The Leonard Bernstein Letters (75 page)

Dear Dovidl,

My 40th birthday approaches, and that makes me sentimental and pseudo-philosophical, and I also think of you when I get that way. I'm going through the usual fortyish motions of stocktaking, examination of life-purposes, re-examination of motives and drives, efforts at great self-knowing – and that's been my summer. My first free summer in twenty years: and it's been so shocking to have it that I've literally done nothing: not a note, imagine, not a bar, no letters written, only programs planned, sailing, and most important of all, spending huge gobs of time with my children. What splendid companions they are!

But not a note written: and I wonder, as I study my hairline in the mirror and pray desperately against baldness, whether any composer who is
really
a composer could go for two months without composing, and doing nothing else either. Where will it all lead? Baldness, I expect.

The Philharmonic season looms large and exciting and frightening. There will be much more television, more difficult programs, more “point” being made, more Handel, more Vivaldi. [Varèse's] Arcanes [
Arcana
],
²⁵
at last, and all
kinds of Ruggles and Riegger, & the Sessions Vln. Concerto, and Ives #2 and Aaron Variations & Ned Rorem #3 & Bill Russo & Ken Gaburo and and and. A sort of overall look at the whole picture. Not the
whole
picture, of course: that's impossible, and I have to leave out all kinds of important fellers like Virgil and you and Marc and [Norman] Dello Joio (important?) and [Paul] Creston (ugh) and Ben Weber and [Andrew] Imbrie and [Leon] Kirchner. The Klee
²⁶
arrived, & believe it or not, I haven't had a chance to look at it yet! That's my summer.

I haven't heard your 4th [Symphony] yet on records: I will when I get back to town in the fall.

I hope Goldoni
²⁷
is fun, & rewarding on several levels. Felicia's Joan is never to be forgotten. She joins me in

Love,

L

I'll be in Milan for a few days in Nov (10–15 or so). Will I see you?

Dear Lenny,

A deep bow of thanks for your wonderful letter. I'm so glad you liked it and I'm so sorry you didn't get to see the Chopin. I think you would have had a ball.
²⁸

Tomorrow starts rehearsals of
West Side Story.
You've
got
to come in and take them musically over their material, at least once, so they know what you're about, especially while the European conductor is here. We'll prepare them all and get them ready for you, but you
must
(IT'S IMPERATIVE) do this for the sake of the success of the show.
²⁹

Dybbuk Dybbuk Dybbuk.
³⁰
I'm sending over an unseen but continually haunting prodder who will creep into your sleep and into your spare moments and will say the words Dybbuk Dybbuk Dybbuk. With this ghost's effort I know that suddenly something will be on paper that will get us all started. I've heard from [Ben] Shahn who is wonderfully enthusiastic and excited about the idea of working with you, so please keep haunted and jot down a few of those scribbles that turn out to be the basis, theme and dramatic motifs for the whole ballet.

Love,

Jerry

Dear Lennie,

Mrs. Alma Mahler-Werfel has chosen some words of mine as the title of her new volume of memoirs
³²
and I wish to give a small party for her on the publication of the book. I am asking about twenty friends to meet her at the Algonquin Hotel – reception room 306 – on November 11 – Tuesday – between 5 and 7.30. She tells me her daughter – the sculptor – Gustav Mahler's daughter – will be there.

Don't trouble to answer this. But it would be a great pleasure if you and Mrs. Bernstein could come.

Cordially yours,

Thornton (Wilder)

Dear Leonard,

It being impossible to keep a secret these days, you will no doubt have heard that a certain show whose title contains that part of New York where nobody, but nobody ever goes, opened in London and was not unfavorably received.

I took 2/3 of my children to see it last night, despite a darkling article in the
Telegraph
– “Should children be
allowed
to see
W
[
est
]
S
[
ide
]
S
[
tory
]?” They got it all, loved it all and in their comments were far more perceptive than those of several adults around us during interval.

I think your score is historic. Only in
Porgy and Bess
have I heard music become both words and plot and character, and it happens again with your music. (I might add a footnote here; in 1954 your score for
Waterfront
and mine for
Genevieve
were both nominated for an Oscar and I can tell you that had Dmitri – tote dat corn, lift dat theme – Tiomkin not edged us both out, this letter might not have been so easily forthcoming.)
³⁴

Further along in the true confessions hour, I am, or at least was, about to start work on a musical myself. But after that score of yours, where does one go except to say, “Face facts, Wotan, you ain't ready yet.”

So, my heartfelt congratulations. You, as a musician, know how another musician feels when he hears something that says something new, different and honest.

Regards to Arthur Laurents, who got me my tickets. Also, if you see him, from [i.e. to?] the boychick of the fiddle, Isaac Stern.

Sincerely,

Larry Adler

Dear Daddy Bernstein,

Man
. I sitting in your office rehearsing my lines, and it is
knocking
me out. You're
My Man
and that's for sure. From your Swiss Kriss
³⁶
Trumpet Player.

Regards,

Louis Armstrong

Satchmo

Dearest Marthy,

Happy New Year. At long last, a rest – although God knows it takes fully as much energy to unwind and force the inactivity as it does to be active. But at least they're not all pushing from all sides: I have only my own sick silly psyche pushing from inside.

I'm not staying at the above – just using the luxuriousissimo facilities & living with friends. Burtie has been with me, left yesterday, all is calm. We started out last week in Sun Valley. Skied three days on the daisies (and a bit of snow) and then left for the hot glorious desert, horses, tennis, swimming. Lord, if I only had a bit of peace in me – a bit only, is that too much? – how I could be enjoying all this! And Poland? And Alaska? And is here next? Did you do the hols in London? Are you as petrified as I of the lunik lunacy?
³⁷
What the hell are we fiddling with? When do you arrive in this favorite land of yours for your Okie junket?

I met Ernest Hemingway at Sun Valley last week, and was taken totally by surprise. I had not been prepared by talk, photos, or interviews for a) that charm, and b) that beauty. God, what goes on there under his eyes? What's that lovely adolescent tenderness? And the voice and the memory, & the apparently genuine interest in every living soul: fantastic. We spoke tenderly of you: he said you were brave.
³⁸
His present wife seems to be a professional Ja-sayer, though simpatico enough. The question is not How could you have married him, but How could you have done anything else?

Dearest love to you, every day, always, dearest potato-pipe. I played tennis today & almost wept with nostalgia for our version of tenny.

Write me –

L

Dearest Lenushka,

I loved your Xmas card, both of you looking so beautiful and so tired and the children so beautiful and benign, like happy little dolls. I am saving my first-in-my-life vote for Alexander who will surely be President unless he decides it's all a silly joke and he'd rather live.

So much to say but I won't say it, probably. This is my last letter, anyhow, for some time, because now I am going to start on a novel and that means silence, fasting and prayer. A novel about Poland. Most daring. I was there 16 days; and learned more and felt more than I have, probably, since Spain. Terrifying and wonderful nourishing experience. I was also frightened the whole time, and I am not used to being; frightened for everyone because they are too brave. And all my desperate faith in the human spirit was revived and rewarded, because there they
are
. Proof.

Shall I say some ominous aunt-like words about peace? I think I will. It is a subject that I have really thought and worked on, you know. So: no one besides yourself will ever help you to get it; everyone, even with the best will in the world, will nibble and shred it. You have to fight for it, yourself, and it is perhaps that most essential fight there is. If you haven't got (and keep clinging to, through every reverse) a hard kernel of your own private peace, maybe no bigger than a pea, you cannot be, do or give any
real
thing. Practically, I find it works like this: one learns what conditions one needs, for oneself, to bring back or foster one's interior nugget of certainty and calm and happiness. For me, it's absolute solitude and silence, in the country; long walks, no timetable of any kind, no telephone, no mail, no newspapers. Long mooning walks, reading, sleeping a great deal. No booze, simply because booze makes me nervous. And then, after a longer or shorter cure of this (depending on how much my peace has been eaten away) I can start to work: and that sets it firmly. I have no idea what you need, but you must, by now, have learned for yourself. No other person gives it, you know, though anyone can take it away. Sex has nothing to do with it either.

The Xmas hols, just terminated, ruined me as usual. I cannot bear any season given over to organized official good cheer, and too many people, plans, parties. So, as soon as I'd put little Sandy on his plane for Switzerland, I rushed off to my usual country hotel for three days alone. Whereupon an old friend (known for
30 years, now aged 74) was in the hospital in London, and I had to take over everything by telephone. That fixed the peace allright. I'm hanging on however, and have now got the telephone here turned off all day, will not accept any invitations nor give any, and I mean by God to come back to myself and to where I really live. You see, I get physically sick when the peace all goes. I think you don't do that, though I am not sure. But I think you hardly know who you are, or why you are doing what you are doing.

Interested about Ernest [Hemingway]. Tenderness is a new quality in him; but people do luckily change all their lives and the luckiest ones get better as they grow older. His main appalling lack was tenderness for anyone. I longed for it in him, for myself and for others. I'd almost have settled for others. I do not remember his voice as being anything much, but I always was thrilled by his memory. He was interested in everyone but there was a bad side. It was like flirting. (Like you, in fact, he has the excessive need to be loved by everyone, and specially by all the strange passing people whom he ensnares with that interest, as do you with your charm, though in fact he didn't give a fart for them.) So he would take people into camp; they became his adoring slaves (he likes adoring slaves) and suddenly, without warning, he would turn on them. That was always terrible to see; it made me feel cold and sick and I wanted to warn each new conquest of what lay in wait for him. But one couldn't; they wouldn't believe; they were on the heights of joy – for he can be a great life-enhancer and great fun, and his attention is very flattering.

By the time I did marry him (driving home from Sun Valley) I did not want to, but it had gone too far in every way. I wept, secretly, silently, on the night before my wedding and my wedding night; I felt absolutely trapped. When I fell in love with him was in Spain, where for once he did have tenderness for others (not me, he was regularly bloody to me, lustful or possessive, and only nice when he was teaching me, as if I were a young man, the arts of self defense in war. And also he liked being the only man in Spain who took his woman around with him, and I was blonde, very helpful in brunette countries, raises one's value.) I loved him then for his generosity to others and for his selfless concern for the Cause. That was all gone by the time I married him. I think I was afraid of him though I certainly never admitted it to myself or showed it to him. You will also be surprised to hear that I have never been more bored in my life than during the long long months when we lived alone in Cuba. I thought I would die of boredom. But it was very good for me. I wrote more with him than ever before or since in my life, and read more. There were no distractions; I lived beside him and entirely and completely alone, as never before or since.

I am very glad he now speaks pleasantly of me. I never speak of him one way or the other with anyone. The whole thing is a distant dream, not very true and curiously embarrassing. It has almost nothing to do with me. What I write you here is, as you can understand, secret and between us only and forever.

He ought to be happy and he ought to be gentle; because life has showered gifts and blessings on him; and I hope he is.

Considering this was to be a quick letter, only saying that I love you and wish you well for 1959 and all years to follow, it has rather swelled, has it not.

My darling Lenny.

Marthy

P.S. Bertrand Russell uses the word “impiety” in relation to luniks and further attempts and he is right.