Any Human Heart (39 page)

There is a pretty girl called Odile who works in Ben’s gallery. In her mid twenties, dark, with short untidy hair and big eyes. She wears black all the time and gold strappy sandals on her unabashedly grimy feet. Ben told her I was writing a book about my time in prison during the war and I could tell she was intrigued. If I can’t have Gloria Ness-Smith, perhaps Odile will consent to be my passport back to the world of human sexual relations.

My routine is straightforward. I wake up, take two aspirin for my hangover headache, and go out for a breakfast of coffee and croissant at a café. I buy a newspaper and my lunch — a baguette, some cheese, some
saucisson
and a bottle of wine. By the time I come back my room has been cleaned and I sit down at my work table and try to write. I eat out in the evenings, usually at the Leepings — it’s open house, Ben says — but I like to give them some time without me so I take myself off to Balzar or chez Lipp, or other brasseries for a solitary meal. I don’t mind a day spent entirely in my own company but I do drink a lot in compensation: a bottle at lunch, a bottle in the evening, plus
apéritifs
and
digestifs.

I asked Odile if I could take her to dinner and she said yes, immediately. We went to Chez Fernand, a little place I’ve found on the rue de I’Université. Odile dreams only of going to New York when Ben opens his gallery there, so we speak English to each other to help her practise. It strikes me that this may be the real nature of my appeal: her own pet anglophone. She has brown, long-lashed eyes; downy olive skin.

I walk Odile back to her Métro station. I lean forward to kiss her on the cheeks and she moves her face so that our lips meet. We kiss gently, the tips of our tongues touching and I feel that old familiar weakness spread at the base of my spine. We agree to see each other later in the week.

Odile was here last night. We ate at the Flore and came back to the hotel. She has a lithe, girl’s body. I was useless, incapable of maintaining a semi-erection for more than a few seconds. My mind was swarming with images of Freya — she might as well have been in the room watching us. Odile patiently masturbated me and, when that had no prolonged effect either, generously bent her head to take my cock in her mouth, but I told her not to bother.

She sat up and lit a cigarette as I tried to explain how my wife had died in the war and how I still couldn’t get over it. In the war? she said. But the war was a long time ago. I agreed it was and apologized. She said, ‘Maybe I better go,’ and dressed and left me. I slept a few hours of a sound and dreamless sleep.

But when I woke — an hour ago now — I felt a quality of despair and darkness grip me that was entirely new. Three years on I am living as vividly with the loss of Freya as I have ever done. And the rain is falling outside. The melancholy drip, drip, drip.

I have taken my two aspirin for my morning headache and have taken two more and two more and two more and two more and two more and two more. I fetched my bottle of whisky out of the cupboard and put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign. I have begun to drink my whisky, slowly washing down the remaining aspirin in my pill bottle.

I know what I am doing but somehow the situation seems quite unreal — as if I’m on stage acting in a play. I just feel — I don’t know what I feel. The decision came to me this morning and I don’t think it has much to do with the humiliation of last night. I know it must be done. It’s a rainy, grey morning in Paris. All over the city there must be other people dying, on the point of death or dead. I’m another to add to their number. I don’t fear death, I simply think for me here, now, it’s the best and only solution. The decision came to me, quite matter-of-factly. I drink more whisky. I will keep on writing. People will say: did you hear about Logan Mountstuart? He killed himself in Paris. I drink more whisky. There are no more pills. I begin to feel drunk — or is this the beginning? I am committing suicide. It seems absurd. Forty-three years was long enough for me. I wasn’t a complete failure. There is some of my work that will

[At this point the words become an illegible scribble and stop.]

1 She was now a lecturer in Medieval History at Edinburgh University.

2 During the years of LMS’s disappearance and presumed death, Lionel had been formally adopted by Leggatt as his son and heir. LMS made no recorded objection to this state of affairs.

3 India and Pakistan were formally separated on 15 August 1947.

4 Probably Graham Sutherland (1903-80).

5 Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister at the time of the Abdication Crisis.

Logan Mountstuart was discovered an hour later by Odile, who popped by the hotel on her way to work to recover her cigarette lighter — a prized silver Zippo — which she’d left on the bedside table. LMS was rushed to hospital, where his stomach was pumped, he was sedated and put on a saline drip. Two days later he left to spend a month with the Leepings before returning to Turpentine Lane. No one in London, including his mother, ever seemed to have learned about the suicide attempt.

He began a process of psychiatric care and analysis at Atkinson Morley’s, a neuropsychiatric hospital in Wimbledon, where he was a patient of Dr Adam Outridge. Dr Outridge prescribed a mild sedative and sleeping pills and advised LMS to cut down on his drinking. Dr Outridge also encouraged him to proceed with his novella,
The Villa by the Lake,
which was published in 1950 to serious and enthusiastic acclaim (‘One of the most haunting and unusual novels to have come out of the last war’ —
Listener)
and very modest sales.

Meanwhile Ben Leeping opened his New York gallery, Leeping Fils, in May 1950 on Madison Avenue between E. 65th and 66th Streets. Marius Leeping moved to New York to run the gallery. At the core of Leeping Fils’ business would be the ‘classic’ modernists of twentieth-century European painting, but Marius’s brief was to be on the lookout for new talent emerging in New York. Artists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell were starting to create a stir and the ‘Abstract Expressionist’ movement, as it shortly after became known, was beginning to turn the attention of the art world away from Paris to New York.

Ben Leeping felt that Marius’s age (he was twenty-three) and inexperience demanded that he have an older associate director of the gallery whom he could trust and, just as importantly, one on whom Ben Leeping could rely as well. LMS, now fully recovered, and his novella published, was the obvious choice.

Thus it was, at the end of 1950, that Ben Leeping offered him the job of associate director of Leeping Fils at a salary of $5,000 a year. The real purpose of the appointment was to have someone keep a close and guiding eye on Marius. LMS did not need much persuading: he closed up Turpentine Lane and sailed for New York in March 1951.

When LMS arrived in New York he spent a few days in a hotel before renting an apartment on E. 47th Street between First and Second Avenues (the first of many New York addresses he was to occupy in a peripatetic existence). It was not the most salubrious of areas but was a convenient twenty minutes’ walk from the gallery.

He and Marius then began a thorough and comprehensive trawl of all the established and new galleries in New York as well as the transient co-op galleries showing the younger artists’ work. Ben Leeping had provided a $25,000 acquisition fund for them to make their initial purchases, money furnished by the final sales of the Peredes Mirós (of which LMS’s Miró netted him some $9,000).

At a party, about two months after he arrived, LMS met a divorcée called Alannah Rule who worked in the legal department of NBC. She had two young daughters, Arlene (eight) and Gail (four). LMS began to see Alannah socially. Their affair began — with perfect timing, as LMS always said — on 4th July 1951.

The New York Journal commences in September of that year.

So here I am in New York, writing again, working again, fucking again, living again. I decided to restart this journal largely because I’m beginning to grow worried about Marius and want to have some aide-mémoire about his actions and behaviour. Ben has absolute faith in him but I’m starting to wonder if it’s somewhat misplaced. I also think his taste is bizarre, not to say dangerously skewed. We argue constantly about what is good and bad and what artists we should try to patronize. I have a horrible premonition about Marius and this gallery and want to have all the evidence I might need well documented and to hand.

For example: I’m always the first here in the morning, even before Helma (our receptionist). More often than not Marius doesn’t show up until after lunch. My whole strategy, agreed with Ben, was to add to our core European stock as shrewdly as possible and not worry about making a splash. The town is full of galleries and co-ops — Myers and de Nagy, Felzer, Lonnegan, Parsons, Egan — to name our obvious rivals. Reputations flare up and die away within the space of a few weeks and we need to make sure that anyone we show — given our pedigree and the Parisian clouds of glory that we trail — has some legs. Marius — let’s be blunt, and this has nothing to do with his charm — has no aesthetic judgement as far as I can see. He seems to react on a whim, or worse, the whim of the last person he was talking to. Anything that Greenberg
¹
suggests he takes up uncritically. I keep telling him: don’t board a crowded train leaving the station, let’s find our own with lots of empty seats where we can stretch our legs. He doesn’t listen — any bandwagon rolling by will do.

Still, I enjoy these mornings in the gallery before the clients and Marius turn up. We are on the first floor — rather, the second floor, in American parlance — and I stand in the window looking down on Madison watching the people and the traffic going by. Helma brings me a cup of coffee and I smoke my first cigarette of the day. At moments like these I think I’m dreaming — I can’t believe I’m living and working here, that this opportunity turned up in my life.

To Alannah’s tonight. A whole weekend together, as the children are away with her ex-husband. We’re going to look for somewhere for me to rent in Greenwich Village. I think I need to be closer to the action.

We found a small apartment on Cornelia Street, off Bleecker. It’s a basement of a brick row house (what is it about me and basements? Why do I like the semi-subterranean life?), unfurnished with a bedroom, sitting room, tiny kitchen and shower room. An Italian family occupy the two floors above.

It was an agreeable bonus to have Alannah’s whole apartment to ourselves this weekend. I find Alannah very sexy: there’s something fiercely alluring about her astonishing teeth and her perfect, groomed blondeness. Yet her pubic hair is glossily dark brown — seeing her naked, wandering into the bedroom with a pitcher of Martinis and two glasses, I wonder if it’s that dramatic contrast that so stimulates me. Everything about our sex is very orthodox, condom-clad, missionary position, at the moment, but there’s something about her that makes me want to go totally debauched. She’s tall and big boned and has a sharp lawyer’s mind. Very concerned about her children and how they will get to know me (why should I want to get to know them?). She’s witheringly dismissive about her ex-husband (‘a weak, pathetic man’) — another lawyer, as it turns out. Alannah is thirty-five. She has a big apartment on Riverside Drive with a live-in maid. What with her salary and her alimony she’s well off. I’m just glad to be sexually functioning again after the disaster of Paris. I thank the U.S. of A. and its fine confident women. Coming here was the best thing I ever did.

Outridge described me as cyclothymic — a small-scale manic-depressive — which is why, he says, he didn’t give me any electroconvulsive therapy. He’s given me the name and address of a psychiatrist in New York if I feel in need of counselling. But I think his diagnosis is wrong: I’m not a manic-depressive, neither small nor large scale. In Paris I think I was suffering from a long-term, building, nervous breakdown that started when I returned from Switzerland and discovered that Freya and Stella had died. After some three years it was finally detonated by Odile, or rather, was detonated by my failure with Odile. (What’s become of Odile, by the way? I thought she was coming to New York. Must ask Ben.) Now I’m here in New York it’s as if the blinds that had been lowered on my life have all been lifted. Sunlight floods the house.

Crisp perfect New York day. In the sharply defined shadow and strong sunlight these huge buildings look magnificent — so defiantly non-European. We don’t need your cathedrals and castles, your moated manors and Georgian terraces, they seem to say — we have something entirely different, we speak in a different language, we have our own version of beauty. Take it, or leave it. Comparisons are meaningless and redundant.

Marius turned up at 3.00 this afternoon, having bought four worthless canvases (smears and slashes in primary colours) from some charlatan called Hughes Delahay at $500 a piece. For that amount of money I could have bought a Pollock — if I’d wanted. I remonstrated, gently — our float is dropping rapidly and I haven’t bought a thing — pointing out that in a month or two we wouldn’t be able to give away a Delahay. Logan, he said, patronizingly, you’re too old-world, like Papa, you’ve got to move fast or you won’t ever fit in here in this city. I managed to keep my temper. Ironic comment, given my rhapsody above. I’d better let Ben know what’s going on.

I go to Janet Felzer’s co-op on Jane Street tonight. I kept the invitation from Marius. Tomorrow I move into Cornelia Street.