The Grand Surprise

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by Leo Lerman


  My deaf cousin [Lew Goldwasser] suddenly appeared—in black-satin drawers and a cerise-and-emerald-green shirt. He is a raving queen, and with him came a little boy also of the same persuasion. Because they cannot hear, they never realized that some people could understand what they were saying. So all Nantucket trailed them up and down Main Street and was horrified and delighted to hear them shrieking at men that they would want to go home with them.

  This is a Nantucket mosaic—make of it what you will…. Christopher Ish-erwood came for a week, part here and part with Truman. I found him quite delightful, with strange eyes and a delight in malice and in hurting himself.

  I have written a wonderful article. I know it's wonderful because no one will publish it. Title: “A Marriage Has Been Arranged.”

  JOURNAL • AUGUST 18, 1947 Howard is packing furiously this afternoon to leave—his toilet paper and all—already having called up his mother. This morning he spent with a boy he picked up the other day. Howard hissed at me: “You've won, just as I told you!” And he said to Richard, “So the beautiful dream has ended.”

  NOTE: Within a few days, all three men were in New York City. Richard and Leo then went back to Quidnet. After Leo departed Nantucket, Howard returned to spend the last part of that season with Richard.

  JOURNAL • AUGUST 29, 1947 • 6:50 A.M. Richard says, “It will be a good day. Well, I'm gonna try to sleep some more,” wraps himself in his sheets and sinks, save for an ear tip and a tuft of hair, from sight. Now his breath is the regular, emphatic breath of sleep—and far-off crows, shrill and distant, sound like asthmatic breathing. The sun is valiant in repeated efforts to find a crevice in the clouds. Last night he was drunk and rambling on about sex, said he was calmer these days, because it had been a week since he had had any, and it was better for his work, and that he had done no work when he was here with Howard, because for those three weeks they had been in bed two and three times a day—almost constantly, he said. I was enraged. But in the dark, pride (which can be a blessing) balmed the rage. This then was another manifestation of R's candor, which is somewhat insensitive. But I would rather know all the truth and be strengthened by it. It has also made me realize that I must no longer look for this from R. With me he is as psychologically impotent as Edwin Denby is with all men save toughs in dark places.69 I must live on the remembrance of it now as a diabetic lives on memories of past feasts. Yesterday I thought it is better, perhaps, to have dreams than ever the realization of them—to dream but not to dream true.

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1947 If only I could meet my House & Garden deadline here I would stay.70 Staying is really cowardice. I am so unwilling to go where I shall inevitably be disheveled by New York, by the competition there. Here, with not much money, I could go along—reading, writing, conjecturing. There is no repose in cities. To make repose requires all our energies and then what remains in us for joy in the repose? Blossoms flowering in hothouses are frequently even more fantastically beautiful than those that grow gradually and naturally. But hothouse beauty is artificial and, while I am interested in it and it brings me pleasure, I have never had lasting sustenance from it.

  OCTOBER 1, 1947 • NEW YORK CITY I get hungry just to talk to Richard. Nobody has his place. But I will not call [Nantucket], because that would only upset us all, and there is nothing in that. I will sit talking to myself—and soon, soon, I will be writing that piece and that will occupy me quite fully. But how cruel and how thoughtless for Richard to say that I have done nothing to hold him. It is, however, apparent to me that some of the actions I thought of as helpful were merely selfish. I must not interfere. It is when he is faced with both of us that he really suffers, and I must not complicate his life anymore. Whenever he is with me, I must be gay and bright and careful—and perhaps one day he will be either here or there. I know that I must remain here in this city, because if I left I would be fearfully insecure, and here people love me— lots of people.

  OCTOBER 17, 1947 The heart could not restrain itself. It spilled over. I make scenes—little niggardly stupid scenes. I do not seem to be able to avoid making them. I know that I must not do this. I do it. All the time I am doing it, I try to undo it, but I continue in my perversity—inevitably saying things I have never intended to say. I know that it would be better if I lived alone or left this city. Then both of us would be helped. This situation is intolerable. I must alleviate it somehow. This morning I will ring up Norman Cousins [editor of The Saturday Review of Literature]. Perhaps he will want me to represent them in London. The danger there is of my writing badly because I am such a chameleon.

  OCTOBER 20, 1947 Idea: The difference between the world presented by Bazaar, Vogue, etc., in its pages (and in the outer persons of its editors and personnel) and that which really goes on in it—the sordid, competitive, cutthroat world—the breaking of hearts and spirit—the really Fascist setup. A microcosm of the great U.S.A. world?

  OCTOBER 29, 1947 “I have a sweetheart, but I don't have any beaux.” Little T.

  LITTLE T AND THE PROF We are sitting in the all-night cafeteria on the west side of Madison Avenue, between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth Streets. The time? That sere autumn of 1947, those cliff-hanger months before Other Voices, Other Rooms was published, our long autumn of cafeteria nights. A life I had had for some years was breaking up, and Little T, who listened patiently to my plaints, was, he said, in love with the Prof up in Northampton. So we sat in the vacant, skim-milk, nullificator light, facing one another over a gouged, splotched tabletop, and I got through quite a few soggy grapefruits, and T sipped tepid coffee from chipped cups, and we talked the nights away.

  I think that Truman was less physically enamored of Newton than he was overwhelmed by his prodigious intellectuality, his sensitivity to all things aesthetic, and his position in academe. “What do you do up there all of that time?” I asked one very early morning when Truman had been back on campus for a couple of weeks. He hunched back in this chair, gave me his tortoise grin, crunched himself into his corncob-pipe-smoking little-old-man self: “Weeelllll… I sit in this little rocking chair, which I love, and I drink hot chocolate, and he reads to me—every day, The Odyssey or The Iliad in Greek, the original Greek. And I don't understand a word, but I love it…. I love the sound of it. Then he plays records for me … beautiful. Do you know the more recent quartets of Beethoven?” “More recent than what?” “Oh you!” he yelped. “I'll never tell you anything again!” (VOGUE, september 1987)

  JOURNAL • NOVEMBER 4, 1947 Richard is going through the books and removing those that are his. These, he tells me, are to be put away into a trunk. Most of them, or many of them, are books that I gave to him. But it is the concrete action—the first visible, on-the-surface action of parting, of separating. He needs to take his books away, to hide them, to separate them from mine. This is another step to his independence. “Isn't this one mine?” “Which?” “The Arab Island by Freya Stark?” “Yes, I gave it to you.” The book slams to the floor. [Richard:] “You have [collected] many stones.” “Yes, I have to throw some out.” “You're silly. You shouldn't try to change your life. You like to live this way. If I liked to live this way, I would…. Isn't this mine?… Now one of these Caesar and Christs is yours….” And the books that are his are flung down—flat, slam on the floor. “There are none in here,” opening the glassed-in bookcase, sniffling because the dust gets into his nose…. “I should think you'd keep some of your better books in here….” I don't think. I find it difficult now to distinguish between tactlessness and subconscious vengeance. The dust blowing away continues—off the Phaidon Botticelli and three volumes of the Fogg [Art Museum] drawings. These I love very much. I gave them to Richard because I wanted them so much myself. And the Hogarth I bought in London. “You haven't written that in a long time….” “What?” “This book is Richard Ford Hunter's to be his very own.” This is upsetting. I wish he had done it while I wasn't here—but perhaps it strengthens me.

  NOVEMBER 11, 1947 “Such a pity
. I have so many sailors, but only one Tchaikovsky.” Czar Alexander III, when he heard about the composer's death, which, according to Léon [Kochnitzky], Pavlik [Tchelitchew]71 was told by Diaghilev. The police told the czar. It seems that Tchaikovsky was so large, he tore a sailor, who had to be treated and died. Tchaikovsky, out of conscience, committed suicide. This was at the height of the cholera, so it was arranged to seem as a death from that plague, not the other.

  I sit at my desk writing, because this is the only solitude left to me. I am like Nicole in Tender Is the Night. This notebook is in my bathroom, but even it has been invaded, and that is hard to forget. Nobody should be on exhibition all the time. No, I cannot even communicate here. I must go inside and try to plunge into darkness. If I lie down, he [Richard] will come in. I don't want it. I do want it. Soon I must go out.

  NOVEMBER 23, 1947 “I prefer the baths,” said Edgar Kaufmann [MoMA design curator]. “Nobody there knows I have any money.”

  NOVEMBER 25, 1947 Richard went last night. Today I am ill with a trying-to-be cold, but resting here in bed is pleasant, and I have my melted-sherbet-pink bathrobe to comfort me.

  “I saw the most beautiful dancing,” I told him. “Alicia Alonso [with Ballet Theatre] … footwork as precisely beautiful as hieroglyphs upon ancient tombs,” I told him—making him a gift of all the loveliness I had that week seen, all the beauty I had known these past few days of separation. “Yes,” he said, not looking at me, not by any little gesture of hand or face assuring me that he had received my offering. “Yes… but…”

  NOVEMBER 30, 1947 Pearl [Kazin] is so bright and feminist and desperate to remove the yoke of Alfred, she occupies herself with queer boys, where she can feel dominant. This is a typical American female character.72

  The D.C. Club: An army major came on Thanksgiving and said he wanted to be beaten, so the head of the D.C. got two sadists, and after Thanksgiving dinner all three beat him with whips. He loved it, and yesterday the major called the D.C. head and said it was so wonderful that he now couldn't even walk.

  DECEMBER 1, 1947 When I hear a piano playing old, gay, sad tunes, then my stomach turns over and I ache. These fourteen years [of knowing Richard] made me rich, but I have paid for them. When Hedda [Sterne] asked me what I was thinking when I looked at my portrait [painted by her], I could not tell her, because I was thinking: “Richard gave me my ears. He made me beautiful.”

  DECEMBER 9, 1947 The Tamayo party73—the kind all out-of-town readers of fashion slicks think New Yorkers give and go to all day and all night: a duplex with a huge triplex window—a few pieces of almost peasanty furniture— modern, of course, the painted primitive innocence of the Mexican bibelots— the cows, the bulls, the artwork, the one or two Tamayos, the huge pewter-silver lamp rearing two stories on a standard as thick as an exotic stalk, (it is a symbol of terror—it swayed), the tortillas and the very elegant cocktail food (cress— memories of England). Some eating because they would have nothing else to eat. Olga [Tamayo] with her ex-sanitarium face. Rufino with his Mexican peasant elegance and his libidinous charm. The eager women. [Silents star] Dagmar Godowsky, with her self-satisfied self-love but how-delightfully-repulsive-I-am wit.

  NOTE: Hoping to sort out his feelings, Richard went away to paint—first to his family's house in Miami, then to Cuba and Haiti. After a few months, Howard joined him. Richard and Howard then remained a couple (frequently apart for months at a stretch) until Howard's death in 1989.

  Richard's family owned property in Buffalo, New York, which provided him with a small income (about $110 per month during his years with Leo). That check, plus a few investments, allowed him to be a dilatory painter and a continual traveler.

  Through the years, Richard and Leo remained close—although Richard never set anchor in New York for long. Howard and Leo's relations, however, were always strained and sometimes icy. Howard often had a querulous and disapproving air that rankled Leo. He may have envied Leo's easy social manner and the life and friends it brought. According to Richard, the difficulty was Howard's great insecurity: “He was easily hurt and just so afraid that he'd be left alone.”

  DECEMBER 22, 1947 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • MIAMI

  Change is good—having people on Sunday nights shows me that. So many new and interesting people—and many people we've known for a long time—and the new and the old quite happy with one another—and all offering and reaching out to one another. The New York growing up now has a chance again—a real chance. All the young people who come, especially the girls, make me feel very optimistic again for the future—and having them here permits us to have a hand in the changing world—and that's very good. We must not live too much with death and dying. Nobody, not even the very strong, can resist the gravity that death and dying exert. They pull from below and wear us down and it is like an undertow. We are gone before we even realized that we were. I do not think New York City has changed for the worse. I think it is changing to something quite wonderful—and I want to be in it—where I can really help.

  PARTIES In the forties, fifties, way into the sixties, so many of us saw one another weekly in one another's houses. We did not have, in the sense of an earlier time, “days,” but we did have definite places where we knew we would meet: Along Fifty-seventh Street, from Park to Fifth, on Tuesdays late in the afternoon, for vernissage day; at the Askews on Sunday afternoons; at Dorothy Norman's where under the guise of parties she held “meetings” (political thinkers, Nehru, the Pandits, [watercolorist] John Marin); at Grace Zaring Stone's (that was at lunch in the corner of the Plaza Hotel's Oak Room on Sundays); at the Van Vechtens', where under the silver-papered ceiling of their drawing room there was a constant to-and-froing of great theater, ballet, literary, and motion picture stars (everyone from Nance O'Neill to the Lunts and Lenore Ulric, from Harlem to Truman and Gore); at the Sonnenbergs, in their ever-expanding treasure-crammed house on Gramercy Park, where the illumination from the silver and brass and the mix of personalities was at its most intense; at the John Gunthers, where John inevitably introduced you as somebody even more important than you were (here was always a chance of Garbo); and at our house—open on Sunday evenings and for random huge parties for all sorts of special reasons.74 (1993)

  DECEMBER 29, 1947 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • MIAMI

  Monday morning four a.m. and after setting some of the house to rights, here I am quite solitary—in your bed—thinking, as usual, of you. People stayed a little later tonight because it is a holiday. Droves came, and it was the most successful yet. You would have enjoyed it very much. And now here I am quite here I am, as Gertrude Stein probably once said. I wore my beautiful new jacket, which Edita and Ira [Morris] gave me. It's deep maroon-wine-burgundy—velvet with black satin lapels. Everybody is so delighted with your postcards. I am stealing as many as I can, because I want them. Do not worry about me. If anything happened you would know, and nothing will. I will be here in this place when you come up these stairs—or I'll know the reason why!

  DECEMBER 3075

  Eleonora has arrived! She says she will stay in New York if somebody gives her a job—any kind of job—but she looks awful, and she really hates Hollywood. She loves Kosleck, but really not enough or in any ways to comfort her. She is the same—in spirit. She came back because the Maestro asked her. She says she has no money, but there is still a million owed her by Holland, and she can get it if she can prove that her mother wasn't a Fascist. I hope she does.76 She says she has [not] taken anything (you know) at any time in Hollywood. I suspect she has—but it is heavenly to have her in the same city.

  JANUARY 2, 1948 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • HAVANA

  When I receive a letter as happy as the one that has just arrived from Cuba, I am so very pleased. I must say, I am very curious about your brothel activities and I think, which is even more curious, that any activities therein are probably good for you—but remember that syphilis
is intensely rampant in the Indies.

  JANUARY 5, 1948 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • HAVANA

  It is about 3:30 a.m., for I have been carrying glasses in and here we are again, you and I, but I decided to sit at my desk to talk with you. This soir was even huger and successfuller, it seems, than any heretofore. Someone said 150 people came, but it seemed like more. Everyone you know—and loads of their friends. I never give them more than four gallons (about $9) and the cheese costs about $1 or $2. So this is inexpensive—and fun to them—all sorts of gay and attractive people.77

  JANUARY 7, 1948 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • HAVANA

  I went to Dorothea [Tanning]'s opening. Her painting is better, but what she paints seems so mannered, so trivial, and somewhat dated. I liked two of them, one of which I would like to own, it being two mermaids (you can tell by their tails) all dressed in crimson i88oish little girl coats, bonnets, muffs, and faces— sort of going calling in a snowy winter landscape—quite delightful.

 

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