Savage Grace - Natalie Robins
Page 36
Love,
Sam
Anatole Broyard
She was in my writing class at the New School for a while and she was the only grande dame we had—it was as if Mrs. Vanderbilt had walked into class. She had some talent but she didn’t work hard enough—she just wanted to fling the thing out into the world and be a success.
Steven M. L. Aronson
Somebody had told Barbara that I was that season’s bright young man in publishing, so she tantalized me with her novel the very first time we met. I was introduced to her in New York, in her own living room, by a friend we had in common who had brought me to one of those parties she was always giving.
The apartment was sort of junglelike. I remember the living room—the way it was lit was interesting, and it seemed exotic and romantic, with all those terraces looking out over everything. And I remember my first sight of Barbara: surrounded, attended, her tawny head thrown back. What a magnet. She was so generous with friends, so bold with total strangers (me!), you would not easily have guessed she was a woman at the end of her rope.
She became a friend from that evening. And later, when he got back from Mallorca, she worked Tony into my life. The three of us would spend cozy, perfectly uneventful weekends in a cottage she was renting on the beach in East Hampton—until the Sunday morning she burst into my room with the Times, handed me several sections of it, then sprawled across my bed to read the magazine section. At some point I looked up and saw Tony standing in the doorway. I’ll never forget his face, contorted as it was into an incomprehensible expression of rage. Barbara had spared me the more salient facets of their history, but later, when I finally read her manuscript, I understood what kind of jealousy it was that had caused that rage.
A few weeks after this, she came to a dinner party at my apartment in New York wearing a black evening dress made of hundreds of little feathers. For days they kept turning up—behind sofas, under chairs. I sent one back to her with a note. “I laughed and laughed,” she replied, “and will keep the feather forever.” From then on, though—in almost every letter she sent me from the mad, gypsy life that she was leading—she enclosed a feather from that dress: so many feathers it must have been plucked clean.
In a letter postmarked London, November 17, 1972, the day she was killed, she said, “Tony somewhat improved—oh! but it’s heavy!” She was inviting me to spend Christmas with the two of them on Cadogan Square. Folded into the envelope was the accustomed feather: “Would that it were from the goose that laid the golden egg! What can I do with feathers except fly?” By the time that feather had crossed the Atlantic, she was six days dead. It was “the last lovely flutter of her strong wings.” Sad! I mean, what could be sadder—feathers without the bird.
Had she lived, Barbara would be a woman completely beyond my imagining now. In fact, the night I sat down and read her novel I saw that she already was.
It was part fantasy, part confession, part paean to profane love, and Barbara, great self-appreciating personality that she was, had clearly written it with the awareness of contributing to her own legend.
What I remember best is the section titled “Summer,” in which the heroine and her son and a male friend of theirs set sail on some tainted sea. First the mother seduces the son, then she seduces the friend. Later she comes upon the son and the friend in bed together. “Leave him alone! My son is not a homosexual!” she screams. “He functions very well sexually with me. I’m not going to let a little pansy like you ruin everything I’ve accomplished.” It was wild. It was garbled. But despite, or because of, its obviously pathological content, the book had a power, a certain unnerving power.
Ellen Schwamm
You couldn’t tell with Barbara—the lines between reality and her imagination seemed sort of shadowy, or suitably moveable, at will. We were in the same writing class. I remember she claimed to be the heroine of one of James Jones’s novels.
Francine du Plessix Gray
Barbara’s novel was absolutely terrible. I remember her coming to stay with us in Connecticut and giving us two or three chapters to read. We told her it needed a lot of work, and she dug into us in such a way! She started attacking my writing—I’d just published “Governess” in The New Yorker, which later became the first chapter of my novel Lovers and Tyrants. She said, “That was a piece of shit. How do you dare to criticize me? Jim Jones thinks my work has genius.”
Letter from James Jones to Barbara Baekeland, Undated
10, quai d’Orléans
Paris IV°
Dear Barbara,
I am returning your story manuscript with this letter. I can only say that I have to treat it as a professional writer or not at all, and my feeling about the story is that it simply does not come off. I find the style much too heated and fervid for the material; and I don’t think the resolution is believable, given the characters.
With regard to the novel which you mentioned you have finished,
I can’t of course say anything about that now. However, if the style is at all similar to this story, or fragment, I would cool the style considerably. I would of course be glad to read it for Delacorte Press, but if it follows in the vein of this piece you sent me, I can almost guarantee you that the editors there would not take it.
Gloria will be writing to you about Tony and all the other things.
Always all personal best.
Sincerely yours,
James Jones
Elizabeth Weicker Fondaras
One weekend in East Hampton, Barbara came to dinner and afterward we settled around the fire in my big winter living room and she read her manuscript aloud to us. She was so excited and enthusiastic about it. I remember extravagant images—the striped walls were coming in on her, or she would be floating down to the sea with rocks rolling all around her. It was like a dream. They were the strange ravings of a person in a crisis—you could see trouble and despair.
Dr. E. Hugh Luckey
I was a houseguest of Liz Fondaras’s the Saturday night Barbara Baekeland decided to entertain us by reading from her novel. I sat there bored stiff for about an hour of recitation. I would have probably gone to bed if it hadn’t been for Liz.
John Sargent, who’s the chairman of the board of Doubleday, was also present. Liz had set that up, you know. She’s the great matchmaker of all time—she tries to help all of her friends.
Well, I knew the game. When Barbara Baekeland took that manuscript out, I knew what was going on—she wasn’t interested in how I would like it, she was interested in how John Sargent was going to like it. I remember the look on his face as it was being read.
John Sargent
It went on and on and on. We couldn’t get it to stop.
After she was killed, I used to send Tony things in the loony bin. Not books—they wouldn’t let me send books. I could only send noncontroversial items, such as shirts and clothing. He wrote me little thank-you notes.
Letter from Antony Baekeland to James Reeve, November 20, 1979
Broadmoor
Dear James,
I think I will start writing seriously when I get out of here and get myself settled, whenever and wherever that is. I have the material for several interesting books, I think, and I will enjoy working on them.
I am afraid I am very disillusioned with most of the people here: now that I am clear in myself I no longer see them as amusing characters but as the moral derelicts which they really are—too stupid to learn from their pain and unhappiness, they will continue forever to batter their heads against the wall, ignoring the door.
I long for some interesting talk and company: the routine here is very dull and always the same old chitchat. Even the most beguiling of companions begin to bore one after so many years: I am not talking about true friends. It seems ridiculous to me that I must undergo more of this psychiatric mumbo jumbo in the U.S. My troubles were purely spiritual and stemmed from a mistake I made a long time ago; it wasn’t a mistake at all, as I now realize: muc
h good will come from it. But I do feel that the ideas held by the “doctors” about the mind, soul, and body are primitive, ugly, and pathetic in the extreme.
Mind you, all this world of doctors, businessmen, workers, actors, etc., are just robots controlled by the Mind of a very few Ladies and
Gentlemen. I don’t think of the mass of people as degraded or pathetic or anything like that, it is just that they are not “real” people and although they control my life at the moment, grace à la Reine, I don’t let them bother me nor do I take them at all seriously.
One of my books will be about the human termite-colony as it really is, I think. Or perhaps I won’t write it at all—I shall have to wait and see. Anyway, James, my fondest wishes and you must please give my regards to your mother.
Love always,
Tony
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Barbara Baekeland, January 8, 1971
Miramar
Valldemosa
Mallorca
Dearest Mum,
Telegram from you four days ago inviting me to New York. I replied today saying that I will come if necessary but would rather not as I am really happy here. If sometimes I write despairing letters it is only that I am disappointed and frustrated at not being able to come more quickly: the other night playing chess I had such a clear vision of my blinding greed to win, to cheat with myself, and saw the calm detachment of my higher self arranging it (the game, like a droplet of quicksilver) so that I could only make the right move if I felt the right feeling. In regard to what you say about intellects I doubt if I could find many of such a caliber and quality as those of Maria and Sebastian, my family here at Miramar. And anyway, intellection is exactly that which I am trying to get away from: these relative truths and falsehoods of our time, of all times, of art, of science, and of literature have no value for me; for the present at least, they are a poison to me and to my pure mind. Perhaps one day soon I will be able and willing to venture into that bog, but by then, perhaps, things will have ceased to be relative to one another and will become relative to One. I don’t think you realize how closely I live with my family here.
What you say about Physical Love is no doubt true, but as our bodies are reflections of our souls’ desire towards life, everything in me impels me to touch and love another person. Anyway I know the difference between love and lust so I suppose I mustn’t worry. Don’t get too caught up with visions of the past or other things like this. I have been having this very strongly on and off for two years and I find it imposes a great strain on the mind (intellect, that stray sheep) which tries in its futile way to fit together the apparent parts of a fluid that extends through itself in all directions. All the years you scolded me for smoking I was only taking it for one reason. I have never experienced what you call “mere pleasure,” what Shakespeare, I believe, called “a waste of folly,” lust. I have experienced it but could not call it pleasure but only the hopeless groan of agony of abandoned oceans.
I am glad you saw what I told you last year about suicide is true. Everything we have told in love is true.
Tony
Miwa Svinka-Zielinski
Barbara invited me for dinner in New York to celebrate because Tony had come home from Spain, and she also invited Teenie Duchamp and Elizabeth Fondaras. And during this dinner, Barbara had some words with Tony, she told him some remark which was not pleasant, so Tony left the table, and we finished dinner. And then he came and took ice from the bucket and put it down her dress. She started to laugh. Then he went to his room, and a few minutes later came out undressed—totally. He was naked.
Elizabeth Weicker Fondaras
He just streaked from one end of the apartment to the other—I think it was a diagonal run he made. He must have just wanted to get his mother’s attention. Barbara thought it was sort of funny.
Brendan Gill
I didn’t have much of an impression of Tony; he was always very dim to me, almost nonspeaking. I don’t think I exchanged ten words with him. He was just like a walk-on, a zombie.
Eleanor Ward
To me, Tony was a complete zero. Now whether this was because his mother was there…I never saw him when she wasn’t around, so what he was like without her I don’t know—he might have been a very different person.
Katharine Gardner Coleman
He was really quite peculiar, but you know, we’d seen so many disturbed young people in the sixties. They snapped back, though.
Sara Duffy Chermayeff
He showed up at my house one afternoon—I hadn’t seen him for, like, nine years—and he read me a story he had written and I will just never forget it. Because he was the artist. Not Brooks. Not Barbara. Tony was.
It was a story about one day in his life in Barbara’s penthouse. He told the day in that place and he described everything about it—the little room next to the hall where you came in, that rotunda with the marble floor that Barbara had fixed up with the candelabra, her bed with the leopard skin. He described her frying liver in a pan for lunch and how at the end of the day she went out to dinner, all dressed up—he described her furs and everything—and the last line of the story, after she went out the door, said, “And I felt no bigger than a lima bean.”
Elizabeth Blow
That spring Barbara put Tony in the National Academy School of Fine Arts on Fifth Avenue way up in the nineties. She invited me for dinner and the first thing she said to him was, “I want you to show Betty your drawings from class.” He almost froze, he refused to move, and so she went and got this large portfolio and started showing them to me. The drawings were very strange—there were figures of people who didn’t look like people. I mean, there was a sort of nonhuman quality to these drawings, and there was also a kind of infantile quality. As she laid them out, she would say, “Aren’t they marvelous!” and so forth. And I looked up at Tony and he was just…stone, he was turned to stone.
Sylvia Lochan
I was the registrar at the National Academy, and a couple of the students came down to my office. They were a little disturbed because Antony Baekeland wasn’t responding to anybody or anything, he just seemed to be in a world of his own. They said the class was painting a still life—flowers and fruit I think it was—and that his canvas had figures on it with blood dripping down the side.
I went up to the classroom and I went over to talk to him. He was seated and I kind of bent down next to him and I said, “That’s very interesting.” He didn’t respond to my being there, my presence—he was staring off into space. And then he turned around and I saw that he had painted his nose red. I walked out of the room and went down and called his mother and said I thought she should come right over and get him. And she did—she was a very good-looking woman, I remember. And that was the last I saw of him. It was obvious to me that he was very troubled at the time, and certainly, looking back, I think it’s very surprising that he wasn’t in some sort of hospital.
Elizabeth Blow
Barbara called me to say there had been what she described as—by this time she was using these little French phrases all the time—a fracas. “There was a little fracas at the National Academy,” she said. “Nothing at all, darling, really nothing at all—all I had to do was take him out.”
Patient Abstract, Antony Baekeland, Private Psychiatric Clinic, New York City, 1971
Patient: BAEKELAND, Antony
Admitted: May 21, 1971
Age: 25 (Born: Aug. 28, 1946)
Civil Status: Single
Occupation: Student
Chief Complaint: Mr. Baekeland enters the hospital fearful, delusional, hallucinating, with a heavy history of drug usage and inability to function.
Present Illness: Mr. Baekeland’s history at no time has been a stable one and it is difficult to date the onset of his present illness. He dates the onset of the use of drugs (LSD, pot, amphetamines) to approximately seven years ago when he was living with his mother (although the patient’s parents were together until three years ago, the
y often lived apart in various parts of Europe for years prior to their separation). Patient, himself, dates the onset of his increasing disorganization in living to three years ago at the time of his parents’ separation. At that time, patient’s father left the patient’s mother to live with a former lady friend of the patient’s. At this point, patient’s mother allegedly made a suicide attempt. Since this time, the patient has been tormented with alternating periods of fury at his parents and spells of depression and guilt in which he has felt he is responsible for his parents’ no longer living together. Although the patient’s father is financially well off, subsisting on family fortune, he has provided no more than minimal financial assistance to his wife and son. Both the patient and his mother seemed to have lived a “pillar-to-post” existence in the past three months, globetrotting in a helter-skelter fashion and finding themselves unable to adjust to the realistic changes required because of the new financial situation. Patient, himself, has become increasingly involved in the use of drugs and has surrounded himself with a coterie of radical, artistic, would-be jetsetters. His mother, determined that her son is something of a “misunderstood genius” who was never meant to “work and toil in this sick society,” has found it impossible to curb his disorganization and to set limits on his unrealistic style of living and flights of fancy. An emphasis upon social appearance despite the reality of circumstances is a paramount idea in Mrs. Baekeland’s thinking also. At the time of the patient’s admission, he was living alternately with some hippie friends in Greenwich Village and spending time with his mother at her apartment. He found that he had difficulty separating his spheres of influence and responsibility from those of his friends. Accordingly, he had become more withdrawn and sought to limit his involvements so that he could maintain a sense of his own self-limits. The event precipitating his admission to the Clinic consisted in his allegedly being chased and assaulted two days prior to admission while he was walking through Central Park at night. He recalls a nightmarish memory in which he was pursued with clubs by police, finally arriving, fearful and disorganized, at his mother’s apartment. Although the patient was able to sleep for more than 24 hours after his arrival there, upon awakening, his mother states that he was still extremely disorganized, delusional, fearful and hallucinated. Moreover, he seemed very agitated and mother was fearful of the possibility of his assaulting her. Accordingly, she arranged for his admission to the Clinic. Psychiatric Examination: The patient is a tall young man with longish red hair dressed in modish clothes. He had an air of frenzied disorganization. His choice of vocabulary and his accent had a finishing-school quality. Patient spoke a great deal about his mother and his father and expounded in a grandiose fashion on his intentions to reunite his parents. He spoke of himself and his mother as though they were a team and his first and most persistent inquiries had to do with when he would be able to phone her. In view of the patient’s present and past environments, both of which might be characterized as unstable, it was felt that his reconstitution from his state of agitated disorganization would be all that could be accomplished in Clinic. Course in Clinic (May 21, 1971, to July 2, 1971): From the outset, the patient’s course in Clinic was stormy. Mrs. Baekeland seemed to align herself with the most bizarre and eccentric statements of her son against what she perceived as narrow-minded arbitrariness on the part of the staff. She spoke of the phones at the Clinic having been bugged and sought desperately to justify her son’s assertion that he was God. Patient related in either a clinging, dependent manner or a supercilious, haughty fashion to other patients and ward personnel. For the most part he remained in his room and listened to Indian music by the hour. Any attempts to set limits on his unconventional behavior were met with fearful and angry resentment. Throughout the patient’s hospitalization there were many angry, demanding phone calls from his mother. Ultimately, in spite of strong counsel on the part of the hospital staff not to do so, the patient’s mother signed the patient out of the Clinic.