Burning the Days (45 page)

So it began.

We met a month or two later in the Spanish restaurant—it was his suggestion—in the Chelsea Hotel. I have never passed it without remembering, in the manner of a love affair. He was then forty-seven years old but very youthful, almost impish, lean, soft-spoken, with a wonderful smile. From the first moment I recognized him for what he was, I saw in him the angelic and also
something, call it dedication, for which I yearned. I longed to know him.

He was fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France. I also liked France, that is to say I was in its thrall, but I did not know Colette or Cocteau except for their faces. I did not know Jouhandeau or Paul Léautaud who, when he was an old, forgotten man wrote,
Écrire! Quelle chose merveilleuse!
The France that Phelps revealed to me was a cultured world in which literature endured.

He also loved movie stars, money in the abstract sense, and glamour—at least he liked to think about them. With a colleague he had founded Grove Press and then sold it, vowing to live by his typewriter. He told me of coming to New York one of the first times to interview James Agee, so nervous he’d had to write the questions on the palm of his hand in ink, and of hearing the slow, mortal steps of Agee, who had heart trouble, coming up the stairs.

He had a keen appetite for gossip, without which most conversation is flavorless, and a great personal modesty. I have said “angel” though he was not a gentle, swooning one. There was a call one day from a woman in California who was writing her thesis on Cocteau and wanted advice. She had gotten his telephone number from his publishers. Could she write to him? she asked. “Yes, perhaps you can get my address from my publishers,” he said.

More typically he made one think of Satie, shy, unshined on, true, if not to himself, to the things he knew mattered. His life was like pure notes, unhurriedly played. Seldom did he talk about his own writing, usually with the impression that it was more or less an illness he was trying to get rid of. He wanted to write novels but could not. Instead he wrote articles and reviews, and books that were for the most part compilations. He delighted in stories, remarks, outrageous acts—the uninventable—and believed in a
moral principle that was like the law of gravity: Things had their consequences, including fame. “Il
faut payer,”
he would say. All around him great Babylon was roaring, the city was pounding out wealth, celebrity, crime, yesterday’s newspapers were blowing in the streets, and amid it he led his singular life. He owned neither house nor car. His expenditures were for the essentials. On his publisher’s—Roger Straus’s—desk he once saw a list of advances that had been paid to writers and his name led all the others, he said rather proudly; they’d advanced him more than anyone else. Philip Roth had gotten five thousand dollars for
The Professor of Desire.

“Did that do well?”

“Oh …”

“What would you guess?” I asked. “Twenty thousand copies?”

“Twenty or twenty-five.”

“It was on the best-seller list.”

“Was it?” he said coolly.

Pinned above his own desk were photographs—Glenway Wescott and a boyish Phelps walking down a dirt road together, heads down as if talking, tennis-shoed feet in unison; a picture of Gertrude Stein with the quotation
I am coming to believe that nothing except a life-work can be considered
—drawings, lists, five Italian words to be learned that week, a carefully drawn astrological chart for the month, and Auden’s comment
We were put on earth to make things.
In the hallway was a pile of books to be thrown away, those that, in going through the shelves, he had found of little merit. His was an existence completely focused, and he himself
one of the last fanatics of a religion that was dying out.

He once mentioned—after dinner, table half cleared, his wife asleep on the couch—two books he was engaged to write. One was called
Following,
about people he followed on the street or others whose lives or careers he traced, essentially his voyeurism. The other was
1922,
the year of his birth, divided into 365 parts, not
all with entries, he explained. The book was to be about everything that happened that year or was in progress or had ended, and that would be part of his life, bits about Walter Benjamin, Proust, Colette, in short, the matrix of his world. It would begin at the moment of his conception and end after his birth.

Early on he pressed on me the single book he loved best, and a model, I think, by another unfulfilled critic, Cyril Connolly’s
The Unquiet Grave,
its dedication being from
A never writer,
as Connolly called himself. Phelps had read it, he said, twenty times.

——

The apartment was on Twelfth Street, off Fifth Avenue. It was on the fourth, the top, floor. The door had no buzzer; someone had to come down to let you in or fold the key in a piece of paper and drop it from the window. Up those stairs had come Marsha Nardi, who had been the mistress of William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell—her letters were famous—throwing out her arms and reciting, as she climbed, a poem of Baudelaire’s. Up also had come Ned Rorem, an intimate friend he admired and envied; Philip Guston; Richard Howard; and Louise Bogan; as well as other writers and painters. Ned Rorem, he said, had once proposed to Gloria Vanderbilt. Her reply was worthy of a queen: “But you’ll have to fuck me, you know.” Phelps talked about a friend who had been in France just after the war and with chocolate and cigarettes, unobtainable luxuries, had gotten remarkable signed editions from Cocteau and Colette. “It wasn’t Ned Rorem?” I said.

“Oh, God, no. He wasn’t in the war. He was busy changing lipstick,” Phelps said.

The larger of the two rooms, in front, had a fireplace. Phelps’s wife, Becki, who was a painter, had taken it for her studio. Passing through a small rectangular kitchen like a cottage of its own, one came to the back room, in which they ate, slept, and entertained. It was filled with books and with talk of them.

At their table one night someone mentioned storms and the pleasure of sleeping during them. “Absolutely the favorite thing I know!” Phelps cried. “There’s a wonderful storm in Hardy, do you know it? In
Far from the Madding Crowd.
” Hardy was the greatest writer of weather, he said. Next came Turgenev and Colette, and Conrad, of course. But where were there other storms?

“Huckleberry Finn,”
someone said.

“Of course. Is there one in Joyce? Proust? No,” Phelps answered himself, “all of Proust is indoors.”

“Pavese, in
Devil in the Hills.
”

“Rain.”

“The Grapes of Wrath,
at the end where they …”

“Pnin,
at the beginning.”

“The Wild Palms.”

“A Farewell to Arms.”

“Wuthering Heights.”

On and on it went, titles batted back and forth without hesitation, like a shuttlecock. I soon ran out of them, myself. It was long afterwards, in his copy of Sherlock Holmes, that I came across a word written inside the cover,
Weather,
and beneath it, with the page number, the title of a story, “The Five Orange Pips.”

That night, later, Becki read my astrological chart. She held—they both did—to the Aristotelian belief that this world is bound to the movements of the one above and everything is so governed. Leo was ascendant for me, she said, “and the sun in the eleventh house means powerful friends.” There were hidden relationships and a great deal of promiscuity, unrelenting. “Tell me,” she said, “have all your dreams been realized?” I burst into laughter.

“A great renown awaits you finally,” she said consolingly. “What is it you want?”

“To be an immortal,” Phelps said impatiently, it being fundamental.

Though they did the charts together they never agreed. He was exact, she was intuitive. “Oh, my God,” he would protest,
“that’s
not there.” There was a single, deep furrow in his brow, between the eyes, the sign of a divided life, perhaps, and I noticed a slight trembling in his long, intelligent hand.

——

“Read these,” he directed me one day. It was in the cramped front room that served him as a study on the second floor of the building. The book he handed me was the collected stories of Isaac Babel. He had marked three, “Guy de Maupassant,” “Dante Street,” and “My First Goose.” I had never read Babel. His name was one of those vaguely floating around. The opening paragraph of “My First Goose” was stunning. I examined every word over and over. They were straightforward but at the same time unimaginable, and set a level which it seemed the rest of the story could not meet but astonishingly did.

From time to time, when he was not using it, I myself worked in the room and read the books he had there. Maugham was one.

“Which book?” Phelps asked when I mentioned it.

“The Summing Up.”

“Of course. That’s his best.”

His opinions, honed by years of reviewing, were confident and direct. The novels of Elizabeth Hardwick were “like old wicker chairs.” Faulkner was a terrible writer, “He may be a genius but he’s a disgraceful writer.” Of a prominent editor, he remarked merely, “He’s a drunk.” His favorite English writer was Rayner Heppenstall—I had never heard of him—and, of course, Henry Green. I immediately read
Loving.

“The nineteenth-century form of the novel is dead,” he told me, “it no longer works. It died in 1922 with
Ulysses
—the writer pretending he is not part of the work, is invisible, above it. But then,
whose voice is it?
Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.
Bloom,” he explained, “looking in at ladies’ underwear—it’s Joyce’s voice, of course, but he doesn’t admit it.

“The second form,” he went on, “is when the writer speaks through someone, inhabits them, as it were, as Henry James did or Fitzgerald in
Gatsby.”

“Berryman’s Henry.”

“Yes. That’s perhaps a great work of the second half of the century. Prose or poetry,” he added, “it’s the same.

“The third form of novel is the confessional, the first person, the writer standing there before you, Henry Miller in
Tropic,
Genet in
Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.
Colette wrote a marvelous description of the execution of … who was it? In Genet, the very first sentence …”

“Weidman.”

“Yes! Now he’s immortal. Gertrude Stein said no life that is not written about is truly lived, and there it is.”

It was the voice of the writer, he insisted, that was the first and definitive thing. I had, around this time, seen a van Gogh exhibition, paintings of his and his contemporaries discussed in his own words, and was struck by his saying, in a letter to his brother,
What is alive in art, and eternally alive, is in the first place the painter and in the second place the picture.
Phelps would agree.

“The original form of storytelling,” he said, “is someone saying, I was there and this is what I beheld, as in Shakespeare where who was it says something like, I saw her on a public street, fourteen paces, or something.” It was Enobarbus in
Antony and Cleopatra
he was thinking of. “Now we are coming back to that again.

“Think about what I’ve said,” he advised.

I had heard similar ideas from a writer in London, Andrew Sinclair, who felt the novel, the psychological novel that began with Richardson and explained motives, emotions, and feelings, had
ended with Proust. Sinclair couldn’t read Proust. He didn’t like to hear what the writer said about his characters’ thoughts and actions, he preferred to see and hear the people and decide for himself. The Proustian kind of novel had coincided with the rise of the middle class, its prosperity, and ended with the class’s decline—something he regarded as self-evident. Anyway, it was a tributary, not the main stream. The main stream was story, like the Bible, like Homer.

Sinclair had a deep voice and was, for me, unfathomable. I ran into him from time to time, sometimes when he was married and sometimes not. His first wife, who was part, or perhaps entirely, French, had been very beautiful. She’d gone to Cuba and given herself to Castro. “She taught me a lot,” he mused. “She taught me that everything I’d learned in England was irrelevant.”

Sinclair had some unusual views, among them that anecdotes were the real history. In this leaning towards the fragmentary he was not unlike Robert Phelps, who liked startling glimpses, lines, unexpected details. “Do you realize,” he asked me once, “Freud had no sexual intercourse after forty?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“On the radio,” he said, unembarrassed.

I had a memorable lunch with him on his forty-ninth birthday. We drank several martinis, and enlivened by them I could see, in the light, his good-natured, countryman’s face, the long nose and sensitive mouth. His hand was shaking. “
Mia zampa
,” he murmured apologetically—
zampa,
paw. He was telling stories of Glenway Wescott drinking at a party with the Duke of Windsor. He married the duchess, the duke remarked, because she was the finest fellatrix in Europe.

We were in a restaurant filled with flowers, fresh napery, the faces of women. “His problem,” Phelps said of the duke, “was quite well known. It was premature ejaculation, poor boy. They had gotten him women from everywhere. He was miserable. He’d
never known the male glory that comes from giving a woman pleasure. Gloria Vanderbilt’s aunt was coming back from Europe—this is what started it—and met Wallis Warfield in New York. ‘Neddie is such an unhappy boy,’ she said, ‘take care of him.’ ‘I will,’ Wallis said. She knew what society was: One did everything but one didn’t talk about it.”

“The Duke of Windsor didn’t actually say that?”

“According to Glenway,” Robert said.

——