The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JULY 4, 1989 Francine [Gray] asked us to tea at the Coz Club to meet Svet-lana [Makurenkova], who is tallish, slim, like one of those summer days— quiet, light, gleaming—but a passionate stirring underneath.41 In profile, she was chinless, plain. Full face, Vivien Leigh transfigured her—that beauty appearing, disappearing. When I was little, and had to feign afternoon naps, I was transported by the fluctuating light and dark as the green-white blind billowed into and out of the window frame. So, Svetlana's Vivien Leigh beauty fluctuated in the plainness of her pale face. Large, researching eyes. And her “talk”!—about Donne, the metaphysical poets, the late plays of Shakespeare. “You do not understand. Here in the West, you make him into one person. We see him as many people, many people all working, writing, making these plays.” She went on—not theory, but fact to her and, seemingly, her Soviet colleagues. She told the tale of the Englishman who, in the University of Padua, late sixteenth century, sat between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This is part of the evidence she gives for Shakespeare being many people. She told of discovering a first edition of Donne in the Lenin Library, brought to Russia, she believes, by one of the “great end-of-the-nineteenth-century collectors.” I suggested that perhaps the Donne was brought back in the seventeenth century by one of the embassies to England. She was interested, but I do not think that she agreed—nor to the notion that the Donne came with a seventeenth-century English visitor. She talked about Arthur Miller and Inge [Morath, a photographer, his wife] and Genet and an early-twentieth-century Dutch writer of epic plays. She has Danish, Dutch, German, Russian—of course, French, English. Most of her research was done surreptitiously, because metaphysics was against the Soviet policy until glasnost. Manhattan made her cry. I think she thinks this island is “against God,” against nature. She is an astonishment, incredible. I wished that we could have spent a weekend with her. I hogged her. No regrets. When we were going away, she shook my hand and curtsied. Her speech, at first, was formal—almost proclamatory, almost handout, but then she flowered. In talking about Russia today, she said that it is being corrupted by all sorts of “foreign” influences.

  JULY 30, 1989 Discovery—took seventy-five years—yesterday, in the early morning—that I have unwittingly worked at being the still center of the whirlpool.

  SEPTEMBER 4, 1989 • PALM BEACH, FLORIDA Sitting on the bed edge since eight, in semidarkness, curtains letting in a sliver of silvery light—insufficient to read by—can't turn on bedside lamp—not enough strength in hand and would probably tumble. I find all of this ironic, but not without giving me the possibility to scribble, in the almost dark.42

  I want to write about Luise Rainer's visit on Wednesday night last. She came, small face wrecked by age, but smile and eyes as beautiful as when she had that famous Oscar-winning telephone agony with “Flo.”43 And we were given that agony, but “real life”—overwhelming. We had it intermittently for almost four hours: agony over [her husband] Robert [Knittel]'s death (We suspect bungled operations, etc.)—tumults, tornadoes of agony… interludes of almost pastoral, long reminiscence about what a good husband Robert had been, how he had devoted his life to her, how he had never let her know anything about money—interludes of concern for us: Gray didn't draw anymore? What did I really do?—interludes about what should she do with her life, about how wonderful Francesca (her daughter) is to her… then she began to curve into passion—how awful Los Angeles is, “They only talk about money—only money! I couldn't live there…. I can't live in New York”—the filth, the expense, the ugliness… so to conjectures about London, “the only place I could live” … then the currents of rage against the Swiss, “They are taking everything!” The voice and body patterns at our kitchen table were as they had been long ago in those prize-winning screen performances—identical—but this all too real, too searing, too no-exit—that tremendous crescendo rising to an enormous full-throated, sostenuto—no, a curve, a deep organ sound, almost a contralto shriek, sinking to a pianissimo so soft, almost soundless—the ghost of agony, of terror, of anger….

  OCTOBER 8, 1989 • NEW YORK CITY When we asked Steve Martin about The Merchant of Venice (Dustin Hoffman in London), he said, genuinely amazed, “That play is a mess! What a mess!” He went on to explain that he knew nothing about Shakespeare, having almost none in school and having seen almost no Shakespeare. Steve is utterly, honestly disingenuous: “I have no way to judge … but that play … all those girls and the things in the boxes and the fun and that anti-Semitic other plot….”

  DECEMBER 31, 1989 • LAGUNA HILLS, CALIFORNIA At Maebelle's — I thought to consider the approach of this next decade, a decade so different in our lives. It is the first decade that we contemplate with some foretaste of a more possible—no, more probable—mortality (mine, Richard's, even Puss's) — than any preceding decade.44 I am seventy-five and a half, Richard seventy-seven and a half, Puss is eight years younger than I am. I now more fully, moment by moment, understand Rebecca's horrible, inconsolable weeping. Over the blower, three thousand miles away, I could hear this storm of raging grief at having to “go,” from one of the great minds of our day. I understand Madame Du Barry's weeping, but that I always understood, thinking her of no splendid, or even special, intellect. She wept at the injustice of her fate, at giving up her life for—what?—perhaps even wept at her own arrogance. For her stupidity in returning to France, for her paltry reasons, was arrogance. But Rebecca—I was plunged into dark confusion. Now I understand that anguish.

  So, here is 1990—Gay Nineties in the twentieth-century sense, not the nineteenth? Also, this will be the decade when the world divides between East and West. And we will probably eventually find Russia more East than West. We are no longer the “rulers” of the world.

  So what other melancholy maunderings? I see no changes—emotional—in our life. The downs and ups will continue. We will, each of us, try to survive these. Physically, I can only look to deteriorate more and more, and I can hope to be able to cope and be coped with. What a future for Puss. If only he could take the little mishaps and the major awfulnesses more calmly—if only … I can only wish on whatever star—wish this for him. Now, about my book: I can only try. If it happens, it will happen. I have not given up the refuge of that dream.

  Now I will, for these few moments, enjoy this oasis of sunlighted quiet, reading Proust's letters, finding assurance in them. If he could, despite his “predicament,” so can I. I do not have his great genius, but I have my own little genius—very small, but some sliver of genius—and I have eaten copiously at his table. Alas, I must earn for all of us, and, alas, I don't have time—much of it—left, having spent so much of it already. But he didn't think that he had much, so perhaps our time ration is now equal?

  JANUARY 2, 1990 New Year's Eve revelation, as we watched a televised Jule Styne tribute:45 I missed my true vocation—a producer-director of top Broadway, specially “musicals.” I realized, about fifty-five years too late, that this is when I “feel” most alive, during a wonderful musical—Follies, Show Boat, operettas of course, Gilbert & Sullivan, Pal Joey…. That is the world I wanted, but I went the other way. This began with Aunt Minnie and Uncle Irving and [Irving Berlin's] Music Box Revue. (Minnie and Irving playing four-handed on Momma's upright piano.) I hear the waltzes from Madame Sherry on a picnic when we lived in the Boston Post Road. I see the dancer leaping out of the music box, all brown and gold, on that music front…. I see a showgirl, very Poiret-Erté: She carries a staff and is bouffant at the hips and tapered at the ankles, her hair piled high (spit curls?), blue-purple and black—that was “Tell Me Pretty Gypsy.” I hear the excitement in Uncle Irving's and Aunt Minnie's voices when they “told” about what they had seen and heard. This was the first glamour in my life—probably before Poppa took me to the moving pictures— The Three Musketeers, The Thief of Baghdad, Madame Sans-Gêne, Madame DuBarry. (I became a royalist instantly at five or six. The aristocrats were so beautiful. They wore beautiful clothes. The others who were “after t
hem” so ugly, so dirty. I hated “the people.” I loved the “shiny ones.”)

  JANUARY 3, 1990 Puss off to an unknown doctor after a terrifying, sleepless night upright in his bed, that being his only position in which breathing was less painful. So, plans for Los Angeles canceled.

  Meanwhile, I immerse in Proust's letters, volume two [1904–9]. What an abundance in both Virginia Woolf's and Proust's letters—life furling on every page. (Extra in Proust's: Robert de Montesquiou's letters. How patient he is with Proust, how affectionate under his careful cover of detachment, how jocular—each in his own way…. What a flirtation.)

  I long to write about this volume of letters, so exhaustively edited by Philip Kolb.46 Having found Proust through Hester Sporer, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, in the Scott Moncrieff translation, helped me to realize and accept what I was, and so I became what I am. How amazingly ripe I was for that society transplanted by Hitler to Manhattan. Question: Would this life have happened this way sans Hitler?

  JANUARY 5, 1990 Now the day here grows longer, as I sit listening to Puss breathing on the sofa, hoping that his epic attack of asthma is diminishing: He is asleep, his breathing, at this moment, no longer is a much-traveled coach rumbling over much-traveled cobbles…. My heart stops when, as in this moment, I do not hear him breathe…. I trust…. Now I resume….

  In Proust's letters, the Louisa de Mornand “relationship”—this could have been “consummated.” Ela told me that Noël slept with her out of “curiosity and affection.”47 That Proust was “taken” with “girls” like Mlle de Faure does not make him bisexual. I have loved—really still love Ela, Penelope … but I have never slept with them or with any woman. I love women, and some women I adore, but I have not even remotely wanted to sleep with any one of them. A few adolescent skirmishes, and I knew. I never had doubts about “the other thing.” Not even when I was four years old, when I was first fiddled with by the boys next door—Louis and his brother Izzy. Because of their mother I found out about babies. Sitting under the dining-room table, in Grandpa's house, when I was about five and a half, for we had already returned to live with him after Grandma died, I heard Momma say to Aunt Minnie, “So, when's she expecting?” Aunt Minnie: “From the look of her—did you see that belly?—any minute!” Next morning, Aunt Minnie said to me, “There's a new baby…. Did you hear the stork bringing it?” “No,” I said, trying to think where the stork fitted, my face clearly showing puzzlement…. “Well, where do you think the baby came from?” she asked. “Her belly!” I said. I was instantly slapped hard. And only years later, when I was in my forties, did I actually find out from where babies came. Sono drew me a diagram. But it was Marlene who showed me female anatomy, when she discovered that I did not know a thing about women below the neckline. That was when she had the intense affair with Yul?48 Still later, when she was playing at the Lunt-Fontanne [theater], and I was in her dressing room before curtain while she was making up (a triangle over the nose, rubber bands around her hairline), she suddenly stood up, dropped her makeup robe, stood superbly naked, and said, as she peered ruthlessly into a full-length, lightbulb bordered looking glass: “The body of a girl of seventeen from the neck down, but the face …” Then she laughed, bittersweet humor—barroom interwined with a flight of small sweet bird notes—and fell to make her face steadfastly young—or at least youthful. Only when she minced onto the stage did she become once again the “fabulous” beauty so beloved by the world for so many years.

  JANUARY 6, 1990 Another relentlessly peerless sun-daft day. A small flare-up at lunch, a firecracker whose short, sharp explosion can set a house afire, but this one only singed. The wound is already aggravated by years of basic truths. Question: Better to hear these awful truths or let them lurk (festering?) beneath the salve of charm, goodwill, loving care, and kindness, which makes living possible? And will the “truths” always, inevitably explode, devastating the “good” living—at least for a time? Possibly these explosions nourish love as much as love nourishes love?

  I write, actually write, whole paragraphs in my head, correcting the punctuation, changing words, reconstructing…. Maebelle reconstructs the past even as I try to reconstruct my past—both of us reinventing, I am sure, as we go along.

  “It's so annoying to think so many things and to feel that the mind in which they're stirring will soon perish sans anyone knowing them. It's true that there's nothing very precious about them and that others will express them better.”

  — Proust to Mme Straus from Versailles, October 17, 1908

  JANUARY 7, 1990 I am almost at the end of Proust's Letters, volume two, and these have opened a door into a room in which I peer, baffled. Having always thought Proust “m.g.” or “so” (his designations), must I now consider the possibility of his being bisexual? I believe Proust basically m.g. but willing to experience anything and then use the experience in his work. I would like to write a probing of Proust's sexuality. I am sure such studies exist, but I would like to write my own. Proust is sexually curious, in all senses of that word. He always wants to note his curiosity.

  JANUARY 8, 1990 I have been “taken to task.” Deserved? Not in the balance of these years, but—yes—deserved because I have been graceless. The sudden outpouring had its direct cause in an observation, made at supper last night: “I feel that we're a very cold group.” I hadn't made much of an effort. I will not make excuses to me. I should have made a characterization—blooming with cordiality, seasoned with small talk, all nods and becks and smiles. I should have thawed the Ice Age in me. I did not try hard enough. I was not the generous person that I thought I was being. I wanted so much to go to the wedding [of Anita's niece, Mary Anita Loos]. All of the “old” Hollywood gathered, my only chance to see the old stars, the survivors of that “golden” time—from everywhere—a mingling of Hollywood and Los Angeles “society” … Well— couldn't be helped. After this morning's reproach I am trying to chatter. I feel what is most required is to make a pleasant, very amiable noise.

  All week at Maebelle's because of Gray's violent sickness [asthma]. I have not been out of my nightshirt and dressing gown since the evening of our arrival. I have not been out of this flat, but I have had a boggling education on Middle America via the television and “convenience foods.” Well, Proust and Philip Kolb have saved me—also the PBS station and forays to the only “good music” station in Los Angeles.

  FEBRUARY 22, 1990 • NEW YORK CITY I fell two nights past. In the night, when I move, I feel that fall, but now, crouching over this desk, no discomfort. “He falls like a cat,” Alex Liberman said. “I never saw anything like it.” This morning Puss said, “I haven't dropped him [Leo] from the Empire State Building, yet.”

  MARCH 13, 1990 Last night Otello — [conductor Carlos] Kleiber plunged us into the fierce drama instantly, and no nuance was denied its full measure. Not since Maestro have I heard anything like it. Despite [Placido] Domingo's worn patches, the central three tangled miraculously into a black-blood snarl. Superb! The Friday night audience so solid a world; almost no outbursts during the action, but, oh, the thunder at each of the three acts' ends, specially for the “star” Kleiber! How many years since we have actually had a great (this debased word) conductor? He is, of course, physically a beauty—great height, never-ending arms, and huge, flapping hands. This is, physically, his most emotional, most frenzied performance.

  MAY 1, 1990 Puss laughed a lot when I told him that I didn't dress [when visiting Maebelle] because I didn't want to wear out my clothes. “Like someone in Molière,” he said. This is anniversary day—our forty-third year.

  MAY 25, 1990 Robin Williams is shooting a movie in Grand Central Station about the homeless while being picketed by the Grand Central resident homeless. As prop men were carrying in cardboard boxes, in which the actor-homeless were to live, they were shouted at by a Grand Central resident: “We don't live in boxes! This isn't the Port Authority!”

  A ghost moment last night, when I dimly discerned my
nearest and dearest, in serried ranks, standing silently in Mary Cantwell's kitchen, to surprise me— with the most enchanting [birthday] party.49

  JUNE 1, 1990 Not being able to write—sitting, staring at a page, which, empty, stares back, is an insomnia—an identical disability to achieve oblivion in dreams. I cannot see what I am scribbling. This light does not light, it obliterates. I am empty. I try to see loved creatures, “things” in this bedroom, but light obliterates almost all. I am as lost in light as anyone in a jungle is lost in a Hell of Green. This would be a Hell of Light, if I gave in to it. The room's inside light is diffused from the lamp; the outside light pours through three and a half windows. It is, through one of the windows, reflected from the Saint. Thomas Choir School. I am scrawling this because I have nothing else to scrawl. I cannot even see this scrawl. I will read The Five of Hearts [on Henry Adams] if light permits.

  JUNE 4, 1990 Walking in the World Trade Center, Stephen didn't believe what I told him about the harbor when I was a small boy—the coffee, tea, and chocolate warehouses, the seamen in the streets. “I really felt old,” I told Puss later. The scintillations of the river, the harbor, in my memory—only what I walked through had been there. It seemed so insubstantial in all this false grandeur, not even as substantial as the fantasy we know as theater lobbies or in Cecil B. DeMille's biblical movies (Intolerance). All served up by a shop selling “history” and another selling “occasions.”