Except for that single passage in “The Foot,” nothing in Chester’s mind was not literary. His life, nearly all of it, was a lyrical, satirical, or theatrical mirage. In the end the mirage hardened into a looking glass. But what was not strained through literary affectation or imitation or dreamscape, what it would be cruder than cruel to think of as black comedy, is the child’s shame, the child’s naked truth, that hits out like a blast of lightning in the middle of “The Foot.” The child is set apart as a freak. And then the bald boy grows into a bold man; but inside the unfinished man—unfinished because the boy has still not been exorcised—the hairless child goes on suffering, the harried boy runs. “I did have the great good luck never to have so much as glimpsed Alfred Chester,” Vidal admits; nevertheless he does not hesitate to name him “a genuine monster.” It may require a worldly imagination of a certain toughened particularity—a temperament familiar with kinkiness and hospitable to it—to follow Vidal into his conjectures concerning Chester’s sexual practices (“sinister pieces of trade”), but one must leave all heartlessness behind in order to enter the terrors of the man, or the child, who believes he is a monster.
And it was only baldness. Or it was not so much baldness as wig. From any common-sense point of view, baldness is not a significant abnormality, and in the adult male is no anomaly at all. But the child felt himself to be abnormal, monstrous; the child was stricken, the child saw himself a frenzied freak tearing down lane after lane in search of a path of escape.
That path of escape (I was sure of this four decades ago, and am partly persuaded of it even now) was homosexuality—implying an alternative community, an alternative ethos, an alternative system of getting and receiving attention. Chester loved women; women would not love him back; Q.E.D. They would not love him back because, by his own reckoning, he was abnormal, monstrous, freakish. He was too horrifically ugly. With this gruesome impetus, he turned his hairless, beardless, lashless countenance to the alternative world, a world without women, where no woman could wound him because no woman belonged.
All this—folded invisibly, or not so invisibly, into notions of “the nature of love”—I wrote to Chester, in a letter sent to Paris. I had heard that he had “become homosexual.” (A term learned at Washington Square College—not from Mr. Emerson—at eighteen. “Gay” had not yet come into general use.) We had been corresponding, not without acrimony, about Thomas Mann. Chester was contemptuous. “Middlebrow,” he growled from across the sea, “Somerset Maugham in German,” though he had so far not approached a word of anything by Mann. I urged him to read Death in Venice. He wrote back, exalted. It was, he said, among the great works of literature; he declared himself converted. By then we had been separated for two or three years. He had gone off to be an expatriate in the second Parisian wave—modeled on Hemingway and Gertrude Stein in the first—and I, returning from graduate school in the Midwest, had settled back into my tiny yellow bedroom in Pelham Bay to become a writer. My idea was to produce a long philosophical novel that would combine the attributes of André Gide, Henry James, George Eliot, Graham Greene, and Santayana’s The Last Puritan; it was an awkward and juvenile sort of thing, and kept me in the dark for years. Chester, meanwhile, was writing and actually publishing short stories in newly established postwar periodicals—Merlin, Botteghe Oscure, Paris Review, Proefschrift. It was the era of the little magazines: these, springing up in Europe, had a luster beyond the merely contemporary. They smacked of old literary capitals, of Americans abroad (Scott and Zelda), of bistros, of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, of existentialist ennui. They were as intellectually distant from my little desk in Pelham Bay as it was possible to be. The Scotch tape that held my Picasso woman on the wall turned brittle; superannuated, she fell to pieces and was put in the trash. Chester in Paris was well into the beginnings of an international reputation—he was brilliantly in the world—while I, stuck in the same room where I had fussed over Mr. Emerson’s assignments, was only another tormented inky cipher. I had nothing of the literary life but my trips on the bus to the Westchester Square Public Library, and the changing heaps of books these occasioned.
The letters from Paris crowed. Chester made it plain that he had arrived, and that I had been left behind. He condescended, I smarted. Death in Venice brought him up short. Literature—its beauty and humanity—had nothing to do with the literary barometer, with ambition and rivalry and the red hot center. Only the comely sentence mattered. The sentence!
Aschenbach noted with astonishment the lad’s perfect beauty. His face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture—pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-colored ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity. Yet with all this chaste perfection of form it was of such unique personal charm that the observer thought he had never seen, either in nature or art, anything so utterly happy and consummate.
We began to talk, as we never had before, of the varieties of human attraction. He was not “naturally” homosexual, I insisted; I knew he was not; he knew it himself. I reminded him of his old stirrings and infatuations. I made no mention of the old rebuffs. I felt a large, earnest, and intimate freedom to say what I thought—we had between us, after all, a history of undisguised tenderness. And had he not yearned after Diana? He was not obliged, or destined, to be homosexual; he had chosen dramatic adaptation over honest appetite.
His reply was a savage bellow. The French stamps running helter-skelter on the envelope had been licked into displacement by a wild tongue, and pounded down by a furious fist. He roared back at me, in capital letters, “YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT LOVE!”
He broke with me then, and I saw how I had transgressed. Privately I took virulence to be confirmation. He was protesting too much. His rage was an admission that he had followed the path of escape rather than the promptings of his own nature. He was not what he seemed; he was an injured boy absurdly compelled to wear a yellow wig. Shame gave him the power of sham—an outrageously idiosyncratic, if illusional, negation of his heart’s truth. He could, as it were, hallucinate in life as vividly as on a page of fiction; he had license now for anything.
Chester is long dead, and though I speak retrospectively about the letter that exasperated him and put an end to our friendship, there are living voices much like his own, and probably just as exasperated. They will claim I am simple-minded in theorizing that Chester’s self-revulsion (sad little New York tree grown into blindness before mirrors) was the true engine of his turning from women. Psychologists and psychoanalysts will know better than I, bisexual men will know better, gay men will know better (and will reprimand me for overlooking the importance of physical loveliness to the homosexual sensibility). And yes, I know nothing about it. Or, rather, I know that no one knows anything about it: about the real sources of homosexuality. Besides, not every boy who supposes himself unattractive to girls will become a man who courts men. No doubt hundreds, if not thousands, of young men unhappy with their looks and their lives have moved on to conventionally heterosexual arrangements, including marriage. A wig is above all superficial: its site is on top of the head, not inside it. Proclivities are likely innate, not pasted on to accommodate circumstance. The homoerotic matrix may inhabit the neural system.
These are fair objections. But how can I surrender what I genuinely saw? I saw that Chester had once loved, and had wanted to be loved by, women. Believing himself radically unfit, he sought an anodyne. Homosexuality was, at least initially, a kind of literary elixir. It brought him apparitions. Who does not recall, on the dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms, the photograph of the beautiful young Truman Capote in a tattersall vest, reclining on a sofa, indolent as an odalisque, with lucent galactic eyes? And what of those luring draughts of Paris and North Africa—brilliant Proustian scenes, Durrellian sweeps of albino light? Anodyne; elixir; apparition. Beyond this, my understanding dims. I cannot pursue Chester into his future; I was not witness to it.
After our last exchange, I never expected to hear from him again. I recognized that I had inflicted a violent hurt—though I had no accurate measure of that violence, or violation, until long afterward, when I came on “The Foot” and the “ax driven straight down the middle of my body.”
But Chester had his revenge: he repaid me wound for wound. If I had intruded on his erotic turf, he, it developed, would tread on ground equally unnameable—our rivalry, or what was left of it. Nothing, in fact, was left of it. Chester was publishing, and being talked of, in Paris and New York. I was still futilely mired in my “ambitious first novel,” which reached three hundred thousand words before I had the sense to give up on it. Mr. Emerson had pushed us into a race, and Chester had indisputably won.
About two years after I had lectured him on love, I took the bus to the post office and mailed a short story to Italy—to Botteghe Oscure, at an address in Rome. It had already been submitted to the New Yorker, for which I had hungrily but mistakenly designed it, relying on some imitative notion of what “a New Yorker story” was in those days reputed to be. The story was a failure—the characters were artificial and brittle, the theme absurd. When it was rejected, instead of disposing of my folly, with the recklessness of envy I thought of Chester’s dazzlements in Botteghe Oscure. He had matured quickly. Whereas I was still writing what I would eventually classify as juvenilia, Chester’s Paris stories were exquisite, and more—focused and given over to high diction, they seemed the work of an old hand. They had the tone and weight of translations from this or that renowned classical European author whose name you could not quite put your finger on: Colette, or Lampedusa, or the author of Death in Venice. Their worked and burnished openings were redolent of delectable old library books: “Once, in autumn, I sat all night beside the immense stone wall that surrounds the ancient cemetery of Père Lachaise.” Or: “Our appointment was for after lunch, down the street from my house in a little formal park full of trees and flowers called the Garden of the Frog.” When I reread these early stories now, they sometimes have, here and there, a poison drop of archaism—as if the 1950’s had all collapsed into the very, very long ago. And I am startled to notice that we were writing then—both of us—in what from this distance begins to look like the same style, possessed, in the manner of the young, by the ravishments of other voices.
Several months went by A letter from Paris! But Chester and I had stopped corresponding. He had cut me off and thrown me out. It was a period, I discovered later, when he was writing hundreds of letters, a number of them to new friends made at Columbia University, where, after college, he was briefly enrolled as a graduate student. When his father died and left him a little money, he escaped courses and schedules and headed for Mexico, and then on to Paris. With no constraints now, he was fashioning a nonconformist life for himself—partly out of books, but mainly inspired by the self-proclaimed expatriate nonconformists who were doing exactly the same. He had made it plain that there was no place in that life for me. Impossible, after our rupture, that I would hear from him; yet I knew no one else in Paris. I looked again at the letter. In the upper left-hand corner, in faint green rubber-stamped print, were two intoxicating words: Botteghe Oscure. The big manila envelope with my story in it, containing another big manila envelope for its return, had been addressed to Rome. This was not a big manila envelope; no manuscript was being returned; it was a thin small letter. Why from Paris, why not from Rome? Botteghe Oscure had its headquarters, whatever they might be (a row of dark shops), in Rome. Princess Marguerite Caetani, the founder, sponsor, and deep pockets of Botteghe Oscure, was a princess of Italy; but ah, nobility travels glitteringly from capital to capital. Princess Caetani—it must be she—was writing not from Rome, where the season had ended, but from a grand apartment in Paris, in the grandest arrondissement of all, not far from a little formal park full of trees and flowers. She had put aside her gold-embossed lorgnette to pick up a silver-nibbed pen. A thin green sheet peeped from the thin small envelope. I drew the paper out in a strange kind of jubilation, half-regretful—it was late, nearly too late, for this glimmer of good fortune. It was years after Chester’s success, though we had set out together. I had been writing seriously since the age of twenty-two, and had never yet been published—all my literary eggs, so far, were in that dubious basket of an unfinished, unfinishable novel.
I recognized the handwriting in an instant. The letter was not from the Princess. Chester was reading for the Princess, he explained, winnowing, going through the pile of awful things the mail habitually brought—the Princess sent everything over from Rome. You wouldn’t believe what awful things he was obliged to slog through. Well, here was my story. It wasn’t all that good, he liked a few things in it, they weren’t completely awful—he would make sure the Princess got his recommendation anyhow.
Chester on Mount Olympus, tossing crumbs. Humiliation: my story was published in Botteghe Oscure. He had won, he had won.
What happened afterward I gathered from rumor and report. Chester left Paris in 1959. Between 1959 and 1963 he lived in New York, and so did I. We never met, spoke, or wrote. As always, he was noisily surrounded, prodding to get a rise out of people, on the lookout for adventures, upheavals, darkening mischiefs. His reviews, of books and theater, were as ubiquitous as sky-writing: you looked up, and there he was. For a while he abandoned the wig, then put it on again. Edmund Wilson, notorious for crusty reclusiveness, sent him a fan letter. But he was restless and ambitious for more, especially for fame of the right sort. He wanted to be writing stories and novels. In 1960 he went off to the perilously companionable isolation of the MacDowell Colony—a retreat in rural New Hampshire for writers, artists, and composers—and stumbled into a private loneliness so absolute that he was beginning to populate it with phantom voices. Unable to sustain his own company, he took on the more engaging job of busybody and troublemaker, begging for attention by riling everyone in sight. In letters that have since been published (how this would have delighted him: he did nothing not for dissemination), he complained to a pair of friends back in New York:
They all have cars and seem rich. Except some of the painters. They see me walking into town and wave to me as they fly by in their convertibles on their way to lakes and cookouts. They are mainly dumb. They are very square. Nobody’s queer, not even me anymore. Besides I hate myself too. I can’t stand it anymore not having any stable I. It is too much. Thrust into a totally new situation, here, I don’t know who I am. My neighbor Hortense Powdermaker walks by and I feel some creature in me rise. I just want to scream fuck I am alfred chester who? But no one will believe me, not even me. who is writing this now?… And the voices in my head go on and on. As there is no me except situationally, I have to have mental conversation in order to be.… Ugh. It’s to die.… WRITE TO ME WRITE TO ME WRITE TO ME AS I FADE AWAY WITH LONELINESS.
I have had a blowout with Mme. Powdermaker at breakfast this morning and am still quivering. I come to the table, at which she, Ernst Bacon, Leon Hartl (a French painter I adore), and Panos, a Greek, sit. Morning, Powdie, say I, for I have been shaking since last night, aching to give it to her. Aching to give it to most of them in fact, this rude, ungenerous, terrified, un-giving teaparty group who preserve nothing but the surface, so illmannered and illbred, so lacking in spirit.… Last night I decided I was no longer going to submit, but to rebel against every act of unkindness. The colony is in an uproar.… First of all I have been persona non grata since last Saturday night when I danced with Gus the cook at the MacDowell version of wild party in Savidge Library.… Gus wanted to fuck me but I wouldn’t let him because of his wife. There has been a party every day since, sometimes twice a day, to which I have been cordially uninvited by the wild young set. I don’t mind. It is all like a tea party with the people made of china. But what I do mind is their hypocrisy, the extreme courtesy toward someone they can’t bear: me. I also mind their bad manners, like leaving me to put away the pieces in the scrabble board, or Powdie saying yes,
very snidely, yes she’d guessed I was a Russian Jew.
There followed a dustup over Chester’s having requested Hortense Powdermaker for a lift in her car, which, according to Chester’s account, she refused, deliberately allowing him to stand futilely in the road in the dark on a summer’s night.
It got pretty hysterical after this and the other tables as well as the kitchen staff were hysterical.
She: (to Ernst Bacon) As head of the house committee, I wish you would take the matter up with this young man. I’m not obliged to be anyone’s chauffeur. It is customary to wait to be offered something. Not to ask for it. You’re a brash young man. You don’t know anything about communal living. You have no place in this colony.
After an official dressing-down, he was asked to leave MacDowell. He was, as he put it in a telegram, “flung out.” He announced that Gus, the cook, and Gus’s wife, were departing with him, along with Chester’s two rambunctious dogs, Columbine and Skoura, who had sunk their teeth into assorted mattresses and the body parts of other residents. (He had been given special permission to bring the dogs with him to MacDowell. He was also supplied with a new typewriter and “a full-length mirror for my yoga.”) “And he is lovely,” he said of himself. “I love him. He is sweet and cute.… O I’m so much gladder to be me than all these pathetic silly other people.”
Fame & Folly Page 10
