by James Salter
His name was Davis Grubb. He had written a book called Night of the Hunter. One of the first things he asked me was whether I had read an article—an entire issue of The Nation, I think it was, had been devoted to it—denouncing J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. I had to read it, he said in a low voice. The FBI had been involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Surely I knew there had been a conspiracy? Had I read Mark Lane, who provided proof? No, but I had seen him on television.
“When?” he asked.
“Oh, a couple of months ago. It wasn’t here. It was in Toulouse.”
“Toulouse.”
“You know. In France.”
“I know. I was there last night,” he said. There was the stare of a man willing to be thought mad.
His dog, a Lhasa Apso, may have been named Laddie. They often went together, late at night, to Clarke’s, a bar where Grubb drank with men who were unquestionably off-duty policemen. How did he know they were? I asked. “White socks,” he said. I could see the dog sitting patiently near his feet, Grubb, the drunken father, careless but loved.
It was said that he was an addict. Looking back, it makes sense, the nocturnal habits, the surreal remarks, the continual need for money. One morning he asked me to help him carry a suitcase filled with remaindered copies of his book. He was going to try to sell them to a store a block or two away—did I think he could get a dollar apiece for them? I did not give an opinion. The store was not even a bookstore.
I believe he was lonely. I never saw visitors. I saw him in the hallway, poorly dressed, locking the door to his apartment. He was in desperate shape, he told me. He needed money for the rent, otherwise he would be evicted. I had thirty dollars and gave him twenty; he thanked me with some embarrassment. We walked out together, down Park Avenue, then over to Madison. There was a luxurious restaurant on the corner.
“Do you have time for lunch?” he asked casually.
“Lunch? Not here,” I said.
“Another time, then,” he replied, adding that he thought he’d go in for a bite. I watched in disbelief as he passed through the doors of shining glass.
It was his final image, though I saw something that made me think again of him once in England: a footpath across wide fields and on it, gray-haired, alone, with a staff in his hand and a pack on his back, a man walked, a soiled dog trotting behind him. The years were gone and all possessions. The villages did not know him, nor would he ever be known. He had only what was crazed and unbroken inside him, and he would be well as long as his dog was alive.
——
Of those years, the 1960s, I remember the intensity of family life, its boundlessness. It was an art of its own—costume parties; daring voyages in an old sailboat, a leaky Comet, far out on the river; dogs; dinners; poker on Christmas night; ice skating. We were in a world of families, all young, unscarred: the beautiful Dutch girl and her husband; the painter and his wife who unexpectedly opened a restaurant on the highway, named for one of his heroes, del Piombo; the psychiatrist and his wife who were our first close friends. It was all an innocent roundelay, a party of touching originality being carried on in the midst of real-estate transactions and countryside that was slowly falling, field by field, to builders.
We lived, for the most part, in a half-converted barn near New City, about thirty miles from New York. Of all the houses this remains the clearest—the cozy room that was made into a study just off the front door, the long bright bathroom with a row of windows above the sink looking down on trees and a shed that served as garage, the stone fireplace, the rough wood floors, the huge kitchen. There was a terrace of large squares of slate that had once served as sidewalk in Nyack, and in back, through woods, was a stream. Still farther one came to a long, slanted field planted each year with tomatoes, the mere gleaning of which was a harvest. Fingernails black with earth we brought basketfuls back to the house in the fall.
Not far away, on South Mountain Road, was the aristocracy. The early artists had settled there, and Maxwell Anderson, the playwright, had owned a house designed by Henry Varnum Poor. Of the latter I knew only that his name was attached to certain structures like a particle. The one I was most familiar with had blue walls and rooms of inherited art, Bonnards and Utrillos, Vuillards, and Cézannes. “Callas just left,” they might have said.
The seasons passed in majesty: summer’s inescapable heat, the storms of winter, the leaves of autumn which in a single night fell from the elms along the road. A few days later I drove through. In the great arcade a wave of yellow leaves was rising, driven into the air again by wind, as far as one could see. It was, unknown to me, a foretelling of what was to come, the time still far off when the beautiful debris would rise again and I would write about those days.
——
The famous figures, writers who taught at universities and were nominated for awards, were still lofty to me and remote from the path I was beating between country and town, diurnal in, nocturnal out, listening to the car radio and watching the black, familiar road unreel before me.
I had written a third book, some of it during a summer in Colorado, some in the Village, fragments of it scribbled on the empty passenger seat while driving to one place or another reciting to myself, rehearsing. It was not a maiden book. It was the book born in France in 1961 and 1962. Not a word of it had been read by anyone. I had a letter from Paula written at the time that urged, the important thing, and I go back to what we used to talk about when we were twenty-one and twenty-two, is to do the things you believe you can do, and want to do and will do.
It was my ambition to write something—I had stumbled across the words—lúbrica y pura, licentious yet pure, an immaculate book filled with images of an unchaste world more desirable than our own, a book that would cling to one and could not be brushed away. During its writing I felt great assurance. Everything came out as I imagined. The title was partly ironic, A Sport and a Pastime, a phrase from the Koran that expressed what the life of this world was meant to be as against the greater life to come.
I was at the time under the spell of books which were brief but every page of which was exalted, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. This sort of book, like those of Flannery O’Connor, Marguerite Duras, Camus, remains my favorite. It is like the middle distances for a runner. The pace is unforgiving and must be kept up to the end. The Finns were once renowned for running these distances and the quality that was demanded was sisu, courage and endurance. For me the shorter novels show it best.
This almost perfect, so I believed, book was turned down by my publisher out of hand. Other publishers followed suit. The book was repetitive. Its characters were unsympathetic. Perhaps I was mistaken and in isolation had lost my bearings or failed to draw the line, emerging as a kind of hermit with skewed ideas. At last the manuscript was brought to the attention of George Plimpton, the editor of The Paris Review, which had a small publishing capability, and he at once agreed to take it.
That year, in the autumn evening I hurried towards corner newsstands, their light spilling on stacks of papers, to pick up the just arrived issue of The New Yorker, which was running, in four long parts, the entire book that turned its author, Truman Capote, from a kind of pet into a blazing celebrity.
In Cold Blood filled me with envy for its exceptional clarity and power, and my admiration was all the greater since I remembered the original chilling article in the Times, the prosperous farm family brutally executed in their own home in safe Kansas. I had even cut it out of the paper, it seemed so monstrous and foretelling. Capote, to his great credit, had done more. In a terrific gamble he had set out, flagrantly daring and astute, with nothing besides his talent and a notebook, to lay bare every facet of the crime he could discover. It was a gamble because the case might never be solved and all his time and energy might be wasted. As it was, the murderers were for a long time uncaught.
Blood, sex, war, and names—the same bouquet goes for the Iliad and the front page. In Cold Blood was somewhere
between the two, an enormous success. Capote soared to the heights. He was clever, his tongue wickedly sharp. He had already swooped through the bright lights developing the diva persona that was to prove irresistible, and now there was money, too.
That November he gave a great party, a masked ball, at the Plaza. The guests, in the hundreds—the list of those invited had been kept secret—were a certain cream. Many came from prearranged dinners all over town, movie stars, artists, songwriters, tycoons, Princess Pignatelli, John O’Hara, Averell Harriman, political insiders, queens of fashion, women in white gowns, men in dinner jackets. They were going up the carpeted steps of the hotel entrance, great languid flags overhead, limousines in dark ranks. The path of glory: satin gowns raised a few inches as they went up on silvery heels. Stunning women, bare shoulders, the rapt crowd.
They woke, these people, above a park immense and calm in the morning, the reservoir a mirror, the buildings to the east in shadow with the sun behind them, the rivers shining, the bridges lightly sketched. There were no curtains. This high up there was no one to see in.
In the small convertible I had bought in Rome I was driving past that night and for a few moments saw it. I knew neither the guests nor the host. I had the elation of not being part of it, of scorning it, on my way like a fox to another sort of life. There came to me something a nurse had once told me, that at Pearl Harbor casualties had been brought in wearing tuxedos, it was Saturday night on Oahu, it was Sunday. The dancing at the clubs was over. The dawn of the war.
In the darkness the soft hum of the tires on the empty road was like a cooling hand. The city had sunk to mere glowing sky. My own book was not yet published, but would be. It had no dimensions, no limit to the heights it might reach. It was deep in my pocket, like an inheritance.
——
At the very end of 1969, A Sport and a Pastime having been published with sales of a few thousand copies, I received a fan letter, long, intelligent, and admiring with, although I was unaware of it until afterwards, the title of one of the writer’s own books woven secretly into a line. I would like to ply you with questions, it read. Sincerely, Robert Phelps.
So it began.
We met a month or two later in the Spanish restaurant—it was his suggestion—in the Chelsea Hotel. I have never passed it without remembering, in the manner of a love affair. He was then forty-seven years old but very youthful, almost impish, lean, soft-spoken, with a wonderful smile. From the first moment I recognized him for what he was, I saw in him the angelic and also something, call it dedication, for which I yearned. I longed to know him.
He was fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France. I also liked France, that is to say I was in its thrall, but I did not know Colette or Cocteau except for their faces. I did not know Jouhandeau or Paul Léautaud who, when he was an old, forgotten man wrote, Écrire! Quelle chose merveilleuse! The France that Phelps revealed to me was a cultured world in which literature endured.
He also loved movie stars, money in the abstract sense, and glamour—at least he liked to think about them. With a colleague he had founded Grove Press and then sold it, vowing to live by his typewriter. He told me of coming to New York one of the first times to interview James Agee, so nervous he’d had to write the questions on the palm of his hand in ink, and of hearing the slow, mortal steps of Agee, who had heart trouble, coming up the stairs.
He had a keen appetite for gossip, without which most conversation is flavorless, and a great personal modesty. I have said “angel” though he was not a gentle, swooning one. There was a call one day from a woman in California who was writing her thesis on Cocteau and wanted advice. She had gotten his telephone number from his publishers. Could she write to him? she asked. “Yes, perhaps you can get my address from my publishers,” he said.
More typically he made one think of Satie, shy, unshined on, true, if not to himself, to the things he knew mattered. His life was like pure notes, unhurriedly played. Seldom did he talk about his own writing, usually with the impression that it was more or less an illness he was trying to get rid of. He wanted to write novels but could not. Instead he wrote articles and reviews, and books that were for the most part compilations. He delighted in stories, remarks, outrageous acts—the uninventable—and believed in a moral principle that was like the law of gravity: Things had their consequences, including fame. “Il faut payer,” he would say. All around him great Babylon was roaring, the city was pounding out wealth, celebrity, crime, yesterday’s newspapers were blowing in the streets, and amid it he led his singular life. He owned neither house nor car. His expenditures were for the essentials. On his publisher’s—Roger Straus’s—desk he once saw a list of advances that had been paid to writers and his name led all the others, he said rather proudly; they’d advanced him more than anyone else. Philip Roth had gotten five thousand dollars for The Professor of Desire.
“Did that do well?”
“Oh …”
“What would you guess?” I asked. “Twenty thousand copies?”
“Twenty or twenty-five.”
“It was on the best-seller list.”
“Was it?” he said coolly.
Pinned above his own desk were photographs—Glenway Wescott and a boyish Phelps walking down a dirt road together, heads down as if talking, tennis-shoed feet in unison; a picture of Gertrude Stein with the quotation I am coming to believe that nothing except a life-work can be considered—drawings, lists, five Italian words to be learned that week, a carefully drawn astrological chart for the month, and Auden’s comment We were put on earth to make things. In the hallway was a pile of books to be thrown away, those that, in going through the shelves, he had found of little merit. His was an existence completely focused, and he himself one of the last fanatics of a religion that was dying out.
He once mentioned—after dinner, table half cleared, his wife asleep on the couch—two books he was engaged to write. One was called Following, about people he followed on the street or others whose lives or careers he traced, essentially his voyeurism. The other was 1922, the year of his birth, divided into 365 parts, not all with entries, he explained. The book was to be about everything that happened that year or was in progress or had ended, and that would be part of his life, bits about Walter Benjamin, Proust, Colette, in short, the matrix of his world. It would begin at the moment of his conception and end after his birth.
Early on he pressed on me the single book he loved best, and a model, I think, by another unfulfilled critic, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, its dedication being from A never writer, as Connolly called himself. Phelps had read it, he said, twenty times.
——
The apartment was on Twelfth Street, off Fifth Avenue. It was on the fourth, the top, floor. The door had no buzzer; someone had to come down to let you in or fold the key in a piece of paper and drop it from the window. Up those stairs had come Marsha Nardi, who had been the mistress of William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell—her letters were famous—throwing out her arms and reciting, as she climbed, a poem of Baudelaire’s. Up also had come Ned Rorem, an intimate friend he admired and envied; Philip Guston; Richard Howard; and Louise Bogan; as well as other writers and painters. Ned Rorem, he said, had once proposed to Gloria Vanderbilt. Her reply was worthy of a queen: “But you’ll have to fuck me, you know.” Phelps talked about a friend who had been in France just after the war and with chocolate and cigarettes, unobtainable luxuries, had gotten remarkable signed editions from Cocteau and Colette. “It wasn’t Ned Rorem?” I said.
“Oh, God, no. He wasn’t in the war. He was busy changing lipstick,” Phelps said.
The larger of the two rooms, in front, had a fireplace. Phelps’s wife, Becki, who was a painter, had taken it for her studio. Passing through a small rectangular kitchen like a cottage of its own, one came to the back room, in which they ate, slept, and ente
rtained. It was filled with books and with talk of them.
At their table one night someone mentioned storms and the pleasure of sleeping during them. “Absolutely the favorite thing I know!” Phelps cried. “There’s a wonderful storm in Hardy, do you know it? In Far from the Madding Crowd.” Hardy was the greatest writer of weather, he said. Next came Turgenev and Colette, and Conrad, of course. But where were there other storms?
“Huckleberry Finn,” someone said.
“Of course. Is there one in Joyce? Proust? No,” Phelps answered himself, “all of Proust is indoors.”
“Pavese, in Devil in the Hills.”
“Rain.”
“The Grapes of Wrath, at the end where they …”
“Pnin, at the beginning.”
“The Wild Palms.”
“A Farewell to Arms.”
“Wuthering Heights.”
On and on it went, titles batted back and forth without hesitation, like a shuttlecock. I soon ran out of them, myself. It was long afterwards, in his copy of Sherlock Holmes, that I came across a word written inside the cover, Weather, and beneath it, with the page number, the title of a story, “The Five Orange Pips.”
That night, later, Becki read my astrological chart. She held—they both did—to the Aristotelian belief that this world is bound to the movements of the one above and everything is so governed. Leo was ascendant for me, she said, “and the sun in the eleventh house means powerful friends.” There were hidden relationships and a great deal of promiscuity, unrelenting. “Tell me,” she said, “have all your dreams been realized?” I burst into laughter.
“A great renown awaits you finally,” she said consolingly. “What is it you want?”
