by James Salter
“To be an immortal,” Phelps said impatiently, it being fundamental.
Though they did the charts together they never agreed. He was exact, she was intuitive. “Oh, my God,” he would protest, “that’s not there.” There was a single, deep furrow in his brow, between the eyes, the sign of a divided life, perhaps, and I noticed a slight trembling in his long, intelligent hand.
——
“Read these,” he directed me one day. It was in the cramped front room that served him as a study on the second floor of the building. The book he handed me was the collected stories of Isaac Babel. He had marked three, “Guy de Maupassant,” “Dante Street,” and “My First Goose.” I had never read Babel. His name was one of those vaguely floating around. The opening paragraph of “My First Goose” was stunning. I examined every word over and over. They were straightforward but at the same time unimaginable, and set a level which it seemed the rest of the story could not meet but astonishingly did.
From time to time, when he was not using it, I myself worked in the room and read the books he had there. Maugham was one.
“Which book?” Phelps asked when I mentioned it.
“The Summing Up.”
“Of course. That’s his best.”
His opinions, honed by years of reviewing, were confident and direct. The novels of Elizabeth Hardwick were “like old wicker chairs.” Faulkner was a terrible writer, “He may be a genius but he’s a disgraceful writer.” Of a prominent editor, he remarked merely, “He’s a drunk.” His favorite English writer was Rayner Heppenstall—I had never heard of him—and, of course, Henry Green. I immediately read Loving.
“The nineteenth-century form of the novel is dead,” he told me, “it no longer works. It died in 1922 with Ulysses—the writer pretending he is not part of the work, is invisible, above it. But then, whose voice is it? Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore. Bloom,” he explained, “looking in at ladies’ underwear—it’s Joyce’s voice, of course, but he doesn’t admit it.
“The second form,” he went on, “is when the writer speaks through someone, inhabits them, as it were, as Henry James did or Fitzgerald in Gatsby.”
“Berryman’s Henry.”
“Yes. That’s perhaps a great work of the second half of the century. Prose or poetry,” he added, “it’s the same.
“The third form of novel is the confessional, the first person, the writer standing there before you, Henry Miller in Tropic, Genet in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. Colette wrote a marvelous description of the execution of … who was it? In Genet, the very first sentence …”
“Weidman.”
“Yes! Now he’s immortal. Gertrude Stein said no life that is not written about is truly lived, and there it is.”
It was the voice of the writer, he insisted, that was the first and definitive thing. I had, around this time, seen a van Gogh exhibition, paintings of his and his contemporaries discussed in his own words, and was struck by his saying, in a letter to his brother, What is alive in art, and eternally alive, is in the first place the painter and in the second place the picture. Phelps would agree.
“The original form of storytelling,” he said, “is someone saying, I was there and this is what I beheld, as in Shakespeare where who was it says something like, I saw her on a public street, fourteen paces, or something.” It was Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra he was thinking of. “Now we are coming back to that again.
“Think about what I’ve said,” he advised.
I had heard similar ideas from a writer in London, Andrew Sinclair, who felt the novel, the psychological novel that began with Richardson and explained motives, emotions, and feelings, had ended with Proust. Sinclair couldn’t read Proust. He didn’t like to hear what the writer said about his characters’ thoughts and actions, he preferred to see and hear the people and decide for himself. The Proustian kind of novel had coincided with the rise of the middle class, its prosperity, and ended with the class’s decline—something he regarded as self-evident. Anyway, it was a tributary, not the main stream. The main stream was story, like the Bible, like Homer.
Sinclair had a deep voice and was, for me, unfathomable. I ran into him from time to time, sometimes when he was married and sometimes not. His first wife, who was part, or perhaps entirely, French, had been very beautiful. She’d gone to Cuba and given herself to Castro. “She taught me a lot,” he mused. “She taught me that everything I’d learned in England was irrelevant.”
Sinclair had some unusual views, among them that anecdotes were the real history. In this leaning towards the fragmentary he was not unlike Robert Phelps, who liked startling glimpses, lines, unexpected details. “Do you realize,” he asked me once, “Freud had no sexual intercourse after forty?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“On the radio,” he said, unembarrassed.
I had a memorable lunch with him on his forty-ninth birthday. We drank several martinis, and enlivened by them I could see, in the light, his good-natured, countryman’s face, the long nose and sensitive mouth. His hand was shaking. “Mia zampa,” he murmured apologetically—zampa, paw. He was telling stories of Glenway Wescott drinking at a party with the Duke of Windsor. He married the duchess, the duke remarked, because she was the finest fellatrix in Europe.
We were in a restaurant filled with flowers, fresh napery, the faces of women. “His problem,” Phelps said of the duke, “was quite well known. It was premature ejaculation, poor boy. They had gotten him women from everywhere. He was miserable. He’d never known the male glory that comes from giving a woman pleasure. Gloria Vanderbilt’s aunt was coming back from Europe—this is what started it—and met Wallis Warfield in New York. ‘Neddie is such an unhappy boy,’ she said, ‘take care of him.’ ‘I will,’ Wallis said. She knew what society was: One did everything but one didn’t talk about it.”
“The Duke of Windsor didn’t actually say that?”
“According to Glenway,” Robert said.
——
In the bedroom he was packing. He was going to France that week and also Italy. On a map of Rome I located hotels for him and the best place to change money. Velvet pants were folded in his suitcase, sweaters and shirts, books. As an afterthought he added a bottle of scotch.
On the desk was a letter in black handwriting from Colette Jouvenel, Colette’s daughter, with whom he was going to drive to Italy. Cher Robert, I read. They were thinking of doing a Hollywood film of her mother, and someone was needed to represent the daughter’s interests in discussions. That was the subject of the letter. “She’s a baronne,” Phelps commented offhandedly. “Oh, nothing important—created by Napoleon III, looked on with amusement by the real aristocracy.”
He looked forward to dining on eels with Janet Flanner and accompanying an eighty-four-year-old Marcel Jouhandeau on one of his regular Thursday afternoon visits to a male whorehouse near the Place Pigalle. I later had a letter from him, from Paris; he’d had a meal in the bistro owned by Jouhandeau’s ex-lover, about whom Jouhandeau had written a masterpiece, Un Pur Amour. It was in this letter or another that he told of his delight in discovering that he was able to walk from his hotel, tucked in the corner of Place St.-Sulpice, to the Seine, the entire way, on streets named for writers. He may have exaggerated slightly—I have never been able to duplicate the feat.
Cher cadet, he would often address me in his letters. He was older, it was true, but it was not for wisdom I was drawn to him, rather for his presence, which confirmed all I sought to feel about the world. In the books he gave me to read, in the long conversations, the lines of Joyce, Connolly, Virginia Woolf, stuffed, as it were, in his pockets, he was one of the most important influences in my life and in whatever I wrote afterwards. Would this interest him, I often wondered? Would he find it deserving?
“Do you use vermouth?” he asked sweetly one evening as he brought out the gin, his right hand shaking, almost with a life of its own. “Katharin
e Hepburn has it too,” he commented. “She had to sit on it during a television interview.”
“Why does it only affect one hand?” I asked. “Why doesn’t it affect more?”
“My God!” his wife cried. “Please!”
Phelps himself moaned.
——
He had loved books from the beginning. His father had been disappointed, wanting him to be a real boy, go hunting with him, play ball, while all he wanted to do was read. The plant, his father called him, the houseplant.
He was an only child, born of an unhappy marriage. His father had married his mother because she was pregnant—he hadn’t wanted to, he’d been in love with two other women at the time. When Phelps was eight or nine his grandfather, whom he loved, shot himself. It was during the Depression. The old man had lost everything, including in the end his house, which Phelps’s father had bought and in which they all lived together while the sharp-tongued grandmother, in scorn, ate her husband’s soul. There was a long argument that began over some tiny windows. The grandfather, who was a cabinetmaker, had fashioned two little windows to be set in doors—in those days housewives were being assaulted by roving, jobless men who came for a handout. No one wanted to manufacture the miniature windows, however, and they sat in the workshop. Robert loved them, of course. For his birthday his grandfather installed one in the room, little more than a closet beneath the eaves, where Robert slept. The grandmother noticed it while she was raking leaves and was furious. Here the house was again to be sold and he was marring it with this foolish window.
That night there was a bitter argument at the dinner table. His grandfather went outside and soon afterwards Robert heard his name being called. He went out to the garage where his grandfather had his workshop, and just as he drew near, there was a shot. The old man had put a rifle to his chest.
Robert’s father came running. He began to shout at his father-in-law, who was lying on the floor. A few hours later, in the hospital, the grandfather died.
There was more to come. In the offices where his father worked was a man who had seven or eight children and who the times had made desperate. His co-workers banded together, each to support a child, and Phelps’s father sponsored one of the daughters, a girl of twelve or so.
He gave her money. He bought her clothes. And somewhere along the way she became his mistress. Her name being completely familiar there, emboldened, he brought her to stay in the house. Why, his wife wanted to know? He found some explanation. It was uncomfortable, however, the invisible currents, the instincts. She didn’t remain. Then, needing a go-between, the father confessed everything to his son. For two years Robert served the pair, hiding it from his mother, trying to protect her.
In the end she found out. She had seen them together or someone had told her. Robert was walking with her behind the house, coming up a path, when suddenly she fell to her knees, weeping. That night there was a terrible fight and his father confessed it all. His mother tried to kill herself by slashing her wrists. Two years later she died. It was breast cancer, metastasized everywhere. Phelps’s father married the girl.
After college, Robert never returned home. He had adored his mother, he was deeply attached to her. He drew the curtain. I asked him once about his years in Cleveland; he remembered very little of that, he said.
“But you lived there. You wrote for the newspaper.”
“I used to write obituaries for the Cleveland Press during the summers,” he said.
“Then you do know it.”
“I knew certain people who died in the forties” was all he would say.
He had resected it from his life. He never saw his father again. One day there was a telephone call; it was from his stepmother. Daddy was very sick—she had always called him Daddy—could Robert come? “No,” he said.
Instead he wrote his father a long letter saying that their parting was forever; there was nothing between them anymore. A friend called the next day to say how awful the effect had been and pleaded with him to come home; his father was dying. He did not go. Nor did he go to the funeral. There was a half-sister he had never seen.
One is drawn to lives achieved in agony. His beautiful scrap-books and letters. Earthly Paradise, his assemblage of Colette’s writing to form an autobiography, her own intimate descriptions with his knowing linkage. He wrote another book on Colette, Belles Saisons, in a form he liked, photographs with extended captions, which surpassed most longer works. It had a unique shape, a bit wider than ordinary books with endpapers the blue of Colette’s stationery. When the first copy arrived his wife sat up all night reading it.
“Such a beautiful book,” she cried to me worshipfully the next day. She loved what it represented. I opened it and began to read. I was so overwhelmed I kissed him.
Colette, as it turned out, was his chief subject. He edited her collected stories and translated her letters. I had an inscribed copy of Earthly Paradise—it was the favorite book of my daughter and was buried with her.
The long, fluttering hand, its helplessness becoming worse over the years, could no longer write. It was Parkinson’s disease, psychosomatic, he knew or at least said, the result of rage, self-condemnation, and self-betrayal, in the end fatal. I could barely hear his voice, a whisper leached away by illness.
A long leap forward now to the last time I saw him. He was lying beneath a single white sheet in the heat of July. Very ill, he could no longer speak. He held my hand for a long time and occasionally gave me what I can only think of as canny glances. It was a sweltering afternoon. His torso and legs lay bare. The lean body and beautiful feet, I would have bent and kissed them were it not for the black nurse sitting silent, watching.
——
When I think of him I think of France, the appetite we had in common. He knew the world of its writers. I knew the provinces, the beautiful, empty roads, the faded rooms. The French figure I knew best was, of course, Napoleon. I remembered that he had married Josephine when she was thirty-two, and that she had subtracted five years from her age for the occasion, while he gallantly added one to his. Robert had gone to the Larousse to see if it was true, but about Napoleon I was confident, I had led the class in military history, I knew his life.
In Phelps’s book about Cocteau, Professional Secrets, there is Cocteau’s confession Every morning I tell myself, you can do nothing about it: submit. A suitcase contained his unfinished novel, left for months on Fire Island; the abandoned attempts—I write and write, he said, but it’s fiction, I don’t believe what I am saying—and short stories begun ten years earlier until, I have a strickening sense of waste, of important days of my life slipping away without being marked, or used … He did submit, unhappily, year by year. To me it seemed romantic, like a sophisticated alcoholism. Whatever his failure, he made me faithful to him and to the things he believed. He is woven for me into the stuff of literature, the literary life.
At someone’s memorial a few years later, during the tributes, while girl photographers skipped along the front row to shoot well-known faces, a man rose slightly in his seat and looked back, a young man, intelligent, unsure, in dark glasses and a camel’s-hair coat. I recognized him instantly but with a shock: Robert Phelps at twenty-four, undamaged, ignorant of what he would one day come to know so well, il faut payer.
——
In January 1972, the year’s beginning, smooth blank pages lay beneath my hand, and in hours of undisturbed solitude I began an outline. No, this is not exactly right. The outline, sixty-five pages of it, was scribbled on the back side of leaves of an old loose-leaf desk calendar. The smooth blank pages came three days later during a huge blizzard, the temperature very low, the snow fine as salt. The roads were closed, Denver airport, Loveland Pass.
I was nervous and elated. I knew what I wanted: to summarize certain attitudes towards life, among them that marriage lasted too long. I was perhaps thinking of my own. I had in mind a casting back, a final rich confession, as it were. There was a line of Jean Renoir’
s that struck me: The only things that are important in life are those you remember. That was to be the key. It was to be a book of pure recall. Everything in the voice of the writer, in his way of telling. I had a list of sufficiently inspiring titles, Nyala, Mohenjodaro, Estuarial Lives. I was writing to fit them, though in the end none survived.
This was in Colorado, in Aspen when it was only a remote town. Behind the old wooden house with its linoleum floors was a building that had been a garage and was now a studio with blue, stenciled boards high up on the ceiling, a fireplace, and a counterlike desk along the wall. Writing is filled with uncertainty and much of what one does turns out bad, but this time, very early there was a startling glimpse, like that of a body beneath the water, pale, terrifying, the glimpse that says: it is there.
In the spring, confident, I sent the first seventy-five pages of what I had written off to publishers. Absolutely must have it, I imagined them saying. The replies, however, were at best equivocal. Farrar Straus turned it down. Scribner’s. As rejections came, one by one, I was stunned. I lay in bed at night wrapped in bitterness, like a prisoner whose appeal has failed. I tried to think of the books that amounted to something only after having begged, so to speak, at many doors.
Finally a well-known editor whom I had met once or twice agreed to take the book. This was Joe Fox.
He was then in his late forties—Harvard (swimming team captain), divorced (man about town), backgammon player, also squash, and acquainted with almost everyone. He was a Philadelphian, though he had lived in New York for years among, with other things, irreplaceable pieces of furniture that had been in the family since Colonial times. He had the prep-school habit of referring to himself by his last name. “Fox here,” he would announce on the phone when he called. I do not mean to say he was snobbish or Anglo, however. He did have his systems and rules and was eligible for any club, but he was also supremely democratic and loyal, a man who did his work in a shirt and tie, the work that God and class, not to mention the publishing house, expected. He liked travel, the ballet, and, without the appearance of it, parties. He was somewhat deaf to argument.
