The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JUNE 27, 1973 Just before we left Vogue today: “There's a strange man on the phone….” His voice was reptilian, and his message was to the point: “We've been watching you, and even people in your own circle—movie circles—think you're very far out—Red. Even those who are Left, think you are too far Left…. We're watching you….” This about my State of Siege review and my saying [film director] Costa-Gavras is on the side of humankind. “You're pushing the Soviet line,” this reptile said. Not pleasant and actually rather frightening.

  JUNE 30, 1973 The Bernsteins—all of them—were received by the pope. Did Lennie kiss the pope on his mouth? On his toe? On his ring? Felicia, of course, knew how to behave.

  JULY 2, 1973 I read Colette and Sainte-Beuve, both tonic: the former one of my deep passions, the latter remarkable even in English translation.121 The balanced flow of these Sainte-Beuve portraits—a sort of blush of irony mantling the clerical contours of Sainte-Beuve's prose and his shafts of delicate wit and shrewd observation, comparison illuminating here this feature, there that feature—the perfections and the blemishes. He casts a sort of gentle, but persistent, revolving light upon his subject—so clear a light that the distant recesses are brought out into sharp, succinct view—but calmly, dispassionately. There is a serenity here, the unruffled serenity of a sea on a calm, brilliantly sun-lighted day, but one is always aware that this is the sea and that the calm is a practiced, calculated deception.

  JULY 4, 1973 Our family came, in one generation, from golden hope and faith to despair and disbelief. Each Fourth of July in that long-ago was rich. Always rain fell, thunder added the cannons' boom to the firecrackers' blast, and the beauty fizzled into acrid smoke as the rain triumphed. “So much racket gets into the clouds and so it rains.” That was the explanation for us kids. We believed this—maybe it is true. Oh, how American we were, sincerely believing all of the truths and all of the myths. It was so important to be part of this glorious promise the U.S.A. That is one reason we became deeply involved in celebrating July Fourth, Thanksgiving, the [presidential] birthday month of February, Arbor Day, Election Day, and Flag Day (in white flannels—very heavy, very hot, quick to stain if any hanky-panky occurred). We vied to be included in American celebrations. We were even more American in intent than “real” Americans—despite being sheenies and kikes and dagos. The discriminations were endless and hurting—scarifying—the reparations almost equally. (I must fix this last. It's not quite true.)

  JULY 7, 1973 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT Why I read anything but Proust, I can't understand. Oriane (the Princesse des Laumes) on furniture and decoration is superb. The musical evening at Mme de Saint-Euverte's, with his microscope on minor, minor people—endless—and the humor, the irony. Ori-ane's “remarks”—to use Guermantes's quotation marks, which is how Proust communicates inflections of speech, these semaphoring a whole “set's” flavor, the nuance of their talk—this is miraculous—not God created the world, but Proust re-creating certain worlds—as infinite in its variety as Mrs. Nature's own. I know how these people sound, move, smell, think. I know their darkest and their most luminous deeps. I know more about them than they know about themselves and, definitely, about one another. I do not know this the way Dickens's people or even Dostoyevsky's or Tolstoy's know one another and each himself, but in a new way—a twentieth-century way—Proust's way. In Proust, character is felt metamorphosing into psychology. Proust sees through and beyond. I have the feeling he sees not only into the past, but into the future.

  And so I return to Proust and Mme de Saint-Euverte's musical evening, and poor Swann meandering through Vinteuil's precious little [musical] phrase to that awful “sell” Odette … whilst seeing (Proust, and I through Proust) Oriane for the “sell” she is—the social sell; seeing the grease of affectation, even on the highest social pinnacle, which makes society function, the grease of social lies and subterfuges—all a deception, but a necessary deception. What a true satire the garden party is in Alice. On one level, the Rev. Dodgson [Lewis Carroll] is annihilating shams as clearly as Don Quixote attempts to annihilate, the Reverend and Cervantes each tilting against social shibboleths.

  The rapture, the pure rapture of sitting here [at Mina's], in this benediction of summer heat, this blessing of brilliant sun, scribbling—the joy of scribbling…. The end of Swann in Love—the brilliant truth of that end: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!”

  JULY 8, 1973 Why autobiography? Mina says she can't write her autobiography and wonders why. I say I write this because I love to scribble. I am so curious about people, things. I know that the conclusions, either set down or inferred, will tell not one new thing—but the affirmation, my belief in people, in character (what we meant by a person having character), in beauty, in truth (Keatsian), in the glorious and in the terrible—as demonstrated in the extraordinary creatures I have been privileged to reflect, in my very deepest self—all of this is valuable, is a beacon in this world which needs constant confirmation of its miracle of existence. How or why we are all still here, I do not know, nor understand.

  I dipped into the pretty Orion edition of Da Ponte's Memoirs—finding this proximity to Mozart irresistible. Da Ponte and his “celestial” Mozart—by a flick of my wrist and a twiddle of my fingers I had Mozart by his hand.122 Oh, the reassurance. If only I could give this reassurance to some future graybeard or beardless creature. If I could put into that future anonymous hand my hand, and so the hand of Ela and of Mozart…. If I could by my fingertips bridge time and so assure this future friend that the continuity is forever, even as myth—perhaps only as myth—and that even if we are time's junk shop, this is worth our little while. Nothing ends; we survive. This morning I held Mozart's hand and my heart leapt up with his. The fountains of the world spring into the air—not a single, infinitesimal, glittering sequin of water is lost. I have been tortured inadvertently—as when I woke during that operation—and irony, bone-deep irony, and beauty and hope (the fountains springing forever) saved me.

  JULY 17, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY Momma into the Florence Nightingale nursing home today—a nightmare, thronged with ancient medieval faces as viewed by Goya—or Ken Russell. The faces with hair skimped, gone, or tousled; the constantly fluttering hands; the mumbling and crying out. And she lamenting all of the time. Momma is, actually, more compos mentis than most of the others. We will keep her in her own house until we can't. I deposited $650 for two weeks and arranged for a phone to be installed at her bedside, where, I hope, she will not be all of the time.123

  JULY 26, 1973 Howard Rothschild had a letter, from some ancient Diaghilev ballerina, in which she wrote: “Diaghilev was interested onlie in his homoskschul mistrisies [sic] and in having them always in the most expensive hotels.”

  JULY 29, 1973 • WASHINGTON, D.C. The long look Momma gave me as I sat there on the side of that Florence Nightingale bed, on the edge of those yellow covers. She sat stolidly in her chair. What was going on in that head so fuddled by self-pity, hysteria, conviction, craftiness? I suddenly thought: Maybe she's about to tell me that I am not my father's son. Curious how this persists—even now, when I am almost sixty. Whose son? Uncle Herman's? I must trace the influence of Uncle Herman in my life. Is my absolute passion and love for Puss an Uncle Herman result?

  I have finished Lillian [Hellman]'s book. She is one of the most self-exposing writers—and, finally, thus permitting herself to show, to emerge bone clean, her inabilities and abilities shredded. She is a considerable being—the secret anatomy of her fears, triumphs, ruses, resorts, joys, sorrows a chart easy to read. Reading this Pentimento, the vulnerable, tough, intensely girl-woman Lillian is plain to see, to feel. That battleground face, which seems to be disintegrating as one looks at it, is a solid, revealing mask: It, unlike so many other phizzes [sic], does not lie.124

  I remember taking tea in her living room, Lil
unable to say [Dashiell] Ham-mett's name, as he lay above us. Whenever she came to his name, she pointed her index finger abruptly ceilingward, giving her a sort of theological cast, as she sat there in a lilac crepe house gown. Her eyes are troubled, sort of veiled angry, large, and watery. Her face is that of a dowager politico—either domestic or state, but women with such faces are both domestic and state—and even in midlife the difficulty is to decide whether this is a man's or a woman's face. I think these faces must be bisexual faces.125

  Then, reading [Alexander] Herzen, I remember the old creature who came to Momma's, that ancient sidler who “gave” change on the elevated. He sidled in. First an ear would appear in the thin crack of the opening kitchen door— a listening ear, rather dirty and hirsute, the hair gushing like a gray moss from a cracked garden stepping-stone. Then, to the delight of the children, gradually the rest of the creature oozed through the crack—his head materializing in his time-greasy peaked cap, his rheumy eyes, his knobby red nose (somehow as pointed as Pinocchio's, despite the encrustations of red and purple upon it— a baroque organ it was), and his emaciated body in the longest overcoat—tightly buttoned up under his snaggly chin whiskers, even in hot summer. His eyes pleaded, and his whole being quivered toward the food on our table. Momma always asked him in, always calling him “Mister.” I never knew who he really was. A relative? A leftover from her [downtown] Second Avenue days? I am sure that his eyes were blue and he was sweet natured, with a kind of tremulous cheerfulness—more like a dog slightly unsure of his welcome, but using all of his dogginess to bridge the possible chasm. We, the children, were embarrassed, but bubbled with secret delight and a feeling of superiority as we sat sure before our heaped plates, Momma saying, “Eat!” He always preceded all of his tissuey scraps of talk with a little flurry of greeting, in Yiddish all of it: “Hearty, happy appetite,” to which we all shouted, “Ask with eating…” He never sat down, and his rivulets of talk rose into an incessant soprano—as shrill as flutes— and he ate and ate and ate—anything—standing there with his grotesque coat, this emaciated creature, putting away more than our entire family of five.

  AUGUST 7, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY Long talk on the blower with Kay Graham, she protesting that she doesn't want any publicity. “Please, please, let me off. It was a team. We all did it. It had to be done, so we did it.”126 She has a low, good, somewhat rich voice—a sort of light-velvet voice—full of sheen—a voice that feels good in the ear. I like the sound of her: “Vogue's been so kind to me— but please, please let me off….”

  AUGUST 8, 1973 Cathleen Nesbitt came to dine in the Russian Tea Room. She remembered so many parties at 1453. “The very first one I ever came to, there were three men sitting together on a sofa, and I asked who they were— they were all so odd looking—and you said, ‘Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Saint-Subber,' and I thought: These are the great men….” She remembered Rudi Nureyev coming up the stairs and peering at her as she lay on my bed. Cathleen's eyes are glittery, dark, deep-set Irish eyes, seeing-into-the-future eyes. She remains a beauty—an old beauty now. Her air of witty appreciation. She uses her pained claws of hands, with virtuosity—making the pain and deformity of these arthritic hands into a kind of symbol of her long courageous life. I took her home, she protesting that she could go alone— a truly remarkable creature, who looks at her long, hard life as an adventure and as good fortune.127

  AUGUST 14, 1973 Mrs. Graham's New York office is utterly unadorned save by a lean, green-leafed, somewhat tropical plant. Her walls are pale. Her table is almost bare, save for a stack of the Washington Post. Her talk—thoughtful but girlish into womanly and suddenly flooded with laughter—a sort of tide of self-hilarity, under which the agile aquatic life of her mind is very busy (that's an image—inflated!). She is a plain, sallow, disheveled-hair woman, her features brought to sudden prettinesses by her inner life. I think that she is a nice woman, likable but deeply troubled—about nation, world, family. She could be a passionate woman—and perhaps she is—but guilt eats at her. She does not want to hurt. She is the kind of woman who would rather be hurt than hurt?

  AUGUST 15, 1973 Sono [Osato] and I talked about Felicia [Bernstein]. Sono said: “She's always so busy. Those little feet pit-pat, pit-pat. On a very thin edge. Even in the middle of a long conversation, she suddenly looks off into some far, far distance….” So this is what happens when you make up your mind, as Felicia did [for Leonard Bernstein], to get someone, no matter what—the most insecure security. For some twenty-three years she's been walking the high wire she knew she would have to walk. Lennie is like pages with glorious geniusy stuff on them—all loose. Felicia's the binding (and most handsome) that keeps the Lennie pages together. Without Felicia he would have been a public mess years ago.

  AUGUST 16, 1973 Nixon's speech [on the Watergate break-in] was precisely what we expected. He looked badly embalmed; his speech was as fat as synthetic grease. But many will believe it all—its message of “Let's get on with the business of our future and leave Watergate, which is unimportant, to the proper authorities.” If Nixon gets away with this, the basic principle (ironic word), so prevalent, so endemic in these United States, of “getting away” with something, will be forever enshrined as a positive moral value.

  AUGUST 19, 1973 • SANDS POINT, NEW YORK [With Sono and Victor Elmaleh] at Sands Point—literally East Egg [of The Great Gatsby], but I could not see any green light across the Sound last night. Garbo's The Temptress late on the telly, was visually superb, beautifully directed, and Antonio Moreno was—the only word is that old girlie-kitsch—stunning. Garbo was beauty. She looked as if she had just been struck fresh from a transfixed crystal wave—her skin was lucent—absolutely lucent. She moved more dancer than any other human, her figure thin to emaciation. She did little or nothing save token gestures. Then suddenly, from some icy deep—overwhelming emotion. After exhaustion, or in the throes, she tapped the universal well. She was all plas-tique brought to intense life by her feeling. Sometimes she was faintly bemused, almost withdrawn in her bemusement—and this fortified her mystery. Above all she was (and is) mysterious. Fascinating how Moreno and Garbo seemed precisely right for another's wanting. An unexpected joy, The Temptress, its direction amazing, especially in the earlier sequences, which owe much to German films. The dinner at which the millionaire kills himself, denounces Garbo—the table unrolling to immensity—did Lubitsch learn this from Niblo or did Niblo learn from Lubitsch?128 But most of all, the glory of The Temptress is Garbo—her economy, her overwhelming beauty, which transcends period, her indifference—ice upon the volcano and the volcano suddenly erupts—soundlessly. Her suffering—Garbo's suffering was always a natural force, like rain or flood. Garbo should have played Tosca—a perfect part for her. Sometimes in The Temptress, she seems about to sing.

  AUGUST 20, 1973 I must try to be more understanding of Momma. She's terrified, but I cannot bear to hear her terror.

  AUGUST 24, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY Two days ago, an early telephone call from Sandra [McElwaine] telling that Rogers had resigned [as Secretary of State], Kissinger nominated—no, designated. A call from [photographer] Harry Benson from the San Clemente White House: Did we want to photograph A Final Importance? A call from Bea [Miller]: Princess Anne in white fox and feathers, by [Norman] Parkinson, is on her way…. That sort of thing goes on daily.129 All so serious—and always I feel how intensely of-this-moment it all is, even when it involves “major” figures. I cannot see this as the giant sort of history. Is it that wars and Toscaninis and such make this moment less epic?

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1973 Maria canceled her first concert, saying her physician said that she couldn't do it because of her eyes. I know that the cause was nerves—and who cannot forgive her those? How horrendous to “come back,” especially if you cannot be sure that you have what you had before you went away. I cabled: “Courage, trust your heart…” etc.

  SEPTEMBER 30, 1973 Here is W. H. Auden's hound-dog face on the front page of the Times�
��dead at sixty-six in a Viennese hotel, cause unspecified, although yesterday's single wireless flash news said “heart attack.” I rang up Mina to tell her so that she could tell Lincoln, and found that Wystan was to come to stay with Goosey, and that he was dreading this advent. Why? Wystan had been complaining how old he felt. Mina said, “So he was as old physically as he said he felt.” I must quickly publish the beautiful poem he sent some months ago.

  I remember Wystan “playing” butler at the birthday party we had for Osbert [Sitwell], when we introduced Marlene to Edith and they sat together on Mary Rose,130 holding hands, and finally Wystan said angrily, “I didn't come to be butler!” but he had insisted on opening the champagne. I remember Wystan in carpet slippers, trudging about his classroom at Bennington, when Carmel sent me there to do a story [for Junior Bazaar] in 1945. I remember Wystan's blub-bery kisses and the horror of that worn and smelly face. I remember Lincoln turning over the table, at lunch in the Plaza dining room, when I said that I wished Wystan would wash, and then Goosey didn't talk to me for many years, after he rushed out into Central Park South. I remember Wystan, quiet and quirky at Anne Fremantle's—he was in carpet slippers again. And then those annual birthday fêtes in that shambles of a flat on East Eighth Street in the East Village—a heady rabble of fine literary folk and street scum, of the upper reaches (Nin Ryan and the Kronenbergers and the Trillings and the ballet and the literary establishment) and boys he and Chester [Kallman] had picked up in baths, in the streets—all of this among bookshelves which stood about like the ruins of a lost, or losing, culture—askew, aslant. Then I remember Wystan's kindness when I wrote to him and asked for a poem and a short piece. They came in immediately. His poetry justifying his being, his perfections monumentally overwhelming any dross: Who am I to enumerate his imperfections?