New York in the '50s (24 page)

Most novelists who had written a best seller, had their second book panned (as
Barbary Shore
was), and their third book rejected by seven publishers would have thrown in the towel, or thrown themselves off a cliff. Mailer dug in. He began writing the new personal journalism that brought him notoriety and a pair of Pulitzer prizes (
The Armies of the Night
and
The Executioner's Song
), and became the most famous writer in America.

And he did it alone. “I've always been a solitary, never found myself in groups,” Mailer says. “I've felt it's bad practice for your work to join a group—what you gain in companionship you lose in the power to think independently. We were all finding our way
in the fifties, and the Kerouac people acted as mentors for each other—there was a gang. Kerouac had Ginsberg, and Ginsberg had Kerouac and Burroughs. I was not part of that.”

After lunch Mailer turns to go back to the Actors' Studio, and I see that he limps a little. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt with gray stripes that hangs out over khaki pants. His hair is nearly white, and he has a bit of a spare tire. He seems small and vulnerable, but there is still that jauntiness about him. Seeing him go, what I think of is not the bluster or rhetoric I sometimes associate with him, but a gentler, more private side I learned about from Marion Magid.

“He's a tremendously sexy man,” Marion has told me. “I'm part of the generation that had a crush on Mailer—like JFK in a way. He's fascinating in spite of everything. There's a deep sweetness in him, sort of like Sinatra—you love him anyway in spite of all the awful things he may have done. Once I was in a cab with Mailer, on the way back from a party at Norman Podhoretz's house. I told him I was getting married, and he started giving me advice, in a very nice way. He said, ‘When one is married one fights. Be sure you fight for the right reasons and on the right ground.' There was a brotherly sweetness about him, and a kind of wisdom.”

After lunch with Mailer I find myself taking the IRT down to Sheridan Square. Even though I'm staying on West 96th Street I keep gravitating back to the Village, especially after I've talked about the old days. I just go and walk around, or stop at the Peacock on Greenwich Avenue and have cappuccino. This is where I feel most at ease in New York. For seven years it was my home, and I felt surrounded by friends, some of whom were more than that, were more like family, the kind I chose and was chosen by rather than born with.

FAMILY

Shortly after I got to know him, I began to call Robert Phelps “Uncle Bobby.” I met him at Yaddo, the writers' and artists' colony, where I'd gone in the summer of 1959 to try to start a novel. I didn't
return to the Village with the beginning of a book, as I had hoped, but with something less tangible and in the long run more valuable: the beginning of my friendship with Phelps. Without it, I wonder if I would have survived the next half decade.

Robert was a boyish-looking man in his mid-thirties when I met him, usually dressed neatly but casually in corduroys, loafers, and a sweater or sweatshirt. Sometimes, to go to an office uptown, he would wrap himself in a sport coat and tie, but he always looked unnaturally confined in such a getup, like a kid who was forced to dress for Sunday school. With his curly, tousled hair and easy smile, Robert reminded me of a late-blooming graduate student. “He was young, and so he would be forever,” his friend the novelist James Salter said in tribute many years later.

Robert had written a novel called
Heroes and Orators
, which Leslie Fiedler later praised as one of the unjustly neglected books of the fifties. I had never heard of it before I met Robert, and did not in fact learn about it from him but from another of his friends and admirers, Martha Murphy (now Martha Duffy, a senior editor of
Time
), who worked then at McDowell, Obolensky, the publisher of the book. She mailed me a copy with her own warm recommendation of it, as well as of its author, when I went to Yaddo. When I told Robert that our mutual friend Martha had sent me
Heroes and Orators
, he winced and waved his hands around in one of his typical gestures of impatient dismissal, saying, “Oh, that old novel. Never mind
that
.”

Robert later told me he'd had trouble writing the book, and the only way he got himself to finish it was to make a deal with David McDowell, the editor and publisher, to send him a chapter every month in return for a payment. When he finished the book, Robert was still dissatisfied. He wanted to take the manuscript back and rewrite it, but McDowell convinced him to go ahead and have it published—knowing, I suspect, that Robert would have spent the rest of his life rewriting and never been satisfied. In fact, it was the only novel Robert published. I'm sure its story of a young husband who discovers his homosexuality in a love affair with a handsome young man was simply too taboo for the time, especially as a first novel by an unknown writer. (Gore Vidal and James Baldwin had
already established themselves as serious authors when they published their novels with homosexual themes—
The City and the Pillar
and
Giovanni's Room
, respectively.)

Robert was genuinely modest about his accomplishments, and again it was from someone else I learned that he had founded Grove Press, which became the most important avant-garde publisher in America. After publishing three books, Robert had sold the company to the enterprising heir of an Ohio ice cream fortune, Barney Rosset.

Robert was no businessman, and couldn't tolerate the nine-to-five routine of office work, but in a part-time, free-lance (and very underpaid) way he was one of the most important editors of his time. He worked in this part-time manner for George Braziller as well as for McDowell, Obolensky, where his literary instincts contributed to the success of James Agee's posthumous novel,
A Death in the Family
, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. It had been Robert's inspired idea to set at the beginning of the book a poetic essay of Agee's called “Knoxville, Summer, 1915.” That lyrical piece established the mood and spirit of the story to come in such a stunning way that it really put the whole work on a different plane, a more universal level of experience.

Later Robert edited the
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye
(Agee's former teacher, mentor, and friend), edited the criticism of poet Louise Bogan, and encouraged the composer Ned Rorem to publish his diaries. His final piece of work was a longtime labor of love, editing the journals of Glenway Wescott, a literary light of the 1920s.

Robert became known as an expert on Colette and Cocteau, and would ingeniously piece together a marvelous “autobiography” of Colette from her own works called
Earthly Delights
. Pictures of Colette, Gertrude Stein, James Agee, and other writers crowded his walls like family portraits, as books and notebooks, clippings and diaries, swelled from desk and shelves in his Village apartments, first on West 13th and then on East 12th Street. Each place he lived in became a warm and cozy nest of literary treasures, the principal one being Robert himself.

“Oh, no one can do it like Scott Fitzgerald,” he'd say. “The way that man could write, my God, he's like a, a”—Robert's face would
burst into a smile of delight as he imagined the analogy—“like a
water spider
.” And he'd fling his hands up, the fingers moving, tracing patterns in the air, demonstrating the delicacy of the prose he was describing.

He loved graceful language: “Oh, Dan'l, I'm afraid if I have any talent at writing at all it's a very
wooden
talent,” he said with a slight wringing of his hands in dismissal. Sometimes he spoke of a novel he was working on and then would put aside, never to complete or publish it. I'm sure it was because his own standards were so high. He told me titles—
Available Light, The Silent Partner
—speaking of them as fondly as if they were the names of lovers, lovers perhaps so impossibly perfect as to finally be unattainable.

What most annoyed Robert and stirred his ire was generalization of any kind, prose as pronouncement, political hyperbole. He had no patience for politics, I think in part because its language was so purposely imprecise, and also because to him the subject was simply boring compared to literature; it had no beauty, no truth.

One of the times I saw Robert most angrily exercised was when we walked down West 4th Street talking about a recent
Partisan Review
article on taste in America, called “Masscult and Midcult,” by Dwight Macdonald. It typified to Robert what he considered the grievous sins of sociological generalization. “Why can't that man tell me something
real?
” he moaned, waving his arms about in frustration. “Why can't he say—” Here Robert stopped, tapped himself vehemently on the chest, and declared, “I'm a middle-aged man and I can't sew a button on my shirt!”

That was specific, that was real, that was literature.

That's why Robert loved diaries, the kind of writing in which people recorded specific scenes, talk, impressions, dreams, desires. That's why he encouraged Rorem to publish his diaries, which became notorious as well as widely praised and read.

Friends flocked to Robert not only for literary advice and counsel but for personal aid and comfort. He was a kind of unassuming and unintentional guru whose wisdom and warmth drew people to him instinctively. When I introduced Robert to my friend Helen Weaver, she told me after that first meeting, “I want to take him home and put him on my mantle, like a household god.”

One morning I rushed over to Robert's apartment and found
that he wasn't there at the moment, but met his wife, Rosemarie Beck, a painter who had come down from Woodstock, where she was living at the time. I introduced myself and said I was looking for Robert. Becky was a tall, striking woman with natural dignity and a straightforward manner that went directly to the point.

“Are you in trouble?” she asked me.

“How did you know?”

“People always come to Robert when they're in trouble,” she said.

Yes, the instinct was automatic. I went to him for advice on everything from love to publishing. It was to Robert I turned in the most desperate of times, when toward the end of my long and dispiriting psychoanalysis, I found myself lying on the floor of the analyst's office in such a state of devastation I didn't think I could get out the door by myself, much less go home. The analyst asked me if I had a friend who would retrieve me. I gave him Robert's phone number, and he came right away.

“Look what you've done to him!” he said to the doctor in a white rage, pointing at me as I lay collapsed on the floor.

It was Robert Phelps, the writer, rather than my M.D. psychoanalyst, member of the New York Psychoanalytic Association, who took the responsibility for my life at that moment and got me safely home. Other friends in the Village also literally saved my life by staying with me through the nightmare ride of hallucinatory hell at the end of the analysis. (It was not alcoholic hallucination but an unleashing of the unconscious like a bad acid trip, and like an LSD experience, the hallucinations returned sometimes in flashes for years afterward, during periods of not using any alcoholic or chemical substances.) Ivan Gold and Robert and Alice Stewart and Jane Wylie would sit with me until dawn, holding and soothing me, giving me shelter, psychic as well as physical, seeing me through. Like my friend Seymour Krim, I found the people of the Village more sane and responsible than the professional psychoanalysts who told me only to go on talking and then put me out the door.

Robert saw me through less desperate hours as well, dispensing good advice and sometimes, at my urging, looking up planetary influences on the astrological chart he made for me. He was the first amateur astrologer I knew, and he mixed in the lore of signs and
stars with his already perceptive insights into people and their mysterious behavior, which never ceased to fascinate him.

At heart Uncle Bobby was more practical than mystical, though, and in times of crisis his advice was admirably down-to-earth. When I went to him one day worried about my ability to meet an important magazine deadline after a drinking binge that left me weak, depressed, and with a mammoth hangover, he said, “Now, Dan'l, the first thing you want to do is get some decent food in you. Make yourself some scrambled eggs, soft scrambled eggs. Use lots of butter and milk, stir them
gently
…” He had a way of making everything, from the simplest cooking to the most intricate theories of fiction and poetry, sound intriguing, alluring. As I left with his instructions that day, both culinary and literary, Robert put a hand on my shoulder and repeated, “Gently, Dan'l. Treat yourself gently.”

I thought of Robert and his words of advice long after I left the Village, waking on mornings many years later with pounding headaches and overall angst in Boston or Los Angeles or Iowa City, comforted by the memory of Robert's voice saying, “
Gently
, Dan'l …” I could not have been born with a better uncle.

Writers I knew in the Village didn't take vacations. That was for rich people who went to their summer houses or exotic islands, or for the folks back home in the Midwest, fishing trips with Mom and Dad in a rowboat under a hot sun on some anonymous lake—“drowning worms,” as we used to call it in Indiana. Besides, the whole middle-class idea of “getting away from it all” was irrelevant if you were where you wanted to be in the first place—the Village. Everyone I knew went or wanted to go to Europe at some time or other, but that was not considered a vacation; it was part of one's work and life. Going to Paris and Spain was a holy pilgrimage, not tourism.

A vacation simply for the sake of recreation was not in our vocabulary, but it was all right to go on some literary mission: a stay at a writers' colony like Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, or the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It was also acceptable to go to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, in Middlebury,
Vermont, and in 1958 I went there as a winner of the Bernard DeVoto fellowship.