The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  MAY 15, 1955 In the morning yesterday we were off to Charing Cross and into the train for Ashford, down through Kentish valleys. Kent is the beauty of countryside in storybooks, written with great love by delicate minds for children of any age whatsoever. Here Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame live, and all the hedgerows, as one nears the sea, ripple with news of noble refugees from the Tribunal—Calais-to-Folkestone. You can see the Scarlet Pimpernel without even lowering your eyelids, and poor Beau [Brummell] on this last journey to exile and poverty and disorder in Boulogne just across the Channel, but forever away from the world he made.

  In the station at Ashford, a tall, sort of diffidently gangling, white-haired but balding, most distinguished man came up to us. He wore a battered, tan raincoat, but with great style, more like a sumptuous but negligible (because he had so many) rich coat, a yellow-and-brown-and-red scarf loosely knotted at his throat. He had a long mouth, rather loose, but fully lipped and quite ready to tremble or turn down or lend introspection to his angular, quite thin, high-cheeked, enormous-eyed (blue they are and sad, but brightening suddenly to amusement) face. He was browned in the open a lot. His hands were long and capable. He waved them and fluttered them, more in the manner of an epoch than in femininity. He was purposefully languid. Immediately one felt that this was the tail end of Regency bucks, Edwardian beaux, bright young people. “I'm Bobby Howard,” he said, “and you must be Peter Wilson's friends.” His voice was quiet, and he enunciated his syllables, caressing some and eliding others, making a pattern so akin to the prose of Wilde in his plays, making contractions here and carelessly-carefully putting in all verb parts there. This speech pattern is so individual that it is surely the last gasp of Edwardianism, of twenties very-high society. At this moment Martin Wilson came up, in gray flannels and what we call a windbreaker, looking very young.77

  MAY 17, 1955 In a moment, summer vanished; autumn chilled the air and leaves almost unborn go sailing in argosies, armadas to gain the world for winter.

  This is an unsettled time—with peace in Austria and terror in cinemas everywhere. The hydrogen bomb had been exploded in an American desert— trial houses peopled by waxen facsimiles of people (children, dogs, cats, all cupboards meticulously stocked with tinned foods), a “test” village, exploded off the earth. I saw the dreadful ghastly sweep of the air and sucking up of the air with it everything torn up, more dreadful than cyclone or tornado, more dreadful than any natural force, and then the broken waxen people, some quite vanished, others deadness among shattered possessions—all too monstrous. This we saw, unexpectedly, at the tail end of a newsreel, just before Carol [Reed]'s not-too-good movie, A Kid for Two Farthings.78 Oh—the dreadful rush of the air as it swept up the houses and burst them open, tore them to splinters in less than a moment, tossing their contents into nothingness or into bits, which in their familiarity made it all the more horrible. Seeing this, why can't people everywhere put a stop to the avalanche, the now almost inevitable nothingness of tomorrow? This is comprehensible, not a dramatic statement: “1,000,000 killed.” No one comprehends one million. Everyone instantly understands an accidental or even an intentional pinprick. What we saw was personal. Still a quarter hour later, watching Carol's little boy and a goat in situations made unreal because they were too movie-made (as opposed to Marty‘s just-as-it-really-happens atmosphere), the hydrogen bomb and its utter devastation became only the shadow of a cloud. There are thunder and torrents and lightning in that cloud. We know that, but who is to fear a cloud? There it is behind us…. Here it is right overhead…. Oh, dear Lord, please send a wind to drive away that awful cloud. Who wants a cloud, even a little cloud, on a holiday? There it goes, the shadow, to spill and bluster and roar and shatter elsewhere. Thank you, Lord. This, then, is how we do not want to believe in clouds and hydrogen bombs, in life ending. It is far easier to fear pain than it is to fear death, especially death from the skies, death by man. I think of Fania [Marinoff], so terrified of dying that she sleeps in a blue-walled room, her blue-and-white glass Venetian chandeliers brilliantly lighted, light blazing from floor lamps, light pouring upon her bed, making it into a stage, upon which she tosses restlessly, fearing death, sometimes leaping from her bed to rummage among the brilliant scraps, which make it almost impossible to shut her drawers and cupboards, there are so many remnants of Poirets and bargains and embroideries and beaded bits and feathers and flowers plucked from barrows in the flea markets of the world.

  MAY 18, 1955 Martin Wilson talks “sister-in-law” talk about Harry Wright [Peter Wilson's companion], gently doing in the rise of Harry, and with such diffidence, such style. Then Martin ran off “to dash more powder all over himself,” said Peter, before going out into the pelting cold rain to meet someone on Duke of York Street. Bobby Howard's house is in precise and exquisite Regency and eighteenth-century style—lovely Vieille Russie objects and satin bedcovers. “They do make such good dog benches,” Bobby said, pointing to a low fuchsia-satin-covered Regency bed, upon which Puffy (a large Alsatian, like a dog on a Berlin wool carpet) had rested.

  Then luncheon in a large, light dining room with birds in cages—a cardinal-red bird, parakeets, and a trilling canary who flew about and was excessively vocal. Lunch bountiful, beautifully served, during a great thunder and rainstorm, with the magnificent dramatics of the skies so enthralling that I forgot to be afraid, and the silver so curious and beautiful—probably early eighteenth, late seventeenth—and china of great delicacy and beauty. When I asked what Bobby did with himself all day (he is fifty-six) I was told: “Oh, he finds occupations—the birds, the flowers, his hair, walking.”

  We went off in Bobby's Rolls to Sissinghurst, where there were many trippers and the gardens were not at their peak, but were nevertheless quite beautiful and one could see how marvelous they would be. The great hedges were wonderfully kept, and two urns pouring purple clematis were as lovely as ornaments in eighteenth-century books. Vita Sackville-West stood talking with some visitors. She was in a battered, tannish, weathered, country-felt sort of pot-cloche-with-brim, a baggy skirt and warm sweater and coat, gardening gloves, leaning on a garden broom. She is very tall, still retains some of the beauty that won Virginia Woolf She vanished before I could talk to her. The dog, Rollo, bounded out, friendly and gay. We went off to tea in a shop in a nearby village—awful tea, but fascinating to see the trippers (the men not removing their hats, guzzling it down with relish) and great shelves of candies with names I had never even imagined.

  MAY 19, 1955 Last night we went off to dine with Dig and Henry (Yorke-Green) in their minute Trevor Place house. Henry seems older, gradually becoming stooped. His eyes enormous and velvet, but more and more fixed in their unclouded whites. His color is compounded of rich browns and deep reds and pallor. And he drinks quietly, unobtrusively, incessantly, wine mostly, never quite betraying his state, but quite plastered all evening long. This does not impair his conversation, which is good, but causes him to reiterate moments of it, sort of making a Greek chorus of himself to himself. Dig has the atmosphere of a woman who has given up struggling against this inevitability. She has humor and curiosity and a sort of properly-brought-up girlish vivacity. She was once lovely, probably in the season she came out she was thought beautiful, and that was more the vitality of the moment and good bone structure than actual physical beauty. Dig is good, the way Penelope is good, and Henry is a good man, but alas he is an alcoholic. He says that he now finds taking up a pen even to write a letter impossible. He has started several books, and written one page. Then they stop.

  He spoke of David Cecil79 going to stay at San Simeon and being flabbergasted by having the plane in which he traveled pass over a blue desert, and after having been met by a fleet of Rollses, Bentleys, and other mythological motors and swept off to [William Randolph] Hearst's fairyland, being told that he would have to carry his own bags up. Cecil, accustomed to hordes of servants and the politesse of Hatfield, could not believe this rudeness and was utterly put out by it. Only
to be overwhelmed again, when he had carried his bags up, by luxury such as he had never imagined any contemporary could summon. In a great garden, furnished with a battalion of Greek temples (actual ones, brought block by numbered block from Greece and erected in this California fantasy), he discovered that each altar, within its temple, was, when a concealed button was pressed, a fully stocked bar.

  Henry's conversation flickered over Cecil, over L. P. Hartley (“He is now considered by many our greatest living novelist. I can't abide children in books, but I did think [Hartley's] The Go-Between good.”), over Ivy Compton-Burnett. (“Cannot abide her. Can't read her books. She was awarded a little honor, the OBE, but she said ‘too late,' for her companion had died.”80) I told him how mean she had been to Miss Jourdain, and he said he was sure that she, Ivy C-B, was a monster. Then he talked of Evelyn [Waugh] and how he had heard a rumor of Evelyn now becoming sporadically unbalanced, how Evelyn had got on a boat to go to Africa or the Mideast and had demanded his letters after the boat had been at sea a long time and became absolutely black-faced with rage when the captain told him he could not possibly have letters at sea. Ultimately, his rage having subsided, he asked the captain whether he, Evelyn, was having hallucinations, and when the captain told him that he thought he was, Evelyn retired quietly to his cabin. His wife came out and took him home. Henry also told of spending a weekend with the Waughs, during which Evelyn flew into a black-faced rage at the table when, having given Henry permission to smoke between the courses, Henry did. Evelyn became so furious that he went off with two bottles of champagne and locked himself into his library. Henry says Mrs. Waugh enjoys all this. My experiences with Evelyn and Mrs. Evelyn [Laura Herbert] do confirm all this. Evelyn brought Mrs. to lunch at the Chateaubriand, which he had chosen, ordered only the most expensive foods, said to the waiters that the food was “filthy, positively filthy,” and threw the basket of biscuits off the table.81

  Henry went on about wanting to come to America. He could pay his way, but would have to be kept there, perhaps by lecturing. “But no one night stands. They do me in. I require one half bottle of gin a day—that is all.”

  MAY 20, 1955 Lesley told about traipsing all the way out to Flushing [in Queens, New York,] to see a cousin of Lady Burton's—a huge, well-poitrined, educated seventy-five-year-old woman married to a night clerk. There she sits surrounded by mementos of Lady Burton.82 She says Lady B was beautifully dressed, gay, not a prude, and that there is a little grave beside the big one, because Lady B insisted on having a tumorous growth which had been cut out buried there in anticipation of her remaining remains. Lady B said that it had been with her very long and suffered and grown within her. It was now a part of herself and must be buried.

  MAY 25, 1955 • COPENHAGEN I finished my Carlo—almost two days of industry and the bliss of sitting and writing and choosing and shaping and patting into place and finding some of it almost what I wanted to say.

  NOTE: Leo's seventy-fifth-birthday tribute to Van Vechten was not published. The following is an excerpt.

  As a nation, we were musically benighted at the turn of the century, but Carlo [Van Vechten], along with his vanguard-minded precursor, [critic] James Gibbon Huneker, did not intend that we should remain a country of mandolin strummers and piano-piece players. So Carlo did his best to make honest women of American jazz, blues, and Negro music; the iconoclastics of Stravinsky; the unorthodoxies of Satie; the tunes of Gershwin; the folk music of Iowa (he was born in Cedar Rapids). He passionately interpreted the new interpreters—singing-actors such as Mary Garden, Olive Fremstad, Geraldine Far-rar, and Chaliapin. He prophesied that movie music would be written by leading—even great—modern composers, not jingle-jangled out of stock “mood-music” collections by marathon piano players. Then in 1920, when he was forty, Carlo said that the time had come for him to give up music criticism and explained why: “Because after that age prejudices are formed which preclude the possibility of welcoming novelties.”

  At least one generation has matured without wittingly realizing that his extraordinary erudition, his enthusiasms, his great gifts as an agent évocateur and agent catalyst, his disdain for the trite and the conventional, his dedication to the exquisite in the most exact sense of that designation, his lavishly documented frivolity, his carefully calculated insolent willfulness, his delight in incongruities and in the unexpected, his seventy-six-year-long, shameless, public love affair with glamour have made today's living in America gayer, richer, and altogether more worldly—if you want it that way and have the capacity to take it. (1955)

  JOURNAL • may 26, 1955 The terrace of the Stephanie et Porte, across Kon-gens Nytorv [the opera house's square] now blossoming with lilac trees and blooms, huge, pale lavender and white, and looking as all flowers do in the north, more delicate, more fragile. Here crowds sit all the long afternoon and into the evening, despite the disadvantageous weather. They hide their tea and coffee beneath cozies, and they wear bits of fur and mittens and, women, antiquated hats. Especially one antique female in a flat-brimmed, brown-velvet, high-crowned hat (like Momma wears in the snapshots, taken of us in about 1918 or 1919. Here many women look like Grandma and my Goldwasser aunts). So they sit on the terrace of the Stephanie et Porte, like so many egg-cozies and tea-cozies, and the bicyclists flash and flit by and the trolley cars lumber along—and horses. Too lovely, this makes me feel inside: All the pleasures of childhood and almost none of the fears.

  MAY 27, 1955 Yesterday felt the first day of spring, when the sun actually warmed this world diligently and all day long. Morning flowed through the twisting, narrow streets and the helter-skelter squares of Copenhagen on the gentle, creaking croonings of pigeons—a coolish, amaranthine morning, which the ping-ping of trolley cars burst open like a great golden orange into torrents of sunlight.

  I went off to tour the ballet school and the Royal Theater with journalists. We trooped through the classes: a men's class in the beautiful haunted rehearsal room, with the blue-and-tan walls and the portraits and the windows (curtained, fan-shaped at the top, and sunlight meshed in the white curtains), and the boys in great form at their barre work and the piano tinkling operetta tunes. I dote on practice pianists, for they are vast repositories of old operetta and show tunes and ballet music no one has heard in years—or ever. All of the boys have the long, straight, precise line which Roland Petit uses so marvelously, and all of the boys, in practice, seemed better than a similar group in New York, London, or Paris. So to Vera [Volkova]'s girls' class, and here the high caliber of form was not so apparent. But Vera is today the greatest teacher we have, and it is delightful to watch her—compact in a dark skirt and little shirt, her hair piled on top of her head and held in place by a little black ribbon—gently straightening a foot into the proper degree of turnout in relation to the leg, here talking in a quiet low voice to a dancer who, having done the same exercise since she was a small girl, is not now doing it.83 The lightly lilting operetta tunes tinkled on and we went to the paint shop and the little theater and through the school where the little children are taught other things than ballet—very cheerful and sunny and high-up, a whole separate suite arranged as a day school for towheaded little boys and girls. All of whom seemed very gay and amused at us, coated and foreign and wintry and gape-eyed. Overlooking the two rooftops upon which these children relax (one for girls, one for boys) is a great ledge, each corner held down by enormous seated-on-their-haunches sphinxes, i8yoish, a decoration of masks, comedy and tragedy, and everywhere against the sky the green-corroded fantastic towers of this city. If you know the principal towers of Copenhagen, you need never be lost.

  MAY 29, 1955 What a lovely Sunday at the sea with Margrethe Schanne and Kjeld [Noack].84 They fetched us at eleven (in a convertible) and we drove north along the coast [by Kattegat], past Queen Alexandra [of England]'s house (white, with caryatids upholding the roof of the second story) and past Isak Dinesen's (still looking unoccupied, so she must be in Rome). We left Kjeld at the Marienl
yst [hotel], where he is staging a revue, and then Margrethe drove us out to Holbæk, where we lunched in an inn with the sea light brilliant. We talked and talked and compared and compared. Margrethe explained Bournonville.85 I see that this style is direct, uncomplicated, simple, and full of strength. The Russian style is essentially theatrical (the difference between Bach and Tchaikovsky). Margrethe has enormous eyes, a Luise Rainer voice, an utterly mobile face, and hands which only a ballerina could have. She weighs about eighty pounds! (She has had the lung sickness, water in the lungs, I believe.) She sometimes has money sent by the Tuborg brewery. When in London she lives at Margot [Fonteyn]'s. Margrethe is unhappy and fatalistic, having too little to dance, but still is the Danes' greatest Bournonville dancer. She says there is no one to teach Bournonville anymore and the tradition is dying out. This must be true, for the company is definitely not as good as it was three years ago. It lacks discipline. How sad that they no longer love what they do best, but wish to do “modern” works for which they have no talent whatsoever.