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BELOVED MONSTER - PART 2The Strange Odyssey of Alfred ChesterBY BLAKE BAILEY
See all articles by this contributorMeanwhile Chester settled down to work on a novel and signed his letters “Earnest Hummingbird.” When the first chapter of Capote’s The Grass Harp appeared in Botteghe Oscure, Chester decided the little magazine might be an ideal forum for his own work. Its elderly publisher, Princess Caetani, responded to his first submission with a rejection written in her own florid hand: His work was “delightful,” she noted, but alas didn’t suit her present needs; nevertheless she asked to meet the author the next time she came to Paris from Rome. A month later Chester had lunch with Caetani and her friend Janet Flanner (Paris correspondent for the New Yorker), both of whom found him charming. Caetani accepted on the spot “a sad-sweet little sketch” titled “Silence in Heaven,” and demanded to see his work in progress for possible serial publication. Touched by Chester’s poverty, the princess gave him a sinecure winnowing the magazine’s slush pile. One day he spotted a familiar name in his basket. After reading the story with (one imagines) high delight, Chester carefully composed a letter to its author, his old friend Cynthia Ozick. She never forgot the gist of it: “You wouldn’t believe what awful things he [Chester] was obliged to slog through. Well here was my story. It wasn’t all that good, he liked a few things in it, they weren’t completely awful—he would make sure the Princess got his recommendation anyhow.” To Ozick’s humiliation, her mediocre story was published—the first and last for a very long time. “Chester was on Mount Olympus, tossing crumbs. He had won, he had won.”
Happily the French were not nearly so squeamish, and in the summer of 1954 Jamie was accepted by Editions du Seuil, a prestigious literary firm that also published the likes of T.S. Eliot and Katherine Anne Porter. Then, a few months later, Robert Silvers of the Paris Review (and later founder of the New York Review of Books) contracted to publish a book of Chester’s stories, Here Be Dragons, under the magazine’s new imprint, Editions Finisterre. At a subsequent champagne party given by Silvers, the bewigged guest of honor walked barefoot about the elegant Pont-Royal bar. Figaro Litteraire dubbed Chester “L’Inconnu de Pont-Royal,” and the author tried to capitalize on his vague celebrity by enticing Charlie Chaplin to write an introduction to his stories; Chaplin declined, as did E.M. Forster, Lionel Trilling, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The book was nevertheless commended on the BBC Third Programme by no less than V.S. Pritchett, who called Chester “original, fearless, and very capable.” One wonders whether Pritchett would have felt a kindred appreciation for the precocious Malcolm Nesbit, Chester’s nom de plume for erotic novels like Chariot of Flesh. The year before, Chester/Nesbit had struck up a friendship with the infamous Alexander Trocchi, author of such naughty classics as Helen and Desire. Trocchi recommended his protégé to Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press—Lolita’s first publisher—who paid $500 for manuscripts included in his Traveler’s Companion series. Chester was thrilled, if a bit uncertain how to proceed. “Just take a book you like,” Trocchi advised him, “and add the fucking.” For a model, then, Chester chose a novel by his fellow Olympian Nabokov, and hence Chariot of Flesh is (as one admirer put it) “a kind of sodomized version of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.” The French publication of Jamie was delayed for almost two years, as Chester wrangled with translators who tended to omit what the author called “beautiful obscenities such as ‘the proud chalk penises whose erections would dissolve with the next rain.’” Meanwhile the novel was also accepted by Andre Deutsch in London, and the two editions were issued almost simultaneously. In Paris the publication party for Deuil Fantaisie (“Fantasy Mourning,” the novel’s French title) was held at Gaët Frogé’s American Bookstore, where a woman fell through a trapdoor and broke her leg. While the host called for an ambulance, Chester pushed through the crowd of gawkers and peered into the cellar: “Oh, thank God,” he announced, “it’s only Gertrude!” In other words it was not any of the notable French critics, whose respectful reviews did little to encourage sales. The novel did a bit better in England, where it was treated as something of a curiosity. Chester was called “a sort of Henry Miller gone precious” by the Times, while the Illustrated London News went so far as to make Jamie their Book of the Week. The problem of sustenance remained. Starving and harried by a long series of irate landlords, Chester considered every conceivable alternative to full-time employment. Finally he wrote a letter informing his family that he’d just gotten married in Edinburgh to a woman named Helen Irene Henriette Simone de Culaufroid (literally “ass in the cold”). Five hundred dollars’ worth of wedding presents got him through the winter but left his life even more complicated than before, as he had to include references to the fictitious Mrs. Chester in every letter home. “Now I am dragging among all my other tsoress an imaginary wife,” he wrote. “Are imaginary divorces expensive?” As ever, and just in time, another deus ex machina arrived in the form of a Guggenheim fellowship worth $3,000—and no wonder: At the instigation of the formidable Princess Caetani, such luminaries as Thornton Wilder, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Frost, and Lionel Trilling had endorsed Chester’s application. (When Trilling vitiated his praise somewhat with a reference to Chester’s “divorce from reality,” the princess demanded he write a more glowing letter from scratch; Trilling obliged her.) Also that year, 1957, Jamie was published in the States by Vanguard Press—whose list included Bellow’s first novels—and for the second time in three years Chester was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. 
Chester’s Guggenheim money ran out the following year, on the Greek island of Salamis, where he engaged in his nastiest feud yet with a landlady. Strife had been imminent ever since Chester adopted two wild dogs, Columbine and Skouras, who defecated on the floors and made a point of biting everyone with the occasional exception of their master. When Chester refused to get rid of the dogs at his landlady’s request, she persuaded the various merchants on the island to stop delivering goods to the house until her tenant complied. Chester retaliated by refusing to pay rent—in fact he was all but penniless—and hence the woman’s burly sons began menacing him with threats of a beating. Chester saw only one way out: he wrote a more or less straightforward account of his predicament, “A War on Salamis,” and mailed it express to William Maxwell at the New Yorker (“including the name of a local bank and telling him to cable money”). A few weeks later, while Chester feared for his life, the answer came: “Since this piece is one of the best things we have ever been lucky enough to receive,” Maxwell wrote, “we saw no reason not to pay our highest rates.” Chester saw this as a sign and made immediate plans to return to “golden America.”
Since his boyfriend was an Israeli citizen, Chester placed an advertisement in the New York Times offering an expenses-paid vacation to Paris and a free divorce to any woman willing to marry Arthur for immigration purposes. Chester’s first choice was a large woman with a mustache; when it transpired, however, that both she and her family were thrilled over a prospective husband, Chester fired her and found an applicant whose psychoanalyst thought marriage (of whatever duration) would be a healthy thing for his client. Thus Arthur was married in Paris, divorced in Mexico, and finally reunited with Chester in New York. It didn’t last. A few weeks later, at a soirée in Jean Garrigue’s apartment on Jones Street, Arthur made eye contact with another guest, a female violinist. “I’m going to get some sheet music,” he announced, and the two fled the place amid Chester’s stern protests. Arthur and the violinist were soon married and settled in Staten Island, ultimately raising a brood of six children.
Chester retired that summer to the MacDowell Artists’ Colony in New Hampshire, where his dogs ravaged the mattress and attacked other colonists, while Chester’s behavior was scarcely more acceptable. Ostracized and lonely, more depressed than ever over Arthur’s desertion, his letters from MacDowell gave an early glimpse of his desperate sense of muddled identity, the many babbling voices in his head. “Thrust into a totally new situation,” he wrote, “I don’t know who I am. I just want to scream fuck I am alfred chester who? Who is this writing now? And the voices in my head go on and on.” His animus was particularly directed against his neighbor, the eminent anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, who wouldn’t give Chester a ride when she drove to the main house two miles away. “Morning, Powdie,” the trembling Chester greeted her at breakfast one day, and then began discussing her (in French) with the painter Leon Hartl. As Chester related the colloquy that followed:
Soon he was back in New York, where he located a raffish penthouse with a roof garden on Sullivan Street in the Village, above the theater where The Fantasticks had recently started its 40-year run. Chester was determined to move in, despite a landlord who demanded exorbitant rent in hope of attracting a wealthy tenant to refurbish the place. Chester posed as an eccentric millionaire in a velvet suit and brought along a friend as his “interior decorator”; together they dazzled the landlord with a vision of Rothkos and de Koonings on every wall, of a new kitchen and fireplace and bathroom. The giddy man accepted two months’ rent in advance, whereupon Chester had the rent lowered in housing court to its controlled rate of $52 a month. His occasional roommates in this bohemian paradise were the young Susan Sontag and her lover Maria Irene Fornés (whom Chester dubbed “la Société Anonyme des Lesbiennes”); according to the poet Edward Field, the women “sat at his feet like apprentices.” Later Chester gave Sontag his job as theater critic for Partisan Review, an entrée she soon parlayed into fame with her essay “Notes on Camp.” Chester, nothing if not ambivalent about his friends (particularly when they became more famous than he), decided Sontag was “a cynical whore” and rarely missed an opportunity to denounce her: “How dare you say ‘your friend Susan Sontag,’” he wrote in a letter. “You rat, she is my enemy. She is The Enemy.”
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