Half a decade later, he was similarly flung out of Morocco, where he had been living since 1963, invited there by Paul Bowles. A young Arab fisherman named Dris, who practiced sympathetic witchcraft and genial conning—the Larbi of “The Foot”—became his lover, factotum, and dependent. “It is traditional in Morocco,” Chester remarks in a story (“Glory Hole,” subtitled “Nickel Views of the Infidel in Tangier”), “to pay for sex. There are nicer, but not truer, ways of putting it. The lover gives a gift to the beloved: food, clothing, cash. The older pays the younger.” It was not because of his sexual conduct that Chester was expelled from Morocco. Tangier was, one might say, a mecca for “Nazarene” homosexuals from the States, who were as officially welcome as any other dollar-bearing visitors. As far as anyone can make out, Chester’s landlord complained to the authorities about the savagery of Chester’s dogs, and of Chester’s own furies, his fits of quarreling with the neighbors over the racket their numerous children made. At MacDowell he had brought in booze to supplement the bland fare in the dining room. In Tangier he turned to pills and kif, a local hallucinogen, and fell into spells of madness. Bounced out of Morocco, he fled to New York and then to London, where he was deranged enough to be tended by a psychiatric social worker. He repeatedly attempted to be allowed back in, enlisting Paul Bowles to intervene for him. Morocco remained obdurate.
In 1970 I was in Jerusalem for the first time, to read a literary paper at a conference. I had published, four years earlier, a very long “first” novel that was really a third novel. It was sparsely reviewed, and dropped, as first novels are wont to do, into a ready oblivion. In Jerusalem, though, I was surprised by a fleeting celebrity: my essay—many thousands of words, which had taken nearly two hours to deliver—was reprinted almost in its entirety, along with my picture, in the weekend book section of the English-language Jerusalem Post. All this I saw as fortuitous and happy bait.
Chester was now living in Jerusalem. The moment I arrived in Israel I tried to find him. I had been given the address of a poet who might know how to reach him, but the poet was himself inaccessible—he was sick and in the hospital. I waited for Chester to come to me. I felt hugely there; you couldn’t miss me. The Post had published, gratuitously, the biggest “personals” ad imaginable. Every day I expected Chester’s telephone call. It had now been fourteen years since he had winnowed on behalf of the Princess, and more than two decades since I had looked into his bleached and lashless eyes. I longed for a reunion; I thought of him with all the old baby tenderness. I wanted to be forgiven, and to forgive. In contemplating the journey to Israel, my secret, nearly single-minded, hope had been to track him down. In New York his reputation had dwindled; his name was no longer scrawled across the sky. An episodic “experimental” novel, The Exquisite Corpse (horrific phantasmagoria bathed in picture-book prose that Chester himself called “delicious”), appearing three years before, had left no mark. Even rumors of Chester’s travels had eluded me: I had heard nothing about the life in Morocco, or of his meanderings in Spain and Greece and Sicily; I had no idea of any of it. Jealousy, of Chester or anyone, had long ago burned itself out. It was an emotion I could not recognize in myself. I was clear of it—cured. The ember deposited on the cold hearth of Mr. Emerson’s ancient conflagration was of a different nature altogether: call it love’s cinder. It lay there, black and gray, of a certain remembered configuration, not yet disintegrated. Chester did not turn up to collect it.
He did not turn up at all. He was already dead, or dying, or close to dying—perhaps even while I was walking the curved and flowering streets of Jerusalem, searching for the ailing poet’s house, the poet who was to supply the clue to Chester’s whereabouts.
Why had Chester come to Jerusalem? In 1967, back in Paris again, he put on a new English fedora over his now exposed and glossy scalp, and plunged into the byways of the Marais to seek out a synagogue. Not since his boyhood in the yeshiva had he approached the Hebrew liturgy. Despite this singular visit, his habits continued unrestrained and impenitent. He drank vodka and bourbon and cognac by the quart, smoked kif and hashish, took barbiturates and tranquilizers, and was unrelentingly, profoundly, mercilessly unhappy.
In Jerusalem he set to work on a travel report, never published, called “Letter from the Wandering Jew”—a record, really, of personal affronts, most of them provoked by loneliness in quest of sensationalism. In it he purports to explain why he had left Europe for Israel. “No roads lead to Israel,” the manuscript begins. A parenthesis about the opening of a “sex-aids” shop in Tel Aviv follows. And then:
Why I came is a very long story, a couple of thousand years long, I suppose. I’d been living unhappily in France since May, I and my two dogs Momzer [Hebrew for “bastard”] and Towzer who are Arabs, having been born in Morocco. The idea of Israel had been with me for some time, a kind of latent half-hearted hope that there was a place on this planet where people who had suffered had come together to shelter each other from pain and persecution: a place of lovingkindness. Besides, does a Jew ever stop being a Jew? Especially one like me whose parents had fled the Russian pogroms for the subtler barbarisms of New York? Yiddish was as much my first language as English, and Hebrew came soon after, for [since I was his] youngest and belated child, my father was determined that at least one of his sons would be a good Jew.
This faintly sentimental opening (not counting the sex-shop parenthesis) misrepresents. The rest is bitter stuff, bitter against father and mother, against going to school, against childhood and children, against teachers and rabbis and restaurants and waiters, against God (“that pig called Jehovah”), against France and the French, against Arab hotels and Jewish hotels, against Arabs, against Jews, against traffic noise, even against the scenery. Once again there are the rows over the dogs, flocks of urchins teasing, exasperated neighbors, bewildered policemen. There are forays after eccentric houses to rent; unreasonable landlords; opportunistic taxi drivers. There are rages and aggression and digression and jokes in the mode of sarcasm and jokes in the mode of nihilism. Satire wears out and reverts to snideness, and snideness to open fury. Eventually vodka and Nembutal and little blue Israeli tranquilizers take charge of the language—now gripping, now banal, now thrilling, now deteriorated, now manic, now shocking. At moments it is no more than pretty, a make-do remnant of what was once a literary style:
The neighborhood was quiet, the house pleasant and sunny; the dogs had a great garden to run around in and there was a pack of ferocious Airedales next door to bark at all the time. Flowers grew all through the winter—roses, narcissi, pansies, and lots of others whose names I don’t know—and when spring came, virtually on the heels of [winter], the roof of the house went absolutely crazy with those gorgeous Mediterranean lilacs that have hardly any smell but almost make up for it by the tidal madness of their bloom.
“Letter from the Wandering Jew” was Chester’s last performance. A paranoid document, it is not without self-understanding. The Promised Land is always over the crest of the hill, and then, when you have surmounted the hill and stepped into the lovely garden on the other side, you look around and in ten minutes discover that everything has been corrupted. The truth is that the traveler himself, arriving, is the corrupter. Chester, in his last words, fathomed all this to the lees:
Aren’t you tired of listening to me? I am. If I had any tears left, I would cry myself to sleep each night. But I haven’t, so I don’t. Besides, it is morning that comes twisting and torturing my spirit, not nights of dreamless sleep. Morning, another day. I open the shutters and am assailed by the long day un-stretching itself like a hideous snake. Does hope spring eternal? Is there still within me the inane dream that somewhere, sometime, will be better?
A few wild poppies are blooming in my littered weedy garden. When I walk out with the dogs I see the poppies opening here and there among the weeds, and here and there a few sickly wilting narcissi. Surely death is no dream, and that being the case, there is then in truth a homeland, a now
here, a notime, noiseless and peaceful, the ultimate utopia, the eternal freedom, the end to all hunting for goodness and home.
Chester wrote these sad cadences, I learned afterward, less than a block from my Jerusalem hotel. He never looked for me; I never found him. I never saw him alive again. (His dogs, I heard, were discovered locked in a closet, ravenous.)
He lives in my mind, a brilliant boy in a wig.
VERY FEW are familiar with Chester’s work or name nowadays, not even bookish people of his own generation. He counts, I suppose, as a “neglected” writer; or perhaps, more to the point, as a minor one. To be able to say what a minor writer is—if it could be done at all—would bring us a little nearer to defining a culture. The tone of a culture cannot depend only on the occasional genius, or the illusion of one; the prevailing temper of a society and a time is situated in its minor voices, in their variegated chorus, but above all in the certainty of their collective presence. There can be no major work, in fact, without the screen, or ground, of lesser artists against whom the major figure is illuminated. Or put it that minor writers are the armature onto which the clay of greatness is thrown, pressed, prodded. If we looked to see who headed the bestseller list the year The Golden Bowl came out, the likelihood is that not a single name or title would be recognizable. Minor writers are mainly dead writers who do not rise again, who depend on research projects—often on behalf of this ideology or that movement—to dig up their forgotten influence. Minor writers are the objects of literary scholarship—who else, if not the scholars, will creep through archives in search of the most popular novelists of 1904?
Quantity is not irrelevant. A minor writer may own an electrifying gift, but a trickle of work reduces power. In the absence of a surrounding forest of similar evidences, one book, no matter how striking, will diminish even an extraordinary pen to minor status. There are, to be sure, certain blazing exceptions—think, for example, of Wuthering Heights, a solo masterwork that descends to us unaccompanied but consummate. By and large, though, abundance counts. Balzac is Balzac because of the vast thick row of novel after novel, shelf upon shelf. Imagine Balzac as the author only of Lost Illusions, say, a remarkable work in itself. Or imagine James as having written The Golden Bowl and nothing else. If Lost Illusions were to stand alone, if The Golden Bowl were to stand alone, if there were no others, would Balzac be Balzac and James James?
Sectarianism also touches on minorness. There is nothing in the human predicament, of course, that is truly sectarian, parochial, narrow, foreign, of “special” or “limited” or “minority” interest; all subjects are universal. That is the convenience—for writers, anyhow—of monotheism, which, envisioning one Creator, posits the unity of humankind. Trollope, writing about nineteenth-century small-town parish politics, exactly describes my local synagogue, and, no doubt, an ashram along the Ganges. All “parochialisms” are inclusive. Sholem Aleichem’s, Jane Austen’s, Faulkner’s, García Márquez’s villages have a census of millions. By sectarianism, for want of a better term, I intend something like monomania—which is different from obsessiveness. Geniuses are obsessive. Kafka is obsessive, Melville is obsessive. Obsessiveness belongs to ultimate meaning; it is a category of metaphysics. But a minor writer will show you a barroom, or a murder victim, or a sexual occasion, relentlessly, monomaniacally. Nothing displays minorness so much as the “genre” novel, however brilliantly turned out, whether it is a Western or a detective story or The Story of O, even when it is being deliberately parodied as a postmodernist conceit.
Yet minor status is not always the same as oblivion. A delectable preciousness (not inevitably a pejorative, if you consider Max Beerbohm), or a calculated smallness, or an unstoppable scheme of idiosyncrasy, comic or otherwise—or simply the persnickety insistence on being minor—can claim permanence as easily as the more capacious qualities of a Proust or a Joyce. The names of such self-circumscribed indelibles rush in: Christina Rossetti, Edward Lear, and W. S. Gilbert out of the past, and, near our own period, Ronald Firbank, Ivy Compton-Burnett, A. M. Klein, Edward Dahlberg, S. J. Perelman, James Thurber. Perhaps Beerbohm above all. (There are a handful more among the living.) Minor art is incontrovertibly art, and minor artists, like major ones, can live on and on. Who can tell if Alfred Chester—whose fiction and essays are currently tunneling out into the world again via new editions—will carry on among the minor who are designed to survive, or among those others who will be lost because, beyond their given moment, they speak to no one?
The question leads once more to sectarianism and its dooms. It may be that Chester is a sectarian writer in a mode far subtler than genre writing (he once published a pornographic novel under a pseudonym, but let that pass) or monomania. Homosexual life, insofar as he made it his subject, was never, for Chester, a one-note monody: what moved him was the loneliness and the longing, not the mechanics. His sectarianism, if I am on the right track, took the form of what is sometimes called, unkindly and imprecisely, ventriloquism. It is a romantic, even a sentimental, vice that only unusually talented writers can excel at—the vice, to say it quickly, of excessive love of literature; of the sound of certain literatures. Ventriloquist writers reject what they have in common with their time and place, including its ordinary talk, and are so permeated with the redolence of Elsewhere that their work, even if it is naturally robust, is plagued by wistfulness. I am not speaking of nostalgia alone, the desire to revisit old scenes and old moods. Nor am I speaking of the concerns of “mandarin” writers, those who are pointedly out of tune with the vernacular, who heighten and burnish language in order to pry out of it judgments and ironies beyond the imagination of the colloquial. Ventriloquist writers may or may not be nostalgic, they may or may not be drawn to the mandarin voice. What ventriloquist writers want is to live inside other literatures.
Chester, I believe, was one of these. It made him seem a poseur to some, a madman to others; and he was probably a little of both. He drove himself from continent to continent, trying out the Moroccan sunlight as he had read of it, Malcolm Cowley’s Paris as the garden of liberating “exile,” the isles of Greece for the poetry of the words, Jerusalem for the eternal dream. Literature was a costume, or at any rate a garment: he hardly ever went naked. He saw landscapes and cities through a veil of bookish imaginings. Inexorably, they failed him. The Greek island had unworkable plumbing. Jerusalem had traffic noise. Paris turned out to be exile in earnest. The Moroccan sunlight came through as promised, but so did human nature. Wherever he ran, the nimbus grew tattered, there were quotidian holes in the literary gauze.
This is not to say that Chester was not an original, or that he had a second-hand imagination. Who is more original than a man who fears he is not there? “And I would watch myself, mistrustful of my presence … I want to be real,” he wrote in an early story. (Its title, “As I Was Going Up the Stair,” echoes the nursery chant: “I met a man who wasn’t there.”) For the tormented who blind themselves before mirrors, a wash of hallucination will fill the screen of sight. Woody Allen’s Zelig falls into old newsreels, his Kugelmass into a chapter of Madame Bovary. Chester allowed himself to become, or to struggle to become, if not a character in fiction, then someone who tilted at life in order to transmogrify it into fiction. He is remembered now less as the vividly endowed writer he was born to be than as an eccentric ruin in the comical or sorrowing anecdotes of a tiny circle of aging scribblers.
Most of the writers who on occasion reminisce about Chester have by now lived long enough to confirm their own minor status. If he was in a gladiatorial contest, and not only from the perspective of Mr. Emerson’s adolescent amphitheater, but with all of his literary generation, then it is clear that Chester has lost. In 1962, commenting on a first collection of short stories by John Updike, he was caustic and flashy: “… a God who has allowed a writer to lavish such craft upon these worthless tales is capable of anything.” A reviewer’s callow mistake, yes. Updike has gone from augmentation to augmentation, and nobody can so much as r
ecognize Chester’s name. It is common enough that immediately after writers die, their reputations plummet into ferocious eclipse: all at once, and unaccountably, a formerly zealous constituency will stop reading and teaching and talking about the books that only a short while before were objects of excitement and gossip. It is as if, for writers, vengeful mortality erases not only the woman or the man but the page, the paragraph, the sentence—pages, paragraphs, and sentences that were pressed out precisely in order to spite mortality. Writers, major or minor, may covet fame, but what they really work for is that transient little daily illusion—phrase by phrase, comma after comma—of the stay against erasure.
I sometimes try to imagine Chester alive, my own age (well, a few months younger), still ambitiously turning out novels, stories, essays. No white hair for Chester; he would be perfectly bald, and, given his seniority, perfectly undistinguished by his baldness. I see him as tamed though not restrained, a practiced intellectual by now; industrious; all craziness spent. Instead of those barbaric dogs, he owns a pair of civilized cats. If I cannot untangle the sex life of his later years, I also know that it is none of my business. (In “The Foot” he speaks glancingly of having had sexual relations with a woman for the first time, at thirty-seven.) His ambition, industry, and cantankerous wit have brought him a quizzical new celebrity; he is often on television. In degree of attention-getting he is somewhere between Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg, though less political than either. He avoids old friends, or, if not, he anyhow avoids me; my visits with him take place in front of the television set. There he is, talking speedy Brooklynese, on a literary panel together with Joyce Carol Oates and E. L. Doctorow.
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