Waiting for the Barbarians (46 page)

But what the journals make clear are the extraordinarily interesting qualities of Lerman himself—the magnet that drew all those famous names over so many years, in combinations and configurations one might have thought unlikely.
The Grand Surprise
features guest lists to some of Lerman’s more dazzling parties: one of these, for a New Year’s Eve party in 1976, includes both Henry Kissinger and Charles Ludlam. In his review of
Period Piece
, Lerman endorsed “wit” and “humor” in books of recollections, and there is no shortage of either here. Whatever his perceived limitations as a writer, he had an extraordinary gift for the amusing yet devastatingly telling character sketch; in a single sentence, he can memorably capture the supremely talented and the merely well-born. (Princess Margaret in 1965: “She’s kind of jazzy and looks like her father struck it good in the female-shoe business.”) These are always shrewdest when Lerman is describing performers. A born critic, he had a remarkable feel for the stage and those who trod it—actors, singers, dancers. Joan Sutherland is “a cross between Margaret Dumont and a high school pageant”; Carol Channing’s “art” (the scare-quotes are his) was “based on that look of apologetic, hopeful anguish seen on the face of a little girl who has just peed in her pants.”

What is remarkable about Lerman’s wit is that it is entirely lacking in cattiness—and, perhaps even more remarkably in the case of a gay man immersed in the arts at midcentury, entirely lacking in camp
attitudinizing. (Or self-aggrandizement of any kind, something Lerman abhorred in Cecil Beaton’s diaries, by which he felt “so embarrassed.”) The emotion that pervades these journals is, if anything, the “love and nostalgic understanding” that their author so admired in the recollections of Darwin’s granddaughter. This undoubtedly has a great deal to do with his deep and loving connection to his family. Lerman, who was born in 1914 and grew up quite happily in a roiling immigrant Jewish milieu in Harlem—the same milieu that produced the chronically dyspeptic Henry Roth—was more than fortunate in his “Momma” and “Poppa” (the latter a house painter), and indeed in the rest of his exuberant and memorable family, fond and highly colored reminiscences of whom occur increasingly, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the journals as Lerman grows older.

In particular, his family’s early and seemingly unquestioning acceptance of his homosexuality—rare for the times, to say the least—seems to have given him an admirably balanced emotional constitution. The journals bear moving witness, from an opening love letter to his first serious lover, the painter Richard Hunter, to its closing tributes to Dietrich and above all to Gray Foy, to relationships both platonic and erotic of impressive depth and longevity. As sophisticated as he was, his feelings were strong, and often disarmingly naked. “
Please do not die
,” he wrote, only half jokingly, to his great friend Ruth Yorck in 1951.

And yet there is never a hint of “mawkishness,” a quality Lerman abhorred in his
Period Piece
review. If he can be severe with others—“I resent Tennessee [Williams]’s evil, sure masturbation of audiences”; “Martha Graham is the Mae West of the dance”—he is never less than severe with himself, too: a welcome quality in a diarist in general, and particularly in one whose writing extends to such great length. “The surface coruscates,” he wrote, in 1945, of his work at
Harper’s Bazaar
,
“but it is sterile.” As if in rueful acknowledgment of the possibility that it was a judgment on his life as well, he went on: “How to live?”

The lack of mawkishness, despite the intensity of feeling throughout, owes much to a stringent (and often astringent) self-consciousness, which was itself, it’s hard not to feel, deeply indebted to Lerman’s lifelong reading and rereading of Proust. A 1972 entry begins, “Having just finished (for the eighth or ninth time) the “Overture” to
A la Récherche
[
sic
], I am overwhelmed.…” Lerman identified with the aestheticized self-awareness of Proust not least because he liked to think that, as with Proust, his sensibility was founded on his outsider’s sexuality and his outsider’s religion: “The richness of being Jewish, the very specialness of being queer—these are two of my foundations.”

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:

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
:

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

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”):

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:

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.