by Anne Bernays
A.B. (far right) in Barnard dance class, 1951.
Anatole accepted nothing at face value, made fun of most objects, people, and institutions I had been trained to venerate, such as the New York Times; the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes; the Upper East Side; the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein; best-seller lists; fancy clothes—everything, in fact, admired by most of the city’s population. According to Anatole democracy was an unachievable ideal; so it would be better for everyone if smart men were installed in high positions than to have the sorts of elections—catering to emotion and narrow interests—that the United States indulged in. That this was just a notch or two below fascism didn’t bother me: Anatole was smart about everything else so how could he be wrong about this?
We rarely broke our dating routine—sex, then meeting up with Milton or another pal, and sitting around talking until midnight—but one night Anatole took me to Delmore Schwartz’s place nearby in the Village, where I learned how to shoot craps, with Dwight MacDonald and Anatole as my coaches.
He sent me to a doctor—I suspected from the familiar way he talked about her that I wasn’t his first referral—to be fitted with a diaphragm. Embarrassed by the procedure, I forced myself to remain cool while between my spread legs the woman rummaged around my insides. While there, she said, “I suppose you know that it’s unwise to have sexual intercourse before you marry.” I interpreted unwise to mean immoral. I wondered if Anatole knew that along with the diaphragm there came, at no extra charge, instructions on the proper way to behave as a single female. When I reported what the doctor had said, Anatole brushed it off. “She’s okay. She just feels she has to take a parental interest. Come over here!”
I made a tactical mistake when I gave my mother the issue of Partisan Review in which Anatole had published a piece as intellectually subversive as the Museum of Modern Art’s fur teacup, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, or the Armory Show had been forty years earlier, shaking up the bourgeoisie and forcing people to look at things in a new way. It said, in effect, that members of so-called respectable society were the true vulgarians because they lived in a constricted world, never questioned or fought against the tyranny of the status quo. He said this via the most graceful and startling prose. I thought my mother would be won over by Anatole’s brilliance and range, but after reading his essay she said, “I don’t want you to see this person anymore. He’s a nihilist.” When I told her Anatole had Negro parents, she went nuts. “Do you want to have a black baby?”
I wanted to shock my mother. But I also wanted to be shaken up myself—everything my parents had done until I went off to college had been designed to shield me from the slightest whiff of danger. They had so thoroughly childproofed my world that I had begun to think I lived inside a bubble through which nothing, no germs—real or metaphorical—could penetrate.
The penetrator—Anatole—was an extreme, way off the scale of normal human behavior. He never paid me a compliment or indicated that he enjoyed my company. We had been invited to a party uptown by one of my few friends he hadn’t said anything dismissive about. “I’d like to go,” I told him. “Well I wouldn’t,” he said. “I’d have to put on a suit and tie, and anyway they’ll just sit around being clever.” I told him that in that case I would go by myself, which seemed to surprise him. I showed up at the East Side apartment, where I found a roomful of young people sitting around being clever. Less than an hour after I arrived, the doorbell rang, the hostess went to answer, and who stood on the threshold, in a suit and tie? Anatole. This was the closest he ever came to admitting that I was in any way important to him.
“What have you got on under that dress?” Anatole said one night as I took my coat off in a loft where a large and noisy party was in progress.
“A panty girdle.”
“It’s terrible. Take it off. You should never wear anything like that.” I went into the bathroom and peeled it off. “I was only trying to look thinner,” I said. “You like thin women.” I’d rolled up the girdle and stuck it in my purse.
“You’re okay without one of those things,” he said. And this was the closest he ever came to admitting he found me less than repulsive to look at.
One of his former friends, Chandler Brossard, wrote a novel with a pretentious title: Who Walk in Darkness. Anatole was reading it in manuscript, dropping each page on the floor as he finished with it, when I showed up at his place for one of our curious dates. “Chandler’s publisher sent it to me to read. They’re afraid I might sue.” Why would he sue? “This book is largely about me. He implies that I’m a Negro trying to pass as white.”
“Well, aren’t you?” This was the first and only time we had ever come close to this porcupine.
“It’s not about what I am,” he said ambiguously, veering off. “I just don’t want him to turn me into some fictional character.”
I asked him what he was going to do, and he said he was going to threaten the publisher with a lawsuit. “I won’t let them publish this garbage.” In the end, Brossard, faced with this lawsuit, changed the main character’s unspeakable secret to that of being born to unmarried parents. This was an era when social stigmas were disappearing from the scene as fast as virgins, and the novel as it was published had none of the impact that the original version would have had. Who cared if the hero was born out of wedlock?
During my senior year the news office at Barnard named me campus correspondent for the New York Times. Since I had absolutely no experience as a reporter, hadn’t been on the Barnard Bulletin, and didn’t even know what a lead was, I could only imagine how the hardworking staffers of the Bulletin felt about my getting this plum job. I was just a blithe kid, and although I assumed, justifiably, that my being given this job had a lot to do with my mother, Barnard, class of 1913 (and also related to the Sulzberger family), I wasn’t fazed by my connections or my ignorance, and was too arrogant to be scared. At least twice a week in the afternoon I took the Broadway subway from 116th Street to Forty-second Street, walked cooly past a phalanx of Times delivery truck drivers who whistled, cheered, and yelled smutty things at me, visited Mr. Garth, the managing editor, who told me how many words he wanted, sat down at my desk in the city room and typed out my little story on three pieces of paper connected at the top. Sometimes, if it was late, a copy boy would be waiting by the desk, plucking the paper out of the machine as I came to the end of a page. No time for revision. During that year the Times published at least one Barnard story a week, not because spectacular things were happening on campus but because Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, wife of the publisher and president of the Times corporation, was a Barnard graduate—the maternal autocrat. And so I profited by two daughterly connections. Anatole made fun of me and my stringer’s job, giving me no credit for my snappy leads—“Cries of ‘nike,’ Greek for Victory, were heard yesterday for the fiftieth time as the annual Greek Games was held at Barnard College”—or my thoughtful stories, but dismissed the whole enterprise, once again, as a doleful instrument of its middle-brow management and readers.
My friend Mary said, “You make Anatole sound like a vampire.”
“I’m besotted. I can’t help it.”
“Then why don’t you marry him?”
“He hasn’t asked me,” I said.
For months after I stopped seeing Anatole, having been told by my shrink that he’d be forced to discontinue the treatment if I didn’t, I walked around like an addict who’s gone cold turkey. He was, in fact, very like a drug, and my trancelike state only underscored my need for shoring up from the outside. For this I focused on men, looking for someone like Anatole.
I met Bernie Wolfe at a party in the Village. He was sixteen years older than me and looked even older, his skin thick and wrinkled. Bernie earned his living as ghostwriter for Billy Rose, a former songwriter, nightclub owner, and theater producer. Rose had maneuvered himself among so many Broadway-connected enterprises that he was identified as a showman, a word used to characterize someone who can’t quite make up
his mind which of his assorted skills he wants to use at any one moment. Among other things, Rose had staged a swimming extravaganza at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair known as the Aquacade—a couple of dozen gorgeous girls in swimsuits performing water ballet to music. Rose, born William Samuel Rosenberg, was so popular and ubiquitous that a nationally syndicated column called “Pitching Horseshoes” appeared regularly under his byline. It was written by Bernie. In “Horseshoes,” Bernie, disguised as Rose, spread showbiz opinions and dispensed news of the theater and its people.
Bernie’s best-known novel was Really the Blues, a fat, sassy book about jazz trumpeter Mezz Mezzrow. Published by Random House, it hadn’t sold very well, but people who knew the subject assured me it was the best book about jazz ever written. Bernie told me stories: how he had been one of Leon Trotsky’s bodyguards in Mexico, where Trotsky lived as an exile after his life was threatened by Stalin. Whenever Trotsky went to the movies, his several bodyguards went with him; instead of looking at the screen they continually scanned the audience for potential assassins, one of whom eventually managed to break into Trotsky’s house and kill him with an ice axe. Bernie was short and not fat but squat, as if pushed in from both ends. He looked a little like the movie star Edward G. Robinson and, like Robinson, smoked cigars; he always smelled like sweetened smoke. I wasn’t in love with him, and he seemed to love me with a sort of avuncular warmth, aware that I wouldn’t sleep with him and having the tact and kindness not to scare me off by insisting we have sex. I was still getting over Anatole.
Bernie lived in the murky two-room basement apartment of a brownstone on Tenth Street a few steps east of Sixth Avenue. He was a Village regular, knew everyone, and was one of the few people I’ve ever known about whom I never heard a nasty, snide, or envious remark. He kept an office-size typewriter on his desk, and next to the typewriter he maintained a neat pile of assorted candy bars, five or six of them—Milky Ways, Baby Ruths, Hershey bars. He told me he ate them as he wrote, converting sucrose into words. The Billy Rose columns helped pay his rent and his mother’s, who lived in Brooklyn and came by occasionally to clean his apartment. She was there one afternoon when I arrived; she was wearing a kerchief that covered her hair completely and had trouble speaking English. I thought she was the cleaning lady until Bernie introduced us. Bernie chafed at having to do the Rose columns; he wanted to write nothing but fiction. I spent a few months seeing Bernie several evenings a week, coming back late at night to the house on Sixty-third Street, where I still lived with my parents. He was so affable and reasonable that sometimes I wished he would chew me out for being a tease, an epithet I had heard a couple of times before and that made me feel as if I had no heart. But he never did; he always asked me what I wanted to do, where we should eat, did I want to go to a certain party—Anatole might be there. Anatole was there one night, and, when he saw who I was with, told me that Bernie was one of the best people he knew.
Bernie was a buffer between my recent past and the rest of my life. We broke up when he realized that I wasn’t in love with him and probably never would be.
CHAPTER 4
Before coming to a party, I’d circle the block several times, stop by the front door, light another cigarette, and set off on another round of postponing the inevitable. Disgust with timidity eventually took over. I’d straighten my necktie once again, head for the elevator, enter a room full of strangers, and, I expected, pass through them unnoticed, like a specter. Parties had been different back in Cambridge. They tended to be placid and predictable, populated by academics, junior and senior, who gabbled in departmental gossip, literary tags, and vacation plans. If not baby talk it was at least parochial. But now, at the age of twenty one, I was in adult territory, a corner of a world I had known about only from reading and hearsay.
At a cocktail party in the East Fifty-sixth Street apartment of Louis Posner, a lawyer and collector of Dickens first editions, I met Somerset Maugham, the prince of cats among popular storytellers of the postwar era. Highbrows like Edmund Wilson called Maugham’s work “a tissue of clichés” informed by “bogus motivations”—“I’ve settled that fellow’s hash,” Wilson boasted. But I was awed nevertheless, mainly because Maugham had written a wickedly funny novel about literary biography, Cakes and Ale, as well as Ashenden, a thriller in the line of E. Phillips Oppenheim and John Buchan. Maugham had based Ashenden on his service in British intelligence in World War I, but it was hard to believe that this “Old Party” (as he liked to call himself), bridge partner of dowagers, had once carried a revolver, feared for his life, and trafficked with spies.
Guest of honor, the great man was in his seventies, with yellow pouches under lizard eyes and a neck wattled and retractile like a tortoise’s. (To fight off impotence and mortality he was rumored to be submitting his buttocks to massive injections of cells from fetal sheep. The inventor of this sheep-cell therapy, a Swiss, Doctor Paul Niehans, was also treating Pope Pius XII and the duke of Windsor.) Maugham rotated his head slowly, one degree at a time, to peer at me, briefly, but appraisingly enough to make me uneasy. Our host’s handsome son, my college friend David, who had invited me to this party, was Maugham’s young lover and had been ever since he was a student at Lawrenceville. Although notoriously stingy, Maugham had helped pay David’s Harvard tuition in return for sexual services rendered. The woman standing with Maugham announced herself, in the fluttery style of Margaret Dumont, as La Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. She added, considerately—“To make it easy for you Americans”—that her name was pronounced as in “clear mountain air.” Apart from a few polite words and Maugham’s stammered “how-do-you-do,” these exotics might as well have been stuffed animals, for all the content of my encounter with them. I had a brief colloquy, at another party, with Dame Edith Sitwell, garbed like a Druid priestess in a flowing black dress, on her head a shapeless hat and on her feet shoes from the men’s department at Macy’s. She said Walt Whitman was a great poet, “wholly unappreciated by you Americans,” and then, having delivered this judgment, turned her back on me and attended to her brother, Sir Osbert. Rubbing feathers with such rare birds, although uneventful, was all very well for the thrill and anecdotal value, but for me this was not what parties were about, nor what New York was about either.
The irreducible essence of parties in New York was romantic, erotic. There was always the possibility, heightened by shyness, adrenaline, and anticipation, of adventure, meeting someone who would change my life. New York was about career, but it was also about women, their mystery, their capacity for affection and surprise. Growing up in an all-male family after my mother’s death I had missed these tender aspects of the creation, even despite the mitigating affection of our housekeeper Georgia Edwards, a woman from St. Kitts who had been with us since I was an infant. In time I left home to enter the relatively monkish confines of Harvard College. This was before “combined instruction” with Radcliffe, a measure forced on a shorthanded Harvard faculty by the war, brought young men and women together in the same classroom. The first weeks of combined instruction in Longfellow Hall on Appian Way, strictly Radcliffe territory until then, I felt like Adam in the Garden waking from deep sleep. The Radcliffe Eves were clearly undecided whether they should dress up or dress down for the occasion—some were defiantly unkempt and wore what must have been their old bathrobes—and whether the presence of males on the premises was a desirable accommodation or heralded another rape of the Sabine women. For my part, I lacked the courage to talk to any of the girls, but scanned the hall and fell in love every fifteen minutes. On one occasion early in the new era of combined instruction the English department lecturer turned up the sexual heat by spelling out references to orgasm and sexual exhaustion in William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife.
Even in the freedom and exuberance of the postwar era, language and manners remained relatively demure. In elementary school I had once been isolated in an empty classroom for an entire day as punishment for saying “go to hell.�
�� Since then the constraints on “blasphemy” and “obscenity” had loosened only a little. The shock value of “smutty language” was as powerful as an air raid siren. The salt, pepper, and ketchup of G.I. speech, the word fuck, supremely adaptable as verb, noun, adjective, adverb, expletive, and “infix” (inserted within another word), hadn’t been demobilized. Even three years after V-J Day Norman Mailer’s publisher made him adopt a transparent substitute, fug, in The Naked and the Dead. (This evasion gave the original word an added prominence and supposedly provoked Dorothy Parker to remark, “So you’re the man who can’t spell fuck.”) James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, like Mailer’s novel an attempt to show the way soldiers really talked, managed to get away with fuck in 1951, but, along with some other indispensable words, it was banned from normal conversation and supposedly worldly magazines like The New Yorker. Well-brought-up girls were shocked when they heard it—or pretended to be. An “obscenity,” the word remained officially taboo in print until the end of the decade, when D. H. Lawrence’s unabridged Lady Chatterley’s Lover was admitted to the company of permissible books. Before then, we packed our copies of Lady Chatterley, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in our bags of dirty laundry, a harmless charade for the entertainment of U.S. Customs inspectors. The movies we saw—even On the Waterfront and The Bridge on the River Kwai—were governed by the inflexible Motion Picture Production Code that banned exclamations like “God,” “Jesus Christ,” and “hell,” and, in westerns, buzzard, because it might be taken for bastard. The movie (1953) of From Here to Eternity featured a scene in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr appeared to be having sex on the sand while lapped by the Hawaiian surf. But with a few such spectacular exceptions most popular movies were almost as innocent of explicit carnal content as Little Women. Movie babies came from central casting.