by William Boyd
MARCIO: SO, Logan, how was your weekend?
ME: I had lunch with an old friend, Peter Scabius.
MARCIO: Great writer.
MARTIN: Ditto to that.
ME: And I went to a show. At an art gallery.
MARTIN: We love art. Who was on?
ME: Diebenkorn.
MARCIO: We got one of his, I think.
MARTIN: We have two, actually, Marcio.
This is what confuses you out here. You think you are having a fruitless meeting with two affable numskulls and you end up talking about Richard Diebenkorn for half an hour. They want me to write the script, they say, but they don’t want to pay me until it’s done and they’ve read it. But what if you don’t like it? I say. You’re not going to pay for a script you don’t like. Won’t be an issue, Logan, Marcio assures me. We know we’re going to love whatever you do, Martin adds.
Later I telephone Wallace in London and ask his advice. Agree to nothing, he says, tell them to make all proposals to me. I sense he’s a little annoyed that I’m only consulting him now. I’m your agent, Logan, he says, this is my job, for Christ’s sake.
Saturday, 30 July
On the plane, Pan Am, back to NYC. Yesterday evening I went down to Santa Monica and walked by the ocean. I had a couple of drinks in a bar by the pier as dusk fell and the sky and the sea began to look like a Rothko colour field. I felt good, lightly tanned, at ease, enjoying the slow burn of the booze and I suddenly had the fantasy about moving out here – start a Leeping Fils West… As you grow older and your life becomes more ordered, so too a comfortable, temperate, easy-going version of the Good Life becomes ever more appealing. I might meet a nice Californian woman – they seem to have more than their fair share of beautiful women out here. But I realized, as I explored it further, that this was and would only be a fantasy: I’d go mad in a month or two –just as I’d go mad in a cottage in Somerset, or a farm in Tuscany. My nature is essentially urban and, although Los Angeles is indubitably a city, somehow its mores aren’t. Maybe it’s the weather that makes it feel forever suburban and provincial: cities need extremes of weather, so that you long for escape. I could live in Chicago, I think – I’ve enjoyed my trips to Chicago. Also there has to be something brutal and careless about a true city – the denizen must feel vulnerable – and Los Angeles doesn’t deliver that either, at least not in my short experience. I feel too damn comfortable here, too cocooned. These are not experiences of the true city: its nature seeps in under the door and through the windows – you can never be free of it. And the genuine urban man or woman is always curious – curious about the life outside on the streets. That just doesn’t apply here: you live in Bel Air and you don’t ask yourself what’s going on in Pacific Palisades – or am I missing something?
We resolved the script issue: $10,000 payable in advance; another ten if it’s accepted. Wallace did a good job, which made me think: why don’t I use him more? When we spoke on the phone I told him about my idea for Octet and wondered if we could prise an advance out of Sprymont & Drew. He told me that Sprymont & Drew don’t exist any more. The company was bought and the imprint is defunct. What about Roderick? He’s resurfaced at Michael Kazin – at a much reduced salary. He suggested I put the idea down on paper and he said he would see what he could do, but added: ‘It won’t be easy, Logan. I have to warn you – things have changed, and you’re not exactly a household name.’ True. True…
Thursday, 15 September
Lionel has been here the last four days. He has untidy long hair that hangs over his ears and a thin patchy beard. I could have bumped into him on the street and not known he was my son. He is still taciturn and diffident and the mood in the apartment since he’s arrived is one of self-conscious reserve and scrupulous politeness: ‘After you with the salt.’ ‘You have it, I insist.’ Lionel seems to know a good few people in the city, what with his contacts in the music business. I asked him about his work and he explained, without my taking much in. His first band, the Greensleeves, changed their name to the Fabulairs and made a successful record – just outside the top-twenty, he said. Lionel was invited over to America by a small independent record company to see if he can effect a similar transformation here. He’s very excited, he says: America is the place to be for contemporary music, he claims, just like art. England is filled with pale imitations of American recording stars. I nod, in an interested manner. Lionel played me his Fabulairs hit – pleasant enough melody, jaunty, a catchy chorus. This music does little for me; or put it this way – I enjoy it as much as I would a brass band. Ganz ordinär. It’s been worth while coming to know him better but I’ll be pleased to have the place to myself again. He moves into an apartment in the West Village next week.
We’ve had a few meals out together – we must look an odd couple as we stroll the Upper East Side. He tells me Lottie is well, though I sense he sees little of her. Her two daughters by Leggatt – what are they called? – thrive: one about to finish boarding school, one working on a fashion magazine as a sort of secretary. So life moves on.
We sit in a restaurant and try to chat naturally. Try: I wonder if we can ever know each other well enough so that we no longer have to make an effort, so that our discourse is instinctive and thoughtless. But, I say to myself, why should that ever be? I never experienced such ease with my parents: I didn’t expect it and neither did they. Lionel is almost a complete stranger to me as a result of my divorce from Lottie. The fact that he’s my son, product of my union with Lottie, seems almost incredible. I have a far closer relationship with Gail. To be honest, I’ll be glad to have him out of the apartment – glad, but guilty, of course.
Message from Marcio and Martin – they have significant problems with my first draft. I bet they do – but not as significant as mine. Thankless drudge-work: I sense the Hollywood period of my life has just ended.
1961
Sunday, 1 January
Saw in the New Year with Janet and Kolokowski. Big, noisy, drunken, depressing party. I popped into Lionel’s apartment on Jane Street for a drink beforehand. He thinks he’s found his new band – the Cicadas, a folk group, a trio. He wants to rename them the Dead Souls. What, I said, after the Gogol novel? What novel? Gogol’s great novel, one of the greatest ever written, Dead Souls. You mean there’s already a novel called Dead Souls? FUCK! He swore and ranted, much to my delight: it was the most animated I’d ever seen him. Look on it as a plus, I said: if you didn’t know about it, chances are not many other people will – and those that do will be impressed. I think it’s a tremendous name for a pop group, I said. My words elated him and he gave a huge wide smile – and for a poignant instant I saw myself in him, and not Lottie and the Edgefields. I went weak at the knees, feeling a swarming confusion of emotions – relief, then awful guilt, terror and, I suppose, the atavistic stirrings of an almost-love. One of the band members arrived – a sweatered and corduroyed youngster with uncombed hair – and the moment was over. Lionel played me some tape-recordings of the Dead Souls’ music and I made the right appreciative noises. He wants to bring me into his world, to share it with me, and I must make every effort to respond. It’s the least I can do.
At the party I had a tense argument with Frank [O’Hara]. I must say he’s incredibly argumentative these days, quite passionately angry – to the extent that some people are frightened of him. Of course, it was drink-fuelled, like all our disputes. I had said that whenever I was interested in a new artist I always wanted to look at the earliest work of theirs available, even juvenilia. Why’s that? Frank said, suspicious. Well, I said, because early talent – precocity, call it what you will – is usually a good guide to later talent. If there’s no talent on display in the early work it rather tends to undermine the claims for the later, in my opinion. Bullshit, said Frank, you’re so institutionalized. Look at de Kooning, I said: the early work is really impressive. Look at Picasso when he was at art school – astonishing. Even Franz Kline’s early stuff is OK –which explains why t
he later stuff is OK also. Look at Barnett Newman – hopeless. Then look at Pollock – he couldn’t draw a cardboard box – which rather explains what happened next, don’t you think? Fuck you, Frank railed at me, now Jackson’s dead, cunts like you try to cut him down to your size. Nonsense, I said: I expressed the same opinions when Jackson was alive and kicking. He’s the redwood tree, Frank said, you’re just shrubs and saplings. He gestured at half a dozen startled artists who had gathered round to hear the row.
Met a pretty woman there – Nancy? Janey? – and we exchanged a kiss that promised much at midnight. She gave me her name and phone number but I’ve lost it. Maybe Janet can track her down. I drank too much and have a sore head and a shivery nervy feel to my body. New Year’s resolution: cut down on the booze and the pills.
Monday, 27 February
My birthday. No. 55. A card from Lionel and one from Gail. ‘Happy birthday, dear Logan, and don’t tell Mom you got this.’ I had a vodka and orange juice for breakfast to celebrate, then a couple of slugs of gin mid morning at the office. Liquid lunch at Bemelmans – two Negronis. Opened a bottle of champagne for the staff in the afternoon. Feeling sluggish so took a couple of Dexedrine. Two Martinis before going out to meet Naomi [the woman from the party]. Wine and grappa at Di Santo’s. Naomi had a headache so I dropped her at her apartment and didn’t stay. So I sit here with a big Scotch and soda, Poulenc on the gramophone, about to take a couple of Nembutal to send me off to the land of nod. Happy birthday, Logan.
Monday, 3 July
Profoundly shocked by Hemingway’s death.8 The devastating, sobering, chilling brutality of it. Herman [Keller] said he blew his head off, literally. Both barrels of a shotgun. The room covered in bits of expressed brain, bone and blood. Is that symbolic, or what? All the trouble coming from the brain so disintegrate it. I think of him in Madrid, in ‘37: his energy and passion, his kindness to me, using his car to find the Mirós. I couldn’t read the novels after For Whom the Bell Tolls – truly bad work, he had lost his way – but the stories were wonderful and wonderfully inspiring when I first read them. Was that the one moment in his career when he was genuinely blessed? And nothing more after – the Jackson Pollock of American Literature. Herman, who knows someone close to the family, said he was like a little frail grey ghost of a man at the end. Wasted by the shock therapy. Bloody hell: I’ve been to those dark places myself and know something of the torments that can be suffered. Thank Christ I never had the ECT, though. Of course, Hemingway was a chronic boozer, also – one of those who kept himself topped up all day, just over the edge of inebriation but not roaring drunk. Look where it landed him. Sixty-one years old – only six years older than me. I feel all insecure and on edge. Called Herman and we agreed to meet. Funnily enough I want to be with another writer at this moment while it all sinks in – another member of the tribe.
[The New York Journal breaks off at this point. LMS made a serious attempt, prompted by Hemingway’s death, to cut down on his own intake of alcohol and amphetamines. Always a light sleeper, he continued to use sleeping pills. He stopped drinking liquor and reduced his intake to ‘under a bottle of wine a day’. In the summer of 1961 he took a month’s holiday in Europe, spending most of the time with Gloria Scabius, now the Contessa di Cordato, and her elderly husband, Cesare, in their comfortable house near Sienna, La Fucina [the forge], inevitably referred to by Gloria as ‘La Fuckina’. It became something of a home away from home for him: he spent the following Christmas and New Year there and returned again in the summer of’ 63 for another three weeks.
In the autumn of 1962, Alannah was granted her divorce and she married David Peterman. Gail still sent LMS the occasional card, and contrived to meet whenever she could, but it was made clear by Alannah’s lawyer that one of the terms of the divorce was that there was to be no contact between LMS and either of the girls – a stipulation that he always regarded as unnecessarily cruel and spiteful.
The gallery continued to flourish quietly and confidently, LMS building up a substantial but select collection of modern American painters, concentrating on Kline, Elche, Rothko, Chardosian, Baziotes and Motherwell. Martha Heuber remained loyal and Todd Heuber moved from de Nagy’s to Leeping Fils in October ‘62.
LMS’s journalism increased also during this period – a reflection of his comparative sobriety, perhaps. He was frequently invited to comment in British newspapers and magazines on American shows that toured Europe. He always rather resented the reputation he acquired as its champion, claiming that his heart always had lain with the classic modernists and the eccentric individualists of the European tradition. None the less, he published important pieces on Larry Rivers, Adolph Gottlieb, Talbot Strand and Helen Frankenthaler in the Observer, Encounter and the Sunday Times colour supplement among others. Wallace Douglas secured him a monthly column, ‘Notes from NYC’, in the political-cultural weekly the New Rambler. The journal resumes in the spring of 1963.]
1963
Friday, 19 April
To the launch of revolver. Ann Ginsberg is funding the whole enterprise by all accounts. Udo [Feuerbach] does it again – though I find it odd that a magazine of the avant-garde arts should take its name from Goering’s famous boast.9 On second thoughts, perhaps it’s rather witty. The old crowd had loyally foregathered – though I think we’re all looking a little old and jaded. Frank, puffy-faced and flushed (we promised Ann we wouldn’t have an argument), Janet and Kolokowski (what does he do, that man?). One was more aware of the casualty list: Pollock, Tate, Kline. Living this hard in New York takes its toll. As I had promised not to argue with Frank, I argued instead with Herman about the alleged beauty of Mrs JFK. I said by no stretch of the imagination could she be described as a beautiful woman: a nice woman, yes; a thin woman, granted; a well-dressed woman, indubitably – but beautiful, absolutely not. Herman, who has been in the same room as her, said that being in her presence is like encountering a forcefield – you’re unmanned, stunned. You’re just a raving fan, that’s all, I said. It’s the office that’s making you awestruck – the First Lady, and all that – you’re not judging, you’re feeling. Then I had another argument with Deedee Blaine about Warhol – whom she sees as the Antichrist. At least Warhol can draw, I said: he can do it but he’s decided not to – it’s quite a different strategy. Naomi broke us up – she thought I was being very provocative.
Ann cornered me later and made me promise to write something. I said I was too old for a magazine as ‘hip’ as revolver and she said, ‘OΚ, I promise we won’t put your age at the bottom of the article.’ I like Ann – chain-smoking, thin as a stick, voice deeper than mine – and one has to admit she’s spread her petrochemical millions around to beneficial effect. She asked me to a French Embassy reception as her escort. I could hardly refuse.
Wednesday, 8 May
Lionel calls round full of excitement: the Dead Souls have entered some chart or other at number 68. His beard is no thicker but his hair is over the back of his collar. He has a girlfriend now, he says, a real American girl called Monday.
After he leaves I haul myself into my tuxedo (I’m definitely putting on weight) and wander over to Ann’s place on Fifth, whence we limo the few hundred yards to the soirée. Ann is greeted like an old friend by the ambassador. I mingle with the other eighty, middle-aged dignitaries sipping champagne under the blazing light of six chandeliers. Very French, such luminosity, I think – like their brasseries: unsparing incandescence. I have a few words with a sweating attaché who seems unnecessarily on edge, continually glancing round to the door. ‘Ah, les voilà,’ he says reverentially. I turn round to see the Duke and Duchess of Windsor walk in.
What do I feel? It’s nearly twenty years since I was this close to them. The Duke looks old, wizened, very frail – he must be in his seventies.10 The Duchess is like a painted figurine under the tremendous lights, her face carved out of chalk, her mouth a livid gash of scarlet lipstick. Neither looks particularly gracious or pleased to be here, but I daresay
they can’t refuse an official summons from the French – given that the state has let them off paying income tax (a complete scandal, in my opinion).
I circle round and try to find a better position to observe them. The Duke is smoking, asks for a whisky and soda. The Duchess’s legs look like they’d snap in a frost. She wanders round, greeting people (she seems to know quite a few), the Duke following forlornly in her wake, puffing on his cigarette, nodding and smiling to anyone his gaze lights upon. But his eyes are doleful and rheumy, and his smile is entirely automatic. I stand rigid as they draw near.
It’s the Duchess who sees me first and her gash-like mouth freezes in mid smile. I do nothing. All that stored animosity from 1943 crackles across the room, as potent as ever. She turns to the Duke and whispers to him. When he sees me, the first expression on his face can only be described as fearful, before it shades into a grimace of anger and outrage. They turn their backs on me and talk to the ambassador.
A few moments later the attaché I’d been talking to earlier comes up and requests me to leave the party. I ask why, for God’s sake. ‘Son Altesse’ insists on it, he says, otherwise he and the Duchess will leave. Please inform Mrs Ginsberg I will wait outside, I say.
I spend half an hour pacing up and down Fifth Avenue, smoking. My beat takes me past the door as the Duke and Duchess are leaving. There are a gaggle of photographers and a small crowd of about a dozen people who break into applause as the couple make for their car. I even see some women curtsy.