Read Online Some of My Lives by Rosamond Bernier - Free Book Online

Bowles

    I said it was an excellent business letter.
    Janie was a highly gifted writer with an outsized writer’s block. John Ashbery and Tennessee Williams prized her work. She wrote in
all a novel, Two Serious Ladies , a few short stories—a wonderful one was called “Camp Cataract”—and a play, In the Summer House . At her request, I read the play aloud to Oliver Smith. He loved it and produced it on Broadway to a somewhat bemused audience.
    Writing was a titanic struggle for her. A severe stroke put an end to the struggle. Alcohol and drugs continued the destruction of this brilliant, witty, adorable, impossible person.

The Good Neighbors
    B efore Pearl Harbor plunged us into World War II, the State Department initiated something called the Good Neighbor Policy. The idea was to send out the word that we North Americans are civilized people (much nicer than the Germans) and interested in Latin American culture.
    The Museum of Modern Art was an active partner in this program. This is how I, a twentysomething who hadn’t even graduated from Sarah Lawrence (I got married instead), and my husband, Lewis Riley, of approximately the same age, were entrusted with a cargo of North American paintings. We were to shepherd them in turn to Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba. In each country we were to put on an exhibition, arrange for the publicity, and scout the local scene for interesting artists.
    The talent, as they say in showbiz, were contemporary American artists such as Eugene Speicher, Bernard Karfiol, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Thomas Hart Benton, and other WPA-era stalwarts.
    Two other similar exhibitions were to travel to other South American countries in the care of representatives of the Modern.
    My qualifications were that I had been unofficially connected with the Modern and its curators, particularly when the museum was planning the mammoth Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art exhibition for 1940. I knew the leading artists well—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco in particular—and so was able to help out.
    Lew was indispensable in that he spoke Spanish like a native Latin American (Spanish Spanish has a different ring to it) and played the guitar.
    Our first stop was Bogotá. In the course of our duties we got to
know Eduardo Santos and his elegant wife, Doña Lorencita. Don Eduardo was the president of Colombia. Previously, he had been editor of the leading newspaper, El Tiempo , which was owned by his family. The Santoses very hospitably invited us to what was billed as a tea.
    We arrived to find a large group of people, and to Lew’s relief cocktails were served. We chatted and we sipped; these diplomatic novices were somewhat shy about total immersion in diplomatic circles. My Spanish was only passable. French helped. On this trip I was to meet several ladies of a certain age who had studied in Paris with André Lhote. Time passed, and we were mentally edging to the door, when Doña Lorencita announced that tea will now be served and led us into an ornate dining room with a large table set as if for a substantial meal.
    The very solid cakes were served like courses. There was no escape. As we choked down what we counted on being the last bites, Doña Lorencita announced, “And now the North Americans will sing for us.” To our dismay, a guitar was produced; somehow it had been leaked that Lew played the guitar. But he only played to accompany Mexican ranchero songs, and sometimes we sang together in somewhat discordant thirds.
    So there we were, faced with the cake remains and a large attentive audience. We did our best for our country.
    When we had finished exhibiting our wares and made the rounds of local studios, the problem arose as to how to transport the exhibition to Caracas, Venezuela. The local facilities were not reassuring. So I had the entire show packed under my supervision in a truck. I hit lucky with an obliging taxi driver and said to him,