Besides the fiction, I also happened upon a few reviews of long-forgotten books Von Slyke had done and two essays. The first, titled ‘Meeting Mr Maugham at the Russell Square Hotel’, I took as a jeu d’esprit, possibly a Nabokovian joke, as I’ve found no corroborative evidence that Von Slyke ever met the British writer, let alone visited London before he was himself aged forty, by which time Maugham was long dead. The second piece, ‘On the Neglect of Balzac’, takes as a jumping-off point two incidents – Lucien de Rubempre’s arrival at the Paris Opera and, later on in the novel, the poisoning of Esther’s greyhound – in The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. This essay appears to have arisen from some deeper well of Von Slyke’s being. Balzac’s late novel – with its veiled yet central homosexual relationship – is a disturbingly prescient, possibly seminal book in Purple Circle studies (De Petrie and Axenfeld note it) and the essay posited several themes – self-identity versus accepting other’s version of identity and the question of being ‘elective’ or ‘choiceless’, motifs which would become central in Von Slyke’s and other Purple Circlers’ works.
Expected among the early manuscripts I went through were the two one-act plays, Representations in Indigo, which according to accompanying papers opened to a very few, decidedly mixed, reviews in an Upper East Side Manhattan theatre (now closed but in the 1980s transformed into the popular ‘Bridge and Tunnel’ discotheque Mistinguet) when Von Slyke was twenty-one. Capping it all were the manuscripts containing the early masterwork Systems for Approaching Emmeline, his first critical success, a novel revelling in Von Slyke’s oddly slanted perspective and unique prose style – at this time at its most richly descriptive.
Besides being ‘densely written’ and ‘sexually indecisive’, the early work of Von Slyke – whether fiction or drama – was problematic in other ways, as critics were harsh in pointing out. Plotlines, when they existed at all, were, as one reviewer unkindly put it, ‘indecipherable’, and when decipherable were deemed ‘smarmily suggestive and indeed morbidly unhealthy’. This about work which to our time is almost chaste in its closetedness. ‘Byzantine in the worst, most dark-corridored, back-alleyed, shilly-shallying sense of the word,’ the New York Times dismissed the plays. ‘Approaching new levels of tortuous, torturing, discomprehension’ whined Atlantic Monthly of the novel.
Despite these nay-sayers, the work was, after all, noticed. The novel especially. The aged, still vitriolic novelist and film critic Parker Tyler predictively announced ‘a major new voice fresh out of the despicable American wasteland – a transformative and healing book’. The nearly senile Anglo-Indian author Aubrey Menen, reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, advised readers that Von Slyke was a ‘young eagle unfurling powerful prose pinions’.
It now seems almost natural that Emmeline would be taken up and adored; what must amaze us was that it was done on so limited a front, primarily a few cognoscenti, mostly by the vast number of then still-closeted gay reviewers, authors, critics, academics and hangers-on.
This was also the period in which Von Slyke possessed as friend, confidant, amanuensis and, most importantly, copy-editor that extremely ambiguous character in all of the histories and studies to date of the Purple Circle, Jonathan Flitch. He hadn’t yet become the ‘bitter and cynical harridan’ Dominic De Petrie later described in his autobiographical novel, or ‘the great foul rotting spiderlike cloaca of gay literature’ that Frankie McKewen had mixed metaphors to not quite name in a thinly disguised portrait in his posthumously published novel. It was thanks to Flitch, however, that I got as far as I did in cataloguing the early work. Whatever faults of character or personality he later revealed as a magazine editor (and they were evidently many and extreme), Flitch possessed two positive qualities that should leave followers of the Purple Circle forever in his debt. First was that intrinsic orderliness of mind and habit historians and scholars are forced to depend upon – and applaud when they find it – and second an absolutely unshakeable belief in Von Slyke as an important writer.
That I was able to deal relatively rapidly with the slew of earliest Von Slyke manuscripts is due to the fact that they’d all first been typed up by Flitch from Damon’s handwritten autographs. Typed up twice (on an electric Smith Corona Super-Coronet circa 1964-6, with a defective ‘g’ key that lifted every second time it was struck), so each manuscript exists in what might be called a ‘pure’ version, as well as in the ‘working’ version, the latter distinguished by ‘outside’ editorial comments and emendations. On a few pages of the autographs so altered, one can make out in faded ink and smudged pencil comments in Flitch’s hand, suggesting an intimate literary relationship, one where Flitch gave the writing a first read-through and responded in an unforced manner.
The manuscript of Instigations, for example – the first of Von Slyke’s work I’d read, the original of which I’d been searching for from the minute I’d returned to the hacienda from driving the great man himself to LAX and having seen him fly off East in a Delta jet, leaving me free rein in the little hidden office. In the four (!) typed versions one sees not merely Flitch’s editing, but also several others’ emendations, despite the fact that all versions were typed on the same electric typewriter, indicative of Flitch’s effort. These several groups of emendations are often at loggerheads with each other, suggesting that by this time Von Slyke was no longer solely relying upon Flitch for literary advice.
For example, on page ninety-two of the manuscript (page seventy-six of the published book) I’d marked MS#2, Flitch had written in the margin in comment of a Von Slyke page-and-a-half-long simile ‘marvelous!’ whereas the same simile on page ninety-two of MS#4 has commented in the margin in what I take to be Dodge’s hand, ‘Dame – was it really “like” all that?’ with a suggestion that most of the simile be deleted, cut to two lines. This is what appears in MS#4 and in the finished book.
Now, it’s a well-known fact, according to both McKewen’s and De Petrie’s journals of these early years, when the Purple Circlers first began meeting each other, as well as throughout the letters of Axenfeld to Leo and McKewen during those annual spring months they lived in Florence, that Instigations evolved quite slowly, and was probably written over nearly three years (this Von Slyke himself confirmed in an interview with The Advocate).
It was begun as a short story, then added to and published in another form in Christopher Street. What would be the second chapter of the novel was emended again, obviously by Mark Dodge, and published later that same year in his path-breaking anthology, Young and Gay. Both the first and the fourth chapters of the book were first orally presented at readings of the Purple Circle, in the Leo-McKewen’s Upper West Side apartment and at Mark Dodge’s Chelsea penthouse.
In each case, handwritten comments and alterations on the typed manuscripts in Von Slyke’s own hand are obviously in response to critiques by the others. Most of these seem to have found their way into the final form of the book.
The fourth and fifth – i.e. the final chapters – also show this kind of emendation. They were presented by Von Slyke in the only two public readings we know the Purples to have done together: one in Manhattan and brought about by, of all things, a nascent film group; the second in Boston, co-sponsored by members of a local university’s English department who seemed to personally (perhaps sexually) know Cameron Powers or Jeff Weber, in conjunction with a local independent bookstore.
Confusing as these several versions of Von Slyke’s first financially successful novel are, they approach the limpidity of a Montana mountain stream compared to what happens once Jonathan Flitch falls out of the scene and other helpmates move in.
The works of what might safely be considered Von Slyke’s second or middle period, the novels Heliotrope Convertible and Pastiche Upon Some Themes Alluded to by Gustave Flaubert, and the nonfiction Rejection: A Masquerade exist in a dozen versions apiece. Even the original handwritten ones are a melange of paper colors (puce, mauve, pale canary) and sizes (though standard letter size 8�
� x 11 inches, prevails), as well as in different colors and thicknesses of ink and pencil (some teal, most in blue-black).
Partly this was aesthetic posturing, partly it was because Von Slyke was then ‘editor’ of – i.e. only on-staff writer of – and thus constantly traveling for – a short-lived Condé-Nast magazine geared toward the so-called ‘Airline Sophisticate’. This may also explain why one draft of chapter six of the Pastiche can be found entirely penned with a sculptural Italic point upon richly textured paper, watermarked by the stationer of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Of course, other factors still unknown to us at this date may have come into play.
We have hints and suggestions from other Purple Circlers, in addition to Von Slyke’s early typist’s rebarbative personality, of reasons behind the waning influence of Jonathan Flitch upon Von Slyke’s life, never mind what would come to be known pre-emptively as his style.
Damon had begun dating, then living with, the younger and somewhat more louche Cameron Powers, the least prolific and certainly the biographically murkiest figure among the group. We do know that the earlier years of Powers’s tragically short life included a stint as an actor and yet another as a director and ‘dramaturge’ with a Lower East Side theatrical company of peripheral importance. More than one of Von Slyke’s letters refer to the various elderly gentlemen – some wealthy, a few famous – who’d befriended the young Southerner when he was still in (their common friend and correspondent) James Merrill’s elastic locution, a ‘male Thais’ – i.e. before Powers settled into Von Slykean domesticity and literary circles.
We know of Powers’s personality that he was ‘a good time girl (sic) whose Mississippi charm’ – according to Frankie McKewen (in his heavily autobiographical, posthumously published novel A Boy from Quad Cities) – was ‘Vivien Leigh crossed with Messalina: so long as she (sic) cares for you it’s lilies and Jasmine tea and Whitman samplers, but get in her (sic) way or cross her (sic) and the lilies don’t fester, they fuckin’ explode in your face’.
Flitch himself never openly referred to Cameron Powers’s new influence on Damon’s life or to the growing estrangement between himself and Von Slyke, neither at the time nor even very much in later years. In fact, when he was interviewed for an obscure journal whose editor rightly recognized how crucial Flitch had been in discovering and aiding not merely Von Slyke but two decades further of younger gay writers, Flitch merely said of Powers that he and Damon had first been introduced ‘in a club named, I believe, Scuzz, a block or two off the West Side Highway’.
Reading De Petrie’s trenchant second volume of memoirs, Chrome Earrings, we find a significant gloss on this meeting place: he describes Scuzz as ‘a suck and fuck palace supreme’, colorfully adding that it was ‘a true dive with shirtless studs endlessly fondling their baskets in front, chains separating the front room from the dimly lighted back room, where said studs and other young hotties spend many hours nightly in “receptive” positions, i.e. either on their knees blowin’ or on their backs against the torn baize of the pool table, gettin’ porked’.
Flitch did often say that in later years he and Damon remained in contact and friendly. In the same vein, once he’d achieved success, Von Slyke was known to go out of his way – in often misguided and failed attempts – to obtain positions, occupations and various offices for his former secretary, when Flitch had fallen on difficult times.
Possibly the changing circumstances and the naturally evolving inequity of their relationship were adultly accepted by the two of them. More likely – and according to Cummings and other biographers – Von Slyke fell ‘hard’ under the influence of Cameron Powers, and when that relationship was over, of several other young men, all of whom also exerted considerable sexual power over the by-then late-thirties to mid-forties author.
Oddly, we find almost no textural indication in Von Slyke’s work of the far greater personal influence of Cameron Powers, despite the three years they lived together (years of great Purple Circle activity) and despite the fact that Powers later became a noted book editor for a subsidiary trade paperback line of Simon and Schuster.
Whatever the reason, not the work but the manuscripts, the proofs and the care and upkeep of the Von Slyke papers ended up suffering most. While the ‘Powers Years’ may be characterized by what might be termed literary multichromaticism, the years in which Von Slyke was ‘in thrall’ to the athletic Herve Fraser seemed to encourage utter disorganization among his papers, while those (thankfully not too many) months during which he was in love with honey-blond Achilles Ashe were bereft of any literary output.
Thus, as I soon found out, the orderliness of the papers and manuscripts continued to worsen the further along the shelves I reached. Fully handwritten and typed-out early, middle or final (even nearfinal versions) of Verbatim, Von Slyke’s follow-up to Instigations, as well as the next novel, Leaving Riverside Drive, were scarcely to be located in the secret chamber. True enough, printer’s proofs existed, several copies each of three-foot-long, unpaged galleys, as well as bound ‘uncorrected’ galleys, but it was only when I was going through another half-dozen unmarked cardboard boxes that I located what turned out to be parts of earlier manuscripts of the two books, in no particular order.
Another bag marked Von’s (an LA area supermarket), which I merely thought contained letters, turned to hold much of the first autograph of Leaving Riverside Drive, as well as some of the stories later collected in The Japonica Tree (a title and title story that -with its Southern setting and dialogue – a decade later, represents whatever influence Powers exerted over his more distinguished partner).
From there on it truly becomes chaotic. Another box marked ‘Tax Records??’ which I briefly looked at ended up containing several sections of Verbatim’s first draft. A third cardboard MS box, pencil-scrawled to read ‘Publisher’s Royalties Statements’, did indeed contain some of those financial reports, but also, it turned out, the rest of what might have been a second draft of Leaving Riverside Drive, which, when I later compared it to the finished book, was more complete than what I’d found in the supermarket shopping bag. By this time I’d reached boxes on which what I now recognized as Von Slyke’s hand had written ‘Insurance Policies/Will’ and ‘Electronics Manuals and Guarantees’ and I didn’t at all hesitate.
Inside I did find manuals and guarantees, but also two autographs of the short stories ‘When in Despair with Fortune’ and ‘Hair Gallery’, and, in addition, penned on the inside leaf of the manual for someone’s – Fraser’s? Ashe’s? – Panasonic Business Partner 150 Laptop Computer, the opening paragraphs of Von Slyke’s seventh novel exactly as they would appear in finished form, I mean DOS: Manuscript in Distress. The title had been taken from a chapter heading of the computer manual, circled by Von Slyke, reading ‘Word Processing Problems: When Your MS is in Distress’.
Evidently – I was forced to conclude – any paper or plastic bag, shopping bag, boxlike container, business, manila or expanding envelope, sheaf of curling paper wrapped in twine or gathered by yellowed Scotch tape, any papers clipped or stapled together, any laundry or grocery list, the back of a PEN Club rejoin reminder, the whiter areas of the Metropolitan Opera Annual Performance Schedule, the margins of correspondence from his health-care provider, the backs of fan letters, the edges and reverse side of a natal horoscope he’d received as a fiftieth birthday present, the obverse of a bank statement, in fact anything and everything made of paper or able to contain paper might contain a draft or manuscript of Von Slyke’s work.
He’d not thrown out much, although seeing what actually remained it was obvious that through sheer sloppiness, inaction, lack of attention and general attrition, losses, possibly even great losses, had unquestionably occurred. If I were to catalogue it right, I had to scour every single inch of the inner room for paper, no matter how it might be marked or unmarked, no matter how unprepossessing a possibility it might appear at first to offer, if only to locate what Von Slyke’s totally unorganized
yet pack-rat-like mentality had left behind.
Scour it and then lay it out in some systematic fashion. For that the library itself proved to be far too small, and I was forced to begin moving material into the huge dining room. Beginning on the table and then, as each new draft, version or proof of one of the thirteen books or any of the more than two dozen magazine pieces appeared, laying it down row-like so that eventually, when there were a dozen drafts or torsos of, say, his title essay of the most recent uncollected essays, ‘G. B. Shaw and Samuel Goldwyn: The Author as Moralist’, the row extended along the tabletop and far onto the dark-tiled floor.
I’m going into detail here, because I want to be very, very clear about the facts: I was not looking for anything in particular. I was looking for everything Von Slyke had written, aware that I might find anything, anywhere.
I’d become convinced that I would know what I’d found once it was in front of me. Damon Von Slyke might have been sloppy and disorganized, yet, as he’d reminded me himself, he also lived quite well and, as was common knowledge, he was unstintingly generous with friends, and thus always short of funds. After he’d made his name with Instigations, not a single article, story or essay, not any paragraph with his name on it longer than a book-cover blurb, was ever again written ‘on spec’ – or free. It was all deemed ‘salable’ and I can attest that it was sometimes sold to several buyers on various continents simultaneously, both in periodical and book form, as well as later on appearing in a variety of anthologies, often several times over.
Also, after Von Slyke’s first fame, nothing he wrote remained ‘in progress’ or in development for very long. Pieces might be revised, but less so as time went on (despite the prevalence of ‘differing’ MSS), and seldom were they as much rewritten as earlier works. They might be retitled, but again that too soon ceased. As a result, knowing what constituted Von Slyke’s finished and published work after about the year 1982, essentially you knew Von Slyke’s work, period.
The Book of Lies Page 6