The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Most of this talk was of war—this war, past wars, wars of which they heard or read, family wars, national wars, world wars. They talked of war in headline terms; they talked of war in terms of food rationing, bond buying, plasma giving, girdles, the draft, heat, and prosperity. They told one another the latest about young Cousin Eddie in the Air Force who has piloted a bomber for months and has only just learned to drive an automobile; about Cousin Larry who parachuted with broken legs into a German prison camp and who continues there to draw his designs for stage sets.28 And they talked and talked and talked. It was all interesting, and in retrospect it all made sense. It was exhilarating, real, alive, courageous, very personal, sometimes very dull, and always as peculiarly balanced as life. It was direct, funny, malicious, uninhibited, and replete with matter-of-fact kitchen wisdom.

  Gertrude Stein talks of all the previous parts of her life connected with wars, and of big and little happenings during four years of life in Nazi-dominated France, and all of it—articulated in Gertrude Steins lexicon—is personal and intimate, and some of it is obscure to the outsider but of world-shattering significance to Miss Stein. Both Gertrude Stein and my family talk of themselves in terms of the world and of wars, and of the world and wars in terms of themselves, and it is the same thing down to the trivial obscurity, the most boring repetition. Sometimes Gertrude Stein is more literate and more comprehensible, and sometimes my family are. (TOMORROW, MAY 1945)

  JOURNAL • JULY 16, 1945 Ruth [Yorck] met an old psychiatrist who attended Nietzsche during the last days of his madness. When she finally pinned him down, he said that Nietzsche had said only one thing, and this repeatedly during those days: “Where is reason?”

  NOTE: Leo and Richard went to Siasconset, Nantucket. Hellmut Roder and Fritz Mosell, a couple introduced to them by Eleonora von Mendelssohn, had lent them a small rented house there for the month of August. Mosell wrote from it in July warning Leo that he might not enjoy it, as “there is no nightlife, only peace and quiet, and you will be the onliest [sic] person one will hear laugh miles around.” Leo found it heavenly.

  AUGUST 18, 1945 • SIASCONSET, MASSACHUSETTS

  TO ELEONORA VON MENDELSSOHN• NEW YORK CITY

  Last night Richard and I—and a man who seemed to know me but whose name I cannot remember nor probably ever knew—were crouched near a roaring fire, because of the winter in the evening, when suddenly there was a shout in our back lane. The door to the little drawing room flew open—and thirty-five people crowded in, headed by dear little Luise [Rainer] and her Bobby [Knittel] (she calls him Butch).29 So then we were giving a party—but it's the only party we ever gave without anything to drink or eat. Three people—the Dreyfuses and an Egyptian princess with a very unreal name [Jacqueline Shohet?]—had appeared at luncheon and ate everything save us.30 Why are people like locusts when they, the people, are on a holiday? But we all had fun.

  We want you desperately because you would love it here, and it would be so healthy for you: no fishers—no conductors of any description—not even a trolley car—and some possibility of practicing witchcraft. To wit, yesterday I was sitting, minding my own and everybody's business, and suddenly one of those awful American women who have given the world such a picture of the American beauty came riding down a little hill, on a bicycle. Looking at her, I wished: “May something frightful happen to you….” Just then a station wagon rushed across her path. She smacked into it. Loads of people flew out of alleys and houses, and she was carried off howling. Richard materialized behind me and said, “You did it!” All the people looked at me quite reproachfully. I smiled smugly. The people went away muttering. Richard and I sat looking at a gray dilapidated automobile. Suddenly, with an awful roar, it burst into flame. I immediately got up and hid behind a hedge. When the fire had been extinguished, I emerged rather triumphantly. Richard glowered at me and said, “What the hell do you think you're doing?” I smirked and we returned to our little nest.

  There's one ancient female who lives out on a point of land who walks around every tree she meets three times, because she thinks it will bring her luck. For forty years she has been waiting for her lover. Darling—this is what it would be like if you or I went away to some other part of the world. It's awful without you—or even the daily possibility of hearing your old cracked voice croaking something appallingly sweet over the telephone. Don't write, just descend on us—that would be dreamy—and on the way you might look for our trunk, which has been missing for a week.

  JOURNAL • AUGUST 23, 1945 One comes to the place where talking ends. It is like reaching the end of a street… the rest is a dirt track ultimately trailing off into meadows or the town dump. When talking ends there is only the first person very singular, a species of chaos, a progression rabbit-run in structure and shape. For the first time in some years, I find myself confined—that means no telephone and little or almost no possibility of escaping into bevies of people. I have consequently become curiously sex-ridden, or perhaps overconscious of sex, although I have enough, shall I call it, indulgence…. But I now know that it is not so much the sexual act, no matter what its form, but the sexual excitement which surrounds this act…. I must sublimate much of this quiet desperation in entertaining, in that sort of mass flirtation that I so enjoy. Giving parties, rushing about for people (really for myself), the endless telephone conversations, all must absorb so much of this lusting. This is the closest to those adolescent years when it was my habit to wander endlessly both in Jackson Heights and Lakewood [New Jersey] in the nights hoping to find somebody— just somebody—who would blot out everything, for this is the basic and very real potency of the sexual act. I know that I remained here, refusing to go with Richard and Franny [Wormser]31 to the film, because deep down I hoped that someone would suddenly materialize out of the night… perhaps a lot of someones… and then I could be very gay and make them laugh and I would feel “myself” again. But in this state, I work so hard at it. I am so very conscious of the bourgeois normalcy so deep all about me.

  OCTOBER 19, 1945 • NEW YORK CITY This is really Saturday morning— about 3:06 a.m. I am starting this in an effort to return into myself. It is as though a glass bell has dropped between me and myself. Extrinsically, it looks the same as it has before—the picture seems unchanged—but this is untrue. I am in danger of becoming one of the amputated ones—with all my days and nights given up to the pursuit of wages—not creation. I mean no writing that illuminates—and no true writing at all—not even book reviews. Into those I can work something seedlike. For Bazaar, I can give, thus far, only sterility. The surface coruscates, but it is sterile. How to live? I am so luxury-loving. Anaïs said today that she could only write a little book behind the door: She gave later; I give here and now. But this is no consolation. She said that she couldn't see how I would have anything left for a book because I was so flamboyant and prodigal. I said that is what's wrong.

  FEBRUARY 11, 1946 I am impatient of any human relationship that falls short of intimacy. All others do seem to me a waste of time—save when they are business. If someone interests me, I want to know him thoroughly. When a person or thing becomes quite completely known, when there seems to be no mystery left, no intangibles, our pleasure is at an end, and disintegration, which subtly began quite unknown at the beginning of the enchantment, has inevitably come.

  I always pay more for charm. If a waiter has charm or is good-looking, the tip is larger than usual, and if a waitress has charm or is lovely in some way, her tip is larger than usual. Charm and beauty should be acknowledged by some gesture of pleasure. We should pay for what we get, even if it's free. And we do pay—wittingly or unwittingly.

  NOTE: Leo was admitted to Yaddo, a writers' colony near Saratoga Springs, New York, for May and June 1946. He would work there on a dual biography of the Renaissance leaders, patrons, and beauties Isabella and Beatrice d'Este. Leo pursued this project for years, never completing a manuscript.

  Truman Capote was also to be at Yaddo th
at summer and they journeyed up to Saratoga together. The two had met earlier, probably in the autumn of 1945.

  LITTLE T I went to visit with a dear friend, Mary Louise Aswell [fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar], and there, in a shadowy room, I found a strange, smallish creature—a sort of changeling, I thought, like the one Titania and Oberon fought over—fragile, but tough. He regaled us with gossip, jokes, little dances. Later when I went away, down a dim stair, someone suddenly landed on my back and with a high treble cry demanded: “Give me a piggyback ride!” I did. And that is when Little T and I became friends. He saw me as I saw myself, and I saw him as he saw himself. We each saw each other's invention and through the invention into our true, ever-loving hearts. (1984)

  MAY 1, 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • NEW YORK CITY

  Soon I will go up to my room in the “mansion” and make myself presentable for my first dinner. I have a corner bedroom on the second floor wherein I nestle my downy ears on a little white iron bedstead, excessively virginal. Carson [McCullers32] greeted us at the door, and it was then Truman discovered that his manuscript plus his typewriter were lost. He flew back to the station. Later I heard him tell that he'd found them.

  The house is something from the turn of the century, the inmates something from The Turn of the Screw … but it does seem lovely here. There are many trees and great gusts of sweet-smelling spring air. There are butterflies and birds twittering and palatial houses for them to inhabit. A little walk from the house I have a house all for myself called Hillside, and it's where I work. It is as large as your mother's living room and there are numerous tables, a chaise longue (!!!) and sixteen large windows. It's so light. I have drawn up a desk and thereon repose the first pages from which I hope to wrest a little masterpiece— also a moneymaker. Across the road and through a little glade Truman has his studio. Mrs. A [director Elizabeth Ames] is a tallish woman, a little plump but extraordinarily pale.

  MAY 3, 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • NEW YORK CITY

  Yesterday Marguerite Young arrived.33 She is a heavy-faced female. Her book is fantastic. The chief character could be Eleonora. She told me that about a year ago she saw me in the lobby of the Royalton [Hotel] and followed me about there trying to hear what I was saying. She said my face fascinated her. She has a way of looking intently at one when she doesn't think you are noticing.

  MAY 4

  Late last night, Truman, Marguerite Young, and an old resident, [biographer] Howard Doughty, went into the main part of the mansion—peering at it by lighted matches. It was vast and very frightening and we didn't stay long. We all talk about murders and what a setting for a mystery—and Marguerite Young is somewhat monstrous. Carson coughs so. Today, walking to our studios, she had a dreadful seizure—and threw up.

  MAY 4, 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • NEW YORK CITY

  Today I have done little work, perhaps because the first little spate of plunging into it is over. Also, I have been disturbed by Curtice [Hitchcock]'s death.34 Any threat to income always sends me to the margin of despair, because I would hate being very poor again. Through my front windows the spring trees and the blue-white patched sky is absolutely a copy of that little Bellini [Madonna and Child] in the Bache pictures—the one with the tree of hope and the tree of despair.

  I think that here I should tell you how much I love you—but again, as in May eleven years ago, I find no words to tell you. There is only one advantage this May: now you surely know; then you couldn't have known. Without you— or without the knowledge that there is you—I am so derelict—so lost. I suppose telling you this—which you know—is not good, for it places responsibility upon you who do not wish it.

  MAY 5

  I spent yesterday evening with Carson, who plays the piano very well. She was trained to be a pianist and she earned her living, while she went to Columbia, by playing in settlement houses. She told me much about her life—especially with Annemarie [Clarac-Schwarzenbach]35—and she said that she disliked me violently that first time at Edita [Morris]'s36 because she thought I had been a friend of Annemarie's. Now she seems to dote on me—but I think she must be quite ill—she coughs so much.

  MAY 8, 1946 SARATOGA SPRINGS

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • NEW YORK CITY

  Yesterday, after I ate my lunch with Truman and Howard Doughty—who is a very nice man (Harvard 1926)—I saw that the gardener had arrived with wood for my stove. So I ran across to my house, which is about a hundred feet from Truman's, and aided and abetted the gardener…. Quite suddenly I heard Truman shouting, “Leo! Leo!” So I went to my door, and I saw Howard walking across Truman's front yard and Truman standing in his doorway yelling. Then I saw that Howard was holding something, which sort of writhed, and I saw that it was a snake … very gray and long… and I thought it's dead … it's dead … and I shouted, “You're mean and wicked….” and ran back into my house and said to the gardener, “They're teasing me…. Please take it away…. Take it away….” and bolted my door and drew all the blinds and lay down under my desk. I think I did that because it seemed so safe … and then I didn't know what to do. I knew that they hadn't done it intentionally because they are not bad, either of them, and they like me. They did it because they didn't believe that I was so upset by snakes… and because boys will be boys even if they're girls (a cheap remark). So then all afternoon I didn't know what to do, and I could hardly move, and everything was black, and I knew that if I lay on the floor, which was hard and reassuring and cool, everything would be all right in the end … but I thought I could never get out of it. I cannot tell you how lost and tired and distraught I was… but there was really nothing I could do about it… nothing. It was one of those times that in retrospect seem to have existed only in the most frightful of nightmares. The spirit, being so affirmative, rejects such times as improbable. There are parts of that afternoon that I cannot remember, for they were so lost, so black. Now there is a brown bird with bright red wings swaying on a bough and only the taste and the color of the afternoon remain and the memory of anguish and disaster and how tired my arms were when I tried to work and couldn't. I suppose I must be very sick where serpents are concerned, and I don't know why. At about five o'clock (after some four hours of misery), I suddenly knew that I was better. I drew some of the curtains and saw the sky and the trees and the rain and then I was quite better and I sat down and made myself work but I could only make notes and not write at all. Then it was time to go to dinner, and I went out and along the road. When I came to the barn where a green snake lives, I walked—I didn't run as I usually do—past it, but I didn't look. Then I went up to my room and sat on the edge of the bed and wondered why all of it had happened. Howard, who has the next room, came into my room and gave me a letter. It was from Mrs. Ames to him saying that she knew that Mr. Lerman was being “insistently persecuted by snakes,” and that if he or Mr. Capote knew anything about it they must stop, because she knew that such persecution could be very dangerous. Howard was very upset, and when Truman heard he was very upset, not because of the letter but because they hadn't realized that I was so affected by all of it… and I never before had realized that either. Now Carson has made them promise that they will convoy me to and from my studio and carefully defend me from all disaster.

  The day before yesterday there was a blue note pinned up where we get our mail and it said, “Katherine Anne Porter will be with us for dinner tonight.” So then that evening we all spruced up, while Truman heckled us, and then when he came down to dinner he was more spruced than any of us… and there was Katherine Anne, who reminds me of Carmel Snow, and she laughs all the time. She is a small woman with the beautiful ankles, feet, and smooth legs of that generation. She has marvelous white hair, and she was a great beauty. She has the airs and graces of a former silent-film actress—and I discovered later that she was one—but most of all she is a Southern belle, with all that implies, and she i
s most like Bette Davis playing Fanny Skeffington. She's overviva-cious. She talks well. She sat next to me at dinner, and she talked all the time very quickly, laughing nervously. She wears pastel colors, and she had on an emerald ring which she'd borrowed from Mrs. Ames (whom I like). She said she'd borrowed it for luck, because it was her birthstone. After dinner, someone put a samba or rhumba on the gramophone, and suddenly she jumped up and did what looked like the shimmy and made me feel as though I suddenly saw one of my parents quite naked and carousing. So, soon Truman danced with her, and she doesn't dance well, but she does give an impression of Lillian Gish making whoopee … and he wore her out. He dances very well. Then there was a lot of dancing, and she practically fell on her face—but it was all very gemiitlich—after which she sat down to Chinese checkers. Truman and Howard and I went off to visit Carson, who was in bed.

  MAY 15, 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • NEW YORK CITY

  Last night, when I saw that there was a moon, I said to Truman, “Let's go for a walk.” So I led him down through the meadow toward the great fountain, where the statue is covered by that tall wooden house, and looking back we saw a light, very dim and secret, in the attic of the mansion where nobody is supposed to be. This was mildly terrifying to Truman, but I was not afraid at all in the meadow, although the mansion standing in the cold moonlight and the wall of moonlit trees—motionless, dense … the mist rising at the foot of the meadow … the big blobs of radiance and mist, which seemed to be trying to form into some palpable shape … all these were the stuff of horrible nightmares. I led Truman into the rose garden, which spread out vast and inhabited by terrible shapeless horrors, all the parterres and white marble people in the moonlight. As I went through the marble gate, I suddenly ran up the path into the horror, dragging Truman with me. I knew that he was terrified but I ran because of delight. I wanted to run up all the paths because it was so incredibly beautiful. Then I walked very measuredly everywhere in the garden and Truman with me, and sometimes I stopped and stroked the white statues because they were so contented and so utterly secretly sly and smiling and alone. It became more monstrously dreamlike all the time … walking under the long, long pergola … standing with the white goddesses… becoming one with the trees. For the first time, last night I was too frightened to go to bed without my light, and Truman was terrified. He said that I had looked and walked so fantastically in the rose garden in the moonlight. He said that when I ran into the garden dragging him with me he knew that something awful could happen, and he was almost sure that it would…. He said that people turn into monsters—and they do37