DIANA TRILLING
39
the sake of
all
of us, it had to be understood as a willed rejection by
Lehmann of her previous self, perhaps in circuitous fashion related to an–
other of the assaults upon reality which were reported of her.
It
was
widely said that she supposed herself to be in communication with her
dead daughter.
Just as Isherwood's
Prater Violet
had once saved me, if only for the
time it took to read it, from the dispiriting run of novels which had to
be dealt with by a weekly reviewer, now, at least for the few moments
that I was able to engage him apart from the rest of the company, he
rescued me from the contemplation of where time had carried
Rosamond Lehmann since the glory days of her young womanhood. We
were at last forced to rejoin the rest of the party and I cannot recall
which of us it was, she or I, who brought Goronwy's name into the
conversation. I daresay it was
I.
"Goronwy!" Lehmann spat out ven–
omously. Her contempt was unmediated. I remember reading of Freud
that when he was dying of cancer, he refused medication to ease his pain;
he didn't want his mind dulled,and he was indignant to learn that his
personal physician had been giving him a narcotic.
Bei welchen Recht?
By
what right, he demanded, did someone administer to him a medication
he had expressly forbidden?
Bei welchen Recht:
the three hard words had
remained my address to all impermissible power, the cry of brave spirit
overridden by hostile circumstance, and they echoed in my mind as I
thought of the virtuous authority that Rosamond Lehmann took to
herself in her condemnation ofRees.
To the end of his life, ill and dying, with Margie gone, Goronwy
had only reason to depend upon.
It
had not always stood by him but he
had stood by it. To depend upon reason is to leave oneself open to the
unreason which fills the universe. The reliable Rosamund Lehmann could
break off her chat with the dead in order to pass judgment upon the
unreliable Goronmwy.
In
the fall of 1975, Goronwy made his first and only visit to New
York. Our son, who had been living in London, had come home to be
with his dying father. Leaving Lionel in his charge, I took Goronwy to
lunch in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, the nearest approach we
then had in New York to the Connaught Grill in London . Goronwy
would appreciate the similarity and the · differences. He had an
Englishman's lunch , a full-course dinner, and after lunch we rode up
Fifth Avenue by bus. On our ride, I pointed out some of the passing
sights of the city: the view across Central Park, the Children's Zoo, the
