Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  I do not imagine that it was of much comfort to the villagers who had lost all their crops and farm animals to learn that this epochal calamity was a onetime thing.

  Malcolm Lowry

  There was one real hotel at the time, the Mirador, run by fat Don Carlos Barnard and his fat family. Boys were already earning pesos diving off the high rocks below the hotel dining room.

  There was one bar in town—we are in Acapulco in 1938—called the Siete Mares, run by a reedy Mexican. The one waiter was a broken-down former boxer known to everyone as Champ.

  The one place to have a drink and dance was the open courtyard of the local brothel called, inevitably, El Foco Rojo (The Red Light).

  The tourist invasion had not begun. Lew and I were the only English speakers around.

  We were building a house. This involved a slow-beat progress in keeping with the tropical heat. And it was hot. Meanwhile, we lived in rented rooms above the town.

  It was there that a boy—the mozo—came up with a message from the bar. A foreigner, ragged and bleeding, had been thrown off the Cuernavaca bus, with no money, speaking no Spanish. He had been dumped there. Would we come down?

  We went. There was a chunky fellow of about thirty, matted blond hair, unshaven, clothes indeed torn and bloodstained, ranting incoherently.

  The verdict of the Siete Mares was clear: “borracho, borracho”—drunk. I knew enough Spanish to recognize the next word cárcel—prison. But in spite of the haze of alcohol, the words he was mumbling had an unmistakable echo of a literate English background.

  There was something about him, despite his unpromising appearance, that made me feel he was worth helping.

  Impulsively, I said, “We’ll take him home and clean him up.”

  This is how we became the temporary guardians of the highly gifted and spectacularly drunken English writer Malcolm Lowry. I had never heard of him. This was some years before he finally had his tortured semiautobiographical novel Under the Volcano published—it was to be widely admired—and long before John Huston made it even better known by his highly fantasized film treatment, with Albert Finney as the doomed dipsomaniac.

  I had had no experience whatsoever with drunks. I thought that with care, a systematic hiding of bottles—even a regimen of exercise—he would shape up. I would take him to the beach and supervise his swimming. He loved the water. He used to talk about having served on a Norwegian freighter.

  Of course I was wrong. But once sober, he was so articulate, so amusing, so totally original, that I persevered in spite of constant lapses. Because however ingenious I was in doing away with the bottles, he always outwitted me. There would be tearful promises of reform, secret slipping of pesos to the maid for more bottles, then plunges via his favorite mescal with what he called his demons.

  It was hard to piece his story together. Bits and strands would emerge, then tangle and twist. The American writer Conrad Aiken, a serious drinker himself, was a boozing father figure. Lowry mentioned Cambridge. There were constant references to sinister forces bent on trapping him. The avenging angels of fate were after him. He seemed to be on the run because of unpaid bills and overstaying his Mexican visa. He was terrified of the police and convinced he was being spied upon. He apparently had been living in Cuernavaca. What was he doing, penniless, on that bus? A wife was mentioned vaguely; she seemed to have disappeared from the scene. He alluded to his family sending him money, but evildoers took it away from him.

  He was adept at wordplay and vastly entertaining when he was not in the grip of whisky, tequila, and/or mescal. Not surprisingly, he was obsessed by the nightmare world of German Expressionist cinema. He loved American jazz, particularly Bix Beiderbecke. He said he had owned a ukulele, and said he played it very well.

  He invented a little dance to the tune of Grieg’s “Death of Aase”; we would stomp around in a circle singing, “All we need is capital, capital, capital.”

  He had DTs and would storm terrified into my room in the middle of the night. In Mexico, the cocks often make their raucous serenades at an ungodly hour instead of waiting until dawn. This would bring on further terrors, horrors. I became so aware of his fears that I started to absorb them myself.

  In the classic mold, he fell in love with his nurse. The situation became untenable. Finally, we had to send him on his way, in clean clothes, with money in his pocket, back to the Cuernavaca bus.

  A few years ago Malcolm Lowry’s biographer Gordon Bowker tracked me down in London and came to interview me. He told me about an unpublished novella by Lowry called La Mordida—The Payback—which included a fictionalized account of his time with us.

  The events he wrote about never happened. One described how he had beaten my husband in a swimming race, which very much impressed me. In fact, Lew was an expert swimmer and had taught Malcolm the crawl.

  More poignant was his tormented mea culpa of having raped me while my husband was away. Nothing of the sort ever happened.

  To quote from his La Mordida:

  Certainly he had not been able to help falling in love with Peggy. [This was a childhood family nickname, long since discarded] … The anguish of the Riley incident, and writing that poem here:

  Love which comes too late is like that black storm That breaks out of its season, when you stand Huddled yet with upturned tentative hand To the strange rain.

  What a bestial thing that had been of him to do! Drunk or not he could find no forgiveness in his heart for it, even if he never knew precisely—and alas!—what he had done. But to have betrayed someone who had befriended him as unselfishly as had Riley and Peggy, finding him drunk and penniless there writing poems in the Siete Mares, and then buying him clothes, … succouring him as well as they could for the reason which above all others should have secured his loyalty, that they believed in his talent, … feeding him, … offering him their car, even at the very end, their car—the warm-hearted, generous kindliness of these two people who could have been friends all his life: and who were indeed as husband and wife so well matched, … singing on their guitar together, swimming together, celebrating their anniversary every month: where were they now? Had he done, he wondered, any permanent damage—to say the least—to that relationship? … There had not been excuse for, when R’s back was turned, trying to rape her—though had he? He would never know.

  Malcolm disappeared from our life with that bus to Cuernavaca. Many years later, in 1947, when I was living in Europe, I read about the publication of a tormented novel, Under the Volcano.

  Only then did I learn more about him. He had begun drinking at fifteen. He confided in his diary, “Secretly I had decided that I would be a drunkard when I grew up.” He came from a substantial English family who sent him money regularly via bankers who rationed the handouts, but nevertheless it invariably was spent on drink. He was in and out of jails and mental institutions on three continents and was constantly being evicted for drunkenness. He managed to get into Cambridge—probably through family pull—but did poorly.

  Out of all this turmoil emerged a splendid if flawed novel, Under the Volcano.

  Malcolm died in 1957 at a cottage in Ripe, East Sussex. He was not yet fifty. Mystery always surrounded his death. Two causes were reported: one was that he had committed suicide; the other, acute alcoholism. A broken gin bottle was near the body sprawled on the bedroom floor.

  Paul and Jane Bowles

  Aaron Copland introduced me to Paul and Janie Bowles in 1937. Lew and I were newlyweds; so were the Bowleses.

  Janie was a small sprite, crop-haired, snub-nosed. “What’s it like being married, for you?” she asked me. Since Janie was a lesbian and Paul a homosexual, their marriage was not exactly a mirror image of ours. She called Paul, most inappropriately, Fluffy or Bubbles.

  She limped. As an adolescent, she had had tuberculosis of the knee. Her mother took her to a Swiss sanatorium, where she was put in traction for many months. She then went to school in Switzerland. As a result, she spoke fluent Fren
ch and knew some bawdy French songs.

  She never wanted people to know she was lame. She always put a small Band-Aid on her knee, as if she had just had an accident.

  Paul was short, compact, very blond. At that time he was known as a composer to a small group that included Virgil Thomson. Writing and The Sheltering Sky came later. He wore a truss, an object of great shame. It was to be ignored. Once Janie picked it up. “You touched it,” he accused her. Never again.

  Paul was involved in helping a theater group from an all-black YMCA in New York. We are in the late 1930s; there would not have been an integrated group in those days. One of the members had written a play that involved two white lynchers.

  This presented a bit of a problem. They appealed to Paul. He appealed to Lew and me. Of course we agreed to participate.

  We showed up for rehearsal. Our part consisted of rushing onstage looking menacing and rushing off.

  We did this on the great night, to great acclaim.

  We were feted at a dinner given after the performance; with Paul we were the only whites.

  This was my first and only experience in the theater.

  Paul and Janie thought of going to Mexico. We were building a house in Acapulco. “Come along,” we said. They came.

  Our house wasn’t finished. We rented a house on a point over the sea belonging to Bill Spratling, the American who made Taxco famous again (in colonial times it had been the source for silver) for its silver jewelry, and for its relaxed sexual mores.

  The staff consisted of one copper-colored youth, whose usual uniform was a wisp of chiffon draped around his neck.

  Paul’s room was on the upper floor, where all around there was silence, except for the sound of waves lapping at the rocks. He slept with great balls of wax in his ears and a black mask.

  Swimming and the beach were the main attractions and occupations. By midday, in the blazing sun, Paul would get a particular glint in his eye and say urgently, “I just have to have some hot soup, hot soup now.” Even the most resourceful hostess would find this a difficult request.

  Paul’s father was a dentist who had perfect occlusion. Paul had a comic turn, imitating his father, explosive with rage, his occlusion threatened by a grain of sand in the spinach.

  It seemed a good idea to rent them their own house. We found one in town that belonged to a good-looking American beachcomber who had been married to a silent-screen star (Nancy Carroll), had taught Shakespeare at Princeton, and had settled in Acapulco to enjoy the obliging female population and to start a pearl-diving business. The equipment for the pearl diving lay in a disorderly heap in one corner of the courtyard, nestled under some dusty palm fronds.

  Janie adopted an armadillo and named it Mary Schuster, after a friend of hers. The armadillo has a very small head and a correspondingly small brain. After lunch, Janie would call out, “Now, Mary Schuster, come for your French lesson.”

  Eventually, Janie moved inland to another rented house. Paul went off to Tangier. Janie enjoyed playing the role of a conventional housewife and inviting the local ladies in for tea. The genteel facade was apt to be interrupted by the Indian maid bursting in and screeching, “Is it now time to kill the chicken?”

  Janie enjoyed seducing conventional middle-aged women and producing them like fairground trophies. One who looked like the chairwoman of the local Republican Party was named Helvetia Perkins. Janie brought Mrs. Perkins to our Mexico City apartment.

  I used to bring the favorite animal of my Acapulco menagerie up to Mexico City with me. At this time it was a wily, well-behaved coatimundi. The coati was thoroughly at home in the apartment. But when we went onto the landing to say goodbye to our guests, the coati rushed out. Feeling lost in unfamiliar surroundings, it scrambled up Mrs. Perkins’s skirts, thereby putting its rescuers in an uncomfortable situation.

  On another occasion, in Paris, Janie produced a nicely suited gray-haired lady named Rose who ran a tearoom in Connecticut. “She’s a volcano in bed,” Janie confided.

  Rose was duly introduced to Diana Cooper and various other highlights of the Parisian scene. “Don’t understand your friends,” Rose complained. “They don’t talk about anything.”

  “What do your friends talk about?” I asked.

  “Business and sports,” Rose answered.

  By this time, the early 1960s, both Janie and Paul had moved to Tangier, but Janie showed up in Paris now and then, where she was a conscientious explorer of lesbian bars. I was in Paris then running my art magazine, L’ŒIL. She sent a message to my office: “I must see you.”

  We went out to a café. “You are a businesswoman,” Janie said. “Tell me what you think of this business letter.” She had been cabling her bank in Tangier to send her money, but could never get an answer. Her letter:

  Dear Mr. Vivanco [he was the bank manager]

  If I do not receive my money by Tuesday, I will shoot myself.

  Yours sincerely, Jane Bowles

  I said it was an excellent business letter.

  Janie was a highly gifted writer with an outsized writer’s block. John Ashbery and Tennessee Williams prized her work. She wrote in all a novel, Two Serious Ladies, a few short stories—a wonderful one was called “Camp Cataract”—and a play, In the Summer House. At her request, I read the play aloud to Oliver Smith. He loved it and produced it on Broadway to a somewhat bemused audience.

  Writing was a titanic struggle for her. A severe stroke put an end to the struggle. Alcohol and drugs continued the destruction of this brilliant, witty, adorable, impossible person.

  The Good Neighbors

  Before Pearl Harbor plunged us into World War II, the State Department initiated something called the Good Neighbor Policy. The idea was to send out the word that we North Americans are civilized people (much nicer than the Germans) and interested in Latin American culture.

  The Museum of Modern Art was an active partner in this program. This is how I, a twentysomething who hadn’t even graduated from Sarah Lawrence (I got married instead), and my husband, Lewis Riley, of approximately the same age, were entrusted with a cargo of North American paintings. We were to shepherd them in turn to Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba. In each country we were to put on an exhibition, arrange for the publicity, and scout the local scene for interesting artists.

  The talent, as they say in showbiz, were contemporary American artists such as Eugene Speicher, Bernard Karfiol, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Thomas Hart Benton, and other WPA-era stalwarts.

  Two other similar exhibitions were to travel to other South American countries in the care of representatives of the Modern.

  My qualifications were that I had been unofficially connected with the Modern and its curators, particularly when the museum was planning the mammoth Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art exhibition for 1940. I knew the leading artists well—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco in particular—and so was able to help out.

  Lew was indispensable in that he spoke Spanish like a native Latin American (Spanish Spanish has a different ring to it) and played the guitar.

  Our first stop was Bogotá. In the course of our duties we got to know Eduardo Santos and his elegant wife, Doña Lorencita. Don Eduardo was the president of Colombia. Previously, he had been editor of the leading newspaper, El Tiempo, which was owned by his family. The Santoses very hospitably invited us to what was billed as a tea.

  We arrived to find a large group of people, and to Lew’s relief cocktails were served. We chatted and we sipped; these diplomatic novices were somewhat shy about total immersion in diplomatic circles. My Spanish was only passable. French helped. On this trip I was to meet several ladies of a certain age who had studied in Paris with André Lhote. Time passed, and we were mentally edging to the door, when Doña Lorencita announced that tea will now be served and led us into an ornate dining room with a large table set as if for a substantial meal.

  The very solid cakes were served like courses. There was no escape. As we choked down what we counted
on being the last bites, Doña Lorencita announced, “And now the North Americans will sing for us.” To our dismay, a guitar was produced; somehow it had been leaked that Lew played the guitar. But he only played to accompany Mexican ranchero songs, and sometimes we sang together in somewhat discordant thirds.

  So there we were, faced with the cake remains and a large attentive audience. We did our best for our country.

  When we had finished exhibiting our wares and made the rounds of local studios, the problem arose as to how to transport the exhibition to Caracas, Venezuela. The local facilities were not reassuring. So I had the entire show packed under my supervision in a truck. I hit lucky with an obliging taxi driver and said to him, “Follow that truck. Don’t let it out of our sight.”

  For ten days we weaved up and around and down the Andes. At the border with Venezuela, Cúcuta, the Colombian authorities had failed to send the release papers to allow the paintings to exit the country. We waited two days at Cúcuta, and you can be sure those days seemed very long.

  By then the taxi driver had become a family friend. He invented a little song called “Peggy la güera de Nueva York” (Peggy the Blonde from New York). He had heard Lew speak to me as Peggy. And I am not blond, but then everything is relative.

  We finally made it to Caracas and were met by the director of the local museum, Luis Alfredo López Méndez. He seemed very nervous and was perspiring freely. It was ten in the morning, so we were a bit taken aback when he suggested a scotch. Anything for the job, we accepted.

  Very soon he blurted out, “I will tell you, someone is sure to tell you, I am the man that ‘Latins Are Lousy Lovers’ was written about.” We remembered that an article by someone called Helen Gurley Brown had appeared in a well-known American magazine. She had been married to the subject. We expressed our sympathy at this poignant admission.