But the chief elements of the Age of Eliot are no longer with us, and may never return: the belief that poetry can be redemptive, the conviction that history underlies poetry. Such notions may still be intrinsic to the work of Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz—Europeans resident in America. Eliot was an American resident in Europe. Even as he was exacting from both poetry and life a perfected impersonation of the European model, he was signing himself, in letters, Metoikos, the Greek word for resident alien. He knew he was a contradiction. And it may simply be that it is in the renunciatory grain of America to resist the hierarchical and the traditional. Eliot’s “high culture” and its regnancy in and beyond the American university may have been an unsuccessful transplant that “took” temporarily, but in the end would be rejected by the formation of natural tissue. Or, as Eliot himself predicted in the “Dry Salvages” section of Four Quartets,
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
For the generation for whom Eliot was once a god (my own), the truth is that we had the experience and were irradiated by the meaning. Looking back over the last forty years, it is now our unsparing obligation to disclaim the reactionary Eliot. What we will probably go on missing forever is that golden cape of our youth, the power and prestige of high art.
* This essay was written in 1989.
* There is, of course, now a fifth: Toni Morrison.
ALFRED CHESTER’S WIG
Images Standing Fast
THE OTHER DAY I received in the mail a card announcing the retirement of an old friend, not an intimate, but an editor with whom, over the years, I have occasionally been entangled, sometimes in rapport, sometimes in antagonism. The news that a man almost exactly my contemporary could be considered ready to retire struck me as one more disconcerting symptom of a progressive unreality. I say “one more” because there have been so many others. Passing my reflection in a shop window, for instance, I am taken by surprise by a striding woman with white hair. She is still wearing the bangs of her late youth, but there are shocking pockets and trenches in her face; she has a preposterous dewlap; she is no one I can recognize. Or I discover that the most able and arresting intellects currently engaging my attention were, when I was myself first possessed by the passions of mind they have brilliantly mastered, little children.
All the same, whatever assertively supplanting waves may lap around me—signals of redundancy, or of superannuation—I know I am held fast. Or, rather, it is not so much a fixity of self as it is of certain exactnesses, neither lost nor forgotten: a phrase, a scene, a voice, a moment. These exactnesses do not count as memory, and even more surely escape the net of nostalgia or memoir. They are platonic enclosures, or islands, independent of time, though not of place—in short, they irrevocably are. Nothing can snuff them. They are not like candle flames, liable to waver or sputter, and not like windows or looking glasses that streak or cloud. They have the quality of clear photographs, or of stone friezes, or of the living eyes in ancient portraits. They are not subject to erasure or dimming.
Upon one of these impermeable platonic islands, the image of Alfred Chester stands firm. It is likely that this name—Alfred Chester—is no longer resonant in literary circles. As it happens, the editor in question—the one who is now retiring—was among the first to publish Chester. And Chester had his heyday. He knew Truman Capote, or said he did, and Susan Sontag and Paul Bowles and Princess Marguerite Caetani, the legendary aristocrat who sponsored a magazine called Botteghe Oscure. He wrote energetically snotty reviews that swaggered and intimidated—the kind of reviews that many young men (and very few young women) in the Fifties and Sixties wrote, in order to found a reputation. But his real calling was for fiction; and anyhow it was a time when reputations were mainly sought through the writing of stories and novels.
There is, by the way, another reason these reflections cannot be shrugged off simply as a “memoir,” that souvenir elevation of trifles. A memoir, even at its best, is a recollection of what once was: distance and old-fashionedness are taken for granted. But who and what Chester was, long ago, and who and what I was, have neither vanished nor grown quaint. Every new half-decade sprouts a fresh harvesting of literary writers, equally soaked in the lust of ambition, equally sickened (or galvanized) by envy. There is something natural in all this—something of nature, that is. The snows of yesteryear may be the nostalgic confetti of memoir, but last year’s writers are routinely replaced by this year’s: the baby carriages are brimming over with poets and novelists. Chester, though, has the sorrowful advantage of being irreplaceable, not so much because of his portion of genius (he may not, when all is said and done, deserve this term), as because he was cut down in the middle of the trajectory of his literary growth—so there is no suitable measure, really, by which to judge what he might have been in full maturity. He never came to fruition. He died young.
Or relatively young. He was forty-two. Well, Keats was twenty-five, Kafka forty, and, in truth, we are satisfied: no one feels a need for more Keats or more Kafka. What is there is prodigy enough. It might be argued that Chester had plenty of time to achieve his masterpieces, if he was going to achieve them at all—and yet it is difficult, with Chester, to assent to this. He rarely sat still. Time ran away with him, and hauled him from America to Europe to North Africa, and muddled him, and got in his way. His dogs—repulsive wild things he kept as pets—got in his way. His impatient and exotic loves got in his way. His fears and imaginings got in his way. Finally—the most dangerous condition for any writer—it was the desolation of life itself that got in his way: moral anguish, illness, helpless and aimless wanting, relentless loneliness, decline.
All this I know from the hearsay of that small accumulation of letters and essays and other testimony by witnesses to his latterday bitterness, and the suffering it led to. By then, Chester and I were long since estranged—or merely, on my part, out of touch. I am as certain as I can be of anything that I was never in Chester’s mind in the last decade of his life; but he was always in mine. He was a figure, a presence, a regret, a light, an ache. And no matter how remote he became, geographically or psychologically, he always retained the power to wound. He wounded me when he was in Paris. He wounded me when, in 1970, we were both in Jerusalem. And once—much, much earlier—in an epistolary discussion of what we both termed “the nature of love,” I wounded him terribly: so terribly that, after those letters were irretrievably written, and read, and answered, our friendship deteriorated. Paris, Tangier, Jerusalem. He lived in all these fabled cities, but I knew him only in New York. I knew him only at—so to speak—the beginning. “In my beginning is my end” was not true for Chester; and having been there at the beginning, I am convinced that he was intended for an end utterly unlike the one he had. I have always believed this—that his life as he was driven to conduct it was a distortion, not a destiny. I even believed that if Chester and I had not been so severely separated, I might have persuaded him (how he would have scoffed at such arrogance) away from what was never, in my view, inevitable.
Unless you count the wig. Chester was the wig’s guardian. He was fanatically careful of it in the rain—he wore a rain hat if rain was expected, or, if it was not, covered his head with his coat. He was also the wig’s prisoner and puppet: it gave him the life he had, and perhaps the life he eventually chose.
So it is possible, even likely, that I am wrong in my belief—a conviction four decades old—that Chester was not meant to die drugged, drunken, desolate, in the company of a pair of famished wild dogs. It may be—if you count the wig as the beginning—that his end was in his beginning, after all. It may be that that orange-yellow wig he so meticulously kept from being rained on determined Chester’s solitary death.
Most people called him “Al,” and, later, “Alfred.” As far as I can tell, except for Mr. Emerson I am the only one who ever called him “Chester,” and of course I still call him that. “Chester” has a casual and natural sound to it, and not merely because it can pass
as a given name. I go on saying “Chester” because that is how I first heard him referred to. Mr. Emerson regularly said “Chester.” Me he called, according to the manners of the time, “miss.” On the other hand, it was not quite the manners of the time; it was a parody of the time before our time; sarcasm and parody and a kind of thrillingly sardonic spite were what Mr. Emerson specialized in. Mr. Emerson’s own first name was not accessible to us; in any case, I cannot recollect it. Like Chester in Jerusalem a quarter of a century on, Mr. Emerson either was or was not a suicide. In the summer following our semester with him, the story went, Mr. Emerson stepped into a wood and shot himself. The wood, the shotgun, the acid torque of Mr. Emerson’s mouth at the moment of extinction—they all scattered into chill drops of conjecture, drowned in the roil of the thousands of ex-soldiers who were flooding New York University that year. The only thing verifiable in the rumor of Mr. Emerson’s suicide was the certainty of his absence: he never came back to teach in the fall.
Mr. Emerson’s class was freshman composition, and it was in this class, in 1946, that Chester and I first met. We were starting college immediately after the war—the Second World War, which my generation, despite Korea and Vietnam, will always call, plainly and unqualifiedly, “the war.” The G.I. Bill was in full steam, and Washington Square College—a former factory building that housed the downtown liberal arts branch of N.Y.U.—had reverted to assembly-line procedures for the returning swarms of serious men still in army jackets and boots, many of them New Yorkers, but many of them not: diffident Midwesterners with names like Vernon and Wendell, wretchedly quartered in Long Island Quonset huts together with old-fashioned wives and quantities of babies. To the local teen-agers just out of high school, they seemed unimpassioned and literal-minded—grave, patient, humorless old men. Some of them actually were old: twenty-seven, thirty-two, even thirty-five. The government, in a historic act of public gratitude, was footing the bill for the higher education of veterans; the veterans, for their part, were intent on getting through and getting jobs. They were nothing if not pragmatic. They wanted to know what poetry and history were for.
The truth is, I despised these anxious grownups, in their seasoned khaki, with their sticky domestic worries and ugly practical needs. I felt them to be intruders, or obstacles, or something worse: contaminants. Their massive presence was an affront to literature, to the classical vision, to the purity of awe and reverence, to mind. They had an indolent contempt for contemplation, for philosophy, for beauty. There were so many of them that the un-ventilated lecture halls, thronged, smelled of old shoes, stale flatulence, boredom. The younger students sprawled or squatted in the aisles while the veterans took mechanical notes in childishly slanted handwriting. Their gaze was thickened, dense, as if in trance, exhausted: when, in the first session of the term, a professor of Government (a required course), quoting Aristotle, startled the air with the words “Man is by nature a political animal,” they never looked up—as if “animal,” used like that, were not the most amazing syllables in the world. Nothing struck them as new, nothing enchanted them, nothing could astonish them. They were a mob of sleepwalkers, heating up the packed corridors and crammed staircases with their sluggish breath and the perpetual fog of their cigarette smoke, inching like a languid deluge from one overcrowded classroom to another. They were too old, too enervated, too indifferent. In the commons I would hear them comparing used cars. They were despoiling my youth.
And youth was what I was jealous of: youth in combination with literary passion. Nowadays one can hardly set down this phrase—“literary passion”—without the teasing irony of quotation marks representing abashed self-mockery: the silly laughter of old shame. Of course the veterans were, in their sensible fashion, right: they had survived the battlegrounds of catastrophic Europe, had seen mortal fragility and burned human flesh up close, and were preparing for the restoration of their lives—whereas I, lately besotted by the Aeneid, by “Christabel,” by Shelley’s cloud and Keats’s nightingale, was an adolescent of seventeen. Chester, though, was not. He was not, as I was, heading for eighteen. He was sixteen still; I envied him for belonging to the other side of the divide. He had the face of a very young child. His skin was as pure and unmarked as a three-year-old’s, and he had a little rosy mouth, with small rosy lips. His lips were as beautifully formed as a doll’s. His pretty nose was the least noticeable element of his pretty face; the most noticeable was the eyelids, which seemed oddly fat. It took some time—weeks or perhaps months—to fathom that what distinguished these eyelids, what gave them their strangeness, was that they were altogether bald. Chester had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. He was a completely hairless boy.
He was, besides, short and ovoid, with short active fingers like working pencil erasers. His pale eyes were small and shy; but they had a rapid look, akin to hiding—a kind of skip, a quickstep of momentary caution. We stood at the blackboard in a mostly empty classroom, doodling with the chalk. The veterans, those wearily cynical old men, began straggling in, swallowing up the rows of chairs, while Chester and I made tentative tugs at each other’s credentials. He identified himself as a writer. Ordinarily I was skeptical about such claims; high school had already proved the limitations of the so-called “flair.” He told me the name of his high school. I told him the name of mine. I knew without his mentioning it that he had arrived by subway from Brooklyn: I knew it because he had one of the two varieties of Brooklyn speech I could recognize. The first was exceedingly quick; the other was exceedingly slow, dragging out the vowels. Chester’s talk sped, the toe of the next sentence stumbling over the heel of the last. A flying fleck of spittle landed on my chin: he was an engine of eagerness. I was, in those days, priggishly speech-conscious, having been subdued by the Shavian Pygmalions of my high school Speech Department, under whose fierce eyes, only a couple of weeks earlier, I had delivered the graduating address. These zealous teachers, missionaries of the glottis and diaphragm, had effectively suppressed the miscreant Northeast Bronx dentalizations of Pelham Bay—a fragrant nook of meadows and vacant lots overgrown with cattails and wild flowers, archaeologically pocked with the ruins of old foundations: building starts cut off by the Depression, and rotting now into mossy caverns. I lived at the subway’s lowest vertebra—the end of the Pelham Bay line; but the ladies of the Speech Department (all three of whom had nineteenth-century literary names, Ruby, Olive, Evangeline) had turned me into a lady, and severed me forever from the hot notes of New York. Chester, rapidfire, slid up and down those notes—not brashly, but minstrel-like, ardent, pizzicato. I saw into him then—a tender, sheltered, eager child. And also: an envious hungry writing beast, and not in embryo. In short, he was myself, though mine was the heavier envy, the envy that stung all the more, because Chester was sixteen and I was not.
The veterans were invisible. We dismissed them as not pertinent. What was pertinent was this room and what would happen in it. Here were the veterans, who were invisible; here was a resentful young woman who was to vanish within the week; here was Chester; and Mr. Emerson; and myself, the only surviving female. The young woman who deserted complained that Mr. Emerson never acknowledged her, never called on her to speak, even when her hand was conspicuously up. “Woman hater,” she spat out, and ran off to another course section. What it came to, then, when you subtracted the veterans, was three. But since Mr. Emerson was what he was—a force of nature, a geological fault, a gorge, a thunderstorm—what it came to, in reality, was two. For Chester and for me, whatever it might have been for the veterans in their tedious hordes, there was no “freshman composition.” A cauldron, perhaps; a cockpit. Chester and I were roped-off roosters; or a pair of dogs set against each other—pitbulls; or gladiators obliged to fight to the death. All this was Mr. Emerson’s scheme—or call it his vise or toy—arbitrarily settled on after the first assignment: a character study, in five hundred words.
On the day the papers were returned, Mr. Emerson ordered me to stand in front of the class—in front
of Chester, in effect—and read aloud what I had written. There was an explicit format for these essays: an official tablet had to be purchased at the university book store, with blanks to fill in. Then the sheets had to be folded in half, to make a rectangle. The face of the rectangle was for the instructor’s grade and comment.
“Read that first sentence!” Mr. Emerson bawled.
I looked down at my paper. There was no grade and no comment.
“ ‘Gifford was a taciturn man,’ ” I read.
“Louder! Wake up those sleeping soldiers back there! And keep in mind that I’m a man who’s deaf in one ear. What’s that goddamn adjective?”
“Taciturn.”
“Where’d you swipe it from?”
“I guess I just thought of it,” I said.
“Picked it up someplace, hah? Well, what in hell’s it mean?”
It was true that I had only recently learned this word, and was putting it to use for the first time.
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