The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JANUARY 25, 1947 Laci told me about how upset he was, and how this seemed to him to sum up the changed world in his lifetime, when, last summer, on the train to Canada, going through to the diner car, he suddenly saw a gaunt, pale woman sitting in a day coach (he was in a Pullman). She was dressed in an ancient black woolen gown, very long, and very high under her chin. It was loose in the fashion of 1915 (or 1920?) and belted. She leaned her head on a little black pillow, and she looked very nervous, very hungry. When she saw that he recognized her, she shut her eyes. It was the ex-Empress Zita.45 He had seen her coronation in Budapest. Hundreds of women had labored a year to embroider her robes in real gold and pearls and diamonds. As he sat eating, she came in very awkwardly, nearsightedly, and sat down trying to hide her nerves and shyness. She sat at a table for four. The steward came up and told her brusquely that she would have to move to a table for two. She obeyed, quite frightened, as though she thought she might even be deposed from this chair. She ordered only a roll and a cup of coffee. It cost 75 cents. She left 75. She did not come in for dinner, but he saw her standing in the heat, in the steaming dirt by the train's side in a station, swiftly eating a thick sandwich from wax paper. She had bought it from the porter. Laci's doctor was her doctor and [her son] Otto's. Fritsch told him that they were absolutely impoverished, that Otto had had ulcers for a year because he ate so frugally and badly from tins, that the two grand duchesses [sic, archduchesses] worked incognito as typists in New York offices. In Montreal, Zita got off and was met by a dowdy elderly woman, ravaged. It was her mother, the duchess of [Bourbon-]Parma, who lived in the country in a small poorhouse, not far from Montreal. The little money she has comes from the church.

  Today there was a sudden announcement that Grace Moore had been [killed] in a flying accident in Denmark, along with “a prince of the royal Swedish house.”46 Now what is the lesson to be learned from this death? Is it that, again, no person escapes without paying for every single thing, and the price is in careful proportion? A good moment is paid by a bad. A life of fun, pleasure, happiness is paid for by premature death, by the incipient agony that one must suffer when one realizes that one is about to die suddenly in an accident. There is always a moment that becomes all time—a brief and horrible eternity. When [I nearly] drowned47 and when I had the cab accident, it was this way. This is the astonished heart: How can this happen to me!!! No, No, No! The blackness and then possibly gray blackness—and then possibly the hilarity of living again, of reprieve.

  Grace Moore's death (which means little to me, for she was not an artist, just a good-time girl of the arts, meaning music) takes a little from each person's security because she seemed so secure, so chosen. Since she could meet so abrupt and disastrous an end, every person knowing her golden life feels the void closer. It was announced between advertisements, ones for a new bread and a new wine. A few years ago, the announcer said, only the titled and the wealthy could afford good wines. Only a few years ago Grace Moore could not have died in the company of a prince, unless she was unofficially connected or strictly backstairs.

  The irritating qualities of the living become marks of individuality, and sometimes ciphers of genius, when those who have inflicted them upon us are dead. That [Alexander] Pope falsified letters is an endearing characteristic, for it shows him to have had vanity, shows him to have been weak beneath the sharp-edged armor of his scorn and invective. That [Samuel] Johnson was filthy in his person is another mark of character. We then prefer our giants to show us marks of weakness and sins of human failings—but in retrospect.

  JANUARY 27, 1947 Looking at Léon [Kochnitzky],48 you would never suspect that Nijinsky had loved him, stroking and kissing his shoulders, saying they were the most beautiful in the world. Or that as a child he had been photographed and his person displayed on chocolate boxes all over Europe. Or that Diaghilev had been jealous of him (Diaghilev with his dictatorships and his tyrannies and his enormous jealousies, tastes, and talents). As [composer] Reynaldo Hahn made love to him one day, Proust had been kept waiting a full fifteen minutes, and finally had gone away, slamming the door angrily. Marguerite Clark, the silent-film star, had loved him. His long love with a Belgian prince was internationally famous.49 He had been stabbed by a ruffian he'd picked up in Vienna, and Ruth [Yorck] had first met him as he convalesced in a hospital there. Later, she had gone to the opera with him in Paris and had startled everyone by displaying a huge diamond on her left big toe. He had been a cabinet minister under D'Annunzio in Fiume.50 He had several doctorates—one from Bologna. He had gone through three fortunes of his own and at least a dozen others. He was ingratiating, charming, malicious and, now fifty-four, utterly believes all the lies he heard, especially his own. He has a marvelous way of putting things together, securing conclusions, all erroneous, and disseminating them as the truth. He owed everyone, and people continued to “lend” him money. He was an anti-Semitic Jew, but boasted of his descent from [Rabbi Eliyahu] the Gaon of Vilna. His father had been a converted Catholic. He looked as though he could be a cardinal one day.

  In certain circles, a man is déclassé who sleeps with women, but homosexuals are always interested in men who sleep with women, especially if the man is suspected of being himself homosexual. It has come to such a pass that certain men say they sleep with boys just to be socially acceptable, while all the time they are having affairs with women!

  How you can know so much about people you do not even know. Howard told Richard about how [scenic designer] Stewart Chaney was in bed. He'd say, “Don't you want it! You know you want it. You know you want this fucking cock shoved up your ass!” Now to know that a man is excited—seeks his oblivion—this way is to know him more intimately than most of his best friends. Yet I know him only most casually. When we meet, we do not even greet one another.

  “I wonder if it's true that the Jewish race has a greater capacity to love,” said Richard. But this capacity is in proportion to the basic insecurity. “This is the only glorious moment of my life for me,” said Howard [to Richard]. “There has been nothing before. I can see nothing after. Only this single moment of loving you.”

  JANUARY 28, 1947 Ela resorts to drugs at the least suspicion that any crisis will be approaching, and since her crises never remain long absent, her drug taking is almost continual. It must be cured, for her to go on at all, at intervals of about three years. These cures are dreadful, but after them she immediately begins to grow fat and full of life, prodigally. Just before, she has become dreadful, her eyes hooded and glittering, her hands like talons. She looks utterly predatory, malignant, evil. She is emaciated, shifting from one dream to another with little rifts between when she perceives what has transpired. Cloud image—and light rays between tall buildings—”Those moments of madness which had the grandeur and vastness of years” (Edith Sitwell on Pope).

  Looking at Howard, who says, “I no longer have a home. My only home is where Richard is,” it is impossible to try to keep Richard—but when he is drunk he is so pathetic that my heart breaks and I do not think that Howard can cope with him. I do not know where there is room for me when they are together. I feel and become so effaced. No matter how long one has been alone with someone he loves, the absences (no matter how brief) are longer. I must be content with writing. It must be my beloved and my lover. It must be the center of my life. Nothing else is dependable—not lovers, nor friends, nor anything. When I lie here scrawling, I am safer than in the arms of any lover, but when I stop to think, I am more alone than when I turn my face to the wall to sleep. This aloneness pays, perhaps, for being able to write anything, but oh, how quietly desperate the heart becomes, rebelling. The heart is an anarchist. It can always overthrow the intellect. The heart knows what it wants, which is to feel against it the heart of its beloved beating the world away, vanquishing its own aloneness.

  FEBRUARY 1, 1947 • MIDDLETOWN, NEW YORK Cesco [von Mendelssohn] throwing himself on the floor to blackmail Ela, saying can't they say their mother is mental
ly infirm to get her money, telling people Ela was incestuous with her father. He now blames her for all of his unhappiness, and Ela says he must be committed for half a year at least, not because he needs to be, but because she's frightened of what he might say that will reach the Maestro.

  The steady clicking, probably a leaking drain, all through the night sounded like someone in high heels walking up and down the walk. The going-to-the-bathroom woke me up and made me count the number of times “they” probably bedded. The first time I had thought of Howard and Richard as “they.”

  Howard: “Isn't it curious. I could never love two people at once like Richard does. I could desire two people. I think Richard will always love you.” Richard and his running away. He does not realize his obligations. He must hate being home. Howard says the great lack in his life is love. He offers no responsibilities, save the responsibility of loving him.

  FEBRUARY 5, 1947 Noël [Coward] on Mary Martin: “The only two grown-up things about her are her ego and her son.”

  FEBRUARY 7, 1947 Howard always talks about his diseases because he has nothing else to talk about. These and the trivial afflictions (from waiters, other servants, clerks) make up the highlights, along with his paid-for pleasures— concerts, theaters—and of course his amatory desires. This makes him so important to himself, this talk of sickness—imaginary mostly—and so boring to others. “I had an old German maid for years, who taught me how to pack with tissue paper—stuff the sleeves of jackets, between trouser creases.” He did it all through the war—even on battlefields.

  FEBRUARY 9, 1947 When I first saw Richard, I wasn't impressed. I even thought him ludicrous. I remember how he wanted to be seduced, and wore those sexy nylon pajamas, but I didn't realize it. Finally he kissed me in the park, and I fell deeply. This is all so female—how I tried to get him interested in Billy, or someone, and how he fell for Winnie.51 Richard was in love with her, and how he used to cry, and how I tried to help him. Ten years later she came back twice to marry him, but she was dull.

  Richard says: “I need people to love me so….” Howard: “I have such a sense of being lost—without love it doesn't mean anything.” How conversation shifts from these deeps to the trivial. Richard: “Did you put your toast down?”

  FEBRUARY 11, 1947 Atavism in people: How Jewish Howard and I become. Yet he never was Orthodox and I do not practice Judaism. Proust compares Jews' essential loneliness and separations to that of the inverts—because both are never sure when they will become the mob's victims. Must study the bravado this engenders. I do not agree with Proust that one loves only an illusory idea. I love Richard, but I know what he is. You must know the bad or weak parts. Then you must love despite these things. Being faithful—what difference does it make? There comes a time when one loves with eyes wide open, and this is the best kind of love—but I do not think I love normally. Howard is more normal in his love. He wants to possess—oblivion in his lover's arms always.

  Most people seem to need continual anxiety to nourish their love (which they confuse with sex). But there comes a time when even love suffers a mutation, and this has happened to me with Richard. I no longer am consumed with love for him—although I have no ability to live smoothly the inner life when he is absent—as I am living it now here in this attic room, which I love, for it is so temporarily safe. I know suddenly that probably I am happier over Howard, because this love between them protects me. I do not need to give myself always and so utterly. I can give myself when I am wanted—and more intensely (I do not mean only sex)—and so have these emotionally quiet times in which to lead my own inner life, while they lead their love together, grateful to me. And I am grateful to them.

  Richard: “It's amazing the things people that love you say. I was thinking about Howard lying in bed. He said that he wished I could come all day—all over him—because it was like a fountain of me, and that he wished he were a vine to twine all over me.” I said that I would rather be roots. Richard: “They're underground.” Me: “I like the idea of underground.” R: “That's the trouble of being like us. You can't touch the person you love in public.” Me: “But that's a good thing.” R: “But sometimes, like in the movie last night, I have to.” Me: “And you did … but touching out of love in public is like talking too much. You dissipate yourself.”

  FEBRUARY 14, 1947 Richard goes back to reading Proust, Howard to lying on his bosom sleeping. R: God, Leo there's a lot of stuff in here that should have been cut out. (Richard's in the last book, the annoying dull part, which Proust never cut. Occasionally Richard kisses Howard's forehead and murmurs something inaudible.) Richard: What time is it? Oh, just nine. Howard: I want you to scratch the top of my head. No, further over. Yes, thank you. How much longer are you going to read? R: This is such a bore. H: I thought you loved it so. R: I do, but, as Leo said, it hasn't been cut. Your head is too low. H: Yes, open the top of your trousers. R: No, I won't. Someone might come in the door. L: Who's going to come in the door? R: What did Proust die of? TB? L: No—everything. H: I thought asthma. (R strokes H's chest. H lies in his lap.) R: I think [the character] Elstir is a combination of Renoir and Monet. He speaks of Monet here as a separate artist—and Renoir—and he speaks of big nudes, and that's certainly Renoir. L: It's getting warmer and warmer. H: The winter's fairly over. R: Are you sad? My God—this one's got a semierection again. H: (laughing) I'm never without it. (The radio advertises Eichler's Beer. Yes, “Everybody has a good word for Eichler's Beer.”) R takes H's thing out: Look at that! H: Go away. L: It's a pretty thing. H: Thank you. Don't they ever play anything else? (Tchaikovsky introduces the John Wanamaker Music Hall.) R: Did you ever hear Rachmaninoff play? H: It was like iron. R: He was so temperamental too. H: No, he wasn't. He just came out and played and got it over with. (Long pause.) H: I like it between my cock and my legs. (Stroking.) R: Why are you covering it all up? (Opens H's fly more.) R: Howard's perspiring around his testicles. I can see these five pages are going to take me a long time to read. Is your brother as nice as you to stroke? H: I never stroked him. R: Is Harold hairy all over? H: Who was it said, “Where he wasn't hairy he was pimply”? Too bad he's not attractive. R: Oh some people think he's attractive. H: I mean I wouldn't want to go to bed with such a hairy person. I'm too hairy for myself. R: I used to hate hair. Now I like it. Howard says he's sure his brother is good in bed, because he loves sex so much. H: Most people love sex, unless they're just pigs about it. R: Howard Rothschild is a sensual pig. I like circumcised cocks. H: You're supposed to have more fun fucking women if you're not circumcised. Before the war I would have come ten minutes ago. I don't want to get back to that. R to H: You look about fifteen now. I think you're going to have tufted eyebrows. (Stroking them.) Your eyes look strained. Are your glasses all right? H: I think Rimsky-Korsakov's very nice, very gaudy, but nice. R: The first music I ever loved … I went to my first concert when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. H: The first concerts I went to were [conductor] Walter Dam-rosch's. I must have been about eight or nine years old. L: I loved them. H: I didn't enjoy them. They were too long and heavy for a child. H: I love to tickle Richard under the armpits. But Richard doesn't like it. R: Yes, I do, but sometimes it tickles too much. H: He really looks like one of the medieval saints on the cathedral of Chartres. It really has a mystical quality. R: How do I look with my eyes closed? H: Wonderful. R: Some people look awful—like corpses.

  FEBRUARY 17, 1947 Howard [to Leo]: “Your whole role is wrong. You should always be more dignified and grand—Zeusian—much more august. You've got the inner dignity to do it, and not be the Jewish Restoration comedy figure you try to make yourself out. You shouldn't camp and make rude remarks to be amusing. You don't know when to stop.”

  For over a week, the three of us have seen no one save one another and the few people who serve us. It is still a little curious to see Howard doing so many things I used to do, behaving so like me. I have lain in Richard's arms so frequently. Perhaps, tonight, I am not so valiant. “What are you wr
iting, Tibis?” asks Richard.52 “Some notes.”

  Howard kisses him—triplets of sweet, little, loving kisses, making wet clicking sounds, like snow against windowpanes. Richard looks tenderly upon Howard, holding his face in his hands, while Howard peers at the Tribune and Léon's piece, which I wanted to save, but Howard wants it for his Diaghilev collection.

  I feel so sick suddenly, as though I can't get out of this room. That's because I never let anyone see me depressed—never—it would be like telling a secret name. You should never show despair, not even to those who love you, perhaps especially not to those who love you. So I have been deceitful for many years now, but why share despair? Nobody can help too much with this. It is the manure which makes the soil rich and the tree to grow more lavishly. (They are both behaving so giddily right now. Howard says: “God, what a bunch of camps we're turning into.” Howard always is impersonating someone—maids, foreign characters, types from plays, friends—needing to project himself somehow.) The root of my despair was surely that Richard and Howard seemed so attached in love. I probably felt outside, but now Howard, before going upstairs, has kissed me very sweetly and said some sweet words, so I feel gayer.

  FEBRUARY 18, 1947 Howard says I accept this situation because I must have a masochistic pleasure in it. Now everything has this “taint” to it. But how much in me is this?