by Leo Lerman
NOVEMBER 7, 1955 I have been joying in and noting in Jean Santeuilsince 4:15 a.m., grudging every word because I shall never again have this first delight.1 It is seeing the chrysalis grow more fragile as one reads—sometimes so transparent, so filled with the beat and stir of the life within it, that the reader is able to discern the minute flutterings and stirrings, to catch the vibrations, dim but suddenly flashing, of color. Is this to be a great luna moth or a peacock butterfly or a curious amalgam of both, not a hybrid but a new breed? We know the answer, for in this marvelous, rare instance, we have had the full, vast spread of the creature, seen in all of its unique colors, known it to be part luna, part peacock. In Jean Santeuil, Proust works with a whitewash brush, in frequently crude strokes and slashes. In Remembrance, the brushes used are the finest sable, the most expensive in the world, so sensitive that the fiercest storms are minutely impaled. Here we move gradually through milky Whistlers of damp fog and starry lights, glowing sharply in the blue-white, skim milk light. This is Proust's sketchbook and should be exhibited with Degas's and Manet's and Saint-Aubin's (the one in Chicago).
Gray said, “No one sits in circles anymore.” The horror when I see that guests have formed a circle in the back parlor. This usually means constraint and formality. Spontaneity falls panting for breath, and the air of free exchange, on the flowered carpet. The flowers instantly become garlands sent to a funeral.
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 Maria is the most gimpy-legged Butterfly, but indisputably the greatest singing actress in the world. Then her Medea, the greatest performance, but quite unseen by an audience, save that few lurking backstage, when the process servers (eight) and the U.S. Marshal advanced on her. Claudia [Cassidy, Chicago critic] with her atmosphere of a silent-film star (this is her relationship to Katherine Anne [Porter]) said, “For three and one half hours I sat through her Butterfly, and then to hold Medea in your arms for half an hour!” Maria is so similar to Marlene in ego, in detail, but Marlene sells beauty and style; Maria sells style and the greatest artistry.2
NOVEMBER 27, 1955 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • naples
I went down to pick up the newspaper at about seven a.m., two mornings ago, and then I got some gramophone records to take up. I was walking slowly up the stair from the parlor floor to the next, when suddenly, I guess, my slipper caught, and down I fell, hard, and hit my head on the edge of a step, cutting my face from the corner of my left eye, about an inch diagonally away from it. The amount of blood was terrifying, but after the shock, thinking that I had to do something about it, because no one else was going to since I was all alone, I gathered my records and slowly mounted higher. On the stair to the bedrooms, I realized that I was going to faint, so I dragged me up to the bathroom to get smelling salts—all the while bleeding like a stuck pig. I reached the smelling salts and then everything happened at once. I tried to get to the telephone, thinking: Even if anyone comes, he can't get in right away, because the chain is on the door. The oddest thing was that I wanted to get to the telephone to call you, even though I knew that you were far away, but I was going to call you—probably at [our old apartment on] Eighty-eighth Street (do not mention this). I heard quite a big crash, and I thought: I never got rid of all those letters. Also: I never remade my will. Also: Isn't this a funny thing. At this moment, I felt that it was touch-and-go as to whether I was fainting or maybe dying. Also: Suddenly I have to go to the bathroom. The next moment everything seemed marvelously clear and peaceful. Then I came to and found myself in the most awful mess of blood and filth. (I didn't know that the bowels became uncontrollable sometimes when one faints, did you?) The bedside table had turned over, and the books fell everywhere, but miraculously nothing was broken. So, after reviving, I crept into the bathroom and cleaned everything up. I guess I dragged myself while trying to reach the telephone. I didn't quite know what to do about stopping the bleeding. So I trusted my instinct and made a mixture of cool water and iodine and used it, and it hurt fearful, but I told myself that I was a grown forty-one-year-old man, who had to accustom himself to taking care of himself. Anyway, I climbed into bed at last, and the bleeding went on until about three o'clock, when Poppa, Jerry, and Janet [Lerman] arrived.3
When Momma heard about this, she announced: “It is a well-known fact that no one passes from consciousness when they are alone.” I inquired where she had learned this “well-known fact,” but got no information. She got angry when I reminded her that she frequently called frantically saying that she had just fainted and that no one was in the house. So now I have an interesting wound, which I don't think will leave a scar—if it does it will only be like a little wrinkle. But it was all quite a shock. Why do most of my accidents involve my head? It is very frightening to know that you are becoming unconscious and that you are all alone—a little glimpse of death, which at the last moment, before I went under, showed me a lovely, calm, nonpainful state. Could that be death—with no waking up in a welter of blood and excrement? Maybe. I wonder whether you had a flash that something was happening?
JANUARY 9, 1956 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • CAIRO
Don't tell a soul but I'm about to try to adapt Jane Eyre for [the Irish actress] Siobhan McKenna. I'm doing it with Stanley Young (remember when we designed Regency dresses for a Byron play he wrote—a bad play?) because if I do it with someone I'll do it. Maybe it could open in London. Please pray that this really comes off and brings some funds, because then I can get out of the fashion-magazine world. I think I would go to The Hague for eight months and live in the Hotel Des Indes (this is a blissful dream) and write my book, now titled “Lament for a Potted Palm.”4
A doctor says that I must cut all my activities in half because I have a common complaint—a spastic colon—and this means that I am too tense and too rushed and do too much (all of which we all have known ever since …). So he says I will be a very sick old man if I do not take precautions now. My grandpa Goldwasser died from this complaint (or complications caused by it), but he died when he was about eighty-two. I am not worried, and I am trying to slow down (hoho).
Are you on a barge with peacock-feather fans fanning you? Keep away from strange asps.
A Christmas card arrived from Leningrad, from little old Truman. Such a curious postcard with a girl, very blond and in matching accessories—red-and-white banded knitted scarf, hat (pointy), and mittens. She's blue-eyed and carries boxes of what could be candy—a round fruitcake tin and a sort of bunched-up package—maybe a babka—or an H-bomb … who knows. He wrote that we would “love this city” and the snow and black palaces and that he was freezing. His rich friends now call him Bunny. Gray said, “I guess Bunny's freezing his little ole cottontail off.”
JOURNAL • JANUARY 26, 1956 • NEW YORK CITY What's bad about me? I am dilatory. I have a Jewish conscience—an equivocal goading thing at best. I am overgregarious; this could be looked upon as vanity—and the overweening necessity of nourishing this vanity. I have an unkind tongue, which means an envious heart. I have understanding but am too sloppy in applying it. I cannot say no purely. I seek the easy way and am spendthrift in almost all things. I make enemies or inimical situations for silly reasons. I am thoughtless—and very selfish—although I do not seem this to many energy-blinded people. I rankle and do not speak out. When I do, everything is disproportionate.
FEBRUARY 15, 1956 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • athens
Gray is currently jealous of Mina Curtiss, and that's funny because he should be pleased that I see her maybe once every ten days or so and not others. She's so harmless and fills a certain need, but not the one Eleonora filled. I like being with Mina because she amuses me and feeds me and talks and I can think about all sorts of other things and she makes no demands and is wonderfully well read.5
Gray's poppa is better, but mine isn't and I worry about that, and what will happen if anything happens. I know what will happen … unless his insurance is not borro
wed on heavily. I am sure that it is. He had an attack last Saturday night, because he behaved like a hog.
FEBRUARY 29, 1956 • DANBURY, CONNECTICUT
TO RICHARD HUNTER • athens
The ballet (New York) opened, not too auspiciously, this evening. The pleasant-est thing was Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt (not dancing) who held out her hand to me, saying, “Good evening, Mr. Lerman …” etc., and I met her over nine years ago, briefly. What an extraordinary memory. Her hair is still fair and she looks Dutch-Scottish, holding herself erectly. She has a very warm, friendly, understanding hand, and a smile that comes from way inside—a golden smile—quite obliterating her homeliness.
MARCH 11, 1956 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • athens
I am peeping at Richard III, the movie having its television world-premiere or, rather, American debut. This is the Gielgud scene—and he is marvelous and curiously beautiful and so like pictures of [the great British actress] Ellen Terry. I wanted to compare. With this sort of movie, if it is made with the crystal screen in mind, there will be no reason to leave one's house. For it is so wonderful to have this in this house, to hear the lines and be able to think about them.
The Whitney sought Gray out last week and bought a drawing [A Sapro-phytic Landscape] for the big spring show. They even had a special meeting so that they could buy it for a high price ($125). He is the luckiest boy. Things come to him.
APRIL 23, 1956 • NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
TO RICHARD HUNTER • athens
I am on the train to New Haven, rushing through a bright, sunny day. I just wanted to say happy day, now that we are in the twentieth year. The only thing I mind about age is sickness. I loathe that and going to doctors and taking medicines every day and always being apprehensive of pain—and being frightened when pains come. All that I hate, but age itself I like.
People have been dying—not close to us people, but the kind I saw at theater and in restaurants, knew professionally, and liked. It's so odd to see one's world—the clutter of it and the endless smiles and greetings, and those to whom you do not have to explain about who you are—dropping away. But spring is trying to burst through, although winter lingers.
MAY 22, 1956 • PHILADELPHIA
TO RICHARD HUNTER • rome
Here I sit in the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia, where I have blissfully been for two days and now two nights while [Gray's mother] Maebelle arrived. I haven't had one unhappy moment and not one sour face nor one complaint nor had to live by anybody's notions save my own—and what peace—it's wonderful. How do men manage to stay married to the same woman for all the years without busting out? Tomorrow Maebelle and Gray come here, so she can see Philadelphia, and then we return to New York. I take them to a preview of High Society (Crosby, Grace Kelly—the musical made from Philadelphia Story) and to supper at Michael's Pub. Then on Wednesday, for my birthday, I take them to lunch at the Ambassador, to the new revue at the Phoenix, and to supper at Luchow's. On Thursday, I take them to dinner at the Canton Village or the Three Crowns and to The Matchmaker and probably to supper at the Plaza. Then I think, if I can find the money, I'll depart again—maybe back here (I write so easily here, and it's so quiet) to wait out Maebelle's departure. It's heaven not answering the telephone. Ah me—I never was meant to be a parent and probably not even a loving mate in any square sense of that designation.
I bought loads of 10-cent books—a real binge, like years ago. I'll get hell when they begin to arrive, but I thought: If I spend so much on Maebelle, I should have something tangible.
NOTE: Instead of returning to Philadelphia, Leo went to stay with Mina Curtiss.
JOURNAL • may 27, 1956 • williamsburg, Massachusetts Mina has the life—the time part of it and the money to keep the time. The bliss of not being interrupted for five hours at a time! I do almost nothing save revel in it— bathing in it, hoping that this immersion, despite its brevity, will wash me clean for a long time. Oh, the bliss of being here, in bed, in the early morning and knowing that any problems are not mine. As much as I love sharing a bed, I do, honestly, wish that I could have the early mornings alone in it. This is my best work time. And Gray doesn't wake early—nor graciously—and why should he?
MAY 29, 1956 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • lausanne, switzerland
I am now on a little old-fashioned-feeling train chugging southward—homeward—from four heavenly days with Mina. She lives about twenty miles from Northampton—such pretty, unspoiled country and not frightening or spooky. That is the house you would love to have—mostly very old, very American— very beautiful, clean, and fragrant—with six old-fashioned country servants, a fine stream with beavers busily building dams, bees, such quantities of books, heavenly furniture, eighteenth- and (early) nineteenth-century American and English paintings, and dozens of unpublished Proust letters and photographs. Sometimes the feeling was very like 150 Highland [in Middletown], when I first went there with you. I worked marvelously, because I woke at 5:30 a.m. every morning. Mina never appears until 11 or 11:30, so I sat in my four-poster and breakfasted on strawberry jam. Everything is homegrown and homemade. I scribbled and read and never worried about one thing all the four days. She never intruded or tried to make me do anything—and she did me great good and gave me a birthday present of the Gavarni illustrated (very rare) Gamille, the earliest edition, and some Proust photos (and you know how very much that pleased me) and an eighteenth-century cookery book (the best I have seen) and a Victorian cookery and household book. She's half-finished with her huge life of Bizet. I read it, making notes for my own fell purposes, and it's very good—you know how related this all is to Proust. But best of all, she said so much, so wisely about my would-be books, and that was the greatest help. She was, I am sure, the good teacher former Smith [College] students always say she was. I know that she seems overbearing, but she's so very good for me. Since Eleonora died, I haven't had any female who talked to me this way—and since you have become a traveler I haven't had anyone, actually, to give my life the continuity it seems to need. I love Gray—but, as you know, this is more the conventional, hysterical, husband-wife business than I ever realized could happen between a couple of boys. I missed you these days because so many things to see and eat and feel were related to our common past, a past I shall never have with Gray because he is younger and temperamentally unsuited to much of it. We were also unsuited to one another in many ways—but we were growing up together. Gray adores me—although this would be hard to believe sometimes from his behavior, and he will always be in my life because I guess he is my child—and I do love him.
JOURNAL • may 31, 1956 • Philadelphia Thinking about Maebelle and Gray, how very similar he is to her, in so many views—minor but making for misery in his relationships with people. She is more outgoing—seemingly. He must have the misanthropic streak from his father and that side. But the vanity and prestige needs, the scorn must come from Maebelle. The disdain of others' frailty and of the need of people to make believe they are what they are not, that need he so seems to despise, comes from his father, I suspect. I should see his father, but I dread that. The temper (Maebelle has pique, not temper) [comes] from his father. The genius part of Gray—that is unaccountable. I do know that I am deeply grateful for those thousands of miles between Maebelle and us.
AUGUST 6, 1956 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • london
I am writing a letter to you, which you will read looking out, perhaps, over Cadogan Square, where Wilde was taken, and where I walked in a January long ago and so caught my death—but as I remember, I did not die.6 Everyone, almost everyone else seems to have picked up and gone away. Alice now [dead on July 19], and that undid me, but not like Eleonora or Valeska [Imbs]. Now they seem to be more on that side than on this. So I sit here scribbling away to you, where my heart is—in a green, dusty, and stripped square—more imagined than actual. I see you in rooms—all gray in the rainy Londo
n light—wav-ery and subaqueous. Here my room is also beneath a tumultuous wave. The tide is running high in all the treetops from here to Sankaty Light, and great moon-eyed fish nuzzle the windowpanes. Little Gray wrenched his back, suddenly, as we hoisted a heavy filing cabinet. He is flat upon a pad of heat—a lily blossom awaiting confirmation of its ethereality from some sparkling-eyed frog with the airs and fretful graces of a prince—my, how literary the light is in this room. With the windows open, I feel the sea buffeting this crumble-house, but with them closed and clamped, nightmares prowl, perceiving in the clasps intimations of victory. In each of us terror and triumph await animation. I cannot bear for friends to go away. I cannot even bear walk-ons to walk on and on and on and so over the edge of the world. Have we ever known one single lovely person to become more lovely or even lovable because of having put on infinity? No. Time does not fonder anything—especially absence. What slothful fibs proverbs and old saws are.
AUGUST 7, 1956 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • london
