“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.
—
In the bedroom he was packing. He was going to France that week and also Italy. On a map of Rome I located hotels for him and the best place to change money. Velvet pants were folded in his suitcase, sweaters and shirts, books. As an afterthought he added a bottle of scotch.
On the desk was a letter in black handwriting from Colette Jouvenel, Colette’s daughter, with whom he was going to drive to Italy. Cher Robert, I read. They were thinking of doing a Hollywood film of her mother, and someone was needed to represent the daughter’s interests in discussions. That was the subject of the letter. “She’s a baronne,” Phelps commented offhandedly. “Oh, nothing important — created by Napoleon III, looked on with amusement by the real aristocracy.”
He looked forward to dining on eels with Janet Flanner and accompanying an eighty-four-year-old Marcel Jouhandeau on one of his regular Thursday afternoon visits to a male whorehouse near the Place Pigalle. I later had a letter from him, from Paris; he’d had a meal in the bistro owned by Jouhandeau’s ex-lover, about whom Jouhandeau had written a masterpiece, Un Pur Amour. It was in this letter or another that he told of his delight in discovering that he was able to walk from his hotel, tucked in the corner of Place St.-Sulpice, to the Seine, the entire way, on streets named for writers. He may have exaggerated slightly — I have never been able to duplicate the feat.
Cher cadet, he would often address me in his letters. He was older, it was true, but it was not for wisdom I was drawn to him, rather for his presence, which confirmed all I sought to feel about the world. In the books he gave me to read, in the long conversations, the lines of Joyce, Connolly, Virginia Woolf, stuffed, as it were, in his pockets, he was one of the most important influences in my life and in whatever I wrote afterwards. Would this interest him, I often wondered? Would he find it deserving?
“Do you use vermouth?” he asked sweetly one evening as he brought out the gin, his right hand shaking, almost with a life of its own. “Katharine Hepburn has it too,” he commented. “She had to sit on it during a television interview.”
“Why does it only affect one hand?” I asked. “Why doesn’t it affect more?”
“My God!” his wife cried. “Please!”
Phelps himself moaned.
—
He had loved books from the beginning. His father had been disappointed, wanting him to be a real boy, go hunting with him, play ball, while all he wanted to do was read. The plant, his father called him, the houseplant.