The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Yesterday, after a morning of looking in the shops (oh, the hard, set, rapacious faces of women shopping), found an oasis in Bergdorf's antique rooms. No one there save some Staffordshire and a porcupine—not too expensive. We rushed home.

  Then Bill Inge and a nice boy to drive came—and Lesley [Blanch], very pretty65 —and off we went through the early green twilight, the tremulous apple-green moment that almost annihilates with memory and nostalgia. Along we went, high above the marvelous Hudson (always imposing Indians and Henry Hudson upon any talk or other inner vision). Lesley suddenly realized that Bill was the author of Come Back, Little Sheba and Picnic and she was in rapture. All the while, the lighted towns on the New York side were so many glittering promises. I think we live too close here, in this house, in this little world of friends and acquaintances and business—and one another. I think we need the air of long rides into the country and walks not on pavements, but most of all a long, deep breathing out of city fumes. Mrs. Nature whooshing down the mountainsides, not the Lexington Avenue bus moaning down the avenue.

  Nyack was in the deep, intensely glass-green twilight, with the churches outlined in colored Christmas lights. Lesley thought that Carson [McCullers] lived in one of those churches, but Carson, when seen, was crouched in a corner of a dowdy sofa. She glowered evilly at us, and did not seem at all pleased to see anyone. She clearly intended for us all to disappear promptly at six, and we wanted to. This was the most un-party party I have been at. A television showed football all the while in an upper room.

  FEBRUARY 26, 1955 This is a first-person-singular book. Yet I have always distrusted “I” as a beginning, preferring this “I” to be tucked away, to be slipped in unobtrusively. Feeling about it much the way I do about exposing the title side of any book I carry. To do that seems to me to be advertising oneself, to be showing off, to be revealing one's secret name, and with those “savages” about whom I read long ago, those South American savages who don't tell their true names, I feel superstitiously … And here I stopped, marveling at the clumsiness of what I had written, questioning how, after so many years of writing, can I write so badly? Then the music seeps in—the sounds of birds, the chiming of Marcus, the little glass-walled eccentric clock. Light bruises [the night sky], and I am suddenly sleepy. So I make excuses to stop this scribbling, to leave once again a little pile of words, of promises, stillborn. “The house,” Gray said, “is filled with abortions. How he can stand it, I don't know. Little heaps of promises.” I burrow down beneath the blankets and scrunch the sheets, exulting: “I am thin—at least I am thin.” I feel this without thinking it, so much of what we say we “think” is not thought at all, but felt.

  NOTE: Gray went to spend a few weeks with his mother at her sister Alice McKay's home near Chicago.

  MARCH 26, 1955 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • glenview, illinois

  This chilly room heaves with Auber [French opera music]—so faded and tinkly and nursery-tunish. We are deep in sleet, and all the world is frost-crusted (sounds like amateur advertisement-writing for a sugar-coated loaf). The light is that employed by seventeenth-century artists of the north countries, who seem to have lived perpetually in a sleety world—winter the year round.

  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is remarkable for never, not even for one moment, touching any sensitive speck in one—save that area wherein revulsion lurks. The play never emerges from the privacy of the bedroom. We sat there feeling that we were peeping into their bedroom, and with no reason whatsoever save voyeurism. Everyone knows that everyone has scenes in the bedroom, but why should anyone be interested in these scenes unless they are raised to general applicability and so reveal us to ourselves and elevate us in so doing? This is a private, dirty-bedroom play which pretends to poetry and heart and universality and never, never gets beyond the dirty-sheets mind of Tennessee. According to him, life's still a mess on the old plantation and Big Mama always knows best. Bill's play [Bus Stop] is a work of delicacy and sympathy, the outpouring of a loving heart compared to this murk. Cat has been endowed with a smooth, orchestrated, shadowy production. It is acted magnificently—with Mildred Dunnock [as Big Mama]66 the image of Muriel Francis and utilizing a voice of such stridency that she seems to have swallowed Ethel Merman and is regurgitating her Southern-style. Barbara Bel Geddes is very good (but how extraordinary Miriam Hopkins would have been), although she seems always too rectitudinous and Aryan to be mixed up in sexual exhibitions—and this play really never omits anything pertaining to the closet, including moths as large as condors. The huge audience adored it. Lesley [Blanch] and the Valentines67 and I seemed the only ones to hate it. I resent Tennessee's evil, sure masturbating of audiences. He literally milks them dry—ugh. So on to other voices in more pleasant rooms.

  NOTE: In May, Gray and Leo departed New York for several months in Europe. Leo would write three long articles for Mademoiselle based upon this trip: about Holland, Belgium, and Salzburg, Austria.

  JOURNAL • may 4, 1955 • London Sotheby's was just locked up by a dapper, gray-suited man in a black bowler as we came to it, so off I went to Claridge's, where I surprised Aunt Minnie and she laughed and cried and looked lovable and told me in a confidence burst that she had arranged to take care of the girls because she was so worried about them.68 This made me too late for Noël Coward's party, so I flew home and into my bib and tucker and off to the opera, just in time. The great arrangements of lilies and peonies on the stair—the men more “dressed” than the women—the friendliness of everyone—also the extreme air of privacy. We talked with John Gielgud—somehow his face looked more disenchanted but quite beautiful. He introduced us to [singer and actress] Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, who was smaller than I had imagined and in a gown of Mediterranean-blue silk with a lilac satin scarf. The women were not dowdy, but also not intensely elegant. No one was chic, in the French or American sense. They were, most of them, suitably well dressed.

  Then David Webster came and introduced us to Sir Hugh Casson, who had carefully designed the Troilus & Cressída (in “Trojan Modern,” as Gray said). The colors were lovely (Cressida wore a pale lilac Alix [Grès] robe)—all purples and earth reds and shades of lavender and pale yellows—with the camp scene against a great, pale, burnt-out sky. Magda László [the soprano] a beauty, a lovely figure, and almost always a ripe voice. She should sing operettas because she is just too good for them—that is the sort of voice operettas need. I saw [William] Walton looking like a Sitwell family member.69 His opera is very good—the music not thick enough always, but beautifully written and proportioned, especially a storm-and-passion orchestral interlude while Troilus makes love to Cressida behind a drawn curtain, a quartet of maidens robing Cressida. This is a first-rate work—really all Walton, no discernible influences like one finds in Menotti—an intricate, tidy, intensely disciplined work.

  Now I must to bed—and work in the morning—but these notes do not give the color, only some of the meager facts. The carpeting everywhere is worn and shabby—but every window is curtained.

  MAY 5, 1955 At the opera, I wondered whether the Frenchwomen were so elegant, even many of the poorest, because the French were essentially a cynical nation—bone cynical—and whether great elegance in dress, or even elegance without “great” was an outward sign of cynicism. Does one then have to be cynical to be elegant? I think that this is probably true. Englishmen are, many of them, elegantly dressed, and Englishwoman are almost all dowds—albeit their suits are beautifully cut. They are sensibly dressed. Englishmen (I am not talking of the lower classes) are basically cynical—perhaps even amoral—certainly, sexy men are given to their pleasures. This is so vigorously a man's town and such a city of business. Not brash business, as New York, which seems effete when viewed from these male-teeming streets.

  MAY 6, 1955 About Margot in Firebird: This is a performance in the great Diaghilev tradition and, since [Ballets Russes dancer] Karsavina coached her, some of the miming is dated—but the bird is magnificent. Her
fingers seemed taloned—yet she wore nothing on them—and her face was both evil and caressing. The great strength of her back and arms has never been so beautifully apparent and so exquisitely employed. This is a long work compared to the Balanchine version. Maria [Tallchief] is dazzlingly brilliant and sharp; Margot is a multifaceted creation.70 The Goncharova Firebird sets [here] seem so dull after the Chagall [for New York City Ballet], and the orchestra sounded unbrilliant. We are accustomed to a more impetuous, coruscating, briefer Firebird, but this is the original and as documentation was fascinating. Here we saw the beginnings of much decoration—i.e., grill and trellis decoration as on tin chocolate boxes (inevitably gold on dull blue). Some of the choreography so very kitsch today—and the peasant women in what looked like nightgowns and moccasins…. Could they have led to Chanel? And the groups like Les Noces (they seemed to dote on thick groups).71 But the Balanchine monsters are more monstrous. This must be seen, as the Copenhagen Petrouchka should be seen, for its historic value.

  MAY 8, 1955 The Tynans live at the top (reached by a small, self-run lift) of a converted early nineteenth-century house in Hyde Park Gardens. The general impression is that it's all been hastily brushed up, things thrust under furniture. You feel that their wardrobe is all out on pegs—such a dressing-room feeling everywhere in their flat—a bath (here they fix drinks: it is closer to the “living” room than the kitchen); a nursery chockablock with stuffed beasts and toys and baby books; a small room crammed with books and papers—one end, his writing place, backed by a montage he has improvised of bullfight memorabilia, a chair heaped with review copies, and the floor piled with things and books (like home); a bedroom with the clothes even deeper on pegs, a wall shelf in which are some of [his wife, novelist] Elaine [Dundy]'s favorites—Benchley, at least five or six volumes, Jane Bowles's play [The Summerhouse] (Elaine loves this play), some photographs—one of Ken and Elaine leaning enthusiastically out of a box or bleacher at a bullfight and another of Ken with some heavy, swarthy men at a terrace table, some café, and on the table a large wine bottle (all very Hemingway, but in the French translation). A beautiful pink toreador cloak stands in one corner of the living room and books are on Italian sort of “modern” shelves, which stand out into the room—the whole impression is of rooms in the Village at home.

  MAY 10, 1955 • LONDON

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • new york city

  We've been to the first night of the Firebird—re-created by Grigoriev and Karsavina for Margot Fonteyn. She is superb in it, but it is not a great part for a great ballerina. David Webster sat us right behind the queen, the Duke [of Edinburgh], and Princess Margaret—so close that unavoidably my foot sometimes poked the duke's bottom. The queen is remarkably like (in face) Queen Victoria at times—sort of that same lowering, reproachful, bad-little-girl look. This is in repose, but when she is animated she becomes quite pretty. She actually looks like many English girls. The princess is pretty and a pet and everyone seems to dote on her. When the apotheosis happened at the end of “Homage to the Queen,” the duke leaned over and gave the queen a little kiss. They are very pleasant together. Some parts of Firebird amused him into comments, across the queen, to the man with Princess M. The queen did some wifely shushing.72 She applauded everything diligently. The people love her. We became local celebrities because we were seen sitting, it seemed, with the royal party.

  JOURNAL • MAY 10, 1955 Osbert [Sitwell]'s house is smaller than ours in depth—actually the right size for two people. It is crammed with all sorts of fascinating objets—drawings, paintings, and some delightful furniture. It is a bright house complete with a happy cat named Ally (after Alice, probably Bouverie), tiger in kind and great-lady in temperament. Miss Noble [the housekeeper] had the Cornhill [magazine] on her kitchen table and Edith's Gardeners & Astronomers at the telephone. “Can read a verse or two while waiting,” she explained. She has beautiful, honest, blue eyes and came to Osbert some twenty-five years ago. “Mr. Walton was here then.” She loves dusting the house, taking one hour for the drawing room (all full of blue and pink Bristol glass, Pavliks [works by Tchelitchew], shell fantasias, glass sailing ships), because she always finds new things in what she's known. She says the house has become better and better as Osbert has “gotten on.” Osbert's bedroom—the floor one below the top—has paintings by a Chinese, done after Osbert had been to China, and these are unique because they included fruits and untypical Chinese subjects—also a wardrobe painted to represent clothes, etc. “I thought that a pity,” said Miss Noble. “It was such a good piece of walnut.” In the morning room where Osbert does his personal mail—a Magnasco [painting]. David Horner's room seemed secret. It was the only room in which I felt that I was invading privacy. It had crucifixes and rosaries.73

  This stood all through the Blitz and only the glass clapper of one Bristol-glass bell was flung out among the glass. Not one object was harmed, although Miss Noble herself picked up incendiaries in the little back court between the house and the dining room, a room quite apart from the house proper. She has to come up from her basement kitchen and out into the open when she serves. The dining room is like a deep sea grotto—Venetian shell furniture, shell things everywhere—all dark and mysterious, this dining room made from a shed.

  MAY 11, 1955 We went to Peter Wilson's to dine. Peter talked about Miss Margaret Jourdain and how Ivy Compton-Burnett had all the money, and how mean I C-B was to MJ.74 One day at tea, with a lavish table, I C-B demanded to know where the quince jam was. MJ said that what with several varieties already set out, she didn't think the quince was needed. After about ten minutes, MJ asked for tea, but I C-B said where was the quince? And not until MJ brought it did she get her tea. MJ was bitter because [her sister] Miss Jourdain left a sizable fortune to [medieval-art historian] Joan Evans, who already has much money, whilst Margaret Jourdain was very poor. Margaret said of her sister, the An Adventure one, “She was not a good witness.” Of I C-B's writing she said—”Oh, she just scribbles away….”

  MAY 12, 1955 The “guests” of Fleming's [Hotel] are strung about this dining room's outer edges, like objets untrouvés, and the bandstand, at the far end, backed by its wall of looking glass, is, as usual, full of clamorous morning emptiness. How very audible are vacant places dedicated to noise. This is the special charm of amusement parks and summer pleasure grounds in winter, their animated ghostliness. And how footsteps sound on London streets: They do sound here like footsteps. In New York I am never aware of footsteps in the street. So, again I perceive that I hear and see and even feel through a literary scrim.

  This morning, we have several waitresses I have heretofore not seen. One pale, red-lipped, and quite unsure but willing. “Will you please bring the toast and tea now?” I ask. Flustered, she darts a look, gathering herself. “Actually, the other girl”—the oldest and most wild-haired and the smellingest of them all—”is bringing the order up.” “The other girl” does, giving tumultuous Irish glances. I believe that Fleming's must be a station on the Underground Railroad to Schrafft's in America.

  The American middle-aged couple has stopped to talk to the shyish, throaty-voiced, unhappy-at-going-home-looking girl in gray suit and tousled hair, neat small-collared blouse and little string of pearls. They tell one another where they're from and how long they'll be: “But we're going on to Paris,” says the man, while his carefully coifed and waved wife (in woolly cardigan, skirt—gray and neat, white blouse piped in blue), her maquillage slightly twenties, dimples and smiles, thereby suddenly almost vanishing into a perspective of tango teas, racy talk, and smoking in public. “That's nice,” says the girl, adding that she's been working in Germany. We have with us, this morning, some of Separate Tables's own75 —including a pocket edition, quite abridged, of the woman in furs. This version is very small-town American, eats mincingly, looks lost in the eyes, is without doubt a widow, was once told by her father that she was pretty and now can't believe that she will never be told again, wears a dark plaid suit, a small bla
ck-green tight-to-head peaked cap, an orange pullover, (only a small v shows) and a string of pearls, also rimless spectacles to shield the shyness and disappointment and even, perhaps, through which to see the world more clearly. Which, unfortunately, those ladies sometimes do.

  Gray came down and I told him about the greetings and getting-to-know one another of the Americans abroad, but midway he said that he didn't like verbatim reports and what was the point? I was sharply hurt and said there wasn't any point. Living so closely must produce these little aggravations. But it occurred to me that a basic difference in temperaments must be my seeing everything as a story, as interesting about people and life, and his not viewing the world this way. I am still upset, but I try to think as much as I can how the other person feels, that perhaps he didn't feel well. Also I know that in conversation one of my great faults is going on, in too great detail, about anything. This makes me, frequently, a dull talker. I have tried, for years, to learn how to hold my tongue in check. Sometimes I talk so much, with such surge and senselessness, that even my nose goes dry and my right ear fills up— providentially, in a way, for I at least cannot hear the sillinesses I trumpet forth.

  MAY 13, 1955 Margot was superb in one of the most beautiful ballets in the world—[Frederick Ashton's] Symphonic Variations. At moments she rose straight off the floor, as though plucked up by some powerful force. A cool, calm, soothing, frigid work to sentimental watery music, a combination as satisfying as sweet-and-sour. In the interval, Margot sat in her dressing room, in a deep red, minutely paisleyed wrapper, her jet black hair tumbled down, undoing her ballet slippers and surrounded by admirers. The telephone rang. Margot said how she'd been to banquets and both menus were identical. “Like being a lecturer, dearie,” I said. Why, she demanded, had Symphonic Variations been such a flop on the first American tour? “Why?… It laid an egg, a great big egg, an ostrich egg,” she went on. But I had to go back to my seat. John Gielgud and two young fellows (very sissy) sat next to us and we talked and he sent love to Karen Blixen. “I'm just in the throes of Lear,” he said to me, “… in the throes.” Later he strode away, incredibly slender in a dark straight coat and black homburg, a flower in the coat and a handkerchief jutting from its pocket, a general air of being Graham Robertson.76 The two sissies ran along, one in front and one behind. It was like a Beardsley as they vanished down a little Covent Garden street.