NEWSLETTER

BY BLAKE BAILEY

At JFK airport Chester called his old friend Harriet Sohmers and asked if she’d put him up for a few days. She was delighted; at last Chester would get to meet his two-year-old godson, Milo, with whom she’d been pregnant when Chester had left for Morocco. “And there was my tanned, now wigless, darling,” she remembered, “slimmer, harder looking, pale eyes glittering with madness.” Incessantly he talked about the green Volkswagens following him around the world, the aliens who were using his brain as a radio receiver, and so on. One day he accused her of bugging his room. Finally she strapped her toddler securely in his chair and confronted Chester with a nine-inch bread knife held behind her back: Act sane, she ordered him, or leave.

Chester relocated to a walk-up apartment at 71 St. Mark’s Place, where he began work on his novella The Foot, a fragmented account of his past and present lives. “The fire engines and screaming red cars,” he wrote, “are at the corner of First Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. In hysterical impersonation of my interior life.” Chester begged his mother to give him money for drapes that would muffle the din; when she refused, he assaulted her—or rather assaulted the “stand-in,” he said, whom his mother had hired for the scene. Afterward in court he was confronted by his whole horrified family: “I found it hard to contain a giggle,” he noted. “Little tan-knitted Mama with her loyal and loving brood, while I the monster murderer on the wrong side of the table.” He was ordered to get psychiatric help, and began his sessions with the renowned Laura Perls.

On a more positive note, Simon and Schuster had accepted his novel. Richard Kluger, Chester’s editor at Book Week, had recently joined the firm and persuaded his boss Robert Gottlieb that The Exquisite Corpse was a quirky work of genius. Both men realized the book would be a tough sell, and Kluger was gratified to learn that the eminent Susan Sontag was a great admirer of the author’s work. Over lunch with Kluger, however, she firmly refused to have her name associated with Chester in any way whatsoever: “I’m tired of playing den mother to America’s homosexuals,” she remarked. The Exquisite Corpse, published the following year, was largely ignored.

Chester didn’t wait to see the results. On the proceeds of his long-awaited patrimony, he’d begun wandering around the world in search of a safe haven. One day his editor at Deutsch, Diana Athill, found Chester sitting in her London office, hunched and staring. He wondered if she had any typing for him to do. Then: “Will you call the prime minister and tell him to stop it?” The British government was harassing him, he explained; the voices wouldn’t stop. The worst part was that Chester realized he’d never really existed, that his work had been entirely written by mysterious Others. When the tactful Athill inquired what had brought him to London, Chester gave her a “stony” look: He was here—as she well knew!—because of what she’d told him in Fez. “Oh yes, you have,” he said, when she pointed out that she’d never been to Fez. Athill let it go and found a manuscript for Chester to type (he thought typing might help drown the voices); she then arranged for him to see a doctor at R.D. Laing’s Tavistock Clinic in the East End. Before he left the office, Chester presented her with a flawlessly typed manuscript.

A friend, Norman Glass, was also living in London, and made a point of visiting Chester at Laing’s clinic. Chester (perhaps heavily sedated) seemed barely able to recognize Glass and walked in a slow shuffle; the only sign of emotion he showed was when he mentioned throwing a bowl of porridge at a fellow patient, which made him titter. As Glass said good-bye, he started to give Chester a hug: “But then I experienced grief,” he remembered, “for he did not respond at all except by an utter lack of response. I had the uncanny impression that I was touching something stony and at the same time horribly soft.” When Glass returned a few days later, Chester mentioned that he was about to be interviewed by Brian Glanville of the BBC and asked Glass to go in his place; he proposed they shave Glass’s head and change his nose. At last the two went together. “Does Norman Mailer represent American youth?” Glanville suavely inquired of his guest. “No, he doesn’t,” Chester intoned. “Do many Negroes read James Baldwin?” “No, they don’t.” Thankfully it was soon over, and Chester returned to the clinic.

A few weeks later he was back in Morocco, where he rented a villa on the Mountain near the likes of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. Paul Bowles was unimpressed by Chester’s growing eccentricity: “Alfred’s still on his lost-identity kick,” he reported. If anything, he seemed to regard Chester as a mildly amusing freak. “Let’s see how Alfred’s doing,” he chuckled one night to his friend John Hopkins. They found him clad in a kind of G-string, sleeping on the floor of a whitewashed room with a new pair of dogs, who (according to Hopkins) “crapped and pissed on him.” A huge fire blazed almost up to the ceiling. When Bowles and Hopkins began to leave, Chester ran after them and began raving about a dinner party he hadn’t been invited to. “He looked and acted so weird,” said Hopkins, “sweating like a little lobster, you didn’t know if he was human.” After a while Chester drifted into a crowd of “old French junkies and queens and lady lushes,” as Bowles described them. He also resumed his friendship with Jane Bowles, now almost completely mad as well. His final stay in Morocco lasted until May 1968, when he was permanently banished.


“The idea of Israel had been with me for some time,” Chester wrote, “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.”

It was not to be. In August 1969—after an unhappy year in Brooklyn Heights—Chester and his dogs moved into the top floor of a large, empty house owned by a Protestant church in East Jerusalem; before long, however, children took to gathering round the iron-spiked fence to tease the dogs and drive their master into a frenzy. As ever, traffic noise was also a problem, and the scathing letters Chester wrote to Shimon Peres (then the transport minister) didn’t seem to help.

Chester did find a single, kindly soul in Jerusalem who sheltered him somewhat from pain and (perceived) persecution. Robert Friend, a poet on the faculty of Hebrew University, had almost met Chester a year before in New York, encouraged by their “obsessed” mutual friends Edward Field and Neil Derrick: “They told anecdote after anecdote,” Friend remembered, “all presenting Alfred as a beloved monster of legend, too fabulous not to be true.” Friend was intrigued but elected to pass at the time; Chester, however, had also heard of Friend, and one desolate day in the summer of 1970 he gave the man a call.

Field and Derrick had hardly exaggerated, as Friend soon discovered. Though Chester got through his days on cognac and barbiturates and was often barely able to speak, he struck Friend as a fascinating creature—”someone on whom nothing is lost,” as Henry James would have it. He spoke in a hesitant, slurred voice, grimacing at sudden flashes of insight and wandering off into labyrinthine digressions without ever quite losing the thread. Always he spoke his mind, whatever that happened to be. “Your prose is a disappointment,” he announced after reading Friend’s dissertation on E.M. Forster. Friend countered with heartfelt praise for Chester’s own work, to which the latter snapped “Literature is shit!”—a constant refrain. Nowadays Chester spent lucid hours reading detective novels and listening to Bach; what little writing he did was flat and humorless, blunted by despair.

There were bad days and worse days. Once when Friend rang Chester’s doorbell, one wild eye appeared in the crack: “I can’t let you in,” Chester muttered. “But, Alfred, I’m your friend.” “My voices tell me not to let you enter”—and the door slammed shut. At other times Chester would attempt to articulate his terror. The world was imprisoned within an enormous bottle, he explained, and one was observed at every moment by Watchers who never sleep—or rather one’s life was projected on a screen. Usually, though, Chester was simply morose. Toward the end he called Friend to announce that his mother had died the day before; he’d mourned her all night, he said quietly, and now his mourning was over. He seemed resigned.

The final crisis came the following summer, as Chester’s lease was about to expire. The prospect of moving yet again seemed more than he could bear. It was too much—he needed total quiet, a garden for his dogs, on and on. Each day he hired a taxi to drive him fruitlessly around the city, east and west, and for two weeks he disappeared altogether. Later it transpired that he’d flown with his dogs to Athens, but there was nothing for him there either. At last, with only a few days to spare, Chester found a house in a distant suburb. Far from seeming relieved, he spoke of the move as if it were a final step into oblivion. “Will you visit me?” he asked Friend over and over. Friend was worried enough to contact Chester’s new neighbor, imploring the woman to call him in case of emergency.

She called a couple weeks later: Chester was dead. She’d wondered at the awful stench coming from his apartment and finally summoned the police; they forced the door and found Chester in the kitchen amid a litter of empty bottles. After the body had been removed, his dogs, Momzer and Towzer, were lured from the closet with poisoned chicken heads. They gave the meat a few hesitant sniffs, then greedily devoured it.

Among Chester’s papers was a last essay, “Letter From the Wandering Jew,” which ended with what amounted to a suicide note: “Surely death is no dream... and there is in truth a homeland, a nowhere, a notime, noiseless and peaceful, the ultimate utopia, the eternal freedom, the end to all hunting for goodness and home.”


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