by William Boyd
‘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 ist.
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 de 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 Stael and other artists. Heuber knows his stuff. He’s strong, like a young peasant or longshoreman, with a square juttingjaw, 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, Klirie, 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-slighdy 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—1 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.
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, ‘Ho
w 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, njuly
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 Wilson↓?’
≡ Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), eminent critic and man of letters.
I said I knew who he was, that I’d read a lot of his books. Another fully paid-up member of the Anglophobe dub.
‘A brilliant mind,’ Fitch said, blowing blue scented smoke ceil-ingward. 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 antien regime, 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 facade 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.↓
≡ Hart Crane (1899-1932), poet. His long poem The Bridge was published in 1930.
I see what Frank means by brains.
Bumped into Tate as I was leaving and asked if he had anything 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.↓ is strolling home.
≡ Eisenhower was elected president by a landslide. Richard M. Nixon was his vice-president.
Thursday, 25 December
London. Turpentine Lane. Glum and depressing lunch at Sumner Place with Mother and Encamacion. Mother seems to be fading—alert enough, but now markedly thinner and scrawnier. We ate turkey and sodden grey Brussels sprouts. Encamacion had forgotten to cook the potatoes, so Mother shouted at her, Encamacion 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, lau
ghter, 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(shewas 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.