He had a keen appetite for gossip, without which most conversation is flavorless, and a great personal modesty. I have said “angel” though he was not a gentle, swooning one. There was a call one day from a woman in California who was writing her thesis on Cocteau and wanted advice. She had gotten his telephone number from his publishers. Could she write to him? she asked. “Yes, perhaps you can get my address from my publishers,” he said.
More typically he made one think of Satie, shy, unshined on, true, if not to himself, to the things he knew mattered. His life was like pure notes, unhurriedly played. Seldom did he talk about his own writing, usually with the impression that it was more or less an illness he was trying to get rid of. He wanted to write novels but could not. Instead he wrote articles and reviews, and books that were for the most part compilations. He delighted in stories, remarks, outrageous acts — the uninventable — and believed in a moral principle that was like the law of gravity: Things had their consequences, including fame. “Il faut payer,” he would say. All around him great Babylon was roaring, the city was pounding out wealth, celebrity, crime, yesterday’s newspapers were blowing in the streets, and amid it he led his singular life. He owned neither house nor car. His expenditures were for the essentials. On his publisher’s — Roger Straus’s — desk he once saw a list of advances that had been paid to writers and his name led all the others, he said rather proudly; they’d advanced him more than anyone else. Philip Roth had gotten five thousand dollars for The Professor of Desire.
“Did that do well?”
“Oh …”
“What would you guess?” I asked. “Twenty thousand copies?”
“Twenty or twenty-five.”
“It was on the best-seller list.”
“Was it?” he said coolly.
Pinned above his own desk were photographs — Glenway Wescott and a boyish Phelps walking down a dirt road together, heads down as if talking, tennis-shoed feet in unison; a picture of Gertrude Stein with the quotation I am coming to believe that nothing except a life-work can be considered—drawings, lists, five Italian words to be learned that week, a carefully drawn astrological chart for the month, and Auden’s comment We were put on earth to make things. In the hallway was a pile of books to be thrown away, those that, in going through the shelves, he had found of little merit. His was an existence completely focused, and he himself one of the last fanatics of a religion that was dying out.
He once mentioned — after dinner, table half cleared, his wife asleep on the couch — two books he was engaged to write. One was called Following, about people he followed on the street or others whose lives or careers he traced, essentially his voyeurism. The other was 1922, the year of his birth, divided into 365 parts, not all with entries, he explained. The book was to be about everything that happened that year or was in progress or had ended, and that would be part of his life, bits about Walter Benjamin, Proust, Colette, in short, the matrix of his world. It would begin at the moment of his conception and end after his birth.
Early on he pressed on me the single book he loved best, and a model, I think, by another unfulfilled critic, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, its dedication being from A never writer, as Connolly called himself. Phelps had read it, he said, twenty times.
—
The apartment was on Twelfth Street, off Fifth Avenue. It was on the fourth, the top, floor. The door had no buzzer; someone had to come down to let you in or fold the key in a piece of paper and drop it from the window. Up those stairs had come Marsha Nardi, who had been the mistress of William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell — her letters were famous — throwing out her arms and reciting, as she climbed, a poem of Baudelaire’s. Up also had come Ned Rorem, an intimate friend he admired and envied; Philip Guston; Richard Howard; and Louise Bogan; as well as other writers and painters. Ned Rorem, he said, had once proposed to Gloria Vanderbilt. Her reply was worthy of a queen: “But you’ll have to fuck me, you know.” Phelps talked about a friend who had been in France just after the war and with chocolate and cigarettes, unobtainable luxuries, had gotten remarkable signed editions from Cocteau and Colette. “It wasn’t Ned Rorem?” I said.
“Oh, God, no. He wasn’t in the war. He was busy changing lipstick,” Phelps said.
The larger of the two rooms, in front, had a fireplace. Phelps’s wife, Becki, who was a painter, had taken it for her studio. Passing through a small rectangular kitchen like a cottage of its own, one came to the back room, in which they ate, slept, and entertained. It was filled with books and with talk of them.
At their table one night someone mentioned storms and the pleasure of sleeping during them. “Absolutely the favorite thing I know!” Phelps cried. “There’s a wonderful storm in Hardy, do you know it? In Far from the Madding Crowd.” Hardy was the greatest writer of weather, he said. Next came Turgenev and Colette, and Conrad, of course. But where were there other storms?
“Huckleberry Finn,” someone said.
“Of course. Is there one in Joyce? Proust? No,” Phelps answered himself, “all of Proust is indoors.”
“Pavese, in Devil in the Hills.”
“Rain.”
“The Grapes of Wrath, at the end where they …”
“Pnin, at the beginning.”
“The Wild Palms.”
“A Farewell to Arms.”
“Wuthering Heights.”
On and on it went, titles batted back and forth without hesitation, like a shuttlecock. I soon ran out of them, myself. It was long afterwards, in his copy of Sherlock Holmes, that I came across a word written inside the cover, Weather, and beneath it, with the page number, the title of a story, “The Five Orange Pips.”
That night, later, Becki read my astrological chart. She held — they both did — to the Aristotelian belief that this world is bound to the movements of the one above and everything is so governed. Leo was ascendant for me, she said, “and the sun in the eleventh house means powerful friends.” There were hidden relationships and a great deal of promiscuity, unrelenting. “Tell me,” she said, “have all your dreams been realized?” I burst into laughter.
“A great renown awaits you finally,” she said consolingly. “What is it you want?”
“To be an immortal,” Phelps said impatiently, it being fundamental.
Though they did the charts together they never agreed. He was exact, she was intuitive. “Oh, my God,” he would protest, “that’s not there.” There was a single, deep furrow in his brow, between the eyes, the sign of a divided life, perhaps, and I noticed a slight trembling in his long, intelligent hand.
—
“Read these,” he directed me one day. It was in the cramped front room that served him as a study on the second floor of the building. The book he handed me was the collected stories of Isaac Babel. He had marked three, “Guy de Maupassant,” “Dante Street,” and “My First Goose.” I had never read Babel. His name was one of those vaguely floating around. The opening paragraph of “My First Goose” was stunning. I examined every word over and over. They were straightforward but at the same time unimaginable, and set a level which it seemed the rest of the story could not meet but astonishingly did.
From time to time, when he was not using it, I myself worked in the room and read the books he had there. Maugham was one.