BELOVED MONSTER - PART 3The Strange Odyssey of Alfred Chester
BY BLAKE BAILEY
Chester’s apartment began to regress into a dark and chilly ruin. The electricity was long gone, but Chester still had gas since the meter was inside the locked apartment and he’d stopped answering the door. Meanwhile a woman from the phone company called to inform him that disconnection was imminent; Chester promised to pay his bill as soon as his hepatitis got better, and the kindly woman granted an extension. Her heart hardened, however, after Chester spent a long night chatting with a friend in London. That left the gas, until one day Chester heard a crash on the second floor of his penthouse. A Con-Ed employee, with the help of two policemen, had smashed through a door by the fire escape; the man ripped the meter out of the wall, and that was that as far as utilities went.
At this darkest hour, both his career and love life were suddenly rejuvenated. Chester’s vicious review of Updike’s Pigeon Feathers in the July 1962 issue of Commentary provoked a lively debate, and overnight Chester became an almost ubiquitous critical presence. Editors gave him carte blanche to review whatever he liked, past or present, and thus Chester settled a number of old scores—with Henry Miller, for instance, “a pipsqueak whose six phoney inches of revolutionary posturing cannot deeply be felt by our world full of aching size-queens in desperate need of philosophic stallions, bulls, rams, etc.” Also that summer Chester fell briefly in love with a stray beatnik named Extro Emen (a nom d’amour), whom a friend described as having “the face of a Fragonard angel [and] the body of a rock star.” By all accounts, too, the young man was remarkably vulgar and stupid, but as Chester would always insist, “Intelligence has nothing to do with love; I have my friends to talk to.” The romance died a few months later in Veracruz, where Extro began chewing raw garlic to keep Chester’s kisses at bay (the latter’s brown, rotten teeth gave off an odor far worse than garlic breath).
Rather like the poet Byron, Chester returned to New York to find himself famous—or anyway in demand. “Publishers are chasing me,” he wrote Paul Bowles, whom he’d met the previous winter. “I had lunch with Jason Epstein [of Random House] yesterday and we were like two Jews from the garment industry trying to outsmart each other. I think I started winning when I said Fuck you, so don’t publish me, everyone else wants to.” Epstein came through with a $2,500 advance, and Esquire followed suit by listing Chester at the “red-hot center.” “I want to be gigantically famous,” he gloated, “and soon, and rich, and soon.”
The first goal, at least, seemed almost within his grasp. In the spring of 1963 he was persuaded to become theater critic for Partisan Review (“squeezing into Mary McCarthy’s old girdle”) with the promise of free tickets for him and his friends. His notoriety quickly spread among theatergoers. When Chester really disliked a show, he tended to talk back to the actors onstage, suggesting alternative lines to those in their dismal scripts. Needless to say he was often thrown out—unless, as sometimes happened, a play was so bad that the audience seemed to prefer listening to Chester.
But it was not Chester’s lot to be contented, even with long-awaited fame. Abruptly that summer (1963) he decided to escape—to accept Bowles’s invitation to live in Morocco. He smashed up the furniture in his penthouse and burned it all in the fireplace, then sold a story to the New Yorker (“Bed and Boards”) about a married couple who does the same thing. He was careful to burn his bridges too: “I’m a little depressed,” he wrote a friend, “because I had a party yesterday and I learned today that I did the following things but don’t remember: bit Muriel’s finger nearly to the bone, smacked Jay, bit Dennis Galvin’s upper arm so hard that he’s been in pain since, smashed Walter’s precious tea cups, tried to jerk off Jerry Rothlein, threw a Bloody Mary at Dennis Selby and later tried three times to push him out the window, put my hand on the cunt of a girl named Sally, and squeezed lime juice in everyone’s eyes.”
Chester in Morocco with his friends Neil Derrick and Edward Field, 1964. By then his wig had burned up in a cooking accident. Photo courtesy of Edward Field. |
Paul Bowles would later remark that he’d never seen anyone adapt to Moroccan life as fast as Alfred Chester, who was “married” (as he put it) within days of his arrival. Edward Field and Neil Derrick had traveled from Paris to meet Chester’s boat at Gibraltar, and the three took the ferry to Tangier and then taxied some 20 miles to the village of Asilah. That afternoon Bowles took them to the beach, where fishing boats were just coming in to unload the day’s catch. “This tall fisherman came across the sand,” Field recalled, “holding a great fish in one hand. He was 19 years old, very handsome in a ferocious-looking way. Paul introduced him to Alfred, and that was Dris.” Dris was no brighter than Extro Emen, and far more loutish, but he could speak a bit of broken Spanish and was highly gifted in at least one respect—happily the one that mattered most to Chester. “Great,” Dris would grunt, when friends asked what sex was like with the hairless “Nazarene” (non-Muslim); “just like fucking a baby.”
For the first few months Chester and Dris shared a dingy rental house near Bowles in Asilah. Morocco was nothing if not cheap, and Chester was able to support his household (which included a maid/witch) on the $100 he received each month for his column in the New York Herald-Tribune Book Week. And while his friendship soon began to sour with Bowles (“a dried-up old queen”), Chester found a soulmate of sorts in Bowles’s wife, Jane. Both she and Chester were homosexual Jews who considered themselves freaks—Jane, lame in one leg, called herself “Crippy the kike dyke”—and both were attracted to the surreal in life as in art. Also, both had been slowly going mad for many years.
Chester left Asilah in October, unable to resist a large apartment on the outskirts of Tangier that rented for less than $30 a month. The most appealing feature was a terrace the size of a tennis court, with a spectacular view of lush rolling hills and the cosmos beyond. When away from his typewriter, Chester began passing his days there, sunbathing, drinking rum, and smoking kif. “Cut!” he’d say, when a cloud floated between him and the sun. “Send it back to Paul Bowles!” But his seeming contentment was increasingly mingled with dread. Drugs and drink fueled his paranoia, and the voices in his head grew steadily louder.
“I have no friends here,” he wrote in February, after the Bowleses began keeping their distance. “Work all day and Dris all night. And pot.” In his loneliness Chester began to spend time at the “Bat Palace,” a squalid ruin near the medina where a lot of beatniks disaffectedly lived. All day long they sat around smoking kif and dropping acid and sullenly discussing mysticism and politics. Chester found them ridiculous and said so. “They think they’re revolutionaries,” he wrote a friend. “They’re just selfish, self-centered, middle-class kids. America doesn’t breed revolutionaries. It’s much too clever for that. I’m the only American revolutionary on this planet.”
Chester’s madness began to get the upper hand. He’d started a novel about his various fantasies that he felt certain would be a masterpiece, and he didn’t want to waste energy on book reviews anymore. He paid 500 francs to the witch of Asilah to cast a spell on his mother that would force her to send money, and also wrote a letter to Jackie Kennedy asking her to become his patron. (“I’m scared,” he wrote Field afterward. “I mean, imagine writing a letter to Jackie Kennedy! Don’t you think I’m crazy?”) One day he stormed into Paul Bowles’s flat and began screaming that the man was spreading rumors about him, that he’d ruined his life in Morocco. Bowles remarked in a letter to Ira Cohen (one of the Bat Palace denizens) that he was fed up with Chester’s nonsense and would have him “rubbed out.” Jokingly Cohen shared the letter with Chester, who snatched it out of his hand and arranged a meeting with Jane Bowles in a public park. “I’m going to come right to point,” he said. “Ten thousand dollars or else.” He explained to the mystified woman that he proposed to “expose” her and Paul as murderers to the American consul. “But Alfred,” said Jane, “I love you.” “Don’t give me that shit!” Chester roared, and left her standing in the park.
Another blow to Chester’s sanity was the loss of his wig, which caught fire one night as he was lighting his stove. Chester managed to fling the thing off before it burned his scalp, but most of the plastic fibers melted before he could stamp them out. Chester took to wearing a kind of skullcap called a tageeya, but that was hardly better than the battered fedoras of yore, and finally he exposed his bald head to the world. One day the Bowleses came to his house for lunch and found Chester lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling; neither guest remarked on the novelty of his baldness, and Chester furiously accused them of “snobbery.”
Chester’s 1965 story collection, Behold Goliath, was a failure in both the US and England (“the writing collapses into derangement and homosexual ecstasy” read a representative review in Harper’s), though by then Chester had persuaded himself that his novel, The Exquisite Corpse, would redeem his reputation and more. The novel had yet to find an American publisher when Chester was visited that summer by his old friend Susan Sontag, now world famous as the “Queen of Camp.” Sontag was shocked by the deterioration of her friend and mentor: First he accused her of trying to seduce Dris, then asked her to marry him; he said that X-rays had destroyed his brain, that the American consulate was spying on him, and in a sudden panic he burned all his diaries and letters. “Is he always like this?” Sontag asked Ira Cohen. When the lights went out in Chester’s neighborhood the night she left Tangier, he thought she’d been executed. “She was, however, alas, not executed,” he later wrote. “[She is] living here in the city of New York where she sticks combs up her ass to induce intellectual activity.”
Meanwhile his landlord had petitioned the Moroccan government to deport him. One room of Chester’s rented house was piled to the ceiling with rotten oranges, and he’d knocked down a wall so he could get outside easier—the better to catch and beat children who taunted his dogs and made a lot of noise in general. The whole neighborhood was in an uproar. In December 1965, then, Chester was conducted to the ferry by police; Columbine and Skouras were destroyed by the authorities.
TO BE CONTINUED
BELOVED MONSTER | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
See all articles by this contributor Anonymous, on Feb 20, 2009 wrote:
a great article | | Anonymous, on Dec 8, 2008 wrote:
great article, well written | | |
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