Drove out to Windrose on Long Island – Nat Tate’s stepfather’s house, a big neoclassical pile. Peter Barkasian (the stepfather) buys 75 per cent of his stepson’s output, acting in a way as an unofficial dealer. Which has good and bad consequences for Nat – a charming (there must be a better word – can’t think of one) but essentially guileless young man. Good, in that it provides him with a guaranteed income; bad, in that as an artist of talent you don’t want your stepfather controlling your professional life.
I bought two of the ‘White Buildings’ series – big grey-white canvases with blurry charcoal markings emerging through the gesso (as if through a freezing fog) that, after a little scrutiny, reveal themselves as houses. Barkasian is inordinately proud of Nat, who diffidently bats away all compliments as if they are buzzing flies. I like him – Barkasian – he has all the unthinking self-confidence of a rich man without the attendant, shrill egomania. You sense he looks on the art world as a schoolboy does a well-stocked sweetshop – here is a world to revel in, full of potential fun and self-indulgence. He went drinking with Nat at the Cedar and was raving about the women: ‘I mean, the boy practically had to fight them off!’ I suspect Nat’s taste doesn’t lie in that direction.
[July]
Mystic. God, what a great place this is. I’ve managed to cut down on the booze and out here all tensions between me and Alannah subside. I look at her on the beach: tanned, her big, lissom frame, the girls laughing and shrieking at the ocean’s edge, and I say to myself: Mountstuart, why are you making life so hard to enjoy? I taste the salt on Alannah’s breasts when we make love. I lie in bed beside her, listening, when the sea is high, to the wash of surf and the occasional zip of a car on Highway 95, and I suppose I feel at peace.
Out here, just a few miles away, the River Thames runs from Norwich to New London. Close at hand are the townships of Essex and Old Lyme. Fitch couldn’t have chosen a worse place to let his hatred of old England stew.
[August]
The girls are with their father. Alannah and I have spent a week on Long Island with Ann Ginsberg. Herman Keller is here and the ubiquitous O’Hara. Thank Christ our summer house is in Connecticut – the New York art world seems to have decamped here to a man and woman. Keller took us to dinner at Pollock’s but Lee [Krasner, his wife] wouldn’t let us through the door. She said Jackson ‘wasn’t well’. We could hear jazz music coming from the back of the house at tremendous, ear-shattering volume. So we drove on to Quogue and ate hamburgers. Keller and O’Hara kept referring to Pollock as a ‘genius’ and I had to interrupt. I’m sorry, but you can’t just bandy that word around, I said. It applies only to a handful of the very greatest artists in history: Shakespeare, Dante, da Vinci, Mozart, Beethoven, Velázquez, Chekhov – and a few more. You can’t put Jackson Pollock in that company and call him a genius – it’s an obscene misuse of language, not to say totally absurd. They both disagreed violently and we had an entertaining row.
[September]
Today I discovered that Marius has embezzled close to $30,000 from Leeping Fils. I don’t know quite what to do. Somehow he has been siphoning off small amounts, always under the $500 that he is entitled to spend without referral, for paintings he has bought. I went down into the picture store to do an inventory and found almost thirty canvases with his name on them: I’d be surprised if he’d paid more than ten or twenty dollars for them, yet the invoices read $250, $325, and so on. An elementary fraud – but hard to prove. And a situation that has to be h
andled with extreme delicacy.
I met Alannah after work and we had an early dinner and went to see a movie – Long Time Gone. I hardly watched what was on the screen. But later, in bed, we made love as if we were on our first date. Was it because half my mind was elsewhere? She seemed to spread her thighs wider so that when I pushed down into her it seemed as if I went deeper than ever before. I felt hugely swollen and potent and seemed to be able to go on and on without coming. Then when she came, she gripped me in such a way that I spurted immediately and with such a feeling of release, of purgation, that I thought at once of Balzac – ‘there goes another novel’. The idea made me laugh and, hearing my laughter, Alannah joined in, both of us experiencing a form of delightful, mutual, sexual mirth. When I withdrew, my erection had only half subsided and I felt I was in some kind of animal rutting fever, ready to go again. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Alannah said, ‘what’s gotten into you tonight?’ We took a shower together and touched each other and kissed gently. We dried off and went back to bed. I opened some wine and we caressed and played with each other, but lazily, as if we had both tacitly decided not to make love again. Something had happened that last time and we both wanted to hold on to that memory.
I woke at 4.00 and am writing this down now, a dull ache in my balls. But my mind is still full of Marius and his fraud.
Thursday, 29 September
Paris. Hotel Rembrandt. I decided to come to Paris partly to talk over the Marius issue with Ben, face to face, and partly because Mother says she is unwell, on death’s door according to her. And also because I need to renew my passport.