The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  57. In Proust's Remembrance, childhood strolls on the Méséglise Way come to symbolize innocence, natural beauty, and maternal affection.

  58. Julian Levy (1906?–81) was the first dealer to show many of the Surrealists in America. As a soldier, Lindamood had befriended many Surrealist painters in Italy.

  59. Critic Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) introduced many foreign writers (Ibsen, Gide) to English readers. Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a novelist (The Old Wives' Tale), playwright, and diarist.

  60. Monroe Wheeler (1899-1988), was MoMA's director of exhibitions and publications (ca. 1938-67).

  61. Alexandra “Choura” Danilova (1903-97), ballerina and teacher, had left Russia with Balanchine in 1924 and performed with Diaghilev and then, from 1938, with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. After retiring in 1952, she taught for four years in Dallas, where Gray had been born and his father still lived.

  62. Frieda von Richthofen (1879-1956) left her husband and three children for D. H. Lawrence, marrying him in 1914. After Lawrence's death in 1930, she married Angelo Ravagli.

  63. For decades, Mademoiselle bestowed paid summer internships upon some twenty college students, who then worked on the magazine's August collegiate issue. Mademoiselle (and sometimes Leo) would host a party to introduce these guest editors to New York.

  64. Alicia Markova (née Alice Marks, 1910-2004), the first British prima ballerina, founded the English National Ballet. Her last season dancing was 1952. Ballerina Calotta Grisi, not Taglioni, created Giselle in 1841.

  65. The show was “American Water Colors, Drawings, and Prints.” GF: “My drawing Summary won a $500 prize, which paid for our return passage on the SS Liberté, second class.” In 2005 this drawing (retitled Dimensions) was purchased from Gray by Steve Martin and given to New York's Museum of Modern Art.

  66. “Marcello Guidi [an Italian diplomat] said casually, in talking about Irene Brin, Oh, she doped even when it wasn't fashionable.' So even that was parallel to Ela.” Journal, October 15, 1972.

  67. GF: “Richard appeared after Leo's dental surgery, when we had to cope with his hallucinations. Richard said, ‘I just cannot deal with sickness,' and sped off.”

  68. “Goosey” was a familial nickname of Lincoln Kirstein. His sister Mina Kirstein Curtiss (1896-1985), biographer and teacher, shared with Leo a passion for nineteenth-century literature and art (particularly Marcel Proust and his circle), which became the basis of a close friendship.

  69. Gabriel Yturri (1868-1905) was Count Robert de Montesquiou's secretary and companion from 1885. Montesquiou (1855-1921) was brilliant, handsome, and insolent—an outstanding figure of Belle Epoque Paris and Proust's model for his Baron de Charlus.

  70. Leo soon donated the papers of Eleonora von Mendelssohn in his possession to the New York Public Library and Brandeis University. Neither donation included Beethoven manuscripts. He will recall in May 1984, however, having once given Callas a copy of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia “left to me by Eleonora.”

  71. A Marlene Dietrich-Rosemary Clooney recording of this song had been one of the hits of 1952.

  72. Leo was frightened of striking matches and would not light a stove.

  73. John Latouche was probably screening Deren's Ensemble for Somnambulists (1951).

  74. The Groke, a character in the Moomintroll children's books of Tove Jansson, leaves a damp, dark spot wherever it passes.

  75. Some news magazines beat Mademoiselle's January 1964 Beatles story by a few months.

  76. A befana is an ugly old woman expected by Italian children to come down chimneys with presents on Epiphany.

  77. GF: “We traveled with everything except a parrot.”

  78. The theatrical billing she preferred.

  79. Launched by Vogel in 1931, Lu was a weekly roundup of press articles from around the world with many points of view on subjects such as armament. In September 1936, Vogel's photo magazine Vu had published a map of Germany's concentration camps, including Dachau. For obvious reasons, the Vogels had to leave France when Hitler invaded.

  JOURNAL • FEBRUARY 8, 1953 • NEW YORK CITY Mina Curtiss translates Proust's letters and now goes about among the very people of the Remembrance. For she is writing Bizet's life, and with the money left her by her parents (they having made it with Filene's department store, the basement of which store is famous for its bargains) she lives in Paris. “You can always reach me through the Ritz,” she says, and goes to visit Strauses and Mante-Prousts and Gramonts and Montesquious and all those others who are to be found along the Guermantes Way,1 becoming herself, this Mina, a figure in that world which perhaps some enfant Proust even now admires from afar, tracking after her along the rue d'Anjou, along the St. Honoré. Will Mina also say, “Fitzjames is waiting?”2

  Last night, watching Brigitta in her house, at her table, listening to her, I thought about how the glittering world de-tinselizes when one is within it. Brigitta, a Norwegian-German girl, telling of the hardships of her early life. Listening to Brigitta tell about her impoverished childhood, her terror in a Norwegian boardinghouse in Paris, her hunger, how the two lovebirds she and her mother bought out of their little savings had to be given away, because in a French newspaper they read that parrots spread a malign disease, and these little beloved birds were their only companions.

  How delighted she is when she tells about the only good time she and her mother had in Paris. This was when her mother fell sick with some horrible ear infection and a doctor, after a week of misery, ordered her to the hospital. Brigitta must also go, for she also was suddenly suffering from earache. After her mother had had an operation lasting four hours, Brigitta had her eardrum pierced, and they then had spent long days convalescing in the clean, good hospital, and they had been fed.

  Then, when she was sixteen, Peter Vollmoeller took her to Venice. She barricaded her door every night. There she met Rut and Sohni—all penniless, but living in the Vendramin.3 Swimming to a raft off the Lido, Brigitta tore her leg so that it was all covered with blood. Flopping onto the raft, she was greeted by a male voice: What was wrong? he wanted to know. In this way, she met [Serge] Lifar and danced [the divertissements] with him at a great ball in Venice and became famous, dancing in a negligee and a cutoff ball gown of [Russian princess] Natalie Paley's (now Mrs. Jack Wilson and so beautiful then, but now a painting by Albright, because of dope).4

  In between, Brigitta and her mother had gone to London, and after an audition in [Anton] Dolin's studio, a large bright room in Chelsea, Brigitta studied with him. She was thirteen. Three months later [in 1931], she became his dancing partner, much to the disquiet of [British ballerinas] Markova and Wendy Toye.5

  Now she is married to Goddard (a Jewish boy from Seattle who has climbed) and they have two children and the only bathroom with a bidet and a Spy cartoon, numbered 69, and a soundless Frigidaire in their bedroom. She has had a glittering career, and is now having a more esoteric one [as an orchestral narrator]. She still yearns to dance Nora [Kaye]'s ballets,6 and in their house is not one evidence of good (what a snobbish remark) taste.

  All this, as she told about her past, made me wonder how much of it had been improvised when she was very young, and now was true in that she had believed it for so many years. During the war, social barriers dissolved, and it is easier for unknowns to climb or even step into so-called high places. I am reminded that for a long time, in my childhood, in my adolescence, I made up histories about myself, my family, my “friends.” I still believe some of these stories and even find myself telling them, and those who hear them also believe them, for the fantastic world of the “smart” magazines and social columns of the rotogravures of my childhood—what is left of them—are now as open to me as those ruins that one finds everywhere in Rome. Like those ruins, some of it has disappeared—forever; some of it has been used to erect other structures or for ornament; some of it is lived in.

  FEBRUARY 12, 1953 Great flashes of searing white light to the east at about two a.m. woke me. They conti
nued with ever-increasing brightness, a white glare like that which was formerly made by the powder that photographers ignited. These, too, terrified me and always at weddings, which I loved and feared, even as I now fear entering even the most familiar group of friends at a party. Poppa and I went to those big family weddings almost always without Momma, for she was ill, or perhaps she did not wish to go. (This is difficult to believe, loving parties as she does.) Always, if she were not in a hospital, she would be in her bed waiting to hear all about the festivity. She had that special delicious Momma fragrance—a white-flower, flour-white fragrance—coming partly from the linens of her bed, a great brass confection in which I was permitted to snuggle early in the morning or when I had night terrors, running across the frigid, uncarpeted, splintery wooden floor, and, oh, the warmth and security, the pleasure of that bed. Mine, a brass cage, was almost always wet and icy. I did not know how to control my bladder, and this brought continual anguish— beatings, starvations, confinements in black closets, rubbings—violently—of my face in the wetness. I did not mind this last, rather liking it—sexually I suppose—but I protested, for the intention of debasing me was so apparent, and anything obviously a punishment demanded a set-piece reaction: howls, wails, screamings, kickings, a convulsion, which led to demonstrations of affection. But always I knew this was tinged by frustration in my parents, a feeling that they did not know quite how to cope with this awful, ugly, perhaps stupid (retarded would be the word today; then no one was retarded, for we did not know the word) child.

  FEBRUARY 14, 1953 Valentine's Day—Heaped the breakfast table with old Valentine cards and little presents, some given before, and laughed very much. About Frankie Merlo: One Saturday afternoon (perhaps four or five years ago?) when Peter [Lindamood] and Touche had been drunk for several days, they went to Everard's [baths]. There, after much sport, Peter told Touche that he had seen an attractive young Italian. So Touche went up to the room in which this boy was (with others)—and for about a year Touche and the boy were intimate (Blanchard [Kennedy, housemate of Lindamood] said: “There they were, riding tandem as hard as they could.”), until Touche took Frankie to visit [painter] Buffie Johnson in Provincetown. Here he met Tennessee and now there they are. Frankie, who had been a bricklayer, wondering who to have arrange his taxes, really telling Tennessee what to do, and having definite opinions on everything. Also, he's rather fat now, but likable in the way a mobster can be. He gives the impression of running the numbers racket.7

  A fragile young man rose at Elizabeth Bowen's lecture and asked: “Miss Bowen, What do you do when you find your style hardening?” She suggested that the work be put aside and the writer read someone diametrically opposed.

  FEBRUARY 18, 1953 Yesterday Elizabeth Bowen came to lunch—thinner, more haggard, with a cold-in-the-nose look about her and her good black clothes unsoignéed by train travel and time. She was dressed too thinly for a cold February day. But nothing dims the fine, intelligent, kind, mildly inquiring look of her eyes. Always I see her in medieval garments, a lady in a fortress-castle. She said how very lonely she is at Bowen's Court [in Ireland], talking swiftly and almost without stammer about Alan [Cameron, her husband] and how deeply she felt his death.8 For, as she explained, she had always been free to go and come and he was always there—for twenty-nine years. So now she did not feel, as so many women do after the initial grief has worn away (what clichés I write), that she was free. The most boring years of her life, she said, were those between thirteen and twenty-three, the year her mother died and the year she married Alan. But she intends to continue at Bowen's Court. It is to her what Africa was to Isak Dinesen.

  11:10 A.M. At Strang, in men's locker room, waiting.9 A genuine locker-room atmosphere, with stories of a mildly “naughty” ilk being swapped by a knot of men, in gowns, sagging, open at the back, loads of warm convivial laughter, with some of them laughing long after the joke is ended, and strung in thought to it—as stations mark the progress of a journey, so their laughter marks the joke's route within each of them.

  FEBRUARY 21, 1953 The doctor appeared in red-rimmed, heavy goggles, and as he massaged my stomach (very pleasant on a workday to lie in the dark with a man massaging my stomach) and inserted the tube up my bottom, he said, “You know, we've met before. About a year ago, at the Ballet Ball. I was at Nancy Norman's table. You were at Mrs. Bouverie's.” He went on in this high-fashion, social tone all the time he gave me the enema.

  NOTE: In late April 1953, Eleonora von Mendelssohn's personal effects were sold by the auctioneer Tobias Fischer.

  JOURNAL • MAY 6, 1953 Her purse, the two black coats she'd “lied” about, the black ostrich-feather bedcoat hanging still with her perfume—at Tobias Fischer's—always the furs on that final rack and the sable gone for $160.

  NOTE: Gray went to California to be with his mother, whose upset over her divorce the previous year had led her to a breakdown. Gray stayed for a couple of months to help her recovery.

  JULY 27, 1953 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • burbank

  I waited almost an hour for the bus, and then it cost only ten cents so it was worth it, I guess. I've been with Marlene, and she fed me a bountiful, excellent dinner of rich, savory lentil soup complete with frankfurter slices, and cut-up steak, peas and little potatoes, and cheese and fruit and wine … all lovely. Then we went window shopping in all directions and to Howard Johnson, where she was pursued by ravenous autograph hounds. She is writing a lovely piece. When we returned, she read Goethe (proverbs and poems) to me for about an hour…. I didn't realize that Goethe was so humorous and human.

  JULY 30, 1953 • 5 A.M. • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • burbank

  Oh why am I such a craven! A sundering, tearing, stabbing storm (I am writing just to try). It's a regular Puss-in-the-Corner tempest, right overhead. All I can do is sit and quiver and say “Oh dear.” I suppose I could pray—a mean stab— Oh, Possums!—The worst storm of the year. I don't dare go up and close the windows. It has sickening moments, when it gathers itself together, and then it leaps…. I am trying to be brave—not successfully. What torrents. What battles aerial and shattering violet light. It's funny—even I can see that. Every time I try to creep up the stair to shut the windows, the flash-and-crash comes, and I run back into this room and crouch, a fat creature in that exquisite, sleeveless creation I favor when the heat's on, which it indeed is. I try to think of happy lovely things—like the beaded-flower store in Paris opposite Marie Antoinette and Louis's graveyard or Sainte-Chapelle…. Ah me … I'll think VENICE.

  If I were a genuine writer, I would utilize this time for minutely describing the storm, rather than crouching here with a terrified heart and an aching stomach … but this is a baroque storm. If one has the serenity to listen, the sound is all flourishes and curves, arabesques of sound, then great whorls of sound. Blessed deaf Beethoven—but he heard even more terrifying sounds…. An interlude, while others are permitted to cower. I wonder if I dare crawl up. I trust that you are not being terrified by anything or anyone. I feel like a small beast, who wonders whether the great hunter and his wrathful hounds have passed. You can't reason with them, best to hide and be discreet.

  AUGUST 8, 1953 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • burbank

  Marlene called. She seems to have had another of those dreadful attacks like she had three years ago. She promised that she would go to the doctor. Her mind blanks out and she can't even remember to whom she's talking. This happened while she was talking to me. It is terrifying. I wonder whether she shouldn't be X-rayed. This could be a brain thing. It would be awful if it happened while she was on the stage. Tomorrow I will hound her into going to the doctor. I told her that you might come home a few days later than we had first planned, and she had a genuine fit, saying hard, true, but unrealistic things about parents in general.

  Of course it's helpful for you to be there, but also parents, like children, have to cope with their own problems. Maeb
elle's are not going to grow easier and she will doubtless make an adjustment to them. All this is painful and will continue to be painful. It's been that way with my family always. Although the pain and problems are not similar to yours. All I know is that no one prepares children for the fallibility of parents.

  JOURNAL • august 15, 1953 For almost a month I have been unable to write in this notebook. The center of my life having gone away, I lacked a center from which to write. Now, suddenly, perhaps because it is less rather than longer until the return of my center, I can write again. George Sand, or rather André Maurois in Lélia [The Life of George Sand], writes: “No woman in love regrets that she cannot offer lost virginity, an untouched body, and an innocent heart to the man of her choice….” This may be true for women, but it is almost utterly untrue for men. I regretted deeply not having a whole heart to give,* but did not realize until recently (a little over five years) that my heart would again become whole through giving it once again. As one can tell the age of a tree by the lines in its trunk, so surely one can tell the heart's age by some similar line.

  *(not even thinking until this moment of the body—the virginity)

  AUGUST 16, 1953 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • burbank

  I think I must write to you about something which only in these last two or three years I have come to realize. When you first saw me my heart was mortally hurt—crumbled or whatever it is when one's heart (one's inner being) has been blasted. I thought that I had nothing much to give anyone—affection, yes, and some knowledge—but nothing of the deep within. Now, my heart (I use this only as a shorthand, a sort of representation) is whole again—richer, fuller. It has been made whole for me, because I have been and I am loved— and I love—totally, without reservation. Oh the duality of all living: the healer is healed—the healed is the healer—in each of us it's the universe, complete, minutely—mountain ranges, sea deeps—precisely as these are in the great world. Each thought we have—the shape of that thought is identical with some shape in nature. So it must be true that when I see stars and moonlight and sun shimmering in leaves I do truly see my love—the shape of my love—my love— my love—my love—I cannot help but think that no matter what enormities a man commits, if he has love truly, even for a moment, he has been God.