Any Human Heart (41 page)

Towards the end of the evening Gloria fixed me with her sceptical ever-so-slightly mocking gaze and said, ‘So what are you up to, Logan?’ I told her I’d just had a book published too. ‘It’s tremendous,’ Peter chipped in, ‘meant to say. Best thing you’ve done.’ He hasn’t read it of course and I can’t complain as I haven’t read any of his since he abandoned his rather good little thrillers for the New Portentousness. ‘Will you send me a copy?’ Gloria asked. ‘We’ve got one at home, darling,’ Peter said. ‘But that’s inscribed to you,’ she said. ‘I want Logan to inscribe one for me, specially.’ I said I’d rather she bought one — I needed every royalty I could get. But as she left she reminded me: ‘Don’t forget that book now.’ I wonder if Peter has finally met his match.

Ben had gone and Peter and Gloria had ascended to their, doubtless, vast suite and for a moment I was alone in the lobby, putting on my raincoat, when I thought I saw the Duchess of Windsor coming in through the revolving doors. I went rigid — until I realized that it was just another thin New York matron with an over-elaborate hair-do, set like cement. She and the Duke have an apartment here, I remembered. I would have to bear that in mind — give the Waldorf a wide berth in future.

The Marius situation is resolved — on paper anyway. I now run the gallery; Marius reports to me and has to refer all purchases of over $500 to me for approval. He has his own fund to draw on of $5,000 — which will be topped up by Ben. This was all spelt out at a frosty meeting this morning — Marius sulky and aloof. Ben was very firm, almost harsh, and I remembered that, of course, Marius was Sandrine’s son, not his. I hope this pseudo-independence and pseudo-autonomy will satisfy him. I’m a little worried still.

I had an early supper with Alannah and the girls. Gail told a series of jokes that she claims to have made up herself. The best one, which had us aghast for a second, was, ‘How do they tell the alphabet in Brooklyn?’ Recite the alphabet, dear, Alannah said. OK, so how do they recite the alphabet in Brooklyn? ‘Fuckin’ A, fuckin’ B, fuckin’ C,’ Gail said. Alannah was outraged but I was laughing so hard she couldn’t even feign anger. Gail did admit she hadn’t made that one up.

Alannah begged me to come up to Spellbrook for another weekend. I said that quite apart from the fact that her father detested me I resented being treated like an adolescent and being made to sleep apart from her. We were mature adults, we were lovers, why shouldn’t we be in the same room? ‘I’m his youngest daughter,’ she said. ‘He thinks I don’t have sex outside marriage.’ I said that was nonsense. Then I had an idea. If she had to see him regularly, why didn’t we rent our own place near by? She could pop over to him and we could sleep together. Not a bad idea, she said.

Alannah is in Connecticut with the girls for the summer vacation. Marius has gone to Paris and so I watch the stock in sweltering July, thanking the gods for the invention of air conditioning. No business at all this month: every painter in New York seems to be on Long Island. Maybe I should sniff around there.

Janet is back, however, and had a party at her gallery last night. Frank [O’Hara] was there too, impish and irritating, drunk as a skunk and deeply tanned. For half an hour he had me pinned in a corner, yodelling on about some barbarian genius called Pate he had unearthed in Long Island. ‘At last an artist with a brain, thank God.’ Back to Janet’s place. I never plan to sleep with Janet but when she’s in the mood it’s very hard to resist. You’ve got to see my tan, she said. It’s an all-over tan.

Spellbrook. Alannah thinks she’s found a house about two or three miles from her father near a village called Mystic. I said I liked it already. We drove out this afternoon with Gail and Arlene. It’s a small shingle-walled bungalow set back from the coast road and surrounded by dwarf oaks. It has a gently pitched roof and there’s a long sun porch at the front and a rubble-stone chimney at the side. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, a big living room with an open fire. The long thin kitchen at the rear looks out on a scrubby unkempt garden. It could be sixty years old, Alannah, said, imagining — sweetly — that this would swing it for me, the European, with his centuries of culture. Everything works inside, water, electricity, heating — so we could use it in the winter too. I could see myself in it — effortlessly — but a little alarm bell was ringing in my brain as the four of us walked around it with the realtor. Logan with his proto-family… ‘Look, Logan,’ Gail shouted, ‘there’s a room up here, this could be your den.’ There was a little attic room under the eaves with a shed dormer giving a distant view of Block Island Sound. I thought suddenly of my room in Melville Road and the roofscape of Battersea from its window. My eyes filled with unexpected tears, remembering my old life. Alannah saw and slipped her hand in mine. ‘You’re right. We could be happy here,’ she said. Gail took my other hand. ‘Please, Logan, please.’ ‘It’s a deal,’ I said.

I’ve insisted on paying all the rent — $1,200 a year — which I can’t really afford but it makes the place notionally mine, rather than Alannah’s and mine. Who am I kidding?

Gail said to Fitch tonight, ‘Logan’s renting a house for us at Mystic’ He looked at me darkly: ‘Once a colonial… ‘The old bastard was in sour mood this evening. He and I sat together in silence — the girls in bed, Alannah tidying up in the kitchen — as he fiddled with his pipe kit, scouring the bowl of his preposterous pipe, thumbing in shag.

Then he said, ‘Do you know Bunny Wilson
³
?’

I said I knew who he was, that I’d read a lot of his books. Another fully paid-up member of the Anglophobe club.

‘A brilliant mind,’ Fitch said, blowing blue scented smoke ceilingward. Then he pointed the stem of his pipe at me. ‘When was the English revolution?’

‘1640. Oliver Cromwell. Execution of Charles I. The Protectorate.’

‘Wrong. It was here in 1787. This is when the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie formed a new society. You’re still
ancien régime,
always have been since Charles II. The revolution you should have had actually happened here, on the other side of the Atlantic. That’s why you resent us so.’

‘We don’t resent you.’

‘Of course you do. That was Bunny’s point. You now have two distinct anglophone societies that split from a common root in 1785. Ours is revolutionary and republican; yours is for status quo and royalty. That’s why we can never get along.’

‘I’m sorry, but — with the greatest respect — I think that’s utter nonsense.’

‘That’s exactly what I’d expect an Englishman of your class and education to say. Don’t you see?’ He barked a laugh at me. ‘You’ve just gone and made my point.’

I let him ramble on. He really is an objectionable old CAUC.

I love to use these phrases — ‘with the greatest respect’, ‘in all modesty’, ‘I humbly submit’ — which in fact always imply the complete opposite. I bombard Fitch with them constantly when we argue (it’s beginning to drive Alannah mad) as it allows me to disagree categorically beneath a smug façade of good manners. We had another row about manners at lunch. I said that, in America, good manners were a way of furthering and promoting social contact, whereas in England they were a way of protecting your privacy. He refused to accept my reasoning.

Went into New London to sign the papers on the Mystic house and make the down payment. Alannah is taking over the costs of furnishing, decorating and refurbishment. So much for my independence. Gail and Arlene wrote me a letter saying thank you, which they posted under my door. They’re great girls. I’m very fond of them.

To Janet’s gallery for her big show. Heuber has three paintings there, which we should have had but I wouldn’t pay his prices. The inflation in the last six months is worrying — one senses a sudden scramble beginning for these really untested, untried young artists. Anyway, Janet has Barnett Newman and Lee Krasner as well. Smart girl. It was a real party too: Gunpowder, Treason and Plot. Annoyingly the show looks like being a wild success. Frank was raving about his new discovery — Nat Tate, not Pate — all of whose work was sold in a flash. I met this prodigy later: a quiet, tall handsome boy who reminded me of Paulus, my Swiss guard. He stood quietly in a corner drinking Scotch and wearing a grey suit, which I was pleased to see. We were the only two suited men in the room. Heavy dark blond hair. Janet was on fire and said she had been smoking heroin (can one do this?) and urged me to try some. I said I was too old for these games. I bought a Heuber and a Motherwell. No Nat Tates to be had, though I rather liked them — bold, stylized drawings of bridges inspired by Crane’s poem.
⁴
I see what Frank means by brains.

Bumped into Tate as I was leaving and asked if he had anything for sale privately and he replied, most oddly, that I would have to ask his father. Later Pablo [Janet Felzer’s dog] shat copiously in the middle of the room, so Larry Rivers told me.

Looks like Dwight D.
⁵
is strolling home.

London. Turpentine Lane. Glum and depressing lunch at Sumner Place with Mother and Encarnación. Mother seems to be fading — alert enough, but now markedly thinner and scrawnier. We ate turkey and sodden grey Brussels sprouts. Encarnación had forgotten to cook the potatoes, so Mother shouted at her, Encarnación said that this English food was disgusting anyway and started to cry — and I made them apologize to each other. I drank the lion’s share of two bottles of red wine (which I’d wisely supplied — the only drink in the house was white rum). I didn’t tell them about Alannah.

I asked Alannah to marry me before I flew here. She said yes, straight away. Tears, laughter, generally overcome. I rather feel she’s been waiting for me to ask for months. On that day, Saturday, I had taken Arlene and Gail for a walk in Central Park. Arlene wanted to go skating. Gail and I sat on the bleachers watching her (she was quite good) and ate pretzels. Gail said, in a serious, considered voice, apropos of nothing, ‘Logan, why don’t you marry Mommy? I’d really like it if you would.’ I huffed and puffed and changed the subject, but that evening over supper (we were alone) I popped the question. It’s true I am very attracted, physically, to Alannah, and I like her but I can’t say, if I’m being honest, that I love her. If you loved her would you still be fucking Janet Felzer? Alannah says she loves me. The problem is that I don’t think I can truly love anyone again, after Freya. But I’m happy, I suppose — more than that: I’m pleased, delighted that we will be married. I’m used to being married; I’m not used to being on my own — being on my own is not a state I welcome or enjoy. The thought lingers, however, that I’m marrying Alannah because it means I’ll have Gail in my life. Perhaps the one I’m in love with is Gail… This is probably very foolish of me: she won’t stay the enchanting, funny five-year-old for ever. Still,
carpe diem.
Of all people, I should be living by that axiom.

[LMS married Alannah Rule on 14 February 1953 at a quiet civil ceremony attended by a few friends and the children. Titus Fitch had influenza and could not travel, so he claimed.

The New York Journal falls silent now for over two years until it resumes in early 1955. LMS had left his Cornelia Street apartment for Alannah’s on Riverside Drive. The house in Mystic (Mystic House, as he referred to it) proved a much loved contrast to New York. He carried on running the Leeping Fils gallery but the uneasy truce between him and Marius Leeping was showing signs of strain.]

Mystic House. Warm sunny day. Could be a day in summer. Dogwood in full bloom. I pretend to be reading in the garden but in reality all I’m thinking of is my first drink. Just before 11 a.m., I go into the kitchen and open a beer. No one around so I take a couple of big gulps and top the can up again with bourbon. Back outside into the garden and suddenly the newspaper seems more interesting. ‘Drinking already?’ Alannah says in her best caustic, disapproving voice. ‘It’s just a beer, for Christ’s sake,’ I protest. This keeps me going until noon, when I can legitimately mix a pitcher of Martinis. Alannah has one, I have three. I open a bottle of wine for lunch. In the afternoon I snooze, then go down to the shore and wander around the rocks with the kids. By the time we return home it’s time for a pre-prandial Scotch and soda or two. More wine with the evening meal, a brandy afterwards, and pretty soon it’s time for bed. This is how I survive a Sunday in the country.

Why am I drinking so much? Well, one reason is because on Sunday I know I have to go back to New York on Monday morning. Spirit of place is something I profoundly believe in — which is why I love Mystic House — and the spirit of place of the Upper West Side is just not for me. I hate our apartment; I hate its location and it’s beginning to sour the entire island of Manhattan for me. What combination of factors provokes this? The narrowness of the north-south avenues on the West Side. The unremarkable buildings that line them. The height of said buildings. And there are always too many people on the Upper West Side. We’re too crammed in, the sidewalks always too busy with pedestrians. And then there’s the cold wide expanse of the Hudson. It’s just not for me — my soul shrivels. I’ve suggested moving many times to Alannah but she loves this apartment. Maybe I’m not used to living with two young girls. Maybe I’m not happy.

Drove out to Windrose on Long Island — Nat Tate’s stepfather’s house, a big neoclassical pile. Peter Barkasian (the stepfather) buys 75 per cent of his stepson’s output, acting in a way as an unofficial dealer. Which has good and bad consequences for Nat — a charming (there must be a better word — can’t think of one) but essentially guileless young man. Good, in that it provides him with a guaranteed income; bad, in that as an artist of talent you don’t want your stepfather controlling your professional life.