The Leonard Bernstein Letters (74 page)

Dear Bill,

It['s] so unbelievable to be in the lland of the llamas that I spend most of the day saying PERU over & over to myself, just for sanity. Peru?!? Auckland. Mozambique. And here it is, a nice normal warm capital like any other, beautiful, full of people and a number of things. Felicia has just arrived, making it all perfect.

The tour so far has been a smash; receptions such as I've never experienced, warmth & love from audience after audience, great reviews – & the orchestra playing like Gods. Every day they become more and more my orchestra, more than I could ever have expected. Your [Sixth] Symphony was remarked by a Caracas critic to be the most important offering we had, and the main feature of our
three
concerts there.
¹⁹
It's been great.

But now I find myself in a spot with our dear old Sixth [Symphony]: we can't play it except in the capitals, where there's a sophisticated audience of some sort; & the time lapse between capitals is such that the orchestra doesn't retain the piece. Last night, for example, it was really ragged and “forgotten” after more than a week; it's not a piece you can tour with; we've had to take it off the La Paz & Quito programs because the enormous altitude prevents the necessary blowing (almost
no
oxygen at all in La Paz – 13,000 feet up); & I'm scared of the next performance, 8 days away. I think we're going to have to take
it off the program for the rest of the tour, heartbreaking as it is; I know you'll understand. It's just plain murder to the players and to the piece. It's just one of those works that has to be hot off the griddle to be played at all well; otherwise it's a haphazard gamble.

We miss you both, & love you.

We also love the Sixth!

Lenny

Dear Dovidl,

Imagínate, here we are in Peru, lland of the llama, lland of llove. Felicia has just joined me (we've been two weeks touring South America already in Panamá, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador) & she'll be with me for the rest of the trip – Peru, Chile (at last!), Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico – the works. Our reception everywhere has been magnificent – warm, thrilling, just the opposite of Nixon's, pobrecito. We think of you often, and miss you. I realize I have several letters from you as yet unanswered, & I beg forgiveness. These last months have been wild. But with beautiful, rewarding highlights: Felicia as Joan at the final concerts of the season, brave & inspiring & unforgettable (the whole orchestra in tears, Honegger notwithstanding); the television shows, especially those for the kids; the orchestra itself, which has become
my
orchestra to an astonishing degree of flexibility, warmth and respect; this exhausting but lovely trip. […] We'll be home by June 15th. Hope to find a letter from you.

Love from us both.

Lenny

My dear Mrs. Bernstein,

I meant to write this at once, but to my horror found I'd mislaid my address book when I left New York the morning after seeing
West Side Story
– and have
only just re-discovered it in a folder stuffed with lecture notes etc. etc. I hope for your sake you are still away and will not have been conscious of my discourtesy. I
never
can thank you properly for your incredible generosity and kindness in enabling me not only to see the opera but to take my two dear far-from-wealthy spinster cousins who had been longing in vain to get tickets ever since the opening night. They are extremely earnest Educationalists, and got me down beforehand by spectacled conjectures about the Puerto Rican Problem being “too serious a subject for frivolous treatment” etc. etc. – but like myself were completely bowled over, breath-taken by the end of Act I. It was easily the most fascinating & exciting dramatic experience I've had for years, and I
still
feel exhilarated, amazed and heart-wrung by the whole affair. Would give anything to see it again! Words are quite inadequate to thank & congratulate your husband. I have the records – that's something. It
is
serious of course, and beautiful; also terrifying, moving, funny & disturbing. It was the high spot of my whole Marathon – and as I say I can never thank you adequately. I was very sorry indeed to miss you both – and thrilled to read of your husband's brilliantly successful S. American tour. I hope you are back safe and sound – & that he is able to have a rest. Or does he never?! I'm only just back, & still semi-prostrate from too many thousands of miles of flying – but I did enjoy a lot of it & confess I miss being spoilt & made much of! – as I was, everywhere. Martha [Gellhorn] is still abroad.

Again, so many thanks.

Affectionately,

Rosamond Lehmann

Lennypot my dearie one,

I waited for the right time to write about
West Side Story
but probably the exact right time will never come, so now on a rainy (can you beat it?) Cuernavaca
morning, my fourth here, and my first not spent jumping with rage and activity against this house, I shall begin. But I know I am not going to do it well enough.

How can it be called a “musical comedy”? It is a musical tragedy, and were it not for the most beautiful music, and the dancing which is like flying, people would not be able to bear to look and see and understand. Certainly they would not pile into that giant stadium, paying huge sums, in order to be wracked by fear and a pity which is useless because how can help be offered, how can a whole world be changed? Tom and I found it beautiful and terrifying. But then he and Omi
²²
must speak for themselves. Omi had seen it before, found it more enthralling the second time. Enough about their feelings.

I was literally frozen with fear. Do you realize there is no laughter in it, no gayety that comes from delight, from joy, from being young? You do, of course, and all of you knew what you were writing about. The immensely funny song, “Please Officer Krupke” (I will get these titles wrong, but near enough), is not laughter, but the most biting, ironic and contemptuous satire. And I felt it to be absolutely accurate – not the perfection of the wit, in music and words – but accurate as describing the state of mind of those young. Again, the Puerto Rican girls' song, when one longs for the beauty of home and the other mocks [“America”], is not laughter; but the hardness of life, the rock of life, a dream of something softer (softer inside, where it counts) as against the icy measuring rod of modern big city young. The love songs made me cry (they had before, when I heard the whole show twice in one day, listening to [Irwin] Shaw's record in Switzerland).
²³
But this time, with the visual picture there, and the murderous city outside, and in America, where
West Side Story
becomes a sociological document turned into art, they made me cry like a sieve, from heartbroken pity.

But what stays in my mind, as the very picture of terror, is the scene in the drug store, when the Jets sing a song called “Keep Cool, Man.” I think I have never heard or seen anything more frightening. (It goes without saying that I think the music so brilliant I have no words to use for it.) I found that a sort of indicator of madness: the mad obsession with nothing, the nerves insanely and constantly stretched – with no way to rest, no place to go; the emptiness of the undirected minds, whose only occupation could be violence and a terrible macabre playacting. If a man can be nothing, he can pretend to be a hoodlum and feel like somebody. I couldn't breathe, watching and hearing that; it looks to me like doom, as much as these repeated H-bomb tests, with the atmosphere of the world steadily more and more and irrevocably poisoned. I think that drug store and the H-Bomb tests are of the same family.

What now baffles me is that all the reviews, and everyone who has seen the show, has not talked of this and this only: the mirror held up to nature, and what nature. I do not feel anything to be exaggerated or falsified; we accept that art renders beautiful, and refines the shapeless raw material of life. The music and the dancing, the plan, the allegory of the story do that; but nature is there, in strength; and surely this musical tragedy is a warning?

It shames me to speak of music to anyone, owing to my hopeless ignorance and to the fact that I do not hear it, only feel it. I love your music – everything you wrote (much more than I like anything you conduct). It may be part of my loving you, but it wouldn't work entirely. I love some people whose writing and painting I deplore. No, it isn't that personal at all. I think I love it because it seems to me real. You'll have to figure that out for yourself.

Thank you for giving us perfect tickets, where Tom
²⁴
could hear – you can imagine my anxiety about that, in advance – thank you very much, darling pie.

I think you must write music, more and more, and I think you will. My theory about this is that what one does and is and how one lives, grows and changes. Americans are fools to fear age. It is needed and proper; all one must certainly do is change with one's age, live one's own age, let one's shape (inside and out) alter as it should. I think that, being you, you had to have the great hectic period of doing everything, being everyone and going everywhere. I think that's raw material; and you had to swallow it all, for you will need it. But I also think you will chuck it, without effort or regret, in time; because that will be the time to work on the raw material yourself, draw your conclusions, make your own private gift out of all you saw, did, heard, felt. I think you will really write music, and be concentrated and used by that, in perhaps eight years from now. All you have to do is not ruin your health before that long slow hard second work-period of your life begins.

You must try to get a book called
Brighter than a Thousand Suns
by Dr. Robert Jungk. It was published in Germany, translated and published in England. The first part is slow and tedious going, and one sees how necessary it is, later. It is the story of the atomic scientists; it is the human side of how we have launched ourselves (and how accidental and ignorant and pitiful it all is) into doom. I find it needed reading, and too fascinating to stop. Now I must find some nuclear physicist, who is an honest man, to check with. But it is specially a book for us, who have no part in that world – and that world this very minute rules us. We must know; we may be ineffective to control our destinies, but we cannot ever be sheep. I do not believe in an atomic-hydrogen war, I don't think it is necessary or will happen. I believe the world is going to be poisoned
(literally, physically) without that. It might be that if people realized they were daily and invisibly being led to the slaughter, they would not go in silence. If they knew that right now the entire population of the world is infected, and that growing children are most susceptible to this kind of infection, there would be revolt. Anyhow, you read it. It is certainly the other side of the coin of the mad children, living in the streets and dreaming sick dreams.

Omi and I are here preparing this pleasure dome. We were robbed of course. It is not as bad as the house you and Feli had, but I must say I preferred your wide range of Navajo-Mexican striped rugs to the false pretensions of this house. I have removed every movable object and most of the furniture; the clothes cupboards seem to have been built for 1920 type movie stars and are useful warehouses. The servants are charming and pea-brained. The roof leaks like a faucet and is covered with slender brown boys gently and imperceptibly laying back broken tiles. The view would be perfection, a wide sweep from the black range of the mountains that rise towards the Mexico plateau, the Chinese follies of the Tepoztlan hills, the volcanoes behind them, and to the west the beginnings of the blue Taxco range. The idiot owners have elected to plant mingy palms and other uncertified trees in such a way that the only manner to see the whole view is to lie on one's stomach at certain points in the garden, or climb to the top of the wall. The doom of everyone is to have to walk with fools nor lose the common touch; but how many and heavy the fools, and maybe the touch is not worth keeping.

When in N.Y., I seem to have gone mad. Within a week (thinking that I knew what I was doing) I arranged four book contracts, two for Tom, two for me, and five articles for me. People leapt to offer me these contracts, paying more money than I have ever before received. The reason for this is that I really do not want to do any of the work, and I certainly do not want a cent more money than I have. The result is that I have to finish my book of collected war reporting by September 1. Beginning in October, and going through until April, I have to do two articles on England, one each on Poland, Hungary and Czecho. My only hope is that I won't be able to get into the last two countries. On April 15, Tom and I return and drive about this benighted land (not this one, the Estados Unidos) for three months, leaving presumably more dead than alive for some quiet spot where we have agreed to grind out a book on the subject in four months. I am surely mad. The only good I can see in it is that it forces me back to work habits, which I have lost, and will be a long dismal training for my muscles. There isn't a ray of light until a year from this coming Xmas. I also have to deliver a short story to the
Atlantic
. I wrote it years ago but in my usual way, I do not feel I have tinkered enough. (I never believe the thing is ready until I can recite every word of it by heart, and go on changing “a” to “the” with a maniacal desire for exactitude.) Well. That's what going to America does for one. I have already warned Tom that next spring's three months' jaunt may be the last visit
of my life. I know I don't believe in progress. I want to live quietly and harmlessly and perhaps do one or two things right, if possible.

But on the other hand, I have grown lazy and I need to get back into that awful discipline of three hours a day at the typewriter and nothing at all else happening in the day, so as not to get cluttered in the noggin. So here and now we start. I have seen no one in Cuernavaca yet, and only been busy buying out the grocery stores; but in any case we live so far from the center, and have no car, that I think perhaps I'll only have an occasional loving chat on the Buena Vista terrace. Dread seeing Vera. What can I say to her? It appears that slob Ross [Evans] returned for a visit (sponge on Vera for a change?) last February and again departed “to look for a job in the north.” And she loves him. Mr. [Somerset] Maugham is not the only one who knows about human bondage.

I hope little Feli is getting some rest on the Cape. You don't know how to, I think, and perhaps don't really want or need it. But do remember she weighs less than you. I find her always more beautiful, and more miraculous. Alexander has my vote for President right now. I trust you will not ruin Jamie by spoiling (Feli will not help you in that ruin) but I see it will be hard to avoid.

You know how I love you –

M.