A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (2 page)

Over the decades, Wescott forgot about “A Visit to Priapus.” He remembered that, early on, artist Paul Cadmus and other friends admired it. But the subject matter of explicit homosexuality doomed it to his abandoned projects. In the 1960s, when freelance editor Robert Phelps began editing Wescott’s early journals, Glenway pulled a copy of the long story from his massive set of papers. Thinking it a failure, he asked if Phelps could salvage some bits and pieces for the journals. A day later Phelps phoned in “almost hysterical admiration,” seeing the connection between “Priapus” and
The Pilgrim Hawk
.

Yet even in the post-Stonewall years, when Wescott believed in it once again, the story remained unpublished. That was ironic because it was Wescott and Christopher Isherwood who arranged the publication of E. M. Forster’s long-suppressed
Maurice
in 1971. Wescott spoke about getting “Priapus” published as a little deluxe book in Europe during his final years, but it never happened.

After minimal light editing by me (picking the most Wescott-like adjectives where he left choices), a private chapbook was printed in 1995, just as a reading copy. “A Visit to Priapus” was included in a big British anthology,
The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories
(2003) edited by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, but in America it appeared only in the short-lived small journal
Ganymede
(2009, no. 3), thanks to the late, literature-loving publisher John Stahle. Even most Wescott readers have never seen it, until now.

The real-life autobiographical story is simple enough. Glenway and Monroe lived with George Platt Lynes as a threesome, but the intimacy was mostly between Monroe and George. Frustrated with his love life and his writing, Wescott took up a friend’s suggestion that he take a weekend trip to Maine to visit a young aspiring artist who was better known for his large endowment than for his canvases. In the story, Wescott’s familiar fictional self, Alwyn Tower, is a writer absorbed with concerns of love and lust and art. He meets the artist, who lives a middle-class, closeted life in a small New England town. The setup is perfect for Wescott’s first person account as well as his interior sort of writing. What follows is a long day, a sleepless sexual night, and the morning after. Through it all his character describes this misadventure beautifully, and thinks of his life and his loves at home, and finally reflects on the good that sex can do, even in somewhat ridiculous circumstances. It’s perfect subject matter for Wescott, who was a close friend of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the famous sex researcher. As is often the case with his best writing, there is much more to the story than the plot.

The first of these autobiographical stories, “Adolescence,” actually did appear in the 1928 collection
Goodbye, Wisconsin
, but it is essential for the present work. In the story thirteen-year-old Philip goes to a Halloween party dressed as a girl at the suggestion of his fifteen-year-old friend Carl. In real life, young Glenway was in a relationship with a boy named Earl who had not yet discovered girls. Wescott once noted in a book inscription that in 1914 he stayed overnight in West Bend “in order to go to this party disguised as a girl. I was thirteen; ‘Carl’ was fifteen.”

Published in
Harper’s Magazine,
“Mr. Auerbach in Paris” is based on his first visit to Paris in the early 1920s, when he was working as a secretary to a rich philanthropist, Henry Goldman. It not only describes his wonderful first impressions of Paris, it reveals a chilling truth from the past—that many well-meaning powerful people in America and England totally misunderstood the soaring nationalism in Germany. Then there is “The Babe’s Bed,” which was published only as a little encased deluxe book in 1930. Alwyn Tower / Wescott is an expatriate writer leaving the luxury of Paris to visit his poor family in Wisconsin during the Depression. The family tensions remind the adult narrator of his boyhood and the fierce battles he had with his father in childhood—not unusual with young males but all too familiar to the gay male in an unsupportive home.

Next is “A Visit to Priapus,” which has waited all these years for its readers. Also written in the same time period is the never-before-published “The Stallions,” which reminds us that Wescott did live most of his days at the large farm of his brother and sister-in-law. When his character mentions that he’s never seen horses breeding, his brother “Tim” arranges that he witness two pairs of horses mating. Only Wescott could bring such elegant prose to such subject matter. Over the years, even decades later, he kept returning to this material to add human stories about country life, to build “The Stallions” into something much larger. He was frustrated in trying to expand this story into a novella because the additional drafts are good but unfinished, and would require major editing. Yet the original material, covering only the horse breeding scenes, remains sharp and clear in finished typescript, and it belongs here.

When Wescott made a prewar trip to Paris in 1938 it left impressions that became “The Frenchman Six Feet Three,” which appeared in
Harper’s Magazine
in 1942. Once more, the narrator is the fictional Wescott, Alwyn Tower. The Frenchman named Roger is based on Michel Girard, a young friend from Jean Cocteau’s circle. Michel’s constant friend Alain is obviously his companion. A member of the army reserve, Roger is equipped with a uniform too small for his large frame, symbolic of how France was unprepared for war. An American journalist in the story, Linda Brewer, is closely drawn from Wescott’s lifelong friend, the
New Yorker
Paris correspondent Janet Flanner. Wescott left notations to confirm the identities. Interestingly, Linda’s/Janet’s companion in the story, Mrs. Lavery, is based on neither of Flanner’s longtime lovers, Solita Solano and Natalia Danesi Murray. Instead, Mrs. Lavery is based on Flanner’s short-term lover Noel Haskins Murphy, a professional singer, as the story notes. Even such small footnotes of gay history are fascinating to uncover after seventy years. This story provides a vivid, unrushed, highly detailed look at prewar Europe, which is very interesting in light of Wescott’s World War II novel that followed in three years,
Apartment in Athens
(translated into seven languages, and now a foreign film,
Appartamento ad Atene).

There is only a paper-thin difference between Wescott’s first-person stories and first-person essays. Considering that the theme in this collection is truthful autobiography, it seems permissible that a few of these stories were written as essays. In fact, this seems to matter even less in our current literary age where twenty-five-year-olds write fictionalized “memoirs” with composite characters and events. “The Love of New York,” which appeared in
Harper’s Bazaar,
has a rare charm because, much as Glenway loved farmland and nature, it describes the Manhattan he loved in the 1940s, during the war years, a rich cityscape that is partly still familiar and partly lost in time. And he candidly sees himself in that experience; a revealing mini-portrait of himself.

“An Example of Suicide” is another story that was never-before published and is based on a sensational news event of July 27, 1938. A young bank clerk named John W. Warde stood on a ledge of the Hotel Gotham (now the Peninsula Hotel) threatening to jump, from 11:40 a.m. to 10:38 p.m., while thousands watched and jeered, and traffic stopped. At the time, all the newspapers and picture magazines covered it in depth. Of course Wescott’s perspective is more complex and analytical. His narrator leaves the daytime scene in the street to go to the apartment of the male “friend with whom I live.” He considers in great detail the young man’s plight, and how most of us are capable of such despair, but don’t surrender to it. However, he realizes, the bluff of suicide could cause a proud male to go through with it. Presently, the character that is Monroe Wheeler comes home and comments on the dramatic standoff. Finally at midnight some young friends visit with the news of the sad ending. Wescott fills in the after-story. Following the widespread journalistic coverage, “An Example of Suicide” was an unusual story to place. One literary magazine held it for months and politely declined, and the clean typescript became buried in the Wescott Papers. It is chilling to note that on August 9, 2012, a man jumped from the twenty-second-floor sun deck of the same hotel, and the next day’s newspaper photos showed only one terrace below that, the seventeenth floor ledge from which John Warde had jumped.

Of the main selections, the last, “The Odor of Rosemary,” is actually a perfectly contained story which is the second half of a long essay that appeared in the journal
Prose
in 1971. Wescott’s late personal essays are beautiful; they can meander like a winding walkway but always skillfully take you back to his main point and moral. The first half of “The Odor of Rosemary” is like that, but suddenly the second half becomes the compassionate story included here. The elder Wescott, in his best form at seventy, looks back on a 1935 ocean voyage, marked by the scent of the herb rosemary from the coast of Spain, when he befriends a melancholy young man from California and learns of his sorrows.

The appendix includes two essays and an unpublished, adolescent experimental story. The first essay, “The Valley Submerged,” appeared in the
Southern Review
in the summer of 1965. It mixes his thoughts about the late-1950s flooding of his country home and valley to create a reservoir, and the 1950s Cold War fears. However, at age 77 Wescott handwrote a copy of “The Valley Submerged” and included several late comments and observations. That is the version presented here. The next piece, “A Call on Colette and Goudeket,” appeared first in
Town and Country
in January 1953, and then in his book of literary reminiscences,
Images of Truth
(1962). It gives the reader a view of Wescott’s love of and devotion to literature, which also was clear in his decades of work for the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He first met Colette in 1935 when he served as a translator during her American publicity tour. He later wrote the long introduction to
The Short Novels of Colette
(1951). But this little piece is about a visit to Colette and her companion when she was bedridden in Paris in 1952. As for the never-before-published 1923 experimental story, “Sacre de Printemps”—influenced by Mary Butts in a surrealist style—it stands totally outside the artistic scope of the rest of his lifelong prose, but is offered here as an interesting read. It is based on twenty-two-year-old Glenway’s visit to a young American gay couple in England, at Oxford, during the same trip that would provide the material for “Mr. Auerbach in Paris.” The kaleidoscopic images are poetic but abstract and difficult. However, the dialogue reveals vivid glimpses of 1923, such as a young Sinn Fein member who mentions “a boy I loved” killed in the Irish uprising, and some first impressions of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
(“Marion” is Molly Bloom). It has little to do with his life work, but it has historical importance— written a decade before Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s controversial, surrealistic, homophile novel,
The Young and Evil.

These stories may be appreciated by different readers in different ways, but all, I believe, with pleasure.

In the attic bedroom of a large house at twilight two youngsters were trying to make up their minds about a masquerade party. Out of the stairway rose an agreeable odor of bath-towels and tobacco and face-powder, reminding the younger boy of his friend’s brothers and fashionable mother, whom he admired but who often embarrassed him. He came from the country, and was sensuous and timid.

Carl, who was at home there, was the youngest of the four sons of one of three brothers who owned the flour mill and several stores and a number of houses in the town. Philip had only his father and mother, and they were poor. They were respectively fifteen and thirteen years old.

Both were excited by the illicit cigarette which Carl was holding outside the dormer window. Past his friend’s face, whose cynical expression was meant to reveal and in fact greatly exaggerated the effect of the smoke, Philip gazed down into the quiet though populous twilight, leaf-green and pink. The small town rose from the river-bed on a number of overlapping hills; heaped with branches and evening silhouettes, the light color of the buildings died down.

It was from the bulky yellow house under the elms that they had received an invitation to a fancy-dress party. A girl named Rita who went to school with them lived there; she was going to be fifteen years old. They could not make up their minds what disguises to adopt. Philip’s imagination ran to lace curtains and borrowed jewelry, but it was Carl who said: “I’ll tell you what. You dress up as a woman. I’ll get my brother’s glee club suit and wear a mustache. We’re supposed to wear masks, anyway, and they won’t know you and I’ll say you’re my cousin from Milwaukee. You’ll make quite a pretty girl. Just for the fun of it. See what it’s like.”

The next afternoon they asked his cousins Lucy and Lois in the house next door to help them. These two lovely sisters lived with their aged stepmother and a maiden aunt. Men of their age at once unmarried and worth marrying almost never appeared on the scene of the small town; they were clairvoyant and knew what to expect; so in spite of their fresh bodies and liquid eyes they already had the serene manners of sisters of charity. They were working at a frock for someone else; eyelet embroidery and ribbons and batiste lay in disorder on the polished table.

As Carl explained what they wanted he leaned against the mantelpiece sturdily, in imitation of his elder brothers giving orders to indulgent women. “You’ll find him a dress, won’t you? You have a lot of old stuff in the cherry cupboard.”

The young women were charmed by the plan. Though Philip wanted to keep even his unspoken requests within modest bounds, he could not keep his poor farmer-boy’s gaze from the rich worktable: the blueprint patterns, the bolt of white cloth like a flattened pilaster, the chiseled pleats, the squares cut out—transparent marble of some fresh and incomplete and ethereal architecture into which a chilly bare body could slip as into a dwelling …