Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (62 page)

I
T IS POSSIBLE
that I am the only person in the United Kingdom who remembers Alfred Chester and his books: what he wrote was too strange to attract a large readership, and we did not overcome this problem. But he remains the most remarkable person I met through publishing and I, and his friends in the United States who, since his death in 1971, have been finding new readers for him, continue to think and talk about knowing him as one of our most important experiences.

He was twenty-six when I first met him in 1956, the year we published his novel
Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire
and his stories
Here
Be Dragons
. First impressions? The very first was probably of ugliness – he wore a wig, his brows and eyelids were hairless, his eyes were pale, he was dumpy – but immediately after that came his openness and funniness. It didn’t take me long to become fond of Alfred’s appearance.

He also inspired awe, partly because of his prose and partly because of his personality. Alfred wore a wig, but never a mask: there he sat, being Alfred, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He was as compactly himself as a piece of quartz.

He had come to London from Paris, where he had been kicking up his heels in green meadows of freedom from his conventional, even philistine, Jewish family in Brooklyn. Already brilliant young New Yorkers such as Susan Sontag and Cynthia Ozick, who had known him when they were students together, were eyeing him nervously as one who might be going to outshine them, but he had needed to get away. And now he was in a stage of first-novel euphoria, ready to enjoy whatever and whoever happened. Meeting him, whether alone or at parties, reminded me of the excitement and alarm felt by Tolstoy’s Natasha Rostov on meeting her seducer and knowing at once that between her and this man there were none of the usual barriers. Something like that shock of sexual accessibility can exist on the level of friendship: an instant recognition that with this person nothing need be hidden. I felt this with Alfred (though there was a small dark pit of secrecy in the middle of the openness: I would never have spoken to him about his wig).

On his second visit he was with his lover, a very handsome young pianist called Arthur. When I went to supper with them in the cave-like flat which they had rented or borrowed, Arthur spent much time gazing yearningly at a portrait of Liszt, and I wondered whether Alfred was husband or wife in this ménage (heterosexuals are always trying to type-cast homosexuals). I decided eventually that, on that evening, anyway, what he mostly was was Mother.

That was the first time he talked to me about identity, explaining how painful it was not to have one: to lack a basic ‘I’ and to exist only as a sequence of behaviours. Did I have a basic and continuous sense of identity, he asked, and I was tempted not to say ‘Yes’ because such a commonplace lack of anxiety seemed uninteresting compared with the condition he was claiming. I think I put the temptation aside because I didn’t take him seriously. How could quartz-like Alfred feel, even for a second, that he had no basic identity?

Nevertheless I remember that long-ago talk very clearly. Perhaps I am being wise after the event, but it seems to me there was a slight judder of uneasiness under the surface which fixed it in my head.

Through ’56 and ’57 we exchanged letters, and one of his contained a passage which now seems obviously deranged.

That sounds like paranoia. And how does the last sentence connect with the first two? But I was not much disturbed by this letter at the time. The rest of it was cheerful and normal, and the sobriety of my own life compared with Alfred’s must have made me assume that his might well include mystifying events.

A letter of mine dated July 1959 reminds me that one of his London visits ended when he disappeared without a word.

It was about a year after this disappearance that a visiting New Yorker let fall that Alfred was back in New York, and gave me the address to which I sent the above, whereupon Alfred replied that yes indeed, he’d become fed up with Greece and was now installed in a Greenwich Village apartment ‘with a
roof garden
!’ And that was where I next saw him when I was on a business visit to New York: in almost unfurnished rooms above the theatre in Sullivan Street, where I found our friendship in good health.

Alfred had to lead the way up the stairs because he was feuding with the landlord who had taken to leaving brooms and buckets in the darkness, to trip him and send him crashing through the frail and wobbly banisters. As we climbed he described the feud with great relish. It was still daylight, so he took me right to the top to show me the roof garden – the heat-softened asphalt of the roof’s surface, thickly studded with dog turds. Dutifully I leant over the parapet to admire the view and the freshness of the breeze, but I was shocked. Dogs are quasi-sacred in my family, and I had been raised in the understanding that they don’t ask to belong to people, so – given that we have taken them over for our own pleasure – it is our duty not only to love them but to recognize their nature and treat them accordingly. Never have I denied a dog exercise and the chance to shit in decent comfort away from its lair – adult dogs, except for halfwitted ones, dislike fouling their own quarters. I saw soon enough that Alfred’s beloved Columbine and Skoura, whom he had rescued in Greece, were a barbaric pair, perfectly happy to shit on the roof – and indeed on the floors, and the mattresses which lay on the floors to serve as beds. They had never been house-trained, and Skoura, anyway,
was
half-witted. But still I was disconcerted that Alfred was prepared to inflict such a life on his dogs.

It was dark by the time we sat down by candlelight (the electricity may have been cut off) to eat mushrooms in sour cream and some excellent steak, and the dim light concentrated on the carefully arranged table disguised the room’s bareness and dirt. Halfway through the meal we heard someone coming up the stairs. Alfred hushed me and blew out the candles. A knock, a shuffling, breathing pause; another knock; another pause; then the visitor retreated. When Alfred relit the candles he was looking smug. ‘I know what
that
was. A boy I don’t want to see any more.’

That led to talk of his unhappiness. Arthur, the most serious and long-lasting of all his loves, had left him. He was trying to force himself into an austere acceptance of solitude, but like a fool kept on hoping, kept on falling into situations which ended in disappointment, or worse. The boy on the stairs was the latest disappointment, a chance pick-up who turned out to be inadequate. I said: ‘But Alfred, dear heart, what makes you think it
likely
that someone you pick up in a urinal will instantly turn into your own true love?’; to which he replied condescendingly that I had no sense of romance.

My two favourite memories of New York were given me by Alfred during my visit: he showed me the only pleasure in the city which could still be had for a nickel, and he took me to Coney Island. The nickel pleasure was riding the Staten Island ferry there and back on a single fare, which meant hiding instead of landing at the end of the outward journey. Early on a summer evening, when the watery light and the ting-tong of a bell on a marker-buoy almost turned Manhattan into Venice, it was indeed a charming thing to do. And Coney Island was beautiful too, the water sleepy as it lapped the dun-coloured sand, the sound of the boardwalk underfoot evoking past summers which seemed – mysteriously – to have been experienced by me. Sitting on the beach, we watched the white flower of the parachute jump opening and floating down, opening and floating down … Alfred teased me to make the jump but I’m a coward about fairground thrills, and jibbed. He was afraid, too, and told stories about famous accidents. He showed me where, when he was a child, he used to climb down into the secret runways under the boardwalk, and instructed me in methods of cheating so that this or that could be seen or done without paying. He was fond and proud of the child who used to play truant there and had become so expert at exploiting the place’s delights, and as we sat beside each other in the subway, going home, I felt more comfortably accepted by New York than I had ever done before. I don’t remember him ever talking about the pleasures of being an
enfant terrible
reviewer, capable of causing a considerable frisson in literary New York, which he was at that time.

Being the publisher of someone whose books are good but don’t sell is an uncomfortable business. Partly you feel guilt (did we miss chances? Could we have done this or that more effectively?), and partly irritation (does he really expect us to disregard all commercial considerations for the sake of his book?). Alfred gained a reputation for persecuting his publishers and agents with irrational demands, but with us he was never more than tetchy, and most of the uneasiness I felt came from my own disappointment rather than from his bullying. In England he was all but overlooked: a few reviewers made perfunctory acknowledgement of his cleverness and the unusual nature of his imagination, but many more failed to mention him. Our fiction list was well thought of by literary editors, and I had written them personal letters about Alfred. I was driven to wondering whether the favour we were in had backfired: had they – or some of them – taken against his work and decided that it would be kinder to us not to review it at all, rather than to review it badly? Only John Davenport, a good critic who had become Alfred’s friend out of admiration for his writing, spoke out with perceptive enthusiasm.

I have forgotten when Alfred moved to Morocco and whether he told me why he was doing so (Paul Bowles had suggested it at a party in New York). The first letter that I still have with a Tangier address was written soon after the publication in England of his collection of stories,
Behold Goliath
, early in 1965.

My answer: