A Heaven of Words Read online

  A Heaven of Words

  Last Journals, 1956–1984

  GLENWAY WESCOTT

  Edited and with an introduction

  by Jerry Rosco

  * * *

  THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street

  London WC2E 8LU, England

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Published by arrangement with the Estate of Glenway Wescott,

  Anatole Pohorilenko, literary executor, c/o Harold Ober Associates Incorporated

  Copyright © 2013 by Anatole Pohorilenko

  Introduction and editorial notes copyright © 2013 by Jerry Rosco

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wescott, Glenway, 1901–1987.

  A heaven of words : last journals, 1956–1984 / Glenway Wescott ; edited and with an introduction by Jerry Rosco.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-299-29424-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-299-29423-6 (e-book)

  1. Wescott, Glenway, 1901–1987—Diaries. 2. Authors, American—

  20th century—Diaries. I. Rosco, Jerry. II. Title.

  PS3545. E827z46 2013

  813´.52—dc23

  [B]

  2012037076

  Contents

  Preface

  A Heaven of Words

  Introduction

  1956–1959

  1960–1964

  1965–1969

  1970–1974

  1975–1979

  1980–1984

  Afterword

  A Glossary of Glenway Wescott’s Contemporaries

  Index

  Preface

  Originally, there were supposed to be several volumes of Wescott journals, according to a contract signed in 1972. The man who agreed to take on this task was the wonderful literary editor Robert Phelps (1922–89). A graduate of Oberlin College, Phelps was the author of one novel, Heroes and Orators. After that he dedicated himself to the most ambitious literary projects, including editing autobiographical works of Colette and Jean Cocteau. He was married to artist Rosemarie Beck (Becki) and had a son, Roger (Phelps’s bisexuality was merely a complication to his married life). Often he supported himself by writing endless magazine articles and reviews so that he could complete the literary books. The purity of his passion earned him a great friend: novelist and screenwriter James Salter. An inspiring book of their correspondence, Memorable Days, was recently published.

  Robert Phelps’s love of literature culminated in his devotion to a writer’s writer, Glenway Wescott. The formal elegance of Wescott’s prose hooked him, as did the sensitivity and humanity in his novels. The fact that Wescott was very famous in his youth and yet stopped writing fiction in mid-life added mystery. Phelps found that he also loved Wescott’s short stories and his essays about art, as well as his literary criticism. When Phelps heard that Wescott had massive journal materials in three-ring binders, his mission became clear. However, the journals faced many delays.

  After Glenway died in 1987, Phelps and the publisher agreed to compress several volumes into one big book, Continual Lessons: 1937–1955. A little more than a year later Phelps’s health failed, and he had the publisher bring me in to finish the work. It finally appeared in 1990 and was well received and quoted everywhere.

  Ten years later I completed my biography of Wescott. Then, gradually, the ambition of Robert and the voice of Glenway drew me back to the journals. This is a smaller book than Continual Lessons, less dreamy perhaps, but intense and just as rich in life and love. Unlike the earlier journals, most entries are dated. Where there is a blank space between entries it is the same day but different documents. Ornaments indicate undated entries; they are placed where they belong, or seem to belong. A few entries from the earlier 1950s were repeated, but I respect perfectionist Wescott’s placement. Text within square brackets is my own—it reflects the many “visuals,” such as clippings, photos, and scratch-notes, that I found with entries. No doubt Wescott would have preferred many images with entries—he did create some scrapbooks like that. He also liked to invent nouns, verbs, and adjectives, often in humor, and copy-editors should stand back.

  As Glenway would wish, this book is dedicated to the memory of Monroe Wheeler. Thanks to executor Anatole Pohorilenko for permission to select and edit the Wescott journals. Four photos here are reproduced with the permission of John Stevenson. One photo is reproduced with the permission of Roger D. Phelps and another with the permission of John Connolly. All other photos are reproduced with the permission of Anatole Pohorilenko for the estates of Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler, and three of those photos with the additional permission of the estate of George Platt Lynes.

  Thanks one more time to archivist/curator Timothy Young and everyone at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and to the staff of the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Thanks to artist Kim Kasow. And finally, thanks very much to editor Raphael Kadushin and the University of Wisconsin Press staff.

  A Heaven of Words

  Introduction

  AS A WRITER AND PUBLIC FIGURE, Glenway Wescott (1901–87) doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of either literature or celebrity. While the high art of his four novels assures that he’ll be remembered, four aborted novels make him something of an enigma, so that it’s best to say simply that he was a major talent. One of the most famous American writers during the 1920s era of the expatriates in Paris, by mid-life he was less well known as he turned to essays, his long-suppressed journals, and decades of literary work for the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Yet throughout his life many of the century’s top writers, artists, and social figures cherished his friendship, including Isadora Duncan, Jean Cocteau, William Somerset Maugham, the Sitwells, Katherine Anne Porter, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Joseph Campbell, and the Rothschilds. As a thinker, conversationalist, public speaker, and activist for the arts and social progress, he was an extraordinary man, not just a writer.

  Yet language and literature meant more to him than anything, and friends such as Porter and Marianne Moore chastised him for putting others’ work before his own. Early on he wrote beautifully of his native Midwest, yet his elegant lyrical prose seems more Continental than American. Some readers appreciate this style, others don’t; but Wescott himself explains (in his February 13, 1957, entry) that his slow, lyrical approach to writing is tied to his beginnings as a poet. As for the piercing sensitivity and humanity of his prose, that is a matter of the heart or soul.

  Born on a poor farm in Wisconsin, Wescott made it to the University of Chicago on a scholarship at age sixteen—his professors were stunned that he’d done far more reading than most graduate students. The deadly Spanish Flu cut short his college years but, influenced by Yvor Winters and the Chicago poets, he was soon publishing Imagist poems and book reviews. At that point, in 1919, he met a dynamic young man, Monroe Wheeler, who was interested in the arts and creating beautiful books. One of the great gay relationships of the century followed. It was Wheeler who published Wescott’s first book of poems, encouraged him to move east to New York, to vis
it Europe, and to dedicate himself to writing. The Apple of the Eye (1924), a haunting poetic novel of the impoverished Midwest he knew, was very well received. Wheeler then encouraged Wescott to join the expatriates in France, and the popular, award-winning The Grandmothers (1927) followed, an influential chronicle-style novel that remains an example of the ambitious great American novel. Admittedly envious of this success, and disliking Wescott personally, Ernest Hemingway parodied him in chapter 3 of The Sun Also Rises.

  Wescott then published Goodbye, Wisconsin (1928), a book of short stories about the Midwest. Meanwhile, Monroe Wheeler continued publishing a line of beautiful small books, and when he and Wescott befriended a wealthy young American heiress, Barbara Harrison, they created Harrison of Paris, one of the great deluxe book presses of the early 1930s.

  After a last story of the Midwest—the bound, deluxe The Babe’s Bed (1930)—Wescott’s career took a detour. A collection of prophetic essays of the coming European war, Fear and Trembling (1932), was too high style for most readers (Wescott was speaking and reading French fluently). A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers that same year was a very humorous little work but it wasn’t the big book he needed to get back on track.

  When Wescott, Wheeler, and Harrison returned to New York, Harrison met and married Glenway’s brother Lloyd, and they bought a large farm in Hampton, New Jersey. A house and surrounding acres reserved for Glenway and Monroe was called Stone-blossom. Beginning in 1937, they had the country home and Wheeler’s city apartment for the rest of Glenway’s life. Wheeler’s career took off as director of publications for the Museum of Modern Art, where he would revolutionize museum books and catalogs in quality, design, and size. Over the decades he became invaluable in setting up exhibitions for MoMA, traveling to Europe and around the world. (In 1951 he received France’s Legion of Honor award for introducing French artists to America.) Likewise, there was the major success of the young fashion and portrait photographer George Platt Lynes. Lynes lived with Wescott and Wheeler in a triangular relationship—closer to Monroe—beginning in the late twenties, remaining friends with them even after their 1943 breakup.

  During the thirties Wescott felt stifled, producing two aborted novels (“The Dream of Mrs. Cleveland” and “The Deadly Friend”), but in 1938 he found his voice with the erotic and introspective long story “A Visit to Priapus.” It remained unpublished during his lifetime (Ned Rorem called it “a posthumous masterpiece”), but its autobiographical first-person narrator, Alwyn Tower, led the way to what is perhaps Wescott’s greatest achievement. Included in anthologies of the best short novels, The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) is believed by many—including William Maxwell, Susan Sontag, and Samuel R. Delaney—to be one of the great short novels in English. Inspired by an afternoon at Barbara’s home outside of Paris, it is rich in double meaning—of the artist’s struggle to create and each person’s painful search for love.

  Wescott made a good start on another novel, called “A Fortune in Jewels,” about the war in Europe. But because he couldn’t put his Alwyn Tower character at the center of the story, it came to a halt. However, when he heard a true story about a family in Nazi-occupied Greece, he quickly wrote An Apartment in Athens. Unlike anything he’d done before, this psychological novel was a Book of the Month Club bestseller.

  In the 1950s, Wescott made another good start with “Children of This World,” using material from his early Chicago years, but eventually gave up on it. At Monroe’s request, he wrote an illustrated little MoMA bookshop favorite, Twelve Fables of Aesop: Newly Narrated by Glenway Wescott, which sold continuously for over twenty years. An example of one of his rewritten fables, one not used in the book, appears here in the July 29, 1956, entry. His admirable book of essays, Images of Truth (1962), about six novelist friends, is a tribute to the art of literature. Other worthwhile nonfiction books were started and abandoned, such as a memoir of W. Somerset Maugham and a volume of late personal essays.

  However, from the late 1930s on, Glenway had been saving short journal notes and potential journal material, such as parts of letters. By the early 1960s, a young editor named Robert Phelps convinced him that his journals could compose an important work that would put his uneven career in perspective. By 1972 they had a multivolume contract, but delays and disagreements postponed the work indefinitely. It wasn’t until Glenway died in early 1987 that the contract was changed to require a single large volume of selected journals from 1937 to 1955. When Robert Phelps fell ill, he suggested that the work be finished by me—as someone who knew and published essays about Wescott. Continual Lessons finally appeared in early 1991, giving Wescott’s voice to matters of art, literature, nature, events of the day, sexual freedom, famous friends, and so much more. In a later Washington Post piece, Rick Whitaker wrote, “Continual Lessons.… is miraculously good, as if the gods were determined to give their favored boy one last benediction.”

  Since then I devoted a decade to writing the biography Glenway Wescott Personally. After a few years away, I returned to Yale’s Beinecke Library and began to read and select material from the Wescott Papers for Wescott’s last journals. Most of the entries have dates, and undated material is placed where it almost surely belongs. This is a smaller book than the voluptuous Continual Lessons, simply because Wescott was writing less in those late decades. The reader must remember that when Wescott refers to his journals here, he means all of them. However, in December of 1969 he wrote, “A Heaven of Words. This is my presumptive title for the final volume of my journals: the time of my life when I hope to enjoy writing more than ever before.”

  1956–1959

  GLENWAY WESCOTT’S EARLIER COLLECTION of journals, titled Continual Lessons, ends in December 1955 with the death of photographer George Platt Lynes at the age of forty-eight. Lynes had remained a close friend after the breakup of the three-way relationship between himself, Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler in 1943. As this journal begins in 1956, Wescott is dealing with the details of that untimely passing. He’s also concerned with the health of his friend Dr. Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex Research in Indiana, and in June he travels to the Institute (as well as to Utah, to give college lectures). His last serious attempt at a new novel, “Children of This World,” ended a few years earlier—good autobiographical fiction that came to a dead end. In the late 1950s he is frustrated again in his writing projects, with literary essays being one outlet.

  As always, his social life is often too rich for writing discipline, with friends such as Baroness Pauline de Rothschild (formerly the famous American fashion designer Pauline Potter), novelist Katherine Anne Porter, New Yorker writers Janet Flanner and William Maxwell, Sunday Times critic Raymond Mortimer, poets Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan and the Sitwells, author William Somer set Maugham, and many others. His grants and awards work for the National Institute of Arts and Letters takes up more and more of his time, and he is elected president at the end of the decade. Wescott’s partner, Monroe Wheeler, is at the height of his career as director of publications and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. The two bring together their fascinating worlds during the evenings at Wheeler’s 410 Park Avenue apartment, a classic art and literary salon.

  Away from the city, they have their Stone-blossom home on the large gentleman’s farm of Glenway’s brother Lloyd and his wife Barbara (“Baba”) in Hampton, New Jersey. Glenway spends more time there while Monroe works in the city and travels to arrange exhibits. By the end of the 1950s, the Wescott clan will be forced to leave their land for another farm—as the state plans to turn the valley into a reservoir—and Wheeler will change his city home in another move. One constant is the relationship of Wescott and Wheeler, even with younger lovers in the picture—John Connolly (an ex-Marine) for Glenway, and first Bill Miller (formerly “handsomest man of the forties”) and then poet and artist Ralph Pomeroy for Monroe. (The pseudonym for John Connolly in the earlier Continual Lessons journals was Ronald Neil.) Wescott also has a relationship with Will Chandlee, who become
s a loyal friend.

  Toward the end of the decade, the young writer and editor Robert Phelps convinces Wescott to plan a collection of his shorter works called “A Windfall.” This leads to years of collaboration, and while “A Windfall” is endlessly postponed, other books emerge for both men. Country, city, family, and literature continue to be Wescott’s great concerns. In the months after Lynes’s death, Wescott is involved with his friend’s legacy, securing photos and negatives for Lynes’s executor, artist Bernard Perlin (a longtime friend of Wescott), and helping Lincoln Kirstein plan a book of Lynes’s ballet photography.

  1956

  JANUARY 1956

  George Platt Lynes: The erotic dreams he always had at daybreak—I was always ashamed to ask about them. The worst of death: the unaskable questions.

  Mother: She is, I think, like one of the great queens. Which one? Perhaps Catherine the Great. The simplicity, the subtlety, the amorousness, the autocracy. I wonder if others who know her, even her other children, think or feel any such thing.

  FEBRUARY 3

  Maurice Chevalier, explaining to a reporter the fact that he is on the wagon these days, said, “On the verge of my 67th year”—I think in fact he is older than that—“I sing wine and I drink water.”

  “Mary Butts’ Image of Me.” When I lived in Villefranche I disobeyed and bitterly disappointed the English fiction-writer Mary Butts [GW slept with her brother Tony], who had been my friend for years, so that her friendship turned to witchcraft. For quite a while after she returned to England, perhaps until she died, she thrust needles into a wax image of me. Friends that we had in common used to report this anxiously; and I would brag that my personal magic was more potent than all the nonsense she had learned from the Rosicrucians and from Aleister Crowley. Then she died suddenly, untimely—oh, half a lifetime before me—which made me shiver; the nearest I ever came to believing in such things.