The seasons passed in majesty: summer’s inescapable heat, the storms of winter, the leaves of autumn which in a single night fell from the elms along the road. A few days later I drove through. In the great arcade a wave of yellow leaves was rising, driven into the air again by wind, as far as one could see. It was, unknown to me, a foretelling of what was to come, the time still far off when the beautiful debris would rise again and I would write about those days.
—
The famous figures, writers who taught at universities and were nominated for awards, were still lofty to me and remote from the path I was beating between country and town, diurnal in, nocturnal out, listening to the car radio and watching the black, familiar road unreel before me.
I had written a third book, some of it during a summer in Colorado, some in the Village, fragments of it scribbled on the empty passenger seat while driving to one place or another reciting to myself, rehearsing. It was not a maiden book. It was the book born in France in 1961 and 1962. Not a word of it had been read by anyone. I had a letter from Paula written at the time that urged, the important thing, and I go back to what we used to talk about when we were twenty-one and twenty-two, is to do the things you believe you can do, and want to do and will do.
It was my ambition to write something — I had stumbled across the words—lúbrica y pura, licentious yet pure, an immaculate book filled with images of an unchaste world more desirable than our own, a book that would cling to one and could not be brushed away. During its writing I felt great assurance. Everything came out as I imagined. The title was partly ironic, A Sport and a Pastime, a phrase from the Koran that expressed what the life of this world was meant to be as against the greater life to come.
I was at the time under the spell of books which were brief but every page of which was exalted, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. This sort of book, like those of Flannery O’Connor, Marguerite Duras, Camus, remains my favorite. It is like the middle distances for a runner. The pace is unforgiving and must be kept up to the end. The Finns were once renowned for running these distances and the quality that was demanded was sisu, courage and endurance. For me the shorter novels show it best.
This almost perfect, so I believed, book was turned down by my publisher out of hand. Other publishers followed suit. The book was repetitive. Its characters were unsympathetic. Perhaps I was mistaken and in isolation had lost my bearings or failed to draw the line, emerging as a kind of hermit with skewed ideas. At last the manuscript was brought to the attention of George Plimpton, the editor of The Paris Review, which had a small publishing capability, and he at once agreed to take it.
That year, in the autumn evening I hurried towards corner newsstands, their light spilling on stacks of papers, to pick up the just arrived issue of The New Yorker, which was running, in four long parts, the entire book that turned its author, Truman Capote, from a kind of pet into a blazing celebrity.
In Cold Blood filled me with envy for its exceptional clarity and power, and my admiration was all the greater since I remembered the original chilling article in the Times, the prosperous farm family brutally executed in their own home in safe Kansas. I had even cut it out of the paper, it seemed so monstrous and foretelling. Capote, to his great credit, had done more. In a terrific gamble he had set out, flagrantly daring and astute, with nothing besides his talent and a notebook, to lay bare every facet of the crime he could discover. It was a gamble because the case might never be solved and all his time and energy might be wasted. As it was, the murderers were for a long time uncaught.
Blood, sex, war, and names — the same bouquet goes for the Iliad and the front page. In Cold Blood was somewhere between the two, an enormous success. Capote soared to the heights. He was clever, his tongue wickedly sharp. He had already swooped through the bright lights developing the diva persona that was to prove irresistible, and now there was money, too.
That November he gave a great party, a masked ball, at the Plaza. The guests, in the hundreds — the list of those invited had been kept secret — were a certain cream. Many came from prearranged dinners all over town, movie stars, artists, songwriters, tycoons, Princess Pignatelli, John O’Hara, Averell Harriman, political insiders, queens of fashion, women in white gowns, men in dinner jackets. They were going up the carpeted steps of the hotel entrance, great languid flags overhead, limousines in dark ranks. The path of glory: satin gowns raised a few inches as they went up on silvery heels. Stunning women, bare shoulders, the rapt crowd.
They woke, these people, above a park immense and calm in the morning, the reservoir a mirror, the buildings to the east in shadow with the sun behind them, the rivers shining, the bridges lightly sketched. There were no curtains. This high up there was no one to see in.
In the small convertible I had bought in Rome I was driving past that night and for a few moments saw it. I knew neither the guests nor the host. I had the elation of not being part of it, of scorning it, on my way like a fox to another sort of life. There came to me something a nurse had once told me, that at Pearl Harbor casualties had been brought in wearing tuxedos, it was Saturday night on Oahu, it was Sunday. The dancing at the clubs was over. The dawn of the war.
In the darkness the soft hum of the tires on the empty road was like a cooling hand. The city had sunk to mere glowing sky. My own book was not yet published, but would be. It had no dimensions, no limit to the heights it might reach. It was deep in my pocket, like an inheritance.
—
At the very end of 1969, A Sport and a Pastime having been published with sales of a few thousand copies, I received a fan letter, long, intelligent, and admiring with, although I was unaware of it until afterwards, the title of one of the writer’s own books woven secretly into a line. I would like to ply you with questions, it read. Sincerely, Robert Phelps.
So it began.
We met a month or two later in the Spanish restaurant — it was his suggestion — in the Chelsea Hotel. I have never passed it without remembering, in the manner of a love affair. He was then forty-seven years old but very youthful, almost impish, lean, soft-spoken, with a wonderful smile. From the first moment I recognized him for what he was, I saw in him the angelic and also something, call it dedication, for which I yearned. I longed to know him.
He was fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France. I also liked France, that is to say I was in its thrall, but I did not know Colette or Cocteau except for their faces. I did not know Jouhandeau or Paul Léautaud who, when he was an old, forgotten man wrote, Écrire! Quelle chose merveilleuse! The France that Phelps revealed to me was a cultured world in which literature endured.
He also loved movie stars, money in the abstract sense, and glamour — at least he liked to think about them. With a colleague he had founded Grove Press and then sold it, vowing to live by his typewriter. He told me of coming to New York one of the first times to interview James Agee, so nervous he’d had to write the questions on the palm of his hand in ink, and of hearing the slow, mortal steps of Agee, who had heart trouble, coming up the stairs.