Burning the Days (46 page)

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.

He was an only child, born of an unhappy marriage. His father had married his mother because she was pregnant—he hadn’t wanted to, he’d been in love with two other women at the time. When Phelps was eight or nine his grandfather, whom he loved, shot himself. It was during the Depression. The old man had lost everything, including in the end his house, which Phelps’s father had bought and in which they all lived together while the sharp-tongued grandmother, in scorn, ate her husband’s soul. There was
a long argument that began over some tiny windows. The grandfather, who was a cabinetmaker, had fashioned two little windows to be set in doors—in those days housewives were being assaulted by roving, jobless men who came for a handout. No one wanted to manufacture the miniature windows, however, and they sat in the workshop. Robert loved them, of course. For his birthday his grandfather installed one in the room, little more than a closet beneath the eaves, where Robert slept. The grandmother noticed it while she was raking leaves and was furious. Here the house was again to be sold and he was marring it with this foolish window.

That night there was a bitter argument at the dinner table. His grandfather went outside and soon afterwards Robert heard his name being called. He went out to the garage where his grandfather had his workshop, and just as he drew near, there was a shot. The old man had put a rifle to his chest.

Robert’s father came running. He began to shout at his father-in-law, who was lying on the floor. A few hours later, in the hospital, the grandfather died.

There was more to come. In the offices where his father worked was a man who had seven or eight children and who the times had made desperate. His co-workers banded together, each to support a child, and Phelps’s father sponsored one of the daughters, a girl of twelve or so.

He gave her money. He bought her clothes. And somewhere along the way she became his mistress. Her name being completely familiar there, emboldened, he brought her to stay in the house. Why, his wife wanted to know? He found some explanation. It was uncomfortable, however, the invisible currents, the instincts. She didn’t remain. Then, needing a go-between, the father confessed everything to his son. For two years Robert served the pair, hiding it from his mother, trying to protect her.

In the end she found out. She had seen them together or someone
had told her. Robert was walking with her behind the house, coming up a path, when suddenly she fell to her knees, weeping. That night there was a terrible fight and his father confessed it all. His mother tried to kill herself by slashing her wrists. Two years later she died. It was breast cancer, metastasized everywhere. Phelps’s father married the girl.

After college, Robert never returned home. He had adored his mother, he was deeply attached to her. He drew the curtain. I asked him once about his years in Cleveland; he remembered very little of that, he said.

“But you lived there. You wrote for the newspaper.”

“I used to write obituaries for the
Cleveland Press
during the summers,” he said.

“Then you do know it.”

“I knew certain people who died in the forties” was all he would say.

He had resected it from his life. He never saw his father again. One day there was a telephone call; it was from his stepmother. Daddy was very sick—she had always called him Daddy—could Robert come? “No,” he said.

Instead he wrote his father a long letter saying that their parting was forever; there was nothing between them anymore. A friend called the next day to say how awful the effect had been and pleaded with him to come home; his father was dying. He did not go. Nor did he go to the funeral. There was a half-sister he had never seen.

One is drawn to lives achieved in agony. His beautiful scrap-books and letters.
Earthly Paradise,
his assemblage of Colette’s writing to form an autobiography, her own intimate descriptions with his knowing linkage. He wrote another book on Colette,
Belles Saisons,
in a form he liked, photographs with extended captions, which surpassed most longer works. It had a unique shape,
a bit wider than ordinary books with endpapers the blue of Colette’s stationery. When the first copy arrived his wife sat up all night reading it.

“Such a beautiful book,” she cried to me worshipfully the next day. She loved what it represented. I opened it and began to read. I was so overwhelmed I kissed him.

Colette, as it turned out, was his chief subject. He edited her collected stories and translated her letters. I had an inscribed copy of
Earthly Paradise
—it was the favorite book of my daughter and was buried with her.

The long, fluttering hand, its helplessness becoming worse over the years, could no longer write. It was Parkinson’s disease, psychosomatic, he knew or at least said, the result of rage, self-condemnation, and self-betrayal, in the end fatal. I could barely hear his voice, a whisper leached away by illness.

A long leap forward now to the last time I saw him. He was lying beneath a single white sheet in the heat of July. Very ill, he could no longer speak. He held my hand for a long time and occasionally gave me what I can only think of as canny glances. It was a sweltering afternoon. His torso and legs lay bare. The lean body and beautiful feet, I would have bent and kissed them were it not for the black nurse sitting silent, watching.

——

When I think of him I think of France, the appetite we had in common. He knew the world of its writers. I knew the provinces, the beautiful, empty roads, the faded rooms. The French figure I knew best was, of course, Napoleon. I remembered that he had married Josephine when she was thirty-two, and that she had subtracted five years from her age for the occasion, while he gallantly added one to his. Robert had gone to the Larousse to see if it was true, but about Napoleon I was confident, I had led the class in military history, I knew his life.

In Phelps’s book about Cocteau,
Professional Secrets,
there is Cocteau’s confession
Every morning I tell myself, you can do nothing about it: submit.
A suitcase contained his unfinished novel, left for months on Fire Island; the abandoned attempts—I write and write, he said, but it’s fiction, I don’t believe what I am saying—and short stories begun ten years earlier until,
I have a strickening sense of waste, of important days of my life slipping away without being marked, or used …
He did submit, unhappily, year by year. To me it seemed romantic, like a sophisticated alcoholism. Whatever his failure, he made me faithful to him and to the things he believed. He is woven for me into the stuff of literature, the literary life.

At someone’s memorial a few years later, during the tributes, while girl photographers skipped along the front row to shoot well-known faces, a man rose slightly in his seat and looked back, a young man, intelligent, unsure, in dark glasses and a camel’s-hair coat. I recognized him instantly but with a shock: Robert Phelps at twenty-four, undamaged, ignorant of what he would one day come to know so well,
il faut payer.

——

In January 1972, the year’s beginning, smooth blank pages lay beneath my hand, and in hours of undisturbed solitude I began an outline. No, this is not exactly right. The outline, sixty-five pages of it, was scribbled on the back side of leaves of an old loose-leaf desk calendar. The smooth blank pages came three days later during a huge blizzard, the temperature very low, the snow fine as salt. The roads were closed, Denver airport, Loveland Pass.

I was nervous and elated. I knew what I wanted: to summarize certain attitudes towards life, among them that marriage lasted too long. I was perhaps thinking of my own. I had in mind a casting back, a final rich confession, as it were. There was a line of Jean Renoir’s that struck me: The only things that are important in
life are those you remember. That was to be the key. It was to be a book of pure recall. Everything in the voice of the writer, in his way of telling. I had a list of sufficiently inspiring titles,
Nyala, Mohenjodaro, Estuarial Lives.
I was writing to fit them, though in the end none survived.

This was in Colorado, in Aspen when it was only a remote town. Behind the old wooden house with its linoleum floors was a building that had been a garage and was now a studio with blue, stenciled boards high up on the ceiling, a fireplace, and a counterlike desk along the wall. Writing is filled with uncertainty and much of what one does turns out bad, but this time, very early there was a startling glimpse, like that of a body beneath the water, pale, terrifying, the glimpse that says: it is there.

In the spring, confident, I sent the first seventy-five pages of what I had written off to publishers. Absolutely must have it, I imagined them saying. The replies, however, were at best equivocal. Farrar Straus turned it down. Scribner’s. As rejections came, one by one, I was stunned. I lay in bed at night wrapped in bitterness, like a prisoner whose appeal has failed. I tried to think of the books that amounted to something only after having begged, so to speak, at many doors.

Finally a well-known editor whom I had met once or twice agreed to take the book. This was Joe Fox.

He was then in his late forties—Harvard (swimming team captain), divorced (man about town), backgammon player, also squash, and acquainted with almost everyone. He was a Philadelphian, though he had lived in New York for years among, with other things, irreplaceable pieces of furniture that had been in the family since Colonial times. He had the prep-school habit of referring to himself by his last name. “Fox here,” he would announce on the phone when he called. I do not mean to say he was snobbish or Anglo, however. He did have his systems and rules and was eligible for any club, but he was also supremely democratic and
loyal, a man who did his work in a shirt and tie, the work that God and class, not to mention the publishing house, expected. He liked travel, the ballet, and, without the appearance of it, parties. He was somewhat deaf to argument.

The book was ultimately called
Light Years.
I remember his final comment when the editing had been completed—the manuscript had blue pencil, his, in one margin and red, the copy editor’s, in the other—“An absolutely marvelous book in every way,” he said, adding, “probably.” I had the exultation of believing it. I wanted praise, of course, widespread praise, and it seemed somehow that Fox might assure it—he had been the editor for many admired writers, Paul Bowles, Capote, Ralph Ellison, Roth. I wanted glory. I had seen, at the Met, Nureyev and Fonteyn in their farewell performance, one of many, of
Swan Lake
—magnificent, inspired, the entire audience on its feet and wildly applauding for three-quarters of an hour after the curtain as the deities appeared, together, then one or the other, then again the two, on and on, bow after bow in weary happiness as armfuls of roses were brought to the stage.

Such tremendous waves did not fall upon writers. On Victor Hugo, perhaps, or Neruda—I could think of no others—not poor Joyce, or Pushkin, or Dante, or Kawabata. For them a banquet or award or something on the scale of the scene in the restaurant at midnight when the star is preparing to leave and stands before the mirror near the bar, drawing tight the belt of his trenchcoat, watched by enthralled waiters.

When was I happiest, the happiest in my life? Difficult to say. Skipping the obvious, perhaps setting off on a journey, or returning from one. In my thirties, probably, and at scattered other times, among them the weightless days before a book was published and occasionally when writing it. It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.