2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  I know what I am doing but somehow the situation seems quite unreal—as if I’m on stage acting in a play. I just feel—1 don’t know what I feel. The decision came to me this morning and I don’t think it has much to do with the humiliation of last night. I know it must be done. It’s a rainy, grey morning in Paris. All over the city there must be other people dying, on the point of death or dead. I’m another to add to their number. I don’t fear death, I simply think for me here, now, it’s the best and only solution. The decision came to me, quite matter-of-factly. I drink more whisky. I will keep on writing. People will say: did you hear about Logan Mountstuart? He killed himself in Paris. I drink more whisky. There are no more pills. I begin to feel drunk—or is this the beginning? I am committing suicide. It seems absurd. Forty-three years was long enough for me. I wasn’t a complete failure. There is some of my work that will

  [At this point the words become an illegible scribble and stop.]

  The New York Journal

  Logan Mountstuart was discovered an hour later by Odile, who popped by the hotel on her way to work to recover her cigarette lighter—a prized silver Zippo—which she’d left on the bedside table. LMS was rushed to hospital, where his stomach was pumped, he was sedated and put on a saline drip. Two days later he left to spend a month with the Leepings before returning to Turpentine Lane. No one in London, including his mother, ever seemed to have learned about the suicide attempt.

  He began a process of psychiatric care and analysis at Atkinson Morley’s, a neuropsychiatric hospital in Wimbledon, where he was a patient of Dr Adam Outridge. Dr Outridge prescribed a mild sedative and sleeping pills and advised LMS to cut down on his drinking. Dr Outridge also encouraged him to proceed with his novella, The Villa by the Lake, which was published in 1950 to serious and enthusiastic acclaim (‘One of the most haunting and unusual novels to have come out of the last war’—Listener) and very modest sales.

  Meanwhile Ben Leeping opened his New York gallery, Leeping Fils, in May 1950 on Madison Avenue between E. 65th and 66th Streets. Marius Leeping moved to New York to run the gallery. At the core of Leeping Fils’ business would be the ‘classic’ modernists of twentieth-century European painting, but Marius’s brief was to be on the lookout for new talent emerging in New York. Artists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell were starting to create a stir and the ‘Abstract Expressionist’ movement, as it shortly after became known, was beginning to turn the attention of the art world away from Paris to New York.

  Ben Leeping felt that Marius’s age (he was twenty-three) and inexperience demanded that he have an older associate director of the gallery whom he could trust and, just as importantly, one on whom Ben Leeping could rely as well. LMS, now fully recovered, and his novella published, was the obvious choice.

  Thus it was, at the end of 1950, that Ben Leeping offered him the job of associate director of Leeping Fils at a salary of $5,000 a year. The real purpose of the appointment was to have someone keep a close and guiding eye on Marius. LMS did not need much persuading: he closed up Turpentine Lane and sailed for New York in March 1951.

  When LMS arrived in New York he spent a few days in a hotel before renting an apartment on E. 47th Street between First and Second Avenues (the first of many New York addresses he was to occupy in a peripatetic existence). It was not the most salubrious of areas but was a convenient twenty minutes’ walk from the gallery.

  He and Marius then began a thorough and comprehensive trawl of all the established and new galleries in New York as well as the transient co-op galleries showing the younger artists’ work. Ben Leeping had provided a $25,000 acquisition fund for them to make their initial purchases, money furnished by the final sales of the Peredes Miros (of which LMS’s Miro netted him some $9,000).

  At a party, about two months after he arrived, LMS met a divorcee called Alannah Rule who worked in the legal department of NBC. She had two young daughters, Arlene (eight) and Gail (four). LMS began to see Alannah socially. Their affair began—with perfect timing, as LMS always said—on 4th July 1951.

  The New York Journal commences in September of that year.

  1951

  Friday, 21 September

  So here I am in New York, writing again, working again, fucking again, living again. I decided to restart this journal largely because I’m beginning to grow worried about Marius and want to have some aide-memoire about his actions and behaviour. Ben has absolute faith in him but I’m starring to wonder if it’s somewhat misplaced. I also think his taste is bizarre, not to say dangerously skewed. We argue constantly about what is good and bad and what artists we should try to patronize. I have a horrible premonition about Marius and this gallery and want to have all the evidence I might need well documented and to hand.

  For example: I’m always the first here in the morning, even before Helma (our receptionist). More often than not Marius doesn’t show up until after lunch. My whole strategy, agreed with Ben, was to add to our core European stock as shrewdly as possible and not worry about making a splash. The town is full of galleries and co-ops—Myers and de Nagy, Felzer, Lonnegan, Parsons, Egan—to name our obvious rivals. Reputations flare up and die away within the space of a few weeks and we need to make sure that anyone we show—given our pedigree and the Parisian clouds of glory that we trail—has some legs. Marius—let’s be blunt, and this has nothing to do with his charm—has no aesthetic judgement as far as I can see. He seems to react on a whim, or worse, the whim of the last person he was talking to. Anything that Greenberg↓ suggests he takes up uncritically.

  ≡ Clement Greenberg (1909-94). The most influential art critic at the time, credited with ‘discovering’ Jackson Pollock.

  I keep telling him: don’t board a crowded train leaving the station, let’s find our own with lots of empty seats where we can stretch our legs. He doesn’t listen—any bandwagon rolling by will do.

  Still, I enjoy these mornings in the gallery before the clients and Marius turn up. We are on the first floor—rather, the second floor, in American parlance—and I stand in the window looking down on Madison watching the people and the traffic going by. Helma brings me a cup of coffee and I smoke my first cigarette of the day. At moments like these I think I’m dreaming—I can’t believe I’m living and working here, that this opportunity turned up in my life.

  To Alannah’s tonight. A whole weekend together, as the children are away with her ex-husband. We’re going to look for somewhere for me to rent in Greenwich Village. I think I need to be doser to the action.

  Sunday, 23 September

  We found a small apartment on Cornelia Street, off Bleecker. It’s a basement of a brick row house (what is it about me and basements? Why do I like the semi-subterranean life?), unfurnished with a bedroom, sitting room, tiny kitchen and shower room. An Italian family occupy the two floors above.

  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 des
cribed me as cyclothymic—a small-scale manic-depressive—which is why, he says, he didn’t give me any electro-convulsive 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 mantrue—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 4⁄th 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 N°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’Hara↓ and some other literary acquaintances to leaven the art world.

  ≡ Frank O’Hara (1926-66), poet, then working at the Museum of Modern Art.

  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 weightlifter (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 tide 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 l
ike an airline. He picked up Villa and riffled through it. Another book, he said, teuflische virtuositat. 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’ll 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-A Anglophobe. If I’d been a Negro and he the Grand Vizier of the Ku Klux Klan the animus couldn’t have been more dear 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.’