NEWSLETTER

BY BLAKE BAILEY

On a sweltering day in August 1971, Jerusalem police found a partly decomposed—and weirdly hairless—corpse in a two-story suburban house near the YMCA. The floors were covered with boxes, their contents exploded around the rooms amid a startling profusion of pill and liquor bottles. Two starving dogs howled and snarled in a locked closet. As much as anything these dogs had made “the bald meshugganeh” notorious in the neighborhood: They’d bitten a number of children to the glee of their otherwise morose owner, who was convinced that his neighbors (indeed all the world) were cruelly mocking him.

Israeli newspapers picked up on the story. The American writer, they reported, had led a life of impressive debauchery—an odyssey of drugs and drink and rough trade that extended from New York to London to Paris to Tangier and beyond, until the furies had run him to ground at last in Jerusalem. Such a legend was a bit hard to square with the pudgy, muttering recluse who’d lived behind the YMCA—except, that is, on the odd occasion when he’d suddenly burst out of his door wide-eyed and screaming at children gathered by the fence. The New York Times, anyway, made no mention of lurid rumors one way or the other. Alfred Chester, so the scant obituary read, was the author of such novels as The Exquisite Choice [sic] and Jaime [sic] Is My Heart’s Desire; he’d received a few O’Henry [sic] awards and a Guggenheim fellowship; his criticism had appeared in Commentary, Partisan Review, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. It wasn’t much for a man who, only eight years before, had been listed at the “red-hot center” of Esquire magazine’s “literary universe.”

Gore Vidal, who called Chester’s life “a fascinating black comedy,” remembered when the man had been regarded as a kind of white hope among gay writers in the years before Stonewall: “There was no doubt in my mind that a master had appeared on the scene, Genet with a brain.” Vidal himself and a handful of other, more popular writers had addressed gay themes more or less obliquely—but Chester insisted on a far more explicit approach, a celebration, that shocked even his most sophisticated readers. The story “In Praise of Vespasian,” for instance—about a young man’s ecstatic nights amid the pissoirs of Paris—was squeamishly rejected by one of Chester’s most reliable organs, Partisan Review: “Our objection is not to the subject or its detail,” the editor hedged, “but rather to the rhapsodic treatment.” Another reason Chester was cast from the red-hot center into the outer darkness was the increasing obscurity of his work. His 1967 novel The Exquisite Corpse took its title from a surrealist parlor game in which stories are formed out of random sentences; in Chester’s novel, characters change identity from chapter to chapter, alternating masks and genders while engaging in erotic, violent rituals against the backdrop of an otherwise prosaic world. It was a career-killing book, in short, though in recent years it has achieved a kind of cult status. In 1999 it was listed among the Advocate’s “100 Best Gay Novels,” and that same decade the critic Allen Hibbard predicted, “Once the novel becomes better known, it will doubtless become a darling of academics poised to demonstrate the workings of postmodernism and the social constructions of identity and gender.”

Chester, who despised academic fads and called himself “the only American revolutionary,” would have cackled at the prospect. His obsession with the precarious nature of human identity was no chic intellectual gambit; it was a deeply personal fixation that was gradually driving him mad. In the meantime he went his own way as a critic, too, savaging the reputations of the high and mighty (Nabokov, Salinger, Updike) and the somewhat marginal as well. Of the pioneering gay novel City of Night—whose jacket coyly promised “a novel about love and the ceaseless, groping search for love”—Chester sneered in the New York Review of Books, “Better cut out all that ‘ceaseless groping,’ Jack, and get down to work!” No less than Edmund Wilson was moved to write Chester a fan letter, commending him as “the only critic in New York who knows his mind.” “What a laugh!” said Chester, contentious to the end.


Who was Alfred Chester? He himself was barely able to say. “I arrived on the planet thirty years ago,” he wrote at the age of 37, referring to himself as a “Venusian” who’d taken the place of a “pretty child with lots of brown curly hair.” A typically roundabout way, this, of describing the trauma to which he never adjusted—namely a bout of scarlet fever that left him permanently hairless. The emblem of Chester’s alienation became the ill-fitting orange wigs he adopted throughout adulthood (until the last one melted in a kitchen fire). As a friend put it, Chester “looked like a butch Bette Davis” with his lashless heavy-lidded eyes and rosebud mouth, the latter pursed with menace lest anyone mention the unmentionable thing on his head.

Alfred Chester was born in Brooklyn on September 7, 1928, to Jewish immigrant parents who did their best to help Alfred cope with the loss of his hair. At first they brought a Manchurian “hair restorer” to New York at great expense, but a year’s worth of treatment proved futile. Meanwhile Alfred’s rare forays into the world exposed him to the stares and ridicule of other children, and often he’d flee to his room when visitors came to the house. At the time, public school seemed out of the question, and for years Alfred attended a yeshiva, where he could wear a cap indoors—not a yarmulke like the others boys, but a series of seedy fedoras he wore to shreds before replacing (“I felt any change at all focused more attention on my head”).

At age 14, as Alfred prepared to enter Abraham Lincoln High School, his older sister Mollie proposed that they buy him a wig. The family escorted him to a genteel Brooklyn salon, Simmons and Company, where a jaunty artiste parted a pair of gold lamé curtains and led the boy to an inner sanctum, a new self. “I sat and accepted the wig,” Chester wrote in his autobiographical novella The Foot.

It was like having an ax driven straight down the middle of my body. Beginning at the head. Whack! Hacked in two with one blow like a dry little tree. Like a sad little New York tree. I wore it to school only. Every morning my mother put it on for me in front of the mirror in the kitchen and carefully combed it and puffed it and fluffed it and pasted it down. Then, before going out of the house, I would jam a hat on top of it . . . and flatten the wig into a kind of matting. I hated it and was ashamed of it, and it made me feel guilty.

The wig only made matters worse, but the mortified Chester couldn’t bring himself to part with it. The world had become divided between “wig people” and “hat people”—that is, friends at school who’d seen him with the wig, and friends at home who’d only seen him with the hat per se. (Nobody but his immediate family was allowed to see him with neither hat nor wig.) The danger of encountering “one side in the camp of the other” was a constant source of “terror” to Chester: “[Terror of] the wig people catching me without the wig. Of the hat people catching me with it. Terror. The terror felt when a man leaps at you from some midnight hedge with a knife in his hand.”

Enforced solitude was conducive to artistic precocity, and Chester shone in his freshman composition class at NYU, where he encountered his first serious rival, Cynthia Ozick. Their instructor, Mr. Emerson (who stepped into a wood and shot himself once the semester was over), gleefully encouraged the rivalry by treating the two like “roped-off roosters,” as Ozick put it. For their first assigned essay, she made the mistake of using a word she hardly knew (taciturn), whereupon the brazen Emerson heckled her in front of the class. He then asked Chester to read—a lesson in humility Ozick never forgot. “Behind that fragile youth, dangerous fires curled,” she wrote in “Alfred Chester’s Wig”:

The coarse cap of false orange-yellow hair shook—it narrowed Chester’s forehead, lifted itself off his nape, wobbled along the tops of his ears. He was bold, he was rousing, he was loud enough for a man deaf in one ear. It was ambition. It was my secret self. He was better than I was! “That’s enough. Sit, Chester!” Mr. Emerson yelled. “Gentlemen, you’ll never find a woman who can write...”

After NYU, Chester enrolled in a Columbia MA program to oblige his mother, who wanted him to be a teacher “if nothing else.” Before long he dropped out and sailed to Paris, taking a room at the Hotel de la Loire near the Sorbonne. Within a month of his arrival, he’d fallen in love with a young Israeli named Arthur Davis, who bore a striking resemblance to Marlon Brando and was, to Chester’s adoring ears, “unquestionably the greatest pianist since Liszt.” Unfortunately Arthur was also straight, or so he claimed. After several weeks of chaste, teasing companionship, Chester became so frustrated that he tried to strangle Arthur with a scarf, a gesture that seemed to have the desired effect (and was hardly uncharacteristic of the romance that followed). “All of Paris seems to know about it because we walk hand in hand down every street,” Chester wrote—and a week later: “Last night outside the Café Flore I raged and screamed and limped (my ankle sprained running for a bus) back and forth across Blvd. St. Germain with Arthur chasing me to the delight of passersby. I spend my time wondering how George Sand and Chopin got along.”


TO BE CONTINUED
BELOVED MONSTER | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

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