The New Issue: Leo Lerman
Leo’s bedroom. Though they typically slept together, Leo and Gray kept separate rooms for practical purposes. One reason: Lerman’s distaste for a decent night’s rest. The editor slept only a few hours a night, often falling asleep sitting up with a book in hand. Gray could sleep soundly down the hall.
January 31, 1971: I do not believe, as Proust did, that all self is successively different. The core is permanent, or should be – the matrix. We extend – as a coral reef – accretions transforming the contours. We are not actually changed within – the kernel. We are each a metamorphosis – but the central, central being, that does not change. Image: those Russian dolls-within-dolls almost endlessly.
This book is terrific!
Thanks for that…and yes, read the book.
I loved the current pictures too!
STB
What’s pretty extraordinary about Lerman’s journals — aside from the thoughtful writing and personal honesty — is his first-person candid commentary about still-fascinating cultural figures such as his buddy Marlene Dietrich (who tells LL that she doesn’t like sex, but since men seem to expect it from a sex symbol, however old she’s getting, Dietrich just gives in to get it over with) and Maria Callas (who spills the beans about Ari Onassis’s preference for anal sex and how Jackie O refused to go that far). It’s like an insider’s guide to the realities behind 20th-century culture.