by Leo Lerman
No one said anything about my not being here [for a day] but Carson and Truman and Marguerite all said that breakfast had been a blight. No one had been happy or civil, and although no one said a word about my absence everyone was thinking about it—not angrily, but because there was no gaiety. It seems that when they are all alone without me they are unable to make one another gay. They were all at breakfast when suddenly the dining room door opened and everyone looked up at Esther [Rolick, a sculptor], who is so gay and Greenwich Villagey. Esther stood there with her face black—horribly awful and corrupt with darkness. She looked at them and ran out of the house. It then came out that she suffers occasionally from fits of manic depressiveness! She was suffering. When I heard this, I was so sad for her, and then looking out of my bedroom window I saw her coming up the path to the house. She looked like Elektra must have looked after all the horror and before she murdered. Her face was utterly, frightfully transformed. You could see misery eating at her. Carson said that sometimes, when Esther lived over there, she would hear a horrible weeping and sobbing in the night, but when she went to see what was wrong she found Esther's door locked and there would be no answer. At dinner I looked at her, and I saw that she wanted to be gay, so I set out to make everyone laugh, and soon we were all howling at Momma and stories about her. Then I saw that there was something strange about Marguerite.
Mrs. Ames isn't here, and she asked Marguerite to sit in her place and hostess. We were all pleased, because we all know that she needs wanting and tenderness. So, there she was at the head of the table, and it wasn't anything she did or said at first but the utterly slumped, abandoned, loose way she sat. Then she suddenly looked at Truman (he sits next to her), and she said, “Do you love me, Truman? Do you love me?” He said, “Yes…” just taking it for good fellowship, and she leaned over from her place to his and pulled him to her and kissed him right on the mouth…. Then she went back to eating as though nothing had happened. Everyone saw this, but everyone went right on. When we were serving ourselves from the sideboard, she went up and down the line asking everyone, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Will you miss me? Will you miss me?” Everyone murmured to her, and we all pretended that nothing unusual was happening … but we all knew that she was dreadfully drunk. Carson had given her some whiskey in the afternoon, and this was the result. After dinner she became completely abandoned and flung herself into Howard [Doughty]'s lap. He stroked her hair, and his face was the face of a criminal fascinated. It shifted, as he stroked her hair, from a horrible tenderness to a tender malignance. It was dreadful and eerie. Finally he escaped, but not until he had kissed her—or rather she had pulled his head down and forced her mouth and tongue, I presume, into his. She seemed to have no realization of what she was doing, and she spoke all the time about love and saints and murder and monstrosities, while Truman and Esther danced to the gramophone like two little children who play among the insane, brightly laughing and fluttering about, not quite understanding where they are or why they should be there.
Howard's life is more complicated than I thought. Every person here has something to hide—insanities fancied or remembered, aberrations assorted and portioned out variously, or just terror. All intensely creative minds have a core of sickness. I don't think that they should be permitted to live together. The sickness tends to grow, like exotic plants forced swiftly to blossom and corruption in a glass house.
MAY 17, 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS
TO RUTH YORCK • NEW YORK CITY
The maids and the cooks came to ask one of the people whether I am a rabbi. They said I was because 1) I wear black; 2) I have a beard; 3) I have the Bible by my bed. What do you think?
I have written and finished four little sections of B and Bella [Beatrice and Isabella]. It turns out to be B's book thus far and maybe it will never quite be Bella's—but do we care? It's gay and highly informative and really quite a drag. Anyone reading it will know immediately that only a sensualist could have written it.
CA. MAY 20, 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS
TO MARY LOUISE ASWELL • NEW YORK CITY38
Mostly we wonder whether we haven't been gently hoodwinked into a sanitarium. There are so many evidences, but my book goes apace and Truman probably will get into his soon. Carson lives in a house with Marguerite Young. Carson sits all day—a cup of tea in one hand and a cup of sherry in the other. Occasionally she puts one or the other down to write a few words of verse. Marguerite slumps all day over a large worktable absolutely snowed under sheets and sheets of discarded manuscript.
The house is vast and of its kind perfection—American William Morris or Seventy-ninth Street Gothic crossed with Indianapolis Renaissance. Two nights ago, we played Murder all through one wing of the house. I was murderer and I picked Carson as my victim, stalking her everywhere she went in the frightful dark. The lights were all turned off through the house. She moaned and moaned and, by and by, when she felt that the unseen was with her everywhere, she called a little bit upon God. Then she stopped, and I put my foot out on hers, and then she began to plead, and slowly I raised my arms and choked her…. This is what you do in that little grisly game … and these, my dear, are Yaddo's childish pleasures.39
Truman just rushed in to tell me that Life has commissioned Russell Maloney to do a profile of Carson, to defend her from her detractors. That's wonderful. I do think that the Bazaar should have an occasional piece about a writer or a painter or a musician, a kind of fantastic discovery sort of person. Vogue is running a whole piece on Marianne Moore. Marguerite wrote it for them. I find the book she's working on curiously intriguing. She's a strange, lovable girl with a great need for assurance. (I've been reading [psychoanalyst] Karen Horney.)
JUNE 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS
TO LIONEL AND DIANA TRILLING • NEW YORK CITY
You, Diana, were right.40 This Yaddo is where any tact creates a situation, and two and two total perverse numerals. I wanted very much to talk with you when I came into town last week because of Bravig Imbs's death. Probably Elsa [Snapper] has told you that I've been among the living … but I adjured her to tell you nothing of this intellectual terror, this sort of psychopathic disaster that our Mrs. Ames manages to create…. Nothing you told me ever prepared me for her passion for the oblique, the indirect. Everything becomes so sinister once she has started her silly suspicions and accusations. She never accuses anybody directly, but does it through other “guests.” The least thing she does, or anyone does, becomes distorted to monstrous proportions. Surely this is not a healthy climate for people who want to work creatively. While the upset lasted, it made me furious enough to start packing all of my trunks. It made one of the other “guests” take to his bed for a whole day. It helped Carson decide to depart, and it kept almost everybody from doing any work whatsoever for almost a whole week. And all because God's Angry Man decided that any hilarity, especially at breakfast, was a sign of abnormalcy!41 Unfortunately, among the newer arrivals is [writer] Richard Plant, the one who caused me to depart from my column in Tomorrow, and just as unfortunately no one likes him, for he is belligerently German and horribly misinformed on everything. So, God's Angry Man decided that some of us had formed a clique against this precious literary talent, and that combined with the hilarity (for all of us enjoy one another very much) made a pretty mess when Ehrlich told Mrs. Ames that he would have to move from the mansion because his nerves were exacerbated by us. He paid me a grave compliment by calling me, according to report, “the life of the party.” So it raged. I think it a great pity that this place, which could be absolute heaven if Mrs. Ames had never read a psychology book, should be, mentally, so mismanaged.
NOTE: Elizabeth Ames's habit of making indirect queries and admonishing residents with succinct notes (“Memo to Mr. Lerman: Rumor has it that…”) certainly grated on Leo. What he apparently did not know was that Leonard Ehrlich was Ames's clandestine lover. Ehrlich's objections to Leo's joviality—and perhaps to his homosexuality, to judge from what
followed—evidently had a special hearing.
JUNE 8, 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS
TO RICHARD HUNTER • NEW YORK CITY
I think that I have perhaps hit upon what is lacking in Truman's work. It's not his writing but his curiously sheltered life that makes for the lack. Although even at twenty-one he has had extraordinary experiences, he still has been kept from the sort of suffering that he looks upon as bourgeois. The other night when I was talking about homosexuality, I said—why I do not now know—how it was a sickness; how anything which deviates from the norm or the average must be or make for sickness, for the norm and the average do not condone deviations and put all who deviate outside. This outsideness—for all one's arrogance—does provide some little distortion or some anguish or some pain. This pain, this incompatibility, is part of sickness. As when one has even a slight fever there is some distortion. Not that it is bad … but I think that there must be some sickness, some melancholy, some suffering for any creation. There are almost no happy artists. When I said this, he was furious. He said that I had a distorted view of life, that everyone condoned homosexuality, that everyone knew about it and didn't even think about it. So I saw that this creature had a very immature and idealistic approach to life (at twenty-one one does. I did, and you did, too). I tried to explain, but he didn't at all understand. I wonder whether he doesn't need at least the terror of living in so dreadful a world as the army for at least a little time. I think he needs some experience in a wider life than any he seems to have known. His people know all about him, and his friends and publishers, and they all adore him and never seemed to have suggested to him that the rest of the world won't. To make him the great writer he should be he must not go on this way, or he will remain minor. Perhaps that's all he ever will be or should be…. But if Virginia Woolf didn't suffer or Dostoyevsky or even Hart Crane (he's not a good example) … When I tried to tell him that if he got into a sex scandal no one save avant-garde publications would publish him, he said that I really had the most morbid approach to life, that he couldn't believe that the Bazaar would not publish him. Do you think that this is how the younger people really all think? And is it quite healthy, or does it mark an acceptance, which is a sign of our increasing degeneration?
When I think of the suffering and of how hard I have tried and of the schooling that has gone to make the curious edifice—the facade that is me, I can only look upon this effort (even if I never do the enormous book I want so much to do) as well worth the struggle. It hurt horribly at times, and it will again, but this makes one feel alive. It enmeshes one in the deeps of living—the emotional deeps, not the abstract psychiatric deeps. I get so furious with these silly children playing with this wonderful abstract weapon, this panacea for all ills—even lumbago or rheumatic fever—psychiatry. Why do they never find their own adjustments? This place is the perfect example of how psychiatry can wreck lives, when it is so basically misunderstood and so promiscuously applied.
We must never forget that we are each of us chained eternally and relentlessly to our individual stakes… like beasts in the fields. Each of us has these chains. Perhaps we forge the links and so their length is dependent upon us, but we are chained to this stake, which is oneself, and all our living time we stumble or fall or move serenely about our stake. Never are we completely unfettered—never—but when we love or when we read sometimes or listen to music or do any creation or view any beauty.
JUNE 12, 1946 • SARATOGA SPRINGS
TO RICHARD HUNTER • NEW YORK CITY
Little Truman has had some hours of anguish, because Howard has sort of been preparing himself for Newton Arvin, who comes today.42 He doesn't understand that two decades of experience or inexperience separate Howard from him. Also, Howard is educated and has been a teacher and Truman lacks almost all education. He is remarkably astute in contemporary letters—mostly fiction—but of the past he knows almost nothing, and when Howard says something to him using mythological creatures, Truman doesn't even know what Howard is talking about. He's very Southern belle that Truman at times. Howard gave Truman the synopsis for his Parkman, and Truman just didn't understand it at all, although he bluffed quite well. What Truman didn't understand about that bluffing is that it would have been better to admit that he didn't understand it…. So it is all very sad. It would make a good short story, because it's really all about how almost impossible it is for two people of extremely disparate ages to love one another for a long time.
It is now 5:15 p.m. Howard came in and said he was bursting with news because he had been with Mrs. Ames to fetch Newton Arvin from the station. Howard said Mrs. A had asked him whether the homosexuals bothered him. So he said to her that he wasn't so heterosexual himself, but she didn't listen at this point. She said that Truman was such a nice boy, that he was so talented, that he would have such a hard life, and then she said how I was so amusing but she implied that she didn't think I was really very serious. Why should she make judgments about intelligence and one's private life, and why should she discuss any of us in this provincial fashion? Oh, I am so upset I want to go right downstairs [to telephone] and ask you to take me home. But if I went and did that, and you did, I would probably indulge myself in a nervous breakdown … because I have tried all these years since knowing you to be careful… that is, as careful as possible within the confines of our world … and nobody ever discusses this with me who hasn't the privilege … and if they do think or talk about it they do it when I'm not there … and nobody makes an issue of it… and this blundering stupid pig of a small-town bitch … It makes me feel so unsure. It makes me feel as if that's all anybody thinks of when I come into a room. This is how Negroes must feel—and outcasts. GOD HOW I HATE THAT WOMAN! I know that this is hysterical, but I had better be hysterical with you than in public. Howard said that he wanted to bash her head in, she makes him feel such a hypocrite. I think I'll lie down and read the Bible, or I'll sit and look at the hills. I have been so careful—more than usual here, because I know how things get distorted. I haven't been unduly attentive to anyone. Am I crazy or is she? Am I so obvious, so transparent after all these years? Has my life been just as insular and sheltered as Truman's? Has all the effort come to nothing? This would be such a failure.
My head aches so, and dinner is almost here, and I can't think how to manage to be gay and amusing…. I suppose if one makes a reputation for being amusing and gay no one ever thinks there's anything else…. This is no place for me or for any people who have managed to adjust themselves precariously. Being so,43 being Jewish (and so exotic, flamboyant), being quite uneducated both socially and formally in any sense, it requires so little to shake the facade I've built up, the security I have been amassing. Even Christians in a Christian world are insecure, so how much more must I be. The worlds of anguish I have put behind me, the torments for having been me … and now suddenly all that is with me again and it consumes me with sickness. If I did not believe in life, if I did not believe in the you of my living, there would be nothing. But now I must take up the little rituals of living here. I will wash my face and my hands and my ears (for these are sacred);44 I will put on a tie and a jacket; I will go downstairs… and since I am such a good drawing room actor this evening will pass.
NOTE: Leo left Yaddo in the last week of June. He stopped keeping his journal for six months.
It was probably during the time Leo had been in Saratoga Springs that scenic designer Ben Edwards, once their classmate at the Feagin School, introduced Richard to Howard Rothschild. Recently out of the army, Rothschild was four years older than Richard and, although not one of the famous banking family, wealthy; a dilettante artist who lived on Park Avenue with his mother. What began as a sexual dalliance grew in a few months' time to be passionate and drama-filled. Leo was fully informed and chose to wait it out. For eight months the men were an uneasy trio.
During the winter of 1947, Richard, Leo, and Howard spent about six weeks in Richard's mother's house in Middletown, New York,
while the Hunter family wintered in Florida.
JOURNAL • JANUARY 19, 1947 • new York city Howard [Rothschild] is so Jewish, so hypochondriacal, and a good lover. It's the only time he can relax. He's spoiled, frightened of his servants, always worrying, always insisting his life and others' conform to little plans and routines. He's dated by his language and his sentiments, Aryan looking save for his nose, a poor little rich boy. He thinks, or is ready to believe, that nobody really likes him, that everyone is out for what they can get from him. He is the conventional neurotic Jew carried to the extreme perfection and as such becomes fascinating (see De Quincey on perfection). He came and kissed my hands and said we must both help one another, because troublesome times were coming—and how apt.
