The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  FEBRUARY 25, 1947 Madame [Henriette] Pascar, says Richard, is very like an old Odette.53 Her husband, Mr. [Simon] Liberman, was a sweet little man who had been intimate with Lenin and was minister of forests or some such thing. He wrote a good book about it, which had some success (published by the University of Chicago) before he died. His son, Alex, is art director of Vogue. He is married to Tatiana du Plessix, hat designer of Saks—rude, big, handsome, blond. She was a comtesse or something.54

  MARCH 4, 1947 Last night when I went upstairs I found Howard in hysterics and tears with bag packed. He said he couldn't bear it, that he loved Richard so much, that it seemed wrong because of me, that I was so good, so understanding. I felt awful because of my really wicked private thoughts and tried to make him feel better and laugh. It was quite dreadful, but I did. I told him that only profit accrues from his love of Richard and explained this and the personal motives, and he said he loved me and it was easier when he had hated me. And he put [Richard's sister] Nancy's pistachio satin and salmon-pink-lined comforter over him because by this time he was cold, and he looked very sweet and like a decadent prelate. I made jokes about it. It looked like a [cleric's] cope.

  9:50 a.m. Just now, Howard came in and said, “Well, did you have a good time last night?” I was embarrassed. “I slept well—” “You know what I mean.” “Yes, but you can have a good time going to the theater or eating chocolate or eating anything you shouldn't.” “You can have a bad time or a good time making love.” “But loving somebody can't be a good time—the language is wrong.” The car came, and he went away. I felt as though I had been too harsh. I really didn't wish to debase the great escape—release—I had been swept into. Having a good time made it sound so cheap.

  MARCH 7, 1947 Lost my temper. The result of Richard's telling me that Howard had said the evening hadn't been a success. This brought back all those years when Richard always told me when I hadn't been a success, and this hurt when I had tried so hard to please, brought back some of that anguish and insecurity. I still cannot seem to be entirely emotionally reconciled to this arrangement—no matter how I know intellectually I must be for our welfare. I continue to feel upset at times and left out.

  We were all in moods tonight. Howard said he would sleep alone and that Richard should sleep with me, but Richard didn't want to, and I felt that this kind of arrangement had nothing to do with love. Now I feel better, because I inadvertently scared Howard by hissing down the stairs when I wanted to drop a surprise love note to Richard. It's full moon—perhaps that's the explanation.

  MARCH 1947 • MIDDLETOWN, NEW YORK

  to ruth yorck • PARIS?

  Ballet Society is the only new thing of any consequence.55 I went to one evening and it was delightful only because they seem to have a passion to do something. What they did was pleasant but not new. This could be good, although the people who head it make it almost impossible. Les Enfants du Paradis [Children of Paradise] I saw twice before it was played for the public, so I saw it uncut, and it is probably my favorite movie. Also saw Le Retour, which Cartier-Bresson made, and it is magnificent, but it was only shown twice in one evening so most of the people who should have seen it didn't. He photographed me. It is the best I have ever had. Cartier is such a curious creature…. Know anything?56

  If you see a Vogue with a picture of little Truman in it, I wrote the article, but I would not sign my name because Vogue bitched up what I wrote.57 A new book Under the Volcano [by Malcolm Lowry] is not uninteresting and, of course, Tower of Babel by Elias Canetti, called in England Auto-da-Fé and published in Vienna pre-Hitler, is magnificent, but the reviewers don't get it. The great triumph of the season is John Gielgud and Oscar Wilde.58 Penelope [Dudley Ward] still reigns as the town beauty and when I go to town we go to town, and everyone is envious. People say, “That's Penelope Ward, but who can that be with her?” and they all look quite alarmed. You see, I have temporarily a full beard—very black and big and some white hairs in it. Richard has a reddish beard and looks more goatish.

  NOTE: Leo probably met the actress Penelope Dudley Ward (1914-82) in the autumn of 1937, when she performed in the Broadway production of French Without Tears, as he was assistant stage manager. They became friends, however, after they were reintro-duced ata party in the fall of 1946, during the run of Cecil Beaton's production of Lady Windermere's Fan, in which she played Lady Windermere. Offstage, she was pursuing the British film director Carol Reed (best known for The Third Man). Ward had asked Beaton to make her the most beautiful woman in New York, because she wanted Reed to hear she was the toast of the town. He would soon divorce the actress Diana Wynyard to marry Penelope. Through that winter and spring, Leo and she spent many evenings in the Plaza Hotel's Oak Room, planning and commiserating. Possessing great looks and gentle manners, Penelope Dudley Ward also had a family history irresistible to Leo: Her mother, Freda Dudley Ward, had been the lover whom the future Edward VIII jilted for Wallis Warfield Simpson. According to Richard, Penelope was second only to Eleonora among Leo's favorite women, but his “Pempie” soon returned to England and ceased acting. Only one letter from Leo to her survives (written April 6, 1968), but the first call and last good-bye on any trip he made to London was always to her.

  JOURNAL • MARCH 11, 1947 • NEW YORK CITY Yesterday morning, Truman told me so many dreadful things about everybody. It's wonderful how Truman acquires bits of information and then passes them off as his own.

  Ela told me that she'd had a to-do with Noël during the Maestro's concert two weeks ago. She says she's always had a hankering for this, for years. She did it gaily, making him think he'd done it. She thinks it's the first time with a woman for him. Interesting how he's always been drifting to this quasi-Vortex relationship (she being both mother and his theme).59 How she drifts to “the boat” [homosexual men]. How could she get anyone from the boat? She wants to know. [Photographer] Horst proposed to her.60

  MARCH 21, 1947 • MIDDLETOWN Saw Ela this morning, looking voluptuously beautiful, but her eyes made her grotesquely ridiculous at times. Laci was there. She is going off with Kosleck. This is the fitting evolution, to mother, especially someone [Kosleck] as mad as Cesco and as queer. She owes everyone, but has bought a car. She looks like vampires are supposed to look after feasting on rich red blood the night through. There is something wicked in her voluptuousness, but she is beautiful and stately. Perhaps some new drug, definitely some evolution in her madness. She's almost never still, rushing about to and fro. I am here in Middletown [at the Hunters'] again. It is heaven, but only for three or four days.

  MARCH 22, 1947 Ela's life is motivated, according to her, by Maestro's making fun of her bed habits in front of people in his house. He is eighty this month.61 She has resorted to queer boys—”the boat”—but not because of this reason. She goes on much about being out of “prison,” about how her friends don't want her to be so happy because they love her to be sad, tortured like themselves. She seems to misunderstand many things, leaping to conclusions like the old and deaf do.

  MARCH 23, 1947 What does it do to hear another's orgasm? Today, for a moment, it quite undid me. I lay here gasping, almost in tears, but only for a moment. I wonder if Richard realizes that he's been living with Howard, and not really with me. This inability to go away must really be linked with the Jew's inability to leave unless forced to. We are so afraid, we Jews, having been terrified for thousands of years, first by our God and then by his people.

  APRIL 2, 1947 It has been so long now that anyone has made love to me. Yesterday Richard said he didn't know whether if I shaved off my beard and became thinner it would help, but I will diet, and at the beginning of summer shave off my beard.62 If Touche and Peter [Lindamood, antique dealer] hadn't called and made the time pass, I would have been in a more wretched state. It is raining and the light is all skimmed milk, white-blue like milk on farina.

  So the pendulum. I feel pleasant. I am drinking tea. Richard came this afternoon and lay beside me, and loved me,
and fell asleep on my shoulder. Even the painfulness attendant upon a portion of the body having fallen asleep was joy— unadulterated—with no bitterness. Joy like lovely dreams—and even better— but Howard is gray with depression and sits playing the piano—quite well.

  Then by seven Howard had packed his things (after escarole-chopping lessons), had said he couldn't stand it. Richard was bored with this new outburst. Howard said he was insanely jealous. I sat drinking my tea and said nothing. And in half an hour it was over. We had our dinner. I made jokes. Howard and I played Pounce. Now I am in bed with the beginnings of a cold. Howard said it was a judgment.

  APRIL 6, 1947 • NEW YORK CITY • 6:30 A.M. In bed at last. I stayed the whole night at Peter Lindamood's party. It was pleasant this staying awake the whole night and talking. It had been a large party, and Iris Barry got very drunk, talking avidly about her time with Yeats, and how Ezra Pound had made [bedded] her (1919–23), and how they would have nothing to do with her when she had a baby. They didn't approve.63 The colored lamp globes at Peter's in the dawn, so lucidly beautiful, holding all the gay night—green, red, pink.

  When [costume designer] Connie De Pinna had been asked by a census taker on a London street what had she done the first two years of the war, she had answered: “Stitching paillettes on my silk stockings.” This sums up a world that should now be dead.64

  PETER LINDAMOOD Peter and his parties on East Tenth Street: Klaus Mann, Moravia, Italian Surrealists, Grace Stone, Stravinsky, Edith Piaf… and his great friend, Oliver Smith … and the Bowles[es]. “Let's get ‘them or ‘her' or ‘him,' “ Peter would say, and the parties went on all night long, among the Victorian fripperies, with Touche singing fake lieder. We would eat fried chicken and stumble out into freezing dawns. The sexual underskein of his parties—all the worlds were entertained at Peter's. By the time I was in 1453 [Lexington, in 1948], Peter had come up into East Fifty-eighth Street and his party world was finished. He held a special quality and was so much a center. Little, infinitely curious, wonderfully observant, hilarious, and needle-sharp in his accurate assessments, Peter was a fantastic, and he had the great gift of making life fantastic for others. Peter is the postwar world. (1984)

  JOURNAL • APRIL 19, 1947 Richard is very contrite, but there is almost nothing he can do. He is sexually so attracted to Howard that he has become 99 percent impotent in all other circumstances. But when he was very drunk and spoke with that profound lucidity which drink seems to bring to otherwise incoherent creatures, he said he loved me beyond anything in the world. I believe him, and this knowledge helps, but only if we lived so as I wouldn't have to lurk in the street until Howard goes home. Howard was so angry with me that he asked me if I didn't have any pride—but this was tactless. And so it has been—save for the three days when Howard was in the hospital, and those were very pleasant.

  APRIL 21, 1947 Richard says that he will go away quite alone, and that will solve everything, but what he doesn't realize is that it will solve nothing for me, and for a long time it will be a punishment—while he escapes—although he will also be miserable. Howard, having plenty of money, will probably follow him. Richard tells me that Howard is even now making plans to go to the West Indies next autumn, because Richard said he wanted to go there.

  Ela went to the Maestro on Thursday and cried the whole night after it. He gave her back the Millet [painting]. She has given him $70,000 worth of paintings up to last spring. Now she's gone to tour with Lizl [Elisabeth Bergner].65 Koz [Kosleck] is living in her apartment.

  MAY 12, 1947 Sunday was warm spring and that commercial invention of the flower merchants—Mother's Day. Momma said wasn't I coming out, even if I didn't bring her something. And I went, taking her the little box of two gold shells, a pillbox, which Fritz [Mosell] and Hellmut [Roder] gave me. It was somewhat gaudy, but I liked it very much. I wrote on a bit of paper, “love— Label xxx” and put it in.66 And when I gave it to her, she didn't look at it. She was sitting in the yard with relatives, but later in the kitchen, she did. And she said: “What's this? What do you do with it?” very nastily and seemed very unhappy to have it and was lousy about it and hid it away and never even said thank you and the bit of paper fell on the floor and that was that. She is truly a stupid, selfish, nasty woman, and sometimes I dislike her utterly. She also told me that I had better make sure I make some money to pay for her operation.

  NOTE: Richard, Howard, and Leo rented a house on Nantucket Island for the summer, this time in the village of Quidnet. Leo and Howard usually rotated their visits; Richard more often stayed with Howard.

  JUNE 11, 1947 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER• QUIDNET, MASSACHUSETTS

  I miss you very much, but I do not miss the difficulties of these past months. I am very lonely, and it is like being cut off from breathing fully to be without you—like seeing only out of one eye—but I would be even more adrift if these last months had been happy ones—or if I knew that I should never see you again—this is not a complaint, just fact—I love you very much—but I am not essentially sick, so I don't wish to go through life like the last months. Also, I don't intend to live a life without you if I can manage it. Howard has moments, sometimes days of sweetness, but for me these never make up for his selfishnesses. I can get along with him—and I will—but somehow the last weeks when he was here were too much, and I do not intend to repeat them. Do not be alarmed by this. He will never realize how I feel, and anyway I won't have time or energy for much emotion this summer. The kind of emotion he seems to need isn't my kind. I think you, too, must feel somewhat relieved to have only one of us about—the strain on all of us is considerably less. I intend no strain (if possible) this summer, so don't worry your hatless head about it.

  JULY 14, 1947 • QUIDNET, MASSACHUSETTS

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • PORT SEVERN, CANADA

  All the boys came and they take very good care of this house and of me and it is very cheerful here and I do my work and the house is filled with enormous bunches of wonderful red roses. Newton [Arvin] and Truman came over and stayed an hour. [Christopher] Isherwood arrived yesterday and Newton is in a state. These boys are tarragons [sic] about work. They all spurn me if I dally, and they all lecture me about eating too much, so I am thinning. I wrote my Vogue (staying up a whole day and a whole night) and it is very long but I think not bad. Today I am finishing my thing for Ruth Stephan. It's called “Notes for an Historical Novel.” I do hope she likes it. It's $250, and that would be lovely to have.67

  JOURNAL• JULY 24, 1947 • QUIDNET, MASSACHUSETTS • 6:00 A.M. I am sitting out on the porch overlooking the sea and the sunrise, which is splendid, with great brushes of cloud overhead directly, then thick darker clottish streaks and the sun, well above the middle horizon, diffused and shy. Blackface gulls everywhere, and our single post on the edge of our cliff, lonely with the loneliness of single objects in a vista. Rays of light as in religious or “spiritual” paintings and movies, radiating through the clouds on the water. Where it meets the sun's rays, an island, all rosy and quite palpable. The sun is gradually drawn upward, behind the cloud streaks. Now its path on the water is dull beaten pewter, and the whole vista has become watery like those in Turner watercol-ors. Two black crows very silent. Swiftly, leisurely, suddenly two of our house swallows, like acrobats opening a vaudeville. There is no wind this morning, just the faintest stirring in the grasses. The Queen Anne's lace nodding gently like very aged ladies in heavy Nottingham lace caps. I love sitting here this way, quite alone, and this would content me, this life, if I had some servant within to care for things, and some money, so as not to worry.

  JULY 29, 1947 I just woke up, but not unpleasantly. Many insects are butting and fluttering and sizzing against the window screens. Yesterday, R came in while I was trying to dress, and suddenly I had some kind of crumbling and went into the closet and clung to the clothes and wept a good deal. I hated that, and tried not to weep, but it did me great good. Also, R seemed to see, for the fi
rst time—for a time—how it was. But I thought I was going out of my head yesterday, and sometimes I was. Lying here now I feel better again, as after a long illness. If only this feeling will last. When I was a small boy I hid in closets and cried—so reassuring, so wombish—but I won't anymore. I must not add anything more to R's burdens. He is beginning to work, and he must go on.

  AUGUST 1, 1947 • QUIDNET, MASSACHUSETTS

  TO RUTH YORCK • PARIS

  All the boys came to stay with me for two weeks, while Honey and his Rothschild went away.68 It was heaven and gay here. I forgot to be sad, and I had fun, and they took care of me, and we laughed twenty-four hours and more a day. We mourned for you and said constantly how you would love it here, with the sea with this house's own private beach and great moors and winds and sea-island skies.

  But now Honey and Mr. Rothschild are here again, and he is bored with Mr. Rothschild's scenes and complaints. Mr. R has lots of money and is a drip, is loathed by everyone (even unsolicited by me), and is generally bad news. He is always telling about how this year his income is better than last year, but how things (to eat, etc., etc.) are not as good anymore. Mr. Honey poses for him and cooks for him. So he has gained little in this venture, save it has made him grow up a little bit. There's much more about Mr. R, but all of it the same boring ilk. He was a mistake on Mr. Honey's part, but it is disagreeable to have people ask me how I feel about it, and others acting as though a royal marriage that was a love-match had had a bad finale.

  Lionel Trilling's first novel, The Middle of the Journey, is coming out. It is superb, really, a novel of the American intellectual during the thirties, beautifully and simply written, but which opens the skull and shows what ticks so punctiliously and with such sure, smooth craft. Truman's book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is coming in January. This one reads as though the child of Carson [McCullers] and Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty and a few drops of Faulkner's sperm (I am in Moby-Dick land, so I think of sperm) had precociously done it. And in a sense he has—horror, horror, horror artfully pruned. The prose is what we used to say about Gypsy Rose Lee: She keeps her garden prettily weeded. That's how Truman and all those girls keep their prose. He has a house about five miles away from here—with Newton Arvin first, and now with Mary Lou Aswell. He is writing the last words of the novel there.