Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  There are, indeed, episodes in The Grand Surprise that uncannily mimic episodes in À la recherche. Not the least striking of these is one recounted in a 1972 entry, in which Lerman, attending an art opening, is bewildered to find himself among “an assortment of elderly women who greeted me with joy”—only to realize that they are all old friends from thirty years past, now made unrecognizable by time:

  Only when I somehow unfocused these seamed, other-shaped faces, so confidently presenting themselves for friendly kisses, did I perceive within each quite unfamiliar visage the face of some other person I had once known well. Here were women I had seen or chatted with daily—a danse macabre … [they] have become those anonymous old women and men who make up lamenting choruses in verse plays.

  This is a re-creation (perhaps conscious but all the more moving if it was unconscious: a testament to the extent to which Lerman had internalized Proust’s novel) of the narrator’s climactic experience at the Princesse de Guermantes’s matinee in Le Temps retrouvé.

  The title of the present volume is, in fact, an allusion to the object that was, for Lerman, something like the famous madeleine: a magnificent butterfly, called a Camberwell Beauty, that he caught sight of as a child and that aroused in him the intensest desire he’d ever known, and that forever after represented to him the thing he sought in life: a sense of wonder, of the swoony and unexpected possibility of sudden beauty. “Thirty-five or so years later,” he wrote in a 1956 journal entry, “I read about this butterfly and discovered that it has another name. Sometimes it is called the Grand Surprise.”

  And so The Grand Surprise exemplifies the qualities that Lerman himself sought out in the autobiographies and life recollections that he—an astonishingly successful autodidact with no more than a high school education—so avidly read: wit, respect for time past, profound feeling, a lack of cheap sentimentality, and above all an abiding sense, when others might have become jaded, of deep “wonder” at the haut monde (as he liked to put it) of art and society to which he had struggled so hard to gain access. This was the quality that Lerman, the Harlem-born Jewish homosexual, responded to so strongly in the diaries of Francis Kilvert, the English clergyman: “Kilvert was radiant with wonder. It was his Golden Fleece, his mighty mite, God given.”

  What makes The Grand Surprise most worth reading for anyone interested in the substance, rather than the coruscating surface, of the times and culture it describes is the scintillant quality of Lerman’s critical acumen. To read this book is, as it were, to witness a meteor shower of sparkling and provocative (if, more often than not, casually tossed-off) insights into the dance, theater, film, music, art, and literature of his day, and of the past. Dietrich is “the permanent symbol of beauty’s decay”; Barbara Bel Geddes was “very good” as Maggie in the 1955 Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but Miriam Hopkins would have been “extraordinary”; the “curvaceous line” of the melodies in Tosca—he is writing about Callas here—suggest to him that Puccini’s music is, in fact, “very Art Nouveau.” Often, there are throwaway lines about eccentrically fascinating ideas that you wish he’d spent more time working out: at one point he remarks that he thinks of Emily Dickinson and Lizzie Borden as “identical, actually as one woman. They represent to me the two schools, as do Duse and Bernhardt, of the same art.”

  It’s in the extended reflections on this or that opera or book or performer that Lerman’s genius for impressionistically conjuring the qualities of art, or artistic people, is fully revealed. Here he is, in 1972, listening to Das Rheingold:

  Wagner made audible the caress. Yet his tensions, even when small by design, are monumental. Listening to Wagner is always like traveling through ranges of mountains, each more overwhelming, through size or beauty or sheer being, than those traversed—the sudden, sweeping vast forests—the shimmer, the sheen, all sunlight fluttering—a vastness of soaring, wings in motion—running, that happens in Wagner constantly—the sound of a single bee enlarged to a magnificent thunder—sense of alarums. In Proust’s opening pages, night—hurrying through the night. Certain pages of Proust, Beethoven, and Wagner are linked by this sense of distant hurrying, by carriage, by horse, through night.

  Here he is in 1951, after seeing Olivia de Havilland’s Romeo and Juliet in London, on the character of the Nurse:

  I realized that the Nurse was a wicked, genuinely immoral, lazy woman, and that she is, actually, the Mrs. Danvers who permits Juliet to undo herself, and even abets her, in what the Nurse must know is a fatal act. This Nurse lives in the moment, is spoiled, lewd.… I have never seen a production which has been staged to present her this way.

  Here he is, in 1984, making what seems at first like an improbable, even silly—and yet ultimately persuasive—comparison between Jane Austen and Judith Martin (“Miss Manners,” whom Lerman saw as “more Jane Austen than Emily Post”):

  How Miss Austen strikes flint on stone, and how sparks fly, sometimes igniting small, astonishing fires, sometimes bursting into conflagration.… The amusement and shock of joy comes from how she views commonsensically, from some sharp eminence. She startles realistically—there’s the link with Judith. The view from the same sharp eminence.

  And to finish this necessarily too-brief catalog, here he is on his beloved Proust; he’s been reading Jean Santeuil, in 1955, three years after its posthumous publication:

  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 [in Jean Santeuil] 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 …

  Lerman had some interesting brushes of his own.

  Judged by Lerman’s own standards for autobiographical recollections, then, the document that was the product of all of his talents—as a man, as a diarist, as a critic—might be considered “a little masterpiece.” Yet the question that begins to form itself in your mind quite early on in The Grand Surprise, and that hovers, increasingly uneasily, over the otherwise festive, even dazzling goings-on here like (as Lerman might put it) the unwelcome fairy godmother, Carabosse, at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, is why a person of such talents, appetites, and ambitions was unable to produce a big masterpiece—the “enormous book I want so much to do,” as he described it as early as 1946. If the question lingers, it’s primarily because Lerman himself keeps referring to his unwritten masterwork (always “my book”); as late as 1989, as he put it in a glum journal entry, he had “not given up the refuge of that dream.” And yet by then, if not indeed much earlier, it was surely obvious that he could not muster himself for the task. Why?

  Here again, Lerman’s early review of Period Piece sheds an interesting light. The review, it must be said, is somewhat top-heavy. Lerman, well known as a raconteur, liked to start off his articles with grand, attention-getting flourishes: “I write of the raptures in reading dictionaries, the pleasures in perusing lexicons, chartularies, enchiridions, omnium gatherums …” one 1957 review begins. But in this piece, as indeed often in his journalistic work, you feel that, once he’s inside—once he has your attention—his interest flags. The middles, the parts where he’s supposed to be engaging the work at hand, tend to feel scanty and superficial, hazily summarizing rather than incisively exploring the contents which, however trivial they may be, he claimed to find both fascinating and worthy of his “study.” (You never do get a real feel for what most of Period Piece is like, apart from the fact that the author “takes the reader right back into the Cambridge of her childhood.”) This seeming inability to translate his brilliance onto the published page was a flaw of which Lerman himself was ruefully aware: “I say such wonderful things about books and people,” he confided to his journal in 1949, just after he’d begun writing and
editing for Mademoiselle, “and … when I come to write it’s all gone.”

  As you make your way through The Grand Surprise, it is hard not to think that the reason that Lerman was incapable of writing the book he had in mind was, in the end, temperamental. “I am very good at creating atmosphere,” he wrote in 1966, pondering his inability to complete a book he’d been contracted to write about Sotheby’s, “and rather blithe”; elsewhere, more devastatingly, he acknowledges that he lacks a certain kind of “content”: “I am decoration, not great art.” In the end, his knack for savoring atmosphere wherever he might find it, for finding the next grand surprise, for being, when all is said and done, a connoisseur rather than a creator was what he had to offer.

  And offer it he did, in those coruscating flashes; but beyond that, there is a curious lack of engagement with the larger world, the world that was more than sensibility and beauty. The Grand Surprise is a document that begins in 1939 and ends in 1993, and yet as you read it you cannot help but be struck by the fact that there is virtually no mention (let alone discussion) of World War II, of the Holocaust, of McCarthyism, of the Stonewall Riots, of Watergate, of the Reagan years—apart from a complaint, apropos of Mrs. Reagan, that “everything save her shoes [was] wrong”—which is to say, most of the history that Lerman lived through. (A significant exception is a brief and touching account of his attending, with Gray Foy, a 1971 protest in Washington against the Vietnam War, which is otherwise unmentioned.) This seeming indifference to the world outside of the glistening bubble he inhabited is noteworthy because it suggests a failure to appreciate the deeper “content” of things—a failure that, in turn, might account for that lack of a certain profounder “content” in Lerman himself, as he himself understood.

  That content, in the end, is what art, as opposed to decoration, derives from. It may well be significant that a passage in Proust that Lerman delightedly singles out for praise is one in which the Duchesse de Guermantes talks about decor. But of course, what Proust is also about is decay—the deep, rotted mechanics of the society that had such perfect taste in decor. Of this Lerman, too, was aware; but out of that awareness, he would or could not create anything—not least because he himself (as he also well knew) was part of the mechanism of superficiality, of what he calls “the false, generated gaiety,” of the ephemeral, “the mighty for a moment.”

  It’s hard not to wonder whether Lerman’s melancholy self-consciousness about his lack of deep content, together with his tormented awareness of his complicity with what he himself saw as an inconsequential industry, was responsible for his lifelong case of writer’s block—a block that didn’t altogether prevent him from writing, as we well know, but did stop him from committing to a project that he had the vision to understand was serious, but not the nature to undertake. What he couldn’t do, finally, was absent himself from the worlds, haute or otherwise, that he’d worked so hard to be part of—to leave the theater or the party and to be alone in the way that writers must, at some point, be alone, to “giv[e] up just existing, just riding on the tide from moment to moment” and “shoulder a burden,” as he put it in one anguished 1950 entry. Ten years later, he goes into a depression when, after an Israeli author asks if Lerman is a writer, Gray Foy responds, “Not for some time”:

  If I had written what I should have written these years, even failing at it—but no one is to blame. I am the only one—having written and published millions of words for some twenty-three or so years and to no deep, abiding avail.… What wrongs I have done to such talents as I have (had). What self-indulgence and waste.… I lack all discipline. This comes of wanting to be loved and admired and be made much of.

  What gives The Grand Surprise an undercurrent that is, in the end, almost melancholy is Lerman’s understanding that the substance of a real writer’s life—“just [to] write it and then rewrite it until it’s good”—was something he was temperamentally unsuited for. “What a difficult life that is,” he wrote mournfully; it was more pleasant to be loved and admired. In this respect it’s worth noting some of the many serious midcentury writers and thinkers who do not appear on Lerman’s guest lists: Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Meyer Schapiro, Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt.

  You could say, of course, that The Grand Surprise itself is the great work that Lerman wanted to produce; but I’m not sure that Lerman, with his rigorous insistence on self-knowledge, would agree. He knew well what character he had and what choices he had made. He may have warned himself, as he did in 1954 leaving a party at Nathan Milstein’s, that it wasn’t “important” to “enter that world,” but enter it he did, as we know; he may have complained, that same year, that Marlene Dietrich’s late-night phone calls were “consuming my reading and writing time,” but a person whose ambition was to be a writer, rather than a persona, would have hung up the phone long ago. Lerman’s tragedy, if it may be called that, one that makes itself felt throughout this remarkable volume, was that he kept private, or never was able to bring off, the work that ought to have been public, while devoting his working life, his public life, his enormous talents to the glossy worlds—parties, magazines—that he knew enough to disdain.

  The irony is that today’s culture of superficial glitter, of knowingness without any real knowledge, is sustained by the very magazines to which Lerman, however lofty his tastes and talents, devoted his working life. And when you lie down with dogs, even greyhounds and Lhasa apsos, you may well get up with fleas. As I savored every page of his remarkable private writings, I couldn’t help noting that nearly every historical, literary, artistic, or biographical allusion had to be footnoted or explained, from Saint-Simon to Sainte-Beuve, from Gustave Moreau to William Hogarth, from Aubrey Beardsley to Ned Rorem—the intimates of Lerman’s fervent inner life, now apparently presumed to be wholly unrecognizable to readers at large. These, it’s perhaps worth noting, are the very readers on whose behalf the reviewer of Lerman’s book, in The New York Times Book Review, felt compelled to ask rhetorically, in her own introductory flourish, “Who is Leo Lerman?” Poignantly, Lerman himself anticipated this question. “The mortality of the fashion world,” he lamented in 1970. “Who will think of me? No one.” Here, as often, he knew how to spot a trend.

  —The New York Review of Books, August 16, 2007

  ZONED OUT

  IT’S LIKELY THAT the writer Jonathan Franzen is no less famous today for the really good novel he published in 2001 than for the really bad mistake he made a couple of weeks later. What the ensuing half decade—and, now, The Discomfort Zone, a collection of autobiographical essays—have subsequently made clear is that the high qualities that made his literary achievement so worthy are inextricable from the flaws that made his real-life behavior so puzzling.

  Precisely a week before the World Trade Center fell (a chronology he has drawn attention to), Franzen published his sweeping novel of middle-American decline, The Corrections, a critically lauded best seller that went on to win the National Book Award. As is now well known, fairly early on in the critical and public embrace of Franzen’s magnum opus the book was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club: a media apotheosis that, whatever else it means to a writer’s career—and just what it does mean was the subject of the ensuing flap between Franzen and Winfrey—is commonly believed to guarantee that nearly a million copies of the writer’s book will be sold. (Franzen’s publisher was reported to have increased its order from 90,000 to nearly 800,000 copies on learning of the selection; half a million of these, according to Franzen’s publicist, were directly attributable to the Oprah Book Club selection.)

  So much for the literary achievement. For, as we also know, Franzen—bizarrely, it seemed to most people; self-destructively, to many—turned Oprah down. For one thing, he didn’t like the little Oprah Book Club sticker that would henceforth appear on his novel. (“I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn’t want that logo of corporate ownership on it,” he said.) For anoth
er, he was made nervous by the fact that Oprah’s audience was largely female. (“I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience.”) And then there was the whole high-low thing. Franzen had “cringe[d]” on learning of the selection, he later said, since among Oprah’s selections in the past there had been some titles that he characterized as “schmaltzy”; and Franzen, as he himself acknowledged, represented the “high-art literary tradition.”

  Unsurprisingly, Oprah coolly disinvited Franzen soon after these and similar comments were widely reported in the press. The quiet graciousness of the notice posted on her website stood in devastating contrast to the grandiose self-importance of Franzen’s public pronouncements about literature and his place in it. “Jonathan Franzen will not be on The Oprah Winfrey Show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection,” the notice read. “It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict.”

  Making people uncomfortable—and describing people who are uncomfortable in their own skin—are what Franzen has always been good at doing in his writing: discomfort, conflict, and a hopeless awkwardness have been his great subjects. That they are now the focus of his new collection raises interesting questions—questions very much on readers’ minds these days, when the divide between truth and fiction seems increasingly to be blurred—about the relationship between a writer’s real life and his fictional work.

  Until now, Franzen’s preoccupation with “discomfort” was best showcased in The Corrections, a ruthless but not unfeeling dissection of one midwestern family falling apart as its stodgy values were put to the test by the go-go avidity of American culture in the 1990s. (A serviceable summary of the book and its themes, in fact, was the one that appeared on the Oprah website: “The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century—a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.”) From the start, it was not hard to see where the novel’s appeal lay. Ostensibly the drama of one family, the Lamberts, that lives in a St. Louislike city called (with a knowing sourness typical of Franzen) “St. Jude,” it seemed nonetheless to be about something larger—about the failure of something in the culture as a whole at the turn of the millennium, about the awkward fit between American dreams and American life. From the flat, rather desperate opening sentence (“The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through”), the sense of imminent crisis and disintegration seemed to be global as well as local, cultural as well as familial.