Tragedy in a room. Rediscovering Glenway Wescott

The relevant queer. The queer in question. This is how Glenway Wescott is described today. The eldest of six siblings, he was born at the turn of the century in the charming town of Kewaskum, amidst lush forests and fragrant pig farms, into a family that had hoped to make him a shepherd of souls. But a great writer always knows the one truth that serves him well: nothing is thrown away, everything is recycled. And indeed, the oppression of the Midwest would take centre stage in "Goodbye, Wisconsin", a collection of short stories that Wescott would publish in 1928, by which time he had long since abandoned the dream he’d had as a boy – to become a musician – in order to devote himself to what he would describe as his ‘strange and sporadic but constant literary career’.

After the First World War, Wescott lived in Sussex, Germany, France and New Jersey. During his time in Paris, he became involved with the community of Americans living in Europe and was so deeply disliked by Ernest Hemingway that – as the malicious whisper, and who are we to doubt it? – the author of "A Moveable Feast" used him as the model for the character Robert Prentiss in the novel "The Sun Also Rises", solely to say of him: "On meeting him, I thought I was going to be sick". Though he was also savagely criticised by Gertrude Stein in her "Autobiography of Alice Toklas" – “Wescott has syrup, but it doesn’t flow” – he was, on the other hand, much loved by Susan Sontag, who described "The Peregrine Falcon", Glenway Wescott’s second novel, as one of the treasures of twentieth-century American literature. But his most acclaimed work was his first, "The Grandmothers", which also won him the Harper Prize in 1927. Glenway Wescott, who died fifty years ago in Rosemont, Illinois – a place of very little ‘relevance’ – was a writer of enormous success and great renown, though this has now faded. He was also the author of a true masterpiece, which enjoyed considerable commercial success at the time: "Flat in Athens", a novel after which he published nothing further, preferring to become an art curator and an influential critic – he edited the American edition of "Colette’s Short Novels". He was also the author of "Images of Truth", a highly acclaimed literary essay that would, in effect, transform him into a man of committees and conferences, and ultimately into a regular fixture on boards of directors and at symposia. Had Wescott, perhaps, decided to follow the advice of his much-loved William Somerset Maugham? The English writer did not believe in him as a novelist but did as an essayist and scholar, ‘if he put his mind to it’ – not exactly an effusive endorsement.

On his death, the New York Times described him in these terms: “Mr Wescott, former president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, achieved literary fame at the age of just 26 with the publication of his second book, The Grandmothers. The novel, a saga of a family of pioneers who moved from New York State to Wisconsin in 1846, won the Harper Prize for Fiction in 1927 and became a bestseller. ‘He was a very important writer, a bit like E.M. Forster in England, in this country,’ said Hugh Ford, a professor of English at Trenton State College, who is writing a biography of Wescott. ‘He wrote only a few novels, some short stories, essays and reviews, but everything he wrote was, in some ways, in the style of Flaubert. He was one of the finest stylists of those years. His fiction came to a halt after the novel "Apartment in Athens", published way back in 1945’”.

So, as well as being the man who took to heart the wise adage that one should step down just when one is at the peak of one’s powers – knowing when it is time to leave the party is not something everyone can manage – Glenway Wescott also became a symbol: he was renowned for the longest union in the history of famous unions. He spent seventy years with Monroe Weehler, an Adonis from Illinois with pronounced, perfect jaws, radiant and truly handsome, the twenty-year-old founder of the magazine "Poetry" and a figure well known in Chicago, whom he met during a meeting of the club of the same name; Weehler was, from the outset, a great supporter of Wescott’s talent. He fell in love with Wescott but abandoned him immediately – health reasons took him to Santa Fe, in New Mexico, where he wrote the poems that would form his debut collection, "The Bitterns". From 1920 to 1945, Wescott’s life was illuminated by twenty-five years of deep love, absolute freedom and great literature. And glorious influences: Ford Madox Ford, Isadora Duncan and Jean Cocteau were his guiding stars. Cocteau would also become a close friend of the couple when Wescott and Wheeler moved – in the year of grace 1925 – to the south of France, to Villefranche-sur-Mer.

But it was the following year that proved pivotal for the writer’s personal and social life. For whilst Wheeler, who had in the meantime become director of exhibitions and publications at the Museum of Modern Art, made public his connection with Wescott, the pair embarked on a relationship – openly acknowledged and deeply scandalous throughout the literary and cultural circles of the time – with George Platt Lynes, the son of a New Jersey minister, a professional aesthete and future cover photographer for Harper’s, Bazaar and Vogue, a key figure in the history of male nude portraiture – his work would influence none other than Robert Mapplethorpe. Thus, what would often be maliciously described as a ménage à trois would become a deeply profound relationship with at times heart-wrenching aspects – ‘there is no one and there is nothing that can take your place in my heart,’ Wescott would write to Lynes in a letter from the early 1930s. In 1934, now convinced that Europe was ‘a mousetrap’, Wescott decided to return to the United States, and so the three of them settled in Lynes’s Manhattan flat. But in 1943 the relationship broke down because the photographer fell in love with his assistant, George Tichenor. Twelve years later, George P. Lynes found himself in utter financial ruin and died of lung cancer, and it was Glenway Wescott who looked after him right to the end. “Life goes on, and it goes on even after one’s luck has run out.”

Those golden years are immortalised in a number of photographs – many of which can be found online – which portray Wescott and Wheeler as a pioneering couple in terms of their emotional and sexual self-affirmation: a carefree and liberated pair, naked amidst a paradise of seas, sands and natural beauty, boldly asserting their impetuous vitality.

These were the years of his success, when Wescott wrote, published and attracted so much attention that the silence following his last novel – at the time of its publication, the writer was only forty-four years old – gave rise to speculation, questions and doubts: what had happened to Glenway Wescott?

In recent years, Michael Cunningham has also written about this. Regarding Wescott’s reticence, the following words of his can be found on the Open Letter Monthly website: “There is little information as to why Wescott stopped writing fiction, although I tend to believe that writers who give up writing do so for reasons as mysterious as those that prompted them to try it in the first place”.

In his Diaries, Wescott confesses: “I live the novels rather than write them”. And whilst this is merely a clue – and no one can be condemned on the basis of a single sentence – it is probably proof, if not of a dried-up vein of creativity, then of a vitality that had exhausted its potential for self-transcendence through invention.

"Appartamento ad Atene", amongst all his books, as well as being the one that ‘closed the door’, is probably the one that has aged best. In Italy, it was published by Adelphi and tells the harrowing story of the Helianos, a middle-aged, middle-class couple who were once well-off but who, in 1942, during the Nazi occupation of the country, were forced to take in the German captain Kalter, a man of ‘frightening temperament’, who requisitioned their flat and moved in. The Helianos have a twelve-year-old son, Alex, ‘a trembling, spindly little creature’, a future good-for-nothing, whom Kalter frequently scolds and humiliates, twisting his bony arm in front of his helpless parents. And then there is Leda, the second-born, a slow and listless ten-year-old girl whom Mrs Helianos had imagined would inherit her physical beauty, but never had there been a more bitter disappointment: Leda was dull, ugly and absurdly in love with Kalter. And, just as absurdly, he returned her feelings. Kalter’s arrival in their home would leave their lives in tatters, as they were forced, against their will, to humour the whims of the horrific god from whom they could not escape. ‘Their immediate experiences were all a nightmare,’ writes Wescott, masterfully sketching this increasingly unsettling family dynamic, whilst the Helianos think with resentment of the friends who, in 1941, had managed to flee to England or America. Their life becomes a living hell: they are reduced to sleeping on a camp bed in the kitchen, dismissing the maid because, according to Kalter, she stinks, and going out into the courtyard to relieve themselves as the bathroom is for the German’s exclusive use. They live with their eyes downcast, nodding, obliging, accommodating, in the presence of that Nazi smile ‘more teeth than lips’. They are afraid of making a noise, of saying the wrong words, of failing to serve adequate meals at the table, despite the well-known financial constraints. Mr Helianos is physically afraid of Kalter, whilst Mrs Helianos whinges, complains and makes everything more difficult. “They were like a pair of draught horses,” writes Wescott, “worn down by the same yoke.” And in the meantime, they learn to communicate mainly through their eyes, “as one does in a madhouse and in prison”.

At a certain point, they realise that, had they been lucky enough to see the end of that nightmare, perhaps they would not have spoken of it much: their experience would have fallen far short of what others would have defined as courage. After all, however, if their lives had not been overwhelmed by fear, ‘they would not have realised the depth of their bond’. A bond based on a shared pettiness. A few years earlier, the couple had lost Kimon, their first son, their best son, the one on whom they had both pinned their highest hopes; and now, whilst there is no more food in Athens and the destitute trudge through the streets, the Helianos cannot escape the constant scrutiny of their own insignificance: "Flat in Athens" is, in fact, the story of how, over two terrified human beings, looms not only the monster of a Nazi but also the monster of truth. A family portrait featuring wretched children and despicable adults. Without the courage to admit it to themselves, as members of the middle class now in disgrace, the Helianos realise they admire Kalter, a methodical and rational man, fearsome and handsome in his own way, the embodiment of a power so grandly tragic that they come to envy him, to fantasise about him, with a touch of vanity. They will even go so far as to admit that neither of them has ever felt love for their children. “They had tried and failed,” writes Wescott, succinctly. “Those odd little bodies of theirs, those sickly little minds: what was there to love about them?”

When Kalter announces that he has to go on leave for two weeks, the most terrible and decisive fifteen days begin: one night, Helianos confesses to his wife his mad desire to challenge the captain upon his return, but she knows him well; she knows exactly who is lying beside her and tells him he would never have been capable of it. But – in a plot twist – when Kalter returns, he will be different. Changed. And respectful, even. He’ll often insult them, but only because of their unacceptable subservience, whilst they’ll be in despair, wondering why their torturer is no longer torturing them. Helianos begins to spy on Kalter at night, whilst he sleeps, and does not realise that, in reality, a catastrophe is brewing in the house: a diabolical spectre, the physical embodiment of horror, Kalter is all the more dangerous the less dangerous he appears. And he becomes a monster of truly terrifying proportions, whose adherence to Nazism is total, unshakeable, without remission. Kalter embodies irredeemability: delirium and ruin. “The amiable and virtuous Germans are deceiving us. They are merely baiting the trap.”

A tragedy in three acts and a flat: Nazism explained by an American, who has penned a chilling and epoch-making drama.